#nah i buy the store brand because i drink too much of that shit to be paying too much of it

[asleep-and-afraid]

i have an unhealthy addiction to seltzer. there, i said it. 

[waitineedaname]

"Accidently ending a phone call with your roommate with a casual ‘I love you’ seems like a very good reason to move out"

For benrey @ gordon?

“And can you pick up some oat milk while you’re there? I just realized I’m out.”

“Man, oat milk freaks me out,” Benrey said, pushing their shopping cart towards the dairy section anyway. “Like, do oats even have, uh. Others?”

“Others?” There was a beat of silence as Gordon attempted to figure out exactly what the hell Benrey was talking about. “You mean udders?”

“Yeah. Cow things.”

“Dude, that’s not how oat milk works.” Gordon’s laugh made Benrey’s cheap phone speakers crackle.

“Then how does it work? Huh? Mister scientician?” Benrey propped the phone between their ear and shoulder as they opened the fridge door to grab the brand of oat milk he knew Gordon liked.

“I don’t fucking know! I’m not a goddamn milk scientist.” Even through a phone call, Benrey could hear the smile on Gordon’s face. “They squeeze juice out of the oats or smush them into a paste or something. I don’t know. Stop making me think about how oat milk works, it’s going to make me not want to drink it anymore.”

“Cool, so I’ll buy milk with extra lactose then.”

“You will not, unless you wanna deal with me laying on the couch complaining all afternoon because my stomach hurts.”

“You do that anyway.”

“Fuck off, man.” Gordon’s tone of voice didn’t carry any bite to it. “Alright, I gotta go, I’m almost at the end of the queue to pick Joshie up. I’ll see you back at home, okay?”

“Mhm. Love you, bye.” Benrey hung up and shoved their phone back in their jacket pocket. They unfolded the shopping list and attempted to decipher the mix of their own chicken scratch, Gordon’s doctor handwriting, and the occasional misspelled request for snacks in Joshua’s six year old handwriting. Okay, they had to get those frozen chicken nuggets Joshua liked, another pack of seltzer, a can of black beans since Gordon was planning to cook dinner tonight-

Thinking about Gordon made them suddenly freeze in place as they realized what they’d just done. Did… Did they just say “love you” on the phone with Gordon?

Aw, fuck.

They’d been living with Gordon for a while now. It hadn’t always been an easy thing for either of them. When they’d been freshly respawned, both of them had been jumpy around each other at best, and at worst, they were at each other’s throats trying to kill each other. It took a long time and a lot of uncomfortable conversations for them to get to the point where they could interact without an unbearable amount of tension. From there, they were able to start rebuilding an actual friendship. Turns out, they got along a lot better when they weren’t in mortal danger. Who knew!

Living with Gordon involved a lot of rules, both spoken and unspoken. They involved stuff like “don’t ask weird questions about Gordon’s feet,” “if one of them gets too angry, walk it off instead of actually fighting,” and “no gross body horror in front of Gordon’s son.” It also involved shit like “please for the love of god don’t put empty juice cartons back in the fridge” and “don’t stain the carpets with Sweet Voice, this is a rental and that security deposit is worth getting back.” So far, Benrey hadn’t had too much trouble following the rules. They had been a security guard, after all; following rules was supposed to be their thing. Besides, they were a low price to pay to get to spend time with Gordon.

One of those early unspoken rules, however, had been “keep the flirting to a minimum.” That one had been a little tricky at first, but it had been necessary, especially back when they still weren’t on the best of terms. Benrey learned that when Gordon was already worked up, blowing a kiss did the opposite of diffusing the situation. This was news to Benrey. Who didn’t love a little kiss from their buddies? Lame.

That had been an early rule, though, and one that had kind of faded into the background over time. The longer they lived together, the more physically affectionate they both got, and a little domesticity is only to be expected when you share a household. It was nice. Comfortable.

And then Benrey had to go and say “I love you” on the phone. What the fuck.

That had to be crossing a line, right? Gordon was fine with some handholding and some cuddling and they’d make dinner together once a week, but this had to be pushing it.

Benrey went through the rote motions of buying the rest of their groceries without really paying attention, too busy panicking. There was only one option. They had to move out. This was fine. This was totally fine. They could just crash on Tommy’s couch until they find a place of their own because there was no way this wasn’t going to make Gordon freak the fuck out. As much as they loved fucking with Gordon, they’d learned there was the fun kind of freaking him out and the bad kind of freaking him out. They were fairly certain this fell into the bad category.

By the time that they were walking up to their apartment door, they were already mentally packing up all their things, resigned to their fate. They were so stuck in their own head that Joshua barreling into their legs when they opened the door actually startled them.

“Benny!” Joshua cheered, clinging to their jeans.

“Hey, li’l dude.” Benrey carefully tried to push past the kid without tripping over him on the way to the kitchen. Tragically, that’s where Gordon also happened to be.

“Hey, what took you so long?” Gordon asked, taking some of the grocery bags from them. “I thought you’d gotten lost in Costco again.”

Benrey grunted noncommittally and started putting away groceries instead of answering Gordon. Maybe if they didn’t look at him, they could avoid confronting whatever Gordon’s reaction was. Yeah, definitely, this seemed like a sustainable, reasonable decision to make. Yep.

“Dude.” Gordon’s hand suddenly appeared on their forearm. Benrey stared at it, then looked up at Gordon’s concerned face. “Are you okay?”

“Huh?”

“You’re putting carrots in the utensil drawer.”

Benrey looked down at their hands again. Oh. So they were.

“You’ve been acting weird ever since you got back from the store,” Gordon said, gently taking the carrots away from them. “Did something happen? You wanna talk about it?”

Benrey screwed their mouth up. No, they didn’t want to talk about it, but learning how to talk through things like adults was something they both had agreed to do. That had been a rule introduced by an exasperated Tommy, sick of mediating their bullshit. So, they sighed and looked away while Gordon put the carrots in the vegetable drawer of the fridge. “I was thinking about how I’ve gotta move out.”

“What?” Gordon stood up too fast and smacked his head on the freezer door. He swore loudly, and Benrey reached over to hand him a bag of frozen peas to put on the back of his head. “Thanks. But also, what? Since when are you moving out?”

“Uh, since now?” Benrey said, confused. Shouldn’t it be obvious?

“Why?”

“‘Cause I said I love you on the phone? Dummy? You, uh, a fucking old man got bad brain disease, not remembering things?” They said, defaulting to picking on Gordon to avoid focusing on anything else. Gordon stared blankly at them for a moment, then, against all odds, a grin spread across his face.

“Benrey,” He said, and Benrey decided he didn't like that tone one bit, “Are you embarrassed?”

“Whuh? No.” There was no way they could be embarrassed. That definitely wasn't what was going on here. Nope. Not a bit, “...Maybe.”

“Dude, you don't have to be embarrassed about that.” Gordon laughed. “Do you know how often I've said stupid Freudian slips? I called my sixth grade teacher mom once and wanted to change my name and move to Canada. I've been there.”

“It wasn't, uh… It wasn't too much? Not crossing a line or anything?”

“Nah, man. It was kinda sweet.” Gordon flashed him a smile and finished putting away the last of the groceries.

“Cool.” Benrey relaxed, letting go of the tension that had been building in their shoulders. “That's good ‘cause I was gonna fight you for custody of your Xbox.” Gordon snorted.

“Good fucking luck, you’re too much of a Playstation guy to win that case.”

The evening passed relatively uneventfully from there. Gordon enlisted Benrey’s help in cooking dinner, and Joshua eagerly told them all about the cool dinosaur facts he’d learned in class that day. They went through the easy routine of watching just one episode (which of course always turned into several episodes) of Joshua’s choice of TV, then Benrey helped wash up in the kitchen while Gordon put Josh to bed. Gordon joined them as they finished washing dishes and squeezed Benrey’s shoulder affectionately when they were done.

“Alright, man, I think I’m gonna head to bed early tonight.”

Benrey nodded. “Cool. I’ll be quiet.”

“Don’t worry about it. G’night, dude.”

“Night, Gordon.”

“Oh, and Benrey?” Gordon paused in the doorway of his bedroom and waited until Benrey glanced up at him. Gordon smiled. “Love you too.”

He shut the door before Benrey could respond, leaving Benrey to stare blankly at the door. They let out a groan, careful not to wake Joshua. Oh, Gordon was going to be the death of them.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #456

“i don’t even need your love, but you treat me like a stranger, & that feels so rough”

What was the longest time you’ve had the hiccups for? I know at LEAST over an hour. I was in agony. What type of TV shows are your favourite? Animal docs. Have you ever been a complete fangirl/fanboy over anything? Bitch I still am lmao. Do you know anyone who has died in battle? No. When was the last time you went on an adventure? Bro, I could NOT tell you. I haven't had one of those in what feels like eons. What brand is your vacuum cleaner? I actually don't know. I don't pay attention. Are you good at rapping? Never tried, but I'm sure I'd be awful. I stutter too much. Name one world issue that upsets you. Just ONE????????? Well, I can name homelessness as very high on the list. How do you feel about tanning? I hate it. I can't stand the heat, so why would I deliberately go bake in it? Have you ever given a public speech? Yeah, in front of the whole 4th and 5th grade when I was innnn... one of those grades, idr which. It was for my D.A.R.E. essay. Do you read comic books? No. Do you force your way into conversations in which you are not involved? NOOOOOOOOOOO I'm way too awkward. Kiss with your eyes open or closed? Bro who tf kisses with their eyes open, that shit is creepy. Do you believe you can change someone? No. One can only change themselves. How did you react when your first pet died? I have no memory of our first pet. Have you ever drawn anime? No. Can you use a pogo stick? When I was a kid, I became a MASTER. I got one for I want to say Christmas and I was obsessed. When’s the next time you’ll see the person that you like? Idk, first he needs to get on Facebook and see I messaged him alsdkfjalkdj. He like never gets on there. Do you like bathing/showering? No. One, it's a chore, and two, it's actually painful for me, standing up so long and propping my legs up and stuff like that to clean myself properly. Have you ever considered entering a race? HEEEEEEEEEEELL no. Rihanna or Lady Gaga? Probably Gaga, idk. Who was your first good kiss with? Jason. What accessory do you want in your bedroom? I actually kinda want a TV now? What do you take the most pictures of? Flowers. What are you always in the mood for? Lately, Krispy Kreme donuts, lol. I haven't had one in a very long time, but goddamn does a hot glazed donut sound BANGIN' right now and has for days. What is something that you never turn down? Hm... how am I blanking??? What is something that you always turn down when offered? Certain foods or drinks, like tea. Name something sexy about your significant other. I don't have one'a those. What is one of your hobbies that you refuse to give up? Um, idk. As interests work, I may move away from any hobby eventually. If you could be a professional in any sport what would it be? Dance. If you could be a professional at any instrument what would it be? Violin. Would you rather be a surgeon or mortician? A mortician. That job doesn't even seem all that bad to me? I think it'd be kinda chill somehow???? I could NEVER be a surgeon. I'd be terrified of fucking something up. Have you ever been on a subway? No. Are you in love? No. Do you like having your lip softly bitten when you’re kissing? *eyes emoji* Do you want to get married when you’re older? Yes. What was the last band shirt you wore? PROBABLY my Metallica shirt? But I'm unsure, ultimately. You can have a milkshake right now. What flavor do you choose? Ugh, I've been wanting a nice chocolate milkshake for a while. Have you ever given someone flowers? For Mother's Day one year, I collected some wildflowers to put in a jar for Mom. I've also given Jason roses before. I really wanted to give Sara some when I surprised her for her birthday, but I didn't want to ask her parents to drive me somewhere where I could buy her some, ha ha. What day of the week is usually your busiest day? None. My days are all the same. Do you have any concerts coming up? No, but UGH, I was so hyped a few days ago because I saw Motionless In White was going on tour next year, but of course they're going to the big city on the OTHER end of the state versus the capital, which I'm way closer to. -_- Bands ALWAYS choose Charlotte on the super rare occasion they come to NC... Do you like or hate the smell of fish? Ugh, I hate it. What’s your favorite brand of chips? Doritos, maybe? Between Mountain Dew and those... I am such a fucking gamer stereotype lmfao. Have you ever written a poem and then read it aloud? I think I had to before in school? Idr. Do you like pineapple? Love it. Does your house have a dishwasher? Yes. A dishwasher is one thing I MUST have in my own future house. I cannot stand touching dirty dishes. Do you know anyone who has a flower tattoo? Oh, absolutely. Sunflower tattoos are especially popular around here. How many different languages can you say goodbye in? English, German, and uhhh Spanish? Agree or disagree: You like Adam Sandler movies. I don't mind them. I've never understood the hate, honestly? I think he's capable of being funny. Have you ever had to get a tooth pulled? If so, what for? Only by myself when I was a kid losing my baby teeth. Have you ever dated anyone while they were in jail? Nooooo. If you’ve ever babysat, do you like it? Fuck no, I hate it. What is your favorite flavor on sunflower seeds? I don't like those. Do you get cold easily? No, but I get hot extremely easily. Do you get a lot of spiders in your house? I don't think so, no. Do you admire nature? I positively adore nature. If only we treated it better... Name one naughty thing you’ve done. Done sexual things in places I probably shouldn't have, oops. Name two of your favorite things as a child. Pokemon and Webkinz. Do you own a Pillow Pet? No. They're cute, though. My niece has one. Do you tend to solve problems with violence? Absolutely not. Have either of your parents gone to jail? No. Do you know a hoarder? Yes. Do you wax, pluck, or leave your eyebrows? I just leave 'em be, honestly. Do you have any interesting scar stories? Not really. Do you hate the texture of meatballs? No, I love me some meatballs. Do you get migraines? Very, very rarely. They fucking suck. Do you like guns? NOOOOOOO guns terrify me alsd;kjfal;sdjfk Are turtles amazing creatures? All animals are. :') How much time do you spend taking surveys? A whole lot. It's just that I'm like... always bored and the randomness of surveys can add interesting little flares to the day, I guess. Would you rather visit: The Eiffel Tower or Egyptian Pyramids? Pyramids, for sure. Would you like to work at a candy shop? No. I don't want to work directly with people. Do you have feelings for someone? It's funny; now that I've settled the extreme indecision, I've come to realize that they're very strong feelings. How you go from being indecisive to really, really liking somebody, hell if I know. Which one of your guy friends is the best looking? Uhhh Girt is like my only real guy friend, so I guess it's by default him, ha ha. I'm not particularly attracted to him, but he's not ugly by any means. Do you have anything to say to your ex bf/gf? I'm so sorry. Which band do you have the most of on your iPod/music player? Either Ozzy or Metallica. Most likely Ozzy, though. Which song describes your mood at the moment? Hm. I dunno. Which movie(s) do you quote the most? None, really. Which one of your best friend’s friends would you most likely date? None; we don't share irl friends, being many states apart, and not even that many online ones. Would you ever let anybody else drive your car? I don't have my own car. Which one of your friends will be the most successful? I'm not psychic. What store did you last shop at? Mom and I picked up a Wal-Mart order the other day. Do you think telepathy is real? Absolutely not. When did you last draw something for fun? A few days ago, I started a drawing of Maieykio for Sara. Who makes the most in your entire family? I have no idea. Do you like writing essays? I don't mind, if the topic interests me. Do you think plastic surgery is no big deal? Nah. Well, I think you can take it to an visual extreme, but that's just my opinion. Do what makes you comfortable in your own body. Do you take your trash to the dump or have it picked up? It's picked up. When you sneeze do you sneeze into your shirt or your hands? The inside of my elbow. Do you usually have sex in the morning, noon or night time? It usually happened at night. Did you ever fail your learners/drivers test? Haven't taken it yet. Would you rather listen to Luke Bryan or Lil Wayne? OH MY GOD NEITHER Name someone you’ve become a lot closer to recently: No one, really? Well, unless you count my change of feelings for Girt, but it's just that: a type of change. I've loved him platonically since high school, and it's like, I feel the same for him, just in a romantic way now? Does your car have a sunroof? No. Are you closer to your mom or your dad? My mom. Have you ever had a friend with benefits? Nope, not how I roll. Who’s the last person you cuddled with? Sara. Unless you count my cat. Are you friends with any of your teachers on Facebook? Former teachers, yes. I feel kinda bad for 'em now... They're all the sweetest, God-fearing people, and then there's my outspoken (online) and liberal ass sharing shit that's gotta disappoint them now lmaoooo.

[flowerfan2]

One Night in Milwaukee - Ch. 6

(Now with my new cover art...)

David x Patrick, 2700 words this chapter (A03) 18k so far.  Read from the beginning here.

Summary:  Being stuck in the Milwaukee airport is bad enough. Then David realizes that the man who broke his heart is sitting right next to him.  After a rom-com worthy reunion, David and Patrick decide to give it another try.

Chapter 6

There’s a new lightness in the air as they settle back inside the house, David kicking back on the couch while Patrick pokes around in the kitchen.  He really does need to make a list and do a real grocery run – although he appreciates David’s efforts to save him the trouble.

David grumbles at his phone and stands up.  “Do you mind if I deal with this?  There’s a problem with a supplier, it’ll go faster if I just talk to her instead of sending endless e-mails.”

“Of course not, go ahead.”

Patrick watches David head back towards the bedroom, his phone already up to his ear.  Patrick’s glad that David is still involved with Rose Apothecary, even if it’s not what it used to be.  At least it means that some part of what they created together survived.

Patrick heard about what happened with the store itself from Stevie, how David relocated it near Toronto, but eventually closed down the physical location.  Stevie told Patrick that David’s heart didn’t seem to be in it anymore, but now that Patrick knows that David was depressed, he wonders how much Stevie knew.  Patrick wouldn’t have been able to do it, either – have the store, but not David.  It was always about the two of them together, left brain and right brain working in tandem.  If he had to run Rose Apothecary by himself, it would definitely have lost its heart.

Patrick finishes up the grocery list, the act of neatly putting down everything he needs soothing in its own right, and sits down on the couch with a glass of water.  He’s tired, again.  It seems like he can’t go ten minutes without wanting to lie down.  It’s been a week since he was hurt, and he thought he’d feel better by now.

Patrick remembers David scolding him, on the plane, for traveling so soon.  He probably has a point, but if Patrick hadn’t decided to get out of town, he wouldn’t have run into David, and that’s worth a lot more than sore ribs.

He leans back on the couch and closes his eyes, wincing as his muscles relax.  If he concentrates, he can hear David’s voice as he talks on the phone, the cadence familiar and reassuring.

Patrick wakes up to the tantalizing aroma of garlic sizzling in a pan.  He grabs his phone, dismayed to find that it’s almost six o’clock, the whole afternoon having gone by while he napped on the couch.

“Hey there,” David says, leaning down to press a kiss to his cheek.  “You’re up just in time.  Dinner will be ready in thirty minutes or so, I was just getting ready to heat the water.

Patrick reaches for David, and David’s face lights up as he sinks onto the couch next to him and pulls him into a hug.  “Hi,” Patrick says, still half-asleep.  It feels too easy, to have David right here with him, to be breathing into his shoulder like nothing ever went wrong.

“Hi,” David responds, rubbing his palms over Patrick’s back.  “Have a good nap?”

“Sorry I slept so much.”  He almost resents missing the time with David.  Time with David is far more interesting than sleeping.

“Not a problem,” David says.  “Gave me the chance to take the Camry out for another spin.”

“Ugh, you did the shopping again?”  

“I did, and thanks, by the way, for the detailed list.  Although I’m not sure that you needed to specify back-ups for each of the items. I’m pretty sure I could figure out what brand of tomato sauce to buy if your top choice wasn’t available.”

“That list wasn’t meant for you,” Patrick grumbles.  “I just like having a plan.”

“I know, sweetheart, I know.”  David kisses Patrick again, and stands up despite Patrick’s grabby hands.  It feels so good to have David close to him, he doesn’t want to let go. “You go freshen up while I finish, if I don’t get the water going it’ll be forever until we can eat.”

Patrick uses the bathroom and puts some after-sun lotion on his face, where a bit of color is just appearing on his nose and cheeks.  It doesn’t take much.  He needs to remember to use sunscreen down here, or else he’s going to turn into a lobster.

When he comes out, David is working on the Bolognese, and there’s a large pot of water heating on the stove.  

“That smells great,” Patrick says, leaning around David to check out the sauce.  He lets his hand linger on David’s waist.  David has put on a pair of his own black jeans, but he’s still wearing Patrick’s dark green t-shirt from this morning.  It stretches enticingly across David’s shoulders as he stirs the pot.

“You still like this, right?”  David asks.  “You haven’t become a vegetarian, or anything like that?”

Patrick laughs.  “If didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have put the ingredients on the list.”  

David has set out dishes and silverware on the kitchen island where they had their breakfast.  The room also has a small round table, but it’s covered in piles of all the junk mail that has been delivered since his parents were last here, and the groceries David bought this afternoon.

There’s a bottle of wine there too, the one Patrick had listed as his top choice on the list he made earlier.  It’s an easy to drink table red that he remembered being able to buy when he was visiting his parents last winter, with a very high class screw top.  He thinks David will like it, and it will pair well with the tomato sauce.

Patrick opens the bottle and searches around in the cabinets for two matching wine glasses.

“Oh, um, none for me, thanks,” David says as Patrick sets the two glasses down next to their plates.

“You sure?  It’s not fancy, but it’s not as bad as Herb’s fruit wine, either.”  Patrick is surprised, but not particularly so, not until he turns and sees the deer-in-headlights look on David’s face.  “David?  You okay?”

“What?  Oh, yeah.  It’s fine.”

Patrick watches David as he slowly empties the box of pasta into the boiling water, giving the task quite a bit more attention than it needs.  Deciding not to push, he screws the cap back on the bottle of red and puts it down on the table, and exchanges the wine glasses for water glasses.

David turns to him, his face scrunched up and pained.  “You can have wine.”

“Nah, it’s okay.”

“No, I mean, just because I’m not having any, it’s okay if you do.”  

“I get that, thanks.”

David shakes his head.  “So why did you put the wine away?”

“It’s not as much fun if it’s just me.”  Patrick realizes that this might not be the best thing to say as soon as the words leave his mouth, but he can’t quite figure out how to fix it.  

After a few moments of awkward silence, David speaks up, keeping his eyes on the stove.  “I’m not an alcoholic.  And I’m not going to fall off the wagon if there’s a glass of wine in my vicinity.”

Patrick thinks back to the many evenings they spent curled up on the couch with a glass of wine, whether something cheap from Brebner’s or a reserve vintage they nabbed from the store.  He’s never known David to have a problem with alcohol.  Between the two of them, Patrick was the lightweight, and much more likely to get tipsy.  Clearly there has to be a reason for David’s decision to abstain, whether it qualifies as alcoholism or not, but given how nervous David looks, Patrick wants to tread lightly.

“You can tell me as little or as much as you want to about why you’re not drinking, David.  It’s okay no matter what the reason.”

Patrick’s standing close enough to David that he can see him swallowing hard, trying to keep his composure.  The last thing he wants is to send them off the rails into another emotional meltdown.  David clearly feels put on the spot, and that’s not what he meant to do.  He certainly doesn’t want David to feel like he’s being judged.  It would be the worst kind of hypocrisy at this point.

Patrick clears his throat a little, not sure how to launch this discission, but then decides to jump right in.  “You know, the night I was attacked, with Jamie, I was hammered.  Wasted.  I made some bad decisions that I probably wouldn’t have made if I was sober.”

David steps away from the pot of boiling water and stares at Patrick.  “What are you talking about?”

Patrick recognizes David’s “I need a minute to catch up” phrase, and understands.  He wishes he could have found a way to work this into conversation more smoothly, but there is a connection, and he needs to get it out.  However he goes at it, the explanation is a rough one, and Patrick’s been stumbling over it in his own mind for a week now.  At least if he manages to spit it out, he might be able to come to terms with it.

“My aunt had asked me to get together with Jamie to check in on him, saying he was having a hard time at university.  But really she was asking Jamie to check in on me.  I wasn’t doing well – I hadn’t found a new job, wasn’t even really looking, and I was pretty miserable.  So I let Jamie convince me that going out with him and his college friends was a good look for a thirty-something guy, and I sat at the bar all night and drank tequila shots.”

“But you don’t even like tequila,” David says, breathless.

“No, I don’t.  It’s disgusting.”

“It is.” David nods sympathetically. He takes Patrick by the arm and pulls him out of the kitchen, sitting him down on the couch and letting his hands rest on his shoulders.  “Okay.  Tell me the rest.”

Patrick is almost thankful that David won’t let him end the story there.  It’s time to get it out.  “Jamie was flirting with another guy, some other kids started talking shit, and I got up to intervene, thinking I would save the day and defend him.  I imagined myself some kind of hero.  But I was so drunk, whatever I was saying was just making it worse.  I wasn’t being clever, I was just being loud and aggressive.  Jamie dragged me outside, trying to avoid trouble.  But the asshole kids followed us out, and that’s when it got physical.”

“Patrick.”  David’s eyes are wide, and he stares at Patrick for a long moment, then pulls him into his arms.  “I’m so sorry,” David says, holding him tight.  “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“I’m sorry too,” Patrick says.  “It’s fucking embarrassing.”

“No, you didn’t do anything wrong-”

“I kind of did,” Patrick corrects him, squeezing his eyes shut and pressing his face into David’s hair.  “I’m not blaming the victim here, but this was more your run-of-the-mill bar fight than a hate crime.  I was blitzed off my ass, I said some stupid stuff to some hyped-up kids practically half my age, and I got beat up.”

“You only got in a fight because you were defending your cousin,” David says.  “Who was the target of homophobic animals.”

“I’ll accept 90% bar fight, 10% hate crime,” Patrick says, sinking into David’s embrace.

“At least fifty-fifty.”  David’s big hand is holding Patrick’s head against his own.  Patrick shifts a little, and then he’s sitting in David’s lap, surrounded by David’s arms, his scent, his breath.

“I feel like an idiot,” Patrick says softly, and David shakes his head in denial.  

“You’re not an idiot.”

“Wouldn’t you be embarrassed if you got yourself into that situation?”  Patrick asks.

David rubs his hands up and down Patrick’s back, and his sore muscles twinge, but Patrick doesn’t pull away.  It feels too good to be wrapped up in David like this.  “Maybe a little.  But they <i>assaulted</i> you.  No matter what you said to them, that’s criminal.”  David turns his face and his nose presses into Patrick’s hair.  “Did you talk to the police?  Do you want to talk to our lawyer?  Now that my family has money again, she’s returning our calls.”

“No, I reported it, the guy who kicked me is probably pleading out.  I didn’t want to have to deal with it.”

“And so you booked a flight to Florida.”

“I did.”

The timer on the stove goes off and they both jump, Patrick regretting it instantly as his ribs protest.

“Oh, god, sorry, are you okay?” David babbles, his hands reaching to steady Patrick as they untangle themselves.

“I’m fine,” Patrick says with a smile.  He gives David’s hand a squeeze and then they make their way into the kitchen to deal with their dinner, Patrick searching for a strainer for the pasta as David turns off the heat.  They work together easily, plating their food and digging in, and their conversation returns to mundane things like whether Patrick’s version of Bolognese is appropriate even though it’s made with ground beef, and why flat pasta tastes better than round pasta.  

They’ve finished loading the dishwasher and putting away their leftovers when David stops wiping the counter and turns to Patrick, one hand on his hip.  “So, you don’t care if I don’t drink?”  David’s face is studiously neutral, but Patrick can tell he’s nervous about Patrick’s answer.

“Nope.  I really don’t.  It’d be good for me to stop, too.  At least for a while.”

David holds Patrick’s gaze, and for a moment Patrick thinks he’s going to argue, but then he just nods.  “Okay.”

“Okay.”

They migrate to the couch, and David turns on another cooking show (this one has the contestants running through a grocery store to find their ingredients, and it makes Patrick think about David at the nearby supermarket this afternoon, patiently going through Patrick’s ridiculously detailed list to find the 15 oz cans of organic, fire-roasted petite diced tomatoes), and before he knows it Patrick is nodding off.

“Hey.”

Patrick opens his eyes, finding David looking at him from the other end of the couch.

“Want to go to bed?”

Patrick squints to see the time on the clock in the kitchen.  “It’s not even nine.”

David shrugs.  “So?”  He stands up and holds out his hand.  “I’m open to an early night.”

It should bother him, this coddling from David, but it doesn’t.  After he got beat up, Patrick had quickly turned away his parents’ suggestion that he come home to recuperate.  At the time he was too upset about where he had ended up – alone, unemployed, and frankly feeling like an idiot for having let his life turn into such a mess – to let his family take care of him.  He can’t believe it was only a week ago.  And it was only forty-eight hours ago that he ran into David in the Milwaukee airport.  It’s crazy how quickly everything has changed.

Patrick takes David’s hand and lets him help him up off the couch.  He leans into David and tucks his face in the crook of his neck, and David hums reassurance and pats his shoulders.  David smells like garlic and onions and Rose Apothecary body milk, and Patrick wants to stay here forever.

“Sorry, you’ll fall asleep on your feet, and that won’t work for either of us,” David says, and Patrick realizes he must have said that last bit out loud that.  No harm done, it seems.

They take turns in the bathroom, and get changed into sleep clothes, David wearing the same striped t-shirt Patrick remembers from way back at Ray’s house.  “Okay if I read for a while?” David asks, propping a pillow behind himself.  He blinks at Patrick, his dark lashes hypnotizing, until Patrick rouses himself enough to respond.

“Of course.”  Patrick slides under the covers and tucks himself against David almost automatically, his drowsiness letting him get away with it without even feeling awkward.  David curls his arm around Patrick’s body, holding him close, and Patrick drifts off feeling better than he has in a long, long time.

[blodeuweddschild]

Tag game 50 q’s

Tagged by @icantwritegood , thank you! I completely forgot about this and found it when I was looking in my drafts (sorry 😳)

what is the color of your hairbrush? I have one that’s black and another that’s blue with leopard spots on it

name a food you never eat: Black pudding, the most cursed of all English food

are you typically too warm or too cold? Too warm, throw me onto an ice rink and I’ll melt it

what were you doing 45 mins ago? God knows, I can’t remember what I was doing one minute ago. Reading perhaps? Dancing around the kitchen with my brother maybe

what’s your favorite candy bar? Either Milka or that wonka chocolate that they discontinued years ago (I miss it very much)

have you ever been to a professional sports game? No but I have been to my brothers rugby matches so there’s that

what is the last thing you said out loud? Oh I know a Scotch Egg do I now?

what is your favorite ice cream? Archers chocolate

what was the last thing you had to drink? I think it was the gingerbread hot chocolate from costa

do you like your wallet? Yeah! It has a fox on it (to match my fuck ton of other fox themed items that my family has been aggressively buying for me over the past 6 years)

what is the last thing you ate? Spaghetti bolognese

did you buy any new clothes last weekend? I got a checkered coat so now I can fully pull off the look of British middle aged builder

what’s the last sporting event you watched? I do not view the sportings

what is your favorite flavor of popcorn? Chocolate covered popcorn. Idk the brand but my mum used to nick packets of it from the cinema for me

who is the last person you sent a text message to? My girlfriend

ever been camping? Yeah I think I’ve been at least 20 times, probably more. I think I managed to get at least 40 nights away while in scouts

do you take vitamins? Not anymore. Used to though, apparently they were the size of horse tranquilizers

do you regularly attend a place of worship? Nah, I was banned from churches anyway when I was like 6 months old cause punched a priest

do you have a tan? No, I live in northern England the sun does not shine here

do you prefer Chinese or pizza? Pizza

do you drink your soda through a straw? I don’t drink soda it burns like holy water

what color socks do you usually wear? Black with any colour patches

do you ever drive above the speed limit? Nah I usually go at a steady 0mph cause I can’t drive

what terrifies you? Mannequins, clothing stores are my version of hell

look to your left, what do you see? My cat Midnight

what chore do you hate most? I hate hanging up the laundry, it never all fits onto the drier

what do you think of when you hear an Australian accent? Nothing, I simply don’t think

what’s your favorite soda? No soda, soda hurts

do you go in a fast food place or just hit the drive thru? Go in cause my favourite fast food places don’t have a drive thru

what’s your favorite number? 16

who’s the last person you talked to? My mum

favorite cut of beef? The tasty part?

last song you listened to? Running with the Wolves by Aurora

last book you read? finished? A Series Of Unfortunate Events: The End

favorite day of the week? None of the days, all the days are bad

can you say the alphabet backwards? Nope

how do you like your coffee? I like it with 3 sugars, milk, a teabag and no coffee

favorite pair of shoes? My trainers because they’re actually comfortable

time you normally get up? 12:00 if I have the choice, it’s to make up for all the missed hours through the rest of the week due to having to get up really early

what do you prefer, sunrise or sunsets? Sunset cause pretty and sleep

how many blankets on your bed? 2

describe your kitchen plates. White with blue, brown or black around them but the black ones are only for when we have guests

describe your kitchen at the moment. I am not in there so I don’t know what it’s like cause I have no memory

do you have a favorite alcoholic drink? Baileys ig? I don’t drink much and I don’t like carbondated drinks so yeah. But like it’s expensive so I don’t have any often

do you play cards? Nah

what color is your car? It’s very red

can you change a tire? Nope idk how to do stuff

your favorite state? Maryland but the only reason is that’s where my girlfriends from

favorite job you’ve had? Any job I’ve had has been shit, hate them all

Tagging: Anyone who wants to do it!

[shochmonster]

84 Questions

original: https://fuckyeahsurveys.tumblr.com/post/61049002526/84-questions

Put your music player of choice on shuffle and list the first 10 songs Guns of Brixton - The Clash Holiday in Cambodia - Dead Kennedys  Chainsaw - Nick Jonas California - Joni Mitchell Make It Wit Chu - Queens of the Stone Age This Woman’s Work - Kate Bush The Bad Thing - Arctic Monkeys Between the Bars - Eliot Smith Drown - The Smashing Pumpkins Different People - No Doubt

If you could spend a week anywhere in the world, where would it be and why? Would you take anyone with you? I’d take @duoloopo to the UK. I’d like to see places other than London.

What is your preferred writing implement? (eg. Blue pen, pencil, green pen)  I use my iPad stylus the most, but I have this heavy mechanical pencil I really like for drawing. 

Favourite month and why? October. I just love the fall vibe. 

Do you have connections to any celebrities (even minor)? List them. I went to undergraduate school with Rebecca Sugar. We used to ride the bus between NYC and DC together on holidays. 

Name 3 items you could pick up from where you are. Can of seltzer, pencil case, stack of bills

What brand logo is closest to you currently? REAL Skateboards

Do you ever play board games or other non-computer games? Got any favourites? I love Small World and Munchkin. 

A musical artist you love that isn’t well known Laura Stevenson and the Cans

A musical artist you love that is well known Red Hot Chili Peppers

What is your desktop background currently? Thomas Barrow on the beach in the Season 4 Christmas Special

Last person you talked to, and through what you talked to them @duomaxwell02 with my face :O 

First colour name you can think of that isn’t in the rainbow White

What timekeeping devices are in the room you are currently in? Two wall clocks, though one is very old and doesn’t wind anymore. I also have a clock @duoloopo ‘s dad made for me. It’s on the piano. 

What kind of headphones do you use? JBL Bluetooth, noise canceling 

What musical artists have you seen perform live? Foo Fighters (3x), Incubus (3x), Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, Audioslave, Justin Timberlake, Troy Sivan, Arctic Monkeys, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Queen (but with Roger Daughtry, not Freddy... for obvious reasons.). Probably a whole bunch of others I’m blanking on. 

Does virginity matter to you? Not really. 

What gaming consoles do you or your family own? PS4, PS2, PS1, XBox 360, N64, Gamecube, Wii, NES, SNES, various Gameboys, Nintendo DS, PSP

What pets do you have? What are their names? Two cats, Hemingway and Renji

What’s the best job you’ve ever had? I like freelance art gigs the best. As for ‘normal people jobs’, I once was a sign painter for Whole Foods. That was pretty fun, minus the work drama. 

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Food service. 

What magazines do you read, if any? I’ll pick up Time once in a while

Inspiration behind your URL? My classic original URL was LinkWorshiper and had been since AIM first existed. I picked it because Zelda was the first fandom I ever joined. Now I’ve changed all my handles (except on AO3) to reflect my actual name, as my literary agent thinks it’s more professional. 

Inspiration behind your blog title? Mean Girls. I always chuckle imagining Thomas and Jimmy as some Edwardian version of the Plastics. 

Favourite item of clothing? My Downton livery waistcoat. And the stiff bosomed shirt and collars I have to go with it. 

Are you friends with any exes? Nah. By the time I felt comfortable enough to possibly try, I also didn’t care enough to. 

Name at least one book you loved as a child. His Dark Materials (the trilogy by Philip Pullman). I still love them and am jazzed that he’s writing more these days. 

What’s your native language? If that language has distinct regional variations, which variation? (eg. AU English, US English) US English, mostly a northeastern dialect/accent

What email service do you use? Gmail

Is there anything hanging on the walls of the room you are currently in? So much stuff. I have a mood board full of Downtons stuff over my desk, various DA posters and memorabilia, plus some artwork I’ve done, and some of my JC Leyendecker collection. The aforementioned wall clocks, a San Francisco cable car bell, Sailor Moon and a few other little knickknacks, like my hamsa. To name a few lol. 

What’s your favourite number, and why? 212 because it’s Manhattan’s area code and also because it used to be the notation for one of my favorite ships in an old fandom. 

Earliest moment in your life you can remember? Sitting under the table and looking at my grandma, who was wearing a Cruella Deville dress she’d knit herself. Like, it had the actual Disney character on it. Pretty cool to a little guy, I guess!

What did you have for dinner yesterday? Quesadilla 

How often do you brush your teeth? Whenever they feel gross

What’s your favourite candy/chocolate? Lately, I’ve been into Junior Mints. 

Have you had other blogs on Tumblr? Do you have any other blogs currently? This blog used to have my old handle, linkworshiper. I did a small Whole Foods blog when I worked with them, but it never went anywhere. 

If you were suddenly really hungry, what would you choose to eat? Sushi

What fandoms would you consider yourself a part of? Downton Abbey, though lately I’ve been crazy busy and not as active as I once was. Casually still poking at old fandoms like Zelda and Gundam Wing to name a few. 

If you could study anything, what would it be? More art education can’t hurt. Maybe some formal history education. 

Do you use anything on your lips? (eg. Chapstick, gloss, balm, lipstick) Chapstick 

How would you describe your sense of humour? Seinfeld 

What things annoy you more than anything else? Mouth noises

What kind of position are you in at the moment? Sitting

Do you wear much jewellery? Nope

Who is the leader of your country, currently? Any other levels of government with leaders? (State, region, province, county, district, municipality, etc) Three supposedly equal branches of government, currently being run into the ground by a clown 

Last 3 blogs on your dashboard, not including any of your own @halcyondaze @mab1905 @lavender-hued-melancholy

What do you carry your money in? I try to never carry cash, but I carry a small wallet 

Do you enjoy driving? Why or why not? I like it but sometimes it feels like a chore, especially during a commute. @duoloopo thinks I’m a shit driver so she tries to drive whenever she can, which has pluses and minuses. 

Longest drive you have ever been on? Savannah GA to San Francisco, CA in a UHaul

Furthest away from home you have ever been? Germany 

How many times have you moved house? God, I don’t even know. More than ten. 

What is on the floor of the room you’re currently in, not including furniture? Cat toys, unused canvases

How many devices do you own which can access the internet? Phone, computer, iPad, various game consoles 

Is there is anything that is guaranteed to always make you happy? Thomas and Jimmy <3 <3 

Is there anything that always makes you sad? Thinking too hard about being a failure

What programs do you currently have open? I just rebooted, so only Chrome, Spotify and Photoshop

What do you associate the colour red with? This line in the Kate Bush Song Blue Symphony, which goes, ‘I associate love with red, the color of my heart when she’s dead.’ 

Last strong smell you can remember smelling? The Greek food I ordered in for dinner

Last healthy thing you ate? Roasted veggies

Do you drink tea or coffee, and how much per day? I prefer tea, and I drink coffee for energy, though sometimes I think it just makes me crash harder. 

What do you associate the colour blue with? The sky

How long is the closest ruler you can find? 12 inches

What colour pants/skirt/etc are you currently wearing? Dark blue

When was the last time you drank water? About a minute ago

How often do you clear your browser history? Rarely

Do you believe nude photos can be artistic, rather than erotic? Yes

Ever written fanfiction for anything? Oh God, yes. You can still find it under Link Worshiper on AO3, though some of my ‘classics’ have been removed since I turned them into original manuscripts 

Last formal event you attended My cousin’s wedding

If you had to move your birthday to another date, which one would you choose and why? Maybe inch my birth year up just by two so that I’d stop being called a damn millennial. At my age, I really just don’t relate to the generation even though technicalities make me a part of it. 

Would you prefer to be at a beach or in the countryside? Beach

Roughly how many people live in your town? 52,000

Do you know anyone with the same birthday as you? Leonard Nimoy :D 

Favourite place to shop? Can be a certain store or a place where there are multiple stores I haven’t really gone shopping since the pandemic. Right now, it feels like the only place to buy anything is Amazon XD

Do you have a smartphone? What kind? If you don’t, do you want one? Samsung. It’s not a Galaxy but is a new model and a fraction of the price. 

What is your least favourite colour, and why? I don’t think I dislike any colors honestly. 

How do you spell grey/gray? Grey. I’ve got too many British online associates to ever go back. 

Go to your dashboard and describe the image shown in the radar section (below the “Find blogs” link) It’s Umbrella Academy fanart of Klaus. He’s in black and white with this hands over his eyes and the background is red. It’s very graphic. 

What difference is there between how many followers you have, and the number of blogs you follow? 736

How many posts do you have? 8,859

How many posts have you liked? I can’t find the stat D: 

Do you post mainly reblogs, or your own content? Mainly reblogs but I pepper in my own content when I can. Lately, I haven’t had time to do as much fanart though, and I kind of feel like it’s not worth bothering to post my original stuff. Nobody follows my blog for that. 

Do you track any tags? No. 

What time is it currently? 7:33 PM CMT

Is there anything you should be doing right now? Waking up @duoloopo. TIME TO JUMP ON THE BED. 

tagging, if they feel like it: @abbys-little-whippersnapper​ @bumblebarrow​ @irrationalgame​ @downtoncat​ @mab1905​ @duoloopo​

and everyone who I’ve forgotten

[queertazsecretsanta]

A gift for @tobytrashoftrash, created by @primatechnosynthpop!

Some Kravitz/Taako/Magnus for you! Enjoy!

~~

The sun was sinking low in the horizon, casting a dazzling array of soft pinks and purples and oranges across the sky. Down on the ground, a fresh dusting of snow coated the landscape. Although the view of the outdoors was obscured by frost on the classroom windows, it was clear that it was shaping up to be a beautiful evening. Taako's students squirmed in their seats as he ran through the final magic lesson of the semester, and he had to admit that he was getting pretty antsy as well. The sooner he wrapped things up and sent everyone home, the sooner he could finally finish his long-overdue Candlenights shopping.

"…And so you move your casting implement like this," he addressed the crowd of fidgety students, swishing the prop wand he used for class demonstrations. "And just like that, you can whip yourself up a tasty holiday treat! This spell can be a real lifesaver sometimes--like when Susan promised to bring desserts to your Candlenights party and then flaked out at the last moment, just as an example."

He cast a glance at the clock mounted on the wall behind him. The hour hand was gradually approaching the 3, although the minute hand was lagging behind between the 8 and the 9. Eh, what the hell, he thought. Close enough.

"Okay, it's time to head home," he said, clapping his hands together and putting on a big theatrical grin. "Remember what I've taught you and, uh, don't party too hard? Nah, scratch that, party as hard as you want. See you on the flipside!"

At that, he heard a faint whoop from toward the back of the classroom, although he wasn't sure which one of his students it was. With a bemused smile, he tucked his prop wand into his purse, which he slung over his shoulder while his students gathered up their own supplies and jumped out of their seats. He hung back for a moment, giving his students the chance to file out first, but didn't lag behind for too long. He had places to go too, after all.

Immediately upon stepping outside, Taako was caught off guard by just how low the temperature had already dropped. It had been hovering around zero degrees celsius earlier that day, but judging by the way the wind nipped at his ears, that number had significantly dropped since then. Fighting back a shiver, he zipped up the winter coat which Kravitz had insisted he wear despite how dorky it looked and stuffed his hands in the pockets. The hood was a little cumbersome to fit around his ears, but he put it up nonetheless. He then scurried down the walkway away from his school as fast as possible. Kravitz was still at work, which of course meant that Lup and Barry were still working as well, and Magnus was probably out doing some shopping of his own, so this would have to be a solo mission. It was more convenient that way, really; shopping alone meant that nobody could peek at what Taako was buying for them.

A few metres down the sidewalk, his stone of farspeech crackled to life in his purse, broadcasting a loud but muffled voice. Without slowing down his brisk pace, Taako took the stone out and held it up to his ear to hear better.

"Hey, Taako," Magnus's projected voice greeted him. "I've finished carving Kravitz's present, so if you wanted to come home and put some enchantments on it or whatever, this would be a good time."

"Sorry, Mags, it'll have to wait," Taako replied. "Making friends was a mistake, because I've got a billion fucking people to get gifts for and today is the last day before all the shops are gonna be closed for the holidays. I'll get home as soon as I can, though," he added. "Love you, bye."

He turned the stone off and tucked it back into his purse just as he approached the store that would be his first place of interest: HMV (the store name, of course, stood for "Handy Magic Valuables"). Inside, the shelves were looking pretty bare as a crowd of shoppers milled around, filling the shop with a dull rabble that thankfully drowned out the chipper holiday tunes playing over the intercom. He made a beeline for the Kenny Chesney records and selected one he was pretty sure Merle didn't already own, then perused the selection of kid's movies, scanning the shelves for the flick Angus had mentioned wanting to own. The kids' section in particular was already pretty thoroughly picked clean, and for a moment he was afraid that the item he was after was already sold out, but upon glancing one aisle over his eyes landed on a copy of Detective Pikachu haphazardly tucked in amongst a bunch of remastered classic horror movies. While he was looking at that particular selection, he picked out the cheesiest-looking one he could find (something about a ghost shark that looked like it had been made on the budget of two cents and some pocket lint) as a gift for Barry. In the checkout line, he picked out some novelty socks with a rude saying on them for Lup.

After leaving HMV, he headed over to Fantasy Home Depot to pick up some stuff for Hurley and Sloane. On the way, he got another stone of farspeech call, this time from Kravitz.

"Hello?"

"Hi, babe, it's me," Kravitz said--he insisted on introducing himself that way no matter how much Taako made fun of him for it. "The Raven Queen is letting us off work early for the holiday, so I'm calling to let you know I'm coming home a bit early."

"Can she do that?" Taako asked.

"Well, she is a goddess, so she can do whatever she pleases."

"Yeah, I guess that tracks. So," he said in his least suspicious tone possible, "Are you home yet, or…?"

"Not just yet, but I'm about to head home." Kravitz paused, and when he spoke up again, there was a teasing note to his voice. "Why, are you and Magnus planning something you don't want me to know about?"

Taako bit back a string of curses, instead setting for grinding his teeth even though everybody and their goldfish told him it was an unhealthy habit. Yes, in fact, Magnus had set aside a half-hour every day for over a month to carve Kravitz a brand-new piano. Taako, meanwhile, had been scoping out all the local pet stores, planning to surprise Kravitz with a new cat and Magnus with a new dog (in addition to the Candlenights feast he cooked for both his boyfriends every year). Sure, it was a pretty big investment, but Taako's financial situation was better than his younger self could ever have dreamed--and besides, even if that wasn't the case, it would still be worth it to see the looks on his boyfriends' faces. He had no idea what if anything Kravitz was planning for Magnus, and what either of them were planning to do for him; his boyfriends were surprisingly adept at keeping secrets from him, probably because they knew him better than the average person.

"Um, no, we're not planning anything in particular," he lied. "But I'm actually out doing some shopping, so if you want to come rendezvous with me at Fantasy Home Depot, maybe we can pick out some gifts together. How's that sound?"

As soon as the words left his mouth, he bit back another even louder string of curses. Shit, no, he can't be with me when I head over to the pet store!

"Um, scratch that," he added before Kravitz could say anything in response. "I actually just remembered that I left my, er, my scarf at the school. So if you could pop over there and see if you can find it, that would be great. Okay, love you, bye!"

He cut the call off in a hurry as he headed into Fantasy Home Depot. On previous years, this had been his destination when it came to shopping for Magnus, and for Kravitz he had usually gotten some sort of novelty item shaped like a skull. It was amazing how the same goof landed every year; he almost wondered if Kravitz would be disappointed not to receive a skull-shaped drinking glass or lawn ornament or whatever this year.

He had already bought a new compass for Davenport and a glitzy novelty ornament for Lucretia, and Ren had insisted that she didn't need any gifts (although he still planned to prepare a special tray of sweets as a gift for her, that still meant he didn't have to buy anything for her aside from maybe a couple of baking ingredients). Once he had picked up the power tool and canister of engine oil that the battlewagon racers had requested, the only shopping he had left came in the form of two fuzzy little companions for the men he loved.

~~

When Magnus had taken it upon himself in mid November to start carving a grand piano from scratch, he had been pretty sure he wouldn't get it done in time for Candlenights. Two weeks into the project, when it had just been a big old block of wood hidden away in his workshop with what barely seemed like an indent in it, he had made a secretive late-night trip up to the Fantasy Bargain Shop and bought a skull-shaped lamp as a backup gift in case things fell through. Now, though, as he stepped back to admire the product of his work--a flawlessly carved grand piano, varnished and freshly painted black--his chest swelled with the pride of a job well done. Now all he had to do was check on Taako's gift to make sure everything was in order, and they'd be good to go.

Just as Magnus turned to leave his workshop, he heard the distinctive ripple noise of one of Kravitz's portals opening upstairs. He scrambled for a sheet big enough to cover the piano and hastily tugged it into place, making sure the gift was sufficiently hidden before heading upstairs to greet him.

"Hey, Krav! How was work today?" he asked, running up to Kravitz and giving him a clap on the back. "Taako is out doing some shopping right now, so he probably won't be home for a while."

"Yes, so he told me," Kravitz said, a note of something like irritation in his voice. "He also told me that he had accidentally left his scarf at his magic school, but I looked all over the place and didn't see any such thing. And wouldn't you know it…" He swiveled his head towards the dining room; Magnus followed his gaze to see Taako's scarf draped over the back of a chair. "Do you suppose he was trying to delay my coming home for some reason?"

"Could be," Magnus said with a shrug. It was only after he had spoken that he realized that was definitely Taako's motivation, probably to prevent Kravitz from seeing the piano. He repeated his shrug with a little more emphasis, then laid a hand on Kravitz's shoulder and gently guided his line of sight towards the fridge. "So, I was wondering if those liquor candies Merle gave us were any good," he said. "Why don't we get into them and see for ourselves?"

"Your restraint truly knows no bounds," Kravitz said, flashing him a teasing smile. "But I really would like to know why Taako wanted me out of the house so badly."

"Um, could be that he was embarrassed by how dirty it is," Magnus said. "We haven't had time to do much cleaning, you know. So we're gonna be real busy tomorrow if we want to have anyone over."

Even as he spoke he internally winced at how unconvincing a lie it was--if only Taako himself was there to think of a good cover. (Or he could just tell him the truth, he supposed, but that would ruin the effect and he really did want the piano to be a surprise.) Sure enough, Kravitz didn't exactly seem convinced; he crossed his arms and arched an eyebrow at Magnus.

"I live here, darling. You think our boyfriend would lock us out for such a reason? Back when I first met him and he was more guarded, maybe, but even then--"

"Or it could be a different reason," Magnus interjected, blurting the words out a bit more loudly than necessary. "We just don't know! But, for real," he added, "Don't worry about it. I promise you, it is nothing to worry about. On a completely unrelated note, welcome home, but please don't look in my workshop."

"Why, what's in the workshop?" Kravitz asked. "Other than that piano you've been carving, of course. Tell me, is it a gift for someone? Of course you know that I don't play piano, only the violin and the occasional woodwind instrument, but…"

He kept talking, but his words didn't reach Magnus's ears; his brain completely shut down for several seconds upon hearing the piano mentioned in such casual terms. When all of what Kravitz was saying caught up with him, his blood froze over. Shit. Fuck. Goddamn it. He knew about his surprise gift? Had known about it basically the whole time? And what's more, he didn't even want it as a gift--wouldn't have any use for it! Even beyond the matter of Magnus's hard work potentially going to waste, what was he going to get for Kravitz now? (He still had no clue what Taako was planning to get for either of them, so even if he did run out and get something now, it may well end up being the same thing Taako had bought for him and he really didn't want to repeat the fiasco of two years ago, when he and Kravitz had both bought Taako the exact same brand of confectioners' sugar.)

"Um, if you'll excuse me," he interjected, grabbing his stone of farspeech off the coffee table in a swift and hopefully not too obvious motion. "I need to go check the mailbox."

With that, he darted outside into the cold winter air, slamming the door shut behind him before Kravitz could respond. His back pressed against the door, he bent over to catch his breath. The cool air stung at his throat as he panted, and his exhales curled up in front of him in little puffs of white, the same colour as the snow. Once his heart had settled back down into its proper spot in his ribcage, he dialed Taako's number on his stone. Luckily, Taako picked up almost immediately, answering with a casual "Yeah?"

"Oh, Taako, this is bad," Magnus hissed, glancing through the window to make sure Kravitz wasn't listening in. "Kravitz knows about the piano I carved for him, and he says he doesn't want it as a gift! Well, he didn't directly say that, but he told me he doesn't play the piano, so he couldn't use it even if we did give it to him. What should I do? Are you almost home?"

"Oh, shit, that's tough," Taako said, letting out a low whistle. Magnus could picture him wincing and adjusting his hat, if he was wearing it--although a glance inside through the window revealed his signature wizard hat hung up on a hook next to his cloak of the manta ray, so perhaps he was going hatless that day. "Um, I'm still not gonna be home for a few minutes, so hang in there 'till I get back, okay?"

"Wait, babe, don't hang up yet," Magnus pleaded. "He's your boyfriend too, remember? Don't you want him to be happy with the gift he gets?"

"Course I do," Taako replied. "That's why I'm out picking up something for him right now. And listen, Maggie, I'm sure Krav won't hold it against you if you just end up giving him a hairbrush with a skull decal on it."

"You know, that's funny; I was just about to ask if I should give him the skull lamp," Magnus said.

Then he paused, listening to the background noise on Taako's side of the call. It sounded like he was in a pretty busy shop--of course, all the shops would be busy right about then--but the weird part was that he could hear what he swore was barking. Quite a lot of barking. And maybe some meowing and other noises too? Brows furrowing, Magnus pressed the stone directly against his ear so he could hear better.

"Hey, you're not at a pet store or anything, are you?" he asked.

"Just here to admire the exotic birds," Taako said. "Listen, though, I've really got to stop lollygagging around here at this pet store that I'm not buying anything from, and head on into the other store next door, which sells other non-pet stuff that I'm gonna buy. Catch you later."

Although Magnus grumbled to himself, initially discouraged when Taako ended the call, his boyfriend's words quickly gave him an idea. Tucking his stone away in his pocket, he stepped off the back porch out into the yard, where Taako and Kravitz had hung up several birdfeeders (he had carved some of said birdfeeders himself, and yet the storebought ones always seemed to be the most popular, which plagued him with irritation). It was too cold out for the yard to exactly be bustling--for once there wasn't a squirrel to be seen--but a few ravens were hopping around at the bases of the birdfeeders. Locking his eyes onto one of the birds, Magnus dropped into a crouching position. It was time to put some of his rogue training to use.

~~

By the time Taako finally got home, Kravitz was anxious enough that he jumped at the sound of the doorbell. From downstairs, he heard Magnus yell "I'll get it!" followed by the sound of his footsteps thundering upstairs. In that time, Kravitz had already come to the door; he held it open for Taako as he walked inside without even stopping to kick the snow off his boots first. Taako carried two shopping bags in each hand, and he was balancing a large box with holes in them under each arm. Kravitz regarded his boyfriend with mild concern as he staggered inside and set down first the boxes, with an unexpected gentleness, and then the shopping bags. Stooped over all his purchased goods, Taako's torso heaved with the weight of exhausted breaths.

"Are you alright, love?" Kravitz asked, unsure whether to chuckle or be worried. "It looks like you've done a lot of shopping."

"Yeah, no shit," Taako wheezed. Then, straightening up and wiping sweat off his brow: "So, have you got everybody checked off your list yet? Cause judging by how the shops were looking, you've got about ten minutes before the whole city is completely sold out."

"No, I've already got all my holiday shopping taken care of," Kravitz said (he had given his fellow reapers their gifts at a holiday party the week before, and the presents he planned to give his boyfriends weren't exactly the kind of things you could find at a store). "Do you need help putting these away?"

He cautiously bent down, reaching for one of the shopping bags. Taako made no move to prevent him from grabbing it, so he took it as a sign that the contents of the bag (a large drill tool and a vinyl record) weren't for him. He set about putting the items away while Taako caught his breath. Nothing in the bags was particularly heavy, so he guessed that the heavy things must have been the boxes. He circled back to try to grab one of them, but Taako's gaze snapped up at that and he moved to stand between Kravitz and the boxes.

"Sorry, Krav, this stuff's off-limits right now," he said. Then, glancing over his shoulder at the two boxes: "Although… hmm, how would you and Maggie feel about opening your gifts right now? That's probably make a few things easier."

"Oh, that's a great idea!"

Magnus's exclamation from behind them made Kravitz jump; he hadn't realized he had come upstairs. Turning to look at him, he appeared to be hiding something behind his back, and was hopping from foot to foot with a big nervous grin.

"I mean, only if you guys want to, of course," he added quickly.

An odd noise almost like a squeak sounded from somewhere in the room, although Kravitz couldn't tell where it was coming from--behind Magnus's back? From inside one of the boxes? Maybe even… no, surely not both. Kneeling between the two boxes, Taako glanced between them, making a soft anxious clicking sound. Kravitz raised his eyebrows but didn't comment. He had a building suspicious as to what at least one of the gifts Taako and Magnus had was, but he hoped he was wrong considering what his own gifts to then were. It would make it rather redundant, and more pertinently, they simply couldn't afford to support that many…

"Yeah, that sounds like a plan," Taako said, interrupting his train of thought. "What do you say, Krav?"

"Er, yes, that's fine," Kravitz said, flashing Taako a smile. "Let's get right to it, then."

"I've actually got my gifts for you two right here," Magnus said--yep, definitely hiding something behind his back, and there was an odd strain to his motion as he stepped forward that suggested he was having trouble holding onto it. "I was originally going to give Kravitz something else, but that didn't work out, so I kind of had to improvise, but considering your whole grim reaper deal I think you'll like it."

"Didja get him some skull trinket?" Taako asked. "Cause, hey, that's my job!"

"Huh? No, this is something different," Magnus replied. Neither of them seemed bothered by the fact that this exchange was transpiring directly in front of Kravitz himself. "Anyway, um… on three?"

"Hold on," Kravitz interjected. "I need to open a portal to the astral plane first."

Ignoring the others' bewildered reactions, he summoned his scythe into his hand and swished it through the air in a broad but purposeful stroke. A rippling hole in the fabric of space-time opened up before him, through which he could see the vast expanse of the world beyond. Bending down, he patted his knee and whistled into the opening. Somewhere amidst the inky blackness, two undead being perked up their heads and scampered over towards him. It hadn't been easy talking the Raven Queen into letting Kravitz give his boyfriends undead creatures for Candlenights, but he was certain that the payoff would all be worth it once he showed them the skeletal pets.

"There, now," Kravitz cooed to the skeletal dog and cat standing before him. He gently scooped them up into his arms, then closed the rift so as not to let anything else in or out. "Alright, on three, you said? Three, two, one--"

He turned around, skeletons in hand, to see Taako opening the boxes and Magnus revealing what he'd been keeping behind his back.

There was a beat as the three men stared at each other, their initial expectant grins at each other quickly fading. In Taako's corner, a greyhound puppy waddled out of the box on the left, and a sleek tuxedo cat stepped out of the box on the right. Magnus, meanwhile, held a raven in one hand and what looked like some kind of a strange weasel in the other. He and Magnus both slowly lowered their acquisitions to the floor, where the skeletal animals and the living ones all scampered toward each other and began sniffing each other--aside from the raven, which hopped over to Kravitz without wasting any time. He recognized it as one of the ravens who frequented their backyard; those corvids always had taken as interest in him, and the feeling had been mutual even before Kravitz had begun serving under the Raven Queen. The flesh cat trotted over towards him as well, while the skeletal one gravitated towards Taako and hopped up onto his lap. The weasel-like creature (maybe it was a mongoose?) followed it, albeit with a bit more caution. Both dogs practically charged towards Magnus, and he let out a delighted laugh as they jumped up at him. He fell back, allowing himself to be bowled over; Taako looked up from scratching the skeleton cat behind its spectral ears to give him a fond smile.

"Well," he sighed, "I guess we should've checked with each other first."

"Indeed, this is certainly… well, it's a lot," Kravitz agreed. The cat headbutted his leg as if to agree, or maybe to argue. "Although I must say, I do appreciate the thought."

They looked over at Magnus, who was rolling on his back with laughter and letting the dogs clamber on top of him and slobber all over his face. Taako grimaced at all the dog saliva, and the mongoose (which had now hopped up onto his lap) chittered with disapproval.

"Gonna be hard to look after them all," Taako went on as the mongoose scurried up his arm and onto his shoulder, and the skeleton cat curled up into a ball in his lap and started purring. "I mean, I bought food and supplies for the flesh boys, natch--" He nodded toward the cat at Kravitz's side and the greyhound pup, which was now sitting down directly on top of Magnus and licking him on the nose. "--And I dunno if these bone babies of yours are gonna need much upkeep… but still, it just seems like a lot, right?"

"It is a lot, is the thing," Magnus agreed from his position underneath the dogs. His hands didn't falter from petting them for even a second. "Probably impractical to keep them all, right?"

"Not to mention how dirty the house will get," Kravitz agreed. "Cleaning will be a nightmare with six animals running around…"

He looked down at the raven perched on his leg, and was met with a pang of surprise at the discovery that he was stroking its head. A glance to his side revealed that he was stroking the cat as well, and it seemed to be thoroughly appreciating the gesture; it repeatedly rubbed its head against his leg, purring.

"Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right. For sure," said Taako, in the distinctive tone he slipped into when he got distracted. "We really shouldn't… I mean, we messed up, good goof and all, but…"

He trailed off, and they lapsed into silence save for the purring of the cats, the sound of the dogs licking Magnus's face, and the soft shuffle of the mongoose making itself comfortable in the crook of Taako's shoulder. None of them stopped petting the animals even for a second--Kravitz wasn't sure he could bring himself to pull his hands away even if he wanted to. Finally, after what felt like simultaneously the most relaxing and the most stressful two minutes of his afterlife, Taako let out a heavy sigh and broke the silence.

"We're keeping them, aren't we?"

"Yep," Magnus replied without a moment's hesitation.

"Oh, we absolutely are," Kravitz agreed, breaking into a grin at the confirmation that the others were on the same page as him.

Taako grinned too, and although Magnus's position in relation to the dogs blocked the view of his face, he laughed again--less giddy now, but with just as much joy. Moving carefully so as not to disturb the pets, Kravitz scooted forward and laid his hand atop Taako's. Then, holding his gaze with an affectionate smile, he brushed back Taako's hair and leaned forward to kiss him.

"Joyous Candlenights, love," he murmured.

"Aw, geez, Krav," Taako mumbled, lowering his face as a furious blush spread over his cheeks. "No need to get so sappy…" He darted forward to kiss him back, then pulled back with a grin, still blushing even though they had kissed a thousand times before. "But, yeah, same to you, babe."

"Hey, what about me?" Magnus asked in mock offense. He gently lifted the dogs off of himself and sat up, edging over toward Taako.

"Sorry, dear, no kisses for you until you wipe all that fucking dog slobber off," Taako told him, giving an exaggerated shudder. Despite his words, though, he raised himself up off the ground to give Magnus a kiss on the top of his head. "And happy Candlenights to you, too. To both of you."

A great warmth swelled within Kravitz as Taako sat back down between him and Magnus. He looped an arm around each of their waists and drew them in close, smiling far brighter than he normally let any of his emotions shine through. Outside, the wind was still blowing as cold as ever, and dark clouds covered the moon, carrying the promise of a heavy overnight snowfall. Here and now, though, the three of them were warm and safe and happy--or rather, the nine of them. Yikes, that really was a lot of pets, wasn't it? Still, looking between his companions and the animals, Kravitz decided they could handle it. In any case, no matter how things turned out in the long run, this was a night that they were sure to remember for a long time to come.

[sims-psycho]

I’m pretty sure I already asked you the hella cute questions for Billie 🤔 So odds for Luna and evens for Kit! 💕

ok, so, this took me so. fucking. long. but I love you for it cuz I’m shit at char development so thANK YOU FOR ASKING ANGEL!!! ♡ ♡  

1. Who was the last person you held hands with? ~ Kane of course

3. Who are you looking forward to seeing? ~ I know this probably isn’t what you mean, but I have a meeting with the drama teacher at college today to see if I can help with the costume design for the musical and I’m pretty excited *smiles*

5. If you were drunk would the person you like take care of you? ~ I know he would because he may or may not have had to in the past *blushes*

7. Do you think you’ll be in a relationship two months from now? ~ Yes, me and Kane are really good

9. Does talking about sex make you uncomfortable? ~ Depends on who it’s with

11. What does the most recent text that you sent say? ~ ‘Yeah sure, do you need anything else?’ to my mum, she wants me to grab some stuff from the shop on my way home

13. Do you like it when people play with your hair? ~ My hair gets really tangled so not really

15. What good thing happened this summer? ~ summers not over yet! *giggles*

17. Do you think there is life on other planets? ~ Absolutely, even if it’s just a shred of bacteria, the universe is to extensive for use to the be the only ones

19. Do you like bubble baths? ~ Ooo, yes, a lot *laughs*

21. What are you bad habits? ~ I’m a bit of a workaholic, so I guess that’s sort of a bad habit

23. Do you have trust issues? ~ I don’t think so, thankfully

25. What part of your body are you most uncomfortable with? ~ My nose is really wide and, yeah i know it’s silly but everyone has their insecurities i guess

27. Do you wish your skin was lighter or darker? ~ Not at all, I love my skin tone and my heritage

29. Have any of your ex’s told you they regret breaking up? ~ I’ve only really been with Kane

31. If your hair long enough for a ponytail? ~ I guess, but it’s not really ‘long’ more just big

33. Spell your name with your chin. ~ ,ljna *giggles* I tried

35. Would you rather live without TV or music? ~ As much as I love a good Netflix binge I’d have to say TV, music is just so good in so many different situations

37. What do you say during awkward silences? ~ Depends on the situation, but I normally try and say something positive, if not that I just stay quiet

39. What are your favorite stores to shop in? ~ I only really buy second hand clothes, or I make them so I don’t really know

41. Do you believe everyone deserves a second chance? ~ Yes, the core of someone never changes, but how they view the world does

43. Do you smile at strangers? ~ Sometimes *smiles*

45. What makes you get out of bed in the morning? ~ I guess I just always have stuff to do

47. Have you ever been high? ~ Maybe….*looks sus*

49. Have you done anything recently that you hope nobody finds out about? ~ Yes *looks uncomfortable*

51. Ever wished you were someone else? ~ When I was a young teen, but I don’t think that’s that unusual

53. Favourite makeup brand? ~ Milk makeup

55. Favourite blog? ~ n/a

57. Favourite food? ~ Any kind of caribbean food my mum makes

59. First thing you ate this morning? ~ Crumpets *cute smile*

61. Been suspended/expelled? For what? ~ Omg never, that would be the end of my life right now

63. Ever been in love? ~ I am right now *blushes*

65. Are you hungry right now? ~ Not really

67. Facebook or Twitter? ~ Facebook

69. Are you watching tv right now? ~ How did you know!? *looks shocked* I’m halfway through sex education and it’s hilarious *giggles*

71. Craving something? What? ~ I could always eat dark chocolate, it’s my favourite

73. Do you sleep with stuffed animals? ~ Yeah…..my little bunny *blushes*

75. Favourite animal? ~ I like deers,  just think they’re really elegant

77. Chocolate or Vanilla? ~ Vanilla

79. What colour shirt are you wearing? ~ It’s like a pinky red sort of colour

81. Favourite tv show? ~ I really love Killing Eve

83. Mean Girls or Mean Girls 2? ~ Who even likes mean girls 2!? *scoffs and laughs*

85. Favourite character from Mean Girls? ~ Gretchen *giggles*

87. First person you talked to today? ~ My mum

89. Name a person you hate? ~ I don’t think I really hate anyone

91. Is there anyone you want to punch in the face right now? ~ No!!

93. How many sweatpants do you have? ~ Only a couple pairs, and I only wear them in the house

95. Last movie you watched? ~ Me and the gang watched birdbox last weekend, it was really creepy

97. Favourite actor? ~ I don’t think I have one

99. Have any pets? ~ We have a cat called Beanie, technically she’s my mums cat but she’s also kinda the family cat *smiles*

101. Do you type fast? ~ Oh yeah, it’s like fire comes off my fingers *laughs*

103. Can you spell well? ~ Uhh, yeah *smirks*

105. Ever been to a bonfire party? ~ I’ve been to a bbq party with family, but I don’t think thats the same *giggles*

107. Have you ever been on a horse? ~ Yeah, me and my sisters used to go to a horse riding club when we were little *smiles*

109. Is something irritating you right now? ~ Nope

111. Do you have trust issues? ~ No, I don’t have any reason to distrust anyone I know

113. What was your childhood nickname? ~ Little moon, or sometimes just lune

115. Do you play the Wii? ~ Me and my sisters used to play the super mario wii all the time when we were kids *smiles*

117. Do you like chicken noodle soup? ~ Yeah, it’s alright

119. Favourite book? ~ The Art of Faminisim

121. Are you mean? ~ I….I don’t think so

123. Can you keep white shoes clean? ~ Can anyone? *laughs*

125. Do you believe in true love? ~ Yeah, I think I do

127. What makes you happy? ~ Luckily, a lot. Off the top of my head, my family and friends, Kane, fashion and art and music and good food and a lot of other things *smiles sweetly*

129. What your zodiac sign? ~ Cancer

131. Your best friend of the opposite sex likes you, what do you do? ~ Be incredibly confused because Eli’s gay *laughs*

133. Favourite lyrics right now? ~ “You and I, wide awake / With the sky falling down / As we wait for the morning / Is there a place in the stars / Where the sky goes to sleep? / We got no way of knowing” Feel by Jacob Collier and Lianne La Havas

135. Dumbest lie you ever told? ~ Oh I can’t remember, I’ve probably told some dumb ones to my parents when I was younger though

137. How tall are you? ~ 5′7

139. Brunette or Blonde? ~ My hair is brown

141. Night or Day? ~ Day

143. Are you a vegetarian? ~ No, but I wouldn’t say I’m a huge meat eater either

145. Tea or Coffee? ~ Tea, I have lots of herbal teas that I drink depending on my mood *smiles*

147. Mars or Snickers? ~ Ooo, snickers

149. Do you believe in ghosts? ~ Yes, sadly it happens to unrested spirits *lowers head*

2. Are you outgoing or shy? ~ I’m super outgoing dude *laughs*

4. Are you easy to get along with? ~ I’m so chill, what are you sayin, of course *winks*

6. What kind of people are you attracted to? ~ Oh man, anyone who’s fit straight off, but people who are just ‘out there’ y’know

8. Who from the opposite gender is on your mind? ~ I saw a spunk on the beach last night, she disappeared before I could introduce myself

10. Who was the last person you had a deep conversation with? ~ Kasper, he lectures me all the time

12. What are your 5 favorite songs right now? ~ Ooh, that’s a toughie, uhhh, Cake by the Ocean, Funky Duck, Feels Like Summer, Andromeda aaanddd…..Wonderwall *laughs*

14. Do you believe in luck and miracles? ~ Sure, why not *chuckles* a lot of crazy shit happens everyday man

16. Would you kiss the last person you kissed again? ~ No joke, don’t know the last person I kissed, oops *laughs, embarrassed*

18. Do you still talk to your first crush? ~ Nah

20. Do you like your neighbors? ~ They’re a’ight. They don’t really leave there place though

22. Where would you like to travel? ~ I dunno, I’ve been to a lot of places, don’t really know where I want to go next

24. Favorite part of your daily routine? ~ I normally skate to the cafe Billie works at most mornings and grab a smoothie

26. What do you do when you wake up? ~ Jerk off *smirks*

28. Who are you most comfortable around? ~ Andie for sure, she sucks a lot sometimes, but she’s my sister and no one really gets me like she does

30. Do you ever want to get married? ~ Meh, maybe someday, but not for a loooooonggg time *chuckles*

32. Which celebrities would you have a threesome with? ~ you have no idea how happy I am i got this question *laughs cheekily* Chris Hemsworth and Cara Delevingne, I wouldn’t need to get any for like a year if that happned *laughs*

34. Do you play sports? What sports? ~ I surf and skate a lot, it’s kind of all I do tbh, me and Kas box together sometimes too

36. Have you ever liked someone and never told them? ~ Yup *smirks*

38. Describe your dream girl/guy? ~ Someone adventurous and confident who can put me in my place *winks*

40. What do you want to do after high school? ~ Man, no one has asked me about school in like, 40 years *laughs*

42. If your being extremely quiet what does it mean? ~ I’m never quiet *smirks*

44. Trip to outer space or bottom of the ocean? ~ Defo bottom of the ocean, I bet theres a lot of my shit down there *laughs*

46. What are you paranoid about? ~ I dunno, sometimes I freak out because the government is fucking up our planet and shit but Maya always tells me one day we’ll be the ones pulling the strings and it makes me feel alright

48. Have you ever been drunk? ~ *laughs* oh yeah

50. What was the colour of the last hoodie you wore? ~ Pink i think *chuckles*

52. One thing you wish you could change about yourself? ~ I’m perfect, what are you saying *smiles cheekily*

54. Favourite store? ~ Theres this tiny sakte shop across town that sell all sorts of cool shit

56. Favourite colour? ~ Like a greeny-blue kinda colour

58. Last thing you ate? ~ I think like an apple or something

60. Ever won a competition? For what? ~ I’ve won a fair few surf competitions in my time *smirks*

62. Been arrested? For what? ~ I know have, but I can’t remember what for, hasn’t happened in a while, I’m obviously not trying hard enough *winks*

64. Tell us the story of your first kiss? ~ pashed my p.e teacher in the kit room, that shit was hot *smirks cheekily*

66. Do you like your tumblr friends more than your real friends? ~ n/a

68. Twitter or Tumblr? ~ Twitter

70. Names of your bestfriends? ~ Andie, Kapser, Teegs, Erik, Maya and Max. I’ve got some friends back in Oz but I haven’t seen them in forever

72. What colour are your towels? ~ Black, cuz we emo in my house *laughs*

74. How many stuffed animals do you think you have? ~ None, i got this scraggly monkey thing that hangs from my rear view mirror in my car though *chuckles*

76. What colour is your underwear? ~ You wanna take a look yourself darlin’? *winks and smiles cheekily*

78. Favourite ice cream flavour? ~ All of them, I fucking dig ice cream so much, especially ben n jerry

80. What colour pants? ~ You really into my clothes aren’t you *smirks* I got green trunks on

82. Favourite movie? ~ The original Alien is fun

84. Mean Girls or 21 Jump Street? ~ 21 jump street defo, although I did like mean girls waay more than I thought I would when I saw it

86. Favourite character from Finding Nemo? ~ Shiiiit, I fucking loved that film, haven’t seen it in years though, whats the turtle called again? You know the really stoned one? *laughs* yeah him, or the shark

88. Last person you talked to today? ~ Kasper, I think

90. Name a person you love? ~ Getting all sappy now are we *smirks* want me to say you? I can if you want babe *winks*

92. In a fight with someone? ~ Nah, don’t take a lot to get me there though *smirks*

94. How many sweaters/hoodies do you have? ~ A fucking lot *laughs*

96. Favourite actress? ~ Margot Robbie is hot as fuck *smirks*

98. Do you tan a lot? ~ I’m tan 24/7 bby *chuckles*

100. How are you feeling? ~ High as fuck *laughs*

102. Do you regret anything from your past? ~ Yeah, but I try not to think about it, live in the moment and shit

104. Do you miss anyone from your past? ~ Sometimes, but I normally forget about it within a couple of mins

106. Ever broken someone’s heart? ~ Ahhh probably, have you seen me, how could I not *winks*

108. What should you be doing? ~ Fuck all *laughs*

110. Have you ever liked someone so much it hurt? ~ Fuuuck, yeaaaaah

112. Who was the last person you cried in front of? ~ I don’t cry around people….I don’t really cry at all tbh

114. Have you ever been out of your province/state? ~ I’ve been all over the world darlin’ *smirks* I’m a cultured guy *chuckles*

116. Are you listening to music right now? ~ I’m in a cafe and theres music playing so yeah

118. Do you like Chinese food? ~ I like all food

120. Are you afraid of the dark? ~ Haha, I do most of my wirk in the dark so I fucking hope not *laughs*

122. Is cheating ever okay? ~ No, unless your girl or guy cheated first, then it’s just payback

124. Do you believe in love at first sight? ~ Yeah, I’ve seen it happen

126. Are you currently bored? ~ Nah, you’re very entertaining *smiles cheekily*

128. Would you change your name? ~ Nah, my name’s alright

130. Do you like subway? ~ Not really, I don’t eat a lot of fast food

132. Who’s the last person you had a deep conversation with? ~ Kasper I think

134. Can you count to one million? ~ I Have to to count the reasons why you and me would make a cute couple *winks and then laughs*

136. Do you sleep with your doors open or closed? ~ Closed, who the fuck leaves it open!?

138. Curly or Straight hair? ~ My hair is kinda wavey, and on other people i like all types, I don’t descriminate *smirks*

140. Summer or Winter? ~ Summer!

142. Favourite month? ~ June duh, it’s my birthday month

144. Dark, milk or white chocolate? ~ yes *laughs*

146. Was today a good day? ~ It was a’ight

148. What’s your favourite quote? ~ Maya and Erik spurt some educational shit at me all the time but fuck do I have a ‘favourite quote’ *laughs*

150. Get the closest book next to you, open it to page 42, what’s the first line on that page? ~ the closest book to me right now is in the library across town so no way mate *chuckles

[boogiewrites]

A Girl Walks Into A Bar 6

Characters: Declan Harp x Bella Fiore (OFC)

Word Count: 6400+

Summary: Modern Declan harp AU.   Bella finds herself warming up to Declan. A friend of a friend lets her know Declan has some skeletons in his closet. When she asks, he gives an honest answer. He can see in her eyes that she has some skeletons too.

Warnings/Tags: Language. Drinking. Talk of violence, murder. 

Click on my screen name then go to Mobile Masterlist in my bio for my other works and chapters. (Had to do this since Tumblr killed links, sorry.)

As it had been going, it was the day of your weekly meet up at the bar with Declan. It'd become a welcome part of your routine and a much-needed stress reliever. The men that were usually at the bar were used to you now, being on a first name basis. They weren't exactly warm to you, they didn't invite you over to talk with them or anything, not that you wanted that, but they would give you affirmative nods when you'd enter and that was a nice feeling. Always better to have the bikers on your side than against you.

This day was much like the first that had brought you to the bar in the first place. You'd been mansplained to for the day by boys half your age about guitar. You weren't as angry as you were tired, but at least you had your truck back to comfort you instead of being stuck on foot. So you rumble up in your old Ford, parking at the end of the sidewalk after all the motorcycles took the good spots in front of the bar.  You take a deep breath and rub between your eyes, not wanting to go in with a bad mood looming as you wanted to enjoy the time you spent at the bar. You had the tendency to come in with a chip on your shoulder from work on Fridays, and you didn't want Declan to think that you were only capable of being grumpy and nothing else. Although historically, and if you asked anyone who knew you, friendly would not be at the top of the list of descriptors for you.

It's April now, over three months since you'd become a regular at The Trading Post. The cold and wind were still holding up strong, especially after the sun went down. You feel the wind bite at you as you pull your leather jacket tight around you, your company logo sweatshirt not providing much insulation. Your boots crunch over gravel and coarse salt, hand shoved into your pockets as you make your way into the warm shelter the bar offers.

The heat flushes your face as you walk in, the bar moving with bodies as it was on a Friday night. Mike passes you, a friendly smile a strong nod that you politely return, starting to peel your jacket off. You begin to move to your corner of the bar that you like to perch at, but find it taken. You twitch your lips in consideration for where to sit, as you don't want to sit between two men you don't know anything about except their nicknames. You choose a booth and even though he's currently focusing on filling pint glasses, Declan sees you walking past to a different seat than usual.

"Mike!" he calls out, watching you slide into the green patched leather benched seat.

"I know! Got it!" Mike says, finishing wiping down a table as he quickly moves to behind the bar. He knew Declan had been waiting for you to show up like he always did. He hadn't given him any shit for it yet, at least nothing more than a few insinuating glances, but if he left him alone once the bar got crowded, he would have a  lot more to say to him once you left.

Declan pats his back as a thank you, as he carries himself with a confident saunter towards you, your favorite ale in hand. "Hey, Bella." he says with an earnest smile, the words spoken almost in an exhale that made you warm on sight. You rise from the booth, and as is customary now, you let him hug you.

"Hey Declan." you try to sound more enthusiastic about his appearance but words come out as a grumble against the soft flannel of his shirt. He didn't usually wear a lot of layers, but he had a worn t-shirt underneath flannel shirt tonight and you'd be lying to yourself if you said the added bulk wasn't serving him plenty of favors in the attractiveness department.

"What's wrong babe?" he questions, a sight rub to your back as he sets the bottle in front of you and you both slide into opposite benches. "Work again?" he suggests, putting the bottle cap to your ale into his pocket to throw away later.

"Yeah." you groan and roll your eyes. "Stupid kids half my age tryin' to tell me I don't know what I'm talkin' about." you take a big swig of your drink.

"About music?" he scoffs with raised brows, making the arches even more prominent over the dark hazel eyes.

"Mmm Hmm." you nod, sucking your teeth and looking around the bar, with more people filing in.

"Are they fuckin' stupid?" he says with a laugh. "No one I know knows more about music than you."

"Thank you." you give him a supportive nod. "The little asshole knows three chords and think's he's gonna be the next Cobain when he can't write lyrics for shit. It was popular in the '90s because it was new. It was the beginning of a movement. It's not as groundbreaking to write angst over some banged out chords nowadays. Everyone one of these little pricks think they're so fucking talented." you shake your head.

"Ah. White teenage boy?" he chuckles.

"They're the worst." your groan turns into a chuckle. "The only upset they have in their lives is their mothers buying them the wrong color iPhone for Christmas and they think they know pain." you rub your temple. "He literally had the words, I hate my parents, I hate myself, I hate you... like...what am I supposed to do with that? Tell him it's any good?"

"Is that what your boss told you to do?"

"Nah, CeeCee is understanding. She's the brain and I'm the heart. So if I don't feel anything from it, it won't be any good." you shake your head and take another drink. "She trusts my judgment." your face softens a bit and he's glad to learn more about where you work, you never really talked about your coworkers.

"That's more than most people get." he says supportively.

"Oh yeah, no, I'm lucky she understands me and my lunacy." you smile. "But privileged little boys do NOT, however." you purse your lips. "I told him I could lie to him, but I wouldn't because he was paying for my expertise. He didn't want constructive criticism though."

"Most people don't." he grins. "Can't handle it. Takes a secure person to realize they might not be right all the time. And those are few and far between." he muses.

"Amen." you say, reaching out to clink your bottles together. You take a drink and you take a second to look him over, admiring the lumberjack vibe he was giving off. You must've looked a little too long.

"What?" he asks with a grin.

"Could I give you some constructive criticism?" you throw a cocky nod his way.

"Will it make me cry?" he pouts.

"I don't think so." you grin.

"Then hit me." he says, thwacking his hand on the table.

"I fully support this... lumberjack vibe you got goin' on." you say, moving your hand in front of you.

"OH!" he says with a genuine smile. "Thanks." he lets out an almost bashful chuckle.

"Any reason you've strayed from your usual humbled rockstar look?" you tease.

"We had a bunch of orders come in today, spent most of the day with the back doors open and loading and unloading trucks from the street. Get's cold." he says, tugging on the black beanie on his head.

"I like it. Works for you." you give him a considerate nod. You are aware you'd just given him a compliment, and by the way his lips tug back, the tension in his jaw as he holds back from it growing farther across his bearded face, you can see he certainly noticed.

"Thanks." he says proudly, letting a smile break through, showing his teeth. He knows a blush is growing, not expecting a compliment from you and thinks of a way to hide it. He pulls the beanie off, throwing it onto the table and ruffles his naturally loose curled hair, hanging past his shoulders. You get hit with the smell of him and your pupils dilate. You were defenseless against pheromones. Or whatever delicious, masculine smell was coming off him. A faint musk, whether from him or cologne you weren't certain. Faint smell of woods or ocean, maybe shampoo. He scratches his head and scrunches his face, letting his scalp breathe again. "What about you? Sweatshirts aren't something I've seen you in before. And with a heart on it? That's not on brand at all." he lets out a deep teasing chuckle.

"Oh but it is!" you say condescendingly. "This is the name of our company." you say looking down and holding out the logo for your and Grace's studio. A logo with a cartoon heart and an italicized word 'sounds' after it in bold text.

"I didn't know it was your company." he says impressed, he thought you only worked at the studio. "Me and CeeCee went in half and half on it when we first started. I was working at a music store, squirreling away every bit I could, playing bars on weekends and teaching guitar lessons, just trying to get by. CeeCee, at the time, was married to a rather well off guy and we met by fate one night when I was playing at his office's new years party. We oddly hit it off, which is rare for me." you roll your eyes and smile. "And a year or so later we started this company, bought the building and the equipment, all that. We're legit." you nod and say with a proud smile.

He looks you over for a moment, the pleased smile, the new knowledge he had about what made you, you, it all gave way to a feeling of being proud of you himself. It explained the long hours worked, the clear passion and intelligence about what you worked in, the skill you'd honed in your instrument of choice. It was clear you were very driven and had been for some time, the realization makes him like you more. In his experience, things that were worked hard for had felt more worth it in the end and with how he was slowly chipping away at you he was hoping the initial hardness and hesitancy you had shown to letting him in would also fall away and in the end be worth it. He saw a lot of potential in you, for a lot of different things. An honest and loyal friend, someone to help him with his business, as you were running a successful one and he could always learn from you. And the one that he didn't want to admit yet, but was becoming more and more obvious to him, he saw the potential for you to be more than just friends. But he didn't want to get ahead of himself.

"I thought it'd be another band I've never heard of." he shrugs. "But the truth is much more interesting." he says earnestly.

"It usually is." you grin. "You wanna know another truth?" you ask leaning in closer.

"Duh." he laughs.

"I'm only wearing this because it's laundry day." you laugh and admit, taking another drink.

"Ah! The most dreaded of all days. Free ballin', shirt you don't really wanna wear and jeans that have gone one too many days without being washed." he muses and you laugh.

"You get it!" you let out a more animated laugh. "Although there isn't much free ballin' happenin' on this side of the table." you snort. "Due to the lack of... well... balls." you say in a goofy way with a motion of your hands in explanation.

"Yeah, what's it called when girls do it?" he narrows his eyes in thought.

"That's just commando right?" you wrinkle your nose as you think.

"Ah, yeah." he nods. "I forget that's the unisex term for it."

"I call it free ballin' too." you chuckle. "To be fair." you shrug and take another drink. "Just... sounds more crude and funny."

"Which seems like your kind of thing."

"Most definitely." you laugh.

He sees you looking over his shoulder. "What?" he asks, turning around.

"Lots of people in here tonight."

"Yeah, it's Jon's birthday," he says, turning back. "There'll be more people in the closer it gets to nine." he explains.

"Do I know Jon?" you ask with a tilted head.

"You referred to him as a second rate hype man that couldn't shut the fuck up." he laughs.

"Yeah I remember that guy." you nod and take a drink. "I guess that means a good business night though." you say optimistically.

"Yeah." he drags the word out. He was grateful for the bump but, it meant he wouldn't be spending his time sitting and talking to you and he didn't see you as often as he'd like already. But he also didn't want to ask to hang out and make it weird. With someone like you he had to let you come to him. "It is getting busy..." he says in a distracted way. "I guess I need to go help Mike." he says, sucking his teeth and downing the rest of the bottle.

"Yeah, go ahead. Don't need my permission." you smile and wave him towards the bar.

"You gonna stick around?" he asks, you can hear the hopeful lilt to it, how could you say no.

"And miss these guys make asses of themselves? No way. 'Course I'm stayin'." you give him a friendly smile to take the edge off his disheartened eyes.

"Might need you around to help me keep these guys in line." he smirks.

"At your service." you nod supportively. "Maybe we can try to hang out before next Friday? Since there won't be much hangin' goin' on tonight?" you offer, testing his reaction to see if he was hesitant to leave your company and in his long exhale you see your guess is correct.

"Yeah, on a night when it's slow." he nods.

"Let's make it through tonight and when it thins out and you can come talk to me again, we'll figure it out." you say casually with a shrug, leaning back and taking another drink.

"You always have good plans, Bells." he grins and shoots a finger gun your way before heading back to the bar. You see Mike give him grief, and you're guessing by the way they both laugh and shove each other it might've been about you.

You're left looking over the carvings in the table top. All crudely done with pocketknives and surely the vandalism was motivated by alcohol. Dates go back to the '80s, you run your fingers over the letters and names, Dina + Ronnie 4 Ever '88, Shirley + Lenny '94. You wonder where they're at now, and how hanging out at a bar had worked out for them. It seemed to be working out pretty well so far for you. You weren't entirely sure just yet. Neither of you were making any moves to have the relationship push past friendship, and you were forever grateful for that on his behalf. For now, a good friend was what you needed, and he certainly seemed to fit the bill. You knew you should make more of an effort to hang out with him outside of his work but he did work a lot, and also the hours when you traditionally would be off of work. You were sort of working with what you were given.

You watch him working, his flannel now unbuttoned, hat shoved in his back pocket with his soft hair bouncing around his shoulders. He engages with every person, being warm and friendly and you wonder how he does it. His tall form leans over the bartop for hugs and cheek kisses, to both men and women and you find yourself charmed. It was hard not to be, the man looked like he could crush you but his demeanor was like that of a puppy's, and who didn't love puppies? You wonder when cheek kisses might be introduced into the repertoire of your greetings. He'd worked hugs in pretty seamlessly, you have to give it to the guy. If the girls at work saw you hug a guy they'd assume you were married. You weren't the hugging type. But it seemed you'd made an exception for Declan, hadn't you?

He was turning out to be an exception to the rule for men for you as well. Polite, humble, hardworking and still somehow also extremely good looking. You weren't sure how that all managed to fall in place, but you figure you should bake his mother some cannoli or something for the work she must've put in to raise such a man. Maybe that's what it was? He was a man. He wasn't a boy. He was a giant dork and goof ass sure, but he was responsible and kind, intelligent and industrious and you wondered if he was the first man, besides your father, you'd spent any real time with.

All the boys you'd dated before were just that...boys. Your first relationship, a hellish shit show of a Greek tragedy that'd turned out to be. You still had the physical and emotional scarring and trauma to prove it, A few casual encounters of off and on dates that never lead anywhere, not that you'd wanted them to. One night stands more often when you were younger, but it'd been a long time since you'd had the urge for that. You'd deleted tinder ages ago and work had replaced any time you'd spent putting effort into finding sex. There had been one guy you thought was nice, but in hindsight maybe that was because he just did everything you told him to. You suppose it doesn't really matter, that one was nipped in the bud fast too. You finish the rest of your bottle, brow furrowing in thought at how it ended, and if it'd happen again if you tried. You decide you don't want to think about that tonight and go get another bottle. Declan opens it with his hand by raising his shirt up and twisting it off for you, a not too suggestive wink to you as he hands it off and he's beckoned by people much louder than you to the other end of the bar.

You take your seat back, watching the crowd, eavesdropping and staring into a mirror that reflected a dark room in the back, you still hadn't found out what was back there and just as you feel the pull to explore, someone sits in the booth across from you. Much to your surprise, it's a girl you haven't seen before. Thin body and lips, blonde hair and a strong jaw sit with a seemingly friendly indifference.

"You mind if I sit here?" she asks, taking off her jacket. "Everywhere else is full or too full 'a drunks." she says with a smile.

"Uh, yeah that's fine." you say with a shrug, your face straight, you go back to nursing your drink.

"Thanks. Bella, is it?" she asks, holding out her hand.

You did like a woman who shook hands, but you weren't sure how she knew your name.

"Heard Declan call ya it when you went up to the bar." she explains, watching the realization come across your face as you blink slowly and nod.

"Oh, okay. I was about to say..." you let out a huff of a laugh for politeness's sake and raise your brows to show your uneasiness and to push back any unwanted pursuit of friendship.

"I'm Clenna," she says with a nod, taking out a pack of cigarettes. "I'm a friend of a friend of Mike's," she explains further. "Here for Jon's birthday." she lights it and thankfully blows it away from your face.

"I'm just here to drink." you say flatly, raising attention to your bottle. "I don't know Jon or anything." you elaborate.

"Oh, you not here for Declan then?" she asks, a furrow in her brow that you aren't sure if you like or not.

"Excuse you?" you ask with only a hint of unfriendliness.

"I saw him with ya earlier." she motions to him with her hand. "With that sorta attention I thought you two might be seein' each other."

You stare at her. What you were was none of her business. She takes a drag and picks up on your unwillingness to share, your confident look of question at her telling her you weren't like the other girls that she'd seen after Declan. They were too open, bubbly even, and usually much, much more drunk. "No." you answer flatly, taking another drink.

"I mean ya no harm," she says leaning in closer. "I just thought it was a good thing you were with him now... ya know... instead of years ago. Seein' as he seems like a different man now 'n all." she says in a more serious tone.

"I'm not with him. We're just friends."

"Well good on that then." she nods. "What with his history 'n that." she says, looking over to him.

You sigh, seeing she's trying to rope you into something. And granted, you knew very little about Declan's past and you could just ask him about whatever she told you later. "Alright. I'll bite." you say with pursed lips.

"If you were thinkin' about bein' with him in any capacity, as one woman to another, there are some things I'd want to know if I were you." she begins. "He is a decent man now, rather peaceful for the sort of place he runs, but he wasn't always ya know."

"Go on." you say, leaning in closer to her on the table.

"I've lived 'round here forever, hell, I even dated Mike for years when's we's young." she shrugs and huffs out a laugh. "And I've heard of the things he's done, seen what consequences people faced from crossin' him. Although if you'd asked him, he did everything in the name of justice, only givin' it to people what deserved it. But to some violence is violence, no matter tha motive." she nods. "He was the man you went to when you had trouble with someone." she lowers her voice. "Known for his ability to find people, his fondness for knives..." she adds with a raise of her brows. "It's even rumored 'round here he's behind the death of a cop."

"I knew he was a part of the Black Wolves." you say, gesturing to the room full of vests with patches that reflected that sentiment.

"Aye. He did leave that. And he got out because of murderin' that man so I'm told." she takes another drag. "The Wolves ain't so much murderers 'n rapists 'n all that nonsense. They love their bikes and their beer and to have their fun and not be bothered. Rather loud and rough, seemingly trouble to anyone who don't know 'em. But anyone who gives themselves a name, calls themselves a gang, there's gonna be rivals and those others might not be as civil as they are, ya know?" she shrugs. "So there's police sniffin' 'round sometimes, lookin' for men to blame. There have been murders, I won't pretend like there's not been... but you know men." she rolls her eyes. "Territorial and that." she nods. "A person can only take so much before they'll retaliate ya know?" she says in a less mysterious tone.

"Why are you telling me this?" you ask with a deeper tone.

"Like I said, I saw him give ya a wink and leave his post to talk to ya, I thought there might be somethin' going's on. I don't know ya, so I know ya ain't from 'round here, so I was tryin' to let you know what sorta trouble might be lurkin' 'round if ya were to stay with this sort of company. If I were someone who didn't know, I'd want to know. That's all."

"Are you some vengeful ex or something?" you flatly ask.

"Oh no." she chuckles and shakes her head. "Only dated Mike, and we's teens then. Water under the bridge now. But I knew Declan then, and I know of him now, and as much as he's cleaned up his act there's always a threat 'a violence around this sort. I know Declan likes to act like he forgets his past, that's he's beyond it now, but... you don't live that hard for that long and just one day leave it behind forever." she sighs. "As one woman to another I dinnae wantin' ya gettin' in over ya head."

"Okay." you nod and take a drink. "If that's true then... thanks." you say with a suspicious glance.

"What the fuck's she doin'?" Mike mumbles, looking over at Clenna talking to you. He knew you didn't know each other, and from the look on your face, the conversation seemed to something you were paying attention to, and something was rubbing him the wrong way. "Fair warnin'." Mike says as the bar starts to thin out. "Clenna was talkin' to Bella earlier."

"Yeah I saw." he mutters, wiping a glass.

"We was busy, didn't catch wind of the topic but..." he shrugs, lips tight.

"Yeah, I get it." Declan says low, looking over to you as you scrolled through your phone alone.

Every time he'd look up and see a guy sitting across from you, he'd get a tingle in his spine that had to right to be there. A knee jerk habit of possessiveness that kept coming back. When they'd end up leaving, or you would, it eased his mind. You'd sit there, sometimes not even looking up from your phone, others he could feel the air from your heavy sighs as they tried to talk to you. As the night went on, and they got more drunk, you became more obvious with your rejections.

You'd get in on a game of pool with a group of older, less wasted men. He could've watched you bend over that pool table all night and he knew he wasn't the only one. But after losing a few games, feeling defeated and not as self-assured, he could tell by their poor postures that they weren't going to be a threat. But as they thinned, the younger, drunker ones caught eyes of you and your ass in those tight jeans and descended. He only worried a little, knowing you could probably handle yourself and was thankful that proved true. His ears perked up the one time he hears your voice raise but watching the interaction go down, he trusts you to handle it. The last thing he wanted was to piss you off by treating you like some damsel. He didn't catch what the guy did but you had him against a wall with the pool cue pressed against his neck and he quickly surrendered, moving to sulk somewhere else. No one really wanted to play with you after that and seeing that you actually knew what you were doing, beating them after they kept offering to show you the ropes. Seems your stories of hanging out and playing in bars were true. He wondered if you also knew how to play darts.

Only a handful of people remain, and you've settled back into a booth, and your thumbs moved fast on the screen, wearing a rather adorable unfiltered face of concentration.

"We survived." he says, plopping down in the booth across from you and startling you out of your focus.

"Ah." you saw, looking around and seeing the bar much emptier than the last time you'd looked. "So we did." you nod and give him a soft smile.

"Can I be nosey and ask what you're doing?" he leans in and asks.

"Playing trivia." you say with a small smile and setting your phone down.

"Any good?" he inquires with a lifted brow.

"I am." you nod and lean forward on the table. "But I think I'd rather ask you some questions if that's alright."

You face isn't angry, your voice isn't accusatory so he agrees. "Okay?" he says with a shrug.

"Who's Clenna?" you decide to start with. Seeing what truth there was to their relationship would be a good starting point for who was telling the truth.

"Right," he nods, pursing his lips. "Mike said he saw you talking to her." his tone doesn't sound too happy about the fact.

"Yeah she was telling me some things." you reply slowly, considering the tiredness now showing in his face.

"And you'd like to know if what she told you was true." he remarks with a sigh, setting up straight and popping his back before leaning in on his elbows.

"I would." you agree without any b/d attitude.  "So who is she?" you ask again.

"Mike's ex. She's around from time to time, occasions like tonight, birthdays and stuff." he answers with a shrug.

"Not yours?" you specify.

"Nah." he quickly answers with a shake of his head.

"Funny. She only talked about you."

"She's been known to sort've...feel girls out before that we're seeing." he begins. "Not that I'm seeing you I just...I guess she saw us together?" he asks.

"That's what she said."

"Kay." he nods. "So what'd she say?"

"That you had a past that I might want to know about." you stay vague.

"Yeah..." he rubs the back of his neck. "I thought that might be it." he sighs and looks away.

"Any truth to that?"

"I don't know what she told you but...yeah, there is." he admits and you nod slowly, happy with how this was going.

"Alright." your voice inflects upwards and his eyes dart to you, expecting to be met with something other than curiousness. "So violence, you were known to "take care of people" I guess is how she put it. Can we start there?"

"Yeah." he draws out again, leaning in closer. "I mean, I've mentioned I ran with a bad crowd. I lacked  a father figure growin' up, he wasn't around much and then he got killed." he says with a sadness slowly glazing over his eyes. "So I had a lot of anger and my mom was working her ass off, as a single mom ya know how that goes." he purses his lips. "Got in with a bad crowd. I was big and angry and I beat people up. Got older, got into the gang, more people wanted to mess with me and I had a chip on my shoulder and something to prove. So I did. Often." he nods and shrugs. "Lots of guys I knew, a lot I still do went to jail or got killed so...I felt responsible for these people ya know? The kids and the girls left behind, they didn't have anyone lookin' out for them so there was a lot of standing up for them I took on. Beating up abusive boyfriends mainly, that sort of gig." he explains. "I'll be honest. That still happens sometimes. I try not to interfere but...I really care about these people and a lot of them grew up to make better decisions but sometimes there are still assholes that'll see a single mom and still try to take advantage and if I've promised the guys on the inside I'd look out for them then-" he begins to speak faster, you feel it turning into excuses instead of information.

"Declan." you interrupt and he looks back to your eyes, his large and sad. More of the look that lead to making you refer to him as a puppy. "It's okay," you say quietly, reaching out to put your hand over his. His eyes dart down to it for a few seconds, eyes blinking fast to possibly push back tears that were building with his anger. "I get it," you say with a half smile. "Point of this wasn't to make you upset. I didn't want you getting sad or angry about it." you say with kind eyes that take him entirely off guard. "I just have one more thing I gotta ask." you say with a wince.

"Yeah?" he rasps out.

"There was something about...killing a cop?" you say quietly.

"Yeah." he nods and sniffles as you retreat your hand. "Yeah I..." he lets out a loud sigh. "It's a whole complicated story but...I know you don't want a bunch of grief so...yeah I did." he whispers the last part, face prepared for an onslaught against him.

"Okay. How are you not in jail?" you ask obviously.

"Everyone that knew him wanted him dead. He was a total bastard. Just a real piece of shit." his posture slumps. "Picked on women and children and my friends. Framed a bunch of guys I knew that are still servin' time for things they didn't do. He came after me and those close to me." you see his eyes go far away for a moment before coming back. "There was only one witness, and they wouldn't talk. They wanted them dead just as much as me." You assume this must be Mike. "And everyone else just...didn't talk when the cops came around. There wasn't anything to point to me, I had an alibi, no witnesses, no evidence..." he gestures broadly with his hands, saying it disappeared.

He watches you blink slowly, thinking and wondering if being honest would backfire. But if he'd lied, you would've found out and you'd be gone anyway. So as much as he hated taking the chance, honesty was the best policy and he hoped you saw that.

"But after that I got out of that life. Or I mean...I tried. That sorta life doesn't just disappear overnight." his voice drops low. "I try to have this place, keep the boys out of trouble as much as I can. I don't take jobs anymore, last I beat anyone up was months ago, before I met you..." he looks over to you with cautious optimism. "And that was because this guy had beat one of my friends in front of her kid... I just... I couldn't..." he shakes his head.

"I get it," you say again, a soft smile and a nod. Once again you surprise him. "Everyone's got baggage Declan. Some's just heavier than others." you say with a frown. "And I believe you. I see you being a decent and gentle man and I've seen flashes of the old you sometimes. I know violence and trauma aren't things that just...go away." you say with a huff of a laugh from experience and it warms him. "You don't have to worry about me holding it against you." you let him know and you see his eyes soften. "Your heart's always been in the right place. And that means more than what you did. In my opinion. If you say the guy had it coming then, as far as I'm concerned, he did." you say with a lighter tone.

"You're really just gonna go and be more understanding than I deserve on top of everything else huh?" he smiles sheepishly, rubbing his arm and sitting back.

"LIke I said... I get it." you say with another subtle but soft smile. But he can see it in your eyes, you did get it, you had something similar that rested behind yours as he did his. Perhaps not the same sort of pain but, there was pain there. And that would've explained a whole hell of a lot about you.

"You do get it don't you? I mean...you've been through some stuff haven't you Bells?" he asks quietly, reaching out and putting his hand over yours and the kind gesture makes you want to jerk back because the look in his eyes was so understanding and lacking any judgment.

You tuck your hair behind your ear and nod slowly. "Yeah. I come with baggage too, Declan." you admit. "But I'd rather not talk about it... as hypocritical as that makes me at this moment." you raise your brows and sigh.

"No! No, of course not." he shakes his head and starts to rise, taking your hand and tugging at you.

"What?" you ask with almost scared eyes as your guard was left down.

"We need a hug, c'mere." he tugs at you.

"Are you fuckin' serious?" you let out a chuckle.

"Sure as fuck am, get in here." he says patting his chest. He sees your eyes moves around the bar bashfully. "No one's here to see, Mike won't tell anyone." he offers with a smile.

"Fine." you say, letting him pull you up and into his arms. He was right. You did need a hug. You make full contact as he puts some squeeze into it. You rest your cheek on his chest, put your arms around his waist and he rubs your back for a moment.

"I"m not here to push you Bella. I'm just here. Okay? You know about me now, you've seen me. And as much as you try to hide it, I see there's much of the same thing in your eyes as mine. So I'm... I'm just... I'm here if you need me, alright?" he squeezes you tighter for a moment and you couldn't remember the last time you'd had an embrace with someone like this. Besides family, besides Charlotte, never. "I know you hate this sappy shit but its real so... deal with it." he chuckles to lighten to mood, seeing you smile against his chest.

"I do. But... thanks." you say quietly, slightly muffled from your cheek being pushed against him. You could hear his heart, feel his breathing as he felt your take a big inhale and slow exhale, knowing he'd gotten his point across.

"Thank you for being so fuckin' cool about it. Didn't want to scare you off." he admits, speaking down at you.

"I"m not the runnin' kind." you shake your head, still embraced and you don't want to run from it. It felt too good. "Declan?" you ask, shutting your eyes and his heart thumps as he sees you sigh out again.

"Yeah?" he asks, a super soft smile on his face, big hands still rubbing your back.

"You give really good hugs." you laugh and then burying your face in his chest as you bounce with his laughter.

"I do! Thank you for noticing! I'm great at it. Fuckin'... king of hugs over here." he laughs into your hair.

"Don't get cocky." you say through the laughter, but in all fairness, he had every right to be.

@vale0413 @littledeadgirlwalking @jaegeeeeer

[lalka-laski]

What was the last thing you bought at a store? When did you buy this? A crewneck from Aerie. My shopping habits have been a little excessive lately...

What noises in the room you’re in, do you hear at the moment? My desk fan and the grinding of the ice machine

What color is the kitchen in the house you’re in, painted? I'm at work so there is no kitchen

Do you live in a town where basically everyone knows everyone else? The town I went to high school in was full of busybodies, so despite being a large suburb it had kind of a "small town" feel. Which is one of the reasons Glenn & I have crossed it OFF our list of potential places to raise our family.

When was the last time you or someone else in your family bought a vehicle? Glenn bought a car about a year & a half/two years ago? Time is a blur so I could be off but yeah.

Are your grandparents the kind who are very protective of you? I didn't get to know my paternal grandparents very well but I do think they were and would've been protective of me in their own way. My maternal grandparents not as much, and I don't mean that as a slight. They just express their love and care differently. Have you ever, or do you live on a farm at this moment in time? Negative.

When was the last time you had any kind of chips? What kind were they? Last weekish

Are you one of those people who can’t help but download everything they find? Oh no, not at all.

How many things in the past have you bought off eBay? What things? A couple lipcolors that Covergirl discontinued, and some reading glasses.

Were you always one of those kids who got in trouble with everyone around? The exact opposite, actually.

When was the last time you took a nap? Did it relax you any? Funny you ask because I proudly announced yesterday that I made it the entire day without a nap! But I napped the day before.

Honestly, do you see yourself as a slut? YEP AND PROUD

Can you text quickly?: TOO quickly. Glenn & his parents always remark how fast my thumbs fly, and how I can text without even looking at my phone.

Do you like fast food or does it disgust you?: I love that shit and I hate people who claim they nEvEr eAt It. Get wrecked. We all know it's not healthy but sometimes it's the only option in a pinch. And don't tell me you don't drool at the smell of some hot Mcdonald's french fries... Have you got a hairdresser that you can trust?: I used to but she weirdly ghosted me after the salon shutdowns? Now I see a new girl who is pretty solid. I'll have to visit her a few more times to build up that trust and officially claim her as MY hairdresser though. Ya know?

Do you wear a lot of make up?: Nah. I don't have the face for it. I always look like a little kid who got into her mom's makeup bag when I wear anything more than foundation & mascara.

Do you get nervous before exams? Exceptionally. I'm not a good test taker. Never was.

What’s your favorite alcoholic drink?: Red ales. And lately hard seltzers.

Do you watch Big Brother?: Nah

Do you like the smell of BBQs?: Oh for sure! I may be veg but I still love that sweet, summery smell.

Do you crash on people’s sofas often?: Nah, not anymore. I need my own bed!

Do wasps scare you?: Nope, weirdly. Of all the things I'm afraid of, bees & wasps aren't really one of them.

Have you ever had to spend the night at a hospital? Mhm

Have you ever bought clothing online? Way too often

Have you ever worn flipflops in the snow? Sure have! My college days weren't my brightest...

In December, were you single or taken? Taken

Were you happy when you woke up today? I was actually. It was the first day in about a week that I woke up without excruciating canker sore pain. I feel brand new!

What mood are you in right now? Pretty damn good

Who was the last person you rode in a car with that was under 21? Uhhh, no clue.

What are you currently hearing right now? Didn't I already answer this?

How much clothes do you have in your closet? Too many, most of which I don't even wear. Who is the last person you talked to on the phone? The nurse from Urgent Care lol

Do you regret anything from your past? I mean, there's a lot I've done that still brings me shame when I think about it. But I wouldn't reverse those mistakes. They all led me where I'm meant to be. And I like it here :)

Did you speak to your father today? Yep, we texted.

Have you ever hugged a complete stranger? Yep. It's what drunk girls do.

Who was the last person to compliment you? Glennie

Do you often use the term “slut”? Affectionately, yes!

Do you regret anything you’ve done in the past 24 hours? Nothing comes to mind

[dansphlevels]

Libertadores (Liberators)

Ao3

I am so excited to finally be publishing this! I’ve been working on this fic since September, as a part of the @phandomreversebang with my amazing Artist, @trashofdoom, and beta, @axolotlpj. Before reading, you have to check out the incredible art here! I love how this story turned out so much, and hope that you love it too :)

Summary: The current conflict in Venezuela told through the eyes of two boys who are not supposed to be in love, not supposed to protest, and not supposed to fight. But they do anyways.

Length: 20k words

Themes: The Venezuela crisis, au where Dan and Phil were born in Venezuela, real life canon violence, protesting, closeted relationship, angst with fluff

TW: weight loss, cannon real life violence, non-graphic descriptions of injuries, light homophobic language

Look at the art for this fic done by @trashofdoom here!

 The day that everything went to shit was warm and sunny.

 It was the type of day where everything felt so nice, so normal, that you thought nothing would ever go wrong again. And though that wasn't true, it felt nice.

 School had gotten out less than an hour before, and Daníel and Felipe sat on Felipe’s, also known as Phil’s, balcony, snacking on some food from Juanta’s down the street. Below them, the noise of the city felt like it came from another world. People called out to each other in Spanish and motorbikes sped down the narrow streets.

 Phil’s neighborhood, like most of those in the barrios of Caracas, was packed to the brim of people. Two story houses painted reds, yellows, blues and whites stood shoulder to shoulder, competing against each other for the brightest hues, the most confusing architecture. Plants weren't rare, but they weren't prioritized. Trees dotted in between the casas, full green Sarrapia trees that stayed the same color all year, winter or summer. Fall didn't mean much, besides maybe the temperature would dip below 26°C and they’d have cause to comment on it. No, actually, that wasn’t true. Fall meant rain, just like Summer meant rain. Any time of day, at any moment, the rain would come and when it had filled its course then it would leave, ending as quickly as it started.

 From May to November it was the rainy season. The rest of the year it was the dry season. All year it was hot, and at any point, dry season or not, it could rain.

 It didn't rain that day. Maybe God decided there was enough confusion going on without adding rain into the mix.

 But at that point in time, on that fateful day of April 14, 2014, Daniel y Felipe, or just Dan and Phil, sat on Phil’s balcony contently. Between them lay the takeout from Juanta’s, paper cups of Nestea and two arepas, one for each of them.

 “Do you want some?” Dan offered, holding up his cup of Nestea. “I got peach.”

 Phil shrugged, grabbing it. “Sure. I got peach too, but I bet yours is better.”

 Dan reached to take his cup back, but Phil had scooted away, sipping from the straw with a playful expression on his face, “Hey! Don't drink it all!”

 “I already finished mine,” Phil admitted, a shy smirk on his face.

 Dan snatched the cup away, trying to scowl but failing to hide his smile. “You have an addiction.”

 “Maybe. But it could be worse. I could be addicted to cocaína.”

 Dan chewed on his straw, slightly bashful, “That stuff’ll probably kill you anyways, with how much you drink.”

 “You're such a mom.”

 “Yeah, well don't die on me, okay? We've only been… friends for a few months, but I'm liking things so far,” Dan could feel his cheeks heat up at the word. Friends. It was a lie, a placeholder for a much stronger word, one they could not say aloud, not here. Likely no one could hear them on the balcony, but it wasn't worth the risk.

 Phil smiled, playing along, “Don't worry Dan. I promise I won't.”

---

 April 14, 2013 wasn't the day that everything went wrong. But you could say it was an important day, one that was necessary for the following events to happen. This was the day that Nicolás Maduro assumed the office as the President of Venezuela.

---

 Five months later, and the power went out. It wasn't like it hadn't happened before, but it still shook everyone up a bit. It wasn't just the power going out in a few places- it went out in most of the country.

 One moment, there was power, and the next— nothing. Traffic lights flickered and blinked out. The underground transportation system was sent to a screeching halt.

 Phil opened his front door to find Dan, standing with a sheet wrapped around him, looking distraught. “My computer shut down. I can't go on tumblr.”

 They went into Phil’s room and laid on his bed, talking and holding hands. It was one of the only places they could show such affection, one of the only places it was truly safe. It got dark soon, and without any electricity in the house, they were left to do their best to adjust and walk slowly to the kitchen. Dan sat with Phil’s family for dinner as they tried to clean out their refrigerator, hoping to keep any food from going bad.

 Dan slept over that night, shyly climbing in bed with Phil, “Is it bad to be worried?”

 Phil considered it, staring up at the ceiling, “Nah. But I don't think there's anything to be worried about. Power should be up again soon, it always is.”

 He nodded, trying to be strong. But there was something ominous about the darkness and how it loomed over them, whispering of things to come, “Power’ll be back up tomorrow,” Dan repeated.

 Why did this outage feel so much worse than the others? Maybe it was because there had been few outages in the past few month, not always even noticeable. Did everyone else feel it, that chill? Or was it just Dan?

 He chose to ignore it for now, rolling over and wiggling until his head rested on Phil's chest. Neither dared to breathe; it was the first time they'd been that close. They'd both had girlfriends, but dating a boy was different. Uncharted territory, where every movement was to be considered.

 Eventually they relaxed, and even managed to sleep. Phil’s stomach was soft, a little bit rounded but Dan liked it. And when they woke up, they woke up to electricity.

---

 “Do you know what was with the power yesterday?”

 “Maduro tweeted about it. He said it was a sabotage, by the ‘extreme right wing’. But it didn't affect the oil industry, apparently.”

 “Oh, good. Yeah, we'd be really screwed over if something happened with the oil.”

---

 In 1999, Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela. He cut ties with the United States and cozied up to China and Russia, both of which loaned Venezuela billions. Chavez ruled until his death in 2013, when he was succeeded by Nicolás Maduro.

 But his government had far overspent on welfare programs, leaving Venezuela in colossal debt. It declared farmlands state property and then abandoned them, and instead made the nation completely dependent on selling its oil abroad.

 Maduro kept up the regime's practices. His administration also stopped publishing any reliable statistics, including ones on economic growth and inflation. It accepted millions in bribes for construction projects and racked up worse debts that it is still struggling to pay.

 Meanwhile, the only commodity Venezuela had left began to sink in value. In 2014, the price of oil was about $100 a barrel. Then several countries started to pump too much oil as previously inaccessible oil could be dredged up with new drilling technology, and at the same time, businesses globally weren't buying more gasoline. Too much oil caused the global price to drop to $26 in 2016.

 Today it hovers around $50, which means Venezuela's income has been cut in half.

 That means a once rich country now is struggling to get by. That means job cuts, and wage cuts, and as everyone needs more money just to survive, prices go up. Homelessness goes up.

 Inflation skyrockets.

 And suddenly you have a country full of underfed, underpaid people struggling just to get by. This is a story about two of them.

—

 Dan and Phil sat in the small restaurant, the shared Nestea between them. Outside, a protest was underfoot, signs and chanting and demands for change. Already, the changes in the people’s forms were becoming apparent, the shrinking arms, the clothes that used to fit but were now a size too big.

 Phil sipped the last of the Nestea, throwing it in the trash with an air of finality. “I don’t think I’ll be drinking this anymore.”

 And so it begun.

——

 Before Maduro became the president of Venezuela, he was a bus driver. His history of formal education was non existent.

 In 2013, with inflation at 50%, he was given emergency powers for a year, prompting protests. Everything done to make things better and inflation go down failed on epic levels. Minimum wages raises just meant that everything became more expensive to produce. Regulating the prices of basic need produces meant that companies would stop making them when they stopped making a profit.

 As the months waned on, Dan found himself curling his hands into fists whenever the tv showed the president's announcements. He’d go outside and see the policidad in their brand new uniforms and wonder how the government could afford them when the rest of the country was struggling just to find toilet paper. He’d walk on the streets, seeing another painting of Chavez erected and wonder how much it cost to commission.

 Electricity cuts became normal. Sometimes, they’d turn the knobs on the sinks and find that the water had been shut off, again. Other times it came out murky or with bleach mixed in in an attempt to clean it.

 They could adjust. Dan’s mom could use the rice maker to cook most of their food, a result of rationed gas. They could collect water in pots and pans for when it was shut off, they could buy bottles of clean portable water, they could go to the grocery store on their assigned day and stare at aisles of overpriced, understocked food. They could ration things, food, toilet paper, gas, water, money, toothpaste. But when Dan walked on the streets and saw all the little kids with swollen stomachs and stick arms, he wanted to ask why Maduro hadn’t sent anyone to work all of the empty farms?

 What happens when no one has enough money for food anymore? What about when no one has any access to medicine anymore? When the streets are crowded with the starving homeless, and they don’t look much different than anyone else, besides the policidad and guardias roaming the streets in their brand new uniforms.

——

 “I want to protest,” Dan whispered.

 Once again, they were sat on Phil’s balcony, though this time it was under the cloak of night. They sat on the railing, watching the neighborhood below, still very alive despite the darkness.

 Phil knew it would happen. He knew it was had to, because he knew Dan.

 It was three years later, and through all their arguments and struggles, they were somehow still together. Dan had dropped out of university; Phil had struggled to stay in; Dan had gotten a job and lost it a few months later because the business had to shut down; and Phil’s dad was forced to change hours at his job, meaning they seldom saw each other anymore. His family was breaking apart, the world seemed to be breaking apart, the very balcony they sat on seemed to have new cracks that they couldn’t afford to replace- but somehow, through it all, he still had Dan.

 Overly headstrong, overly persistent, and reckless to the point of disaster, Dan was a storm stuffed inside a pair of too large jeans and a too dark t-shirt. Of course he would want to protest, of course it had to happen eventually.

 Phil swallowed. He agreed that protesting was important, but that didn’t mean he wanted Dan to do it. There was no such thing as a peaceful protest when your country was slowly starving to death.

 “Okay. When should we go?”

—-

They were not prepared.

 The protesters had marched and yelled, hoisting up banners and flags and signs listing the injustices they’d suffered. Some wore T-shirt’s wrapped around their lower faces, others had strange gas-mask type things covered their noses and mouths. Some people carried huge wooden shields, or had a makeshift type of armor made from cardboard or carpet. They all bore the signs of previous fights, scars and grim faces of determination.

 They marched together. And when they reached the line of soldiers, or guardias, they were shot down. Not with real bullets, but with rubber ones, and then with whatever the guardias loaded into their weapons. Some people retaliated, firing back with burning Molotov cocktails or rocks. But this protest was thick in people as inexperienced as Dan and Phil were, and they fell quickly. A lot of people ran.

 Dan and Phil were standing still when the tear gas was released. Cans opened and thrown into the crowd, resulting in yelps of pain and yelling for people to run. Their own eyes were going red and teary when Dan finally moved, grabbing stones from the ground and running forwards, hefting them into the ranks of guardias, some hitting their clear shields and bouncing back.

 "Come on, grab something! We have to fight!"

 And they did. Everyone fought, or at least tried to. Just by going to the protest you were fighting, even if you turned to flee when you realized the true danger and chaos.

 Minutes turned to what may have been hours, but who knew anymore? Time was as abstract as the swirls of gas rising towards the sky.

 Phil’s eyes caught on something, and before he knew what he was doing he was running.

 "Phil!"

 But it was too late. There was the impact, then the sound hitting his ears, then the pain. An unfamiliar hue of bright red stained his arm, and before he could process anything further, Dan was on him tearing him back away from the front lines. "We have to go, we have to-"

 "I’m fine, I’m fine, I-"

 "Have to get you home, you can’t- God Phil, you can't-!" Voice crack. Phil could hear noises around them, the commotion as the protest took a turn for the worse, but it felt like it was somewhere else. "Come on, we have to leave!"

—-

 “What happened?” Martín leant up against the wall with his arms crossed, looking at the boys with some weird mixture of emotions that didn't quite add up. Worry? Anger? Intrigue?

 Dan had already helped Phil out of his shirt, and was now using the cloth to dab at the wound on Phil's arm. Phil scowled, his face tight with pain.

 “He tried to help someone,” Dan growled in Spanish, digging through the first aid kit, “They were sick or something from the tear gas, and this idiot—” he yanked out a small roll of thin bandages, and began tightly wrapping them around Phil’s arm, just below the shoulder. “-this idiot tried to help them.”

 “They were sick!” Phil defended, wincing as Dan yanked tighter.

 Dan ignored Phil's protest, continuing to explain to Martín what happened. “He ran right in front of the soldiers. Right in front of them.” 

 Phil looked up at his older brother, pleading, “I only got hit with a piece of glass.”

 “You were lucky,” Dan agreed, tearing the bandage away from the rest of the ball, “I'm surprised they didn't pump you full of buckshot. You're lucky the glass only hit your arm.”

 Martín winced as Dan yanked the bandages tighter, tying them off, “What type of glass was it?”

 “The dirty type,” Dan complained as he started packing up the first aid kit. It was from before everything happened, before they needed one. It was pathetically small, but there was no way to get more supplies, “It cut deep. No other reason for him to have bled so much.”

 “What if it gets infected?”

 “Then I hope Phil doesn't use that arm often,” Dan zipped up the bag, staring at it like he was looking for something that was missing.

 Phil reached out for Dan's arm slowly, as if touching a wild animal, “Dan… you're being dramatic.”

 “I'm being realistic.”

 He pulled Dan's arm, forcing him to at least look at him. Even though Phil was the one who was supposed to be in pain, it looked like the injury affected Dan even more, “I'm fine. It's not going to get infected, nothing's going to happen.”

 Dan's eyes flickered to Martín, still standing, still watching them. He pulled his arm away, “You're right,” he said, and the words felt like cotton sticking to the back of his throat, “Fine. I don't care. It's no big deal.”

 Phil wanted to say more, but he knew he couldn't. Not now. This was the beginning of a more important dialogue, and it wasn't one that could be said with others around to hear it.

---

 “You could have died.”

 They had been quiet for a long time, just staring at the ceiling. It wasn't time for dinner yet, but when it was, Dan would have to go home. You didn't stay at someone's house for dinner anymore, not in these times.

 Phil stretched out his hand gently, letting his fingertips barely touch Dan's arm. They had to be careful with touching each other in the real world- but in this world, the one that existed only in their bedrooms with the door closed, they could afford a little affection. “I wasn't going to die. Please, the soldiers don't have that good of aim.”

 Dan snorted, smiling fondly. Lightly, yet fondly. “They wouldn't have to have good aim Phil, you were two meters in front of them.”

 “Yeah, I mean come on. I feel like Maduro should start investing in some better soldiers, the fact that they didn't kill me is ridiculous. Seriously? A little scratch is the best you can do?”

 “They should really up their game,” Dan agreed, playing along. He paused, and the joking mood dissolved back away, “They shouldn't want to kill you.”

 Phil titled his head, staring at his fingers tracing shapes on Dan's arms tiredly, “I don't think they want to kill me. Just want to… shut me up, I guess.”

 “They want to subdue you. They want us to suffer in silence.”

 Phil's stomach hurt. He supposed eventually, he'd have to get used to the feeling of hunger. It wasn't going away anytime soon.

 “I guess that's why we're protesting,” he decided, fingers going limp, “Let them know we aren't going to starve in silence.”

 There was a knock on the door, and both boys immediately jumped up, sitting on opposite sides of the bed casually, “Yeah?”

 “¡Cena!,” Martín called through the door, effectively ending their conversation. Dinner!

—-

 It was a few weeks later, and Dan lay in bed, alone. Alone hurt a lot more on an empty stomach.

 He knew he should sleep, but didn't want to. He just couldn't turn his brain off. Around Phil, even when everything was wrong, it was okay. But alone…

 Dan thought of the protest that day. The guardias, those mamawebos had fired round after round of rubber bullets. Some protesters ran for cover, some stood firm and hoped that whatever they had in the way of armor would save them. Dan had his Resistencia shield, which Phil ducked behind too. Phil, with his slingshot and bag full of rocks. It wasn't just a protest- this was a war they were fighting. Rocks versus bullets.

 Rubber or not, they did damage. Dan hadn't had the displeasure yet of being hit by a rubber bullet, but he was one of few. They were nasty injuries, and though the bullets didn't penetrate the skin, they hit hard enough to make you bleed, and left horrible green and black bruises. Sometimes, if they hit just the right spot, they could break bones. Dan had heard that they could be deadly. But they lived in a world where anything could be deadly, if you were desperate enough and threw it hard enough.

 After the guardias ran out of rubber bullets, they threw rocks. Some days, they weren't as violent, but today, they definitely were. New recruits, or so he had heard. More angry. More willing to fight. Dan wanted to spit at them. Instead of protesting to try and save their rapidly diminishing world, these people chose to fight against the protestors.

 If Phil were here, he'd try to defend them. Say that maybe they had a family member who was sick, or maybe they couldn't afford food anymore. Being a soldier meant these things were more accessible. Then, Dan would laugh, painfully, heartlessly. We’re all sick. And you should let me know if you find someone who can still afford food, because I saw a lot of people today, but I don't think a single one of them can afford 200% inflation. 

 Then Phil would give him that look, that stupid look of disappointment. Betrayal. And Dan would say What? It's true!

 /Just because it's true doesn't mean it's right.

 That's what Phil would say. If he were there. But he wasn't- Dan was alone, very alone, and that's why he was thinking those things in the first place.

 But it hurt. And it wouldn't stop hurting until Dan's stomach was full and everything stopped smelling of goddamn tear gas.

---

 Phil knew that it happened; of course he knew. There were things you noticed without allowing yourself to notice, things you process and file away for later, without ever really thinking about it.

 Phil knew that when he took the trash out, sometimes there were pieces of garbage on the ground, as if a wild animal had gotten in, and he knew that it wasn't a wild animal. But the day that he actually saw what was digging through his trash was the day he realized that he couldn't pretend forever.

 He'd been walking around the side of his casa when he saw the figure and froze. A boy, around his age but smaller and far thinner. Even with the boy’s oversized shirt hanging over his chest, it was clear to see that he was painfully underweight.

 Phil froze and the boy’s gaze shot up, but he didn't run. He just stared at Phil through hungry, hollow eyes. One hand on the rim of the trash can, the other on a bag that had once held rice, but now was uncomfortably empty.

 They held eye contact for longer than perhaps they should've. Two boys, the same age— they may have even gone to school together— both slowly losing pounds and hope. Except Phil still had food. And this boy didn't.

 “You can look in there if you want,” Phil offered, not sure what to say, “But I don't think you'll find anything.”

 A silent nod.

 Phil took a step forwards, his feet unsure where to go. Then, he turned, stiffly walking back the way he'd came.

---

 “It hurts a lot,” Dan groaned, clutching the spot on his rib cage with both hands. “Bruises never bothered me much, but this one sucks.”

 The patch where he’d been hit was dark red and puffy, shaped like the side of a canister of tear gas. He held his shirt up so he could see it, but didn’t take it off. Moving his arms above his head hurt too much.

 “You'll be fine,” Phil promised, barely paying Dan any attention. He went over to his closet, stripping his shirt and quickly replacing it with a black one that didn't reek of tear gas. “It's just a bruise. I doubt anything was even broken.”

 Dan looked at his feet, still cradling the injury mournfully. “That's not what you're supposed to say.”

 Phil unbuckled his pants, pulling them down. “Oh yeah? What am I supposed to say?”

 Dan was a stranger in the room, tapping his feet and trying not to look at Phil, trying to keep his face from turning pink. “You're supposed to say… ‘let me see’ or ‘I'm sorry you're hurt’ or something. You're supposed to… I don't know.”

 “I'm supposed to care?” Phil offered, pulling up a fresh pair of jeans and zipping them, turning to Dan with arms crossed. “Do you want me to pity you?”

 “No.” Yes. “I just want you to… I don't know.”

 “Validate you?”

 “No, just-”

 “Promise it'll all get better?” Phil walked over, looking down at Dan. His tone reeked of mockery. “Do you want me to kiss it better?”

 “Yes, actually!” Dan allowed himself to look up, and immediately regretted it. He was met with angry Phil, annoyed Phil, the side of Phil that yes, existed, but hardly saw the sun. It was Phil’s human side. And Dan didn't want to see him like that.

 Dan lowered his voice, not giving in to the temptation to let his eyes sink back to the floor. There is something about being yelled at by the one you love that makes you want to back into a corner and die. “I want you to kiss it better,” Dan narrated. “I want you to make me feel better. I want you to… to…”

 “Pity you?” Crossed arms, scowl, anger.

 “Yes!” Dan let go of the bruise, throwing up his hands in frustration. He winced, pulling his arms back down. “I want you to pity me! I want you to coo over me and promise that everything's fine and everything will be alright!”

 Phil's gaze clouded over. “I can't promise you that.”

 Dan was on his feet before he'd even processed the words. “Then lie!”

 “I can't! I don't want to!”

 “Just play the game!” Dan yelled, his cheeks reddening. “Play the fucking game Phil, just play it. Do it, just play the game.” His voice cracked. “Just… just… Phil, I'm hurt.”

 “I’m going to take a shower.” The other boy’s eyes were somewhere else, somewhere far away. “You should go home.”

 And there was that sinking feeling, the sharp blunt force of impact. Dan could almost feel his chest recoil inwards, and his breathing become more painful, like the true effect of the bruising was just hitting him. “I-”

 “I want to forget,” Phil admitted. “I don’t want to deal with anything else right now. Just… just want to go to sleep.”

 Every breath made Dan’s chest ache miserably. He needed comfort, needed some sort of something but he didn’t know what and didn’t know how to ask. But when he looked up at Phil, he could see the silent pleading.

 “Talk tomorrow?” He offered quietly, twisting the hem of his shirt in his hands. He was still in his clothes from the protest. He shouldn’t have sat on Phil’s bed, now the sheets were going to smell like tear gas.

 Phil nodded weakly. His body sagged with exhaustion against the corner of the door.

 Dan got up, ignoring the way it hurt to breath and to stand and to walk and to move and walked over to Phil, pressing a small kiss to his jaw. “Feel better.”

 Phil’s mouth formed words but no sound came out, a mix of you too I’m sorry I don’t want you to go but I have to take a break playing on his lips like Dan had pressed his mute button and Phil’d forgotten where the volume controls were.  

 Dan turned to leave. And he really, really was going to leave, and they would talk it over on the morning or maybe just pretend it never happened because this didn’t have to be a big deal. Dan respected Phil. He respected Phil’s needs. And if Phil needed to forget about it, then Dan could let him.

 But Dan didn’t get the chance to.

 The older boy’s gaze softened and he hung his head. “Wait.”

 Dan stopped midstep.

 There was a long sigh. “Okay.”

 “Okay?” Dan pretended his face wasn't bright pink with emotion. He didn’t look up, didn’t want Phil to see how desperate he was. Desperate for validation, desperate for affection, and desperate for something else, something that Phil couldn't give him. Safety.

 “Take your shirt off, and I’ll take a look at it. Here, I’ll help you.”

 So Dan allowed himself to be babied, sitting limply on the bed with the door closed once more, and let Phil pull his shirt off. The bruise was on his right side, low on his rib cage. It was the size of a person’s palm, and the color of dark pink tulips and vomit.

 “I’m sorry.” Dan muttered, trying to cover the bruise with his arms. “I’m being stupid.”

 “Maybe just a little.” Phil gently reached out and touched the bruise, tracing the side of it with a feather touch. Dan refused to look at him. He was being stupid, he was being weak, he couldn’t act like this-

 “How does it feel?”

  Like a weight being pressed against my chest trying to push until my rib cage snaps in two-

 “It doesn’t hurt that much.” Dan almost believed himself. “Does it look bad?”

 “No,” Phil lied easily. “No, it's not bad at all.”

 Dan allowed Phil to push his bent arm up a little ways, exposing the full mark. Dan still covered his other rib cage, and tried to cover his stomach. It looked bad. He could feel the indents, the sharpness of his bones underneath.

 Phil pressed his full hand against the mark, almost completely covering it. Dan bit his tongue to keep from hissing in pain.

 “Will I get better?” He asked, trying to distract himself. He didn’t look at Phil or at the mark, instead training his eyes on the opposite wall.

 “Yeah, you'll get better. Give it a day, and it won't even hurt anymore.”

 “I want to be weak,” Dan admitted, still not looked over. He felt his rib cage rise and fall with each breath. “Can I be weak? Just for a few minutes?”

 Phil nodded. His expression was one of calm, one of the people playing the violins on the Titanic as it sunk. Eerie calm, gentle rhythm, a reassuring presence as the ship tilted towards the moon and the last lifeboat was released into the water, crowds of people still onboard. Dan had heard that the band has kept playing until they drowned. That’s what Phil’s expression reminded him of.

 Dan nodded his head. He stared down at the ugly red mark, eyes red. “Will everything be okay?”

 “What do you mean?”

 It wasn’t a question you should have to clarify.

 “Will everything…. will it be okay? Will we have to fight again?”

 “No, we won't have to fight.”

 “For how long?”

 Dan’s voice was edged with anxiety, a little higher pitched than normal. Phil touched the edges of the mark with a feather touch. “Not for a long time. Not for the rest of the night. Tomorrow doesn't have to come.”

 Dan nodded meekly. Phil reached up, and brushed his thumbs under the boy's eyes. “Let's just… go to bed. Get you out of these clothes, I think the tear gas is still making your eyes water.”

 They both knew it wasn't the tear gas. But they also both knew that neither wanted to admit the truth.

 The night was a good one for lies. They lay in bed, shirts discarded on the floor, and whispered promises to each other that they knew they couldn't keep.

—-

 The next morning, there was water so Dan took advantage of it and took a shower. He didn't plan on taking a long one anyways, but as soon as he turned it on dirty lukewarm water drained out, at a lower pressure than normal. The water was an unsettling shade of murky brown.

 He rushed to wash himself, trying to use minimal soap and be careful around more sensitive parts. The water stung the scratches he'd been accumulating during the protests, and he wondered vaguely if it was even safe. Maybe it'd give him an infection, or if he drank it he would be poisoned. Maybe it was carrying some sort of disease, or STD. Maybe, after everything Dan had been through, he'd die from AIDS.

 He tried to wash his hair, but moving his arms above his head hurt too much. The bruising was still red, but was turning a more purplish color. Dan held his fingers against it, pressing slightly. Even that little bit of pressure hurt.

 After his shower, Dan towelled off and stood in front of the mirror, just letting the remaining water drip off. He felt very empty— empty stomach, empty mind. The boy who stared back at him in the mirror had dark circles. Dan wanted to tell him to get more sleep, but he knew that the circles weren't because of sleep.

 His arms, which never had much hair on them, now had a soft layer of hair covering them. Wispy little blond strands, like peach fuzz, but on his arms. The rest of his body seemed to have a little more hair too, as if trying to make up for the loss in mass with hair.

 Dan tried not to stare at his arms, his stomach. He had wrapped the towel around his waist, but that meant his entire torso was bare. He'd lost weight, that was undeniable. Dan's skin was a size too big.

 Dark circles; messy, wet hair; peach fuzz; rib bones.

 Dan went to his room and got dressed. He put on a shirt, one that had fit perfectly a few weeks ago, but now was too big. Digging through his drawer, Dan yanked out a different shirt, one that hopefully wouldn't be too hot, and tied it around his waist underneath the other shirt, trying to give himself a little more mass. If he blurred his eyes and didn’t look too closely, it almost worked.

 He tore off the second shirt, dumping it on the floor and leaving it there.

---

 Two boney boys sat on a balcony, repeating a conversation they'd had many times before with different answers each time. There was no anger, no resentment. Neither had a mind for drama nor a desire for it. As far as they cared, the previous night didn’t even happen.

 “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Dan asked. He'd asked the same question three years ago. And three years before that.

 “An astronaut,” Phil answered, without thinking about it.

 Dan laughed lightly. It hurt. “Spaceboy Phil, I like it. I want to be the President of Australia.”

 “Dan, Australia’s a continent, not a country.”

 “Isn't it both?” Dan shook his head, waving the question away, “Whatever. I want to be its president.”

 “Do you want to have kids someday?”

 Three years ago, Phil had asked Someday, do you want to have kids? Slightly different, but the difference doesn't matter.

 “Yes.” Three years ago: Probably.  “You?”

 “Yeah, eventually. If I can.”

 Dan laid down, looking up at the sky. “Do you ever think you'll get married?”

 “Yes.”

 “But not here,” Dan clarified.

 “Not here,” Phil agreed. “We’ll run away to America.”

 “America sucks,” Dan argued. “We’ll go somewhere a little bit more chill. London, maybe.”

 This caused Phil to laugh. “London? Why would we go to London?”

 He shrugged. “Why not? I've heard that anyone can get married there, even raging homosexuals.”

 Phil grinned. “Raging homosexuals? Is that…” he lowered his voice, aware that even as their words were concealed from prying ears by a language barrier, there were still people who could hear them and understand the meaning. “Is that what we are?”

 “Yes. Horrible, miserable, raging homosexuals. I should put that in my tumblr bio.”

--- Two Weeks Later

"Hey look! It’s the quitter!" A boy's voice called out in Spanish.

 Dan laughed, walking over to where the sound originated from. "I’m so offended," he joked. "Speaking of which, how's those fifty essays going for you? I wasn’t sure if I’d see you here, thought you might have jumped off a bridge by now."

 Mateo laughed, standing and clutching Dan's hand and pulling him into a bro hug. "No, not quite yet. But who knows? The semester's still young."

 Phil grinned. "You have Martinez?"

 Mateo and Phil clutched hands, bro hugging. "Nah, transferred out of her class. Decided I wanted to keep my sanity."

 They sat down, the rest of the people in the casual circle on the grass scooting back to make room for the two boys.

 Phil looked around, a little wistfully. He’d graduated uni only a few years ago, but it felt like forever. He’d graduated earlier than a lot of his friends, who were still in their last few years. If Dan hadn't quit, he’d be in their year.

 They talked for a while, not having seen their friends for too long. They only talked about the light stuff- school, work, things they’d heard and things they’d done. They didn’t talk about the lines outside the supermarkets, or the protests that were becoming more and more common.

 They didn’t talk about how their clothes didn’t fit like they used to.

 Mateo was about three shades darker than Dan, and about six shades darker than Phil. He had short, black hair and a loud laugh that reminded Dan of the good days of university- the lunch conversations, video game tournaments, and parties that ended a few hours before class started. Law had sucked, but uni overall wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

 Phil crawled over to Mateo, showing him something on his phone. Dan almost snorted out loud. Phil was one of the few people he knew who had light colored skin. Instead of tanning, Phil just got really freckly. Normally, Dan hardly noticed, but when Phil sat next to someone like Mateo the difference was obvious, and honestly, a little comical.

 Mateo made a joke, and Phil giggled, sticking his tongue out between his teeth. Dan hadn’t heard the joke, but he had to do his best not to laugh along. Phil smiled so widely, he practically radiated light.

 "Earth to Dan." A hand waved in front of Dan's face, and he blinked, making himself look away from Phil.

Another one of their old friends, Dalia, smirked. "Tired?"

 "Zoned out."

 "Daydream?"

 Dan bit his lip, smiling slyly. "Maybe."

 Dalia nodded, as if she’d known. "Who about?"

 "My one true love."

 "Phil?"

 Dan laughed, shoving her lightly. "Yeah yeah, real funny. No, I wasn’t daydreaming about my friend, I was dreaming about my one true love. Pizza."

 Dalia's eyes brightened. "Seriously?"

 "Yeah," Dan lied. "What about it?"

 "Mateo!” She called out, excited. "Dan, tell him what you told me!"

 Dan leaned back, rolling his eyes but still smiling lightly. "I was daydreaming about pizza," he mused. "Sue me."

 Mateo mirrored Dalia's expressions: surprise, then disbelief, then excitement. Then annoyance. "Dali! You told him?"

 "No! I thought we said it was supposed to be a surprise!"

 Phil raised his eyebrows. "A surprise?"

 The other two exchanged glances. "Should we tell him?" Dahlia asked, switching to English.

 "Tell them what?" Phil asked, switching to English too.

 "Is it a secret?" Dan joked, amused that they forgot he and Phil spoke English fluently as well. "I love secrets!"

 Mateo rolled his eyes playfully, switching back to Spanish. "Dalia ordered a pizza for us to share. It was supposed to be a surprise, but-"

 "A pizza?" Dan interrupted. He may have lied about daydreaming about pizza, but he definitely craved it. "You’re not shitting me?"

 "Not shitting you," Dalia promised. "I just wanted to do something special for you guys, you know?"

—-

 They were all talking when the pizza came.

 Every since they’d brought it up, it’d been hard to think about anything else, but they still managed somehow. That morning, Dan had wanted to take a shower, but the water had been shut off. He’d been left feeling smelly and gross, thinking that everything was just getting worse, and then- pizza.

 Dan was the first one to spot it. One of Dalia's friends was carrying it towards them, other students hanging out in front of the campus parting in front of her, looking at it longingly. Dan hardly noticed; he was too focused.

 The conversation in their group died down, all of them just watching.

 It was only a medium pizza, and there were at least six of them, but it still felt amazing. Everyone had been eating smaller and smaller meals, and Dan's family had managed to continue eating three meals a day, but at the cost of them being far smaller than normal. One piece of pizza was more than Dan had been eating normally for lunch.

 For a few minutes, that ever constant tug of hunger seemed to almost disappear.

 It was time to go. A bell sounded, and Dan and Phil's friends started packing up, hefting their backpacks for their next classes.

“Burguesa,” someone grunted, purposefully knocking into Dalia. /Rich girl/.

—-

 People peeled off of the side streets, wearing painted shirts and tennis shoes, motorcycle helmets and baseball hats, chests covered in cardboard or carpet armor, or left bare. The sounds of marching filled the air. No talking. Just marching.

 Some people had clearly protested before. They bore the evidence of the pain, the evidence of the ill preparation. Their faces were hidden with gas masks or just t-shirts in attempt to hide their identity. They carried homemade shields and slingshots, carried bags of ammunition. Bruises contrasted against tanned skin, against freckled skin. Somewhere in the background, a violin played.

 Phil’s only comfort was Dan, marching beside him. Since their first protest, they’d become more prepared. Dan had made a shield out of a large rectangle of wood, some rope, and some paint. It was small enough to carry without too much difficulty, but large enough that they could both just crouch behind it. Painted on it were the words ‘Libertadores, Resistencia De Venezuela’, which translated to Liberators, Resistance of Venezuela. It too bore the evidence of the previous protest: centered around the word Libertadores were six tiny holes were a round of buckshot had been fired at them, and had instead implanted themselves in the shield. Phil had seen the injuries buckshot caused. Needless to say, he was thankful for the shield.

 Dan held the shield around his left arm, and he carried it with a sense of pride. Dan's mouth was covered with an dark blue shirt, in part to help hide his identity, and part to help protect him from the tear gas. Phil on the other hand, had a real gas mask, left over from when his dad painted part of their house when he was twelve. The paint had had a horrible toxic stench that made Phil want to cover his nose and hold his breath. Still, compared to the reek of tear gas, that old paint smelled like fresh baked bread.

 Phil’s fingers twitched against the slingshot in his hand. He'd made it yesterday out of a piece of a fallen tree branch, and a rubber band. It was pretty rudimentary, but it would work far better than just throwing rocks.

 Slung across his back was Phil’s old school bag. Inside it were pebbles and stones for the slingshot, and a few other tricks Phil had planned for the guardias.

 Phil felt a lump form in his throat as he watched the people who had obviously never protested before. Unarmed, unprotected, unaware of what was to come. He wanted to warn them. He wanted to tell them to go home, home to the dirty water and power outages and starvation, but at least they wouldn't be shot at. But he stayed silent. As much as he hated it, this was a numbers game, and he couldn't turn away anyone who wanted to help to make their voices heard in this world of suppression.

 They turned onto a Main Street, merging with another group. Signs were hosted in the air. “¡Li-ber-tad!” Dan yelled out beside Phil. “¡Li-ber-tad!”

 Phil's throat felt like sawdust. “¡Li-ber-tad!”

 The chant spread throughout the crowd. The lower part of Dan’s face was still covered by the bandana, but Phil could still see the way Dan crinkled his eyebrows, the anger in his eyes.

 Shields moved with the chant. “¡Li-ber-tad!¡Li-ber-tad!” Feet pounded against the pavement, signs pulsating above heads. The crowd was one person- one strong, angry person, who was going to make a change- no matter the cost.

 They marched for a long time, going down the streets to one of the main roads of Caracas. “¡Li-ber-tad!¡Li-ber-tad!”

 Some people ran away. Some people joined their ranks.

 “¡Li-ber-tad!¡Li-ber-tad!”

 Amongst the protesters, Dan was one of the loudest. He stood firm, and with every chant he called out the government for all their wrongdoings. He called out the guardias, called out the policías, called out the colectivos and everyone else the government hired to make their lives miserable. With each chant, Dan called out Maduro himself.

Libertad. Liberty.   ---

 After they got to the main roads, it wasn't long for guardias to show up.

 Armored cars pulled up, stopping a safe distance away. Some of the protestors stopped, unsure, but the rest of the crowd pushed on. Dan’s eyes were trained on one of the cars, his expression one of hatred.

  Guardias formed ranks and marched forward towards the crowd. “Get your slingshot ready,” Dan mumbled, not looking away. “And the rocks. Phil, get the rocks ready.” Dan brushed against Phil casually, reminding him of his presence. “We're going to take down these mamawebos.”

 Phil kept marching as he unzipped his backpack, his slingshot still clutched in hand. It felt sticky; his hands had been clammy since they stepped into the crowd. A rock was held against the rubber bands.

 The guardias marched forwards, in real ranks. Clear riot shields were locked together. The soldiers had protective vests and helmets, standard olive green uniforms, and army grade boots. They carried guns.

 Phil gripped his slingshot tighter.

 “Rain hell on them!” Someone called out, and the protestors scooped up stones from the pavement and hefted whatever defenses they’d brought, and fired. Phil yanked back the rubber band of his slingshot and released it, quickly pulling more rocks from his back and firing again and again, the rocks being flung into the ranks of soldiers with far more force than he could have managed by merely throwing them. Next to him, Dan grabbed whatever he found on the ground- some rocks, some trash- and threw them with his whole body, grunting with each one. The guardias were pelted, like they'd stepped into a dangerous hail storm that wasn't forecast.

 More rocks. More guardias, getting in line, bracing themselves against the avalanche of stone. The protesters got louder, singing a song of screaming accusations. People who were tired starving. People tired of watching family members die. People tired, just tired, and done with standing still and taking it.

 They surged forwards, yelling as they physically shoved the police backwards, bodies thrown against riot shields, forcing them to take small steps back. Dan’s shield was thrust against one of the police’s, and they pushed against each other, fighting for dominance, narrowed eyes locked. Phil didn't hear anything, just saw everyone in silent, slow motion. The protesters, their angry, starving mob, was winning.

 BANG!

 A scream. Not of anger, but of pain.

  BANG! BANG!

 “¡Asesino!” Dan called out, accusing the guard in front of him who he fought against. “¡Hijo e’ puta!”

Murderer! Motherfucker!

 More gunshots went off. Screams, yelps of pain. Phil pulled the rocks back like he was an archer, letting the rocks fly up into the air and fall amongst the guardias.

 People ran away. People ran away. But many stuck with the crowd, some already brandishing new wounds.

 Dan won his fight of shields against the guard and shoved him backwards, causing a small domino effect of soldiers, and Dan laughed, Dan laughed as people surged forwards into the opening, catching some soldiers on their unprotected side.

  BANG! BANG! BANG!

 A rubber bullet bounced off the shoulder of Dan's shield, narrowly missing him.

 A round of orders came from somewhere inside the police lines, and they all started pushing forwards, roughly shoving protesters back. Cans of something were thrown into the crowd, and Phil looked back just in time to see white smoke hiss up. People called out to each other, yelling and screaming and then coughing.

 More rounds of rubber bullets, closer. A woman next to Phil screamed, stumbling backwards. “Dan!” He called out rushing, towards him. “Pull back!”

 “Mamawebos!” Dan screamed. Cock-suckers! Phil grabbed onto his arm, pulling his away from the guardias ready to fire on him. “¡Coño e’ madre, malparío!” Your mother’s a whore and you were born wrong! A can pouring white gas was hurled at them, landing on ground and bouncing to hit Dan’s shield. “My grandma can throw better than you, and she's dead!”

 Phil grabbed the can spilling tear gas and chucked it back into the soldier's lines, already feeling his eyes stinging. It made his throat sting like he’d just inhaled a mixture of ash and pure bug spray. He grabbed Dan's arm, not gently, and pulled him forcefully away. They ran back, hurrying to duck behind a parked car.

 Dan's eyes were trained on Phil’s with the same intensity as he'd been sending the soldiers. “Las molotov.”

 Phil nodded, unzipping his backpack and pulling the old beer bottles out, handing two to Dan, followed by a handheld cigarette lighter. The guardias held their place, not stupid enough to push forwards into the mob they'd just tear gassed. Everyone had retreated from the front, but still the soldiers were pelted with rocks and trash. The noise was deafening, shouting and coughing and the constant explosions of guns. Rubber bullets- probably not deadly, but horribly painful. The protesters threw round after round of debris into the ranks, but the tear gas was spreading, dissolving the people in white smoke.

 Phil shook the beer bottle around, the liquid sloshing inside. A rag was stuffed in the top which he lit ablaze, throwing it into the ranks of soldiers. It exploded, glass shrapnel piercing their uniforms, fire lapping at their heels. The lines of soldiers began to disassemble, moving away to make themselves less easy targets.

 “Dan, get your- Ah!” Phil stumbled forwards, falling next to Dan.

 “What's wrong?!”

 A sharp pain spread through Phil's body- originating from his leg. “Something- something bit me!”

 Dan knelt next to him, examining the wound hurriedly. “You've been shot.” His hands splayed across Phil's thigh, and Phil gasped in pain.

 “A normal bullet?” Phil asked desperately, trying to move his leg. Even the smallest movement sent pain shooting up his leg.

 Dan’s face was grim. “I can't tell. Too much blood. We have to get you out of here.”

 With some difficulty, Dan helped Phil stand, and they limped away, Phil leaning heavily on Dan's shoulder. People ran past them, and their eyes watered with the residue of tear gas. The sound of bullets rang through the air, but they just kept walking.

 Dan had abandoned his shield, so they ducked behind cars and tried not to look like targets as they scrambled away.

 After twenty minutes of walking, Phil requested a break. “I can't… I just…” he was struggling for breath.

 “We’re far enough away,” Dan decided. “Take your mask off, maybe that'll help.” Dan tore the tshirt covering his lower face off, stuffing it in Phil’s bag. He leaned down. “Let me.”

 Phil tried to stay still, his chest rising and falling with labored breaths. “You going to be fine,” Dan mumbled comfortingly. “Everything’s-”

 “What are you doing?” Someone accused in Spanish.

 Dan jumped back, shoving the gas mask in his bag and tossing it on Phil's injured leg, making him lurch. “Just talking. Is everything alright?”

 A man glared at them, the dark blue uniform making it clear who he was. A pair of handcuffs dangled by his side. “There's a protest happening a few kilometers away. Were you coming from there?”

 “No,” Dan said, eyes wide. “A protest?” He looked at Phil. “Did you know about that?”

 Phil shook his head, biting his tongue to keep from whimpering. The bag covered up his bleeding, but it was heavy, and when Dan tossed it onto his leg he'd wanted to pass out from pain.

 “Yeah, we were just heading to a friend's house.”

 The officer didn't say anything for a moment, and Phil wondered if he'd bleed to death before he answered. “Well then stop fucking loitering,” he barked. “And I don’t know what you were doing just now, but it looked like you were about to kiss.”

 Phil managed a strained smile, and Dan laughed loudly. “I think my girlfriend would have an issue with that.”

 The policeman made an expression almost like a smile. No, not a smile- a sneer. “Good. There’s already too many faggots in this country, and I need to save ammunition for protesters. Now get moving, nothing good will come from hanging around here.”

 They nodded, pained smiles plastered across their faces.

 The police waited.

 “Come on D-” Phil started, quickly cutting himself off before revealing Dan’s identity. “Let's go.” Phil stood, holding the backpack over his injury and doing his best not to limp.

They walked slowly away, not touching as the police watched them leave. Turning a corner, Phil collapsed against the wall. “Shit!”

 “Phil!? What's wrong?”

 He breathed heavily, spots dancing in his vision. “Get out your shirt from my backpack.” Dan did as he was told, fumbling with the bag. “Tie it around my leg.”

 Dan looked up, looking worried. “Like a tourniquet?”

 “No Dan, I want to keep my leg.” Phil said, struggling to speak through the pain. “Just… enough so that no one sees. And to put pressure on it! Pressure’s good.”

 Dan did it, kneeling in front of Phil and tying the shirt around the boy's upper thigh. If the police were able to come over, he'd definitely have some questions for them- and not just about the injury.

 The rest of the walk home was a painful eternity. Phil limped the whole way, leaning heavily on Dan, but by the time they got to Phil's house, they were both completely exhausted and drenched in sweat.

 Coming inside, they collapsed on the couch, Dan falling on top of Phil with exhaustion, careful to avoid his leg.

 “What-” Martín started, and Dan quickly got off of his boyfriend.

 “First aid kit. Phil got shot.”

 By the time Martín came back, Dan had already taken the shirt wrapped around Phil's leg off. “It's still bleeding. Why is it still bleeding?”

 “Did you walk back?” Martín asked, trying to conceal his concern. He knelt by the couch, unzipping the overly simple kit.

 “Yeah,” Phil muttered, struggling to get enough breath. “Not that far.”

 “You're drenched in sweat.”

 “Not that far,” Phil repeated. He closed his eyes, then stared up at the ceiling. “Fuck.”

 Martín and Dan exchanged a look. Phil didn't swear, ever.

 “We need to wash the blood away,” Dan decided. “Is the water-”

 “It's turned off,” Martín supplied. “But we have a tank.”

 “Hashtag the 1%,” Dan muttered. “Is the water cleanish?”

 Martín shook his head. “Bring him to the tub, we have some water bottles.” He glanced at Phil's leg again, before forcing himself to look away.

 “How bad is it?” Phil muttered, refusing to look.

 Dan was shaking slightly. “On a scale of paper cut to shark bite? Like, a paper cut.”

 “You're a horrible liar.” Phil groaned as Dan helped him stand, limping heavily as they made their way to the bathroom.

 Dan helped him sit on the edge of the tub, stretching his leg out and balancing it on the other side.

 Martín came over and together, the two boys rinsed away the blood. To see the full wound, they had to wriggle Phil’s jeans off of him, which was as difficult as it was painful. But finally, they had a clear view of the injury, and Dan was able to let out a sigh of relief. “The bullet missed you. Skimmed the side of your leg, but missed you.”

---

 “You could’ve died.”

 They’d had this conversation before.

 Phil stared up at the ceiling. “I know. You could've too, we were standing right next to each other.”

 “Yeah, but you're the one that got hit.”

 “You were the one egging the /guardias on. I'm surprised they didn't aim for you.”

 “Of course they aimed for me, they were aiming at all of us, you spork. But you know that wasn't a guardia.”

 Phil sighed, closing his eyes. “I know. But at least I caused some havoc with them, makes me feel like I at least got a few good shots in.”

 Dan snorted. “Yeah, maybe.”

---

 There was a cemetery a few miles away from Dan’s home. It was huge, and even with everything going on, the cemetery remained untouched. People had better things to do late that Wednesday morning, so it was empty too. Empty besides the two boys who walked along its paths, talking and laughing quietly, as to not disturb the peace.

 It had long enough since the protest that Phil could walk without feeling much pain. Or at least, he didn’t limp or complain. But at that point, even Dan was tired of complaining.

 Phil wore a backpack over his shoulders, stuffed full of something. Dan didn't ask what was inside, instead, allowed himself to get his hopes up. A five course meal. A chocolate cake. Plane tickets that would fly them to the middle of the ocean and drop them off there.

 Dan was always the optimistic one.

 The cemetery was so big and so empty that before long they were holding hands, in public. It was so dangerous, so potentially destructive— but they'd done a lot of dangerous, destructive things in the past few weeks, so it felt natural.

 Dan imagined it was a park. It wasn't hard, what with the green grass and well-arranged trees. The sun was out, but it still managed to be just warm enough as to be comfortable, not too hot. If you ignored the grave markers, it was easy to pretend they were a normal couple, having a stroll in a normal park, on a perfect, sunny, normal day. Sometimes, normal was one of the greatest blessings you could have.

 A cluster of bushes and trees made a perfect resting spot. It was concealed enough that even if they turned out not to be alone, the likelihood of being spotted was greatly decreased.

 Dan was at a point where a part of him wanted them to be caught. Take that, Maduro, he thought smugly. I'm a protester, AND I'm gay! Suck it!

 Somehow, he thought that wouldn't help much of anything. But it was nice to imagine.

 From his backpack, Phil produced a thin sheet, laying it on the ground.

 “Things are getting steamy in the cemetery,” Dan commented blandly.

 Phil— always the smarter one of the duo— wisely chose to ignore him. “It's a picnic blanket. And I brought food.”

 He pulled out a big reusable water bottles— filled with clear water, God bless his soul— and two cans: “Technically one for each of us, but I thought we could share.” Phil reached into his bag and grabbed one last thing, keeping it hidden from Dan for a moment longer as Phil assessed his features. “Dan, I'm going to take this out and set it on the blanket. Promise you won't jump me?”

 Dan promised, and Phil pulled out a jar of Nutella.

  And there was that chocolate cake Dan had wanted.

 “Fucking hell Phil.”

 They stared at the jar sat between them, wondering if it was real. Could it be a hallucination? Or was it really—

 “I found it in my sock drawer,” Phil confessed, his cheeks heating up, “From literally years ago. It's probably disgusting, but—”

 “Phil, it could be from the 19th century and I'd still lick it clean,” Dan interrupted, his eyes trained hungrily on the small container. How long had it been since he'd had chocolate?

 Phil produced two spoons, and they hurriedly opened it, finding that it was blessedly still half full.

 “I might go back on my promise,” Dan decided, eying it hungrily, “I might have to kill you for this.”

 “A ‘thank you’ would suffice.”

 Dan scooped his spoon in the mixture, staring at it like it was molten gold, “What did I do to deserve this?”

 Once again, Phil blushed, smiling shyly, “Happy anniversary.”

 Dan put the spoon in his mouth, and closed his eyes in pleasure, savoring the delectable flavor. “Fuck,” His eyes fluttered open, wide with amazement, “I'm actually going to have to propose.”

 Phil laughed, and oh God Dan missed that sound. “I'm going to make you. You know it's serious when I'm willing to share chocolate with you.”

 Phil dipped his spoon in the Nutella too, and quickly ate it, moaning almost comically before covering his mouth in embarrassment, “Sorry! I just didn't think it'd be so good!”

 They allowed themselves a few more spoonfuls of the rich chocolate before forcing themselves to close it and save the rest for later. Next, Phil opened up the cans and gave one to Dan, “One for each of us, but they're both different so we can share.”

  Dan took a closer look at the labels, slightly peeling off. His can was of mixed vegetables, and Phil's was peaches, “Where'd you get these?”

  “Martín has been bringing some stuff home lately. I don't know where he got it from, but I begged him to let me have them.”

 “He's crazy,” Dan commented, diving in. Cold corn had never tasted so good, “Fuck. This is how I'm going to have to propose: with Nutella and cold corn.”

 “Sounds perfect.”

---

 The protests went on whether or not Dan and Phil were apart of it.

 Phil's old university professor had sent him an email, requesting to meet up with him. So Phil went, leaving early and walking the few miles to get to the building. When there, he flashed his ID and was allowed in.

 “Felipe Lester, it's good to see you!” The professor announced excitedly when she saw him, speaking rapid fire Spanish. “How long ago did you graduate?”

 “Two years, Profesora,” Phil beamed. “It feels like longer though.”

 “Doesn't it always? Do you have a job?”

 Phil shook his head. “I worked for a small tv station for a little while, but they went under. Right now I'm just helping out, you know?”

 The professor gave Phil a subtle once over, her brow creasing with worry, but she quickly hid it. She glanced around, making sure no one was eavesdropping, then switched to English. “You’ve been protesting?” It was supposed to be a question, but judging from the intensity of her eyes, it was more of a statement. Phil had no choice but to nod, also switching to English.

 “Yeah. I just can't stand to be idle. Have to help out, you know?”

 She clicked her tongue, shaking her head. “It's too dangerous. People are dying Felipe, and I won't stand to let you be one of them.” She looked around again, looking more worried this time. “Listen. You remember Caterina Hernandez, my assistant teacher?” Phil nodded. “She disappeared a few weeks ago. No one knows exactly what happened but… well, she had a big mouth. And she had money. I can only think, with the gang activity-” she scowled, cutting herself off. “She's gone, and I've been tasked with finding another assistant. I'm supposed to find one with experience, but I'd rather help out someone I know. You were a good student, Felipe. And I see you've held onto your English. If you want it, the job is yours.”

 Phil felt a little dizzy. “When would I start?”

 “As soon as you decide you want it. You'd be needed weekdays, from seven to five, but school is only from eight to four so sometimes you'd be able to leave early.”

 “I'll think about it.”

 The profesora eyed him warningly. “Don't think too long. It's a good offer, the best one you'll get. I need to fill the spot soon, and I can assure you that if you don't want it, there are plenty of people who'd gladly take your place.”

---

 Dinner was quiet that night. They were eating black beans and rice, and the three of them ate quietly, ignoring how small their bowls were and just savoring the taste of food, because that would be it until breakfast the next day.

 “I went to the university today,” Phil spoke in Spanish, trying to be calm about it.

 His mother and Martín looked up. “That sounds nice. Did you get to see your old teachers?”

 “I talked to Profesora Martinez.” He paused, chewing. “She said there's a job opening.”

 His mom dropped her spoon, clattering against the bowl. “What? How much?”

 “I don't know. Didn't ask.”

 “This is great Felipe! I'm so proud, when do you start?”

 So Phil filled them in on the basic details, answering their excited questions about when it starts, how much he'll be working, how often he'd be paid. In truth, they seemed more excited about it than he did.

 When dinner ended and he went back to his room, Phil realized that they hadn't asked him what the job actually was. He supposed they were just so excited by the prospect of a job, of more money, maybe of having a little bit more rice and beans to eat and a little bit more to live on that it didn't matter what the job was, just that it was a job.

 Phil pulled on his tennis shoes, dirty from protesting, and walked back through the house and out the door.

---

 “A job? Nojodás.” Dan's eyes were wide, and Phil could practically see the gears turn in his head. “How much?”

 “I don't know, didn't ask. I’d be working at the university, for Profesora Martinez, my old linguistics teacher. She says they wanted someone with experience, but she wanted to offer me the job first. She was glad I was still fluent in English.”

 “Thank you tumblr!” Dan looked to the ceiling, as if David Karp himself was looking down on them from heaven. “You told her you'd take it?”

 “Told her I'd think about it.”

 “Idiota, here, use my computer, email her now. Don't let this opportunity slip through your fingers, you-”

 “Dan, chill!” Phil laughed, accepting the laptop Dan all but shoved down his throat. “I want to take the job. But… it means that I won't be able to protest anymore.”

 Dan watched him, his gaze steely. “You dumb motherfucker, no way in-” this part Phil censored out- “-are you going to not take a job because of protesting.”

 “I said I'm going to take the job!” Phil threw his hands up, exasperated. “But what about you?”

 “What about me?”

 “What will you do?”

 “I'll be protesting, you cuchara. We'll be the ultimate power couple- while you make bank, I'll be making the world a better place.”

 “You'll be egging on the guardias to shoot you,” Phil corrected. “Only I won't be there to drag you home.”

 “I don't need you to drag me home! I'll be fine Phil, just accept the job!” Dan shoved Phil back lightly, pushing against the computer purposefully. “I have a shield, I have the armor crap, and it's not just me protesting! And last I remember, you were the one to get shot, not me.”

 Phil set the laptop on the bed, crossing his arms. The wound on his thigh, now scarred over and not hurting much anymore, ached with the reminder. “And if you get shot? What then?”

 “I won't!”

 “And if you do?”

 “Someone else can help me. Other protestors, people in the area, I'll make fucking Maduro himself scoop me up like a baby and carry me home. I'll figure it out!”

 Phil cringed slightly at the curse. “Other people can protest, Daníel.”

 “I don't fucking care-”

 “You should,” Phil cut him off breathily, stepping forwards. “You should care. It's not safe to protest on your own.” Dan bit his lip, holding back more accusations. “You can't go alone.”

 “I can. And I will.” Dan stared at Phil, his voice solid, unyielding. “I'm going to keep protesting, no matter if you're there, no matter if anyone's there. If everyone gives up, I will keep protesting because I refuse to sit idle and starve to death.”

 “You won't starve,” Phil offered weakly. “I'll be getting more money. If you need it, I can take care of you.”

 Dan sniffled. He stepped closer, and brushed aside Phil’s fringe affectionately, with an expression that Phil couldn't quite decipher, until it hit him. Dan was being brave. “An what if that's not enough? Phil…. Phil, I love you, but you can't tell me that your job as an assistant to a university teacher will be enough. Inflation is up 200%. And it's just going to keep rising unless we do something.”

 Phil wanted to throw up. He wanted to cry. He wanted to turn around and start walking, walking across the city to the coast and keep walking, walk over the Atlantic Ocean and walk all the way to London. But he didn't do any of those. “I love you too.”

 Dan lowered his eyes. “I'm going to keep protesting.”

 “Don't. If you love me, don't go without me.”

 “If you love me, don't give me ultimatums,” Dan snapped. “You’re accepting the job?”

 “Yeah.”

 “Then fucking tell her.” He picked up the laptop from the bed, shoving it into Phil’s arms. “You know the password?”

 Phil swallowed the lump in his throat, and forced himself to move, laying on the bed on his stomach and opening the laptop. “Yeah.” He began typing, opening up his email and writing the letter accepting the job.

 Dan lay on the bed next to him, rolling over to be on his side. “You're making the right choice.” He reached over, playing with the hem of Phil’s shirt absently. “You'd be stupid to let this offer pass you by.”

 “I never wanted to teach,” Phil grumbled.

 “I never wanted to get hit by a can of tear gas, but look where we are now. Make sure to thank her for the job, too.” Dan's voice raised an octave, watching the words appear on the screen as Phil typed. “Thank her. Make sure she knows you're serious.”

 “‘Kay,” Phil muttered.

 “And-”

 “Let me finish writing this, okay?”

 Dan shut up immediately, watching silently. He twisted the hem of Phil’s shirt tightly, then released it, bunching it up in a ball.

 Finally, Phil sent the email and closed the laptop. He looked straight ahead, avoiding looking at Dan.

 “I'm sorry,” the boy murmured. “I'm sorry you don't want to be a teacher.”

 Phil stayed quiet.

 “And I'm sorry I'm going to protest. Actually- no, I'm not sorry for that. But I'm sorry you don't want me too.”

 “You're impossible,” Phil muttered. “Absolutely impossible.”

 “And I'm sorry we have to fight. And I'm sorry for being an asshole.”

 “You done yet?”

 “Almost. I'm also sorry for upsetting you.” Dan scooted forwards, sitting up slightly so he could lean closer and kiss Phil’s neck.

 “I'm tired.” Phil announced, not pushing Dan away.

 “Just kissing?” Dan suggested.

 Phil hummed, squeezing his eyes closed at the feeling. “Just kissing.”

----

Three Months Later

 Phil was almost to the university, his backpack over his shoulder. As a teaching assistant, he was supposed to wear nice clothes, but he was currently dressed in a pair of faded jeans and a tshirt, with clothes to change into in his bag. He'd learned the hard way to change into good clothes after getting to school- wearing nice clothes made him look like he had money, thus making him much more attractive to gangs, or anyone desperate enough to jump him. He'd learned that the hard way.

  Dan opened the door, his smile immediately falling when he saw Phil. His jacket was gone, and right under his left eye his cheek was bruised.

 “Are you kidding me. You literally went to school today, and you look even worse than I do.”

 Since then, Phil had made sure not to wear the nicer looking clothes when walking.

 He liked walking, but it made his mom nervous. But she could hardly complain, especially since each week he gave her most of his paycheck, 235.000 bolívares, the equivalent of about 10 U.S. Dollars after inflation. Phil kept the rest of the money, only 15.000 bolívares, in a jar under his bed, labeled “London Fund”.

 Dan had kept protesting, though not as often as he had when Phil still went with him. Sometimes, on the weekends, they’d go together. Phil still supported the cause, he just didn't like Dan going on his own. Dan had managed to stay out of too much trouble, but he hadn't gotten away unscathed.

 They liked to spend time together at one of their houses after each protest, even if it was uneventful. They shared stories of their day while Phil pretended he wasn't examining Dan for injuries. Dan's current weapon of choice was Molotov cocktails and lighters, which resulted in long burn marks going up and down his arms. The first aid kit at Dan’s house was even sparser than the one at Phil’s house, but it had a little bit of a burn salve in it. When Phil applied it to the worst burns, he had to hold a hand over Dan’s mouth because of how loud he moaned in relief. “The neighbors will hear!” He warned. If he doesn't shut up, the United States will hear, he thought.

 Dan also got a lot of little cuts and scrapes from the protests, but Phil liked skinned knees much more than he liked bullet wounds.

 Both of Dan’s parents worked, though Phil didn't know how many jobs. He'd had his job for less than a month when one of Dan’s friends hooked Dan up with a job at a Juanta’s, the old restaurant that had been converted into a corner store, but it was only part time. Still, it gave Dan’s family a little extra cash, and gave Dan something to do all day besides dare the guardias to shoot him.

 About a month later, they were at Phil’s house- doing some things they were definitely not supposed to- when Phil put his hand on Dan’s stomach and could feel it growl. “Hungry?” He teased, trying to be gentle.

 “Ever since 2013,” Dan played along, though his tone wasn't as humorous. “Phil, keep going.”

 But Phil didn't. “It's after dinner, shouldn't you be good for-”

 “Skipped dinner. Whole family did. Our day to get groceries is Thursday, but when we got there it was closed. ‘Workers holiday’ or some shit. Now please, keep going-”

 Phil’s eyes widened, and he quickly got up, leaving Dan whining, even though they both still had their jeans on. “When was the last time you ate?”

 “Breakfast.”

 Phil strode over to the nightstand, where a small alarm clock sat. “It's eight pm.”

 “Oh.”

 “Stay here.” Before Dan could protest, Phil was out of the room, the door closed behind him.

 Martín was sitting in the living room, writing something, but he looked up when Phil came in. “What's up?”

 “Nothing,” Phil said impatiently, hurrying over to the fridge.

 “Why aren't you wearing a shirt?”

 Phil looked down. Crap. “Too hot.”

 “Is Dan in your room?”

 “It's too warm in there,” Phil defended, going through the refrigerator. “I think I might be sick,” he added, trying to help his brother come to a different conclusion than the truth. Phil grabbed a closed container and a fork and hurried back to his room before Martín could ask anymore questions.

 As soon as Dan saw it, he recoiled. “No. I refuse.”

 “Dan-”

 “Red. Red. Red. Fucking- red, no Phil, put it back, I refuse to take any of your family’s food-”

 Phil sat casually on the bed, putting the food in front of him. “Can you shut up, for like, five seconds?” Dan did as told, but he was still uncomfortably tense, looking at the food like it was poisoned. “It's not my family's food,” Phil reasoned, “it's my food. For lunch tomorrow. But it's okay, I'll skip.”

 “Like hell you will.”

 “What'd you have for breakfast?” Dan was silent. “Come on. Dan, what'd you have for breakfast.”

 “Oatmeal.”

 Phil’s stomach twisted in a knot. “Yeah, you're eating this. It's just more rice and beans, and you know my mom adds those spices you like.”

 Dan crossed his arms. “I one hundred percent refuse.”

 “You're not depriving me of anything. Trust me, I get enough to eat.”

 “Bullshit.”

 “We can call it your birthday present.”

 “My birthday’s in June.”

 “Then it's your Christmas present! Dan, I swear, if needed I will hold you down and force feed you.”

 Dan held his crossed arms tighter against his body. “No. I’ll jump out the window first.”

 “You're the most stubborn person I've ever met.”

 Dan flashed a cocky smile. “It's one of my better qualities-”

 Before Dan could finish his sentence, Phil had tackled him. He'd tried to tackle him on the bed, but unfortunately, Phil never had great aim, and they went spiraling onto the ground. It was a short tussle- as big as Dan talked, Phil was stronger, and Dan was weakened from lack of food. “Red!” Dan announced, though he was more annoyed than upset. “Red! Dammit Phil, why do we have a safeword if you don't even respect it?”

 “That's when it comes to… other things,” Phil decided, proud he'd managed to pin Dan down. “This is about your well being.” He reached onto the bed to get the lunch.

 “Why do we even have a safeword to begin with?” Dan wondered aloud, the amount he was talking directly proportional with his nerves. “It's not like we do anything crazy. I'd like to think that if I tell you to stop, you'd respect it.”

 Phil ignored him, uncapping the container. “Can you feed yourself, or will I have to?”

 Dan glared up at him, raising an eyebrow.

 “How did I end up with someone so stubborn?”

 “How did I end up with someone who so blatantly ignores my boundaries?” Dan mused. “What’s the point of a safeword if you don't respect it when I use it? Honestly Phil, let's never get involved with BDSM, you'd be horrible at-”

 Phil leant down, and pecked him on the lips, effectively shutting him up. “Done?”

 “You think I could ever be done? Phil, the matter of consent is very important. I could go on for hours just talking about safewords alone, much less-”

 “I love you,” Phil decided, and once more Dan was lost for words. “And I care about you. And you need to eat. Please?”

 About ten minutes later, they were back sitting against the headboard. Dan licked the fork clean. “Thanks for that Phil. You're right, those spices your mom adds really tastes good. What's her secret?”

 Phil, who looked like he'd just fought some wild animal, just sighed. “Adobo. Like, half a container of Adobo.”

——

 Dan had gotten approximately four hours of sleep. That meant that he needed approximately five more hours of sleep. But instead of being in bed, for some reason, he found himself in an ungodly long line at an ungodly hour of the morning, in ungodly rain.

 "Come on Dan, let’s play I-spy," Phil suggested, far too excited.

 Dan grunted, not bothering to respond. He pulled his hood closer around his face, trying to scoot impossibly closer to the wall. He was insistent that the closer you are to a building, the less wet you got. It wasn’t working. But he wasn’t going to stop.

 "You know, I actually like the rain," Phil decided. "It’s exciting. And it smells good. I like it better when I’m inside, but this actually isn’t that bad. It’s so early in the morning, it kind of makes it cool, you know, like-"

 "Phil," Dan cut off, hardly able to listen to another word. "Please. It’s 6 in the morning."

 "Actually, we’ve been waiting for a while," Phil corrected helpfully. "So it’s probably closer to 7."

 "I’m going to take a nap," Dan decided, closing his eyes and leaning against the wall. "Right here. Get my groceries for me, will you?"

 Phil scowled. "No. You said that this would be fun."

 "I also said it’d be quick. You should know by now that I’m full of shit."

 Phil smiled lightly. He leant against the wall next to Dan, bumping into him playfully. "Are you going to come with me to get my groceries on Friday?"

 Dan groaned, his eyes still squeezed shut. "Can’t Martín?”

 Phil stopped bumping against him, letting their shoulders rest together. He sighed, relaxing against the wall. “He's busy. And mom and dad both work early.”

 Dan tilted his head up, accidentally getting a face full of rain. He spluttered, wiping it away. They looked over, moving up in line. It had only been an hour, and the front was already in sight. The line was moving faster than normal.

 They leant back up against the wall, Dan resting his head on Phil’s shoulder.

 Phil tensed. “Dan,” he mumbled under his breath in English. “We have to be a little more… discreet.”

 Dan whined. “Fuck that.” He nestled his face into Phil’s neck, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly.

 When they got to the front of the line, Phil was made to wait outside while Dan went in. He looked at the smudged list on his arm, and did his best to find and grab everything. The shelves, once full, were painfully bare. It was a good day; he found most of the food on the list. But there was no rice to be seen.

 Dan's stomach growled. They were out of rice last week too. He'd never liked rice all that much, but it could be eaten practically anything, and when mixed with beans made one serving go a long way.

 He got in line to pay, and after another wait, finally got to the counter, slinging his backpack off of his shoulder and pulling out his ID. “No rice?” He asked in Spanish.

 “We usually get shipments on Saturdays.” The cashier answered, tapping on the keys of the register.

 Dan slumped. His ID number ended in one, which meant he could only go shopping on Mondays. It was part of the rationing, a last ditch effort to try and keep everyone from starving. Clearly, it didn't work all that well.

 “That'll cost 184 bolivares,” the cashier announced, looking at Dan expectantly.

 He cursed under his breath, looking at the life preserving items and trying to decide which were expendable. “How much were the beans?”

 “62 per packet”.

 “They were 56 last week!”

 The cashier was not amused. “Are you getting them or not?”

 “Not.” Dan pulled out the money from his bag, starting to count it. A year ago, it was enough to buy food for a week. Now, it was hardly enough for a handful of groceries.

 “Here, give it to me.” Dan handed over the money, and she put it on a scale, weighing it. “New system. Quicker to weigh than to count.”

----

 Dan going to protests alone meant that if he got hurt, Phil had no way of helping him or even knowing that he was injured unless he physically saw him. Dan went to the protests knowing he could be shot, knowing he could be injured, and knowing that the hospitals couldn't help him. The shortages meant they received no new shipments of supplies or medicine, and at this point, the hospitals could do very little. Better to die at home.

 People died in the protests. Dan could easily be one of them. And every time Phil saw him, he had to accept that it may be the last time.

 Ever since Phil got the teachers assistant job, Dan had been searching for more work. His paycheck from Juanta's just went down as inflation went up. In the end, he found two other jobs, one on Saturdays at a market, and another translating things to English for a small company. Even with three jobs, the money was barely enough. His padres both worked full days, his father getting home late every night, and still they were barely scraping by.

 Phil had hoped that with Dan working more, he wouldn't have time for protests anymore, but Dan insisted he'd still be going a few times a week. "They have enough time to screw us over, I can make some time to return the favor," he'd say.

 Phil had to be okay with it. Dan was miserably stubborn, and he made it clear that he was going to the protests, and Phil was allowed not to like it, but he wasn't allowed to refuse it.

 And Phil had almost accepted it.

 He was working late at school the night that Dan got shot.

 There were too many assignments to grade, then it took too long to change into street clothes and too long to walk home. When he got home, it was already time for dinner, so Phil ate. Both Dan and Phil's families were down to two meals a day, but Phil's were considerably more. Then, finally, finally he was able to walk over to Dan's casa, smiling at the thought of seeing him after such a long day. They could watch a movie, or if the electricity was back up, just scroll through Tumblr together.

 Dan's younger brother opened the door, hollow eyes wide. "He's at Doña Gloria’s," he answered before Phil could speak. "You should hurry."

 Immediately, Phil turned and ran, heart beating in his ears. Doña Gloria was a retired nurse who, too old to work, had taken in the sick and wounded in exchange for small offerings of food and money, whatever the family could manage. You brought family members to her if they were in dire condition, but still had a chance of being saved.

 Phil burst in the door without knocking, eyes scanning the floor. The entire house reeked of blood and vomit and death, but he still gasped for air, trying desperately to find Dan. Half dead bodies were draped across the ground, some groaning in agony, some still, too still. But no Dan.

 Phil leaped over them, running through the short hall and glancing in the rooms with open doors, only finding more and more of the same. People from the protests, people from the streets, people dying of sickness that there was medicine for, just not here.

 He sprinted from the hallway and slammed into a small woman. "¡Con permiso! Disculpe, perdón. Solo estoy buscando a mi amigo,” he blurted out without taking a breath. Sorry! Sorry, excuse me, I'm just trying to find my friend.

 "¿El de la bala en la pierna? Está en el patio, por aquí, apúrate." The one with the bullet in his leg? He's on the patio, this way, hurry.

 Phil didn't know what was wrong with Dan, but he went where she pointed without question. Tearing through the doorway, he ran to the wooden picnic table where he found Dan laying, his chest rising too slowly, too shakily.

 His parents were at his side, both his mom and dad, though Phil didn't know how they managed to contact him. Doña Gloria tended to his leg, wiping at it with a bath towel from Dan's house. A piece of cloth was tied around his thigh higher up, holding pressure over the wound to decrease the blood flow.

 Dan was drenched in sweat. His skin was pasty and pale, and his overly curled hair was pressed away from his forehead.

 When Phil came into view, Dan's eyes fluttered. "Took you long enough," he murmured, his voice low and gravelly. "I've been here forever. Tell me, how does it look?"

 Phil swallowed, trying to bite back the tears that were threatening to appear. He looked at the injury. It was in a similar spot as his own bullet wound, even the same leg. But he'd been barely nicked by that bullet- this one had fully punctured Dan's leg. The wound was drenched in dark red blood.

 "It's barely a paper cut," Phil promised, willing his voice not to break. "I can hardly see it. You don't even need to be here, just need to.... suck it up, buttercup."

 Dan snorted, smiling widely up at Phil with the same drugged expression. There was no way he'd had painkillers, too difficult to find. No, it was the pain itself that drugged him.

 Dan gestured Phil closer, and then grabbed his collar, pulling him down slowly. Phil was worried he wanted a kiss, which would be the worst thing to do right now with others watching, but instead he pulled Phil close to whisper in his ear, "Now we'll have matching scars. Isn't that nice?" His eyes glinted with painful irony.

 The Doña stood straight, and immediately everyone looked at her, waiting for her verdict. "The bullet's still in there. I'll have to take it out." She looked at Dan with sympathy. "It will hurt a lot. Usually I don't recommend this, but if you feel like you might pass out, do it. It'll make it hurt less."

 Dan tried to look calm. Phil pretended he didn’t see the wild flicker of fear in his eyes.  "Okay."

 Doña Gloria glanced over to the open doorway calling for someone. Another woman hurried out, with the same facial features as the Doña, but about thirty years younger. She went over to the other side of her mother, and held Dan’s legs down at the ankles. “You hold his legs down up there. He might kick, but just hold him in place.”

 Phil did as he was told, leaning over Dan and holding his legs down.

 Dan watched Phil as the woman got out a pair of long tweezers, wiping at the wound again with a towel. His smile was gone.

  Phil adjusted so he was leaning on Dan’s legs with one arm, and he reached out with his other arm, clasping onto his hand. His hand was clammy but he held tight. They stared at each other without words as she started.

 Phil could feel when she plunged the tweezers into the wound because Dan's breathing caught and he cut off the circulation in Phil's hand.

 Phil could feel the tears fall from his eyes, his lips quiver. Dan looked up at him with the same plain but determined expression. "Stop it," he commanded. Phil shook his head, unable to stop crying. "I said stop it. Stop crying."

 Phil's voice broke into a sob. "I can't." He shook his head, his vision blurry from tears. "I can't. I can't."

 Dan grabbed onto his arm with impossible strength, forcing him to stay still. "Listen here you little fucker, there's a woman digging around in my leg and it hurts like mother fucking shit, you hear me?" Dan's voice broke, and he coughed, clearing it. Then he continued, his voice a little higher than normal. "You can't cry. You're not allowed. Suck it up, look me in the eyes, and stop fucking crying, otherwise I'll have to bitch slap you in front of my parents, and neither of us wants that. But I'll do it, I'll fucking do it, you hear me? Hey, look at me."

 Phil wiped his eyes sloppily, trying to stop the tears. He managed to look down. Dan's eyes were glassy, but he wasn't crying. He wouldn't cry.

 Behind them, Phil could hear Dan's mother sob. He shook his head, sniffed, and willed himself to stand taller.

 Dan looked at him with such intensity Phil wanted to look away, but couldn't. "It doesn't hurt," Dan promised. "I don't even feel it."

  Dan winced hard,squeezing his eyes shut for a split second. "Aha!" The old woman announced, apparently having gotten ahold of the bullet.

 Dan didn't look away. He forced himself to relax again, digging his nails into Phil's hand. "I don't even feel it," he repeated, as if reminding himself. "I don't even feel it."

----

 After the bullet was removed the wound was wrapped up tight, and Dan was warned to wait a while before moving much.

 Then Phil was forced to step back, and Dan's parents stepped forwards.

 Dan's mother was upset because Dan was hurt. Dan's father was upset because Dan was hurt in the protests.

 Their overall message was clear: Dan was forbidden from protesting anymore.

 And Dan rained hell on them. Dan was always generally respectful of them, and he never raised his voice against them, but when they told him he couldn't protest Dan lost it.

 He spoke so fast his words blurred together, an angry tirade of accusations and insults and refusal.

 "You can't go!" Dan's father commanded, enraged. "With your big mouth, it's a wonder you haven't been killed! I refuse to let you leave and to have your mother open the door one day to find that her son is dead! I refuse to let you do this to us!"

 "This isn't about you!" Dan shook with fury, his voice ringing with disgust. "This isn't about you or mom or me or any of us! Don't you see? I'm fighting for Venezuela, and I will keep going and keep fighting until things are fixed, I don't care what you have to say-"

 Dan's father stepped forwards and raised his hand, but before he could do anything Phil had grabbed him, shoving him back. "Don't you dare," he fumed. "Go. Dan needs to heal, he shouldn't be getting his heart rate up. Just go."

 The older man pushed Phil away, but didn't go to hit Dan. Instead, he caught the eye of Doña Gloría, who had come back outside, no doubt from the yelling. She nodded to the door.

 "Fine," his father relented, though he still looked furious. "But don't you dare go to another protest."

 He turned, and left.

 Dan's chest heaved as he watched him leave. "I'm going to go. I don't care what he says, the bastard."

 His mom stepped forwards. "Dan, he's still your father."

 "It's still my country!" He retorted immediately. "And you may be fine not doing anything, but I-"

 "Dan," Phil chided, harshly. "You were just shot. Calm down, we can figure it out later."

 "There's nothing left to figure out, I'm still going to-"

 "Red," Phil announced, switching to English. "Red. Shut up."

 Dan's mouth dropped open, but he quickly closed it again. He put his hands under his head, looking up at the wooden panels that during the day would provide shade, but during the night just blocked his view of the stars. "Fine. I'm shutting up."

 "Good." Phil turned to the Doña, changing the subject back to Dan's injury. "What else does Daníel need to do?" He asked, switching back to Spanish.

 The woman shrugged. "He shouldn't walk on it for at least a few days, longer if possible. And Daníel, stay out of the protests for a week or two after that. No need agitating it. I don't want to see you under these conditions again."

 Dan grunted and agreed. Despite all his big talk, Phil suspected he might be in more pain than he was letting on. Protesting should be the last thing he wanted to do right now.

 Dan's brother appeared a little later with a backpack over his shoulder. The Doña took it into her house, and brought it back a minute later emptied. Phil didn't know what was inside- whether it be food, money, or medicine- but he suspected a bit of each. The Howell's didn't have enough of any of the three to pay with only one.

 A few guys came over and offered to help Dan get home. Phil helped too, taking Dan's right shoulder. Dan's brother wanted to help, but they told him it wasn't needed. That wasn't necessarily true, but one look at the scrawny, twig-like boy with his hollow eyes and pasty skin, and it was clear he would be little help. Dan had lost weight less drastically. It was in a way that when you were looking for it, the change was obvious. But it had been so gradual that Phil had hardly bothered to notice. But as they lifted him, he was uncomfortably light. Phil could feel the bone of his shoulder sticking out sharply against his chest.

 They brought him out front, where the guy supporting Dan's uninjured leg set his foot down, and rushed to get his motorbike.

 "I'm going to get a bike like that," Dan decided, his forehead becoming sticky from sweat.

 "You said that in English," Phil reminded.

 "Fuck you. Me voy a comprar una moto así."

 Dan was loaded onto the back of the bike, his left leg hanging limply off the edge as he tried his best not to move it. The guy went around and got on in front of Dan, letting him wrap his arms around his waist.

 "Wish we'd gotten you a pretty girl to grind on instead," one of the guys joked lightheartedly. Dan managed to send them a quick wink before the engine started, and they revved off.

 Phil walked to Dan's house, it only taking a few minutes longer. He wasn't sure how Dan had managed to get from the protests to la casa de Doña Maria, but he could assume it was due to help from more friends. Friends were vital in times like this.

 ----

 "Don't say anything," Dan begged, hanging his head. "Please. I can't take any more of it."

 Phil shuffled in, closing the door behind him carefully. "I wasn't going to say anything. Just wondering if there's anything I can do to take the pain away."

 Dan looked up at him desperately, eyes red. "Can you get me drunk? I need a distraction from the pain."

 "I can get you drunk," Phil agreed, slightly hesitantly. He climbed on the bed, sitting with his legs crossed and leaning back on his hands. "I can get you so tipsy off of lukewarm water that you won't even be able to walk. Just say the word."

 Dan snorted. "We can't even afford alcohol. What is the world coming to?"

 Phil winced. "Well... Martín actually got some rum last week. Expensive stuff too, not even Carupano. I have no idea where from."

 Dan furrowed his eyebrows. "How does he keep getting stuff? The cans, the rum, the extra money. What do you think he's doing?"

 Phil didn't want to talk about it. But if it was distracting Dan from the pain, then maybe he had to stretch his comfort zone a little bit. "Well," he ventured, crawling over to sit next to Dan, taking his hand and fiddling with his fingers absentmindedly, "I might have an idea. But I don't like it."

 "He's a bank robber," Dan suggested, feigning ignorance when in reality, he had a decent idea of what might be up. "Or he's actually Maduro, and he's only been pretending to be your brother. I bet if you sneak into his room while he's asleep, you could see him without his skin mask."

 Now it was Phil's turn to snort. He smiled absently, tucking Dan's fingers into a fist and then untucking them, turning his hand over to examine his palm. "Yeah. Maybe."

 Dan nudged him, prodding him to go on. "I think he's involved with gangs." Phil struggled to get the words out, pinching Dan's palm softly. "He never would have before but... it's how he can best support the family. I think he feels like he has to do it, you know? And... I'm not just saying this because of the rum. The other day, he snuck in and his shirt had a bunch of blood on it. But later that night, he was walking around shirtless and he was fine. I... I don't really want to think about it."

 Dan sniffled. He stretched his leg out a little more, moving it cautiously. "I'm sorry."

 He leant his head against Phil's shoulder. Here, alone, without anyone to watch them or anyone to impress, Dan was very small. Out on the streets he could be Confident Dan, the one with the loud voice and the proud stance, the one who fought and fought and got hurt and then fought some more. But here, with the only person he could trust fully, Dan was able to show his other side. He was two boys in one, and this boy was small and unsure. The confident boy wasn't gone, he'd just been tucked away until he was needed to fight again. Confidence is armor, and Dan had to wear it often.

——-

"I’m actually annoyed," Dan grumbled. "You could’ve gotten me rum. Fuck lukewarm water, you could have gotten me actual, honest rum and you didn’t."

 "Dan-" Phil started, but Dan cut him off again.

 "Don’t Dan me. That’s it. I’m done."

 "What are you-"

 "I’m done!" Dan threw his hands up dramatically, his eyes still fluttering around the block party, landing on each bottle and shot glass individually. He licked his lips slightly, as if trying to taste the liquor already. "We can’t be best friends anymore," he said quieter, paying less and less attention to their conversation as he realized his surrounding were far more interesting.

 Phil put his hands on his hips, still very focused on the conversation. He was wearing a light colored baseball hat with a green rim, even though it had long since fallen dark. It was tilted slightly lopsidedly. "Why not?"

 "Because I was bleeding out and you didn’t get me booze! Phil, I was in serious pain! What kind of friend-"

 "You were not bleeding out. By the time you got home, you were hardly even bleeding."

 "I was in pain," he argued indignantly. "The least you could do-"

 "Oh, shut up already."

 The block party was in celebration of something- a birthday maybe? Dan wasn’t really sure, and he didn’t really care.

 It was already dark when they got there, and already it was beginning to get crowded with neighbors and friends. Cheap fairy lights were strung up around the balconies and along the tables, illuminating the brightly colored clothes and faces already lit up with joy. They’d been having to manage for too long. It was about time they got a break.

 Daníel and Felipe made a beeline for the drinks table, quickly downing their cups as soon as they got them. It was Carta Roja, the cheapest rum you could find. It came in a big bottle with a red label and cap, hence the name, which translated roughly to 'Red Letter'. It tasted like the smell of gasoline, and Dan’s face crinkled up slightly as he downed it, but the effect felt almost immediate. Around him, the salsa music seemed to get louder, the lights a little out of focus. It was probably just the placebo effect, but frankly, he didn’t care.

 The went around, socializing and getting more drinks. Dan could feel himself sway slightly to the beat of the music, not drunk enough that he lost his rhythm but just intoxicating enough that he couldn’t feel the pain his leg from two weeks ago. Slowly, he had completely tuned out the words of everyone else, completely entranced by the music.

 Salsa music is unlike others. It has a lot of Afro-Cuban influence, from African slaves working on cotton plantations in the Cuban heat. The music was focused on a central beat, a tempo that didn’t change throughout the song. The music was a mixture of the sound of bongos and a rhythmic tapping, half a dozen instruments mixing together to make a beat that you couldn’t help but sway to. There’d be some string instruments added, maybe a horn of some kind, and singing. You didn’t listen to the words, just to voices. Love and passion and sadness and dance. They sang in Spanish, but they could have been singing about various types of cheese and Dan wouldn’t know.

 He realized that the others were staring at him. Phil, and Dalia, and a few other friends who were now looking at him with a look in between a smirk and a smile.

 But Dan didn’t care. "Dalia?"

 She took his outstretched hand immediately, and Dan lead them over to the improvised dance floor: the stretch of dark gray pavement only wide enough for the motorbikes that came up that way sometimes.

 They danced easily. Salsa dancing was the type that went 1, 2, 3, pause, 5, 6, 7, pause. Step forewords, up, step back, and wait for a fraction of a moment. Then your feet start going again, this time back, up, forewords, pause. Then forwards up back pause, forwards up back pause, step open and step and close and pause and open step close pause and spin. Dan was almost as light on his feet as Dalia was, and they moved easily, Dan's hand on her hip, her hand on his shoulder, and their other hands intertwined together and held up to the side. Back step forwards wait forwards step back pause.

 "Look," Dalia nodded over Dan’s shoulder. They turned in a half circle, so Dan was able to see. Phil had gotten a partner too, a girl from his university. What was her name? Andy? Andrea?

 Phil had lived in Venezuela all his life, yet he still danced like someone who’d never heard music before. In Salsa, the man is supposed to lead, starting by stepping forwards, and in turn the woman steps back, creating an even rhythm. Instead, Phil shuffled an inch forwards and another inch back, his eyes trained on his feet as he managed to ignore both the pause and the extra step. The baseball cap and the looking at his feet completely obscured his expression, but Dan could imagine the mix of panic and concentration. If that wasn’t impressive enough, he also managed to step on Andrea's feet every other step. "¡Perdón!" he apologized quickly, just loud enough for Dan to hear a few paces away.

 "He never learned how to dance?" Dalia asked, trying to suppress her smile.

 "Let’s say that," Dan agreed. He twirled her, and they fell right back into rhythm, Dalia stepping back with her right foot as Dan stepped forwards with his left. Dan hesitated, watching as Phil stepped on Andrea's foot again, and she winced. "Would you mind if I-"

 "Oh no, please. I don’t think I can stand to watch this anymore."

 They let go of each other, and Dan went over, tapping on Andrea's shoulder. "Can I steal him for a moment? It’s time someone taught him how to dance."

 Andrea looked incredibly relieved, handing Phil off to Dan without a second look. She and Dalia looked around, but everyone else either already had a partner or were doing something else. Shrugging, they started dancing with each other. Andrea seemed to like this significantly better.

 Meanwhile, Dan placed Phil’s hand on his own hip, and set his hand on Phil’s shoulders. Their other hands intertwined. Phil's hand was sweaty.

 "What are you-"

 "I’m saving you," Dan explained, a little cocky. "And saving Andrea. She didn’t come here to have her feet tap danced over."

 Phil looked a little red, but it was hard to tell with the hat shadowing his face. "Yeah, okay. Let’s-"

 "Slow down," Dan advised, his voice going softer. "Stand up straight. Arm up... yeah, like that. Now we’ll start..." Phil took a step back, and Dan quickly corrected him, pulling him back to the starting position. "You’re the man. You step forwards, like you’re walking through a door."

 "But we're both men."

 "Yes, I am aware. But for teaching purposes, I can be a lady."

 "Lady door."

 "Please never say that again."

 Soon they almost had a rhythm. Dan was still leading more than he should, and they were having to count under their breaths in order to keep with the beat of the music. By that point, they’d been dancing for a full two songs and had a decent amount of sweat going.

 "You’re getting it," Dan whispered lowly in English, so only Phil could hear him. "See? It’s not all that bad." Phil had managed the basic steps, but was still lacking the hip movement. As you step forwards and back, your hips are supposed to sway, which was what Dan was doing, but Phil was still stiff. "Relax. Move your hips, like I’m doing."

 Phil looked down. He was definitely blushing. "Like, erm... like this?"

 He swayed a little extra. "Kind of. A little more though, and just centered around your hips, not the rest of your body."

 Phil tried, and improved a little. He was a little off rhythm, so Dan sped them up a little, adjusting back in time with the tempo.

 "1, 2, 3, pause, 5, 6, 7, pause. 1, 2, 3..."

 "I think people are staring," Phil whispered.

 "It’s just dance lessons," Dan argued, catching his eyes. "I’m doing a service to society. It’s not," he lowered his voice, "gay."

 "I don’t know if I agree with that."

 Dan looked over his shoulder, noting how some of the others were dancing. A few people gave them the side eye, but Dan didn’t know if that was because they were both boys, or if it was just because of Phil’s questionable skill.

 "Spin me," he decided.

 "What?!" There was true panic in his voice, like Dan had just suggested he eat a cockroach or they hold hands in public. Actually... they were already doing that last one.

 "On the eighth beat. You spin me, then we keep stepping. Ready... 6, 7..." he spun, landing and stepping forwards, colliding into Phil’s chest. "Sorry! That was my fault, forgot I’m supposed to be a girl."

 "Bitch same." Andrea said a few paces away. Dan had forgotten she spoke English, but they’d been in the same class in Uni. So that’s how he knew her.

 They tried to fall back in a rhythm, but Phil was a little out of it. While the alcohol made Dan a more confident dancer, it seemed to have done the exact opposite to Phil.

 Dan moved a little closer to try and help Phil keep his balance. He could smell the rum on his breath.

 Dan stumbled slightly, and accidentally knocked the hat off of Phil’s head and onto the ground. "Sorry!" He let go, leaning down to pick it up.

 "Are you okay?"

 For a moment, the alcohol seemed to wear off, and the bullet wound in Dan’s leg made itself known. But Dan managed a smile. "Fine. Just tripped." He lifted the hat up, but instead of giving it back to Phil he turned it around and put it on his own head backwards. "There. Now I can see your face." He moved back into their previous position, letting Phil hold him maybe a little closer than appropriate. As they started doing the steps again, Phil's gaze immediately went down to his feet, trying to get it right. "Hey," Dan warned, his voice soft. "Look at me, 'kay?"

"So if I’m dancing with a girl I should just stare at her the whole time?"

 "Nah. Protip: You can look over their shoulder instead of straight at their faces. That way, it isn’t just three minutes of... um, what’s it called? Contacto visual sostenido."

 "Sustained eye contact," Phil answered.

 "Yeah, that."

 Slowly, their conversation died out, and they continued to dance without speaking. Dan, wearing Phil’s hat, and Phil, staring at Dan even though he’d learned the trick about the shoulders. And they just danced, swaying back and forth, sweaty hands clasped together and bodies moving back and forth under the fairy lights.

 And that’s the story of how Dan and Phil managed to dance together, literally wearing each other’s clothes and standing so close they could feel each other’s breath, swaying and twirling and holding each other under the fairy lights, and no one batted an eye.

———-

 Wuilly Arteaga was 23 years old, studying medicine in the central university. He played the violin in the protests, sometimes folk tunes, sometimes the national anthem.

 The national anthem, “Gloria al Bravo Pueblo”, was intended to be played with a full band, an orchestra, trumpets, the whole nine yards. “Gloria al Bravo Pueblo” means Glory to the Brave People, and the lyrics tell of bravery and justice. When it’s played with the full band, it’s a tune that reeks of triumph, victory, and honor.

 Wuilly Arteaga would stand tall, draped in the colors of the flag. His chin rested on his violin, arms poised with the type of familiarity that you could only get from years of practice. He marched in protest, playing the national anthem with a triumphant look in his eyes, though the rest of his face was washed in concentration, jaw set with determination. Perhaps he saw everything going on around him. But perhaps he only heard the music.

 The lyrics of the national anthem drifted in the minds of everyone who heard, despite the fact that no one sang along to his lonely playing. Translated to English, they went:

Glory to the brave people which shook off the yoke, the Law respecting virtue and honour.

 Without the rest of the band playing, the music sounded eerie and beautiful. A familiar tune warped by emotion, full of life and love and empty at the same time.

Down with the chains! Cried out the Lord; and the poor man in his hovel for freedom implored. Upon this holy name trembled in fear the vile selfishness that had once triumphed.

 The music was a reminder of what Venezuela was supposed to be. Arteaga walked through the protest, sometimes alone, playing the music and letting the lyrics drift through the air, unspoken. He didn’t throw rocks, didn’t torment the guardias, just played his music.

Let's cry out aloud: Down with oppression! Faithful countrymen, your strength lies in your unity; and from the heavens the supreme Creator breathed a sublime spirit into the nation.

 And he was assaulted with blasts from water cannons, attacks and brutality from police and soldiers. He set a precedent for peaceful protest and they opened fire on him. He was imprisoned for two weeks. He was banned from protesting. They took his violin and destroyed it in front of him.

United by bonds made by heaven, all America exists as a Nation; and if tyranny raises its voice, follow the example given by Caracas. 

——

They meandered around, eyes flickering to the tv every few seconds as they waited for Tibisay Lucena, the president of the National Electoral Council, to make an appearance. It wasn’t mandatory viewing, but most people watched it anyways. Announcements like this were always released late at night, as if they were hoping that no one would stay up to watch it. This announcement in particular was a big one; they were announcing the fate of Venezuela.

 They were at Dan's house. His parents and younger brother were there too, and Martín. Phil’s whole family had been invited over, but his parents had decided they’d prefer not to make an event of the news.

 It was almost like a party. There was a tablecloth on the small coffee table, and fresh flowers in a vase. They drank peach Nestea that Martín had brought over. Phil sipped it, like he’d sip expensive liquor, or poison. It tasted like sunny afternoons sitting on the balcony and working up the nerve to kiss his boyfriend behind closed doors. It was bitterly sweet, sweeter than he remembered, sweeter than he would have liked.

Voting had just finished up. The voting decided whether the constitution would be rewritten in favor of a new government, a Constituent Assembly, in which the government took every corner of the country that they didn’t have control over, and seized it. Including the citizens, the citizens homes and property, the citizens bank accounts, etc. It also gave the government access to filtering the country’s internet access, or just to remove citizen access altogether. 'Constituent Assembly' was code for 'Dictatorship'.

 And it could happen. It all depended on the votes. Which, in a country that seldom experienced an election without voter fraud, was an issue.

 All conversation stopped in perfect unison as Tibisay Lucena came on camera, sitting behind a pedestal. Her wire rimmed glasses were pushed halfway up her nose, her hair grayer than it had been last time, her scowl tighter. Her words came out distorted and nasally, and she spoke in a voice that Dan had always mocked when he was a kid.

 She spoke of the things that had happened in the past few years, but they tasted a little sweeter coming from her mouth than they did in the living room. She didn’t mention the mistakes the government had made that resulted in their current situation, nor did she mention the huge protests who had been fighting in opposition to the new policies. She spoke dismissively of issues that had hardly touched her. Because she was sitting on her fancy chair, behind her fancy watch, and you could bet money that in the past few years of massive food shortages, she’d gained weight, not lost it.

 As she continued her speech, the truth began to wash over them like a sedative. It crawled up Phil's toes, icy fingers brushing past the scar from where the bullet scraped his thigh. It traveled up his body slowly, cold tendrils wrapping around his chest and daring him to breath.

  ...and with 8 million votes, the Constituent National Assembly will proceed...

 8 million votes, the exact number needed for it to be passed. It was too convenient.

She was still talking. But no one listened. When she finished speaking, there was a smattering of polite applause. In the small house on the side of the hill, they did not cheer. They just sat, eyes wide and faces pale.

 Everything they’d fought against… gone. A rigged vote had just determined their future. And they’d thought it was bad before.

  This is why they were protesting. This is why they were protesting. For the future of Venezuela, one that wasn’t a dictatorship. No, not a dictatorship per day, a communist society. It was the worst case scenario, and it had happened.

Someone turned off the tv. Or maybe it was a power cut. Or maybe it was all in Phil’s head, or maybe it was a bad dream, or maybe the Nestea was laced with drugs and all of this was a lie.

 They sat in silence. One minute, two minutes, twelve hours, thirty seconds.

 Without a word, Dan stood and left.

----

 Daníel Howell was loud.

 Daníel Howell was excited.

 Daníel Howell was a fighter.

 He was angry.

 He was happy.

 He was a storyteller.

 He was closeted.

 He was in love.

 And he was full of life.

 He was fun, and humorous, and ridiculous, and made bad innuendos and liked speaking in English because it made him feel like he had secrets to share. He marched the streets of Caracas with his shield held high and his chin held higher, chanting and screaming and calling injustice by name.

 He tied bandages too tight and got angry when Phil put himself in danger.

 He ate chocolate like it was the last thing he'd ever taste.

 And he laughed like he'd never laugh again.

 That was who Dan was. That was who Dan is- not the boy sitting on the roof, looking out at the city below him like he was looking into the depths of the ocean. There was no life left, just eye bags and slouched shoulders and brown eyes that saw nothing at all.

 Phil walked over, sitting next to him. Dan didn't move. His chest rose and fell slowly, like his lungs were working without his permission. Lights from the city reflected in his glassy eyes.

 Phil coughed quietly, and for the first time Dan realized he was no longer alone. His legs pulled close to his chest twitched, and he looked down and away, closing his eyes.

 Somewhere below them, someone was crying. Phil didn't know who it was, or if it was just one person. He didn't know if he cared anymore.

 Neither of them spoke.

 What happens now?

 Will we be okay?

 There were questions they wanted to ask, but that they didn't want the answers to. So they stayed silent.

 Phil got more comfortable on the rooftop, bending his knees to his chest. In the moonlight, Dan had lost all color. Closed eyes, gray skin, unmoving. He was skin and bones and warm breath and not much else.

 In the distance, someone was calling out orders in Spanish. Phil couldn't hear the words, only the gruffness of them, the anger in them. Not a guardia; it was a protester.

 People joined in, screaming and cheering different words that all morphed into the same meaning. We will not be silenced.

 A fire rose into the sky, cheering filling the streets.

  We will not be quiet.

  We will not be obedient.

  We will not be silenced.

 Next to Phil, Dan started sobbing. Eyes closed, silent sobs that made his whole body shake miserably. Phil worried he was too close to the edge.

  We will not be starved.

  We will not take it.

  We won't stop fighting.

  We will not be silenced.

 "Do you hear us, Maduro?" Someone screamed. "We're coming for you!"

 People cheered. Weapons were hoisted into the air, guns and wooden planks and bats and fire and stones and metal water bottles and dinner knives.

 The fire crackled loudly. Dan's cheeks were wet with tears. He didn't open his eyes. Phil wanted to close his eyes. He didn't want to see this. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want to see this. He wanted to close his eyes. He couldn't be here. He didn't close his eyes.

 More chanting. More screaming. Accusations. Tires screeching.

 "Oh Phil," Dan muttered, not looking at him. "What are we going to do?"

 Phil scooted over to Dan, his entire body trembling. Dan opened his eyes, watching him. I love you.

  I'm scared.

 Dan opened his arms, hugging him, pulling him closer. Phil's entire body shook, and so did Dan's, and so did the building and so did the earth. The entire world shook. Their entire world shook.

 "I don't know," Phil whispered, so quietly only Dan could hear.

  What's going to happen?

  What are we going to do?

 "I don't know."

  What now?

  What now?

 Phil sobbed into Dan's shoulder. "I don't know."

 And the sound of gunshots tore through the night.

Please let me know if you enjoyed it! In case you didn’t read the note at the beginning, this story was written as part of the Phandom Reverse Bang, with Artist @trashofdoom and Beta @axolotlpj. Check out the art here!

Fic Masterlist / Request A Fic 

The Other Story I Wrote For The Phandom Reverse Bang 

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

Karen Russell (2013)

THE SCARECROW THAT WE FOUND lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to countrymen and women. They lived in hick states, the “I” states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds, and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me — I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.) Scarecrows got planted into the same soil as their crops; they worked around the clock, like charms, to keep the hungry birds at bay. That was how it worked in TV movies, at least: horror-struck, the birds turned shrieking circles around the far-below peak of the scarecrow’s hat, afraid to land. They haloed him. Underneath a hundred starving crows, the TV scarecrow seemed pretty sanguine, grinning his tickled, brainwashed grin at the camera. He was a sort of pitiable character, I thought, a jester in the corn, imitating the farmer — the real king. All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand watch over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I couldn’t remember (my brain stole this image from the seven-grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag — at school I cheated shamelessly and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist too, copying its homework).

This mission had nothing to do with us or with our city of Anthem, New Jersey. Anthem had no crops, no silos, no crows — it had turquoise Port-o-Pottys and neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, bag ladies with powerful smells and opinions, garbage dumps haunted by the wraith white pigeons; it had our school, the facade of which was currently covered with a glorious psychedelic phallus mosaic, a series of interlocking dicks spray painted to the scale of Picasso’s Guernica by Anthem’s tenth-grade graffiti kings; it had policemen, bus drivers, crossing guards; dolls were sold in stores.

And we were city boys. We lived in projects that were farm antonyms, these truly shitbox apartments. If flowers bloomed on our sooty sills, it must have been because of some plant Stockholm syndrome, a love our sun did not deserve. Our familiarity with the figure of the scarecrow came exclusively from watered-down L. Frank Baum cartoons, and from the corny yet frightening “Autumn’s Bounty!” display in the Food Lion grocery store, where every year a scarecrow got propped a little awkwardly between a pilgrim, a cornucopia, and a scrotally wrinkled turkey. The Food Lion scarecrow looked like a broomin a Bermuda shirt, a broomwith acne, ogling the ladies’ butts as they bent to buy their diet yogurts — once I’d heard a bag boy joke that it was there to spook the divorcees. What we found in Friendship Park in no way resembled the Food Lion scarecrow. At first I was sure the thing tied to the oak was dead, or alive. Real, I mean.

“Hey, you guys,” I swallowed. “Look — ” And pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a T-shirt that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. His hair clung tight as a cap to his scalp, as if painted on, and his face looked like a brick of sweating cheese.

Gus got to the kid first. “You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll.” He punched its stomach. “It’s got straw inside it.”

“It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo.

And he kicked at a glistening bulb of what did appear to be straw beneath the doll’s slumping face. A little hill. It regarded its own innards expressionlessly, its glass eyes twinkling. Mondo shrieked again.

I followed the scarecrow’s gaze down to its lost straw: dark gold and chlorophyll green strands were blowing loose, like cut hair on a barbershop floor. Some of the straw had a jellied black look. How long had this stuff been outside of him, I wondered — how long had it been inside of him? I looked up, searching the boy scarecrow for a rip. A cold eel-like feeling was thrashing in my belly. That same morning, while eating my Popple breakfast tart, I’d seen a news shot of a U.S. soldier calmly watching blood spill from his head. Calm came pouring over him, at pace with the blood. In the next room, I could hear my ma getting ready for work, singing an old pop song, rattling hangers. On TV, one of the soldier’s eyes was lost behind the sticky pink sheet. The camera closed in; a second later the footage switched to the trees of a new country under an ammonia blue sky. I couldn’t understand this — where was the cameraman or the camerawoman? Who was letting his face dissolve into calm?

“Let’s cut it down!” screamed Mondo. I nodded.

“Nah, we better not.” Juan Carlos looked around the woods sharply; he looked up, as if there might be a sniper hidden in the pin oak. “What if this” — he pushed at the doll — “belongs to somebody? What if somebody is watching us, right now? Laughing at us…”

It was late September, a cool red season. The scarecrow was hung up on the sunless side of the oak. The tree was a shaggy pyramid, sixty or seventy feet tall, one of the “famous” landmarks of Friendship Park; it overlooked a ravine — a split in the seam of the bedrock, very narrow and deep — that we called “the Cone.” Way down at the bottom you could see a wet blue dirt with radishy pink streaks along it, as exotic looking to us as a sea floor. Condoms and needles (not ours) and the silver shreds of Dodo Potato Chip bags and beer bottles (mostly ours) had turned the Cone into a sort of sylvan garbage can. The tree spread above it like a girl playing at suicide, quailing its many fiery leaves.

Years ago, before we started loitering here in a dedicated way, the pin oak had been planted to commemorate an Event — there was an opal plaque nestled in its roots. We knew this much but we didn’t know more — some delinquent, teenaged forefather of ours had scratched out everything but the date, “1957.”

The plaque looked like a lost little moon in the grip of the tree’s arachnid roots. I always felt a little cheated by the plaque; it was a confusing kind of resentment; I didn’t really care about the “why” of the tree at all but I didn’t like how this plaque was an open secret either, a mystery that was always itching at us. It bothered me that we were so poorly informed about the oak’s first purpose that we did not even have the option of forgetting it, using our patented June 1 method, whereby we expulsed a year of school facts from our brains in spasms of summer amnesia. (Harriet Tubman — did he invent something? The War of 1812 — why did we fight that one? For tea? Against Mexico or Sicily?) Forgetting was one of my favorite things to do at Camp Dark; I felt like a squid, sending jets of inky thoughts into the Cone. The plaque was illegible, but the oak’s glossy trunk was covered in gougings that you could easily read: V hearts K; Death 2 Asshole Jimmy Dingo; Jesus Saves; I Wuz Here!!! We’d added ourselves:

MONDO + GUS + LARRY + J.C. = CAMP DARK

The “deep end” of Friendship Park we called Camp Dark. Camp Dark was Anthem’s lame try at an urban arboretum, a sort of surprise woods bordered by gas and fire stations and a condemned pizza buffet. THE PIZZA PARTY IS CANCELED read a sign above a bulldozer. These central acres of Friendship Park were filled with young deciduous trees and naive-seeming bluish squirrels. They chittered some charming bullshit at you too, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the true woods, which were about an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown, according to Juan Carlos — only Juan Carlos had been out there. (“There was a river with a purple fish shitting in it,” was all we got out of him.)

Recently, the Anthem City Parks & Recreation had received a big grant, and now the playground looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: All the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam. To absorb the risk of a lawsuit, said Juan Carlos; one night, at Juan Carlos’s suggestion, we all took turns pissing hooch onto the harm-preventing pillows. Our park had a poopstrewn dog run and an orange baseball diamond; a creepy pond that, like certain towns in Florida, had at one time been a very popular winter destination for geese and ducks but which had for some reason fallen out of fashion in the waterfowl society; and a Conestoga-looking covered picnic area. Gus claimed to have had sex there last Valentine’s Day, on the cement tables — “pussy sex,” he said, authoritatively, horrifying us, “not just the mouth kind.” Our feeling was, if Gus really had tricked a girl into coming to our park in late February, they most likely talked about noncontroversial subjects, like the coldness of snow and the excellence of Gus’s weed, while wearing sex-thwarting parkas.

We’d started hanging at Friendship Park four years ago, when we were ten years old. Back then we played actual games.We hid and we sought. We did benign stuff in trees. We amassed a stupidly huge plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the pin oak, including a Sounds of Warfare Blazer that as I recall required something like sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a female guinea pig putting a brave face on her tuberculosis. Those were innocent times. Then we got shunted into Anthem’s combo middle-and-high school, and now we came here to drink beers and antagonize one another. Biweekly we shoplifted liquor and snacks, in a surprisingly orderly way, rotating this duty. (“We are Communists!” shrieked Mondo once, pumping a fistful of red-hot peanuts into the sky, and Juan Carlos, who did homework, snorted, “You are quite confused, my bro.”)

Participation levels varied, but usually it was the core four of us at Camp Dark: Juan Carlos Diaz, Gus Ainsworth, Mondo Chu, and me, Larry Rubio. Pronounced “Rubby-oh” by me, like a rubber ducky toy, my own surname. My dad left when I turned two and I don’t speak any Spanish unless you count the words that everybody knows, like “hablo” and “no.” My ma came from a vast hick family in Pensacola, pontoon loads of uncle-brothers and red-haired aunts and firecrotch cousins from some nth degree of cousindom, hordes of blood kin whom she renounced, I guess, to marry and then divorce my dad. We never saw any of them. We were long alone, me and my ma.

Juan Carlos had tried to tutor me once: “Rooo-bio. Fucker, you have to coo the ‘u’!”

My ma couldn’t pronounce my last name either, making for some awkward times in Vice Principal Derry’s office. She’d reverted to her maiden name, which sounded like an elf municipality: Dourif. “Why can’t I be a Dourif, like you?” I asked her once when I was very small, and she poured her drink onto the carpet, shocking me — this was my own kindergarten trick to express a violent unhappiness. She left the room and my shock deepened when she didn’t come back to clean up the mess. I watched the stain set on the carpet, the sun cutting through the curtain blades. Later, I wrote LARRY RUBIO on all of my folders. I answered to RUBIO, just like the stranger my father must be doing somewhere. What my ma seemed to want me to do — to hold onto the name without the man — felt very silly to me, like the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote holds on to the handle (just the handle) of an exploded suitcase. Latching into pure space.

The scarecrow boy was my same height, five foot five. He had pale glass eyes and a molded wax or plastic face; under his faded brown shirt his “skin” was machine-sewn sackcloth, straw stuffed. So: He had a scarecrow’s body but a boy’s head. I took a step forward and punched his torso, which was solid as a bale of hay; I half expected a scream to roll out of his mouth. I looked down — I was standing on a snarl of his guts. Would a scarecrow’s organs look like this? I wondered. Like birds’ nests. A grass kidney, a flammable heart. Now I understood Mondo’s earlier wail — when the scarecrow didn’t cry out, I wanted to scream for him.

“Who stuck those on its face?” Mondo asked. “Those eyes?”

“Whoever put him here in the first place, jackass.”

“Well, what weirdo does that? Puts eyes and clothes on a giant doll of a kid and ropes him to a tree?”

“A German, probably,” said Gus knowingly. “Or a Japanese. One of those sicko sex freaks.”

Mondo rolled his eyes. “Maybe you put it here then, Ainsworth.”

“Maybe he’s a theater prop? Like, from our school?”

“He’s wearing some nasty clothes.”

“Hey! He’s got a belt like yours, Rubby!”

“Shut up.”

“Wait — you’re going to steal the scarecrow’s belt? That ain’t bad luck?”

“Oh my God! He’s got on underwear!” Mondo snapped the elastic, giggling.

“He has a hole,” Juan Carlos said quietly. He’d slid his hand between the doll’s sagging shoulders and the tree. “Down here, in his back. Look. He’s spilling straw.”

Juan Carlos was jerking stuffing out of the scarecrow and then, in the same panicky motion, trying to cram it back inside the hole; all this he did with a sly, aghast look, as if he were a surgeon who had fatally bungled an operation and was now trying to disguise that fact from his staff. This straw, I recognized with a chill, was fresh and green.

“You got your ‘oh shit!’ face on, J.C.!” Gus laughed. I managed a laugh too, but I was scared, scared. The straw was scary to me, its pale colors and its smell. A terrible sweetness lifted out of the doll, that stench you are supposed to associate with innocent things — zoos and pet stores, pony rides. He was stuffed to the springs of his eyeballs. Put it all back, Juan, I thought hopefully, and we’ll be OK.

“Uh. You dudes? Do scarecrows have fingers?” Mondo held the scarecrow’s left hand, very formally, as if he were suddenly in a cummerbund accompanying the scarecrow to the world’s scariest prom.

“I mean, usually,” he added lamely, as if this were a normal topic to solicit our opinions on, the prevalence of scarecrow fingers.

“His body is soft.” Gus demonstrated this for us, punching it. “But his face is, like, a wax? Not-straw. Some other shit. Plastic.”

Only it wasn’t generic, like a mall mannequin. Even the dark blue eye color looked particular, familiar. His features were weird and specific, like the face of a wax actress in a museum. Someone you were supposed to recognize.

“What the hell?” Gus whispered, twisting the scarecrow’s face by its plastic chin. The chin was pocked with a fiery braille of blemishes and cuts, so convincingly nasty that you half expected them to ooze. The longer I stared at him, the less real I myself felt. Was I really the only one who remembered his name?

“Weird. His face is cold.” Juan Carlos ran a long finger down the scarecrow’s crooked nose.

“He’s not wearing his glasses,” I mumbled. Now that I knew who this was I was afraid to touch his face, as if the humid wand of my finger might bring him to life.

“His face is hard,” Mondo confirmed, knocking on the scarecrow’s forehead. “His eyes are…uh-oh. Oops.”

Mondo turned to us, grinning.

“Oh shit!” Gus shook his head. “Put them back in.”

“I can’t. The little threads broke.” Mondo held out the eyes: two grape-sized balls, an amethyst glass soaked blue by the last light of day. “Any of you bitches know how to sew?” Intense pinks were filtering through the autumn mesh of the oak. It was dusk, sunset; the park was now officially closed. “Seriously?” Mondo asked, sounding a little panicky now. “Anybody got glue or something?”

I stared at the sprigs of thread where the scarecrow’s eyes had been. Now his face was putty white from the “T” of his nose to his forehead. A little firefly was lighting up the airless caves of the doll’s nostrils, undetected by the doll. You’re even blinder now, I thought, and a heavy feeling draped over me.

Then I heard the question I’d been dreading: “Don’t we know this kid?”

Now Mondo stood on his toes and peered into the scarecrow’s eyes with a shrewdness that you did not ordinarily expect from Mondo Chu — his mind was lost inside one of those baby-fat faces that he couldn’t seem to age out of, with big slabby cheeks that squeezed his eyes into a narcoleptic squint, although outside of school Mondo could get pretty annoyingly energetic. There was some evidence that Mondo did not have the happiest home life. Mondo was half Chinese, half something.We’d all forgotten, assuming we’d ever known.

In fact, as a “we,” Camp Dark was pretty fiercely uninterested in the details of its members’ lives outside of school or beyond the fenced urban woods of Friendship Park. Silence policed the shady meeting point under our oak. I didn’t know, for example, if Juan Carlos’s big sister was pregnant or just getting large on Hershey’s Kisses, or how Mondo got the yellowish bruises that covered his flabby upper arms. Inside of our “we,” nobody would ask you about your ma’s cancer or your alcoholic aunt, your moon-eyed half sister, your family’s debts, nobody commented on the emotions that might fly across your face and raise your fists and nobody demanded a bullshit weather report from you either, a reason for your anger — not like the teachers, who were always demanding that sort of phony meteorology from us. We cracked jokes together in Camp Dark, but I think it was the silence, all those unasked questions, that bound us. At school we beat down kids as a foursome and this too we did in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the red-brick Science Building — this march could look a little medieval, like some Gallows Day parade, each of us taking up an arm or a leg — and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. For us, this process was a necessary evil. We were like four factory guys, manufacturing the quiet, a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble around our fists like glue.

It was Mondo who cracked the mystery. He didn’t solve it, I don’t mean that — in fact he made the mystery much worse. That’s what I pictured anyhow, when Mondo tapped the mystery with his little eureka! hammer — hairline cracks appearing in a round, solid shell. Yolk came oozing out of the mystery, covering all of our hands, so that we became involved.

“Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels and let out a bee-stung cry. “It’s Eric.”

“Oh.” I took a step away from the tree.

Juan Carlos paused with one hand lost in the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.

“Who the fuck is Eric?” Gus snarled.

Then Mondo, grinning loonily like a Jeopardy! champ, grabbed the scarecrow’s left arm by the wrist and made it shake hands with the cold air between us. “Don’t you assholes remember him? Eric Mutis.”

Sure, we remembered him now: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried by Coach Leyshon from the room. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October of the previous year, a transfer kid. One day Mutant was sitting in the back row of our homeroom; the teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey, and generally the teachers made the New Boy or the New Girl parade their strangeness for us; but Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, much weirder even than the Guatemalan New Boy, Eric Mutis arrived in exile. He sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.

In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him — there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his oblivion, his froggy lashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Jilly Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a harpy. “What smells?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Jilly, thrilling us with her acid tone, and only Eric Mutis would blink his large, bovine eyes at her and say, “I don’t smell it, Jilly,” in that voice like thin bluemilk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, incapable of shame. Even then, at age twelve, before our glands made us all swell into monsters, I felt allergic to the kid. His ugliness panned into a weird calm, and this combination was like a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too — the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.

The courts, the grass behind them — that was where Camp Dark came to order. We did what you might call these “alterations” on the blacktop. At recess we’d descend on Eric Mutis like deranged tailors, trailing these little threads of Eric’s spittle and Eric’s blood. But his costume — the smoggy yellow cloud of his hair, his sickly bus-terminal complexion — it was his skin. We could not free him, we could not torch the costume off him. He wouldn’t change, no matter how often we encouraged him to do so with our insults and the instruction of our “pranks” and fists. We stole his Hoops sneakers, hung them up on the flagpole, we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times that year, his hideous glasses, with frames the width of my TV set; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same eyesore frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops sneakers, fresh from the Starmart box. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy — or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?

“Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop — closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his blue bubblegum, and what we called “Anthem cologne” — like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stunk of diesel and fried doughnut grease and the sweet, fecal waft off manhole covers.

“Why don’t you learn?” And I Goliath crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.

“Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”

“Are you retarded?” I marveled. “You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was our blood actually, but his voice and his monotone blue eyes made me furious. “WAKE UP!” I backed away to give Gus space to deliver an encore kick. “Listen, Mutant: DO…NOT…WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”

And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?

Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutant seemed terribly oblivious of his own appearance — that was the problem — he wore that stuff witlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we took Eric Mutis around behind the red-brick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even — his blue eyes drifting, unplugged — that it was happening to him.

In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. The school bathroom was tiled, naval blue for boys, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john; I’d cracked younger kids’ skulls on those tiles before. Eric the Mute knew this much about me — that was the one lesson he took.

“Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him.

More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)

“Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, which was his baseball signal to the rest of us that he’d lost it, his patience with our dithering voices, his faith in debate fertilizing an action. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here — ”

“The scarecrow,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.

Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? One way to learn what he is supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”

“But, Gus.” I swallowed. “What if something does come to Anthem?”

“Well, Rubby…” Gus shrugged. “Then we’ll have some fascinating new information about this scarecrow, won’t we?”

We had been riffing on this: What threat, exactly, was this scarecrow keeping away from Friendship Park? Not crows, that was for sure; but what was the Anthem equivalent, the urban crow? Rabid cats? A flock of mob gunmen, or sewer rats? Those poor Canada geese that kept getting sucked into the engines of jet planes at the Anthem airport? (That one was my idea.) What could a doll of a child scare away, a freak like Mutant?

The oak shivered above us; it was almost nine o’clock. Police, if they came upon us now, would write us up for trespassing. Come upon us, officers. Maybe the police would know the protocol here, what you should do if you found a scarecrow of your classmate strung up in the woods.

“I’m with Larry. I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore, either,” said Mondo. “To cut him down. What if something really bad happens? It would be our fault.”

Juan Carlos nodded. “Look, whoever put this up is one sick fuck. I don’t want to mess with the property of a lunatic…”

Juan was still enumerating his understandable concerns when Gus, who had fallen quiet, walking around the tree and finishing everybody’s brews, stood up. A knife sprang out of Gus’s pocket, a four-inch knife that nobody had known Gus carried with him, one of the kitchen tools we’d seen used by Gus’s pretty mom, Mrs. Ainsworth, to butterfly and debone chickens. Down went Eric.

“GUS!”

We stood up just as the scarecrow shucked the oak permanently, and plummeted into the sky.Watching him go over, I felt dread without a drop of surprise — it felt like we were watching a horror movie that we’d seen a thousand times before, The Scarecrow of Eric Mutis Dives Into the Cone! I can still see the stars swarming around the pin oak and Gus sawing at the rope, Gus giving Eric Mutis’s doll a little push — joylessly, dutifully, like a big brother behind a swingset — the plaque catching at him like a stumbling stone, illegibly flashing, the doll launching over the roots, headfirst, into a night that shrank him, into the Cone’s collapsing sky, the doll falling and falling and then, not. He landed on the rocks with a baseball crack. I don’t know how to describe the optical weirdness of the pace of this event — because the doll fell fast — but the doll’s descent felt unnaturally long to me, as if the forest floor were, just as quickly, lunging away from Eric Mutis. Somebody almost laughed. Mondo was already on his knees, peering over the edge, and I joined him: The scarecrow looked like a broke-neck kid at the bottom of a well. Facedown, his limbs all scrambled on an oily soak of black and maroon leaves and strata of our glass. Had it lost more straw? Black plants waved down there and I couldn’t tell which weeds might have belonged to the scarecrow. One of his white hands had gotten twisted all the way around. He waved at us, palm up, spearing the air with his long, unlikely fingers.

“OK,” Gus said, sitting back down next to where he’d dug his red beer can into the leaves, as if we were at the beach. “You’re all welcome. Everybody needs to shut up now. Let’s start the clock on this experiment.”

We emerged from the park at Gowen Street and Forty-eighth Avenue. A doorman waved at us from a fancy apartment building. Awnings sprouted above all of the windows like golden claws. When the streetlights clicked on without warning, I think we all stifled a scream. We stood on the dirty tarmac of the sidewalk, bathed in a deep-sea light. Even on a nonscarecrow day I dreaded this, the summative pressure of the good-bye moment — but now it turned out there was nothing to say. We split off in a slow way, a slow ballet — a moth, watching the four of us from above, would have seen us as a knot dissolving over many moth centuries underneath the green air. It occurred to me that, given the lifespan of a moth, one kid’s twitch would occupy a year of insect time. The scarecrow of Eric Mutis would have twirled down for moth aeons.

“What the hell is so funny, kid?” the doorman shouted. I had been spawning a slow smile on my face, imagining the decades of moth time going by as my smile grew: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, sleigh bells ring, Mr. Moth, here comes spring…

That night marked a funny turning point for me; I started thinking about Time in a new way, Time with a capital “T,” this substance that underwent mysterious conversions. On the walk home I watched moths go flitting above the stalled lanes of cars. I called Mondo on the phone, something I never did — I was surprised I even had his number. We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. You know, I never tried to force Eric Mutis from my mind — I never had to. Courteously, the kid had disappeared from my brain entirely, about the same time he vanished from our school rolls. Were it not for the return of his scarecrow in Camp Dark, I doubt I would have given him a second thought.

I am in the shower, Eric Mutis is where? I tied myself to mental train tracks, juxtaposing my activities against Eric Mutis’s imaginary ones — was he blowing out twisty red and white birthday candles, doing homework? What hour of what day was it, wherever Eric Mutis had moved? I pictured him in Cincinnati squiggling mustard on a ballpark frank, in France with an arty beret (I pictured him dead too, in a dreamy, compulsive way, the concrete result of which was that I no longer ate breakfast). “You don’t want your Popple, Larry?” my ma screamed. “It’s a Blamberry Popple!” The Blamberry Popple looked like a pastry nosebleed to me. What was Eric eating? How soundly was he sleeping? (“Did we break Mutant’s nose?” I asked Gus in homeroom. “At least once,” Gus confirmed.) Now each of my minutes cast an hourglass shadow and I divided into two.

But inside the Cone, as it turned out, the scarecrow of Eric Mutis was subdividing even faster.

Every day for a week, we went back to stare at the facedown scarecrow of Eric Mutis in Friendship Park. It lay there in the sun, sleeping it off. Nothing much happened. There was a mugging at the Burger Burger; the robber got a debit card and a quart of milkshake. Citywide, bus fare went up five cents. A drunk driver in the Puerto Rican day parade draped a Puerto Rican flag over his windshield like a patriotic blindfold and crashed through a beautiful float of the island of Puerto Rico. Nothing occurred on the crime blotter that seemed connected to Eric Mutis, or Eric Mutis’s absence. No strange birds flew out of exile, no new shapes came to roost in the oaks of Friendship Park now that the scarecrow’s guard was down. Downed by us, I thought angrily, like a cut power line. Drowned in air, like the world’s stupidest experiment.

Had Eric Mutis’s scarecrow been babysitting a crop? Some Jersey version of the Amish seven grains? Years of city trash and plastic guns, that was Camp Dark’s harvest. I thought of the slippery weeds crushed underneath his face, the rocks and cans glowing like blind fish in the ravine.

“Did Eric have a dad? A mom?”

“Wasn’t he a foster kid?”

“Where did he move to again?”

“Old Mucusoid never said — did he? He just disappeared.”

At school, the new guidance counselor could not help us find our “little pal” — the district computers, she said, had been wiped by a virus. Mutis, Eric: no record. His yearbook slot was an empty navy egg between the school-mandated grimaces of Omar Mowad and Valerie Night. ABSENT, it read in red letters. We consulted with Coach Leyshon, whom we found face deep in a vending-machine cheeseburger behind the dugout.

“Mutant?” he barked. “That dipshit didn’t come back?” We broke into Vice Principal Derry’s file cabinet and made depressing, irrelevant discoveries about the psychology of Vice Principal Derry — his top drawer contained about five million pointless green pencils, a Note to Moi! memo, in pen, that read BUY PENCIL SHARPENER, and a radiant mélange of glues.

Next we consulted the yellow pages at the city library, Ma Bell’s anthology of false alarms — we thought we found Mutant in Lebanon Valley, Pennsylvania. Voloun River, Tennessee. Jump City, Oregon. Jix, Alaska, a place that sounded like a breakfast cereal or an attack dog, had four Mutis families listed. We called. Many dozens of Mutises across America hung up on us, after apologizing for their households’ dearth of Erics. America felt vast and void of him.

Gus whammed the phone into its receiver, disgusted. “It’s like that kid hatched out of an egg. What I want to know is: Who made him into a scarecrow?”

Again the yellow pages got consulted. This time we weren’t even sure what sort of listing to scout for. Who made a doll of a boy — some modern Mary Shelley? An artist, a child taxidermist? We looked for ridiculous things: SCARECROW REPAIR, WAX KIDS.

I found an address for a puppeteer who had a workshop in Anthem’s garment district. Gus biked out there and did reconnaissance, weaving around the bankers’ spires of downtown Anthem and risking the shortcut under the overpass, where large, insane men brayed at you and haunted shopping carts rolled windlessly forward. He spent an hour circling the puppeteer’s studio, trying to catch him in the act of Dark Arts — because what if he wasmaking scarecrows of us? But the puppeteer turned out to be a small, baldman in a daffodil print shirt; the puppet on his table was a hippopotamus, or perhaps some kind of lion. This Gus learned on his twentieth revolution around the workshop, at which time the puppeteer lifted the window, gave a friendly wave, and told Gus that he had just telephoned the police.

“Great,” sighed Juan Carlos. “So we still have no clue who made that doll.”

“But how the fuck you going to confuse a hippo and a lion, bro!” Mondo grumbled. Often Mondo’s reactions would miss the mark entirely and slam into a non sequitur, as if his rage were a fierce and stupid bird that kept landing on the wrong tree, whole woods away from the rest of us.

“Chu, you have a brain defect.” Gus stared at him. “Something that cannot be helped.”

“Maybe Mutant did it,” I said, almost hopefully. I wanted Eric to be safe and alive. “Did he know that we hang out in the park? Maybe he roped the scarecrow there to screw with us.”

“Maybe it was Vice Principal Derry,” said Juan Carlos. “One time, I’m walking to the bus, and I see Mutant in Vice Principal Derry’s office. Through that window that faces the parking lot, right? And I sort of thought, ‘Oh, good, he’s getting some help.’ But then Derry catches me looking, right? And he stands up, he’s fucking pissed, he shuts the blinds. It was so weird. And I saw the Mute’s mug — ” I could see it too, Mutant’s leech white face behind the glass, I had seen it framed in Derry’s office window, Eric Mutis swallowed in Derry’s leather chair, wearing his queer gray glasses. “And he looked…bad,” he finished. “Like, scared? Worse than he did when we messed with him.”

“Why was he in Derry’s office?” I asked, but nobody knew.

“I saw him get picked up from school,” Mondo volunteered. “After second period, you know, cause he had one of his twitch fests? The, uh, the seizures? And this dude in the car looked so old! I was like, Mutant, is Darth Vader there your dad?”

This too was something we all suddenly remembered seeing: a cadaverous man, a liver-spotted hand on the steering wheel of a snouty green Cadillac, tapping a cigar, and then Mutant climbing into the backseat, the rear window as foggy as aquarium glass and the Mute’s head now etched dimly behind it. He always climbed into the backseat, never used the passenger door, we agreed on that. We all remembered the cigar.

Gus hadn’t stopped frowning — it had been days since he’d told a truly funny joke. “Where did Mutis live in Anthem? Does anybody remember him saying?”

“East Olmsted,” said Mondo. “Right? With a crazy aunt.” Mondo’s eyes widened, as if his memory were coming into focus. “I think the aunt was black!”

“Chu,” Juan Carlos sighed. “That is not your memory. You are thinking of a Whoopi Goldberg movie. Nah, Mutant’s parents were rich.”

“Oh my God!” Mondo clapped a hand to his face. “You’re right! That was a great movie!”

Juan Carlos directed his appeal to Gus and me. “Kid was loaded. I just remembered. I’m, like, ninety percent sure. That’s why the Mute pissed us off so bad…wasn’t it? Dressing like he was on welfare and shit. I think they lived in the Pagoda. Serious.”

I almost laughed at that — the Pagoda was an antislum, a castle of light. Eric Mutis had never lived in the Pagoda’s zip code. In fact, I had visited the house where Eric lived. Just one time. This knowledge was like a wild thumper of a rabbit inside me. I was amazed that no one else could hear it.

Wednesday morning, I went to Friendship Park on an empty stomach, alone. The sun came with me; I was already an hour late for songs with Miss Verazain in Music I, a class that I was certainly failing, since I stood in the back with Gus and made a Clint Eastwood seam with my lips and sang only in my mind. It was the class I loved.

That day we were set to sing some classical stuff, words floating uselessly on the surge of one of those “B” or “C” composers, Bach or maybe Chopin, these dead men whose songs sawed through time with violins and uncorked a forest to let a soft green light flood out, and into the voices of my friends — back then I would have said that Music I calmed me down better than pot and I didn’t like to miss it. But I had my own business with the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. I’d been having dreams about both Erics, the real one and the doll. I twisted on my pillow and imagined it loaded with straw. In one dream, I got Coach Leyshon’s permission to sub myself in for him, lashing my body to the pin oak and eating horsey fistfuls of a bloodred straw; in another, I watched the doll of Eric Mutis go plunging into the Cone again, only this time when his scarecrow hit the rocks, a thousand rabbits came bursting out of it. Baby rabbits: squeamish, furless thumbs of pink in the night, racing lemming quick under the oaks of Camp Dark.

“Eric?” I called softly, well in advance of the oak. And then, almost inaudibly: “Honey?” in a voice that was not unlike my own ma’s when she opened my bedroom door at night and called my name but clearly didn’t want to wake me, wanted instead who-knows-what? A squirrel watched me with an aggravating fearlessness as I entered Camp Dark, scratching its chest fur like a man in a soiled little shirt. I kicked it away and got on my knees and held on to the oak’s roots like my bike’s handlebars, peering down into the Cone.

“Oh my God.”

Whatever had attacked the scarecrow in the night had been big enough to tear his arm off at the root. Green and beige straw spewed out of the hole. You’re next, you’re next, you’re next, my heart screamed. I straightened and ran and I didn’t slow down until I passed under the stone arch of Friendship Park and saw the violet-gray speck at the bottom of the hill that became the glass umbrella of the #22 bus stop. I did not stop until I burst into Music I, where all of my friends were doing their do re mi work. I pushed in next to Gus and collapsed against our wall.

“You’re very late, Señor Rubio,” said Miss Verazain disgustedly, and I nodded hard, my eyes still stinging from the cold. “You’re too late to be assigned a role.”

“I am,” I agreed with her, hugging my arm.

There was one day last December, right before the Christmas break, where we got him behind the Science Building for a game that Mondo had named Freeze Tag. The game was pretty short and unsophisticated — we made a kid “It,” the way you’d identify an animal as a trophy kill, if you were a hunter, or declare a red spot “the bull’s eye,” so that you could shoot it:

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

We’d grinned and our four bodies in our white gym shirts made a grin too, where we’d gathered in the witchy grass of the back-lot ball field. We were up to our knees in the grass, advancing. Two halves of a circle. We didn’t corner the kid, Mutis, we made actual lips around him. From above we would have looked like a mouth, closing. The rules were simple and yet Eric Mutis stared at us with his opaque blue eyes, staked to the field, and gave no sign of understanding it.

“You’re it,” I’d explained to Eric.

Everybody followed me toward Camp Dark in a line.

“Here comes the army!” cackled a bum with whom we sometimes shared beers, one of a rotating cast of lost men whom Gus called the Bench Goblins. He had a long stirrup-shaped face that grinned and grinned at us when we told him about the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. Long fingers brushed at the oatmeal of wet newspapers that covered his cheeks.

“No,” he said, “I don’t see nobody come this way with no doll.”

“One week ago,” I prodded, but you could tell that this unit didn’t mean much to the guy. He had amassed a slippery skin of newspapers on his legs with headlines from early August.

All last night it had rained; the leaves were shining, the red playground foam looked like a giant’s dental equipment. We marched forward. I wasn’t the oldest or the tallest but I was the leader now, and why? Just because I knew the bad scene waiting for us behind the treeline. And, in fact, I knew a little more about the real Eric Mutis than I was letting on. I had some brewing theories, nothing I was ready to voice, about why the scarecrow had arrived in our city. It is a very good thing that we elect our presidents in America, I thought, because this had to be the wrong basis for picking a leader — if I was at this particular moment the best informed about the danger we were heading toward, I was also the worst scared.

“So what do you think did it, Rubby?” Gus asked.

“Yeah. An animal, like?” Mondo’s eyes were gleeful. “Is it all clawed up?”

“You’ll see. I dunno, guys,” I mumbled. “I dunno. I dunno.” Each word crawled like a gray mouse up the bars of my ribs to my throat. Mice dug their pink claws into my belly and my heart. (Could mice have done that to the scarecrow of Eric Mutis? Chewed off and carried away a whole arm? Could ants? Maybe the threat was multiple, pestilential, and smaller than I’d thought.)

Hypothesis 1: A human is doing this.

Hypothesis 2: An animal, or several animals, are doing this. Smart animals. Surgical animals. Animals with claws. Scavengers — opossums or something, the waddlesome undertakers of the park.

Hypothesis 3: This is being done by…Something Else.

But when we reached the Cone and they peered over the edge — I hung back, leaning on the oak — everybody started to laugh. Hysterically, a belly-clutching laugh, like three hyenas, Gus first and then the other two.

“Good one, Rubby!” they called.

I was shocked. “Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, shit, that is a good one, Rubby-oh. This is a classic.”

“This is your best yet,” Juan Carlos confirmed with a gloomy jealousy.

“Dang! Larry. You’re like a goddamn acrobat! How did you get down there?”

Eyes were rolling at me in a semicircle. I found myself thinking of Eric the Mute, Eric the Mutant, and what we must have looked like to him.

“Wait — ” I rolled my wet eyes back at them. “You think I did that?” Everybody nodded at me with a strange solemnity, so that for a disorienting second I wondered if they might be right. How did they think I had managed the amputation? I tried to see myself as they must be imagining me: swinging down into the Cone on a stolen phys ed rope, a knife in my back jeans pocket, the moon hanging over Anthem in a crescent, its light washing over the Cone’s rock walls and making the place feel even more like an unlidded casket; I watched myself approach the doll in the reeds, the doll that had been waiting for my attack with a patience rivaled only by the real Eric Mutis’s; I heard the doll’s right arm ripping away as I grunted the knife into the fabric, the moon shining on, the world watching us out of one slit eye, like a cat, a cracked Anthem stray. And then what? Did my friends think I’d swung the arm back to the surface, à la Tarzan? Carried the arm out of the park in my book bag?

“I didn’t do it!” I gasped. “This is not a joke, you assholes…”

I got up and vomited orange Gatorade into the bushes. It was all liquid — I hadn’t been eating. Days of emptiness rose in me and I dry retched again, listening to my friends’ peals of laughter echo around Camp Dark. Then I surprised myself by laughing with them, so uncontrollably and with such relief that it felt like a continuation of the retching — like disgorging my claims of innocence and crawling on my hands and knees back inside our “we.” My lungs filled with and expelled this relief, which I knew would only last as long as we could loft the joke. After a while the laughter didn’t sound connected to any of us. It was like a thunderhead, a stampede — sound poured all over us. We blinked at each other, under the laughter, our mouths open.

“And the Oscar for puking goes to…Larry Rubio!” said Juan Carlos, still doubled over.

A bird floated softly over the park. Somewhere just beyond the treeline, city buses were wheezing a cargoload of citizens to and from work. Some of these were our parents. I felt a little stab, picturing my ma eating her yellow apple on the train and reading some self improvement book, on a two-hour commute to her job at a day nursery for rich infants in Anthem’s far richer sister county. I realized that I had zero clue what my ma did there; I pictured her rolling a big striped ball, at extremely slow speeds, toward babies in little sultan hats and fat, bejeweled diapers.

“My ma’s name is Jessica,” I heard myself say. I could not stop talking now, it was like chattering teeth. “Jessica Dourif. Gus, you met her once, you remember.” I glared at Gus and dared him to say he’d forgotten her.

“Rubio? Why… ,” Juan Carlos said slowly, picking around my body like an Inquisitor, “…the hell…are you telling us this?”

I was staring down at the scarecrow’s shredded body. A gash down his back had hemorrhaged a dirty-looking straw. A golden bird was hopping around down there, pecking and pecking. Now YOU need a scarecrow, I thought, watching the bird savagely tease out straw from the old hole.

“I’ve never met my father,” I blurted. “I can’t even say my own fucking last name.”

“Larry,” Juan Carlos said sternly, standing over me. “Nobody cares. Now you pull yourself together.”

What followed over the course of the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme:

On Tuesday morning, the scarecrow’s hands were gone. Both of them. I pictured the white fingers crawling through the park, hailing a cab, starting a new and incognito life somewhere, perhaps with a family of unwitting tarantulas in New Mexico. Eric Mutis, the real Eric, he too could be living in a painted desert now, with a new father or a new guardian. Or in a mountain town, maybe. Living at a ludicrous altitude, his body half eaten by the charcoal clouds of Aspen. By the sea. In Salamanca, Spain. In a cold cottage on the moon.

By Wednesday, the scarecrow was missing both coruscating Hoops sneakers and both feet. Everybody but me snickered about that one. We’d stolen Eric Mutis’s Hoops maybe a dozen times last year, we stole Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair enraged me. The “H” logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I’m poor! Once Gus and I had gotten a three-day suspension for jerking off the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and his crusty socks and holding an “America the Great” sparkler to his bare feet — just to mess with him.

“Larry!” Gus said, clapping my back. “How did you get out of the Cone with two shoes in your hands? This is some Cirque du Soleil bullshit! You got to try out for the Olympics.” He checked the backs of my arms for fresh nets of scrapes. “What, are you flying down there?”

“I am not doing this,” I said quietly. I was getting hoarse from saying that. I realized with a grim shock that I was leaning against the oak in exactly the spot where we’d found Mutis’s scarecrow.

“Maybe,” I said in a whisper, “we can fish him up…? Hook him out? Maybe we can get down there and, and bury it.”

“Are you crying, bro?”

Everybody complimented me on my “acting.” But they were the actors — believing their easy suspicion, pretending that I was the guy to blame. OnlyMondo would let me see his smile tremble, and I felt a little better, thinking hard at him: Mondo, whatever’s happening down there, I am not behind it, OK?

On Thursday, his second arm was gone. Ripped whole, presumably, from the cloth shoulder, so that you got an unsettling glimpse of the gray straw coiled inside the scarecrow. Not-it, not-it, not-it, I’d been thinking all week, a thorny little crown of thoughts.

“What’s next, Rubby? You going to carry a guillotine down there?”

Not it! I worried I was about to ralph again.

“You bet,” I said. “How well you all know me. Next up, I’m going to climb down there and behead Eric Mutis with an ax.”

“Right.” Gus grinned. “We should follow you home. We’re gonna find Mutant’s arm under your pillow. The fake one, and probably the real one too, you psycho.”

And they did. Follow me home. On a Saturday, after we discovered that the doll’s legs had disappeared — the scarecrow was starting to look like a disintegrating jack-o-lantern, pulpy and crushed, with a sallow vegetable pallor. I was “It.” I was the only suspect. Under a dreary sky we left the scarecrow where it was, everybody but me laughing about how they’d been fucked with, faked out, punked, and gotten.

“You rotten, Rubby-Oh,” grinned Gus.

“Something’s rotten,” agreed Mondo, catching my eye.

Afterward we walked very slowly across the park toward my ma’s apartment on First and Stuckey, where we lived in ear-splitting proximity to the hospital; from my bedroom window I could see the red and white carnival lights of the ambulances. Awake, I was totally inured to the sirens, a whine that we’d been hearing throughout Anthem since birth — that urgent song drilled into us until our own heartbeats must have synced with it, which made it an easy howl to ignore; but I had dreams where the vehicular screams in the URGENT CARE parking lot became the cries of a gigantic, abandoned baby behind my apartment. All I wanted to do in these dreams was sleep but this baby wouldn’t shut up! Now I think this must be a special kind of poverty, low-rent city sleep, where even in your dreams you are an insomniac and your unconscious is shrill and starless.

When we got to my place, the apartment was dark and there was no obvious sustenance waiting for us — my ma was not one to prepare a meal. Some deep-fridge spelunking produced a pack of spicy jerky and Velveeta slices. This was beau food, suitor food, a relic from my ma’s last live-in boyfriend — was it Curtis Black? Manny Somebody? Which one had been the jerky lover? As the son, I got to be on a first name basis with all of these adult men, all of her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way. We folded thirty-two cheese slices into cold taco shells and ate them in front of the TV. Later I’d remember this event as a sort of wake for the scarecrow of Eric Mutis, although I had never in my life been to a funeral.

They searched my apartment, found nothing. No white hands clapping in my closet or anything. No legs propped next to the brooms in the kitchen.

“He’s clean,” shrugged Gus, talking over me. “He probably buried the evidence.”

“I do think we need to go down into the Cone,” I started babbling again, “and bury him. What’s left of him. Please, you guys. I really, really think we need to do that.”

“No way. We are not falling for that,” said Juan Carlos quickly, as if wary of falling into the Cone himself.

Accusing me, I saw, served a real utility for the group — suddenly nobody was interested in researching scarecrows at the library with me, or trying to figure out where the real Eric Mutis had gone, or deciphering who was behind his doppelgänger doll. They already had a good answer: I was behind it. This satisfied some scarecrow logic formy friends. They slept, they didn’t wonder anymore. That’s where my friends had staked me: behind the doll.

“Let’s go there one night, and just see who comes to shred and tear at him like that. We’ll be the scarecrow’s scarecrow, haha… ,” I gulped, staring at them. “And then we’ll know exactly…”

Mondo winced and snapped the TV on.

“Nice try, Rubby!” Gus crunched through a taco shell. The pepper specks that covered the yellow shell looked exactly like the blackheads on Gus’s broad nose. “Oh, I bet you’d love that. Nighttime. Phase Two of your prank. Get us all good in Camp Dark. I can’t wait to see how this all turns out, kid — what sort of Friday the Thirteenth ending you got planned for us. But we are not just going to walk into it, Rubby.”

It felt like we sat there for hours before somebody asked: “What the hell are we watching?” Nobody had noticed or commented when the station switched to pure static. My ma had an ancient, crappy RCA TV, with oven dials for controls and little rabbit ears; I always thought it looked more authentically futuristic to me than my friends’ modern Toshiba sets. Spazzy rainbows moved up and down, imbuing the screen with an insectoid life of its own. Here was the secret mind of the machine, I thought with a sudden ache, what you couldn’t see when the news anchors were staring soulfully at their teleprompters and the sitcom comedy families were making eggs and jokes in their fake houses.

Eric’s face — the face of scarecrow Eric — swam up in my mind. I realized that the random, relentless lightning inside the TV screen was how I pictured the interior of the doll — void, yet also, in a way that I did not understand and found I could not even think about head-on, much less explain to my friends, alive. My apartment was as silent as the rainbowed screen; with the TV on mute you could hear a hard clock tick.

“Hey! Rubio! What the fuck we watching?”

“Nothing,” I snapped back; a wise lie, I thought. “Obviously.”

For three days, little pieces of the doll of Eric Mutis continued to disappear. Once the major appendages were gone, the increments of Eric’s scarecrow that went missing became more difficult to track. Patches of hair vanished. Bites and chews of his shoulders. By Monday, two weeks after we’d found it, over half of the scarecrow was gone; with a sickening lurch I understood that it was too late now, that we were never going to tell anyone about him. Nobody who saw the wreck in the Cone would believe that it had been a doll of Eric Mutis.

“Well, that’s that,” said Juan Carlos in a funny voice, gazing down at the quartered scarecrow. In the Cone, his light spring-and-autumn straw was blowing everywhere now. All that bodiless straw gave me a nervous feeling, like watching a thought that I couldn’t collect. His naked head was still attached to the sack of his torso, both of these elements of Eric Mutis intact and ghoulishly white.

“That’s all, folks,” echoed Gus. “Going once, going twice! Nice work, Rubby.”

I shook my head, feeling nauseated. I’m still not sure how that silence overtook us. How did we know that we’d missed our window to tell an outsider about the scarecrow? Why didn’t we at least discuss it — bringing the police to Friendship Park, or even V.P. Derry? This might have been an option last week but now, as mysteriously as the parts themselves had disappeared, it wasn’t; we all felt it; we hadn’t acted, and now the secret was returning to the ground. Eric Mutis was escaping us again in this terrible, original way.

That Friday, the scarecrow’s head was gone. Now I thought I detected a little ripple of open fear in the others’ eyes. It was me, I realized, that they were afraid of. All of the laughter at my “prank” had fizzled out. I was afraid of my friends — terrified that they might actually be onto something.

“Where did you put it?” Mondo whispered.

“When are you going to stop?” said Juan Carlos.

“Larry,” Gus said sincerely, “that is really sick.”

Hypothesis 4.

I think this knowledge sat on the top of my mind for days and days. But it must have been unswallowed, undigested, like a little white bolus of food on a tongue — because I didn’t exactly know it. Not yet.

“I think we made him,” I told Mondo that night on the phone. I don’t know how, I don’t mean that we, like, stitched him up or anything, but I think that we must be the reason…”

“Quit acting nuts. I know you’re faking, Larry. Gus says you probably made him. My dinner’s ready — ” He hung up.

About the static — sometimes that was all you could see in Eric Mutis’s eyes. Just a random light tracking your fists back and forth, two blue-alive-voids. When we laid him flat in the weeds behind the Science Building, it was that emptiness that made us wild. The overriding feeling I had at these times was that I couldn’t stop hitting him — OK, I shouldn’t be hitting him at all, I’d think, but if I stop I’ll make things worse. The right light would return to his eyes and he would know what I had been doing. Stopping the punishing rhythm, without any warning, I’d risk waking him from a dream. Me too, I’d wake up breathless. Somehow I swear it really did feel like that, like I had to keep right on hitting him, to protect him, and me, from what was happening. Out of the red corner of one eye I could see my own wet fist flying. The slickness on it was our snot and our blood.

Only one time did anybody stop us. “Leave him alone,” said a voice approaching from the awning of the Science Building. We all turned. Eric Mutant, breathing quietly in the weeds below us, rolled his eyes toward the voice.

“You heard me,” the voice repeated, and, miraculously, we had. We stopped. The four of us followed Mutis’s example, and froze. This voice belonged to our librarian, Mrs. Kauder, a woman whose red lipped face and white hair made her shockingly attractive to us. Here she came like a leopardess, flaunting all her bones.

Somebody wiped Eric’s blood onto his own sleeve, a decoy swipe. Now we could credibly asseverate, to the librarian or to Coach Leyshon or to Vice Principal Derry, that our assault on Eric Mutis had been a fight. The librarian fixed her green eyes on each one of us — every one of us except for Eric she had known in elementary school.

“Now you go back to your homerooms,” she said, in this funny rehearsed way, as if she were reading our lives to us from a book. “Now you go to Math, Gus Ainsworth — ” She pronounced our real names so gently, as if she were breaking a spell. “Now you go to Computers, Larry Rubio…” Her voice was as nasally as Eric’s but with an old person’s polished tremble. It was a terribly embarrassing voice — a weak white grasshopper species that we would have tried to kill, had it belonged to a fellow child.

“Remember, boys,” the librarian called after us. “That is a no-no! We do not treat each other that way…” She finished with a liquidy rattle, so that you could almost see the half-sunk moon of her optimism bobbing up and down inside the sentence (this librarian was a forty-year veteran of her carrels and I think that light was going out).

“Now you, Eric Mutis,” the librarian said softly. “You come with me.”

And here’s the thing: That was just a Wednesday. That was nowhere near the worst of what we did to this kid, Mutis. I think we needed the librarian to keep reading us her story of our lives, her good script of who we were and our activities, for every minute of every day — but of course she couldn’t do this, and we did get lost.

“Do you think Eric is alive?” I asked Mondo. We were alone in Camp Dark; Juan Carlos had improbably gotten a job as a Food Lion bag boy and Gus was out with some chick.

Mondo looked up from his Choco-Slurpo, shocked. Even the junior size of the Choco-Slurpo contained a swimming pool of pudding. The junior was like the idiot adult son of the gargantuan “jumbo.”

“Of course he is! He changed schools, Rubby — he’s not dead.” He sucked furiously at chocolate sludge, his eyes goggling out.

“Well, what if he died? What if he was dying all last year? What if he got kidnapped, or ran away? How would we know?”

“Maybe he still lives right around the corner! Maybe he helped you to put the scarecrow up! Is that it, Larry?” he asked, offering me the fudgy backwaters of the Choco-Slurpo.When Gus wasn’t around, Mondo became smarter, kinder, and more afraid. “Are you guys doing this together? You and Eric?”

“No,” I said sadly. “Mutant, he moved. I checked his old house.”

“Huh? You what?” Out of habit, Mondo heaved up to chuck the junior cup into the Cone, our trash can of yore, momentarily forgetting that the Cone was now a sort of open grave for Eric Mutis; with the freakishness of blind coincidence, Mondo happened to look up and notice an inscription on the sunless side of the oak; not new, judging from its scarred and etiolated look, but new to us:

ERIC MUTIS

SATURDAY

The letters oozed beneath an apple green sap and were childishly shaped; the kid had pierced the heart with a little arrow.When I saw this epitaph — because that is how they always read to me, this type of love graffiti on trees and urinals, as epitaphs for ancient couples — my throat tightened and my heart raced in such a way that my own death seemed a likely possibility. Mayday, God! O God, I prayed: Please, if I am going to die, may it happen before Mondo Chu attempts CPR.

“Look!” Mondo was screaming. For a moment he’d forgotten that I was supposed to be the culprit, the engineer of this psychotic joke. “Mutant was here! Mutant had a girlfriend!”

So then I filled in some blanks for Mondo. I offered Mondo the parts of Eric Mutis that I had indeed been hoarding.

Something was alive in the corner. That was the first thing I noticed when I set foot in Mutant’s bedroom: a stripe of motion in the brown shadows near the shuttered window. It was a rabbit. A pet, you could tell from the water bottle wired to its cage bars. A pet was not just some animal, it was yours, it was loved and fed by you. Everybody knows this, of course, but for some reason the plastic water bottle looked shockingly bright to me; the clean good smell of the straw was an exotic perfume in the Mute’s bedroom. “You think this will fit you, Larry?” Eric held out a shrunken, wrinkled sweater that I recognized. “Uh-huh.”

“You better now, Larry?”

“Terrific. Extra super.” I was, in fact, almost out of my mind with embarrassment — I had been riding my bicycle on the suburban side of Anthem, on my way to see a West Olmsted kid who owed me money, when I felt a fierce pain in my side and I went flying over the handlebars — I landed a little way from my bicycle, where I sat in the street watching the front bicycle tire spinning maniacally with a pebble in my fist that turned out to be my tooth. I knew the car — it was the green Cadillac. It was that gargoyle from the school parking lot who had almost killed me. I was still sitting in the road, hypnotized by the blue sea glare on the asphalt, when I watched a pair of Hoops sneakers come jogging toward me.

“Hi, Larry,” he’d said. “You all right? Sorry. He didn’t see you there.”

I had been planning to say: “Is that maniac your dad? Mr. Hit and Run? Your caretaker or whatever? Because I could sue, you know.”

Instead I watched my hand slide inside of Mutant’s hand and form a complicated red-and-white mitt. It was a slippery handshake, my palm bleeding into it, my bike stigmata — I waited for Mutant to say something about that time I smashed his specs. But his ugly, big-eared face lowered to me and then I was on my feet, following him through a scarred wooden door, number 52, the knocker of which was a brass pineapple with filth-encrusted tropical checkers. Tackiness and incoherence, that’s what awaited me in Casa Mutis, as augured by that fruity knocker — the living room was a zombie zone of grime and confusion. Chaos. The furniture was arranged in a way that made it look like a family of illegal squatters, the plaid sofa rearing on its side, even the appliances crouched. Mutant made no apologies but hustled me into a bedroom, his, I guessed; here he was, going through drawers, looking for a change of clothes to lend me. If I went home covered in blood and toting the twisted blue octopus of my bicycle, I explained, my ma, terrified by how close I’d swerved toward death, would murder me. I pulled Mutis’s sweater on. I knew I should thank him.

“That’s a rabbit?” I asked like some idiot.

“Yeah.” Now Eric Mutis smiled with a brilliance that I had never seen before. “That’s my rabbit.”

I crossed the room, in Eric Mutis’s boat-striped sweater, to acquaint myself with Eric Mutis’s caged pet, feeling my afternoon curve weirdly. It was sitting on a little mountain of food, the rabbit. It had piled that food so high that its tall ears had pushed flat against its skull, which I thought made this rabbit look like a European swimmer.

“I think you are spoiling that rabbit, dude.”

Big fifty-pound bags of straw and food pellets filled all the corners of the room, sharing space with less bucolic stuff: a shitty purple tape deck and a vat of roach-zapping spray, grimy cartoon-print pajama pants and underwear that looked like free-range laundry to me, no hamper in sight. Mutis had stocked this place for the apocalypse, turned his room into a bunny stronghold. (Where did Mutis get his rabbit funds from? I wondered. He got the free lunch at school and dressed like a hobo.) Pine straw. Timothy, orchard, meadow. Alfalfa — plus calcium! said one bag below a humongous Swiss cheese–colored rabbit with what must have been, for a rabbit, a bodybuilder’s physique. The rabbit smiled gloatingly at me, flexing muscles you would never suspect a rabbit possessed.

“My Christ, do they put steroids in that alfalfa?” I peeled off the price sticker, feeling like a city bumpkin. “Twenty bucks! You got ripped off!” I grinned. “You need to buy your grass from Jamaica, dude.”

But he had turned away from me, bending to whisper something to the trembling rabbit. Seeing this made me uncomfortable; his whisper was already a million times too loud. I felt a flare-up of my school-day rage — for a second I hated Eric Mutant again, and I hated the oblivious rabbit even more, so smugly itself inside the cage, sucking like an infant at its water nozzle. Did Mutant know what kind of ammo he was giving me? Did he honestly believe that I was going to keep his lovenest a secret from my friends?

I strummed my fingernails along the tiny cage bars. They felt like petrified guitar strings. “What’s his name?”

“Her name is Saturday,” said Eric happily, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Who knows why? Because Eric Mutis had a girl’s pet; because Eric Mutis had named his dingy rabbit after the best day of the week? I’d never seen Eric Mutis say one word to a human girl, I’d never thought of Eric Mutis as a lover before. But he was kicking game to this rabbit like an old pro. Just whispering a love music to her, calling down to her, “Saturday, Saturday.” Behind the cage bars his whole face was changing. Mutant kept changing until he wasn’t ugly anymore. What had we found so repulsive about him in the first place? His finger was making the gentlest circle between the rabbit’s crushed ears, a spot that looked really soft to me, like a baby’s head. The rabbit’s irises were fiery and dust dry, I noted, swiping hard at my own with Eric’s sleeve.

Inside the cage, the rabbit twitched phlegmatically, breathing underneath waves of Eric Mutis’s love. The rabbit didn’t change at all. Not one whisker trembled. This struck me as pretty rude behavior, on the part of the rabbit. I was just a bystander to their little feeding here, and I could feel my heartbeat getting steadily faster. Behind the bars, Saturday was wrinkling her nose into a joyless, princessy expression, as if breathing air were an onerous obligation that she wished she could give up. What was the big attraction here? I wondered. This pet rabbit had all the charm and verve of a pillow with eyes.

“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.

“No.”

But then I realized that I could do this; nobody was watching me but Mutant and his voiceless rabbit. Some hard pressure flew away from me like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my hand through the door of the cage and brushed the green straw off her fur. Still I thought this pet was pretty stupid, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Whatever. Sure.” At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.

Eric Mutis opened a drawer; there was so much dust on the bureau that his elbow left a big tiger stripe on the wood. There was so much dust everywhere in that room that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.

“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had bobby-pinned to her ear, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to the usual, magical algorithm of rabbits coming out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. Even “found,” hugged inside the photograph, the creature was escaping its owner. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared plaintively. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.

“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble at the exact same tempo as the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with every color of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”

“OK.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”

Suddenly we were laughing, hard, even Saturday, with her rumpshaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.

Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter the maple cavity of their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.

“Is that your father?”

Eric’s face was bright red.

“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”

Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.

“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”

I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?

Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”

For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.

“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”

And then we got quiet,me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.

I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d all be long gone — Eric said he’d torn them all down — but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! fliers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST! MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.

“I have news that might be of some interest to you.”

She knew right away.

“Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents too.

“Yes. That is correct. Something has come to light, ma’am.”

I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. For some reason I was putting on my one-hundred-year-old voice, the gruff one I used when I ordered pizzas on the phone and requested the Golden Years senior discount. I heard myself reciting in this false, ancient voice the address of the house where Saturday and Eric slept.

At school, I breathed easier — I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back. “Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful, she loves being home!”

Eric Mutis’s eyes, locked inside the gray corrals of his Medicaid frames, now became a second, dewless glass. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his face showed the pruny strain of a weight lifter, puckering inward and then collapsing, as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks. When we finished with him they had looked like a doll’s eyes — open, staring, but packed solid with frost, like the blue Antarctic. Permafrost around each pupil. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.

“Larry — ,” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.

Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional. “Jesus H., are we graduating from something?” I grumbled. “Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”

Mondo had stopped walking in the middle of the playground. One of the few pieces of playground equipment that had survived the city pogrom and the red foaming were the zoo pogos, the little giraffe and the donkey on a stick. Mondo sat on it; the pogo groaned beneath his weight. He turned and looked at me with the world’s most miserable face.

“I am not going.”

I said nothing.

“I am changing my mind,” he said, the little pogo donkey listing east and west beneath him. He leaned a fat hand on its head and broke its left ear off. “Goddamn it!” He stood up, as if some switch inside him had broken off. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to convince him of anything. I was glad, even, that he was afraid — I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.

“This is stupid,” he mumbled. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”

“Let’s just get this done.”

An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to satisfy whatever force was feeding on the doll of Eric. It wasn’t a good one, but the other option was to leave the scarecrow untouched down there until it disappeared.

“Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there…”

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”

Mondo shook his head. His chubby face looked tumescent and red, not unlike the playground foam, as if his cheeks were swelling preemptively to protect him. Far away a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.

“Shut up, Larry!” Mondo yelped near the duck pond, when a car backfired and I jumped and brushed the flabby skin of his arm. “Watch where you’re going!”

Our flashlight beams crossed and blinded one another. After this we did not talk. Night had fallen hours ago — I didn’t want to be interrupted by anyone. Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the treeline, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere — the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.

“How’s it going tonight, Mutant?” Mondo asked in a nervous voice when we reached the oak. He chucked something into the Cone — the plaster donkey’s ear. It landed squarely on Eric’s back. This was all that was left of the doll of Eric Mutis, his last solid part. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from — it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. The same golden stuff I’d seen bagged that day in the Mute’s dark bedroom. I took a big breath; I wished that I could imitate the scarecrow and leap into the Cone, swim down to him, instead of crawling along the rock wall like a bug.

“It’s moving!” Mondo screamed. “It’s getting away.”

I almost screamed too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away, inch by inch, the zipper twinkling in the moonlight as the pouch pushed over the roots.

“Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”

So Mondo, staring at me with real fear as if we’d never met, as if I’d only been impersonating his good friend Larry Rubio for all these years, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It took almost forty minutes to lower myself into the Cone, but in fact my friends’ suspicions had prepared me for this descent — I had already imagined myself backing into the ravine. I stumbled once and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was OK, I was OK (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu) — and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lacunae between its frozen roots like tiny underworld lights. Much farther away, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball round and came loose.

I crouched over the scarecrow’s torso, which at this moment could not have looked less like a scarecrow’s anything — if you didn’t notice the seam of straw, you might have thought it was a battered sofa cushion. Featureless and beige. I plucked up a green straw and felt a lurching sadness. Anybody with a mirror in his house knows the strangeness of meeting himself, his flaws, in light. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye — the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed — and failed. A face started to stutter together, shattered whitely away.

“You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it sort of less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the relic of the scarecrow, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t Saturday — I couldn’t steal Saturday back, I’d figured that would appease or solve nothing, but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror — “You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?” Many of the products that this pet store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.

Mondo was screaming something at me from the near sky, but I did not turn — I didn’t want to letmy guard down now. I kept my feet planted but sometimes I’d move my arms crazily, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. When I thought a bird was coming our way, I hollered it away. Shapes caught at the corner of my eye.Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a reversal of its birth from my black book bag — first went with its furry ears, its bunching back, the big, velour skis of its feet. I was there, so no birds dove for it or anything. I was standing right there the whole time. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling me faintly from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or come up yet. Owls, I worried, city hawks. The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.

[surveystodestressme]

56.

5000 Question Survey Pt. 13

1201. Have you ever owned a record? nope. 1202. In some states people want to make it a requirement that creationism (god made the world) be taught alongside evolution in high school sciences classes. What do you think of this? i don’t really care either way.  honestly if they would’ve had that taught in my school i would’ve hated it because i don’t believe in that kind of stuff 1203. Should evolution also be taught in religious establishments like church or temple? sure 1204. Can a person believe in creationism and in evolution at the same time? yeah

1205. You obviously like surveys since you are filling out a 5,000 question one. Do any of the following surveys sound interesting: The Doors/Jim Morrison Survey: The David Bowie Survey: The Beatles Survey: The Rocky Horror Survey: The Labyrinth Survey: The SLC Punk Survey: The birthday survey: So this is love, the survey: The heartache/break up survey: Creationism vs. Evolutionism Survey: Opinion Survey: World Trade Center Survey: Halloween Survey: Survey of Sin: How evil are you? Survey: The Roaring 20’s Survey: sure they all sound a little interesting Well, once, long ago, I created all those surveys. Now they are floating around in people’s diaries because the diary I had them in (Simply Surveys) was deleted due to disuse. 1206. Who did you get this survey from? Say one nice thing about the person you got this survey from: this girl who i follow.  she picks out some pretty good surveys lol 1207. Here is a list of priorities… Love/sex Family Close friends School/learning Job/career Being true to yourself/self respect Honesty Aesthetics (beauty in the world) Creativity Patriotism Knowledge Wisdom Leading an exciting life Making a contribution to humanity Being rich Being famous Having power Justice/fairness World peace Accepting and understanding others Finding yourself Spirituality/religion Health Happiness What are your top three priorities from this list? happiness, self respect,and knowledge 1208. Out of that same list what are your BOTTOM 3 priorities? patriotism, being famous, and having power 1209. How many hours of TV do you watch in an average day? too many 1210. Do you want to have a car, a house and 2.5 kids? i have none of those lol 1211. What song, CD, or band is a ‘guilty pleasure’ for you (meaning you know it sucks but you like it anyway)? lol i like me some t swift from time to time 1212. If you were going to vote for a candidate for president and then you found out that the person you were going to vote for is HIV positive would that effect your vote and why? no??? their medical history is none of my concern 1213. Have you ever had an HIV test? nope 1214. What time do you: Get up in the morning: around 7-9 am Eat lunch: sometime around 2 pm Do something active during the day: randomly throughout the day Go to bed: 11 pm 1215. Have you ever ridden a motorcycle? yes. 1216. When you hear the word ‘biker’ what kind of person do you think of? someone that has and rides a motorcycle 1217. Did your parents ever talk to you about sex? i mean, not really 1218. If your pet dies, you can now have it cloned for $50,000. How do you feel about this? nah i wouldn’t do it. it may be a clone but it wouldn’t be the same in my eyes.  plus waaay too expensive 1219. Are you or would you be embarrassed about buying condoms? i’m not embarrassed about doing it 1220. Do any of your clocks make an odd noise or play a song when the hour strikes? nope. 1221. What are the things that make you go 'Hmmmm….’ (remember that song?)? idk 1222. Are you a sinner? yeah 1223. Are you naughty or nice? naughty 1224. Is belly-dancing sexy? it can be. 1225. What celebrity would you love to be able to dance with? morgan freeman 1226. What is your favorite comic book movie? kickass 1227. What movie would you recommend for couples to watch on Valentine’s day? my bloody valentine

1228. Besides when you were little how many people have seen you completely naked and who? my boyfriend, and a couple of my good friends 1229. Is sex something that should be treated casually? no.  personally, i would only be comfortable having sex with someone i know very well and love 1230. Have you ever participate in an orgy? If no, would you ever consider it? i don’t think i'd want to 1231. What song is in your head right now? i don’t have one right now 1232. What was the best day of your life like? idk i’ve had plenty of good days 1233. What are you all about? my tattoo on wednesday 1234. You have won a contest where you get all these great prizes but you can only keep one for yourself and must give the others away to friends, family or whoever. Which one do you keep and who do you give the rest to: A $5,000 gift certificate to radio shack: Jack A brand new yellow jeep: my brother An all expense paid vacation for 2 to Italy: my sister and her wife Lunch with N'Sync: Mariann A lifetime supply of herbal essences shampoo: whitney A $1,000 check: me A palm pilot? Cayenne An autographed picture of Shakira: Breakfast with kid rock: angela A shirt once worn by Jonathan Davis: Jake One round of mini-golf with Sharon Osbourne: Parky and rebecca A phone call from Robert Smith: neeson??? he likes a lot of music artists (if that’s the robert smith i think it is) A brand new washer/dryer: my parents Free medical insurance for 1 year: my grandparents on my mums side 1235. Who do you think you might have known in a past life? idk a lot??? 1236. Do you take vitamins? no. 1237. Do you prefer fake or real flowers around the house? fake. real ones die so quick 1238. Sometimes roses are pink, yellow, white or red. If you give someone a rose, does its color change the meaning behind it as a gift? i hear that there is a meaning behind the colors of roses but idk what they are 1239. What’s the most deadly thing you can think of? drugs 1240. To-MAY-toes or to-MA-toes? first one 1241. Out of all your friends, family and the people you know who is the most: Intelligent: jack Happy: chandlyre Miserable: mariann Easily influenced: cassie Cranky: corben Bitchy: denise Evil: cayenne Nice: my mother 1242. What’s the best live musical performance you ever saw? twenty one pilots 1243. Have you ever had a 'pregnancy scare’? yes. 1244. Kelly Osbourne or Madonna’s version of “Pappa Don’t Preach”? idk 1245. Can you change a tire? yeah 1246. Have you ever put your fist through a wall? i’m not strong enough 1247. When do you feel the most relaxed and able to be yourself? when i’m in the bath or a shower 1248. Do you have a place that is your own where you won’t show anyone else? i used to but not really anymore 1249. Are you a part of any teams or clubs? nope 1250. Is cheerleading a sport? yeah i think so 1251. Do you believe that people should be able to choose death for themselves if they want to end their lives? i wouldn’t say in a form like suicide.  but if someone is already dying and wants the plug to be pulled, i can understand that 1252. Is there anything you morally object to? idk off the top of my head 1253. What would you never do for money? have sex with someone 1254. Applebees, the Outback, or TGI Friday’s? applebees 1255. Which do you drink the most: juice, soda, milk, or water? soda 1256. What sport do you like to watch the most? hockey 1257. What sport do you like to play the most? bowling 1256. Do you write poetry? nope 1257. Are you aggressive? i used to be 1258. Have you ever fallen from grace? don’t think so. 1259. Does it bother you when a band you like gets really popular? i don’t really mind except for the fact that their songs are on the radio all the time 1260. Has anyone ever won you a stuffed animal? If yes, did you name it after the person who won it for you? i don’t think so 1261. Can you go one week without cursing at all? i don’t think so 1262. What’s the best candy? kit kat 1263. Can you lick your own nose? i think so 1264. What song would you like to hear spontaneously in a public place (like a store)? cotton eye joe 1265. Do you ever make others feel unwanted? i don’t try to 1266. Do you think you have ever made others feel unwanted without realizing you were doing it? i hope not. 1267. Are you very sensitive to what other people are feeling and how they will react to certain things? i used to be but i try not to be like that anymore 1268. Have you ever climbed a tree? yeah 1269. Do you feel somehow different when the moon is full? no??? 1270. Who do you know that talks a lot but never really says anything? lots of people 1271. Is world peace possible? i think so but it’s a far way out 1272. Who do you know that is making a huge life mistake yet you can’t stop them? What’s the mistake? mariann.  she keeps going back to the same piece of shit guys who treats her awfully and it annoys the crap out of me because she deserves so much better 1273. Do you plan to own a home or rent an apartment for most of your life? i want to own a home eventually 1274. Would you enjoy going to a strip bar to see strippers (of whatever sex you find appealing)? sure, idk 1275. Would you ever consider stripping in a sexual way for money? i used to want to do that lol 1276. Would you ever consider being a nude model for an artistic life drawing class for money? no. 1277. What are 2 goals that you have? make everyone around me happy and have myself be happy 1278. What are 2 negative traits that you have? i procrastinate and sometimes i’m too harsh 1279. Will these negative traits stop you from achieving your goals? yeah 1280. Everyone knows that you are nice, fun, creative, and good but what are 4 other positive traits that you have? hard working, funny, intelligent, and driven 1281. How often do you daydream about your wedding day? not very often 1282. If you were hiring someone for a job but could only ask him or her 3 questions in the interview what would you ask? what do you want to get out of this job?  how would you contribute to this company?  what are your goals? 1283. If you were interviewing someone for the position of your new friend but could only ask 3 questions, what would they be? what do you like to do for fun?  what kind of music do you listen to?  are you okay with constant venting and crying? 1285. Wholesome - Conducive to sound health or well being; salutary: simple, examples: wholesome food; a wholesome climate, Promoting mental, moral, or social health: example: wholesome entertainment. Do you enjoy wholesome activities (sports, cooking, beach, family time, zoo, museums, etc.)? If yes what wholesome activity do you enjoy the most? Are you a wholesome person? oh absolutely!! i love going to museums and shit like that 1286. When was your first kiss and what was it like? well, if you count truth or dare, it was the summer before freshman year and i kissed 2 girls.  but if that doesn’t count it was a guy named jacob, and it was outside of the movie theater after we saw a movie and i was a freshman.  it was ok 1287. Are you quiet and shy? i’m not shy but i’m quiet 1288. Are you bitchy, cranky, whiny, miserable, depressed, needy, mean, flakey, shallow, obnoxious, inconsiderate, nervous, and/or stuck up? i’m cranky and bitchy a lot lol i’m nervous a lot too but more like anxious 1289. Do you come off any of these ways even if you aren’t really like that? i’m sure i do 1290. Are you loud and unfriendly? i’m loud sometimes but i think i’m pretty friendly 1291. Can a positive attitude/good personality make up for someone being less than beautiful? absolutely 1292. Can being totally beautiful and hot make up for a negative attitude/bad personality? absolutely not 1293.What are you seeking? happiness 1294. Could you see yourself as a future nun/monk? lol no 1295. Would you rather have a baby or get a pet? get a pet, definitely 1296. What mistake do you repeat over and over? procrastinating 1297. What do you think of the restaurant Hooters? they have good food and i get served by beautiful women in skimpy clothes.  i mean, i’m not complaining 1298. What are 5 traits that make someone ugly? rudeness, egotistical, stupidity, ignorance, and incompetence 1299. Do you hate when people tell you to smile? yes 1300. Do you like the writing of Douglas Adams? idk them.

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #436

from a couple days ago again; still don’t feel like rewriting any answers.

Do you own many pairs of shorts? I don't own any. Have you ever taken a close up shot of a flower? A hell of a lot; I love doing that. Have you ever wanted to get drunk and get your mind off everything? Yup. But I don't like hard alcohol and only really drink light fruity stuff, and I'm apparently no lightweight, so I got to the point I just really didn't want to drink anymore. Anything you might be giving up on soon? I have felt very, very hopeless with photography lately that sometimes I'm tempted. I don't think I will, but... it's hard. When was the last time you changed your picture on Facebook? It's been months. Have you ever painted a piece of furniture? Yes, actually. I helped Jason paint his shelf black. Do you have a favorite quote? No. Have you ever made a business card for yourself? No, but I have thought about it. I just really don't have nearly enough popularity among the local photographers to feel like I really need to design one. Did you love playing hide and seek as a kid? YES. I loved it. Are there any recipes you have memorized? No. Do you know your multiplication times tables? ... no lmao Have you ever been severely burned? Not severely, no. Did you ever dream that you had a baby? I actually have more than once. What was the weirdest thing you ever saw cross the road? I think a turkey? Are you good at coming up with jokes? God no. Where do you prefer to sit when you catch the bus? When I used to ride home with Jason from school, we always sat way in the back. Do you ever listen to music to fall asleep to? No. I did when I was younger, though. I went through a loooong phase of sleeping with my iPod. If your parents... or anybody else... found your cell phone, would they be horrified at any of the messages in your inbox/outbox? No. Do you get offended if someone repeatedly checks their mobile phone when you’re out for lunch or dinner? That's very rude. What is the stupidest thing you’ve heard somebody say recently? Anti-vaccination bullshit from my stepmother. :^) Think about the last person you kissed - was it the very first time that you kissed them? No. When you drink alcohol with friends, do you play drinking games? We never did. Do you believe that there are certain circumstances where cheating is okay? Nope. Who was the last person to call you? My psychiatrist. What food disgusts you the most? Things like sashimi and caviar. I also think rare meat like steak, especially when it's still bloody, is absolutely disgusting. I could go on and on about this, 'cuz I think a lot of food is really gross. One place you would never want to get lost in in the dark? The jungle. Yikes. So many dangerous creatures, so claustrophobic, and with the canopy, I'd assume it'd be EXTREMELY dark. And it rains so much in the jungle, so it'd be hard to hear danger approaching. One thing that always creeps you out? Perhaps #1 is seeing an unborn baby move from outside their mother's stomach. I will fucking scream and want to puke. If you could be roommates with anyone of your choice, who would you pick? SARA!!!!!!!!! Omfg I'd LOVE to have her as my roommate. We've actually talked about the possibility, but that's nowhere near set in stone. What is the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard? In light of recent events, a high contender is shit like "vaccines cause autism." Would you rather be buried or cremated when you die? I'd strongly prefer to be cremated. What is your favorite food around the holidays? Spiral honey ham, for one. I love Christmas treats like chocolate-covered peanuts, fudge, cookies, etc. etc... Tell me about the greatest prank you’ve ever pulled? I don't pull pranks. If you could have the power to cast any kind of spell, what kind of spell would you cast? Maybe enchanting the human population to not be such violent and hateful fucks??? Have you ever gotten a flu vaccination? Only for Covid. Double dates: a do or don’t? They are SO fun, but I do feel like it's good to have individual ones, too. Do you know any guitarists? Yes. My old friend Tommy actually plays the electric guitar in a band, and Juan was really good at it, too. How do you feel about full-length beards? They look good on some people. It varies with everyone. Do you have any relatives that have shunned you, or vice versa? Not currently. My half-sister stopped talking to me many years ago when I was a homophobic fuck, and I don't blame her. We're perfectly cool now! Has anyone ever posted a HORRIBLE picture of you for everyone to see? omg no Does/did your high school have pop machines? Yes. Have you ever gambled? Nah. If you could work at any retail store, which one would it be? I am NEVER working retail again. I can't handle it. What’s the name of the last cat you pet? Roman. :') Have you ever stringed green beans before? Yes, actually, with Colleen's in-laws. They had a big garden that I helped tend to sometimes. I absolutely hated it with how sweaty I got even then, it was WAY too hot, and my body was also weak back then to where bending down was extremely painful. I just never wanted to say no. Have you ever had any painful dental work done? If so, what? No. What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re bored? It really depends on what I feel like doing, but I think playing World of Warcraft tempts me most often when I'm unbearably bored. What did you watch today? I've just been rewatching Mortem3r play Monster Hunter World. That game looks soooo fun, I wanna try it. ;-; True or False: Yoshi is the cutest dinosaur ever? No. I adore dinosaurs and dinosaur media, so I could name a lot if I thought long enough. Who is the last person you spent money on? My niece. I still feel awful I didn't buy Ryder a gift by myself; I just could NOT decide what to get him. I'm very thankful that Mom let me use one she got him as "mine." They were bright, light-up golf balls, and he loooooved them. What is your relationship like with various members of your family? I have a biiig extended family, man, so I'll try to keep this as brief as possible. I am EXTREMELY close to my mom, like there is no way I'd be alive without her, and her support for me seems endless somehow. I love my dad very much too, but I don't see him nearly as much as I wish I did. He tries to support me however he's capable, and he always lets me know that he's there if I need him for anything. I love, am very proud of, and look up to my two sisters, but I'm also very envious of them and how they are successful adults with direction and big accomplishments. We are very different, so we have difficulty with really bonding and talking about things regularly, and it really makes me feel like a terrible sister. My nieces and nephew are absolute diamonds to me, and I'm especially close to Ash's oldest daughter Aubree. She and I are very similar in a lot of areas, so I really relate to her, even in her young age. Ryder really seems to like me, and I love that little rascal, too. :') My youngest niece Emerson is still only a baby, so she can't really communicate in words yet, but she is still a beautiful darling that I'd protect with my life in not even a blink. That covers who I consider my "immediate" family, really, at least that I see regularly. What’s something you disagree with about the way you were raised? I am very firmly against spanking, but my parents did it. I think since Ash's kids were born though, Mom's opinion changed on it. It was around that time, I know. She won't lay a hand on them. Who was the last person to add you as a friend on Facebook? I have no clue, actually. Who was the last person that asked if you were okay? *shrug* The last time you were in a car, who was driving? My mom. Did you ever get into a bar and drink before you were 21? Never tried. What countries have you been to? I've never left the U.S. Honestly, is that car insured? I don't have my own car. What do you think about gay marriage? I vigorously support it. Do you like Carrie Underwood? I actually do. She has a beautiful voice. How far away do you live from your parents? I live with my mom. Idk how far I am from Dad, really... but not THAT far. How do you like your steak cooked? Medium well. Have you ever been to Mount Rushmore? No, and I don't want to. It is absolute vandalism. Where is your favorite place (that you have actually been to)? Chicago blew me away, but I think it's just because it was SO foreign to me. I actually don't like cities very much, but for a brief visit, I thought it was very cool. Do you believe places can really be haunted? Yes. Do you take anti-depressants? Sleeping pills? No. I took anti-depressants for I think most of my life, and they did nothing for me. Come to learn from the doctor who actually set my meds straight that anti-depressants for people with bipolarity do nothing but aggravate the symptoms of bipolarity, and I was living evidence. I take mood stabilizers for said disorder instead. I don't take sleeping pills; none seem to work for me. What’s your favourite brand of peanut butter? Maybe Skippy? Idk, I'm not very picky with pb. What’s your favourite Lunchables meal? The nachos one. How many languages can you recite the alphabet in? Two. Do you like Bob Marley? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO. I can't stand his voice. Have you ever eaten at Golden Corral? Yeah, but I'm not a fan. Buffets gross me out. Do you sit and eat dinner at the same table with your family? We very rarely sit at the table. Have you been working hard to achieve something lately? If not, what was the last thing you worked hard to achieve? Losing weight, yes. I am honestly trying so hard at the gym, like to the point I've almost fallen many times as well as been overtaken by incredible nausea a lot. I don't feel like I'm over-working, necessarily, just working my ass off. Do you use ice cubes in your fountain drinks? No, because it waters the drink down and I hate it. Would you ever want your very own library, or do you not read enough for it to be worth it? No. I don't read nearly enough, and besides, can you imagine all the dust? What site did you originally start doing surveys on? I actually don't know... Have you ever used something other than water to make ice cubes? What did you do with them? I've actually never thought to do that. Would you ever willingly experience life temporarily without sight, hearing, or any of your other senses, simply to know what it is like? Fuck no. I would go insane. In what ways are you very judgmental? I'll judge the fuck out of rapists, child molesters, pedophiles, people like that with no goddamn shame. But your average person, I try not to judge very much. What is your main problem in life right now? It's hard to determine my main problem, honestly. There are a lot of issues going on in my life that've just piled up into one big tangled mess. Do your “favourites” change often? Definitely not. I've had the same favorites in so many topics for forever. Have you ever read a biography on someone? I've read Ozzy's autobiography, and I also read the Some Kind of Monster Metallica book, which was written by I want to say St. Anger's musical director? This was a very long time ago, and honestly, I thought it was pretty boring, so my memory is faint. You learned quite a bit about the band in his time with them, but damn, I don't care about the musical director al;skdfal;we. Do you know anyone who has ever been in a movie? Who and what movie were they in? What was their part? Not to my knowledge. I have an acquaintance who's had minor acting roles, but I don't believe she's ever been in a film. When was the last time you brought a pet to the vet? What was wrong with it? I want to say around two years ago (probably less) when we got my cat neutered. Have you ever made your way through a corn maze? No.

[stealme-with-a-kiss]

I Hate You, I Love You. {Min Yoongi}: Chapter 1

“Oooooo, how about this one?” Lana motioned excitedly to one of the cameras that was being exhibited at the Best Buy we were in.

I raised an eyebrow as I eyed it. “Well, it looks pretty promising, and It’s from Samsung…yeah, it looks pretty good”

“I did my research on Samsung cameras and apparently they’re great,” Lana said as we kept looking at the other cameras. “I don’t think they beat a Canon, though”

“Me neither, but those ones are probably more expensive” I said, stopping my pace in front of another camera that caught my eye.

“They’re worth it”

“I know,” I almost whined. “But the best ones are always the most expensive. And we need a new camera urgently because the old one’s coming to an end. Right when we start taking Photography”

“Can you imagine ourselves holding a Leica, though? An actual working Leica?” at the questions, both of us sighed dreamily at the same time.

“I dream about it everyday” I said in exaggeration, although I did picture myself with one at many occasions.

Lana wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “Someday, my child, someday… Oh, I think this one looks great!”

She motioned to a Nikon camera. “The brand’s good, the camera looks pretty decent…”

“How much does it cost?”

“$348 with 16 cents”

“And how much do we have?”

Lana took out the amount of money we joined to buy a new camera and counted it quickly. “$520. I think It’s perfect! Besides, It’s pobably one of the less expensive ones around here that actually looks good”

“And what if it isn’t good?”

Lana read the details of the camera that were right next to it, then gave me an assuring nod. “Nah, it sounds pretty good”

“Well, let’s buy it, then"

***

After we had our camera and left the store, gushing over it all the time, we started to walk a bit around the mall. It was after we ate some burgers that Lana’s boyfriend called. “Whaddup, mah bitch?” she said with a smile.

As she started talking on the phone, I nudged her arm with my elbow and motioned to the Bookstore to my right. Excitedly, I grabbed her wrist and we headed inside. And whilst she giggled and nodded and spoke to her boyfriend, I might’ve bought 3 books impulsively…

When she hung up, both of us walking out of the store, she turned to me with a big smile on her face. “So… we’ve been invited to a last-minute party… tonight”

“Tonight?,” I whined. “Why tonight?”

“Because people throw parties on Friday nights,” she pointed out. “Anyways, we’re gonna buy new outfits”

“Lana, new outfits are unnecessary”

“New outfits are never unnecessary, my dear goblin,” she said. “And besides, we still have money left -thankfully, you didn’t spend it all on books-, so why not?”

I folded my arms across my chest as we kept walking. “I didn’t even say I was going”

“Oh, but you are, because I say so,” she said whilst batting her eyelashes at me. “There are gonna be lots of cuties for you there”

“Right,” I said with a sarcastic tone. “That’s my motivation in life”

“Well, it kinda is, since you drool over your celebrity crushes all the time” she chuckled.

“Shhh”

“So,” she ignored me. “Call your mom, like, right now, and tell her you’re staying over at my house because you’re going to a party”

“And why are you so sure that she’s gonna let me go?”

She scoffed. “’Cause I know her well, and you certainly do, too”

Of course I did. My mother wasn’t an irresponsible mother, but she wasn’t one to tell me ‘No’ whenever it came to parties, although I didn’t usually go to them. Obviously, she worried about me, but I guess she wanted me to “live life to the fullest” or something like that. “Fine,” I sighed in defeat. “But you’re buying me ice cream”

***

When we got to Levi’s (Lana’s boyfriend) house, there was already music coming from inside. But, thankfully, there were not as many people as I thought there were going to be. Almost all of Levi’s friends (which were quite the handful) were there, some people that I didn’t really know but recognized from school, and our own friends. Our closest friends were a gay guy called Robbie and a Japanese girl named Chiyoko, and they were both already drinking at the poolside by the time we found them. They weren’t drunk yet, but they were very tipsy. “Heeeeey!” they greeted us through the music, opening their arms in the air for us.

I chuckled at them. “You guys don’t waste any time, do you?”

“Nah, honey, this has been the most stressful week of my entire life, and It’s only been almost a month since school started,” Robbie said. “And I already have two projects coming up, a shit ton of homework, and I have two tests this week. I fucking hate school and I fucking hate everyone”

“Drink” Chiyoko demanded, and both of them gulped what was left of the liquid in their glasses.

“How long have you guys been here? And how much alcohol have you had already?” Lana asked them, looking at them up and down with her arms folded across her chest.

They pretended to think about it. “Oh, I don’t know. We’ve been here since The Battle of Hogwarts ended, I think. And we’ve drank, like, 3 glasses of wine, and now this”

“I think It’s a cocktail,” Chiyoko eyed her glass as if there was still something there. “Levi knows how to make some good cockails, goddamn, bless that boy”

I rolled my eyes at them. “Go easy on them, though”

“Of cooooouuuuuuurseeeeee,” Chiyoko giggled. “I’m just gonna go and grab some more wine and then I’m done”

“Mmhmm”

“I’m serious!” but she was still laughing.

At that same moment, Levi approached us and hugged Lana from behind. “You guys having a good time?”

“Yup,” Robbie nodded. “Any cute gay guys around that I should know of?”

Levi chuckled. “There are a few around here, you might be able to find them”

“Great! Then I’ll see you losers later!” Robbie said before running back inside, stumbling at one point.

When I saw Levi whispering something in Lana’s ear, I took it as a cue to turn back to Chiyoko and say, “Let’s go to the kitchen to get some drinks, yeah?”

Chiyoko’s face lightened up. “I love the way you think!”

Excusing myself with the lovebirds, I grabbed Chiyoko’s arm and both of us headed inside. The house was pretty big -Levi’s parents weren’t exactly rich, but they had a lot of money-, but we didn’t have much of a problem finding the kitchen. When we entered it, we found two guys there: Kim Taehyung and Min Yoongi. Taehyung smiled at us instantly, but Yoongi just rolled his eyes once he saw who entered. “Hey girls,” Taehyung said as he hugged us both. “Haven’t talked to you in a while”

“Because you always have basketball practice!,” I said with a chuckle. “But It’s okay, we forgive you”

“We’ll forgive you even more if you serve us some drinks, though” Chiyoko added, grinning. She might’ve looked like an alcoholic at the moment, but she and Robbie didn’t spend all of their time drinking. They drank at special occasions mostly, and obviously they loved it, so they don’t waste any time and live those moments to the fullest. 

Taehyung chuckled but agreed, and he made his way to the fridge to see what was left. While he did that, I instantly stood next to Yoongi and smiled at him. “And how’s my favorite person in the entire world doing tonight?”

“Can you stay away from me, please?” he said without looking at me directly, but placing his hand in front of my face.

“Hey, that’s not nice,” I fake pouted. “You should really learn to be nice to me”

“Well, you should learn to be less annoying”

I rolled my eyes at him, but I still had a small smile on my face. I don’t even remember how this “hatred” between us started, but for me it was so fun to annoy him, as childish as it sounded. “You shouldn’t be in this party if you’re going to be all grumpy, then. People here actually like to have fun”

“Well, I was having fun right before you came through that door” he pointed out.

“Oh, really? What were you doing in the kitchen, dancing?”

He huffed, sipping from the drink in his hand. “Because there aren’t many fun things to do on a kitchen, except maybe baking,” I continued to talk, just to irritate him. “And I didn’t see you baking anything earlier”

“Seriously, can you leave?”

“Oh, but this is a free country and if I wanna be here next to you then I will” I grinned, and then I grabbed his arm in a loving way, only to be pushed away quickly. I laughed at his reaction whilst he rolled his eyes, and at that moment Taehyung held a glass in front of my face. “For you, m'lady,” he said as I took it, muttering a ‘Thank You’. Chiyoko already had her own drink in hand, giggling at the things Taehyung had been saying ever since I started talking to Yoongi. “Now, that one’s a bit strong, so you should take it easy”

“If they can handle it” I heard Yoongi say quietly next to me.

I looked at him, raising an eyebrow when we made eye contact, and then I gulped down the whole thing. I tried to hide how strong the liquid was by keeping a straight face, but I think Yoongi saw right through it 'cause he scoffed, drinking himself. “Come on, Chiyoko, let’s go dance. We can’t drink too much, alright?”

***

THIRD PERON’S POV:

Lana and Levi were tipsy.

Chiyoko was drunk.

Robbie was even more drunk.

And Y/N and Yoongi were completely wasted.

All of them had different ways of behaving when they drank. Lana was too into the dancing, Levi was saying things that almost no one understood; Chiyoko, Robbie and Y/N were laughing loudly every 3 minutes, and Yoongi was on the couch sleeping, despite the loud music on. But he seemed to be muttering things in his sleep. “I wanna go to the pool, you guys!” Chiyoko said loudly.

“You can’t go to the pool, you ugly shit!,” Robbie told her. “The water’s probably infected by now!”

“Infected with like… zombies?” Y/N asked, widening her eyes.

Chiyoko gasped. “No, girl,” Robbie shook his head and leaned in too close to Y/N. “It might be infected with… you know what”

Y/N thought hard about it, although her drunken face was very confused. “… Leaves?”

“Oh my Goooooood,” Robbie whined, then went to whisper in her ear. “With boy 'stuff’”

Y/N’s eyes widened even more than before, and just like that she burst out laughing for like the 100th time in the night. Robbie followed and so did Chiyoko, even though she didn’t hear the answer.

And that was what their time consisted of, until Y/N said, “I’m getting tired. I’m gonna go take a nap on the couch”

“Weeaaaak,” Chiyoko slurred, placing an arm around Robbie’s shoulders. “We’re gonna go around and look for some di-”

“Byeee, I don’t wanna hear it!” Y/N shouted, covering her ears and then walking away from them.

Stumbling various times, Y/N found the nearest couch, the one that was already occupied by Yoongi. Not caring, Y/N sat on top of his legs and then laid completely on top of his body. He didn’t wake up until she started stirring. “What are you doing here?” he asked grumpily, raising his head a bit to glare at her.

“I have the right to be on this couch, too” Y/N replied, both of them sitting up. Yoongi looked annoyed, like he always did whenever Y/N was around, but his eyes were squinted and his lips were almost in a frown.

“Well, I was here first, stupid, so It’s mine now” he lazily pushed Y/N’s shoulder.

“It ain’t yours!,” she protested, pushing him back. “This is Levi’s house so It’s his couch and he’s my friend so I’m allowed to use this couch”

Yoongi groaned. He could not keep balance even when he was sitting. “He’s my friend, too, you know”

“But he’s my best friend’s boyfriend so that makes him my... best friend’s boyfriend” Y/N pointed, furrowing her eyebrows at her own words.

“Hey,” he said, leaning close to her ear, as if he was gonna tell Y/N a secret. “Nobody cares”

She pouted. “A lot of people care about what I say. Even Jinyoung over there, who gives zero shits about anything”

“Look, if I kiss you, will you shut up for once?” every word coming from his mouth was slurred and slow, and Y/N didn’t have difficulties listening to them, especially that last question, which made her eyes widen.

“Well...” she pondered. “Kissing doesn’t require talking. I can’t talk while I’m kissing someone, that’s a sin”

“Yeah yeah, whatever,” Yoongi said. “Come here”

Just like that, he grabbed her cheeks and joined their lips together in a drunken kiss, which soon turned into a pretty heated make out session as soon as their tongues found each other. The movements between them were slow and lazy, and they didn’t seem to want to stop even though they “hated” each other. If Yoongi weren’t drunk, he would’ve never kissed her like he was doing at the moment, he’d rather kiss a cockroach. Y/N? Well, she never thought about kissing him, but she could admit that Yoongi was cute, despite the way he treated her. It wasn’t on her bucket list or anything like that, but she wouldn’t have had problem with doing it at different circumstances.

Lana was dancing with Levi when she spotted them and she gave a really loud gasp, catching Levi’s attention. When he saw what was happening, he said, “Holy shit”

“The world is ending, Levi”

“I know. Just know that I love you”

“And I love you,” but when she looked back at the pair, who seemed to forget there was a party going on around them, she couldn’t help but to laugh loudly. “Oh my God, they probably won’t remember this tomorrow”

Levi raised an eyebrow at his girlfriend’s mischievous look. “I’m guessing this will be a non stop teasing?”

“Yes”

“And you’ll make sure Y/N won’t hear the end of this and will be haunted forever?”

 “Yup”

[ruffsficstuffplace]

The Keeper of the Grove (Part 31)

Ruby and Blake trekked back to Keeper's Hollow, a pole on their shoulders supporting a giant, seven-foot long, several-hundred-pound weight tuna; the latter had a content smile on her face, her stomach noticeably distended.

“We're home, and we brought tuna!” Ruby called out as they came to the foot of the elevator. “Well, just a tuna because Blake got hungry on the ride back, but she'll share with everyone! Except Weiss, sorry about that!”

Silence, not even the sounds of anyone heading out to the elevator.

Ruby frowned. “Uncle Qrow? Penny? Weiss? Zwei? Any of you guys home…?”

It was then that she noticed three figures sitting on the highest balcony of the house--”Qrow's Nest” as her mother used to call it, because of how fond he was of going up there alone. One was clearly Zwei, laying down and looking forlorn; the other two were sitting over the edge, nursing drinks in their hands.

Ruby sighed, her face falling. <Oh no...>

Blake frowned. <You need help with drunk duty?> she asked as they set the tuna down on the ground. <I'll help with Qrow, but Weiss is all yours.>

Ruby shook her head. <Nah, I got this; you get this tuna in the fridge, before the Weavers' spell starts to run out,> she said as she headed up the ladder on the side.

After the fish was safely cut up and stored, Ruby made her way up to Qrow's Nest. Zwei looked up from both Qrow's and Weiss' laps as she poked her head out of the hatch; he panted happily at her, before put his heads back where they were, anchoring them to the floor with his weight, eyes watching them both carefully.

Qrow turned around and waved. “Hey Ruby,” he said, slurring slightly.

“Hey Uncle Qrow,” Ruby said, trying to smile. “You're not both drunk, are you...?”

“Just buzzed, but Weiss is 100% sober,” Qrow replied, before he took another sip of his beer.

“It's impossible to get drunk on milk, after all,” Weiss grumbled, before she took a swig of her own drink.

Ruby blinked. “You're drowning your sorrows in milk?”

“Yes! Because apparently the fermentation process for all your alcohols involves so much bacteria it'll utterly annihilate my stomach as is, and your uncle here only seems to ever buy the shitty, beer-flavoured water than the good brands.”

“Well excuse me for being poor…” Qrow muttered.

“So, how'd the Job Gauntlet go?” Ruby asked quickly.

“Terrible!” Weiss replied. “I failed every single exam. Did you know I'm completely unqualified for any sort of job the Fae could offer me? I have printed evidence from the professionals to prove it, just ask Penny when she's done with her daily maintenance!”

“Did you try the Watchers like Elder Goodwitch asked?”

“She did,” Qrow replied. “The holo for her combat test's gone viral all over AoA.” He switched languages. <It's called 'Soft-Skin Schnee Gits Wrekt.'>

“Go watch it,” Weiss grumbled.

Ruby frowned. “I don't know, Weiss, it sounds pretty--”

“Just do it. The sooner all of you Fae watch it for the fifteen-hundredth time and collectively get sick of it, the better.”

“Shit, Weiss, that holo's going in the Hall of Fame!” Qrow said. “Hundreds of years from now, we're still going to be pulling that out of the Codex and thinking 'Man, you'd think this'd get old, but it just gets funnier each time!'”

Weiss scowled. “That's a very encouraging thought, Qrow,” she said through gritted teeth.

Qrow shrugged. “Just making sure your expectations are realistic! It's easier to just face your shit reality and do something about it now, than waste time and energy pretending things are going magically to become better. Trust me, sooner or later, the smell's going to be impossible to ignore.”

Ruby sighed quietly. “I'll just go do that, then...” she said as she climbed back down.

“Watch it on the HV!” Qrow called out. “It's better with big resolution!”

Later, Blake and Ruby were sitting on the couch, grilled tuna slices, cookies, and milk between them. They loaded up the holo, skipped through the technical details and the info that was for the benefit of the senior Watchers handling recruiting.

They watched Zwei come out from the cage. Ruby smiled, Blake frowned.

<...And for the purposes of this test: ZWEI on FIRE!> Nora cried.

Zwei was set alight with soul fire. Ruby frowned, Blake smiled.

As the giant, flaming, two-headed canine came bounding towards her, Weiss turned around and fled, arms in the air and screaming at the top of her lungs.

<… And our recruit is off, trying to put some distance between her and—oh, nope! Zwei caught up to her already.> In Nivian, “Cardio, Weiss, cardio!”

Weiss replied by shrieking in renewed terror as Zwei grabbed her in one of his mouths, bit down just hard enough to hold her steady as he shook her side-to-side.

“Use your sword!” Nora cried.

Weiss whacked the hilt on the side of Zwei's head.

“Use your sword as a sword!”

Zwei carefully tossed her away. Weiss went flying for several feet, rolling as she hit the dirt. She dropped her rapier as she scrambled back up to her feet and started running for higher ground.

“Wait, Weiss—you dropped your weapon!”

“I KNOW!” Weiss screamed, tears streaming down her face now.

Zwei stopped and looked up at Nora, conflicted and still alight.

<Go get her, boy!> she called out. <She's not going to pass if you go too easy on her!>

Zwei turned to Weiss over on the other side of the arena, sobbing and jumping up and down, trying to reach a handhold that was just slightly taller than she was.

Blake choked on her fish from laughing so hard. Ruby smacked her on the back as they continued watching.

“Turn around and shoot him!” Nora cried. “His vitals are getting low! Well, low enough for you to get a good score!”

Weiss turned around, held up her shooting arm, and fired. Because of the tears in her eyes and the absolute terror she was experiencing, most of the darts missed Zwei in spite of him being an incredibly large target that was only getting closer.

Weiss ran out of ammo, the repeater kept on spinning and whining as she held the trigger.

“Reload! Reload! Reload!”

Weiss started smacking the release lever, her hand missing several times.

“No, Weiss, point it away from your--!”

The empty canister popped out and flew into her eye. “GAH!”

��--Too late.”

Weiss groped about, dropping two of her extra canisters before she finally got a grip on the third. She was about to load it into her repeater when the bright glow of the Pit's floodlights were replaced by an ominous, green hue.

Zwei slowly padded up to her, both heads deep in thought, unsure of what to do.

Weiss screamed, threw the canister at him, it bounced harmlessly off his left head.

Zwei barked.

Weiss dropped to the floor and curled up in the fetal position.

The horn was sounded.

Birds came by and dropped cure water on Zwei, extinguishing the soul fire. An extraction crew came up, along with Penny and a Therapy Mender carrying a well-worn, much-loved limited edition Eluna plushie the Watchers kept on-hand for situations like this.

There was a final shot of Weiss hugging it and squeezing it to her chest as she was carted away, before the video ended.

Blake snatched up the remote, and pressed the replay button.

Ruby heard a door opening, turned around saw Weiss dejectedly walking back into their room, her milk exchanged for one of her bottles of bacteria culture. She picked up her dinner and went on after her.

She knocked on the door with her horns. “Weiss?” she called out. “Can I come in?”

“It's your room, you decide!”

Ruby frowned, and opened the door. She saw Weiss already lying on her side in her hammock, gently rocking back and forth as she hugged Winter's Eluna plushie, an empty bottle on the floor.

“You want some milk and cookies?” she asked as she held up her dinner.

“Already had way too many,” Weiss muttered.

“Okay,” Ruby said. She walked over to her nest, and sat down on one of her pillows. “So...”

“So, what am I going to do about my being a NEET?”

“A what?”

“It's an acronym: 'Not Employed, in Education, or Training,'” Weiss explained. “I guess it's the human equivalent of Moss.”

Ruby nodded. “Yeah, that. So, do you have any talents or anything? Song, dance, arts and crafts, maybe? I'm sure we can use your being a human as a gimmick while you're starting out and building a fan base—I'll even be your audience if you need someone to test an act out on!”

“I can sing, but I think I'll just sell my body to science,” Weiss replied. “If being a star with the Fae is anything like being a star with us humans, the competition's going to eat me alive by virtue of being able to talk with their fans anytime they want without needing a translator…”

Ruby frowned. “Weiss...”

“You don't need to come with me to the Chronicler's Grove,” Weiss said as she turned away from Ruby and to her other side. “Qrow and Penny are already overdue for a 'brain drain,' so they're taking me with them tomorrow morning.”

Ruby sighed and put her food down. “Weiss, you can't just give up like this!” she said as she got up and walked over to the other side of her hammock.

“And why not?!” Weiss snapped, glaring at her, tears beginning well in her eyes once more. “Let's face the facts here, Ruby: I'm completely, absolutely useless to all of you!”

Ruby blinked. “Well duh! I thought that was already pretty obvious.”

Weiss gritted her teeth. “You were supposed to tell me I'm not useless.”

Ruby frowned. “Why would I do that?”

“Because I was fishing for compliments!”

“Fishing for what now?”

“It's when we talk bad about ourselves so other people will try and make us feel better...”

Ruby paused, and slowly raised a finger. “Weiss, let me get off topic for one moment:

“THIS IS WHY I FUCKING HATE NIVIAN! 'THE DOVE DOVE,' 'THE KNIGHT RIDES OUT AT NIGHT,' THE ENTIRE CONCEPT OF 'SARCASM' WHERE YOU SAY THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU MEAN FOR 'EMPHASIS'!

“WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU EVER INVENT A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE FOR EVERYONE IN AN ENTIRE REALM WITH THE INTENT OF BEING MISUNDERSTOOD 90% OF THE DAMNED TIME?!

“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU HUMANS?!”

Weiss stared up at her, stunned.

“Whew!” Ruby sucked in a deep breath. “Look, I'm sorry, but I had to get that out of my system!

“Anyway… Weiss, you're going to find something you can do to make yourself useful, and even if it's probably going to be just me and Penny, we're going to help you find it. We'll put you through a training regime, teach you Actaeon and all the other stuff you'll need to know, help you develop a skill than you can use to make something out of your life!

“There's a saying in Actaeon—something about every animal, from the smallest bacteria to the biggest monsters in the Timeless Depths being here in Avalon for a reason, all of them with a purpose in life, and because we Fae are animals too, that means we have those too!

“Maybe it won't be as obvious and instinctive as sheep existing to eat grass and get eaten by thunder wolves, who keep their population in check so they don't eat all the grass and everyone dies of starvation…

“… But you're not going to be useless forever, Weiss.

“Maybe now, yeah, you can't do anything right, but way back when, the Valley was just a big patch of wet dirt and swampland that happened to get shade from the sun because of the Twin Peaks, and retained a lot of the water from the Flood.

“But now look at it, after we Fae moved in and put in the work to try and make it better...”

Ding.

Weiss could see the light bulb go off in Ruby's head.

“… And I just got a great idea!”

“It's not going to involve faking my own death again, is it...?” Weiss asked warily.

“Nope!” Ruby replied, beaming. “Go to sleep, Weiss—you're going to need it!” she said as she hurried on out, stopping only to grab her dinner.

Weiss sat up. “Ruby, wait--!”

She was already out the door.

Weiss sighed, before she laid back down, and decided to just do as she was told and get some shut-eye.

Whatever it was Ruby had planned this time, it could wait till morning.

In the living room, Qrow and Blake were still rewatching the footage of Weiss' ill-fated fight, drinks laid to the side after one too many choking and spitting incidents.

<Uncle Qrow!> Ruby said as she zoomed up right to the back of the couch.

Qrow turned around. <Yeah, Ru--?> he dodged and avoided being accidentally gored with her horns.

Blake noticed, and paused the video.

<Sorry!> Ruby cried. <Do we still have dad's old tools?>

<Uh, yeah, they're in the shed, still on the old hooks on the wall—why do you ask?>

<Because, I've got a great idea to help Taiyang stay here!> Summer replied.

Qrow blinked, shook his head, and noticed Ruby frowning at him.

<A flash again...?> she asked.

<Yeah, don't worry about it,> Qrow replied.

Ruby sighed. <You should really go get your chronicle fixed, Uncle Qrow.>

<Not until that doesn't come with a mind wipe...> Qrow grumbled as he turned back to the HV. <Go get Penny to help you, I've stuffed a LOT of crap in there over the years, and I don't know what might have nested there since the last time I opened that door.>

<Will do, Uncle Qrow!> Ruby said, before she zoomed off once more.

<What was that all about?> Blake asked.

Qrow shrugged. <Who knows? Now unpause that holo, we're almost to the best part!>