#projections upon projections upon projections

[jadecantcreate]

the krew and body counts

[stupidlittlespirit]

Rating: NSFW (kissing) Type: Long form, Stanford Pines x Reader Tags: Enemies to lovers, Academic rivals to lovers, arguing that turns into making out, bullying, no pronouns used, minor injuries, making up, injury care, art student!Reader Word count: 19,567 (yikes!) My other works: here on tumblr and here on Ao3!

You're forced to work with Ford, your sworn rival, for a college project. Things quickly get out of control.

@sleeplessdreamer14 asked for this so I hope it's okay dude!

Right in the centre of the list, glaring up at you in black and white, reads the worst thing you could possibly imagine: your name and directly across from it, Stanford fucking Pines’, joined together by a backslash and grouped snugly under the heading ‘MID TERM, PARTNERSHIP PROJECT.’

Your heart feels like it might be ejected through your mouth. You re-read the list, and then re-re-read it again, but the text doesn’t miraculously change. It still states the unholy student matrimony between you and the biggest asshole in Backupsmore.

Oh no no no no no.

There is never, and will never, be anything wrong with a little bit of friendly competition.

Competition drives innovation, innovation drives achievement and achievement drives happiness. A harmless rivalry can benefit just about anybody, provided it stays as just that: harmless.

Whatever you have going on with Stanford Pines, however, is decidedly not that.

Naturally it's all his fault, of course.

You've shared a space with the man for only a couple of months now, since the beginning of the second college semester of Backupsmore, and you're absolutely positive that you've never met such a stuck up asshole in all your life.

Pines had joined your Fine Art class late. Significantly so, in fact. The course had already been halfway through its first year when he had darkened the doorstep of Studio 1B with his stupid tweed jackets and his fluffy hair, and even at the time you can recall how taken aback you'd been when Professor Stonepoor had announced his joining.

Stonepoor, a surly old chap with bright silver hair and a penchant for chain smoking indoors (one which you’re not sure you can begrudge him, honestly, because if you had to work in a place like Backupsmore, you’re sure cigarettes would be the mildest form of distraction at your disposal), had announced Pines’ unorthodox arrival to the studio one wet September afternoon.

Before any of you had had the chance to take your usual seats for the afternoon, Professor Stonepoor had clapped his hands together from behind his cheap desk and caught everyone’s attention the moment you had all filed inside. Standing at his side, Stanford had shifted uncomfortably from one loafered foot to the other under the abrupt attention of the room.

“Kids,” Stonepoor had said, in his bored, trademark voice akin to gravel being dragged across concrete. “This is Stanford Pines. I trust you’re familiar, yes?”

And of course, the entire class had nodded their affirmation, yourself included.

Barely six months into the year and Pines had already left quite the impression upon his fellow student body, a far less complimentary achievement than it might sound. Stanford had garnered a reputation of sorts, almost from his first day of term, and unlike most other rumours that run alongside young men of fraternity age, Stanford had become known for being the exact opposite of the trope: Extremely intelligent and extraordinarily lame.

Stanford Pines was, as the kids say these days, a Square. As strait-laced as they came: He never attended parties, not even when he managed to garner pity invites from some of the nicer students on campus.

He didn't take drugs, he didn’t skip classes, and he didn't drink. All Pines ever did was flex his abnormally large brain on every other student at the school. Everyone on campus knew Stanford Pines was a genius, but no one knew it more than Pines himself. Belligerently and exceptionally intelligent, and utterly obnoxious about it, Stanford never cared to let others forget it.

Professor Stonepoor had nodded at the collective hum of acknowledgement from the other students and gestured vaguely to Stanford. “Well, fortunately for you lucky people, Mr Pines will be joining the class for the remainder of the term.”

With little care for the rudeness of the action, you’d scoffed aloud and questioned exactly why a student with no artistic inclination would join a fucking fine art class halfway through term. Everybody knew Pines was a die-hard scientist wannabe, what on earth would he be doing here?

You can still recall how Stanford had frowned down his aquiline nose at your comment, despite the disinterested air he’d displayed suggesting he felt similarly.

You’d scowled right back and held defiant eye contact with him for as long as he dared.

Mr Stonepoor had rolled his eyes and replied, very simply: “Ford has…. Run out of classes to take.”

“What?” You’d laughed, disbelieving and mildly confused.

“He’s completed significantly more of his major ahead of schedule and the dean thought it might be good for him to, and I quote, ‘soak up as much education as possible’ during his time with us.”

Which was, of course, utter bullshit. The dean had probably panicked about not receiving a full year’s worth of tuition and tried to drag out his stay in this desperately underfunded shit hole for as long as possible.

You hadn’t offered more than a sceptical arch of your brow and Mr Stonepoor had met you with a disinterested shrug before simply ushering Pines towards the free desks.

At first, you'd tried to play nice despite your initial annoyance at being disturbed. Perhaps Pines would be willing to take a back seat in a class that wasn't his forte? You'd approached him as he'd stood awkwardly by an empty desk on the far left of the room, a hand outstretched in a stiff welcome and your name on the tip of your tongue.

Stanford had regarded your hand like it was covered in bees, his big, brown eyes flicking from your fingertips to your eyes, before turning away to rifle through his briefcase (and honestly, who carried a briefcase in college?) as though you'd never even said a word. “A pleasure, I’m sure.”

In spite of his lack of manners, you can recall how surprised you’d been at the sound of his voice. You’d never crossed paths with him before and certainly never held a conversation with him, and it had come as a mild shock that such a voice belonged to somebody so….

Well, somebody so like him.

You’d expected a nasally tone, something more fitting of such a nerdy exterior, but instead Stanford sounded…. Strong. So completely at odds with his unimpressive stature and awkward aura, that for half a second you had been too surprised to respond.

And then his snarky address had caught up with you and you’d found your tongue well enough.

Teeth gritted, you'd applied your best faux smile and steamrolled over his rudeness. “You know, you'll need to catch up on last semester's work. I'm the highest ranking student in this class, I'd be happy to show you some of my-!”

“No need,” Pines had dismissed you without looking up. “I completed it last night. Professor Stonepoor has my folder.”

You'd laughed, until it had become clear that he wasn't actually attempting a bad joke. “You…. Are you telling me you completed an entire semester's worth of work over the summer?”

It had been Stanford's turn to laugh then and finally he'd faced you. “Oh, no,” He’d scoffed. “I did it in two weeks.”

“Sorry, you what?”

“No need to apologise,” Stanford had said before giving you the kind of smirk that screamed just how much he knew his words were intended to provoke.

Your teeth had been ground further down.

“The dean asked me to join the class a few days after we returned for term and well, as much as I consider it a waste of my time, he said it might benefit me, so I figured why not.” Stanford had shrugged.

“‘A waste of your time’?” You'd frowned.

“Of course,” Stanford scoffed, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I mean, who pays thousands of dollars to study something as menial as art? College should be used for education, not for daydreaming and doodling.”

It had taken every ounce of decorum you owned not to punch his lights out, and from there, things had only gotten worse.

The next time you'd attended class, motivated to simply ignore Pines (and maybe to show off your extensive knowledge of your chosen subject to him to ensure he knew who he was sharing the floor with), you'd made a beeline for your usual desk only to find the object of your ire already sitting in it.

The seat by the East window of the studio was yours. Nobody else’s. You’d had a claim over it for the better part of the school year and nobody in class had attempted to challenge it. Not until Pines’ arrival, anyway.

At your insistence that he find somewhere else, Stanford has brushed you off yet again: “Your name isn’t on it. Can’t you take the one in front?”

Somewhere behind you, a classmate had hissed through clenched teeth and another had choked on a poorly stifled laugh; your exchange with one another was apparently entertaining enough to warrant a minor audience.

“No,” you’d snipped. “The light here is best, that’s why I sit in this one.”

Pines had hummed thoughtfully before finally meeting your eyes. “Well, now I’m definitely not giving it up.”

And so, he had commandeered your own seat from you in front of the entire fucking class.

But he hadn’t stopped there, oh no.

Your top student status had been more or less demolished in the space of a week.

You’ve always prided yourself on your work, on being number one amongst your classmates. You work hard and it has always paid off, as evidenced by your grades and your standing. Except, Stanford had practically appeared out of thin air and blown you out of the water immediately.

He raised his hand faster, he was quicker with his answers, more precise with his art history timelines and to make matters even more utterly miserable: he’d turned out to be an exceptionally talented artist.

His work was near-photorealistic in its detail, his anatomy was excellent and he’d picked up his colour theory in less than two classes on the subject. A significant improvement on the time it had taken you.

Stanford Pines absolutely dominated the classroom. Your classroom.

Your passion, your talent, your achievement. All of it had been bulldozed by the guy.

Of course, never having been one for going down without a fight, you had bitten back hard: pulling all nighters and skipping parties to ensure you’d still topped the charts in your scores. You’d even beaten him a couple of times, and the tangible frustration you’d felt from him had been enough to encourage you to keep at it.

That’s how the entire thing had started: You and Stanford Pines vying for top dog status of Studio 1B, horns locked and grievances held, no matter the day, no matter the project, no matter the reason. You absolutely had to beat him.

Today has been no different.

Class is coming to a close for the evening and you've spent most of it battling with Stanford, as per usual, over answers. The two of you have been going back and forth together for the better part of forty minutes before Mr Stonepoor manages to cut in whilst Stanford is taking a breath.

“While I appreciate your passion for Winckelmann, Mr Pines,” Stonepoor says, with little enthusiasm to match his words. “We really ought to be finishing up. I need to discuss the upcoming projects with all of you.”

Stanford's mouth shuts with an audible click! and you shoot him a smug look, pleased to have gotten the final word in class.

Stanford rolls his eyes.

“As you all know, in the next week you’ll be beginning work on your mid-term projects. Alongside your mini-exhibition, you’ll be expected to complete a short presentation on your chosen topic and explain the sense of meaning behind your themes.” Professor Stonepoor continues, oblivious to your exchange. “Except, this time things will be a little different.”

Stonepoor’s words are enough to get you to halt in your gloating and pay abrupt attention again.

“This won’t be a solo project, as the others have been. This time, you’ll be partnered up and expected to work together with a classmate to show how well you can collaborate with your peers.” Professor Stonepoor takes a seat in his creaky chair and procures a lighter from the top pocket of his suit jacket. He’s clearly preparing to deal with the stress that will inevitably come his way.

You raise your hand. “Will we get to pick our partners, Professor?” You ask, cautiously hopeful. You’ve only a few friends in Backupsmore: Jennifer, who you sit beside currently, and Melissa, who attends opposing classes to you but who technically counts as a peer. If you’re going to have to work with anybody, it’ll be them.

Stonepoor lights his cigarette and fixes you with a look that makes something cold settle in your stomach. “No,” he says simply, and the amusement in his voice fills you with uncomfortable concern.

Before anybody can question him, the shrill sound of the bell rings out and the rest of the students dutifully begin to pack their things away. As much as you’d like to question Stonepoor further, for now you’ll have to hope he does himself a favour and sticks you with somebody you’ll get along with.

It’s not like he’d partner you up with Pines of all people anyway. It’s unlikely he’ll want to cause himself more stress, right?

Right?

You’re lounging on the Quad later that evening, killing time with a couple of classmates and sheltering from the bright sun under the shade of an ancient oak tree, when the topic comes up again.

Thumbing through the battered copy of Pride and Prejudice on your lap, you listen to your friends complain back and forth about the strife in their lives until their annoyances invoke you directly.

“I can’t take another day of you two arguing like that, y’know,” says Jennifer, your fellow artist in 1B.

“I don’t know what you mean,” you mutter, picking at the corner of the novel and only barely paying attention.

“You and Stanford Pines,” she clarifies, and you can practically hear her rolling her eyes. “You’re driving everybody nuts.”

“It’s his fault,” You shrug one shoulder. “If he wasn’t such an asshole about, like, everything, I wouldn’t-”

“Be such an asshole back?” Jennifer finishes. “God, why don’t you two just fuck it out already?”

Her comment is enough to get you to snap your head up, attention on your novel shattered instantly. “What’s that supposed to mean?!” You exclaim, almost choking on your tongue.

“Oh, come on,” Melissa snorts. “There’s enough tension between you two to kill the Professor ten times over.”

“And the rest of us,” Jennifer adds, high fiving the other girl. “Poor Stonepoor always looks on the verge of a breakdown when you guys start fighting.”

Melissa laughs. “Yeah, and besides, everybody’s noticed it. You’d win me ten bucks if you jumped his bones.”

“What do you- Are you taking bets on my non-existent sexual chemistry?!” You ask, appalled. “You’re not even in the same class as us, you’ve got no idea about my…. Thing, with Pines.”

Perhaps that isn’t the most ideal choice of words, but still.

As though she can read your mind, Melissa shoots Jennifer an amused look.

You scoff, shaking your head vehemently. “You’re wrong. I can’t stand him and he definitely can’t stand me. I’d rather puke in my hands and clap than touch that guy.”

There’s absolutely no way you’d consider anything of the sort with Stanford Pines. Sure, objectively he isn’t too bad to look at: He’s tall and broad shouldered, with a stocky form in spite of his lack of sporting ability, and he’s got a nice enough face, but he’s nothing special. Puppy dog eyes and strong features are ten a penny, aren’t they?

“Anyway, I think he’s kind of cute,” Melissa says, bumping shoulders with you. “Y’know, in a loser type of way.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why you’re dating Jamie,” you grumble under your breath. The less said about her blockheaded jock boyfriend, the better…. “You like losers a little too much.”

Melissa opens her mouth to defend her pet idiot, but she’s cut off by someone shouting your name.

You glance up just as someone skids to a halt in front of your group, their trainers sliding on the poorly maintained lawn. You can vaguely recognise him as a kid from the studio…. Danny? You think. Darryl? “Oh, hey, uh….”

“Damian,” says Damian, looking a little annoyed. “We’re in Studio 1B together. Have been for a while now.”

“Right….” You give him an apologetic smile. “What’s up?”

Damian pauses, like he hadn’t expected to actually have to voice his reason for catching your attention. He looks uncomfortable and it sets your teeth on edge.

“Is everything okay?” You ask, shifting to stand up. “Has something hap-”

“Have you, uh….” He clears throat stiffly. “Have you seen the partner listing for the mid-term project yet?”

You frown. “No, I didn’t even know it was up.”

Damian flinches again and rubs the back of his neck. “Yeah. It went up like twenty minutes ago….You might wanna take a look. Figured you’d want to know..”

You’re not sure you’ve ever moved so fast in your life. Without more than a thanks to Damian, you toss your paperback into your bag and leap to your feet, barely hearing the annoyed shout of your friends as you scramble past them to head straight for the arts building. You take the stairs two at a time, weaving between crowds of other students, your heart beating so hard you think it might burst right through your shirt.

Why would Damian bother to alert you? You’re fairly certain you’ve only ever exchanged niceties with the guy over the paintbrush station, he’d have no reason to bother you about something like this unprovoked. Not unless….

“You’re driving everybody nuts….”

As you round the landing of the stairs, you spot the old stained door that leads to Studio 1B, along with the bulletin board that’s positioned right at its side. There's a small gathering of students around it, all talking amongst themselves, and you slip right through them to get up close to the A4 pieces of paper that's tacked to the cork surface.

Your eyes scan it, desperately searching for confirmation that you're overreacting and that Damian is probably just being helpful, right? Not forewarning of an incoming storm like you fear he might be, until….

Oh.

Oh, no.

Right in the centre of the list, glaring up at you in black and white, reads the worst thing you could possibly imagine: your name, and directly across from it, Stanford fucking Pines’. Joined together by a backslash and grouped snugly under the heading ‘MID TERM, PARTNERSHIP PROJECT.’

Your heart feels like it might be ejected through your mouth. You re-read the list, and then re-re-read it again, but the text doesn’t miraculously change. It still states the unholy student matrimony between you and the biggest asshole in Backupsmore.

Oh no no no no no.

You can feel the eyes of other students of 1B burning into your back. Clearly your predicament is common knowledge already. You feel a warmth burn on the base of your neck and very carefully, you avoid meeting their gaze.

Perhaps there's still time to talk your professor out of it. It's not even 5PM yet, he'll still be knocking about in the classroom for a while and if you’re quick, it might be your best and only opportunity to talk him into reconsidering. Surely he'll be easily convinced to change his mind? It's not a secret that he's more than a little fed up with your bickering; you're certain that the only reason he allows you and Stanford to go back and forth so often is because it means he can put less effort into teaching the rest of the class. He practically owes you both one!

Ditching the throng of students, you press your ear to the door of the studio. It sounds like somebody is already talking to Stonepoor , but whoever it is will have to wait. Right now, you're on a mission to ensure your sanity stays intact.

You hammer a quick series of knocks on the door before wrenching it open and ducking inside without even bothering to wait for a welcome, your protests already loaded in your mouth: “Professor Stonepoor , there's some kind of mistake on the-!”

Your words die a quick death on your tongue when you realise who it is that's currently talking to him.

Stanford Pines looks over at you from where he's standing, arms crossed and brows furrowed, in front of your teacher's desk, evidently as equally as annoyed as you are. He's wearing a blue button down shirt and brown corduroy pants, and his hair looks messier than usual, like he's been running his hands through it in distress.

You know how he feels.

Stonepoor leans sideways slightly in his chair, another cigarette in his mouth (he really must be stressed), and peers around Stanford's broad form at you. He doesn't seem very pleased to have you here.

“A mistake?” Asks Stonepoor, tiredly.

“Yes,” you say assuredly, ignoring the way Stanford watches you approach. “On the partner list. You put me and…. Him,” you struggle to keep the disdain from your voice and Stanford scoffs. “Together.”

Stonepoor laughs and for once he sounds genuinely amused. “No mistake there. You'll both be working together on this project.”

Instead of vomiting your heart, it drops out through your ass and a cold dread settles in its place. “What?!”

“Precisely my sentiment,” says Stanford, nodding. “Why on Earth are we being paired up? I could do far better work alone, I don't need someone dragging me along-”

“‘Dragging you along’?!” You snap, scowling over at him. “I'm perfectly competent, thank you. I don't even see why we'd need to work together out of everyone else in the class! If Stanford wants to work alone, why can't he-”

“Because this is a paired assignment,” says Professor Stonepoor slowly, like he's talking to an idiot. “And you two are top of the class. I'd like to see what you can come up with when you put your heads together willingly, instead of butting them back and forth.”

Stanford huffs, petulant. “But I-”

“But nothing, Mr Pines,” Stonepoor sighs, exhaling a long cloud of smoke and sitting back in his chair. “You're an excellent student, Stanford, truly-”

Stanford puffs out his chest at the acknowledgement and you have to force yourself not to pull a face to illustrate your disgust.

“-But you're still a student,” Stonepoor goes on. “And I'm your professor. It's my call, and I say you two need to learn how to work cooperatively for once. You won't get anywhere if all you do is piss each other off, so the decision stands. Work together.”

You want to argue more and you can tell that Stanford does too, but Stonepoor isn't having it. It quickly becomes clear that you'd each have better luck arguing with the stack of still-drying canvases in the corner rack of the room.

The moment you open your mouth, he holds a hand up to silence you. “If you can't get along and you can't produce something worth my time, I'll give you both the lowest grade and you can fight it out over who gets to hang that on their wall. Do I make myself clear?”

And just like that, your fate is sealed.

You're going to have to work with the one person you like least, whether it destroys your sanity or not.

Stanford sighs, long suffering and put upon, and once you've accepted your situation, he follows you from the classroom and out into the hallway. Thankfully it appears most of the people who had been lingering around initially have moved on, leaving the corridor uncomfortably quiet and the perfect place to lay down some organisation.

Taking a deep breath, you turn to Stanford.

“So, here's the deal-”

“Why don't we just-”

You both speak at the same time, words rushing out in a hurry to beat one another to the point, and Stanford sighs.

“Look, I'm as apprehensive about this whole thing as you are, believe me,” he says. “I'd be perfectly happy to work alone but it seems as though we're just going to have to get along for this whether we want to or not.”

As much as it pains you to admit it, he's right. Stonepoor has made that perfectly clear. You’re not going to let this fucker leave a blemish on your record and you’re sure he feels similarly.

“Fine,” you murmur, leaning against the classroom door. The stress of all this has already exhausted you and you haven't even had one on one time with him yet. God, this is going to suck. “Let's just…. Agree a truce for now, right? We get through the next few weeks, get our heads down and then we can go right back to how things are supposed to be. Deal?”

Stanford nods. “Deal.”

You mirror him and yank your bag up your shoulder. “Starting tomorrow, meet me in the library. The art history section. We can work out what we want to do and build from there. Sound good?”

It doesn’t look like it sounds good to him, but to his credit, Stanford nods stiffly. “Be there at six.”

“Done.”

..

As expected, Stanford is utterly unbearable to work with. If, that is, what you’re doing can even be compared to working together.

From the moment your ass touches the seat opposite him at the library table, he rubs you the wrong way. For one thing, he doesn’t even greet you. He doesn’t even so much as look up at your arrival, for god’s sake. Instead, he keeps his big nose buried in a dusty book he’s reading and says: “You’re late.”

You cast a glance at the wall clock to see that you are, technically, about four minutes behind when you said you'd be here for. That doesn’t mean you’re going to take the heat for it though.

“Barely,” you mutter, dumping your bag onto the table and making his thermos wobble.

That’s enough to get him to look up.

Stanford frowns and catches it before it can fully tip over, avoiding a spill. “If we set a meeting time, I’d appreciate it if you kept to it,” he says snippily.

You nod, but you’re not really taking his chastisement on board. You’re too busy checking out the array of books he has splayed open in front of him like a weathered old cheeseboard for his perusal. You’re expecting them to be books on the Renaissance or maybe some old masters biographies (he seems like the type to enjoy the classics), but when you peer closer you’re surprised to see that they’re predominantly all physics books. Even the yellow legal pad at his elbow is full of mathematical equations.

“Not interrupting something, am I?” You ask, raising an eyebrow at his work.

Stanford clears his throat and snaps his book shut before you can gawp much more. “Of course you are,” he murmurs, beginning to clear them away. “Art is hardly my most prominent area of work, you know. Some of us are studying for more than one thing, hence the importance of time management.”

“And just how many things are you studying for, Stanford?” You say, amused by how easily you can get under his skin. “I hope they won’t get in the way of this project.”

Stanford furrows his impressive brows at you. “Just because I don’t care about art, that doesn’t mean I’d let my work slip,” he says as he piles the textbooks up. “And I’m taking five degrees, thank you.”

“Five?!” You say, a little bit louder than is appropriate for the setting.

Stanford shushes you, as do a few more students at other tables, and you offer them an apologetic wave before repeating yourself at a more suitable stage whisper: “Five degrees? How the fuck are you managing that?”

Stanford scoffs, sitting forward in his chair to rest his elbows on the table. “With a great deal of talent and commitment, of course,” he says, as though it’s obvious.

Holy shit, you think. That’s insane. As much as you want to fire off a snappy comment about big headedness, you have to admit that perhaps some of it is warranted if the man can manage five fucking degrees in one go.

“I intend to take more but I’m focusing on those for now. I plan to make it to PhD as quickly as possible so I need to concentrate and manage my efforts accordingly. I’d hate to throw off my groove by picking up random, useless classes that I’ll never use again.” He pauses to bark a laugh. “Not that this isn’t exactly that, mind you…. No offence.”

You roll your eyes. “Every offence taken. Art might not be as academically lauded as science or maths, but it’s just as important.”

Ford snorts as he shoves his books into his briefcase, mildly amused by your comment.

“I’m serious, Stanford,” you say, defensive. “How do you think you get those illustrations in your anatomy textbooks, for example?”

“Those are different,” Stanford says, waving you off. “They serve a purpose.”

Jesus.... This guy’s grandiosity knows no bounds. “All art serves a purpose for somebody. Just because it doesn’t serve your every purpose, doesn’t make it useless,” you scoff. “Art informs science just as much as science does art.”

Stanford opens his mouth to answer back but he seems to fall short of actually finding the words to fire off at you. Behind his eyes, you can practically see the gears whirring and ticking as he weighs up your statement in his mind, and after a moment, he exhales the air he’d saved to fight back with through his nose, sharp and short. The tips of his ears are a little pink and he looks decidedly annoyed.

It strikes you suddenly that you might have just accidentally bested your sworn rival over a ridiculously simple concept. Your skin prickles with righteous pride and you fix him with an assured smirk, absurdly pleased to have beaten him so casually.

Rather than apologise, Stanford simply ignores your statement and flips through his yellow legal pad, settling on a clean page and placing it between you both. “If you're done debating me,” he says, clearing his throat. “I suppose we ought to figure out our roles, yes?”

“I’m not debating you, Stanford,” you say, rolling your eyes with a smile. Sure, technically you won your point, but you’re not actually trying to beat him in this discussion any more than you are just bringing the truth to his attention. He really can be a misanthrope sometimes. “We’re socialising. Normal people do it all the time, so I’ve heard.”

He looks a little taken aback at that, and you can't help but think the owlish way he blinks at you suits him quite nicely in comparison to usual scrutinising stare. “Oh,” he says. “Right.” He nods quickly and averts his gaze downward to the pad.

It's painfully clear he isn't used to being spoken to on such a level. You almost feel a little bad for him. It must be hard to make friends when you're all work and no play, and especially when someone has the aura of a person who'd rather be laying on train tracks than holding menial conversation….

Mentally, you yank on the reins of that line of thought: you are absolutely not going to feel bad for someone that's always such a jerk to you, and to everybody else. No way.

Stanford taps the pad of paper between you both. “I can do most of the work. You’ll just follow along and I’ll write in some speaking parts for you, so that way you’ll still be included in the grade,” he says, rolling his shoulders and slipping back into the usual aura of asshole-ness.

There goes that empathy.

“What?” You stare at him like he’s gone mad, the smile sliding off your face. “Absolutely not. This is as much my project as it is yours! We can go fifty-fifty, that way it’s totally fair.”

“No disrespect,” says Stanford, and you can tell he’s about to say something that intends fully to illustrate how much he doesn’t mean that caveat. “But your history and research is lacking, and you tend to focus more on the intricacies of the piece than on the entirety of the project. I’d be happy to shoulder most of the work. That way we’ll have fewer weak points.”

You grip the edge of the table, hard. Weak points? Who does this guy think he is?!

“I want to earn my grade, Stanford,” you say, quite admirably keeping the anger from your tone. “Maybe you’re used to working with people who are happy to sit in for the ride and get top marks for doing fuck all, but I’m not that kind of person. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t treat me as such.”

He regards you for a moment, seemingly nonplussed by your adamant refusal to accept the easiest option, and for a moment you think you’re going to have to fight it out with him.

You’d rather not get banned from the only library Backupsmore owns for beating him to death with his own physics books, but you’re not going to just let him take control like he so clearly wants to.

However, much to your surprise, once he’s finished turning over your words in that big brain of his again, he nods. “Fine. If you think you can do it, have at it.”

You’re astounded he’s given in so easily until he adds:

“But if you start to drag me down then I won’t hesitate to scrap whatever you’ve come up with and do it all again from scratch myself.”

There it is.

As an afterthought, he tacks on: “And if we're going to be partners, you might as well call me Ford. I prefer it.”

A nickname? That's awfully familiar of him…. But you suppose if he prefers it then you'll bite.

“Fine,” you say. “Then let’s do this, Ford.”

And if you’re not mistaken, he might even smile a little at that.

This is going to be a weird couple of weeks….

Nothing much changes in the classroom.

The two of you still go back and forth like your lives depend on it, much to the visible chagrin of your professor and peers.

At first, your pairing with Ford had been the talk of the studio. The other students had made offhand comments about it all behind your back, but none had brought it up to your face.

Melissa and Jennifer had been as amused as they were apprehensive about it all, both of them begging you to at least try and get along for everybody’s sake, but of course all you’d manage to do for the first week or two was complain and lament to them about the entire situation.

“He’s a total nightmare! A complete control freak and a perfectionist. I can’t survive another day with him, I swear,” you froth to the girls over lunch one afternoon, after yet another frustrating session spent with Ford.

The entirety of the study time had been spent arguing back and forth about painting techniques, and you had had to leave before you’d throttled him with a cleaning rag.

Every complaint fell on deaf ears, of course. Both Jennifer and Melissa only ever exchanged mutual looks of exasperation with one another any time you moaned about him and neither seemed to offer much more than a conciliatory ‘that sucks’ with each grievance you bring them.

Eventually, you and Ford had come to the agreement of using ‘uniqueness’ as the basis of your project.

The idea had been brought up at the start of the third meeting, once everything had been arranged for responsibilities and chores, when Ford had dropped into conversation that he held a penchant for the strange and unusual.

Although your initial reaction had been to disagree simply on principle, the idea had been interesting enough that you’d caved without much argument.

When you questioned why his interest lay in things like cryptids and paraphenomena when he clearly lauded himself as a serious scientist, he’d given you a strange look that you had struggled to decipher.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he’d asked toward the end of your second week together, watching as you’d painted fine details onto the fur of thylacine one rainy Tuesday evening.

You’d shrugged. “Because you’re a nerd?”

That was the most obvious answer, wasn’t it? Excluded by his peers and his own intelligence, he probably felt a kind of kinship with things that others didn’t accept. Perfectly understandable, you supposed.

Whilst you’re no genius, you’ve never been immune to exclusion. You can recognise traits in monsters that you might share with them, in the ways that nobody ever believes in them.

His interest made sense and for some reason, it had even made you feel a little more…. Connected to him. And while you’d rather die than admit that aloud to anyone, a secret awareness of empathy for the guy wouldn’t hurt anyone.

“No,” Ford had replied, coming to stand behind you. “It’s because I…”

You’d lifted your head from your work, glancing over your shoulder and craning your neck to stare up at him expectantly.

Ford had paused as he’d met your eyes, unsure of an answer for only the second time in your presence, before he’d cleared his throat and looked away again. “It hardly matters. I suppose you’re right.”

He had stood so close behind you after that, silently observing; the scent of his cologne, all spice and musk, filling your nose and making your mouth water.

You had struggled to concentrate then, but you’re sure it had been for no specific reason, of course. Just a simple case of being uncomfortable with having someone in your personal space. That was all. Nothing more.

Still, Ford pushed harder for results than any other project partner you can recall having. Possibly even harder than any teacher you'd ever had, too.

Despite giving you the grace to put your own touch on the project, it had become clear very quickly that Ford was decidedly not very good at collaborations.

He worked at a break-neck speed and with laser precision in everything he did, whether he was passionate about the subject or not, and if you couldn’t keep up? Well, that was a personal failing on your part, obviously.

His intensity had built up very quickly and it hadn't taken long to feel less like you were partnering equally on a job and more like you were being dragged along in the dirt by an unruly workhorse.

Long hours in the studio weren’t unheard of for you, but pouring over your canvases until the wee hours of the early morning every night? Less so. Arguments over techniques and methods weren't uncommon, and unrequested criticism from Ford quickly became the norm.

Lack of sleep and total dedication to the project combined with all your other classes had begun to take a toll on you. For Ford, it seemed he barely needed sleep or lunch breaks, but for your much more average ability, you couldn't quite say the same.

Even your arguments in class had become less and less heated as you'd lost the free energy to fight it out with him.

The first time you'd almost dozed off during a study session in the library for background research, Ford had clicked his fingers in front of your closed eyes with the loudest snap known to man, jerking you awake and almost causing you to fall out of your seat.

“If you can't keep up, just say so,” Ford had quipped, going back to his elegant cursive-filled page of notes. “I told you I'd be happy to take over.”

Of course, you'd told him to fuck off. No way would you be seen dead giving him what he wanted. No matter how exhausted you got, regardless of the pressure on yourself, you absolutely would not give in…..

Which is why today, you find yourself slumped before your half finished canvas, vision blurring at the edges from lack of rest and head throbbing painfully.

There's only one week left of prep time for the project and you're not even sure you'll live to see the fruits of your labour at this point. Your back aches from sitting at awkward angles and leaning over your work for one too many hours a day, your hand is painfully stiff from gripping pencils and paintbrushes 24/7, and alongside the pressures of this project, you've still got to contend with your other classes too.

Fine Arts degrees aren't all about painting nice pictures and using free time to kick back and slack off, despite what some people may think. Your grades are important to you and you're pushing yourself in every other class you have too: history, sculpting, printmaking and more. You're spread as thin as you can be and it's taking its toll.

At this rate, you'll fail in several of those. Even a few of your teacher's have pulled you aside to ask about the abrupt decline in your attendance (late nights lead to oversleeping, who knew?) and you're not sure you can bear another ‘are you taking this seriously?’ scolding from them again.

You've arrived early today. Typically you meet in the spare studio with Ford at six o'clock sharp, but today you'd decided to try and come in sooner in order to get a head start.

You've fallen behind with some of the work; the oil piece currently propped up in front of you is still only in its early stages and it'll take you a while to get it finished to the standard you hold yourself to, plus you still need to draft your speeches for each painting and write your cue cards out too.

If you can push yourself to complete the best part of this painting today, though, then it will be one less thing to worry about. Not to mention that you haven't even started on your presentation rehearsal yet.

Miserably, you dump your paintbrush in the glass of murky water on the trolley beside it and sit back with a groan, digging the heels of your hands into your eyes. You're so fucking stressed you want to cry.

Your eyes burn when you lower your hands and distantly, you realise that you already are crying. Wetness trails down your cheeks and you can feel the tips of your ears burn with embarrassment. Crying over a fucking presentation. Pathetic.

You cast a glance over to the corner of the room where Ford has left out one of his own pieces of work to dry, and it only makes you feel worse. He's so precise with his brush strokes and colours, and so effortless with what he does.

It's enough to encourage more tears; his skill is admirable, even if you'll only ever concede that through brutally gritted teeth, and knowing that he's so talented even in a subject he doesn't care about only makes you feel worse.

“This is ridiculous,” you groan aloud, voice thick with distress.

Why hadn't you just taken Ford up on his offer? Stupid fucking pride, always getting in the way of an easy ride and making things harder than it needs to be….

You sniffle and heave a great, shuddery sigh. Could be worse, you think miserably. Ford could be here to see me be all pathetic and snotty.

And because the universe is a cruel and unforgiving mistress with a sick sense of humour, the door to the studio opens at that exact moment and the man himself barrels in with an arm full of textbooks. “I hope you're here early because you plan to make back the time on those diagra-!”

Ford stops mid sentence, eyes going wide at the sight of you. The door bounces off the wall behind him and slams shut as he stares in your direction, taking in your downtrodden appearance.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

You feel your entire face go red, and roughly, you wipe at your eyes. You attempt to duck back behind the safety of your canvas and hide your tear stained face from the exact person you'd hoped to avoid, but Ford has already seen the state of you. There's not much you can do to hide it.

You clear your throat, head ducked to conceal your face. “I'll get them done,” you say, only slightly croaky. “Relax.”

Ford stands rooted to the spot, his textbooks hugged to his broad chest. He's silent for a minute, only staring right at you with wide eyes, and then he mirrors your awkward throat-clearing. “Are you…. Okay?” He asks, stiffly. “Did something happen?”

“No. I'm fine.”

“You don't look fine,” Ford says, finally wandering over. “And people don't tend to cry when they're just ‘fine’.... Something must have-”

“I'm stressed, Ford,” you cut in, a little sharper than is necessary. You're not really in the mood to explain everything to him like he's your therapist, but maybe he'll back off a bit if you give him something to sate his (evidently unstoppable) curiosity. “I have other classes as well as the one we share, you realise? Other projects. It's- It can be a lot. I'm tired and I'm stressed.”

Ford frowns, his confusion palpable. “Stressed?” He repeats, putting down his armful of textbooks on a nearby desk. “About art?” He sounds so baffled, like it's impossible to imagine someone might struggle with such a ‘lesser’ pursuit than his own.

It’s enough to get your back up so high that you instantly forget to measure your response before you open your mouth. Maybe it's the tiredness, or the mounting pressure, or maybe just a combination of all of it, but you just can't take his obnoxious way of addressing you anymore.

“Ford, give it a fucking rest would you?” You snap, standing up from your chair in anger and finally meeting his gaze. He already knows you're upset, there's little point in hiding it anymore.

“See, this is exactly why I didn't want to tell you! You just don't get it! You're so fucking intense about all of this,” You gesture vaguely towards your canvas and the rest of the room, confident that he'll pick up what you mean. The entire fucking project. “I'm not used to it! I've never worked with somebody so- so like you, before.”

Ford flinches and somewhere within you, you feel a little guilty at your choice of phrasing. It's probably not the first time he's had someone say such a thing, judging by his reaction.

Undeterred, you push on, unable to stop the exhausted word vomit: “Staying up every night, pushing me on everything I do, it's relentless! You're relentless! I'm not like that, Ford, I can't just burn my candle at both ends when there's nothing left to burn.”

Ford seems surprised by your outburst. It's hardly the first time you've yelled at him, but it is the first time he looks out of his depth about it. He opens his mouth but nothing comes out. Instead of answering, he runs a hand through his messy chestnut hair, forcing the strands to stick up, and blinks back at you, deer-like.

Under any other circumstances, you'd find it funny how blatantly nervous he is at your display of emotion. Ford is the sort of person who runs solely on logic, on equations and science, and definitive answers.

He's never once given you the impression that his IQ extends to EQ and seeing him try to figure out how he ought to approach such a difficult problem would be comical if you weren't so upset right now.

After a moment of silence, filled only with you sniffling, Ford finally finds his voice again. “I told you, I can handle the workload alone if you can't-”

“Oh, sure!” You scoff, before he can finish his stupid sentence. “You'd love that, wouldn't you? Then you can totally win this stupid thing by yourself and leave me in the mud.”

You shake your head and turn away, wiping your face with the sleeve of your sweater. “I knew I shouldn't have said anything, you're just gonna use this against me now, aren't you?” You mutter.

Ford, unexpectedly, looks a bit hurt by your unfounded accusation, and guilt nibbles at your gut again the moment you've said it, even if it is a genuine concern of yours.

“I would never do that,” he says defensively. “We're partners, aren't we? It wouldn’t be…. Fair for me to use your emotional state against you like that.”

He sounds so genuinely certain in his words that you find yourself unable to answer him. You'd expected him to laugh and snatch the project out from underneath you instantly, with little care for your wellbeing.

Not necessarily out of spite, but out of indifference. The way he rejects your assertion so defensively is enough to make your eyes water all over again.

“I'm not a robot, despite what some people may think. I know how it feels to work under pressure,” Ford says, and you suppose he must, what with the extortionate number of degrees he’s currently juggling. “Maybe not from art,” he admits. “But I’m not immune.”

“I told you, I can take on what you struggle with,” Ford continues on, and at your attempt to interrupt, he steamrolls on. “And before you say anything, no, I don't mean that because I think you're not good enough. I just mean that I can help.”

You raise your brows, surprised, and turn to face him. “I thought you thought my work was shit,” you say, picking up on his comment instantly.

Ford frowns. He takes a deep breath and comes to your side, a bit hesitant to get closer than within arm's length of where you stand at your station.

“I don't think that at all,” he says, like it should be obvious to you. “Why would you-”

“Ford, all you do is criticise the stuff I create,” you say, exasperated. “You spent forty minutes telling me my shading was bad on that fucking sketch last week alone.”

Forty minutes is conservative. The drawing hadn’t even been part of the mid-term line up. It had been a warm up piece before you’d started on your actual project work, and yet he’d still gone off about how your light source had been inconsistent, that the still-life had lacked depth et cetera et cetera.

You’d seethed in the corner and attempted to burn holes through the back of his head with your venomous gaze for the rest of the evening, but he hadn’t noticed a thing. He rarely does.

To his credit, Ford looks embarrassed now that you’ve brought it up. He adjusts his glasses nervously. “That's not- I don't do that because I think you're bad,” he assures you. “I do it because I can see where you'd be even greater. I just… Thought it might help.”

You stare at him. Out of all the reasons for him to be so pushy, he thought he was helping? “We hate each other, Ford, why would you even want to help me get better?”

“‘Hate each other’?” Ford says, only growing more confused. “I don't hate you. On the contrary, I thought we were having fun…. Are you…. Not having fun?”

You stare at him as though he's just sprouted a third eye. “But, in class- all we do is fight and argue, and-”

“That's just good debate, isn't it?” Ford says with an awkward laugh. “Did you- Don't tell me you thought I hated you?”

Well, now you feel like a total fucking idiot. “I mean, can you blame me?” You say defensively. “You’re hard to get a read on. I’m not exactly a telepath.”

Ford gives you a shy, lopsided grin and rubs the back of his neck, bashful. “Right, right. Sorry,” he says, the first apology you’ve ever heard from his mouth. “I suppose I assumed you could handle the way I am sometimes, what with the way you work in class,” he admits.

“Fiddleford, my roommate,” he explains, “He says I can be… What was the word he used?.... ‘Difficult’,” Here, Ford puts dramatic air quotes around his roommate's statement and it’s enough to make you smile a bit, watery and weak.

“How very diplomatic of him,” you hiccup a laugh and Ford smiles again, the skin at the corners of his eyes wrinkling. There's a compliment hidden in his words when you turn them over in your mind: I thought you could handle the way I am.

“He’s much better at being tactful than I am,” Ford admits, looking a bit sad about the fact. “I’m afraid I’m not the best at all this social stuff. If I gave you the wrong idea about it all then….. That wasn't my intention.”

He's looking at you strangely, his eyes searching yours in the silence. He almost looks guilty. It's as though something has flicked a switch inside of him and for a moment, the impossibly high walls with which he surrounds himself have lowered fractionally. Only a little, but enough for you to catch a glimpse of something…. Softer.

Up this close, you can read the minute changes of his expression far easier than when he's across the classroom or buried behind a book. You’re not sure you’ve ever been so near to him before, not face to face like this, anyway, and you can see all the shades of brown in his eyes.

He’s got wonderfully long lashes, thick and curved in a way that would make even a beauty queen weep with envy, and a smattering of very light freckles across his strong nose. The bridge of it is curved and convex, a Roman-esque quality that only adds to the subtly strong features of his face and balances out the harsher lines of his face.

You worry your lower lip between your teeth, brain caught in a loop of cataloguing his features. He really isn’t all that bad looking up close….

Ford’s gaze drops to your mouth. The movement barely lasts point-five of a second, hardly long enough to even really take note of before he aborts it in motion, the two of you sharing a slightly awkward laugh. A redness tints the tops of his cheeks.

The familiar scent of his subtle aftershave wafts towards you again, and you’re reminded of when he’d stood behind you during that studio session a week or so ago.

You swallow thickly and look away to quell the funny feeling that makes your stomach flutter nervously. You’ll blame your vulnerable state for that.

Desperate to find something to distract yourself with, you look down to where he's nervously toying with the brown leather band of his wristwatch. The sleeves of his chequered shirt are rolled up today, exposing his forearms and showing off the threads of veins that stand out under the skin, and you follow them down to his hands in the hopes of finding a way to avoid examining from whatever dangerous territory your thoughts are trying to wander into.

And boy, do you find one.

Momentarily, you wonder if the tears in your eyes are blurring your vision too much to see straight. You've no idea how you’ve never noticed it before. You’ve seen him painting, seen him gesticulating wildly when he’s gotten passionate about something you’ve challenged him with, and yet somehow, the realisation has completely slipped past you.

When you react, you don’t think about what you’re doing. You're too caught up in your desperation and your shock to really consider that the move might be unwelcome or rude: You just do it.

“Oh, my god,” you murmur, reaching out for him. “You do have six fingers.”

Rumours about Ford’s hands have always floated around school, but you’ve never given them much credence. You’re not one to care about physical features like that; life isn’t a freak show and you’re not part of a baying townsfolk who want to point and laugh at someone else, so you’ve always glossed over them. But when the realisation takes you by surprise so suddenly, you act without considering the consequences.

Like your touch has scolded him, Ford yanks his hands back and steps back, away from you. He looks panicked, as though you’ve just announced his worst fears aloud, and you watch in real time as those castle walls come crashing down all over again.

The redness on his face burns brighter than ever before, a deep rouge that soaks across his cheeks and ears like watercolours on paper, and you’re not sure you’ve ever seen him look so humiliated. His eye contact drops and his expression shifts from panic to anger.

“Look, hate me if you must but I’d rather you not make a big deal about that,” he says stiffly.

“What? What are you talking about?” You frown, shaking your head. His demeanour has changed so suddenly that it makes your head spin more than the smell of white spirit does after cleaning your oil palettes. “I wouldn't-”

Ford bumps into your abandoned chair in his haste to retreat, sending it skittering backward until it rocks onto its side with a clatter. He hurriedly snatches up the textbooks he'd left on a nearby desk earlier and shoves his glasses up his nose again, righting them from where they've slipped down in his hurry.

“If you need time to catch up on your end of the project, then just- Just say the word and I'll finish it alone,” he snaps.

And then he's scrambling from the room, shoulders up around his ears and posture slumped as he wrenches the door open and exits as quickly as he'd entered, leaving you to stare after him in utter disbelief.

What the fuck?

..

Ford doesn't show up to the next study session. He leaves a note on your desk that reads ‘caught up in physics, will see you next time’, which really makes no sense because he'd have to come all the way across campus from the science labs to deliver it. If he was that busy, surely he'd have just left you to it?

Alas, he doesn't make an appearance at the session and he doesn't approach you afterwards to check on your progress, either.

You can see that he's finished his paintings, however. They sit at the back of the spare studio, right near where you work after hours, and you've been admiring them all week.

He has a nice little collection of pieces now, including a moody looking wendigo oil painting and a very pretty study in watercolour of a type of flower that you're not botanically inclined enough to know the name of, but you've a sneaking suspicion it's the gross one that smells like corpses.

You're even mildly disappointed that you haven't had the chance to ask him about it and then watch him passionately lecture you on its ins and outs and whatever else he might find fascinating about unusual flora.

It’s not like you miss him, though. Obviously not. If he was here, he’d just be insufferable about it all, of course, and throw off your creative vibe with all his science talk. At the start of the project, after you’d seen all the physics books he carried on his person so often, you’d made the mistake of politely asking about his lab work and then been subjected to a full hour of listening to him harp on about topics that might as well have been in a foreign language to you.

But then the way he’d just sort of….Lit up about it all had been strangely breathtaking. He had practically burst into fucking flames of passion about molecules and dimensions and all sorts of things the moment you’d shown even the most tepid bit of interest that you hadn’t had the heart to stop him.

He’d looked so alive, so much more animated than you’d ever seen him, and something about it had been horribly endearing.

Still, you totally don’t miss that. Not his wild gesticulating, not the way he would run his hands through his hair in concentration and leave it all fluffy and stupid right after. The way he would chew his lip as he watched you paint.

Definitely not. Too annoying and far too distracting, for reasons you’d rather not study too closely.

In class, Ford barely looks at you. He doesn’t say hello, he doesn't bring up the project, he doesn’t even acknowledge your presence when you attempt to talk to him on the way out of class, either.

It feels awful.

You try to tempt him into debate a few times but shockingly, he doesn't rise to it. Instead, he looks everywhere but at you, jaw tight and head bowed, and he even pretends not to notice when you purposely get a history fact wrong in the hopes he might feel compelled to correct you. That’s the moment you realise that something is seriously wrong.

You hate to admit it, but the lack of challenge and his avoidance is making you so fucking miserable that even the other students have begun to pick up on it.

You’ve been moping about so much recently that Melissa and Jennifer have dragged you along to a party under the guise of getting you so insanely drunk that you might either admit what’s pissing you off or forget about it altogether.

As far as you’re aware, none of them know the real reason for your melancholy and they’re putting it down to academic stress. They’re not entirely wrong in that vein anyway, and you suppose it might be good to focus on something else (and chug free booze), so you agree.

Which is why you find yourself standing about on the quad this evening, dressed up as nicely as you can be bothered to be, and milling around while you wait for the others to get their act together and head over to the East Wing dormitories where the party is taking place.

The group is made up of yourself, Jennifer, Melissa, and Melissa's boyfriend Jamie, plus one of his idiot friends that you're too annoyed by to ask their name.

The others are already drunk enough that it's been a challenge in and of itself to herd them downstairs and out into the open night air, and getting them to actually follow you across campus is proving equally as hard.

You're only slightly buzzed; barely a couple of clear-liquor drinks in so far and not at all as wasted as you'd like to be if this is going to set the tone for the evening.

Frustrated, you roll your eyes at where Jamie and his buddies are attempting to show the other girls how many people they can lift with just one arm, and step away. “Are we planning on actually making it to this dumb party, or do I have to watch you guys try and put your backs out all night?” You ask, not even attempting to hide the annoyance in your voice.

Melissa laughs and shakes her head. “Oh come on, you're no fun!” She says, coming to your side to hang off your arm. “Live a little!”

The bag on your shoulder, the one you carry with you everywhere, slips down a little at her insistent touch and you huff, pulling away to correct it. It's less filled than it usually is tonight, only holding your purse, your keys, and the small, reliable, battered sketchbook that you always keep close just in case inspiration hits.

“I'm living vicariously through you,” you tell her dryly. “But right now I'm cold and I want a fucking drink, so can we please just get a move on already?” The night air is cool enough to prickle gooseflesh on your bare arms and you rub at them insistently.

“Take my jacket, babe,” says the other jock, lumbering over in the hopes of winning favour.

“Thanks, but I’m good,” you refuse, wrinkling your nose a little. You really don’t want to give him the wrong idea and let him think he’s got an in with you. You know how these types are, after all.

“God, lighten up already!” Jamie scoffs, swaggering along with one arm thrown around Melissa. “You're being such a bitch tonight.”

You open your mouth to inform him that you're most assuredly not being a bitch but that you'd be very happy to show him what you're like when you are, when Jennifer cuts you off.

“Working with Stanford Pines for whoever-the-fuck knows how long will do that to a person,” she snorts. “That's enough to turn anyone into a dick.”

Jamie and his buddy gawp at you. “No kiddin’?” The jock says, a broad, blonde spectacle with unsettling blue eyes. “You’re in with that fuckin’ loser? Bummer, dude.”

“Oh yeah,” Melissa giggles. “All we hear these days is how much he sucks. Says he's a real asshole….”

“What's he doing in an art class?” He asks. You think his name might be Riley. “Isn't he like, a total math geek or whatever?”

Before you can interrupt, Jamie laughs, obnoxious and scathing. “Oh yeah, totally. I bet he only gets hard for science, right?” He says, grinning nastily toward you. “Or have you been- What's that guy called…. Purlow? Pavlov? That's it, Pavlov!” He snaps his fingers together, clearly pleased at the chance to flex some of his psychology minor in front of the girls. “You been Pavlov-in’ him to get hard another way?”

“Ew!” The girls collapse into giggles.

You grit your teeth. “Wow, Jamie, it's so cool that you know such a big word!” You grind out, jaw flexing. “I didn't know they taught Psych 101 in Kindergarten.”

“Hey, fuck you-”

“And,” you keep going, temper rising not least because of the topic. “For your information, we've just been doing a project together. It wasn't exactly by choice and anyway, he won't even talk to me anymore so problem solved, I guess.”

“Wait, is that why you two stopped fighting in class all the time?” Asks Jen, suddenly intrigued. “Did something happen?” Her intonation is suggestive and you know she's probably coming up with wild theories in her mind already.

Melissa squeals. “Oh my god, did you finally fuck him?!”

“No!” You say immediately, shaking your head. “Nothing like that!”

The boys guffaw and shove each other around, jeering and laughing. “That's fuckin’ gross,” says Riley, “Who would wanna screw him?”

“Hey, I heard he’s got six fingers,” sniggers Jennifer. “I bet that makes a difference, huh?”

“God, shut up,” you mutter, rolling your eyes. “I told you, it’s not-”

“What a fucking freak,” laughs Jamie.

“He’s a loser, babe,” scoffs Riley, attempting to put an arm around your shoulders again. “You need a real man, not a fuckin’ dork like that. I bet he-!”

“Look, he’s not that bad!” You interrupt, raising your voice a bit and shucking the boy’s arm off of you. “He’s not- He isn’t a total asshole all the time, okay? And he’s not a freak, that’s not cool. Don’t talk about him like that.”

Truthfully, you say it accidentally. You don’t mean to defend him and especially not to this particular group of people, but they’re being so mean spirited and these jocks are such dickheads that you feel dirty even allowing them to say as much as they have.

All’s fair in love and war between you and Ford; going back and forth with one another is purely business. It never reduces to calling the other person names or taking low blows like this, and it feels weird to let other people outright bully him. Especially over his hands.

You think that might be the cause of his whole meltdown earlier this week, and even the thought of him overhearing such cruelty makes you feel sicker than any amount of alcohol could.

The others stare at you like you’ve announced you intend to swan dive from the campus clocktower and momentarily, all of them are silent. That is, until Jamie opens his big mouth again: “What are you, like, in love with him or something?”

You feel your face suddenly begin to get very warm. “What?” You laugh, trying to sound dismissive. “No! God, no! Of course I’m not! I just-”

“Holy shit,” Jennifer says, a slow grin spreading on her face as she puts the puzzle pieces together. “You’re totally into him, aren’t you? That’s why you’ve been so lame recently! You’re all sad that he won’t talk to you!”

“No!” You refute, holding your hands up defensively. “No! It’s nothing like that!”

Your bag slips down your shoulder again and Jennifer grabs it without warning, dragging it off of your person and procuring your sketching journal.

“You’re such a liar,” she says, laughing, “Look, here,” She opens the journal to the page that your pencil is lodged into and flaunts it to the others. “I saw you drawing these last free sesh’ when he wasn’t in class! Makes total sense now….”

You instantly know exactly what she’s showing them: In free sessions, you’re given time to practise areas you might need to improve upon, and Ford had mentioned your anatomy a while ago. You’d taken it on board, however testily, and found yourself sketching away that afternoon.

Only, what you’d been drawing had been Ford’s anatomy. Nothing lewd, obviously, but something still intimate: his hands.

Ever since noticing them, you’ve been intrigued. Call it fate from the theme of your project, but something about them has drawn you in and you’ve struggled to forget them. They’re fascinating and beautiful and very weirdly him, and maybe yes okay you've been having some complicated feelings about him recently but does everybody need to know?!

Jamie laughs at you, snatching the book from Jen and inspecting the sketches up close. “Holy shit,” he says. “You’re made for each other, pair of freaks!”

“Fuck off, Jamie!” you snap, face burning. You try to snatch the book back and he holds it aloft, out of your reach. “Give it back!”

“No way!” He jeers, and then he glances off above your head and his ugly grin grows even wider. “Hey, check it out…. There’s your boyfriend now! Why don’t we ask Fordsy what he thinks of these?”

Much to your utter horror and absolute distress, when you turn to see where Jamie is pointing, you spot Ford striding across campus. He’s wearing an argyle sweater and brown slacks (and bless him, he really does look like a nerd), and he seems to be heading towards his own dorm.

He hasn’t spotted your group yet and silently, you pray that Jamie is just trying to rile you up.

Except, Jamie gives less of a fuck about your prayers than the universe itself does. He raises one shovel sized hand and yells out to him: “Yo, Stanford! Hold up a minute there, buddy!”

Ford freezes on the spot and turns your way, eyes wide like a rabbit in headlights. He looks confused.

“Jamie, don’t you dare!” You hiss, attempting to kick at the bigger man’s shins as he strides past you. It does nothing to stop him and instead, you turn to Jennifer. “Do something!” You say, and you hate how much it sounds like begging.

“Take a chill pill already,” Jennifer laughs. “He’s just kidding around.”

It takes great self control not to tear your own (or her) hair out as the rest of the group trot after Jamie.

Petrified, you jog along to catch up with them and by the time you reach them again, they’re already collaring Stanford.

Jamie slings a heavy handed arm around Ford’s shoulders, knocking his glasses askew, and he jerks him about a bit. “How’s it hangin’, buddy?” He asks, grinning. “Up to no good?”

“What?” Ford says, both annoyed at being stopped by such a group and awkward about how to deal with the interaction.

Jamie rolls his eyes and shakes his head, dramatically playing it up for the sake of the others. “What are you up to tonight, man?”

“Oh,” Ford shrugs. “I just finished at the library, I was going home. That’s all.”

Jamie laughs and the others join in. “On a Friday night, dude?”

“Is…. Is there a more suitable night to do it on?” Ford asks, sounding genuinely curious, and oh god your heart breaks for him.

The boys share a look of incredulity and laugh amongst themselves as you elbow your way through them. They part after a second, with some sharp elbow pokes to persuade them to move, and you stop in front of Ford and Jamie, hoping you don't look as distressed as you feel.

Ford's expression hardens the moment he notices you. It's obvious he's about as pleased to see you as he is to see the others and although, admittedly, that stings more than it has any right to, you half hope it might work in your favour to get him to leave.

“Hi, Ford,” you say, hoping you sound both casual and suggestive enough to let him know he should run for the hills. “Why don’t you get outta here and we’ll just-”

“Woah, woah,” says Jamie, cutting in before you can finish your sentence. “Not so fast, man. I have a question!”

Ford's frown deepens and he looks over at Jamie. Although the jock is tall, Ford matches his height well enough that, other than his lack of muscle, means that he doesn’t seem to be quite as intimidated as somebody of a smaller stature might be. That being said, he still looks decidedly uncomfortable with the whole affair.

“Uh, sure…?” Ford says, shrugging one shoulder. “What can I do for you?”

Jamie stifles a laugh and looks to the others, who similarly struggle to keep their laughter contained.

You know where he’s taking this topic. He’s still holding your sketchbook, waving it around to punctuate his words. “Jamie, leave it alone, stop being-”

“Come on, don't be such a square!” Melissa laughs, and Jamie is quick to agree.

“Is it true you've got extra fingers, Fordsy?” Asks Jamie, through the most horrible shit-eating grin you've ever seen. “According to certain sources,” He winks dramatically at you, implicating you in his plan. “You're rockin’ six on each hand, right? That’s far out, man. ”

Ford pales and simultaneously turns a deep shade of crimson, and his gaze snaps immediately to you. “What?” He says, his usually deep voice suddenly weak.

“You heard me, check it out,” Jamie flips open your sketchbook and you know he's showing Ford the pages of your sketching study.

Ford's brows knit upwards as he realises what he's looking at, distress and anger clear on his handsome face, and your blood turns to ice.

He looks devastated, eyes scanning back and forth over your work like he can't believe what he's seeing. Rather than seize the book for a closer look, you watch as he slips his hands into the pockets of his pants, hiding them from the view of everyone else, and your heart squeezes unpleasantly in your chest.

The subtle way that he does it makes you realise this is probably not the first time he's pulled such a move.

“You…. You drew these? Of me?” He asks in a small voice, glancing up at you. There's such a dejected sadness in his eyes that you almost want to be sick.

“No!” You say immediately. “I mean- Yes, I did, but not- I didn't draw them like tha-!”

“Some people must dig freaks, man, you're all over this shit!” Jamie chokes out through his laughter and the others follow suit.

“Shut up!” You snap at him before turning your attention back to Ford. “You don't understand! Yes, I drew them, but not because-!”

“I understand perfectly,” says Ford stiffly, and something steely and cold flashes in his gaze. He presses his mouth into a thin line and you can tell he's not just upset, but furious.

“Yeah,” Riley grins, stepping forward for his turn in the ring. “If you weren't doing it because you thought they were fuckin’ weird then why were you drawing them?”

“I….” Your voice dries up. What are you supposed to say? Because I think they're really stellar and unique, and I think you are too? Jamie and the others will eat you alive. The words just won't come and all you can do is stare back at Ford, equally as red faced and humiliated.

Jamie is still harping on about the sketches, pointing things out to Ford who isn't looking at anything he's being shown. He's just…. Staring right back at you with a mixture of genuine sadness and utter betrayal on his face.

You have to look away after a moment. It's too much to bear and you feel so awful that meeting his eye feels shameful. Although you know you haven't done anything with the intention of hurting him, you know how it must look.

When you tune back in, Jamie is still going: “-should be grateful you got to work with her, buddy. What other chance would a guy like you have to be friends with-”

You're not sure what makes you react, whether it's the combination of guilt and embarrassment, or whether it's simply because you've had enough of all this, but almost automatically, you step forward and shove Jamie away from Ford.

“Jamie, shut the fuck up,” you snap, pushing him as hard as you can manage in his stupidly broad chest. “Don't talk to him like that, asshole, it's not fucking cool. You're a piece of shit, man.”

Thankfully, the push is just about strong enough to get Jamie to stagger back a couple of paces and relinquish his grip from around Ford's shoulders. He stumbles and his laughter dies, along with the others.

“Hey!” He growls, stepping toward you and puffing out his chest. “What did you just say to me?”

This is exactly the reason you hate his type. They're loud and braggadocious and cruel, and they absolutely cannot take the heat themselves.

You square your shoulders back. You're nowhere near his size and if he decides to hit you then it'll be a permanent lights out for sure, but you're hoping he might at least realise his girlfriend would be upset if he knocked out her classmate. Desperately hoping, in fact….

“I said, stop. You're acting like a loser, leave him alone,” you say, admirably firm in spite of your nerves.

Jamie stomps over to you, teeth bared in a grotesque grimace. “You fuckin’ bitch, who are you callin’ a loser?!” He stretches out one hand as if to grab you and you brace yourself for the final nail in your coffin, when Ford abruptly steps between you both.

“That's enough,” he says firmly, sounding more fierce than you've ever heard him. “If you want to act like a child and bully me, do it. I don't care.” Ford glances back at you. “But don't drag other people into it just because you're a fucking drunken manchild who can't take it.”

For half a second, everything goes deathly silent. No one says a single word. All you do is gape at Ford in utter disbelief at his cutting words, as do the others. Even Jamie looks completely blindsided by it.

Clearly not finished, Ford keeps going, and this time it seems he’s talking more to you than to everyone else. “I don't need anyone to stick up for me, I'm not a child anymore. I’m perfectly capable of arguing against idiots like y-!”

Unfortunately for Ford, no matter how much you deserve his ire, with his attention on you instead of the threat, he completely misses Jamie reeling one of his big fists back and you watch in horror as he swings it in Ford’s direction.

You barely get the chance to let out an aborted shout of warning before Jamie’s knuckles collide solidly with Ford’s nose and send him stumbling back past you. They make a sickening crack! as the hit lands perfectly across his face, and Ford is sent sprawling on his ass in a lightning quick second.

Jamie moves as though he intends to follow Ford to the floor and keep hitting, but one of the other boys thankfully catches his fist and prevents him from going through with it. The group shout amongst themselves about it, evidently surprised by the sudden turn.

Instantly, you drop to your knees in the damp grass beside Ford and hover anxiously around him. Blood gushes out of his nose as soon as he hits the floor, cascading down over his lips and smattering onto the wool of his sweater, and his glasses are thrown from his face with the force. He groans in pain, his once hidden hands flying up to cradle his injury and to stem the bleeding. It does little to help.

“Oh, my god!” Your hands hover around his face helplessly, unsure where to touch him. “Fuck, Ford, are you-!”

“He’s fine,” says Jamie, waving away the concerns of the others. “Forget about him, we’re leaving.” He leans down to grab you by the arm but you smack him away angrily.

“Fuck off!” You shout, voice wavering. “You hit him!”

“So? He shouldn’t have mouthed off like that,” Jamie says, like it’s obvious. “Whatever, you wanna stay with him? Fine. Be two fuckin’ freaks together for all I care.”

He gestures for the others to follow him as he begins to walk towards the party dorm, carelessly tossing your sketchbook into the dirt beside Ford. You look up to the others for help, yet they only spare you a half-hearted sympathetic look before following the ringleader.

You want to yell after them, to tell them how pathetic they are laughing along, but for now you’ll have to save your anger. Instead, you root around in your bag for some spare tissues and quickly hold them up to Ford’s bloody face. “Shit,” you breathe, noticing just how much blood there is. “I’m taking you to the medical office, Ford.”

You grab his glasses and attempt to help him to his feet, however he shrugs you away. “Get lost,” he says thickly through the wall of blood on his mouth, snatching his glasses from your hands and shoving them into his pocket.

“What?” you say, confused as though you’re the one who’s just had your shit rocked. “Ford, you're hurt, let me help you!”

“I don't need your help!” he snaps, struggling to his feet.

You’re taken aback by his reaction, however he’s a little shaky, clearly discombobulated by the hit and the entire event, and even though he doesn't seem open to your touch, you catch him by the elbows to steady him.

He wipes his lips with the sleeve of his already-ruined sweater, dark blood swiping across the wool. It’s a fruitless effort; the gore is simply further smeared around his face. It does little to reduce the mess and everything to spread it, and Ford turns his head away from you to spit out the blood that's gathering in his mouth.

As soon it's clear that he can stand unassisted, Ford shakes off your tentative touch as though you're some kind of leper. He meets your eyes and the look he fixes you with is so searing that it's enough to turn your insides to liquid ice. He shoulders you aside and takes off across the lawn, ignoring a few curious onlookers and striding towards his dorm.

Momentarily, you’re too stunned to follow him. He’s never looked at you like that before and frankly, it fucking hurts. After all this time, after all of your disagreements and squabbles, Ford has never been quite so…. Disgusted with you.

As much as you might like to crawl under a rock in your ashamed state, you just can’t leave things like this. Besides, he might be seriously hurt beyond what you can see; that punch was solid and Ford isn’t much of a fighter, not to your knowledge anyway. If he dropped dead of a brain bleed or something equally as awful and dramatic, you’d never forgive yourself.

Frankly, you’re not sure you ever will anyway.

You shove your sketchbook back into your bag and take off after him, jogging across the damp grass to try and catch up with his purposeful movements.

“Ford!” You call out to his retreating back. “Wait up!”

He does no such thing. His stride doesn’t even falter at your request.

You push onwards, trying to tamp down the frustration you feel and speeding up just enough to reach his side as he swings open the door to his building, leaving a smear of blood across the handle. “Stanford!”

“Stop following me!” Ford snaps over his shoulder. He lets it fall heavily back onto you without even glancing in your direction.

You ignore him, chasing after his back. The building is surprisingly quiet for a Friday evening; there are usually at least a few students milling about in the halls, whether they’re looking to party or just avoid studying for a few hours, most of the time there’s someone about.

Not tonight though, it seems. Perhaps they’re all off to the party you’re supposed to be attending…..

As you follow Ford down the North hallway, past the walls of pigeon hole letterboxes and glass cases of alumni photos, you try again to stop him. “Ford, come on, you’re bleeding everywhere. Just stop a second, please,” you cajole. “What if you have a concussion?”

Ford still doesn’t answer. He keeps power walking down the corridor, taking a sharp right and barrelling into what seems to be a common area.

There are couches and chairs pushed towards the corners of the room, arranged around mismatched tables and strewn with remnants of earlier life: styrofoam coffee cups and screwed up pieces of paper, and even a couple of crumpled beer cans.

As he passes through, Ford shows no signs of slowing and your frustration rises. “Look, you can be mad at me all you want but please just let me take you to the nurse’s office!”

“I’m fine,” Ford says, voice strained in a way that betrays how much he definitely is not fine. It’s a sick parody of your last conversation in the studio.

He starts to speed up again, nearly jogging now in his determination to escape you as he approaches the farthest side of the room, and despite the way your breath is already burning in your lungs, you force yourself to match his stride.

The shaky way he dismisses your worry only upsets you more and in your unfit desperation, before he can reach for the exit, you jerk out a hand and grab the sleeve of his sweater, snatching him back by the fabric at his elbow. “No, you’re-!”

“Let go of me!” Ford rounds on you, shoulders squared and chin jutted upward like he expects you to be the next person to fight him. He halts so suddenly that you almost crash into him, stepping into your space and causing you to stumble back a few paces.

He’s tall enough to be intimidating when he draws himself up fully like this but you refuse to let him make you back off.

“No!” you shout back, keeping a firm hold of his sweater as best you can. “Let me help you, Ford, I can explain-!”

“Did you all have a good laugh?!” Ford asks bitterly, cutting you off. He seizes your wrist, his grip tight over where you’re clutching onto him. “About my hands? About me?! When you showed them those sketches, did it feel good to win their stupid approval?”

He squeezes your wrist tightly and you grit your teeth, acquiescing your hold on him and releasing his sweater. The blood on his fingers smears across your skin, cool and coagulated, and he uses a strength you didn’t know he possessed to hold you still.

“It's not like that!” You say, breath hitching. “I didn't draw those for anybody but myself.”

“Bullshit!” Ford snarls, jerking your wrist back and forth. “I know you're lying!”

“It's the truth!” You snap, hackles rising at his roughness and his accusations.

Tonight has been full of mistakes on your part, sure, but if Ford won't even let you explain then how are you supposed to even��try and fix all this?! “Jamie and the others grabbed my sketchbook off of me, Ford. I didn't give it to them! That stuff was private!”

“Then why would you even have things like that in there?!” Ford yells back, scowling.

“Because I- It wasn’t supposed to be-” You stumble over your words as you shout back at him, anger and humiliation lodging them in your throat, and Ford seizes the opportunity to scold you further.

“Exactly! Stop lying to me!”

“I’m not lying to you, Ford!” You wrench your hand from his grip, fed up with his claims. For all your guilt, you’re not going to let him just shout and scream at you in a public hallway until he deigns you with the opportunity to explain yourself. “I wouldn’t do something like that, no matter how little you think of me!” You say, jabbing him in the chest with your finger a few times.

You rock up on your toes to try and draw your faces level as you bark back and forth at each other. “They were the ones who brought it up, not me! I was telling them to stop!”

Ford’s jaw flexes with each jab of your finger, lip twitching with anger. “Yeah, right.” He laughs, scathing. “You think I missed how you reacted in the studio earlier this week? I mean, was that even the first time you realised or was it just the first time you saw me up so close that you couldn’t help yourself? I know you think I'm a freak, just like everyone else does! That's why you drew those- those fucking caricatures of my hands and you laughed it up with your stupid little friends about me!”

“No, I-!” idiot

Ford jabs a finger into your chest, right above your heart, mirroring your pose to him and pressing down hard as he shouts in your face, like a haughty parent telling off their unruly child. “You know, I hate to admit this, really I do, but I'm actually disappointed in you! I had hoped it wasn’t like that between us! I enjoyed that you disliked me because I’m smarter than you, because I’m a better artist than you are, and not because of my hands. Everybody else goes straight for the obvious bait because they can never compare to the rest of me, but I suppose you must be just like your asshat, jock buddies afterall!”

“I am not-!” You attempt to shout over him, to interrupt his tirade, but Ford keeps going, poking you hard again.

“And do you want to know the worst part about all of this?” He demands, looking borderline insane with wide eyes and blood all over his face. “The worst part is that your sketches were fucking terrible! Your anatomy is just as shitty as it was the day we met!”

Like a dam, your limited composure breaks. The insult is small in comparison to all his other harsh words, some of which you can even admit you might deserve, but his obnoxiousness has grown steadily like a snowball careening down a slippery slope and gathering mass, and that’s the final nail in the coffin for you.

“You know what, Ford? Fuck you!” You shout, driving your own finger back into his broad chest as hard as you can and poking him with every word. Your breath comes in short, sharp pants as you lay into him, your noses almost touching as neither of you back down to the other.

“Fuck you! You fucking idiot! You don’t know anything about how I feel. Do I think you're an asshole with a god complex? Absolutely! Do other people say all kinds of shit about your hands? Of course they do! But I never cared enough to actually check how many fingers you have! The other day in the studio, that was the first time I ever even noticed it! ! I never thought that you were a freak, Stanford, not even once!”

Something strange falters in Ford's expression but you barrel onward, refusing to give him the chance to come back at you.

“Our entire project is about uniqueness, you stupid fucking idiot!” You continue, desperately fighting the thick lump that rises in your throat and the burning that prickles the corners of your eyes. You're so exhausted and worked up, so humiliated and angry, and this is the fallout of everything at once. There's no stopping it now.

“I mean, for god's sake, we talked about how much we both like unusual things! That's why we picked that fucking topic, Ford! I like odd shit! I wasn't drawing your hands so that I could show my so-called friends and laugh about it with them, you moron! I was drawing your hands because I can't stop fucking thinking about them or how pretty they are, or how fucking pretty you are and if you just listened to me for once in your stupid-!”

You don't even get to finish your sentence before Ford's mouth is on yours, hot and determined, in the fiercest kiss you think you’ve ever experienced.

You're not sure who moves first.

With barely a whisper between the two of you it's hard to tell, but in a flash the distance is closed and your hands are twisted in the front of his dirty sweater, leveraging him down as he backs you up into the closest wall.

Ford makes a guttural sound, the kind that rumbles in your chest, and one of his hands gropes blindly at your waist as he returns the kiss whilst the other plants itself beside your head on the wall.

He’s clumsy and unskilled, and you’re pretty certain you can feel wet blood smearing across your own face as he presses into you, yet he’s so enthusiastic that you can’t bring yourself to care much about any of that right now. It just feels so fucking good.

He tastes like coffee and copper, and his musky aftershave overwhelms your senses again, enveloping you as he presses even closer along your front. Ford's broad form is warm against your exposed skin where his weight pins you up against the wall. He's clearly been tipped off of balance by the motion and without his quick thinking of walking you back to the surface, you're sure you'd have bowled over by now.

Your hands slip up from the front of his sweater to tangle in his thick, curly hair, fingers catching in amongst the strands to pull him in until he's melting against you, pliant under your touch. It's evident that he doesn't have much practice at this and that, combined with the fervour of the motion, makes the kiss sloppy.

As foggy as your brain is right now, you manage to conjure just one silly thought as you coax his tongue with your own: Finally. Something I am better than him at.

Ford gives another groan at the sensation and almost instinctively, he slides a leg between yours. It's not clear if he knows how arousing it is or whether he's simply trying to balance himself better, but it does wonders for you all the same.

Warmth burns in the pit of your stomach, a molten hot interest that takes you by such surprise it practically has stars blooming behind your closed eyelids.

It feels like this is the catalyst: the final moment that’s been building and building between you both ever since Ford arrived in Studio 1B. Rivalries and arguments that on the surface, had appeared to everyone but the two of you as a sign of more than just academic passion and the desperate need to be right. Everything has led to this and god, does it feel spectacular.

The tangy flavour of blood begins to overwhelm Ford's spit and just as you tilt your head to up the ante, sighing happily against his mouth, your nose catches his in the motion and Ford rips himself away with a yelp of pain.

“Fuck!” He cries, letting go of your waist and pushing off the wall to cradle his nose.

You start, completely having forgotten about his injury, and rush to his aide. “Shit! I’m so sorry, I didn’t even think-”

More blood trickles out from his nostrils, though thankfully not quite as much as on the initial hit, and winces. “Probably not the wisest of ideas in this state,” Ford mutters thickly, but he's giving you a lopsided smile that's big enough that you can tell he doesn't seem to mind too much. You can even see the blood that's settled in the gaps of his teeth.

A similar expression crosses your own face: a shy, stupid grin tugging at your mouth as you both share the same pleasantly surprised, if disbelieving, look. A few moments of silence follow the halting of the kiss and your situational awareness creeps back in.

The abrupt reminder of his injuries and the fact that you're likely equally now covered in blood, coupled with the fact that you're both still in a public space is enough to kick the sensible part of your brain into action.

You clear your throat and push up off the wall, straightening your clothing where Ford has left it rumpled with his wandering hands. “We should probably get you cleaned up before we….” You trail off, unsure of exactly where you mean for your train of thought to go.

Ford nods, understanding. “Right. Of course.”

“I’ll walk you to your room,” you say, gesturing for him to show you the way. “If you won’t go to the nurse then at least let me fix you up a bit.”

Ford nods again, cheeks flushed, and takes you through the double doors you’d stood by barely five minutes ago, leading you deeper into the building. He’s only living on the second floor with his roommate and thankfully, it doesn’t take too long for you to reach his dorm.

There still aren’t many students hanging around up here and the ones that are are far too preoccupied with their own business to even spare a glance at you both. You suppose that without engaging in a screaming match, you can pass by covered in whatever substance you like without drawing attention.

“F is out visiting his parents this weekend,” Ford explains as he unlocks the door to his room and lets you inside. “It’ll just be us.”

“‘F’?” You ask, stepping into the darkness.

“Fiddleford, my diplomatic roommate,” Ford says, and even in the dark you can hear the smile in his voice.

“Ah, I remember,” you grin.

Ford fumbles around until he finds his desk lamp, flicking it on and filling the room with a soft, warm glow. It makes the mess on his face look an otherworldly black. He busies himself with rummaging around in the bottom drawer of what you presume to be his personal desk that sits at the side of his bed, and you take the opportunity to absorb his living space.

All the dorms in Backupsmore are built the same: cheaply and efficiently with the bare minimum added, and Ford’s is no different. The far wall is exposed brick, with a broad window in its centre, while the other walls are covered in drab, ochre wallpaper.

Above Ford’s half-made bed is the navy BMU flag along with a few posters that are, frankly, quite adorable. There’s one of Tesla posed before his famous coils and another of Sagan, with what you can only describe as an alarmingly seductive look on his face. Admittedly, Sagan is quite the looker, as is Tesla when you really consider it, so you can hardly blame Ford for his choices.

Nestled around the posters are books. Lots of books. All packed in tightly on cheap shelves and those that won’t fit with their partners are stacked up around the room in untidy piles. You can count at least six different stacks by his bed alone, most of which seem to vary from physics to astronomy to advanced mathematics.

Ford must catch you taking it all in because he clears his throat awkwardly and you break away from your staring to look at him directly. “Sorry,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. “I don’t really get any company in here besides Fidds, so it’s a little messy.”

You laugh quietly. If only he could see the state of your room…. “Don’t worry about it,” you assure him. “Nobody comes to college to be tidy.”

Careful not to disturb their precarious resting places, you pick your way around the book piles and take a seat on the edge of his bed.

Ford joins you after he adjusts the desk lamp to shine directly over you, carrying a small white plastic box and setting it between you both. He retrieves his glasses from his pocket and puts them beside the box so he can sit comfortably.

You realise it’s a proper medical kit. “Do you just happen to carry around a first aid box with you all the time?”

Ford huffs a laugh as he clicks it open and roots through it to find what he needs. “When you get bullied enough as a kid, you start to learn that carrying around things like first aid come in pretty handy sooner or later.”

He says it so casually that your heart squeezes in your chest. “Ford….” You say, soft and slightly pained. “That’s awful, you know that, right?”

Ford shrugs one shoulder, procuring some sterile wipes and plasters from the kit. “You get used to it.”

You want to tell him that that's ludicrous, that he shouldn't have to do any such thing, but you know how cruel people can be. It's not like he can do much to stop them anyway; Ford fights back intellectually, not physically, and talking back to someone in the way he has done tonight has only worked out poorly for him. Rather than reply, you put your hand on his knee and he pauses in his motion of opening the wipes.

“If anyone gives you trouble again, tell me,” you say with a smile. “I'll put white spirit in their coffee.”

“Thanks,” Ford laughs and you can see the upset tension leave his shoulders a bit. “I’d rather not kill anyone over it, but that’s very kind of you…. In a weird, unethical sort of way.”

He goes to use the wipes on his face but you stop him, taking the packet from his hands and plucking a couple out. Ford lets you do it without any quarrel, watching you closely.

The blood isn't too thick when you begin to wipe it away, although it has begun to oxidise into a more congealed state, and carefully you start to swipe it away underneath his nose.

For a few minutes, Ford observes you in silence before finally speaking up again: "Did you really draw my hands because you like them?" He asks, voice quiet.

You don't meet his eyes as you take hold of his chin, gently tilting his head towards the light a little more. "Yes," is all you reply, praying he doesn't pick up on your embarrassment.

The area you're working on is close enough to his mouth that you catch him bite down on a smile, and you try to fight your own grin by doubling your focus on your work. Neither of you press the matter.

You clean up over his philtrum and his lips, covering your thumb with the wipe and swiping it across his closed mouth slowly. You swear you do it only to ensure that you’re being gentle, but you can hear Ford’s breath catch in his throat with the movement and you’re not immune to the intimacy of the act.

Despite not looking directly at him, you can feel his gaze boring into you. You imagine this must be how his science experiments feel, pinned down under his watchful eye and dissected by observation. Admittedly, it’s not the worst feeling in the world….

Once the blood is gone from his face, you turn your attention to the rest of his injury. The hit must have been solid; a strong blow square on the nose. There’s a fairly clean cut across the bridge, probably from both the force and the metal of his glasses biting into the thin skin there. The edges are raw and reddened, and already you can see a purplish bruise beginning to spread from the cut outwards towards his left eye.

“I don’t think it’s broken, thank god,” you murmur, dabbing the cut gently. “But you’re gonna have one hell of a bruise for a while.”

Ford winces slightly. “That’ll be humiliating to explain.”

“People will think Jamie is the embarrassment, Ford, trust me,” you assure him. “All you did was stand up for yourself…. And for me. Thank you for that, by the way. You really didn’t need to-”

“He was going to hit you.” Ford interrupts. “I didn’t want that, no matter how upset I was.”

“Maybe, but it’s not like I didn’t deserve it.”

Ford catches you by the wrist where you’re finishing with his nose, lowering your hand, and you meet his gaze. He's looking at you like you've said the stupidest thing imaginable. “No, you didn't,” he says, so firmly that you find yourself unable to argue.

“I still should have done something sooner, Ford. This whole thing is my fault,” you say, shaking your head. “I swear that I didn't draw those sketches of you because I wanted to show the others, and definitely not because I think you're weird. I'm sorry that I didn't just admit everything before things got so out of control, but I meant what I said earlier.”

“I think it's fairly clear that we both misunderstood each other, wouldn't you agree?” Ford says with a tiny smile. “I overreacted in the studio without thinking and I didn't want to bring it up in case you really did think I was a freak. I'm not sure I could've taken it, to be honest.”

“Is that why you've been avoiding me all this time? Skipping sessions and stuff?” You frown.

Ford's cheeks stain red, visible even in the low light, and he looks away with a nod, abashed.

“Why not just talk to me, you idiot?” You say, not unkindly.

It's evident that he's embarrassed to go further into detail, but he's piqued your interest now. It's too late to play coy and he probably knows it.

“I….” Ford huffs, still not meeting your eye. “Fidds is my only friend here and, well…. Even when you and I argued in class you were never cruel about it. You held your own and I respected that. I still do. That's why I assumed we were having fun,” he says, recalling your discussion in the studio last week.

“And then we started working together. I suppose I expected it to be terrible but you talked to me like I was just another normal person. You asked me about myself. No one ever does that….” Ford says, looking so wistful that your heart threatens to break further. “Usually it’s about my hands or my brain, or ‘Ford, can you do my essay for me?’, ‘Ford, can I copy your test?’, and it was just so different that I suppose I hoped we might eventually become friends. When you saw my hands and reacted out of nowhere, I worried that you'd wind up being just like the others, so I avoided asking so I didn't have to have my fears confirmed.”

You struggle to form the words that you desperately want to say. Not out of humiliation or fear this time, but because the lump in your throat is so big that nothing seems to be able to get past it beyond a weak sounding: “Ford….”

“That was wrong of me, I know,” he continues. “Old habits die hard and all that…. Plus, I can't say my intentions were wholly pure, but that is mostly your fault.”

That's enough to startle a laugh from you. “Oh?”

Ford smiles to himself and takes a deep breath, like he's finally admitting to a deep secret. “You're very attractive, I couldn't really help it…. Why do you think I kept standing so close to you in the studio?”

You can feel your cheeks burn and you smile, stupid and shy. Slipping free of his grip, you take his hand in your own and lace your fingers together. The fit is unusual with his extra appendage but you find that it's quite nice to have your palm so entirely encompassed.

Ford is surprised by the action, staring down at where you're holding him.

“Look at me, Stanford,” you command, and he does exactly as you ask without hesitation.

You use your free hand to grab his glasses from the bed and, mindful to avoid irritating the cut, you slide them onto his face gently so that he can see you properly.

“You almost drove me mad with that, you know?” You smile and Ford does too, hope dawning on his handsome features. “I admit that I thought you were a total asshole at first. You made me look like an idiot as soon as you started in class and I hated it. You didn't even want to be there but you were better than everyone else, and I took it personally. I mean, you were also kind of a jerk about art and that did get under my skin….”

Ford winces, looking suitably guilty, but you smile.

“The more we spent time together, though, the more I realised that you’re not so bad…. Still a bit of an ass but it’s not like I’m always an innocent party either,” You grin. “And for what it’s worth, in the studio that day? I only noticed your hands while I was looking for something to distract myself with because you were so close to me. I was worried I’d make an idiot of myself and do something stupid that I couldn’t take back.”

“Oh….” Ford’s brows raise. “And…. Do you want to take back the- Our- I mean, what happened earlier?”

It’s sweet that he can’t quite say it. “You mean when you kissed me?”

“Technically, you kissed me,” he argues back without hesitation.

“I don’t think that’s how it went down,” you smirk. “Fairly certain you were the one who started it.”

“I'm afraid I only work with cold, hard facts.” Ford grins. “You'll have to prove it.”

“Make me.”

Ford takes a sharp breath in, gaze dropping to your mouth. “You have no idea how much I want to, but…. You're still covered in my blood.”

Oh, right. You’d forgotten about that.

“Shit,” you mutter, grabbing one of the wipes and blindly smearing it over your mouth. You must look crazy.

Ford laughs under his breath and takes it from you, making quick work of the spots you've missed. After a moment, he speaks again: “That was my first kiss, you know,” he admits.

You're too polite to voice your lack of shock, but you had suspected it might be. Ford is hardly the type to get about in such a way if his behaviour at Backupsmore is anything to go by.

Even in the flurry of action it had been easy to pinpoint a certain lack of grace. Not that it's an issue for you, of course, it certainly feels nice to possess a skill that he doesn’t for once. “And how was it?” You ask, tactfully avoiding any insecurity he might have over it.

“Besides hurting my nose?” Ford says, tossing the wipe onto the soiled pile. “Better than correctly calculating a hypothesis before anyone else has even started the experiment.”

You stare at him blankly.

“Thrilling,” Ford clarifies with a grin, and then he's kissing you again. It's gentle and nervous, yet hungry enough that you can feel how desperate he is to return right back to that earlier moment.

You make a soft, happy sound, your eyes falling closed and hands reaching up to cup his face. Again, Ford takes a hold of your waist and leans into you, exhaling heavily through his sore nose. You'll have to remind him to take some painkillers before he loses himself completely for the evening….

The rest of the night passes just like that: Exchanging slow, delicate kisses with barely restrained heat and talking about life. Ford (just about) apologises for his anatomy comments ("They're better than the other ones, at least....") and you take it in gracious stride; a lot of things have been said (or not said, as the case may be) tonight that neither of you mean.

It won't do to hold them against one another now and anyway, you can pick a better time to help him work on his constructive criticism delivery than right this minute.

Things don't progress further than that, though. You're too concerned that his brain might still be rattled from the punch and even he confesses he's a little nervous about bleeding all over you again.

You stick to chatting, punctuated by measured makeouts and hesitant touches, and somehow it’s impossibly more arousing than jumping into bed with him immediately.

Hours go by before you can bring yourself to leave, and when you do Ford is polite enough not to beg you to stay even though it's blatant that he wants to. You’re both completely rumpled, hot from toe to tip and wound tighter than a drum, but Ford doesn't pressure or guilt you to come back in the way others have before.

He offers to walk you home again, but the temptation to bring him inside your own dorm would be too much; you decline and assure him that for both of your sakes it’ll be better that he stays here, and Ford, being the smart cookie that he is, understands immediately.

“Would you like to come over after our next study session? We could practise our presentation, hang out for a bit,” He suggests when you're standing on the threshold of his door, ready to leave. “Maybe listen to some records….?”

You hope that's code for ‘fuck each other's brains out’.

“That sounds groovy,” you say, smirking. “Are you bringing the vinyl's or should I?”

Ford flushes pink from his throat to the roots of his hair at the heavy innuendo in your question, but he keeps it together admirably, leaning on the doorframe as casually as he can. “Well, you’ll be my guest,” he says, trying not to grin. “It would be awfully rude of me to make you bring them yourself, would it not?”

Oh, that is so definitely code for ‘fuck each other’s brains out’.... This is going to be fun.

The two of you share a long, charged look, all barely restrained smiles and electric hope, before the slamming of a door down the hallway is enough to spur you back onto your original course of action.

“I’ll see you in class, Ford,” you say, leaning up to press a chaste kiss to the corner of his mouth.

“Sweet dreams,” he murmurs, and then he’s closing the door and leaving you out in the hallway alone.

That night, your dreams really are the sweetest they’ve ever been.

In the end, your mid-term presentation with Ford is a resounding success. Professor Stonepoor seems pleasantly surprised by your cooperation, though he gloats a little about it being his plan all along, and all your hard work pays off when he awards you both top marks. He does also pull you aside to ensure that you aren’t the one responsible for giving Ford his black eye, but Ford is quick to assure him that it’s quite the opposite.

Everything else between you both stays a secret, at least for now. Not because you’re ashamed or because Ford is unsure, but because it’s just too much fun to play along with the rivalry narrative. The back-and-forths stay the same in class, though now they serve closer to full on foreplay than academic fighting, and despite the fact that you’re sure a few people might have caught the little glances you throw at each other, nobody pulls you up on it. If they’re still placing bets on your chemistry, you’ll be damned if you give them the satisfaction of knowing for sure.

When Stonepoor catches the two of you making out in the spare studio after hours one evening, however, said plan falls apart. He declares, very jovially, that at least two other faculty members are going to owe him twenty bucks before he shuts the door on you, and as much as you want to complain about his lack of professionalism, the moment you meet Ford’s eyes neither of you can keep it together for long enough to form the words.

All’s well that ends well, you suppose.

A/N: and yes, Stonepoor's name is a play on Rockwell, a famous artist from the 70's (man standing up meme!). I thought it was funny and I'm not sorry.

[permanentswaps]

Formerly Conrad

Conrad had always been the odd one out. Growing up, he was the awkward kid with a gangly frame, unruly hair, and acne that refused to clear up. He was never popular, never one of the kids who fit in. The whispers and sideways glances he caught around school only deepened his insecurities. He felt like an outsider in his own skin, and no matter what he did, he couldn't shake the feeling of being... less.

As he muddled through his teenage years, Conrad found solace in an unusual place: the idea of becoming someone else. The concept of stepping out of his own skin and into another’s became an obsession, something he clung to when his self-worth hit rock bottom. What if he could wake up in the body of one of those perfect guys he saw online? Strong, confident, and admired. The thought crept into every corner of his mind and, over time, it developed into a kink.

While most of his peers moved on from their teenage insecurities, Conrad's fantasies only grew stronger. He couldn't look in the mirror without imagining how much better it would be to see someone else's reflection staring back at him.

When he reached his early twenties, something snapped. He decided he was tired of hating what he saw in the mirror. He didn’t think he could change who he was entirely, but maybe he could change his body enough to make it more bearable. So, he dove into fitness, throwing himself into the gym with an intensity he had never felt before.

The change wasn’t instant; it took years of grueling effort, countless hours spent lifting weights, and a diet that felt more like punishment than nourishment. But gradually, his body began to transform. The muscles he had long coveted in others started to take shape on his own frame. His shoulders broadened, his chest filled out, and his arms developed a definition he had never thought possible. He wasn’t the scrawny, awkward kid anymore.

But even as his physique improved, his self-esteem didn't catch up. In the mirror, he still saw flaws. Despite the muscle, despite the way others now looked at him with admiration—or even desire—he still felt like he wasn’t enough. The notion of someone actually wanting to be him? It remained a laughable idea, one he never entertained.

---

One restless night, as Conrad aimlessly scrolled through the web, he stumbled upon an article about astral projection. It was buried within a strange forum, filled with people claiming all sorts of paranormal experiences. He would have dismissed it as nonsense if not for the vivid descriptions and detailed instructions. His curiosity piqued, and a familiar twinge of longing settled into his chest. What if...

For the next few days, he delved into every piece of information he could find on the subject. Guided meditations, visualization techniques, breathing exercises—he consumed it all. It took weeks of nightly attempts before he finally felt that strange, tingling sensation. One evening, lying still on his bed, he felt his body grow heavy, like he was sinking into the mattress. His consciousness, however, felt light and free, like a tether slowly snapping loose.

Then it happened. He opened his eyes—or rather, what he thought were his eyes—and realized he was floating. The sight of his own sleeping body below startled him, but only for a moment. He blinked, half expecting to be jolted awake, but he remained hovering above himself, weightless. It worked.

At first, he kept things simple. He drifted through his small apartment, phasing through walls like a ghost. He explored each corner of his space in this strange, untethered form for just a few minutes at a time before slipping back into his body, exhausted yet exhilarated.

But astral projection was not enough. As freeing as it felt to float around, it didn't bring him closer to the fantasies that had driven him for so long. One night, he lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling the itch to push further. Possession. He closed his eyes, breathed deep, and let himself slip into that familiar, heavy sensation. He moved from room to room, passing through each door in search of something—or rather, someone.

His heart pounded as he floated through the walls of 4B. That’s when he saw him: Marcus. He had seen him in the hallway a few times, a tall, well-built guy with an effortless confidence. Now, Marcus lay sprawled out on his bed, shirtless, his chest rising and falling with each steady breath.

Conrad hesitated for a split second, then steeled himself. He willed himself forward, toward Marcus's body, and felt a strange pull as if being sucked into a warm, dark space. There was a moment of disorientation, and then—bam! Conrad's eyes snapped open. Only they weren't his eyes; they were Marcus's.

He gasped, feeling the rush of heat and sensation flood through him. His hands moved on their own, feeling the taut skin of his abs, the curve of his biceps. He lifted an arm, flexing it and feeling the power in the muscle. It was intoxicating

Conrad spent that time exploring Marcus's body thoroughly. He touched every inch of his new form, flexing, posing in front of the mirror, relishing the foreign strength. But after about an hour, his energy waned, and he found himself slipping back into his own body. He woke up drenched in sweat, his heart pounding with adrenaline.

That experience haunted his thoughts. He found himself returning to Marcus again and again, each time staying a bit longer. With each possession, he grew bolder, exploring Marcus's life in small ways—trying on his clothes, looking through his phone, going to the bodega, … jerking off.

One night, he pushed himself further than ever. He slipped into Marcus’s body once more, feeling the familiar rush as he opened Marcus's eyes. But this time, he wasn’t alone. Marcus's girlfriend lay asleep beside him. Conrad froze, his eyes scanning her delicate features in the dim light of the room. His heart thumped heavily in his chest.

His hands moved almost of their own accord, sliding under the sheets. The sensation was electric. He reached out, touching her gently, feeling the warmth of her skin against his fingertips. She stirred, letting out a soft sigh as his fingers traced along her thigh, inching closer to the heat between her legs. Am I really doing this?

But he couldn’t stop. His fingers found their mark, pressing into her, feeling the slickness of her arousal. She gasped, her eyes fluttering open. She looked at him—at Marcus—and let out a breathy moan.

"Marcus?" she whispered, her voice still thick with sleep.

Conrad, in Marcus's body, didn’t respond with words. Instead, he moved over her, pushing her legs apart, positioning himself between them. Her hand reached up, clutching at his shoulder as he guided himself into her with a low, shuddering groan. Her back arched, her fingers digging into his skin as she woke fully to the sensation.

He moved inside her, thrusting with an urgency and need that had nothing to do with Marcus's feelings. It was his need, Conrad's, spilling out into every thrust, every motion. For the first time, he wasn’t just pretending to be someone else—he was someone else, living out a fantasy he had only dared to imagine.

---

Conrad couldn’t get enough of the thrill that possession brought him. It wasn’t long before he tried pushing his limits, attempting to see how long he could stay in Marcus’s body. After a series of short, exhilarating possessions, he decided to take it up a notch. One night, he slipped into Marcus, the now-familiar sensation washing over him as he settled into the strength and confidence that the body carried. He remained in control for a record-breaking two full days, living as Marcus, feeling his every move, reveling in the reactions he received from others. It was euphoric.

But just as he was getting comfortable, Conrad felt a strange pressure building inside his head. It was like Marcus was fighting back, pushing against the foreign presence within him. Despite Conrad's efforts to hold on, he was suddenly forced out, yanked back into his own body. He jolted awake in his bed, gasping for air, drenched in sweat. He shook it off, telling himself it was just a fluke, a one-time occurrence.

However, in the following days, it became harder and harder to possess Marcus. Each attempt was met with increasing resistance, as if Marcus had developed an immunity to him. What used to be hours dwindled down to mere minutes before he was violently ejected back to his own skin. It was frustrating, maddening even. How could this be happening? Conrad had never thought his grip on another body could weaken over time.

Realizing that Marcus was no longer a viable target, he moved on. There were plenty of other men in the building, after all. And so, Conrad spent the next few weeks prowling through the halls, sliding into the bodies of anyone who caught his eye. He took a three-week vacation from his job just to indulge this new addiction. Each night, he slipped into different forms: the fit jogger in 2A, the charming bartender in 5D, even the brooding artist in the loft upstairs. He lost himself in their lives, pushing each possession to its limit before getting forced out, moving on to the next.

But eventually, he ran out of guys in his building who interested him. There was no one left to possess, no new thrill to chase. Exhausted and feeling strangely empty, Conrad decided to take a break. He returned to his own body, collapsing onto his bed with a heavy sigh. He hadn’t truly inhabited his own skin for more than a few hours over the past several weeks.

He forced himself to stay put, telling himself he needed to reconnect with his reality. One day passed, then another. He could feel his body readjusting. But then, on the third day, he felt a strange pressure. His heart skipped a beat as he recognized the sensation—it was like when Marcus had pushed him out.

“No, no, no...” Conrad whispered, panic setting in. He tried to stay grounded, to hold onto his body, but the force was relentless. Within moments, he was thrust out, spinning through the air before solidifying in his astral form. He floated above his bed, staring down at his own body, now inhabited by... someone else.

“What the—?” he gasped, trying to understand what was happening.

From below, his body sat up and stretched with a satisfied groan. "Oh, fuck, Conrad … yess, get out of me thank god," the new inhabitant chuckled. It was a intonation pattern Conrad recognized: his elderly neighbor, Mr. Reed. "I can’t see you, but I know you’re here somewhere. Thank you so much for this sexy-as-fuck body.”

Conrad's stomach dropped. This can’t be happening.

Mr. Reed laughed, standing up and flexing Conrad's muscles in front of the mirror. "Damn, you really kept this thing in shape," he mused, turning this way and that, clearly relishing every moment. Then, almost as if he was addressing Conrad directly, he continued, “You know, I’ve been astral projecting for years. And word of advice, kid—never leave a body empty for too long. Someone might just decide to make it their own.”

Conrad's astral form shuddered with shock. "Wait, you've... been watching me?" he stammered, though he knew Mr. Reed couldn’t hear him.

“Actually,” Mr. Reed went on, ignoring Conrad’s unspoken words, “fun fact: I’ve possessed you before. Always wondered why you were so damn self-conscious, especially with a body like this." He ran a hand down his—Conrad's—torso, feeling the muscle. "If I had this kind of body, I would have given up astral projection ages ago. And now," he grinned, stretching his new limbs, "looks like I get to do just that.”

[jflemingology]

Breaking Point | Jessie Fleming x reader

In which: the stress concerning everything going on with the national team causes Jessie to lash out at you

Warnings: little bit of angst, if you can even call it that? Argument but they make up, fluff at the end :)

WC: 5.3K

A/N: Based on these two requests! Thought they were similar enough to be grouped together. Really enjoyed writing this, it's quite a long one too. Hope you enjoy! <3

Divider: @cafekitsune

You were just downing the rest of your morning coffee when you heard a notification come through on your phone. The clock read 8am, which meant it was 5pm in France. If you remembered correctly, Jessie had a tactical meeting from 4:30 to 5:30 so it couldn't be her. You made your way over to the couch where you left the device earlier. Your eyes widened upon seeing the headline from CBC News.

"BREAKING: Canada Women's National Team Coach Dismissed From Olympics Amid Drone Scandal"

Your jaw fell slack. You had heard a little something here and there from the spying case, but you didn't know it had gone this far. Jessie hadn't told you much about it either. Despite being in the leadership group now she tried as much as possible to put it next to her – focusing on the controlables; her football.

Being away from Jessie was hard. Your schedules clashed quite frequently; her being away for games or for camps, you being away for business trips with your company. You knew what the downsides were going to be about dating your Canadian, but you wouldn't change it for the world. On moments like this, though, when you knew Jessie was going to be put under enormous loads of stress, you'd much rather be by her side in France than on the other side of the world in Portland.

Jessie was adamant you stayed home. Going with her to France would've meant you giving up on one of your projects you'd worked on the last couple of months, and as much as Jessie would've loved to have you by her side throughout the tournament, she knew that this was important to you.

So here you were, back in your shared apartment in Portland, sat on the couch not knowing what to do. You went over the options in your mind. You could call her, but you didn't know if she was free right now. Texting her seemed a safer option, but maybe she would want to come to you with the news instead of you coming to her about it. So that's what you did, you spent your morning dancing between trying to get some chores done and checking back with your phone if you hadn't magically missed a notification in the last 30 seconds.

After what felt like ages, just as you were about to take a shower – you'd contemplated it for a good 20 minutes, because what if she called while you were in there –, your phone rang. You sprung up from the side of the bathtub and knocked your elbow against the wall in the process, silently cursing while crossing your bathroom in quick strides.

You grabbed your phone and headed back into your bedroom, accepting the call once you made sure it was your girlfriend who was calling. "Hi," you breathed out as you sat down on the edge of your bed. "Hey baby."

Jessie sounded tired, and you noticed how her voice wavered – despite the effort to conceal it. A silence fell over your conversation, neither of you knowing what to say nor how to tackle the subject at hand. "How are you feeling?"

You tried your luck with an easy question. As far as she knew, you could be talking about how she was feeling after Canada's game against New Zealand yesterday – which they won 2-1. You had stayed up to watch her game, the bags beneath your eyes more than worth it seen as your girlfriend helped Canada win their game with an assist and a great performance.

If she remained silent any longer, you would've thought she had hung up on you, but right on cue Jessie spoke up. "Okay. Could be better. It's been a rocky afternoon," you hummed, acknowledging what she said.

"Is there anything I can do for you?", you knew she would probably say no, but that was Jessie's way of coping. She toughened up, built her walls a little higher than they already were. You had worked really hard over the past three years of your relationship to meticulously tear them down – and most of the time she kept them down around you –, but not everyone was that lucky. Especially in moments like these, stressful situations, you expected her to bring them back up.

"I'm fine," she quipped back. It came out quite harsh, and it left you a little taken aback. You bit back a disappointing sigh. "I know you are, Jess. You're strong and I know you can handle these situations. But that doesn't mean that you can't talk about it," you knew you were starting to push her, but you also knew that if you didn't, she'd never talk about it and bottle it up until one time it'd explode. You'd been the dupe of that a handful of times, and you knew that you were better off pushing her to say something than letting it get to that stage.

"Babe, I said I'm fine," she paused but you felt like she had more to say, so you didn't counter her. Jessie took a deep breath before she continued. "I'm fine." You felt like she was leaving many things unspoken. Even though you didn't feel confident in what she said, you decided to leave it for now and enquire her about the rest of her day.

You sensed an end was coming to your conversation. A glance at the clock taught you that Jessie would probably have to hang up soon, because she told you earlier that she had a couple media appointments to attend to that evening. She hadn't told you what for, but it was more than clear what the reason was. Still, after 20 minutes of conversation, the subject hadn't been mentioned directly. As much as you felt like Jessie needed this break away from the whirlwind that it had been this afternoon, you felt like she was excluding you and it wasn't a nice feeling.

Just as you were going to say your goodbyes to each other, you interrupted her. "Jessie, wait. I know you'd rather not talk about it but I just want to reassure you that if you're ready, I'm here for you, okay?", there was no malice intent to what you said. As you told her, it was just about making sure your girlfriend knew you were there for her if she wanted to talk to you. And maybe, just maybe, you were hoping you could pull something out of her – but you'd never expected the response you got in return.

"Please, for the love of God, I'm fine!", you could sense the irritability in her voice and went quiet. Jessie rarely ever raised her voice at you, so her tone took you by surprise. "I've told you I'm fine plenty of times, what don't you understand? I don't want to talk about it and especially not with you. I called you to get it all off my mind and not talk about the bullshit that I've had to deal with here but clearly you can't even catch a hint. Honestly I don't even know why I bother with calling you anymore, if you can't even give me a break from my football."

Before you could muster up a response, you heard the sound of the call ending. You slowly retracted your phone from your ear, remaining seated on the edge of your bed for a little while before you came back to your senses. You had nothing but good intentions with the way you handled the situation, although you could acknowledge that maybe you pushed her a bit too far. That aside though, you didn't feel like you deserved her lashing out to you like that. You fought back the tears that were threatening to spill when you thought back about the way she snapped at you, so out of character and something she'd never done before. Sure, you two argued from time to time but it never ended up like this. You sighed deeply before pushing the call and what your girlfriend said to the back of your mind, finally hopping in the shower and hoping she would come back to you sooner rather than later.

–

Jessie let her body fall against her mattress after she ended the call. Deep down she knew you were full of good intentions but it hadn't done her any good that you pushed, and she snapped. She'd never snapped at you before, not in the way she did now. She'd raised her voice, not often, but that was something that occurred from time to time. But it was different now. Especially the way the call ended, it wasn't just something that would pass overnight.

She rubbed her hands over her face and stared up at the ceiling as she fought back tears. Out of frustration or sadness – she didn't know. What she did know, is that an argument with her girlfriend was the last thing she needed to be added to the pile of growing worries.

Jessie's watch read 6:03pm now, which meant that she had to go down for dinner soon. She grabbed her keycard and left her hotel room, taking the elevator down to the dining hall. She rehashed the conversation you were having merely 5 minutes ago in her head while the elevator took her downstairs, thinking about where it went wrong and why she snapped at her. Jessie's frustration settled rather quickly after the call and insecurity settled in, the realization hitting her that she probably overreacted.

The bell of the elevator pulled her out of her thoughts. She dragged herself towards the noise, mentally preparing herself to plaster a smile on her face for the next couple hours.

As much as she did her best to conceal how she was feeling inside, her inactivity and lack of participation in conversations around the table had grabbed some people's attention. Janine, especially, could tell that Jessie was acting off. She knew Jessie liked to take a walk after dinner, so when she set off, Janine followed suit a couple moments later.

She jogged up to her Canadian teammate who was trudging along the hotel perimeter. "Jess!", Jessie's head turned to the side upon hearing her name, offering Janine a tight-lipped smile when she joined her. "You okay, bud?", she threw an arm around Jessie who shrugged and looked down at her feet.

"My girlfriend and I had an argument earlier," Janine hummed, allowing Jessie the space to explain herself further. "And I think I'm the one that caused it.", Janine sucked in a breath through her teeth and squeezed Jessie's shoulder. "Dog house?"

She shrugged again, seemingly the only appropriate response she could come up with as she didn't speak further. "Wanna tell me what happened?", Janine tried. Jessie took a deep breath before she recited the whole story of what happened when you two were on the phone earlier, while taking a detour of the path she'd normally walk – allowing Janine and herself a bit more time to talk about what was going on.

"So yeah, that's where we are at right now. I sent her a quick message to check in after dinner but she's giving me the cold shoulder – I got left on read. And I don't know how to go about things now."

Before she replied anything, Janine couldn't stop the chuckle that escaped her lips. Jessie frowned and looked at her friend, confused as to what she found funny. "You're one of a kind, Jeff. Honestly. You've got a caring girlfriend that's on the other side of the world right now, and all she wants is to check in. She can't physically be with you so the only thing you can do right now is be emotionally available.", Janine grabbed Jessie's shoulders and halted them both, turning their bodies towards each other. "I know you don't like speaking about your feelings, but this is a serious matter, Jessie. This is not a silly subject, it's about your job. Our job. It's okay to be insecure, to be in your head, to be annoyed at the situation and to not know how the future is going to ensue. And it's more than okay to voice those feelings to someone – especially your partner. You've gotta let her in sometimes, okay? I know you're reserved but if anyone deserves to be opened up to, it's her."

Jessie closed her eyes and sighed, and Janine physically felt tension escape her shoulders as she still had her hands on them. "How about you fly her out here? Things like that are better talked about in person. If I remember correctly, the project she stayed home for was presented two days ago. Is her schedule free for the rest of the week?"

Jessie quickly checked your shared calendar on her phone and saw your free – granted nothing had been planned that you didn't put in the calendar yet. "Yeah, she should be. There's nothing in the calendar that she can't miss."

When she looked up her eyes found Janine's, who were full of concern. "Make it up to her, okay? Fly her out, talk to her about it. Maybe it'll give you a boost on the pitch too. We're all tackling this issue together, but it won't work if you get yourself into precarious situations like these. I know you love her, then show her too."

Jessie nodded, Janine's words convincing the Canadian midfielder to make things right with you.

-

From: Jess 🤍 "Hi baby, I checked the calendar and as far as I can tell you don't have any obligations at work anymore. I remember them telling you if you wanted to come to the Olympics for a couple days you could, so here's a plane ticket. It's for tomorrow and you would arrive in time for our game against France. I'd love for you to be there and have you with me again, and for us to have a chance to talk about things. Please?"

You had just woken up from a nap to Jessie's message. It was quite late in the evening in France now, way past Jessie's usual bedtime which confused you. She wasn't one to miss her 9 hours of sleep, especially not during tournaments.

You had ignored her previous message when she checking in with you a couple hours ago. You knew you were probably being unreasonable, but you wanted to let her know in one way or another that you weren't pleased with the way she handled the situation – didn't matter if she was under a big stress load or not.

You typed out a couple responses, none of them which seemed suitable to you. In the end, you settled on something relatively simple, yet would probably settle her worries around you a little.

From: You Thank you, I'll be there. Kick ass. ❤️

You finished up packing the next day around 10am and set off, your flight departing at 2pm which left you enough time to grab an Uber to the airport and be comfortably on time.

You arrived 2 and a half hours early, giving you enough time to check in and go through bag checks, making sure your gate exists before settling down on one of the free seats. You tried to kill some time by replying to some emails before you officially made an "Out of office"-announcement for a couple days.

The flight went reasonably smooth. Jessie got you a business class ticket – you always assured her there was no need –, because she 'only wanted the best for you'. You slept through most of the itinerary and when you woke up you let Jessie know you were almost there. The jet lag was something you'd have to deal with later, but all in all you were very excited to see your girlfriend. Argument aside, you'd not seen her for 4 weeks now and it was weighing down on you anyway – missing her embrace, her touch, her smell, her kisses.

You had booked a night at a hotel not far from where Canada would play France tomorrow, but far enough from Jessie's hotel to not be tempted to go over. The team didn't allow any visitors on the day before a match, and you knew Jessie wouldn't appreciate that either right now. Considering the energy between the two of you was still tense, meeting you now wouldn't be a joyful conversation for her, it would only add more stress to the load that was already on her shoulders and you wanted nothing less than to be an extra burden.

You spent your afternoon exploring the streets of Saint-Etienne, an adorable city where Jessie and her teammates would face France in Stade Geoffroy Guichard tomorrow. Soon enough the evening came and you ordered takeaway in your room, not feeling comfortable enough to go to a restaurant by yourself in an unknown country. You spent your evening scrolling through the French channels on tv, quickly realizing that the little French you taught yourself was way less useful than you thought it was. You fell asleep quite quickly after a long day of traveling.

-

Jessie woke up the next day feeling much better than before she went to bed, a whole lot of pressure off her shoulders ever since she knew you got to Saint-Etienne safe and well, and especially since she knew she was finally going to see you again tonight.

The usual matchday routine started for Jessie and her teammates, trying to dance around the ongoing scandal allegations and trying to manage the team without Bev in place. They prepared themselves as best as possible for the game and tried to put everything towards the back of their minds and focussed on the task at hand; trying to beat France in their second group match. The points may have been deducted, but that didn't mean they wouldn't go full on and leave it all out on the pitch. There was little chance, but it wasn't lost yet. And as long as there was opportunity, Jessie and her teammates would rise to the occasion.

Breakfast, mobility sessions, pre-match walk, it all went smoothly. Jessie had to refrain from texting you and asking what you were up to, but she knew that was a place she wouldn't come back from. She had always taken it upon her not to text you on matchdays, she liked her own bubble and as much as she wanted to break it for you on this occasion, she had something more important at hand tonight.

It was only on the short bus journey from the hotel where the Canadian team stayed at to the stadium when Jessie started to get nervous. She'd done incredibly well to keep all the nervosity at bay throughout the day, but reality came crashing down on her on the bus and she couldn't help but get a little anxious. It was the first time the Canadians would step onto the pitch since the scandal escalated. What would the reaction of the fans be? How will it be received? How will it feel to play against the home crowd? Jessie tried to ground herself by playing her pre-match playlist through her headphones instead of listening to the songs that were being played on the bus speaker.

Arriving at the stadium, it was easy for Jessie and the team to just go through the motions. Entering the changing room, getting changed into the warm-up gear, getting massaged or strapped by the physios, having an energy gel or drink – it was a routine that was engraved into their minds, no one in that room had to think twice about anything they were about to do. Some things came easy in football, and this was one of them. It's things like this that ground the team; the routines, things they could hold onto.

When coach called it was time for the team to go out for warm-ups, Jessie called the girls into a huddle in the changing room.

"Let's do this, yeah? We're up against the home team and their crowd today, it won't be easy. We might also be up against a whole lot more people seen what happened the past couple days. But that's not our focus right now. Let's go out there and show that we're pretty damn good footballers, yeah? I believe in us. In every single one of you. If you believe in yourself, we have one hell of a shot at turning this situation around. Canada on three. One, two, three..."

-

"... CANADA!", you only caught the back end of what the stadium speaker said, but you didn't care. Jessie had just scored the equalizer for her team in the 58th minute of the game, bringing the score back level and giving Canada a second chance of grabbing something from this game.

Jessie's mum engulfed you in a tight hug in means of celebrating her daughter's goal together. You high-fived her dad and her siblings, who were also in the family box watching the game.

You'd made it to the game just in time, Saint-Etienne traffic taking you by surprise as a quick Uber to the stadium turned into a 30-minute start and stop journey. You'd rushed to the family box, greeting Jessie's family before your eyes scanned the pitch looking for your freckled Canadian. Warm-ups were long done and the players were just about walking on the pitch, getting ready for the anthems. You noticed Jessie singing along, eyes closed while she took everything in. Your eyes stayed locked on her figure, waiting until she opened hers again. When the anthem finished, Jessie looked up to her family box and you couldn't miss the little grin that formed on her face when she saw you. You gave her a small wave which she reciprocated eagerly, then quickly falling back into captain's duties and getting ready for the game.

So now you were here. You were sure you didn't have any nails left, your leg bouncing up and down as the clock slowly but surely ticked further leaving the Canadians with little time to score a potential winner. The fourth official held up the board that said there would be thirteen minutes of extra time, a wave of excitement being heard from the stands from both sets of fans who believed their team could score a second goal.

Then, everything seemed to happen so quickly. Janine made a wonderful defensive move before passing a through ball to Adriana. She laid the ball of to Jordyn whose shot got saved, but the keeper had nothing against Vanessa's rebound. It felt like ages between the ball leaving her foot and the net rippling, but they had done it. They had scored in the 103rd minute and they successfully saved their Olympic group stage, giving them a chance at qualifying for the knock-out stages of the tournament.

You jumped up and down, no longer trying to fight back the tears that were threatening to spill across your cheeks. You found yourself once again engulfed in a hug, a big family hug this time. "They did it!", you screamed to Elysse. You could tell she was having a hard time to keep it dry too, endlessly proud of her sister and teammates.

Not long after, the whistle blew and the game was officially over. The Canadians made their way around the pitch making sure to thank as many fans as possible for having made the long trip from Canada to France. They took pictures, signed jerseys, gave away boots, until they found themselves in front of the family boxes.

They all started climbing up and over the barriers and made their way to their friends and families, as you took a step back from the group to allow Jessie to talk to her parents and siblings first. She got engulfed in many hugs, accepting the congratulations from many other people around her. As captain, she had led this team to a historic win and you couldn't be more proud of her. When conversation died down with her family she slowly retreated from that group and tentatively made her way over to you, a slight smile creeping on her face once you noticed her coming up to you. She stopped right in front of you, locking her eyes with yours.

"Is it okay if we talk about everything later, please? I missed you and I really, really want to kiss you right now."

You hummed in agreement and couldn't stop the bright smile from spreading across your face when Jessie closed the final couple steps of distance between the both of you and wrapped you in a tight embrace, digging her face into the crook of your neck. "I missed you so much," you could just about make out the words she mumbled against your skin and you pulled her impossibly tighter against you. "I missed you too, Jess. I'm so proud of you," she retreated her head from your neck and you cupped her cheeks, looking her in the eyes. "You've done incredibly well. What you did tonight is amazing. I couldn't be more proud."

You leaned in closer to her and waited for Jessie to cross the final bits of space before you finally pressed your lips against hers. You couldn't hold back the soft moan that escaped your throat upon the feeling, Jessie chuckling and digging her fingers into your waist. In this moment it felt like you'd never ever been apart, her lips slotting perfectly against yours and bodies moulding together. Jessie deepened the kiss as you started playing with the baby hairs at the back of her neck, a shiver going through her body when she felt the soft touch of your fingertips on the sensitive skin. Before you could get carried away, you broke the kiss with a teasing bite on her bottom lip, smiling ear to ear as you locked eyes again.

"Go get a shower, you must be cold. I'll wait for you up here," Jessie nodded and pressed another chaste kiss against your lips, savoring the feeling of being together again and having you at arm's length, rather than on the other side of the world with a 9 hour time difference.

Jessie emerged from the changing rooms about an hour later, caught up in conversation with some of her teammates when she entered the family box. Her parents and siblings had already left, their journey to their hotel quite a bit longer than yours. You were waiting for your girlfriend while sipping on a drink you'd ordered, when she dropped her washbag next to you and put her hands on your shoulders, towering over you as you were sat down.

"You wanna get going? We're allowed to have a visitor to stay the night the evening after matchday. I've not been able to make use of that yet, so I'd like to do so now," you grinned at your girlfriend and nodded your head, excited about the idea of sleeping in her arms again tonight.

The ride to the hotel went smooth. Jessie came with the team bus so you had to get a taxi back there, which caused a dent in Jessie's wallet but you both went with it. The ride was silent, and as much as you enjoyed being in your girlfriend's presence, you could feel the air shifting. It grew tense upon nearing the hotel, unspoken words hanging between the both of you as you knew you'd have to talk about things later. You grabbed Jessie's hand that was in her lap and pulled it into yours, steading yourself with her touch.

Once arrived, you greeted and congratulated some of the other Canadian players who had also brought their partner back to the hotel. They were all mingling in the entrance hall as you moved past them, Jessie leading the two of you to the elevator and towards her room on the second floor.

Seen as the squad moved around the south of France for their games they didn't have a set hotel, which meant they couldn't really make it their own space. This meant that no home comforts were trickled around the room, something Jessie would normally do when she was away for multiple weeks for camps or tournaments. You let her unpack her stuff while you sat down on the bed, having quickly changed into something more comfortable and forgiving.

A few minutes later Jessie joined you in bed, ushering you both to lay under the covers as she claimed to be cold and tired, wanting to be in bed properly. You laid on your back as she cuddled up next to you, a big smile on her face as she finally felt the warmth of your embrace again. She pressed a kiss against your chest and let out a sigh of relief.

"How are you feeling, Jess?", you were well aware the last time you posed your girlfriend this question it turned out in a way no one wanted, but you were confident it wouldn't happen this time. Jessie shifted and positioned herself so that she could look up at you, a faint smile lingering on her lips. "I feel good. Genuinely. Better than I have been feeling the past couple days," you nodded, silently pushing her to go on. "It's been a lot but the game and you being here have helped me settle. Thank you," she pressed a fleeting kiss against your lips to accentuate her words.

You reciprocated the kiss, but pulled away rather quickly to not get lost in her affection. Jessie understood why you did and spoke up again. "I'm sorry about what happened the other day. I shouldn't have snapped at you," you soothingly rubbed her back when you sensed the nervosity that crept in her voice. "It had been a rough day and I wanted nothing more than to unwind and talk to you about other things, but when you started pushing I just couldn't bare with it anymore. I know you were just trying to do good, though. I talked about it to Janine and she made me realize that I'm not honest enough with you. I always try and bottle up my feelings, but that ends disastrous in ways like it did between us two days ago. I promise I'll try and be better for you. For us."

Her words were laced with emotion, her voice soft as she tried to keep the emotions at bay upon expressing how she felt about the situation. You wiped away a stray tear that had escaped her eye and was making its way across her cheek, pressing a tender kiss against her forehead. "Thank you, baby. I want to be there for you, but you need to let me. It's a two-way thing, okay? We both give, we both take."

Jessie nodded, shifting again and now burying her face in your neck, soaking up the warmth of being under the covers together. "Thank you", she mumbled barely audible against your skin. You let out a chuckle at her words. "What for?", you asked. "Just, for being you. For being the person you are and for dealing with my moods. I love you so much," she lifted her head from out of your neck and looked you in the eyes before she lowered her head and pressed her lips against yours. "I love you too," you mumbled against her lips before you two got lost in one another and made up in different ways for all the time you had missed out on together the past month.

[wanologic]

college au prequel: what happened to danny during junior year - 2940 words

Viscous green liquid sludges through a dry river bed, whetting the cracked ground and seeping deep into the void. Soil softens, becoming fat with nutrient. In the most basic definition, still itself, but filled with new matter, ready and accepting of more. This is what it was made for, its purpose. It has been sitting, dry and untended for too long. In this symbiosis it is more than it dreamed to be. Complete in the sense that it has been starved.

--

Danny wakes up, the dream lingering.

He’s been feeling odd lately, despite the fact that he is more comfortable in his skin than ever. He has a goal, he has support. 

A bridge, he called himself.

Even if he’s only sixteen and his influence is contextually small, he has time. People are listening. Ghosts are listening. Small steps over a long period will get you where you need to go, and he’s still just a kid. 

A kid who has to get ready for school.

He goes through the familiar motions, snags a quick breakfast and lets his parents know he’s headed out, that he’ll see them later. He’s out the door and on his way before he knows it.

Danny’s grades have improved since his freshman year. The pressure to keep things secret has all but alleviated and his family is sticking close. The world might not know that Fenton and Phantom are the same, but the people who matter do.

He’s managing. Thriving, even.

His extracurriculars are atypical of a high school junior, but he plays his role well. The Ghost Investigation Ward meets Phantom and the Fentons on neutral ground that evening, working their way methodically through a tangle of red tape. Teaching, learning. There’s always danger in compromise, but both parties are being two faced. It’s civil for now.

He’ll do this from the opposite angle on another day, playing border guard for the dimensional tear nestled into the fabric of his basement. Walker would be proud of him. He’s enforcing the Rules.

And it’s all going well as far as he can tell. Things are so much less chaotic than they were, his brawls feel like bonding, his head is no longer on a swivel.

For now, it’s off to his room. A space for himself to decompress after a long day's work.

He spends a lot of time thinking about a prehistoric past. What the future might look like once his job is over. This solid physical reality fed that swirling and infinite realm of emotion directly, once. It didn’t last, but time has passed. 

Danny is more aware of this fractured nature than most. He’s sure it’s why he’s had so much success. Why the responsibility falls on him. He feels it every time he calls upon his second self. 

And that’s what it is, isn’t it? Human first, ghost second. Humanity is the frame of reference he was born with. Everything new he experiences in this strange half-life is compared against it. Spectra once asked him what he was. But humanity is in his nature. He is a creepy boy with creepy powers. He’s sure of it. 

Going ghost.

Returning to humanity.

Not that he prefers one over the other. He’s made the choice. More than once. When his memories were erased or his powers short-circuited he always took them back. Felt the thrumming and euphoric energy pulsing through his being once again. His shape projected and unreal. Weightless. It feels incredible.

At some point, some late night discussion about feelings, whether it was with family or with friends, he realized his dual nature was more of a privilege than he could ever hope to fully comprehend. His human half feeds his ghost half everything. His ghost half is complete. No wonder he’s so determined, so strong. He has never once craved emotion the way the others have. He has intrinsic access to everything. Every failed test, every frustration, every joy, every thrill. He is comfortable and whole. Has no need to lash out. Two separate identities working together as two polar magnets, inseparable through the strength of their attraction, moving through the world as one.

He slips the familiar glowing rings across his body, the cool wash of ectoplasm coursing through his veins. Back again, blood pumps oxygen to his cells. Human. Ghost. Human. Ghost.

--

This time the dream is stranger.

The river craves the ocean. 

Danny feels the sand cake beneath his nails as he digs a trench, a violation of the river’s established bed. There’s a trickle as a thin and frothy stream flows out of sync with the current along the path he lays. It longs for the larger disconnected body ahead. A curious tendril seeking an easier path. He digs deeper, automatic, compelled by a force he doesn’t quite understand. 

Is this a bridge too?

He’s both excited and afraid to find out.

The liquid pools at his fingertips as fast as he can dig. Nudging. The sand is saturated and wet in front of him. He’s not sure how much further he has to go. But if he can claw his way through this dense barrier he’s sure it will pick up momentum even without him. The fluid mass can carve its own trench. Wider. Faster. Wider again.

He wakes up in a cold sweat. He somehow feels incorporeal. This isn’t right. He looks at his hands. His fingers in the dark. Clean. Spotless. He feels the sheets beneath his body, the press of the blanket above. So he’s still human then, wrong as it may seem. He clutches at his chest as he tries to calm his racing heart, quell the strength of an intense emotion that he cannot describe. It’s exhilarating. It’s terrifying.

He stops digging and fashions a dam, not yet ready for what the final connection could mean.

His head hurts.

Nausea tucks itself against his gut.

He takes a shower.

--

It’s Saturday and he has business in the Ghost Zone.

He shifts, expecting the weird feeling to subside. Instead it’s more of the same. Something is off. He ignores it. A thing to worry about later when he has less to do.

His work that day goes smoothly, another step in what he can only hope is the right direction. And it feels nice, giving in to the compulsion and focusing on what is in front of him, what is currently begging his attention, rather than the problems lurking beneath the surface. It is a learned behavior, one he falls back into easily.

Upon his return he feels like he is dragging a piece of the Infinite Realms back with him. The air seems to thicken, the cold steel walls of the portal are closing in on him. The exit is a pinpoint.  He’s being called back. He wants to move forward. He can feel silky fingers worm their way over his skin, hundreds of tendrils trying to pull him into their embrace. He stays strong. Moves with intent. The invisible hands can’t find enough purchase and he is finally welcomed back into the Physical World like the denizen he is. 

The caress stays with him much longer than he’s willing to admit.

--

Weeks go by and he only feels stranger and stranger. High. His attention slides off of everything so easily, his eyes blurring mid-conversation, a stuffy feeling, like a balloon that’s expanding well past the boundaries of his head. He loses time. Cancels appointments. He doesn’t feel well, sorry, he’s going to stay home today.

There is something Danny knows he needs to do. He can’t keep existing in limbo like this, his job only half-finished, pulled in two directions but choosing neither. His powers will wane once again in his indecision. His purpose sits unfulfilled.

He lays back and stares at the softly luminescent stars pasted to the ceiling of his room. Takes deep and even breaths as he struggles to remain present. His sister is worried for him, he’s sure. The best he can do for her is secretly practice what she has preached.

Danny eventually thinks back to that trickling stream. The slimy offshoot of the coursing river. He thinks of the dam he dreamed up all those weeks ago, sure it’s bigger now. His denial adds weight and height to the metaphor. Every day it feels less like a figment of his fucked up imagination and more like the worlds are trying to tell him something. What’s on the other side now, he wonders? Is the river still flowing? Are the fruits of his labor still there or has that little hand-clawed pathway dried up? How large is the reservoir pressing up against that sandy hill if it hasn’t?

He’s scared. 

He doesn’t want to know. 

But this isn’t what he promised himself.

A peek can’t hurt.

--

The dream comes easily, now that he lets it.

The funny thing about water is that it always finds a way. No matter what people do, how they try to tame it, erosion is inevitable. It starts as a dark wet splotch, the faint idea of a tiny breach in the all-but-permeable barrier between worlds—the river and the ocean. As the spot expands a dip forms on the horizon. The water moves. Under, through, over. Destructive. Alive. Danny shouldn’t have looked but he can’t stop what has already started. Equilibrium will be achieved one way or another. It was only ever a matter of time. He stands in the shallows, cowed as the wall comes down. Slowly first, then all at once.

The edges of panic are sharp and he realizes what is happening only a beat too late. 

The dam breaks.

He screams.

He was the dam, he is the trench, the rapid connection of energy flowing out of bounds and rushing along a new path. Lightning striking the rod to avoid burning down the house. The portal below him is a wound, a tear. He is something asked for, something natural. His mind can’t keep up as he struggles to regain ground and prevent being swept away by the violent current.

Dim awareness of his physical body comes back to him slowly as he writhes against the foreign dimension assaulting his senses. A second death. His double life was a conceptual marvel, a switch flipping from on to off, and back on again. He is the embodiment of two worlds, split, distinct. His quest to join them together requires this of him, doesn’t it? Whatever autonomy he has against the will of the universe cannot remain if he truly wants to serve his purpose. It’s a choice he has to make. One that he has been making. One that has been made.

He takes a deep and shuddering breath.

He tries to let go, and finds that he can’t. It’s like being electrocuted all over again, his nerves fried and his joints stuck rigid. It’s a feeling that is impossible to control, tense as he is.

His breath still comes ragged as colors around him saturate and the world warps. He can feel his fear, his desperation, feeding the momentum of whatever is happening. The exchange of emotion, osmosis through a rapidly deteriorating membrane. Thousands of overlapping inputs assault his mind as he feels the energy sliding around in the folds of his brain. He breathes through it. It’s not at all painful, but it is intense. His human points of reference aren’t working to help him conceptualize what is happening. His atoms are buzzing with newfound energy and the world is no longer solid. He tries once again to attempt the mindfulness ritual Jazz has been shoving down his throat, tries to name five things around him. The exercise fails him as he feels his brain liquefy in his skull. He gasps at the sloshing sensation, back arching. He’s going to be unmade.

Instead of loosening his grip, he tightens it. Remembering what it is to be human with all the force he can muster. His knuckles are white. Sweat slips down his brow. If he can’t let go, he has to hold on. He is gasping, thrashing. He’s hyperventilating, he’s sure, but no oxygen floods his system. He wants release, wants off this ride. The world outside of his perception ceases to exist. Flesh slips from his bones and it feels so, so good.

Then he sees it.

His eyes are blind, but he perceives it, somehow. The yawning void of the infinite realms is so much bigger, so much hungrier than he had ever thought. Reading that tablet, all that time ago, he thought his purpose was something simple. Easy in a way that a fourteen year old imagination could rationalize. The earth and the zone were two physical spaces that only needed to understand each other and hold hands to achieve that elusive harmony. 

He’d been wrong.

It’s not the earth that feeds the realms. Dimensions aren’t something that can be explained by an elementary understanding of mass and matter. They aren’t some static three dimensional points in time and space. They are universes of their own, expanding, interstitched in a nasty and sticky web of inexplicable physics folding over and back on themselves, forever too complicated to pry apart.

The realms are fed by the conscious universe perceiving itself, the soul, the spirit, whatever you want to call it. Emotions aren’t some grid of faces on a paper, they are infinite, they are cause and effect, the chicken and the egg, projecting forever in a möbius loop human understanding can never truly describe.

He’s going to go insane, he concludes. Here on his bed, on some random weekday, alone in his room. The magnetic pull of his two halves are phasing into each other, becoming imperceivable as the two separate forms he once knew. He’s not even sure that he really exists at this point. 

There is another choice to make.

He thinks back to what he knows about this buried history, Pariah Dark, The Ancients, wonders if they considered this connection, what they knew about how this should happen. Is there a way to do this that is objectively correct? If he knew more would it be easier? Or would it go down just the same? He has no desire to conquer. Only to be a bridge. A tether. An example. To show that this merging from two to one can be peaceful, a shift in perception rather than a violent overhaul. It is unavoidable now. His only wish is to remain recognizable as himself. 

He focuses not on his mind but on his body. He has to rebuild from the ground up or risk losing himself forever. Start small, a beating heart. Vascular systems. Skeletal. Muscular. Take a breath and pump blood into the empty cavern of his skull. Human is what he knows, though he’s never had to think about it quite this way before. His nerves lace through the structures he’s struggling to create, half intuition, half memory. It feels like being a ghost, all projection and thought, a deep and innate understanding. He knows this. He’s existed this way every moment of his short life and he can do it again. He’s alive, his blood is red, his flesh is tangible.

His brain slams back into his body and he promptly throws up.

--

The worlds are connected once again.

Danny’s hands shake as he tries to get a grip on himself. He’s been changed. He can feel it. The Infinite Realms has marked him as he has marked it. The world is flowing through and from him. Energy hums under his skin, and in it there is access to a well so deep he’s not sure it could ever run dry. 

He finally gets it. This is what being a bridge between worlds means for him.

He gets off his bed slowly. Half floating, half stumbling for balance. His instincts are scattered and his breath no longer sits in his body the same.

This change gives him the authority and the power, the perception and understanding to mend the bleeding fracture between dimensions. He will be listened to. He cannot be hurt. His appearance no longer matters, he is what he is, wholly and entirely. He exists as a linchpin. He is the keystone in the arch where one side is living and the other is dead.

Gravity feels so odd. Like someone changed the coefficient.

He sobs and grabs his dresser for support, woozy and unbalanced, a newborn deer walking on unfamiliar legs. He intends to make his way downstairs. Wants to fall into the embrace of his parents. Needs someone to hold him and tell him that everything will still be okay. He looks to the door.

And without moving, he is there.

Breath comes hard and fast as he steadies himself. His perception catching up to the new perspective. His hand is on the handle, he radiates a trail of semi-physical matter with every motion. It will take practice to appear normal again. He’s reminded of his freshman year.

When he finally opens the door, a swirling green wall is all that meets him. He stares at it, the cold vapor of the Realms slipping around and through him.

He knows the observants exist on the other side. He is sure of it as he is sure of anything. They are there to acknowledge the crown above his head. To observe what he has finally made of himself. 

He will tell him that he didn’t want this, didn’t ask for it.

They will tell him that he is lying.

He steps through the threshold.

[brucie-baby]

anyways steph is doomed by the narrative, jason is haunting the narrative and bruce is narrating the narrative. does this make sense.

[simstationdance]

HAPPY BIRTHIVERSARY part 2 - Crop Tops & Punk Skirts

FUN FACT: The Sims 2 (2004) was released 3 days before the date upon which I was released from my mother's womb, therefore making me younger than The Sims 2 by 3 days as of September 14th 2024, but objectively older by 6 years as of September 17th 2024. As of this post, it is now my birthday. I can feel the hands of time slowly pulling me into the earth. Let's celebrate!

Today's Very Special Birthiversary post includes a set of stylish, vaguely Scene-inspired clothes for ladies: 24 recolors of the Urban Primitive skirt, separated from the Maxis outfit by Skell, and 5 Goth themed patterned recolors and 5 bright solid recolors of the 4t2 Bow Crop Top by MDPthatsme, with black tank top undershirts attached using textures by DeeDee. The clothes are for AF and TF, with Standalone and Repositoried options for TF, and they come with all morphs.

All meshes are included and special characters that would make the game load slower (specifically hyphens) have been removed from the filenames. Since the skirt is from the ever popular Maxis Match Repository Project, you probably have the mesh for the skirt lying around in your Downloads somewhere, so make sure you don't have duplicates.

For the skirts, there are two versions with tights - one of which is a mashup of fishnets by Io (colored red and black) and the Maxis black and white stockings, and the other is the Maxis shorts+fishnets texture because I liked it - and one version with bare legs, which can be used with @themeasureofasim's stockings accessory boxes. (actually only a handful work, see under the cut)

The crop tops and the skirts are 'meant' to be paired together but, being separates, you can mix and match with any other top or bottom you want.

CROP TOPS SWATCH | PUNK SKIRTS SWATCH

See under the cut for more (not very important) information.

DOWNLOAD (sfs)

Mesh credits: @mdpthatsme, Yuichen, @deedee-sims, Skell Texture and alpha credits: DeeDee, Ghanima Atreides, Creesims, Io, and Maxis Pattern credits: andrea_lauren, nerd-and-vine, ophelia_payne (@ Spoonflower), Blue Moth Fabrics, and VictoriaBat.

I have done my best to credit everyone who's resources I used. If I have misattributed or missed anybody, or if I have broken a rule in someone's TOU somewhere, please let me know.

Secondly, this is my first time 'retexturing' clothing instead of just recoloring it, as well as the first time I've done anything clothes-related in a very long time, so please be gentle to me with your criticisms and let me know if anything needs fixing <3

I wanted to recreate this outfit using only textures, because I know nothing about meshing and Milkshape scares me. As you can probably tell, I got a little carried away from the original goal.

I mashed a bunch of patterns, textures, and colors together on top of the crop top and skirt in an effort to learn 'advanced' recoloring of clothes in GIMP, as the most I've ever done before was just recoloring using pre-made PSDs. it was a bit of a disorganized disaster and there was quite a bit of blood, sweat, and tears. But the end results look... mostly nice, I think.

The arm warmers and fishnet gloves shown in the preview are a pair of accessories created by katsurinssims that I used to try to 'complete' the look, and are not included in this download.

Edit: im very sorry, I only tested a handful of the accessory stockings on the bare legs skirts, because I was very tired and there are A Lot of them, and assumed they would all work. But after a bit more testing, some of them have small gaps or poke through the boots, and the ones that are supposed to go over the crotch area end up looking like over the knee socks. Other than that, most of the knee high socks and tights work, but only on AF. I don't consider this a huge problem though, because a good amount of the tights work and the ones with gaps are barely noticeable.

There's a shoe swap that makes all of the boxes work with these skirts and I'll make another versIon of them with that mesh later.

[avcdgrdn]

── .✦ [ FIC ]: coffee date with ford ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝

stanford pines x reader fluff // based off of this headcanon post.

˙✧˖° ༘ ⋆｡˚

you could tell that something was off as soon as you walked into the house.

the mystery (s)hack has officially run out of coffee beans ... and there's a grumpy grunkle to show for it.

"uuugh..."

six rough fingers moved to wearily rub the forehead of their owner: a sleep-deprived scientist who'd stayed up late last night working on a project. of course, whether the project was actually worth losing sleep over or not wasn't entirely relevant ... ford just didn't want to go to bed and deal with his thought-filled brain. despite his troubles with bill being behind him, there often are nights where he just can't fight the paranoia.

trudging out into the kitchen, the broad-built man leaned against a countertop with one arm, heaving a low and rumbling sigh.

"well, well. good morning, sunshine." a gruff voice called out from across the room, accompanied by the sound of cereal pouring into a bowl. stanley was ' making breakfast ' for dipper and mabel, who waited eagerly at the table. "didja get enough beauty sleep?"

"i'll answer that question after i have my coffee." ford huffed, eyes still half-shut and darkened with exhaustion. upon hearing those words, stan trailed out an 'uhhhh' and glanced towards the coffee machine.

"about that, sixer ... it's all gone. i was gonna grab another bag the last time i was out, but i got distracted."

if, by being distracted, he meant attempting to shoplift a twelve-pack of pitt cola and getting caught, he was technically telling the truth.

"what."

the corner of ford's left eye twitched. no coffee? how could he have overlooked such a possibility? great ... just great.

after a moment longer of taking in the unfolding scene from the open front door, you decided to speak up.

"uh, everything okay?"

everyone's attention shifted to you. you'd only been staying with the pines family for a few days as a temporary fix for your living situation, but somehow, it was beginning to feel like home. mabel grinned brightly upon seeing you, waving her small hands in the air.

"hiya, cutie !! back from your morning walk? how'd it go?"

you met her honey brown eyes, and a smile crept onto your expression.

"it was lovely, thanks." you made your way into the house, closing the front door behind you and promptly taking a seat beside the smaller twins at the table. the grunkles observed you, following suit and each coming over to fill the remaining empty seats.

"i hope ya like cereal, cause i can't cook for my life!" stan grinned, gave everyone a bowl of cereal, and the feasting began.

mabel scarfed down her bowl, akin to how waddles might eat his own breakfast. dipper and stan both ate slowly, while you were somewhere in the middle. the only odd one out was ford, who hadn't touched his spoon at all. his head was rested against one hand, and his eyes were shut, as if he were deep in thought or (more likely) dozing off. still, he looked like he should at least eat something ...

"ford?" you called from across the table, spoon in hand.

"i- wh- ... huh?"

he stammered, a faint shade of crimson tinting his cheeks as he snapped awake and stared at you like a deer in headlights. stan snickered.

"what's wrong?" your voice was concerned, with an undertone of amusement. it seemed unnatural for him to act so disheveled, considering how your first impression of him was extremely put-together and educated. although, you couldn't say you disliked this side of him.

he cleared his throat. "well, you see, we've ... run out of coffee. during days like these, i rely on the caffeine to keep me awake."

"i see." you crunched on another mouthful of cereal, swallowing with a thoughtful hum. "isn't there a good café somewhere near here?"

at that, ford raised his bushy brows. a café? that's a good point.

"it must be relatively new, because i can't say that i've ever been to such an establishment in town." he mused, stroking his chin stubble as he attempted to recall the various changes that had occurred in gravity falls since he'd returned after being gone for thirty years.

"i could take you, if you like."

"...what?"

and now, all eyes were on you.

blinking innocently, you restated your offer.

"i said, i could take you, if you like. i've been there a few times myself, and they've got a lot of good options."

"gasp !! like a date ??" mabel squealed, only to be elbowed by her twin brother. her comment earned a darker blush from ford and a choke from stan.

"u-um ... i wouldn't necessarily say a da-"

"ahem! i accept your offer. it would be good for me to get out of the house, anyway." ford hurriedly interrupted you, averting his gaze as he straightened his trench coat and adjusted his turtleneck. a stifled squeal of joy could be heard from the kids' end of the table.

and just like that, you found yourself strolling down the sidewalk, side by side with the tired scientist. he had freshened up somewhat, having taken the time to tame his bedhead hair and clean his dusty glasses. even while sleep deprived, he looked handsome in the warmth of the sunlight. catching yourself staring, you quickly averted your gaze to in front of you, focusing on where you were walking. ford had most definitely seen you looking, but chose not to say anything about it.

the silence wasn't uncomfortable, per se, but it certainly was not commonplace for either of you. you've been living on your own for a while now, so you're acquainted with silence, but not the kind shared with another person. on the flip side, ford has slowly been learning to cherish peace and quiet again after getting rid of bill's voice in his head.

upon arriving at the café, the two of you took in the inviting atmosphere, inhaling the scent of brewing coffee and sweet pastries as the little bell hanging from the door jingled to signal your appearance. ford visibly relaxed, already pleased.

"you know what you want?" you questioned with a smile, glancing up to meet his eyes.

"mm, i think i'll have the cold brew with vanilla cream." he replied, the corners of his mouth tugging up in a somewhat shy grin. you swore you could feel butterflies in your stomach.

"alright." making your way up to the cashier, you put in your order for two drinks, pulling out your wallet and selecting the appropriate bills to pay for the both of you. ford was somewhat shocked that you had made the move to pay for his drink, and his bashful smile grew as you found a table to sit down at.

"thank you, that was very generous of you." he adjusted his glasses, sitting across from you and giving you a brief once-over. "i could have covered it, you know."

"ah, don't worry about it." now that you thought about it, this was the first time that you were spending one-on-one time with him, apart from the rest of the family ... was this really a date, like mabel had said? your face began to heat up at the notion, but you quickly distracted yourself by looking down to fidget with the edge of your sleeve.

feeling the need to break the silence, the silver-streaked man shifted in his seat. "so ... tell me about yourself."

he was clearly showing interest in getting to know you, which was flattering, and somewhat endearing. given his quiet demeanor, it was obvious that socialization was not his strong suit. still, you couldn't deny that he had a certain rugged charm about him.

staring out the window, you thought for a moment, then spoke. "for starters, you know that i'm working on moving into a house." there was another pause as you mulled over your next words. "i'm interested in the strange phenomenons here in gravity falls. i was raised in another state, but my family relocated here while i was in high school. that's what got me curious about certain ... abnormalities." you smiled softly, fixing your gaze onto him. "i think unusual things are wonderful."

stanford was practically slack-jawed, his dark brown eyes shining with the wonder of a child in love. any previous hesitation was completely abandoned.

"why, that's what i've dedicated my life purpose to for years!" his wide shoulders leaned over the table, bringing his face closer to your own. "i've been keeping journals-"

he was interrupted by a barista calling out your name across the café. regretfully, you had to tear your attention from his enthusiasm, standing to go collect your drinks from the counter. for some reason, the thudding of your heart was very loud.

returning to your seat, you put ford's cold brew in front of him before taking a swig of your own drink. he carefully picked up the cup, observing it from a few different angles before raising it to his lips. he took a long sip, then made a low, content hum. "yes ... this is exactly what i needed." you could already see the caffeine revitalizing him. "now, where was i? ah, yes! the journals."

the next hour and a half consisted of him infodumping about the journals and all of the wonderful things he's seen and done. he earned quite a few reactions from you, each of which inflated his ego even further. by the end of his rant, he was on an energetic and emotional high.

the two of you were laughing at some corny one-liner he'd thrown in, and ford leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms over his broad chest as it heaved with deep chuckles.

"you know, i haven't talked with anyone like this in a while, besides stanley and the kids, of course." a warm smile graced his features. "i'm glad that you invited me here. and ..." he trailed off, his eyes narrowing. "... i think you're an interesting person. clearly, we share the same passion."

oh, crap. why was he looking at you like that? why was it hot? you could feel yourself slowly losing your composure. why did your type have to be nerds?

"t-thanks. i think you're interesting, too." you blushed, smiling and feeling giddy.

"we should do this again, yes?"

"i would love to."

end (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶)

author's note:

expect more ford content from me (he's literally my pookie)

also if you give me feedback i love you

if you have any fic ideas, shoot me a request!

[trauma-bot]

puts this here and scuttles away like a frightened mouse

comfort selfship art bc im the most normal guy ever. ft my oc E! this is one of the only pieces so far where i've drawn him happy <3

[artbyblastweave]

So I was rereading the Lung interlude, and it really is astounding the extent to which the behavior and mindset on display in the interlude matches perfectly to the largely unremarked-upon idiosyncrasies he displays earlier in the book when he's less of a character and more of an obstacle (the disconnect between his ambition and his overwhelming firepower, his extremely specific vulnerability to drugs, his weird pan-asian gangbuilding project, a couple other beats that jumped out at me that I now forget.)

This, coupled with the fact that the Lung interlude is kind of a very tertiary addition to the flow of the action in the main story, is the kind of thing where I find myself wondering whether this is a situation where Wildbow had an entire Lung Dossier sitting somewhere on a hard drive and was just waiting for the slightest excuse to deploy that information in an interlude, or a situation where he decided to go back and retroactively flesh out a tertiary antagonist, or what.

[kale-theteaqueen]

Behind Closed Doors: A Study in Boundaries

---

When Feyre overhears Nesta informing Cassian that the family's teasing has gotten to be too much for her, she realizes that there are many things about her sister that she may not know. That she is not privy to. Things, perhaps, that are reserved just for her mate.

In an effort to understand the eldest Archeron better, her family attempts to investigate, only to come upon soft moments between Nesta and Cassian instead.

Cassian, however, wants nothing more than time to dote on his mate in private.

Or, 5 times the Inner Circle witnesses Nessian behind closed doors, and one time they're truly alone, based on the theme of respecting boundaries and learning healthy communication.

A submission for @nessianweek 2024 Day 5: Behind Closed Doors

---

Tag List: @c-e-d-dreamer @podemechamardek @talkfantasytome @moodymelanist @whyisaravenlike-awritingdesk @doriansgf @eerievixen @sweet-pea1 @thewayshedreamed @agents-assemble @jsmelodies @aelinchocolatelover @unlikelypersonalknight1 @slipknotvol3 @stylishmuser @lady-winter-sunrise @bri-loves-sunflowers @misswonderflower @acourtofladydeath @natasharomxnov @unhealthyfanobsession @fiction-loving-person @daddyduncan69 @bobanna81 @a-trifling-matter @blueunoias

[penny-anna]

“I looked you up.” Clark rested his forehead upon his hand. “You’re married?” Wally sat up fully straight, coffee abandoned. “You’re what?”

[eff4freddie]

Things You Knew

Javi Gutierrez x Reader Rating: M Words: 8k AN: This is my submission for @burntheedges roll-a-trope challenge and @auteurdelabre trope-off. Apologies for doubling up on challenges but it's been a pretty insane month at work. Anyway. I chose Javi G as I've never written for him before, and my trope was Soulmates. This was really fun to write and I hope you enjoy! Warnings: None

Your ankles crinkled in their sockets when you stretched them, and you didn’t want to think about what it meant, so you didn’t. You rolled your shoulders, feeling the way the tendons strained under the weight of keeping your head up. It wasn’t even that working for Javi was that hard – he was a kind boss, generous with his time and respectful of yours – it was just that his relentless quest had started to take its toll on all your other tasks. Tasks that were mounting up without his attention.

‘Mr Gutierrez…’ you started, your arms full of binders and your iPad balanced precariously on top, ‘you have a meeting with the executive producers this afternoon…’

‘Cancel it, and it is Javi, please. You know this, Cariño.’

He was good looking enough that you didn’t mind the pet name, or that he’d bestowed it upon you the moment he saw you on your first day in the job, seven and a half months ago. Now, though, it grated on you as he strode past you standing patiently at his office door.

‘They’ve said that if you don’t show up this time the deal is off, Mr Gutierrez,’ you tried again, following behind him as he made his way down the hall to the front door. Your heels clacked on the marble in a way that announced your arrival well before you had any intention of making it, and you hated that you were unable to move silently through his house.

‘They can say whatever they want to. They do not understand I’m on a quest,’ he said, talking to you over his shoulder as his longer legs carried him. You sighed, the sorrowful little sound of it stopping him in his tracks. You took a step back as he rounded on you.

‘Como, Cariño?’ he asked, his brows saddled in concern. ‘Do you work too late? Do you carry too many things? Look at all these…’ he tutted at you as he took the binders from your arms, all labelled neatly in your script; the names of his various projects, ledgers, budgets, a contract he still hadn’t read let alone signed. ‘Who makes you carry these, hmm?’ he said, grinning at you slightly as you secured your face in a disapproving glare.

‘My boss,’ you said, but fighting a grin.

‘What a monster he must be,’ Javi said, winking at you. You felt the heat crawling up your cheeks, and hated yourself for it. You had noticed long ago that his voice, when it was just the two of you, was softer, quieter, that he almost whispered to you such that sometimes you found yourself leaning closer into his orbit just to pick up the words. You felt the fizzle up your spine and ignored it, every time, his cologne and his shampoo and just his skin enough to send a riot of butterflies into your throat and suffocate you.

‘Enough of this, it does not matter to me,’ he said, dismissing your months of work.

‘Mr Gutierrez, when you find her, you’ll need…don’t you think you’ll…’ you tried to think of a reason. He didn’t need the money, you knew that. He didn’t need the social status, he had that in spades thanks to his wealth and his association with Nicholas Cage. He had everything a man could want except for the thing that kept him up at night, and when he found it…

‘Don’t you think Nic will want to know what happened to your next movie?’ you tried your Hail Mary, invoking the name of Jesus himself. Javi paused. Your arms now empty you tugged nervously on your sleeve.

‘I will find her,’ he said, determined, and you nodded at him. ‘But when I do, you are right, I will need to juggle all my other responsibilities…Oh, Cariño will you help me, still? You will not leave me to rot?’

‘You won’t rot,’ you said, rolling your eyes at him. ‘You’ll be too happy with her.’

He grinned, his dimples popping out. Sometimes you wondered what it would be like to take them between your teeth, but you resisted, you always resisted.

‘I will be, Cariño, won’t I?’ he said, but he wasn’t asking for an answer, and you could see the way his eyes had drifted away from yours that he was imagining her again, conjuring her in his mind as if he could transport her in front of him just by sheer will.

‘Yes, Prince Charming,’ you said, and he smiled at you, again.

‘If only I had a glass slipper to try on these women,’ he said.

‘You have better,’ you said, nodding to his wrist. Absent minded, he ran his fingers over the mark, the pattern you had seen enough times to know by heart.

He looked at you, sadly, then, his eyes coming back to yours. He knew it was a privilege to have been marked, that not everyone was born with their destiny etched on their wrists.

‘Is this hurting you?’ he asked, and you swallowed, collecting yourself for a moment.

‘You’re not the first I’ve witnessed find their match,’ you said, the words bitter on the back of your throat. ‘I’m happy that you will be happy, Mr Gutierrez. And that you apparently won’t fire me the moment you find her.’

‘I would never,’ he said, jostling the binders in his arms so that he could extend a hand to your shoulder. You felt the warmth seep into your skin through the loose cotton of your shirt. He wore a look of consolation on his face, and somehow that burned more than anything else.

A moment passed between the two of you, Javi’s thumb caressing your skin without his fully realising. You could see again his eyes were unfocussed, could see the spread of goosebumps up his forearm. You pushed him away, taking a step back and out of his grasp.

‘I do hope it’s soon, though,’ you said, plastering a smile on your face. ‘Not sure I can hold off the execs much longer.’

‘Tell them a family emergency came up,’ Javi said, ‘tell them I am sorry, but I must attend to my loved ones.’

‘Mr Gutierrez, we said that last time,’ you reminded him. He dropped your binders, one by one, on the hall table by the door. Through the glass you could see his driver idling his sports car. You held in a sigh. Taking a pen from his front pocket he at least signed the contract, sight unseen.

‘Tell them again…it is not untrue,’ he said. ‘When I find her, she will be family.’

Before you could try and get him to see sense he was gone, the door opened and closed for him as he strode over the threshold. You forced yourself to look away, to turn your shoulder and stare instead at the binders beside you. You could never look when he left you.

--

You had meant to go home, you really had, but you found yourself unaccountably engrossed in Javi’s bookkeeping and before you knew it the sun was setting over the ocean. Your phone rang, the vibrations jolting you out of your work.

‘-lo?’ you said, without checking, and when you heard a scoff you knew it was your roommate, Karla.

‘Girl, what are you doing?’ she asked, and you sighed.

‘I got…stuck with work.’

‘I’ve been texting. This time you didn’t even leave me on read.’

You had put your phone on Do Not Disturb the moment Javi had cleared the driveway. If he found Her, finally, you didn’t want to know about it.

‘Oh, I…needed to concentrate,’ you said. You realised your eyes were stinging and you blinked them a few times. How long had you been bent over your laptop? Too long, judging by the squawk of protest from your shoulders when you moved.

‘You’re breaking your back for this guy again?’ Karla asked. She knew, or at least she suspected with the benefit of very good evidence, that you didn’t work so hard for Javi because you cared about his next big movie production. Balancing the books for a multi-billion-dollar company wasn’t your job, either. But you knew that Javi had been taken advantage of before, by his own family no less, and you just liked to keep an eye on things to make sure he could trust his accountants.

‘I have a business degree, I gotta use it somehow,’ you said, and you heard Karla laugh. ‘What did you want, anyway?’

‘I was calling to see if you wanted to go out tonight, but I’m pretty sure I know the answer.’

‘Mmm,’ you agreed. You felt your stomach protest, remembering that you had forgotten to eat lunch. Javi had a way of making your tummy flip that made it difficult to want to add food to the equation.

‘He’s out again, on the hunt?’ Karla asked, gently, because she could read your mind even through the phone and that was why you loved her.

‘Mmm,’ you said, again, this time trying to sound blasé.

‘And you’re not waiting around for him to come home to see if he’s hit the jackpot?’

‘Mmm-mmm,’ you said, shaking your head for the benefit of absolutely no one.

‘Course not,’ Karla replied. ‘Will you at least go eat something?’

‘How did you…’

‘Could hear your stomach grumbling from here,’ she cut you off, and you grinned. You paused, feeling the smile slide off your face.

‘Do you think he’s ever going to stop looking?’ you asked, and you heard how wistful you sounded, how sad, your voice failing to cover for you.

‘Honestly?’ Karla said, and you held your breath, waiting for her to answer. ‘No, that man is determined and he gets what he wants.'

‘He put the ad in the paper,’ you said, ‘and he went on Late Night and showed his mark on TV.’

‘And how many fakers did that bring out of the woodwork? The cheap tattoos? That one lady who Sharpied hers on and didn’t think he’d try wiping it?’

You scoffed at that. She had lasted all of three minutes, and it was three minutes too long in your opinion. His security teams had received a talking to after that.

‘I don’t like seeing him… like this,’ you said, and you meant distracted and not able to attend important meetings, making you grovel for reschedules. Of course that’s what you meant. ‘He was so disheartened when all that publicity didn’t work.’

‘Kind of makes me grateful I don’t have one, to be honest,’ Karla said. You made your way to Javi’s kitchen, untouched by anyone except for his chef, and scrounged around for something with which to make yourself a sandwich. ‘I think he’ll do all this dating, and he won’t find Her, but he’ll find a girl nice enough, or gorgeous enough, and he’ll make do.’

‘Some stunning influencer.’

‘6 foot tall, waist tiny enough to wrap one hand around,’ Karla agreed.

‘Rich lady hair. Tits up to her chin,’ you added, after a thought.

‘She’ll have a PhD in neuroscience, and something in Law’ Karla giggled, ‘and she’ll volunteer for the UNHCR.’

‘And she won’t know how beautiful she is, she just will be.’

‘She’ll pop out twins and be…wait are we just describing Amal Clooney?’

‘We…we might be,’ you conceded.

‘I met her once, she was lovely.’

‘Of course she fucking was,’ you said, an ache blooming at your temples you were worried would turn into a full-on migraine. Karla was right. That was absolutely the kind of woman Javi would end up with, should end up with, if there was any justice in the universe. You knew this. Of course you knew this.

‘I’m gonna go meet my Not The One But Good Enough,’ Karla decided.

‘Put the sock on the doorknob,’ you reminded her, and she remained on the line long enough to scoff at you before she was gone. She was your best friend.

You turned back to the cupboards, considering your options. The kitchen was well stocked, but it was an ingredient kitchen. You just wanted a box of mac and cheese, not to have to roll the pasta yourself. You sighed.

‘That was dramatic,’ you heard a voice behind you, and you swivelled fast enough to make yourself dizzy.

‘Mr Gutierrez!’ you said, his voice honeyed but his eyes sad in the light from above the stove. ‘You’re back early.’

You watched as he sighed, plonking himself down at the table. Behind him a storm threatened to blow in over the ocean. You felt your stomach sink for him.

‘She was not the One,’ he said, and you nodded.

‘Not even the Not the One But Good Enough?’ you asked, and he shook his head.

You knew Javi. Despite Karla’s predictions, you knew he was uncompromising in getting what he wanted, that he had enough money in the world to engineer any career, any dream for himself but this one thing, this one missing piece, that was nevertheless evading him. He wasn’t the type to settle, even if it would make him reasonably happy. You knew this, too.

‘I do not know how to describe it, just that I knew she was not Her.’

You stayed by the cupboard, not wanting to interrupt his reverie, not sure if you should intrude. It almost seemed as though he forgot you were there, until he snapped his eyes to you. ‘What are you doing hiding in the kitchen?’

‘I didn’t have dinner…’ you said, and he slapped his forehead.

‘I forgot!’ he exclaimed, standing and running out of the room. You followed, because it seemed urgent, and because of course you did. You watched as he ran to the garage, disappearing into the darkness before you heard a car door slam.

‘Sorry, Cariño, I was just so upset about the girl, but it should still be warm. I will heat it for you.’

‘Mr Gutierrez, no, I can…’ you said, not wanting to remind him of the last time he tried to heat up leftovers, including his Great Grandmother’s silver serving spoon.

‘I know, Cariño, no silverware,’ he tutted at you, and you once again found yourself tagging along behind him.

‘Now you know,’ you said under your breath, and you heard him giggle.

So caught up in chasing him down, as per usual, you didn’t even look at what was in his hands until he produced a plate and served it. You had been expecting a half-eaten chocolate cake, maybe some bread and an unwanted appetiser, but what greeted you was an intricate dish, seafood and delicate squares of polenta, a garnish of radish and dill. You looked, as subtly as possible, for any bite marks and found none.

‘The chef recommended it as his favourite,’ he explained, his eyebrows saddling as he watched your reaction. ‘You eat fish, yes?’

You nodded, dumbly. ‘How did you know that I would…’

‘You’re always working late, Cariño. You think I do not notice but I do.’

You felt heat in your chest, your belly flipping again. This time, though, the smell of the food wafting gently over your nostrils was enough to overcome it. You were embarrassed to find your mouth watering.

‘Thank you, Mr Gutierrez,’ you said, warmth in your eyes as you looked at him. He smiled, pleased.

‘She did not like the food at all,’ he said, rolling his eyes as he put the plate down in front of you and went to find forks. ‘She did not like to eat.’

‘Well, she’s crazy,’ you said, too impatient to wait for the cutlery and instead diving in with your hands, picking up a polenta square and popping it into your mouth. An explosion of flavour danced across your tongue and you moaned, your eyes closing of their own volition. When you opened them again you saw Javi gazing at you, pink blooming across his cheeks.

‘It is not cold?’ he asked you, his voice oddly strained.

‘No, it’s good, do you want some?’ you asked, reaching down and holding a square out for him. He came forward, tentative, as you placed the food gently on his tongue. You felt an ember of something lighting between your thighs as he savoured it, groaning slightly.

‘Oh, it is heaven,’ he said, still with his eyes closed. You thought for a deranged moment of slipping from your chair and getting down onto your knees for him, wondering if you could make him make him groan like that with his cock in your mouth. You blinked, swallowing harshly. His eyes opened, gently, to gaze down at you.

‘I regret so much about tonight, and now I must also regret that I did not choose this for my own,’ he said, and you smiled at him. He reached for more and you batted his hand away.

‘Mine,’ you growled at him, and he grinned.

‘My hungry little Cariño,’ he said, and the little ember started to catch flame.

He sat beside you, his hand resting on the back of your chair, as you tucked in. So engrossed in the food you didn’t notice he had lapsed into silence until your plate was almost entirely cleared. When you finally remembered he was in the room you took him in.

He was quiet, his chin resting in his other hand as he considered the darkening sky over the ocean. You could see he was deep in thought, a kind of maudlin contemplativeness he was prone to sink into when things didn’t go his way. You wanted to pull him into your arms and wrap your fingers in his curls, soothe whatever troubled him with your lips on his skin.

‘What else do you regret about tonight?’ you asked, bold for someone who was technically talking to her boss. You pulled him from his reverie, but the room remained heavy with the weight of his sadness.

‘Have I gone about this all wrong?’ he asked. You wanted to reach out and smooth the indent where his brows crashed together, wipe the hopelessness off his face once and for all.

‘I don’t know how else you could have gone about it,’ you said, honestly. ‘You’ve gone about it basically every way there is.’

‘The talk show, that was not such a good idea.’

‘It seemed OK at the time, you just forgot people are generally terrible.’

‘A Sharpie, of all things. And it was black.’

You snorted a little. ‘I mean, no marks for execution but you gotta respect the hustle?’

Javi lapsed back into consternation for a while, and you let him. Being with him set your nerves ablaze but also, paradoxically, calmed you in a way that no-one else did. He was your boss, and he was annoying and this quest of his was ruining your standing with quite a few important contacts, but he was also kind, and he was loving, and you imagined that if you were to rest your head on his chest and listen to his heartbeat it would sound like home.

‘She just feels…I do not know how to say it. She just feels…like she’s right there. But I can not grasp her.’

You wanted to reach out and put your hand on his forearm, rub it with your thumb as you cooed into his ear. You needed to get yourself together. You were tired and he was wearing down your resistance by being so sad and so fucking gorgeous at the same time. You cleared your throat.

‘I should head home, it’s late,’ you said, and he nodded.

‘Cariño…’ he suddenly started, grabbing your arm as you went to move away. You pulled it from him, the heat of his touch even through your sleeves scorching. He sat beneath you as you stood over him at the table, his expression changing from sadness to hope to something else, something not quite settled comfortably on his features. ‘You can come in late, if you like. Since you worked late tonight.’

You couldn’t have said how. Maybe just that the look on his face, his hesitation, just by the way he had paused as he gazed up at you, but you just knew he had been going to say something else, had been thinking something else entirely. You wouldn’t ever be able to articulate it. You just knew this, too.

--

You shouldn’t have been surprised. This was what you wanted, after all. So, you could only smile, a little tightly, when Javi bounded into his office one afternoon, uncharacteristically late, and beamed down at you sitting at your desk.

‘You found her,’ you said, ignoring the stone shifting in your belly.

‘No,’ he said, his face suddenly serious, a look of almost remorse crossing his fucking beautiful features. ‘But she is just as good.’

You nodded at him. Fucking Karla had willed this into existence.

‘So, your quest is over?’ you asked, but he was already bouncing on his heels, looking at you with bright eyes and his dimples so sharp he could poke himself. You recalibrated. ‘Tell me the story,’ you said.

‘Oh, Cariño it was like nothing I had expected but somehow it was better.’ He was looking over your head, as if watching the movie of this perfect moment playing back behind his eyes.

‘We do not have the same marks. Hers is different, it is close but a little off on the left side? Anyway, I was at the bar talking to Marco, you remember Marco he financed my last project? So, I was talking to Marco about locations for filming in the Spring, and suddenly there is a tap on my shoulder and a woman…a vision of a woman…tells me if we need a vineyard she has one on the south coast!’

‘She…has a vineyard,’ you repeated, an image of Amal Clooney in a sundress holding a bottle of wine while giving you the finger appearing in your mind.

‘Well, it is her fathers, but I can not exactly complain about that,’ Javi said.

Ah. There it is.

‘And where did she get her law degree?’ you asked, not able to stamp out all the bitterness in your tone before the words escaped your mouth.

‘Eh?’ he asked, and you waved him away.

‘No, nothing, it’s…that’s great. When do I get to meet her?’

‘Cariño, you want to meet her?’ he asked, and he seemed genuinely surprised this, and because of that it was difficult for you to quantify the hurt it caused.

You’d forgotten, you supposed. All the late-night chats, the bringing you dinner, the times you had stood beside him while he worked his way through half of Europe trying to find his one, then most of Hollywood to boot, you thought that there had been a friendship there, something more than a boss and an overworked, underpaid employee. Of course there wasn’t. He was a billionaire and looked like a model and talked with passion about almost everything he encountered. You were…you. You knew this.

‘Well, I need to vet her, Mr Gutierrez,’ you recovered, quickly. ‘Have you done the necessary background checks?’

‘Oh, I do not need those, this is love,’ he said, and you tasted sour over the back of your throat. Your mouth was turning down all on its own, the muscles of your jaw twanging under the strain. You were horrified to realise you were going to cry in front of him if you didn’t get out of there.

‘Mr Gutierrez, I strongly urge you to do the background checks,’ you said, your voice reedy, but he wasn’t listening. You wondered if he ever would again.  

‘We are to holiday in St Tropez,’ he announced. ‘I have just decided. Will you organise the helicopter?’

This time, you didn’t follow him as he strode out the door. You worried, instead, that you had condemned him, and by extension yourself, to a life of disappointment. It had to be this way, you were sure of it, and maybe you were worrying over nothing. Maybe this vineyard-inheriting goddess could make him happy, in the end.

Almost unconsciously you lifted your sleeve, your fingers tracing idly over your mark. You knew Javi’s so well. It mirrored your own.

--

‘He’s going to fucking marry her,’ you predicted, genuine misery in your chest nearly as heavy as the four pints of ice-cream you’d put in your belly. The Ben and Jerry’s had been Karla’s idea, and only now were you slightly regretting it.

‘Oh, fuck her, and fuck him too,’ Karla said, waving melting Triple Caramel Chunk in the air. ‘She’s probably got a stick so far up her arse she can’t bend over without getting a splinter.’

You snickered at this, the cruelty of it appealing to your whispering dark corners.

‘Daddy’s got a vineyarrrrrd,’ you intoned, affecting a truly awful sort-of-British accent.

‘DADDY! GET ME MORE VIIIIIIINES!’ Karla yelled, and now you were laughing so hard you were in real danger of asphyxiation.

‘DADDY! I’M TIRED OF THIS MANSION BUY ME ANOTHER ONE!’ you joined in, through hiccups of laughter and an errant burp.

You both paused for a moment, catching your breath. In the quiet the sadness seeped back in.

‘I still don’t understand why you don’t show him,’ Karla said, after a while. You sighed.

‘It’s not meant to be,’ you repeated for the hundredth time.

‘How can it not meant to be? You’re marked.’

‘Because he’s just…his life is completely different. I don’t fit into it, in any capacity.’

‘You do in one capacity,’ Karla said, nodding her head to your wrist.

‘He would be disappointed,’ you said, eventually, and Karla sighed.

‘You said when you saw him it was like lightning bolts?’ she asked, and you nodded. ‘You don’t think he felt that, too?’

‘I know he didn’t, because he didn’t react at all. It was like he didn’t see me. He just…employed me.’

‘But that doesn’t mean…’

‘Karla, I love you, but you need to listen to me on this one. There were no turtle doves, no petals falling from the sky. He saw me and he shook my hand, and he said, “welcome to my staff, it is lovely to have you” and then he was gone. The whole soulmates thing, they don’t mention that crushing, ridiculous privilege will override it. He didn’t feel anything for me because there was too much money and status in the way.’

You were dangerously close to tears again, the helplessness and the grief washing back over your bones. To your relief Karla just nodded at you, extending a cold hand to rest on your knee. You immediately shucked her off. ‘Ice-cream hands,’ you muttered, and she smiled.

‘I just…I just feel like, shouldn’t he have the choice? To decide for himself?’ she asked, and you shrugged.

‘It’s better this way. He’s found Little Miss Vineyard. He says it’s…he thinks it’s good enough, clearly. That’s good for him.’

‘What about you, bub?’ Karla asked, and you were going to protest, going to tell her that it didn’t matter, that you were happy he was happy, that maybe the one act of love you could do for your soulmate was to just stay out of his way, but for some reason that night the words died on your tongue. You swallowed down their corpses, feeling them curdle alongside ice-cream in your belly.

‘I’ll be OK,’ you said, and you knew the more times you said it, the more likely you would, one day, believe.

--

Javi and Vineyard were gone for the next ten days, which was enough time for you to harden your heart again and get back down to business. You decided, in the spirit of change and new beginnings, to finally bust out the black Amex card Javi insisted you keep in your drawer ‘for emergencies’ and renovated his office, deciding the mid-century brothel vibe didn’t suit a seaside setting. You were going to do modern coastal, you decided, using company time to browse furniture websites and considering the merit of rattan in a professional setting. You were going to do coastal, and you were going to do a fresh start and you were going to do healing. One decorative seashell at a time.

What you didn’t anticipate, though, so insistent on a new office kit out and by extension a new personality, was that everything would arrive flat-packed. The groundsmen faked bad backs, and the security team were pretty adamant their jobs didn’t extend to Allen keys, and so you found yourself down on your knees, sweat sticking your hair to your forehead, trying to beg the lug nut to sit flush on the dowel, whatever the fuck that was. It was this moment, of course, because the Universe was clearly punishing you for an egregious wrong doing in a past life that Javi, of fucking course, wafted back in.

‘Cariño?’ he said, uncertainly, to the lower half of your body.

‘Mmph,’ you responded, a screw held tight between your lips. ‘-ust a sc-nd Mr Git-er-ez,’ you muttered.

‘What are you doing? Where are my things?’ he asked, and you felt your shoulders drop. You took the screw from your mouth, deciding that four equal table legs that all touched the ground was so last year, and got up on your knees.

‘I wanted to surprise you,’ you said, and you looked around at the detritus of your efforts; the bubble wrap, the ripped-open boxes, the two successfully constructed armchairs that took you the better part of the morning to assemble. ‘I thought, a fresh new look for your new love,’ you lied, and watched as his eyebrows shot up.

‘This was all my father’s,’ he said, gesturing to where the old furniture was stacked up against the back wall. You swallowed. You probably should have known that.

‘I…’ you started to apologise, but he cut you off.

‘It was never my style. But I never knew what my style was until…this…’ he said. ‘This is perfect, Cariño. How did you know?’

Your mark tingled and you pulled your sleeve down tight over your wrist.

‘I thought about what I would like and did the opposite,’ you lied again, and he laughed, clapping his hands in delight.

‘My brilliant Cariño,’ he said, and it would have been kinder if he’d just shot you on the spot. You felt the burn and ache in your chest. You wondered what cute little pet names he called Vineyard. But he was coming towards you, getting down on his knees in a way that made your breath catch in your throat.

‘I will assist,’ he announced, in that way he had where there was just no arguing with him.

‘Why do I feel like you have never, in your life, put together flat-pack furniture?’ you asked, and he grinned at you.

‘You know me so well,’ he said, and you really fucking did.

It took an hour and a half, but by the end of your toiling you and Javi had the legs on the desk, all four and all the same length. It turned out if the dowel didn’t sit properly you could just whack it really hard with a paperweight. The things you learned working for Javi.

You stood together, appraising the upturned desk.

‘So, I guess we just each get on the other end and…flip it?’ you suggested.

‘It looks heavy,’ he said, his brows furrowed in concentration.

‘It is, I got the really expensive one,’ you said, and smiled at him when he looked at you, questioningly.

‘You spoiled me?’ he said, and you scoffed.

‘One way to think of it,’ you said, not wanting to tell him you’d paid with glee thinking somehow this might put a little dent in his amour somewhere, knowing that of course it wouldn’t, but feeling the vindication anyway.

‘Ok, Cariño, you get on that end and then I think we…put it on its side?’ he asked, and you nodded at him.

‘Yeah, roll it that way,’ you said, gesturing to your left as you leant down.

‘That way?’ Javi asked, gesturing with his head to his left, not yours, but you weren’t watching him.

‘Mmmhmm,’ you hummed, bracing yourself to lift. Was it lift with your knees to protect your back? Squat? That seemed like it would strain more…

‘1…2…3…’ you counted, hefting the desk to the left while Javi hoisted to the right. It immediately corkscrewed, rolling out of your hand and twisting your wrist as it thudded to the ground. You screamed in surprise and then blooming pain, holding your wrist in your hand as if you could repair it with just your grip.

‘Cariño!’ Javi called, vaulting over the desk and at your side in an instant, reaching out to grasp your wrist. He moved so quickly, so agile over to you that you didn’t have time to react. He pulled up your sleeve to get a better look, turning your wrist towards him to inspect it.

‘Wait, wait…’ you said, as your mark gently rotated into his view.

He froze. You closed your eyes for a moment, terrified to look at him, before you heard his sharp intake of breath. You opened your eyes again to see him examining it, lifting your wrist closer to him to properly inspect it.

‘Cariño…’ he whispered, and you swallowed acid over your raw throat.

‘I can explain,’ you said, but you couldn’t really. He finally lifted his eyes to yours, as if remembering for the first time the mark was attached to a person, and you watched as the confusion on his face crumbled away to a sorrow deep enough you thought he might stop your heart.

‘You knew,’ he said, his voice soft and dripping in betrayal. ‘All this time, you stood and watched…and you never said a thing.’

‘Mr Gutierrez…’ you whispered, not knowing where to even start. He was right, of course he was right, but you had never intended to tell him, had never allowed yourself to imagine the conversation unfolding around you in this moment. The hurt bloomed on his face, and you felt tears start to well at your waterline. You blinked them back.

‘The whole time. You knew,’ he said.

You did, you had known. So many things you had known.

‘I…’ you started, but he was moving, standing up and backing away from you, out towards the door. You looked away as he left you, like you always did. You knew now it would be the last time.

--

This was beyond even Ben and Jerry’s. Karla mostly left you to it, the unique weight of the pain at having hurt your soulmate indescribable. You had read that it was possible, when you finally made the connection, that you could feel their feelings as richly and as closely as your own. The combined weight of your sadness crushed you, pulverised you, such that you could barely think straight. Karla brought you easy food; toast and bananas and chicken soup, and you ate it all without tasting, only feeding your meat suit purely for maintenance, and didn’t allow yourself to remember the taste of the fish Javi brought back to you; his soulmate and his traitor.

You resigned, immediately. In writing, in an email that was never replied to. Each day you scrolled Instagram for news of the inevitable engagement to Vineyard. You held your phone in one hand while you rubbed at your aching mark with the other.

You knew, there were stories, of divorcing soulmates. It was rare but sometimes circumstances overcame even destiny, even biology. Sometimes people died, leaving their soulmates behind. You spent time on message boards reading the stories of people who had lost their connections, of people who had woken up one day and felt the mark cold to the touch, had known in their hearts then and there that their mate was gone. Some had felt it before they had found their matches. They struggled the most; the what ifs, the could-have-beens.

You considered that maybe it was a blessing that you at least knew it was Javi. It would stop you looking for the rest of your life, stop you having to check the wrist of every man you met, second guess any minimal attraction you might have felt to another.

Karla sat on the end of the couch as you stared out the window, the TV on but unwatched in front of you.

‘You love him,’ she said, simply, and you nodded. Heartsick, you didn’t have the words.

‘From the first moment,’ you agreed.

‘No, but it’s deepened, the more time you’ve spent with him,’ she observed. You nodded again before lifting your knees to your chest and resting your cheek there. If you closed your eyes and really tried you could conjure the memory of his cologne, could imagine you rested your head on his chest.

--

A couple of weeks passed. You couldn’t be sure how many. You got off the couch, the thrumming hurt of your heart and your mark lessening somewhat as the days went on. You checked it every morning for its warmth, relieved not to find it cold, and you wondered if your lessening sadness was really just that Javi was moving on with Vineyard. That now you were starting to lose his connection you could be left to your own miserable devices. You considered that this was inevitable, that the ending you had been expecting probably ran pretty close to this. You hated that you had hurt him, though. You had only ever intended to fade into the background before he noticed you were gone.

You applied for another job, this one far less glamorous but less likely to utterly gut you. On the mainland, doing some general bookkeeping and executive assistance for a CEO of a small manufacturing firm. It would be simple work, and you were a shoo-in, subject to a satisfactory referee check. You hovered over the form naming Javi as your previous employer.  In the end you named his business manager, leaving the details for him to fill in.

Your reference check came back within the hour. Glowing. You were offered the job.

Your first week was good, then your first fortnight. You received your first pay-check with gratitude, even though it was almost half what Javi had been paying you. You felt good to be productive again, to be able to put some of your skills to good use. You didn’t have to trail behind your boss as he blew off any and all obligations for some flight of fancy. You spent considerably less time discussing Face/Off.

It was fine, you were fine. It was going to be fine. You were aware, distantly, that you were probably heaving in denial and numbness, and it suited you, so you let it.

Except when you woke on what you thought would be a normal Thursday, your mark burning so hot you gasped awake, reaching for it to check it hadn’t been seared into your skin. Holding it up to the light it looked the same. Karla checked it and confirmed it seemed to the same temperature as the rest of you. Just your nerves were screaming, perceiving a flame not visible to the eye.

You googled, checking message boards, searched ‘burning marks’. There was nothing, which you weren’t sure was a good or a bad thing, worried for a moment you would pull up results from those who had lost their spouses, the burning mark serving as a premonition of the horrors to come. You slathered burn cream on it, which did nothing, took an anti-inflammatory or two and considered calling in sick. In the end you decided against it, because you weren’t sick sick, you were heartsick, and somehow that just didn’t feel anywhere near as real.

On the ferry over to the mainland you considered lowering your arm into the ocean water, the cool of the water maybe able to provide some relief. You would have to get down on your knees in your work skirt, on the wet and not particularly clean ferry floor. You considered it longer than you cared to admit.

In your office the heat from your mark started travelling up your arm and you started googling ‘infections of the blood and skin’ and ‘septicaemia’. You wondered if it was an allergic reaction, if perhaps you had run your arm through some kind of heinous plant, and you wondered if the office had an epi-pen in the first aid kit. You googled if it was bad to use one if you weren’t actually in anaphylactic shock. The internet was pretty damning of the idea.

You wondered if you needed to go the local emergency care clinic, was just debating asking your boss for the afternoon off, when a shadow darkened the door.

‘Cariño?’ it said, a perfect Javi-shaped silhouette as the sun streamed in from behind.

‘Mr Gutierrez?’ you asked, gasping immediately as your mark pulsed, the heat shooting down your arm and into your chest. Was it a stroke? How were you supposed to know if it was a stroke?

‘My Cariño,’ he said, stepping forward into your little office and somehow crowding all the space. His cologne wafted over to you, and you felt the warmth of it spread over your nostrils and down into your blood. You wavered a little on your feet.

‘I’m so sorry,’ you said, stepping back from him as he advanced, feeling the sudden urge to keep space between you, not to let him to get too close, knowing that if got within arms reach you would pull him into you, wrap his arms around your back and your legs over his hips, never detach yourself from him, sink your lips over his neck and taste his pulse through his skin.

‘Cariño…’ he said, but you interrupted him, the searing heat of your mark now making its way to your racing heart.

‘I thought you would be happier with someone more like you… I thought it was a kindness, that you would feel something for someone that would be enough to make you happy. And I only ever wanted you to be happy, you have to understand that I did it so that you could be happy…’ you trailed off, the words spilling out of you now, distracted by the flames in your chest. ‘Karla said I should tell you, let you choose, and I know now that she was right, I think I always knew she was right, but the idea that you wouldn’t choose me, I wasn’t sure I could survive it, so I didn’t let you. It was selfish and it wasn’t very brave and I know I hurt you, and I never wanted to…’ you felt tears on your cheeks, marvelled at them, at how they could appear unbidden. You weren’t sure you were breathing. You weren’t fully convinced you were alive.

‘Cariño…’ he tried again, taking another step towards you but you held your hand up, your aching mark now uncovered.

‘Please, please…I don’t think I can…’ you started, but you didn’t know how to finish. You didn’t think you could stand it if he’d come here to just finally end things. To tell you he was going to marry Vineyard but wanted a clear conscience first. Wanted to let you down easy, in person. Was your mark burning because he was furious with you? He mostly just seemed nervous.

‘Let me speak, Cariño, oh my god,’ he muttered, his patience rapidly running out. You stopped short. ‘I know. I mean, not at first. At first, I did not understand, but I thought about what you must have been feeling, how you must have thought of me.’

‘No, I…’

‘The silly man who runs around causing you problems.’

‘No…’ you started, but he kept talking, despite you.

‘But then I thought harder, and I felt more.’ He gestured to his mark, the perfect match for yours. ‘I was not angry, Cariño, I could never be angry at you. I was sad, I think, that I had failed you.’

You shook your head, the words failing you.

‘I felt more into the mark…I do not think I am making any sense. But I thought of you, my Cariño, I think I heard you in my head a little bit, and I thought of your beautiful heart, and I knew why you did it.’

‘You did?’

At this he shrugged, honest and raw. ‘Of course I did, you are my One.’

‘Why did I do it?’ you asked him, genuinely still trying to settle it for yourself.

‘Because you love, and this is how you show it. You put others first. You always have.’ You nodded. This was true. ‘I see that about you, Cariño. What do you see about me?’

You answered immediately. ‘I see a man who feels deeply and freely, who is passionate about what he wants… who usually gets it.’

‘Usually?’ he asked. You noticed for the first time that, since he had started talking, he had also been moving towards you. That if you reached out to him, and he reached out to you, skin would meet skin.

‘Always,’ you said, grinning.

He nodded. ‘It is true, I will not lie,’ he said. ‘I get what I want.’

He took another step, and this time you stayed put.

‘You don’t hate me? You’re not mad? All those dates…’ you asked, and he shook his head.

‘I knew,’ he said, devastating you in two words.

‘You did?’ you asked, with the little breath you still had.

‘Some part of me knew, yes,’ he nodded. His brows were crashing together now, his face so earnest, so open, as he inched towards you like he was trying not to spook a bear. Later you would realise the closer he was to you the less your mark burned. You could smell him this close, more than his cologne but the clean, crisp scent that was just his skin, just Javi.

‘All of those women, Cariño. In all of those women I looked for you.’

You didn’t think. Nothing about it was conscious. You just felt the firework explode in your chest and moved to him, letting him pull you into his arms and kiss you, his lips searching and little muffled whimpers matching your own. It wasn’t just a kiss, it was a melding, a coming together. It was something right and essential slotting into place, a line item checked off on the Universe’s ledger. You gasped into his mouth, your knees weak, your pulse heavy at your throat. His skin on yours. He reached up a hand to cup your jaw, pulling you closer into him.

‘Javi…’ you whispered, and he groaned a little.

‘Say it again,’ he said, and you did.

[gilverrwrites]

Sionis!Reader with Jason is a genre handcrafted by a fanfic deity, but Sionis!Reader who is classmates paired together on a project to unlikely friends to lovers with Tim Drake is untapped potential

Callin’ you captain, 'cause you've got one hell of a hook, boo!

But if I may add one thing: Sionis!Reader who actually has a moderately decent relationship with their pops, so they were raised with a chip on her shoulder, especially when it comes to the Wayne family. Thus; academic rivals to lovers/academic rivals to unlikely friends to lovers.

Excuse me while I do some yapping:

Tims always thought you were cute, if a bit annoying. Always trying, often succeeding to one-up him at any chance, to get a higher grade, to be a class rep or group leader, checking out books from the library before he gets a chance. But for you it's personal. It's ingrained deep in your bones to hate him and his swoopy hair, and his pretty eyes, and his cheeky laugh.

You hate the way he quietly contradicts your statements during lectures, hate his hushed tone as you whisper-argue over it until you get told off.

You even hate the way he rides to classes on that damn skateboard, and how his posture makes his dumb butt look cute.

So when you’re paired together on an important assignment it’s like your world is crumbling, how can you trust him? God, your dads gonna be pissed and sneaking him around is only gonna cause stress which will affect your ability to work.

Basically, you’re expecting the worst.

Which is why it’s so darn surprising when you actually enjoy his company. Confusing even, it goes against everything you believe but he’s actually, nice? Fun?

You stop arguing about who’s wrong during that one class, instead bitching about the professor you both dislike instead.

It takes a while to compromise, but eventually, you find a way to evenly split the workload. For the first few weeks, you take it upon yourself to secretly do his half of the work anyway, but that stops after he impresses you by consistently delivering week after week.

You’re a little harsh in your feedback but he only bites back when you go too far, and eventually, he coaxes an apology from you for being intentionally overly critical. When he doesn’t lord that over you, you start to relax around him.

Sneaking around turns out to be kind of exhilarating, actually. He’s like forbidden fruit. Well, if the forbidden fruit was studying and Eve had to eat the fruit in order to stay in the Garden of Eden. Certainly not any other interpretation of that story.

And he’s pretty flexible about meeting you in places your dad won’t find out about, so long as it’s before sundown. A few times he surprises you by throwing rocks at your window in the middle of the night like he’s John Cusack or some shit just to swap notes and tell you about his latest idea. You’d never tell him but once you got over your paranoia, you actually kind of enjoyed your late nights together.

There’s still witty banter too, you still act like you’re adversaries a lot of the time, but by the end of it, there’s no venom behind your snide remarks. It’s like your inside way of showing affection.

Although he does keep borrowing all your pens and never returning them which is infuriating, but endearingly so. Not that you’d ever tell him that.

When you get your joint grade back on the final submission,obviously you get full marks. You’re not sure what comes over you, but when you find out you pull him in for a tight hug, his hands linger on your hips a little to long, your eyes are drawn to his lips until he speaks;

“So… are we friends now?”

“No.” Embarrassed, you pull back, pushing on his shoulders despite your waists still being joined.

“Oh, well, good. That means it’s okay if I kiss you then.”

“What?! Why would that be okay!?”

“Cause you so clearly want me to kiss you, and doing so won’t ruin our nonexistent friendship.”

You're dad is not gonna like this, but really Tim’s not so bad. Your dad will have to understand. He can’t honestly be mad at Tim for the sins of his adoptive father, right?

[doctorsiren]

Woe! Fanfiction be upon ye!

[deafknell]

Been busy with a few different fic projects, but something that I’ve been going back to a lot is parenthood in the ana camp.

Julius, losing his parents in a flood. Joshua, constantly feeling like a burden to his family, hiding his own reaction to Julius’ adoption so his father doesn’t feel guilty. How quickly Alviero takes Julius as his pride and the influence he’s clearly had on his children, being so kind to a young Anastasia and Mimi in Before Memories.

Then on Ana’s side, you have Ricardo who becomes her father figure with little resistance, getting a job where she works just to look after her. The landlady that takes Ana in too, and her bond with Halibel.

Roshi with the triplets, who then leaves them to Ricardo and Ana to look after. The same triplets who take Joshua under their wing, while Ricardo gives his blessing to Julius with Ana.

They’re all just so,,, connected. A family that care for each other greatly in their own ways. You cant really cut any of them out—losing Julius has Ana retreat to her od, scared to lose him, and losing Joshua really gets to Julius and even Ricardo, a little. Tivey doesn’t leave Joshua’s side after everything.

Emilia camp’s seen as like, one big family because of Subaru’s closeness with Beatrice, Meili, Petra, Garf, Ram etc and its definitely a valid take. But I think Ana camps the one thats closest to just being a family, with Tappei even addressing them (pre Josh and Juli) as such in an SS. Fits in amazingly with not just the emilia camp

Think this line from Ana says it best:

Upon noticing that, Anastasia pointed at Julius. “You were once wonderin’ why I was so confident in myself… Would ya get it if I said I got it from him?”

“That is…” Joshua uttered.

“Not jus’ him, though,” Anastasia continued, gracefully putting her hand on her cheek. “Tivey, Mimi, and Hetaro, too. What the hell, I’ll even add Ricardo to the list… And, of course, you’re in it too, Joshua.”