#take a shot every time I mention bone chapels

[hordeofcorvids]

Is it too weird to say in polite company that you want to locate and visit all the chapels and such made from bones in Europe?

Listen. Sometimes healing your inner child is visiting the bone chapels I don't make the rules.

[firemblem-fics]

Running With the Wolves [3]

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-> Pairing: Yuri Leclarc x Fem!Reader

-> Modern!Au | Gang!Au | Enemies to Friends to Lovers

-> Word Count: ~2.4k

-> Warnings: Violence, Blood, Intense Scenes, Alcohol Mention, Someone legit gets shot, Other things I probably forgot about

-> Summary: You were just a normal college student, trying to find her way in a new place. You didn't mean to get caught up in the wrong crowd. You just wanted coffee, but now you're running with the wolves.

-> A/N: hi i’m back hello this took me a little bit to do because after the action scene i simply lost motivation but it’s back i know what i want to do and i WILL do it. also, just an fyi, i, as a writer, do not condone anything that my character, Hiram Chapelle, says or does. Hiram is meant to be an ass and for gods sake he’s quite literally a psychopath. That’s how he’s written. I’m just saying for future reference because Hiram is a shitty person and I plan on keeping him that way LOL

send an ask if you’d like to be on the taglist!

If someone had told you, months ago, that when you moved to Fodlan, you’d be accidentally caught up in gang activity, you’d laugh in their faces.

What a silly notion, You’d nearly cry out of laughter, Fodlan is safe. Nothing happens there.

What a fool you were. Everything was too easy. Life was too simple for there not to be a catch. That’s the funny thing about the universe and her strange ways. There’s always a catch.

Your mother had said that God always tests you. That you’d know in hard times, He was just challenging you. The only thing you knew at this moment was that if God really was real, you’d like to have a few choice words with him.

Your test was only getting more difficult with each step you took. Each limp, actually. The frigid night air numbed nearly every part of your body, except for your ankle. Instead, it burned with a fiery intensity. Your shoe was tight enough to prevent a bit of the swelling, but you needed medical attention soon.

You laughed bitterly- you’d been saying that you needed help for a while now. Your arm, your ankle, and now probably a therapist. Physical and mental help were on your to-do list.

Biting back another shiver, you fumbled with your phone. The screen was black, only showing a little red battery in the middle of it. Dead.

The window you’d jumped through was in the back of the house, facing a patch of woods. In your rush, you didn’t think to run another way to get out, only pushing forward until you had no clue where you’d come from and where to go. Everything was forest. Everything was dark.

Until it wasn’t.

A flash of light shined from behind you and you gasped, running to your left and trying to hide behind a larger tree. The flashlights came closer and you held your breath.

“What doesn’t she fucking understand about you can’t leave?”

“Well, boss, you were a little rude about it-“

“She’s in danger! And she doesn’t even realize it- the seriousness of this situation. I don’t care if I’m rude or not, she’s risking her own life being this stupid.”

You resisted the urge to scoff. Yuri was definitely a rude individual from what you’ve interacted with, but of course he didn’t care.

The lights were getting even closer now. You stepped back and started to run again, ignoring the pain. You’d get help when you were safe. You tried to stay light on your feet, but couldn’t help but crush the fallen leaves under your feet as you ran.

“I hear something that way!” Constance shouted and every light flashed in your direction before the group began chasing after you.

Your heart caught in your throat as you willed your legs to work faster and faster. You’d be okay- you’ll get help when you’re safe. Lungs burning, you surged forwards still and tried to take different turns to make them lose your trail. It didn’t work.

“Y/N, stop!” Hapi yelled out.

You didn’t answer, still running. Suddenly, you were airborne. Your feet flew off the ground and you landed two feet in front of a tree root, sticking up from the ground. You were hyperventilating- they had caught up with you.

Before they could reach you, Yuri also stumbled over the root. His flashlight and handgun both flew out of his hands, skidding to a stop in a puddle of mud in front of you. You lurched forward, grabbing the gun and pointing it at the group. It was just Balthus, Hapi, Constance, and Yuri, but you still felt helpless. They could easily overpower you, but you weren’t giving up without a fight.

“Stay back!” You cried, your finger sitting shakily on the trigger, “Don’t come any closer!”

Hapi put her hands up. “We don’t want to hurt you- we want to keep you safe!”

“Keep me safe? By making me some bad guy in a gang that I never even asked to be a part of?”

Yuri scoffed and tried to step closer, but you quickly aimed the gun at him. “You think we did?”

“No more. Don’t come close, I’m warning you.” You could only utter a few words.

The leader of the Wolves ignored this, putting his hands out in front of him, “Drop the gun and this will be okay-“

“STAY AWAY!” You were screaming at this point. Everyone tried to shush you, but you couldn’t stop. Hysteria did such cruel things.

“Y/N-“

“NO!”

You closed your eyes and pulled the trigger, your arm injury hurting slightly from the recoil. Constance yelled out, grabbing onto Yuri, who seemed to fall in slow motion. Your head was spinning. Stars seemed to twinkle in the trees and bushes in front of you instead of staying in the sky like they should.

You swayed for a moment, watching the three try to help their leader. Blood seeped out of the right side of his abdomen. You tried to stay awake, but soon the gun fell out of your hand and you went limp beside it.

· · ─────── ·𖥸· ─────── · ·

Your mind was awake before your body. You could feel the velvet sheets beneath your fingertips and smell the comforting french vanilla aroma that wafted through the Wolves’s house. It was warm- almost too warm for your comfort. Or maybe it was the fever you were running from stress.

You tried to smack your lips together, cringing when the inside of your mouth resembled that of a desert. You needed water.

Peeling your eyes open, you groaned. The lamp beside the bed was too bright, contrasting greatly against the still-dark sky. How long were you out?

You sat up on the bed, feeling sore, but brushed it off and trudged towards the door. You opened it and headed towards the stairs when you heard voices in a room across from you, two doors down.

“She’s already caused too much harm. I say we let her go and let natural selection take its course.”

You scoffed. Typical Hiram- rude ass.

“No- no. We brought her into this, the universe has basically ordered us to keep her safe. If any Eagles see her on the street, she’s done for.” Hapi reasoned.

“That might be a good thing-“

“Hiram-“

“She shot Yuri! He’s not waking up because of her!”

The silence that followed his outburst made your heart clench. You didn’t mean to actually hit him- you just meant it as a warning shot. Hell, you didn’t even know your aim was that good.

“He’s going to be fine. In the meantime, we need to contact Claude or Dimitri and see what’s happening.”

Claude? Claude, the boy at the pizza shop? You rolled your eyes. Of course he’d be a part of this- whatever this is.

“What if they’re siding with her?” Constance asked worriedly.

“Trust me, if it’s anything that Claude’s against, it’s an imbalance of power. As for Dimitri, I’m not sure.”

Your hands began to shake again and you blinked rapidly, trying to push away the looming realization that no, this wasn’t a joke, and yes, these college kids are in a fucking gang. You supposed a part of you didn’t want to believe it until now, but it crashed onto you like a bag of bricks.

These people have hurt others. Killed them. You hurt someone too- you shot a man. A man who apparently is trying to keep you safe.

Continuing to blink, this time biting back tears, you walked down the stairs into the kitchen. Grabbing a glass from the counter, you filled it up in the sink and began chugging.

One glass.

Two.

Maybe if it was alcohol, you’d feel a little better. But it wasn’t. And you didn’t.

More footsteps resounded from the stairs, making their way through the living room and into the kitchen. Hapi entered first, followed by the other four. She gave you a tight smile, choosing to mess with some papers that still rested on the kitchen table.

The papers were frenzied and unorganized- they must have really rushed out once they realized that you’d left.

Hiram walked past and bumped your shoulder rather harshly, making you spill your third glass of water down the front of your shirt. You hissed, wanting nothing more than to yank out those snowy locks of his, but he was definitely armed and no doubt dangerous. You valued your life a little too much to mess with the little man.

Eventually, the group sat down at the table and Hapi patted her hand on the wood, pointing to the empty chair across from her. “Please, Y/N, sit.”

You did so, awkwardly, clasping your hands and putting them in your lap. You didn’t want to look up, already feeling the five intense stares burn into your form.

“It seems our first little talk wasn’t as… effective as it needed to be.” The redheaded girl began. “You were seen with us in the cafe when Edelgard attacked. You let your mouth run, disrespecting her. And I can assure you right now, that the Eagles have all the details on you. Especially since one of their own seemed to recognize you. Like it or not, you’re in this now.”

Hiram snorted, leaning back on his chair and nonchalantly checking his nails. “You’re stuck with this, toots. If you didn’t want to be, you should’ve stuck behind everyone like a good little coward and let the big dogs fight over the bone. You could’ve easily been seen as a citizen and an innocent bystander, but no. Something in you said ‘hey, let’s be a bitch to these people who suddenly barged in here with guns’. If I didn’t know any better, it would seem to me like you were practically,” He leaned forward, his icy eyes boring into your own, “asking for it.”

You furrowed your eyebrows, but still kept shut. He wasn’t necessarily wrong, you could’ve easily decided to let the obviously-more-experienced people deal with it, but in your defense, you didn’t know at the time! You didn’t even think your 5 second long conversation with this Edelgard chick was as negative as they made it out to be.

Crossing your arms, you willed your face to remain stoic. “I just don’t see why she’d have it out for me. I didn’t even do anything that bad.”

“Look, look at my face.” Hiram pointed to the bridge of his nose, where a deep, pale pink scar contrasted against his skin. “Rhys and I used to be… involved with them. Her little lap dog- Ferdinand- did this. Because I made some ill-timed joke.”

You couldn’t help but glance over at Rhys, whose eyes had darkened at the mention of his past. The mention of Ferdinand’s name and his affiliation with the Eagles made you wonder about everyone’s past- how exactly did all of these people get involved with such a deadly life? You didn’t have much time to dwell on it before Balthus spoke up.

“Listen, little one, just stay here and chill out until we can a hundred percent confirm that the Eagles aren’t associating you with us. If they’re not, you’re free to go.”

“And if I am?”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”

Everyone at the table gasped and turned around to the kitchen entrance, where the strained voice had come from. Yuri was leaned up against the door frame, holding onto his side still. His torso was bare, but the skin was covered by bandages and gauze.

The Wolves shot up out of their seats, rushing over to their leader.

“Yuri!”

“Why are you up?”

“You need rest.”

Yuri just chuckled at them, hiding a wince as his stomach contracted with the laugh. “I’m fine, I’m fine, everything’s cool. Not the first time.”

You still sat at the table, watching as they helped him sit in his place at the head before going back to their own seats. The Wolves really seemed to care about each other, you noticed, and felt a small pang of guilt for causing them so many problems already.

“So, Yuri-Bird, I was explaining to everyone earlier that our best choice of action is to contact Dimitri and Claude and see what’s happening in their little sectors of the world.” Hapi folded her hands on the table, “I know with about a 90% certainty that Claude will be against whatever Edelgard’s doing. Dimitri, I’m not so sure.”

Yuri nodded, taking in the information. “We need stronger people going to Dimitri, then, just in case he sided with her.”

“Which is why I decided that it would be best for all of us to go together. Dimitri has that one assassin with him- the Black Cat or whatever his alias is.”

“It’s Felix. I wouldn't forget the name of such a hunk of a man.” Hiram practically swooned.

Hapi rolled her eyes. “...Right. So, we start with Claude and then move on to Dimitri.”

Rhys raised his hand for a moment, making Hiram shush everyone. He said nothing, only jutting a thumb at you as if asking ‘what do we do about this chick?’ The room was quiet for a moment, then Constance clapped her hands together.

“She can stay and take care of Yuri!”

“What?” You and the previously mentioned man cried out.

He turned and glared at you. “You lot are going to entrust my healing to the same bitch that shot me? No. I’m coming with you all.”

Balthus shook his head. “She’s right, Boss. You could barely walk down here. You need to rest before you get back in the game.”

“Yeah,” Hiram began to laugh, “I’m sure Miss Girl will fix you right up. Maybe she’s better at caretaking than she is running away.”

You returned Yuri’s glare, but quickly switched it to Hiram. He lost his smile and quirked up an eyebrow, as if challenging you to say something. You didn’t.

“We leave tomorrow morning at 8 o’clock. Yuri, you sleep in. Y/N, be up early to change his bandages.”

Hapi stood and stretched, letting out a large yawn before walking out of the kitchen.

The rest of the group followed, Yuri lagging behind as Balthus helped him walk. His lavender eyes pierced into you, obviously extremely angry at you. You shuddered. You absolutely did not want to be alone with him tomorrow.

Dreading morning, you went to your room and tucked yourself back under the velvet sheets, watching the hall light turn off and listening to Hiram’s annoying voice echo throughout the walls.

“Goodnight y’all! Sweet dreams- except for the Princess, of course.”

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taglist: @fairyblue-alchemist @emperor-pizza @flavoredmilktea @sadies-stories-n-things @blviddyd @laurexlance @atomicchocolatecookie @mapesandoval @local-goth-lilz 

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[consumedkings-archive]

ancient names, pt. xii

A John Seed/Original Female Character Fanfic

Ancient Names, pt xii: splinters

Masterlink Post

Word Count: ~11.4k. (ash shut the fuck up challenge has been brutally failed)

Rating: M for now, rating will change in later chapters as things develop. Tiny tiny TINY hint of something more explicit for like one second if you blink.

Warnings: uhhhhhhh descrips of an anxiety attack, Elliot turns feral like 2x, Joseph is V creepy (what's new--so I guess like, some Joseph/Deputy if you squint again), brief allusions to assault, also some very very very VERY minor steaminess mentioned but it's like just John being himself inside his own brain so. Yeah.

Notes: "what do you MEAN you're closer to your best friend and actual working partner than me, the guy who tried to drown you like a week ago" - @starcrier​, impersonating john seed

I don't want to sound like a broken record but I mean it when I say: THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU! This chapter is 11k words long and I don't have anything to say for myself, I just want y'all to know it wouldn't have happened without y'all (which you know by now).

I've been staring at this chapter for like 3 days so I'm gonna keep this short but. I hope you enjoy! Everyone say thank you to @starcrier for proofreading this hot mess and then we can move on to wishing John and Elliot would just bang it out already.

“So what the hell was that?”

Elliot didn’t particularly want to think about it, and she especially didn’t want to discuss the nature of her last John Seed Interaction with Joey. She knew how that was going to go—and even if she didn’t, she’d hardly figured out the whole thing herself. She didn’t think her heart had stopped hammering even after he’d left.

I told you, there’s just the one. This one, El, me.

Boomer’s cold nose pressing against her chin pulled her mind away from the feeling of John’s fingers in her hair, his arm slid around her waist, his mouth on hers, the faded scent of his cologne washing over her. Already she felt the heat crawling back into her face and she swallowed thickly, closing her eyes as she planted a kiss on the side of Boomer’s face.

“It wasn’t anything,” Elliot said, before she could think too much on how the lie coming out of her mouth made her feel. She’d never lied to Joey—not about anything, not about her ex-boyfriend or her mama or anything —but it felt like a losing game to be honest about what had happened, especially before she’d even figured out how she felt about it.

“Didn’t look like nothing,” Joey replied, sitting on the edge of one of the beds. “And you’re doing that thing you do when you’re trying to lie.”

“It was nothing, ” Elliot insisted. There was no heat in the words. She pulled Boomer into her lap and rubbed his belly, watching the Heeler loll his head dreamily against the affection. The blush was starting to fade from her face now, and in its place was the stabilizing familiarity of the hound.

Joey watched her for a moment before she said, “Crazy that Boomer didn’t rip John’s throat out.”

Deciding against answering—because the answer would almost certainly sound like she was defending John , which she did not want to follow up whatever it was that had just happened—Elliot instead pressed her cheek to Boomer’s and shrugged.

John kissed me, something in her mind said, furiously rebellious, and I kissed him back. Fuck fuck fuck.

“El,” Joey said quiet, “we have to get out of here.”

“Yeah,” Elliot agreed. “We will. We can hitch it Fall’s End, you think? And get... Supplies, and a car, and...”

Her voice trailed off. The idea of walking all the way to Fall’s End from the compound, unarmed—because the Seeds would certainly not give them arms if they could help it—exhausted her. While the drugs that the Family had pumped into her were mostly out of her system by now, save the occasional faint wobble in the corner of her vision, her body still ached; her lungs still strained to fight off the sickness she’d gotten just days ago, which had been blissfully tamped down from her senses while she was high but was now back in full force.

“But it’s dangerous,” she added after a moment. “With the—the others still out there. I thought if Ase died it would be the end of them, but—”

“The big one.” Joey’s voice was a quiet agreement. “He’s going to be mad. I thought I heard him last night, when we were getting out of there, after John and Jacob brought you back down.”

Another quiet pause stretched between them. Elliot couldn’t help but think back to what John had said: that he hadn’t shot Ase that second time, but Jacob had. She couldn’t remember for the life of her if John had been holding the shotgun or not when they got down the slope. She couldn’t remember if she saw Jacob with a shotgun. She couldn’t remember much from that night, anyway, besides the dread that had flooded her body when Ase had made her look into the woods, and the strike of the woman’s viscera against her face when she’d been finished off.

Sleep had not come easily to Elliot, in the last twelve hours, and she didn’t imagine that it would any time soon. Her life had become one exhausting blur of blood and panic, with only the occasional respite of quiet, and Elliot felt deep in the marrow of her bones that pattern wasn’t going to be changing any time soon.

“Let’s just take advantage of the quiet while we can,” she suggested after a moment, rubbing her eyes tiredly. Already she wanted another cigarette, the gentle rattle of her lungs on every intake of breath told her to rethink that urge. Joey made a low noise of agreement.

The brunette slid off of her seat on the bed, scooting over until they were next to each other and she could give Boomer’s belly a steady pat. Elliot rested her cheek against Joey’s shoulder. She sighed.

“You think those Seeds are plotting something?”

“I think they never stopped,” Joey replied tiredly. “Not for one second.”

Elliot made a soft noise of agreement. She wanted to ask her what she remembered of the night before—if John was being honest when he said Jacob had delivered that second blow, if she thought that it even mattered who had done it.

It does matter, she thought tiredly. It matters to me.

“We’ll lay low for a few days,” she murmured. “Get back on our feet, and let them think.... Whatever they want to think. And just keep our wits about us until we can get to Fall’s End. Maybe one of us should stay, in case someone tries to call for us.” She closed her eyes, and for a moment, Elliot could almost pretend things were normal; it wouldn’t be crazy to think that maybe this was all just a bad, horrible dream.

But she couldn’t have dreamed up the way John had kissed her—one hand in her hair, the other gripping her hip, like he was hungry. Hungry for her . She had always wanted that, she thought; for someone to be starved for her. How did he know? How did he always know what she was weak to?

“And then we’ll get out of here,” Joey said, her voice soft and tired, too. Elliot couldn’t imagine how tired she was, after it all.

“Yeah,” Elliot replied. She steeled her voice, but her eyes stayed closed. “Then we get the fuck out of here.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The best sleep she’d gotten in days was on a bed in the Eden’s Gate compound, Boomer tucked into her side. It was only an hour or two—certainly not the full night that she needed—but when she woke up she was already feeling better.

Better, and more aware of what had transpired.

She’d yelled at John about shooting Ase, and John had said that was Jacob, and there was no way to affirmatively know that he was telling the truth short of taking his word on it, and if there was one person who she didn’t trust the word of, it was John Seed.

Well, maybe Joseph less than him, she reasoned absently, rinsing her mouth with water that wasn’t contaminated with drugs in the bathroom, splashing it onto her face. Then John, then Faith, then Jacob.

She tried not to think about how troubling it was to consider Jacob the more straight-forward of the Seed siblings, even more so than Faith, but while Elliot felt desperately like she wanted to protect the girl—she knew that was the point. Joseph wouldn’t have picked Faith if she was truly as pure as she liked to put on.

Boomer buffed in the main room of the cabin, nails clicking on the wood flooring. Elliot dried her face and headed out the front door to see what he was fussing about; Joey still slept quietly, probably glad to sleep without drugs weighing her system down and an immediate threat—well, immediately beyond the Seeds—hanging over her.

“Stay,” she murmured. “Stay with Joey, Boomer.”

The Heeler whined, low and exceptionally pathetic, before crouching low to the floor and settling. She closed the cabin door behind her and wiped her hands absently on the front of her jeans, gaze flickering across the yard. Joseph had apparently gathered the members of Eden’s Gate from hiding and they now milled about, heads turning wherever she went, hostile but controlled. For now. It wasn’t unlike the first time that Elliot had walked into the compound with Burke and Whitehorse, as she moved across the yard to the chapel; almost surreal, the world fizzing around her in a white-static as she remembered the way it felt to have Joseph look at her and say, and Hell followed with him.

Dreadful.

Fall was now in full swing, which meant that though the sky was clear, the afternoon had a bite to it that was trying to work its way under her clothes and into the marrow of her bones. From the side of the church, she could see the treeline of the woods that surrounded the compound; against her better judgment, Elliot stopped at the chainlink fence and stared.

The monster in the woods that she’d seen last night still stuck to her—wadded up somewhere right in the hollow of her jaw, locking her mouth shut from being able to talk about it. It wasn’t like she’d know what to say if she could talk about it, anyway; I saw something big, and scary, and it was in the woods and it knows me. What would it matter? It had just been the drugs, anyway. A madness shared by a group of people, seeing what they wanted to see, melding with the things that Elliot hated the most.

Seeing herself, hearing herself, and not recognizing who she was anymore.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

She didn’t have to turn around to know who it was; the slick, rich timbre of Joseph’s voice rattled through her, straight down to the marrow of her bones. If I could have only gotten a good look at it, something in her said, like the monster had been real, like something really was out there trying to slide under her skin.

“Joey and I are leaving,” Elliot said, by way of response; she could feel Joseph’s eyes on her, his footsteps against the packed dirt hitting soft behind her before she saw him stop just in her peripheral. “As soon as I can get to Fall’s End, we’re leaving.”

Joseph was quiet for a moment. And then he said, “You seem troubled, deputy.”

“Well, I did get fucking drugged out of my mind,” she snapped.

“You’ve seemed troubled for a while,” he replied. “Prior to the Family, to all of this.” He gestured vaguely at the compound, absently adjusting the yellow-tinted glasses on his face. Not once did he look at her, pin her with those eyes, but rather kept his gaze focused on the forest where she’d been looking. “I saw you before, Elliot. Before you were even a junior deputy. You were different, then.”

It shouldn’t have felt like a violation to know that Joseph had seen her, known of her, before all of this—but it did. It felt like a violation because she had no way of controlling it. Joseph may as well have flipped through an old yearbook and read all of the things friends had written to her, or pried open her diary.

Elliot said, carefully and meticulously planting each word, “People change.” She was determined not to lose her temper with Joseph, not the same way that she did with John or Jacob—it made it difficult to feel justified, when the man was so hard to rattle as it was.

“People are changed,” Joseph corrected her in his easy cadence, “by the things around them.”

The pressure of her molars grinding together was beginning to make a headache bloom just behind her eyes. What the fuck does he know, she thought furiously, the idea that the person that she was today had been entirely out of her hands making her stomach wrench with something vicious. Joseph was full of shit, and he wore stupid sunglasses and preached hollow, empty words, so what did it matter?

It mattered a lot. It meant that she’d had no hand in who she was now, and that she wouldn’t be able to change it if she wanted to; as though, in the instance that she didn’t want to feel hungry and hurt and needing all the time, she wouldn’t be able to make it change herself. She’d have to wait.

“If I put you in a perfect, empty bubble of a room,” he continued, when she didn’t argue, “and left you there, would anything about you change?”

“You’re the last person I would take psychological observations as truth from,” she managed out after a moment, finally turning to look at him—and he did too, at the same time, like he was ready for it. Anticipating it. Knew that she would do it all along.

For a long moment, he didn’t say anything. He just watched her, his eyes glued to her own, and finally he said, “Elliot, it’s not uncommon in people who are abused to—”

The word abused rinsed her system like an ice bath. It catapulted her mind somewhere else, somewhere far, away, but the muscle memory pulled through anyway, spitting the words, “I’m not abused,” out of her mouth to overrun whatever psycho-babble bullshit Joseph was trying to tell her. She might have tried to swallow down the volume of her voice had it been anything else, anyone else, but she felt it shoot up with hysterical rage.

“Deputy—”

“I’m not.” And now she didn’t know if she was saying it for his sake or something else. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“I know that you have scars,” Joseph replied, his voice firmer now than before. And that dragged her head back, neurons firing off left and right. Red alert, they screamed, abort mission. “Scars that you don’t get from nothing. Scars that—”

“—need to stop fucking talking—”

“—only mean that you don’t become like this without—”

“Like what?”

He stopped. Something passed over his face, but only for a moment—not long enough for her to decipher what it was. Against her better judgement, she stayed where she was instead of walking away from him; perhaps it was a morbid curiosity, to know what it was that the great and mighty Joseph Seed thought she was afflicted with.

And then, with a soft, delicate kind of pity, Joseph placed his hands on her shoulders and said, “Hurting.”

This was all wrong. The pressure of Joseph’s hands on her shoulders did not quiet the roar in her head, did not bring her any kind of comfort. Nausea welled up inside of her like a black bile; her body wanted to purge it, a venom seeping from a wound. Vaguely, she was aware that she wished he’d said something else—anything else, anything other than hurting, anything that could give her the footing to be angry and furious and spit her poison at him.

But there was nothing.

“You don’t have to keep pushing it down,” he continued, his voice low and almost urgent. “Absolution isn’t out of your reach forever.”

“Shut—” Elliot sucked in a sharp breath; she reached up, but her arms felt like lead weights. “S-Shut the fuck up—”

“Elliot,” Joseph murmured, squeezing her shoulders, “you might be able to convince yourself that you’re fine, but I see you.”

Ase’s glassy eyes, her fingers twisted in Elliot’s. Sisters. Do you see?

“Aren’t you tired?” His voice, sliding under her skin, trying her on. He was the monster in the dark of the woods, humming as he lifted the edges of her skin and peeled them back. “Aren’t you so tired, Elliot, of all of this running? All of this anger?”

He was too close, now, his hands on her neck, cradling. Joseph leaned in and rumbled, just against her temple, “It must be so hard, living with it every day. I can help you rest.”

Her brain scrambled for a grip, anywhere; she was only vaguely aware of pushing Joseph’s hands off of her shoulders, that they met resistance for a moment before he gave way for her. Anything, anything but that, don’t fucking look at me, I didn’t say that you could, don’t fucking touch me.

She willed her feet forward. Away from the fence, away from Joseph, away from the church and around the back of one of the buildings.

“It’s not uncommon in survivors, Miss Honeysett. The nightmares , reliving the moment — it’ll get better. I promise.”

But she still felt his hands on her; not Joseph, but him, his hands grabbing her mouth and her hair, pinning her against the door, the taste of copper flooding her mouth when she sank her teeth down and ripped. She still felt the grip when she closed her eyes, and the doctor said it would go away and it would get better, but how long was she supposed to wait? How long was she supposed to feel like this?

I see, she thought frantically, the… The grass, and… I hear… I hear —

“I can see that you’re hurting. I’m only here to help; you just have to let me. I can help, Elliot.”

“Elliot,” John said, sounding surprised to see her come bolting around the corner. He leaned a little, to see where she had come from, and then looked back at her, reaching up. “Why are you breathing so hard? I thought I heard shouting. What’s—”

“Stop,” she bit out, grinding the words between her teeth before she let them out. “Don’t—”

“Okay,” he replied quickly. His hands hovered for a moment before dropping; his gaze drifted again, lingering behind her, before he returned his attention. “Okay, I won’t. Why don’t you sit down?”

I see you.

“No!” Elliot snapped, taking in a shaky breath. The adrenaline wouldn’t stop; not even with the distance between herself and Joseph, not even with John’s voice anchoring her to the ground. “No, I’m not fucking—sitting down. Take me to Fall’s End so I can get—so I can get out—so I can—so I—”

She didn’t think when she grabbed John’s arm to steady herself. Looking back on the moment later, she thought maybe it was a force of habit; he’d been around for a lot of moments like this. In the last few days, they’d gotten through a lot. And—

And he hadn’t had to come back for her if he didn’t want to. And he hadn't had to kiss her if he didn’t want to. He didn’t have to do any of those things, and he did them anyway, and somehow she only felt worse than before; it had been easier when she could hate him blindly.

“It’s supposed to storm tonight,” John said, and if he felt anything about the way she was gripping his arm he didn’t say. Something uneasy flickered in his face, and he added, “You should probably wait until tomorrow, deputy.”

“Fuck. Off,” Elliot said. “Take me to Fall’s End or—”

This seemed to reassure him that she was doing fine. John arched a brow at her loftily and said, his voice a light challenge, “Or what?”

“Hey, John? Hey?”

“Yes?”

“Fuck you?” It returned a bit of normalcy to see him roll his eyes. Her fingers wadded into his shirt sleeve, she said, “Or I’ll walk there myself.”

“You seem to think that relieving me of the burden of your constant verbal assault is a threat,” John deadpanned. “And besides, you’re in no position to be threatening me anyway . You’re the one who didn’t want Joey to know that we—”

Kissed.

“Sh—” The sharp sound coming out of her mouth was enough to stop John. She glanced over her shoulder; if there was one person she would hate more than Joey to find out about that, it was Joseph. Oh, he’d probably just be delighted . As she swallowed back the lump of anxiety in her throat, she said, more urgently now, “John.” Please, she wanted to say, but she wouldn’t.

He watched her for a long moment. She didn’t know how to tell him that if she spent a second longer with his human scalpel of a brother trying to peel her skin back she was going to lose it. She didn’t know how to say that even though she hated him—even though he’d kidnapped her best friend and teased her with that stupid commercial and considered the logistics of drowning her—in the last few days he’d been something close to reasonable, something, and she wanted desperately to keep that streak going.

“Fine,” John said after a moment of deliberation. “But only you. Hudson would spend the entire time trying to eviscerate me, and I only just got you off that kick.”

Bad, Elliot’s gut said. But he was right. Joey would have never accepted help from one of the Seeds, and it was best if she stayed here to rest, anyway; she’d been through the worst of it. She could leave Boomer here to help ease her concern, and if someone tried to radio in—either the Resistance members or Burke—it would be better for Joey to make sure they didn’t get lied to.

“Fine,” Elliot repeated, swallowing thickly. “But—we go tonight. Like, right now.”

“Sure, boss.”

She dropped her hand from John’s arm and took in a deep breath, pushing the hair away from her face. When she looked back over her shoulder to where she’d fled from, Joseph was no longer standing there. She had the feeling that he’d been there for a while. Watching.

But she couldn’t think about it much, because John was turning and heading off, talking over his shoulder. “Tell your Hudson that we’re going, and we can head out.”

Yeah, Elliot thought. Easy enough.

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It did not, in fact, go over well.

Or, well, that’s what John could glean from what he heard from the outside of the bunkhouse. Hudson wasn’t pleased—but it was easy to see that it was because she didn’t want to have to say that she owed anything to them. In the long run, even John knew that this was the best option.

Well, the best option was probably not having Elliot do anything. 

“Hudson’s a problem,” Jacob said, arms crossed over his chest as John stood leaned up against the front of the truck. Absently, he swung the key ring around his finger.

“It’s fine.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be convincing Honeysett to stick around?” Jacob muttered. “Seems like giving them the resources to fuck off is the opposite of that.”

“What did you say to Joseph?” he asked, ignoring his older brother’s comment regarding what he was supposed to be doing or not doing. “Before I talked to him last night.”

Jacob slid his gaze to him. For a second, he didn’t say anything, like he was trying to parse out what exactly it was that John was asking him. Because it wasn’t just what did you say to Joseph, it was what did you two talk about, and he wasn’t sure he was going to get even close to the answer that he wanted.

“Just told him what you told me,” the redhead replied, uncrossing his arms and letting them drop to his side. “Burke’s gone. That’s a problem, too.” Another pause, and then: “Seems like we have a lot of problems around here as of late.”

John watched his eldest brother’s receding silhouette. What the fuck does that mean? He wanted to say, but there was no time—Jacob would almost certainly indulge him, and if he derailed Elliot’s plan anymore than it already was, he’d almost certainly get strangled. In the less-fun way.

The door to the bunkhouse opened, and Elliot came out with Hudson trailing close behind. Seeing the two of them together just reminded him, again, of the last time the three of them had been in the same space together. 

I don’t know which, Elliot had said, like there was a John she’d want to kiss, and she needed to find him.

“Are we going?” Her voice, brisk as it normally was, ripped him out of the memory as she reached to take the keys from his hand.

He lifted them just out of reach. “At your leisure,” John quipped, “my liege. ”

“Bring her back, alive and in one piece,” Hudson ground out. “I’m only staying in case the Resistance radios in, and to keep an eye on your stupid brothers. If I had my way—”

“I’d be dead, the Resistance would be flourishing, the cops would be flooding this place, yada yada.” John waved his hand absently. “A pleasure as always, Deputy Hudson.”

“Don’t instigate her,” Elliot sighed. “You sound like a fuckhead.”

“He is a fuckhead,” Joey bit out. “Elli, I’m serious—I can come. You don’t have to—”

And then, in what John thought could only be a surprising act of self-control, she stopped herself. She stopped herself and didn’t finish her sentence, and the moment stretched long and unspoken between the two of them.

More than ever, John felt like the intruder, the interloper. Where he had thought Hudson would need to get used to the tenuous and tentative teamwork he and Elliot had been building, it now felt painfully apparent that the person that was going to be on the outside was him.

“I know,” Elliot replied after a moment. “I know, and I’m—it’ll be okay, I’ll be back soon, okay?  John, I’m driving.”

“I don’t feel like dying.”

“You drive like an old man,” she quipped, and when he arched a brow at her as if to remind her that she’d never once experienced his driving, she said, “ probably, in comparison to me—”

“—right, yeah, the woman who drives like she’s on Monster Jam. I think I’ll pass on the adrenaline rush, but thank you.”

“ Fine, ” Elliot sighed. “You’re so annoying.”

He headed around the front of the truck. Elliot exchanged a few softer, quieter words that he couldn’t quite make out with Hudson and then slid into the seat next to him, buckling up and settling back against the seat with a sigh. As soon as they had pulled out of the compound, she seemed to visibly relax; whatever tension had been holding her shoulders so close to her face had fled.

“Do you want to play a game?” John asked conversationally, after they’d been on the road for about ten minutes; he anticipated her answer but asked anyway. Part because the silence made him uneasy, and part because there was a small chance she’d say yes.

“No.” And then, moving on the offensive: “Do you really believe it?” she asked, and when John waited for her to elaborate, she continued, “All of this—bullshit. That Joseph is saying about the end times, and—”

John cleared his throat. He’d figured this question would come up sooner or later. He’d just hoped to have had more time, first. “I believe in Joseph,” he said after a moment, skimming his hands along the steering wheel. “I always—Joseph has always had our best interests in mind. And he hasn’t been wrong , you know.”

“So far,” Elliot pointed out.

“Yeah, well, that’s still a pretty good record.” He could feel himself getting defensive. “I spent—our parents, they—”

And then the words stopped coming out. They halted in his throat, dragging, shredding inside of him. I spent my whole life waiting for something to say yes to.

“Anyway,” John continued after a moment, eyes grazing the incoming storm clouds, “I would do anything for my family.”

“Ah.” And that was all she said. For some reason, it really dug at him—didn’t she want to push and press, slam on his berserk button until he couldn’t stand it anymore? John let the silence stretch between them for a bit longer before he glanced over at her.

She was about half-asleep in the passenger seat. Every time her eyes began to drift, they’d suddenly flutter awake; without her brows furrowing and her mouth set into a hard line, she looked like she had when he’d seen her in that bar, years ago. Soft, he thought absently as wisps of her hair fell out of her ponytail.

He was reminded briefly of how Jacob had once told him, back when they were kids, that an animal feeling comfortable enough to sleep around you was a sign of trust; and then he thought about how much he was sure Elliot would murder him for even drawing those parallels.

“What were you doing?” he asked, when he saw her eyes stay open for longer than a few seconds. “When I ran into you, I mean. Back at the compound.”

A grimace crossed the blonde’s face. She rubbed her forehead tiredly. “Just thinking.”

“That is quite a chore,” John agreed, and she shot him a scowl.

“Fuck you.”

“If you ask,” he agreed, “politely.”

That bloomed the red in her face, so fair was her skin that it was visible almost instantly. For once, she had no rapidfire response ready. He could hear the gears of her brain grinding and hitching before she finally said, “Stupid.”

John tried not to seem too pleased. Rain began to fall—steady at first, and then pelting the windshield with what felt like baseball sized raindrops. John slowed down as they took a corner, grimacing.

“I don’t want you to tell Joey,” Elliot said after a moment, with no context, though he had an idea of what she meant and it made something sharp and prickly coil in his stomach, right there under his heartbeat. Still, he feigned innocence.

“About—?” he prompted, but before she could clarify he plunged on. “That I’d do anything for my family? Or about how if you asked nicely I’d—”

“The kiss,” Elliot bit out, scoffing under her breath. “You fucking narcissist.”

“That’s still about me,” he pointed out, slowing down more as the wind picked up. “I really don’t think we’re gonna beat the storm.”

“ John.”

“Well!” He exhaled sharply. “What, you don’t want your best friend to know that I kissed you—”

“I’m serious—”

“—and you kissed me back?”

“Yes!” She snapped. “That’s exactly right! Good job, John, do you want a medal for your skills in critical thinking? I know that must have been a real fucking strain for you.”

Great, he thought dryly. Glad she’s back up to full steam. “And why not?” he demanded. “Seems like you and Hudson don’t keep anything from each other.”

“Because she’s going to ask why ,” Elliot replied finally, after she let a long heartbeat wind its way between them, “and I don’t—I won’t have an answer, because I don’t know.”

It was his turn to be quiet. He might have been more discouraged—and fairly—if his brain didn’t keep turning over the fact that she hadn’t denied kissing him back. Not even for a second.

I think you’re doing a great job with the deputy.

In an effort to ease the tension, and ignore Joseph’s voice lingering in his head, John offered, “If she asks that, you could just be honest.”

Elliot waited, because he supposed that she knew he wasn’t done talking; but it wasn’t any fun if she wasn’t going to walk into the punchline, so he waited, too. And when she finally said, “And how would I answer, then, John?” tiredly, he settled back into the seat comfortably.

“That I’m handsome, and irresistible, and there is an undeniable —” He ignored her infuriated groan and plunged on, “—attraction between us.”

“I have an incredible idea. Let’s play the “John shuts the fuck up and gets Elliot to town” game.”

“Now you’re just being mean. ”

A little laugh came out of her at that—the first time John thought he’d heard her laugh in a long time, even considering that they’d only been at this for a little under a week. The sound made a pleasant warmth bloom in him.

“Just focus on getting us to town, grandpa,” she said. “Then we can talk about how mean I am.”

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By the time they got to Fall’s End, the storm had started to hit in full force. John barely managed to pull the truck in front of the Spread Eagle before he watched the wind lean a telephone pole hard left.

“We’re not driving back until this storm is done,” he told Elliot, over the screaming wind. Thunder rumbled, rattling deep inside of the cavity of his chest; two seconds outside of the truck had them drenched, clothes sticking to them.

“Then we’ll have plenty of time to collect up supplies,” she called back, pushing the door of the bar open and stepping inside. John followed suit; he even held his breath, just for a second, with the idea that maybe the Resistance hadn’t left when she’d told them to. But inside it was quiet; the lights were down, presumably from the storm, and all he could hear was the faint sound of the rain pelting the windows and the thunder rolling outside. 

Elliot said, in a sigh of relief, “They left.” John threw the lock on the front door just for good measure—not that he thought Ase’s men would be out in this kind of storm—and then followed her further into the bar. 

“I’m glad that we’re able to get… Fireball for you and Hudson,” John remarked as he inspected one of the bottles, and Elliot scrunched up her face.

“Gross.”

“What? You’re a little country bumpkin. Don’t you love Fireball?”

“Um,” Elliot said, “fuck you. Call me a country bumpkin again, John.” She busied herself with picking up one of the plastic crates and filling it with dry foods, muttering crossly under her breath. He watched her deliberate for a moment before she picked up one of the nicer bottles of vodka and planted it in the crate.

“I’m scandalized!” he exclaimed. “Can’t wait to tell Jacob I drove you down here for you to get alcohol .”

“That’s not the only thing,” she protested, “and we still have to stop by my house. Once the storm clears up.”

It didn’t pass John’s attention that Elliot hadn’t argued with him about driving in a storm like she had before, nor that she seemed to be a thousand yards more relaxed than she had been in the compound. Her hands moved with a different surety now, a different kind of confidence that had been missing before; sleep, he thought, and a day or two without getting drugged would do that to a person.

“Well, I’m going to take a shot,” John announced, shivering. “Before I die of exposure.”

She eyed him warily but continued to busy herself; though her clothes were drenched too, her shivering was purely physical, shuddering in her shoulders and back but not once rattling her teeth or hands. The blonde pushed the wet hair from her face on occasion, and sometimes sniffled, but as John poured himself a shot he thought that she seemed much more composed.

John made his way over to where she was packing things up behind the bar, reaching around her from behind to set a shot down in front of her.

“I’ll take back that I called you bumpkin,” he said lightly, “if you take this shot with me.”

“We’re here to get supplies, John,” she replied flatly.

“And we’re stuck until the storm blows over.”

Elliot narrowed her eyes. She was certainly considering a number of things—the fact that they would be leaving as soon as the storm was done, he would assume—but then, as though she had worked herself up to it, she snatched the shot glass off of the table and took it. John quickly followed suit, but not without a noise of protest.

“That isn’t how you take a shot,” he told her, watching her mouth twist at the taste. “You’re supposed to tap the bar first.”

“I was going to lose my nerve,” she defended, and for once that idea that Elliot was admitting that she had nerve that could be lost made John feel a little good. “ Yuck. I told you Fireball was bad.”

“I take it back. You’re not a bumpkin. You’re a very sophisticated, intelligent, beautiful woman, who just happens to want to live in the country, for some reason.”

Something about what he’d said made her attitude falter, disappearing right before his eyes as her cheeks heated up from his words. She said, after a moment, “Why are you trying to get me to drink, anyway?”

The question was a fair one, he supposed, though as he leaned against the bar near to her he shrugged. “Well,” he began, “it’s fucking cold, for one. For two, since Hudson spirited away when we first met, I never got the chance to figure out what would have happened if you’d stayed.”

The blonde returned to keeping her hands busy, moving briskly. “ I know,” she said, more confidently than he would have expected, and he arched a brow at her.

“And what would have happened, then?”

“I would have gone home with you,” Elliot replied, without missing a beat, sucking the wind right out of his sails. And it was that easy, too; I would have gone home with you, she’d said, like it was nothing, like it didn’t matter that this whole time she’d been fighting him at every turn but was now openly admitting that she had wanted him then.

She would have been mine, something wicked in him whispered, pulling itself out of the dark recesses of his mind. I would have had her, all to myself, for all this time. She’d have been my monster of Wrath. Think about how obedient she would be now.

Before John could say anything, she continued, “Because I was young, and stupid, and we should be thankful that I’m not the same girl I was then.”

He studied her for a moment, watched the way that she absently pushed the damp hair from her face, the way the heat spread in her cheeks. And he said, “Pretend, then.”

Her hands stilled, and she looked at him. “Pretend what?”

“We’re in a bar,” John replied, closing what little distance remained between them, his hand on the bar beside her, gently and half-way boxing her in. “You’re Junior Deputy Elliot, as you are now , and I’m me. Pretend that we’re just in a bar together, and that you’re not a stupid, young girl that was just charmed by me.”

There were a few moments of silence; moments where John thought he might have spooked her off, ignited that hairpin fight-or-flight inside of her, but she didn’t seem like she had adrenaline running through her body; she just seemed to be figuring it out.

“I can’t,” she said after a moment.

“You can’t,” John repeated.

“Yeah. Because—” She stopped, and then said, “we’re behind the bar. If we’re customers, we wouldn’t—”

John couldn’t stop the short, barked laugh that came out of him. The absurdity of the moment just struck him too hard; and when he laughed, Elliot frowned, turning to face him fully and crossing her arms over her chest.

“Well, it’s true!” she exclaimed. “You can’t ask me to roleplay a situation and then put me in the wrong location.”

“Unreal.” John reached up absently, tucking a loose strand behind her ear. “I cannot believe you just completely ruined the moment.”

“It’s not like we were going to kiss.”

“Oh, it’s not?” His hand drifted from where it had been tucking away her hair down, resting at the juncture between her neck and shoulder. The gesture made her eyes flutter; just the sight of that had something pleasant twisting in John’s stomach, this wild little animal blushing from just a little teasing, just a little touch. How touch-starved was his little hellcat, he wondered? How much could he wring out of her, just like this? “We didn’t even go through the whole scenario, you don’t know.”

“I know ,” Elliot said, even as John leaned in closer, even as her arms seemed to instinctively drop from where they were crossed to allow him to crowd in. The meaning of the gesture wasn’t lost on John—he’d seen the way she’d acted when other people touched her, aside from Hudson. The way she threw up a wall or a hand the second someone got in her space. It made it all feel different.

There was a strange moment suspended between them; the air felt thick and syrupy, humid from the storm outside and their drenched clothes and something else, bubbling and fizzing. She would have been mine, that voice said again. Mine, and not anyone else’s. Not Joseph’s and not Jacob’s and and and.

A thick rumble of thunder rolled just above them; John’s thumb skimmed just over Elliot’s pulsepoint. Her heartbeat flickered at the touch, beats after the sound, so that he knew exactly what had caused it. Him.

She still could be our little hellcat. Our little monster. Our little killer.

“John,” she started, maybe by way of warning, maybe for something else; he leaned in, felt her shoulders tighten with tension or anticipation or both.

So good, John, she’d have said, sweet and obedient and his, when he finally got his hands on her, and the sweet cadence of her voice would hitch just the way that he liked. You feel so good, nobody else has ever made me feel like you, I’d do anything for you, yes yes yes.

“I meant it back then.” His hands itched for it, now that the words were turning over and over in his head, now that he was letting the days of frustration and anger fade for just a moment. His voice came out in a murmur. “When I called you beautiful. That hasn’t changed.”

She sucked in a little breath, like she was trying to steel herself. “Don’t fucking play with me.”

“I’m not.” John skimmed his fingers up to her jaw; her chin tilted up like nothing, as though she already knew what he wanted and she wanted it too, and it suddenly all felt like a little bit too much; too raw, scraping against exposed nerve-endings, all of those times she’d spit on his work or bite out an insult into the walkie or dig her nails into him until he’d bled or tried to kill a man for touching her, all blending into sharp edges that caught and tore the closer they got to each other. John would twist and writhe his way in past them, if she gave him the chance—so that he could get elbows-deep in the gore and grit of her, really sink his teeth in.

So much wrath, he thought, when their noses brushed. So much wrath, and look at how sweet she is for me now.

What patience he’d been exerting was rewarded; Elliot closed the last of the distance between them and kissed him. She tasted like cinnamon-whiskey and a little like rain; he wouldn’t have wanted someone less, he thought, someone less wrathful. He liked the infernal in her—he was supposed to be wiping it out, breaking it in his hands and shaping it into obedience, but he liked that when her lips parted and she sighed into the kiss that something felt carnal about that simple, plain gesture alone, because the knowledge of what she was capable of and what she didn’t let others do made this kind of thing feel more.

A heavy gust of wind rattled the front door in its frame; the sound of it, wood colliding and metal shuddering against the strain of keeping it in place, made Elliot jump and pull away. It took all of his willpower not to chase her body heat. Instead, he stayed exactly where he was—perfectly within reach of her, and he thought for a moment that Joseph had been right: she would have never cowed to his methods. This was the only way to—

To what? Break her in? Make her mine?

“I can’t,” Elliot said again, the words brushing their lips together, and this time he hadn’t asked her to do anything so he knew what she meant. “I don’t know what kind of game—”

He felt her pulse jump under his fingers again. “No game.”

“There’s always a game,” she protested.

“Maybe I just want to kiss you,” John offered, and leaned in just a little again, keeping his voice low. “Have you thought about that? Maybe, I just like the way you are when I kiss you.”

Elliot’s head tilted out of reach. He could feel the heat blooming on her cheeks, even in the dark. “Oh,” she said. He waited for an elaboration, and it was several heartbeats before she continued, “You make me so fucking mad.”

John exhaled a sharp breath, hand dropping from her as he lugged most of his weight against the bar top. “It must be so exhausting,” he said, “doing the amount of mental gymnastics you have to do every day to pretend like you don’t want to kiss me back.”

“Well, I—” Her eyelashes fluttered, and she set her jaw, and John could see she was doing that thing where she readied herself for some kind of blow. “It’s—different. When you’re like this.”

“Like…?”

Elliot sighed. “I don’t want to talk about this,” she said, turning back to the crate full of supplies and nudging it out of the way to make room for a second. As the wind howled outside, and rain pounded against the roof and windows, John thought that the most infuriating thing about Elliot was that she’d run her mouth for days and was now deciding to be tight-lipped.

“No, please, continue,” he insisted, his words coming out tight. “I’m just dying to know your official diagnosis of me, Deputy Honeysett. While we’re at it, why don’t we do the whole group? Jacob, Joseph, me, and Faith. You are the authority on fuck-ups, aren’t you?”

“You don’t owe him,” Elliot snapped. Her gaze was hard when she turned to look at him, her words a vicious parry of his anger. “You don’t owe Joseph your blood and guts all the time.”

“He gave me everything,” John bit out. “He’s my brother.”

“So what?” She ground the words on their way out of her mouth. “So fucking what, John? You think I bend over backwards for my mama while she drinks herself to death every fucking day? No, I don’t. I don’t grovel for her affection, I don’t kiss the fucking ground she walks on just because she brought me into this world, and that’s more than you can say Joseph did for you. So I’ll say it again—so fucking what, he’s your brother? What does it fucking matter?”

I don’t know, John thought, his brain scrambling to piece together a response. But nothing came. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how to explain to Elliot that before-Joseph and after-Joseph were so drastically different, and that if he went back to before-Joseph, he didn’t know who he was going to be.

“I don’t,” John managed out after a moment, all of her softness gone. He’d misstepped on his way in, and now those jagged edges were latching on to him; no room to back out and escape her dissection, no room to delve in deep and find refuge in the space between her ribs, either. “Do that, for him.”

“You do,” Elliot snipped, turning to him now. “I’ve seen it. I told you I have. You’re not that stupid, John.”

Her words lit something angry in him—something wounded, something hurt, something that wanted desperately for Joseph to tell him he did a good job and that didn’t want to admit it. “Well, that can’t be true,” he said, “because Joseph didn’t ask me to go back for you at the campground, and I did anyway. So what’s your diagnosis on that , Doctor Honeysett?”

Elliot’s baby-blues flickered for a moment, impatient to exit the conversation but unwilling to relinquish any ground she’d gotten. She is so fucking stubborn, he thought as he watched the tension in her jaw. So fucking stubborn, even when she practically crumbles the second I touch her.

“I don’t know,” she said finally.

“Well I do ,” John replied angrily, “and it’s that outside of my loyalty to Joseph, there’s you, and I want both.”

“Fuck you.” Her words weren’t angry now, but strained, scrambling for a foothold somewhere; not a damsel in distress, but a damsel under duress, Joseph had said. “You sound so—fucking stupid saying shit you don’t—”

He kissed her again—no tentative questioning, now, no delicate pauses between breaths to try not to spook her. He took her face in his hands and kissed her, pinned in the corner of the bar between the terminal and the bar top itself; John waited for any sign that she wanted him to stop, but her fingers fisted the front of his shirt and kept him there.

“I do mean it,” he said against her mouth, fingers threading in her hair, just at the base of her scalp. “I want you too , Elliot.”

“You—can’t,” she said. “You can’t have both. I won’t—”

I can, John thought furiously as he kissed her again, as he felt her tense and then relax against him, like each touch was a potential for vicious impact but it turned out not to be. Not quite, anyway. She still felt sharp, like he had to slide past each jagged every time he went to kiss her, but it was worth it, to hear her say his name against their kiss. I can, he thought again, a mantra. To grip too tight or to hold loosely; he didn’t know, but he was afraid of the departure, so he held tighter. I can. You’re mine, and I can have both.

I will have both.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The storm didn’t let up, which meant that Elliot was trapped—with John, with what she’d done, with what she’d let herself do. Kiss—and enjoy kissing—John Seed.

It had been stupid to indulge again. It had been stupid to let herself take his words— I want both —at face value because John had proven time and time again that even he couldn’t swallow back the duality of his own existence. The bark and the bite. But though she wanted desperately to pretend as though she didn’t want or feel anything, though she wished that she could wipe the memories from her mind forever, John’s hands on her face grounded her; they rooted her to the earth, and he didn’t kiss her like any man had ever kissed her before. It was like he was starved for her.

A vicious gust of wind rattling the front door of the Spread Eagle had broken the moment. John went to the window to make sure it was just wind, and without the smell of him and the heat of him muddying up her conscience, she could busy herself. Loading supplies, gathering whatever she could that Mary May had been holding on to and hadn’t taken with her when they left, because tomorrow she and Joey would be gone, and she would be able to forget about John Seed and the glimpses of goodness and patience she had seen in him, in equal parts with his anger and cruelty.

And she could forget about how she liked those parts, too, because they felt like her own, like someone knew exactly what she felt and was going to accept those parts of her anyway.

By the time they had finished loading stuff up in the truck through quick darts back and forth, the storm had mostly slowed down to rain. John’s teeth chattered as they loaded up into the truck and then pulled around and down the street to Elliot’s house, the heat cranked and the radio flipped off, leaving them with only the sound of the rain to mitigate whatever lingered loud and sharp between them.

“I’ll wait here,” John said, rubbing his hands together. “If you go quick we might be able to make it back before this picks up again.”

“Got it,” Elliot replied briskly, grateful that he wasn’t going to push to come in. He seemed just as deep in his thoughts as she felt, which meant maybe she’d get some peace and quiet on their way back. 

She nudged the door open and ducked into the house, fumbling under the mat for the spare key before opening the door and stepping inside. It might have been a little bit of a mistake to come back home. The smell of her house —a little like pine and her fabric softener, because she’d just ran a load of laundry before all this happened—hit her hard. It sucked all of the air out of her lungs, ripped it right out of her, gutted her instantly.

My home, she thought, with a sense of finality. Because she would never be coming back. She would never come back to this little house, even if Joseph got put down, even if the Family got cleaned out of Hope County. There was a part of Elliot that understood she would never be able to be happy here, not again.

She stuffed clothes, photographs, some books into a bag. She took the time to change into something dry and warm, pulling socks up and lacing herself into some boots. There wasn’t time to take everything that she wanted, everything that mattered, but she had started over her whole life once before and she thought that she could do it again.

It felt like perhaps an eternity had passed as she moved through her house and tried to pick and choose what mattered enough to come with her; in reality, it was probably only ten minutes, but her grip on time seemed to slip away the second she was in the safety of her house, of her own clothes, around her things.

I’m really leaving . The thought swept through her brain violently as she closed the door behind her, zipping up her jacket against the chilly nighttime winds. I’m really never coming back.

Elliot tossed the bag into the back seat, among the other supplies, and then settled into the seat. John looked at the small bag, and then back at her.

“Got everything?” he asked, and what he meant was, is that really all you wanted?

“Got everything,” Elliot replied. She kept her eyes fixed forward, because she thought if she looked over at John and saw the way he was looking at her, she might actually come unglued.

The brunette only waited for a moment longer before he pulled out from in front of her house and then drove them out of Fall’s End. The bar, the church, her house; they all faded away in the rearview mirror of the truck, perhaps the last time she would ever set eyes on the place that had always taken her back and held her—in the way that her mother hadn’t, the way her father hadn’t, the way nobody else had.

John stayed blissfully quiet for the car ride. He didn’t bring up their moment in the bar, or anything that she’d said, but just drove them diligently back to the compound. It was the first time that he’d opted to stay quiet of his own volition, and she was grateful for it.

I want both.

She didn’t know what that meant. She knew what he was saying—in a perfect world, John Seed would have Joseph’s approval and she wouldn’t want to kill his siblings, and she’d stick around and just drop everything she had spent this entire time suffering for. But she didn’t know what it meant, what it really meant to John, when he was saying it to her with his fingers tangled in her hair and his mouth on hers.

It was early morning by the time they got back to the compound, dawn just beginning to creep over the distant mountain range and the rain having slowed. John turned the truck off, the engine ticking as it cooled, and for a second they just sat there, the sound of the rain in the early morning swallowing them up in the cab of the truck.

And then, Elliot said, “I’m really leaving,” at the same time as John said, “You don’t have to go,” and the silence was really awkward then, stretching out endlessly between them. John exhaled sharply, rubbing the back of his neck.

“If you go, it won’t be the end,” he finally continued. “They could catch you and Joey on your way out. Even if they don’t, Burke got out—this whole thing is far from over.”

“So—” Elliot stopped herself, trying to find some composure somewhere inside of her. “—why are you staying , then?”

It wasn’t like she was asking John to come with them. She just didn’t understand the need to stay and burn.

“I told you,” John replied after a moment. “They’re my family.”

The words made her tired. She pushed the door open, a gust of cold wind hitting her and sobering her almost immediately.

“Elliot—”

“I’ve got a lot to do, John,” she said, hauling one crate and then another out of the truck before stacking them and lifting them into her arms. Her muscles screamed at the effort, but it was a good kind of burn—the kind that reminded her that she was alive. The kind that reminded her she was real.

John said, “Okay, El,” as she hauled her things back to the bunkhouse.

Okay, she thought. Okay, okay, whatever you say, John.

It would just make it easier in the morning, anyway.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Elliot spent the entirety of the morning ignoring him. It was probably for the best, anyway; John had a distinct feeling that any conversation between the two of them was only going to end up tense at best, and explosive at worst. He didn’t know how he was going to tell Joseph that they weren’t sticking around.

Another problem for another time.

Once, when the sun came out, he passed Joey on his way to the church. She stopped and looked like she wanted to say something; even when she finally got around to it, her words were clipped.

“Thanks for bringing her back,” the brunette said, watching him warily.

“I wasn’t going to leave her at Fall’s End. You’re not the deputy I want,” John replied dryly, knowing full well that Joey thought he had some nefarious plan to keep Elliot stuck there. Well, she’s not that far off, anyway.

Joey’s lips twisted into a grimace. She said, “I meant before. From the campground. I know you didn’t have to, and Jacob’s pissed you did, so.”

Oh, John thought, not having expected that. He cleared his throat and tried to figure out how it was he wanted to respond—there was no formula in his brain on how to disarm or parry Hudson when she was being genuine.

Before he could come up with something, she said, “Anyway, that’s all,” and turned to head off, walking briskly, effectively ending their conversation and reminding John that their time together was rapidly drawing to a close.

The morning bled into the afternoon. It was a beautiful Fall day, after all of the rain and wind that had been plummeting Hope County into something wretched. John thought that Elliot had to be sleeping off their little adventure in Fall’s End—another event and space in time that he wanted both to lock away forever and keep at the forefront of his mind in equal amounts.

“Hey, fuckhead!”

His head snapped immediately to the front of the yard. They’d been back since early dawn, but he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Elliot, or even Joey after their little run-in; John was still stuck trying to figure out a way to get them to stay—tell them they couldn’t take a truck, maybe, but even though he knew that’d slow them down, he also knew that Elliot and Joey would carry their shit on foot if they had to, and Elliot wouldn’t be staying without Joey.

However, the problem at hand had immediately made itself apparent; Jacob, turning a truck off after having pulled up next to the one that she had just emptied out and Elliot, stalking across the yard, vibrating with fury. He could feel it from here.

“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, feeling eyes turn to the commotion. Faith watched him inquisitively from the doorway of the church, leaned against it with the dark circles ringing her eyes. He took in a sharp breath. “Hold on, I’ll—one minute—”

“I’m tired, deputy,” he heard Jacob drawl as he opened the driver’s side door, one leg sliding out. “Don’t you think you can wait to...”

Elliot kicked the driver’s side door hard , in a spartan-like gesture that would have been impressive if it wasn’t so alarming, slamming it on Jacob’s leg and drawing from his eldest brother a bit-out swear that made John think perhaps Elliot was going to be hurtling herself toward death imminently; and maybe Elliot knew that too, but if she did, she didn’t care.

Jacob climbed all the way out of the truck and closed the driver’s side door, the frame rattling from the force of the gesture. Bad , John thought faintly, idly, somewhere very far away from himself. Bad, so fucking bad, what the fuck.

“Hey,” John said, coming around the front of the truck feeling something close to panic at the way Jacob’s expression darkened. “Deputy, let’s—”

“Where the fuck is she?” the blonde demanded. John hooked one arm around her waist the second she started taking another step toward Jacob—not just because he thought Elliot might actually put her teeth in Jacob if she got the chance, but because he also thought that Jacob wouldn’t skip out on an opportunity to try and teach her a lesson. Regardless, John’s presence meant next to nothing; she pushed at his arm with vigor, but her vitriol remained pointed at the redhead. “What the fuck did you do with her, you stupid fucking caveman?”

“Muzzle your fucking beast,” Jacob snapped, his words overlapping Elliot’s. The collision of their voices in apparent discord—Elliot’s high, frantic note of hysteria and fury brutalizing the darker timbre of Jacob’s voice—clattered around in John’s tired brain violently; Elliot squirmed in his grip, and the idea that she might try and headbutt him passed briefly through his mind.

“Yeah, John .” Elliot dripped the words in a sticky honey on their way out of her mouth. She was practically sweating poison, her thrashing stilled for a moment as she used that same eerie, cloying sweetness she had before, with Jace. You’d let me walk around, wouldn’t you? Except now it was pointed at him, this saccharine tone, begging him to do it. “Muzzle your beast, poor Jacob’s scared I’ll fucking kill him.”

Not how he wanted this. Not like this. Fuck fuck fuck. “Elliot—”

A half-cocked grin split across Jacob’s face. He leaned forward, almost within grabbing reach of Elliot. “Yeah? You think you could do it, little girl?”

“We’re not doing this,” John insisted, hauling the blonde back a few feet. “Alright? We’re not doing—”

It was only them, the two of them in the whole world—Jacob and Elliot, desperate to rip each other apart, and John was just the poor fool stuck in the middle.

“Get John to let me go,” Elliot bit out, “and fucking find out. I know you did something to her, and when I find out I’ll fucking kill you—you and your stupid fucking brother and every single Peggy that tries—”

“Okay, alright—” John turned, dragging the blonde— she’s so tiny, how is it so hard to take her anywhere —and started walking her toward the bunkhouse. She dug her feet into the dirt, but he thankfully had an advantage on her in that respect. “We’re done here.”

With his arms locked around her, and wisps of her hair sticking to his face, he heard Jacob call from behind him leisurely, “Only one thing to do with a rabid dog, John.”

Put it down. 

The sentence completed itself against his will in the confines of his mind. He knew already what Jacob was thinking, but that was a problem for another time.

“In we go,” John said, releasing one grip to open the door. The bunkhouse was empty , which suddenly made Elliot’s venom and anger make more sense.

“She’s gone!” Her voice was almost a wail, and as she pulled herself out of John’s grip she began to pace, frantically. “She’s fucking gone and I know he did something, what the fuck was he doing out of the compound? He hates Hudson. I know he does. He did something to her, John—”

He held up his hands to steady her, reaching, but she smacked his hand away.

“Move,” she bit out.

“You can’t kill Jacob,” John replied.

“Fuck. You.” For a second, he thought that she might actually try to kill him. Her eyes swept over him in a way that they hadn’t before— calculating, figuring out the logistics of strangling him or not, the same way that he’d seen her regard other members of Eden’s Gate, the same way she had looked just before smashing a man’s face in with a shovel. 

It seemed her brain came to some conclusion, because instead of trying to kill him she moved to go past him again, but he was faster. His arm hooked around her waist again and hauled her back from the door.

“I don’t mean that for lack of trying,” John snapped, “I mean that Jacob will kill you first .”

She made a wrecked, agonized noise and tried to squirm out of his grip again, but he locked it in tight; the noise was enough to rattle his skeleton, enough to make his stomach twist, but he held fast.

Elliot said, distressed now, “I have to find Joey, I have to—what did he do with her—”

A frantic kind of panic was spilling out of her, bleeding into him, too. She was going to go out there and try to kill Jacob if he didn’t put a stop to it, and though there was a part of him that wanted to let her try—to see how much she could actually do against Jacob—he knew better.

“El,” he said, “don’t. Jacob didn’t do anything to her.” He didn’t know that for sure, but that would be a problem for another time.

“I have to find her,” Elliot insisted, her voice breaking. “I have to, John—”

“We will.” His words seemed to cut straight through the panic, right down to the grit of it, and she stopped trying to split past him. Her hands were trembling though, the blood having fled them as she gripped him.

“Find her,” she gritted out. “ Please.”

Please. John couldn’t remember a time that she’d asked him like that, with politeness. With sincerity. Maybe she had—but it was hard to pick out those moments in all the rage, all of the wrath.

“I will,” John managed out, after those baby blues had him pinned. “I will, El, okay? I’ll find her.”

“Promise me.” Urgency flooded her voice; her eyes flickered over his face, as though to check for a lie, some kind of tell that would out him; but she would find none, because there were none. There was no universe, John thought, where he would say he’d find her and he didn’t mean it. To what end, anyway? She’d leave if he did. “Promise me, I can’t do it by myself.”

“I do.” He took her face in his hands; all of the blood which had fled her fingers was in her face, feverish with panic. Her breath wobbled in her mouth frantically; it was the first time he’d seen her so close to tears without the horror of a bad trip dragging her down.

John knew that he was toeing a fine line between helping Elliot and keeping her. He knew that he couldn’t say he wouldn’t, or he’d risk ruining everything that had been so delicately built between them—but finding Joey would enable them to go. And then what would he do?

Anything I have to.

“I promise.”

[enchanted-prose]

#18 Blackberry Night iii

the last of our fancy antics

Word count: 2,384

Characters: Roden, Nila, Merry (Original character)

Enjoy!

Blackberry Night had a grip on every building and on every person. However, Renlyn and Amarinda’s strict color rule only applied to the castle. 

Roden wondered if he’d get an earful for skipping the grand party for something calmer.

Hopefully.

The instructions were clear. They were to meet outside the city gates beside the Roving River. He was to bring every weapon known to man, a full suit of armor, and barrels of pitch. 

Unfortunately for Merry and her extreme hatred for crawfish, Roden hadn’t been able to mobilize forces.

But he did bring Nila, who didn’t really mind crawfish. She didn’t really mind anything, much to the horror of her tutors. 

Merry was standing at the river bank, mud covering her bare feet. She waved. 

“I hope you don’t mind,” Roden tilted his head in Nila’s direction. “Sadly, waging war against water bugs wasn’t able to find space in my schedule.”

“Lady Harlowe, it has been far too long,” Merry said, nearly scraping the ground with her head as she bowed.

“The pleasure-,” Nila mimicked the bow. “-is all mine.”

“Your trousers are impeccably tasteful, if I do say so myself.”

“They’re quite nice to tell the truth.”

Merry put her hands on her hips, “Did you do the braids in your hair?”

Nila shook her head, and pointed at Roden. He coughed. “I did them.”

As captain of the royal guard, Roden was responsible for ensuring that Princess Amarinda and Imogen were watched over during their travels. He rode outside their carriages and kept vigil outside their tents. During their travels, he was with them for almost every single moment.

Of course they’d taught him how to braid hair.

“That’s- bravo, Captain Harlowe, you’ve earned a little bit more respect from me,” Merry whistled. 

“They’re just braids,” said Roden.

“Very nice braids, mind you.”

“Do you like the ribbons on the ends?” Nila asked, holding up the ends of her two golden braids. A pair of blue ribbons were tied to the edges in immaculate bows.

Merry looked to the side and pointed to her own blue hair ribbon, “We match.”

Nila looked at Roden, her smile reaching her eyes. “We match!”

“Ah, yes, that you do,” he said. 

He’d have to start giving away different colors of ribbon.

“I hope you don’t mind helping me catch crawfish,” Merry scratched the back of her hand. “I slept in again and I didn’t get to pick my chore.”

“I’m good at catching crawfish, they get really big in Libeth so I’m not scared of the little ones in the Roving River,” Nila said. “The village boys like to have team contests with catching the buggers, everyone wants me on their team.”

“The crawfish here are small?!” Merry tapped her right shoulder and then her left.

Roden recognized the sign. Bymarian and outdated. Meant to expel evil spirits from entering the soul. Amarinda explained it to him several years ago.

“Sometimes they’re red,” he added. 

“With glittery black eyes!” Nila held her fingers to her face, imitating a pair of spectacles. 

“By the Saints! Do the Devils wander Libeth too?” Merry stepped back, disgusted.

Taking Nila by the hand, Roden stepped off of the main road, approaching the silty riverbank. “Haven’t seen one yet, but there’s a first for everything.”

A large bucket waited for them, supporting a series of sticks of varying length. There was a cloth inside the bucket, and upon further inspection, a sausage too. Nila sat down in the reeds and peeled off her boots. 

“I brought string,” Merry fished around in her patched apron pocket. “Do you have anything to cut it with?”

“Are you using a stick and bait like you’re fishing?” Nila scoffed. 

“Are you going to catch them with your bare hands?”

Nila tied both of her braids in a knot at the base of her neck, and slowly waded into the Roving River without a word. Roden tensed. She knew how to swim, but he still struggled with keeping a safe distance. 

It was hard to stay away knowing the various dangers that could occur at a whim.

“Right, well, ah, I don’t like holding crawfish, so I’m using a stick and string,” Merry mumbled. 

Roden motioned for the string, “Why don’t you like crayfish?”

“They’re scary and their pincers hurt. Don’t get me wrong, I like to eat them, but I don’t like looking at them.”

Completely fair. 

He cut through a length of string, handed it to Merry, and cut a length of string for himself. Nila’s fearlessness was completely different from Roden’s. The more he thought about crawfish and their spindly little legs, the less he wanted to hold one. 

“Jolly said you frequent the chapel,” Merry dug around in her skirt pocket.

“Yes, ah, I do,” said Roden. He rubbed the back of his neck, wondering just what Merry hoped to 

accomplish by pointing that out.

She frowned, still patting at her skirts. “I swear if I lost it-”

“Lost what?”

“I made you something. But I won’t tell you what it is, and it’s not a tart this time. I didn’t know Nila was coming, otherwise I would’ve brought something for her too.”

“She’d understand.”

Merry stuck her tongue out as she searched another skirt pocket. She gasped in delight, “Found it! Here, if you don’t like it, don’t tell me.”

A string of beads, bits of polished glass, stones, and another fish coin dangled from her grip. She held it from the middle to point to another charm at the top of the string: A silver shield bearing an ‘x’.

“Are these-?” Roden asked, holding the string up to the setting sunlight.

“Prayer beads? They’re a little unconventional, but I know that’s important to you and I’ve gathered too many stones, they needed a purpose,” Merry shrugged. “I bought the charm, and the coin at the end matches the other one I gave you.”

The unorthodox beads, mostly green in color, matched the springtime season growing between his ribs. Encompassing his bones. Roden held the string in his fist, unsure of what to say. Unsure of how he could describe what they meant to him.

“Thank you,” Roden grinned. “It really-”

Merry brushed her chin, “Ah, don’t mention it. It’s just trash I’ve collected over the past few weeks.”

Except that it wasn’t trash.

He wouldn’t put pressure on her. Roden knew exactly what pressure did to a person, and it rarely worked out in the end.

What turned a heart to stone?

Turned a smile to ice?

Pressure. 

“I caught one!” Nila shrieked, yanking her prize out of the water. The crawfish in her hand pinched at the sky, trying to reach backwards to attack Nila’s hand.

“Absolutely revolting,” Merry gagged as she dumped the sausage out of the bucket. She held her skirt in her hand as she stepped into the mud, holding the bucket beneath Nila’s crawfish. 

“You really did catch that with your bare hands.”

“She’s really our best offense when it comes to a crawfish battle,” Roden said.

The bucket found a permanent place wedged in the mud not far from where Nila stood. Her knotted braids came loose, resulting in both blue bows dragging in the river water each time she dove for a crawfish. By the time Roden had both poles ready for himself and Merry, Nila had caught three more crawfish.

“By the Saints, can I give her my wages if she always comes to help,” Merry put her hands on her hips. She yelped, and leapt away from the water. “Something touched my foot!”

“It’s probably just a plant,” Roden said. 

Merry nodded, and once again stepped into the water; Roden slid out of his boots and socks as fast as he could, splashing in after Merry. The silt between his toes conjured up unpleasant images from years ago.

But he’d ignore them for now.

His battle was with crawfish, not with boys his own age at the wrong side of a war.

“I can’t, I just keep thinking about-,” Merry swallowed. “-about one crawling over my foot.”

“A reasonable fear, your ankles are too small to put up much of a fight,” countered Roden.

“My ankles are most certainly not too small.”

Roden gestured for Merry’s hand, “Step where I stepped, there’s a rock you can stand on.”

“You found the rock first, you can stand on it.”

“I have hardy ankles, you don’t.”

“I caught another one!” Nila bellowed. “How many have you caught with your pole, Merry?”

“Fifty, but sadly, they are all invisible.”

Ultimately, Merry did step on the rock. Roden took several steps to the left, and tossed the sausage into the water. The silt sliding beneath his feet reminded him too much of a familiar substance he’d tried to avoid for as long as he could.

Distraction. He needed a distraction.

“Are you doing anything once you’ve captured every crawfish in the Roving River?” He asked, pulling the string a little closer to him.

Merry laughed, “Not exactly. It’s my first time in Drylliad for Blackberry Night, and I’m one of the only girls who’ll have to pass around tankards of ale to all the young lovers at the Dragon’s Keep.”

“Somebody will try to steal you away.”

“You’re right. Jolly has grand plans and apparently I’m the only one who can help with them. Something about getting all of the Gelynian’s in Regar’s army to demonstrate their signal songs.”

“My voice teacher’s Gelynian!” Nila called. 

“Then perhaps you can join us at the Dragon’s Keep and show off your skills,” Roden said.

“Really?”

“No.”

“Roden! I’ve been to the Dragon’s Keep before!”

Merry clicked her tongue, “You got yourself into this one, Captain.”

“Friends help friends?” Roden tried, once again tugging his string to a new patch in the river.

“Nila, love, the Dragon’s Keep is going to be horrifically crowded,” Merry explained. “Besides, somebody needs to make sure Roden gets into bed on time.”

“Exactly! Ah, Merry, your string’s gone tight.”

“My string’s gone- My string’s gone tight!” Merry burst, jerking the string up. The crawfish and sausage piece shot out of the water, and landed in the grass. An odd slapping sound confirmed that the crawfish hadn’t escaped to the water yet.

Roden caught a small crawfish not long after he picked up Merry’s for her. As expected, Nila brought in several. Her trousers were completely soaked, and river water dripped from her once pristine braids.

She looked like a mess, but the giddy laugh that came with every caught crawfish excused the dirt stains.

Merry and Nila began a spying game, each one taking a turn quietly spotting an object and letting the other try to guess what it was.The game was familiar, and Roden joined in after a few rounds, but gave up after Nila chose a tree for her object three turns in a row.

The silt. That slippery, dirty grip it had on his ankles and calves. It was nowhere near those old memories. If anything, the silt was cleaner.

But it felt too much like blood soaked grass.

The makeshift rod in his hand felt too much like a sword. He-

“Roden, can you help me?” 

A crawfish was swinging in a circle, picking off pieces of sausage. Merry held the string at an arm’s length. The crawfish waved a claw in the air. Roden nodded, and pulled the crawfish free from the sausage.

Mosquitos buzzed, signalling that it was time to either go home, or face the wrath of hundreds of cursed bugs. Nila had already pulled her boots on. She held the bucket with price, and pointed out each crawfish she’d caught. 

The roar from the Dragon’s Keep echoed all the way through the streets and almost past the walls. Merry gave Nila a tight embrace.

“Really, it means the world to me that you caught that many,” she laughed. “I’ll never doubt your claims ever again.”

“Good, because you shouldn’t,” Nila clasped her hands behind her back. “I’ll think of you when I see a crawfish.”

“Saints, I hope you don’t. Now hurry along, I’m not responsible if you turn into a fish from wearing those soaking clothes for too long.”

Nila stuck out her tongue, and bounded ahead of Roden. He lingered for a moment. “I, ah, I’d rather not be trapped in a room filled with nobles.”

“I don’t blame you, though Carthyan gentry is much more favorable than any other court I’ve been t- I’ve heard of,” Merry crossed her arms. “Are you sure wild noise and Jolly’s eternal lute playing is something-?”

She didn’t need to say it. Roden knew what she was hinting at; Merry wanted to know if he needed a quiet place.

And the answer was no, he didn’t. Quiet places left him alone with his thoughts, and Roden didn’t want to be alone. Not tonight, anyways.

“I can get past the lute,” Roden promised. “Can I come see you?”

“If you don’t mind watching me clean, then yes. If you stick around till I’m finished, we’ll steal an entire cake and eat it ourselves.  Or feed it to a very lucky pigeon. And you’ll get to see Gelynians belting their hearts out. That’s a sight to see.”

Roden caught himself nodding. The roar of noise at the Dragon’s Keep was different from the porcelain chatter that would undeniably be at the great hall. Nobody cared at the Dragon’s Keep, but everyone at court was waiting to rip somebody to shreds in a moment of weakness.

He could ignore what happened at the river if he was given the right tools.

Take the matter up with his father once the situation calmed.

“I’m glad I got to help you conquer crawfish,” Roden said, the prayer beads were almost heavy in his pocket.

Merry smiled, and patted his cheek, “Thank you for putting them away because I hate them.”

There was no need for goodbyes, Roden knew he’d be back. 

“Oh! And Roden?” She added. “Bring ink and a quill, I’ll bring flowers. We’ll toss something over the bridge.”

Tossing flowers and wishes into the Roving River, turning a blazing flow of death to a place of good memories.

He couldn’t stay away if he tried.

[lovemesomerafael]

El Amor Todo Lo Puede           Chapter 50:  Holding Your Breath

Source: @fortheloveofbarba

Chapters 1-45  Chapter 46  Chapter 47  Chapter 48  Chapter 49

************  NOTE: This is one of the endings to this story.  But there will a few more chapters, which can be considered an alternate ending.  After you read this chapter, PLEASE read the note afterward to decide whether you would like to read on.  ************ 

It was bizarre to Rafael that a place could be both hectic and dull at the same time.  He couldn’t understand how he could possibly be both terrified and bored.  He hated every slowly crawling second in this crowded, dingy waiting room; useless, out of his mind with fear for Laura, and unable to do a damn thing to help her.  He wished he could scream and throw every piece of crappy furniture in the room through the dirty windows.  He also wished he could crawl under the plastic couch he was sitting on, curl up in the fetal position and cry.  Instead, he did what he had been doing for the past – what, week?  He sat looking at his shoes, trying to tune out all the sharp sounds jangling his strained psyche. Every time a phone rang or an announcement came over the PA system, lightning shot through every nerve in his body.

Olivia came and sat next to him.  “You know,” she said with attempted lightheartedness, “I think this is the worst I’ve ever seen you look.”

“Oh, good.  It’s the worst I’ve ever felt.  I like symmetry.”

“Can I get you anything?  Coffee?” “Hell no.  I’m so strung out now I’m gonna fly apart any minute.”  He sighed heavily.  “Either that or implode.  I haven’t decided yet.”

She simply sat quietly next to him as they waited.  Hours passed.

Finally, mercifully, an older black man in surgical scrubs pushed tiredly through the double doors separating the waiting room from the surgical and recovery suites beyond.  He called for the Parker family.  Three quarters of the room stood and stepped toward him.  

A group of about thirty cops and firefighters gathered around the surgeon, naturally moving so that Rafael and Olivia were positioned face to face with him.  “You family?” He asked, looking around at the uniforms and badges.

“We are,” Olivia said firmly.  

He clearly knew first responders.  He asked no questions and didn’t hesitate.  “Well, the Detective’s out of surgery, and she’s stable for the moment. She got incredibly lucky, in one sense. The bullet barely grazed the brain. I’m not expecting any trouble there.” His voice lowered an octave.  “But that’s the good news.”

“And the bad news?”  Rafael’s voice cracked as he asked the question he did not want the answer to. Olivia put an arm around him.

“The brain is surrounded by layers of lining, with fluid in between, right?  It’s like a cushion between the brain and the skull.  Well, the bullet tore the hell out of those layers of lining as it passed through.  That’s what took so long, repairing that damage.”

“But you were able to repair it?”  Olivia asked anxiously.

“Yes, I was.  But the brain really doesn’t like to be disturbed.  When it is, its reaction is to swell.  And that’s the problem.  Detective Parker’s brain has suffered significant trauma.  And it’s already beginning to swell.  The skull is a limited space.  It’s bone. It can’t stretch.  So if there is enough swelling, her brain will begin to be squeezed against the skull, which damages it.  And if there is too much swelling, it can cause… catastrophic damage.”  

“Catastrophic damage,” Olivia repeated, looking intensely into the surgeon’s face.  She shot a quick look at Rafael.  Quietly, she continued.  “You’re saying she could die.”

“We’re doing everything we can to minimize the pressure, and we’ll continue to do that.  But yes. She could die.”

Rafael looked sick.    

“If we can get her through the next 48 hours, then she can make a full recovery.  But I need to be straight with you.  If you’re the praying sort, now is the time.”

The assembled cops and firefighters mumbled thanks to the surgeon as he turned to go.

“I need to see her.”  Raphael managed to croak around the painful constriction in his throat.  He was pretty sure he was going to vomit sometime in the next few minutes.  

The surgeon turned to him.  In a voice that conveyed his kindness and his understanding of the depth of Rafael’s pain, he answered, “We’ll be moving her to ICU.  As soon as she’s settled, someone will take you to the waiting room up there.  As long as she’s stable, we’ll see.”  He turned and disappeared through the double doors.  

Now that Laura was out of surgery, some of those assembled in the waiting room had to get home to their families, or back on duty.  With muted, somber voices, they said their farewells and shuffled out.  

Soon only Rafael, Olivia, Fin, Carisi, and Rollins were left, standing in a tight knot.  Rollins said, “So she’s made it through surgery.  That’s a start.  I gotta believe she’s gonna get through this.  She’s tough, you know?”

“Tough as nails, man,” Fin agreed quietly.  

“Look, I know I’m not going to be able to think about anything else tonight, but I gotta get home to the girls.  Please, call me if anything changes, will you?”

They all agreed that they would.  Rollins hugged Rafael and whispered, “Hang in there.  I’ll be praying for her,” before heading down the hall.

Fin, always protective of Olivia, tried to talk her into going home to Noah, but she said she wasn’t ready. “I’ll just stay until she’s settled in ICU,” she said.  

“I’m picking up her parents at the airport when they land,” Carisi said.  “I got just enough time to stop by the chapel and say a few hundred Hail Marys before I need to head out.  Call me. For anything.”

“Will do,” Fin assured him.  Carisi squeezed Rafael’s shoulder before he, too, headed out.

An hour later, Rafael, Olivia, and Fin were ushered up to the ICU waiting room.  One of the nurses came briefly out to the waiting room to explain that even the short trip from the recovery ward to ICU had caused a spike in Laura’s intracranial pressure and destabilized her condition to the point that the surgeon could not allow any visitors.  He promised that the surgeon, whose name was Dr. Webb, would come to speak with them again when he could.  

Time crawled.  After half an hour of total silence, Rafael looked pleadingly over at Olivia, sprawled in a chair across a scarred wooden coffee table from where he sat on another plastic couch.  

“How am I…  What am I supposed to do if…” he began shakily.  He couldn’t speak the thought.

Olivia went to sit next to him, putting an arm around his shoulders. “We’re going to get through this. Together.  One step at a time.”

From his chair next to the one Olivia had vacated, Fin said, “I got faith.  You gotta have some, too.  The man upstairs has got this.”  

Rafael just stared blankly, the tortured look in his red-rimmed eyes tearing at Fin’s heart.

“Hey, counselor, you know you can’t blame yourself for this, don’t you?  That asshole with the gun, he’s the one to blame.  This is in no way on you.”

Raphael’s features twisted with tired fury.  “Bullshit.  I’m the one he was coming for.  I should be the one in there with a bullet in the head, not her.”

“That’s not how it works.  You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us,” Fin replied.

“Fin is right, Rafa.  Any one of us would’ve done what she did.  It’s the job.  And when she wakes up, she’s going to tell you that.”  

The tortured look on Rafael’s face said everything about the hellish fear and guilt that threatened to tear him apart

They heard the swish of the automatic door into the ICU and Dr. Webb entered the waiting room.  All three stood up.  

“We got her stabilized, for now.  Her pressure’s still climbing, but I’m encouraged by her response to the drugs we’re giving her.  Listen, I’m not going anywhere, and she’s in for a long night.  I really encourage you folks to go home and get some rest.”

“I need to see my wife.” Rafael said.

“I figured you’d say that.  I can let you see her, but when I say ‘see her’ I mean stand in the doorway and look in at her for a moment.  That’s it. Any stimulation can increase her intracranial pressure and she’s already got two nurses in there with her.”

“I’ll take whatever I can get,” Rafael quietly assented.

Olivia and Fin waited while Rafael and the surgeon went through the doors into the ICU.  Moments later, Rafael was again ushered out into the waiting room.  He still looked ravaged, but perhaps a bit less wild with fear.

“How’s she look?”  Olivia asked tenderly.

All Rafael said was, “Tiny.”

At that point, Fin took charge, instructing Olivia that he was going to drive her home.  Looking at Rafael, he said, “I’m comin’ back.  I know there’s no point asking you to go home.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“Then give me your keys.  I’ll stop by your apartment and pick up a change of clothes for you.”  Of all the signs that Rafael wasn’t doing well, the fact that he mutely handed his keys over scared Fin the most.  

When they had gone, Rafael stood staring out the window at nothing. He prayed with an intensity born of terror, dimly hoping that something in his repeated pleas for Laura’s life would get God’s attention.  “Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo, santificado sea tu nombre...”[1]

Around midnight, Carisi arrived with Laura’s parents.  Carol Parker tearfully enveloped Rafael in a tight hug that he found surprisingly comforting.  He quickly caught them up with the events that had occurred after Carisi left to pick them up.  They exchanged meaningless chatter about the Parkers’ flight from Illinois, and then Carol announced that she was going in to look at Laura.  Rafael mentioned that she might not be allowed to.  As she drily told him that she pitied anyone who tried to stop her, she reminded him so much of Laura that he caught his breath and teared up again.

“No disrespect, counselor, but I’ve seen you look better.” Carisi said gently.  “She’s in the best hands she could be, and there’s nothing we can do to help.  Why don’t you let me drop you off at home?”

“Not gonna happen,” Rafael growled wearily.  Carisi didn’t bother to argue.  He simply said his goodbyes, muttered some hopeful words, and left for the night.

Rafael and Laura’s father took seats at right angles to eachother around the coffee table.  Ed Parker leaned forward, elbows on his knees.  If he’d had any doubts about Rafael’s love for Laura, the look on Rafael’s face and the wired exhaustion in his posture would have resolved them.  Looking at him, Ed said, “Rafael, you look like crap.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

“We’ve been here before, did you know that?  Twice.”

“Hmmm?”  In his distress and weariness, Rafael wasn’t sure what Ed meant.

“Did Laura ever tell you what finally got her into rehab?”

“She said she had to have emergency surgery.  An ulcer.”

Ed rubbed his chin, remembering.  “There was a little more to it than that.  The ulcer perforated her stomach.  She threw up a pretty good amount of her blood volume before they got her to the hospital.  And the blood she had left had a potentially lethal level of alcohol in it.  When they took her into surgery, the doc told us to prepare ourselves for the worst.  So we did.  I think that was the darkest moment of my life.”

He paused and sighed.  “She was so beat up from drinking, I didn’t know whether she had any fight left in her.  And I didn’t know if she had anything left to fight for.  But she fought like hell, and she made it.  And then she went straight into rehab and fought like hell there.  And she got sober.”

Rafael got the message, but didn’t know how to respond.

“You know she was attacked.”

“I know.”

“Well, they said she shouldn’t have survived that, either. But she was absolutely not going to let that asshole win.  And she didn’t.  You’ve been married for over two years now.  You may have noticed my daughter can be stubborn.”

They shared what passed for laughter in the situation.

Ed touched Rafael on the arm to make sure he was listening.  “So here’s the thing.  I get that Laura’s in trouble, and I understand how serious this is.  I’m not kidding myself about where we are.  But this time, she has everything to fight with, and everything to fight for.  She has you to fight for.  I’m not trying to tell you not to be scared.  Hell, I’m scared to death.  But don’t you give up hope.  You said it yourself, in a fight, the smart money’s always gonna be on Laura.”

Rafael smiled weakly.  He realized then how glad he was that Laura’s parents were here with him. They were perhaps the only other people who could begin to love her as much as he did.  He also realized how fond he had grown of them, and that somewhere over the last two years, he’d formed a bond with Laura’s father.  Which is why Ed deserved to know that it was Rafael’s fault his daughter was now fighting for her life.  

“Ed, there’s something you should know.  This is my fault.  That bullet was meant for me.  There was a guy –“

Ed cut him off.  “I know what happened.  Sonny told us.  And I know my daughter.  It doesn’t surprise me one bit that she did what she did.  If you’re about to apologize, you’d be apologizing for Laura being who she is.  And that would just be absurd.”

Rafael could only manage to whisper a strangled, “Thank you.”

Carol returned from seeing Laura.  Sometime later, Fin returned with a gym bag that held some clothes and toiletries for Rafael.  In his uncomfortable chair, Rafael fell into a grief-induced sleep listening to Laura’s parents and Fin talking in low voices.

The next day passed in an endless drone of bored anxiety, punctuated by visits from friends and coworkers.  All the conversations were the same but, really, what was there to say? It felt to Rafael like standing on the edge of a knife poised over a canyon.  Standing there hurt like hell, but falling off would be worse.  

The only positive news was that Laura had no further pressure spikes since the initial spike when she was transferred to ICU and, by mid-afternoon, her intracranial pressure had stopped climbing.  Dr. Webb said that he was encouraged but, despite Rafael’s relentless efforts, would not revise his prognosis.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Barba.  I would like nothing better than to give you good news.  But I’d be lying to you.  There’s hope.  She’s holding her own right now, and we are going to continue to do everything possible to get her through this.  But her condition is still critical.”

“Doctor, when will we know?  I know you said the first 48 hours after surgery were crucial, but… how will we know she’s going to be OK?”  Carol’s voice was tearful, but determined.

“When she wakes up, we’ll know,” Dr. Webb answered.

Late in the afternoon, the surgeon returned to update the visitors gathered in the ICU waiting room, which included the entire SVU team.  Because Laura’s condition had been stable throughout the day, he said that he would allow one visitor to sit with her for a few minutes.  Everyone seemed to naturally turn their eyes to Laura’s mother.  

When she realized it, Carol said, “I know how this is going to sound, but I don’t think it should be me.  She needs calm and quiet, and I just…”  she had to pause a moment to sniffle.  “I don’t think I can go in there and look at my little girl with her head all bandaged, and that horrible monitor in her brain, and…”  she couldn’t continue.  She collapsed into Ed as he put an arm around her.

“Rafael, you go in.  Give her a kiss for us,” Ed told him gruffly, his own emotions dangerously near the surface.

“All of us,” Olivia added.

So Rafael found himself seated next to Laura’s bed, the room as dimly lit as possible with the sliding glass door pulled nearly shut to keep out the noise from the busy nurses’ station just outside.  The nurse had told him that he could hold her hand, but to keep their hands still and not to otherwise disturb her.  

He sat, simply looking at her, for a long time.  As his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he took in the bulky, white bandage that completely covered her head, except for her pale, still face.  She had deep, dark circles under both eyes.  She breathed quietly and shallowly, the rising and falling of her chest barely perceptible under the blankets.  The banks of machines surrounding the head of the bed looked to him like the cockpit of an airplane – no, there were too many for that.  A spaceship.  

It was obvious how badly hurt she was.  Yet Rafael was astounded at how much quieter his mind was, how dulled his fear was, simply because he could see and touch her.  He didn’t have to wonder what was happening, because she was right there next to him.  So when, after about fifteen minutes, the nurse came to tell him it was time to go back to the waiting room, he simply and quietly refused. 

She tried to convince him, but very quickly saw that he was absolutely uncompromising.  He didn’t argue.  He politely told her he would not leave Laura, and didn’t move.  She left the room, and was quickly replaced by Dr. Webb. The surgeon had been here before. He recognized the situation for what it was – Rafael had no intention of doing anything that would endanger Laura, and no intention of leaving her.  It would be useless to argue, and would only risk disturbing his patient.  He reviewed the data from the monitors and, reasoning that Rafael’s presence had not caused any negative change in her delicate status, decided that there was no reason to press the issue.  He instructed the nurses to let Rafael stay with Laura, as long as she remained stable.

As the afternoon progressed into evening, the nurses noted that Laura’s intracranial pressure had fallen slightly.  Her blood pressure had also improved, and her pulse was a bit stronger.  Rafael sat quietly, one hand holding Laura’s, the other on the bedrail where he rested his chin on it.  He watched her, hour upon hour, as the evening went on.  The nurses wondered what he was thinking, but didn’t disturb him as they quietly and efficiently did their work.  

What he was actually doing was trying not to think.  He just wanted to be there with Laura, breathing with her, praying for her when he remembered to, and enjoying the occasional memory of something she had said, or something they had done together.  Too often, a vision of the moment the night before, when she had thrown herself at him to knock him out of harm’s way, intruded into his thoughts.  He saw her, again and again, register the movement of the shooter as he stood from his hiding place to fire at Rafael.  He heard her shout, felt her weight crash into him, relived the horrible moment when he reacted to the fall and she did not.  Saw her limp form, too much blood already pooling around her head. The overwhelming pain of those intrusive images sickened him.  Only knowing that he needed to be quiet for her kept him from groaning out loud.  He could not even begin to touch the bottomless pool of guilt that threatened every moment to engulf him.

As midnight neared he sat, eyes staring unseeing at her hand in his, their wedding rings touching.  He again thought back to her lying there on the ground.  He winced.  He relived the frantic scene as the paramedics worked on her, and the seemingly eternal ambulance ride to Mercy Hospital.  At the edge of consciousness, he caught a faint, breathy groan, like a sleeper reluctantly awakening with a colossal hangover.  He looked, startled to see Laura’s eyes drowsily looking back at him.  Her expression was confused, sluggish.

“You look terrible,” she whispered hoarsely.

Rafael burst into tears, even as he laughed.  He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it fiercely.

“Hi,” he finally managed.

“Hi.”  She replied in the same hoarse, tired whisper.  Her brow furrowed.  “Did I get beat up again?”

“You got shot.”

Her eyes widened in drowsy surprise.  “Huh.  That’s a new one.  Where?”

She moved as if checking herself, then grimaced in pain and put her hand to her head.  “Oh. Found it.”

Rafael smiled through his tears.  “The doctor says you’re going to be fine,” he said, kissing her hand again where it was still clasped to his lips.  

“That’s nice,” she murmured groggily, her eyes beginning to close again.

“I need to tell them you’re awake.”

“OK,” she sighed.

While Dr. Webb and the staff checked on Laura, Rafael went to the waiting room to tell Laura’s parents and the squad, all of whom were there, the news that she had awoken.  There were more tears at this joyful news than any of them had allowed themselves during the crisis.

Twenty minutes later, Dr. Webb came out to the waiting room. They all crowded around him.  “I’ve done a number of tests, and Detective Parker appears to be entirely neurologically intact.  I’m confident that, barring any unforeseen events, she is going to make a full recovery.”  More tears flowed and Carol actually hugged Dr. Webb.  

“What she needs now is rest.  Her body needs a chance to heal itself.  What I normally say at this point is that you all need to go home and no visitors until tomorrow.  And I am going to say that.  But first, she is insisting – no, she’s demanding – to see her husband for a few minutes.  I shouldn’t allow it, but she says if I don’t, she will get up and come out to him. I believe her.”

This threat, so typical of Laura, caused the room to erupt in relieved laughter.    

Rafael followed Dr. Webb back into Laura’s room.  Laura smiled sleepily and held a hand out to him. He sat down next to her bed, holding her hand in both of his.  Tears were running down his cheeks.

“I don��t remember anything.  But I can guess what happened,” she murmured weakly.

A curtain of pain fell over Rafael’s face.  He looked down at their clasped hands.  In an anguished voice he asked, “How many times are you going to get between me and a bullet?”

“Every time,” she whispered.

He shook his head and couldn’t look at her.  “Damn it, Laura,” he whispered.

“Amor[2], look at me,” she finally mumbled. Willing himself to comply, he dragged his eyes back to look into hers.

“It’s your fault I love you.  But this?  My choice.  Not your fault.”  She briefly winced in pain, and again had to rest a moment before continuing in her weak, scratchy whisper.  “Got it?” 

“You’re telling me you chose to get shot?”

“Wasn’t exactly Plan A.”  She gave a weak laugh.  “But rather me than you.”

“Not to me.  I would much rather get shot than see you like this,” he responded, his voice serious and full of love.

“Tough luck.  I got better reflexes.” 

They smiled at one another for a moment before she continued.

“Need a favor,” she whispered, becoming exhausted from the effort of speaking.

“Anything.”

“Imma crawl back under this morphine.  Sleep for a long time.”  She had to rest again, eyes closed.  She grimaced and gave a feeble groan.

“That’s an excellent plan.  What do you need me to do for you?”

“Go home.  Sleep too. Else I’ll worry ‘bout you.  Won’t enjoy my narcotics.”  

He closed his eyes for a moment and hung his head wearily, occasional tears still streaking his cheeks.  “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Hazlo.”[3]

“I’m leaving your parents here with you.”

“Don’t make me negotiate.  Got shot in the head.”

He looked up at her again, chuckling and crying at the same time. “There’s no negotiation here.  I’ll go home, but I’m leaving your parents here with you.  And I’m calling my Mami.”

She smiled tiredly, already beginning to doze.  “OK.  Te amo,[4] Rafael.”  Her voice trailed to a barely audible whisper as she fell asleep saying his name.

He took his time, simply looking at her.  Then he leaned over and placed the softest of kisses on her lips.  “Te amo. Dios, cómo te amo.”[5]

******

Lying between Rafael’s legs with her back against his chest, Laura laughed at a cheesy line spoken by a macho spy type to the woman he was trying to seduce.  She was getting very tired of the hospital, but at least she was in a regular room now, where she and Rafael could be snuggled together as they watched movies, or talked, or read.  She could feel him playing with the ends of the beautiful new scarf Lucia had given her to wrap around her head.  

“As many hats and scarves as your mami has given me, either she really hates my shaved head or she wishes she’d have had a girl to dress up.”

“Neither.  She just loves you.  She wants to spoil you.”

The raw emotion was back in Rafael’s voice.  The shooting had been much harder on him than it had on her. She wasn’t surprised to feel his arms tighten around her, and didn’t make a sound when he squeezed her hard enough to make her head hurt.  When his embrace loosened, she maneuvered herself around so that she was still laying on his chest but could see his face, and wiped a tear from his cheek.  

“It’s OK, amado,[6]” she whispered.  “I’m right here.  I’m fine.”

“I thought I was going to lose you,” he said, for the thousandth time since she’d been shot six days before.

“I know.  But I’m not going anywhere.  Haven’t you figured that out by now?  I would’ve thought when we got married, that would be a clue.”

Rafael leaned his head down to hers, closing his eyes and saying yet another prayer of thanks.

Laura reassured him again that she was all right, and the mood passed as quickly as it had come over him, the way it always did. The trauma counselor had said that this was the way it would be for him for a while, until he’d fully processed what had happened.  The counselor had also said that exactly what they were doing – being together doing normal things, and reassuring him as often as he needed it – was all it would take.

“Have I told you lately how happy I am?”  Laura asked.  “And how much I love being married to you?

“I actually have some time, if you'd care to tell me now.”

“Well, buckle up, Harvard, because it's a lot.”

Laura turned off the movie and spent a long time telling Rafael all the things she loved about him, and their life together, even though she was well aware that he already knew. He didn't mind hearing it again. And when she was done, he made her laugh, even while she cried a few tears of overflowing happiness, by laying out a quite logical, well-constructed, and entirely convincing argument why he, in fact, was more in love, and the happier spouse. After that, they lay cuddling in the dark, dreaming dreams together, and devising plans for making them all come true.

[1] Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…

[2] Love

[3] Do it.

[4] I love you.

[5] I love you.  God, how I love you.

[6] Beloved

IMPORTANT ***** IMPORTANT ***** IMPORTANT****

This is the end of the story – a (YAY!) happy ending for Rafael and Laura.  I wrote it that way because I freaking ADORE Rafael Barba.  I also really like you guys.  I appreciate your reading this and supporting me while I wrote it more than I can say.

Please, if this is the ending you want, the only one you can live with, consider this that happy ending.  Because it is.  The whole reason I wrote this chapter the way I did is so we get this ending.  (Because I want it, too.)

But you’re going to notice that there are more chapters.  Here’s the thing.  I don’t want my friends coming after me with pitchforks and torches.  This can be the ending.  Or the rest of the chapters can be the ending.  Or, this story can have alternate endings.  IT’S YOUR CHOICE.  I absolutely do not want to upset or disappoint my fellow members of Team Rafael.  That’s why I’m including this note at the risk of being kind of a major spoiler.  PLEASE DO NOT READ THE REST OF THE CHAPTERS AND THEN FLAME ME BECAUSE YOU CAN’T LIVE WITH ANY ENDING OTHER THAN THIS ONE.  Please stop here, with my deepest thanks for reading and letting me know you were here. 

If you are OK with considering a different ending, and choose to read on, great!  I promise a happy ending, just a different happy ending. 

[the-blind-assassin-12]

Oblivion

Part Seven: You See Right Through It 

A/N: Erik is keeping his word to let you continue to see Logan even after the wedding, but at what cost to you? At what cost to him? This trip is going to be different, but how? 

Warnings: language, mentions of drug use, overdose, suicide, character death, sexual assault

Word Count: 3,244 

Harding Investments Incorporated Makes Merger Official As Alan Harding’s Daughter Ties The Knot With Erik Speer of Speer Financial.

The two weeks that followed your wedding to Erik were the most unbearable that Logan could recall. The news was ablaze with photos from the day; of Erik’s arm draped around you, that smug, poisonous grin on his face. His fingertips curled possessively over your shoulder, his grip white knuckled like he knew that Logan was doing everything he could to rip you from him, daring him to try. The articles all went on to talk about the financial aspects of the merger, speculating where the newly acquired funds will likely be invested. Nowhere in any of them did your name appear, and why should it? You were just another asset to be traded or bought to these people. The only mentions of you at all were in regards to fashion, with an editorial on your gown and the authentic, vintage lace that was hand-sewn onto the dress. Logan could still feel the fine tulle beneath his fingers as the pictures scrolled before his eyes. He felt sick, a pit deepening in his stomach, swallowing him from the inside out. You looked so lost, so resigned and small. The spark in your eyes from that first night had been doused so thoroughly it was almost absurd to think that it had ever even been there. He could only imagine what each day had been like for you, waking up as Erik’s wife, how that title was taking a toll on your will. He could only imagine the way Erik would abuse his role as your husband, and the thought of that cruel monster’s hands on your body scorched his blood. He scratched at his forearm, fighting every urge to quench that fire in his veins with a sharp needle and a full syringe.

“This isn’t who you are, Logan… This isn’t all that we are…”

Your voice filled his ears then, and he felt your soft touch tracing the reddish purple webs that were still barely visible against his fair skin. A choking sob emanated from deep in his soul as his dark eyes swam, and he forced air in and out through his nose to try to control his breathing. She needs you, he told himself. She needs you as much as you need her, so you can’t leave her...you can’t do this to her…  He hadn’t shot up since you’d told him that there was so much more for you both than this pain, this suffering, and he wouldn’t do it now, not when there was still a chance that the plan could work. But the way he’d been beaten down for so long left him sure that if the plan were to fail, if he were to truly lose you and all the hope you’d given him and all the fire that there was between you, that there’d be no other road for him to take. As it was you’d found him clinging to his last lifeline, treading water and fighting exhaustion. You’d somehow breathed life back into him, somehow given him some of your strength, and he wouldn’t throw that gift away, not yet.

He remembered the way that you’d kissed him, standing beneath the stars, your white lace shining against the night, against the rich black suit he wore. He recalled the way his lungs strained as his lips refused to leave yours, recalled the way your heart hammered against his chest as you pressed yourself as close as you could, like you were trying to leave your bones behind and inhabit his instead. “We’re almost free,” you’d said to him, dropping your lips behind his ear, so much cautious hope in your voice that it broke his heart.

“Almost,” he’d responded, taking his hands from your waist. One moved to the small of your back and the other wound up around your shoulders, fingers wrapping gently around the base of your neck. He felt your silent tears soaking into his shirt as he cradled you to his body, rocking slowly, like a melancholy dance.

“I don’t want to go to him tonight, Logan,” you whispered, and he suddenly felt disgusted with his own selfishness when you were suffering like this. “I don’t want him to touch me… I… I want you Logan, not him…” He felt another piece of his heart chip off and crumble to dust as a shallow breath slipped from his lips and his thumb traced patterns against the pulse point of your throat. If I could kill him right now I’d do it without thinking, I’d fucking- but you interrupted his murderous thoughts as you continued, voice cracking slightly. “You know that...right? You know I...you know I don’t want him…”

You were more concerned with the way he was feeling than with yourself; more concerned with the way he was taking this and with making sure that he knew where you stood. Your body was about to be stolen from you- again- by Erik’s rough hands and forceful actions, and your main concern was ensuring that Logan knew that you wanted him instead. He spoke your name, silencing your shuddering breaths and your babbling assurances as his hands found their way back to your face, pulling back to look into your eyes. “Hey...hey, hey...I know… I know… please...don’t worry about me, okay?” Your tears fell over and between his fingers, and he let them as you nodded, reaching one hand up to tuck an errant lock of his hair back in place and out of his eyes. “I’m so sorry that I can’t… do anything...I’m so sorry.” His words melted into kisses- on your cheeks, your forehead, your eyelids- as you sunk back into him, tightening your hold on him. I hate this. I want to kill that fucking bastard.

“I just want you,” you said again. “Only you… whatever he does to me,” Logan felt his heart thud to a hard, abrupt stop at the combination of pain and strength in your words. “Whatever he does to me won’t matter...as long as I can have you.” There was a detached quality to your voice as you spoke about Erik that demolished him, but he knew that detaching was the only way that you could bear the unspeakable.

“You have me. You have me, always. I’m not going anywhere you’re not coming, too, remember?” His tone was soft and he spoke slowly and deliberately.  “I’m getting you off that island...remember?” He ran his hands up and down your back, resuming the gentle swaying motion as he rocked you beneath the stars. “And I’ll see you again, soon… so soon, just hold on…”

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Two weeks after the worst day of your life you sat on the train, wringing your trembling hands as the scenery flashed by on either side. Like always, you ignored the looming mountainscape, paid no attention to the way the clouds had been hung in the sky, so close you should be able to touch them. You crossed, then uncrossed your legs, shifting in your seat and scrunching up your face in discomfort. You could feel the blood rushing in your ears, pulsing in your skull, the anticipation of getting there worse than ever before. It was the same damn seat on the same damn train and you were passing by the same damn cactus patch. But this trip was going to be different from any other for many reasons.You were married now. You’d been damaged further by Erik and his influence on your life.  

You looked down at your hands, shaking in your lap, at the veins and the bones that you could see through the skin. They looked frail. You never thought of yourself as weak, not even the night of the engagement party; you’d fought then, too, but the alcohol and the Xanax had ideas of their own and you didn’t even know what you’d done until you were covered in your own blood, convincing yourself that this was the right option. You didn’t always win, but you always thought of yourself as a fighter. No matter the odds, no matter if you were scared or hurt, no matter if you were alone or if you even stood a chance in Hell, you  always fought. But fighting had proven nearly impossible in the weeks following the wedding, Erik draining every ounce of your strength that he could. You turned your left hand over, and though you weren’t wearing them now, you could still feel the weight of your rings, like chains, tethering you to a man who seemed intent on breaking you down to your smallest self.

Logan, or the thought of him, had been the only beacon, the sole source of warmth, the only thing whispering in your ear to keep trying. You called on the memory of his tongue tracing your shoulder blade, his bottom lip dragging along behind it; on the steady beat of his heart beneath your palm while you lay, sleepily smiling against his shoulder; on that lock that clicked open inside your soul when he’d found you, against all odds and defying reason; you called every night as you stared at the ceiling in the dark.

The night of the wedding, while he held you, swaying under the stars, you’d agreed that the next time you met in the park that you would go directly to the chapel- that he wouldn’t wait for you on the platform like last time, taking Erik’s threats about anyone recognizing the two of you as seriously as possible. While it was the safest thing to do, you hated the idea of having to wait even longer to see him, of him having to wait to see you. You went directly to the stables as soon as you exited the train, practically running, but trying not to call too much attention to yourself. You didn’t think Erik had any other Hosts programmed to watch you, and you didn’t see Angela anywhere, but you couldn’t take any chances. You reached the stable and saw that it was overrun with Guests, saw that there was a wait for horses, and your heart fell through your ribcage. It was only twenty minutes before you were sitting in your saddle, but you knew Logan would worry. You rode as hard as you could, pleading with whatever higher power wanted to listen that nothing else would keep you from him.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Three hours. Logan checked his pocket watch, one foot bouncing anxiously. He clenched his jaw, muscles tense as he narrowed his eyes, peering out the window. It’s a three hour ride. Why isn’t she here? The fat sun was hanging at the perfect height to cast its light through the large stained glass, throwing colors around the room and over his face. It was beautiful, but he couldn’t appreciate it, not when he’d expected you to be here by now. He shoved the watch back inside his pocket and paced across the small chapel. His footsteps echoed in the emptiness, the sound of his own breathing the only other thing in the room. He started running through reasons for why you were late, shooting most of them down as soon as they came up; Maybe the train broke down- it doesn’t. Maybe she got a slower horse- they’re all the same fucking horse. He grabbed at his hair with both hands, pushing it back and down behind his head before gripping his neck and hanging his elbows over his shoulders. Maybe something happened...maybe she didn’t come… “No.” he said out loud, shaking his head. She wouldn’t… pressure like a heavy stone weighed on his chest. He knew you wouldn’t just not show up, knew you wouldn’t have changed your mind. Then where is she? He felt bile rise up in his throat at the idea that Erik had done something to...interfere. “Fuck!” he kicked a long wooden bench, hard as his hair fell over his eyes. He sunk down to the ground, grabbing the soft blue blanket that was draped over the bench he’d just stomped on the way down. He held it in his lap, knees bent up in front of himself. He swore he could still feel you as he ran the faded fabric through his fingers, could still feel the residual warmth from where your skin had been, from the place where your heart had beat against his own. “Where are you?” he asked the air, worry wobbling his vocal chords.

Another twenty minutes went by as he sat there, the blanket in one hand, his pocket watch dangling from the other. He was starting to give in to the worst of his thoughts when the far off sound of hooves against the gravel broke the deafening silence. Logan scrambled to his feet and didn’t even bother checking out the window to make sure that it was you- if it wasn’t, if it was some kind of trick...well, if it wasn’t you nothing mattered. He threw open the door as you rode closer and faster, striding from the entrance, long legs turning over quickly to reach you as soon as he could. He felt a relief fall off of his back like the weight of existence as you dismounted and ran towards him. She’s here.

He could hear your breath catch as he got closer to you, could see tears shining in your eyes and on your wet cheeks, and the two of  you collided like clouds in a storm. His lips were on you as soon as they could make contact, and his hands were in your hair, gripping your face, sliding down your arms and around your back to bring you closer, always closer. Never close enough, never too much. He leaned his forehead against yours as both of you shook with the release of anxiety and uneven breaths. You snaked your arms under his, flattening your palms against his back and he felt more solid with your arms around him than he ever did on his own. He felt like maybe you were right; maybe he could be more than all of the things that had hurt him, maybe, if he had you and you had him. He closed his eyes and kissed you slowly, breathing into the kiss, feeling you breath against him. “I was so worried,” he confessed, lips still pressed to yours. “So worried that you-”

“I’m sorry Logan,” you answered, dropping your head. “There was a tour group ahead of me and the stables, when I got there, the horses, they were all out and-” the words were running from your mouth tripping over themselves to get out, your eyes wide and panicked. “I knew you’d be worried, I was worried too, I’m sorry Logan,” you dissolved against him as he began trailing his hands over your back.

Logan shook his head, swallowed the tears that were threatening to spill from his own eyes- of relief and fear and anger, of something else that he wasn’t quite sure of, love?- and spoke softly. “It doesn’t matter. You’re here now. You’re here, safe with me.” He looked you over, finally seeing you, finally seeing…

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

“I am. I’m here with you, I’m-” You stopped at the look in his eyes, hard and angry as you followed them to where they were trained on your arm, where your sleeve had gotten pushed up during your embrace...where Erik’s big purple thumbprint marred your porcelain complexion. Your eyes flew back to his as he reached out to push your sleeve further up your arm, nostrils flaring and jaw clenching under his beard at the sight of several more finger shaped bruises.

“He did this to you.” It wasn’t a question. It was a flat statement, laced with hatred for your husband.

You kept eye contact with Logan, even though it hurt to see his ebony depths swirl with rage and sorrow. You let out a shuddering sigh. Wait until he sees my legs… You’d fought Erik, the first few nights. And for a brief moment you’d seen excitement flicker in his murky, swampy eyes, but eventually he grew tired of prying your legs apart, of holding you down so you couldn’t punch or slap or scratch. If you had it your way, you would have fought every night, every time he tried to touch you. You would have died fighting. But after five nights of that, Erik’s pride had taken a hit. He was Erik Speer, now CEO of Harding Investments Incorporated. He was on top of the world and he didn’t think he should have to work this hard to fuck his wife. He threatened to keep you from Westworld, from Logan...threatened to share his stash of recorded information with your father and Jim, and that changed your tune. You continued to fight, in your mind, closing off and keeping him out. But you complied and let him do what he wanted, staring at the ceiling in the dark.

You nodded in answer to Logan’s statement and he was silent for a long time as your heart banged an erratic beat. Reaching out, you slid your palm against his cheek and felt him lean into it as he shut his eyes. “It’s okay, Logan. It’s okay. Like you said, I’m here. I’m safe with you.” You kissed him and it took a few seconds but he snapped out of it and kissed you back. He took your hand in his and the feel of his fingers wrapping around yours helped soothe both of you. Later, laying under the stained glass, the late afternoon sun still throwing blue light through the intricate design above you, he kissed every one of your bruises, lips lingering on your arms and shoulders, on your calves and the soft skin of your inner thighs. You forgot the world you’d left behind. This was your world now, you and Logan, just like Juliet’s plan. Nothing else mattered, everything else was just a screen, a film, but when it was just the two of you, you could see through it, see what mattered. You’d spent the entire night in his arms, talking and trading kisses, sharing secrets and sharing your bodies. Tomorrow is a big day, you thought as you felt dreams take your mind and his touch slowed, his hand growing heavier as it rested fully against your back. Tomorrow everything changes.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Two years after your last trip to Westworld you sat in front of a screen, trembling as you read the words that scrolled across. You knew the news was coming, knew what day it would come and what it would say. But reading the words- “found unresponsive”, “heroin overdose”, “youth cut short”- and applying them to Logan felt like a dagger through your chest, felt like a vacuum sucking the air from your chest and stilling the beat of your heart. It felt like ending. You knew it was coming but knowing and seeing were two different things. Processing information and emotion were vastly different. To think of Logan, succumbing to the darkness that he carried, that he fought for so long, that you always tried to help him fight...to think of that was too much. You tore your eyes from the screen and left the room.  

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

@something-tofightfor @my-little-dumpster-fire @suchatinyinfinity @lexxierave @ymariejp @obscurilicious @belladonnarey @ms-delos

[trade-baby-blues]

Sutures and Sweets

Pairing: Bones x Reader

Word Count: 1529

Warning: minor injury, merciless teasing, secondhand embarrassment

A/N: The first fic in my Christmas Celebration! Requested by @outside-the-government​. Prompt 6: Character A and Character B meet in the ER on Christmas Eve. Hopefully you like it!!

The holidays were your least favorite time of year. Not because you didn’t like Christmas or winter weather. It just felt like as soon as that first snowflake fell, everyone forgot about common sense. The ER was flooded with people injured  from falling on ice or falling off ladders while putting up decorations. Not to mention, a quarter of the trauma department had requested vacation time, so the emergency room was short-staffed on top of everything.

You dropped the latest patient’s chart onto the nurses station, trading it out for the coffee Christine handed you. “Christine Chapel, you are an angel,” you groaned when you finally took the first sip.

“You looked like you could use it,” she smiled. “Besides, if you pass out in the ER, I’d have to take care of you, and I’m busy.”

“My hero.” You reached for the next chart, ready to start another set of rounds, before almost toppling over the child standing in front of you. You steadied yourself against the counter, hoping the smile plastered on your face would keep the girl from noticing you were having a mild heart attack.

“Can you help my daddy?” She looked up at you from behind a halo of curls, eyes big and scared.

Setting the clipboard on the counter, you bent to her level and prayed that your voice would be steady when you spoke: “I can try. Who’s your daddy?” The girl pointed to a bed on the far side of the room where a dark-haired man was arguing with an intern.

You looked longingly at the coffee in your hands before putting it on the counter with a sigh. Christine shot you two thumbs up as you grabbed the girl’s hand and forced your cheeks up into what you hoped looked like a smile.

“Missing something,” you said with a chirp in your voice. The girl let go of your hand and jumped on the bed.

The man sighed. You could tell he was tired. If the flour and frosting covering the front of his sweater weren’t a dead giveaway, the bags under his eyes were. “Jo, I thought I told you not to run off.”

“I didn’t run off, daddy. I got a doctor.”

“And I’ll be happy to help,” you said, nodding for the intern to tap out. She mouthed “thank you” as she left, and you couldn’t help but wonder what exactly you’d gotten yourself into.

“Looks like you cut yourself pretty bad. What happened?”

“We were making cookies,” Jo piped in.

You raised an eyebrow. “Making cookies. Out of what? Glass?”

The patient snorted. “Yeah, just like ma used to make. Listen, darling, can we hurry this up? I’d do it myself but…” His voice trailed off as he shook his injured hand limply. The lidocaine had clearly already sunk in, so you opened a suture kit.

“Ah so that’s why you think you know better than our intern. You must be a doctor.” You kept your voice teasing, but hoped he got the message.

“Yep,” Jo answered for him. “He’s the best doctor in the world!”

“Good to know you’re a better doctor than baker, Doctor….” You trailed off, realizing you hadn’t even looked at his chart. God, you were tired.

“McCoy. Leonard McCoy.”

You paused, drawing your eyes away from the needle to look at him. “As in Mercy Gen’s pride and joy?”

Leonard groaned. “You know who I am?”

“Please, every doctor in the area knows who you are. The Jim Kirk case? That was a medical miracle what you did.”

“Sorry, didn’t realize you were a fan,” he teased.

“Yeah, well knowing you managed to cut yourself bad enough to need stitches while making cookies kinda takes away some of the celebrity.” Doesn’t take away from those delicious blue eyes, though, you thought.

“Why do you think I came here instead? My coworkers would never let me hear the end of it.”

“Who says I’m going to?” You winked at Leonard before starting the first stitch. It might have been the light, but you could have sworn he blushed. “Were the cookies at least worth it?”

“Yes,” Jo yelled at the same time Leonard said “No.”

“They were SO good. Chocolate chip - meemaw’s special recipe that she only makes at Christmas. We couldn’t go see meemaw this year so daddy was gonna make them. Only, he burned himself getting the cookies out of the oven. Then he knocked my glass of milk off the counter when he put the cookies down and slipped in the milk when he tried to clean it up. That’s how we got here.”

You hazarded a glance up at Leonard, who looked like he’d rather be lying in a field buried in snow than lying in front of you. “Funny. Given your surgical prowess, I always figured you’d have better coordination.”

“Shut up,” he grumbled.

“Maybe if you’d brought some of the cookies you wouldn’t be so grumpy. Right, Jo.”

“No, he’s always grumpy. Cookies don’t help.”

“What,” you gasped. “Cookies don’t help? That is a serious case of the grumps.”

“I’m not grumpy,” Bones mumbled.

“I think my intern would disagree.”

Bones caught your stare again, relieved to see you were still teasing him. Stil, he sighed. “I know. Will you tell her I’m sorry? It’s Christmas Eve and I just wanted to make it perfect  and well...you see how that worked out.”

“I bet if you bring some of those cookies back we can forget all about it.” You snipped the last stitch and threw the needle and forceps onto the cart. “All done,” you said, peeling off your gloves. “I’ll go get your discharge paperwork started, and you’ll be free to go home and make more cookies for Santa. Maybe skip the milk this time, though.” Jo giggled and you heard her whisper excitedly to her father as you left. You couldn’t help but smile. It must be nice to have someone to spend Christmas with.

Wouldn’t mind spending it with Leonard. The thought crept into your mind as quickly as you banished it. “Married to your work” barely began to cover your relationship to your job. You didn’t have time to date, let alone to date a patient. Except he’s not going to be a patient as soon as he signs his discharge form. You pinched the bridge of your nose and sighed. You really needed some sleep.

“Here’s your discharge paperwork,” you said as you approached Leonard’s bed again. “Since you’re a hot shot surgeon, I trust you know how to keep that clean?”

“I think I can manage, sugar.”

“Well, if it does start bothering you, sugar, feel free to come back in and someone’ll check it out. If there’s no questions, you guys are free to go.”

Jo looked at her dad impatiently. He returned her stare, shaking his head and motioning for them to go. She shook her head in response, crossing her arms as they continued their silent conversation. You stood awkwardly to the side, chart still in hand as you watched them.

You could sense Leonard’s growing desperation as his silent gestures became more erratic and decided to pipe up. “Are there….questions?”

Leonard sighed. “Joanna wanted to know if you could come over and try some of the cookies we made, but-”

“It wasn’t just me,” Jo interrupted. “Daddy wants you to come over too!”

“Does  he now,” you said, struggling not to smile.

“Yes, he does. You said so, daddy” Jo argued when Leonard shook his head again. “You said she was pretty and that I could invite her over for cookies!”

You looked to Leonard for explanation, but he was currently hiding behind his hands, begging silently for a trauma to come in and distract you. Joanna tugged gently at his sleeves until he finally dropped his hands. He avoided your eyes as he spoke, “Yes, I would like you to come over for cookies if you’re free.”

There was no way this was happening. You honestly began to wonder if you’d fallen asleep in the on call room and dreamt all of this. All you could do was laugh. “Someone will need to help you change those bandages, and if there’s cookies on the table I suppose I could be tempted to make a house call.”

“You really don’t have to,” Leonard said, taking the discharge forms. A blush crept up his neck as he pretended to read the papers. You smiled down at him before reaching forward and turning the forms right side up. Joanna fell into a fit of giggles as Leonard signed the forms and handed them back to you. “I think we’re just gonna go before I do anything else to lower your opinion of me.”

“Don’t know if it can get much lower,” you joked. “But, if you ever want to try my number’s on your discharge papers.”

Bones stammered out one last thank you before taking Jo’s hand and leading her outside. You leaned against the nurses’ counter, bottom lip pulled between your teeth, as you watched them go. Maybe the holidays weren’t all bad after all.

Tags!!

@outside-the-government @martinawalker @thevalesofanduin @goingknowherewastaken @thefanficfaerie @brooke-taylor0323 @slither-in-a-half @cuddlememerrick @reading-in-moonlight​    @8bit-arc-reactor @jimtkirkisabitch @sjlovestory @kristaparadowski 

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[jiminthestreets-bonesinthesheets]

Lost In Translation - Ch 12

Title: Lost in Translation

Fandom: Star Trek

Pairing: Mckirk

Rating: Lemon

Tags: minor character death, hurt, little bit of self destruction, stranded, smut, slow burn

Summary:

    “Attention citizens. This is the crew of the Enterprise asking for your aid. On Stardate 2264.78 a shuttle manned by our captain and fourteen cadets was ambushed by an unknown source and chased out of sight of our ship and into open space. Those cadets as well as our captain, James Tiberius Kirk, are still missing. We are asking anyone with any information on their whereabouts, or regarding the attack, to please contact the Enterprise immediately. Our family would appreciate any assistance you can give.” 

AO3 Link

Masterlist

A/N:

     Hey all!! Back again with another chapter, and I regret to say that we are getting close to the end of this journey. Close, but we still have a little bit of a ways to go. Thanks to everyone for sticking with this story! <3

    And if anyone is interested in being tagged for future posts for this fic or any others I may post, please let me know and I’ll add you to the list! Thanks for reading <3

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter 12

    A knock came at the door before Len heard it click open and rushed to wipe his eyes before turning around.

    “How is it going, Doctor?” Spock eyed Len as he walked into the room, “Have you finished the logs?”

    “Not yet, I just…” Len sucked in a breath, heaving it out, “I'm having a hard time getting through them. All these memories that Jim's bringing up, things I should have done or said back then… I wish I had time…”

    Len leaned into his hands and whimpered, trying not to cry in front of Spock.

    “Doctor, there will be time. Jim will pull through, he is a strong man.”

    “He should have woken up by now, it’s been five days!” Len turned angry red eyes back on Spock.

    “Yes,” Spock nodded, then gave Len a good once over, “and you have been holed up in here for all of them, sleeping in this chair and barely eating, which is why I am here. You must take a break, Doctor. Go to your quarters, shower, and change. I have Lieutenant Uhura bringing food to your room as we speak, it will be there for you when you arrive.”

    Len quickly shook his head, “I can’t leave, Spock, not while he's still like this.”

    “I will remain by his side while you are gone and if anything changes I will call you immediately.”

    “I'm not leaving,” Len was determined to hold his ground on the matter, pulling Jim's hand closer to his chest as he did.

    “Doctor, please,” Spock almost begged, “I am not trying to pull you away from Jim. The crew and I only ask that you take a small break and allow some time for yourself to regroup and at least change your clothes. And perhaps you could… make a few calls,” Len turned slightly to look at the Vulcan, hands clasped behind his back and eyebrow raised in typical Spock fashion, “there has been a certain someone calling all week inquiring on the conditions of the Captain. I have been intercepting the calls while you have remained by Jim's side but I do not think I can deter them any longer. I promised that I would have you return their calls today, and I do not intend to break that promise.”

    Len sighed, he knew exactly who it was and he never should have neglected them or pushed aside their calls for so long. He should have called right away but his only thoughts at the time were on Jim, still were.

    With a sigh he forced himself from the chair, every bone in his body protesting at the sudden change in position. He stretched and popped his bones for relief, then turned away from Spock and leaned into Jim, the Vulcan turning his back to allow them some privacy in the moment.

    Len rubbed his nose against Jim's and whispered against his lips, “I’ll be back, so don’t you go anywhere while I'm gone, you hear?” then he placed a soft kiss on his chapped lips and turned to face Spock.

    When the Vulcan heard the doctor’s footsteps approaching him he turned back, and was now face to face with Len who shot him a no-nonsense look as he recited his terms, “I will go to my room, eat, shower, make the one phone call, and then I'm right back here. And if anything, and I mean anything happens while I am gone, you call me right away! You got it?”

    Spock nodded once, “I understand completely, Doctor, and you have my word.”

    “Great,” he walked past Spock to the door, “I will be no longer then an hour, less if I can help it.”

    He gave one last look back at Jim in the bed, Spock now occupying his chair by his side, and then turned to leave before he could change his mind.

~~~~~~~~~~~

    Len practically ran through the halls of the Enterprise and into his room. The doors barely had a moment to close behind him before he was already shucking his clothes off and tossing them haphazardly across the room, making his way to the shower as fast as he could. The faster he could get this done and satisfy Spock, then the faster he could get back to Jim's side.

    He stopped at the bathroom door when he looked into the living room. There was a tray of food there as Spock had said there would be, so he walked over to examine it. There was a sandwich, a bowl of fruit, and a salad. As much as he knew himself that he was hungry and that the small fruit cups Chapel kept forcing him to eat were not enough, he just couldn’t muster up the strength to force himself to eat any of the food on the tray. So instead, he peeled off the remainder of his clothes and jumped in the shower.

    It was the quickest shower of his life. He was in, washed, and out in under five minutes, changed, and running through the living room while he towel dried his hair vigorously. Now that he was clean and honestly feeling a little better, he walked back over to the tray of food. He decided on half the sandwich and the bowl of fruit and walked over to the computer desk to eat it. When he was finished, he opened a call window and called the person Spock had mentioned back in Jim's room, feeling slightly guilty about ignoring them for so long.

    The call was answered almost immediately, and a familiar and welcomed face popped up on the screen. “What. The. Ever-loving. Hell?!”

    “Hey,” Len leaned towards the screen, “you may be a teenager now, but that doesn’t mean you can use language like that with your old man.”

    The dark haired girl took a calming breath then went on, “Sorry, Daddy, but can you blame me?! You have non stop talked about this Jim Kirk since Mom let me start talking to you again after the custody battle was over. I have heard nothing else besides the name Jim Kirk since then, and that was years ago! And then over a month ago you suddenly call me in a panic saying that Jim is missing. I called every day after that to find out if you had found him and how the search was going, and then one day I call and speak to a Vulcan who tells me that Jim had been found and that you were in the room with him. No one would tell me if he was okay or even alive, and I’ve called everyday for the last five days and got the same spiel. That you were still with Jim, you weren’t taking any calls at the moment, and that they would leave it up to you to inform me any further. But a damn lot of good that does when you won’t even call me back! I may not know Jim, or have even met him, but I do know you care about him a lot, Daddy, and I have been in a panic for days! I thought the worst.”

    “I'm sorry, Joanna, its just…” he sighed and ran a hand through his hair, “it’s been a hard couple of days.”

    “So tell me what's going on,” she gave him a serious look, “is he okay?”

    “He’s stable, but he… he won’t wake up. He's been in a coma for five days and I-” Len choked on a sob and turned his face away from the screen, not wanting to cry in front of his daughter.

    “Daddy,” he kept his gaze turned away, “Daddy, look at me for a second.”

    Reluctantly he turned back, eyes stinging and red, “Daddy… do you love Jim?”

    His eyes went wide and a slight panic tightened his chest at the sudden question, “Why would you ask me that?”

    “I already know the answer,” she smiled at her father softly, “I can tell in the way you talk about him, the way your eyes look when you call me and tell me about him. The way your voice sounds when you say his name. The way he's all you can think about all the time, the only thing you want to talk about, and for the month that he was missing he was the only thing you cared about. And, Daddy, I’ll be honest, I was worried about what would happen to you if you lost Jim. It’s like he's a part of you and without him you were not the same person. You need Jim, and if that’s not love I don’t know what is.”

    Len just stared at the screen still in shock as his daughter kept speaking, “And its ok, Daddy, that you do love him. I’ve never seen you as happy as you are with Jim, and I want you to always be that happy. So, I already know that you love Jim Kirk, but I think maybe you need to hear yourself say it. So tell me, Daddy, do you love Jim Kirk?”

    The wisdom of his teenage daughter was astounding. She had grown into such an amazing person already and Len was so proud of her, but maybe she was right. He had told himself that he loved Jim, whispered to Jim of the love he would show him when he woke up, how he would never let him go again, but he had never actually said the words out loud.

    “Say it,” she whispered, as if afraid to scare him away, “out loud.”

    “I… I do,” he started, barely above a whisper, but Joanna still heard it, “I love Jim Kirk, and if he doesn’t wake up-”

    He turned his head again as the tears welled up even faster this time, when Joanna called to him softly again.

    “Daddy,” he turned back, on the cusp of holding it together, “you know it’s ok to cry right, it’s always okay to cry.”

  And that’s what did it. He broke down completely, losing all control over himself, bawling his eyes out in front of his daughter, sobbing and choking on his breaths. Tears were streaming down his face, dripping off his cheeks and landing on the table below him, and Joanna sat there with him while he cried it out.

    When he was finished, when his sobs and wails died down into hiccups and he wiped his face clean with his sleeve, that’s when she spoke again, “How do you feel?”

    “Better,” he hiccuped again, “I won’t be perfect until he's awake, but I do feel better.”

    “Good,” she smiled, happy she could help relieve even a little of her fathers stress, “now tell me everything that happened since he was found, it will help to get everything off your chest.”

    “He came in five days ago,” he began, a little more steady now then when he first called, “he was… broken, bruised, bleeding. Some was old, some was new. He had been stranded on some desert planet for almost forty-five days. When Spock found him he was unconscious and had wandered away from the crash sight in search of food and water, but seeing as how he was extremely dehydrated and malnourished when they found him he obviously didn’t find either.”

    She nodded and remained silent, and he continued.

    “They brought him on board and rushed him to the medbay. I tended to his injuries and when he was finished with surgery I sat myself beside his bed and I’ve been with him since. But Spock, he…” he takes a breath, “he found Jim's comm beside him on the planet and wanted me to listen to all the logs he made while he was stranded, and… its been hard and I'm not even finished them yet.”

    “What did they say?”

    “They started off as normal captain’s logs,” he shook his head, thinking back on all the logs he'd heard so far, “just updates on the crash, where they were, conditions of the cadets he was with.”

    “The fourteen new recruits from the academy that Jim took on board,” she nodded, remembering her father telling her that detail earlier.

    “Yes,” he nodded, “some died on impact, but by two weeks Jim had lost them all and he was alone.”

    She gasped, covering her face in horror, “They all died?!”

    “Every single one,” Len sighed, closing his eyes, “he's gunna blame himself for this.”

    “He shouldn’t, it’s not his fault you were attacked in open space.”

    Len pursed his lips, “He won’t see it that way.”

    “Then it’s your job to make sure he knows better when he wakes up.” He looked at her, the look in her eyes, and he knew she was right, “What else did they say?”

    “After that they… changed,” he scrunched his brow as he explained, “they started becoming less and less formal and more geared towards me. Like he was talking only to me, as if he was leaving me some kind of… of goodbye letter. He started talking about old memories, things he was sorry about, things he never got to tell me but wished he had, and… it’s hard to listen to them when he's laying there, eyes closed, when he could still-”

    “Don’t,” she stopped him, “don’t do that to yourself. He's going to be fine.”

    “He should be awake by now, Joanna, it’s been five days.”

    “I don’t know Jim, but from what you’ve told me about him, he seems a little… dramatic,” Len couldn’t help but chuckle, “I'm sure he's just waiting for the right moment to make his grand entrance.”

    “Yeah,” he said with a small smile gracing his lips for the first time in weeks, “you're probably right.”

    “But there’s more to this, I can tell. So, out with it.”

    “Listening to him talking about these memories with me, things we did together, things he wished he had said back then,” he sighed hard, “now it’s all I can think about. There were so many times I could have told Jim how I felt but didn’t, so many times. And I should have. And now that I'm looking back on all of this through Jim's logs, its obvious that we have both felt the same way for a long time, and to think all the time we’ve wasted secretly pining for each other when we could have just been together, but we were both too damn scared to act on it.”

    “So this is where you change that. When Jim wakes up you make sure that you push down every fear you’ve ever had about telling Jim what you’ve just told me, and you tell him everything. How you’ve felt for all the years you’ve known him, how much you missed him, how much it hurt to be without him, and how much you love him. Ok, Daddy,” she held a finger out to the screen, almost scolding Len from across the galaxy, “you tell him everything, or so help me if you don’t I’ll come out there and do it myself!”

    Len laughed, actually laughed for the first time in over a month, “Jim would like you. He actually said in one of his logs that he wanted to meet you, that he would have been happy to have you as his family, so if he wakes up you should meet him.”

    “When he wakes up,” she made sure to emphasize the word, “I would love to meet him! I’ve been dying to since you started telling me about him. I'm excited to meet the man that makes my daddy so happy.”

    “He really does, darlin’,” he smiled softly, thinking about Jim.

    “So,” she began with a little smirk, “when I talk to him, what should I call him? Jim, dad… papa?”

    Len laughed again shaking his head at his daughter, “Yeah, I’ll let you two figure that out.”

    “How does Jim feel about kids anyways?” she quirked a brow, “do I see a sibling in my future?! The pitter patter of little feet. I would love a little brother!”

    He rolled his eyes with a smirk, “I know Jim loves kids, and always talks about having some of his own, but when he meets you he might change his mind.”

    “What are you talking about,” She chuckled, waving her arms in the air, “he's gunna love me!”

    “Yeah, he certainly is.”

    They smiled at each other for a brief moment before she smiled and said, “You should head back to him, I'm sure he's waiting for you.”

    Before he could answer his comm went off in his pocket flashing Spock's name. Panic and fear filled his eyes as he looked to Joanna who had the same look when she cried, “Go, Daddy!” He didn’t even bother to answer the comm and ran out of the room as fast as he could, needing to make sure Jim was okay.

~~~~~~~~~~~

    When Len barrelled into Jim's room, Spock was standing back by the door while Chapel checked over Jim and the machines attached to him.

    “What happened?!” he asked completely breathless.

    “He stirred a few moments ago, but when I called out his name he ceased all movement. I thought perhaps he would wake, but it would seem he is not yet ready.”

    Len looked from Spock to Jim in the bed and Joanna’s words came flooding back to him ‘he's waiting for you.’ He forced himself to take a calming breath to return his frantic heart rate back to normal, then moved past Spock and sat back in the chair taking Jim's hand in his again. Chapel stepped back and looked Len and Jim over once, then nodded to Spock and head out the door past him.

    Spock turned his gaze to Len and spoke evenly, “I shall leave you to it, Doctor.” Then his eyes moved from Len's to the padd on the desk prompting the next log, and he silently slipped from the room.

    Len's eyes followed where Spock's had looked to the padd and he heaved a sigh. He reached over and grabbed it and to pull up the next log.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 A/N: So I hope everyone liked the addition of Joanna!

And if you want to be tagged just let me know <3

Tags: @goingknowherewastaken @medicatemedrmccoy @reading-in-moonlight @flaminglupine @0dannyphantom0 @weresilver-in-space @bi-e-ne @resistance-is-futile81  @haveyouseenmymind @jimboy-mccoy

[kinkykinard]

Whumptober 2018 - Day 2

For @auduna-druitt.

Fandom: Star Trek AOS. Pairing: McKirk. Prompt: Bloody Hands. Word Count: 906. Warning(s): blood, gore, surgery.

There’s always so much blood.

In the back of his mind, Leonard knows that it looks like more than it is, but any blood spilled carelessly, needlessly, is too much.

Especially when it’s Jim’s.

He keeps his eyes trained on his hands, on the forceps, the needle driver, the suture thread that he’s manipulating with the glinting instruments.  He keeps his gaze on things he knows he can control, because he knows that if he stares too deeply into the cochineal pooling around his hands faster than Chapel can suction it away he’ll lose his calm.

Damn it, Jim.

The kid’s bleeding so much it’s a miracle that his vitals are holding and Leonard refuses to tempt fate by allowing himself to feel any amount of relief.  He works meticulously, methodically, tying knots and cutting thread, keeping up the dance of instruments meant to keep Jim from dying.  It’s all he can do until they close Jim up and roll over into a whole other kind of waiting game, dodging specters of infection and breakthrough bleeds.

Leonard is focused.  He’s angry.  Most of all, he’s terrified.

Under the blue-white operating lights, Jim looks far too pale, too vulnerable.  Leonard exchanges a glance with Christine and the confidence in her expression does nothing to reassure him.  

He ties off the final stitch and pulls back, waiting, waiting.  

Christine suctions the remainder of the blood in Jim’s abdominal cavity.  Jim’s organs are pink and healthy; he’d gotten to the OR in time to spare them, at least.  Everything is intact and where it should be, and Leonard takes a moment to breathe before closing up.

The minutes and hours that follow the surgery are the longest Leonard’s ever experienced.  He says that every time Jim’s in recovery, of course, but each time it seems the seconds tick by more slowly, the clock’s hands stalled by gnawing, relentless uncertainty.

By the time Jim’s eyes open, Leonard’s have closed against his own sheer force of will.  Exhaustion has won out over his desperation to see Jim wake up.  Jim is loathe to disturb him both because he knows how much Len needs the sleep and because he’s wary of the wild flurry of emotions the doctor will experience once he’s satisfied Jim is alive and well.  

He disturbs Len anyway, knowing it’s the lesser of two evils.  Letting him sleep any longer will only incite anger, too.

Leonard is alert the moment his eyes open.

“How’re you feeling?”  he asks, affixing an expression of stoicism that he doesn’t feel.

Jim watches him hover, hands moving, eyes scanning the bio bed’s readout, assessing, examining, reassuring himself.  He knows better than to make a fuss when Leonard is in this kind of headspace.  

“Like I got run through with a spear,” Jim replies tiredly, licking his parched lips.

Christine’s at his side with ice chips seconds later as Leonard continues his doctoring.

“Well you very nearly did,” Leonard murmurs, tapping away at his PADD, tracking Jim’s condition.  “Your liver took the worst of it.  You’re lucky I like puzzles, else you might’ve wound up missing a few pieces.”

Jim winces inwardly, masking his reaction with a groan of discomfort as he shifts around.  Chapel’s there in an instant, ahead of the curve with a shot of analgesic right into Jim’s IV port before Len can even write the order.  They make an amazing team.

“Thanks, Bones,” Jim says softly, averting his gaze.

For saving his life, for putting him back together again, for going above and beyond in the line of duty, for having to watch yet again as Jim’s body fought to cling to life.  Thanks isn’t enough, it never can or will be, but it’s all he has.  He can’t promise it won’t happen again; he doesn’t have that luxury.  He can’t even promise that he’ll be careful next time because when it comes to the lives of his crew and the safety of his ship, everyone and everything else is a second thought.  He hates that Bones knows that, but his lover never complains.  Drowns his feelings at the bottom of a bottle sometimes, but he keeps quiet.  Jim has no idea how he got so lucky.

“Don’t mention it,” Leonard waves him off.  “Someone’s got to keep you alive so the admiralty can tell you how stupid you’ve been.  Again.”

Jim smiles at that.

“Trust you to save my bacon when there’s a lecture involved,” Jim teases weakly.

Leonard sets his PADD aside, dropping exhaustedly into the chair at Jim’s bedside and reaching out to link his fingers with the younger man’s.  His gaze flickers briefly to the bio bed’s display again, analyzing the numbers there.  Jim’s heart rate is steady and his blood pressure stable, which is far more than Leonard can say for his own.  Sometimes he thinks he’s getting too old to watch Jim throw himself headlong into danger all the time, but as the strength of Jim’s grip on his hand starts to reassure him just the smallest bit that things are going to be okay the thought dissolves away to nothingness.  As he looks into Jim’s bright, blue eyes, he knows that no amount of pain and suffering over Jim’s close calls will ever be enough to break him.

“I love you,” Leonard murmurs quietly.

Jim yawns widely, the painkillers making it ever-harder for him to stay awake.

“I love you, too, Bones.”

@starshiphufflebadger @star-trekkin-across-theuniverse @feelmyroarrrr @musingsongbird @ababyinatrenchcoat @medicatemedrmccoy @wonders-of-the-multiverse  @devanshade @dolamrothianlady @startrekimagines @theonlyparadox @itsjaynebird @goodnightwife @thevalesofanduin @elsa-lost-in-translation @thefanficfaerie @gryffindor9whovian @auduna-druitt @archangels-lollipop @supermoonpanda @bubblegum-star-trek  @the-space-goddess-16 @starmission @the-geeky-engineer @startled-seastar @littlecarowrites @eyeofdionysus @emmkolenn @battlebunnyteardropsinthesun @kirkaholic123 @ambie2020 @iwillwakeherinthemorning @haveyouseenmymind @this-obsession-o-mine @kriskentia @reading-in-moonlight  @mad-girl-without-a-box @itsrandombooklover @gaeilgerua @kickingitwithkirk @sebastianstanslefteyebrow @kawaiiusagichansan @garnet-redtailedhero @djisfantastic @ever-faithful-sidekick

[muhyousafsalfi]

Why are so many people getting a meat allergy?

Becoming allergic to meat turns your life upside down. Known as alpha-gal allergy, the condition dictates what you can eat, wear, how you relax, and even which medicines are safe. Is research finally starting to catch up?

It is early morning in early summer, and I am tracing my way through the woods of central North Carolina, steering cautiously around S-curves and braking hard when what looks like a small rise turns into a narrow bridge. I am on my way to meet Tami McGraw, who lives with her husband and the youngest of their kids in a sprawling development of old trees and wide lawns just south of Chapel Hill. Before I reach her, McGraw emails. She wants to feed me when I get there:

“Would you like to try emu?” she asks. “Or perhaps some duck?”

These are not normal breakfast offerings. But for years, nothing about McGraw’s life has been normal. She cannot eat beef or pork, or drink milk or eat cheese or snack on a gelatine-containing dessert without feeling her throat close and her blood pressure drop. Wearing a wool sweater raises hives on her skin; inhaling the fumes of bacon sizzling on a stove will knock her to the ground. Everywhere she goes, she carries an array of tablets that can beat back an allergy attack, and an auto-injecting EpiPen that can jolt her system out of anaphylactic shock.

McGraw is allergic to the meat of mammals and everything else that comes from them: dairy products, wool and fibre, gelatine from their hooves, char from their bones. This syndrome affects some thousands of people in the USA and an uncertain but likely larger number worldwide, and after a decade of research, scientists have begun to understand what causes it. It is created by the bite of a tick, picked up on a hike or brushed against in a garden, or hitchhiking on the fur of a pet that was roaming outside.

The illness, which generally goes by the name ‘alpha-gal allergy’ after the component of meat that triggers it, is a trial that McGraw and her family are still learning to cope with. In much the same way, medicine is grappling with it too. Allergies occur when our immune systems perceive something that ought to be familiar as foreign. For scientists, alpha-gal is forcing a remapping of basic tenets of immunology: how allergies occur, how they are triggered, whom they put in danger and when.

For those affected, alpha-gal is transforming the landscapes they live in, turning the reliable comforts of home ­– the plants in their gardens, the food on their plates — into an uncertain terrain of risk.

In 1987, Dr Sheryl van Nunen was confronted with a puzzle. She was the head of the allergy department at a regional hospital in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia, and had a reputation among her colleagues for sorting out mysterious episodes of anaphylaxis. This time, a man had been sent to see her who kept waking up, in the middle of the night, in the grip of some profound reaction.

Van Nunen knew at once that this was out of the ordinary, since most allergic reactions happen quickly after exposure instead of hours later. She also knew that only a few allergens affect people after they have gone to bed. (Latex, for instance — someone sensitive to it who has sex using a latex condom might fall asleep and wake up in the midst of an allergy attack.) She checked the man for the obvious irritants and, when those tests came up negative, took a thorough look at his medical history and did a skin test for everything he had eaten and touched in the hours before bedtime. The only potential allergen that returned a positive result was meat.

This was weird (and dismaying, in barbecue-loving Australia). But it was the only such case Van Nunen had ever seen. She coached the patient on how to avoid the meals that seemed to be triggering his reactions, put it down mentally to the unpredictability of the human immune system, and moved on.

Then a few more such patients came her way. There were six additional ones across the 1990s; by 2003, she had seen at least 70, all with the same problem, all apparently affected by meat they had eaten a few hours before. Groping for an explanation, she lengthened the list of questions she asked, quizzing the patients about whether they or their families had ever reacted to anything else: detergents, fabrics, plants in their gardens, insects on the plants.

“And invariably, these people would say to me: ‘I haven’t been bitten by a bee or a wasp, but I’ve had lots of tick bites,” Van Nunen recalls.

In her memory, Tami McGraw’s symptoms began after 2010. That was the year she and her husband Tom, a retired surgeon, spied a housing bargain in North Carolina, a development next to a nature reserve whose builder had priced the big houses to sell. The leafy spread of streams and woodland pockets was everything she wanted in a home. She didn’t realise that it offered everything that deer and birds and rodents, the main hosts of ticks, want as well.

She remembers one tick that attached to her scalp, raising such a welt the spot was red for months afterwards, and a swarm of baby ticks that climbed her legs and had to be scrubbed off in a hot bath laced with bleach. Unpredictably, at odd intervals, she began to get dizzy and sick.

“I’d have unexplained allergic reactions, and I’d break out in hives and my blood pressure would go crazy,” she told me. The necklines of all her T-shirts were stretched, because she tugged at them to relieve the feeling she couldn’t take a deep breath. She trekked to an array of doctors who diagnosed her with asthma or early menopause or a tumour on her pituitary gland. They prescribed antibiotics and inhalers and steroids. They sent her for MRI scans, pulmonary function tests, echocardiograms of her heart. Nothing yielded a result.

Looking back, she realises she missed clues as to the source of her problem. She always seemed to need to use an asthma inhaler on Wednesdays — the day she spent hours in her car, delivering steaming-hot dinners for Meals on Wheels. She would feel short of breath, and need to visit an urgent-care clinic, on Saturdays — which always started, in her household, with a big breakfast of eggs and sausages.

Then a close friend had a scary episode, going for a run, arriving home and passing out on the hot concrete of her driveway. Once she was recovered, McGraw quizzed her. Her friend said: “They thought I got stung by a bee while I was running. But now they think maybe I have a red-meat allergy.”

McGraw remembers her first reaction was: That’s crazy. Her second was: Maybe I have that too.

She Googled, and then she asked her doctor to order a little-known blood test that would show if her immune system was reacting to a component of mammal meat. The test result was so strongly positive, her doctor called her at home to tell her to step away from the stove.

That should have been the end of her problems. Instead it launched her on an odyssey of discovering just how much mammal material is present in everyday life. One time, she took capsules of liquid painkiller and woke up in the middle of the night, itching and covered in hives provoked by the drug’s gelatine covering.

When she bought an unfamiliar lip balm, the lanolin in it made her mouth peel and blister. She planned to spend an afternoon gardening, spreading fertiliser and planting flowers, but passed out on the grass and had to be revived with an EpiPen. She had reacted to manure and bone meal that were enrichments in bagged compost she had bought.

She struggled with the attacks’ unpredictability, and even more with the impact on her family. “I think I’m getting better, and then I realise I’m not,” she says. “I’m more knowledgeable about what I can and can’t do.”

The discovery of new diseases often follows a pattern. Scattered patients realise they are experiencing strange symptoms. They find each other, face to face in a neighbourhood or across the world on the internet. They bring their experience to medicine, and medicine is sceptical. And then, after some period of pain and recalcitrance, medicine admits that, in fact, the patients were right.

That is the story of the discovery of CFS/ME and Lyme disease, among others. But it is not the story of alpha-gal allergy. An odd set of coincidences brought the bizarre illness to the attention of researchers almost as soon as it occurred.

The story begins with a cancer drug called cetuximab, which came onto the market in 2004. Cetuximab is a protein grown in cells taken from mice. For any new drug, there are likely to be a few people that react badly to it, and that was true for cetuximab. In its earliest trials, one or two of every 100 cancer patients who got it infused into their veins had a hypersensitivity reaction: their blood pressure dropped and they had difficulty breathing.

That 1–2 per cent stayed consistent as cetuximab was given to larger and larger groups. And then there was an aberration. In clinics in North Carolina and Tennessee, 25 of 88 recipients were hypersensitive to the drug, with some so sick they needed emergency shots of epinephrine and hospitalisation. At about the same time, a patient who was receiving a first dose of cetuximab in a cancer clinic in Bentonville, Arkansas, collapsed and died.

The manufacturers, ImClone and Bristol-Myers Squibb, checked every obvious thing about the trial: the drug’s ingredients, the cleanliness of the manufacturing plants, even the practices at the medical centres where cetuximab had been administered. Nothing stood out. The most that researchers could guess at the time was that the unlucky recipients might have some kind of mouse allergy.

Then the first coincidence occurred: a nurse whose husband worked at the Bentonville clinic mentioned the death to Dr Tina Hatley, an immunologist in private practice in Bentonville. Hatley had recently finished postgraduate training at the University of Virginia’s allergy centre, and she mentioned the death to her former supervisor, Dr Thomas Platts-Mills.

The bad responses to the drug looked like allergic reactions, and they were common enough — and far enough from the manufacturer’s expectations — to be an intriguing research opportunity.

Platts-Mills pulled together a team, looping in Hatley and several current research fellows as well. Fairly quickly, they discovered the source of the problem. People were reacting to the drug because they had a pre-existing sensitivity, indicated by a high level of antibodies (called immunoglobulin E, or IgE for short) to a sugar that is present in the muscles of most mammals, though not in humans or other primates. The name of the sugar was galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, known for short as alpha-gal.

Alpha-gal is familiar to many scientists because it is responsible for an enduring disappointment: its ability to trigger intense immune reactions is the reason that organs taken from animals have never successfully been transplanted into people. The puzzle was why the drug recipients were reacting to it. To have an allergic reaction, someone needs to have been primed with a prior exposure to a substance — but the trial recipients who reacted badly were all on their first dose of cetuximab.

Team members scrutinised the patients and their families for anything that could explain the problem. The reactions appeared regional — patients in Arkansas and North Carolina and Tennessee experienced the hypersensitivity, but ones in Boston and northern California did not. They investigated parasites, moulds and diseases that occur only in pockets of the USA.

Then Dr Christine Chung, a Nashville researcher recruited to the team, stumbled on an intriguing clue. Almost one in five of the patients enrolled at a cancer clinic at her hospital had high levels of IgE to alpha-gal. But when she checked those patients’ near neighbours, treating them as a control group — that is, people who lived their lives in the same way, but did not have cancer and had no reason to have received the drug — almost one in five had antibodies to alpha-gal as well.

Almost a decade later, that correlation still makes Platts-Mills chuckle. The alpha-gal reaction “had nothing to do with cancer,” he says. “It had everything to do with rural Tennessee.”

The question then became: what in rural Tennessee could trigger a reaction like this? The answer arose from a second coincidence. Dr Jacob Hosen, a researcher in Platts-Mills’s lab, stumbled across a map drawn by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing the prevalence of an infection called Rocky Mountain spotted fever. It exactly overlapped the hot spots where the cetuximab reactions had occurred.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever is transmitted by the bite of a tick: Amblyomma americanum, one of the most common ticks in south-eastern USA. It’s known as the lone star tick for a blotch of white on the back of the female’s body.

The researchers wondered — if the mystery reactions shared a footprint with a disease, and ticks caused the disease, could ticks be linked to the reactions too?

It was an intriguing hypothesis, and was reinforced by a new set of patients who came trickling into Platts-Mills’s clinic at about the same time. They were all adults, and that was odd to start with, because allergies tend to show up in childhood. They had never had an allergic reaction before, but now they were experiencing allergy symptoms: swelling, hives and in the worst cases anaphylactic shock. They too had high levels of IgE antibodies to alpha-gal.

None of them, though, were cancer patients. They told the physicians that they had no proof of what was causing their reactions — but more than a few of them sensed it had something to do with eating meat.

Dr Scott Commins, another postgraduate fellow in Platts-Mills’s group, took it upon himself to phone every new patient to ask whether they’d ever suffered a tick bite. “I think 94.6 per cent of them answered affirmatively,” he says. “And the other few per cent would say, ‘You know, I’m outdoors all the time. I can’t remember an actual tick that was attached, but I know I’d get bites.’”

Meat from mammals inevitably contains alpha-gal — so in already sensitised individuals, eating meat might constitute a second exposure, in the same way infusing cetuximab had been.

If tick bites had sensitised them, then the alpha-gal reaction might be a food allergy as well as a drug reaction. But the connection was speculative, and cementing cause and effect would take one final, extraordinary coincidence.

As it happens, Platts-Mills likes to hike. One weekend he took off across the central Virginia hills, tramping through grassy underbrush. He came home five hours later, peeled off his boots and socks, and discovered his legs and feet were speckled with tiny dots. They looked like ground pepper, but they were dug into his skin — he had to use a dull knife to scrape them off — and they itched something fierce. He saved a few, and sent them to an entomologist. They were the larval form of lone star ticks.

This, he realised, was an opportunity. As soon as the work week started, he had his lab team draw his blood and check his IgE levels. They were low to start with, and then week by week began to climb. Platts-Mills is English — his father was a Member of Parliament — and in the midst of having his IgE tracked, he went to an event at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. “And at that point,” he says cheerfully, “I ate two lamb chops and drank two glasses of wine.”

In the middle of the night, he woke up covered in hives.

The lone star tick doesn’t receive much attention in the USA. It’s the black-legged tick, Ixodes scapularis, that has the dubious honour of being the most well-known, as it’s the carrier of Lyme disease, which causes an estimated 300,000 cases of illness in the USA each year.

The lone star tick doesn’t transmit Lyme disease, but is the vector for other serious illnesses, including Q fever, ehrlichiosis, Heartland virus, Bourbon virus and tularaemia, an infection so serious that the US government classifies the bacteria that cause it as a potential agent of bioterrorism.

While Lyme clusters in the north-east and the northern Midwest, the diseases carried by Amblyomma stretch from the coast of Maine to the tip of Florida, the Atlantic to the middle of Texas, and the southern shores of the Great Lakes all the way to the Mexican border.

And that range appears to be expanding. “The northern edge of where these ticks are abundant is moving,” says Dr Rick Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, north of New York City. “It is now well-established further north, into Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York and well up into New England.

“Climate change is likely playing a role in the northward expansion,” Ostfeld adds, but acknowledges that we don’t know what else could also be contributing.

It’s a universal complaint among tick scientists that we don’t know as much about ticks as we should. Tick-transmitted illnesses are more common in the USA than mosquito-borne ones — according to the CDC’s most recent accounting, in 2017 tickborne diseases were 2.6 times more common than when the agency began counting in 2004 — yet it’s mosquitoes that receive the most public health attention and funding, from national surveillance programmes to local mosquito-control campaigns. (In fact, the CDC was founded in 1942 because of mosquito-borne disease; its original title was the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas.)

What is known about where ticks live, what they feed on, and how they are affected by changes in land use and climate has mostly been assembled out of the findings of scientists fighting for scarce research funding.

It’s impossible to talk to physicians encountering alpha-gal cases without hearing that something has changed to make the tick that transmits it more common — even though they don’t know what that something might be.

The lone star tick is a sturdy, stealthy predator. It isn’t picky about conditions — it tolerates the damp of Atlantic beaches, and its western expansion only stopped when it ran up against the Texas desert — and it’s content to feed from dozens of animals, from mice all the way up the tree of life.

It loves birds, which might have helped it move north so rapidly, and it has a special lust for the white-tailed deer that have colonised American suburbs. And, unlike most ticks, it bites humans in all three stages of its lifecycle: as an adult, as a nymph and as the poppy seed-sized larvae that attacked Platt-Mills, which linger on grass stalks in clusters and spring off hundreds at a time.

Ticks detect scent with organs embedded in their first pair of legs, and what they’re sniffing for is carbon dioxide, the exhaled breath of an animal full of warm oxygenated blood. When lone star ticks catch wind of it, they take off. “The Lyme disease tick is a slow tick,” says Dr William Nicholson, a microbiologist at the CDC. “Amblyomma will run to you.”

There has been so little research into alpha-gal allergy that scientists can’t agree on exactly what stage of the bite starts victims’ sensitisation. It is possible that a fragment of a previous blood meal, from a mouse, bird or deer, lingers in a tick’s guts and works its way up through its mouth and into its human victim. It’s also possible that some still-unidentified compound in tick saliva is chemically close enough to alpha-gal to produce the same effect.

One aspect of its epidemiology is becoming clear, though. The allergy isn’t only caused by the lone star tick.

In Australia, Van Nunen (who is now a clinical associate professor at the University of Sydney School of Medicine) couldn’t understand how her patients’ tick bites solved the mystery of their meat allergy. But she could see something else. The beaches that fringe the coast north and south of Sydney are rife with ticks. If bites from them were putting people at risk of a profound allergy, she felt compelled to get the word out.

In 2007, Van Nunen wrote up a description of 25 meat-allergic patients whose reactions she had confirmed with a skin-prick test. All but two had had severe skin reactions to a tick bite; more than half had suffered severe anaphylaxis. That abstract formed the basis of a talk she gave later that year to an Australian medical association, which was then indexed — but not published in full — in an Australian medical journal. It took until 2009 for the Virginia group to catch up to it, after they had already published their first alert.

That was unfortunate, because the crucial detail in Van Nunen’s research wasn’t just that her cases were earlier than the first round of American ones. It was that they were caused by bites from a different tick: Ixodes holocyclus, called the paralysis tick. Alpha-gal allergy was not just an odd occurrence in one part of the USA. It had occurred in the opposite hemisphere, making it literally a global problem.

And so it has proved. Alpha-gal reactions linked to tick bites have now been found in the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Panama, Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire and South Africa. These cases trace back to at least six additional tick species. (An online map on which patients list themselves includes over a dozen more countries.)

Wherever ticks bite people — everywhere other than the Arctic and Antarctic — alpha-gal allergy has been recorded. In Belgium, patients reacted badly to a drug produced in rabbit cells. In the Italian Alps, men who went hunting in the forests were more at risk than women who stayed in their village. In Germany, the most reactive food was a traditional delicacy, pork kidneys. In Sweden, it was moose.

Van Nunen herself has now seen more than 1,200 patients. “The next busiest clinic, about 350,” she says. Those cases have all occurred in two decades, less than the span of a single human generation. As in America, the surge leaves Van Nunen mystified as to what the cause might be. She reasons that the rise cannot be due to something in her patients; neither genetic nor epigenetic change could occur so quickly.

“It has to be environmental,” she says.

It’s a sunny early morning at the University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill. Commins, who moved here in 2016 to become an associate professor, has 11 patients to see before the end of the day. Seven of them have alpha-gal allergy.

Laura Stirling, 51, is fretting over a list of questions. She does not live nearby; she flew down from Maryland, drawn by Commins’s reputation. In 2016, she found a fat lone star tick attached to her, and afterwards had fierce indigestion whenever she ate or smelled pork — a challenge, because her husband likes to tinker with a smoker on weekends. In 2017, she was bitten again, and her symptoms worsened to midnight hives and lightheadedness that sent her to her doctor’s office. She immediately cut all meat and dairy from her diet. A year later, she wants to know if she can add anything back.

“Can I eat dairy?” she asks. “Can I cook dairy? Can I eat it if it doesn’t have animal rennet in it?” She pauses. “I’ve been symptom-free, because I don’t take risks.”

Commins walks her through a protocol he’s developed, a method for adding back mammal products one dose at a time. He has a hypothesis that alpha-gal reactions are linked to the fat content of food; that might explain why they take so many hours to occur, because the body processes fat via a slower metabolic pathway than protein or carbs.

He recommends that patients start with a spoonful of grated dry cheese, because its fat content is low, and graduate by slow steps up to full-fat yogurt and milk and then to ice cream. If those foods don’t provoke reactions, he suggests tiny doses of lean meat, starting with deli ham.

Stirling lights up at that. “I dream of charcuterie,” she sighs.

Because Commins was part of Platt-Mills’s earliest research, he has been seeing alpha-gal patients for more than a decade now. He estimates he has treated more than 900 men and women; five new patients arrive every week. He has coached a significant number of them back to eating some mammal products and managing their exposures to the things they can’t handle, so their worst experience is hunting for an emergency Benadryl, not being rushed to the ER.

Not every patient can do this. Julie LeSueur, who is 45 and lives in Richmond, Virginia, has been monitored by Platts-Mills for four years. (He is one of several doctors she has seen for the condition, after years of severe stomach issues escalated to repeated attacks of anaphylaxis that put her in hospital. One physician, frustrated she wasn’t getting better, told her: “This is all in your head.”)

What started as an allergy to meat expanded into reactions to anything with an animal connection, including gelatine in medications and animal products in cosmetics, and then to sensitising her immune system to an array of other irritants, from nuts to mould. She buys vegan soap and shampoo, has prescriptions formulated by a compounding pharmacy, and mostly works from home to avoid unintended exposures. Reluctantly, she cut back a hobby that meant the world to her: fostering animals that have been rescued from abuse.

“I’m at home all the time now,” she tells me by phone. “I’m lucky to get off the couch.”

Commins and Platts-Mills named alpha-gal allergy a decade ago, and Van Nunen saw her first patient 20 years before that. A lab test for the allergy, the one that Tami McGraw received, has been on the market since 2010. (Platts-Mills and Tina Hatley, now Merritt, share the patent.) That makes it hard to understand why patients still struggle to be diagnosed and understand the limits of what they can eat or allow themselves to be exposed to. But alpha-gal allergy defies some of the bedrock tenets of immunology.

Food allergies are overwhelmingly caused by proteins, tend to surface in childhood and usually trigger symptoms quickly after a food is consumed. Alpha-gal is a sugar; alpha-gal patients tolerate meat for years before their reactions begin; and alpha-gal reactions take hours to occur. Plus, the range of reactions is far beyond what’s normal: not only skin reactions in mild cases and anaphylaxis in the most serious, but piercing stomach pain, abdominal cramps and diarrhoea as well.

But alpha-gal reactions are definitely an allergy, given patients’ results on the same skin and IgE tests that immunologists use to determine allergies to other foods. That leads both Van Nunen and Commins to wonder whether the syndrome will help to reshape allergy science, broadening the understanding of what constitutes an allergy response and leading to new concepts of how allergies are triggered.

Merritt, who estimates she has seen more than 500 patients with alpha-gal allergy, has it herself; she has had bad reactions to meat all her life, since being bitten by seed ticks at Girl Scout camp, and was re-sensitised by a lone star tick bite last year. She is sensitive enough to react not only to meat, but to other products derived from mammal tissues — and as she has discovered, they are threaded throughout modern life.

The unrecognised dangers aren’t only sweaters and soaps and face creams. Medical products with an animal origin include the clotting drug heparin, derived from pork intestines and cow lung; pancreatic enzymes and thyroid supplements; medicines that include magnesium stearate as an inert filler; vaccines grown in certain cell lines; and other vaccines, and intravenous fluids, that contain gelatine.

“We have enormous difficulty advising people about this,” Van Nunen says. “Sometimes you have to sit down for seven hours, write seven emails and have four telephone conversations to be able to say to a 23-year-old woman who’s about to travel: ‘Yes, you may have this brand of Japanese encephalitis vaccine because they do not use bovine material. The vaccine is made in [cells from] the African green monkey and I have looked up that monkey and it does not contain alpha-gal.’”

Some replacement heart values are grown in pigs; they may cause alpha-gal sensitisation that could trigger an allergy attack later. And cardiac patients who have alpha-gal allergy seem to use up replacement heart valves more quickly than normal, putting them at risk of heart failure until they can get a replacement.

There’s also a growing sense that alpha-gal may be an occupational hazard. Last year, researchers in Spain treated three farm workers who developed hives and swelling and had difficulty breathing after being splashed with amniotic fluid while they were helping calves to be born. All three of them — a 36-year-old woman, a 56-year-old woman and a 53-year-old man — already knew they had alpha-gal sensitivity, but had never imagined that skin contact would be risky.

Commins has treated hunters who developed reactions after being splashed with blood after field dressing deer; those cases raise the possibility that meat-processing workers could be at risk. In the two main Facebook groups where patients gather, it’s common to hear school cafeteria workers fret about reactions from breathing the fumes of meat cooking.

Last summer, researchers working with Commins reported that people with alpha-gal allergy may have greater allergic reactions to the stings of bees and wasps, potentially endangering landscapers and other outdoor workers.

It’s hard to know how many people may be sensitised to alpha-gal without knowing it. A project at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that studies unexplained occurrences of anaphylaxis found last year that 9 per cent of the cases weren’t unexplained after all: they were alpha-gal patients whose sensitivity had never been diagnosed.

Platts-Mills points out that the prevalence of high levels of alpha-gal IgE in his earliest studies was up to 20 per cent in some communities, “but that was absolutely not the prevalence of allergic reactions to meat,” he says. “So there are clearly plenty of people out there who’ve got the antibody but don’t have this syndrome.”

What this all means is that there are almost certainly people for whom a meat-containing meal or medical intervention could trigger an alpha-gal reaction of unknown severity.

There may be further peril awaiting them. In June, Platts-Mills and other researchers revealed that more than a quarter of patients who came to the University of Virginia’s medical centre for cardiac catheterisation, to clear out life-threatening blood-vessel blockages, were sensitised to alpha-gal without knowing it.

The patients with the undetected allergy had more arterial plaque than the ones without, and, most worrisome to the researchers, their plaques were of a type that is more likely to break away from the arterial wall and cause heart attacks and strokes. Though the research is early — done in one group of 118 patients, in a known hotspot for alpha-gal — Platts-Mills worries it presages a risk for heart disease that is larger than anyone expects.

When a new disease surfaces in the USA, it’s usually the CDC that investigates, pouring epidemiologists and data scientists into the field to track down connections and bring back samples for lab analysis. But investigation of alpha-gal is caught in a bureaucratic quirk of federal science. The CDC is responsible for infections spread by insects and arthropods — but alpha-gal syndrome is not an infection. That makes it the responsibility of NIH — which has abundant lab scientists, but no shoe-leather disease detectives.

NIH does seem to be taking an interest. In June 2018, it hosted an invitation-only one-day IgE-mediated Meat Allergy Workshop; in the past, such meetings have indicated the giant agency is considering launching a research programme. But just reading the workshop’s programme provides a hint of how new alpha-gal research is; participants called the problem by multiple different names, displaying that there isn’t even yet any agreed nomenclature for it. Similarly, the US-run universal search engine for journal articles, PubMed, indexes papers on alpha-gal under “allergy to galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose”, “mammalian meat allergy”, “delayed red meat allergy”, “galactose-α-1,3-galactose syndrome” and more.

Platts-Mills was one of the workshop’s invited speakers and gave the opening statement. Commins was there as well, along with researchers from New York, Germany, South Africa and Sweden.

Dr Marshall Plaut, who convened the meeting and is now chief of the Food Allergy, Atopic Dermatitis, and Allergic Mechanisms Section at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, describes it as the earliest step in possibly committing to a research programme. (Platts-Mills and Commins have already received some NIH funding.) “It signals that NIH has some interest in understanding more about the disease,” he says. “There are a lot of things that need to be understood.”

In August, Commins gave a talk on alpha-gal allergy at the International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, a conference held every two or so years and sponsored by the CDC that often surfaces the earliest signals of illnesses that are destined to become big problems.

The CDC’s director of foodborne illness was in the audience; so was its director of vector-borne diseases, the department that deals with ticks. Afterwards, they both zoomed up to ask him questions. “I kind of had the impression this was just a weird, small thing,” Dr Lyle Petersen, the vector-borne director, told him. “But this seems like kind of a big deal.”

With NIH and the CDC paying attention, research into alpha-gal might be reaching a threshold, a moment at which isolated investigations might coalesce into answers. For the patients, who feel isolated too, that can’t come soon enough.

[annathewitch]

Falling, Ch.2: (Let’s Get) Physicals

Summary: Bones x Reader. 2/6, Annual physicals are due and you have to get the crew to attend, including a reluctant Captain.  Bones comes to a realisation.

Word Count: 5000 *eep*

Warnings: Swearing 

A/N: So part 2 ended up being a bit epic and a fic in itself (must practice drabbles…).  It’s also more plotty than part 1. But there’s some Jim, and a little Spock, and Halloween so I needed all those words. 

I still need to work out how to link to part 1… spot the tumblr noob.

“October,” Doctor McCoy announced with a sigh, dropping a couple of padds on the station between you and Christine and perching on the edge, legs stretched out in front of him and arms crossed, “you know what that means?” “Halloween?” you supplied without looking up from your console. McCoy grimaced, “worse than that, guess again.” Your head shot up. “Back up a minute there Doctor! What do you mean, worse than Halloween? Halloween is awesome! Costumes, trick or treating, pumpkins, unreasonably vast quantities of candy! What’s not to like?” Christine chuckled and you shot her a look. “Try all of the above,” McCoy retorted. “Damned pagan nonsense is a recipe for stomachache, cavities and general ridiculousness. Guess again.” You rolled your eyes and shrugged. “I give up.” “Annual physicals!” Christine chipped in, clapping in what you could only assume was mock excitement. “You’re in for a treat Y/F/N.” “You needn’t sound so damn pleased about it Chapel. A month of mind numbingly tedious work and that’s when you can get the damn crew to an appointment. Hell, it almost makes me long for shore leave on a planet full of pregnant Gorns.”

The Doctor turned to you and raised an eyebrow, the faint trace of a smirk gracing his features. “In honour of your first starship assignment, you get the dubious pleasure of making sure every last one of the idiots on this tin can attends an appointment. They’ll try but no one gets to wheedle their way out of it Nurse Y/L/N.” McCoy’s comm buzzed and he excused himself, giving you both a jaunty salute. You stared after him incredulously.

“Close your mouth Y/F/N. you’re catching flies,” Christine said, suppressing a grin.

“What’s got into him? Is this retribution?” you asked, slumping back in your chair.

Since your ‘intervention’ a little over a month ago, McCoy seemed back to his usual self, perhaps even a little less grumpy. He’d smoothed things over with Chapel, which was a relief for everyone, and you had thought your own relationship with him had improved. He seemed more personable and you found he requested your assistance more frequently than before. Even off duty he’d sometimes sit with you in the mess, presumably when the rest of the senior crew were busy. You also occasionally arrived on shift to find a perfectly replicated coffee waiting for you, and Chapel had suggested it was the doctor’s way of acknowledging and apologising for his asshole behaviour.

However, you hadn’t actually talked about the conversation. McCoy had said in passing that Joanna was doing fine, and he shared bits and pieces from her comms, which were more frequent than ever, but neither of you mentioned what had been said that day. Despite the positive effect, you felt a niggling doubt that you had overstepped your position, forcing him to reveal things he wasn’t comfortable with. It was best to let him bring up the subject if he wanted. “No! He needed a good talking to and he knows it.” The head nurse reached out and touched your arm, “It just so happens we both think that you’re the best person to get the job done. You’ve said you wanted more responsibility, now’s your chance.” You considered this for a second and accepting her reassurance, nodded. “Well thanks, I think.” McCoy had silently cursed when his comm had interrupted your conversation. He hadn’t wanted to drop all that work on you and just up and leave, but a summons from Jim couldn’t be ignored. He stalked along the corridor, not realising he was growling in frustration until he startled an ensign coming the other way. He stepped into the express turbolift to the bridge, and leaned back against the handrail. As he absently watched the deck lights flashing by he couldn’t help but think about you. Again. Since that moment in his office a little over four weeks ago, he had developed a new kind of awareness of you. Of course he’d not been oblivious to you before, but it had been for practical reasons: you were a competent nurse, sensible and a decent substitute for Chapel when the need arose.

But now his awareness was harder to define. He was constantly aware of where you were and equally felt your absence. But it was also little things like when you wore your hair differently, or when he knew you hadn’t taken a break. Your voice was more distinctive and he found himself listening for your laughter, and he was sure the familiar antiseptic smell of the medbay was tinged with the smell of your shampoo whenever you had been near. Suddenly these things were important: you mattered to him. Unfortunately he had no indication that the opposite was true. You seemed to be more open with him the more time you spent in his company, but the friendliness and gentle teasing banter you shared with him were not particular to your interactions. It was just the way you seemed to be with everyone. You were capable and independent - he had no sense at all that you needed anything from him. And you certainly had shown no inclination to discuss that conversation. You hardly needed to hear more about what a fuck up he was, his terrible choices were his own burden to bear. So he left it alone. As your CMO he had to be careful not to overstep his bounds and so far he had managed to keep things normal and professional. If he asked for your assistance a little more than he used to, it was simply because you were good at your job and you wanted to learn. And Chapel had supported the idea of you leading on the physicals this year. There was no reason not to spend time with you as colleagues, hell even relax and enjoy your company a little. 

For now, he would just have to learn to ignore the occasional swooping feeling inside when something you did caught him unawares. And stop behaving like a prize idiot. What the hell McCoy, did you actually salute the woman? Smooth. The gentle hum of the turbolift slowed as it came to a stop. McCoy straightened up and tugged on his uniform shirt. Things would be back to normal soon enough. Well as normal as they ever were on this damn ship. In the meantime he could do a fucking good job of pretending. “What the hell kind of mess have you got us into now, Jim?” Over the next weeks, you threw yourself into managing the physicals like a woman possessed. It was repetitive work, but the volume of it filled your days and you didn’t want to prove to Christine and McCoy that their faith had been misplaced. The whole team seemed to eat sleep and breathe examinations, paperwork and follow ups, and you in particular barely seemed to leave the medbay. Cups of coffee kept appearing on your desk with increasing frequency and Chapel seemed always to have brought an extra sandwich back from the mess, ‘just in case’. With only a few days left it had got to the point where there was only a handful of crew members who hadn’t booked an exam, mostly engineering officers and unsurprisingly, the Captain. You had sweet-talked Scotty into letting you track down his reluctant crew members on shift and force march them to an appointment, but Kirk was a different matter, the man was like a spectre, never where he was supposed to be. You knew that he did his damnedest to avoid medbay at all costs, and McCoy was the only person who managed to get him through the door while conscious with a combination of threatening, cajoling and downright deviousness. Chapel had warned you to expect his avoidance and not to take it personally, but you were so close to getting 100% attendance it was frustrating. “Hey, Doctor McCoy?” From behind his never ending stack of padds, McCoy saw a head peer tentatively round his office door. “What is it Y/L/N? I’m trying to finish these records before Chapel hypos my sorry ass.” He yawned and stretched. Starfleet command had grits for brains if they thought the physicals schedule was reasonable. “Sorry, I won’t keep you. It’s just the Captain…” McCoy’s head snapped up before you finished your sentence. “What’s the damned infant done now?” “Nothing, that’s the problem. He’s last on my list for the physicals, but he’s more slippery than an eel.” McCoy chuckled and sat back, “Yeah. Sounds about right for Jim. Welcome to my life! You need me to haul his ass down here just say the word.” “You think I want to give up that easily?” You raised an eyebrow and stuck out your chin stubbornly, and the doctor felt something twist in his gut. Of course you didn’t need his help. “With all due respect you gave me a job to do and I want to have one last try. I just might need to be away from my station for a little while?” McCoy cocked his eyebrow in return. “You do what you’ve got to do. But don’t be too hard on yourself if you can’t pin him down. Catching eels takes practice.” Well if that wasn’t a challenge.

Two hours later, you found yourself waiting in the Captain’s ready room. Lying in wait might be more accurate. Lieutenant Uhura had taken pity on you for your fruitless Kirk-hunt and had persuaded Commander Spock to hear you out. The First Officer had been surprisingly open to supporting your subterfuge. “The Captain’s health is of paramount importance to the efficient functioning of command, Nurse Y/L/N. As you have provided sufficient evidence to support your conclusion that all reasonable avenues to speak to him have failed, it is only logical to consider the unconventional,” Spock had responded. “Indeed, Doctor McCoy has himself had to employ unorthodox tactics on more than one occasion.” So he had gone to retrieve Kirk from the bowels of Engineering on the pretext that the Captain’s attention was required in his ready room. “If I neglect to mention that it is not I that requires his attention, it will not be a lie.” Spock’s mouth had curled an almost imperceptible fraction, and you had the distinct impression he would enjoy this. As you waited you were drawn to stare out of the panoramic floor to ceiling window behind Kirk’s desk. Medbay had no windows, so it was only off duty that you ever saw the stars warping in waves and swirls of light around the ship as it hurtled through the vastness of space. It was still novel enough to astound you. Mesmerised by the feeling of being inside a giant kaleidoscope, you were startled by the sound of the door opening and Captain Kirk’s voice. “What’s so important Spock, that you had to drag me away from my quality time with Mr Scott and the warp core?” He strode into the room. While his focus was fixed on his XO, you could immediately see how he could command the undivided attention of an entire room. There was something compelling in his manner and it made you nervous. Spock wordlessly inclined his head in your direction, and Kirk turned to look at you. You had adopted a stance with legs planted apart and arms crossed, ready for confrontation and hoping it conveyed a confidence that you certainly didn’t feel and more than a hint of displeasure. Kirk stopped in his tracks mouth open, looking between you and Spock. You raised an eyebrow hoping for additional effect and a shit-eating grin spread across his face. “Nurse, you’ve been spending too much time around Bones!” “Captain, with all due respect, you must just incite all medical professionals to eyebrow raising levels of exasperation.” Despite your words, your foot tapped nervously. “I’ve been looking for you, Sir.” Kirk laughed, and made his way over to take a seat in his chair behind the massive desk beside you. He indicated for you to do the same. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure Nurse…” “Y/L/N,” you supplied. “You would have had the pleasure sooner if you hadn’t been avoiding your physical, Sir.” “Straight to the point Y/L/N. I like that!” The Captain leaned in elbows on the desk, resting his chin on his fist. He looked at you intently. “Did Bones send you here to do his dirty work?” “No Sir. This was all my own initiative.” You smiled sweetly and continued, “So when can I book you in?” Refusing to be distracted by his startlingly blue eyes, you picked your padd up and pulled up the medbay schedule. Ignoring you, Kirk continued his own line of questioning. “You persuaded Spock to help you? To get me here under false pretences?” “Captain…” Spock interjected from behind you. “I know, I know, it was probably logical.” Kirk paused for a minute looking thoughtful. “Y/L/N I’m impressed. Listen, I’ll overlook all this,” he waved his hand vaguely, “and get my Yeoman to schedule something next week.” The shit-eating grin returned; you both knew the chances of that happening were slim.

You sighed and got to your feet. “I appreciate you making time in your busy schedule Captain.” He nodded a dismissal. “I’m sure Doctor McCoy won’t mind extending my deadline to accommodate you.” Kirk looked up at you with a frown. “Deadline Y/L/N?” “Yes Sir. End of Beta shift tomorrow is the deadline for all crew physicals. The Doctor put me in charge. Like I said I’m sure it will be fine.” You sighed again for effect. “I just wish I hadn’t taken his bet is all,” you added with a rueful smile. Spock quirked an eyebrow at you from across the room. “What bet?” The Captain asked curiously. “Oh, nothing much Sir. Doctor McCoy bet me that I wouldn’t be able to get every physical completed by the deadline. It’s not important. I mean he’ll be unbearable for days but…” You shook your head and shrugged and made as if to leave the ready room. Three, two, one… “Hold on there Nurse. What are the stakes in this bet?” You turned back slowly, wanting to dangle the lure a little closer, but not wanting to startle the fish. “A bottle of vintage bourbon. It’s silly, really, forget I said anything. Thank you for your time Captain.” You nodded at both of the senior officers and made a hasty but hopefully dignified exit, before scuttling across the bridge and into the turbolift. As soon as the door slid shut you slumped against the wall, shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter. Your little piece of deception might work or it might not, but bluffing like that had been kind of fun. Returning to the nurses station, you noticed McCoy watching from the other side of the department. He tilted his head at you in an unspoken question and you replied with a shrug.

There was an undeniable atmosphere of excitement tempered by utter exhaustion in Medbay the next day. It was the last day of the marathon that was physicals and in recognition of all the work done over the last few weeks, Christine had agreed that the team could dress up for Halloween if they wanted. McCoy had not disapproved, though he had vetoed the idea of ‘getting dressed up like a prize pig’ himself and that was about as much of an endorsement anyone could reasonably expect. He had arrived early and since there had been no overnight patients, he relieved Doctor M’Benga and the Gamma shift and set about replicating coffee. Checking the chrono he figured you would be arriving soon and so he left a steaming mug at your station and disappeared into his office. The coffee had become his little ritual, that started off as unspoken thanks but had continued beyond the shelf life of his initial gratitude. Truthfully, he had seen your smile whenever the mug was there and, observing your pleasure from afar, he didn’t question his motives too closely. Sure enough, he heard voices moments later - you and Chapel laughing over this ridiculous costume thing. He moved to stand in the doorway of his office, watching you help his Head Nurse, currently dressed as a witch, pin an arrangement of plastic bats into her hair. “So come on Y/F/N, let’s see yours!” “Oh, I totally cobbled it together last night. I didn’t exactly pack for fancy dress,” you laughed and shrugged off your oversize cardigan. You had borrowed a blue dress with a flared skirt from an ensign on your corridor, and adapted one of your uniform aprons to wear over it. Rummaging in a bag, you pulled out a wide blue ribbon and a battered fluffy white rabbit. You proceeded to tie the ribbon around your hair with a big bow and did a twirl. It was damned ridiculous really, but McCoy found himself thinking how blue suited you and before he knew it he’d left the safety of his doorway. “Alice! That’s cute.” Christine smiled.

“Appropriate,” McCoy said drily, making his presence known as he walked over, “most days on this ship I feel like I’ve disappeared down a damn rabbit hole. Nice bats Chapel.” He picked up the rabbit and looked at you with a quirk of his lip. “This yours?” You felt a flush rise. “Yes, he is. Don’t mock the rabbit.” You grabbed your bunny back with a huff. “So if we’re all in wonderland does that make you the Mad Hatter?” “Nope.” The doctor’s quirk grew into a rare full blown grin, dimples and everything. “Darlin’ our esteemed Captain has that role locked down. We’re all guests at his mad tea party.” “I’ll tell him you said so if he turns up today. Right, to work.” You sat down purposefully at your station, picking up the coffee waiting for you. Glancing up at McCoy you smiled knowingly, and he felt his stomach flip flop. Dammit. The day passed quickly, but approaching the end of Beta shift, there had been no sign of the Captain. You were just about ready to go and admit defeat to the doctor, when the doors to medbay swooshed open and in walked the man himself, apparently injury free and powered entirely under his own steam, closely followed by Spock. Sighting you at the autoclave, he made his way over, smirking. “Reporting for physical as ordered Ma’am!” You stared mutely, absolutely tempted to prod the man to make sure he wasn’t a figment of your imagination. The Captain winked, “I would have come earlier, but it’s more fun to snatch victory away from Bones in the final moments, don’t you think?” You nodded, making an odd sort of strangled sound. “Where do you want me?” Kirk asked waggling his eyebrows. “Um… take a seat in exam one and I’ll be right back.” You watched him saunter across medbay, and hustled over to Spock who was waiting with Nurse Chapel. “I can’t believe that actually worked.” You shook your head in disbelief. “I admit surprise that your… gambit resulted in success. I accompanied the Captain to see for myself that he reached his intended destination. You have indeed understood the motivations of the Captain where many have failed, myself included. I would posit that you are quite formidable when you wish to be Nurse Y/L/N.” Spock regarded you up and down. “You are dressed as Alice are you not?” You had forgotten that you were in costume. “Yes, Sir, for Halloween,” you nodded, slightly embarrassed. “I confess I do not understand the human custom for disguise, but I admit I have fond memories of my mother reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to my sister and me as children.” He nodded crisply and left. Christine, unfazed as ever by the turn of events, nudged you out of your slightly bewildered stupor. “You’d best get the doctor, you should assist him with this one.” As if summoned, McCoy appeared behind you. “What did our Vulcan friend want?” “I’m not sure, but I think he liked my costume.” McCoy frowned in confusion. “And the Captain is in exam one, Sir. For his physical,” you added. With this additional surprising information, the doctor didn’t seem to know what to do with his face, and his eyebrows did a strange dance up and down his forehead. “You’re kidding me.” He looked to Christine for confirmation.

“Nope, she’s not.” The doctor spun on his heels and rolling your eyes at Christine you followed him into the Exam room. You nearly collided with his back as he stopped short, arms crossed, in front of Captain Kirk who was lying nonchalantly on the biobed, hands behind his head as if he was simply preparing to take a nap. “Bones!” he exclaimed sitting up. “Happy Halloween! I see Nurse Y/L/N here is a very fetching Alice,” he winked again, “and you, in that get-up you must be a hypo-wielding demon doctor, no?” “Unbelievable.” McCoy looked between you and the Captain, then seemed to recover from his shock and rolled his sleeves up. “You could have made a damned appointment like everyone else Jim. Let’s get this over with,” he grumbled. “You need my shirt on or off Nurse?” Kirk asked, blue eyes wide and innocent. McCoy snorted but before he could intervene you swatted your padd at the Captain. “Don’t you pretend this is your first physical, Sir. You know damn well you keep your clothes on. All of them.” He laughed, hands up in surrender. The rest of the exam was remarkably easy. McCoy couldn’t help sneaking a glance in your direction every so often, wondering, not for the first time, how you had achieved the impossible. As you were winding up, preparing a booster vaccine, Kirk turned to McCoy. “So Bones, don’t forget you owe Y/L/N that bottle of whiskey.” You fumbled the hypo, dropping it on the floor. McCoy looked at you curiously and you shook your head almost imperceptibly behind Kirk’s back. “Uh, just gotta get a new one of these,” you waved the hypo and disappeared out the door. “So,” Kirk looked speculatively after you with a grin, “she’s something else. No wonder the crew are knocking down the door for their physicals this year. I’m glad I finally had the pleasure of meeting the infamous Nurse Y/L/N. You know she doorstepped me in my own ready room doing a perfect impression of you. I like a woman with… I don’t know…” “Sass.” McCoy replied, “the word you are looking for is sass. And don’t even think about it Jim, my nurses are out of bounds.” He waved his tricorder warningly, ignoring the tight feeling in his chest as he realised the Captain, his friend, liked you. Few were resistant to his charms when he put his mind to it. “She’s more than sass and a pretty face, Jim. She’s smart and hard working and kind, and definitely too good for you so quit your flirting.” He punctuated each word with a jab of the scanner. Kirk looked innocently at McCoy. “I never said anything about a pretty face Bones.” As you came back in with the new hypo, something was off. The Captain was positively gleeful, and McCoy looked flustered. He told you to finish up and left the room as if someone had lit a fire under him. You administered the vaccine and rubbed the spot in Kirk’s neck to ease the sting. “That wasn’t so bad Captain, now was it?” “No. You’re better at it than Bones. I believe his bedside manner has been described by some as ‘questionable’.” You narrowed your eyes wondering just how much the Captain had been told about the conversation with McCoy. He smiled more genuinely at you than he had before. “I’m glad Bones has someone to keep him on his toes.” You laughed, “Chapel and I do our best. Between you and me I think she actually runs this place.” Kirk looked at you head on one side considering you carefully. After a moment he seemed to decide something, and he hopped off the bed and clapped you on the shoulder. “Keep up the good work Y/L/N.”

As the door closed behind him you breathed in deeply, then did a little victory dance round the bed. You didn’t notice the swoosh of the door opening again and it wasn’t until you did an undignified twirl with a final fist pump that you noticed McCoy was there shaking his head. “I am definitely down a rabbit hole.” He stepped in the room and leaned against the wall, arms folded. “You want to tell me how you managed that?” The doctor seemed to have regained his earlier composure, seemingly at the expense of your own. Your face was impossibly warm. “I don’t suppose you’d believe it was simple persistence?” you offered with a shrug, fiddling with your apron. “Nope.” He shook his head with a small smile. “I don’t doubt your stubbornness, but I’ve spent too long perfecting the art of Kirk-trapping to believe that.” You sighed and hopped up onto the biobed avoiding McCoy’s steady hazel gaze. Something about it made you at once unsettled and unable to lie. You’d seen him use it on patients to great effect, but only now realised it’s power. He waited. “Can’t a girl have any secrets?” you grumbled. “Ok, so Commander Spock helped me get to see the Captain and then I may have given him the impression that by turning up for his physical today he would help me win a bet with you,” you admitted, the words coming out in a rush. “Sorry Sir.” “You lied to the Captain and Spock helped you?” McCoy stared, his mouth open. “When you put it like that… well… yeah.” It sounded bad out loud. You had been too busy focussed on the end goal that you hadn’t thought much about the method. You hung your head. “And what exactly was the bet I’m supposed to have made?” “That I couldn’t get all the physicals finished by today. We bet a bottle of bourbon.” Your voice was small. “It seems like you and the Captain are always arguing about something, he seems like he enjoys getting one up on you…” you tailed off. “So let me get this straight,” he ran his hands through his hair and you looked away. “He thinks I lost a bet because of him? You used the Captain’s own competitive streak against him?” Before you could answer you were startled by a strange huffing noise coming from McCoy, which appeared to be the prelude to him throwing his head back and honest to god whooping with laughter. Too amazed to do anything, you just sat there waiting for the doctor to subside. Eventually he regained some control, and grinned at you. “Y/F/N, you are a goddamned evil genius.” McCoy shook his head. You smiled back in relief. “You know I think Commander Spock was trying to tell me something similar earlier. Chapel’s trained me well.” You winked and McCoy felt his stomach leap into his chest again. As you sat in silence he realised the sheer absurd perfection of the moment. Needing to say something before the silence got awkward he inclined his head towards the monitor behind you. “Your vitals are a little off. Do you have a headache?” You realised the biobed you were sitting on had picked up your readings. Always the doctor. You nodded. “I’ll give you a painkiller, but you need to take it easy, and get a proper meal.” He rummaged in the med cabinet. “Thanks Doctor.” You grinned mischievously. “Don’t say anything, but my commanding officer is a hardass, I’ve been working all the hours god sends lately. Crawling through Jeffries tubes after engineers just to keep him happy.” McCoy raised an eyebrow as he tilted your head to one side to expose your neck, trying to ignore how distractingly close you were and the smell of your hair as it moved. He administered the hypo gently, and rubbed the injection site. “Idiot,” he huffed. “I’ll tell your boss to give you the day off tomorrow.”

Chapel had looked at you curiously as you emerged from the exam room, but you had just mouthed ‘tell you later.’ God only knew what she thought had gone on in there. You took the doctor’s advice and went to get food from the mess. Though your shift had ended, when you were done you decided to go back to medbay and finish off the last logs for the physicals. You liked it at this time of night. It was quiet; Chapel had gone and only a skeleton staff for Gamma shift remained. M’Benga would have relieved McCoy by now. Though the lights had been dimmed for the two patients in overnight, you could see from across the room that something had been left on your workstation. As you approached, there, next to your battered old stuffed rabbit, was a bottle of bourbon. You unfolded the note attached to it and smiled. In unmistakable handwriting it simply said,‘Drink Me’. The lights were still on in the CMO’s office. You made an impulsive decision and grabbed the bottle, and a couple of clean mugs from the sink, and knocked on the door. “Enter!” You hit the release and stepped inside. McCoy sat on the couch along one wall, padd in one hand, handwritten papers discarded beside him. He always looked more approachable at the end of the day, when he was slightly rumpled. He looked up, brow furrowed. “Y/F/N, I thought you left?” “I had a couple of things to finish up.” You held the bottle up. “What’s this?” McCoy hoped that in the dim light you couldn’t see the faint flush across his cheeks. He answered gruffly, “Your winnings. A southern gentleman never welches on a bet. Even one he didn’t know he made.” “I don’t deserve it but thanks.” You shifted nervously from foot to foot. “Listen, my hardass boss gave me the day off tomorrow and I can’t drink this alone.” You waved the mugs in your other hand. “It’s not exactly classy, but have a drink with me?” You bit your lip waiting for a response. While things had changed between you and McCoy recently, he was your commanding officer and you still weren’t sure if he considered you as a friend as well as a colleague. There were probably a million reasons why it was good idea to refuse, but right now looking at your hopeful face the doctor couldn’t think of a single one. “Why not.” Pouring a couple of fingers into each mug, you smiled a little when you realised one was Stick McCoy. You handed it to the doctor and moved to sit on the other end of the couch, fussing with your skirt to be able to sit cross legged. “To the end of physicals!” You raised your drink. “And to evil genius nurses.” McCoy clinked with you and you both took a sip. He watched as you groaned in pleasure, closing your eyes and tipping your head back as the whiskey burned your throat, still wearing that damned ridiculous bow.  His eyes traced the curve of your neck.  Oh hell. There, underscored by the gentle familiar hums and beeps of medbay, McCoy finally admitted to himself that you mattered to him too much for things to ever go back to normal.

A/N: Thanks for all the lovely feedback on chapter 1! Hope its ok to tag a couple of people, I won’t be offended if you want to be removed!

@dirajunara @spookyscaryscully

[pherryt]

10 or 21 for McKirk.

This...did not stay short. I tried. I really really tried. but it’s still a little over 1k! I also kept trying to do research for planets and diseases from TOS. So i think i spent at least half the time i was writing this actually researching. Well, trying to.

10. ‘If there’s no food, I’m going home.’

21. ‘I’m trying to have a serious conversation with you.’

I somehow managed to incorporate both, though the focus is on 21.

Star Trek, McKirk, Confessions, Misunderstandings

 Jim Kirk stared at his Chief Medical Officer in frustration.“Bones, I’m trying to have a seriousconversation with you!”

Leonard’s brow rose and his mouth twisted up. “Since when doesJim Kirk do those?”

“Since when – what? Are you kidding me? I have seriousconversations with you all the time!” Jim gritted out in exasperation.

Leonard snorted and turned away, fiddling with a piece ofequipment Jim only had a very vague idea of what it did. “Right, like that timeyou threatened to leave a peace talk – risking an international incident, mightI add - because they didn’t have any food.”

“That was serious!Don’t you remember? I was still recovering from the Altarian Flu and I hadn’teaten in like, a week!” Jim protested. “And I wasn’t really gonna leave.”

“What about that time you tried to convince Sulu someone wasmessing with his plants?”

“Well, how was I supposedto know that that species of flora regularly uprooted itself to take a walk?”

“You could have asked him, seeing as he is the botany expert on board,” Leonard pointed out reasonably, buthis shoulders were tense and his movements stiff.

Jims eyes narrowed. “Wait, wait…Bones…turn around and lookat me.”

“I’m busy, Jim,” Leonard snapped out.

Jim reached forward and touched Leonard’s shoulder softly,drawing him around. The doctor looked nervous as he scowled at his captain.Beneath the scowl was something else and Jim focused on that with laser beamprecision.

“What do you think is going on here, Bones?” Jim asked softly,trying to catch the doctor’ hazel eyes. Normally straightforward and not one toshy away from direct eye contact, Jim was finding this difficult as Leonardavoided his gaze.

“Nothing is going on here, except you’re likely to complainabout the state of your love life, again. Which, really Jim, what makes youthink I’m interested in hearing about your conquests or one-night stands?”

Jim stared, mouth agape. “What conquests? Or one-nightstands? Jesus, Bones, what do you really think of me?”

Leonard finally looked at Jim, and he could see hurt andconfusion and anger roiling through his eyes, though his face was still twistedin the same scowl as usual. “What, that wasn’t you flirting with what’s-her-name,the ambassadors’ daughter only yesterday? Or putting the moves on that pilotfrom uh…what was it, Rigel, just last week? I thought you were gonna hop intohis ship when he finished resupplying. Not to mention when you came back from aweek on Risa completely exhausted – I wonder why that was? Hmmm?”

Jim started laughing. “Oh my god. You’re jealous!”

Leonard’s eyes narrowed further. “Like I said. Not a seriousconversation then.” He turned his back and made to walk away and Jim’s laughterabruptly stopped.

“No, but Bones – Leonard– “ Leonard froze and Jim moved closer. “That’s just it. The flirting was justflirting it didn’t mean anything. I can’t help it, plus, y’know, diplomaticrelations and all. The pilot? Sure, he was hot, but you should have seen the modifications he had on hisship! I had to tell Scotty all about them, see if there were any that madesense to incorporate in our own engine rooms. And Risa? I went mountain climbingand hiking and…maybe got lost in the woods for a couple of days. That’s prettyfreaking exhausting.”

Jim lightly tugged at Leonard’s shoulder, sliding his handdown his arm and grasping the doctor’s hand. “Look at me, please?” he asked,softly.

Leonard shivered and turned, slowly. Jim smiled at him. “You’reinfuriating, you know that?” Leonards’ brow shot up and his mouth opened and Jimhurried to place a finger over his lips. “Shh, wait, okay?” He paused and tooka breath. “Look, when I came in here, I was going to ask you to accompany me tothe ambassadorial dinner. As my date. As a realdate, not just an excuse to keep the ambassadors’ daughter at bay. That’s justa bonus.”

“A date?” Leonard stared at Jim incredulously, the doubtclear in every line of his body, his face, his most expressive eyes.

“Yeah, if that’s, I mean…I dunno if you’re interested. You’venot once dated anyone since I met you and I don’t know if you’re even attractedto men but I couldn’t just not try anymore.I had to know if this was one sided or not, if I had a chance or if I shouldjust…give up.” Jim’s words flew out in a breathless rush, a perfect babble, abit of panic trying to rise up. He ruthlessly shoved it down. If he could captaina starship, face down Nero and Khan and Krall – and countless others – he coulddo this. He could put his heart on the line and wait for his best friend toeither embrace it or stomp on it.

“Don’t you dare,” Leonard rasped out. Jim’s heart sank, andhis eyes cast downwards, nearly closing before Leonard continued. “Jim Kirkdoesn’t give up. That’s not the man I know and love.”

Eyes shooting upwards, Jim looked back at Leonard only theDoctor smiling shyly at him. Hope shot back into Jim’s heart, and he swallowed.“Y-yeah?”

“Yes, you dumbass. For a long time now. Why the hell do youthink I’m even out here, huh? I hate space!” Jim could see Leonard gearing upfor a long rant or lecture about the dangers of spacefaring but he was toogiddy to process it. Grinning boldly now, he touched Leonards’ cheek and thedoctor stopped, his words trailing off, both of them getting lost in the other’seyes.

“You gonna kiss me or what?” Leonard finally asked.

“Not yet,” Jim said, his eyes a twinkle. “Gotta have aproper date first.”

“Oh, is that how it’s gonna be?” Leonards’ lips twitched upin a smirk.

“You bet your ass, that’s how it’s gonna be.” Jim’s grinonly grew wider and Leonards’ eyes softened even more.

They were so lost in each other that neither noticed Chapelwalk into the room, shut her mouth, roll her eyes and walk right back out.

She had some bets to collect on.

Finally.

[impalaanddemons]

Gravity - Part 11

Summary: Reader’s a young security officer (Lieutanent Junior Grade) who happened to be on an away mission and fall hard for a certain Chief Engineer. Both of them aren’t the most outgoing regarding their feelings and tend to just watch each other from a distance, which is going to change.

Wordcount: 1500

A/N: Something just a bit funny. This one excluded, there’ll be 3 more parts to wrap the series up. I’m sad already!

This fiction is set in AOS

Warnings: none

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10

A starship was like a village in space - of course there were the away missions and exciting discoveries; but sometimes the human mind just longed for some good old fashioned gossip. This is why everyone and their mum had an opinion about your choice of clothing. Mess hall had become a battle field. The gangways were trenches. Quarters a bunker to hide from unwanted opinions. „It’s going to be a dress, isn’t it?“ A couple of very curious eyes were focused on you, you noticed, as you glanced over the replicated steak in front of your mouth around you. „I really don’t know.“ A couple of crewmates from security were gathered around the table. They were your friends, you reminded yourself. They meant well. That and they were very curious. „You should wear a dress. It’s a CO, after all.“ voiced Bancroft and offered a lopsided grin. „That’s not how this is.“ you rolled your eyes and shoved the steak down before it could get any colder. „I’m just saying it’s probably going to be fancy“ You stared at him blankly, not having considered this before. „Oh“. „He didn’t even give you a hint?“ „Nope.“ „Then pick a dress! It’s definitely going to be fancy!“ You sighed and gave up on your endeavor to actually eat that steak in front of you. „I don’t even have a lot of dresses.“ „Uh-Oh - there’s the black one, that you wore on graduation day, the one that just barely -„ „MIGHT I remind everyone here of their bedside manners?“ Everyone knew that voice. „Ca-Captain!“ the color of Bancrofts face actually managed to match his red shirt within seconds. If his blood rushed to his cheeks any faster you’d have to call medbay. You stifled a laughter as you greeted the Captain, who smirked at you. „So, is there still a space left at this table?“ „We were actually just going, Captain.“ and with that, the rest of your crewmates saluted, left the table and scuttled away, throwing you to the wolf. Kirk sat down, shaking his head and put his tray in front of him on the table, mumbling something about people avoiding him. There was a mischievous twinkle in his baby blue eyes as he turned to face you. „So, Lieutenant Y/L/N“, a grin spread on his lips: „Are you going to wear a dress?“ Everyone. And their mother.

„I don’t know“ you moaned and rolled your eyes. „It’s still a day until shore leave!“ „You would probably look dashing in you dress uniform, Lieutenant.“ „Huh“, you said, throwing him a suspicious side-eye. „That’s actual, solid advise. And here I thought you were just being nosy like the rest of them.“ At that he raised his eyebrows, putting his right hand on his chest in what was supposed to be a shot motion. He laughed. Then he bent over the table, as if trying to create a conspirative atmosphere. „So, where are you going? Any clue?“ „Sir. Don’t you have .. like …a ship to run?“ „Sulu’s at the helm. Chekov's navigating. And I got the best first officer a captain could wish for. I think we’re pretty solid.“ „That’s a pity, Sir, because I have an Doctor’s appointment in .. oh.. look at the time. Now.“ you tried to keep the sass in your voice at bay. This was, after all, your captain. „Oh,come on, you can tell me! I’m your Captain!“ „Has Monty told you anything?“ Kirk chuckled lightly. „‚Monty‘“, he made sure to stress the word as much as possible. „Hasn’t told me one bit, but I’ve heard he did consult with Lieutenant Uhura a few days ago.“ „Is that so.“ you furrowed your brows. „Anyway, gotta go Captain, I’d hate to keep the Doctor waiting.“

„Just wear whatever you feel comfortable in.“, said Chapel and her kind smile made you forget for a moment to think about who on this starship had spread the news. It was probably due to Scottys rank - you imagined him talking with Uhura about it, who talked with Spock, who spilled it by accident to Kirk, who then talked to Bones and everyone else around them listening in all the time. „I just want it to be a special occasion“ you answered and smiled back in return. There was no way anyone could be angry at Chapel. „Every occasion is a special occasion for a young couple“ she said with a wink and lifted a finger: „I’ll get the Doctor.“ The head nurse of the Enterprise left and only a few moments later Doctor McCoy entered the room, a concentrated stare fixed on his PADD. „Lieutenant Y/N“, he said, shook your hand and put the PADD on his lap while sitting down. „I’ve just read the readings Nurse Chapel got for me and it looks like you’re in prime health again.“, his fingers tapped the PADD. „Thanks, Doctor. So I am cleared for shore leave, yes?“ You hadn’t mentioned it to Scotty, because you did not want him to skip his own leave to be with you. He was the guy to do something like that. Taking in the soft expression that crossed the doctors face for a second, there’d be no need for anyone to skip shore leave. „Yes, you’re cleared for shore leave …“ you hissed a small ‚Yesssss‘ at that „…but while we’re at it.“ „Is there anything wrong, Doctor?“ There was really no need for any more bad news in your life. And at the tone in his voice you instantly worried. „Nothing serious, but since you’re here - there’s no hormone implant in your medical record.“ Blood rushed too your cheeks. Your pounding heart  seemed determined to drown every other sound in the room. „I … ah .. there was ..I didn’t think there would be…“ „No need for that on a five year mission?“ he raised his eyebrows questioningly and watched you fidget under his gaze. „Yeah .. ? I thought I’d get one when .. uh …“ „I can get one right away and apply it. With the newer implants you’ll be fine by tomorrow evening.“ the Doctor just continued, unfazed by your blushing. He had probably had this talk with a lot of young women on the Enterprise. „Aye …“ you answered meekly. „Great. Just wait here, we’ll get started right away.“ At least he hadn’t asked you about what you’d wear.

Your quarters still felt empty when you were there alone and in that moment you felt a sting right where your heart was. Cas would’ve known what to wear. A smile flashed across your face, just for a second, while you stared at the clothes scattered across your bed. Not that you had that many to begin with. Well, not that you didn’t like clothes - but being in Security and on a five year mission in space there was hardly any opportunity to wear something else than your star fleet uniform. Bancroft was right, of course - you did have that nice black dress you wore on graduation day (to be more specific: You wore it on the evening of graduation day. The biggest party you could remember. At least up until now.). You could also wear your dress uniform. It was very formal though. There was also one more dress (blue,you liked it a bit too much to leave behind) and some jeans and a blouse. For the first time in years you felt the nervous flutter in your guts again, the one you once had when you were a teenager and tried to ask that guy from the football team out. „Good lord, Cas, I could really need your help right now“ you huffed and dropped on the bed. „The black one is very short, maybe I should wear it in the evening. If we’re going to .. take a walk … or so … I’ll wear the jeans. And tomorrow I’ll take the blue dress. Good?“ waiting for an answer that would never come you sighed. “Great. I’ll take that as a yes.“

„How was your day, lass?“ You opened your eyes to look at the silhouette of Montgomery Scott getting rid of his t shirt. You’d never get enough of that. „Getting better by the minute“ at that the scotsman chuckled and slipped out of his shoes. The shower was always one of his top priorities as soon as he got to his rooms, which sometimes happened at odd hours. One day he had stumbled into his quarters at the end of beta, greeted you with a kiss on the forehead, showered, changed, and was off again „before the nuclear accident we’re sitting on is going to happen“. Now he slid out of his trousers and smiled at you. „We’re only a few hours away from Yorktown now.“ he grabbed a dry towel and made his way over to the bathroom. „I’ll have to go back to engineering, but only for a wee bit, and then I’m all yours.“ „Sounds great“, you said and basked in the warm feeling that spread through your body.

READ ON

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[sincerelybluevase]

Fanfic Friday: lips touch, part five

BECAUSE WHAT IS SELF-CONTROL? HERE, HAVE A THIRD FIC IN ONE DAY. 

Patrick only intended to clean his instruments at Nonnatus and then go home again, trying to get a few hours of sleep before the start of the new day. His new autoclave hadn’t arrived yet, and the old one still refused service, hence making him dependent on the nuns. Sister Julienne had even given him a key so he could get in at any time of night; she knew he could not sleep easy without having cleaned his instruments first.

So, making sure his instruments were sterilized was the original plan. It got thwarted when Patrick heard a thread of music winding through the cold and deserted hallway.

It is three o’clock in the morning, he thought and went to investigate the melody’s source. The light spilling from the nun’s living room proved to be a vital clue. Patrick took care to walk softly; he didn’t want to scare whoever was listening to Jim Reeves.

It’s probably Sister Monica-Joan, he mused. The nun had taken to wandering in the night. Patrick had advised Sister Julienne to keep the door of her bedroom locked, but none of the nuns felt that it was right to lock Sister Monica-Joan inside her room at night. They did lock the outer doors, though, to prevent her from straying away from the convent. She had done so once before and it was an experience that no one involved would like to repeat. When Patrick reached the living room he abruptly halted in the doorway, arrested by what he saw.

A young woman dressed only in a white nightgown was dancing, slowly rocking along to the music as if in the arms of an invisible partner. She had hair the colour of honey; it spilled down the curve of her neck, the tips ghosting her shoulders. Patrick’s brow knitted; he didn’t know this person. What was she doing here, in a convent, dancing to music in the wee hours of morning? He wished she would turn around and see him; he was reluctant to make her aware of his presence for reasons that he could hardly fathom.

“May the good Lord bless and keep you,” she sang. A burst of electricity shot along Patrick’s spine. He knew that voice.

“Sister Bernadette?” He had never seen her out of the habit and without her wimple, but he knew her sweet soprano voice, having heard her singing in chapel. She turned around. She didn’t wear her glasses, which made her seem younger. Patrick guessed she had no need of glasses, now; her eyes were closed and her face wore the peaceful mask of deep slumber.

She’s sleepwalking, Patrick realised. Tenderness and embarrassment pulsed through his veins. He felt like an intruder, knew he should avert his eyes and stop acting voyeuristic. At the same time he could not help looking at her. He doubted whether she knew the effect she had on him in daily life, the ever-growing love she inspired that he kept locked away deep inside his heart. Now, dressed in a nightgown that did nothing to hide her lovely legs and her creamy throat he felt positively dizzy.  Patrick felt torn. This dancing was not appropriate for a nun, but the beatific smile that hid in the corners of her mouth made him feel guilty for even entertaining the thought of stopping her. Besides, he was sure she would be mortified if he woke her, being dressed in only her nightgown, not even wearing a cap to cover her hair.

“Sister Bernadette?” Patrick asked again, taking a few hesitant steps in her direction. Even though she was safely cradled in the arms of Morpheus she must have felt his presence, for she turned towards him and smiled.

“Would you like to dance, sir?” she whispered in her lovely Scottish lilt. Before Patrick could make up his mind she stepped forward. Sister Bernadette took his hand in hers, put her other hand on his shoulder and leaned her head against his chest, over his heart. Patrick’s arm snaked around her waist almost of its own accord. They rocked slowly, keeping time with the music.

“Fill your dreams with sweet tomorrows, never mind what might have been,” she murmured. Patrick wanted nothing more than to kiss her, hold her, make this moment last forever, but he kept himself in check. He reminded himself that the person he held in his arms was a nun, thus a woman in name only. Never mind that she looked sweet and innocent and that her hand held his ever so softly.

The song ended, filling the room with soft crackles. Patrick stopped dancing. Sister Bernadette made a sound of disapproval in the back of her throat and knit her brows. The small line that appeared between her eyebrows made her look adorable.

“You have to go back to bed,” he whispered.

“I want to stay here, with you, forever,” she murmured.

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.” “Why not? You’re Doctor Turner, you make the impossible possible.” His cheeks turned very hot at her mentioning his name.

“Sister Bernadette, do you know who I am?” She nodded.

“I wish you would stop calling me ‘Sister Bernadette’. It makes me sound like a nun.” She pressed herself closer to him, making a small sound of contentment as she inhaled the scent of his shaving soap and cigarettes. He forced himself to recite every bone in the human foot in an attempt to distract himself from feeling the subtle swell of her breasts against his ribs.

“Now, let’s dance.” “We can’t. It would be inappropriate. You’re a religious sister.” “Stop saying that.”

“But you are a nun, Sister,” Patrick gently corrected her.

“No, I’m not,” she mumbled.

“Yes, you…” She stood on tiptoes and pressed her lips against his. Patrick was too baffled to stop her. Only when her tongue flicked against the seam of his lips did he gently take her face in his hands and break the kiss.

Not so innocent now, he couldn’t help but think.

“You talk too much. I just want you to take me dancing,” she huffed.  

“Let’s dance, then,” Patrick decided. She smiled serenely and kept smiling all the time it took Patrick to dance their way to her room.

[cathygeha]

How to Tame a Beast in Seven Days by Kerrelyn Sparks

The Embraced #1

 Loved this introduction to a wonderful new paranormal fantasy series filled with romance, intrigue, wondrous beasts and delightful characters. I found the prologue provided just enough information to set the hook that led me into the story. My guess is that the five sisters of the heart mentioned in chapter one will each get a book of their own and I look forward to reading each and every one of their stories.

 In book one Luciana learns she is not an orphan after all and has the opportunity to save her father’s life IF she is willing to return with him to his castle and marry Leo, The Beast of Benwick. With her skills of communing with ghosts, the need to keep her identity secret and an upcoming marriage to a man who can kill with a touch she is not sure what will happen but is willing to do what she can to save her father and his people. With assassins out to get her, ghosts telling her secrets and her growing attraction to Leo her life is never dull. Leo is equally attracted to his bride to be BUT worries that he won’t ever be able to touch her let alone consummate their marriage.

 This is a fun adult romance that has everything I like in a book. I was taken back to fairytales of childhood but with a more grownup story to read. I smiled at interactions, worried about characters, hoped that the hero and heroine would manage a HEA and am now eager to find out what will happen in future books of this series because this one was so very very entertaining.

 I would like to thank NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC. This is my honest review.

 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29875893-how-to-tame-a-beast-in-seven-days?ac=1&from_search=true

5 Stars  

EXCERPT:

Chapter Four

As Leo and his companions rode north, the rain began, and the rolling green landscape gave way to increasingly taller hills. Their horses went at full gallop, eating up the miles before the rain could turn the dirt road into a sea of mud.

By the time they passed the second beacon, the rain was pounding on them. Their uniforms were drenched, their hair plastered to their heads. The hills had become moun- tains, and flocks of sheep huddled in the narrow glens where a few trees could give them shelter.

Thunder clapped overhead, and Leo spotted the first flash of lightning to the west. Good. He was going to need all the power he could get. Normal people didn’t stand a chance against the winged creatures that breathed fire. People like his father.

Leo had heard the story many times over a campfire. His father’s last battle had been against the Norveshki. Cedric had plowed through a dozen of their fierce warriors, but when a dragon had attacked, all his bravery and expertise had been in vain.

Another flash of lightning, this one a little closer. Leo would need to break off from the group soon. As they

 neared the village, a mountain loomed to the right, topped with craggy cliffs and a beacon tower. It was Mount Bae- dan, which the village was named after. He spotted a cliff that overlooked the village. That was the perfect place.

“My lord.” Nevis drew his attention to a horseman charg- ing toward them. A scout.

Leo and his companions slowed to a stop. “Report,” he said, loud enough to be heard over the pouring rain.

The scout bowed his head, causing a puddle of rain to slosh off the brim of his cap onto his chest. “Four drag- ons from Norveshka have attacked the village of Mount Baedan.”

“No warriors?” Leo asked.

“None, my lord. Just the dragons. They swooped into the valley and set the village ablaze to force the people from their homes. While the villagers ran to a nearby cave, two of the dragons captured two small children and flew away.”

Leo stiffened, his hands tightening on the reins, as the men around him cursed under their breaths. Ten years ago, the dragons had started snatching sheep. Now they were nabbing small children.

He glanced westward, hoping to see another flash of lightning streak across the sky. He needed the power now. “The rain put out the fires,” the scout continued. “The villagers are starting to leave the cave. A group of men

rode out, hoping to rescue the two children.”

Leo swallowed hard as bile rose up his throat. The res- cue attempt would be in vain. Men on horseback could not cross the mountains as fast as a dragon could fly.

Thunder cracked overhead so loud, the men flinched. “Ride on to the village,” Leo shouted at them. “The last

two dragons could still be close by. I’ll take care of them. You protect the people.” He turned his horse and started up the slope of Mount Baedan.

 Higher and higher his horse climbed, but eventually the path became too muddy. Leo dismounted and patted the horse, the quilted material now drenched through.

“Go join the others.” He gave the horse a slap on the rump, and it started down the mountain.

Leo abandoned the muddy path that snaked back and forth up the mountainside. Instead, he scrambled straight up the rocky slope. He was halfway up when a bolt of lightning shot from the sky and struck the ground thirty yards away, blasting a boulder into bits.

Yes! The lightning had found him and was zeroing in. Energy from the blast rolled toward him, seeking him out in waves he couldn’t see, but could feel. His skin tingled. His hair, which had been plastered to his head, now crack- led as it lifted into the air.

Thunder boomed overhead, sending another wave of energy toward him. It slithered under his damp clothes, giving him a slight shock. Then an increase in power. And speed. He charged up the mountainside faster than any human could go.

Anticipation swelled inside him as he reached the first set of cliffs. Another lightning bolt ripped through the sky, this one hitting only fifteen yards away. It blasted through the rocks, causing the cliff to crumble away. As the ledge beneath his feet trembled, he ran and leaped.

He landed on the next cliff six feet away as thunder cracked and the first cliff tumbled down the mountainside. More energy surged into him, and he scrambled higher up the mountain. Faster. In a race against the next strike.

He reached the highest cliff. Nearby on the mountain summit, the beacon tower stood, deserted in the storm, its flame long smothered by the rain. The village lay nestled in the valley far below. He spotted houses built of stone with their thatched roofs burned away. The chapel of En- lightenment partially destroyed. The village lookout tower

 stood as high as the chapel bell tower and was manned by a lone villager. No doubt, he was keeping an eye out for the last two dragons.

Nevis and his troop arrived, and the villagers poured from their homes to welcome them. Leo winced at the sight of small children running about. Dammit, Nevis, get them back into the cave.

A rumbling noise echoed through the valley, sounding much like thunder, but Leo knew better. It was the beat- ing of dragon wings. The last two dragons had waited for the people to reappear.

Leo ripped off his gloves and threw them down, along with his bow and quiver. Then he drew his sword and pointed it to the sky. “Now!”

Lightning broke through the dark clouds, racing toward him. He widened his stance and braced for impact. It struck his sword, fracturing so that a dozen smaller streaks shot off in a circle around him.

The major portion of the lightning sizzled down his sword, eager to reach his flesh. It hit his bare hand and jolted him so hard he fell to his knees and dropped the sword. The dozen fractured shards rebounded, drawn to him like a magnet. They pounded into him, jerking him back and forth. Thunder cracked over him so loud his ears rang.

Power surged through him, so fierce and scorching he thought his skin would melt, his guts would boil, and his head burst like a kernel of corn dropped into a fire. Pain and power, power and pain, he could no longer tell the dif- ference. He only knew he wanted it, wanted to drink it in, soak it up, and claim it all.

The fiery torture eased to a warm, buzzing sensation, and he found himself on all fours, gasping for air. How many times had he endured this? And it still hurt like hell. He rested back on his knees and splayed his hands in front

 of him. Sparks skittered around his fingers like a host of fireflies.

Good, but not enough. The Beast wanted more.

He grabbed his sword and hefted himself to his feet. “More, dammit!” He lifted his sword in the air.

Lightning struck again, driving him to his knees and knocking the sword from his grip. He cried out as both pain and power ripped through him. Nevis was right. Someday he would explode.

Thunder cracked around him as if he’d become the cen- ter of the storm. His ears grew numb, only hearing the buzz of energy pulsing around him. This time, when he examined his hands, streaks shot out a few yards. Not enough to kill a dragon.

He fumbled for his sword once again. Nevis’s question reverberated in his head, bouncing off the inside of his skull. Do you enjoy courting death? Over the years, he’d found he could take in more power each time, but what was the limit? How would he know when it was too much?

He stumbled to his feet and slowly lifted the sword. When he had the weapon only waist-high, the lightning streaked toward him. Like a desperate lover, it pounced, not even waiting till he was fully cocked. It struck hard, flinging him through the air into the wall behind him. His head cracked against stone, and he crumpled into a heap.

Rain splattered on his face, keeping him conscious. The pain was merely the price he paid for the ability to protect his people. The pain would be fleeting.

The power he could keep for months.

He rose to his feet. If he were normal, he’d have suf- fered a concussion and some broken bones. Hell, if he were normal, he’d be dead. But instead, he swelled with strength and power. Tiny streaks of lightning swirled around him so fast, he appeared to glow.

He strode to the edge of the cliff to see what was hap-

 pening. The dragons were flying low, probably to avoid the lightning. They swooped down at the screaming villagers, herding them away from the cave. Making them easy to prey upon.

With the superfast speed he now possessed, Leo pulled a length of coiled rope from his sword belt and tied one end loosely to a tree deeply rooted in the rock wall of the cliff. The other end, he tied to one of his metal arrows. He grabbed his metal bow, nocked the arrow, and imbued them with some of his energy. Now, when he shot the arrow, it would fly faster and farther.

He aimed for the lookout tower and let the arrow fly. It whistled through the air and struck the top wooden beam of the tower, embedded deep. Continuing at his fast speed, Leo tightened the rope, tossed his bow and quiver over his shoulder, sheathed his sword, then looped the sword belt over the rope. He ran to the cliff’s edge and pushed off.

Hanging on to the belt, he careened down the length of the rope. Just before crashing into the tower, he swung his legs up and over the top beam and landed on the top plat- form. The lone villager gaped at him.

“Go!” he shouted. With lightning sizzling around him like a golden nimbus, he didn’t need to speak twice.

The villager scrambled down the ladder, yelling that the Beast had arrived.

After dropping his sword belt on the platform, Leo quickly readied another arrow and pivoted, searching for the dragons. Even though it was possible for him to sim- ply shoot a lightning bolt from his hand, he’d learned from experience that raw power didn’t always go exactly where he wanted it to go. Since there was a chance of hitting in- nocent bystanders or setting their homes on fire, he pre- ferred to use a metal arrow imbued with his power so he could control the force and trajectory.

There, through a steady sheet of rain, a pair of red,

 glowing eyes was glaring at him. The dragon was perched on the bell tower of the chapel. It sat up, expanding its chest, a sure sign it was about to breathe fire.

Leo released enough energy to make sparks pop and crackle around the metal arrow. When he shot it, the ar- row would fly with enough speed and power that it would actually pierce the dragon’s scaly skin and release an elec- tric shock wave through the creature’s body.

He aimed for the dragon’s chest, but just as he let the arrow fly, the dragon pushed off, flying straight at him. Fire erupted from the dragon’s mouth, forcing him to drop flat onto the platform. Flames shot over him, missing him by a few inches. Meanwhile, the arrow hit the dragon’s hip.

Sparks spread from the arrow, jerking the dragon around in midair. It shrieked, then shot up into the sky and turned north toward Norveshka. Leo notched an arrow to shoot again, but screams below made him look down.

The second dragon had grabbed a child. “Nevis!” Leo shouted. “Catch it!”

Nevis spurred his horse and galloped after the dragon. It was gaining altitude, now higher than the rooftops of the houses.

Leo sent a surge of energy into his bow and arrow and aimed, trying to keep a safe distance from the child. The arrow zipped through the air. Direct hit to the dragon’s tail. Sparks exploded around the wound, racing up the dragon’s body, and it jolted, bellowing in pain and dropping the child. A dress flapped in the wind. It was a little girl.

Nevis charged onward as she tumbled from the sky. Villagers screamed, then let loose a round of cheers as Nevis managed to catch her.

The dragon flew away, filling the sky with an angry roar.

Leo lowered his bow and arrow and watched through the rain as the villagers crowded around Nevis. The little

 girl was safely deposited in the arms of her crying mother. Nevis glanced back at Leo and gave him a thumbs- up before being dragged off his horse by a swarm of happy villagers.

With a cheer, the villagers led Nevis and his men into the cave. Boys led the horses, including Leo’s horse, to the stables. Women dashed into their homes to gather cups and jugs of beer and wine. A few men rushed into a nearby pen to slaughter a lamb. Leo wasn’t sure if the village was cel- ebrating the rescue of one child or drowning their sor- rows for the two who were lost, but clearly they intended to partake of food and drink. And even more clearly, it was a celebration he could not attend.

He glanced at his hands. Sparks still shimmered around his fingers. One false move, and lightning would streak from his fingertips, possibly killing someone. He’d been in such a hurry he’d left his gloves on the cliff. With a sigh, he picked up his sword belt, then buckled it on.

The rain was still pelting him, so he climbed down the ladder to a second platform just below. Drops of rain leaked between the wooden planks overhead, and the wind blew more rain at him, but it was an improvement. He sat in the driest corner and rested his back against a wooden pillar. For a short while, because he had released so much energy, he would feel all right. But soon the pain would start again.

He spotted two men rolling a cask toward the cave. The villagers must have run out of beer. Sounds of laughter emanated from the cave. Soon he could smell the scent of a lamb roasting over a fire. His stomach grumbled. A quick search of his pockets came up empty.

With a sigh, he leaned his head against the pillar. Alone again. It was always this way. He was too damned dan- gerous to be near anyone. Even Nevis had learned to stay away from him when he had this much power.

 He closed his eyes as a memory flitted across his mind. The first time lightning had found him, he’d been only five years old. One strike had sent him flying, and he’d crum- pled onto the ground, twitching uncontrollably. His nanny had run to him. Calling out to him, she’d touched his face. Then a surge of energy had shot through her, and she’d col- lapsed beside him dead.

His first victim. Someone he’d dearly loved.

“I didn’t mean to . . .” Leo whispered, the sound whisked away with the wind. “Forgive me.”

Since then, everyone had known to keep their distance. And if a stranger didn’t know, he soon learned when he heard the new name Leo had been given.

Never touch the Beast.

Never let the Beast touch you.

The rain continued to fall. The energy inside him spread throughout his body, expanding, rebelling against the nar- row confines of his human shell, demanding to be released and used. Not now. He had to keep as much power as pos- sible so it would be available whenever he needed it.

The sun lowered in the sky, and the wind became more chilled against his wet clothes. He welcomed the cold. It made it easier to deal with the energy boiling inside him, threatening to escape like steam from a kettle.

The strains of a pipe and fiddle came from the cave. The people were dancing, their music accentuating the thud- ding rhythm in his head. The energy kept expanding, push- ing against the inner walls of his skull, pushing so hard he expected to hear the sound of bone cracking. He squeezed his eyes shut, gritting his teeth against the pain.

Sometimes he thought this was the worst part about his gift. The headaches would torture him until either he re- leased some power or it managed to escape on its own.

“My lord?” a female voice spoke below.

He opened his eyes. On the ground by the ladder,