#what the fuck do you mean hush cut that's just a shaggy cut!!!

[hwiyoungies]

maybe i'm a hater but i'm tired of people renaming things that have existed for decades just to make them seem more trendy

[sylvesterlestermanchester]

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

Summary: Dan’s happy in his relationship with Phil. If only everything else could start to fall into place, that’d be great.

Word Count: 5,700

Genre: Humor, fluff, angst. Isn’t that life?

Warnings: Swearing, mentions of homophobia, allusions to conversion therapy.

A/N: This won’t make much sense unless you read the first fic in the Fearfully and Wonderfully verse, Fearfully and Wonderfully! (I was really creative with that title huh.) Also, ty for all the love on the past two fics! I don’t have much free time to write these, so I appreciate a few people actually saw it lol.

Dear God. 

Hey, God, it’s me.

Our father, who art in heaven...

Wait, am I supposed to pray to God? Or Jesus?

Dan let out a quiet groan, burying his face in his hands. It was way too early in the morning to be thinking, let alone trying to connect with a higher power. 

Why couldn’t Dan pray like Phil did?

Yeah, Dan could’ve asked his boyfriend for help with this. His boyfriend, literally the most religious person Dan had ever met. His boyfriend, who had plans for seminary. His boyfriend, who...his boyfriend…

A sleepy grin spread across his face as he pushed all other thoughts out of his mind and snuggled up closer in his boyfriend’s arms, their bodies squeezed together on the tiny twin mattress that barely fit just one of their lanky bodies. In the month that they had been dating since coming back from the retreat, Dan still wasn't tired of calling Phil his boyfriend-when nobody was around, of course.

“Boyfriend…” Dan sang quietly as he moved to play with Phil’s shaggy hair, biting back a laugh as he received a quiet snore in response. “Oi, boyfriend.”

“Shush your hush.” He hears back after a moment, voice low and tired, but still fond. “Shush your hush?”

“Mmm.” “Wow, quite eloquent. Shush your hush. I’ll write it down for later, so you can-”

“Shush!” Phil suddenly rolled on top of Dan, pressing a sloppy, wet kiss to his cheek.

“Wha-Phil, guh-ross!”

“It’s what you get.” Phil laughed, nuzzling his nose into Dan’s hair.

The sleepy cuddles only last a bit longer before they force themselves out of bed, getting ready for class. It’s only when Dan tugs on a new shirt and catches a glimpse of Phil kneeling beside the bed and looking up at the ceiling that he remembers why he woke up early to pray-or at least try to. 

Phil looks...peaceful. Transcended, almost, from their cozy but cluttered dorm room. Part of Dan winces for his knees, but part of Dan is jealous. This is something so deep, so meaningful to him, and it’s something Dan feels this need to share with him. 

How could he be with Phil if he can’t even share the most important thing in his life with him? He’s pulled out of his thoughts this time by Phil’s soft giggle. “Are you watching me?” He asks softly, pushing himself to his feet and moving over to wrap his arms around Dan’s waist. 

“W-What? No. Just zoned out. I need coffee.” He whined, running a hand through Phil’s hair and pushing it back lightly.

“You were creeping on me, creeper.” Phil giggled and tickled Dan’s side lightly, watching as he squirmed.

Before Dan can argue back, Phil leans closer and presses a lazy kiss to his lips. One month in, his knees still weaken as he feels his boyfriend’s soft lips on his. 

“C’mon, we should get going.” “We could just kiss the day away.” Dan murmurs. “We could. But I could also buy you coffee and we can try to focus on these midterms you guys keep warning me about.” Dan grumbled and pressed a quick peck to his lips before pulling away reluctantly. He was dreading the mid-semester exams that were coming up just a couple weeks from now, and he knew Phil wouldn’t be prepared at all, considering he hadn’t even known they were a thing until last week. 

Once they gather their things and share a final kiss (okay, three) they both pull away, Phil smoothing his shirt down and Dan fixing his hair before they step out into the hall.

Phil trails behind-close, but not too close. Far enough away that they look like just roommates. Close enough that it keeps Dan from reaching back and tugging him into his arms, just wanting to envelop himself in Phil.

It’s when they’re walking that Dan sees the glint of the silver cross necklace bouncing against Phil’s chest, and his eyes trail from that up to the clouds in the sky, finally getting as close to a prayer as he figures he’s going to get.

Hey, God. Speak to me, yeah? If for nobody else, for Phil. 

-

“Okay, I’ve done the math-we can do this! With a week left before everyone’s first exam, we just need to keep up the studying, and-and maybe sleep, like, three hours less a night each.” Phil rambled, hands shaking from the abundance of caffeine rushing through his veins. He looks up from his calculator before looking at Louise and Dan across the booth, a nervous smile on his face as he tries desperately to cheer up his sullen friends. “Y’know, three hours isn’t even that much, especially if we work really hard and study non-stop. These tests should be easy then, right?” PJ chuckled dryly, rubbing his temples slowly. “You sound insane. You really never had to take tests in your little homeschool world up North?” He asked, pawing through the mountain of books in front of them. The fun “study session” that Phil had suggested had devolved into madness once the sugary coffee drinks had gone through their system, and Phil was desperately trying to scrape it back together.. “Well, not really. Once a year, we did this one just to prove we were actually learning. And then I took that weird G-C-E test or whatever, but I didn’t even take that seriously, because I barely knew what it was. But I must’ve done okay, because I ended up here, right?”

Louise stared at him before groaning. “Only you could half-ass the GCSEs and manage to score high enough to get a fucking huge scholarship.” Louise rolled her eyes playfully as she reached out and ruffled his hair. “The rest of us are doomed. Hey, Speaking of the North, why didn’t Chris show up, again?”

Phil giggled a bit as PJ shrugged, slurping his Frappuccino. “Just said he couldn’t make it, that’s all.” “He’s been ‘busy’ a lot lately.” Louise rolled her eyes gently. “He’s gonna bomb if he just stops studying.”

“What is he even doing?” PJ raised his eyebrows. “Seriously, I’m getting concerned-”

 “Less gossip, more studying, c’mon!” Phil interrupted suddenly, shaking his head quickly.

Louise and PJ rolled their eyes but reluctantly grabbed their pens, but Dan is too focused on Phil’s slightly trembling hands thumbing through his textbook. His nearly-neurotic obsession with studying wasn’t anything new-Phil had been studying a lot lately, breaking both the coffee and all-nighter limit they had set earlier that semester. 

Dan...well, he wasn’t exactly doing the same.

Pre-law was boring as fuck. Dan could feel his soul dying every time he went to a seminar. He couldn’t stand anyone else in his major. His eyes glossed over if he read case studies for more than 15 minutes, and if it came between studying and, well, literally anything else, he would gladly take anything else. 

Especially when that anything else was kissing Phil. 

Kissing Phil sounded really good right now. If their friends hadn’t been around, he’s sure he would’ve dragged Phil out of here by now and to one of the dozens of hidden corners of their campus for a good secret-kissing session. In fact, he’s tempted to make up some excuse and pull Phil away now when Louise nudges him. 

“Earth to Dan? Dan, aren’t you slipping in this class? C’mon, stop zoning out and get to work.” “You’re slipping?” Phil frowns, head jerking up. “Oh, Dan, why didn’t you say anything? You know I would’ve helped you study.” Dan groans under his breath. “Okay, okay. I’ll do it. I can’t help that it’s just so incredibly dull and stupid and-” PJ rolled his eyes. “We get it, you hate it. Less bitching, more studying, all of us.” Dan ducks his head down and begrudgingly starts to read along with the rest of them. He doesn’t miss the way Phil’s eyes glance over at him, offering him a sympathetic smile. If he had to, he would. If only just so he could trudge through it and get to the other side already. 

After a moment of debating, he glances up at the ceiling. God, if you’re there-let me get through this?

-

“Remand.” “I want to re-mand you that you’re my boyfriend, not my tutor.” Dan flashed Phil a grin, wiggling his eyebrows.

His grin wavered a bit as Phil shook his head, biting his bottom lip and giving him a stern look.

“Remand.” He repeated firmly, and Dan sighed.

“Um...the case in the court below it was incorrect?”

Phil shook his head. “Close, it’s actually-” He gets cut off by a dramatic groan from Dan, only muffled as Dan buried his face in their mattress. “Dan, I know you had your English exam today, but this law test is in two days. You need to-”

“Give me another one.” He snaps, and Phil sighs.

“Preemption.”

“That’s not a word.” “Dan, yes it is.” Phil says, voice softening as he reaches out and rubs Dan’s back. “Head up. What does it mean?” “Wait....is it when two courts, can-can...they can hear the same case at the same time?” Dan asks hopefully, looking at Phil, who’s grimacing.

“Not-Not exactly.” Before Dan can start up again, he quickly jumps in. “Let’s try an easy one-Plaintiff.” “Who even cares?” Dan snapped, kicking his feet childishly. He’s being annoying, he knows. He knows it’s late, and Phil has his own studying to do, and that he’s just trying to help. But Phil’s been on him since their study session last week when Louise let it slip that Dan wasn’t doing well in this class.

“I care, Dan.” Phil sighed, looking down and speaking quietly. “I-I just want you to do well. I’m praying for you and everything, but you gotta put some work in as well.” That shuts Dan up. 

“You’re praying for me?” He asked quietly. “I mean, I pray about you all the time.” Phil lays back down and gently pulls Dan with him. “But yeah, I’m praying for you. You just-you don’t seem happy with what you’re studying, and I just want you to be happy and successful. So I’m praying you find that.”

Dan pauses, not sure how to react. He doesn’t have a chance to when Phil gently adds “Even if...even if that means not doing law.” At that, Dan turns to look at Phil. “Don’t say that.”

“Seriously, Dan, if you want to study something else-” “Phil, drop it. I mean it.” “Fine, fine.” Phil pulls away, rolling off the bed and padding over to his desk. “You take a break, I’ll study on my own.” Dan curls up slightly into himself, his stomach turning. Phil sounded...defeated, almost. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or maybe Phil was more stressed than he was letting on. And Dan was only adding to it, oh God, what a fuck-up he was- “Pray with me?” Dan blurts out suddenly. 

Phil freezes mid-highlight before turning to Dan, eyebrows furrowed.

“You just...you look so calm when you do. It’s worth a shot, right?” Dan says, but it’s a weak lie. He doesn’t just want the calm Phil has. He wants that relationship with a God, that spiritual awareness. He wants to feel close to Phil in the way that seems to keep them apart, moreso even than the physical distance that they keep when out in public.

After a moment Phil’s expression softens and he gives Dan the kind smile that always makes him melt. Before Dan knows it he’s back on their bed, pulling Dan close. “Why don’t we do the Daily Examen?” “More exams?” Dan raised an eyebrow, smiling as Phil giggled.

“Examen. It’s a guided prayer. It helps me when I’m all over the place and can’t think as clearly.” 

Dan nods a bit, taking Phil’s hands and watching as his eyes fall shut. “Dear God...we’re now entering a space where you’re with us.” Dan watches as Phil takes a deep breath before realizing he should probably close his eyes, too.

Phil starts them by listing their gratitudes (coffee, a kind professor who let Dan finish the last bit of his essay despite being over the time limit, a sunny day), focusing on emotions (Dan’s a bit surprised with how empathetically Phil agrees with Dan’s overwhelment), picking one area to pray (peace), and then their hopes for the next day (just to get through it). 

As he leads Dan, Phil gets that serene smile on his face, and Dan opens one eye slightly to watch him. He wants what Phil has, really. But he can’t shake the feeling that, well, they’re just talking to someone who isn’t there. 

When Phil opens his eyes, he gives Dan a slightly hopeful look. “Better?”

“I feel...calmer,” Dan says, and it’s true. He feels a bit better, but he’s not sure that it’s as much because of the prayer or because of Phil’s soft, guiding voice. 

“Good. Now, let’s forget about vocab, yeah? We can study more tomorrow. Let’s get some rest.” He presses a gentle kiss to Dan’s forehead, and suddenly Dan feels the guilt build up further. He wants to feel this sense of closeness, and he’s pretty sure by the relaxed grin on Phil’s face he wants it as well.

“Night, love.” Dan whispers, watching as Phil snuggled up close before drifting off. With a sigh, Dan looks up at the ceiling.

Okay, God, I had Phil with me this time. He thinks, furrowing his eyebrows a bit. And you still can’t talk to me? Give me a break here, yeah?

-

Dan and Lou stand in the cold a couple days later when they're outside the church for study group, waiting for Phil.

PJ had to cram right before an art exam, which seemed like an oxymoron to Dan, but he couldn’t be envious of how cool that sounded. They both had tests-Phil a math exam that he was surprisingly confident about, and Dan’s law exam, which, well…

“How’d it go?” Phil asked cheerfully as he jogs up to them both, and despite the heavy feeling in Dan’s chest as he flashes back to the test-he had barely finished in time, and he knew that a lot of guessing was involved.

“It’s law. But, um, you know. Decent.” Dan lies with a small shrug. Louise quirks her eyebrow subtle, a trait that Phil doesn’t seem to pick up on as Dan asks about his exam and smiling as Phil lights up.

“Good! I know I nailed the extra credit. I’m exhausted, but-” “Chris? Hey, I thought you said you weren’t going to come!” Louise says as Chris walks over. It’s only then that Dan realizes he hasn’t seen him for more than a passing wave in the halls for about two weeks now. 

All their study sessions, and group de-stresses, and snack runs, Chris hadn’t been there. But here he is, Bible in hand and with a weird grin on his face.

“You know me!” He says, sounding just a bit too cheerful. “Unpredictable Chris. Let’s get inside, yeah?”

Phil watches as he makes his way through the chapel. “Oh-yeah, that sounds good. How is everything, by the way? It seems you’ve gone MIA-”

Chris waves him off. “I’m here now, Phil, c’mon. I need some snacks.”

They head down the stairs and make their way to sit in their regular seats, Phil and Dan exchanging quick glances. After a few minutes, they begin-brief introductions, a few announcements, and finally the starting prayer.

Before Caroline can direct them to a verse to study for the day, Chris butts in. “Can I ask a question?” 

Both Phil and Caroline smile widely and nod, and Chris flips open his Bible.

“I was reading some 1 Samuel, about David and Jonathan.” He starts, gripping the book tightly in his hands. He taps a bit of a highlighted text, raising his eyebrows. “And they talk about how “David loved Jonathan more than women,'', and how, and I quote, ‘the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David’. I mean...they were gay, weren’t they?”

The group seems a little taken aback by Chris’ bluntness, and Dan doesn’t need to look over to sense Phil shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

Caroline jumps in quickly. “I-I mean, people have interpreted it that way, yes. But they could have just had a deep, brotherly bond-”

Chris’ snort cuts her off. “I dunno, it seems pretty gay to me. I mean, they literally start smooching it up.”

“I think that they were gay, actually.” A girl across the room says with a shrug. “I mean, there had to be gay people back then. And Chris is right. They seem to act pretty romantically.” “You really think so?” A guy furrows his eyebrows. “I never read it like that. Judas kisses Jesus, but they weren’t gay.” “Yeah, well, I guess that’s not exactly the point. Here’s my question. How can you guys read and live by this book, but even though you claim that God is all-loving, some of you guys hate gay people?” The group falls silent, but that seems to only spur Chris on further. 

“Seriously. You guys talk so much about loving God, and God loving us, and loving brothers and sisters, but what if somebody in here was a guy, who happened to love guys? Like…” Dan holds his breath, eyes wide as he stares at Chris. 

“Like me?” He continues. Dan blinks a few times, looking equally as stunned as everyone else as his eyes dart around the room.

“Well-we want to be tolerant of everyone in here, so let’s start off with that.” Caroline jumps in again, but Chris shakes his head and barks out a laugh that doesn’t sound funny at all.

“I don’t want to be fucking tolerated, I want to be respected, and loved, and cared about-not just in spite of my sexuality, but because of my identity.” 

Chris stands to his feet, gritting his teeth as he slams the Bible shut and starts pacing around the circle. “It really, really fucking hurts when people don’t respect that. It hurts when I have to hear from my friends-” With that he whirls around, walking over to Phil suddenly. 

“Chris…” Phil whispers, sinking down in his seat somewhat as he looks up at him.

Chris stops in front of him, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring down at him. “When my friends talk so much about loving one another, but I’m not sure that they would love me if I was authentic with him.”

Phil sucks in a deep breath, slowly standing up. “Chris.” He says, voice shaking. “Chris, I promise I had no idea.” 

“Yeah, well, forgive me for being nervous.” Chris snaps. “I mean, you-Phil!”

Chris lets out a small yelp as Phil suddenly tackles him in a tight, desperate hug. The entire group is watching their every movement. Dan feels like his heart is going to explode. Finally, Phil pulls away, still holding both of Chris’s hands in his.

“Chris, if I haven’t shown you that I love you dearly as one of my greatest friends, I have f-failed you. As a friend. As a man. And as a follower of Christ.”

“You haven’t failed-” Chris laughed shakily, trying to hide the fact that his eyes were welling up, but then he looks shocked as a small sob erupts from Phil.

“I love you s-so dearly, Chris.” He says, quickly trying to control himself. “ ‘If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?’ “

“Chris, I-I know what love is because of the undying love of you as my brother. Through that I know God, and I know that God loves you so, so much. E-Even if you don’t believe, nobody ever-and I mean ever-should use him against you or your sexuality.” 

Chris is full-on sobbing now, and Phil pulls him to his chest, rubbing his back.

“If you’re gay, or bi, or-or whatever, I love you, and I love you b-because of it. I never want anyone to f-feel hated for that.” Phil pulled away after a moment before turning to the group. “And-And if you call yourself a servant of Christ, and you want to perpetrate this hate, or intolerance, I-I’d ask you to question why seeing someone-someone like Chris love another person with a pure heart makes you s-so uncomfortable.” Phil hugs him again as Chris’s shoulders shake and he balls up Phil’s shirt in his hands, mumbling “Thank you, thank you, thank you...”

After what seems like an hour, Caroline speaks quietly. “I think you both brought up some great points. Why don’t we wrap up early today, and-and we can try to pick this up next time, okay?” The group stays silent as Caroline leads them in their closing prayer, Chris’s quiet sobs the only noise besides her soft voice. People stand, a few shuffling over to give Chris hugs and murmur in his ear. “I think I’m gonna go for a walk with him. Y’know, help calm him down.” Phil murmured to Dan when he got a moment away. “Clearly a tough time, yeah?” “Yeah, yeah, of course.” Dan nods quickly, still a bit shell-shocked from the sudden outpouring of emotion. “Are you gonna-” He glanced between the two of them, and Phil bit his lip.

“I don’t think this is the best time to tell him about, um...that. It’s about him right now, me.” He said, glancing back at Chris nervously. “I just want to give him time to decompress. But we’ll grab dinner later, yeah?” 

Before Dan can answer Phil is back over with Chris, a supportive hand on his shoulder as he leads him out. The next thing he knows, he’s alone in the small room, and he takes a few deep breaths before looking up at the ceiling.

Why do you have to make this so hard, God?

-

It’s just about eight-thirty when Dan’s phone buzzes.

We had a long talk-tho i guess u guessed! Lol! 0_o U want 2 meet @ snake path? -Phil! 

Dan couldn’t help but grin in spite of the heaviness he had been feeling for the past several hours, practically jumping off the bed. 

Omw in five. 

Snake Path was Phil’s name for this little curvy path near the edge of campus, totally obscured by trees. The two had shared plenty of kisses and mini dates there, hiding out from the world when it all got to be too much. Some time with Phil sounded perfect-time where he didn’t have to think about God, or Chris, or coming out, or God forbid the fucking bombed law exam.

Dan can practically feel the sadness dissipating as he makes his way down, pulling his jacket tighter with a happy hum under his breath. Once he sees Phil, he picks up speed, laughing a bit as Phil gives him a small wave.

“Why didn’t you ask me to bring you a jacket?” Dan whined, wrapping his arms around Phil tightly. “You must be freezing!” “Well, good thing I’ve got you to warm me up.” Phil grinned and sat down, pulling Dan into a kiss as soon as he was sat down as well.

Dan giggled and started to speak, but Phil was kissing him again, hands moving to gently hold his hips.

“I missed you.” He murmured against his lips. “I know it’s stupid, but we haven’t had enough time to ourselves lately.”

“I missed you, too.” Dan sighs, wiggling slightly under Phil’s hold as he pulled him into another kiss. 

Phil kisses back, and for the first time all day, Dan feels good.

Dan’s totally lost in the feeling, letting out a happy sigh. Before he knows it, he’s climbing into Phil’s lap, hands cupping his cheeks. 

He doesn’t even realize that he’s sliding his tongue into his mouth until Phil makes a surprised noise, quickly freezing as he feels guilt swarm inside him.

“Phil…” He starts to push him away, but Phil giggles a bit, looking a bit stunned, before he slowly tries to pull him back. “Nobody’s out here…” He assures Dan, shrugging a little bit. “If-If you want to keep going-” 

“Phil, I-what are we doing? What am I doing?” Dan quickly moves off of Phil’s lap, hugging his knees to his chest.

Phil blinks a few times. “...Kissing your boyfriend?” He asks, tilting his head to one side. He’s giving Dan a clueless look, like he really doesn’t get what’s going on. That only makes Dan’s stomach hurt worse.

“You know I want to do a bit more than kissing, don’t lie.” Dan’s snapping now, but he can’t help it. All the frustration is bubbling up, and the way Phil’s face turns red and he looks away sheepishly. “And I think you do, too.”

“Is that such a problem?” He said quietly. “That I want to...do more, with you?”

“Yes, Phil!” Dan groans. “Are you-Are you kidding me right now?”

Phil takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry-you just came on kind of strong. I-I guess I must’ve gotten the wrong idea.” “Yeah, well, you sure did.” Dan grits his teeth, running a frustrated hand through his hair. “I’ve had the worst fucking day of all time, and now look what’s happening.” Phil looks completely beside himself, curling up a bit further into himself, but before he can speak Dan’s going off. All these things he’s been holding inside him for so long, they just seem to be exploding out.

“Everything sucks, yeah? I get that for you, it might be different. You know what you want to do with your life, and you love it. It’s your calling or whatever. And you’re naturally some freaky genius who gets to do everything right the first try.” “Dan, c’mon-”

“No! It’s true! You’re Mr. Saintly, you can do whatever you want! My parents think I’m some delinquent, and I have to become a shitty lawyer to convince them I’m not!” “Hey, hey-” “You don’t get the pressure I’m under!” Dan snaps finally, slamming his hand against the grass. “I don’t know pressure?” Phil says, voice quiet. Dan opens his mouth to speak, but freezes as he catches the glare Phil shoots him. “You’re telling me I don’t know pressure? The model Catholc ex-homosexual?” Dan nearly shivers as the way Phil’s voice raises in anger-it’s not even that he looks that mad, but it’s so foreign that it terrifies him.

“I mean, really, Dan! I’ve never taken exams like this, I’m exhausted, I’m worried about you, I learn my-my friend thinks that I’m just as bad as the people who tried to ‘cure’ me, and now my boyfriend is getting mad that we just want to kiss after a long day and telling me I don’t know pressure?”

Dan gulps audibly, wrapping his arms around himself. “I didn’t mean to get mad.” He says finally. “Then why were you?” Phil sounds exasperated. “I don’t understand how you can kiss me like that and then just freak out and expect me not to get worried!”

Dan sniffles a bit, looking down. ”Well...we were getting kind of intense. And we’re Catholic, so I thought-”

He falls silent as Phil’s anger fades away and is replaced with confusion.

“Wait, hold on.” He shakes his head. “We’re Catholics?”

Dan freezes before looking over at him with a guilty look, feeling his insides physically ache at all of the hurt inside him. “Well...I-I’m trying to be one, anyways.” He explains shakily,

Phil gently rubs his hand with his thumb, letting Dan continue.

“I-I’m always trying, you know that? Even if I seem like I’m being a little bitch about flashcards, or-or slacking off, or just being weird and watching you pray. I’m trying! I’m trying to believe in God, I’m trying to not flunk out, I’m trying t-to not kiss you in front of everyone, I-I’m trying so hard, and it’s just-it’s not enough…” “Baby…” Phil reaches out and pulls Dan into his lap again, this time only to hold Dan as tight as possible. 

“Why isn’t it enough?” He hiccupped out as he started crying, breath coming faster. “E-Everyone else g-gets to do everything s-so easily, s’not fair!”

Phil didn’t say anything, just humming sympathetically and rubbing slow circles onto his back. After a bit, Dan finds himself slowly starting to calm down, and when his crying has been reduced to sniffles and a shaky sigh, Phil pulls away. 

“Do you want to start brainstorming solutions?” He suggested gently. Dan shrugged, rubbing his eyes. “Okay, let’s start with an easy one.” He says, voice somehow managing to be matter-of-fact and still loving. Dan feels himself shrink slightly, pressing his cheek to Phil’s shoulder. “You think you’re going to fail?” Dan laughed weakly, nearly about to start crying again. “It’s not really a question at the moment. I totally bombed that test today.”

“Do you care?” Phil said, quickly clarifying. “Do you care if that hurts your chances of having a career as a lawyer?” Dan pauses, taking a deep breath. “I don’t...I want to be in college. I don’t wanna flunk. But, fuck, if I become a lawyer I think I’m gonna be sad, and miserable, and having a miserable mid-life crisis, fuck-” Phil tugs him closer. “Hon, you don’t have to do law. You can do something else.” “You don’t get it, my parents-” “Dan.” Phil nudged Dan’s side. “Remember, I’m supposed to be an ex-homosexual and a future man of God. My parents expect me to be holy. Literally. I know it's tough. But it’s your life, right?” Dan nodded, rubbing his eyes. “I just...I don’t wanna be aimless.” “Then don’t be. Use the rest of this year to explore what you’re into, and then we can regroup and come up with a plan.”

Dan bit his lip. At first, the thought terrified him, but really after this semester there was only a semester left. Maybe Dan could take that theater class he had heard about...and the idea of not having to do another law seminar didn’t sound too bad…

“Mmm...I suppose I could.” He mumbled, rubbing Phil’s chest absentmindedly. Phil smiled and kissed his nose. “Now. About the religion stuff.” He started, sighing as Dan groaned in embarrassment before continuing on. “Are you really wanting to be Catholic? Like...really?”

“I want to be Catholic with you.” Dan said softly. “I want to share that-that idea of God with you. Because what if, when you-you go to seminary-which I know is a million years away, but still-what if you realize you need to be with another Catholic?”

Dan’s voice broke at the end and Phil cooed, rocking him back and forth gently in his arms. “Daniel, I-I...I don’t even know if I want to be Catholic anymore.” He admitted. As Dan shot his head up, 

“I want to follow God, and be a leader for Him. And I love some of the ways that the Catholic church does. But the idea of trying to be a religious leader for a religion that can’t support me and my relationship...” He took Dan’s hand and laced their fingers together. “Maybe I could check out some more, um, progressive Christian denominations.” 

Dan took in a deep breath, cupping Phil’s cheek with his free hand. “Wow. Just...wow. You see us lasting that long? Even if...I’m sorry, but even if I don’t think I could ever believe in God?” He asks, a bit doubtful. “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law...” Phil began, nuzzling his cheek. “Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” At the blank look on Dan’s face Phil laughed. “It means love is the most important thing, out of all the rules and commandments of Christianity. I think you’re a wonderful person who acts with love as much as possible, and I think that’s why I love you, and honors God-whether you call it that or not.”

Dan blushed. “You really think so?”

“Of course. And we can share deeper, spiritual things together, if you want to get close in that way. We can try meditation sometime. Or-Or more midnight talks, you know I love those.” “And what about...getting close, y’know, in that way?” This time it was Phil’s turn to blush, looking down. “I’m not exactly saving myself for marriage anymore.” “Can’t you become a virgin again?” Dan asked, and Phil turned infinitely redder.

“I-yeah? But do I really want to do that? I mean, I did what I did. And I don’t want to be a virgin until I can sign some piece of paper. I-I don’t want to wait that long at all, actually.”

“Oh?” Dan gulps thickly.

“I want to share it with you, because I love you, so much. I’ve never done it with someone I’ve, um, loved before.” He whispered softly. “Only quick, desperate stuff when I was...y’know.”

Dan cooed and cupped his cheeks, kissing him slowly. “I want to share it with you, too, love. We can figure it out later, yeah?” Phil grinned and nodded before leaning into the kiss, Dan giggling a bit. It might sound stupid, but he just felt so good. So light. Like he could just sit here in Phil’s arms forever, and nothing bad could happen. Like-

“Are you two tonguing right now?!” Louise shrieked, and Dan yelped as suddenly Phil was scrambling away, both their faces bright red as they turn to look up and see Louise, Chris, and PJ looking down at them with amused looks. “You totally were!” “Noooo…” Phil whined, burying his face in his hands as Chris snorted out a laugh. 

“Wow, Phil, kinda bummed you didn’t show me this kind of brotherly love.”

 Dan and Phil exchanged small glances, a slow smile spreading across each of their faces. “The soul of Daniel was knit to the soul of Philip.” Dan teased.

“Oh-shush your hush!”

[itsthesinbin]

Take a look at your demons (Vogrel/Jinx). Happy birthday, Tori!

Made a Spicy oc last night and managed to make somethin nice for @beansapalooza‘s birthday! Hope you like it hun <3

Vogrel is my oc, Jinx is hers.

------------------------------------------------

When dealing with sleep paralysis, you’re told to never open your eyes. Don’t look at the thing crawling its way towards you, and try not to pay attention to whispers and groans you hear from it. None of it is real, and none of it can hurt you.

What if it didn’t want to hurt you to begin with?

Jinx got to learn first-hand what their sleep paralysis demon was like. Long limbs and matted fur and milky eyes…

And he was a bastard, too.

The kinda bastard like a cat that steals your favorite underwear while you’re gone and chews it to hell and back. Your special underwear, gone forever. And the little bastard just sits and meows at you ‘cause he’s hungry.

And you’ll feed him anyway because you love him.

Jinx’s “cat” was an eight foot tall, four armed demon that used to feed off their fear. Now, he just sits around the couch pretending to read and eating everything in their apartment. They only minded when it got excessive, though.

After a long day at work, Jinx came home to find their weird… boyfriend? In the kitchen. They guessed he was their boyfriend, at this point.

Demon boyfriend. Why not?

“... What are you doing?” He looked up, ears perking as they turned from the stove. Something was clearly burning on it, and he seemed to realize that as he rushed to turn it off and push it onto a paper plate.

“Food-,” was all he got out, before shoving the plate in their direction. A single grilled cheese sat on it, crusts singed and molten cheese dripping out of it. The parts of cheese that touched the pan were also burned, leaving hard cheese pebbles on the sides of the sandwich.

They couldn’t hide the amused, tired smile that crept onto their face. The guy tried, he really did, but he could not cook for shit. Either burnt or under done- no inbetween. It was cute, though, that he tried.

“Thanks, Vogrel.” They set the plate down, before pulling out the leftover pizza they intended on actually eating for dinner.

“But did you forget about this?” He stared at the pizza box, ears drooping slightly. His pupils blew out, looking upset. They bit back a laugh as they set the box down, going over to him to pat his fuzzy cheek. The small “bwrrp” made them snicker.

“Don’t worry, I’ll eat the grilled cheese, too. I’ll just… cut the burnt bits off.” They popped the pizza in the microwave, before cutting the burnt crusts and cheese off of the cooling sandwich. He decided to be nice and give them a can of soda from the fridge. WIth a little thank you kiss, she grabbed her pizza and sandwich and sat down. He set the can next to her food, before sitting on the floor next to her.

“... You know you don’t have to sit there, right?” They feel like they have this conversation every time they both sit down to eat. When they weren’t eating, it was fine- he’d sit next to them easily. The minute they sat down to eat, however… on the floor he went. Strange. He’d never explain why, either.

As always, he nodded, but stayed on the floor. Instead, he put his head on the table and watched them eat. As per their dinner routine, they’d throw him bits of food to catch out of the air. He caught them almost every time. Except for the piece of pepperoni that landed on his eye. Jinx couldn’t help but laugh as they washed their eye out, before eating the offending pepperoni that was still on the floor when he got back.

“Nasty,” they joked, finishing off their food. Throwing the plates and can away, they stood.

“I’m gonna go shower, then I’m going to bed. I’m tired.” That got a small keen out of him, knowing that meant he wouldn’t get his usual amount of attention, but a quick head pat calmed him down.

“Oh hush, you baby. I know you’re still gonna sleep in the same bed as me.” He closed his eyes, content, before opening them when they began to hobble to the bathroom. Their prosthetic was starting to itch, and they needed to wash up before they got a rash.

After the shower, they hobbled back to their room before dropping ass on the bed. They all but threw their leg onto the floor next to the bed, before laying down. Barely three minutes later, and they felt the tell-tale dip of the bed as their giant boyfriend curled up next to them. All four arms wrapped around their stomach and chest, pulling them close. Back sufficiently warmed by his shaggy fur, Jinx proceeded to pass the fuck out.

In the middle of the night, they had a terrible nightmare. Creatures chasing them, some… demonic mist that caused terrible… terrible things. They woke up petrified.

Literally.

They woke up alone, on their back, unable to move. It felt like something heavy was sitting on them, making it hard to breathe. Their breathing picked up, a wheezing whine coming from their throat. They tried to call to Vogrel, trying to make them stop, but… it didn’t feel like them. They weren’t causing it this time.

They heard something clicking down the hall, making their panic rise. They saw the hall light on, but couldn’t turn their head to look at the door. Another whimper left them, making the creature stop.

It moved again after a moment, faster this time, before settling on the bed next to them. A long, thin hand came into their view for a moment, before stroking the side of their face. They almost began to panic more, before a familiar noise hit their ear.

A coo-like purr, right next to them, and a feeling of someone’s forehead pressing against the side of their head.

They were picked up, before cradled against a furry chest. Vogrel’s face came into view now, calming them down immensely.

“Am okay. Have you- am okay.” He rocked them a little, nervously purring to them as they slowly came out of it. They took deep breaths as the tightness eased out of their chest, and flexed their palms when they finally could. He sat back a little, still holding them but giving them more room to breathe.

“... Did you do that,” they asked, voice groggy and quiet. He didn’t say anything for a moment, growing slightly nervous as they sat up by themselves.

“N… mm…. Kinda,” he stuttered, rocking back and forth slightly. A thing he did when he was particularly nervous.

“No mean to. It… happens… when hungry.” His ears went down, clearly upset it happened. They sighed slightly.

“I’m not angry- don’t worry. If you can’t help it, you can’t help it.” They were pulled against him again, cradled to his chest.

“Besides, I bet you got a good feeding from that little scare, huh?” He was quiet, before he gave a little “yes” in the cute tone he always did.

Yeth. They loved how he talked. It was adorable.

They laughed a little, before laying down. They grabbed his arm, pulling him down to lay next to them.

“Well, now that you’re full, let’s not do that again, huh?” He cooed at them again, pulling them close. They snorted slightly as he nuzzled their cheek and kissed their jaw.

“Yeah, yeah, just let me go to sleep.” A quiet bwrrp was their only confirmation, before he settled finally.

Eh… sometimes looking at your demons does you some good, they guess. As long as it can be reasoned with.

Or fucked. Fucking’s always a fun way to get to know somebody.

Unless you’re tired and the demon won’t let you go to sleep because he’s a nasty, horny little bastard.

“Will you quit that?” “Sorry.”

[inkomidoriyasavestheworld]

Battle Scars

Touya Todoroki was no stranger to seeing scars on his best friend Tenko Shimura’s skin. Due to his crippling anxiety, Tenko was known to scratch his skin until it bled when he was particularly triggered. This was never on purpose of course, the boy never really noticed when the scratching started. Touya never failed to point it out, stopping the scratching as quickly as he could before too much damage was done.

These scars were never a cause of too much concern, as they usually faded pretty quickly. They were accidental, never too deep and just enough to leave a faint mark where the wound had been. They were normal, at least for Tenko anyways. Just as it was normal for Touya to have burn scars on his arms and shoulders. Just as it was normal for each to receve various wounds from battle training. Touya knew these were normal. He knew exactly how they got there, and why. 

So, when he noticed a set of fresh scars scored neatly across each of his best friend’s wrists, he knew right away that they weren’t normal.

“Tenko.... What’re those?” The redhead spoke, the tone of his voice indicating that he had some concerns. Tenko’s scarlet gaze flicked over to his friend, the game controller in his hands lowering as his concentration faultered.

“What’re what?” the blue-haired male asked, seeming genuinely confused by the question.

“Those... Scars, on your wrist...” Touya spoke hesitantly, his bright blue eyes flicking their gaze towards his friend’s hands as he set his own controller down on the floor in front of him. Tenko visibly tensed at this, his look of confusion melting away as one hand released the controller to tug as subtly as it could at the sleeve of the opposite arm.

“They’re just scars... I always have new scars, you know that...” he mumbled, fingernails now absentmindedly scratching at the scars hidden underneath his sleeve.

“Tenko... Don’t lie to me.” Touya’s voice gained a hint of greater concern as he noticed the tell-tale signs of Tenko trying to hide something. Tenko said not a word, setting the controller down and tugging at his other sleeve now. “Tenko, where did you get those?” Touya asked, a hint of a stern tone creeping into his voice at the other boy’s lack of response.

“It... It was an accident.” Tenko muttered, one hand reaching up to scratch at his neck. As he did this, the sleeve of his oversized sweater slipped down just enough to reveal the cause of his red-headed companion’s concern.

Touya’s eyes narrowed at the half-hearted answer, his gaze flicking towards the exposed scars. Without a moment of hesitation, his hand darted out to take hold of Tenko’s wrist. Tenko’s reaction to this was less than calm, the shaggy-haired teen jumping near violently as his wrist was grabbed. He had never really been one for physical contact, especially when it happened suddenly. Touya was well aware of this of course, and under normal circumstances he never would’ve dared do anything that suddenly. But this wasn’t normal circumstances.

“An accident?” The scarlet haired boy asked, his tone almost demanding. “Like I’d believe that bullshit, Tenko. This, wasn’t an accident.” Tenko’s wide scarlet eyes met Touya’s steely gaze, his breathing a bit heavier than normal. “Tell me the truth, Midorya.” Touya demanded, his grip on Tenko’s wrist tightening a bit. “You did this, didn’t you?”

Tenko continued staring wide-eyed at Touya, staying silent for a few moments. Then, very slowly, he gave a small nod in response to the question. Touya looked extremely displeased by this answer, his grip tightening on Tenko’s wrist yet again.

“Tenko, why would you do that? Why did you do that?” He asked quickly, voice raising just a little bit. The raise of his voice, along with the tightening of his grip caused Tenko to flinch slightly. “What’s wrong with you?”

Tenko’s lip began to tremble, eyes tearing up as he met Touya’s gaze. “I... I dunno...” He whimpered, his shoulders slumping slightly as the tension in his body involuntarily slips away. “I... I just thought-”

“You just what, Tenko? You thought that hurting yourself would solve all of your problems?” Touya cut him off, causing the other boy to flinch away again. “In what universe in your head, does this help you? At all?” The older boy demanded, still holding Tenko’s wrist tightly.

Tenko winced slightly as the grip on his wrist tightened, making a half-hearted attempt to pull his arm away from the other. Of course, this failed to do anything other than cause Touya’s grip to tighten even more.

“I’m sorry...” Tenko spoke softly, unable to meet the other boy’s gaze as he muttered the quiet apology. Touya was less than pleased with this, although his grip did loosen on Tenko’s wrist.

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, Tenko...” The redhead grumbled, finally releasing the other’s wrist in an almost violent manner, tossing the other’s arm away from himself. “Why did you think this was fucking okay?” He demanded, his bright blue eyes practically boring into the side of Tenko’s head.

“I... I didn’t... Which is exactly why I didn’t tell you.” Tenko admitted, keeping his gaze fixed on the floor, still refusing to meet his friend’s. “I... I don’t know why I did it, I’m sorry....” He apologized again, though said apology fell on deaf ears.

“Don’t apologize, just promise that you’ll stop fucking doing this to yourself, you fucking idiot.” Touya responded, his voice stern, but not harsh as he spoke. Tenko didn’t reply, his hands fidgetting in front of him. Touya’sbrow furrowed, his hand reaching over to rest onTenko’s shoulder. “Tenko, look at me.”

Tenko didn’t say a word, either not hearing the request, or simply ignoring it. Touya frowned, his hand slowly moving from Tenko’s shoulder to his chin, gently lifting the other’s chin to look at his face. A few tears rolled down Tenko’s cheeks onto Touya’s hand, his ruby red gaze still not daring to meet his friend’s. A soft sigh passed Touya’s lips, his gaze and tone softening as he read Tenko’s expression.

“Tenko... Please look at me.” his words were traced with worry, his hand cupping the quiet boy’s chin gently. The softness in his tone was enough to ease Tenko just enough to convince him to comply this time. His gaze flicked to Touya’s face as his friends gently wiped the tears away, though he still didn’t speak. 

“Tenko, tell me you’re not going to fucking do this again.”

“I... Touya, I can’t...” Tenko’s words were stuttered, his voice quiet and shaky. “I don’t want to lie to you...”

“Then don’t fucking do it again!” Touya all but snapped, his voice raising again at Tenko’s response. “Because if I ever find out you’re doing this shit again- No, if you ever evern think about doing this shit again, I will fucking find out. And I’ll- I’ll...” The fiery haired boy paused abruptly, his mind racing with ideas of what to say. “I’ll tell your mom.”

Tenko’s scarlet eyes widened at these words, a look of worry overtaking the almost blank look that had been on his face before. “N-no, you can’t do that-” He objected quickly, a tone of panic lacing his words.

“And why not?” Touy countered, his hand pulling away from Tenko’s face. “It’ll get you to stop if she told you to, right?”

“It would kill her!” 

“How do you think I feel?!”

Tenko froze at these words, his own catching in his throat. He had thought about Touya of course, he wouldn’t have hidden the scars in the first place if he hadn’t. But he hadn’t imagined it would affect his friend this badly. Slowly, and carefully, the blue-haired male reached over to gently grab onto Touya’s shirt.

“Touya...” He began, before he was cut off unexpectedly. Touya gently tapped Tenko’s hand off of his shirt, reaching over and pulling his friend into a tight hug. Tenko tensed, his hands raising defensively as he was suddenly tugged into the hug. His breath caught in his throat, his heartrate picking up as Touya held him close for a few moments.

“You’re an idiot.” Touya huffed, his arms wrapped around Tenko in an almost protective manner. “You’re such, a fucking, idiot...”

“I... I know...” Tenko replied softly, slowly wrapping his arms around the other boy to return the hug. “I’m sorry...”

“Stop fucking apologizing.” Touya scolded, pulling away from the hug. “Just promise me that you’ll stop. Or, I swear to fuck, I will tell your mom.”

Tenko was silent for a few moments, causing Touya to scowl. “Promise me, Tenko.” He said sternly. This wasn’t a request.

“O-okay, I promise...” Tenko gave a nod, meeting Touya’s gaze. Touya didn’t seem satisfied by the answer, lifting one hand with his pinkie raised. Tenko’s gaze flicked to the hand, seeming hesitant.

“Promise me, Tenko.” Touya repeated, his expression dead serious. Tenko hesitated before almost reluctantly wrapping his pinkie around his friend’s. Giving it a firm shake, he nodded. “I promise.”

“Good... Moron.” Touya muttered, pulling his hand away. Without another word, he hugged Tenko again. This time, Tenko didn’t tense as much, hugging back with less hesitation.

“I’m sorry.” he muttered another apology, earning a soft squeeze from Touya.

“Shut up and stop apologizing you idiot.” he muttered, hushing his friend.

“But-”

“No buts.” Touya cut him off quickly. “Your words don’t mean shit. What matters is that you understand how fuckin stupid doing that was.” he pulled away from the hug to meet Tenko’s gaze.”You do know that was really fuckin stupid, right?” Tenko glanced away.

“Yeah... I do.” he murmured, seeming ashamed. “I’m so-” he paused, catching himself about to apologize yet again. “I mean... Yeah.” Touya sighed softly, running a hand through his bright red hair. A few awkward moments of silence followed before Tenko spoke again.

“Touya... Are you mad at me?”

“... Yeah. Yeah I am.” Touya replied with a little nod.

“... Thought so...” Tenko sighed softly, one hand scratching at his neck. Touya reached over to gently move the hand away.

“You understand why, right?” he asked cautiously, his head tilting just a little as he gently lowered the other’s hand away from the bad habit. Tenko’s response was a small nod, his ruby red eyes staring down at the floor. “Good....” Touya breathed his reply, his hand lingering on the back of his friend’s for a few moments. “Let’s just... Get back to me kicking your ass at Mario Kart, okay?” he said softly, trying to lift Tenko’s mood. Tenko was quiet, causing Touya to frown. that is, until-

“Says the one who’s in third place.” Touya smiled a little at Tenko’s response, his mood lifting significantly.

“For now.” He said, scooping his controller off of the floor. “Give me a minute and I’ll pass you, Mr. First Place.”

“Yeah right.” Tenko huffed, snatching his controller from the floor. “Bring it on.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Brought to you by: Mod Tenko

[almostafantasia]

tenderly, tragically, beautifully

Summary: In which bad things happen to the people who deserve them the least and Lexa learns that although cancer can be treated, the scars it leaves behind take much longer to heal.

Read on AO3.

Trigger warning: Clarke has cancer in this fic but it’s non-terminal and she doesn’t die. There’s a fair amount of angst though.

She feels as though every pair of eyes is watching her from the moment that she steps through the school gates. Which is just paranoia at its absolute finest because the reality is that not a single person is actually looking at her, but with the very obvious way in which the other kids are deliberately trying not to stare at her as she walks up to the red brick school building, Clarke might as well have a giant flashing sign above her head.

A giant flashing sign reading this kid has cancer, with a vertical neon arrow pointing down at her.

Clarke knows that they all know. Even if Raven hadn’t already filled her in on everything that happened while she was in the hospital, this is high school so gossip spreads faster than a race car speeding around an asphalt track.

“Yo.”

Raven makes an unnecessarily loud entrance, clattering into the row of lockers beside Clarke’s and dropping her shoulder bag to the floor with an unceremonious thud. It catches the attention of those nearby, but upon realising that Clarke is there, those heads quickly turn away for fear of being caught staring.

“Everyone’s treating me like I’ve got a deadly virus. It’s cancer, it’s not contagious!”

She raises her voice with this last bit, startling the group of freshman boys who cross to the other side of the corridor in order to give Clarke a wide berth as they pass.

“Clarke,” Raven hisses, resting a comforting hand on Clarke’s shoulder.

“I’ve been here for two minutes and I already wish I was back in that stupid hospital,” Clarke complains through clenched teeth, taking a heavy textbook out of her bag and throwing it into her locker with slightly more force than actually necessary.

“They probably all heard the word ‘cancer’ and assume that you’re on your deathbed,” muses Raven.

“I’m not.”

“I know,” Raven agrees, as she reaches out to give Clarke’s fingers a reassuring squeeze with her own. “You’re going to be fine, you’ve just got a few shitty cells in your body.”

“John Murphy’s got more shitty cells in his body,” Clarke comments, as the shaggy-haired boy saunters past the two girls with his hands buried deep in the pockets of his leather jacket, giving Clarke the side-eye as he passes.

“Well unlike Murphy, your shitty cells are going to be killed by the chemo. He’s stuck with his for life.”

Clarke appreciates what Raven is trying to do, but that doesn’t mean that it works. As grateful as she is for her best friend’s insistence that she’s going to survive this new obstacle in her life, it doesn’t really detract from the fact that she has months of having her body pumped full of chemicals to get through first.

“Raven…”

“What? I’m just letting you know that I’m sticking by you no matter what.” With a wicked smile, Raven adds, “I’ll always be your best friend, even when you go bald.”

“Oh god, don’t remind me,” Clarke whines, shutting her locker and turning around to lean against it dramatically.

“You finish treatment just before Thanksgiving, right?”

“Yes,” Clarke nods, wondering in which unpredictable direction Raven’s train of thought is heading this time.

“So you’ll be rocking the cutest pixie cut in town by Christmas.”

Clarke lets herself imagine it for just a second. She hasn’t had her hair shorter than shoulder length since a disastrously bad haircut at the age of ten, but when she pictures herself with much shorter hair, barely long enough to curl ever so slightly around her ears and the top of her neck, she smiles slightly. Mostly at the realisation that with virtually no hair to have to deal with each morning before school, she’ll be able to get out of bed a whole fifteen minutes later than usual, but also at the thought that with minimal effort and a bit of strategically placed styling cream, she can probably make herself look hot as fuck.

“Thanks Raven,” Clarke smile gratefully.

But Raven’s brain is always moving way faster than Clarke is able to keep up with and she’s already onto the next thing.

“Hey, do you think the chemo is going to give you superpowers? Wouldn’t it be awesome if you got x-ray vision or invisibility or something even cooler?”

“Raven…”

Class is weird. Raven walks her to the door of her classroom like a mother dropping her young child off for the first day of kindergarten, and when Raven departs with a final wave over her shoulder, Clarke feels exactly like that scared five year old, out of her depth in a world that seems far too big for her.

It’s pretty much exactly the same routine in the classroom as it was out in the school corridors, except that now, in this more confined space, Clarke can’t really do much to pretend she hasn’t noticed how everybody is behaving around her. Each pair of eyes fall onto her as she passes, then glance away when they realise who has just walked by.

And then the hushed muttering starts. Clarke’s classmates must be seriously misinformed about the symptoms of cancer if they think that she isn’t able to hear the whispering as she makes her way to her usual seat on the far side of the classroom.

As the clock on the wall just above the teacher’s desk slowly ticks away towards the start of another day at school, the desk next to Clarke remains empty. Finn Collins, the desk’s former occupant, who Clarke is ninety-five percent certain was flirting with her in the few weeks leading up to the discovery of the tumour in her back, has moved to a previously empty seat in the back row next to Atom. It’s too much of a coincidence for Clarke to blame this on anything but the cancer. Who would want to flirt with her when there are plenty of other much prettier, much healthier girls in the school to flirt with, all of whom are still going to have a full head of hair in a few months’ time?

“Hey.”

Ten minutes into her first day back at school and already so used to being treated like a bomb that is waiting to go off, Clarke actually startles in her seat a little bit when the girl in the seat in front of her turns around to say hello.

“Oh, hi Lexa!”

Lexa Woods was Clarke’s elementary school best friend until the two of them slowly drifted apart as they grew up and their interests changed. Not to say that they no longer get along, but that they move in different circles now, with nothing more than a polite smile if they pass in the school corridors.

Until now.

“This is for you.”

Clarke’s eyes widen in surprise, then her entire face twists into a confused frown as Lexa places a thick ring-binder down on Clarke’s desk, upon which lies an envelope.

“Um, thanks,” Clarke replies tentatively, picking up the envelope and sliding her finger into the small gap at the edge to tear it open and remove its contents.

It’s just a card, white with pastel coloured butterflies surrounding the embossed words ‘thinking of you’ in a pretty cursive font. Surprised, Clarke flips it open to read the message inside.

Dear Clarke,

Wishing you all the best over the coming months for a speedy recovery.

Lots of love, Lexa xx

It’s pretty much exactly the same as the twenty other cards she has at home from various relatives and friends of the family, empty words that don’t really detract from the potentially life-threatening illness that resides in her body, but it somehow means so much more coming from Lexa than from anybody else. Coming from Lexa, who could quite easily have done exactly the same as Finn and everybody else in this godforsaken school and blatantly avoided having to go anywhere near the girl with cancer.

“And this is everything that you missed while you were in hospital,” Lexa continues, opening the folder to display the thick wad of handwritten notes inside, neatly colour-coded and underlined and separated into subjects by labelled dividers.

“Lexa, what the…?”

“You missed two weeks of school and you must be really behind in all your classes so I wrote out my notes again so that you could have a copy,” Lexa explains hurriedly, a pink flush rising to sit on her sharp cheekbones. “If there’s anything you don’t understand when you read through it, I’d be more than happy to go over it with you.”

“Lexa,” Clarke sighs, feeling a rush of affection for her former best friend as she flicks through page after page of Lexa’s impeccable handwriting, laid out under clear capitalised titles and broken up with nearly drawn diagrams and tables. “You shouldn’t have.”

“It was good revision for me,” Lexa shrugs, as if the gesture is insignificant.

“Wait,” frowns Clarke, as she reaches one of the coloured dividers and enters a different subject, “do you even take Chemistry?”

“No, but I know Monty through the debate club so I borrowed his notes and copied them out,” Lexa answers. “They might not make much sense because I didn’t understand a lot of it but I’m sure that Monty would be able to explain it if you need help…”

“Lexa, this must have taken you hours…”

“Yeah, well you’ve got cancer, it’s the least I can do to help.”

The word hits Clarke like a fist in the gut. It’s been two weeks since the diagnosis, two weeks where Clarke’s mind has been consumed with nothing but that one singular word going around and around in her mind until she’s half crazy. But Clarke realises that maybe the problem is that the word has only been in her head since the diagnosis – nobody around her has been brave enough to say the word aloud since the doctor who gave her the bad news two weeks ago. Even her mother, a doctor herself, skirts around the word at home, as if saying it out loud makes the whole situation far too real to comprehend.

It’s just a word, it shouldn’t hurt so much.

Except that it’s not just a word anymore, it’s a way of life. It’s chemicals being pumped into her body, and being ignored by even those who used to flirt with her, and the inescapable unsettling worry that despite the assurances of the oncology nurse, maybe she isn’t going to make it to the other end of this ordeal with her life.

“Sorry, did I say something wrong?” Lexa’s voice pulls Clarke out of her thoughts with a lurch, and she shakes her head to focus herself back in the real world.

“No, it’s just…” Clarke tries to explain, her voice just a croak as she tries to push past the lump that forms in her throat. “It’s still quite new to me.” Trying to articulate aloud for the first time, Clarke continues, “It’s weird because it’s all I think about but it still takes me by surprise sometimes. I’m so used to everybody skating around it like they want to pretend that it’s not happening, so it surprised me how forward you were.”

“Sorry,” Lexa mumbles, bowing her head apologetically. “I shouldn’t have…”

Reaching out a hand to touch Lexa’s shoulder in reassurance, Clarke says, “Lexa, it’s fine, I…”

But she doesn’t get the chance to finish. The classroom door clatters open as the teacher enters to start the lesson, and within an instant Lexa is facing the front once more with wide, attentive eyes.

The teacher’s eyes scan the classroom as his voice fills the room to get their attention, but he stumbles mid-sentence when he spots Clarke in their midst. There’s a moment that feels like an eternity, a moment in which Clarke knows the teacher is trying to decide whether to acknowledge Clarke’s return to his class, a moment in which Clarke wants nothing more than to melt into the hard plastic chair as if she has never even been here at all, but then it passes, and the class continues as if nothing has happened.

As if Clarke doesn’t have cancer.

But she does.

“Lexa,” Clarke hisses, when the teacher turns his attention to the computer and pulls up a powerpoint presentation for the lesson. Lexa turns around to frown inquisitorially at Clarke, who forces the resentment out of her mind and the sadness from her eyes as she smiles gratefully at her former best friend. “Thanks for the notes.”

Lexa thinks about it a lot, probably way more than she should think about somebody who she so rarely speaks to these days, but it really plays on her mind. Why somebody so young, somebody with such a bright future, somebody with so much joy and happiness and vitality should get diagnosed with cancer when there are so many bad people in this world that it could happen to instead.

It sucks, and Lexa isn’t even the one with cancer.

She almost wishes that she was. And yes, she knows that’s a terrible thing to think and that she should be grateful for her own good health, but it’s the truth. If there was a medical procedure that could suck the illness from Clarke’s body and transfer it to her own, then that’s exactly what Lexa would do. Clarke has everything; a big friendship group full of nice people that nobody in their year group seems to dislike, good grades, good looks, and an aspiration to be a doctor. Lexa, meanwhile, feels as though she has nothing in comparison - only a few people that she would consider friends, two parents who somehow manage to straddle the line between loving her too much and not loving her enough, and an unhealthy dose of anxiety. It should be her that has the cancer, but instead there seems to be an unjust system of reverse karma in place, where bad things happen to good people.

There are bad people in the world, and there are good people. And then there is Clarke. Clarke, who is so good and pure that Lexa isn’t entirely convinced that she isn’t an actual angel reincarnated in human form. Clarke, who on the second day of kindergarten, helped a tearful and bruised Lexa back to her feet after being pushed to the ground by John Murphy, then declared them to be best friends for life, though only after kicking Murphy in the balls for hurting Lexa in the first place.

Nobody deserves to be diagnosed with cancer less than Clarke.

Lexa almost wonders if Clarke’s illness is karma punishing her. Perhaps fate is saying a massive fuck you to her, not to Clarke, by forcing her to stand by helplessly as the girl she loves suffers. Because there is absolutely no doubt that Lexa does love Clarke. She’s known it for about a year, though she’s probably loved her since the day that six year old Clarke offered out a hand to help Lexa get back to her feet.

But what hurts the most is knowing that there’s absolutely nothing she can do to help Clarke, nothing she can do but sit by and watch as Clarke’s health deteriorates and the side effects of chemotherapy kick in.

Lexa has never felt more helpless.

Lexa almost doesn’t recognise the girl who walks into class the following Thursday morning with bright pink hair. Nothing has changed other than the hair colour – she wears the same worn out jacket she’s owned since freshman year, the same slightly pitiful frown that’s been on her face since the diagnosis a couple of weeks ago – and yet the vibrant pink that frames Clarke’s face makes it seem like she’s an entirely different person from the girl with the beautiful golden tresses that Lexa has known for most of her life.

“Clarke!” Lexa gapes, as Clarke drops into the seat beside her, Lexa having moved back a row now that Finn Collins has taken up his new seat at the very back of the classroom. “I – wow!”

Though Lexa, quite deliberately so, does not ask for an explanation for Clarke’s sudden and drastic makeover, Clarke gives her one anyway, as if she feels like she has to justify her new fashion choice.

“I’ve always wanted to dye it,” she shrugs, reaching up with one hand to play with a single pink curl, “and I might not have hair for too much longer so it seemed like as good of a time as any to get it done.”

As Clarke glances away, a brief moment of sadness passing across her face as she does so, Lexa’s insides lurch unsettlingly at the thought of Clarke’s hair falling out against her will. She quickly remembers that Clarke will be taking the day off school tomorrow for the first of many chemotherapy treatments, which explains the unexpected change of hair colour mid-week, and just tries to imagine for a second how terrified Clarke must be at the prospect of going into hospital for such a daunting treatment.

Lexa flails silently for a moment, wondering what, if anything at all, she can say that might ease Clarke’s mind ahead of her hospital visit but nothing comes to mind that won’t do more harm than good. Lexa settles instead for saying something a little different.

“The pink really suits you.”

Eyes wide with surprise as she lifts her head to look up at Lexa, as if she hadn’t been expecting the compliment at all, Clarke softly mumbles, “Thanks,” before reverting back into a glum silence for the rest of class.

Clarke’s absence on Friday, despite her only sharing a couple of classes with Lexa, feels somewhat akin to Lexa having to spend the day without one of her arms. She’s a mess for pretty much the whole day, distracted with pondering thoughts of where Clarke is, of what the doctors will be doing to her, and of hoping that none of it is as bad as the scary word chemotherapy makes it all sound.

When she arrives home from school that afternoon, Lexa collapses on her bed with her phone in her hand, the screen unlocked and opened on a message conversation with Clarke, but she hesitates with her thumb hovering over the keyboard before she sends anything. Nothing that comes to mind quite seems right for the situation - casual well-wishes seem too impersonal and asking how the treatment went seems far too invasive and unsympathetic.

Lexa exits the conversation and locks the phone with a sigh, shaking her head in dissatisfaction. She wants to be there for Clarke, she really does, but there’s no class at school for how to be a good friend to somebody with cancer and it’s not really something that Lexa can do on intuition alone.

She decides, forty minutes later and after some assistance from her mom, on a simple Facebook post; an old photo of the two of them with their arms around each other and toothy grins on their faces at Clarke’s eighth birthday party, which she captions “Found this looking through some old stuff - partners in crime since kindergarten!” and then tags Clarke in it. Nothing fancy. It’s simple, it’s irrelevant, and it will hopefully let Clarke know that Lexa has been thinking about her all day.

She definitely doesn’t spend the next few minutes eagerly refreshing her new feed, waiting for a notification that lets her know that Clarke has seen the post.

It never comes.

She doesn’t know what she was expecting, if not a comment then perhaps at least a like, but each time the little red bubble pops up in Lexa’s notifications, it is with somebody else’s name and not Clarke’s. A selection of school friends like the post, both from their high school and old friends who knew the girls back around the time that the photo was taken. Some names are ones that Lexa doesn’t recognise, presumably friends of Clarke’s from elsewhere. Octavia Blake reacts to the post with a red heart that Lexa wishes came from Clarke instead.

The first comment is from Raven; “Double denim? Griffin, you were such a style icon!”

It hurts more than it should, two minutes later, when Lexa’s post remains unacknowledged but the little blue thumb icon appears underneath Raven’s comment with Clarke’s name next to it.

Clarke is back at school on Monday morning, almost as if she was never gone. There’s no indication that she missed a day of classes for the first of many life-saving medical treatments, no missing hair, no hospital gown or big sign around Clarke’s neck saying I had chemo. And Lexa curses herself for even thinking that things would be different.

(She decides that Clarke’s pale skin and tired eyes are just a figment of the imagination that is looking for something different in Clarke’s appearance.)

“Hey,” Lexa greets Clarke in their first class of the day. “How was the … uh, the treatment?”

Raising a single eyebrow at Lexa, Clarke replies, “You can call it chemo. That’s what it is.”

“Sorry,” apologises Lexa, feeling the mild burn along her cheekbones that is no doubt accompanied by a pinkening of the skin there. “I’m just new to all of this.”

She regrets the words the very second that they leave her mouth. The way that Clarke’s face falls, disappointment filling her blue eyes as her brow knits into a furrowed frown, is enough to inform Lexa that what she has just said was insensitive on every level.

“You’re new to this?” Clarke asks, her voice soft but laced with bitterness.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that,” Lexa says dejectedly. “That was insensitive of me.”

Lexa is more disappointed in herself that she would care to admit. She’s spent more than a little bit of time this weekend on her laptop, googling questions like what to say to a friend with cancer and the overwhelming number one piece of advice she could find was to not make it about herself and how she feels about Clarke’s diagnosis. And yet, all that research is for nothing as she lets herself down within the first thirty seconds.

“It’s fine,” Clarke assures her, though Lexa can’t help but feel that this isn’t fine at all, nor will it ever be until Clarke’s treatment finishes and she gets the all clear in however many months’ time. “I get it, you want help but don’t know how. The best thing you can do is to just act normal.” Lexa nods along earnestly as Clarke reaches out a hand and rests it tenderly on Lexa’s forearm, before continuing. “And Lexa, I appreciate what you’re trying to do. You’re treating me like a human, not like a time bomb. That’s more than I can say for most of the rest of the assholes in this school.”

“I’m sorry,” Lexa attempts to apologise a final time, but the arrival of the teacher for the start of the lesson means that she isn’t given the chance to take her apology any further.

“By all means, come on in,” Clarke says to Raven, pushing open her bedroom door as she leads her best friend inside. “But fair warning, it looks and smells like a hospital.”

Clarke wrinkles her own nose as she steps into her bedroom, the nasty smell of cleaning product invading her nostrils. Her bedroom doesn’t really feel like home much at the moment, the various medications prescribed to her for combatting the side effects of chemo scattered haphazardly across all available surfaces in the room. The smell, despite her desperate pleas, comes from her mother’s insistence of giving the room a thorough disinfect almost every other day so that Clarke doesn’t catch anything while her immune system is reduced.

“Jesus Christ,” Raven blanches as she follows Clarke into the room, lifting her hand up to her face to cover her nose and mouth. “Do you not have any air freshener?”

“I’ve asked my mom to get me some,” Clarke answers. “She insists on keeping this place spotless. I’m already sick, a few germs isn’t going to do any harm.”

Raven’s hand reaches out to Clarke’s, her fingers clasping around Clarke’s wrist to get her full attention.

“Hey. No. Mama G is a medical professional, you listen to what she has to say, okay?”

“Jesus, Raven,” Clarke whines, dropping onto the bed with a plop that rumples the freshly washed sheets. “Are you my mom now?”

Raven launches herself belly first onto the mattress next to Clarke, propping her head up with one elbow as she sends a wicked smile in Clarke’s direction.

“Shut up,” says Raven, rolling over onto her back, where she steals half of the pillows and cushions that decorate Clarke’s double bed and sets them up against the headboard behind her. “Are we gonna watch a movie or what? It’s so awesome that you’ve finally got a TV in your room.”

Shrugging and reaching for the remote control that sits on top of a pile of untouched pamphlets from the hospital, Clarke points it at the brand new television that sits on top of the dresser against the opposite wall and says, “Cancer perks.”

The end of the school year and the start of the summer break between Clarke’s junior and senior years of high school comes around two weeks later, shortly after her second chemotherapy appointment, and Clarke has never been more grateful to have a couple of months off school.

She can already feel some of the changes in her body – most notable is just how lethargic she’s starting to feel. Clarke has always been the number one advocate for power naps but since starting the treatment, she’s found herself passing out pretty much everywhere, including in class, though two hours of calculus on a Monday morning is probably enough to send anybody to sleep.

The other thing is her hair. It hasn’t started to fall out yet, not properly, but Clarke has started to notice a bit of thinning. Each pull of her hairbrush through the newly-dyed pink hair tugs strands out from her scalp that get caught around the bristles of the brush and when she showers, there is slightly more hair than usual to pull out of the drain at the end. It isn’t noticeable in the mirror yet, but Clarke knows that the worst part – when actual clumps of her hair start falling out in uneven patches across her scalp – is almost imminent, and she’s grateful that she won’t have to go to school during this in-between stage.

Lexa is thankful for the arrival of the summer break. Junior year has been a lot of work and she knows that her final year at high school will be even more tiring. As much as she’s looking forward to throwing herself headfirst into another year of challenging schoolwork and college applications, the two months she has before that to mentally and physically rest is exactly what she needs right now.

And yet, three days after the last day of school, she finds herself already missing the crowded corridors and the uncomfortable plastic chairs.

Well, maybe not those, per se.

She finds herself missing Clarke.

Their friendship is by no means rekindled to the level that it was at before they started drifting apart in middle school, but Lexa likes to think that they’ve reached the point once more where they can text each other and make social plans without it being weird.

Clarke, on the other hand, seems to disagree.

Lexa Are you free today? We could catch a movie or get lunch if you like! Or something else, I’m open to suggestions.

Clarke I’m pretty tired actually. Think I’m just gonna stay at home.

Not yet disheartened, Lexa is already prepared with another suggestion that might suit Clarke a little better.

Lexa I could come over and we could watch something at yours?

Clarke I think I just want to sleep tbh

Lexa tries to think of something to say, anything to let Clarke know that she’s always going to be welcome to hang out with Lexa later, but everything she tries typing out just falls flat. She doesn’t want to seem needy, doesn’t want to force Clarke to exert herself any more than she’s physically capable of doing right now, doesn’t want to make Clarke feel guilty for the way that the side effects of the chemotherapy are inhibiting their social interactions.

She just wants Clarke to know that she isn’t alone.

Lexa No problem!

Clarke stands in front of the mirror and adjusts the beanie on her head for what is probably the hundredth time in the last ten minutes.

“You look good,” Raven says. “Don’t worry about it.”

Except that Clarke is worried. Because Octavia is throwing a party tonight and Clarke has been coerced (by Octavia, by Raven, even by her own mother) into attending and it’s the first time she’s left the house for anything other than a hospital visit in the three weeks since school finished. And the first time in almost as long that Clarke has worn anything except for pyjamas.

Not to mention the fact that it’s the debut of her new hairstyle. If you can even call a patchy buzzcut a hairstyle. Hence the beanie.

“Are you sure people aren’t going to notice?” asks Clarke, turning to look at Raven, who is sprawled across Clarke’s bed, playing on her phone as Clarke gets ready.

Pushing herself up into a seated position, Raven grins up at Clarke and answers, “The only thing people are going to notice is how hot you look. Because damn girl.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“I’m not,” Raven insists, shaking her head. “Everybody is going to wish they were you.”

Clarke arches an eyebrow, because she’s pretty certain that there is not a single person in the world who would want to be a kid with cancer.

Raven doesn’t miss the look that Clarke shoots her and she jumps up to her feet, crossing the room to stand beside Clarke as they both look at Clarke’s reflection in the mirror.

“You’re hot,” Raven tells Clarke again. “The colours really suit you, your tits look great in that shirt, and you’re totally rocking that beanie. Fuck the cancer, you’re awesome!”

And for just a moment, Clarke believes it.

Parties aren’t always Lexa’s thing. She not a huge drinker, nor does she like big crowds of people, not to mention the fact that she doesn’t fall into the right social circles to get invited to most of the parties thrown by the kids in her year at school.

But for some reason Octavia Blake, who has never taken the time to talk to Lexa much off the soccer pitch that they share during training for the women’s varsity team, personally insisted that Lexa just had to come along to the party that she’s throwing tonight.

It’s not Lexa’s scene at all. Music thumps from two loudspeakers positioned on either side of the living room, questionable drinks are being poured into cups from a large keg being manned by Octavia’s college-aged brother, and sweaty bodies are crammed into every corner of the Blakes’ small house. But Lexa doesn’t get invited to parties often and she’s determined to at least try to enjoy this one.

(Her attendance has absolutely nothing to do with the possibility that tonight might be the first time she sees Clarke since school finished for the summer. Nothing.)

There’s a big shout from the already quite tipsy Octavia when Raven arrives at the party, and Lexa’s eyes desperately squint towards the door for Clarke.

And there she is.

Oh boy.

Lexa doesn’t know if it’s the jungle juice catching up with her or if the sight of Clarke entering the room behind Raven is really that mesmerising, but her head starts to swim a little bit. Clarke looks a little thinner than before, a little more tired, but Lexa hardly notices that because Clarke is still just as beautiful as ever. There’s a dark gray beanie pulled over her head, hiding her hair (or lack of it, as Lexa quickly realises may be the case), but it just emphasises everything else. The sharp plane of Clarke’s jaw. The blue in Clarke’s haggard eyes. The dip of the neckline on Clarke’s rather revealing tank top.

Jesus Christ, when did Lexa become so fucking gay.

Lexa’s heart is racing, and the only thing that stops her from passing out, or from locking herself in a quiet and soundproof room for the duration of the party, is that Clarke has an expression on her face that matches the same startled-slash-terrified feeling that Lexa has too.

And so Lexa pushes her own anxiety aside and makes it her main aim to make Clarke feel as comfortable as possible in this scary new environment. Lexa takes a sip from her drink for courage, then plasters a smile on her face as she pushes through the crowd to cross the room and welcome Clarke.

“Clarke!” Lexa beams, her smile genuine as she throws her arms around Clarke’s neck in a greeting. “I didn’t know if you’d be here tonight.”

Lexa didn’t know, but she hoped.

“Yeah, Raven came to my house and basically dragged me out of bed,” Clarke shrugs. “Also, my mom threatened to cut off the wifi at home if I didn’t leave the house. She’s worried I’m becoming a recluse. I swear parents are supposed to worry about kids going to wild parties and getting involved in underage drinking and sex, but apparently when you get cancer they actively encourage it.”

“Then why are you complaining?” Lexa teases Clarke. She gestures towards the kitchen, then asks, “Do you want something to drink?”

Clarke squints at the plastic cup in Lexa’s hand, inspecting its contents with a wary gaze, before she answers, “Sure. Why not?”

Clarke’s hand seeks her own so that they don’t get separated as they slowly navigate their way through the mass of drunk teenagers, and Lexa tries to ignore the erratic pounding of her heart in her chest and the feeling of Clarke’s warm palm against her own. It’s stupid to get so worked up about such meaningless platonic intimacy, but this is Clarke, who gets Lexa’s pulse racing by just looking at her. Lexa knows that being with Clarke in that way is beyond her wildest dreams, but even an act as simple as having Clarke’s hand squeezing her own as she leads Lexa towards the kitchen, is more than Lexa thinks she deserves.

“Are you having another?” Clarke asks, when they make it to the keg where Bellamy is pouring his homemade concoction into plastic cups and distributing it to the teenagers that surround him.

Lexa glances down at the cup in her hand and takes a moment to think, before knocking bag the dregs at the bottom and nodding as she passes it across to Bellamy for a refill.

“So,” says Clarke, when they both have their drinks, leading the way out of the kitchen and through the glass doors into the back yard, where the music is quieter and the air much cooler than the warmth indoors that feels heavy with the scent of cheap alcohol and teenage sweat. “You seemed surprised to see me here tonight, but I’ve never seen you at a party before.”

“Yeah, parties aren’t usually my thing.”

They reach the far side of the yard, where a rusty swing set stands under the branches of a tall oak tree, and Clarke sits on the seat, looping one of her arms around the chain to keep herself steady, while Lexa stands nearby.

“What’s different about tonight?” asks Clarke.

“Octavia was very persuasive,” replies Lexa. She takes a quick swig of her drink for courage, and then continues, “And I was hoping you’d be here. I wanted to see you. To know that you’re doing okay.”

The cover of the darkness, lit only by the crescent moon ad a few twinkling stars in the sky, does a good job of hiding the blush that rises to Lexa’s cheeks when she confesses that seeing Clarke was a motivator for pushing herself beyond her usual comfort zone.

“I’ve been bad at replying to your messages,” says Clarke. “And I’m sorry for that. Sometimes I just don’t have any energy and then I forget and…”

“No!” Lexa protests quickly, holding up a hand to stop Clarke before she can apologise any further. “You don’t have to say sorry. I probably text you way too much.”

“I like that you message me,” Clarke says in a soft voice. “It’s nice that you think of me.”

“Of course I think about you,” says Lexa, laughing softly under her breath, because there is hardly a moment that goes by where Lexa isn’t thinking about Clarke, even subconsciously. “You’re … I mean, you’re you.”

“What do you mean by that?” Clarke asks, an inquisitive smile on her face.

Lexa’s cheeks burn in embarrassment and she’s grateful that it’s late enough that the shroud of darkness hides her red-tinged cheeks.

“You’ve always been special,” Lexa shrugs as she answers, avoiding eye contact with Clarke out of fear that she’ll fluster and stumble over her words. “You were my first friend in Kindergarten. Do you remember that?”

“I do,” replies Clarke, and when Lexa finally looks up, it is to find Clarke grinning fondly at the memory. “Murphy pushed you over and I kicked him in the balls.”

“My hero,” says Lexa, mockingly fluttering her lashes in Clarke’s direction.

“God, even back then you were an adorable nerd,” Clarke teases, taking a swig from the plastic cup in her hand.

“Wait, you think I’m adorable?”

“I don’t think I said that,” Clarke denies resolutely, though Lexa can see that she’s trying to fight a smile that gives away the truth.

“You definitely said that,” insists Lexa.

“I also called you a nerd,” Clarke reminds Lexa matter-of-factly.

“Yes, but that’s old news.”

They fall into silence, and as Clarke gently pushes herself back and forth on the swing with her feet against the lawn, all Lexa can see are flashes of memories from years past, of two small girls chasing each other around the nearby playground and seeing who can fly the highest on the swings before losing their nerve.

“I’ve missed this,” says Lexa, smiling to herself at the memory. “Missed us.”

“So have I,” agrees Clarke, scraping her feet against the grass to bring herself to a standstill. “We should do this more often. Hang out, I mean. If you’d like to.”

Lexa’s eyes widen in surprise.

“Yeah, I … I’d love to!”

Lexa can’t remember why she was ever so worried about coming to this party in the first place.

The thing about promises is that they are easy to make and even easier to break. So when Clarke and Lexa promise to spend more time together, to rekindle a friendship that has been not much more than a pile of ashes since middle school, it’s far too easy to just let things continue how they did before the party.

It’s not that Lexa doesn’t try. Because she does. She sends Clarke occasional messages, links to things she’s seen online that she’s found funny, photos of the mundane happenings in her day to day life, little anecdotes that she thinks Clarke might enjoy. And Clarke replies most of the time, but it’s very rarely more than a one word answer or a laughing face emoji. When it is something more, the conversation fades out within the two or three messages after that.

Lexa tries her best not to push Clarke, because as much as she wants Clarke’s friendship to be the same permanent fixture in her life that it used to be, she also knows that Clarke is having a difficult enough time right now without having to fend off the unwanted attention of a former best friend who has a massive fucking crush on her.

When three weeks have passed since the party, three weeks since they promised to spend a little bit of time together, three weeks in which virtually nothing has changed since before their conversation at the party, Lexa decides to attempt to initiate a face-to-face meeting.

Lexa Woods Do you want to hang out later? We could have a movie night? You wouldn’t even have to leave your bed!

She doesn’t have to wait long for Clarke’s reply.

Clarke Griffin Yeah, might be fun

Lexa Woods Cool! I’ll bring popcorn! What time do you want me to come over?

And that’s it. There isn’t a reply to that message. Lexa checks her phone over and over again, just in case she has accidentally missed the ping of her text tone, but there’s still nothing. She assumes that Clarke has fallen asleep, that her message goes unanswered for a completely legitimate reason, but Lexa soon starts to second guess herself and doubt begins to creep into her mind.

Maybe Clarke doesn’t want to hang out with her.

Maybe Lexa is being too pushy.

No, Lexa tells herself. Clarke likes you. Clarke wants to spend time with you. It’s not her that’s pushing you away, it’s the cancer.

With that in mind, Lexa slips into her shoes, grabs a jacket, and decides to head over to Clarke’s house.

When Lexa arrives at the Griffin house, she is nervous.

Nervous that Clarke won’t be in the mood for socialising and that she’ll be turned away at the door.

Nervous that she’s going to be invited inside and will have to somehow find a way to cope with spending two hours watching a movie with a girl that she’s basically in love with.

The fluttering of her heart is almost enough to make Lexa go home of her own accord before she can enter the house.

Lexa musters all of her courage and raises her hand, tapping on the front door sharply with her knuckles. While she waits for somebody to answer the door, Lexa’s heart pounds so hard that she can hear the blood rushing through her ears.

It feels like an eternity that Lexa is waiting on that doorstep, but the door finally swings open and Abby Griffin peers inquisitively at her.

“Hello, can I-?” Abby stops mid-question to peer closer, and recognition seeps across her face as she realises who is on her doorstep. “Lexa?”

“Mrs Griffin,” Lexa nods, smiling politely.

It’s been years since Lexa has been to the Griffin house, years since she’s seen Abby, and though things have changed – there are different cars on the drive, a new rug in the hallway just behind Abby, more gray in Abby’s hair and more crinkled lines around her eyes and mouth – Lexa feels like no time has passed, like she’s still a bright-eyed middle-schooler visiting for a slumber party with stolen candy and whispered secrets beneath the sheets long after the rest of the house has fallen silent.

“Please, call me Abby. And come in!” Abby steps aside, welcoming Lexa into her home and closing the front door behind her, before she continues, “It’s good to see you. It’s been far too long since we had you in this house.”

Lexa nods in agreement, and then asks, “Is Clarke around? We said we’d have a movie night.”

“I haven’t seen her for a while,” Abby answers with a frown, pausing to think before she speaks again. “She came down and made herself some toast just after two but it’s been quiet since then. She’s probably been sleeping.”

“Oh, okay,” says Lexa, trying to mask her disappointment.

“You can go up and see her if you like,” suggests Abby. Abby’s eyes widen as she has an idea, and she explains to Lexa, “I tell you what, I haven’t planned any dinner tonight so we could order pizza for your movie night. How does that sound? Why don’t you go and wake Clarke and ask her what she wants on her pizza? You remember where Clarke’s room is, don’t you?”

“That sounds great,” says Lexa, the anxiety from earlier starting to be replaced with comfort as Abby makes her feel welcome in the place that used to feel like a second home.

She can only hope that Clarke does the same.

Leaving Abby alone downstairs, Lexa ascends the staircase to the upper floor of the house and makes her way to the door that she knows leads to Clarke’s bedroom. And yet again, she hesitates outside the door as nerves begin to rise within her gut at what she might find inside.

After two deep breaths, Lexa knocks lightly on the door and then, when there is no response, she pushes it open and peers inside.

Clarke is asleep. That much is apparent straight away. Her eyes are closed, her mouth slightly agape, and she snores softly. One of her arms is flung casually above her head on the pillow, while Lexa can just see a few toes decorated with chipped red nail polish peeking out from beneath the covers at the foot of the bed.

The most glaringly obvious thing in the room, and Lexa tries her best not to stare at it for too long, is that Clarke has no hair.

Lexa always knew that Clarke was going to end up losing her hair at some point, but she immediately regrets not preparing herself for the sight. Clarke’s scalp is stubbly, like the hair has been shaven close to her scalp at some point in the last few weeks, but the little hair that remains is thin and wispy, like that of a newborn baby before their proper hair starts to grow in thick. It only adds to the childlike image that Lexa gets of Clarke, sprawled out on her bed like an infant taking a nap, and Lexa wants nothing more than to wrap Clarke up in bundles of blanket as she presses soft kisses to her forehead and whispers promises to keep her safe.

Grateful that Clarke is asleep and therefore unable to witness Lexa staring at her almost-hairless head, Lexa forcibly drags her eyes away from the sleeping girl and takes in the rest of the room. Though it’s still the same room that Lexa remembers from her childhood visits, it’s much different. The room feels smaller and less inviting, is Lexa’s first impression. It smells clinical in here, but that’s not it. Across the dresser, there are an assortment of medicines in bottles and boxes, labelled with names that are just as terrifying as they are long. Lexa had no idea that cancer treatment required so much medication.

A giant corkboard leans against Clarke’s closet door, upon which Lexa can see various information pamphlets from the hospital pinned up with brightly coloured pins. Most of the corkboard is dominated by a huge yearly wall planner, which Clarke has decorated with coloured stickers to denote which medicines she needs to take on which days, as well as written in all of her hospital appointments. At the bottom of the board, there’s a handwritten sign that says 12 days to next treatment, with a homemade flip chart to change the numbers as she counts down. Around the edge of the board, Clarke has pinned up a few inspirational quotes, and Lexa smiles to herself as she reads one in particular - scars are like tattoos but with cooler stories.

It’s all very strange to Lexa, seeing the evidence of Clarke’s cancer all over the same bedroom that she used to have playdates and slumber parties with Clarke in, but the reality of it sinks in a little more that it has before. Lexa feels a tinge of sadness at the realisation that this is what Clarke’s life has become now, but also a huge swell of admiration for how Clarke is refusing to let the cancer take her down without a fight.

When Lexa glances back at the girl still soundly asleep in the bed, she feels as though she’s looking at her in a different light.

“Clarke?” Lexa says in a hushed voice, crossing the room and sitting down gently on the edge of Clarke’s bed, trying not to cause the mattress to jolt suddenly under her weight as she takes a seat. Lexa is torn between wanting to wake Clarke up to spend time with her or leaving her to continue her peaceful slumber, but it is the selfish part of her brain that wins out in the end. “Clarke, it’s me. Lexa.”

Clarke stirs ever so slightly and Lexa reaches out with one hand to brush the back of her fingers against Clarke’s warm cheek, stroking the soft skin tenderly. Clarke leans into the touch, and her bleary eyes flicker open just a fraction.

“Your mom is going to order pizza for dinner,” explains Lexa. “Does that sound okay?”

Clarke lets out a little grunt that Lexa assumes is an affirmative, and so she continues her line of questioning.

“Great, what do you want on yours?”

“Cheese,” mumbles Clarke sleepily.

“Just cheese?” Lexa asks for clarification. “No other toppings?”

“No.”

Clarke rolls onto her side towards Lexa, tucking her legs up to her chest as she curls up and pulls the covers over her shoulder. Her eyes are closed once more, as if she never stirred at all.

“Do you want me to leave you to sleep?” asks Lexa, her voice just a whisper as she tries not to startle the sleepy girl beside her.

Clarke lets out a low hum that Lexa interprets as an affirmative, and Lexa slowly gets to her feet, careful not to disturb Clarke as she crosses the room and backs out into the hallway, closing the bedroom door with a soft click.

Once she is back downstairs, Lexa relays Clarke’s pizza order to Abby, as well as her own, then takes a seat on the couch in the Griffin’s living room.

“She’s fast asleep,” Lexa says, once Abby has phoned the pizza restaurant and placed their order. “It was almost like she was talking to me in her sleep.”

“She does that,” nods Abby. “Sometimes I can go into her room and have an entire conversation with her and she’ll have no recollection of it when we speak later in the day.”

“Wow,” gasps Lexa. “She must be really out of it. Does she spend a lot of time asleep, then?”

“You could say that,” Abby laughs softly under her breath. “Now, Clarke has always enjoyed her sleep. It’s difficult enough to get her out of bed in the morning at the best of times, but since she started the treatment, she spends most of the day in bed. She’ll surface a couple of times a day for a snack, but it’s rare to see her awake for more than a few hours at a time.”

“I…” Lexa starts, but then trails off, wondering if the way her thoughts are going aren’t appropriate for a conversation with the mother of a cancer patient. But Abby looks at her with warmth in her eyes and an encouraging smile on her face, and it makes Lexa feel a little like there isn’t a wrong thing that she can say, and so she continues, “This is probably going to sound really ignorant, but I’ve never known anybody with cancer before, and seeing somebody go through all of this is so different to how I imagined it to be. I don’t mean that to sound so…”

“No, Lexa, there’s no need to say sorry!” Abby is quick to shut Lexa down for she can start apologising. “I’m a doctor – I deal with people suffering from all sorts of things on a daily basis, and I even did a placement in an oncology ward when I was a student doctor – and there are things about Clarke’s treatment and the side effects that surprise me.”

Lexa smiles gratefully at Abby’s words, and then continues, “It’s just, media makes it seem like cancer is about your hair falling out and being connected to a machine by a tube.”

“And there is an element of that to it,” Abby interjects.

Nodding, Lexa adds, “But it seems like it’s so much more than that.”

“There is,” agrees Abby. “You also have to remember that not everybody experiences cancer in the same way, so the way that Clarke’s body responds to the chemicals fighting off the disease is not necessarily the same way that mine would, or yours.”

“Clarke is … I know it’s stupid for me to be saying this when it’s mostly my fault that we aren’t as close as we used to be.”

“Lexa,” says Abby, reaching across the space between them on the couch and resting a comforting hand on Lexa’s arm. “You and Clarke have been an important part of each other’s lives. It’s perfectly natural for you to be affected by what she’s going through.”

Lexa smiles gratefully, Abby’s words doing a little to quell the guilt that Lexa feels for finding it difficult to talk or even think about Clarke’s health.

“Clarke is special,” Lexa confesses to Abby. “Clarke has always been there for me. She’s been looking out for me since the day that we met, and it feels like it’s my turn to repay that favour, to look out for her.” Lexa pauses, before she admits, “And I’m worried about her. She doesn’t seem the same as she used to be.”

Lexa wonders for a moment if she has said the wrong thing, when Abby’s brows furrows and her eyes fill with sadness at the changes she’s seeing in her only daughter.

“She’s not,” agrees Abby. “And she may never be. But whatever she may seem like now, she’s going to be a much stronger person when it’s all over.”

Lexa is reminded of another one of the quotes she saw pinned to Clarke’s corkboard up in her bedroom - Cancer is always going to lose, because though it tries to make you weaker it only ends up making you stronger.

“To quote Kelly Clarkson; what doesn't kill you makes you stronger,” says Lexa, and Abby laughs softly at her words.

“Mom?”

They both startle at the sound of Clarke’s voice, having not heard her descend the stairs, and look up to find Clarke rubbing her tired eyes as she enters the room,  wearing pyjama pants and an oversized hoodie.

“Who are you talking to? I thought Dad was away toni-” Clarke stops mid-sentence when she notices Lexa. “Lexa?”

Lexa gives a meek little wave. Clarke looks completely surprised to see Lexa in her living room, as if she doesn’t remember either inviting Lexa over or even the short conversation that they shared in her room earlier. Lexa remembers what Abby said about Clarke often having entire conversations that she’s too tired to remember later and realises that must be the case.

“Told you she wouldn’t remember,” Abby's says, quiet enough that only Lexa can hear her.

“I came up to your room earlier to ask you what you wanted on your pizza,” Lexa explains to Clarke, smiling kindly in an attempt to reassure Clarke that it’s completely fine if she doesn’t remember. “We had a conversation.”

“We did?”

“Pizza is on its way,” says Abby. “Probably about half an hour.”

“I don’t know if I’m hungry,” Clarke protest, her voice feeble. She drops into one of the armchairs and curls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them to keep them close to her body as her head drops back against the cushion behind her.

“That’s fine,” Abby tells her. “But it’s there for you if you want it. Lexa says you two are having a movie night.”

“Oh shit, I totally forgot about that!” sighs Clarke, eyes widening as she remembers inviting Lexa over.

“Language, Clarke!” Abby scolds Clarke, though there isn’t actually any trace of anger in her voice.

“Sorry,” mumbles Clarke.

“I can go if you want me to,” says Lexa, trying to mask the disappointment as she makes to get up onto her feet.

“No!” says Clarke quickly, leaning forward in her seat slightly and letting her feet slide onto the floor as if preparing to chase Lexa if she tries to leave. “Stay! Please?”

Lexa drops back into her seat perhaps a little too eagerly, just pleased that she’s finally going to be able to make true of the promise they made at Octavia’s party and spend some time with Clarke. If her heart picks up its pace in her chest, then Lexa vehemently ignores it.

“Let’s use the den,” says Clarke. The Griffins have a room at the back of their house that they call the ‘den’, a small-ish room with a couch, a television, and several towering bookshelves along one wall, and Lexa remembers the room well from her childhood visits here, she remembers eating chips in front of cartoons, and making a fort to hide from the grown-ups. “My bedroom is too much like a prison.”

Lexa nods, her only concern being Clarke’s comfort at all times. If Clarke would rather host their movie night in the den, rather than the bedroom that has become almost like her own private hospital ward at home, then Lexa isn’t going to put forward any complaints.

“That sounds like a great idea,” says Abby. “Why don’t you girls go and set up in there? There’s some spare blankets and pillows up in the spare bedroom if you want to make it more comfy in there. I can bring the pizza to you when it arrives.”

“Thank you, Mrs Griffin,” says Lexa.

“It’s Abby,” replied Abby, a twinkle in her eyes, “and you know that, Lexa!”

They build what can only be described as a nest on the couch in the den, cocooning themselves in a warm bundle of blankets and cushions while they choose a movie from Netflix. When the pizza arrives, Abby brings it through to them and smiles at the sight of their heads peering out from under all the blankets.

The pizza box sits between them on the couch, resting on a small cushion, and they help themselves to cheesy slices while the movie plays in the background. Despite her earlier protests that she wouldn’t be hungry, Clarke’s stomach gives a traitorous growl when they lift the lid, and she manages almost two slices before she gives in and says that her appetite has gone.

Clarke falls asleep about halfway through the movie, and with her stomach full and the nest of blankets keeping her cosy, Lexa can feel her own eyes drooping with the onset of drowsiness not too long afterwards. She tries to fight it, to stay away and watch the movie, but her eyelids are heavy and she quickly succumbs.

When Clarke wakes up, she is uncomfortable.

Which is weird because she’s bundled up in blankets on the soft couch cushions in the den, with Lexa fast asleep against her side. She should be the epitome of comfort.

There’s an unsettled feeling in Clarke’s stomach, and it takes her a few sleepy moments to realise that she feels nauseous. The need to be sick is not an urgent one, but it is there, but as soon as she realises that she’s feeling queasy, it takes over her entire body and she can’t think of anything else.

Clarke tries to extract herself from the blankets without disturbing Lexa, but with the other girl asleep against her side, her head resting on Clarke’s shoulder, it’s a harder task that it seems. The blankets are tangled around their limbs and as she tries to remove herself from their warmth, Lexa stirs against her and her eyes blink open.

“Are you okay?” Lexa asks, her voice raspy in her newly awakened state.

“Just gonna go to the bathroom,” Clarke says, trying not to let her discomfort show. The last thing she wants is for Lexa to worry about her.

Lexa looks on in concern, but she nods silently and lets Clarke leave, helping to remove the blankets so that she can make her escape.

Clarke knows the drill by now. She reaches for a hair tie and pushes her hair back into a loose bun, then sits on the edge of the bathtub within reach of the toilet basin. She takes deep breaths, trying to stop the bile from rising in her throat, but by this point she knows it’s going to happen.

When she can’t fight it anymore, Clarke leans over the basin and retches, emptying the contents of her stomach into the toilet bowl. When she doesn’t think she can be sick any longer, when there is nothing left to throw up, Clarke scrabbles with one hand for the flush, while the other reaches for a square of toilet paper to wipe the disgusting dribble from her chin and lips.

“Clarke?”

As if things couldn’t get any worse, Clarke glances up from where she is huddled on the bathroom floor to find Lexa leaning against the doorway with concern on her face. The very reason that Clarke rarely has friends over at her house is because she doesn’t want them to see her like this, but the illusion that she’s dealing with cancer with her dignity still in tact is lost the moment that Lexa lays eyes on the way that Clarke is clinging to the toilet seat with her own drool coating her lips.

“Go away, Lexa,”

“Can I do anything to help? Do you need anything? Water?”

Clarke is loathe to ask for help, but her throat burns and there’s an acidic taste in her mouth and water sounds like heaven.

“There’s a bottle of water that I left in the den,” Clarke reluctantly says to Lexa.

“I’ll go get it.”

Lexa hurries out of the bathroom obediently like a dog rushing to fetch a ball, and Clarke is only left alone for a moment because the commotion brings her mom along in Lexa’s absence. Abby enters the bathroom and takes a seat on the edge of the bathtub, rubbing a soothing hand up and down Clarke’s back.

“Clarke, are you okay honey?” she asks.

Clarke glances up and puts on a forced smile, as she replies sarcastically, “Peachy.”

Lexa returns with the water bottle, filled with fresh water, and gives it to Clarke with a worried expression still on her face. Clarke accepts the bottle with a grateful nod of her head and takes a huge gulp, swilling the water around her mouth to wash away the taste of her own vomit, before she spits the water into the toilet basin and takes another sip to actually drink.

“Lexa, I don’t want you to see me like this,” says Clarke, now that her throat isn’t quite so dry and scratchy.

Though Lexa looks as though she wants to say something, she remains silent.

Pushing herself up into a standing position, it is Abby who comes up with a solution, leaving Clarke on the bathroom floor beside the toilet as she says to Lexa, “Lexa, how about I make up the spare room for you and you can sleep there tonight?”

Lexa keeps staring at Clarke with a frown on her face, eyes full of pity and something else, before she finally glances up at Abby and nods silently. Abby ushers Lexa out of the bathroom, leading her down the hallway, and it is only when Clarke has been left alone in the bathroom that she lets herself break down, tears cascading down her cheeks and her chest heaving with sobs as she collapses on the bathroom floor and just cries.

School starts up again at the end of the summer and so begins Lexa’s senior year.

Clarke doesn’t show up on the first day, nor on the second, and when she does finally show her face on the third day, she looks wearier than Lexa remembers, and her words are much more negative.

“I just don’t want to be here,” complains Clarke, when Lexa meets with her during morning break to give her a copy of Lexa’s notes from the two days she’s missed. “I don’t see the point.”

“Of course there’s a point!” Lexa tries to assure her. “This is senior year, your last year!”

“And what?” shrugs Clarke dejectedly, slumping against her locker. “I have to miss school for appointments but what about the days like yesterday where I physically couldn’t get out of bed? I’m tired all the fucking time!”

“I’m sure the teachers will be able to help you catch up on the work you’ve missed,” Lexa suggests.

“The teachers don’t give a shit,” replies Clarke. “I’m not in school enough for them to care. They’ve already written me off as a hopeless case. I’m just a kid they’ll talk about in a few years, like ‘remember when we taught that girl with cancer, such a sad story’. That’s all I am to them, a story.”

“Then I’ll help you!” promises Lexa. She hates seeing Clarke like this, hates how the cancer seems to have drained all of Clarke’s positivity. “I can come over to yours and help with the stuff that you miss and it’ll even help with my own revision.”

“I can’t ask you do so that.”

“I want to,” Lexa shrugs, her voice soft.

Clarke looks at Lexa in confusion, her eyebrows furrowed into a frown, like she’s trying to work out why Lexa hasn’t written her off in the same way that nearly every other person in the school has.

“But why? There’s no point. My life lost all its worth the moment they did the scan and found a tumour.”

Clarke chokes on her words towards the end, and Lexa catches her reaching up to rub at her eyes, as if wiping away tears. Within a few seconds, Clarke’s chest is heaving with sobs and her cheeks are damp.

“Come on,” says Lexa, putting an arm around Clarke’s shoulder and guiding her into the nearby girls’ bathroom.

There are two girls in there when they enter, standing at the mirrors touching up their eyeliner, but upon seeing Clarke in tears, they seem to sense the need for privacy and quickly gather their belongings, vacating the bathroom to leave Lexa and Clarke alone.

“It’s okay,” Lexa soothes Clarke. “Let it out.”

“Why me?” sobs Clarke. “What did I do to deserve this?”

“Nothing” says Lexa, as she pulls Clarke in for a hugs and wraps her arms around Clarke’s shoulders. Clarke’s own arms circle loosely around Lexa’s waist and her head falls on Lexa’s shoulder, her tears soaking the sleeve of Lexa’s t-shirt. “You did nothing. You don’t deserve any of this and it makes me so mad that it’s happening to you.”

“I had it all planned out,” says Clarke, another sob tearing through her body as she trembles in Lexa’s arms. “I was going to get a good GPA and go to med school and become a paediatrician but none of that is going to happen anymore.”

“It can still happen if you want it to,” Lexa tries to reassure Clarke.

Clarke pulls herself out of Lexa’s embrace and walks into one of the toilet stalls, emerging a few seconds later with some toilet paper scrunched up in her hand, which she uses to dab at her eyes and then blow her nose.

“That’s the other thing,” Clarke says to Lexa, tossing the used tissue in the nearby trash can. “I’m not sure I even want to be a doctor anymore. Why would I want to spend the rest of my life working in a place that reminds me of what I’m going through now?”

“Then that’s fine,” Lexa answers without hesitation. “There’s still so many other things you can so. You can still go to college without deciding what you want to major in yet, or you don’t have to go to college at all if you don’t want to.”

Clarke’s eyes narrow and she looks at Lexa with an expression on her face like she doesn’t understand why Lexa is so insistent that Clarke’s life isn’t as bad as she thinks it is.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” asks Lexa.

“Being so nice to me.”

Clarke still looks at Lexa with incredulity in her eyes, like the very idea of somebody showing her kindness is one that she can’t begin to fathom.

“Do you remember in Kindergarten when you helped me up after Murphy pushed me over and then kicked him in the balls?” asks Lexa, and Clarke’s glistening blue eyes soften with traces of amusement as she nods through her tears. “You’ve always had my back and now that things aren’t so great for you, I want to have yours.”

Lexa omits the part where she’s basically in love with Clarke and would do anything to ensure her happiness.

“I mean, Murphy hasn’t done anything but if you want to kick him in the balls anyway, it would really cheer me up.”

“Noted,” smiles Lexa.

Though her cheeks are blotchy and there are red rings around her eyes as evidence of her tears, Clarke is no longer crying and Lexa is grateful that she seems to have cheered up a little. She thinks that seeing Clarke like that, seeing the emotional impact that the cancer is having on her, is far worse than it is to see all of the physical changes on Clarke’s body. Even seeing Clarke hunched over a toilet bowl emptying her stomach that time Lexa went over for a movie night was more bearable than this, because at least Lexa knew that the nausea would pass. Seeing Clarke so upset and feeling like there is nothing she can do to help only leaves Lexa feeling completely helpless, and she wishes that there could be steps for her to take to ensure that Clarke doesn’t have to feel like her life isn’t worth anything now that she’s sick.

“Seriously, though,” Lexa tells Clarke, who has now turned to the sink and is splashing water over her face from the faucet. “I’m here for you. I know that things aren’t going your way at the moment, but I don’t want you to ever feel like you’re alone, because you’re not.”

Clarke’s eyes are still red and the skin around them puffy from her tears, but there’s something much deeper in them as she looks at Lexa, like maybe she might be finally starting to believe that what Lexa is saying is true.

Something changes in Clarke.

Lexa hardly notices it at first, because in many ways nothing changes at all. Clarke still misses a lot of school and when she does show up, she is still just as weary and down about her situation as she was at the start of the school year, keeping her head down on her desk for often entire lessons and secluding herself from most of her peers during break and lunchtimes.

But there’s definitely something different too. Something in the way that Clarke’s eyes seek out Lexa’s in the school canteen and her tense shoulders relax visibly as she comes to sit at Lexa’s table. Something in the way that Clarke will always choose to sit next to Lexa in the classes that they share, even if she ends up sleeping on her desk for the entire lesson. Something in the way that Clarke has started inviting Lexa over to hers after school every now and then so that Lexa can help her with the work she’s missed, even though their ‘study sessions’ usually end up with them binge-watching TV and reminiscing about memories from years past until their cheeks hurt from smiling too much.

Lexa likes it. Well, she doesn’t like that Clarke is still struggling, but she likes the way that even though Clarke is having a tough time, she’s giving Lexa the chance to try and make it a little less difficult.

Clarke has her last treatment in early-November and Lexa spends the entire day glued to her phone. Or at least as glued to her phone as she can be at school without the teachers noticing it and confiscating it from her. She checks it as often as she can, waiting for a message from Clarke to say that she’s out of the hospital so that she can congratulate Clarke on making it to the end of a gruelling six months of chemotherapy.

There isn’t a message, but when Lexa checks Facebook during her lunch break, there’s a post from Clarke at the top of her feed, dominated by a goofy selfie of Clarke at the hospital with a dumb filter that distorts her face and gives her a pair of animal ears.

Lexa taps the ‘like’ button instantly, then scrolls down to read the caption that Clarke has posted below.

Clarke Griffin 34 minutes ago Last ever chemo today! It’s been a difficult six months but I’m coming out the other side stronger and I couldn’t have done it without the most incredible support from the best friends and family I could ask for. Thank you to each and every one of you for sticking by my side during these tricky months. I love you all! All there’s left to do is to wait for the scan to confirm that the cancer is gone and then I can start growing my eyebrows back!

Lexa’s eyes prickle with tears and she wipes them away immediately, before anybody else can see her crying in the middle of the school canteen, but Lexa can’t stop the smile that spreads across her face with the growing pride that she feels for Clarke and the struggle that she has overcome as she types out a comment on Clarke’s post.

Lexa Woods So proud of you and the strength that you’ve shown! <3

It doesn’t come close to expressing what Lexa is really feeling, but when the notification pops up a few seconds later telling her that Clarke has replied with a heart emoji of her own, Lexa hopes that maybe it’s just about enough.

On the day that Clarke goes for her final scan and gets the all-clear from the doctors, who tell her that the chemotherapy has been successful and that she’s in complete remission, they go for milkshakes and donuts to celebrate.

“To you,” says Lexa, holding up her milkshake glass when the waitress brings them their drinks, and Clarke meets it with a soft clink of her own against Lexa’s, “for being the strongest and bravest person I know and kicking cancer’s butt.”

“To you,” adds Clarke, keeping her glass raised even after Lexa lowers her own, “for sticking by my side when so many others turned their backs.”

Lexa wraps her lips around the straw and sucks up some of her milkshake, sighing at how refreshing the drink is, before she puts the glass down on the table.

“Of course I stuck by you,” Lexa shrugs. “I just didn’t want you to feel alone.”

“I appreciate it,” smiles Clarke. “As long as we’re still going to be friends now that I’m healthy again?”

Clarke has genuine concern in her eyes, like she actually thinks that Lexa might stop being her friend now that she no longer has the excuse of wanting to help Clarke through her difficult times.

“Of course we are,” Lexa promises Clarke. “I’ll always be your friend, even when you have hair again!”

Clarke’s face cracks open into a grin and Lexa flushes with delight at having made Clarke smile, a sight that has been so rare over the last few months. It’s nice to see Clarke relaxed for once, instead of exhausted and void of hope, and Lexa can’t tell if Clarke is actually more radiant than before or if it’s just Lexa imagining things. Either way, Clarke looks beautiful as she sips on her milkshake, even more so when she smiles, and Lexa is reminded of all the un-friendlike feelings she has for Clarke as her heart stirs in her chest and makes its presence known by thumping rhythmically against her ribcage.

To distract herself from her racing heart, and to stop herself from doing anything stupid like telling Clarke that she looks beautiful and accidentally confessing her love, Lexa gestures to the box of donuts on the table between them and asks, “Powdered sugar or chocolate sprinkles?”

“Like you even have to ask,” grins Clarke, reaching for the donut decorated with chocolate icing and multi-coloured sprinkles.

The cancer might have gone, but Clarke’s social anxiety definitely has not, and the nerves that she feels upon entering the party that Octavia is throwing at her house for half their year is almost overwhelming. Her hair, barely starting to grow back and still a closely shaven fuzz on her head, is hidden beneath a comfortable gray beanie, and even though it has been months since she had long hair, Clarke still feels self-conscious about her current look.

The other partygoers greet her as if nothing has changed, as if she hasn’t spent months going in and out of hospital appointments and barely showing up to school. There’s the people who have always been her friends, even through it all - Raven wraps Clarke in a tipsy hug when she first sees her, Jasper greets Clarke with a fist bump and offers to pour her a drink from a suspicious-looking homemade concoction stored in an old plastic water bottle, Octavia drags Clarke straight into the middle of a makeshift dance floor in the living room and starts grinding up against her instead of Lincoln - but there’s others, people who have barely acknowledged Clarke during the last six months, who greet her and smile as she passes as if she has never had cancer at all.

It’s weird and Clarke doesn’t like it.

When Clarke has finally managed to escape from Octavia’s inappropriate dancing, using an excuse of needing to go somewhere a little cooler, Clarke makes her way to the slightly quieter kitchen and pours herself a drink.

“So the cancer is gone, huh?”

Clarke glances up, bottle of soda in one hand and a red plastic cup in the other, to find Finn smirking across at her. Finn, who was definitely flirting with her before the diagnosis, but who hasn’t even looked her way since, let alone spoken to her.

“Well,” says Clarke, trying not to let her disinterest in conversing with Finn creep into her voice. “I’m in complete remission, so…”

“So you’re basically cured.”

Clarke knows that she used to be attracted to Finn, though in this moment she can’t possibly remember why. Perhaps the chemotherapy has killed all traces of the former attraction along with the cancer.

“Finn, it…”

“When is your hair going to grow back?” asks Finn.

He must think that he’s flirting, because he wears a smirk on his face and leans closer to Clarke. Clarke decides that they must be living in alternate universes, because Finn clearly thinks that his advances are wanted, while Clarke is struggling to think of anywhere she would rather be less than here with Finn.

Except for perhaps the oncology ward with a tube pumping chemicals into the port on her chest, but it’s an incredibly close call.

“What if I like it short?” Clarke replies haughtily, folding her arms indignantly across her chest.

Still undeterred, Finn says, “I think you look really pretty with long hair. You know, how it was before.”

“Well, if you like it short then I guess I have to grow back.”

Finn completely misses the sarcasm in her voice because instead of getting the idea that Clarke doesn’t care about what he has to say and backing off, he instead leans yet closer and says, “How about we go and talk somewhere a little more private?”

It takes all of Clarke’s self-restraint to stop herself from rolling her eyes.

“And by ‘talk’, you mean hook-up?” she asks him, raising her eyebrows in disbelief.

“Well, I guess. If you like.”

Clarke loses it.

“No, Finn,” she snaps, spitting his name out like it’s a nasty taste on her tongue that she can’t wait to be rid of, “I don’t like. I don’t like the way that you think you can ignore me for six months and then as soon as I finish my treatment, you decide that it’s okay to start flirting with me again because you no longer have to deal with a girl who has cancer.”

“Clarke,” whines Finn, “I only meant that…”

“Well, guess what, Finn?” continues Clarke, barely allowing herself time to take a breath before she launches off again, not giving Finn the chance to try to wriggle his way out of this one. “I’m always going to be the girl who had cancer! You don’t go through something like this and just forget about it. This experience has changed me and I’m not the same girl who had a crush on you last summer. And if you didn’t want to be around for that change then that’s on you.”

“Clarke…” protests Finn.

“Finn, I don’t care,” Clarke tells him bluntly. “If you didn’t want to be my friend when I had cancer, then you don’t get to be my friend now that I don’t.”

Clarke is pretty proud of herself for that one, but she becomes aware that her rant at Finn has drawn a little bit of attention from the handful of other people in the kitchen. They watch her with mild fear on their faces, as if worried that she’s going to turn on them next and give them the same kind of treatment that she’s given Finn.

But Clarke is done ranting, and from the way that Finn is finally silent, Clarke thinks that maybe she might have got through to him.

Clarke decides that she has to make a quick exit to escape the judgement of the other people in the kitchen, but when she looks up at the door out of the kitchen, she notices that Lexa is standing there watching her, and Clarke realises that she must have seen the entire exchange with Finn.

With her conversation with Finn fresh in her mind, Clarke realises that Lexa is the only person outside of her tight-knit friendship group who has even looked Clarke’s way during the last few months, let alone tried to support her through the biggest challenge of her entire life, and the realisation has everything clicking into place.

Clarke pushes past Finn and walks towards Lexa, grabbing Lexa’s hand with her own on her way out of the kitchen and pulling Lexa with her.

“Come on, Lexa. We need to talk.”

We need to talk.

Put together in that order, they are probably four of the most ominous-sounding words in the English language, but Lexa has no time to process what they might mean or what Clarke wants to talk about. Clarke’s hand grips her own and Lexa is being dragged down the hallway of Octavia’s house, past a few other kids in their year, until Clarke opens up the front door and leads Lexa outside into the chilly December air.

“Clarke, what…?”

Clarke kisses her. Like actually kisses her, lips gently moving against Lexa’s while one of her hands comes up to tangle itself in Lexa’s hair.

It’s not at all what Lexa imagined their first kiss to be like - and Lexa has probably imagined and re-imagined a thousand different scenarios in which she and Clarke share a first kiss. Lexa has pictured it being tentative and clumsy, she’s pictured it being fiery and fuelled by lust, she’s pictured it taking place right after Lexa has delivered a smooth line to knock Clarke off her feet, and she’s pictured it happening in the darkness of her own bedroom late at night during a slumber party. In fact, had you asked Lexa just thirty seconds ago, she probably would have said that there is not a single version of their first kiss that she hasn’t already imagined.

But she never once imagined it to be like this, never thought that it would happen on Octavia Blake’s front step while a party rages on behind the closed front door, never expected that Clarke’s lips would be so soft or that her hand would caress Lexa’s scalp in the way that it does, never once predicted that Clarke kissing her would make Lexa’s heart beat in her chest like it’s having its very own high school house party in her chest.

Lexa tries to be as present as she can be, a task which is a lot harder than it seems when her entire body feels like it’s floating off the ground and soaring into space. She tries to kiss Clarke back, and she lifts her own hand to cup Clarke’s jaw, where her fingertips dip just beneath the soft material of the beanie that Clarke wears and her thumb traces patterns along the bone of Clarke’s gaunt cheek.

The kiss is a bit of a surprise - as far as Lexa is aware, her feelings for Clarke have been entirely one-sided until now - and Lexa can’t help but wonder what has changed in Clarke’s mind to bring them to this point. When Clarke draws back from the kiss to change the angle, Lexa pulls back from the kiss, though she keeps her hands on Clarke to hold her close, trying to let Clarke know that this is just a temporary pause, not a permanent halt on their kissing.

“Clarke, what…?

“Finn was hitting on me and it made me realise that there’s only one person I want to be doing that,” explains Clarke. When Lexa stares at her dumbfoundedly for a few seconds, not quite believing what she’s hearing, Clarke elaborates by saying, “You.”

Lexa’s jaw drops open like she can’t quite believe what she’s hearing, even though she already has the physical evidence that Clarke wants her from the way that her lips are still tingling from the recent pressure of Clarke’s mouth sliding against her own.

“Listen, this isn’t going to be easy,” says Clarke, dropping the hand that is buried in Lexa’s hair so that it’s draped around her neck and bringing the other one up to match it. “I still have to go to the hospital for tests every few months and there’s always a chance that the cancer could come back. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but mentally I’m a bit of a fuck up right now.”

“Clarke…” protests Lexa, shaking her head.

“What?” shrugs Clarke. “It’s true! I’ve still got a difficult journey ahead of me but I want to make that journey with you. I want you to still be by my side, because I can deal with the cancer - not very well, I admit - but I can deal with it. I don’t think I could handle not having you in my life.”

There’s a question in Clarke’s eyes, as if she’s waiting for Lexa to promise that she’s never going to leave. Lexa can’t find the words to do justice to the way that she’s feeling, so she decides to do it with actions instead. Her hands tighten on Clarke’s waist, pulling her closer as she leans down for a second kiss that feels like Lexa is arriving home.

“Just to be clear,” Lexa mumbles against Clarke’s lips, “are you asking me to be your girlfriend?”

Clarke lets out a little noise, something that Lexa decides must be the audible version of an eye roll, before she answers, “Yes, idiot. Be my girlfriend?”

Lexa doesn’t know how she manages to keep kissing Clarke when her mouth is threatening to crack into a huge grin, but she manages it, only pulling back for long enough to say, “Yes.”

[sonnets-and-snowdrops]

Saiyuki Inktober 2017, Day 2 - “Past and Present”

Fandom: Saiyuki Pairing: A teeny, tiny sprinkle of 58 cuteness Rating: Parental guidance suggested. Unless you’re Gojyo, in which case, parental figures are, like, the least ideal people imaginable for coping with the content of this fic. (But in all seriousness, this fic does include mentions of physical and verbal abuse, as well as some mildly descriptive violence, and mentions of bodily fluids.) Word Count: Approx. 2k seriously why the heck can I not write short pieces gahhhhh one of these days mark my many, many words Author’s Note: Once again, I’m sorry for the ludicrous delay here BUT I’VE GOT WIFI IN MY PLACE NOW HECK YEEEEAAAAAHH DO A HAPPY DANCE WITH ME PEOPLE but yeah I also apologize again if this is kinda meh, still been busy with moving-in shenanigans

The guy who came up with the idea of putting one foot in front of the other must have been a stupid-ass motherfucker, Gojyo decides. He spits - or, he tries to, anyway - and a glob of foul-looking, brownish-reddish goop shoots sideways out of his mouth and dribbles down his chin before it drops to the ground, mixing with the gloomy, gloopy, late-night, rain-soaked mud. “Shoulda known,” he slurs aloud, to no one in particular. “Shitty trajectory, am I right?”

He is right, as it happens. Gojyo’s swelling face is pressed firmly against the loose-packed dirt of the path that leads away from the bad part of town, where he’d spent the past several hours gambling with the local gents and admiring the local ladies - and, his squirming stomach reminds him, knocking back the local spirits at a borderline breakneck rate. He’d lost the last round of seven-card stud, and neither he nor his woefully empty pockets had particularly felt like paying up. And so, he’d slapped the most charming smile he could manage onto his villainous visage, and he’d tried to sweet-talk his way out of his unfortunate circumstances.

It had been a pretty effective tactic, all things considered.

One of the guys at the bar had shrugged, and had asked Gojyo if he’d be willing to offer something else as payment. That had made Gojyo a little nervous, as was to be expected; but thanks to years of ingrained street-smarts, he’d managed to check himself before reflexively drawing his arms behind his back to cover his ass with his grubby hands. The guy had laughed, big and loud - he must have seen how shit-scared Gojyo was of the mere idea of someone making him pay up in that particular fashion - and he’d shaken his shaggy head, saying “Ain’t nothin’ much, Gojyo-san. I’ve just been wantin’ to punch that pretty face of yours for a long damn time.”

He must have blacked out at some point. Maybe it was the drinks, or maybe it was the pain, or maybe it was a finicky combination of the two. Heck, maybe it even had something to do with the wild, distant laughter bouncing around inside his thick, half-youkai skull - “I can’t stand to look at you,” came an all-too-familiar voice, hysterical and high-pitched, between blows, between the bouts of laughter - “I can’t - I CAN’T!” - an all-too-familiar series of punches to the gut and slaps upside the head had followed - if he’s honest, he wasn’t even sure who was hitting him anymore. It could have been the guys at the bar, beating the crap out of him for always being down on his luck financially but inexplicably up on his luck romantically - “How the fuck does a guy like you bag all those chicks, huh?” he distinctly remembers one leery voice sneering. “A dirtbag like you? I can’t believe it, man!” - or it could have been a woman who had been cold and dead for years and years, who never thought twice about raising her clawed hands to a little kid - “I can’t stand to look at you,” said the woman - “I can’t fuckin’ believe it, man!” said the guy - someone slugged him in the kidney, and he went down, hard, knees first - “I can’t stand it!” - he felt like he was on some kind of fucked-up merry-go-round, his world was spinning so gods-damned fast - “I can’t believe it!”- “I can’t STAND it!” - “I can’t” - “I can’t” - “I CAN’T” - “I CAN’T - !”

And then, somehow, he’d made it outside.

He’d found himself staggering, stumbling, stupid, towards home, in the bleak, black rain.

Of course, he remembers thinking. On a night like tonight, of course it was raining.

So, Gojyo had done the only thing he could do: he’d focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and steering his sorry ass towards home. Trouble was, when you were drunk off your face and reeling from just having been treated like a half-human punching bag, putting one foot in front of the other was a pretty harebrained thing to try and do.

As Gojyo quickly discovered.

His ankles got all twisted up beneath him somehow, and he’d ended up facedown in the slop of the road, frustrated, fatigued, and feeling more than a little bit like the entire contents of his stomach was about to come spewing out through his big mouth. “S’not even how people walk,” Gojyo had moaned weakly as he felt his body thud to the ground, for what wasn’t even the first time that night. “Feet go more side-by-side than that, gods damn it… stupid fuckin’ guidelines, not helpful at all…”

The worst part is, he isn’t even that far away from home. All he has to do is haul his wretched, wrecked self up from the ground and traipse the half a mile to his battered door.  There’s a cold shower waiting for him behind that door, and a soft bed. There’s a fresh pack of cigarettes somewhere, one that hasn’t been soaked through by the rain. In the morning, there’ll be cheap whiskey and hot coffee (in that order) to take the edge off. Gojyo knows all of these things. And, if he’s honest, Gojyo wants all of these things, too.

But, just a little bit more, he wants to close his eyes.

And so, he does.

The next thing he knows, someone’s nudging him, and they won’t stop. He feels hands shaking his shoulders and grasping at his upper arms. He starts awake, and by reflex, he seizes up, clenching his fists and tightening his abs, readying his body for another beating - “Cut it out,” he tries to scream, but the words gets stuck in his scratchy throat -

“Gojyo,” says a voice.

Gojyo hesitates.

He knows that voice.

He’s sure he does.

But - but how - and why -

“Please,” the voice continues, “stay still, if you can manage it. You’ll hurt yourself even more if you thrash around like that.”

“…Hakkai?”

“Yes.”

“How - h-how the fuck did you - ”

“It’s four in the morning, and you hadn’t returned. I was curious.”

“Been out that late before, y’know.”

“Yes.” Even through his stupor, Gojyo can hear Hakkai hesitate. “The rain,” he says, finally. His voice has gone high and tight. “I couldn’t sleep. I took a walk. I found you here.”

“Mm,” is how Gojyo replies to that. In part, it’s because he doesn’t want to press the matter any further, and in part, it’s because that’s all he has the energy to say.

“We need to get you home,” comes Hakkai’s voice again. “I won’t ask what happened now, but you’re in terrible shape.” He pauses. “How do you feel?” he asks.

Gojyo laughs, a weary, broken sound. “How d’ya think I feel?!” he answers gleefully. “I feel like shit!”

“Do you think you can walk?”

“Do you think I can walk?”

“I don’t know, Gojyo. That’s why I asked.”

Gojyo laughs again. He shoves himself up onto one shoulder, leaning clumsily sideways so that he can look his roommate in the face - but a wave of nausea sweeps over him, and he hangs his head again. “I dunno, man,” he answers honestly. “I could try, but it’ll be one hell of a long shot. I kinda get the feeling that I’d take two steps, and the next thing we’d know, my guts would end up all over the road.”

At that, Hakkai goes strangely silent.

“What?” Gojyo says, lifting his head again, deciding that the roiling in his stomach might be briefly worth enduring. “What’d I say?”

Abruptly, Hakkai shakes his head. “Nothing,” he replies. “Nothing at all.”

“I said something, didn’t I?”

“No.”

“Look, you - you don’t have to haul my ass back, man - it ain’t your job or nothin’ - ”

“If your guts do end up all over the road,” Hakkai says, his voice clipped and quick, “let’s call it returning the favor, shall we?’

At that, Gojyo stops.

“Oh,” he says.

He really can be an idiot sometimes.

“Shit,” Gojyo mumbles. “I’m sorry, Hakkai. That - that wasn’t a guilt-trip thing, I swear - ”

“If it was, you’d be perfectly entitled, you know.”

“I - yeah, maybe, but - “

“Gojyo - I was only - “

“That’s not my style, man - I didn’t mean to - ”

“Hush, Gojyo. I believe you.” Hakkai’s face softens, just a little - not enough that Gojyo feels completely comfortable, but a little - and he nods his acceptance. Oh, Gojyo realizes, belatedly. That ‘entitled’ thing was his version of a joke. “It’s all right,” Hakkai says gently. “I understand that that isn’t what you meant.”

“Shit,” Gojyo says again, gritting his teeth and forcing the words out. “Shit, Hakkai - I’m sorry - ”

“I just told you, Gojyo - it’s all right - ”

But Gojyo shakes his head. “Not for that,” he says, and he hears the resignation that tinges his voice as he speaks.

“Oh?”

Gojyo cringes.

“For this.”

And with that, Gojyo promptly empties his stomach onto the road, right in front of the man whose life he never really meant to save - the man who became the roommate he never really planned to have. Still, Gojyo can’t help but feel a little thankful. What are the odds, after all, that he’d end up sharing his digs with just the kind of guy who takes weird, late-night walks at desperate times like these?

When it’s over, and when Gojyo can think straight again, he recognizes the feeling of firm, strong hands on his back. For the first time in a long, long while, he doesn’t get all tense when he senses the touch. He cracks his eyes open and glances up, and he sees Hakkai, silhouetted and pale, gazing almost sympathetically down at his fallen companion. “Thank you,” Gojyo says, softly.

“It’s my pleasure.”

“Heh. Doubt it.”

“Well,” Hakkai replies, “perhaps I’m using the word ‘pleasure’ a bit generously in this instance. Still,” he says, laying one slender hand upon his own stomach, “I won’t pretend I don’t have a debt to pay.”

“Forget it, man.”

“Gojyo - ”

“I mean it,” Gojyo says, giving Hakkai what he hopes is a fierce and determined stare - though, he recognizes that his odds are slim, given what he looks like at the moment. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

“But - ”

“Just shut up and accept the fact that I’m grateful to you for this, would ya?” Gojyo snickers. “Talk about going above and beyond the call of duty. For real, man.”

“Gojyo, I really can’t - ”

“Look,” Gojyo says, figuring he’ll give this just one last try before he throws in the towel altogether. “I get that you feel indebted to me. Fine. That ain’t gonna go away any time soon, and I get that. But listen - we live in the here and now, don’t we, Hakkai?” Weirdly, it’s important to him that Hakkai actually answers this question. He waits, and when Hakkai says nothing, he repeats himself. “Don’t we?”

Hakkai nods, somber and steady.

“Yeah,” Gojyo says, finally, finally satisfied. “We do. So let it go, okay?” And he gives Hakkai one last, lopsided smile before he lets his face fall back into the mud. “What’s past is past,” he concludes proudly, “and you just watched me puke.”

[howlingbarnes]

Forelsket - Part Six

Characters - Steve Rogers x Reader, Natasha Romanoff, Bucky Barnes

Word Count - 1408

AU - Soulmates

Warnings - Language, Cliffhanger, Implied depression

A/N - I’m bringing this back and I’m taking it easy so it won’t be on a daily schedule. I still don’t know how it’s going to end tbh.

Forelsket Masterlist

Nat found herself in her usual spot, leaned against the kitchen counter with a hot mug of coffee in her hand. Blowing at the steam, she peered over the rim of her cup as Steve slipped out of your room. He squeezed the door closed behind him, being sure not to make too much noise for fear of waking you up. His hair was shaggy, his beard was lush and in need of a touch-up, and there were bags living beneath his eyes.

“How’s she doing?” Natasha asked in a hushed whisper as if the sound of her voice would disturb the stillness of the apartment. “I see you go in and out but feel like I haven’t seen her in days.”

“That’d probably be because you haven’t,” Steve answered back, his groggy morning voice being muffled behind his hands as he ran them down his bruised face. “She won’t leave the room and she’s barely sleeping.”

Natasha let out a heavy sigh. Her brows knitting together in concern while she took the liberties of getting Steve some coffee.

Though Nat and Steve had only known each other for a short time, they’d become friends in passing. When Steve would come over with takeout or tiptoe out of your room in the morning, she was always there for a quick conversation. There were times though, much like this that she found herself worrying more than anything.

When Natasha didn’t say anything, Steve felt the need to elaborate. “She’s broken up about the whole thing. Not because she was in love with him.” He paused to heave out a sigh, thinking of the state you’d been in lately. “She hurt someone that did nothing but care for her. I think she’s just disappointed in herself.”

“What about you?” Nat asked, squinting over the rim of her mug before taking a sip.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how are you holding up after all this? He’s your best friend, she’s your soulmate, and you’re suffering right alongside both of them.” Nat clarified, gesturing toward Steve. “So, how are you?”

Steve wasn’t able to hold her gaze for long, finding the floor in embarrassment. He wasn’t even sure why he felt awkward about the string of questions being asked of him. Maybe it was the fact that he felt like he had to be the hero, the one that was strong for everyone else. Pushing his own needs to the back burner was a specialty that no one really questioned before.

“I’ve had better days.” Rubbing the back of his neck nervously, Steve thought long before continuing. “I miss Bucky, I really do, and I feel like shit about the way everything happened. I hate watching Y/N punish herself. I can’t look her in the eye and spew a bunch of positive, uplifting bullshit at her. She’s in pain, sometimes that’s okay and we need to go through it but I just wish I could do more than comfort her while she cries herself to sleep.”

A giggle rippled through the thin wood of Wanda’s bedroom door. Scott had been over nearly every day since they’d met and when he wasn’t, Wanda was over at his place. The two were like the eye of a storm, making everyone around them feel like there was hope. Steve and Natasha both found themselves looking at the door with small smiles, both chuckling softly at the infectious happiness seeping into the space.

“I wouldn’t give her up for anything.” Steve shook his head, his voice pulling Nat’s attention back to his smiling face. “She’s my soulmate. I was created just for her and I feel it every time I look at her.”

Just as Natasha opened her mouth to answer Steve, the creaking of the hinges of your bedroom door caught their attention. Though the door was barely ajar, you managed to make eye contact with your friend, sending her a half-hearted wave while Steve placed his empty mug in the sink. Nat waved back with a smile tugging at her lips, remaining unmoved from her spot.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I woke up and you were gone so I was just checking to see if you were still here.” You answered through the cracked door.

Steve wasted no time getting into your room. His arms wrapped around your frame and suddenly, you felt like you could will yourself back to sleep. Since the night at the club, you’d been unable to get a true night’s rest. Even with Steve with you each night, you laid restless with him. You wanted to tell yourself that he simply just couldn’t sleep either but you knew that he was forcing himself to stay up in order to keep you company and make sure that you were okay.

Climbing back into your bed, you relaxed into the warm spot you’d just crawled out of. Steve’s body radiated a comforting warmth as he settled in behind you. With an arm around your waist, he pulled you close and nuzzled his nose into the crook of your neck. He was trying his best to do everything he could to bring you peace and it was something that you’d never forget.

“Thank you for being here with me.” You said, letting your thumb rub circles into Steve’s forearm.

“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

Steve’s vibrating phone stirred him from his sleep. The sun burn his dry, tired eyes, making him squeeze them shut and blindly search for the cell. Once he’d gotten his hand on it, he swiped the screen and pressed it to his ear.

“Hello?”

“Hey man, I’m-I’m sorry.” Bucky’s voice was chipper and light. “Were you asleep? I can call back if it’s-”

“No, it’s alright, Buck.” Steve cut him off, ignoring the feeling of his heart pounding against his ribcage at the sound of his friend’s voice. “What’s up?”

There was a long pause on the line, so long that Steve was about to call out Bucky’s name but the silence was broken before he had the chance. “This is gonna sound kinda weird, but can you and Y/N come over today?”

“Do you know why he wants to see us?” You raised a brow at Steve, feeling rested for the first time in a while.

“He didn’t tell me,” Steve replied as he held out your jacket for you to slip into. “He almost sounded happy about it though.”

The walk across campus was filled with musings of what you thought Bucky wanted to talk about. A part of your mind was telling you that it wasn’t a good idea, that he was just going to get you there and then tear you a new one for the horrible things you did to him. Steve seemed optimistic about the whole thing though. With a gentle kiss to your knuckles, he asked you to trust his judgment and you felt your stresses melt away to nothing. He was right, if anybody knew Bucky, it was him.

“I’m still a little nervous.” You admitted before knocking on the door so lightly that you were sure Bucky hadn’t heard it.

“There’s nothing to be nervous about. I’m here.”

Bucky opened the door with a welcoming smile on his face. Looking like he wanted to say something, he just stepped to the side and invited you in. You pulled your fingers free of Steve’s and followed Bucky into his living room before taking a seat. Bucky thanked you for coming before nervously stuffing his hands into his pockets. He paced a path in the space for a moment, gathering his thoughts before turning to where you sat with Steve.

“What happened last week was really fucked up. It’s not okay that you cheated on me.” Bucky stated with a stiff shrug before giving his attention to Steve. “It’s not okay that we beat the shit out of each other.”

Silence hung thick in the air. You couldn’t make your eyes find Bucky’s and you were positive that Steve couldn’t either. You felt embarrassed and ashamed at your actions. It wasn’t who you were as a person and it wasn’t what Bucky deserved. You wracked your brain to find the right words, but there weren’t any that could fix the situation that you’d put yourself and both men into.

“But I want you both to know that it’s okay that you’re soulmates and I support your relationship.”

“What?”

Tags - (forever/closed) @bovaria @bionic-buckyb @purgatoan @mamapeterson  @ladylizzieofdarbyshire @feelmyroarrrr @my-blackbird-universe @hellomissmabel @huffleypuffelycas @palaiasaurus64  @callamint @takemetoneverland91 @seargantbcky @marvel-fanfiction @hollycornish @toc1985 @lillianfromaccounting @viollettes @sincerelysaraahh  @anyakinamidala @teamfreewill-imagine @debzybrazy @justareader

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[chargenovasmash]

Thicker than Blood, Pt. I [Cousins AU]

FINALLY.  This one hurt, folks.  3775 words of pain.  Thank my love @pathfindersemail for not letting me give up on this.

Puck goes home to her brother after dropping Sarianna’s drunk ass back at the Tempest, and things start to fall apart.

Read on AO3.

Nights like this, when a hushed vidcall whisked his sister away unceremoniously at some ridiculous hour, left Oliver Park with plenty of time to think.  

Too much.  Too much time to wonder if keeping to his silent memorization of her antics was enough; whether the face she showed him or the one she showed the rest of Kadara was the true mask, and whether her lies, old as she was and proliferating as they were the more she worked for Reyes, would catch up to them sooner or later.  

The sky was already a few shades lighter by the time the soft whirring of the shack’s door announced her return.  His sister, the formidable outlaw known as ‘Puck’, dragged her feet across the threshold, wrenched off her grisly helmet, and let it fall irreverently on an empty crate next to her.  Oliver watched silently as she stared at the floor for a moment after the door shut behind her, heaving exhausted breaths in and out before realizing she wasn’t quite safe from all scrutiny just yet.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

A classic Reggie response.  No explanations, no excuses, and certainly no apologies.

“I didn’t say anything,” Oliver replied with a shrug as she shed piece after piece of her armor, like she couldn’t get it off of her quickly enough.  The tension in his neck and shoulders released bit by bit with each hard clank on the floor.  Little by little, she left ‘Puck’ and everything her alias entailed behind.  Soon, it was just Reggie standing in front of him again, desperately trying to counter the ever-present nuisance of helmet hair as she secured the top half of her undersuit around her waist and let the skin exposed by her fraying tank top breathe real air once more.

“I know, that's why I said ‘don't look at me like that’.”

An emerging trend in this routine was a stab of bittersweet melancholy once his sister’s face was wholly hers again.  It hadn't changed much over the years,  although she’d lightened her hair from the same deep black as his to a warm chestnut brown and went from a tight ponytail to cut short and shaggy once helmet hair became a daily inevitability.  Years weren't what wore on her, though.  He was, his burdens that she'd been fighting him to carry since they were kids.  Four years her senior, he’d always been her hero, her Superman; the last thing Oliver ever wanted was to be to his sister the reason she looked so damn tired.

The heaviness in that idea wouldn’t let him laugh at her joke like he knew she wanted.  Instead, he gathered her into a tight hug, the fraternal sort that ended with a healthy rake of his knuckles across the top of her head.  The screech inlaid with rolling, high-pitched laughter as she tore out of his arms drew out a chuckle, and things felt okay again.  This was normal.  This...this, he would let be his fault.

“You okay, assmaster?” she taunted, and threw a light shove at his shoulder.  “Anything happen while I was gone?”

Oliver plucked a wrench off of the shelf next to him and waved it back and forth between two fingers.  

“Well, buttface, I dropped this, and it made a loud noise.”

Whether from his facetious answer or his low effort contribution of ‘buttface’ he couldn’t say, but Reggie’s entire body groaned.  

“Chodefarmer,” she muttered, a smile teasing at her face as she opened her omni-tool.  Starting that medical scanning software she’d stolen from the Nexus before they left, no doubt.  “How’s your head?  Any better?”

It was his turn to let his entire body groan.  Not a day had gone by since he woke on this evil-smelling rock that he hadn’t spent at least a few minutes awash in the orange glow of that fucking scanner.

“Just fine, dicksocket,” he replied, giving it a bit more thought this time.  Predictably, she grinned her approval behind the omni-tool screen, but she didn’t reply.  Data from her scans raced in between them and held her attention, interrupting the succor he’d found in the flow of banter between them.  Brows furrowed, Oliver waved a hand in front of her, hoping to break her concentration.  “Come on, put that thing away.”

“Shh,” she hissed, swatting his hand away while keeping her eyes glued on the screen.  “I’ve gotta-”

“Hey, Reg…” Momentarily abandoning their game, Oliver set a firm but gentle hand on her arm and slowly lowered it.  He met her protesting eyes with raised brows he hoped would drive the point home.  

“I’m fine, kiddo.”

When she was younger, Reggie would pop her hips out to one side, plant her hands on them, sneer exactly the way she was now and defiantly insist she was absolutely not a ‘kiddo’.  Now, it was all she could do not to let him know just how endearing the nickname had become.  He leaned in a little closer, eyes still locked on hers, and waggled his eyebrows as if to say, you know I’m right.  

She did, but she didn’t want to.  Stubborn as she was, a tacit understanding existed between them: no secrets, and no lies, including whether or not Oliver was, indeed, fine.  Her face softened for a moment with a reluctant exhale, and, in true Reggie form, hid immediately behind a smirk rather than say the words out loud.

“We’re on ‘E’,” she huffed, closing her omni-tool and struggling to keep the smirk from widening any further, “and it’s my turn, elcor breath.”

“Oh, well, in that case, I’m fine,” he retorted, plastering a smug grin across his face, “fart factory.”

Reggie shook her head between snickers, and brushed past him in search of the large crate in the next room that held their stash of food.  That one always made her laugh, whether she wanted to or not, and this time was no exception.  For everything about Reggie that changed, there were a precious few that never would, and Oliver was content for the moment knowing that was one of them.

“So, what was it?”

“What was what?” she called through a mouthful of some sort of jerky.  He wasn’t sure he really wanted to know what she made it from.  He was, however, sure that she knew what he meant; when Reggie asked for clarification like that, it only meant he wouldn’t like the answer.

“What was so important you had to rush out of here in the middle of the night without saying where you were going?”

The rummaging stopped, and the crate lid fell shut.  Reggie appeared in the doorway a moment later, still vigorously chewing, eyeing him with a rancor that didn’t match her nonchalant shrug.  

“It wasn’t.”

Or, it meant he really wouldn’t like the answer.

Typical Reggie evasiveness, skirting around the temptation to lie by avoiding the subject altogether.  Between the racket she made when she left waking him and the anxiety of waiting for her to come back, Oliver wasn’t in the mood for games.

“You’re not Puck here, you know.”  

Her face scrunched into the exaggerated look she always gave when she was playing dumb.  

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Oliver couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration of what he’d just told her.

“It means when you make that face here, I can actually see it.”  

Her face leveled into a scowl, and Oliver couldn't resist a hushed chuckle at how her protest only reinforced his point.  He walked to the crate by the door and lifted her helmet off of it, giving it a soft toss upwards and catching it just next to his head with a taunting shake.  “It means this…this is…”

He saw it out of the corner of his eye, and grasped the helmet with two hands in front of him for closer inspection.  At first, he thought it might have been a seam in the plating he'd never noticed before, but instead of a smooth, straight line, it was crooked, bent inward and dented around it.  Some of the circuitry inside was visible.  Not seamed.  Broken.  

“Shit, this...this had to be one hell of a blow, Reg.” He raised his head slowly to look at her, only blinking when the sting in his eyes reminded him of the necessity.  “What happened?”

Reggie snatched it from him with the same wide-eyed consternation as if it were some private thing, like she’d caught him going through her holos or her extranet browser history.  

“Nothing.  You don’t have to worry about me.”

Oliver folded his arms across his chest and quirked one eyebrow.

“Okay, except yes, I do.”  He gestured towards the helmet cradled in her arms with a flat, open hand.  “That could easily have been way worse.  You said this one would be easy, and you should’ve been back hours ago.”  

Reggie relegated the helmet to the floor with the rest of her armor and folded her arms in front of her, her face set in the sort of indignant look mothers gave their children when they need to wordlessly emphasized what they’d just fucking said.

Oliver sighed, and shook his head.  

“I know...I know you’re helping him to help me.  I get it.  But...is all this really worth it just to keep me from getting headaches?”

“It’s not just headaches, Ollie, and you know it.”

He did.  The Initiative disqualified most L2 biotics from participating, and for good reason.  Cryostasis was risky, and the revival process for an L2, especially one as finicky and troublesome as his, required time and the utmost care and precision.  None of which, of course, were afforded him when Kett shot their shuttle out of the sky and it was either burning to death in his stasis pod, or being dragged out to risk severe stasis sickness and, well, his own brain killing him.  Out of the frying pan, he supposed.  The seizures, at least, had stopped for the most part, and the migraines were starting to retreat back to their somewhat bearable pre-cryo level.  He shot a begrudging glance at the old white cane leaning in a corner; it had gleefully been abandoned there for a week now, but he tasted a lingering bitterness in his mouth at having ever relied on it at all.

“And what do you mean, ‘all this’?”

“This!”  Unable to focus on a single thing to point out, he threw his hands into the air, the haphazard flailing motions encompassing everything a simple explanation could not.  The armor littering the floor, the few things they owned or inherited from the shack’s previous owner in perfect order yet somehow in complete disarray, the busted helmet that should never have been his sister’s face to begin with.

“I hate that you have to stick your neck out and do shit like this because of me.  That’s not your job, Reggie, it’s mine.”  

Her face fell in a deadpan straightness as she cocked her head to one side.  Oliver felt like a petulant child in a history vid, wailing that, in running herself ragged to keep him alive, his sister had stolen his birthright.  What jabbed at him the most, though, wasn’t that it was his little sister instead of himself who hid her face and played sidekick to a smuggler for his sake; it was the fact that, if necessary, she’d do far worse.

“You and Reyes...this arrangement you have with him has done a lot for us, and I appreciate it, I do,” he began, in a half-assed attempt to be reassuring, “but...it’s not worth sitting up wondering if tonight’s the night he gets my baby sister killed.”

She knit her brows together, and her chest and shoulders rose in unison as she inhaled sharply through her nose and growled through her teeth.  “Seriously, Ollie?”

“Yes, Regina, seriously!  What if you’re not so lucky next time?  What if next time it’s your skull and not your helmet?”  

Thanks to a cursedly vivid imagination, his hypothetical scenario felt very, very real.  Too real.  It was lucky.  Any time he saw her could easily be the last, and her huff of haughty dismissal did little to ease his mind.  

“You’re all I have left, kiddo.  I can’t lose you too.”

His hands came to rest on her shoulders.  She stared piquedly up at him before she relaxed, and curled one hand around his.  That was Reggie, though, wasn’t it?  Laughing in the face of things that could kill her on a whim and charging headlong into things she couldn’t be sure she could charge away from?  Well, she would be sure, at least.  ‘I can’t’, in that context, didn’t exist in her vocabulary.

“I promise, Ollie.  It was nothing,” she replied, a hint of a fond smile pulling over her face.  “Reyes wanted me to go get some drunk out of his room at Tartarus, and they got a little feisty.”

She puffed out a half-assed giggle as she spoke.  Oliver bit at his lip; pain in the ass kid never took anything seriously.  

“I’d call that more than ‘a little feisty’.”  

If the stony frown that fell over Reggie’s face was any indication, his flippant tone failed miserably to convince her it was anything other than a smokescreen.

“Okay, look.  I can fucking handle this shit, okay?” she spat, stepping backwards out of his hands and leaning indignantly against the crate.  “Stop acting like it’s the end of the goddamned universe because Reyes asked me to go drag beans out of a fucking bar.”

With a roll of her eyes, she shoved off of the crate and paced around the room, head down and hands on her hips.  Oliver rubbed at the back of his neck; the headaches never really went away, but they sure as hell spread down to his neck and shoulders when Reggie said stupid shit like that.  A practical amount of caution was prudent, if anything, given their situation, and if dragging beans out of a bar for Reyes meant she came home with a gigantic dent in her helmet, it was more than…

Wait…

Something about that phrase was...familiar.  It poked blindly at his memory, like someone trying to find a keyhole in a dark room.  Irritating, to be sure, but resolute, sure he’d figure it out if he just kept trying.  His eyes found her once more, narrowed into slits and staring beams through her skull.  

“...what did you just say?”

Reggie made a face.  “What?”

“Just now, what did you say?”

“‘What’?” she replied, mocking him by waving her hands next to her head.  Oliver only rolled his eyes.

“Come on, I’m being serious.  You said you had to drag ‘beans’ out of a bar.”

“Yeah, a dead-weighted person?  A sack of beans?”

He raised an incredulous eyebrow, and cleared his throat with a gruff hack.  “Yeah, Reg, you’ve never used that analogy in your life.  In fact, the only person you’ve ever referred to as ‘Beans’ is...is…”

No.  It couldn’t be.  

He raised his head, eyes round, simultaneously hoping for and dreading confirmation.

“Sara.”

And there it was, in the minute tics at the corners of Reggie’s eyes and mouth, and the way the words hung in her mouth.  His heart started to race, and he clenched a fist, symbolically grasping the revelation.  

Shit...she’s here.  Sara’s here.  They made it.

“It’s been over a year, Ollie.  Sara’s dead.  They’re all dead.  The ark’s gone.”

Oliver’s breath caught in his throat, and heat flushed through his cheeks.  He'd seen that look on his sister’s face a thousand-no, thousands of times before.  Well, he'd observed it.  It was a look she gave everyone else to puppy-eye them into believing every word she said, and it always melted away the moment she was alone with him again.  Now that he was the look’s recipient, however, he wondered at just how she’d managed to avoid getting her ass knocked out for it.

She lied, right to his fucking face.

There had to be some reason, some explanation.  Sara didn't get drunk enough to need dragged away from anywhere without cause, so something must've happened.  Was she marooned here?  A fight with her dad?  Exiled herself, perhaps?  

No, no way.  Internally, Sara was as much at odds with her father as Reggie was, but where Reggie made no secret of it and could barely be in the same room with the man without trying to bite his head off over one thing or another, Sara kept it to herself.  She played by the rules.  Besides, if she was exiled from the Initiative, there's no reason Reggie would've dragged her anywhere other than back here.  She was in Reyes’s room at Tartarus, so maybe...no, definitely not that.  Even then, Reggie would think it was too funny not to tell him about it.  

No, there was only one reason he could think of that she'd want him to think Sara was dead, a stupid and infuriatingly selfish reason that only made his lip curl harder.

She was happy playing outlaw on Kadara, and if Sara was alive, there’d be no reason to stay.

Oliver remained silent long enough that Reggie’s shoulders started to relax, and she adopted a kind half-smile that served as an apologetic gesture of sorts.  That the Hyperion was lost, all of the Initiative’s plans had gone to shit, and no one else was coming was an unspoken consensus between them, accepted as fact but never uttered out loud. In truth, he said nothing not because of what she said, but because there was too much he wanted to say.  The words stuck in a gaggle in his mind, too frantic to organize themselves enough to be manageable.  

A dull throbbing manifested at the base of his skull, and he could feel the hairs there start to stand on end with the threat of rising biotic energy.  Great.  He wasn't glowing yet, at least, but he drew out his next inhale in hopes it wouldn't get to that point.  Glowing would hurt.  Anything more than that might kill him.

When she reached forward to place a reassuring hand on his arm, he scoffed, and heaved the only word he could get past his lips:

“Wow…”

Reggie sighed and pursed her lips to one side.  

“Hey, I know it’s bullshit, but-”

‘Bullshit’ was a vast oversimplification.  Oliver closed his eyes and threw one hand up in front of her face, the other clenched into a fist at his hip.  This ended now.

“See, this is exactly what I’m talking about,” he interrupted, centering his eyes on hers so there could be no doubt in her mind how painfully serious he was.  “I know every lie you’ve ever told, but not one of them has ever, ever been to me.”

His skin was bathed in pins and needles.  The thought raced through his mind like a gremlin, grabbing and nagging and clawing through every attempt he made to block it.

She lied, she lied, she lied, she fucking lied...

“This work, these people you’re dealing with...it’s changing you.”

Blood pounded through his neck and in his wrists, both of his fists clenched now, desperately holding on to the last bits of control he had.  Despite the spearing pain at the realization that he’d never, ever had to preface a question to her this way, he had to ask.  He had to know.  He had to hear her say it.

“Tell me the truth, Reggie.  Sara’s alive, isn’t she?”

She wouldn’t even say the word.  She just stood there, twitching her head up and down in the tiniest nod she could possibly have managed.

God damn it, Reggie.  God damn it.

“How long?” he muttered under his breath, despite knowing full well he wouldn’t be able to keep his biotics at bay if he did.    

She shifted on her feet a little, too stubborn to break eye contact but too...what, ashamed? To maintain it.  It came out in a look that was both sinister, angry at him for figuring her out, and infuriatingly sheepish.  She should be sheepish.  Embarrassed.  Of all her answers in this conversation, he was going to like this one the least.  This one was going to hurt.

“A month, maybe.”

Fuck.

The pins and needles became tiny stings, steadily intensifying and radiating in all directions, setting his skin ablaze while leaving his insides impossibly cold, as if all the heat was being sucked out of him through the dark purple corona that erupted around him as the last of his control slipped away.

“Hey, wh…” Reggie gasped, throwing her arms towards him in a near panic, “Stop, okay?  You'll hurt yourself!”

It did hurt.  

It burned.  It stung.  It coursed through him, sped up his heart and breathing while seeming to slowly rip the very fibers of his muscles apart, pressing outward in excruciating throbs inside his skull, tearing his skin to pieces as if he’d explode if he let it go on much longer.  

And that was only the biotics.  The chorus in his mind continued, prodding and squeezing, crushing him to dust with every refrain.

She lied.  She lied.  She lied.

“Hey!”

Reggie managed to roar louder than his thoughts, and it jarred him enough to dissipate much of the energy, leaving him with only the familiar pins and needles again.  Things were bearable, for now.  She grabbed him by the arms and looked him over, seemingly relieved and satisfied he wouldn’t be in a coma anytime soon.

The chorus remained.  It wasn’t enough.  It wasn’t enough, and he couldn’t let it slide.  Not this time.  

He tore backwards out of her arms and to the footlocker next to his bed.  Inside was a rucksack, and a piecemeal set of armor scavenged from dead outlaws.  He filled the rucksack with what little was left, and set about strapping the armor over his clothes.     

“Ollie, what the fuck?” Reggie protested.  He stormed past her, heaving the rucksack over one shoulder, and opened his omni-tool to access the door.  She feigned disinterest at first, but her voice trembled in desperation a little more with each press of a button.  

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Oliver closed his omni-tool to the tune of the lock mechanism whirring open.  As the panels separated and the blue-tinged landscape of early morning Kadara coalesced between them, he turned towards his sister once more, shifted the rucksack again, and straightened his back with a resolute stare.

“The port.  I’m going to find her.”

[anavoliselenu]

Hiched chapter 18

I grit my teeth. “It wasn’t like that.” Except, fuck, it was. I’m the world’s biggest asshole.

“You’re in deep shit, Justin. Not even your magical nine-inch strawberry-flavored dick is going to save you this time.”

“Yeah,” I mumble. “Got it.”

“Good luck.”

I end the call and double-check the directions. Camryn was no help, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll be there soon enough, and I will get my woman back.

I hit the gas pedal and zip off down the road, that much closer to whatever the future holds.

• • •

When I pull into the circular driveway in front of a freaking mansion built into the side of a mountain, I do a double-take to make sure I have the right address. Sure as shit, whoever this David is, he lives in a fucking ski resort, by the looks of it. And based on the lack of cars in the drive, I’m wondering if he and Selena have the place all to themselves . . . and how they’ve been keeping busy.

Climbing the front steps, I brace myself for what I might find inside. But before I can knock, the large glass door swings open and Selena’s standing at the threshold with a pissed-off glare in her eyes.

“I can’t believe you,” she barks and then storms away.

I follow her inside, taking note of the cozy cabin-chic decor and the gourmet kitchen with a rustic barnwood table for ten. “Selena, I—”

She stops in front of a massive stone fireplace that rises to the beamed vaulted ceiling. “Using my father’s health as a bargaining chip,” she scoffs. “Is nothing off-limits with you?” Her posture is stiff, but I can see her hands trembling.

“I’m sorry about that.”

She rolls her eyes. “I called him the second we hung up. He was at home resting, said he was totally fine.” Her gaze drops for a second. “Well, not fine. But nothing’s changed.”

I step closer to take her shaking hands in mine. “When shit hits the fan, you run. It’s what you do. It’s what you did when we were first presented with the contract. Then again at our wedding when Brad blackmailed you. And now, when I fucked up. Real couples don’t run from their problems. We have to work on this together, and that means talking it out.”

She yanks her hands away. “Great, I’m all ears. I can’t wait to hear how you’re going to talk your way out of this one.”

I hear footsteps behind us, and watch Selena’s expression turn neutral as her eyes track who I assume must be David. Fighting off a smirk, I turn around.

David looks to be our age, with shaggy brown hair and a pleasant grin on his face. “Hey. Sorry to interrupt.” He turns up his palms. “I’m David. Justin, I assume?”

“The one and only. Did you enjoy my wife?”

His grin vanishes as his eyes narrow. “I don’t know what you’re implying, but Selena is an old friend from college. When she called needing a place to crash away from the city for a few days, I opened my door to her.”

Selena’s hand on my shoulder stops me. “Don’t be a dick, Justin. I don’t know if I’m even going to be your wife after this.”

My gut twists and I swallow down a lump in my throat. “Fine. But it’s time to go.” I have zero interest in hanging around with her pal in his mansion.

She crosses the room, without the argument I expected, and gives David a hug and a kiss on the cheek. They speak in hushed tones, and after he gives her a final hug, she heads for the front door, ignoring me completely.

I follow behind her, giving David a curt nod.

I’m afraid it’s going to be a long, silent drive back to the city.

And for the first fifteen minutes, it is. We speed down the highway, the only sound the quiet hum of the air-conditioning. Miles tick past and Selena sits motionless beside me, staring straight ahead at the taillights of the car in front of us, making a point of neither looking at me nor avoiding me. The subtle scent of her vanilla honeysuckle perfume teases me from the passenger seat.

I’m still pissed off, still unsure how to proceed. There’s no manual for how to be a good husband, and I’ve fucked up plenty. But my heart is in the right place. Still, it hurts more than I thought possible that she ran off to some other guy for comfort.

“Did you fuck him?” I finally blurt, cutting through the silence.

She tenses. “What?” Then she turns toward the passenger window, not letting me see her face. “Don’t be an idiot.”

“Did. You. Fuck. Him,” I repeat, my hands tightening on the wheel.

“You have no right to that information.” Under her breath, she adds, “Just as you had no right to my uterus.”

“Fucking hell I do.”

Her head suddenly whips around. “What if I did? Would that piss you off? What if I said that he licked my pussy and fucked me until I screamed his name?”

My foot jams the brake. I haul the car over to the side of the two-lane highway. I slam my fists against the steering wheel and inhale angry breaths, my nostrils flaring.

“Goddammit, Selena.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re mad at me?” She scoffs aloud, crossing her arms over her chest. “You have some fucking nerve, you know that?”

“You ran to another man for comfort, Snowflake. How am I supposed to feel? I’m your husband.”

A bitter laugh that sounds more like a yelp bursts from her lips. “Some husband. Do I need to remind you of all the various ways you’ve fucked up within the past forty-eight hours?”

I hold up one hand. “Please don’t. I’m miserable, Snowflake. You can’t possibly know how sorry I am.”

Something flashes in her eyes and for just a second I see . . . sympathy? But then it’s gone, replaced by her steely reserve. And that’s the precise moment I know I’m fucked. It’s one thing to imagine how she was feeling, but it’s quite another to see the hurt still burning in her eyes, to hear the venom in her voice. This isn’t going to be easy.

“Were you really going to do it? Get me pregnant without including me in the decision?”

I swallow and loosen my grip on the wheel. “I’m not going to lie to you. The thought crossed my mind. But then I knew I couldn’t. Wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did something like that.”

“And when I caught you in the bathroom?”

“It was a moment of confusion. Weakness. Desperation. I promise you, I wouldn’t have gone through with it.”

She nods once, then looks down at her hands. “Just take me home.”

“I have somewhere better in mind.”

• • •

When I roll to a stop in front of the Cane family estate outside the city, Selena unbuckles her seat belt and climbs from the car without a word. I called Fred on my way here and asked him and Prescott for a quick meeting.

Fred’s standing in the foyer. As we approach, he shifts nervously.

“Hi, Dad,” Selena says, giving him a brief hug. She might be pissed off at him too, but he’s a sick old man, and her father. Something tells me her forgiveness will come a lot quicker for him than for me.

Fred tips his head toward the study. “Go have a seat. Prescott and I will be right there.”

As we head toward his office, I swallow the last of my pride because I know this conversation is going to be a difficult one. I’ve taken advantage of Fred’s trust in me—tricked his little girl. I feel about two inches tall.

We take our seats at opposing ends of the mahogany table and settle in to wait.

Selena’s gaze cuts over to mine. “Why in the world were you fucking me with condoms if you were supposed to get me pregnant?” she hisses.

“Because it was what you wanted.” My voice is soft and Selena’s eyes are wary, like she wants to understand my true motivations. I hate this part of our relationship. I hate that I lied to her, and that I don’t know how to fix it. “You asked to begin a physical relationship. Of course I wanted that too, but you were in the driver’s seat. I tried to give you what you wanted. And as far as getting you pregnant without your consent, I never could have gone through with it.”

Her mouth turns down into a frown. Now she doesn’t look angry so much as confused. She stares at the platinum wedding band on her left hand, turning it over and over while we wait.

Chapter Three

Selena

Prescott arrives about ten minutes later and takes the seat next to Dad. We’re evenly spaced around the conference table, as if nobody wants to get too close to anyone else.

I used to play in Dad’s study as a child, under this very table. Its familiar mahogany surface is smooth and cool beneath my clammy palms. With every slight move of my hand, my wedding band ticks against the polished hardwood like a clock. Counting up or counting down, I’m not sure. I’m even less sure about why I haven’t taken off that damn ring and thrown it in the Hudson River.

With us four the only attendees, the atmosphere should be relaxed; we’re family, after all, with the exception of Prescott. But it’s even stiffer and stuffier than a typical business meeting. I can’t quite look any of these men in the eye—especially Justin. Every time I try, my emotions start roiling again, threatening to spill over, churning so ferociously that I can’t even tell what I’m feeling. I shouldn’t have sat across from him, but the alternative would be going near him.

The way Justin finagled a chance to talk to me today, when I’d already made it clear I didn’t want to talk, I still can’t believe he had the balls to do that. I was already ultra-pissed at him for hiding the truth about the heir clause. Telling me that Dad was on death’s door was just piling lies upon lies. Did he really think that more deceit would help his case?

I saw right through his plan, of course, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is how deep Justin seems determined to dig himself. (Although I couldn’t help but be a little insulted by the obviousness of his lie. How stupid does he think I am? I called my father the second we hung up.)

And then to top it all off, he started interrogating me the instant he set foot in David’s place, accusing me of letting all sorts of strange penises into my vagina. What the fuck? He acted like I was the one who’d done something wrong and needed to account for my behavior. Even if I had screwed David, my sex life wasn’t Justin’s business anymore. He forfeited all husbandly rights the instant he chose to conceal my own inevitable pregnancy from me.

He didn’t even tell me anything when he barged in. He just kept insisting that he’d never do anything to my body without my consent—totally contradicting the scene I stumbled into that night—and bitching about how much his regrets hurt. I could tell that he was genuinely sorry about damaging my trust, but that didn’t mean my trust wasn’t still damaged. I wasn’t going to forgive his stupid, selfish decisions just because they backfired on him. The asshole made his bed, and now he can lie in it . . . far, far away from me.

Although, speaking of bed, one thing he said did give me pause. When I asked him why we were using condoms if he was trying to knock me up, I was struck by the plain way he said, “Because that’s what you wanted.” As if the reason was obvious. As if my wishes, my desires, were his first priority. I’m still not sure what to make of that, in the context of everything else that’s happened lately.

And somehow, despite all my anger and hurt and suspicion, I found myself agreeing to come back for an emergency meeting with him and Dad and Prescott. Temporarily, mind you, just to try putting this mess behind me . . . but still. How does that man always persuade me? How does one look into his intense dark eyes always end with me believing in him?

Maybe I was just sick of always running away from disasters. Justin had hit a nerve with that comment. One way or another, I wanted closure. A definite end to this story, leaving no room for regrets or second guesses later on down the road. Closure.

Whatever my reason was, I got in Justin’s car. I let him drag me down from that Catskills retreat and back to civilization. And two hours of driving later, I’m sitting here in the house I grew up in—where I have no choice but to stare our problem in the face.

I do my best to push down my feelings and find the cool, rational mindset I work best in. Now isn’t the time to wallow in negative emotions. I can’t let my confusion and anger and sadness run away with me . . . yet again. Justin arranged this meeting to get everything out in the open and everyone on the same page. If all goes well, we might even be able to start straightening out this mess. I can wait until I’m back in my own private space to scream or cry or tear my hair out, or whatever the hell my wounded heart desires.

Except I don’t have my own space anymore. Shit, I almost forgot. What are we going to do about that little issue? Unless I want to kick Justin out of the penthouse, or rent a hotel room for the foreseeable future, I’ll have to see him every night. I’ll have to deal with his puppy-dog eyes following me around the room, silently begging me to understand his side of the story and accept his apology. I’ll have to see his handsome face, feel the warmth of his toned body, when I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to let him touch me again. We’ll have to keep living together in our marital home . . . when I’m feeling anything but wifely.

Dad interrupts my dour thoughts by getting the ball rolling. “Justin filled me in on the phone about what’s happened the past couple days,” he begins.

Oh, great. Even though this is what we’ve come here to discuss, I hope Justin didn’t provide too much detail. Tight-lipped, I nod at Dad to continue. “And your thoughts are?”

His bushy, graying eyebrows fly up. “I’m appalled, of course! I’m so sorry things ended up like this. Neither Bill nor I ever meant to deceive you.”

“Then how did this happen?” I ask. “Why was this weird pregnancy stuff even in his will in the first place? How did it end up in the inheritance contract?”

Dad clasps his hands tightly together where they rest on the table, and gazes at me with an earnest, almost pleading look. “We added the heir clause into our wills on a whim. We both wanted grandchildren . . . it was our fondest wish to see you two kids together, and the family you’d build for yourselves one day. We figured you’d fight us on that point and we’d just cross out the whole thing. It was wishful thinking.”

“But Bill Tate died sooner than anyone expected,” Prescott explains, “so the heir clause slipped into his will unseen and unchallenged. And after that point, it had to be included in the inheritance contract.”

“Jesus, this thing got passed around like a bad penny,” Justin murmurs.

I make a point of ignoring him. “But surely we could have done something. Asked a judge if he could rule that clause unenforceable and declare a partial revocation . . .” Or at least find some loophole or tricky way of fulfilling it that didn’t involve me actually getting pregnant.

“Yes, we could have looked for other options,” Prescott says. “I would have worked with you to find an alternative solution if either of you had objected.”

Dad leans forward. “But when you didn’t, I was a little surprised but I figured you must be okay with it since you’d signed the contract.”

That was Justin’s argument too. I groan internally at the reminder that I signed without reading every last word.

“And I thought, heck, maybe they’ll have fun trying to get pregnant. It would keep both your minds off the failing company.” Dad sighs heavily, the lines of age and fatigue and regret etched deep into his face. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I meant this inheritance to bring you together and make you happy, not tear you apart and make you miserable. I feel terrible, like Bill and I both failed our children.”

I swallow around the sudden lump in my throat. “But how did you know? How were you so certain that pairing us off like this was the right thing to do?”

“Because it’s always been obvious that you two were meant for each other. You’ve been in love all along. Ever since you first met, when you were three years old and he was five.” Dad’s expression lifts into a slight, fond smile. “And your mothers agreed. All four of us knew our children . . . we could read the signs.”

“Mom? She thought this was a good idea too?” I blurt.

“If I remember correctly, she might have even been the one to suggest it.”

Stunned, I blink. All along I assumed that this arranged marriage was only concocted by our fathers. Are our entire families just fucking nuts? Or . . . were they on to something? Four people, two of whom ran a multibillion-dollar international company, couldn’t all be wrong . . .

Prescott looks almost as uncomfortable as I feel. He probably didn’t come here prepared to be drop-kicked into the middle of an emotional battleground.

“Even as toddlers, you two were inseparable,” Dad continues. “Literally, on some occasions. You fought like cats and dogs, yet somehow ended up laughing and playing happily five minutes later. You always wanted to sit together whenever we sat down for a meal or a movie or anything like that. And if we tried to move you . . .” Dad chuckles. “Oh, the tantrums we’d get! When we went to the water park for your fourth birthday, Selena, Bill tried to take Justin to the men’s room and you both nearly had a conniption. Your mothers had to take you together to the women’s and you held hands under the wall between stalls.”

What? How have I never heard this story before?

And more importantly, how is this relevant?

“That was over twenty years ago,” I protest. “I hardly see what it has to do with us now.”

From the pinched expression on Prescott’s face, he agrees with me. Neither of us expected a trip down memory lane.

But once Dad gets started rambling, he can’t be stopped. “Oh, but I’ve got dozens of great stories about you two. The first time our families vacationed at the beach together—all the summers before then, you were still too young to travel far from home—Justin accidentally sat on your sand castle and you started crying, so he built you a new one and found a starfish to decorate it.”

“I think I actually remember that,” Justin muses. “And you gave me your ice cream when I dropped mine.”

“Here’s one you might have been old enough to remember. Selena, on your first day of elementary school, some boy was hassling you on the playground, and Justin punched him right in the kisser. Bought himself a one-way ticket straight to the principal’s office. And he marched the whole way there with a smile on his face, happy to take whatever punishment he was given. For you.”

Now that Dad mentions it, I do remember this story. I guess some things never change. That exact same scenario—Justin rushing to my defense—has played out with Brad not once, but twice recently. And he’d do just about anything for Rosita too. Justin still has the same strong sense of justice, the same streak of protective compassion.

He just cares so much about people. And he approaches life from his gut, not his head. That hot-blooded quality is something that I’ve come to appreciate, as a fresh perspective in the workplace, charm in an unconventional romance, and a sexy rush in bed. It’s not that I don’t care about people; it’s just easier for me to set aside my emotions in order to think clearly, whereas Justin feels so fiercely that he can never escape their pull.

From the way he talked about our duty to Tate & Cane, it was clear that the thought of laying off our employees ate him up inside. Bad enough, I guess, to paralyze him, to bar him from telling me the truth until desperation broke him free.

But that doesn’t change anything. Doesn’t erase his lies or heal my wounded trust. His general depth of feeling or capacity for caring isn’t the issue on the table here. If he really cared about me specifically, he wouldn’t have hidden the truth for so long and then scared the hell out of me that night. He could be the best man in the world to run this company and still be the wrong man for me.

“Don’t forget what happened the next day,” Justin says, unaware of my racing thoughts. “That same kid made fun of me for getting in trouble—when he got off scot-free, the little shit—so Selena kicked him in the giblets and went to the principal’s office too.”

Dad bursts out laughing. “Really? I never heard that one. I guess Susie kept a few secrets from me after all.” He inclines his head at me. “But that only proves my point. At the first hint of someone messing with him, you came running, ready to teach them a lesson.”

How weird. I must have cooled down with age . . . because the only other explanation is that I’m more similar to Justin than I thought.

“That’s hardly the only time she’s saved me.” Justin turns his affectionate smile to me, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners, and I just can’t look away. “I’d wait until the last minute to start school projects, then panic and beg you for help, and you’d roll your eyes and scold me, but you always gave me advice and checked my work. I don’t even know how many times—”

“I can give you an estimate,” I remark dryly. “It was about fifteen, maybe twenty.”

“I admit, I had my head up my ass until after I graduated from high school,” Justin says with a sigh.

“Only until then? That’s not how it seemed to me.”

Justin turns up his palms with a shrug. “Okay, fine, after college. But who doesn’t?”

Dad interjects, “You had your silly moments too, sweetheart. When Justin first started dating—you were twelve, I think—you were so irritable for months. Out of nowhere, you would start ranting about how ‘I don’t care about that stupid jerk, he can do whatever he wants’ when no one in the room had suggested otherwise. Or even brought up the subject at all, for that matter.”

My cheeks flame red as Justin starts laughing. “D-dad . . .” I squawk.

“Oh my God, that’s perfect.” Justin chuckles. “I can just picture it. It’s exactly what you would do.”

I glare at him, still blushing. “Shut up.”

“But he made up for it,” Dad says. “For your fifteenth birthday, he gave you a framed picture of the first hundred digits of pi, written in binary.”

Now it’s Justin’s turn to go a little pink. “Jesus, that was so dumb. I just figured, hey, she likes numbers and math and stuff, right?”

I shake my head. “No, I loved it. It’s still hanging in my room upstairs.”

He blinks. “Really? You kept that stupid present? I’m surprised you even remember it.”

“It wasn’t stupid. And of course I remember.” Realizing how mushy that sounds, I hurriedly add, “That was the night you totaled your first car on our way to the country club, and I offered to walk with you so you wouldn’t feel weird. But then we ended up waiting for a bus because I didn’t realize how hard it would be to walk five miles in high heels. I was an hour and a half late for my own birthday party.”

“But do you regret spending that time?” Justin asks, his eyebrows raised playfully.

“I sure as hell regret trying to dance the tango with you afterward. My feet hurt just thinking about it.”

Although I also remember the breezy, full-moon summer night, Justin smiling at me, my friends being jealous that I’d made a dramatic entrance with such a handsome senior who didn’t even go to our school . . .

“Speaking of gifts,” Dad says, “what about the time when you were in third grade and Justin gave you a set of diamond-and-platinum earrings? You didn’t even have pierced ears yet. And then it turned out that Justin had ‘borrowed’ them from his mother’s jewelry box.”

Prescott clears his throat impatiently. “Not to interrupt, but could we get back to discussing the contract?”

Wait, he’s right. What the hell am I doing? We’re here to talk about the heir clause and how to salvage our inheritance. How did I get sucked into family-story hour? I’m reminiscing about my past relationship with Justin when what matters is our company’s future.

I shake my head as if I can dislodge all this silly nostalgia. “I agree with Prescott. Why are we talking about this stuff? We’re not here to sing ‘Kumbaya’ and share cute anecdotes. We’re here to clean up a serious mess . . . a mess that you had a lot to do with, in case you forgot.”

And with that, the slowly lightening mood plunges back into grave silence.

“I wouldn’t have phrased my objection in quite those words,” Prescott says after an awkward second, trying to be delicate.

“You asked how Bill and I knew you two were meant for each other,” Dad says gently.

Abruptly I stand up, pushing out my chair with a squeak of wheels. I can’t do this right now. I wanted to, but I just fucking can’t. My brain won’t work with Dad and Justin looking at me. I have to get out of here if I want any hope of sorting out my own feelings and figuring out what I want to do next . . . assuming I can even do anything at all.

I tamp down my instinct to apologize for making the atmosphere tense, for cutting our meeting short, for everything. I’m not the one who screwed up here—Justin is.

Instead, I just mutter, “Excuse me. I have a lot to think about.”

And with that, I turn and leave Dad’s study, my head buzzing so loudly I can’t hear whether anyone calls after me.

Chapter Four

Justin

“Can you pass me the orange juice?”

Those are the first words Selena’s spoken to me in days. Ever since the confrontation in her father’s study, she’s been as cold and icy as ever. Not that I can blame her. I did try to conquer and pillage her uterus like it was my own private jungle gym.

“Here you go.” I hand her the carton across the counter. She’s seated at the breakfast bar with her laptop and bagel while I’m at the stove frying an egg.

It’s our first weekend back home together since everything went down, and I still have no idea where we stand or what to do to win her back.

Instead of brainstorming about how to right this mess, the meeting with her father turned into a sweet reminiscing session, which Selena promptly shut down.

“The gala’s tonight,” I comment, sliding the lone egg onto a plate. Weeks ago when we RSVP’d, it was assumed that we were attending the charity banquet together—with Selena as my plus one, my partner in crime. Sure, it was a work event, but there’d be dinner, champagne, and dancing. It was a date, for all intents and purposes.

“Yup,” is all she says, her eyes still on her laptop screen.

“Okay. I have a car coming at seven.”

“I’ll be ready,” she says coolly.

She’ll play the part well—doting wife, professional CEO, happy banquet-goer. Her mask will be firmly in place tonight. My goal will be to break through the facade.

“See you then.”

I grab my keys from the counter and head out. No way I’m sticking around in her deafening silence today. I’ve said my apologies, groveled to her, even included her father in the conversation, and she’s still holding on to anger.

That’s her choice. From this point onward, we’ll either work this out and make it as a couple—or not. The ball’s in her court.

• • •

“So this is how one of Manhattan’s best attorneys lives? Nice place.” I stand in the center of Sterling’s newly renovated studio apartment in the heart of Manhattan, appraising the recent remodel.

“It should be for what I paid, but thank you.”

Sterling purchased the top floor of a historic building that was undergoing renovations more than six months ago. By the time he finished gutting the entire thing, it boasted a modern kitchen, brand-new bathroom, sleek polished wood floors, and cool neutral colors on the walls. It’s decorated well with pieces of art and stacks of coffee-table books and even some patterned throw pillows on the slate-gray sofa, but it’s not feminine. Just well put together, like it’s had a woman’s touch. It makes me miss home.