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dairy-farmer · 7 months

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Back at it again, with me haunting your ask box~ ,(^○^)/

But? I think I cracked it. The kink code for my current writing phase! Distilled for purity and ready to be shipped! Lol Is a combo of service tops, overstimulation, and toys. But how do these fine fruits come together in a wine, you may ask? Glad ya did!

May I present to you o/~~☆ : The Pollen Kink. 🎉🎊🎉🎊🎉

But What 🤔 Is this marvelous invention? I hear you ask, in your smart and sexy voices! How smart and sexy of you! Why, thanks to our dear friend Dr. Pamela Isely? Pollen can be anything from a Fuck-Or-Die powder to a Hallucinogenic Fuck Powder! Something to ride out while helpless and emotionally vulnerable. It depends on the plants she has and her mood!

But WAIT! There's MORE! You may be asking? How does this terrifying and marvelous powder become a kink? Why, it's simple my dear friends!

You simply need to have the emotional vulnerability of a brick wall, equal communication skill, AND routinely agitated the good Doctor! You'll be Pollened in no time!

Thus? As, say, a local Caped Crusader? You'll have to create Counter Measures! Now, we'd all LIKE to think we can just jab our selves with a counter-agent and skip along our way, after being hit by the good Doctor's creation, but this is simply Not So! While such counter-agent agents exsist, they are medically QUITE harsh on the body! To many back to back risks the liver and kidneys!

It's medically? Not recommended to USE such agents unless you test positive for one of the lethal strains! And even then, you'll be in for at LEAST an hour of "discomfort" as it were.

Now! Show of hands 🤚🤚🤚 ! Who here knows how we used to treat "female hysteria"? I see some dots connecting 😃😘😏! Now, AS a Batman? (For there are many.) What do you DO when you've been hit? Punish yourself. Obviously. You have deep, DEEP seated issues! Pleasure? In THIS good Bat themed Cave? Absolutely not!

But it CHANGES when you introduce your SONS, doesn't it? Do THEY deserve to suffer? To hurt? Of course not! But... how... EXACTLY? Can you HELP? Touch Them??? You'd sooner set fire to both your hands. But! They would be SUFFERING! But Bad Touch(tm)! But-!

And then it occurs to you! Machines. THEY can control what THEY feel comfortable with and need! Oh thank god! No conversations needed. And it mostly works! Yes, there are terrifying moments where it does not, but that is solved with a jab of counter-agent. With bundling your son up in blankets and ignoring the frantic movements of their hands. Being there for them, when they are scared. No different to fear toxin.

It sets a precedent... don't it~ Isn't Superhero life such a mess? If only you had all TALKED about this. But~ it is what it is~~

Because Jason dies. Robin number 3 comes crashing into your life. He is clearly a he and you're trying to ignore him. Why do an indepth medical? Or even check his current medical files? THAT certainly won't haunt you! Oh? Ivy's having a girls night? Time to suit up! Aaaaaand?

Well shit. Congratulations on entry to the "I want to punch Ivy in the dick she doesn't have" Club! Tim has been hit by Pollen~

Bruce, awkwardly explains protocol as he runs the standard "does it need a needle jab?" Test. Tim is getting hornier and honier. He squirms, nods to Batman, goes to check The Box Robin's Don't Talk About(tm). Dead silence. Longer dead silence. A sniffle. Bruce doesn't want to be here. But Would Not abandon ANYONE in such distress. No matter his complicated feelings about them. He sighs and walks over.

Does Tim need help understanding what they are? Or is he overwhelmed?

Then the devastating blow Bruce will not recover from. Big, teary eyes turn to him. Shoulders curling in when they usual square so defiant and bold. A tiny trembling voice. These all require a... a... he doesn't HAVE a...

And Bruce is not a stupid man. His eyes dart to the box, back to his miserable and apparently TRANS sidekick. He's fucked up. Tim is CRYING. Bruce Does The Panic(tm). Thankfully DOESNT blurt out anything stupid. Small miracles. He nods. See? He is accepting and supporting you in this time of vulnerability, doing a Mentor. Not panicking in the slightest as he digs through the box. He's NOT.

He finds one with a vibrating component. Uses a near by set of tools to break the bead vibrator free. Tim has curled in on himself. A miserable little ball on the floor. Bruce is still Not Panicking. About to hand the vibrator over when... his paranoid little brain drop kicks him. Power slam! Straight from the high bar!

What if this sets off a bout of disphoria? Or Tim refuses to use it out of fear of being perceived as feminine? Does he even know HOW to use this? What if it sparks or was rendered unsafe because removing it from the toy it was attached to, made it no longer water proof somehow? Would be be cognizant enough to STOP before he seriously hurt himself? The toy stays gripped, dangling like a noose from his hand.

Tim is making the sniffling little huffs of a someone about to burst into tears. Bruce changes his plans. There... IS a precedent... sorta. And most importantly? Someone NEEDS him. Needs help. He strides over and scoops up his miserable Robin. Who blinks at him with DEVASTATINGLY effective, teary doe eyes.

It's quick work to change them out. Throw an oversized shit on Tim. Then he's up in his room with a pile of blankets. Guest rooms would have been better but... it felt WRONG somehow. And Tim doesn't HAVE a room to take him back too. Not like Dick or Jason. He should fix that. But first? The softest blanket he has. To separate them. So it's... less wrong...

Wraps himself like safety and security around his Robin. He's here. He's gonna make it okay. Gonna make the fire under your skin STOP. He hesitates... but then turns on the bead... slips him hand between those legs. Finds that little virgin clit. Holds Tim as he jerks and sobs and orgasms, again and again. Murmurs soothing words and praise. Feels the wets against his fingers. The way he gets warm and boneless and shake-y in his arms.

He tries not to notice how... GOOD it feels. To take care of someone like this. To do nothing but make them feel good. Make them feel WANTED and SAFE and to be so completely, utterly trusted. To CREATE something purely good in the world. Like whiping away some of the hurt. And... and not having to drop HIS gaurd to do it. No nakedness. No messy, physical vulnerability.

Just the sweet, warm glow of intamcy. The after glow. Like being a cat, basking in sunlight.

Yes, he CERTAINLY makes no notice of that. Nope! He is WELL versed in denial! But if he does more RESEARCH then you would expect? To expand the Ivy Exposure Box? That's his business.

Except... EXCEPT! Fate is LAUGHING at him. Ivy keeps getting OUT. Tim apparently can't dodge for SHIT but ONLY and SPECIFICALLY when Ivy is involved. Worse, the NEW variant of the Pollen makes you... needy. Causes actual near physical pain if you are not being touched. Cuddled. Held. It's apparently to help speed the whole process along. Bruce may personally strangle Isely himself.

There is ALSO a lose of coordination added, thanks to years of him chasing after her. Which means? Tim can't... can't Take Care Off himself. So Bruce does. But! This isn't.. isn't some sex thing for HIM! So he has to use whatever TIM needs! Of course. And if TIM needs to fill full?

Well he has to be responsible. Can't let Tim HURT himself. Will hold him and gently work bigger and bigger toys into that tight little hole. Impossibly tight at first. Let him feel full, and rock it in and out, while it buzzes so nice. Or patiently work in a string of beads until he feels like he'll burst. And... and if he REALLY needs fingers...

It would be cruel righ? To make him sit there, suffering cold unfeeling plastic, while he literally cries for the kindness and warmth of a friendly hand... right? So maybe he slides a hand, now so familiar, down to rub and rub. To slide deeper and IN. To gently take care of his Boy.

And maybe at some point, Dick is visiting. He SEES this new protocol. And he-! A moment of fury! But then Tim's miserable little face turns towards him. An arms works its way free of his blanket burrito. Reaches desperately. Bruce is calling him over, Tim NEEDS him. And... and.... his Fury crumbles

Because this? It's sparking something in his brain. Everything lighting up with pleasure and RIGHT. He... he HATES being objectified. The constant lust. Always AT him, never WITH him. But... but the AFTER GLOW. The warmth and cuddles and-! That softness? He might just die without it. Is ADDICTED to it. T-This is... he can have?? And with Timmy???

He takes SUCH good care of his baby bro. All soft touches and gentle words as he drags Tim over the edge so many times they blur together. Until his boneless and brainless. And neither he nor Bruce bring up the kink the DEFINITELY have developed. They wait for the inevitable. Pretend.

Jason? At first he's mean about it. Fucking machines and ignoring him. Getting his ass handed to him him be Dick and Bruce for it. He figures FINE. If they'll leave him the hell alone about it. He'll be sweet and gentle with the princess.

It rocks his world. Holding his replacement close, like a lover, wrapped up in his arms. Gasping and shaking and needing him as the guy falls apart on his fingers. Getting so... so WET. And he's not... he doesn't DO casual sex. Barely likes being touched some days. But this? The quiet, domestic, almost sacred nature of it? The soft noises and how desperately he clung? How warm and trusting he was after?

It's amazing.

Damian of course takes longest to realize this. He's still trying to fight everything. But protocol is protocol and with just the two of them? Be greatful Drake. But oh? What's THAT Damian? You're deep rooted love for taking care of soft, vulnerable things? Your desperate need for acceptance and warmth? Softness? And suddenly you're AWASH in ALL of that? Oh dear >:3c how that doesn't AWAKEN anything in you~ (it doooooes)

But! Unlike the others? Damian has NO CHILL. Patience? What name so? So Tim wakes UP to Damian deciding... his day off? Timmy Fuckies Day. All orgasms, all day. Your welcome. Brace yourself. And the others of course wonder where they went! Find them! Wait, Damian, you can't do that!

He most certainly can and is! And Tim is letting him! *various buffering noises* Wait... that... That was An Option!?

So now? Not unusual to just... find a Bat hauling around a stuffed full and twitching Timmy, like a teddybear. Just watching TV. Doing some research. Playing a video game. All while Tim is bundled up and panting, gushing, getting brought off for the fifteenth time today. Their warm, cuddly, lil bundle of Good Vibes~ *smooch* *turns up the toys* They DO gave to schedule who gets Tim which days though, or there's fighting.

them using tim's body as a little plaything🥺🥺🥺at first it was because of the pollen, all of them rationalizing it to themselves but then 👀👀👀👀👀 it was because tim was sooo perfect for them so sweet and wet and they just couldn't help but use his body like it was a toy, watching every twitch and expression he made 👀

#anonymous #asks #answered asks

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moorheadthanyoucanhandle · 5 months

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SHORT PEOPLE GOT NOBODY

Opening in theaters today:

Saltburn--The title refers to the enormous, somewhat faded English country mansion in which most of the movie unfolds. But it may also suggest the proverbial pain of salt poured into a wound, as might be caused by the very sight of such a residence and the class system it represents.

Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan), a slight, nebbishy scholarship student to Oxford, is befriended by a classmate, the blueblood Adonis Felix (Jacob Elordi), who invites him home for the summer to the title pile of bricks in 2007. Felix's family is a fairly gothic bunch--abstracted Dad Sir James (Richard E. Grant), blithe, cordial Mom Lady Elsbeth (Rosamund Pike) and addled wreck of a sister Venetia (Alison Oliver), along with the sneering biracial American cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe). Carey Mulligan is also around as Elsbeth's nutty parasitical friend Pamela, as is Paul Rhys as the imperious butler Duncan.

Rather quickly, Oliver finds himself enmeshed with each of the family members, and drawn into the intrigues and occasional casual decadence of their isolated and mysterious lifestyle. While Oliver initially seems like an honest but in-over-his-head parvenu, like Balzac's Rastingnac or Faulkner's Ben Quick, we gradually see that he has his own wormy, calculating, opportunistic side.

This is the second feature written and directed by Emerald Fennell of 2020's Promising Young Woman. If it's a sophomore slump, that probably says more about the incisive brilliance and focus of Promising Young Woman than it does about any shortfalls of its own. The fury that charged Fennell's first film was direct and uncomplicated. Seemingly wanting to get across something more subtle and nuanced about class, Saltburn flails around a bit and sometimes feels confused, overwrought, overlong, even borderline campy.

But stick with it. It ultimately adds up to a potent piece of moviemaking, and of storytelling. Shot with hallucinatory garishness by the marvelous Linus Sandgren, the movie brings its setting vibrantly to life; there's none of the comforting stodginess of, say, Downton Abbey to it. And Fennell's narrative is involving. Even as we sense the influence of everything from The Shining to Risky Business, we're also pulled into investment in a yarn we haven't seen before. And she doesn't let us down; despite the movie's gratuitous thrashing about, in the end the plot snaps together to a satisfying and fairly devastating point.

Fennell also gets uniformly superb performances from her cast. Probably the wittiest and most endearing is Rosamund Pike, but Barry Keoghan, maybe the single best thing about The Banshees of Inisherin, is spectacular here, giving a tour de force turn in a role that is not only wildly mercurial on an emotional and psychological level, but also required physical fearlessness. Saltburn may end up being most remembered for literalizing a common expression for finding somebody extremely attractive, but Keoghan's draining performance makes a splash.

Napoleon--Returning to France, uninvited, from exile in Elba, the title character is confronted with a regiment of soldiers he used to command. "I missed you," he tells them, seemingly sincerely. Soon he's back in charge.

Apparently there is some historical basis for this scene; Napoleon is said to have had a fond and comradely relationship with his troops, despite his willingness to get them slaughtered. But to the casual viewer of this Ridley Scott epic, the moment may come as a surprise. Nothing in the movie prepares us for it. Played by Joaquin Phoenix, this Napoleon shows little affection or even interest toward anyone or anything apart from himself, and a certain almost adolescent erotic fixation on Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). In between campaigns, he makes rather unromantic attempts to impregnate her, and reacts with sullen outrage when they don't succeed.

Scott's movie, based on a script by David Scarpa, is largely a pageant of carnage. It begins with a graphic depiction of Marie Antoinette's meeting with Madame Guillotine, then shows us Napoleon navigating the deadly mayhem of the Revolution and the First Republic. It then traces him from battle to battle: Toulon, Austerlitz, Moscow and some of his other greatest hits, culminating, of course, against Wellington (Rupert Everett) at You-Know-Where.

This Napoleon isn't boring. It's entirely watchable and well-staged. Scott deploys his forces with the care of a child playing with toy soldiers on his bedroom floor. But it doesn't really hit hard emotionally; something is missing from it. Early on, we see a cannonball splat into the chest of a horse, and the resulting explosion of gore is so obviously computer-generated that, for me at least, it carried little shock (it has this in common with the splatter effects in Thanksgiving, which, exhaustingly enough, I saw the same day). This sort of detached unreality hangs over the movie's horrors, and the same detachment extends to the central character.

While Phoenix holds our attention with his movie star charisma, it's as if he's working in a vacuum. Except here and there in his scenes with Kirby's drolly unflappable Josephine, Phoenix seems to be anomic, walled off from the other characters by his own narcissistic self-regard. Maybe that's deliberate; maybe Scott is trying to dramatize the Napoleon of Walter de la Mare's unforgettable poem:

What is the world, O soldiers?

It is I.

I, this incessant snow,

This northern sky.

Soldiers, this solitude

Through which we go

Is I.

In any case, the movie has a point to make about the appetite for an autocratic "strongman" leader that seems to inevitably arise in reaction to the messiness of democratic movements. It's a theme which would, admittedly, seem to have a slight smidge of relevance to our current times. It should be noted that, warmongering megalomaniac though he was, Napoleon was also a tremendously intelligent and curious person, which puts him in a very different category than our most notable current would-be Emperor.

#napoleon #saltburn #emerald fennell #barry keoghan #rosamund pike #jacob elordi #archie madekwe #alison oliver #joaquin phoenix #ridley scott #vanessa kirby #rupert everett #linus sandgren #promising young woman #carey mulligan #richard e grant

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riddle-me-ri · 2 years

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also oops i saw you had sirens!riddler in there too and i haven't read that yet but i know what he looks like and he's another one who is apparently allergic to buttoning up his shirt (not a negative) so uh, in light of him being surrounded by other super hot girls, please afab/female reader who needs a bit of reassurance and is offered the line "that's it. that's my girl." 💜 (and also ily again u-u)

A/N: omg omg asdfgghjj to be told "that's my girl" by any of the green beans asdfgghhj I'd instantly melt on the spot. I took some liberty and changed the quote a tad because I'm a rule breaker u-u but the tone is still there. And YESSS PI Eddie! PI Eddie! This was the perfect way to destress after my breakdown yesterday rip. Also this ended up being so fuckin' sweet? Like I love this set-up I have going?? I wanna write another sequel? AGAIN? (ily too thanks so much for requesting you have the best ideas I stg)

Trigger Warnings: descriptions of an anxiety/panic attack, insecurities, strong language, overall hurt/comfort, and the comfort is extra sweet and soft

Word Count: 1.9 k

Gotham City Sirens!Riddler x F!Reader - That's My Girl

You were seething.

It's a wonder your skin wasn't bubbling from how hot your blood was boiling.

You were once again picking out leaves from your hair and sweeping thorns from under your desk.

Another visit from Selina, Pamela, and Harley. A popular trio that's been dropping in like flies to their favorite dumpster.

Not a surprise there. They always came knocking on Edward's door whenever they were in the slightest bind and didn't bother to put in a single ounce of effort to solve their own problems.

Now you know that's not true. You know Pam would do anything before asking Ed for help. They're smart and resourceful, only coming to Eddie when they've reached a dead end. Wouldn't you do the same?

You huffed as you slumped back into your desk chair. You would do the same.

Besides, Selina has done a few favors for Edward before his reformation…and a couple during it. He owes her.

You lean your head back and cover your face with your hands. You were already tired from cleaning, you really didn't need these mental gymnastics going on.

He can rely on her for anything. All he can rely on you for is his paperwork being in order and to push his new image.

That is all you were just some pencil pusher in a pencil skirt.

In a city full of super heroes, super villains, super geniuses and super sexy powerful women…it was really easy to feel incredibly puny. Incredibly ordinary and insignificant.

In Gotham, if you weren't a hero or a villain..you were a bystander or a victim…

What are you even doing here? What the hell were you thinking even having a chance with Edward? Edward Nygma at that, the fucking reformed Riddler…

"What am I doing here?"

Just like that the walls were slowly caving in. The walls painted with insecurity and founded on anxiety started crumbling. Suffocating you, claustrophobia setting in.

When you leaned back from your chair, you felt bile come up in the back of your throat. You barely managed to swallow it back down.

You couldn't say the same for the tears welling up in your eyes.

Your hand started shaking on your desk. Everything was hazy and foggy around you.

What are you doing? You wasted space! To think you could hold a candle to the likes of Selina Kyle…fucking Catwoman! Poison Ivy, Mother Nature incarnate! Harley fucking Quinn, the Joker's ex boo and a 10 to boot!

You barely made out the soft shushing sounds you were making. Your hands caged around your head doing anything to cease the nagging, taunting cruel voice in your head.

You laid your head on the desk, wrapping your hands and arms over your skull. Something, anything to make it stop.

"Please…please just stop.." You murmured into the long sleeve of your black blouse that no doubt had tear stains now.

"Y/N?"

Everything came to a screeching halt. The mocking voice, the falling walls, the shakes, the tears. Everything.

Shit.

You popped your head up from under your arms like a jack in the box. Immediately grabbing the nearest and softest material to wipe your face with.

"Oh..umm…hi Mr. Nygma, I-Im sorry um..I was uhh.."

"I see Pam left a mess again. Funny, how much she wants to clean the environment but can't clean up after herself.." Ed chuckles in a remorseful tone. As he recalls the weeks she manipulated him with her pheromones and made herself at home in his apartment.

"Y-Yeah, can't…can't miss her that's for sure." You sniffle.

"Are you all right? Did something happen while I was out?"

"Oh no, no, nothing like that Mr. Nygma…I, I think I may just be having a small allergic reaction to Pam's plants."

Smooth.

If you don't shut up I swear to God…

Ed nodded but he doesn't look the slightest bit convinced. "I would have thought after a couple outings you would drop the formalities…"

You were fidgeting with the hem of your skirt. You lean back in your seat with your head hung low.

"Oh, yeah…sorry. Just force of habit…"

"We'll break that habit eventually, I'm sure."

"Hm.." You nodded solemnly.

Silence hung in the air for a moment.

Edward started walking towards his office, but not without a gnawing feeling in the back of his brain. Something upset you greatly, and he wants…no…needs to figure out what it is.

You were hesitant to divulge any information that much was certain. Your face was puffy and red, your eyes were watery. More in line with crying than an allergic reaction.

Think, Eddie, think…

She was fine this morning, bright even. Smiling and content. She brought us both coffee and she gave me some medicine for my growing migraines…things were going great. She was gonna ask you something…

Then of course Selina and the others came in with another – oh!

While the wheels started turning in his head, he already knew he couldn't leave you alone to your own devices again.

He stopped in front of his door with his hand gripped to the doorknob. He looked over his shoulder and was immediately taken aback by the forlorn look on your face.

You got up slowly from your chair and slung your satchel over your shoulder. It was five o'clock when you usually left anyway, and you needed to get out even if you didn't want to.

You did feel better with Ed around but you were worried the next thing he'd say may cause you to break down again.

"W-wait, Y/N…"

Damnit.

"S-sorry Mr.-- Ed…I'm not feeling myself, I was going to head home, unless there's something you need me to do, and I can take it with me?"

Ed shook his year. "N-No..no, umm…can I speak to you for a minute, in my office. Please, if you don't mind of course."

"Oh, ok..sure. I'll be right there."

You were cursing yourself in your head as you sat your bag on your desk and followed him to his office.

Funny, all the times you fantasized about this exact set up, you didn't imagine you'd had an emotional breakdown just before.

You took a seat in the chair in front of his desk and Ed made his way to his chair. He put down his cane and hung up his signature green suit jacket.

When Ed sat down he rolled up his white dress shirt sleeves and removed his eye mask.

You hate when he wears that thing. You understood why he did. He did look cute with it on, but you adore his eyes too much to want them hidden all the time.

You couldn't stand the silence, so you choked out. "I-I'm sorry, Edward…I just kinda got stuck in my own head. It was stupid, and I'm sorry you had to see that."

Ed furrows his brows. "You don't need to apologize for that. It's perfectly…normal, I'm even prone to that at times…sometimes more often than I care to admit."

"I can't even begin to imagine, but it was over something so…trivial..childish even."

"I can be the judge of that…If you don't mind discussing it with me?"

You felt your throat clamp up again. You wanted to talk to him, you appreciated him even giving you his time to help console you. You two have been going out, but nothing was entirely official, so he didn't have to do this.

"Can I take a guess?"

You nod.

"Was it Selina, Pam, and Harley from earlier?"

You lowered your head in defeat but muttered a "y-yes."

"Why?"

"T-They're just…they just make me feel so…inadequate. Like I shouldn't be here, in your world. I envy them, as much as I hate to admit it. They're smarter, stronger, and they're gorgeous –"

Your fingers have started tapping the wooden desk as you got lost in your anxious rambling. It wasn't until Edward put his warm hand over yours that made you stop. You gasp and look up at him.

"S-Sorry, see? It's so stupid."

"Stop. I'm gonna stop you right there…"

He reached his other hand to grab your other hand. He held both of your hands and squeezed them.

"It's not stupid. As I said it's normal, but I'm telling you now, you've earned your seat here. Why? Because you are intelligent. This world of mine with villains, heroes and crooks, it takes someone of strong will to take it on every single day. Even if you're behind a desk there's always that sliver of a chance of something happening, because of me and who I was and who I am now."

Your breathing was evening out again, despite the thumping of your heart, but it wasn't from anxiety for once.

"And you are gorgeous, you drew me on the first day I saw you. More so than any of those three, they don't hold a candle to you…"

He squeezed your hands again.

"Besides…there's one thing you'll have that they never will."

"What's that?"

He offered a soft smile, "Riddle me this…what’s extremely valuable, risky to give, hard to receive and sometimes impossible to repair once it’s been broken?"

You blinked for a moment. Your heart skipped another beat when you realized the answer.

"Trust?"

Edward rewarded you with a warm smile and kissed the back of one of your hands. "They may be acquaintances, I'll scratch their back if they scratch mine later, but I don't trust any of them as far as I can throw them. But I trust you with everything…and anything."

"You really mean that?"

Ed teasingly scoffed. "Y/N…I know I'm many things but a man of my word I'm certainly am, you should know that."

You giggled. "Y-Yeah I do…t-that's just…I never knew that, never thought of that."

"I know, I…I don't show it often how much I appreciate you and just how much you mean to me. This is fairly new territory for me…but I would like to do better."

You couldn't deny it any longer. You got up from your chair and went over to his side of the desk. You wrapped your arms around his neck and pulled him into an embrace.

"T-Thank you," you whispered in his ear. He slowly stood up and wrapped his arms around your waist.

You kissed his cheek before you looked back into his eyes. "By the way, you're doing great."

Ed chuckled. "Good to know."

You giggled at the all too familiar lopsided smirk he gave you.

Edward leaned in and kissed your forehead. He brought his hand up to your cheek and caressed your cheek with his thumb.

"Wasn't there something you wanted to ask me this morning? Before we were very rudely interrupted."

"Hmm..oh!" You had gotten so infuriated after Ivy entwined you with her vines, tossed you out of the room, and constricted you to your chair…you completely forgot.

"Umm…oh! I was wondering if you would like to have dinner tonight…at..at my place?” You smiled sweetly.

Edward’s heart swelled up on the inside. Your eyes were bright with excitement, your posture was lax and comfortable against him, and your beaming smile was absolutely precious to him.

He couldn’t resist when he tucked your chin between his thumb and forefinger and brought your lips to his in a tender kiss. When he pulled away, he chuckled at your widened eyes and cheeks dusted a rosy hue. You smiled before you hid your reddening face into his shoulder. He tightened his hold on you, before he whispered in your ear:

“There she is, that’s my girl.”

#gotham city sirens riddler x reader #gotham city sirens edward nygma x reader #gotham city sirens riddler #gotham city sirens edward nygma #sirens!riddler x reader #sirens!edward nygma x reader #ri writes

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enochianribs · 3 years

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Chapter 2 of the Cabin AU is up now!

Read on Ao3 here, or under the cut.

(Reblogs appreciated!)

The roof had a leak. Dean woke up to a growing wet spot on the pillow next to his. He laid still, eyes crossing as he stared at the ceiling, watching the bead of water run across one of the unfinished boards, suspending itself for an entire minute until it plopped right next to his head. Slowly, his mind pulled itself out of his dream, though the haze lingered. The roof had a leak. Dean woke up to a growing wet spot on the pillow next to his. He laid still, eyes crossing as he stared at the ceiling, watching the bead of water run across one of the unfinished boards, suspending itself for an entire minute until it plopped right next to his head. Slowly, his mind pulled itself out of his dream, though the haze lingered.

“Mmm...great.” Another item on his to-do list.

Dean was willing to bet there were more leaks in the living room.

For a moment he debated allowing himself to be lulled back to sleep. It was all too easy to slip back to that dream again: blurry hands, soft mouths, quiet murmurs, everything he missed and everything he’d never had. Not really.

Rain gently pattered against the outside of the cabin, the storm grinding in from the East and then settling its haunches right over the hills to stay for the night. The sun was rising, and the pink sky cast shadows from the drops on the window pane, little spots phantom dripping down his sheets.

It was the first morning since he’d gotten to the cabin that he’d slept in past sunrise. Sluggishly, he sat up, diggin the heel of his hand into his eyes as a yawn fought its way out of his chest. He turned his head, and reached out with a hand to wake his companion, before reality caught up with him and his hand fell to the mattress, going through the ghost.

That’s right , he thought. His mouth tasted like ash.

If he laid there any longer his chest would become heavy, and his breaths ragged, so he tossed the covers off, and trudged over to the shower. The cold water bit through the fog better than anything else could, and he leaned his temple against the glass door waiting for it to heat up and fill the room with steam.

Normally, he’d air dry, but it was chilly and an urgency hung around him. He grabbed the bleach-spotted towel hanging sadly by the door towelled off quickly.

He wandered idly, picking his daily morning tasks up and dropping them before he’d complete them. Something pulled him around the house. He was forgetting something.

Dean was midway through folding the quilt and draping it on the sofa arm when they caught his eye.

Two large feathers sat in the middle of the massive dining table (he still wondered who had built and what they’d been thinking— the thing could seat the knights of the round table if necessary). Tugging the fridge door with one hand he reached blindly for the pot of coffee he kept iced, and nudged it closed with his knee, never taking his eyes off them.

They were captivating. He continued to stare as he poured himself a cup, spilling some of the coffee onto the counter. He’d forget to clean it up, and it would stain, but that was okay. If they asked, he was experimenting with wood staining.

Dean could examine them once he made himself some kind of breakfast. Those were the rules: remember to feed yourself, and then you can do whatever you want to with your day. Breakfast ended up being toast and jam, and he plopped it down at the end seat of the table, and reached for the feathers before he took a bite.

The color on the first one was so dark it looked heavy, but it was as light in his hand as any feather should be. He held it up and squinted, twisting his wrist back and forth. It caught the light and reflected a shimmering oil slick back at him. The colors shifted, hues iridescent.

At first glance it could be a raven’s, but it was at least four times bigger than that.

The second one was more muted, the black towards the base of it dappled into a brown and white, and it was downy soft where the other was sharp and precise. Yesterday he’d thought it was grey but better light proved that it was a grey-brown.

He’d assumed that it was from the same bird— creature , but now he wasn’t so sure. Dean didn’t know the first thing about birds. However, he knew several people who did.

▵▿▵

“Hey, Bobby. Can I talk to Rufus?”

“He’s kinda in the middle of some’in’, Dean.” The roll of his eyes was audible, as someone yelped in the muffled background. “Can I call you back?”

“Please?” Dean asked, grinning cheekily even though he wasn’t there to warm Bobby over in person.

Bobby made a disgruntled noise and paused, before sighing. “You’re doing the face aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Fine. You never want to talk to me .”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Hm.” Bobby replied. Out of spite, he kept the phone next to his face as he shouted for his attention. “Rufus! It’s Dean.”

Ouch , Dean mouthed wincing at the volume, as he listened to the sound of two old men grumbling at each other before fabric shifted, and Rufus picked up the phone.

“He lives.”

A smile burst its way through Dean’s concentration. “Hey Ruf, gotta question for you.”

“Coulda called us sooner. We were beginning to wonder if you’d sold the cabin and moved somewhere warmer with pink flamingos.”

The image made Dean snort. Him at the beach? Unlikely.

“Nope.” Dean quipped. “Still here and freezing my ass off. You guys ever think about installing a damn heater?”

“And pay that bill? Hell no. We added a fireplace, what more do you want from us.”

Good ol’ crabby Rufus. “What do you know about birds?”

“A lot.” As per usual, he was being obtuse.

“Know of any big enough to leave behind two foot feathers?”

Rufus whistled. “Not in North America, unless you’ve got ostriches running around.”

“That’d be a negatory. So there’s nothing you can think of?”

“Nope. Did you find something, kid?”

“Holding one right now.”

“No shit.” He could hear the bewildered tone of his voice over the shitty connection. “Well, I guess keep an eye out. It’d be real hard for something that big to hide, and even harder for it to sit comfortable in those pine trees with the branches so dense. I’d say you’re about to make the biggest zoological discovery in North America in the past century. Keep us posted?”

“Will do.” Dean said, and he heard Rufus handing the phone back over to Bobby.

“Hope everything’s okay up there, Dean.”

“Everything’s peachy, honestly. Anyways—” He checked the clock on the stove. 8:30. The hardware store would be open in a half hour. “I’ve got some errands to run, so I’ll leave you to whatever it is a couple of old farts do in retirement.”

“Hey—”

Dean grinned to himself. “See ya, Bobby.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

The line went silent, and Dean shoved his phone back into his pocket, bobbing his head to the side in thought. Though he didn’t get a definitive answer, at least the call had eliminated the options of native fauna.

▵▿▵

At nine in the morning, Dean was usually one of a small line of people waiting outside Lafitte’s Goods to needle Benny’s brain for fixes and tools of the trade. Pamela was waiting against the brick wall, hand shielding the summer morning sun from her eyes, reading a 99 cent paper back with interest.

“Hey, Pamela.”

“Dean-o. Call me Pammy.”

“Really?”

“No, of course not. But Pam works. I’m not your mother.”

“You call your mom by her first name?”

“Fair point. What’re you here for?” She nodded her head and bounced off the wall, as Benny unlocked the doors. A couple of grizzled old men shuffled in ahead of them, beelining it for the plywood.

Porch season.

“Roof’s got a leak.”

“Leak season.”

“Apparently. This is the third one since I got here.”

She squinted at him, like he was omitting something important, and popped the bubble of gum in her mouth. Dean started to itch under her scrutiny. He hated being studied like a lab rat.

What was the woman? A witch? Why was she peeling back layers of his get-up without warning.

Dean coughed, and used Benny’s presence as an excuse to wiggle out from under her gaze. “Gotta— yeah, see you.” Turning on his heel he fled towards the adhesives, face contorting with embarrassment.

Holy fuck, somehow he’d gotten even more awkward.

Dear god, help me.

Benny never pried unless Dean seemed interested in offering up information, and for that Dean was actually incredibly grateful. Most days he didn’t want to talk about anything, certainly not his past, but Benny and his bushy beard and warm eyes had managed to wiggle through his walls, just a little.

“Benny.”

Benny stared at him from behind the register, inquisitive expression considerably easier to cope with than Barnes' hungry expression. A friendly smile danced across his face as he assessed Dean’s no-doubt rosey cheeks.

“She’s got her claws in you, huh.”

Dean ducked his head, glancing sideways at the brunette woman still looking at the different kinds of rope. A tramp stamp peeked out from under the bottom edge of her tank top. Dean tapped his fingers on the pock-marked wood counter and turned his attention back to his friend. “Is she always like that?”

“Sure is,” Benny drawled, ringing up everything Dean had haphazardly shoved onto the counter in his escape. “You just happen to be the newest, prettiest , plaything in Pringle.” The burly man winked.

Pink crawled up Dean’s neck from his collarbones and spread into his cheeks once again. Christ, there was no escape from these people. Still stammering, Dean practically ran back to the Impala.

▵▿▵

The phone vibrated in his back pocket. By the third ring, Dean had parked Baby in her usual spot, and he struggled to tug it out of his pocket, checking the Caller ID.

California.

He pumped the window down, the air getting warm inside the car, and he flipped the phone open, inhaling sharply. He should have called before now. Shouldn’t have let so much time pass. In the fall, he’d be too busy to take any of Dean’s calls anyways.

“Hello?”

“Dean?”

“Sammy.”

Several seconds of too-long silence passed between them.

“Where have you been?”

Dean swallowed, thick, guilt permeating the small space.

“Sorry, I just—” He didn’t have an excuse. “I didn’t know what to say.”

“You still could’ve picked up the phone. I tried to call you about six times. You don’t always need to have something to say, y’know… It just would’ve been nice to know you’re still breathing.” His brother’s voice was basically a whisper at the end.

“I know.” Dean closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose, sighing shakily. “I know.”

“I had to hear it from Bobby. Dean—” Sam’s voice pitched up to that octave it always did when he was upset. “Dad’s gone again.”

Fuck.

“And that’s fine. It’s not like I’m ten and incapable of caring for myself but I thought— I thought he’d be back by now. It’s been a couple of weeks.”

“Shit, Sammy.”

“I think he’s fine. He sent a vague text a couple of days ago, it’s just with school starting in two months I get worried. Not even for him, just for us. I can’t pay for school myself, and I can’t afford to miss anything because of Dad. If my grades drop, I’m out.”

“I know.” God, Dean knew.

Sam was a late bloomer for college. The kid was brilliant, but he’d been dealt a bad hand, and it was a miracle Rufus and Bobby had invested in a saving fund for the two of them decades ago. At twenty-two, Dean knew that he’d already had trouble securing the scholarships. Stanford wanted the best and brightest, not the kid with seven schools on his high school transcript and an overabundance of unexcused absences.

The guilt piled up and perched itself on his shoulders until he sagged into his seat under the heaviness. It was his job to keep John out of trouble, not Sammy’s. And instead he’d run away from that responsibility.

The repair materials sat in the backseat, and his heart twisted in his chest. The meadow sat peacefully in the late afternoon sun, just across the short distance of woods, and it still kept its secret. He didn’t want to go back. Not yet. Not until he’d had his fill of independence.

“Look,” He could kick himself for how his voice cracked. “If John doesn’t turn up by the end of the week, I’ll come back. I’ll help. Promise.”

For what it was worth, a facet of his brother’s relieved sigh sounded apologetic.“Thank you, Dean. I don’t know how to do this without you.”

“Okay then.”

“Bye.”

“Talk to you soon, Sammy.” Dean’s jaw clenched involuntarily, as he flipped the phone closed and tossed it against the passenger door. His frustrated shout echoed between him and the trees, but he didn’t feel better.

Always this .

Historically, John would do something stupid and irresponsible and Dean would drop everythign to clean up the mess and no one would thank him. Not really. That was fine.

Family was supposed to break your heart.

▵▿▵

The leak proved to be an easy fix.

Dean fought the attic door that led to the roof, following the small staircase up until he was on the balls of his feet, head sticking out as he pulled himself onto it. The shingles were rough, cracked and damaged from the winters, and he scrapped the length of his arm against it.

The source of the leak took only a minute to find. Five or so shingles were missing, leaving nothing but the wood underneath, which did nothing but absorb any and all precipitation. The rubber sealant smelled terrible, and he gagged dramatically, almost dropping the metal can in the process. Done applying, he plopped his ass down, determined to see it dry properly before he went back inside.

Half assing things had always resulted in a stern talking to in the least, and it had been something he’d struggled with growing up, his mind yanking him a thousand directions until his head was spinning and John was disappointed.

Dean grit his teeth, purposefully dragging the raw scrape against the rough roofing, the burn biting through the thought, bringing him back down from that far off place he so frequently wandered to. He didn’t even know how he got there, but he found himself lost, shrunk down, smaller than the hand-me-down leather jacket he tried to fill.

From the roof he could see almost everything. It turned out that Rufus and Bobby’s cabin foundation was built onto a gentle slope.

The rain clouds had dissipated, migrating to the flat plains further south, and it left a crisp atmosphere behind. The sun poked through the remaining gargantuan cumulonimbus clouds, sunbeams gently caressing the grass. Grey mist rose from where the creek beds greedily absorbed the heat. It reminded him of the paintings of cowboys, sitting on a stallion, bathed in golden light, their backs to the audience, all the edges illuminated and throwing everything else into stark purple shadows.

The burn of the scrape subsided as a sense of peace settled Dean, his body melting into the shingles. An hour passed before his stomach growled, and he climbed back down for lunch.

▵▿▵

Tapping.

Tapping at the window pane only inches from his face.

Groggy and only slightly encrusted (gross) Dean opened his eyes and was met by dark blue ones, a tawny human hand pressed up against the glass.

Dean’s soul evaporated out of his body, back pressed to the headboard as he scrabbled for the small knife he kept under his pillow. Before he could look again, it was gone.He launched himself out of bed, so very entirely grateful that he’d had enough sense to go to sleep in his boxers and his worn-out threadbare Kansas shirt.

Holy hell.

Fingers trembling, he opened the window, leaning almost all the way out, hovering a few feet above the ground.A single feather slowly came to rest soundlessly on the pine-needle carpet. The view from the window remained unyieldingly motionless.

Black-eyed susans had begun to sprout in the shade, despite themselves, and now they quivered where they grew between the pine-roots even though the morning wind had not pierced through the woods yet.

Craning his neck, he glanced up, half expecting the last thing he’d ever see to be a terrifying bird man staring down at him like he was lunch. Nothing.

Dean practically fell out of his room, chanting under his breath in a poor attempt to calm himself down as he stumbled down the short hall to the living room.

It’s human.

“No,” Dean spoke to the picture frames on the walls. He had no idea what he was denying, but the situation begged to be denied. He paced back and forth in the living room, no doubt wearing the floor down despite the fact that he was wearing socks— the ones with the holes in the heel. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Oh my God, it was so very not okay.

Suddenly, the couch seemed like the perfect place to suffocate himself to unconsciousness. Someone else could deal with this.

No , he thought. You wanted this to happen, you dirty liar. Stop panicking and deal with it.

Wings was human- or at least partially human. He looked like a man. Dean’s thin eyelids fluttered closed, and the image was painted on the backside of them with crystal clarity. Square jawline, arrow-straight nose, curiously arched eyebrows… and the eyes . They were so blue. And they had been looking right at him. Watching him.

It was entirely ridiculous that his eyes overshadowed the massive lurking darkness behind him, of what had to have been his wings.

A human with wings.

This was crazy. Everything was crazy.

The way he saw it, there were two directions this could go: he could pretend he hadn’t seen anything, and this would be tucked away into the delusion box that he kept under lock and key at the back of his mind and he could grow old being none the wiser of whatever breach of reality this was, or he could go find it.

The first option was sounding real nice. Normal. Well adjusted.

He was well adjusted.

Besides, Dean wasn’t entirely convinced it wasn’t a dream. this entire thing was a fever dream and he was in some hospital bed back in Lawrence, stuck in a coma. Dean pinched himself, viciously and stared at the white marks left on his forearm, helpless.

Nope.

“Okay.” He barked out a laugh.

He should call Jo.

After a few more minutes of pacing and hyperventilating, he decided against it. He would tell her— of course he would! —but when it came up.

The Harvelle’s were good people and they’d shown him nothing but kindness.

The situation had to be broached with care, or the small home he’d built in the life he wanted to live would topple in on itself, and the rubble and dust would drown him.

Trust issues were a problem of his, and he’d been aware of them since high school, when he’d had too many secrets to keep and any semblance of a support system was states away.

God, he knew the way he clammed up was obvious, but sometimes he surprised even himself. If he was being honest, there was a lot more to it than a strong need for privacy. Didn’t matter though. In the end, after all the nit-picking and self beratement, it boiled down to fear.

Jo could keep her mouth closed, but there was always a chance she’d accidentally tell someone, and there was a high chance it would be the wrong person. If he let it slip that this thing existed, who knew what would come packing. And he knew sooner or later, someone would bring the heat. Words got around easily in a small town like Pringle and he knew everyone would be at his door, wanting a chance to see the freak of the week.

Which… was a thing that existed. A human with wings, that called the small clearing his home.

His heart skipped a beat at the thought. He felt protective over the man, almost ferociously so.

The day’s hunting trip wasn’t happening— now Dean was paranoid.

What if he accidently shot him? Or scared him off permanently?

His stomach churned, acid and bile climbing their way up his throat. The burn was familiar. Half his childhood had been spent subsiding panic attacks and anxiety, calming down Dad or Sam or both at the same time.

▵▿▵

The tin echo of a gunshot managed to penetrate through the thick log walls of the cabin.In a heartbeat, he was scrambling for the ancient shotgun. The front door swung open, the little voice in his head told him to close it behind him, but his feet carried him quicker than his mind and so he left it swinging on its hinges at his back.

An anguished scream gargled its way from somewhere deeper into the woods, due south of the cabin. Rocks dashed the soles of Dean’s feat and he swore out loud, having forgotten his boots at the door.

Shit shit shit.

Someone was nearby, and they were ballsy enough to fire a weapon despite the illegality of hunting on private property. His mind raced at the same speed he ran towards it, a limp skewing his gate every few steps. Stray branches caught the sleeves of his shirt, tearing through the fabric as he refused to slow down.

It’s just a deer.

He knew better.

They’re just after a deer, or a bison that wandered away from the heard or an elk or something—

Another blood curdling scream erupted from amongst the pine, this one loud enough to rattle the crows out of their nests. They cawed, the sound of dozens of pairs of wings taking flight muting the pained groans.

He knew better.

Please— please. Not Wings.

He faltered over a boulder, panic overtaking muscle memory and skidded to a halt at the crest of a ledge. The scene below knocked the breath out of his chest, leaving a vacuum in its wake.

Campbell, one of the more elderly hunters of the area was standing over another tawny body. Giant black wings sprawled out, twisting and twitching in the dirt and mud, feathers slightly splayed underneath his back.

Campbell’s face distorted in pain, a tense moment passing before his wild eyes landed on Dean, the whites of his too visible, even from ten yards away. Blood pumped out from a wound on his neck, and he had a hand clamped down onto it, slick with red, he held a shotgun limply in his left hand, the butt of it dropped heavily to the ground.

Semi-satisfied that Campbell didn’t seem interested in shooting again, Dean fixated every ounce of attention on Wings and his breath hitched. Smeared across his mouth and chin was a copious amount of blood. He’d bitten Campbell. Dean’s heart swelled with pride.

Good .

His short encounter with Campbell prior had proved that the man was a bag of dicks, cocky and far too keen on the killing aspect of hunting. It skeeved Dean out then, and it certainly did now. Campbell was still looking at Wings like he was prey. Though no component of the scene begged to differ: the man was naked, teeth bared, but he was incapable of escaping, the gunshot wound in his abdomen bleeding him dry.

Dean leveled the end of his shotgun at Campbell’s head. “Get the fuck away from him.”

Campbell backed away from Wings, the muscles in his right arm tensed, like he wanted to put it up defensively, but it was necessary he kept pressure on the wound. It looked like Wings had gone for the jugular. “It attacked me, Winchester.”

“And?”

“You’re fucking crazy.”

Dean would put money on the fact that he looked the part, he could feel his chest heaving, something akin to dull rage pumping through his veins. He prayed the tremor in his hand didn’t betray his hesitation. “I said move .”

Obeying his orders, Campbell stepped back, never taking his eyes off of the strange man. Agony flashed across his face where he laid in the dirt.In his hands, he held a silver blade. Wings looked from Campbell to Dean, expression visibly softening.

“Give me your coat.” Dean didn’t have much time, glancing at Wings, he saw that a red gleam of blood was starting to trickle from the corner of his mouth and his eyes moved frantically. He slid down the slope and went to take off his jacket and remembered his was only in his boxers. “ NOW .”

Campbell shirked it off and threw it at Dean, staying exactly where he was. Moving quickly, Dean pressed the thick fabric to the wound, moving his other hand to the back side to see where the bullet went. There was no opening there, and he was thankful that Wings was naked. He could skip the sometimes detrimental process of removing his clothes to assess the wound better.

He tied the jacket around him and slid one arm under his legs and the other across his shoulder blades, lifting him up carefully. Dean had to get him back to his house immediately, before Wings lost too much blood.

One last time, he regarded Campbell. He felt the sneer tug his lip up, his voice like acid trying to eat through the other man’s bones until he was nothing. “Get the fuck off my property. And don’t tell anyone about this. He’ll be fine, not that you care. But you won’t be if I see you here again, or if I hear about this from anyone. Do I make myself clear?”

Samuel’s eyes darkened clearly at war with Dean’s threat, but his skin was taking on a pallor akin to lethal blood loss. He nodded curtly, acknowledging the agreement, at least for the moment.

Reasonably satisfied that Campbell wouldn’t shoot them in the back, Dean turned and left, the body draped over his shoulder too warm.Dean’s hand wrapped around, hand feathering over his taut side, avoiding the wound. He could feel his fingers wet with blood.

Wings was whispering something feverishly, though Dean couldn’t catch a word of it, his eyes glazed over with pain, searching the sky for something with a fervor of a religious man with hell hounds on his heels.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” Dean murmured, straining to carry the both of them the distance to the cabin. “I’ve got you.”

Wing’s head lolled to the side, and his body went slack. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes, but Dean couldn’t afford to cry now. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to get them inside safely. He swallowed the terror. He ducked and wove through the undergrowth, fearing that the drooping wings would catch on a branch or boulder.

The time it took until he could lay Wings down on his dining room table felt like hell had manifested on Earth, keenly able to feel life slipping away in his arms.

Once Dean managed to put Wings on the table without his head smacking the wood, he tore the kitchen apart for salt and a bowl of water and some clean washcloths, and sprinted to the bathroom, yanking the drawers out and emptying their contents onto the counter and sink until his eyes landed on the tweezers and isopropyl alcohol.

It wasn’t a perfect med kit, but there was no other choice. It had to do.

Dean approached the table cautiously, worried that too much movement would set him off. The dark wingspan spread out almost three feet on either side of the table and Dean swallowed a stone.

He had no idea what to do next, not really. The closest experience he’d had to being a doctor had been treating John’s stab wound when he was thirteen and John had come home more beaten than usual.

He stared helplessly down at Wings.

“He...help.” Wings voice was like a ghost’s, he barely heard it, and he was standing right next to him. He looked up at the cobwebbed chandelier lighting like it was something holy and mesmerizing and Dean realized he was losing him.

“Shhh… it’s okay.” His forehead was sticky with sweat and drying blood, and Dean pushed some of the unruly black wisps from his eyes, humming low. “I’m gonna help you.”

Wings hand shook, following the edge of the table, feverishly searching for something to hold onto. Tentatively, Dean slid his fingers between his, feeling his calloused palm against his own. “Wings. Wings, you gotta listen to me. Wings, please . You have to lay still.”

He had no idea if the man understood a single word he was saying, but it seemed to do the trick. Over the span of a terrible minute, his breathing slowed down, and his grip on Dean’s hand went from frail to almost bone crushingly alive.

Wings’ blue eyes were on him, flickering a little in the low light. Dean waited, untrained, unable and unwilling to play operation on him while he was still conscious, eyes desperate to look at anything but the daunting task before him.

Eventually, he passed out, his painful grimace replaced by a soft one, and Dean began to remove the shrapnel bullet, praying to anyone who was listening that it had not shredded his insides beyond repair.

▵▿▵

At some point in the night, Dean had gotten up to draw the curtains and lock the door, willing to sacrifice only a moment to seal them away from the rest of the world.

Now, sunlight pierced through the cracks, illuminating them both in thin lines of white light. He watched Wings toss and turn, his face gnarling into pain each time he moved.

What if Dean had fucked it up? What if the next breath he drew was his last? His mind raced, punishing him for every moment’s hesitation that could very well lead to his death.

Dean caught himself following Wings jawline, examining the stark contours of his face like he would never see them again. Please, just please make it out alive.

“Don’t die on me, Wings.” The words slipped out subconsciously. “Please, God, don’t die on me.”

Dean had the decency to cover him up with the quilt. The two’s hands were still tightly entwined long after the heartbeat in Wing’s wrist lulled Dean into sleep, tumbling heart over head.

#honestly i think i'm gonna reverse the title #I HATE TITLES what kinda corny ass things i come up with lmao #but for now.#that's what its called #cabin au #*#mine

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angrylizardjacket · 3 years

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dirtbags // 1: Charlotte

Summary: Motley Crue High School AU with The Pack (Lola, Charlotte, Peach, & Eileen); Winter, 1984. Charlotte’s halfway through her Junior year of High School when Lola arrives in town, and becomes a part of Charlotte’s life almost by accident.

Tommy seems to fall for any girl he hasn’t grown up with, Nikki and Charlotte are in agreement that their friendship becoming public knowledge would be social suicide for them both, Vince is a tool, and Eileen is still mad at him for what happened over Summer.

A/N: 8829 words. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO @misscharlottelee this has literally been in the works for what’s felt like a year, but i decided that i can’t keep putting it off forever, so here. part 1. i think im going to try and put these out weekly?? maybe sooner?? but i adore you and i of course absolutely adore @josaphinebaker so i’m glad to finally let you all enjoy the long-awaited, multi-part HS AU (me, not posting writing for months: AND WHAT’S THIS? THE HS AU WITH A STEEL CHAIR --) ft. a softer world quotes

who said life can’t be an adventure? because whoever said that is probably the villain.

There’s a place for everything, and everything has it’s place. That’s they way the world works, at least, that’s the motto the rest of the cheerleading team seems to adhere to almost religiously. Charlotte, who’s been on the team for almost a full year and a half, since the start of her Sophmore year, can’t see the world so black and white. It’s not that she signed up to be a Cheerleader to fulfil some bitchy, blonde stereotype, it’s more that she had free time to fill and thought it would be fun. It took her a few months to find her footing once she’d been offered a place on the team, and was quickly thrust into her school’s the social spotlight, but she managed in the end, and had been managing ever since, mostly.

“Charlie, you’re so lucky,” Tommy, her cousin, lamented to her, driving her home after cheer practice, and marching band, had finished for the day. He was still in his uniform, as was Charlotte, and she gave him a sidelong glance, picking at the nail polish on her thumb. She doesn’t even give him an answer; ever since she’d joined the team, he had felt the need to wax poetic about the other cheerleaders and their uniforms. It’s so familiar that she doesn’t even need to prompt him into mooning over seeing Pamela in the cafeteria that day.

“She’s never going to date you if you don’t talk to her,” Charlotte’s smile is sly as her gaze slides back to the road, and the sun drifting towards the horizon.

“If Pam ever found out I’d looked at her, she’d probably just spit on me, call me pathetic or some shit,” Tommy’s eyeroll is implied by the flatness of his tone, but Charlotte can’t help but laugh.

“Oh Tommy, everyone looks at Pam,” she reminds him, and Tommy lets out an annoyed whine.

“I know,” he groans, clearly not cheered by that fact, feeling ever the more hopeless, and they fall into silence. Charlotte reaches down beside her seat and lifts a lever, pushing the seat back so she could comfortably rest her feet on his dashboard.

“Did you hear someone finally bought the MacCready burger joint? Dad was talking about it yesterday,” Tommy says mildly, making a left-hand turn onto their street. Charlotte raises her eyebrows, intrigued, but doesn’t speak. Tommy knows her well enough to take her silence as an invitation to go on, “Mrs Mac is going into hospice care and apparently some guy bought it and moved into town.”

“Oh shit, poor Mrs Mac,” Charlotte muses, and crosses her ankles on the dash, “hopefully their food is edible now.”

“Their burgers were great!” Tommy protested loudly.

“Their burgers were trash, Tommy! You’re just a rat -!”

“I’m not a rat!” He argues back, pulling into the gas station around the corner from their house. Tommy pulls up beside one of the pumps, and Charlotte gets out to browse the various snacks on offer inside the service station.

“Afternoon, Mick,” Charlotte calls out to the gas station attendant, the guy who’s been working here since he was fourteen, who’s currently got an electrical apprenticeship every other day. Charlotte realizes she might know too much about him considering he barely communicates in grunts most of the time. It’s not that he can’t speak, it’s just that he has a well documented dislike of her over exuberant cousin.

As expected, Mick doesn’t look up from his copy of Rolling Stone behind the counter, but makes a noise of acknowledgement.

Before Tommy has finished filling the tank, an unfamiliar figure enters the gas station, breezing past Charlotte and snatching up a packet of pork rinds, moving to the drinks fridge and taking a can of lemonade. The person is a young woman, though Charlotte doesn’t get a good look at her face; she’s got silky, black hair down to the small of her back, beneath a backwards baseball cap, and she’s the most notable of her clothes are her scuffed, black boots, and her oversized, black denim jacket littered with patches and pins.

When she puts her items on the counter in front of Mick, she pauses, frowning at the display, and Tommy enters the shop with an oblivious smile, asking if Charlotte had decided on anything.

“Can I help you?” Mick asks flatly, and the girl holds up a single finger, the universal signal for wait, and Mick huffs, but remains quiet. The girl adds a packet of gum to her haul, and leans her elbows on the counter.

“And a pack of Marlboros.”

Mick scowls.

“How old are you?”

“Are you being paid enough to care?” She responds, voice a low, challenging alto, and after a moment of deliberation, Mick actually shrugs, and turns to the cigarette display, picking out a pack for her as she pulled a few bills from her back pocket. After everything’s paid for, and the various food and drink had been stashed in the numerous pockets of her jacket, the girl is quick to open the cigarettes.

“They’re for my dad,” she explains, taking one out and putting it between her lips, grinning, “mostly.”

She passes a bewildered Tommy and Charlotte on the way out, giving them a flat look over, eyebrow raising minutely at the sight of Charlotte’s cheerleading uniform, but she’s quickly out the door. Tommy, flabbergasted at her display of confidence, marches straight up to counter and leans on it like he’d seen the woman do.

“A pack of -”

“Fuck off,” Mick tells him, before Tommy even finishes his sentence. Charlotte snorts a laugh, approaching the counter with a bottle of diet coke.

“Fifteen bucks on pump three,” Tommy sighs, pulling out his wallet, “and Charlie’s drink.”

“Do you know her, Mick?” Charlotte asks, still smiling, mind playing over the interaction.

“Do I look like I know her?” Mick grumbles, counting the handful of quarters Tommy had passed him with a ten dollar bill. Tommy, however, has never in his life taken Mick’s constant foul mood to heart, even when he probably should.

“He loves me, secretly, I know he does,” Tommy grinned when they were back in the car, heading to Charlotte’s house to drop her off, “we’ve known each other for five years, we’ll be friends any day now.”

“Tommy, he’s three days away from just decking you when you go to pay.”

“Which is a step up from when you said he’d throw me in front of traffic,” Tommy, ever the optimistic dumbass, chooses to look on the bright side. Tommy wears his affection on his sleeve, and seems to find himself trying to befriend anyone who would sooner fight him, if his hero-worship of local punk Nikki Sixx is anything to go by. It’s with a painful clarity that Charlotte realizes if he ever meets the girl from the gas station, he’s going to fall in love with her almost immediately.

Which makes Charlotte’s accidental and secret friendship with Nikki Sixx awkward.

“Oh Miss Lee,” Nikki whistles at her the following morning, wearing a grin that’s all teeth, “you know just what a guy likes to see on a Thursday morning.” He’s leering at her, leaning on the mesh of the fence, fingers hooked into the metal as he presses himself against it, his gaze trained on the pleat of her cheer uniform split upon her thigh over her tights.

“Every time you speak, I consider vehicular homicide,” Charlotte tells him with a sigh, straightening out her skirt, already resigned to the fact the rest of her free period was about to be co-opted.

“Then I’m glad you can’t drive,” Nikki’s still grinning, throwing his bag over the fence, into the garden Charlotte had thought was peaceful enough to study in.

“It’s the only thing keeping you alive,” she says, plastering a fake, sweet smile on her face, closing her biology textbook as Nikki vaults the fence a few feet away from her. She pulls her jacket a little tighter around herself, in an attempt to ward off the slight chill of the end of semester air.

Never in Charlotte’s life would she have intentionally tried to befriend Nikki Sixx. How was she supposed to know that two of her free periods coincided with when he liked to show up to school? And that the secluded garden area out behind the library where she liked to study in said free periods was the easiest place to sneak in?

She’s threatened to turn him in more times than he can remember, and he spits back that she should just find a new place to study, but she keeps showing up, and she never turns him in, and by now most of Nikki’s flirting is harmless.

They were both very much of the opinion that having a public friendship would be bad for the both of them; Nikki’s got more than a reputation of his own, both because his name technically isn’t Nikki, but he fights anyone who calls him Frank, and because he’s kind of a slut. Also there’s still an unconfirmed rumour about him being expelled from his first high school back in Seattle, since he’d joined their school a semester in Freshman year. Everyone’s too afraid to ask. Charlotte knows the cheerleaders aren’t above making hell for one of their own if they were caught fraternizing with someone like him.

That being said, Nikki had made it very clear that he’d rather saw off his arm than admit that they were even acquaintances, scoffing about how he’d lose any and all street cred he’d ever had if his friends found out he was hanging around Miss Everyone’s Best Friend Charlotte Lee. At the time, she’d taken offence to his tone, but she quickly came to learn that that’s just how Nikki is sometimes.

He offers her a cigarette from the pack in his pocket like he always does, sitting opposite her on the picnic bench instead of going to class, his bag still on the grass where he’d thrown it. Like always, Charlotte turns it down, but it does remind her-

“Saw a girl yesterday at Mick’s gas station that reminded me of you,” Charlotte flips to the back page of her notebook, which was already littered with little drawings, and starts scribbling idly.

“She hot?”

“I guess?” Charlotte says after a moment of consideration, “didn’t get to see her long enough to really be able to tell.” Nikki hums thoughtfully, and Charlotte, without looking up, “she asked Mick for cigarettes and he was like ‘how old are you?’ and she was like ‘are you being paid enough to care?’“

Nikki takes a long draft from his own cigarette, and kindly turns to the side to blow smoke into the wind, instead of directly into Charlotte’s face, as he used to do, or like he does when he’s annoyed.

“Mick would have mad respect for a move like that,” Nikki snorts, and when Charlotte looks up from her notebook, she sees him looking off into the distance, giving a genuine smile at the mental image. Maybe this is why she puts up with him, these rare genuine moments. He raises the cigarette to his lips again, and looks back at her, eyebrows raised, as if prompting her to go on. Charlotte looks back at her notebook.

“It inspired Tommy to try and buy smokes too, but Mick shut him down fast; I swear, if we show up when he’s clocking off, he’s going to K.O Tommy the first chance he gets.”

“Which is a step up from when you said he’d throw him in front of traffic,” Nikki notes, and Charlotte pauses, frowning. She hadn’t realised her hyperbolic threats on Mick’s behalf were a standard unit of measurement for how much he did or didn’t like her cousin. They were bullshit! Why did anyone take them seriously? Charlotte’s often astounded at her own credibility, and how much people tend to take her at her word without question.

“What’s she look like?” Nikki asks, flicking his ash into the grass, bringing Charlotte out of her thoughts.

“Who?”

“The girl from the gas station.”

“Oh,” Charlotte pauses, thinking, finally settling on, “she was wearing heaps of dark shit, had black hair, maybe that’s why I thought of you. I don’t know who she is though, didn’t recognize her from anywhere.” She adds, and Nikki hums thoughtfully, nodding. With his free hand, he snatches her pen out of her grip, despite her yelp of protest, and begins doodling pentagrams on the back cover of her notebook.

“You free tomorrow night?”

“I’d rather die than date you.”

“Charlie, you’re not my type -”

“Nikki, your type is tits and a heartbeat.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’d fuck you, but I’d rather be castrated than date you,” Nikki responds flatly, and Charlotte quickly shuts up, scowling, “but my band has a gig at a place that doesn’t card, so if you and that overgrown Labrador you call a cousin can sneak away from mommy and daddy for the night, you’re more than welcome to come party with the big kids.” He smirked, flicking Charlotte’s pen back at her. Charlotte’s annoyance has simmered down at his offer, considering his words.

“Nikki Sixx inviting me to see his band,” she mused, sly smile curling at the corners of her lips, mischief glinting in her eyes, “you like me, don’t you? You like Miss Everyone’s Best Friend. Soon I’m going to be your best friend too!” At least she was self aware enough about her people-pleasing tendencies to poke fun at his scorn.

“I like that you’re cousin’s obsessed with me, so bring him too,” Nikki’s quick to correct, but his heart’s not fully in it, if the smile he’s failing to repress is anything to go by, “I’m just in it for the ego trip, sweetheart.”

Charlotte gags at the pet name; the bell rings.

“She smells like an ash tray,” is the first thing Charlotte hears when she sits herself with the rest of the cheer squad at lunch, and she’s terrified for a moment that Heather, the Vice Captain of the squad, is talking about her. Discretely, Charlotte sniffs at her hair, worried that the perfume she’d spritzed to hide any of Nikki’s lingering smoke had worn off quickly. Heather’s not even looking at her, leaning in to whisper conspiratorially to the other gathered girls.

“Heather, half the people at this school smell like smoke,” Eileen cuts in as the voice of reason, taking a dainty bite of her food to punctuate her point. Heather’s expression sours.

“Yeah, but she’s pretty, why would she smoke?”

“Heather, you smoke,” Eileen rolls her eyes, and Heather sits back, crossing her arms, long, dainty fingers resting on her perfectly tanned and toned biceps.

“Yeah, but at least I have the decency not to smell like the bottom of an ashtray,” Heather raises an eyebrow, as if offering some form of challenge, and Charlotte watches Eileen bite back on a scathing retort, simply offering a withering smile, and continuing on with her lunch, “anyway,” Heather rolls her eyes, and starts up a new conversation with the girls on her other side, who were hanging onto her every word like it was gospel.

It’s quite possible that the tensions between Heather and Eileen may never actually die down, Charlotte considers, fiddling with the plastic-wrapped straw of her juice box. The thing is that Heather had only scored the position of Vice Captain of the cheerleading squad after Eileen, practically a shoe-in after two years on the squad and a pretty impressive acrobatic repertoire, publicly turned down the offer, quit, and joined the swim team the very next day, refusing to give a reason for any of her actions. A vicious joke circled the school about Heather being sloppy seconds, and despite Eileen never actually contributing to the joke in any way, or even acknowledging it, part of Heather still obviously resented her. The fact that Eileen still chose to sit with the cheerleaders despite not being one anymore, might also play into that, like she’s rubbing it in Heather’s face, even though she never would intend to do that.

Charlotte’s known Eileen for what feels like forever, since Summer camp in Grade School, living close enough to maintain a friendship, but not close enough that they were in the same district for Grade or Middle School. Both academically and socially minded young women, they’d found themselves in a number of clubs in those years that brought them face to face at meet or competitions, and thankfully, their local high school drew from a wider range of districts, finally bringing them together as allies, rather than competitors.

“Who were they talking about?” Charlotte asks quietly, stabbing her straw into her juice box, trying to keep their conversation discrete.

“A girl transferred into our grade -”

“On a Thursday?” Charlotte scoffs a little, “with three weeks left to go before Winter break?” And Eileen makes a noise in the back of her throat, an I know, it’s weird, right? Without saying any actual words.

“Something Fields; we just had French with her,” Eileen nods to where Heather’s now happily chattering with the other cheerleaders, earlier disagreement seemingly forgotten.

“Something?” Charlotte asked wryly, and Eileen gave her an amused look.

“Madame Laurent’s accent would butcher the name Sally, I’m surprised I managed to understand Fields,” and okay, she has a point, Madame Laurent’s French accent was half the reason any of the students studied the language, if only to understand her, because her English, while technically good, was sometimes incomprehensible.

“The girl didn’t correct her?”

“Nah, just kept quiet, embarrassed, I think,” Eileen mused, and Charlotte hummed thoughtfully, “though she did sit herself right next to Heather; bold move, I’ll applaud her for that.”

“Bet Heather didn’t like that,” Charlotte snickered quietly, and Eileen’s smile stretched into a full grin.

“She straight up moved the moment the girl put her bag down.”

“The poor girl,” Charlotte shook her head with a sigh, before clarifying, “not Heather, obviously.” Eileen snorted a laugh.

“What’s the new girl like?” Charlotte finds herself asking, intrigued.

“Quiet,” is Eileen’s immediate answer, “couldn’t get a good read on her, but she knows a decent amount of French.” But she deliberates for a moment, “looks kind of mean.” And for the barest moment, Charlotte frowns, mind flashing to the girl she’d seen at the gas station yesterday... it couldn’t be.

“Black hair?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“I saw a girl at the gas station yesterday, black hair, kind of mean looking, Mick didn’t know her,” that was the big tip; Mick seemed to know all the gas station regulars, so she must be new. Eileen catalogued this information in her mind, but had no comment on it beyond a shrug, before reminding Charlotte that they had debate after school, and asking if Tommy would be sticking around to give her a lift home.

“He will be, he’s got practice until four too,” Charlotte said with a half smile, “and yes, he can give you a lift home too... Will Peach be needing one too?” She asked, referring to Eileen’s younger sister, but Eileen shook her head.

“She’s staying back until five every day this week to finish her science fair project, mom’s happy to pick her up - something about magnets this year - but I don’t want to wait around.”

“Wait, how long until the science fair?” Last year, Eileen, Charlotte, Tommy, and Vince Neil, who they’d still considered something of a friend at the time, had all come to support Peach in both her first year of high school, and her first science fair. Peach had come third, with a rather impressive display about which various household liquids killed plants fastest, and all three had cheered when she’d been given her ribbon, and Tommy and Vince spent the entire ride in the back of Peach and Eileen’s mom’s station wagon ranting about how she should have won, and scheming about how to best put a dead houseplant in their science teacher’s bed, like some low budget, home depot Scarface. Tommy may have become their friends via his place as a constant fixture in Charlotte’s life, and Vince simply because he had grown up as something of her neighbour and Tommy’s close friend, but their loyalty was absolute. Well, almost absolute. Vince was noticeably absent from their current roster of friends however, the then-four of them how vowed to make it a habit, and they could all tell Peach had been touched by the gesture, and Eileen, Charlotte, and Tommy were, at the very least, going to uphold that promise. A small smile plays on Eileen’s face.

“Next Tuesday, she’s so excited.”

if you put your mind to it, you can do anything. but you won’t.

So according to Eileen, Vince Neil is throwing a party on Saturday, and seeing as Charlotte’s parents still think the world of Vince after he’d been so kind of her after everything happened with her ex at the start of the year, she’s allowed to go. They went to middle school together, though he was always a year younger than her, in Tommy’s grade, and their parents were passive-aggressive PTA friends for a few years there, and, as mentioned before, he’d been genuinely sweet when she was at her lowest. Her parents don’t know that a week and a half into Summer break, right after he’d taken her to prom and promised to key her ex’s car if she asked, he started surfing, starting hanging out at the beach with the rest of the pretty, mean jocks spending their Summer in the sun, and had turned into a vain asshole. Or, well, more of a vain asshole than he already was.

Vince’s family was well off, and his parties were legendary, which is what made her parents agreeing to let her go so strange.

What they didn’t, and would never agree to, was letting her go to Nikki’s gig, so she didn’t even bother to ask. Instead, she asked to spend the weekend with Tommy and Athena. Her mother calls to confirm that that would be okay, Charlotte packs a duffle bag with outfits for the weekend, and her mother reminds her to take care of herself at the party the following night, kissing her on both cheeks when Tommy turns up in his beat up Vista Cruiser.

“Why are you hanging out with us tonight?” Tommy asks, frowning, still in the clothes he’d worn to school. Charlotte’s grip tightens on her duffle bag.

“Because we’re going out tonight.”

Immediately, Tommy’s posture straightens, and his expression lights up; he was delightfully easy to excite. Suddenly he was brimming with questions as he drove, fighting to keep his eyes on the road, and Charlotte let herself relax a little, glad to see he was onboard.

“Nikki Sixx’s band -”

“- is playing tonight!” Tommy finishes her sentence, his voice breaking on the last word out of excitement, though Charlotte kindly doesn’t comment, and it doesn’t stop Tommy’s eyes from sparkling, “he wrote it in sharpie in pretty much every bathroom in the school; you want to go?” Yeah, that sounds about par for the course for Nikki Sixx’s brand of advertising.

“You’re half in love with the guy,” Charlotte ignored Tommy’s spluttered protests, “so I wanna see what the hype is about,” she lied easily. She wasn’t a fan of lying to Tommy, he deserved better than that, but he also might crash if he knows that Nikki had personally invited them.

Tommy begs his mom to let them go, promising to be safe and be back by midnight, and the moment Charlotte vouches for him, his mother’s concern melts into agreement, and Athena complains that she’s never allowed to go anywhere. Tommy sticks his tongue out at her, and she kicks him in the shins, scowling, until Charlotte asks her to help her get ready, and Athena brightens considerably.

“Charlie you look like a badass!” Tommy delights when he steps out of the bathroom, hair all teased up, eyeliner expertly applied his waterline, wearing an outrageous outfit. He was going to fit in easily.

“Holy shit, dude, so do you -”

“Tommy! That’s my shirt!” Athena accused, storming over to him, trying to pull the tight, black tank top with the hot pink diamante lightning bolt off of him, despite his jacket over it, while he tried to slap her away.

“It looks better on me!” Tommy snapped, escaping her grasp and trying to hide in the bathroom.

“Dude, she’s thirteen, give her the shirt back, you can borrow one of mine,” Charlotte sighed, standing back from it all.

“Never!”

His mother called out if everything’s okay, and while Athena yelled that Tommy was stealing from her, Charlotte called back that she’d take care of it.

“Charlie, please,” Athena sulked, leaning against the closed bathroom door, while Tommy told his sister to piss off. Charlotte sighed, before giving the young girl an evaluative look.

“Would you let him wear it for five bucks?”

Athena squinted at her, seriously considering the offer; if Tommy had made it, there would be no way she would have accepted, but she knew Charlotte was good for it.

“Fine, but if he stretches it, I’m telling mom about his stash of Playboys,” she threatened, to which both Tommy and Charlotte made noises of surprise, Charlotte because she hadn’t known about that, and Tommy because he clearly didn’t think Athena knew about it either.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Tommy hisses, wrenching the door open. Athena turns arms crossed, smile smug, and gives him her best try me look. Tommy wrinkles his nose, but stalks into his room, grabbing a five ones from his wallet and giving them to Athena, who Charlotte had never seen so pleased before.

“I hate her,” Tommy seethed, and Charlotte petted his shoulder in solidarity.

“I know,” and then, “aren’t you going to be cold?”

“I’ve got another jacket.”

The pub, Kings’ Hotel, sits on the border between suburbia and the CBD, and Charlotte’s been past it a million times, has spent a considerable amount of time idly staring out the window of MacCready’s Diner across the road, but never actually been inside. Speaking of MacCready’s, there’s a ton of scaffolding around it that Charlotte definitely doesn’t remember, and the sign’s been taken down, so it appears Tommy’s gossip about it being under new management was true.

There’s no bouncer, but high schoolers and music were already spilling from the building by the time Charlotte and Tommy showed up. The music is decent, if a little heavy, but Charlotte knows she could definitely get into it if she wanted to. When she approaches the building, she notices a gaggle of vaguely recognizable people all in a cluster, huddle together while they smoked to keep warm in the cold night air.

“Hi Heather,” Tommy calls out to one, putting on his most winning smile, and when Charlotte gets a proper look, yeah she can see Heather with her hair sprayed up and lipstick shiny, give her cousin a sceptical look. She does, however, notice Charlotte, and her expression shifts to something faux sweet and coy, a show of being amicable to someone obviously associated with a fellow cheerleader, and she gives them both a wave.

“I thought you had a thing for Pam,” Charlotte asks quietly as they push their way into the pub.

“Charlie, I’m into any and every cheerleader I’m not related to, why should I deprive any of the other lovely young ladies by only focusing on one girl?”

“Gross,” was Charlotte’s only comment. Tommy ignored her.

It was kind of overwhelming at first, between the loud music, the crush of people she half-knew, the fact that the bartender didn’t even blink when Tommy ordered a beer, or the fact that Nikki Sixx was on stage in skin tight leather pants, playing bass like it was his God given mission in life.

Her ex and his best friend had also been kind of obsessed with Nikki and his band, and she was coming to understand the hype. Between the swirling lights, the people on the dancefloor, and the heat of the crowd, it was almost hypnotizing to be a part of.

“You should get a drink,” Tommy urges, and Charlotte hesitates. She’s had spiked punch before, half a glass of wine at a family get together when her mom had been tipsy and feeling indulgent, and a couple of sips of beer that her ex had offered her when they’d gone to parties together, but she’d never really...

“I don’t know what to order,” she admits, hesitant, but still raising her voice over the music. Tommy offers her his beer to taste, but Charlotte was already well aware of the fact that beer tasted like piss, and she turns him down. She tries to think back to what people order in TV shows and movies, and tentatively approaches the bar.

“Could I get a jack and coke?” She asks, just thankful that her voice doesn’t shake. The bartender looks her up and down, checking her out without a hint of subtlety, and Charlotte fights the urge to pull her jacket tighter around herself.

“Of course, honey, that’ll be five-fifty,” the bartender smirks, and Charlotte gives an uncertain smile back, thanking him and passing over a ten dollar note. He gives her a five change, along with her drink and a wink. Gross.

“What’d you get?” Tommy asks, when she finds him again, standing against the opposite wall, already halfway through his drink. Charlotte’s holding hers in her fingertips, nervous, taking a sip and scrunching up her whole face at the taste.

“Jack and coke,” she hisses as the alcohol burns. Tommy’s eyebrows shoot up at her bold choice, and asks if he can try it. She offers it easily, and he too makes a face as he drinks, but pretends like it’s great.

They see more people they recognize, people confused but glad to see them out. They’re almost immediately accosted by Keanu, yet another face Charlotte hadn’t been expecting to see, and he wraps them both up in a hug; he’s all dark hair and wide, easy smiles, somehow everyone’s friend in a way that’s so different from how Charlotte seems to be everybody’s friend, but he and Tommy get on like a house on fire. There’s a resilience they both seem to have, and a shared enthusiasm, despite the fact that Keanu was a Senior, a year above Charlotte, and a full two above Tommy, but his good nature seemed to override these boundaries; the moment Tommy mentions he’d been thinking of heading to the dancefloor, Keanu’s more than happy to join him.

Immediately Tommy gulps down the last mouthful and beer and the pair of boys see fit to start cutting shapes on the dance floor with wild abandon, and so Charlotte finds herself at a table at the back of the room with Heather, a few other cheerleaders and their boyfriends, and surprisingly, Vince. He’s in white leather pants, and they look cool as hell, but also it’s Vince, and Charlotte’s fighting back the urge to laugh.

“Charlotte Lee, you’re looking fine tonight,” Vince slide into the space beside her, and Charlotte doesn’t roll her eyes, or make a comment about how he looks like a greasy snowman, no matter how much she wants to.

“Surprised to see you here, Vince, where’s all your popular little surfer pals?” She asks sweetly, and Vince raises his eyebrows at her, a retort on the tip of his tongue.

“I forgot you two knew each other,” Heather says, and she pauses, clearly deliberating, something dangerous in her eyes, “didn’t you used to date?”

“No,” Charlotte blurts quickly, though Vince is just as quick to deny it, “we’re friends- we were friends; not anymore. We went to prom together, yes, but we never dated.” She clarifies quickly, body language all tight and uncomfortable, which manages to go all the way over Vince’s head, and his hand comes to rest on his heart, expression reading betrayal.

“How long have been known each other, Charlie, for you to say we’re not even friends -”

And maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the alcohol, but Charlotte snapped.

“We were friends for years, Vinny, then six months ago you decided to spend all your time with a bunch of tools and bragged about taking me to prom because I was a cheerleader, and also - oh yeah, remember this? - made one of your best friends cry,” Charlotte hissed venomously, shoulders still tense, fingers gripping the edge of the table. Vince scowled.

“Peach wasn’t-” the words spill from him automatically, but there’s a flicker of something that may just be shame in his eyes, so he drops his gaze and starts again; “my friends are not tools -”

“The Vince who was my friend wouldn’t skip school three days a week to get high and fuck on the beach!”

“It sounds like you two have a lot to work out...” Heather seems genuinely surprised, and while she’d been fishing for gossip, this was too much, and she graciously backed out of the conversation, pulling one of her friends over to the bar. Charlotte was suddenly aware of how hot it was in the bar, how sweaty and oppressive it all felt.

“People can fucking change, Charlotte,” Vince scowled.

“You didn’t change for the better, Vince, whatever the opposite of character growth is, it’s what happened to you.” Charlotte spat, and turned on her heel before he can respond. She didn’t want to stand on the side side of the road out the front, so she heads for the door labelled Beer Garden, and steps into the cool night air.

Once outside, she realises how quiet it is, and when she sees Nikki Sixx at one of the tables with a blonde girl giggling in his lap, she comes to the conclusion that the band must be on break. The Beer Garden is mostly populated by smokers, the people around Nikki being the cool, intimidating, stoner punk rockers that she’d figured would be here, but that she can’t bring herself to approach. It’s nice to take a moment to be alone, she finds, breathing in the crisp night air, head feeling clearer for it, looking up at the stars glittering overhead.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Vince is a fucking tool. He’d made Peach cry the week they got back to school, and Charlotte had vowed to never forgive him for it.

After a few minutes, Charlotte takes the time to really look at the people milling around, wondering if she actually recognised anyone. Much to her surprise, in the back corner of the courtyard area, she did.

Side by side, Mick from the gas station, and the mysterious girl who’d bought cigarettes from him, sitting on the edge of a planter full of dead shrubs, both smoking, neither speaking, reading one magazine between the two of them.

Charlotte’s not quite sure who’s more likely to stab her, between Mick and the girl, and Nikki’s band of misfits, but she hedges her bets and heads to the pair at the back.

“Having a good night, Mick?” Charlotte asks tentatively, before giving pause. They’re reading a ratty old copy of Hustler. Mick looks up, and lets go of his side of the magazine, letting the girl take it, to keep flipping idly through.

“The band’s okay,” Mick muses, and seems to realise that his cigarette has gone out when he tries to take a drag on it, and he pulls out a lighter and relights it, “how’s your night been?”

“It’s been alright, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Charlotte gives an awkward laugh, looking to the magazine, which Mick seems to either have forgotten about, or not realise that he’s reading porn in public, but finally the girl looks up.

“Someone cut out all the tits,” she’s got an accent Charlotte hadn’t noticed back at the gas station, and still can’t quite place, but that’s not the part she focuses on.

“What?”

The girl flips the magazine around to show a Farrah Fawcett look-alike posing suggestively, with her entire torso cut from the magazine, just leaving a hole where the cologne ad on the next page can be seen.

“Found it on the side of the road on the way here,” Mick says, like it suffices for an entire explanation. Instead of elaborating, he offers Charlotte a cigarette.

“No thanks, I don’t smoke,” an awkward silence follows, Charlotte with her hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jacket, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, while the girl close the magazine with a resounding slap and threw it over her shoulder into the dead shrubs, “I’m Charlotte.” Charlotte offers her hand. The girl looks at it, then to Charlotte’s face.

“From the gas station, the cheerleader” she says, tone unreadable, giving Charlotte a scrutinizing look, like she’s waiting for the blonde to shirk under it’s intensity. Charlotte doesn’t back down, and the girl finally gives her a firm handshake, “Lola.”

Silence followers, chatter filters over from the various other groups, Nikki’s laugh, loud and clear, above the rest. Neither Mick nor Lola makes room for Charlotte, so she sways idly from side to side, people watching the rest of the courtyard.

“Didn’t pick you for this type of scene,” Mick muses finally, crossing his ankles and fixing Charlotte with a strangely neutral expression, cigarette almost burned down to the butt where it’s poised between his lips, “that over-eager cousin of yours, sure, but this doesn’t seem like it’s your style.”

“Oh, Tommy is here,” Charlotte’s quick to clarify, looking around as if he were about to jump out of the bushes and irritate the rarely amicable Mick, “but, I don’t know,” she shrugged like coming out tonight wasn’t her idea, “I’m more than happy to give anything a go at least once; people at my school are kind of weirdly obsessed with the bass player, so I guess I wanted to see what the hype was about.”

Mick finished his cigarette as he considered her words, giving a pensive look to the bass player himself, still surrounded by a gaggle of fans, and eventually stubbed the last of the ash out against the edge of the planter he was sitting on, letting the butt fall, crumpled, to the ground.

“He’s the only one with any ounce of talent,” voice gruff, Mick’s approval comes as a surprise to both Charlotte, who’s eyes go wide at the statement, and Lola, who barks an unexpected laugh, that ends with her choking on the smoke in her lungs. Mick thumps her on the back, and she roughly when her breathing clears, tears watering in her eyes.

“Whoever writes their songs is half decent,” Lola points out, wiping her eyes with her sleeve, after which she dropped her own mostly burnt-out cigarette, crushing it under the heel of her boot. Yes, she has a point, but Charlotte’s curiosity gets the better of her.

“Can I ask...?” At her tentative tone, Lola immediately tenses, growing defensive, “are you Lola Fields?”

“Why?” Lola immediately snaps, and Charlotte raises her hands in surrender. Mick’s arms are crossed, looking with interest between the two girls.

“I think you go to my school,” Charlotte quickly clarifies, but Lola’s scowl deepens, as if wondering how she knew that, “do you take AP French with a tall, ginger girl?”

“I don’t really know who else is in the class,” Lola slowly tells her, but it’s not a no, which is all that matters. Charlotte nods, but doesn’t press the subject, “it’s weird that you know that much about me.” Lola adds.

“It’s barely anything,” Charlotte points out, baffled at the sudden defensiveness.

“You know my last name and that I do AP French,” Lola says, and her gaze shifts from Charlotte to the gaggle of fans surrounding Nikki, as they all started to head inside.

“Well,” Charlotte doesn’t let her resolve falter, smiling, “my name’s Charlotte Lee, and --”

“Oi, Cheerleader, you coming inside? We’ve got another set to go!” Nikki Sixx’s voice rings out through the courtyard area, and Charlotte visibly cringes at the sound of it, turning slowly on her heel, still wincing when she faces him.

And yes, he was talking to her, his hands are still cupped around his mouth like a megaphone, a tunnel showing off his smug and toothy grin. She hadn’t realised he’d even noticed her, but he had, and he needed her to know he had.

“The world doesn’t revolve around you,” she calls back, irritated. Nikki lowers his hands, and even from this distance she can see him raising his eyebrows.

“But you’re here, aren’t you?” He leaves the because I invited to you as an implication only she would hear, knowing she would hear it nonetheless. Charlotte sighs deeply, shoulders sagging with resignation, and Nikki, feeling as though he’d won, turns sharply on his heel and marches inside.

“I hate him,” Charlotte groaned.

“You know him?” Mick seems rather surprised, enough that the emotion could be heard in his voice. Charlotte turns back, not quite sure what to expect when she faced them. Mick is watching Charlotte with actual interest. Lola was watching the spot where Nikki had been, expression carefully blank.

“He’s a pain,” Charlotte says, defeated, and Lola’s gaze flicks to her, expression turning amused, but before she can get a word in -

“There you are!” The door to the now mostly-empty beer garden bursts open, and Tommy makes himself known. He’s left Keanu somewhere inside, apparently, now that he was on the hunt for his cousin. Mick sighs so heavily that it’s all he can do to lean back into the planter, arms crossed over his chest like a vampire, as if the very sight of the kid exhausts him. From this position, the packet of cigarettes in his pocket is exposed, and Lola steals one.

“I’ll owe you,” is all she says, as Tommy approaches, in less of a beeline, and more of an unsteady wave, more than a little tipsy. Christ, his mom is gonna kill them both.

“I was looking everywhere for you,” his wide eyes betrayed his concern, despite his current state, but his concern turns to joy, upon seeing her company, “hi, Mick!” Mick does not answer, laying with his eyes closed, in the shrubs.

“He’s dead,” Lola supplies without missing a beat, pulling out her lighter and lighting the stolen cigarette, and Tommy’s expression falls.

“We should help him -”

“I can help him, don’t worry,” Lola assures, with faux seriousness, before her tone shifts to something light, easily distracting the tipsy boy, “you were in the gas station the other day with this one, weren’t you?” She gestures with her lighter towards Charlotte; Tommy looks to his cousin before looking to Lola.

“I- yeah, oh, shit, you’re- hi,” suddenly flustered as he finally remembered where he knew her from, he offers his hand, “Tommy.”

“Lola,” there’s a new edge to her smile, sparkling in her eyes as she taking in Tommy and his whole look, which has something strangely protective flare up in Charlotte’s chest. But then Lola catches the slight frown on Charlotte’s face, and it’s like she knows exactly what she’s thinking, because she lets go of Tommy’s hand and her expression betrays on the faintest hint of amusement.

“Lola,” Tommy nods very seriously, as if committing the name to his memory in his current state was quite the task, but he persisted nonetheless. After a moment, however, he seemed to remember his original mission, “Vince thought you’d headed home -”

“Fuck Vince,” Charlotte spits automatically, venomously, a knee-jerk response, and Tommy’s stunned into silence.

“Do you want to go home?” Tommy’s far too earnest and concerned for his current state, and Charlotte feels momentarily guilty for her outburst, hanging her head and letting herself breathe for a moment.

“No, the music’s good, we just got into a fight -”

“You guys used to actually be good friends,” Tommy hesitates, confused, and Charlotte gives him a rueful smile when she looks back at him.

“Then he decided that being nice to the people who have been friends with him for years was lame.”

“He’s nice to me,” Tommy says, sounding a little put out, and Charlotte shrugged, crossing her arms.

“And he’s still nice to me, doesn’t mean he’s not a tool; I’m a cheerleader, and you’re a guy, of course he’s still going to be nice to us.”

Tommy still doesn’t get it, but Charlotte decides to head back into the pub with him, throwing over her shoulder that it was nice to meet Lola. She could almost swear she heard a muttered ‘fuckin’ teenagers’ from Mick, all of nineteen years old himself, which just has Charlotte rolling her eyes. Mick taps Lola’s arm when Charlotte glances over her shoulder, while the rest of him still lays flat in the dirt, and Lola passes him the cigarette obligingly, crossing one leg over the other and smirking at him.

it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty. i am gonna drink it through this crazy straw!

“Vince is on the warpath,” Eileen’s always been able to remain composed while unreasonably drunk better than any person Charlotte’s ever known, and the following night, while Vince’s house party rages around them in the living room of his house, is no exception. She won’t say how many vodka sodas she’s had, or who supplied her with the vodka, but the way she was unable to suppress the amused twist of her lips was a dead giveaway that she was a little more than tipsy.

“Oh?” Charlotte’s eyes were roaming from face to face at the party, never sticking to just one, hands clutching a red solo cup full of cheap wine.

“Someone told him the person who keyed his car was here,” Eileen’s close to laughter, and Charlotte’s eyebrows raise in surprise.

“Does he -”

“No,” Eileen shakes her head, taking another delicate sip of her own drink, “he thinks it’s one of Duff’s friends.” She says, before her eyes going wide, and she slaps her free hand over her mouth - “sorry.” Charlotte, who’s too tipsy to care about the mention of her ex, is more confused than anything else.

“Because of me?” She actually snorts, skeptical, “as if Duff or any of his friends cared about who took me to prom after everything happened, enough to key Vince’s car.” It’s been long enough now that she can laugh at it, and the warped logic of it all, knowing full well that the girl sitting beside her was the real vandal of Vince’s shiny, red car.

“Can you believe Vince asked me to invite Peach? After all that shit he pulled on her after Summer? I almost clocked him in the middle of the carpark!” Eileen’s movements were relaxed and uncomplicated, so unlike her usual demeanour, so easy-going, so honest, sometimes drunk-Eileen’s openness caught Charlotte by surprise, “told him to invite her himself if he wanted her there so bad.”

“I’m in awe of your restraint,” Charlotte mused, leaning into Eileen, letting her eyes fall closed in an attempt to keep the room from spinning in her vision, “he’s such an ass; I’m surprised you’re even here.”

“The nerve on him, acting like he’s too good to be seen with her because he’s got new friends,” Eileen shook her head, wrapping her free arm around Charlotte’s shoulders, securing her, still people watching, “I should have keyed him,” for a moment, she hiccups, and when Charlotte cracks her eye open for a moment to guage her friend’s current state, she sees Eileen glaring into her mostly-empty cup.

“I’m still deciding if I should pee on something he cares about,” Eileen says, tone so serious that Charlotte can’t help but dissolve into giggles.

“What?”

“‘s why I’m here,” Eileen was so earnest in her declaration that Charlotte was a little nervous, if only because drunk-Eileen would absolutely do something as undignified as pee on something of Vince’s in an act of revenge.

“Would you key Duff’s car for me?” Charlotte asked to change the topic, all soft and teasing, and she can hear rare, unrestrained the smile in Eileen’s voice when she assured Charlotte she would in a heartbeat, giving her shoulder a squeeze.

Despite it still being early in the night, Charlotte knew that if she seemed drunk when she got back to Tommy’s house, her Aunt would tell her mom, and that’s the exact opposite of what she needs. Tommy can get legless if he wants, he only has to face the wrath of his weirdly supportive parents; if Charlotte comes home obviously drunk, she won’t be allowed out of the house until college. So she decides to get water.

There’s bodies everywhere, and Charlotte’s struggling to move through them, even with Eileen guiding her to the kitchen.

Charlotte’s been in and around this house so many times, it should be second nature to her; she and Tommy had spent what felt like half their childhoods in this house, within it’s pristine, white walls, and expensive, leather furniture, playing pretend trying to imagine what their future would turn out to be. None of them would have pictured this, of Charlotte, of Charlotte hating Vince and still stumbling, drunk through his house, nor had they seen Vince, playing pretend with popularity, tossing them all aside for a set of conceited fair-weather friends. Tommy’s never been able to predict his own future, too willing to go with the flow to be too certain of anything.

Away from the living room, and the record player, the music is muffled, and the chatter is quieter, as people are here for drinks, or snacks, while most were choosing to dance in the crush in the living room, or making regrettable, teenage decision upstairs.

Eileen tops up her drink with obviously spiked punch. Half vodka and soda, half spiked fruit punch. Gross. Charlotte looks on in disgust as she sips water, and Eileen acts like there’s no difference between taste, but she interrupts her own performance of stoicism when her eyes widen.

“Fields.”

“What?” Charlotte asks, confused as all hell, following Eileen’s gaze to where the kitchen opens up onto the patio, only to see Lola, in a full face of makeup, hair sprayed to high heavens, wearing all sorts of black, ripped, mesh and denim layers, looking like an intimidating cross between glam rock and crust punk. She was straddling someone’s lap, looking at them intently, what looked to be a black, eyeliner pencil in her hand.

“That’s the girl from my French class,” Eileen sounds a little surprised to see her, and Charlotte smiles a little.

“Her name’s Lola -” but her mouth drops open when Lola, in the dim light spilling from the kitchen, leans in and kisses whoever she’s sitting on. After a beat, both Charlotte and Eileen burst in fits of unsubtle laughter, not having anticipated this turn of events. They’re holding each other for support in their drunken amusement, laughing like this is somehow the funniest thing they’ve ever encountered, thankfully aware enough to set aside their cups.

“I- we’re intruding right? This is- we should leave-” they’re not even the only ones in the kitchen when Charlotte says this, gasping for breaths between her laughs, but they seem to be the only ones who have noticed what’s happening, or at least the only ones who halfway care.

Until there comes a shout of ‘yeah, get some, Tommy!’ from the bonfire about thirty yards from the patio, and Charlotte very clearly and distinctly thinks ‘oh no’.

Vince is silhouetted by the fire, bleach blonde hair catching the light, but Charlotte can hear the smirk in his voice.

“Shut up, Vince!” Lola’s partner, who is now unmistakably Tommy, calls back, flustered, as Lola hides her grin against his shoulder. Vince and his cronies, none of whom Charlotte knows by name, jeer in response. Then Lola’s leaning back and saying something that Charlotte doesn’t catch, but suddenly Tommy looks inside, his expression turning from flustered and pleased to horrified as his gaze locks with Charlotte’s and they both know that she knows.

Eileen is wheezing with laughter beside her.

Charlotte sees Tommy’s now lipstick-stained mouth mutter ‘shit’. Lola follows his gaze, and waves awkwardly at Charlotte. Charlotte also mutters ‘shit’.

Charlotte tips out her water and gets herself another cup of wine from the back of Vince’s refrigerator. A lot has happened in thirty seconds, she thinks she deserves one more drink for the night.

#mick mars #tommy lee #vince neil #nikki sixx #motley crue #the pack #charlotte & lola #lola&charlotte #the angry lizard writes

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organabanana · 3 years

Text

Leaves of three, let it be [1/?] || harlivy

Chapters: 1/?

Fandom: DCU (Comics)DCUHarley Quinn (Comics)Harley Quinn (Cartoon 2019)

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence

Relationships: Pamela Isley/Harleen Quinzel

Characters: Pamela Isley, Harleen Quinzel, Selina Kyle

Additional Tags: Mentions of alcohol, mentions of batman fucking bats, most of this is straight up idiocy tbh, i just finished watching the cartoon so everyone swears like a sailor i'm sorry, rated for (ahem) happenings later on, ivy/harley/catwoman frenemies

Series: Part 1 of the Cliché a Week 2021 series

Summary:

Aided by a terrible hangover and a severe lack of impulse control, Harley accidentally drinks an unknown substance at Ivy's apartment and suddenly remembers why Ivy goes by Poison Ivy in her professional life. Luckily for Harley, she's immune to Ivy's toxins. Unluckily for Harley, she may not be immune to her love pheromones, and turning into a human-plant hybrid is not her idea of a good time.

Telling Ivy so she can give her an antidote may seem like the obvious course of action, but there are very few things Harley hates more than disappointing Ivy with her poor decision-making skills. Besides, like Selina said, if she'd drunk pheromones she'd be in love with Ivy by now, right?

And Harley Quinn is absolutely not in love with her best friend.

Notes:

This was (loosely) inspired by Prompt #1104 by @promptsforthestrugglingauthor: “Hey, do you know if potions expire?” “I think it depends on the potion. Why?” “Well, I was really hungover this morning and grabbed the wrong glass and I feel super weird right now.” And "Everyone knows they’re dating except them” from the Cliché A Week Challenge by @montocalypse. The plan is for this to be 4-5 chapters at most BUT I'm not ready to commit to a number just yet so we'll see how that goes!

[ao3 link]

Harley wakes up with a pounding headache that makes her wonder if someone stole her bat and tried to crack her skull with it last night.

"Ughhh..." she groans, squeezing her eyes shut. Her mouth feels like sandpaper. Her throat feels like... like sandpaper. Listen: she's not in any kind of mood for elaborate, imaginative similes right now. Everything is pain and/or sandpaper. Deal with it.

"Fuck me." It comes out in a whiny, pathetic little voice, and Harley is almost more pissed off about that than about the hangover itself. Where is she, anyway? She forces herself to sort of... perceive the world around her without moving a muscle or opening her eyes, which may not be the best approach but it works anyway because she totally knows Ive's apartment by smell.

As friends do.

Once that's settled, and she knows she's in fact safe (how could she not be? She's at Ivy's!) Harley moves her right hand and feels around for the bedside table, but apparently she didn't climb into her usual side of the bed (friends have sides of their friends' beds, obviously) because what she feels on her right side is soft and warm and definitely not a bedside table.

"Sorry." She mumbles, affectionately patting Ivy's ass before turning over to the other side and trying again. She does find a table this time, and she nearly cries in relief when she finds a little water bottle waiting for her parched lips to drink.

Score.

It's only when she's downed the whole thing that she realizes two things:

One, that did not taste like water.

And two, there is a reason Pam goes professionally by Poison Ivy.

"Shit," Harley stage-whispers, blue eyes now wide open as she stares at the empty bottle in her hand, "shit, shit, shit."

Harley knows she's not dying. She knows she's immune to toxins, and she's cuddled the fuck out of Ivy (as friends do) on enough occasions to know she doesn't break out in hives at Ivy's touch. But the thing about Ivy is, she's kind of an overachiever. There aren't just toxins to worry about. Harley could be about to turn into a fern or something, and nobody could do anything to prevent it.

Well, except Pam.

But you know what? Considering the kind of mood Ivy gets in when Harley makes a less than stellar choice, she's gonna risk turning into a plant rather than waking her up.

"Morning, sunshine." Selina walks -- nay, prances -- into the bedroom looking flawless as always, which is pretty fucking unfair considering her presence at Ivy's can only mean she was there for whatever hangover-causing shenanigans they all happened to get into last night. But of course, Selina Kyle is above looking like shit while hungover.

" Selina ," Harley all but hisses (which is fitting, considering Selina's... you know), showing her the empty bottle, "I fucked up."

"When do you not fuck up, Harley?" It comes off as both smug and somehow charming, which is, again, pretty fucking unfair. "What did you do this time?"

Harley shows her the empty bottle once again, shaking it slightly like she cannot believe Selina isn't getting the gravity of the situation right away.

"What? I don't get it-- ohh ." Selina lets out a quiet chuckle that sounds almost like a purr. "Yeah, you fucked up."

"Dammit, Selina! What if I turn into a fucking succulent?"

"Oh come on, don't be dramatic. What color was it?"

Harley stares at her. "Don't you think I'd have known not to drink it if I'd looked at it?"

"I mean, I tend to assume people look at things before putting them in their mouth. But you did fuck Joker, so..."

"Hurtful." A beat. "Fair, yes, but still. Hurtful."

As if on cue, Ivy rolls over in her sleep, draping her arm across Harley's lap. Harley smiles, momentarily forgetting the bottle and its contents and the potential result of her having drunk them, because Ivy is just such a good friend. Protecting her from Selina's... well. Selina-ness even in her sleep.

"You guys need some privacy?"

Harley doesn't stop gently tracing the vines on the back of Ivy's hand, but she does look away from soft green skin to shoot Selina a teasing look. "Aw, does someone need scritches? Here, pussy pussy..."

Selina rolls her eyes. "Fine. Turn into a fucking sequoia for all I care. At least you'll be good for climbing."

The soft movements of Harley's fingers stop as Selina's words fully sink in. "Wh- what?" Harley's voice sounds a bit deflated, like one of those sad clown balloons after a sad balloon fart.

"I'm just saying. Pheromones and chill forever as a human-tree abomination? Kind of her signature move."

Harley just stares at Selina, horrified at the prospect of spending the rest of her life as a brain-dead tree and trying (and failing) to come up with a plausible reason why there is no way Ivy's pheromones were in that bottle.

"Anyway!" Selina sighs, stretching her arms up over her head. "I should get going. I have cats to feed."

"Wait. Wait!" Harley stage-whispers, and she's suddenly extremely thankful for Ivy sleeping like a log.

Heh. Like a log .

"You can't leave me, Selina! What if you're right?"

"Oh, come on, kitten," Selina says over her shoulder, already on the way to the door, "if it was pheromones you'd be in love with her by now."

The sound of the door slamming shut behind Selina is enough to finally wake Ivy, and Harley feels her best friend's arms tighten around her as Ivy stretches awake.

"Mmmhey, Harls." Ivy mumbles, voice rough and heavy with sleep as she moves even closer to Harley.

Normally, Harley would've just sunk back into the most comfortable bed ever (there's a reason she rarely sleeps in her own!) and gone in for a round of lazy morning cuddles. She'd have basked in the smell of Ivy in the morning (freshly cut grass sparkling with dew drops) which is so different from the floral notes of Ivy at any other time of the day. She'd have pressed a kiss or two to Ivy's warm skin, felt her lips tingle with the sweet taste of a poison she's very much immune to, and maybe even fallen back to sleep listening to Ivy's heartbeat and the soft rhythm of her breaths.

You know. As friends do.

But today, thanks to Selina (the fact that nobody forced Harley to drink that stupid bottle is irrelevant, of course), Harley can't relax. She stiffens, even, becoming virtually un-snuggable and making Ivy fully open her eyes to give her a questioning look.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, of course, Ive!" The enthusiasm is as fake as her smile, and the way Ivy's eyes narrow tells her it's been very much noticed. "Bit hungover, that's all."

It takes a couple of seconds for Ivy to speak. Like she's pondering whether to mention there's never been a hangover bad enough to keep Harley from getting her cuddle on or to just let it go for now. Harley's delighted to see the second option win in the end.

"Want me to give you something for the headache?"

"Nope!" Harley's on her feet in two seconds flat, practically jumping away from Ivy's warm body and her warm eyes and the warm offer of some nice natural drugs. "Thanks, though. You're sweet as pie, butter...fly."

"Butterfly." Ivy deadpans from the bed, looking more and more like she's mere seconds away from researching actual mental health facilities in Gotham (Arkham does not count).

"Buttercup doesn't rhyme with pie. Listen, I should go. I have so much to do. There are-- well, you know! Havoc won't wreak itself, right? Gotham needs me."

"To... wreak havoc."

" Pre cisely. Gonna wreak it real good. You know me! Won't settle for a half-wroken havoc."

"Wro... ken?"

"Oh, for sure, for sure!" What is she even saying? Harley grabs her bat and swings it a little like she's holding a purse and not a weapon, but thankfully she doesn't break anything in Ivy's room, which is great. "Text ya later, yeah?"

Ivy looks like she's struggling to even begin to process everything that's happened in the five minutes she's been awake. And honestly, Harley's grateful for it. She hasn't noticed the missing bottle, and she's not forcing Harley to stay and answer questions, so it's a win/win/win situation if you ask her. You know... other than the potential mutant tree issue.

"Okay!" Harley grins. "Good talk. Bye, Red. Love ya!"

Shit .

Harley freezes for a moment. She's told Ivy she loves her before. Of course she has! She loves Ive, and Ivy loves her. They're pretty vocal about that. But today isn't just any other day. She always loves Ivy as a friend, of course. As her best friend she adores and would absolutely kill and die for. The most important person in her life. The one person who's ever made Harley feel safe and loved and appreciated unconditionally. She loves Ivy in a way that makes her feel like her heart is a bit too big for her ribcage and sometimes it gets so crowded in there she's afraid she may pop a rib out of its socket or something, but then Ivy holds her and everything settles again.

You know. A friendly kind of love.

But does she love Ivy? Harley looks at her hands like she's expecting a few leaves to have sprouted there already.

"Harley. Seriously, are you okay?"

Ivy's voice snaps her out of her funk, and Harley knows she needs to get out before she's forced into a whole conversation about this thing.

"Peachy keen, Pam-a-lamb." Harley forces herself to walk towards the door without looking back, just in case. Just in case suddenly Ivy's surrounded by a pink fog of love, or whatever the fuck people see when they look at her while under the influence of her pheromones. I mean, she can't look even more beautiful than she does normally, right? That's not even possible. So it must be like... a heart emoji filter or something. She really doesn't want to find out. "Talk later!"

***

Harley looks at the melting cheese on her third egg sandwich like she's expecting it to hold the meaning of life. Or, at the very least, an answer to today's big conundrum. Is she or is she not turning into a tree?

And sure. Sure! She could ask Pam. This would be solved immediately, she knows. She could just ask Pam what was in the bottle and confess she's drunk it and just... put up with her mood for a while. No big deal! Except she really fucking hates disappointing Ivy, you know? When she gets all... cold and detached, and feels more like lettuce than lush tropical foliage.

Listen, trust her, okay? Sad salad buffet lettuce Ivy is just the fucking worst.

So she takes a bite of her sandwich and tells herself whatever she drank can't have been anything too dangerous. It's been a couple hours now, so she should've felt some kind of effect, right? She should be feeling a bit plant-y, at the very least. Maybe a bit nauseous or something. But she feels fine.

Well-- not fine , fine. She's still kinda rattled, but that's Selina's fault.

She's fine.

***

"Are you sure you're up for this?"

Ivy lets Selina handle the entry point (you'd think Gotham millionaires would've given up on skylights by now) and looks at Harley with a mixture of concern and distrust in her eyes. She clearly hasn't forgotten about their conversation in the morning.

"I'm fine!" Harley swings her bat around just to loosen up her bat-swinging muscles. She's fine. Not a plant, not in a love fog, not in any way dying. Totally fine. And , most importantly, not dealing with limp lettuce Ive. "It was just a hangover."

Ivy's eyes narrow just enough to make it crystal clear how little she trusts Harley right now, but for once Selina Kyle makes Harley's life easier instead of harder when she speaks.

"Ladies. This is a truly riveting conversation, but I have shit to do.”

“Like fucking a bat-fucking bat?” It may be a cheap shot, but it makes Ivy stiffle a laugh, and Harley kinda thinks that makes it the best joke ever.

But Selina simply cocks an eyebrow at Harley. “Are you sure you want to discuss regrettable sexual partners?”

Ouch. “Fair enough,” Harley concedes, already jumping through the hole Selina’s cut in the glass, “come on, we have an oil tycoon to kill.”

“Not an oil tycoon, Harls.” Ivy glides down on a vine, looking all majestic like some kind of forest nymph, and Harley simply has to stare and smile because how can she not? Look at her friend! “He’s been using an experimental fuel that causes—“

“Does it matter?” Selina sighs like even interrupting Ivy is exhausting, plucking a shiny gold ornament from a nearby table and making Harley wonder (honestly, not for the first time) if she just keeps shiny trinkets hidden in her catsuit like a magician to make it seem like she’s finding them everywhere. “Guy’s loaded.”

“It matters to me, Selina. Not all of us have the moral compass of a magpie.”

Harley giggles at Ivy’s joke. You know what? It may not even have been a real joke, because Ivy’s sense of humor is not exactly her best quality. But it was funny anyway.

“And if it matters to Ive, it matters to moi .” Harley points at herself with her bat and winks at her best friend, and honestly, who the hell cares what this guy does, exactly? Maybe he’s single-handedly destroying the Amazon, or maybe he just happens to walk through the grass instead of using the little paths when making his way across the park. Whatever it is, it’s important to Ivy. And if it’s important to Ivy, it’s important to Harley. And if it’s important to Ivy in a way that makes her smile like she does when Harley winks at her? Well, then this is absolutely Harley’s top fucking priority.

Things get interesting as soon as they turn a corner and step onto the plush carpet of the experimental fuel (hey, she actually listens when Ivy speaks) tycoon's private wing. And you know what? Harley's delighted to hear the alarms go off and a bunch of goons crawl out from their hidey holes like buff armed cockroaches. She knows Ivy and Selina prefer the whole... well, you know. In and out, clean and easy kind of approach to murder and robbery, respectively. But Harley's an action gal. She has the energy to burn and a bat to swing, and most of all, she has shit to not think about.

So she's delighted when this guy's goons happen to be relatively okayish at fighting, which is much more than can be said for most men she fights in this city.

"I'll go deal with him before he can escape," Ivy says, already walking towards the door to his office. "You guys all right out here?"

"We're great ." Selina says in that tone she has where she pretends she's annoyed but you can tell she's having a blast.

Honestly. Who wouldn't be having a blast? It's like whack-a-goon!

"So," Selina says as soon as Ivy's out of earshot, which Harley can appreciate as an act of friendship, "no pheromones, I take it?"

"Nope!" Harley punctuates the word by slamming her bat into some guy's face. "None at all."

"Huh."

"What?" She's distracted enough by Selina's reply that she actually takes a punch to the face, which only manages to piss her off. She turns to look at the guy who delivered the blow just so he can see the look in her eyes before she completely obliterates his face. "Holy shit, dude. Can't you see we're having a fucking CONVERSATION !?"

For the next few minutes, Harley focuses on getting rid of the last few men around them so they can finish talking. Sure, beating up idiots is fun, but that little 'huh' was just mysterious enough to grab Harley's interest. What could possibly be so huh-worthy about her being fine?

By the time they're done, there are a number of unconscious goons scattered all over the place. Harley pants, using her hand to wipe blood (mostly not hers) and sweat (mostly hers) off her face as she catches her breath.

"Whew. That was fun, right?"

Selina, as usual, manages to look spotless even if Harley saw her deal with several men with her own two eyes. Is Selina Kyle secretly magic?

Could be.

"I've had better." Selina uses one of her claws to unlock an ornate little box and gather the jewels inside. Can she smell expensive stuff? "Come on, let's go get Ivy."

"No, no, wait." Harley lowers her voice like she's scared Ivy may hear them somehow. "What did you mean earlier?"

"What do you mean, what did I mean?"

"You know," Harley motions in the general direction of the spot where Selina was when they were talking before, "with the huh."

"The what ."

"The huh, Selina! The huh!" Dark olive eyes narrow in confusion (and annoyance), and Harley groans because she can't believe Selina Kyle is being this thick. "I said no pheromones. And you said huh."

"Oh, that." Selina uses a polished silver platter as a mirror to reapply a lipstick Harley is frankly not sure where one would even carry in a skin-tight leather jumpsuit. The more time she spends with Selina, the more convinced she is she just doesn't abide by the laws of physics.

And the more time she waits for Selina to elaborate, the more Harley realizes she just... isn't going to, apparently.

"Uughhh!" Harley groans and uses her bat to smash a nearby sculpture. "You're killing me, Selina! What the fuck did you mean!?"

Selina cocks one perfectly manicured eyebrow (Harley can tell it's happening under the mask) and gives Harley a look like she can't believe she'd have the audacity to speak to her in that tone.

"I meant," Selina's tone is a warning, like she wants to make it clear she could have made Harley suffer more if she wanted, but she's choosing not to, "I found it surprising. You looked a bit loved up to me."

"What? Pffft." Harley lets out a chuckle and nudges one of the pieces of the sculpture with her foot. "Cut back on the catnip, Selina."

Loved up. Ridiculous. Does she love Ivy? Of course. Is she loved up? Of course not . There's no heart emoji fog. None at all.

"If you say so." Selina gives her A Look. The kind of look says she doesn't believe Harley, and she wants Harley to know that even if she won't engage in an argument about it right now. Selina Kyle can say a lot with one look.

For a moment, Harley considers pushing the issue. She could insist. She could give her a list of reasons why she's absolutely not loved up at all whatsoever. She could tell Selina how what she shares with Ivy is actually true friendship, and Selina would know if she was capable of bonding with anything other than cats and jewelry. She could tell her how there's nothing even remotely mind-foggy about her feelings for Ive (she could bring up she's seen that mind fog in action the many times Ive's put Batman under her spell, even). Harley could tell Selina how her brain always feels a bit foggy in a vague kind of way -- just foggy enough to keep Harleen quiet and let Harley take the wheel -- but being with Ivy makes her feel more lucid, more real , than anything else in the world. How when Ive says she loves her Harley feels it right in her bones, in the very marrow of them, in the deepest, darkest, longest-forgotten parts of her brain where no other feeling can ever reach.

She could tell her how wildly different all that is from a silly potion-induced love fog. But she doesn't think Selina would understand their friendship even if Harley actually spelled it out. So she doesn't.

Instead, she silently follows Selina towards the office where Pam's been doing her thing. Where Pam's still doing her thing, actually, and Harley can't help but smile and lean against the doorframe to watch her best friend doing what she loves most (after Harley) in the world: eco-conscious murder.

"I fucking swear ," Ivy hasn't realized they're there, so she must be talking to what Harley can only assume is the tycoon himself even though only one of his legs can be seen outside the enormous mouth of a very happy-looking carnivorous plant, "how hard is it to not print out e-mails? Look at all this shit. Do you know how many trees had to be killed so you could print out your shitty... whatever the fuck this is?"

Ivy groans like she's frustrated she can't use her powers to just will all the papers scattered everywhere to turn back into trees. There are vines everywhere -- like nature reclaiming the furniture and the walls and the floors and really every surface of his office. There's a strange beauty to it, Harley thinks. Haunting, like those pictures of abandoned buildings covered in grass and moss and weeds. Even when she's angry -- and oh, she's angry right now -- Ivy really can't help but make the world a more beautiful place, can she?

Even when she was on the other side of the reinforced glass, wearing her glasses and her white coat, Harley never fully understood why Poison Ivy was lumped in with the rest of the psychos in Gotham.

Harley doesn't know how long she stays there. Selina's happily working on the safe next to the carnivorous plant, and Harley's more than content to just watch Ivy in her element for a while.

And then, it happens.

Ivy's going on a rant about a bunch of single-use coffee cups she's found in the trashcan by the desk when she suddenly stops in her tracks. Harley can't see what she's looking at until Ivy turns around with a small flower pot in her hand, a sad-looking, mostly dry plant limply hanging off its side.

"Fuck him."

Ivy touches the plant and her brow furrows, and Harley knows she's feeling the thirst and the pain in the little plant as if it was her own. "You're okay now," Ivy says as the plant starts to recover, and her voice is so soft -- so full of love for a dry, nearly dead plant -- that Harley swears she feels her heart grow at least a couple sizes. She watches her best friend breathe life into a little plant, watches it turn from brown to green, brighter and taller, watches it sprout new leaves that make it look like it's stretching after a long sleep. And then she watches a bright yellow flower bloom, and when Harley finally manages to tear her eyes away from the flower to look at Ivy instead, she swears she feels her heart stop dead in its tracks.

Ive's always beautiful. Always, without fail, no matter what time of day or night, lounging at home or brooding in an Arkham cell. Pam is beautiful always. But Harley doesn't think she's ever seen her look more beautiful than she does right now, with her hair slightly disheveled after a fight and some blood (not at all hers) splattered on her face and clothes. It's the way she's smiling at that little plant. The way her smile grows and softens when she notices Harley looking at her. Harley's so enthralled by Ivy that she doesn't realize what she's thinking until it's been running through her mind for a while.

God , Harley's in love with her.

And that's when she realizes. That's when she hears the proverbial record scratch in her brain and her eyes widen in horror because there it is. There's the pink fog before the botanical mutation, right? I mean she can't exactly see a literal pink fog, but she may as well. She can feel her heartbeat all over the place. The butterflies in her stomach. The nearly all-consuming need to grab Ivy and kiss her until neither of them can breathe.

"Shit. Shit, Red, shit, shitshit shit ."

Ivy's no longer smiling. At all.

"Oh God, Pammy. I fucked up." Harley feels her eyes well up with tears as she rushes towards her best friend because this is no longer a hypothetical: this is happening. She did drink something dangerous. And suddenly keeping Ivy from finding out and getting mad at her feels less important than fucking surviving. "I fucked up, Ive, I drank a potion and now I'm turning into a fucking plant, please tell me you have an antidote."

"Harley. Harl, look at me." Ivy looks so genuinely concerned Harley's sure the ridiculous amount of love she can see in green eyes must be part of the potion's effects. She's hallucinating, isn't she? "What potion? You're immune, Harley, you know that. Calm down."

"No, no! Not poison, I mean--" Harley shakes her head but has to stop when Ivy places her hands on Harley's cheeks to hold her head steady and look into her eyes like she's wondering if Harley's on drugs or something. "I mean a love potion, Ive! Shit, I thought it was water and I just drank the whole thing and I thought maybe it was nothing because I felt fine but now I know for sure I fucked up because I'm so in love with you like-- just feel this!" Harley grabs one of Ivy's hands and moves it from her cheek down to her chest, pressing it right where her heart is still skipping all over itself. "Right?"

"I-- I don't-- Harl, what potion ? You're immune to all of my--"

"The pheromones! I don't know what it was! God I'm such a fucking fuck-up and now I'm just-- shit I hope I at least turn into a rhododendron bush or something because I don't want to be a succulent, Ive. Don't let me turn into a succulent." Harley's really crying now, black mascara running down her cheeks and staining Pam's hand as she struggles to breathe through her words. "I know I should've told you but I didn't want you to be disappointed and now I'm in love and it's just-- Selina, you tell her!"

"Selina?" Ivy turns around like she's just realized Selina is still in the mansion, let alone in the room with them. "What's going on?"

Harley was expecting Selina to tell Ivy exactly what happened that morning. She was expecting Selina to tell Ivy all about Harley being an idiot who drinks things without looking first, about the pheromones and chill, about Harley's refusal to tell Ivy right away. Instead, Selina looks... almost like she's the one who's been caught in a lie.

"Selina, what the fuck did you do?" Ivy's voice sounds like she's mere seconds away from feeding Selina to the plant, too. Harley can feel the anger like tingles where Ivy's hands are still pressed against her skin. "What did you give her?"

Selina lets out a sigh. "Margarita mix."

"What?" Harley feels a lightbulb go off inside her brain. That was the weird taste when she drank whatever was in that bottle. Fucking margarita mix. But just.. "Why? What the fuck, Selina? Why would you let me think it was pheromones? I know Batman doesn't actually fuck bats, probably. Come on, it was a joke! Mostly!"

"Will you relax?" Selina sounds like she can't believe Harley may be a bit agitated after spending a whole day thinking she's going to die and/or mutate into a plant. "I'm sick of watching you two idiots pretend that ," she points in the general direction of Harley and Ivy, "is just a couple of gals being pals. Figured I'd help you out."

"Help!?" Harley could just-- God , she could just smash Selina's face in with her bat. But she suddenly realizes there's a much more pressing issue to handle before revenge can even begin to be considered. "Shit, Red," Harley takes one step back to look at Ivy, and for the first time ever she's surprised to see she can't read the look in her eyes, "I didn't mean-- you know I didn't mean any of it, right?" For a split second Harley swears something like pain flashes behind green eyes, but it's gone as quickly as it appeared. "I was just worried and I-- I got in my head about it. But you know I didn't mean it. You know , right? Pammy?"

It takes Ivy a few seconds to answer, and when she does she sounds... different. "Yeah. Yeah, I know."

For some reason, it doesn't sound as reassuring as Harley though it would.

"Come on, Ive--" Selina tries to keep talking, but Ivy cuts her off.

"Listen, we're done here. So I'm just gonna..." Ivy shakes her head like she's trying to physically clear it of thoughts and feelings and general clutter, "I'm just gonna go home."

Harley feels like she's stuck to the floor. She just stands there, silent and frozen in place as she watches Ivy leave. She knows this isn't right. She knows something just happened -- something she can't quite wrap her brain around right now. All she knows is Ivy's leaving, and she wants her to stay but she doesn't know how to make her body move or make any noises until her gaze drops to the desk and she sees the little plant right there.

"Ive!" Harley grabs the pot and runs out just in time to see Ivy's vines lifting her up through the same skyline they used to get in. "Ivy, you forgot the plant!"

But Ivy doesn't come back.

#harlivy #harley x ivy #fic #harley quinn/poison ivy #cliche a week 2021 #this is my first chaptered fic i can't guarantee it won't be a hot mess #comics #dcu #poison ivy

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adhdeancas · 3 years

Text

Sunset Sound: God is Dead?

I might start updating twice a week because I am writing this story at BREAKNECK speed. this is my favorite chapter so far. enjoy! (special thanks to @friedchickenangelwings once again for sticking with me and my incessant rambling about this story at all hours during holidays)

Fic Summary: Everything is the same up to the end of 15x20. Chuck has been “defeated,” but it was all a farce. When Jack absorbed Chuck, Chuck easily took over the 3 year old’s body and acted as if he were defeated. Chuck!Jack then had the Rusty Nail placed in the barn where Dean died, and with Cas gone, Dean didn’t fight it. Chuck did reimagine Heaven, but he’s fed the same lie to them all: that everything is perfect, they are free, they are in real paradise. Except it’s all an illusion insulated by blue skies and endless horizons. Because, just like the Good Place, people make Heaven into Hell for each other. And there’s nothing Chuck loves more than the natural order of tragedy. He “let it slip” to Bobby that he brought Cas back, when he really left him to rot in the Empty. Dean has to find his best friend before it’s too late, and he has to keep a happy face for everyone else, because Chuck is watching. Always watching.

“You know?” Dean shakes his head. “What’s going on?”

Charlie leans back against the bar. “Well, after Ash and I found each other-” they give a cute little nod of the head in sync, dorks, “through the frankly shitty wifi they’ve got up here, we got to talking.”

“Yeah, we realized some shit just didn’t add up. Like angel radio.” Ash spins around and ducks into his backroom, coming back with a laptop that’s way more advanced than it was last time. Dean raises his eyebrows at it. “Yeah, man, it’s sick, right? Charlie upgraded my systems, it’s bitchin’.” he reaches past Dean’s shoulder to give Charlie a fist bump (enthusiastically returned) and Dean backs off.

“Yeah, bitchin’,” Dean repeats with a grin. He’s too dumb for these people. But he sure is glad they’re on his side. “Well, hey, show me whatcha got.”

Ash nods and taps his temple. He mutters to himself and pulls the system toward him while Dean watches anxiously. Ash pauses and looks at him. “Dude. Gimme a second? This setup is a lil’ more complicated than your blackberry.”

Dean snorts and gives him space, followed by Charlie. “Dude. you’ve been dead too long. Blackberrys haven’t existed for like… ten years.”

Ash gives him a genial middle finger and Dean grins. Charlie sits up on the pool table and Dean leans against it next to her. “Listen, Charlie, I gotta. I gotta say sorry, again, for…” He clears his throat.

“Dying?” Charlie asks lightly.

“Uh, yeah.”

“Not your fault, Dean.” She shrugs, and she actually manages to look cheerful. Damn, Dean loves this chick. She puts her hand on his shoulder and shakes her head. “Seriously, Dean. Let it go! I have! Seriously, I got to spend a few years with my high school girlfriend watching Lord of the Rings - she was a cheerleader - and sneaking out to design some fucking world-altering programs with Ash! Being dead, for me, it’s kinda amazing.” She smiles at him. “Guessing you don’t feel the same though, huh?”

Dean swallows. He doesn’t know how much he wants to say about that, but being dead… it definitely sucks. And not in the good way. “Guess it just feels like I got more to do. Now, at least.” Now that Cas is… and heaven is…

Charlie looks like she doesn’t know what to say. Luckily, they’re interrupted before she has to think of something.

“Eyo! Sorry, amigos,” he leans over backwards to look at them. “Found it.”

Charlie jumps off the table and grabs Dean’s hand. After a few steps she shoves him with her shoulder until he bumps into Ash’s back. Dean bounces off his soft form and clears his throat. “Sorry,” he mutters, throwing a death glare back at his surrogate sister. She flashes him a smug grin before focusing back on the computer screen.

Ash recovers from getting jostled in time to point. “Yeah, so, we got word on Angel FM that this Jack kid is goin’ real Jim Jones over here.” He holds a finger up at several paragraphs as he’s flipping through them. “Preachin’ all kinda love and peace and hippy commune shit, but if somebody even questions it, he snaps. Naomi no-likey,” He smirks up at Dean and points to a group of cuss-words even Dean barely uses. “Rough translation.”

Dean shakes his head. “That doesn’t sound like Jack.” Jack, especially Jack-with-a-soul, almost never got mad. I mean, he’d spent quality time with Lucifer without blowing up. The kid is level-headed to a fault. “Anything else?”

Ash frowns at him. “Y’know, going through angels’ personal phone calls is a lotta work.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a genius. Got anything else?”

“Ash, what about the human rumors?”

Ash looks at Charlie and they have a silent battle of wills, but Dean’s too impatient to see who wins. “What human rumors?”

They pause and come to an agreement. “Fighting. People fighting. Couples. Families. Friends. All over, since the reboot. People are happy, but… it’s like earth. People can talk - people can fight.”

“And?” Dean raises his eyebrows. There’s something they’re not telling him, and he thinks he knows what.

Ash raises them right back. He’s not about to divulge. “Hombre, this ain’t earth. People are supposed to be happy. If they ain’t… like a glitch in the matrix, y’know?

Dean grunts. “Anything else weird on the radio? Anything at all.”

Ash’s sigh sounds labored. He leans back in his chair and wobbles, obviously sorting through all the enochian bullshit he’s read over the past… whenever. “Meh… I got… I don’t know, God was singing?”

“Singing? Singing what?” Dean leans in, intent. If it was Taylor Swift, Beyonce, maybe Lizzo…

Ash cocks an eyebrow. “Folk shit. Indie music.”

That’s what Dean was afraid of. “Shit.”

“Why? What does that mean?” Charlie grabs onto his arm.

Dean’s worst fears, that’s what. “It means that ain’t my kid. It’s Chuck.”

“Who the hell is that?” Ash stands up as Dean walks away, cursing every stupid atom that had decided to make this dumb universe. Although, he guesses, that was Chuck’s purview too.

“He’s god! God before the reboot I mean, the dick who up and left and only came back to screw me and Sam over. Fuck, I thought we’d finally gotten out from under his thumb! Now, apparently, he’s just using my kid for his meat-suit.” Dean takes a deep breath. This is bad. Worse than bad-bad.

“So… what do we do? How do we nuke God?” Charlie asks the question like it’s normal, just another Saturday afternoon.

Dean thumps his forehead onto the nearest table. Sure, sure, good, great. They were back to square fucking one. “I don’t fucking know,”

“Alright, break it down. We need more mojo, right? How do we get more mojo?”

“Well, angels are the next best thing, right? Maybe if we get them all together, they’re obviously not psyched about folk-God, or whatever,”

Ash points at her like she’s a genius. “Alright, yeah!”

“Guys, there aren’t enough angels left to even try.” Dean feels hopeless. There’s nothing to do. They are literally out of options. There’s no hope.

“Well, where can we get some more angels, then?”

Dean stands up. “I know a place.” His heart feels like it’s being squeezed like a lemon. It’s a crazy idea. It’s practically impossible. And probably suicide. And he’s gotta find a way. “We gotta break open the Empty.”

“The Empty?” Ash looks skeptical. Dean smirks.

“Yeah, angel/demon afterlife. We punch our way in there and we’ve got juice for days, man.” He spreads his arms out, asks the question.

Ash glances at Charlie then back at Dean. He sniffs and nods. “I’m in.”

Dean looks to Charlie, who scoffs. “Duh. Of course. So what, we get in and say pretty please help us kill your dad?”

A warm feeling spreads through Dean’s chest. “Well, we’ll have a little help on the inside. Cas.”

“Castiel? The angel dude?”

“He’s dead?” Charlie’s voice has much more concern than Ash’s. Dean nods in response to both questions. It still makes him feel like he’s swallowing glass to think about it. “What happened?”

Dean looks down at his boots. It’s only the scene that keeps playing on repeat behind his eyelids. Cas crying, holding onto his shoulder, telling him… telling him goodbye. Telling him that. “He saved me.” he starts, expression guarded. “He made a deal.”

Ash grunts and nods, ready to drop it. Charlie stays quiet too, but she clearly wants to say something. Dean’s thankful for the drop. He doesn’t know what he’d say if they asked more. All he knows is that he needs Cas back. And he needs to talk to him. He needs to tell him that - that he wants him to just stay fucking put, damn it. That he needs to stop dying on him. And that he can’t just go and say something like that and then leave. It’s a bitch-ass move.

“Yo, Deano?”

Dean jerks his head back up. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“How do we jail-break ‘em?”

“Guessing we’re gonna need some serious magic shit. And since we can’t get to Rowena…”

Ash breaks into a wide grin. “Pamela? I’ll give her a call.”

Pamela is “busy,” so they have to wait for her to finish up with Jesse before she can come by. Dean has to hand it to her, it’s just about the most Pamela thing in the world to put off their realms-saving work for a heavenly hookup. Dean hangs around talking for a bit, filling his friends in on the latest on Earth, but he can’t concentrate. Ever since they’d decided the next thing is to get into the Empty, he can’t relax. He takes his beer and goes outside to wait, settling down on the Roadhouse’s front step to watch for Pamela.

After a bit, Charlie plops down next to him, a soft grin on her lips. He returns it half-heartedly before looking out across the clearing. She leans her head against his shoulder. A few minutes pass in comfortable silence before she turns into him. “So we gotta get into the Empty.” she sighs. Dean nods glumly. Just his fucking luck. Even heaven is ruined. But at least… at least they’ve got a shot. “And get Castiel.”

Dean frowns and pulls away to look at her. Maybe it’s just his paranoia, but he hears some deeper meaning in her voice. “The guy died for me. I gotta,” he presses his lips together, hating himself for the half-lie he’s telling. Cas deserves better. Charlie just nods and watches, like she’s waiting for him to keep going. When he manages to talk again, his voice cracks. “We gotta get him, Charlie.”

Charlie pulls him into a side hug. “I always said he was dreamy, that angel.” She points out. Dean snorts. He remembers. He’d blushed like an idiot after she said that the first time.

“Yeah.” He mutters. Okay, so she knows. That he and Cas are… that Dean’s… good. Cas deserves recognition. He deserves someone to talk about him. For Dean to talk about him. But then Charlie just hasn’t spoken, and he feels like he needs some explanation. “I… there were other guys, before him.” He continues, clearing his throat. His mind wanders to Benny and Lee, Crowley. “But he’s… he’s it.”

He risks a look at Charlie and she is just staring at him with a fond smile. She surges forward and kisses his cheek, squealing. “Yes, I fucking knew it, you bisexual dumbass! Bi, right?”

Dean laughs. “Yeah, I guess- wait, you knew?”

Charlie looks around, like Dean’s a dumbass it was so obvious. “Well, yeah, dude. Game recognize game.” She motions between the two of them and he scoffs. That’s right. Gaydar. That would’ve been nice to have for the last, oh, 12 years? “We’ll get him back.”

Dean pulls Charlie in for another hug and leaves her tucked under his arm until a motorcycle pulls up and Pamela gets off, shaking her hair loose like a blind slow-motion model in a porno. She grins at the pair on the steps like she can see them. “Take a picture, you two. It’ll last longer.”

“How did you-”

She throws a hand out in dismissal. “Please, I can feel ogling from a mile away.” She pauses, laughing at the embarrassed silence Charlie and Dean are sporting. “Nah, I’m just joking. I do the hair-shake for a reason. I deserve a good stare. Hell, it’s half the reason I own this motorcycle.” She throws her helmet in the general direction of the motorcycle and greets her friends. Dean can’t decide whose hug is more flirty, his or Charlie’s.

“Alright, bitches. Let’s séance some shit.”

tag list: (ask or dm to be removed or added)

@dochunterwitch @justonecitizenoftheearth @gnbrules @purpe @castiel-is-a-cat @alienapparatus

#sunset sound #god is dead?#chapter 3 #fanfic #deancas #destiel #my writing #dean winchester #castiel #charlie bradbury #pamela barnes #ash

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forlornmelody · 4 years

Text

Trust Exercise

Rating: E (Smut with some plot, for flavor.)

Fandom(s): DC Comics

Ship: Poison Ivy/Harley Quinn

Linkage: Ao3

Summary: Harley wants to try something new, but Ivy isn't sure her girlfriend is ready to see that part of her.

Note: Commission for @rookie009. Dude, thank you so much for commissioning me again. And insisting I write my faves. <3

->->->

Ivy’s in the lab when Harley finds her, nose-deep in an experiment she’s been running all day. “Oh, hey, babe. Did you get my text?”

“Mmhm.” Harley’s hands grasp her shoulders, her fingers meandering past the collar of her lab coat.

“So, you know that I can’t do date night tonight.” Harley’s lips find her cheek, then her ear, and the tissue culture Ivy’s been working on for the past hour slips from her fingers.

“Sure you can.” Her lips meander down her neck, as Ivy stares at the ruined culture with both horror and... arousal. Something hot roils in her belly, and Ivy stifles it as she turns around.

“Harley. How many times do I have to tell you--”

“Mm. You’re even more pretty when you’re angry.” Harley grabs Ivy by the lapel of her lab coat, pulling her in for a kiss. The jungle surrounding the lab roils as if shaken in a gale force wind.

Ivy breathes her in, and pushes her back, holding her girlfriend at arm’s length. “Harl, if you want me to tie you up, you only need to ask.”

Harley flushes, biting her lip as she glances away. Ivy draws her attention back with a finger under her chin. “Do you want me to tie you up?”

“Ives…”

“Harleen Francis Quinzel, I promise you I won’t ask again.”

“Yes!” Harley says quickly.

“Yes, what?”

“Tie me up.” Harleen swallows, her tongue darting out to wet her lip.

“And?”

Her skin blushes pink as one of her pigtails, and Ivy almost doesn’t hear her.

“What?”

“I said use your vines.”

“You sure?” The words fall out of Ivy’s mouth before she realizes what she’s asking. Sure, she’s usually the dominant one in bed--Ivy knows what she likes and how to ask for it. But this...Damnit, Pamela. What if this is too much? What if being tied up and used reminds her too much of…. Ivy doesn’t even think his name. She just conjures up an image in her head and sets it on fire.

“Ives?” Harley says, her eyes widening and her mouth shrinking into a small oh.

“Sorry?”

“You okay, Pam-a-lamb?” Harley brushes her thumb across Ivy’s cheek, pushing a wisp of hair out of the way. God, she must look like a mess right now.

“Of course!” she lies, and a nearby fittonia albivenis wilts in protest. Charlie, as she liked to call him, always is a dramatic asshole. “Go on.”

“You sure? Cause George doesn’t look so good.”

“Charlie.” Ivy sighs, rubbing her forehead. “His name is Charlie.” She nods over at the opposite corner, where a helianthus annuus, commonly known as a sunflower, is giving her a judgmental stare. “That’s George.”

“Daisy Girl...if the plants are upset, you must be upset.” Harley Quinn leans closer, so Ivy has to meet her eyes. “You can’t lie to a therapist, remember?”

“I can try,” Ivy mutters.

“I know you too well, Pam-jam. Now tell me what’s eatin’ ya.”

Now, Doctor Pamela Isley could uncover her sordid history with her parents, charm school, the nice conservative respectable university her parents sent her off to--the one she dropped out of and ran away from, the respectable open minded one she graduated from, the mentor who ruined her and created her, and the day they met in Arkham, but Harley already knows she doesn’t dump her past out of the trash can for everyone to see, especially when there’s a bed in sight, metaphorically speaking. God, what a buzzkill that would be. “I want to believe you, Harls. When you say you want this.” Ivy presses her thumb into Harley’s bottom lip. “But how do I know you’re not just saying this to make me happy?” Like she always would with...well.

“Easy. You trust me.”

Does she?

The powder-mix lemonade crashes against the opposite wall, barely missing her therapist’s head. “Stop fucking analyzing me. I’m not your rat.”

Dr. Quinzel doesn’t defend herself or argue against the insult. “You’ve good aim.” She does, however, flinch. Something twists in Ivy’s gut. At first, she thinks the Morton’s cafeteria slop has turned sour yet again, but Ivy notices the feeling runs deeper this time, and it spreads like frost throughout her middle, all the way to her lungs. “Softball?”

Fucking hell. She’s feeling remorse. “Gymnastics.” The answer spills out of Ivy’s mouth before she can stop it.

And then Dr. Quinzel’s face lights up like a Christmas tree. “Me too! Did you compete? Which team?”

Ivy spills some more, and they swap memories, apparently having crossed paths without remembering the other at one point or another. Not that Dr. Quinzel would have ever recognized Dr. Pamela Isley when she was a tween with braces and an awkward smile. Or Dr. Isley would have remembered Dr. Quinzel was a spirited overachiever with a chip on her shoulder. Actually, Pamela takes that back. She can see some of it now. She also notices Dr. Quinzel’s hands intertwined with her own. And the warmth between them.

“Please, call me Harleen.” Harleen smiles shyly, biting her lip.

Ivy gulps. “Do all your patients get to call you that?”

And just like that the moment’s gone. But Ivy’s hands feel warm long after Dr. Isley has left the room.

->->->

Ivy should have known this was a set up. The security guard missing from his post. The alarms turned off. The dark room where the lights should have had motion sensors and generator backup. She should have turned back the moment she noticed, but she couldn’t leave this warehouse like this. Not with one of two middlemist camellias sitting inside, ripped from its soil in New Zealand and brought to Gotham for a filthy auction.

The moment Ivy touches the leaves the door slams shut behind her, and she notices the sealant sprayed on all the windows. Oh no. A hose hisses on the floor, and Ivy slowly feels the air being sucked from the room. No. No. No. Not like this.

There’s no chair, no bat, nothing to break the windows with. Just Dr. Pamela Isley and the lonely Middlemist’s Red that will die with her. Pam closes her eyes, and tries not to hyperventilate, counting her breaths just like Harley taught her—

“NOT TODAY ASSHATS.” Glass shards rain on the floor, and an alluminum bat clangs against the concrete floor. “Pambsel?” Soft fingers touch her shoulder. “Ivy? Come on, Ivy. Stay with me.”

“Ivy?” Harley’s staring at her in their bedroom, her eyebrows lifted in concern.

“I trust you more than anyone else.”

Harley brushes her lips against hers. “And I trust you more than a stripper trusts her heels.”

“God.” Ivy chortles despite herself. “That’s terrible, Harley. Maybe I should keep you from talking.” Those words sound so...different once they’re out of her mouth. Like cinnamon candy burning on her lips.

For once, Harleen Francis Quinnzel has nothing to say. Her mouth hangs slightly open, to the point that Ivy wants to trace it with her fingertip, maybe slip her finger past those lips to see Harley suck on— “Would you?” Harley whispers, blushing as pink as one of her pigtails.

“I’d love to.” It’s a little unnerving how easily this comes to her. “But there’s only one thing.”

“What’s that?” Harley leans closer, her hands grasping at Ivy’s clothes, pleading without pleading.

“What’s our safe-word?”

“Puddin’?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Batman?”

“Nope.”

“Come on, Pretty Girl. You’re killin’ me here.”

“It has to be a word we both agree to, Harley. Rules are rules.”

“Says who?” Harley leans in close, her hands on her hips.

Ivy smirks at her, whispering in her ear. “Says the woman who is about to give you a night you won’t forget.”

At this point, Ivy half expects Harley to say Arkham, but she doesn’t. “Robinson Park.”

It’s Ivy’s turn to lose her words. Of course, Harley would name her old hideout. Well. Not just any old hideout. The place where they first kissed. “That’s--that’s two words.”

Harley grins proudly, pressing a soft kiss against her cheek. “Does that break the rules, Rosey Cheeks?”

Ivy allows it. She also allows herself to check with Harley several times as she persuades a nearby pharnera vahili to stretch towards them. The plant balks initially at the thought of making its flower buds large enough to penetrate, but Ivy mutters a quiet “Coward” and the plant swells to prove her wrong. Perhaps Peter would be a fitting name for this one? Brushing the buds, she strengthens him, hardens them, really, and shoos any creatures or enzymes that would bring harm to her favorite person in the whole world.

“Ready, Harley?”

Harley nods, biting a grin.

Ivy steps towards her, pinching her chin between her finger and thumb. “If this is going to work, I’m going to need you to use your words, Harleen.”

“Yes.” Harley gulps a breath of air, and she closes her eyes as if she’s about to kiss her.

Pulling out of her reach, Ivy returns to Peter, stroking a few tendrils, feigning more interest in them than her lover. “Then remove your shorts. I’d hate to ruin them.”

“These always were your favorite, weren’t they, Red?”

Indeed, they are. “Perhaps.” Ivy can’t help but watch them slip down Harley’s cream-colored thighs. She itches to get between them but that will have to wait. “Now lay down.”

“But--”

“It’ll be easier to secure you from the bed, trust me.”

“Always.”

Again, that itch. That burning unyielding need to touch every inch of Harley’s skin, exposed or not. This is just as much an exercise in patience for her as it is for Harley. Ivy whisks her fingers, curling the vines around Harley’s wrists and ankles. “Is that comfortable?”

Harley nods quickly, only to see Ivy quirk her eyebrow impatiently. “Yes, Ives,” she says, her breath ragged.

“How about now?” The vines lengthen and grow, suspending Harley’s prone body in the air. Ivy wishes she could draw how beautiful Harley looks like this, her mouth parted and arched back, her legs already flushes with need.

“Amazing.” Harley closes her eyes. “I feel like I’m floating.”

“And what is our safe word, again?”

Harley starts to say it, only for Ivy to brush between her calves with a tendril.

“That tickles!”

“Don’t squirm.” Ivy smirks despite herself, stroking the inside of Harley’s legs, from the bottoms of her calves to the narrowest point between her thighs, edging around her center but never quite touching it.

Twisting in her restraints, Harley groans. “Don’t tease me, Pam-Pam.”

“I believe you asked me to tease you. Isn’t that the point?” The tendril snakes past her middle, scratching under her chin. “To make you beg for it?”

“Please.” The vine edges back down, circling her warmth, now moist with the juices dripping down her legs.

“Please what?”

“Touch me.” She pleads, seeing Ivy’s lips pressed in a thin line. “Touch my clit.”

“That’s my girl.” Ivy resists the urge to mirror the motion of her plant. Her own thighs twitch with want. Her vine grazes Harley’s lower lips, feather light in their touch, and Ivy aches at the whimper slipping from Harley’s mouth. She keeps circling with smaller and smaller circles until Harley shakes and keens. And that’s when she drags the vine against where Harley wants her most.

“Oh fuck. Fuckity-fuck fuck.” Harley strains against her bonds, her hips writhing against the vine.

Ivy licks her lips. “Would you like this vine inside you?”

“Mmhm...y-yeah.” Harley’s voice breaks on the edge of her first orgasm.

Then Ivy pulls away.

“No, Ives, please. Please touch me. I’m--I’m so close.”

“I know, Harl.” Ives steps around the now massive bulk Peter has grown into, caressing Harley’s own cheek with the back of her own hand. God, she wants to tear off all their clothes right now and just have her way, but she can’t. Not yet. “I’m going to give you something special.” One nail presses into Harley’s cheek, enough to indent, but enough to break the skin. “Would you like to know what it is?”

Sweat glistens around Harley’s hairline as she looks back at Ivy helplessly. “Yeah.” She manages.

Shit. She must be thirsty. “Hold on.” She snatches a water bottle, holding it to Harley’s lips. “Drink some water.” Ivy doesn’t pull the bottle away until Harley’s finished it. She downs her tea. Then she rubs her fingers together, until oily spots form on her fingertips. “This oil will heighten your sensations. Do you want it?”

Harley can’t even form words at first, but she manages. “Please, Pammin-Jammin. I need you.”

Ivy also licks her lips, her entire mouth tasting like vegetable oil, but stronger. And the oil packs some heat. Not enough to burn, but enough that she’ll need to wash her mouth out later if she’s going to focus on anything. “I need you too, Harley.” She brushes her lips against Harley’s and want hits her like a gale-force wind. With the way Harley moans into her mouth--she feels that way too. Patience. Even the quickest-growing plants need time to breathe.

Before Harley can deepen the kiss, Ivy trails her lips down her chin, her neck, and her collar bone. She massages her shoulders, her arms, then up her sides and back down again. Ivy kisses down to her chest, avoiding Harley’s already too sensitive tits and just focusing on the valley between them, pausing a moment to listen to her quickening heartbeat. Harley squirms, and Ivy holds her steady, paying careful attention to the planes of her abdomen. Her hands move around Harley’s hips, pinching either side of her ass, covering her thighs and in between. “Oh, Ivy.”

When Ivy finishes caressing Harley’s feet, she stands up to see Harley’s face caught like a saint in a Raphaelite painting. She guides her own hands around one of the tendrils, slowly, gently penetrating her as if she were using a dildo. And when the tendril is as far in as it’ll go, Ivy grins against her ear. “Ready?”

“Mmhm,” Harley whimpers.

Ivy snaps her fingers, and the tendril takes on life of its own, pumping in and out of her lover without any guidance from her.

“Fuck!” Harley gasps, her wrists twisting in her bonds as she seeks purchase to rock back against the vine. “Oh, fuck that’s good.”

Ivy finds her hands drifting down towards her legs. She clenches them behind her back to hold them still. Not yet. Focus on Harley. But focusing on her and how fucked she is seems to be part of Ivy’s problem. Licking her lips, she asks, “How do you feel about anal?”

“Mm?” Harley probably means to ask, but her mm sounds more like a moan than anything else.

Making a point of rolling her eyes, Ivy snaps her fingers a second time, and the vine pulls out of her.

“No no no. Please. I was almost…”

“I asked you a question, Harl.” Ivy growls, more from arousal than annoyance, but Harley’s eyes widen.

“What was the question?”

“Do you.” Ivy grips Harley’s chin. “Like. Anal sex?”

Harley’s eyes brighten and her frown morphs into an ecstatic smile. “Double penetration?” She bites her lip. “Would you?”

“I’d love to. But first.” Ivy pulls out a familiar bottle--her own recipe. She squirts a generous amount on her fingers, and ringing a circle around Harley’s butt hole, and then little by little, probing inside with her finger. “Good girl,” she whispers in Harley’s ear. Her lover starts to tense up, and Ivy holds her hip firmly with her other hand. “Relax. You are the most amazing person I’ve ever known, and you have done the impossible time and time again.”

“You...you really think t-that?”

“I know that, Harley.” Her finger gets pulled deeper inside, and Ivy works her open gently, as Harley’s eyes glaze over and her mouth drops open. “And tonight, I’m going to make you feel how amazing you are. Do you trust me?”

“Mm. Y-yeah.”

“Then you’re gonna take more for me.” Ivy whispers, taking Harley’s lobe between her teeth. Harley shudders and nods, and Ivy, slowly, gently, and with more oil, adds a second finger.

“Nn--Ivy, Oh god. Please. I--I need.”

“Need what?”

“More.”

“More what?”

Harley moans--whimpers in reply, “I---make me come,” she begs, sprawled in mid-air, and Ivy raises her free hand to pull the prepared vines. “Pam-Pam, please.” She croaks. “Please, Pamela.”

The vine droops just inches from Harley’s hips.

“Pamela Isley!” Mrs. Saint-Claire always pops the p in Pamela’s name, and spittle flies out of her mouth. How many times do I have to tell you!” Those skeletal hands jerk her shoulders back. “Back straight! Like a puppet on a string!” Pam’s so tired. She just wants to go home. Well, maybe not home. “And smile for once! It won’t kill you.” Mrs. Saint-Claire yanks her wild curls into a peppy poiny tail. “How are you going to win a man like this?”

“Pam-pam?” Harley’s looking back at her, her eyes still dark with want and pleasure, but her eyebrows are lifted in concern.

Maybe Ivy should hold back, more. What if she goes too far? But Harley would tell her. She’d say the word. She doesn’t pretend, not in bed, not unless that’s...well. Maybe it would be nice to pretend. A different time, perhaps.

“I’m still here,” Pamela says more to herself than Harley, and she refreshes that vine until it’s erect and moving again. “Are you?” She coats the vine slick with oil, and she slips her fingers out completely.

“Yes, yes, please.”

“Then take it.” The vine enters her slowly, filling her already stretched hole, pumping in tandem with the other in her cunt. And fuck it, Ivy reaches down and touches her own center, hissing at how sensitive she is already.

“Yes, yes, yes!!” Harley’s always been loud in bed, but she’s never screamed like this. Ivy smirks, directing a third vine to mimic the motions on Harley’s clit that Ivy’s already doing to her own. And oh, Harley shakes, rattles, so full and so hung she can’t move, only ride the wave as the vines move in and out and around her. “Fuck yes.”

“Are you close, Harley?”

“Y-yeah….” And then her eyes shut, and her mouth forms a silent oh, and her body jerks, clenching around the vines.

“That’s my girl.” And Ivy brings her down slowly until Harley relaxes, and she pulls the vines away, untying her wrists and ankles and holding her close. “How’re you feeling, Harls?”

Her lover doesn’t answer at first, nestled against Ivy’s breast, her eyes distant and warm. “Thank you.” Harley nestles into her breast, breathing her in. “I feel amazing, as promised.” She giggles, and Ivy’s so busy laughing with her to notice the hand creeping towards her now naked legs. “Oooooo. What’s this?”

Ivy gasps, unable to help her moan at Harley’s touch. “Harley, you don’t have to--”

“Jesus fuck, you’re wet. Why didn’ you say somethin’?” Harley toys with her, circling her engorged clit and playing with her labia.

Ivy can’t bring herself to her own defense, too focused on how nice Harley’s fingers feel. She squirms, gripping Harley’s shoulders. “Harley--”

“Shh. C’mere. Lemme return the favor.” And then Harley lays back on a newly formed flower bed. With strength Ivy didn’t think she’d have at this point; Harley pulls Ivy’s thighs towards her face.

“You sure?”

“Isely you’ve gotta stop asking me that.” She tilts her head up, kissing the inside of Ivy’s thigh. “I love you. Of course, I’m sure.” Her lips drift toward Ivy’s center, half-cleaning up the mess they’ve made, half-making it worse.

Biting her lip, Ivy swallows her gasps, trying to hold on. “Harl, I--” Oh. It’s like she’s never felt another’s mouth on her, though clearly Harley (among others) have been down more than she can count.

“Shh,” Harley manages to say between long licks. She edges the tip of her tongue around her clit, drinking her in without drying her up. Fuck, she still has pleasure oil on her tongue. Not as strong as at first, but Ivy doesn’t need that strength.

Maybe that’s what love is. Trust that the other person won’t let you fall when you step too far off the ledge. Someone to hold your hand when you do fall, so you can fall down together. Someone to pick you back up. “Harley, I need--oh.” Ivy groans.

“‘S okay, Ives. Ride me.”

Ivy doesn’t need to be told twice. She grinds down, not so hard as to smother Harley, but enough to feel her mouth that much more. Oh god, fuck, she’s sucking her clit and--

When Ivy comes to, she’s lying on her side, with Harley playing the big spoon. “Holy shit, Harley,” she says, her mouth dry as cotton.

“Your turn,” Harley shoves the water bottle in her face, and Ivy drinks it dry. “Not bad, eh?”

“Not bad at all.”

#lemon #dc comics #poison ivy #harley quinn #harlivy #poisonquinn #melody writes #gosh writing these two was intimidating #I want to do them justice y'know?

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anhed-nia · 4 years

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BLOGTOBER 10/4/2020: SOCIETY

Without having a survey to back me up, I feel comfortable asserting that as a horror fan, you go through different phases with SOCIETY. It’s a basic fact of life, and yet it morphs and mutates underneath you, shocking you anew just when you think you’ve got a grip on it. You never forget your first time, because there is simply nothing like it. Then, after you get over the initial shock of its patented brand of body horror, you start to take it for granted; it's so broad and monolithic that it becomes something like the Grand Canyon--when it’s not right there in front of you, you begin to experience it more iconically, as part of the wallpaper of existence, rather than an in-your-face confrontation with the limits of experience. Then, you revisit it every few years (or months, depending on what sort of person you are), and the prophylactic layer that your brain has wrapped around your memories of it--the one that allows you to think of SOCIETY as a fun, wacky cheap thrill--begins to crumble, and you realize all over again how iconoclastically vile it is. Wherever you happen to be at, with this inimitable genre landmark, you'd be hard pressed to deny that it earns its royal status among horror movies, just for being so uniquely fucked up.

Filmmaker Brian Yuzna is best known as the co-creator of the indispensable RE-ANIMATOR (or as the co-writer of HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS...depending on what sort of person you are, again), itself a milestone achievement in the blending of sex and gore that so characterized '80s horror production. That film clearly brought out the best in Yuzna and frequent collaborator Stuart Gordon (also of HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS fame...among other things), but it's interesting to see how they operate apart, to understand the unique ingredients that each filmmaker brought to the more perfect union of their classic Lovecraft adaptation. Gordon skewed darker and more intellectual, as evidenced by the end of his career with the shattering mob thriller KING OF THE ANTS, the disturbing true crime drama STUCK, and the Mamet-penned EDMOND. Yuzna, for his part, is almost anti-intellectual, preferring to cook up blackly comic, semi-pornographic nightmares like his two increasingly horny RE-ANIMATOR sequels, the terminal S&M fantasy RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3, and the shamelessly hokey comic book adaptation FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED. Yuzna's lack of shame is really his defining feature as an artist, and nowhere is this more obvious than in his directorial debut and signature masterpiece, SOCIETY.

Salvador Dali's "The Great Masturbator," a chief visual inspiration for SOCIETY.

Yuzna was able to leverage the success of RE-ANIMATOR to lock in two directorial opportunities, BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR, and a bizarre body horror exercise about a Beverly Hills orphan who discovers that not only are his adoptive family from a different bloodline, but they're not even from the same species. That both pictures employed the writing team of Woody Keith and Rick Fry gives you a little taste of what to expect from SOCIETY, but to be frank, the latter threatens to make the former look like a very special episode of ER; "overkill" barely begins to describe SOCIETY’s ambitious assault on the human body. In a recent interview, the philipino-american director giggles perversely, "I think my friends were a little embarrassed for me (when they saw SOCIETY)," and this sound bite reminded me that the last, most important ingredient that Yuzna contributes to any project is unabashed joy. It's a little hard to imagine stomaching SOCIETY without it.

In this unusual scene from the class struggle in Beverly Hills, Billy Warlock (son of HALLOWEEN 2's Michael Myers, Dick Warlock) plays Bill Whitney, a rich, handsome, athletic high school student with a heavy duty anxiety disorder. Although he appears to have it all, he is plagued by nightmares and hallucinations, reflecting suspicions that the family that spoils him is also out to get him. Perhaps this is all understandable, though. Bill is under a lot of pressure these days, with his parents devoting all of their attention to his sister's coming out party, and his narcissistic girlfriend pushing him to ingratiate himself to the assholes higher up the social ladder; it's enough to make any teenager feel alienated and insecure. But, do these garden variety anxieties account for his visions of his sister's body deforming itself unnaturally, or the dubious evidence he finds that her debutante ball involves incestuous orgies and human sacrifice? Is Bill simply crumbling under the strain of societal expectations, or is the friction with his shrink, his parents, and his peers all symptomatic of an elaborate plot against him by elites who are truly less than human?

I can’t believe they use this cheapo blanket trick MORE THAN ONCE in a movie that is famous for its unforgettable special effects, and I guess I kind of love it.

In case I haven't made the answer abundantly obvious, I'll add that while SOCIETY is the purest expression of Yuzna-ness on the market, it has an important co-author in Screaming Mad George. The eccentric japanese FX master, whose name is apparently an amalgamation of Mad Magazine, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and...George, has produced some of horror's most outrageous makeup and visual effects, mostly for Yuzna, many of them in SOCIETY. If you've seen even a trailer for Alex Winter's 1993 oddity FREAKED--which is itself a grossout criticism of American social standards--then you are already familiar with SMG's trademark style. He specializes in twisted perversions of the human form that would make a cenobite blush, driven by a penchant for puns, and influenced equally by THE THING's Rob Botin, and Big Daddy Roth’s Rat Fink style. Screaming Mad George is instrumental in articulating Yuzna's premise: that behind the shimmering veneer of success and sophistication, the upper class are just a bunch of degenerates, who literally degenerate into something unimaginable behind closed doors. It's impossible to imagine SOCIETY without his sinuous, slithering monstrosities, or his indescribable realization of their most important social event, "the shunt".

One of many great images from a zine I wish I owned, on SMG’s Facebook page.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by SOCIETY's visual impact, but its message is just as potent now as it was at the end of the Reagan era: Rich people are not only different from the rest of us, but in fact, they aren't even human. Writers Keith and Fry make an interesting choice of hero to help put this across. A lazier writer would have selected any archetype from the Freaks and Geeks set to create an easy Us vs Them tension, but SOCIETY is led by a promising young man who, for reasons he himself does not yet understand, is just not "the right kind of people". Bill appears to have every advantage in life, including a level of popularity that wins him presidency of the debate team despite his nerdier rival’s superior prowess--and yet, he suffers from a stigmatizing psychiatric disorder that is the natural result of feeling indefinably different from one's peers, and intuiting that, as a consequence, they don't even really like you. The shallow jock with deep-seated emotional problems is a much more interesting protagonist for this kind of social allegory than the charismatic outcasts that you get in movies like THE FACULTY and DISTURBING BEHAVIOR, for whom the idea that the elites could be aliens is just de rigueur.

It's worth noting that this complexity of character extends to Bill's love interest, sympathetic society girl Clarissa Carlyn (Playboy Playmate Devin DeVasquez). At first, she seems villainously eager to introduce Bill to the many splendors of "the shunting", but as the plot against him mounts to its horrifying conclusion, she defects. There appears to be a reason for this, although honestly, this is the most difficult part of SOCIETY for me to wrap my head around. Clarissa lives as an essentially independent adult, only burdened by her mother (Pamela Matheson), a possibly brain damaged hulk who lurks in and out of various scenes just to be disturbing, always announced by some toots on a tuba, before eventually siding with our heroes. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be going on in this part of the movie, except that this character contributes to a number of distasteful jokes. But, I hold on to the idea that by virtue of whatever disorder Mrs. Carlyn suffers from, she serves the purpose of priming Clarissa to rebel, since her very existence makes her daughter something of a societal outcast herself. That's the best I can do.

In any case, everyone working on SOCIETY commits completely, with Mrs. Carlyn being no exception. The movie's climactic orgy of the damned is an all hands on deck operation, just as reliant on Screaming Mad George's artistic abilities as it is on the actors' responsibility to make you believe that this fucked up shit is really happening. There's a visceral patina of sleaze spread over the entire film, dripping from the way that characters talk to and touch each other, flirting and flaunting their bodies in a distinctly unseemly fashion, even when it stays within the realm of mundane reality. This constant sinister, insinuating attitude on the part of the whole cast lays the foundation for what is to come, and while I appreciate everybody's hard work, my favorite performance is from an actor who only comes in at the very end: David Wiley as society king Judge Carter. Wiley's career consisted almost exclusively of the most ordinary sort of television work, which makes his outrageous turn in this alien porno flick all the more respectable. While other characters transition from suspicious pod people to full-on mutated perverts, Judge Carter has to show up just for the finale, establish his authority, rip off his clothes, and plunge straight into a sea of slime, happily fisting his way through the cast. Wiley meets this challenge with aplomb, making of himself a hybrid of Robert Englund and Gene Hackman, perfectly embodying the movie's joyful absurdity, and never betraying the slightest hint of embarrassment.

SOCIETY is very much a don't-look-down type of endeavor, a fairy that could expire at the slightest lapse in faith. There's a visual pun in the last act that's so gross, so offensive, so frankly idiotic, that I don't have the courage to describe it; my whole body tenses up when I know this scene is coming, as if it were the meat hook scene in TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE or the brutal rape in the middle of SHOWGIRLS. I don't like it, but at the same time, I respect Yuzna's unhesitating commitment to show it to me, and I think that actor Charles Lucia should get some kind of award for shouldering the burden so valiantly. SOCIETY is a daring movie in the truest sense, a film with more balls than brains, and in this it exposes the limitation of intelligence and taste, and the real need for pure transgression, in producing art of any real value. You might argue with me about whether Yuzna's masturbatory magnum opus really qualifies as art, but to respond to that, I'll quote the great transgressor Alejandro Jodorowsky: "If you are great, EL TOPO is a great picture. If you are limited, EL TOPO is limited." So stick that in your shunt and smoke it.

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PS Here, have this stuck in your head for the rest of your life.

#blogtober #2020 #society #brian yuzna #screaming mad george #woody keith #rick fry #billy warlock #Keith Walley #devin devasquez #david wiley #horror #black comedy #satire #body horror #social criticism

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kouei116 · 4 years

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Jakou no Lyla - Trap of musk: European night

Come, look at me. In return, I'll show you the most wonderful dream.

Well, I'm supposed to study for an exam, I thought I'll only procrastinate & play for a litttle bit, but... Welcome to the newest hell I'm currently stuck in - Jakou no Lyla (人´ω｀*)♡

It is originally a 3 part PC otome game but has been ported to the Switch. This game is one out of 3 games from triAngle project, so... there is a Spy Ending where MC will be with both guys ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Longer details under cut.

Part 1 European Night - Vince Lugan (seiyuu Taniyama Kishou, e.g. Amnesia Memories Ikki) on the left hand side of the above photo - Rolan Crydelle (seiyuu Tachibana Shinnosuke e.g. MidCin Louis) on the right hand side of the above photo, my 2nd fav

Part 2 Asian Night - Korei Rin (seiyuu Okitsu Kazuyuki, e.g. Brothers Conflict Masaomi) the white hair guy sniffing MC's shoulder in 1st photo, my fav :3 - Kirei Rin (seiyuu Sato Takuya) the black hair guy at top right corner in the 1st photo

Part 3 Arabian Night - Lizaru Shanasa (seiyuu Morikawa Toshiyuki, e.g. DL Carla) the tan-skin guy with a whip in 1st photo - Jemiru (seiyuu Murase Ayumu) the guy with upside-down net bra(?lol) over his eyes in 1st photo

The popular ranking (voted in Oct 2019) result is Lizaru (1), Jemiru (2), Kirei (3), Korei (4), Vince (5), Rolan (6).

Vince: ... I want you

MC uses her special tattoo to seduce Vince, it is working... kinda. But Vince is a tough cookie, he realizes something isn't right with himself, grasps his short sword and squeezes his right hand on the sharp blade in front of the speechless MC. He wants the pain to pull him away from the desire for MC.

V: Come in... Hey, turn this way. Look at me, Y...

During the Conference break, V saw MC talking with Rolan on the way to the market. He got very grumpy aweee. At the market, R fell down, MC helped R get up and her clothes got muddy too. When she returns to the palace, grumpy Vince saw her muddy clothes and told her to take a bath with him. He tried to kiss her but she pushed him away, poor V :’(

Y: Rolan-sama, please sto..

The special tattoo doesn't last long so the salon master comes to the palace to help her refresh. I thought she only has one on her chest, but apparently there is one on her back too :/ She has to keep it uncovered for 2 hours to dry. R came by and accidentally was affected by the tattoo. He started touching and kissing her back. She knows she has to push him away but she doesn't want to because she already knows abt his tragic past. She’s afraid pushing him will hurt his feeling (I'll explain his past in his route summary). She tried very hard to grab the veil, cover her tattoo and R turned back to normal, frantically apologized to her.

R: You don't need to think about anything. Surrender everything to me...

MC (name is Shirien) is a dancer at show salon Kamal. Her parents were killed, the village was destroyed. The salon master took care of her and her best friend Aisha so she wants to do everything to repay him. The master also helped another kid (who arrived heavily injured) named Jermiru and asked MC to look after J as his older sister. MC and J works as secret spies for the master. MC has a special henna tattoo (made from teromeana mixed with medicine herbs) that can seduce men to the point they lose all reasoning. Then she uses a sleeping needle on them to make them sleep & dream that they are ichaicha-ing with her but in reality, she tries to find materials/info in their rooms for her spy mission. In addition, she collects blood of young healthy ‘excited' men to help research a cure for the salon master's sickness. The master also prohibits her to kiss the men targets because it can sway her heart (hence she pushed Vince away in the bath when he tried to kiss her).

In part 1 European night, her clients are Theo (Vince's best friend) and Rolan Crydelle. Her mission is to seduce Vince to find out the whereabout of Pamela - Rolan’s younger sister - who they think was kidnapped by Vince when V destroyed the Crydelle kingdom. Theo will pretend to lose the drinking game and gives MC to V as a winning trophy.

V is a tough cookie to crack though, he pays 100% attention on his country/work, doesn't want to waste any time with women. In his country Lugan, women are not allowed to speak unless they are given permission. This is because in their history, a king lost part of the territory bc he spent too much time on women. That territory becomes the Crydelle kingdom. In contrast, Crydelle is led/dominated by women, while men only stays inside the house and cannot go out unless given permission by women. Rolan is a shy and naive because he is indoors all his life, he cares deeply about his younger sister Pamela, he carries a doll that looks exactly like her.

I only know a little bit about V from the common route and his appearance in Rolan's route, but he isn't as cruel as the rumour says. The more time MC spends with him for her spy mission, she realizes he (and his touch on her) are gentle and kind. Everything he does is for the benefit of his country. He did destroy the Crydelle kingdom, killed the royal family (except Rolan who was living in a secret room) so other princes at the Conference sneer at Vince during the policy discussion. Personally, I think the choices Vince suggests are actually effective and to the point, not wasting time trying to be merciful. In Rolan's good end, he even helps Rolan save MC. He gives me the IkeSen Nobunaga and MLQC Victor's vibes.

The last Rolan photo above the cut is after the confrontation with Eleanor (who looks exactly like his sister Pamela but said she is not Pamela), R is very sad and ran to the old harem area to be alone. MC chased after him and tried to comfort him. He hugged her and started kissing near her chest, offered to make her feel good and begged her to not leave him (poor bb ;u;) MC stopped him, tried to calm him down asking him to tell her everything. In short, due to his past, R always wants to keep people happy, he thinks pleasing people is the only thing he can do to make his life has some values, the only way to keep people staying with him. MC told him none of these are true. Even after hearing his past, MC didn't look down on/feel disgusted abt him, and told him from now on, he will learn many other ways to make people happy. This makes him very happy, he asked to hug her for a bit longer ｡ﾟ( ﾟஇ‸இﾟ)ﾟ｡

---

Tbh, when I first looked at the suitors, I thought I'd go with Vince, but oughhh Rolan stole my heart during the common route. I guess not likely many people will like Rolan (he actually ranks 6th out of 6 suitors, my poor bb ;u;). It’s okay, I luv Rolan. I love his character growth throughout the route, desperately trying to grow stronger to protect MC. And his yandere doll-carrying creepy vibe. His 2nd bad end broke my heart badly ~ like CxM Shiraishi's bad end 4 level of heartbreak（ｉДｉ）I will write his route summary after I (hopefully) pass my exam.

I enjoy this game much more than I expected: kisses sound yayyy (not DL’s level of kissing & blood sucking but enough to burn my ears huehue), nice arts and BGM (melancholy music to stab on my heart even more while reading bad ends, nice!). I prefer the bad ends, they are more haunting and memorable to me; good ends everything get solved quite easily, but overall the story is fine so far. I get completely sucked into this game and finished all 6 ends for Rolan and Korei in 4 days (what is sleep, what is exam :3) Normally I only play the routes of the guys I’m interested in then move on to next game, unless I want to collect PS Vita trophies and autoplay. But I have high hope that since this game can surprisingly change my favourite from Rolan to Korei (still very close, I luv both of them lotsss) from the route story, I should read everybody’s routes properly and see who my favourite are in the end. My 2020 otome game year is off to a wonderful start already ahhh~ (*´╰╯`๓)♬

#jakou no lyla #trap of musk #vince lugan #rolan crydelle #kouei116 translation #kouei116 nintendoswitch

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i-will-physically-fight-you · 4 years

Text

Gibbous Chapter 8

Chapter Title: One Swallow Does not Make a Summer

Summary: It’s fine. Everything is fine. (It really isn’t)

Pairings: platonic lamp, platonic sleepxiety lets finally be honest with ourselves

Chapter Word-Count: 6024

Warnings: unresolved grief, past minor character death, panic attack, crying, panic/anxiety, emotional abuse/gaslighting, dissociation

Previous | Present | Next

AO3 Link

Hi, apparently I don’t know how to write 2k chapters anymore, guys I’m sorry. Special thanks to @theeternalspace for her continued support for this AU in terms of brainstorming/cheering me on and to @stillebesat who beta’d this chapter, helping point out plot inconsistencies & grammar stuff.

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“Hey Virgil, it’s time to get up.”

Virgil grumbled, shifting in his bed, “Don’t wanna.”

A chuckle, “Are you sure? Your dad is making his world-famous pancakes. Better get up before he eats them all himself.”

“Pancakes?” Virgil asked, looking up at last at his mother. Her dark hair was pulled into a loose side ponytail rather than her typical bun. Little curly wisps escaped the ponytail, kindly framing her face. She wore a yellow sweater with a goofy sloth face on it, something that was definitely his father’s.

“I knew that would get your attention, my little poet.” She grinned, affectionately booping his nose.

“Moooom,” Virgil groaned, because he was nearly thirteen and entering preteen angst. He was too old for boops and cutesy nicknames. His parents didn’t quite seem to get the memo just yet.

Mom kept smiling at him, wide and bright. Like she knew something he didn’t.

“What?” Virgil demanded, tilting his head sideways in confusion.

“Oh nothing,” She said, hands gently cusping the sides of his face, “I’m just thinking of how old you’re getting and how proud I am of you.”

“For what?” Virgil asked, confused by her words. He knew his parents loved him. They often proclaimed that with words and hugs. He could take being loved. But being proud of him? That was a completely new territory. He hadn’t done anything to earn this sentiment. He wasn’t the Grade A Student or the Star Athlete. He was just Virgil. An anxious preteen who liked listening to MCR. He didn’t get why his mom would be proud of that.

“Because you never give up, regardless of what life throws at you.” Mom said softly before pressing a kiss to his forehead, “I love you, Virgil.”

“Love you too,” Virgil mumbled, cheeks burning as he threw his arms around Mom for a quick hug. Never gave up? He wasn’t sure if that aptly described him. He felt like a colossal coward, one who always ran from his problems rather than face them. Maybe he’d managed to trick his parents into thinking otherwise. A pang of guilt hit him from that thought. Like a dodgeball during recess. Still, he couldn’t deny the warm, grateful feeling that crept inside of him.

Virgil withdrew from the hug and leapt out of his bed. When he reached the doorway, he paused to turn back at his mother, “C’mon! We have to go downstairs before Dad eats all the pancakes, remember?”

“Oh yes,” His mother said, following behind him, “how could I ever forget that?”

As they descended down the stairs, Virgil could hear pancake batter sizzling and his father’s attempts at singing.

“Just a small town giiiiirl, living in a lonely wooooorld!”

Virgil loved his dad, just as much as his mom. He loved how enthusiastic the man could be. His dad put his whole heart into everything he did. Even if he wasn’t great at them. It was an admirable quality to be sure. It still didn’t mean Virgil didn’t wince a tiny bit from his dad’s screechy singing.

“Please make it stop,” Virgil whispered underneath his breath.

His mom shook her head, looking more amused than anything else. He supposed it had something to do with how they first met doing a duet at a karaoke bar. He heard the story a gazillion times by now, but it never got old. Especially with his father adding new details every iteration. His mom would hover nearby, correcting him in an exasperated but loving way.

“Hello Dearest.” Mom said, startling Virgil out of his thoughts. He looked up to see they were already in the kitchen. Huh. He must’ve gotten lost in his thoughts or something.

Dad gasped, putting a hand to his chest in a playful offended way, “Love, is that my sweater?!”

Virgil’s mom easily towered him by a few good inches. Some people made fun of Virgil’s parents because of that. They said it was weird for the woman to be the taller one in a relationship. Virgil never understood that arbitrary reasoning. Not when his father looked up at his mother like she was his whole universe. His whole sun, moon, stars and everything.

“Is it? I found it lodged in my drawer. Almost like someone hastily stuffed it in there without paying attention to which dresser they placed it in.”

His dad spluttered at a loss for words and Virgil snorted. He couldn’t help it. Not when his dad was a walking, breathing cartoon character. Anyone could read him like a book from his facial expressions alone. He kept spluttering, his eyebrows nearly flying off his face and eyes as wide as saucers. One unsubtle wink directed towards Virgil told him that it was mostly an act on his part.

“Well, uh, may I offer you in some….pam-cakes?” His dad asked, redirecting the topic from his haphazard attempt at house cleaning.

Pamcakes. A pun on his mother’s name—Pamela. Oh my god, he said that every time. His mom always rolled her eyes at it, lips pressed together to keep from smiling. She was supposed to be the stoic foiling his comedic. Yet it fooled nobody at all. It was why his dad did it every time, knowing she secretly loved it.

Mom rolled her eyes as always before leaning down to accept a kiss from him, “You may.”

“Really? Right in front of my pancakes?” Virgil said, pretending to gag. As a growing preteen, it wasn’t cool to have your parents be all mushy in front of you. Even if he still thought of them as the coolest Mom and Dad ever. They chuckled, breaking off the kiss.

“Virgil, someday you will find someone you love very much and then you’ll understand why I am obligated to kiss your mother every time I see her.” His father grinned, flipping the last set of pancakes on the griddle.

“No I won’t, because kissing is gross.” Virgil said, childishly sticking his tongue out because technically he was still a child.

“Afraid of catching cooties?” Mom teased.

“I know those aren’t real, Mom.”

“I wouldn’t be so certain of that,” His father said, a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “The Cootius Amor is a very real disease. I was under the affliction of it, suffering heart palpitations and an upset stomach. You know what saved me?”

“What?” Virgil asked, despite being suspicious that he knew the answer.

“Your mother!” He fake-swooned, taking the pancakes off the griddle and bringing them to the kitchen table. Mom snorted, trying to maintain a calm composure and failing.

“You’re ridiculous.”

“I think you mean ridiculously in love with you.” Dad said, grinning widely when he managed to get an actual laugh from her this time. Then they kissed again, causing Virgil to groan yet again from the syrupy sweetness of it all. But he wouldn’t have any other way. This moment was perfect, a moment he could relive a million times. He knew this, because he had done so.

In this perfect idyllic moment a startling realization hit Virgil. Something he always inevitably realized. Something that he should’ve realized from the start. Something he wished wasn’t true. Because this moment, this shadow of the past, this wasn’t real. He hadn’t been twelve years old for awhile now. A decade almost. The same amount of time since he’d last seen his parents alive and in the flesh.

This was all just a dream.

God, every time he had this realization it hurt so much. Sometimes he was able to forget his parents were dead. He’d gotten very good over the years at distracting himself. The truth felt far-off in the distance, almost unreal. He envisioned them as simply being elsewhere. Too busy for him to call or visit. As much as that illusion hurt, it was better than simply accepting reality.

Other times, he was forced to be very cognizant of their deaths. The hole in his heart became an expanding void. One that threatened to engulf him whole. Those times he just wanted to lay in his room and just cry. Where all he wanted was their comforting embrace, their words of assurance. But he couldn’t. He wasn’t allowed that. It’d been almost ten years—you’d think by now he would be past the grief.

But accepting their deaths almost felt like a betrayal. Almost as if he believed they were still alive hard enough, then it’d come true. They would come find him and be a family again. If he accepted their deaths, they’d be lost to him forever. He knew it was stupid and didn’t make sense. It still didn’t stop him from trying.

As uncertain as Virgil lived his life, he’d always known without a doubt they loved him. When he made mistakes or failed, they didn’t berate him. Rather, they came alongside him to help him understand and grow past them. So of course fate snatched away the most important people in his short lifespan. He missed them so much.

This was what made dreams like this difficult. Because for a brief moment, everything was back to normal again. They were always so vivid too. He fell for it every single time. It was cruel to gain them back in this temporary sort-of way. As cruel reality crashed into him every time upon waking up. It made him simultaneously want to sleep forever and not at all.

“Virgil, are you with us, bud?”

A hand touched his shoulder, shaking it gently. Virgil didn’t feel it.

“Little poet, your dad and I had a talk regarding your birthday—”

“—tell you something—”

“Virgil, please listen—"

Virgil’s lungs seized up. His breaths came out short and shuddery like a car engine struggling to start. Tears stung his eyes as a harsh sob escaped him. Mom? Dad? He couldn’t hear their voices anymore. Nor was he sitting at the kitchen table, bright light streaming into the window. He laid on a soft surface, his surroundings dark and murky. He was awake.

Awake and with the wound of his dead parents ripped open again. He bit back another sob, sweeping the grief underneath a metaphorical rug. Just like his dad and his cleaning tactics. Maybe Virgil did take more after Dad than he thought he did.

He forced himself to breathe, taking in one shaky breath in at a time. He’d managed to get it mostly under control when an alarm blared. A loud, discordant sound of chaos in the midst of stoic silence. Virgil screamed in fright, hitting his head on something as he jolted forwards. Work—he had work today, didn’t he? Cathy was going to be upset if he was late again—wait no. That wasn’t right. He didn’t work there anymore.

The alarm wasn’t right either. It sounded different than the one on his phone. He glanced around the room, aptly thinking, “Well, this isn’t my room.”

It was dark to discern much, but the one key factor was the window. It had a thick shade better at blocking out sunlight than Virgil’s blanket-duct-taped-to-the-window solution. The bed was nicer, the bedsheet soft and not as threadbare worn as Virgil’s. Where was he?

He couldn’t remember. It was nothing but fuzzy tv static sizzling inside of his brain. Like someone changed channels and he didn’t have the remote to change it back. Oh god, please don’t tell him he drank too much and went home with a complete stranger. He couldn’t handle even the thought of it.

Something shifted above him, causing him to realize this was a bunk bed. It creaked as a blanket dropped to the floor. Or rather, a blanket containing a bundle of something.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Blanket Bundle muttered, slapping a blanket-covered appendage over the Alarm’s OFF button. Virgil inhaled sharply, causing Blanket Bundle’s attention to snap towards him. Fizzy, curly hair spilled out of the blanket, framing a very recognizable face; Remy. He stood there, black shades absent. Virgil had seen him without them before, of course, but it was weird.

He couldn’t shake the image of Remy with red eyes. Even though Remy currently stared at him with hazel eyes, an unidentifiable emotion within them. His eyebrows slightly raised, his lips curved downwards. Remy almost looked…worried. But then he cleared his throat and with it his expression changed at once.

“Hey Virge,” Remy greeted, casual and cool as usual, “How are you doing? Did you get good beauty sleep?”

Virgil hated that first question. It was too big and ambiguous. Way too much currently for his brain to grasp. Not to mention nobody truly cared about the answer to the question. It was just a thing people were required to ask others. As to the second question, well. He definitely didn’t get good beauty sleep. So he decided to answer neither of them.

“I’m hungry.” Virgil croaked, surprised by the hoarseness of his voice.

“Breakfast yes,” Remy nodded sagely, “The most important meal of the day. Follow me this way, my good homo sapien.”

“Homo sapien?”

“I’m practicing vocab terms for biology,” Remy rolled his eyes, “Like gurl, do not get me started on my biology professor. She’s part of the rhetoric that refuses to see vampires, homo sanguis, as anything but diseased homines. Like, I can’t even!”

He paused, as if waiting for a response. Virgil offered nothing but a blank stare in return. Something was wrong. He didn’t know what. He still couldn’t remember how he ended up at Remy’s dorm room.

There was also Remy’s behavior to consider. The vampire was a flurry of activity as always. Never one to remain still if he could help it. He moved about the room, putting his sunglasses on as he ranted. Yet something rubbed Virgil the wrong way about it. Virgil couldn’t tell if he was reading into things but it was too fluid and smooth. Perfect to a degree that was unlike Remy’s usual chaotic brand of energy.

“Anyways,” Remy said, rolling his eyes, “I may be a ‘diseased human frothing at the mouth for blood’ but even I have learned some basic skills like cooking to blend in.”

“I don’t even know how to cook.” Virgil blurted out.

“Yeah well neither did Betsy back in the fifties but did that stop her from criticizing my prized quiche? Oh no!”

Virgil followed Remy into the small dingy dorm kitchen, still baffled as hell. As much as that confusion ramped up his anxiety, a small part of him wanted it to stay that way. It warned him he might not like the truth. In the same way he tried ignoring the reality of his parents’ death.

“So!” Remy said, rummaging through the cupboards, “What are you hungry for? Pancakes or omelets?”

“Omelet please.” Virgil muttered, barely withholding a shudder. He didn’t think he could stomach pancakes after that dream with his parents. He sat on a stool, his legs tucked close to his chest.

Remy, thankfully, didn’t comment on it.

“Good choice, my roommate would probably murder me if I took from his pancake mix. Even though he definitely drank the last of the OJ and left the jug in there, biiiiitch. Good thing he’s not here because I’d give a piece of my mind. He’s not getting away with that easily, no mad’m!”

He casted a look towards Virgil as if saying “Roommates am I right?” and Virgil forced a laugh. It was a pastime of theirs to complain about their roommates. Alongside with discussing their favorite bands, of course.

Remy cracked eggs against the frying pan, his mouth still going a mile a minute. He flipped from one topic to the next, never settling on one for long. There was a high pitch to his voice, an almost nervous energy to it. Like he was putting on a performance for Virgil. Something for him to take comfort and solace in. It grated on Virgil’s nerves. Virgil wanted to call him out on it. He wanted to demand Remy to cut it out. He wanted to know what was going on.

Yet, fear held him back. It clamped down on his throat, like a bear trap and refused to let go. It told him it was better to say nothing than to possibly risk inciting Remy’s ire. Even if Remy had never been angry with Virgil before, did he really want this to be the first time?

So he sat there, too foggy-brained and half-asleep to say something. Or at least, that was what he told himself. A small part of him appreciated the mindless chatter Remy provided. It was a distraction from the daunting feeling he was forgetting something important.

He went to pull out his phone. Just to check the time—maybe scroll through tumblr real quick. Nothing big. He slipped his hand into his pocket, coming into contact with something jagged. Not smooth.

The tv static in his mind dissipated. Crystal clear HD images flooded his mind. The text from Patton. Jerad jeering. The chase around the apartment. Jerad gripping his wrist, squeezing it tightly like a boa constrictor. Dangling over the street far below. So close to plunging to his death. His phone falling, falling, falling to the ground. Into a tiny million pieces. Virgil fleeing, panic pulsing through his veins. Remy? Remy was there. He comforted him. But none of that made any sense. Just like a dream. It had to be a dream. No, a nightmare.

….He had to wake up.

Wake up, wake up, wAKE UP!

“Virgil!”

Someone shouted something. His name? He couldn’t tell for sure over the raging storm of panic consuming him. Just like it did last night. No that wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. If he repeated that to himself, it’d come true. As true as his parents weren’t dead. Just simply…not around.

Burning. The smell of burnt food invaded his nostrils. He tasted something salty. Tears? He felt a wetness on his face. A hand rested upon his own, fingers thrumming against his knuckles. Singing. A voice low and strained. As if overcome by some sort of emotion.

“We’ll carry on, we’ll carry on, and though you’re dead and gone believe me—”

“Your memory will carry on.” Virgil croaked, causing the voice to stop.

He didn’t wake up. He still sat on the kitchen stool. Only now Remy sat beside him. His expression indiscernible due to his sunglasses. The broken pieces of his phone still dug into his hip. Virgil always found reality more frightening than nightmares could ever be. At least you could escape nightmares. You couldn’t do that with reality. At least not as easily. Virgil swallowed.

“Remy?”

“Yeah?”

“I think the eggs are burning.”

“Well fuck the eggs,” Remy scowled, expression softening as he squeezed Virgil’s hand, “Right now the only thing I care about is making sure you’re okay.”

The intensity of Remy’s words spooked Virgil a bit.

“Well, maybe you should turn the burner off? Just in case it starts a fire?” Virgil suggested weakly.

Remy stared at him for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly and rose to do just that. He leaned against the counter, facing Virgil once more. His lips twitched downwards but he otherwise maintained a blank exterior.

“Virgil, are you gucci?”

“I’m fine.” Virgil said before he could even think.

“Are you sure of that, hun?” Remy said, raising an eyebrow, “because I found outside my dorm last night and you didn’t know who I was at first. And then—just now…”

“Wait, you found me outside your dorm?” Virgil gaped.

He didn’t pick a particular destination when he started running. He just ran and ran, the world one big blurry ball of nothingness. Did he subconsciously run to Remy, hoping to receive comfort? What did that say about him? For being so needy and dependent on Remy? No wonder he seemed so upset!

“Virge, did someone hurt you?” Remy asked.

Virgil jolted, completely unprepared for this question. It seemed to come out of nowhere, not at all connected to the conversation at hand. Remy’s eyes drifted away from his face, looking at something in Virgil’s general vicinity. He followed Remy’s gaze to a purple splotchy bruise on his wrist, its tendrils spreading out like a spiderweb. No, a hand. Jerad’s hand. Squeezing like a claw machine and he the hapless stuffed animal trapped in its grip. Virgil’s breath hitched.

“Nobody, I—I just hit my hand against a doorknob, that’s all.”

Remy’s frown deepened. He stepped towards Virgil, who barely repressed a flinch. He looked away, unable to maintain eye contact. Not with the unusual ferocity that emanated from Remy.

“Vee, I’m serious,” Remy whispered, crouching beside him, “I don’t care who it is. If it’s that idiot pup again or even Boss Man. Tell me their name and I’ll beat them up for you.”

Virgil’s breath hitched. Remy was a vampire--one that happened to be centuries old. He’d known this, of course, for some time now. But during that moment, the full weight of it Virgil. Even if Remy didn’t drink human blood now, he had to at one point. Right? Or at the very least, you don’t live that long without committing some violence acts. Did he really know the real Remy?

Paranoia aside, he couldn’t fight other what-ifs attacking him. What if Jerad hurt Remy? What if Jerad found out about Remy’s a vampire? What if Virgil caused the death of his first true friend in a decade?

“N—no one. It’s no one, Rem, I swear,” Virgil said, fear coiling around him like a python, “It’s just sometimes, I get panic attacks. L—like they suck and stuff, but there’s nothing I can really do about it.”

He snuck a gaze up at the vampire, heart hammering away at his chest. Remy’s eyes peered above his sunglasses, narrowed. Remy didn’t believe him. He didn’t need verbal confirmation, he just knew it. Virgil gripped the side of the breakfast bar, searching. Looking for something, anything to help him escape this conversation. A clock. One of those digital ones that contained both the date and time. Tuesday, 9:51AM.

“Okay I won’t—”

“I have to go.” Virgil interrupted, shooting up from the stool. So abruptly that the stool fell onto the floor with a crash. “I—I’m going to be late. I’m supposed to be at work by now—oh my god Logan’s gonna kill me.”

“Wait!” Remy stepped in front of him, “I think you should play hooky.”

“What?” Virgil said, one decimal away from screeching.

“Call out of work,” Remy suggested, “Logan will understand. He’s not that bitch Cathy. And if he doesn’t, I’ll make him.”

For a second he saw the flash of someone else in Remy’s place. A huge, hulking silhouette. A shudder ran through Virgil’s spine. He moved away from Remy, shaking his head.

“No, no, it’s fine—I’ll be fine. I have to go. I just—” Virgil took off, unable to finish that sentence without a sob escaping.

He ran out of the dorm, out of the university campus and to the city beyond. He ran, running from his problems like always.

“Virgil!”

He shrieked, halting to a complete stop. Remy was there, almost as if he just appeared. Out of thin air, no less. Because with Virgil’s head start, he shouldn’t have been able to get to his side so easily.

“What, Remy?” Virgil snapped, hands forming fists at his sides. He couldn’t do this, not now.

Remy didn’t recoil. His sunglasses fully covered his eyes, masking his expression again. Instead he offered something black and soft towards Virgil. A black jacket, one Virgil never saw him wear before.

“It’s always pretty chilly in the library, you know.” Remy shrugged, looking away.

Virgil saw through Remy’s words. He was offering him a way to hide the bruise from visible view. Something that hadn’t crossed Virgil’s mind, really.

“Thanks.” Virgil swallowed, taking the jacket. He slipped it on and left without saying anything else.

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When he slammed Logan’s office door open, he expected to be faced with lots of angry lecturing for his tardiness. He did not expect concern and understanding from Logan. Like, at all. Somehow that scared him more than the alternative. Why was Logan being so lenient with him?

Sure, today was a fluke. He was usually great at being there on time. A tiny bit of him was relieved about it after everything. The rest of him held its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop. While it didn’t exactly drop just yet…well. The black jacket Remy gave him hadn’t completely worked.

“Virgil, who gave you that bruise?” Logan asked, staring into the depths of his very soul.

He’d freaked out at that question. Just like Remy, but worse. He spoke sharply to a werewolf who growled at him just seconds prior. Logan had been upset to see that bruise—just like Remy. Most people appreciated others showing an interest in their wellbeing. Not Virgil. It terrified him for reasons he didn’t quite understand himself.

The rest of work resumed as usual. Virgil drowned himself in the mundanity. The only thing that existed in the entire world was the library. His whole purpose? Working the front desk. Helping patrons the best he could. Sorting and putting books away. Telling a rowdy studying group to quiet down. Before he knew it, he was clocking out for the day.

That was when everything threatened to fall apart. He didn’t have anywhere to spend the night. He couldn’t crash at Remy’s again. Because if he asked Remy, then the vampire would really know something was up. When it wasn’t, not really. Just a spat between roommates. Sure, it ended in a broken phone, but it could’ve been worse. Like falling to one’s death—

Virgil took a deep breath as he walked the front entrance of the library. His movements stiff and mechanical. As if someone else was manipulating him to walk like strings to a puppet. He could do this. He just had to take things one step at a time. Literally.

Step one, leave the library. Simple, easy. He could do that. Once outside, he’d figure out the rest. Step two? Find somewhere to stay the night. Less easy.

The library’s automatic doors slid open and the last bright, brilliant rays of the sunset greeted him. A swarm of blackness attacked him next. He jerked backwards, hands automatically reaching to grapple with the thing that caused it. He stared down, eyes stinging, at a very familiar black plaid hoodie.

“You actually caught it! I thought you’d fumble it like a dumbass.”

Virgil stopped breathing; Jerad. He stood there, hands haughtily crossed against his chest. Had he been waiting outside for Virgil? And if so, for how long? Virgil couldn’t take him on in a fight. He had to flee—run back into the library. He didn’t move. He remained rooted to the spot, muscles locked in place as Jerad advanced. To pummel him, or worse yet—kill him.

All color left his face as Jerad raised his arms and…hugged him? Or at least Jerad’s version of a hug. A tight, vindictive squeeze that Virgil had grown used to over the years. It still did nothing to diminish the fear swelling inside of him.

“Aww man, you should see your face! You look like you thought I was gonna punk ya!” Jerad crowed as he released Virgil.

“I—you—the phone.” Virgil stammered, unable to form complete sentences. Jerad didn’t get angry. He just laughed, slapping Virgil’s back in what was a friendly gesture. Virgil winced despite it.

“Oh that! Shit man, you know I don’t really mean anything when I lose my temper. I just can’t control it, ya know?”

Virgil silently nodded, unable to trust his voice in the moment.

“Besides, that thing was old and already falling apart! You know what you need? The latest greatest current smartphone out there! My treat!”

“Wha—” Virgil barely squeaked out before Jerad dragged him off to a cell-phone store. Jerad rambled about stuff on the way there. Virgil couldn’t hear him over the roaring of his heartbeat in his ears. He clung to his hoodie in one arm as if it was a stuffed animal. He couldn’t think. His mind was a myriad of white noise. This couldn't be real, right? He had to have fainted or something. Please let it be so.

“—huh, Virgil? What do you think of this one?” Jerad said, nudging him.

Virgil blinked, spooked to be faced with a display of smartphones. Somehow, they were already at the store. He bit his lip, eyes widening at the price tag.

“I—it’s—I don’t know,” He glanced over to a cheaper phone at the other end of the display, “I like that one.”

“C’mon Virgo! This one comes with a protective screen cover! That other one doesn’t,” Jerad scoffed, leaning in closer, “Do you really want another shitty phone that’ll break like your last one?”

Those words sparked a rage inside Virgil. A fire burned in the pit of his stomach as words materialized at the tip of his tongue. It was Jerad who threw the phone from a five-story balcony. Jerad who always mocked Virgil and acted like throwing money at the problem solved a situation when it didn’t. Not really. Jerad who insulted his friends. Virgil wanted to scream at the top of his throat obscenities at him.

“N-no.” Someone said out loud, shaky and uncertain.

Virgil jumped a bit at the sound, glancing to see who it was. It sounded familiar. He looked to see Jerad staring right at him, smirking. His stomach churned as a wave of realization crashed into him. Oh, oh. That had been him, he’d been the one to say that. But why? That had been the exact opposite of what he meant to say!

He didn’t have much time to process it before Jerad clasped him on the shoulder, chuckling.

“That’s what I thought! Lemme just—”

A loud obnoxious 80s rock song interrupted him. Jerad fished his phone out of his pocket, groaning upon seeing the caller id.

“Ugh, it’s my mom again. You’re lucky your parents are dead, Virgin, because they are so fucking annoying.” Jerad rolled his eyes, declining the call as he strode off to find a store associate.

Virgil stood there, withholding a flinch. Because he knew if his parents were still alive, they wouldn’t be proud of their son. They’d be absolutely repulsed by his cowardice.

He watched as Jerad chatted up the store associate, his back facing Virgil. If he couldn’t stand up to Jerad—this was it. This was his chance to flee. To run off while Jerad was distracted. Maybe he could run to Remy again. They could get an apartment together, away from both their annoying roommates. They’d laugh together and watch awful movies for the sake of ridiculing them.

They’d be the best of friends until Remy grew sick of him. Until Virgil became annoying and obsolete to discard like an old flip-phone. Remy was immortal, just like Patton and Logan. It was really all a matter of time before they confirmed his suspicions. They’d get tired of him. It happened. It always happened to everyone in Virgil’s life. Why wouldn’t it happen to them? They’ll eventually grow tired of him and he’ll become their next meal. He’d be an idiot to think any other way.

Virgil turned to look back down at the phone display. He swallowed, unable to dislodge the lump in his throat. His vision spun a bit, his stomach nauseous. He couldn’t move a muscle, just like a statue. Perhaps he could try becoming one. All they did was remain motionless all day and let pigeons poop on them. He’d be better at that than being a human being.

“Virgil!” A hand took hold of his shoulder, forcibly turning his body around to face a new direction. Virgil glanced briefly down to see he was still flesh-and-blood. Not a ivory stone statue, free of all his troubles and misery.

“Virgil, this is Jeff,” Jerad said, gesturing to the store associate, “He’s gonna help with getting your new swanking, danking phone!” Jerad fist-pumped the air, letting out a whoop.

Virgil locked eyes with the poor slightly frazzled store associate named Jeff and did a small nod of recognition. As if to say, “I’m sorry to be the cause of your agony.”

He knew what it was like to deal with customers like Jerad. He hated knowing it was his fault they were in the phone store in the first place. Virgil sharply exhaled, eyes blinking rapidly to stop the tears from forming. If he couldn’t keep himself from crying then he was truly pathetic.

His awareness grew blurry, almost foggy. His body moved out of its own accord, nodding along to the conversation and following after Jerad. Normally this type of thing would’ve freaked him out. Given all the panic already present in his body, it might’ve killed him on the spot. Instead he couldn’t bring himself to feel the twinges of anxiety. Or frustration, anger, disgust. Nothing. A numbness took hold of him, wrapping around him in a cold embrace.

Jerad purchased the new phone, true to his word. He fiddled with it on the walk back to the apartment, ogling over its features. Virgil’s legs faithfully kept walking, each step closer to the apartment. His heart beat right on time, his breaths slow and even.

“Let’s take the stairs, get some exercise in today.” Jerad suggested and Virgil’s head jerked in agreement. They took the stairs, five flights and all. Virgil wheezed at the end of it. The pain of getting insufficient oxygen made him feel alive again for the briefest of moments. It ended sharply with Jerad laughing as he patted Virgil’s back.

“I see someone skipped leg day!”

A feeble imitation of a laugh croaked from Virgil’s lips. Jerad shoved his key into their apartment door and unlocked it. Virgil followed him in. Jerad stopped abruptly in the middle of the living room, causing Virgil to almost run into him. He turned around, the new phone clasped in one hand.

“Hey man,” Jerad began, offering the phone toward Virgil, “we cool?”

Virgil spat in his face.

Or at least that sounded better than what actually happened.

“Yeah, thanks.” Virgil said. He took the phone from Jerad and headed off to his room.

He sat on his crappy bed, swaddled in his raggedy purple blanket. He looked at the phone, at its glossy smooth screen. It was fine. Everything was fine. Virgil had just overreacted, that was all.

Jerad was not that bad of a guy. He was a jerk, yes. He liked to jerk Virgil at times, get inside his head. He was the jerk that threw Virgil’s phone down a five-story balcony. But he was a jerk who made up by purchasing a brand new one. The phone currently in Virgil’s hand.

His old phone couldn’t compare with this one. Not with its cracked screen and bad battery. This new phone had the latest technological achievements and best camera lens. He wouldn’t have this if it wasn’t for Jerad.

It didn’t stop him from wanting his old phone back. He’d felt so proud to own it after scraping and saving for it. It was dumb but he’d named it Taran and treated it almost like a friend, no more than that. A lifeline that got him through life no matter what punches it threw at him.

It was okay. He knew eventually it’d break on him. It didn’t matter how it broke in the end. Really, it didn’t. He just needed to move on and stop mourning an inanimate object. Maybe he could name this new phone Taran II in remembrance or something. It was fine.

Virgil kept staring down at the phone, into his reflection in the phone-screen. He looked past greasy hair and dark eyebags into dull, defeated eyes.

He threw the phone onto the ground, unable to bear the sight any longer. He curled up in his bed, head firmly pressed against his pillow, and cried.

#thomas sanders #sanders sides #virgil sanders #remy sanders #logan sanders #kat writes #did i recycle a previous scene from the previous chapter into this one?#yes #shh

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