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crazyk-imagine · 1 year

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Chapter VI: House Drop

Characters: Sulane “Sullie” Celeste, Jasner ""Jas" Verbane, James Diamond, Kendall Knight, Carlos Garcia, Hortense "Logan" Mitchell, Gustavo Roque, Kelly Wainwright, Katie Knight, Mama Knight Freight Train, Camille Roberts (Briefly mentioned)

Warnings: Shenanigans, Sulane not feeling well, mansion sitting gone wrong, Monty the hairless cat being called a chicken, Sulane and Monty are not friends :(, Sulane showing her future potential as a producer, Jasner being both helpful and unhelpful, Kelly is a godsend

Word Count: 5,627

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Jasner decides to take a break from auditions for the next few hours, debating on if he should work on some homework, he hadn’t been able to do yesterday or put it off until later and find Sullie.

He shakes his head at the feeling of those damn butterflies moving around in his stomach whenever he thinks of her. He's happy to see her become the person he imagines she was before arriving in the Palm Woods, happy.

But he’s also kind of scared because the pretty boy of the band seems to hate him. Which is kind of weird for him to think about when everyone else here seems to like him and yet, he thinks he knows why.

Yesterday when he left Camille for a second to grab the smoothies, he may or may not have taken a minor detour and may have used his favorite form of travel in any building (he can find a blueprint to) the vents.

He couldn’t tell what he was feeling when Gustavo asked them if they had experienced the kind of love, they needed to in order to “perfect” the song and James turned around to look at the only person who’s around them most of the time, that’s their age.

He left without popping in to say hi, needing to figure out what he was feeling before talking to Sulane again.

“How are you feeling?”

“Huh?” She turns her head, staring at him.

‘Oh… no.’ He smiles at her, has she always been this pretty?

Is he slow to realize that she’s really cool and interesting and- he’s not just crushing he’s on the verge of falling for her, and hard.

He sits on the couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs. ‘Act normal. She doesn’t need to know.’ “Whatcha doin’?”

“Reading more letters. I found some hidden behind pasta in the cabinets.”

“Oh, really. Do you,” his voice cracks. Jasner winces and shakes his head. “Do you want me to look around and see if I can find anymore?”

“Not right now. I’m still reading through the first two weeks I was here. Apparently, Carlos got his first A which turned out to be a mistake because there were two Carlos’ in his math class.” Sulane huffs, throwing her head back against the cushions of the couch.

They turn to look at one another, staring into each other’s eyes before she sighs.

“Do you want to take a nap?”

She shakes her head, stretches her arms above her head, stifling a yawn.

“You’re lying. Come on, up you go,” he pats the cushion beside him.

“Fine.” She sets the letter on top of the pile she’s made.

He moves out of the way, smiling. “Lay down, I’ll watch something on TV and wait till you fall asleep before leaving.”

She nods, already half asleep.

He purses his lips, wondering what he can do to help make things easier for her.

She’s been working so much more than he's ever seen and it’s taking a toll on her.

He shakes his head, grabbing the blanket off the back of the couch, carefully laying it across her before squatting, resting on the balls of his feet.

He brushes a few fallen strands off her cheek, pushing them behind her ear. “If I ever get a big role and have to shoot out of town or something, I’d really miss you,” he mutters, watching over her until he realizes he needs to go to his apartment and make an audition tape. He doesn’t know why he said it, but he doesn’t regret it because he would.

S01 EP 06

She opens her eyes at the sound of Gustavo’s ring tone for when he calls, Darth Vader’s iconic music.

She chuckles at the sound because she doesn’t like Star Wars (but watched all the movies because of Jasner and knew when she heard the sound, she had to find it). “What?”

“Don’t you what me? I’m the one who signs that thing you call a paycheck.”

“And I’m the one keeping your assistant sane because I’m amazing, want to try that again without so much attitude.”

He grumbles.

A heavy sigh comes through along with some rustling. “Sulane. I need you to get down to the studio, Gustavo needs help finishing the boy’s song. He can’t figure out this one line and he’s starting to get on my nerves,” Kelly tells her daughter.

“On my way.”

She hangs up and changes before grabbing a piece of licorice and opening her door. “Freight Train, just the guy I wanted to see.”

“You heading off to work?”

“You know it.”

“Piggyback?”

“Please.”

They pass by as the boys are doing something moronic but don’t stop.

Sulane needs to keep her stupid meter on low today.

Jasner walks out into the pool area, wandering over towards the guys listening to Logan explain fartology to Kendall and James. “It's basic fartology.”

“He’s not wrong.”

“Hey, Jas,” Kendall and Logan greet him.

“So how do we know when it's coming?” James asks.

The three band mates leaned down.

“I'm not sure,” Kendall responds.

“Oh, guys. I wouldn’t-”

It’s too late. They’re drenched.

“Whoo! Did you get that on video?” Carlos shouts, excited about the results.

“Should it be smoking like this?” Kendall asks, watching as his camera short circuits and smoke comes from it.

“Man!” “Oh, man.” The boys exclaim, disappointed in their work.

- Ah, ah, ah-ah, ooh -

“I wanna be famous,” the band sings waving Kendall to sing his line. “You want to be the one who's living the life.”

The producer pushes his mic button. “And cut!”

“It sounded great, right?” Kendall asks, still feeling the adrenaline of singing with his best friends. He glances over to see the blonde doing a “stop” gesture and tilts his head in confusion… until Gustavo continues.

“No,” he starts off, which confuses the boys. “Green day sounds great. You guys didn't make me want to vomit.”

“Oh, Gustavo!” They all angrily rip their headphones off their head. “Come on!”

Until the producer pushes a button and mutes them and he mouths to them, “I can’t hear you.”

“Why can't you tell them they sound good? Or thank them for all their hard work?” Kelly asks, after smacking his arm.

“Showing thanks is a sign of weakness.”

“What about you know who?” She gestures to Sulane, who stands in front of the glass window, writing something in her notebook.

“I stand by my previous statement. And besides, you don't hear them thanking me.”

The teen girl lifts her notebook for the boys to see. “Say thank you or I end you all. You haven’t thanked him once and I think he’s hurt by it.”

Carlos gives her a thumbs up.

“Gustavo,” Kendall says earning the adult’s attention. “We just wanted to thank you.”

The others chime in. “Yeah, thank you.”

“Thank you so much,” Logan clarifies.

“So much fun,” James adds.

“It's been a blast,” Carlos tells him.

Kelly nudges her boss’s shoulder.

“I just wanted to say you guys,” the producer pauses for dramatic effect.

“Are done for the day. Kelly and I are off to North Carolina.”

“Ooh, can you bring us back a tar heel?” The corndog lover asks, with a clearly excited tone.

“Ooh, I'm thinking about bringing back a hot new band, that I can replace you with when you inevitably fail me.”

Sulane pursed her lips, she knew this was going to happen, but she hoped he wasn’t going to do it to them. She pinches the bridge of her nose because she cares.

Kelly gives the boys a sorry look and her frown deepens at the sight of her daughter.

“Replace us?”

They glance over at her.

“Did you know?” Logan asks.

She scoffs, rolling her eyes, placing her headphones on her head, needing to tune the stupidity out before exiting the room.

The band follows their producer. “Gustavo!”

“Stop!”

“You can't be serious.”

“You can't. You're not gonna replace us, not after you see my new head shots.” James lifts his headshots after seemingly pulling them out of his pocket. “One hot young doctor, one hot greasy mechanic.”

“Ooh, ooh.” Gustavo says, removing them from the pretty boy’s grasp, flinging them to the side. “Ooh, I'll put these with the others.”

James yelps and reaches for his headshots.

Sulane glances at the boy from the corner of her eye.

James feels her stare and quickly hides it behind his back.

“Kelly,” Gustavo walks to his office backwards, “who'd you get to house-sit my mansion?”

“Oh, you said that you would take care of that,” Kelly points out.

“There is no way I would have ever said-”

The more experienced assistant pulls out a tape recorder and hits play. “Kelly, I'll find someone to house-sit my mansion.”

The producer groans.

She glances over shoulder at the boy band. “I record everything now.”

James gives her an impressed expression with an okay hand signal.

Logan clicks his tongue and points to her.

Kendall is impressed (and hopes Sulane takes notes).

Carlos is a little scared but proud of her.

Sulane wraps her arm around her mom’s shoulders, “I’ve taught you well.”

“See! This is why I didn’t want you two working together. You’re both mean.”

They scoff, rolling their eyes.

Jasner walks down the hallway, turning right so he's standing behind the boys; he sips his smoothie. “What’s up?”

The band jumps back, not expecting him.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” The blonde asks.

“Shouldn’t you?”

“Touche.”

The producer rolls his eyes. “You can play your blame game later. Meanwhile, who's gonna dust my 100-inch plasma.”

The boys step forward.

“Feed my exotic pets.”

They take another step.

“And make sure my $1 million media room stays set at 68 degrees?”

Carlos holds onto Kelly shoulder, slightly shaking while James does the same thing with Sulane as they answer. “We'll mansion-sit for you.”

“Oh, you want me to let the monkey’s mansion-sit?”

“Yeah, I thought we were dogs,” the brainiac points out.

“You're monkey dogs. And the answer is no.”

“Can I see you in your office, please? Mm.” The more experienced assistant shoves her boss into his office as Gustavo glances back at them, feeling very confused.

The teen girl throws her head back and laughs. “Oh, you guys are desperate.” She pushes James and Jasner off her. “And I’m done. Bye.”

“Wait, you’re leaving?” Carlos asks.

“I have plans.”

“But, watching Gustavo’s mansion is probably better than your plans,” James tells her, not wanting her to depart from them just yet.

She sighs and he smiles and pulls her closer to the door so they can listen in.

The group falls onto the floor and quickly pushes themselves off the ground… except for Jasner.

The boy notices the raised brow he’s getting from Kelly. “I’m not going to waste a drop of this smoothie; I can’t find a raspberry one anywhere.”

“What’s up?” Carlos says after pushing himself up.

“Hey man,” Logan starts. “We were- we were just hanging out.”

“I didn’t plan on this happening,” Sulane quickly adds.

“Quiet and follow weird name.”

“There are five mansion-sitting rules at Casa Gustavo. One, stay out of my media room.”

James gives him a thumbs up.

“Two, do not open my living room fridge.”

Carlos does an okay gesture with a reassuring head shake.

“Three, keep the butts off my $40,000 Federico Benini couch.”

Kendall gives him finger guns and then looks away, glancing over at the blonde, silently asking if he’s serious to which she nods.

“Four, do not touch my Peruvian hairless cat, Monty.”

“Ooh, I love cats,” Logan replies, with a smile.

“Don't touch him!”

The brainiac shrugs. “I don't even like cats.”

The teen girl slaps her chest. “Oh my god.” She snatches Jasner’s smoothie from him and takes a sip. “That thing is still alive?! You haven’t accidentally cooked it.”

Everyone glances over at her.

“What? It was sitting in a bowl, and I thought he was defrosting some chicken.”

“And five, if anything- anything is broken in my mansion, you are all fired! Are we clear?”

Sulane shakes her head, “morons.” She walks out of the room as they continue to cheer.

As Kendall tries to persuade his mom into letting them mansion sit, with the not so helpful assistance of Logan; he has to chuck a dinosaur chicken nugget at the other two to make his point.

“You-” Sulane takes a deep breath, swallowing her food. “You are not old enough? You can be an adult and have a childish side, nothing too like major though you know… not like Molly.”

Mama Knight glances in her direction.

“Sorry, anyway, they’ll be fine.”

“Fine, as long as she goes with you, and I want hourly updates.”

“No,” Sulane groans, holding her head in her hands.

The boys cheer until Carlos knocks over James’s chocolate milk.

“You knocked over my chocolate milk.”

The helmet lover chews louder which angers his friend.

“Whoa!” Carlos shouts as the pretty boy tackles him.

Katie and Logan each take a nugget from the boys’ plates.

“I'll be in charge along with the assistance of everyone’s favorite person.”

She shrugs him off her. “Get off me.”

Sulane opens the door to hear, “Katie, you're not staying. Get out of the duffel bag.”

“Fine.”

She shakes her head at the young girl’s behavior. “Sorry, Katie,” she and Kendall apologize.

“See you.” Jasner turns around and thanks Mama Knight.

The older woman smiles, “you’re welcome. I’m happy they have someone else to hang out with.”

He turns around with a big smile on his face.

“Why do you look so excited?” Logan asks.

“This is the only time I get to see the inside of Gustavo’s mansion.”

“So, you’ve never been here before?”

“Only to the front door but that’s about it.”

“Why?” Kendall chimes in.

“Something about him not trusting me or thinking I’m going to destroy his mansion.”

The boys nod before running inside.

The teen girl escapes to her room, not at all in the mood to even try and deal with the boys and their excitement.

She rolls her eyes when she hears them having fun come from the media room.

They decide to go on a journey to the kitchen.

They stare at the fridge with their heads tilted.

“Why do you think Gustavo locks his fridge?” Kendall throws out there.

“I bet he keeps his heart in there,” James replies.

“Or his victims,” Logan adds.

“Or food,” Carlos and Jasner say. They turn to one another and high five.

“Well, only one way to find out.”

The brainiac turns to stop his blond friend from taking a step further. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, are you crazy? Don't you remember mansion-sitting rule number two?”

They turn to a flashback of Gustavo telling them, “rule number two, help yourselves to anything you want in my living room fridge.”

“That was not it,” Logan tells them.

“Yes, it was,” the other four say.

Carlos spreads his arm open, forcing Logan, Jasner, and James to take a step back. “Step aside, boys. My uncle was a locksmith. You just place your hands between the cylinder and the central housing, and then hit it with the sledgehammer!” The corn dog lover raises the item (he seemingly pulled out of nowhere) and screams.

The found Gustavo’s holy grail… his pudding fridge.

“Pudding!” They all shouted.

Sulane walks downstairs, in need of an aspirin or something to get rid of her migraine, something that always happens whenever she thinks about visiting her mom’s grave.

Once she gets what she needs and begins to slowly feel some relief, she decides to check on the boys and passes by the broken fridge.

“What. Did. You. Guys. Do?” She sees Kendall reaching over to grab a spoonful of James’ pudding (and is successful). “Don’t you dare.”

The leader turns to her, looking like a deer in headlights… and then the pudding falls from his spoon.

The boys start screaming.

“You idiot. Why would you do that?”

“Gustavo's $40,000 couch!” Carlos freaks out.

“Get your butts off his couch was rule number three,” Logan adds.

“No, it wasn't,” Kendall shakes his head.

They see another flashback. “Rule number three, keep your butts off my $40,000 Federico Benini couch.”

“Okay, maybe it was,” the leader stresses the last word.

“Gustavo's gonna kill us. And we're only 64 years old,” James adds.

“Minus us two, right?” Jasner whispers to Sulane.

She shrugs him away; this whole thing just turned her sour mood into an even worse sour mood.

The leader pulls her out of her thoughts. “Which means we are more than capable of removing a pudding stain from a couch. Logan brain now.”

“Right, okay, um- Gustavo has a cat, right? And cat litter's main ingredient is bentonite, which as we all know, is a natural absorbent.”

“Why the hell do you know that? Do you study cat litter in your spare time?”

The brainiac frowns. “Why are you so upset?”

As these three talk, Kendall has Carlos and James getting started on their pudding mishap.

“I’m not.”

“You are though,” Jasner tells her.

“Okay, well you two need to shut up because I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“Logan.”

“Yeah.” He sees the look she’s giving him. “Shut up, right, got it.”

“There, now we just relax and wait.” Logan sets the box of cat litter off to the side.

“Did anyone think that maybe that Monty is going to see cat litter and think it’s in his litter box?”

No one answers her as they scream when they see said cat hop onto the couch.

“Whoa, what is that thing?” Logan points to the hairless cat.

“Oh, it must be his cat,” Jasner and Kendall adds.

“That's a cat?” Carlos asks.

“No, it’s a chicken in disguise.”

“I totally see it now. That’s freaky. I never saw Gustavo to be the kind of guy who would buy a naked cat. Did anyone else see that coming?” Jasner chimes in.

The boys shake their heads. “J- just get him off before he-”

“Marks his territory,” they answer together.

Sulane throws her head back and claps her hands. “I told you guys.”

“Get him off the couch,” Kendall screams.

“Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.” Carlos lifts the cat, but it tries to fight back, and he chucks the cat to the other side of the room and out the door. “Uh-oh.”

“There goes rule number four.” Logan sits down at the nearest table, feeling a little defeated with all their mishaps so far and accidentally sits on Gustavo’s party remote.

A disco ball pops out of the ceiling and Carlos is scared.

“Rule number five! If we break anything, we're fired!” James shouts over the music, freaking out.

“Everybody, just calm down. All we got to do is get the stain off the couch, Find the cat, and raise the disco ball. We can do this together,” Kendall puts his hand out, wanting everyone to do it.

“Uh- hi,” Jasner interrupts, putting his hand in too. “What about the pudding? You guys-” He clears his throat when he sees Sulane glaring at him. “We ate like, all of it. How are we going to restock his fridge?”

Kendall purses his lips.

Logan runs up to Kendall and Jasner who use the fire extinguishers to put out a fire they made. “I can't find the cat at all.”

“I think I broke the statue,” James says, holding two of the statues’ pieces.

Kendall accidentally sets off his fire extinguisher.

“Okay, kid,” Jasner lowers the blond’s hands. “Don’t set it off again.”

“Well, the good news is, this can't get any worse, right?”

Carlos pops into the hallway and starts screaming. “The alligator's loose! The alligator's loose!”

“Wait, is there a- Why is there an alligator?” Logan passes out.

“Get him! Get him!” Kendall tells the others.

“Leave him. He’ll be the bait. If we feed it, we can lock it back up.”

They turn to look at her as she leans against the stair railing.

“Sulane!” Kendall yells at her.

“What?” She rolls her eyes. “Hurry up and grab him before you all become alligator food.”

“How did an alligator get in here?” The leader whines as he holds a piece of meat on a makeshift “fishing pole”, standing on a ladder with Carlos next to him.

“I opened the back door to let the smoke out, and it crawled in from Gustavo's moat.”

Jasner’s head snaps in Carlos’ direction.

“His moat?” James and Logan repeat from their section.

“Oh, yeah.” Sulane’s voice echoes from the top of the stairs. “I could have told you guys that a while ago. They usually don’t leave the moat though.” She chuckles. “Maybe they like boy bands.”

James and Logan frown at her.

“What? It’s a joke.”

“Nice alligator. Follow the meat.”

The alligator yanks the meat and broom out of his hands.

They slam the door shut behind it and cheer.

Sulane walks down and watches them celebrate. “You guys’ better hope that alligator can’t open a door.”

Jasner grimaces at the thought.

“Now just to find Gustavo's freaky bald cat so Gustavo doesn't kill us,” Kendall reminds them.

The pretty boy turns to Logan. “Call the FBI.”

“For a missing cat? The FBI only works with serious crimes.”

“Oh, that explains a lot.” James has a flashback of when he called. “FBI, help! My hair is limp and lifeless.” The call ends. “Hello? Hello?”

“I know one of you used all my cuda massive hold.”

“Focus,” Kendall regains everyone’s attention. “Now, there's only three possible places the cat could be hiding. One, he's roaming the neighborhood. Two, he's hiding up a tree.”

They hear the alligator burp. “And that would be three.”

“So, it might like a chicken in disguise.”

“Stop joking about the cat being a chicken,” Carlos says, sounding all serious until he starts chuckling.

“You can’t tell me it doesn’t look like one. If we find it, put it in a bowl and tell me it doesn’t.”

The group stares at the orange cat sitting on the table.

“You can't shave a cat,” the brainiac tells them.

“Don’t you dare touch this cat.” Sulane grabs the cat, petting it in her arms.

“Oh? Would you rather tell Gustavo we lost his and you know, have him replace us and destroy my dreams?” James screeches.

“Where did you get the cat?”

“I've got a guy,” Carlos answers Logan.

Sulane and Jasner take a step back, glancing at the corn dog lover with concern.

“Quiet. Hold him down steady.”

James passes the clippers to Kendall.

Carlos takes a step forward.

“Don’t you dare,” Sulane tells him. “I will fight you and you will not win, corn dog.”

“Licorice, please. Come on. You don’t want to destroy our dreams, do you?”

She can see the look James is giving her from the corner of her eye.

“Oh, I can't look,” the brainiac covers his eyes when Carlos takes the cat from her.

“Would you chill? How hard can it be to shave a cat?”

The leader turns the clippers on.

They sit on the couch, whining when they see more of the house being ruined and torn into a million pieces.

“Where did it learn to spray paint?” Carlos mumbles, watching the cat spray paint an exclamation point onto its “cats rule”.

“We're doomed,” Kendall whines.

“No kidding.” She says, holding an ice pack for him.

“What’s this for?”

“Your lip.”

Meanwhile in North Carolina, Gustavo realizes he’s missing a certain group. “What's the problem?”

“I'll tell you what the problem is. They do everything I say when I say it, and I can't stand it,” the producer pouts.

Kelly smiles. “You know what I think. I think you miss your boys or your monkey dogs or your boy monkeys.”

“Miss them? Me miss them? Ha! Ha-ha!”

“You thrive on the chaos. They argue with you. They get in your face. They raise your blood pressure. And you like it. You need it. And that’s why you haven’t fired Sulane because she does the same thing but, better since she actually keeps you on track.”

“Wrong! Okay, not wrong. But I can't abandon the windmills. I'm their hero. And it's not like there's record producers waiting outside the door ready to sign them.”

Kelly gets up and opens the door, proving her boss wrong.

He sighs, “okay, they're all yours.”

“Oh, we are horrible mansion-sitters,” Kendall comments, taking a look around the place.

Jasner pats his shoulder. “No.”

Sulane snorts as she takes a bite out of her secret mansion stash of licorice. “Yes, you are.”

James rolls his eyes at her comment. “You’re not helping.”

“I’m not trying to,” she tells him.

The blond’s phone rings, and he pulls it out of his pocket, “oh. Oh, good news. Gustavo and Kelly are coming back early.”

“Oh! Okay, don't worry. I can fix this,” Logan runs to them with a laptop.

“Yes! I knew the smart one would come through. What do you got?” James asks.

“There's a 4:00 A.M. flight to Bolivia. We get there, change our names, raise alpacas.”

The teen girl takes a deep breath before she chokes on her snack. “That is actually one of the best plans I have heard from anyone today.”

“Yeah, I have a better idea.”

“You're gonna call a cleaning service,” Carlos throws out there.

“A statue repairman,” James adds.

“And one of those places that gets the cats out of the alligators,” Logan says, with hope in his voice.

“Ooh. All of the above.”

“I’m going back upstairs. You all have fun.”

“Oh no, no,” Kendall wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her off the stairs.

“Noooo!”

“Hey, mom, here's the sitch,” Kendall starts to say.

“Zip it. I'm gonna need three liters of club soda, a sewing Kit, a bucket of vinegar, bleach, and get on the phone and find a place that delivers super-turbo bonding glue and semigloss white paint.”

“Got it.”

The gang nods.

Carlos puts his helmet on. “Wait, what about Gustavo's cat?”

Mama Knight pulls a box of cat food out of her cleaning supplies and shakes it. The boys cheer.

“That's a cat?” Katie points to Monty.

“No, it’s a chicken in disguise.”

“That I believe. There’s no way this is a cat.”

“Right.”

“What are you all staring at? We're gonna be here all night. Go! Go, go, go!” Mama Knight sends them on their way.

“That's right. Move it,” Katie adds.

“You too! Go!”

“Guys, it’s almost time!” Sulane shouts.

“Okay!”

“All right. Looking good, guys. And that glue will be dry in ten, nine-”

“Bigfoot's on the campground. Repeat, bigfoots on the campground,” Logan repeats.

“Mom,” Kendall says, extending the word with worry in his voice.

“Five seconds and the bond will hold.”

“He's coming up the steps!” Logan screams, freaking out.

“Three, two, one, let's roll,” Katie drags her mom out of the mansion.

“Mom,” Kendall screams, causing her to turn around. “Thanks.”

She smiles and blows a kiss in his direction, until Katie grabs onto her again. “Come on.”

“Oh, look who's here,” the leader says, with a fake yawn.

“It's Gustavo and Kelly,” the pretty boy adds.

“We slept here 'cause we didn't want to touch anything,” Logan clarifies.

“Yeah. We're not just pretending,” Carlos says, basically giving them away.

The boys pinch him. “Ow!”

“Silence! Monty?”

The cat comes prancing into the room.

“The chicken has returned.”

“I told you it’s not a chicken. Why are you down here with the dogs?”

“I woke up too early and was bored.”

“We'd love to stay and chat, but we got to get out of here,” Kendall starts walking past them, along with the others trailing behind him. “Thank you so much.”

“Stop. There's something I need to say.”

“Well, you can say something tomorrow, so-” The leader’s eyes don’t focus on the producer, and he turns away.

The others add, “Yeah!”

“See you at the studio!”

“Guys? This is important,” Kelly tells them, getting them to stop.

“We've been working together for a month now. And I just wanted to say, although we've had our ups and downs, the truth is, I luh- I luh- I like you.”

The statue shatters and breaks again.

“And we like you too,” Kendall says, calmly before shouting, “Run!”

Gustavo groans, staring at the statue.

Carlos walks back towards Kelly, placing the cat they almost shaved earlier into her arms. “Here. Have a cat.”

“Thanks for the break. See you,” James runs back into tell them.

“Sulane!”

“Thank you so much, Gustavo! You’re the best!” She screams and runs away, never having felt this way before.

“Aspirin. Aspirin. I need aspirin.” The producer goes into the one bathroom he shouldn’t have and locks the door.

Kendall holds onto the door and informs the older assistant of the situation.

Sulane stands behind him.

“Oh, and by the way, you might not want to go in the bathroom.”

“Alligator! Alligator!”

They glance at one another with wide eyes.

“Run?” He asks.

“Run.”

They push each other closer to Mama Knight’s car, not caring about anything else other than getting away from the mansion.

“Alligator!” Gustavo tries to get out without making things worse.

Once Gustavo successfully escapes from the bathroom and gets the animal back into his moat, he finds the boys and yells at them for a solid… hour and a half.

“Can I suggest we get smoothies and then we make a song?” Jasner chimes in, needing to fill the silence.

“That’s not a bad idea after I ALMOST DIED!”

Sulane nudges her friend in the ribs.

“Ow!” Jasner whines, holding his side. “What was that for?”

“Quite reminding him.”

“I barely told him.”

She narrows her eyes at him and looks away. “Why don’t you go out while I finish the song?”

“Uh- no.”

“Why not?” She puts her hands on her hips, “you know I’d do a good job.”

“Maybe that’s a good idea,” Kelly adds. “I think it’d be a good idea to let them do their own thing while we stay away from the mansion for a bit longer?”

“Fine.”

The two exit the studio and go off onto their own thing. “Okay, guys you know what to do.”

“Time to get in that booth.”

She raises a brow at her friend.

“What?” Jasner shrugs. “It was right there; how could I not take the opportunity to make a rhyme.”

“Easily.”

“Whatever just go on and do your pushing of buttons and sliding slash turning the nobs.”

“Why don’t you shut up?”

The raspberry lover rolls his eyes and decides to sit down.

She puts her headphones on and gives them a thumbs up.

When the chips are down

Back against the wall

Got no more to give

'Cause we gave it all

Seems like going the distance is unrealistic

But we are too far from the start

So we take what comes, And we keep on going

Leaning on each others shoulders

Then we turn around

And see we've come so far somehow

We're halfway there

We're looking good now

And nothing's gonna get in the way

We're halfway there

And looking back now

I never thought that I'd ever say

We're halfway there

She bobs her head and turns a nob here and there. “Atta boys,” she greets the boys after clicking the mic button. “You guys did great.”

They cheer, all smiling widely at her.

“We’re done for right now. I want Gustavo to hear it before I make my suggestions.”

“Alright,” Carlos says.

“Let’s celebrate,” Logan finishes for him.

“Smoothies?” Kendall suggests.

“Are you in my mind? I was thinking that,” Jasner says with a smile.

“You really are weird, aren’t you?”

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.” He grabs Sulane’s bag and wraps an arm around her shoulder.

“Get off me you weirdo,” she chuckles.

He smiles and pulls her into his grasp again; she doesn’t pull away and lets it happen. “Smoothies!”

“You’re so weird.”

Logan’s about to take a step forward when he realizes no one from the band is moving.

“You okay?” Carlos asks James.

“No.”

“Is it because-”

“Yes! Why else would I be upset? I mean, I’m watching the girl I’ve had- she’s hanging out with him. She invited him to help watch Gustavo’s mansion… if she likes me the way you guys say she does, why is she hanging out with him?”

“Because he’s her friend,” Kendall answers him.

“Friends don’t look at each other like that.”

“You do,” Carlos points out, not really thinking about it or realizing that the pretty boy never officially confessed to his feelings for her.

Logan nods with his lips curving to one side of his mouth. “True, but he also wants to be more than that with her.”

The three boys stared at James with concerned expressions before leading him out the door to follow them.

“What are we gonna do?” Carlos asks before they exit the building.

“I don’t know,” the other two confess.

The three let him walk out first when Sulane opens the door.

“I think that’s the first time he’s been honest with himself about his feelings for her since we got here,” Logan whispers to the other two.

“I know. What should we do?” Kendall asks.

“I don’t think we’re the ones who are supposed to do anything. I think it’s up to them,” the brainiac adds.

Previously: Chapter V // Continue: Chapter VII

#big time rush #Big Time Rush Fanfiction #Big Time Rush fanfic #big time rush imagine #big time rush imagines #james diamond #james diamond imagine #james diamond fanfic #james diamond imagines #james diamond fanfiction #james diamond x oc #james diamond x ofc #james diamond x sulane celeste #it's you

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you-show-me-love · 3 years

Text

How Tami Met Mickey

I really just wanted to write a headcanon of when Tami understood Mickey's existence since we were deprived of their interaction in the show okay bye

Tami was going to kill Lip. She was going to kill him and leave Fred on the dirty floor of the Gallagher house and she was going to disappear from their lives, head out west and hide out in a hair salon under a false identity, because Lip swore up and down Fred's teething ring was here somewhere and the kid was screaming his head off and had been for the last hour.

"Where the hell is it?" She whined, feeling like crying herself as she pushed aside random junk on the floor near where they sometimes set up the playpen.

Mickey descended the stairs into the kitchen, still in his tank top and boxers even though it was well past noon. He grimaced at the sound of the crying baby.

"Will you shut that kid up? Some of us are trying to sleep."

Tami rolled her eyes, disrupting her search of the coffee table covered in crayons and paper. She loved Ian, she did, but she couldn't comprehend why the sweetest Gallagher had up and married this surly, foul mouthed convict. She chose to ignore him most of the time, especially after Lip told her he had been in for attempted murder of one of their family members.

"Believe me if I could I would but he's teething and I can't find his teething ring anywhere and Lip said it was here in this mess somewhere..."

She was rambling, losing her sanity as Fred screamed louder and pulled a fist full of her blonde hair. Maybe Mickey could put her out of her misery since he apparently had no problem killing family members. Afraid to ask in case he took her seriously she shifted Fred to her other hip and pushed her fingers into the couch cushions, trying not to think of what they might come in contact with in the process.

Mickey watched the tall blonde with apathy as he chugged orange juice straight from the carton. He belched loudly and moved back out of sight, running some water and opening the refrigerator. A few more minutes of fruitless searching and Tami decided to give up. She turned to head to the backdoor only to find Mickey there, a wash cloth in hand. She watched, rapt, as Mickey pushed the chilled, damp cloth into Fred's open, wailing mouth, watched as her son clamped down immediately and began to suck. Her ears rang in the blissful silence and she stared at Mickey in awe.

Mickey wasn't looking at her, he was cradling the back of Fred's head and running his thumb along his baby soft hair, a small almost sad smile on his face.

"How did you know to do that?" Tami couldn't help but ask.

"My kid used to cry like that, had to keep this shit on standby for him, twenty-four seven."

Mickey seemed to come back to himself, dropping his hand from Fred's head and stepping back from mother and son. He was back up the stairs before Tami couldn't say anything.

Tami had stopped by too late to have breakfast with the Gallaghers, Lip giving her the extra hour of much needed sleep after Fred kept her up most of the night. She accepted Franny's hug around her knees and gave Fred a tickle and a kiss to the forehead. He smiled around his squishy teething ring and wiggled in the high chair.

Debbie paused her cleaning to pull Tami's plate from the microwave and Tami decided to ask Debbie something that had been on her mind since yesterday.

"So, Mickey has a kid?"

Debbie looked up at her, face twisted in confusion, but she nodded.

"Yeah, Yevgeny. Why?"

Tami didn't know how to answer that. Why did she want to know? Maybe it was because of the obvious.

"But…he's gay."

Debbie rolled her eyes.

"Gay people can have kids." She seethed, indicating to her own mini-me. She shoulder checked Tami on her way upstairs muttering bitch under her breath as she did so.

Fred had been just put down and Lip and Tami were laying in bed, trying to decide if they should use this opportunity to fuck or to sleep. Lip made the decision for them when he pulled off his shirt and rolled onto Tami.

They were kissing, hands roaming, but Tami's mind was on someone else entirely. The trail of kisses Lip was leaving down her body stopped as she asked him what had been on her mind.

"So, Mickey has a kid?"

"Uhhh, yeah." Lip affirmed, looking up at Tami in confusion. "With a Russian hand-whore." He concluded with a light chuckle.

"What?!" Tami sat up, Lip further away from his destination. He sighed and joined her at the head of the bed.

"You good Tamietti?" Lip asked as he watched his girlfriend's face pass through a range of emotions. She eventually shook her head. Lip licked his lips and leaned closer to her, keeping his voice low even though it was only the two of them.

"Look, it's a touchy subject for Ian and Mickey both. Broke Ian's heart to see him marry her. Then Ian stole the baby-"

"Wait wait wait." Tami interrupted, too loud considering their own sleeping baby was just one room over. "Mickey was married before? Ian stole a baby? What-"

"It's best if you don't know just...don't bring it up okay?"

Tami nodded, accepting a few more soft kisses from Lip before they both settled into bed and fell asleep while they had the chance.

Tami couldn't not bring it up, not when Ian was right there, bouncing Fred on his hip and making silly faces. Tami had to get to work but she could spare a moment to ask what had been eating away at her for a week now.

"Ian, can I ask you something about Mickey?"

Ian regarded her hesitantly but nodded. She let out a breath and resolved to satisfy her need to know once and for all.

"He has a kid. He's gay but he has a kid and used to be married to a woman? And you stole his baby? I mean, what is the story here?" She ended with a hysterical giggle, arms smacking against her thighs in exasperation.

Ian went paler than usual, his chin jutting out in a hard line. He stared at his nephew, watched his tiny fingers wrap around one of his own. Tami swallowed at the dark look on Ian's face, sudden regret for not following Lip's advice filling her.

"Back when we were kids Mickey's dad caught us. The homphobic prick beat Mickey bad and forced him to fuck a woman in front of me." Ian's voice was rough as sandpaper only making Tami feel worse.

"Mickey got her knocked up, married her, thought we could still bang in secret, but I took off. I came back and we tried to make it work but then I had a manic episode and took off with Yevgeny. I wanted him to be mine, be ours. My brain just ran away with the idea."

Tami's knees were weak and she backed herself into the nearest chair. She knew about Ian's disorder, but had never witnessed it, never heard them talk about it much at all, and she understood why looking at Ian now, seeing how much guilt and pain he internalized over what he did when he had no control.

"Svetlana filed for divorce while Mickey was in prison, married some old rich bastard, and disappeared. Mickey's never tried to find them, don't think either of us deserve to at this point."

Ian sighed, finally looking Tami in the eye. She could only stare helplessly back in the wake of his words. Mickey wasn't just some convict Ian brought home after his stint in prison after all. Mouth dry she figured she had already dug herself this deep, what's a bit more.

"He really go to prison for trying to kill your sister?"

Ian made a face of knowing, standing taller and squaring his shoulders, jutting his chin even further in defence.

"Yeah, he did." And with a bit of softening creeping into his hard features he whispered, "He did it for me. Because he loves me."

Tami left a few minutes later, assured by Ian he was fine to watch Fred until Lip came home. She totally cut a client's hair uneven as her mind drifted back to Mickey and what she now knew about the man before today. Turns out she knew jack shit.

Now she knew he was so much more.

Tami threw open the front door of the Gallagher home, Fred crying in her ear after refusing to take his afternoon nap. Two heads turned at the commotion. Quickly Ian halfway off the couch to rescue his brother's girlfriend. Tami ignored him entirely and dropped Fred in Mickey's lap.

"He needs some more of that Mickey magic." Tami explained as the husbands stared wide-eyed between mother, crying son, and each other.

She left them to take a much needed bathroom break. After she was done she grabbed a beer and leaned against the doorway, watching the way Fred squirmed in Mickey's arms as he held him close and rubbed his back. Ian watched the pair with adoration before looking up at Tami and mouthing a simple thank you.

And that's how Tami Tamietti met the real Mickey Milkovich.

#this took over my brain #i had to write it #i see your tami/mickey bff headcanons and offer my own #or the start of it anyway #i think they'd have an interesting friendship #mickey milkovich #tami tamietti #shameless #gallavich #shameless headcanon #chaos speaks

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nugnthopkns · 3 years

Text

i’ll tell you i was wrong if you dance with me

word count: 3.3k

warnings: explicit fem!reader, slightly unhealthy relationship moment (lack of communication), mention of infidelity, cursing, alcohol consumption, a fair bit of angst

recommended listening: fred astaire | adam brock

a/n: communicate with your partners!!! also yeah this is the song from lady bird. it’s a banger

This seriously isn’t happening.

You never fight with Travis. Communication comes easy between the two of you, but you also make it a priority to talk about your feelings. It keeps things from boiling over; both of you are known to unleash wicked tempers on occasion and have found being direct stops issues from occuring. Arguments still occasionally happen, but they’re typically over trivial things like what movie to watch or where you’re spending the holidays. Travis apparently forgot about the fact you talk to each other about things.

He’d been upset when he came home from practice, but you were pretty sure he was fine after he woke up from his pre-game nap. Knowing he’s a superstitious person and has a lot of pressure on him to put up points, you had made the choice not to ask about what was bothering him. Throwing off his routine could have detrimental consequences. Tonight's game is tighter than it should have been, but the Flyers come out on top. Travis spends a bit more time in the penalty box than you would have liked, but everyone was getting chippy by the start of the third period. Claude tries to talk to him on the bench but he gets shut down. Whatever Travis was upset about before is still clearly bothering him, and it’s affecting his game.

You’re following Travis home from the game, and can tell he’s uptight from the way he’s gripping the steering wheel. As you wind through downtown Philadelphia you try and prepare yourself for any bomb that could drop. Chances are that when you reach your apartment things will explode. Maybe it’s nothing; Travis is fine and just wants to be a responsible driver for once. You pull into the free spot beside his car and see him walking towards the elevator, suit jacket balled up and tucked under his arm. This won’t be good. Trying to buy yourself some time, you take the stairs. Seven flights later you arrive outside your door; he left it unlocked, which gives you a sliver of hope things will be fine.

“Do you want to talk about what’s bothering you?” you call into the darkness of the apartment. Your sneakers are left at the door and to retreat towards the bedroom, looking for a sign of life. You find one in the bathroom: the light is on. A gentle push on the door reveals your boyfriend is in the shower and ignoring you.

“Trav?”

“Yeah,” he huffs, words muffled by him tossing his head back to rinse the shampoo of his hair. Apparently the shower isn’t as relaxing as he had hoped.

You don’t bother to tread lightly, upset that he’s acting like a child. “You’re being an asshole. I get that you had a bad day, but you can’t take it out on me. I just want to help.”

Travis turns the water off suddenly. “Can’t help if you’re the problem,” he scoffs.

His statement doesn’t make sense. You’ve done nothing out of the ordinary the past couple of days; nothing that would warrant the behaviour you’re receiving. “What do you mean?”

Shouldering passed you to exit the room, Travis doesn’t bother to respond. You’re beyond frustrated: partners in healthy relationships communicate, not show emotions like grade schoolers. “You’re not giving me the fucking silent treatment Travis. You gotta talk to me.” The bedroom is dark when you enter and you flick the overhead light on to see better.

“You really don’t know?”

“Of course I don’t know,” you seethe. “If I did know we wouldn’t be in this predicament because we’d be solving the issue.”

The glare you receive is sharp enough to cut stone. He pulls on a t-shirt, anger clear in the aggression he does it with. “Why did I have to find out from Carter that you’ve been getting coffee with your TA?”

You’re shocked. In no way is it what he thinks it is. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” you sigh, upset that Travis would take someone else’s words at face value and not talk to you about it.

“I’m dead fucking serious Y/N. You preach communication, but it looks as though you’re the one who hasn’t been doing enough talking.”

The room around you starts to spin. You can’t comprehend what he’s insinuating. “Wait, you think I’m cheating on you?” you ask. There has been a gross miscommunication error somewhere; never in a million years would you think of having an affair.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well what the fuck did you say?”

Travis tugs at the roots of his hair in frustration. He doesn’t answer immediately, pacing the length of the bed a few times. “I just–” he struggles to articulate his words. “I just said that you’re being a bit hypocritical, don’t you think? You’re standing here yelling at me because I didn’t voice my concerns, but you haven’t been talking to me about what’s going on in your life.” Travis’ tone is sharp, and it stings.

It’s your turn to show how upset you are. Your hands curl into fists at your side, and you squeeze your nails into your palms before releasing them. “I do tell you what goes on in my life Travis,” your breathing ragged as you try to not lose your cool. “I ran into my TA at the coffee shop yesterday, and he paid for my drink because my card wouldn’t work. Didn’t think it was breaking news, sorry I don’t send you every single fucking life update that happens. What’s gotten into you?”

“You could have been cheating!”

“But I wasn’t!” you scream, no longing caring about keeping up appearances. You can’t believe Travis would think that. It hurts. “And I never would! You know this”

He turns his back to you, like it pains him to look at you, but you don’t understand why. You're not the one suggesting infidelity. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say?” he seethes.

“That’s all there is to say! There’s nothing to explain, no secret to uncover. I’m not in the wrong here.”

“And you think I am?”

You look at Travis like he has three heads. “Are you serious? You’re the one who’s so fucking upset over a situation that could have happened to literally anyone.” Your tone suggests that you’re exhausted with the conversation, and Travis gets the hint.

He slinks towards the door, still visibly angry. “I’ll take the couch tonight,” he grits out before tightly gripping the doorknob and shutting the door with more force than needed.

The bed doesn’t look appealing, full of much happier memories, but fighting with Travis has knocked any and all energy out of you. You gingerly pull back the covers and slip underneath. Tears trickle down your cheek as you toss and turn, trying to fall into some sort of slumber. However, your mind has other ideas, replaying the blowout. You can’t begin to understand why Travis is so bothered by the instance, and more importantly why it caused him to disregard a fundamental part of your relationship. There’s little movement from beyond the door, but you can hear the faint noise of a Johnny Cash record playing from the speakers in the living room. After hours of staring at the ceiling your eyes close and a fitful sleep follows.

You might have gotten nine hours of sleep, but you wake up feeling exhausted. Fighting with anyone drains you, but fighting with Travis is especially terrible because it rarely happens. There doesn’t seem to be any movement from the other side of the door; maybe he’s still asleep. You refrain from heading into the kitchen, unsure of what will happen if you see him. After nearly twenty minutes you can’t wait any longer to start your day and pad into the main living space. It’s empty: no sign that Travis has been there for many hours. Guess you don’t have to immediately deal with the fallout of last night.

A post-it note is tacked onto the fridge handle and your heart skips a beat. In Travis’ chicken scratch it reads I’ll see you at the gala tonight. We’ve got media all day and I won’t be back in time for us to go together. There’s no mention of the fight, and you can’t judge from a two sentence note whether or not he’s still pissed off.

“Fuck,” you groan. “The gala.” Tonight’s the annual Flyers Give Back gala, and you’re expected to be in attendance. It’s not even a charity event; the organization is offering a chance for business men to chat up the players in hopes they continue to donate. You find things like these unbearable and tedious, but Travis does his best to make them enjoyable. Not knowing what page you’re on with him is going to be terrible. There’s a pretty good chance he’ll ignore you if he’s still upset.

As if someone is reading your mind, the better halves group chat starts to explode. Everyone is chattering excitedly about tonight, and under normal circumstances you’d be excited to see them in such a relaxed setting. It’s been a while you’ve all hung out, but you can’t find yourself to contribute to the conversation. You mute the notifications and do your best to move on with your day. The rest of the morning is spent working on your thesis; mind numbing work that almost makes you forget about everything that happened in the past twenty-four hours. Once you’ve hit an acceptable word count for the day you shutdown your computer and make lunch.

The grilled cheese sandwich you eat while watching a John Mulaney comedy special fulfills your appetite but doesn’t curb your dread. You decide to call your sister, hoping she can be a welcome distraction. Dialling her number you sink further into the couch cushions, wrapping yourself tightly with a blanket so that only your head is poking out. “What’s up?” she asks, and you hear her shuffle in the background, presumably to move somewhere more private. It isn’t normal for you to call her unannounced.

You hold it together for approximately two seconds. The tears start and they don’t stop. Every emotion you’ve felt since getting home last night comes to the surface, and before you know it you’re sobbing into the receiver.

“Woah, slow down,” she says. “Y/N, take some deep breaths.” When your breathing returns to a somewhat regular level she continues speaking. “What happened?”

It takes you nearly twenty minutes to tell the whole story because you’re so distraught. No detail is spared, and you go back much farther than is probably needed. You recount what happened after yesterday’s practice, pretty much the entire game, and the fight that followed. “I just don’t know what brought this on,” you sniffle. “We don’t fight, we talk about things. I’m not sure if I’m more upset at what he insinuated or at the fact he broke a cardinal rule.”

Your sister sighs, and you hear her breath fan in slight annoyance. You’re worked up about something kinda stupid, you know, but you can’t let it slide. “It’s probably a bit of both. So, what are you going to do?”

“What can I do? I know that we need to talk about what happened, but a public event is not the best place to do that. I also can’t not show up or ask Trav to ditch in order to figure this out. We have to be there.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it figured out then.”

You really don’t. “What happens if he ignores me the entire night?”

She laughs and tells you to not to anything stupid, and to take your mind off of things tells you a story about your nephew eating dirt. It does the trick; you’re momentarily distracted and forget about Travis. You talk for a while longer before she has to go. “Miles is crying, will you be okay if I let you go?”

It’s your turn to laugh. “I’ll be fine,” you insist. A glance at the clock tells you it’s time to start getting ready. “I’ve gotta shower and start the process. Beauty is time consuming you know.”

Against your better judgement you open your text messages to see if there’s anything from Travis. His text thread is the same as it was yesterday and you’re disappointed. You had hoped that maybe he’d get bored between interviews and check in. With no new notifications you exit out of the application and pull up a playlist you hope will brighten your mood. The steam from the shower relaxes your tense muscles and warms you up. It’s comforting in the way a cocoon is; you practically have to drag yourself out of the bathtub.

Your bedroom is cold and doesn’t offer the same respite as the bathroom. The music continues to float in from the hallway, and you allow yourself to get lost in it. It’s been a while since you danced around your room; it worked to cure sadness when you were a teenager. Hopefully the magic hasn’t worn off. You flail your arms, not caring how silly you look since no one is here to see you anyways, and scream along at the top of your lungs. After a few songs you feel better and return to the task at hand. The dress code is labelled as ‘black tie’ on the invitation, but that isn’t what you’re worried about. You own a million dresses for situations like this after being with Travis for so long. You don’t know what he packed to wear, and there’s a decent chance you’ll be pushed together for photos. Clashing colours will look terrible.

A quick glance through his side of the closest leaves you no clues, so you decide to be as literal as possible. Black is a flattering colour and works well with every colour combination. There’s a jumpsuit hanging in the back that catches your eye and you think it’s the perfect choice. After pulling it on you move back into the bathroom to do your hair and makeup. Everything is natural and relaxed; once again for the sake of potential photos. The clock strikes on the hour and you realize it’s time to leave. A pair of heels are slipped on and you order an Uber before locking the apartment and heading to the lobby. You had thought about driving yourself, but on the occasion that things don’t end well with Travis you’ll probably have more than a couple of drinks.

The entire way to the venue your leg bounces up and down. It’s been years since you’ve been this nervous about being around the team. You’ve been with Travis for a few seasons now, and the organization has become a second family to you. No one is going to know about the fight and you worry they’re going to talk about your solo arrival. The outside of the convention centre is sharply decorated, and your driver lets out a low whistle at the extravagance of it all. “Thank you so much,” you gush, and exit the car. Thankfully no photographers are set up outside, and you dart inside without being seen.

Once in the main event space, you scan for the bar. There’s no sign of Travis, which should make you more relaxed but doesn’t. What if there was an accident on the way to the venue? You have no idea where he was all or who he came with. Overthinking distracts you from your original goal, leaving you standing aimlessly in the middle of the room.

“You look like you might need one of these,” Ryanne chuckles, handing you a champagne flute. You gladly accept and down it in two gulps. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” you sigh, eyes scanning to see if your boyfriend has made an appearance.

She sees right through your facade of calm and wraps you in a tight hug. “What’s going on?”

For a second time today you explain what happened last night. There’s no judgement from Ryanne as there might have been from your sister because she understands. Dating a professional athlete isn’t easy; things like this happen much more frequently than you’d expect. Perhaps it’s all the time spent apart that makes the occasional lapse in communication so apparent. She listens quietly, full attention on you. To your credit you don’t cry this time, slightly more numb to the situation to due more time passing. It still hurts a tremendous amount.

“He’ll come around,” Ryanne insists. “TK is a little moronic sometimes, but he’d never jeopardize his relationship with you. You’re quite literally the most important thing in his life.”

“I know. I’m just upset because the whole thing could have been avoided.”

She offers you a sympathetic smile. “I know.” Ryanne links her arm through yours. “Let’s go find something to snack on.”

You spend most of the night with Ryanne, and occasionally Claude when he can get away from the hot-shot businessmen. Travis eventually came in, flanked by Nolan, but was immediately pulled into the politics of the night. The two of you occasionally sneak glances at each other and you tell he’s uncomfortable. You can only hope it isn’t because of your presence. It’s nearing eleven; the party has become a much more relaxed affair, and the DJ is playing sappy love songs in an attempt to get the media team some good photo ops. An intern asks the Giroux’s if they’ll dance for an instagram story and they both look hesitant. “Go on guys, I’ll be fine,” you reassure. It’s the subtle push they need to enjoy a quiet moment together.

As if he can sense you’re lonely and feel out of place, Travis approaches you. It’s tentative, like he’s petrified you’ll turn him away, but he comes regardless. Drinks are in each of his hands and he extends one to you. When you don’t take it he sets it on the table behind you. “Hi,” he says sheepishly, fiddling with something in his pocket.

“Hi Travis.” You’re determined not to let his presence crack your resolve; last night illuminated a big issue and it needed to be dealt with. It’s proving to be difficult because he bumps a shoulder against yours and all you can think of is kissing him senseless.

The song changes to a Bruce Springsteen ballad, and you recognize it instantly. It played at the coffee shop on your first date with Travis all those years ago. One look at him tells you this isn’t an accident, that he had requested it specifically for the two of you. “Dance with me?”

You sigh deeply, looking him in the eyes. “Trav, this isn’t going to magically fix things.”

“I know, baby, I know,” he pleads. “I fucked up so bad last night because I was being an idiot. I wrote down everything I would do differently if I had a time machine, look.” A hand reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a piece of paper filled with his nearly illegible print. “Just one dance, and then we can go home and talk about it like I should have suggested in the first place. Let me know we’re still okay.”

If you hadn’t been in public you’re sure Travis would have been in tears. It’s not necessarily a good look to cry in front of hundreds of sponsors. He has a reputation as the goofy boy who takes no shit to uphold. “You have a lot of talking ahead of you,” you say, and let him drag you onto the dance floor. Swaying in his arms you realize things are going to be just fine. Travis loves you and you love him; there’s nothing the two of you can’t work through.

☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

taglist: @jamiedrysdales @kiedhara @tortito if you want to be added shoot me an ask :)

#travis konecny imagine #travis konecny x reader #travis konecny fic #philadelphia flyers imagine #hockey imagine #hockey fic #nhl imagine #nhl fic #cwrites

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whump-town · 3 years

Text

Will You Take Me Home?

Here is some heart-warming fluff to make up for what I did with the cancer fic. I would do it again so I’m not sorry but I do feel remorse for hurting you

Word Count: 5055

Retired Hotch’s Birthday

The normal temperature of the room outside his nest of throw-blankets and heating pad causes goosebumps to break out over his exposed arm. He groans, not even bothering to check the caller ID as he puts his phone to his ear and answers “Aaron Hotchner”. His voice has taken on the gravel of disuse, fogged by the painkiller-induced nap he’d accidentally fallen into. If he was following his doctor’s orders, that wouldn’t happen. His body would have acclimated to the drugs and the pain wouldn’t leave him so exhausted that he can hardly keep his eyes open when it dulls to throbs. Which, he’s not aware of just yet, but is the very nature of this call: his detrimental habits.

“Sleeping beauty,” the other person greets and he leans back against the pillows behind him, rolling his eyes. The phone rustles and Hotch shakes his head as he hears the faint scratching and rustling of keys at his door. “I knocked four times,” he’s informed. “I was starting to think--” the door comes free and Hotch doesn’t even look up. “I thought I was going to find you dead in here.” The call ends and from the other side of the couch, he hears, “which, by the way, would be a hell of a thing, you know? Dead on your own birthday.” He closes his eyes but feels the cushions get pushed down, the telltale sign she’s leaning over the back of the cushion overtop him. “Speaking of which,” she beams. “Happy Birthday, old man.”

He looks up at her, taking in the full effect of mischief he could only hear before. The expressive lines of her smile spread across her face and it’s a distinct moment when all he can think about is how truly awful things had been between them at the beginning. How mean he was, really, because it wasn’t her. It was his own inability to trust. Yet, here she is before noon on his sixtieth birthday leaning over his couch and no doubt about to start a pot of coffee that she’ll consume over three-fourths of. Suppressing the smile tugging at his own lips, he raises a more important matter at hand. Far more pressing than why it is that she’s letting herself into his home. “How long until they come?”

Retired doesn’t mean born yesterday (whatever the opposite of that is, really). He’s not around the office anymore but given Garcia’s questioning last month of his favorite cake flavor, Dave’s inquiry into his schedule for this week, and Emily’s early arrival he knows exactly what they’re doing. To her credit, Emily pretends she doesn’t and she might be more convincing if he didn’t know every tell she’s had for the last two decades.

“Who?” she asks. “How long until who comes?” He just looks at her. A stand-off, really, to see who caves first. They’re assholes so this could go on forever and if she were looking for the thrill of watching him break and she would press on. She cracks but not because he’s better at this game, just because she’s excited. “You have an hour. I’ve been sent to get you ready so you’re not a crabby old bastard when they arrive.”

He groans, sinking back into the couch and pulling his blanket up over his head. Effectively locking her out. Well... not really. She just leans further over him, not caring when he grunts tries to burrow farther away. “Come on,” she shakes his shoulders. “Aren’t you the least bit excited? Penny made you those cookies you like and Derek is bringing Hank, who, I might add, is very excited to see Hops.” And she’s only buttering him up because-- “I’m not supposed to tell you this because it’s a huge surprise but Dave left this morning to go pick up Jack. He’ll--” she can’t even get it out. He peaks out, just the top of his head so he can narrow his eyes at her. To see if she’s just fucking with him, using his feelings against him but he sees only sincerity. She grins, she knows she’s won. “So up and at ‘em old-timer! You’ve got a gaggle of people to entertain!”

Old-timer? He’s four years older than she is. That’s not what he comments on. “Gaggle?” he repeats back to her, grunting as his knees protest his standing. “Really showing your age there,” he mumbles and steps out of the way of the pillow she throws at his head. “What?” he defends. “You said it, not me.” He shakes his head, heading back to his room and leaving her to entertain herself. Which she will and he can hear her rustling around the coffee machine. Nearly surprised that she doesn’t complain he still hasn’t set up the Keurig she got him for Christmas (which they are rapidly approaching him having owned now for a year).

Though he isn’t sure how to express it anymore, he’s excited to have them here. Even if he knows that it will get overwhelming, he can’t deny that the night will end far too soon and he’ll find himself missing them all over again. But that’s not what’s important. In an hour (less than that knowing Penelope and her strict party-throwing agendas) he’ll have them all right here. Reid with his never-ending knowledge, quizzing him on the book recommendations that Hotch has been slowly working his way through. With Derek and Savannah and Hank, the latter of which can’t pronounce Hotch and it makes his heart do a funny little thing when the toddler sees him and screams in pure delight “Hops!”

JJ will pour in with Henry and it’ll be like old times watching Henry and Jack slunk off together (and they all pretend like they don’t know they’re smoking pot in the backyard). Emily and Dave force him to mediate the same four fights that they always have and then they’ll stick around long after the others have gone home to talk about whatever comes to their minds.

And Penelope.

His house is about to be flooded with baked goods and meals in containers because despite being alive as long as he has, she denies the notion he can feed himself. She’ll organize them in specific ways and each will be labeled in her neat handwriting so he can tell what’s in each. Most of them will be vegetarian because she’s worried about his cholesterol (and the environment) and a few will be spicy and chicken will make its way into a few of the dishes. He’ll thank her and kiss her cheek and she’ll remind him like she always does, that all he has to do is ask. He won’t but he does appreciate how much she cares. As smothering as it can be.

He showers quickly, giddy in a strange way to get out and be properly ready when the others arrive. Not too quickly, the last thing he needs is to bust his ass while Emily is here. She is far too comfortable with herself and with him and he knows that she will come in here if she hears him. The other thing about that woman is that she might have a distaste for constantly being touched but she can put that aside to annoy him. Which has created this weird mind-game thing he knows he’s losing when he doesn’t even notice her encroaching on his personal space.

Everything is a battle with her.

He decides to save himself the trouble of being bullied and searches through his dresser for a pair of jeans. He owns maybe two pairs of jeans both purchased forever ago and just to help him fit in with the parents at Jack’s school during field trips and soccer games. He stuck out like a sore thumb when he was a kid and he knows he still does but he won’t be the reason Jack gets weird looks. Emily had raised an eyebrow at that (why he had even divulged this to her is beyond him) so evidently it didn’t really do the trick but Dave assures him he looks fine and Garcia thinks he looks like a DILF so… he’s fairly certain that’s good. He’s not really sure what that means but he’s learned it’s better not to ask her to clarify.

Emily is fixing the couch when he comes out, the apartment filled with the scent of the coffee she’s brewed while he was showering. “You’re going to burn the house down with this thing,” she tells him. She holds up his heated blanket as it offends her. “You need to go to the doctor, there has to be something they can do.”

What surprises him isn’t her apparent anger-- with Emily, it’s a diversion. Her anger is rarely that, it’s to distract, and right now he knows he’s to perceive her anger and not the way she fears for him. The way that she can’t say “I love you” like the others but can, instead, be outraged that his body has been working against him for so many years. She’s not angry at him for needing to be tucked up in that blanket all the time, she’s afraid of a vascular issue that might kill him or that he’ll leave untreated until they’re all being reunited at the closest general hospital. Waiting for a doctor to tell them that he waited too long or that his heart can’t handle another surgery or a million other things.

He takes the blanket from her, clumsily folding it over and tucking the cords into the folds. “I have gone to the doctor,” he assures her. Not for that specifically but he did bring it up. He leaves it at that for now and she understands that means maybe later. It’s not worth getting into and he doesn’t feel like thinking about George Foyet and his knife today.

“Hey,” Emily hums, smirking at him. “Your ass looks really nice in those jeans.”

He stops dead in his tracks, frowning as he looks back at her but just as he’s about to inquire what, no doubt, awful thing she’s done to make her feel the need to compliment him to compensate for it, the apartment door opens. They both turn to the noise and Garcia steps in and freezes when she notices the two of them standing there.

Looking at the bags full of things she has in her arms and then to Emily and then to Hotch she sheepishly smiles. “Happy Birthday?”

With a sigh, having accepted this defeat a while ago, Hotch steps to help her with bags. He tries to hide his amusement but he cuts Emily a glance, three bags in his left hand and more still coming, and he can’t help it. Garcia turns back just as the smile eats its way up his face and he shakes his head. For a split second, he can see her apprehension, the way that her fear of going overboard or embarrassing herself washes over her before she carefully masks it (and to think he gets all the shit about masking). “Thank you,” he whispers so sincerely that he has to avert his eyes. Adding softly, “you know, you’re the only person who ever cares to make me celebrate it?”

Which just makes her sad. “Sir,” she whispers frowning. “You deserve the world, do you know that?”

He blushes, shaking his head, but he can’t get the words out in his shock.

“Oh,” she tsks. She stands on her toes and pulls him down so she can wrap her arms around him. “I love you.”

Emily makes a sound of disgust behind them and he’s glad for the distraction before all this undue attention gives him a heart attack. “Bleh,” Emily rolls her eyes. But she brightens when she sees the red Tupperware container holding the cookies. “Are those the--”

Garcia sees Emily zero in on them and hands them right to Hotch, holding them to his chest. “Are not for you,” she says to Emily with a nod of her head.

So Emily just looks to Hotch and he passes them to her with a shrug and weakly defends, “they’ll go stale if she doesn’t eat half of them.” They’re his birthday cookies but she’ll get her hands on them anyway. If not today then the next time she lets herself in. If not her then Reid when he gets bored and wanders over here for entertainment. If not Reid then Dave then Derek… you get the point. He’ll never finish them on his own.

Garcia lets it go because she knows that’s how he is and because she has a crapload of other things to make sure he eats. He leaves her to mess with his fridge, it’s better to let her do her thing. She’ll move his almond milk to the side door because that’s its proper place (even though he’ll move it right back) and come in about five to ten minutes to fuss with him about a specific something she notices he’s lacking. Today it will be the complete lack of breakfast foods in this house when she knows for a fact that his doctors are giving him hell about eating more than once a day.

He’ll have no excuse, never does, but she won’t give him a chance to provide it either way.

Reid arrives next and actually knocks and waits for someone to let him in, something none of the others will do. He sheepishly offers Hotch the books he’s artfully wrapped in a newspaper and Hotch ignores it for a moment to hug him. If they don’t do it now Reid will just wait in anxious anticipation for it because he knows it’s what people do and he likes being hugged by Hotch but he doesn’t know how to initiate it himself.

“The Sultan of Brunei spent $27.2 million on his 50th birthday,” Reid tells him as soon as Hotch lets him go. “Michael Jackson was there,” he says with a nod. And Hotch smiles and listens to him anxiously work his way around the point that he’s trying to make. Which is that by the standards of the Sultan of Brunei, this party will be exceptionally small and quiet… the way Hotch would want it to be.

They are still standing at the door, talking about what the act of giving a card means. The way that the stories get warped and it thrills Reid to slide the pieces of that puzzle together through-out various cultural ideals until you have them. And that America has a very strange, above-average affinity for birthday cards.

Derek nearly hits Reid with the door when he comes in. Too distracted with a squirming Hank on his hip and Savannah behind him fussing with him for not knocking. He brightens the second he places his eyes on the two of them, a face that Hank matches perfectly upon seeing his favorite people.

“Weed!” the toddler greets throwing himself into his godfather’s arms. Reid takes him happily, laughing at how tightly Hank holds onto him. He just loves that Hank never gets tired of him. He could still see Hank every day for a month and Hank would still greet him with the same enthusiasm as the first day.

Derek is kicking his shoes off, offering Savannah his hand so she can do the same when he notices Hank still excitedly talking to Reid. That’s by all means not abnormal but-- “Hey,” Derek mumbles Hank. He nods his head to Hotch who is standing watching Reid and Hank with a bright, wide smile. “Don’t you have something for Hops?”

Reid puts Hank down before the toddler can start to squirm and Hank immediately glues himself to Hotch’s leg. No one knows why it’s just what Hank likes to do but not just, in general, he only does it to Hotch. He stands for a few seconds, both arms wrapped around one of Hotch’s legs, face pressed into the material of his jeans, and Hotch stands still to allow him to do it. Hops is a nickname he has no control over, the same way that Reid doesn’t fight that he’s been “Weed” now since Jack was two and stumbling over his name.

Hotch got off easy. When Henry was younger he just sort of kept his distance from Hotch. Hank… just really loves him.

“Is that a hot wheel?” Hotch asks softly when Hank finally peels himself away enough to offer the bright toy clutched in his hands. Hank beams up at him and stretches to hold it higher, trying to get Hotch to take it. “Oh wow,” Hotch gasps, shaking his head and pretending to just be so impressed by this toy so severely dwarfed in his hand. “Do you know what colors these are?”

Derek holds his hand out for Savannah to take and guides her through the house. Moving them to the kitchen to talk with Garcia and Emily knowing that he won’t be getting his son back this afternoon. Both because Hank won’t want to leave Hotch or Reid’s side and because Hotch and Reid won’t want him to leave. The Hotwheels was entirely Hank, they spent twenty minutes finding the perfect one when all Derek needed from the store was stain. Though they all agreed to no presents because Hotch would already hate them invading his home with cake, they all got him presents.

The others all got him books because that’s what they know he likes and he really does love to receive books. They’re fun entertainment and they all say something about how not only they perceive him but also the sorts of things that they like and he… well, he loves that.

Derek built him a new bookshelf. It’s sitting in the back of the truck and he’s waiting on Will to get here to drag the thing in here. Derek had noticed two weekends ago that one of the shelves Hotch uses in the hall was bowing under the weight of the books on it so he’d made something to replace it. Thin but heavy-duty-- he’d considered all the ins and outs of the current shelf. Things he didn’t like about it until he has a higher shelf that doesn’t stick out so obscenely.

Which doesn’t matter, really, Hotch will love it either way.

Hank keeps “Hops” distracted while the others pull dinner together. Emily is set to ice the cake but she’s awful and she’s sent to sit in the living room with the other three. Hotch is sitting in the recliner, Hank sitting on his knees and telling him about what he did in preschool this week while Reid pokes through the bookshelf Hotch keeps by the door.

JJ knocks as she comes in but still lets herself in. Henry is bummed to see Jack isn’t here yet but he’s quickly distracted and swept right back out the door to help his father and Derek move the bookshelf into the house. They don’t really need Henry’s help but it’s an effective way to ensure Hotch doesn’t try to help. Not because he can’t but because… he’s old and they don’t want to break him.

They’re just buying time, anyway, until Jack and Dave get here.

With them comes the party…

Hotch only puts Hank down to hug Jack, biting down his tears when he realizes that his son now stands just as tall as he is. Probably bound to be taller. He’s grown out his blonde hair in college and just as Hotch is opening his mouth to ask about school, how seeking out that Master’s Degree is treating him, he spots--

“A puppy!” Hank shouts.

Jack smiles timidly, stepping back to show his father the dog still held back by Dave’s hold on her collar. “Her name is Scout!” Jack kneels down, beaming up at his father while the thrilled puppy licks his face. “Do you get it?”

Oh, he gets it alright. Emily had snitched him out two weeks ago (to his own son, of all people) and admitted she was a little worried. He still doesn’t think there was ground for her fears. It’s not abnormal for him to shut himself out and if his therapist doesn’t think he’s any crazier than normal then that should mean he’s fine. At least, that’s how Hotch feels about it. That’s ignoring the way that everyone else feels. Which is that he’s visibly more on the edge and jumpy. That he gets irritated in public spaces and his anxiety is getting worse despite starting therapy and medicine he swears is helping.

Jack had done his best to get through to his father but sometimes Hotch makes those conversations like talking to a brick wall. That conversation had ended rather badly, honestly. Jack had yelled, shouting mindlessly that he’s twenty-five and he’s too young to have to be taking care of Hotch like this. Too young to have to fear that each day he’ll receive that phone call and the crazy thing is that Jack wouldn’t even be surprised-- everything about Hotch’s life is damning proof to the fact that he acts impulsively, reckless, and without care to his own well-being.

Jack had called later and he’d apologized, they both had. It had been careless on Jack’s behalf, Jessica had explained to him at sixteen some delicate things about his father. He’d come to understand just what it means for everyone around Hotch to love him. The way that his mother had tried to stifle that urge in his father and Jessica and Dave and Emily and Derek and everyone who has ever loved a man like Aaron Hotchner has tried to walk him back off that ledge. But it’s as if he was born there and you can move him but you can’t take that fundamental calling away. Can’t wash his darkness away.

Jack had spent his entire childhood likening the characters around him to his father, just pulling at strings to understand the man. Sometimes he’d earn himself a smile and other times a grunt. He’d bring his father the books or replay scenes in movies all to just see his reactions to know if the man he sees his father as is the same one Hotch sees himself as.

Freshman year of high school they’d read To Kill A Mockingbird and he’d thought his father to be a man like Atticus Finch. In many ways, he is but he keeps coming back to that book. Until during that heavily apologetic phone call, Jack had laughed and realized his father might be a bit like Atticus Finch but he’s a Boo Radley. The recluse that always represents unwavering good.

Hence Scout.

What had driven Boo Radley from his home? Little Scout Finch.

He lets them into the house, not really sure what to say. “You know,” Hotch mumbles, shaking his head. He watches the puppy eagerly work her way around the others. Snaking between legs and nearly knocking Hank over in her excitement but the boy is around enough dogs to only laugh harder. “You could have just got me a… gym membership of something.”

Derek huffs at that and now, he’s sitting in his living room watching his closest friends snickering at his son’s clever book reference. With a sigh, he leans down and offers his hand to the puppy, frowning when her first instinct is to lick him. “Hi, Scout.”

Jack squats down, petting Scout while she continues basking in Hotch’s attention. “You don’t go to the gym, dad.” Jack rubs behind her ears, smiling when Scout doesn’t divert her attention from Hotch. She’s zeroed in on him and he’s fairly content with that. “Besides I got Scout from that program that they run in Richmond.” There’s this dog training thing they do down there that his friend actually works at. Scout failed her training-- as it turns out she’s a bit of a reject. They’d tried to start her out as a service dog but she’d been too smart for that too. Too eager.

Hotch raises an eyebrow at that, not liking the sound of what he thinks is happening. Those dogs are expensive and it’s already enough that she’s a German Shephard. “What do you mean?”

Jack glances at Dave, “well…”

Dave steps up and soothes it out. “I made some calls and Jack’s friend helped us out. Scout is a reject from two academies, a failed service dog and from the police dog academy in Richmond. So she’s too smart for them to just send anywhere.”

Great, Hotch thinks.

“It’s perfect,” Emily snickers. “Hotch loves to take care of things and now he’s essentially got a toddler again.”

“She is potty trained,” Jack offers quickly.

But Emily is right and the idea is brilliant. Hotch does like to take care of things and having Scout will prompt him to start taking walks in the morning again. It might help him implement a strict eating routine, place him in the kitchen to feed her. He won’t go do things for himself but he will take her to the dog park and sit there until she’s tired. Throw balls for her to retrieve and (what had been the killing stone) is that she’s far too smart for her own good. She’s got other training. Senses anxiety and depression and is very protective.

Hotch frowns down at Scout, she’s placed her head on his knee watching him as he takes this in. Hank is leaned up against her side, fingers trailing through her short fur, and she’s entirely unbothered by it. She’s only worried about Hotch and Hotch is worried about her. He’s never had a pet before. Jack had a goldfish he fed occasionally but… there’s no way that counts.

“Thank you,” he says softly, rubbing at his fingers anxiously and frowning when Scout smacks his hand with her nose. He sighs and puts his hand on her head, scratching like he thinks she wants. Too distracted to note what she’s effortlessly just done. Put off by her clinginess, he’s not even thinking about the curling hot ball of nerves in his stomach. His mind does wander but she nudges him again and he sighs and keeps patting her head.

Dinner goes well and Scout and Hank are glued to his sides. Hank to his left feeding him chips and Scout green beans which Hotch sees and chooses to ignore. Her immediate allegiance to him is a little strange, she’s not too bothered with Garcia or Derek no matter how hard he tries to win her over (feeding her green beans just like his son). Scout does like Hank, Henry, Jack, and Reid. She takes to them like it’s nothing. She’ll go from ignoring Derek’s attempts to get her to sit to trot right over to Reid and lay over his feet.

Hotch does enjoy that, it’s funny.

They funnel out slowly after eight. Hank has already fallen asleep in Hotch’s arms and Savannah has to wipe his tears up and shush him back to hazy contentment with the promise he’ll see Hops soon. Derek will probably be over in a day or two to make sure that the shelf is holding up well and to transfer the books and he’ll bring Hank along to distract Hotch to do it.

JJ and Will trickle out not too long after. Henry and Jack conspire together to get Dave to take them for ice cream and he caves-- Jack promises to text him before he falls asleep to tell him where he landed for the night.

Garcia takes Reid home, won’t let him take the subway back at this hour and Hotch doesn’t even have to ask they just know to text him when they get home safe. He promises to eat the food Garcia left and she already has the date in which he should run out marked on her calendar. She’ll give him a week to bring back the Tupperware before coming over here herself and seeing what he has and hasn’t eaten.

Emily sticks around until ten. The two of them picking up meager things and she promises to come by early tomorrow and the two of them will go to PetSmart to figure out what kind of food Scout should be eating.

And before he knows it…

“I guess it’s just me and you then.” Scout tilts her head at him. “You want to… go to bed?”

He’s not really sure how the dog thing works. TV has shown him plenty of times they’re not supposed to sleep in your bed so he makes her a blanket bed of her own and marks down a dog bed on his list of things to get tomorrow at the pet store. He tells her goodnight and then blushes at how silly that sounds.

He’s in bed, changed into pajamas, and yawning into his book but he’s committed to reading a chapter every night. He hears her get up but he still jumps when his bedroom door is opened. She doesn’t wait for a command and doesn't listen to his “no” before jumping up into the bed alongside him. He’s trying to grumble, to get up but she lays right across his hips. Turning her head to look up at him and he gives up. “Only tonight,” he says.

Tonight turns into the way she sits between his legs, when they’re listening to the guy at PetSmart help them pick out food. To the way she looks up at him when he tries to estimate how big she’ll be to get her a properly sized bed. Which ultimately turns into him giving up and Emily hiding her smirk at just how whipped he already is.

Tonight turns into every night and if his nightmares stop coming as frequently because she’s laying atop him he doesn’t say anything. If he starts going out more and the team starts picking out pet friendly places to meet him for lunch or to have a coffee break then he also doesn't say anything but Scout is right there.

So… what exactly does it take to draw Aaron Hotchner away from the ghosts? A puppy.

#criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #aaron hotchner #emily prentiss #penelope garcia #spencer reid #derek morgan #jack hotchner #hank morgan #savannah hayes #jennifer jareau #will lamontagne #henry jareau #david rossi

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daydream-believin · 3 years

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The Never-Ending Roadtrip (there’s nothing wrong with Ohio)

Summary: Reader joins Douxie in the quest for Nari’s safety. He’ll need company won’t he? - (Part 5) ohio hijinks. national forests, a b ‘n b. next- (part 6) start here -> (part 1)

Warnings: swearing, meat eating, idk gambling kinda?

Word Count: 6620

A/N: AAAAAHHH i gotta stop writing shit at 3am. it’s showing. also i cant believe i reworked their entire planned trip route for this. ajhqhdsjhfljh i have no excuses for any of this

Douxie was uncharacteristically quiet during the trip through the first bit of Indiana. Y/n hung over the railing feeling awkward. The treetops below flew past her in a blur. Y/n kinda felt bad, like maybe she had broken him. Did she nudge a little too hard? She had thought, if anything, her flirting would get him flirting too. Hell, Doux flirted with everyone. It was just part of his charismatic persona he’d built over the years. And he had been so strange this week, but especially strange during the time they’d spent on the road. Every time Y/n had thought she’d figured something out with him, he’d surprise her.

Douxie was still processing what had happened earlier that day. He may have been going mad finally, immortals do tend to do that, but he was starting to think Y/n had feelings for him too. Which was something he had to be imagining, and yet she kept making it really hard to dismiss. Maybe it was just that their trip to St. Louis had felt pretty damn close to a date. His gaze lingered over her form, looking out at the scenery, covered in his jacket, a little piece of him to always cling to her skin, mingling their scents. His eyes snapped back to the sky in front of him as he narrowly dodged a telephone wire tower.

They had decided on taking one last pit stop before settling for the night. They were making their way up to Cleveland, which was a little unnecessarily high north into Ohio, but since Y/n was the one holding the map so to speak, she got to shift their course, almost to her whim even. Douxie was happy with anything as long as they kept moving. There was something she wanted to see in Cleveland. It’s not like Douxie wouldn’t enjoy it too, though. In fact, if her memory served her correctly, Douxie might enjoy the trip more than her. Back to that last pit stop. Hoosier National Forest. Somewhere nice and nature-y for Nari, and as a bonus, nice and forested for magic boat hiding. It would be a good opportunity to stretch out their legs.

Speaking of stretching, Y/n stretched out her arms to the expanse below, her fingers spread with the wind whistling between them, and she let out a soft groan. She was just trying to make her shoulders less stiff, she had been holding onto that railing tightly for quite a while now, but Douxie did not like that action one bit. He locked his staff in place at the helm, giving him just enough time to loop his arm around her midsection and pull her back into the center of the ship. He was able to return quick enough to stop them from hitting the top of a particularly tall evergreen. Y/n was still confused as to what just happened.

“Why don’t you take a seat now, Love.”

She did as she was told, less confused now, yet disgruntled at the fact the Doux had just scooped her away like she was a tiny kitten he was keeping from jumping off the couch.

Hoosier National Forest was magnificent. Well, Y/n thought all forests were wonders, but this one was still great, promise. There were tall trees and big rocks and waterfalls. What more does a national forest need. She managed to convince Douxie that they should go for a hike. Just a little trail, only half an hour, scouts honour. They had flown most of the way, and a brisk walk was what they all needed. It would be good for Nari, after all. Archie took a hard pass, in favor of yet another nap in the sun.

There was a waterfall nearby. A small one, but a waterfall nonetheless. Y/n had pulled up the map of the forest on her phone. Thank the stars for living in a cyberpunk dystopia. She led the way on the trail, until Nari told her that she could feel the waterfall and they could get there faster if they stepped off the path and made their own way. A bad idea, really, don’t do this. Y/n was all for it, to Douxie’s dismay. He had hoped she’d be more sensible, but no, now they were climbing down a steep rocky hill with a literal spirit guide. Nari led them through more twists and bigger rocks to climb over. Douxie tried his best to keep up with Y/n, to keep a hand on her, but she and Nari were moving too fast. At least he could still see them. If Y/n ate the dirt he’d just have to patch her up, he supposed.

Once they made it to the waterfall site, coming out of some brush, they took a moment to rest. Apparently, they were supposed to relax and enjoy feeling the waterfall’s aura or something but Douxie was too preoccupied on assessing the damage from the trek. After he voiced his concern, Y/n boasted that she made it here with only a few scratches and only one cut. Completely normal Dewdrop. Douxie was going to make her take the actual path back. He was probably ruining the waterfall’s calming energy.

After patching up Y/n with bandages and alcohol from the pack on his back, Douxie took a moment to actually take in the water feature. It had carved itself through the rocks it came forth from. It wasn’t powerful when it began, but capable of cutting through solid sediment now. Thousands of years, spent in the same rock formation, and yet none of the water flowing was water that had been there before. Constantly moving, and going nowhere. Neatly polished stones as it’s only reward. Doux was starting to get uncomfortable thinking about this insentient piece of nature now.

They weren’t planning on stopping again until the next national forest, Wayne, so they picked up a bite to eat from a camp store on their way out. Not exactly a restaurant, their meal consisted mostly of beef jerky, almonds, and some dried fruit. Eh, good enough. It was easy to eat on the fly. Pun intended. And it reminded Douxie a little of the dried winter foods he used to eat back in the day. A good meal indeed.

` ` `

The sun had set hours ago. Douxie was keen on spending another night flying until morning but Y/n and Nari looked like wilted flowers. Nari a little more literally. They were slumped over on each other, barely keeping their eyes open. Y/n’s eyelids fluttered. He supposed they could spend yet another night actually getting a decent amount of sleep, in a comfortable bed, and not the deck of a magic flying boat or whatever. They were still in Wayne National Forest but he could see lights up ahead. Not many, but enough that it was probably another tiny town.

Douxie steered the boat to the outskirts of the town. Not much going on, but they were in the middle of nowhere yet again after all. He called over to Y/n, who gave a jolt at the sound of her name, waking her up enough to give him her attention. He watched as she looked around, gaining her bearings. The town itself was nothing they hadn’t come across dozens of times before. Despite the inky blackness from the thin moon, and the remoteness of location, the town had a homey vibe to it. A relief, after yesterday. This town had either already started decorating for Christmas despite it being September, or never took down their decorations from last year. The lights in the trees made up for the absence of the moon, glistening off the orange leaves. This town still had a drive-in movie theater, and it was showing Roman Holiday, for some reason. It looked like more than half the town’s population was parked in that drive-in. It was almost like this little place was stuck in time.

Y/n pointed over to a gingerbread house. The hanging sign swung in the wind, reading Avalon Bed and Breakfast, painted in fancy blue cursive letters. There was an illustration of a floating island under the script. Douxie wasn’t exactly feeling good about that name, they had had enough of spending the night in someone’s final resting place last night. Sure, it looked harmless enough, but most Venus wizardtraps did. There was a wrap-around porch, illuminated by the warm light spilling from the windows, and a woman sat in one of the rocking chairs, telling a story to a couple of children, sitting on the ground around her feet. Y/n’s pupils were really big, locked onto the scene. Avalon B ‘n B it is then. If all goes well, they leave this place in the morn with a magic buzz, not entombed. Or it could just be a regular inn with a sacred namesake. It was always hard to tell with these things.

Douxie hid the boat in the nearby forest and they set off for the B ‘n B on foot. There was a chill in the air. Y/n put her hood up to shield from the wind to their backs. She threaded the fingers of the hand not attached to Nari through his. Douxie’s hands were too sweaty for her to keep doing this to him. Hopefully she wouldn’t stop. Archie jumped up on his shoulders, ready to hide if need be by shape shifting into something much smaller and less noticeable than a cat. Y/n googled the inn as they walked. They were listed as pet friendly, however their website revealed that this policy only extended to cats. Luckily for them, Archie was cat-passing. No need to become a rat that stayed in Douxie’s cap.

As they stepped inside the large wooden door, they were bathed in an orange light. There was a deep scarlet rug under their feet. The atrium they stepped into had a bench with too many colorful cushions stacked on it, an antique mirror that was probably silver-backed behind that, and a counter blocking the way for you to step into the rest of the house, with a few keys hanging behind it. The old man behind the counter stood as they entered, grinning.

“Welcome to Avalon! Name’s Robert. Why, what a beautiful family you have here.” He leaned over the counter to speak to the veggie lady. “And what’s your name, Little Miss?”

“I am Nari of the Eternal Forest.”

Y/n laughed, in an effort to be convincing, “Oh, she’s going through a wee fairy phase, it’s our fault, we took her to a renn faire last month.”

“Oh, how adorable. Could I get a name for your reservation Ma’am?”

“Casperan.”

“Perfect. And we have both a room with a single queen, and a room with a queen and a twin. We also have a room with two twins available, but I’m sure that wouldn’t serve you folks well.”

“We’ll take the single, our little one still isn’t very brave when it comes to sleeping in new places.” It was cheaper.

“Alrighty, here you go. We ask you to pay the bill up front if that’s okay with ya’ll,” Douxie came forward to hand the man his card, which he promptly accepted with a flourish, “And don’t worry about your feline, he should be fine as long as he can get along with our resident kitty cat, Sammy.”

“No worries, it should all be fine, Archie here is very friendly,” Y/n gave Robert her biggest smile. She shot Archie a look when the man turned away. He better get along with Sammy if he knew what was good for him. Speak of the devil, a little gray cat one could only assume was Sammy came trotting over and sniffed the feet of these new people in his domain. Douxie put a none too happy Archie down to greet the new friend and told him to play nice. Sammy sniffed Archie, hesitated for a moment, but then rubbed his cheek on Arch’s shoulder. Douxie let out the breath he was holding. Archie kept his tail from flicking and chirruped to the gray cat.

After passing by an archway that led into the dining area, where several old ladies were playing bridge, Robert led them up the stairs and through an unevenly rugged hallway to their room, near the end. “Now take your time settling in, but do join us downstairs soon, you’ll miss all the fun.”

After promising to show back up in a jiffy, they took in the room after he left. There bed was covered in four different green quilts, or that were as many as were visible. The windows were covered in thick green drapes. They came in and laid down their packs. The wallpaper was covered in green vines. There was some fancy loveseat, also green. Nari loved the amount of green. There was an oil painted portrait of a cat on the wall, and below it, a large vintage radio that looked like it might as well had been new. Y/n turned it on. ‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered’ was playing. Ooh, she loved this song.

She grabbed Douxie’s hands and pulled him to the center of the room. “C’mon, dance with me Dewdrop.” With a hand extended for him to take, her eyes sparkled as she looked up at him. Well, there was no way Douxie was saying no to that face. Y/n pulled him into her embrace the second he tentatively put his hand in hers. It was a sweet, slow love song, so they began to dance sweet, slow, and loving. Nari had made herself comfortable on the loveseat with Archie, who was pretending to be busy cleaning himself to give them one less pair of eyes watching them. Nari grabbed a book off the doily covered coffee table titled ‘Poisonous Herbs and How To Use Them’ that had caught her eye.

As they swayed, Douxie leant down to Y/n’s ear, “Why are we sharing a bed once again, Love?”

“You saw those people downstairs, if they knew we weren’t married they wouldn’t have given us accommodation, you want to go look for a new inn at ten o’ clock?” Douxie nodded, “and I figured we shared a bed last night and that was fine so why not tonight too? Oh stars, did I make you uncomfortable last night?” Douxie could hear the panic surging in her voice.

“No, no not at all, Love. Well, a perhaps wee bit,” Y/n pulled slightly away from him, which he quickly countered, “But in a good way. I- liked it.”

Y/n eyes got big as she scanned his nervous face. A weak smile spread across her flushed face. “I liked it too- oh,” Doux spun her around to the music. She giggled, but soon locked onto his eyes. There were so many things in them that she couldn’t name. Despite the chaos behind them, looking into them made her feel safe, his hazel eyes always did. A brilliant hazel, a little brown, a little gold, haloed in green. Warm colors, the palette of her fondest dreams. Ella Fitzgerald’s sweet voice still sung, Y/n couldn’t tell if the melody was lasting forever or if time had just slowed in each other’s embraces. His gentle touch on the small of her back, the warmth beneath his palm, was going to linger long after they parted.

She leaned closer, resting her head on his shoulder. Y/n could smell a mixture of cheap soap from the motel, the sweat of his skin, and the pine needles from their hike. His hair tickled her face. She could hear him take every breath. It was enamoring. Bewitched indeed, Ella. Y/n was so lost swaying in Douxie’s embrace that she almost didn’t catch what was being sung.

Y/n lifted her head back up. “Wow, I don’t remember the lyrics to this song being so dirty.”

Douxie laughed. “That’s because most versions are not. They cut it off before it gets too far, but this is the full version.”

“And people were listening to this in the fifties?” Y/n asked incredulously.

“Oh, Love, you’d be surprised.”

It took some convincing to get Nari to put down the book so they could go downstairs. She was engrossed in a page about bloodroot, and wasn’t happy about having to stop. Douxie wasn’t sure about how he felt about Nari getting into said literature, and was annoyed that Y/n was slightly encouraging it. Y/n knew all about this kind of stuff, sure, but he trusted Y/n not to suddenly turn on him when the whim found her. Bleeding balroths. Before now, Douxie hadn’t realized that he didn’t quite trust Nari. That was probably bad. Sure, Merlin trusted her, and that should be enough for his apprentice Hisirdoux. But Doux had trusted a lot of people over the years, even some endorsed by Merlin, before his slumber. It was a dangerous game, that trust. The scar on his hand served a permanent reminder, the thread tied onto his pinky, a promise to never forget.

Douxie felt bold, and laced his fingers through Y/n’s this time as they headed down the stairs. Archie took his perch on Douxie’s shoulders, it would give him an excuse not to have to interact with the inn cat. They were met cordially at the bottom of the stairs by the innkeeper’s wife, Sherry. She had been on her way from the kitchen to the dining with a platter of cookies. She beckoned the group to follow her, she’d lead them to where the action was at. Said action was laughing people sitting at the dining room table playing cards, with drinks ranging from a posh teacup to an Oktoberfest beer mug littering the table, children stealing sweets from the platters on the buffet cabinet in the midst of their game of hide and seek, and a new mother rocking her infant by the fire, a quilt draped over her lap.

“Hey folks, the Casperans have joined us finally.” They received a cheery greeting by all in the room.

Y/n didn’t like the idea of Nari joining the children in their hiding game, since Nari was not someone who should be left out of sight, so she suggested the veggie lady go ask the woman in the corner of the table who was knitting if she’d show Nari how. That kept the forest child busy all night. Easily explained to the adults by her being a strange little one, a shy child. Besides Robert there was only one other man in the gathering, so they seemed pleased by Douxie’s arrival. They tried to get him out of his shell and bond over beer, fishing stories, and how much they loved their wives. Douxie was trying his best to fit in with the merry men. As Y/n sat, the blue haired lady next to her offered her hand to shake and asked her name. “Y/n Casperan, pleased to meet you too, Ma’am.” Douxie bit the inside of his cheek, it was all he could do to keep his soul from leaving his body. Archie teased Doux with his eyebrows, which made it worse.

Much to Archie’s dismay, Doux got his revenge by putting him down on the ground and telling him to go play nice. Besides, it would be weird if Doux just left him there on his shoulder all night. Disgruntled, Archie took a perch up on the back of one of the old plush couches nearby. He kept an eye on Nari, since Douxie and Y/n were distracted. He had hoped he could stay anti-social from up there, but no, Sammy saw him from wherever the old cat was in the house and joined him. The gray cat snuggled next to Archie, loafing. It’s not that Arch didn’t like cuddles, he just didn’t want them from this random Russian blue from Ohio. Sammy began to purr; Archie could feel it against his own chest. Sighing, he accepted his fate, but didn’t hold back from flicking his tail in contempt.

The gathering dealt Douxie and Y/n in for the next round. Apparently, Y/n was a card shark, not something Doux was expecting. Y/n’s secret is that she’d oftentimes sneak off from her aunt’s fancy parties to go gamble with the snooty rich men who never thought a little girl in a poufy pink dress could clean ‘em out. They were often too embarrassed to tell the tale so she never got caught. He watched her lovingly as she bluffed and bantered with the other women. Y/n glanced over to him from across the table, catching his gaze. Her own gaze softened at the sight of his adoring expression towards her. She looked back down at her cards and promptly ended the hand. The dealer started passing around cards again, but Y/n refused hers.

“Oh, I sure would love to play another round, but I need to go have a conversation with my husband outside for a moment.” She shot a glance to Douxie and he understood. He stood up from the table and pulled her chair out for her as he did.

“Of course, Love.”

Douxie followed Y/n out to the porch. The soft orange light streaming from the window illuminated her back as she grabbed his hand to lead him towards a more private spot. Now no longer within the sight of the party, she leaned back against the porch rail, facing Doux. The expression he bore was a slightly questioning one, slightly eager. Y/n gulped, here goes nothing.

“So!”

Douxie cocked a brow, “So?”

“I know. And You know. And you didn’t know that I knew but I know, and I don’t know if you know but I’ve made it pretty clear so I’m hoping that you do know.”

Douxie’s eyes flittered back and forth as he tried to make sense of that babble. “Er- Love, could you say that in proper English for me? I think I know what you’re saying, but I- I need you to say it,” He looked away, pushing his hair back with his hands.

“I- Love You,” She lost her courage for a moment, taking a deep breath and not daring to look into his eyes, “This is so irresponsible, I know. But I, Y/n L/n, love you, Hisirdoux Casperan. And- and I have for quite some time now.” She waited a beat with no response. She still refused to look up from the floor as she asked, pleading, “Do you, return my feelings, or- or-“

“Yes.” He cut her off. She hadn’t noticed him getting so close to her. “I, Hisirdoux Casperan, love you, Y/n L/n.” Her heart skipped a beat as he chuckled, “I have for quite some time now.”

Y/n let out the breath she was holding in a dreamy sigh, “Okay.”

“Okay.” Doux brought his hand up to move a stray strand of hair away from her face, and he let it linger against her skin. Y/n placed her hand over his, and drew him closer. Her eyelids slowly closed as she reached her hands up to his hair, pulling him in for a sweet kiss. Douxie couldn’t believe this was finally happening. His eyelids snapped shut and he deepened it with fervor in an effort to show her just how much he wanted this, in case she had any hesitation left. He surely was going to wake up any moment now, alone on the smelly old couch of the bookstore with his songbook on his face. She pulled away from him way sooner than he was happy about. With their foreheads still together, he took in her flushed face. Looking up into his eyes, her voice rasped, “I- I’d- I’d like to apologize.” Douxie’s brows furrowed. His head was a little fuzzy, but he’d not know where she was going with this even if he hadn’t just kissed the love of his life. “I- I’ve been so weary, and for nothing. And-and I’ve probably wasted all this time we could have been happy an-”

He cut her off with another kiss. This time he’d make sure it lasted a good, long time. Although a bit sloppy at first, they eventually found their rhythm together. Their lips slid across each other in sync. Y/n tightened her arms around his neck as she pulled him even closer, clinging for dear life. As they eventually surfaced for breath, the hot ragged breathing visibly mingled in the chilly autumn air. He pressed his forehead back into hers, nuzzling, “I believe it was worth the wait, Darling.”

They could have spent all the time in the world in that moment, if not for the sudden crash coming from the dining area. “Oh fuzzbuckets, Nari.” Doux mumbled under his breath as he grabbed Y/n’s hand to go check out the startling noise. Once back in view of the window, they could see it was a false alarm, as Sherry had dropped a metal platter and was cleaning it up. Nari was still attentively watching the knitting woman, and Archie seemed to be getting cozy with the inn cat. Ooh Archie, you Casanova. Douxie breathed a sigh of relief. Y/n tugged at his hand,

“C’mon Dewdrop, let’s rejoin the merry making.” Douxie obliged.

And the merry making lasted until just before midnight. Surprising, considering the company they were in. They didn’t even stay until the others retired for the night, Douxie wanted to get an early start on the day and also really didn’t want to have to hear another one of Bill’s fishing stories and act like he knew anything about fishing. He complained as soon as the door closed behind them. Archie argued that he had had it worse, which Doux scoffed at. They bickered back and forth, making Y/n smile. She never knew family arguments could actually make her heart fonder. Strange. So this is what genuine love brings.

After brushing their teeth, such a mundane thing that Douxie loved doing with Y/n, they settled in to bed for the night. The autumn chill might have come, but it still way too warm for the fifteen blankets the bed had been covered in. They removed the extra and set them neatly on a pile in the loveseat. Or Y/n at least made sure the extra quilts were neatly folded, Douxie had just thrown them off and let them bunch up. Nari got under the covers, like she’d seen humans often do before, but decided it was not a sensation for her. It felt strangling, to have something weighing down at her. She joined Archie where he lay at the foot of the bed and curled up. Archie was not in the mood for more cuddles, and Nari appeared to sense that, and stayed a little ways from the dragon-cat while still trying her best to be close to him.

Y/n nestled in, with the blanket pulled up on her ear, looking cozy as ever. Douxie’s heart skipped a beat. This was still so surreal. This entire day had been surreal. There was no way this wasn’t all one big dream. Maybe he did get eaten at the Missouri motel. Perhaps something was draining his life force but giving him a pleasant dream to pacify his dwindling mind. Y/n noticed him, still standing there at the side of the bed in a trance, and reached for his hand to drag him in. He fell flush against the mattress, and as he picked himself back up, she could see his cheeks were flushed as well. Y/n giggled at the sight of him.

“Get in, just mind Arch and Nari.”

Douxie carefully got under the covers without disturbing the two at the foot of the bed, laying on his side to face Y/n. For a beat they stilled, looking into each other’s eyes and watching each other breathe, miles apart despite being so close, until Y/n stretched an arm out to place it on his shoulder, an invitation. Doux got the memo and closed the gap of sheets between them, and Y/n snuggled into his chest. He tentatively wrapped his arms around her. This was sleep time and he was supposed to be settling down and relaxing but now his heart was beating fast as if he were running. Surely Y/n could feel it, hear it even, with her ears against his heart itself. He hair smelled lovely, like dirt but right as it first starts raining. Gently smiling to himself, he tightened their embrace.

“You know, I wanted to do this last night too. So, so badly.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Bold words of someone who literally just apologized for wasting our time with her weariness.”

y/n pretended to scoff, but failed to contain her snickers, “Oh, sod off. I am asleep now, and I cannot hear you.”

Douxie woke up to a face full of dark fur. Not an unusual thing for him to wake up to, just not what he was expecting for this particular morning. At some point in the night Archie had climbed up and nestled into the space between his face and Y/n’s. Impertinent, but endearing. Douxie supposed he’d be waking up like this for many mornings to come. This magic moment would become normal, a fact of his life that he got to enjoy. Just him, Arch, and Y/n. His tiny little family. What a lovely thought. What a lovely future.

Breakfast was at seven. That was the best part of staying in a bed and breakfast, Douxie reckoned. The fragrance of the goetta frying was heavenly after not having eaten anything but beef jerky and nuts since yesterday afternoon. The innkeeper’s wife had also made biscuits that she was serving with apple butter and her signature chocolate gravy, which neither Douxie nor Y/n were brave enough to try. The apple butter was just fine, after all. Nari didn’t care for the goetta, or many meats at all, Douxie was starting to realize, instead opting to glop way too much apple butter on a biscuit that she made into a sandwich. The fruit sauce dripped out when she bit into it, which only made the other guests dote on her, telling her how she was just so cute.

Y/n was wearing that new outfit, that Ash Dispersal Pattern shirt. It looked good on her. He hoped he wasn’t being possessive here, but it really made him feel good to see her in it. They would wash their other clothes in New Jersey. Hopefully they’d make it to the garden state and the troll settlement by nightfall, but by the way things were going, Douxie could only do that, hope. They’d make their way through Pennsylvania and maybe tuck through Maryland and Delaware to avoid Philly. The new Trollmarket was under a bridge of a small town in the thick of New Jersey. They’d make it there, that was the plan.

They bid their goodbyes to the people at the bed and breakfast, and headed off to Cleveland around eight. It was an uneventful trip, unremarkable and not even worthy of being described. Although one aspect of it that Douxie enjoyed was that Y/n stayed away from the edge, choosing to hang on his arm instead of the railing. A win-win if he had ever known one. Archie made some sarcastic gagging noises at their pda, but Doux ignored him. He had been waiting way too damn long for this to not embrace his beloved on his own fucking flying ship. Arch could tease him all he wanted. This casual affection he was now allowed to show somehow was worth it. The fact that he could now just touch Y/n? And she would not only not flinch from his touch, but would even touch back? It was priceless to his heart, marrow to his old bones, chicken soup for his soul.

As they drew nearer, Douxie found out that the reason Y/n had directed them to the metropolitan area around Cleveland, pretty high up into Ohio, was that she had wanted to make a visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Douxie knew he shouldn’t have expected anything less. He sure knew how to pick ‘em. He could get on board with this, a little trip down memory lane might be nice. There was a reason he’d never been. A lot of his old friends who’ve earned their places in this building had passed on. Yet, it might be nice to see their faces once again.

They once again hid the boat in a wooded area and took a bus into town. It wasn’t a problem finding a close stop, since their destination was a popular tourist destination. They wandered the halls, Douxie told Y/n and Nari about some of the people from bands that he had known. Y/n listened intently. Nari really liked all the pictures and memorabilia. She understood that this was some sort of memorial, and she was making sure that she was being respectful as Hisirdoux told her about it all. She didn’t quite understand why there were tributes to some still living humans, but did not question the humans’ rituals. Perhaps they were going to die soon. All mortals will.

There was a little station with a sundry of instruments, there for people to try out. Everything was most likely out of tune, being floor instruments touched by thousands of hands. That didn’t stop Y/n from grabbing an acoustic guitar to show Nari, plucking at it’s strings effortlessly. It was a silly little ditty, meant to entertain the veggie lady, but still impressive. Wait.

“Since when have you been able to play?”

“Ah, I dunno, Dewdrop. High school, I guess? I can’t really remember when, but my friend Roxy showed me a few chords and then I was obsessed for months.”

“What, I- I gave you lessons just last month. You were terrible.”

“Hisirdoux Casperan we both know that was just an excuse for you to hold me and touch my hands as you positioned my fingers.”

Douxie’s face was red. She was right, of course, but he hadn’t thought he had been so obvious about it. He watched her fingers drift across the neck as she started playing a softer tune. It was a song he recognized. Y/n seemed to get lost in what she was doing, mumbling the words here and there. At one point she started actually singing. Softly, under her breath, but it was audible nonetheless. Either she had forgotten he was there or she was finally getting comfortable enough around him to let him hear the beautiful voice. He hoped it was the latter. Nevertheless, whichever it was, it was like a siren song to Douxie’s ears.

“Why don’t you ever sing?”

Y/n stopped suddenly. She looked up from the stings, her eyes wide. “What?”

“You’re always humming as you do things, but you only ever actually sing when you think no one’s around. Why’s that, Love?”

While he wouldn’t recommend she try out for a singing competition reality show any time soon, her voice was hypnotic to him. Soothed his soul. Not that silky as was traditionally praised, but somehow felt like home, like a less smooth polished fabric, like a well-loved linen. The cadence of her voice was the best sound he had ever heard even. He had only been lucky enough to hear her fully sing a few blessed times, yet he knew that he could listen to her sing forever. Addicting.

“I – well it’s quite embarrassing isn’t it? To sing in front of people. I’m no starlet.”

Okay, now Douxie was ready to punch the lights out of anyone who made her think she should hide the angel voice of hers. Embarrassing. Who the fuck had the nerve. “Hmm. I think that’s bullshit, Love.” Y/n looked taken aback, and morphed into an expression of confusion. Douxie decided this wasn’t a time to be subtle. He cupped her face in his hand, drawing her in to make eye contact. “Let me make this clear, My Darling. Everything I’ve ever heard come out of your mouth has been nothing but angelic. I would never want you to feel shame about expressing yourself, even if I didn’t think your voice was my favourite sound on the planet.”

Tears welled in Y/n’s eyes. She hadn’t expected him to say anything like that. She was so cautious to keep him from hearing her before, but he liked her singing? It was hard for her to fathom. The first time he had caught her crooning to herself while unboxing a new shipment of bestsellers in the bookstore had been mortifying. She had never wanted to relive that, but maybe she wouldn’t have to. She loved singing. Her father had liked to call her his little songbird. She had hidden away that part of herself like a chest of out of fashion clothes in a dusty attic. If someone like Douxie, her beloved, thought so kindly of her though, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to open up the chest and try on a few dresses.

“I- You’re serious? You really think that?”

Douxie held her gaze. “Absolutely.” He tipped her face up towards his to punctuate his point with a kiss.

They continued to wander through the rooms and exhibits of the museum. Douxie stopped to look at a portrait of someone he particularly missed, an old friend he had many good times with. He’d miss the geezer. He really was a great musician. He had taught Douxie a lot of tricks, and Doux wouldn’t be able to play the electric guitar half as well without his friend. He had a different kind of magic.

He was caught in his reverie when Y/n popped in from another room, urging him to come see something. Her excitement was something Doux would never stop enjoying, so he let her grab his hand so he would follow her. Douxie didn’t know what he was expecting her to show him, definitely not this. He was staring face to face with his own poster, circa 1960. They were experimenting with a new style, the rock of the day that was becoming increasingly popular. He remembered it fondly. It was a new age. The drummer in the photo, he was mortal, and while he could have been alive today, sadly he was taken, just ten years after joining the band. Seeing his smiling face filled Doux with peace. So many memories, he was glad he got to make them. And there would be more memories to come, he’d make sure of it. No order of ancient terrors breathing down his neck was gonna stop him from doing what he loved.

He was so lost in thought they he almost missed what this meant. He was in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. How did he not know he was in the fucking hall of fame. They didn’t even tell him. Well, he supposed this version of him no longer legally existed, so that made sense. Still. It was fantastic news. He was pretty proud. Some sweet validation that he always craved. Y/n had brought him here, she’d been here before, she knew. She was showing him off, to no one in particular, but the thought made him grin. Ash Dispersal Pattern in the hall of fame. Heh. He’d have to tell the others; in fact he would announce this to the group chat as soon as he had some free time. Zoe would get a kick out of him not knowing. Y/n tugged on his arm.

“Aren’t you cool, Mr. Rockstar.”

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ada-mike · 3 years

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The Truth Always Comes Out - Digimon (Davis/Yolei)

Hey, guys, long time no see. Hope you’re all doing well, all things considered. I decided to dust off this blog and post a little FanFiction for a change! Fancy that. Why FanFiction for a fairly rare pair in a children’s cartoon from twenty years ago? Good question. I was honestly inspired by the work of a truly amazing writer @tanyatakaishi and their incredible story Innocent Games, whose sequel is currently in progress and definitely worth the read whether you’re into Digimon or not (but you should be into Digimon, i mean seriously?) But yeah, drop by and give Innocent Games a read, drop a comment and a kudo too while you’re at it. This short story I’m posting myself is so inspired by Innocent Games, it’s pretty safe to call it a FanFiction of a FanFiction, doesn’t really fit into any canon, and is just something I had rattling around my head that I needed to bang out. Please give it a read and let me know your thoughts! Stay safe, ya’ll.

- Mike

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In hindsight, he really should have known better. Yolei had always possessed an inquisitive streak to put it lightly (whether or not the matter being investigated was her business was rarely a concern) and she was typically about as adept at snooping things out as Davis was poor at hiding them.

And really, on his laptop of all places?

Davis, along with the rest of their friends, had spent his fair share of time around – as well as inside of – computers, but regardless, they were still Yolei's domain through and through, her expertise. And as his father had once told him many years ago, during a family trip to the supermarket where Davis had denied, despite being caught, that he'd tried to shoplift a pack of gum down the front of his shorts: The truth always comes out.

His thoughts were scattered though as they stumbled through the front door and into the blackness of the dorm he shared with Ken. Yolei was strung over his back like a long-legged, lilac-haired knapsack – having mounted him during the elevator ride, laughing, the liquor in her belly turning her playful.

The haze of alcohol still hung heavy in Davis’s mind too, enough so that his legs wobbled dangerously as he carried her through the blackness to where he approximated the futon was.

“Is Ken here?” Her breath was warm in his hair and the heat climbed up his neck to settle in the tips of his ears.

“Nah,” He said. “He’s with his parents this weekend.”

“Perfect.” She purred.

Davis picked up the pace, stumbling over a pair of soccer cleats in the dark. He spun in a circle, pulling a fresh laugh from Yolei, before depositing them both on the sagging futon cushion. Yolei sat pinned behind him, a little squished, but regardless it was the perfect position to plant sloppy kisses on his exposed neck. Davis squirmed, his heart racing.

“It doesn’t smell in here, does it?” He asked.

“Only a little.”

“It’s the trash, I bet. I haven’t taken it out since Monday.” He moved to rise, but she pulled him back into her lap, near growling:

“Leave it.”

“Mmm,” He hummed. “You like the funk, huh? It sets the mood for you?”

“You’re about to ruin the mood if you don’t shut it.”

“Such a way with words, love.”

Love.

That word. It was enough to diffuse squabble that had been sparking.

Davis sunk back into her and she wrapped her arms around him, feeling up and down his chest, then down his gut. He seized one of her hands and brought it to his mouth, kissing her sharp knuckles, the pads of her fingers, her wrist. It was surprisingly tender for him.

And it drove her absolutely wild.

Her free hand had just wrapped around the buckle of his belt, when the door to the bedroom creaked open.

“Davish?”

They both flinched as tiny feet pounded on the floor, leapt, then thudded lightly on the futon by their side. Yolei reached and flicked on the lamp switch by her head.

“DemiVeemon!” Davis was grinning at the sight of his partner, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I thought you’d still be sleeping, buddy.”

“I had a dream that we were on a boat! I wanted to tell you about it!” The in-training Digimon clambered onto Yolei’s knee. “Yolei, your face is so red you look like a tomato!”

“It’s hot.” She explained. And it was, the compounding moments of passion followed by DemiVeemon’s interruption had them both sweating slightly.

“Where’s Poromon?” The Digimon asked, unperturbed. Fresh from his nap, he was ready to play.

“Um- He’s spending the night in the Digital World.” She dug her nails into Davis’s side, causing him to wince in pain, the soft touches suddenly gone. “I kind of thought you’d be there too.”

“Nope!” Chirped DemiVeemon. “But we could all go now!”

“Tomorrow, buddy.” Davis brushed his hands over DemiVeemon’s ears. Even if a trip to the Digital World could be fit into their agenda, the phantom feeling of Yolei's hands on him was fresh and that very likely meant that standing up anytime would be a bad move. “But hey, you know, I think I still have some Udon in the fridge from yesterday. Ya hungry?”

“Yes!”

As DemiVeemon scampered away, Davis sighed and lifted himself out from between Yolei’s legs so he could sit beside her.

“Sorry about that,” He settled his arms on her shoulders, leaning close. “But where were we?”

“Davis, no.” She pushed him back. “I told you that I was taking Poromon to the Digital World so we could be alone tonight. Why didn’t you do the same?”

“I was going to. I just – I dunno, felt bad about dumping him there.” Davis rubbed his nose. The alcohol's buzz was fading from him now, much too fast for his liking. “He’ll be in a food coma in twenty minutes though, I guarantee it. Then we can get back to -”

“Hold on,” Her eyes sharpened into knives behind her glasses “You think I dumped Poromon in the Digital World?”

“No, I-”

“I did not dump him,” She continued, shifting further away on the cushion as she sat up straighter. “He’s helping out in Primary Village. I’ll be there to pick him up again tomorrow.”

“I know!” Davis felt a fresh wave of heat roll up his ears, annoyed that she was picking apart his words tonight of all nights. “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty.”

“I have no reason to feel guilty.” She folded her arms and sank back, eyes settling on the kitchen where DemiVeemon’s ears were casting shadows up the wall from the light of the open refrigerator. “He’s fine, just – dammit, Davis.” A heavy sigh billowed her lips, then: “You and I just got back together, what? Three days ago? And between school and everything, you and I haven’t had time… We needed a night like this.”

It was true. This most recent “break” of theirs had been a rough one and longer than any previous up to now. Almost an entire two months had passed where they barely spoke a single word to each other, only interacting when strictly necessary for Digimon matters, or the occasional late-night message over their D-Terminals.

Davis slumped back too.

“Tonight was a good night.” He said lamely.

She just nodded.

They sat in silence for a minute as DemiVeemon finished rummaging for food. He eventually waddled past them back to Davis’s bedroom, a warm bowl nearly as big as he was balanced on his head. All dreams of boats forgotten for the time being. Whether or not he had heard the beginning of their spat, Davis wasn’t sure. Regardless, he now wished his partner had stayed to break some of the tension that hung heavy in the room.

What he really wanted was another drink.

What he needed to do was apologize.

Instead, he lurched forward, propping himself on one arm as he reached over Yolei. She opened her mouth, ready to rebuke him again, until he reached past her and snatched the clunky laptop that sat on the end table.

It was five pounds heavier and just as many years outdated for anything Yolei would have considered satisfactory, but Davis had got it for a good price in a resale shop and desperately needed a computer for school. He grunted as he settled back in his seat and flipped open the lid, determined to find a way to break the awkward silence.

“Can I – um, play some music?”

He was already scrolling through his rather extensive music library, not waiting for an answer, but Yolei nodded anyways.

“Just no dub-step, please for the love of God.”

He chuckled and something in her chest unwound. He eventually settled on something, and with a double-click the room was filed with smooth guitar and steady drums. They listened, Davis nodding his head in beat and Yolei watching him.

“The speakers on that thing are awful.”

“Yeah.”

The song transitioned, adding more varied guitar and aggressive vocals.

“I haven’t heard this one before.”

“Ken showed it to me.”

“It’s good.”

“Yeah.”

As the song started to fade, Davis reached, without looking, and rubbed a line up and down Yolei’s thigh. She unfolded her arms, but before she could move further towards him, he was lifting the laptop from his lap and moving it into her’s. He stood up.

“Gotta take a piss.” He muttered, trudging towards the bathroom, tripping over the same pair of cleats as he went.

Yolei watched him leave, long nails tapping on the plastic laptop chassis. After the bathroom door closed and she heard him emptying his bladder into the toilet through the thin wall, she sighed and began flicking through his music.

She had gotten a little too defensive earlier and she knew it.

The truth was, she did feel a little guilty for parting ways with her Digimon, even if it was only for a night. Despite the lack of crises in the Digital World needing their intervention, it sometimes felt like she was shirking responsibility by turning more attention to other aspects of her life.

But she was older. She was busy – they all were.

Breaking up with Davis a few months ago had been a mistake, a rash decision after a stupid fight.

Drawing a good night out by coming home with him and arguing tonight had been a mistake. The wounds from the breakup were still fairly fresh. They couldn’t exactly just pickup where they left off.

Hell, maybe getting back together had been the mistake.

She wasn’t even reading the list of songs anymore as she scrolled. Her ring finger tapped a little too quickly on the arrow keys and the music program locked up from overestimation. Grumbling, she tapped more—even though she knew better—and the window was suddenly minimized, and then she was confronted with the egregious mess of folders on Davis’s desktop.

What immediately caught her eye was the folder labeled ‘Sexy Sexy Sexy’, and with that, any thought of innocently returning Davis’s music library vanished up in smoke.

Eyebrow quirked, she clicked and opened the oddly-named folder without hesitation. Of course she knew that most every guy had that particular folder stashed away. Having it on the desktop was definitely bold though.

What she saw though almost made her guffaw, and she struggled to steel herself.

The folder contained pictures upon pictures of different styles of ramen, most likely purloined from some high-end bistro’s online menu, judging by the nearly indecent high quality and their tiny watermarks in the corner of each. Nearly every photo was accompanied with an adjacent text document, containing what Yolei astutely guessed were Davis’s attempts at parsing out the recipe by looks alone.

This ramen folder was probably more organized and cared for than the one he used for homework, and a quick visit back to the desktop and to a directory simply dubbed ‘hw’ confirmed this.

Yolei glanced at the bathroom door. Things inside had gone silent, but if history and the number of sliders he ate at the bar were reliable indicators, Davis would probably be preoccupied for a few more minutes. She had plenty of time.

Yolei cruised through the rest of his desktop in record time, finding nothing of note outside of a few folders containing game roms, a second folder of his own home-brewed ramen recipes, and much to her surprise: an alarming amount of digitized Shoujo manga, definitely pirated. She filed that away for teasing ammunition later.

Now, to find the really good stuff.

Her practiced fingers danced over the keyboard, running a shell command to search for recently accessed items. Buried in several sub-folders was one entry that caught her eye, a single folder with a timestamp indicating it was opened just an hour or so before he’d picked her up for their date earlier that evening.

The folder was named ‘yolei’.

A swirl of emotions flooded her as she opened the file with her namesake, and she found it was a dumping ground of yet more photographs.

Instead of gratuitous snapshots of food however, they all featured her.

Yolei immediately recognized a series of selfies she’d sent him herself – some as early as when they had first started their on-again/off-again relationship years ago. It had never occurred to her that Davis would be the type to save them anywhere but his phone. It was surprisingly sentimental of him.

An image of Davis lying in his bed, clicking through and lovingly studying a slideshow of her, sprung to mind and she felt a warm swell of affection for him. She had done something similar on occasion, when their respective university work had kept them apart for multiple days on end.

There were other styles of pictures too. As she scrolled further, she found photos they had taken together at her high school graduation ceremony, shots of them at a beach trip, and one from her recent birthday where he’d tried to wrestle her face into the cake. She couldn’t help but laugh quietly.

She came to a stop at one photo in particular, the image’s age betrayed by how grainy it’s quality was.

They couldn’t have been older than thirteen. Davis was round-faced and grinning in the middle, one arm slung over Ken to his left and the other over a mildly miffed Kari. T.K. stood on Kari’s other side (Yolei had forgotten about that silly hat he used to wear) and on the opposite edge stood Yolei herself, all spindly limbs and thick, round glasses—stained brilliant white from the flash of the camera.

Their Digimon partners stood huddled around their feet and Yolei felt a fresh pang when her eyes fell on Hawkmon.

She scrolled further, perhaps more quickly than necessary, but then came to a screeching halt.

“Bastard.” She hissed, an angry blush spreading across her cheeks.

“What?” Davis had somehow exited the bathroom and was halfway back to his seat. Yolei had been so engrossed in her recent discovery she hadn’t even heard him flush.

Without missing a beat, she twirled the laptop around and pointed the screen at him accusatory.

“What the hell is this?”

To his credit, Davis had learned since the gum smuggling attempt in his youth that it was best not to lie when he’d be caught.

“Oh,” His mouth formed a perfect O-shape. Now he was blushing too. “I can explain-”

“You better!” She rattled the laptop at him, the hinge wobbling dangerously. “I told you to delete these, Davis!”

It had been her one demand when they had broken up most recently. He had listed several himself, including the unconditional return of the multiple sweater-shirts she’d swiped from his dorm. She considered this a devastating blow, as they made the perfect sleeping shirts in her opinion. But to be fair, he actually needed them more than she did, his winter wardrobe being sparse as it was.

“I did delete them!” He shot back.

“Oh—that is so obviously not true.” She flipped the laptop back around so she could look at them again. The photos were definitely there, present and accounted for, completely not deleted. Her eyes were flashing as she glared back up at him. “Why did you keep these?!”

“Look, you specifically asked me to delete from my phone,” He explained. “And that’s what I did.”

“Oh, so you thought you could keep these on a technicality, huh?”

“We’re back together now so why does it matter?” He threw his hands in the air. “They’re not even that bad of pictures.”

“They’re disgusting.”

Davis chose not to argue with that. Certainly most of the photos could be construed as less-than appealing.

His laptop currently contained the only copies in existence of seventeen candid photos of Yolei, caught in various stages of sleep, sickness, and general foulness.

It had started as kind of sweet. On one of the nights she had slept over he’d woken first, and had snapped a quick picture of her face as she slept rather serenely, messy hair splayed over his pillow. When he’d showed her the picture later, he’d called her beautiful. She made a show of rolling her eyes, but smiled and blushed all the same.

For the second photo, he’d caught her while she was trying to subtly pick her nose.

It had kind of snowballed from there.

“Why were you even going through my laptop anyways?” He demanded in turn.

“I was looking for music.” Yolei turned her nose up matter-of-factly.

“In my pictures? Yeah, Right.”

“You’re missing the point.” She waved her hand as if his words were a fly buzzing by her ears. “This is a major breach of privacy.”

“Now that, you’re right about.” He stepped forward finally and reached for his laptop, but she pulled it to her chest.

“I mean my privacy, you jackass.”

“I took those, so they’re actually mine.”

“But they’re not pictures of you, are they?” She looked down, scrutinizing one of her in an unseemly, homemade guacamole facemask, filename: ‘she-hulk’. She had seen all these pictures before at one point or another, usually accompanied with some gentle ribbing at her expense, but seeing the collage now felt entirely different. “Davis, how could I ever trust you again? You promised me that you’d get rid of these.”

She was right of course, and that caused the words to sting all the more. Davis was near a hundred percent sober now, but his vision still blurred. Hot tears of shame, and a heaping dose of frustration, pricking his eyes. He fought and managed to keep his voice level, mostly:

“Yeah, well... how am I supposed to just go around like it’s nothing when you could be sniffing through my drawers every time I turn my back?”

She didn’t have an answer for that.

A half minute passed where neither said anything. The music from the laptop was still playing passively, shuffling through Davis’s library automatically and currently playing some upbeat video game OST Yolei didn’t recognize. Eventually he moved and sank down onto the futon with her again, a few inches of space between them, and both their eyes settled on the gallery of photos still on display on the glowing screen in Yolei’s arms.

Davis remembered telling his friends oh so recently that he and Yolei were back together. Tai and Izzy had exchanged a quick glance, a silent exchange of barely-contained, mild exasperation. He imaged them placing bets on how long he and Yolei would last this time and pictured money exchanging hands when he broke the news that they were surely once again parting ways-

“That was the most sick I’d ever been in my entire life.” Yolei muttered suddenly, indicating one of the pictures. “I literally thought I was dying.”

He chuckled despite himself.

“Your nose is so red there.”

“Yeah, the tissues from I-Mart were like sandpaper. They still are.”

“Red looks good on you though.” Their eyes met then, and Davis continued quickly, stammering slightly. “I mean, not many people can pull off crimson flight pants, but- um… you did.. for years.”

Her face had an unreadable quality to it, and it seemed as if she might respond with something, but then she turned away and began scrolling through his computer again. He noticed her eyes weren’t focused though and he didn’t have it in him to try and dissuade her from searching still. There was nothing else to find anyway.

“Why do you even have this folder?” She asked, eyes forward.

He debated with himself for a few seconds, then decided on the truth.

“I like… having photos. You know, of you.” He admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. “And when we broke up last time, and you told me to delete all those ugly pics of you, I did.” Yolei’s mouth opened to object, but he continued before she could interject. “I really did. I honestly just forgot that they were on my laptop with everything else too, and when I saw them later, I just… couldn’t get rid of them.” He stared at her profile, tracing with his eyes the lines of her cheek, the bump on her nose. “I really thought this last time was the real deal.”

“Me too.”

“Do you think we should break up again?”

“I don’t know.” Even though they weren’t quite touching, Yolei felt him stiffen by her side. She closed her eyes, and said her next words to the blackness of her eyelids. “I don’t want to.”

He breathed out, the air leaving him as if released from a balloon.

“God, me neither.”

She twisted on her seat, opening her eyes to meet his gaze.

“I’m sorry for looking through your laptop. I shouldn’t have done that.”

“It’s okay.” He responded quickly.

Yolei continued anyways.

“If I’m being honest too, I was looking to see what kind of porn you had saved on here.”

“What?” Davis balked. “Seriously? Why would you think I had… that stuff… on there? I don’t even…” He shook his head, the image of incredulity. “I don’t even watch that.” Yolei watched him steadily, a single brow raised. “What? I don’t!”

“Sure. We’ll talk about that some other time.” She was only half teasing.

The promise of ‘some other time’ bolstered his spirits quickly. He eyed his laptop in her hands, suddenly loathing the pathetic thing and how he’d used it to hide away the secret vestiges of what he had once thought would be all that remained of his and Yolei’s relationship. She had owned up to her transgressions.

What he needed to do was apologize.

Standing, he pulled the laptop from her slack grip before she could argue, and looking her dead in the eyes, gripped each half of the computer and snapped it in half along the hinge. The music died with a pitiful wheeze and splinters of plastic flew everywhere, a few bouncing off Yolei’s glasses to disappear into the fibers of the rug at her feet.

“Davis!”

“I shouldn’t have kept those pictures.” He discarded the broken halves of the computer, speaking passionately. “I want us to start over fresh, okay? I don’t want any dumb secrets or anything like that to cause any problems. I want you to trust me, because I trust you – I really do.” He swallowed hard. “I still love you, Yolei.”

Her eyes shone and laughter bubbled in her throat.

“But you computer-”

“I needed a new one anyways. You can help me pick one out!”

“Yeah, but,” She wiped her eyes clear. “What about all the other pictures? My graduation, the Digimon?”

“I still have those on my phone, no worries.”

“And your homework?”

“My homework?” It took a second for Davis’s brain to catch up. His eyes passed from one broken piece of the laptop to the other, then his hands rose to bury themselves in his hair. “Oh shit, shit. My mid-term paper is saved on there...”

Yolei wanted to laugh, she wanted to cry, but instead she reached out and pulled him to her. She gently unwound his fingers from his hair and twined them with hers. She kissed him and kept pulling until he was climbing onto the battered futon with her, then over her.

In the morning, she would take off the back panel of his broken computer and pull the hard drive. She’d help him recover his homework and maybe, just maybe, a couple of the more agreeable photos that she would allow him to keep.

For now though, he didn’t need any of the digital keepsakes. As far as either of them were concerned, any number of pictures paled in comparison to the real thing.

For now though, she held him close and breathed in his ear.

“I love you too.”

When DemiVeemon bounced back into the living area sometime later, he found the pair asleep and huddled under a blanket together on the futon. The small Digimon took in the mess on the floor, the couple’s mussed hair, their slow and steady breaths, chests rising as one. Of course, he had heard every word of their argument from Davis’s bedroom, but he was used to the ruckus by now and too preoccupied with his noodles to care. Anyways, no doubt there would be many such squabbles in the future for him to witness.

He decided to let them sleep for now and bounded to the kitchen in search of a mid-night snack. He would just have tell Davis about his dream some other time.

#digimon #davis motomiya #daisuke motomiya #yolei inoue #miyako inoue #daivis/yolei #daiyako #demiveemon #my fanfiction

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pawprintsmoon · 3 years

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The dust settled around him, and he wore it like glitter.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/29724879

“You’re not the one who slagged off the crown and your own family in the emails that everybody in the world has read. I’ve got to handle that on my own before you come back over.”

-page 384

It was two days after Henry had been cuddled awake in the Queen’s Bedroom, tangled up in fuchsia sheets and Alex’s legs. After an international flight, two sleepless nights, and a whirlwind of damage control, Shaun dropped him off for therapy.

As he walked from the car to the clinic, he thanked God for his PPOs and empty parking lots. Paparazzi on his way to therapy would’ve been just too much. In his state of constant apprehension, he noticed the creeping chill of autumn air forecasting the upcoming Presidential election. For the past few days, he had felt like he was burning through the sky at the speed of light, but apparently the world was still turning at its normal pace.

He sat down on the sofa in Shanon’s office gingerly, because his body ached as if he’d just run a marathon. Mostly he’d just been pacing in his bedroom.

Shanon sat down in her chair across from him and said, “So, I hear you’ve had a bit of a week, huh?”

“You could say that.” Henry’s breath was shallow, as it had been ever since they’d been outed. “How much do you know?”

“Henry.” She gave him that therapist look. “You know that I try not to read news about you. I just saw that the whole world knows about you and Alex, and I know that can’t be easy for you. That’s all. I want to hear what you want to tell me about it all.”

“Right, I… well.” He wasn’t sure if he was ready to hash through it all, but he knew he could try. Despite the excess of cortisol that had been tensing him up into a knot of adrenal fatigue, he knew he was safe in Shanon’s office. He had been going there for an hour every week for the past four years. The familiarity of twinkly lights dangling in her potted tree and the meditation cushions in the corner encouraged him to speak.

“The entire world saw my insides.” He looked at the twinkly lights and took his time telling the story. “They took a picture of us through a windshield, you know, after the er, date with June. They took another through my bedroom window, but it was grainy. They didn’t publish it because it wasn’t enough to prove anything, but still. I haven’t opened my bedroom curtains since. It’s been rather dark in there.”

“They invaded your privacy,” Shanon said, understanding. “It was wrong, and it makes sense to feel vulnerable.”

“Yes, well. Then there’s our emails.” He stops and tries to take a deep breath. It doesn’t work.

She gives him some time before gently prompting, “Your emails?”

“Yes.” He was glad he got to tell her this himself and that she hadn’t read the news. It gave him back an ounce of control. “All of them. Every… every word. They were published and anybody in the world can read them. The things I said, I… That was for him. For us.”

“Wow.”

“It’s too much.” His throat was dry and his temples pounded. “It’s worse than feeling vulnerable… it was violating. Obscene.”

“Super violating, yeah. That’s a lot.”

“Indeed.”

“So, how do you feel about all of it?”

“I’m… er.” It’s odd how easy it is to spill every part of him into his writing, but as soon as he tries to talk, his stiff upper lip takes over, even with his therapist. He looked up at the feelings wheel poster on her wall to pick out some of the right words. “I feel… angry, apprehensive, overwhelmed, kind of helpless. Er… stupid for getting caught too, I suppose. Definitely experiencing some bursts of hysterical panic. I’ve been eating Jaffa cakes, and took a couple lorazepam, and Bea hasn’t left my side. So that helps.”

“Well yeah, this huge thing happened to you, completely out of your control and without your consent. Of course you’re overwhelmed.” She must know the gravity of the situation, because Henry very rarely used his ‘just in case’ benzodiazepines. “And you’re effectively using some of your coping mechanisms, so that’s admirable.”

“Thanks, yeah, I’m playing a lot of piano too.” Despite the list of negative feelings, Henry felt the corners of his lips twitch up. “Lots of Elton John.”

“You’re smiling,” she said, mirroring with a small smile of her own. “I know this smile. It’s an Alex smile, isn’t it?”

Henry actually laughed a little in response with a shrug in confirmation. His shoulders relaxed a miniscule amount. She knew him so well.

“So you’re scared and overwhelmed and angry, but what else are you feeling?”

“You see, that’s the thing. I also feel absolutely amazing.”

“Amazing! Tell me more.”

“I’m, well… I’m free. It’s exactly like Bea said, they already know everything, so I don’t have to hide anything. I kissed Alex in front of people! And I introduced him to my mom. As my boyfriend.”

“That’s amazing!”

“Shanon, it’s… I haven’t faked a smile in days.”

They sit there, just grinning at each other. That shortness of breath? Sure, it was the crippling anxiety of his secrets laid bare. But it was also the sweet flutterings of lovesickness, clear as day.

“In some ways,” Shanon said, “this is the happiest I’ve ever seen you.”

“I think you’re right. I’m...” He was positively giddy and he shrugged again letting his thoughts be nonlinear. “Well. There’s also the public support. You know I hate the spotlight, but, well. I’ve never felt so… like England loves me.”

“Your country matters to you.”

“Well, yes.” He nodded. “And I always thought the only way I could be their Prince and fulfill my duty was to be what Philip and the queen wanted. But now I don’t think that was ever my duty at all. See, I try to avoid social media because it’s all too much. Way too much. But Bea keeps showing me anecdotal stories of how I’ve helped people come out. Poor, rural teens. It feels good.

“You see, I could go to pride this year, and wear a bloody rainbow cape. I can tell everyone that my dog is named after Bowie. I could geek out about queer history -to the press! And that picture they dug up of me from uni? I looked so gay and I was embarassed and hid it, but now I’m thinking… I can look like that if I want. Hell, I could wear eyeliner if I wanted! I mean, I won’t, obviously. But the point stands.”

“That’s really exciting.”

“Yeah. It is. And bizarre. See, also, I had completely forgotten about Lord Ivar Mountbatten, my third or fourth cousin, once or twice removed? He married his husband a couple years ago and he called me yesterday,” he continued. “He’s not, like, an heir, and most people don’t know who he is, but you know. He called and it made me realise, even though this is a huge deal, even though we’re putting a dent in history, it also isn’t so big of a deal, is it?”

“Two seemingly contradictory things can be true,” Shanon agreed.

“I know,” he nodded, remembering the basics of dialectical behavioral therapy. “Like, it’s empowering to be dealing with everything on my own for once, but I also just wish I was with Alex again. I can’t seem to breathe when he’s so far away.”

She hummed, nodding.

“I’m trying to put it all together, set up the formal courting thing, adjust to mum’s new found investment in my wellbeing… it’s a lot.”

“It sounds like you’ve been really brave, deciding to come back to England alone to take care of everything,” Shanon told him. “But it’s really hard and I can tell you’re holding a lot of tension in your body. Being outed like this… it’s traumatic.”

Henry looked at his shaking hands. He hadn’t thought of it that way, but he knew she was right. “I just… we wanted to do it on our terms. Like we talked about. And now I just, I haven’t slept in days. I just feel all of the feelings and my brain won’t shut up.”

“I know,” Shanon said, voice full of compassion. “Would you like me to guide you through a body scan meditation? Then perhaps we can set some specific goals and action steps, once you’re de-escalated a bit.”

Henry agreed. His parasympathetic nervous system could use a little wind down. So she led him through a meditation and his body relaxed. After that they were able to walk through how he would relate to his mum, to the press, and to his new future. They talked about how much he loved Alex. And Bea, Pez, June, and Nora. How he was proud to be able to tackle the royals on his own, and how he was so grateful to have his support system. By the end of the session Henry’s shoulders hung heavy, and his breath deepened and slowed.

“Thanks, I’ll see you next week,” he said as he left the office.

“I’ll see you next week, Henry.” They shook hands as usual. “You got this.”

He nodded, believing her. On his way out to the car he snapped an exhausted selfie to Alex with the caption: ‘You got this.’

Within seconds Alex responded with an equally frazzled smile. ‘Love you.’

So, his steps were long and the autumn air did not spook him with it's implications of their very public future. His world had exploded and now the dust was settling around him. He would wear it like glitter.

And maybe he’d take a nap.

#first prince #ao3feed #rwrb #red white and royal blue #fanfiction

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steves-on-a-plane · 4 years

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Halloween PJs

For @thefanficfaerie‘s OTP Challenge (2020) Words: 847 Pairing: Tony Stark x Reader Prompt: Spooktacular Halloween: Day 2 - Halloween PJs Summary: Reader’s first big Amazon order of the holiday season has arrived and she needs Tony’s help to bring everything inside. While they’re unpacking, she finds the box full of matching PJs she ordered for them. One outfit in particular makes Tony incredibly excited.

“Tony! bAbY?” You called for your husband through the house. There was a large package on the front door, but you needed his help to being it inside. “Hey J, where’s Tony?” You asked JARVIS.

“It seems he’s upstairs sleeping, Mrs. Stark.” JARVIS told you. You opened the front door and looked down at the large pile of Amazon packages that currently littered your porch. You wondered if it was worth trying to wake Tony or if you should just bring the packages in yourself. Tony was probably napping because he’d been up late playing in his lab the night before. You decided you needed his help after all. He could go back to napping later.

“Hey there, Beautiful!” Tony smiled when he awoke to you sitting next to him. “Come to join me?” He tugged at your waist trying to get you to lay down with him.

“Actually, I came up because I need help.” You laughed. “Some of that stuff I ordered came in and I need help carrying the packages inside.”

“Can we just stay here and snuggle instead?” He complained, kissing your neck.

“It’s supposed to rain tomorrow,” You giggled as his lips brushed your skin. “I don’t want to leave the stuff out there overnight.”

“Alright, alright.” He complained, letting go of you. Tony tossed the covers off himself and got out of bed. “Did you order me any snacks at least?”

“You’ll just have to see once we open up the boxes, won’t you?” You said as you followed him out of the bedroom. The two of you made your way downstairs and to the front door.

“Sweetheart,” Tony called over his shoulder to you when he saw the small mountain of packages out on the porch. “Did you leave anything at the Amazon Warehouse for anyone else to order?”

“Oh please, it’s not that much.” You laughed. “Start carrying, Baby. I’m the architect of this whole thing, that makes you the muscle.”

“This is the first time in my life I’ve been the brawn instead of the brains.” He pointed out, already reaching for one of the biggest boxes.

Once everything was inside the front hall, you sat down on the floor and invited Tony to do the same. Generally, Tony considered himself a man above sitting on the floor. I mean who was he, Clint or Bucky? But he always wanted to see what you were spending your exorbitant Halloween budget on, so he pilfered a cushion from the couch and placed it between himself and the floor.

Armed with the sharpest steak knife from the kitchen, you started cutting into the packages like a kid at Christmas. The first box you opened was a pair of skeleton lawn flamingos. The second was a three-foot-tall animated spider that tapped its toes when it sensed motion. There was an ample supply of faux spiderwebs and rubber bats. (You had a lot of house to cover.)

“Uh, where are you planning on putting this?” Tony held up a decorative rug that he’d just removed from a box near him. It was brown and designed to look like the Handbook for the Deceased from Beetlejuice.

“Oh, right here in this room. Right when people walk in the front door. Isn’t it neat?” You asked.

“You know?” Tony took another look at the rug in his hands. “I kind of like it.” He nodded. “It will fit better in here without all these boxes though.”

“Ha, ha.” You laughed sarcastically. “This is the box I was looking for!”

It was no secret that you and Tony with the Queen and King of the socializing. You always threw big bashes during all the major holidays, and in between you were known to host smaller gathering here and there. So, in preparation for the inevitable movie nights and pumpkin carvings, you ordered a few sets of festive pajamas for you and Tony.

There was a matching set of onesies that looked like Skeletons. A pair of white pants with black bats printed on them. These pants had a coordinating top with a larger bat and the words “Let’s Hang” Printed on the front. The Box had a costume onesie in Tony’s size that looked like a dinosaur and a costume onesie in your size that looked like a shark.

“Did you order us matching halloween pajamas?” Tony asked when you showed him the contents of the box.

“Yes, I know it’s not exactly your thing, I mean it’s really domestic and…” You began to apologize.

“And I love it!” He interrupted you. “I want to wear that dinosaur outfit like yesterday! Give it here!” He insisted impatiently. You handed it over, enjoying how joyful he looked. “It’s so soft!” he exclaimed. “How soon can we have someone over, so I have an excuse to use this?”

“We could set up a movie night on Friday.” You suggested.

“Great idea! I’ll start texting the team right now!” Tony jumped up from his seat on the floor and bolted from the room to look for his phone.

#Tony Stark #Tony Stark FF #Tony Stark Fan Fic #Tony Stark Fan Fiction #Tony Stark Reader Insert #Tony Stark x Reader #Halloween #Halloween 2020 #OTP Challenege #OTP Challenge 2020

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strawberrysoup · 4 years

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Let’s Review || Chapter 10

Peter Parker knew that his big sister would do anything for him to be safe and happy. She’d given up everything for him twice over already and would do it again in a heartbeat. And that’s why, when the criminal mastermind Tony Stark started inextricably following him around, he didn’t say a word. Because he knew without a doubt Penny would do whatever she had to if it meant keeping Peter safe. He had to protect her, just like she always protected him. He never considered what would happen if Stark decided both Parker siblings were worth taking. Never considered who else in Stark’s inner circle would agree. He just wanted to protect her and yet somehow, they both ended up with needles in their necks.

relationship: Steve Rogers/Original Female Character/Bucky Barnes, background Peter Parker/Tony Stark rating: Explicit/18+ warnings: Dark Steve Rogers, Dark Bucky Barnes, Dark Tony Stark, Dark Avengers, kidnapping, non-con/dub-con elements, underage Peter Parker, emotional and psychological abuse, very dark

Penny never had difficulty sleeping. She was exhausted 90% of the time, between three jobs and everything that went into raising Peter, and could take a nap whenever the opportunity arose. It was a joke amongst all of her coworkers, that if you gave Penny an idle 10 minutes, she'd find a place to curl up and nap. She could sleep 16 hours straight happily if given the chance.

Insomnia wasn't a part of her life. It was why finding herself unable to sleep was shocking to her entire system. The day of her punishment she took a nap and that was the last time she slept more than an hour at a time for the next three days. She wasn't sure if it was the fear and anxiety or the stress or any other combination of things, but she simply couldn't sleep.

She didn't know if her kidnappers had noticed, strangely enough. They watched her constantly, tracking her movements and making notes of her habits, but never mentioned her sleep patterns. Or her eating patterns, for that matter.

When Steve got up in the mornings, she waited about half an hour before getting out of bed herself. While he went for a workout, she pulled all of the curtains back from the floor to ceiling windows in the living room and laid on the floor in the sunshine. It was the only time she really slept soundly for longer than 20 or 30 minutes. By the third day, when she got up and went into the living room, the curtains had already been pulled back and the couch cushions were arranged like a pallet on the floor where she usually lay. An apple, which she had a tendency to grab in the mornings to hold her over until breakfast because half the time the only kosher food in the kitchen was fruit or vegetables, was already washed and cut and set on the coffee table.

They never said anything about what she ate, even when Bucky made large, intricate meals and she avoided most of it. The first night he made spaghetti and meatballs with a side salad and she'd only eaten the salad. The second night had been pork chops and pasta salad— she'd dug out the last of the salad from the previous meal and a bit of the pasta before realizing there was bacon in it. Honestly she was starving, there was hardly anything kosher in the apartment and she was living off vegetables.

Her captors were strange dudes. Sometimes they seemed chivalrous to a fault, set in some sort of bizarre gender stereotype; they would never sit before she did or start eating until she took her first bite. But Steve didn't like when she cursed or rolled her eyes and Bucky told her smoking wasn't ladylike when she asked for cigarettes. There was a weird dichotomy where they desperately wanted her to be happy in her imprisonment but simultaneously wanted to micromanage her behavior.

After the fourth near sleepless night, she’d once again retreated to the living room once she was sure Steve had left. The spot in front of the windows was comforting for some reason, the warmth of the sun was encompassing like a hug but didn’t require touch. It felt safer than anywhere else in the apartment.

She slept for at least an hour and only woke up to the sound of JARVIS playing a chime every few seconds, the noise slowly increasing in volume. As she blinked, slightly disoriented by the sound, and realized she was no longer laying on the cushions. At some point while she was asleep Bucky had managed to wedge his way beneath her, leaving her to lie on his chest. His arms were raised on either side of her head like he was holding something over her and the top of her head brushed his chin.

At that point, her body didn’t even bother to instinctually tense. Even after such a short period of time, the panic response had lost its grip in the face of resentful acceptance.

“Good morning, doll,” Bucky’s voice was a rumble beneath her more than a sound and she heard a page turning above her, “I can see why you like to lay here.”

Penny didn’t bother answering, tired eyes tracking his movements as he lowered his arms and put a book on the floor. He didn’t look tired at all with his hair carefully pulled back into an artfully messy bun, fully dressed despite the fact that it couldn’t have been past 7 am. It was unfair how attractive they were, considering the position they had put her in. She’d never even considered a man bun atttractive before for fucks’ sake. After a short moment, his hands came back up to cup her face.

Knowing the kiss was coming didn’t make it any easier to process or mentally prepare for. She didn’t want him to, it was disgusting, how dare he kiss her— but it was also so nice. Bucky was a really good kisser, both of the soldiers were, and it sent tingles down her sprine every time. The warmth from the sunshine was amplified by the feeling until it seeped into her veins and rendered her boneless against him.

“Really good morning,” Bucky smiled against her lips, brushing his nose against hers as he pulled away enough to look at her, “Steve’s gonna be out of the shower in a few and we’ll head up to breakfast. Go get dressed.”

Penny nodded in response, dazed, and let him pick her up and set her to the side of the pallet where it was easier to stand. The bedroom was still mostly dark, the heavy curtains drawn and the only light coming from the partially open bathroom door. The shower was running and she could hear Steve moving around as she walked to the dresser.

There was a drawer dedicated to the softest clothing they’d purchased for Penny and she was especially taken with the shirts in it. They felt like ultra thin, soft cotton but were actually rather thick and warm. She pulled out a black one with long sleeves and traded it for the t-shirt she’d slept in. The same pair of jeans she’d worn the previous day followed and she tugged off her socks, prefering to go barefoot just because she could tell it bothered Steve.

She stepped past the blond in question just as he came out of the bathroom, pretending not to notice the once over he gave her. The assholes weren’t exactly subtle, probably didn’t see the need to be. Bucky was waiting by the elevators when she walked into the living room, motioning over with the metal hand.

It had been days but she still hadn’t gotten up the courage to ask about the arm. Steve and Bucky both treated it like a completely normal arm, as if it wasn’t a super strong and incredibly high tech prosthetic, and she was afraid to mention it. Instead she tried to make sure she didn’t look at it for too long, or hesitate when he touched her with it just in case it made him angry.

“Ready for breakfast baby?” He wrapped the arm around her shoulders and tugged her into his chest, ducking his head down to kiss her cheek.

“Yeah,” Penny murmured, eyes tracking Steve as he also left the bedroom and crossed the room, kissing them each soundly before calling JARVIS to bring the elevator.

Penny had forced herself to become comfortable with any display of affection that came directly before getting to see Peter, just in case they decided to throw a hissy fit at her rejection and refuse to take her to breakfast. Despite the fact that she'd been promised she could see her brother multiple times a day, it had been limited to breakfast. She asked at least 20 times a day, can I see Peter now? I want to see Peter. I want to see my brother. They brushed her off every time, made some sort of excuse.

It was part of their plan to make the siblings 'adapt' to their new lives. Penny could read between the lines and knew they didn't want them together too often to avoid any plotting. If they couldn't communicate enough to make an escape plan, they probably wouldn't try. It made sense, the clever bastards, but not being able to see her brother was wearing her down. Combined with the lack of sleep, she was beginning to feel more and more distraught.

JARVIS was a small, unexpected saving grace. She wasn't sure why, but the AI would give her updates on Peter if she asked. Is Peter okay? Yes, Ms. Parker, he is currently in the lab. Is Peter okay? Yes, Ms. Parker, he is taking a nap at the moment. Is Peter okay? Yes, Ms. Parker, he is watching the original Star Wars trilogy.

As they rode in the elevator up a few levels to what she'd come to realize was Stark's floor, she could see a very small red light in the upper corner. JARVIS was always watching, monitoring things like heart rate and temperature. He understood Hebrew if she spoke in it and would answer in kind, giving her a sort of privacy from the men boxing in her. The AI wasn't on her side per say, but the little things he did helped keep her from going crazy.

When the doors opened, Penny didn't wait for the men to move before she began on her way to the kitchen. She would sit in a chair, despite the incredible amounts of pain it caused after her punishment, but would be transferred to someone's lap almost immediately. Likely Bucky, since they seemed to take turns and Steve had held her yesterday. They wanted to hold her and feed her. It restricted her movements, kept her farther from Peter, and drove her batshit insane.

She quickly sat in the chair closest to her brother, forcing herself not to wince in pain and reached out for his hand. Peter was coping much better than she was, it was plain on his face and otherwise in his appearance. He didn't look happy necessarily, but he was sleeping and eating regularly. There was no visible cringe when Stark touched him, which she assumed meant the man hadn't hurt him.

Penny had been considering for days what she would do if she walked into the kitchen one morning and found Peter injured. She was about .02 seconds from losing it at any second as it was, if she ever suspected Peter was hurt she would go ape shit. The goal would be to take Stark out as efficiently as possible— she'd likely only have one chance. She was pretty sure shoving a fork through his eye would be as effective as anything else.

"You know, you get a very particular look on your face when you're considering killing me."

Penny looked away from Peter just in time to see Stark before he swept her up out of her chair and sat down with her in his lap. Being as small as she was, it made manhandling her pretty easy in comparison to say, Peter, who despite being skinny was tall and ungainly to lift and carry around.

"Tony," Bucky sounded displeased but Stark waved him off.

"My turn Winter Wizard," the older man snarked, tugging her snugly back against the line of his chest, "I love Penny too."

Love. Stark didn't love Penny. She was half convinced he didn't even understand the concept, had it so thoroughly confused with obsession that he couldn't comprehend what love was. Love was selfless and unconditional, it was supposed to bring joy and comfort. Nothing about Stark's actions were any of those things, didn't provide a feeling of happiness and safety. Sitting in his lap was like sitting on a live landmine.

"What're your plans for today sweetheart? Peter wants to spend some time in the lab with Bruce— honestly I think he likes biology more than engineering, can you believe that?"

Penny didn't answer, watching from the corner of her eye as Steve and Bucky sat down in the chairs around them. Steve sat opposite of Peter at the head of the table while Bucky took a seat to the teenager’s right, across from Penny and Stark. There was another comprehensive breakfast spread across the table, a quiche, pancakes, scrambled eggs with cheese and ham, fresh fruit, sausage and bacon.

Every time they loaded plates for her, Penny found herself turning her nose up at at least half of it. She was pretty sure they were unaware that the siblings were Jewish, either that or they were too stupid to realize there were dietary restrictions involved in the religion. Peter was more lax than Penny, he didn't remember their parents as much and aunt May and uncle Ben hadn't been religious, but she still ate kosher about 75% of the time. Plus, most kosher foods just felt more ethical and humane.

Not that the mother fuckers who'd kidnapped them had any idea what it meant to be ethical. Or humane for that matter.

"Penny, words," it wasn’t an order necessarily but she'd come to realize over the few days she had been in the tower that Steve's tone left no room for disobedience.

"I don’t have any plans," she tried not to overtly grit her teeth in irritation.

Any other day she'd be at the daycare until 1ish, taking care of the babies. After that she'd go to her barista job and after that, she went to the grocery store to stock shelves over night. Penny didn't have downtime, she didn't have hobbies, she didn't do anything during the day other than work. Maybe that's why she wasn't sleeping at all; she wasn't doing anything. Certainly not half as much as usual.

"Well, what would you like to do? What do you do for fun?"

Simmering anger began to build under Penny's skin but before she could answer (and potentially get herself into trouble), Peter jumped in, "Penny used to knit. And you liked gardening, right? When we lived in the house you had all those plants and the garden out back."

"Ma's garden," Penny twitched her nose, the movement preventing a facial expression from settling and giving away her emotions— she tried not to think of the garden, or the house they'd lived in before the accident, it made her too sad.

"Bite, sweetheart," Tony directed when she went quiet, refusing to elaborate.

The food on the fork was a piece of the quiche, something with spinach and cheese and bacon, and Penny shook her head. The bacon was bad enough, but putting dairy with it as well was too much for her to stomach. Stark hesitated for a moment before sighing heavily and putting the fork down, forcing Penny to turn slightly in his lap to face him.

"You have to eat, sweetheart," he looked just a shade short of irritated and a thrill ran through her, a mix of fear that he might hurt her if he got mad enough combined with dark satisfaction that her actions were having an effect on him even if unintentionally, "you're too skinny as it is and you can't keep refusing food."

"I won't eat it," she stated quietly, resolution in her tone.

The only things on the table she would truly be willing to eat were the fruits and the pancakes. The quiche had cheese and bacon, the eggs had cheese and ham, and the individual meats were pork. For some reason, the bites of food she wanted were few and far between compared to the dishes she couldn't eat.

"It's not an option baby," Bucky's voice was soft and imploring.

Irritation climbed up her throat. She wasn’t on a hunger strike, she wasn’t being difficult. They were the ones who'd snatched her up against her will without considering her needs and wants. They were the ones at fault and fuck if she was going to—

"That's not kosher," Peter quickly pointed to the quiche, followed by the scramble, "that's not either. The pancakes might not be either depending on the eggs. Penny will eat the fruit."

"You guys eat kosher?" Bucky and Steve both looked startled and she'd bet Tony did too.

She didn't realise they were all considering what they knew about Peter; Tony had taken the boy out to eat multiple times in the months before bringing the siblings to the tower and there'd never been any sign of a special diet. They were Jewish, yes, but Tony could clearly remember the teenager eating bacon cheeseburgers and shrimp alfredo.

"I don't but Penny does."

Since they'd brought her into the apartment, the soldiers hadn't paid too much attention to what she ate. Salads mostly, pasta. They hadn't focused on what she was eating, just the quantity of what she ate.

"Ms. Parker regularly checks with me before consuming anything," JARVIS announced to the silent room.

Maybe part of the reason Penny wasn't sleeping was because she was hungry. Honestly she was always sort of hungry, Peter having plenty to eat was more important than her eating regularly, but she'd been really hungry over the past few days.

"Penny why didn't you say anything?" Steve looked stricken and Bucky's face was ashen; he'd even talked to Wanda about kosher foods before they'd assumed the Parker's didn't eat a specific diet.

"Why didn't I tell my kidnappers that I follow a religious diet? I wonder."

The words were scathing and spoken with a hiss of disdain that had their shoulders raising automatically. Bucky and Steve both shrunk back slightly and Stark went still behind her. She even managed to get out of his arms without a fight, standing up and heading for the elevator without hesitation.

"...Penny?"

"I'm going to take a shower, leave me alone!"

She was so angry and fucking exhausted and hungry. Irrationally, it felt like storming off after having an argument with family instead of the true life villains she was surrounded by. She felt like a teenager storming off after fighting with her parents. Shockingly, they really let her go. The elevator doors opened and closed for her, even though she was alone.

"Shall I bring you to your apartment Ms. Parker?"

"It's not like I can go anywhere else," her voice was tearful and she bit the inside of her cheek, refusing to cry.

But instead of moving, the elevator stayed still for an abnormal amount of time. She assumed JARVIS was waiting for the soldiers to arrive.

"Perhaps you would like to go to the kitchens, miss?"

"The kitchens?"

"Yes miss, I've spoken to one of the chefs who is more than happy to make all necessary adjustments to the kitchen to facilitate a kosher diet. New equipment is being brought in to prevent cross contamination and an order was sent to the runners for kosher foods which should arrive in less than an hour. In the meantime, Chef Cohen is gathering the necessities to make a kosher breakfast from what is currently on hand."

Penny immediately burst into tears against her will, entirely overwhelmed. The tower was a goddamn nightmare, she was trapped and more often than not separated from her brother, but JARVIS was slowly becoming one of her favourite people (even if he wasn't really a person) in the world. Because JARVIS talked to her in Hebrew and told her about Peter when she asked and helped her figure out what she could eat and played movies on the wall all night while she was stuck in bed.

He couldn't help her escape, he was a computer program at the mercy of his protocols, but he did more for her than anyone else.

"Yes please JARVIS," Penny managed to get out through her tears, pressing her palms against her eyes gently, "thank you JARVIS."

"You are most welcome Ms. Parker, your happiness is my priority."

"It is?"

"My protocol is to make sure Mr. Parker and Master Stark are happy. In order to do so, I must make sure you are happy miss."

Penny wasn't smart. She didn't have a high IQ, never finished college, would never qualify for anything more than a dead end job. But she was good at reading between the lines. Finding unconventional solutions to problems was a skill of hers. JARVIS might not be able to intentionally help her escape, but he might help her on accident without even realizing it.

It wasn't a plan, not yet, but it was a tool in her arsenal she never expected to have. And she would use it to her advantage as soon as possible.

"Sir, Ms. Parker is currently on her way down to the kitchens were Chef Cohen is preparing a kosher meal. He has also compiled a comprehensive list of kosher foods to be kept in the kitchen at all times."

"He made a list? Why didn't you do it J?"

"He's Jewish," Peter answered before JARVIS had a chance, shrinking back slightly when three pairs of eyes leveled on him suddenly.

"Have you met him? He shouldn't have come up to this floor."

Sometimes Peter forgot that gentiles didn't recognize Jewish surnames, "he… didn't. His last name is Cohen. That's one of the most Jewish names I can think of."

He couldn't be sure, there was a high chance that Peter was hallucinating, but it was possible that Tony Stark was blushing. Like, it was possible but Peter was pretty sure his eyes must've been playing tricks on him. Tony made him blush a million times a day, it was never the other way around. A small thrill ran through him, had he made Tony turn red?

"Peter, is there anything else like this that we should know?"

Steve's voice drew him out of his reverie and Peter directed his attention at the blond, "like what?"

"Like things Penny doesn't like, or will upset her?"

Peter nodded in understanding, "like abducting her and keeping her against her will?"

"Peter!" Tony was trying to admonish him but his tone was full of laughter.

Bucky leveled the teenager with a vaguely amused expression, "Tony was the one who kidnapped her."

"Yeah but she hated him on principle before that, you guys she learned to hate."

"Okay, moving on," Tony waved his hand dismissively before the soldier could respond, "J, let Cohen know he's officially Penny's personal chef. I want him available any time she's hungry, any time she wants a snack. I'll up his pay, but if Penny gets up at 3am and wants some ridiculously complicated meal, he'll be dragging his ass out of bed to make it."

"Understood sir."

Bucky absently stared towards the doorway Penny had disappeared through, "I could figure out kosher cooking."

"Let the professionals handle it, Bucky Bear," Tony snorted slightly before turning his attention to Peter, "is she allergic to anything?"

"I'm not sure, we think she had an allergic reaction to something a while back she never went to the doctor or anything," Peter took a huge bite of his pancakes.

"She hasn't been to the doctor in a long time has she?" Bucky frowned, considering the implications.

"Or the dentist," Peter nodded.

"We'll have Bruce do a complete work up, just to be safe. We’ll get dentist in here too. J?"

"Dr. Banner would be happy to see Penny anytime today and I am sending a request to your own dentist sir."

"Tell Bruce we'll head his way once Penny finishes eating," Steve had a tendency to look up at the ceiling occasionally when speaking to JARVIS despite knowing he wasn't up there, "will you let us know once she's done? I want to give her some time to calm down."

"Once she has finished her meal I will direct her Dr. Banner's lab—"

"J, you'll tell them when," Tony ordered, quickly noticing the way his AI tried to steer his words, "the soldiers will accompany her. Going down to the kitchen by herself was a stretch, she can't be wandering around unattended this soon."

"She was hungry, sir."

Steve and Bucky exchanged a glance; the AI sounded defensive but there was a derisive tone to him as well, aimed at the soldiers. They were the ones supposed to be taking care of Penny and yet she was hungry. JARVIS was unimpressed with them and had a surprisingly strong attachment to Penny after such a short time.

"Yeah, yeah, J, just let them know a few minutes before she's done eating," Tony turned his attention to Peter, "baby, why don't you go take a shower before we head to the lab?"

Peter felt his eyebrows furrow in confusion. Usually, showering before going to the lab was sort of a waste. They'd get sweaty and gross by the end of it and need another shower anyway. He hoped he wasn't blushing— usually Tony took a long bath with him when they were done in the lab.

"We're still gonna take a bath together baby, don't look so sad," the salacious look on the older man's face had Peter quickly darting to his feet, face on fire as he ran off.

Tony waited until the teenager was out of earshot to turn a very dark look on the soldiers, "wanna explain how the fuck you haven't known for two full fucking days that Penny won't eat anything that's not kosher?"

"Tony—"

"No, actually," he waved his hand before Steve could finish speaking, "I don't care what you have to say. You're going to listen."

He wasn't older in literal years, but Tony's consciousness was older than the soldiers' and in that moment he felt those years. He stood from the table, coffee mug in hand and took a few steps towards the counter. In general, Tony considered his friend’s to be his family. They were important to him, he wanted them to be happy and healthy and cared for. But Peter was his world and because of that, Penny was too. Her happiness usurped theirs.

“I gave you both the opportunity to take Penny, the way I took Peter,” he took a sip of coffee, tapping his fingers against the expensive marble countertop, “I knew from the way you talked about her, that you loved her the way I love Peter. But I didn’t want to. Honestly, I wanted to keep her tucked away where I can keep her safe and happy. I knew I could do a better job than you, but I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Tony dumped his coffee into the sink, setting the mug in after and running some water into it. Around 10am a housekeeper would come in a clean up after breakfast, leaving the dishes that lived in the house and taking the rest down to the kitchens. He liked to keep everything as spotless as possible because his brain was a pretty big disaster at the best of times and clutter didn’t help.

“You’re very quickly losing it,” he held his hand up when Steve went to speak, “shut up, I don’t want to hear it. Right now you’re listening. This is strike one. Penny is upset and she’s been hungry for the last two full days. Somehow, despite being around her constantly, you didn’t realize that. You better figure out what else you’re not realizing because if I feel like Penny isn’t thriving, I’m going to take her back whether you like it or not.”

#steve rogers x oc x bucky barnes #steve rogers x oc #bucky barnes x oc #dark!steve rogers #dark!bucky barnes #dark!tony stark #dark!mcu #let's review #let's review chapter 10

156 notes · View notes

rekutopia · 4 years

Text

In which Shirayuki met Obi's assistant

A part of the Flatmate AU

“I’m going to install the cabinet today,” Obi suddenly said as he arranged their used plates and mugs into the dishwasher.

“It’s about time we do it – the empty space is slowly getting on my nerves.” Shirayuki placed the half loaf of bread back into the bread box and glanced at the clock. It was already a little after ten. “But then you’ll need to hurry. You only have three hours until the quiet hours. Or do you plan to do it in the afternoon?”

She heard Obi snort and she rolled her eyes. Quiet hours. It was one of those typical things in this country which took Obi a while to get used to. She could understand why, though. Surely there are people who want to take an undisturbed nap after lunch on a Sunday, but sometimes it limits other people’s time to do things in their homes, like playing music, or installing kitchen cabinets. Especially when they only have Sunday to do these stuff.

“Nah, I’ll do it in a bit. Won’t take that long. Besides, I’ll have an assistant,” Obi said, smirking.

Shirayuki frowned. This was unlike Obi. Usually he would have told her days before if he needed her help. “I can’t be your assistant, Obi. I’ve already promised Yuzuri to accompany her to this coffee exhibition, remember? Unless you could wait until I’m back? I can’t tell you for sure when I’ll be back, though...”

Obi chuckled, “Of course I remember, sweetie. Don’t worry, it’s–”

Just then the building’s doorbell rang. Obi grinned at Shirayuki. “I’ll get it. That should be my assistant.”

Shirayuki watched as Obi slammed the dishwasher’s door closed and trotted to the front door. He pressed the buzzer to let the person in and waited until they arrived at their floor. Who could that be, Shirayuki wondered. Obi rarely talked about his friends, other than Suzu. And even then, it was always in a work context. She wondered whether they were even friends outside of work. Creeping to the corridor Shirayuki hid herself behind the wall and peeked around the corner, just as the door opened.

“Right on time, Aki-chan!”

“Hi, Obi.”

Shirayuki’s eyes widened. The assistant was a big guy, half a head taller than Obi, muscular and proud of it, judging from the tight tee he was wearing. A second later he was pulling Obi into a tight embrace, his platinum blonde hair a stark contrast to Obi’s dark one. His face was beautifully carved, with a high nose bridge and thick, hard angled eyebrows. His eyes were closed and a huge smile was on his lips, showing a row of pearly white teeth.

Oh wow.

Obi’s chuckle brought her back from her fascination. “Why are you hiding, sweetie? C’mere. This is my friend Aki-chan. Aki-chan, meet my flatmate, Shirayuki.”

“Nice to finally meet you, Shirayuki,” the guy shook her hand excitedly. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

A pity I can’t say the same about you, Shirayuki thought. “Nice to meet you, uh, Aki...chan?”

The guy laughed. Even that sounded infuriatingly charming. The corner of his eyes crinkled as he continued to smile at Shirayuki. “You can just call me Aki. It’s embarrassing enough that Obi uses ‘-chan’ on me. I mean, it’s not that I look like a little Japanese girl, right?”

“U-um…”

Obi slung his arm around his friend’s shoulder. “Aww, come on, Aki-chan. It’s cute, and you’re cute!” He poked Aki’s cheek playfully and Aki pretended to bite his finger. “Besides, ‘Aki’ is also a Japanese name, so, why not?”

Shirayuki suddenly felt out of place in front of the two guys bantering about proper use of names and name ender, like a third wheel on a date, though this wasn’t one. Or wasn’t it? In any case, Shirayuki could do without watching her flatmate flirting with a hot hunk and started to head back to the living area. She had to get ready to meet Yuzuri anyway. She almost managed to escape to the bathroom when a hand on her arm stopped her.

“Whoa there, young lady.” Obi was scowling at her. “I wasn’t sure this morning but now I see it clearly. What’s wrong with your feet?”

Damn, she was found out. She had been hoping that Obi wouldn’t notice her slight limping. The pain had started yesterday after work. She had been wearing ballerinas that day, on Yuzuri’s insistence.

Just what do you think you’re wearing?! This is your first lunch with him! You know how extremely little time Zen has! You can’t waste time going to your locker to change shoes! Just wear these today, they’re lady-like but don’t have heels so you should be fine!

But Shirayuki was not fine. Not at all. Apart from the numbing pressure she felt on her soles at the end of the day, intermittently there was a pricking pain at the base of her right big toe. She was assuring herself that the pain was only temporary and that it would go away after she cushioned her feet in her comfy sneakers today.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Just a bit of pain. It’ll go away soon.”

To her surprise, Aki stepped forward and squatted in front of her. He looked thoughtful as he eyed her bare feet. Shirayuki held back the urge to curl her toes and hide them from his scrutiny. “Have you been wearing too small shoes lately? Your skin looks raw in some places.” Then, to Shirayuki’s horror, Aki reached out his hand towards her and she took a step back in reflex.

“Really, it looks worse than it actually is. Don’t worry about it.”

“Hmmm…” Aki stood up slowly, looking unconvinced. He threw a glance at Obi, then back at her. He jerked his thumb at Obi, raising his eyebrows. “You do know your flatmate does physio?”

Well, duh. It’s not like Shirayuki hadn’t considered asking Obi for help. But Obi deserved his rest. She just couldn’t let him work 6 days a week and have her as an additional patient on a Sunday. Besides, she wouldn’t know how to feel if he said no. Hell, she wouldn’t know how to feel if he said yes. Shirayuki would never admit to anyone, not even to Yuzuri, that she sometimes dreamed of having Obi’s lovely fingers roaming over her body, caressing her tenderly, squeezing at the right places–

In any case, she was worried that things could turn awkward between them.

Before she could protest she heard Obi say, “Why didn’t you tell me, sweetie? I’d be happy to check it out for you.” Did she just imagine it or did he look slightly dejected?

“You’d better listen to him,” Aki said, rubbing it in. “And he’s really good at massages, right Obi?”

Shirayuki wanted to ask how he knew that. She was also curious whether it was common practice for Obi to give others treatment outside of work. But she couldn’t find the appropriate words without sounding so nosy, so she just sighed, resigning to her fate and promised Obi she would let him take care of her later.

*****

Seven hours later Shirayuki found herself laying on the couch with her right foot resting on Obi’s thigh. The door to the balcony was open, letting some breeze in. It would still take a while until the sun set, but at least the air had cooled down a little.

Obi’s fingers probed carefully, stretching her big toe away from the rest. His hands were so big they looked almost comical encircling her foot. From time to time he looked questioningly at her, searching for signs of discomfort.

Shirayuki hummed quietly, keeping a small, reassuring smile on her lips. She did feel a little embarrassed at the beginning – her feet being not her favourite body parts – but Obi’s pure professionalism put her at ease.

Her eyes wandered back and forth from Obi’s focused face to his clever fingers. She had never seen him in such a concentrated state before. She didn’t think it was possible for her flatmate to look even more attractive than usual, but today she was proved wrong.

Watching him work, Shirayuki wondered whether this was how Obi’s patients felt during their sessions. She wondered whether he would be that one talkative, flirty therapist everyone was fond of. She also wondered whether the way his long, slender fingers moved ever made any of them felt ...aroused. Just like how they made herself feel now–

A twinge in her chest jolted Shirayuki back from her musings. Where did that come from? She should stop being ridiculous. Obi is gay. The hot assistant from this morning was another proof.

She mentally shook her head and drew her attention back to Obi, who was lecturing her. Well, actually he was lecturing Yuzuri. He had been going at it for a while. Good for Yuzuri that she wasn’t here. He would have chewed her ear off.

“–sure she works more at the back office, but she’s your coworker! She should know how much time you spend on your feet! To let you run around in flats like that! In borrowed flats! You both may have the same size, but every person’s feet are different! Borrowing shoes should be made illegal! I can’t believe you did that! Thank goodness it was only for one day! One day was bad enough! You could’ve seriously injured yourself–”

His words were scolding but his tone was soft, worried. “Hey, are you even listening to me?” He ground his knuckles into the middle of her sole.

“Ow-ow-ow-ow! I’m listening! And for the last time, I’m sorry!”

Obi sighed. “Promise me you’ll never do such a stupid thing again? If you’re worried about wearing clogs to your future lunch dates I’ll get you a nice pair of Birkenstocks, okay? Those are closed shoes, so your prince would never ever see your cupcake print socks.”

Shirayuki flung a cushion at Obi’s head. “He’s not my prince! And it was just a lunch, not a lunch date. I've only known him for a little more than a week!”

Obi hummed, smirking and not at all convinced. Shirayuki desperately searched for a way out of the embarrassing conversation.

“A-anyway, I’ve been wondering. Is Aki a model?”

“Huh? Aki-chan?” Though he seemed surprised by the drastic change of subject, Obi decided to humour her. “Does he look like one to you?”

Shirayuki raised a brow. Doesn’t he look like one to you? “W-well, he’s very handsome, a-and very well built, just like those male models from the magazines, so I thought...”

“Heee…” Obi’s smirk grew wider. “And here I thought your type is more of a delicate, classy looking bocchan like your prince.”

Shirayuki gritted her teeth in frustration. This change of subject was not working well. To her mercy, Obi dropped his teasing, though not his smirk, and answered her question. “Believe it or not, Aki is also a physiotherapist. He works at that big health centre near the main station.”

Ah, a fellow physiotherapist. That explained his actions this morning, Shirayuki thought. “I see. And how did you two meet?”

Obi gently replaced her right foot with her left one on his thigh. “Let’s see...We met at that training I went to in January. We had to work in pairs and he was assigned to be my partner. It wasn’t long before we found out that we both speak English and immediately after that we kind of clicked. It turns out he’s also from here. So we’ve been staying in touch since then.”

“Oh, then you’ve known each other for quite a while.” Shirayuki wondered why Obi had never mentioned him to her before. Though she was burning with curiosity, Obi must have had his reasons, so she held back her questions. “Is that how he knows how good you are at massages?” she asked instead.

Obi shrugged. “He and I help each other sometimes. Being in the same profession we know the problem zones well, so it’s more or less for practical reasons.”

“He’s right, though. You are amazing.” Shirayuki winced and groaned as Obi put the right pressure on the right spot. When she looked up again she thought she saw a tint of pink blooming on Obi’s tanned cheeks. “Why, sweetie, you know it’s always a pleasure for me to satisfy all of my patient’s needs,” he gave her a wink. Shirayuki threw another cushion at him and he dodged, laughing.

Adjusting her position on the couch, Shirayuki thought about the new gained information. Now that she knew more about the hot assistant, there was only one more thing still nagging at the back of her mind.

“Say, do you often give treatments outside of work?”

Obi pursed his lips. “Nah, why should I work for free? I mean, I’d totally do it for a friend if they asked, like Aki–” His fingers suddenly stopped working and he gazed intently at Shirayuki. “Speaking of which, you haven’t told me the reason you didn’t come to me?”

Shirayuki cursed inside. That was an unexpected turn of the conversation. “I-I…” Think, Shirayuki, think! “...I didn’t want to bother you on a Sunday,” she settled for the safest answer she could think of. It was the truth anyway, at least one of them.

“Hmmm…” Obi tickled her sole and Shirayuki pulled her foot away with a yelp. When he turned to her his expression was kind. “Next time don’t hesitate to come to me, okay? Even if it’s on a Sunday. I’ll always have time for you.” Then his expression turned stern, “Though, I forbid you to come back with this kind of stupidity again, you hear me, young lady?”

Shirayuki gave him a mocking salute. “Yes, sir!”

“Good. I’ll go grab the salve for your chapped skin.”

Shirayuki watched Obi disappear into his room and then blew out a long breath. That was close. She hoped Obi believed her. It’s not like she could tell him she didn’t know how to handle getting turned on by the view of him massaging her feet. She patted both her cheeks firmly.

Better order that Birkenstock soon.

——————–

Notes:

I’m not participating in the ObiYukiMadness20. It’s just a coincidence that I’ve started writing again during this event. Basically I just want to write some ObiYuki domestic fluff.

In case any of you is wondering, Aki is American born Finn and is based on the Finnish model Otto Seppäläinen.

Coffee exhibition do exist.

Guess in which country this was set? :D

Big thanks to @claudeng80 for beta-reading <3

#myfanfic #akagami no shirayukihime #obiyuki #flatmate au

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blankdblank · 4 years

Text

Next Caller Pt 26

Sunrise brought with it the same slow stream of customers allowing the guys to watch your show on Thorin’s laptop propped on the end of the counter easily to enjoy and pause when groups arrived on the steady usuals each stealing glances at the old show surely sparking more to search for clips or even their own copies. Every so often they could catch hints of voices similar to those on the radio show subtly turning Dwalin and Balin’s heads among others who took notice of it as well.

“Is that the Adrianna?” Dwalin turned his head looking at the Hobbitess on the other side of it pointing at the laptop Thorin was leaned against a counter watching while finishing off his own cup of tea. “From the Bunny Show?”

Dwalin said, “Sounds like it doesn’t it. One of our friends is on the voice actor crew and she worked on that one as well.”

“What show is that?” She asked and copied down the title into her phone browser looking it up with a spreading smirk on her way out into the breeze she used to slide her way back to her car parked across the street after years of being used to the heavy winds this time of year.

Back to Thorin’s side Dwalin rumbled, “Told you she voiced Adrianna.” All Thorin did was chuckle to himself and that had Dwalin’s eyes narrowing at him wondering what he knew. Smirking at the thought he asked, “I heard you were made some soup and homemade bread.”

“She had bread, didn’t make it for me.”

“Still, you know what a home cooked meal alone means.”

“That was not the intention.”

“Still counts and you know it.” Only making Thorin rumble in the back of his throat sipping on his tea again.

Once his mug was empty he rumbled back, “Well she doesn’t.”

“One way to fix that,” Balin teased.

“Don’t you dare.” Thorin rumbled back making the pair chuckle.

In a trip just into your mailbox you decided to wait on it at the much heavier winds than the day before. Usually you had little mail but the daily check was becoming a sort of enjoyable trot back and forth with little to no results from the ritual. An alert on your phone however had you fetching your laptop to go and check on the Venture Publishing’s website, across the front of which sat the sketch turned ad for your book racking up comments on their board they had attached for that just flooding with the question of when the book would possibly be available. Though questions soon rippled around on how large it would be to fit all the epic scenes they had already heard in hopes of having it filled out even more. Hopes for a series were evident with more people demanding more sketches and even maps detailing hints and trips previously mentioned in the show groups had wished to mirror when summer break came.

Grinning to yourself you shut off the laptop at the sound of your doorbell. Hurrying to the door you could hear the delivery team on the other side of it who turned and grinned at you when you had opened the door. “Hi.”

“Hello,” they both replied, “Delivery for Miss Pear.” The taller one stated.

“Yes, that’s me,” you said and they split apart once you had signed the offered sheet on the clip board and passed it back again for the other pair who were lowering the heavy tree trunk desk on the metal platform from the back of the truck on a heavy duty cart. Through the gate they carefully wheeled it and all four helped it over the bottom lip of the door frame into the hall for a much easier albeit wandering path to your study where you moved the trunks aside and turned over your notepads. Gripping the desk they unwrapped they eased it off right where you wanted it and smirked in helping you lay out the mat underneath before your grin flinched a moment and you muttered, “Now I have to shop for chairs.”

In a groan you trudged out behind the chuckling four who went to load up the smaller tree like table that at how short it was you had settled into the atrium to hold your phone stand. Lastly was the davenport and stand you had settled along the wall in the parlor with no idea where you wanted it to go exactly just yet. Heavily thanking the men you said goodbye wishing them safe travels as they grinned saying to enjoy your furniture. Turning around you sighed and pulled out your phone getting to snap pictures of the trio of gifts you sent to Frerin with thanks for them.

Back to the stack of magazines you had left by your bed you curled up and got to digging again. An odd find, not an office chair per se, but a round chair similar to your round lounger in your study you drew a star next to and drew a copy of into the study sheet in your journal for your home and added to the itemized list of things to buy. With a ghost of a smirk you crossed off the two tables and davenport and felt a momentarily lift of weight at the few thousands taken off the list even after adding the new chair.

Smaller details were noted in new sketches as a sort of ‘find later’ list to discover if what you wanted was already sold by someone. Down to random pillows and possible trinkets ideas of what each room outside your already detailed guest rooms filled with lists of blankets and pillows you had purchased already crossed off above the bed sets, storage, tables, stools and minor touches. The shelves you had built already were crossed off and next would be a few dresser and shelf kits for the other rooms easily painted. Little by little it was coming together, at least in your mind, with paintings to be added for decorations you could handle yourself saving that hassle of finding the right ones later on.

Finally the winds died down and you went to the mailbox managing the trip only to find another delivery arriving that you had ordered full of self building kits for simple tables, shelving units, stools and nightstands for your guest rooms. More thanks and waves later you smirked bringing your journal out to cross each off while you completed assembling them. In the open garage you worked to the sound of the neighborhood around you with a few people milling around about their days stealing glimpses to try and figure out just what else you had been adding to your home. All the stools, both with hammer on cushions included and hidden storage cubes with the same additional easy kits already in the colors you wanted were added to their intended rooms. For the table above two storage cubes between two of the beds in the orange and blue room in the white you wanted it was added as well where it was intended.

Nightstands were next with each topped with post it notes to mark the colors needed and where they were all going. Payday was Monday and the new paint would have to wait until then. By dinner twenty kits were finished off and the cardboard sliced up into a neat pile you left by your rolling green trash can with barely a bag to add to it yet. With what little you could afford in your former apartment you really didn’t create much waste that couldn’t be reused in one way or another. More stew was made and you smirked crossing off more things from your list to complete or purchase. Post cleanup however you were back to your study making more notes to add to your notepads on the new book until bed.

Post shower in a fresh set of clothes you braided back your hair and stepped out your front door seeing Dwalin and Bilbo’s car there waiting for you. The wind was tolerable compared to most of the week and climbed in beside the napping toddler you settled listening in while the adorably hushed bickering of the couple had rose up again after a pleasant greeting for you. Out on the curb you stepped closing the door and sliding a little until Dwalin hurried around to use a hand guiding you to the door he unlocked to help you through before hurrying out leaving you a bit confused in his hop back into the car. And Thorin more so when he arrived next through the front door from parking behind the shop halfway lost in thought from a dream about his planting herbs in your greenhouse for his own little section of the gardening haven almost making him blush in seeing you.

Waving at the confused grump you said, “I think Dwalin’s dropping off Bilbo and Frodo.”

He nodded and got to readying the counter top and got to heating up your cider. “Sleep well?”

“Ya, got some more kits in yesterday, so put those together now I just have to paint the ones not the right color next week.”

“Why next week? Is it that big of a job?”

“No, just, Monday’s payday.” When his lips parted you pointed at him, “No. It’s a few days, keep that wallet of yours in your pants.”

“If you need help painting at least-,”

“Shouldn’t really need help, though most I can brush on, two would need to be spray painted for the coating that I want.”

Dwalin was back within a few moments and said, “Back,”

You grinned at him saying, “I can walk-,”

He swatted his hand in the air, “No you won’t. I knew by the time I got back Thorin would have gotten your drink ready for you.” He glanced between you asking, “Ready to go?” In accepting the mug you nodded and passed Thorin the bill he nearly gave back to you so you could put it towards your paint he didn’t want you to wait on. To Dwalin you were running late already and thankfully you had gotten there early to have the time to get up all the stairs. Leaning against the wall across from your booth you caught Mal’s panting entrance to the floor bringing her to plop down on the ground beside you.

“Looks like the lift repairs ran late.”

Wryly Mal let out a chuckle and replied, “Oh ya. Well they have five hours to fix it.”

“Well I’m not a fan either of sliding down stairs but things happen. I guess I’m used to it after the one in my old place being shut off when I got home from the hotel every night.”

She looked up at you, “No wonder your legs are amazing. 17 floors of stairs every night.”

You shrugged, “Had to get back to my birds somehow.”

“How are they?”

“Belly’s happy, loves Darling, Dot is settling I think, Kuu has more owl friends so he’s good, and the couple in the yard have three eggs and have said if their daughter and Kuu hit it off they would be leaving her with me since there are so many girls in their home. Even let me touch their eggs.”

“Wow, that’s huge.”

You nodded, “Yup, of course it’ll be at least a couple years by the time till their girl and Kuu would both be ready for nesting and such, so no telling how long they choose to stay, but they said they’d visit often. However often often is.” Making her giggle before you asked, “How was your night?”

“Just finishing off my costume. Parents get in today.”

“Ooh, they staying in a hotel?”

She chuckled again, “My place. Set up the air mattress for me and they get my bed.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Not really, hate that mattress, but Adad needs a better bed for his hip and shoulder, and Amad just prefers beds.”

“Sounds familiar,” you teased and your hand dipped to help her up at the sign off of the group before yours.

Durin the Deathless and Ents. That was what had the world buzzing. Against the hideout the Ents struck and flooded Holm’s lands sending him scurrying for his life in time for Durin the Deathless to swoop down in a shark shaped flying craft that lifted the culprit from the lands below and soar off to the unknown. Miles below however Bunny was still left in the hand of her savior Ent taking her off to who knows where while the Tibelt came up on an endless force they did not expect. All hope was almost lost until a shark ship came out of nowhere and to the Durins’ amusement his voice sounded eerily like their late Great Grandfather, who would have been eternally honored to have been the inspiration of their ancestor’s voice.

Out of his office Thorin walked hoping that after his lunch break he might be able to find some room to aid in the next round of refills only to have Balin’s hand settle in his head forcing him down out of sight. “Wh-,”

“Shh,” Using his legs Balin ushered him to the back hall out of sight of the customers when Thorin popped up only to hear, “Zeqbe. Go, now.”

Thorin, “I’m not hiding-,”

Balin replied, “No, you are buying tea for your Mafioso. You’ve been sighing about it all day and you should go now before you get into a mood before this weekend.”

Thorin, “Balin,”

“I am older than you and my foot is down, the Lass is probably bored out of her mind after work, you mentioned she needs paint,”

“She wants to buy her own paint.”

“Then bring her tea and maybe ask her to a film.” The last half of the sentence more of a gritted order making Thorin roll his eyes and grab his coat on his way to the tea shop listening to your show on the radio smirking proudly at how your story was turning. With another full basket of tea he pulled out his phone at the alert of someone using his gate code in the garage at his apartment. Across the screen of his phone he saw the picture of his ex and hit the decline button on his screen blocking her entrance into the garage and sending her picture to the front entrance in case she got out that would have security escorting her off the premises.

Dwalin, “Sorry, some trouble at the shop.” You nodded and watched the shop pass by on his way to take you home again. A few streets later and you spotted Thorin’s car in your driveway making you look at Dwalin with a brow raised. “Oh look, Thorin’s here.”

“Uh huh, and here you are clueless.”

“Exactly.” You rolled your eyes and climbed out of your door that Thorin opened for you to help keep you from sliding away. Taking hold of his arm you waved goodbye to Dwalin in his pull away and turned to the mailbox he stayed close while you checked the empty box then led you to the door.

“Did a bird go crazy with your blenders?” he looked at you when you stepped into the front entrance blocking you from the winds. “They said there was trouble at the shop.”

Shaking his head he said, “Apparently I was told to hide, an unfortunate guest.”

“Ah, Muffin Lady again.” At that he chuckled and you said eyeing the bag in his hand, “I see you brought tea.”

“Yes. With plenty for a cup for you.” When you let him in he hummed out, “That was my Great Grandfather’s voice,” Your brow inched up peering up at him, “For Durin, sounded just like him.”

“Ah, politician?”

“Yes.”

You nodded and said, “I remembered the voice from speeches playing at one of my old jobs. Must have just, stuck.”

Lowly he chuckled guiding you in through the parlor to the kitchen where he stopped smirking at the davenport. “Did you build this?”

You shook your head, “No, Frerin snuck a peek at my list, got me this, a small table and my desk I wanted.”

“Ooh,” you giggled and he said, “After your tea is ready I hope you don’t mind my being nosy.”

You smirked at him, “You nosy, never.” Making him roll his eyes.

A few minutes of showing you what everything was he had bought you while the water boiled and the tea seeped later and you snapped a picture pocketing your phone nodding your head to the side. Guiding him from the kitchen through each of your guest rooms passing the atrium he smirked in seeing your new table to hold your phone stand. “This is what you meant by tree table,” he all but purred adoringly loving it already and kept on going to the next room seeing the bits and pieces of the rooms coming together.

The desk in your office and the twin modern baroque nightstands for your mother’s bedroom in rectangle contrasting your more curvy pair in your room you paused at showing your odd but adorable blend of tastes used to fill each space.

“I can’t tell if they fit or not, but I do like them.”

Smirking at you he hummed back, “They fit just fine.” He said eyeing the trunks that used to by your bed as a nightstand now at the foot of it. “It’s all lovely, what else needs to be painted?”

Out to the garage you went showing him each piece and the rooms they would go in complete with sketches to complete the ideas. “So not bad,”

“No, not bad at all. What was your next step, on payday?”

“Well the bunk bed company is seasonal, so I was thinking maybe starting with that. It’s expensive, but, it would get that out of the way, and I’d have to get the mattresses too, they say they’ll add the mattresses if we have them through the build if not I’ll have to figure out how to do that on my own.”

“How expensive?”

“With mattresses 6k.” He bit his lip and you said, “Which after that I could maybe get a couple bed frames too.”

“Frerin mentioned you got 40 k a month for your show, surely-,”

“35 after taxes and I wanted to save 17.”

“That’s not unreasonable. Then you have 12 left,”

“Ten-ish,”

“Again with the ish,” he hummed with a smirk your way.

You rolled your eyes, “For the scooter.”

“Alright, ten-ish, you can do a lot with that, just bed frames or mattresses too?”

“The others can wait.” He huffed and you said, “Then you can focus on searching for more for your own place.”

“My place is furnished to my needs already.”

You fake gasped deepening his smirk, “What a coincidence, so is mine.”

Making him chuckle. “How about a movie then?”

“Are you asking to take me or to hide yourself?”

“I am asking. Have some fun.”

“Fine, but you’re buying snacks.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way.” He said as you finished off your tea, the mug from which you took to the sink then joined him out to his car.

Keeping a hand on your back he helped you to his car and started the drive to the theater. One film on a jungle adventure had you both giggling and murmuring about the ridiculous gliders used and rock climbing turned to endless plummet scene. Boneless chicken bites and dipping sauces to large supplies of fries solved your hunger and allowed Thorin reason to lean close to you, at least until they were gone and he simply refused to shift the other way for the rest of the film.

“I knew I saw your car.”

Turning around you smirked saying, “Muffins Galore, right?” That had her grin flinching as you asked, “How’s your husband?”

The breeze picked up and his hand settled on your hip with his arm around you holding you in place, “He’s fine.” She said curtly, then looked to Thorin, “A Hobbit seriously?”

“Careful, he’s a quarter Hobbit. Plus if Dis hears you say that she’ll pummel you. I’ve seen her protective rage over their lineage.”

“I don’t need you to tell me they’re part Hobbit! I know them! I’m here to talk to Thorin!” She said with a stomp of her foot.

“Ok, you’re bigger than me you don’t need to stomp like a two year old. And he’s right here,” you said waving a hand in front of his chest making him try not to crack a grin at your game show prize introductory like motion. “Go for it.”

She looked at you, “Alone.”

“Well, I see a very big problem with that, I happen to be aerodynamic and the car is all the way over there and cuddlekins here is keeping me grounded, so, I can plug my ears if you like, but I warn you I’m about 2/3 Elf and a quarter Maiar so, ya I have exceptionally good hearing so you’d be better off just saying it without the charade.”

At that her eye twitched in your grin and Thorin said, “Miss Marne,”

“You know my name, Thorin!” She barked back.

To which he repeated, “Miss Marne, we are no longer on familiar terms and I will not address you in such a manner. What was between us has been dissolved for some decades and I suggest you accept your choice, which seemed to be an acceptable one up until this last expo. Give my best to Mr Grenald I wish you and yours the best.”

In his step away you grinned and pointed at her, “And congrats on the baby.” Her grin dropped entirely and you looked up at Thorin, “Did I say something?”

Lowly he chuckled rumbling back, “Hobbits catch on to pregnancies earlier than others.”

“Oh,” you said then flashed her another grin, “They have lovely cakes down the block if you wanted to surprise your Hubby with the news!” Turning to face the path to the car leaving her stuck in place wither hair blowing into her face still after her hands dropped from holding it to her chest. “I think that went well.” You said a few feet away making him chuckle again.

“Cuddlekins?” He rumbled to you and you smirked at him.

“What would you have preferred, Schmootseypoo?”

“No, a million times no.”

“Cuddle Monster?”

“No.” He said fighting a smirk and his creeping blush.

“Oh come on, you would make an adorable Cuddle Monster.” Making him chuckle again at his cheeks prickling to pink. “What about Pookie? Classic, even Garfield had a Pookie!”

“Cuddle Monster is fine.” Making you let out a squeak and him chuckle at your awkward flinch of a hug around his middle, “Just don’t tell the boys.”

In pulling back to climb into the car door he opened for you he chuckled as you said, “Oh trust me, they have no grounds for what she could call them.”

Rolling his eyes he closed the door and walked around, muttering, “Cuddle monster.”

Once inside he looked at you when you asked, “Do you know any fabric stores?”

“Yes, why?”

“Curtains. We don’t have to but if you know where one is I can go later.”

“We can go.”

Looking at him you said, “Sorry if you think I crossed a line.”

He looked at you asking, “About my ex?” You nodded, “You did me a favor actually.” Wetting his lips he looked you over then asked, “Are the curtains for the guest rooms? The big window in yours has the internal ones, right?”

You nodded, “Ya, they only have those small windows, but Naneth and Cirdan’s have that one huge set. Shouldn’t be that much I don’t think. Some good thick striped materials and some teal for hers, peach for my sisters’. Then I have that back room, not really sure what to do with that yet, living room and parlor have internal blinds. I don’t mind the others with the windows aiming into the back yard, and I know Naneth would love her view of the garden half of it but still, I wouldn’t want to make Cirdan imagine he couldn’t linger in his towel if he wanted.”

“Ah, free spirit?”

“No, just, who doesn’t linger from time to time and he’s got a lot to get caught showing off.”

Thorin chuckled and hummed, “Normally that would be said with irritation or a hint of reluctance.”

“He’s a very good looking male in Elven standards. And probably Dwarf standards for some.” That had his brow inching up, “He has an amazing beard, and hair. He’s not round though, muscular,”

“And nearly ten feet tall.”

“That too. But he gives amazing hugs.”

“I bet. If I can poke a sleeping horse for a moment, I am glad to hear you love him so much.”

“Hard not to when he loved her so amazingly while I was gone. Plus he was, one of the most intimidating and the least threatening men I’d ever met. I’m hers, and he wanted to love every part of her, even me. He is also absurdly patient. Like one of those Elves that could sit near wild horses and they would break first and come closer to check him out. That’s how he won me over, like a wild horse, let me come to him. I mean, I was an adult, or at least considered to be. He let me be a kid again, no doubt my size didn’t hurt that.”

“Well we all certainly can’t wait to meet them when they come to visit.”

Resisting the urge to buy fabric was hard for him but he grinned seeing you copying down the info for the fabrics you wanted so that you could come back another time along with rings that you could stitch into them that you would pair with the right curtain rods.

Pt 27

#Thorin x Reader OC #Hobbit #lotr #Dwalin x Bilbo

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mysticwhore · 5 years

Text

Heavenly, Part Two

Dark!Steve x Reader

Notes: I pretty much started working on this right after I posted Part One. Keep in mind that the reader is young; she’s around the 18-20 range, or at least that’s how I imagine her, so she may seem naive at some parts, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid. If you noticed the lack of Y/N, just know I hate seeing it, so I refuse to write it.

Warnings: A bit of cursing, but not a whole lot. A small snippet of Steve's P.O.V.

Word Count: 3,121

You honestly felt like your heart was going to beat out of your chest; it was pounding that hard.

How could he know your name? You certainly never told him.

You rest your hand over your heart and felt the thick plastic of your name card. Oh.

Now you just felt stupid. Steve could have just looked at your name tag. He’s freaking Captain America, so why are you getting so spooked about everything he does?

You couldn’t shake the feeling that something much more ominous was going on, but you had nothing to prove it. Even if you could, what would you do? Being a creep isn’t against the law, and when you’re Captain America, the law probably would turn a blind eye to your actions, especially after you just saved the world.

“Could you shut the door any louder? I’m trying to sleep.”

You turned and looked at the now opened door of your roommate’s room, where Nikita stood. Her hair was tangled from sleep, but she gave you a deadly glare.

You sighed. “Sorry. Won’t happen again.”

She chuckled and crossed her arms. “It better not, but it looks like you just saw a ghost. You good?”

You slowly nodded your head. “Yeah, yeah I’m fine. Just tired.” You slung your bag down on the coffee table before you collapsed on the worn sofa.

Nikita shuffled over to the recliner next to the couch and sunk into the cushions. “You’ve never been a good liar. Spill.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” You sat up to slip off your coat and threw it over the coffee table.

“Try me. I used to teach third graders. I’m sure I’ve heard worse.” Nikita had wrapped the threadbare blanket over her shoulders as she propped her feet on the table.

“I don’t even know where to start.” You rested your hands on your face and groaned. She wouldn’t believe you; she’d just think you’re crazy.

“How about start from the beginning.”

You turned to her, and she had her chin rested against her hand. Even though she was obviously tired, she looked at you intently.

“I was about to close when this guy walked in at the last second. I was checking him out and the guy was fucking Captain America.”

Nikita cut you off, “No way. He went missing months ago.”

You huffed. “I told you, you won’t believe me.”

You began to sit up when Nikita gently grabbed your arm.

“Sorry, I’ll listen. Are you sure it was him?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Sure, he looks a bit different now but there’s no way it wasn’t. He didn’t seem surprised when I figured it out, either.” You sink back into the sofa, and the springs groaned a bit. “He walked me out to my car and insisted that he drive me home when it wouldn’t start.”

Nikita looked at you, confused. “Why wouldn’t your car start?”

You shrugged. “I have no idea. I mean it’s not the best car, but it shouldn’t have broken down. It was fine when I left for work.”

She leaned back into the recliner and pulled up her legs. “Maybe the heavens just decided to screw you over tonight." She pushed a stray hair behind her ear. "Sorry; I interrupted you."

"It's okay. It's just that he grabbed me multiple times. Even though he wasn't hurting me, you don't just grab a stranger." You crossed your arms over your chest as you pushed your shoes off with your toes.

Nikita nodded, and her mouth opened a few times, but she didn't say anything. Eventually, she cleared her throat before saying, "I really don't know what to say. A part of me is like, 'it's fucking Captain America; he isn't a creep,' but the other part of me knows that you don't know him, and you don't lie about this type of stuff."

"I really hope that I'm wrong about this, but I can't help but feel like that something is going on. The worst part is that I have no reason to feel this way. It's not a crime for offering someone a ride home." You pushed yourself off of the cushions and stretched. "I guess I should go to bed."

Nikita looked up at you and narrowed your eyes. "Don't you have to work tomorrow?"

You groaned in frustration. How the hell would you get to work? Nikita has work tomorrow also, so you can't borrow her car, and she works earlier than you, so she can't drop you off on her way there.

"Actually fuck my life, but I'll get there somehow. If all else fails, I'll walk."

She scuffed. "The hell you are. I'll take you on my break and pick you up, okay? I'm not letting my girl walk home in the dark." She stood up and crossed the small distance to her room. "And don't even try to say no. It's the least I can do."

You rolled your eyes but couldn't fight your growing smile. "What would I do without you?"

All Nikita said as she walked into her room was, "Get mugged, probably."

You barely slept a wink that night.

Each time a car would pass by your window, your heart would leap into your chest.

What if it was Steve?

What if he wanted to kill you?

You almost chuckled at how stupid you sounded. Of course, he wasn't going to kill you. Probably not anyway. He didn't even know you.

When you finally managed to fall asleep, you couldn't even count it as going to bed; it was a cat nap at best.

Nikita woke you up around six or so to let you know she was leaving for work, and since then you weren't able to fall back asleep. You stayed in bed for almost another hour but admitted defeat when your stomach rumbled. Even when you went through the fridge, nothing caught your eye, so you ended up getting dressed and taking the five-minute walk to the nearby coffee shop. Sometimes living close to Main Street had its perks.

The cafe wasn't too busy; there couldn't have been any more than six people in there, so after you placed your order, you set your jacket at one of the window booths. A few minutes passed before your name was called, and as you walked up to the counter to grab your order, shivers went down your spine.

"Well, would you look at that. Twice in less than twenty-four hours."

You slowly turned to look at none other than Steve Rogers standing behind you. His lips were pulled into a small smile, and his eyes twinkled with joy. His clothes were similar to what he wore yesterday; jeans, a flannel, and work boots, but he didn't look any less handsome.

You chided yourself for thinking that he was handsome, but when he cleared his throat you looked back up at him.

"Hey, you okay?"

You started to shake your head but stopped at the last second. "Um, yeah, I'm good."

His smile grew as he took a step closer to you. You would have backed up, but you had nowhere to go; you were pressed up against the counter.

"I'd hope so. Have a coffee with me?" He gestured to your drink and croissant in your hands.

You looked down at them then back into his blue eyes, but before you could reply he said, "Go sit down, and I'll be with you shortly. No longer than a minute, I promise."

You noted how he used the same words from last night, and you couldn't help the shivers now. There wasn't anything sinister about what he said, so why did it creep you out so much? You're overthinking it; a handsome guy just wants to spend time with you. Where's the harm in that?

"O-okay." You shuffled your feet back to the booth and slid into the side where you set your jacket.

True to his word, Steve plopped down in front of you with a cup in his hand. He gave you another smile before taking a sip. "Would you be surprised to hear that not all black coffee tastes the same?"

You shook your head and mumbled, "I wouldn't know." You took a long sip of your hot chocolate before ripping a piece off of your croissant.

"I take it you're not much of a coffee drinker?"

You didn't even look up as you shook your head. You weren't even done chewing what little bit of food you had in your mouth before you shoved in another piece.

Steve cleared his throat again, and you looked up at him. "I know I already apologized, but I feel like I should explain why I came in so late."

You shook your head. "I already said it was fine. No need to explain yourself."

You began to lift your drink up to your lips when his hand grabbed your wrist.

"Yes, I do. See, I don't sleep well, but reading is one of the few things that tire me out. I knew the library was still open, so I decided to swing by. I didn't mean to take so long."

Even though you didn't ask for an explanation, it did make you feel better about the whole encounter. He wasn't purposefully trying to keep you later than normal, but that still didn't explain the touching. Speaking of which, he still had a hold of your arm.

"Uh, thanks, but you can let go now."

Before he could let you, you pulled your wrist from his grasp and set it in your lap.

He gave you a small sympathetic smile. "Sorry. I don't even realize when I do it."

You mumbled "sure", and if he had heard you, he didn't show it.

"You have work today?"

You opened your mouth to reply but hesitated. Why did he care? There is no way he could have read all of those books in one night. Going against your gut, you decided there was no harm in telling him. "Yeah, I do. I'm closing again tonight."

Steve gulped down the remainder of his coffee before setting it to the side. "And do you have a ride?"

You felt much more comfortable answering this question. "My roommate offered to drive me, and it's almost impossible to tell Nik no." You chuckled at Nikita's threat about cutting your legs off if you tried to walk to work.

"You have a roommate?" Steve's face was neutral, but his eyes were stone. His jaw tightened as he awaited your answer.

"Uh, yeah, we've lived together for a couple months now. She's pretty cool."

He visibly relaxed at the mention that your roommate was a woman. "What kind of woman has the name Nik?"

You laughed, "It's just a nickname. Her name is Nikita. She's a handful, but I love her."

Steve sat up and rested his elbows against the table. "Tell me about her."

"Well, she works at the post office. She's from New York, but she's lived here for the past five years." You toyed with one of the napkins as you spoke. "Whenever I first moved out, I found this ad of someone looking for a roommate. I didn't have very many options, so I was pleasantly surprised that she wasn't a total crackhead."

Steve laughed at your choice of words, but leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. "And what makes someone a crackhead?"

"Well, lots of things. Actually being addicted to crack for one, or just being nasty. I don't know; I guess it depends on how I'm feeling." There was a sharp pang in your stomach when you realized you'd let your guard down. He was still a stranger, and you'd just given him details about your friend. Who does that?

"If that's the case, I hope I'm not a crackhead." He gave you a sweet smile, but you couldn't find it within yourself to mirror him.

"I, um, I should get going. I need to get ready for work." You slipped on your jacket and climbed out of your seat. Steve did the same.

"I can drive you back to your place if you want?"

You shot him a look. "No. I'll be fine. I don't live far." You grabbed your bag and slung it over your shoulder.

"I can't just let you walk everywhere. Your house is on the way anyway," he insisted.

When you met his eyes, they were soft and pleading, and you felt your resolve crumbling around you. "I promise I'll be okay. You don't have to taxi me around just because you feel bad."

Steve shook his head. "I don't feel bad; I just feel like it's the right thing to do. Plus, me driving you will save you a ton of time."

You relented and threw your hands up in defeat. "Fine, but this is the last time. I'm not a charity case."

"I never said you were, but there's nothing wrong with needing a bit of help, and good thing I'm good at helping." He placed his hand between your shoulder blades and gently ushered you out of the cafe. His car was parked across the street, and when the light turned green for the crosswalk, he wrapped his hand around yours and led you to the other side. You didn't have time to react because as soon as you were on the other side of the street, he dragged you to his SUV and opened your door. He practically lifted you into the seat and had you buckled in before your mind caught up with what happened.

After shutting your door, he walked to his side and climbed in. "I might need a couple reminders on directions. I'm not completely sure I remember the way."

"It's on Heavenly Avenue. Do you know where that is?"

He gave you a nod and pulled out of the driveway. "You really don't live that far, do you?"

Steve was waiting for you in the living room while you changed. You hadn't given him permission to enter; he just let himself in. It was a bit creepy, but this man was offering you a ride for free. He had been nothing but kind to you, and you repay him by being spooked by him for no reason.

After you changed, you walked back into the living room to find Steve looking through the small knick-knacks you had on display.

"You or Nikita really seem to like mermaids."

You let out an embarrassed giggled. "That would be me. I've been obsessed with them since I was little."

He set down the little mermaid statue before turning to look at you. "You look nice."

You glanced down at your clothes. They weren't anything special; your shirt was a dark grey henley, your jeans a faded blue, and a pair of black slip-on shoes. It wasn't anything special.

"Um, thanks?" You grabbed your bag off of the sofa and folded your jacket over your arm. "Ready to go?"

Before Steve could answer, Nikita walked through the front door.

"Hey, hun, are you- what in the goddamn?"

She looked at the two of you with wide eyes. You never had guests, and the fact that it was Steve Rogers in your living room made the encounter that much more unbelievable.

"Nikita, I presume?" Steve stuck out his hand for her to shake.

She hesitated, but after a few seconds placed her palm in his and shook it. "And you're Captain America."

He chuckled, "Please, just call me Steve."

She absently nodded. "Steve. Sure." She turned to you, and her face turned to stone. "Hey, hun, can I talk to you?"

She didn't even wait for your answer before she grabbed your wrist and pulled you into her room. She slammed the door shut and turned to you. "What the actual fuck. First, you say he's a creep, but now he's in our living room?"

"Nik, I can explain."

She grunted and crossed her arms over her chest. "Yeah? Then explain."

You told her about your trip to the coffee shop, and how he sat down with you. You mentioned how he explained himself for coming in so late, and that he offered to drive you to work.

"So you're saying I didn't have to waste part of my break to come get you?" Nikita was more annoyed than angry, but her glare still gave you shivers.

"Sorry, I forgot to text you. Forgive me?" You did your best effort at puppy eyes, but she just laughed.

"You look so stupid. It's funny, but I guess so. Now if you'll excuse me, I actually need to get to work."

She pulled you into a hug then whispered, "Please know what you're doing. He's still a stranger."

You didn't get the chance to reply since she had already let go of you and exited her room. You followed her out to the living room, and Steve gave you a smile.

"I'm assuming she doesn't approve?"

You huffed. "You're good. Just don't try anything."

You walked over to the door, but before you could even touch the knob, Steve had wrapped his huge hand around it and rested the other on your lower back, causing you to stiffen. He led you back out to his SUV, and as the same the first two times, he opened your door and buckled you in. A part of you was still put off by your actions, but you ignored it; you finally settled with the idea it was a forties thing.

The ride to the library was in silence; the radio station the same it was last night. When Steve pulled into the parking lot, he parked in the same space he did the night before.

"Thanks for the ride." You gave him a small smile and opened your door. As you climbed out, he called your name. "What?"

Steve gave you a smile. "If you want, I can see if I can find out why your car didn't start. Is that okay?"

You eyed him suspiciously, but what did you have to lose?

"Knock yourself out." With that, you walked inside.

Steve's eyes flitted over your figure as you walked away from him before settling on your backside. He couldn't fight the small grin that stretched over his lips.

You were already so trusting of him, even though he was a stranger.

You didn't even suspect that he was the one who sabotaged your car.

Removing a spark plug was never a difficult task. Yours sitting in his glove box was proof enough of that.

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docholligay · 4 years

Text

A Whisper and A Roar

Yesterday was the four year anniversary of the AU of Mystery and Shadow, something usually only released on the Patreon, so I decided to release a few out to the world! Please let me know if you enjoy!

Michiru had often listened to the call of the sea, the lap and the roar of the waves as they drove toward the shore. It was not the gentleness of a soft blanket, or the warmth of a loved one, but the faraway songs of what must have been called the sirens, but Michiru knew was only the ocean itself, amoral and truthful and noble in these things. The sea had beckoned her close since she was a child, told her its secrets, the way it knew all that had been and would be, for all things return to the sea, in the end.

It had been a comfort but not a friend, in the way that sometimes a misery can become comfortable, for it is familiar, and the familiarity of that low, sad song can be enough to lull one into a quiet and easy melancholy.

It had been a small blessing to Rei that the Sight was only partly Mars, and some of herself, clinging to her even as the power left them. That same truth was a bane to Michiru.

But as she had aged, and as the water of love had had shaved the harsh edges off of her life, the call of the sea had softened too. What was a crash had become a muffled lap, merely dipping against the shore, forward and back.

She did not think of these things often, so many years after the sea had quieted, only a whisper now, if anything at all. But even as the Sight no longer cast nightmares across her mind as she slept, old habits, it seemed, died the hardest, and so she would never be much of a sleeper. Which is how she found herself sitting on the front porch of a quiet bungalow, looking out at the sea, smiling as it spoke too softly for her to hear.

The night had been beautiful. It had been so long since she and Haruka had been on a vacation without the girls, and as much as Michiru loved them, she had forgotten the quiet joys of holding Haruka’s hand across an intimate table, the soft gold of her hair illuminated in the candlelight. Could the sea have told her, for all the things it knew, that one day she would hold Haruka’s hand and not think of when that grip might fade? It never comforted her with the knowledge that there was a world where she and Haruka could simply love each other as others did, with no threat but the normal comings and going of life. If only it had whispered to her, as a teenager, that one day they would sit together in a garden in Hawaii, and Haruka would pick a fallen flower from the ground, and tuck it in Michiru’s hair, and the galaxy would send nothing to interrupt the moment.

For all the horrors it showed her that might come to pass, it might have shown her the possibilities of light.

But perhaps things were better when they were surprises, and she did not begrudge the sea too much of its churlishness. How could she be bitter, when the wind swept in the scent of salt and flowers and all the love carried on oceans and skies?

She imagined what the Michiru of years ago might to say to the thought, and laughed at herself.

“What’s so funny?” Haruka wheeled out to the porch, hair still rumpled from where she’d fallen asleep the instant they’d gotten home, changed into her soft pajamas and smelling of the beach and warm cotton. She had a bottle of champagne tucked into her lap, nestled next to two glasses.

Michiru shook her head. “I was only thinking of what manner of spoilt child I must have been.”

“You were a brat.” Haruka nodded, smiling and leaning in for a kiss as Michiru play-pouted in greatest offense. “But I was a jackass.”

“However did we win each other?” She cupped Haruka’s cheek and kissed her.

Haruka snorted. “No one else wanted us.”

Michiru looked up into the sky, each tiny point of light spelling out what had been, stories scraped across the sky like inkblots, waiting to be tied together into what people needed them to be, and Michiru saw her own story written out, signed in flourishes of love.

“Well then I am the luckiest of all.”

“Here.” Haruka handed her the bottle of champagne. “It’s making me cold.”

Michiru examined the bottle, relieved to find it was one of her selections. “Rather decadent for us to be drinking as an intermezzo between sleeps.”

Michiru shifted over to the other side of the wicker loveseat, and Haruka transferred in next to her, exchanging a glass for the bottle.

“Because,” Haruka twisted at the cork and popped it open with gusto, “Happy anniversary.”

“Hm, tomorrow--”

“It’s midnight.” Haruka poured into Michiru’s glass, and then her own, the champagne sparkling like a whole new set of stars, even in the dimness of the moonlight.

The wind breezed by again, that same scent of salt and garden mixed with Haruka’s own, and Michiru wanted to bottle it, only for a moment, only before she remembered that these sweet things were best when they were temporary, when they were moments. When people could not be kept under glass.

“Well then,” She drew her legs up onto the cushion and snuggled in closer to Haruka, “Happy anniversary. I meant to let you sleep, you know.”

“Eh, you always do,” she chuckled, “I’m an old woman, but I can get by with a nap.” She drew her arm around Michiru as they looked out to the sea, listening to it go in and out, certain and sure and soft.

Michiru felt the breeze, the warmth and care of it, encircling her like Haruka’s arm, and she closed her eyes to the sea and stars and whatever they might care to add. The wind whispered what she needed to know. Where she was. What had been.

Where she would go no longer mattered. The grand battle had been fought, the destiny had been fulfilled, the curtain had been drawn, and now she found herself living in the quiet epilogue of some grand novel, the sort of this an author might favor with only a few pages, but upon which Michiru would happily linger for years and years. She had her children, she had her wife, she had the future carried in on that softly scented wind of hope and love.

And Haruka kissed her head, and told her the only thing she had ever needed to hear, her whisper stronger than the roar of any ocean Michiru had heard in all those years.

“I love you.”

#AU of Mystery and Shadow

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lizzieraindrops · 4 years

Text

Your chance to make the sun rise thrice (Chapter 2)

a river that still runs (8803 words)

Beth Childs has come to Helsinki to meet her best friend Veera for the first time in the Herbs on the windowsill universe, an alternate timeline where the original Helsinki massacre was prevented and DYAD routed by Clone Club Alpha’s successful publicity stunt back in 2001. Veera Suominen and Niki Lintula survived and decided to live in a little apartment together as qpp’s. Numerous Leda clones worldwide are now in contact via a secure online network that Veera maintains.

Note: This chapter is a bit heavier than the rest of the AU. Beth is still struggling with a lot of the same challenges in this universe, even if the events causing them are somewhat different because of such early canon divergence. But the whole point of this story is that things can end up okay no matter how rough it's been. She's getting the help she needs and she's gonna be alright. That said, warning for soft discussion of past abuse, the effects of trauma, depression and anxiety, and some suicidal ideation. And of course, lots of love and learning how to heal, with support from her best friend.

Fun fact: Veera's username is 3mika, and she always sets her font to the precise warm turquoise of hex color #2299aa. She thinks she's hilarious, and she's right.

Also on AO3 | Playlist | Aesthetic sideblog

Part 1: Herbs on the windowsill

Part 2: Someday colors

Part 3: Your chance to make the sun rise thrice | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

***

Beth wakes on a squashy couch that isn't hers. Morning-soft sunlight pours through the window above her, bouncing back off the walls to fill even the shady corners with a warm secondhand glow. Her limbs are soft, splayed under unfamiliar blankets and sinking into the cushions. She doesn't move yet.

The apartment. Helsinki. Beth's really here. She holds herself still, letting the truth sink into her. She half expects the usual anxious tension to clench her into a ball the instant she moves a muscle, but it isn't there. Neither is the invisible weight that so often pins her immobile. She still wakes frequently with both of them holding her body hostage, keeping her muscles unmoving but restless, even in sleep. Right now though, they're gone. She just lies there, soft beneath the window.

It's quiet but not silent. The occasional car on the little road outside chuckles as it passes. A soft rush of water echoes through pipes in the walls, running toward an early riser in another unit. These sounds fall strangely on Beth's Toronto-bred ears, isolated in the stillness of this of this little apartment on the outskirts of the city. Still, the early-morning atmosphere settles comfortably into her jet-lagged bones, murmuring a rhythm for her to sink into. The temporal upheaval of a transcontinental red-eye and a series of exhausted naps yesterday have left her a little unbalanced. And yet, here she is waking up with the day, and the ground under her feels so much more stable than she’s used to.

Beth breaks her stillness with a deep, deep breath that she can feel expanding all the way down to her feet. She stretches, too, but soon pulls the toes that get exposed back underneath the warm, scratchy blanket. The cushions of the old couch creak a little in complaint as she shifts, but her limbs remain supple. For a time, she just observes the sensations. Then, her awareness spreads beyond the couch and the window to the rest of the room.

All around her, an oddly blocky pattern covers the walls. It's one of the first things she noticed when she walked into the apartment yesterday afternoon. The pattern isn't wallpaper like it appears at first glance, but actually a multitude of small photographs. Most of them are unframed, but taped up in crisply aligned rows. In them, she sees the same face infused with a hundred different lives. Just above her, a sleeping, slack-jawed redhead with bulky headphones around her neck sprawls on the very same couch Beth's laying on now. A few rows down, a brunette and a blonde with their long hair in matching wild waves are leaning all over each other and grinning like devils. One of the few framed photos shows a girl with a hospital-short buzz cut and a delighted expression, sitting in front of what looks like a mouthwatering strawberry shortcake. Beth can see at least six others in the background behind strawberry girl. Among them are Mika with her unmistakable scars and Niki with her bright blonde hair, their arms around each other's shoulders.

Morning light glances off the glossy surfaces of the photos on the west wall. The particularly bright reflection off one of the framed photos draws Beth's eye. With a tiny jolt, Beth recognizes one of her own selfies beneath the glass. In it, she's wearing the same old turquoise blue sweatshirt that's spilling out of her suitcase next to the couch right now. Underneath it, she's wearing her track gear, so the photo is at least two years old. She'd had to quit cross-country so she could try to get the shitshow her life had become under control. She vaguely recalls sending it to Mika a long time ago. It's strange to think that her presence has been in this apartment for so long.

She's here. In Finland. Staying with Mika – Mika - and Niki. Far, far away from everything.

Sprawling on the couch she slept on with a sigh as if she hadn’t a care in the world, Beth can't believe she's really gone and done it. She's run so far away that there's an ocean between her and her problems. It’s so much better than she's dreamed, even if it's only for a little while. It’s worth it, even though she'll be going back far too soon. For the first time in years, it feels like she’s where she’s supposed to be right now.

It had all started out as foolish idea she'd floated one Saturday morning, months ago. She hadn't been serious at all. She'd woken up so relieved at not having to get up and go to work, until she remembered her weekly therapy appointment with a hopeless groan.

Putting off the genuinely daunting prospect of hauling herself out of bed, she reached out to snag her phone from on top of her dresser, checking to see if she'd heard from Mika overnight. After all, Helsinki was nine hours ahead, so Mika had already seen most of the day that was just beginning for Beth. They talked so often these days, since they'd first made contact over two years ago. Rarely a day passed without touching base. But there wasn’t anything since Beth had checked last night. She took it upon herself to send the first message of the day.

runwaterblue: god, i dont wanna get up and deal with any of thsi shit today

After her world fell apart, after finding out about Project Leda, after realizing that all her nightmares and more were real, after her father...

runwaterblue: wish i could come visit u and get away form everything for awhile

Mika replied almost immediately.

3mika: you can

It was evening in her time zone, but to be honest, Beth had no idea if she had anything resembling a regular sleep schedule. The girl was always online.

3mika: though you really should go to your appointment. you always feel better afterward

runwaterblue: howd you know i have therapy today

3mika: you always have an appointment saturday afternoons

runwaterblue: yes but how do you remember that? i cant evne remember my own appts lmao

3mika: you mentioned it months ago when you switched from sundays to saturdays

Beth shook her head with a smile. Mika was so good with details.

3mika: anyway. you’re welcome here, if you can get here

3mika: it would be great to see you

3mika: Niki wouldn't mind. we've had a bunch of Ledas visit us here, it's always fun

3mika: except that one time Dani and Ary got into a fight over football. some French-Italian team rivalry thing. that was not fun.

Beth laughed. It was funny how Mika was so good at making her do that, even on days like these. She leaned back against her pillow and held her phone over her head without sitting up, being careful not to drop it on her own face. She'd done that before. More times than she'd admit.

runwaterblue: i was kidding. id love to visit, but idk how id get there

runwaterblue: u should see the americans go off abt their football lmao. they're nerly as bad as the hockey freaks here

3mika: pls no

3mika: no more sports. it was a year ago and I’m still exhausted

3mika: sports are banned in this apartment.

Beth snorted. Mika wanted nothing to do with sports of any kind, and with Beth's athletic record, the topic had become a point of mutual teasing between them.

In so many ways, they were such different people, DNA be damned. Mika was reticent where Beth was outgoing. (Or at least, Beth had been. She was never quite sure how to think of herself these days.) Clone drama aside, Beth had been a pretty average Canadian high schooler. She got reasonable grades, played a few sports, and kept mostly out of trouble because there would be hell to pay if she didn’t. Mika was a brilliant homeschooled autistic orphan who had been raised in near isolation by her guardian after surviving the hospital fire that marked her skin for life. Beth mostly listened to pop music, and where no one else could hear, the occasional classical symphony. Mika held fast to Finland's weird obsession with death metal and dabbled in literally everything else.

And yet, Mika understands Beth like no one else does. And it's not just because they've both been through all this Project Leda bullshit. Though Beth doesn't know what she would have done without Mika to help her through that, too.

Beth won't ever be able to forget the moment that everything changed. Recognizing a her own face from the mirror on the evening news stopped her in her tracks, as something in her gut caved in with the hollow certainty that it wasn't her. Then face after face flickered before her, a flipbook barrage of déja vu. Blonde and smiling. Scarred and pensive. Braids and piercings and a rakish grin. Beth was rooted in place as people she had never been wearing things she had never worn said things she was never supposed to know.

That utter strangeness on the screen immediately seeped into her life like an oil slick into a river, tainting every thing she thought she knew with clinging uncertainty. Her father was inexplicably even more upset about it than Beth was, yet adamant that they shouldn't look into the matter. But it was already too late to stop herself from thinking. With slow horror, the truth of what exactly his behavior must mean dawned on her. And yet, even with the desperate growing certainty about who her Leda monitor must be, it was hard to believe that he could be anything other than her plain stern father.

He was always a bit strict and overprotective - probably well more than a bit, she realizes these days. But she’d thought that's just what it was like to be a cop's daughter. He'd never done anything really extreme, nothing beyond the firm discipline any kid could expect. He was just not a man to be trifled with, that was all. So until everything she thought she knew shifted that day and threatened to topple every assumption she’d built her life on, she had never truly dared to cross him.

Outright daring him to say to her face that he wasn't her monitor was probably considered a step beyond trifling. He did not take it kindly.

Two months later, Beth and her mother were living in an apartment on the opposite side of the city. It took two months for the two of them to lay plans to leave together, for good. For two months, her every move was watched. She spent two months knowing there would be hell to pay if she didn't give the performance of a lifetime pretending everything was fine, even while sirens blared inside her day and night. Two months was more than enough to teach her things she never wanted to know about the hidden marks fear leaves on the body.

Even after she finally escaped, her life was in tatters and nothing made sense. It wasn’t just the sudden jarring discovery of Project Leda, or the crisis it had forced her to confront. It was learning that, deep down, she had known that she’d never once felt free. She’d unconsciously kept herself from knowing to avoid exactly that conflict of wills that she’d known she would lose.

Trying to come to terms with what had happened and how it changed everything, Beth was continuously losing her balance. Questioning which parts of her life had been screwed over by her father and which by being part of some ridiculous supervillain science experiment was like trying to stand on two kickboards in a pool. She couldn't find her footing, and all she could do was try and stay afloat. She had to repeat her whole junior year of high school that she lost to this shitshow, while starting over at a new school, and only barely scraped her way into senior year. Now that she knew how honestly terrible she'd been at judging who in her life she could trust, it was as hard to talk to old friends as it was to make new ones.

Therapy helped her start sorting out what she was feeling, and how the environment she’d grown up in was really not the healthiest. She hadn’t realized how much she’d learned to doubt her own perceptions. That made constructing any kind of new understanding of her situation an uphill struggle. And of course, her therapist couldn’t help her confirm anything about a human experiment that was so illegal it had been an international secret. As she continued to stumble forward, Beth even started doubting her former certainty of the identity of her Leda monitor. She questioned herself and everything she knew until she wanted to scream with frustration or weep with confusion. The floor of the counselor’s office could have been mopped with her tears. It was, quite literally, driving her mad.

So, finally, Beth had taken up the invitation on the banner of every Leda news feature to "Contact the secure, clone-run Clone Youth Group Network (CYGNet) for answers by emailing [email protected]."

She wanted something concrete that would help convince her brain to stop reenacting these head games that warped her reality. It still insisted on playing through the patterns it had been taught, even in its teacher’s absence. She needed something that could brace her against the ideas that she was really just paranoid, overreacting, accusing, that this was all her fault for making a big deal out of nothing. Even with his other faults (cruelties, her mind whispered) aside, at least his involvement with Project Leda was unforgivable, and she wanted proof of it. Maybe if she had that, she could stop being mad at herself for not wanting to forgive. And if anyone had that proof, CYGNet would.

Maybe it was just because of the sheer blunt honesty about her motives, or the inescapable vulnerability of the message Beth sent, but Mika had replied to her within a day. And she'd been so gentle about it, too, enough to make Beth later question where the stereotype of autistic brashness came from. Then again, over email, Mika had all the time she needed to compose her thoughts and lay them out as softly as she wanted. She didn't have to spit them out as fast as she could to keep pace with a quick and painfully overwhelming world.

Hi Beth Childs,

I'm so sorry for what you had to go through. I still don't know how they got away with doing things like this for so long. I suppose people will always find ways to be cruel. But we've survived this long, and the whole point of CYGNet is to help us all heal. The experimental network has been dismantled, and we are assembling resources to help us. We've brought mental health professionals on to the project to develop custom programs for our needs. We can make them available to you, if you are interested.

I attached scans of some of your files that we recovered from DYAD. There are a few case reports with the signature of the person you asked about, spaced throughout your lifetime. There are also financial records with his name in the list of paid employees. He was without a doubt part of the Leda monitor program. I can provide all of the documentation that we have related to you, if you like, but I thought that would be too much all at once. I know these are hard to look at, but I hope they help let your mind rest. They are very real, and every awful thing we have experienced was also real, no matter how they tried to convince everyone that we were making it all up.

Please take your time with these, and stay in contact if you want to. You can join our mailing list, if you want to know when we have new information or new resources available. We're here for you.

And hey, if you just want to talk to someone who knows what it's like to deal with all of this, I'm here, too. You can reach my personal inbox or IM me at [email protected]. It'll be okay.

-Veera

Beth had started crying before she even finished reading the letter, much less opened the attachments. She cried so often these days. She only knew why half the time. But this time, it felt like the tears were extracting some of her pain as they left her, instead of just overflowing from the unending wellspring of her directionless distress. All of this was real, and someone else knew it.

Though she was grateful beyond measure for her mother’s untiring support, they were each other’s too-close, ever-present reminders of what they’d survived, trying to act like they weren’t, trying to convince each other and themselves that they were okay. Beth had needed something else, too, something until now unnamed.

This was a handhold, a backstop Beth didn't know she'd been desperate to find. It wasn't just the confirmation of what she’d concluded about her father. The ability speak plainly to someone she didn't feel the need to pretend around was an exhale of a breath held too long. At least one person in the world not only understood, but really and truly didn't want or expect her to act like any of this was normal or okay, or that she would ever be the same again.

Veera – or Mika, as she often went by online – made good on her offer of a sympathetic ear. Their correspondence started off with awkward, grammatically correct messages about the less painful details of their lives. Mika told her about the farmer’s market three blocks away where she went walking early in the morning before it got busy, and the plant stand there that her best friend and roommate Niki (also a Leda) had to ask her to stop buying so many succulents from.

At first, Beth tried to chatter like she used to, but there were no safe subjects. What had happened had touched all of her life. Normally, she’d talk about school, or sports, or her friends. But she was trying to start all over again at a new school with all the struggles that came with it. She didn’t have the time or energy for sports anymore, and talking about them hurt, now. Running used to make her heart sing. But no matter how she tried, there was no joy in the motion anymore. To top it all off, it was as hard to connect with old friends from her old life as it was to try and make new ones. She spent most interactions either doubting her own character judgement or dreading the moment people recognized her Leda face from the news.

She didn’t know how to talk about any of it to anyone. Maybe she could have if it had been just the clone thing or just the dad thing. But the two were inextricably entangled, and she still couldn’t even explain it to herself. It was all unbelievably horrifying, and any time she tried to be honest about it, people ended up disbelieving or horrified. Shocker.

Maybe, though, it wouldn’t be weird to talk about it with Mika. Mika already knew the worst. Beth didn’t have to hide that hurt from her to keep from shaking her world, or to keep her dismissal from hurting Beth. Maybe that’s what was hurting the most: the feeling that even after escaping, she still had to pretend to be okay. That compulsive stifling feeling choked her whenever it bubbled back up. On her bad days, a simple “how are you?” could reduce her to a blank face plastered over a raw tangle of emotions held motionless her own iron grip.

But Mika mentioned having bad days, too. Days came where she was too scared and nightmare-weary to do anything but make herself some tea and soak up some sunlight in the safety of home. Beth could casually say things like after those two months, i still twitch every time i hear a door open, and i wish my body would quit feeling like it doesn’t exist, my legs feel numb. It barely broke the surface of what it was like in her head, but was discomfiting enough for people that she held her tongue at school.

Sometimes, Beth got tired of constantly thinking about all this shit and tried to lighten things up. On one comically disastrous occasion of cultural exchange, she liveblogged Mika her attempt at eating the infamous Scandinavian lutefisk, along with an audio recording of the incoherent horrified noises she made after tasting it. In return, she received a recording of someone, presumably Mika, laughing harder than she’d ever heard anyone laugh before. It made Beth smile. Not many things did, back then.

Slowly, as the formality fell away from their transcontinental conversations, their heavier stories seething below the surface seeped in. Beth had been in therapy long enough now to know that she couldn't just recklessly unload on people the way she did in counseling sessions. But a counselor couldn't always provide the same kind of unspoken solidarity that someone in the same boat could.

Bit by bit, slipped into the chats that were becoming a daily occurrence, they talked about monitors, about what the experiment had really all been for, why that both was and wasn’t important, and how they'd discovered they were a part of Project Leda. Putting words to the pain hurt, a lot. But the ability to lay out long-unspoken truths in front of each other, knowing they were believed in the way that only people who have shared something can, was a healing kind of pain instead of the festering one Beth had been living with.

The two of them had more in common than they'd thought, growing up a world apart. Beth's experience raised under the subconscious wariness of her father's hovering thumb felt a lot like what Mika described growing up largely isolated with her former guardian. But sometimes, whenever they realized that something they'd both thought was normal was pretty not, they got a good laugh out of it despite the weight of their pasts. Mika seemed somewhat accustomed to her normal being considered pretty weird, so she usually took the revelations in stride better than Beth did. Beth wouldn't find out for at least a year after meeting her that it was because of her Asperger's, since it was a topic Mika seemed quite sensitive about.

Mika explained it once, in a conversation full of long pauses on her part and watching the typing icon disappear and reappear on Beth’s. The way she put it, it just meant that her brain worked a bit differently than most people's, processing sounds and sights and all the information it took in at different speeds and with different emphases. The difference could turn everyday things like the sound of a refrigerator running into a splitting headache, or something as simple as the soft texture of her favorite jacket into a kind of bliss. That alternative way of processing also extended to things like words and emotions as well. Sometimes, it took her longer than the world was willing to wait to process them into something that made sense. It often made communication tricky, trying to compensate for the gap in mutual understanding with most people. The world and the people in it could be so overwhelming sometimes, so fast and bright and full of noise and uncertainty and bewilderingly arbitrary social conventions. But the biggest challenge was other people expecting her to do everything the same way they did, ignorant of the fact there were any ways to exist other than their own, and completely oblivious to the fact that she was already putting in at least twice as much effort to communicate with them as they were with her.

And yet, even coming from such a different perspective, Mika gets it. Beth says sometimes i dream of drowning and its not a nightmare and i wake up not knowing how to feel, and Mika says I still dream of burning and wake up not knowing which fires are real, and they both say yeah. And they sit there across the world from each other knowing these things, knowing that it doesn't fix anything. And yet, it does change something. Nothing's any better, really. But somehow, the knowledge that someone else understands makes it a little easier to bear.

And that's just it. Somehow, without ever even having seen her face, Mika sees Beth clearer than anyone. All of her, all the ugly parts she hides so that they can't hurt anyone, and all the good parts that she also hides so that nobody can hurt them or take them away from her. Mika sees all of that and then just tells Beth another story about the Northern Lights she sees on the regular. Apparently, in Finnish, they’re called "fox fires." Beth hardly ever sees the aurora, living relatively far south in a bright city. But her stories about life in the metropolis by the lake intrigue Mika as much as the tales of the twisting green lights do her. And Beth can talk about something lighter again while not having to pretend that the heaviness isn’t there, too, even while she’s just once more trying and failing to explain poutine. For her, the weight never really goes away. But the effort of pretending she’s not carrying it takes more out of her than the weight itself. Mika understands that.

Maybe that’s why Beth had talked it over with Mika first, even before her mom, when she was considering taking a gap year after she hopefully managed to finish her senior year of high school. (God, it was so hard to think about English or math or whatever when just that morning she’d woken from a nightmare about being back in a not-home house that she never escaped.) Beth's mom had been so unbelievably supportive of Beth's recovery, even while she herself was adjusting to the wrenching change in both of their lives. It was both inspiring and a little intimidating. If her mom managed to run a household and raise a daughter all on her own, even while trying to heal from her own trauma, how could Beth not do her utmost, too? She was grateful to be able to talk to Mika about it, to get a reality check from someone who both understood her situation intimately and didn't make Beth feel that pressure of expectation. In the end, Beth did decide to take a year or two off before considering college, and her mom was again nothing if not supportive. Beth figured, after this entire mess, she deserved some time to herself to work on sorting her shit out, and her mom agreed.

After graduating with reasonable if not flying colors, Beth worked a series of part-time and odd jobs that didn't stress her out too much, letting herself focus on her own healing. In between her mom's support, seeing a counselor regularly, and the security of having a friend she could really trust, Beth felt like she was making progress. Slow progress, sure, but progress, nonetheless. Considering that she had seventeen years' worth of lies to unbelieve and emotional trauma to finally acknowledge, Beth figured that there was only so much she could do in the three years she'd had.

Her days were still hard. Getting sleep and waking up and eating and even just existing were still so fucking hard sometimes, and it was horrible. Some days, the thinnest sheet trapped her in bed like it was a car pinning her down. It felt so stupid for such simple things to be so hard. But then her therapist would remind her that that’s what mental illness and trauma was, that this was what the wounds in her mind and heart made her feel like. And once in awhile, sun broke through the shadows, and she had a day that reminded her what an okay day felt like – that okay days existed. That more might.

Now, she’s here, lying in a bright living room so far from home, with her dearest friend in the next room. She’s comfortable, except for the knot in her neck from sleeping oddly on the couch. The soreness pales in comparison to the usual tensions that are so strangely absent. Beth can’t remember the last time she felt this okay. She’s not steeling herself to go to work. She’s not dreading the next conversation with her mother that goes quiet as they both remember awful things they don’t mention. She’s not bracing herself for the next time her brain runs rampant worrying about whether she’ll run into the subject of her restraining order somewhere in the city and have to wonder if he'll honor it.

None of that reaches her here. There’s something about this quiet little pocket of space. It’s overrun with a proliferation of potted plants, from the sprawling lacy-leafed monster in the corner, to the fern peeping out of the kitchen, to the vine cuttings spilling out of an oddly familiar leaf-shaped glass bottle on the sill. Sunlight streaks through leaves and windowpanes and across the colorful patchwork of rugs on the floor. In the midst of it all, Beth is held by a palpable aura of gentleness. It holds her so softly that she doesn't need to hold herself in. It's like the layer of caution that she always keeps wrapped between herself and the rest of the world has simply dissolved away. In this moment suspended in morning light, she is okay.

She feels safe.

The realization undoes something in her. She feels the tears starting, and she expects the taut tension of involuntary stifling that always comes with them to return. But it doesn’t. She lies still and soft on the couch with the water creeping over her cheeks, breath occasionally catching but flowing freely. She savors it in the quiet.

The soft thunk of an ill-fitted door opening breaks into her odd reverie. Mika’s up. Beth sniffs and scrubs at her eyes halfheartedly, but she can’t hide them right now and she doesn’t want to. Mika notices immediately, and comes trotting over with quiet steps, leaning forward all concern.

"Beth," she says softly. She shifts from foot to foot like a nervous cat, watching Beth with enormous eyes. Beth has never met anyone else with such an intense stare. Or maybe it's just the fact that Beth knows beyond all doubt that she's being looked at by somebody who really sees her in her entirety. It's like she's staring right into Beth's soul. But Mika was able to do that long before they saw each others' faces. They've shared so many thousands of words over screens and seas, so many emotions that have gone otherwise unspoken, so many too-early mornings and too-late nights on the fringes of each other's dawns and dusks.

“What’s wrong?”

Finally, a flash of that sick tension runs through Beth’s body. It’s been okay when Mika has asked that before, when it was just silent letters on a screen. But out loud, the question falls on her ears like every well-meaning inquiry she’s ever had to scramble to find an acceptable answer for. The strain begins to cinch tight around her again like coarse ropes across barely-healed skin, ready to compel her to replace the truth with something safer. Her arms and legs tied, she begins to freeze, railing against herself for tainting the softness, the safety of this place.

"Beth." Mika says again, softer but more urgent.

In the gap between thoughts created by hearing her name, Beth seizes the chance to redirect them to the present. She clings to the welling in the corners of her eyes, the warmth of the sun caressing her back. The leaves of trees whisper outside the third-floor window in a mild breeze. The brightness spills over the sill and across Mika’s asymmetrical, half-craggy face and lights up tufts of her short hair as she steps closer. The couch dips as Mika sits down next to her, tilting Beth toward her.

Without meeting her eyes, Mika lifts a hesitant hand that hovers in the air between them, uncertain yet reaching. Her gentle palm falls onto Beth's forearm as softly as a floating leaf. The fingers curl around Beth’s arm just below the wrist, firm but not tight. Comforting.

The softness surrounding Beth seeps back into her, saturating her. As the memory fades like a ripple into water, the tension slackens. But it leaves her shaky, with traces of a familiar ache in her neck muscles, one that goes deeper than the simple stiffness from the couch. She sucks in a few unsteady breaths while Mika gives her arm a gentle squeeze.

“Sorry,” Beth says in a small, awkward voice.

Mika tilts her head. “Why?”

“Uh, I didn’t mean to bring all – this mess, in here.” Beth rubs the back of her neck with her free hand. “It’s so... soft, and okay, and – I don’t wanna ruin it,” she says, trailing off into a mumble.

“Hey.” Mika moves her hand from Beth’s arm to her shoulder. When Beth looks at her, she’s looking right back. Mika's eyes dart down to the floor for a moment, but then return to hold Beth’s with deliberate steadiness. “It’s alright. It’s like this here because we wanted it to be safe to be messy. You’re not ruining anything.”

“... Oh.” She’s steadied by Mika’s fingers curling around her shoulder, by the tendrils of sunlight spreading across her head and back and arms. Mika’s voice is small but steady, and somehow it comes from the same throat that makes that huge pealing laugh. It’s so strange how they sound nothing alike. Until yesterday, Beth hadn’t heard her voice since the lutefisk incident. They’d mostly kept to text and pictures. It had seemed easier, the way it gave them both plenty time to think before they spoke through their different uncertainties. Beth was already planning her trip before they realized that they’d never actually called each other. By that point, it sounded like more fun to meet in person the old-fashioned way.

"I'll make you some tea." Mika abruptly stands and lets go of her. Beth is sad to lose the contact. She flits across the room toward the kitchen in her soft cotton pajama pants, complemented by yet another black graphic tee for yet another Scandinavian metal band Beth's never heard of. Or at least, she'd never heard of them before Mika, who has something to say about all of them, and now Beth knows more than she'll ever need to.

Mika moves in and out of view behind the half-wall that separates the little living room from the kitchen. The fronds of the fern on the counter make a green rustling as she brushes by them. It sends soft feathered shadows waving across the wall opposite the window. Beth hears the rush of water boiling out of sight, and soon sees steam rising from the mug that's being handed to her.

"It's hot," Mika says unnecessarily. She sits down next to her again, this time leaning into Beth with her arm. Beth’s glad for it.

"Have you ditched the bags and gone loose leaf?" Beth says, eyeing the fragments of bright green leaf free floating in her mug.

"It didn't come in a bag. It came from the window."

"The window?"

"It's basil tea. For the fear and pain. Five large fresh leaves in two hundred and fifty milliliters water. We grew it here."

Beth takes a cautious sip. It's surprisingly sweet, and the savory smell of the steam rising from it curls into her sinuses. The aching in her head and neck begin to relax. It's unfamiliar, but it feels like home should, just like everything else here.

"Thanks," Beth says. On an impulse of craving closeness, she leans her head onto Mika's shoulder with a sigh. The sensation of contact deepens as Mika leans against her, too.

Beth holds the cup close, fingers wrapping around its warmth. She takes another sip and gets a bit of leaf stuck in her teeth. The way she scrunches up her face trying to dislodge it pulls a tiny laugh out of Mika.

“You don’t have to be okay here,” Mika whispers. “You can just be. That’s what we do.”

Beth finds her eyes wet again, but she smiles while she sets her mug down and wipes them away. “Kinda already wish I could stay here,” she says with a chuckle.

“... That’s probably not impossible.”

“Really?” Beth asks wryly. “Not even twenty-four hours, and you’d already be willing to put up with me?”

“Twenty-four hours and twenty-seven months.”

Beth melts a little even while waving the idea aside. “I wasn’t serious.”

“I know, but... weren’t you looking at the school here?”

“I mean, yeah, but... really, my mom just thought I deserved a break to get away for a little while. She’d saved up a bit, and I didn’t want to make it a big deal or anything, but she really wanted me to. She knew I wanted to come see you. Checking out the school was mostly an excuse. I know it’s a great place, but... I don’t really think it’ll help with what I wanna do.”

“What do you want to do?”

Beth sighs and leans back, looking at the ceiling. Mika follows her so that they’re still shoulder to shoulder, and pulls her feet up to tuck them in cross-legged.

She flounders for a moment, trying to find where to begin. She hasn’t told anyone this yet.

“This Leda crap has been kind of awful, right? It’s screwed so many of us up. But there’s only, what, a few hundred of us? And that’s not the only reason things get messed up.” She swallows. Her eyes trace irregularities in the ceiling: a knot in an exposed wooden beam here, a sealed and repainted crack there. “Kids like me are a dime a dozen. There’s so many people out there going through hell, just because they got stuck with people who are hurting so much that they hurt other people. And then they go on and hurt more people. It’s a cycle that’s really fucking hard to break.”

Breaths that have become harsh force her to pause and let them lengthen again. A touch on her knee draws her eyes down to a hand resting on it palm up, offering. Beth takes it. Mika squeezes her fingers in reassurance.

“When I was little, I wanted to be a cop like my dad, did you know that?” Mika, eyes wide, shakes her head. “Yeah. That was always my plan. I used to think he was so brave. Wanted to be just like him.” She shudders. Mika grips her hand, steady. “Even if I could do it better than he did, the system is still full of people like him. It’s broken. I couldn’t – I can’t end up like that. I can’t keep being a part of this shit. I want to actually help people.

“I never thought about it before I met you, but the people you brought in to do therapy programs and all for CYGNet? They’re amazing. The stuff I’ve gotten from them has helped me so much. And I don’t know what I’d do without my regular therapist. These people really help people like me. Like all of us. Those are the kind of people I wanna be like.”

Beth’s voice drops and becomes small and secretive, but firm. “I’ve been looking at the social work programs at home. There’s some really good ones at the uni near where mom and I live now. And that’s the city where I grew up. I know how things work there. I know it won’t be easy, but. I could really... do stuff.”

Silence stretches. Beth looks at Mika, only to be completely thrown off by an expression she can’t make heads or tails of. “What?”

Mika’s face is blank yet soft, only barely hinting at her thoughts in the faintest crinkling of her eyes. It’s funny, how quiet her face is most of the time. Beth never would have guessed, going off her online impressions of her. Mika’s so expressive and eloquent with her written words. In person, she is much more subtle. But even after only a day spent around her, Beth is already starting to see how her movements speak volumes in a language of their own. The flickering of her hands flares to life with excitement. The casual shake of her head tosses her hair out of her eyes even when it’s not in the way, like she’s clearing the slate of her mind. And much like Beth these days, she goes very still and tense when she’s getting uncomfortable or overwhelmed, the way she did after a particularly loud whistle at the train station. It shows in her shoulders. They’re soft now though, and she just watches Beth and squeezes her hand once more.

“You’re really amazing, you know,” Mika says.

“Wh- huh?”

“Well.” She looks away and turns their hands over, but doesn’t let go. “After the awful things you’ve been through – nnnh! Don’t pretend,” she says, looking back sharply as Beth begins to protest that she didn’t have it that bad. Mika knows her so well. Beth can’t help but laugh a little. “After all that, you just want to help people. All I ever want to do is get away from them, most of the time.”

Beth quirks a brow at her with a bemused grin. “Really? Because setting up and running an organization that provides mental health resources and extremely important information to a few hundred people is a really shit way to not help people.”

“I never talk to most of them! And CYGNet only has one hundred and thirteen members, not hundreds.”

Beth rolls her eyes with an exaggerated motion. “Yeah, so, you’ve somehow convinced, what, a whole freaking third of a huge group of scared strangers to trust you?”

“A lot of that was Niki and the press team, she’s way better at talking to people th–”

“And you’ve been careful enough and clever enough to keep them and all the information you got from DYAD safe and secure? I can’t even imagine the organization and, and cyber-security and whatever the hell else you put into all this. That you still put in. And look what you’ve done. You’re helping so many people. You found something only you could do, and do it really damn well.”

Mika looks down into her lap, half her face flushed. The raised ridges and swirls of the scarred side are pink, but not as dark. Her shoulders curl in a little, but she doesn’t pull her hand away from Beth’s. If anything, she holds on a little tighter.

“You don’t have to like talking to people to help them. You don’t have to be someone you’re not,” Beth says gently, then pauses as a new thought occurs to her. “Why did you talk to me?”

Mika gives a tiny shrug, eyes still downcast. “You reached out to me. Most people are scared, or suspicious, or hard to talk to, but you were just... honest. You told me exactly what you needed, even if that meant sharing your painful secrets with a stranger. I...” She trails off, looking toward the closed door of Niki’s bedroom. She blinks slowly.

“It reminded me of something Niki said a long time ago. When we first met. We didn’t trust each other at first. But when things got bad, we needed to, and she just... We’d only known each other for a day. She told me a true story that people had called her crazy for, and trusted me to believe her. And when I told her about... my Asperger’s, about being autistic, she just told me something about herself, too, another thing that a lot of people get cruel about when they know. This was back before she came out, too. She was hardly out to herself, then, really. But she told me anyway. ‘Secret for a secret,’ she said.”

“She’s really special to you.” It’s not a question. How could it be, with the sheer softness of love rounding out every syllable and making Mika melt into the couch and into Beth’s shoulder.

“She’s... yes. She’s my family.” Mika looks out the window, and the bright light dances over her nose. “I don’t remember ever having one.”

Beth slings an arm around Mika’s shoulders and smiles as she curls closer into Beth’s side. “Looks like you’re part of a pretty big one, now,” she says, waving a hand at the dozens of photos on the walls circling them.

“I guess so.”

“No need to guess. The evidence is right there. And I’m right here.”

Mika turns those huge eyes on her again. She’s done that multiple times now, even though Beth knows she rarely looks people in the eye. Eye contact is too much, most of the time. She describes it as too intense, too distracting, too intimate. Meeting those eyes – so like Beth’s own, but filled with such a different kind of light – Beth thinks she understands a glimmer of it. If every eye she met were as overwhelmingly expressive as Mika’s, Beth probably wouldn’t meet them all either. It keeps taking her by surprise, coming across their eloquence in an otherwise quiet face. Caught by that gaze, every emotion that lives in it touches Beth. Right now, it’s soft with adoration but shaded with a gradient of doubt. The width and depth of Mika’s eyes reveal a clear view of a vulnerable, aching, healing heart that spent eleven years starving for the love it needs and still hasn’t forgotten the famine.

It might be breaking Beth’s heart. No wonder Niki is always showering her with hugs and kind words and gentle hands on rounded shoulders. Maybe one of these days, Mika will have spent long enough finally getting to soak up all that affection that she won’t look at Beth like this when she says the simple truth.

“Hey. Here I am. Really.” Beth’s voice is a little choked up. She pulls Mika into a proper hug with both arms. Mika squeaks in surprise at being squeezed so emphatically, but returns it all the same. God, but she gives the best hugs of anyone Beth’s ever met. All contact and even, firm pressure and steadiness. “It’s so damn good to see you. I can’t believe you’re...” real, Beth thinks but doesn’t say. I can’t believe I didn’t imagine you. I can’t believe you’re just as kind as your words. I can’t believe how good it feels to be around you. “I can’t believe I’m really here.”

Mika doesn’t say anything. For a moment, one of her hands leaves Beth’s back to fiddle with something, then comes back to give her a little squeeze that Beth returns.

Beth’s phone buzzes a notification behind her on the little glass-top table next to the couch. The table’s wooden base is a round blob carved into the shape of a very fluffy and very ugly sheep with curly horns. Beth’s arms loosen from their embrace as she turns to look at it, bemused. No one but Mika really messages her except for her mom. But if it’s morning here, it’s about time for bed at home. She checks it, just to be sure she’s okay.

But it’s not from her mom.

Mika reaches out to gently grasp her forearm again as Beth shoots her a quizzical look and opens the message.

3mika: I'm glad you're here.

Beth's heart quails.

To think, that her darker days might have kept her from ever being in this moment. Beth might never have gotten to this point, hurt but healing and here. Here, she's seven time zones and an ocean away from the cycle of pain she grew up in, barely aware she needed to escape. She might well feel safer right here in this crossroads of time and place than she has at any other in her entire life. It's a realization that's as humbling as it is nourishing.

Already, the distance this journey has taken her has given her so much perspective. She wasn’t sure, before, whether the work she’s been considering was just a response to what she’s been through – or just a way for the cycle to keep her within its spiral. But she’s seen what Mika can do, what Beth could do one day, if she keeps on.

It won’t be easy. She’ll go back, and deep-seated memories will try to drag her back into small dark places. But being here, even for only a few hours, has already changed her. She can change, and she can grow, and she is already tapping into new strengths that her past has yet to reckon with. She is here, right now, in spite of all of it. And today is not a dark day.

“Me too, Mika. I’m glad to be here, too.” Beth’s tongue stumbles over the name, because she’s never said it out loud before, only read it on a screen.

Surprise sends Mika’s eyebrows up and her eyes wide again, like she’s never heard it before, either. Maybe she hasn’t. She tilts her head again like a question, touching her ear and looking at Beth.

Beth grins. “Mika.” A smile blooms on that curious face, lighting it up. She’s the one who pulls Beth into a hug this time, and it’s both fierce and soft. When she lets go, she leans into Beth’s side again and they stay like that, arms over shoulders and comfortably curled up together, soaking in the warmth of each other’s presence like leaves drink in light. The simple sweetness and companionship of it soothes Beth’s heart, seeking its way into the aching crevices. It’s an odd feeling, both seeping inward and flowing outward, trickling all the way through her until it warms her cold toes in a way that feels both new and strangely familiar.

A long, sleepy yawn announces that Niki’s awake now, too. Soon, she comes out of her room stretching her arms over her head. Mika reaches a hand out toward her to wave in greeting, though she leaves the other arm draped over Beth’s shoulders. Niki smiles at them. That kind smile, too, adds to the warmth washing through Beth. Her feet practically itch with it, and with a growing sensation of déja vu. She fidgets her toes against the floor as Niki walks over to brush Mika’s outstretched hand like a touchstone.

“How'd you sleep? Isn’t that couch the comfiest?” she says to Beth.

“Well, I’ve got a crick in my neck, but I still slept better than I have in years.”

Niki turns her sunny smile on Beth. “Good to hear it. Weird, though, I nap there all the time and my neck’s always fine. Huh. Anyway, I think I might make waffles. You two want some breakfast?”

Mika nods, but doesn’t let go of Beth yet. Beth is lost in thought, trying to remember what that light, floating feeling in her feet reminds her of.

“Sweet.” Niki ambles toward the kitchen and bends down with pursed lips to peer at the fern perched on the counter. “Hmm. You still look a little pale. Let’s get you some more sun.” She brings the plant over to the living room and is fussing over settling it on the sheep table when it clicks for Beth. A physical memory washes over her, for once welcome. She lets it fill her, refreshing like a deep breath of cold morning air her lungs are suddenly hungry for. She flexes her calves and ankles, her legs remembering the joy and freedom of stride and strike. Her bones are finally recalling how they once carried her with ease, even while they're adjusting to the new weight of who she's become. Fully alive again for at least this moment, her soles are practically prickling with the desire to eat up ground.

“How about you, Beth? Do you like waffles?” Niki asks, fluffing the fern’s crinkly green leaves. Mika squeezes her shoulder.

Beth grins and plants steady feet on the blue rug in front of the couch. “Save a few for me? I think I might actually go for a run first.”

#orphan black #clone club #veera suominen #beth childs #niki lintula #mk ob #mika ob #herbs on the windowsill au #lizzie taking up space #lizzie's adventures in writing #welcome back yall #long post #fic #ob fic #that a garden will grow

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parkernotes · 5 years

Text

sick day

also available on ao3

post-endgame / sickfic / domestic fluff

featuring worried parents pepperony & big brother peter

word count: 4646

The shrill sound of the bell indicating the end of the last period of the day is definitely the best thing Peter has ever heard. Mrs. Warren starts reminding them about the next week's quiz, but her voice gets muffled by the sound of Peter's classmates packing their bags and dragging their chairs across the floor noisily as they stand up. Peter is able to hear it due to his super hearing, so he messily writes down a reminder on his planner before throwing everything inside his bag and hurrying up to catch up with Ned who is already waiting by the door.

"So, MJ and Betty told me during lunch they want to go grab some pizza tonight, are you in? I think Zach and Tyler are coming too, but I'm not sure," Ned says as they step out of the classroom into the hallway, already packed with students. He pauses for a moment before continuing, "You know, it's enough time for you to… hang out. In Queens. For a while. If you know what I mean. We were planning to meet up at 8."

Peter chuckles, but shakes his head. "I'm gonna spend the weekend at the lakehouse. I'll only have time to pack a bag when I get home, so no hanging out in Queens today, I guess," he explains, tugging the hem of Ned's jacket, silently indicating he needs to stop by his locker.

Ned hums as Peter inputs his passcode on the lock. "I thought you were going to be around again this time. It's been a while since you went there, yeah?"

"Not that long," Peter says, pulling out his Chemistry and Calculus textbooks. His Physics one is already inside his bag, and with three different exams scheduled for the following week, he will have no choice but get some revision done during the weekend. "It's because Pepper went on a business trip, and Tony had to tag along, for some reason. Guess it was pretty important."

Tony mentioned something about going with Pepper to California to deal with some issues of the company - Peter didn't really understand what those entailed, only that the couple would be gone for two weeks. They left Morgan in Mrs. Rhodes' care, who is by all means Morgan's honorary grandmother. She invited Peter over multiple times the past few days to hang out with them, but due to the pile of homework he had to complete, the countless of tests his teachers were scheduling plus patrols, he had no time to barely breathe, let alone visit them. It didn't stop him from feeling bad, though.

Peter doesn't think he has sleep for more than four hours during the past week while trying to balance all aspects of his life, and it's getting to him. Despite the stamina that came with the spider bite, he can still only push himself so far. He feels quite lethargic due to the exhaustion, and just can'twait to fall asleep in his room at the lakehouse tonight.

"Well, we'll miss you, man," Ned says as they start walking towards the exit again.

"I'll come back Sunday afternoon, though," Peter says as they head down the steps. "Maybe there'll be some time to hang out."

"Alright, you let me know," Ned says.

They hurriedly do their handshake when Ned spots his bus parking in front of the school, and Peter watches him run towards it in order to grab a seat, pushing some people by accident in the process. He smiles a bit to himself, but as soon as his friend is out of sight, he can feel the exhaustion creep on him again.

He feels bad for not patrolling after school as usual, but at the same time he knows he wouldn't be able to do much. At best, he would stop some muggings before falling asleep on a random rooftop out of pure fatigue. He doesn't really want to be woken up by a desperate call from Tony asking if he's alright - not again - so Peter decides it's probably for the better.

Happy knocks on their door at 5 p.m. sharp, only a few minutes after Peter is done packing his bag. From his room, he hears May opening the front door and greeting Happy excitingly, as if they hadn't seen each other just yesterday.

Peter cringes to himself. He still refuses to stop and think about that .

He pauses when he hears a third voice in the living room, loud and familiar.

"So, where's the kid? Please don't tell me he forgot we were coming."

At that, Peter stands up right away, heading to his door as May laughs, answering he's just getting ready. He walks through the short hallway and into the living room, pausing as the three adults turn around to face him.

"Tony," he breathes, a big smile on his face as he closes the distance between them. Tony catches him in a warm hug, chuckling against Peter's hair and patting him on the back.

"Missed me much?"

"I didn't know you were coming!" he smiles as he steps back, glancing up at the other man. "Hey, Happy!"

"Hi, kiddo," Happy says. "How have you been?"

"Good, good," Peter says, despite everything.

"You look a bit tired," Mr. Stark points out, not unkindly. "School's been tough?"

"He's been working hard," May answers for him, her tone proud but somewhat concerned at the same time. She pats him on the back softly while looking at Tony. "This weekend will be good to him, so make sure he rests a lot."

"Don't you worry, there will be no studying done under my watch," Tony reassures her, winking at Peter. "So, you ready?"

Peter nods, already turning towards his room. "I'll just get my bag!"

Turns out Tony was already in town to meet with someone and decided to wait for Peter so that they could head to the lakehouse together. However, he also finds out Happy will actually be staying behind with May, which is fine, but also totally weird. After hugging May goodbye, he tries to glare at Happy but only ends up receiving an amused - but also suspiciously nervous - chuckle and a hair ruffle from the man.

Once finally on their way to the lake house, Peter can't help but nod along sleepily as Tony talks away about his time with Pepper in California, sat comfortably on the passenger seat of one of Tony's many fancy cars. They're not even out of town when he finally dozes off, head resting on top of his hoodie crumpled up against the window.

He doesn't know how much time has passed once he wakes up, but they're on the road. The sun is setting on their left, and the sky is all shades of purple and orange. Music is playing softly from the speakers, and Tony glances at him once Peter raises his head.

"Hey, sleeping beauty, thanks for conking out on me," he says.

Peter smiles, stretching his arms in front of him with a groan. "Sorry, it's been a long day."

"I'm just kidding," Tony says, but Peter already knows. "Sleep more if you want. We have around half an hour left before we get there."

Peter nods, raising his hands to rub up and down his arms. Even though the AC is off, he feels colder than usual.

He catches Tony looking at him again through his peripheral vision, and soon he's supplying helpfully, "There's a blanket in the glove department."

"Oh, thanks," Peter says around a yawn.

He opens the glove department and pulls out a carefully folded Paw Patrol blanket, certainly Morgan's. It's thick enough though, so Peter doesn't hesitate before covering his upper body with it, resting his head on the same place as before. He's out again a few minutes later.

The next time he wakes up is by Tony shaking him gently, a hand on his shoulder. Once Peter's eyes flutter open and focus, he realizes they've arrived at the lake house, and night has fallen.

"We're here, bud," Tony announces, opening the door on his side to step out.

Soon enough, the dark landscape is illuminated by the warm light coming from the inside of the house as the front door opens and a tiny figure steps out. Morgan comes running directly towards Peter as he steps out of the car, and despite all the fatigue, he picks her up easily.

"Pete! I've missed you," she says, loosening the grip her short arms have around his neck only to kiss him on the cheek with a loud smack .

He giggles despite himself, twirling them both around. "Me too," he says. "Sorry for not visiting you at Mrs. Rhodes house."

"It's okay," she says.

Peter puts her down and she runs to greet Tony just as Pepper steps out of the house, heading towards the car. Peter meets her halfway in a gentle embrace, sighing softly against her shoulder.

"How have you been, sweetheart?" she asks, pulling Peter back to look at him properly. She brushes a curl away from his forehead, studying his face attentively. "May told me you've been so busy with school."

"Yeah, it's been hard, but I'm almost done with most tests," he shrugs, smiling softly.

He's sure Pepper knows how tired he feels when she says, "After dinner you'll go to bed right away, yeah? We can do whatever you kids want to do tomorrow."

"Yeah," he breathes, smiling gratefully. He turns around to face the car, "I just have to get my-"

"Tony will bring your bag inside for you," Pepper interrupts, raising her voice so that said man can hear. She wraps an arm around Peter's shoulders, leading him to the front door. "Right, honey?"

"Yeah," Tony grunts, and Peter looks behind his shoulder only too see him balancing Peter's bag on his right shoulder and Morgan on the left one.

Peter feels weirdly dizzy when he steps out of his room after showering and changing into some comfy clothes. He suspects it might be because he hasn't eaten in a while, or because he hasn't slept for a long time the previous night despite his nap on their way from the city, but, either way, he feels like crap.

He plops down on the couch next to Morgan, who's attentively watching My Little Pony on Netflix. He can hear Tony and Pepper cooking in the kitchen, and the smell of homemade tomato sauce drifting from there.

Peter closes his eyes, resting the back of his head against the soft cushion of the couch. He hears Morgan giggling at a particular funny line and Pepper complaining about something Tony's done in the kitchen, but soon these sounds become muted and he starts to fall asleep.

He almost dozes off when he startles himself with a violent sneeze.

Morgan jumps from where she's sat next to him, looking at him with wide eyes before saying, "Bless you."

"Thanks, Mo," he says, the sound coming off a bit nasal.

He makes a quick trip to the bathroom to blow his nose, and settles on the same spot next to Morgan when he comes back. This time, he falls asleep without any interruptions.

"Bud, dinner is ready," Tony's voice drags him back to reality. "You're really worn out, hm?"

Peter groans in response, feeling the man's brushing through his hair. A moment passes, then the hand pauses.

"You're a bit warm," Tony observes. His hand travels down to press against Peter's forehead, then his cheek. "How're you feeling?"

After a moment of consideration, Peter opens his eyes tentatively. "Head hurts a bit. I'm feeling kinda weak, too," he admits after a few moments of hesitation, not feeling like hiding it.

"Well, you might be coming down with a fever," Tony sighs, a worried crease between his brows. "Pep, can you get me the thermometer?"

Pepper, who had just entered the room with the plates to set the table, frowns at them. "What happened?"

"Kiddo's a bit warm. He's not feeling very good, either," Tony replies, hand gently landing back on Peter's hair.

"Oh no, sweetheart," she sighs, placing the plates down on the table. "I'll be right back."

Morgan makes her way from the dining table, where she was excitingly waiting for her spaghetti plate, to the armchair near Peter and Tony. She looks down at Peter with a frown, so similar to her dad's - Peter softly smiles up at her, reassuringly.

Pepper comes back only a few moments later with the thermometer. She turns it in and hands it to Peter, who closes his lips around it with a sigh.

"Come help me put the table, baby," she calls Morgan. "Peter's just fine, hm?"

Morgan follows after her mom silently, not before throwing one last fearful glance behind her shoulder.

Once the thermometer beeps, Peter pulls it off and Tony takes it to check the reading.

"105.3," he pronounces. "Well, you do run a little hotter than us, but that's a little bit high for you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Tony sighs, looking down at him empathetically. "I would only really start worrying if it goes above 106, though. I think with some proper food in your system and a long night of sleep you'll be just fine."

"God, I hope so," Peter groans, rubbing his hands across his face. "That would suck."

He hears Tony chuckle, and in the next moment the man is standing up. "C'mon, before Morguna eats all the food."

Peter usually helps to wash the dishes after dinner when he's over at the lake house, but this time Tony brushes him off.

"I can handle a few dishes on my own," he says, patting Peter on the shoulder and turning him towards the staircase. "Go on, I'll check on you after I'm done."

Peter can only nod sleepily in response, slowly starting to climb the steps behind Morgan and Pepper. The little girl is already proclaiming which bedtime story she wants to read this time, and once they reach upstairs she turns around to look up at Peter.

"Do you wanna read, too?" she asks, reaching out to take Peter's hand in her own tiny one.

Peter's heart breaks a little. Throughout dinner, he tried to speak up and join the conversation not to frighten Morgan with his condition, but it wasn't much. Looking down at her, he can easily understand she doesn't want to let him out of her sight just yet.

Pepper puts a hand on top of Morgan's head, gently brushing her hair back while giving Peter a reassuring look. "Peter needs to rest, sweetheart," she then says, looking down at Morgan. "You can play with him tomorrow, alright? Say goodnight."

Morgan pouts, reluctantly letting go of Peter's hand. "Goodnight," she says.

Peter smiles tiredly, reaching out to pat her in the head. He'd usually give her a hug and a kiss, but he doesn't want to risk spreading any germs. "Goodnight, Mo."

After turning around and heading to his room, Peter doesn't even bother to turn on the lights. He makes a beeline for his bed and crashes into it, then tiredly arranges the covers on top of his body.

He wakes up to someone touching his hand. He startles, eyes shooting open, but once his vision focuses he sees Tony sitting on the edge of his bed in the semi-darkness, holding Peter's wrist against his chest. The lights from the hallway are entering his bedroom through the narrow opening of the door, and thanks to that Peter is able to see the watch Tony is slipping on his wrist.

"What…?" he begins, trying to sit down.

"Hey, it's alright," Tony reassures him, easing him back against his pillow with a hand on his shoulder. "Didn't mean to wake you up. This is to track your vitals during the night, okay? FRIDAY will let me know if your temperature rises."

"Oh," Peter replies, bringing his wrist closer to his face to inspect it.

"How do you feel?"

"About the same," Peter replies, eyelids already starting to feel unbearably heavy again.

Tony sighs, tucking the covers up to Peter's chin before standing up. "Even though you have the watch, let me know in case you need anything, yeah?"

Peter hums in response, eyes fluttering close. The last thing he hears is Tony softly wishing him a goodnight and the door behind closed with a muted click after he steps out of the room.

The next time he wakes from sleep, is to quiet voices talking in his room.

Before even opening his eyes, the next thing Peter feels is a pounding headache and how... damp his clothes feel. He whimpers softly at the pain, and suddenly he hears someone shushing him and a hand brushing through his hair.

"Pete, come on, I need to give you some medicine," Tony's voice says. "Can you sit up?"

Peter tries, but there slightest movement he makes with his head makes the headache pound at his skull. "Hurts," he manages to groan softly.

"I know, kiddo," Tony replies. "The medicine will help."

He blinks his eyes open, and he spots Tony sitting on the exact spot to when he was slipping the watch on Peter's wrist. Behind him, Pepper is standing up with her arms crossed over her chest, looking over them with a frown.

"I'll get him another shirt," she says once as Tony helps him up.

Looking down, Peter realizes his shirt is almost soaked in cold sweat.

"Come on, arms up," Tony tells him quietly, minding his headache, tugging at the hem of his shirt.

Peter weakly lifts his arms in front of him, and Tony drags the fabric up his chest, through his head and then through his arms until he's shirtless. He whimpers, feeling colder than ever, but soon enough there's another shirt - completely dry this time, thank God - going over his head.

The movements make Peter feel a bit dizzy, so he closes his eyes as he leans back against the pillows Pepper arranged against the headboard of the bed.

"Don't fall asleep, Pete," Tony urges. When Peter's eyes flutter open, he sees Tony opening a small pill bottle. "Give me your hand."

He drops two pills on the palm of Peter's hand and gives him a glass of water.

"This should work for your metabolism. Superhero Ibuprofen, if you will," he says conversationally as Peter swallows the pills. "Courtesy of Bruce. Your Aunt should have some back in Queens, too."

Peter feels a wave of warmth wash over him. Knowing that there are people thinking ahead for him, taking care of this kind of stuff even though he thought he would never get this sick ever again, makes him feel a little bit better despite the pain.

Peter didn't even noticed Pepper was gone, but suddenly she steps out of the adjoined bathroom of his room with a wet cloth and a hand towel.

"Come here, sweetheart," she guides him forwards gently so that Peter is sitting on the bed but not leaning back against the pillows. She uses the towel to wipe off some of the sweat from his collarbones, neck and his face.

While she does it, Tony hurries to change his pillowcase, so that when Peter's eased back to lay down on his back again, he's not grossly covered in cold sweat anymore. The slightly cold wet cloth is placed against his burning forehead, and as Tony adjusts it against his skin Peter can already feel himself drifting off.

"Th'nks," he manages to murmur before falling asleep.

Peter's temperature doesn't rise again throughout the night, but he doesn't sleep very well. He turns around a lot and the movements only serve to make him even more dizzy. When morning comes, instead of waking up to FRIDAY or Pepper announcing that breakfast is ready as usual, the door opens slowly and Tony steps into the room with a bowl on one of his hands. Peter wasn't deeply asleep to begin with, so his eyes flutter open at the noise.

Peter only blinks up at Tony as he sits down on the edge of the mattress and places the bowl on the nightstand. Through his mostly clogged nose, Peter can smell oatmeal, banana and honey.

"Your temperature dropped," Tony observes, voice almost a whisper. He raises a hand to brush Peter's messy curls away from his forehead, and he notices that the wet cloth placed there during the night is gone. "Feeling any better?"

"Head doesn't hurt anymore," Peter replies. "It feels kinda heavy though. Feeling kinda weak."

"That's because you haven't eaten anything since dinner," Tony observes promptly. "Try eating this and then going back to sleep, alright? You gotta sleep it off, rest as much as you can."

"Kay," Peter agrees, only because he just wants to get over this sickness as soon as possible.

"Good kid," Tony praises. "You should get sick more often. You're never this compliant."

Peter scoffs. "Ha ha," he says, slowly getting up. "You know I-"

He interrupts himself when the door creaks as it's slowly pushed open. Both he and Tony turn around to look, and sure enough Morgan is peeking through the narrow opening, wide eyes fixed on Peter.

"Mo, weren't you eating breakfast?" Tony asks.

"I finished already," she replies, unusually quiet.

Tony sighs fondly, reaching his hand towards her. "C'mere."

Morgan hesitantly steps inside the room as Peter reaches for the oatmeal bowl on his nightstand.

"Your brother's fine," Tony reassures her, pulling her up to sit on his lap once she's close enough. "He's improved a lot already, yeah? It happens. He'll be up soon enough, climbing up walls and giving us all heart attacks."

Peter smiles. "Yeah, don't worry," he agrees, holding back a wince at how hoarse his voice sounds. "We'll get to play before I leave."

"Today?"

"I'm afraid not yet today, baby," Tony answers for him. "Maybe tomorrow. Petey needs to sleep as much as he can to be strong again."

Morgan huffs, but nods. "Okay."

She only stays for a few more minutes, still looking terribly sulky as she goes away to find her mom. Peter sighs after swallowing a spoonful of food, feeling terrible about the whole ordeal. He was supposed to be perfectly fine , playing on the edge of the lake with Morgan during the morning and then coming back inside to revise for his exams during the afternoon, only to spend the evening before and a little bit after dinner with Tony in the garage. He missed them all so much, but now he's making them spend their time looking after his sorry self.

Being sick really fucking sucks.

"Stop sighing, you're depressing me," Tony pipes up a while afterwards, looking up from the phone he pulled out of his pocket. "Don't blame yourself for this, alright? Pep and I were expecting this. She spent a long time away from everything familiar to her, but even now that we're back her routine is still not back to normal. It would be kinda weird if she wasn't acting up a little bit."

Peter thinks a little about it. Before Tony and Pepper had to leave for California, Peter saw them practically every weekend and therefore was able to spend a lot of time with Morgan. She's still probably facing the same separation anxiety as he is, but worse. Not surprising for a five year-old.

"Still sucks," he concludes grumpily. "I hate being sick. I didn't think I would fall sick again after the bite."

"Me neither," Tony sighs. "But it's alright. The good news is that you're improving really quickly, so you should be fine by dinner."

"Yeah," Peter nods, putting the bowl back on the nightstand. He rubs his hands over his face. "Gosh, I feel so tired."

"As expected," Tony sighs, patting his ankle above the covers before standing up. "Go back to sleep. I'll wake you up for lunch."

Peter naps during the day as advised, but again, it's a weird kind of sleep. He can't get comfortable no matter what, and his head starts to hurt again. He dutifully eats the soup Pepper brings him a few hours later, but he's quite dizzy and doesn't even manage to finish it. Tony gives him another dose of medicine and tells him to go back to sleep, looking down at him with a worried frown Peter thought he wouldn't see again this weekend because he's supposed to be feeling better already.

Well, his condition does improve a little bit, but he still feels like utter crap. Tony thought he would be as good as new by dinner, but he doesn't make it to the dining table. They bring him more soup, and afterwards Tony convinces him to take a shower. Peter manages to shower on his own, leaving the door unlocked in case he crashes, but thankfully that doesn't happen while he's under the showerhead. However, it's once he's weakly pulling a pair of clean sweatpants over his boxers that he loses his balance, colliding painfully against the sink before descending to the ground.

"Fuck," he hears Tony say, and in the next second the man is dressing Peter's trembling frame in a shirt and hoodie. Peter didn't even notice he had entered the bathroom. "Are you okay? Did you hit your head?"

Peter shakes his head softly, but his vision suddenly becomes blurry as his eyes well up with tears.

"Kiddo, what's wrong? What hurts?"

"Everything," he whimpers, quite pathetically. But it's true - everything hurts. His head feels heavy and fuzzy, his nose is clogged all the time, he feels like he's fucking freezing , and while he was supposed to rest during the day, his fucked up brain decided to give him disturbing nightmares instead.

He starts crying out of pure exhaustion, mental and physical. This weekend was supposed to help him relax and recharge, but so far it only made him more miserable and turned him into a huge bother to Tony and Pepper.

"Hey, hey, hey," Tony says, sounding quite startled. He wraps a hand around Peter's shoulders, crouching besides him on the bathroom floor. "Don't cry, buddy. It's alright, I'm here. Tell me what's wrong."

"I'm so fucking tired," Peter whines, choking on a sob. "I just wanna rest but I can't."

"Oh, Pete," Tony sighs, pulling into into a warm embrace. Peter rests his cheek on his chest, hiccuping softly as tears run down his cheeks. "It's okay. You're getting better. I know it sucks, but it'll be over soon."

He runs a hand up and down Peter's trembling back, squeezing him against his chest for a moment before pulling back. He wipes Peter's tears away with his thumbs, even if they keep on coming.

"Come on, let's put you in bed," he says, standing up and pulling Peter up with him.

Tony tucks Peter in, but follows suit and lies down next to him on the bed once he's settled and covered in blankets like a human burrito. He wraps his arms around his covered frame, tucking Peter's head under his chin.

"Try to rest now, yeah? I'll be right here with you," he reassures Peter. "If it doesn't work, I'll still be here."

Peter sniffles. "Okay," he whispers back. "'’M sorry."

Tony clicks his tongue, pressing a kiss against the top of his head. "You have nothing to apologize for," he says. "It's not your fault you got sick. It probably had to do with some weak self care skills, but it wasn't your intention. We'll work around that, yeah? Don't you worry."

"Okay," Peter says again, sleepier by the second. "Th'nk you, Tony. Love you," he adds as an afterthought.

He both hears and feels Tony chuckle lightly. "Love you too, kiddo."

#irondad #fic #peter parker #tony stark #fanfic #slice of life #mine

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