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andreafmn · 3 years

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I'm Not Afraid - Chapter 6

Word Count: 3,753

Characters: Female Reader Argent Character, Original Male Argent Character, Derek Hale, Allison Argent, Scott McCall, Stiles Stilinski, Isaac Lahey, Lydia Martin, Chris Argent, Jackson Whittemore

Story Description: (Y/N) Argent arrived at Beacon Hills to put to rest her father’s sister, Kate Argent. For the first time, her family has decided to settle down and sustain a life in this interesting small town. After 17 years, (Y/N) has the opportunity to establish interpersonal relationships but will she be ready to face the complications that come with relating to her cousin’s, Allison, friends; especially, the infamous Derek Hale. She will face the adventure of being associated with the Derek and McCall pack as well as being faced with the discovery of certain aspects of her life she never imagined.

*DISCLAIMER* I do not own in any way Teen Wolf, all credits of the pre-established characters, script, and storyline belong to Jeff Davis and MTV Network. The only thing I own is Argent Reader insert, her immediate family, and her storyline, as well as her effects in the others’ storyline.

Chapter: 6/?

Warnings: mentions of murder, arson, and blood

A/N: The ending is dark, y'all, dark. If you enjoy my writing I’ll also be posting them in AO3 and Wattpad along with other stories (I also hope to start taking requests if ya’ll want) Hope you enjoy and all constructive criticism is encouraged.

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Chapter 6

I followed my father inside the house, my hands trembling and sweating. The only topic I believed they would seriously need to talk to me about was the supernatural and the family business. Just as I had told Derek, if I hadn’t met him and Scott, I would have probably joined without a second thought. But I had met them, I had been embraced by them, and I didn’t know what I was going to answer.

I sat across from my parents on the kitchen’s island. They seemed excited, but a bit anxious. Obviously, revealing to your daughter the existence of supernatural beings and the fact that the whole family hunted them wasn’t an easy task. At least, she already knew the most hard-hitting information and she wouldn’t feel blindsided.

“Honey, what we have to tell you is very important, and we don’t want you to feel like we have been keeping this from you on purpose,” my mother started. “But you need to understand that everything we have to say today is nothing but the truth. Okay?”

“Guys, what is it? You’re scaring me.”

“You know that all Argents work at the family company, Argent Arms International, and that at some point you’d probably end up working there.”

“Yeah, dad. The reason I know too much about weapons,” I laughed. I couldn’t let on that I knew more than they thought.

“Well, the company is actually a front for the real work we do behind the scenes, and the reason we’re on the road a lot,” my father started. “Since the start of our lineage Argents have been hunters.”

“Hunters of what?”

“Now, I need you to remember that what I am about to tell you is the full honest truth.” I nodded. “We hunt supernatural creatures, but mainly werewolves. You remember the tattoo I have on my arm that you asked about when you were younger?”

“Yeah, ‘Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent’. French, we hunt those who hunt us. I always thought it was more of a psychological phrase.”

“That’s our family mantra. All Argent generations have been trained since childhood to become hunters one day, Chris and I were the only ones that decided to give you and Allison the choice once you became teenagers to know about our world. It’s completely up to you to join us.”

“So, all the training, physical and with weapons, was all in preparation for this?” My father nodded. I could see the worry in his face of how I would take this news – a one-worded answer was going to shift my whole life. It was one thing to be knowledgeable of this life, it was another to be in the center of all of it.

“We run by a code,” my father explained. “We only hunt those who have been proven to have harmed innocent lives – only adults, no young ones, and no humans. Any hunter that breaks that code is an enemy to our cause.”

“Is that what aunt Kate did?” I spoke in a hushed tone knowing this was a difficult topic for my father, one that we hadn’t touched upon in the time we had been here.

“Yes, it is” my mother answered. Her dislike towards her sister-in-law wasn’t a secret. Mom had always thought of her as arrogant and self-centered – or so she would state when in an alcohol-induced rant.

“Unfortunately, my sister did break the code, but that’s beside the point,” dad interjected. “Sweetheart, we make sure that everyone around us is protected from the creatures that are unknown. So, what do you think? Do you want to join us?”

They both studied my face, waiting on any reaction that could arise from me. All I could think is how my decision could affect the people that had made their way into my life. Allison had accepted, and although her relationship with Scott was strained, she still managed to keep him close. But what if I accepted and all it did was deteriorate all the new relationship I was trying to build?

“Yes.”

After the conversation, my father warned me that training would start soon, after I passed some sort of test. They were happy that I had agreed to join the family trade, but I noticed a sign of worry in my father’s eyes. His whole life had been built around supernatural hunting, so what was he worried about? Whatever it was, he did not express. They had both been called away on a meeting and excused themselves before leaving. With the house to myself, I basked in my decision sitting on the living room couch, petting Brody.

“What do you think, bub? Did I make the right choice?” Brody looked up at me, his tongue hanging out, a smile on his face. A bark came after and I took it as confirmation that I had. “Maybe you’re right. We’ll see, huh? Should I call Derek and tell him?”

At the sound of Derek’s name, Brody barked out happily. I laughed at his reaction and decided to call Derek. It still surprised me that Brody had taken to Derek so quickly – probably had to do with him being a werewolf and an alpha. I clicked on his contact on my phone and waited on speaker for him to pick up.

“Hello?” His voice rang out, exciting Brody once more. “Hey, buddy!”

“He’s been very excited to hear from you.”

“I can see,” he chuckled. “I can assume you made it home safely?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“What’s wrong? You sound weird.”

“How can you possibly deduct my tone from over the phone?”

“Intuition, you could say. But seriously, what’s wrong?”

“Well, my parents talked to me about the family business,” I breathed out, nerves building up inside. I didn’t know what his reaction would be, and I hope my decision wouldn’t push him away. “They asked me to join them.”

“And what did you say?” He already knew the answer. Asking was just courtesy.

“I said yes.” He kept quiet for a second, and I truly believed I had ruined our relationship before anything had ever started. “Are you mad?”

“I can’t be mad. I understand why you did it, they’re your family. Why would you think I would be mad?”

“I don’t know. I’m gonna be actively working on hunting you and your kind, that would put a strain on any kind of relationship.”

“And what kind of relationship would that be?” He teased.

“Derek, this is serious. What kind of relationship could we have when we’re born enemies?”

“Allison and Scott seem to make it work. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible.”

“So, sneaking around, worrying every second that we’d be found out by hunters. Seems viable,” I snickered. “And in no way, shape, or form stressful. Believe me, Derek, I have enough anxiety as it is. I don’t need the stress of keeping all my relationships secret.”

“Do you have any other choice?”

“I guess I don’t.”

“The way I see it, (Y/N), is you can use this opportunity and work for both sides. You can protect us from the inside, and hunt those that are a real threat. Like the Kanima,” he stated. It made sense to work with my family to protect my friends, even if my family was hunting them. “And, as much as I hate saying this, you should talk to Allison about this. She seems to be handling this way better than I thought.”

“I will. Thanks, Derek. I’ll call you soon, okay?”

“I’ll be waiting. Sleep well, (Y/N).”

“You too, Derek.”

I hung up the phone and breathed out. My life had turned a lot more complicated than I had ever imagined, and I was sure it was going to turn a lot worse. I had just started dipping my toes in the supernatural pot we were living in, something told me that there was still so much that I didn’t know. And there was one person I knew would have the answers I was seeking.

I grabbed my jacket off the coat rack and got on my motorcycle, a clear route ingrained in my brain. The night was cold, and the breeze nipped at my skin as it blew under my shirt. There was so much I had to learn, and so little time.

The drive wasn’t long, and I was still surprised I remembered the way.

The lights in the McCall house were off, but the car was in front, so I assumed Scott was home. I would have gone to Allison, but I needed to know everything, and I was sure she would try to protect me from the worst of it. Scott seemed like someone I could trust, and being at the center of everything gave him a lot more insight that I could use. I looked around the house and, remembering which room was his, found a way to climb up the side to his window. Hopefully, I didn’t encounter something I didn’t want to see.

Looking away, I knocked on his window – loud enough for him to hear, but silent enough to not alarm his mom. I clutched my jacket tighter as I waited for an answer, the wind finding me easier on higher ground. It didn’t take long for the window to slid open, revealing a very confused Scott.

“(Y/N)?” He rubbed sleep off his eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you. Can I come in?”

“Sure.” He stepped aside and let me through. His room was messier than the last time I had seen it, and the bed was disheveled. On his desk, his computer was propped open, and a disarray of papers lived atop the wooden surface.

“Sorry for waking you, but this couldn’t wait.”

“Don’t worry. I couldn’t sleep anyway,” he chuckled. A lopsided smile taking place on his face. “So, what’s up?”

“Tonight, I was asked by my parents to join the hunters, and I agreed. But, going into this, I’m the one that knows the least about this world. Apart from Lydia, that is. I need to know everything you know about what we are up against. I don’t think our parents would have asked Allison and me to join now unless we were facing something truly dangerous.”

“Okay, I get it. And please don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you asking me and not Allison or even Derek? It seems like they would be the natural choice to ask about this.”

“Because they would try to shield me from the most dangerous aspects of what’s happening. Hopefully, you being a third party you’ll be truly honest about the situation we are in.” My tone came out friendly, but the underlying threat was evidently laced with it.

“Alright, where do you want me to start?”

“I want to know everything. No detail left out.”

“For me, this all started last year…”

And everything I learned. Scott had been bitten by Peter Hale, Derek’s uncle, who was alpha at the time. Most of last year he spent learning about his new werewolf life, which he believed he was alone in, until Derek, who came from a long line of werewolves that resided in Beacon Hills. The very same family my aunt had murdered. When he explained that part of Derek’s history, I couldn’t help but tear up. How could he ever stand being near me when my own blood had done that to him? Ripped him from his family in such a horrifying manner. I knew she had killed people but knowing that Derek was one of the survivors made my stomach knot.

He also told me how Derek came to be the alpha, and how Peter had held the alpha title also. And how my aunt had truly died. Everyone’s stories seemed to bundle into the same mess of supernatural chaos.

“Then, Jackson asked for the bite, which Derek gave him. And the thing about the bite, you sometimes turn into something other than a werewolf due to internal issues you could say. So, he became the Kanima, which is a lizard type-creature that looks for a master as we just recently learned. His main objective is to do as his master commands, and in his case, it's killing a bunch of people. He also secretes a venom that paralyzes people, but it didn’t work on you and Lydia.” Me? “Which was really weird – Lydia, we think it has something to do with Peter biting her. But you, we’re not sure. Because there’s no indication as to why you could possibly be immune. Unless you’re not human, but that would mean that Lydia’s not human either, and that doesn’t make sense.”

“Okay, Scott. You’re rambling,” I chuckled dryly, stopping him in his track. How he talked for so long, I did not understand. I believed Stiles was the only one with that ability. “How could you know that I was immune though? I haven’t had any contact with the Kanima or this venom.”

“Well, actually, the day we were making rock crystals in lab, Isaac had left some venom on Lydia’s crystal. You weren’t supposed to taste it, but it was a surprise when nothing happened to you. Have you ever been in contact with any other supernatural beings?”

“Seeing as I didn’t even know my parents were hunters, it’s safe to assume I haven’t. But I think finding out why I am the way I am is at the bottom of the list with this Kanima going around.”

“Yeah, and your family is making it very hard to do so when they’re actively hunting us.”

“They can’t be, they run by a code, and you guys are innocent.”

“But your grandfather doesn’t care. He lifted the code. He’s on a rampage towards all supernatural creatures, us included. They’re even keeping an eye on us at school – with Gerard running it and Victoria being our new teacher.”

“But we have the upper hand in learning about the Kanima, right? I mean, if my family is actively recruiting the younger ones, it means they are up against a threat they don’t know about, and we have the bestiary translated.”

“Kind of. I just have a feeling Gerard knows a lot more than he lets on.”

“Can’t really give insight on a person I don’t know. But anything I find out I’ll be sure to pass it along,” I smiled. “I still can’t believe all of this was happening right under my nose. How did I not notice?”

“It’s easy to ignore when you don’t know it exists. If I hadn’t been in the forest that night, I would be as in the dark as you were.”

“I guess so,” I smiled. “Thank you, Scott. For your honesty, and for trusting me with this information.”

“You’re one of us now, (Y/N). We look out for our own.”

“Thank you, Scott. I’ll leave you now to hopefully catch up on some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”

“Of course, (Y/N). We’re gonna meet up with Allison in the library to talk about the Kanima. I think it’d be good for you to be there.”

“I will.” My body was outside the house, squatting in front of the window. “Again, thanks, Scott. It’s good to know I have a friend looking out for us.”

“Don’t mention it, (Y/N).” He smiled, scratching his neck trying to hide the blush that had crept to his face. “Get home safe.”

I felt uneasy the whole ride back home. I truly couldn’t fathom how Derek old even spend a second with me after everything my family had put him through. My stomach hadn’t stopped turning, and I felt like I could throw up at any second. He didn’t deserve to have to look at a person that resembled the person that had screwed up his life. The tears started streaming from my eyes before I could stop them. It didn’t feel right, and it wasn’t right.

Somehow I made it back home. I had blacked out at some point and was moving out of muscle memory. I was glad my parents had not made it back home yet — I could let tears cascade without having to hide them. Allison and I had always looked up to our aunt. To us, she presented herself as a confident, independent, and badass woman. I still remember how one Christmas Allison and I had gotten into her clothes and pretended to be her. When Kate found us, she couldn’t help but laugh at the two little irks in front of her. She questioned what we were doing and we told her we wanted to be just like her. I recalled how I told her I wanted to grow up to be her. There’s nothing I wouldn’t have done to take that back. Had I know back then what I knew now, I would have stayed as far away from her.

“This family is all types of messed up. Huh, Brody?” My dog looked up at me, a questioning glance on his face. “What am I gonna do, bub? I don’t think I’m strong enough to face him. I really don’t.”

Brody barked, leaving kisses on my cheeks — a nimble approach to getting rid of my tears. I snuggled closer to him, enjoying his comforting presence. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep well tonight.

I was standing in the middle of Derek’s family home, the only light coming from the moon peeking through the clouds. It was a cold night, and the low temperature was seeping into my bones. My whole body ached and the air smelled of soot. I felt uneasy standing there. Now knowing its history, my heart clenched tightly. I could only imagine the pain that had ensued in what I presumed was an agonizingly slow death. The tears that escaped from my eyes burned into my skin, and my ears rang with an unknown high pitch. I kneeled on the floor, and attempt to catch m breath.

“It hurts doesn’t it?” I stood up, the unknown voice startling me. “The smell is the worst part.”

“Aunt Kate.”

“The screams weren’t that bad,” she chuckled. “They died down quickly. There’s so much screaming you can do when smoke fills your lungs.”

“Stop,” I sobbed. “Please.”

“I can just imagine them thinking it was a normal afternoon, and then the fire starts. You know, wooden houses are a very good catalyst to speed up a fire.”

“Stop.”

“(Y/N), come on.” Kate was grinning, a sinister smile that would have anyone shivering. “It’s only a matter of time before you do something similar. You and I have always been the most alike — centered, strong, morally grey. It’s in your blood, baby girl. At first, you’re gonna believe you’re on their side, but soon you’ll see that they’re all bad. Sooner or later they all spill innocent blood. It’s better to get them when they’re fresh, it’s so much easier”

“How can you talk like that? These are people’s lives you are talking about.”

“It’s different, sweetheart. They’re not normal, they’re a living abomination,” she rationalized. “This is all a game of power. We can’t allow them to have the upper hand. If we let that happen, they’ll overtake us, and there is a natural order to things.”

“Is that why you murdered a whole family of innocent beings? The family of a kid you tricked to fall for you, leaving him alone to suffer!” I yelled, the loudness hurting my throat. “You tricked Derek and used him to end his line. Why?”

“A pack is only as strong as its number. The bigger they are, the stronger they are. I was just doing my job,” she grinned. “Just like you did.”

“What are you talking about? I would never do something as heartless as you have.”

“Are you sure, honey? Why don’t you walk through that door and say that again.”

I stared at her like a deer stuck in headlights. My body shook as I slowly made my way to the dark front door of the house. Her eyes burned into every step I took, the sinus eerie grin still prominent on her face. With every step, her stare edging me on forward. There was a scene to unfold behind that door, and she was eager for me to see it.

I stretched my hand towards the doorknob but flinched when I felt the burning temperature it held. Kate said nothing as she encouraged me to open the door, daring me to face whatever I had to with just her gaze. I braced myself for the feeling and clasped my hand around the knob, turning it to reveal whatever it was that she wanted me to see.

The scene in front of me was heartbreaking. We now stood in front of Derek’s apartment complex, his loft lit aflame. The smell of ash was more prominent and the heat was almost unbearable. I tried to run into the building, the need to help any survivors growing in me. But Kate held me back, a painful grip holding onto my arm.

“Let me go!” I yelled through tears. “I need to save my friends.”

“Darling, don’t you get it?” She chuckled. “They’re all gone. All thanks to you. Look at your hands, honey.”

I did as she told, and my breath hitched in my throat when I did. My clothes were drenched in blood, and in my hands, I carried a bloody knife and a lighter. “No, I would never do this.”

“You already did.” She pointed forward, fixing my sight on the bodies that laid on the floor of the lot. “And some of them were innocent, too. But in war, there are always casualties. I mean, your cousin sided with them, and look how she ended up.”

I walked around the bodies, trying to find a sign of life in any of them as a flood of tears streamed out of my ducts.

Scott.

Stiles.

Lydia.

Isaac.

Allison.

Even Boyd and Erica were there.

But I didn’t see one important person. “Where’s Derek?” My voice croaked, barely the volume of a whisper.

“Who do you think is inside the building? It’s a fitting end for him. Dying in the way he shucked have years ago,” she laughed maniacally. “At least he’ll relate to his family when he gets to the other side.

“NO!” Once again I tried to run into the building, needing to risk my ice to save his. But she stopped name in my tracks once more, her grip tightening. “Let me go, please. Just let me go, I have to save him.”

“Honey, he’s already gone,” she scoffed. “Don’t you get it, sweetheart? There are only two ways this will end — it’s either you or them. And the sooner you accept it, the easier it will be; you are just like me.”

Tag List: @hellowinterlane @lokisgoddesofpower @mersuperwholocked-lowlife @malar-region @sunshine-flower

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winterscaptain · 3 years

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a kindness.

Aaron Hotchner x Gender Neutral Reader a joyful future fic

a/n: it is loving megan kane hours!! i’ve been working on this one for a while and i am so excited to share it with you!! we have ajf!pleasure is my business at last! as always, tell me what you think!! i adore your feedback. also, if you’re thinking ‘what the hell, tali! why am i missing from the tag list?????’ it’s because i redid it! the link to the form is below.

words: 4.8k warnings: language, canon-typical death, canon-typical discussion of sex work

summary: “i believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.” ― steve martin. au!february 2009

a joyful future masterlist | ajf faq | taglist | what do you want to see next?

You rap twice on the office door before pushing it open with your fingertips, peering inside while ready to retreat at a moment’s notice.

There’s no need. Aaron’s alone.

“You’re here early,” he says, his eyes still on his paperwork.

You snort. “So are you.”

He looks at you over his nose. “Can I help you with something?”

Sitting down opposite him at his desk, you prop your chin on your hands and grin at him. “You stole my line.”

“Get out of my office.”

Your smile stays plastered on your face as you stand and cross the room, closing the door behind you. On your way out, you catch the ghost of his smile.

+++

You watch Hotch leave the bullpen, his go-bag slung over his shoulder.

“Where you headed?” You ask, looking up. You’re still the only one in the bullpen, taking a few consults off your teammates’ hands by typing up quick briefs they can review without going through every single comma in the file.

He sighs. “Dallas.”

Yikes.

“By yourself?”

He sighs. “Standby - not sure what’s going on yet. Can you -” He gestures to the hallway behind you.

You nod and stand. “Yeah. Fly safe.”

After you watch him leave, you turn and make a beeline for JJ’s office. She’s here early, too - pushing away the separation anxiety by diving into work.

“Jayje?”

She looks away from her computer, looking exhausted. “Yeah?”

“Hotch just left for Dallas - we might have a case there, but it didn’t sound like something that would come across your desk.”

She squints. “Why d’you say that?”

“He had that look on his face like he was going into a room full of lawyers.”

+++

You lean forward, jamming yourself into the circle around the table with the rest of your team. Hotch, on the other end of the line, sounds oddly well-rested.

Spencer, as usual, gives you the history and textbook briefing before you get to the actual case. “Female serial killers are a fascinating field. We don't have much information on them, but what we do know involves throwing the rules completely out the window. Signature, for instance. They don't torture or take trophies.”

“Because there’s no sexual gratification when a woman kills,” Derek adds.

Looks like we’re all getting in on the pre-brief today.

“Exactly. Murder is the goal. They don't have to do anything extra.”

That makes you laugh a little. “So, basically, women are more efficient at killing?”

Spencer shrugs. “Historically, they’ve had body counts in the hundreds.”

Hotch, of course, is the one to get you all back on track. “So, assuming that the job is the stressor, what are some of the reasons prostitutes kill their customers?”

Derek, of course, is the first to follow. “Money, drugs, post-traumatic stress disorder…”

The team bounces for a moment, covering previous cases of serial killers with a history of sex work. Emily brings up Allison Wuornos, but Aaron shuts it down. He thinks this killer is organized, not so much driven by trauma or need but the mission itself.

Spencer looks at the medical examiner’s reports again, comparing notes between the victims. “She’s using tetra-methylene-disulfotetramine.”

You don’t look up from the same report. “Bless you.”

Emily snorts.

Spencer continues, unperturbed. “It’s a popular rat poison in China - easily soluble in alcohol.”

“Poison is the perfect M.O.,” Dave notes. “Quiet, quick, and the victims never see it coming because they think they’re getting lucky.” He turns back toward the phone. “Does that mean something to you?”

“Well, at $10,000 a night, these men are paying for discretion as well as sex.”

Fair point.

“She has a history with them. They see her repeatedly.”

You look over at Dave, trying to find the thread that connects Aaron’s thought to his.

Before you can really get to it yourself, Aaron spells it out for you. “She didn't decide to kill them in the moment. She walks in with the intent to kill them and she's doing it before she sleeps with them.”

There we go.

“So she's not just organized,” you add. “She's also methodical. Could she be parsing out which clients are worth killing and which aren’t?”

“Maybe the victims all share the same fetish?” Emily offers.

Derek shrugs, his eyebrows raised in thoughtful agreement. “Both victims were in their fifties, highly visible. Careful about their image. I mean, if they were kinky in the same way, they'd go to great lengths to hide it.”

“And we're facing a corporate culture that'll do everything it can to keep us out.”

There’s the exhaustion I’m used to from Hotch.

He sounds weird without it.

“Actually,” JJ says, “I had some luck there. Hoyt Ashford's wife isn't too happy with how he died. But because every silver lining has a dark cloud, the hedge fund released a statement.”

JJ pulls the statement from her file and reads aloud: “Ashford died peacefully in his home, according to lawyer David Madison.” She puts it down again. “They're already trying to close ranks.”

Spencer frowns. “Does that language sound familiar to anyone else?”

“What do you mean?” You ask.

“The press release from the first victim.” He recalls, not needing the paper itself. “‘According to company lawyer, Stanton died peacefully in his home.’”

Hotch begins to make assignments, directing Emily and Derek to the wife of the second victim. JJ’s tasked with the lawyers and you’re tasked with setup at the precinct with Spencer and Dave. When he’s done, you pick your phone up from the table, taking him off speaker.

“What are you gonna do?” You ask.

Hotch snorts. “I’m gonna see which of the lawyers calls us back and in the meantime, see what I can get out of anyone else.”

“Good luck.”

+++

You’re up in your hotel room, getting a little bit settled and unpacked when you get a call to your cell.

“Hey, Hotch.”

There’s a sigh. “We got another body.”

“I’ll meet you downstairs in five.”

+++

You hop out of the car, following Aaron through the service entrance and up the back hallways to the lobby. Between your travel from your room and Aaron’s wrap-up in his, Derek and Dave beat you to the scene.

Hotch is wearing that coat - your favorite, the one he’s apparently had for years - with the red lining and the soft wool exterior. It so rarely sees the field anymore you were afraid he’d done away with it, but every time you remember it exists and worry about its whereabouts, he brings it out again.

Derek hands you a notebook when you reach him. You settle near Dave for the rest of the info. He, of course, delivers.

“Victim was Joseph Fielding. He was the CFO here.”

You frown. “Poisoned? Like the others?”

“And staged,” Derek says. “She killed him in his office and then rolled him out here to be found.”

“The lipstick's new,” you muse, circling the body in the elevator. “Done postmortem, it looks like.” You find Derek’s eyes with a little frown. “Reid said female serial killers don't leave a signature. I think she did that just for us. She's already exposed him at his most vulnerable.”

He hums. “Now she wants to be noticed.”

There’s some kind of scuffle at the police line - another man in a suit who thinks he’s more important than God.

Hopefully he’s looking for Hotch.

“Which one of you is Aaron Hotchner?”

Ugh. Good.

You step back and point at Aaron, getting out of his way as he shoves past the crime scene techs.

Aaron turns. “I'm Hotchner.”

“Larry Bartlett.” The man holds out his hand, but Aaron doesn’t take it. He retracts his hand with an unperturbed tilt of his head. “I represent Mr. Fielding in Webster Industries.

Hotch, as usual, has no time for his bullshit. “This is a closed crime scene, Mr. Bartlett.”

My lawyer could kick your lawyer’s ass.

That’s a good bumper sticker.

You shake off your thought and return to the victim, directing one of the younger crime scene techs. After a moment, you return to Derek’s side.

“Yes. I spoke to Ellen Daniels.” This clown still sounds far too confident for his own good. “She said you're a very... reasonable man.”

“Escort him out, please.”

You stifle a laugh.

“No, wait. Please.” The lawyer - Mr. Bartlett - shrugs off the security team and chases after Hotch on his way to your side.

Aaron stops, but looks inconvenienced in the extreme.

“The press is outside and they can smell blood. Any way we can handle this discreetly?”

“We're not about to lie for you.” Derek’s even less amused than Aaron, if that’s even possible.

Aaron squints at the other lawyer, and you find it nearly impossible to tear your gaze from the little pinch at the corners of his brown eyes.

You can only imagine him behind a prosecutor’s bench, laying into witnesses with the same deadpan amusement - like a bored cat with a half-dead mouse. Hoping to back him up a little bit, you get a little closer, looking skeptically at the lawyer from over Aaron’s shoulder.

“You don't have to lie,” Mr. Bartlett insists, his eyes flickering to you. “Just don't comment.”

“Excuse us.” He takes you by the shoulder and leads the three of you into a huddle.

“Is there any reason to go public yet?” Aaron asks.

Dave wavers. “Validating her is exactly what she wants.”

“If we hold back, she's more likely to make a mistake,” Derek says.

You raise your eyebrows, looking over your shoulder for a moment. “He doesn't need to know that.”

Hotch’s mouth twitches, and you know it’s almost a smile. He turns over his shoulder, back in game mode as he approaches Bartlett again. “We need everything you have on Fielding. Bank accounts, tax records, emails, everything.”

+++

“Eighteen cars, six houses, and three boats.” Spencer rattles off the numbers with only the barest hint of shock in his voice.

Your brow pinches and you look up. “Can you even boat in Dallas?”

“You know, when you're talking about that much money, ten grand for a call girl is like deciding where to go for dinner.”

“You sound like you’re speaking from experience, Em,” you laugh.

She rolls her eyes, still pinning photos to the board. “Yeah, right. My mom had a pretty cushy gig with her postings, but we were never that well-off. But...” She looks over her shoulder, “I’m sure Rossi would know a little something about that.”

Before you can all get too out of control, Hotch reaches over you to connect to Garcia on the speakerphone. “Are you there, Garcia?”

“Affirmative.”

JJ flags him down. “I have half a million over here for something called the Bat Cave...”

It really takes everything in you not to laugh.

“...and here's a picture of him as fetish Batman. That is… wrong.”

Emily pulls a face.

“Is there anything this guy didn't like to spend money on?” Spencer asks.

“Yeah,” Aaron replies. “His ex-wives. Fielding was married four times. He didn't have prenups for the first two, but he did everything he could to cut them off anyway.”

You lean forward, trying to see the paper in his hands. “Are there children involved?”

“Yes, with three of the wives.” He hands it over to you and looks at Emily. “Hoyt Ashford was married a few times, too, wasn't he?”

She nods in the affirmative.

“You know, considering that when Kevin takes me to dinner and a movie, he defaults on his student loans, this amount of money is sick.”

Tell me about it, Pen.

Emily sounds resigned. “What did you find?”

Garcia outlines a series of bitter court battles about child support, alimony, custody, etc. “And even when the court ruled in the wife’s favor - which was almost always - these three charmers just, you know, decided not to pay.”

Hotch asks for a cross-checked list of high-profile Dallas CEOs holding out on their ex-wives, and you figure it’s not a short one.

“One loaded losers list, Dallas edition, comin' at ya. Penelope out.”

The line goes dead and Aaron turns off the speaker.

“So,” Aaron leans heavily on the table. “Why would a prominent businessman who could easily pay child support refuse to?”

Spencer obliges. “For this type of overachieving personality, paying money after the marriage ends probably offends him.”

“They're spending tens of thousands on an escort, but they won't drop a dime on their wife and kids? That's cold.” JJ shakes her head and looks over at Hotch, seeking an answer.

“Narcissistic, self-absorbed, a pathological avoidance of paternal responsibilities.”

There’s an odd kind of look that passes over Aaron’s face as he speaks, and you pin it for later. You can already tell he’s falling into a headspace that’s fraught with comparison and self-loathing.

They bounce around for a moment while you keep your eyes on Aaron.

“Well,” JJ brings you back. “Should I assemble the police for a profile?”

Your mouth twists. “I just don't think it's gonna help.”

“She lives in a completely different world than they do,” Aaron adds.

“And,” Emily pipes up, “the CEOs who sleep with her won't admit to it.”

JJ snorts. “Like I couldn't even get past the team of lawyers protecting them.”

“What if we give the profile to the corporate lawyers?” Aaron stands straight, his hands resting on his hips. “They've cleaned up after her, even if they don't realize that they've seen this woman.”

“Why would they go for that?” You ask.

“Because she's putting them at risk, too.”

Your phone rings and you answer as you always do, chirping your last name into the receiver without really looking too closely at the caller ID.

“Hey, it’s me.”

You nod once to your team as you step out of earshot. “Hey, Haley.”

“I can’t get a hold of Aaron. Is everything alright?” She’s beyond surprise or concern at this point. You’re sure you could tell her Aaron’s been shot in the head and she’d probably just hum at you.

“Yeah,” you say with a sigh. “Things are crazy and there are lawyers all wrapped up in this. Are you alright?”

“Jack’s got a fever - I just wanted to let Aaron know I’m taking him in to get checked out. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll let him know. Give Jack a big kiss from me and I’ll do my best to get us all home quickly and in one piece.”

She laughs a little into the phone. “Thanks. Will do. Talk soon.”

You hang up and return to the table, shooting Hotch a significant look. He nods and pulls you aside.

“What’s up?”

“Jack has a fever - Haley just wanted me to let you know she’s taking him to the pediatrician to get him all checked out, just in case. I told her we’d all do our best to get home soon.”

Aaron sighs and flips his phone in his hand. “I’ll call her now…”

“No need. She knows this is a tough one and you’re getting your money’s worth out of your JD this week.”

When he starts to walk away, you call his name again. He turns.

“You know - um.” You wet your lips and swallow. “You’re not like these guys. You know that, right? You’re a great dad.”

His face lifts in surprise for a fraction of a second before he recovers.

“Thank you,” He says. “Really.”

You offer him a crooked smile. “Anytime.”

+++

Hotch stops you all before you enter the conference room, full to the brim with suits and pantsuits. “Let me lead on this one. I’ve handled corporate lawyers like this before and they can smell blood.” He snorts. “This time, it’s their own.”

You and Derek raise your hands in simultaneous and identical postures of surrender.

“Have at it,” you say, falling into line behind Aaron. “Corporate lawyers scare the fuck out of me.”

+++

“Hey, Prentiss. Got a whip?” Derek holds the leather outfit to Emily’s shoulders and she laughs.

“Yeah, right.”

You fondly roll your eyes at them and continue following off Aaron’s right shoulder. The two of you reach the bookshelf - an impressive glass case that runs from the floor to the ceiling.

Aaron’s gloved finger opens the case and runs over some of the spines. “Antique first editions on the bookshelves.”

Rossi quips something about porn in the DVD player while Spencer espouses about the merits of a disposable, adaptable lifestyle in this line of work.

“Well, these aren't just for show,” Aaron says. “The spines are cracked. Somebody's read these.”

You peer over his shoulder. “Who reads Voltaire in French?”

“Someone with good taste. Probably well-educated…”

You pick up where he trails off. “We profiled that she learned to fake privilege. What if she's not faking it?”

“You're saying maybe she came from money the whole time?”

You shrug. “It’s a possibility, at least.”

Just then, the apartment phone rings.

“Prentiss should answer,” Aaron says. “If it's a customer, she'll get more information out of them.”

You hum, hedging your bets a little. ‘Unless she's calling in for her messages.”

Too late. Derek’s already on the phone with Penelope. “Yeah, Baby Girl, we're getting a call to this line. Can you work some magic?”

“I don't have a trap-and-trace in place yet. Give me a few. I'm gonna stay on the line.”

Aaron gives her the go-ahead. “Prentiss, get ready to vamp.”

The voicemail picks it up before Emily can so much as reach for the phone.

“Hi, it's me. You know what to do.” Beep.

“...Aaron.”

You turn your head so fast you throw your neck out. You raise a hand to the crick and work it with your fingers. Aaron’s too busy frowning at the phone to notice.

“I know you're up there. Pick up… Aaron Hotchner... Hello?” She drags out her words, almost flirting with everyone listening.

With a sigh, Aaron pushes past the rest of you, silently counts to three, and picks up the phone while Emily clicks the speakerphone button.

“I'm at a disadvantage. You seem to know my name, But I don't know yours. Can we start there?”

Nice start.

The game has begun.

“I thought I could trust you, Aaron.”

What?

The pinch between his brows deepens. “Who says you can't?”

“I want to. I even looked you up online. Is that strange?”

Yes.

“No.” Aaron wets his lips and begins to pace, the gears whirring in his head. “It's flattering to be noticed by a woman like you.”

The woman continues as if he hasn’t said anything at all. “And I thought you were so... upstanding. I watched the presentation you gave on school shootings. I found it posted on YouTube...”

She has good taste. That’s an excellent presentation.

“...And for a moment, I actually thought there were still good people in the world.”

“But I've disappointed you, haven't I?” He asks. “Just like all the other men in your life Who've walked out on their families, Who deserve to be punished.”

“Did you walk out on your family?”

His eyes flicker to you and you nod, nearly imperceptibly, reminding him he’s not alone. “No. My wife left me.”

“Do you have kids?”

“I have a son.”

A sweet, thoughtful, perfect son.

You smile a little, thinking of Jack, but it disappears when you remember that he’s home sick with Haley, probably having a miserable time.

“How often do you see him?” She asks.

“I try to see him every week.”

“Do you see him every week?” The question is mocking, smothered in dark amusement that could almost be called sarcasm save for its bitterness.

“No,” Aaron’s eyes fall to the floor. “No, I don't get there as often as I want.”

“I believe you.” Her response is softer, and you think she might make a decent profiler if she wasn’t on the other side.

She is a profiler.

In some ways, you suppose it’s true. She has to read and respond to everything her clients do, say, how they behave. It makes her good at her job and you good at yours.

Same skillset, very different application.

“But don't compare yourself to the men I see,” she continues. “You are nothing like them. You're just another whore.”

Never in my life did I ever think I’d hear someone call Aaron Hotchner a whore. Unironically.

That catches everyone’s attention, even Derek’s, still on hold with Penelope.

“How am I a whore?” He asks.

“You come when called. You do their bidding. In hotels you take the side elevator to avoid crowds, while the men who pay your salary walk across the ivory marble foyer into their cars.”

Derek, behind you, presses. “Garcia.”

You can hear her, faintly. “I'm in on the landline. Triangulating the cell. Give me like sixty seconds.”

You gesture to Aaron when he looks. Keep going.

He nods. “But I'm just frustrating you, aren't I?”

She sighs, sounding a little impatient for the first time. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you want to show the world all these bad men and my investigation's just getting in your way.”

“No, Aaron.” You almost startle, her tone escalating to a deeply frustrated shout. “You're not doing your job! You don't want to arrest me, you don't want me in custody because you're in their pocket.”

She’s crying now, actively. “You just want me to disappear, just like they do.”

“Truthfully, I'm only interested in finding you.”

Now that’s a tone you recognize - you’ve heard it when he talks to Haley. Most recently, when he couldn’t make it to some appointment or another. It’s one that’s disarming in the extreme, soft, but not condescending.

“You've been betrayed so many times, You don't know who to trust, And that's why that first murder felt so good. But each one since has been less and less satisfying. You know that's going to continue.” He pauses, letting his words sink in. “Am I right?”

Just like Haley always does, the woman loses steam, sniffling once before answering. “Yeah.”

“Come to me and turn yourself in. I will make sure that you get the help you need. I won't let you disappear.”

“If we met under different circumstances... I could believe that. I won't let you cover this up.”

A gunshot rings through the line and you flinch, turning to Derek just as the line goes dead. You know Penelope will have something for you soon.

She never fails, directing you to an address only moments after the elevator doors close in front of the team.

+++

Once you found Megan Kane, it was easy enough to find her father.

You could empathize with her mission well enough after meeting him. He’s shrouded by his lawyers - detached and seemingly indifferent to anything Aaron had to say.

Aaron starts the car and you settle back into the seat. “So, the wall of lawyers strikes again.”

A shadow of a smile ghosts around the creases at the corners of his eyes. “So it seems.”

“What’s next?”

“We tail him - home and office. He’ll meet with her soon enough.”

Your brow furrows. “Not to protect her, right? It doesn’t seem like he cares that much.”

Aaron turns, placing his hand on the back of your seat as he pulls out of the parking spot. You’re momentarily distracted as he turns back, spinning the wheel with the heel of his hand and gunning it out of the garage.

Focus.

“No,” he says. “Think about it.”

It comes to you only seconds later. “To protect himself.”

“There you go.” He turns to you, another little smile threatening. “You’re getting pretty good at this.”

You roll your eyes. “I’ve been here over a year, Hotch. I’d fucking hope so.”

You’re rewarded with a real smile, and it’s enough.

+++

You take Derek’s six through the hotel, clearing the floors and reporting back to the rest of the team. SWAT is in full deployment, clearing the hard-to-reach areas like the stairways and rooftops, just in case.

Aaron catches up to you, taking the four o’clock position off your left shoulder as Derek breaches the door.

The gun and chilled champagne sit like ironic centerpieces on the entry table, but they hardly use any of your bandwidth as you clear the room, your vision narrowed by the sight of your service weapon.

You hold a hand up when you catch the figure on the balcony. “Hotch.”

He squints, and you move to raise your gun again and make the arrest, but he stops you with a hand over yours. “Easy.”

There’s a question in your eyes.

He, of course, answers it. “She knows it’s over.”

Just then, she places an empty champagne glass on the table where you can see it.

“I’ll call 911,” Derek says, stepping out and closing the door behind him.

You turn to leave with Derek, but catch Aaron’s open hand, subtly signaling you from just under his hip.

Stay here. It says. Stay close.

So, you stay. You lean on the far wall of the hotel room, watching Aaron hold the hand of this dying, hurting woman. They’re speaking softly, and she smiles at him when she drops something into his hand. His eyes are soft, gentle, not even searching. Just warm.

You feel for her.

It’s the best way to go, you think. If there was ever a time you were dying before your time, you’d want Aaron there, holding your hand, telling you he was going to continue the work that killed you, that it was gonna be okay.

“How could your wife have ever left someone like you?” You hear her ask.

As much as you love Haley, the same question often floats through your head, and your heart aches for this woman who’s been able to see Aaron so clearly, even if she’s only seeing him for the first time now.

“You’re the first man I’ve ever met who hasn’t let me down.”

You creep forward, further into Aaron’s eyeline, and sit on the edge of the couch. She’s close to her last breath and you can feel it - so can Aaron. His eyes flicker to you for a moment before returning to her.

Megan’s voice is full of tears when she asks, “Will you stay with me?”

You have a feeling it isn’t the first time she’s asked the question and you find yourself hoping Emily will be particularly rough with the handcuffs when she apprehends Mr. Kane. Hopefully he didn’t make it past the checkpoint and is still on-site.

“Yes.” Aaron is solemn, so sincere, so genuine it makes your heart ache.

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

You’re not even sure he realizes it, but he’s doing her a great kindness - one that many would not offer.

It’s because he is good.

A good man.

The tension drains out of her, and she grips tightly to Aaron’s hand as she fights through her final breaths. His hands are gentle, his attention only on her. He looks more like a father in this moment than any other time you’ve known him. She’s safe. She knows she can die in peace.

Once more, you hope you have the opportunity to leave this plane of reality in such safety, when your time comes.

When she’s gone, he places her hand in her lap and takes a moment to brush the hair off of her face, pressing the back of his fingers to her temple as if checking her for fever.

After a minute or so, he turns to you, and you hope the pride and respect coursing through you is evident in your gaze. You pull an evidence bag out of your pocket, but he shakes his head, pocketing the SIM card.

You rise as he gets closer, returning the evidence bag to your pocket. He’s clearly affected, tears threatening at the corners of his eyes.

Opening your arms to him, he wilts into you, allowing you to gather him into your shoulder. His arms are loose around your waist, his fingers wrapped around his opposite wrist as an anchor. It’s a rare moment of vulnerability and you’d hate to make him feel anything less than safe.

You still have a minute or so before they all come stomping through the door to collect Megan’s body.

“I’m sorry, Hotch.”

He shrugs. “I don’t know why this one hurts.”

Your arms tighten around him. “It’s okay. I feel it, too.”

A deep, shaky breath rolls through him.

“She’s right, you know.” You almost regret your words, afraid you’re giving yourself away.

“What?”

“You didn’t let her down. You’re a good man.”

His jaw tightens, and you can feel it against your neck where his head falls into your shoulder.

“Oh, stop. You’ve never let me down.” Your hand reaches up, stroking the back of his head, carding your fingers through the hair. “She died knowing you kept your promise.”

+++

You look up to Aaron’s office when news of the leak breaks, finding his silhouette haunting the window, staring at the television.

A ghost of a smile crosses his face, and he turns back to his desk, settling back down to work.

+++

tagging: @aaronhotchnerr @ambicaos @angelsbabey @arganfics @averyhotchner @bwbatta @capricorngf @cevanswhre @crazyshannonigans @criminalsmarts @deagibs @forgottenword @genevievedarcygrangerwriting @hotchsflower @hotchslatte @hurricanejjareau @joanofarkansass @kelstark @kerrswriting @little-blue-fishie @lotties-journey-abroad @mandylove1000 @missdowntonabbey @mrs-dr-reid @pan-pride-12 @popped-weasels @quillvine @qvid-pro-qvo @reidingmelodies @reids-mismatchedsocks @roses-and-grasses @shesbiochem4 @ssahotchnerr @ssaic-jareau @ssareidbby @starsandasteroids @stxrrywildflower @sunflowersandotherthings @sunshine-em @teamhappyme @this-broken-band-girl @ughitsbaby @unicorn-bitch @venusbarnes @violet-amxthyst @word-scribbless @writefasttalkevenfaster @zizzlekwum @iconicc @avatarkorraswife @mooneylupinblack @ssworldofsw @nuvoleincielo @kaemarie23 @violentvulgarvolatile @abschaffer2 @ellyhotchner @rousethemouse @baumarvel @reidtomestyles @dreamsonthewall @jhiddles03 @willlemonheadsupremacy @infinity1321 @messyhairday-me

#aaron hotchner x reader #hotch x reader #aaron hotchner imagine #criminal minds imagine #criminal minds x reader #criminal minds fanfiction #aaron hotchner #criminal minds #tali talks cm #tali writes fanfiction #a joyful future #a joyful future fanfic

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lunannex · 3 years

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Allison Hargreeves Fic Rec List

I love Allison dearly so I figured I'd share some of my favorite Allison-centric fics to spread a little more love for her!

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Seven Pounds Eight Ounces Healthy Beautiful Perfect by sunriseseance

Allison wanders more, not ready for the sleep to end, and takes in the breadth of nothing in which she’s draped her house. The fad of void that reflects her heart completely, or else does not at all, and to such a frightening degree she can hardly think it. What if Claire hates it here? What if Claire hates it everywhere? What if Claire has powers and Allison was right, always right to not want kids? What if the nightmares are premonitions and Reginald comes into the dark empty house and rends the child from her breast and talks about finally having a useful seventh and there’s still milk on Claire’s little lip and Allison can’t do anything can’t even breathe and the worst part is that maybe Claire is better off because at least Reginald can do something other than ache.

-------

An exploration of Allison, trauma, and motherhood.

Happy In That Moment by sunriseseance

She did cry a little bit when she looked out at her family’s section and saw four empty seats instead of the planned three. She did add Ben’s rose, and then Five’s rose, to her bouquet to be pressed later. It was tradition, she heard, to place roses on the seats of deceased family. Save a place for them. She didn’t bother to look into what happened after. Should she have thrown the flowers away? Vanya’s chair sat empty, asking her if she had ever made a good choice in her life. She couldn’t answer.

Karma, Leave These Kids Alone by sunriseseance

Klaus is right, because he usually is. Their childhood was worth fearing. But it wasn’t all bad, she thinks, and some guilt pangs her. I wouldn’t wish this on us, but I’m glad I got him out of it. I’m glad Claire is safe.

She holds out her hand for him, and he takes it.

---

A meditation on Allison and her traumas, guilts, fears, and loves. Centered around her and Klaus, their love for one another, and how that changes her love and fear for Claire.

Smoke and Mirrors by stilitana

She’d find the right string of words someday, the magic words that would conjure the long-dead childhood pet rabbit back out of the hat, whole and healthy, and everyone would scream with joy when they saw that everything was saved, because she had seen that it was good and should be so.

A vignette-style exploration of some scenes from Allison's life, pre-season one.

ode to queen mab by GiuGiu

Raymond stares at her in horror as she tells the man “More, more, more, more, more.”

But she wants to burn this man. This awful bigoted monster. He burned her first, it’s only fair.

When Ray pulls her away she realizes she did it again.

She lost control.

A deeper look into Allison's power with some added elements.

Helpline by Gin_Juice

“What?” Diego’s flat voice greeted her.

“Oh, is that how we’re answering the phone now? Good morning to you, too.”

He grunted. “I’m heading out to work and I’m writing a note that you called as we speak. So unless you have something important to tell me, I’m hanging up.”

Wow, he was a regular ray of sunshine today, wasn’t he? Allison sat down sideways in one of the high stools at the kitchen island.

“Everything okay? Because I expect Five to threaten to hang up on me in the first ten seconds of a call, but you usually make it little further than this.”

Her own problems could wait a few minutes—God knew they weren’t going anywhere.

___________________________

It's hard, sometimes, being out in Los Angeles by herself, but Allison's siblings and all of their issues are only a phone call away.

Echoes by chiiyo86

On the night of November 15, 1963, Allison finds Five passed out in the back alley where she landed two years ago. Together they set out to try and find their siblings, but the task turns out to be more complicated than they imagined...

Terrible Waffles by neuronary

On their wedding night, Ray wraps his arms around her, presses his lips to her forehead, and turns off the lights with a yawn. Allison’s stomach twists, first in confusion, then further anxiety. She doesn’t know what’s going on and she doesn’t know who to ask and it scares her.

They don’t talk about it. Until they do.

---

Allison Hargreeves is asexual. She doesn't know there's a word for it, but that doesn't matter so much with Ray.

Fool's Gold by kneworder

What do you do when your sister destroys your world?

You rebuild. You get out the scotch tape and the lies and the dazzling smiles and you make yourself a new castle even bigger than before.

Allison, and the fallout of the bomb that was Vanya's book.

#hoping to find the time to re-read these soon so i can leave the authors some nice comments #it's what they deserve <3 #echoes is allison AND five centric btw! just thought y'all should know #i took a break from writing an allison fic of my own to compile these lol (and it took me forever but it was so worth it)#fic recs #allison hargreeves #tua #the umbrella academy #my queen #luna talks

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delightfulfiresoulweasel · 3 years

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DAYdreaming a Kevaaron AU

This is an Kevaaron Singer Aaron! AU I came up with from crazy brain storming and, well, ended up here so I hope it will be enjoyed as much as I enjoyed it in my head. Kevin and Aaron break up, Aaron scribbles down lyrics instead of class notes and his Med school friend notices, takes Aaron to a studio to compose the music and create songs, because its better than Aaron relapsing, and one night without telling Aaron, posts the songs on Soundcloud. And what if Exy finals had half time performances like Super Bowl finals does, and they asked Aaron to perform as Kevin'’ team were in the finals.

(I will be using songs and lyrics that does not belong to me; songs: MrLoverman, Burning, Falling, Till Forever Falls Apart, One Last Song)

Kevin and Aaron are dating, Aaron is in med school, Kevin is a successful exy player living in Chicago. One day, while Aaron is visiting Kevin, they fight over something very small, the argument starts getting heated, both of them bringing up the issues they have been repressing. The argument turns into a shouting match until Kevin tells Aaron that he doesn't have time for this. Aaron leaves Kevin'’ flat, books himself a flight ticket on his way to the airport and calls his friend, Jason, to come pick him up.

They don't talk for a month. Neither of them text or call each other. They don't tell any of the Foxes about the breakup either. But it becomes obvious when Aaron doesn't show up to Kevin'’ game that is in his city.

Aaron used to go to every single one of Kevin'’ games when it was in his city, fly over to the most important ones as support.

The reporters and sport commenters loved Aaron. He would sometimes join Kevin in his post game interviews, Kevin'’ arm wrapped around his shoulders. The fans also waited for the pre-game kiss that became a ritual for the couple. Kevin climbing the bleachers as Aaron draped himself over the railing to reach Kevin'’ mouth, for a good luck kiss. After the game, the photo would circulate all through twitter, fan accounts making a collage of the gathered photos.

So when Aaron did not show up to Kevin'’ game that was in his city, the Foxes knew. Aaron'’ phone was blowing up with messages even before the game started. He wasn't at the stadium but he was watching it on TV at home.

He had many texts from Nicky, asking to know if Kevin and him were broken up. Matt, Dan, Renee, Allison, Robin and Katelyn were all equally concerned.

Andrew called him, he picked it up. "What did he do?" "Nothing." Aaron had said. "Nothing?" Andrew had huffed. "Leave it, we broke up but I still love him, no one is to blame." Aaron had said before he hung up.

He was disconnected in classes, too busy scribbling down words swimming in his head than concentrating in his classes. Jason, his new found friend, which was a foreign concept to Aaron, had noticed. Taking one glance at Aaron'’ notebook, he had realised that these were potential song lyrics. He had an idea.

Aaron was not happy being dragged by his sleeve by Jason. They were stood in front of a beat-up studio.

"I have no idea why we are here" he had said. Jason had smiled.

Sitting on the piano, Jason snatched Aaron'’ notebook from his book. He knew a friend, who knew a friend that owned a studio. Jason had thought it would be good for Aaron if he sang his heart out. He knew Aaron was a good singer from the few times they went to Karaoke together.

They had spent the whole night at the studio, composing a melody to Aaron'’ first song.

I am MrLoverman, and I miss my lover man.

Jason could hear the hurt in Aaron'’ voice, voice cracking, the shaky breathing when he was too close to tears, the tremble in his hands and the distance in his eyes as he was lost in thought, thinking of better times.

The second song was harder than the first. It was filled with more emotions and truth. It was a pleading, a cry for a voice to be heard. Openly stating that he wanted his lover back. The sweet melody of Aaron'’ voice making the song both a weapon that created a wound in your heart and the balm that licked to wound closed.

Oh, have you ever called I will burst straight back Give you my forgiveness And the shirt off my back

Jason had asked one night between recording sessions, the studio was their new stop place now. After every class they would rush to the studio, some musicians that were there just to jam had heard Aaron'’ voice, they were captured by it. Aaron was the Nine Muses ( yes all nine of them) and the audience was mesmerised. He asked if he were to ever release an album that had these songs in it, what Aaron would name it.

After a pause, Aaron answered between laughing fits that he would name it DAYdreaming, get it, Kevin Day and he was dreaming of him 24/7. Jason laughed but thought it would be a great marketing name.

As Aaron wrote, the songs were getting more and more detailed and personal, they were all the words he couldn't speak before.

Forget what I said It's not what I meant And I can't take it back

He had not meant to say half of the things he had said to Kevin a month ago, looking back, he knew they were simple things that could have been solved if they had just spoke, if Aaron had just been brave enough to start the conversation.

But he had been too scared, scare that he would lose Kevin over something so simple, so he avoided the topics, and at the end, he still lost him.

Aaron had hated California, the place full of memories of his mother, a torturous life Andrew had endured, the missed years both of them could have had as brothers. But Kevin had changed that, the memories were still there but now, accompanied by happy ones Kevin had created for him.

If the tide takes California I’m so glad I got to hold ya

They had stood on the beach, wrapped in each others arms, looking at the horizon as the sun set, Kevin whispering future plans for the both of them into Aaron'’ ear. Aaron had smiled to all of them, some ridiculous, some too good to be true ideas, but he did not mind, because in all of them, Kevin and Aaron were stood together.

And if the sky falls from heaven above Oh I know I had the best time falling into love

All of these studio sessions, all of these songs, they were all for Kevin, for over a month, he had dedicated all his time to create the perfect songs that reflected his truest feelings about Kevin, his regrets, his cries for lost love. He loved Kevin, and it did not scare him anymore, his love for Kevin.

Maybe one day I won't sing about you

But he did, he always would, did not matter if Kevin resented him or welcomed him with open arms, he would sing about Kevin for the rest of his life like a broken vinyl.

I know you don't want to talk to me So this is what I will do Maybe you're listening So here's one last song for you

He knew he would never post these songs anywhere, or send them to Kevin, but he had hoped deep down in his chest that somehow these lyrics would be carried out to Kevin.

They eventually run out of lyrics and music to combine, Aaron knew he had to leave this behind him. His true love, buried away in his make shift song lyrics. He closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep with something missing inside him. Jason did not

That night, he uploaded their album, DAYdreaming by Aaron Minyard and the medics ( get it, med students) on SoundCloud. He had watched Aaron crumble under the loss of Kevin, voice booming into the microphone as if he was calling out to Kevin, hoping his voice reached his ears. Jason hoped someone, a fan, might discover it, and the album got carried out to Kevin.

What he did not expect was the insane success. Aaron had an angelic voice, now the whole world knew. They were listening to his heartbreak over and over again, tagging Kevin, asking what had happened, millions were relating to Aaron, crying to his hurt, his story, his voice.

Aaron however was fuming mad, he could have strangled Jason. The Foxes were blowing his phone up, agencies calling him to sing a contract with him, many gig and concert offers.

He accepted a few small radio'’ interview proposals, with Jason by his side, explaining that he had written those songs only for himself, and his nosy friend had went out of his way to leak them online.

But the rush did not die, in fact, it only got bigger as Exy finals game was approaching. Kevin'’ team was against Andrew and Neil'’ team. The match alone would have created a big deal, but now with the breakup and the album drama, all eyes were on how Aaron'’ twin would react to Kevin on court.

Aaron did not want to Foxes taking sides, he had said it to all of them personally, texted in the group chat where Kevin could see, mentioned it in interviews. They were a family, and Kevin'’ and his break up should not mess their hard found family.

The finals were a big event all on its own, but it got even fired up when Aaron was offered to perform in the half time show. Aaron was shocked, Jason was delighted. He said yes, and Aaron, feeling prideful from the support his songs were getting, said yes as well.

Andrew was not pleased, Neil was very much amused, and he could imagine that Kevin was fuming.

Aaron was shaking with nerves on the finals day. Nicky had flown from Germany as support to both Andrew and Aaron. All the Foxes were lined up in VIP seats, but no one was there for the big game and all of them knew it.

Aaron briefly made eye contact with Kevin right before the game. Kevin was flexing his broken hand, a nervous habit he had, meeting Aaron'’ eyes, he stopped. Aaron smiled at him, a warm, gentle smile. Kevin'’ hand relaxed, he smiled back.

The first half of the game passed as a blur for Aaron, he was having a hard time focusing on the players and the game as time got closer to half time whistle. Jason was stood right next to him, Nicky'’ hand a grounding presence on his shoulder. Eric was there too, he hugged Aaron tight before he got on stage, in front of millions.

Aaron did not do this, he was not a singer, he was supposed to focus on his classes and stay out of drama. Not perform for the whole world to see.

The songs were lined up from less painful to more painful ones, ending with One Last Song.

Under the blinding lights, Aaron could not see anyone else but the microphone in front of him. He sang, with all his heart, he sang. The crowd was wild, screaming his every word back to him. Aaron had never felt this kind of ecstasy, not with drugs, not on Exy court. This was all him.

The last song, was the hardest to sing, after singing all his heartbreaking songs one after other, laying all his hurt, truth, mistakes and regrets in front of millions, he was emotional for the last song.

Maybe one day I won't sing about you I'll sing a song about someone new But right here, right now You are on my mind And I think about you all the time I'm sending a message to you And I'm hoping that it will get through

Oh, the message was getting through all right, the person that needed to hear this was standing right on this court, Aaron'’ insides made a move, as if he was going to throw up. He closed his eyes. The part that hurt him most was approaching.

In case you hear this Then know you're the love of my life Want to tell you I'm sorry I miss having you by my side When you were mine

He was getting chocked up, the tears burning, no longer able to contain them behind his closed eyes, he opened them, momentarily blinded by the stage lights.

He did not see the person climbing up the platform, he did not hear anything over his own heart beating.

When it was good it was bitterswe...

He was cut short, strong hands holding his shoulders, turning him around, he was facing Kevin. His hair slicked back with sweet, cheeks glistened with tears.

Aaron knew his was also covered in sweat, tears running down his cheeks. Kevin cupped his face in his strong hands, Aaron leaned into the touch.

Kevin bent down, closing the distance between them and kissing Aaron, heavy and bruising, too possessive, too longingly. Aaron smiled into the kiss, messing it up, but he did not mind. He wrapped his arms around Kevin'’ neck and kissed back just as hard.

The crowd was screaming, Jason was whooping from where he was on the stage but none of it mattered, Aaron'’ world was Kevin and Kevin only.

#all for the game #aaron minyard #kevin day #kevaaron #all for the game imagines #aftg #aftg textpost #kevaaron supremacy #singer au #AU

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ravenvsfox · 5 years

Note

hello meghan my love my darling when are you going to post the next chapter of the rockband au???? you should do it on or before the 2nd for absolutely no personal reason at all. but anyway ilysm???? i hope you’re doing great now that it’s starting to warm up (seasonal depression whomst?) 💖💖

(hello ily honeyy happy happy happy birthday I’m sorry this is late)

Neil wakes up, as usual, to the pinging of a text message. He doesn’t bother to look at it. He knows what it will say; the unassuming number, the conspicuous silence whenever he writes back.

He rolls over so that the thinning comforter pulls and sticks beneath him, and he slits his eyes against the pre-dawn light.

Yesterday he’d deleted the number ’36’ from his messages and jammed his bare feet into his boots. He’d walked all the way out back to the dumpster with the cellphone cracking in his fist before his fear won out, and he’d pocketed it again.

He knows what day the zero should fall on. He’s learned to dread countdowns because he’s lived to see what comes on the other side of them, surfed the sand in an hourglass as it ebbed out from underneath him.

The monsters keep him busy, and so do the Foxes, now. They pull him in different directions, divide his attention, pique his curiosity. He’s acutely aware of how devastating it will be for him when he has to leave them, what a terrible thing he’s done by letting them close enough that they’ll notice when he’s dead.

But no one endures like the lonely people who end up at Palmetto, and he knows no one will stumble for long.

He reaches into the swath of blankets and holds the phone in his hand. It buzzes again, the nudge of the same message insisting upon being read. He feels frustration crest and fall in his chest, and then he wonders if anyone else is awake. Sometimes Andrew will get up early and make eggos, or Kevin will go for a run before the sun is up, but they’ve been inconsistent while they sloshed through the songwriting process.

He’s heard Aaron making endless pots of coffee and Nicky in the basement, practicing licks without an amp in the middle of the night. Once, Neil wandered down and knelt the wrong way on the couch to watch him play. He wasn’t quite awake, and the music twanged against Nicky’s goofy grin and made Neil smile back at him.

Now that Ausreißer’s album is edited into submission, sent off for packaging, all of their tireless work crystallizing somewhere, he’s promised Foxes that he’ll record a vocal for them. It’s strange to think of them wanting his serious voice worked through their bright sound, incongruous as salt in coffee. It’s even stranger to think of the way his voice will be broadcast after he’s dead, perpetually echoing after his disappearance.

Their album is set to be released in a week, and then the next leg of their tour will roll up to meet them, and sometime in those delicate, dwindling months, Neil will be found. He fantasizes about leaving a ripple when he’s taken, and then he thinks better of it. When his mother died, he watched the fire take her skin, and her hair, and her eyes, and he thought, death would be easier if we didn’t let ourselves matter to one another.

He lets the phone sink back into the sheets, and sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress. Someone knocks twice on the door, just the edge of a knuckle. Andrew.

“It’s open,” he says.

Ever since Andrew had burst in, answering questions that Neil hadn’t even thought to ask, he’s taken to leaving his door unlocked.

Andrew opens the door and promptly crosses the room towards Neil’s dresser, not even sparing him a glance. His hair is unkempt, a riot of blond that won’t part correctly, fluffed up from sleeping on it wet.

Unlike the rest of the monsters, who’ve buckled back down into their routines, Andrew’s been acting increasingly erratic. He’s been self-medicating more often, and holding himself back from something so effectively that Neil can’t quite see what it is. Sometimes he seems to glitch out, cutting himself off mid-sentence, cagey and self-contained.

The drugs should make his tongue looser, but mostly it seems to make him say more of everything. It’s harder to find whole kernels of truth in a bowl full of bravado that’s puffed out like popcorn.

Andrew puts both hands on the knobs of Neil’s drawer and waits there. Neil nods, amused. He’s long since found a lock for the bottom drawer and secreted away his money and information. Andrew pulls the top drawer out, sawing it back and forth when the dufflebag catches. He digs briefly through Neil’s small selection of shirts, and picks out something in faded green. He throws it and some light-wash jeans in Neil’s direction.

“Up, get up. Renee’s already at the studio.”

“You have today off,” Neil says.

“Well deduced,” Andrew says. “I’m driving you.”

Neil hesitates. “I’m fine with walking.”

“Do what you want,” Andrew says flippantly. “I have an errand to run near the studio, and you can come with me or you can waste Renee’s time and mine.”

“That’s not manipulative,” Neil says sarcastically.

“I’m giving you a choice,” Andrew says. His gaze finds the burner phone nestled in Neil’s bedding, then trails up to catch his eye.

“Yes, okay. Just let me change.” He’s secretly glad to be ferried to the studio, to have earned Andrew’s passenger seat, and to not have to think about who could be tracking him on foot. Andrew crosses wordlessly to the threshold of his bedroom and closes the door behind him. He can hear him shifting his weight outside, guarding Neil’s privacy.

He dresses quickly and quietly in the clothes that Andrew picked out for him, feeling strangely flushed about the whole thing. He doesn’t want Andrew to know that he’s doing exactly what he suggested, or that it’s become a habit for him to do so.

They leave not ten minutes later, after he’s stopped in to use the bathroom and splash water on his face, teasing fingers through his hair and swigging Nicky’s mouthwash.

Andrew waits at the door, turning keys over in his hand, hair still wild, belt buckled kind of askew with the tail of it sticking out.

“Are you ready?” Neil asks tentatively. Andrew cranks open the screen door in response, and steps out into the sweet spring morning. Neil follows, watching his even gait, the full, yolky yellow of his hair.

They climb up into the cold barrel of the van. When Neil reaches for the dial to turn up the heat, Andrew catches his wrist.

“I can’t get any warmer.”

It’s around this point that Neil suspects that Andrew might already be high.

Maybe balancing the creative chaos of their album with the newness of Neil has taken more of a toll on Andrew than it has on the others. Something about working constantly, writing feelings into rhymes that you can chew and rinse and spit with has made him itchy and distracted.

“Did you take something?” Neil asks.

“Not yet,” Andrew says, reversing violently onto the street, much too broad a maneuver for such a large vehicle. He clips the opposite curb before he cracks into drive and takes off.

Neil watches his inscrutable face, the tightness around his mouth and the brightness of his eyes. He can’t tell.

“No one drives like this when they’re sober.”

“You know I do,” Andrew tells him. Neil does. He’s seen Andrew stoned, laughing like he doesn’t want to be doing it, the way people do when they’re being tickled. He’s also seen him drunk, soaked through with sweat, sticking to the seats, and he’s seen him storm-cloud sober. He always manages to make it feel like the van is on ice skates.

“Did Wymack ask you to hold my hand?”

Andrew considers this for a moment too long. “Depends on what you mean by that.”

“Babysit me,” Neil clarifies. “Drop me off and pick me up so I don’t cause another incident.”

“No,” Andrew says simply, turning left so sloppily that he almost clips a crossing pedestrian.

“Then why would you—why are you doing this?”

“Million dollar question.”

“Is there a million dollar answer?” Neil asks.

“There are no million dollar answers,” Andrew says. “There are disappointments.”

“So no one asked you to do this for me.”

Andrew looks at him. “You may have noticed that I do not do what people ask me to unless it’s in my best interest.”

“You’re not as selfish as you want people to think,” Neil says, looking away, out the window. The studio is creeping up on them, three intersections way, then two. He’s come to know the route well, imagining the bends in the road when he’s trying to fall asleep. “Defending Kevin could bring the yakuza down on you, and you’ve always known it. Just like you had no guarantee that killing Tilda for Aaron wouldn’t kill you too.”

“Most people wouldn’t give murder as an example of selflessness,” Andrew says. “Does it make you feel better, to make us into good people?”

“No, actually,” Neil says honestly. “It makes it harder to pretend I’m one of you.”

Andrew pulls up into the shaded side of the studio, and Neil breathes out heavily. The honesty comes so much easier now; after those first botched pricks to his veins the blood has just flowed and flowed.

“Here,” Andrew says, pulling his keys from the ignition and prying the ring open. He slips a little bronze key from the loop and hands it to Neil. “To our front door. Allison’s going to drive you home, and none of us are going to be there to let you in.”

Neil’s hands go cold with surprise, and he opens them both for Andrew. “Just for today?”

Andrew shrugs and drops it into his palm. “It’s yours.”

“Why?” Neil asks quietly, pressing two fingers to the ragged edges. The metal is still warm from Andrew’s hand. He thinks of his name looped into a contract, thinks of sharing a microphone with Kevin and bumping fists with Matt. He pictures himself unlocking the door to a home on a residential street and hearing their record playing somewhere inside.

“You live there,” Andrew says, bored. “It’s convenient.”

“It’s more than that,” Neil says fiercely. “You know it is.” He wishes suddenly that he could give Andrew a key to something, an access code to a vault of secrets or a missing piece that would topple Riko’s threat. Before he’d found a stolen twin and a frantic cousin, he had even less of a home than Neil did. The teeth of the key eat into his palm.

“Do not lose it,” Andrew says. “I’m not cutting you another one.”

He knows that he would never misplace this proof of the flimsiness of Andrew’s apathy, this symbol of belonging, this ticket to normalcy. He also knows that Andrew would make him another if he really needed it, and that it means something distinct to both of them.

Andrew watches him mildly. “Go inside. Find your Foxes. If they try and wash your voice out with shitty effects, walk away.”

Neil smiles a little. “You told me yesterday that you don’t care about musical integrity.”

“I don’t want to hear you complain when the track flops,” Andrew says.

“Right.” Neil pops the door open. “I’ll see you at home,” he says tentatively, and when Andrew waves him off, he closes the door between them.

He lets himself uncurl his hand to look at the key, slowly, like it’s a living thing, something he unearthed. He studies the pattern of it, the tangy metallic smell clinging to his fingers.

When he looks up again, Andrew has pulled away. He forces himself to ease the key into his pocket and lower his eyes before the van disappears around the corner.

______

He finds Renee alone in the biggest upstairs studio, sipping demurely from something that smells natural and fruity. She smiles warmly at him when he comes in, and he feels caught in the suspended moment between springing the trap and suffering the consequences.

“You’re early,” she says.

“Interesting. Someone told me I was late.” He shrugs off his jacket and drops it over a music stand.

“Interesting,” she echoes.

Neil crosses his arms. “Where are the others?”

She pauses with the rim of her travel mug at her lips, then lowers it again. “Struggling to get out the door, probably. Allison likes to take her time primping.”

“Okay,” Neil says, uncomfortable to find himself alone with the only person at Palmetto that he can’t really read. “Warm up?”

“If you want,” Renee says easily. Infuriatingly. “Or we could talk, like Andrew so obviously wants us to. I recognize his machinations when I see them.”

Neil considers the slender silver cross at her neck winking in the overhead light. She has the nimble, capable hands of a musician, and the inexplicable ability to garner the respect of someone like Andrew. It’s more than enough to warrant his curiosity.

“What could he possibly want us to talk about?” Neil asks, sitting gingerly in a stray chair across from her.

Renee shrugs. “He’s not usually forthright with details.”

Neil tilts his head and decides all at once to play along. “What is it that he likes so much about you?” he asks.

Renee takes his rudeness in stride, her mouth pursing a little with amusement. “He discovered that we have a lot in common. Rich histories of bad situations and terrible exit strategies. The only difference is that I have my faith and he has his nihilism.”

“And what exactly constitutes a bad situation, for you?”

He’s seen Andrew’s sleeves of scars, he’s seen him wake violently from dreams that never seem to be anything but nightmares, and he’s seen that shallow look in his eyes that says that he’s been hurt as badly as he can be, and everything else is just smoke after fire.

He can’t see any of that on Renee. Her faith is gentle as candlelight, her mannerisms easy as warm water, and he doesn’t like the waxy, tepid feeling of being around her.

Her smile cinches, as if yanked closed by pursestrings. “How much time do you have?”

Neil shrugs. “As much as you do.”

She pulls a hand awkwardly through the hair at her neck — as if, for a moment, she was expecting it to be longer.

Neil waits. Renee sighs. The overhead clock ticks.

She tells him methodically about her mother’s whirlwind of abusive boyfriends, the years that compounded into a deadly pressure that would only give when she took knives to it. She doesn’t hesitate when she tells him about causing her parents’ death, running with gangs until it landed her in juvie, and then into foster homes. For a moment, Neil can see something of Andrew in her face like a familial resemblance.

Renee worries a fingernail in her mouth for half a second, distracted, before she explains what Stephanie Walker did for her. The way music and faith entered her life at once, twin forks on a lightning bolt. Church choir first, and then violin lessons.

Cruelly, he resents her for having someone who desperately fought for her, for letting her mother die so quietly in jail. He also understands, for the first time, why he’s been so unsettled by Renee; she walked out of her tragedy and shut the door. Neil can never latch his while Nathan’s foot is wedged in the gap. He has the most unsettling feeling that Andrew’s door has been wrenched off of its hinges.

“So why aren’t you with Andrew?” he wonders aloud. It’s not the right thing to say, but it’s the only complete thought he’s had since she started talking. Her story reads like a high quality forgery of Andrew’s. Renee complements him just as well in friendship as she does in music.

She smiles like she was expecting this question. “Why would that matter?”

“It doesn’t,” Neil says quickly. “Matter. I don’t care. It just seemed like an obvious fit.”

“We’re kindred spirits in some ways, and I have a hunch that we’ll always be friends. But I’m not his type.”

“I can’t imagine who would be, if not you,” Neil says. He doesn’t mean for it to come out as an accusation, or a compliment, so it sits uncomfortably between the two.

“That’s a puzzle,” she says, smiling impishly.

“You know the rest of your band is placing bets on you?” he asks.

She laughs. “Sure. Gotta pass the time between sets somehow.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

“Not at all. Allison’s in on the joke, and that’s half the fun — bluffing together. Finding your allies.”

“In on— in on which joke?” he asks, vaguely frustrated.

Her eyes drift sideways, away from him and towards the door. She pushes up her sleeves carefully. “Andrew and I aren’t just unlikely. We’re impossible.”

“Why impossible?”

She shrugs. “I don’t date men, if I can help it.” Neil barely has time to process this before she adds, “and Andrew doesn’t date women.”

“Oh,” Neil says dumbly.

“I wouldn’t spread that around, though,” she says. “It’s not common knowledge just yet.”

“So why would you tell me?” he asks.

She smiles again. “If he suspected that you were curious about my relationship with him, and still engineered this conversation, I don’t think he would be surprised to know that I’ve told you this particular truth.”

Neil turns this thought over in his head. Andrew puts his secrets at such a remove that he completely avoids being confronted about them. Their impact disperses and melts away before he even makes an appearance.

He thinks about Andrew’s complete disinterest in the fans who throw bras at the stage and shake posters with his name on them. He doesn’t think their gender has anything to do with his apathy, but those instances still tint and change in his memory.

Renee sits good-naturedly through his bout of silence, and then she says, “I hope I helped uh— fill in the blanks a little more for you. I know I don’t really know anything about you, even though we’re all really trying to. Your bandmates though—you breathe the same air and play the same songs day after day, so they can’t help but know you a little. And I know them. So maybe we can be friends someday too.”

Neil feels a distant pang of regret that he won’t be around long enough to prove her right or wrong. He’il be pried from this life with the abruptness of a needle lifting from the middle of a record, and the truth will die, unspoken, on his wasted tongue.

He doesn’t reply, and lukewarm silence stretches between them until Allison comes teetering into the room on platform heels a minute later. She puts her iced coffee on the table and tugs affectionately on the ends of Renee’s hair, and Neil thinks, of course.

A memory surfaces—Andrew twisting dye into his hair and his eyes slipping involuntarily closed—but Dan and Matt parade into the room, arms full of store-bought water and gatorade, and whatever the thought was going to be slips away.

_____

It takes them hours to nail the recording. Neil is dissatisfied with every take, Dan keeps thinking up ideas to beef up their harmonies, and Matt messes with the controls, stripping back the distortion to ‘show off Neil’s pipes’.

They break for lunch at 1pm, and Neil finds himself drifting away from the others, wandering all the way downstairs and through the door, out to the shade where Andrew had left him that morning. He takes out a cigarette that he’d stolen from the console in the van, and the backup lighter from the bowl of keys in the foyer.

He lights up, flame chewing its way towards his fingers. He turns his back against the brunt of the cold and keeps his shoulder to the wall, hair washed forward over his eyes by the wind.

A car rolls up somewhere behind him, and then there’s a snap like a briefcase being closed.

Someone says, “Nathaniel.”

Neil whips around. His fingers tense so that the cigarette nearly snaps in half, but he clings to it and the lighter, the only weapons on his person.

There’s a sleek black SUV parked several spots away, and Riko Moriyama is leaning out of the open side door.

“It is time for us to talk,” he says.

Neil takes a step back. He can see at least two other people in the vehicle, and when he looks up, the shades are drawn over every visible window in the building.

“If you run it will only drag this process out for all of us,” Riko sighs. “We don’t offer civil discussions often. I would take this rare opportunity.”

“You have a knack for making threats sounds like kindnesses,” Neil says. “But then, most bullies do.”

“Get in the car,” Riko says. “Or your real name goes violently public.”

Neil’s teeth clench hard enough to crack. He drops the cigarette on the pavement, and walks forward two steps. “Can I say goodbye?”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Riko says, and his upper body disappears into the car. Neil follows him in, trying to conceal the way his legs have gone stiff with terror.

In the cab of the car it is just Riko across the expanse of cool leather in the back, and two older men whom Neil doesn’t recognize in the driver’s and passenger’s seats. They peel smoothly out of the parking lot and onto the street.

“They’re expecting me back,” Neil says. One of the men in the front passes Riko an ornate black cane, and he levels it in Neil’s direction.

“I don’t want to hear anything from you until I have finished speaking. In fact, do not talk unless you have been prompted to. I already know everything about you that I care to.”

“I’m at a disadvantage then, since all I know about you is that you are a sadomasochist with the bravado of a much more interesting person.”

Riko raps the cane into the side of Neil’s head with such force that his teeth clatter together and his ears ring.

“I guess pleasantries are over, then,” Neil says.

Riko regards him with distaste. “In another life, perhaps, you could have been an asset. Your father’s reputation precedes him. We might have recruited him if he were as easy to pin down as his son seems to be.”

“What would the yakuza need with another butcher?”

Riko raps him on the hands this time, a warning. “Don’t. Speak.” He watches the redness bloom immediately on Neil’s knuckles with flushed pleasure.

“It would be easy enough to send word to his colleagues and have them at Mr. Hemmick’s front door in a day or two, but I’m not sure that you wouldn’t stir up a mess in the meantime. The publicity from your death could bolster Ausreißer’s success. The disappointment from hearing that you’ve left voluntarily is a boycott and a think-piece away from cutting them off at the knees.”

“You want me to leave the band,” Neil says incredulously.

“Of course,” Riko says.

“I’m aware that you have sway in many circles, but not here,” Neil says. “The people in this studio are inside each other’s pockets more than they’ll ever be in yours. They won’t accept this. They won’t.”

“Your interpersonal connections mean nothing to me. Kevin belongs on my team. Andrew and his monsters have been a nuisance, but you are an insufferable offence.”

“So you’re removing your biggest threat?”

Riko’s lip curls. “I found vermin in my house, and I will return it to the sewers where it was born unless it gets out of my way.”

“Even if you did scare me with your posturing, my hands are tied,” Neil says. “I have a contract. He—they won’t let me go.”

Riko’s expression shifts, sand dunes moving in the blowing wind. “You think the drummer will protect you?”

Neil doesn’t reply. He doesn’t want to betray Andrew’s position. He’s like a pipe bomb in a mailbox or a chess piece in check.

“Oh, Neil. He couldn’t even protect himself.”

“What,” Neil says flatly.

Riko waves the cane in a relaxed circle, like he’s deciding where it should land. “I would have thought that someone with your trust issues would have done better research on the people around you.”

Neil stays silent.

“Andrew was a foster kid, yes? It’s chaotic for kids in those crowded houses. So many mouths to feed. Or fuck, in Andrew’s case. I’m sure it was traumatic for little Andrew to be passed around like that, from bed to bed. No wonder he’s so hot and bothered over our intervention. He knows what it looks like when someone’s overpowering him.“

“You’re lying,” Neil says, thunderstruck.

“Mention Drake Spears to your little bodyguard and see how quickly he loses it. Or better yet, just look up the Minyard trial. Andrew can drink the past away, but he can’t erase it from the news. Drake was a fascinating man. Not that rapists in uniform aren’t common, but to break someone like Andrew in I’m sure takes a little extra finesse.”

Neil lunges for him, and Riko counters a beat too late with the cane. Neil clips his eye, and the cane makes contact with his throat a second later. He splutters and reaches, trying to get a hand around Riko’s throat.

“That’s not true,” Neil’s saying, over and over. He twists the flesh on Riko’s neck, scrabbling at his clavicles, physically pressing him to be honest.

Riko looks annoyed, but not deterred as he holds Neil’s hands at bay. “How did you think he got to be a monster, exactly?”

It knocks the breath out of him. His grip sags. He’s aware suddenly that the car has stopped moving, and that anyone in it could kill and dispose of him without so much as interrupting their day.

“You’re not a monster because of what other people do to you,” Neil says, seething.

“Nonetheless. Leave the band, or one of the other members goes missing,” Riko offers. “I don’t care which, but Andrew is so nicely broken in already.”

Neil’s hand darts for him again, and Riko catches it, bored, cracking it back at the wrist. The door pops open at Neil’s back, and he’s hooked halfway out of the car by one of the other men, forearm screaming with pressure where Riko has him clamped in his fist.

Cool sweat breaks out on his brow from the pain as Riko leans down to face level, nails piercing his skin.

Before he can speak, Neil chokes, “you can’t set Andrew up. I won’t let you.”

Riko looks suddenly fatigued, and he lets Neil go so that he rocks back onto the sidewalk. “The more you underestimate my family’s clout. the more people suffer by our hands. You must understand that I am the only thing keeping any of you alive right now.”

“You’re wrong,” Neil says.

“You’re likely to be dead by summer, Nathaniel,” he says evenly. His eyes are black in the shadow of the open car door.

“That’s not my name.”

“If you want to lose allies and make new enemies in the meantime, it is your choice. But I don’t want to see you on stage again.” He shuts the door quietly between them, and Neil stumbles back several steps, momentum almost overbalancing him.

He watches the SUV depart and thinks of all of the leverage they have over him, how laser focused their will is to scrape Ausreißer off the charts and clip Neil’s loose end. His defiance had almost no affect on them at all. He had rubbed up against Riko’s temper, sure, but it was no harder than squeezing the trigger on a gun that’s already in your hand.

He squints distractedly at the studio several metres behind him, the bustle of midday spilling through the streets. The pleasant murmur of a city heralding in the end of Neil’s life.

He keeps thinking, if Riko knew about Neil’s past, he had no reason to lie about Andrew’s.

He keeps thinking, how could he be stupid enough to imagine that he had the biggest secret in the band — like Andrew wasn’t writing him a roadmap with songs, like his past wasn’t melted down and repurposed into lyrics.

He thinks, the target on his back just swallowed everything and everyone around him.

He thinks, I have to talk to Andrew.

______

He can’t bring himself to go back inside and excuse himself from rehearsal. There’s no explanation that they would accept without also understanding that he’s dragged them all down into danger with him.

He let them believe that his problems weren’t active case files and bleeding wounds. He pretended that he could broadcast his voice and maybe the music would be so sacred that no one would come looking for him.

Neil takes the bus home, scraping together spare change from his pocket. He finds his key while he searches, and his heart sinks. When he’s slouched in an aisle seat, he looks down at the shape of his hands, the grit under his nails, the old slice across his pinky, and the key nested in the intersecting lines of his palm.

Rain starts to patter against the window, blurring the colourful shapes of people outside who were hopeful enough to dress for much warmer weather.

He whirs with anxiety, searching for an out so desperately that it becomes a physical act, a shaking and a sweating. He should leave the city while he can still bear to. He owes it to everyone at Palmetto studio to take such a volatile element out of their equation.

It used to be his favourite solution when things turned ugly, dumping his life and name and letting a car carry him to a new one. The ritual of dying his hair and popping in lenses always felt charged with possibility.

Now he can’t let himself consider it. The idea of never seeing Dan or Wymack or Nicky or any of them again, of abandoning his deal with Andrew and dropping his new key into the nearest storm drain — it’s different now.

They were the first people to squint past his face-paint and recognize him as a lost kid. They gave him a key and a home with a locking door and passed him a microphone with the name he chose taped onto the handle. They gave him all sorts of contracts, but most important was the unspoken one that, for a minute, looked like friendship.

He gets back to the house two hours ahead of schedule, but it still feels too late. He thinks about letting himself in but suddenly can’t stand the thought of walking into the home that he’s about to ruin.

He knocks and steps down onto the second stair to give himself some distance. After a minute, someone stirs inside, and then there’s a thumping of footsteps, and the whine of the screen door.

Andrew stares down at him through the mist of rainwater.

“You have a key, don’t you?” he says. Neil looks up into his wan face, studying the way he’s holding himself up with the door, washed out in the bleak light from outside. Neil climbs warily to the top step, feeling a lived-in sadness settle into him.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Got it in one,” Andrew says, smiling with one half of his face. “So very very perceptive all the time.”

It’s such bad timing that Neil laughs, then holds a trembling hand over his mouth. “I can’t have this conversation when you’re like this,” he says.

“Which conversation is that?” Andrew asks sharply. “Do be precise.”

“I need you sober,” Neil insists.

“You don’t need me anything,” he sneers.

“I’m making you coffee. And then we have to talk about the Moriyamas.”

Andrew looks immediately more alert. His hand slips from the door, and Neil just barely catches it before it closes on him.

“Why are you back early?” Andrew asks slowly. Neil closes his eyes.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I came.” He should be hitchhiking over state lines. He should be in someone’s truck bed with the rain in his hair. He should be using the cold to forget what warmth feels like.

“Not a good enough answer,” Andrew says. He steps backwards into the entryway and turns, calling “keep trying” over his shoulder. Neil follows him solemnly, nudging the doors closed at his back. He steps out of his shoes while Andrew disappears silently into the kitchen.

When he rounds the corner, Andrew’s sitting on top of the dinky round table by the window, legs crossed beneath him. His cigarettes and lighter are at his side, and a bottle of Smirnoff is open on the chair behind him.

Neil moves towards the coffee maker, but Andrew snaps his fingers at him.

“Tell me why you left recording, no non-answers s’il vous plait,” he says. Neil hesitates, then climbs quietly up onto the table across from him, boosting himself with one socked foot on the cushion of a chair. Andrew looks surprised and red-eyed as Neil settles in, knee to knee.

He swallows thickly. “I have to leave.”

“You just got here,” Andrew points out.

“I have to leave the band,” Neil explains.

He waves this off. “Oh, no, I’m pretty sure we have our contractual claws in you, Neil Josten.”

“There are people, more now than ever, who have… more deadly claws in me.”

Andrew taps his lower lip thoughtfully. “Is it claws though, or is it talons? I know how the Moriyamas enjoy their raven motifs.”

“Riko’s threatening the band.”

“What’s new?” Andrew says.

Everything, he wants to say. Everything’s reaching a new and chilling level of dangerous.

“He stopped me on the street,” Neil says quietly. There’s a hand on his jaw immediately, turning his face towards the overhead light fixture. Neil lets his eyes unfocus in the harsh light. Andrew puts a finger to the bruise from the cane Riko was borrowing. “It’s fine.”

“You will be fine up until the moment that you’re dead,” Andrew spits, one hand moving to inspect Neil’s tender wrist.

“I’m fine if I can walk away,” Neil argues. “I’m okay if I stand up and move on, and that’s what I need to do here.”

“You took some heat from Riko and now you want to run away,” Andrew extrapolates. “Which is great, except you told me you weren’t ready to give up our deal.”

“I kind of assumed all deals were null and void in the event of a deadly threat.”

Andrew uses his leverage on Neil’s chin to tilt their faces close together. “I,” he says, “am a deadly threat. Riko is a little boy playing with his father’s knives.”

Neil flinches at his phrasing, shaking his head. “He has connections I can’t begin to understand. He told me things about my past, about yours—“

“Did he?” Andrew interrupts. His voice is the kind of inescapable cold that turns all of your exposed skin red, then blue, then black.

Neil tries to turn his face out of Andrew’s grip, and the pressure on him is immediately lifted. “Who’s Drake Spears?” he asks.

“Oh,” Andrew breathes, and then he laughs. “A dead man. Aaron’s gift to me.”

Neil’s face goes lax with surprise. “He killed him?”

“We like to keep our violence in the family,” Andrew says, smiling again, joyless. “Or rather, they did. We ended the cycle.”

“So Riko wasn’t lying about what happened to you,” Neil says slowly.

Andrew takes his cigarettes in one hand and shuffles them against the tabletop for a long moment. “Unlike you, Riko doesn’t always think that lying is in his best interest. It’s not one of his favourite sins.”

Neil stews in this revelation for a moment, trying to outlast the directionless rage streaking through him.

“I wish I’d known, before.”

“Why? So we could waste our time excusing ourselves in miserable circles for things that other people did to us? So I could explain to you what all of my scars mean and make you feel better about yours?”

“So I could have killed him myself,” Neil says fiercely. Andrew eyes him steadily. The rain picks up outside, and Neil can see it coming in through the window cracked over the sink.

“Is that supposed to impress me?”

“It’s not supposed to mean anything to you. It’s just the truth,” Neil says. “If I can’t kill my own demons, I—would’ve liked to kill yours.”

“Much too late for that,” Andrew shrugs. “Not too late to stay here with us. If Riko threatens you out of the band on his first try, then you’re not as tenacious as I thought you were.”

“I’m afraid,” Neil says, “that someone else will suffer for my pride.”

“It’s not pride, it’s trust,” Andrew says, and then his face clouds over like he’s sobering up, remembering himself. “In case you’ve forgotten since I reminded you two minutes ago, we have a deal. Protection for participation.”

He shouldn’t believe that this volatile, five foot nothing stage performer could rebuff the yakuza, but he does. He can’t look at Andrew’s eery, wavering certainty without wanting badly to trust him.

“Right,” Neil agrees, feeling hours-old tension ebb out of his shoulders. He came here, he realizes, knowing that Andrew would give him a reason to stay. “I’ll wait it out. But you have to promise me that you’ll watch your back.”

Andrew shakes his head and pulls a cigarette from the pack. “He can’t touch me,” he says, flicking his lighter open. His eyes are hazy as he props one hand up and smokes on autopilot. Neil’s not certain that he knows for sure who Andrew’s talking about anymore.

The tour isn’t for another couple of weeks. He can keep his face out of the news and slog his way through all of this new information, maybe turn over a solution somewhere in the muck. At the very least, he can spend these final weeks pretending that he’s not afraid of the dark at the end of the tunnel where the rest of his life should be.

______

It’s the bark, not the bite

the prelude to a fight

the gleam of bared teeth

when they catch the low light

the revving beneath

the thought that you might

with the last of your breath

get our ending right

Neil turns the demo down on the car radio, embarrassed, and Dan grins at him from the driver’s seat.

“That’s a sexy little lyric.”

“Shut up,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“I like the weird synth in the background, that’s baller,” Matt pipes up from behind them.

Nicky groans. “Don’t tell Kevin that, he thought he was a fucking genius for stringing together six notes by ear.”

Dan laughs brightly, easing onto the freeway that’ll carry them out of the city.

Their album was released at midnight, and they’ve spent the morning watching the charts and listening to Nicky read out reviews as they were published, waiting to see if they’d be rejected or absorbed into the musical bloodstream.

It was exhilarating to see the finished product saturating their little corner of music culture, to watch people forming opinions, and to pop up in playlists and news feeds. Someone had already posted a guitar cover of one of their tracks before noon.

Neil watched the locked door of their house and hoped furiously that Riko wouldn’t take this new music as defiance and show up to drag him away. Foxes had shown up instead, with congratulatory champagne and a novelty card for Neil that read “baby’s first album”.

Both Ausreißer and Foxes were scheduled to take the weekend off before they’re all launched into promotions and tours on opposite coasts. Dan had suggested a Palmetto-wide retreat to lake Jocassee, and Neil had jumped at the opportunity to dodge the pressure from the Moriyamas and corral everyone out of harms way.

“This is going to be such a rowdy time,” Nicky says, chin tucked onto the shoulder of Neil’s chair. “I can’t believe you convinced Andrew to come.”

“Yeah, what the hell,” Matt says. “How did you manage that?”

Neil shrugs. “I asked.”

“Oh, you asked,” Dan says, nose scrunching under her sunglasses. “Do you know how long we were playing nice with the monsters before you showed up?”

“Neil’s got that magic touch,” Nicky says.

“Just how magic a touch are we talking?” Matt asks slyly.

“Don’t,” Neil warns.

“He won’t let us bet on them,” Nicky complains. “He’s just like, not fun.”

“It’s bewildering to me that you clowns are wasting your time when we all know who Andrew’s into,” Dan says. She keeps talking, and Neil hears Renee’s name, but he’s uninterested in the direction the conversation is taking. He looks distractedly out at the sun-split highway.

He thinks of how quiet the other car must be, stacked with supplies, caught in that constant vortex of tension between the twins, plus Kevin with his headphones on as always. Or what Renee and Allison talk about, tucked into Allison’s baby-pink convertible, the wind catching their bleached hair.

“Damn, are they passing us already?” Nicky asks, and Neil looks back in time to notice the massive shape of the van swerving past on their left. He catches the tail end of Aaron flipping them off, and Nicky laughs, craning into the front to return the gesture.

“They left like half an hour later than us, what the hell,” Dan says, revving a little, reluctant to fall behind.

“Andrew’s driving,” Neil says. The van jolts awkwardly into the lane in front of them, and Neil smiles as it streaks ahead. “They’ll beat us by a mile.”

“If they don’t crash first,” Dan grumbles.

“Look at it this way — if it’s not that, it’ll just be some other disaster,” Matt says. “That’s what you sign up for with the monsters.”

“You say disaster, I say a great time. Am I right, Neil?” Nicky asks, flicking at his shoulder to get his attention.

“I’m staying impartial.”

“You literally can not fool me,” Nicky says, affronted. “You love having an opinion.”

“He doesn’t want to incur your wrath by agreeing with us,” Dan teases, winking sideways at him.

“My wrath? This is the guy who taunted Riko Moriyama on sight, and you think he’s afraid of me?”

“We all are,” Matt says solemnly, and Nicky socks him in the arm.

They keep bickering, but Neil mostly tunes them out. A song that he helped write is still playing at half volume from the sound system, rounded out by Kevin’s deft bass solo. The car is warm enough to lull him to sleep, and he can see the rest of the Ausreißer crew fading into the scorched horizon ahead.

______

They arrive in staggered bursts to a spacious cabin, swallowed in overhanging trees on all sides. It’s two stories high, with a broad, wrap-around porch — courtesy of Allison’s string-pulling.

The twins are sharing a bench when they pull up, talking seriously, and Neil has to squint to make sure he’s seeing them correctly. Three hours in a car together and against all odds they’re still sharing space.

No one bothered to unpack the van, so Neil keeps himself busy by hopping into the back and pulling out duffel bags. Allison and Renee arrive soon after with coolers full of booze and perishables, and by the time everything has been lugged inside, there are three guitars propped up and abandoned in the foyer.

It’s surprisingly easy, once all of them are talking at once. Kevin drinks enough to stay loose, which always seems to relax Aaron in turn. The girls sit on the floor of the dining room while Matt unpacks groceries. Nicky chatters about getting everyone hammered so they can play “sweet, genre-fucked music” together. Someone lights a joint, and it makes the rounds.

Neil hops up on the kitchen counter, and Andrew leans against the fridge beside him.

Neil relaxes at the sight of him. “Aren’t you glad you came?” he asks, a little louder than he intended. He can sense the others pretending not to eavesdrop, their conversation dropping and then starting back up again, overly bright.

“Remains to be seen,” he replies.

“You were talking to Aaron,” he says. Andrew stares passively back at him. “I’ve never seen you speak one on one like that.”

“It was a long drive.”

Neil hesitates. “Did you tell him—“

“Andrew,” Nicky calls. “I’m comin’ through with groceries, can you free up the fridge?”

Andrew moves wordlessly aside, and then all the way out of the room. Neil watches him go with a dull sort of disappointment. For someone who is so frequently difficult to parse, Andrew is such an obvious font of honesty and clarity that speaking to him sometimes feels like an antidote to his own lies.

“Come on, Neil,” Renee trills. “We’re talking about the collab.”

“I want to hear the track,” Kevin says.

“You want to critique it,” Neil counters, wandering closer.

Dan throws a hand out towards him. “Exactly!”

“I think I have a right to know how you’re utilizing my lead singer.”

“Oh jesus, Kevin’s going to start talking about music theory, isn’t he?” Allison says. “I’m gonna need to drink so much more.” Dan cracks up, passing her a mickey of spiced rum.

“We all do,” she agrees, raising a full bottle in toast. “It’s a Palmetto tradition. Work hard, play hard.”

“Thanks coach,” Matt snorts.

“C’mon, bring it in.” They all tilt bottles together, some of them unopened, eyes rolling. Neil can see Andrew watching from the next room, and when they drink, he takes a drag from his cigarette.

______

Neil drinks too much.

He’d half planned on it, but his stomach is empty and his anxiety is just barely held down by sobriety, and it all gets to him so fast. His elbows keep chafing against other people’s, and his fear keeps blinking back at him from between branches outside and through passing headlights and in his own reflection.

They’re all seven or eight drinks deep when someone brings out a guitar, and then it’s a chaos of bad singing that coasts into real singing, someone upstairs laughing hysterically with someone else, someone on the porch with a bong.

He likes how it feels, the old safety of staying numb, like the back of the bars where nobody knows you, so you don’t have to bother to know yourself, and there’s nothing to be afraid of except the throb of a hangover at the end of the night.

But it’s different, now. Dan gets in close and thumbs both his cheeks, and Allison puts little, almost undetectable braids in his hair. Matt tells him how happy he is that they’re all together over and over again. The longer Neil looks over at Andrew the more he’s aware that he’s looking for something that isn’t there.

Nicky looks solemnly into his eyes in the bathroom mirror and asks to see his tongue piercing. There’s a strange moment, when he opens his mouth, where he thinks Nicky might grab him by the tongue.

“Come here, come here, come here,” someone says, and Neil looks at Allison’s reflection where she’s hanging in through the doorway. “Convince Andrew to play us something.”

“I can’t,” Neil’s mouth says. He tries again. “He won’t.”

“He does whatever you want,” Nicky says, looking much too serious.

“You—no,” Neil says. “You guys ask for whatever you want. I ask what he wants.“

“Whatever,” Allison says. “Semantics. Come out here.”

Nicky puts his hands briefly on Neil’s hips to sidle by into the hallway, and he and Allison chatter all the way back to the sitting room. Neil looks blearily at his reflection. His hair is so long now, it softens the angles of his father’s features. Makes his eyes look less painfully blue. He blinks, and breathes, and tries to think about nothing.

His feet carry him out to the rest of them. Dan cheers when he enters the room. She’s so flushed, and even though she’s sitting, Matt’s holding her steady.

Andrew’s sitting in an armchair by the fireplace, his posture relaxed, lips wet, drink in hand. Neil walks as steadily as he can to his side. The room goes nearly silent.

“Will you play something?”

Andrew looks up at him flatly. “Why would I?”

“I want to hear you sing,” Neil admits.

“And?” He takes a sip of his drink.

Neil shrugs. “I’ll trade you something for it,” he offers.

After a long moment, Andrew says “I’m not interested.”

“I know you’ve been writing new lyrics,” he says softly.

Andrew watches him for a minute, then nods towards the place where his notebook is sitting unassumingly on the coffee table. “Then sing them yourself.”

Neil considers this. He retrieves the book and holds it in both hands, giving Andrew time to back out. He doesn’t, and someone breathes out behind him.

“Okay,” Neil says. “Fine.”

He flips to the centre and finds blank pages, then beyond that, two that are flush with words and annotations. There are chords written out for four more pages after that, and then just scores and scores of melodies and poems and the lucky places where they meet.

He thumbs through songs he recognizes and new, title-less ones, still standing, everyone watching his search with interest.

He comes to a page near the back with the title burn this, and it reads:

Hands off never used to be a bad thing

It would be better if I never heard you sing

I know it’s winter, you can’t tell me that it’s spring

I want you without wanting anything.

Then a few lines are scratched out before the next fragmented stanza. Neil looks up into Andrew’s face, and he’s already staring back, eyebrows hitched so, so slightly together.

Neil crosses the room, and wrestles a little portable synth out of his bag, carrying it over to the couch. Some of the members of Foxes ‘ooh’ dramatically.

He nudges it on, cracks his knuckles, and toggles a couple of switches. He holds the book open on his knee, and starts to arpeggiate the suggested chords that Andrew’s written above each line.

He sings, improvising the melody, those first four lines and then —

It was too easy not to feel

when the drugs still told me you weren’t real

I always knew you were here to steal

We started this, me back on my heels

and you—beneath me.

There’s more, but Neil can’t bring himself to keep singing. His throat sticks and his vision goes spotty.

“Kind of a bummer,” Matt says.

“I think it’s pretty,” Dan says softly.

“Hard to believe the monster wrote it,” Allison says.

“You must know by now that we can write good lyrics,” Kevin says, irritated.

Aaron says something, but Neil’s still stuck staring down at the words on the page. Something is angrily crossed out in the second stanza, just completely struck through, unreadable. He feels remarkably sober all of the sudden, and he trudges to the precipice of an understanding so large that he has to step away from it, or he’s sure it’ll call him down to his death.

Andrew stands, somewhere in the field of Neil’s vision, and lets himself out onto the porch.

“Whoops,” Matt says, when the door closes behind him. “Do you think we took it too far?”

“He offered the book up,” Allison points out.

“To me,” Neil says.

“Well, yeah, but I think ‘sing them yourself’ was pretty self explanatory,” Dan says, missing the point. “So are we supposed to know who that was about?”

Neil stands, and the synth slides off his lap and into the crease between couch cushions. He walks to the kitchen and pours himself a cup of water, downing it all. Then another. He tries to remember exactly what the lyrics said and finds himself less and less certain.

For the second time that week, he thinks, knees knocking with terrible anticipation, I have to talk to Andrew.

______

He finds him curled on the bench outside, drenched in the yellow light from an exposed bulb, still nursing the same whiskey from before. He looks up with what Neil now recognizes as carefully tailored interest.

“Why does Nicky think that you’ll do whatever I ask?” he asks, voice wavering.

Andrew taps his fingers erratically on the rim of his glass. “Presumably because your track record has been good so far.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

Andrew’s lips purse. “Then ask a new question.”

“Fine. I’ll play,” Neil says. “What was that song about?”

“It was about wanting something that I can’t have.”

“I didn’t think you wanted anything.”

“No,” Andrew agrees. “Except maybe to see if you sound as good in bed as you do on stage.”

Neil sits down, hard. He’s half-surprised when gravity still works, and the wicker footstool catches his weight.

“You like me,” he says weakly.

“Not really,” Andrew replies, expressionless. “Want and dislike are not mutually exclusive.”

Neil dry swallows a couple of times. He thinks of their eyes connecting darkly in a bathroom mirror, Andrew’s fingertips gliding over his scars, the passenger seat left open for him, his mouth and then Andrew’s on the same flask. He thinks of lyrics on their own album about running and lying and wanting without taking, and he remembers the deal that has kept him upright and safe and sane for so long.

Andrew’s amused interest when he’s high, the cryptic things that Nicky said to him on the night they met, the conversations where he gives away his secrets but doesn’t feel like he’s losing anything, it all completely restructures in his head.

He’s dizzy, still drunk, one foot in the reality where he was little more than a hindrance to Andrew, and the other in one where he writes songs about how much he wants him.

“You didn’t tell me,” Neil says dumbly. “You never said.”

Andrew shrugs. “There’s no point,” he says. “I’ve thought about it. Written about it. But I know better.”

“Okay,” Neil says, even though it’s not. Andrew shifts in his seat, and Neil watches his broad hands, his shiny lower lip, his squared shoulders. The night chirps and smokes with faraway firewood, pitch dark beyond the line separating the porch from the wilderness. Andrew might be the brightest thing for a thousand miles. “Okay,” he says again, but this time it splits in his mouth, and he reaches for Andrew’s face.

#the boys are back in town and emotionally? they're doin bad #aftg #the foxhole court #andreil #tfc fanfic #rockband au #abuse tw #violence tw #drugs tw #this one is a bit of a rollercoaster tbh #sorry if this is kinda poorly edited I've been at this for hours and gd hours #mine #philosophium #ask #long post

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stereksecretsanta · 5 years

Text

Merry Christmas, @bloodgutsandstarbucks!

Read on AO3

******

Love Don’t Lie

Stiles set his paperwork on his desk and caught the eye of his new partner, Scott McCall. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Scott grinned. “I have the best idea.”

He wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that. “Oh?”

“Since you’re new in town, I was thinking, you probably don’t know many people, and you moved into that big house outside of town…I could set you up with someone!”

Stiles’s jaw hung open. “Like a date?”

“Yes! But don’t worry, I have someone in mind. It’s perfect, because he’s new to town, too!”

Stiles laughed a little hysterically. “No, no, I think you’ve got the wrong idea. I’m actually happily-”

“No, really, he's perfect. His name is Derek Hale, he works with my wife. He's new to Beacon Hills, just like you, and he hasn’t gotten to know anyone yet, either!” Scott’s eyes widened and rounded, shining like a cartoon.

Stiles paused. “...Oh? And he's single?”

“Well, we’re pretty sure. He doesn’t have a ring, and he hasn’t mentioned anyone. How about this!” Scott waved his phone. “I’ll tell Kira to relay the message that you’re interested, and then he’ll let us know if he’s single or not.”

Stiles covered a laugh with a cough. He could just imagine what Derek's face would do at that little invitation. “Sure. You do that.”

“Great! I’ll let her know! Oh, also, we’re supposed to go check out a gnome thief on Saundersville Road,” he added cheerfully.

“Small towns are nothing but excitement, eh?”

Scott laughed.

Stiles grimaced at the menu in front of him, trying to avoid eye contact with his…date.

An irritable sigh made him finally look up. “You shouldn’t have agreed to this.”

“There were circumstances,” Stiles hissed. “And excuse me, you agreed, too!”

“I only agreed because I was told you’d already said yes!” Derek set his own menu down with a slap.

Stiles pointed at him. “And you didn’t want to disappoint your new buddy, right?”

“Kira is my boss, I couldn’t just tell her no after she said you’d agreed! It would be rude!”

“Yeah, well, Scott’s my partner, and I couldn’t say no to him, either!” Stiles held up his hands. “Look, we just have to pretend to date for a little while, until they lose interest. No big deal, and no sad puppy eyes from Scott.”

Derek stared at him. “Stiles,” he began.

“No, really, it’ll be no big deal, I swear. All we have to do is go out after work together once a week for a staged date. Like this!”

“I hate going out to eat.”

He sighed. “Homemade is better, but seriously. Three dates is all it’ll take for them to take a step back.”

Derek sighed deeply.

“If you’d seen Scott’s puppy dog eyes, you’d understand.”

“Kira’s got them, too,” he said.

“So, it’s a deal?”

“Fine,” he mumbled grudgingly. “It’s a deal.”

Scott cornered Stiles at the station the next morning. “So?” he asked eagerly. “How’d it go?”

Stiles almost spat out his coffee; he’d briefly forgotten about the nonsense that was his life. “Uh—good. We’re going to go out again on, uh, Friday,” he fabricated, nearly wincing. He’d have to let Derek know.

Scott lit up. “That’s awesome! I knew you two would get along.”

“Uh-huh, yep. It was great.”

“Where are you guys going?”

“Ummm…”

Scott beamed. “You should volunteer at the animal shelter!”

Stiles’s face must have done something weird.

“No, really. I know it sounds weird, but it’s actually a good way to get to know someone. Plus, cute animals and doing a good deed! It’ll be perfect, I have a friend who works there, and she can make sure you get an easy job, you won’t even have to clean up any poop.”

“Ah…”

Scott’s eyes rounded just a little.

Stiles sighed. “That sounds…fun. We’ll do that.”

“Great! Also, we got assigned to take statements for a robbery.” He grinned and clapped his shoulder before walking out of the break room.

Stiles rubbed his eyes and pulled his phone out. He was sure Derek was going to love the plan.

Stiles was in love. Their names were Snickers, Milky Way, and Kit Kat. “No, really. I’ll obviously take care of them, and Scott would love the story.”

Derek rolled his eyes. “And this is all for Scott’s benefit,” he muttered. He cleared his throat. “Wouldn’t Scott find it suspicious if you adopted two dogs and a kitten on our second date?”

Stiles held up Snickers, a three year old mix of some very small dogs. “I want him.”

“Don’t you have enough pets?”

“Scott obviously thinks I’m lonely.”

Derek scoffed.

Stiles set Milky Way in Derek’s lap. Technically, they were supposed to be bathing the dogs for the coming adoption fair, but Stiles considered pre-bath cuddles part of the bathing process. They deserved it.

“Do we really have to continue this?”

“Oh, what else did you have to do tonight?” Stiles scoffed.

“Unpack! And I could have had plans!”

He rolled his eyes. “It is one night out of your week. You can spare that much time for a fake date with your fake boyfriend.”

“This is only our second fake date, so I think you’re jumping ahead calling yourself my fake boyfriend. Fake boyfriend is after at least three fake dates, and you have to walk me to my fake door, and give me a fake kiss goodnight.”

“You’re very high maintenance,” Stiles observed, kissing Snickers on the nose. “Maybe I don’t want you to be my fake boyfriend.”

Derek smiled pleasantly. “Then you can tell Scott and Kira the truth.”

“Uh, you agreed, too. You’ll have to tell Kira.” Stiles lifted Snickers to eye level, staring into his sleepy brown eyes. “Look, pal, this is gonna be traumatizing for both of us,” he said seriously. “But I promise, I will be here for you the whole time. We’ll be quick and thorough.”

Snickers didn’t seem to mind the bath; he even seemed to enjoy the warm water and gentle massage.

“Dramatic,” Derek muttered while Stiles dried him off.

“Rude!”

The next day at the station, Scott and Allison Argent, another officer, looked way too eager to hear about his date.

“It went well,” Stiles said, feeling harangued. “We’re going, uh, out to eat on Saturday.”

“That’s so awesome! See, I told you I was a good matchmaker,” Scott boasted.

Allison’s eyes narrowed. “I guess. But historically, you really aren’t. You’re almost always terrible at setting people up.”

Stiles laughed awkwardly. “Well, he was bound to get lucky once, right?”

That made her relax a little, flashing a quick smile. “That’s true. Well, I’m glad your date went well. Tell us how Saturday goes!”

“Yep, sure.” He nodded maybe a little too enthusiastically, because they both stared at him. “Uh, I just remembered I have some paperwork left over. See you later!”

“So if they’re onto us,” Derek said on Saturday, “why don’t we just tell them the truth?”

They were at a restaurant, since they had to eat sometime, and it’d might as well be on their date.

“Because you didn’t see Scott’s face. He was so proud of himself for successfully setting me up.”

Derek nodded while staring at the table. “So, do you like him?”

“Sure, he’s-” Stiles caught on a second too late. “No, not like that.” He rolled his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s the first friend I’ve made! I don’t want to crush his spirit.” He looked around the restaurant; at least four sets of eyes quickly looked away. Small towns. He smirked. “Hey, I had an idea.”

“Oh?” Derek did not look enthused.

“What if,” Stiles lowered his voice, “we kissed a little, here? I’m sure it’ll get back to them in a town this size, and they’ll know everything’s just as I said, and it’ll all be fine.”

Derek rolled his eyes. “If we kiss, they’ll know we aren’t dating.”

Stiles scowled at him. “What, you don’t want to kiss me?”

“You know-”

“Yes or no.” Stiles leaned forward and grinned. “Chicken?”

Derek grinned and leaned in, too. “Never.”

They were still kissing when someone cleared their throat right beside their table.

Stiles jerked back, flushing all the way to his hairline when he saw their audience. “Hey, Scott,” he said in a high pitched voice. “Whatcha doing here?”

Derek blinked. “Hi, Kira…Boyd.” His gaze darted over to the blond man and woman with them. “Date night?” he asked weakly.

“Nope,” the blonde woman said brightly. She leaned around Boyd and dropped something on the table.

Stiles stared at the matching silver rings.

“This is Isaac,” Scott said, gesturing at the blond man. “And Erica. We’ve all been friends since high school.”

“Hi,” Stiles said weakly.

“Isaac works at the Kenzie Jewelers on Main Street.”

“Oh?”

Derek dropped his head in his hands.

“Apparently, about four weeks ago—right before your first day at the museum, Derek,” Kira said brightly, “a man dropped off his and his spouse’s wedding rings for a cleaning.”

Scott picked up from there. “I was telling Isaac about my new partner, and how I set him up for a date with Kira’s new curator of prints and drawings, and you know, he said those names sounded awfully familiar.”

Stiles winced. “I can explain,” he said earnestly. He grabbed his ring and put it on, letting out a little sigh as it settled; he’d felt naked without it.

“Do tell. Please.” Kira crossed her arms.

Scott pulled the puppy eyes again.

Derek lifted his head. “Stiles didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

Scott made a face. “You could’ve just told me you were married.”

Stiles waved a hand frantically. “I tried! You kept interrupting me to tell me how great my husband was!”

Scott winced.

“And then,” he continued, “you told me his name, and I figured, hey, that’s fine, we’ll go on a date, no big deal. We could use a break from unpacking anyway. But then you were so excited that you successfully set someone up that I couldn’t come clean!”

Isaac let out a muffled snort.

Erica held up a hand. “So…Scott’s only success in matchmaking…was an already married couple?”

“Looks that way,” Boyd said. He glanced at Stiles and said, flatly, “He set me up with Isaac.”

Isaac pinched the bridge of his nose. “We all took an oath to never speak of that again!”

“The point is,” Scott said loudly, “you could have just told me. I wouldn’t have been upset.”

“I figured you’d just…back off, once we’d been on a few dates,” Stiles said weakly. He frowned at his wedding ring. “Why did the cleaning take so long, anyway?”

Derek rubbed his temple, avoiding eye contact as he put his own ring on.

“What, did you forget to pick them up or something?” he snickered.

“No, the cleaning only takes about fifteen minutes, maybe an hour if we’re really busy,” Isaac said cheerfully. “But since we’re the only jeweler in town, the engraving can take three or four weeks, especially near the holidays.”

Stiles’s mouth fell open. “What engraving?”

Derek sighed and reached for Stiles’s hand. He gently removed the ring and tilted it. “Merry Christmas,” he mumbled.

Stiles took it so he could read it. He smiled, then laughed at the engraving: Dramatic. He lifted his eyes and found Derek holding his own ring, tilted so he could see the engraving on that one: Rude.

“What does it mean?” Isaac asked. “We were all trying to figure it out.”

Stiles cleared his throat. “It’s the first thing we said to each other when we met.” He swiped at his nose surreptitiously. “We met in a bookstore back in New York; we ran into each other, literally, and I spilled hot coffee all over myself. I started swearing and…stuff, and Derek called me dramatic, I called him rude.” He shrugged. “We got some napkins and had lunch together.” He slid his ring on and rubbed his thumb over it. “I love it.”

Derek smiled at him. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

Isaac winced. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s alright.” Stiles snorted. “I get the feeling that secrets don’t survive long around here.”

“No,” Scott agreed, laughing.

Stiles leaned over the table to kiss Derek, because he had to. Then he looked up at their friends. “You guys should join us for dinner, since you’re already here.” He grinned. “We still have a ton of unpacking to procrastinate on, might as well do it right.”

Derek sighed. “The only things we’ve unpacked are the cats’ beds and food bowls.”

“Madame Socks can’t sleep unless she has her own bed, Derek. Tip can sleep anywhere!”

“Madame Socks is the oldest cat,” Derek explained with a grimace. “Tip is the dog.”

“This is so weird,” Scott said with some awe. “You guys are so married. I should have guessed.”

Stiles folded his hand in Derek’s. “Probably. I’m starving, seriously, if we don’t eat soon, there will be tears.”

Derek lifted his hand and kissed his knuckles. “Dramatic,” he murmured.

“Rude,” Stiles laughed.

#bloodgutsandstarbucks #stereksanta18 #*fic18 #*gifts18

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dramallamadingdang · 7 years

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Replies!

These go back a bit, because...yeah. *sheepish smile*

For @elfpuddle, @nimitwinklesims, @penig, @acquiresimoleons, @pixelated-world, @holleyberry, @timeparadoxsims, @pensblr, @an-elegant-simblr, @yarerakai, @celebkiriedhel, @mrningbrd, @princess-arystyl21, and @sim-boo. Whew! :)

elfpuddle replied to your photoset “By request, here is the “invisible” roads default I made to match my...”

In theory, then, a person could replace the road textures for each terrain with the default textures and have no roads anywhere? Does modding out signs and traffic happen only in lush hoods, or would that need to be repeated as well?

Modding out traffic is a global thing. If you put in that mod I linked to, you’ll have no neighborhood traffic in any of your neighborhoods, so long as the mod is in your downloads. You have to manually remove the intersection stop signs, though. (They’re just neighborhood deco, perfectly OK to remove as you would any other piece of deco.) But yes, you can have a road default for each type of terrain in the game and you can have multiple different ones that you can switch in and out, although you can only have one road default for each terrain type in your game at a time. So, if you use Maxis terrains, you’d just need four road defaults (one for each terrain type) with the road “pieces” painted to match the terrain.

I tried to make a road default that just consisted of all empty, transparent textures, the goal being to make it “universal,” with the roads being invisible on any terrain, but it didn’t look right. So, it is what it is, but, yes, you could take that default and replace the images with ones from any terrain you use in your game to make it match those terrains. Then you can switch your road defaults in and out as needed for different neighborhoods. That’s the nice thing about defaults. :)

elfpuddle replied to your post “Ugh, I’m so far behind on my dashboard, I don’t think I’ll ever catch...”

ICad is not a bad blogger; she needs to take care of herself first and foremost.

Yeah, I know. It just sucks being sort of chronically not-well. I want to do stuff, and the body doesn’t always cooperate. It’d almost be easier if it was always uncooperative, because then I’d get used to it and be resigned to it and learn to live with it, but it isn’t always like that. More often (at least for now) I have energy to spare and feel perfectly healthy, but sometimes I don’t, and I can’t figure out any rhyme or reason to it. If there was a pattern or a cycle to it, like a menstrual cycle sort of thing or if it was related to eating something or not eating something, then I could know what to expect and when. But there isn’t. It’s very frustrating.

Cherish your liver, people! Baby that sucker!

nimitwinklesims replied to your photo “Ahahahah! A non-ocean (as in no-waves) beach lot! This is something...”

Yay, very cool! As I just built the fisher's shack on a beach lot on a river, I'm just going to pretend the surf comes from the nearby sea... Even though they're on the mouth of the river... Yeah, well. xD But now I know about this trick for next time! \0/

It is a pretty neat thing. And I discovered it completely by accident, too! I just wanted an off-road beach lot, so I did the moving around. I figured that “Beach Lot” option in the Lot Adjuster would turn it into a beach lot, but I figured it’d generate surf, too. But it didn’t, and I was like, “Hey, cool.” But then a test Sim couldn’t swim, and I was like “Bummer!” But then I remembered the beach portals, which I’d used once before, many years ago, on a non-beach lot that edged neighborhood water, and I’m pretty sure that when I used them there, surf was generated. So, I figured the portals would generate surf on this lot, too. But they didn’t, and I was like, “YEEEESSSSSSSS!” *fist pump* Yay, serendipity! :)

penig replied to your photo “And there’s Amelia Shankel, granddaughter of Goopy GilsCarbo and Sandy...”

Maybe the cook used to know her parents and thinks she looks familiar?

Maybe! I mean, it’s the same cook in every dorm, I think, so she would have known Amelia’s parents. And she’ll probably know Amelia’s great-great-great-great-etc.-grandchildren, too. Immortal undead dorm cooks, yay! Maybe that’s how the manage to work 20 hours a day every day without, you know, dying. :)

acquiresimoleons replied to your photo “Aaron GilsCarbo, grandson of Goopy GilsCarbo and Sandy Bruty, all...”

He's fine!

Yeah, he’s definitely the neighborhood’s hottie! :) Too bad he’s gay, ‘cuz those genes really oughtta be passed around. But, perhaps he’ll get himself abducted by aliens at some point. Of course, then his genes will be eaten by the alien’s, but...

pixelated-world replied to your photoset “Sage had opening-of-the household wants to hire a maid and to…buy a...”

"the little mustache makes him look stereotypically French" -> me : (^・ω・^ ) I just laughed so much at this mustache...

I know! I saw that little mustache and my brain just went off and imagined him doing all those silly stereotypical French things, like running around exclaiming, “Zut alors!” every other second. Or saying things like, “But I am le tired!” It’s all the mustache’s fault!

penig replied to your post “Ugh, I’m so far behind on my dashboard, I don’t think I’ll ever catch...”

Why do you feel guilty about this? We don't want to be a chore!

It’s not guilt so much as regret. I enjoy seeing and commenting on people’s pics and posts. Makes me feel connected to the world, I guess, and when I can’t do it for whatever reason, I just feel regret. Sadness. That sort of thing.

holleyberry replied to your post “Ugh, I’m so far behind on my dashboard, I don’t think I’ll ever catch...”

Sorry to hear you haven't been feeling well. No worries about the Dash. Everyone has RL things that happen.

Yeah, I know. It’s just frustrating. I’ve just been really tired, not really sick, per se, but just really, really lethargic, sleeping most of the day if I don’t deliberately keep myself awake. Stupid metabolic issues. I’d sit down at the computer with grand plans to do stuff...and then I find myself nodding off and occasionally literally headdesking. *sigh* It’s been better today, though. And at least I didn’t miss your Dossanina update! :D Which I’ll be off to read when I’m done with this. :)

timeparadoxsims replied to your post “WCIF Simon's hair please? I'm always on the lookout for nice long male...”

It's a conversion by Umi-Sims2 and it's been reuploaded by sims2packrat here: http://sims2packrat.tumblr.com/post/153963303471

Ahhhhh, that’s why I couldn’t find it then! Thank you! Maybe the “Simon’s hair anon” will see this. Or at least hopefully they’ll see your reply on the post. :)

penig replied to your photo “This is generally a house of slobs which is probably why it’s...”

She's keeping her immune system strong. I've found some sloppy kids do dishes out of an apparent desire to show off how grown up and in-charge they are.

Perhaps. Allison is definitely the bolder of the twins. Her brother’s kind of bookish and apparently happy to be up in his room, playing alone, even though he’s just as outgoing. But Allison’s in everyone’s faces all the time. Even the dogs’ faces.

pensblr replied to your photoset “This is a little thing I just made. Usually, I use a different phone...”

Yes! You have no idea how much I was just grumbling to myself about this very issue a couple of weeks ago. Thank you!

You’re welcome! I’ve been grumbling about it for years, off and on...but it only just then occurred to me that, hey, if I can make something be visible in hood view, surely I can make it invisible in hood view, too! Derp......

an-elegant-simblr replied to your photoset “This is a little thing I just made. Usually, I use a different phone...”

It’s very useful really, I hated that phone booth! I use defaults for the lot (before I just hid it under rocks or underground with an OMSP, but I have lots of witches in Strangetown and it was annoying when they arrived and got trapped), but the hood view wasn’t changed and it looked really ugly in the hood view.

Really? It still looks like that in hood view even if you use a default for the phone booth? That’s...annoying. :P But if that’s the case...Yeah, it’s more useful than I thought, then. It kind of sucks, I suppose, not to have any hood view at all rather than a proper one (especially if you use a default), but it’s better than that hideous yellow-and-blue thing screwing up your hood view in a medieval neighborhood or whatever.

yarerakai replied to your photo “Ahahahah! A non-ocean (as in no-waves) beach lot! This is something...”

Many thanks ! Sometimes it annoys me also when my sims live near a river and can't swim in it.

Or, they CAN swim in it, but that’s because it’s a beach lot with the waves and stuff. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be able to put trees right up to the edge and hanging over the water, like a real river. It looks kind of silly if you do that with ocean waves coming in. :p

celebkiriedhel replied to your photoset “Jupiter became an old, fugly dog. <3”

he is looking like he needs a good feed!

Yeah, I know! He always has. Poor thing has a skinny greyhound-type body and a bulky coonhound-type head. The bulk of his head makes his body look even skinnier. Ah, game. *shakes head*

mrningbrd replied to your post “Hey iCad! Are you still thinking about sharing a custom decorated...”

i would die for an icad neighborhood. i wish hoods werent so susceptible to corruption, im sure that would make it easier

*sigh* Yeah, it probably would. Outside of corruption issues, I wouldn’t worry so much about it, but I want to make it a sub-neighborhood template, so that it can be attached to other neighborhoods or be part of an uberhood or whatever. Can’t be that if it has stealth hoods attached to it, itself. :\ One of these days, I’m going to set up a new user account on this machine and test it out. Hopefully, it’ll work...

princess-arystal21 replied to your photoset “House #1 for the new pseudo-Amish. It’s pretty much done on the...”

It's so....brown.

*laugh* Yes. Yes it is. :) But, that tends to happen with log construction. Unless it’s fake log construction and you have drywall and stuff inside that you can paint. I wanted “real” log construction, though.

sim-boo replied to your photo “When your dog has enough floof to hide in… Jupiter got his licks in,...”

I want a floof dog

I love floof dogs. I have a big, floofy Mastiff/St. Bernard mix, and I love cuddling with her and burying my face in her floof...when she’s clean. Which isn’t all that often. Which is one of the main problems with floof dogs. :) Especially when they really, really don’t like baths and they weigh more than you do. Bathing them is, like, a three-person job and everyone ends up soaked to the skin, not just the dog.

acquiresimoleons replied to your post “Some replies.”

nono not your recolors, the mesh set.

Ohhhhhhh! Maybe? But I didn’t think that Ray posted on MTS. Maybe someone included the meshes with a recolor set, though. Either way, though, it’s a beautiful set. Worth having twice, maybe! Well, OK, not because that doesn’t do you any good, but you know what I mean. :)

#replies

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type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

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What's Hot from ADA 2012 - t:slim Pump, T1D Exchange, Youth Transitions and More

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/whats-hot-from-ada-2012-tslim-pump-t1d-exchange-youth-transitions-and-more/

What's Hot from ADA 2012 - t:slim Pump, T1D Exchange, Youth Transitions and More

Sixteen-thousand doctors, scientists, and other healthcare providers. Hundreds of Pharma industry folks and food and diabetes supply vendors manning 171 booths in a cavernous exhibit hall. Over 2,500 research reports, plus over 2,000 more studies presented on mini-billboards known as research posters. More than 150 live sessions where experts present nearly 378 reports on every imaginable aspect of diabetes in the human body.

This is the American Diabetes Association annual Scientific Sessions conference, taking place this year from June 8-12 in Philadelphia. Once again, we are there.

First impressions?

Amy: "I love the focus on behavioral issues and on youths transitioning into adulthood with diabetes this year. Those are two areas that are traditionally so underserved! So it's great to see a lot of new research in that area. Also, no one's saying 'pipe dream' about Artificial Pancreas technology anymore, are they?!"

Mike: "Being my first-ever time attending, let me just say... WOW! I'm amazed at the scope of everything going on. It's an incredible experience with a lot to absorb. But at the same time it's a little disappointing to feel like a lot of these experts are missing the point; it's not about stats, graphs, and scientific concepts. It's about us as people and patients."

Allison: "It's always remarkable to see so many people focusing in the intricacies of diabetes. Each time I attend conferences, I gain even more appreciation for how complicated this disease is! But I also bemoan the fact diabetes is so complicated... Advancements just never seem to come fast enough, do they?!"

Device Updates

On the technology side, the big buzz was of course the official launch of Tandem's t:slim insulin pump, a sleek little model with color touch screen reminiscent of Apple products. We wrote about the t:slim in some detail last fall. The company is taking orders as of today, and the product will ship to customers starting in August. Insurance coverage is still TBD, and the out-of-pocket price tag is about $5,000.

At a "Product Theater" presentation Saturday, conference-goers got to see a full live demo of the t:slim's features and functionality. It sure as heck looks easy and intuitive to use! One function that I thought was awesome is a little "IOB clock" that appears on the home screen, showing how much "insulin on board" is still active in your system, complete with a time count-down to let you know when it's wearing off. Useful! Look for more details on the t:slim launch from us soon.

On the topic of next-generation pumps: conspicuously absent from ADA this year were the Debiotech folks with their wireless, smartphone-connected Jewel Pump, which made such an impression a few years ago.

But looking at their site, it seems they're in the midst of a multi-center user study in Europe on an algorithm for a closed-loop system including the Dexcom sensor, as part of the European Artificial Pancreas consortium. So maybe they're holding back on a pump introduction until they can offer a more integrated system. We'll keep you posted.

Another pre-FDA-approval wireless pump from CellNovo that includes integrated glucose testing and can actually be controlled via cell phone was getting a lot of attention in its expo booth, despite the fact that nothing much seems to have changed since the system was demo'ed last summer. Company reps tell us the product's doing well in Europe, but U.S. FDA approval is being held back by two things: an upgrade from 3G to 4G wireless technology. and a necessary changeover to the OneTouch Verio test strip (in Europe the system currently uses another, which is not sold in the U.S.). They're also in the midst of a UK-based usability trial.

The new iBGStar meter was of course on display, and Sanofi had an eye-popping 3D movie showcasing this device that passed FDA approval in December. We were already impressed, as it's the first and only cable-free meter that connects directly to an iPhone and iPod touch, but there's nothing like a bunch of doctors wearing red 3D glasses oohing and aahhing through a film about a BG meter taking them on a journey through time! (Actually, the film almost made it look like iBGStar is continuous glucose monitor, if you just watched it without knowing any better.)

Remember the all-in-one Pogo ("Press & Go") blood meter by Intuity Medical? Well, it was on display again (five years running) but it's still not available to buy. The company says they filed for FDA approval last summer. The most noticeable change is that the motor's even quieter now (as in, you can barely hear it lance). No blood or needle seen, thanks to the 10-strip drum inside. They've also got a separate FDA submission filed for a web-based data software called Patterns that would be downloadable for free. The Pogo looks cool, but we've seen this for so many years, the story is the same: let us know when it hits the market!

T1D Exchange National Type 1 Registry!

One of the most exciting things announced here, hands-down, was the Helmsley Charitable Trust official launch of its T1D Exchange Registry, "the most comprehensive analysis of people with type 1 diabetes ever undertaken in the United States." This new national registry has collected data from 25,000 participants to date from 67 clinics across the country, and the analysis of that data has yielded some very surprising things — mainly that A1Cs on the whole are too high for comfort, especially in the over-50 T1 crowd, which also had the highest rates of severe hypoglycemia and ER visits. I would've pegged adolescents, for sure!

What's particularly exciting with T1D Exchange is that this group is on a holy mission to help accelerate progress in research and development of new treatments. At a Saturday evening reception, the room was humming with anticipation as David Panzirer, Dana Ball and other project leaders outlined how T1D Exchange plans to act as a liaison between industry, regulatory, academic and patient groups to get things moving better, faster, and more productively. Patient-reported data is key to this, they say: "We'd love to transform the way clinical trials are done in America." Wow! Considering how much they've accomplished in just a year and a half — creating and launching the registry + fantastic online community called MyGlu.org (do check it out!) — I for one cannot wait to see where this group is going! (Disclosure: myself and a few other well-known DOCers are part of an outreach advisory board for this project.)

Insulin News

Novo's new degludec beat Lantus in lowering glucose in Type 2's in a recent study, but we heard word at the conference that FDA approval of degludec has been delayed until at least October.

Meanwhile, cancer risk from insulin was a key topic this year. A huge Sanofi-sponsored study showed that there was no increase in cancer risk from using Lantus, as had previously been reported. This will come as a relief to many, not least the company!

Another study, sponsored by the NIDDK (acronym ORIGIN), shows the first-ever clinical evidence that long-term use of any kind of insulin is safe! In more than 12,500 patients over a median of 6.2 years, researchers found that daily injections "neither increased or reduced the risk of heart attacks, strokes, cancer or cardiovascular-related mortality."

SGLT2 Inhibitors

This is a new class of drugs under development that works primarily by helping the body slough off excess glucose in urine — in a healthy way. Beohringer, Lilly and J&J are all working on a daily pill for type 2s that could hit market as early as 2013. J&J's canagliflozin is the most advanced to date and is already under evaluation by the FDA. These drugs also have promise for treating type 1s, I am told.

Further on the research side, here are some of the ADA updates we found most noteworthy:

Source: references to all research abstracts can be found on the ADA website here

* Transition of Youth to Adult PWDs

We love that this topic was finally in the spotlight! Remember just a few short years ago, when the diabetes establishment seemed to be oblivious to the fact that all puppies grow up to be dogs (err, all "juvenile diabetics" have to keep on truckin' after age 18)?

New research "sheds light on the health status and psychosocial challenges faced by this population." Unfortunately, the facts are grim. One study showed that non-diabetic college coeds scored higher than PWD youths on "purpose and life satisfaction," BUT the two groups scored the same on depressive symptoms, disordered eating, alcohol use, smoking and sleep quality. (So everyone has an equal opportunity to crash and burn in college years?)

Another study showed that type 1 adolescents were at 20% higher risk for suicidal tendencies than their non-D counterparts. Another showed that as young PWDs transition from pediatric care to adult doctors, they "experience sadness and loss over leaving the doctors with whom they had grown up, felt like their new doctors were more like partners in care but didn't know then as well and felt as if they needed to be matched with their new new doctors by personality style." Amen to that!

One more study in this area found that those who transition out of pediatric care too early face higher risks to their health, i.e. their A1Cs tend to shoot up once dropped into the free-falling world of "adult care." Maybe the next round of research here ought to be on how we can make adult diabetes care more like the nurturing world of pediatric care?

* Islet Cell Transplantation Update

The results are much more encouraging here. One study showed that a new method of transplanting islet cells into the liver, called the Clinical Islet Transplantation 07 (CIT07) protocol, actually helped transplanted cells survive better than the current gold standard "Edmonton Protocol." Both protocols use the same immuno-suppressing drugs, but with CIT07, the islet cells are "cultured" prior to transplantation. Results suggest that the immuno-suppressing drugs may not be toxic to islets, as previously suspected. Which is good news!

Two other studies looked into use of the drugs sitagliptin and pantoprazole with transplantation. Results showed that these meds can "augment beta cell function," but fall short of actually regenerating beta cells (i.e. no new cells are created).

Another study found that transplanted cells function better and may survive longer when the patient takes a long-acting GLP-1 analog. So after transplant surgery, you may be off insulin but have to use another injectable drug?

One more study looked at patients who've had their pancreas removed. Does tight BG control in the hospital immediately following islet cell transplantation help the cells survive better? It does appear that way.

A few other studies looked at patients with pancreatic tumors and pancreatitis. The upshot is that the more islet cells transplanted, the better for long-term outcomes. And in the case of the tumor patients, "isolating" the islet cells during transplant procedures is also beneficial.

The more they learn about successful transplantation techniques the better, I always say!

* LADA is Not Different (?)

Really?! In contrast to a session we reported on from the recent AACE conference (American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists), a study presented here at ADA testified that LADA (latent autoimmune diabetes in adults) is NOT a distinct form of auto-immune diabetes.

This multi-country European study did find a few differences by age of onset: those diagnosed younger tended to have lower BMI and earlier need for insulin therapy.

But they found "insufficient differences in auto-antibodies to characterize LADA" as anything other than plain old type 1 in grown-ups. And the debate marches on...

* "Sleep Yourself Healthy"

There's actually an expression in German: Schlaf Dich Gesund, which literally means you can "sleep yourself healthy." And now it's a proven scientific fact! At least according to two studies presented here at ADA.

The first showed that not getting enough sleep, and poor sleep quality, significantly raises risk of developing diabetes in those who are at-risk. Folks in the study who got a full night's rest were 60% less likely to be diagnosed.

A second study showed that folks with sleep apnea had significantly higher post-meal BG levels "associated with greater risk for cardiovascular events." Conclusion? "Sleep apnea may have a substantial impact upon glucose regulation" and it's bad for your heart too. Bah! If you've got sleep disorders, get 'em treated, please!

* "An Apple a Day..."

It's no wives' tale. Research now shows that eating more fruit per day ("equivalent to about one apple or two bananas") is associated with lower incidence of diabetic retinopathy. In this 8-year study, those who ate the most fruit had the lowest incidence of retinopathy. But wait: TWO BANANAS a day with diabetes?! My, that sounds like a BG control disaster to me. Makes me wonder: don't these researchers cross-reference their work? Surely the two-banana group suffered in terms of rising A1C results...?

* Do Pollution and Cow's Milk Trigger Type 1?

Who read Dan Hurley's book Diabetes Rising, outlining all the prominent theories on what may trigger type 1 diabetes? Yup, environmental pollution and early consumption of cow's milk are right up there on the top of the list. Two new studies that looked at pollutants (pesticides and heavy metal concentrations) found that "only lead seems to be associated with an increased risk for this condition." Heck, lead in your bloodstream is surely not good for any aspect of your health, IMHO.

So what about giving your baby cow's milk too early in life? Continued analysis from an ongoing study called DAISY (Diabetes Autoimmunity Study In the Young) showed that this does NOT contribute to risk of type 1 diabetes. However, infants who get fruit too early and rice and barley too late appeared to be at greater risk. Researchers conclude: "There is a complex relationship between the timing and type of food an infant is exposed to and his or her risk of developing type 1." (No pressure, new moms! Geez!!)

* Ancient Drug Could Help Type 2s

I'm quoting the press release on this one:

"In the first modern-day clinical trial of one of the world oldest drugs, researchers have found that salicylate, first used by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks to ease pain caused by inflammation, also has glucose-lowering properties and may be a potential treatment for people with type 2 diabetes."

The drug is derived from the bark of the willow tree, is relatively inexpensive, and is still used commonly for treating joint pain. "Nobody has ever looked before to see what other properties it might have," says principal investigator Dr. Steven Shoelson of Joslin Diabetes Center. In his study, it reduced A1C and fasting glucose levels in 286 T2 patients.

Wow. Back to basics, ay? Just like I recently discovered that good 'ol fashioned white vinegar cleans your house better than most of those fancy, expensive spray products. (Housewife tip!) Keep your eye out for more news on salicylate.

* Artificial Pancreas Update

So much work is being done in this area! Very exciting!

Some of you may have caught the JDRF/Helmsley AP webinar last week, so you heard that Medtronic is developing dual-sensor technology to increase the accuracy (i.e. safety) of a potential closed-loop system. Obviously, sensor reliability is key!

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

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andreafmn · 3 years

Text

I’m Not Afraid - Chapter 2

Word Count: 4,585

Characters: Female Reader Argent Character, Original Male Argent Character, Derek Hale, Allison Argent, Scott McCall, Stiles Stilinski, Isaac Lahey, Lydia Martin, Chris Argent, Jackson Whittemore

Chapter: 2/?

A/N: SOFT DEREK, SOFT DEREK!!!!! If you enjoy my writing I’ll also be posting them in AO3 and Wattpad along with other stories (I also hope to start taking requests if ya’ll want) Hope you enjoy and all constructive criticism is encouraged.

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Chapter 2

5:00 am my phone read.

It was usual for my brain to be awake at this hour. Since before I can remember it was part of the schedule I followed, everywhere I went. It was a small thing, but the sense of normalcy was a comforting friend. It made sense to follow a routine I could have anywhere. I was out of bed and into workout clothes, ready for a quick jog around the woods.

I started off with a slow and comfortable trot before speeding up once I reached the tree-filled terrain. The smell of wet soil, the sound of birds chirping and leaves rustling, the crunching of leaves under my feet was oddly comforting. There was a strange pull that came from the heart of Beacon Hills. I had lived in many places in my short lifetime but this place was different, the atmosphere was different, the people were different. One of those people was Derek Hale, the mysterious, broody, sarcastic man that had bumped his way in.

Speak of the devil and he shall appear.

"Why are you stopping?" He asked, a small chuckle escaping his mouth.

"How did you get here? Where the hell did you come from?"

"You're not the only person who jogs in this town and this happens to be the trail I take. You know, you should work out on a trail that is closer to your house. Makes it easier to actually go back."

I looked around. Once again, I had trailed off and didn't know where I was. "Lucky for you, I have a great memory. We can finish off running and I'll instruct you back to your house."

"You know you sound like a stalker." We started to jog once again.

"How so?"

"Well, you've only been there like two or three times and you already know the way back. Creepy!"

"Oh, come on, it means that I have a very sharp memory. Unlike you who can't seem to remember what house you live in."

"Touché."

The con and occasionally laughing at something. It felt good talking to him, almost natural. There was a supernatural attraction that I felt when I was near him, an unusual need for his closeness. Our relationship came easy, as the cliché would have it, it felt like I had known him all my life.

We ran for about an hour and a half before we turned back. "I think it's time we went back. You have school in an hour."

"Whoa, take the stalking down a notch."

"Oh, come on, I went to that school before you, I think I know the schedule."

"Alright, grandpa. Let's head back. It's time for your breakfast smoothie and then some bingo."

"Very funny." He ruffled my hair whilst fake laughing.

"I try." We ran and ran until I came into view of the curb that led to the house. "Well, this is my exit. Would it be too much to ask for you to take me to school?"

"Not a problem. Meet you back here at 7:45?"

"That would be perfect." He kissed my cheek and left to run to where I believe was his house. My face turned red, and I ducked inside.

"Mom? Dad?" I entered the kitchen and noticed a note over a covered plate. "Left for work early. Eat your food and go to school." I read out loud.

I took my time getting ready for school. My bag was already packed, as was my lunch. A long shower and a slow breakfast were in store as I awaited Derek's black Camaro to roll into my driveway.

"Thanks so much for the lift. I packed you some breakfast."

"No problem and thank you." He smiled. "You know, maybe after school, I can finally give you a tour around town. So you can familiarize yourself."

"That would be wonderful." I checked my schedule. "Actually, you can pick me up an hour before school ends. I have study hall at that hour, and no one would care if I left."

"I think I can make that arrangement." He looked at me showing a perfect set of white teeth and a smile that would make anyone melt. "But wouldn't your parents know that you left school? I mean, you won't be there when they go pick you up."

"I'll just tell them Allison gave me a ride or walked home," I said thinking of more excuses I could tell my parents. Distracted by my thoughts, my hand started reaching out to the powered-off radio and I didn't notice that so did Derek's. A sharp current went up my arm as our hands make contact. We both quickly pulled away and I could feel the blood rushing to my face turning it a deep shade of red.

"Sorry, I shouldn't impose. It's your car." I spoke up, quick to start picking at the skin around my fingernails to busy my hands. Derek perceived the nervous nature of my actions and stopped my fussing by putting one of his hands over mine.

"Don't worry it's fine. Just put the radio on whatever station you like." He smiled reassuringly and I reached to the radio and just turned it on, leaving it in the last station it had been on.

"Ugh, I absolutely dread going to school. Most of it I'm gonna forget either way."

"I'd tell you to ditch but that would be shame on me, so I won't. But think about it, this day you'll only get 7 hours of school and then you can hang out with me. Best present ever."

"Yeah, don't think so highly of yourself. Maybe I'll just wander around town until I find my way home."

"Very funny." He stopped at the drop-off zone. "This is your stop."

"Thanks again for the ride, awfully kind actions from such a sour wolf" I laughed at his scowl. "I'll see you in the afternoon."

"Looking forward to it." I exited the car and he waited till I was on the sidewalk to speed off.

"Was that Derek Hale that just dropped you off?" I turned around and was met face-to-face with Scott.

"Yeah. What's the problem?" Not that it will matter.

"You shouldn't trust him, he's bad news."

"Honestly, Scott, I understand your good intentions, but I'll sort out the wrong kind on my own terms." He looked taken aback at my response, probably thinking I would not talk back.

"I'm sorry if I offended you, but he is not a person that anyone should be with." With that, he left with worry evident on his face.

I understood that he was looking out for my "well-being”, but he didn't know me and I'm pretty sure he didn't know Derek either. Maybe that's what Derek meant when I met him. Everyone thinks he is a bad person, but he hasn't done anything wrong in my eyes.

I walked over to my locker and started exchanging my books. Closely next to me I could hear Scott talking to Allison about me and Derek, and my name should be out of his mouth. Once I finished with my locker, I slammed the door and they both stopped talking, noting my close presence. I walked past them feeling their worried stares burning my back. This was going to be a hell of a year. The only thing that could get me through it was the acquaintance relationship I have with Isaac. I did text him a bit last night but mostly helping him with homework. Lord knows he needs all the help he can get.

We all stood around in gym class as Stiles and Erica climbed the rock wall. Everyone else had gone including Scott who mastered a great fall. Stiles appeared to have fun, but Erica would let out sounds of discomfort and shortness of breath as she climbed. At a point, she stopped.

"Erica, are you dizzy?" Coach said. "Is it vertigo?"

"Vertigo is the dysfunction of the vesicular system of the inner ear" Lydia stated in a mocking tone. "She's just freaking out."

"Erica!" Coach screamed.

"coach, maybe it’s not safe. you know she's epileptic." Allison stated. How does no one care?

"Wh-why does no one tell me this?!" Coach Finstock questioned annoyed. "Erica, just fall back, there's a mat that will catch you."

She slowly let go of the wall and made her descent. No one seemed to care that the poor girl was shaken to the core; they all laughed.

When class was over everyone headed to their respective locker rooms to change. Something inside me kept pulling me back to the gym, so I walked back as I put on my shirt. As I opened the doors, I saw Erica fall from the wall and luckily into Scott's arms. He slowly put her on the floor as the class ran in behind us.

"Put her on her side," I stated.

"How did you know?" Allison whispered to Scott.

"I just felt it." He whispered back.

After Erica had calmed, the coach called an ambulance to take her to be checked at the hospital and the day went by normally. I was currently in my "last" period. Tapping my nails in a rhythmic pattern waiting for the stupid bell to ring. Only 5 more minutes and I would be out of here. This was the first time I had done something like this. I always stick by the rules and make sure to follow all of them. My heart was racing, and my palms were sweating. In 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Cue the bell. I grabbed all my things and stuffed them in my bag. I used to my advantage the fact that everyone was piled in the hallway and headed outside. Waiting for me was Derek in his black Camaro. Suddenly my heart steadied its pace and I felt relaxed.

"Hey there, rebel." He smirked at me as I entered the car and buckled my seatbelt.

"Don't make small talk. Just go." I said whilst trying to hide by burrowing in the seat. If I could I would have jumped into the trunk to avoid any hidden stares from authority figures.

"Don't tell me you've never done this before." I shook my head no and felt my face growing warmer by the second. "Aw, you're so innocent. For a big mouth that is." I slapped his arm as hard as I could.

"Don't be rude." I crossed my arms, slouched down, and pouted. He looked over at me and laughed. That made me slouch farther down.

"Oh, come on. Don't get mad." He ruffled my hair and laughed once again when I swatted his hand away. "Yeesh, feisty."

"So, where's our first pit stop?" I asked whilst looking out the window not wanting to look at his face.

"A small diner I know. Wouldn't want you to starve." He smirked. "Might make you angrier."

"I am not angry, just annoyed."

"Got some feelings hurt?" He said laughing.

"Derek, don't be rude. You will regret it."

"Oh, what could you do?"

"Is that a challenge?" He didn't answer, just laughed. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out. "HELP!! This man is kidnapping me!! HELP!! Bloody he...!"

My sentence was cut short by Derek's hand pulling me down by my jacket and onto the seat again.

"Why did you do that?" I asked innocently. I had caused the faces of a few people on the street to look at the car in horror.

"You know why! That was totally uncalled for."

"I told you that being rude was something you would regret. I'm not one to say this a lot but, I told you so."

He tried his best to keep a tight scowl on his face but in a matter of seconds, we were laughing at my past actions.

"Whatever, we're here." He turned off the car and went to the passenger side to open the door for me.

"Why thank you," I said and took his extended hand to pull my weight up.

"No problem." I smiled at his goofy courtesy but as we walked inside the establishment I could feel my heart beating faster by the second. "Table for two." Derek pointed at a booth made for two people exactly. Once we had sat down a lady maybe in her late thirties approached us to take our order.

"What do you want to order today, darlings?" She gave us a warm smile as she waited for our response.

"I'll have the bacon cheeseburger with some onion rings, a stack of pancakes, and some chicken fillets, a Diet Coke, and afterward some pie, please."

"Would you like the kitchen sink with that?" I said in shock. "I think I'll just get the, ummmm, bacon cheeseburger also with some onion rings and an iced tea. Maybe add some pie afterward too."

The lady laughed a bit, nodded, and smiled at us as she turned to the kitchen to put out our order.

"So, someone's a bit hungry. Huh, sour wolf?" I chuckled.

"Why do you call me that?" He said somewhat annoyed.

"I don't know. It just fits you."

"How?"

"Cause you're very sour and you kind of look like a wolf. Hairy face and crazy hair. I don't know how to explain it. It's just a nickname, though. If it makes you mad I can just call you something else."

"I'm not mad. Just wondering." He slouched on the seat looking less tense. "How is it that I'm usually so bad with meeting people yet with you, I just clicked?"

"I don't know. I'm just special that way."

"Very funny."

"I know! I could take up a career in comedy." He chuckled as he threw a sugar packet at me. "So, since we are getting to know each other we should know basic things about one another. Let me start. What's your favorite color?"

"Maybe black or blue. What about you?"

"Totally red and black." The waitress came with our drinks. I took a sip of my iced tea and continued with the questions. "Favorite place to be?"

"That house in the woods where we met." I gave him a weird look.

"Why there? It barely stands with a foundation. What could possibly be there?"

"It's the house I used to live in before it burnt down. My family was in there." I choked on my drink when he said this.

"Oh my gosh, Derek. I'm so sorry I brought it up. We can drop the topic."

"Don't worry about it. It happened such a long time ago it's sometimes relieving talking about it." After there was an awkward silence, so Derek cleared his throat and asked a question. "Um, and what's your favorite place to be?"

"I'm not sure. Usually, I like places more because of the people I'm with. But if I had to choose probably the woods, it's the calmest place I know. The only place where you can actually be free."

"Wow, Ms. Argent. So poetic. It touched me." He pointed at his heart. "Right here."

"Very funny, now, favorite sport?" And the game went on even when our food served. Whilst eating we kept asking each other questions and getting to know each other profoundly. This has been the first time I had ever opened up to someone. It felt strange. Letting someone know small details about yourself. Making yourself vulnerable to them. Showing them how they could break you. But this was different. I felt like I was just becoming closer to him.

"We should do that someday. I mean the thought of just leaving for a whole day, not knowing where you are going, just finding an adventure."

"Definitely. You decide when the first time." I smiled at him.

"That's a deal." He looked down at his watch. "I think it's time I take you home. Don't want your parents to worry."

"Alright. Let's go." I grabbed my bag and was about to pay my part of the check, but he wouldn't let me. He grabbed the money I left and paid completely. "I don't understand the need of being such a gentleman if this wasn't a date. Just two people hanging out."

"So, this wasn't a date?"

"You thought it was?" I thought about it. "What do you classify a date per se?"

"An outing in which two people go out and get to know each other a little bit more." What he said made sense. It had never dawned on me that this could have been anything other than just a casual outing, but not being too well versed in normal social encounters, let alone dating encounters.

"Alright, you win. I have officially gone on my first date."

"No way. This could not have been your first date." When he saw the serious look on my face, he stopped chuckling. "I'm so sorry you had to have given you such a crappy first date. I promise I'll make up for it one day."

"Deal." We even shook on it. "Now let's get going before my parents know I'm late."

During the drive back, he pointed out different key places I should know when going around Beacon Hills as well as easier routes to these places. Although I was heavily grateful for all the useful tips, my brain could hardly remember the first route he showed me.

When we got to my house, I noticed that my father's car was not in there. I guess they haven't arrived yet. I said goodbye to Derek and entered the house, thanking him for a lovely afternoon. I changed into workout attire and, deciding to stay home, went to the basement and started working out. After half an hour of running and half an hour of physical training, I decided it was enough and went to take a shower. I noticed that my parents weren't home yet.

"I wonder what's holding them back?" After my shower, I continued my current read of Pride and Prejudice. But something was bothering me, a thought that wouldn't leave my head.

I'm leaving once the year is over. Getting close to Derek will fuck me up once I leave. I've never had to say goodbye to anyone. I can't start now. I'll need to start avoiding him. Don't know how, but I must try.

I went downstairs to get a glass of water when I heard a knock on the door. It was Uncle Chris.

"Hey, Uncle Chris. What are you doing here?"

"I'm looking for your father. Is he here?"

"No, I haven't seen him. I got here and neither mom nor dad was here. Is something wrong?"

"No. Just couldn't reach his cell. I'm sure he's fine. Have a good night, sweetheart." He kissed my forehead and left. I started to worry. What if something had happened?

So, I decided to call him. Fortunately, he picked up.

"Dad, where are you?"

"Oh, honey, I forgot to tell you. Your mom and I will be out for the rest of the week. We left some money on the first drawer of the right side of the kitchen island and if you want you can stay with your uncle."

"But Uncle Chris came by and he didn't know where you were. Does he know you left?"

"Oh, I forgot to call him. I'll do that right now. Goodnight, munchkin, go to sleep."

"Goodnight, dad. Love you."

"Love you too." I hung up the phone and went upstairs completely forgetting about the glass of water I went to drink.

My phone buzzed and I looked at the caller ID signaling that Isaac was calling.

"Hey, Isaac."

"Hey, (Y/N). Um, do you think you can pick me up?" Isaac said in between short pants.

"Sure, where are you?" I asked. He told me where he was, and I took the keys to my mother's car to look for Isaac. He looked scared and frantic when I neared the spot, he told me about. His physique also looked different. Usually, he would walk cowering but now he stood tall and seemed a bit more buff. "You okay?"

"Yeah, just, um, do you think I could stay with you tonight?"

"I guess." I started driving to my house. "Are you sure you're okay?"

"Yeah, totally. Just tired." I took the hint. He didn't want to talk, and I wasn't going to press on.

At my house, I arranged the guest room and got him spare clothes to change into. He thanked me and left for the bathroom. Something was wrong. But what?

***

Three days had passed.

Three days that I had stayed in my house for my daily workout.

Three days that my phone had been buzzing with messages from Derek asking where I was.

Because three nights before I had decided to avoid Derek at all costs.

The only way to leave it all behind is if you don't associate yourself with anyone. That way you won't feel any remorse or pain once you disappear. One time when I left was when I was approximately six or seven years old, and I had to say goodbye to Allison since we were sharing a room at that time. The second time was when I had to leave Josie. After that, I started familiarizing myself with the feeling of loneliness. It wasn't that bad once you remembered the fact that you would always see your parents when you got home, and everything would be better. Although, these days I had housed Isaac in my house, rare was the occasion that we interacted other than doing homework. Isaac would come home late in the night and quickly went to sleep. But, he stayed in my spare room for two nights and told me he had found a place to stay. He left thanking me for my hospitality.

When I finished my workout, I ran upstairs and took a shower. I changed from my stinky workout clothes to a plain white shirt and black jeans, obviously paired with my leather jacket. Once dressed I went downstairs and grabbed some cash to buy myself a muffin and a big coffee. Finally, I found the keys to my beautiful matte black Harley Fat Bob. My father had gotten me this motorcycle about two years back when he noticed I just kept crashing cars. The only thing I never crashed was his motorcycle and because he was worried I would, he bought me my own. I tend to wreck a lot of stuff. It's not intentional, I'm just clumsy at times.

I opened the door to the garage and noticed it sitting in a corner covered by a blanket. Once I took it off, I smiled. I passed my hand over the beautiful color, the smooth surface, the cold metal. It all felt familiar. A part of me. I grabbed my helmet and got on it. Once I sat my body felt relaxed, at ease. A spark of adrenaline was shot through my body when the engine came to life.

I backed up from the garage and went to the local café store. While waiting to pick up my order I noticed Derek walking in with his jogging clothes on. He still hasn't noticed me, too busy looking at the menu. When my name was called, he looked at me and called my name, but I ran out of the café with my order ignoring him.

When I got to the school everyone was staring at me. The new chick was now badass. I walked in with my backpack slung over my shoulder easing towards my locker.

"Hey there, gorgeous." I closed the locker door to see Jackson standing next to me. I rolled my eyes.

"Hi, Jackson. What do you want?"

"I was just wondering when you were free."

"Oh, well from tomorrow to never gonna happen. Get down from the cloud, buddy."

"Oh, come on, we both know you want some of this." He motioned over his body.

"Get over yourself." I scoffed.

"Babe, it doesn't hurt to try."

"I believe she's not interested, Jackson." A strawberry blonde girl appeared. Her confidence struck me like lightning, a very apparent aura of dominance radiating from within her.

"Why don't you mind your own business, Lydia. I'm talking to her, not you. You've already ruined everything else."

"Well, I think she has no business with you so why don't you scram?" With a huff and a puff, Jackson finally gave in and I turned to greet my hero, who was surprisingly accompanied by Allison.

"Thank you, so much. He wouldn't take no for an answer."

"No problem. I'm Lydia, but you knew that."

"(Y/N). Argent." She motioned between Allison and me. "Cousins."

"Pleasure." Then the bell rang. "Guess I have a new best friend, (Y/N)." You guessed wrong.

I entered Mr. Harris' classroom and sat down next to Isaac and as usual Mr. Chatty Pants tried to hold a conversation from the table behind us. Seriously, how much can someone talk? I took out my notebook and started writing down everything the teacher was saying is the homework on the board. Stiles had finally gotten the hint and didn't talk to me the whole class. That was a relief. Maybe it was due to the fact he was too focused on the strawberry blonde who had saved my ass from Jackson.

The day went on quite smoothly except at lunch. It wasn't the same Erica that had fallen from the rock-climbing wall. She completely changed; a more confident walk, she was wearing makeup and tight-fitted clothing, and her hair was perfectly styled. She left the lunchroom after taking a bite off an apple seductively and Scott and Stiles followed, as did I. Curiosity had taken the best of me as to this overnight transformation.

She opened the front doors to the school and there he was. Derek Hale in his black Camaro with the biggest smirk on his face staring at Scott. When he directed his sight to me his smirk kind of fell but was brought up quickly. During that Erica had gotten inside the car and they left, together. I don't know why I was jealous because he meant nothing to me, but it broke my heart. I got nervous. I think Scott noticed because he looked at me worried.

"Are you okay, (Y/N)?" I nodded rapidly and out of breath. I had no idea what was happening.

"I think you're having a panic attack." Stiles pointed out handing me an inhaler.

"I used to have panic attacks, too." I inhaled a pump and my breathing seemed to normalize. "You okay now?"

"Yeah. Thanks." I handed him the inhaler.

"No, keep it. I don't need it anymore." I said a low thanks and walked back to school to head to my next class.

I felt extremely weird the rest of the day. Why did I feel that way when I saw Erica and Derek together? It wasn't like anything was going on between us. Also, he's far too old for me. Or maybe I'm too young. I don't know. But I couldn't shake off that sour taste of jealousy that the image of them left.

I knew I wanted to stay as far away as I could from hin but at this moment there was nothing more that I wanted than to be close to him.

Tag: @lokisgoddesofpower

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A/N: Please check out my last post about the fandoms I’ll be writing for.

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