#need to fix my energy again! howl’s this week so i can settle into some yearning! totoro next week for some magic and family feels!

[alottanothing]

Kismet

Summary: Evie prepares a meal for the stranger who helped her and finds herself more than a little smitten.

Previous Part: Hope

Word Count: 5707

Warnings: Language

Tag List: @ramilicious, @txmel, @edteche2, @gloriousdarkangelsworld, @diasimar, @xmxisxforxmaybe (Let me know if I missed you, or if you would like to be added to the tag list)

A/N: Okay, I almost didn't get this up today because I was up most of the night sewing kilts for Highland Weekend at the Ohio Renfiare. BUT I stayed awake and did my final read-through, so this should be mostly okay. I skipped a couple steps in my editing to get this up on time but I think, for the most part, it's okay. If you see a grammatical booboo, just ignore it, I'll get in here sometime this week with my other two editing steps and find it, then repost this. Capisce? Okay, cool...now. I hope you enjoy it, I also hope my trying to phonetically write Mer's accent doesn't get too annoying. I know you really shouldn't write accents, but I think it helps add to the characters. And I do try to keep it to a minimum so it doesn't get annoying. Thanks for the love the first part received last month! I know waiting so long between updates is a bit sad after weekly updates with LtR. But life is busy right now and once a month is all can guarantee.

Jonny did not know how to keep a house.

In fact, Jonny did not know how to do much more than drink, argue, and get into fights. He was nothing but a thorn in Evie's side—never mind how much she needed him for a place to lay her head. A necessary thorn was still a thorn. Given the opportunity, she would rip it out as soon as she could and dress the wound promptly so she was finally able to heal better. She stayed only because she had no other choice. And every time Jonny raised his voice or stumbled in reeking of alcohol and red-faced, Evie could hear her best friend's warning in her head. Cynthia had begged her not to go with him, but she hadn't listened.

Oh, how she wished she had.

Luckily, Jonny wasn't the kind of man who liked to stay home which eased the ache of the ever-present thorn in her side. Whatever money he did have, he spent out on the town—the town being New Orleans. Like Evie, Jonny had been born and raised in the Big Apple, the noise and the chaos was part of him. As such, he hadn't taken to the quiet suburban life Bridge City offered as well as Evie. She liked the quiet, easy flow of the sleepy town. Her housemate loathed his new home. He thrived in disarray, thus, he found a group of like-minded young men to run amok with in the neighboring metropolis every chance he got.

If Jonny had been any sort of amicable company, the notion of him leaving most every night to wreak havoc several miles away would have been upsetting. Thankfully, his penchant for city life meant a good portion of Evie's days were spent out from under Jonny's tyranny. The hours he was gone were blissful and calm, and she relished in them. Whether she was creating art or tending to chores around the old house, Evie didn't care as long as Jonny wasn't there—never mind how lonely the routine often was.

Evie had never gotten the chance to meet Jonny's maternal grandmother, though she suspected she would have liked to. Unlike her grandson, she seemed like any other sweet elderly woman judging by the furnishings she'd left behind. There were dozens of lace doilies, and table cloths with soft patterns, decretive china even, but it was the plethora of photos the old woman kept that told Evie she'd carried a kindly heart. All of them were kept in pristine albums or intricate frames; they were the only barbles that seemed to have been cleaned or dusted with any regularity which spoke of how much she must have treasured them. Evie loved those tiny trinkets and black and white memories. It didn't matter that they were not her legacy of family heirlooms to keep, she adored them anyway.

She couldn't count the number of times she'd replaced a broken frame that had fallen victim to Jonny's drunken belligerence or scrubbed tirelessly at a stain he'd left on the patterned tablecloths. It proved to be a hefty undertaking, but dwelling in the fantasies of someone else's history let her forget the grief of her own. She was willing to sacrifice a little elbow grease if it allowed her mind to roam away from the shadow that never really seemed to vanish.

For all the effort Evie put in on the interior, the cottage held little in the way of curb appeal. The porch was sunken in the middle, the paint was peeling off in chunks, and the yard was mostly weeds. Worst, however, was the screen door which squeaked so loudly, every dog in the neighborhood howled in protest every time someone crossed the threshold. The outside needed love that Evie simply didn't have the energy to lend. Despite the grit, however, the foundations were sturdy enough that she didn't worry. The cottage proved to be stronger than she looked—a feat Evie felt she had in common with the old house. And while it was a swell enough place to rest her head, it never truly felt like home. Home was somewhere safe, and as long as Jonny lived under that roof she wasn't safe. Not really.

Fortunately, Jonny wasn't home when Evie returned after her run-in with Mr. Shelton—Mer, she corrected herself with a hint of a giddy smile. Without her housemate there, her evening promised to be hopeful instead of lonely, and she wasted no time in figuring out what to make for dinner.

With her red pumps replaced by her worn-in slippers and her blue checkered apron secured around her waist, she set a pot of water to boil and dialed the phone conveniently located in the kitchen. Every evening she called her sister-in-law to pass the time and keep up on unimportant gossip back home; this time, however, Evie was excited to finally have some good news to share.

"You got the job, didn't you?" Cynthia Clarke asked on the other end, sounding hopeful. "I knew you would."

Evie grinned, still amazed how the sound of Cyn's voice always seemed to settle some of the ever-present anxieties buzzing in her head. She missed her friend so much.

"I didn't even say yes."

"Did you or did you not get the job?" Cynthia pressed.

"I did," Evie confirmed and her smile grew hearing her friend cheer on the other end of the phone.

"See! I knew it." Cynthia said. "My gut feeling is always right."

Evie rolled her eyes and shook her head fondly.

"I think I'm gonna like working there too, so that's good." she mused as she stood at the stove, eyeing the pot of water she’d set to boil.

"That's so great, Ev. I'm so proud of you." Cynthia paused before continuing. "So, what are you up to tonight? Avoiding Jonny?"

"Sorta," Evie nodded even though she knew her friend wouldn't see.

As she continued to watch her cooking pot of water she told Cynthia all about her trouble with Jonny's car and the man who'd been so kind to help her.

"Wait. You invited the stranger over who fixed the car?" Concern was heavy in Cyn's voice, and Evie half expected a lecture to follow.

Despite knowing each other since childhood, Cynthia had taken on the role of her protector since Evie's family was no longer in the picture. The war had claimed Evie's father, and brother—although they'd never found her brother, Jimmy after he disappeared behind enemy lines. Evie never lost hope that Jimmy would one day be found, Cynthia though, was certain her husband was never coming home. After Cyn’s brother, Charlie, died at Normandy Cynthia had difficulty believing anyone was going to make it home. As for Evie's mother, losing a child and her husband to the war was too much for her tender heart and she passed not long after. Ever since, Cynthia was overcome with the need to act as Evie's guardian.

"He wouldn't let me pay him," Evie explained. "So I'm making him dinner—it seemed like the least I could do."

"I suppose…." Cynthia didn't sound convinced, if anything she sounded slightly irritated there was no quick way for her to argue the logic. "Just be careful, Evie. You don't know this guy—he could be another Jonny Doyle. Or worse."

"He's not," Evie said quickly. She wanted nothing more than to tell her friend all about how benevolent Mer was, but she decided against it. Cynthia would only argue that point somehow.

A long pause followed, and Evie wedged the receiver between her ear and shoulder so her hands were free to work on the meal.

"So, what are you cooking?" This time, there was a hint of jest in her friend's tone when she spoke.

The art of cooking was one creative outlet that Evie struggled with, second only to music. In her youth, her mother did all the cooking—it was a passion of her mother's—thus Evie had done little more than watch in wonder as her mother whipped up meal after meal effortlessly. Breakfast she the meal she was probably best at, apple pies too, but anything beyond that Evie required a step by step guide to prepare. And even then she lacked confidence. Thankfully, when she'd fled south, she remembered to grab her mother's cookbook. It was a cumbersome tome with yellowed pages and notes scribbled into the margins: a piece of art itself cultivated over years of collecting recipe after recipe starting the moment her mother stepped off the boat that brought her from Ireland. And like a witch and her spellbook, Evie depended on it.

"Spaghetti with garlic bread," Evie admitted feeling as though the meal lacked a certain something.

Pasta was something she knew held a low degree of difficulty when it came to preparing. Surely she couldn't mess up pasta.

“Mmm, I can almost smell it,” Cynthia said.

“Shut up.”

“No, seriously,” Cyn replied. “You’re mom’s spaghetti recipe was always my favorite.”

A doleful smile pulled at the corners of her lips, thinking back to her mother happily cooking in the kitchen as she sang a Celtic tune. It seemed strange that those moments would never again play out, instead they’d become bittersweet memories Evie could only relive in her mind.

“Mine too,” she murmured, suddenly missing her family.

Neither of them said anything for a moment, and Evie’s mind roamed the dregs of her grief before blinking back into reality and the hope of something happy to come.

“I need to go, Cyn,” Evie told her friend with a sigh. “I don’t want to burn the garlic bread.”

Cynthia chuckled and said her goodbye, only after making Evie promise to call her in the morning to let her know how everything went.

With her second hand restored after hanging up, Evelyn reached for her mother’s cookbook to give the steps another look over to ensure she had done everything and added every herb and ingredient she was supposed to. She’d followed everything perfectly, even factoring in the little notes scribbled into the margins left there by her mother—those she smiled at fondly and traced the fading ink with her fingers. Everything was as it should be. Even so, without a taste, Evie knew the sauce she had prepared would never be as savory as what her mother made so effortlessly.

“You were the artist in the kitchen, Ma,” she said with a shrug. “I’ll stick to paper and canvas.”

For the smallest of a moment Evie thought she would hear the warmth of her mother’s laugh, and when it never came she sighed again, trying not to dwell on the shadows behind her. What mattered was the light ahead.

Despite her lack of confidence, the meal came together without any severe hiccups. The noodles were not overcooked, the sauce was a complementing mix of savory and sweet (though, as she had guessed after a tiny taste, was not nearly as good as her mother's) and the garlic bread was nicely golden. A small tingle of pride manifested in the form of a surprised, but satisfied, smile as she surveyed the dinner before her.

“Not bad, Ev,” she told herself, knowing her mother would have been delighted.

With the cooking done, Evie threw a glance over her shoulder to the clock mounted on the wall, triggering a surge of anxiety to bubble in her gut. Stranger, perhaps, was the amount of excitement coursing through her veins. It was as though all of her happiness was riding on whether or not she would see Merriell again. None of it made sense; the man was little more than a stranger. The coupling of nerves and delight was not a feeling that put her ill at ease, however. She trusted it. And it was that peculiar sensation that seemed to fuel her movements.

With a few minutes to spare, Evie wandered into the small bathroom to freshen up. She made sure her hair was still pinned the way she liked—up and pretty. Her make-up was holding up nicely despite the heat; all she needed was a fresh layer of lipstick to complete the illusion of a put-together young lady. It wasn't often she wore a dress with heels and a face of cosmetics—she liked to when the opportunity arose, but she was just as comfortable in a pair of old overalls and smudges of charcoal on her face.

Just as she wiggled back into her red pumps—discarding her worn-in house slippers with a couple of calculated kicks—a knock on the door signaled Merriells arrival. Immediately a grin curled onto Evie's lips and her heart began to pound an anxious-excited rhythm. A blush threatened to color her cheeks to give away the torrid muscle beating in her chest—her ever yearning heart already making leaps and bounds for a man she had known for mere hours.

Don't be ridiculous—she warned herself taking in a deep breath to curb the eagerness coursing in her veins. Untying her apron, she tossed it along with her discarded slippers and went to answer the door, taking one last deep breath to steady the fervor in her heart.

Merriell had changed and showered. The sweet bouquet of his shampoo coupled invitingly with the musk of the aftershave he'd chosen, making it difficult for Evie to keep from soaking in the scent he carried. His curls were still somewhat damp—too much moisture in the air to keep the heat from drying them on his way over—though they fought to spring back into their previous fluff. The grease-covered, jeans he'd been wearing had been replaced by a nice pair of tan slacks, and the buttoned shirt he wore was a soft shade of green that made his eyes glitter a deeper emerald as he stood under the glow of the porch light. All Evie could do was stare—utterly beguiled—every rational thought in her head lost to her.

Mer smirked, amused by her ogling. "Hiya."

Evie blinked, coming back to reality, suddenly feeling foolish, and uttered a nervous "hi" before swinging her arm to invite him inside.

"Come in."

Merriell's smile grew as he crossed the threshold, inhaling deeply. "Mm, smells tasty in here."

He gently forced a bottle into her hands as he passed on his way to investigate the savory smells in the kitchen.

"I wasn' sho what ya was makin', but I figured wine usually goes with anythin'."

"Oh, thank you." Evie glanced at the label, unable to read the French words printed there. "You didn't have to bring anything."

"I know," Mer shrugged, placing his hands in his pockets. "I just wanted to make a good impression."

There was something almost boyish when he smiled then—cheeks coloring pink ever-so-slightly—that made him even more of a mystery. One Evie was eager to solve.

"Well," she said placing the bottle on the kitchen table. "It should go perfectly with dinner."

His expression lost a hint of its boyish charm as it grew into a look of delight.

"Make yourself at home," Evie gestured vaguely between the table and the sofa in the living room as she ventured to the cabinet where the stemware was kept.

She placed two crystal glasses on the table along with the wine and retraced her steps to fetch some of the nicer china Jonny's grandmother had kept. Mer watched her, his gaze, gentle and attentive, and a little bit yearning as she methodically sat the table.

"Need help with anythin'?" he asked finally.

"Nope," She replied with a smile. "Everything is almost ready."

The hearty red sauce on the stove was beginning to boil again which told her it was hot enough to serve, and Evie eyed the pot with scrutiny, praying silently her attempt at cooking would go over well.

"I'll pour us a glass then," Mer announced.

"Great, lemme…" Evie spun to fish for the corkscrew in the drawer of misfit utensils, finding it, only to turn to see Merriell holding his lighter against the neck of the dark bottle just below the cork.

Before she could ask, a loud pop sounded, causing her to jump as the cork went flying.

"Oh my goodness!" she laughed, a little surprised, a little impressed. "Where did you learn to do that?"

Mer shrugged, a sly expression on his features, and left her question unanswered.

"How much ya want?" He held the open bottle over the top of her glass, waiting patiently.

"Enough," she said, tossing him a coy smirk without really meaning to.

He bit his lower lip as he smiled, chuckling under his breath when he poured a generous glass of red wine for each of them. She thanked him as he took his seat and grabbed his plate to dish out their dinner.

"How much pasta would you like?"

Mer's face lit with charm and mischief as he turned to face her.

"Enough," he grinned.

The expression on his face was playful, his smirk devious and amused by his own response and his cheekiness settled warmly in Evie's stomach. Not only did she revel in it, but she also played into his whimsy and scooped as much spaghetti into his plate as she could before coupling it with the savory sauce and a slice of bread.

Despite being only strangers, the atmosphere that bloomed that evening was not marked by any hint of bashfulness, instead, it was relaxed and amiable. Warmth that Evie had longed to dwell in again—that unrefutable kindness she'd lost with the passing of her family—flowed uninhibited from the man sitting adjacent to her. His conversation was cautious but still jovial and genuine. It was the first time since running south Evie could recall what life felt like without grief and fear weighing upon her. Merriell was a stranger, but she felt safe with him. Jonny had never made her feel that way.

"So," Evie spoke as she twirled the last bit of pasta with her fork. "What is it you do, Mr. Shelton?"

Mer cast her a look of disapproval—no doubt in retaliation to being addressed so formally—before his features softened back into a neutral, yet somehow still amused side smirk.

"Nothin' too excitin'," he stated vaguely. "The odd jobs are what I like ta do the most—like fixin' ya car this aftah noon."

Without really meaning to, Evie leaned forward, resting her elbow and chin on the table, utterly enchanted by the beautiful stranger at her table.

"You like to get your hands dirty, huh? Fixing things?" she was entirely too intrigued with the thought of what he could do with his hands.

He shrugged, suddenly modest after a foray of playfully arrogant smirks and glances. It made him abruptly twice as charming.

"I've always had a knack for it, I guess." Merriell finished the food on his plate with the help of his remaining garlic bread to mop up the sauce still left on his dish.

"What about you?" he asked after chewing. "Ya workin' anywhere?"

All at once, a proud smile lit up Evie's face. After all the excitement of seeing Merriell again, she'd almost forgotten about her good news.

"Actually, I just got a job today—the general store downtown, Southern Comfort."

Mer's face lit up too, "Birdie's place?"

"Yeah, you know it?" Of course, he knows it! She thought, Bridge City's population was slightly less than the number of people who lived in a single district back home in New York. Everyone knew everyone else.

"Sho do—I was practically raised there…ole Birdie's like a second mothah to me."

"Really?" Evie found a great deal of comfort in that notion. In fact the more she thought on it, the more she realized how similar the old woman and Mer were; they radiated the same magnetism and sincerity.

"Mmhm," he nodded, his eyes focusing elsewhere as the veil of memories danced across the contours of his features. "My mama used ta work there…once upon a time…"

"Does she still work there?"

Merriell's face lost a hit of its levity and he swallowed as though to fight off the onslaught of sudden emotion threatening to cast a shadow onto his expression.

"No…" he said softly. "She—uh—she died, about a year ago."

Shit!

Abruptly, sick knots twisted into Evie's stomach, feeling callous, but understanding of the quiet misery he hid under layers of charm and arrogance.

"Merriell, I'm…I'm sorry—I didn't mean…"

He met her eyes and cast her a quick smile—doleful, but enough to ease the awful feeling in the pit of her stomach.

"It's okay," he reassured her, reaching for his glass of wine and taking a good gulp before changing the subject. "Birdie's great—you'll enjoy workin' for her."

"I hope so…" Evie said softly, still too embarrassed to meet Mer's glance longer than a second or two.

For the first time all night the atmosphere they shared felt cumbersome—perhaps more melancholy—than she'd wanted it to get. Evie sat, worrying her bottom lip, her fingers toying with a loose thread in the table cloth as she stole quick glances through her lashes in Mer's direction.

He was nursing the alcohol in his glass with the same sadness she'd caught plaguing him as he sat at the bar hours ago. And while Evie was eager to know if his grief stemmed only from the loss of his mother, or perhaps more, Merriell was still too much of a stranger to warrant such questions. It didn't matter how easy it was to be near him, she had not earned the right to know his narrative.

A soft sigh broke past her lips as she fought to find a way to properly allay the gloom that was quickly ruining an otherwise wonderful evening. It wasn't until her eyes found their desert sitting on the counter, waiting to save the day, that she perked up.

"Got any room for apple pie?" Evie asked with a hesitant smile. She hoped he wanted to stay long enough to have a slice, though she would not have blamed him for wanting to leave.

Immediately Mer perked up too, the shadows on his features retreating with the promise of something sweet.

"I was countin' on it—seems as how you promised a slice earlier," he said with a boyish grin.

When she stood, he did too, helping clear away their dinner plates, and letting them soak in the sink to be washed later. Evie cut them each a slice of apple pie and the delight on Mer’s face made her smile too seeing him lick his lips as his grin continued to grow. Catching that flash of his tongue was like a bolt of hot lightning striking her without warning; a blush rose so quickly on her cheeks Evie had to look away to keep the blunder a secret. Thankfully, the pie was more than enough to hold Merriell’s attention away from her.

“Mmmm… Almost looks too good to eat,” he said ogling the desert in front of him.

When Evie chanced a look his way, the expression on his face caused her to chuckle, “‘oughta be, I made one for my pa every year for his birthday since I was nine. It’s probably the only thing I have any confidence in making in the kitchen.”

“Coulda fooled me,” Mer quipped as he loaded his fork with as much pie as he could.

The moment he took a bite, his brows creased, and eyes closed as he chewed painfully slow. Those few seconds were like agony. Evie’s heart was pounding in her chest with so much anticipation she feared she might faint as she watched him sample the only thing she could actually make that was worth a damn.

“Fuck me, if that ain’t the best apple pie I’ve evah had the pleasure of tasting.”

A somewhat nervous, but relieved chuckle sounded in the back of Evelyn’s throat as she watched Merriell shovel a larger bite of pie into his mouth.

“Mmm… Yep. God damn delightful.”

“Stop,” Evie said sheepishly, suddenly afraid he was overselling his reaction to keep from hurting her feelings.

“No,” he wiped his mouth and leaned across the table to meet her gaze with a sincere expression that stole away all the doubt writhing in her stomach.

“I mean it. If I wasn’t so full of pasta, I’d eat that whole damn pie right now.”

“Well,” Evie grinned softly, trying not to let her blush color her cheeks too obviously. “Thank you. And you’re welcome to take the rest of it when you go.”

Excitement took form on his face with a smirk that was sweet but roguish all at once—a sort of debonair charm that amplified his magnetism—as if his bright eyes dark curls and razor-sharp jaw did not make him alluring enough already. Again she had to look away knowing the pink in her cheeks would be too strong to combat.

“Imma have ta take ya up on that offah. An’ I’ll be thinkin’ ‘bout you every time I cut me a slice.”

That blush was unstoppable; her heart was suddenly so smitten, it felt as though butterflies were fluttering merrily in her stomach. She felt weightless with warmth and hope swelling in her bosom, fearing any slight breeze would carry her off. It was ridiculous how at ease Evie felt sitting there eating pie with a complete stranger. The conversation had been easy all night; even when it had delved into less savory topics he still made her feel comfortable. Evelyn had forgotten what it was like to be in the company of a man who wasn’t easy to anger, who was genuine and kind and wanted only to live in the moment.

For a time the whimsy of the atmosphere faded as the warmth in her heart ached, suddenly missing her brother James and Cynthia's brother Charlie. Both of them were good men, kind and genuine—like Merriell—but they had been swallowed by the rages of war. Brave young men were lost forever, while a man like Jonny Doyle was still alive How was that fair?

No matter how pleasant her thoughts could be, they always fell back to the grief that plagued her. She sighed, deeply, pushing those intrusive memories back into the depths of her mind so she could find joy once more in the moment with a kind stranger.

When Merrill finished his plate he made a beeline for the sink full of soaking dishes.

“Oh, no,” she said jumping to her feet. “I can do those.”

Merriell, however, shook his head. “Uh-uh, you did the cookin’, I can do the cleanin’.”

When Evie tried to argue, Mer simply shook his head, his grin amused but determined as he kept scrubbing the dirty dishes.

“Let me help at least,” she suggested. “I’ll dry and put them away.”

Before he could protest, she snatched the freshly rinsed dish from his hand and began wiping away the droplets of water clinging to the porcelain surface, throwing him a smug smirk that made him chuckle.

“Alright,“ he smirked.

She watched him for a moment not really paying attention to her task as he scrubbed the old plates clean, overcome with a blissful vision of peaceful domesticity. It made her stomach fill to the brim with whimsy and her heart was fluttering again; had this stranger bewitched her already? Or did what she feel bubbling lightly in her gut like a seltzer stem from an end to her loneliness—even if it was only for a few hours? Evelyn didn’t know. Nevertheless, she was intrigued with a profound feeling and she wanted to dwell in it for as long as she could.

Occasionally as he would hand a freshly washed dish her way, his calloused fingertips would brush against her skin, igniting a spark she didn’t know how to react to. It was more than an amicable tingle racing from the tips of her fingers right to her heart. And each time they touched, Merriell would cast her a gentle smile that held nothing more than his inherent charm and magnetism. She wondered if he felt it too, or if her need for companionship was playing a dirty trick on her.

When the dishes were all back in their usual places—the night drawing to a close—Evelyn realized she was not ready to say farewell to her Beautiful Stranger. She longed to stay up all night just chatting with him, she did not care about what, Evelyn only wanted to stay encompassed a while longer in the blissful warmth he brought into her life. Once he was gone, all she would be able to do was stay up and ponder the significance of those little touches and the sparks they brought.

Thankfully, Merriell lingered on the old rickety porch, one hand in his pocket, the other holding onto his plate of leftover pie, seeming to stall their inevitable departure.

“Well,” he said with a grin. “Thank you for invitin’ a stranger ovah for dinna.” He paused, glancing at the leftover pie in his hand. “Can’t recall ever having a better plate of pasta, an’ nothin’ evah gonna beat this pie.”

Evie quickly looked at her feet to hide another blush.

“It was the least I could do,” she told him before looking back to meet his eyes. “You have no idea how much of a savior you were this afternoon…”

A glint of concern flashed in his eye, his brows beginning to crease as his unspoken question lingered between them.

She thought about telling him—telling him how Jonny was nothing more than a throne in her side, and how much she cherished Merriells company—but Mer was still a stranger. It wasn’t right to unload so much onto someone she’d only known for a few hours.

Before Mer could offer any reply, the sound of screeching tires stole all their focus as an old wagon pulled along the curb—narrowly missing a collision with the mailbox. The rowdy passengers were laughing and shouting loud enough even before the door opened to let Jonny stumble out. He staggered on drunk feet and screamed a handful of profanities to his buddies in the car which made them all roar with laughter.

It was only after the wagon full of hooligans pulled away that Jonny began to stagger towards the house, and it was exactly then that Evie’s fluttering heart became consumed with panic.

She and Mer watched him cross the yard, unseen, both frozen: Evie in fear and Merriell in confusion. Jonny’s intoxication level inhibited him from taking notice of them until he was at the base of the steps leading onto the porch. Immediately, his eyes narrowed and he frowned.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Jonny, this is Mr. Merriell Shelton,” Evie said quickly, willing her voice not to shake.

The Doyle’s were not known for their hospitality, nor were they known to trust most people. Especially strangers.

“He helped me this afternoon with a bit of trouble I was having,” she explained vaguely, hoping to thwart any more suspicion. “I made him dinner to say thank you—he’s just about to leave.”

Jonny eyed Merriell, seizing him up as best he could through drunken lenses. Mer stood his ground, eyeing him back with a subtle intensity that never so much as cracked under Jonny’s scrutiny.

Finally, being the better man, Mer held out his hand in a friendly manner, “nice ta meet ya.”

Jonny cast a prolonged glare at Merriell's open hand, his brows furrowed and part of his lip hiked up in a sort of snarl. Instead of returning the kind gesture, Jonny made a show of spitting at his feet before tossing his heavy leer at Evelyn.

"Evie, do not invite any more strangers into my house. I don't care if they are dying." He shoved past them both, purposely bumping Mer's shoulder (most likely in hopes to start something) muttering as he went: "I don't trust any of these filthy southerners."

Shock sent Evie's jaw slack; this time the redness in her cheeks was a symptom of embarrassment instead of infatuation. She should have known Jonny would say something rude and uncouth. Without another thought, she grabbed Mer by his sleeve and pulled him across the lawn until they stood next to his truck parked along the curb.

"I am so sorry about him," she said, crossing her arms and glaring at Jonny's house, ashamed and angry.

Mer shrugged as he placed his partially eaten pie in the passenger seat through the open window before fixing his hands in his front pockets.

"Ya boyfriend's a bit of an asshole."

"He is not my boyfriend," Evie corrected vehemently. "I don't think he knows that though. I'm just staying here until I can figure some things out."

Merriell was quiet a moment, nodding silently. It seemed as though he was taking his time processing the whole situation. There was compassion on his face and behind his eyes, but it was guarded somehow. Evie caught it though and she was grateful when he didn't ask the questions plainly forming in his mind.

"Well," he said finally, his tone light as one corner of his mouth quirked into a grin. "Since he ain't ya othah half, I feel more inclined ta leave ya with this…"

Gently, Merriell caressed her upper arm as he leaned forward to plant a tender kiss on her cheek. He let his lips linger slightly longer than was common for such an act, that all at once wove a new hopefulness into her heart.

"Dinna was swell," he added as he pulled away, his smile somehow more charming than it had been all night. "Hope I see ya again, Evie."

"Me too," she murmured.

Evie watched as he got in his truck to leave, her hand held to the cheek he'd graced with his kiss. And when he drove away, it took everything inside of her to keep from running after him.

#Beautiful Stranger Series #Merriell Shelton x Original Character #Merriell Shelton #Snafu Shelton #HBO War #The Pacific #The Pacific Fanfiction #Rami Malek Fanfiction

[thiswasinevitableid]

15. Nymph SternClay alternately, Stern is a Dryad residing in a huge forest where a strange creature, similar to humans but different (aka Bigfoot) wanders alone. Ever curious, Stern seeks to understand why this beautiful creature doesn’t seem to have anyone else, and even tries to hide from the few humans who venture deep enough into the woods. Can they be alone together?

Here you go! It’s SFW

Joseph knows he can’t spend every hour in the Great Oak, reading and researching the movements of humans. He still struggles to justify his fascination with creatures that have little contact with his kind. Some of his peers go so far as to insist humans are a myth, or the result of the odd dryad or naiad seeing a bear from the wrong angle. 

This is false, of course, and humans have been getting bold lately, making paths and taking walks deeper and deeper into the trees. This means that dryads assigned to security roles must spend at least six hours a day in their tree to make sure no one threatens their home. Joseph is in a Copper Beech not far from the GreenBriar river, mentally drawing up his to-do list for the week, when heavy footsteps catch his attention. 

At first he thinks it’s a particularly hairy human tromping through the underbrush, decked out in a ratty flannel shirt and what he’s heard humans refer to as “sweatpants.”  But his feet are bare, his limbs and face covered in dark, copper-flecked fur, and his ears are more pointed than those of a human. He leans against Josephs’ tree, drumming his fingers on it as he surveys the area, massive back-pack slung over his shoulders. There’s a flat patch of grass twenty yards away, and this is where the visitor eventually settles. Within fifteen minutes, a small tent sits on the grass. When the creature crawls inside and lays down, his feet stick out of the flap. 

Once snoring filters into the air, Joseph slips from the tree, conjures a blanket from moss, and sets it across his feet. It gets cold here at night.

His kind gesture does not go as planned.

The instant the fabric hits skin, the figure in the tent jolts upright, growling.  Joseph sits back as his guest's head bursts into the open. Then their positions instantly reverse, the other creature scrambling backwards in alarm.

“What the fuck? Where, where’d you come from, I didn’t hear you, didn’t even smell you sneaking up on me.”

Joseph raises his eyebrows, “Probably because I smell like bark and my footsteps are no different from falling leaves.” He holds out his hand for the creature to shark, “Joseph Stern, dryad.” 

“O-kay, so why is a dryad trying to…” he looks at the blanket for the first time, “tuck me in?”

“You’re new to woodland living, I take it?”

“Not really.”

Joseph sighs, “There are specific rules that govern this forest. One of them is that dryads are responsible for everything within a two mile radius of their base” he points to the Beech, “including any residents, visitors, or refugees. Which means you’re my responsibility.”

“Uh, I’m good, you don’t need to, like, babysit me.”

The dryad produces a notebook from his pocket, flipping to the section for his resident intake form, “I’m not babysitting you, I just need some information for my records. Name?”

Deep brown eyes blink, perplexed, and then his guest shrugs, “Barclay.”

“Species?”

“No fucking idea.” Barclay picks up the moss blanket, folding it and setting it next to the tent. 

“Purpose of stay?”

“To get some peace and quiet.” He turns a pointed glare at Joseph. Even with the glower, he’s the most handsome creature the dryad has ever seen. 

“Um. Right. I’ll just fill in the rest myself. If you need anything, I’m just over there.” He walks briskly away, managing to only look over his shoulder once. Barclay is watching him, looking for all the world like a hare waiting for the fox to pounce. 

It’s only when he’s back in the tree that he realizes having a resident will cut down on his research time. Then again, his guest is far more intriguing than any human could ever be.

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

Barclay was so ready to stop feeling bad. He feels bad for stealing the tent from a guy he scared off his campsite two towns back. Bad for yanking clothes off the clothing line of rural houses so he could have two sets to rotate instead of a filthy, single shirt and shorts combo. Bad because it’s been months since he ate anything but MREs, granola bars, and day olds salvaged from dumpsters. 

Now he gets to add “feel bad because you’re crashing on some guys front lawn” to that list. He didn’t even know nymphs were a thing; he thought he was the only weird semi-human in the world. Yet here’s Joseph, hair as dark and shiny as the leaves on his home tree, skin the color of bark, and vines occasionally twining up his arms and legs. Unlike Barclay, his inhuman features make him beautiful, not beastly. 

Barclay came here to be alone. 

Barclay hates being alone. He wants a house full of warmth and voices mingling over a kitchen table, wants people to care for and who care about him. So when Joseph appears the next morning near his small fire and it’s boiling pot of foraged tea, he offers the dryad some. 

They sit, awkwardly sipping from their mugs, when he decides to take advantage of his host.

“I, uh, don’t suppose there’s any herbs growing around here? Like mint, or maybe alliaria? I wanna catch fish for dinner, but they taste better if I can season them.”

“I think there’s some growing upstream. Do you want me to show you?”

“Uh, no, that’s fine. I’m used to finding stuff on my own.”

Joseph nods, finishes his tea, and magics the cup clean before handing it back to Barclay.

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

“What...what’s all this?” Barclay stares, stunned, at the pile of goods sitting by his firepit. He counts a camp stove, teapot, and two boxes of fresh food, including bread and cheese,

Joseph looks up from organizing the supplies, “A few friends of mine, plus the Ashroot Market.” He smiles, Barclay’s stomach flipping like a flapjack when he does, “did you think we live on berries and air?”

“Kinda, yeah.” Barclay rubs his arm, embarrassed, “thanks, Joseph. I, uh, I don’t really have money, so maybe I can pay you back with-” he trails off as the nymph stands and sets a hand on his shoulder. 

“Barclay, you don’t owe me anything. I did this because you keep saying how much you miss cooking from a real pantry and, um, I thought it’d make you happy to have some options.”

“It does.” He freezes as Joseph strokes the fur poking through a hole in shirt, “I can restock your sewing kit the next time, if you want.”

“That’d be great.” He wants so badly to touch him back, to see if he shudders away from his claws or holds his hand. 

Josephs arm drops back to his side, “Ned has a surprising number of camping supplies. I suspect he stole them from humans, which is technically against the rules but” he indicates the stove, “I’ll let it slide for now.” 

A conspiratorial wink and Barclay rumbles out a purr, catching it before Joseph notices.

“Will, uh, will you at least let me make you dinner as a thank you?”

The dryad nods, “That sounds perfect, big guy.”

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

Barclay doesn’t howl often; it draws unwanted attention and there’s no one like him out there to answer anyway. Tonight he couldn’t help it, the loneliness tearing him to bits on it’s climb up his throat. He’s cross-legged on the ground, face to the stars, when Joseph sits down beside him. 

“Are you okay?” 

“I’m fine. Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you. Thought you were out.”

“I was reading.” Joseph scoots closer, rubbing Barclay’s back, “and I can tell you’re lying.”

Barclay delays answering, fixes his gaze on the Beech where Joseph lives. Nymph homes occupy liminal spaces, fitting an entire domiciles within trees. His current hobby is imagining what it looks like on the inside; whether there are books stacked neatly everywhere, whether there’s a nice kitchen, how big the bed is, what the view from the bed is like…

He’s never going to know, Joseph made that clear. 

“It’s not that no other creature is allowed in a nymph home, more that getting them in there takes a dangerous amount of energy.”

“Barclay?” Joseph rests his head on his shoulder, “have you always been alone?”

“No. Or, well, I don’t think so. I get flashes of memory from when I was really little. Like there’s this big house with lots people who look like me, and they’re talking and keep passing me around so the grown-ups can ruffle my fur and make this, this sort of” he breaks off into the low, soft hoots that echo down through the years, “and then...then there’s this gap and the next thing I remember is being dumped on the side of the road somewhere in central California, more or less an adult myself. I spent so long looking for my family, for anyone who looked like or could give me answers and all I got was some scars and a bunch of T.V shows about hunting me.” 

“That sounds awful. I, um, I’m glad you stumbled into my neck of the woods. I know I’m not always the best company and ask more questions about living around humans than you’d probably like but, um, you deserve to have at least one person on your side.”

“Thanks” Barclay tips his head sideways so it’s resting against Josephs’, “Uh if, if you ever want to, we could have a dinner here with Duck and them. I like cooking for people; one of those things I know about myself even if I can’t remember why.”

He must imagine the lips brushing his forehead as Joseph sits up, “I’ll invite everyone first thing tomorrow.”

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

A danger of sleeping in Joseph’s clearing is that Barclay feels safe. Starts sleeping like he has nothing to fear. 

The voices in the distance, jarring him awake in the dead of night, remind him of the truth.

“Shit” he scrambles out of the tent, piles it and all his other possessions into a hollow log and throws the moss blanket over it just to be safe. Then the worst sound in the world reaches him: barking. Not only are the hunters close, they have dogs. And, his acute hearing informs him, he’s their prey. 

Fuck, his scent and fur are all over this part of the woods, no wonder they’re honing in on him so fast. His best chance is to run and cross the river, but there’s an open stretch on the other side, so unless he’s lucky they’ll still spot him. 

“Hey! I think something is moving over here!” 

He flattens against the Copper Beech, narrowly dodging the beam of a flashlight. 

“Shit, shit” he doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t want to hurt anyone. He doesn’t want to be caught. Inhaling, he readies himself to give the loudest roar of his life. 

Then the world tips and twists and he’s no longer in the woods. He is, however, in a tree, if the view from the window is anything to go by.

Gasping sends his attention to the floor and he drops to his knees, scooping a limp, pale Joseph into his arms. 

“Wel, welcome to my house. Sorry it’s such a, a mess.”

He glances at the polished furniture, the neatly stacked books, and the spotless floor.

“Seriously, babe? That’s the first thing you say after saving my neck?” He giggles, tipping towards hysteria. 

“I couldn’t let them hurt you.”

“You could have died.” Barclay adjusts him so he’s mostly upright and hugs him close, “I coulda lost you why, why did you-”

His question is lost in the clumsy kiss Joseph pulls him into. Barclay’s body gives up on adapting to anymore surprises and he falls onto his back, the nymph weakly petting his cheeks as he tries, clearly exhausted, to continue kissing him. 

“You’re the most incredible being in the forest and, and I’ve been so happy since you came to stay. My entire body feels like a leaf beaten limp by the rain and I’d do the same spell this instant, without hesitation, if that’s what it took to keep you safe. Keep you with me.”

Carefully, Barclay guides him into another kiss, vines curling up them both the more he pours all his affection and thanks into the nymphs mouth. When Joseph finally pulls away, he nestles down on Barclays chest, running his fingers through his fur. 

“You, um, you may be here awhile. I’m not sure if I can get you out safely or if Dani and the others will have to help me.”

“No complaints here.” Barclay strokes his hair, which feels like soft leaves and normal locks all at once. 

Joseph answers a few more logistical questions before falling asleep in his arms, which is plenty of answers for one night. And in the morning, when the nymph rolls over to smile at him, he can confirm; the view from the bed is beautiful.

#sternclay #agent stern/barclay #monster march #reader requests #taz amnesty

[moonlightjinko-kun]

The Forbidden Tower (one-shot)

Late submission for D3 of @atsukyouweek! 

Characters/Pairing: Nakajima Atsushi & Izumi Kyouka // Atsukyou

Genre: Fairytale, Fluff ending, some angst, some psychological manipulation/abuse (implied)

Rating: Teens and Up

Prompt used: Fairytale AU - Rapunzel AU

Word Count: 2.1k+

Summary: Kyouka attempts to save Atsushi from the witch who had trapped him in the tower.Basically, it's a Rapunzel AU with Atsushi as "Rapunzel" and Kyouka as "the Prince"

Read it on AO3!

A/N 1: Used my favourite fairytale for this HAHAHAH cries atsushi I’m sorry I trapped you in the tower with a manipulative witch, please forgive me TT 

Kyouka floats herself up to the single window with her magic and peeks into the tower."Atsushi? Ready?" Her voice is a low whisper, barely audible, but he is close enough to hear. He moves closer, letting a shaft of moonlight light up part of his face. “Come on, I’ll catch you.”

Atsushi holds onto the side of the wall with his trembling hand. “She’ll know immediately right?” Kyouka nods, urgency in her eyes.

“But…” His gaze drops, and he takes a small step back while shaking his head. “No… Mother’s right. You’re just pretending.” He pauses, his lips quivering. “You should go.”

The conviction in his tone draws a sigh from her. She fixes a glare at his retreating back, frustration spilling into her voice, “Atsushi, I’ve told you before -“

“Stop, just stop lying and leave.”

Kyouka closes her eyes at his words and centers her magic on him. A new dark aura pulses from him, staining the air around him an inky black. She exhales the breath she had been holding and throws her eyes to the heavens above in exasperation. She should have pulled him out the first time they met, why had she even spent weeks to gain his trust and befriend him, just for it to fail in the end. She chooses her next words carefully. “I’ll stay by your side, Atsushi. Please, please trust me, I’m here to help you.”

The air around him crackles with a mounting mixture of dark energy and his anger, and the tendrils of the blackness stretch to the far corners of the room. His head angles slightly to her, as though he’s challenging her. Kyouka composes herself, knowing that she can’t fail, not when she is this close to success. Her life, her revenge and her home - they all hinge on Atsushi’s move, so she has to persuade him to come home, back to his rightful throne.

“Atsushi, please.” Her voice quivers slightly with a pleading note, her eyes full of sincerity.

He inches back to her, a feral snarl on his face.

“Leave.” Threat lingers in his single command as he stalks his way towards her, a smouldering anger in his eyes. Kyouka controls her expression while she waits for him to approach the window. This is the only way I can save him.  

“LEAVE. LEAVE ME -“

She pulls hard at the hand that she had been tracking. The rest of his sentence cuts off as he tips through the window in a shell-shocked daze. She concentrates her magic in her palm and blasts at the inky darkness around him while she pulls him free of the tendrils clawing at him, leaving behind a residual aura around him.

“I’m sorry.” She holds her hands over his heart and her magic flows over him, bathing him in a soft yellow light. Confusion shines in his eyes as he croaks out her name, a gentle voice that brushes against her cheeks. A smile flits across her face at the soft gaze in his eyes, and she fails to notice the ball of dark energy zooming through the air to her before it slams into her, throwing her back. A hooded figure leaps through the air to grab the falling Atsushi. Her magic activates, stopping her fall in mid-air and she floats to the ground.

“Daughter of Izumi huh? Hah, looks like I missed one pesky brat.” Their high-pitched voice grates against her ears, sounding unnatural and eerie. A nasty sneer smears across their face as they make their next move.

Kyouka rolls to the side to avoid the figure spiralling towards her. The dark aura crackling around them is the same as the one around Atsushi, but it is stronger and it engulfs her, choking her in its foul darkness. Her eyes flit around the area and she makes out a limp form near the base of the tower. She closes her eyes for a moment and sends a soft incantation his way to protect him from the darkness that is sure to encroach him again. Her eyes open to the sight of a sphere of their dark magic hurling towards her. She bursts it apart with her own magic, and in that moment of collision, she catches a fleeting glimpse of their identity as their disguise slips.

“YOU. PESKY. BRAT.” The figure spits in anger, punctuating each syllable with an attack which Kyouka deflects with a lazy flick of her wrist. Kyouka leaps into the air after the figure as they cackle a mad laughter, a chillingly eerie sound that scrapes against her skin like nails on a chalkboard.

“YOU. YOU WITH THAT CURSED LIGHT MAGIC LIKE YOUR PATHETIC -“

Kyouka closes the distance in a single leap and blasts her magic in their direction. But they are faster and both of their magic spheres collide in a shower of sparks. Kyouka jumps clear in a graceful arc through the air, landing softly by Atsushi’s side. She kneels down beside him and shakes him, while holding up a magical barrier over them. The wind blows hard and whips their hood back at her command, revealing their face.

Her pale face contorts in anger, and her thin lips are pulled into a nasty sneer. The locks of blonde hair that had been whipping across her face fall to her back in a sweeping curtain as she snatches the command of the wind from Kyouka. Her black eyes narrow on them as she saunters over.

“Very good. You’re strong, stronger than your parents, a foe worthy of me. But you lack experience, so this is where you fall.” Her hands force through the barrier, stopping just inches away from Kyouka’s face. Calmed determination flows through Kyouka’s body with the deep breath she had drawn in.

In one swift move, Kyouka grabs the woman’s arms, burning her arm with magic as she recites an ancient curse. The woman’s eyes widen with shocked realisation and she writhes in agony and panic. Her screams tear through the air, frighteningly eerie like those of a cornered animal. A howl of defeat escapes the woman as Kyouka seals the curse with her true name.

“King Elijah, this is for my parents.”

Kyouka’s curse sears away the disguise to reveal an old, wrinkled face framed by shoulder length silver hair. Black marks from where Kyouka had burned him with the curse spreads up his limbs. The persistent tugs on her dress have stopped, and she slides her gaze over to see Atsushi’s hand slipping to the ground, his eyes wide with shock at the revelation.

“Ma… Mother?

“My. Sweet. Boy.” The old man’s lips twist into a sadistic smile and the voice that comes out is a staccato mix of pitch toggling between that of “Mother” and Elijah himself. “Come. Come… to… me.”

Kyouka slaps his blackened fingers away from Atsushi while she pushes Atsushi further behind her. The black marks run its corrosive course through his body, killing him from the inside, as he mutters in a low rumble. Kyouka turns to see Atsushi, cowering behind her in shock and disbelief and she reaches for his hand to calm the slight tremble in it.

The muttering stops and Elijah fixes her with a hard, angry stare. “BITCH, YOU.”

Her lips twist into a smirk as she watches death finally descend upon him - his face staining blacker by the second and his struggles to pull air into his collapsed lungs. He forces his gaze back to Atsushi, his words straining out of him. “I… wish… I wish… I had-“ The strength in his voice has drained away but the threat and anger laced within it rings true in the silence that follows his words.

Elijah’s eyes fixed to the heavens above are vacant and his blackened body is still with death. A single tear drops onto Elijah’s cheek and Kyouka slides a worried glance to Atsushi as his body shakes with sobs.

“She… no… he… it’s all true?” The tremble in his voice worries her as she parts the curtain of hair that had fallen over his face to see his tear-stained face.

“I’m sorry that you had to see this.” I wanted to finish him off without you here. She leaves the words unspoken and shoves them back down her throat.  

Silence, broken only by his sobs, settles between them. When he speaks, his voice was soft but firm with certainty. “Kyouka, I can’t come back with you. Not now at least.”

“Then where are you going to go?”

Atsushi offers her a small fleeting smile with uncertainty in his eyes.

“Atsushi?” She prompts.

He closes his eyes and draws in a deep breath. “Anywhere but here.” He stands and dusts himself off, a sad smile crossing his face. “Thank you for being my friend all this while but I can’t help you anymore.”

Kyouka’s eyes widen with shock and she calls out to his retreating figure. He stops to turn back to her, his purple and yellow eyes dark with sadness. “Please don’t come after me, Kyouka.”

She stands hurriedly and rushes to close the distance. She reaches for his hand to pull him to a stop, forcing him to turn to face her. “Wait, don’t go. Please. I’m sorry I tried to trick you into returning to save the kingdom, but… over the weeks, I really enjoyed your company and I’m really happy to be your friend. It’s fine, we don’t need to go back, I.. I can’t force you to go back too.” She pauses and releases her hand from his. “I’m really sorry.” Her eyes orient down to the ground and she hears Atsushi walking a few steps away from her. The air around them is deadly silent and it threatens to swallow them. Kyouka waits, not willing to break the silence before he does. Loneliness had been her constant companion growing up, but she had finally found a friend in him, a friend who is worth more than her life back in the kingdom. If she has to give up her life back in the kingdom, she will, because she doesn’t think she can live out the rest of her life despairing in loneliness and crying over the loss of her one and only friend.

He starts, a hesitation in his voice. “You’re my first friend, I don’t want to lose you. But if you don’t go back, you’ll become a wanted criminal, I can’t ask you to do that. So Kyouka -“

“It’s not a problem, really. I rather be out here with a friend than to be stuck in a cell, awaiting death. Two people together is always better than one. And I definitely don’t want to lose a friend like you.”

A smile tugs at the corner of his lips, as he nods in agreement. “So, where to next?”

Kyouka laughs, a joyful note of laughter, as she shakes her head. She closes her eyes to check his aura and heaves a sigh of relief at the gradual return of his golden aura. The lingering remnants of Elijah’s dark magic in the air around them is dissipating with the disintegration of his body, returning the aura to its original forest green. The soft wind carries with it a tinge of the sweetness of nature and life returns to the forest. She runs after him into the forest, never looking back, never regretting her choice to leave her life behind for him.

                                                                                         ―――――

                                                                                       5 years later

“You look beautiful today, Kyouka.”

Her cheeks flush warm with a soft pink and she smooths her gown once again with her hand while her other hand clutches the bouquet of flowers tightly. Kyouka takes the hand Atsushi was holding out and draws in a deep breath. Her gaze slides to Atsushi and she sees the same jittery nervousness reflected in his eyes. He catches her gaze and turns to her, a smile of pure joy and happiness lighting up his face. She returns a small smile and her grip on the bouquet tightens, her heart druming madly in her chest.

“Are you ready? We’re going.” He whispers into her ear.

She takes in another quick breath to steady her heartbeat, as they walk out of the open door to greet the cheers and applause from the crowd gathered in the palace courtyard with broad smiles on their faces.

“Today, we gather to celebrate the wedding of our King Atsushi and Queen Kyouka. May our kingdom prosper forevermore with the union of our King and Queen and may the people of our kingdom continue to live in peace and prosperity.”

A/N 2:  Thank you for reading to the end and I hoped you enjoyed it! Feedback is always appreciated so if you have any, please leave them hehe Tbh this was good self-indulgence and I had a lot of fun with this! 

#bungou stray dogs #atsukyouweek2020 #atsukyou #atsushi x kyouka #nakajima atsushi #izumi kyouka #rapunzel au #I love this one shot btw #HAHAHA #cries this is a self-indulgence piece lmao #CINFICS 🎀

[artificialqueens]

Not Nineteen Forever (4) (Branjie/Scyvie)- Ortega

a/n: i am absolutely hanging out my arse so editing and re-reading this chapter made me feel vaguely ill. i’ll pass it off as method acting xo thank you so much for the continued love and support for this fic, the fact that each chapter so far has broken 100 notes makes me piss my pants with excitement (watch now i’ve jinkxed it and this one’ll get like 8). in this installment Scarlet finds it hard to believe that she isn’t Victoria Beckham.

Trigger Warnings: explicit drug use, alcohol. unaaay.

Summary: Brooke, Yvie and Nina are three flatmates who forged a friendship in their first year of university and picked up some other waifs and strays along the way. Now in their final year, there are feelings that need to be unravelled and confessions to be made whilst navigating drunk nights, hungover mornings, takeaways, group chats, library meetups, cafe gossiping, and the small matter of getting a degree

***

Scarlet had to admit, she was enjoying the high life. As she sat up the back of the lecture theatre in the new fur coat she wasn’t planning on taking off anytime soon, blinking heavily with her £75 lash extensions, drumming her £50 acrylics against her notepad, she smiled to herself. This was definitely the kind of life she was suited to. Okay, she got a bit of a shock when the rent left her bank account, as well as her gas and electricity bills, but she still had a good amount there. Clenching her stomach, Scarlet thought about the number on her banking app. £3713.65. Slightly giddy, she pressed her lips together as she thought about it. How could she have spent over a thousand pounds in the space of two weeks? She thought through it in her mind. Rent, £550. Electricity, £30 split with Ra’Jah. Gas, £25, also split with Ra’Jah. But that only came to what…just under six hundred pounds? There was still so much unaccounted for. Scarlet thought about how much she’d paid for on nights out, the two shopping trips she’d been on since her scratchcard win, and the many, many Ubers she’d taken pretty much everywhere. It was time to reign the spending in.

It was crazy how much confidence it was giving her, though. Even on the group chat Scarlet felt self-assured enough to throw out barbs every so often, the girls all responding with keyboard smashes and capitalised laughter and giving her a boost of serotonin. It had even made her feel more confident around Yvie. Scarlet felt weird about the whole Yvie thing. Now that she’d realised she liked her, she didn’t really know what to do about it. She knew she would do something, she promised herself, as if she ended up in a situation like Vanjie’s she would scream. Scarlet cast a glance to the girl beside her, frantically typing notes into her laptop and listening intently. Bored, Scarlet took her fluffy-topped pen and wrote on her notepad, pushing it Vanjie’s way.

Lunch after this?

She watched as Vanjie looked down at her writing, looked back up, then nodded once. Scarlet smiled, glad that she had something to look forward to. It had been a while since she’d had a catchup with Vanjie, and part of her was excited to see if there had been any progress made between her and Brooke. Scarlet then realised it was a little selfish of her to think that way and, realising she hadn’t confided in anyone about her crush on Yvie yet, she decided she’d let Vanjie in on her secret.

When the lecture finished up they decided they would go for lunch at the Mexican place in town. It was a slightly longer walk than anywhere on campus but Vanjie was good company, chatting away happily about something funny her Mum had done back home and distracting Scarlet from the cold weather. They eventually reached the restaurant and got sat at a table, despite the fact Scarlet could have stood under the heaters that were blasting by the entrance forever. She watched as Vanjie shrugged her huge coat off then leant forward.

“So, how’s your lovely flatmate?” Vanjie asked, Scarlet letting out a snort and rolling her eyes.

“Our oven’s broken. She’s saying I broke it,” she explained, Vanessa tilting her head with intrigue.

“Why? What did you do?”

“I don’t know. Used it to cook food,” Scarlet said, her laugh giving away her monotone voice and causing Vanjie to giggle too. “It’s exhausting living with her! She just hates me for no reason! I swear she’s going to turn up by my bed in the middle of the night with a knife and her pillow to smother me with.”

“But then she’d have no-one to blame for the shit that goes wrong in the flat.”

“True. If I’m ever found murdered, though, you know who it was,” Scarlet raised her eyebrows knowingly, Vanessa having to stop herself from laughing as a waitress arrived at their table and took their drinks orders. Vanessa ordered a Corona and Scarlet almost joined her, then realised that beer on a lunch break when she still had a lecture in the afternoon was risky. She got a blood orange San Pellegrino instead. As the waitress walked away, Scarlet continued. “How’s Silky and Akeria? I’ve not seen them since last Saturday.”

“They’re good. Akeria’s stressing about Masters applications, even though I keep telling her every uni is gonna be fallin’ over themselves to accept her. Silk is fine. She’s always fine. I think she’s made peace with the fact she’s probably going to get a 2:2.”

“Nothing wrong with a 2:2,” Scarlet shrugged, even though she knew that if she was on course for a 2:2 she’d be crying as if her life was over.

“That’s true. Degree’s a degree. Still gon’ cry like a baby if I don’t get a 2:1 though,” Vanessa frowned, brightening up as the waitress returned and put their drinks in front of them.

“You will,” Scarlet said. It hadn’t been a lie- even though she only saw Vanessa working towards part of her PPE degree, she always seemed on the ball with lecture notes, got good grades in her essays, and you could never shut her up in tutorials. The other girl still narrowed her eyes at her as she took a drink.

“You have to say that, though. You’re my friend,” Vanessa said, Scarlet brightening up at the validation of her friendship. She’d never known if Vanessa had liked her at first, but over the years they’d eventually settled into being comfortable with each other. Vanessa sighed. “I worked out that if I want a 2:1 I need to get above 65% in everything until the end of the year.”

“That’s doable!” Scarlet insisted, pouring her can into the glass in front of her. She frowned and shook her head. “Anyway, let’s not worry any more about uni. How’s Brooke Lynn?”

Vanessa slid down in her seat and covered her face with the menu. “I don’t know, bitch, ask her.”

“You know what I mean! How are things going? Any progress?”

Vanessa screwed up her face. “I mean, I don’t know. Kind of? Maybe? It’s so hard to tell with that bitch.”

“What’s the maybe?”

“So last Monday we went for a drink after we went to the library. We were just talkin’ and somehow…I don’t even know how we got onto this topic…we started talkin’ about how we were…y'know, like in bed.”

Scarlet let out a screech. “OH my God. Amazing. How is that a maybe in any way?!”

“Nah, well, you know,” Vanessa smiled bashfully, fanning herself with the menu which neither of them had so much as glanced at. “It started to get deep and then I did my classic ha ha ha what a big joke this is I’m definitely not takin’ this serious in any way thing I always do with her. I think I made it awkward, ‘cuz I’ve not seen her since then. I mean we’ve talked on the chat but…yeah.”

Scarlet pouted, feeling sorry for her friend. “Oh, Vanj, no. It won’t be that at all. You know her and Plastique have got their portfolios due next week, she’ll just be busy!”

Vanessa bit her lip, then smiled slowly. “How about if I organise a lil somethin’ to take her mind off her work, then?”

Scarlet took a sip of her drink. “You’re going to turn up to her flat wearing nothing but a massive bow playing The Stripper through your phone speaker.”

As Vanessa howled, Scarlet realised a little too late that someone had come to take their order. She asked for five more minutes, neither of them having looked at the menu yet and having only used it as a prop for embarrassment.

“No, bitch,” Vanessa wheezed, finally getting her breath back. “Let’s see if we can get her to come out tonight.”

Scarlet felt her brows pulling together involuntarily. “On a Wednesday? She’ll be too responsible.”

Vanessa sighed and gave the menu a cursory glance. “Couldn’t we at least try? I just need to know if I’ve made things awkward so I can go about trying to fix them. Although how the fuck I’d do that, I don’t know.”

“I guess you could put it on the chat?” Scarlet shrugged.

Gleefully, Vanessa bounced about in her chair and grabbed her phone decisively, immediately typing. She put it back face-down on the table almost as quickly as she’d picked it up. “It’s sent. Although now we’re running the risk of everyone being free apart from Brooke Lynn, and if I’m honest I really don’t have the energy to go out otherwise.”

“We’re getting old,” Scarlet shrugged, her eyes scanning over tostadas, taquitos and empanadas without really being able to focus on any of them. “Do you remember the days when you could manage two nights out back to back?”

“I remember the days I could manage two nights out in one night,” Vanessa laughed, running a hand through her hair and exhaling. “Scarlet, why am I nervous? Tell me why I’m nervous.”

“Because you’ve just orchestrated a night out with our whole friendship group just so you can see one member of it. Instead of, you know. Asking her on a date,” Scarlet smiled teasingly, Vanessa laughing in self-depreciation. It occured to Scarlet that she still hadn’t told Vanessa about Yvie. “That reminds me-”

Just then she was cut off as the waitress appeared again at their table. Scarlet couldn’t bear to send her away again so she quickly ordered some fish tacos and some sort of cheesy beany quesadilla she had no idea the other ingredients of. Vanessa rapidly fired off an order for a pulled chicken burrito and pork taquitos which, Scarlet could glean from a quick glance at the menu, seemed to be served with radioactive levels of spice. As the waitress walked away, Scarlet frowned.

“Are those taquitos not really spicy?”

“Meh. I don’t mind spice. Worst case scenario I’ll have to install scaffolding round my ass for the next three days after I eat ‘em,” Vanessa shrugged and then leaned forward, hardly giving time for Scarlet to laugh at what she’d just said. “You said ‘that reminds me’ after we were talkin’ about dates, what’s up with that?”

“Oh uh, nothing,” Scarlet smiled shyly as she picked at a bit of dripped candle wax on the tabletop. “Just that I’m joining you in the crushing-on-my-best-friend club for the foreseeable future.”

Vanessa’s face lit up. “What is this?!”

Scarlet felt cheeks flush red as she said it. “I…think I have a crush on Yvie.”

Vanessa let out a quick screech of delight, drawing the gaze of a dining couple sitting at the opposite side of the room. Hushing herself, she leant close to Scarlet and continued. “Oh my God! Bitch! I love this. This is amazing. Aw, you’d be so cute together! I knew you were touchy with each other but I always thought that was just how your friendship was.”

“It is how our friendship is!” Scarlet protested, then put her head in her hands to cover her cheeks as she smiled. “I just…realised I like being touchy with her a little too much to be friendly.”

“Oh, I got it. You wanna be touchy with her in a different way,” Vanessa winked suggestively, Scarlet squealing in mortification and both the girls ending up howling with laughter. As the laughter died down, Vanessa smiled. “Well, welcome to the world of crushing on a friend, boo. It’s amazing, electric, and largely horrific. And painful. I’m not selling this well.”

“It sounds slightly sadomasochistic.”

“That’s actually what you get if you Google it,” Vanessa nodded faux-seriously, then put on a funny, posh-sounding voice. “If you liked getting shocked by a disused electrical socket twenty-five times in a row, perhaps you’d like: crushing on your best friend!”

Scarlet laughed, then shot a glance down at her phone as it sat face-down on the table. “I’m kinda hoping Yvie comes out tonight too now.”

“Ooh! We should check the chat,” Vanessa said, pouncing on her phone and her face dropping as she looked. Scarlet opened her own to see what had been said.

FORD TRANSIT VANJIE: me n Scarlet wanna go out tonight who’s down

large incongruous silkworm spiced praline: BITCH ARE U CRAZY WE AINT FRESHERS ANY MORE

large incongruous silkworm spiced praline: I GOTTA DATE WITH BRADLEY WALSH AND WHOEVER THE CHASER IS TODAY

Akeria Sainsburys Bag for Life: Girl we all know The Chase starts at 5pm you gotta think of a better excuse

Akeria Sainsburys Bag for Life: Sorry boo I’m out

large incongruous silkworm spiced praline: BITCH BACK TO BACK EPS ON CHALLENGE TV FROM 7 THANK U NEXT

Akeria Sainsburys Bag for Life: Need to be at the library early if I wanna get that 1st

Kim Kardashian-West: Placement :((((((( sorry babyyy

Akeria Sainsburys Bag for Life: I’ll see yall at pres though

Akeria Sainsburys Bag for Life: I’m guessing they’re gonna be at ours

Okay Then: Sorry girls our portfolios are due in like 9 days

Okay Then: big celebrations after though!!

Dave the Laugh: i’d actually be down

Scarlet felt guilty as her heart gave a jump, Vanessa sitting dejectedly across from her. “Hey, chin up! She’s not replied yet.”

“If Plastique is sayin’ no, she’ll be a no too,” she jerked her mouth to the side in a pained attempt at a smile. “Your girl’s down though, that’s good!”

“Stop. She’s not my girl.”

“Yet,” Vanessa smiled, a glint of disappointment still present in her eyes. Just then, Scarlet’s phone lit up in her hand.

mose: I’m going to follow the tradition of my entire university career making poor life choices and say yeah I’d be up for a night out

Scarlet looked with anticipation across to Vanessa, whose eyes were wide with excitement. She didn’t seem to know that she had a beaming smile on her face, and Scarlet couldn’t help but let out a chuckle, happy for the girl opposite her. “See? Good news!”

“Oh my God. It’s gonna be me, you, Yvie and Brooke Lynn. Fuckin’ double date night out,” Vanessa’s eyes scrunched up as she laughed happily. Scarlet felt her pulse start racing, nerves taking hold of her already. She was excited, though, for some time with Yvie in a slightly smaller setting. She hadn’t grabbed a coffee or done anything with just her in a while, and even though this wasn’t the ideal setting, it was still an opportunity. Vanessa was back typing quickly into her phone, and Scarlet watched the group chat progress.

FORD TRANSIT VANJIE: yall suck apart from Yvie and BrookeLynn

FORD TRANSIT VANJIE: come to mine for 9 then bitches! Xoxoxoxo

Mose: See ya then boo

Scarlet turned over her phone and raised an eyebrow at Vanessa. “You’re her boo.”

“Yeah fuck y’all bitches, I’m Brooke Lynn’s lil’ ghost,” she smiled and gave her hands a quick clap together in excitement, Scarlet spluttering a laugh at her friend’s adorable reaction. Just then, their food arrived and got placed down in front of them.

“Oh hey, can I grab another Corona?” Vanessa asked, holding up her empty one. The waitress took it and nodded, and Vanessa gave Scarlet a guilty look. “I should really head to the library after this but I’mma go back home and nap, then spend the next four hours gettin’ ready. Fuck, I don’t even know how I’m gonna afford goin’ out tonight.”

Scarlet took a bite of a taco, then thought. Lunch was only going to come to about forty-ish pounds altogether, and really, what was that out of her winnings? She swallowed, looked to Vanessa, and smiled.  

“Hey. I’ll get us lunch,” she shrugged, shifting a little in her seat as Vanessa blinked at her.

“Serious? No, Scarlet, I can’t let you do that.”

“Honestly! My loan came in early,” she said, looking down at her plate as she lied. “Think of it as a celebratory, double-date-crush-night-out-whatever-the-fuck-this-is treat. And you can buy me a drink or something when we go out, call it even.”

As a waiter came by and placed another bottle in front of Vanessa, she gave a smile and raised it. “To coming out on the other side of tonight with girlfriends?”

Scarlet smiled as she clinked her glass against Vanessa’s beer. “Let’s not push it.”

The rest of her lunch with Vanessa passed by comfortably, Scarlet paying the bill when they were finished without a second thought and the girls saying goodbye with a hug and an excited squeal in anticipation of later on. Part of Scarlet wanted to head straight to the shops to look for something new to wear but she stopped herself, instead getting in an Uber and going back to the flat, the prospect of her returning to campus for her 3pm lecture growing thin. Turning the keys in her front door, she sighed when she heard loud music coming from Ra’Jah’s room. Scarlet had hoped she’d be out by now. Walking through to the living room to dump her shoes, coat and bag, she paused when she saw something on the messy, cluttered coffee table that she was sure hadn’t been there before.

It was a tiny, clear, plastic ziploc bag filled full of a white powder. Scarlet frowned as she picked it up, transferring the bag between her fingers and watching as the powder inside crumbled and broke up, the same sort of consistency as flour although slightly looser and whiter. The realisation of what she was holding suddenly hit her like a bus, nearly making her drop the bag. She stood silent for a couple of minutes, completely unsure of what to do. Then she heard the music in Ra’Jah’s room get turned up and that seemed to make her decision for her.

Storming back through into the hallway, Scarlet banged on her flatmate’s door. “Ra’Jah!”

The music got cut off and there was an eerie buzz of silence in the flat. The door in front of Scarlet swung open to reveal her flatmate, her face unimpressed. “Yes?”

Scarlet held up the bag, hoping it would elicit some emotion out of the other girl. It did not. “Can you not leave that shit lying around our flat?”

Ra’Jah smiled in amusement, showing a set of slightly uneven teeth. Scarlet felt her top lip curl up in a sneer. Ra'Jah wasn’t able to pull them off, not like Yvie with the cute gap she had between her front teeth. Fuck, was she really thinking of Yvie right now? Ra’Jah leant on the doorframe cockily. “What, a girl ain’t never seen cocaine before?”

“Of course I’ve seen it,” Scarlet lied, gripping the bag tight between her fingers. “I just don’t want the flat looking like a fucking crack den. I mean it’s not a potted plant, Ra’Jah, it’s a fucking class A drug. It’s not decorative.”

“Class A, ooh,” Ra’Jah mimicked mockingly, irritation washing over Scarlet. “Don’t shit yourself, bitch, it’s fine. I only put it down for, like, two seconds anyway. Just give it and I’ll put it somewhere safe.”

Scarlet went to pass it back to her, but something held her back. She looked at the powder again and a flash of thoughts flew through her head, of skinny, glamorous models and nightclub toilets and champagne. It was an illegal drug, and everything Scarlet had been brought up to believe told her it was fucking disgusting, and dangerous, and led to a spiral of addiction and debt. But still part of her was so insatiably curious, like she was addicted without even having tried it yet. She watched Ra’Jah’s expression change as Scarlet curled her fingers back. “Where’d you get it?”

“What is this, twenty fuckin’ questions?” her flatmate snapped back, rolling her eyes. “Just give me my narcotics, bitch.”

“Can I, um. I’ll buy it off you?” Scarlet stumbled out, causing Ra’Jah to look at her in disbelief.

“You want to buy cocaine?” she raised an eyebrow at her, speaking through a slight laugh. Scarlet’s hackles were up.

“Or give me the number of your dealer.”

Ra’Jah let out a small snort, shrugging her shoulders. “Ain’t any need to involve anyone else. Alright, that’s a gram. Give me sixty and it’s a deal.”

Scarlet felt her eyes widen involuntarily, Ra’Jah chuckling in response. “Girl, what did you think it was gonna be? Naomi Campbell snorts this shit for a reason, people use rolled up hundred dollar bills to snort this shit for a reason. It ain’t fuckin’ Cabbage Patch kids weed we talkin’ ‘bout here.”

Scarlet frowned and took out her phone, opening up her banking app. Just before she transferred the money, she looked at her flatmate suspiciously. Ra’Jah rolled her eyes.

“Look, I’m not taking you for a ride. I got it for fifty, a bitch wants to make a profit. Sixty is standard in some places. Others you’d be talkin’ seventy. Google it if you don’t believe me.”

“No, I believe you,” Scarlet simply said, hitting a button and just like that, sixty pounds flew out of her account. A nervous heartbeat felt entirely too fast and too loud in her body. Another hundred pounds gone.

“Thanks, bitch. This was great fun, maybe I’ll drop out and become a dealer,” Ra’Jah laughed, Scarlet saying nothing in reply as the door swung shut in her face. The bag seemed to make her right hand tingle, and a surge of nervous excitement shot through Scarlet like propane.

She got ready for the night ahead in a sort of daze, as the panic and the gravity of what she’d actually done began to sink in. She’d just bought a gram of cocaine for a night out. What the hell was she planning on doing with it? There was no way she’d be able to actually do any. Or was there? That was what Scarlet had always said about weed and now her and Yvie got high together all the time. Her pulse thrummed at her wrists when she thought about the other girl. Scarlet imagined bringing the small bag out in a toilet cubicle with her, watching her eyes grow wide, imagined her thinking holy shit, I never knew Scarlet was this type of girl at all. Imagined them both cutting it up with Scarlet’s bank card and snorting it, then hitting their high on the dancefloor, turning to her and letting Yvie lean in and kiss her in a haze of euphoria and lust.

Scarlet felt a throb of heat pulse between her legs, her doubts gone. This was a good decision.

Scarlet showed up to Vanessa’s flat only running a tiny bit late, ready with a bottle of vodka the size of her head and a couple of mixers in case any of the girls wanted to share. She got buzzed in quickly and was welcomed into the flat by Akeria who was looking a far cry from her usually-glamorous self, her hair piled on top of her head in a towel and a pair of pink flannel pyjamas on. Scarlet was shown through to their kitchen where she found Vanessa, Brooke and Yvie all sitting on the sofa or on chairs beside Silky who was also in her pyjamas and, just as she’d promised on the chat, was watching The Chase. The girls gave a small cry of delight as Scarlet walked in, Scarlet not missing the way Vanessa was sat on Brooke Lynn’s lap. Part of her prickled with jealousy, wishing that her and Yvie were in their place, but she didn’t mind too much. She was happy for Vanessa. Scarlet grabbed a glass, took a chair to sit in, and began pouring a drink as the girls continued to watch the TV.

“Low offer of minus four thousand pounds, high offer, please?”

“Fifty-one thousand pounds.”

“We’re watching The Chase,” Vanessa explained to Scarlet.

“I gathered.”

“If he takes the minus offer, I’m gonna reach through the TV and stab him,” Brooke said seriously, her face displeased.

“Nah, he’s gonna stick in the middle. I trust Nigel, 52, from Stockport,” Yvie drawled, taking a sip of her drink then smiling at Scarlet from her position on the chair beside her, reaching across and squeezing her hand. “Hey, girl, how are you?”

“I’m good, thanks,” she smiled shyly, giving Yvie’s hand a small squeeze back and admiring her crushed-velvet red dress. “You look good.”

Yvie momentarily looked as if she was about to say something cute in response when her eyes were suddenly ripped from Scarlet’s and back to the screen as the girls groaned loudly.

“He’s a fucking TRAITOR,” Silky yelled, launching a cushion at the TV. “Sheila brought back forty-five thousand for this asshole to take from it? NO MA’AM!”

“Well this is the most lit pres I’ve ever been to,” Scarlet deadpanned.

“I hate this motherfuckin’ game show. Silk, turn this shit off,” Vanessa rolled her eyes, her flatmate loudly complaining.

“It’s my fuckin’ flat too, hoe!”

“Yeah, some of us actually have to do work tomorrow,” Akeria piped up from her position at the oven, checking on whatever she’d put inside. “How come you’re out tonight anyway?”

Scarlet caught Vanessa’s eye and she just stopped herself from smiling. “Oh, you know. Sometimes you just fancy going out.”

“It’s called being spontaneous, Kiki. You should try it,” Brooke joined in as she brought both hands up around Vanessa’s waist, the other girl giving a happy sigh and Scarlet staring at them, jealousy burning under her skin. As the other girls bickered, Yvie turned to face her again.

“Hey. You alright?” she asked, concern etched on her face and making Scarlet’s heart swell up.

“No, yeah, I’m good!” she smiled, blinking and trying not to come out with the truth of I’m insanely jealous of how close and cuddly Brooke and Vanessa are being right now and I wish Silky would get up off the sofa so we can join them. Satisfied with her answer, Yvie smiled.

“That’s good. No sad allowed at pres,” she joked, then tapped her gently on the nose. “Also you’re not allowed to be upset, you’re, like, my favourite person. Don’t tell the others.”

Scarlet felt something akin to a tidal wave flood over her whole body. Boosted, she gave Yvie a small wink. “I won’t. I promise.”

Something behind Yvie’s eyes seemed taken-aback, but not in a negative way. Almost as if she hadn’t expected Scarlet to come back with something so flirty so quickly, and Scarlet had to hide her smile behind her hand when she saw Yvie’s cheeks turn slightly pink.

Two hours later, all of Scarlet’s vodka had been drank and the four girls had managed to navigate a drunk Uber ride and entry into one of the fanciest clubs in the city. Usually none of them would have been able to afford the entry fee, but Scarlet had paid the ten pounds for each of them without batting an eyelid. She probably should have cared, but Scarlet had hit that stage where the alcohol had her convinced that life was wonderful, she was invincible, and she would be young and rich forever. She laughed as she cast her eye around the small circle the girls had formed on the dancefloor. Vanessa was dancing, frankly, like a stripper, and Brooke seemed to be living for it, her hands on the other girl’s waist protectively. Yvie was bouncing and flailing about, completely intoxicated, and yelling along to whatever song was playing- Scarlet didn’t know it, but she didn’t really need to. Turning to Yvie, she grabbed her hands and laughed. Yvie looked at her curiously.

“You look like those things…those car lot things…they go like this in the wind,” Scarlet explained, suddenly demonstrating to Yvie and throwing her hands in the air. Yvie buckled over with laughter, her hands on her knees, and Scarlet was so pleased she’d made her laugh.

“Bitch you started doing the floss to Miami 2 Ibiza, shut the fuck up,” Yvie snorted, Scarlet howling beside her. Casting her eye again to Brooke and Vanjie, an idea planted itself in Scarlet’s head.

“Yvie, watch me dance like Vanessa,” she commanded, suddenly feeling emboldened enough to throw her arms around Yvie’s neck and push her body up against hers. She ran her hands through the other girl’s hair messily, Yvie’s eyes half-lidded as she laughed gently at her.

“Girl…messing up my hair,” she muttered, Scarlet smiling back brazenly.

“It was messed up when you did it,” she smiled cheekily, tapping Yvie on the nose like she’d done to her earlier. Without giving her a chance to respond, Scarlet dropped down onto the floor in a move she hoped would make her look irresistible. Instead, she toppled over and ended up flat on her back against the sticky floor, the crowd parting around her like the Red Sea. She looked up to see Yvie laughing hysterically, holding both her hands out to her. Scarlet took them gratefully and she was pulled up, beside Yvie again only this time with just a fraction of the confidence. Yvie must have seen her pouting as Scarlet felt her strong arms being wrapped around her in a hug.

“Aw baby, I like your dancing the way it is,” she slurred into her ear, a tingle shooting down Scarlet’s spine at the proximity of Yvie’s lips to her skin. Scarlet was about to do something, say something, when she suddenly felt herself being wrenched away from Yvie and dancing beside Vanessa, who was gripping her arm. Scarlet was confused until Vanessa leaned in close to her and yelled above the music.

“I got an idea,” she said, her voice thick with alcohol. “Gonna make them both jealous.”

Scarlet’s eyes widened, an electric shock running through her veins as Vanessa pulled her close, then tilted her head up and kissed her. There was little to no hesitation and Scarlet felt herself kissing back, feeling the eyes of the other girls on them both. Vanessa kissed as if she’d known Scarlet’s lips her whole life, hot and passionate, and it briefly ran through Scarlet’s mind that Vanessa probably had a certain Canadian blonde on her mind as she was doing it. She desperately wanted to open her eyes, to look over to Yvie to see if she even cared. Show over, Vanessa pulled away, beaming and laughing, and Scarlet felt herself laugh back. In her drunk state, the situation was funny- the pair of them getting with each other to try to make their two other friends jealous. It appeared to have worked, certainly in Scarlet’s case, as Yvie took her hand and pulled her back, an odd sort of smile on her face that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She shouted over the music at Scarlet, something that she couldn’t quite hear.

“What?”

Yvie raised her voice a little more. “I didn’t know you liked Vanessa like that!”

Scarlet laughed. “I don’t!”

Yvie gave her a funny look, a multitude of questions no doubt running around her head. Scarlet felt her confidence peak and she leaned in close to Yvie’s ear, Yvie’s arms snaking round her waist instinctively. “You jealous, girl?”

She felt Yvie’s body shake in a laugh Scarlet could tell was affected. “No…bitch.”

Scarlet leant her head on her shoulder and spoke against her neck. “Hey, 'f you’re lucky it might be you next time.”

She pressed a tiny kiss against Yvie’s skin and pulled away laughing, Yvie looking momentarily shaken then joining in with Scarlet’s laughter. Scarlet ran her tongue over her teeth. Fucking yes. Suddenly, she remembered the tiny bag she had in her bra. She caught the attention of the other girls and shouted over the music again. “Guys. Come pee with me.”

She began to make her way through the crowd to the toilets, hearing Vanessa and Yvie laugh at Brooke singing a parody of Come Fly With Me but replacing the word “fly” with “pee”. They eventually all managed to cram into a cubicle together, Scarlet counting her blessings that there was no toilet attendant on duty who would almost definitely have bundled them all out. The girls looked shocked as Scarlet turned around from locking the door and produced the bag from her bra.

“Is anyone down?” she asked lightly, Brooke letting out a nervous laugh beside her. Vanessa flipped her hair over her shoulder.

“What the fuck is that,” Yvie asked, her face set in a hesitant, concerned smile. Scarlet shrugged.

“It’s exactly what it looks like.”

Vanessa spoke first with a blase shrug. “Yeah, bitch, let’s do it.”

Scarlet smiled happily, part of her quite surprised at how readily Vanessa agreed to the whole thing. Her eyes darted to Yvie, who was still looking at the bag cautiously. Obviously noticing her eyes on her, Yvie gave her a look that Scarlet couldn’t quite decipher, then screwed her face up. “So this is a thing we all do now?”

Vanessa narrowed her eyes at her. “Aw Jesus, Yvie, it’s one key in a club on a night out, we’re not all about to turn into fuckin’ junkies.”

Scarlet’s confidence had been given a knock. She hesitantly caught Yvie’s eye. “I mean, you don’t have to, I just thought-”

“No, girl, I’ll do some. ’M not a fucking pussy,” she frowned, taking a breath that seemed to be shaky and turning to Brooke, who was still looking with wide eyes at Scarlet. “Brooke, you doing this?”

It occurred to Scarlet that this was the first time she’d ever seen Brooke look anything other than completely sure of herself. She was laughing awkwardly, almost nervously. Scarlet watched as Vanessa put a gentle hand on her arm. “You don’t have to, baby.”

“No, well, y'know me. Try anything once,” she slurred, leaning into Vanessa’s touch. “Okay, fuck, let’s do this shit.”

Scarlet moved to empty the bag out onto the toilet cistern, but Vanessa put out a hand to stop her. “Woah, girl, the fuck you doin’? Just take a key, ain’t no need for all that fuckin’ credit card shit.”

Scarlet frowned at her, confused in her drunken state. “Keys?”

Vanessa seemed to shrink back into herself as she saw all three girls looking at her intently, wondering how she knew so much about the process. Wordlessly, she gestured for the baggie and produced her keys from her gold clutch bag. She calmly opened the small plastic bag and fished into it with a single key, balancing some of the powder on the length of it. With a short glance up at the girls, she pressed a finger to one nostril and gave a quick, harsh sniff with the other. As quickly as it had appeared, the cocaine was gone. Vanessa rubbed quickly at her nose, sniffing awkwardly.

“Alright, who’s next?” she questioned. Scarlet could feel Yvie’s eyes on her.

“Well since Scarlet brought it, she should go next,” she said, something off to her tone and her stare that Scarlet couldn’t quite pinpoint. Scarlet shrugged stiffly, Vanessa reaching back into the bag with the key and holding some out for her. The butterflies in her stomach almost overwhelming, Scarlet leaned forward and mimicked what Vanessa had done. The first thing that she felt was the all-encompassing smell of petrol, followed by a horrific stinging at the back of her nose and mouth, Scarlet briefly being reminded of jumping into swimming pools when she was little and water shooting up her nose. She gave a cough and a big, follow-up sniff, Vanessa chuckling lightly.

Well, that just happened.

Nervously thrilled, Scarlet felt the butterflies in her stomach dissipate as she watched Vanessa hold a key out to Yvie. Yvie frowned and shook her head.

“Nah. Changed my mind. I’m out,” she said darkly, shooting Scarlet a glare that made her feel like a reprimanded child.

“Come on, Yvie, it’s fine,” Scarlet offered, the other girl scrunching up her face.

“No. It’s not happening. You guys have fun.”

Scarlet felt dejected. She wished she knew what she’d done wrong. Trying to push her feelings aside, Scarlet watched as Vanessa turned the key to Brooke. Brooke was looking from the key to the lock of the toilet stall, nervous. Vanessa reached up and touched a lock of her hair.

“You don’t have to, Brooky.”

“No, I will, I will. I’m just nervous. And excited,” she stammered out, Scarlet thinking she couldn’t have judged the girls’ reaction to this entire situation less accurately if she’d tried.

“You can rub it on your gums if you don’t wanna snort it,” Vanessa explained, part of Scarlet wishing she’d told her that before her turn. Brooke tilted her head, considering, then wet her finger, reached into the bag and took some. Then she put her finger back in her mouth and maneuvered it around, her eyes on Vanessa.

“You tryna flirt, boo?” the other girl questioned, her eyes half-lidded as she locked eyes with her.

Brooke let out a laugh. “Bitch I’m trying to take fucking drugs!”

Vanessa, Brooke and Scarlet burst out laughing, Yvie shushing them.

“Right, let’s go, junkies,” she said irritably. Scarlet frowned, sad that she seemed to have upset Yvie in some way. An idea came to her as they left the cubicle and wandered past the judgemental line of waiting girls.

“I’m gonna get us a bottle of champagne,” Scarlet decided, sure for a second that she saw Yvie roll her eyes, but she wasn’t too sure.

“Vanjie, does it look obvious we’ve been doing drugs?” Scarlet heard Brooke yell over the music, Vanessa laughing gently.

“Everyone here is on drugs, baby. Just chill. It’ll kick in in a minute,” she winked, taking both of Brooke’s hands and jumping a little on the dancefloor.

Scarlet watched as Brooke’s eyes darted to a security camera on the ceiling. “Guys. They can see us. They know.”

“Brooke, relax, nobody gives a shit,” Yvie rolled her eyes. Brooke turned to Scarlet, panic filling her eyes.

“Scarlet, what was in that? Is it all okay, yeah? It’s not got anything through it?”

“Oh, good. Well done, bitch, are you seeing this?” Yvie glared at Scarlet before she had a chance to reply to Brooke. “Brooke! It’s fine! You’re okay!”

The music seemed as if it had been turned up louder. Scarlet scrunched her eyes closed. “Brooke, it’s fine, okay? I’m going to the bar, who wants something?”

“Ugh, of course you are,” she thought she heard Yvie mutter. Suddenly irritated, Scarlet whipped around to face her.

“And what is that meant to mean, huh?” she snapped, Yvie’s eyes widening a little at being challenged.

“You, bitch! What the fuck is up with you these days?”

“Nothing’s up with me? What is this?!” Scarlet cried, a couple of heads turning their way then slowly turning back. She could feel her heart hammering in her chest as if she’d just drank fifty Red Bulls back to back, although she was unable to tell if this was the effect of the drugs or just how annoyed she was.

“Something’s off with you. Fucking…cocaine, champagne, this constant…buying everything for everyone like we’re all charity cases, behaving like you’re a fucking extra off Gossip Girl? This isn’t you, Scarlet!” Yvie yelled back, suddenly grasping her by the wrists and giving her a shake. “The normal Scarlet would have shit herself at the thought of doing a key, the normal Scarlet would want to go to Levels and pay a pound for entry instead of going here to dance around with a bunch of fucking Love Island rejects!”

Yvie’s words stung harshly at Scarlet’s heart. She knew the other girl could sometimes grow argumentative when she was drunk, but Scarlet had never had it directed at her. It wasn’t nice. Scarlet felt her tone switch a little as she spoke. “Yvie, you’re being kind of a dick.”

Yvie gave a laugh of disbelief. “Well breaking fucking news, Scarlet! So are you! I mean do you have any idea how shitty it is to see your best friend grow into a total asshole over the space of two weeks?”

“Guys,” Vanessa suddenly interrupted out of nowhere, and Scarlet had no idea how long they’d been fighting or at what volume. “Me and Brooke are gonna go. She’s not doing well.”

Yvie looked at Vanessa, panicked. She cast Scarlet one last withering look before dashing through the crowd, presumably to pick up their jackets. Scarlet felt a bubble of upset prick at her throat. She turned to Vanessa instead. “What’s happened?”

“She thinks she’s having a heart attack. I mean, she’s not, it’s just the drugs, but I’m still worried about her,” she frowned, biting her lip. Vanessa jerked a thumb back to where Yvie had slinked off. “The fuck was that all about?”

Scarlet shook her head silently, not trusting herself to speak unless she began to cry. She didn’t understand how she’d managed to fuck everything up so badly. Vanessa saw her upset and pulled her in for a quick hug.

“Baby. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”

The four of them got their coats and joined the taxi queue in a blur. Yvie wouldn’t even look her way, and Scarlet didn’t trust herself to try to speak to her in case she managed to make things even worse. She seemed more concerned about Brooke anyway, who was chattering away, her teeth clicking together in the cold night air.

“Is the taxi driver going to know? Will he just drive us to the police station and hand us in? Do you think he’ll phone the police? What if the police were to just come here right now and say they’re giving random drug tests to everyone in the line? What if-”

“Oh my God, what if you shut the fuck up?” Yvie snapped, Brooke looking taken-aback. Vanessa wrapped her arms around Brooke’s waist protectively.

“Brooky. It’s alright. The police aren’t coming, the taxi driver isn’t gonna turn us in. We’re going back to your flat and we’ll get you into bed safe. You’ve got us, nothing’s gonna happen to you.”

Brooke let out a sound that was halfway between a sigh and a sob. She buried her face in Vanessa’s hair. “I love you, V’nessa.”

Scarlet saw something shut down behind Vanessa’s eyes as she squeezed Brooke tightly. “I love you too, baby.”

Scarlet couldn’t stop herself from casting her eyes across to Yvie, selfishly longing. If she hadn’t fucked everything up, maybe something could have happened. Now, though, it looked as if she’d have to piece their friendship back together, never mind anything more.

The line moved up, and they found themselves at the front. Brooke and Vanessa spilled in, then Yvie. Scarlet went to join them when she found the door getting pulled across in her face. Yvie scowled at her. “No. You’re not getting in with us. I don’t even want to speak to you right now.”

Scarlet could hear Vanessa protesting. “Yvie, for fuck’s sake-”

“You’re not coming with us, bitch. Make your own damn way home,” she reiterated, slamming the door shut.

As the taxi sped away, Scarlet couldn’t fix the slack-jawed look of complete hurt she could feel on her face. As the reality of what had just happened sank in, she felt her face crumple like a paper bag as she began to cry, stood on her own at the taxi rank in the small hours of the morning, and all she could do was wait.

#rpdr fanfiction #tw drug and alcohol use

[inevitably-johnlocked]

Another Top 10 Fave Fics

I’m not sure I’ve used the right option…I don’t submit thingys on pages often I always feel a bother.

I’m off sick at the moment whilst the NHS try and figure out what’s going on and I’ve been off for like almost THREE MONTHS and I can’t even do much as I’ve got no energy.

ANYWAYS…

Whats a fix you’ve read recently that your obsessed with? Or just really made your soul happy/smile wide?

I needs the good sh*t to read!!!

(submitted by bluetree76)

———————-

Hi Lovely *HUGS*

Ugh, I’m so sorry for the delay; Sorry you’re not doing well, and I only hope that by now you’ve been able to get some answers!

Oh gosh, asking me to pick “fics I’m obsessed with” is dangerous because I love WAY too many fics, LOL, and I’m currently reading some new long fics, so I haven’t been re-reading anything in a little while! So let’s do this: I’ll give you some links to some of my past “fave” lists, and on this post, I’ll give you one of those cheesy “ANOTHER xx fave fics” things, because I have over 300 fics on my fave fics list XD, so I’ve a lot to go through, LOL. Sooooooo I hope you enjoy what I’ve picked out for you today :) I’ll try to keep today’s picks for stories I’ve read / re-read recently, and none are repeats of the fics on the bolded link below (Sept 18′s Fave Fic list) :)

—-

ANOTHER  TOP 10 FAVE FICS (June 2019)

See also:

Top 20 Fave 40K+ w. Fics (April 2017 )

Ten Fave Short Johnlock Fics (Easy Reads April 2018)

25 Fave Johnlock One Shots (April 2018)

Top 10 Fave Fics (September 2018)

Top 30 Read-Again Fics (March 2019) 

Top 20 Bookmarks of 2018 (March 2019)

The Wisteria Tree by SilentAuror (E, 29,773 w. || Post-S3, Emotional Love Making, Amnesia/Memory Loss, Sherlock Loves John So Much, Sherlock POV, Romance, Angst with Happy Ending, First Times, Hurt/Comfort, Est. Rel., Retirement) – Sherlock wakes up from a month-long coma only to discover that he has no memory of the previous six years to his own shock as well as John’s…

Love or What You Will by miss_frankenstein (T, 31,987 w. || College/Uni AU || Professor John, Ph.D Student Sherlock, Pining John, Poetry, Falling in Love / Slow Burn, Light Angst, Happy Ending) – John is an English professor who specializes in War and Post-War Literature and Sherlock is the brilliant yet impossible Ph.D. student assigned to be his TA because no one in the Chemistry Department is willing to put up with him. And - somewhere between Waugh and Plath, e-mails and takeaway, novels and villanelles - they fall in love.

The Boy Who Drank Stars by kinklock (E, 36,157 w. || Howl’s Moving Castle AU || Witches and Wizards, Slow Burn, Magic, Jealous John, Happy Ending, Bed Sharing) – “I’m looking for a castle,” John informed the scarecrow. “A moving one.”Except that, as it turned out, it was not a moving one at all.

A Week is Just Seven Days Isn’t It? by scifigrl47 (T, 39,906 w. || Humour, Friendship/Bromance, Stroppy Sherlock, Undercover/Army John, Texting, Pining-ish Sherlock, John Whump) – When John heads overseas for a week, Sherlock’s forced to fend for himself. It goes about as well as anyone could have anticipated. Which is to say, very, very poorly. Don’t worry, things’ll be fine in just seven days.

Spare Change by Ermerness (E, 51,966 w. || Rich Sherlock AU, Virgin Sherlock, First Time, Alternate First Meeting) – The Holmes family is one of the richest and most powerful in England. Sherlock spends his time flying around the world on the family’s private jet drinking a lot and shopping at expensive boutiques as a way of trying to alleviate his endless boredom. His mother decides it’s time he settles down with someone powerful, wealthy and well connected. John Watson happens to be none of those things.

A Hundred Crimson Sols by elldotsee (E, 55,536 w. || Astronauts AU || Mars Exploration / Space Travel, Slow Burn, Shy Sherlock, Scientist Sherlock / Biomed Engineer John, Alternating POV, Mutual Pining, UST, Angst with Happy Ending, Domestic Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Injuries, Suicidal Ideation, Zero-G Sex) – Will Holmes is a chemical researcher recognized widely for his contributions to the new Mars exploration program. Thanks to his ground-breaking developments, the IMMC (International Mars Mission Corporation) is one step closer to Martian colonization. Will and his team of scientists are headed out on the first of three manned missions before the first group of settlers arrive. Three days before launch, one of the crew has to be replaced. Will panics because…new people. The replacement is of course one John Watson, biomedical engineer and space hottie who was pretty sure he had retired from actual space exploration and was now content to work in the nice, quiet research lab. Can the crew survive this TOTALLY ROUTINE trip? Will they be able to endure each other for the looooooong trip in close quarters? Gonna be a wild ride… prepare for blast off. Part 1 of the SpaceBois go to Space series

The Vapor Variant by 88thParallel (CanadaHolm) (M, 72,684 w. || Post-THoB, John Whump, Protective Sherlock, Guilty Sherlock, Anxious/Worried Sherlock, Virgin Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD John, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Suspense, Virus, Sickfic, Big Brother Mycroft) – They stood face to face in the middle of a clearing. The dim light of the moon barely allowed Sherlock to see the glassy terror in John’s eyes and the sweat that glistened off his forehead. His nose was bleeding again, blood dripping in a slow stream from his right nostril. They were both gasping for air, John’s eyes locked on Sherlock’s. There was no recognition there, just wild animal fear. Time stood still for an eternal few seconds, and Sherlock took a shaky breath. “John—”Spell broken, John spun and bolted back into the woods. Still heaving for air, Sherlock took off after him.

A Further Sea by i_ship_an_armada & ShinySherlock (E, 125,492 w. || Historical Pirates AU || Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Doctor John / Pirate Captain Sherlock, Sailing, UST / RST, Masturbation, Action / Adventure, Mild Angst & Peril, Romance, Shaving, Molly/Janine, Bottomlock, Hand / Blow Jobs, Past Drug Use, Slow Burn, Mild Violence, Happy Ending) – Here be a tale of adventure for both body and soul, but beware if ye be not of stout heart, for this be piratelock, ya savvy? Luckless ship’s surgeon John Watson takes a chance, and finds himself eye to eye with The Ghost, the scourge of the seven seas and a definite thorn in the side of the blaggard, James Moriarty. But when John finds there’s more to this most cunning pirate than be meetin’ the eye, he has to choose… is it a pirate’s life for him?

Midnight Blue Serenity by BeautifulFiction (E, 151,907 w. || Friends to Lovers, Gay Bar / For a Case, Drugs, Pining, Case Fic, UST) – When Sherlock infiltrates a club in order to track down a serial killer, his altered appearance is enough to make John question his assumption that Sherlock is beyond his reach. However, is he the only one who appreciates his flatmate’s charms, or is Sherlock at risk of becoming the next victim?

Gimme Shelter by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John (E, 159,368 w. || 70′s Surfer AU || Period Typical Homophobia, Hawaii, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Professional Surfers, Gay John / Sherlock, Angst with Happy Ending, John was a Sailor, Misunderstandings) – All John Watson wants is the feeling of a freshly waxed surfboard under his feet and the hot California sun baking down onto his back. To finally go pro in the newly formed world of professional surfing and leave the dark memories of his past behind him as he rips across the face of a towering blue barrel. To lounge beside the beach bonfire every evening with an ice cold beer tucked into the cool sand beside him and listen to Pink Floyd and the Doors while the saltwater dries in his sun bleached hair. That’s all he wants, that is, until the hot young phenom taking Oahu and the Hawaiian shores by storm steps up next to him in the sand in the second round of the 1976 International Surf Competition.

#bluetree76 #steph replies #johnlock fic recs #my fic recs #fave fics #top 10 #submission #send me things

[delicrieux]

pairing: kane x f!mc

fandom: playchoices, the elementalists

summary: after the confrontational and scandalous tea party, (name) finds herself in a wonderland-esque place when her life had just started becoming boring again.

warnings: uh... age gap i guess?? 

words: 3k (i snapped)

author’s note: jfc this took so long. hours of work. and a few different versions (one was set in a labyrinth but i decided to go with this instead). hope you like it! tagged all the people that wanted. you can view this as kane totally manipulating the mc ..he probably is tbh. anyway, this will suffice till TE is back in a few weeks. i regret nothing for stanning my eccentric mustache man.

tags: @tilliesmarshall - @somegdchoices - @lastfirstcupcake - @peach-space - @magicpijama

feedback is always appreciated xoxo

masterlist | buy me coffee☕

It had been a terrible week full to the brim with nothing but stress and worry. To make it all seemingly worse, none of her friends bore their gentleness with her, and their jubilant smiles, daydream gazes, bell like laughter was washed away by autumn rain. There must be something in the water, they all mutely concluded one cloudy morning during breakfast, with their lips sealed and eyes sunken into fresh cups of coffee. Yet it is as if they all shared a telepathic line, acutely aware of what their seatmate was thinking: Why is no one talking?

In silence they had all decided that this is simply one of those weeks where nothing goes right, and the only salvation is solitude. Even the ever social Shreya seemed to count her words, rejoicing once she had reached their limit. And Aster, ever the tender soul, wore less blooming flowers as days slipped into nights, appearing a bit haunted and even ill. (Name), too, was hardly any better. She is the Sun, the brightest star in the sky, but her light had reduced into nothing but a pale, sickly glow. There must be something in the air, they had mussed wide awake at midnight, listening to the wind howling outside their bedrooms. Nevertheless hope poked and prodded their heads with an impatient thought: Surely this will all blow over and chaos shall resume as it has, never to be disturbed again…right?

It is late again; the evening is inky, full of stars. (Name) sits beside her writing desk with her head in her hands, feeling herself slip into madness once the words in her textbook swim again. She swallows a fit of frustration that wanted to escape with a curse. This will not do. It would appear that being detached from Pend Pals would grant more time to focus on studies, though it has been the last thing on her mind and now she has an exam the next day and she knows absolutely nothing. There is a secret within her heart; a secret that no one knows and cannot know, because she realises just how silly it is. She feels as if the walls are closing in on her; that this room is too small, too crowded, though she is, and has been for most of the week, completely alone.

A knock on the door makes her jolt, and raspy she squeaks, “Come in!” though she fills with dread at the mere prospect of talking to anyone. The visitor waits for no other confirmation and the door opens to reveal her twin, displeased as she always is, glaring down at her.

“What’s wrong with you?”

She blinks, taken aback by the hostile question “My… I’m just…not feeling that well.” She explains clumsily, “Is there something you need? Because I really have to study.”

“Sure you do. Mind telling the truth now?”

“What?”

“Don’t ‘what’ me. I know you. Everyone’s been acting weird. You especially. You’re not as…” She gazes her up and down, searching for the right word, “-dramatic as you used to be.”

“It’s just stress.”

“If it was just stress then you’d be crying that you are literally dying.” Atlas crosses her arms over her chest, her displeasure momentarily melting into concern before she fixes her stern façade again,” So…talk to me. Or whatever. I can’t let you be out of it when Kane’s on the loose. Even if you pulled the stupidest move imaginable and tried to stop Alma from killing him.”

Irritation seizes her breath and she grits her teeth, “Yeah so I got a little heated, sorry for wanting to settle things peacefully. He’s literally the only one that gave me any sort of answers. And –just-ugh! What is with you and constantly being on your guard? Fighting? Can’t I just be a normal student and worry about normal things? Like exams?”

“Normal was thrown out the window when our mother—“

“You know, for someone who hates her so much, you sure don’t shut up about her.”

Atlas pales, speechless. Before she can fire back, (Name) adds, “Just leave me alone. Try to focus on your studies. Because the only danger we’ll be facing soon is Harrington’s stupidly difficult questions.” She turns back to the book, “Goodnight, Atlas.”

Of course Atlas would notice the change – she had always considered herself an outsider, even now, but being rejected by her sister is too much, and the hurt in her eyes betrays it. (Name) can’t see it, the glister of angry tears, but she can feel it; can feel Atlas’ magick pulse about her, unruly. The door shuts and silence falls over her bedroom, as if Atlas was never here in the first place. (Name) sighs. Perhaps she should not have said that. She does not know what came over her. This is all simply too much.

The witching hour has long passed and (Name) haunts the hallways of Penderghast. Strange illusions play on the walls; the air is cool, fresh, much better than the stuffy, perfumed atmosphere of the dorms. Here she feels a bit better. She wonders if there are any professors roaming about this late, and if there are, will she be in trouble if they catch her. There is a sharp ring in her ear that distracts her, one she had tried again and again to get rid of by shutting her eyes, hitting her head, though all it did is worsen the ache and vertigo nearly took her.

A playful gust of wind brushes the back of her neck and she shivers, eyes lighting up from the all too familiar magick. Kane. Her hearts leaps in her chest, though is it from fright or excitement or both she has no clue. At the very end of the hallway she notes an open door, the only open door, from which moonlight spills onto the floor. She moves as if enchanted, enraptured by curiosity, suddenly eager to speak, to run, to rejoice, when just this morning she had barely gotten out of bed.

She enters the Hall of Mirrors and her reflection meets her in a thousand ornate forms. His magick lingers here as if a personal invitation. She finds its source easily, and turns to her side with a grin. It almost feels odd to smile after frowning for the whole week. The tall mirror’s surface ripples as if water. No signs of danger, or perhaps she misses all of them, or she does sense it and embraces it, because she feels the same exuberant energy she always does return to her, as if she’s soaking it all in like a sponge. With a spring in her step she jumps through the mirror, not caring if she is to be eaten by sharks a moment later.

The mirror turns solid behind her, and, slowly, the door to the Hall of Mirrors shuts with a ghastly creak.

She feels a rush of verve pass through her, nearly taking her breath with it. The world is a distortion that clears into a detailed, vibrant scene. The forest oozes in dazing scents; The sky is candy, luminous - shy pinks, spry lemons, calm blues – held by trees so tall she cannot see their tops; flowers, some as big as she is, some as small as the ant crawling on her shoelace, grow and radiate in gentle rainbow colours; birds chirp their melodic songs. It is warm here, humid, as if in a magickal rainforest.

There is no paved path, and with her magick she swiftly parts bushes and flowers alike into a makeshift archway. What is this place? She wonders, taking in the scenery with every step, Am I really somewhere or…in an illusion? A white rabbit darts across her path and startled she jumps. She senses him before she sees him, and with her heart in her throat she cautiously waves her hand and the trees bend into a walkway, revealing a pocket of large, closed space, littered with ruins of old buildings and chest pieces that the forest had claimed as their own ages ago.

“Apologies, my dear (Name).”  The wind carries his voice to her in a velvety whisper, “I would have come to greet you sooner, but I was not sure if it was you.” Kane tips his hat in curtsy, a smile stretching on his lips as he eyes her curiously, “I am, however, absolutely delighted to see you again.” In a grand gesture he motions to the area, “Well? Do you like it? I was thinking of all sorts of places to show you after our little tea party. I’m hoping no…distractions this time, however.”

“It’s definitely beautiful,” She agrees. He is visibly delighted, “And…no distractions. I came alone.”

“Wonderful. You were the only one invited.”

There is just something about him that is deliberately strange. He has a child-like exuberance about him, which can become extremely chaotic if not contained. But she hardly minds chaos. In fact, after their last encounter, she grew to enjoy it. Who cares if this is an illusion? What does it matter if the sky falls on her head? Who is to say this is not just a dream? Why spoil the fun with all this thinking, Atlas is the thinker, she is the doer. Two sisters can’t be too much alike – that would be unbelievably dull.

The same tender smile does not leave his face, and with one last longing look, he spins on his heel, his first somewhat contained excitement now spurring into arrogance, “Join me!” He exclaims, jutting his elbow for her to take, not once worrying she might not.

(Name) glides to him as if enchanted, wrapping her arm around his. Hints of his cologne hit her nose with a dreamful inhale; the fabric of his jacket is silky and smooth. They fall into step, she too distracted by his closeness to realise how her magick reacts to his: it dances, sways, traces behind them like a cape.

“I was anxious you might have gotten into trouble for defending me.” He says, catching her gaze, “Though I am incredibly grateful.”

She gulps, tries to think about her answer, yet his eyes – what a peculiar colour – are much too beguiling, “Well…There were…No fights, per se.” She hums, quickly glancing away, “We just all…stopped talking.”

“That is quite unfortunate. Though, it is as I told you, (Name). I will be your friend even when no one else will.”

His words bring calmness and a sense of security, however odd that might be, and she smiles to herself, hoping he would not notice. But he does. “Don’t suppose you want to dance with Wood Nymphs? Smoke cigars with the Caterpillar? Cause a massive storm?”

“Wood Nymphs? Cater—You want to destroy this place?

“I’m simply suggesting activities, my dear (Name). I want you to enjoy yourself. I want you to be happy.”

They lock eyes for a long moment, and her heart begins to beat just a little faster.

“But I am.” She admits in a whisper, feeling rose bloom on her cheeks, “I…haven’t had this much fun since…forever.”

“And you have no idea how long is forever if you have no one to share it with.”

There is a pause before she speaks, “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“What do you truly want, Kane?” He perks at the mention of his name, quirks his lips upwards.

“The same thing you want. I want to have fun. Your friends and…colleagues pin me for the evil type. I admit I have some…questionable motives at times, but I only have one objective. To have fun. And where is more fun than on Earth? Illusions lose their charm when there is no one to look at them. And this world can become quite lonesome after some time.”

And the activities commenced, all minus the storm. They had first stumbled upon Wood Nymphs, twirling in circles, donned in silk and cashmere robes. One lounged on a branch high up, playing the golden harp. The melody echoed along with the chirp of birds. The dancing Nymphs soon rushed to them, pulling (Name) out of his grasp with giggles and sweet whispers. She looked at Kane as if to ask if it was alright to join them. He merely winked. A grin broke out on her face as she let the women spin her as she joined their strange dance. But as she glided, stumbled, and watched, trying to catch onto the next move, she kept stealing glances at him, finding him greatly amused at her expense, and his magick playing with the saplings which jittered happily.

Everything was unexplainably loud: the joyful tune, the rustling of leafs, the breaths of Nymphs and their sing-song laughter, the faraway sound of dipping water… And the heat was finally getting to her, and once she spun her foot got caught on a root and she tumbled forward, straight into his chest. He did not even budge, simply caught her with ease.

“Careful now.” He warned, regaled, his lips quirking into a devil-like smile, “How am I to take you dancing if you keep falling over?”

Shakily she apologised, not failing to notice his hands resting on the sides of her waist. But before she could even form a coherent sentence, the Nymphs had stolen her back from him once again, and this time he let her go with laughter. Blushed and flustered, she tried to avoid looking back at him, though the idea was tempting.

When they escaped the Nymphs, they trotted along, and (Name) made sure to show off her crown of flowers the women had placed on her head. They moved with no direction in mind, this forest a labyrinth of secrets. But just as she figured they had taken a wrong path to nowhere, they found a glass garden, big and mossy, yet through the glass she saw butterflies sleeping in flowerbeds. They entered and it was even hotter here, crowded. The pollen emitted peculiar scents: from strawberries, to chocolate, to something pleasant but light-headed. She coughed when she breathed it all in. Suddenly, everything was funny.

And yes, perhaps there was a small storm once they stumbled upon a body of water – oh dear, when had he lost his hat? – and perhaps she was too giddy to control her power, and the leaves which she magickally moulded into makeshift boats shattered along with half of the pond.

But the sky was still candy, still luminous. She isn’t sure if it was before or after the water incident that she realised this place is forever. Her life back at Penderghast felt like a millennia ago, dull, and grey, and full of responsibilities, but here she was free to do as she pleases. There is so much to explore that she knows even if she inspected every inch of this forest that she still would miss something. The possibilities here are endless, and summer here, too.

Before she knew she was back at the begging, at the old mirror which’s surface rippled once more. And fear abruptly struck her and she took a cautious step back, letting go if his hand that she, unknowingly, was holding.

“You don’t want to go back?” He questions, brows raised, pretending to be surprised by her reluctance. She shakes her head.

“I don’t want to leave you.” She admits before she can stop herself, and she feels so stupid for her outburst. He grins, all too pleased, yet the look in his eyes is tender. His hand lands on her cheek, his fingers rough against her sensitive skin.

“The first time I saw your face, I knew it.” She leans into his touch, “I knew there is something undeniably special about you. I am…glad you feel the same.”

“I knew it too.” She whispers, “I just…there were…People trying to convince me otherwise.”

“Do they still matter?”

“No.”

“Good. I do not enjoy sharing.”

And it is finally so painfully clear. The secret that had been heavy in her chest burst free and blooms into awe and love. Love? Fascination, adoration, one may choose which ever word one may, but there is no denying the obvious. This feeling is greater than her, greater than him, and the whole world, every accident, every smile, every painful memory was meant to lead her to this moment. Her eyes gleam with fondness and he knows exactly what she is thinking, because he is thinking it, too. All it takes is one gentle pull and his lips connect with her in a delicious, forbidden kiss that leaves her breathless.

It is over much too soon, and when they part their fingers intertwine.

“Write to me?” She asks.

“I am not sure that would be wise.”

She smirks, “Wise? Who cares about wise? Where’s the fun in wise?”

“Ah, a woman after my own heart.”

“Don’t I already have it?”

“And here I thought you had a shy disposition. I’m proven wrong. It is you who is bad for me, not vice versa.”

She takes a few steps towards the mirror, “You sure you don’t want to come with me?”

“Oh, I do. But I can’t.”

“Because of Alma?”

“And the rest of the faculty, yes.”

“Then I’ll make sure to raise a bit of chaos for you.”

He lands a kiss on her knuckles and finally lets go, watching with a pleased smile as she winks and jumps through the mirror. The world is a delirious contortion once again before all falls into the stale image of the Hall of Mirrors. The rising sun is peaking over the horizon, its rays slowly dissolving the crown on her head, which evaporates into gold and orange smoke. She is shivering from the nights events.

Yet she can’t help herself from smiling. Wide awake she wanders back to the dorms, entering the shared lounge and finding Shreya, sleepy, her hair a mess, stopping by her bedroom door to glance at her, “Morning?” Shreya says, voice hoarse from sleep.

(Name) beams, “Mornin!”

“You’re…up early?”

(Name) hums, “Yeah, I’ve been walking around campus trying to clear my head. Anyway, better catch up on some zs. See you at breakfast?”

Shreya only nods, stumbling into her bedroom and shutting the door behind her. (Name) wonders will the table be silent again. With her so…energetic, that is hardly an option. She will talk everyone’s ears off.

And no one will suspect a thing.

thank you for reading! ❤

#the elementalists #playchoices #pixelberry #choices: the stories you play #choices imagine #the elementalists 2 #kane #kane x mc #te #te 2 #the elementalists x mc #te atlas #shreya mistry #zeph #becket harrington #griffin langley #aster #playchoices fanfic #imagine #imagines #one shot #fluff #oof #tHE WORK IVE PUT INTO THIS SMH WISH I STUDIED INSTEAD #anyway yall are sleeping on te #which is really disappointing #cuz its legit one of pbs best books #yes i know im biased lol #fanfiction #who knew constructing wonderland was so difficult

[thewritewolf]

Inseparable Chapter 18: A Ticking Clock

Ladybug and Chat Noir pay a visit to Master Fu. 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

@ladynoirjuly2019

Enjoy!

Read on Ao3

Adrien closed the door behind him and set his bag on his bed with a sigh. It hadn’t taken long to find Marinette after the battle. Despite knowing she was alright since he had seen her race off as Ladybug, he caught her in a hug when he saw her running up towards him. Maybe that had been the right move - after all, she had seemed confused when he wasn’t still hiding in the bathroom. Or maybe it hadn’t been a good choice - she stiffened up when he held her, and she couldn’t meet his eyes the entire rest of the field trip. She could barely speak afterwards. Did he really bother her that much…?

“What was that, kid?!”

Speaking of being bothered… Adrien took a seat in his computer chair and waited for Plagg to berate him.

“I know… I couldn’t do it.”

“Yeah. I saw that much.” Plagg was floating in front of him, paws crossed and tail flicking back and forth. “I thought you said that today was going to be the day? Reporter girl even managed to do most of the work for you and got the two of you alone. You were all the way there and chickened out at the last second.”

Adrien rubbed at his face with one hand. “Trust me, I get that. I just-” He threw his hands up. “I don’t know! I’m scared, okay? I just want to enjoy what we have for a little while longer before I accidentally mess it up like everything else.”

There was silence as the words hung heavy in the air. “Is that what you think, kid? That she’ll care about you any less?”

More silence. A defeated nod from Adrien.

The quiet was broken with Plagg’s cackling. “Wow. I don’t even know what to say. Except maybe that you’re just plain wrong, but we both know that, don’t we?”

“Hey, wait a minute-”

“No. Listen kid - Does Ladybug care about Chat Noir?”

“I mean, yeah, I guess, but-”

“And does Marinette care about Adrien?”

“Sure, probably, but if you’d just-”

“Then why in the name of ME would anything be any different just because those two people she cares about are actually one person?”

Adrien opened his mouth to reply, but couldn’t find any words to refute his kwami. Instead he groaned and leaned back. “You’re right, but that doesn’t make this any easier.”

“Oh no. A superhero will have to do something slightly difficult. How awful.” Plagg scoffed. “Anyway, you’ve got plenty of opportunities coming up, between school and all those akumas. If we can get to Fu’s next week with this out of the way, then it’ll be great for all of us.”

“I’ll try to bare my soul to Marinette within your precious time frame.” Adrien glared at his kwami, but his attention was already elsewhere.

“That’s great, kid. Now get me some camembert. Dealing with you has been almost as tiring as that akuma fight.”

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

Her eyes darted between the project she’d been working on all afternoon and the clock. It was late, late enough that her parents would be soundly asleep and on a school day she definitely would be too. There wasn’t much time left before Marinette had to meet up with Chat Noir for their meeting with Master Fu and she had to decide now if she was going to attempt to get this next patch done or leave it here for now.

With a sigh, Marinette sat down her fabric scissors and collapsed onto her chaise.

“I’m proud of you, Marinette. It’s very wise to know when to carry on and when is best stop,” Tikki chirped as she appeared in front of her.

“Thanks, Tikki. But that means I don’t have anything else to do while we wait.”

“Well… we could talk, if you want.” Tikki settled down on the chair beside her. “Is there anything on your mind?”

“Chat has been acting weird, I guess?”

“That’s very true. We don’t usually see him so… timid or shy. What do you think is going on with him?”

Marinette rolled her eyes. “Knowing my kitty, he is probably plotting to ask me to something again. Maybe he has a rooftop picnic or something in mind.” She glanced outside as a cold wind howled. A shiver shook her as she reminded herself she’d be outside in that before too long. “Although hopefully not.”

“So you aren’t too worried?”

“If it isn’t that, then what else can I do for him? Our hands are kind of tied with the whole secret identities thing.” Marinette shook her head sadly. “No, I’ll do my best to be here for him, but there is only so much comfort I can give.”

“It wasn’t that long ago that you two were trading little facts about yourselves. What happened with that?”

Marinette squirmed in place. She was aware that they’d stopped doing it and she had tried to tell herself that it didn’t bother her. But there was a part of her that was disappointed. Chat Noir often felt like he was larger than life, an exaggeration of a person. But little details like his favorite dish? They made him feel more real, more grounded. Maybe that was why she was scared - anything could happen in their fight. She’d already had to see him get erased or turned against her. What would happen if she knew who exactly was under the mask? Knew exactly who she had failed to protect?

She was startled out of her thoughts by a tiny paw patting the side of her head.

“I know it all seems scary, Marinette. But I’m here for you, one hundred percent. And I know that Chat Noir is with you completely. The best we can do is face things together, right?”

Marinette nodded before her eyes widened as she remembered to check the clock. Only five minutes until the meeting started.

“Tikki, spots on!”

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

“Ah, greetings to both of you,” Master Fu said as Marinette and Chat Noir entered the room together. It had been close, but she made it. Apparently Chat had also been running behind since they landed at their usual meet up at practically the same time.

They both gave awkward bows as they hurried to their spots. In front of each of them was already a cup of hot tea.

“I suspect that you have questions for me?”

Marinette shared a look with Chat Noir, who shrugged. How did he know…?

“Yes, master. There has been some weird stuff happening with our powers lately.” Marinette took a hesitant sip of her tea. Delicious as always.

Master Fu raised his eyebrows, but there was a glint of amusement in his tone. “Oh? What sort of ‘weird stuff’?”

“She purred, I got cold, she could see and hear pretty well. Not to mention the weird empathy, thought sharing… stuff that happens sometimes.” Chat Noir raised a finger for each point, but Master Fu seemed unconcerned as he raised his cup to his face. Chat’s cat ears perked up. “Oh! And there was that time we swapped who could do Cataclysm and Lucky Charm. Then that last akuma when we did something weird with Cataclysm.”

Fu jerked back in surprise. “The central abilities of your miraculous were swapped?”

“Yes, master,” they replied simultaneously.

“I see. This is excellent news!” Master Fu folded his hands together and smiled. “You two are moving quicker than I had anticipated.”

“This… is supposed to happen?” Marinette asked in confusion. She didn’t see how it could be helpful to have their powers randomly swap for no discernable reason. Although… the destruction orb had been useful.

“You need not worry. This is perfectly natural.” Master Fu stood and retrieved a tablet from the shelf. He flipped through the familiar pictures of the book they’d briefly stolen from Gabriel before settling on an illustration of the Ladybug and Black Cat miraculous. “It is believed that, in the beginning, the kwamis of creation and destruction were one and the same - the kwami of reality.”

“But they aren’t anymore,” Chat mused, as he cupped his chin. “When did they get split? And what does this have to do with us now?”

“Patience, young one. The kwami of reality was to be bound into one miraculous five thousand years ago, but their power was too great. The kwami was split into two parts - creation and destruction - and bound to separate miraculous. Even then, the legendary sorcerer only barely survived. But this origin is unique among all the miraculous.”

He flipped to the next page on the screen, showing another illustration. This one was of a person glowing with energy, the earrings and black cat ring worn simultaneously.

“These miraculous are the only ones that can be safely worn by one person at once.”

“Huh? Are the others really that dangerous?”

“Alone, no. But the miraculous were designed to be worn one at a time. Two at once can overwhelm an individual and cause terrible damage. To themselves, to the people around them, sometimes even to the miraculous.”

Chat sighed. “And there goes my dreams of Dragon Chat…”

Marinette elbowed him in the side. “Be serious!” Despite her words, there was a faint smile at her lips.

“The other unique quality is the power sharing you have mentioned. Essentially, once there is a powerful tie between the users, the miraculous begin reconnecting as well. Energy can be shared between them - minor quirks of those powers are often first, like with cat and ladybug tendencies. But this shared energy has incredibly versatile potential, culminating in the ultimate ability of the two - mastery over reality itself.”

There was silence as the two processed what Master Fu was saying. Eventually Chat Noir spoke up.

“So… a wish?”

Master Fu pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes, Chat Noir. A wish.” He fixed them each with a stern look. “But do not rush to that skill - it requires an immense amount of training to achieve and even then should only be used sparingly. Toying with reality often has dire consequences, although it is necessary at times as a final resort. There are some problems that can only be repaired with a wish.”

“I think I understand.” Marinette rubbed one of her earrings between her fingers. She narrowed her eyes in thought. “You said the kwami were bound to the miraculous. Was that by choice?”

“The kwami are benevolent beings who had yearned to assist mankind since the beginning. The sorcerer merely convinced them that the miraculous was the best way to achieve this.”

“But why?” Marinette tilted her head, remembering the events of Style Queen and her team up with Plagg. “The kwami seem plenty powerful by themselves.”

“Your question holds the answer: The kwami are powerful. Too powerful. The miraculous acts as a filter so that they do not harm the world around them by accident.” Master Fu frowned and stared at Chat Noir - or, more specifically, his ring. “Hiccups in that design have lead to… accidents.” He shook himself out of his memories. “Which reminds me. Hawkmoth has been clawing at these restraints for some time now.”

“What makes you say that?” Marinette ignored the spear of panic that pierced her heart. The idea of her nemesis breaking those filters worried her immensely.

“His akumas have grown more and more powerful, all the while becoming less and less cooperative. More often than not, the akumas turn on their master. Besides the obvious reasons, Hawkmoth dismantling these restrictions can have devastating consequences. At best, the miraculous gets broken, which is something that is not easily fixed. At worst… he gets the power he so craves. More than he could ever hope to handle.”

Marinette shared a look with Chat Noir and was pleased to find the steely determination in his eyes. “We will do everything it takes to defeat Hawkmoth before that can happen.”

“I am glad. For now, the best we can do - short of discovering his identity - is to hone your newfound abilities. I am certain that mastery of them will prove vital in the coming battles.”

With that, they spent the remainder of their time in meditation and the fine manipulation of energy. Once they had a handle on where to find their opposite power, it became easier to draw on it, however crudely they did it. The real difficulty came from their physical reaction to that power. Marinette quickly became nauseous using the power of the black cat, while Chat Noir became exhausted. Master Fu assured them that once they got used to the energy, these side effects would fade away.

It was in the earliest hours of the day that they finally left, Marinette wanting nothing more than to go home and sleep in. But she didn’t make a few steps out the door before Chat Noir had snagged her wrist.

“Um, m’lady? Can we… talk?” His ears were flat to his head and he struggled to meet her eyes. The poor boy was struggling.

She remembered her talks with Tikki. “If this is a romantic thing, Chat, can we please not-”

“No, no, it isn’t like that, I promise. But this is something that I need to tell you…” He looked around theatrically. “...Away from any prying eyes and ears.”

She sighed, already yearning for her warm bed. “Alright, Chat. Lead the way.”

#Miraculous Ladybug #LadynoirJuly2019 #Marinette Dupain-Cheng #Adrien Agreste #Chat Noir #Ladybug #Ladynoir #Plagg #Tikki #Master Fu #ml fanfiction #my writing #Inseparable

[eturni]

The world is ending (but my whole world is you)

Based entirely from this amazing, heartbreaking art by @millerizo

https://millerizo.tumblr.com/post/186388494906/could-you-say-it-again-for-me-angel-hi-please

It was 10 minutes until the end of the world:

And Crowley was fussing over his appearance, stomach tight with nerves he’d deny until his last breath. This was an extraordinarily long time for an immortal being whose corporation didn’t actually need to breathe.

It was also 8 months, 3 weeks and 6 days since Armageddo-Not-Today-Thank-You. Crowley had wasted no time in getting back on the ‘our side, run away with me, anything for you angel’ horse and as such was due to pick Aziraphale up for dinner at a small sushi restaurant the other favoured. It didn’t hurt that the place also had excellent sake.

Crowley was raising an eyebrow at himself in the mirror and trying to decide if he should leave his belt as it was or let it sit casually askew when something insidious prickled its way up the back of his neck. It settled into the back of his brain with an almost snakelike hiss. It was the same sense of unease that had drawn him to the Bastille, forced him bodily into a church in the war, led him desperately towards a burning bookshop.

He was in his car, phone in hand calling Aziraphale in a space of time too quick for a human’s mind to register. The tightness in his stomach from before was now the knot of some terrible beast twisting over itself and doing its best to turn into a clawing, mind numbing panic. This felt too familiar. Too soon. Crowley ruthlessly pushed back against it, tried to think of other things even as the phone continued to ring unanswered. Panic roared and thrashed as it tried to rise in his throat and Crowley only pushed down harder. There was no reason for it. He was being paranoid. But there’d been fire everywhere.

He set the phone ringing again and thought of how fine Aziraphale would definitely be. The better things that had happened in the Bentley.

Read at AO3  https://archiveofourown.org/works/19979650 or

  Aziraphale’s grip was white knuckled around the console of the Bentley as some poor soul on the street just barely managed a miraculous leap back onto the pavement away from the speeding vehicle.

Crowley grinned at him from behind dark glasses, not bothering to really watch the road. The Bentley knew better than to stray off to road, after all. For all of the fuss about his driving Aziraphale had rarely opted to walk rather than being driven around.

Aziraphale turned to him and his grin only grew when the angel bit his lip nervously, watching the flesh trapped between teeth. “Crowley please watch the road.” He begged. Crowley rolled his eyes but did turn front and centre. “I love you but you  do  go too fast for me.” The angel sighed with relief.

Crowley almost rear-ended the car in front. “What?!”

“Eyes on the road Crowley!”

“ Ssssay that again, angel.”

“What? Oh, yes, I’m sorry. I know how much you hate me talking about your speeding habits.” Aziraphale pursed his lips, fussing at his hands in his lap.

“No… The other thing angel.” Crowley pressed, taking his foot off the pedal just a little. Give both of them some breathing room as his heart pounded in his head.

“Ah, yes. I do love you.” Aziraphale smiled perhaps a little nervously, turning the full, soft force of it on the demon.

  He had to pull over until he figured out how to speak again.

It was 3 minutes until the end of the world.

Crowley screeched the Bentley to a stop in the spot that was always miraculously clear when he arrived. There was no raging inferno, no crime scene. No sign of anything out of place. Crowley wished that it did anything to calm the desperate animal trying to claw its way up through his throat.

The shop was closed. This was not unusual. It opened easily under Crowley’s hand. This was only mildly confusing for the door that had been fairly certain it was locked but was also used to being confused when this particular occult being approached.

Crowley slammed the door closed behind him. “Aziraphale? Bit early, you ready?” He called out, willing his voice not to waver.

Everything looked fine, perfectly in place. Books still in absolutely no discernible order, furniture still ridiculously tartan and well worn and spotless. But there was the sense of something cold and ethereal here, not the normal warmth of his angel. It was something that shouldn’t be leaving that unease that Crowley never, ever felt in Aziraphale’s shop. This was one of the safest places in existence for him. This was where he was invariably happiest. He distractedly ran a hand over one of the sofas as he headed towards the back room.

  Crowley was laid back, head resting in Aziraphale’s lap as the angel ran deft, comforting fingers through his hair. He was pleasantly buzzed from good food and better wine but he was, as always, more warm and off guard just for the fact of the other’s undivided attention on him.

“Hey angel?”

“Hmm?” Aziraphale blinked back to reality from where he’d completely lost himself. Looking at Crowley. It made the demon’s chest constrict with warmth.

“Could you say that thing again?”

“I love you.” Crowley expected a beaming smile, or perhaps one of Aziraphale’s more devious smirks if he was going to use the evidence of him being soft against him later. Instead the smile was warm, with the confidence of millennia of love and understanding.

  Crowley could feel the heat on his face and the absolutely stupid lovesick smile he knew he must have. But what did it matter? Alone in the shop with Aziraphale and no sides left to speak of everyone else could go hang.

“Again.” He whispered.

“I love you.” The smile turned bright and affectionate.

“Again!” The demon demanded biting his lips together and trying to hide a delight that wouldn’t be contained.

“I love you!” Aziraphale declared, pushing up Crowley’s glasses so that he could look into his over bright eyes.

“One last time?” Crowley reached up and placed a tentative hand to his angel’s cheek, revelling in the warmth there.

“Crowley, as many times as you want. I” Aziraphale leaned in, kissing at the snake tattoo “love” his lips moved along Crowley’s jaw, enjoying the slight shiver he got in return. “you.” Aziraphale pulled Crowley closer still, letting their lips meet in a lazy kiss that knew it had the privilege of all the time in the world on it’s side.

It was 2 and a half minutes until the end of the world.

Crowley paused on the threshold to the back room, throat closing up as the howling of the panic in him overcame his brain’s attempts to process the scene in front of him. The window was shattered, a few books strewn across the floor where they’d been toppled for their position as fingers scrambled for purchase.

And there, in the midst of it, Aziraphale on the floor, eyes glassy with pain barely seeing as Crowley entered the room, rushing to his side.

“Aziraphale? What happened?  Shit  what’s going on?” He quickly looked over the angel, hands trembling so much he could barely grab his jacket enough to push it out of the way.

Aziraphale whimpered in pain, teeth trying to grit against it. His hand came up, slow and uncertain, and pressed up against his ribs.

Crowley desperately took Aziraphale’s hand in his, squeezing it between them and feeling sick as he carefully pulled it away. There was a small hole there, just below the heart, steadily leaking blood that wasn’t nearly as celestial looking as it should.

“Shit, okay. I’m going to fix this.” Crowley croaked, lacing his fingers firmly with Aziraphale’s and squeezing, though he didn’t know who he was comforting more.

 Fingers lacing with fingers. A faint squeeze out in the open, in St James’ park, just because he can now.

  Crowley and Aziraphale sat at the same park bench they always haunted, watching the world pass by with all the indifference of any couple who couldn’t see anything outside of the two of them. Aziraphale had moved first, always a shock, and taken his hand, shuffling close enough that Crowley could feel the heat from shoulder to hip to knee right down his right side. He had to bite down on his tongue to not grin.

“Could you say it again?” He asked, shuffling until he was all angles again but never breaking the contact of their hands.

“I love you.” Aziraphale smiled, bringing their twinned hands up to brush a kiss against Crowley’s fingers.

It was 2 minutes until the end of the world.

Crowley took in a deep, shaking breath and snapped his fingers, demonic energy surging in the air.

Aziraphale let out a cry of pain, blood bubbling up through the wound as something sparked under the flesh with cold, Heavenly light.

Crowley almost scrambled back but his body wouldn’t let him move away from his angel, even if it blinded him. “No, no, no. What’s wrong? What happened? What do I  do ?” The demon could quickly feel all traces of composure leaving him, blood rushing away from his face so quickly he thought his corporation might faint on him.

He felt a gentle squeeze of his hand, too soft, and looked up to the angel’s face, surprised to find the image shimmering with the prickle behind his eyes. “My dear” the voice had a wet wheeze that made Crowley feel like the floor had dropped out from under him. Like Falling but worse. “I think this is it.”

“No, you can’t. They won’t give you another body.”

“Feels mortal. Feels… more.” Aziraphale struggled to get enough breath into the body to speak.

Crowley felt similar. “ No. ” He demanded, grip too tight on Aziraphale’s hand but the other didn’t even grimace.

“It’s down to the soul. Gabriel.” Aziraphale wheezed and Crowley thought he was going to throw up. Or pass out. Or burn everything around him.

What could he even do against something protected from his miracles?

Anathema. The witch wasn’t truly ethereal or occult. Silly girl had to have something. He reached into his pocket, hand slick with blood and fumbled to unlock his phone with a shaking hand. He didn’t dare remove the other from his angel’s? Anathema was suddenly in his contacts, a number his phone shouldn’t know. It was one that Aziraphale’s phone knew, however. And despite the generational gap it did what it could to make sure that Crowley got exactly what he needed. Aziraphale had kept in quite close contact with the others after Armagedidn’t after all.

 Aziraphale was stood in the back room on the ancient phone that Crowley swore was just backwards enough to be coming back into fashion with hipsters. He gave Crowley a quick, welcoming wave as he asked about some new divining ritual or something.

  Crowley wasn’t listening, he was grinning deviously at his angel from across the room. “Say it again for me.”

  Aziraphale glowered at the demon, mouthing his name over the top of the receiver as though scandalised. It didn’t mask the pleased glint in his angel’s eyes.

“You said, any time I needed it.” He leaned against the bookshelf nearest to him with his hip cocked out at an angle designed to show he was challenging Aziraphale.

  The angel sighed as though completely put out. “I love you.” It was no less thrilling the hundredth time than it had been the first. “Hmm? Oh no, not you Anathema. Just a particularly clingy...” He trailed off, looking down at the phone in his hand wryly. “Why yes, just that actually.”

It was less than a minute until the end of the world.

Aziraphale’s breaths were coming shallower and Crowley was biting back a scream when the line finally picked up. “Yes! Angel, stay with me! Anathema, what do you do with a magically treated weapon? It’s lodged in there and I can’t heal him!”

“What? Is that Crowley? What’s-”

Crowley’s wings flared out of his back as he lost most semblances of control, desperate to do anything to protect his angel. “No time!” He hissed, desperately. “How do I get it out? Or neutralise it? He’s bleeding out!”

“I don’t know. I’ll look through what I have. What’s happening?” Anathema finally sounded worried enough for Crowley. He disregarded anything that wasn’t an answer for him.

“Move fast! And you stay with me. You’re not going anywhere.” His voice landed somewhere between a snarl and a hiss. His eyes stung, the heat of tears over his cheeks burning like holy water.

Aziraphale looked up at him and even beyond the cloud of pain Crowley could see the unmistakable undertone of pity there. Of a deep sorrow. “Not enough… time.” He sighed out.

Crowley bit his cheek hard enough to draw blood. “No! Stay with me! I… say it again. You promised.” There was the faint edge of hysteria and Crowley couldn’t find it in him to care.

Aziraphale’s lips twitched up in the best smile he could manage and he reached up, slow and painful, to touch Crowley’s cheek. The demon gripped hold of it, pressed it against the wetness of his cheek. “I love you.” The sound was barely there, like being passed through a sea of stars to reach him.

Crowley’s wings wrenched with a sob that racked his whole body. “I love you too. You have to stay.” He begged, watching with terror as the faint light behind Aziraphale’s eyes dimmed further and further.

“Move faster!” He roared, not even sure where the phone was any more as he clung to Aziraphale’s hand in his. As the angel lost the strength to hold it on his own.

It went limp in his hand and the noise that whined from the pit of Crowley’s soul wasn’t human. “Aziraphale, no. Say it again.” He clutched at the hand in his, tears dripping through the space between them. The silence that answered him was somehow louder than a hurricane in his own head.

“Please say it again, I’m  begging  you-”

The world ended inside the circle of his arms and Crowley couldn’t even find the breath to scream.

#good omens #fic #Ineffable Husbands

[studentville-struggles]

The Law of Wind

Inspired by this post on @hgk477  

Platonic!Tony x reader, a smidge of Loki x reader

Summary: The God of Lies spots yours, could this possibly end well?

Words: 2,023

Being friends with the Avengers was easy, lying about yourself in order to maintain said friendship was not.  

You had met Tony in the waiting room of your therapist's office. Now normally the waiting rooms were incredibly quiet and being Iron Man, world superhero, as well as Tony Stark, global superstar and millionaire, you figured he probably had things set up so he could go straight through to an office, rather than wait and deal with people staring or even asking questions. That day, however, both therapists were running incredibly behind schedule and he was patiently waiting in the waiting room next to you. After a half hour or so, he struck up a conversation with you, trying to calm the nerves of waiting for so long. They may try and make waiting rooms calming, but opening up your life to some random person for an hour a week wasn’t exactly an experience you looked forward to. 

 After that day, you saw Tony around the waiting room a little more often, your friendship pretty limited to comments such as "Distraction plan for today?” and “Thought I’d read some Iron Man erotic fan fiction, see what she thinks of it?” before heading to your respective sessions, the just so happened to be scheduled for the same times.

After a couple of months of this generic small talk and joking around, you started going for coffee, enjoying the mutual understanding of not always wanting to talk but the company can be nice, especially after a heavy therapy session. Who knew having a therapy neighbour would be such a good thing?  

Eventually, he introduced you to the rest of the avenger's lot, having become close enough friends with Tony that he trusted you among everyone. Whilst they welcomed you with open arms, there was still an element of wariness, which you couldn’t blame them for. As the weeks went by, you grew closer to them, joining them for movie nights, or occasionally showing face at one of Tony’s parties. You even had them over for dinner one night, somehow all squeezing into your small apartment. You didn’t always know when they were away on missions, but the times you did, you couldn’t help but worry. On quiet evenings you could be found, sat on your balcony, whispering your worries and hopes for them into the night, you felt better knowing you had at least done something.

It wasn’t until they had Loki move in at the tower that your lie, which you argued wasn’t really a lie, it was more of an omission, started to catch up with you. You had just been introduced to him one movie night, a strange look flashed across his face, but like the master of disguise he is, it was covered so quickly, you barely recognised it was there. Shortly after, Sam came wandering in complaining about how it was so windy outside that he kept getting blown off course on his little night flying exercise. Whilst everyone was messing with him, telling him it wasn’t the wind and that he just can’t fly straight, or that his wings need fixing, you sat quietly shaking your head. Something Loki picked up on.

“I think our guest disagrees with you all” Attention is certainly not what you were asking for in this situation.  

“No, no, ignore me.” For once, please, you thought to yourself.

“Nah Y/N, please add an insult to Sam’s already damaged ego.” Bucky said, always happy to bicker with Sam.

“Or come to my defence, Loki did say she was disagreeing with you.” Sam added, the last part clearly aimed at Bucky.  

You shook your head, this time hoping you don’t have to say something.  

“Y/N please, what were you going to say, or what were you thinking?” You always found it hard to say no to Tony.  

“Just that everyone knows you shouldn’t get in the way when the wind is howling.” Please just think I’m weird, please don’t push it. Even if I am saying something that is basic law of wind.

Everyone was staring with a confused look on their faces, everyone but Loki that is. Loki was smirking, happy that his suspicions, currently, seemed to be true.  

“Why? None of us knew that so do enlighten us.” Sassy Bucky was both terrifying and attractive.  

“The ghosts are passing through, you should always leave them be, lest you aggravate them.” Again, blanks stares.  

Natasha was the first to speak. “Cute story.” She was curt but left it be, which you were thankful for, hopefully the conversation would soon move on. Unfortunately, there was no such luck for you.

“It’s not a story you know.” You stared at him, panic all over your face, questioning why of all times, he had to speak up now?

“Pardon?” Tony was the confused one now. Loki wasn’t paying him any attention now though. He moved and sat on the coffee table directly in front of you.  

“What else do you know about the wind?” He asked, wanting to further confirm his suspicions.

“Not much” You muttered quietly, really wishing they would all move on from this. You looked to Tony for help, feeling very uncomfortable with where this was headed. You couldn’t help but feel that Loki knew.

“Alright Reindeer Games, that’s enough leaver Y/N alone.” Tony said, coming to your rescue.

“No.” Loki responded flatly. “If my suspicions are correct, I have been waiting hundreds of years to meet someone like her.” Well, you thought, this definitely isn’t going to end well.  

The room was silent now, Loki’s statement shocking and confusing everyone else in the room. Loki himself hadn’t stopped looking at you the entire time.  

“Tell me.” He said slowly.

“Tell you what?” You whispered quietly. You could feel the frustration in him rising, Wanda, whispered to Tony, telling him he may want to move back a bit.  

“Tell me.” Loki repeated an edge in his voice this time.  

“I don’t kn-” Before you could even finish, Loki stood abruptly, his legs pushing the coffee table back as he did so.  

“You know damn well what I want you to say!” He shouted down at you, is frustration starting to bubble at the surface. Tony stepped forward to intervene, still not sure why Loki was being so rude, but before he could say anything, your emotions got the better of you, you blamed it on having someone with Loki’s magic so close.

“Leave it!” You shouted back, the emotion in your voice being matched by your energy, the windows in the room shattering at the sudden energy pulse. You turned running to the door to leave, realising what had happened.  

Loki wouldn’t let that happen though, grabbing your arm to stop you as you neared the door. “Stay.” he said, loud enough that everyone could hear his words, but still soft enough to be calm. Your arm warmed significantly at his touch, you could feel his magic. “I did not mean to frighten you, I only wanted a response and you gave me that. I will not harm you, I give you my word.”  

You were still shaking with the sudden emotional outburst, Loki proximity and grasp on your arm not helping either. Fear was clear all over your face, guilt starting to replace it as Tony came over.  

“Y/N” Tony whispered, his voice full of disbelief. “What just happened? Why have you never said anything?” You could see tears in his eyes, you had been one of the very few people he had let in recently, and you had broken his trust.  

Before you could respond though, Steve placed a hand on Tony’s back, he was clearly in Captain America mode, the relaxed nature you saw early totally gone. 

 “I think we need to have a chat. Shall we head to a meeting room?” Steve asked rhetorically.

“There is no such need. The living room will suffice, you need not treat her like a threat.” Loki calmly responded, defending you having just aggravated you a mere minute earlier.  

Once everyone had settled back down again, Loki calmly waved towards the windows, the glass floating back into place in the windows at his command. Instead of the light-hearted atmosphere that had been present earlier in the evening, the feeling now was tense, Steve ready with his shield should you be deemed a threat needing to be detained.  

“So.” Steve started, a hard edge in his voice. “Y/N, Loki, who wants to explain what the hell is going on?”  

“She’s a child of Skaði and Njord.”  

“Why do those sound worryingly Asgardian?” Funny you should say that Steve.

“Skaði was Asgardian.”  

“Fantastic. So, she related to you then Loki, given you’re the God of lies and all.” Tony’s harsh words hurt more than he knew, silent tears ran down your cheeks.  

“No. Though we both have Asgardian and Jotun roots. You cannot blame her for not revealing her Goddess status. It is not in her to be so egotistical as to brag about it.”  

“Sure. What do you do then alien lady?” Tony twisted the knife once more.  

“Wind and nature, somewhat similar to my parents.” Finally, you spoke up, grateful for Loki’s defence against you.  

“If you are actually a Goddess, why have you been living on Earth for so long?” Steve asked, still unconvinced.  

“Have you seen the state of your beloved earth?” Loki snarked back.

Glancing at Loki, a small smile on your lips, you turn to Steve. “Sibling difficulties, I’m sure you understand having met both Loki and Thor. My issues surrounding predicting fortunes left them feeling a little too entitled, so I came here to work on myself and generally help sort a few things out here. I promise you I mean no harm here.”

“No alien armies coming to take over then?”

“None.” Steve seemed to be relatively relaxed by this.  

After a relatively long, somewhat awkward pause, Sam spoke up once more.

“So, uhh, what were you saying about the wind earlier?” You smiled in response, Loki laughed.  

“Might as well inform them of the Law of Wind Y/N.”

“Alright then, but take note.” At your word, Sam and Rhodey began scurrying around looking for pen and paper, before settling down once more, looking up at you expectantly.

To Loki, it was almost as though you revealed who you were really, you visibly relaxed and became almost ethereal. To Tony, it was as if you became someone new, you took on a new persona, so soft yet powerful, your fear and anxiety from earlier totally gone. He could feel himself relaxing just listening to you.

“I already said about howling winds, the ghosts are passing through and you should leave them be.” The boys nodded, writing it down anyway. You continued.  

“When storms arise, do not talk, listen to them. When winds are quiet, talk, she is listening. However, only tell her what is meaningful, and only whisper. She knows everything about you, you must never lie. She has a strong temperament, you should do well not to anger her. Do not complain about the wind, she will remember.” You laughed softly as Sam’s faced turned to one of worry, his mind thinking of his earlier comments. Others around couldn’t help but notice how your eyes shone brightly as you spoke, watching those around lean in, enchanted by your words.

“When autumn leaves are swirling, let her dance, although you may play the flute to her. Should she whisper in your ear, listen closely, her trust is a special honour and words travel far and fast. Phrase your responses so that they do not awake the spirits. Finally, a sudden draft is always a bad omen.”  

Leaning back in your seat, you watched the boys as they frantically scribbled down the last points, glad to point them in the right direction.  

Leaning over so the others couldn’t hear, Loki whispered in your ear. 

“I must say Y/N, after 800 years, it is a pleasure to finally met you.”  

He placed a soft kiss on your cheek before standing up and walking towards Steve once more.  

Masterlist

#studentville-struggles #rachel tries to write #tony x reader #tony stark #platonic!tony x reader #loki #loki x reader #Loki Laufeyson x Reader #Loki Laufeyson #avengers drabble #wind #avenger x reader #stern steve #asgard #jotun #jotunheim #loki drabble #tony drabble #iron man #iron man x reader #god of lies x reader #god of lies

[wardencommanderrodimiss]

The Distant Turnabout

Bullshit Defense AU. Siblings in Khura’in, and the events of Cosmic Turnabout.

[more Bullshit Defense AU fics]

Something is wrong.

It’s an intuition that Nahyuta has lived his life with — not of the spiritual power of his mother or sister, nor cut off from it like the rest of their family. Just a feeling, like butterflies swirling about in his skull, that something has twisted, taken the wrong path, the threads yanked sharply to the side and woven into the tapestry in a different place than what the pattern read.

He has spent the last 27 hours in that state of unease, knowing without answer that something has gone wrong. He has spoken to Amara and Dhurke, Rayfa and Datz, the high priest and monk trainees, vendors at the market, guards at the palace, everyone everywhere who might have felt something rumbling. But there is nothing, nothing but unease — no. Uneasy was what he felt before Apollo told him that he had stood in court as the lead defense for the first time and gotten his boss arrested for murder. This is dread.

This is dread clawing at him, with a strength he can never before recall, and even now that he has an answer, it has not ceased.

Maybe it is because this is no complete answer, only a news article about a bombing, no name of the dead or the injured, and to fill in the gaps he has made twenty calls to Apollo that have gone straight to his voicemail. Hi, you’ve reached Apollo Justice. Leave a message and I’ll call you back. His accent is all American now, all foreign, like someone else has stolen his brother’s voice but can’t get the native Khura’inese inflections right. He doesn’t leave a message because he knows he will say things that he will regret, knows that some curses once uttered cannot be taken back, and he will not wish him to Hell when the Twilight Realm may have already taken him to now decide where his soul will dwell until it returns to the world as something that will not be him.

It is three in the morning, a trial in seven hours, and Nahyuta is wide awake, unable to even meditate because he is waiting for a call or an answer to an email or five messages scattered across social media that Apollo barely uses or an update to a news article, waiting, waiting for the icy grip of fear to release him. He thought he was good at waiting, at patience, thought the training of a monk had prepared him, and usually it has, usually he is not failed by his long-practiced calm—

But he is, now, thanks to Apollo, Apollo impatient and loud and fiery and restless and everything Nahyuta is not, and it will have damned him. If he had not left, this would not be happening — Nahyuta would not be drowning in failing to get answers; he would not be remembering that the last time Apollo visited was two years ago. “Are you ever going to come home for more than a week or two again?” Rayfa asked, Rayfa who was growing up more of her life than not with one of her older brothers on the other side of the world, and Apollo told her he would, once he was settled in his career, once he could leave for a month without losing his position at a firm, once he had job security of the kind that he always could have found at Dhurke’s law office, then he would come home. He promised to come back.

It just might be in a casket now.

He calls Clay and remembers as the voicemail begins that if everything happened as it should, he is not even on the planet right now. There is no one else whom Apollo knows that Nahyuta knows, nothing left at this point but to track down any online contact information for the office that Apollo works at — Shields, is the name? — while he keeps calling, again and again, to get nothing but a recording. Hi, you’ve reached Apollo Justice…

The door creaks slowly open. “Brother?” Rayfa asks, brushing her tangled hair away from her tired eyes. “What is wrong?”

She knows that something is. Nahyuta turns his laptop toward her and she leans her head against his shoulder as she slowly works her way through the news article, sounding the English words out under her breath as she goes. When she reaches the rundown of the casualties, injuries treated on site and hospitalizations and dead, one poor soul dead, she stops, her mouth still open, and she raises her head. She looks at Nahyuta, her eyes wide. Her jaw tenses.

Nahyuta moves at the same time she does; he springs from his chair and she to the door, carelessly throwing it open again and racing out into the corridor. He pursues her through the halls to the heavy doors that lead out into the garden, before which she hesitates only a moment, straining to drag them open. That gives Nahyuta just enough time to catch up to her, but after a last moment to gather herself, she bounds forth into the cold winter wind and lets the door start to swing closed in Nahyuta’s face. He wrenches it open to see Rayfa in flight across the garden, the snow so iced over that she does not sink into it and her thin slippers barely leave mark on the surface. His feet are bare, and her shawl and nightgown only enough to keep her warm before the fireplaces of the palace; neither of them are prepared for the mountain air, but both of them children of the Holy Mother, dragons unyielding, and neither falter.

Rayfa reaches the far wall, behind the monument to the Defiant Dragons and victims of Ga’ran’s rule that was once a tomb for Amara, and scrabbles at the snow at the base of the wall to expose damaged stone and a hole large enough for a child. He tries to grab Rayfa as she worms her way through, but she tugs her shawl out of his hands and vanishes. The monument has enough handholds that he can scrabble up the side of it and leap to the top of the wall, where he barely has time to make a cursory scan for guards before he has to jump down and keep running after Rayfa, who has just slipped around a corner.

They take the long way to the temple that avoids the guards out in front of the palace, winding through the market. The city is dark and still, no sound but the wind and the crunch of snow beneath his numbing feet, and nothing moving but his sister in white like a wraith darting through the alleys ahead of him. The stairs up to the temple doors are iced over and Rayfa slips on her way up. Nahyuta lifts her back to her feet and they walk slower the rest of the way to the huge doors that are never locked, into the chilly silence of the temple. At this hour some monks should be awake but none have reason to go the same way as Nahyuta and Rayfa, up the towering staircase into the Hall of Justice.

Rayfa runs again at the top of the staircase, flinging her shawl from her shoulders as they pass the defendant lobbies, and Nahyuta snags it from the ground as he passes. He stops at the defense’s bench and waits, watching his sister scream her invocation to the Holy Mother over the wind rattling the windows and howling across the open skylight, and he wonders if now in this cold emptiness and near-silence, with not even bells to punctuate Rayfa’s manic energy as she spins about the Pool of Souls, if they will watch their brother die through his own eyes.

The pool remains empty when she drops to the ground beside it, panting. Nahyuta sinks to his knees beside her. “Did you see something?” he prompts, praying that here in this hallowed space this morning they will not face the worst. O Holy Mother, please. Please keep my brother safe. Please do not usher him to the Twilight Realm today.

She shakes her head. “Nothing. He lives,” she says and she flops over sideways, pressing her face to the cold stone floor.

The knot in Nahyuta’s chest has not been cut, has barely begun to unravel, but he can breathe. He can breathe again. Thank you, Holy Mother. Thank you.

They wait there for a long time. Nahyuta prays with his eyes fixed on the butterfly mosaic in the depths of the pool. Rayfa’s breathing quiets and slowly she sits back up, leaning her head on his arm. “When will he come home?” she asks. “Why won’t our brother come home?”

He smooths down her wind-ruffled hair and has no answer for her.

Snow has started to fall, down through the open ceiling into the pool.

When they leave the temple, it is even colder, the chill biting even deeper down into their bones. Rayfa is bleary-eyed and stumbling but if they linger they will freeze. Nahyuta isn’t particularly attached to his toes but he still would like to not go through the loss of them. He nudges Rayfa with his shoulder. “Little Sister,” he says, smiling at her disgruntled expression, “we should race back to the palace.”

“I’m not a child,” she protests, hunching up her shoulders and balling her hands into fists. “I don’t need you to trick me into getting home sooner.”

But when he starts off at a jog, glancing back over his shoulder, she stands there glaring for a moment longer, and then runs, tearing past him and down the main way. From the temple it is a much straighter and shorter path to the front gates of the palace and it is there that they head, knowing that the guards will not stop them from going back in — though no doubt in the morning they will face questioning as to how they got out undetected and further tightening of guard rotation to make sure the feat will not be repeated. How many times did that happen long ago — and how many times did Apollo and Nahyuta escape again? Apollo, son of a wandering minstrel; was running just a part of his blood and bones by birth the way that power was for Amara’s line? Could Apollo ever have stayed?

The baffled guards have barely started walking them toward the residence wing of the palace before when Datz materializes in front of them, wearing an expression that is uncharacteristically solemn. “I’ve got ‘em from here,” he says, waving the guards off, and scooping Rayfa up like she is weightless. She is too exhausted to make even a cursory protest. “Rayray. Yuty. What are you up to?”

“We had to go to the temple,” Nahyuta says.

“Had to? Really? That quick?” He glances toward Nahyuta’s feet. “Back in my paratrooper days I knew a guy who got frostbite and had to cut his own toes off.”

“Hm.”

“We had to go to the Pool of Souls,” Rayfa murmurs, her face buried in her shawl. “For Apollo.”

Datz stops dead. “What?” he asks. “He — he’s not—”

“There was a bombing in a Los Angeles courthouse,” Nahyuta says, “and I cannot reach him. Rayfa had an idea of how we could know. He isn’t dead” — Datz visibly slumps and Rayfa squeaks as though she thinks she is about to be dumped on the ground — “but beyond that I know nothing of how he is doing.”

“Well, if he’s not dead, I wouldn’t worry about him.” Datz laughs. “Near-death experiences are like a rite of passage for your family, what with your parents. AJ’s just following tradition. He’ll be fine.”

Nahyuta plants himself in front of Datz.

“Oof. You’ve got your old man’s death glare.”

“It isn’t funny.”

“Sure it is. Everything’s funny if you look at it the right way.”

Nahyuta leaves him to bundle Rayfa into five layers of quilts and shuts the door to his own chambers. His laptop is still open, his phone still lying on the desk next to it.

He has no missed calls, no new emails.

-

“Oi! Yuty!”

He wakes, phone still in his hand, to a yell and a heavy weight landing on top of him. Rayfa is sitting on him when he opens his eyes, and Datz is in the doorway. “Court in forty-five minutes, Yuty.”

“I — what!”

“Hey, since you were up half the night once you finally passed out I figured I should let you kids sleep.” Datz laughs. “You’ve never been late before, yeah? Once won’t kill you—”

Nahyuta shoves both him and Rayfa out of the room. “I will not be late.”

And he isn’t, even though he has to brush and braid Rayfa’s hair while meeting with the last witness in the lobby, and braid his own while giving his opening statement. The judge frowns but makes no remark on it; across the courtroom, at the defense’s bench, Beh’leeb looks at both him and Rayfa with worried eyes. Dhurke probably told her what happened; Datz said that he spoke with him about it earlier in the morning.

Nahyuta still has not heard from Apollo.

The day in court goes smoothly, despite everything else; the rest of the afternoon crawls by and when Nahyuta has finished the work that needs doing he returns to the temple, where Rayfa has lingered. He finds her in the Hall of Justice sitting next to the pool while Datz is perched on the prosecution’s bench. “He’s still alive,” Rayfa says before Nahyuta can ask.

And they know nothing more than that, and the sensation of dread tangled around his heart has not released him.

He doesn’t sleep much that night either, digging into the new articles that tell a little more about the bombing. The suspect is an eighteen-year-old legal student, allegedly with a grudge against the courts after she was arrested and tried for a crime in which she was not the culprit. Nahyuta doesn’t know what to make of that reasoning: surely there was some sort of evidence to point to her but if she was exonerated, why would she go forth to ruin her life committing a crime for real? He would ask what legal student would know anything about making and setting off a bomb, but he and his father both have some areas of knowledge that one wouldn’t expect for lawyers. The weight of the revolution lingers on his family’s shoulders.

The lone victim of the bombing is a detective, in to testify for the case that was ongoing in that courtroom at the time of the explosion — a case that just happened (no, no, even from the other side of the world, Nahyuta does not trust it to be coincidence) to involve another bombing. One at the Cosmos Space Center.

He has barely read the words before the apprehension tight in his chest has started to loosen, the pressure hissing free. The bombing interfered with the expected rocket launch, and that, that was two days ago, that was when Nahyuta felt the pall of cold fear over him. This is his answer why, and he can breathe again but feels also like he is still drowning. Apollo is not dead but his best friend might be. Unquestionably, Clay must have been caught up in events at the Space Center, and Nahyuta knows him just well enough to feel that distant crushing fear for him the way he does for his brother.

He alternates calls to the two of them with naught but exhaustion to answer for his efforts.

O Holy Mother, if they are both alive and well, pass on to them the knowledge of your protection from all things but me, because I am going to strangle them both and once they are reincarnated as earthworms, dig them up to feed to Rayfa’s pet frog.

The next day is worse, Rayfa antsy and snapping at everyone, Nahyuta feeling the same as her but better at hiding it even while he arranges for a plane to take him to Los Angeles in the morning if he does not hear anything about Apollo’s condition, right up until he isn’t; right up until the afternoon shadows are lengthening with the setting sun and he is in his father’s office, snarling at Dhurke while everyone else who was in the office immediately flees from it. It’s been a long time coming, them about Apollo, if one of them did something to drive him away forever, if the Sahdmadhi name is too heavy of a mantle that Apollo had to run to the other side of the world for the chance to be anyone more than Dhurke’s son.

“Perhaps I am ‘overbearing’,” Nahyuta says, when Dhurke asks in disbelief exactly how many times has he tried to call Apollo since news of the explosion, and Rayfa has called him overbearing before, time and time again, and perhaps his other sibling feels the same, “but that is far better than to be as you and not care in the slightest!”

And that is a monstrous thing to say; it is not the worst thing he has ever said, but anything crueler has only ever been uttered to unrepentant murderers who are already damned by something stronger than Nahyuta’s words. And he should apologize; he opens his mouth to, and flees the office instead, before something worse can emerge from his lips. He leaves his father looking stricken and runs straight into Beh’leeb who has stayed frozen on the doorstep on her way out. He apologizes profusely to her for nearly knocking her off her feet, more than is necessary, knowing that he is trying to balance the scales for what he just said to Dhurke. (That is not how balance happens. Good done for one will not directly cancel out evil to another.)

“Nahyuta,” she says gently, when he has almost managed to compose himself and fallen silent, “you know that is not true, yes?”

He hangs his head in shame and she does not follow her statement up with immediate elaboration, but instead invites him to supper with her and her husband, the high priest, and the foreign woman who has been staying with them for the past six months. It isn’t until they are in the market, Nahyuta with his arms full of the meats that Beh’leeb has purchased for her household for the next week, that she resumes the conversation. “He speaks often of Apollo,” she continues, “and how proud he is to see him coming into his own in a country in such desperate need of honest lawyers as America is.” She shakes her head. “We are fortunate that Ga’ran did not have such time to inflict on our country and courts the damage that has been done to Los Angeles — but your brother has the spirit of a dragon, and it is for knowing his strength that your father does not show his worry.”

Nahyuta does not know how to respond to that; instead he says, “I am sorry that you had to hear that. It was wrong of me to say at all, but especially unbecoming where others may hear.”

“I will utter of your family’s struggles to no one,” Beh’leeb replies.

Once the royal family were thought to be nearly gods, at the cusp of divinity; now they are only known to be far too human, far too fallible. There was Ga’ran, cruel and power-hungry and manipulative and the least of her faults the fact that she was born lacking any spiritual power and thus by tradition shouldn’t have ever held the throne; there was Amara to stand before her kingdom and admit that she was both alive and had been fooled by her sister into believing that the corrupt one was Dhurke, not Ga’ran. What is left is their mistakes, laid bare like the snow-chilled highest mountain peaks for all their kingdom to see.

At least the Inmees are old family friends.

Tahrust has not yet returned from his duties as high priest at the temple, but the house is not empty when they arrive, the smell of broth wafting to the doorway — along with something slightly burnt. “Oh dear,” Beh’leeb says. “Maya!”

A cry of surprise comes from the kitchen as Beh’leeb rushes into it. “It’s good! It’s good! I can fix it!” The other woman’s accent is awkward, with too much of a hard edge to her words, but even through her labored pronunciation, it isn’t difficult to understand her. Nahyuta follows them to the kitchen to find Beh’leeb opening a window, just barely more than a centimeter to let the wind clear out the smell without freezing them, while the other woman, who wears a pale lavender kimono and a magatama hanging from a beaded necklace around her neck, hastily removes a sauce pot from the stove and nearly knocks a laptop from the counter as she searches for a place to set it.

“I’m sorry!” she repeats, grabbing the laptop and slamming it shut and stuffing it into the spice cabinet above her head. “I was trying to contact my family again and I forgot to—” She frowns suddenly, her mouth still moving, searching for a word. “To pay attention.”

“What happened with your family, if I may ask?” Nahyuta says, in English, because he has always found it to be a bit of trouble to communicate in a second language when in distress.

She jumps like she hadn’t seen him come in. “Oh!” she yelps, sounding very American, but in the next moment she is fumbling for Khura’inese again. “Hap’piraki! My name is Maya Fey.” She claps her hands together in front of her and bows.

“I am Nahyuta Sahdmadhi Khura’in,” he says, again still in English, and he sees Beh’leeb turn her head with a hand over her mouth to hide her laughter at the two of them talking past each other in languages foreign to them. “It is very nice to meet you.”

“Nahyuta Sahdma — oh! You’re the prince!” Maya’s eyes are very wide. “I’m sorry, I know how to address your mother and sister but not what to call you—”

“It’s fine. You may just call me ‘Nahyuta’.”

She still looks thrown off-guard, but after a few moments the question that he asked her sinks in and her face falls. “My siblings are lawyers in Los Angeles,” she says, and Nahyuta knows how she will finish the sentence before she does, “and yesterday there was a — a—”

“Bombing.” He fills in the word for her in Khura’inese before she can spend any more time grappling with it. That isn’t something that she should have any reason to know how to say. It shouldn’t be relevant vocabulary.

“I’m surprised you heard about it,” Maya says, her eyes downcast turning toward the ground, and Beh’leeb shoos them both out of the kitchen for as long as they will be conversing and not contributing to the efforts of supper. “But, yes, the bombing” — she trips over pronouncing it — “and my family are all lawyers. My brother had a case that morning. I haven’t heard from him. I know he isn’t dead,” she adds, sounding surprisingly assured of that fact, “but only one of my sisters has responded to any of the messages I have been… spamming” — she drops that word in English — “them. And she only responded with ten words. Maybe twelve. ‘Everyone’s alive’, thank you, Sis, but that is the barest amount I want to know. If ‘alive’ is the best you can say, I am worried!”

She does a good job of looking angry, but it is obviously a mask. “And I don’t have a phone with international calling so I can’t just annoy them all and…” Her mouth is still open when she trails off, staring at the phone that Nahyuta offers her from his pocket.

“My brother is a defense attorney in Los Angeles as well,” he says. “And he is very, very bad at communicating to me that he is alive. I understand how you feel.”

“Thank you,” she says, taking the phone and staring at it as though it is a treasure of unimaginable worth. “I — thank you.” As she jabs at the numbers with far more force than a touch screen needs, she mumbles to herself in English. “Miles I hope you’re still asleep so I can ruin your morning. Wakey-wakey, you stupid jerk!”

Nahyuta retrieves the laptop from the cabinet and returns it to the sitting room and is just asking Beh’leeb what he can do to help her salvage the unburnt sauce when there is a loud “Ugh!” and Maya storms back in. “He didn’t answer,” she says, and though she likewise waits for instruction from Beh’leeb, she doesn’t relinquish the phone. They work in silence for several minutes before the sound of the Plumed Punisher theme song rings out. All three jump, Maya and Beh’leeb both looking around in confusion before they realize that the sound is the ringtone of Nahyuta’s phone.

“Miles!” she barks before she has even fully brought it up to her ear. “You’re terrible! You’re the worst brother, you know that right?” Frowning, she edges from the kitchen, and though he knows he shouldn’t, Nahyuta finds himself straining to listen to her side of the conversation. A lump is gathering in his throat again; not dread, but something like loss, an absence of something. Neither of them should have had to chase down their brothers like this; but especially not Nahyuta, when Apollo should have stayed here safe in Khura’in.

“Mia said everyone’s alive but that’s hardly reassuring — you weren’t? Was — oh no, he was?” Maya is pacing small circles near the threshold to the kitchen. Now that she is speaking in English, her words tumble out quickly enough to throw Nahyuta off momentarily; he is not so used to following along with spoken English. “Oh good, but I — what kind of trials are you running, anyway? What is going on?” She falls quiet for about thirty seconds, her face creasing into a deeper and deeper frown. “Of course Fran’s not explaining anything. I hope it really is over soon. Also, hey, question for you — you’re like a human directory of all the defense attorneys in Los Angeles, right? No, yeah, you are. Hang on one sec.” She lowers the phone, covering it with one hand, and catches Nahyuta’s eyes. “What’s your brother’s name? Maybe someone in my family knows him. Sahdmadhi?”

Nahyuta shakes his head. “His name is Apollo Justice,” he says.

Maya raises an eyebrow; it could be a question as to the fact that they do not share the same surname, or it could simply be a reaction to Apollo’s slightly-ridiculous but also ridiculously-fitting-for-a-lawyer name. “I met, um, someone” — the prince of the kingdom, and Nahyuta can see why she doesn’t want to launch directly into that — “who’s worried about his brother in LA and since you are too totally a lawyer directory, do you know an Apollo Justice?”

They wait, Nahyuta leaning against the doorframe, Maya nodding along with whatever is being said on the other end of the phone, and then her eyes widen and she says, “No way, really? He works for Uncle Ray? — Uh huh, okay, yeah, gimme a sec.” She looks back to Nahyuta. “He’s okay,” she says, but the knot in his chest hasn’t yet released him. “He was in the hospital again today, or yesterday, ugh, time zones, but he’s okay.”

Ah. So this is why he still feels something is wrong. “Again?” Nahyuta asks. “For what injury was he — for what reason was he admitted to the hospital the first time?”

She returns to the phone to ask that. “He was hurt in the bombing,” she explains, and the vice squeezes tighter around Nahyuta’s ribs, “and then got knocked in the head by a suspect while investigating.”

He wants to scream. He nearly does, but he murmurs thanks to Maya and ducks back into the kitchen before he can get any more details that are any worse. This shouldn’t have happened — this wouldn’t have happened, not in Khura’in, where anyone would know that only the deepest hells await as punishment for assaulting a son of the royal family; for laying a hand on Dhurke’s son. But in America, Apollo is no one, and maybe that was what he wanted in leaving, but it is killing him. It nearly killed him.

“Yeah,” he hears Maya saying. “That was the soonest plane there was. I’ll see you around the new year, at least! Say hi to Nick and Trucy and everyone else for me.”

She reappears in the doorway with a thin smile on her face, but it vanishes when she sees Nahyuta’s expression. “I’m sorry,” she says. She hands him the phone back.

“You have nothing to apologize for. I owe you a great many thanks for asking after Apollo.”

The frown doesn’t leave her face but they set back to the work of cooking without any further discussion. When Tahrust arrives at the house to find Nahyuta there, he doesn’t question it; Beh’leeb will probably give him the summary later, her promise to keep quiet never extending to her husband. But for now Nahyuta has to say nothing, merely do as he is told and listen to Maya and Tahrust discuss her training, whatever that is. She keeps casting glances from the corner of her eyes at Nahyuta. She probably thinks he doesn’t notice.

He doesn’t broach the question until after the meal, while he and Maya are sent back into the kitchen, able to clean up without supervision, no chance of burning or oversalting anything. “Forgive me, but I heard you say to your brother that you wouldn’t be returning home until around the new year?”

“Oh. Yeah. I mean, you know Khura’in isn’t a huge tourist destination — no offense meant! And Ahlbi’s gonna change that, that kid is determined to set up a rousing tourism industry — and especially not in the winter, so the plane schedule is eh if I don’t want to take three or four bumpy off-roader rides down through the mountains to the next country over and a bigger airport.” She has reverted back to English; maybe the full conversation at supper, three different people coming at her in Khura’inese, exhausted her enough for her to return to her default.

Nahyuta nods. Apollo has mentioned — complained about — it. “Generally, yes. I have arranged, in the morning, for a craft to take me to one of the larger airports, and then on to Los Angeles, and given that I have already coordinated this, it would be no trouble if you wished to accompany me.”

“Perks of being royalty, huh?” she asks with a wry grin. “But that would be really great, you have no idea. Or maybe you do, a little. Brothers, y’know?”

He leaves the Inmees’ house feeling more reassured than he has for the past three days. It is dark by the time he reaches the palace, slipping back to his chambers to book an additional ticket for Maya for the second leg of their journey. Rayfa finds him there and sits on his bed in silence, staring at him with owl-eyes. He has closed his laptop and set it aside by the time she finally asks, “Will you make him come home?”

Make him. Would that with the Holy Mother’s blessing it be that easy. “If he doesn’t wish to, I cannot.”

For lack of a staff to tap against the ground, Rayfa slams her hand down against the quilt. The bedsprings creak, weak from long-ago years of being jumped on. “Nahyuta!” she says imperiously. “I want my brother to come home!”

And what is he to say to that — that Apollo has always and will always be split between two worlds, always hunting for the family that gave him a name and a bracelet, and that has led him to a dangerous foreign city in which he still hopes to establish a life? In which he has already established a life? Has a job, friends — or really just one that Nahyuta actually knows anything about — a cat—

“I know you do,” he says. Rayfa slides to the floor and storms from the room. Nahyuta follows her to find and apologize to Dhurke. The shame gnawing at him doesn’t cease even when Dhurke offers forgiveness before Nahyuta has even finished asking for it; Dhurke brushes off hurt too easily, and Nahyuta somewhere learned to dole it out too well.

“Maybe sometimes I do regret that Apollo grew up as my son,” he says, the two of them shut away out of hearing in Dhurke’s study in the palace, where some files for his case coming up for trial next week sit ignored on the desk. “He should’ve had his own father; it was our family’s shit that stole him away from his. You, Nahyuta, you’re stuck with me.” He laughs and claps a hand to Nahyuta’s shoulder. “By blood and birth, you’re never getting out of this. But Apollo…” He scratches his chin. Nahyuta stares out the window into the darkness; somewhere beyond it, the walls around the palace, and further, the mountains. “Sometimes I thought about sending him away myself, back while Ga’ran still had the throne. I couldn’t decide if that would be better or worse for fucking him up in the long run, this life here with us or one alone abroad.”

“And now once he has left, the safer place is here in Khura’in,” Nahyuta says.

In the morning, Datz drives him and Maya, with Rayfa demanding to be brought along for the ride, out to the airfields in a jeep that probably hasn’t been properly inspected since the revolution. The fact that it doesn’t have a roof and lets the wind like icy daggers cut them through is one of the lesser of its problems. “You probably wish you hadn’t come along, huh, Rayray,” Datz says and Rayfa, who had her head buried in Nahyuta’s back to hide from the wind that has continued even after they have stopped, stomps her feet indignantly but doesn’t speak, her scarf pulled up over most of her face. Datz laughs and ruffles her wind-battered hair further. She doesn’t say anything to Nahyuta when he leaves, just hugs him fiercely, and the several times he glances back she is not looking at him, instead huddled into Datz to shield herself from the cold.

It is a flight of several hours to Kathmandu, where they have two hours’ wait to board their next plane. Maya asks if he likes the Plumed Punisher because of his ringtone; he tells her that it was Rayfa who set it and then tells her not to ever let Rayfa know that he said this. “It’s her most closely-held secret,” Nahyuta explains, to Maya’s laughter. “She does not like to be thought of as a child liking childish things.”

“Childish?” Maya asks. “I’m not a child!”

“I did not say—”

Her cheeks puff out in comical rage. “And my brother’s even older than us and he really likes the Steel Samurai!”

“What is this ‘Steel Samurai’?”

Maya spends the rest of the wait explaining the show to him — it sounds remarkably like the Plumed Punisher and what of it he has watched with Rayfa — and once they are situated on the plane and her excitement over traveling first class has calmed, she pulls up an episode on her tablet, which leads into another seven episodes. He doesn’t exactly see the appeal of it but if he treats it like a case investigation, trying to pick apart what the draw is for adults like Beh’leeb and Maya and her brother, it is almost enough to keep his mind occupied.

She is again cagey in response to his question as to what she is studying and training for in Khura’in; he files this information away in his mind, against the fact that Beh’leeb and Tahrust seem to very much like her. She does tell him that her family line traces back to Khura’in, by way of Japan, and then without giving him time to comment on this she launches into bragging about her siblings, two defense attorneys and a prosecutor. She stops for breath long enough for Nahyuta to ask her about her uncle, who Apollo works for; this nets him only a little information about the man, who seems decent enough, and instead some of the tangled story of Maya’s family, how half of them aren’t even related by blood and two of her siblings are step-siblings and one of them was adopted into that original family, long before her mother married their father. Her uncle isn’t related to any of them by blood or law — “Well,” she says with the most catlike of grins and Nahyuta braces himself, “not by marriage or adoption or anything, but we’re all related by law because almost everyone is lawyers.” He groans.

She stops herself eventually, after explaining how her niece was adopted — “And don’t even get me started on whatever Miles and Nick’s deal is” — and she gives Nahyuta a curious look. He wonders if perhaps she questions if he cares, but then she asks, “So how did your brother end up in LA anyway? It’s a long way from Khura’in.”

“It is,” he agrees.

But she regaled him with the story of her family built out of mismatched pieces, confessed to him that she is resigned to worry, almost too weary to feel it at all, in times such as the occurrence of this bombing, because she has sat beside vigils for too many of her family before. And he tells her, start to finish, where it crosses with the history of his kingdom, of his family, and all of the reasons he can think to call to mind to explain what it was that made Apollo decide to stay so far away.

Maya is quiet for a while. “It’s a lot to live up to,” she says finally. “A name like that. Like my sister, Fran, the prosecutor, the adopted one, she’s got Dad who’s great, since she was, like, two — and she’s still always been so curious about where she came from.”

“Though she never ran off to — was it Germany, you said?”

“Well, no, but her name ‘von Karma’ is even more infamous there — okay, maybe it’s not quite like your brother’s situation. But kinda. Family’s complicated, is what it is.”

“von Karma?” Nahyuta repeats. “That…” He has heard that name before, but not recently. “There was a prosecutor with that name, a very long time ago. He was disbarred and jailed for cutting deals with witnesses, forging evidence, and attempting murder.”

“Yeah, that’s the bitch,” Maya says. “Fredman von Karma.”

That sounds right to his memory, but Maya started giggling halfway through the name and hasn’t stopped, and that he cannot trust. “Are you certain that is his name?”

“Of course I am!” she says, and her giggling intensifies. He resolves to investigate for himself later.

They watch half an episode more before they land in Guangzhou for another layover of another several hours. Nahyuta meditates and Maya, Holy Mother preserve her, drinks coffee by the litre, almost incomprehensible in her babbling as the caffeine kicks in. He makes a few last attempts to contact Apollo that come up empty. Maya reads the expression on his face and manages to wait about ten minutes before she asks if she can borrow his phone to text her siblings to demand one of them pick her up from LAX. By the time they board the plane, she looks like she is crashing from her caffeine high, but she has put together a eighteen-hour “Optimal Viewing Playlist” for the rest of the Steel Samurai and many of its associated sequel and spinoff series. “How many derivations of this show are there?” Nahyuta asks, regretting it when Maya begins counting on her fingers only to give up and shrug.

It is a very long flight across the Pacific Ocean. It ends with a bottle of terrible airplane wine split between them, the Best of Children’s Television playlist still unfinished, and Maya with no idea if she has anyone who will be meeting her at the airport. She makes several calls to increasingly-exasperated siblings while they wait in line to pass through customs, on her own phone, finally, and Nahyuta fires off a few messages to let the rest of his family know he has arrived. And then, Apollo. Hi, you’ve reached Apollo Justice…

“Brother, this is your last chance for a response before I show up on your doorstep,” he says, his Khura’inese mingling into the rest of the chorus of languages around them. Maya doesn’t pretend that she isn’t trying to follow what he is saying. “I will show up on your doorstep anyway. I did not book a hotel.” He sends another email to cover the main bases of communication, nearly writing may the Holy Mother forgive you for the grief you have caused us, before he settles instead for the equally passive-aggressive but nonetheless not-as-harsh, sooner or later your family would like to be informed, by you, that you are alive.

He tries to simply catch a taxi and leave Maya behind to wait for whichever sister she roped into picking her up, but she catches him by the arm and hangs onto him, insisting that he let them drive him instead of paying for someone else. He tries and doesn’t succeed at shaking her off; she seems to have decided that they are friends now and that she owes him this. After one last attempt he relinquishes control of his life in this moment to her, waiting on the sidewalk with her awkwardly trying to balance herself on top of her suitcase, complaining about how he isn’t showing any signs of jet lag. “You monks and your monkish ways,” she says, toppling off of the suitcase and crashing into Nahyuta.

“It is not as though it is not possible for others to learn these same skills and hone their will in the same manner,” he says, watching her decide to just sit in the middle of the sidewalk instead of standing back up.

“I like food too much to have willpower.”

“Hm.” He doesn’t know what to say to that. Again he wonders what exactly it is that she is studying in Khura’in.

Los Angeles does not get dark; the sky, a beautiful abyss, is lit up with an absence of stars, filled instead by glowing windows in skyscrapers several times taller than the palace. He thinks of Clay and Apollo, both of whom have told him so much about the stars, and would have to haul themselves so far outside of their home to see them in more than the models and projections at the Space Museum.

He again prays Clay is all right, because if he isn’t, then Apollo isn’t, either.

The car that Maya’s sister arrives in is an old and silver beat-up thing, foreign for its lack of mud splattered up the sides. He catches a glimpse of a magatama around her neck, surprising him — he had supposed that it was something Maya had picked up in Khura’in. She awkwardly twists herself around in the driver’s seat to offer him a hand to shake. “Mia Fey,” she says brightly. “Thanks for bringing Maya home. It was a nice surprise.”

“I am happy to have been able to help,” he replies, taking her hand after a moment of ah, yes, this is America, and then folding himself into the back seat. “I am Nahyuta Sahdmadhi.”

“We’ll drop you off first at Apollo’s place,” Mia says. “I already got his address from Ray, actually. You might’ve seen from Maya and anything Apollo’s told you that we’re an odd bunch, but we look out for each other, and since your brother works for Ray, he’s one of our own now, too.”

“Thank you,” Nahyuta says, and he doesn’t know how to properly convey that he means it.

Would he have dropped everything to run to the other side of the world had he known that Apollo had found employment with such a tight-knit group of people as Maya described? Perhaps not — likely not, Had he been assured that there were others besides Clay to look out for Apollo.

But he wasn’t. Apollo never told him enough about the people he works with. Apollo was always bad at responding to messages, even when there wasn’t a crisis.

Traffic is slow-moving and loud, a cacophony of horns and screeching tires, and Mia grumbles at the gridlock while Maya bothers her in a way that reminds Nahyuta of Rayfa. “You know,” she says, while Mia slaps her hand down to stop her from flipping off the car that nearly sideswiped them, “I do kinda miss this chaos whenever I’m not in it. Good to be home.”

It is darker around Apollo’s apartment building, the street lamps spaced further apart and flickering. The buildings are shorter but the moon has still not crested the horizon. Home — this is home for him? This drab, dismal place, with all the life of a mausoleum? Even in the coldest months of winter, Khura’in has a warmth that this city never will.

“Do you want us to wait here for a bit?” Mia asks, opening her door and standing halfway out of the car as Nahyuta grabs his bag from the trunk and slings it over his shoulder. “In case Apollo isn’t home, so you’re not sitting in the hall waiting for him.”

Will he be home? It is late enough that unless he is overworked — and if he is being overworked after two stints in the hospital, Nahyuta is going to have words with his boss — he should be home from the office. And if he isn’t—

“Thank you, but I shall be fine, even should he not be home. I will be able to get in.”

Maya sticks her head out the window. “Like, you’ve got a spare key, or…?”

He considers that question and decides that the best answer is the lawyer’s answer, an evasive nonanswer. “I will be fine,” he repeats, leaving her with no room to further question by continuing on immediately. “Thank you both for this most gracious assistance you have given me,” he says. “May the Holy Mother’s blessings follow you both as you go about your lives.”

“See you around!” Maya calls as they pull away; perhaps it will be here, still, or perhaps not until they have both returned to Khura’in.

And then he is alone in the faint light, to enter the building and find a broken elevator sectioned off by yellow tape — he could probably litigate that if it has been for any significant amount of time. Apollo’s apartment is on the third floor, up two worn flights of stairs where some of the steps are not the same height as the rest and down a hall with unevenly carpeted flooring. Nahyuta tests the doorknob and finds it locked, to which he is thankful; more the inconvenience for him but at least Apollo is not leaving himself wide open to danger. He knocks several times, increasingly louder, to no response. “Apollo? Apollo!”

Where is he? In the hospital again? Would Mia not have said so if he were? He slams a hand against the door, willing it to open before him, to show his brother’s face at the other side, his brother who is to be in his next life an ungrateful slippery worm desperately trying to wriggle away from the fishhook that is his family’s concern. O Holy Mother, did you suffer this too with your sister, the mighty Lady Kee’ra? How often as she chased down your foes did you wonder for her safety? Were even you afraid?

He can’t say he didn’t foresee this, and from his bag he removes a set of Datz’s old lockpicks. Datz had been insistent, starting before Nahyuta can properly remember, that they learn the less savory, slightly shady skills critical to survival as children of the revolution. That the revolution succeeded and they went from a hidden home in the mountains to a wing in the palace didn’t deter him, to Amara’s lasting chagrin. “You never know what will happen in the future,” he said, and while Nahyuta is certain that he was preparing them for something much more dire than this — well, he will still need to thank him for it.

As long as no one spots him doing this and calls the police. What was the name of Maya’s sister, the prosecutor — Fran von Karma? He isn’t above dropping a few names and finding strings to pull if the alternative is Khura’in finding out that its prince was arrested for breaking and entering.

But like he anticipates, though he considers the other prospects, no one passes by and the door clicks open for him to slip into the dark apartment without trouble.

In the doorway he fumbles for several moments for a light switch. He finds it just in time for something to brush against his leg and he looks down at the cat weaving its way around his feet. It continues to encircle him as he steps forward, seeming to try very hard to trip him up. “Apollo?” he calls. His brother could be home, just asleep, or in a coma with a concussion, or—

No, he would have felt it were it something worse than that.

“Pohlkunan! Are you here?”

Silence greets him. He sets his bag down and begins to investigate the apartment. The cat has fresh water and food and the litterbox has no stench: someone has been here recently enough to take care of it. The bedroom is a mess, which is very unlike Apollo: he has been leaving in a hurry and on return has no energy with which to take care of anything in his home. The dishes piled in the sink further suggest this. The refrigerator is nearly empty, the pantry filled with ramen: it still leaves the question of whether he always eats like this or if it is further evidence of the toll of this week. Nahyuta takes one of the packages and squints down at the instructions on the wrapper. Can this actually taste better than airplane meals? He has doubts. He hunts down a scrap of paper and a pen and while he eats sets to work on making a proper list of necessary groceries. Even leaving aside the apparent issue of vegetables, what Apollo has to call a spice cabinet is abhorrent.

Rayfa has sent him a message asking if he has found their brother yet. He does not respond right away, waiting until he has cleaned up the most obvious messes in the kitchen, praying that Apollo will walk through the door and he will be able to answer their sister, yes. Apollo’s laptop is on the couch and he makes a few cursory attempts at guessing the password, all of which fail; any clues to where Apollo is this evening, and whether it is part of a pattern, will remain locked away. Perhaps he is with Clay, wherever he is. Perhaps he is with some other coworker, someone else who is part of that network of lawyers.

Maya at some point while using his phone left her number in it, and if in a few hours he still knows nothing he will use her as a starting point for his search, but for now he settles onto the old couch to meditate. The cat crawls up into his lap, purring like the engine of a truck, and there Nahyuta waits for his brother to come home.

#bullshit defense au #bullshit defense fic #god this was a fucking nightmare to write i had absolutely no idea how the fuck to write nahyuta #did my best at getting down the right beats of what i think are his core attributes but! i don't know! i've got no idea! i'm trying. #i hope he's recognizable enough as nahyuta. one who hasn't gone through all of the garbage with ga'ran anyway #anyway this idea - specifically the part w what rayfa does - has been haunting me for a while so i'm glad to have it done #which is why i'm posting it at this odd fucking hour. 9:30 est idgaf i'll reblog it 8 times tomorrow i don't care #roddy fanfics

[highland-gem-guardian]

[PART 1] 

Hey, it’s part 2 of Thistle’s story from well over a month ago! You’ll probably see a familiar yet different looking face in here as well - Matiu was quite the fashionista back in his heydays. Tagged warnings for swearing and general bad mouthing. It’s also quite long.

Background credit to Lukas Neasi on Unsplash

The dark brambles above smothered the floor beneath them in a thick blanket of shadows, where another dragon was making his way through the Shadowlands. Fallen twigs cried out underneath the heavy feet of the dragon and he abruptly halted. His head crests raised upward in suspicion, before he passed off the sense of danger and continued on his way. Their little legs can’t have taken them this far, he thought to himself. They’re barely weeks old and children of Ice, they won’t have a chance navigating through this kind of darkness!

Unbeknownst to him, there were other creatures lurking alongside him along the inky paths. These creatures did not appreciate a dragon of all things intruding on their territory, with its long ugly neck and a sharp, curved trident fixed around its waist.

Matiu continued on his search for the missing youngsters, his plump Bogsneak body proving to not be living up to its name as more twigs cracked underneath him. Eyes followed his every move until a low growl finally reached his ears, and by then it was too late to grab his trident as the pack of Umbra Wolves launched into an attack.

One pounced towards his neck as Matiu quickly attempted to unbuckle the trident from his belt, only just missing its shot as Matiu flung his body to a side to finally release his weapon. Grabbing on to the steel pole he thrust the tridents heads into the ribs of the nearest beast, only to drop his jaw in surprise as its body simply disintegrated into a trail of wisps.

Fuck.

The pack growled even more fiercely at his pathetic attempt to fight back. Never mind the hatchlings he thought, it seems like I’m the one who’s not got a chance through this darkness!

He backed away quietly as the pack cornered him into towards a rotten old oak tree with trident still at hand. It seems like the only thing that could defeat these beasts was elemental magic of some sort, and unluckily for Matiu he decided that blades and brawls were more worth his interest than sitting and learning to meditate for a puff of sparkly smoke.

“Really comes back to bite you in the ass, doesn’t it?”

Matiu had barely any time to acknowledge the arrival of the small purple trickster before a tangled bolt of pure Nature magic flew past his face and into the shoulder of a wolf. The wolf howled in pain as the strike tore into its ghostly hide, just as a masked and armoured figure dashed in from behind the rotten oak with spellbook in hand.

The Tundra uttered a few words of unknown origin to Matiu before raising his fist that became engulfed in pink flame. Thistle then threw his arm outwards and opened his fist which spewed a flaming orb of Arcane energy into the pack, and like a lit bonfire they each became surrounded by the flame that scorched into their ethereal forms. With weakened howls of horror and grief they each melted into the air around them, leaving the three dragons alone in the gloomy woods.

Matiu simply stood in disbelief before his trance was interrupted by the fluttering of a pest in front of his face. He snapped back to the world around him and with a simple blink he looked directly into the eyes of the straight-faced Discordia.

“What? No thank you? No how the blooming heck did you suddenly appear in my time of dire need when I was surely meant to be alone?” She scoffed.

Thistle coughed and glared over at the two of them. “She doesn’t mean to be so snotty, we were in the area anyway. What in Arcanist’s hands are you doing here all by yourself?

Matiu finally managed to shake his head and set his mind on track. “Hatchlings. A clutch of them. They ran off on me a while back - we were passing through here towards the Ruins. You wouldn’t happen to have spotted them have ya’s? Three Faes, a little bigger than miss bigmouth-flutterwing here. Piebald markings on all of ‘em.”

Thistle shook his head solemnly. “I can’t say we’ve seen any dragons besides you mister.”

Matiu groaned and cursed under his breath. Thistle meanwhile had eyed up the steel trident still in Matiu’s possession. “Is that yours? Can you use it?”

Discordia snorted. “If it ain’t a flimsy mimic with a ghostly body, then probably just about”

Matiu looked at them, confusion creeping onto his face. “...Mimic?”

Discordia rolled her eyes. “Answer the question dummy, can you use that stick or not?”

A smirk grew on Matiu’s face, and he twirled his trident around his paws. “Course I can. One of the best trident wielders across the continent, just ask any rich-looking fellow in the Hewn City who looks like he needs to hire the occasional mercenary for a hit.” He then returned the trident to his belt, fastening it in as Thistle nodded again. Discordia pouted.

“Looks like you look after that pole better tha-” She was quickly shut up as Thistle swiped a paw at her, causing her to lose balance and tumble to the ground from the air. It was Matiu’s turn to snort.

“Listen, mister…” Thistle began as his expression turned serious.

“There’s been a whole lot of mysterious things going on here. One of them being those wolves we fought earlier - they are mimics, unreal. A strange magic has come upon the Tangled Wood and this time it’s not Shadowbinder unexpectedly introducing a new race. There’s someone out there, someone bent on revenge on their own family and who’s not afraid to use forgotten, corrupted magic to do so. As long as they still stand your hatchlings are in grave danger.”

Matiu stopped smirking at that last sentence.

Thistle continued. “Basically, we need the help of a warrior or someone who can watch over us at least. You seem more than capable with that weapon of yours, so we need to group up together if we’re gonna ever find Thana and those hatchlings.”

Matiu looked down at the inky earth below. He hadn’t the foggiest clue what kind of shroom this magic weirdo must have eaten to be spouting nonsense about forgotten magic and the Shadowbinder’s revenge, but they had proven themselves powerful with magic against those shadowy beasts. If he was going to have a chance getting through this place unscathed with those hatchlings, he’d be best going with other dragons than alone, whether said dragons were tripping balls or not.

“Right then. Here’s the deal - you help me find those hatchlings, I’ll help you with this little problem of yours. I don’t often do jobs for “free”, so count yourselves lucky to have an experienced fighter such as myself on board.” Matiu spoke up.

Discordia - still laying on the ground after her swipe - burst into a fit of laughter. She then rolled over, shaking and wheezing, before steadying herself and fluttering up to Thistle’s ear and whispered harshly.

“You’re not serious about taking this guy with us right? I know I said we needed a warrior right away but this guy? We saved his butt from being “devoured” by ghosts, Thistle, literal ghosts!”

Thistle took no notice of the sharp whispering in his ear and stepped forward to Matiu. He held out his paw to the Bogsneak who in turn held out his and they shook on it.

“It’s settled then. Do you remember which direction those Umbra wolves had attacked you from?” Thistle inquired.

“It seems like they’ve been following me since I entered this wood. Though I was heading towards the Stairs, I’d say we best backtrack and see if we can find anything else deeper in the woods.” Matiu replied.

“Then we follow your lead then. Come on Discordia, we’ve got ourselves a warrior who can handle himself so quit your sulking.”

Discordia grumbled dreadfully but obliged, and flew upwards over the dragons’ heads. The trio set off again along the dark, blanketed path that stretched for miles into the unknown parts of the Wood.

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

A crimson figure watched from their hiding spot in a tree not far from the scene and slipped back into the murky shadows, giggling wickedly. You’ll need more than puny mortal magic and a fool to stop me.

#long post - #do read mores even work on mobile? if not i apologise for your extra scrolling #story: thistle's mission #clan lore #flight rising #fr #writing by me #c: thistle #c: discordia #c: matiu

[worryinglyinnocent]

Fic: The Most Beautiful Mistake (7/?)

Here we are! I promise that things start to get less angsty from here on in. 

Summary: Belle French and ‘Rumpel’ Gold have been best friends for a long time, ever since Belle first walked into Gold’s yarn shop. One stormy night, one bottle of wine, and a couple of heartfelt confessions later, and their relationship will never be the same again.

Rated: NC-17 overall, this chapter is PG.

=====

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [AO3]

=====

Seven

Belle was pacing up and down the foyer of the bed and breakfast, unable to work off her nervous energy. Granny came through from the office and watched her with a raised eyebrow for a few moments before leaning on the reception desk and giving a little smirk.

“You know, you’re going to wear a hole in the floor if you keep doing that,” she remarked dryly.

Belle stopped, turning to Granny, and her shoulders sagged.

“I’m just worried, Granny. What if I get there and something’s wrong?”

“Then you’re in the best place for them to fix it, aren’t you?” Granny pointed out gently. “This isn’t something that you can put off, love. And I swear that once you get there and you see your baby for the first time, you won’t be worried any more. It’ll all just melt away. I know I was a nervous wreck before my first appointment when I was expecting Ruby’s mother, but it’ll pass.”

“But what if…”

“No more what ifs,” Granny interrupted sternly. “The more you worry about what ifs, the more likely you’ll be to get one. I know it’s scary and it’s even more scary that you’re going through all this alone, but we have faith in you, me and Ruby. You can do it.”

“Speaking of Ruby…” Belle glanced up the stairs towards Ruby’s room. “Where is she? If she doesn’t get a move on then we’re going to be late for the appointment.”

“I’m coming!” Ruby clattered down the stairs in a vision of high-heeled boots and red leather, and Belle had to double-take, but didn’t say anything. Granny had no such qualms.

“Aren’t you slightly overdressed for accompanying your friend to a sonogram?” she asked.

“No!” Ruby exclaimed. “I just always like to look my best, that’s all.”

“And the fact that you might run into Dr Hopper has absolutely nothing to do with that at all, of course.”

“Granny, how many times do I have to tell you that I am over Dr Hopper. Well, he’s still very handsome of course, but… Oh, we don’t have time for this, come on Belle, let’s go!”

She steered her slightly bemused friend out of the bed and breakfast and towards her little red car, the wolf charm hanging from the rear-view mirror swinging with alarming vigour as she got in.

“Are you all right?” she asked, fussing around her friend as Belle slipped into the passenger seat.

“I’m fine, Ruby, honestly. You can’t even see the bump yet.”

“I know, but I don’t want the seatbelt cutting off the circulation to its feet or something.” Ruby started the engine, driving remarkably carefully along the roads towards the hospital on the edge of the town. “Can we find out if it’s a boy or girl today and stop calling it an it?” she asked excitedly.

“No, not today. It’s too early to tell. It’s only about that big.” Belle held up her thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart, and then decided that it was time to change the subject before she got too worried about what was going to be happening once she got to the hospital. “So if you’re not dressed up for Dr Hopper, who are you dressed up for?”

“I am dressed up for you, my friend.”

“Ruby, you’ve gone as red as your leggings.”

“Fine. There’s a nurse. I met her at the Rabbit Hole a couple of weeks ago and I think we hit it off pretty well. And you know, any opportunity is a good opportunity, right?”

Belle gave a snort of laughter. “You’re incorrigible, but I love you. If you start making eyes at my sonographer over my belly, I’ll consider my role as a matchmaker confirmed. What’s her name?”

“Dorothy. She works in the emergency room so you should be safe.”

Belle settled back in her seat for the short journey. She was glad that Ruby was happy with her crush, even if it did set her thinking about her own unrequited love. She hadn’t seen Gold since that morning in the library, and she couldn’t really blame him for avoiding her after that display. All the same, she wanted to know how he was, whether he’d got through the storm ok, whether he wanted her to come over for the next one… Despite the distance that had come between them over the past couple of weeks, she still held out some kind of hope. There was something still there, that connection they shared hadn’t died completely. She’d felt it when they talked in the library and it felt like suddenly her world was brighter despite the wind howling outside. Belle glanced sideways at Ruby as her friend drove. Although she had accepted being a single mother, she had also accepted that she didn’t have to do everything by herself and it was fine to ask for help if she needed it. Ruby was overjoyed to be able to offer assistance wherever it was required, if that included coming to sonogram appointments with her then so be it - especially if there was a chance of seeing Dorothy. But really, in Belle’s mind, Ruby was not the person she wanted at the appointment with her. She wanted Gold there, wanted him to see their baby for the first time at the same time as she did.

But she couldn’t ask him for that. She’d told him that he didn’t need to get involved and it was clear that he didn’t want to get involved. She couldn’t start asking him to come to her appointments with her now. The last thing that she wanted was for him to feel like she was pressuring him into something that he wanted no part of.

Ruby, she knew, would take a different view; that since Gold was a part of this baby already having given it some of his DNA, then he had a duty to be involved, but at least she accepted that the situation was more complicated than that and had duly kept her mouth shut on the subject. For all the circumstances around it were saddening, Belle was happy to be pregnant and for all her fears was looking forward to having a baby.

“Ok, let’s meet this little one.” Ruby parked up outside the hospital and positively bounced towards the doors, Belle following at a more sedate pace behind her.

“You know, I think you’re more excited about this than I am,” Belle remarked.

“Well, I think it’s easier to be excited when you’re not the one who’s going to have cold gel slimed all over you and be prodded and poked,” Ruby said. “I really hope I’m in the running for godmother, here, by the way.”

Belle rolled her eyes. “You’re way too excited about this.”

“Well, one of us has to be.” She slipped her arm through Belle’s and led her down the corridors towards the maternity unit. “Can I have a picture?”

“Why would you even want a picture?”

“Because you’re the first one of my friends to have a baby!” Ruby exclaimed. “This is a momentous occasion!”

“Ruby…” Belle trailed off as they passed the bone clinic. Gold was coming out of the outpatients’ centre. Of course he was, because fate had decided that it hated them both and had scheduled his quarterly orthopaedic review on the same day and the same time as her sonogram.

Ruby followed her gaze.

“Ok, snap decision, do you want to hide or do you want to talk to him?”

“Ruby, we can’t hide, we’re in a hospital.”

“There’s a janitor’s closet literally right next to us, I can bundle you in there and he’ll be none the wiser…”

It was too late, Gold had noticed them conspiring, and Belle could see the brief flash of fear that crossed his face. Gold knew that Ruby knew he was the father of her baby; the three people in the world who knew the truth were all standing here in this corridor and it was painfully obvious that none of them knew what to say.

“Hi,” Ruby said brightly.

“Hello Ruby. Belle. It’s good to see you. You’re looking… well.”

Belle smiled. “Thank you.”

“We’re here for Belle’s first scan,” Ruby said pointedly.

“I hope it all goes smoothly.” Gold opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something else, but then shook his head. “I should let you get on. Don’t want to be late for that first meeting.”

“No…” It was so tempting to ask him to come. Just make the offer nonchalantly, it didn’t have to mean anything, he was the father after all, and even if the doctor didn’t know that, he knew that Gold and Belle were friends. It wouldn’t look strange. But in the end, conscience and good sense won out. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”

Gold nodded. “I’ll see you around, Belle.”

Except they wouldn’t see each other around. As Belle continued down the corridor, she knew that they wouldn’t see each other and the words sounded hollow in her head as she replayed them. They’d been actively avoiding each other for weeks and it felt so stupid saying something so meaningless. She glanced back over her shoulder at Gold’s retreating back, watching him limp away towards the doors. His shoulders were hunched, as if he was trying to make himself smaller, less noticeable. It was a defence mechanism she’d seen in him often over the years.

“Come on.” Ruby gave her elbow a gentle tug. “Let’s go meet your baby.”

They reached the maternity unit right on time and took a seat in the waiting room.

“You do realise that when you find out whether it’s a boy or girl, Granny’s going to want to know so that she can start knitting,” Ruby was saying.

“But what if I want a surprise?” Belle asked. She hadn’t thought about the baby’s sex yet. She hadn’t planned that far ahead. Right now, all the planning that she was doing involved the fact that there would be a baby, and childproofing her apartment.

“I’m not sure that Granny will let you have a surprise. Have you thought about names yet?”

Belle shook her head. The baby needing a name was too far in the future to think about just yet. Although… It was less than thirty weeks away now, which didn’t sound all that far away. Baby was just Baby for now. She pressed a hand over her stomach. In an ideal world, she and the father would be discussing names together, and for a moment, Belle allowed herself to imagine a different situation, sitting on the sofa in Gold’s flat, her flicking through a baby name book whilst he massaged her aching ankles, exchanging names for ideas and dismissing the ridiculous ones out of hand, fighting over the ones that she thought were good and he thought were awful. It was such a simple thing, and yet it was something that she wasn’t going to have. The name would be her choice alone. Anything she wanted.

“I like Gideon for a boy,” she said eventually. “A good strong name for a hero. And Thea for a girl.”

“I like Gideon,” Ruby agreed. “Not that it really matters what I think, but I might rescind the godmother thing if you ended up calling him something like… Englebert.”

“And what, precisely, is wrong with Englebert as a name?” Belle looked around the waiting room and picked out a man sitting with his heavily pregnant partner. “He might be called Englebert. You might just have offended him greatly.”

“I apologise to any and all Engleberts in the vicinity, but I stand by my notion that it is really not a name you should give your child,” Ruby said solemnly. Her straight face lasted for all of five seconds before she burst out laughing, and Belle had to do the same. It felt good to laugh again. There hadn’t been a lot to laugh about in the last few weeks. She’d mainly spent the time being sick or being in pain as her body steeled itself to make room for the new life growing inside it. When she hadn’t going about the business of being pregnant, she’d been lamenting the effects that her pregnancy had had, on her friendships and on the rumour mill. Being able to laugh now at something so silly made things feel like they were getting back to normal, and that she would be able to cope with whatever life could throw at her and still find the humour in it.

“You know, we need a girl’s night out,” Ruby said once the mirth had died down. “You, me, Ariel…”

“Dorothy,” Belle supplied.

“Yes, well, if she wanted to come too then I wouldn’t be averse,” Ruby said coyly. “You and I haven’t been out for ages.”

“We haven’t, but Ruby, I think you might be forgetting the tiny detail that I’m pregnant.”

“We’ll keep you stocked up in fruit juice and soda!” Ruby said. “Come on, you need to live a little. You won’t have much chance after you give birth, you’ve got to admit that.”

“True…”

“Besides, you need some fun. You’ve been so stressed recently thanks to everything that’s been going on and I haven’t seen you smile like you just did for ages. We need to get you smiling more. You’re going to be a mum and everything’s going to be all right.”

Belle nodded. Ruby’s words made sense. She couldn’t stay in her melancholy state forever, not when there was so much to look forward to. The circumstances were not the ideal ones, but they were what they were and she had to make the best of them.

“Belle French?”

The sonographer called her in and she and Ruby followed through to the consulting room. Ruby gave her hand a brief squeeze as she got comfortable on the bed and pulled her sweater up to expose her belly. There was nothing really to see yet, just a slight curve that was not normally there but could be put down to overindulgence if it was noticed. The sonographer, a cheerful lady named Dawn, tucked some paper into her waistband and smeared gel over her stomach.

“Ready?” she said. “I’ll check everything’s as it should be first, and then you can take a look and meet your baby for yourself. Are you excited?”

Belle nodded. Just as Granny had said, now that she was here, the fear had lessened. Dawn switched the transducer on and pressed it over Belle’s tummy, and a steady swishing sound, like ocean waves in a shell, filled the room.

“That’s your baby’s heartbeat,” the sonographer said. “Nice and strong and steady, just what we like to hear. I���ll just get the measurements.”

She clicked a few buttons on the computer screen as she measured the baby, and then turned the monitor towards Belle.

“Here we are,” she said, pointing to the fuzzy black and white image and moving the transducer over her skin again to get a better picture. “Legs, arms, head, all perfectly formed. You’re definitely not expecting twins, and looking at the measurements, your due date will be..” She looked at the calendar, counting down weeks. “June 3rd.”

It didn’t really look much like a human baby, more a vaguely human-shaped blob, but Belle couldn’t help staring in wonder at the picture. This little nugget was her baby, safe and snug inside her, and in seven and a half months she’d get to hold him or her.

“Hello sweetheart,” she murmured, waving to the monitor. “I’m Mama. This is Aunty Ruby. She’s a bit strange, but we all love her really.”

“Hey!” Ruby gave Belle an offended look. “If you weren’t pregnant I’d hit you.”

“Would you like a printout?” Dawn asked.

Belle nodded. “Yes please. And one for Ruby too, she’s insisting on it.” She paused. “Actually, can I have three copies?”

“Sure. We start making you pay print fees after the third though.” The sonographer winked and sent the image to print before turning off the transducer and cleaning the gel off Belle’s stomach before helping her make herself decent again and handing her off the bed. The pictures would take a little while to print, so Ruby and Belle went out into the waiting room again until they were ready.

“Are you going to give the third print to Gold?” Ruby asked.

Belle didn’t reply. She wanted to, but she hadn’t quite decided yet. Best to have the opportunity to send it rather than regret not having done so. If she didn’t end up doing anything with the third copy, then so be it, but she wanted to have that option. She didn’t even know what she was hoping to achieve by giving the picture to him, but since he hadn’t had the opportunity to meet his child in person, she could do the next best thing for him. If he didn’t want the picture then that was his problem.

Then again… Belle sighed. Maybe it was too much, maybe it would come across as desperation, trying to guilt trip him into becoming more involved. She didn’t want that, but she desperately did not want him not to know his child. Still, it wasn’t as if she had to make a decision right away.

The receptionist brought over the prints and Belle handed one to Ruby before tucking the others safely into her purse. Ruby wrapped an arm around her friend’s shoulders as they made their way back to the car.

“Whatever happens, it’ll turn out for the best,” she said. “I promise.”

#rumbelle fic #rumbelle #Belle French #Ruby Lucas #Pregnant!Belle #Fic: The Most Beautiful Mistake #Ruby Slippers as a mentioned sidepair

[phantomrose96]

Artificial Heart

This is my Final for my creative writing class. It’s over 10,000 words long so not the lightest read. But heck man it’s done and I’m pretty proud of it :‘D

Matt never saw the whole body.

Most of it was too buried to see, or charred to a black unrecognizable. It was only the right arm he saw, slung across the cement ground with its fingers curled in, nails cracked and peeling back from the heat. The palm was scorched ashen, splits in the skin leaking fresh oily red beneath the pyre of flame and the sweeping blankets of dark black smoke. The heat cracks ran like veins down the forearm, until everything became buried at the elbow. The forearm was half-submerged in the slick, oily sludge that built up a sheen at the bottom of the pile--a viscous, separated fluid which smelled of death in its own right. An ochre trash bag rested on top and molded to it. Then more sat atop that. They built the whole inferno—sickly flesh-colored sacks that split from the heat and spilled their guts of rotted food and plastic containers and diapers, napkins, dinner plates. The ochre bags were designed specifically to be environmentally friendly, that’s why regular citizens were allowed to burn them once the landfills had overflowed in 2030. It said nothing for the contents of the bags.

Matt stood, his own ochre bag in hand filled with nothing but take-out containers and soiled paper plates. He stared until his eyes burned with the smoke, and his throat itched with the particulate matter not trapped in the cotton mask over his nose and mouth. He considered getting closer purely out of curiosity, but it was in the air now, the parts of it that had burned. He pictured the ashy, feather-light flakes of it settling on his sweatshirt, on his mask, on his brow unprotected. He could never scrub that off, not fully. So he shuffled over to the conveyer belt, and he dropped his own garbage bag there, and hung around just long enough to watch it topple over the precipice and onto the pyre below, its fabric already crinkling in the flames.

Matt turned around so the air hitting him was fresher, and he considered for a single moment calling the police. The thought lasted only a second, and it was banished. Matt had called the police only once in his life, and he had thought it was brave at the time. He’d been fifteen, sitting on the front steps of a dense and warm summer night listening to the yelling inside roll and ebb and crescendo again. It was back when his dad’s affair was new information and his mother, small as she was, had become something heinous when given access to alcohol and kitchenware. The police fixed nothing after he called them, as he sat there, arm curled around their dog Lucky. They only took his mother off for the night, and his older brother had to drive to the station to retrieve her in the morning. And her court date two weeks later to dismiss the charges had ran late, so she arrived thirty minutes after tennis practice ended to pick up Matt, dressed in her Sunday best and saying nothing the whole ride home.

Matt learned to keep things private after that. He did not want to thread himself with the affairs of the police again—as a victim, or a witness, or a suspect. He would not call them, not even for a dead body.

…

Gray storm clouds rolled in with the humidity. They drove a tension into the air that crackled against Matt’s skin and made his upper lip sweat against the air mask. He walked the concrete-lined path back to his apartment, a full half-mile from the communal trash pyre. He lived with his girlfriend Lena, and luckily they lived upwind from the pyre, but days like these sent hot, bloated pockets of wind in all direction. The standing water that lined the streets and rimmed the cracks in the sidewalk turned pungent. Air clung to the skin like sweat, and in the distance the lone few leafless trees howled, the wind stripping their branches and slicing through like hot breath. Matt quickened his pace. He didn’t care to feel the air linger on his skin any longer. It stuck to his throat too easily, shortening his breath, pushing his heart through hiccupy bursts that would stutter until he coughed. The air was bad for you, everyone knew, but Matt had a feeling it was worse for him than most anyone else.

Matt was wheezing slightly when he made it up the last of the four flights of stairs to his apartment door. He undid the deadbolt to get in, and redid it for good measure when he had shut the door behind him. The air inside was cleaner, thinner, but not pure enough to warrant removing the mask. Matt removed his shoes instead, and rubbed his heels. He set his eyes to the sink to wash his hands of the lingering feel of the trash bag. He’d shower too, to wash the ash from his hair.

“Any trouble?”

Matt shut off the tap. He ran one dripping hand through his sandy hair and looked to the couch. Lena sat there, her legs curled beneath her, laptop propped against her knees. Her hair was wet, licking her collar bone with water beads like drops of sweat. The dryer parts of her hair had curled into a thick frizz, coiled by the humidity. Her cotton mask was pulled to the side. Matt wasn’t sure if she’d had it like that the whole time, or if she’d pulled it aside to speak to him unmuffled.

“No, no trouble,” Matt answered through his mask. His throat still felt smothered. He opened the cabinet in search of a clean glass.

“You took long today.” She stood, and carried her laptop over with one hand supporting it like a serving platter. Lena stretched to her toes to grab a different glass from the cabinet. She waited behind Matt, who quickly turned the tap back on to finish filling his glass.

“Did I?” Matt asked, benign in his pretend ignorance. He pulled aside his mask and tried not to cough as the water hit his throat. Lena filled her glass after him.

“What are you working on?” he asked.

“3-D designs.” Lena tilted her laptop so he could view it. A three-dimensional grid sat superimposed on the general model of a heart whose surface was broken up into thousands of matte polygons that wove together into bevels and dips and hollows. The left ventricle was still one flat surface, not yet constructed.

Matt stared until he felt tired looking at it, imaging the work behind the intricacies of its details. He set his glass beneath the tap against and refilled it. “Are you going to get it 3-D printed?”

“Eventually. It’s not done yet. I’ve kinda hit a block working on it.”

Matt nodded, and it was about the best he could do in these conversations. He didn’t understand her work, at least not at a level to contribute to these discussions in any way that didn’t leave him feeling foolish. Lena had been a senior at Holyoke Tech when Matt had been a freshman. She’d graduated with her degree in biomedical engineering and accepted the offer to stick around and do her PhD under her senior thesis advisor. She’d claimed it was the best choice financially, but Matt knew she’d turned down at least two job offers in California in order to stay. She’d been excited about those offers; she’d tried to talk him into transferring to some tech institute near one place or the other. He didn’t remember what institute—he only remembered that he hadn’t had the energy to consider uprooting himself after a whole year at Holyoke. He’d managed to tell her that, and that if long distance wouldn’t work, he thought it would be best they break up. Lena stopped talking about the job offers. She started acting excited about staying at Holyoke for her Ph.D. It could have been coincidence, Matt told himself, but deep down he was almost certain she’d stayed just for him.

The details in his mind were hazy; that had been nearly three years back, and Matt’s memory was a cracked and hole-ridden thing anyway. He wasn’t sure. Maybe she has had a different reason.

By the end of this year, Matt would be graduating with a degree in computer science. Pursuing a Ph.D. afterward didn’t interest him—nothing much did. His future remained empty, so he mostly listened to Lena’s explanations of her work, feeling just a bit stung that he could understand nothing past the graphics interface her modeling software used, and even then at nothing more than an amateur level.

“Do you still have to do a lot of work on that before it’s printable, or what?” he asked.

Lena nodded, her lips tight. “Yeah, but Farhid only wants to see the wireframe structure by Monday. These filled-in regions can be tweaked later. They’re all resting on a wireframe and that’s the only part I really need done by Monday. Farhid’s current model has got too flimsy of a scaffold. It’s gotta hold its shaped but when he gets to the phase of growing the cells around it they get too eager to bind across the gaps. Instead of dividing enough times they just heal across the gaps—extracellular matrices find each other and bind—and they squeeze the scaffold until it warps. Farhid’s given up on his design and wants me to come up with something that won’t do that. Usually he’s a lot more hands-off with my work but he needs this favor…” Lena trailed off. Her top teeth lingered on her lip, eyes lost out the window in thought. Matt followed her gaze but found nothing. He saw only tall brick buildings just like theirs stretching into the air, separated from them just by the street below. The smog sat between their window panes like water vapor.

“Lena?”

Lena snapped back, dark eyes suddenly alight. She set her laptop on the counter and raised her glass to her lips. “Right, I was just thinking if maybe my scaffold--pretty much I should have this part done by noon. Do you wanna watch a movie after lunch?”

“I shouldn’t—I’ve got work,” Matt answered. He did have work—three overdue labs and a fourth one on the horizon. Dread weighed his stomach down, to the point that failing seemed preferable to slogging through the programs he knew he’d not get completed before the end of term. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t graduate. And maybe that was fine. Maybe he’d take an extra semester here with Lena, and sort his life out…

He was too tired anyway. For work or a movie.

Or Lena.

“What about going out to dinner?” Lena followed up. She glanced to her laptop, a worried twisting of her brow, then shut her computer entirely. “There’s a new Thai place across the street from Bella’s apartment. She says it’s good. I’ve been looking for somewhere to go for my birthday.”

Matt’s lip curled slightly. He didn’t know Bella well. She was Lena’s friend, an ashen white girl of 22 with stringy blond hair and thin teeth. She talked too much and too long about nothing; her focus shifted too easily—between people and conversation topics and drivers on the road. He had been in the back seat, Lena in the passenger’s, three years ago when Bella T-boned another car through a red light. Matt had woken up in the hospital with a punctured lung and his breathing had never since been quite right. He hadn’t hung out with her since, and had no desire to.

“You don’t like Thai food,” Matt answered, because he knew that route would be easier.

“I don’t like the Thai take-out place. This one is new.” There was an edge to her words. It annoyed Matt just a bit, because it filled him with the sense that he wanted to reassure her, but his mind was too tired to come up with the words to do so.

“Maybe another night.” Matt passed from the kitchen to the livingroom—the two were separated only by a change in floor tiling, linoleum to wood. He settled on the couch, dragged his laptop across the coffee table, and glanced once more to the hazy gray sky through the window, pregnant with a threatened acid rainfall. Matt tried to remember just how many missing assignments had piled up. He couldn’t. His brain felt moth-eaten. He was tired.

“…Are you feeling okay?” Lena asked. She followed him, settled in beside him with her laptop angled away. There was something just too probing about her stare, clinical like a doctor’s. “Let me see your Fitbit,” she said, and reached for his arm.

“It’s fine. I’m tired,” Matt answered, shifting his arm out of reach. He was uncomfortable with becoming a specimen.

“You’ve been coughing. Your heart’s being weird again, yeah? You should maybe take a couple days off from classes to feel better.” Her worried face was ashen. Matt was reminded of staled chocolate bars that accrued gray, ashy dust on their surface from age.

“I told you I’ve got work to do. I need to go to campus tomorrow for class.” Matt paused, and he racked his brain. “…You’ve uh, you’ve got some kind of presentation tomorrow, don’t you?”

Lena pulled back, her cheeks filling with just a bit of color as she looked to her laptop. “Yeah… It’s a small thing. All the Ph.D. students have to present at the panel.”

A deep and low grumble shook through the house. The hot, humid air spiked, and the television-static hiss from the outside the windows followed the sudden deluge of rain from the choked skies.

“How about I come to that? For your birthday, instead of going out to dinner. And you can go out with Bella on your birthday instead.”

“You wanna hear me talk about my work?”

“Yeah, it’s cool stuff. I mean, making body parts? That’s cool.”

“It’s still—ah, there are a lot of failures in my work,” Lena answered, dismissive, though her cheeks flushed just a bit deeper, and she spoke through a suppressed smile. “It could be a long time before I’m able to make something sustainable.”

“Yeah but, eventually. And in the meantime I still want to hear about it. Even if I don’t get it.” He moved a hand out and reached around her back, placed it lightly on her shoulder, testing if it felt right. She eased into him, and Matt was reminded how soft she felt—her cheek against his shoulder, her arm wrapped to his chest. The tension inside him loosened. Shamefully, Matt wondered why he felt any tension toward her at all.

“I think you’ll be a bit disappointed. I won’t be pulling any fully-formed organs out of a vat at the podium. My slides are just going to be a lot of pictures of slimy half-formed organs and some charts about their constitution. The slides with the virtual models will look nicer.” Her wet hair soaked into his shirt, leaving paintbrush streaks and small damp blots. Matt was reminded of the charred flesh still likely clinging to the fabric. Lena’s hand tightened against his chest, and she lifted her head to look him in the eyes. “Oh, there’s going to be images of cadavers on some of the slides too. They’re donated to science so you don’t have to…feel bad, but if you’re uncomfortable seeing them.”

Matt swallowed once. Curled charred hand in the pyre. “…Cadavers?”

“Dead bodies. Like they use in teaching hospitals, med school. Farhid has a colleague at Holyoke General so he can file requests for cadavers that the hospital is finished with—that wording sounds harsh. Um, to put them to further use, I mean, is the better way to put it.”

Matt nodded. His chest felt heavy, his head just a bit light, like he was breathing in his own air. He thought about dead bodies, dead flesh, charred skin, how it burned black and peeled and split. He felt like it was in his lungs, and doubled over coughing.

“Matt!” Lena pushed off from him. She crouched on the floor in front of him, grabbed his chin, and worry was all he saw in her eyes, more worry than actual person. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Matt—“

“I’m fine.”

“Tell me.”

“I saw something in the garbage pyre.” Matt blinked, straightening, though he now stared only at the ground as she spoke, racking his memories. “There was a dead body in the garbage pyre. I saw it burning there, all buried underneath—just an arm but, it was a human arm. The body was somewhere. It was burning. Right in the garbage pyre.” He steadied his breath. He grabbed his mask and pulled it aside so he could suck air deep into his lungs—it felt better like that, clearer, and for a single moment his head cleared as well. “That’s ridiculous, right? There can’t be—there’s no way—I was seeing things. There’s no dead body in the garbage pyre.”

Matt locked eyes with Lena.

“That is ridiculous,” she said, and each syllable was well-enunciated. Her face had closed off, a dark and blank slate, with a piercing directness behind her eyes.

“That…is ridiculous,” Matt said again, as if to test the words. He looked at his hands which he had already washed, and felt he could see the residue of burnt flesh, scattered up in the wind, clinging to his slick and sweaty skin. He felt it on his shirt, dense around the collar and tight as if restricting airflow to his lungs. His heart hiccupped through a beat, and only caught its normal rhythm again when he coughed.

“Yes, it is ridiculous,” Lena echoed after him. “Crime around here doesn’t happen. It’s only other Holyoke students who share that pyre. If someone had been murdered and vanished then we would know about it.”

Matt rubbed his hands against his pants, until the sweat glistening in the lines of his palms vanished. He would wash this outfit. He would burn it in the garbage pyre, maybe. “Then what did I see in the pyre?”

“Anything. A lot of things can look like body parts.” Lena dropped her hands to Matt’s shoulders, grounding him. “I look at body parts and organs so much I start seeing them everywhere. It happens. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“What if it was there?”

“It wasn’t.” Lena paused. Then her grip loosened, and she leaned back against the coffee table. She lowered herself from her crouch, sitting now on the floor, her knees up and wrapped against her chest. “…But even if it was, it doesn’t affect us, Matt. It’s not either of us. It’s not our problem…”

“Okay… Okay.” Matt stood. He offered her a hand, and he pulled her up. The light that leaked through the pelting rain robbed the room of color, desaturated it. Everything had tinted gray, and just a bit yellow. The sensation still clung to Matt’s clothes, and he offered Lena a smile. “You’re right… You’re right. I’m uh… I still want to shower. Want to do take out? Afterward? Or in a few hours maybe.”

Lena nodded, though Matt still felt like a specimen beneath her eyes—worse, a specimen to be handled carefully. “Sure. Sure. Want to do the Chinese place?”

Matt waved a dismissive hand as he stepped around her. “Whichever. I’m not all that hungry today.”

Matt shut the bathroom door behind him, and he stripped his clothes and dropped them in the pocket of space behind the hamper so they would not mingle with the others. He showered too long, then fell asleep still-damp and in pajamas on the couch when he only meant to nap for an hour or so. Lena did not wake him, even for dinner, so he rose only to the sound of pre-sunrise birdsong some 14 hours later.

Matt checked the bedroom, and Lena was asleep in bed. He considered moving to join her, but he doubted he would fall back asleep. Instead he shrugged on a coat, and laced up his shoes, and grabbed an umbrella as he headed out.

The garbage pyre was muted under heavy rain. Its tall licking flames were reduced to wisps, smothered and buffeted about under a sheet of water the danced with the hot gusts of wind. Matt’s cotton face mask grew damp, the breath in his throat wet. He squinted through the sheets of rain to the bottom of the pyre.

There was no hand there.

Nothing sat where it had been. To its right, Matt was certain he saw the light imprints of boots in the sludge, shimmering visible because the rain water filled them in.

…

Lena drove them both to campus that day, her wipers churning through the slates of rain that washed her windshield. The black skies were blacker now. Thunder rumbled; pieces of the cloud cover flashed with light. The shallow sewer grates bubbled over so that the water flushing through the streets turned murky. The air tasted hot and sour against the back of Matt’s throat. His head ached with the lightness he hadn’t been able to sleep off.

She pulled into her parking spot in the lot just outside the biomedical building. It was rare for Ph.D. students to have their own spot, rarer still to have one right beside the building. As Matt understood it, it had been part of Dr. Farhid’s bribe to get Lena to stay for her Ph.D.

Lena did not switch off the exhaust. She did not unbuckle her seatbelt, so Matt did not either. He followed her eyes, distantly focused in the pelting sheets of rain against the windshield, the wipers that cut watery arcs over the glass that filled back in after each pass, incessantly, forever. She drummed her fingers along the steering wheel instead.

“…Lena?” Matt asked.

“I can still take you home,” Lena said. “I know you’re not feeling well.”

“I’ve been feeling weird for a couple weeks. It’s normal now.” He studied her, the tension in her body, the tightness of her fingers wrapped to the wheel as she only stared forward. “I can like, schedule a doctor’s appointment, or something.”

“You don’t need to come to my talk just to support me. It’s okay,” Lena said. She looked to him, smile pained, and Matt could tell saying so was a sacrifice. She wanted him here.

“I want to,” Matt answered. He looked away, because he felt that tension again clamping on his chest. He hated not knowing what about Lena made him so tense. “You do all this amazing stuff that uh, I think it’s like I forget. Or like, I forget that it is amazing, because I’m like ‘yeah, that’s what Lena does, creates body parts from nothing, like always.’ I should uh, I should see you talk about it and impress people. I wanna remember all over why it’s so impressive.”

Matt heard nothing but the sweep of the windshield wipers, the firm pelting of the rain. He finally glanced her way when the silence unnerved him.

She was just smiling.

It was a smile that brought out the little crook of dimples along her cheeks, and squeezed softly around her eyes, and brought a warm brightness to her face that lit what the smothered sun could not.

She used to smile like that a lot more, Matt realized. Years back when they first met. Most days now, she only seemed stressed.

Matt could say the same of himself, he supposed.

“Okay… Okay. Do you need to stay for your class after? If you’re not feeling well, I can just drive you home after my presentation. How about that?”

Matt shrugged. “I’ll let you know how I’m feeling.”

Lena nodded, satisfied. She twisted around in her seat to grab her backpack that had been tossed into the back. She unzipped it and pulled a pocket-sized umbrella from its depths, and she handed it to Matt. “Here.”

Matt grabbed it, then looked to Lena; she was significantly better dressed than he was: a stark and crisp blazer overtop a ruffled white button-up, a black pencil skirt and stockings, heels on her velvety dark shoes. She’d straightened her hair, and whisked her lashes with mascara, and touted a faint red artificial blush on her cheeks. He then looked out the window, at the torrential rain, and the thirty feet at least to the door.

“You need that way more,” Matt remarked.

“It’s fine. I’ll run. You need this way more. This weather is bad for you.”

Matt wasn’t sure what she quite meant, so he only nodded, and took the umbrella. Lena leaned across the divider between them a left a single, light kiss on his cheek. When she pulled away, it was the old Lena again, with the bright smile and the eyes like warm chocolate that Matt remembered falling in love with.

“Love you,” Lena said, and she killed the ignition, and popped the driver’s side door open.

“Love you…” Matt whispered back, and he watched her race through the rain, heels clacking, her backpack held just above her head for shelter.

…

The auditorium was a room he’d never seen. It was a brightly lit room whose seating rose a step at each row back, so that the very last row watched from the highest vantage point. The seats were plush green, and each had a small fold-out desk for taking notes. Dark wooden paneling lined the very back of the room, just behind the very last row of seats. The podium and presenter would seem small from back there, low to the ground and dwarfed beneath the enormous projector warming up against the lowered white screen at the very front.

The room was already about a third filled, and from the scattered number of audience members in well-ironed blazers and professional dark dresses, Matt assumed the presenters sat among the crowd while awaiting their turn. So he scanned the audience, and found Lena sitting in one of the backmost rows, all the way to the left, just against one of the rear exits. Bella sat next to her, one seat closer to the center of the row. Bella pointed to Matt, and Lena turned to follow the line. She waved when she spotted him.

Matt sidled in beside Lena, the last seat of the row, and set the wet, collapsed umbrella down at his feet. Up close he could see how the rain had thoroughly soaked her hair. Streaks from her fingers ran through it, where she’d clearly attempted to comb it back into submission. It had mostly worked, though a few loose coils spun free. Her make up remained mostly intact.

“Hi,” Bella said first, and the tight discomfort of her lips seemed to suggest she was no more happy to speak with Matt than he was to speak with her.

“Hey,” Matt offered back. He looked her over once; her corn silk hair had been pulled back into a tight bun. A floral patterned dress hung loose around her stocky frame. Her shoulders were covered by her halfway-buttoned cardigan, a muted pink against the vibrant violets and reds of her dress. She wore dark stockings and dark shoes not at all distinguishable from Lena’s

“How are you?” Bella asked.

“Good. How are you?” Matt returned.

“Lena says you haven’t been feeling that well. Um, I hope you get better.” Her eyes flickered around, either disinterested or uncomfortable, Matt could not tell.

“Yeah I’m sure I will. This thing comes and goes.”

Lena leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees so that she cut Bella from Matt’s sight. “So you found the room okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m here. There were signs. You sure you didn’t want the umbrella? I mean too late now but uh, you’re all wet.”

“It’s fine. Best you don’t stress yourself too much,” Lena answered. Matt leaned away just a bit on instinct.

“I’m fine…” he answered. The insinuation that he wasn’t had worked its way beneath his skin. It ignited that tension in him all over, fumbled his emotions until he settled on annoyance. He realized Bella had worn the same look too—some kind of anxious discomfort or pity that Lena now appraised him with. He wondered what Lena must have told her. He wondered more why Lena was so insistent upon him being unwell.

He said nothing about it. He only let it simmer while Bella and Lena restarted their conversation from earlier. Matt didn’t care to listen. He sunk into his plush seat, his breath just a bit too uncomfortably hot and damp beneath the face mask. So he loosened it from his mouth and nose. He shifted it to the side to just block the two girls out, and pulled himself up into his own mind.

The body… The body the body. Or the arm, just an arm, in the pyre, burning until someone had pulled it out sometime last night. It would have been easy enough to do, given some caution and a pair of thick gloves, since the rain dampened the fire to near non-existence. But to trudge through the oilslick underneath, through the miscellaneous soup of rotting and putrid and fetid garbage. Matt shivered, thinking how long a shower it would take to rid yourself of that taint.

The lights above dimmed. Some man in a suit stepped up to the platform. Applause met him; the audience stirred and shuffled. Matt blinked, adjusting to the new dimness, squinting at the harsh white glow as the projector caught, and displayed the Holyoke crest across the whole screen.

Matt didn’t catch the name of the man speaking. He was a bald and dark-skinned man whose voice was low and smooth enough to distract Matt from what he was actually saying. The man’s speech began with some remark about the advent of human discovery in medicine, and anything past that Matt did not hear. He only clapped when everyone else clapped, and stared on as the first Ph.D. student approached the podium to present.

He was a mousy little boy who introduced himself as Dylan something. Nerves seemed to raise the pitch of his voice, and he spoke too quickly as he flipped through slides detailing the design of some chip to capture circulating tumor cells out of blood draws. Or maybe he spoke at a perfectly fine pace, as everyone else seemed to follow along—Lena and Bella watched on, calm, looking neither lost nor confused. Maybe Matt himself was just too dumb to follow.

Spitefully, Matt elected to stop listening. He let the mousy boy Dylan-something keep on talking, and lost himself instead in his own mind again. Bella lived in the same designation of apartment buildings. She shared their garbage pyre. It was a slim chance, but she might know something. She could have taken her trash out the previous night. She could have seen something to explain what Matt himself could not.

He glanced past Lena, who was washed pale in the residual light from the projector, and she stared at Bella instead. He investigated her face as if he might be able to read off it if she’d seen a dead body or not. He had no such luck.

Lena felt his eyes, and she glanced over to him. Her smile was thin. Quietly she whispered. “Anything wrong?”

“No…” Matt answered.

“Okay. If you’re not feeling well…”

“I’m fine,” Matt asserted. He stared forward again, breathing deep so that he could stomp down his own squirming frustration. The presenters had switched in the meantime. The new girl was a redhead who opened her presentation with a slide filled with gratuitous shots of what seemed to be an eviscerated rat. Matt shuddered. He elected to zone out again. He racked his memories so that he could permanently stamp the image of the hand to his mind. He wouldn’t let this become another punctured hole in his memory. He thought about the way the skin shined, like pork skin on a spit roast, leathery and tight except for where it split to reveal the squishy pinkish oozing mess beneath. He thought about the splits in the fingernails, and the torn-away flesh at the wrist where bone was exposed, and how little blood seemed to coat it, and if—

“I’m up next. Let me scoot past you Matt so I can get to the front.”

Matt leaned back against his seat, and silently he let Lena step over him. Only her backpack remained in the foot-space of her seat.

--and if someone he knew really was a killer.

Applause echoed from all sides of Matt. Rat girl drew her presentation to a close, and bowed with a deep toothy smile. She unplugged her laptop from the projector, which fizzled out to a stark blue screen while Lena propped her laptop on top and plugged it in.

The empty gap between him and Lena felt suddenly loud.

“Are you uh…Are you excited to see Lena present?” Bella asked.

“Yeah,” Matt answered.

It was strange, experiencing a silence with Bella that was not immediately filled with her prattling voice. It had been three years since he’d spoken with her at length. He’d anticipated an apology for the accident and never quite got one, so he’d made no real effort to reconnect with her again. Maybe she’d just gotten quiet in that time.

“She does really cool stuff. We’re all jealous of her, you know. Okay not like we hate her, but we all know she’s doing the best work. She acts like it’s not but it is. She doesn’t even talk about most of it. You should be really impressed with her. And not in a mean way but you should probably be feeling really lucky to have her.”

Matt stared forward. He decided again that he didn’t like Bella. “Yeah, it’s impressive.”

“Some people think it’s just setting down cells in the shape of some organ, but no. It’s way way more complicated. That’s the reason scientists can’t make 3-D organs yet it’s because they fail right away, there’s too much complexity to a body. Lena’s on track to crack that. You should feel real grateful to her and not stress her out, okay? She’s doing so much.”

“Are you saying that I am stressing her out?”

“I’m not saying you’re doing it intentionally. Just please be nice to her.”

Matt shot her a withering glare, but she offered no response. She sat there, bony and lanky and wispy and like half a living human herself. He disliked her more than the carefree talker that lived in his memories before the crash, before his memory got bad.

“There was a dead body in our garbage pyre yesterday, did you know? Lena says nothing was there. I’m wondering if maybe you’d say differently.”

“Dead body?”

“Dead body. A hand, I saw. It was burning in the bottom of the pile. And then this morning it was gone.”

He met her level gaze. Her bright blues eyes seemed to wait for him to reveal more. He held out the silence.

“That sounds extreme. Maybe it was a mannequin hand.”

“The inside was flesh.”

“You said it was gone this morning. Maybe you just didn’t really see it yesterday.”

“I could report it to the police. We could see if there are surveillance tapes around—“

“Don’t—“

Matt lapsed into silence. Bella’s voice lashed and then died instantly. A momentary look of panic flashed and vanished from her eyes, and she pulled back into her seat.

“Don’t…?”

“Don’t stress Lena out anymore, okay?” Bella answered. “Don’t get her roped into some kind of crazy witch hunt with you. Lena has real things to do. Not all that should revolve around you, all the time, like it does.”

“It doesn’t,” Matt answered. Bella acted as though she hadn’t heard. She was staring forward. Too late, Matt realized Lena’s presentation had started.

He scanned the current presentation slide, mentally scrambling in an effort to catch up. Eight time-lapse photographs were lined up, four on top, four beneath, showing what seemed to be the thin, sturdy, almost plastic membrane in the shape of a heart progress into something fleshed and filled-out. The first image was a plastic shell suspended in some kind of saline solution. The next seemed to have developed a thin, slime coating. The next had been moved into a mold whose translucent outline bore the unmistakable negative space for a human heart. The next had two dozen hooks and needles piercing the flesh, seeming to weave and coax the direction of artery growth.

“Professor Fahrid’s design above… Disfigurement by stage seven… Beats under electric pulse… Constitution too weak to support normal blood flow…”

Matt caught only fragments of Lena’s voice. She flipped slides, and on it was the wireframe model she had shown Matt yesterday. Its left ventricle was constructed this time.

“Hope to implement… Full 3-D design… Stem cell cultures in hopes of…”

She flipped the slide again. This one contained two images, left and right. The left was a computer model, a lifeless polygonal human with its chest slit a few inches by the sternum and cracked ribs hinged back, the wire-frame heart, now fleshed in, secured in the chest cavity. The image was captured “Future implementation”

The left picture, with “Current implementation” captioned on top, was not a computer image. It appeared to be a simple cellphone photo, of a widely torn-back chest flushed white beneath the surgical lighting. The heart model Matt recognized as Fahrid’s from a few slides back was situated between the two lungs, both ghastly white and near indistinguishable from the bed of ribs that had been cracked back around it.

Neither the chest nor the heart caught Matt’s attention. Instead his eyes trailed to the bent arm, elbow just out of frame, and the fingers curled down near the hipbone where the image stopped. He stared at the cadaver’s fingers, all curled and white and bloodless, its nails like the nails in the fire but uncracked now, flesh still secured to the bone, except for near the wrist where a flap of skin had been cut away to reveal bone.

Without a word, Matt reached to the backpack Lena had left at the foot of her seat. He unzipped the front pocket and grabbed her wallet, flipping it open to see that her ID was tucked inside. He slid it into his pocket, and he stood, and he looked to the rear exit.

Maybe all dead hands looked identical. But he felt he was looking at the hand he’d seen in the pyre. The cut at the wrist, the flap of skin peeled away to reveal the protrusion of bone. He’d seen that. It was etched into his memory. He’d seen that exact cut in the pyre.

“Hey, where are you going?” Bella whispered.

He left the row. He quietly set a hand to the rear door and eased it open without a sound.

“Where are you going?” Bella hissed.

The door shut behind Matt. He clung to the image of the dead body on screen, its chest flayed and open, its curled hand filling just the edge of the frame. It reminded him all too much of… No, it was more than the hand in the pyre. Somehow, it reminded him of something worse, something more sinister. It filled him with some kind of aching familiarity.

(Lena did not want him focusing on the body.)

Matt knew the path to Lena’s lab, because he’d surprised Lena before in her PI’s office complex with flowers for her birthday. The secretary had found him endearing ever since, and she wouldn’t bat an eye if he entered.

(Bella did not want him pestering Lena about it anymore.)

He pulled Lena’s ID from his pocket and scanned it. The door unlatched. The receptionist, Margot if he remembered, saw him and smiled. Matt tried for a smile and a nod too.

(So he would just check it out alone. The itch became like a rash, if he could just understand what the cut had been. Just convince himself that the two bodies were separate…)

“Hey Margot, Lena needs me to grab something from her lab bench before her presentation, sorry.”

“Oh… I can’t let you down there,” Margot answered, blinking in surprise. She chewed her lip, chalky and cherry red.

“It’s very important for her presentation.”

“Still… You haven’t done any of the biohazard training, have you? It’s policy.”

“Is it…” Matt dropped his voice. “Is it because of the cadavers down there?”

“Cadavers?” Margot’s voice startled Matt. He jumped back a bit as Margot clutched the edge of her desk for effect. “Goodness no. Goodness no you cannot bring cadavers into this building! Are you crazy? No! Dead bodies in this building? You think I’m happily working here while there are dead bodies beneath my feet? Goodness gracious no. They’d arrest us for five different felonies I image. No… no all the cadaver work happens at Holyoke General Hospital. Only at Holyoke General Hospital.”

“Oh…” Matt answered, a bit taken aback, and a bit ashamed for having thought differently in the first place. “Okay then. Thank you.”

He turned on his heels, swallowing his disappointment. It was for the best, probably. There was no real logic in needing to see the cadaver body. He could ask Lena point-blank about the wrist. Maybe she would know, better yet, maybe she would finally believe him about the burning body. He had no real reason to trust Bella’s advice out of anyone’s.

“Well…” Margot spoke up, her voice lilting. “if she really needs it, and you can be fast…”

Matt paused. Margot’s words hung in the air. When he turned, her eyes were sly.

“Oh, um, it’s okay, Margot, she’s just—“

“Just don’t tell Fahrid I let you down there, okay? Can’t have poor Lena messing up her presentation, especially when you were sweet enough to come all the way down here.” Margot answered, and she motioned to the elevator just a bit down the hall.

“Oh…thank you,” Matt answered, his voice wavering uncertain. He had no good way to talk his way out of his lie, so he stepped into the hall, and he hit the down button. The elevator door pinged open for him. Matt coughed, and he vanished inside it.

He need only poke around the lab, and grab the first important-seeming notebook he could find, and resurface with it pretending it was what Lena had sent him to retrieve.

The temperature dropped with the decent and the door opened somewhere colder, dryer. Matt stepped out into a concrete hall. Matt coughed, and it echoed now in the hallway leading to Lena’s lab. The fit continued, until his heart stuttered sluggishly and tears beaded in the corner of his eyes. His footsteps echoed along with the coughs as he rounded the end of the hall to Lena’s lab.

He stepped up beside it and set his pocket to the scanner. It blipped. Lena’s card got him in, and Matt entered.

The lab was something he’d only ever seen once: a modest set up, white tiling and white walls and a white ceiling. Blue-topped counters lined each of the walls, and a single island in the middle bore shelves that stacked to the ceiling. Beakers, boxes of pipet tips, bottles of ethanol and dilutions lined the shelves, pipet racks sat on the counter—spotlessly clean—where the sink carved out a section in the corner. A water bath sat, set to 37 degrees Celcius, heating a bottle of red cell medium. An incubator sat opposite. Its shelves were like the shelves of a fridge lined with flasks of cell culture. On the opposite counter were several petri dishes, none with tops, all sporting different swaths of translucent flesh. A large heat lamp burned above them. There was a stop watch beside the set-up, ticking down.

Matt stepped forward. His shoes were still wet from the storm, he realized, and they squished leaving sponge marks with each step. He gave the lab another once-over, and a thin gray notebook propped on the middle shelf caught his attention. That would work. He grabbed it, flipped through it. It was filled with the documentation of experiments over the last couple weeks.

Matt…

His name flickered past at the head of one of the pages. Matt paused his flipping, and he sifted backwards until he happened upon the same page. It filled him with a strange twisting dread as he locked onto it, and read.

Height…

Weight…

Waist circumference…

Wrist circumference…

Hair length…

Shin measurements…

Thigh measurements…

Forearm measurements…

Matt skimmed the list. His name sat in solitude at the top, and down the entire page stretched a hundred or so different measurements, each penciled in with recordings to hundredths in their precision. His insides squirmed as he read the list again, his mind empty for any reason for having such detailed notes of him.

It felt violating, almost, to see himself deconstructed into hundreds of numbers. Like he was a specimen. Like he was something to experiment on.

The discomfort that filled his lungs was something difficult to breathe through. He flipped the page, and found the measurements continued.

Carotenoid artery diameter: …

Left/Right ventricle volume:…

Left/Right atrium volume:…

Depth of carotenoid vein permeation: …

The measurements became something Matt could not understand. The discomfort was violating. He felt suddenly in the lab of a stranger. He closed the notebook, and he looked around again, as if hoping something tacked to the wall might explain it.

He saw nothing tacked to the wall; Matt spotted only another door in back, leading to a supply closet of sorts, or something larger than that. There was a gauge beside the door that read -4C on it.

He stepped forward, and he jostled the door until it budged. Inside was dark. Inside was colder, chilled numbingly cold. Matt shuddered. He flipped the light on.

He froze.

A gurney stretched across the opposite wall. A body sat atop it.

The skin was sickly white, a pure milky unblemished hue robbed of all blood and life in the artificial casting of light. A simple tarp was draped across it for modesty sake, but limbs extruded from the edges. Toes curled up, their tendons taut and stiff beneath the skin. Light hair dusted across the skullcap, soft like snow, unbludgeoned, not knotted with blood, but so deathly still, so deathly stiff. A medical mask of sorts covered the nose and mouth, connected elsewhere. The right arm protruded from the tarp covered, slung out, fingers curled up and in, begging to mirror what had been burned.

Matt hadn’t noticed the tremble working through his system. The cadaver wasn’t the same as the one pictured in the slides. Matt knew that immediately from the intact right wrist hanging off the edge of the gurney.

The cadaver was, he realized, likely not even a cadaver.

Cadavers would never enter this building, Margot had said. This body, whoever and whatever it was, did not belong in the lab. This body was something Lena had brought here on her own terms, which she’d stashed away in the freezer room of the lab she shared with no one else.

Something cold, something dead, that existed in a place outside the realm of medical license. Lena’s discomfort with the dead body in the pyre resonated in him with new meaning. Bella’s fear of police involvement twisted in his gut. He knew he was staring at something heinous. He knew he was tightly wrapped, down to his every last measurement, in something that would terrify him to understand.

Silently, Matt dropped to his knees. He stared at the gurneyed body a little longer, and wondered what lifeless thing it was, and if his own fingerprints were now in the room, and if the body up there knew anything about the body in the pyre.

“Matt!”

His head shot up. Lena’s voice sent ripples of fear through him.

He did not turn though. He could only stiffen as the pounding of her feet approached, as she dropped down and grabbed him and held him, rocked him, muttering something through tears—

“No!” Matt yelled. He swung his hand out, throwing her off as he scrambled away. His back collided with the nearby wall. He swore he heard the gurney rattle. “Why is there a cadaver in the lab? He’s not one, is he? You brought it here.“

“Listen to me, Matt.”

Matt looked up. Lena inched closer, careful steps along with that same worried face. She looked as though he might fracture any second. She shouldn’t look like she pitied him. She shouldn’t look concerned.

“He’s dead,” Matt repeated.

“That’s not right.”

“The body! In the pyre! He was dead too.”

“Yes, he was,” Lena answered. Her words were sharp now, cutting in between Matt’s hysterics.

“Dead!”

“Yes! Yes Matt, the body in the pyre was dead, okay!? Dead! Stop saying it! I know. I know…”

Matt watched her approach with wide, hunted eyes. His hand shot behind him, to the drawer handle digging into his back. He opened it and plunged his hand in. It wrapped around the only thing he could grab, just a scoopula, which he brandished like a weapon for his own sake. Lena stopped, looking more hurt than threatened.

“You put it in the fire?” Matt whispered.

“Yes, I did,” Lena admitted through gritted teeth. “Now let me explain.”

“The whole body!? Was it there—just the arm—did you cut it up!?”

“Let me explain—“

“Was it a cadaver? In the fire?”

“Not—don’t call it—no, no it wasn’t.”

“Did you kill him?”

“I didn’t!”

“You did! Why would you burn it otherwise? You did.”

“I didn’t!”

“Who then!? Who did!? Who killed him!?”

“Bella did,” Lena snapped. Then she pulled back, and breathed once before whispering, “Bella killed him, three years ago.” Lena moved, and she was a smaller thing now. She stepped over Matt’s feet without his brandished scoopula reaching her, and she stopped by the gurney. She set a hand around the mask and lifted it. The body on the gurney had just a bit of color to his lips—sandy hair, bony frame. Matt stared at in in a momentary transfix of horror, then he touched a hand to his own burning face. “I’ve been trying to save him ever since.”

Matt didn’t hear. He stared at the body, his attention transfixed.

He stared at his own face, silently white on the gurney.

“It’s me…” Matt muttered.

“It’s you,” and it was an admittance of defeat. “It’s the next you I’m making.”

Matt shook his head. And he shook it some more, because it was all he could do. “Who was the body…? In the pyre? Who was it?”

“It was you, Matt.” She swallowed once. “The you who died last time. He’s been on ice, a few months now, because I needed to find a time when the trash heap was high and no one would notice but…you did. You weren’t supposed to notice.”

Matt shook his head again. “I’m me.”

“You’re one of you… So was he, in the pyre.” Lena looked to the gurney, and she nodded her head to it. “So is he, eventually.”

She placed the mask back over the body’s mouth lovingly, then she stepped away from it. She stopped in front of Matt and crouched, easing the scoopula away from him until it just dangled in his fingers, then she stowed it in her pocket. Her hand rose, the back of it skimming his hot cheek. “I keep trying, but I can’t get you right. It’s…they’re cadavers, at some point, the number of strings I pull with Fahrid to get them and not ask me why.” She looked around, agitated, then her manic eyes were back on him. “They’re only the framework though. I can’t make everything. I try to make everything I can—your organs, your mind, your face—I can make all the pieces of you now, and put you back together inside a cadaver’s body. But you just don’t last. Over and over—I’m doing something wrong. Your heart doesn’t keep beating in rhythm. The smog fills up with lungs with tar and it never filters out. Then something hits…a fever…pneumonia or…and you just don’t bounce back. I’m making you in a way that keeps on breaking, and it kills you again every time. It’s my fault, somehow, but I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”

Horror blossomed hot and violent under Matt’s skin. Lena’s touch was like ice.

“That’s wrong. I’m me. Who did you burn?”

“So far, five of you… Five of you I’ve burned.” She looked away. “Including the real you… I’m sorry—I had to burn your real body and replace it. If I hadn’t then the hospital, the doctors, your family, they’d think you died.”

“…In the garbage pyre…?” Matt whispered.

“You were brain-dead,” Lena answered. She stood now, moving back to the gurney where her hands lingered above it, careful, loving. “The car smashed through you—not me and not Bella—it should have been me for dragging you out. …Should have been Bella for driving,” Lena said, a hint of malice in her voice. She reached beneath the gurney and grabbed a monitor and a pair of diodes. Then she moved back to Matt’s side and pressed them to the sides of his head. “But it was you. The doctors said you’d last only another two weeks after the accident. No part of you could recover from being so…so mangled up. It was just the machines keeping you alive, and only until the swelling in your skull finally killed you… They said to take you off lifesupport, Matt. I almost lost you. I almost lost you… ”

Lena tapped a button on the machine, cranked a dial up, and electricity seemed to burst behind Matt’s eyes. He blinked through it, confused.

“Everything I know is about modeling, scanning, printing organs. And I know you better than anyone. I just needed to model you perfectly, and build you up from scratch.” Lena tapped off the dial, and removed the diodes, and stood. She leaned over the body on the gurney and attached them to the sides of its temple. “Right down to your brain waves. Your memories.”

“…My memories?”

“Yeah,” Lena answered. The body’s eyes twitched, still shut, but suddenly alive with movement. “And you won’t remember this.”

Matt swallowed. His heart beat shallowly in his throat, fluttering and erratic. It sent stars through his vision. “Are you erasing my memory?”

“I’m just not transferring it to him,” Lena motioned to the body on the gurney. Then her eyes, wet with pity, set on him. “You’re the first clone to find out; is it okay to tell you I’m sorry? I’m sorry I let Bella drive. I’m sorry I can’t get you right. I’m sorry you have to keep dying like this every couple months. I want you to last… I’ll figure you out eventually, with no heart troubles and no breathing troubles. I hate watching you die. I love you, Matt.”

“Like this…?” Matt echoed. He tried to steady his breathing, but he couldn’t anymore. “What does that mean? What does that mean? What does that mean?”

“You always last the same amount of time. Before the complications set it. I’m sorry Matt, you—this you—you’re winding down.”

“No… No no no no no.”

“I’ll stay with you. I always do. I won’t turn him on until you’re gone.”

“What does that mean?” Matt asked, panicked tears cutting an edge in his voice. He understood though, as his skin tingled to numbness, and Lena dropped to his side. She wrapped him in a hug, rocked with him, as the numbness spread, as it washed through his body in bursts and Matt found himself too weak to move.

It lasted hours, or minutes maybe, he couldn’t really tell. Rasping hot breath into his lungs for the body he couldn’t feel as Lena rocked with him, crying lightly. And it lasted, and it lasted until a white hot fire cut through his chest and erupted outward, and his breathing was strangled through water, and oxygen wouldn’t reach his brain fading black and stuttering damp and dark and cold, numb, off…

in…

to…

nothing…

…

Matt sat on the couch Wednesday afternoon, his laptop open to a few half-finished labs and the tv switched on to ESPN. He rested a bag of potato chips in the crook of his arm and ate them absentmindedly, watching the clock time out on the last play of the game. The clouds had cleared. The sunlight caught in beams along the smog and lit the air a fiery orange.

“Matt, I’m taking the car out for about an hour. You good here?”

Matt glanced over his shoulder. His eyes flickered back and forth between Lena and the game, making sure the clock really was on track to time out. It did, and he let out a small whoop before dedicating his whole attention to Lena.

She shot him a small smile, and grabbed the ochre bag from the trash bin, tying it tight. Matt frowned.

“I can take the trash out in a bit. Nice day, so the walk to the pyre shouldn’t be bad.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ve got some old furniture I’m getting rid of there, so I’m taking the car.”

“You’ll stink up the car.”

“It’s a short ride.” She bit her lip. “And I’ve got other errands, might take a while.”

“It’s almost your birthday,” Matt remarked, unsure why he’d said it other than having been suddenly struck by the information.

Lena paused. “It is,” and she hefted the bag over her shoulder.

“There’s a new Thai place nearby. Do you wanna go there?” Matt asked.

“Where’d you hear about the Thai place?”

Matt paused, racking his brain. He screwed his brow in concentration and found the paths fizzling out, strangely empty. His memory had been so full of holes lately. “I dunno. Someone in my class probably. It wasn’t you who told me?”

“No…” Lena said, and some part of it was clearly a lie from the tightness in her voice.

“…I think Bella told me,” Matt said cautiously.

“I don’t really like Thai food.”

“You don’t like the take-out Thai place. This place is…” Matt trailed off, unsure how he’d meant to finish the sentence. Lena didn’t like Thai food.

“I should get going,” Lena cut in. She hefted the bag again, even though it was only maybe a quarter full. “I’ll be gone a while.”

“We can order take-out when you get back.”

Matt couldn’t explain the pained expression on Lena’s face as she left. He didn’t want to think too hard about it, because he was feeling fine for the first time in weeks and didn’t care to sour his mood with worry. He grabbed another potato chip from the bag and hoisted his laptop onto his legs, lab assignment open.

He’d gotten behind on his assignments, but it wasn’t impossible to catch up, not yet. Matt indulged for a moment in the idea of buckling down and working now, and not letting up until every last one was done. He imagined getting a passing grade in the class, and he imagined a diploma in his hands at graduation. He was giddy almost at the thought of getting out. Where? He wasn’t sure, but he could move on finally, get out on his own, get away and be himself somewhere away from—

He couldn’t finish the thought but, he knew what his mind meant by it. Lena was too good for him, really.

But the actual break up—that was a dour thought. It wasn’t meant for today. So Matt pulled up his assignment, and he skimmed the directions, and he coughed once. He kept going though, even as two or three more coughs racked his chest, because the coughing wasn’t all that bad.

Not yet.

#writing #long post #body horror // #dead bodies // #gore // #: 3 c

[forlovedogs11]

You’re excited about your new puppy, but it’s been five hours and he’s still crying in the crate. You didn’t get any sleep last night and are at your wit’s end. If this is what dog ownership is like, you’re not sure if you’re up for it.

This is an all-too-common problem for new puppy owners. Dogs that cry in the crate are exhausting to deal with, and many of the solutions out there feel useless.

Don’t worry though – we’ll talk about how to get your pooch to settle down and stop whining in the crate without losing your mind.

Why Should I Crate My Dog?

If your dog has been crying in the crate a lot, you may be starting to wonder if crate training is worth all this agony. While it’s certainly not essential, crate training can really be very useful long term for you and your canine.

Crating dogs is a great way to help with potty training or reduce destruction when you can’t supervise your dog.

All dogs should be at least familiar with the crate to help reduce stress if they need to be put in a crate for travel or medical purposes. But crate training comes with some challenges –namely, lots of dogs cry or bark in the crate.

Crate Training Expectations: Crying is Normal At First

With young puppies, crate training generally takes several weeks. Most puppies under the age of about 16 or 20 weeks (4-5 months) won’t be able to stand being in the crate for more than a few hours. Really young puppies just don’t have the bladder control to be in the crate very long, and they instinctively cry when they’re left alone.

As a foster dog parent, I expect dogs to cry in the crate for their first few nights. I crate these untrained dogs because they can’t be trusted in the house yet. However, I no longer recommend letting dogs just “cry it out.”

It’s pretty normal for dogs to cry when they’re first put in a crate – but the “cry it out” method of crate training is pretty outdated. We’ll discuss below what you can do to help your dog quiet down, rather than simply let them cry it out.

It’s important for you to have realistic expectations as you’re crate training a dog. Just like with a new baby, expect there to be some long nights.

Most dogs eventually settle down in the crate, but what can we do to help them learn to be quiet in the crate? Crying in the crate can be a very real issue, especially if you live in an apartment or are a light sleeper.

Why Do Dogs Cry In Their Crate?

The good news is, your dog is not actively trying to make you lose sleep or get you evicted!

That said, there are a variety of reasons that dogs bark or cry in the crate. Luckily, the treatment for most of these underlying reasons is the same.

Reasons why your dog might be crying in the crate include:

 Your dog is lonely. If your dog is at your side whenever you’re home, then gets locked in a crate whenever you leave the house or go to bed, there’s a good chance he’s crying because your dog misses you. These dogs usually will settle eventually, but may start crying again whenever you move around.

 Your dog is bored. Crates can be a pretty boring place. Dogs that give steady barks throughout the day are likely bored.

 Your dog is scared. Some dogs are ok being away from you, but are scared of the crate. They might not like being confined.

 Your dog needs to get out of the crate. Almost all dogs that cry in the crate want to get out of the crate. But sometimes, dogs need to get out of the crate. If a crate-trained dog that’s normally quiet starts whining, he may be sick to his stomach or might need to pee – he’s trying to tell you that he needs out. If your dog is normally quiet in the crate but suddenly starts to cry, look for a reason why.

All of the reasons above are perfectly normal crate-training problems that can be fairly easily overturned with a bit of training and management. This is very different from true separation anxiety.

Dogs with separation anxiety are thrown into a full-on panic when left alone. These dogs will need long-term management, training, and even medication to help with their condition.

Dogs with severe separation anxiety often will dig at the crate, bite the crate, and otherwise take great measures to escape the crate.

You may want to consider an especially durable, strong dog crate to deal with your dog’s separation anxiety in order to keep them safe – but this alone is not a cure for a dog that is panicking. Dogs with separation anxiety need training.

Dogs with separation anxiety generally don’t feel better outside of the crate, and often will have a hard time being left behind no matter where they’re left. They won’t eat, drink, or relax and may even hurt themselves trying to back to you.

Talk to a trainer or veterinary behaviorist if you think your dog has separation anxiety – and make sure to check out our Separation Anxiety Training Plan too!

Why You Shouldn’t Punish a Crying Crated Dog

It’s tempting to scold your dog when he whines, barks, or howls in the crate. It’s best not to punish the dog for a few reasons:

Your dog may already be anxious. If your dog is crying because he’s scared, yelling at him won’t help. You are your dog’s guardian, and he trusts you with his life. Yelling at him when he’s scared might hurt that trust. He might stop crying simply because he’s even more scared now – but you haven’t really fixed the problem.

Punishment gives a bored dog attention. If your dog is barking because he’s bored, you might be entertaining him by scolding him! He might temporarily quiet down because he’s interested in the ruckus going on.

Even negative attention could be a reward for the dog. Many dogs cry in the crate for attention, just like kids do. If you come over to the crate and scold them, you’ve just given them the attention they crave. They’ll stop barking in the moment, but this is a surefire way to guarantee that the dog will continue barking in the future.

Even though it’s hard, try not to get frustrated with a dog that’s crying in the crate. There are some better options for teaching your dog not to cry in the crate.

How to Teach a Dog Not to Cry in the Crate

Luckily, there are lots of things to work on to help stop your dog from crying in the crate. Many of these fixes are small things to change that can make a big difference for your crying crated fur-baby.

Step One: Make the Crate a Great Place to Be

Crate training works best when you set up the crate properly. Before trying to convince your dog to sleep in the crate, you’ve got to make sure it’s actually a decent place to hang out.

Leave treats in the crate. You can distract your dog by giving stuffed, frozen Kongs in the crate. This easy fix will really help! I have four or five stuffed Kongs in my freezer at all times. That way I can just chuck a Kong in the crate with Barley whenever I run out for errands! Freezing them makes them last a lot longer.

Feed dinner in the crate. I like to feed dogs dinner in the crate. Instead of putting their bowl on the kitchen floor, I just feed dinner in the crate. You can either feed the dogs their dinner when you leave in the crate, or you can let the dog out after dinner. Either way, this is an easy way to start building a good association between your dog and the crate!

Put toys in the crate. My dog is a total squeaky toy nut, so at first, I kept his toys in the crate. He was rewarded for going into the crate by a quick bout of play. It was great to see him start to actually want to go into the crate on his own!

Make the crate comfy. Make sure the crate is comfy with a comfortable crate mat, a safe chew toy, and something that smells like you!

Ensure the crate is the right size. The crate has to fit the dog correctly. Your dog should have room to turn around and stand up comfortably, but not much more than that!

Place the crate in a common area. Many dogs cry in the crate because they’re lonely. A simple fix for these dogs is to put the crate in your bedroom at night, near the bed. If the crate doesn’t fit in your bedroom, you can sleep on the floor or the couch near the crate and gradually move towards your final sleeping arrangement. This is similar to what many parents do with young babies – they don’t start with the baby sleeping in his own room upstairs and across the house! They build up to that level of independence.

Some trainers recommend playing crate games to help your dog learn that the crate is a great place to be. I no longer recommend this because it may teach your dog that being in the crate is exciting, and we want the crate to be a relaxing place instead.

Step Two: Exercise Your Pup Before Crate Time

The next step to successful crate training is – drumroll please – exercise. If your dog is still full of energy when you put him in the crate, he’s going to have a very hard time settling down. This is especially true for teenage dogs (around 6 to 18 months old). Be sure to give your dog an age- and breed-appropriate amount of exercise before even attempting to put him in the crate.

For a young puppy, this might just mean running around the backyard for a few minutes. But for an adolescent Labrador retriever (or other working breeds), you might need to spend an hour or more exercising your pup before it’s time for the crate.

As a benchmark, my five-year-old border collie generally gets a three to ten-mile run or a twenty-minute nosework session before I leave for work. No wonder I lost weight when I adopted him!

Most adult dogs will need at least a 20 to 30-minute walk before being left in the crate.

Check out our list of games to play with your dog and suggestions for activity walks to get ideas for how to properly tire out your pup.

Step Three: Teach Your Dog That Crying Gets them Potty Breaks

Conventional wisdom in dog training is changing regarding whether or not to let your dog “cry it out.” The fact is, this method does not work for some dogs. If we can’t punish them, and ignoring them doesn’t work, what can we do?

We can teach our dogs that crying in the crate gets them a potty break – and nothing else.

But wait, you might be saying – doesn’t that reward my dog for crying in the crate? In a way, yes. And that’s not the end of the world. Ultimately, I’d rather have a dog that whines in the crate when he truly needs to go to the bathroom than have a dog that knows that crying doesn’t get him anything. That’s called learned helplessness, and it’s no good!

So rather than attempting to ignore your crying puppy for five hours, I want you to take your puppy out when he cries in the crate. Here’s how it goes:

Carry him outside or put him on leash.

Stand outside in one place for two minutes, tops. Don’t talk to him, play with him or look at him. Just wait.

If he potties, give him a treat and go inside and put him back in the crate. If he doesn’t potty, put him back in the crate. No talking, no playing. Just a quiet, quick potty break.

Repeat.

Your dog will quickly learn that crying in the crate doesn’t get affection, comfort, playtime, or anything except for an ultra-boring potty break. This will teach your puppy how to ask for a potty break when he needs one, but not to carry on for hours just because he’s bored.

This method generally only requires a couple of repetitions for your dog to “get it.” You don’t have to wait for your dog to be quiet before you let him out – just take him out if he fusses.

This method has several major benefits for teaching dogs not to cry in the crate:

 It teaches your dog what to do and how to get what he needs.

  It teaches your dog that you can provide potty access, and you won’t ignore his needs.

  Your dog doesn’t practice crying for hours in the crate, effectively strengthening the behavior.

  You avoid the stress of trying to ignore a crying dog, and your dog avoids the stress of not knowing why you’re ignoring him.

  You avoid the risk of breaking down and letting your dog out after hours of crying (which teaches your dog to cry for hours).

  You’re doing something to help your dog, rather than trying to just ignore a dog that’s upset and crying for help.

I used to recommend letting dogs cry it out, but I can say with certainty that that does not work for some dogs. Some dogs cry it out for hours, every night, for weeks. That’s unsustainable for the human and terribly stressful for the dog. This method is far more humane for you and your dog.

It can take several repetitions to teach your dog that crying in the crate doesn’t get them anything but a super-boring potty break. But if your dog keeps on crying the second you close him in the crate, don’t keep repeating something that’s not working! He needs something you’re not providing.

For constant criers who aren’t getting better with repeat potty breaks, go back to basics. Are you giving your pup enough exercise? Does he have a frozen Kong to chew on? Are you leaving him for too long?

When working with dogs that have a really bad time in the crate, you may have a long road ahead of you. Go back to the basics of step one and two. If you’re really stuck, try changing to a different crate, using an ex-pen, or hiring a trainer to troubleshoot your crate training.

Step Four: Avoid These Crate Training Mistakes

With so much conflicting information out there, it’s easy to get tripped up when working on crate training. Should you squirt your dog with water when he cries? Should you ignore him? Or should you take him out on a potty break?

It’s confusing – but it’s easier if you focus on following the instructions in step three and avoid these common crate training mistakes:

 Being inconsistent. Whatever method you choose, stick with it. I recommend teaching your puppy that crying gets him a boring potty break. That said, if the cry-it-out method is working for you, be consistent with it. If you mix the cry-it-out method with the boring-potty method, you’re going to confuse your dog and slow progress.

Please avoid using punishment regardless – we’ve already covered why that’s not the best approach for this problem.

 Leaving your pup for longer than he can handle. If your Chihuahua or Australian Cattle Dog puppy can only hold his bladder for four hours, don’t try to leave him in the crate for a full eight-hour workday. This means that you might need to get help with crate training at first to let your puppy out often enough.

If you can’t get help with crate training, leave your puppy in an ex-pen with potty pads while you’re gone for longer than his training and bladder can withstand.

 Teaching your puppy that crying gets attention. If you skip the “boring” part of the boring-potty method, you can create a huge problem. Ensure that you stick to the plan of taking your puppy directly outside, totally ignoring him for two minutes, and taking him directly back to the crate. Anything extra might teach your puppy that crying in the crate gets him playtime, affection, or attention! We don’t want that.

Crate Training Alternatives: Is a Crate Necessary?

While crate training is a great way to help with potty training or destruction issues, ideally you won’t be leaving your dog in a crate every day for the rest of his life.

If you and your dog are struggling, think about why you’re using the dog crate. Could you be using something else for the same goal?

My favorite solution for dogs that don’t like the crate but can’t be trusted outside of the crate is an ex-pen. Most dogs do better with a bit more space, and they can’t get into quite as much trouble.

If you need to stick it out through crate training but are really struggling, consider a dog walker or doggie daycare. These options are best for dogs that cry during the day, but won’t help nighttime criers. Getting your dog out of the crate and keeping sessions short will help as you’re training him to love the crate.

You might just have to crate your dog a few times a year, or maybe you crate your dog every day while you’re at work. Regardless of how often you crate your dog, you certainly don’t want them to be miserable the entire time!

Having problems with a dog that cries in the crate? Let us know if this article helped! We love feedback!

[rewrittenkoomie]

“That’s not the wind howling” Chapter 1.

Dealing with snow was difficult, I don’t even remember why I moved into this little honkey-tonk town to begin with.

Oh, that’s right, my folks BEGGED me to come and live nearby so they could visit their grandchild more easily. It wasn’t all bad though, the view was nice and the mountains kept the worst of the weather at bay, plus it was a pretty rural area.

There were Farms nearby that my son could visit and learn about various animals and the farmers themselves were friendly enough to let him run all his energy while playing with the foals, or even letting him pet the hatchlings. He was fascinated by the small critters that would flow and ebb around his ankles, and was ecstatic when a horse would trot up calmly to meet with him.

Personally, I loved farm animals too, but being so incredibly lazy, I knew that raising them was a  task larger than I was willing to deal with. My five year-old son would come home with stories and beg to keep some of the smaller animals, most notably chicks and ducklings. He’d been begging for weeks now, ever since the other kids all got to play with and even keep at least one pet from their parent’s farms.

His eyes had been huge, begging me silently for the opportunity to have a small life that he could coddle and nurture all of his own.

“Now, you know animals are not toys. If you have one, you have to take care of it.” He nodded emphatically, His dark brown curls bouncing off his forehead and tumbling with each movement. “You know they must be Fed multiple times daily, they need to have their area cleaned up, and you need to play with them. Plus, IF,” and I stopped, Hands on my hips, Tilting my head to drive the point home.

“IF I get a pet for you, you will be in charge of it, anything it does wrong will be your fault. You have to train it to be good. Okay?” My son’s eyes danced, his wide grin so hopeful and bright.

I didn’t stand a chance.

“I’ll be really good momma! I’ll give it baths and play with it and even take it for walks, jus’ like Genny from the Holted’s farm does with the Lambs!” He was dancing in place, so excited. He didn’t seem to care if I was getting him a dog, cat, foal or even a mouse, he just wanted a pet. Something he could nurture and be proud of.

I sighed in defeat, “Okay, but it’ll have to wait until I can talk to the farmers nearby to see if any of them are willing to let you have one of their animals okay?” He squealed with delight, tackling my legs and hugging them tight. “THANK YOU MOMMA! I’LL BE THE BESTEST PET OWNER EVER!”

He then turned and ran out the door to plow through the snow I had yet to shovel from the walkway.

Shortly after he ran off to somewhere, most likely to one of the farms that he loved to wander around, I was outside and shoveling the drifts back up to the yard. It was hard work, using muscles that I didn’t normally work out.

I was just a simple single mother, working as a receptionist at a company about three hours’ drive from home into the city round-trip. It was pretty easy work, seeing as it’s all I’d been doing for the last decade. I had moved into the Rural area to be closer to my folks, plus the classes for my son were smaller and The housing was pretty darn cheap. Even more so when my folks owned the house, and land, and let us live in the mother-in-law house. All I was required to pay was the utilities for my portion.

It was a sweet deal, and after the nasty break up with the father of my son, it was a haven. I could relax and not have to worry about what that man was doing to our child while I was working. I was also getting more time to spend with my son. He seemed to flourish with all the nature around us.

I had just finished the walkway to the garage that sat next to our little home when a big Red pickup truck pulled up next to me and rolled his window down.

“Hey there Teddy, how���s it going?” Theodore was a Farmer from a few houses down, which was an average of 5 miles away, he came to visit occasionally since he met my son and preferred to be called Teddy. His Farm in particular housed larger animals. Cows, Bulls, Horses and even a few Ostriches, I still didn’t know why or how he came across those huge birds.

“I’m all good ‘Belle, how’s Gunter?” His cocky smile always made me feel warm inside.

Theodore was one of the few Bachelors still living nearby, and was a total package deal. He was tall, around six foot five, and had thick black hair. His pale green eyes seemed to sparkle when he talked about his two great passions his farm, or food. He had the traditional Farmers’ Tan and was built like a brick house. He swore he had the money for the ‘Fancy machines’ but was convinced that they made more problems than they fixed, so almost everything was done the Old-fashioned way with sweat and muscle.

He did have a couple of four-wheelers for feeding his animals and even took my son out to go meet the herds once or twice.

“Gunter’s been begging for a pet again, and I just couldn’t say ‘no’ one more time.” I sighed as Theodore chuckled.

“’E’s a good boy! A pet would do him some good, mebbie settle ‘im down some.” I pursed my lips and shot him a look of disbelief. He just continued to smirk, then changed the subject.

“Anyway, I was wonderin’ if you’d be so kind as to feed a poor bastard for the’ night?” He took on a pleading look, clasping his hands out the window as if in prayer. I sighed again, “And here I thought you liked me cuz I’m pretty!” I giggled as his face lit up.

“Just help me with the driveway so you can park and You’re mor’n welcome to stick around.” He whooped and backed up his truck quickly, then tumbled out into the crisp snow after he’d parked on the side of the road. He quickly rummaged through the truck bed and pulled out a sturdy snow shovel and began on one end of the driveway while I started at the other.

Within the hour the whole driveway had been cleared and salted just as more snow decided to fall.

“I wonder which farm Gunter decided to wander off to this time?” I wondered out loud, Teddy shrugged and dusted off his jeans as we entered the mud room to the house.

“I’s Sure he didn’t go my way, I woulda’ spotted ‘im and brought ‘im back with me.” Teddy slipped his work boots off and we both walked into the house, rosy cheeked and sweaty.

I pulled off my jacket and rested it on the nearby chair and pulled my cell phone out of the top pocket. There were no new messages, but I sent out a text to the local Farmers asking if they’d seen my son and to let me know if they needed me to come get him. In the meantime, Teddy settled down at the kitchen counter, practically draped over the stool. He sniffed the air, drinking in the scent of the pot roast I had prepped hours ago as it bubbled in the crockpot. I smirked as he hummed to himself.

Shaking my head I pulled out the potatoes I had peeled and boiled earlier and set to mashing them. Teddy always seemed to pick the days I was making a good-old fashioned lunch or dinner to ‘pop’ over and invite himself in. I didn’t really mind, seeing as he was a gentleman and always tried to help out with things that needed fixing.

He’d helped fix the roof last summer and even helped with prepping the garden back in spring so that I could actually start growing something. I’d done the work of planting, but getting the posts in the ground and the boxes in place? All Teddy’s handiwork.

“Would you please grab one of the Pie tins from the Pantry? And the smaller bag of flour too please!” Teddy may have been relaxing, but he was quick to react when I asked for something. Soon enough I’d had all the potatoes mashed and the pie tin waiting for me on the counter.

Teddy stretched and touched the ceiling with his fingertips as he sauntered into the living room. I blushed lightly, since his stretch had pulled his T-shirt from his jeans and exposed a part of his sculpted lower back. He was deliciously handsome and Fit, if only a hunk like him was interested in a flabby wench like myself. I sighed, dashing that thought from my mind.

No man in a rural area wanted a pre-started family, especially with the kind of baggage we brought to the table.

As I put together the Apple pie, the timer on the pot roast went off and I opened it up to check how it was doing. Teddy had turned on the Radio to one of the local rock stations. I tasted the stock from around the roast and cut into the meat, checking how soft it was. It was perfect.

The potatoes had been put in the oven with some garlic and butter sauce to cook a bit more and the pie was in the smaller oven browning to perfection. I was very satisfied with myself, in less than a year, I’d learned to cook some damn-fine meals. It didn’t hurt that a lot of the women around the area traded recipes all the time. Adding to that, quite a few of the farmers would barter meat and eggs for veggies and fruit too.

My contribution was that since I went into town so often, they would trade me staple goods for exotic things from town, or fetching packages from the post office for them when I was on my way home. I loved to bring home bulk items that I could then later trade for some fresh eggs or milk.

I pulled the Mashed potatoes from the Oven to cool on the rack and arranged the Pot roast and Its fixings on a plate. When I turned to start setting up the table, there was a knock at the door. It sounded almost urgent and I wiped my hands on a towel I kept on the oven handle.

Teddy heard the rapping on the door and had emerged from the Living room, brows knit together and frowning slightly. He stood behind me as I opened up the mudroom door and unlocked the outer door. Teddy’s arms were crossed and he leaned on the doorframe as the outer door opened to a harried looking Farmer from three houses down the road to the north.

“Fredrick, what’s wrong?” I was surprised, normally Fredrick wore a sort of soft half-smile. Like he was privy to a secret and was never going to tell anyone.

His pure white hair was sticking up on all directions and he had an almost wild look to his soft brown eyes. “It’s Gunter,” He croaked, and my body went cold. Ice seemed to shoot up my spine as my stomach tightened.

“W-what about Gunter?” I whispered, Fredrick ran his hand through his hair, making it even messier. Fredrick refused to look into my eyes, and instead stared at Teddy.

“Fredrick?” I was scared, and being ignored wasn’t helping. I looked to Teddy, who was frowning and looked almost murderous. It was chilling to see the fire in his eyes, as if he was going to break the first thing he touched.

“Teddy?” I was cautious, I had seen my Ex-husband with that look, and when I’d bothered him, He’d tried to break me to soothe his anger.

Unfortunately for him, I refused to break.

Teddy clutched at his shirt and took a deep breath, leaning his head back as his eyes closed. Just as rapidly, he stepped forward and I stepped back. I pushed myself against the wall in the mud room, trying to keep from aggravating Teddy. He shoved his feet in his boots and threw on his jacket.

“Teddy.” I breathed his name, my chest tight. His shoulders where stiff and he stood with both hands fisted at his sides.

“’Belle,” He started, voice rough with what sounded like fury, “I’ll try t’ be back ‘fore sundown.” He strode forward, Fredrick rushing to his own Deep green SUV. Teddy practically stomped up to his Red pickup and seemed to rip the door open. I’d followed them outside, where the snow was gently falling around us, almost surreal.

Once he’d gotten into the vehicle, I tapped on the glass of his driver’s window. He took a moment to breathe, then rolled it down to face me. His eyes seemed to blaze, sharper and brighter than before the green even more vibrant than before.

“What happened Teddy? Please tell me!” I begged, Gunter was my baby, He’d been a complete surprise to my-then-husband and I.

I’d been elated to prove the doctors wrong, as I’d been told I was infertile only a few months prior, but my husband had been furious. He hadn’t wanted a child at all. Not only had Gunter proven the doctors wrong about my fertility, but they proved them wrong about my ability to carry at all. I had carried him successfully until two weeks before my due date, the day my husband first started beating me.

It had been a shock to have the man I’d married hit me so hard. Sure, we’d argued a bit, but that was normal and we’d always found a common ground and made amends. Something about having a child drove my husband crazy and he’d finally snapped.

We’d been arguing about where we’d move to after he’d gotten his promotion. He wanted to move to the East coast, but I was adamant about moving to the Midwest. At the time we’d lived a bit between the two. I wanted to be closer to family, both his and mine, and He wanted to start living more ‘in-style’.

I’d refused to move with him to the East coast, and He hit me. I was so shocked that I had frozen on the floor where I landed and just stared at him.

It had taken me only a week to decide to leave him the first time.

We’d made up for it later and had struggled to cope, but in the end All I asked of him, was to leave us alone. I didn’t want his money, or his name, just the child we’d created together. He agreed and signed the paperwork that released me from the nightmare of being his Wife.

Teddy was tense, and I thought he was going to lash out at me for getting in his way. He moved his left arm quickly and I flinched back, anticipating a smack, but it never came. I had closed my eyes reflexively, but cracked them open to see Teddy with his arm held out, a strained look on his face and the green of his eyes pale again. He gripped the steering wheel with his right hand so hard that It creaked, and he gently held his left hand to my face.

“ ‘Belle, I will never, ever hurt you on purpose.”  He practically growled as his hands felt rough against my skin but he rubbed my cheek so gently, as If I was made of spun glass, just waiting to fall apart. Tears were welling from my eyes and I was on the verge of bawling, I just wanted to know what was happening to my son!

As if he heard my mental cry, he cupped my chin once more, and gently pulled me to look up into his eyes. The green had lit up once more, and seemed to search inside mine for something.

“I’m sorry ‘Belle.” He whispered, “I cain’t tell you what you want to know.” He took a deep breath, releasing my chin. He then leaned against the doorframe and propped himself out the window to kiss me.

His lips were softer than I’d imagined, and the rough feel of his stubble was almost delightful, making warmth spread down into my core. My hands reached up and I took a step forward wrapping my arms around his neck to pull him in deeper. He groaned against my mouth and reached out again with his left hand and mixing his fingers into my wavy blonde hair, his right keeping him steady In the window. I stood there like a statue, reveling in the feel of his warm mouth and dancing tounge.

Suddenly he parted from me, and groaned while shaking his head. I was blinking, still overwhelmed with everything and in complete disbelief. Teddy just kissed me.

“’’Belle, stay here. Please.” His eyes still blazed, but there was some gold creeping in, he looked almost feral. I nodded dumbly, not thinking at all.

“Don’t open the door after sunset, and do’n open it ‘till after Sunrise.” I was transfixed on Teddys’ face, as I nodded again, and I opened my mouth to question why, when he shook his head once and grimaced.

“I cain’t tell you darlin’, not yet.” His hands were shaking, and he finally put his truck into gear. I stepped back, finally realizing I’d been standing there longer than a few minutes and shivered.

“I’ll tell you what I can, when I can. Jus’ …sit tight, I’ll find yer boy and git him home safe. That’s a Promise!” He pulled out of the driveway and directed himself northward, to Fredrick’s farm. The Truck squealed in protest at changing gears so quickly, from reverse to drive and then being pushed to dive through the fresh snow at a high speed.

I stood there shivering until his truck faded from sight into the woods that surrounded my home. It was a few moments before I turned to go back inside, and by then the pie I’d been preparing was ruined, and I flipped the oven off. The pot roast was now dry and even the potatoes were cold.

So much for Dinner.

I was still in a state of shock, Gunter was God-knows-where in some sort of trouble, and Teddy had kissed me. Between the Elation of that kiss and the Fear of losing my only child, I was frozen. I stumbled into the living room, ignoring the food or the mess it caused in favor of hopefully making sense of what was going on.

I knew when I had moved in only two years ago, that this town was small and had its oddities. My folks had always told me to check the eaves for bats, make sure that there were no animal tracks around the house and to water the toadstools that circled the small house I lived in.

The bats and the tracks I could understand, but the mushrooms? I didn’t question my folks, and did as they said. Once or twice I found coyote tracks and raccoon tracks around the house and showed Gunter how to distinguish them from one another.

He was practically a natural at picking up practical knowledge like that. He even went so far as to have someone teach him to make plaster molds of the more interesting prints he found and asked to keep them on a shelf in his room. To this day he had well over a dozen tracks, some canine, a few feline, and a few deer tracks too.

I was still shivering.

I wasn’t cold anymore, but I couldn’t stop shivering. There was something my mother had told me before they’d suggested Gunter and I move out to live with them.

“There’s quite a few tall tales around this little town, most of them having to do with werewolves. I know it seems far-fetched, but these folks take those tales seriously.”

Werewolves, was Teddy insinuating that they were real? That Gunter had been caught up with them? Or did something terrible happen and no one wanted to be the bearer of Bad news? I had started scratching my arms in a nervous fit, only realizing I was doing so when I felt warm liquid running down the rest of my arm.

I’d scratched right through my skin, leaving me bleeding. I swore to myself,

“This isn’t getting me anywhere!” I stomped over to the bathroom and tended to my arm. Once that was finished, I still felt the need to be ‘doing’ something.

Teddy had been pretty adamant about me staying indoors once the Sun set. And a quick glace outside had me guessing that I had about an hour before I needed to close myself in for the night.

Quickly, I put on my thickest sweater and leggings, hoping that I could make it outside and back before the stipulated time. I rushed through the mud room and yanked on my knee-high boots a colorful scarf, and my parka jacket.

After thinking about it, I returned to the living room and reached up to the doorway where the Remington 700 was perched just for safety’s sake. I checked the barrel from the loading mechanism, and it looked all clear. Pausing by the closet nearest the door to the mudroom, I rifled through the jackets until I reached the back wall where the dial and handle was visible for the safe where I kept the ammunition.

A quick turn of the dial and the safe was open. I only took five bullets from the box and loaded them into the Rifle. After which I shut the safe and locked it back into place.

Slinging the rifle over my shoulder carefully, I headed out the front door.

I had checked the doors to the house and had locked both of them. The mud room was never locked, to shelter people from the cold or heat depending on the season. If Gunter came home and everything was locked, he wouldn’t be in danger staying in the mud room.

I turned to the Road in front of the house, took a deep breath, and stepped beyond the circle of dormant Toadstools around the house. It was going to take time, but If I walked, I was less likely to miss hearing screaming or shouts. I had started my trek facing North. Since that was where the men had run off to, that’s the most likely area that Gunter was.

I quickly realized, no matter how motivated I was, I was not physically ready to make this trek. I was breathing heavily, and sweating terribly. My knees and feet had already started to hurt, and when I glanced behind me, I couldn’t see my house anymore. The sun, however, was just touching the skyline. I was just getting close to the neighboring farmstead.

The Nylors home was ranch-style and honestly very pretty, if a bit more rustic than I liked. I trudged up the shoveled walkway and stopped to catch my breath before I attempted to knock on the door. Their Mud room was much larger, and much nicer than mine, but then again, they had a larger family and had also been living here much longer.

I finally found my breath and knocked on the house door after stomping out the snow from my boots. I heard some scuffling, and then heard a creak as someone stepped up to the door.

“Who ‘dere?” came the gruff voice of Pa Nylor, The Patriarch of the family. He was the oldest living person in the town and was also the only person who could handle any animal regardless of its temper.

#promt #writing prompt #writing practice #Koomie #Koomiesan #KoomietheFool #KoomieinaBox