112thumbtacks

[112thumbtacks]

i hust read the yelena fic twin

did u like it twin

[112thumbtacks]

i would rather burn forever (don't hold me like you know me)

2. coconut lime coffee creamer

masterlist

page from aiken's journal: starting off with the warnings: implied rape/SA, mental health discussion, references to depression; not part of the warnings but this has also been uploaded to ao3 so if u see it on there posted by forkflies, then that's me :)

Middle of November, 2027.

The “New Avengers” Tower.

Phoebe and Bucky spent the next half hour in the training room talking about Phoebe’s past with Yelena. Bucky asked the questions he thought were appropriate, Phoebe answered the ones she chose to answer. The number was limited to less than five, but Bucky didn’t mind. 

After a while, Bucky shifted to sit on the floor against the wall. The story Phoebe was telling turned into a bit of a conversation. Bucky asked stuff and pointed out things he thought were worth mentioning, and almost every time ended with them getting side tracked and talking about something completely different before Phoebe eventually goes back to the initial topic.

Bucky learned that people in Bucharest were mostly more enjoyable than people in the states, as well as different words and phrases in Romanian that Phoebe learned while she was there, a few things about Phoebe’s life even before she moved to Romania, like when she graduated and where she went to college.

When Phoebe went into detail about her relationship with Yelena, Bucky made sure to listen carefully to see if he could try and piece together a solution to the mini feud going on between them. The amount of arguments Phoebe mentioned made it seem like it was going to be impossible to make their history seem like water under the bridge, but Bucky figured he could manage. He noted a few elements, like how they managed to understand each other when, as the time passed and the words processed in his mind, they never truly knew each other; how they had a pattern when it came to the aftermath of their arguments, what they liked to do together, how Phoebe mentioned that conversation used to flow between them like a stream.

The end of it was what puzzled Bucky.

Phoebe didn’t go into detail about how her time in Bucharest ended. She swerved around it, detoured in every way possible.

Bucky’s curiosity was growing to an irritable level.

“Phoebe, I want you to know something,” Bucky starts, adjusting his spot on the floor thanks to him starting to lose feeling in his ass cheeks. “This room,” he takes his finger and gestures to the ceiling, “is a safe space. No judgement. And I’m not saying that you have to tell me this–”

Phoebe rolls her eyes and slouches against the wall, crossing her arms and flattening her expression.

“–But…what made you leave Bucharest? And I know you said it was because of a fallout between you and Yelena, and I get that…” Bucky’s face contorts as he tries to think of how to say what he wants to say next. “But I feel like there’s something more to it. I mean, you barely touched on when you left and why you left. What else happened?”

“So you did pay attention after all, huh?” Phoebe’s face splits into a halfhearted grin, looking away for a second and shaking her head briefly, scoffing out a quiet laugh.

“Phoebe,” Bucky starts. “You kept dropping the same rhetorical question and asked, ‘was it my fault or hers?’ or ‘whose fault was it that it happened? We’ll never know,’” Bucky shrugs his shoulders as if to mimic her.

Phoebe’s gaze adverts back to him, staring at him blankly. She knows he knows that she’s implying something. It’s clear as day. But those weren’t rhetorical questions, they were something Phoebe genuinely wanted to know the answer to. Something, even if it was a lie spoonfed from Bucky, that would fill the sense of unease that’d left a gaping hole in the back of her mind for years. Years of wondering if anything that happened that night was her fault or Yelena’s, and on nights when her mind was leaning towards the idea that the answer being it was entirely her fault, which were more often than Phoebe would like to admit, it nearly swallowed her whole. The gap in the back of her mind nearly manifested every time into something with jaws and teeth ready to snap and take her away from the world.

A void. A piece of her that’d been taken from her unwillingly.

She inhales deeply.

“It was, maybe about twenty minutes, after the fallout,” she starts slowly. Bucky straightens his posture. He senses that whatever he’s about to hear isn’t good.

“I’d walked off in the opposite direction from her. It was late and I shouldn’t have been walking the streets alone, but I felt that being around her any longer than I already was surely would’ve exploded.”

The air turns unsettling between them. Bucky’s jaw clenches as a feeling of discomfort slithers up his spine.

“I could barely see. On top of it being dark out with a only few street lights lit up, I was fucking crying, and my tears were blurring my vision.”

Phoebe’s heart drops. So does Bucky’s.

“Sometimes I still ask myself, as you already know, whether or not it was on me for being out alone so late at night, especially in the part of the city I was in, but we’d walked to the bar a few hours prior to the argument, so I couldn’t just hop in my car and go. I still vividly remember pulling out my phone to check the time– it was well past midnight, by the way– just long enough for someone to grab me while my attention was still someplace else and not on my darkened and enclosing surroundings.”

Bucky knows it’s not the right time, but he finds himself impressed with Phoebe’s skills of storytelling. He wonders if she’s an English major.

“You were grabbed?” Bucky asks before he can stop himself.

“I was,” Phoebe murmurs. Her eyes are more distant now. Like she’s staring beyond him and into a looking glass that was showing the events coming out in the form of her words, and it looks like it’s still scaring her now just as much as it did then.

“I still remember his face. Sometimes I can even still feel how hard he’d gripped my arm. But most of the time it’s still the feeling of his hands.”

Bucky’s heart somehow drops even further and eventually reaches his feet. His stomach feels like it’s turning and folding in on itself. He knows. He’s piecing it all together now. The hands, the time, the darkness.

The face.

“And I can’t wash it away.”

Phoebe finally looks away from Bucky, or the looking glass from the great beyond. She tears her gaze away from it, from him, from the wall. From the movie playing in her mind’s eye that tortures her to this day.

“There’s something about the way a person can keep his grip on you so tight and in place that you can’t wash off.”

Bucky’s heart rises up at a sickening pace and stops nudged in the column of his throat. He feels sick. There’s a quickening in his chest that makes him uncomfortable to even let his arms rest.

“And for the few minutes it lasted I felt the fabric that made me into who I was being stripped away and turned inside out. All the layers that I put around me, that I got to call ‘Phoebe’, were being peeled back. Then I knew how it really felt to be cold.”

“It keeps you stuck in place,” Bucky’s voice comes out more raspy than he’s okay with. Phoebe looks back at him, averting her eyes away from the other side of the wall she kept herself focused on. She nods briefly.

“It does. And I’d like to tell myself that I’ve moved on, that I’ve healed, but there are some days and nights where I can’t drink enough without dying of alcohol poisoning to convince myself it’s true.”

Bucky feels like he might throw up if she continues. His stomach still turns and folds in on itself until it becomes a knot.

“It’s not your fault,” he starts again. Phoebe frowns slightly. “It’s not. No matter how late it was or where you were. You’ll be clean eventually.”

Phoebe exhales shakily, like she’s holding back a sob she’s been holding back for too long.

“I wasn’t loud enough, Bucky,” she blinks. Her eyes are glossed over now. A tear rolls down her cheek. “I called out for her. I needed her to help me, to save me, and I screamed her name about a hundred times that night.”

“But she never came,” Bucky outwardly concludes. He understands it now. It cost him the feeling of impending doom and sickness and uncanny sliding up his back and leaving behind a cold and slimy snail trail, but he understands. 

“And you think that if you never walked off, that if you’d stuck with her even when being around her felt suffocating, that it wouldn’t have happened?”

“I don’t think, Bucky, I know.” Phoebe brings her hand up to wipe her eyes free of their tears. “I should’ve just…sucked it up and dealt with her bullshit. Hell, maybe I’d still be in Bucharest if I did.”

“Don’t get all should’ve could’ve would’ve now,” Bucky interjects with a tilt of his head towards her. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t Yelena’s fault, either. Don’t blame anyone but the perpetrator.”

“I know,” Phoebe’s hands drag over her face as if to wipe the exhaustion from her features. “I know.”

Silence stretches between them for a moment. Bucky and Phoebe don’t look at each other for a few minutes and instead look at other things in the room. Bucky looks at the number of training weapons on a table laid out to his left, then at the training mat with the same smell that Phoebe had complained about a while ago. Phoebe looks at the ceiling and the lights that adorn it, then at the bluish grayish walls around them. She swallows quietly and takes a sharp breath, blinking a few times before she straightens her posture.

“She doesn’t know, by the way,” Phoebe adds, sounding a bit too normal for having just told Bucky a deep and disturbing part of her past. “No one does. Except you, me, and the fucker who did it.”

“She doesn’t know?” Bucky repeats, his face contorting into a puzzled look. For a moment he can’t wrap his head around it, and then it becomes apparent that he’s finally processing it when his expression morphs into a resting that Phoebe probably never saw Yelena again until a few weeks ago.

“Nope,” Phoebe pops the ‘p’, “I never told a single soul until now. So don’t go around telling the others my business, yeah?”

Bucky nods politely. “You got it.”

He doesn’t mention how casual Phoebe looks and sounds after telling her story. He wants to compliment her on her skills when it comes to storytelling, but he figures that would be inappropriate considering the example he got was a story of an assault. He wants to remind her that it’s okay to be weak around him when she’s still trying to put on that mask as if to prove to herself and him that it doesn’t affect her even after telling him she can’t drink her wishful thinking into existence.

And he truly doesn’t mean to patronize her or one-up her on anything, but he knows how it is to feel stuck. Cold. Alone. Like you can’t move at all, you can’t even think. The only thing you can focus on is the cold, the way it feels like you’ve been stripped bare and haven’t gotten the chance to pick up the pieces that are left make you feel like yourself again.

_________________________

After the story Bucky heard in the training room, he didn’t see Phoebe again for a few days. He wanted to think it was because she’d gone back to being a hermit in her basement again to tinker and work on her stuff, but he knew better, even if he wasn’t allowed to see it for himself.

No one heard anything from or about her during that time period. No one brought up her name at all in the span of three days, not even Yelena (which he can’t decide if that’s on point for her or not). The first time someone talked about her again was Bob when he’d stayed up all night again and was making coffee at the ass crack of dawn and asked to those who were in the kitchen (John, Yelena and Bucky) if they wanted any, then asked if he should try bringing some coffee down to the basement for Phoebe. That was when her name started circulating around again and soon enough, it brought her to existence again.

Bucky isn’t around to see it since he’s already gone on his morning run, but Phoebe does come up to the kitchen to make coffee and make herself a fruit salad before she eventually goes back to her basement.

But as of right now, she’s standing in at the counter and waiting on the coffee maker to finish doing its thing. Her palms are planted on the surface of the counter to support her while her head hangs low with her eyes shut. Yelena walks in in the middle of it and opens the fridge, grabbing out the orange juice. She dares to look over and find Phoebe slumped over the coffee maker taking a cat nap, and a small chuckle escapes her. Small enough that Phoebe doesn’t hear it.

“Jeez,” Yelena prods in a whisper. “When’s the last time you slept?”

Phoebe’s head darts up at the sound, her eyes fluttering in an attempt to wake herself up. She glances over at Yelena for a second then back at the coffee maker.

“A few days ago,” she answers curtly. “I’ve been working.”

“Is that normal for you?” Yelena opens the cabinet next to the fridge and grabs a cup. She takes the orange juice and unscrews the cap before pouring it into the glass with one hand.

“Is what normal for me? Working or staying up?”

“Bit of both,” Yelena shrugs casually. “Never really pegged you to be the working type.”

A chord is struck in Phoebe’s brain and the irritation is quick to come over her. “Wouldn’t you be surprised by how much a person can change over the course of ten years?” she retorts, impatiently tapping her finger against the counter. 

“Yes, actually,” Yelena puts the cap back onto the orange juice and puts it back in the fridge, closing the door. She grabs her cup and takes a sip, eyeing Phoebe over the rim with a knowing look. “This is the first time I’ve seen you look invested at the idea of working.”

Phoebe simply sighs. She bites her tongue to keep herself from saying something either really shitty or something that doesn’t make any sense at all. She knows Yelena’s baiting her. For what, she doesn’t really know, but to her dismay, it’s working.

“Why do you care?” Phoebe looks at Yelena pointedly, then at the cabinet. Yelena moves so she can open it and grab one of the mugs that’s sitting on the next layer above the glasses and the cups. She steps back over to the coffee maker and pours some from the carafe.

“I can’t be interested in your life?”

“Oh, now you’re interested,” Phoebe nods her head briefly and puts the carafe back in its place. “It’s been nine years, and now you’re interested in my life?” Phoebe looks at Yelena again, this time with a sharper glare in her eyes. She brushes past her and moves to open the fridge, grabbing the creamer and giving it a second glance as if to ask to no one in particular what kind it was with that universal judgmental lilt before unscrewing the top anyways.

Yelena shrugs casually, “I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me,” stepping back from the counter to lean against the table behind her. “You packed your shit and left. I assumed you hated me.”

Phoebe looks at Yelena like she has three eyes. Yelena keens. “Was I wrong?”

“What, about me hating you or not wanting to hear from you?”

“Are the two not mutually exclusive?”

“No, Yelena, they’re not,” Phoebe counters and tips the bottle of creamer over the mug. “Me theoretically hating you doesn’t coincide with me leaving Bucharest. Other things happened that night that made me leave, you’re not special.”

Yelena watches with a carefulness in her gaze that’s reinforced as Phoebe sets the creamer down on the counter and reaches for the cap. As far as Yelena knows, the only thing that happened that night was their fallout, and nothing more. Then, it clicks. There’s something Phoebe’s not telling her.

“What did happen, then?” She asks, a bit softer this time, because she’s taking into consideration that literally anything could’ve happened between their last words to each other in Bucharest and when Yelena came back to the apartment to find the door wide open with a bunch of Phoebe’s stuff gone, and the chances that it was something bad are high and going off like sirens in Yelena’s head.

Phoebe stills. Her back straightens and her jaw clenches. It’s something bad. Yelena can tell.

“It’s none of your business now, is it?” Phoebe retorts and rolls her eyes, “You weren’t there to see it, so it doesn’t involve you, so just mind your own business,” screwing the top back onto the creamer. 

Yelena chews on her bottom lip. “You mentioned it, not me.”

“Yeah, because it was an offhand comment, not something I wanted to go into detail about.” Phoebe shoves the creamer back into the fridge and closes the door with a light slam. She pauses for a moment to listen for any broken glass from the sauce bottles and jars sitting in the shelves, then continues on with her business and opens one of the drawers to look for a spoon. She frowns when she sees what used to be the utensil drawer now filled with rags and battery packs.

“What the hell is this?” She momentarily drops the argument and looks at Yelena like she can’t believe what she’s seeing. “Who the hell emptied out the utensil drawer and filled it with random crap?”

Yelena frowns with her. “You put the utensils next to the fridge?”

“Where else would they be?”

“Right at the corner where they belong? Why would you put the utensils in a separate spot from where the bowls and plates are?”

“So then put the bowls and plates next to the fridge,” Phoebe blinks twice at Yelena. “But y’know, following your logic, I could ask the same thing about why the mugs and cups aren’t above the coffee maker, but nobody says anything about that.”

“That’s because the coffee maker is portable, genius.”

“So are bowls and plates!”

“And mugs and utensils.”

Phoebe glares at Yelena with pursed lips and Yelena simply stares back. Her cheek twitches once with annoyance, twice on purpose to be dramatic, then she sighs sharply and turns back around to the drawer at the other end of the counter and opens it, begrudgingly finding the utensils right where Yelena said they were. She looks at her again before biting the inside of her cheek and taking out one of the teaspoons.

A few beats of silence between them pass.

“Did Bucky put you up to this?” Phoebe questions, stirring the spoon lightly inside her mug until the coffee turns a lighter shade of brown. Yelena takes another sip of her orange juice and looks at her.

“Put me up to what?”

“Annoying the shit out of me.”

“You annoyed the shit out of me in Bucharest, I didn’t ask you if God put you up to that task, did I?”

Phoebe takes the spoon out of her mug with yet another frown. She licks the remaining coffee off of it, “You’re avoiding the question.”

“You never answer any of mine, so.”

“I did, like, a few minutes ago, when you asked me when I last slept, so.”

Yelena narrows her eyes. “Touché,” she sets her cup of orange juice down on the table. “No. He didn’t ‘put me up to this’.”

“So you just felt like doing this? Is that the kinda impression you wanna leave on me after this long?” Phoebe sets the teaspoon in the sink and holds her hands a few feet apart, gesturing to the nine years.

“That was the one you made on me!” Yelena’s face scrunches up as her hand moves and gestures to nothing in particular. “But when I do it, it’s a problem.”

“There’s a difference, genius,” Phoebe reaches for her mug, whipping her head around to glare at Yelena again. She brings the mug up to her lips and takes a sip. Then scrunches up her face like she ate a lemon.

Yelena lifts a brow at the look on Phoebe’s face. “And the difference is?”

“The difference is that me being annoying is part of my charm,” she takes the mug away from her mouth and sets it back down on the counter. “At least, I think it was. I dunno. You seemed to like it.”

Yelena stares. Partially because she can’t fathom the idea of anyone ever unironically enjoying such an abomination, and because she’s tired and still waking up, and also because there’s a familiarity that breaches her insides. She tries mentally fighting it off and succeeds, putting back on that porcelain face and picking up her cup of orange juice and drinking the rest of it.

She doesn’t say anything else, she just disappears. Phoebe doesn’t watch her go but she does feel a weight lifted off her shoulders. She looks back down at her mug of coffee and scoffs, dumping the rest of it out and leaving the mug there in the sink.

_________________________

The rest of the team make their way through the day around the tower, as per usual. No assignments have been handed out for a few weeks so that unintentionally gives them the leisure of relaxing and pretending to live like normal people. John spends his day alternating between the gym and the training room, either sparring with Bucky or bench pressing with Alexei inviting himself in to join him, after which John leaves to disappear off to his room to doom scroll for several hours. Ava spends pretty much the whole day in her room; nobody really knows what she’s doing, but they like to think they actually have lives to tend to so they don’t really ask just to make sure she’s not doing less ethical things. Alexei floats around the tower and does his own thing, exploring some more because there’s about a million and one rooms there and he’s only explored ten of them. Bob sits in the living room hiding away in the corner reading Phoebe’s copy of The Odyssey to entertain himself while virtually having nothing else to do. No one really knows what Yelena’s doing either, but like Ava, nobody asks because they don’t care for the time being.

Nobody asks around about Phoebe because they already know she’s in her basement tinkering with her Christmas projects and talking about things with the built in AI system that nobody else would understand and would probably think she’s speaking another language if they don’t already expect her to have an expansive education and thus use it in an expansive manner.

Bucky pushes someone else to talk to Phoebe, since he knows by now that trying to get her to engage is pointless unless it benefits her in a way she actually likes, like tending to her food-motivated personality or giving her the opportunity to talk someone’s ear off about whatever science she’s thinking about at the moment.

The next day, Bucky pushes Bob to go down to her basement to talk to her. At first, Bob tries to politely decline and say that he wouldn’t really know what to talk about and therefore the both of them would be sitting in awkward silence. Bucky knows this, of course, but he makes him do it anyway because Bob doesn’t really have any other way of saying no, so Bob finds himself taking the private elevator that has a route that goes straight down to Phoebe’s basement.

Like he said, he doesn’t really say anything at first. He sits in the basement and watches Phoebe tinker with things and does what he does best and stays in the corner. Just like Phoebe told him a while ago, she’s working on that belt, which the material’s already laid out on the table.

“Bob, c’mere,” she finally breaks the now comfortable silence between them. Bob’s head tilts up as he steps out from the corner he was previously hiding in and inches toward the table in the middle.

“Yeah?”

“I need you to take off your shirt.”

Phoebe turns to him and stares blankly at him. He blinks a few times.

“My shirt?” he looks down at the black crewneck he’s wearing.

“No, your socks. Yes, your shirt, Bob.” Phoebe snarks with a grin and, with a pen between her fingers, gestures to his sweater. “I need to measure your hips for this belt and I don’t want there being any inaccuracies with a thick shirt like that on you.”

Bob nods hastily and awkwardly pulls his sweater over his head and sets it neatly on the table, leaving him shirtless and standing in the middle of the room. Phoebe steps over to one of the counters and opens a few drawers, searching around for a tape measure and scoffing when she can’t find one.

It’s like that for a few minutes, Bob looking around the room oafishly while he waits patiently. The air coming from the heating unit blowing into the room from the vent directly above him feels good on his skin, at least.

Phoebe reappears in front of him with a tape measure finally in her hand. She pulls out some of the tape and stiffly wraps it around his hips, her hands reaching around his sides to pull it back around the front. A half second passes before she sticks the pen behind her ear and uses her now free hand to release the tape measure from around his hips.

“Alright, get your shirt back on, this looks compromising,” Phoebe smiles politely at him before stepping away and letting the tape slip back into its slot. Bob grabs his sweater from its spot on the table and puts it back on, fixing the hem over his hips.

“What’s that?” Bob asks curiously, eyeing the material Phoebe has laid out in the middle of the table.

“This,” Phoebe starts enthusiastically, looking over at the material, “is kevlar. It’s what I’m gonna be using to make your belt.”

“That sounds cool.”

“It is. I was originally gonna try using vanadium, but it’s too hard. You know what they use vanadium for, Bob?”

“I don’t…what do they use it for?”

“Stuff like steel alloys for aircraft carriers and nuclear reactors. I was gonna use that, but I feel like the stiffness wouldn’t have been very comfortable to move around in. Plus, kevlar was easier to find. It’s not like I have any vanadium lying around here.”

“I see…”

Bob continues watching Phoebe work for the next hour or so, spectating curiously as she gives out orders to the built in AI and plays with the holograms that the projector monitor shows. Eventually, she remembers what the belt is supposed to be, along with other things she started working on, and tells him to get out because “him watching it would ruin the Christmas surprise,” so he sheepishly leaves.

Bucky asks him what they talked about in there. He gives as best an answer that he can muster, telling him that it was mainly Phoebe working in silence before she measured his hips and talked to him about kevlar and vanadium. Both of which being chemicals that they never heard of or heard used in a sentence until today.

Bob notes to Bucky that the air between him and Phoebe was a little unusual in comparison to the handful of times they’ve been in a room together, whereas those times it was comfortable and even a little amusing to Bob since he likes to think Phoebe’s like the comic relief the team needs in a way that’s somehow different from Alexei. When Bob visited Phoebe in her basement, he felt that the awkward silence between them was a byproduct of a shift in her mood, even though he doesn’t know her that well so he can’t really assume that anything was wrong with her at the moment and that she isn’t just like that from time to time. He tells Bucky she seemed like her usual self (the assumption gathered from what he typically sees of her) on the outside, but there was this profound yet quiet nothingness about her whenever he caught her staring at one of the models showing on her projector monitor.

Bucky knew what it was about. Not that he’d tell Bob anything about that, at least not without knowing Phoebe would be okay with it, and even then, he wouldn’t consider telling anyone else that. He saw the toll it took on Phoebe, watching her be vulnerable around someone she wasn’t entirely sure she could trust and carefully unpeeling her layers until she was walking a tightrope over the edge between comfort and the uneasy feeling of being alone and yet in a room full of things Phoebe won’t explicitly say. It’s easy for Bucky to tell that even if she were to tell him it’s okay to talk to the others about it (which he weighed the chances and the outcome was highly unlikely), it wouldn’t be his place to speak on it.

That fact being hung on the rack of other things he has in his mind, he sends someone else down. Someone a little more familiar than Bob and can easily break through the ice better than him. Yelena objects at first. Bucky tells her to go anyway. She objects again and tells him Phoebe might not want to see her. Bucky tells her to go again. So that’s how Yelena found herself taking the elevator down again to intrude on Phoebe and her tinkering business.

While she’s standing there in the elevator, she notes how significantly more nice it is in comparison to the other elevators everyone else has to take. The heating system is much better than the rest, the music it plays is actually decent (Phoebe told them the elevator music installed in the other ones were from 2015), the paint on the walls is a prettier shade of bluish-gray than the manilla walls lit up by small lamps at the top; even the buttons are fancier. Yelena wonders how far Phoebe’s knack for giving herself more fancier things will go.

She also dwells on their conversation from yesterday. More accurately, their mini argument that only lasted a few minutes. A record, she concludes, since usually Phoebe used to drag out the feeling in the air that comes after an argument over something Yelena thought was trivial in her humble opinion, which in turn resulted in her nonchalance most of the time. She thinks and ponders whether the curtness in Phoebe’s attitude was because she was talking to Yelena again or if there was something else that was bothering her prior to Yelena adding onto it.

Her thoughts dissipate like a smoke cloud being waved away when the elevator doors open to the gray stone wall staring at her and the flattened steps leading a path to the left. She shoves her hands into the pockets of her jacket, stepping out of the elevator and trekking down the steps and emerging from where the windows meet the stone. Phoebe’s door is closed this time as opposed to when she visited a while ago when Bucky first told Yelena to “settle it” and the door was wide open. One of the perks of knowing Phoebe is that her passwords aren’t that hard to guess, and she jumps the gun, putting in Phoebe’s high school graduation year, 2009. It was a bragging symbol, Phoebe had once told her back when they were still in Bucharest, since she had graduated extremely early.

Yelena walks into the basement to find the shutters closed and Phoebe in her chair, as she expected, in silence and letting some song Yelena’s never heard of playing lowly from the speakers. From how it sounds, Yelena infers that it’s playing throughout the room because Phoebe’s feeling blue. She doesn’t want to assume what it’s about.

She hesitantly steps over to the large middle table, her steps quiet as a mouse, and she turns around and leans against it.

Yelena’s seen this look on Phoebe’s face only a few times before. An emptiness takes place in her brown eyes where there’s usually some form of sarcasm, amusement, or some other relatively neutral description. She’s staring off into space. Physically, she’s there, but her mind is someplace else. Someplace dark, Yelena infers, by the lost look that takes over the rest of her features. Her eyebrows are relaxed in an uneasy way. Her lips are sealed shut and her face doesn’t even twitch. She doesn’t move a muscle. The color is drained from her face and one might think she’s dead if it weren’t for the soft rise and fall of her shoulders.

In her hand, there’s a small glass of liquor that only fills about a tenth of the inside. It lingers in the grasp of her fingertips that loosely hang onto it, daring it to slip from her flimsy excuse of a grip. In the dimness of the room, save for the glow coming from the light blue model from her projector (yet another unidentifiable shape), Yelena can barely make out the tiny discolored spots on her white Neighbourhood shirt. She’s been crying. At first it’s a knee-jerk reaction to remind herself that it’s none of her business. A reflex ingrained in her to not pry. But it’s Phoebe. Phoebe. She never cries. That fact alone is enough to break through every instinct and reflex she has.

“You okay?” Yelena finally asks. The deepness of her voice pulls Phoebe back from whatever abyss she’s been staring into and yanks her into reality. She wishes she didn’t say that– because obviously Phoebe is not okay.

“Yup,” Phoebe murmurs, not paying attention to the way Yelena pays attention when she blinks away the tear that was welling up in her eye. “Winter’s just got me all fucked up.”

Yelena blinks, then she stares for a moment. She can see right through her. “Do you expect me to believe that?”

“I wouldn’t tell you that if it wasn’t the truth.”

“I know you’re lying, Phe.”

Phoebe’s heart drops at her nickname dropping from Yelena’s lips. The softness, like it was made of quiet melancholy and something delicate neither of them can name. Or maybe they can, but giving it a name would ruin what’s so special about it–the faceless feeling they both used to get whenever moments like these occurred when the hour was late and neither of them could sleep and they’d look to each other for comfort in the silence of the night; the knowing that it’s there and present in the gaps of affection between them.

Yelena’s only ever called her that a few times. Usually during moments like these. Phoebe hates that it still makes her feel like a hook and wire has just been latched onto her heart, but never moving.

“You were crying,” Yelena continues quietly, earning a pointed look. “You once told me you never cry, for anything–”

Yelena shuts up when she sees Phoebe look away from her. She’s prying, she knows that. Phoebe doesn’t want her to pry, and she knows that as well. Phoebe never wanted anyone to get her to talk about how she feels, not even Tony after trying to have one of those cheesy heart to hearts that every dad has with his then teenage daughter. Yelena pries anyway, because it’s the only way she’ll ever really know what’s going on in Phoebe’s head.

“You looked… lost, for a moment,” Yelena sighs inaudibly at the second pointed look she receives–more accurately, a glare. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“What am I thinking, then?”

“That you want me to shut up.”

“Among other things, yes.”

Yelena stares knowingly. “You’re not going to sidetrack me.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

Phoebe lets out a quiet, exasperated sigh. She knows what Yelena’s doing. Prying. Pressing. Trying to get her to say more than fragments of a sentence. She tells herself not to fold under the pressure.

“I’m not going to leave you alone until you tell me what’s going on.”

“Maybe I don’t wanna tell you.”

“You never want to tell anyone. That’s not good for you.”

“And you know what’s good for me, now?”

“I know it isn’t–” Yelena shrugs one shoulder and gestures to the way Phoebe’s slouching in her chair, “whatever this is.”

Phoebe looks down at herself, at her band t-shirt and her sweats, the glass in her hand, and her slouched position. “What, me sitting in silence and drinking a tiny sip of whiskey because I can?”

“You know it’s not just that,” Yelena tilts her head towards her in a knowing way. Phoebe looks back up at her and slightly shifts uncomfortably in her spot.

“So tell me,” Yelena starts again. “What were you thinking about?”

Phoebe sits. She stares. A few minutes pass and neither of them say anything. They don’t have to. It irritates Phoebe for a few reasons. They both can see right through each other, and Phoebe doesn’t like that. She hates it. It makes her feel different now than when it did ten years ago. Now it makes her feel naked.

They can see right through each other like looking glasses, right now Yelena can see right through Phoebe, and yet she’s making her put her glass feelings into words.

It irritates her.

It stirs and unwelcome heat inside her chest.

“Stuff,” Phoebe smartasses, shifting again in her spot to get more comfortable. A front she’s putting up to show that she won’t let herself be vulnerable the way Yelena wants her to be.

Yelena rolls her eyes. “Wow, that really got us somewhere.”

“I can already feel our connection deepening.”

“Alright, dipshit,” Yelena deadpans. “Be serious.”

Phoebe shrugs like she herself doesn’t know what she was thinking about. She basks in the way Yelena rolls her eyes and shifts against the edge of the table uncomfortably like she’s trying not to break anything. Phoebe’s sure she knows that table wouldn’t bend or dent for anything. She doesn’t tell her anyways for the sake of the irony in her head.

“Did Bucky send you down here?”

“If I say no, will you finally talk to me? And don’t be a smartass about it.”

“Maybe.”

“Then no. Stop avoiding the question like it’s the plague.”

Phoebe sighs again and downs the drop of whiskey left in her glass. She briefly leans forward to set it on her table, then leans back again and rests her ankle over her thigh and her elbows on either arm of her chair. She knows by now that the words are finally on the tip of her tongue. Her thoughts are gathered. The words are staring down the abyss as they hang from the cliff of her tongue and swing loosely as if to dare her courage to let them fall and speak. And yet she can’t find it in herself to talk. Like her voice shrinks at the face of the concept of putting her feelings into sentences, cowering away like a scared mutt.

She knows that Yelena knows that Phoebe is still hesitant. She can see the gears turning in her head in an effort to make a lightbulb turn on over her skull.

Yelena’s shoulders slump. She knows this is wrong. So wrong. She picks herself back up.

“I was out earlier,” she starts, crossing her arms over her chest and shuffling in her spot. She shifts her rear against the edge of the table as a result of getting uncomfortable and leans even more of her weight against it. “It snowed, obviously. But I was walking. I passed people and they passed me. They aren’t important, but I found a penny on the sidewalk.”

Phoebe lifts an eyebrow. Bringing up mundane things. Trivial things. A penny. Copper. A sign of wealth; pretty fitting for Phoebe, but there’s more. On the ground. Cold and wet from the snow. Observing people as they walk by, step over it and don’t acknowledge its existence. Spectating. Its monetary worth was little, but every cent of it counts in a world like New York. Thumbed away easily into a fountain or thrown into the cold and unforgiving snow by life itself. Double sided.

Phoebe finds the mention of a singular penny on the snow-covered sidewalk to be a bit relatable.

“A penny,” she remarks.

Yelena nods briefly. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“It reminded me of you.”

“Why?”

Yelena doesn’t shrug, but Phoebe knows she means to. To shrug in the face of a question asking someone why a penny reminded her of someone else would look careless, like there wasn’t any real thought behind why she chose a penny of all things. Yelena doesn’t want to look careless. She isn’t careless.

She knows she should be careful with her words. A penny’s meaning can be broken down into many things. The blanket term being that it’s associated with luck because they’re extremely common to find, thus anyone can find it, but it chose Yelena. It’s also a currency. If she were to say that then it implies that Phoebe is simply a credit card that talks. It’s made of copper. She can’t pinpoint when exactly it was, but a while ago, in Bucharest, Phoebe went on a tangent about different things in symbolism and Yelena remembers her mentioning that copper can be a symbol of love and passion, or wisdom in other cultures. She weighs her options.

“Well, pennies are made of copper,” Yelena starts, looking around the room to plan her next words. She looks back at Phoebe. “I remember you once told me that copper can be a symbol of wisdom, in some cultures.”

“So you think I’m wise?” Phoebe’s raised eyebrow curls.

“Not really,” Yelena admits quietly and straightens her posture. “I just wanted to show that I still remember.”

Yelena thinks she’s hit the bullseye when she sees the way Phoebe’s eyes soften for a moment.

“Really?” Phoebe’s whole face changes. Yelena splits her day into two parts: before that familiar, soft expression, and after. She can’t decide whether or not that’s a good thing.

“Yeah.”

“I’m that hard to forget?”

“Easy to remember,” Yelena corrects her. She hardens up her shell again at the fact becoming apparent to her that Phoebe’s ego is still easily inflatable.

“It’s easy to remember because it’s easy to put things you learned to a familiar concept.”

“What?”

“It’s a psychological thing,” Phoebe shrugs her shoulders. She’s getting comfortable. “You learn something in a science class while sitting in a bright room. You take a semester exam and the lights are off, suddenly it’s harder to remember what you learned because you associated that thing with being in a well-lit room at the time.”

Yelena blinks. She thinks she knows everything she needs to know for a person of her lifestyle. Phoebe has proved her wrong numerous times with these “fun facts” that stick with her.

“It’s like that, but with associating learning the symbolic meaning behind copper with me,” Phoebe points her hands at her chest. “Think of it as a reiteration of putting a name to a face.”

“I don’t need a psychology lesson from you,” Yelena glances away for a second. She bites her tongue to stop herself from asking Phoebe if she remembers if the lights were on or off the day she told her about the meaning of copper and all that, but the thought lingers.

“You don’t,” Phoebe adds casually. “What you actually need is to stop manipulating me into getting me to talk about my feelings.”

“I’m not manipulating you, idiot.”

“No, you’re just telling me about trivial things you saw today to loosen me up, an old method you used way back when.”

“That was one time,” Yelena rolls her eyes aggravatedly. “I just want to know if you’re actually okay, or if this whole appearance you’re giving the others where you look like you’re chill and laid-back is all a front.”

Phoebe cocks her head slightly. “What do you think?”

“I think it’s bullshit.”

“And why’s that?”

“I said it earlier. You were crying. You never cry. And because of that, you’re going to tell me what’s going on.”

“Tell you?” Phoebe laughs heartily. Yelena makes a face as she looks away again for the duration that her laughing keeps going.

“You act like I’m a villain, like I killed your whole family.”

“Let’s compromise, then,” Phoebe adjusts her posture, sitting up straight and taps the arm of her chair with her fingertips. “I’ll tell you bits and pieces of what I was thinking about, and I’ll let you make inferences to fill the gaps, deal? It’ll be like a mini English lesson.”

Yelena stares for a moment. Really stares, looking right into the dark brown irises of Phoebe’s eyes that are almost black from the poor lighting of the room. Yelena considers telling her that it isn’t good for her eyes, but telling Phoebe that most of her habits aren’t good for her health are always pointless, so she doesn’t bother. That’s not what she focuses on. She focuses on the way her eyes darken. The air shifts again like the other hundreds of times it already has in the x amount of time that’s already passed. But it’s familiar this time around. The density, the weight of the unknown pressing down from the ceiling over her the way it had yesterday.

“I’m thinking about… stuff,” Phoebe starts matter of factly. “Stuff that haunts me, that’s been haunting me for years, now.”

Yelena’s two front teeth press down on her tongue to keep her from asking, even when she already does a good job at not doing that.

“It’s not pretty, obviously. If I ever gave it a face, you’d think it’s something straight out of a Stephen King book. I think if I gave it a face I’d never be able to look away out of terror that would multiply tenfold from already sending the tremors down my spine while remaining faceless–” Phoebe pauses, averting her gaze, which was initially staring at nothing in particular, over to Yelena, and she narrows her eyes. “You haven’t asked anything yet.”

“I figured it’s better to let you talk.”

Phoebe thinks to herself that Yelena’s a good listener. Not that she hasn’t recognized that before from when she used to run her mouth all the livelong day and find that she was still watching, listening intently. She decides not to dwell on the sentiment behind that. She goes back to staring off into space, instead.

“Of course, none of that would feel real. The face, I mean. I guess that’s my own way of saying the make-believe look I’m giving this feeling that watches over me when I’m alone and feeling especially vulnerable is a bit of a metaphor, or an analogy, for how I really feel, sometimes. There are times where I don’t quite feel like I’m actually here, like this is all a simulation, like the matrix. Sometimes I dehumanize myself as a result of what’s haunting me and thus reduce myself into a machine, and I work. I work, and I tinker, and I think, and I make stuff, and I talk about things nobody really understands to nobody in particular, and I turn myself into this thing that only serves to tinker and think and make stuff and talk to the walls. I don’t let myself rest, because whenever I’m feeling especially haunted, like in times where I’m working, I’ve conditioned myself to think that resting is a human thing– a person thing. I feel too dirty to be a person; too grimey, too darkened with the stains of the cruelty of another person to be one of them.”

Yelena’s eyebrows furrow. As much as she’s trying to make an effort into keeping up with the extensive word vomit coming out of Phoebe’s mouth, her attention is especially caught at that last part. She can’t help herself this time.

“‘The cruelty of another person’?” She repeats, frowning slightly.

“Inferences, Yelena.”

“Sorry–” Yelena shakes her head briefly. “Were you abused? Attacked?” she pauses, unsure, shortly nibbling on the inside of her bottom lip before releasing it. “Or is what you’re saying metaphorical, too?”

“Inferences.”

“I am making inferences,” Yelena’s frown deepens. “But there’s a fine line between that and assumptions. I don’t want to be rude.”

“True,” Phoebe shrugs. “But I’m giving you an English lesson here.”

Yelena rolls her eyes again, defiantly, but she complies. “You said you didn’t feel human, or real,” she starts slowly. “And you said you felt too dirty to be a person. ‘Too darkened with the stains of the cruelty of another person–’” she trails off. She thinks to herself for a moment that it’s a pretty deep analogy to make. Then it dawns on her.

“Oh,” she murmurs, straightening her posture again and clearing her throat. “So you were attacked.”

“Bingo,” Phoebe gives Yelena a grin that doesn’t reach her eyes. It dances around the crevices and brushes her lashes to give them a tint to them that might make other people think she’s being sincere. But Yelena knows better. She always does.

A part of her thinks that’s a curse.

Yelena asks again. “And you said you were thinking about that?”

Phoebe nods. “I was.”

“That’s what you were crying about, too?”

“Kinda–” Phoebe cringes, scrunching her nose and looking away momentarily. “That also pertains to other things.”

“Such as?”

“I’m not tell–”

“You’re not backing out,” Yelena asserts, scooting over to the right so she’s sitting right in front of Phoebe on the table. “I’m not letting you back out. Because if you do, you’ll retreat, and you won’t tell anyone anything ever again.”

“Yelena,” Phoebe starts; quieter, softer than her voice has been the entire time. Yelena ignores the way how miraculously her ribcage starts to feel suffocating for her. “You can already tell something’s wrong by just lookin’ at me. Why do you need to pry?”

“I already know what that is telling me,” Yelena raises her hand and swirls her index finger, gesturing to Phoebe’s face, which looked notably calmer than when she first came in. “But what matters is what this tells me,” she finishes with a smaller gesture to Phoebe’s chest.

Phoebe stares for a moment. At the finger, her heart doesn’t race. Just a finger. Then her eyes flit over to her face. Her heart doesn’t race, just skips. She tells herself it’s because she thinks Yelena is pretty. Though that’s true, she also thinks Ava is pretty, but her heart doesn’t hop, skip, and jump the same way when she looks at her. Bucky is… handsome, or whatever. Still not hop, skip and a jump. Bob’s more cute than anything; he gets a little familiar beat. Looking at John and Alexei would be like flatlining.

There’s a certain familiarity that comes with how pretty Phoebe thinks Yelena is. It’s not the first time she’s acknowledged it before and she’s sure it won’t be the last. There’s no sunlight to pour through the slats of the blinds and shine on her face that used to look uncharacteristically peaceful when sleeping (she’s not so sure now), but the light blue hue highlighting the crown of her head and the outline of her shoulders is a look that Phoebe could get used to.

She shouldn’t get comfortable.

For her it’s really hard not to. Despite it being Yelena, but especially when it’s Yelena.

Phoebe doesn’t say anything after that. Yelena leaves without any dismissal or anything and simply leaves because she got the premonition that Phoebe would snap at her like a dog. Historically, there would be no outward signs leading up to those moments. But, just like with everything else, Yelena knows better. Knew, anyways.

They don’t talk again for a few days after that. As if it were a byproduct, Phoebe didn’t come up the next few days after that, either. Only times she did were during the unholy hours of the night when the others were either sleeping or doing their own thing in their rooms and not wandering the halls late enough to catch her in the kitchen getting a 4 AM snack. Her periodic disappearances have become such a trend now that none of the others ask if they’ve seen her at all.

Bucky doesn’t bother sending anyone else down to the basement after Yelena. She came back up looking slightly more pleased with herself than when she went down. He didn’t ask questions, and she didn’t say anything.

Phoebe worked, as usual. Talking to her built in AI system and designing things– after she’d finished designing Bob’s belt and adding some finishing touches to it, she moved onto working on capturing the element of surprise for Ava’s gift. She designed it pretty quickly, but she decided it was too simple to spend a month working on. She decided she’d stall on it before moving onto Bucky’s gift (after also deciding that she’d be going in order of what’s easiest to what would be the biggest pain in her ass). She worked and tinkered and thought and talked to the walls about things most of the others wouldn’t understand unless she spelled it out in simple terms using spaghettios. Of course, that came with not sleeping a wink for a solid three days straight either, and even after that, she refused to hit the hay even when her personally designed AI recommended her hourly to get some rest. 

She came to a stopping point– more like a roadblock– in her work when the AI told her the tower didn’t have the resources to power her experiments. After that point, she spent another whole day trying theoretical combinations of elements on the periodic table that she could come up with that could hypothetically power her designs. None were successful, thanks to the universe’s mirthless humor.

Phoebe knew it was time to sleep when she stared at the molecular structure of palladium for fifteen minutes straight and thought out loud that it looked like a balloon dog. It didn’t, by the way.

On her way up, which was during the middle of the way when half the team was gone on a mission to the Middle of Nowhere, Alaska, consisting of Yelena, Alexei and Bucky, she encountered John and Ava, sitting in the kitchen in silence. Bob was someplace else, probably hiding since that became a habit of his after a while in the giant tower where he could hide anywhere.

John questioned what Phoebe was making an unusual appearance for. She told him she was getting water before finally going to bed. He reminded her that it was three in the afternoon. She said she didn’t care because she’d been awake for four days at that point and was one ASMR video away from sleeping standing up like a horse. John told her she should start going to sleep at earlier times, and to get more sleep in general. Phoebe waved him off before falling asleep on the living room couch.

She slept for seventeen hours after that. By the time half the team came back from their miserable mission, she was still out cold, and they found her on the couch with her leg up and her head on a couch pillow. They almost didn’t have the heart to wake her because it looked like she was actually having a really good ass nap.

Phoebe doesn’t wake up on the couch where she initially passed out.

It’s familiar looking at first, when she opens her eyes and adjusts to the amount of sunlight pouring into the room. Then comes the strain on her optic nerve from the brightness after having been a) stuck down in her horribly lit basement for ten thousand years and b) sleeping for so long.

The sheets are cool. They’re not warm like she expects them to be. Maybe she hasn’t been there very long– she looks around again when the blinding light hurts her eyes a little too much. The walls are a bland gray with no decorations whatsoever. That’s the giveaway that she isn’t at least in her own room. The other half of the room is lit by the light streaming in from the window left open by the curtains pulled to either end. She lifts the covers off, and there’s a glow to her skin where her shirt isn’t covering her arms. There’s also an interesting smell to the sheets and the covers. Not like the coconut-caramel-shea butter scent she normally keeps in her own bed. This one is… boring, for a lack of better words. It’s boring, mundane, and Phoebe only knows one person who comes to mind when she thinks of how bland these sheets smell.

The door clicks open.

That damn accent comes out before Phoebe can whip her head back around.

“I thought you’d be asleep for at least several more hours.”

Phoebe twists her torso around to find Yelena stepping into the room with damp hair slicked back and a dark green-gray shirt and black sweats. Phoebe looks down to find herself still in her white band t-shirt and her own black sweats, and she cringes.

“On top of not bringing me to my room,” she starts, sitting up properly and pulling the rest of her legs out from underneath the covers. “You had to let me stay in the same clothes I wore the other day?” Phoebe looks down at her socks instead of the cheeky look that comes across Yelena’s face as she shuffles over to her dresser.

“Don’t get onto me about that,” Yelena shrugs, pulling open the top drawer and taking out a pair of socks. “You’re the one who decided not to go up and change before you passed out on that couch.”

“Yeah, and I would change, but given the circumstances,” Phoebe looks around the room again and scrunches her nose in mock distaste. “That’s not really an option.”

“Why not?”

“You know damn well.”

Yelena turns and sits on the edge of the bed, her back facing Phoebe while she rolls her sweats to halfway up her shins and puts her socks on. “I do. But that’s not what I am saying.”

“I know what you’re trying to say,” Phoebe lifts her brow when Yelena turns her head to look at her from the corner of her eye. “But I won’t tell you what you’re trying to say.”

“Why?”

“Because if I say it, then it won’t happen.”

Yelena finishes putting her other sock on and she turns around again, resting on her knees and sitting on her heels while she frowns slightly. “You and I are talking about two different things, then.”

“Is that so?”

“I’m talking about your refusal to change because your clothes aren’t in here. What are you talking about?”

Phoebe nibbles on her bottom lip for a moment as she and Yelena stare at each other.

“I’m still not saying it.”

“Because if you do then it won’t happen?”

“Precisely!” Phoebe chirps as she hastily stands up from Yelena’s bed. “It’s called irony. If I do say what I’m talking about, then it’ll change the predisposed event that was supposed to happen and replace that one with a new one just by mentioning it.”

Yelena rolls her eyes and parts her lips to say something, “Are you high?”

“Do I have to be high in order for me to acknowledge the irony in this situation?”

Yelena frowns again, deeper. “What ‘irony’ are you even talking about?”

Phoebe gives her a pointed look, “I know what you’re doing,” she whips her head away and tilts her chin up as if to make a strained effort not to give Yelena whatever time of day Phoebe thinks she’s looking for.

Yelena’s face shifts and her eyebrow raises. “And that is…?”

“You’re baiting me. You’re trying to get me to talk about it, and by talking about it, I’d be changing the trajectory of how this morning ends.”

“The only change being made would be to your ego,” Yelena deadpans. “And how someone needs to pop it with a needle. Like a balloon.”

Phoebe crosses her arms. “I don’t see how my ‘ego’ is involved in this equation.”

Yelena’s hand gestures to Phoebe as she cocks her head briefly, “Proved my point.”

“You know I’m bullshitting you, right?”

“Oh, really? I totally couldn’t tell.”

“I know. That’s why I had to tell you. Cuz you were definitely buying into it.”

“I think if I did then your head would be too big to fit in this room.”

Phoebe softly scoffs out a chuckle as she looks away again, “Alright, asshole,” she shakes her head briefly. She steps over to the window and looks outside of it; it’s the usual sight. A bunch of people and cars shrunk down to the size of a pinch between her index finger and her thumb all conjoined together into tiny puzzle pieces that make up the streets of New York. It’s a familiar look. Not because it’s New York.

Her smile drops in an instant. She turns back around and hastily walks across Yelena’s room and to the door. She doesn’t say anything as she opens and shuts it on her way out. Yelena assumes it’s Phoebe having another one of her ‘Phoebe Moments’ where she does things out of the blue with no elaboration or explanation as to what she’s doing or why she’s doing it.

Phoebe eventually does return to her room. It’s a few floors up from the others as a result of her taking pride in being the owner of the tower and thus giving herself one of the nicer rooms (not that the others aren’t nice too, but the upper floor bedrooms are leagues fancier) and it’s one of the few floors that hasn’t fallen victim to Alexei’s cartographing a map of Winter Wonderland.

She changes. She changes standing away from her full body mirror standing between her dresser and her pull-open closet door. She’s self conscious still, even after losing five years of her life and spending the past four of them telling herself in a rehearsed tone that she doesn’t care about it anymore.

She changes, and she stands away from the mirror, and she can still sense the eyes all over her. The eyes that stared once and never looked away for anything. She can still feel the hands grabbing her waist aggressively, still feeling the thumbs digging into her sides and leaving perennial bruises that would stay even after they’ve long faded away.

She still feels it. Everything comes back to her, and she doesn’t ask for it.

in the event that anyone would like to be tagged, u can ask in my replies! :)

[112thumbtacks]

i would rather burn forever (don't hold me like you know me)

1. the one where her "ex" joins the team

masterlist

page from aiken's journal: on the first day of christmas my true love gave to me... the first chapter! :D anyways not much to give a tw here but I will anyways: just some cursing, referenced toxic relationship (or something) kind of a booty cheeks ending? idk that's a common theme with me if you've ever read my other stuff. not part of the warnings but this has also been uploaded to ao3 so if u see it on there posted by forkflies, that's me :)

Middle of November, 2027.

The “New Avengers” Tower.

Christmas.

The time of year where family gets together– much like Thanksgiving, and Fourth of July, and Easter, and New Years, and grandma’s birthday.

Interesting how the one of the only times when the whole family tree is under one roof is when it’s to give and take from each of its branches, drink a little eggnog, spark some quiet shit talk between the aunts in the corner, watch the little nephews and nieces get into fights on the living room carpet, parents glaring daggers at each other.

That’s how it normally is around the majority of the Christian globe. Other parts of it are for people who have different beliefs or just flat out don’t celebrate all that Santa jazz or doing not-so ethical things that the grinch would give one of his ear-to-ear shit-eating grins at the sight of.

The Christmas decorations hung every which way around the Avengers tower (finally put to use after years of abandonment) made it look like Santa and all his elves had thrown up on all x amount of floors. None of the avengers could make a turn around a corner without being greeted with the obnoxious red and green spiraling around them in a way that made them want to throw up. Maybe except for Alexei, but nobody paid him any mind while he fed himself on all the candy canes lingering around the couches and in the others’ rooms.

Yelena might as well have gone right back to sleep in favor of sparing herself from the strobe effects of Christmas lights being hung around the halls, no thanks to Bob and Alexei’s enthusiasm. She wishes she did, at least. For more reasons than getting a headache from the brightness of all the tacky rich-person-esque warm white lights hanging around.

She would complain if she didn’t know Alexei better. She knew if she said something then he’d spout some random bullshit about how special Christmas is (despite having spent the last few years alone) and how important it is to be festive as if to discreetly tell her Santa is watching if she’s being naughty or nice like she still believes in any of that junk.

She doesn’t, by the way.

Walker had a few choice words on the sheer amount of red, white and green he sees around the tower, and how he can’t seem to escape it now that the rest of New York is as festive as Bob and Alexei are. Ava, begrudgingly, felt the same way about how every floor, room and elevator looked like a fragment of the map of winter wonderland. Bucky had no solid opinion on the whole jolly getup, but he did find it weird how on some days since the start of the month Alexei would pop up in random places to say ho ho ho like he’s a Russian Santa.

Aside from all the Saint Nick shenanigans, the nutcrackers boring holes into the back of Yelena’s head, the tragically decorated Christmas tree sitting in the middle of the umpteenth floor with its sister sitting on the side of the helipad or whatever it was, the elves on the shelves switching places every morning that, most of the time, weren’t even shelves (one of which was nailed to the top of a doorway), the obnoxious Christmas music blaring at the asscrack of dawn, and Alexei swearing up and down he saw one of the elves move in the middle of the night, life had much worse plans brewing for the next month and a half.

Mind you, it isn’t even Thanksgiving yet.

It’s been some months since the Bob-Void incident in which he turned half of Manhattan into a black dot on the globe thanks to the physical manifestation of untreated depression and BPD. Valentina moved the handful of them into the Avengers tower which she expressed her plans for remodeling after being wrecked some years ago. It came with a few perks: nice rooms, lots of space, a nice training room, an absurdly expensive liquor collection (which Alexei made use of). Yelena wasn’t too proud of living in the same vicinity as Walker, Bucky, Ava, and Alexei (Bob is an exception because he’s actually tolerable) for the first few weeks. Getting around the tower proved to be the new age Odyssey journey. Endless floors and mile-long hallways and a million and one elevators.

Bucky knew by the fifth time that he and the others had gotten lost on their way down to the first floor to start a group mission a few weeks ago that it was time to ring in some technical help from someone who’s a familiar face around the halls.

He held a meeting the day prior in the debriefing room to talk about “recruiting” someone onto the team that he knew of. As expected, everyone asked who it was. They seemed a bit too proud to hear that it was a Stark.

Well. Save for Yelena, whose uncharacteristic pout Bucky ignored by choice but still kept note of in the back of his mind. He figured he’d ask later if said Stark actually agreed.

Which results in Bucky standing on the helipad and holding his phone to his ear and listening to the dial tone going for a moment.

Someone picks up. Fortunately for him, it’s the voice he was hoping to hear.

“Yello?”

Phoebe. Tony’s daughter. His other daughter, not the eight year old tucked away in some other part of the state with her mother.

“Phoebe, is it?” Bucky asks, just in the event that the voice on the other end was wishful thinking.

“Um…yeah. The one and only.”

“Not sure if you remember me all that well,” Bucky sucks in a breath and looks around the view of New York below him. “But it’s Bucky. Or, uh, Congressman Barnes.”

Silence hangs between them for a moment. The wind blows through Bucky’s hair and shoots through his nose, a sharp pain that nobody likes. The feeling of breathing in cold air through your nose. Yikes.

“Yeah I remember you. Vaguely, anyways.” Bucky’s eyebrows quirk up in slight surprise that she remembered him after all. It was only…thirteen years ago when they encountered each other back when Bucky wasn’t Bucky and he was still the winter soldier. “You callin’ to say Happy Thanksgiving?”

“Something like that.”

Aka, Bucky requesting that Phoebe Stark, the prodigal daughter of Tony Stark, who kept her identity hidden as well as she could for someone who inherited daddy dearest’s riches, join the New Avengers.

“Quite the early Christmas gift” – Phoebe Stark, seconds before hanging up.

Bucky couldn’t tell if that was a yes or no. He also didn’t know what to tell the team: if he should reiterate what Phoebe said and get another opportunity to watch for another pout to cross Yelena’s face, or if he should simply stick with what is professional and say he isn’t sure. 

He went on reiterating what she said and watched the inevitable constipated look flash across Yelena’s face again. Confirming his earlier hypothesis that Yelena somehow knew Phoebe. The truth of that being a good or bad thing was something for future Bucky to worry about when he told himself he’ll eventually ask what Yelena was pouting for right when Christmas is around the corner.

“So…is that a yes or no?” John folds his leg and rests his right ankle over his thigh. His left leg brushes against his Taco Shield (trademark impending) as he slightly sways it from side to side.

“Sounds like a yes to me,” Ava chips in.

“We’ll know when we’ll know,” Bucky glances around the room again, examining everyone’s faces to cover up the fact he’s actually only really analyzing Yelena, whom of which was looking at other things around the room pertaining to the holidays (not that she had many other options).

“But for right now, don’t get your hopes up. I didn’t hear anything else from her before she hung up.”

“Are we sure she’s even his daughter?” asks John.

Everyone looks at him like he just opened his third eye and grew a second head.

“Why’s everyone looking at me like that…?”

“Are you sure you actually used to be Captain America?”

“I feel like you’re mocking me.”

Bucky couldn’t hold in the sigh that worked its way out of his chest. He figures he’d deal with the idiocy of his own team later when the sting of the cold air wasn’t still striking through his nose and the migraine from the irritating lights wasn’t pounding his head from all sides.

The team eventually left the room to wander off to some other parts of the tower. Bob went to the kitchen to do the dishes since there was a bit of a pile starting to build up in the sink. Ava disappeared off to some unknown area where she could do whatever it was that she was doing. Walker retreated to his room where he could linger around and be on his phone for the rest of the day doom scrolling. Bucky didn’t get the chance to ask Yelena why she was having such a negative reaction to hearing about Phoebe potentially joining the team before she disappeared into the abyss of the tower known as the training room and he was left with the faint sound of wind blowing outside.

A few hours later, Bucky got a call from Phoebe. She told him she was coming in a few minutes.

What she meant by that, Bucky didn’t want to guess, but he assumed it was because she was flying over to the city.

Bucky summoned the team back to the debriefing room to quickly tell them to be nice to Phoebe and not give her the ick immediately and give her a reason to change her mind. They all agreed with a quick nod, to which Bucky didn’t believe, but he didn’t have time to question it. Someone over the intercom (Valentina) announced that they had a visitor on the bottom floor and that she was coming up and interrupted the interrogation he was pre orchestrating in his head.

Bucky, Yelena, John, Ava, Alexei and Bob walk out to the umpteenth floor (literally walking up there because they took the stairs as a result of not knowing which elevator to use). At first they assumed Phoebe was still in the elevator when they came out to introduce themselves and she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Then she popped out from behind the bar which held the absurdly expensive liquor collection and unironically held a mini bottle of White Russian.

John stares wordlessly. Ava squints in confusion. Bob watches with an estranged curiosity. Alexei simply watches. Bucky stares disapprovingly. Yelena mirrors John, except with a bit of a familiar glint in her eyes unlike the rest of them.

Dark brown hair, much like Tony’s back in the day, brown eyes, kinda short like Yelena, white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and revealing a few meaningless tattoos here and there on her arms (a beetle on her right wrist, two lightsabers clashing on her forearm, a Darth Vader tattoo on the inside of her left arm, and other Star Wars related elements on her fingers). The rest is hidden by the height of the bar.

Phoebe stands behind the bar and pries open the White Russian with her hand, taking a sip while glancing between the unimpressive handful before her.

“I’m very confused,” she squints her eyes, “is this it?” as she looks at John, then Ava, then Bob, then Alexei, then Bucky. None of them notice how she doesn’t spare another glance at Yelena.

Bucky looks at the rest of the team along with her. “Yeah,” he drawls like it’s a question, like he’s equally as puzzled.

Phoebe stands there and examines the handful one more time. Her free hand comes up to lightly scratch the back of her neck with her fingers while she scrunches up her face. She looks at them and they look at her and it’s a few minutes before the awkward silence is broken.

“So…” Phoebe starts, leaning forward and resting her arms against the surface of the bar. “You guys are the ‘New Avengers’ or whatever?”

John blinks. “I’m getting the idea you’re not impressed.”

“Well, you’re not wrong for thinking that,” Phoebe eyes him up and down, sizing him up before she inhales sharply. “Sorry– it’s just, you’re all so…regular.”

The team looks at each other like they can’t believe what they just heard. More accurately, John looks at Alexei, Alexei looks at him before they both look at Bob and Bob’s looking at them because they were looking first.

“You call this regular?” John steps forward. Phoebe’s eyebrows raise as she shifts her position and rests her palms against the edges. Her expression changes as she cocks her left eyebrow a little further upwards as if to silently challenge him.

John points to himself first, then Bucky and Alexei. “Super soldier, super soldier, super soldier,” he moves his finger in what he thinks is Ava’s general direction. “Ghost…whatever,” then Yelena. “Ex Red Room assassin. Black widow or whatever.”

Phoebe rolls her eyes at that. To which Yelena sees and decides not to comment on it for the sake of John’s theatrics.

“And Bob. You call that regular?”

Phoebe snorts at the end of John’s list. “You sound very proud that there’s a Bob on the team.”

“Are you, like, not getting what’s special behind that?”

“Enlighten me, then,” Phoebe shrugs before she moves her head to the side to get another look at Bob. As far as she can see he looks like a civilian caught in the middle of the action.

Bucky steps forward and pulls John back with the rest of the handful so he can quit embarrassing himself. Bucky makes a quarter turn to face them, and from Phoebe’s point of view, they do kinda look…not very promising. 

“I do understand this looks like a bit of a downgrade.” He says once he reaches the bar, standing in front of Phoebe, mirroring her and placing his hands on the edges.

“Ya think?”

“I know, I know,” he lets out a quiet sigh as he turns his head around to look at the others with a disapproving face. Ava and John are bickering again (nothing new), Bob and Alexei are watching like it’s actually entertaining, and Yelena’s glaring at both John and Ava like they both pissed in her cereal.

“Are you at least gonna think about it?” Bucky turns back to face Phoebe, who’s digging around the inside of the bar for something she seemingly can’t find.

“Should I?” Phoebe stands up straight, fixing her posture and looking at the massiveness of the room. “I mean, you all could fit on my couch.”

Bucky decides not to tell her that they do, by the way, actually fit on the same couch.

“You and Bob would be our wild cards,” Bucky mutters. Phoebe takes another swig of her White Russian and takes half a second to glance in Yelena’s direction, just long enough to acknowledge she’s there, then looks back at Bucky.

“What’s so special about Bob?”

“It’s…well…do you remember seeing Manhattan getting turned into a void on TV several months ago?”

“Uh huh…are you telling me that was him?”

“Sort of,” Bucky shrugs one shoulder. 

“And he’s a good guy now?”

“Yeah.”

Phoebe stares at him and he stares back. She’s not contemplating on joining or pondering her decision. She knows she’s joining the team because one, job hunting isn’t her thing even if, in retrospect, she doesn’t even need one considering the butt load of money she has, and two, living in the Avengers tower is way better than living with Pepper and taking care of her eight year old sister. She’s only giving them shit because it’s very entertaining.

Save for one tiny problem that Phoebe figures she can ignore by spending as much time as she can tinkering in Tony’s old workshop.

“Alright,” Phoebe sighs, feigning exasperation. She downs the rest of the White Russian and chucks it into the trash can next to her, “I’m joining.”

The others, in the middle of bickering whilst Bucky was talking to Phoebe, finally shut their pie holes and look at Phoebe like she was the one who grew a second head and opened her third eye. She looked at them and they looked at her and it was an awkward silence that went on for a few moments between them, all of them sharing glances at one another before John interrupted it with the sound of his irritating voice in the form of a sneer.

“Oh, I thought we were too regular for you.”

“Well, I’m making you guys un regular.”

“Quite the ego for a newbie,” Ava mutters under her breath, to which Phoebe pays no mind to and instead opts to keep talking.

“Not like I’m gonna let you guys run around my tower unsupervised.”

John butts in again. “Hold up– your tower?”

“...Yeah?” Phoebe furrows her eyebrows as she tilts her head, bringing her hand up to scratch the back of it with her nails. “It’s not whoever leads this team–”

“That would be Yelena,” Bucky raises his vibranium arm to point his thumb over at Yelena, “she runs this whole circus.”

Phoebe’s nose scrunches up slightly. “Anyways,” she continues, looking around the room awkwardly.

“Anyways…so how is the tower yours again? Valentina didn’t tell us shit about that.”

“I’ve heard that Valentina is also a lying piece of shit.”

“True–”

“But after daddy dearest bit the dust a few years ago, I inherited the tower. I haven’t said anything about Valentina running the place like it’s hers because…well, I wasn’t doing anything with it. Until now. So this is me taking back what’s mine.”

“Hopefully these goddamn Christmas lights can go,” John pops his neck while he walks around the room, looking up at the fairy lights strewn along the walls and making it look like a college dorm from 2016 home to a chronic tumblr user.

Phoebe narrows her eyes. “What, you guys aren’t festive?”

Everyone but Bob and Alexei calls out collectively, “No!”

“You guys are no fun,” she chuckles, moving to the side and hopping over the surface of the bar. “The lights aren’t that bad.”

“They’re ridiculous! It isn’t even Thanksgiving yet!”

Phoebe shrugs. “Blame whoever put them up, then.” She walks around the room as well, looking up at all the lights hung around and even she has to agree that it’s a bit overkill. All the lights on during the day time just seems unnecessary, especially with all these windows that let in a bunch of sunlight from nearly every side. She scrunches her face again, squaring her shoulders as she clears her throat slightly, turning to face the rest of the team, now all over the place and actively avoiding each other.

Phoebe quirks an eyebrow again. “So who needs a new and improved tour of the tower?”

_________________________

By the time Phoebe decides she’s finished with giving the rest of the team a second informal tour of the tower, John’s already walked off someplace else, Ava’s phasing in and out of the walls out of boredom, Bucky lost interest in it after the first hour, Alexei’s working overtime to get on Phoebe’s nerves, Bob’s just Bob, Valentina interrupted them five times to tell them random stuff they didn’t care about, Phoebe tripped over a few stray chords lingering here and there in some of the halls, and there’s a profound tension between her and Yelena by the end of it when she reaches the workshop she’d secretly been looking for the entire time. It’s a little more dusty than she’d like, probably from nobody having a reason to go down there at all anyway since none of them know how to use anything in there and thus letting the dust pile over from wall to wall. The only people left standing in the room are Phoebe, Yelena and Bob, all looking at different things and parts of the room like it was a museum. Phoebe told Alexei to wait outside while the rest of them went in.

Some of the stuff in the workshop was a tiny bit outdated, too. It still had things in it from about sixteen years ago when the tower was first built, a few others from 2015 when Tony was working on Ultron. Phoebe figures she’d have to spend at least a few days down to clean it up and bring the technology up to speed by bringing some of the stuff back from when she was living with Pepper and taking care of Morgan that Tony kept during what Phoebe likes to call the “Blip Period”. The five year long terror of losing half the entire universal population from a single snap, then coming back to find your loved ones being completely different people or moved on or even dead.

A large rectangular table sat in the middle of the room with a small hologram projector monitor in the center of it. The wall to the right had a bunch of shelves and cabinets full of stuff with a thick layer of dust and memories piled over them, as well as some giant toolboxes sitting on the counters underneath the cabinets. The left side was where the tinkering and the making and the building actually took place. To Bob and Yelena, almost all of the things in the room were things they’d never seen before, which they were curiously looking at and picking up smaller things that didn’t look like they were of much importance. 

In the left corner of the room on the side the door frame gave way to the glass threshold between the room and the flattened stairs they had to take after leaving the elevator was a desk that was pushed right into the crevices and fit perfectly into the corner. The surface went around four sides but two of them stopped short so someone could be let through, and an old office chair was placed in the middle of the desk. Smaller projector monitors than the one on the middle table sat in each middle upstage position of the desks. Phoebe recognized it as her personal desk that Tony made for her back when the tower was still being built so she could take over that room and make another room into a lab for himself.

Phoebe decides to end the tour with that. “The basement,” she calls it, even though it’s only some floors down from the living room which the bunch first met her in. She tells Bob and Yelena to tell the others that the rest of the tower is a maze they can all explore. When Bob leaves and Yelena doesn’t, Phoebe pulls her office chair from its original spot in the middle of the desk Yelena said looked “tacky” and sits it in front of the middle table with the back of the chair facing the doorway.

She lets Yelena look around a little longer despite the discomfort in the glances they not-so-discreetly stole from each other from time to time when Bob wasn’t looking (and even after Bob left) and the tension that, surprisingly, no one made a comment on. Phoebe doesn’t pay attention to the things Yelena looks at. She doesn’t assume she’s being curious and looking at the many advanced things in the room that she could definitely break if she held them the wrong way. She can just feel Yelena’s peripheral vision fixed on the back of Phoebe’s chair and sometimes the way she’s sitting in it like she’s already made herself at home in her basement and has no need for a bedroom because this is all she needs.

“Somehow Alexei didn’t get his hands on this place and turned it into Santa’s workshop,” Yelena breaks the silence once she picks up a broken projector monitor after she’d opened one of the cabinets that’d been collecting dust and other germs and such. She turns her head to the right to see if Phoebe was giving her yet another eagle eye or not. She isn’t, by the way. She’s merely looking at her because Yelena was looking first.

“I kept him outside because I didn’t want him getting any ideas,” Phoebe answers dryly. Her leg pushes the chair gently, swaying it from side to side slightly as to distract her from any other outwardly mundane thing in the room.

That was what Yelena figured, anyway. She saw and analyzed the speed at which her face changed from neutrality to something closer to joy when she found the basement. Yelena doesn’t want to think about how mad Phoebe would be if she walked in one day after straying away from the room for a bit too long to find her basement having been turned into another piece of the map of winter wonderland cartographed by one Red Guardian. 

Yelena turns and leans against the counter, looking at the broken projector monitor in her hand instead of engaging in conversation. Her pointer finger runs over the wound where the heavy material had been damaged with a few tiny wires poking out because of it. She listens to the heaviness in the sigh Phoebe lets out a moment later, and she takes it as a signal she’s ready to be left alone to make renovations to the room.

She doesn’t go. She stays. Phoebe’s presence is a faintly familiar one. A presence Yelena particularly enjoys in comparison to most of the others.

“You look like you have intentions of staying,” Phoebe notes. She’s right to think that, of course. It surprises her. She’s never known Yelena to take interest in stuff like this.

Then again, she’s not even sure if she ever actually knew Yelena.

“It’s…nice in here,” Yelena looks around again like she hasn’t spent twenty minutes in it already. “Nice view of the city. Nice…tech.”

“Most of this stuff is outdated.”

“That doesn’t make it useless.”

“No, it only makes it incompatible with the present-day stuff I have to bring in from home.”

They both look at each other pointedly for a few moments. They hold eye contact long enough for the look of familiarity to come over Phoebe’s face like she’s taking in, for the hundredth time, the fact she’s even in the same room as Yelena again. The air thickens between them. They both look away eventually, but their eyes never stray far.

Yelena thinks it’s finally time for her to leave. The silence is getting uncomfortable in a way she’s never really been able to handle. The silence she became familiar with a while ago that could only ever be accumulated if Phoebe was at the root of it all.

Yelena eventually leaves as a result of the silence and the so-thick-air-you-could-cut-it-with-a-butter-knife between them. 

Phoebe feels her chest feel lighter when the glass door closes, and she turns in her chair to see Yelena walking up the flat stairs back up to the elevator where Alexei was still waiting outside. She closes her eyes and sinks into the flat and aged cushions of her chair. She mentally reminds herself to get something more comfortable than that.

_________________________

A handful of days go by. The tacky Christmas lights in the living room still haven’t been taken down by the way, thanks to the group laziness that’d collected over the short time. Thanksgiving inches closer, which brings in a few complications to the team: Yelena and Alexei don’t really celebrate it anymore, John’s family doesn’t want him there, Ava and Bucky have no family to celebrate it with, Bob says he’s neutral about Thanksgiving, and Phoebe was originally intending to spend it with Pepper and Morgan again this year before she got called in to join the all-mighty New Avengers. Valentina’s tried to come by and get the chance to talk to Phoebe a few times since she first got there, all of which were turned down by Phoebe simply not being anywhere to be seen. Nobody told her that she was lurking in her basement just to fuck with her.

The times that Phoebe is out of her basement is when she’s getting something to eat or showering or other bathroom related activities. The others didn’t really acknowledge Phoebe's lack of appearance around the tower until one day when Bucky found her in the kitchen at the ass crack of dawn as he was about to get ready for a morning jog. He concerningly noted the dark circles under her eyes as she stood by the coffee machine and asked her if she was getting any sleep. A dumb question, he knew that, but it was only because Phoebe looked like actual shit. He didn’t tell her that, of course.

She told him that she’d spent the last few days straight in her basement working on an experiment after she finally got some more modern stuff put in the room. Bucky naturally asked what kind of project she was working on that required her to neglect her human need for sleep. He couldn’t help the flat expression that crossed his face when Phoebe told him that she was working on making her own lightsaber, thus requiring hours of attention. Legend has it she’s still down there to this day. 

A few days after that, Bucky came up to her when it was time for Phoebe to emerge from her cave and told her it was important for her to interact with her other teammates in order for this whole thing to work, and that he didn’t drag her up to New York so she could huddle up all day every day in her basement and avoid others. More specifically Yelena, but he decided not to bring that up and use everyone as a blanket term, since he still hadn’t asked her what Yelena’s deal was when Phoebe’s name was mentioned for the first time.

Bucky didn’t know what he would’ve forced her to do with the others. Valentina mentioned nothing about any upcoming assignments for them to get their hands dirty with, so dragging Phoebe to the debriefing room for no reason was off the table. He did reluctantly suggest a “talk circle” (self explanatory) for the whole team to get into and simply talk about how they feel for an hour or so. Then he realized that’s a bit too personal for Phoebe to get into with them after meeting the rest just a handful of days earlier and barely said three words to them since they met. He eventually settled with asking Phoebe if she knew how to fight; in the event that she said no, he’d take it upon himself to drag her up to the training room and teach her (she did, by the way, which resulted in her lying when she told him she’d meet him the following day at nine so he could train her.).

She did eventually come in. He made sure she would. He trained her. She complained about the smell of “cinnamon rolls with a sweat glaze instead of a sugar glaze dipped in melted flakes of dead feet skin cells”. He called it a day after that.

Phoebe would eventually drag herself out of her basement to interact with the others while they were all in one room, the living room. John asked, very insensitively, if she had “social anxiety or whatever”. She didn’t answer him; no one paid him any mind. She figured that was his usual mannerisms and mentally noted to keep contact with him to a minimum. 

So much for her idea to interact with the others.

“So,” Phoebe slaps a notepad down on the cushion of one of the loveseats and pulls it over with a strained tug, grunting slightly with effort as she drags it and places it so that she’s sitting across from everyone else gathered on one couch. She giggles to herself before she grabs her notepad that somehow teleported between the cushion and the back of the loveseat.

John lifts an eyebrow. “So?”

“So!” Phoebe chirps, prolonging the pointless conversation with John as she looks around at everyone. Still sitting on the same couch. Just like she said last week.

“Christmas is around the corner,” She takes her pen out from her breast pocket of her shirt and clicks it with her thumb. She flips the paper on the notepad a few pages back as they’re filled top to bottom with random sayings and lazy doodles made while she was waiting on something to synthesize or whatnot. “As you guys can see…”

She waves her pen around in the air and gestures to the Christmas lights still hanging up.

“Still not Thanksgiving yet.”

Phoebe lazily shrugs one shoulder. “Christmas comes right after. Anyhoo,” she shifts and gets comfortable in her spot on the loveseat. She looks at all six of them once more, still amusing herself with the fact that they really do fit on one couch.

“Christmas is the time of giving,” Phoebe starts out dramatically. Yelena rolls her eyes like she’s seen similar things from her a thousand times before.

“As Thanksgiving is the time of thanks, Halloween is the time to cosplay and bother people for candy which, on any other day, would be illegal, fourth of July is the time to kiss America’s rotten ass, and so on and so forth. From what I’ve observed–albeit, not very much– you guys,” Phoebe swirls her pen in a circle whilst pointing at the cluster on the couch. “Don’t give me the idea that you have intentions of bearing gifts.”

“Given that we don’t really have time to indulge in that,” Ava remarks.

“I know, I know. Running around and doing Avengers work, I know. Which is why I’ve decided to improvise,” A grin works its way onto Phoebe’s face. She watches as the whole group looks at each other in confusion as to what on Earth she might be talking about. 

“Given that you guys are too lame for any actual presents even though you all look like you could use some jolly spirit from Saint Nick in your life,” she clears her throat and straightens her posture, crossing her legs. “I’ve decided to take it upon myself to be the bearer of gifts around here in an Avengers-accustomed manner. Aka, me making you guys new weapons and stuff because you clearly need them, and also because gift giving is my love language.”

Yelena scoffs quietly under her breath, crossing her legs at the ankles as she aimlessly looks around the room and pretends she doesn’t feel the pointed look that Phoebe gives her immediately afterwards.

“Anyways,” Phoebe cocks her eyebrows as she writes something down on her notepad before quickly striking across it to underline the title, presents for these shitheads. “Who wants to go first?”

The whole room is silent after that for a few moments. Everyone looks at each other cluelessly as if to ask each other for ideas, like they’re students in the middle of a test trying to cheat off each other.

Alexei takes one for the team. He asks for a maul. A big maul. With spikes and all. Phoebe writes it down and moves onto the next thing. Before she can ask who’s next, John’s voice breaks out in #that tone Phoebe’s already getting used to.

“I’ll go,” he blurts out, looking around at the rest of the team.

Phoebe looks at his shield (still bent in the shape of a taco), then at him. “What, you don’t wanna keep your taco bell?”

“Very funny.”

Phoebe sends him a cheeky smile before shifting in her spot and clicking her pen twice. “I’m assuming you want something shield related?” She asks, looking back at his taco bell and eyeing it for a moment with much amusement in her eyes.

John nods wordlessly. Phoebe hums and lifts her free hand to scratch her hair, scrunching up her face slightly.

“I can’t promise it’ll be vibranium like the original, but,” Phoebe emphasizes on the last part with a tilt of her head towards him. “I’ll definitely try.”

“That’s…actually rather nice of you.”

“Who’s next?”

Ava looks around at the room before she eventually looks at Bob, who then looks at Bucky, who eventually finishes off the staring contest with Yelena, and they all look at each other like they’re arguing over who should go first.

“I’m just gonna pick one if y’all can’t hurry up already.”

Ava taps her foot on the floor impatiently before she lets out a sharp sigh. “I’ll go next,” she drawls, pondering for a hot minute. Everyone else looks at her.

“I can’t think of anything.”

“Clearly. Let’s improvise– I’ll use the element of surprise and make something completely random, and when Christmas rolls around, you’ll see what it is then, yeah?”

Ava clicks her tongue and cocks her head to the side slightly, her face scrunching in confusion. “Yeah…I don’t entirely trust that. I mean, what if it’s something utterly useless to me?”

“Alright, then what are your preferences?”

“Things that aren’t useless,” Ava states matter of factly.

“Yeah, that totally narrows it down,” Phoebe lets out a quiet huff as she starts writing again on her notepad all the things that the others had requested. An invisible light bulb went off over her head.

“Oh, I know what to make you.”

“What is it?”

“That defeats the purpose of the element of surprise,” Phoebe grins as she finishes writing, clicking her pen and looking back up at the group.

“Now I want you guys to take a few moments and think about what you want before asking.”

Bob raises his hand. Everyone looks at him; the others expectantly, Phoebe with amusement.

“Yes, Bob?”

“May I get a–”

“Let’s get Bob a new suit,” John butts in, earning a look from the entire team. “Get rid of that god awful one he has already.”

“It can’t be that bad,” Phoebe interjects.

“Oh, it’s bad. It’s so bad.”

“If it’s so bad, then I think I’ll just do you guys the honor of keeping the suit just so you guys have to keep looking at it!” Phoebe beams at John, then looks back at Bob with a much calmer expression. “Anyways. You were saying, Bob?”

“May I get a belt? I’m not so sure I’d need anything that’ll be of use in combat…but I think a belt would look nice.”

“You know what, hell yeah,” Phoebe nods enthusiastically as she writes down on her notepad again. “And actually, that belt of yours is getting made first.”

“Wait, why?” John butts in again.

“Because Bob has manners, unlike the rest of you guys.”

“Does that include you?”

“Well, I did say ‘you guys’ and not ‘you guys and me’. Who’s next?”

“I know what I want,” Bucky calls out. Phoebe visibly relaxes upon hearing that, like watching Ava sit and waste a few minutes trying to think of something with futile efforts took a few years off Phoebe’s life span.

“Whatcha got, Buck?”

“Just a knife. Or something with a blade. Maybe a dagger.”

“Smoothest request so far,” Phoebe nods her head approvingly and writes down on her notepad once again. She notes that she’ll make something special for both Bucky and Ava to go with what she has in mind for the both of them. She looks back up when she’s done. “Who’s next?”

“There’s only one other person who hasn’t gone,” John remarks and looks at Yelena pointedly. She looks at him because he was looking first.

“What?”

“The request train’s leaving soon,” Phoebe shifts uncomfortably in her spot. She reaches behind to scratch the back of her neck awkwardly, looking around and hoping for some divine intervention to save her from an interaction with Yelena.

“I–”

“Y’know what, lemme surprise you too,” Phoebe cringes as she writes down and notes to surprise Yelena with whatever she can conjure up. Her foot taps against the floor impatiently, ignoring the pointed and darkened look coming from Yelena.

“You didn’t even let me finish, dipshit.”

“I promise you’ll be satisfied with what I have in mind,” Phoebe murmurs, knowing damn well she doesn’t have anything in mind yet. She looks up at the rest of the group and exhales deeply, clicking her tongue and giving the couch potatoes a once over.

“I should have these puppies done around the first week of next month if I get started right away, as in teleporting to the basement and working with zero distractions and no sleep. And in a perfect world, I would,” Phoebe shrugs. “But realistically, that ain’t happening. So they might be done in a little over a month, maybe a few days after Saint Nick steals my store-bought cookies and makes a mess of my living room if I’m having some difficulties.”

“Did you used to tell stories before you got here?” John questions.

Phoebe clicks her pen and taps her chin with her finger. “No…but that does sound like something I’d enjoy doing.”

“Yeah, you’re…quite dramatic. And you seem to love your word salads.”

“A word salad a day keeps the doctor away.”

“Uh-huh…”

“So anyways,” Phoebe stands up from the loveseat, leaning forward with her notepad and pen held in one hand and stretches her arms out. “I’ll be going down to my basement now. Say your last words before I disappear for the next month.”

No one says anything. Phoebe’s already gone before anyone is able to realize they left her hanging.

_________________________

A while after Phoebe’s whole shenanigan of titling herself as the group's Santa Claus and taking it upon herself to make things for the rest of the team out of the kindness of her heart, Bucky finds himself in the kitchen early in the morning the next day. Not that that’s unusual or anything, he normally wakes up at the ass crack of dawn for a morning run, same as John, but the unusual thing about that is that Bucky finds Yelena sitting at the kitchen table sipping from a mug of coffee. He doesn’t typically find her there until later on when the others are awake as well.

He takes this as his opportunity to strike. Aka, ask Yelena about whatever it is that’s going on between her and Phoebe.

It starts like this:

“You’re up early,” Bucky remarks, pointing her out as he walks over to the counter. He opens up the cabinet above the coffee machine to grab a mug. He decides he’s going to take his time this morning, as he isn’t in a rush to leave so soon when he has the chance to get to the bottom of this…feud.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Yelena answers dryly, taking a shallow sip from her mug.

She can tell Bucky’s stalling his run. She doesn’t have proof or evidence, but she can feel it. The way he lingers at the counter and takes his time slowly and steadily pouring coffee from the carafe into the mug like he has nowhere else to be at the moment. 

He saunters over to the table and takes a seat across from Yelena. They both take discreet glances at each other like they both know they’re hiding something from the other. They both sit in silence, neither one of them bothering to speak up about it until Yelena’s down to her last drop. She sets her mug down.

“Out with it,” she mutters, her voice low and her accent rough from the lethargy fighting to take over her mind. “You want to ask me something. Spill.”

Bucky keens. He takes one more sip before he sets down his mug on one of the coasters.

“You’re tense,” he points out and leans forward and rests his elbows on the table.

“I’m just tired,” Yelena’s hands come around the mug, still warm enough from the coffee heating up the porcelain earlier. “Sleep never came to me last night.”

“I know,” Bucky answers. “I’m not talking about that."

“Then what are you talking about?”

“Phoebe.”

It ends like that.

Yelena assumes Bucky’s testing her. Which he is, and she isn’t sure what the right answer is. She’s conflicted: should she go with her knee-jerk reaction and let the bitterness on the tip of her tongue show on the rest of her face or should she remain unfazed by it?

The decision is made for her when she spends a second too long pondering, she can tell by the way Bucky squares his shoulders and puts on a knowing look.

“What’s going on between you two?” He asks, narrowing his eyes a bit. “Do you two know each other or is this some sort of right-off-the-bat beef?”

“It’s not beef,” Yelena starts, then she grimaces when she realizes she just partially lied. “Well, it is, but it’s more than that.”

Bucky sighs. He thinks to himself that he should’ve known from the get go that Yelena would beat around the bush and never give him a clear answer. He downs the rest of his coffee and decides to drop the topic, noting that he’d have to ask Phoebe at some point after his run.

“I want you guys to settle it,” Bucky gets up from his seat with the mug in his hand and walks over to the sink. “There’s no need for any drama between the team,” he rinses off the mug before he sets it down. He makes a turn for the door and leaves before Yelena can say anything else, leaving her to sit perched at the table alone with her conflicting thoughts.

A little while after Bucky and John both go on their morning runs (of which they both go different routes and still end up at Central Park), Bob and Ava come in for breakfast. Valentina walks in and interrupts them eating to tell Ava she has an assignment ready for her as soon as she’s done, to which she doesn’t outwardly complain about until Valentina leaves. Bob notes shortly after that Phoebe still has yet to come up to eat, which only reminds Yelena of Bucky’s demand to “settle it” between the two of them.

It���s not that she doesn’t want to, she does. It’s Phoebe herself she’s more concerned about. Phoebe’s had a track record for never handling conflict and confrontation well, either not taking it seriously enough or fueling the fire and leading it into an explosive argument (said from personal experience). It’s Phoebe’s childishness that Yelena doesn’t care for too much, and while that used to be something she adored (and envied a little)–watching Phoebe indulge in her youth and playfulness instead of being a sourpuss like most of the women Yelena knew by the time they were her age–it turned excessive. That childishness turned into a lack of responsibility. She does take into account that yes, it’s been nine years since they last spoke, and most people change after that much time passes, but it’s simply a reflex to think about all the times Phoebe’s lack of accountability got in the way of whatever they had in the past.

She does eventually try to settle things with her. As cordially as she can, anyways. She goes down to the basement as one normally does and opens the glass door with the passcode that Phoebe put in a few days after her arrival; she gave it to everyone in case of an emergency and they couldn’t reach her any other way for whatever reason. A few of the others have walked in on her working while she didn’t want to be interrupted a time or two, and she’s been meaning to change the passcode since then and only let Bucky have it. Evidently she has yet to do it.

Thus, leading to Yelena walking in and, thankfully, finding Phoebe seemingly in the middle of doing nothing but sitting in her chair and studying a hologram of some shape Yelena couldn’t identify. They’re both silent for a few moments; Phoebe doesn’t comment on Yelena’s intrusion and Yelena doesn’t point out that Phoebe looks like shit again, probably from having stayed up all night again.

She tries. Before she can say anything when she opens her mouth, Phoebe tells her–more to herself than to Yelena– that it’s supposed to snow tomorrow, with temperatures in the single digits. Yelena came down to try to clear the air between them and Phoebe’s talking about the fucking weather.

Avoiding conflict. Glad to see some things haven’t changed.

Yelena doesn’t say that, of course. Instead she hums and nods along like she cares about that. The tower’s heating has worked pretty nicely so far, she doesn’t have any doubts that it’ll break down just because of a little snow.

They sit together for a while after that. Not looking at each other, not saying anything, not quite relishing in each other’s presence. Just existing in a manner that they both keep each other at arm’s length. Like being in the same room together alone for certain periods of time is the equivalent of dusting off an old car that hadn’t been driven in years. Rusty and old and outdated and certainly in need of some repairs.

Yelena eventually gets bored. The unidentifiable shape on the hologram hasn’t moved yet, and Phoebe obviously has no intentions of talking about the elephant in the room (which isn’t the funny looking shape), so Yelena decides she’ll deal with whatever consequences Bucky has in mind for when he gets back and finds out nothing changed between them except a few extra minutes tallied onto the invisible chalkboard titled “Total Minutes Yelena and Phoebe Spent Together Since Their Impromptu and Informal Reunion”. A bit of a mouthful, but it’s accurate.

Phoebe comes up some hours later after Yelena’s unannounced visit to leave the tower and get something from the Subway down the street. Bucky catches her when she comes back and orders her to come with him to the training room after she’s finished eating. Phoebe purposely takes her time with it just to stall walking back into that smelly excuse of a training room.

When she does walk in, Bucky’s surprised he doesn’t have to remind her again to change into something a bit more suitable for practicing. Unlike the last time when she showed up in her jeans and her crewneck, she walked in with a simple long sleeve compression shirt with a band t-shirt over it and a pair of basketball shorts. He doesn’t point out that she’s lacking in places where some muscles are needed for this type of job.

“You remember what I told you, right? About holding your stance?” He asks, watching Phoebe set down her water bottle on the floor in the corner of the room.

“Yeah, yeah. Close your thumb around your fingers, use your arm and not your body, keep a tight grip, I got it.”

“Glad some things get through to you,” he remarks. Phoebe steps in front of him with some sass to her pose, her hip poking out and her weight shifted onto her left leg. “Now I wanna make sure you know how to kick.”

“I’m not incompetent,” Phoebe snarks, taking a step back and performing a perfect side kick. “It’s not that hard.”

“That’s good,” Bucky steps over and gets behind her, shifting her body into a different position. “But there’s more than just side kicks.”

“I know,” Phoebe rolls her eyes, lightly pushing Bucky away from behind her when a chill goes up her spine. She blinks and shakes her head briefly and shudders, then she looks at him with a flattened expression. “I took karate for a few years when I was a kid. It served as a way for me to get away from the house.”

“I don’t need the whole story,” Bucky murmurs as he steps back. “You said you did karate but you didn’t know how to punch?”

“I was eight, dipshit.”

“Sorry…what belt did you get to?”

“Brown. I would’ve gotten to black belt, but I dropped out after a kid kicked me in the ribcage and punctured a lung during a competition.”

“And you said you were eight?”

“I dropped out when I was twelve, but the kid was fourteen, I think.”

A beat passes between them.

“Are you gonna train me or not, dude?”

“You’re a brown belt in karate, Phoebe.”

“I was a child, dude! I’m a grown ass adult and haven’t had a need to use my karate skills since I was twelve!”

“Fair point,” Bucky looks around the room and thinks for a moment. “Well, you already know how to kick and punch, so you have a surface level understanding… I don’t assume they taught twelve year olds capoeira, did they?”

“Not necessarily, no.”

_________________________

Over the next half hour, Bucky tried (and failed) to teach Phoebe the basics of capoeira. Not that that’s an easy thing to grasp in such an absurdly short amount of time, it just felt like that half hour was more like half a year. Phoebe was in some desperate need of getting her stamina up; every time Bucky knocked her down (which was starting to feel robotic with how many times it happened) she had to take a quarter of a minute in order for her catch enough of her breath and tell herself she’s ready to go again. Obviously she wasn’t, but Bucky never said no to opening doors to possibilities and opportunities, so they kept going.

The next hour and a half passed with the two of them switching gears to something that was a little more suitable for Phoebe’s speed. Takedowns were an easier thing for her to grasp, and she even managed to get her legs around Bucky’s throat long enough for her to consider it a win before he easily flicked her off like she was a bug.

Bucky isn’t tired yet. Nowhere near it, but Phoebe’s already finished her water and is redder than a tomato. He decides it’s time for a break when she sinks against the wall on the other side of the room onto the floor and lifts up her band t-shirt to wipe the sweat off her face.

He takes this as an opportunity to pry, since he knows Yelena certainly didn’t fix anything.

“I’ve noticed,” he starts, already pre-orchestrating a plan to discreetly detour the conversation toward Yelena Highway. “You don’t really come up often. From the basement, I mean.”

“Well, yeah,” Phoebe pants, tipping her head back against the wall behind her and closing her eyes. “I’m working on projects for you guys. Not a lot of down time for me to spend frolicing with you and the others.”

“And that’s kind of you–” Bucky’s eyebrows push together slightly. “But it’s also important to talk to your team. Get to know the others around you a bit more, that way it isn’t weird in the event that you go on your first mission.”

“This is the second time you’re pushing me to talk to those barbarians,” Phoebe tilts her head forward again and looks at Bucky.

“Communication is important, Phoebe. Plus, a few of us are worried.”

Phoebe makes a face. “About what?”

“Y’know, when people spend too much time in their rooms, people get the idea that they’re depressed. It’s like that with you spending so much time in the basement.”

“Yeah, except I’m being productive down there. It’s not like I’m sleeping the whole day or anything.”

Bucky sighed. This doesn’t look like Yelena Highway.

“Mental health works in different ways,” he leans back against the wall and crosses his arms over his chest. “You don’t necessarily have to be sleeping the day away. I mean, that’s usually what happens, but everyone’s different.”

“And you do have a point,” Phoebe shrugs. “But I promise I’m not depressed or anything.”

“Yeah, but if you are, you could always talk to us, y’know.”

Phoebe chuckles like she’s shrugging it off, like she doesn’t believe it. Bucky notes that.

“And who would I talk to about that? Walker?”

Bucky shrugs one shoulder. “He’s not a villain, Phoebe.”

“He’s not exactly nice, either.”

“Good thing there’s more people to talk to than that. Like Yelena.”

Bingo.

Bucky knows he has his chance when Phoebe gives him a blank stare. Some people, like John or Ava or Bob, would assume that on the surface level, Phoebe doesn’t give a shit. But Bucky sees the way Phoebe’s face instantly loses the lines of interest etched in the creases between her eyebrows and the scrunch of her nose and the slight uplift of her lips. He understands it now.

“Right,” Phoebe mutters, grabbing her water bottle and toying with it, planting her feet on the floor and resting her arms over her knees. “Yelena.”

“Is that a problem?” Bucky quirks an eyebrow, and Phoebe looks at him like she’s finally figured out what he’s doing.

“You’re baiting me, aren’t you?”

Bucky shrugs again. “I’m just trying to get to the bottom of whatever’s going on between you two.”

“You could’ve just asked,” Phoebe narrows her eyes. “I’m not so closed off that you have to plan a whole conversation-scheme just to get me to talk about Yelena.”

“You’re right, but I also asked Yelena about it earlier and she made it seem like it was a touchy subject. Better safe than sorry.”

Phoebe shakes her head. She sets her water bottle down on the floor and extends her legs again, spreading them into a v shape and clasping her hands together then rests them over her abdomen. “So, you wanna know the whole story, huh?”

“There’s a story?”

“Oh, yeah. Just your typical ex drama.”

“Exes? You two…” Bucky trails off.

“Yes, Bucky, we dated. It’s 2027, girls are allowed to date girls, you know.”

“I know–” Bucky flicks his wrists and raises his hands defensively, surrendering before Phoebe can jump to any more conclusions. “I know. I don’t have a problem with it, I just wasn’t expecting it.”

“Honestly, yeah. Cuz we’re, like, totally different people, right?”

“Among other reasons, yes… she never mentioned it.”

“Well, yeah. It’s been nine years, I don’t see why she would. I mean, if you wanna get practical, it’s actually only been four years if you exclude the blip period.”

“If it’s been nine years then why are you two still acting like piss babies over it?”

“We’re not acting like piss babies!”

“You can barely look at each other, Phoebe.”

“I didn’t say it was all water under the bridge, Bucky.”

“I guess you have a point–” Bucky’s eyebrows knit together. “You’re stalling, aren’t you?”

“You caught me,” Phoebe smiles and shrugs casually. “Alright, alright. Lemme set the mood. So this whole thing actually started ten years ago in 2017 when I met her in Bucharest.”

“You were in Bucharest? For how long?”

“Lived there for two years. Moved back to the states in 2018 after me and Yelena had a fallout, along with a few other reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Let me tell the story and you’ll know.”

“Continue.”

Phoebe clears her throat and sits up straight, inhaling deeply and letting out a quiet, shaky exhale.

“Once upon a time, in 2017 Bucharest, a girl named Yelena met a girl named Phoebe in a random alley.”

“An alley? Were you getting mugged?”

“No,” Phoebe grins again. “I was taking a piss. She walked in on me doin’ it.”

Bucky raises his hand to scratch the back of his head awkwardly, trying hard not to envision Phoebe crouching in the back of some dark alleyway and Yelena sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong and walking in on Phoebe. And naturally, because the universe has a strange sense of humor, his efforts fail in spite of that.

“Anyways, I kinda cussed her out for that. Then I apologized and we went from there. We walked around the city for the rest of the night and that’s where the drama kicked off. She told me she lived in an apartment complex a few blocks down from the more flashy building that I lived in, but obviously we spent more time at my place. And I know I said we’re exes, but the thing is, we didn’t actually…date. We just hung out, went on dates, did stuff that other couples do, but we never put a label on it and that’s what made it complicated.”

“I see,” Bucky nods his head like he understands. It’s not that he doesn’t, it’s just still a very confusing concept for him to grasp even after having it explained to him by a ton of different people. A “situationship” they call it. He’s never heard a more silly word in his life. He’s more used to the boyfriend-girlfriend moving onto husband-and-wife time period.

Bucky opens his mouth again to speak before Phoebe interrupts him, and this time seeming a bit more upset.

“And it’s one of the things that we argued about the most, and it’s not like we argued a lot, we just had more subtle ways of creating tension. I always asked her why we weren’t just friends but also not labeled. She always told me she wasn’t ready for something like that, and thinking back now I guess that’s a reasonable excuse…and then I remember that she literally listened to me talk about anything and everything under the sun, and told me that my thoughts were something she could listen to for a long time after I asked her if I was annoying her because I felt subconscious after a while. She also beta read a project that I was working on, she beta read everything I worked on and she said she liked everything. She held me all night in the bathroom one night after I tried committing suicide and calmed me down by telling me about all the different mundane and trivial things she saw that day and how they reminded her of me. And when morning came she acted like it was a normal fucking Tuesday, and it was shit like that that really pissed me off, and still does to this day.”

The more Phoebe talks, the more Bucky begins to understand why Phoebe’s holding such a grudge against Yelena even after all these years. But he can’t bring himself to think of any of the other nutshell stories he heard as relevant after she told him about her suicide attempt (which happened more than once, and Bucky heard that Yelena held her through it all). He wants to pry, he wants to ask. He doesn’t. He knows he shouldn’t. But the eagerness to peel back all the layers beneath that lingers inside him like an itch he just can’t scratch.

He mentally tells himself he’ll try and get Phoebe to open up about that after she’s done with the whole story.

But for right now, he’ll have to sit in silence and listen while her story turns into a vent, because sometimes all people need is an ear.

in the event that anyone would like to be tagged, u can ask in my replies! :)

[112thumbtacks]

i would rather burn forever (don't hold me like you know me) (masterlist!!)

pairings: yelena belova x oc :3

page from aiken's journal: once again these chapters are all gonna be 10k+ words long so be prepared for that. unless you don't feel like reading all that which tbh I don't blame u

CHRISTMAS LIST

-the one where her "ex" joins the team

-coconut lime coffee creamer

-tba

[112thumbtacks]

hi

so earlier this morning at like midnight i checked my recent post which was asking if i should post my fic now or wait till the holidays. democracy wins so i’ll be posting that later on today but first i wanna introduce y’all to the oc (sweats nervously)

everyone, give it up for… phoebe stark ! yes it’s a stark!oc but PLEASE do not mistake it for those stark!y/ns back in 2020-2021. yk, with the constantly being kidnapped by hydra, having wanda’s powers but purple, loki falling in love with us as soon as we lock eyes for one zeptosecond and bucky calling us doll in every single sentence. i promise this isn’t anything like that 😭 (you might find that there is a little bit of a bond between phoebe and bucky but i promise it’s just a father-daughter thing)

moving on,,, moodboards because what’s an oc introduction without those?? starting off with the older version because that’s the one the story starts off with,,

STARK, PHOEBE

AGE 27

DOB: 17, MAY, 1995

BLIPPED? YES OR NO.

*YOU MIGHT ALSO FIND THAT THERE ARE SOME INCREDIBLY TOXIC TRAITS ABOUT HER AND ALSO SOME TOXIC IMPLICATIONS IN THE NARRATING. SOMETIMES IT MIGHT BE OBVIOUS THAT SOME PARTS OF THIS STORY IS BEING NARRATED FROM HER POINT OF VIEW. THAT BEING SAID, ALONG WITH THE FACT THAT SHE’S TOXIC, THAT RENDERS HER SOMEWHAT OF AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR. DO NOT TAKE THAT AND RUN WITH IT BECAUSE MOST OF THE THINGS BEING NARRATED ARE TRUE AND OTHERS ARE STRETCHED FOR THE SAKE OF DRAMATICS AND STORYTELLING. NONE OF THIS OR ANY OTHER POSSIBLY TRIGGERING CONTENT WILL BE ROMANTICIZED AND WILL BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY.

*ALSO, I KNOW THIS IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE, BUT THERE IS HEAVILY IMPLIED SA. NOTHING IS EXPLICITLY STATED BUT THE IMPLICATIONS ARE SO THICK YOU COULD CUT IT WITH A BUTTER KNIFE. ITS ALSO HEAVILY BEAT AROUND THE BUSH.

moving onto the younger version, because there’s gonna be a bit of a time jump. (the setting will be given at the beginning of each chapter)

STARK, PHOEBE (2017-2018)

AGE 21-23

DOB: 17, MAY, 1995

BLIPPED? YES OR NO (not yet)

*NOT A LOT TO WARN YOU ABOUT HERE. SOME SUICIDAL IDEATIONS, DRUG USE, ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE COPING MECHANISMS AND OF COURSE TOXICITY.

great person, right?

*ALSO PLEASE KNOW THAT THE SA IMPLICATIONS HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH YELENA.

[112thumbtacks]

so it's come to my attention that you guys want it now... honestly i was considering going against that and waiting until December anyways but i'm noticing a bit of a lack of fics being produced, so i've decided to post it a little sooner than that. it'll probably get posted later on today (or maybe in the next hour if the universe gifts me with the divine boost of motivation), so, invisible crowd, be on the lookout for the thingamabob🫡

hi guys so I have this fic in docs with the first two chapters drafted (the second one is still unfinished but I'm literally almost done so it counts),,,, problem is 1. it takes place during november-december 2. its x oc and I'm not sure how many people enjoy that and usually I wouldn't care but i'm feeling kinda self conscious rn because literally all I see anymore is either shipfics or x readers,, no in between except for the small amount of x ocs I see. so anyways I wanted y'all's opinion on that...

[112thumbtacks]

hi guys so I have this fic in docs with the first two chapters drafted (the second one is still unfinished but I'm literally almost done so it counts),,,, problem is 1. it takes place during november-december 2. its x oc and I'm not sure how many people enjoy that and usually I wouldn't care but i'm feeling kinda self conscious rn because literally all I see anymore is either shipfics or x readers,, no in between except for the small amount of x ocs I see. so anyways I wanted y'all's opinion on that...

[112thumbtacks]

wasteland, baby!

⊹masterlist⊹

one: (prologue) enter RIO, stage right.

two: tba

[112thumbtacks]

line without a hook (wasteland, baby! series)

chapter one: enter RIO and NATALIE, stage right.

masterlist

(divider from @dollywons !)

note: first chapter ! woooo ! ok this is only a prologue which explains why this is just 17k of a whole lotta yapping. i locked in last night and wrote like 4k+ words for like 4 hours just because i was tired of looking at this sitting in my docs taking up space

SOME POINT IN SPRING, 1996.

Nobody really liked Rio Marcini.

It was a universal fact. Very few people in the world—specifically small town New Jersey where most of the population consisted of uptown people and their trailer park counterparts who were often looked down upon with the suspicion that each and every one of them were up to no good—ever got along with Rio. It primarily circled around the stereotype that people (particularly white people, but they’d never ever own up to their oppressive thoughts and beliefs) made about Mexicans. Plays soccer; wears alternative clothing; foul mouth; mediocre grades. Some people even went far enough to assume she does drugs (‘some people’ referring to the ones who left their first interaction with her with a fat lip after boasting their stereotypes about her), but whether that’s true or not doesn’t play into the deeper part of her.

She hadn’t been in Wiskayok very long, moving further up north when she was 14 and was pushed into the 8th grade class in the middle of the year. Long before then, during her time in a sun-soaked Miami, it wasn’t as bad as people in New Jersey rumored it was. Maybe it wasn’t as ideal to them as it was to Rio, probably because everybody there either grew up with their whole lives on a silver platter or still had to work three jobs to pay rent. Skin color and clothing style was the first thing people noticed when she came to Wiskayok—because of course the most head-turning thing in the world is a brown skinned girl walking around the 8th grade building primarily surrounded by a bunch of white kids.

She didn’t care—that’s what it looked like to most of them, anyways. Further proving that ignoring the bully doesn’t solve anything and only gives them the impression that their actions don’t have consequences when their main target is a person of color.

A few people did end up liking her. A handful. It wasn’t enough. She’d always find herself wanting more until she’s satisfied with who she thinks people want her to be.

But this’ll do.

A girl—the first person to actually show kindness to her aside from her mom and occasionally her younger half brother who sometimes pops in whenever things in Montana (her father left just a few months before Rio and her mom moved up north to New Jersey, taking her unknown half brother with him) with her father were rocky for however long it would last—her name was Natalie. Nobody really liked her either, save for the few people she hangs out with after school and the varsity soccer team she got into to distract herself from her own home life.

Natalie wasn’t exactly the ideal Wiskayok high school girl, either. She was considered a ‘burnout’—skipped school sometimes (a habit which Rio actually picked up on), smoked, drank, all sorts of stuff. It was nothing less that was expected of people who lived in the trailer park on the other side of town. She didn’t show much emotion, though Rio could see that she cared when she looked between the lines when Natalie would show up to her house with a ceram wrapped peanut butter and jelly sandwich one morning in their freshman year (she claimed it was because the breakfast the school served in the cafeteria was shit, but Rio knew better than to buy into the shallow excuse to show her affection). Rio did admire her fierce loyalty—nobody ever messed with her without messing with Natalie (which sometimes led to the two of them getting into a mini argument over Rio claiming that she wasn’t a damsel in distress).

There were these few other boys who liked her. Two of them had some sort of homoerotic friendship going on that earned a bunch of head turns and questioning glares from the people around them whenever they talked a little too loudly. One of them was one of those boys who looked like they’d roll out of bed and throw on their cleanest shirt (most of the time it would be some sort of band t shirt) and basketball shorts and pull up to school riding a skateboard and half expect the senior girls to swoon over him instantly. At least, he looked like it, anyway. His hair was never neat—always messy with a black squirrel's nest sitting over his head with shitty eyeliner smudged over his eyelids with little splotches even getting into his eyes. He was one of those guys who trashed on people who listened to really popular bands and artists and swore to the gods above that he had the best music taste around (he couldn’t convince anybody that he was simply “branching out” when Natalie caught him listening to Sir Mix-A-Lot after he heard Rio listening to brown shuga on her walkman).

Despite all that stuff about him, his quirks and faults and flaws and annoyances, he wasn’t that bad. He was incredibly sweet, all things considered—in Rio’s sophomore year she only got a few things on Valentine’s Day (one of which was from the varsity soccer team captain Jackie—but whatever goes on between her and Rio is another can of worms) and he—Seth, the guy with the shitty hair and the guyliner and the ‘godly music taste’—gave her her first Valentine’s Day gift in all her time at Wiskayok. She recalled seeing an unnatural blush on his freckled cheeks as he handed her the rather fancy box of chocolates that was rumored to be shoplifted from the mall (whether or not that was true didn’t necessarily matter—it was the thought that counted), warm from being in his backpack the whole day and waiting 7 periods before he could hand it to her just a few minutes before soccer practice started.

The soccer team itself was actually quite entertaining for Rio. The teammates were nice—one of them instantly clicked with her once she joined the team. Back in Miami, the community soccer team she played for was mediocre at best and they believed that having fun was the most important part. Rio couldn’t have disagreed more—and apparently so did the Wiskayok soccer team. That didn’t mean she didn’t miss them.

The team goalie—Van—was the one that instantly clicked with Rio. Taissa often stuck with her and was always talking to her whenever practice was over or just before it started. Laura Lee was probably the sweetest girl Rio ever met; a Christian girl with absolutely no hate in her heart. That being said, Rio never ever missed an opportunity to tease her about ‘finally accepting Jesus into her heart’ only to reveal she was messing with her every single time. Shauna was one of the harder ones to bond with. She was one of those quiet girls with excellent grades and a few friends. Part of Rio thought she was only on the soccer team because she felt some sort of obligation to one of the other teammates—Jackie, to be precise. She was never caught staring at anything else for a long period of time other than Jackie.

Jackie herself was an easier one to get along with—not as easy as Van or Natalie or Laura Lee, but they had their moments together. She was an excellent team captain—albeit she definitely wasn’t the best player on the team, with Rio dominating all of them in terms of footwork and a few others being faster than her, she was definitely the most enthusiastic about the sport. In addition she was also one of the most caring people on the team—and that she ever met in general—after finding out that once Rio had gotten diagnosed with glaucoma and had a really bad habit of “forgetting” to do her eye drops (she hated them) that Jackie had somehow gotten her hands on the same exact tiny bottle and sometimes did them for her. On the rare days when Rio was feeling the effects of other people being their ignorant selves and dogging on her for fitting the stereotype that they saw her as, Jackie would be the one to tell Rio that ‘they can talk shit all they want about someone they don’t know, the more they do it the more stupid they’ll look when they come to realize that this heart of gold in your chest is something they could only dream of having.’

Moving on.

Lottie was nice. Rio didn’t know a whole lot about her aside from the fact her parents were fucking loaded. Maybe too loaded and it didn’t really make sense to Rio that the Matthews decided to live in this tiny town. A lot of the parties she’d been to were at her house—more of a mansion, really. Mari was what was called an acquired taste—Rio didn’t care for her all that much in the beginning and even thought she was a bit of a bitch. She couldn’t recall when it was, but at some point in time she got used to Mari’s shit and most of the things she said didn’t phase her. Misty was…definitely an equipment manager. Rio had only three one-on-one interactions with her before and she had nothing nice to say about any of them.

The rest of the teammates she didn’t pay much attention to—they either opted not to interact with Rio outside of practice or they were underclassmen (which Rio soon found she had a heavy disdain for once she was a sophomore). Altogether she barely considered her teammates as “friends” aside from Natalie and Van.

_________________________

The middle of February came around again—the entire month itself was always a mix of warm and freezing temperatures in Wiskayok. Some people had plans for Valentine’s Day that they made a month ahead (Jackie, for example). Seth danced around hinting who he would ask to be his Valentine (nobody was oblivious to the hints he thought were “sneaky” when the next thing he’d look at was Rio with the tenderest look in his eyes). Rio wasn’t dense—she knew Seth had some sort of thing going on for her, though it wasn’t very easy to believe at first considering that the only Valentine’s gifts she received were in elementary school in Miami back when it was mandatory for all the students to pass gifts out to the whole class. And then Seth started hanging around her more often: showing up to her locker (and sometimes getting there before Rio could and waiting for her there), buying tickets to whatever movie had come out that Rio had only expressed interest in for a few seconds (then faking an apology to his friends when they asked why they didn’t get any, saying “these were the only ones left, guys”), putting together cassette tapes of all sorts of genres and bands he thought she might be into. Seth often did other things for Rio, really dumb stuff like opening the door for her and taking an extra roundabout in the classroom so he could take her paper up to the teachers desk and turn it in for her so she wouldn’t have to.

Natalie sometimes teased Rio about it—for what reason she’d never understand, but she definitely knew that Natalie was secretly rooting for the both of them. Or maybe not—it’s hard for Rio to tell with Natalie (as well as anyone in general, but especially her), like when she’d poke fun at Rio for it when they’re hanging out with their dysfunctional friend circle or at soccer practice (and get everyone else in on her shenanigans in the process), but when it’s just the two of them she makes no effort to bring up how Seth always always took up whatever spot next to her. If their shoulders weren’t almost smushed together then it was him sitting right behind her with Rio between his legs and the front of his shirt almost brushing against her back. Jackie and a few other girls on the team thought Rio was dense when she said she didn’t think much of it and wasn’t reading into it at all.

As a result of all of that, it was an understatement to say Rio didn’t really appreciate the teasing and the shipping. The pressure she felt from Mari when she arrived at practice on some days when she asked her unofficial trademark question Rio was sure she’d heard more times than any other phrase in her life, “so how are things with Seth?” Completely platonic, is what she wants to say and possibly scream out to the whole team in hopes it’d give her some peace from their suggestive tones when they’d occasionally see her walking to practice with Seth glued to her side. She wonders if this is how rednecks feel when they say their infamous quote to voice their opinion on the lgbt community, ‘stop making everything gay,’ but then her thoughts are undermined when she remembers that’s about same-sex attraction and not boy-girl relationships.

Then she wonders how it’ll sound when she ultimately tells Seth that whatever they have is platonic when someone from around school takes it too far and assumes something extreme like sex (which unfortunately is looking to be inevitable, given that even the boys fucking baseball team is getting in on the teasing too, probably from Jackie’s doing, but Rio’s frustration towards any of them would be neither here nor there), only for Rio to find out Seth thought the same thing too and make a fool of herself for bringing it up.

But that instance didn’t sound very likely, anyway. Especially not when February went by in the blink of an eye and March rolled right around with a flurry of games coming up (including the one that following Saturday) and the very last thing that Rio needed to worry about became a fucking worry of hers.

It wasn’t the most romantic thing in the world, in Rio’s fair and inexperienced opinion. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be charmed by the rushed confession of Seth’s feelings for her just minutes before he was supposed to leave for a culinary exam he’d been scheduled to retake. She also wasn’t sure if she’d ever be charmed by him if it was something more intimate—maybe leaving a movie theater well into the night or sitting on the hood of his car at the park and eating sandwiches from Subway. Regardless of where or how it took place—in the middle of a busy atrium or with the chilly night air blowing through Rio’s hair—the sentiment would still be there. A sentiment she wasn’t clinging onto very tightly. She supposes Seth would still have been equally as nervous if he’d planned and orchestrated it ahead of time than if it was spontaneous like it was that day.

“I know this is extremely rushed and sprung on you—and onto me, too, cause technically I’m supposed to be in the cafeteria by now, but this isn’t really about me! Unless you think it’s not just you or me but it’s the both of us and this is just as nerve wracking and pressuring for you as it is for me—“

The incredibly slow and wordy build up wasn’t necessarily doing the trick for Rio. If it weren’t for the fact he was standing right in front of her (more specifically right in the way of her first period economics class) she would’ve been zoning out and looking at literally anything else aside from him. Maybe at the chipped wall painting that definitely was overdue for a new layer, maybe at her nails that suddenly became more interesting to inspect and mentally debate which color polish would look better than to look at the nervous wreck in front of her, maybe at her soccer captain strolling by with her usual strut and her quiet girl best friend beside her, or possibly at the dried gum that's been spat onto the floor some fifteen years ago.

Then came the inevitable million dollar question:

“—can I be your boyfriend?”

Seth, standing in all his loser glory, with his usual eyeliner smudged and heavily contrasting against his sickly pale skin and his absolute mess of haircut that Rio wasn’t sure even had a name, as well as his orange 2Pac shirt (whom she was sure he wasn’t even into) and his wildly unmatched khaki colored cargo shorts, looked at her with a nervous smile like this was the first time he’d ever talked to her. To anyone who didn’t know any better it might’ve looked just like it—Rio never had a more forced smile on her face than the one she brought up to her lips. At first she thought it was obvious it wasn’t very sincere, then over time it just melted and it became something like a flustered grin, because the more seconds that passed the bigger Seth’s nervous smile turned into a hopeful beam.

Rio was sure Seth knew she never had a boyfriend before—or ever even really done anything intimate, save for that one kiss she had back in Miami when she was at a 7th grade dance at the end of the school year. The closest thing to a kiss she’d ever done after that was hugs and sharing an icee with Natalie (and occasionally kissing her goodbye after games and parties—but that didn’t count). Rio was also sure Seth knew she didn’t necessarily understand the pressure that a ton of girls face when it comes to boys—like they’re expected to have a boyfriend as if it’s some universal rule you have to follow or else you aren’t really good for anything. She always wondered why it almost seemed like the concept of a heterosexual romance was being advertised at her every turn. She remembered a few weeks into her freshman year her mom asked her if she’d seen any “cute boys” yet. Her mother never stressed the concept of a straight relationship over Rio that much, but even when the amount of times the conversation happened was only a handful, she never failed to notice the undertone at the end of each and every one. Remember, Rio. It’s only natural to be attracted to men as a woman. Be with a man, why don’t you.

She never quite questioned it. Because god forbid Rio bring up the idea of her being into anything other than a traditional life with her male counterparts.

Nobody in the atrium was watching them, but the heat that crept up the back of Rio’s neck and seemingly attacked her face like a hot flash made her think that this was some sort of spotlight moment in a play where the only thing the audience could see was them, and the prying eyes felt like pointing fingers aimed towards Seth as if to tell her this is your destiny. She surely felt a fever was coming over her with how hot her face felt—her chest, as well. Her tank top felt like it was stuck to her, latching to her chest with the intent to squeeze and wring the air out of her lungs until she was a raisin. Her armpits were screaming at her to take her jacket off before they caught on fire, and she would’ve if she wouldn’t get dress coded by the deans lingering around. It wasn’t even that warm and fuzzy feeling that one of the girls from the soccer team described. It was sweltering, incredibly uncomfortable and it might as well set her whole heart on fire and burn uncomfortably in her chest the whole day.

Rio could see that Seth was visibly growing nervous the longer they both stood there in the middle of the hallway. Despite the bell having already rung and a few people sped past them because they were late for whatever reason, nobody stopped to look at them and question what the fuck they’re standing around for like they’re freshmen. When a hall monitor emerged from the doorway to the main hallway, Rio was pulled out of her train of thought and looked away from Seth.

“Uhh…” she began with no pre-orchestrated plan on what she would’ve said next. And she thanked whatever god was up there when the hall monitor practically sped his way over to the both of them, pushing his rather expensive looking pair of glasses up the bridge of his freckled nose and got ready to hiss for them to go to class so that she wouldn’t have to give Seth an answer (whatever answer that may be, she wasn’t necessarily sure yet but she wasn’t leaning towards the ‘yes’ side).

“Go to class!”

“Fuck off, Henry,” Seth frowned as he whipped his head around to look at the incoming hall monitor, watching him make no effort to stop power walking towards them seemingly with a notepad at the ready. For what reason he had such a portable thing on him, neither Rio nor Seth could ever find out, but they both assumed it wasn’t for any reason that would benefit either of them in any way, so instead of focusing on the more romantic aspect that Seth thought they had going on, they both opted to go their separate ways for the while and go to their given destinations before getting chastised by the helicopter hall monitor.

Rio was internally grateful that Seth decided to drop the initial topic and went away before she could be pestered any more than she already had been. She didn’t necessarily feel like listening to him explain to the hall monitor that instead of going to the cafeteria for the culinary exam retake he was spending the past five minutes standing there and asking out one of his only lady friends to be his girlfriend only for him to get nothing but a cheap smile and dead silence in return. Consider that his very late and very bland Valentine’s Day gift after having nothing to give him in return.

Although there came the embarrassing feeling of walking into class late and without a proper excuse as to why she was a whole three minutes late. She couldn’t think of anything to say when someone had opened the door for her as a result of all the pairs of eyes that suddenly became so interested in her tardiness, as if that’d become a universal entertainment for the whole school population.

Her economics teacher stood there at the chalkboard with her arms crossed and a small piece of chalk sitting between her fingers and with a raised eyebrow on her face. “Tardy pass?”

No, you moron, I just got here ten minutes ago and was immediately pestered by a guy who thinks I want him.

“No,” Rio drawled out quietly and almost shamefully, until she dared to look around the classroom and find none other than fucking Natalie Scatorccio sitting at the back in her usual spot with her usual smirk and her usual cocky glint in her eyes.

“Any valid reason as to why you’ve decided to express your tardiness?”

Rio hated that her economics teacher did this to everyone who was late, even if it was a measly three minutes. No, she obviously didn’t have a valid reason as to why she was tardy. It irritated her. And what was she supposed to say? The throes of romance got the best of her and rendered her a victim of Cupid’s unfortunate arrow? That she was being held up by a dude who wanted her to fit into the role of a “guy’s girlfriend”?

“No,” she grumbled out again, looking around again and letting her eyes land on Natalie, her face scrunching up slightly at the smirk that didn’t seem to want to leave. As much as it irked her she couldn’t really find it in her to be mad at her. Not just at that but in general—but she’d digress if someone were to ever ask why.

The teacher didn’t bother with publicly shaming Rio for being tardy. It was only eight in the morning, and frankly she hadn’t even taken attendance yet, much less started class. Though instead of showing her tiredness like a normal person would at eight in the morning she opted to be a bitch to her first period class, because everybody’s too groggy to pay attention to the way her eyes carry a tired glint to them despite having a bit of makeup on to cover her eye bags underneath.

Rio shuffled to the spot reserved for her in the back of class—not that assigned seats were a thing in this teacher’s class, since this kind of class was specifically for seniors, and she had just enough faith in said seniors that they could behave themselves with no seating arrangements that prohibited them from sitting next to their friends—Natalie’s shoe covered the seat next to her, with her leg stretched across the row and a shit eating smirk on her face.

“Nuh uh,” Natalie shook her head teasingly, her eyes staying on Rio as she stood there with an entirely unamused look. For the sake of not having the teacher get on her case again, Rio only kicked her leg away and took her rightful spot next to her best friend, tearing her impossibly heavy backpack off her shoulders and setting it on the floor next to her chair.

“You wanna tell me why you’re late?” Natalie prods, turning in her seat to face Rio. The teacher never bothered to pay any mind to the students in the back of her class who sat there for a reason—doing stuff and talking about stuff and doing anything and everything except paying attention to the class itself, which is why Natalie so casually turned to face Rio instead of facing forward.

“Don’t act like you have a leg to stand on,” Rio countered, turning her head to look at Natalie. “You fucking skipped classes before.”

“Yeah, but like,” She licks her lips as the gears turn in her head and she thinks of something else to say to defend her case. “That’s kind of expected of me. You’re kinda like a goodie two shoes, except you’re not that great.”

“Listen to the teapot calling the kettle black,” Rio lets out a chuckle meant to make fun of Natalie, furrowing her eyebrows with a grin that mirrors the cocky look on her face. “You aren’t up to people’s standards either, burnout.”

Around other people, like Seth or Laura Lee or Mari or the other handful of friends she has, it wasn’t very often that they saw Rio with a spunky attitude. Most of the time it was her acting the same way as them—mirroring their personalities and talking like them. Nobody ever really questioned that fact; verbally, anyways. A few of her friends wondered why she had such varying attitudes towards others at different times but they never actually asked her about it because they thought it was her way of being everybody’s friend. Natalie was no exception—whatever snarky and sarcastic thing she had to say, Rio had a quip ready on the tip of her tongue to keep Natalie on her toes. It was just like that between them and nobody else.

Maybe Natalie was into that. Probably not, but it was safe to assume for everybody that never spoke to her a day in their lives that she was into anything with the kind of reputation that surrounds her.

Natalie knows it’s all in good fun, when Rio calls her “burnout”. She doesn’t mean it like other people do when the word rolls off their tongue and seemingly lands in the mud puddle it was originally meant for. It doesn’t sound like a bitter taste on her tongue, it doesn’t sound like a punch to Natalie’s face. Instead it ignites a warmth in her chest that makes her feel a different way about the word. Like she shouldn’t give a damn what people judge her by calling her that, because as long as it carries a different connotation in Rio’s mouth, everybody else doesn’t matter.

“You’re avoiding the question, loser,” Natalie leaned her arm on her desk. “You’re late, dude.”

“No shit,” Rio snarked back, and a second later she ran her hand through her hair and let out an exasperated sigh. She knew Natalie wouldn’t stop being nosy about why Rio was late until she told her whatever it was she was hoping to hear. So instead she opted for a smartass remark.

“I was late cuz I was doing anal with your mom.”

“Interesting,” Natalie raised an eyebrow to accompany the now confident grin that’d taken shape on her face. “So do you want me to report the both of you before or after Regionals?”

“You know I’m only joking,” Rio reached a leg over to her left to lightly kick Natalie’s ankle. “It was something else. It was really weird.”

Natalie’s eyebrow stayed lifted. She didn’t look surprised at all and if anything she looked curious—which she undoubtedly was judging by the way she shifted in her seat to get comfortable. “Well don’t beat around the bush.”

Rio groaned. It was too late. Natalie was already invested in it, and Rio began wondering how long it would take for her to lose interest in it once she found out it was about Seth. Now she began to momentarily orchestrate how she’d say it without Natalie getting that pouty look on her face. Rio nibbled on her bottom lip; she knew that Seth was a rather unenjoyable topic for her (and frankly she felt the same despite being friends with him for so long), and she knew, even if Natalie didn’t say, that she only hung out with Seth because Rio did. And Rio only hung out with Seth because he was friends with one of Natalie’s other friends. Point being neither of them really had an opinion on him. That wasn’t a good thing.

“You’ll never believe it,” she started slowly; she still only had part of a plan orchestrated on how to say it without mentioning Seth. Her teeth let go of her bottom lip. “But, someone…”

“Someone…?” Natalie pressed, tilting her head forward. The sun shining through the window casted a glint over everyone in the room, though Rio wasn’t really paying attention to them. She was watching the way the light shone over the bleached blonde hair, as well as the light doing wonderful things for her jawline, and the warm look in her eyes (which needed no assistance from the sunlight) that she always got whenever she was looking at Rio. Reason being, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know; or maybe she did know and she never brought it up out of fear that it would change things between them. And obviously it would, but she didn’t want things to be complex. She wanted it to stay the same, to stay simple and easy and without question.

Moving on.

“Someone…asked me out,” Rio finally pushed the words out of her mouth like they were originally stubbornly tied into a knot on her tongue. She watched the warm glint in Natalie’s eyes fade. Her heart clenched slightly. It sounded weird anyways despite her half-baked efforts not to make it sound weird. Natalie almost looked disappointed if it weren’t for her attempt at covering it up with a snarky smile and a look of disbelief.

“So people do have low standards,” Natalie let out a dry chuckle, crossing her arms and leaning back in her chair. She crossed her legs next. “I almost feel bad for whoever it was.”

“Yeah, well, I could say the same thing about the guys who hit on you,” Rio rolled her eyes affectionately.

A pause. It’s only for a few seconds, but it was long enough for Rio to start thinking that what she said might’ve actually made Natalie upset before her train of thought was interrupted.

“Are you gonna tell me who it was or are you gonna make me guess?” Natalie quirked an eyebrow, her smirk solidifying into an almost genuine look. Maybe she manifested her own legitimate smile into existence. “Or is this shit all in your head.”

“Asshole,” Rio lightly kicked Natalie’s ankle again, earning a shove on her shoulder in return. “Why do you care who asked me out, anyways?”

“Why would I not give a shit? You’ve, like, never been asked out before,” the way Natalie said it so matter of factly nearly shoved it into Rio’s face that she could potentially have her first ever boyfriend today, in the instance she’d accept Seth’s confession with the open arms he was hoping for. Maybe the realization was there before and Rio was just avoiding it for whatever reason that pertained to wanting something else—someone else, though it seemed unlikely to Rio at that very moment.

“You’re so nosy,” Rio scoffed, shrinking away slightly and sitting properly in her chair as if to avoid the question by pretending to pay attention to whatever her teacher was saying. The way she shifted didn’t go unnoticed by Natalie’s watchful eyes.

“And you’re deflecting.”

“I don’t wanna fucking tell you,” Rio hissed, her eyebrows furrowed. Natalie narrowed her eyes at the sharpness in her voice; she could see the gears turning in her head and the process of eliminating going on in her mind’s eye. Where she got options she came up with, Rio would never know. But at some point between when she snapped and when Natalie finally clicked her tongue which signaled she had an idea of who it was, she came to the conclusion of who it was.

“It was Seth, wasn’t it?”

“It’s—“ Rio started, and she didn’t have a clue why. She couldn’t find a way to explain herself, much less figure out a way to make the whole thing not sound weird. The things she wanted to say were clogged up in her throat. The word vomit that tried making its way from her stomach just barely reached her mouth and left an unidentifiable taste on her tongue.

“I probably won’t even say yes,” she didn’t want Natalie to be upset if she did ever accept Seth. Like she already acknowledged many times before, both Natalie and Seth were indifferent towards each other. Why they were so weird around one another, that was between them and God.

“But you’re considering it,” Natalie retorted. It was only then that Rio noticed the smirk fell from her face.

“Kind of…” Rio started again. “But like, I don’t wanna turn him down and potentially ruin our friendship.”

“It’s not my place to tell you who you should and shouldn’t date,” Natalie held her hands up slightly in defense, signaling her surrender in an argument that never even started. Rio felt a familiar taste of disappointment replace the word vomit. “But if you say no and he doesn’t take it well, then that doesn’t sound like a dude you wanna keep around.”

“I know—you’re right,” Rio leans her elbow on her desk and rests a hand in her hair, frizzy from the humid March air she’d been trudging through just an hour ago to get to school just to avoid driving her car with no air conditioning. “I just don’t know if I like him or not.”

“Can you envision yourself kissing him?” Natalie quirked her eyebrow again in an attempt to give Rio the impression that she was already moving on and pretending there wasn’t any tension just half a second ago.

Fuck that. There was no way Rio could envision herself ever kissing Seth. He wasn’t ugly, but he wasn’t dashing, either. She never paid too much attention to his lips but she imagined they weren’t very soft if she had any leg to stand on in comparison to Natalie—then again those “goodbye kisses” from leaving parties and games didn’t count. Not to Rio, anyways, and Natalie never made a big deal out of the whole thing being so casual despite the fact she was literally kissing her best friend. She was more than sure Seth wouldn’t even come close to being on her level. And doing more than kissing? The thought made her physically recoil in her seat.

And so came the weak “Yeah.” A lie. A fat one, at that. Natalie knew. She saw the way Rio made a face just a few seconds after such a blasphemous question was imposed on her.

“You’re such a shit liar,” Natalie grinned, like she had any idea just how much Rio truly began to resent the thought of having to kiss Seth. “Why would you wanna date someone you can’t even picture yourself makin’ out with?”

“Kissing and making out isn’t all there is to a relationship, is there?” Rio asked rhetorically. On the contrary she agreed with Natalie, but at the same time a very small part of her was curious. There’s always room for more: more money, more opportunities, more knowledge. Which means room for growth. Could she grow to like kissing Seth even if she’d never done so? Could she grow to like the idea of being with a man despite all her inner monologues against her mother’s rhetoric and her own pondering about her sexuality to prove otherwise? The universe does work in mysterious ways, after all.

“Not really,” Natalie shrugged. Like she knew anything about a stable relationship. “But it’s pretty strange if you’re with someone and you don’t even kiss them.”

“I guess,” Rio mirrored Natalie and shrugged in return. “But there’s other ways to show your love for someone without having to like…” she trailed off. She didn’t know squat about relationships either, the only knowledge she had about them was from watching the occasional romcom from time to time if she ever decided it was worth her attention. “Y’know. Get intimate.”

Natalie argued. “He’s just gonna wind up cheating on you.”

“And how do you know?”

“Well, for one, he’s a teenage boy. Two, he’d be stuck in a relationship where his girlfriend doesn’t wanna fuckin’ kiss him. He might think you’re the one cheating on him from all the times we kiss each other goodbye from games and parties.”

“That doesn’t count!” Rio whisper-yelled, which in turn made Natalie raise her eyebrows suspiciously. While Rio never saw or heard her make a big deal out of that whole affair being casual in Rio’s eyes or ever confronted her about it, Natalie did wonder why Rio was so insistent on it just being completely platonic. What was so friendly about kissing your best friend on the mouth? It wasn’t only kissing, either. It was the less physically intimate parts about them. Like when they’d sit on the bleachers share an orange creme soda together on the occasion that they got to the soccer field early and waited for practice to start. Or when Rio’s driving and she reaches a red light and they randomly turn to each other and gaze into the other's eyes until their moment of longing is interrupted by a rude honk from the car behind them. Being caught watching the warm glint in your best friend’s eyes and wanting to swipe your thumb underneath her eyelid doesn’t exactly scream “just friends!”

“Whatever you say,” and so Natalie decided to drop it. She figured it was better to just let it play out the way God intended than to try and fight it knowing damn well Rio probably would end up accepting Seth’s confession that Natalie was mentally sure wasn’t even sweet and considerate anyways despite saying otherwise just a few minutes ago.

Rio couldn’t find the words to keep the whole conversation going. Curse her awkwardness. Thinking back now, if she wasn’t so awkward earlier when Seth approached her with an inconvenience about him to match her uncoordinated conversation skills, this whole thing wouldn’t be an issue. She would’ve actually had the balls to turn him down and not give a rats ass if it sent his ego balled up into a knot and rolling down a very bumpy hill towards frown town. Heaven forbid she actually engages in what she’s feeling like a normal person. Heaven forbid the cat doesn’t get her fucking tongue.

A personal grudge she holds against herself. A few, actually, and part of said grudges pertain to a bunch of other people too, so as not to make it look like plain self deprecation to anyone who asked. Her own inability to speak for what she wants (which in this case is to not be Seth’s girlfriend), she sort of blamed on her mother. All those undertones that meant to say get a fucking boyfriend already, Rosario rather than do you wanna invite your friends over for your birthday? assuming Rio would include her guy friends in the process. She never did, by the way. Her letting other people make their assumptions about her without saying a thing to them to prove that their stereotypes weren’t true. Well, scratch that. A few might be on point, like her playing soccer and wearing alternative clothing. A grudge she holds against a few of those popular girls Rio calls “Heathers” despite having differing names and all those baseball and football guys who date cheerleaders and all look and act the same: white, buff, brown or blond hair, tall, and fucking stupid.

Grudge number three: her dad cheating with another woman, which ultimately resulted in Rio and her mother moving up north away from Miami. As well as a little brother whom Rio had no idea even existed until one day in her freshman year when this boy showed up on her doorstep and explained to her that he was her brother. She wasn’t too pleased with it.

Quite a few grudges. No biggy.

The silence that dragged between Rio and Natalie made the rest of the class feel like time was purposely moving slowly so that the both of them had to sit in their own awkward atmosphere they built up when Rio decided to announce that someone had their eyes on her as some sort of punishment for being too much of a pussy and not doing anything about the tension that started growing between them in their sophomore year.

Yes, tension. Between Natalie and Rio. Not bad tension, per say, but it did make things a little weird for them. For a time Rio wasn’t used to seeing Natalie in a light that brought a heat to her face—and no it was not from “the sun” despite all the times Rio would argue that it was whenever one of her annoying teammates would ask about it.

“I think she’s got the hots for Nat…” Van would whisper to Taissa.

Such a shocking thing to discover when they’ve been kissing each other on the mouth since tenth grade.

And the bell finally rang, much to Rio’s dismay that it didn’t ring about 30 minutes earlier. It certainly would’ve saved her the urge to rip her hair out simmering inside her. She was pissed off, and she couldn’t put a finger on the reason why. Not at Natalie, who seemed to be mildly irritated with her in turn, though neither of them made a point to talk about it because it would eventually fade away by the end of the day when practice started from the natural waves of the school day that washed over them whenever they saw each other again. If anything, Rio thought it was safe to assume that her anger was pointed at Seth, even though in reality he hadn’t really done anything wrong and he was only expressing the feelings for Rio that strummed evenly in his bloodstream like guitar strings playing a soft tune. She didn’t like that. Not really, anyways. She didn’t like the thought of being his girlfriend, of actively touching her lips to his and cuddling up with him and spending time with him in that way.

She was confused about herself, yes, but she wasn’t stupid. She could tell between what she wanted in general and what she didn’t want with certain people. She could tell that whatever Seth had going on for her, she clearly didn’t have it going on for him. And she didn’t think she’d ever have it going for any other dude that was bound to make their move on her in the foreseeable future she was supposed to make it to.

Then again, she was only a teenage girl. All sorts of things change in a teenage girl’s mind.

_________________________

LATER THAT DAY.

Natalie wasn’t too pleased with Seth. A mini grudge birthed itself in the back of her head to which she made no effort to keep back there. No effort to hide it, no effort to make it known to Seth that she didn’t feel anything else for him other than resentment.

Rio’s considering it.

Actually considering being Seth’s girlfriend, as far as she knew. Which in Natalie’s defense wasn’t a lot, given that their whole conversation earlier that morning wasn’t to show that they were champions at communicating with each other.

Defense fucking failed. Seth knew right off the bat that Natalie was pissed with him for the day. No need for assistance from one of her other bonehead friends to poke and prod at the wrong buttons today. Seth’s big fat Cupid’s arrow shaped thumb poked at the big red button at the center of Natalie’s chest, right above her heart, with Rio’s name on it and sounded off just about every alarm in her head that nearly sent steam blowing from her ears.

Fucking cool it, Nat. You’re being a weirdo. She’d tell herself after she noticed the look Seth gave her like she had grown an additional head after she’d barked a little too loudly that she was “fine” when she’d shown up to her English class looking a little too not fine.

This must be how Shauna feels, was what ran through her head for the rest of the day. And if Natalie knew anything from catching glimpses from the all-too obvious yearning in Shauna’s eyes when they lingered on Jackie, she was not gonna let herself go down that miserable Shauna Shipman path.

Not that she hadn’t been subconsciously going down a much similar path the whole time. Maybe a sister path, without a knockoff Jeff for the time being up until that day. It seemed that the whole week before spring break was a curse for Rio and Natalie. Like life had it out for them any time it saw them getting closer and closer until they were a hair’s touch from being satisfied with life as it was.

Practice had been waiting for Natalie with a shit eating grin on its face. Just like it always was, with the usual hour and a half of running laps around the soccer field for 10 minutes as a warm up that, more often than not, left a few beads of sweat sliding down her temples. Only for her to find out that her best friend had decided to fucking skip. Then it was accompanied with the whole team discussing what they were going to do for spring break instead of actually practicing despite Jackie’s speeches and lighthearted demands to do so (hypocrisy’s sassy head reared in in the form of Jackie standing over a few teammates crouched down on the grass with a hand on her hip and talking instead of kicking balls around). Natalie wasn’t too excited for spring break, and, to her halfhearted surprise, nobody else was, either. She would usually hear something interesting about whatever Rio was gonna do for the break, but to Natalie’s dismay resulting in her raising a lovely middle finger to the sky on her sweltering odyssey home after declaring life had pulled Rio from practice to spite her wanting to see her again, there was nothing to fucking hear.

Of course, that wasn’t all. Just like people do when either Jackie or Shauna weren’t there (which was an extremely rare sighting), the team asked “Where’s the rest of you?” referring to Rio’s empty spot at her locker next to Natalie. She was half tempted to come up with some bullshit lie. Another half of her was tempted to very angrily tell them a short and brief story that someone was trying to take away her only chance at happiness. Then she decided both ideas were dumb as shit and went with the blatant obvious she’s not here.

Yeah, no shit, Natalie. No other reason for you to walk around with a storm cloud over your head.

Practices without Rio were surprisingly boring, in Natalie’s opinion, which in this case wasn’t very credible. Surprisingly, because it wasn’t too often that Rio skipped practice and usually it was for something serious. They were boring because there wasn’t anyone around to get on Jackie’s nerves or condescendingly talk shit with Mari and let Natalie eavesdrop on it because Rio knew she’d only pester her about it later despite Natalie’s mild disinterest in gossip, so she’d listen anyway. Nobody was around to walk home with Natalie even when she didn’t want to go home—just about anywhere sounded better than her shitty trailer littered with cigarette butts and beer cans and her mom who didn’t give a rat's ass about her.

The next few hours dragged on like nails against a chalkboard. The humid, sweltering heat seemed to melt time into wax and make it move slower than usual, and normally Natalie wouldn’t mind it. She wasn’t too fond of the teasing from Van, who seemed to be one of the first to see right through Natalie’s grit teeth and the straight face she wore the entirety of warming up (running laps around the field).

“What’s with the storm cloud over your head?” Van asked once she’d finally sat down on the grass, taking a spot next to Natalie instead of her usual place next to Taissa during the second half of warming up: stretching until their muscles felt like rubber.

Natalie doesn’t ponder her answer which came out in her usual monotonous voice. “Just had a shitty day,” not necessarily a lie. Her day was only mildly ruined when she learned that Seth had decided to test his luck in his dating pool with an ambiguous answer in return. It wasn’t as bad as she made it out to be, though if Van knew the extent of the underlying issue behind why the day was so “shitty” then she’d never hear the end of it. “Typical Wednesday.”

“I hear ya,” Van made a face to show to Natalie that she agreed, and that she’d drop asking her why she was so grumpy through teasing comments. It only lasted a few seconds before she smirked. “Y’sure it ain’t got anything to do with a certain Rio-shaped gap next to you?”

“Absolutely, cuz my entire life revolves around Rio showing up to practice.” Natalie extended her legs all the way out in front of her before leaning over, stretching her arms out to touch the tips of her cleats with her fingers. She purses her lips to keep a satisfied groan from escaping the back of her throat.

Van scoffed. “Might as well,” she pulled her legs into a butterfly stretch, setting her hands on her knees and leaning forward slightly. “With the way you’re acting like a piss baby.”

“Piss baby,” Natalie grumbled under her breath with a shake of her head, pulling herself back up and running her hands up her legs before making a stop at her hips. “That’s a little dramatic.”

“Hey, man,” Van sat up straight and raised her hands slightly. “You’re the one who’s grumpy here.”

A beat. A long one, long enough for Natalie to think Van already moved on from pestering her about the real reason she’s so moody.

And once again Van proved her wrong.

“Maybe she’s just late.” Came her lame attempt at making Natalie not look like she just ate a lemon. She turned her head to get a clear look at Van, still looking like she ate a lemon.

“It’s been twenty fucking minutes, Van. She’s not coming.”

“Chillax, holy moly,” the way Van, even if it was playful and lighthearted, acted like Natalie had said something completely out of line (which, okay, maybe the aggressiveness wasn’t necessary, but it was completely justified!) made her frown deepen. She forced her eyebrows to relax and got herself to pull out her resting bitch face almost immediately.

“Worst case scenario, she’s runnin’ off making lean and probably doing lines off some aliens ass crack somewhere.”

Natalie’s eyebrows furrowed in a natural response to Van’s attempt at bringing her spirits up before she even had time to process the sheer absurdity of it. Her head whipped back around to look at Van with the scowl that’d curated on its own.

“Is that your own version of comfort?” Because anything short of what Van just said could be closer to comfort and reassurance than that.

“I’m just saying, dude. At least she probably isn’t doing that.”

Natalie shook her head. It’s more humorous than comforting, probably the closest thing to amusement she’s had other than pretending to find comedy in the mental picking apart of the sentence Someone asked me out in her head, only to find none but laugh it off anyways because laughter was always the best medicine when your heart is actively sinking into a pit in your stomach.

Stupid heartache, man.

“Doin’ lines without me,” Natalie tuts, pulling herself up from her spot next to Van and popping her neck in a way that left a sharp pain in the left side of her nape. Just another thing to be pissed about. “Nah. She wouldn’t do something so exhilarating as that without me.”

Van follows suit after her, pulling her goalie gloves out of her pocket and pulling them over her fingers. “Worst case scenario, you wind up asking Shauna where the hell your girlfriend is. Don’t they got last period together?”

“My girlfriend?” Natalie squinted her eyes incredulously as she glared at Van.

“Oh, that’s what you ask about,” Van gave her a look. “You’re so bad at hiding it.”

“There’s nothing to hide,” in the history of bad lies ever told, that was the worst of them. Natalie couldn’t have made it more obvious than if someone stuck a hat over her head with a sign that said I’m in love with Rio Marcini! And it is actively ruining my life!

“Right, right,” Van gave Natalie a brief nod and looked off to the side as she smirked. “So does she have a date to prom yet?”

“Fuck if I know,” Natalie set her hands on her hips as the look on her face changed from irritation to exasperation. Fuckin’ Seth Mitchell, probably. The poorly familiar taste of jealousy settled in her mouth as the thought of Rio showing up to prom with the skunk-raccoon breed looking guy hanging off her arm. She figured she’d have to douse out the jealousy in her tastebuds with a bit of vodka from her mom’s fridge.

“Why do you care, anyways? It’s not like my best friend’s date to prom is any of your business.”

“How do you, like, not know if she has one? Every best friend knows their best friend’s date to prom?”

Practice without Rio on a measly Wednesday before spring break was nothing short of annoying.

_________________________

A BIT LATER THAN THAT.

It wasn’t serious at all, unbeknownst to Natalie who’d made the assumption that Rio skipped practice for something serious, unbeknownst to Rio that an assumption was even made.

Natalie didn’t get very much out of asking Shauna if she knew what was up with Rio; all she got out of Shauna after asking, very roughly, you know where that asshole went? was a measly explanation that Rio’s mom had come up to pull her out for the rest of the school day. Natalie couldn’t say it irked her; she would’ve given up her right arm if she didn’t have to go to her 7th period English class with Seth and the other boneheads to her right and bitchy, cunty, stereotypical popular girls to her left that liked to bother her like it was a hobby.

Lucky for Rio, who didn’t even have 7th period English class, it wasn’t anything extreme like Natalie had presumed. If anyone asked, it would’ve been hard for Rio to explain, but occasionally when her mother felt like being nice, she’d do stuff for Rio that she didn’t typically do. For some people it might’ve been the bare minimum, but her mother didn’t want Rio to waste her energy on practice that day and instead spend the rest of her afternoon “sprucing up,” as her mother said when Rio got in the car when the question was lingering on the tip of her tongue.

Sprucing up for what, exactly, Rio had no idea. Part of her thought her mom had super hearing or some sort of telepathic powers that extended all the way to her school and could read her mind pondering on the million dollar question imposed on her that morning, and that was why her mother wanted her to spruce up. What her mother had in mind was getting Rio’s nails painted in the color of her choice (which, upon choosing black, made her mother’s nose crinkle for a half second before putting on a supportive grin in an attempt to silently tell her that whatever made Rio happy, she was happy), getting her hair trimmed, to which Rio was actually grateful for as she’d made plans a while ago to get her hair fixed up before States, then taking a trip to some restaurant Rio had never even heard of and getting take out.

Only for them to run into her little brother hanging around the counter talking to the dude standing behind the register.

Hugo, her little brother, with short and still somehow messy black hair, one of the thousands of plain black shirts he owned, jeans that looked like they’d been through hell and back and dragged to absolute filth, converse that looked like they experienced the same kind of evil, and a singular silver nose piercing that somehow made him stand out from all the other alternative boys at her school. His other saving grace was the glasses on his face and the fact his skin was just a tiny bit darker than hers and a voice so distinct it was easy for Rio to clock even if they were in a crowded room. He had the same slouch to his posture, which was given the way his arms were crossed over the white counter he was perched in front of on his feet with a toothy grin that, in some other peoples minds (probably Seth or Kevyn Tan from 3rd period ASL), seemed outwardly friendly. Rio knew better. Hugo was grinning stupidly wide at the cashier and had a twinkle in his eyes that told her it wasn’t a smile that said he wanted to be friends.

Rio and her mother stood there in awe as they watched Hugo casually stand there talking to a cashier he’d never met in his life before that day as if he hadn’t traveled all the way across the country from the west. At first they didn’t actually think it was him, and then he let out a hearty laugh in that annoying voice of his that pulled them back to reality and made them realize that, yes, Hugo was there once again.

It ended with Rio opting to hop in the back of her mom’s car instead of staying up front where her bag was so she could talk to Hugo on the ride home, while he ate all the fries and left the three of them only the mediocre, ridiculously greasy burgers and the nuggets that came with his.

“The fuck are you doing here?” Rio whispered, squinting her eyes before raising her hand when the car turned at an angle where the sun shone right into her eyes and nearly frying her retinas in the process. Hugo handed her a fry.

“Shit hit the fan in Montana again,” he whispered back as quietly as his pubescent voice would let him. He pulled a fry out from the bag before he looked back down and realized he had the last one. He turned back to Rio and ate it right in front of her.

She only scoffed. That was the same thing Hugo said every time he popped into Wiskayok. “Is that what you’re gonna say every time dad gets even slightly involved with the cops?”

“Better safe than sorry!” Hugo reached over and swatted Rio’s arm with his hand before he went back to holding the paper bag like it was his baby. A moment of silence lingered between them and Rio’s mother, who’d been eavesdropping on what they were talking about even when she made it seem like she was focusing on driving. Rio figured out the signals a while ago when she noticed her eyebrows would raise every time one of them said something shocking.

“I got a game on Saturday,” Rio whispered again. Hugo turned his head as if to ask if Rio still played soccer like he’d forgotten over the time he’d been back in Montana. “You wanna come see?”

“And watch y’all lose? Why not? It’ll give me something to clown on you for.”

“Ass,” Rio swatted Hugo’s arm again, biting back the smile that had attempted to make its way onto her face. “We’ve been undefeated all season. And we got States coming up soon in May, so if you think you’ll be stickin’ around long enough you can watch us make it to Nationals.”

“I heard about y’all playing our team a few weeks ago,” Hugo reached his arm around to scratch the back of his head. An invisible lightbulb went off over it, and a shit-eating grin took form on his already annoying face.

“You still friends with that Natalie girl?”

Rio’s face fell for a moment when Natalie’s name tumbled from Hugo’s mouth. The image of that detached look on her face flashed in the back of her mind, then she remembered she hadn’t said anything to her mother or to Hugo about Seth. She cringed internally, though it quickly went away when the thought crossed her mind that if they won the game coming up on Saturday, then Rio would be get to enjoy the temporary escape from her reality when her and Natalie inevitably shared another “goodbye kiss” that shouldn’t have sent a shiver down her spine and a hotter flush to her cheeks as many times as it did.

“Why are you suddenly so interested in my friendship with Nat?”

Hugo simply shrugged like he knew nothing of the real intentions he had behind asking. “Dunno. Just thought I’d ask if y’all are still platonic after all the things you said about her over the phone.”

Rio felt a wave of panic rush through her as her blood went cold.

She slapped her hand over Hugo’s mouth to keep him from saying a little too much while her mother was still around to hear it.

“Shut up,” she took her hand off of Hugo’s mouth, and he raised his eyebrows slightly. A look flashed across his face, a knowing look, one that told him that he was getting somewhere when he asked if Rio and Natalie were still platonic.

The rest of the ride back to Rio’s house was primarily quiet. Hugo once complimented Rio on her hair, though it hadn’t changed much since the last time he’d seen her; it was a bit messier and frizzier than it normally was, but spring weather had its conditions. In exchange for nice breezes (and only nice breezes), humidity filled the air and allergy season came in return. Occasionally, Rio’s mother would look in the rearview mirror and send a glance at Rio, something she’d started to do ever since Hugo opened his mouth and dared to suggest that Natalie and Rio were anything more than friends. Rio would’ve liked to think she didn’t care and that she was aware it wasn’t really any of her business, but the look in her mother’s eyes wasn’t exactly warm and welcoming, even if there was the slightest chance that what Hugo said was completely false. It disappointed her, and it only served to egg her on even further to wander away from Natalie.

The neighborhood which Rio and her mother lived in (plus, temporarily, Hugo thanks to his inviting himself in) was within walking distance to the trailer park Natalie and Van lived in. Rio could’ve gone out to her backyard and climbed up the fence and she probably would’ve seen the trailer park from there, if it weren’t for the overgrown grass and bushes that Rio nor her mother never bothered to clean up. Their house itself wasn’t quite the dump it would seem to be, given that they were so close to the lowest of the low one can get in Wiskayok. A medium brown covered the exterior that extended to the size that a normal house would’ve been, with a few windows on the front left side and one on the right with the door painted a darker brown in between them. The garage stuck out from the doorway, going past half of the walkway which led to the porch guarded by a veranda painted in the same shade as the exterior and extended to the side of the house. The roof was just plain black shingles that absorbed way too much sunlight; one of them had practically dangled on the left edge of the front near the garage and seemingly had been waiting for some divine force of wind to finally knock it out of place.

On the right side of the house was Rio’s room. It was only slightly bigger than her mother’s room, but the difference was so small that her mother couldn’t even tell and she’d been happy as a clam to see hers. The inside hadn’t started out very special; over the last few years they’d been there it was obvious Natalie had a bit of an effect on the way it was styled. In Rio’s freshman year her room only consisted of her bed, her desk, her drawer, her closet and a few posters here and there that she’d collected before she left Miami. In comparison to that, by the start of her senior year, fairy lights hung around the crevices of her ceiling and all around her room with a substantial amount of posters her and Natalie had been hunting for (in an effort to make Rio’s room have more personality, since the first time Natalie came over she’d pointed out that “the walls look a little bald.”) and trinkets were hung and held up by thumb tacks and pins. A nightstand was moved in next to Rio’s bed, where it’d been filled with all sorts of stuff: the top drawer with her numerous pairs of sunglasses, as she liked how convenient it went with her hair and her style, a few old cassette tapes she kept for the sake of nostalgia, and a few things of hair ties Rio made no use of in the two years since Jackie had given them to her from having a few too many to fit in her own drawer and had been towering up on her bathroom sink; the middle drawer keeping her polaroid camera that Lottie had given her for her birthday during the summer between sophomore and junior year (to which she’d put to use quite often), the rest of the drawer having been filled top to bottom with tons of polaroids of random things (most of them were of her and Natalie, which she’d never ever throw away no matter how much space they took up); the bottom drawer held a few of her notebooks she’d used to the very last page to write all sorts of things in. Most of the time she’d written something that involved whatever she had to complain about (which is one of the things she did best) or paragraph after paragraph about her own self reflection and a few attempts to psychoanalyze herself. The attempts were, more often than not, futile, but a few exceptions were made by the universe whenever Rio had been staying up at an hour which would earn an earful and a snatch of her walkman from her mother, and her lamp had been lit up just enough that she could see what she was writing and surprised herself in the morning when she’d woken up to find her open notebook containing things she’d concluded about herself in the dead of night when she was alone and had nothing to show for her enjoyment of life. Other times they’d been about whatever shenanigan she’d been up to with Natalie for the day or simply stuff about her best friend that she occasionally flipped to the pages of when she was feeling bored and caught herself smiling at the mere sight of her name written in the lead of her own mechanical pencil.

The left side of the house was where her mother slept in her slightly smaller room that she was oh so delighted about. Her mother took it upon herself to buy a bunch of paint during the early months of living there and painted her walls a rose-gold color to make herself feel more at home. A giant dream catcher was hung on the wall right above her bed, because that was the sort of thing Yesenia Marcini believed in. Her room wasn’t much special, just the typical things a mother would usually keep in there. Her mother specifically restricted Hugo from ever even going in there as a byproduct of the heavy distaste for his father still left simmering inside her. She tolerated him nonetheless, only because Rio loved him as her half brother. Hugo sometimes slept on the couch, that way he had the whole living room to himself at night while the other two left him alone. Other times he stayed in Rio’s room despite her demands for him to go away and slept on the floor after Rio caved in and gave him one of her pillows and an old blanket.

In between that was, ideally, a bathroom down the hall from their rooms on the left side, and a laundry room which also gave way to the back door. At the front of the house was the kitchen and living room, with typical kitchen and living room necessities. In one of the drawers in the kitchen was a specific set of silverware separated from the rest of the forks and knives and spoons. One of each set aside for Natalie, which went to prove she practically had her own place to stay there whenever she didn’t want to go home (which was more often than what was considered normal).

Upon arriving home, which took a little bit longer than Rio would’ve liked, considering that the air inside the car felt just a tiny bit suffocating for the second half of the ride, they’d been greeted with their back gate being propped open despite the fact none of them had even touched in the span of the past several weeks. The murky brown, rickety, wooden gate was swung open just a little bit, but it was enough to suggest that it was wide enough for someone to easily slip through. Rio had half a brain to turn to Hugo and raised an eyebrow at him to silently question him, only for her to have received a confused look in return. The suspicion sat uneasy in Rio’s stomach, and she felt that her need for food had vanished bit by bit as she was the first one to get out of her mother’s car to go and check out what it might’ve been. A stupid idea, she realized when it dawned on her that she wasn’t armed in any way and that she could’ve been walking into a fight with some dude with a gun or a knife at the very least. She was careful to look for footprints and shoe prints that weren’t hers, and when she found none, she assumed that the wind had somehow knocked the gate open. But then she looked at the lock and saw that for the gate to be opened that far, someone must’ve purposefully pulled the lever down and pushed the gate open.

Nothing was back there, Rio found out after she’d tiptoed around the yard and tested if the backdoor was unlocked. It wasn’t, but of course that did nothing to ease the anxiety that’d worked its way up her neck and squeezed around her throat like barbed wire. She earned herself an earful from her mother after that, the words having gone in one ear and out the other when she’d droned on abou how “that was a stupid idea” and “are you stupid? You could’ve gotten hurt, child!” Rio did find that her mother liked to use the word “stupid” a lot in those few minutes she’d spent yelling at her instead of letting it go and opting to eat in peace.

Rio and Hugo ate in her room. Despite Rio’s protests for Hugo to go somewhere else (even when she knew he would’ve had to face the consequences of her mother glaring daggers at him from time to time), he stayed in there anyway. He claimed that her demanding he leave her room only served to egg him on and stay there out of spite. He also told her that she didn’t have much of a choice anyways and that he’d make himself comfortable on the floor at some point that night. Another way to ruin her fun, in Rio’s mind, but she let it go nonetheless.

After they ate, Rio procrastinated on her homework instead of doing it right away like she usually did. Hugo was a massive distraction to her, one of many in her life. They talked and bickered and made jokes instead of leaving each other alone so Rio could focus and Hugo do…whatever it was that he could’ve done with little resources to entertain himself. The hours passed and before the two of them knew it, Hugo had first yawned like a child and gave Rio a sleepy-eyed look that told her he was beyond ready to sleep. She couldn’t blame him. He’d probably spent all day getting from point A to point Z just to wind up in Wiskayok from Montana with her mother, then had to sit around town and talk to people he didn’t know.

The dead of night came. Hugo was barely awake on the floor; he claimed that the roughness of the carpet was irritating him, and Rio did sympathize with him, but she wasn’t about to give up her spot on her bed just because her 15 year old brother couldn’t handle sleeping on some carpet.

Rio, on the other hand, was wide awake. Her mind wracked with the anxiety that came from having taken a peak in her backyard earlier and even went as far as to search her house for anything that was out of the ordinary to her. She found nothing after she’d even looked in the cabinets in case the hypothetical burglar was a dwarf and in the fridge in the event that they happened to like the cold. Earlier, Hugo had to bully the anxiety out of Rio and told her that she was being stupid for being worried about it even after it was confirmed that no one had broken in. It wasn’t quite shaken out of her head, but she pretended anyway just to get Hugo to shut up.

She glanced over at the clock on her nightstand next to her bed. 12:03 AM. Her body was practically glued to the bed. If Hugo had gotten up his gaze would’ve been able to cut through the darkness and see the evident uneasy look on her face. Her heart beat so loud in her ears she was sure it’d brought him back from nearly being unconscious. A part of her envied him for being able to be so carefree on the floor in the middle of the night. A fear lingered in the back of her mind that someone or something was hiding under her bed, waiting for her to make the wrong move so it could come up from the edges of her bedframe and snatch her, and eat her whole. The image of something dark and ugly and shadowy and deformed coming up from right underneath her played over and over in her mind’s eye, and it sent an absurdly unpleasant shiver down her spine. She was stuck. She was frozen with fear, too scared to make any movement or try to come up with any reason in her mind that there wasn’t anything to be afraid of.

She wasn’t about to bother Hugo to make her realize that there isn’t a boogeyman under her bed because one, it embarrassed her to think that she needed such support from her little brother, and two, it wasn’t like she had a choice in the matter, anyway. She couldn’t even bring herself to lift her head up, and earlier she’d strained the muscles in her eyes to the point she surely felt she’d pop a blood vessel just to get a good look at her clock. Rio thought of a time a while back during her freshman year when she’d accidentally told Natalie about her massive fear of the dark. Natalie told her, in an attempt to shake the fear out of her habits, that most of the time there wasn’t anything in the dark to be scared of, and if there was, then she’d never have to face it alone. Her attempts amounted to little, obviously, but in Rio’s foolish and young ears, Natalie had basically said that she’d be her knight in shining armor during times like that night when Rio was spooked to the point even her voice had shrunk in its own shell and refused to come out from the back of her throat.

Natalie. Natalie, Natalie, Natalie. Rio already began to miss her bleached blonde hair and her eyeliner that’d been around her eyes for so long they could’ve been passed as real circles around her eyes like a raccoon. The sound of Natalie’s voice in her head saying she wouldn’t have to face her fears alone, all raspy and low, brought a warmth to her chest that seemed to work on thawing out the chilling fear that’d taken her body hostage.

She glanced over at the nightstand again. Her eye muscles strained once more, but this time she couldn’t find any ounce of giving-a-damn in her body to stop and let her eyes rest. Instead her gaze lingered on the telephone sitting on the top next to her alarm clock. The blackout curtain which was hung a few months ago let in just a tiny sliver of moonlight that shone on the top of the beige paint of the telephone. Rio contemplated on reaching over and risking getting snatched away by the boogeyman apparition accumulated by her imagination and dialing Natalie’s trailer and beckoning her over through the other end of the line. Then came a different kind of fear that was incredulously worse than the boogeyman under her bed. The fear that she was being needy, the fear of Natalie finally telling her to fuck off or just being straight up ignored.

The angel on her right shoulder told Rio that she should just take a few deep breaths and think happy thoughts. She was half tempted to reach over and flick off the angel for having made such a dumb suggestion when the department of sunshine and rainbows and cupcakes and bunnies in her brain was out of order for the time being and the nightmare department had been working overtime for the past thirty minutes since the lights went out.

The devil on her left shoulder told Rio to pick up the damn phone and call Natalie and completely ignore the off chance that she was asleep. Screw the boogeyman, the little red devil on her shoulder said, if it means you get to see your girl tonight, who gives a fuck if it’s Pennywise?

Wait— “your girl?”—

Pick up the fucking phone! And take a breath, damnit.

Rio mentally flicked the invisible angel off her shoulder and pulled her arm out from underneath her blanket. She leaned over, seemingly breaking through the ice that’d caked up around her limbs, and reached for her phone with her hand.

It shook in her palms, sweaty from the anxiety bubbling beneath her skin. She swallowed quietly, her tongue darted out to wet her lips after her entire mouth had gone dry. Her left hand reached over and dialed the number, her finger shaky and nearly missing all the digits and almost dialing a completely different number instead. She inhaled and exhaled weakly shaking her head before she pressed the phone to her ear.

Rio silently cursed the universe for having made the dial tone be so loud in a quiet room. She wasn’t even sure if Hugo was unconscious yet and she was calling someone past midnight. Third times the charm, or however the fuck it goes, she thought to herself when the possibility popped up in her head that her mother could’ve used her wicked spidey sense and sped over to her room to catch her on the phone. She gulped and wordlessly prayed to every deity in the history of theism and religion and mythology and whatnot that that wasn’t the case at all.

The stretch between Rio dialing the numbers and the tone starting seemed to be far too long for her liking.

One Mississippi.

A bug outside her window began buzzing. A moth, a bee, a wasp, whatever. The buzzing was so loud it might as well have been right in her ear.

Two Mississippi.

Maybe Nat isn’t home, Rio thought in an attempt to console herself and make up for the nervousness that’d started to swirl back in her stomach. She knew Nat sometimes wouldn’t go back home until the wee hours of the morning; she knew because most of the time it was because the two of them had stayed out all night.

Three Mississippi.

Okay, she better be fucking home—

“Hello?”

Rio’s teeth released her bottom lip, tearing off a piece after she’d been subconsciously chewing on her lap for the past few moments. A sigh of relief worked its way up her throat before she pushed it down once she remembered she wasn’t by herself.

“Hey, Nat,” Rio whispered. She turned her head slightly to try and see if Hugo was awake; he wasn’t. She felt blessed.

“Rio. The fuck are you doin’ calling me this late at night?”

Rio should’ve known that Natalie wouldn’t have enjoyed getting a call in the dead of night, regardless if she’d been asleep or not. She chuckled quietly.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m…I just feel like I’m about to have a literal nervous breakdown, or something.”

Natalie was silent on the other end. Rio couldn’t tell if that was a good or bad thing. On the other end, though, Natalie was swallowing a lump in her throat as she tried to think of anything to say that might’ve served to calm Rio’s nerves.

“You there?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry I called you, Nat. You–”

“It’s fine, doofus. Are you sayin’ you need me to come over?”

Rio felt a smile trying to stretch across her face. She let it; it was the kind of smile that made her cheeks warm and her heart beat just a little bit faster. The fretful clouds in her head began to clear up already.

“If it ain’t too much trouble, yeah.”

A beat. A moment of silence.

“But be quiet, though. My little brother’s here.”

“Hugo?”

Rio was sure Natalie had the phone pressed between her head and her shoulder at that moment. She heard the shifting coming from the other end, as well as her getting up to go grab her boots. Her grin widened.

“Yeah.”

Another moment of silence. For once, the lack of noise was comfortable.

“I’ll be at your window, idiot.”

“Thanks.”

“Mhm.”

Rio huffed out another chuckle when the dial tone followed immediately after. An excitement bubbled up in her chest as she looked at her window like that would’ve magically made Natalie appear in an instant. The fear was still there; it died down quite a bit in the moments that she and Natalie had called. It still lingered in the crevices of her shoulders and the hollows of the corners of her knees, watching, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike again and bind Rio to her bed until an inevitable Natalie-shaped antidote arrived.

The minutes passed. Rio glanced every few seconds at her clock and sometimes watched the minutes change from 12:20 to 12:21. She was impatient. She felt a hunger for Natalie’s very presence that was causing a pit to form in her stomach. She moved over to see if Hugo was still fast asleep and found him in a strange position that one could only be found in if they were having the best sleep of their life. So much for complaining about it earlier.

An hour passed. The hunger grew, and the more her body craved—no, not craved, because that’s weird— itched, for a lack of better words like craved, the more the fear came crawling back in a force that multiplied with each passing second wasted alone. Rio’s throat felt as if it had closed up on her. She knew first and foremost that Natalie would never abandon her for anything, but in the back of her mind she couldn’t stop the new and improved wave of anxiety that’d washed over her.

Her chest felt weird. A little too weird for her liking (the bar wasn’t very high to begin with). All prickly and impatient, her heart beat with the same connotation as someone tapping their foot on the floor, waiting.

Rio swore if she thought hard enough she could’ve manifested it into existence sooner: letting Natalie in, sneaking her around Hugo’s sleeping body and pulling her in by the collar of her leather jacket Rio knew she’d worn, laying in silence and listening to her breathing or whispering so quietly they could barely even hear themselves. Another smile tugged at her lips.

Then, she was certain she’d never ever feel this impatient for Seth, or anyone else, really.

Tap tap.

Rio’s head snapped upwards, the moonlight that’d shone through the sliver of her curtain gap casted a twinkle in her eyes unbeknownst to her. She cautiously crept out of bed, despite the fear that’d switched to taking root in her feet, and tiptoed to her window. Her fingers wrapped around the edge of the curtain to pull it back and revealed a head of bleached blonde hair glowing in the moonlight facing the side. Rio marveled in how Natalie looked even at this time of night, even if she’d taken an hour to get there.

Rio reached for the lock and nearly jumped out of her skin when it made a sound that Rio was sure would’ve woken up her mother. Rio and Natalie both locked eyes for a moment; Natalie looked much more calm than Rio had at the moment, with her hooded eyes and expressionless face. Rio looked a little… scared shitless, but she didn’t see any sign of Natalie brewing up some sort of tease in her head, so she brushed it aside. She pulled her window open and let Natalie crawl in after she’d taken off her boots.

The little devil on her left shoulder giggled in her ear when her heart started pounding in her chest again. Like it knew why it was doing that in the first place.

Natalie dusted off her black, dusty jeans (she’d tripped over a root and fell on her knee which resulted in a hole right where she landed) and messed with the hem of her shirt, fingers flitting back and forth over the edge like she was nervous. Was she nervous? Or just stalling so she didn’t have to say anything? Rio couldn’t tell, so she chose not to pay so close attention to it and opted to close her window and pull back her curtain instead.

“You didn’t say he was sleeping right there,” Natalie finally turned to face Rio after she spared the sleeping Hugo a glance. A teasing tone was in her voice, for reasons unknown to Rio other than the fact that was how she always sounded around her.

“I did say to be quiet, didn’t I?” Rio whispered back. She balled her fingers into a fist to stop herself from reaching out and grabbing Natalie by her jacket to pull her into bed with her. Natalie saw it. She said nothing.

“You don’t look like you’re on the verge of tears,” Natalie commented quietly, and gave Rio a once over. Rio swallowed and rolled her eyes, stepping away from Natalie and moving back to her bed. She sat in the middle criss-cross and looked at her pointedly.

“You look perfectly fine to me.”

“Hm. Must be the affection talking.”

Natalie scoffed. Her lips quirked into a grin as she ran her tongue over her front teeth. “You’re full of shit, y’know that?”

“Listen to the teapot calling the kettle black.”

Natalie flipped Rio off before she stepped over to Rio’s bed, kneeling beside it and resting her arms on the mattress. “Game recognizes game.” Rio inhaled quietly and looked at the edge, then back at Natalie. She raised an eyebrow.

“What, I got somethin’ on me?”

“No, idiot,” Rio chuckled quietly. She leaned over on her side and propped her head up with her hand, her other arm over her waist. “Our back gate was open earlier.”

“And?”

“And, it was what was giving me grief earlier.”

“Yeah, I still don’t follow.”

Rio internally groaned as she tilted her head back and clenched her jaw for a moment. Natalie huffed out a stifled chuckle.

“I, um…I kinda got scared. Like, what if something was under my bed?”

A moment of silence stretched between them. Rio let her head fall and her eyes met Natalie’s gaze, which held a look to them that told her she was about to pull some smart remark. Natalie raised an eyebrow as their eyes locked again, and a smirk smudged the corner of her mouth. She broke eye contact (which Rio was enjoying) to take a quick look under Rio’s bed, ducking her head under the bed frame and looking around with her naked eyes at the darkness that her best friend was oh so deathly afraid of. Then, with a stifled snicker, she went back up, and the size of her smirk had doubled.

“Well, no sign of the boogeyman over here,” Natalie shrugged. Her smirk lessened, and it turned into a softer version of itself. Possibly one of Rio’s favorites. “But, if it’s of any use to calm you and your nerves, you would’ve smelled something. Or heard something. Or someone would’ve jumped out as soon as the lights went off, or whatever.”

“You seem very confident in what you’re saying,” Rio remarked quietly. Her arm that was around her waist moved so that her hand rested flat on her blanket. Natalie didn’t want to think that it was Rio silently daring her to put her hand over hers and let a portion of her warmth engulf her for just a moment.

It was tempting, like dangling a carrot in front of a pig.

“Told you you’d never have to face these things alone, remember?”

“And you clown on me for being a sap.”

Natalie pulled away slightly from the edge of Rio’s bed with another quiet scoff under her breath. She shook her head, and she wondered if she should’ve just ignored the call and went to sleep immediately after. And though the thought floated around her head, she knew she’d never be able to deny her anything. Traveling from her trailer park to Rio’s neighborhood seemed about as easy as breathing, like going to such measures as walking around Wiskayok alone at night just to see Rio and make sure she was okay was a second nature to her.

Jealousy was like a snake hiding in the bushes. She’d stepped too closely to it, and it darted out and got her. The familiar taste of envy festered on her tongue like she was about to throw up. She found her emulous thoughts from earlier in the day circling back to the current moment and ruining it. She wondered, very rudely, if anything like this would ever happen with Seth instead of her. If Seth would ever be the one to sneak in through Rio’s window and have intimate moments where Rio held her hand out and wordlessly dared him to touch her like that. If Rio would ever call him for any reason in the middle of the night. If Rio would ever even think of him in such a vulnerable moment.

Obviously not, the little angel on her right shoulder told her. If that’s the case, you wouldn’t even be here. Get over feelin’ sorry for yourself.

“That’s somethin’ you and Seth both got in common,” Natalie knew she’d only just tested some very dangerous waters. She looked back at Rio to see if her face had changed at the mention of her chaser, to see if her suspicions were right or wrong and to either feed the doubt in her mind or try to extinguish it. “You’re both fuckin’ saps.”

“I don’t see what Seth has to do with this,” Rio mumbled, and she looked down at her blanket. Her fingers messed with the material of it, picking at it with her nails and smoothing her hand over it.

Natalie wasn’t about to let Rio know that her mundane response gave her an absurd boost of hope.

“Isn’t he your boyfriend now, or whatever?”

She’s playing dumb on purpose, Rio, the little devil on Rio’s left shoulder whispered into her ear as she looked back up at Natalie. She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

“Y’know, this isn’t doing much to soothe my nerves.”

“Sorry,” Natalie murmured halfheartedly. She knew Rio was onto her. She didn’t care at that point. “You’re avoiding the question, though.”

“Not that this’ll do anything to serve as a balm to the big fat jealous wound over your heart, or whatever,” Rio started quietly. She looked around her room and hoped that some sort of god that had the power of forcible amnesia would make Natalie drop the topic already. “But he isn’t my boyfriend. I haven’t even seen him since this morning.”

“That’s right,” Natalie quietly snapped her fingers, like she really did magically drop the subject. “Your mom checked you out. Shauna told me.”

“You actually asked?”

“Well, yeah. I was wondering where my best friend went. I thought you’d totally blown off practice to go be with Seth or…do lines off an alien’s ass cheek, or whatever.”

Rio stifled a laugh, a hearty laugh this time, as she bit her lip with her teeth and pressed her lips together afterwards. “An alien’s ass cheek?”

“Gotta be as open minded and inclusive as I can be.”

“Yeah, you’re quite the progressive.”

Natalie laughed quietly, leaning her face into the mattress to stifle her voice with the blanket. Her shoulders shook slightly as she giggled, her hand snaked up the side of the bed and rested next to Rio’s hand. A daring move, one that Natalie’s proud of since Rio didn’t back away or retreat, didn’t tuck herself in her turtle shell and hide.

“You still don’t look like you’re on the verge of tears.”

Rio squinted her eyes. Her grin lessened into a tender smile. “You must be a fixer upper of sorts.”

“Is that the affection talking?” Natalie teased, earning an eye roll and a light swat in her arm from Rio as they both chuckled together in sync. Natalie glanced over at the alarm clock. 1:30.

“You think your mom would lose her shit if you let me stay the night?”

“Why, you gettin’ tired?”

“No,” Natalie’s grin turned bashful as she looked down at the blanket, her bangs working to cover her face.

“So you just don’t wanna leave, then?”

“Something like that.”

Natalie looked back up at Rio and they locked eyes again. She could’ve sworn she saw Rio’s gaze quickly drift down towards her lips then raced back up to her eyes like she’d been caught stealing from the cookie jar. It was one of the signals that this was one of the few times they found the conversation wasn’t going anywhere. She knew how that night would’ve ended, how her short time at Rio’s house would come to a stop. How she’d be inevitably sent off. It both hurt and soothed her heart that Rio couldn’t think of any other way to dismiss Natalie other than to seal the bounds of their time together with a touch of affection that left the both of them feeling flushed.

“Well,” Rio started after she cleared her throat nervously. Her heart was in her throat, and she knew as well. “I can guarantee you, you’d definitely be banned from coming over ever again.”

“You did well sneaking me in tonight,” Natalie shrugged one shoulder and looked at Rio pointedly. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

“And what we know would make her pop a blood vessel.”

Natalie let out a dry chuckle, but she knew nothing was funny. She knew Rio’s mother wasn’t very fond of Natalie (as she wasn’t very fond of anyone but herself and her daughter), and she had the suspicion that her mother was starting to suspect the both of them having thoughts about each other that didn’t exactly pertain to the friendship they’d kept up over the last four years. She was right, of course, to have an inkling that they saw each other as anything more than friends. If she knew they’d been secretly kissing each other goodbye from time to time whenever they’d leave parties or games she definitely would’ve kicked Natalie to the curb and forbid Rio from seeing her again if she could help it.

Natalie looked over at Hugo, as if his snoring had ever distracted her before. “It’s a wonder how he didn’t wake up.”

“That’s all you, dude. You’re the one who kept laughing.”

They both sat in silence for the next few minutes. As they went by, they both sent each other knowing glances, and they weren’t the good kind. They both knew that they’d eventually bid each other goodnight and send Natalie on her way home with yet another invisible present to keep in her drawer and think about during her more vulnerable moments when no one was around, save for herself and a cigarette between her fingers.

Rio initiated it. An off chance, since it was usually Natalie who grew a pair first and went in.

They touched and they brushed and they ghosted each other’s lips. Natalie felt a rush, the same old rush she got every time they kissed and yet it never bored her. She felt she could’ve sat there for the rest of the night, simply bidding each other goodnight without ever actually leaving or going to sleep, knowing that come morning when the sun came to blind her with the bleeding reality that it would all be swept under the rug. And though this was the first time a moment like this actually happened, it felt so familiar to her, in a way that gave her deja vu and had her head nearly spinning off her body.

“Good thing he isn’t awake,” Natalie whispered once she reluctantly pulled back. Her tongue darted out as she looked up at Rio, and her lips immediately pressed together to hold back what she really wanted to say.

“I don’t think he’d snitch if he saw,” Rio muttered. Her lips felt like they didn’t belong to her body at that moment.

Natalie’s eyebrows drew closer together. She wanted to ask why, but a light turned on out in the hall and highlighted the bottom of Rio’s door. The light poured into a small part of the room, only a sliver, but it was more than enough to send a wave of panic crashing over Rio’s heart and frantically usher Natalie out as quietly as she could without Rio’s mother noticing her spidey sense going off and taking a detour to Rio’s room to see if anything was out of the ordinary.

Natalie went home a little bit afterwards. She walked around for a while, letting the cool breeze that followed the late hours of the night distract her from the dull pain that’d twisted in her chest at the knowledge that she was only a dirty secret at the moment. And that knowledge would never have the same moonlight shed upon it again, and instead the tears choked her heart that she’d never let out.

Natalie went home after her walk around Wiskayok in parts she knew she wouldn’t get snatched up in. She went to sleep a little bit afterwards, with her invisible present tucked to her chest instead of her drawer, the first ever.

[112thumbtacks]

wasteland, baby! (three-part story)

masterlist ♡ pairings: jackie taylor x oc x natalie scatorccio 🫣

original universe; follows the 1996 timeline with snippets of the adult timeline

beware…hair ripping angst lies beyond this point…♡

contains (part one): very brief period-typical racism; period-typical homophobia; blood; death; descriptions of depression; mentioned comphet lesbianism; angst; oc has no sense of self; mentioned cheating; fluff; jackie x oc here but it definitely does not last (iykyk); some jackieshauna but this ain’t about them; mentioned underaged drinking; sapphic yearner natalie mhm mhm I’ve already decided; doomed yuri but what’s new with me; my writing actively going to shit ♡.

contains (part two): even more angst; implied cannibalism (“implied” then she literally eats jackie meat); suicidal thoughts and tendencies; homicidal thoughts; literal handwritten murder notes so just be prepared for that; oc adds 3 new stages of grief; oc x nat is so canon; complex-toxic relationship between nat and oc; self harm; near death experience; ghost jackie; oc “draws" (steals) the queen card; then actually draws it again later on; brief van thirsting over oc in the adult timeline (for like 3 seconds); takes up both s2 and 3 so this is gonna be LONG

contains: (prequel) (won’t be released until after first part is finished sorry 💔) (reading it is optional however, won’t really miss anything except lesbian yearning and booty cheeks communicating skills) more sapphic yearner nat; angst again :3 i’m on a roll; some jackie x oc so that it isn’t completely random in the first part; but this is primarily a nat x oc in the most non nat x oc way possible; drug use 😱; whole lotta yearning tbh there’s not much else to it

UPDATES WILL NOT HAVE A SET SCHEDULE; MEANING I’LL UPDATE LIKE TWICE ONE WEEK THEN DISAPPEAR FOR A THOUSAND YEARS

(x reader is in the tags, though this is not a self insert at all, i gotta make this get views somehow)

[112thumbtacks]

yellowjackets oc drop !

gosh I'm a little nervous about posting this LMFAOOOOO

info drop in a boring format because I'm too nervous to add personality to my description 😁

Rosario Mancini

-(i actually have no idea how old most of the team is so i’m saying 17 for consistency) (and umm 43 in the adult timeline)

-Mexican-American

-Nickname(s): Ari (Hugo), Rio, doofus (Nat)

-June 5th 1978

-Cisgender female

-Fav color: red

-Height: 5’7

-Fav number: 420 😭😭💔

-Fav movies: The Shining, Heathers, Ghostbusters, Nightmare on Elm Street, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

-Fav food: Musubi🤔, potato salad, enchiladas, baby back ribs

-fav bands/ artists: Motley Crue, Deftones (is high key excited for around the fur), Lauryn Hill, Tupac, The Runaways, The Cranberries, Heart, Michael Jackson, The Offspring, sir mix a lot, queen, the smiths

-traits: actually very sweet, only snarky and cunty to people who instigate and wanna make her look bad, low key blind as fuck 😭😭😭

-Backstory: not a lot going on here, just living her life knowing she’ll always be seen in a bad light and there isn’t anything she can do about it so she lets people think what they want and say what they want about her because no matter what she tried or how hard she tried she couldn’t do anything to change their minds; she knows it’s no use to fight the way people talk about her and look down on her just because of her skin color, so she develops a mindset that it’s impossible to be anything at all so she doesn’t think of herself as anything and reduces herself to look like whatever people think she is.

-Personal opinions: God isn’t real (every mention of gods and deities is sarcasm), Travis’ haircut is actually tragic, Misty needs a personality change (and a hairdo, and some friends, and a life, and to learn not to chase after literal adults), Lottie’s a freak, Laura Lee is also a freak, Shauna is a fag (though everyone knows), had a feeling that coach Scott was a fag, Jackie needs to shut up (affectionate), Nat needs to get that yearning look out of her eyes.

-has a little half brother 🧏‍♀️, he’s 15 in the teen timeline + Asian and Mexican (Asian mother and Mexican father), his name is Hugo 👽

fc 😅

adult fc drops when I finish part one :D (which might be never but just know she survives)

[112thumbtacks]

brown dividers dump

[112thumbtacks]

new YJ fanfic coming soon at some point 😈 (probably within the next million years/j or maybe in the next few weeks depending on if i actually wanna work on it)

[112thumbtacks]

Oops make that Revy and/balalaika one with a fem s/o, just saw you only do fxf

ur all good; i love revy and balalaika :3

Pairings: Revy x F! reader

Revy with a sweet but violent gf! <3

warnings: typical violence 🤔, cursing, only half a part being posted,,,,,,,🤫

ok so let’s literally ignore the fact i posted this 2 years after the ask was sent 💀‼️‼️ and the fact i couldn’t finish balalaika’s part so i cut it out 😭.

Revy

revy, perhaps the scariest woman on earth (next to balalaika) was into women after all?! truth be told, that shocked revy herself as much as it did her other friends, probably herself even more if she pondered about how or why or even when it all started. though if she thought hard enough, she dates it back to last year when she met a particular sweet girl who seemed to always be like that: sweet, kind, and seeming to have no hate in her body. boy, was she wrong. she saw that girl-- you-- beating the shit out of some guy in the alleyway because he was hitting on your friend.

revy and rock were simply walking around roanapur when the two of them were beginning to hear faint grunts coming from some alleyway. rock was the first one to check it out while revy didn't think it was worth her time and stayed behind until rock eventually had to get in the middle of the beating, attempting to pry you away from the poor man.

"isn't that enough?!" rock shouted once he got to you and the guy you were beating up; he was lying on the ground, his arms folded over his stomach in pain after you were stomping on his stomach over and over again. your frown, which was the nastiest one that rock had ever seen (possibly worse than what revy gives him), quickly left as you looked up at him with a grin. "why do you get to determine what's enough for him?"

"because he's just a man!"

you scrunched up your face, turning to face rock with a frown. for a moment he had a little bit of hope in his eyes that you'd stop, but that went away as quickly as it came when you took your foot and pressed it against his shoulder, dislocating it after a moment had passed, and a spine-chilling, blood-curdling scream came from the man underneath you. revy even found herself grimacing at the reverberating sound that was probably heard from the other half of roanapur.

"that's what you call a man?" you look back down at the cripple beneath you, his left arm clutching his right one as he was cowering down in both fear and pain, two things you think go hand-in-hand. "what a weak man."

"she doesn't seem that bad," revy comments to herself, paying no mind to the fact that rock heard it himself and sent her a look. you eventually removed your foot from his shoulder then stood on both feet and turned to face them.

"uh, i'm rock, and this is my friend revy--"

"don't you ever call me your fuckin' friend."

"i'm rock and this is revy."

you slightly perk your eyebrows upwards at the pair; they looked pretty good together, you would admit, if you didn't just hear revy threaten rock. while you were checking them out, your eyes scanning the both of them like you're a robot, revy was giving you a dirty look when you glanced back at rock.

"i'm y/n," you said rather politely, a stark and confusing contrast from your attitude and actions earlier, which baffled both rock and revy to an extent. revy was a bit appalled, though she seemed indifferent. rock was clearly shocked, but he had to remember that this was roanapur, every bit of crazy goes on here, and that very well includes a polite girl with manners turning into a merciless menace.

"forgive me for being rude earlier, may i buy you both drinks?"

"cut the horseshit politeness facade, we know you don't give two shits about our forgiveness."

"being polite gets you in many places," you grin as you begin to walk past them, stopping right when you leave the alleyway. "are you two coming?"

"she did apologize," rock nudged revy's arm a bit with a knowing look on his face. knowing revy, she did not trust you, at all, but she's not dumb enough to turn down free drinks, so she went instead of throwing a hissy fit.

going out for drinks that night with rock and revy ended with a shootout, not unusual. you did feel bad for the owner, he just wants to run his bar. when you walked out with them (unscathed, much to rock's surprise), you offered to walk them back to wherever they were going, but revy was adamant about ditching you right then and there so she dragged rock off back to dutch and benny.

time and time again, the two of them would see you around roanapur, be it beating up some other low lifer in a secluded area or walking around the city with one of your friends. revy would scowl at the sight of you seeming so polite around your friends, knowing that you're a real monster from when she first laid eyes on you. she doesn't hate that, you've gotta be ruthless in a fight to win, but at least be upfront and honest about yourself, or at least that's her way of thinking.

when another shootout happened at the bar for about the third time that month, you just so happened to be on the other side of the bar where you'd been sitting there, looking so fucking prim and proper, like you've been groomed for perfection your whole life when you're far from it. revy's eyes landed on you, watching you with eagle eyes as your nimble fingers picked up the glass, just barely swirling it around and talking to the person next to you with much warmth and richness in your voice. she could practically hear you from across the bar, talking about whatever the hell she thought you were talking about with those words rolling off of your tongue and escaping your smooth lips. wait-- why is she paying attention to your lips, of all fucking things about you?

the shootout started only a moment after revy spotted you, which was why she was a bit startled when she heard the first gunshot, because she was paying so much attention to you. after that night she didn't see you again for months, she thought you'd somehow died, which baffled her for a while because of how menacing you were in that alley. but eventually she got over it and moved on with her life.

that is, until some random boat decided to bash heads with dutch's torpedo boat.

"what the hell?! who the fuck is that?!" revy shouted from the front before turning to face dutch in the window. he didn't have time to answer, so he simply shrugged behind the window as he steered the boat away from the other the best he could. his efforts amounted to nothing when the boat shot large grapples onto his, and a platform pushed itself out from the body of the ship.

"did you miss me?" your voice comes out just as rich as she last heard it. revy can't believe herself, or the figure standing in front of her, seeming proud of itself for making such a dramatic entrance. there you are, standing in front of the torpedo ship, one step away from joining as you stand there, the back of your trench coat flying and flapping in the wind as the sea breeze blew past everyone, eventually blowing part of revy's hair in her face.

"you wish i fuckin' did, what the fuck is all this shit?" she frowns, pointing her gun at your ship and everyone on it, then back at you. your hands remain in your pockets as the two of you stand there face to face, a mere foot away from each other. your eyes dart around in revy's background, momentarily glancing at dutch, who was aiming his gun at you, finger on the trigger and ready to pull, then you look at rock, watching him stand there with a look of shock on his face. it amuses you, so you smile slightly, then you finally look back at revy.

"what the fuck are you smiling at, asshole? there's nothin' funny about this bullshit stunt you and your dipshit crew's pullin'."

"i see you're still violent," your gentle smile turns into a smirk, an equally teasing glint in your eyes, and the more revy looks, the more visible it is. "you can't fucking talk, you beat the ever loving fuck out of some guy in an alley."

you simply shrugged and shuffled your hands in your pockets. revy looked down at one of your pockets before she lowered her left arm, pointing it at your right pocket with her gun. "hands out the fuckin' pockets right now, missy."

"alright alright," you take them out, holding your hands up in a state of defeat. revy narrowed her eyes for a moment, debating on whether she should look through your pockets or not before she let her thoughts win and shove an intruding hand into your pocket, rummaging through, but she ultimately found nothing.

she sighed, lifting up your arm again and keeping you at gunpoint. "what is it you want, asshole?" she grumbles out, her forehead creasing as her eyebrows knit even closer, forming a ripple on the bridge of her nose. you shrug after a moment of thinking, "i dunno, we were simply cruising around and we saw your ship, and at first i wasn't sure if it was you, but then that beautiful hair was unmistakable.

"cut the shit and stop lying, what the fuck did you want?" she grits her teeth, moving her cutlass upwards to press it against your forehead. your eyes follow it, almost crossing as you're barely looking at her finger resting on the trigger.

"believe me revy, when i say i only wanted to talk to you."

"why'd you wanna fuckin' talk to me?"

"because you're cool, and very interesting at that."

revy grinded her teeth against each other, tempted to pull the trigger and blow your brains out. she would, if she weren't so busy paying attention to that goddamn smirk on your lips. that charming smirk she sees makes her want to gag, she's sure you've given that same smirk to all the pretty men you see just to leave the morning after. what she didn't know, was that you didn't use it on men, quite the opposite, one would think.

"are you trying to fuckin talk me up or some shit?"

"no," you shake your head, a small chuckle leaves your lips as you do so. "would you like me to?"

“what the hell?!"

you took your chance to grab her gun from her hand while she was still confused by your words, then grabbing her by her elbow and flipping her around, her back hitting your chest as you held her own gun to her chin.

revy reached into her other socket, grabbing her other cutlass and holding it up to the side of your head. your finger pressed lightly against the trigger and your grip on the rest of the gun tightened as the seconds passed, no one saying a word or moving at all. the waves and the wind blowing were the loudest sounds at the moment.

"put the fuckin' gun down, or i blow your fuckin brains out," she grumbled, pressing the cutlass harder against your temple. it didn't hurt, but you still pressed the gun against her own temple even harder. "do it, there's a whole crew waiting for you on the other side of this platform," you emphasize by tilting your head back towards your own ship, with your own crew pointing their own guns at revy. she barely turned her head to see the crew before she already got a good view of the handful with M4 Carbines.

"i've taken out way more than that, so they can fuckin' have it, but it's your fuckin' choice, dipshit."

"let me buy you another drink, it's the least i could do since we're out in the middle of the coast."

all revy could think was, is she serious right now? you're offering her drinks when you're holding each other at gunpoint? despite the fact you nearly crawled onto dutch's torpedo ship, stole her gun and currently are holding her at gunpoint at the moment, she never says no to free drinks.

"alright, fine. but you better not fuckin' pull some fuckin' bullshit like this again, dickwad," she brought her arm down, letting it fall to her side as you removed the gun yourself. you removed your other arm from her waist and handed her the gun back, to which she shoved both of them back in their socket.

after that event, you had to convince dutch, benny and rock to join revy in the hull, since that's where you had a bar be put in and hired a bartender as well. the four of them seemed curious, and you couldn't help yourself so you went on to explain that you're a smuggling company: in exchange for smuggling goods and whatnot, you're paid in money and a collection of drinks, like different brands of beer, whiskey, rum, etcetera.

"why the fuck would you get rum, of all drinks?" revy questions, looking at the rum sitting across the bar with a stink eye. you hum, looking in that direction as well. "some part of my crew likes it. i always make sure to do a round check to see what drinks the crew wants before i get it," you turn back to face her, then rest the side of your head on your hand. revy scrunches up her face before taking another sip from her glass, "just how rich are you? you've got your own fuckin' bar on a fucking ship that looks like throwback 1769 and you've got some of the most expensive fuckin' brands on the planet."

you shrug, "i can't tell you that. i'm a certified gatekeeper."

"screw you," revy shakes her head disapprovingly, biting back a chuckle from escaping her now pursed lips. your own lips stretch into a toothy grin as you swivel around the glass sitting in the grasp of your smooth finger tips. revy feels your eyes staring at her, so she whips her head around to find you flashing her a charming grin that pissed her off to no end.

"fuck you and that smug look on your face," she grumbles as she lifts her glass up to drink the whole thing in an attempt to hide her now rosy cheeks.

"what? does it look too good for you?"

"shut up," she grumbles again as she brings her arm up to wipe her nose as if it helps with her cheeks. you chuckle as you watch her try not to look embarrassed.

after that night, things went back to the way they were before: rock and revy seeing you around roanapur, beating up some guy or walking around with a friend. that smirk you gave her still lingers in the back of her mind and whenever she thinks about it, she can't stop the blood rushing up to her cheeks. it confuses her, to say the least, because it only happens when she's thinking about you, another girl. rock asked her about it since he, benny and dutch were all noticing how she's been acting lately, and dutch and benny all decided to put rock up to the job to ask about it.

it took a long while worth of asking and convincing, but revy finally gave in if he would finally shut up about it. she told him what was going on, and rock immediately jumped to the idea of feelings. that definitely set her off, ending with her stating she'd never talk about this stuff with him again while she stomped away from the bar, knowing that he might be right.

though the chances are small. but never zero.

"revy, when are you going to talk to y/n again? she seemed really nice, other than when she threatened you."

"that's up to her, she has to fuckin' talk to me," revy shrugs as she plops down at her signature chair at the bar. rock sighs resting his elbows on the wood, then he turns around when he hears the door open again.

"you might not have to wait that long, look," rock gently pats revy's arm, pulling her attention towards the door that just opened. there you stood, looking as smug and charming as ever as your eyes scanned the room, seemingly looking for revy.

"she's over here!" rock yells, pointing his thumb at revy sitting next to him. her face immediately turns red when she sees you glance at her, and you stroll over towards her with something in your hand.

"do i still look too good for you?" your voice is as warm as her cheeks and as rich as you look, holding a singular white rose with your fingers. revy takes a moment to glance at the flower in your hand, then scoffs as she turns to face you with a frown. "the fuck are you doin' here?"

"came to talk to the most beautiful girl i've ever seen, of course," you hand her the rose as she glances down at it like it's a foreign object. she gives it a stink eye before reluctantly taking it in her own hands, still not bothering to smell it (she never saw the joy of smelling flowers.)

"why a white rose? i thought red was the fuckin' standard," she grimaces looking up at you with barely pink tinted cheeks. you shrug, "red's overrated."

somehow the two of you are closer, because everyone in the bar is cheering and chanting for the both of you to 'kiss! kiss! kiss! kiss!' revy was having none of it, though she couldn't deny how sweet this was of you, but not in a good way. she finds it concerning, knowing you could switch up any minute.

unfortunately for her and very fortunately for you, the pressure put on by everyone else caves in on the both of you as revy leans in hesitantly, breath reeking of alcohol and smoke fans against your face before you close the gap, slotting your lips against hers.

the previous statement still stands, revy liking women shocked herself as much as it did rock, dutch and benny and almost every other person in roanapur. even balalaika was a bit surprised when word got around eventually. you and revy were quite the pair, she's still rude like she was before, but always gets into fights with people if they're rude to you.

she's still baffled, to say the least, at how she caught feelings for someone-- let alone another girl-- who looks like the pussiest of all pussies on the planet. that certainly isn't the case, and people shouldn't really judge something just by the looks of it, but that's how revy thinks.

still, the two of you remained a cute couple, and it's best we leave it at that.

[112thumbtacks]

Writers Truth & Dare Ask Game

🎱 ⇢ post your AO3 total stats  🍓 ⇢ how did you get into writing fanfiction?  🌵 ⇢ share the link to a playlist you love 🕯️ ⇢ on a scale from 1 to 10, how much do you enjoy editing? why is that? 🛼 ⇢ describe your latest wip with five emojis 🥑 ⇢ you accidentally killed somebody, which mutual(s) do you text for help? 🥤 ⇢ recommend an author or fanfic you love 💌 ⇢ how many unread emails do you have right now?  🌻 ⇢ tag someone you appreciate but don't talk to on a regular basis 🐇 ⇢ do you prefer writing original characters, reader inserts, or a mix of both?  🧃 ⇢ share some personal lore you never posted about before 🎲 ⇢ what stops you from writing more in your free time?  🍄 ⇢ share a head canon for one of your favourite ships or pairings 🧸 ⇢ what's the fastest way to become your mutual? 🪐 ⇢ name three good things going on in your life right now 📚 ⇢ what's the last thing you wrote down in your notes app?  🍬 ⇢ post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character 🔪 ⇢ what's the weirdest topic you researched for a writing project? �� ⇢ share some personal wisdom or a life hack you swear on ❄️ ⇢ what's your dream theme/plot for a fic, and who would write it best? 🌿 ⇢ give some advice on writer's block and low creativity 🥐 ⇢ name one internet reference that will always make you laugh  🏜️ ⇢ what's your favourite type of comment to receive on your work? 🍦 ⇢ name three good things about a character you hate 🥝 ⇢ do you lie a lot? what's the most recent lie you told? 🦋 ⇢ share something that has been on your heart and mind lately  🦴 ⇢ is there a piece of media that inspires your writing?  🍅 ⇢ give yourself some constructive criticism on your own writing 🐚 ⇢ do you like or dislike surprises? 🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here ☁️ ⇢ what made you choose your username? 🐝 ⇢ tag your biggest supporter(s) and say one nice thing about them 🌸 ⇢ do you have any pets? if you do, post some pictures of them 🎨 ⇢ link your favourite piece of fanart and explain why you like it 🧩 ⇢ what will make you click away from a fanfiction immediately?

[112thumbtacks]

this IS getting a rewrite, i kinda feel like i could’ve done better with the general plot and yeah.

reflections; maki x reader

“Can you hurt me a little less in the end?”

Master list

before you begin

not allowed

christmas kids

wasted summer

the office

first mission

“studying”

not evil

smoke

hot summer nights, mid july

do what you must

she loves you, after all

white—red, blue, green—back to white

pretty when you cry

rosyln

as long as your back is turned to us

this place is death

dead or alive

i’m god

two men and a deal

go tell the birds that i am gone

before you begin!!

-this is also on wattpad and ao3!! if u see it on there, it’s made by me :))

-this was originally a rewrite of an old fanfic im embarrassed of, but then writers block hit me like a truck and i had to copy paste off my other maki fic on ao3 (functionalism on ao3 to see for yourself) and keep reflections on hold until i had something else to write

-fortunately i was on tiktok and came up with an ending for it and now i know what i wanna write 😈

-(future reference, y/n is NOT a zenin)

-ty for reading 🤗

(uploading this on tumblr since wattpad suspended me😐)

(also contains mega manga spoilers so anime onlys shoo)

(this is basically a bat signal for other maki lovers like me 💔)

[112thumbtacks]

When you want to read arcane x reader/tlou x reader but the tags are js filled with the x male reader drama