#BESTIE COME HOME

[nobie]

[archived-2001]

living alone right now is driving me crazy

[formosusiniquis]

interrogation and other lost arts

Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington | Tommy Hagan & Steve Harrington & Carol Perkins inspired by @morganbritton132 who posts nothing but bangers, specifically this one about Tommy and Carol and Robin T | WC: 2.2k | Lavender Married Stobin; Tommy and Carol Redemption Arc Beginnings AO3

The third time Carol Perkins comes wandering out from one of the rows of movies with nothing in her hand, Robin starts to suspect something is going on.

Well, really, she suspected something was going on the second she and Tommy walked into the store. Now, it’s more that she finally understands what her grandma’s new kitten must have felt like when Fat Gordon was hissing at it through the crack in the bathroom door. All that’s missing is the yowling sound, and she hasn’t seen Tommy since the two walked in, so he could start making any kind of noise, and she wouldn’t be able to anticipate it coming.

She just isn’t totally sure why. Why they’re here or why her own hackles are upped and ready for any potential hissing matches.

The movie she put on the TV isn’t interesting enough to be distracting. She thinks about switching it up for Bambi or Old Yeller just to see if Steve had been telling the truth the last time he had been wistfully remembering his time with the two loitering in her store. She doubts that Tommy would actually cry in the middle of Family Video on a Tuesday, but if they’re gonna be creeps, she can fire a shot across the bow, so to speak.

Before she has a chance to find either of them, Carol gives up the illusion of browsing, walking up to the counter empty-handed.

“What are your intentions?” She’s imperious, hand on the counter and fingers sprawled wide. Tommy emerges from the back aisle like a dog called to heel, arms crossed in front of his chest, frowning in that squinty way he gets.

“Probably to remind you we have the right to refuse service to anyone and that loitering is a crime.”

“With Steve,” Tommy grits out.

Robin lets herself take a second. Tommy’s scraggly-edged words, rough-hewn like they were dragged from between sandpaper and not his teeth. She’s withstood Russian torture, so she feels fine, blinking in silent contemplation in Carol’s face. There’s a puzzle in front of her, and the blue pieces will eventually make a sky if she looks at them long enough.

Maybe if she tilts her head like Steve.

Carol breaks first, her face stays the same, but her tone shakes with a rage Robin didn’t know she could have. “It was one thing when you were palling around the mall, but we’ve seen the paper.”

“Do you even know him?” Tommy snaps, a dog reaching the end of his chain.

And there’s the sky. The picture is starting to shape up.

“I think if anyone should be asking about intentions, it’s me,” Robin says. She’s been looking for something to kill the time since Steve went home early. This feels like a gift in a way.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Carol’s eyes harden. Robin suspects that this is supposed to be scary, but Steve did the exact same thing last week when Dustin called him an old buzzkill.

“Steve almost died in March, and you’re swanning in during the summer to… prove a point?”

“Of course not!” The first real emotion she’s seen splashes dramatically across Carol’s face. Cheeks pinkening like Robin had struck out with her hand and not just her words. Her hand rips back from the counter to clutch at her chest. Tommy looks green, no longer the dog, now he’s the kid who saw Fido on the roadside.

“There are really only so many conclusions to come to. You came in here to..? Threaten me? What was the plan here?”

“You don’t even know him!” Tommy snaps, accusation instead of supposition. 

She isn’t about to dignify that with a response. There isn’t a person in the world she knows as well as Steve.

Which, unfortunately, means she knows these guys pretty well too.

“He has allergies,” Tommy continues, “he has food stuff.”

Actually, maybe it’s kind of sweet that they’re here. One-on-one, she has a chance to fuse the versions of Tommy and Carol that she knows from school with the ones she’s learned from Steve. Just like she’s fused bagel Steve with her soulmate and life partner Steve.

“He’s allergic to penicillin, and he tells people he’s allergic to mushrooms because he doesn’t like how they feel in his mouth. He’ll only eat one brand of any food, and he can tell the difference. The only mac and cheese he likes is the kind your mom made.” She points to Tommy and his gaping mouth, staring him down so he knows this is both an acknowledgement and a threat.  “We have the recipe memorized, and I probably make it better than she does.”

Carol waves a hand in front of her face, breaking her winning staring contest; the heartbreak that had once been there schooled back into something brow arching and haughty that’s more familiar to Robin. “He’s been in the hospital often enough; you better know his allergies and every single injury, surgery, and follow-up he’s had.”

Robin does. And she’s also making note of what a real tonal threat sounds like. There’s a little bit of hate in her heart as she thinks that Carol would probably pick up a tonal language, like the Mandarin Robin has been trying to learn through Linguaphone, a lot faster than her. Strange that hate has her stomach squirming like this.

“I know everything about him. I know things about Steve he doesn’t even know about himself. I know he has trouble reading. Do you know why?”

Tommy’s lips pinch into a freckly pucker; she doesn’t see anything schoolboy-ish or charming about it, but she also knows that Steve does. Carol’s jaw clenches hard enough that it jumps, which she can see a certain charm in.

Still, she doesn’t let the question linger long enough for them to get over themselves to answer. “He’s probably dyslexic, but he thinks everyone has trouble with letters moving, so he thinks it’s a personal moral failing that he has trouble.

“I know that he’s tricked himself into being a morning person. Why do you think that is?”

Robin holds her hand up to her ear as she asks this one, poking it out toward her stony-faced audience.

She’s kind of on a roll, though, monologuing instead of the interrogation that she had planned. Last summer, she had laughed through the threat of bone saws, the drugs in her system turning abuse into a comical mishap, but the very implication that she didn’t know her dingus was torture enough to have her spilling her guts.

“It’s because he thinks if he gets up early enough, he won’t have to wake up alone.

“I know about things he’s afraid of that you’ve got no idea of. So you tell me: what do you want? You don’t even know me, why the hell do you think you can decide whether I’m good enough for him?”

Tommy is a little hangdog, slumping at the shoulders and ducking his head. It reminds her of Steve, and it’s distressing how much it does to endear him to her.

“I know about you, Robin Buckley,” Carol says, and beneath it, she can hear the phantom sound of her middle name.

Pulling her shoulders back, she draws herself up to her full height. Easily a head taller than Carol, whose chin tilts up to keep her narrowed eye contact, the girl across from her feels as much of a challenger as the former Soviet whose tactics she’d failed to emulate.

Carol squares herself to the counter, pulling the hip that had been balanced against it away and blocking off Tommy from the conversation. “I know you sat behind Steve in Click’s class. We shared a math class three years in a row. You sat in the back, making snide comments because you aren’t as wholesome and sweet as you pretend to be. It’s a good thing you got rid of that awful perm before you all started working together, or Steve never would have given you the time of day.”

She cocks her head to the side, assessing, before her lips pull into something approximating a smile. “He’s trimming your bangs for you. You keep them too shaggy on your own.”

Short, almond nails, painted pink, are reaching toward her face, her hair, and Robin is… She’s stunned. Speechless and flustered. Carol has always been beautiful; time away at whatever college she picked hasn’t changed that.

“Care,” Tommy warns. She pulls her hand away.

Carol looks flustered too. Or as flustered as she ever looks. The hand that almost touched her is clutched tight in the unoffending one. There’s a flush that stains the high points of her cheeks, but she doesn’t duck her chin. Her eyes are a storm cloud locked onto Robin’s.

“Steve isn’t a fancy house, and the promise of a future trust fund. He’s…”

“Comfort,” Tommy says.

“Gentle.”

“Safe,” Robin can’t help but add.

She takes the time to look them both in the eyes as she does. She understands. She continues. “He’s all that for more people than just you now. Can you deal with that?”

The cross of Tommy’s arms has shifted lower, clutching at an old pain. Carol’s chin wobbles, but her lips are drawn into a tight line.

Tells, she knows it’s time to start asking questions again.

“What are your intentions?

“What do you want with him?

“What are you going to do?

“Why should I let you?”

Carol sneers at that, the tight press of her lips breaking up into a curl. “Sign some papers at the courthouse, and you think you can make decisions for him?”

But every interrogation has a weak point. Tommy breaks. “We miss him.” It undercuts nothing.

Beside the phone is a yellow pad of paper, one that she and Steve mostly use to write notes while on the phone with annoying customers. The remains of an attempt at tic-tac-toe and hangman sit on the top page that she crumples in her fist before she starts writing.

“He should either be in bed or on the couch when you get there. If he’s trying to work through the migraine to do chores, force him back into one of those spots.”

“Migraines?”

“He gets those now, thank your pal Billy.” She loves Max like family, but she has no problem letting her tone suggest all the ill she thinks of the dead.

Carol doesn’t either. “He wasn’t our pal.”

“Steve got hurt that bad?” Tommy asks.

“I sent him home early cause the lights were making him nauseous, but she should still feel okay enough that you can apologize. I’ll be checking your work, so make it a good one.”

Carol’s hand is soft, warm, as she presses the note into it. The one that shoots out to grab her wrist and stop her from letting go is iron. Her breath is a bubble caught in her throat. If this goes the way these two want, she’s going to have to learn how to be around Carol.

“What is this?” She asks. Her voice is soft as her grip pulls Robin closer, holds tighter as the counter bites into her hips.

“Some things have changed with him. There are things that bother him more: lights, smells. It’s a cheat sheet.”

“I doubt we’ll need that.” It folds in the tightening of her fist.

“Well, you remember where the house is. He better still be in one piece when I get there.” Tommy is already making for the door. It’s strange to watch him clamber into something other than the Beamer, stranger to see him in the driver’s seat even.

But as the engine rumbles to life outside, Carol is still holding onto her.

“I don’t know how you turned this around on us,” she admits.

“You might have been the first to torture me, but you definitely weren’t the best.”

“If pigtail pulling is your idea of torture, I can’t believe you managed to marry Steve.”

“Steve is the biggest romantic I’ve ever met. Wait-”

A long, tied F# plays, Tommy leaning on the car horn.

Carol smirks, following him out the door. She’d found the upper hand again.

She pulls up Carol’s account, adds, then deletes a failure-to-rewind fee. She pages through a rental history full of things she’s heard Steve call favorites and spotted with things that are actually good.

When Steve is feeling better, she’s going to pull him into the bathroom and force him to answer some suddenly pressing questions she has about his old friends. With three hours left on her shift, those nursemaids have just enough time to help Steve through the worst of this mild attack, if they follow the directions she sent. On the way home, she’ll grab everyone’s favorite pizza: Steve’s plain cheese and a half-pepperoni, half-anchovy monstrosity for the others.

It’s an olive branch or maybe another fired shot across their ship. Proof that in knowing Steve, she knows them too. They’re all linked together now, even if Tommy and Carol aren’t ready to admit it, and Steve doesn’t know it yet. That’s marriage, she thinks, what’s his is hers. 

It will be nice to have a non-life-threatening challenge as they figure out just what that’s going to look like for the four of them.

[notyourmusebby]

Carlos Sainz Sr. really went from calling him “Leclerc(disrespectfully)” to “Leclerc” to wince while he said “Sharl” (cue that el cafelito interview) to PUBLICLY AND PROUDLY ACKNOWLEDGED CHARLES AS HIS SON IN LAW IN HOME SOIL during pride month 🏳️‍🌈✨

[rookthebird]

i think no matter how minor viktor's problems are jayce is always going to drop everything and make viktor his top priority.

viktor didn't sleep well last night and he's eepy? jayce is going to whip off his jacket to make a pillow for viktor. he doesn't care if it's raining, viktor needs a pillow!

viktor has a minor cold and is looking a lil pale and sniffly? jayce is canceling all his plans. his lab partner is SICK. and NEEDS HIM.

viktor had a bad day? someone was mean to him? ALERT ALERT DEFCON 4. GET THE HAMMER.

i don't even think mel is the first woman jayce walked out on to go check on his lab partner, just the hottest

[gihunloversunite]

Ten days till we get to see gihun again

[skipporeity]

"bnha manga" ? whats that? cmon get up, the shinsou deku training friendship arc is premiering!!

WAAAH

[sargebon]

SO WHEN IS THE FUCKING REUNION

[sadlynotthevoid]

Dreamed about OgCale and Rok Soo being roommates besties in a modern fantasy Earth AU—

Except the whole dream was OgCale swinging and humming in the kitchen, preparing a dessert as breakfast. Then he opened Rok Soo's door and threw a pillow at him, saying "WAKE UP, BITCH. THERE'S BREAKFAST"

Then the two of them had a quiet "Rok Soo's birthday" breakfast and fed a cat while recalling how they met.

Apparently Rok Soo was sitting in a bank outside a house/apartment complex? And OgCale came and told him no one sits there because the woman living in the store above likes to water her plants too much. Cue Rok Soo getting a whole bucket of water rain over him. OgCale then got him to come over to his apartment, which was nearby, to get him dry. I don't remember what he said exactly but we know the real reason is he's kind when he doesn't have to put an act.

Anyways, Rok Soo ended up staying for the night. Later they became roommates because OgCale's cat kinda adopted him, so OgCale decided he was fine. OgCale jokes about that a lot. So does Rok Soo, just most people don't notice he's joking. He calls the cat "Milky-nim".

[nobie]

ok we got two episodes left. no cody. my thoughts are bringing me to the possibility of the batch just finding him in one of those cells. but cody is strong, has many talents, would they waste that on using him as a test subject for m-count?

I def still see him being, if not cx-2, one of them other assassins. or whatever hemlock was working on in his little lab with the super assassin death trooper looking thing. I'd assume he needs a human subject for that. and what if that subject is cody.

[lesbiancosmicowl]

you're in your mum's gf's flat all cautious excitement tinged with anxiety waiting for her to come home from the hospital. you've been visiting getting her get well soon cards acting like everything's fine. because it's going to be, right? it has to be. she's here she's alive and she's coming home. you helped your mum decorate put up banners fetch the cake from roy's. you watch her get the call don't even have to ask. it's routine. not the comfortable kind. the 'please stay please don't go into a job that can kill you please listen to me please stay' kind. the 'they need me i have to go there's been a murder/robbery/assult i'll be home late they need me' kind. the kind that is constant, unchanging despite her best (?) efforts. later, carla comes home. she's happy to see you hugs you back calls you darling. it reminds you too much- no. she's not here anymore. carla is. you know what she's gonna ask before she opens her mouth. "there was murder." "she was going to be here." "she put up the decorations." you're well versed in explaining to yourself why she is the way she is. in making excuses for her. in defending her to yourself. she's not here. she wanted to be. she's not here. she wanted to be. she's not here. she wanted to be. a well worn mantra repeated on forgotten dinners late nights missed parent-teacher meetings tardy pickups from work. the difference is now you have to explain it to other people as well. person. carla. you hope she has more patience than you more grace more understanding. you hope she stays. she's not here. she wanted to be. carla is here. she wants to be.

[dykekarkat]

every time neil gets even slightly mentioned in tsc i start vibrating like a small dog.

[itsnotalemon]

They need to invent friends that live closer to me

[lizgraciee]

Does anyone know if Jack is still with that girl or if Trevor is still with Dixie?

[paintedpeeta]

peeta and katniss seem like the types to hang out in the kitchen around the other talking even if they’re both not cooking. they just want to gossip with their bestie

i genuinely could not agree more... this is so them.

i think it’s probably peeta who does most of the cooking but i don’t subscribe to the belief that katniss is a terrible cook, so they both get a chance to make dinner while the other yaps about their day.

like i said in my previous headcanon post they definitely talk smack, and peeta makes her guffaw with laughter when he does impressions of people they know (mainly haymitch if we’re being real).

however, most of the time they have chill conversations and katniss goes on little tangents about the woods and things she saw that day and the seasons and all of that good nature-y stuff that she loves, and that peeta loves to listen to. when she gets so passionate about something he never interrupts, except sometimes to occasionally lean over the counter to let her taste whatever he’s cooking and check if it’s to her liking.

when it’s katniss’ turn to cook, peeta likes to hang around to chit chat but also to help out however he can. most of the time she doesn’t even need to ask him to do anything, he’ll just start chopping up the vegetables or measuring out ingredients for her while continuing the conversation. since he naturally spends more time in the kitchen than her, he just knows where everything is and can always put his hand to whatever she needs (which never fails to impress her)((she gives him heart eyes when he wordlessly grabs the thing she’s looking for without her even asking)).

some nights haymitch joins them for dinner and while they’re cooking together he just sits at the dining table and listens to them blather, only occasionally chewing them out for “never. shutting. up.”

[starrydeww]

BOOM MASSIVE WYNNCRAFT DOODLE DUMP FROM THE LAST COUPLE WEEKS :DDDDDD (theres a lot more things i want to draw, LIKE A LOT I LOVE THIS SERVER TOO MUCH)

i also do want to say that after yapping a little with friends i was convinced to switch the oder between Aldorei's secret pt.2 and ROL 5 so now Wynn Mika helping Olon has a lot more impact, because it's his way of trying to pay back Lari for her sacrifice back at the Realm of Light. But after Olon Also starts to go through his own process of dealing with grief it becomes a mutual healing experience (yes mika stays the full 4 days in Efilim) of just having silent moments in each other's company as support for each other :D it also means that when Mika slept outside of Olon's home, it wasn't a mindless nap, he was using the sleep as a way to try and ease the pain in his heart after losing Lari

in other news i miss tasim i haven't seen him in like 60 levels. come home tasim.

in other other news I HAVE SO MANY THOUGHTS ON CORKIANS AND ELECTROMAGIC AND I WILL BE BRAINSTORMING SOON