#and it makes everything sound like a shitty mp3.

[rudy-redd]

Is anycreature here an audiophile and/or have enough opinions on record players? Like, which one i should buy?

[grapehyasynth]

maus what if i was curious to know what drabble you cook up based on the song 'impossible' by shontelle?? 💜

MY BELOVED MAUS!

oh boy did this get ANGSTY! my original idea was canon-compliant, since the playlist is meant to align with canon, but then this bubbled up. sorry to my boys </3

Wille wakes up to a splitting headache and a missed call from Simon. He’s not sure which one is the stronger force in keeping him immobilized in his bed for another half an hour. 

They haven’t talked since the breakup, even though it was mutual and mostly amicable. It just hurts too much. Not like it doesn’t hurt, not talking to him. Everything hurts. 

He puts off calling Simon back. He pushes back the thick curtains, washes his face, brushes the stale alcohol breath off his teeth and tongue. He debates not returning the call at all. People still accidentally butt-dial, don’t they? 

It’s only when he catches himself nibbling at his thumbnail, a habit he’s (mostly) kicked, that he drops onto the chaise longue, drawing his knees up to his chest so he can tug his sweatshirt over his legs. 

“Hej?” he ventures, when the call connects. “What’s up?” 

An indignant little huff of a laugh shivers in his ear. He’s spent the months since their breakup absorbing Simon’s voice through videos and mp3 files, but hearing it just for him is better, worse, everything. “Wille, I get that the situation is shitty, but this is your only warning. Next time I’m blocking you, on all the platforms. I know that sounds harsh, but I just can’t -- I need to not--” 

“Platforms?” On a sudden, vertiginous, half-remembered hunch, Wille puts the call on speakerphone and flips through to see which other apps are still open on his phone. Instagram - open to his direct messages with Simon. Shit. Apparently, at 2AM last night, Wille had sent could you maybe act a little less thrilled to be done with me? or give me half the grammy jfc. thanks so much puss och kram. “Shit. Simon--” 

“My manager wanted to cancel my appearances today. And you know how much she does not believe in days off.” 

“It wasn’t -- I didn’t mean to--” He’s not going to tell Simon it was a joke. Not even the most generous interpretation of text tone would let that message read as a joke. 

He’d been drunk, thoroughly blasted from a friend’s birthday party. He’d gotten back to the royal residence well past midnight, and in an effort to escape the silence of the dark, massive, lonely hallways, he’d wound up on his stomach in his bed, still wearing a suit, watching a seemingly endless parade of Simon’s live performances to promote his new album. The new album that exudes fuck you, that proclaims boy bye, that flaunts Simon’s singlehood and freedom. And the whole world knows Wille was Simon’s last boyfriend. So not only does he have to live without Simon, he has to see him thriving, and he has to read all the strangers on the internet, especially Simon’s superfans, speculating about why they broke up, about how shitty Wille must have been as a boyfriend to make Simon this desperate to move on, about how he never deserved Simon and Simon was probably never happy with him. Wille knows it’s not true - they’d fucking loved each other, neither of them wanted to break up, but it got too hard, the demands of their respective careers and duties threatening to ruin what they had. But alone in this castle, drunk and morose, he’d started to wonder. Hence, the DM. 

“It wasn’t about you,” he offers Simon eventually, dully. “Not really, not like it seemed. It just... fuck, Simon, I know your songs aren’t all autobiographical but it hurts.” 

Simon’s quiet too long, a tense silence Wille remembers, when Simon is nearly vibrating with emotion but trying to breathe his way through it. “You’re right, they’re not all autobiographical. And these songs were written ages ago, before we were together - I didn’t even write all of them myself - they’re not about you, not the - not the ones people think, anyway. And of course I know that it hurts, Wille, god, I - do you think I want to sing about a shitty ex and perform like I’m having the time of my life when I’m so heartbroken I can barely get out of bed?” 

Wille doesn’t know what to say. If they were in person, this is when he would go to Simon, hold him as he cried. 

Wasn’t the breakup supposed to prevent them both from falling apart? 

Simon sniffles. “I’ll try to make it more clear, in my interviews. I’ve tried to steer them away from you but I’ll do better. Is that what you want, Wille? Would that help?” 

“Yes. No. I don’t - I don’t know what I want, Simon,” he admits brokenly. “I just want you.” 

“Wille--” 

“I just want you.”

[killian-whump]

Come Buy My KWTs

That’s right. You heard it here first!

I’m going to release a series of exclusive KWT collectibles. KWT stands for Killian Whump Things, and I guarantee each and every KWT will be an actual bonafide thing of some kind. Not only that, but they’ll all be non-fungusible, meaning there’s absolutely NO WAY fungus will grow on any of them!

Imagine that! You’ll be the coolest kid on the internet with your spanky new KWT while all those other kids have other things that fungus would love to slowly devour and return to the earth.

I’m going to release 25,728 of these bad boys, and charge $15 million a piece. I’m also going to post them all online here on my blog, so you can right click and save them and do whatever you want with them, because it’s not like I can stop you or anything and it’s a free world. (Fungus will grow on them, though. BEWARE!!!)

There will also be exclusive music for each one of them! ...but only if you’re in my house, listening to the MP3s I’ll be playing as I shitpost about them. Otherwise, you’re on your own and have to provide your own shitty music to accompany your experience.

AND as an added incentive for you to send me obscene amounts of money, each KWT comes with exclusive access to the KWverse. “What?” you’re thinking. “Another useless metaverse spin-off?” NO! This is a real life universe built in a small medieval dungeon filled with extremely handsome men for you to play with to your heart’s content. Like women instead? Sure, I can throw some hot women in there, too! I can do whatever I want, because it’s called the KWverse because I own the fucking place. Oh, and it’s all non-fungusy, too - because nobody wants mold in their play space. I know.

Not only THAT, but for a limited time, if you send me half a pint of blood, I’ll come and have dinner with you. Or at least eat some sort of meal at your place. Or raid your fridge when you’re not home. Look, I’m not sure what’s going to happen, or what I’m going to do with all that blood (haha, I’m lying, I’m gonna summon a few demons), but it’ll be great and you’ll love it. I mean, why would I lie to you? I wouldn’t, that’s why! Trust me! One out of one mes trust me. You should too!

Let’s see... What else, what else... Well, everything else! You like gaming? I’m gonna put gaming in the KWverse. You like super dramatic celebrity court battles? We’re gonna have, like, a thousand of them every week! You like fraudulent insurance scams? I could pull a few. Why not?

I’m also gonna have a concert. I can’t play any instruments worth shit, but that doesn’t matter, because there’s only a .00000003% chance it’ll actually happen, anyway. But it makes it sound like your $15 million is going to a lot of different things instead of just the one single unmoldy KWT you’re actually buying - so its value to me is immense.

So what are you waiting for? Come buy my KWTs!

Remember, anything can have value if enough people believe it has value. Come and believe with me. Together, we can fleece everyone else out of their hard-earned cash and blow it on gluten-free cocaine and hookers!

[ddddaikon]

Cant sleep insomnia trauma posting time because maybe ill get some rest if i get it off my chest??

Anyways like my mom is dying, and im not really sad about it because shes 77 and honestly I'm not close to her at all. The annoying thing is that I keep remembering things from when I was a kid and suddenly understanding some way in which she was shitty

Like a non exhaustive list:

-when i was a teenager and had breakdowns and she lied and told me that the landlord said we couldnt stay any longer because i was too loud (we were renting a house and the house was next to an elementary school gymnasium. We had no neighbors.)

-my mom would literally be able to spend $100 in a single store buying curtains (this isnt an exaggeration) but she wouldnt spring for more than $20 for an mp3 player that couldnt hold more than a max of 20 songs and only last a month at a time before it broke

-she loved spending money on useless impulsive shit and like yeah i can understand that i have impulse problems too but she constantly lied to avoid doing anything for me or my brother. At one point she became obsessed with a fucking mail order catalogue and decided to put in an order for $100+ of random cheap garbage. The one thing i wanted was a little fairy statue that i was into and my mom supposedly called in the order and that one thing was mysteriously sold out!

-me and my brother got identical cd players for christmas that year, from the same fucking catalogue, and mine was so poorly made it literally caught on fire. Rather than asking for it to be replaced she ended up calling customer service and straight up lying about it never coming in the mail??? Idk how she ever got a refund, it had been at least 3 months.

-(these things all sound weirdly dated but it was only like 2008, we just lived in the middle of nowhere and it was like a decade behind. The only available internet was dial up)

-she decided to pick up and move from wisconsin to virginia despite having no money to do so. She cracked into a savings thing of like 5k that was meant for me for college (lol). No shit, she went to the casino like a week after she got the money, the money was suddenly gone, and when i asked where it went she just said "its gone" implying that someone stole it. When pressed as to how someone could steal 5k she didnt physically have on her person, she would only insist "its gone"

-in high school i was getting ready to take my SATs and they cost something like $60 but money was consistently tight. We were at a fucking kmart when there was a bizarre announcement over the speakers about a special presentation in the store and it was some dude pedaling cheap jewelry. My mom put in a drawing for some kind of prize but the prize was pretty obviously a bid to purchase a $70 bag full of ugly plastic garbage jewerly. She immediately agreed to purchase this shit and i was like wait no mom youre not going to be able to afford my SAT fee, and she told me it was no big deal to wait another month. And then later yelled at me for embarassing her

Its just like all of this stuff still makes me mad and its compounding with work stress and stress from general tasks that feel paralyzing because of everything else making me lose sleep. Bah!!!

[innytoes]

Breanna and the Phantoms

(Also on AO3)

Since losing her parents in a car accident, Breanna didn’t sing anymore. Or hack. They’d sent her to her grandmother first, but she’d slowly started to forget her, too. She wasn’t sure what was worse, losing someone in one flash of headlights and screech of tires, or slowly, over the course of a few months, until the bad days outweighed the good ones so much that there was almost nothing left of her grandmother at all.

They’d sent her to live in a foster home, after that. Nana was a no-nonsense kind of woman, who took one look at her refusal to participate in music class and the weird way she was both drawn to and repulsed by computers and sent her to a therapist. Her dad had taught her how to play the piano. They used to write songs together. Her mom had taught her how to hack, fingers flying over a different type of keyboard, making music with code and bytes and command lines.

She just wasn’t sure she could do it anymore. Even if it meant getting kicked out of the music program.

Sunday dinners at Nana’s house were usually kind of a big thing. Every first Sunday of the month, she’d host this pretty much all-day dinner for anyone who wanted to come. Former foster kids stopped by for brunch, Nana’s friends from church came by for lunch, the neighbours, people from Eli’s temple, it was this big whole day affair. Sometimes it was fun, especially if Darryl brought over his Spirit Ruse cards, but some days Breanna just wanted to hide away from everything.

Which was how she’d ended up in the weird garage at the side of the property. Nana had told her about the instruments in there, and said she was welcome to go and check it out whenever she wanted, no pressure. Which of course meant she’d avoided the place like the plague. It was perfect, because it was the last place anyone would ever look for her now. She’d snuck inside, skirting past the instruments covered in sheets, and had heaved herself up the stairs to the small loft. Even if anyone did come looking, they wouldn’t find her easily.

Hiding away was pretty boring, though, so pretty soon she was poking away at the junk in the loft. There were bags of old clothes, more instruments, an entire box full of old romance novels, a weird looking, dusty cardboard model of a church with a stained glass window depicting… snake Jesus? What the hell. But below it was where she found the real treasure.

“Oh my god look at you, you beautiful antique,” she breathed out. This computer was ancient. Like, from the actual Nineties. Early Nineties! For a moment, she forgot all about hiding out, too busy carefully bringing the computer down the stairs and seeing if it booted up. She could play Oregon Trail on it or something, who knew.

Miraculously, it booted up. She’d had to hack to get around the password protection, but really, it was a computer from the Nineties. It was more nostalgic than challenging, even if there were some odd quirks in the codes she was pretty much entirely sure shouldn’t be there. Maybe whatever geek had owned this computer knew what they were doing. Maybe she’d ask Darryl if he knew anything about who had owned it. It had to be from around when he’d been staying at Nana’s, right? He was old.

She poked around the files on the desktop. There were no photos. There were a bunch of old-school cracked SNES games, and a little folder titles ‘not illegally downloaded music’. It had all sorts of genres in it, from rock to pop punk, to R&B and even some country. Maybe this had been a family computer? That was a thing back in the day, right? But there was only one user.

There was another folder on the desktop titled The Greatest Music Of All Time, which also seemed to be composed of MP3s and text files. She clicked one of the mp3s, and it started playing from the shitty little speakers. But something was off about the sound, unless this was some kind of weird-screamo-alternative thing.

Except the screaming wasn’t coming from the speakers. It was coming from the… three figures that dropped out of nowhere in front of her. There was a girl with long blonde hair in a leather jacket, a lanky black guy in a soft looking pink hoodie and a distressed jacket, and a short guy with long hair wearing a red flannel and torn jeans.

Breanna screamed, and the three people screamed and grabbed each other. She grabbed one of the speakers and chucked it at them, screaming louder when it went right through Leather Jacket’s stomach. She looked unfazed, but at least she stopped screaming long enough to say ‘hey!’ in an offended tone, which made the two boys stop as well. Just for good measure, the chucked the other speaker as well. The long haired guy ducked, but it went through his shoulder, same as what had happened with the girl.

Because she was a scientist, Breanna did the next logical thing. She grabbed something off the shelf behind her (a crucifix of all things) and chucked it at Hoodie.

“Now that is just anti-Semitic!” he said, ducking behind the other guy.

“Please stop screaming!” Flannel Guy growled, clutching at his ears. Breanna did, if only because if Nana came out here, she’d send her back to Dr. Turner three times a week if not more.

“Who are you,” she asked. “And what are you doing in my Nana’s garage?”

“Oh hey,” Hoodie said, peering over Flannel’s shoulder. “You’re one of Nana’s, that’s cool. I’m Alec, sorry I couldn’t be here to give you  the tour, that’s usually my job, but you see, we had this big performance and…” he paused, looking around. “Guys, what did she do with all our stuff?” He glared at Breanna, and she grabbed another thing off the shelf.  None of them seemed very impressed with her improved weapon of An Ugly Statue, though. “You’re here for like one night and you’ve already messed with our stuff?”

“Give us a second,” the blonde said, pulling the other two into a huddle. Breanna took the time to check her pulse, her forehead. How did you know you were having a psychotic episode? She knew the signs of a stroke, but not of this. Maybe she should Google it. Maybe she should make a break for it and just never come back here again and pretend she hadn’t gone insane. Maybe she’d inhaled some weird spores up in the loft and this was all a bad trip or something.

“How’d she get all this stuff in here so fast?” Alec was saying, waving his hand at the boxes stacked in the corner, and the grand piano near the window.

“Maybe she’s a witch,” the blonde whispered back, far too loudly. “There’s chairs on the ceiling.”

“Dammit, Parker, there’s no such thing as witches,” Long Haired Guy said.

“You sure, Eliot?” Alec said. “Because I used to think there was no such thing as ghosts and well.” He made a dramatic gesture between the three of them, flailing in place. The other guy muttered what sounded like ‘dammit, Hardison’ under his breath.

“So we’re going with witch?” the girl, Parker, asked.

“No, we’re not going with witch,” Eliot said, rolling his eyes. “She’s just scared. Let someone who actually knows how to talk to girls handle this one.” And man, ghost or not, he was going to be sorely disappointed that whatever white-boy charm he thought he had going on would have zero effect on her whatsoever.

Which appeared to be none, because he gave her what she assumed he thought was a nice smile before half-yelling “Why are you in our studio?” at her.

“Why are you haunting Nana’s studio?” she shot back.

“Nana lets us use it,” Alec said. “We’re in this band called Sunset Swerve.”

“Tell your friends,” the blonde chirped.

“Last night was a really big night for us,” Alec continued. “It was going to change our lives. Which uh, I guess it did, but not in the right way.” The guy with the long hair looked like he swallowed a lemon, clearly not amused at the joke. The girl, gently poked at her shoulder, ignoring Breanna’s flinch when her hand went straight through.

“Okay, this is freaking me out,” Breanna said, dodging another poke from Parker. She moved to behind the piano, taking out her phone.

“What is that, what are you doing?” Eliot asked, suspicious.

“It’s my phone,” she said, glaring as Alec moved closer to peer at it.

“Who are you calling?” Parker asked. Like she’d be stupid enough to call anyone in what was either a really bad trip or her Sixth Sense ‘I see dead people’ awakening.  

“I’m looking up Sunset Curve,” she said, annoyed to see Alec had moved behind the piano with her, gawking over her shoulder.

“Sunset Swerve!” the three of them said, offended.

“You guys, I don’t think we died last night…” Alec began, trying to poke at her phone. Rude. Luckily his hand went straight through it. “This tech is like… Woah.” He paused to read the headline of the article she’d brought up.

“Says here you died…” Breanna paused, making sure she had the math correct. “Twenty-five years ago.” That explained the fascination with her phone. And the Nineties fashion. Though to be fair, the Nineties were coming back, so it wasn’t like they looked too out of place.

“What?” Eliot said, sounding angry. “No. No, that’s impossible. After we floated out of the ambulance all we did was go to that weird dark room where Hardison cried.”

“Weeell,” Alec said, voice high-pitched and spluttering. “I don’t… I think we were all pretty upset, y’know?”

“But that was just for like an hour,” Parker said, full of conviction. “We weren’t gone that long.”

“You died in 1996,” Breanna pointed out. “It’s 2021.”

“So we’re in the future?” Parker asked.

“I think so, babe,” Alec said. “I mean, I would have killed for a phone like that. That tech is like… sci-fi good. She has the internet. In her pocket.” Eliot rolled his eyes, crossing his arms, clearly not impressed. Which was kind of rude, because the internet was really cool and sometimes when she thought about having access to all the information in the world inside a tiny little device in her back pocket was pretty cool. (Until she thought about it for too long and landed on, you know, privacy violations and algorithms and conspiracy theory echo chambers and anon hate and all of the terrible things that came with the internet.)

“Hold up, hold up, hold up a sec,” Alec said. “Does this mean I have been crying. For twenty-five years? Without a hug from either of you?” He pointed an accusing finger at the other two.

“I was looking for a way out!” Parker defended.

“And you,” Alec said, pointing at the other guy. “What’s your excuse? Or is it just ‘oh Hardison I’m emotionally constipated, I don’t do emotions’.”

Eliot looked flustered, but didn’t have anything to say other than: “Dammit, Hardison. Can we focus here?”

“Focus on what?” Alec said. “How you won’t hug me even in a weird dark room with nobody else around because you’re too cool?”

“How we’re not alive anymore and technically homeless?” Eliot shot back.

“We’re not homeless,” Parker said, cheerfully flopping down on the old leather couch Breanna had been sitting on and stretching out. “My couch is still here!”

“And I like, live here,” Alec said. “I mean, if it’s been twenty-five years I technically aged out but I’m pretty sure Nana wouldn’t kick me out. Or any of us. She always pretended she didn’t know Parker was staying in the garage, even that time the cops showed up looking for her.”

“We’re still ghosts, man!” Eliot said, sounding upset. “Your Nana is a nice churchgoing lady, what’s stopping her from getting a priest in here to exorcise us when she finds out the place is haunted?”

“Excuse me, Nana runs a multi-denominational household,” Alec said, offended. “I’m sure she can make room for some ghosts.”

“I mean,” Breanna butted in. They turned to her like they’d kind of forgotten she was there. “Nobody else really comes out here anymore. That’s why I was hiding out here. You can stay here, if you want.”

She really was going crazy, but the way the three smiled at her, it felt like the start of something good.

[papaivcallme]

10, 16, 17, 22 for the music asks! 🎶

THANK YOU SCHMOOPIE 🖤🖤

10.) "What was your first concert?" THIS ONE'S A DEEP CUT LMAO I don't know if this counts as a concert bc it was actually more of a small bar gig not a big concert, but I count it bc I love them My first concert (that I remember at least) was going to see Driftless Pony Club!! I'm pretty sure it was around 2011, so I was like… 12/13? It was super fun!! WheezyWaiter signed my sibling's friend's face connecting his beard to his sideburn it was great askansjdf. If you've never heard their music and enjoy some early 2010s indie, I highly recommend their first two albums "Buckminster" and "Expert," the sound of my childhood 🖤🖤

16.) "Have you ever been in the first row for a concert? if not, what was the closest seat you’ve ever had?" Not yet, I really, really hope to get close for Ghost in Sept. tho 😭 The closest I've been was in GenAdm at Monumentour 2014 seeing Fall Out Boy and Paramore lmaooo I'm not as into them anymore, but I had the TIME OF MY LIFE. I was like five rows of people from the stage and I could have touched Joe Trohman it was amazinggg. I have a bunch of shitty quality pics and videos of it from my ipod touch 4 LMAO I was also pretty close to the front when I went to see Against Me! in 2018, we were standing a level above ground to avoid the pit, they put on an AMAZING show. I adore LJG and Against Me! holds a very special place in my heart (Also idk if this counts bc not a concert, but I got front row tickets to see the Beetlejuice musical on broadway. It was the second to last show with the full original cast before Rob McClure left and I cried so hard it was amazingggggg 😭😭😭)

17.) "If you could go back in time and attend any artist/band’s concert that you were unable to attend, who would it be and when?" FR??? I just want to go back in time a few years and have listened to Ghost since Meliora era. I was so close!! I've known about them for a while having had only listened to Square Hammer, but only recently got really actually into them. Gross buzzword, I know, but I have such fomo for not being able to see papa iii in concert 💀💀💀 That, or, there was a time Todd Rundgren came to a city near me. I wanted to take my dad for Father's Day bc he introduced me to his music, but I just wasn't able to swing it 😔

22.) "Name a song that reminds you of one of your best memories" Ooooh that's a tough one, I've got bad memory kasdfkjank A lot of these are more like general ethereal feelings of being happy with people I love since I'm bad at remembering specific events 😭 The entire RENT soundtrack makes me happy bc it makes me think of many a road trip spent with my sibling and my best friend from high school, that and screaming Hamilton with my sibling driving me back and forth home on the weekends for the short time I was in college The Sweeney Todd soundtrack makes me think of my mom, she's the one that got me into musicals from her love of theater. We used to have matching MP3 players, and that soundtrack specifically was one of the few things on hers LOL Meat Market by Everybody Else and How The Day Sounds by Greg Laswell make me think of playing OMGPOP games with dear friends I have a lot of music that I connect to my bestie and roommate kenzie, but we've been living together for over two years through the (multiple) pandemic(s) so I Cannot list everything, mostly more musical soundtracks come to mind. I love that bitch ✊✊ Also in general, Welcome To The Family by Watsky gives me a very warm happy feeling and always makes me think of my friends

[xxisxxisxxis]

Gateway Drug | Part Eighty-Seven

Words: 4.5k

Warning(s): explicit language, sexual situations, drug abuse, violence

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NIKKI

"Nikki, what the hell are you doing?" Vivian asks me as we walk down the stairs of the law firm. 

"I've broken every fuckin' vow except 'till death do us part' and I'll be fucked to hell if we stuck it out and stayed with each other after the worst bullshit just to fucking divorce." I state and she stays quiet for a moment before I'm stumbling back when she halts and snatches away from me, glaring up at me. 

"What if I want a divorce?" She asks. 

"I'd tell you you're full of shit." I snap and she raises a brow and crosses her arms. 

"Then what the hell was the point of hounding me for a divorce just to do this?!" She barks at me. 

"To prove a point I guess, I don't fucking know." I admit. 

"To prove a point?! What point were you trying to prove?! That even when we're not together you still have the control in the relationship?!" She yells.

"I don't have any fucking control in this relationship, are you fucking me?! I haven't had any control since day fucking one, Vivian!" 

"Are you fucking serious?!" She screams at me, frustration all over her face. "You have always had control, Nikki, trust me, I know, I'm the one that had to lay down and take your bullshit and give up what I wanted to do just so you'd feel in control!"

"I told you to go to fucking New York to go to school, did I not? What the hell did you do? You stayed! You can't get pissed at me for not giving you what you supposedly think I promised you!" 

"No, Nikki, I'm not pissed at you for not giving me what you promised--I'm pissed because you've given me years of fucked up shit that was never supposed to even be a part of the plan!" She has tears in her eyes, her voice shaking…

She's right. I'm not going to tell her she's wrong…

I sigh and rub the back of my neck, exhaling, as she wipes her eyes. 

"...Look, me and the guys are going to a different rehab, and I'll actually stick with it, and I want to work this out." I tell her, honestly. "I just don't know how to come back from the shit we've done to each other, Viv, but if we can figure out how, then I wanna do it." 

She doesn't say anything, looking at me with her pretty green eyes, nodding slightly. 

I didn't realize that once we agreed to work on our marriage, that all hell would break loose in the midst of repairing the damage. 

Me and the guys, except Mick, were sent to another rehab because the first one was too obnoxious, and by the second one, we were actually getting somewhere with each other as a band and individually, including the people closest to us in our lives. For me, that was Vivian.

My leg can't stop shaking as I repeatedly tap my foot, waiting for my counselor to get in and meet Vivian for the first time.

I exhale and glance at her, her red hair curled, reaching just over her boobs, long legs taken up by black stockings that have lace trim mid-thigh, just peeking out from under her black dress, black heels tapping quietly on the floor, her dark red nails standing out against the cover of the shitty crossword she's flipping through. Her perfume has the whole little area she's in smelling good and her red lips rub together for a moment as she doesn't even notice me staring at her. 

It's a Saturday and I'm assuming she's going out with Sharise or something when she leaves here, or she dressed like this to torture me, knowing I haven't had sex in nearly two months, starting in Japan back in December, and my right hand is my best friend currently. 

My fucking balls hurt as she shifts her legs, uncrossing them to cross them the opposite, now. 

If it were up to me they'd be wide open and either around my hips or my head. 

I keep my hand pressed to my lips, resting my elbow on the arm of the chair, focused on her.

I slide down in my chair a little to try to see what kind of panties she's wearing--if she's wearing any at all. 

It wouldn't surprise me if she's not wearing any at all. Just to fuck with my head like she loves to do. 

"Take a picture and it'll last longer." She tells me flatly, not taking her eyes off the book. 

"I would if I had a camera." I don't even deny staring at her and she flicks her gaze to me. "Or a video camera. That'd be better." I add. 

"Ha. Ha." She sarcastically lets out and I smirk, watching her get up to grab her purse from the empty chair adjacent to me, leaning down to dig through it. 

It takes everything in my power not to get behind her, bend her over it, slide her panties to the side and start poun--

"We're here to start the process of fixing things between us and you're here only focused on sex." She states and I snap out of it. 

"No, I'm not." I argue, furrowing my brows. 

"Nikki, I know when you're picturing having sex with me." 

"I'm always picturing having sex with you." I state. "And you know exactly what you're doing." 

The faintest, smallest little grin comes to her lips as she goes to sit down again. 

"I don't know what you're talking about." She mumbles and I look at her. 

"You're cruel." I mumble and she rolls her eyes. 

"Oh, whatever." She replies. 

"You look hot." 

"Shut up." 

"We can be done in ten seconds." I say next and she goes red. 

"Stop, Nikki!" She scolds me.

"C'mon, Viv, we've never fucked on a desk before." I point out. 

"We've broken into Doc's office just to mess around on his desk, Nikki." She reminds me. 

"Well, we've never fucked on a therapist's desk, so c'mon, it'll be quick."

"I--" she starts laughing, not believing me, "--am not having sex in a rehab facility. I'm not that horny." 

"So you admit you are horny to some degree, though." I say and she rolls her eyes. 

"Shut up."

"Just flash me or something." 

"Nikki."

"Please?"

"You're so weird." She ignores my request while I'm pinching the bridge of my nose. 

"I'm in pain, Vivian." I say next, groaning, exaggerating. 

"Sounds like a personal problem." 

"Fuck." I lean my head back, rubbing my face. 

The door opens and my counselor comes in, smiling at us. 

"Sorry, I'm late." She says, stepping to Vivian, extending her hand. "I have heard lots about you, I'm Amber." 

"Vivian. It's nice to meet you." Vivian replies, smiling her shiny smile that should win her an Oscar because she wears it so well even when she's fucking miserable--I obviously know from experience. 

Amber sits behind her desk as Vivian sits back down in the chair, and she looks up from her paperwork at us, raising her brows. 

"If we're going to start this grueling process, I highly suggest you two get comfortable being within three feet of each other, again." She adds.

Me and Vivian exchange looks, before she sighs and stands up, walking to the little couch I'm sitting on, plopping down beside me. 

I smirk to myself, looking at her from the side of my eye. 

"Okay, let's just get to it, Vivian, I've gotten a brief history of your husband, and I feel as though I can sort of, kind of, pin point a thing or two that has lead to the point that you two are at currently, but I'd really like to learn a little bit about you because all that's portrayed publicly to all of us is he's this nitty gritty, abrasive rock God, and you're the angel that tamed him to settle down." She explains and Vivian scoffs, raising her brows. "I know it sounds ridiculous but that's what's given in magazines and pictures taken of you two." 

"Yeah." Vivian nods. 

"And I don't think that's true, I don't think everything is happy and sunshine and, 'oh, we're opposites but that's what we love about each other,' and blah, blah, or else neither of you would be here admitting your marriage is in shambles...so, becoming familiar with Nikki--sober--the way that I have the past week gives me a sense of who he really is without the drugs and the cameras and the fans and the girls, because in here he's only got himself. He doesn't have to upkeep the persona he puts on to make it seem like everything's perfect. And, although you aren't a patient here, I really want you to allow yourself to just be and differentiate between who you are to the public, and who you are privately, because--from what I've heard--they're two completely different people." She says next and Vivian nods. "So, who is Vivian Kinston and how did she get together with Nikki Sixx?" She offers a warm smile and Vivian exhales, already looking overwhelmed…"In three descriptions, who were you when you met Nikki?" 

"A very religious, ballet dancing, perfectionist." Vivian says and Amber nods. 

"Let's dissect that and break it down for a moment." She says next. "Okay, religious--was that on your own or passed through your family or…?"

"Both of my parents, but mainly my mom." She replies and Amber nods. 

"Okay, and what is mom like?" 

"Very strict Christian, we couldn't have anything secular in the house...I'm not sure what she's like now but when I last saw her she had the pastor I grew up with trying to exorcise a demon from me because she found out I was engaged to Nikki." She tells her and Amber's brows shoot up. 

"When was that?" 

"'82, '83, around that time." Vivian explains. 

"So you haven't seen mom in close to six years." 

"Yeah." 

"Okay...you were a ballet dancer when you met," she starts the next point. 

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Since I can remember." Vivian informs her. 

"So, a strict Christian upbringing, and a very, very, intricate form of dance that requires a lot of discipline, since you were probably a toddler." 

"Yeah." 

"And is that where the perfectionism comes in, through your background with dance?"

"No." 

"No, okay."

"My mom and my upbringing." Vivian explains. "Anytime I did something my mom didn't like or approve of or thought other people would lose their minds over if they knew I was doing it, she'd get onto me and would constantly drill into my head, 'this is not what we do, Vivian'." 

"Wow." Amber nods, her brows slightly furrowed. "So, it doesn't come from a place of that physical drive to be perfect at most things you do, it comes from a mental and emotional drive of not wanting people to know what skeletons are in the closet that would make them think less of you." 

Vivian nods, taking a deep breath. 

"Okay, and do you think that sense of perfectionism from your mother has helped you or harmed you in the long run?" 

"Harmed." She's saying it nearly before Amber can get her words out of her mouth. 

"And why is that?" 

"Because I grew up with her holding me to a nearly unreachable standard, and hounding unrealistic expectations onto me." 

"And in turn…"

"...It's made me do the same to him." Vivian says and I stare at the floor. 

"What unrealistic expectations, or unreachable standard have you held him to?" 

"Not doing the things that he's done." She says next. 

"What things?" 

"Infidelity and drug and alcohol addiction." 

"Why is expecting your husband not to cheat on you or put drugs and alcohol before you an unrealistic expectation that is unattainable for him?" Amber asks next and I rub my lips together. 

"Because of who he is and what he does." Vivian says next and Amber raises her brows. 

"So you think because he's Nikki Sixx--big time rockstar--that it's not realistic to expect him to do what he is supposed to do as your husband which is stay faithful and not put substances before you?" 

"Yes." 

"Oh, I see." Amber looks at me and I sigh. "Was your relationship ever open or polygamous, during or prior to marriage?" 

"No." She shakes her head. 

"Was he addicted to anything when you got married?"

"He did drugs and drank but at that point in time he didn't have a heavy reliance on it, no."

"An unrealistic expectation would be you telling him he can sleep with other women but then you getting angry every time he did. That's setting an unrealistic expectation of, 'I'm giving you permission to indulge in sex with other women but I expect you not to,' or him being addicted to heroin when you got married and you expecting him to drop any addiction he has solely based on the fact that you two got married. That's an unrealistic expectation. Him being a famous rock musician has nothing to do with his ability, or lack thereof, to be monogamous and sober." She explains to Vivian. "So you wanting your husband to not have an affair and not get strung out was not an unrealistic expectation that you had in a moment of naivety." She assures her.

"Okay." Vivian sounds like she's been waiting to hear that for a while…

"And I believe the issues you two are facing the most from both Nikki, and yourself, have grown from the root of how you two think. I know we hear the saying, 'opposites attract,' but we don't think about how sometimes when people are too opposite it acts like hot and cold air when it mixes and if it's in a big enough whirl, or big enough of a spectrum, it creates a tornado or a hurricane." She says next. "Religion equals a sense of morality, your history with ballet equipped you with a fair amount of discipline, and that perfectionism that you spoke on is your way of caring so much about what others think of you, you sacrifice yourself and just smile to keep things looking amazing on the outside."

Vivian nods. 

"I asked him to describe you in three words, and he said, 'beautiful, depressed, belligerent'." She tells her and I slowly see tears coming to Vivian's eyes. "Nikki admitted to me that when he met you, he had no sense of morality, he was doing whatever he wanted, when he wanted, he had no discipline in terms of controlling himself around drugs and women, and he couldn't give less of a care about what people thought of him." She explains. "And that might even been fun and exciting when you were just starting out but once you're married and he's gotten all these eyes on him suddenly, there are expectations put on the both of you to be this couple who has everything, and you're both attractive, and he's the bad boy and you're the good girl and you just fell in love is the only explanation you have for making the relationship work to the point of wanting to get married and you have a great house and matching cars and all this and all that and you're in the press smiling and laughing and holding hands and hugging up on each other and oh, it's a wonderful life, but as soon as you get alone…" she trails off, looking at the both of us knowingly. "He's high, you're suffering, and both of you are living a hell. But nobody can know that because you're Nikki and Vivian Sixx. You two are perfect because he doesn't cheat on you like other rockstars do to their wives and girlfriends. He doesn't put drugs and alcohol before you like so many others do to their girlfriends and their wives. He doesn't turn into this monster you don't recognize and lash out like a dog at you after a night of sitting in his closet and shooting up, because he 'loves' you, and you don't have to keep quiet for years while it just keeps adding up and adding up until finally you beat on your husband and those around you over minuet instances because the big things you were probably justified to get that angry over were swept under the rug and were never dealt with for years--because that's not what you do." She ties it right back to Vivian's mother. 

A tear rolls down Vivian's cheek, neither of us expecting it to be this heavy just during her introduction to Viv. 

"If we don't stop that mentality, it's going to poison every relationship around you that it hasn't already and when you have children it's going to be a curse on them just like it's a curse on you." She tells her, as Viv sniffles, trying to keep up with wiping her tears away. "I've already been on him about his upbringing burdening him, so please don't think this is a personal attack on you."

Viv nods, mouthing, "okay."

"You two want to make this relationship better and be better for one another, we are going to have to tear down six years worth of walls and blockades and gut this entire thing completely and start again. It's not going to be easy, you're probably going to learn things about each other you've been hiding and maybe even amicably decide to divorce before it's all over with, but you are both going to heal and start the process of forgiveness. With yourselves, with your parents, with your friends, and with each other."

She gives the both of us some homework...

"I want you two to prepare to tell each other everything you've not told one another for next time we meet." Amber tells us and the color drains from Viv's face, I know for a fucking fact that I don't look much different from her.

"What?" Vivian asks her.

"If we're healing this relationship we need everything in the dark in the light so we aren't building on an old foundation of secrets." She states. Vivian just nods hesitantly before we're dismissed.

"Vivian." I stop her out in the hall before she can leave, grabbing gently at her wrist.

"Yeah?" She asks me. 

"I love you." I tell her and she looks at me, smiling a little. 

"I'll see you Wednesday." She replies, squeezing my hand before she walks away. 

What the hell? I tell her and I love her and she just fucking says, "I'll see you Wednesday'?" 

I watch as she goes down the hall, heels clicking, hair down her back…

Goddamn. 

This is definitely my payback for taking my time with her for granted, because now that I'm in my right mind and not ruining our marriage, she barely even looks at me. 

At least she was actually wanting to work things out, because after the Vanity bullshit, I thought we'd never make it out after the first time I saw her since it had happened.

July 1987

I brace myself against the bathroom wall as my whole body goes numb for a moment, my eyes rolling momentarily. 

"Sixx, c'mon, we gotta get goin', Viv's here!" Fred yells from behind the door, his fist beating at it. 

Fuck him. Fuck this tour. Fuck this band. Fuck everything right now. 

Viv's just got here from the airport, she flew back in earlier this morning and I've been hiding, completely avoiding her, but I can't anymore. 

The media's in a frenzy since Vanity aired all of our dirty laundry, only making Viv and I both on edge even more. 

We've been denying the shit out of Vanity's engagement claims, but I don't think people are buying it as much as we'd like to think they are. 

I take in a breath and stumble to the mirror, looking at myself. 

Not too bad for a low down, dirty, bastard. 

Opening the bathroom door to see where Fred's waiting for me, I glance past his shoulder to see Vivian.

She looks like she feels like hell, but has managed to pull herself together. 

Makes two of us--well, kind of, at least. 

"C'mon, the guys are already at the venue." 

Fred tells me. 

"Great." I smirk, patting his shoulder, stepping to Vivian. 

I don't think either of us are taking into consideration the amount of utter bullshitting we're about to have to do. 

I also don't expect the amount of paparazzi waiting for us right outside the hotel's doors.

As soon as the door opens, screaming, flashes, invasive questions come hurtling our way. It feels closterphobic enough to make Vivian grab my hand, tight, curling closer into me as if trying to hide away from prying cameras and questions about my alleged affair.

I feel her being tugged at once, and just as she says, "Nikki," I'm snatching my hand from hers to beat repeatedly, as hard as I can, at the forearm of the perpetrator, a media creep trying to get her attention. 

"Don't fucking touch her!" I bark out over the noise and he stumbles back, holding at his arm as I put my arm around her waist, tightly, getting to the car. 

When we get inside, Vivian's obviously distraught over what just happened, shoving herself away from me. 

I turn my anger to Fred. 

"What the fuck is the point of  having fucking security if you're not going to keep people from touching her?" I sneer. 

"Because I'm a bodyguard, but you're a fucking Rottweiler." He states back without hesitation and I just roll my jaw, glancing at Vivian and she doesn't even look at me. 

I sigh and dig in my pocket for the little baggie I got earlier, grabbing my hotel room key to take a bump to help me wake up for this show, and when we get to the venue, I'm getting out of the car and waiting for Fred to get out. 

He does, and I stop Vivian, nudging her back inside before saying, "we'll be there in a second."

Fred just looks at me and exhales, rolling his eyes before stepping inside. 

Vivian sighs out as I look at her, avoiding looking at me…

"Vivian, are we gonna talk about it or…?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"I think we should."

"You proposed to her, Nikki."

"Allegedly." I add.

"You. Proposed. To. Her." She says it sharply and I lean back. "You had an affair with her. I trusted you. I trusted the both of you. And you lied to me." She hisses. "So, no, there is nothing to talk about...just let me out of the damn car." She slides over and opens the door but I reach over her and slam it shut.

She takes heavy breaths from where she's sitting, my body hovering over hers, the tips of our noses brushing together…

I lean down, my lips pressing to her's for just a second before she lets go of the fact I completely screwed her over. 

I'm about to pull away when she pushes her tongue past my lips, her nails running over my back through my shirt as her legs wrap around my hips, one of her hands in my knotted hair.

As always, I end up eating her like a starved pervert, relishing in the sounds of her moans and gasps. 

The truth is, she may hate me, but I'm good at getting her off and she knows it.

Once she comes and we start getting ourselves together to go inside, I look over at her. 

"So, are we good?" I ask her, oh, so fucking stupidly, and she blinks at me. 

"What?" 

"Are we good?" 

She catches on to what I mean, and rubs her lips together. 

"Nikki, you could fuck me into oblivion, which you can't because I'm never letting you fucking touch me again, and we still wouldn't be good. Not even close to 'good'. You can't have an affair with my friend and then expect everything to be good just because we fooled around while you were stoned out of your mind." She snaps and I roll my jaw as she gets out and slams the door, stomping to the back entrance of the venue. 

For the first time I feel the sting of rejection. 

Is this how groupies feel? 

I never thought once about getting head, leaving them in the limo and going on about my business. 

Anger boils in me, Sikki chomping at the bit. 

That selfish bitch! 

I get out and go after her. 

I don't know what the fuck I'm gonna say to her, but I'm mad. 

"How dare you use me to get your rocks off and then toss me aside?", no, because I've done that to her a couple times...but that's because she's into it. 

I swear she comes harder when I randomly come up behind her and just start going at it because she knows I'm just using her to get off and then leave her wherever I stopped her, and go out right after and wouldn't think twice about it. 

But me? I'm so used to her looking at me like I'm God while I have my full attention on making her feel good, and she has the audacity to get off on my face and then kick me to the curb and tell me I'm never touching her again?! 

I decided it wasn't worth the fist fight it would inevitably turn into by the time I got inside, but and looking back, she had every reason to get me horny and then swear off ever letting me get near her again. It was petty, but smart. And despite having sex one last time not long after that instance, the point was still made clear. For the first time in our relationship, the acceptance of sexual advances didn't take the place of forgiveness.

[alarawriting]

52 Project #27: The Pale Bro

Five friends drove up the mountain into the forest, where the vacation cabin waited for them. It was their senior year of college, so it wouldn’t be long before they’d be graduating and going their separate ways, and who knew when they’d all be able to hang out together again? So they’d decided that this year, instead of going on spring break someplace where there were a ton of other people, they’d spend break together in a cabin in the woods, because there was no possible way that that could go wrong.

They were just five totally ordinary college guys. Steve, a white dude with brown hair who loved video games and playing guitar; Trevor, a black dude with short hair who was on track to graduate magna cum laude and had already been accepted at a top medical school; Harrison, an outgoing, short, red-haired white dude who played soccer, but not, like, at career athlete level or anything; Evan, an Asian dude who kept his hair in a long ponytail, and whose family owned the cabin, who was planning on taking a year off after graduation to backpack around Asia and had sold it to his parents as an exploration of his heritage; and the Pale Bro, a twelve-foot tall dude with paper-white skin whose fingernails were like long razor blades and who was completely covered with eyes and mouths, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, cut-off shorts that would have been nearly pants on any other guy, and a pair of Vans on his feet. Just five ordinary young fellows, like anyone you might know.

Steve was driving the minivan, kinda wishing it was his dad’s SUV because of the effort of getting a minivan up the slope, but his dad’s SUV was in a different state and besides, it wouldn’t have had room for the Pale Bro. The minivan was the kind where you could put down the back row of seats to expand the cargo capacity, and the Pale Bro had laid out a thick sleeping-bag style blanket on top of their suitcases and was laying on them now, curled sideways because there was no dimension where he could stretch out in the van. Must be rough for him, Steve imagined, always having to bend down or curl up to fit into buildings and vehicles with his bros. He never complained about it, though. He was a great friend.

“How much farther is this place?” Harrison asked. “I gotta piss like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’ve been unfortunately next to you at the urinals,” Trevor said. “I’d believe it.”

Steve checked the GPS. “Shit. The GPS has just decided to get the vapors because it’s up too high. It’s telling me I’m literally in the middle of nowhere. Like, look at this.” He showed the screen to Evan. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t even drawing the road.”

“Don’t worry about it, I can guide you in from here,” Evan said. “Just stay on the road another 20 minutes or so.”

With a voice that rumbled like the sound of tectonic plates grinding together and the hiss of static from the birth of the universe behind it, the Pale Bro conveyed that there had better be some fucking food at the cabin, because he was starving.

“You and me both, buddy,” Trevor said.

“We all just got Burger King like, two hours ago,” Steve complained.

“Yeah, well, me and Pale are tall dudes. We need more food than you.” Trevor smirked.

“There should be food, I had a grocery delivery scheduled for earlier today and one of my parents’ employees was supposed to swing by the place, pick it up and put it in the fridge.”

“There’s a fridge at this cabin?” Harrison asked.

Evan looked at him. “Yeah, dumbass, you think I’d have suggested coming here if there was no fridge? There’s running water, too. It even gets hot if you run it long enough.”

“Well, excuse me for not being so rich I can afford to go to a cabin in the woods, ever, before now.”

“What else has it got?” Trevor asked.

“Well, there’s three bedrooms, one of which has a king-sized bed and the other two have bunk beds. I figure, Pale Bro gets the big bed and we break up into two’s and do the roommate thing. There’s a sofa bed too, in case someone really can’t stand having a roommate. We don’t have a washer or dryer, but if you only brought one pair of underpants and it’s getting really rank, we’ve got detergent and a clothesline so you can wash them in the sink. There’s a dishwasher.”

“I would have put in a washer and dryer before I put in a dishwasher, personally,” Steve said.

“Yeah, well, my mom had a different opinion. Anyway, it’s camping in the woods. It’s not supposed to be just like if we were at home.”

“I call top bunk!” Harrison said.

“There’s two top bunks. Both rooms have bunk beds.”

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice like a Gregorian chant of nightmares that he wanted to know if there was a bathroom in the master bedroom, because that shit would be sweet.

“Naah, man, sorry,” Evan said. “But there is one of those really deep claw-foot bathtubs that you like.”

Like the rumbling of an oncoming avalanche, the Pale Bro opined that that was excellent.

***

“I don’t believe this shit.”

They had just disembarked, the Pale Bro in the rear bringing his own suitcase and the beer cooler, which was the size of a mini-fridge, and everyone else dragging their suitcases in… except for Evan, who had gone directly to the kitchen without bringing in his own stuff yet. He came stomping out. “Joe never showed up, the bastard! I’m totally having my dad fire his ass.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked.

“I mean that food order never showed up. So we have canned food, and boxed food, but we don’t have anything perishable. No bread, no lunchmeat, no eggs, no bacon, no orange juice, none of that shit.” He sighed. “I’m gonna have to drive down into town myself to get food, and we just got here.”

“Hey, man, I can still drive the car,” Steve said. “You just need to tell me where to go.”

“Steve, you’ve been driving for 6 hours, you’re probably wiped. I can drive,” Trevor said. “It’s the least I could do with Evan buying our food.”

“Yeah, but you bought the beer, man,” Evan said. “So maybe Harrison needs to drive.”

“Uh, hey, before anyone drives anywhere, maybe you should call and find out if your parents even know where that Joe guy who never showed up is, and if he’s all right?” Harrison called from outside.

“Why?”

“Just… everyone come take a look at this!”

Everyone went outside and congregated around Harrison’s find, which was a roughly humanoid, but clawed, tread that was at least three times the size of a normal footprint. Experimentally the Pale Bro put his own massive foot into the tread. Harrison whistled. The footprint was about 25% bigger than the Pale Bro’s.

“Dude. What is that? Is that a bear?” Harrison asked.

Trevor shook his head. “Those are sneaker treads, Har. Bears don’t wear sneakers.”

In a voice that was the perfect auditory personification of the Zalgo font, the Pale Bro suggested that it looked like one of his cousins was back on its bullshit again.

“Goddamn,” Evan said. “That’s a big fellow.”

“I think maybe if we go into town we should all go,” Steve said.

“We’ve just been driving all this time, though,” Evan said. “I wanted to relax, crack a cold one, put on some MP3s. We don’t get Internet worth shit out here but I’ve got a huge music library on the stereo’s hard drive.”

The Pale Bro opined that before anyone drove anywhere, maybe he had better find his cousin and make it clear that if his cousin touched any of his friends he would shove its head so far up its ass it would be blinking shit out of its 27 eyes for a month.

“That… sounds reasonable,” Trevor said. “Since we don’t know what happened to Joe. We can hunker down here and wait for you to get back.”

“I’m pretty sure I got instant just add water pancake mix,” Evan said. “And my mom stocked this place with crappy dehydrated chicken pieces like the kind doomsday preppers buy. I could make a shitty chicken soup, we’ve got bouillon and noodles. Oh, and there’s a few cans of chili. Canned stuff is shit but I could maybe perk it up with some spices, some extra beans… put some rice in the cooker, I bet my mom left rice here, she buys like 100 pound bags of rice.”

Like the sound of Jupiter hovering in orbit above, rotating ponderously, the Pale Bro agreed that some canned chili with extra spices sounded pretty good considering how fucking hungry he was, and as soon as he found his asshole cousin he’d be back to eat with the rest of his bros. He also reminded them to save him some beer.

“Dude!” Steve laughed. “We’ve got three keggers’ worth in that cooler! There will be plenty of beer for you.”

Evan called his parents as the Pale Bro left the house, and reported back, somewhat gray-faced. “They said Joe never called in to say he got to the house. He reported picking up the groceries, he was headed up here, and then nada.”

“Oh, well, then, you work on the chili,” Trevor said, “and me and the rest of the guys are gonna lock up all the windows and doors and put someone on watch for when the Pale Bro gets back. You don’t have any guns up here, by any chance, do you?”

“Nope, my parents aren’t really hunters,” Evan said.

“Well, I’ve seen your kitchen at home, I know what kind of equipment your mom likes to stock. We’ll have plenty of sharp knives, I’m betting.”

“Yeah.”

And so as Evan attempted to turn six cans of canned chili into something his bros would find edible, and the Pale Bro stalked through the forest on the mountaintop looking for his asshole cousin, the other three made sure everything was locked up, that the car keys were secure, and that there were wicked cooking knives within easy reach, but not line of sight from the outside, of every door. Just like ordinary bros do, every day.

***

The Pale Bro stalked through the woods. Now, you’d think that being twelve feet tall and having a foot easily the size of a car tire’s diameter would make it hard to walk through a thickly wooded forest with plenty of underbrush, but the Bro’s long, skinny arms and legs could easily step over bushes and shrubs, and could pivot in directions that didn’t seem to quite exist within three-dimensional space. So he had very little difficulty making his way through the dense forest.

In the beginning, he was tracking the large treads that may or may not have been left by his asshole cousin, but the trail disappeared as it crossed a small creek. In a tone that sounded like the anthropomorphic personification of the trumpets of Jericho, the Pale Bro groaned, recognizing that he’d lost the trail and would have to search for it.

And so he went up the creek, and down the creek, and out from the creek, and up the trees around the creek, looking for any sign of his cousin… until he heard, in the distance, human voices.

Human female voices.

He stumbled through the woods, suddenly much clumsier than he’d been, following the sound of girls, until he half-fell out of the treeline and ended up in a clearing around another cabin, like Evan’s but bigger. The sounds were coming from around the corner of the cabin. The Pale Bro slid forward, long long legs making long long strides through the yard around the cabin, until a hot tub with a wooden deck came into view. The hot tub was on, and populated by five smokin’ hot girls.

There was a fair-skinned blonde girl, in a skimpy blue bikini that showed off all her curves, whose wavy hair floated angel-like around her head, improbably given that she was in a hot tub. There was a short, delicate black girl with hair in very wet braids and a soft, beautiful face, wearing a candy pink bikini. There was an Indian girl with long hair and an athletic build, with a red bindi mark on her forehead and a pale turquoise one-piece bathing suit with a little skirt, sitting on the deck and kicking her feet slowly in the water. A red-haired white girl with tan Mediterranean skin, tight curls, and a bright white bikini that stood out against her tan, had turned away from the tub and was looking directly at the Pale Bro, a slight smile on her face. The fifth girl was green and scaly, with webbed hands and golden eyes with nictating membranes; she didn’t have hair, but she had betta-like, beautifully colored fins on her head that looked hair-like.

All of them were absolutely gorgeous.

The blonde girl shrieked and ducked into the tub; the black girl bounced and climbed out of the tub, a big grin on her face. “Hi there, stranger!” she yelled from the rail around the deck. “Why don’t you come over and have a beer with us?”

The Pale Bro admitted in a tone like the creaking of an ancient rusted machine at the base of an abandoned windmill that that sounded awesome.

The green girl rolled her eyes. The Indian girl gave the black girl a questioning look. “Are you sure, Kayla?”

“Come on, Nandi,” the red-haired girl said. “I think he’s cute.”

The blonde girl came back up. “Are you inviting him over?” she asked, sounding horrified. “What if he’s a psycho killer?”

“Oh, right,” the green girl said. “He’s pale and tall and has eyes all over his body so he must be a psycho killer. Racist much?”

“No! He’s just a strange dude, that’s all! You have to watch out for strange dudes!”

The Pale Bro explained in the voice of a broken subwoofer booming at outdoor concert sound levels underwater that he didn’t really want to scare any of the girls and he’d go if they didn’t want him here.

The green girl leaned her elbows on the edge of the hot tub. “Forget Ashlee, she’s just paranoid.”

“You didn’t want him coming over either, Y’lehna,” Nandi said quietly.

“I just knew that if Kayla invited him over, we’re gonna lose Rhiannon for the rest of the night,” Y’lehna muttered.

The red-haired girl, presumably Rhiannon, was smiling broadly at the Pale Bro now. “Hey there,” she said. “We’ve got hard cider and hard lemonade, Bud, Corona and a couple of local microbrews. What’s your pleasure?”

In a voice that was actually surprisingly normal-sounding for once, the Pale Bro said he’d have whatever Rhiannon was having, which turned out to be hard cider.

He clambered up onto the hot tub deck, pulled off his sneakers, and soaked his feet in the hot tub, which barely came up to his knees.

“So what are you doing around here? You don’t live near here, do you?” Kayla asked.

And so the Pale Bro explained that he and his bros had decided to spend their last spring break of college together, in a cabin in the woods, because once graduation came they might never see each other again, and certainly even if they made excuses to get together on occasion, they’d see each other a lot less.

“That’s so sweet!” Kayla said.

“We’re juniors,” Rhiannon said. “Except Ashlee, she’s a sophomore, and Y’lehna’s technically a senior but she’s planning on doing a fifth year. But we decided to hang out here because Ashlee’s parents just put in a hot tub.”

“Hot tub!” Kayla sang out, and slid back into the tub. She was maybe just a little bit drunk.

As it turned out, they all went to the same university, and Y’lehna and the Pale Bro chatted for a bit about sports. “I tried out for the swim team,” Y’lehna said, “but when they found out I had gills, they disqualified me because apparently part of the point of the sport is that you are only allowed to breathe gaseous oxygen?”

The Pale Bro commiserated, as he hadn’t even tried trying out for the basketball team like he had once dreamed of, realizing that they would never allow someone who was taller than the hoop to play.

***

“I don’t know, though,” Ashlee, who had warmed up to the Pale Bro once another hard lemonade was in her hand, said. She was lying in a deck chair rather than in the tub. “Normally I love this place, and the tub’s great, but something just feels really creepy today.”

“You’ve been on edge since we got here,” Nandi – whose full name turned out to be Nandini, but she insisted that the Pale Bro should use her nickname – agreed.

The Pale Bro was thus reminded that his bros were expecting him to track down what might be a killer who may or may not have murdered Joe, the guy who was supposed to bring in the groceries, and also that he was very hungry and the hard cider wasn’t doing him any favors on an empty stomach. He pulled his feet out of the tub and confessed, in a voice like the grinding of the gears of the machinery that runs the universe, that his bros had sent him out to find a monster – he didn’t mention that the monster was probably his cousin – who might have killed someone, and also that dinner was waiting for him back at the cabin.

“Oh, you should bring them over!” Kayla said cheerfully.

“Are they all like you?” Rhiannon asked in a tone that might be considered “sultry” by anyone not as oblivious as the Pale Bro.

The Pale Bro shook his head and admitted that his bros were all much shorter than he was.

Rhiannon put a hand on his arm. “Well, that’s too bad, but I guess one handsome, tall fellow in a group is all I can expect, right?”

The Pale Bro looked at Rhiannon’s hand like it was an inexplicable glob that might be ice cream and possibly should be washed off, but equally possibly should be licked up.

Y’lehna said, “Why don’t you bring them over? They might be cute.”

“Yeah,” Nandi said, “we can’t all fit in the hot tub at once, but didn’t you say you had four friends back at your cabin?”

“That makes five,” Ashlee said, “and there’s five of us!”

“Also,” Nandi said, “we’ve still got, like, five pizzas in the house.”

This made the decision for the Pale Bro. He took the girls up on their offer of a couple of slices of pizza – they were cold, but he didn’t mind – and then headed back to the cabin to let his bros know about the girls’ offer.

***

The Pale Bro knocked on the window of the cabin, which apparently gave everyone inside heart attacks, even though he’d just meant to warn them to open the door for him. “Jesus, Pale,” Evan complained. “There’s a door.”

Within a few minutes – and after dropping his hard cider bottle in the recycling bin, because Evan’s family were big on recycling and the Pale Bro wanted to be polite – he had explained the situation to his bros.

“Let me get this straight,” Evan said. “You didn’t find any sign of Joe, you didn’t find your cousin or any other kind of monster or killer, and you want us to leave and go hiking through the woods to go hang out at a cabin full of strangers?”

When Evan phrased it that way, the Pale Bro admitted that it didn’t sound like a great idea, but on the other hand, there were five incredibly hot girls, plus a hot tub, plus pizza.

“Now let’s talk about this,” Trevor said. “Has anyone considered that if there’s really a psycho killer or a monster loose in the woods, those five girls might be in a lot more danger than we are? Maybe we should go over there to help protect them.”

“Yeah! And we could bring some of our beers, and Evan’s chili and rice—” Harrison suggested.

“Fuck no, I’m not making anybody else have to eat this chili,” Evan said. “It’s shit. It’s just the best I could do with the supplies I’ve got.” He sighed. “Too bad I can’t bring my tunes.”

“We need to be careful about locking everything up,” Steve said. “We really don’t want to come home tomorrow morning and find the psycho killer waiting for us here.”

“Or a gaggle of rabid raccoons,” Evan said. “That’s a thing around here.”

“Did any of you guys bring condoms?” Harrison asked. “Because I didn’t think we’d be seeing any action this weekend, so I didn’t bring any…”

Trevor chuckled. “We haven’t even met these girls, Har. Aren’t you jumping the gun a little?”

“Hey, I like to be prepared.”

“I’ve got a handful in my wallet, but I don’t think I’ve got five of them,” Steve said.

The Pale Bro pointed out with laughter like the rolling of thunder in a distant cavern that probably none of Steve’s condoms would fit him anyhow, so it would be fine.

“You don’t have to eat that chili, man,” Evan said, observing that the Pale Bro had dumped half a rice cooker’s worth of rice onto a plate and then all the rest of the chili that the other bros hadn’t eaten on top of that, and was currently chowing down. “It’s shit. I admit it. And you said you had some pizza.”

The Pale Bro declared that he was too hungry to care what it tasted like, that two slices of pizza weren’t nearly enough, and besides, it tasted fine to him.

So the five bros armed themselves with the sharp knives from Evan’s mom’s kitchen just in case they ran into a psycho killer along the way, locked all the doors and windows to the cabin and the doors to the car, and the Pale Bro carried the beer cooler as he led the way back to the house with the five hot girls.

***

It wasn’t particularly easy for the Pale Bro to retrace his steps through the woods; it’d been just short of sunset when he’d found the girls, and now it was full dark. His myriad eyes could see well in the dark, of course, but his bros couldn’t, so he had to watch out for them, and they were also a lot less flexible, and tall, than he was. Also, he hadn’t been toting a beer cooler the last time he came through here.

It didn’t help that his bros were very jumpy, freaking every time a night bird called or a twig broke loudly. The Pale Bro got it, he did – there might be a psycho killer in the woods, or a monster, or his cousin who was also a monster, and they couldn’t see as well as he could, or defend themselves. But this was just ridiculous. In a voice that was an auditory personification of the concept of dread, he suggested that they stop being such big pussies and concentrate on not tripping before they accidentally stabbed each other trying to brandish knives at random bushes.

“Yo, man, we can’t all be twelve feet tall,” Harrison said, sounding pissed but also still really anxious.

In a voice that was best described by some kind of metaphor implying a deep and scary sound that hopefully hasn’t been used already in this story, the Pale Bro offered to give Harrison a piggyback ride.

Trevor said, “Not in the middle of trees, man, you’d brain him. Walk right into a tree branch and knock him off.”

“Yeah, I gotta turn that down,” Harrison said.

“You smell that?” Steve said. “Smells like someone’s firing up a grill somewhere. I can smell the charcoal.”

“Did the girls have a grill?” Trevor asked.

The Pale Bro admitted that to the best of his knowledge, they did not, but on the other hand they had Hawaiian pizza. This, of course, triggered the old argument, where Steve and Harrison insisted that pineapple did not belong on pizza, and Evan and the Pale Bro insisted that pineapple on pizza was quite valid. The argument continued, with Trevor’s exhortations to show some common sense and save the argument until they were not walking through a dark forest that might contain a psycho killer going unheeded, until Steve accidentally fell in the creek because he couldn’t see it, and in the process lost one of Evan’s mom’s good cooking knives.

However, the Pale Bro mused, this was a potentially good sign because he’d found the girls while walking alongside the creek. So the bros walked alongside the creek, Steve muttering that these girls had better be hot after all this, until they heard the sound of female human voices, exactly like the Pale Bro had had before.

They entered the clearing, observed the very large cabin, Evan making comments like “I bet it’s a bitch to keep clean, ten to one that thing’s not sanitary” because he was jealous that the cabin was bigger than his family’s, and then around the corner to observe the very hot girls, who were all still very hot even though some of them had pizza sauce smeared around their lips.

“Well, hell-o, ladies!” Harrison said, trying to be suave and cool, and failing miserably.

The Pale Bro wondered, in the voice like the echoes of a rockslide in a canyon, if there was any of the pineapple pizza left, because unfortunately he was still hungry. He gestured at his very large body somewhat self-deprecatingly.

“Hi, guys!” Kayla, who was obviously the group’s ambassador to guests, said, with possibly more bubbliness in her voice than was currently in the hot tub. “I’m Kayla, and this is Nandini, and over there in the blue bikini is Ashlee, whose cabin this is – I mean, really it’s her family’s cabin—”

“I get it,” Evan said. “My family’s got a cabin too, that’s where we’ve been hanging. We just got in today. My name’s Evan.”

“Cool!” Kayla said. “That’s Y’lehna in the lawn chair with the wine cooler, and Rhiannon went to the bathroom but I’m sure—”

“I’m back!” Rhiannon announced. Trevor’s eyes widened and then turned heart-shaped. Metaphorically.

“And I’m Trevor. Hello, ladies,” he said, sounding much cooler when he said it than Harrison had.

“I’m Harrison, and this is Steve, and he’s kinda shy!” Harrison punctuated this by shoving his kinda shy friend forward.

“Uh, hi,” Steve said. “I kind of fell in the creek on my way here?”

Kayla’s eyes went wide. “Oh, wow! Hey, Ashlee, do you mind if I bring him inside and show him the shower?”

“Long as he takes his shoes off,” Ashlee said, coming to the deck railing. Steve saw her angelic hair, beautiful skin, and ample charms shown off by the rather small bikini, and fell in love.

“Oh, definitely. I’ll definitely do that. I – yeah. Thanks a lot for letting me use the shower, I’m all covered in mud. Which you can see. Because you’re standing there, looking at me covered in mud.”

Kayla laughed. “Oh, yeah, let’s get you cleaned up!” She took Steve’s hand with surprising alacrity and lack of reluctance, given that he was covered in mud.

Evan said, “The guy who was supposed to bring over the groceries never showed, and I made some chili and rice out of canned stuff for my friends, but it was kinda shitty. Pale asked if there was any more of the pineapple pizza? I could definitely go for a slice if you’re offering.”

Ashlee lit up. “Oh! Sure! I can take you in to get some pizza!”

Rhiannon had by then walked over to the Pale Bro, and put her hand on his arm again. “You know, I could definitely go for some more pizza myself,” she purred.

Meanwhile, Harrison was trying to chat up Y’lehna, and also strip to his boxers so he could get in the hot tub, without looking like he was doing it in a creepy way. “So, where’re you from?”

“Massachusetts,” Y’lehna said, lying back in the lawn chair and wistfully gazing at Trevor, who had followed Rhiannon, the Pale Bro, and Ashlee in for pizza. “A little town called Innsmouth, on the coast. Little more than half an hour north of Boston.” Y’lehna had legs, but they were covered with scales and her feet were large and webbed.

“Cool. I’m from New Jersey, but, you know, like the south end. Not the part that’s all gritty like Newark and Jersey City.” Harrison slid into the hot tub. “Oh, man, this is nice. You wanna get back in?”

“After I finish my wine cooler, maybe. Ashlee doesn’t like it when we eat or drink in the tub.”

Evan was the first to come back from the pizza hunt, carrying a beer and two slices and had actually had swimming trunks at the cabin – they hadn’t planned on going swimming on this trip, but Evan kept some clothes here all the time, and he’d already changed into them and then put his clothes on over. He stripped to his bathing suit and then went and got into the hot tub near Nandini. “Hey.”

Nandini barely noticed; she was too busy looking at Harrison. Evan had to say it again to get her attention. She turned and looked at him. “Oh, you can’t eat those in the tub. Or drink the beer.”

“What if I sit back from the tub and just soak my feet, until I’m done with the food?”

Nandini shrugged. “I guess that’d be okay, but you’d have to ask Ashlee. Can I ask you something?”

Evan beamed. “Sure! Whatever you want!”

She nodded her head toward Harrison. “Does your friend have a girlfriend?”

Evan’s first reaction was dismay – Nandini seemed to not even notice him as a man, and was just making eyes at Harrison, who was obviously captivated by Y’lehna. Then he narrowed his eyes and decided to make problems on purpose. “Oh, sorry, Harrison is gay.” Actually, Steve was bi and the rest of them were straight – Evan thought, anyway, unsure about the Pale Bro and if he even had a sexuality, but he did seem to like to look at girls.

Nandini sighed. “Aren’t they always.”

Ashlee was the next to come back. She sat next to Evan. “You know, if you want to get into the hot tub and still eat your food, I normally have a rule about that but I could let it go this time. Just as long as you keep the actual food and drink out of the hot tub so it doesn’t make everything gross.” She smiled at Evan.

Evan smiled at her, because it was always good to smile at your host, and it was also always good to smile at a pretty girl, and Ashlee was both. “Thanks,” he said, not planning to take her up on it because what if he dropped the pizza?, and then turned back to Nandini. “What’re you majoring in?”

“Ugh, I hate having to explain it to people,” Nandini said. “It’s… complicated. It’s a discipline that’s part economic theory, part psychology, part sociology and part anthropology. Basically, I’m majoring in the question of why do people do dumb things when they’d be better off doing smart ones, and how that impacts our understanding of economics.”

“That sounds really interesting,” said Evan, who had quit his business major because he was bored out of his mind by economics. “I’m doing Asia studies. Yeah, it’s a cliché.” He’d gone into Asia studies after he quit his business major because it was the only thing he thought his parents would let him get by with if he refused to study business. Some kind of “Mom, Dad, I really want to get in touch with our heritage and understand the culture of my grandparents” bullshit. Also, statistically you were more likely to find a girl who considers Asian guys hot in Asia studies than any other major, he suspected.

“That’s pretty cool!” Ashlee said. “Which part of Asia is your family from? China, Korea…?”

“China, originally,” Evan, whose real name was Haoran, but who’d been going by Evan since second grade, said. His pizza finished, he slid down into the tub and turned back to Nandini.  “So, we came over here to warn you – and maybe help you fight if it comes to it – but we’re worried there might be a killer or something in the woods?”

“Omigod, really?” Ashlee asked, eyes wide with terror.

“Why do you think that?” Nandini asked, seeming completely calm.

“Well, my parents had an employee, Joe, buy food for my cabin. He was supposed to drop it off… but he never showed up, and he never called my parents, and he’s not answering his cell. Meanwhile, we saw this absolutely huge tread in the dirt, and the Pale Bro thinks it might be his cousin.”

“Yeah, he told us all that,” Nandini said. “Except for the part about it maybe being his cousin.”

“So, a monster?” Y’lehna asks. “Because there’s a difference between a psycho killer, who’s human, and a monster, who isn’t. You don’t know what the monster’s capable of, but when you see them, you know they’re a monster.”

“Yeah, but just because they look like a monster doesn’t mean anything about what they’re like!” Harrison said. “The Pale Bro looks like a monster, but he’s a really great guy!”

“I’m guessing his cousin sucks, though,” Y’lehna said.

“Well, we don’t know his cousin,” Harrison said, somewhat diplomatically.

“Do you really think there’s a killer?” Ashlee asked, getting into the hot tub right next to Evan – and inconveniently, between him and Nandini. “But you’ll protect us, right?”

“Uh, some of us can protect ourselves…” Nandini said.

Evan got back out of the tub so he could see Nandini more clearly without Ashlee in the way. “Absolutely. I’m not trying to say that we’re offering our protection because, you know, we’re guys and you’re girls and we think we’re tougher than you. That’s not it at all; I bet most of you could kick my ass.” He did not actually think this; Evan was in pretty good shape, since he was preparing to backpack all over Asia next year if he got the chance, and also, he bicycled a lot. It was pretty clear to him, though, that Nandini was invested in thinking of herself as someone who could protect herself, and who knew? Maybe she was a martial arts master or a crack shot. “But we figure, there’s safety in numbers. Plus, if it is the Pale Bro’s cousin, he can get it to back the hell off.”

“Good point,” Nandini said.

At this point there was a glass-shattering, horrible screech, and then something, some unknown creature moving so fast it was a blur, leapt out of the hot tub and charged directly at Evan, Nandini and Ashlee. All three of them screamed, as it slashed bright pain across Evan’s legs, right above his knees.

And then Ashlee started cracking up, as the horrible assailant stopped at the edge of the deck and began washing itself vigorously. “Phenyl, you dumbass. I know you like to sleep on the tub when we have it covered, but couldn’t you see we have it open and it’s full of water?”

Evan’s heart was still pounding, but now that he could see the creature that had slashed gashes into his thighs, he took deep breaths to calm himself down. “That’s your cat?”

“Yeah, her name is Phenylephrine and she’s a dumbass. She catches rats, though. One time she chased off a raccoon who’d gotten into the trash.” Ashlee attempted to pick her cat up, but the almost-entirely-black-except-for-white-bib cat jumped down off the deck, apparently not sufficiently recovered from her ordeal to tolerate interacting with humans. Evan decided not to ask why the cat was named after a decongestant.

“So what are you majoring in?” Harrison asked Y’lehna, trying to come across as casual. “I’m doing liberal arts, you know? Just a little of everything.”

“Shakespearean literature,” Y’lehna said.

“Oh, wow! You know about the theory that he didn’t write his own plays, right?”

Y’lehna rolled her eyes. “Of course I do. It’s bullshit.”

And as she explained all the reasons why she thought the theory was bullshit, Harrison listened to her raptly with imaginary hearts in his eyes.

***

Steve was deeply grateful to Kayla for taking him in to find Ashlee’s shower. The cabin had wooden floors, thankfully, so the gunk still dripping off his body could be easily cleaned. It made sense – it was a cabin in the woods, after all – but Steve had some vague idea of what rich people houses were like from visiting Evan, and carpet played a big role in his mental image of a rich person abode.

He was less impressed with the towel Kayla found him, after he came out of the shower. It was very… brief. Bigger than a hand towel, but not by much, it covered the territory it was required to cover and not very much else.

“I hate to ask, but does Ashlee have any brothers or other family members who might be around my size? This towel is kinda…”

Kayla laughed. “I think you look cute in it, but yeah, I can see why you’d want something bigger!” She stuck her head in the kitchen, where Ashlee was serving pizza to Evan, Rhiannon, Trevor, and the Pale Bro. “Hey, Ashlee! Does Hunter have any swimming trunks or t-shirts here?”

“You can check. He usually uses the middle bedroom.”

Steve called out, “I can have them cleaned and returned tomorrow, I just… my clothes are all muddy… I don’t want to impose, but this towel’s kind of tiny…”

“No problem, I don’t even care if you keep Hunter’s stuff. It would serve him right for being a douche,” Ashlee said.

Kayla checked, and came back with a NASCAR t-shirt and a pair of swimming trunks with grotesquely grinning emojis all over it. “Sorry, I hope it fits! It’s all he had!”

“No problem, NASCAR’s cool,” Steve said. The sum total of his knowledge about NASCAR was that it had something to do with cars, probably, and that guys who drank warm crappy beer and drove pickup trucks liked it, and that was all. But if Ashlee’s family was into it, maybe it was worth checking out.

He and Kayla walked into the kitchen, now that he was vaguely decent. “OMG I am so sorry,” Ashlee said. “That shirt is awful. Is that really the only one Hunter had?”

Steve shrugged, understanding more about Ashlee’s relationship to her brother’s interests. “It’s not like I’m into NASCAR or anything, but beggars can’t be choosers, right?”

The Pale Bro chose this moment to inform everyone in a voice that echoed like a portent of doom that there was no more beer in Ashlee’s fridge, and this was a problem, because he and his bros had brought beer for 5 people for three days, but now they had ten people, so what if they ran out?

Steve privately thought it was good that the Pale Bro wasn’t majoring in anything that needed math. Ten people would burn through the beer for five people at twice the rate, but twice the rate of three days would be a day and a half, more than enough time to go get more beer, unless the psycho killer or monster slashed their tires or something.

Kayla spoke up. “I’ve got more in the trunk of my car, but I parked kind of crappy.”

“Well, no matter how crappy the parking job was, more beer’s always a good thing,” Trevor said.

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was like the crackling of atoms fusing together in the unfathomable heat of the sun that he’d be happy to go get them out of Kayla’s car.

“Uh… no, I think Steve should do it,” Kayla said. “Because he’s shorter, and it’s a really crappy parking job. Trust me, you will bonk your head on trees about six times just trying to reach my car.”

“Did you park it in the woods?” Trevor asked.

“Um, sorta… I was kinda excited about getting here and waving to my friends and I accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake and I ended up in the woods… yeah.” She looked up at Steve forlornly. “I’m such an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot,” Steve said, because it was always a good idea to tell a pretty girl who said she was an idiot that in fact she was not.

In a voice like the echoes of a NASCAR race going on over one’s head because one was in a sewer system under the track, the Pale Bro offered to help Kayla get her car out of the woods, if it was stuck there.

“That’s really sweet of you,” Rhiannon purred. “Probably better to do it in daylight, though. There’s a cliff drop near there, and you don’t want to accidentally slip over the edge.”

“Or worse, drop the car,” Steve said, and laughed. Kayla laughed with him.

The Pale Bro expressed to Kayla that if there was a cliff face near there, then he was very glad that she hadn’t accidentally driven off the edge, because that would have been bad.

“Yeah,” Kayla said, “but it all worked out so no harm done, right? Unless, like, I punctured the gas tank with a tree branch or something. That would definitely be bad.”

Steve, Trevor, Rhiannon and the Pale Bro all agreed that that would definitely be the case.

***

After Steve and Kayla had left to go to Kayla’s car to get more beer, Rhiannon asked the Pale Bro what his major was.

“I’m pre-med,” Trevor inserted, not actually having been asked.

“Mm, nice. I’m trying to become a physicist, myself. What about you?” She repeated the question in the Pale Bro’s direction.

In a voice that was muffled and full of pizza, the Pale Bro conveyed that he hadn’t heard the question, sorry.

“I just wanted to know what your major was,” she said.

The Pale Bro confessed that he was majoring in gender studies, having decided that hotel management was not really a good career path for him.

“Oh, really!” Rhiannon brightened. “You don’t see a lot of guys majoring in gender studies! You must be very secure in your masculinity.” She said this as someone who seemed very secure in the Pale Bro’s masculinity, herself, as she pressed against him.

The Pale Bro mumbled in a voice that really didn’t sound all that different from anyone else’s mumbling that he just didn’t like how society treated women, and added that his mother raised him to respect and look up to women. He confided that she had torn apart giant megafauna with her bare claws and fed them to her brood of spawn while insisting on table manners, and that he couldn’t imagine any job more difficult than being the primary caretaker of children. Children, he admitted, scared him.

“Oh, yes, the little rugrats can totally bring the chaos,” Rhiannon laughed.

The Pale Bro clarified that actually chaos was perfectly fine by him and the natural state of all things that the universe must someday return to; it was their high-pitched screechy voices that really bothered him.

“I never knew that,” Trevor said. “Weird, what you learn about people. Rhiannon,which kind of physics are you concentrating on? Like, space, or quantum, or what?”

“Haven’t really narrowed it down like that, it’s going to depend on what grad school accepts me and which programs I can get into,” Rhiannon said. To the Pale Bro she said, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk? It’s really nice out.”

“It is, but there might be some kind of killer or monster in the woods,” Trevor reminded her. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to go wandering off by yourself?”

She rolled her eyes and gestured at the Pale Bro. “I’m pretty sure that Pale here would be able to protect me if anything came up,” she said.

The Pale Bro confessed in a voice that echoed like the infrasound rumble of the collapse of a concrete building, but an embarrassed and regretful tone, that actually he wanted to wait right here, because he wanted more beer and also his feet hurt.

“Well, why don’t we go back to the hot tub and let you soak your feet for a bit?” Rhiannon asked.

“That sounds like a great idea,” Trevor said. “We’ve got our own beer cooler out there, remember? You brought it over.”

This was true, the Pale Bro admitted, but he couldn’t eat or drink in the hot tub, and he wanted another slice of Hawaiian pizza if there was any.

“Oh, but you’re a big fellow,” Rhiannon said. “You could totally sit back from the hot tub and dangle your feet in it while you’re eating, and you wouldn’t be close enough to the tub to bother Ashlee.”

In that case, the Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like the rumbling of a train full of dead bodies, he was all for the hot tub, because that shit sounded great.

***

The group joined back up around the hot tub, all except for Kayla and Steve, who were still in the woods, ostensibly getting beer out of Kayla’s car. Ashlee had brought out chips and pretzels, which, she said, were not to be eaten within five feet of the hot tub. This meant that the Pale Bro could soak his feet while he snacked, as promised, but no one else could actually eat near the tub.

“Come on, that’s not fair,” Y’lehna, who was considerably more drunk than she had been earlier in the evening and probably really needed to fill her stomach with chips and pretzels, complained. “I’ve been good all night but now I’m starving, and you know my skin needs to be moisturized.”

“I keep offering to let you try some of my Oil of Olay,” Ashlee mumbled.

“If I wanted to cover myself in something oily, I’d use fish oil, it’s traditional around my hometown,” Y’lehna said sharply. “I wanna be in water. Like, H20.” She looked up at Trevor, pleadingly. “Do you think I’m asking too much? I don’t think I’m asking too much.”

“I think you should definitely eat something,” Trevor said.

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask,” offered Harrison eagerly.

“But I don’t want to get any food in the hot tub,” Ashlee whined. “It’d be gross, and we’d have to drain it and clean it…”

“Well, I want to be in the water and I want goddamn pretzels, is that too much? Is that really too much?” Y’lehna yelled, making Ashlee quail.

At that point they all heard the sound of clanging and shattering, and Kayla and Steve screaming like they were being murdered.

Ashlee shrieked in terrified response. The Pale Bro, Trevor and Nandini were all off the deck and running toward the sound in a second, followed by Rhiannon, Evan and Harrison. Y’lehna took the opportunity to grab an entire dish of pretzels, drop herself into the tub, and stand at the edge of the tub, facing the concrete around the tub and stuffing her face. “I can be responsible,” she muttered. “I can not get pretzels in the tub. I don’t have to eat underwater. I don’t even want to. Pretzels aren’t like fish. They get soggy.”

No one was there to hear her, though, because they had all gone into the woods.

The Pale Bro had only gotten in a few feet when Steve yelled, “Don’t come any closer, guys!”

“Are you being murdered?” Trevor asked, loudly.

“We will totally fuck them up if someone is trying to kill you!” Harrison said, clenching his fists.

“No, guys, it’s good… it’s all good.”

“It’s not good at all!” Kayla wailed. “I spent so much money on that beer!”

The Pale Bro heard the word ‘beer’ and conveyed that if something was going on with the beer he absolutely needed to know, right now.

“We dropped it!”

“We dropped it off a goddamn cliff,” Steve moaned. “Kayla had this whole big cooler—”

“It was so expensive! So much beer!”

“And we were carrying it together, and then I tripped on a tree root, and slipped, and Kayla tried to grab me… and we dropped the beer.”

“Off the cliff!” Kayla couldn’t have sounded more heartbroken if she were a young lady during the Vietnam War being told that her betrothed, who had been her childhood sweetheart since she was three years old, had had a completely sober four-way with two Vietnamese twins and their pet goat, and then had been killed by the Viet Cong while he was still cavorting with the goat.

In a voice that sounded like the auditory representation of hair raising combined with the scream of nails on a chalkboard, the Pale Bro expressed that he couldn’t believe this and Steve had been such a fuckup.

Steve, actually kind of intimidated, raised his hands. “I know, man, I’m sorry! We didn’t mean to!”

The Pale Bro then lectured the two of them about how if he’d been allowed to help in the first place, he wouldn’t have accidentally dropped the beer off the cliff and right now they would all be knocking back some sweet brews, but instead they insisted they could handle it and now all that beer had been tragically lost, cut down in the prime of its life, its yeasty lifeblood spilling out across the rocks and stones below where none could drink it except maybe some squirrels who would get themselves totally fucked up.

“Come on, man, it’s just beer,” Evan said. “We can get more.”

“Not if there’s a killer out there!” Kayla wailed. “We won’t be able to leave to go get beer until morning! What if the killer slashes our tires?”

The Pale Bro conveyed that if that happened, it was fucking on because no psycho killer, monster, or cousin was going to get between him and more beer.

Trevor, trying to be the voice of reason, said, “Folks, we’ve got a lot of beer in our cooler and we’ve barely touched it. There’s no use crying over spilled… beer.”

“Yes, there is! It’s very cryable!” Kayla declared, starting to cry.

“God, you’re drunk,” Nandini muttered. “Maybe you shouldn’t be hitting any more of the beer anyway.”

“Come on,” Steve said, putting his arm around Kayla. “It’s gonna be all right. Don’t cry. Trevor’s right, we’ve got a lot in our cooler.”

Kayla turned toward him and cried against his chest, as he hugged her with one arm and awkwardly patted her head with the other.

“Wow,” Nandini said. “You’re really into this guy, aren’t you?”

Steve turned red, which they could all see by now because they’d made their way out of the woods and back into the outside lights of the cabin. “Uh, I don’t think so, I’m just trying to comfort her…”

“You’re a white guy touching her hair and she’s putting up with it,” Nandini said. “Kayla’s been known to punch white people who touch her hair.”

“That was that bitch Madison and it was one time!” Kayla cried.

Steve removed his hand. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, I just…”

“No! I like it when you touch my hair! I don’t like it when bitches like Madison touch my hair after they’ve just said some racist bullshit, but you’re being so sweet! You can officially touch my hair,” Kayla said, and then started sobbing again, hugging Steve tightly.

The Pale Bro audibly sighed, in a voice like a dude who’s just seen one of his best friends score a date with a chick he was really into and he can’t even be mad because it wasn’t like he got anywhere with her himself or even admitted to anyone how cute he thought she was.

***

The group returned to find that Harrison had wandered back to the hot tub as soon as it was clear that no one was being killed except maybe a large number of innocent bottles of beer, and was sitting outside the hot tub but right by Y’lehna, who was in the hot tub eating chips.

Nandini said, severely, “Y’lehna! Ashlee told you not to do that!”

“Ashlee can tell me herself,” Y’lehna said with chips in her mouth.

“I’ve been watching,” Harrison said brightly. “None of the crumbs have fallen in the water! It’s all good!”

Trevor snorted. “Well, of course you think so, Har,” he said. “You’ve got it bad, haven’t you?”

Nandini frowned, and then scowled, and glared at Evan. “Wait, you told me he was gay!”

“You said what?” Harrison was shocked.

Evan held up his hands. “Sorry, Har. But…” He looked over at Nandini. “I thought that if I told you that he only likes really unusual girls, you’d feel hurt because it would sound like I was telling you you were basic or something, and that’s totally wrong. You’re gorgeous and you could probably get any guy you wanted, except Harrison, because you don’t have scales or feathers or six eyes or something.”

“Well, you could have said that,” Nandini said.

Kayla said, “I get it. Rhiannon’s like that, too.”

“To be fair,” Harrison said, “I am bi.” This was information Evan had not known. “I just haven’t yet met any weird dudes who aren’t related to Pale here, and it’s just way too weird to date one of your bro’s actual brothers or something.”

“Does anyone know where Ashlee went?” Steve asked.

Everyone looked around. There was no Ashlee.

“Could she be in the bathroom, maybe?” Nandini asked.

“Don’t think so,” Y’lehna said. “She ran off while you guys were running to the woods. I wasn’t gonna get in the hot tub and eat pretzels if she was still here!”

“Uh, yeah,” Rhiannon said. “That’s a little long to be in the bathroom.”

The Pale Bro expressed in a voice that was exhaustedly done with this bullshit that he could look for her.

“Nah, man, I’ll do it,” Trevor said. “I know your feet are hurting, and I’m the next biggest guy after you.”

“I could go with you,” Steve said.

Trevor shook his head. “Steve… that is a cute girl who is very, very drunk,” he said, pointing at Kayla. “I don’t know her tolerance, but I’m pretty sure that if she isn’t at puke bucket level now, she will be soon. You need to stay with her and make sure she’s okay.”

“Yeah, good point,” Steve said.

Nandini turned back to Evan as Trevor walked away. “I can’t believe you lied to me, though. I mean, I know Rhiannon. I could have accepted ‘he’s only into weird-looking chicks’—”

“Thanks, Nandi, that’s sweet,” Y’lehna said.

“You know what I mean,” Nandini said, waving her hand dismissively.

“Look, I’m gonna come clean with you,” Evan said. “I really thought you were great. You’re hot, you’re smart – I’m not dumb, but when you talked about your major, I realized you could run rings around me – and you stay calm in a crisis, and I really respect that. But you asked me if Har had a girlfriend, and I just – I’m sorry. It was like you didn’t even notice I’m a dude, and that made me feel bad. So I did something shitty, and I gotta apologize to both you and Harrison.”

“I mean, no problem on my end,” Harrison said. “It’s all good, bro.”

“Damn,” Nandini said, running her hand through her hair. “I didn’t even think about what that sounded like when I asked you. I’m sorry, Evan, what I said to you was a shitty thing too. I mean, I still think what you did was worse because you were lying, but I understand why you did it.”

“Hey, I know you didn’t mean to hurt my feelings.”

“Evan’s right, though,” Harrison said. “I mean, not about me being gay, I like girls just fine, but…” He shrugged. “Girls that look like normal human beings, even beautiful human beings, it just doesn’t click. Y’lehna here’s really different-looking, and that is so hot.” He turned to Y’lehna. “You know you’re super-hot, right?”

“Yes,” Y’lehna said, “but boys like you don’t usually agree. So that’s nice.”

“I guess I can forgive you,” Nandi said to Evan. “But you’d better not lie to me again.”

“I am pretty sure you could kick my ass if I did, so I won’t. I like my ass un-kicked.”

“Your ass is okay,” Nandini said. “I’ve seen better asses, but yours is all right.”

Rhiannon had offered to give the Pale Bro a foot rub, since his feet hurt. A guy as big as he was suffered from foot pain frequently, so he’d agreed, while apologizing in a voice like a church organ in a cave for his toenails. Some might say his toenails were worth apologizing for, as they were about four inches long and razor sharp.

But Rhiannon disagreed. “Your toenails are great. Look how white they are! I never see guys without all kinds of grody fungus turning their toenails yellow. And I bet you’re amazing at climbing trees with them.”

The Pale Bro allowed that this was true, and that climbing in general was one of his talents.

Steve, meanwhile, wasn’t exactly sure what he ought to be doing with Kayla, who was now lying on her back, her head in his lap, rambling about stars and how far away they were. When she’d asked for another beer, he’d gotten her cold water instead and reminded her that water was important to avoid hangovers. She’d finished most of the water – the rest had spilled – and now she seemed to be close to falling asleep in his lap.

“You’re really into stars, huh?” he asked. “You an astronomy major?”

“Oh no!” Kayla laughed. “Math! I’d tell you all about it but I’m waaaaaay too drunk. I just reeeeally like stars!”

“That’s cool,” Steve said. “I’m a comp sci major myself.”

“Are you gonna build an AI that wants to take over the world and enslave humanity?” Kayla asked.

“Hey, I’d be happy if I could build an AI that can identify rocks as not sheep,” Steve laughed.

***

Trevor had very quickly guessed where Ashlee might be.

Ashlee was nervous and reacted badly to things that startled or scared her. Ashlee was also at her own house – well, cabin. So odds were, Ashlee had gone into the cabin to calm down.

The cabin wasn’t very big, and Ashlee wasn’t in any of the rooms in an obvious place. So Trevor started checking the not-obvious places, like a closet in a room that looked girly enough that it might be her room. He knocked on the door.

She shrieked, inside the closet, but he said, “Ashlee, calm down! It’s me, Trevor. Can I check on you to make sure you’re okay?”

“Uh… okay,” she said, and Trevor opened the door. Ashlee was sitting in a lighted closet, on the floor, completely covered to her shoulders with stuffed animals.

“Wow. Are you okay?” He squatted down. Being a big black man, Trevor had learned many strategies for making himself look less threatening. Not towering over somebody was one of them.

“Not… really?” Ashlee said.

“I know you were scared with all that noise. Hell, I was too. But it turned out to be nothing. Steve and Kayla accidentally dropped some beer over the cliff.”

“It’s not that,” she whispered. “It’s just… it’s too much. Too many people.”

“Yeah?” He sat on the floor crisscross applesauce, making himself even lower and more relaxed-looking. “You want us to go?”

“No! I mean, this was supposed to be a weekend with just my friends, and then you guys show up, but you’re nice guys! I like you guys! But it’s just so many people, I started to wig out.” She lifts an arm out of the sea of stuffed animals. “So I do this thing when there’s too many people and I start to freak… I find a tiny place and I fill it with soft things and I lay in them until my tachycardia goes away.”

“Tachycardia?”

“Oh, um, that means fast heart beat. Sorry. I just always call it that because it sounds scarier than fast heartbeat and it really is scarier so I want people to know it’s a problem.”

“I know what it means, I’m a pre-med. I just wondered—”

“Oh wow! I’m in pre-med, too!” Ashlee sat up , some of the stuffed animals falling off her. “I guess we’re not in any classes together because you’re a senior and I’m a sophomore, but did you have Lessing for Organic Chemistry?”

“You’re doing orgo in sophomore year?” Trevor whistled. “That’s fast.”

“Yeah, I, um, my high school had like this program where good students could do science classes at a nearby college, for college credit, in senior year, so I took chemistry then, and bio last year and also the math I needed, so I get to do orgo this year.”

“I hated orgo. It’s just memorize a bunch of prefixes and suffixes and string them together. Couldn’t we find a better way to describe methylethylpropylene than that?”

She laughed. “Is that even a real thing?”

“I don’t know, but it’s pretty ridiculous that I can put together a string of prefixes and make something that sounds like a chemical even if it doesn’t exist.” He shook his head sadly. “And yeah, I had Lessing. She’s tough. She giving your brain a real workout?”

“Yeah. It’s a challenge. Everyone always told me, ‘Ashlee, you can’t just coast along getting straight As without ever studying. Ashlee, when you go to college it’ll be a lot harder. Ashlee, you need to learn how to study or you’ll fail in college.’ Well… I haven’t failed yet, but… it might be close.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. I must sound so stuck up with my humblebrag. ‘Oh, it’s so hard to be a gifted student who gets straight As!’ But it really is hard. Because if it was too easy for you in school you don’t learn how to handle it when it gets too hard, and I’m just, like, totally stressed.”

“I feel you. My mom made me study, and I was like, ‘momma, I do not need to read the book and highlight all the important parts and then write them in an outline and then read over the outline! I got it the first time I read the book!’ And that was what she said. ‘You take shortcuts now because everything’s easy, you’ll be in a world of hurt when things get hard.’ And hell, I ended up in a world of hurt in orgo anyway.” They both laughed.

“Anyway, your friends are worried about you and I don’t want people to think we both got bumped off by a psycho killer, so I figure, there’s three options here. I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and I leave you the hell alone; I leave and tell everyone you’re okay, and then I come back and we keep talking; or you and I both leave together and we both tell everyone you’re okay, and then we get to eat some chips, if Y’lehna and Harrison didn’t get them all already.”

“She’s in the hot tub eating chips, isn’t she.” It was not a question.

“Yeah, sad but true. At least she’s leaning over the side so the crumbs get on the concrete and they don’t fall in the tub.”

Ashlee sighed. “I guess I better get back out there. But I do still want to talk and stuff. And I wanna check up on Phenylephrine so maybe you can help me find her.”

“Phenylephrine?”

“My cat. The cat before her was Sudafed so when she died and I got a new kitten I named her Phenylephrine.”

“I get the joke there, but why was the first cat named Sudafed?”

“My mom was allergic to cats and she said if we get a cat we might as well name it Sudafed because she’d be taking so much of it, and then we did get a cat, so she did name her Sudafed.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten a cat if she was that allergic?”

“Oh, no, my mom loves cats. She just says wiseass things sometimes. Anyway, Phenyl lives here at the cabin and the cleaning service makes sure she gets fed. They call her the head of Mousekeeping Services.”

Trevor laughed.

***

Outside, it turned out there was no need to turn out a search party for Phenylephrine, as for some entirely inexplicable reason it turned out she liked chips, and also Harrison’s lap, where he was feeding her chips. She didn’t actually eat the chips, she just licked them.

The party was starting to flag just a bit; Evan suggested putting on some music, but the internet wasn’t good enough here for Ashlee’s Spotify playlist and she didn’t have MP3s on a hard drive like Evan did. Evan was regretting not putting a bunch of MP3s on a flash drive and bringing them with him. Nandini had a CD in her car – the girls had all come up here in their own cars, except for Y’lehna who couldn’t drive – but it was hit songs from Bollywood musicals and no one here knew any of them, and she was self-conscious about whether anyone would even like them.

And then, as they discussed what to do about tunes, a shadow fell across them, blocking the moon for a moment.

They all looked up, even the Pale Bro. A shambling monstrosity, 20 feet tall and brick red, with sprouting tentacles where its face should be and eyes on the tentacles, and Edward-Scissorhands-length blades for fingernails, loomed over them.

Several of the group screamed. The Pale Bro got to his feet.

“D̶̫̊̚Ũ̸̟̝͍̘̮͒Ḍ̸͋̽̀E̷̛̝̹̗͈̊͌̍,̷̨̖̲̺̤̝͂̈́̎͘ ̴̛̱͚͗Y̶̧͔͉̙͋͊̊͋͘Ô̸̢̥̙͙U̴͖͍̳̭͗̊̌͘͘͜R̷̫̜̘̀ ̶̼̘̠̾̐̈́̒̚Ṃ̴̡̡̦̮̖̿͗̊͋͝Ȯ̴͛ͅM̴̺̱͕̳̀ ̷̱͔̄̃̎́I̸̙͐̍͑͐S̶͉͉̲͋̊͒̽̄͜ ̵̤̙̬̫̒͋́͛P̷̧̧̧̰͔̦͠Î̴̢̜͒̅͘S̷̛̝̤͂́̍̐S̴̭͉͆̋̿É̴̢̺̲̫̝͋́̋̚̚D̴̥͈̠̋̅̅̀͝͝ ̴̡̡̖̬̓A̵͈͚̣͂̆̔̍̂̕T̷̡͙̠̙̫̎̈̄͝ͅ ̴͔͗̀̋͗̏Y̴̤͇̪͕͇͎͆̌̀̊̈́Ơ̸̡̢̙̭͇͕̒̐̕̕U̸̡̩̠̚.̸̣̖̼̫́͛̄,” the entity boomed.

In a sound like the rushing of lava through underground caverns just before a volcano was about to blow, the Pale Bro demanded to know if the entity had eaten any people lately.

“S̴̙̱͕̀H̴̭͐̈́͠I̷̘̟͉̝͊͐̄̋̀̑Ṱ̷̢̫̮͓̲̐̑͗̈́̀,̵͓̥͖͈̾́̏̇͘ ̵̣̳͍̿Ń̵̟̦̰͖̺͜O̸͉̓̈̊͛̔̕.̷̣̜̗̩̈́ ̸͖̋̓̀̀͝͝Í̶̘̗͓̱̗̬̀̈́'̴̗̯͈͈̥͎̎̇M̷̹̻͉̼͑̎̓̐̏̀ ̴͚̻͚̱̇̿͛̏͒͠O̴̩̪̣̯̤͙̐̐̚̚Ņ̶͇̘̤̗͗͗̑͛̏̇͜ ̸̡͎̔̽͛A̷̢̘̪͎̗͊͐̌͝͠ ̸̤̺͉̫̖̫̀̓̑̕̕D̴̡̜̤̻̉Ĩ̸̡̯͉͔́̓̂͘͝Ę̶̨̫͇̬̳̉̽͑̈̊͐T̸̥̝̹̑̾.̷̢̟̻̭̲̿ ̴̧̣͌̆̃̕ͅÏ̷̟̰̫̰̹̽̐̐F̶͖̂̉̌ ̵͔͚̊̐Y̸͔̆Ö̴̞̦͕̘̀̒̀͘Ṳ̶̪̝͙̎̿͘ ̵̥̀̏͗E̵̦̣̲͍͉̥̊V̶̑͒̏ͅȨ̷͚̪̲̎͜ͅR̵͎͖̀̓̈́͑͠ ̷̣̀̀̓͋C̸̲̗͎̞͔̭͌̈́̕͘Ã̶̝͉̮͉͉̓̄͒̈́͜͝M̵̙̮͎̹̌E̷̥̪̎̓͗́͝ ̷͎͓̙̺͔̗͂̑̕H̶̢̍͗́͋͊O̴̗̎̽̆M̴̮̭̮͐̑́̚Ë̶̩̦̹̞́͂̈́̆ ̴̩̻̈́͘Y̴̨͍̣̩͈̎̅͘͘O̵̠͉͒̐̈̕͝U̶̪̝̳̺͑͆̇'̸̖̋D̶̗̉̓̿͐̓ ̸͉̍̀͠K̷̥̞̼̍͛́̇͗͝N̵̡̹̠͚̥̰̋̈́̌̈́͘O̸̻̠͍̲͋̉Ẁ̸̞͎̺̀͆̌̀ ̴̛͔̙͗͗̉͠T̸̨̓̀̎H̶̡̱̘͈̹͐̔͗͂͘A̷̠̠͉͎̫̰̿̄T̴̡̰͍̦͕̉̌,” it said, rolling tentacles clockwise around its face in an approximation of an eye roll.

If that was the case, the Pale Bro shot back, explain why this entity’s footprint was found right outside his bro’s cabin, and a man was missing.

“Į̴̙͈̻̓͗͜ͅ ̷̙̑̔͛͝W̷̺̯̲͗͝Ã̸̹͕̊S̷̹̲͆̏ͅ ̵̝̈́̒͗̓̍L̸͖̺̊͛Ǫ̶̗̥̼͍̥̒̒̌̊O̸͙̊̎̋̏̕Ķ̴͚̫̤̈̔́̅͑͝Į̵͑̍Ṉ̸̨͌͂́Ǵ̵̭̥̹̮̞̏͂ͅ ̷͚͙̹̋F̸̧͕͉͓̊̾͊O̵̲̙͓͛̌̄̏̕̚R̴̬͚̠͉̬̘̽̀̌́͊ ̴͎̀̏̐͋Y̴͈̘̮͌͋̍̃̍̈́Ơ̷̞͉̝͙̻̒U̵̦̭͈̻̪̽͂͗̚,̴̳̐ ̸̢̠̙͕̰̐̅D̸̟̫̋͑̅̈́̄͜͝ͅŰ̵̡̜̤̺̿̍̃̈́M̵̼̜̳̊͊̋̈ͅB̷̧͖̲̮̤̜͋̐͑̔Ȁ̶̼̪̟̼̱̐̔̋̀͘S̷̨̳͂S̶̨̡͈̈́̐͂̿͜͠,” the entity said. “A̷͕̎͆Ṷ̴̢̣͙͐Ņ̷͓͔͕̙̟͛̿́̐͝T̶̠̹̜͇͐̾̊̂̚  ̸͔̐͋̓̓͐͝€̶͉̦̍̊̅₯̷̟̙̗̱̤̈́̋̌͂͌̚ῥ̷̠̩̇ῗ̶̦͎͚̃͊̾ᾗ̴̤̞̰͕͓̈́͜Ỷ̸͔̫͙̦͐ẞ̶̦͕̱́͂͑́͊̈́ ̵͉͍͉̼̐͑̈́͋͝S̷̢͇̽͗͛͊̏E̸͉̲̓̉̎̈N̸̤̾Ț̷̻̍́̍ ̴͓̱͉͍̝̄̐̀͜ M̷̹͖͝E̸̘̖͓̍͋͜ ̶̢̲̘͋ T̴̠̘̲̼̍̈́̄̏̃͝ͅǪ̷̨̡̤͕͎͠ ̴̬͑͊ T̵͚̫̆̏͘E̴͚̗̯̠̊͗͌̕̚ͅL̴̫̺̫̀̄̽̃̕L̶̡͚̫̬̈́͑̇ ̴̲͙̼̖̘̺̈͊̓̂͠ Y̸̰̳̰̑Ơ̵̢̼̯͕̌Ų̶̜̜͚͇̕ͅ ̶̟͎̫͌ Y̴͔̱̼̅̋̄̀͜O̴͕̰̰̎̄U̶͓̜̼̝͑̃͂͘͝ ̸̨͎̀͊Ṅ̵̢͙̙̹̀Ë̸̖E̵̢̪̪͛̒̈D̷͍͖̀̈̏͊͋̚ ̶̦̙̫̺͓̉͂͠T̸̙̮̬͚̚Ó̷̖̘̩̘̝̌̄ ̸͇͍͋͒̃̑Ṽ̸͉̞͔̘̱̃͑̌I̷͙͛͑͝S̸̢̗̬̞͂̽I̵̺̿̾͗̀̓̅T̷̢͈̺̹̀̇͊͐̊̍ͅ,̵̭̔ ̷̹̥̺̟̣͋̄͜Ş̵̺̱̃Ḩ̴̙͙̼͙͉̔̎̍̐́̃I̷͔͚͂̇̑͂͜T̷̲̱͔̬̓͠H̶̝̝͌̏͐Ę̴̨̰̙̤͖̎A̸͔͠ͅḐ̴̻͚͔̯̏́͐͘.̵͚͎̪͖̼̻̇̉.”

The Pale Bro replied, in a voice like the whining of an engine underneath the whapping sound of helicopter rotors, that he was on vacation with his bros and he was not here to visit his mom and she could just deal.

“A̶̱̘̬̪̝̓͌͊͐̚R̸͙͌̉̆̆̇̔ͅE̵̡̱̙̯̮̅͗ ̴͈͒̐Y̶̮̤̽̄O̴̢͓̙̝̮͉̾̆̈́̔̚͝Ų̸͚̗͓̞͎̀͝ ̶̡̬͚̄̆͌͋̉̆F̷̙͊͋U̷̿͊̊̽͌̚ͅC̴͙̦̼͕̈́̊̒K̴̬̘͆̀̑͒̐I̸̅́̈͒̅͠ͅŅ̴̪͍̭͂̈G̴̗̥͎͌̔̽̑̈́ ̸̻̰͆̈̕Ȟ̶̱̜̎̕Ī̴͎̝̖̼̤̱̏̐G̵͚͙̊͆̃̍̅ͅͅḦ̸̡̾̄̕?̵͉̫̠̉̈́̓ ̸̡͕̔͐Y̵̨͒͊̈̕O̴̮͓̼̽̓͝Ú̶̝̺͜ ̴̛̪̚ͅͅC̸̣̆͛̿̓̂Á̸͇͈̦͐͗̇͝N̸̞̭̲̻͖̦̽̈́̈'̶̪̪̐͐̈́T̸͔̘͌̄ ̴̨̪͙̫̩̐́S̶̩̋̃A̷̡̨͙͉͕͑́̔̓̌͜͠Y̸̯̝͕̋͗̄̾ ̵̲̜̥̥͆͊̾̑̊͜͝ͅT̴̟̭̼̲̐̄H̶͚̦̯̱̐̔͝Ą̴̥̤̅̃̄̂̾T̵̞̜̱̍̈́̔̕͜ͅ ̶̤͇͐Ṱ̷̃̾̚Ȏ̷͇͈͓̰͇͓ ̶͓̘̟̉̄̀͌̽ͅẎ̸̢̠̿Ỏ̸̧̢̹̹̀̓U̶̢̬͚̞̘͂́̃̆̽̔Ṛ̵̬̱̯̟̀͐̓̎̃͠ ̵̨̮̏̑̐̐M̷̽͜͝O̴̪̙͙͕̥̕͘M̵̨͉̫̭̩̔͑̈́̈̈͝!” the entity exclaimed.

“This is your cousin, bro?” Evan asked diplomatically.

In a voice like the moaning of the wind through a forest of dead things and disappointments, the Pale Bro admitted that this asshole was indeed his cousin, and was carrying a message from the Bro’s mom that he needed to come visit her, because somehow she’d found out that he was vacationing in the area.

“Well, why don’t you just tell him that you will go to visit your mom, in a few days, right before we head out? It is rude to be right near her house and not go visit her, but on the other hand you’re on vacation to spend time with us, so just do it at the end,” Evan suggested.

The Pale Bro expressed that if he absolutely had to visit his mom, that was probably the best way to handle it, and could his cousin kindly fuck off now.

“Ö̵̡̩͙̠̮͌̓̍K̶͈̬̳̰̺͂̋̂́̕Ạ̸̢̬̪̠̠̽͝Ÿ̴͓̰̰̻͔́̏͒̌͆,̶̮̉͒͒̿̏ ̵̦̺̠͓̩̲̍͆̉B̸͕̽͆Ư̵̟̔̈́̌̏͒Ţ̵̳̞̙̣̪̏̂ ̶͈̲̃͐̈́͋͛Y̴̝͍͌̈̍Ơ̶̙̝̱̘̈́̉́̊͒Ū̷͎̦ ̸͚̓B̷͕̥͊͗̿̒͝Ë̴͕͖̪͇̃́T̶͉̓̾̌̃̀͘T̵̨̟̠̩͚̜͂̎̚̕͝Ḙ̴͈̳̮͗̆͋̐́̈́R̶̡̛̪̮͖͓͙̍̈́͌́ ̸̧̘̻̞̣̈́͆͑̄͜N̷͎̦̬͊͌̆̌̕O̵̧̫̾́̾͜T̵͔̉́ ̸͔̒̀̐͆̌F̵̣͉̖̺̱̚ͅÒ̸̯̜̼̖̋̑͘͜R̶̲̦̱̭̱̙̆̈G̵͓̘̞͎̑̅E̴̲̓̿T̴̝̝̑͌̏̊̄̕ ̴̧̡̮̮͓͓̐͒T̸̡̛̖͈͒̕Ḥ̸̬̭͙̪̲̈́͌̈́̚͠͝Ì̸̡͎̝̎̈́̾͂̕S̷̠̻̣̈́̓͘̚ ̶̧̤̀̈́Ţ̴̧̛̫̫̑͗̓͌̉ͅÏ̵̧̘̰̆ͅM̶̮̤̎̉͜E̶̘̬̟͓̜͔̓̕̕̕,̶̗̈ ̶̖͇̞̀̾͑̓͜͠D̷̡̢̧̹̖͙͛̂̒̏̏I̵̛͍̘̜̲̥̓̏̅͐͂̋͝P̴̧̢̡̱͖̣͔̰̦̊̀Ṡ̸̳̺̓̓̕H̷̰̭̣͂͗Ị̶̢̧̜͇̅̎̓̈̉̂̃̐̕͜͜ͅT̶̰̰̋͐.̵͍̜̠̰͊͝ ̷̝͔̼̞͘ͅI̶̩͍̘͎̺̓'̷͕̟̗̣̳̻̀͂͠L̵̹̣̃͗̇͆L̴̢̛̩̤͖̬̆̚ ̸̲̬̲̈́͛͑̌B̴̘̹́́̈͝E̵͓͐̋͒͐̏̎ ̵͇̹̂͒Ẇ̵̨͎̣̝͔͘ͅA̷̻̗̫̍͑̈́̇̐T̸̥̱̘̲̳̋C̶̪̀H̵̢̏͜Ì̸̡̨͙̜̠̲͘N̸͖̹̦̿͊́͛̈́͝G̵̡̨̘̼̀̑̅̎.̷̍̑̆.” The giant creature lumbered off, back into the woods.

“Your family sounds like mine,” Evan said, commiserating.

“Mine, too,” Nandini said. “If I was within 50 miles of my mom while I was on vacation and I didn’t stop by to see her, I’d never hear the end of it.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met your mom,” Steve said.

The Pale Bro suggested that that was just as well.

***

Kayla was napping on Steve, whose legs were starting to go numb but he didn’t want to risk waking her up. Trevor and Ashlee were talking animatedly about terrible professors and classes that were absolute bullshit but required for the pre-med track. Nandini, having forgiven Evan for lying to her about Harrison, had agreed to go on a date or two with him once they all got back to school, and see where things went. Also, she’d helped him recover his mom’s good knives, which they’d all dropped in the dirt when they got here so the girls wouldn’t be scared of them. Rhiannon continued to hit on the Pale Bro, who either didn’t notice, or was so flustered by a girl paying attention to him that he pretended not to notice. Y’lehna, somewhat overheated by spending too long in the tub and not drinking enough water, had a headache, and Harrison was tending her by getting her glasses of water with ice from Ashlee’s freezer.

Everything was going pretty well, and a lot of fun, except for Steve and his numb legs, when a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a bloody knife came out of the woods.

Everyone except Trevor and the Pale Bro screamed. The Pale Bro growled, less like a dog and more like the sound of the devil’s car engine, down in Hell, when the devil is revving it because he’s just challenged the Archangel Michael to a race in a demonic replica of NASCAR. Trevor took note of where Evan and Nandini had put all of Evan’s mom’s kitchen knives, and yelled, “Can we help you?”, preparing to grab a knife from the pile and go knife-fight the dude, just in case the Pale Bro was too drunk to simply lift the fellow up and toss him off the cliff that had already claimed Kayla’s case of beer.

“I hope so!” the man yelled back. “I’m in the middle of cutting up steaks for the grill, and I realize, I don’t have any potatoes! I was gonna do the potatoes on low and slow so they’d be nice and soft inside, but turns out, all my potatoes rotted and I haven’t got any, and it’d take like forty-five minutes to drive into town. And now it’s too late for baked potatoes, but I haven’t got any kind of starch, so I was wondering if you guys have any French fries?”

Trevor blinked.

“Uh, why are you wearing a ski mask?” Nandini asked.

“Oh, this!” The man pulled off the mask. “Haha, almost forgot I had this on! I’m anemic, so my face gets cold. I wear ski masks around to keep warm, but I forgot how that would look to somebody else. Wow, that was dumb of me.”

The man was a good bit older than any of them, maybe late 20’s or early 30’s. He was a white dude with a tan complexion, like Rhiannon’s, but it was a little grayish and unhealthy looking in the bright lights around the hot tub, which could be due to the anemia. His black hair was wavy and longish, parted on the side and going down to his shoulders, framing his face, and he had a mustache and beard. “My name’s Jason,” he said. “My girlfriend and I just moved back in to the cabin – we live here in the spring and summer months because my girl can’t handle the summer sun, she needs some shade – and I brought the steaks with me to celebrate, but I thought I had potatoes. I forgot, potatoes don’t survive being stored for four months.”

“Whew.” Evan shook his head. “That’s nasty, man. I hope you were able to get the smell out of wherever you were storing them.”

“It might take a few more good scrubs,” Jason acknowledged, grinning. “Hey, do you guys mind if I put the ski mask back on? I know what it looks like, but my face is really cold.”

“Go ahead,” Trevor said.

“Yeah, we don’t mind,” Nandini said. “If you turn out to be a serial killer, it’s not like you’re not a serial killer when the mask is off.”

Jason laughed again. “Well, I can eat a whole box of cereal in one sitting, so I guess you could call me a cereal killer.” Many of the college students groaned at the pun.

“You and your girlfriend, do you have kids?” Harrison asked. “Because that was dad-joke worthy.”

“Haha! Nah, no kids yet, dunno if that’s in the cards ever to be frank. Angella’s not much of a kid person.” He pronounced the name On-zhellah rather than An-jellah, like it was French or something.

“I don’t think I have any fries,” Ashlee said. “Or anything, really. When I’m here at the cabin I mostly drive down into town and get takeout. I mean, I’ve got bacon and eggs and bread for toast, and I could make you a PB&J or a lunch meat sandwich, but no real food.”

“That’s better than what I’ve got,” Evan muttered, and then, more loudly, “You got any tomatoes or peppers? I could chop them up and fry you some Spanish rice; I’d just have to go back to my cabin to get rice and spices.”

“Hey, man, that’d be awesome,” Jason said. “Yeah, I’ve got tomatoes and peppers. We’ve got a lot of steak and I don’t think even Angella’s appetite for bloody meat will put a dent in it, so if you guys wanted to come over and get some steak…”

The Pale Bro said in a voice like the moon had crashed but was still orbiting, scraping itself along the Earth’s crust as it went, that steak sounded sweet and he wouldn’t mind having some steak.

“Bro, you are just, like, an eating machine,” Harrison said. “But yeah, wouldn’t mind a steak.”

“I prefer seafood,” Y’lehna said, “but I don’t dislike steak.”

“Guys, Kayla’s asleep and I can’t leave her alone here,” Steve pointed out.

“I’ll stay here with Kayla,” Ashlee suggested. “You can go get steak.”

“I don’t feel great leaving you guys by yourselves, though, you sure you don’t want me to stay?”

At this point, Kayla lifted her head and asked blearily, “What’s happening?”, which solved the issue of who would stay with her; when steak was explained to her she cheerfully agreed that steak would be nice, and everyone else agreed that Kayla had had enough to drink that, assuming she didn’t puke it up, putting more food in her stomach might be a good idea.

Trevor and a couple of knives went with Evan back to Evan’s cabin to get the rice; the Pale Bro went with the rest of them to Jason’s cabin, both to make sure nothing happened to any of his friends, and because steak sounded awesome. Since Evan’s family had been coming here for vacations since he was a kid, he knew the area well enough to know how to get to Jason’s house once Jason gave him the address.

***

Jason’s cabin was about the same size as Evan’s, and it did not have a hot tub, but it did have a barbeque grill. Not one of those tiny little portable things that run on charcoal, either. This was a large fancy propane-powered grill of the kind that could practically be used in an industrial kitchen.

“Honey! I brought guests! And they brought beer! And their friend is gonna make us some Spanish rice!” he called.

A woman came out of the cabin, looking so goth she might as well have invented it. She had incredibly pale white skin, without even the undertone of red most healthy human beings have; she wasn’t quite as pale as the Pale Bro, but it was close. Long black hair slunk down her back like she was cosplaying Morticia Adams. She was wearing hip-hugging black jeans and a long-sleeved black blouse, and a chain around her neck with an Egyptian ankh on it, and her lips were blood-red.

Then she opened her mouth, and it became immediately apparent that she had fangs.

“How do you do,” she said in a vaguely quasi-European accent. “I’m called Angella Darque, with a q. And you are?”

The college students introduced themselves, Nandini wearing a very skeptical pair of eyebrows the entire time. After introductions were done, she asked, “Is your last name really Darque?”

Angella looked taken aback. Jason said, “It’s really Duncan, actually, but she’s getting together the legal paperwork to get it changed because she hates her dad. Deadbeat, never paid child support, you know the type.”

“Oh, Jason, I had no idea today was ‘let’s tell total strangers all about my girlfriend’s private history’ day. Is that what we’re celebrating?”

“Sorry.”

“His lips are so loose,” she confessed to the students. “Sometimes I just want to… sew them shut.”

“Isn’t she hilarious?” Jason laughed. “We met at a support group for people with anemia, five years ago, and we’ve been together since.”

“Um,” Ashlee, obviously very nervous, said. “Uh, we brought some beer if you want. And also wine coolers. Would you like a wine cooler?”

“No, I never drink… wine,” Angella said. And then, “Do you have anything like a Jaeger?”

“Evan’s got vodka back at the cabin,” Steve volunteered.

“Does your cell phone work up here? Maybe you could call him,” Jason said. “Or I could, if he’s got a landline.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want to put anyone out,” Angella said. “I have 151 here, and that’s quite fine. Would any of you like some?”

“Yeah, slip it on me!” Kayla cheered, somewhat mangling her idiom.

Nandini and Y’lehna said at the same time, “No.” And then Y’lehna clarified. “I’m a little drunk, but she’s, like, totally plastered. We can’t even let her have a beer at this point. Soda’s cool, though.”

The Pale Bro conveyed in a voice like a million marbles suddenly gaining sentience and stampeding for a cliff to fling themselves over like lemmings, except that lemmings don’t really do that, that he would appreciate a rum and Coke.

Angella went back in the house to make the Pale Bro a rum and Coke with dangerously-high-proof rum. Harrison, Steve, and the girls looked at each other. Finally Rhiannon said, “I thought maybe I saw… your girlfriend has fangs? What’s up with that?”

“Pretty cool, huh?” Jason said cheerfully. “Now you guys need to let me know, should I use the rosemary garlic marinade, the pineapple ginger, or the Brazilian steakhouse?”

“Why not mix it up?” Harrison asked. “You got a lot of steak there, you could do ‘em all!”

“I don’t think pineapple ginger would go well with steak,” Ashlee said uncertainly. “Doesn’t that sound like more of a pork thing?”

“Or fish,” Y’lehna said. “Oh, but wait! Nandini, can you even eat pork?”

“I can eat anything,” Nandini said irritably, “but my family’s Hindi, not Muslim. I’m supposed to stay away from beef, not pork. But some traditions I don’t even believe in is not going to stop me from eating a nice steak.”

“I could add pork medallions, if you thought it was a good idea,” Jason said.

“Nah, man, you’ve got a lot of meat here,” Harrison said. “It looks great! Maybe if you had like a swordfish or tuna steak for Y’lehna, but if you don’t, no worries.”

“I got a salmon.”

“Pineapple ginger might go really well with salmon,” Y’lehna suggested.

Meanwhile Angella had brought the Pale Bro his rum and Coke, and they were currently discussing literary trends in fiction aimed at college-educated women.

***

Evan and Trevor returned with rice, spices, dried vegetables, and coincidentally, a can of pineapple chunks. Jason ended up preparing the salmon with the pineapple chunks after defrosting it in his microwave, and Evan made the Spanish rice he’d promised, and no one actually questioned why someone had started grilling steaks at midnight.

The salmon was done first, and Y’lehna and Nandini, who was feeling just a little bit guilty over her earlier decision to eat beef, got most of it. Angella got the first steak that came up, when it was barely warmed, still dripping blood. Then the rest of them, as the rest of the steaks were all done around the same time, along with the rice.

At some point, Evan suggested that everyone return to his cabin, because he had video games and music and nice speakers; Jason and Angella turned the offer down, Angella saying, “The night is young, and has yet to yield all its delights”, which was really corny and pretentious, but given the look she gave Jason when she said it, none of the guys questioned why he was staying at his own cabin tonight instead of going with them. Ashlee also insisted on staying at her own cabin; after a whole night of having ten people at her house, she was kind of burned out on people, and needed to get some sleep. And everyone agreed that Kayla should stay at Ashlee’s cabin; she was still cheerful and fun, but she was still pretty plastered. Because of the potential threat of a killer, Steve volunteered to stay with the girls; he knew Evan’s landline number, so he could call in reinforcements if necessary. Everyone else trooped back along the road, many carrying tinfoil-covered plates of steak and spicy rice, back to Evan’s cabin.

There was blood dripped onto the driveway.

The Pale Bro noticed it before anyone else, with his multiple sensitive eyes. His arm went out to block Evan from going any further, and in a voice like the rumble of an entire river’s worth of water pouring from a broken dam, he warned everyone of the blood and suggested he should go first.

Evan put up his hands. “No problem, man,” he said. “You take point.”

“I’m right behind you,” Trevor, holding one of the knives in front of him, said.

“Okay, I’ll bring up the rear,” Nandini said. “Harrison, Y’Lehna, Rhiannon, Evan, you go between us.”

Harrison looked at Nandini, who was taller than him, and then at the others. Evan was maybe the same height as Nandini, maybe very slightly taller… or very slightly shorter. It was too dark for Harrison to accurately judge.

He, too, put up his hands. “Works for me,” he said.

Evan looked back at Nandini. “I feel like I should be back with you,” he said. “If Pale’s got Trevor as backup…”

The Pale Bro pointed out, in a tone that conveyed deep irritation, that he didn’t need backup because if it was a human killer he’d make short work of them and if it was a monster, only he had a chance, and anyway it was probably not a monster because his cousin had claimed to be on a diet and the only reason they’d thought it was a monster in the first place was his cousin’s footprint. He then walked forward resolutely.

The door to the cabin was hanging open. The Pale Bro ducked his head way down, which he was pretty much used to doing any time he was going through a door, and pushed through, followed by Trevor. They’d left all the lights on, with the shutters closed, so that the light leaking around the edges of the shutters would make someone think they were home, and also because the lights were LED bulbs so seriously, that was probably like only thirty cents worth of electricity wasted. In that light, they saw blood all over the floor.

All of the group looked at each other uneasily. Ever since the Pale Bro had found the girls and the hot tub, no one had really been acting as if there genuinely was a potential killer out there; they’d given lip service to the idea, they’d certainly gotten scared enough every time something bizarre happened – and a lot of bizarre things had happened – but they hadn’t really treated it as a serious risk. Now it seemed possible that someone had been murdered in Evan’s cabin, or had been stabbed somewhere else and staggered into Evan’s cabin, despite the fact that all the locks had been locked.

The Pale Bro went forward into the kitchen, following the blood trail – and stopped in confusion. This caused everyone else to stop short, without being able to see into the kitchen because the Bro was blocking the doorway.

“Come on, bro, what’s going on?” Evan asked.

The Pale Bro slid sideways out of the way in a fashion that didn’t quite look like a real way anything could possibly move, and Evan pushed forward to be right behind Trevor, both of them crammed into the doorway.

A middle-aged white dude wearing a baseball cap advertising Evan’s parents’ company was at the sink, his front covered in blood. He had turned to face all of them, his hands clean but his sleeves completely saturated with something’s death juices.

“Joe?” Evan said disbelievingly.

“Evan!” Joe said. “I’m so sorry about the mess, man, and the hour, I know you’re pissed and I don’t blame you, I’d be pissed too, I know I’m really late—”

“Joe. Why are you covered in blood? What happened?”

“The meat defrosted,” Joe said. “I was driving around this mountain trying to find the cabin for so long, the meat defrosted, and when I pulled it out of my trunk, the bag caught on something and ripped and all the blood from the meat defrosting was all over me. I’m so sorry.”

“Why are you—” Evan glanced at a fancy cuckoo clock on the wall that actually ran on batteries, not solely on clockwork. “—getting in at two fucking am when you were supposed to be here before six?”

“I have been driving around this mountain since four in the afternoon,” Joe said. “My GPS stopped working halfway up the mountain, and I swear I tried to follow your mom’s directions, I swear, but I couldn’t find Long Leaf Lane no matter how hard I looked, and I went back down and asked at the gas station but none of them lived on the mountain, so I bought a paper map but it didn’t help at all because Long Leaf Lane wasn’t even on it—”

“It’s a private drive, I don’t even know if they put those on maps,” Evan said.

“Evan, if this is your guy with the food and he’s not dying of stab wounds, I’m going to use your bathroom,” Nandini said. “Where is it?”

“There’s two, one upstairs with a claw-foot tub and one down on this floor, go back out of the kitchen and it’s the door on the east side of the living room,” Evan said.

“Great, using the downstairs one,” Nandini said, and ducked back out of the doorway.

“Are you okay?” Rhiannon asked Joe.

“I’ve been driving for ten hours. Last six of which I couldn’t find my way back down the mountain either, and I didn’t have any food and the only water was the ice that used to be in my Sprite that melted—”

“Come on, man,” Evan said, sighing. “Yeah, the GPS situation really sucks around here. I wouldn’t wanna try to find Long Leaf Lane if I hadn’t been coming here every summer for, like, ten years. Let’s get you upstairs and get you cleaned up.” He looked over at Harrison and the Pale Bro. “Guys, you know more or less where the stuff in the kitchen goes, right? Can you put the food away?”

“The ice cream melted,” Joe moaned. “I’m so sorry…”

“No, come on. Let’s get you a shower and a change of clothes. I’ll borrow something of Steve’s while you’re in the shower, he’s about your size.”

“I think I know,” Harrison said. “We put the meat in the freezer?”

Rhiannon and Evan said, “No!” at the same time, and Rhiannon added, “You’ve got to put it in the fridge. You can’t freeze most things twice, they get freezer burned.”

“Huh,” Harrison said, looking over the sheer quantity of meat that Joe had been trying to carry in a paper shopping bag with handles. “I guess we’re gonna go back to Jason and Angella’s at least one night this week, ‘cause this is way more meat than we can eat before it goes bad.”

The Pale Bro, who had just picked up the bag of melted ice cream and slurped the whole thing down like it was a milkshake, said, in the voice of a creature whose mouth was entirely full of melted ice cream, something very much like “Watch me.”

“Lemme go throw this shit out,” Harrison said of the paper shopping bag, whose bottom had almost disintegrated from holding way too much au jus for even a strong, well-made paper shopping bag to handle, and which smelled like a murder had been done, or at least that someone had lost an arm and was bleeding out.

Evan took Joe upstairs to the bathroom to wash himself, broke into Steve’s suitcase and took a random t-shirt and pair of shorts, and advised him that he could stay overnight, sleep on the couch, and have some eggs and bacon in the morning, now that he had brought the eggs and bacon.

And then they all heard Harrison screaming.

Evan got down the stairs approximately as fast as Nandini came racing from the bathroom, but Rhiannon, Y’lehna and the Pale Bro were out the door faster, having been closer.

Harrison was on the ground. The trash can had been dumped over. It was mostly cleaning products used by the team that cleaned the cabin between uses, but there were some banana peels and candy wrappers – and now, a bloody shopping bag – in the pile of trash.

Standing over the pile of trash, looking kind of pissed, was a black bear.

In the voice of a guy who has finally, finally gotten the chance to use his strength and size to protect his friends after like what seemed like twenty-seven false scares tonight, the Pale Bro said something that could possibly be understood to be “Fucking finally,” and charged at the bear.

The bear had a lot of mass, even more than the Pale Bro, who was a very, very skinny dude, but the Pale Bro was around twice as tall as the bear, had much longer claws, and was doing something weird to the space around the bear, making lensing effects that distorted all the angles of the trees and branches behind the trash can. The bear flailed a bit, and then the Pale Bro lifted it and held it straight out from his body, where its much smaller paws couldn’t hope to reach. It snarled and kicked and scratched, but the Pale Bro relentlessly carried it into the woods, where they both disappeared.

“Well.” Evan said. “Who wants to help me clean up this trash?”

“’Want’ is a strong word,” Harrison said, but he helped, and Nandini and Rhiannon pitched in. Y’lehna would have helped, but she had to run back into the cabin to run cold water over her arms and legs.

The Pale Bro returned minutes later, without a scratch on him. “Where’d you put the bear, dude?” Harrison asked.

The Bro conveyed that he could possibly have gone out to the cliff that ran alongside the road – the same cliff that, in a different location, had claimed the life of an entire case of beer – and by the way, did any of them know that bears bounce? Because he hadn’t.

“Dude, you didn’t have to kill it,” Evan complained.

“Yes, he did! It was gonna kill me! I don’t want it coming back for revenge!” Harrison gabbled out.

The Pale Bro declared that he hadn’t killed it. Before anyone could feel either relief or fear over that, he added that his mom lived down that way someplace and she would probably kill it, because eldritch spawn eat a lot and he had a lot of brothers and sisters.

***

And so the first night of their vacation ended, with the Pale Bro staying up all night playing video games with Trevor, who’d returned to the cabin with Steve once they’d both been informed that there was no psycho killer and Joe was actually fine, he’d just gotten really lost. Evan, Harrison and Steve went to bed like normal people, or rather, like normal people who are young men in college, around four am, after walking Rhiannon, Nandini and Y’lehna back to their cabin like gentlemen, because psycho killer or no, the woods were dark and any number of things could happen. In other words, it was a perfectly normal night on vacation, just like any group of friends in college might have.

As for anything that might have happened the next day, or any of the other days of their vacation… that’s a story for another time.

[newtafterdark]

Taste of Metal - Chapter 9: Quality Time with your Orb-Shaped Child

AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26157634/chapters/65862415

Summary: What if the overwhelming VR experience Gordon went through, had a deeper purpose than just being a simple simulation & a freelance debug job for him?

But most importantly- what if Gordon Freeman listens to Metal & used to be in a band? aka. the “Metalhead Gordon AU”

- -

“When you told us all about this… “Kaiju Invasion”, a huge part of me was hoping you were just bullshitting us.”

 Gordon looked away from keeping an eye on Joshua zooming around the table for the past few minutes, his focus landing on Bubby who had moved back to the couch, Gordon’s laptop on the table in front of him and scrolling through news articles.

 “I wish, man... I really wish.��, Gordon said with a weak smile.

 If he was honest with himself, there were a lot of things Gordon would feel comfortable and justified to make jokes about to most members of the Science Team. But he knew his own limits. 

 He truly wished he could have welcomed the Science Team to a safer world… but it was not like he had a different one to pick from. 

 However, despite everything this world had thrown at him, he was happy to be alive and be around people he deeply cared for. No matter how chaotic they and the world around them were.

 “Well, at least he didn’t bullshit us about having a son!”, Dr Coomer exclaimed, currently gently holding the small robot in question in his hands.

 “Yeah bro, but what’s with the shitty photo of him in your digi-locker, tho? Little dude ain’t looking anything like it.”, Benrey threw in, letting out an amused huff at Joshua loudly counting each piece of metal on Coomer’s Extendo-Arms. 

 Gordon let out a sigh, rubbing his temples with the side of his hands, lightly pushing up his glasses in the process-

 “The thing is, I built and programmed him myself, but his body is made from old Black Mesa computer parts. I was... always afraid of them finding out that he existed and claiming ownership over him… but at the same time I really loved talking about the progress he was making? Small things he was learning, not dissimilar to how a human child would… so I figured that the stock picture in my files would work just fine.”

 Benrey tilted his head at that, but eventually leaned back, crossing his arms and nodding to himself. 

 “Gordon Freeman Protective Dad moments.”, he added.

 Gordon laughed at that.

 “Honestly? Yeah… I also need to add that his AI isn’t… stable. Or flawless for that matter. I am a good programmer and Joshie is a fast learner… but we have reached several roadblocks over the years. They don’t matter to us, because I love him - little glitches and all - and I hope you guys will as well-”

 His heartfelt speech was suddenly interrupted by what could only be described as the crunchiest mp3 file of a foghorn noise recording… which was coming straight out of Joshua’s speakers.

 “Holy Shit… wow!”, Tommy exclaimed, ears still covered protectively by his hands from the sudden noise.

 “Gordon! Your son is so talented!”, Dr Coomer said with a smile, not taking his eyes off the small robot in his hands- “You have a loud voice for being such a small man, Joshua!”

 Joshua let out a soft happy trilling noise at the praise, lifting out of the old scientist’s hands and flying a loop in the air.

 “I can record and replay any sound I hear but the foghorn is my favourite!!”, he informed the group before flying down to the ground to land near Sunkist, happily trilling at the big dog and getting a happy bark as a reply.

 Joshua had several features that weren’t quite necessary… but fun. Originally Gordon built Joshua as a simple AI that would keep track of a lot of things he lost track of, either because of his ADHD or how hectic things could get at MIT.

 The bot would alert him when assignments were due when Gordon had last eaten something, asked if he had taken his meds and reminded him to drink water.

 When eventually the Kaiju started to erupt from the ocean, Joshua got a receiver for global warning messages, becoming a reliable news source for Gordon and the other people in his dorm.

 These basic functions stayed, but Gordon had always loved adding new lines of code that would end up giving Joshua more of a personality. Even now, he was already thinking about what he could teach Joshua to make interacting with the Science Team more fun for the small robot.

 He relayed all that to the group between finishing his hot chocolate.

 “If Joshua and you would allow us, we all could teach him a new thing or two, Gordon!”, Dr Coomer eventually said, after being deep in thought for a bit- “I would love to share my knowledge with someone who is so eager to learn and has the same capabilities as I, as a fellow AI!”

 “DAD! Can he?? Please??”, Joshua pleaded with excitement in his voice.

 How could Gordon say No to that?

[noisyquokka]

Dumb Traditions

pairing: Xiaojun x Reader 

genre: Fluff

length: 2.4k

warnings: Mentions of alcohol and this gif could kill you like LOOK AT HIM BEING ALL SOFT இ௰இ

@lluyangyang​​ requested 29: "Christmas is so close, I can almost smell the mistletoe I’m never going to get kissed under.“

This is so unbelievably late cause I had some personal stuff happen but I also had no idea where I wanted to go with this so I’m sorry, Em! You might’ve forgotten about this too oops 😂 either way, I hope you like it, child 👀🤙🏻

__________________________________________________________

You were not a party animal.

It was the truest statement about you, parties weren’t your thing and that was okay. But somehow, over the course of the week, your best friend had talked you into going to his holiday party. He knew you weren’t one for parties. You couldn’t stand the crowds and the number of people who would sit around making out, making bad decisions thanks to the alcohol that clouded their mind. To be frank, you didn’t care what those people would decide to do. It just wasn’t the highlight of your night. But here you were, wrapping your coat around yourself as you walked to his dorm. The thought had occurred to you that you could stop this pursuit at any time. You could stop walking, turn around and go home and you shouldn’t have to feel bad about that. But you we’re almost there and it wasn’t exactly warm outside. So you kept on your way, thinking about how you managed to get yourself into this situation.

~~~

"I’m going home for Christmas break.”

YangYang picked his head up in surprise, slowing his pace as you both strolled down the sidewalk. He had finished class for the day and was going shopping for his upcoming Christmas party, which you decided to tag along on. And tagging along just meant he pulled you away from your friends on his way out of the university. It had to be a surprise to hear of you going home though. After all, you had spent every Christmas with him and Xiaojun since you started college. You never had much desire to go home.

“So… What made you change your mind?” YangYang finally asked, dragging his feet against the salt-covered sidewalk. You shrugged, carding your fingers through your hair.

“It’s just– I don’t know. Xiaojun and I do the same thing every Christmas, you included when you’re not out partying. I feel like we could use a change.” It was true, you spent every Christmas the exact same way. Xiaojun would order takeout and you’d set up the tv to watch the same old Christmas movies, dozing off sometime before midnight. Every. Single. Year. You spent a lot more time with him because YangYang was always out with friends, normally spending the night elsewhere.

“Okay, now what’s the real reason you’re thinking about going home?” He cocked his head your way with a sly grin.

“What do you mean ‘real reason’? I just told you I-”

“No, no, no. It’s easy enough to change things up. Plus, you hesitated when you answered my question.”

“I did not.”

“You did.”

You exhaled through your nose, throwing your head back in defeat. As per usual, YangYang ate it up.

“Hey, if you don’t wanna answer, it’s fine. I was just wondering.” You emitted a mirthless laugh, shoving your hands in the warmth of your jacket pockets. It was just like YangYang to badger you and tease you about something and then act as if he didn’t want to pry. You pondered whether or not to say what was really on your mind before blurting it out.

“Christmas is so close, I can almost smell the mistletoe I’m never going to get kissed under.”

It took everything in YangYang not to burst into laughter but he failed miserably, leaving you to regret opening your mouth. Now that you’d said something, you felt dumb. Who cares about being single on Christmas? Or any other day? Nevermind that you’re a college student who should be focused on your future. You finally found the courage to smack the boy in the shoulder, a non-verbal warning.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” YangYang cackled, trying his best to control his breathing, “You’ve just never sounded so hopelessly single!”

“Gee, thanks. But don’t you ever have those days where you just crave a healthy relationship with someone? Being able to go out and have no worries because you’re with the one person who makes your day so much better?” You frowned at the chunk of ice sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, taking your frustration out on it with a kick. The brunette gave a half shrug, sweeping his hair from his line of vision. Sometimes you wished you could read this boy’s mind. YangYang was hard to read from the day you started hanging out with him, which was an odd day in and of itself, considering how much partying he did. Everyone expected the quiet one to be friends with anyone that wasn’t Liu YangYang and yet here you were, 5 years later. You wondered if anyone realized just how shy he could be until you got to know him.

“Is this about you catching feelings for Xiaojun?”

“No! Can’t I just be sick of being single?” You sputtered, running a hand through your hair. He bit his lip, a shitty attempt at hiding his smirk that only made you frown deeper.

“If you’re so sick of being single, you gotta put yourself out there, you know? Maybe meet some new people… at a holiday party, for example…”

“You just dodged my question with another question to shamelessly plug your holiday party that you know I’m not going to.” He chuckled, elbowing you in the side.

“I didn’t say my party! It’s been a while since you came to one of mine though.”

“Not this again.” You pinched the bridge of your nose. This was the twelfth time in the past two days that YangYang mentioned his holiday party. The second most popular to his New Year’s parties. You stopped at the crosswalk, pressing the button for the light to change.

“I’m just saying, the last time you came to one of my holiday parties was the last year of high school. Things aren’t as crazy as they used to be.”

“I have a pretty good idea of what your parties are like thanks to Xiaojun’s monthly recaps. Almost everyone attends, your dorm gets crowded… It’s amazing you haven’t had cops show up at your door yet.” You muttered. He gave a dismissive wave of his hand, knowing how Xiaojun described his parties.

“Fine, I could start the party earlier. By the time the evening comes, it won’t be as packed and you can come hang out and enjoy yourself a bit more. And Xiaojun will be there!” He wiggled his eyebrows in a playful manner.

“YangYang-”

“I’ll even buy your favorite drinks! Deal?” He didn’t give you another second to intervene, answering with a high pitched “Wow, YangYang, you’re such a cool and supportive best friend. It’s a deal!”

Your expression dulled, feeling his arm wrap around your shoulder as you walked across the street.

~~~

Thinking about it you never really gave him a yes or no answer at the end of the day. It didn’t matter now that you were standing right outside of the dorms. If you wanted to, you could still text Xiaojun and spend the night eating takeout and watching Christmas movies like normal. But knowing he was in there meant a call or text would most likely go ignored. Not because he was ignoring you, but because of the loud music and being a co-host for his roommate. With a deep breath, you walked up to the door and knocked. And there it was; that dreaded minute of waiting for the door to open. You weren’t able to feel this anxiety before, you would always be here before the party started when you used to attend. The longer it took for no one to answer the more you thought about walking away. Maybe it was better to walk away.

And then the door opened. You tensed as Xiaojun suddenly appeared, eyes lighting up at your presence.

“I was hoping you’d come,” He beamed, stepping outside beside you, “I ordered some lattes from the cafe. I need to go pick them up though.” He checked the time on his phone before slipping it in his back pocket.

“I’ll join you. If that’s okay of course.”

He nodded, descending the staircase to the dorms. You noticed his light humming of Christmas songs as you strolled down the sidewalk, sneakers scraping the snowy pavement. It was a lovely sound; Xiaojun’s soothing voice slowly emerging from those low hums. Maybe you weren’t big on Christmas but hearing him sing his own renditions made you feel some type of way. You definitely preferred him singing “Santa Tell Me” over the original as you walked into the village.

“Wow, I think you’re making me biased against Christmas songs!” You spoke up. Xiaojun scoffed but still sent you a smile.

“Is this the part where you ask me to make you a mixtape of me singing Christmas songs?”

“I would, but we spend so much time together. You’re like my own personal mp3."

"Mp3…” He scoffed again, shooting you a grin as he pulled the door to the cafe open. You chuckled and walked in, immediately being enveloped by the smell of coffee and fresh pastries. You walked up to the counter together, waiting on the order to be finished. The holiday vibes always seemed to be strongest in a coffee shop, you noticed. The smells always transitioned around November, stronger and sweeter than any other time of the year. A mixture of fresh coffee beans, cinnamon, and nutmeg blanketed the small business now, easing your mind from the anxiety that clouded it earlier.

“Here you are.” The barista smiled, sliding three drink trays and a bag across the counter. Xiaojun was quick to pay for the order, handing you the bag and one of the trays to carry.

“Is no one in the alcohol mood tonight?” You questioned, gesturing to the number of drinks he’d ordered. Xiaojun shrugged, holding the door for you once more.

“Nah, YangYang wasted money on the extra alcohol and everyone stayed pretty sober,” He replied, shaking his head in disbelief, “But there’s always New Years. Can’t expect college students to stay docile on New Years!” You nodded in agreement. Only YangYang has the craziest New Years parties around campus. It’s one of the top reasons it’s so popular.

“So did YangYang trick you into saying yes to this party or did you come by free will?” Xiaojun asked, sparing you a glance. You laughed at his choice of words.

“Hmm, let me think,” You drew your free hand near your face, tapping your finger on your chin in thought, “He might’ve cajoled me into coming.”

“Was it the favored drinks?”

“What can I say, he knows me too well!” You joked, catching a glimpse of a lopsided grin on your best friend’s face. And maybe you stared way too long, getting lucky enough that Xiaojun’s focus was on the pavement below.

"Well, whether or not you genuinely wanted to come, I'm glad you decided to. These parties have always been a little bit better with you there." He confessed, looking up at you with a genuine smile. You didn't want to read too much into what those words meant so you just allowed yourself to internally freak out, your stomach doing flips the rest of the way back to the dorms.

~~~

"I was just about to call you, I thought you were bailing on me." YangYang pulled you towards the kitchen, grabbing the drinks from your hand to replace it with an alcoholic beverage.

"Dude, chill! You know how y/n feels about parties." Xiaojun reminded, handing out the large order from the cafe. It was safe to say YangYang was a tad drunk from the way he clung to your arm, like a toddler looking for attention. The dorm was pretty empty at this point. A complete 180 to the normal parties you'd been to in the past. The few people who still stuck around were either mingling or just waiting for their drink from Xiaojun so they could take their leave. You did your best to slip out of YangYang's death grip but he stuck to your side, whining every time you tried prying his arms away. 

“You should go to bed, party animal.” You teased, making your way towards the empty couch. He still clung to you for dear life, resting his head on your shoulder once you sat down. It didn’t take much longer for the straggling guests to leave, Xiaojun playing co-host for a very unconscious YangYang who you could finally push off of you. With the push of a button, the Christmas music cut out and the blond-haired boy sighed in relief.

“You hear that? Serenity...” Xiaojun breathed, leaning against the kitchen island. You chuckled, quietly getting up to join him. He slid your drink across the counter, luckily not spilling it.

“Thanks.” You sighed. “I don’t know how you manage to help host these parties so often. I wasn’t even here for most of it and I feel exhausted.” 

“I guess I have a knack for co-hosting. It’s not one of my weekly desires though.” He replied, taking a sip of his latte. You mirrored his actions, letting the liquid warm your tummy. 

“I’m pretty sure if I were in your shoes, I’d be YangYang right now.” You said, looking over your shoulder. He was still sprawled out on the couch, one arm hanging off the side of it.

Xiaojun smirked at your comment, taking another slug of his latte.

“Huh...” 

You turned back to him, noticing where his focus was; the ceiling. You looked up yourself, mentally cursing. The sprig of mistletoe hung above the two of you, a looming reminder to the comment you made to YangYang a few days ago. Either he forgot about that conversation or he planned for this to happen and right now you had a pretty good idea that it was the latter of the two. Does that mean Xiaojun knows? Your neck suddenly felt hot, the butterflies in your stomach fluttering about for the second time tonight. You cleared your throat, leaning against the counter.

“Hey, it’s just a dumb tradition thing, right?” You chuckled awkwardly, looking anywhere but at your best friend, “What’s the worst thing that would happen if we didn’t... you know...” 

Xiaojun watched you with amusement from his spot in the middle of the doorway. You were adorable, and not helping your case with your nervous blabbering. Without a word, he leaned in, pausing a moment before pressing his lips to yours in a gentle kiss.

“This dumb tradition just gave me the guts to do the one thing I’ve been wanting to do for years.”

[cherr-e]

— disclaimer ➛ swearing maybe? trainee life?

genre ➛ angst and fluff

— title ➛ three a.m

summary ➛ It’s the final night as a trainee within the best K-pop company in the world. Oliver prepares to leave that life behind. Yet, one young boy has one last memory to create at three a.m.

AUTHOR’S NOTE:-  [mp3] when oliyong get to the window scene, make sure to listen to rosyln by bon iver (slowed would make it even prettier) [mp3] yeah it’s kinda shit but we move

masterlist

He turned left, the street he was used to for nine months greeting him. The black plastic bag rustling as it slowly swung backwards and forwards while Oliver sluggishly walked back to the accommodation his company had provided for him. It was nearing three a.m, the people who lived in this street were most likely huddled in their quaint homey places but also some were probably wide awake and alone - singular within their homes.

Oliver entered his apartment building he shared with other trainees, he ascended the first flight of stairs - the elevator was never on his favour. He only rode it once, the creaking wires and the flickering lights enough to make him prefer the stairs. Now, he was pressing the keypads - his mother’s birthday locked the dingy place up who he only shared with a frail boy named Taeyong. A trainee who only joined a few months back, Oliver found him cute - he was absolutely clueless when he first joined and those big puppy-like eyes made his heart warm up with love. Taeyong was like a younger brother he always wished for, and when he found out they lived together, he wanted to make sure that the young naive boy would adjust well. 

He taught him basic dance moves, a few chords on the guitar and rehearsed lightly with him. Oliver also made sure that his friend would eat, sometimes he would treat him out for some food with the little money he had from the monthly allowance his parents sent him. 

The machine let out a tune, and Oliver pushed the door open slowly - not wanting to wake up the only other person in the small space he lived in. When the older one first moved in nine months ago, there were other trainees who lived with him. Sammy and Jungwon, they had been with the company for years but realised they were not going to make their debut soon - so they packed their bags and left to their new lives, away from their dreams. For months, Oliver was always alone in this place, his passion for the stage beginning to slowly tumble but a new light had joined the house. They could both relate to each other, wanting to better themselves to debut or even debut in the same group. 

Taking off his worn-out trainers, he slipped into his black fluffy slippers and placed the bag on the countertop. “You’re here?” A high-pitched voice greeted Oliver and the boy nodded as he washed his hands. “Back from the convenience store, when did you come?” He asked as he took out the junk from the bag. “A few minutes ago...” Taeyong hesitated to speak, but it was Oliver’s last night with him. “It’s going to be weird without you.” 

Oliver let out a soft chuckle, “don’t miss me too much - you’ll find better ‘mentors’” He air quoted the last word and Taeyong was now giggling. The older popped the kettle on and pulled out his tattered cigarette box, “I never knew you smoked.” Taeyong arched a brow, curious on how Oli had gotten away with it considering the strict rules. 

“I only let it out when I’m frustrated or confused.” He replied, placing the lighter against the butt of the cigarette and shielded it for a few seconds before inhaling the nicotine and a cloud of grey left his mouth and nose. Taeyong coughed, suddenly feeling awkward and scrunched up his nose at the smell. “Sorry Taeyong, I’m filled with worries for the future.” The smoker cleared his throat and took another swig. 

“It’s okay, it’s not like you have to follow rules anymore.” The joke sounded monotone, or even depressing. The silence that followed made the situation at hand even more dark and gloomy than it already was - jokes beginning to tumble. Humour no longer able to protect reality. 

A boy who was confused with his identity, and what future he wanted to choose. Something he loved - music and dance - beginning to make him lose himself, and as well as that Oliver felt so lost with who he was and what he believed in. Continuing this life, would break him and hate the things he once loved. 

“Whether you’re signed underneath a strict label or not - you’re bound to break rules in this system.” He looked into Taeyong’s eyes, the kettle beginning to hiss but the frail boy wouldn’t look away. Oliver’s eyes were dark and mysterious, the person he was getting to know in the past few months seemed different from the one who stood there with his hands on either side of the table. He looked intimidating, scarier and just cold. 

“You seem different Oli.” The shorter one voiced his thoughts aloud, making the other one break out of his state through a cheeky smile wearing itself on his face. “Got a little philosophical there.” He spoke in a cheery tone, ripping open the cup ramen open as he picked up the kettle to pour into the snack. He folded the plastic lid back into place, letting nearby chopsticks hold the lid in place as the flavouring powder weaved its way in the starchy food. The cigarette still in between his lips, he looked real and tired. 

A sly smirk wore itself on Oliver Lee’s features, the end of the cigarette lighting up as he breathed in a new batch of nicotine into his lungs. A cloud of smoke left his lips again, Taeyong’s naive eyes still focusing on the stick in between his lips. Something so small was so addictive to many, that cigarette was a relief to many - like the man in front of him. Taeyong felt like Oliver was his cigarette, something he was irrationally addicted to, he didn’t know why. Moving away would be healthy for his best friend, and he should be happy for him but he was far from happy. Taeyong was upset, lost, confused and stupid. Nothing made sense in this world, he felt like a bullet soaring through the air, trying to reach something that he could penetrate and create home within. However, the bullet kept on flying. 

“Do you want some?” The older asked, pointing towards the cup ramen that had been spinning there for a few minutes. “Not really.” He replied, Oliver, nodding in acknowledgement - “let’s go sit in front of the window.” Taeyong suggested with a cute grin adorning his face, the idea making him all fuzzy inside. If he was confused with his feelings, he’d put that aside and fall for Oliver more - underneath the bright moonlight. 

Gosh, he really was entirely whipped. 

They got up and left the kitchen, taking a seat on the wooden floor which was often cold but they paid no mind to the temperature. The view they got with this place was beautiful, it was shocking as usually, companies housed their trainees in shitty dingy places with barely functioning necessities - which was true for the duo’s apartment. But the view made them forget of the worries they had, as well as the broken shower head. 

They stayed there while Oliver ate, finished smoking what he could of that cigarette. Being in the company of who he admired was enough for Taeyong, it was his last moment with him for a long time, the possibility of them re-uniting sparse and thin so he felt like he had every right to stay silent because it was better than useless small talk. “Why are you so quiet today?” Oliver asked, rubbing the butt of the cigarette on the top of the ramen plastic lid - he was now slightly liberated away from his thoughts. 

“Appreciating the lights I guess, it’s better than talking with no meaning.” His shoulders were slumped forward, eyes focused straight forward on the city lights as they switched on and off every few 10 minutes, reassuring him that three a.m made them feel restless. Just how he felt right now, heart quickening knowing that Oliver Lee was looking at him right now. 

“Your eyes sparkle a lot y’know.” He said, a light blush growing on Taeyong’s cheeks and turned towards the person who held his heart. “Don’t lie Oli.” “But they do, and there’s nothing wrong about it. They are actually quite pretty.” 

“Don’t say that,” Taeyong mumbled, palms beginning to sweat - he was slightly angry. “Say what?” Oliver was clueless, playing with his lighter in one hand as he looked into the city ahead of him. “You don’t say that to friends.” 

Oliver stopped with the lighter. The atmosphere turning tense, Taeyong felt like the only thing he could hear was his racing heart, beating quicker as every second turned into a different number. “You’re quite again,” Oliver spoke up, beginning to pull out the box of cigarettes for the second time. “Don’t smoke again, it hasn’t even been ten minutes since your last.” He wasn’t soft-spoken anymore, it was like all those months of annoyance at everything had been pointed at Oliver even though he didn’t mean too. 

The pressure to be perfect at his sparse talents, he didn’t know where to find them, the confusion towards having feelings you were supposed to have with a girl falling onto his best friend and roommate. His roommate not taking care of himself, harming and belittling himself. Taeyong knew Oliver felt like shit, it was so fucking obvious.

“Look at me Taeyong.” Oliver begun, waiting for a few seconds before heaving a sigh and repeating himself more sternly. He placed his rough calloused hands on the side of Taeyong’s neck, and the boy turned towards his touch. That place felt hot beneath his palm, itchy and the younger felt himself get sweatier. 

“What’s up?” 

He didn’t have words to explain himself, what would he even start with? Complaining about life, complaining about the greed he had for him? So, he pursed his lips in anger and stayed quiet and turned his head to look at his frantic hands. This led to Oliver getting closer, hand still situated on Taeyong’s neck, “speak Taeyong-ah.” 

With a swift movement, Taeyong leaned in closer and puckered his lips to meet Oliver’s. He felt hot and adrenaline had sought him out before his rational side had spoken, he pulled away slightly. At least he did it, at least he shared his first kiss with the person he admired. 

“I like you, Oliver. A lot, I don’t know how much but it is quite a la-” Amidst his ramble, the older one had placed his lips on Taeyong’s pouted ones. A habit he often had when he’d speak when worried or confused, Oliver placed his hands on the sides of Taeyong’s face as he kissed him harder, he parted his lips as the kiss got deeper. Lips on the other lips. Oliver tasted of cigarettes, his lips were soft and plush like Taeyong had always dreamed of. He had slipped a tongue in, both of them warming up with love and desire for one another.

He pulled back and had that stupid smirk Taeyong had fallen for. He didn’t know if he was mocking him or revelling in what had just happened, he wished it was the latter. 

Oliver pulled him in for one small kiss, and then they lay there below the moonlight shining through. The clock had just turned into four a.m, sleep enrapturing the both of them in each other’s warm arms - beneath a blanket Taeyong had strung along with him. They both wore their clothes, Taeyong felt safe in Oliver’s arms. 

Except it was short-lived, as he had now woken with sore muscles and an empty side. He slowly got up from his position, searching for traces of his love. But he was gone, and the only thing left was a note:

❛ I am glad to have been your first kiss and I am glad you were my friend in the last few months in Seoul. Focus on yourself now.  — Oliver Lee.❜

[littlespoonevan]

pls talk to me about the bleachers let's get married,mp3. i'll start: the song being about this guy who's been "so far gone lately" and who wants to get right for his honey, to take all his medicine, to spend him all his money. a guy who knows he's difficult to love and that the world is shitty but who thinks that they're a safe house, safe home. a guy who asks his love to change him from all this bad. who's saying hey! with you i'm so good. whose hope is a little fragile or naive, but so tender

asjdkfhjdsah aNON. oh my god i’m too fragile for this right now but yes!!!!!!!! like???????? this is ian????? abt his love for mickey???? and how they’ve gotten to the right place in their relationship, u know????? how dare shameless not play it during 10x12??????? it would’ve been perfect over the moment where they’re all rushing to set up the polish doll!!!!!

and while we’re at it, i’ve been saying for months don’t take the money should’ve been the song playing when ian proposed the second time because: “You steal the air out of my lungs, you make me feel it // I pray for everything we lost, buy back the secrets // Your hand forever's all I want” is just???? exactly how they were feeling during that period between 10x08-10x10. 

ALSO. it has the most mickey reference ever in the 2nd verse:“And I cut off my t-shirt sleeves // And claim a new continent // 'Til I saw your face and hands // Covered in sun and then // I think I understand” like i’m sorry can u get more specific than the t-shirt sleeves line???????? ugh it just makes me think of that moment on top of the abandoned building where ian says the “he’s not afraid to kiss me” line bc that’s exactly what those lyrics describe??????? like mickey realising, shit i like him and i want to be with him and i need to show him. i need to kiss him. tbh if we wanna go deep, i feel like verse one sounds like ian figuring out his feelings for mickey and verse two is mickey figuring out his feelings for ian and the chorus is just where they were in s10 and aNYWAY the bleachers are gallavich stans 

[shoelace-noose]

#059 | Lost Love

Sonny Carisi/Klaus Hargreeves. Klaus doesn’t need to hear to understand.

Word Count: 1299

There was a time when Klaus listened to music day in, day out, to drown out the ghosts, even when the drugs did the job just fine. He had carefully curated playlists for every mood and occasion, a well worn pair of cheap headphones, and a shitty old mp3 player. It was good for him.

But then, of course, Vietnam happened. Klaus lost a lot of things there; his sanity, his sobriety, his love. He spent ten months in the muddy jungle, caked in blood and sweat, putting everything he had on the line just because of Dave. Just the thought of Dave makes him smile as he remembers that kind voice, and rough hands holding him like something fragile, even when the gunshots echoed louder than the spirits all too plentiful in a war zone like this one. When he came back, Dave’s name was still heavy on his lips and he knew he would endure anything just to see him one more time.

Of all the things Klaus lost, the one he hates the most has been his hearing. Funny how constant machine gunfire and bombs and screaming do that. When he tumbles painfully back into present day, all he can hear is an ugly, painful ringing. He was relieved at first, somehow. If he’s deaf, he doesn’t have to listen to the ghosts.

He still has to listen to them. Because they don’t technically make a physical sound, and it wasn’t his ears perceiving their screams in the first place, he can still hear them loud and clear. The difference is that he can no longer drown them old. Klaus really got the shit end of the stick, like always, and the worst part is none of his siblings believe him. They think he’s joking. They yell at him. They wave their arms in front of him. He tells them he can’t hear them, and they storm off.

Sometime after they avert the end of the world, Diego believes him after he offers to take Klaus for something to eat and Klaus doesn’t even look up. It’s a whirlwind after that. Diego drives him to the hospital, and Vanya rides along in the back with him, holding his hand while Ben sits in the front seat and relays Vanya and Diego’s conversation to him.

At the hospital, Ben disappears in the sea of other ghosts milling about, begging for Klaus’ attention. But Diego and Vanya are still there, each with a steadying hand on his shoulder while Klaus fills in the paper questionnaire. Has the hearing loss been gradual? When did he notice it? Were there any events which would have caused it? Do his ears hurt? Did he bleed? All the fun things. And then someone puts headphones on him and tells him to press a button whenever he hears a beep. He doesn’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears that’s been driving him crazy since he got back from Vietnam. Then he’s in a fun tube for a while, and the doctor shines a light into his ears, and it’s all great fucking fun.

Vanya writes things on a little notebook while the doctor talks for Klaus to understand what’s going on too. He can’t make much sense of it, but the gist of it is that his eardrums burst, and apparently have gotten infected in the past like, month since it happened. Which explains the dull ache that’s been bothering him which he figured was just leftover withdrawal. Figures. He’s prescribed something to clear up the infection, and Vanya grimly informs him that the hearing loss is permanent. So this is his life now. Nothing but the ringing and the ghosts.

After six months, Klaus would like to think he’s done a good job of adjusting. He has a nice little flower shop where he’s discovered his surprisingly green thumb. Turns out being able to surround himself with life does wonders for his horrific anxiety. He’s gotten pretty good at reading lips. And a nice chunk of his inheritance went towards a service dog. Klaus had considered hearing aids, but they way they feel irritates him, and there’s an occasional background hum that makes him want to claw his ears off. But he has Daisy, and she’s a real sweetheart. She lets him know when someone comes into the shop, warns him when someone’s coming up, alerts him to alarms and phone notifications.

So when he’s busy tending to little green shoots in the back, Daisy nudges him with her nose. She always hears the bell when a customer comes in. Klaus pats her head and gets to his feet, dusting his dirty hands on his jeans as he goes up to the front. People tend to walk around looking at premade bouquets for a moment or two before they come to the counter. Sometimes they pick up something Klaus has already carefully arranged, others, they want something special.

The customer is already at the counter when Klaus gets there, wearing a crisp suit and looking down at his polished shoes. He seems the sort of businessmen who occasionally come in and get upset when Klaus can’t understand them. As expected, he immediately starts talking when he sees Klaus, quick and upset and it’s just too fast and poorly enunciated for Klaus to keep up. He points at the sign on his counter made in blocky letters by Vanya, with a few watercolor flowers bordering the text.

My name is Klaus. I am deaf and cannot hear you. If you talk to me, please speak slowly and clearly while facing me so I can read your lips. I do not speak ASL.

It takes a moment for the man to read it, but once he does, he adjusts his posture and enunciates an apology. Not an asshole then, just someone who didn’t know. Klaus hates the assholes who act like he’s stupid. Contrary to popular belief, now that he’s sober, Klaus actually has a good head on his shoulder.

“Do you take bulk orders? For special events?”

Klaus nods and reaches for the order sheets by the cash register. “What kind of event?” he asks, realizing from the man’s flinch that he must have been too loud.

“A funeral.”

Death. You’d think after thirty odd years of speaking to the dead, Klaus would handle it better, but every mention reminds him of the way Dave’s eyes lost their shine to the gleam of moonlight reflected on all the blood. There had been so, so much. Fuck. Sometimes, Klaus can still see it caked into the lines of his palms and under his fingernails.

Something touches his arm and Klaus jerks out of his thoughts to look back at the customer. “Are you okay?”

“What do you want for the funeral?”

The man seems just as lost as Klaus was moments ago. His eyes are far away and his words start to twist in his mouth as he talks about whoever he lost. Blue and purple and white flowers, because “Mike” loved bright colors but his father would want something more classy. Klaus recognizes the grief too. Mike was someone this man loved deeply.

“When?”

“Three weeks from tomorrow.”

That’s cutting it closer than Klaus would like, but he understands the pain, and writes down the date before jotting down notes of what the man wanted. He promises to have a sample bouquet ready by the end of the next day, takes down a credit card number and ID, and finds himself wondering about whether the man- Dominick, according to his license- would hold him the same way Dave did because his hands have the same pattern of calluses and his mouth has the same deeply fond yet forlorn not quite smile.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Michael After Midnight: Movie 43

I want you all to know I sat at my computer for many minutes trying desperately and ultimately failing to find some way to talk about anthology or sketch comedy films. I kept trying to come up with some comparisons to how well the horror genre handles these kinds of films (for the most part anyway). And I was totally going to come up with some brilliant, cutting lead in to talking about the black hole of talent known as Movie 43.

Sorry to disappoint you all. It’s a sentiment I share with just about every single actor in this film.

Movie 43 is a sketch comedy film, though honestly the “comedy” part should be in quotations because it takes a mind heavily impaired by illicit substances to find humor in this film. And look, I’m no comedic prude; I get a laugh out of stuff like Freddy Got Fingered, I’m not so snooty I’m above Scary Movie or getting a chuckle out of Step Brothers, I’m not only in to high concept British comedies or anything. But this, this really is bad on a level that even The ABCs of Death wasn’t, because as disgusting, vomit-inducingly bad as that film was, at least it was full of no-name actors with nothing to lose and no dignity to begin with seeing as they were in The ABCs of Death. This movie is not only stuffed to the brim with famous actors and actresses, most of them were roped into appearing in this out of strict contractual obligation rather than any real desire to be in the film. A lot of actors just got sucked in and guilted, only a small handful of them even showed up to the premier, and only Stephen Marchant has anything nice to say about being in the movie. Everyone else has at least enough dignity to be ashamed of their involvement.

I guess there’s no sense in prolonging this: let’s take a look at one of the most abysmal comedies of the modern age:

The Pitch: This is the framing device that is used for the US cut of the film, and thus the framing device I saw, in which a disgraced movie director played by Randy Quaid pitches his numerous shitty ideas to a producer, with said shitty ideas being all the sketches in this film. So basically, what you’re watching is what I can only assume was the actual pitch for this movie, and thus it sucks. There is nothing entertaining about this framing device; it really says something when the international version’s framing device, where kids look for a banned movie on the internet, sounds a lot better as a framing device.

The Catch: So apparently this was the first sketch filed, and it was used to sucker other celebs into joining the film. And I mean, it has Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet, and who wouldn’t want to be in a movie with those two? Well, when Hugh Jackman has testicles dangling from his neck, I sure wouldn’t. This isn’t really the worst sketch because of its content, but it is awful because it just hurts so much to see something so embarrassing. You feel so bad for Jackman for having those fake testicles on his neck, and you feel bad for Kate Winslet for having to act through this with Jackman. It honestly makes me depressed just thinking about it.

Homeschooled: This is probably one of the few sketches in the film that actually approaches being amusing. In it, parents played by Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber talk to another couple about how they homeschooled their kid, and how they made his homeschooling feel like authentic high school, complete with the parents bullying, hazing, and just making their poor son’s life into a living hell. All these jokes are pretty standard and basic, and of course they gotta throw in some incest jokes too and top everything off with some Oedipal imagery, but it could have been worse. Really, when it comes to this film, “could have been worse” is the best you can ask for.

The Proposition: Have you ever wanted to see Chris Pratt’s ex-wife ask him to take a shit on her? No? Well congratulations, fucker! You’re a normal, functioning human being, and not either of the writers for this shitty segment. This segment ends with Chris Pratt being hit by a car, exploding in a massive shit tsunami, and then his girlfriend finally accepts his proposal. What a load.

Veronica: Out of the entire movie, this might be the most inoffensive clip of the bunch; it’s not funny or anything, but it’s at least not as tacky and offensive as the others. I guess it helps that Emma Stone and Kieran Culkin are just really hamming it up for this one, as if they know they’re in a terrible bastardization of an indie movie scene and just want to make the whole thing look as dumb as possible. It’s not a good sketch, but it’s almost okay.

iBabe: So there’s this new life-sized nude replica of a woman you can use as an MP3 player. The fan was place din a certain spot that’s causing problems. Can you guess the spot, and the problem? If you’re the age of twelve or older, you sure can, and if you can, there’s really no reason to watch this pointless sketch.

Superhero Speed Dating: Batman is a dick to Robin. Tee hee. What a funny fucking joke. Next.

Machine Ki- Ok you know what? Fuck it. I am talking about the fucking speed dating segment, because it is just such an obnoxious, unfunny joke. Batman is just rude, condescending, and worst of all a total cockblock who doesn’t respect his partner, which is the sort of thing you see a lot in parodies of Batman mythos. And it’s just so… totally opposite of what Batman is, it doesn’t really subvert his relationship with Robin in a funny way either, it’s just “Haha what if Batman was a dick to his student?” And it’s just not funny. It’s lame, it’s lazy, and it’s a sign of someone with an extremely shallow knowledge of Batman.

Anyway…

Machine Kids: So it was kind of supposed to just be a joke, interrupting this segment to rant about the last one, but there is honestly just nothing I can say about this one. It’s a sketch that exists, I guess? It’s not particularly funny, it’s just something that’s real.

Middleschool Date: You know what’s really funny? Girls getting their periods. That’s the entire joke of this segment. If you don’t think girls getting their periods and teens freaking out over not understanding basic life facts is funny, this won’t amuse you. It also has a rather nonsensical ending, which certainly doesn’t help it out much.

Happy Birthday: This is it. This is the sketch that most closely approaches the realm of being funny. It’s about a guy catching a leprechaun for his buddy’s birthday, but the leprechaun is an obscene, nasty little bastard. It’s funny seeing Gerard Butler play a leprechaun, the joke is okay, the sketch doesn’t really overstay its welcome, and it has a juvenile but kinda amusing punchline. Maybe it’s just because everything else in the movie is so bad, but this one just isn’t really one I can muster a lot of hate for.

Truth or Dare: Halle Berry and Stephen Marchant go on a date and begin playing, well, truth or dare, and soon enough things go from risque to downright insane. If you’ve ever wanted to see Halle Berry make guacamole with a prosthetic boob, well, here you are. I feel it’s not worth it considering how nasty and disturbing the end is, but Marchant sure is unashamedly proud of being in a sketch with Halle Berry.

Victory’s Glory: This one is just boring and filled with bland stereotyping. It’s one you’ll forget exists as soon as it’s over.

Beezle: In the midst of the credits, we see how far James Gunn has come as a creator when we are subjected to this edgy piece of garbage he created. It’s about a girl who thinks her boyfriend’s animated cat is trying to sabotage her relationship, which he is. It has sodomy, brutal murder, bestiality, all that charming stuff from the man who brought us Guardians of the Galaxy. I guess this really is good as a showcase of how far he has come as a writer and director, because this ain’t Guardians, it ain’t Slither, and most importantly it ain’t good.

So… yeah. As you can see, there’s really nothing of value to be found here. Like yes, there’s an okay sketch in the middle of all this, but there were some passable ones in The ABCs of Death, and that movie was still shit. I’m sure you’re expecting some witty summation of this movie and its flaws, maybe a reiteration of how depressing it is to see so much talent wasted for unfunny jokes, maybe some sort of comedic take on all this garbage.

Well, that’s not happening. Even thinking about this stupid movie for this long has sapped my strength. I’m going to lie down. Fuck this movie.

[its-love-u-asshole]

Slipping Underneath [Ch. 6]

Pairings: Kuroo Tetsurou/Tsukishima Kei

Summary: Tsukishima was in some deep shit he realized, but common sense told him he should have been rather happy about the discovery he’d just made. Of course, that didn’t stop him from freaking out.

“Tsukki? Did something happen?” Bokuto asked.

Dejected, the blond lifted his head, giving Bokuto the flattest stare he could manage. “The neighbor downstairs hates my voice.”

Rating: T

Tags: soulmates, mythology/sirens AU, some iwaoi and bokuaka thrown in bc why not, first meetings, fluff, Kuroo is a nerd and Tsukki can’t help but be charmed, Siren!Tsukki, Siren!Bokuto

Note: Hello! Thank you all so much for reading this fic! I can't believe I'm almost to the end fff, this chapter and the next contain the scenes I've been waiting to write all along, so hopefully you enjoyed! Thank you to @emeraldwaves for reading this over and being amazing! I'm hoping to have this fic done by valentine's day, but I probably just jinxed myself ^^'' the next update from me will come from my other ongoing fic though, so check it out ;)))) Thanks again for following this fic these past few months! Enjoy~ 

AO3

"You know....like...none of this would've happened if you'd just told him from the beginning that you were a siren."

Across the living room, a weak, muffled voice groaned in response. "I know."

Tsukishima currently had a face full of couch cushion, his limbs too lazy and his mind too bogged down for him to even consider moving an inch. Who knew if Bokuto could even hear him through the fabric, but fucking whatever. He refused to speak up, refused to do much of anything except lay there, and occasionally walk to the kitchen for no actual reason other than to remember the fact he was still cursed to walk the earth.

Of course, his friend wouldn't ignore it though, and knew him far too well enough to allow it. Especially not when Tsukishima would give him so much crap during one of his 'episodes.'

God, this is gonna suck.

Bokuto lounged easily on one of their kitchen island stools, swinging his legs back and forth as he consumed one of Tsukishima's strawberry bars. Asshole. A preemptive strike. Nothing got Tsukishima in a 'fight me' mood like someone stealing his snacks, but Bokuto had obviously underestimated the level of shit Tsukishima had gotten himself into.

Not even ice cream bar theft would lift his spirits.

"Like it would've been that easy," Bokuto continued, slurping up the treat loudly.

Tsukishima only sighed. "Yeah, I get it."

Unfortunately, Bokuto mastered the art of wearing people down back when they were twelve.

"Like 'hey there Kuroo, before we date, I should tell you this one thing,' or whatever," Bokuto went on, and Tsukishima swore he heard the sound of a half eaten bar being thrown into the trash.

"Uh-huh."

"Because you know, this was avoidable."

"Yup."

"Super avoidable. I can't begin to tell you how avoidable--"

Enough. Tsukishima lifted his head, giving everything he had to the glare he sent Bokuto's way. "Kou. I know. Please shut up."

Tsukishima's voice packed a punch, but despite how enraged he was, the power behind it fell short. It came laced with a roughness only a night of tears and loathing could be responsible for. His eyes still burned, and with a grimace, he rubbed at them until they hurt more so.

He shouldn't have to put up with this. He'd never wanted this. If only he didn't have this stupid voice. Like stanzas and notes, turned to shackles, dragging him down with the somber odes they complimented.

Normally, he'd be way too fucking prideful to let anyone see him like this...crying over...over anything. But this was Bokuto, and the chances of him not picking up the signs were low. People thought the other was so dense, and he could be. Not when it came to those he loved. Not when it came to his friend of over a decade.

Tsukishima had been silent for two days now. No singing, no humming. No music on top of it. Tsukishima had never gone a day in his life without music. But now his mp3 player just sat on the coffee table, no battery, and Tsukishima had no desire to change that.

It was unhealthy for their kind, living this way, and the toll it took on Tsukishima's health seemed to ignite Bokuto's anger.

"No! And you shouldn't either! You've been way too quiet, even for you," Bokuto said, leaping from his perch, footsteps thundering against their shitty laminate flooring. Tsukishima vaguely wondered if Kuroo could hear the ruckus...

"You're not the boss of me," he muttered back, childishly, dropping his face back into the mountain of pillows.

He expected a snort, maybe some of their usual bickering, but he'd never been that lucky. Bokuto's sigh communicated nothing but sadness, disappointment, and Tsukishima couldn't help but glance back up at those golden eyes, full of pity.

He hated this. He didn't need pity, didn't want any. He'd made a decision, and now he had to stand by it. It wasn't Tsukishima's fault. He didn't listen to the rational parts of his head, the ones which begrudgingly agreed with Bokuto. No. At the end of the day, Kuroo didn't trust him, had spied on him. The apology wasn't Tsukishima's to give.

Bokuto trudged over, seating himself at the end of the couch near Tsukishima's head. Stubbornly, Tsukishima scooted away.

"Kei," Bokuto sighed, slouching against their lumpy cushions. Tsukishima could practically see his expression, concerned and scared. The knots in Tsukishima's stomach pulled tighter. "Look, you can handle the Kuroo situation however you want. I think you should fix things as soon as possible, because like it or not the guy makes you happy and you can't deny it! But...I won't force you. It's just... you need to sing. This isn't good for you. It's starting to...show..."

Bokuto punctuated the statement with a hard wince, and Tsukishima had to admit he had a point there. His skin had lost the usual shine, the glow. It looked a sickly grey now, dried out and scratchy. His body felt weak, his hair brittle and limp. Coupled with his mess of emotions, it was not a pretty sight.

Tsukishima had never let it get this bad. In fact, regardless of if he liked to sing, he made a schedule to avoid situations like this.

But well, what was the point?

Tsukishima was far from happy. What was there to sing about? He couldn't if he tried.

He felt like crap, his heart ached, and all he wanted was to go one floor down and melt into Kuroo's arms. But no, not when Kuroo had lied to him. Not while Tsukishima's stubbornness made him ignore Bokuto's advice.

Regardless, the need to vent burned deep, probably a result of his body's desire to express something, in song form or otherwise. Bokuto likely wouldn't give up either, so he couldn't avoid the conversation in the end. Whatever...

"He thought I was cheating on him," Tsukishima breathed out, the words slurring together. He wondered how long it would be for his voice to give out, it sounded so damn weak already.

Two days. That's all it had taken. Being in love sucked.

"First off, you assumed that, you don't know," Bokuto countered. Fucking hell, fine. Tsukishima had some fight left in him.

"What else could it have been? And if it was something else, he could've asked me," Tsukishima hissed. There was a brief moment of silence while Bokuto thought of his next argument, and each second added an extra dose of dread to Tsukishima's deteriorating form.

"Mm yeah, you got a point. He messed up. But so did you!" Bokuto said, hitting Tsukishima with the nearby pillow. "You've been lying to him all along! If you'd told him you were a siren, then he'd know why you're a dude magnet. When I met Akaashi, I--"

Fuck--

"Ughhh! Please make it stop, I've heard this story twenty times, I get it!" Tsukishima rolled back and forth on the couch, his hands clamping over his ears like a survival instinct. Bokuto visibly flinched, since hell, that was the most vocal Tsukishima had been in a while, but shit. Tsukishima didn't deserve this. He wouldn't stand for it. "I know okay? You and Akaashi are perfect. When you met Akaashi, everything fell into place. You two are so in love. Nice. Now get off my lawn."

"Okay but we really are. We're hella cute."

"I swear--"

"I mean, you don't have to be so jealous. Even though I wouldn't exactly blame you..."

Bokuto barely held back his laughter, and Tsukishima scrambled up, his glare too intense to be serious. They stared at each other, a stand still familiar to them both after years of friendship, waiting for the other to crack. Bokuto's lip quivered, and Tsukishima fisted his hands into the couch cushions, but eventually his defense proved too weak.

Tsukishima snorted, short but loud, and Bokuto broke down, clutching his stomach.

"Asshole," Tsukishima said as he threw pillow upon pillow onto Bokuto's shaking form, the other dying from breathlessness. But despite his words, Tsukishima couldn't help but grin, his heart lighter for a fraction of a second.

Eventually, Bokuto's chuckles died into short giggles, his chest heaving as Tsukishima flopped back onto the haphazard cushions. When Bokuto finally wiped the tears from his eyes enough to look at Tsukishima, his expression softened into something Tsukishima didn't think he'd earned.

"Hey, there we go. Your skin looks a little brighter now..."

Tsukishima shook his head, knowing it wasn't true, but also realizing it was better to not point it out. When he looked to his forearm, his pale skin was dull as ever. "Sure Kou, whatever you say."

Below him, he heard a door slam, something Kuroo only did when he was truly frustrated.

It stung, and Tsukishima clutched at his chest, the pain nearly physical in nature.

He missed Kuroo. That much he could admit. He wished this whole thing had never happened. Part of him wished he'd never been caught singing on his balcony by Kuroo at all, but somehow, the wish didn't feel genuine.

Now that Kuroo was in his life, he couldn't bear to have him leave. So...now what?

Bokuto grabbed his hand, squeezing tight. "You need to tell him. Kuroo's a good guy, I'm sure of it! You wouldn't like him otherwise....you're so picky."

Tsukishima swatted him halfheartedly, but well, Bokuto was right. Kuroo was a nerd with bad jokes, cheesy lines, and untamable hair. But he also embodied everything Tsukishima wanted, and his stupid kindness seemed immeasurable. Tsukishima had been a goner since the beginning, hadn't he?

Tsukishima sighed in defeat, the corners of his mouth lifting ever so slightly.

"He'll apologize, but you kinda gotta...do the same..." Bokuto's tone dripped with hesitancy, like the slightest advisement would have Tsukishima jumping back in fear, right to square one.

Rather than admit Bokuto had gotten through to him, Tsukishima stood up, his feet tingling from finally being used after hours of lethargy. Tentatively, Tsukishima cleared his throat, then sang one fluid note into the air.

It cracked near the end, and barely managed to be heard above the AC in their apartment, but it was there. Low and melancholic, it was there.

Ignoring the satisfied look on Bokuto's face, Tsukishima walked to the kitchen, humming all the way and determined to give his parched throat some relief.

No, he couldn't sing happily, couldn't communicate joyous lyrics or ideas. But he could sing of his pain, of his longing, of the hurt festering inside him. He'd sing his vents until they were no more, until his head was clear and rational enough.

Then he could talk to Kuroo again. Then he could be himself.

Sending Bokuto a thankful glance, Tsukishima grabbed his water, and retreated to his room.

--

Apologies were not a race or a competition, he reasoned about three days later.

Tsukishima's throat ached from use, but considering that was his only physical issue, he was lucky. His hair gleamed, soft to the touch, his skin healthy and vibrant. The red rims around his eyes had mostly faded, and the honey hue of his eyes glowed once more in the sunlight.

He felt better. He felt ready.

It had been his misguided pride and selfishness that had held him back from approaching Kuroo before, but his mind had cleared. As stubborn as he was, this wasn't something he could, or wanted to avoid.

They were both at fault at the end of the day. He should've heard Kuroo out more, shouldn't have jumped to conclusions. Probably should've told the truth from the beginning...

Kuroo owed him a fair share of explanation and an apology as well, Tsukishima wouldn't let that shit slide. Tsukishima was certain he already knew that too. Kuroo was too good of a guy not to.

It didn't matter who came to who, or who explained themselves first. What mattered was fixing this error, and Tsukishima's determination could rival even the toughest soldier right then.

Bokuto's morning text of 'you better tell him ur a siren, ya slut' had helped too. As much as his heart raced and his stomach twisted at the thought of Kuroo's reaction, he knew it was the only way to avoid this problem in the future.

All he had to do was hope that Kuroo wouldn't think he was a freak. Ha.

It was all planned out in his head. After his last lecture, he'd go to Kuroo's apartment, and they'd sort everything out.

He was so focused on his strategy he hadn't dreamed of expecting any detours. For example, he hadn't factored in the possibility of Kuroo finding him first, stopping Tsukishima dead in his tracks in the middle of the sidewalk.

Crap. Well there goes that idea.

Kuroo had come into his view from the side, chest heaving like he'd run to meet Tsukishima in time. It would make sense, they knew each other's schedules so well now. Tsukishima tried not to dwell on the fact that usually Kuroo walked him to class on days like this.

But normalcy would return soon. Right?

"U-uh--" Tsukishima's voice betrayed him, his brain only willing to focus on Kuroo's warm hands on his shoulders, and the apprehensive vibe he gave off. Kuroo...Kuroo shouldn't ever look how he did right then.

His golden eyes seemed less playful, framed by dark bags of exhaustion. His hair sat more disordered than usual, and his skin lacked its ordinary shine. Tsukishima had never thought about it, but if he'd ever had to describe Kuroo, the word 'lively' would've come to mind first. Lively, teasing, confident, among a plethora of other things which Tsukishima admired more than he liked to admit.

Now though, now Kuroo looked like a shadow of his former self, and it made whatever vestiges of Tsukishima's former anger dissipate instantly. Just the sight of him made Tsukishima want to put a pause on this weird quarrel they'd put themselves in, if only to force Kuroo to get some sleep.

If Kuroo were a dog, he'd be trembling, tail between his legs and eyes full of fear. Like he expected the worst

Like he'd spent all week worrying about Tsukishima's feelings, the guilt eating him alive.

Turns out they'd both been in bad shape after all. But he could fix that, he could fix this, temper be damned.

"Kuroo, I--"

"No, me first," Kuroo cut off, his voice stony and laced with nerves. Long gone was the easiness and cheer which tended to fill his tone. Tsukishima bit his lip, willing himself to let Kuroo speak, no matter how badly he wanted to just come out and confess.

“Or last...whatever," Kuroo continued, sighing heavily. His fingers kept digging into Tsukishima's shoulders. "I'm sure you want nothing to do with me right now, and you deserve to feel that way! I really fucked up, and--god Kei, I'm so sorry if I made you cry or...made you think I don't trust you! Because I do...so much..."

Frenzied, Kuroo brushed a hand through his untamed hair, swallowing hard as he searched frantically for his words. To think Kuroo would ever have a problem with words of all things. If things weren't so tense, Tsukishima might've laughed.

Now he was just trying to keep from embarrassing himself with tears. At least no one was around.

"I just...I don't have an excuse okay?" Kuroo's shoulders sagged as he stared at the ground. "Well, I kinda do but it's stupid and I'd rather tell you in a cemetery so I can bury myself alive afterwards. But point is, I messed up and you have a right to be angry, and to want to break up with me, or whatever really."

The mere thought had Tsukishima's heart stalling.

"I know we haven't been dating long but...I don't know. I want you to be happy, so happy. I never wanted to be someone who didn't make that happen but obviously I'm an idiot," Kuroo said with a small, humorless chuckle. "I love being around you, everything about you. I never should've doubted you, and if you still want me around...I won't ever do it again. I swear."

The determination locked in Kuroo eyes was the first trace of a familiar spark Tsukishima had seen since Kuroo had started talking, and it melted him on the spot.

I love being around you, everything about you.

How exactly was he supposed to react to that? It breathed life into him, better than any song could, no matter how profound or fitting the lyrics. It almost made Tsukishima want to laugh more, to think they'd let things get so out of hand when in reality they needed each other.

In that moment, Tsukishima knew that was the truth, soulmate connection or not. He didn't need the universe to tell him how much he needed and wanted to be by Kuroo's side. It was simply a plain fact.

"If I still want you around..." Tsukishima breathed out, snorting lightly. In what world wouldn't that be the case? Tsukishima scolded himself for being cheesy, but watching Kuroo perk up at the words made it worth it.

He'd truly become hopeless, and he felt perfectly fine about it.

Grabbing Kuroo's hand off his shoulder, Tsukishima squeezed tight, breathing in deeply. Push pride aside.

The image of Bokuto's text flashed in his mind, and as annoying as it was, it did the job.

"I don't want to break up dummy, where did you even get that idea?" Tsukishima asked, and he continued despite Kuroo's strangled gasp. He scowled at the space behind Kuroo's head, not confident enough to meet his eyes, lest he come completely undone. "I was really angry with you though, I won't lie. I'm still not completely over it but...this was my fault too. I'm...I'm sorry."

At the sight of Kuroo opening his mouth to protest, Tsukishima squeezed his hands tighter, silencing him. "I'm serious. I haven't been totally honest with you, because I didn't think it would matter. But obviously that didn't work...so, you deserve to know."

Kuroo's eyes widened, the mix of confusion and suspicion hard to ignore. "Wha--wait. Huh? What is it?"

"I can't tell you here, and wow, don't give me that look. I haven't been harvesting your blood in your sleep or anything..." Tsukishima clicked his tongue, but his tone relaxed into something playful, something more them.

It got a small laugh out of Kuroo, and again Tsukishima was grateful. "Well who knows, I've had worse theories before...but alright. Where do you wanna..." Kuroo looked around, noting the few students now passing them now and again with questioning eyes. He unlaced their hands, considerate as ever of Tsukishima's desire for privacy, and smiled.

"Can you come over tonight?" Tsukishima asked, hoping his voice didn't give away his nerves. He'd gotten through half of the obstacle, but the worst was yet to come. Oh how he loathed being a siren sometimes...

Part of him knew he shouldn't worry though. This was Kuroo he was dealing with. Kuroo, who had just poured his heart out.

He'd said he loved everything about Tsukishima. Hopefully that would include his secret.

"Anything for you," Kuroo said, the same embarrassing dreaminess leaking into his expression. Things were already returning to normal..."Are you sure we're okay though? I mean it Kei, I made you upset. I'll do anything to make it up to you."

The pure genuine nature of the statement only solidified Tsukishima's predictions. Things would be fine. All he had to do was come clean.

"Oh I'm sure," he replied, smirking lightly. "We can talk about it tonight, just...don't keep me waiting."

Tsukishima glanced around quickly for onlookers before he dropped his hesitancy all at once, acting on impulse alone as he pressed a kiss to Kuroo's cheek. His skin burned, and he was sure red color traveled down his neck from how damn embarrassed he was, but Kuroo communicated with affection, with touch. Tsukishima needed to make sure Kuroo believed him, believed that everything would be alright now.

"I-I have to go to class, see you tonight," Tsukishima's voice sounded rushed and panicked, but hell, his embarrassment wouldn't get any worse. The stunned look on Kuroo's face as the raven internally combusted probably added to it too. Dork.

Mind and heart feeling lighter by the second, Tsukishima went on his way, knowing the night wouldn't come soon enough.

--

Tsukishima had told Kuroo not to keep him waiting, so naturally, Kuroo arrived early in order to avoid the possibility of the universe's cruel intentions of making him late via earthquake or fire. He'd thankfully arrived in one piece, twenty minutes ahead of schedule.

The only downside of that: Tsukishima hadn't returned home yet.

"What?" Kuroo asked, blinking in confusion at Bokuto Koutarou, Tsukishima's roommate. Side note: holy fuck this guy is ripped.

He'd have to ask Tsukishima how he'd never mentioned that before, because man, Kuroo needed Bokuto's workout regime stat.

"Oh, he'll be back soon! Sometimes his last professor holds the class back, Kei hates it," Bokuto said, his face breaking out into one of the most blinding smiles Kuroo had ever seen. Seriously, he was probably half blind now. "You should come in though! You can wait for him inside!"

Somehow, something in Kuroo's head told him Tsukishima would very much mind Kuroo being alone with his best friend of over ten years, but oh well. This was his chance to get some prime Tsukki intel...

"Sure, why not?" Kuroo said easily, waltzing into the apartment he visited often. Well, he hadn't been there in a while, but he hoped to change that misfortune. "I'm Kuroo Tetsurou by the way."

Bokuto laughed, gesturing for Kuroo to sit on the couch while he claimed the ratty armchair nearby. "Dude...I know. I wouldn't let Kei off the hook until he spilled everything about you, he's so mean to me! I tell him everything but nooo, he hides his boyfriend from me," Bokuto said with an exaggerated pout, his voice booming in the tiny apartment.

Kuroo could already tell he was going to like this guy, but how he ended up being best friends with quiet and reserved Tsukishima remained a mystery.

"Sounds like Tsukki," Kuroo laughed, fondly eyeing the various records and headphones strewn about the living room. He'd have to ask Tsukishima to play him one some time, he'd never actually used a record player before...

Looking back to Bokuto, Kuroo tensed at the sharp smirk directed at him. He felt like a mouse suddenly, about to be swooped up by deadly talons.

"You look so whipped," Bokuto said, almost triumphant in the assessment. Kuroo blushed, but hey, couldn't exactly deny that. "Kei is too. Totally gone I mean. It's good you guys patched things up."

Then, Bokuto paused, squinting to the point where his eyes were nearly closed. It would've been ridiculous as hell if Kuroo wasn't still walking on eggshells.

"You did patch things up...right?" Bokuto asked, his eyes filling with concern. Tsukishima always told him how overly sweet and trusting Bokuto could be, but Kuroo didn't exactly view those as negatives. The guy clearly wanted what was best for everyone, even Kuroo, someone he barely knew.

Kuroo smiled, his shoulders relaxing finally. "Yeah...yeah I think so. We're trying to lay everything out in the open you know? Kinda overwhelming..."

But he was so happy about it too. Tsukishima didn't hate him. Tsukishima wanted to be with him, to open up to him fully. It was all Kuroo had dreamed of. They really needed to have a talk about communication too, no more of these weird misunderstandings.

Then maybe Kuroo wouldn't lose his mind again, thinking about sirens and all that garbage...

Just the reminder of his botched and unfounded theory made him blush, and he quickly pushed it out of his mind. No more assumptions, no more strange hypotheses...

Tsukishima would tell him what he needed to know.

Sighing heavily, Bokuto collapsed back into his armchair in relief. "Thank god, I was getting so tired of him angsting everywhere. He wasn't singing either, which okay, I know you probably don't know much right now. But for a siren, that's like...super bad for his health."

If Kuroo's brain were a record player, the harsh scratch of vinyl would've bounced off the walls.

For...for a...

"What?" Kuroo croaked, his mind teetering on the edge of sanity.

Bokuto, still not looking at Kuroo as he pulled out his phone to scroll through some texts, only shrugged. "You know, we were made to sing. So when we don't, we get really sick. You would've freaked out if you'd seen him."

I'm freaking out now. Okay, okay. Calm down. He's--he's gotta be joking. Or I'm dreaming. Yeah.

"B-Bokuto, I think--"

"And y'know, Kei doesn't sing excessively or anything, but ever since you've been around he's been doing it a lot more! So I got really worried when he just went silent on me," Bokuto continued, oblivious to Kuroo's internal breakdown. "He's such a good singer too! It annoys him though, because of all the guys and the attention he gets, oh right--I'm sure that must've been so weird for you. Kei would never cheat though!"

At the very thought, Bokuto's face scrunched up unpleasantly, and right...Tsukishima must've vented to him about Kuroo's suspicions of infidelity. Even though...those hadn't exactly been his suspicions at all.

No, what plagued his mind had been silly, unfounded. Or at least he'd thought so. But even now, one word rang in his mind, like a chorus, chanting and chanting until...

"Sirens," Kuroo said, his voice shaky. His forced chuckle seemed to finally break Bokuto of his rambling, and the other looked over at him, his bright eyes blinking owlishly. "That's...a good one. Ha...did you guys figure that out from Oikawa? That bastard. I know it's pretty stupid to suspect you guys of it, so I deserve the jokes."

Kuroo laughed again, but it felt hollow and broken, painfully awkward as he waited for Bokuto to laugh too, to confirm this whole thing was some elaborate prank.

Silence was his only reward.

He could almost see it, the exact moment in Bokuto's expression where he realized he'd fucked up, the exact second Kuroo knew he hadn't been joking at all.

Bokuto tensed up, his mouth opening and closing several times while color drained from his face, those golden eyes flicking every which way in a panic.

Oh my god...

"Oh my god," Bokuto echoed in a pained groan. "You mean you--he didn't--you don't? Ah shit."

At that exact moment, they both heard the telltale sound of a key turning in the lock of the front door, and the last thing Kuroo heard was Bokuto's whimper before Tsukishima stepped inside.

Perceptive as ever (and bless him for it, Kuroo needed help), Tsukishima froze, recognizing something was indeed wrong with the expressions of both their faces.

Now, Kuroo knew he should've probably handled this situation gently, carefully. After all, it was a pretty big deal, and his boyfriend had just got him. Springing this on him out of the blue would surely just lead to madness. If Kuroo were in his right mind, he'd pull Tsukishima into his room, and calmly ask his questions.

Except, Kuroo was very much not in his right fucking mind.

His boyfriend was a mythical creature and how else was he supposed to handle that other than word vomiting all over the damn place?

"You're a siren?" Tumbled out of his mouth at the exact same time he heard Bokuto mutter a very pathetic "please don't kill me."

Tsukishima dropped his book bag, his fierce eyes flying to Bokuto like darts. "What did you do?!"

"I-I don't know! I thought you told him!" Bokuto lunged for a pillow, pressing it to his chest as if it had any chance of protecting him from sudden death.

"I never said that!"

"That's not my fault!"

"It's totally your fault! I was going to tell him once I got home," Tsukishima all but growled, his gaze murderous and his hands wringing the fabric of his sweater.

"Well...I guess I saved you the trouble? Ha..." Bokuto said, voice weak and trembling. A quick, painful second of tense silence was all Bokuto needed to make his final decision: fucking run for it.

"Well you guys have fun, I'll be back never," Bokuto shouted quickly, throwing his pillow into Tsukishima's arms to give him a head start, and promptly grabbed his shoes and slammed the front door behind him.

If Kuroo weren't so out of it, he might've congratulated him. He'd never seen a faster exit in his life.

Blinking in shock, Kuroo turned towards his boyfriend, with nothing else to do but wait. So many questions sat in his mind, yet none felt more important than the other, canceling out before one could dare leave his mouth. He'd just have to put his trust in Tsukishima, like he'd vowed to do, and have him lead the way.

Somehow, that thought alone made Kuroo's fear dissipate, only replaced with concern when he met his boyfriend's gaze. Tsukishima's expression softened as he finally looked to Kuroo. It held everything Kuroo had wanted, but some things he didn't. Love, consideration, but also fear and guilt. Those honey brown eyes he loved so damn much...were afraid of Kuroo's reaction.

And well, he just couldn't have that.

Getting up despite his shaky limbs, Kuroo crossed the small gap between them, grabbing Tsukishima's hand with no hesitation, and reveling in the way the blond pressed up against him. Yeah, he'd definitely missed that.

"Care to explain?" Kuroo asked, no venom detectable, and he grinned when he felt Tsukishima nod against his chest.

--

"Wait, but I don't get it. Why don't I like your singing?" Kuroo questioned about thirty minutes later while he sat in Tsukishima's bed, much more relaxed but still horribly confused. The tea Tsukishima had made him had long grown cold. He'd been way too caught up in all of Tsukishima's explanations to drink it. "Should I be all...ahh or whatever too when you sing?"

As if the simple "ahh" example hadn't been enough, he twisted his face into some ugly, lovestruck expression which had Tsukishima giggling beautifully. Honestly, that was the best sound in his book.

He watched as Tsukishima glared, the cutest blush lighting up his cheeks. A good sign.

The blond cleared his throat uncomfortably, fingers pulling at the loose threads of his comforter. His eyes were fixed on the various music posters which adorned his walls, or really, anywhere else that wasn't Kuroo's intense gaze.

Smirking softly, Kuroo wrapped his arms around his blond's waist, pulling him into his bubble. Tsukishima grunted, but didn't resist, and Kuroo grinned in triumph. "Tsukkiiiii, tell me..."

He punctuated each plea with a small kiss to Tsukishima's neck, while his fingers poked and prodded at Tsukishima's sides, and eventually the blond relaxed into the embrace. Although, he still remained quite huffy about it, but it was cute.

Pushing back on Kuroo shoulders, Tsukishima brought them face to face, eyes serious and grounding. Needless to say, he had Kuroo's rapt attention. "When...when you're a siren's...soulmate, the siren's song becomes physically painful."

Tsukishima's voice barely counted as a whisper, but Kuroo heard every word he spoke.

Soulmate.

Not waiting for Kuroo's shock to go down, Tsukishima continued. "Most sirens have soulmates, or...people that are supposed to be soulmates. Whatever. Point is, that first night, when I saw how much you hated my voice, I knew. That's why I don't sing in front of you, that's why it sounds so awful if I do. I didn't...I didn't want you to know--"

"Why?" Kuroo couldn't help but ask, a mix between confusion and joy settling in his stomach. Of course he'd be ecstatic, knowing he and Tsukishima were weirdly fated to be together, but it also felt...sort of wrong. He didn't like Tsukishima because of fate, he liked Tsukishima because...well, that list was too long.

This evening had been full of way too many surprises. Kuroo continued to be in awe, but his mind also remained in a frenzy. Sirens. Sirens, of all things, existed. And who knew what else existed out there in that big wide world? What did being a siren mean? How much was there to it? How many were there?

He was sure he'd find out. It was part of his life now, because it was Tsukishima's life, his identity. Kuroo's boyfriend was a mythical creature, and the fact had yet to truly settle. There was a lot he didn't know how to grasp or handle, but he was ready to be guided through it. One thing he did know though, was that he wanted Tsukishima by his side forever. That came directly from his heart and soul, fate be damned.

"Kuroo, I hate that word...soulmate. I don't like you because the universe told me I should, it's just because you're you. Irritating, dorky, you," Tsukishima explained, blushing as he forced the words out. Being this open probably didn't come easy to him, but Kuroo appreciated more than the blond would ever realize.

"Well, aren't you rude today," Kuroo said, pinching Tsukishima's nose. He was of course, swatted away. Maybe the statements were true after all...not that Kuroo planned on changing anytime soon.

"I mean it, so don't go overthinking again," Tsukishima sighed, his eyes flicking back down in shyness. "When we first met I wanted nothing to do with you, I'll admit. I was stubborn, I don't like believing things are out of my control. But, everything was so damn easy and nice and...with you, I..."

Tsukishima's words grew disjointed, and the blond glared at his hands, hating that he couldn't speak. But he didn't have to.

You didn't mind losing control when it came to this, did you?

Tsukishima didn't need to say it, Kuroo got the message, clear as day. He almost felt like he could be dreaming again, because no way had he gotten this lucky, having someone like Tsukishima fall for him.

Bringing Tsukishima into his arms, Kuroo sighed into the embrace. "Yeah, I love being around you too." It was easy, fun, right. Hell, he'd almost said he loved Tsukishima with everything he had, but bombs like that would be dropped in due time.

Right now, this was enough.

Pulling back, they shared a slow, deep kiss, and Kuroo couldn't believe he'd gone even a day without this feeling. Tsukishima, sighing against his lips, falling into each other perfectly.

When they separated, Kuroo couldn't help but laugh. "I'll admit, I still can't believe this. You're a siren. That's so cool!"

Tsukishima's smile fell into pure annoyance. "It’s not, trust me. It's just troublesome as hell, and there's nothing I can do about it."

"Well, I think it's great. I mean, it's part of you," Kuroo supplied, glancing around the room. Original song lyrics sat smudged on notebook paper at Tsukishima's desk, his iPod charged calmly at his bedside, and everything else in the room screamed music.

It was only fitting in the end, that Tsukishima's existence itself ended up so heavily tied to his passion.

"You can't actually mind it," Kuroo said, more a fact than a question, and he smiled when Tsukishima just scoffed, no disagreements on his lips.

They laced their hands together, and everything finally settled into peaceful silence.

...for a second anyways.

"Okay okay, so wait! If you're a siren, why are you a dude? I thought they were all girls? Is that fake? Are there girls?"

"Oh oh! Actually, how many other sirens do you know besides Bokuto?"

"Do all sirens have soulmates?"

"What would happen if you sang for a crowd of people? Like...would they all fall in love with you or are there levels to your power? Oh my god...are you considered a powerful siren? That would be so cool..."

"Oh, and--"

Tsukshima's hands slapped over his mouth, effectively ending his interrogation. Good thing too, he'd forgotten to breathe during it.

"Whoa okay, that's enough," Tsukishima said, smirking to himself. "I'll tell you everything eventually. Just...one at a time."

Slowly, Kuroo pushed Tsukishima's hands away, holding them in his own as he raised a brow in skepticism. "...promise?"

Humming, Tsukishima thought it over, eyes far too innocent to be believable. Cute brat. "Tell you what, you get five questions a day."

"Ten."

"Eight, and they can be in depth," Tsukishima negotiated, the amusement in his eyes making Kuroo's resolve crumble.

Eh, so be it. In the end, he still had what he wanted, Tsukishima's full and undeniable trust.

"Deal?" Tsukishima prompted, climbing to sit comfortably in Kuroo's lap.

And yeah, there was definitely no refusing an offer like that. Chuckling, Kuroo stole a kiss, the first of many more for the night. "Deal."

[lady-silvernight]

Rockstar

I wrote a little Pynch oneshot because I was bored. It’s longer than I expected but I finished it. @todreamforever asked me to post it when I got done so here it is. Enjoy everybody.

Summary: Rockstar AU 

Ronan and Adam are internet pen pals but they have never met in person before. Ronan invites Adam to a concert only for Adam to arrive and Ronan to never show up. Ronan swears up and down he was there but Adam isn't convinced until Ronan sends him an unreleased song by the band that had played. Only then does Adam realize that the person he's been messaging for the last six years is the lead singer of his favorite band.

AO3   FFN 

New message from Ronan. Adam's phone blinked at him. He smiled and swiped to open the message. He had messaged Ronan on a whim a couple years ago and they had hit it off. Adam had tried a lot to broaden his horizons when he got to college and finding an internet pen pal became them. He'd never figured out what exactly Ronan did because they had never moved forward from messaging one another. Ronan never seemed to be in one place. Every time they were talking he was in a different time zone or he was working, or not sleeping at normal times. The fact that he messaged first must mean he wanted to talk really bad.

"I know this is kind of last minute but Dream Thief is playing near you next week. I have an extra ticket that I don't know what else to do with it. We can meet up."

Adam quickly typed out a reply.

"Please tell me you're not just a fan because the lead singer has the same name as you?"

"No. Do you want the ticket or not. I need to get it in the mail before the end of the day if it's going to get there in time." Ronan was like that sometimes. He would be nice one second and a complete ass the next but it was kind of endearing to be completely honest. 

"Of course I want it. I love Dream Thief. We've been talking for years and we've never bothered to even try and meet up. I'm excited to finally meet you in person. You've got my address, just make sure to express ship it." "Obviously. It will be there Monday. Don't lose it before the concert." Ronan replied. Adam smiled. 

Work the following week seemed tedious and boring but Adam threw himself into it knowing he was going to finally meet Ronan in a few days. He had taken Friday off so he could stay out late if Ronan wanted to. Not to mention Dream Thief was notorious for running late into the night and Adam would rather take the day off than try to work with just a few hours of sleep. His coworkers could tell something was up but they didn't pry too much. In the three years Adam had been working there he had never once taken a day off of work. Something strange must have been happening but they never approached him to ask. 

When Thursday finally arrived Adam did his best to stay focused at work but by three he was ready to get out of there and get ready. Near him happened to be the event center on the other side of town. Twenty minutes drive from his little apartment. Adam punched out at exact five and was pulling out of the parking lot ten minutes later. The concert started at eight so Adam texted Ronan he was on the way at seven fifteen and climbed into his car. Traffic was going to be ridiculous so Adam wanted to be early. 

By the time he managed to park he only had fifteen minutes to find his seat and Ronan. The ticket was for the floor seats near the front of the crowd. How Ronan had managed to afford two tickets for down here Adam didn't want to know. There were two empty seats in the row near the isle so Adam grabbed one and waited. 

People continued to file in and find seats but Ronan never appeared to take the empty seat.

"Hey man, where are you? The concert is going to start without you." Adam sent a quick text to Ronan and waited some more. The lights dimmed and the tour manager of Dream Thief, Richard Gansey, came out.

"Before the festivities start I want to thank everyone for coming tonight. This year has been tough with shifting tour dates around so much and we appreciate it all very much. A lot of work goes into putting on these shows, Henry wants you to know how hard he works to impress you guys and hopes you enjoy it all. Have a wonderful time everyone." He said. The crowd cheered as the lights dimmed and the fancy laser lights came up. Still no text from Ronan though.

"It's starting man, are you coming or not?" Adam texted. He didn't want to enjoy the first set as Dream Thief started playing with Ronan still not being there. By the end of it he was starting to get into it even if he was still pissed that Ronan hadn't shown up yet. A smaller band came on to perform in the middle while they reset some things for the finale. Ronan was two hours late at this point. Adam knew he wasn't coming but he still slipped out to call him in the hallway.

"Hey Ronan, It's Adam. I'm not sure what happened but it would have been nice to know that you had decided to bail on me. I'm still waiting if you want to come, the last set hasn't started yet. I doubt you'll be here but I can at least try." Adam left the message in Ronan's voicemail hoping he saw it in the morning and felt bad for ditching Adam here. He headed back to his seat and was surprised to find a girl waiting near his seat.

"Are you seat 162?" She asked looking up at him. Man this girl was short.

"What if I am?" Adam asked.

"My name is Blue and I'm a Roadie for Dream Thief. You were our random draw for dinner with Ronan Lynch tomorrow while he's still in town. He doesn't meet fans after the show so you would be one of the few who is meeting him on this tour. If you don't want to come it's up to you but I have to give you this and tell you that it's up to you what you want to do." She said handing him an envelope with his seat number on it. 

"Thanks but no promises. I'm a busy man."

"I understand." Blue said and then she headed back towards the stage. 

The last set started and Ronan never showed but Adam didn't give up hope until the last song started. Dream Thief always ended with their song Remembered. One of the guitarist's, Noah, sang most of that with Ronan backing him up. It was by far one of Dream Thief's most popular songs.

"Listen man, I don't know what the plan was tonight but it's not cool to stand up somebody like that. I don't know what you thought was going to happen but common courtesy is to tell someone if your plans fall through."  Adam texted Ronan before driving home. It was close to two AM by the time he finally crawled into bed and he was forever grateful he had taken the day off of work. After sending one more angry text to Ronan he fell asleep.

"How was the concert?" Adam couldn't believe it. Not even an apology or an explanation for what had happened, just a simple question.

"you tell me. You were supposed to be there." Adam replied.

"I was. It was good. Remembered still gives me the chills."

"Why didn't you answer any of my texts then? Or at least tell me that we didn't have seats next to one another?"

Ronan didn't reply to that. Adam shook his head and stuck his phone on the charger before cooking something for a quick lunch. He'd slept late and decided an early lunch made more sense than breakfast today. His phone buzzed a couple times while he cooked and ate but he ignored it. He had the day off work so nobody else was messaging him. By the time he finished eating he had seven new text messages and an email from Ronan. 

"As terrible as this sounds, I didn't have my phone on me most of the night. The one time I had it I didn't get a chance to reply.”

"I know that's a shitty excuse but it's all I have for you."

"I'm sorry. Is that what you want to hear?"

"Adam, please?"

"Here, I'll make it up to you. I emailed you one of the new songs that technically hasn't been released yet.  Don't share it with anyone else."

"I don't know what else to do."

"Adam?"

Adam shook his head as he opened his email. It was blank aside from an attached mp3 file labeled Foil. Turning up the volume he clicked play to hear the voice of Ronan Lynch.

"This is probably the worst way to tell you this but it’s the best way I can think of so here goes. These past few years messaging you have been amazing Adam, and I want to meet you so bad but the tour schedule is killing me. I'll figure out some way to meet you I'm sure. Anyway, this song is for you. I'll probably record it for the next album but you can know that it's for you." Adam scrambled to pause it. The Ronan he had been talking to for the last few years was The Ronan Lynch. Lead singer of the headlining band Dream Thief. With hands shaking he pressed play and listened.

At first I walked alone, I treaded waters unknown, I had a path laid out for me A plan for everything. But some things have changed, That path has moved again, The only factor, The only thing that's changed, Is you, My foil….

The song had been playing on repeat for the last hour. As soon as it had ended Adam had rewound it to the beginning again. He had searched through all the forums about Dream Thief's new album. There was supposed to be fourteen songs on the one that just came out but one had gotten cut and the other had just disappeared a couple weeks before the release. 

Adam wasn't paying attention and the last little piece of the file started playing as the song ended.

"that should do it. Track thirteen is a wrap. Keep this one under wraps. I'm going to release this one maybe a touch later. It's for Ad-, someone special." The voice said on the recording. Adam looked up sharply when they had stumbled over their words there at the end. It had almost sounded like he had said a name there, his name.

He thought for a second, staring at the phone before grabbing it and doing the one thing he had wanted to do for three years. 

He called Ronan.

They had been talking for almost six years now and never once had they had a conversation that didn't involve their screens. They had gotten comfortable with the text messaging and the occasional random photo of not each other. They had no idea what each other looked like aside from the basic descriptions. He'd never even heard Ronan's voice until now.

"Hello?"

"Are you still in town?" Adam asked before he could lose his nerve and hang up.

"Maybe, depends on who's asking?" The voice on the other end replied sounding a bit defensive.

"Shit sorry, It's Adam. Are you still in town?"

"Adam? Really? It's been six goddamn years and you finally got the nerve to call me." Ronan laughed. "Yea, I'm in town still. You want to meet up somewhere?"

"There's a pizza place on 42nd. It's not very well known but it's pretty good. Closest thing I could find to the pizza place from my hometown. I'll send you the address and I'll meet you there in an hour." Adam said as he mentally ran through what he had for clean clothes right now.

"I'll be there."

"Ask for a spot near the front windows. It's fun to watch the people go by on the street. I'll see you in an hour." Adam replied.

"See you in an hour." Ronan said then hung up. 

Adam's hands were shaking as he pulled his phone away from his ear. He was actually going to meet Ronan. For real this time. He texted the address to Ronan before opening his closet to find something to wear. The place they were headed was fairly casual so he settled on a faded Coke t-shirt and a nice pair of jeans with a nice black jacket. With one last check in the mirror he grabbed his keys and headed downtown to meet Ronan.

It was almost seven by the time he got there and the dinner crowds were starting to thin out already. Two of the tables by the window were free already. Adam checked his phone quickly to see a message from Ronan.

Tell them you are Adam. I said I was waiting for you.

Ronan was already here. He was in one of the seats by the window. Adam hurried inside.

"How many for you?" The lady at the courtesy table asked.

"My name's Adam. Someone should be waiting for me." He said. She smiled and grabbed a menu before heading for the last table by the window. Ronan was sitting with his back to the door so Adam couldn't see his face till the lady set down his menu and walked off again. 

"I take it you liked the song?" Ronan asked. Adam just stared in awe for a second. Ronan, his internet friend of six years, was Ronan Lynch, the lead singer of Dream Thief.

"It was great. Why didn't you release it?" Adam finally replied. 

"I wrote it after that night I stayed up texting you until almost five. You were the only thing between me and making some very bad decisions. I wanted you to hear it before the general public heard it. Originally I wasn’t even planning on recording it but Noah found the lyrics and brought them to one of our sessions. Everybody else seemed to like it even if they didn't know what it meant.”

"Why did you never tell me though? I thought you decided I wasn't worth meeting when you didn't show last night."

"I was afraid of what you would say. People sometimes change how they act when they find out they are talking to a celebrity. I liked our basically anonymous relations." Ronan said.

They chatted over dinner before heading to the park nearby to talk while the sun set. It was dark by the time they made it back to Adam's car.

"I'm glad I finally got to meet you." Adam said with a smile. Ronan grinned.

"Same here. Next time, you're coming on tour with me so we can do this all over the world." Ronan replied. With a soft kiss on Adam's cheek Ronan turned and headed towards his car on the other side of the parking lot.

(One year later)

"Get your lazy ass out of bed. We need to load the bus." Ronan shouted smacking Adam with a pillow.

"I'm entitled to at least a few hours of sleep in a real bed before four months on the road." Adam groaned holding the pillow to him.

"You haven't seen our bus yet. We have a real bed this time." Ronan said.

"And Chainsaw is a dog now. There is no way you convinced Gansey to redo the bus just for us." Chainsaw cawed from her cage in the corner where Ronan had started moving their bags.

"I told him to can it and then paid for it myself."

"Fine. Where did you put my stuff?" Adam said getting out of bed.

"It's on the chair where you left it. I'm taking a load of stuff out. Best get moving before Blue comes to yell at you." Ronan said. Adam smiled and gave Ronan a quick kiss before jumping in the shower.

Dream Thief's Chosen tour started in a week and Adam was going with. After all, it would look bad if Ronan Lynch's new boyfriend didn't make an appearance.