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rn-zane · 1 year

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SETTING: outside the hospital TIMING: last week PARTIES: @rn-zane + @magmahearts SUMMARY: zane gets into some trouble with an angry passerby. luckily, it's vigilante night for cass.

Being back at the hospital had felt like finally taking a breath after way too long underwater. The noise and chaos, the conversations and even the bad coffee had been a blessing, leaving Zane with a goofy smile at the end of his shift despite how much his leg currently hurt. It was a strange feeling, being completely wiped out while your body felt like it could go on for ages. As much as it had started to bother him to be at Alma’s house, he was looking forward to a good meal and a completely brainless netflix session.

Walking out the staff entrance, he was greeted with the brisk night air and a jittery stranger desperately sucking on a cigarette. Zane tucked his head down and turned, which did nothing to deter the stranger. “Hey! Yeah, you. Hospital guy.” The vampire only made it a few steps before the back of his bag was pulled on, forcing him to stop and turn. The man’s eyes were uneven, sweat pearling on his skin and blood was drying on his shirt. “I’m sorry, I have to get home. Someone inside can-”

“No one will help me inside,” the man interrupted, taking a step closer and forcing Zane back, hands raised in a display of submission due to the anger in the other’s voice. “They brought my girlfriend in here hours ago and no one will tell me where the fuck she is.” Zane blinked, watching carefully as another drag was taken from the cigarette. The cigarette held in scuffed hands, knuckles red with the clear signs of blood and bruising from a punch. A shiver ran down the vampire’s spine as he remembered the young woman who’d come in earlier tonight, clearly under the influence and badly beaten. It wasn’t fear that was making Zane bristle. It was anger. “You’re not going to see her,” he bit out and turned, moving briskly away before he did something he’d regret.

The man clearly didn’t have the same worries as Zane. Once again, his bag was tugged at, hard enough to make him stumble back a few steps and perhaps not surprisingly, it was followed by a fairly heavy punch to the face. Jaw aching, anger (and instinct) took over and for the first time in his life, the nurse found himself punching someone square in the face. Regret was instantaneous; not because this guy hadn’t deserved it but because his nose started to drip with crimson red. Shit.

—

Cass — or, rather, Magma, since that’s who she was tonight — didn’t usually venture out to this area. There was more than enough crime in Gatlin Fields and Worm Row to keep her busy, but lately there’d been a pit in her stomach every time she patrolled the area. She couldn’t stop thinking about the death pit in the Fields, couldn’t stop remembering the way they’d thrown Debbie’s body down, down, down, couldn’t stop replaying the clumsy eulogies in her head. She didn’t feel much like a superhero anymore. She wanted to fix that. She didn’t think she could do it close to home, close to the pit.

So… she changed things up. Made her way over to Deersprings instead, far away from the stench of the pit that seemed to follow her everywhere she went. She swore she could still smell it, even here, but she knew it was in her head. She just needed a good distraction, a way to shake herself loose from it.

She found it in the form of an altercation outside the hospital. An angry, disheveled man accosted another man in scrubs, yanking him around by his bag and punching him in the face. Definitely, absolutely a good distraction. Selfishly, she was a little excited about it. It was difficult to think of a death pit and the body you’d thrown into it when you were saving some medical professional from being punched a second time.

Even if the medical professional in question wasn’t exactly helpless. Cass blinked as the man reared back and punched the assailant himself, unsure how to proceed. It must have looked at least a little weird; she’d run over to help, but she hadn’t dropped her glamour just yet, which meant she looked like a teenager staring wide-eyed at an altercation between two grown men. After a moment of uncertainty, she grinned. “That was a pretty good hit!” She said, flashing the nurse a thumbs up. “I was going to see if you needed help, but it looks… Whoa, are you okay?” He looked a little… weird, staring at the blood dripping from the other man’s nose with a strange look on his face.

—

Truthfully, Zane had been hoping for someone else to step in and diffuse this situation. It had already been heated enough to start with, just by the presence of someone who was clearly violent and not sober, but now with blood and anger that didn’t even really feel like his own… Someone else hadn’t included a teenaged girl however, no matter whether or not she was wearing a mask. Somewhere buried deep, a sensible thought reared its head that this was dangerous for a normal person to walk into, especially one so young. Finding the right words to get her out of here was extremely hard however, when it felt like there was nothing but a growl lodged in his throat.

“This is none of your business, kid. Fuck off,” the stranger growled, voice pinched due to his broken nose which he was attempting to wipe with the back of his sleeve. Zane felt nailed to the ground, unable to respond even to the worried question coming from the girl. It wasn’t until the man moved, quickly and erratically, that the vampire was lurched into action as well. It was hard to decipher anything from his thoughts at the moment as they were more like whispers and feelings, hissing about food and protect and anger. Whether or not the man had intended to hurt the young girl or just scare her off seemed irrelevant.

It was a flurry of movements, none of them fully registering until Zane blinked and found himself holding the man up against the study building wall, blood now seeping from the back of his head as well. The sound in the fairly quiet alley took a moment to register as coming from him, the low snarl so completely unrecognizable.

It was enough to snap him back for a second, remembering the other person standing just a few feet away, his grip in the man’s jacket loosening. Before he could do more, compose himself, anything, the man had managed to scramble around in the nearby dumpster and grab at a metal pole from some discarded household item. No matter how many times it had happened, the heavy weight against his head didn’t feel any less disorienting than the other times, coming dangerously close to knocking him out if not for the low rumbling of animalistic anger keeping him conscious.

—

The guy — not the nurse, but the man who’d attacked him, the man who smelled like an alleyway she’d slept in for a while in New York and looked like the people who’d stumbled by said alleyway at two in the morning — barely acknowledged Cass for a moment, and it was still enough to make her feel small. And she hated that. She hated that she was supposed to be this proud, strong, mystical thing and could still be made to feel tiny by angry men with loud voices, hated that she’d worked so hard to make herself into something after years of feeling like she was nothing and could feel it all melting away the moment someone snapped at her. It was stupid.

It was worse still that the nurse was here to witness it, because she thought he seemed nice. She thought most people with the patience to work in hospitals, where men like this one must have been very common patients, seemed like they had to be pretty nice to put up with it all. And she liked that he’d punched the guy, too, even if it only seemed to make him angrier. She thought people like this probably deserved to be punched. She thought she probably wasn’t supposed to think that.

The world burst into movement, but not from the man who’d attacked first. It was the nurse who was a flurry of limbs, so fast that Cass could hardly keep up. In a matter of seconds, the nurse had the other man pinned to the wall and was — growling? She thought of Metzli, and a few things began to slowly slide into place.

Cass took a step forward, ready to try to talk the nurse down because no one needed to die in this stupid alley just like no one had needed to die in that dark supermarket, and she was so tired of death where death had no place being. But before she could step in, the vampire seemed to come back to himself and the other man saw his chance and took it. A metal pole, a blow to the head. Why did it always come down to this?

She didn’t even mean to drop her glamour. It was instinctive, at this point; a Pavlovian response to rushing headfirst into danger. When she was Magma, Cass didn’t keep her glamour up. When she was Magma, she was invincible. Cass didn’t know how to handle this, but Magma did. So the glamour dropped, and the oread stepped forward. “Get the fuck away from him!” Her voice was distorted, gravely and crackling. Live lava flowing through a field and into the sea, throwing up sparks as it went. The man with the pole dropped it, shock and terror clear on his face.

—

All this head trauma couldn’t be good for him, vampire healing or not. His ears were ringing where he’d sprawled down onto the ground, everything before his eyes blurry. For a presumed apex predator, Zane really was a shit one. The first attempt to push himself up went horribly and the second one was halted by the sudden glow around them, visible even to his blurry eyes. Blinking rapidly in the hopes of seeing what in the world was going on, he heard the commanding voice, if it could even be called a voice. His eyes adjusted finally but not before his body was instinctually scrambling back, away from the source of searing heat.

What stood between him and the aggressor was no longer a teenager wearing an eye mask. It was… fire and earth in the shape of a human. Zane faintly registered the clang of the metal pipe falling to the ground, too transfixed on the sight in front of him. Protecting him, it seemed. Even after he’d all but chomped on the man. Probably a good thing that he’d snapped back to his senses just in time or he might have been the one staring, terrified, into the face of… whatever she was.

It hadn’t been conscious, the decision to scramble away from heat and possible fire, every nerve in his body screaming that it meant danger, but by the time the other man snapped into action and bolted, Zane had pulled himself as far away as possible with his back now resting against the opposite wall. He could vaguely feel the gash on the side of his face from the pole, a wound that should have been gushing with blood but after this girl’s display, there probably wasn’t any need for pretenses of being normal, right? “Thank… thank you,” he stuttered out, carefully prodding at the wound on his head and wincing. Hoping that his thanks weren’t premature and he was the next to face down this person of boiling heat.

—

She felt the vampire behind her scramble backwards, felt a twinge of hurt at it. Was he afraid of her now? She still remembered Kuma’s face the day she’d accidentally dropped her glamour, the day Kuma had kicked her out with terror etched into her expression. You’re some kind of a monster, and you never said! What is this, Cassidy? Did he think the same now? Would he run before she could turn around and talk to him? People did, sometimes. It was rare that she saved someone and got to have an actual conversation with them after. No one ever wanted to stay and chat.

The man who’d attacked the nurse certainly didn’t, though Cass felt no disappointment when he ran away. She didn’t mind scaring the bad guys. In fact, there was something undeniably exciting about that, some quiet thrill that she pretended not to cling to. She shouldn’t love terrifying them, but she kind of did. Maybe it would make the guy think twice before hitting anyone with a metal pole again in the future.

With the bad guy gone, all that remained was the vampire nurse. Cass was almost afraid to turn around, scared that she’d see the same terror that Kuma had held in her eyes. But instead, she heard the man stutter out a thanks. A thanks she knew she should release him from, but held onto all the same. Maybe she could use it to help him someday. That was what she told herself; it sounded like a lie, but lies only hurt when you said them aloud. “You’re welcome,” she said quietly, putting the glamour back up with a quick squint of concentration before approaching him. “Are you okay? Your — Your head. What do you need? I want to help.”

—

Despite the surreal appearance of the stranger, Zane found his apprehension bleeding away the second she turned. There was nothing threatening in the way she held herself or looked at him, a stark contrast to the demeanor that had easily scared off the other man. And then, almost in the blink of an eye, the young teenager appeared again. He really needed to learn more about the things that lived in this town.

As she approached, he made a feeble attempt to sit up straighter, bringing on another violent dizzy spell. Once everything stopped spinning, he got a good look at the girl. Definitely young, possibly eighteen but it was hard to tell with that mask on. She was worried, speaking in rapid fire that took a few moments for his mind to really register. His mouth felt dry when he finally spoke. “I’ll be fine. Just…” What do you need? Zane trailed off because he knew what he needed right in that moment but he’d given in to that urge with Jonas and the guilt from that still lived heavy in his mind. Not to mention that this was a young stranger. That smelled surprisingly enticing underneath the faint scent of burning coals - stop it. “I just need time, it will heal.”

It took a few tries but he finally managed to whip his backpack off, pushing it over to the stranger. “You can dig up some gauze for me if you don’t mind. Don’t wanna… terrify people on the walk home.” It was still unspoken, the fact that a normal person should have been bleeding profusely and definitely rushed inside the ER just a few feet away. She wasn’t human and something told Zane she was smart enough to have clocked the same fact about him. “I’m Zane, by the way. And I don’t make a habit out of getting into fights, just so you know. Even though it has been happening a weird amount lately…” Was he rambling? He was rambling. Man, his head hurt.

—

He didn’t look afraid of her anymore. Even before her glamour came down completely, the fear seemed to leave him. There was something breathtakingly comforting about it, like the wind had been knocked out of her in the best possible way. She didn’t want the people she was saving to be afraid of her. The people she was saving them from, maybe, but people like this? Nurses who were just trying to get out of work without getting hurt? She didn’t want to scare him.

Even if he was a vampire.

She studied him carefully, thinking of Metzli and the few things she’d learned from them. She knew the basics of vampires even before she’d met them, of course — that was one subject that the media she consumed often got right, and the bits that it got wrong she’d found out for herself through years of living on the streets. Vampires had fast healing, so he probably really would be fine. He might be fine sooner with blood, but… Cass didn’t know if fae blood worked the same as human blood when it came to vampiric meals, and she didn’t want to offer hers if it might only make things worse. Something told her he wouldn’t know the answer, either. He gave her the vibe of someone who was far newer at this than Metzli was. She made a note to ask them this question later, just in case there was ever a next time.

Leaning over, she began digging through his bag. “Do you have… food at home, Zane? I, um, I think that helps. If you didn’t know that already.” He probably did. She’d noticed he walked with the slightest of limps, a sign that this wasn’t his first time being hurt. She doubted it was his first time being hurt as a vampire, either. “I’m Cass. And, uh… I kind of do make it a habit of getting in fights, I guess. But only to help people. People like you. Which I hope I did. Help, I mean. That guy was — he looked really mad, and I don’t think he could have killed you but that doesn’t mean you should be hurt, either, so I’m… Yeah. I hope I helped.” There was no head injury to excuse Cass’s rambling; only anxiety and the overwhelming desire to make Zane like her.

—

In a strange way, it was comforting that Cass seemed to have some idea what he was, judging by her hesitant question. It meant he wouldn’t have to answer any questions at the moment about not bleeding, being stronger than normal and literally growling at another person. Zane nodded at her question, mouth still feeling dry and his tongue heavy, but moving his head wasn’t really a good idea either. Eyes shut for a moment as pain rolled over him, passing quickly but incapacitating him for a moment all the same. He didn’t want to be thinking about food right now, not with Cass so close and smelling much different than anything he’d ever noticed before so the change in discussion was very much appreciated.

Her words registered slowly, the rambling and his foggy mind making everything settle together at a snail’s pace. A habit of getting into fights to help people. She was kind and most likely reckless but maybe not so much considering how her… other shape had looked. Intimidating, hard to hurt. If Zane had the ability to transform into something other than an unhinged, bloodthirsty creature he couldn’t quite control, wouldn’t he have stupidly ended up doing exactly what Cass seemed to be attempting to do? Helping people? “You definitely did,” Zane reassured, mustering a smile and grabbing the bandaging once it had been removed from the bag. Whether she’d inevitably helped him or the stranger more was unsure. Zane was glad either way and mustered a weak smile for her as he started to messily wrap up the wound on his head.

“That’s, uh… that’s really noble of you. Trying to help people. Dangerous though but you’re obviously not just a regular person so maybe not.” The chatting was a good distraction, both from the pain and the smell, and the fact that Zane needed a few more moments on the ground before he would make an attempt to stand up. “Is it okay if I… if I ask what you are? I’ve never seen anything like you before, it’s… you’re really impressive.”

—

He was definitely in pain, and this was the part Cass was bad at. She could fight danger when she could see it, could make people run away or drop what they were doing, but she couldn’t fix them once the damage was done. Not in the way she imagined Zane must be able to. If she were smarter, she thought, she would have wanted to be a nurse, or a doctor, or something like that. Something that could fix people when they were broken. Instead, she did this. She did everything she could do to try to stop them from being broken to begin with. And she wasn’t always successful, but maybe it mattered that she was sometimes. Maybe sometimes was all she could really strive for.

Zane said she helped, anyway, and Cass smiled at the words. He probably wasn’t that much older than her, but his approval felt just as good as those few times she’d been able to ring something similar out of the older fae in her aos si. None of them were ever as open with it as Zane was being now, though. Hesitantly, Cass took a step forward to watch him with the bandage, trying to figure out if there was more she could do. Did he need help wrapping it, or packing it, or any of those other things they talked about on TV? She might not be a medical professional of any kind, but she’d seen Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs. She knew some things.

“It’s not too dangerous.” Her stomach clenched with the lie, and she tried not to think about Debbie. She hadn’t even been out as Magma that night. Maybe it would have ended differently if she had. Zane made no move to stand, and Cass made no move to leave. She could walk him home after this was done, she thought. Make sure the guy who’d attacked him wouldn’t come back. It would be nice. “I’m a nymph,” she said, more open with it than any of the fae she’d ever known would have preferred her to be. “A kind of fae that’s tied to nature. I’m an oread, which means I go with rocks and mountains. Or, um, volcanoes, specifically, for me. And you’re a vampire, right? How long have you been one?”

—

Zane was thankful for his savior sticking around and not only because he was curious to know more about her. Even though he probably wasn’t going to pass out, the slight chance of it was worrying and he definitely didn’t want any of his coworkers to find him out here. It would lead to questions that he didn’t have normal answers to, not to mention it would inevitably delay him getting home to feed. The thought of that was terrifying - being dragged back into the hospital, getting hungrier by the minute, around all of the wounded people and healthcare workers… Shaking the thought away, he tucked in the end of the bandage. It would do until he got home. At least he wouldn’t be walking the streets with a gaping, open head wound.

Focusing on her explanation, Zane racked his brain for a pop-culture equivalent of what she was describing. The closest he came was remembering Tinker Bell so he gave up. “Wow,” he breathed, genuinely amazed, his expression portraying every bit of it. Maybe that had something to do with why she smelled so different. “That’s… wow.” Questions sluggishly came to mind but Cass seemed to have a few of her own as well. “Yeah, guess you know more about this stuff than me.” He smiled sheepishly, shifting slightly to test the odds of standing up. The ground wasn’t spinning quite as violently as before. “It’s just been a few months. A few very weird months,” he admitted before finally making an actual attempt to stand up.

One hand braced against the wall as his feet pressed into the ground, dizziness making him sway for a moment before it passed. “Uh, what about you?” Talk through the pain, through how much some blood would help right now. “Is the…” His free hand waved as Zane dug back for the word, “whole nymph thing something you’re born into?”

—

A few months. He really was new to this, then. The closest comparison Cass could think of to relate it to was her experience of being removed from her aos si and forced to live in the human world for the first time on her own, and even that didn’t seem like a fair comparison. After all, she’d known a little about humans before she’d been thrust into their world, had a fascination with them that had caused quite a few of her problems to begin with. If Zane had been like most humans before he was turned, there was a pretty good chance he hadn’t even known vampires existed. To go from thinking something was a work of fiction to being that thing yourself… Cass could only imagine how strange it must have been. A few very weird months seemed like an understatement.

Hesitantly, Cass hovered close to him as he swayed, trying to decide what she should do if he fell. She wasn’t sure she could carry him anywhere, and dragging him seemed like it’d be a bad idea. Maybe distracting him from the pain was the best bet. “I bet it was weird,” she said, trying to keep him talking. “Going from being human to being something else. Did you know about any of this before? Did the person who turned you stick around to explain at all? I guess I don’t really know what’s normal for vampires in that, um, situation.” Metzli’s sire, from everything Cass knew, had been awful, but was everyone’s? Surely not, right?

Smiling just a little as he turned the question around on her, Cass nodded. “You’re only a fae if you’re born a fae,” she confirmed. “One or both of your parents needs to be one. Usually they both are because, um… A lot of fae don’t really… like people who aren’t fae. But my mom was human.” Is human? She didn’t know if her mother was alive or not, didn’t know where she might be if she was. But that wasn’t really what Zane was asking about here, was it?

—

If not for the lingering fear of ending up hurting the young girl, fae or not, Zane would have asked her to steady him for a walk towards the street. As it was right now, he didn’t dare have her come much closer than she was at the moment. Cass was kind, sympathetic, and even though the fact that she seemed to run along at night like some vigilante worried him, Zane found that he definitely liked her. “It’s been an… adjustment. Is an adjustment,” he replied honestly, finding it easy to open up when she was being so honest herself. At least she seemed honest but his tendency to see the best in people wasn’t always a hundred percent right. “But yeah, I’m part of a group. Or a clan, it’s sort of like a family but… well, less like a family than I thought it would be. But I’m not completely alone so there’s that.”

Aside from Emilio, Zane hadn’t really divulged his apprehensions about his clan to anyone. Chris had accidentally found out that the vampires he was reluctantly looped in with weren’t exactly the nicest bunch but aside from that, it was a worry he was so far carrying on his own. It felt nice to say it outloud, to just admit that the situation he’d stupidly gotten himself into was far from perfect. Disclosing it to someone who was still by all definitions a stranger and probably wanted nothing to do with this information was maybe not the best call but Zane was really just trying to focus on the positive right now.

As Cass spoke, Zane finally relinquished the safety of the wall and to his surprise, stood pretty balanced. It was shocking that no one had yet joined them here in the dark and he wasn’t really willing to test his luck on that. One hesitant step followed another and he relaxed. His head was still throbbing but at least walking seemed to be on the table for now. “Sorry to hear about your mom,” he said softly, having taken note of the past tense Cass had used. Then again, there was a possibility that her mother was alive but no longer human. “I know what it’s like to be without parents so really, I’m sorry.” Did she have anyone in town? If there were more vigilante fae like her, odds were he would have run into them at some point. Was she hiding this nighttime activity from her family or was she alone?

It was a relief to reach the street, cars passing and people bustling about, Cass’s smell mingling in with everything else the town had to offer. Under normal circumstances, Zane loved the walk home after a shift, giving him time to ruminate over everything that had taken place. Now, with his leg aching and head searing, a taxi seemed like the best idea. Hailing the closest one down, he turned back to Cass. “Thanks again,” he said, smiling softly. “I would love to… I don’t know, buy you a coffee or something? Not really sure what the protocol is for paying someone back after they save you from a man with a steel pipe.”

—

A group? Cass wondered if it was at all like an aos si, full of like people coming together. She’d often longed for what an aos si was supposed to be, often thought of the community she’d missed out on through her wretched inability to belong to the people she was supposed to belong to. Did Zane ever feel like that? Was that what he meant when he said it was less like a family than he thought it’d be?

Oftentimes, she felt as though there was something inherently wrong with her. Otherwise, why had life played out the way it had? Why hadn’t her aos si accepted her, why had she found nowhere to belong in nineteen years of trying? But if Zane was having trouble fitting in with his clan as well, if someone who seemed kind and nice and helpful couldn’t quite find his place in a group of people who’d chosen to bring him into its fold in a pretty permanent kind of way, maybe it meant that she wasn’t entirely at fault for her lack of belonging. It was always easier for her to see the positive in someone else’s situation than her own. Optimism was born when the two situations were similar enough to make a comparison. “Do you like them?” She asked the question carefully, casually. Like nothing at all hinged on the response. It wasn’t a spoken lie, but it burned in her throat all the same.

Zane seemed to be able to stand on his own two feet even without the support of the wall, and Cass found some relief in that. It was a good thing; it meant he was already healing a little. She didn’t know enough about vampires to know quite how fast their healing worked. Metzli seemed to get into enough scrapes to suggest that she’d end up figuring it out quickly if they continued their ‘friendship’ with her, though Cass wasn’t confident that would be the case. Eventually she was going to have to release them from their promise, and despite their claims that she wasn’t as bad as they’d originally assumed, she doubted they’d stick around for long after. No one ever did. Shrugging at the mention of her mother, she looked away. “You don’t have to apologize. I never even met her. I don’t even know if she’s still alive or not. She just… didn’t want me.” She shrugged again like it was nothing, like it didn’t mean anything, like it didn’t still sting. It wasn’t important anymore. Maybe it never had been.

He thanked her again, and she knew she should tell him a little more about fae, knew she should warn him about that kind of thing so it didn’t come back to bite him in the ass later on, but she didn’t. She was so much more selfish than she wanted to be, sometimes. So much more selfish than she ought to be. Heroes weren’t supposed to do things like this, but she tucked the gratitude away anyway. “You’re welcome,” she replied with a small smile. “Coffee would be fun, I think. But after you’ve healed up a little. I don’t know if you’re supposed to drink caffeine when you have a head injury or whatever.” They never talked about that subject on Grey’s Anatomy.

—

It was such a loaded question, despite the ease in which Cass had asked it. Did Zane like the people he currently lived with? Who made sure he was fed and all things considered, were people he would be spending an indeterminate amount of time with considering the whole immortality of his new situation? As if his pause before answering hadn’t been answer enough in itself, Zane found himself blurting out the truth under his breath. “Not really.” His face portrayed just how little interest he had in elaborating, even though he knew he’d be spending the next few hours by himself just going over what this all even meant.

He listened to her answer and despite still feeling woozy, Zane was adept enough at reading body language to see through her casual tone. Of course she was hurt. Not meeting your parent didn’t mean you wouldn’t yearn for them, think about what could have been. It didn’t mean that you wouldn’t feel abandoned which he could painfully relate to. “Hey, well, her loss, right?” he replied softly, going for uplifting even though one sentence would hold little power against a lifetime of feeling left out.

Cass accepting the offered coffee made him feel a little more at ease. Even though Zane had plenty of his own shit to deal with, he wanted to look out for her. Probably saw a little bit of himself in the girl and as much as he hoped she currently had someone looking out for her, he couldn’t count on it. Not yet, at least, so he wanted to make sure. If not, at least she had a vampire with a truckload of baggage on her side now. “Eh, caffeine never hurt anyone,” he joked, hesitating as he wanted to offer a handshake but worried about feeling the warmth of her skin. So he settled for a gentle punch to her shoulder which he immediately regretted, shaking his head awkwardly before getting into the taxi. “Hey, uh… be careful out there.”

#cass.001 #writing #who helps the helpers #thread:cass #magmahearts

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