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rwprincess · 2 years

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Worth a Shot (Fred Benson x Fem!Reader)

Masterlist

Word Count: 2.6k

Synopsis: A few inconspicuous touches during movie night lead you to make a bold move in regards to your feelings for Fred during a late night in the Newspaper Office

CW: spoilers for The Elephant Man, anxiety, first kiss

It didn't start this way. At first, you were just part of a group of kids put together with a common goal: to tackle the school newspaper. 'Work colleagues' turned to friends, which evolved into its current stage of an infatuated crush. While you didn't let on to the latter and counted yourself rooted firmly in the "friends" category, you longed for something more. But, given your current status, you simply suggested 'hanging out' tonight and Fred accepted.

"We could rent a movie," you suggested and Fred gave you one of his signature deadpan stares. "What? What's that look for?"

"I hate going to the video store."

"Why? There's not a ton to do here as it is, options are limited, Freddie."

"Mm, mostly not fond of the buffoons who work there."

"That Robin girl seems nice enough," you chided.

"Sure, but admit it, she's pretty scatterbrained," he said and you gave a non-commital shrug before he continued, "and then Steve Harrington? Need I say more?" He scoffed.

"Yes. What's your deal with Steve?" You asked.

"What's my problem with Mr. Perfect Empty-Headed Steve? Hmm, I wonder." He put on a faux-thoughtful expression and you giggled. "He also hits on you any time we're there." He muttered, fiddling with his glasses: a nervous habit he'd picked up to try to cover his emotions or lessen his anxiety.

"Steve hits on every girl in a five-mile radius," you shrugged, trying to be nonchalant.

"And that doesn't bother you?" When you only gave him an 'eh' response and another shrug, he followed up with, "what, do you want him to hit on you?" He adjusted his glasses with the other hand now. He didn't really want to know the answer.

"Pfft. Good God, no." You replied and the tension dropped from his shoulders, but you didn't notice. "I just don't care because nothing will come out of it. I only surround myself with people who I find intellectually stimulating." You reached out a hand and gently ran it along his jaw, then patted his cheek. "That's what I have you for, my dear boy." It was a risky move on your part, it seemed like too obvious a gesture. But Fred didn't say anything about it or use the opportunity to try to make a move on you. He simply sighed as you took your hand away, which you took as frustration with your insistence on going to the video store but was really his way of lamenting the withdrawal of physical contact and his consistent inability to read you. It seemed like it was a good sign that you would say you didn't want the hot, popular (and willing) Steve and then to point out that you enjoyed Fred's company instead, but he could never be sure and he had to be. He didn't want to ruin the good thing you already had because he was deluding himself into believing you could be something more.

"Fine. We can go get a movie." He acquiesced. Truthfully, with that one touch, he was already done for. He knew you weren't consciously manipulating him, you just didn't know the hold you had over him. To try to save some of his dignity, he added, "but I get to pick."

"Look, I get that it's an artistic masterpiece, but you couldn't have picked something slightly less…depressing?" You hadn't argued with his choice at the store as he was already testy and you could see his agitation grow with Steve hovering to 'make recommendations,' but now you were at your house and you were definitely judging his choice of The Elephant Man.

"Have you actually seen it?" He asked, dryly as you thoroughly examined the VHS cover.

"No, but I've heard it's sad. Good, but…sad." You sighed at the stern look on his face, knowing you weren't going to win.

"The good outweighs the sad," he said doing air quotes around your words he was echoing, "I promise. You love art, you'll love the makeup in this. It's so good that the Academy was pressured into making an award for best makeup effects."

"Really?" Now he had you interested, and he knew it.

"Are you questioning me and my sources?" He asked, falsely aghast, which made you roll your eyes in response.

"Yeah, yeah. I'm going to go make popcorn. You deal with…that." You gestured to the TV and accompanying VHS setup before heading to the kitchen, unaware that Fred was watching you, smirking.

So far, it wasn't a bad movie. It started with some curious surreal scenes and took some time building a dramatic reveal for John Merrick, The Elephant Man's makeup, which you found astonishing as Fred had promised. You both were quietly invested by the time Dr. Treves took John to his own home to meet his wife, Anne.

"I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr. Merrick." The character of Anne said, cordially.

"I'm very pleased…" John began to return in kind, before breaking down in sobs.

"What is it, John? What's the matter?"

"It's just that I-I'm not used to being treated so well by a beautiful woman…" Merrick replied and you put a hand over your touched heart. Meanwhile, Fred was eyeing you from his periphery, feeling very much the same as Merrick in that moment. While he didn't have a severe condition, of course, he had been ostracized growing up, particularly by girls who thought he was a loser. And yet, here you sat next to him, beautiful and kind.

Later, you sat tensed up on the couch. It was what you assumed to be the climax: a gaggle of strangers chasing and harrassing Merrick through a train station until they had him cornered. "Why can't they just mind their own business?" You lamented to Fred, "It seems like every problem could be solved in this movie if everyone just minded their business and left him alone." Fred gave you a soft smile, knowing what you were trying to say, before you turned your attention back to the screen.

"I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!" John cried and you felt tears spring up into your eyes. Instinctively, you grabbed Fred's hand. It was an unconscious gesture and you didn't realize you'd done it, really, until you felt his reassuring squeeze. You continued to hold on to him like a safety blanket until the danger in the movie seemed to have passed.

At the end of the film, Fred looked to you and asked, "So, did you like it?"

You looked up at him with still wet eyes, swiping away the remaining tears. It definitely stirred up emotions in you and the evidence was plain to see on your face and the hems of your damp sleeves. "Yes. The good outweighed the sad, you were right."

"Aren't I usually?" He said with mock pride, trying to lighten the mood and cheer you up. It worked and you gave a tearful chuckle in response.

"Yeah, yeah. I shouldn't have doubted you. Thank you for making me watch such an emotionally devastating piece. I'm a better person for it." You joked, sticking out your tongue and he laughed, reaching up to wipe away one stray tear from your cheek with his thumb. It was clear that he wasn't thinking about his touch before initiating it, either, as his face immediately turned red and he stumbled to adjust his glasses.

"Um, yeah." He cleared his throat looking away quickly. "Well, it's getting late, I should probably go." He stood up, looking to make a quick and flustered exit. "You don't have to. It's not that late. I could always drive you home later," you offered. He hesitated, pausing for just a moment as though he were going to say more, but just shook his head.

"No, no. I-I best be going. I'll see you later." He spun around and left through your front door before you could make another plea for him to stay. He feared he was already in too deep.

About a week later, you found Fred working late in the Weekly Streak office. Neither of you had brought up the "Elephant Man incident" (as you referred to it in your head), but you had definitely run through it in your mind countless times to try to process it. Fred was not a particularly open person and he seemed pretty vulnerable that night. You still weren't sure what your touches and interactions meant. Maybe he just acted on human instinct the way you had when you reached for his hand. But even then, you had to admit to yourself that you had done that because it had been Fred there. The impulse would have been curbed if it were someone else.

He was working studiously at his desk, brows furrowed in concentration and gaze down at his latest work. You took the sight in for just a moment. The hunched shoulders that always made him appear smaller than he was, his signature sweater vest and watch, and of course his large glasses, framing his adorably wide eyes. You sighed softly at the sight before approaching him. You placed a hand on him and he went rigid at the touch, not expecting it, but you saw him visibly relax as he realized it was you. "I think you need to take a break. You look tense." You said, giving his shoulder a squeeze before letting go, not noticing the way he sank into the touch. "C'mon, I brought you a Coke. Caffeine is perfect for meeting deadlines, right?"

He gave you a weak smile as he slid back from his desk to follow you, "Thanks."

"Don't sweat it. I have Razzles too." You winked and he chuckled at your enthusiasm while shaking his head.

"Somehow, I'm not surprised."

You sat on the floor, leaning your backs into some of the archives shelves, both facing the same direction. You put your legs out in front of you, crossing them at the ankles as you talked. Fred was folded awkwardly and pretzel-like beside you as you talked. "I have an idea for a sort of game," you began as your previous conversation had died down. You stood up and gathered a couple of supplies: a few pieces of paper and an empty mug off of Mrs. Callahan's desk. "I guess it's kind of like truth or dare, but you kind of have to earn it."

Fred raised an eyebrow at you, "I have no idea in the slightest what you mean."

You placed the cup on the floor a good distance in front of him and returned to sit by his side. "So, before you can ask me a question or I have to commit to a wager or whatever, you have to make the shot." You ripped off a small piece from the paper and wadded it up as an example. "Like, I get to pick the next movie night if I make it. If I don't, you do." You tossed the paper at the mug, watching as it bounced off the side. He looked at you as though you'd grown another head. "C'mon. It'll be fun." You nudged his shoulder with yours and he gave in with a nod, taking a paper from your hands.

"Um…I make it in and you have to interview Jason Carver about the basketball game. Save me from doing it." He tossed his balled-up paper and sank it into the mug. "Yessss." He hissed triumphantly.

"Ugh, thanks so much for the assignment. Let's see… if I make it, you have to tell me the most embarrassing thing that happened to you in elementary school." You poised yourself to arch the paper perfectly in, but Fred coughed beside you and ruined your aim. "Oh, come now. You did that on purpose!"

"I don't know what you're talking about," he replied stoically and you laughed, pushing him playfully.

"Come on," you whined, "I didn't know you back then. I wanna know!"

"Become a better shot, then. Rookie move."

"Fred Benson!" You feigned shock, "I have never been so insulted."

"I can't help it if it's true. And I didn't make the rules of this game, you did." He said, clicking his tongue, trying to hide the devious smile creeping up his face. "My turn. Uh…would you rather be poor and work at a job you love, or be well-off at a job you hate?" Of course he made his shot.

"This is not fair. I didn't expect you to be this good at this. You always claim to have no athletic ability," you complained.

"It's not a difficult question. It's not even that personal."

"I know but it's the principle of it."

"Well, you chose this game and you have to admit that you have no spatial reasoning. That's the only way it's working for me." He shrugged. "Anyway, quit stalling. Answer."

"Job I love. I mean, I don't get paid for working on The Streak but I stay because I love it." He nodded in acceptance of your answer and you battled back with a question of your own, "If you could have any superpower, what would it be?" You took the chance and almost whooped in victory as you got your first scrap of paper in. "Yes! I made it! In your face!"

"What are you, six?" He asked with an eye roll, "I dunno. I guess reading minds selectively would be a good power. I'm never really sure if people are being honest or not."

"Hmm. Would be good for investigating too. See if someone's hiding the truth."

The two of you went back and forth. You, of course, had many more misses but kept trying, having faith you'd make it in. With your last ball, you threw caution to the wind and escalated the game. You had no idea why you decided to take the risk but the dare rolled from your mouth before you could stop it. "If I make it in, you have to kiss me." Fred gulped in response and you tried to delicately throw the paper, hoping against hope that this one would go in, but it bounced off the rim. "Damn," you whispered and felt your face growing hot, both at your failure and your proposition. You both sat in silence for a moment and you began quaking with regret.

"Did you mean that?" Fred asked softly, voice barely above a whisper. You remembered what he said about never being sure if someone was honest.

"Yes," you squeaked, with a nod. Your throat had become unbearably dry and you were almost incapable of making a sound but you had to tell him the truth.

He didn't speak, but looked at you, trying to read your expression. Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips against yours gently before pulling back. Your eyes widened in surprise and your heart took up residence in your throat. You bit your lip nervously and Fred said, "I shouldn't have done that." You began to panic, a million thoughts racing through your mind at once before he cracked a smile and said, "I mean, you didn't make the shot. You didn't earn it."

"Oh my God!" You shoved him, nearly knocking him off balance, so you pulled him back up. "I thought you meant you regretted it or didn't like me, or-or, oh, you jerk!' You cried out as he laughed.

"Hey, I gave that one to you because I wanted to." His laugh quieted down and he looked at you more seriously now. "Can I…can I kiss you again?" He looked apprehensively to your lips and then back to your eyes.

"What? Without making the shot?" You joked, "We both know you would have made it anyway." You smiled at him as you placed your hands on either side of his face, his eyes fluttering closed at the touch before you pressed your lips to his this time.

#fred benson #stranger things fred benson #fred benson x reader #Stranger things 4 #80s

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ettadunham · 9 months

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the 00s were a lawless time.

would i recommend dead head fred, a video game that's been aptly described by eurogamer partially as something that was seemingly 'designed by teenagers desperately trying to be edgy' in 2007?

no. of course not.

did i do a full playthrough of it despite all the gross, annoying and janky aspects of it?

......yeah.

please judge me.

okay, so i do want to get out the positives first. this game is clearly going for a wacky, out there premise and tone, and for better or worse, it commits to it. you play as fred, a detective that was murdered by the local mob boss, and now has been resurrected without his original head (hence the whole brain in a jar aesthetic). Part of the game's gimmick is that you can put different heads on fred, and they can do different special actions and are good against specific enemies - including a mannequin head where your special fight action is just finger gunning at people.

sigh, truly my favorite of the heads.

another fun aspect of the game is that there's a surprising amount of side missions and mini games involved. you can play pinball(!), billiard, fish, raise mutant roosters to brutally murder other roosters in a cage match... you know, the usual stuff. the voice acting, music, etc is also solid, and carries the same general wacky tone through.

what else, what else...

no, i think that's it. that's all the positives.

now for the real talk.

when i say that this m rated game really is a 12-year-old boy's idea of peak edginess in 2007, i really do mean it. there's a lot of gross out stuff, you murder most enemies by some brutal special attacks or beheading, and some of your heads are just... well, gross. but also, there's the racism, the form they chose for fred turning small in particular doesn't feel right, doesn't feel organic, and i'm pretty sure that one of the fish specialties you can buy from the asian stereotype seller is just a slur.

and yes, before you ask, there is of course a morgue assistant who's just a necrophile. obviously.

another fun little thing is that when our edgy protagonist's girlfriend gets kidnapped around the climax of the game, his reaction is pretty much just to go 'oh well, i guess kill her then'. but then somehow he still expects her to fall into his arms by the end??? and she pretty much does????

do you see what i mean that this game is a 12-year-old boy's idea of an edgy power fantasy at the time when south park was at its peak?

but hey, at least the gameplay's gotta be fun, right?

nope.

there are a lot of fights, and they're pretty much all bs. there's no health bar for your enemies, and you have a limited amount of tactics you can use, despite the variety you'd expect from the multiple heads. it's tedious and often miserable, for example, it can be almost impossible to kill an enemy if they keep blocking you and won't use their special attack that you'd be able to counterattack.

it's a big part of the game and it is baaaaaad. and it doesn't really changes or gets better.

okay, but this is also an adventure game, right? surely it has puzzles, like...... 3d platforming. oh no.

but sure, i'm a notorious hater of 3d platformers, it might not be that bad... except that this game was made before controllers started to have a second analog stick for camera control, so there's limited options of controlling the view. and even that is noticeably janky and bad to the point that i'm reading it as a complaint on that same wikipedia page from multiple review snippets as well. so yeah, for once, it's not just me it seems. needless to say that i absolutely hated every minute of those sections, and used almost as much profanity as the characters in the game as i was trying to get through them.

did i mention that this game also insults you and calls you an idiot when you die?

fuck off.

fuck right off.

god, i hate this game actually.

#mse's playing dead head fred #mse's playing adventure games #adventure game extravaganza #dead head fred

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alittleghostwhoeatsbread · 7 months

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Dafür Zu Verrostet

Fred had used and abused many a pedestal in his early years, having favoured concrete or metal square blocks for their plainness and balanceability before growing up and settling on a marble triangle in Victoria Square, the realisation that flair and a lack of balance weren’t always a bad thing settling it, perching on its upmost tip and striking the pose of that of a naked and aroused sailor mistaking a distant pile of seaweed for the bosom of a charitable mermaid for twenty years. Victoria Square was a haven, filled to the brim on all sides with statues of different forms, shapes, and materials, its centrepiece being the visitor named Floozy who lounged in a jacuzzi shaped fountain the size of a bus and the colour of jade with hands that stretched to the sky as if asking a cloud lover to return, but Fred was close only with the two statues perched close enough to his own pedestal to converse with without shouting- Vicky, an iron made royal figure with a froggish chin gently cradling a baton, and Hazel, a sandy stone sphinx complete with exposed tongue and fangs. One day as the sun rose and turned the square the colour of an oranges intestine, it deemed it time to cling to the statues forms and highlight their imperfections with the magnifying glass of a recently divorced judge, sending a perfect ray out to strike the surface of Fred’s backside and showcase a small patch of discoloured flaking metal to backside loving Vicky, who upon being showcased too immediately raised her baton and pointed it at the affected area of the closed-eyed Fred, who was smiling up at the warming sun with the bliss of a tightrope stander mid tightrope stand, jerking it up and down as if it was a gun rather than a baton.

“Rustitis, Fredrick. On your backside. Rustitis!”

Closed-eyed Fred instantly became open-eyed Fred and his peaceful smile began the slow downward crawl of an accidental amputee to their accidentally displayed and dashed about limbs, opening into a chasm of fear while waking several statues who’d still been sleeping with the rhythmic hammer on metal slapping of his own ass, slapping which caused more of the rusted surface to flake and drift off with the Joie de vivre of a gang of oddly coloured snowflakes who know their own attractiveness and aren’t afraid to flaunt it.

“No, no, no. It can’t be. Maybe it’s bird shit or a miraculous tattoo. For God sake look again and say it’s bird shit or a miraculous tattoo,” Fred pleaded with a Vicky who was still pointing her gun at his ass in a way that cast no shadow of doubt on the hard bodied fact that if she had ammo or a real gun, she wouldn’t have hesitated in shooting.

Hazel, whose pedestal was on the side of Fred which meant his backside was inaccessible to her, woke up during this hullabaloo, confusedly lapping at the air with her fat tongue until the sun helpfully exposed with a blinding light another patch of rustitis on Fred’s shoulder blade and caused her to retreat that fat lapping tongue back into her mouth to hide, almost leaping off her pedestal to forcibly remove him from the square but resisting, partly because he was her friend but almost entirely because the idea of actually touching him was too much for her to bear.

“Oh, Fred. I’m sorry,” she murmured, shaking her great head from side to side with enough force to hammer the final nail in the coffin of belief that the marks could simply be miraculous tattoos or bird shit.

“Don’t let them take me,” was all Fred said to the nail being hammered, his eyes, which had looked pleadingly at an invisible patch of bosom shaped seaweed for twenty years, spinning to look pleadingly at his friends instead.

But it was too late for anyone to not let anything happen even if they would or could, which they wouldn’t and couldn’t, as the signal had been sent and received as soon as the word of rustitis had been uttered and within seconds they arrived in white coats and vans with miniature cranes on top, eyes cold and uncaring, ears hearing but ignoring Fred’s stammering pleas as they wrapped several ropes around his waist and attached them to the top of one of the cranes which had cogs that immediately began to scream like coals in heat as they strained in removing him from the top of his triangle. They screamed for five minutes alongside a Fred whose feet clung like a hunch to a back to his pedestal and hands reached desperately out for his recoiling friends who still cared enough to turn their eyes away and pretend they didn’t want what was happening to happen before his hunch feet lost the fight with a POP! and he came off his pedestal and was lowered into the back of a van to watch from the rear window, his arms still stuck in the pose they’d held for so long, as his home pantomimed a hairline and receded away.

The van sped through the city and Fred’s eyes grew as mournful as a dog in heat as they passed several of his old pedestal points and he wondered if all the times he’d watched other statues with rustitis getting dragged away without making a sound other than a small laugh was why the disease had targeted him, doing his best to feel sorry for all the past victims of his small laugh in his heart of hearts as if it would make a difference to his own circumstances before discarding his limited memories of them and feeling sorry only for himself in his heart of hearts, fearfully considering what was going to happen to him. He, Vicky, and Hazel had debated on what happened when the rust part of rustitis got worse, usually after an afflicted statue was taken screamingly away, and had laughed as they discussed possibilities such as disintegration, missing limbs, and exposed or hidden genitals rotting into twisted things that sang with lyres about the sadness of having never being touched before they were rotted twisted things. He briefly became afraid that his penis would become a twisted rotten thing that sang with a lyre before dismissing the possibility with a clenching of the fists, believing fervently that his penis was at least of the class of genital that would pluck a harp as it approached its end, a clenching of the fists that was remarkably therapeutic as it enabled the metal to stretch, with the grinding grind of a convicted robot’s ass being dragged alongside the back of a police car as a method of cruel and unusual punishment by a cruel and unusual jury, as it hadn’t been able to for twenty years.

His feet were still stuck in the unusual tippity toed ballet position that had been required for him to stay bonded to the tip of his triangle and the stuckness of them prevented Fred from turning his head around enough to look not through the rear window but through the gap behind him where two heads belonging to two white coats floated, but his ears could prick like radar dishes and hear well their mumbles and grumbles about the damn growing number of patients being brought to the Establishment’s treatment hall and how it was too much dammit. Fred had never heard of the Establishment or its treatment room but the fact he was going to a place where treatment was to be had filled his chest with the hope the sailor he had posed as for so long must have felt at mistaking the seaweed pile, and he began working on stretching out the rest of his body as the city continued to pass with the speed of a runaway cat who’d got the cream. He'd just gotten his feet to unstick so he could turn and stare through the back of the white coated heads to what they were driving towards when they pulled into the driveway of a large granite building with all the charm of a train ticket inspector, completely square and almost impotent looking, and the driving stopped, the backdoor of the van being thrown open by more figures in white and the scream of the van’s crane cogs coming again as Fred was pulled out, suspended, and dropped onto a little trolly with wheels that wheeled him towards a huge doorframe as square as the building with a sign above it reading, WELCOME TO THE ESTABLISHMENT: CLEAR YOUR THROAT UNLESS YOU’RE A PATIENT.

The white coated figures pushing the trolly hacked and hawked to unclog themselves before wheeling Fred into a spherical hall as in odds with the shape of the outside of the building as an abstinent ant with a horny-horny hippo, the sloping hall walls bordering a space filled with beds that in turn were filled with statues in a variety of positions and stages of rustitis- some merely with flaking patches of discolouration like Fred, some peeling all over like overheated oranges, some as rusty as a former prodigy returning from retirement- any tiny movement from them letting out froggish croaks and creaks but those croaks and creaks being kept to a minimum as they all kept movement of any kind as infrequent as possible, most of them lying as still as if their beds were their pedestals and the other statues their visitors.

Despite their stillness, rust floated off the statues filling the beds, forming clouds, puffs really, in the air of swirling vapour metallic in taste no matter what material the statues they came from were made from and Fred was pushed through and made to inhale these puffs on his journey from the entrance all the way through to the back of the hall, which was the back of a hall, blocked from both extending the space further or revealing whatever wilderness lay beyond it by a curved brick wall that Fred was pushed up against before being levered onto his back on top of a bed homed in by metal bars. The bed was bordered by a row of others just like it that followed the sideways curve of the back wall- the hall being set up like a Dantesque version of hell, the rows of beds continually forming their own circles that grew incrementally smaller until the ice cold centre was reached- the two on either side of his own being occupied by a wooden whinnying and rearing horse and an alabaster little girl with an oversized and extended hesitant finger hesitating over some invisible debris. The white coated men who’d wheeled him in nodded at Fred after tying him to the bed with a leather strap that would have looked more at home in a brothel to say that yes they had brought him and that yes their job was done before leaving with a sharp turning of their heels and Fred’s legs, one of the only parts of him able to move with restriction, began air running desperately in the air as if he did it enough he would somehow air run back to a period in time when he was not tied to a bed and slowly rusting.

The wooden horse did its pose a service and let out a high-pitched whinny before immediately doing that same pose a disservice by turning that whinny into the wet-lipped hacking of a smoker face to face with a clown, inciting the little girl on Fred’s other side to look at Fred and let out a tinkling akin to the splash of urine in a dark alley.

“Did you hear that helped with the rust?” The horse asked in between hacks, his raised legs nibbled, almost to what would have been bone if bone had been there to arrive at, by rust, raising higher and kicking with glee and a little bit of hope as if he might have actually heard it helped with the rust.

“Yeah, ha-ha, did you?” The little girl also began kicking, not her legs which were cemented together to form a shapeless mound the rest of her body rose from like the fire of a firework, but her oversized hesitant finger which abused the air with wags.

“I just want to run. Out of this bed, out of here, out of the present, but I can’t because I’m immobile and not by choice.”

“If you didn’t hear that helped from someone then being immobile should be your choice, it’s good for your rustitis,” the little girl’s wagging finger purposefully came to a stop as the horses' legs also stopped kicking. “We’ve heard, and from trained and informed specialists in white coats too, that staying as still as we can might be the way to being cured. Why do you think we’re strapped down like this?”

“You’ve ruined a solid week of immobility,” The horse neighed, its gaping nostrils gaping furiously. “My rust has gotten worse already, look. Look at it!”

Completely smooth holes with the look of tunnels of the worming worm, larger than the nibbled patches that had been visible before, had appeared right across the horses hide, dotting it like enlarged speckles, and when Fred turned his head and saw these holes leading to somewhere he didn’t want to go but was heading any way he shivered and turned his head and body as much towards the little girl as he could, questions falling out of him.

“Are we safe here? Has anyone here ever been cured? How long have you been here? Why are we strapped down? Does rustitis make your genitals twisted and rotten? Will being so close to others like you with it worsen my own rust? Answer the second question first please,” Fred flicked the insides of his eyes down to all the parts of his body not covered in strap but keeping the outsides of them solely on his penis, rubbed gold by twenty years of visitor's hands, his mind playing tricks with him so that he sometimes saw rust there and sometimes didn’t as he waited for the little girl to race to answer all his questions but specifically the second one, the little girl being interrupted before the starting whistle by the horse forgetting its desire to stay immobile, click-clacking its teeth together.

“Boulton’s going bucket,” it shouted to the excitement of all the statues whose beds were positioned in a way that they could see what was about to occur, all immediately abandoning their own respective immobility exercises and spinning as much as their straps would allow them in the direction of a bed containing what had possibly once been a full statue but may have always just been an overly large bust of a head.

The head of Boulton had two eyes which had rusted into perpetual shuteye and a mouth that was looked down upon by what might have once been quite a regal moustache but was then little more than a smear, tiny patches of metal not rusted and showing his original colour splattered like pox across the rest of his features showing him to have been a statue of much finer quality and material than most of the ones salivating at the sight of him trembling and flapping his looked down upon mouth with the haplessness of a seashell with wings, each flap letting out a cloud of the progressively darker rust until, with a tremendous booming noise that temporarily made the world go black, he exploded into a beam of light so dense and bright it couldn’t be seen into. The beam of light, stretching from floor to ceiling of the hall, stayed dense and bright for several seconds before beginning to swirl in the manner of a tax-evading tornado, the tip of its swirl bouncing on the bed in the spot where the head of Boulton had been before finally dissipating, leaving behind only a little nest of fragmented rust, the egg resting in its centre not an egg at all but a shiny silver bucket that shouldn’t have surprised Fred by appearing but still did. The horse’s teeth were two coconuts making love, going slower and slower as the excitement of the scene died down, stopping without finishing as the cheering and whooping of the rest of the statues faded too and several white coats appeared to remove the bucket, the bodies of all the statues returning to their immobility with the exception of their eyes which fixed and flickered to remain on the fastly disappearing bucket that had been Boulton until the fastly disappearing bucket that had been Boulton had completed its disappearing.

Fred’s teeth took up where the horse’s had left off and clicked together, two homeless pennies huddled together in a winter rain, as he contemplated what he’d seen until he felt as if he felt all the patches of rust on his body growing and eating away at him bit by bit as if there was a hungry rat let loose inside the pipes and tubes of his innards who had no qualms about coming up for air to munch indiscriminately on things it thought looked tasty, and when he felt as if he felt that a mad thrashing, accompanied with a little old lady groan that escaped his lips like a stray balloon and rose into the air, began to be done by him. The little girl turned to look at the fearful flaying of Fred, reaching from her bed with her oddly long finger to prod him gently but repeatedly in the left eye, a shhhhhhing sound emerging serpently from her lips until he stopped thrashing and groaning to look at the tip of her prodding perpetually ponderous finger which had an expanding patch of rust on it far worse than any of the other patches on her, a rust so rusty the slightest breeze or gust or gale sent parts of it smoking away into the ether and encouraged him to scuttle as far back on his bed as a strap would allow.

“Did you know Boulton?” She asked once he’d scuttled.

“N-n-no,” Fred stuttered, fearfully watching the tip of the little girl’s finger sway in the space his left eye had occupied.

“Then what’s up duck?”

“I didn’t know that’s what happened.”

“You didn’t know going bucket meant you turned into a bucket?”

“I didn’t know we would go bucket at all!”

“What did you think would happen? We’d disintegrate into clouds and float into the sky and that would be that? Wishful. The white coats told horse who told me that we’d have to have a really lazy disease for it to end us like that. At least we don’t have a lazy disease.”

“What are they going to do with him now he’s a bucket?”

“I don’t know. Use him to collect water or hold a mop. Sell him to people who’ll use him to collect water or hold a mop. You know, bucket things,” the little girl, who’d finally withdrawn her finger and gone back to being still, shrugged with her eyes.

“But doesn’t the idea of that scare you? Buckets don’t have eyes or a mouth or anything,” Fred was adrift and agog that nobody else was adrift or agog themselves about the entire situation.

“I’m assuming we won’t need eyes or mouths or anythings when we’re buckets but of course it’s scary and we’re all scared,” the horse snapped while moving its mouth as little as possible, his teeth hitting together nonetheless with a force that made it clear they wished Fred’s gonads were between them. “Why do you think we’re trying to stay still? For fun?”

Fred sat up as much as he could sit up to angrily reply, the strap pulling tight across his chest with the type of restriction only a strap made for restricting could enforce, just enough for his body to be at an obtuse angle and for the digits at the end of his hand to mimic a furious mouth, but before that open mouth could spew or sign any words at all into the ether, an old speaker attached like a hair follicle to the curved wall directly above Fred’s head, snap, crackled, popped and announced with the voice of an elderly snake charmer that it was that time again, yes that’s right, treatment time and streams of white coats began flooding into the hall from areas unseen and unknown, all with different objects in hand, all of which they held with the air of charitable givers giving umbrellas to those caught in the midst of a terrible rain shower when in fact the objects they had in hand were nothing like umbrellas brought in the midst of terrible rain shower but things such as guitars, canvases, paints, beers, plates of food, cans, megaphones, tape recorders, violins, microphones, wine, chopsticks, detergent, antibacterial spray, soap, shampoo, tables and chairs, boxes of toys such as little cars and figures, torches, blankets, teddy bears, teddy dogs, teddy cats, dogs and cats, one giant tortoise being led by a lead, forks and knives, meringue, stones, and lemon shaped juggling balls. A white coat with an electric violin and amp went to the horse’s bedside, another holding a plate of macaroni and cheese went to the little girls, and approaching Fred’s, a white coat with white hair and a small white goatee and two cheekbones made from bone holding a can of polish, a rag, and a bottle of beer, all of which were brandished in front of his face with a hand as steady as an unflyable kite as the sound of an electric violin being poorly played filled one ear and cheese and pasta being force fed filled his other.

His white coat mimed clearing his throat before screaming over the sounds coming from the bedsides beside Fred and the similar sounds coming from and echoing around the entire hall.

“Hello, I’m sure you have questions. Hold them inside for a mere moment. Introductions first. You are my patient and you have rustitis. I am Doctor Doc, one of the leading healers and leaders of the Establishment and I will be treating your rustitis. This will be a long process that may take longer than you last. We are sorry this is the case but the case it is, so try and take heart that your potential demise could be the key to us finding the cure for others. You can let your questions out now.”

Fred’s face had turned as shiny as a new fish from holding in just two questions which had been competing with each other to be the first to scale his body and emerge victorious from his mouth so when he did let them out, both of them having arrived at the same time and been beating on the drum of his clenched lips, they spewed into the world almost simultaneously.

“Your name is Doc? What will you be treating me with?”

“Yes, my name is Doc, short for Doclan, and with the items I hold in my hands, of course.”

The can of polish, rag, and bottle of beer was again brandished to Fred’s face before the bottle of beer was placed on the ground and, with the air of a magician convincing an audience he is about to do a dramatic trick but instead just exposes his nipples to them, Doc twisted the nozzle on the can of polish from locked to unlocked, spraying the substance first on just the visibly affected rust areas on his torso but then everywhere so that foam as white as the surf of the sea coated his body. Fred looked at the little girl as his body was foamed, her oversized finger poking at the white coat of the white coat who was shovelling food like slime into the Styx into her, each poke causing the white coat no apparent discomfort, their face remaining as jolly as a jellyfish in spring as their mouths repeated, ‘It’s homemade at home by me!’, but each one reducing the size of that finger, and then looked at the horse who lay as still as he could as the electric violin let out a tune that could have been O Danny Boy and could have been a cat being molested, accepting its treatment with the wide eyes of a steed broken in and willing.

Doc, once Fred was covered to his satisfaction, began wiping away at the foam with a variety of polishing techniques more akin to that of a window cleaner- the S shape polish, The V shape polish, the rubadubdub polish, the whenI’mcleaningIsinggggg polish, the circular polish, the freestyle jazz polish, before doing the towelling off a wet child finale- each stroke, rub, and wipe of the rag on Fred’s surface making him tingle as Doc, who spoke as he stroked, rubbed, and wiped, ducked his head close enough for the words to be heard.

“You’re in luck having me treating you. Such luck. I almost cured my last statue. They were showing such promise. I’d faded not one, but two of their rust patches to patches of almost not rust before they, alas, went bucket. But I considered what I’d done, and I think now I’ve figured out a way to speed up the process. With these treatments and my new know how, you could be the one!”

“What treatments? Where? You’re polishing me, that little girl is being force fed, someone’s playing some awful violin. I don’t understand,” Fred’s voice came out in the tone of a claustrophobic tortoise feverously praying to escape its shell.

Doc stopped polishing in its tracks and looked sternly down at Fred who’d shouted loudly enough for some other white coats to hear, his mouth in the middle of his goatee a puckered anus ready to release a shit storm as the violin screeched into silence and the white coat holding it brandishing their horse haired bow like a rapier towards Fred, eyes wet as puddles and cheeks pillowy.

“Of course, you don’t understand, are you a white coat? Are you a member of the Establishment? Have you ever had to treat a patient so sick you’re afraid that nothing you do will ever cure them? No, you’re a statue with rustitis. A statue with rustitis whose damn well lucky if you ask me to be being treated by such an esteemed white coat as Doc.”

Doc held his hands up before the bow, twisting them as if controlling the internal temperature of the angry white coat.

“Now, now Igoress, calm down. Carry on with your playing, which I much mention is getting much better by the way, Fred here is just afraid.”

Igoress stared at Fred with their bow brandished for several more seconds, its tip shaking with a Parkinsonian tremble before spinning with a dancers gait back to the horses' bedside to begin again inciting wails from the electric violin while Doc, still paused in his polishing, looked down at Fred, his brows berating him as his mouth gently explained, the very definition of a man with good bedside manners.

“We members of the Establishment treat our patients with rustitis in the best way members of an Establishment not made to treat patients with rustitis can do. This disease hasn’t been around long and we don’t know much, so we treat it in the ways we think best. Me, for example, I’ve always been a good polisher, Igoress over there can, almost, play the violin, and Llewyn has always made damn good macaroni and cheese. Now, accept your treatment because it will only maybe work if you accept it and there is nothing else to be done.”

Fred fell silent as Doc began to polish him again, accepting the rubs and wipes like tight hugs from an aunt you’re obligated to accept them from, until his parts unaffected by rust shone like the light of life, the parts affected had an even uglier blemish to them than before, and Doc wiped some sweat from his face, throwing his rag down and cracking open the bottle of beer he’d placed carefully on the floor before matronly lifting Fred’s head up and tipping some of the liquid across his tongue and into his depths where it swished and swashed down with the sound of a rainstick when you’re all tucked up inside. Fred liked the taste of the beer and was disappointed when Doc stopped pouring into him and started pouring into himself, relaxing into an armchair that appeared from nowhere at the bedside as an alarm went off and the rest of the white coats placed little white pills in their statues mouths that even without swallowing made them close their eyes and sleep and all streamed away, leaving with their items so quickly that if you blinked you would have missed them, all except Doc, who stayed in his armchair beyond a blink watching Fred and taking minuscule sips of the beer in between periodic licks of his lips.

“I’d like to start devoting a bit of extra time to my treatments,” Doc explained without being asked to. “I feel that forming a connection with my patients is the missing link to what I’ve been doing and forming a connection can’t be done to a time constraint or while polishing someone. No, you have to have a drink with them after a hard day's work. I’m simply doing my duty to my treatment by doing this. Does that make me better than the rest of the white coats who don’t do it? Most of them would, and do, say yes, but not me. I’m very humble.”

Doc leaned forward and poured more beer into Fred’s mouth which had been left agape with the aura of a tunnel waiting to let in battle reinforcements, the alcohol entering his system until his head felt as if a bumble bee was in there bumbling about and his pleading sailor face became a content sailor face, a grin changing its structure as Doc finally finished off the beer with a dramatic gulping, throwing the empty bottle into his deep white coat pocket, his eyes shiny as he spread his wide hands wide, the lines of his palms beckoning Fred to lean into the treatment by asking, ‘Tell me about you Fred’, and Fred did.

“I’m Fred. A statue. I stood in Victoria Square on a triangle pedestal for twenty years. The visitors of the square liked me and the two statues I stood with liked me. I liked them too. All of sudden I caught rustitis and now I can’t be in the square or stand on my triangle because I was taken by you and the Establishment. I’m confused and scared about maybe becoming a bucket without eyes or a mouth or anything.”

“The lines on my palms didn’t ask you to tell me about your situation. I read your case file, and I know your situation. I want us to form a connection, Fred, my Freddy boy, I need you to tell me a secret. A secret something that reveals a certain something about yourself to me. A secret something that I can gasp and nod and feel as if I know you in a way nobody else does.”

Fred cleared his throat and thought until the beery bee in his bonnet told him what he already knew, that he’d had spent his life posing and had no secrets, not in his bonnet nor his bumper, and so, scared that would mean he couldn’t lean into the treatment and thus commence to be treated, closed his eyes like a rabbit afraid of rejection, whispering. “But I don’t think I have any secret somethings.”

Doc’s mouth became an upside-down rainbow with two pots of gold masquerading as dimples on each tip as he considered what he’d heard before he grabbed Fred’s hand, rubbing his thumb over the surface of his metal, pointing first at his chest and then at Fred’s with his other hand, pointing and pointing until Fred felt a little sailing ship sail by his heart and throw a rope around it before sailing into Doc and throwing that same rope around his, tying them together.

“Now that’s worthy of a connection. Do you feel that? That’s treatment baby. You told me something and to make this connection as strong a connection as a connection between a white coat and a statue who’ve just met can be, I will now disclose something to you. When I was young I… sigh… I had a dream where I molested a shrew.”

Doc nodded after his confession, looking down in shame while Fred nodded in return to show he’d heard and accepted that secret and what’s more wished he could move his arms out of their restrictions enough to pat him on the side of his white goatee and gently show that he felt the connection, oh boy did he feel it, but before he could say something to show what he was wishing, Doc was standing up and looking at his watch.

“That’s enough treatment for today methinks. We have a connection that we will continue to build on in further treatments, believe you me.”

Doc pulled out a white pill of his own and, putting it on a tongue which lapped out as trustingly as a trussed up taco terrier, forced Fred into a sleep in which he didn’t dream but merely stared at an oil painting depicting the horror he’d no doubt feel when turning bucket until he awoke again in a hall absolutely bustling with statues in states of shock and excitement about the four buckets that had appeared while he’d been gone, all lining the back wall, the horse who Igoress had been playing so badly to one of them, gone and replaced with a bucket made from shiny wood and dull metal bolts.

“Finally awake?” The little girl asked, not yet a bucket herself but much rustier than she’d been before Fred had slept, her childish features marred by the creeping and crawling patches, her oversized finger suddenly normal sized as she turned as fully as her restrictions allowed, her rust addled components letting out Shakespearian shrieks as she did… haaaaaaarkkkkkk… horatiooooooooooooo… “You missed it all. I was lucky. I woke up as it was happening. Four buckets, all at the same time. Look, the light of them burned the floor! The horse wasn’t even that rusty, but it didn’t matter, bang, bucket he was. He wasn’t even awake yet.”

Fred shook his head in a daze and a similar shrieking as what came from the little girl came from the folds and sheets of him… Viennaaaaaaa…. and when he looked down to see how that could be so, in shock and horror, he saw, with shock and horror, that his own rust had gotten worse to a degree less than that of the little girl now he’d woken up but more than she’d been when he was first brought in, a swirling pattern of it decorating his chest and shoulders giving him the fear his life would never be beautiful or good that sipping expired milk will give you.

“Nobody thought you could go bucket asleep or as not very rusty as the horse was but now everybody’s thoughts have been changed by the fact that both of those things can and have happened,” the little girl suddenly gave a leap from her back, coiling her spine so that she came a tiny bit into the air with a smile. “But try not to show you’re scared. There’s a new educated rumour going around that showing fear makes you go bucket faster. I’m also heard that the previous advice of staying immobile to help with treatment was just a joke by the white coats and that it’s actually more helpful to keep moving.”

The little girl’s features ticked in perpetual movement as if some great beast was waking inside of her and pushing at certain nerves within her casing and it was then that Fred noticed that it wasn’t just her, that whereas when he’d last been awake the hall had been accompanied by the Royal Stillness Symphony Orchestra, it was, now he was awake again, accompanied in fact by the Royal Movement Symphony Orchestra, all the other statues leaping and jerking within the bounds of their confines like machine parts come loose from their machines, smiles spitting in the face of fear tattooed on their faces so they resembled convicts queuing up to be shot but not giving their shooters the satisfaction of shooting people not smiling in a spitting manner. Fred began to move too, with more force than everyone else, jerking his limbs around and letting out a scream that shut most of the other statues in the immediate area up and removed their smiles, a scream that had an under and overtone of fear to it, words mingled in with its gargling,

‘HOOOOOOWHOOOOOOFuckfuckfuckfuck, I’m afraid and I’m not going to hide it because I am afraid and you keep changing your minds about how to fix things and I want to speak to Doc because I’m his patient and we have a connection and I want him to hold me and tell me it’s okay to be scared.’

When his scream finally fell off the edge of the cliff it had been precariously balancing on, the other statues in the hall began their fearless in the face of fear smiles again, making them even bigger than before so they could make like a gaggle of magpies ignoring a dodo in distress, thinking in their hearts that he would be next to go bucket while they would all get better, and then, from wherever in the Establishment the white coats congregated, Doc appeared, sliding through the circular maze of beds, white coat billowing in a capeian manner, to place a hand on Fred’s brow gently.

“You are showing you’re afraid, stop it. Have you not heard the new advice now we’ve had enough of our joke? Showing your fear is detrimental to your treatment.”

“I told him. I told him,” the little girl said. “I tried to help. Can I get a new white coat because I tried to help? Please. I don’t want any more macaroni.”

Fred and Doc ignored the little girl who was doing the worm in bed as she spoke, their eyes on each other as Fred’s tongue waggled, “But I am scared. Very scared. Scared about this, scared about that. Scared I’ll go bucket when I really don’t want to, scared because I’m even rustier now than when you started treating me.”

Doc put two fingers upon his chin in an Apostolic manner before using his remaining six fingers to undo Fred’s restraints and wave him up and out of bed with a ‘come with me’, chirp, taking his hand and pulling him away from the back wall of the hall and through and towards the right side wall of the hall, on which, almost hidden, sat a small brown door with the number three perched like a cleaved in two number eight on it. Doc pushed the door open roughly and they stepped through into another hall, larger than the one they’d left and more appropriately shaped to the cubic nature of the building from the outside, one divided into patchwork sections by towels and rags and curtains with a thin mazey strip of a path running between them for you to find their way through. They walked down this path for a while going sideways and upways and crossways, Fred marvelling at the sheer lack of noise permeating the air, as if all sound was being smothered by a jealous pillow, until Doc stopped them at a floral curtained section, his name embroidered on it in emerald green thread, and they entered, Doc pushing Fred down on a wheely chair next to a chest of drawers and quickly drawing the curtain back across the hole they’d made, the silence which had followed them in there becoming somehow even more so, so it was as if they stood in a vacuum cleaner that had accidentally hoovered up the vacuum of space.

“This is my office,” Doc said, sitting down himself while synonymously drawing up the sleeve of his white coat to reveal that he had a pale arm under it, a pale arm of normal length but one that’s paleness was disfigured by patches of greenish rustitis. “And as you can see I, and I’ll tell you now all of the other white coats as well, have what all you statues have. None of us has gone bucket yet, but the time is getting closer. None of our treatments have worked so far and I, we, need one of them to work, for all our sakes.”

Fred’s mouth, so used to falling open and letting out a string of fearful nonsense, was already halfway to being open but was stopped on its rusty hinges by the palm of Doc striking it with the sound of a triangle being clanged somewhere in the back of a complicated piece of music.

“We have a connection. You showing your fear makes me want to show my fear and I don’t want to show my fear because deep down I believe what we white coats have made up. Besides, neither of us should be afraid at all because I have a plan that has never been tried before and so is almost certainly bound to work.”

“What is it?” Fred kept his tone nice and middle ground though his innards were a battlefield of giblets stampeding to escape a disintegrating arena.

“I’m going to put a white coat on you and let you treat some statues.”

“Why would that work?”

“Because it doesn’t seem as if it should. Why should trees grow when wood seems so dead? Who knows. This has never been done before, a statue white coat, who would have thought, and so I think if you treat a few statues, eventually either they or you will begin the process of de-rusting and BOOM, a cure.”

At that Doc threw off the rest of his white coat and then top to reveal that underneath them he was nearly all rustitis with a hole where his heart should have been so that if Fred had wanted to he could have peeked through and seen the face of God, and then he threw that white coat at Fred caught it with his head before standing and slipping it on, becoming a white coat in all the ways putting on a white coat can make you, it muffling the screeches of his movements as Doc himself pulled on a t-shirt and sat down where Fred had been sitting, putting his feet up in the air with the air of a handsome feline about to be milked.

“Don’t dally, go, go,” he said when Fred paused.

“But where shall I go? Who shall I treat?”

“I guess I can hold off Llewyn and his macaroni for now so go to the little girl. Treat her.”

“But how shall I treat her?”

Doc sighed like a trunkless elephant.

“What are you good at? What can you do?”

“I can stand really still.”

“It has to be something more than that. You can’t just put on a white coat and stand as still as a statue.”

“But I’ve never done anything other than be a statue.”

“Well, we need something.”

Doc got up and began rummaging through the wooden chest of drawers that by golly seemed to be there simply to be rummaged around in before, with a “Hoooooooo”, he withdrew a large thermal mug sealed with a black lid and threw it to Fred whose hands sprung to grasp its round warmth instinctively, caressing it as a bovinophile would an udder.

“Take a sip of that with your gob.”

Fred did as Doc said and took the lid off, releasing a finger of visible steam that suggestively fingered his nose holes and carried with it the stench of a burnt carrot, before sucking a sip and turning back to Doc while posing as he imagined a version of himself that had been born a white coat would do while treating, putting a hand on his hip and sullenly gazing into the middle distance, a pose that made Doc act as a stray dog at a buffet, veering up further on his hind legs and smacking his lips.

“That’s what I’m talking about, yoooooooooooo-mama, you look great. Very Geil, to bust out my almost perfect German. You drink very well and what’s more look good doing it. That my friend is coffee, and drinking it shall be your treatment. That mug won’t ever run out, believe me, so take it, go to the little girl, drink around her, maybe talk to her a little as well, but mainly drink.”

Fred took more sips of coffee, deep ones that felt like rivers as they flowed into him, and sighed, the burnt carrot stench having been replaced by the stench of perfectly cooked toffee and the taste, which upon first suck had been like tar- hot and thick- dancing devilishly on his tongue, having replaced itself with what he could only imagine was the taste of godly ambrosia and didn’t move until Doc began to jostle him towards the curtain door with his feet.

“Don’t dilly dally, go treat. You don’t need to wait until treatment time dammit. You can treat by your own rules. Be the renegade white coat, the maverick. We all need you to succeed quickly, and I definitely don’t want to see you fail slowly.”

Doc’s words shoved Fred out into the wilderness for him to walk in the direction he thought was right for him to get back to the hall he’d been in before, zigzagging like a hindered bolt of lightning through the maze of curtains, towels, and rags, drinking his coffee as he did and feeling more and more like dancing in a moonlight he wished was spotlighting him until finally stumbling upon the back of the brown door with the dismembered eight on it and opening it, puff puffing on his mug’s hotness like a choo-choo train has he stood white coated before the ailing statues, forgetting with his feeling of power that underneath that white coat he was still also an ailing statue. Fred followed the curvature of the hall like a blind mouse, sniffing at the toffee-scented finger of steam and trusting it to point him in the right direction until he came again upon his own empty bed and the little girl who he was surprised hadn’t rusted any more in his absence, the bed where the horse and then the bucket that had once been the horse having been filled by a cat-sized plastic statue of a slug hunting toad desperately stretching its tongue a metre out.

The armchair that Doc had materialised by Fred’s bed had since been placed by some unknown helper at the little girl’s bedside and Fred swept himself onto it with a dramatic flurry, coughing to gain the still gyrating and jiving little girl’s attention, stroking the lapels of his white coat as he did, expecting the little girl’s little mouth to fall open at the sight of him, a statue as a white coat, but instead, that little girl’s little mouth simply grinned as if she’d merely stumbled upon a balloon filled with grinning gas.

“A new white coat, oh yes a new treatment! Thank God, I couldn’t have swallowed any more macaroni, let alone cheese.”

“Are you not surprised it’s me giving you that new treatment?” Fred asked, slightly put out, leaving his thermal mug hanging from between his teeth like an armless Inuit.

“You? I don’t know you. I suppose I knew you for a bit when you were a statue but I don’t know any white coats so even if you are the same statue I knew for a bit underneath that white coat, I certainly don’t know you now so no, I’m not surprised but am curious as to what you’ll treat me with? I really hope it isn’t more macaroni food. Don’t tell me it’s more macaroni food.”

Fred’s put outness disappeared at the sight of the little girl’s eyes looking so earnestly and questioning at him, a man of power and decision making, so, raising his thermal mug dramatically with his pinkie sticking out like some sort of vestigial tail and wiggling his ass to get comfy, drank deep from his well of coffee, almost drowning himself before coming back up for air, blowing his finger of steam into the little girl’s eyes where it coiled and licked like a flame at the rust creeping around the sides of them.

“I drink this coffee and you listen as I most likely, almost certainly, definitely, talk. The end result, the treatment works and either you or I are cured.”

The little girl, obedient as a fable, waited as Fred sucked back some more joe, waited as time commenced to pass, the seconds doing what seconds do, speeding down the autobahn into nothing as Fred waited for some words he could use to treat the little girl with to arrive at his tongue until finally the little girl, who was patient and obedient only until she got tired of being those things, proceeded to incite the words to appear herself.

“Tell me a story. A good one.”

Fred looked into the depths of his coffee and swirled the shadow substance around as he tried not to panic, taking back the finger of steam from the little girl, breathing it in, deeper and deeper so that its entire length became inserted into the depths of his brain, its tip there not licking or lapping like fire but prodding and pushing at all the sleeping masses and parts that resided there in beds with quilts up to their chins, legs and feet skinny and disused but sturdy enough to carry their weight as they were awoken by the incessant prods and pushes and forced to roll over and out of those beds with grumbling grumbles, pulling at red tipped levers that sparked and flashed.

“There was a girl once who desired nothing more from the world than to be able to eat porridge and sit on a boat on the water,” Fred’s voice was a mistreated otter standing before a warm hug as it started in its attempt to tell a story, a good one. “She had many oats, lots of milk, and a very nice boat made from shiny wood with a blue sail sticking from its mast, but unfortunately there wasn’t a drop of water around for that boat to sit on as the ground where she lived was a hungry beast. A dry thing filled with cracks and slices like the dome of a bald head made from sand.”

Fred’s voice was interrupted by his hands raising his mug back to his lips to take back more than the finger, cramming in fact the whole body into his brain, finding room somehow, smacking his tongue at the taste and clicking his fingers, feeling gargantuan in both mind and spirit.

“One day, sad beyond belief at not being able to eat her porridge while sitting on a boat which was, in turn, sitting on water, the girl began crying thick salty tears that dribbled from her eyes and fell like drops of rain from the tippy tip of her nose. These tears plink plonked to the hungry ground and, knowing their origins despair, surprisingly, raised a knife before they could be swallowed, threatening the shocked ground with castration until the shocked ground lost its appetite and cowered into a foetal position, allowing the tears to stay until their edges touched other edges and became more than single tears...”

The little girl in her bed watched Fred talk and every now and then inhaled deeply with a flaring nose that acted as a net swinging around a lakeside trying to catch a hint of the scented steam that had once floated from the top of his mug and tickled her but was then firmly ingrained with the rest of its body within the maze of his brain, each swing being followed by a shower of rust flakes falling from her marred features, what had been her oversized finger but was then little more than a stub waving in the air with the air of a frog conductor conducting a symphony of bassoons as if it, as a sort of finger itself, could call the steam back out.

“… soon they formed a lake the colour of an aristocrat’s embarrassment that drowned the ground and raised the little girl’s boat in the air. Unfortunately, the girl, who had jumped onto her boat as soon as the lake started forming, had only two hands available and could only grab a few barrels of oats and a single jug of milk to bring on board the boat before the rest of her stock was washed away, but she didn’t mind too much to see them go. In fact, she was happy enough to be sitting in a boat on some water to stop crying once a large enough lake had formed. To stop crying and start smiling as she prepared a small bowl of porridge and ate it for the first time while bob bob bobbing on the lake.”

Fred waited for the little girl to speak, his hands, in the manner of a giant holding a lock of hair taken from a non-giant lover they’d physically loved and subsequently crushed, curled around his mug, nervous until the little girl clapped her hands together and wriggled and jiggled for the first time not from her desire to be constantly moving but because of excitement.

“I liked that. I liked that a lot. I like this treatment and when I had it, I liked the smell of that coffee. Could I try some of its taste?”

“Coffee taste is for white coat’s only and even if it isn’t and I’m wrong, it’s still a no because though Doc told me this mug is endless, he could be wrong, and it would make me very sad if it was finished by anyone other than me.”

“But what if the taste could cure me quicker. You’d be the best white coat around then and even if it did run out, get more.”

The little girl’s lips pursed, stretching towards the edge of Fred’s mug in a manner crocodilian, but Fred only nodded thoughtfully in the way all nodders who aren’t listening nod, sitting back, his white coat brushing his ankles as he took another bigggg long gulp of coffee, the taste of it having acquired subtle hints and clues of hazelnut, dark chocolate, and iron the more he sampled, and he flicked through these hints and clues, enjoying each one individually and collectively while stroking a large patch of rust along his collar bone, quite enjoying the lumpy bumpiness of that too until his stroking came upon a small patch of rust within the larger patch that felt less lumpy bumpy and more just lumpy, causing him to use his eyes and see that the small patch of rust also looked less lumpy bumpy and, what’s more, less rusty than the larger patch around it.

“Break time for treatment, that’s what I say,” he stammered before running back to the office of Doc, finding it upon throwing back the curtain much changed; Doc, still there, but lying in the crack of a luxurious heart-shaped bed completely naked apart from the parts of his body, such as from the waist down and where once there had been pectorals, that while Fred had been spouting a story to the little girl had succumbed to rustiness and gone away.

“You see what has become of me?” Doc raised his head when he heard Fred come pantingly in, also raising what would have been a thumb if hadn’t just been a fist. “All in the space of five minutes. One second I was relaxing, drinking a beer, polishing my arm, trying to form a connection with myself, the next, reality’s palm, my face, SMACK, I fell, my legs piles of rust, my middle melting away. This is a cruel disease.”

“But look,” Fred sensually exposed the small patch of treated rust housed tumourly within the larger patch of untreated rust on his collar bone. “I’m getting better.”

Doc attempted to jump to feet that no longer existed and so simply fell back down onto the bed with the grace of a disco dancing dodecahedron, what had once been a jolly well deep belly button becoming less than that and joining the dusty rust pile of himself lying in the middle of the hole that had been his middle, but still the light in his eyes jumping to attention as he shook his hands together as if they belonged not to him but to two eminent businessmen who’d been waiting a long time to meet and whose first impressions were more than good.

“I’m the greatest of all the white coats. Look at that rust, running away from its death which my imagination imagined with such force it’s becoming reality. Was it just drinking the coffee around the patient that did it? Was it more? I need information.”

“I drank the coffee around her, but I also told a story I made up. I’d never done that before, make a story up, but apparently, I’m good at it. I’m a storyteller.”

“Undoubtedly. Indubitably. Christ on a cracker at Christmas this is exciting. What about the patient? Did her rustitis show any improvement? Did you give her any coffee?”

Fred clutched his mug tighter, hesitating before clearing his throat with a shake of the head, swirling the hem of his white coat around his knees like a blackhole hating ballet dancer doing their act in front of a ballet hating blackhole.

“I gave the little girl some coffee, of course. Are you suggesting I didn’t? Of course you’re not because she did have some, but when she indicated that she didn’t enjoy the taste as much as she enjoyed my story I stopped giving her any just in case it was a waste. Which it would have been, because no there was no improvement to her rustitis.”

“So, the treatment only works for those administering it. Mmmm, a reversal of the typical white coat/ patient relationship. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm, how interesting and good,” Doc smiled at Fred before holding out a hand, its one remaining finger doing the mariachi. “Well, pass me my white coat back then, lickety-split. I’ve gotta get to work!”

“What do you mean?” Fred instinctively took a step back. “I’m getting better. If I take the white coat off, I’ll stop getting better.”

“You won’t, you won’t. Well, you will, but only until me and the rest of the actual white coats are cured. Then we’ll take to the beds and let the rest of you have way. That’s an actual white coat promise. Now come on, have off with it.”

“What if I go bucket before you’re finished being cured? What if all the statues do? Look how quickly your rust has spread.”

“Exactly, look how quickly I could go bucket if we don’t start my treatment immediately! Now I don’t want to invoke our connection, not to mention my natural superiority over you, a statue, but I have to insist you pass me my things right now.”

Fred took a long swig from the mug, knowing as he did that his connection to Doc had been seized like a jewel by Blackbeard by the black stuff in there, the finger and body of steam, which had slunk back out of his brain as soon as his making up of stories was over, beckoning him to drink some more and then never stop drinking, to stay in the liquid forever, and so, shaking his head at Doc once he’d finished slurping, Fred stamped his foot on the floor.

“Our connection has been rerouted and I won’t do what you insist. I’ll keep wearing this white coat, drinking this coffee, and spinning my yarns until I’m completely cured and not just on my way there, and you’ll keep lying there and getting worse until that happens.”

Fred’s shout was a grain of rice announcing its passion for frying, the sheer loudness causing Doc to cower in his bed with his neck sinking into his chest, his crumbling hands held up as to defend themselves against a Fred who hadn’t planned to strike him, his crumbling hands which had a meekness that prompted Fred to strike him despite his lack of plan, giving him a little flick on the nose that turned its rust black and blue. Doc began to howl once he’d been flicked, the jagged end of his waist that had once worn legs kicking up and down as he mixed vowels together indiscriminately, “OOOOOOUUUUUUIIIIIIAAAAAEEAIOUEAIIIII!”, before Fred stopped his mixing as abruptly as an ant in headlights by flouncing off through the curtain to continue his treatment, waving his elbows like maracas until he reached the little girl who was pleased to see his mug again, her lips immediately pursing.

“Well, it’s been several minutes. Break times can’t last forever, and I figured I should see how you were looking. I see now you’re looking exactly the same except for several patches that have gotten significantly worse. On with the treatment then!”

“I really think, and it’s not just because it smells so good it would make me salivate if I could salivate, that if you shared the coffee my treatment would go much faster and with a bang and a wallop and a tick, I’d be as cured as ham and then you could be as cured as that too.”

Fred stiffened like a statue and put the little girl’s pursing in the bin by physically pushing her lips back towards the rest of her features, his breath becoming the sound of wind in a tunnel and funnelling out to strike the little girl’s face, the same shade and scent as the finger of steam arising from his mug as he asked.

“Are you a white coat?”

“No.”

“Have you ever even worn a white coat?”

“No.”

“Exactly. You’re a white coatless statue so do as white coatless statues are supposed to and leave the treatment ideas to me and the Establishment. In fact, if you can’t just leave your thoughts where you find them, discard them in a bin. The coffee is mine. Ask for it again and you’ll receive no treatment from me or anyone else and bucket you shall go. Stand of the under?”

The little girl sat sullenly back and she and Fred stared at each other, a battle of wills armed with batons having a baton-type tussle, until, finally, she was tussled into a submission that equalled the back of her head resting on her bed’s pillow and her ears opening wide enough to swallow the voice of Fred, who clenched one white corner of his white coat in hand as he again began to story and sip, the rusty parts of him becoming slightly less rusty at the end of each one he spoke, the rusty parts of her becoming slightly more so throughout. He told her the one about red having a fight with blue who was having a fight with yellow so it was that they were all fighting until they realised the fine line between love and hate and stopped to form a throuple and collectively give birth to brown, he told her about the man who stuck himself in a hole filled with quicksand and refused to leave until he was given the perfect bite of croissant but eventually sank to the bottom all alone and biteless, he told her about a featherless bird who was mocked for being featherless and unable to fly until it evolved and invented a flying machine that helped it fly better than any of those with feathers, he told her about a photograph of a desert that wasn’t fixed in space and time and how its image would shift and move depending on the time of day and of the little boy who found the photograph and realised he could dive into the image and so did dive only to find he was and had been a desert snake all along, he told her about a bowler hat made from wood by a carpenter who’d always wanted to be a hat maker instead of what he was and how that wooden bowler hat was rejected by the men and women who wear hats not made from wood but because of that rejection went on to experience adventures no other hat-shaped object in the history of anything could claim to have experienced such as becoming a pirate and marrying a slug, he told her about a chocolate bar the size of a skyscraper never unwrapped and destined to never be so though it was made of the most delightful tasting chocolate the world had ever seen and so simply basked in the sun until it grew so hot it melted and flooded the city it sat in.

The little girl never got to hear the end of the chocolate bar story as that same little girl, all of a sudden, went bucket with a tremendous bang much louder and tremendouser than the bang Boulton had bequeathed when he’d done the same, a shard of bright yellow light piercing Fred’s eyes in the instant before she fully became a bucket but had already ceased to be a statue, the bucket of her when it appeared having the appearance of any old classic plain stainless steel bucket if that stainless steel was whiteish rock, its surface trembling against the buffed surface of Fred’s hand, which he briefly laid on its side in commiseration, as if it still held the writhing spirit of the statue it’d been, before pushing himself while still story telling in the direction of a chicken the size of a desk rock rocking back and forth in a bed too small for it that would have been rusted from beak to cloaca if patches of unrusted granite resembling miniscule versions of the polka spots of a polka man hadn’t still dotted its sides.

“… and the city was forever coated, chocolate coated. The end. Good story, shame you only heard the end. I’m Fred, a white coat, previously just a statue with rustitis and without a white coat, I’ll be treating you…”

“Baaaarqqqkk?” came from the chicken, who was one of the rare statues made so well they could sound only like the thing they’d been made to resemble, as Fred went straight into the story of a man who, being in love with his own daughter, locked himself up in a high tower without windows or doors to protect her before ultimately being rescued by a foolish hero who thought he’d had been locked up by a fiend and needed rescuing and who, upon being rescued, thought he’d been saved by God’s grace and had permission to take his daughter as a wife and did just that to the misfortune of their severely impaired offspring, the coffee bouncing around Fred’s mind like a ball designed to bounce causing him to speak faster and with more excitement, his foot tap tapping in time with his words, each one giving out the ringing of a bell muted by touch. The chicken went bucket at the very end of the incest story as if consciously taking a way out, wings a-flapping as it boomed away, but Fred barely noticed- so intoxicated was he by the mug and the substance within- his veins a marching band marching and banding in a rising drone, his tongue a piece of Velcro catching those sticky treatment words flying from his sparking mind as his body zip zipped from the chicken’s bedside to a section of four bedsides that he spoke to as a whole, as if their rusted forms formed one giant bedside, speaking until the crackling speakers lining the hall walls crackled to announce that it was that time again, that time equalling treatment! and all the other white coats began flooding in, some commencing to remove the buckets Fred had left in his wake.

“Excuse me? You, statue, why are you in a white coat?” Four white coats chorused in unison, the hair on their heads bristling with just as much union, every strand of it on their skulls standing up and increasing in thickness so that they could have easily and collectively brushed down a dragon if there’d been a dragon handy and a person big enough to wield them, as they stood to the side of the bedsides that Fred was treating and that they were used to treating themselves, their voices aggressive but not enough to stir the big ol’ cup of coffee that was Fred who thought, ‘I know your secrettttt,’ when they interrupted him and stood up, his movements fluid, his rust barely surface level, to grip and rip their white coats from their bodies.

Gasp, shock, and horror were things done and felt by all the statues who could see the rust eating away at the white coats and curiosity followed by a gasp, a shock, and a horror were done and felt by the statues who couldn’t see this exposed event but could and did hear tell of it as like a domino falling, screams followed by a roiling as statues strained against their restrictions filled the air. The white coats Fred had exposed screamed too, their noises the same as foxes caught in play, their legs slightly crossed and bent, covering their rust with hands and arms despite their rust being uncoverable no matter how large the palms or expansive the fat while the rest of the white coats, unexposed but being angrily confronted by shouting straining statues- like blocks of mouldy cheese that know they aren’t appetising and that they won’t be eaten and that if they aren’t eaten will simply mould even further- thought, ‘fuck you,’ and took off their white coats to make themselves even more unappetising, exposing their states of decay to the masses. Once they were all exposed, all the white coats then all fled the Establishment, each fleeing footstep causing great puffs of rust to rise from their afflicted bodies and float in the air, the exact colour of a variety of extinct and poisonous caterpillar, before being sucked towards the inhaling wailing mouths of the restrained statues lying beneath them while Fred, whose eyes had reflected the fleeing scene, turned back to the bedsides he’d been speaking to and carried on with it in the same garbled excited manner that reflected the fact that his coffee was sweet and bitter and made his liver a jazz drummer beating a cymbal at 4/4 time.

“Now we’ve got them out of the way, now we’ve got the space to ourselves, as it should be and as it is, I’ll carry on, I’ll tell you my stories, I’ll make them up because I’m a deity writing the history of an elephant named Grady. Or maybe I don’t have to make anything up for it to be a story? Maybe this is the story and we should fuck Grady? A stream of story sent straight from my consciousness to yours, beamed in like an image to a television. Tell me can you see this in your heads? Can you see me sitting and speaking to you as closely as if I was actually sitting and speaking to you this close? Or am I crackly and distant like a pirate radio station or your grandmother who never thought you smelt good enough to hug on Christmas? Drat and blast it, I have to tell you, I know I shouldn’t, you’ll be upset I’m not allowing you the opportunity to take this opportunity now there are all these vacant white coats lying around, but I’m too busy to give even some of you this opportunity. I’m a white coat drinking coffee and telling tales busily but not too busily to have to tell you that I’m in fact being cured while you’re all slowly going bucket and that it’s all thanks to my drinking coffee and telling tales in this coat. Don’t be upset or angry, that is if you can even hear me over this din, this absolute racket of-”

All four of the bedsides interrupted Fred by going BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG, the echo of those noises being followed by an even more alarming BANGGGGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAABOOOOOOM! as loud as anything the world had heard since the first big bangaboom spat it into existence as every statue from the hall’s entrance to rear went bucket with the force of a large bomb going off in the style only large bombs going off can go off in, violently and with the power to make Fred, a bronze God with a firm palm over the opening of his thermal mug, go flipflopping through the heavens as the entire Establishment came down around the field of buckets and uprooted beds that had appeared, the building crumbling into nothing as Fred landed on his back one hundred metres away, getting up quickly to take a calm, measured sip from the pool of coffee he’d collected in the well of his hand.

“Well that’s something,” he muttered, staring at the rubble before raising his arms and shoulders in a full-bodied shrug that opened his white coat and revealed the rust that had once snaked up his chest had finally snaked away into nothing, the blast having blown it all away so Fred was as shiny and new as a shiny and new penny not yet put in a pocket or spent at a shop or tossed in the air and accidentally dropped down a drain. “My, my that’s something indeed.”

Fred took off his white coat and laid it gently on the ground to inspect and stroke his once again unblemished surface and think of the freakshow contortions Hazel and Vicky’s faces would achieve when they saw him lackadaisically stroll, white coat clad and rust free, back into Victoria Square to mount his pedestal and reinvent all that a statue could be; no longer would he pose in naked stillness, NO! he would keep his coat, change his pose often, without routine or rhythm, and keep making up stories to regale visitors with, a prop thermal mug of delicious coffee held clenched in hand, the only constant in his ever shifting posture. He began to walk back in the direction of the city on roads that had been close enough to the rubble that had been the Establishment when it went bangaboom to have become black and cracked like the toothless gums of a grandma coal, roads that sounded like dry leaves underfoot and remained like that until Fred had walked on them enough to allow the hungry horizon to swallow what he’d left behind. He drank at the same speed he walked- fast, erratic, and urgent- time moving as fast as that as well, speeding away from him, taillights winking, so that it was soon dark and he was soon on the outskirts of the city, staring at the lit lampposts lighting up the Aston expressway like the strip of an unloved and abandoned airport. There were no cars on the road and his feet were cow lovers shaking and banging their cowbells to make them go a-clanging and call their loved ones into pasture on a cold Sunday morning as they came down on the tarmac, his mouth a ravenous limpet slurping and suckling on an open wound as it drew coffee into him, coffee that made his thoughts flicker with the quickness of a deluge mob … Hazel… Vicky… coffeeeeeeeeeeee… dancing?.... Doc is bucketdeaddeaddeadbucket, dead as a doornail… how many doornails are in a pudding pie? Too many!... each one frozen and then thawed as if introduced to the centre of a dying star as they rapidly arrived and left, his mind being the centre of that dying star, pulsing, pulverising, pitter-pattering as he reached the end of the expressway and the great square pedestal of the great floozy, lounging jade-like in her jacuzzi in a spontaneously seductive manner, appeared in the distant centre of the bright city and into Fred’s sight.

His hurried footsteps hurried, turning the sound of cowbell clangs into the childhood memory of a hammer coming into contact with a sheet of aluminium and his leechy slurps into the gasping inhale of a pirate realising they have nothing left to live for… home… red slippers… clip clop… I’m a horse hoarsely heading homeward… hospice for can I ever stay still again?... how can I dance and run on a pedestal?... I’m a better man with a better plan... drink… sip… yeahhhh… his sight affixed so intensely on the beacon of the floozy’s great square that it was all he could see as he burst onto the square with the confidence of a gigolo knowing a large phallic legend will have preceded them and worked up a clammer, panting as his burst finished and no clammer was met, standing still finally to listen out for voices that upon not hearing he finally looked for amongst the metal, wood, and stone buckets standing upright on pedestals dotting a floor of smaller buckets made of veiny skin stretched thin that lay on sides or upside down and twitched as if attempting to escape their inherent bucketness, or dance in celebration of it.

#short story #story #fiction #absurdism #literary magazine #surreal #original story #short stories #fitzcarraldo editions #weirdcore #weird art #bizarre #funny #humour #statue

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kimberly40 · 1 year

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It recently dawned on me that Mama was right about most everything she ever told me:

*Sunshine is good for the body and soul.

*A brisk walk clears the mind.

*Vegetables are good for you.

*Pick up your house at night and you will never wake up to a mess.

*A penny saved is a penny earned.

*Always take time to pick up a penny. If you don't care about pennies, your dollars won't matter either.

*There is no shame in using a coupon.

*Coupons and discounts are the same as money in the bank.

*Waste not, want not.

*Always work hard. God is watching.

*Always be honest. God is watching.

*If you put things back where they go, they will never get lost.

*Into every life, a little rain must fall.

*Everybody has problems.

*God cares about people's problems.

*The world would be a better place if everyone would read their Bibles in the morning.

*Prayer changes things.

*A quilt is the best blanket of all.

*Cleanliness is next to godliness.

*A clean house runs better.

*No one is better than anybody else.

*No matter what kind of house you have, you can make it look good by keeping it clean.

*Don't judge a book by it's cover.

*You never know what someone is going through.

*Babies need love, attention, and songs.

*Children are a gift from God. Don't let anyone tell you anything different.

*Don't worry about what everyone else is doing.

*Do what is right and you will never go wrong.

*Without rain, there would be no flowers.

*Without sunshine, there would be no flowers.

*There is no substitute for a good night's sleep.

*God has a plan for you.

You were right, Mama. You were right about everything. ♥️

(Artist: Fred Swan)

#appalachian #appalachian mountains #north carolina #appalachia #western north carolina #the south #mcdowell county #nc mountains #mother #Mom

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wikiangela · 1 year

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himyf 2x06 - spoilers!

older Sophie is still so cringy my god

I was glad Oscar was back, and he seemed nice, but I didn't expect him to stick around any longer tbh haha - the necklace thing was so ridiculous but it worked 😂 it was hilarious, and it just got better and better haha

the whole plot with Ellen and therapy was great, it had potential and it delivered - I think she was making me laugh for the first time at least this season 😂 I was finally enjoying her storyline!!!

I felt kinda bad that they were all using Ellen like this but it was so hilarious 😂

this was Ellen's best episode, and it's honestly just her episode 😂👌 pls keep it up like this, she's finally fun to watch 😂

and omg we got Val and Jesse team up?? yas pls, start mixing them up, bc we constantly see the same duos or trios and there's so much to explore here haha - it was fun, tho nothing special and Fred was just cringe, but good for them for how they ended up this episode, Val promoted and Jesse back at his job!

Sid and Charlie are a great duo and they're so funny haha, we didn't see a lot of them, but their moments were great - and I feel like it'd be more exciting if I knew who Judge Judy was (I mean, obvi I have heard about her and know who she is more or less, but I never saw the show or anything so I was like whatever)

Overall, I absolutely loved this episode

it was sooo fun, and I loved all the storylines, and I feel like I laughed more than at any other, this might be one of my faves yet fr (I just need more Sid pls haha - But Ellen killed it in this one!)

#himyf season 2 #himyf #himyf spoilers #himyf 2x06 #how i met your father spoilers #how i met your father

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spxcemuses · 5 months

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Anonymous asked: For the eye candy thing!! “Look, Barbara broke your heart, but you have to get back out there. You know, start dating, live your life.” @ Fred hehe

“Pain festers and makes monsters of us all.” @ Frollo👀 not implied to be about his character directly, it's moreso about people in general, I'm curious to see how he would feel about this!

[ Eye Candy Sentence Meme ] | Always Accepting

" Oh, it wasn't that she broke my heart, but rather the fact that I stepped too far with my particular... habit. She was furious with me, it would almost be humorous if I didn't feel bad afterward and if she didn't try to lunge at me to attack. So, I realized she needed the space and mutually parted ways. "

Fred sighs wistfully, momentarily closing his eyes as he remembered the times that he had with Barbara when he was a younger lad. It was for the best that they separated, even if he still was sentimental about their relationship. She essentially was his first love.

" You do give some wise words. I do have to put myself back out there, sometime, some day... but I worry that people will perceive me as, well... weird. "

----

The judge had stared at the other, finding that their words had rang true to both himself and to humanity. Frollo takes some time to process the thought, leaving both in a silence that is calming yet almost too long to bear. His dark eyes travel to the altar that sat in front of both, his words slow as he speaks.

" That is what redemption is for, young one. Humanity in its entirety is full of pain, suffering, sin... God can save those who are hurting and misguided and lead them towards the path of righteousness, towards a more faithful path. You have to let Him in your heart, believe that He will make the wrongs in the world right again and truly mean it... only then will you be saved. "

#( freaky barber. ); Freaky Fred #( iron clutches. ); Frollo #. anon #. answered #frollo tw #religion tw #ask to tw

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fredborges98 · 7 months

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ABBA - The Winner Takes It All (Official Lyric Video)

youtube

The Winner Takes It All

By: ABBA

I don't wanna talk

About the things we've gone through

Though it's hurting me

Now it's history

I've played all my cards

And that's what you've done too

Nothing more to say

No more ace to play

The winner takes it all

The loser's standing small

Beside the victory

That's her destiny

I was in your arms

Thinking I belonged there

I figured it made sense

Building me a fence

Building me a home

Thinking I'd be strong there

But I was a fool

Playing by the rules

The gods may throw a dice

Their minds as cold as ice

And someone way down here

Loses someone dear

The winner takes it all (takes it all)

The loser has to fall (has to fall)

It's simple and it's plain (yes, it's plain)

Why should I complain? (Why complain?)

But tell me, does she kiss

Like I used to kiss you?

Does it feel the same

When she calls your name?

Somewhere deep inside

You must know I miss you

But what can I say?

Rules must be obeyed

The judges will decide (will decide)

The likes of me abide (me abide)

Spectators of the show (of the show)

Always staying low (staying low)

The game is on again (on again)

A lover or a friend (or a friend)

A big thing or a small (big or small)

The winner takes it all (takes it all)

I don't wanna talk

If it makes you feel sad

And I understand

You've come to shake my hand

I apologize

If it makes you feel bad

Seeing me so tense

No self-confidence

But you see

The winner takes it all

So the winner takes it all

And the loser has to fall

Throw a dice, cold as ice

Way down here, someone dear

Takes it all, has to fall

Yes, it's plain

Why complain?

Knots and ties

Never knots, ever ties.

Does the winner takes it ALL?

By: Fred Borges

Is there a Winner or a Looser in a love relationship?

Don't mind the Material or Financial sides a part!

It"ll always goes bye and say goobyes.

Focus on emotional and historical dilema to be in Love.

No Fences or Ofenses.

Just time's ties and unties!

Celebration's ties!

Adversities ties!

Controvertial ties!

Dilemas ties!

Conflicts that ties!

Dialogs ties at ALL!

Love and hate can always construct and reconstruct borders.

The inside builds outside.

It' s about a SELF journey shared with the one you' ve choosen.

No matter the geographical distance.

No matter cultural,moral sexual, gender or prejudices.

Love Will always be love.

Aware and awarness of love.

Matter the sensibility.

Matter the sense.

Matter the sense and sensibility to wear others foot.

Matter the balance between you and me.

Ties of the truth.

And the truth is that I still loving,living, breathing and sweating you.

But, there is always a but, a botton LINE, a bother LINE or borderLine between ego's reality and fantasy.

No winners or no loosers, only learning and goosers.

Foolishness of all, we only have it ALL when lovers surrounders and surrenders.

Love and fate, love and hate, love and mate.

No winners, no losers just the delight of love' s and lovers miracle between you and me.

#Youtube

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whosvioletta · 3 years

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four babies!

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pairing: fred weasley x fem!reader

warning: s/o leaving their gf, pregnancy, george dies in the war instead of fred, mentions of death, let me know if there’s anymore!

masterlist.

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• you and fred met at hogwarts during your fifth year

• it was pretty cute, and very perfect

• you had a crush on him for a long time, and one day snape sat you guys together in potions class

• he was funny, and kind, and never judged a soul

• you guys did everything together (and george of course)

• from pranks to studying to staying up late in the common room

• you both graduated the same year, and stayed at the burrow for a while

• but as the war started up and things started getting dangerous, he started to worry about you

• worry more than he should have.

• people were getting hurt, they were dying

• and he couldn’t stomach the fact that it could happen to you

• so he impulsively broke things off with you

• and for months you couldn’t figure out why.

• everything was going so well..

• then you found out the worst news ever

• george had died in the battle of hogwarts

• your heart felt so heavy for fred, you couldn’t imagine what he was going through.

• and you tried to talk to him, you really did, but you just couldn’t seem to ever reach him.

• so you kept in touch with molly, checking in and making sure everything was okay.

• and then that’s when things got complicated.

• you were pregnant.

• and MY GOD were you so sick.

• not just the morning sickness, but like about the WHOLE complicated mess you were in.

• and when you realized fred did not want to talk to you, you decided to raise your baby on your own.

• turns out you had this kickass aunt who passed away, and she left money to her only remaining relative

• YOU!

• and this woman has LOADS of money, i’m talking rich rich

• so now you had LOADS of money, more than you would ever need

• your belly got really big and..

• SURPRISE!

• you’re having quadruplets!!!

• you were terrified.

• but you’re a strong and independent woman, so of course you got through this!

• you gave birth to four beautiful babies.

• the first one was a boy, and you named him finn. he was loud, and outgoing. definitely a future quidditch player.

• the second was another boy, and you gave him the name declan after your amazing grandfather, a kind man. declan was mischievous and very witty.

• the third baby was a little girl, miss charlotte. she was so kind to her brothers, but just as strong.

• and finally a boy, the youngest. he was kind, and quiet, but when he spoke he said the funniest of things, and he loved playing pranks on his mama.

• so of course you named him george.

• one day five years later molly found out you had babies, and with her mother’s intuition she just KNEW those babies were fred’s.

• and they all had their heads full with red hair

• she invited you over every monday for tea, so the kids could run around the burrow and have fun, and you could have a break

• your one wish was that she could NOT tell fred.

• you didn’t want to speak to him after he left you without a trace.

• molly tried explaining why, but you would not have ANY OF IT MISS GIRL. GO OFF QUEEN.

• but one day out of the blue fred showed up with flowers

• he wanted to surprise his mom on his day off!!

• but there was little kids running around

• did his mom start a daycare for baby wizards and witches?

• let’s be real molly would do that lol

• that was a hard no because he saw you

• as beautiful as ever

• sitting at the table with molly

• and the little boy with red hair called YOU mama

• he stood there in shock

• fred had heard rumors you were insanely rich now, but never heard anything about kids

• you stood up quickly, and awkwardly smiled

• “hello fred.” you would say softly.

• merlin did he miss your voice

• “who’s are these?” fred would ask in shock, but knowing the answer already.

• the red hair gave it away.

• the kids lined up next to you

• “this is finn, declan, charlotte, and..”

• you usherd the little boy hiding behind you out for fred to see.

• “and this is george.” you smiled.

• and fred almost broke down into tears.

• he regretted everything. leaving you, never bothering to check in.

• and the five lonely years he spent thinking of you.. and george.

• things finally felt okay.

• and he knew you and him needed to talk, cause he was not leaving. not now, not ever.

#fred weasley imagine #fred weasly x reader #fred weasley x y/n #fred weasley #fred weasley fluff #fred weasley angst #fred weasley headcanons

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mjolnir-steve · 3 years

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Foolish

Frank Adler x fem!Reader

Word count: 5027 (oop)

Warnings: light drinking, very brief mention of suicide, some cursing, smut (18+ ONLY!!!), unprotected sex (m/f) ... Please let me know if I missed anything!

A/N: Hi, y’all! Here’s my entry for @stargazingfangirl18 and @navybrat817’s Shameless Hoes for Chris Challenge!!!! I haven’t written smut in a LONG time, so please be gentle with me LOL. Here’s what I got:

Frank Adler

“I didn’t like the way he was looking at you.”

Breeding / mutual pining 🥴

I’d like to dedicate this to @rodrikstark for always sharing the Frank Adler feels and @sparkledfirecracker for bullying me (with love) into finishing this. ❤️

If you like this fic, please comment and reblog!!! I hope you enjoy. :)

Fridays never seemed to come soon enough. You looked forward to the beginning of the weekend as much as the next person, but over the last few months, Friday nights took on new meaning for you. You moved to the trailer park a little less than a year ago, wanting to buy a small place of your own and start making a home for yourself. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t expensive, and it was only a ten-minute drive from your office where you’d just secured a promotion. Roberta, the manager, helped you make it feel like home right away, insisting on going with you to pick out paint samples and providing copies of menus for the best take-out in the area.

Before long, Roberta introduced you to the trailer park’s resident certified genius, Mary Adler. Mary and Roberta spent Saturday mornings with you when you were free, which unfortunately, was pretty much all the time. You played games, sang karaoke, and even let Mary’s one-eyed cat Fred come over. He took a liking to your swinging chair in the living room, and if Mary couldn’t find him at home, odds were he somehow squeezed through your window and ended up in that chair.

Another two months had passed, though, before you met Mary’s uncle and guardian, Frank. You came to learn that Mary stayed with Roberta every Friday night because “Frank needs time to be an adult” and she was not allowed to come back to the house until noon on Saturdays. This information made you feel like Frank must be some kind of sad, perpetual fuckboy. You were right about the sad part, not so much about the latter. One morning while Mary played with your watercolors, Roberta let slip - ironically over a cup of tea - that Frank did have the occasional hookup, but usually, he drank himself sleepy on Friday nights and just needed the time to himself. He worked himself to the bone as a boat mechanic, often late into the night because it was too hot to do some jobs during the day. Frank took Mary in when she was just a baby after his sister, her mother, tragically committed suicide. He spent the majority of his scarce free time with Mary, so when Mary was still a toddler, Roberta offered the Friday night deal. Frank countered that he would do any repairs in the trailer park for free, but she refused to let him do that work without pay, saying he deserved to have a life, too.

She also informed you that Frank was a former philosophy professor, single, and very attractive, especially if you were into the rugged thing. You rolled your eyes with an amused exhale and took another sip of your tea. You’d be lying if you said your interest wasn’t piqued. Mary then shouted over her shoulder, confirming that she’d been listening to your entire conversation, “Frank is great, but he’s a grump. Good luck cracking that egg.” You snorted, nearly spitting out your tea, and she went back to reading your color theory book to Fred.

With that, you heard a sharp rap at the door. You set your tea down on the kitchen table, curious who your visitor might be. You didn’t know anyone else in the trailer park, or in town, really. You opened the door, taking in the sight of possibly - no, definitely - the most handsome man you’d ever seen. You quickly guessed it was Frank, judging by the grease smeared on his quite large hands. His eyes, though tired, had the same bright look as Mary’s, and he had the most perfectly imperfect fluffy hair and overgrown stubble.

“Good morning,” he said with a sweet, closed-mouthed smile. “Is Mary here?”

You had to remind yourself to breathe. Stammering, you opened the door wider, gesturing inside. “Hi, y-yes. She is!” Why am I like this? “She’s just painting with Fred. Please, come in.” You moved aside so he could fit his broad shoulders through the doorframe and then held out your hand. “You must be Frank. I’m Y/N. Mary is just wonderful.” You smiled at him, feeling the heat rise in your cheeks.

He took your hand in both of his, gentler than you’d expected. “I’m sorry. Yes, I’m Frank. It’s great to meet you, finally.” He smiled wide for the first time and you were certain you’d pass out. Who LOOKS like this? “And thank you, she really is wonderful. I couldn’t do it without Roberta. She’s family.” He smiled and waved at Roberta, who was looking at you over the lip of her mug.

Mary didn’t even bother to turn around and face Frank. “What are you doing here, Frank? It’s only 11. I have a whole ‘nother hour with my friends.” You tried to keep your laugh quiet, covering your mouth with your hand and shaking your head.

“Well, excuse me for thinking you might like to go out on the boat with me this morning. I guess I’ll go by myself.”

Mary jumped up from the floor, scrambling to clean up your paints and books. “Can Y/N and Roberta come?”

Frank crouched down to meet Mary’s eyes. “Of course they can, if they’d like.” He looked back at you over his shoulder, trying to gauge your interest, then turning back to his niece. “But do you remember what I told you?”

You could see that Mary was making a conscious effort not to roll her eyes. “You told me that my adult friends have adult lives that include adult responsibilities, and they might not always be available to spend time with me.”

“And?” he looked at her expectantly.

“And I need to invite them to do things without assuming they will do them.” She couldn’t hold back her eye roll any longer, but she made sure not to let Frank see. “Roberta, Y/N, would you both like to join us on the boat today?”

You were amazed by the exchange taking place in front of you, able to see where some of Mary’s brains and tenacity came from. The conversation between the two flowed so easily, playful yet intelligent. It was clear that Frank treated Mary not as a child, but as a person, and you chided yourself internally for thinking that was kinda hot.

Shaking yourself out of your mildly inappropriate thoughts, you responded. “I’d love to come, Mary.” You smiled at her, bending over to help her pick up the last of the paints from the floor. “Roberta?”

Roberta gave you a look and you just knew she planned this somehow. “I actually do have some of those adult responsibilities to handle today, but thank you for inviting me.” You sent a glare in her direction, quick but no less scathing. “Maybe next time.” She winked at you before washing out her mug and saying her goodbyes.

You spent the whole rest of the day and night with Frank and Mary, doing everything from building sandcastles to cooking dinner together. Mary eventually fell asleep in your lap as you were watching Oliver & Company, Frank’s favorite Disney film that had become Mary’s, too. “An underrated classic,” they told you in unison.

You helped Frank put Mary to bed, a task made easier after such a tiring day. “I guess I should get going.” You stood awkwardly in the small kitchen, unsure of yourself and painfully aware of how close your hand was to Frank’s resting on the counter.

“Yeah, I have a job early in the morning.” He looked down at his shoes, unable to look you in the eye, and you wondered if he hadn’t found your company as enjoyable as you’d found his.

“Listen, I don’t know if you’ve been to Ferg’s? The little bar down the road? I go every Friday night just to relax and have a few beers. Maybe you’d like to come with me next weekend?”

Is he asking me on a date? You could feel your heartbeat racing. The look on your face must not have matched the excitement you felt at the prospect of spending time alone with the dreamy, kind, sarcastic man in front of you.

He felt like an idiot when you hesitated to answer. He clearly read everything wrong. He had to fix this. “It’s a good place to meet people, you know? I know you’re fairly new to the area, so if you’re looking for more local friends, it’s a good place to start.” He winced, hoping you couldn’t sense his embarrassment at thinking that you would want to go on a date with him.

You swallowed, trying not to let your disappointment show outwardly. Of course he’s not interested in me. Stupid. “Oh, yeah! That would be great, Frank. What time?”

Frank let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding, relieved that you didn’t seem offended by his offer. “How’s 7? I’ll pick you up? We can walk over together.”

And that’s how Fridays came to mean so much to you. Almost every Friday for the last six months, Frank met you at your door and you walked to Ferg’s together. Frank told you it would be a good place to make new friends, but you paid no mind to the other patrons. You only had eyes for each other, yet neither of you could see it, even though Roberta pointed out (repeatedly) that neither of you had taken anyone else home in all that time.

The more time you spent with Frank, the more certain you were that God was real and your life was His favorite trainwreck reality TV series. Even if you could have customized a dream man Build-A-Bear style, Frank still would blow your creation out of the water. He was smart and funny, not to mention an adoring parent to Mary, to whom you grew more attached each day. He was kind and thoughtful, talented and hard-working. Although he was a grouch, as Mary would say, he always was sweet to you. He took a genuine interest in anything you had to say, whether you were venting about work or filling him on the latest episode of whatever show you were binging. He was ridiculously sexy without even trying. All those hours he spent doing manual labor in the sun did wonders for his physique. You’d only seen him completely shirtless on one occasion, and the image of him with sweat dripping down his chest was burned into your memory, fueling your late-night thots and causing you to break out your vibrator on what was now a regular basis.

Six months had come and gone in the blink of an eye, and you’d begun to accept that Frank didn’t want to be anything more than friends with you. You decided tonight was as good a night as any to talk to someone new, to start letting go of your unrequited feelings.

You swapped out your usual jeans for a sundress, t-shirt bra for a push-up, and lip balm for lipstick. Putting your phone and some cash in a wristlet, you considered wearing your new strappy sandals. The walk to Ferg’s was about five minutes each way down a sandy road, though, and memories of the sticky floor inside aided your preferred pair of Converse in their victory for the night.

Just as you finished tying your shoes, you heard a knock at the door. You adjusted your cleavage and fluffed your hair a final time with one last look in the mirror. Here goes.

Frank felt like he had the wind knocked out of him in the best possible way. He suddenly felt entirely underdressed in his aloha shirt, even though it was his go-to for nights out of the house. He’d never seen you dressed so nicely when you weren’t going to work.

You were the kind of beautiful that didn’t require makeup. Your natural hair always framed your face perfectly, even if you didn’t think so. He thought you were adorable when you were concentrating on something, blowing your hair out of your face with a huff. Visions of your soft curves made their way into Frank’s dreams on more than one occasion. He had seen you in your swimsuit several times, sunbathing with Roberta and swimming with Mary at the beach. It wasn’t even all that revealing, but it accentuated your figure in ways that forced Frank into needing a cold shower or two. Above all, though, he admired your heart. You’d allowed Mary into your life without hesitation, spending time with her because you wanted to and allowing her to ask all those questions that Frank just wouldn’t be able to answer. It killed him that you didn’t see him the way he saw you, a perfect partner for him and a worthy maternal figure for Mary.

“Frank? You okay?” Your concerned voice shook him out of his thoughts, prompting him to close his mouth which apparently had opened wide in astonishment when you stood in the doorway.

“Yeah, um... You look…” He looked a little confused, his brow furrowed and lips pursed. “Why are you all dolled up? It’s only Ferg’s.” He wished he could’ve kicked himself in the teeth when your face fell at his question. He rubbed a hand over his face. “Shit. Let me try that again,” he nearly begged, running up to you to stop you from going back inside. “You look really nice, honey.” He ran his calloused hand up your forearm, but quickly returned it to his side when he realized what he’d done. “Is it a special occasion, though? Should I change?”

You gave him a watery smile, given that you were three seconds from slamming the door in his face and crying. “That’s better. Thank you.” You lightly pushed at his shoulder, trying and failing to ignore the electricity you felt at the contact. “No occasion, though. Just thought maybe it was about time I actually introduced myself to someone new.”

You couldn’t quite read his reaction. Little did you know he was certain he just felt his heart physically crack in his chest. “What do you mean?”

The two of you started walking, the tension between you thickening the very air you breathed. “Well, when you first invited me to Ferg’s, you said maybe I’d get to know some other people in the area, right? But we’re always with each other. I’m sure you’re itching to talk to someone other than me. I don’t want to hold you back.”

“Ah. Gotcha.” Frank abruptly reverted to the quiet, distant state he usually occupied before he met you. He sped up a bit, walking ahead of you and desperately attempting to school his features before you caught up with him.

Frank practically ran to the restroom, not slowing down even to hold the door open for you. You took a deep breath and rolled your shoulders, relaxing before entering the bar. Normally, whoever made it first would order drinks for you both, but Frank made it painfully clear that he had no desire to be in your company tonight. You ordered your usual, an Angry Orchard with a shot of Fireball in a tall glass. The combination tasted like apple cider, but the burn in your throat was caused by liquor rather than heat. It was strong enough to get you buzzed, but not so strong that you’d be stumbling home. You swallowed half the glass in one gulp, wanting to feel the warmth in your veins boosting your confidence as quickly as possible.

“Y/N? How are you?” You turned around, eyes meeting those of Jamie, your coworker. He leaned in for a hug and you accepted somewhat reluctantly, having interacted with him only in passing.

“Hey! I’m all right. What’s up?” You smiled at him, taking another sip of your drink. Jamie was not very subtly staring at your chest. You weren’t crazy about him, but the attention felt nice, so you allowed it.

“Not much. Just happy it’s Friday, ya know?” He looked around for a moment before returning his attention to you. “You’re usually here with that mechanic dude, right?”

You stifled a laugh thinking about how Frank would react if he heard himself referred to as “dude” by this prick. “Yeah, he’s around somewhere. We’re just-“

“-Just friends?” he finished for you with a hopeful look.

You nodded in response, looking him up and down. He was no Frank, but you couldn’t deny he was handsome. It had been so long since you’d even been kissed, and though you hated to admit it, you were touch-starved. One night couldn’t hurt, could it?

Meanwhile, Frank was splashing his face with cool water. He couldn’t believe he’d fucked up so royally. He was sure you didn’t want him how he wanted you, and now he was sure it was too late to tell you how he really felt.

He knew from the moment he saw you that he’d never get you out of his head. Roberta had been talking you up to Frank for weeks, but he wanted no part of it, mumbling something about there being “a reason why no one used matchmakers anymore.” He had no choice but to make your acquaintance when he was looking for Mary, and he’d never been so happy that Roberta could say she told him so.

Later that day at the beach, Mary approached him while you were dozing on a towel in the sand. She sat on his lap and reached for his face, using her pointer fingers to turn the straight line of his mouth up into a smile. “Roberta says you have a ‘charming’ smile, Frank. We think you should use it more.” He chuckled quietly, careful not to disturb you, and pulled Mary in close, planting a wet kiss on her cheek. She grimaced at the feeling, dramatically wiping at her face until he let her go back to reading with Fred.

The sound of the jukebox starting up cut short his reverie. He had to get out there and explain himself. Frank dried his face and hands with a paper towel before smacking his cheeks and stretching his neck back and forth to each shoulder.

Frank exited the restroom only to find some douchebag staring at your ass as you leaned over toward the bar. He saw red when the piece of shit held out his hand behind his back while his friend slipped a twenty-dollar bill into it, seemingly winning some sort of bet.

Jamie didn’t stand a chance when Frank stormed in between the two of you. “That’s IT,” he yelled, so intense he borderline bellowed. He threw whatever cash he had in his pocket on the bar to pay for your drinks before he pulled you outside, almost getting to your door while you fought against his grip. He only stopped when you spun your body around like something out of Dancing with the Stars and jumped in front of him, forcing him to catch you.

“Jesus Christ, Y/N, what are y-”

“-What are YOU doing, Frank? What the fuck was that?” You put your feet back down on the ground but remained facing him, arms crossed over your chest.

He groaned in frustration, suddenly realizing he actually had no clue how to respond. “Fuck.”

You looked at him, tapping your foot in anticipation.

“I didn’t like the way he was looking at you.” He rubbed at his temples in the way he did when he felt a headache coming on.

“And how was he looking at me, Frank? What does it matter to you?”

“He was looking at you like you were a piece of meat and I… FUCK!”

You both turned when your neighbor opened his window. “Can you kids keep it down out here?”

You waved bashfully at the old man. “Sorry, Mr. Parker,” you said in unison.

“Come inside, Frankie.” The nickname that typically made him roll his eyes at you never had sounded sweeter, now that its use confirmed you didn’t hate him for the scene he made. You both toed off your shoes at the door before you made your way into the living room, motioning for him to sit next to you on the couch when he tried to sit in the armchair across the room.

You leaned forward, pinching his chin between your thumb and forefinger. “Now what’s going on in that sun-damaged brain of yours?”

He let out a laugh so soft you almost missed it, but you were glad you didn’t. Sitting back against the arm of the couch, you pulled a pillow into your lap and hugged it, giving Frank your full attention.

Frank cleared his throat, doing his best to accept that it was now or never. “That guy was leering at you, and it pissed me off. You deserve better, Y/N.” He pried your fingers from where they were locked around the pillow to hold your hands in his.

“If you want to meet new people, that’s great. If you don’t want to be with me, that’s a little less great, but I’d understand. He didn’t even pay for your drinks. And I th-”

You covered his mouth with one of your hands, and he knitted his brows in confusion. “You’re making it sound like it’s an option to be with you.” You were in disbelief, side-eyeing him, waiting for Ashton Kutcher to announce that you were, in fact, being Punk’d.

The corners of his mouth lifted into the soft smile he reserved for you. It was the same one he gave you whether you were on a tangent about how “Obsessed” by Mariah Carey is “the single greatest diss track of all time” or you were helping Mary put a harness and leash on Fred “just to see how he’d do” on a walk.

“For a distinguished professor, you’re kind of a dummy, Frank.” You took his face in your hands, thrilled to be feeling his stubble against your palms. Before he could talk back to you, you kissed him, unsure how you denied yourselves such a simple yet extraordinary pleasure for so long. It only took a moment for him to relax into it, his hands removing the pillow between you before finding your waist and pulling you almost into his lap.

You deepened the kiss, threading your fingers through his hair. He pulled away first, pressing his forehead to yours. “Seems like we’re both dummies, huh?”

You were going to ask why pulled away until you looked down to see a considerable tent forming in the front of his jeans. You laughed as he pulled you into a tight hug, one arm wrapped around you while the other hand held your face against his neck.

You kissed the side of his neck softly before leaning back to look at him. “All this time? I thought you didn’t see me this way.” You held his face, stroking his cheeks with your thumbs. “You asked me to go to Ferg’s and then said I could meet other people, so I thought that was it, you know?”

He covered your hands with his and pecked your lips softly. “Honey, I thought it was the other way around. I was trying to ask you out and you looked like you’d seen a ghost.” You giggled, spluttering a bit because tears had started falling at some point. He wiped your tears away before swiping his thumb over your bottom lip, pulling it down a bit. “We’re fools, aren’t we?”

You nodded slowly and Frank saw something wicked flash in your eyes before you took his thumb in your mouth, sucking lightly. “Jesus, honey.” His length hardened underneath you and you could feel the wetness beginning to pool in your panties, prompting you to grind down into his lap.

You released his thumb from your mouth, pressing your chest into his before kissing him again. “I think we’re only fools if we don’t take advantage of the rest of your adult time.” You removed your dress easily, returning your hands to Frank’s shoulders to push off his shirt.

He surged forward to kiss you again, working magic with his tongue against yours. You wrapped your legs around his waist and he picked you up, walking you into the bedroom. Placing you on the bed carefully, he removed your bra and panties before pulling off his boxers and jeans in one go. You thought you wanted him before, but now that you could see everything he’d been hiding under his baggy clothes, you didn’t see how you could ever let him leave your bedroom.

The next few minutes were spent exploring each other’s mouths while Frank stretched you with his fingers. You didn’t think you’d ever been so wet in your life and thought you might pass out if you didn’t feel him inside you immediately. You gave his cock a few strokes before sliding his head through your folds, coating him in your slick.

“Waitwaitwait, honey. Do you have a condom?”

“You don’t need one if you don’t want one. It’s okay.”

He looked like you just gave him tomorrow’s winning lotto numbers, taking a deep breath to steady himself before he looked at you again. “Oh, God. Are you sure?”

“Mhm. I wanna feel you. Make me yours?”

“Anything you want, honey, but if you change your mind, just tell me, okay?” He lined himself up, seconds shy of entering you for the first time.

“I figured if you were gonna be possessive of me tonight, you might as well take it the whole nine, Frankie.” You laughed as he let out an exasperated sigh. “Seriously, though, I’m clean, I’m on the pill, and I’ve wanted you for a long time.” You reached up to scratch lightly through his chest hair.

“The only thing I wanna hear right now is you moaning for me.” He drove into you harshly, but waited a moment for you to adjust once he was seated to the hilt. “So damn wet and tight for me, honey. You’re so perfect, so beautiful.” He kissed you again before he began to move, slowly but surely making you lose your mind.

He dipped his head down to take one nipple in his mouth, then the other, effectively shutting you up and emptying all thoughts from your head. He nipped at the swell of your breast, soothing the bite with his tongue. “Fuck, Frank, please!”

“Please what, honey?” He picked up his pace, fucking into you so vigorously you moved up the bed. “Tell me what you need.”

“Make me cum, Frank. Please, baby, I need it. Need you,” you cried, leaning up to bite into his shoulder, stifling your moans.

“I wanna hear you, Y/N. I wanna hear those pretty moans while I’m making this perfect pussy cum for me.” The combination of his filthy words and the sight of him sucking on his own fingers before rubbing at your clit sent you over the edge, making you scream his name over and over again for what felt like forever and not long enough.

You could tell he was close, his hips stuttering and losing their rhythm. He began to pull out, unsure if you were willing to let him finish inside you, but knowing he was too close to wait for an answer.

You hooked your legs around his waist and pulled him close, pushing him back into you. “Fill me up, Frank. I wanna feel all of you. Please give it to me,” you whimpered. His release triggered another for you, chanting each other’s names surely loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

He stayed inside you as you both came down from your shared high, gingerly flipping you over so he laid on his back with you on his chest. He kissed the top of your head, fingers fluttering up and down your sides.

“What’s on your mind now, Frankie?” You looked up at him through your lashes, mildly terrified of the answer.

He looked down at you with the most adoration you’d ever seen, lifting your chin so your eyes met his in the moonlight. “That wasn’t too soon, was it? You mean so much to me and to Mary. I don’t wanna mess this up. I don’t ever wanna hurt you. You’re the best thing in my life besides Mary, you know that?”

You kissed his chest before looking back up at him, smiling. “First of all, I would argue that wasn’t soon enough.” He hissed as you clenched around his still softening cock inside you.

“You’re evil.”

Winking at him, you continued tracing patterns on his chest with your fingers. “Second, that all kinda sounds like you might be in love with me, Frank Adler.”

His hands stopped moving for a second before he responded. “Would you run away if I said I am?”

“Well, I wouldn’t run away. This is my house.” You thought your heart might explode in your chest.

“I didn’t even say it, but I take it back,” he huffed, throwing his arm over his eyes.

“What if I told you I felt the same way?”

He grinned, sitting up to kiss you feverishly on your cheeks, the tip of your nose, and finally your lips. You could feel him starting to harden again inside you, leading to round two of… well, you lost count.

You ate breakfast and showered together in time for Frank to return home before Mary did, agreeing to talk more later and to hold out on Roberta for a while.

Frank stood on your doorstep, leaning in to kiss you once more. All of a sudden, you heard a familiar meow and thanked God you were dressed and not in your robe.

“Frank, what are you doing here? I thought I’d come see Y/N since I’m not supposed to come home until noon.”

You bit your tongue to keep from cackling. Frank ran a hand over his face, his blissful bubble burst. He was getting you a hotel room next weekend.

#shamelesshoesforchris2021 #maggie's writing #frank adler #frank adler x fem!reader #frank adler fluff #frank adler smut

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musical-shit-show · 2 years

Text

waste my time

Pairing: Dewey Finn x Reader

Inspiration: Prompts #29 (you know this means nothing, right?) and #62 (enjoying the view?) from Prompt List #2

Warnings: cursing, drinking, mild drug use (marijuana), anxiety, depression, Dewey is a little bit of an asshole if you squint, light angst, a touch of fluff

Word Count: 3,745

Author’s Note: Okay this turned out a bit longer than I anticipated, but I’m really starting to like writing for Dewey. I suppose this is set before the events of SoR, but whatever…my one shot, my rules. If enough people ask (or if I get a jolt of inspiration) I might write a sequel. As always, please check out my full masterlist, about me page, and prompt lists! And if you have a request, please send one to my ask box! And of course, like, comment, and reblog if you enjoy! Thanks for reading :)

“Can we please leave now?”

“You know, you could try and have fun at one of these things for once,” your best friend Patty scoffed at you, “Even I’m having a good time. That’s how I know you’re being a stick in the mud.” You chuckled humorlessly as she handed you a beer.

The music was thumping so hard you could barely hear yourself think. Quickly, you took a sip of the cheap brew. How you had been roped into attending a Halloween party where you knew barely anyone, you’ll never know. Patty always had a way of dragging you to social events, because, well, her boyfriend Ned also had a way of dragging her to social events. Except now, you seemed to be the only one who was miserable out of the dozens of increasingly drunk twenty-somethings.

So, there you were, only having been in attendance for little more than a half hour and already eager to leave. Not only were you growing more and more claustrophobic as party goers crammed themselves into the seemingly ever-shrinking Brooklyn apartment, but you were also dreading the arrival of a certain wannabe rock star.

“He’s not here yet,” Patty said, catching you eye the front door, “Thankfully.” You didn’t know how it was possible, but you found Dewey Finn even more infuriating than Patty did, and she was the one who had to deal with his constant freeloading and loud scream-singing.

It wasn’t that you thought he was a bad person, per se. But he made it very clear that he did not give a shit about anyone but himself, and you couldn’t stand that. And what pissed you off even more is that he seemingly managed to make everyone like him, despite his utterly selfish ways.

It was at that moment that there was a cheer near the entrance of the apartment, and you rolled your eyes into the stratosphere; Dewey had just arrived, hoisting a keg the size of a small toddler into the crowd, stupid grin plastered on his face.

As he made his way to the kitchen, you could see that he was wearing tight black jeans with a matching black button-down shirt that was rolled at the sleeves, and a red tie. His hair was unkempt, as usual, and he was also sporting a thick ring of eyeliner around his top and bottom lash lines. ‘Oh, right,’ you thought, ‘Ned had mentioned something about him coming as Billy Joe Armstrong. Figures.’

For as long as you’ve known him, Dewey wanted to be a professional musician and performer. And he was actually pretty talented; the only problem was that he could never stay in a band long enough to make a decent amount of money.

“Hey, Dew!” Ned called happily, waving to his best friend who was emerging from the tiny kitchen area like a god among men. He and Patty had decided on a couple’s costume, Fred and Daphne from Scooby-Doo. Unoriginal, but you had opted for Wednesday Addams, so you couldn’t really judge. Even holidays like Halloween brought you little joy these days.

Patty took another swig of her beer, and you surmised that it would be the first of many if she was supposed to put up with Dewey all night. As he neared, you got a better look at him. More specifically, you couldn’t help but take note at how well that eyeliner suited him. It gave his typically dopey face a little bit of edge.

“Enjoying the view?” you heard him say over the blaring music, a small, impish smile spreading across his face. Shit. He had obviously noticed your staring. You thanked the powers that be that the lights were low; the last thing you needed was for him, Ned, and Patty to catch your face reddening in embarrassment.

Instead, you clenched your jaw, instantly tensing your muscles. “Nope, I was just thinking about how if your music career never takes off, you can always work at CVS recommending makeup products to emo teens.” Patty snorted into her bottle, amused. She loved it when you exchanged verbal blows with Dewey; when she did it, it always ended in an argument between her and Ned. This way, she could just watch and relish in your takedown.

However, Dewey seemed unfazed on this particular evening. “You’d know about emo teens in that getup, huh?” his tone playful yet not without bite, “That eyeliner looks almost as black as your soul.” You couldn’t help but laugh incredulously. If he didn’t make you want to tear your hair out, you’d be almost impressed with his little comeback.

“Alright, enough you two,” Ned said as you continued to stare daggers into Dewey’s eyes while his continued to mock, “I’m going to get a drink. Dew, could you uh, help me with the keg?”

“Of course, oh best friend of mine,” Dewey replied, straightening his tie and winking at you and Patty, “Enjoy the party, ladies. I’d love to see you two let loose for once.” Ned practically pulled Dewey’s arm out of the socket towards the kitchen, not in the mood for a spat to break out.

“In your dreams, Finn!” you called in their direction, feeling your temperature rise even further. Your night was already going about as well as you had imagined, you didn’t need Dewey Finn tormenting you with his antics any more than you needed a hot sauce enema.

Patty let out a dry laugh and grabbed another beer from the cooler that sat next to the torn-up couch, “Wanna get drunk?” Your mouth twitched upwards.

“Very.”

The alcohol was not working. Why wasn’t it working? You felt mildly tipsy, yes, but it wasn’t enough to stop the familiar tightening feeling of dread that was firmly present in your chest and quickly spreading throughout your body.

You soon found yourself in a bedroom, whose you weren’t sure. You didn’t care. You just needed to get away from everyone. Luckily, it wasn’t difficult. Patty was doing shots with Ned and some of their other friends, and it was almost too easy to tell her you needed some air and could fend for yourself. The truth was, you were so overwhelmed, by both the party and, well, everything else.

Work had been kicking your ass, your love life was in the toilet, and you still felt like you didn’t belong in the city. You could feel hot tears welling behind your eyes, allowing a few to spill onto your black skirt. You blinked rapidly, tilting your head towards the ceiling. The last thing you wanted was to fuck up your makeup and ruin your night even further.

Suddenly, your panic attack was interrupted by the bedroom door swinging open. You have got to be shitting me, you thought sourly as Dewey stood in the frame, looking even more disheveled than usual. The faint smell of hops wafted in your direction, and you prayed he wasn’t totally fucked up; Drunk Dewey was even less pleasant to be around than his sober counterpart.

He looked at you, then the pile of coats that adorned most of the bed, and then frowned. “Goddamn it, you didn’t happen to see a black and white guitar pick anywhere, would you?” he ran a hand through his messy brown hair. You shook your head, attempting to steady your breathing. Screw your makeup, the actual last thing you wanted was for Dewey Finn to catch you in a moment of weakness.

Luckily, he seemed too caught up in his guitar pick crisis to notice. “Can’t you just get another one?” you asked, your voice faltering ever so slightly. Dewey pinched the bridge of his nose, clearly annoyed by your seemingly harmless question.

“Another one?” he repeated, exasperated, “No, you don’t understand, it’s Van Halen’s pick. The pick he used while recording and on tour, it’s one of my most prized possessions.” He started haphazardly throwing coats onto the carpeted floor, scanning the comforter for his precious souvenir. You quickly decided he wasn’t as drunk as you first thought, given that he seemed to have all of his wits about him. And, if he was sloshed, he was certainly holding himself together much better than he usually did.

“And why exactly did you bring it here?”

“I had a gig tonight and I was nervous. That pick always gives me good luck, okay?”

That was almost…sweet. You had never thought Dewey Finn of all people would need help performing in front of a crowd. “Okay,” you finally said, throwing your feet off the bed, letting them dangle for a few seconds.

“Look, I know you hate me and everything but—”

“I’ll help you look,” you cut him off, standing up. For once, he wasn’t be a total douche, and you felt a little bad for him. Even if it was over a guitar pick.

The two of you scoured the room, throwing the remaining coats aside. Finally, Dewey found the pick buried deep in his own coat pocket, which ended up irritating you only slightly.

“Uh, thanks,” he said sheepishly, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, “For helping me look.”

“Don’t mention it,” you said, deadpanned, “Seriously. Don’t.” He couldn’t tell if you were kidding. Neither could you.

“Wanna go out onto the fire escape, ya know, for some air?” he asked, gesturing to the window facing the still busy city street, “That is, if you don’t want to push me to my untimely demise.”

“Don’t give me any ideas,” you say with a smirk, “But sure. Why not.”

The two of you crept out onto the fire escape gingerly, the air shocking your senses despite your tipsiness. However, it doesn’t do much to quell your anxiety.

“You really don’t like this shit, do you?” Dewey said, taking a gulp from his beer after scanning your demeanor.

“That obvious, huh?” you said dryly. He raised his eyebrows and nodded. “I…used to. I’m trying to again. It’s just…weird right now, I don’t know. I feel like I’m not myself here.” You turned from him, embarrassed, as you hugged your arms to guard you from the chill. It actually helped, or at the very least you convinced yourself that it did.

Dewey frowned. “Well, that’s no good.” He held his bottle over the railing precariously, watching it dangle five stories above the ground. “But hey, maybe when you get back to being yourself, you’ll finally see how awesome I am.”

You turned to face him, and punched him lightly on the shoulder in retaliation. He barked a laugh, and felt your guard falling. Maybe he wasn’t as terrible as you thought. And you were a little drunk. And he was also a little drunk. And you felt the sudden urge to kiss him.

You shook your head, ignoring the thought. But the way he was looking at you made your stomach do a somersault. It was a mix of morbid curiosity and genuine concern with a just a dash of flirty energy. A dangerous cocktail, really. Luckily, Dewey spoke again before you could do something you’d regret.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, bracing himself for a verbal assault, “but uh, every time I see you, you just seem so fuckin’ stressed. Have you tried, I don’t know, relaxing?”

You scoffed. Of course that would be his suggestion. He made everything sound so easy, didn’t he? “No, that never crossed my mind, Finn. How astute.” He shook his head, raising his arms in mock surrender. After so many spars over the years, you had never seen him give up on an opportunity to criticize you so quickly. You couldn’t help but grow a little suspicious.

“Hey, I said it earlier but I really think you’d benefit from letting loose a little, ya know?”

“And how do you suppose I do that?” you asked, your tone coming out more frustrated than you intended, “I’ve tried everything.”

A wicked smile spread across his face, “Well, not to be too obvious, but have you ever tried smoking?” He produced a small joint from his pocket, along with a black lighter decorated with red and orange flames.

You nodded your head, looking unenthused. “Tried it with Patty once in college. Didn’t work.” And it was true. Despite smoking what you considered far too much weed, you barely felt a thing aside from a slight bout of the munchies. What you thought would quell your nervousness only ended up resulting in a stomach ache.

“I doubt Patty had anything of substance,” he remarked, a smirk dancing on his lips, “I’m pretty sure a horse tranquilizer wouldn’t be able to mellow that woman out.” You couldn’t help but crack a smile. You usually found Dewey’s humor irritating, but you kept wondering if that was your own bias. Maybe you were just searching for reasons to despise him.

Still, you couldn’t trust yourself, not with the night you’d been having. “What’s the catch?” you asked, narrowing your eyes, “I thought we couldn’t stand each other, remember?”

“No catch,” he said, his voice shockingly devoid of sarcasm or snark, “Consider it even for helping me find my pick. Plus, I think we’d all benefit from you being high. At the very least, it’ll serve as my entertainment for the rest of the night.” You couldn’t help but laugh. Maybe you were too harsh on Dewey. Not that Patty didn’t have her own reasons for disliking him, but that didn’t mean you had to keep up your animosity when he had at least treated you like a human being since he entered the coat-ridden bedroom.

You stared at the joint apprehensively as he held in between his calloused fingers. He rolled his eyes, playfully this time. “This is the good shit, I promise,” he purred, waving the joint in front of your face, “Don’t you trust me?”

“Not in the slightest,” you mused, gnawing on your lower lip, “But when have I ever been right. Light me up, rock star.”

Far be it from you to admit when Dewey Finn was right. But holy shit. Whatever strain he had did the trick, because you actually felt yourself relaxing for the first time in months, even after just a few puffs.

You didn’t care that you had been outside for the better part of an hour; even more surprisingly, you didn’t care that you were sharing a joint with someone you thought you despised at the start of the night. “Okay, I’m not saying I’m gonna become a stoner now or anything like that but…” you drawled, hugging your arms to your chest, “That did help a bit. So…thanks.” You were already feeling the effects of the both the alcohol and weed wearing off, seeing as you only consumed small amounts of both. Still, you couldn’t help but appreciate Dewey’s attempt to help, despite your past dislike of one another.

Dewey couldn’t help but flash a wide smile, leaning on the railing of the fire escape. “Don’t mention it,” he said sweetly, “Or maybe do. I’d love to take credit for being the person who finally removed that stick lodged firmly up your a—”

Before he could finish the crude remark, you placed a hand on his broad chest, pushing him flush to the railing. “If you value your life, you won’t finish that sentence, Finn,” you threatened, your eyes darkening. Dewey’s widened in fear, if only for a moment. You were of course, unserious, but you didn’t mind making him squirm a bit.

You flashed a smug look and he instantly matched you playful yet aggressive energy. “Oh please, you wouldn’t send the life of the party tumbling to his death, would ya?” he clasped his hands together, mock begging for mercy, “I know you can’t hate me that much, babe.”

You shivered. You tried to write it off as the chill in the air finally catching up to you, but you knew that it was also from Dewey’s smooth talking. You noticed your hand was still pressed up against him as the space between you lessened.

“Well, no,” you relented, finally letting go of him, “I mean, you annoy the shit out of me most of the time but tonight has been…okay.”

“I’ll take okay.” The two of you sit in silence for a few minutes, an energy hanging in the air that you can’t quite place. You glanced over at him, goosebumps prickling up on his exposed forearms. “Since tonight has been so okay…mind if I ask why you were crying earlier?”

You felt your face go flush in embarrassment. You could’ve sworn he hadn’t seen, but it was clear he was more observant than you gave him credit for. “I guess, well…I haven’t been myself. For a while now. And I just don’t know if I belong here: in this city, with these people. Ned and Patty have been a part of my life for so long but…I don’t know. Maybe I’m better off somewhere else.”

Dewey nodded, casting his eyes towards Manhattan across the river. The two of you looked on, the sounds of the street filling the quiet you shared. The light pollution was illuminating the night sky despite it being nearly midnight. “For what it’s worth,” he sighs, “I don’t ever feel like I belong either. I just try to convince myself that I do, and hope everyone else follows.”

“Well, you’re damn good at it,” you remark, “Everyone loves you, Dewey.”

“Yeah,” he laughs, “Not Patty. Not my band. Not you.” His last words hang in the air awkwardly as he immediately goes red. At least you weren’t the only one feeling embarrassed that evening. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you mean,” you said, smiling with ease. Once you actually had a real conversation with him, you realized how freely you were able to speak to Dewey. “But for what it’s worth, I owe you an apology. I just always pegged you for an obnoxious deadbeat, but I guess we have more in common than I thought.”

“It’s okay. I may have also thought you were a lame ass wet blanket for years, but I’m willing to bury the hatchet if you are.” You both laughed at each other’s expense and suddenly, that urge returned. Only this time, you couldn’t blame it on the little alcohol you drank or even the weed. You just wanted to kiss him. You wanted to kiss Dewey Finn.

You felt your stomach churn at the thought. Sure, maybe he wasn’t as bad as you thought, but were you so easily won over? Was he just charming you to end your little feud, or was he playing you? And even if he wasn’t messing with you, what the fuck would Ned and Patty say?!

“By the way,” he said in a low voice, snapping you out of your thought spiral, “I’ve seen a million Wednesday Addams costumes, but, uh, the goth girl thing works for you.”

“Oh yeah?” you said, holding back giggle. God, you felt like an idiot school girl around him now.

“Yeah,” he gulped, his face growing pink. Was it possible he was experiencing some of the same strange, conflicting feelings about you? From what you gathered over the years, it didn’t take much for Dewey to let his dick be in the driver’s seat when it came to decision making.

Feeling bold, you chose to throw some compliments his way, “Thanks,” you said, batting your eyelids, wondering how seductive you could possibly be when it looked like you were headed to a demented funeral, “You look good too. Green Day was one of my favorite bands growing up, so the Billy Joe costume was…definitely a sight to behold. In a good way, I mean.”

“Ah, so you were staring at me earlier?” Dewey raised an eyebrow, feeling extremely self-assured. You decided to let him inflate his own ego this one time, mostly because it made him more attractive all bloated with confidence.

“It’s possible,” you conceded, “But if you tell anyone, I’ll deny it.”

He laughed brightly, and your stomach did another flip. “That’s okay. It’s reward enough to know you secretly have the hots for me.” You pursed your lips, scowling at him. You could barely admit these new feelings to yourself, there was no way in hell you were going to admit to Dewey that you wanted to pounce on him at that very moment. So instead, you decided to do what you had be doing for the last couple hours: deny, deny, deny.

“Do not.”

“Do too.”

“Do not!”

“Do. Too.” He inched closer to you, his gaze growing more intense with each passing millisecond. You felt your breath hitch suddenly in the back of your throat. And before you had any time to think, you sort of lunged at him, your lips catching his angrily, passionately. He tasted like cheap beer and tequila. A normally shudder-inducing combination, but you couldn’t get enough of it.

Though he knew he was egging you on, Dewey was still caught by surprise. Still, it didn’t take longer than a moment for him the wrap his arms around you, securing your body against his as he kissed you hungrily. Despite the weather outside being chilly and dry, his lips were soft and plump, and you couldn’t help but nip at them as he let out a faint, almost imperceptible moan. You felt your fingers tangle in his hair as his snaked to grip the side of your neck towards your jawline.

Once you realized what you had done, you broke away, looking Dewey dead in the eye, “You know this means nothing, right?” You could deal with your attraction to him later; for all you knew, this little incident would never be spoken of by the two of you ever again. Maybe that would be for the best.

Dewey blinked dumbly a few times, then smirked, “I’m sort of counting on it, babe.” He pulled you in again, his breath visible in the cold October air as it washed over you like a tiny puff of smoke. He couldn’t help but kiss you again, and perhaps stupidly, you kissed him back for a few seconds until his broke it, his smile sinful. “I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”

“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a deal, rock star.”

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