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makeroomforthejolyghost · 3 years

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In Search of Lost Screws (RQBB '21)

Here at last is my entry for the 2021 Rusty Quill Big Bang!

Fandom: The Magnus Archives Rating: T Word count: ~30k Warnings: Chronic Illness, Mild Body Horror, Internalized Ableism, Canon-Typical Spiders, Mention of Canon-Typical Suicidal Ideation, Alcohol Other tags: Cane-user Jon, EDS Jon, Canon-compliant, Season 5, Set in 180-181 (Upton Safehouse period) Characters: Jon Sims, Martin Blackwood, Mikaele Salesa (secondary), Annabelle Cane (secondary) Relationships: Jon/Martin Summary: While staying at Upton House, Jon and Martin accidentally break their bedroom’s doorknob, and can’t get back into the room until they fix it. Meanwhile Jon tries not to break into literal pieces without the Eye, and also to pretend he’s having a good time as he and Martin lunch with Annabelle, parry gifts from Salesa, and quarrel about whether Jon’s okay or not. He's fine! It's just that the apocalypse runs on dream logic, and chronic pain feels worse when you're awake. Excerpt:

“Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?” “I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here.” “Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.” “Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?” Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice. “Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him. “Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.” “Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.” Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?

Huge thanks to @pilesofnonsense for hosting this event; to @connanro for beta-reading; and to @silmapeli for their amazing illustration, whose own post you can find here.

If you prefer, you can read this fic instead on Ao3. I won't link it directly, since Tumblr has trouble with external links, but if you google the title and add "echinoderms" (my Ao3 handle), it should come up!

Crunch. “Oh god. Shit! Oh god, oh no—”

“What’s wrong? What happened?”

A clatter, then a noise like a small rock scraping a large one. Jon’s heart plunged; halfway through his question he knew the answer.

“I—I broke it? Look, see, the whole thing just—take this.” Martin tore his hand out of Jon’s and dropped the severed doorknob in it instead. Then he dropped to the floor, diving head- and hands-first for the crack between it and the door as if that crack were a portal between dimensions. Jon closed his eyes and shook this image away, hoping when he opened them again he could focus on what was real.

He should have known this would happen from the moment they left for breakfast. Every time he’d opened that door its knob felt a little looser. Why hadn’t he warned Martin? Well, alright, he didn’t need powers to know that one. He just hadn’t thought of it. Been a bit preoccupied, after all. And even if he had thought of it, that was exactly the kind of conversation he’d been shying away from all week. Watch out for that doorknob; it’s a little loose, he would say, and yeah, probably Martin would answer, Oh, thanks. But there was a chance Martin would say instead, Why didn’t you tell me?—and all week Jon had obeyed an instinct to avoid prompting that question. All week he had made sure to enter and exit their room a few steps ahead of Martin, and hold the door open for him. Martin probably just saw it as Jon’s way of apologizing for their first few months in the Archives together, and once that thought occurred to him Jon had started to look at it that way himself. Maybe that’s why he’d forgot this time.

“Nooo-oooo, come on come on!”

“I don’t think you’ll fit,” Jon said, when he looked again and found Martin trying to wedge his fingers under the door.

(Martin used to leave Jon’s office door open behind him—perhaps absentmindedly, but more likely as a gesture of friendship and openness, which the Jon of that time would not suffer. Sasha and Tim, n.b., only left his door open on their way into his office, when they didn’t intend to stay long; Martin would leave it gaping even if he didn’t mean to come back. Every time Jon had sighed, pulled himself to his feet, and closed the door behind Martin, drawing out the click of its tongue in the latch. And a few times he’d closed the door in front of him, so as to exclude him from a conversation between Jon and Tim or Sasha that he, Martin, had tried to weigh in on from outside Jon’s office.)

“What are you looking for?”

“The—the screw, I saw it roll under there. It fell down on our side. Oh, my god, it was so close—if I’d reacted just half a second earlier, I could’ve?—shit.”

“Oh.” Jon huffed out a cynical laugh.

“I can’t believe it. I broke Salesa’s door! He welcomes us in to an oasis, and I break the door. Oh, god—I’ve broken an irreplaceable door, in a stately historic mansion!”

A few more demonstrative huffs of laughter. “No you didn’t.”

Martin paused. He didn’t get up, but did turn his head to look at Jon. “Yes I did. It’s right there in your hand, Jon—”

“I should’ve known. Check for cobwebs, Martin.”

“Oh come on.”

“This can’t be your fault—it’s far too neat. This is all part of Annabelle’s plan.”

“Do you know that?”

“W-well, no. I can’t, not here. I just—”

“Yeah, I don’t think so, Jon. Pretty sure it’s just an old doorknob.”

“Did you check for cobwebs?”

“Of course there are no cobwebs. A spider wouldn’t even have time to finish building the web before somebody wrecked it opening the door!”

“Then what’s that?” With the tip of his cane Jon tapped the floor in front of a clot of gray fluff in the seam between two walls next to the door, making sure not to let it touch the clot itself.

Martin rolled over to see where he was pointing, and almost stuck his elbow in it. “Ah. Gross. Gross, is what that is.”

“Christ, I should’ve known this would happen. I did know this would happen,” Jon reminded himself—“just ignored the warning signs because I can’t think straight here.”

“It doesn’t mean anything, Jon. It’s a corner. Spiders love corners. I mean, unless you can prove the corner of our doorway has more spiderwebs than anywhere else in the house—”

“Well, of course not. You forget she’s got her own corner somewhere, which we still haven’t found by the way—”

“So, what, you think Annabelle Cane lassoed the screw with a strand of cobweb.”

“Not literally? She could be sitting on the other side of the door with a magnet for all we know!”

Martin peered under the door again with an exasperated sigh. “She’s not.”

“Not now she’s heard us talking about her.”

God, what a delicate web that would be, if all he had to do to avoid the spider’s clutches was reach a door before Martin did. Perhaps if he’d knocked first that’d have saved him. Maybe Martin was right. How could Annabelle know him well enough to foresee this mistake? Most of the time he hated people opening doors for him, after all.

Why do people see someone with a cane and think, Only one free hand? How ever will he open the door!? They don’t do that for people with shopping bags—not ones his age, at least. Letting another person open a door for him felt to Jon like… defeat, somehow. Like admitting the dolce et decorum estness of this version of reality all nondisabled people seemed to live in where he couldn’t open doors. And that version of reality horrified him. Not so much the idea of being too weak to open them—that sounded merely annoying. Like knocking the sides of jar lids on tables and swearing, only with doors. He had beat his fists against enough Pull doors in his time to figure he could live with that. It was more the idea of becoming that way. Letting his door-opening muscles atrophy ‘til it became the truth.

But sometimes you just let a thing happen, and forget to hate it. That was the thing about pride. Sometimes your convictions and your habits stop fitting together—you believe Fuck this job with all your heart, but still tuck in your shirt when you come to the office. And then you fly back from America in borrowed clothes, and pop in at the Institute like that on your way to Gertrude’s storage unit, and that’s what changes your habits. Not the knowledge you can’t be fired; not your now-boyfriend’s plot to put your then-boss behind bars. A thirdhand t-shirt with a slogan on it about how to outrun bears.

On his way out this morning the doorknob had felt so loose in Jon’s hand he almost had told Martin about it. But Martin had been full of let’s-go-on-an-adventure-together-style chatter—like when they’d left Daisy’s safehouse, only, get this, without the dread of entering an apocalyptic wasteland—and listening to him put the door out of Jon’s mind before he’d had time to interject.

Their first day here—or at least, the first they spent awake—Jon had inadvertently taught Martin not to accept invitations from Salesa. The latter had bounded up after Martin’s lunch in linen shirt and whooshy shorts and was, to Martin’s then-unseasoned heart, impossible to deny. So Jon had spent thirty minutes on a creaky folding chair, lunging out of his seat on occasion to collect a ball one of the other two had hit wrong, and trying to keep Salesa’s too-bright white socks out of sight. He’d pretended he preferred to sit out, knowing Martin would worry if he tried to play. But he hadn’t done as good a job hiding his boredom as he thought. “Thanks for putting up with that. Sorry it went on so long,” Martin had said as they re-entered their bedroom. “I just couldn’t say no to him, you know? For such a cynical old man he’s got impressive puppy eyes.”

“It’s fine? You know me, I don’t mind… watching.”

“I just mean, I’m sorry you couldn’t play. How’s your leg, by the way? Er—both your legs, I guess.”

“It’s fine. They’re both fine. I didn’t want to play anyway, remember? I don’t know how.”

“Sure you don’t,” Martin replied, words tripping over a fond laugh.

“I don’t!”

“Come on, Jon. Everyone knows how to play ping-pong.”

Martin had turned down Salesa when he showed up the next day in khaki shorts and a pith helmet with three butterfly nets, without Jon’s having to say a word. More emphatically still did he turn him down when Salesa mentioned the house had an indoor pool, and offered to lend them both antique bathing suits like the one he had on, “Free of charge! A debtor is an enemy, after all, and in this new world I have no wish to make an enemy of” (sarcastic whisper, fingers wiggling) “the Ceaseless Watcher who rules it. I have nothing to hide from you,” he’d alleged, for the… third time that day, maybe? Each morning Jon resolved to count such references; he rarely missed one, as far as he knew, but kept forgetting how many he’d counted.

But Salesa was a salesman, and over time his efforts had grown more subtle. He stopped showing up already dressed for the activity he had in mind, and instead would drop hints at meals about all the fun things they could do if only they would let him show them. Martin loved how the winter sunlight caught, every afternoon around four, in the branches of a tree visible outside the window of their bedroom. “Ah, yes,” Salesa had agreed when he remarked on it one morning. “Turning it periwinkle and the golden green of champagne.” (He poured sparkling wine—the cheap stuff, he said, not real champagne—into an empty juice glass still lined with orange pulp. Over and over, without once overflowing. The oranges weren’t ripe enough to drink their juice plain yet, he said. But they’d still run out of juice first.) “If you think that’s beautiful”—he paused to swallow bubbles come up from his throat, waved his hand, shook his head. “No. On one tree, yes, it is beautiful. But on a whole orchard of bare trees in winter”—he nodded in the direction of Upton’s orchards—“the afternoon sun is sublime. You can see how the twigs shrink and shiver under its gaze; the grass rustles with a hitch in its breath as if it fears to be seen, but with each undulation a new blade flashes gold like a coin,” &c., &c.

“Wow. Sounds like you really got lucky, finding such a nice place to, uh. Sssset up camp?”

Jon knew Martin well enough to hear the judgment in his voice; if Salesa recognized it then he was an expert at pretending not to. “And it's only a two-minute walk away,” he’d said, instead of taking Martin’s bait. “It would be such a shame for my guests not to see it.”

“Oh, well. Maybe in a few days? It’s just, we’ve been outside nonstop for ages. It’s nice to be between four walls again. Besides, we don’t know the grounds as well as you do—and the border isn’t all that stable, you said? Right?”

“It is if you know how to follow it! I could accompany you—show you all the best sights, with no risk of wandering back out into the hellscape by mistake.”

“We’re just not really ready for that, I don’t think. Right, Jon?”

“Mm.”

“Are you sure? If it were me, a foray into a beautiful natural oasis would be just what I needed to convince myself that my peace—my sanctuary—is real.”

“If it is real,” Jon couldn’t stop himself from muttering.

Salesa remained impervious. “You would be surprised how difficult it is to feel fear in a place like that. I don’t think that is just the camera.”

“We‘ll think about it,” Martin conceded.

“Yes—you should both think about it. I am at your disposal whenever you change your mind.”

And so on that morning they had narrowly escaped. Would they had fared so well today. The problem was, on these early occasions Jon had interpreted Martin’s No thankses as being, well, Martin’s. But after a few more of Salesa’s sales pitches Jon began to second-guess that.

“Is it warm enough in here for you both?” Salesa had asked them last night at dinner. “I worry too much, perhaps. I only wish the place took less time to warm up in the morning. At breakfast time, in sunny weather like we've been having, I’ll bet you anything you like it’s warmer out there than in here.”

“It’s alright; we’re not too cold in the mornings either. Right, Jon?”

“Hm? Oh—no.”

“Perhaps we three could take breakfast out there, before the weather changes.”

“Ha—that’s right,” Martin had laughed. “I forgot you still had that out here. Weather changes. Brave new world, I guess.”

Salesa smirked and shrugged. “Well, braver than the rest of it.”

“R…ight. ‘We three,’ you said—so not Annabelle?”

“Mmmmno, probably not her. I have tried taking spiders outside before; they never seem to like it much.”

Nearly every day, here, Jon found a spider in their bathtub. The first time Martin had been with him. Martin had picked the thing up with his fingers and tried to coax it to leave out the window, but by the time he got there it’d crawled up his sleeve.

“Excuse me.”

Martin pulled back his own chair too and frowned up at him. “You okay?”

“Just needed the toilet.” He tried to arrange his mouth into a gentle smile. “Think I can do that on my own.”

The other two resumed their conversation the moment Jon left the dining room. Before the intervening walls muffled their voices Jon heard:

“I suppose that does sound pretty nice.”

“Pretty nice, you suppose? Martin, Martin—it’s a beautiful oasis! What a shame it will be if you leave this place having done no more than suppose about it.”

“It is a bit of a waste, I guess.”

“You wouldn’t need to sit on the ground, if that’s what concerns you. There are benches everywhere.”

He’d been just about to cross through a doorway and out of earshot when he froze, hearing his name:

“Oh, ha—not me, but, Jon might find that nice to know,” Martin said. “Thanks for.” And then silence.

Was that the whole reason he kept declining invitations to explore the grounds? To keep grass stains out of Jon’s trousers? Martin was the one who’d sat down on that godforsaken Extinction couch; why did he think—?

Not the point, Jon told himself as he sat on the toilet and set his forehead on the heels of his palms. He tried to watch the floor for spiders, but his eyes kept crossing. The point was that if—? If Martin was lying about wanting to stay inside—or, more charitably, if he was telling the truth but wanted that only because he thought Jon would have as dismal a time out in the garden as he had at ping-pong—then…?

He imagined holding hands with Martin while surrounded by green. Gravel crunching under their feet. Martin smiling, with sunlight caught in the strands of his hair that a slight breeze had blown upright.

“And if you get too warm,” he heard Salesa tell Martin, as he headed back into the dining room, “we can move into the shade of the pines! You know, they don’t just grow year-round? They also shed year-round. The floor under them is always carpeted in needles, so you need never get mud on your shoes.”

“Huh,” Martin laughed. “Never thought of it that way.”

“But of course there are benches there too,” Salesa added, his eyes flickering up to Jon.

As Jon hauled himself into his seat he asked, in a voice he hoped the strain made sound distracted ergo casual, “So, what, like a picnic, you mean.”

Not a fun picnic. Not very romantic, since their third wheel was the first to invite himself. Salesa neglected to mention how much wet grass they would have to trek through to get to his favorite spot; that there were benches everywhere didn’t matter since they couldn’t all three fit on one, so they ended up sat in the dirt after all—and n.b. it required a second trek to find a patch of dirt dry enough to sit on at this time of morning. Jon was so sick with fatigue by the time they sat down he could barely eat a thing, though he did dispatch most of Martin’s thermos of tea. His hands shook and buzzed, and felt clumsy, like they’d fallen asleep; he ended up getting more jam in the dirt than on Salesa’s soggy, pre-buttered toast. He felt as though the rest of his flesh had melted three feet to the left of his eyes, bones and mind. Eventually he elected to blame his dizziness on the sun. When his forehead and upper lip started to prickle, threatening sweat, he stood up and announced, “It’s too hot here.”

Or tried to stand, anyway. One leg had oozed just far enough out of its joint that it buckled when he tried to stand; indigo and fuchsia blotches overtook his sight. He pitched forward, free arm pinwheeling—might have fallen into the boiled eggs if Martin hadn’t caught him. “Jon! Are you okay?”

God, why was Martin so surprised? This must have been the fifth or sixth time he had asked him that question since they left the house. One time Jon had bent down to brush dirt off his leg and Martin had thought he was scratching his bandages. So he asked him were they itchy, had they started to peel, did they need changing again, were they cutting off his circulation (no, not yet, not yet, and no). How could someone be so attentive to imaginary ills and yet miss the real ones? At another point, an enormous blue dragonfly had buzzed past, and instead of Did you see that? Martin had turned around to ask Are you okay. Now, on this fifth or sixth occasion, for a few seconds of pure, nonsensical rage he wondered how Martin dared stoop to such emotional blackmail. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies, Jon thought; aloud he snorted, as in malicious laughter. His throat felt thick, like he might cry.

“Fine, I’m just—sick of it here.” He pulled his arm free of Martin’s and overbalanced. Didn’t fall, just. Staggered a little.

“Should we move to the shade? We could try to find those famous pines, I guess.”

Jon sank back to the ground. “What about Salesa? Do we just leave him here?”

“Oh. Right,” said Martin. Salesa had eaten most of Jon’s share, and drunk both Jon’s and Martin’s shares of wine. Now he lay asleep in the dirt, head pillowed on one elbow, the other hand’s fingers curled round the stem of a glass still half full. “I guess, yeah? I mean he seems to know the place pretty well, so. It’s not like he’ll get lost out here.”

“We might, though.”

Martin sighed. “True. Should we just head back to our room, then? Maybe get you a snack.”

“Not hungry.”

“A statement, I meant.”

“Oh. Alright, sure,” Jon made himself say. “That sounds like—sure.”

So then they’d headed back, and only Martin had a free hand, and Jon was too tired by that point to distinguish his mind’s vague warning not to let Martin open the door from his usual pride on that subject—and that kind of pride never does seem as important when it’s your boyfriend offering. So he’d dismissed the warning and, well, look what happened.

When he got up from his knees and turned round Martin frowned at Jon. “Are you alright? You’re sat on the floor.”

Jon frowned, too—at the seam between the floor and the hallway’s opposite wall. “I was tired.”

“You hate sitting on the floor.”

“I sat on the ground out there,” Jon said, with a shrug that morphed into a nod in the direction they’d come from.

“Yeah, under duress,” Martin scoffed. “In the Extinction domain you wouldn’t even sit on the couch.”

There was something odd in Martin’s bringing that up now; somewhere, in the back of his mind, Jon could hear a pillar of thought crumbling. But he lacked the energy to find out which of his mind’s structures now stood crooked. “I think this floor is a lot cleaner than that couch,” he said instead, with an incredulous laugh.

“Even with the cobwebs?” Martin didn’t wait for Jon’s answering nod. “Fair enough,” he said, one hand on the back of his neck as he twisted it back and forth. He dropped the hand, sighed, cracked his knuckles. Looked at Jon again. “Yeah, okay. Guess we don’t have to deal with this right now. Let’s find you another bedroom first.”

“Maybe that’s just what Annabelle wants,” Jon muttered, deadpanning so he wouldn’t have to decide whether this was a joke.

Martin snorted. “I’ll risk it.”

Find was a generous way to put it; in fact there was another bedroom only two doors down. By the time Jon got his legs unfolded he could hear the squeak of a door swinging open down the hall. When he looked up, Martin said as their eyes met, “Nope—bed’s too small. You good there ‘til I find one that’ll work?”

“Seems that way.” Jon tried to smile, relief warring with his usual If you want something done right urge. In the quiet moment after Martin neglected to close that door and before he swung open the next one, Jon made himself add, “Thank you.”

“Of course. Oh wow,” Martin said of the next room, in whose doorway he’d stopped. “This one’s a lot nicer than ours. It’s got a balcony. Wallpaper’s pretty loud though. D’you think that’ll keep you awake?” Laughingly, “I know you don’t close your eyes to sleep anymore, so.”

“How loud is ‘pretty loud’?”

“Sort of a… dark, orangey red, with flowers?”

Jon shrugged. “I won’t see it at night.”

“Oh, god. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Should we do this one, then?” Instead of closing the door, Martin swung it the rest of the way open, then strode back to Jon’s side of the corridor, arm already outstretched. Jon managed to stand before Martin could reach him, but, as it had done outside, his vision went dark for a few seconds. He felt Martin’s hand on his shoulder before he could see his frown.

“You alright?” Martin asked yet again.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

“It’s just—you don’t usually blink anymore, except for effect.”

“Oh.”

Out there, none of the watchers blinked. At first, soon after the change, Martin had asked Jon to try, “Because it just feels so weird. Like I’m under constant scrutiny. Literally constant, Jon. You get why that feels weird, right?” (Jon had agreed—sincerely, though he wondered why Martin needed to ask that question in a world whose central conceit was that being watched felt weird. He’d also chosen not to point out that his scrutiny, like that of Jonah Magnus, was not, technically, constant, since he did sometimes look at other things. But he still rehearsed this retort in his mind every time he remembered that conversation.) Turned out it was hard to time your blinks properly when your eyeballs didn’t need the moisture. He’d forget about it for who knew how long, then remember and overcompensate by blinking so often Martin at first thought he was exaggerating it on purpose as a joke. It got old fast, in Jon’s opinion, but even after he learnt Jon didn’t intend it as a joke Martin still found it funny. “You’re doing it again,” he’d say every time, shoulders wiggling. Eventually Jon had asked him,

“You know you don’t blink anymore either, right?”

“Oh god, don’t I?” When Jon shook his head, with a smile whose teeth he tried to keep covered, Martin squeezed his own eyes shut and pushed their lids back and forth with his fingers. “Ugh—gross!” And for the next half hour he’d done the whole forget-to-blink-for-five-minutes-then-do-it-ten-times-in-as-many-seconds routine, too. After that they had both agreed to pretend not to notice the lack of blinking. Jon figured he couldn’t hold it against Martin that he’d broken this rule though, since Jon himself had broken it first, on their first morning here:

“You blinked,” he had informed Martin as he watched him stir sugar into his tea. Martin, who had not only blinked but broken eye contact to make sure he dropped the sugar cube in the right place, replied with a scoff,

“Didn’t know it was a staring contest.”

“No, I mean—”

“Oh! I blinked!”

“…Right,” Jon said now. “I’m—it’s nothing.”

Martin sighed. He closed his eyes, but probably rolled them under their lids. Jon used the inspection of their new room as an excuse to look away, but took in nothing other than the presence of a large bed and the flowered wallpaper Martin had warned him about.

“‘Kay. If you’re sure.”

Taking a seat at the foot of the bed, Jon looked down at his grass-stained knees and prepared himself to ask, Look, does it matter? I’m about to lie down anyway, so, functionally speaking, yes, I am fine.

“So, you’ll be okay here for a bit while I go figure out what to do about the door?”

“Sure.”

“Okay. I’ll come check on you as soon as I know anything, yeah?”

“Of course.”

“Although—if you’re asleep, should I wake you up?”

“Yes,” Jon replied before Martin had even got the last word out. He heard a short, emphatic exhale, presumably of laughter. “Wait—how would you know, anyway?”

“Oh. Yeah, good point.”

Jon looked down at his shoes. His fingers throbbed in anticipation, but he figured he should spare Martin the horror of getting grass stains on a second bedroom’s counterpane. The first shoe he pulled off without untying, since he could step on its heel with the other one. But he had to bend over to reach the second one’s incongruously bright white laces, biting his lip when he felt his right femur poke past the bounds of its socket as between a cage’s bars. On his way back up his vision quivered like a heat mirage, but didn’t go dark. He scooched himself up to the head of the bed. Made sure to face the ceiling rather than the red wallpaper.

A few months into his tenure in the Archives, Jon had discovered that if you close your eyes at your desk, even just for a minute, you can trick your whole body into thinking you’ve been gentle with it. But that trick didn’t work anymore. Out there, this made sense; interposing his eyelids between himself and the world’s new horrors couldn’t push them out of his consciousness, any more than it had helped to close the curtains at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin’s sentimental attachment to sleep had baffled him, as had his insistence on closing his eyes even though they’d pop back open as soon as his body went limp. Here, though, Jon sympathized with Martin’s wish. He too missed that magic link between closed eyes and sleep. Probably he should just be grateful for this rest from knowing other people’s suffering? The thing he had wished to close his eyes against was gone here. But now that most of his bodily wants had synced up with his actions again, it felt… wrong, like a tangible loss, that he couldn’t assert It’s time for rest now by closing his eyelids. That it took effort to keep them joined. Jon even found himself missing the crust that used to stick them together on mornings after long sleep.

That should have been his first sensation on waking, their first morning here. After seventy-one hours his eyelids should’ve been practically super-glued together. Instead, they’d apparently stayed open the entire time. It wasn’t uncomfortable—he hadn’t woken up with them smarting or anything. Hadn’t noticed one way or the other; after all, when not forced awake by an alarm, one rarely notices the moment one opens one’s eyes in the morning. He just didn’t like knowing that he looked the same waking and sleeping. It didn’t make sense. The dreams hadn’t followed him here, so what was he watching? He could see nothing but the ceiling.

He rolled over, hoping to look out the window. Doors, technically. Between gauzy curtains he could make out only wrought-iron bars and the tops of a few trees. A nice view, he could tell; when he got his second wind he was sure he’d find it pretty. For now he wondered how much more energy debt he had put himself in by rolling over.

Drowning in debt? We can help!

How had he not foreseen how horrible it would be inside the Buried? The inability to move or speak without pain and loss of breath—“Just imagine,” he muttered sarcastically to the empty air, as though addressing his past self. “What might that be like.” He’d lived for years with the weight of exhaustion on his back—heavier at that time than it’d ever been before. And he knew how it felt to risk injury with every movement. What an odd frame of mind he must have lived in then, to think his magic healing wouldn’t let him get scratched up down there. Had he thought it would protect him from fear? I must save my friend from this horrible place! But also, If I get stuck there forever, no big deal; I deserve it, after all. There seemed something so arrogant about that now, that idea that deserving pain could somehow mitigate it. That because monsterhood made him less innocent, it would make him less of a victim. How could he have thought that, when he’d known pulling her out of there didn’t mean he forgave her? He should apologize to Daisy for—

Right. Nope, never mind.

He began to regret rolling over. If he planned to stay on his side like this for long, he shouldn’t leave his shoulder and hip dangling. He could already feel their joints beginning to slide apart. But his body had started to drift to that faraway place from which no grievance ever seemed urgent enough to recall it—neither pain now nor the threat of greater pain later. Nor the three cups of tea he’d drunk.

After he and Martin had fallen asleep on Salesa’s doorstep, Jon had vague memories of being led up the stairs to their bedroom, though he remembered neither being shaken awake nor getting into bed. Just a seventy-odd-hour blank spot, followed by pain of a kind he had thought he’d left behind.

It wasn’t that watchers couldn’t feel pain, after the change. They could, but it was like how real-world pain felt through the veil of a dream. Your actions didn’t affect it as directly as they should. In the Necropolis Martin had asked him, “How exactly does a leg wound make you faster?” If he’d had the courage to answer, at the time he would have said something about his own wounds not seeming important now that he had to tune out those of the whole world. That wasn’t it though, he knew now. Pain just worked differently out there. When Daisy attacked him, it had hurt—but the wound she left him hadn’t protested movement. Not until he and Martin entered the grounds of Upton House. You could bear weight on an injured leg just fine out there, because it wouldn’t hurt more when you stood on it than otherwise.

Sometimes, when his joints slid apart while he slept, he could still feel it in his dreams. Up until 13th January 2016 (for months after which date he dreamt Naomi Herne’s graveyard and nothing else), his sleeping mind used to craft scenarios to explain its own pain and panic to itself. Running from an exploding grenade, staying awake through surgery, that sort of thing. But over the years, as the sensation grew familiar, his dreams about it became less urgent, their anxieties more mundane. He’d shout for help from passing cars, then feel like he’d lied to the stranger who opened their door to him when it turned out running to get in the car hurt no more than standing still.

Even before the change, it’d been ages since he’d had to worry about that. Since the coma, Beholding had fixed all these accidents, the way it’d fixed the finger he tried to chop off. They wouldn’t reset with a clunk, the way they had when he used to fix them by hand. It was more like his body reverted to a version the Eye had saved before the moment of injury. When he tried to pull open a Push door he’d hear the first clunk, followed by about half a second of pain, then after a gentle burst of static—nothing. Just a door handle between his fingers that needed pushing. If he tripped on uneven pavement he might still go down, but his ankle wouldn’t hurt when he stood back up, and the scrapes on his hands would heal before he could inspect them. Here, though, in this place the Eye couldn’t see, Jon lacked such protections. He didn’t have the dreams either? And that was more than worth it as a tradeoff, he was sure. But it still smarted to remember that pain had been his first sensation waking up in an oasis. Not birdsong, not sunshine striped across linen, not the warm weight of another person next to him. He knew he’d come back to a place ruled by physics rather than fear because he’d woken up with gaps between his bones.

“Jon? Are you awake?”

“Hm? Oh. Yes.”

“Cool.” Martin sat down on what felt like the corner of bed nearest the door. “I think I know how to do this now.”

“How to put the doorknob back on?”

“Yeah. God, I still can’t believe it twisted clean off in my hand like that. With no warning—like, zero to sixty in less than a second. I mean, can you believe our luck? The thing’s perfectly functional, and then suddenly it just—comes off!”

“Er…”

“Oh, god, sorry—I didn’t mean—”

“What? Oh—hrkgh”—Jon rolled around to face Martin, hoping the little yelp he let out when his leg slopped back into joint would sound like a noise of exasperation rather than pain. He found Martin sat looking down at the severed doorknob which poked up from between his knees. “No, Martin, of course not, I know—”

“Still, I’m sorry about—”

“No, it’s—it’s fine?”

On that first morning, Jon had managed to get his limbs screwed back on properly without making enough noise to wake up Martin. He’d limped out of their room and down the hall, pushing doors open until he’d found a toilet, whereupon he sat to pee and marveled that the flush and sink still worked. It was bright enough inside that he hadn’t thought to try the light switch on his way in—too busy contorting his neck to look for the sun out the window. On his way out, though, he flicked it on, then off. Then on again and off again. How could it work, when there was no power grid the house could connect to? Automatically Jon tried to search his mind’s Eye for a domain based in a power plant or something. Right, no, of course—that power did not work here.

When he got back to their room he found Martin awake. “Oh—morning,” Jon told him with a shy laugh.

“It—it is morning, isn’t it,” Martin marveled. Then he asked if Jon could hand him the map sticking out of his backpack’s side pocket. (What good are maps when the very Earth logic no longer applied here, after all. But Martin was rubbish at geography, so Jon still had to provide the You Are Here sign with his finger for him.) Jon grabbed the map on his way back to bed, and was about to tell him about the miracles of plumbing and electricity he’d just witnessed—not to mention the bathtub he’d admired on the long trek from toilet to sink—when Martin frowned and asked, “Why are you limping?”

“Am I?” Jon had shrugged, then cleared his throat when the motion made his shoulder audibly click. “Daisy, must be.”

“No, Jon. That’s the wrong leg.”

He slid both legs out of sight under the blankets and handed Martin the map. “It’s nothing. It just… came off a bit. Last night."

Before Jon could add It’s fixed now though, Martin said, “I’m sorry, what?”

Jon had assumed Martin understood the kind of thing he meant, but that he’d misled him as to its degree—i.e., that Martin objected to his talking about a full hip dislocation like it mattered less than what happened with Daisy. So he’d said,

“No, sorry, not all the way off—”

And Martin just laughed. “What, and you taped it back up like—like an old computer cable?”

“Sort of, yeah? It—it does still work, more or less.”

“Right, of course. No need to get a new one, yet; you can just limp along with this one. No big deal! Just make sure you don’t pull too hard on it.”

“I mean.” By now he could sense Martin’s sarcasm, his bitterness; that didn’t mean he knew what to do with them. So he'd said with a huff of laughter, “I can’t just send for a new one. That’s—that’s not how bodies work. You have to….” Wait for it to sort itself out was the natural end to that sentence. But he hadn’t been sure he could say that without opening a can of worms.

“Wait so… what actually happened? Are you okay?”

Only at this point had Jon recognized Martin’s response as one of incomprehension. What happened exactly? he had asked, too, when Jon told him the ice-cream anecdote. Did no one ever listen when you told them about these things?

“Nothing. Never mind. It’s fine.”

“Oh come on.”

“It’s. Fine! It’s not important.”

And then for days Martin kept alluding to it. Like some kind of reminder to Jon that he hadn’t opened up, disguised as a joke. Every time something came out or fell down he’d mutter, “So it came off, you might say.” Eventually they’d fallen out over it, and now neither one could come near the phrase without this song and dance.

“Don’t worry about it, Martin,” Jon assured him now; “I’m over it.”

“…Uh huh. Well, putting that to one side for the moment—I think I can fix this?”

“Oh? Great!—”

“—Yeah! It should be simple, actually. I think I just need to replace the screw that fell out? I mean, there doesn’t seem to be anything actually broken, just, you know,” with an awkward laugh, “the screw lives on the wrong side of the door now. But if we can just put a new one in the door should be fine.” He looked to Jon as if for help plotting their next steps.

“I—I don’t, um. Think we have one.”

Martin’s shoulders dropped; the corners of his mouth tightened. “Yeah, I know we don’t have one, Jon. I just mean, we need to find out where Salesa keeps them.”

“Oh!” Jon replied, in a brighter tone. Then he registered what this meant. “Oh. Right.”

“Y…eah.”

“Any idea where to look?”

They checked what seemed to Martin the most obvious place first. Salesa used one of the ground-floor drawing rooms as a sort of repository for everything he’d left as yet unpacked—all the practical items he hadn’t been able to repurpose as toys, plus some antiques he’d been too fond of or too nervous to part with. Two nights ago, Salesa had noticed the state of Jon’s and Martin’s shoelaces, and insisted they let him replace them with some from this little warehouse. “Please, come with me; I’ve nothing to hide. You can have a look around, see if I have anything that might help you on your journey….” As he said this he’d counted to two on his fingers, as though listing off attractions they should be sure not to miss.

Jon watched Martin perk right up at this. All week Salesa had kept pleading with them to tell him about any luxuries they had wanted while touring the apocalypse, so he could try to find something to fulfill those wants. “Well, I—I don’t know about luxuries,” Martin had ventured the third time this came up. “But I do think we might run out of bandages soon, so. If you’ve any extra?”

“Of course, of course, yes, how prudent of you, always with one eye on the future. Must be the Beholding in you.” (Neither Jon nor Martin knew what to say to that.) “But there will be plenty of time for that. I meant something for now, while you are here, while you don’t need to think of things like that.” And sure enough, each time Salesa had come to them with presents from his little warehouse (booze, butterfly nets, more booze, antique bathing suits, &c.), he’d forgot about Martin’s homely request for gauze and tape. Martin insisted they change the dressing on Jon’s leg every day; by now they’d run through the bandages he brought from Daisy’s safehouse. So when Salesa suggested they accompany him to his repository, Martin said,

“Sure, yeah! That sounds really helpful.” (Salesa clutched his heart as though he’d waited all his life to hear such praise.) “Er. The things in your warehouse, though. They’re not L—um.” Leitners, Martin had almost called them. “You don’t think they’ll develop any… strange properties, when we leave here, do you?”

“Of course not,” Salesa had answered, stopping and turning all the way around in the corridor to face Martin with a frown. “Martin, I promise, only my antiques are cursed—and even then, not all of them.” He’d resumed the walk toward his little warehouse, but turned around again and held up a hand, as if to preempt a question. “There are, indeed, yes, some items out there, touched by the Corruption, which can pass their infection on to other things they come in contact with. But, no,” he went on, his voice fighting off a joyous laugh, “no, the only item I have like that does almost the opposite.”

“Oh.”

Salesa nodded, but did not turn around this time. “Strange little thing. It’s an antique syringe that, so long as you keep it near you, repels the Crawling Rot. I like to think it helped dispatch that insect thing Annabelle chased away. But if you try to get rid of it,” he added in a darker tone, “all the sickness, the bugs, the smells, even stains on your clothes—everything disgusting that it’s kept away—they remember who you are, and they hunger for you more than anyone else. The man who sold it to me….” He shook his head ruefully, hand now resting on the door.

“Was eaten alive by mosquitoes,” Jon muttered.

“Something like that, yes,” said Salesa, as he jerked open the door.

Jon hated the way his and Martin’s shoes looked now. He hadn’t had to put new laces on a pair of old, dirty shoes since he was a kid, and the contrast looked wrong—the same way starched collars and slicked-back hair on kids look wrong. Jon’s trainers were gray, their laces a slightly darker gray, so these white ones wouldn’t have looked quite right even without the dirt. Martin’s had once been white, but their original laces were broad and flat, while these were narrow and more rounded. The replacements’ thin, clinical white lines looked something between depressing and menacing. Too much like spider web; too much like the stitching on Nikola’s minions. When they came undone on this morning’s walk, Jon had made sure to tread on them in the mud a few times before tying them back up. Poor Dr. Thompson’s syringe must have retained some of its power here, though, because they still looked pristine. Jon wondered if it had no effect on spiders, or if without it this whole place would have been draped in cobwebs.

Martin seemed pleased with their haul, though. Despite Salesa’s amnesia on the subject, his little warehouse held more plasters, gauze, medical tape, antibacterial ointment, alcohol wipes—the list went on—than one man could ever use. In a strange, raw moment Jon liked to pretend he hadn’t seen, Salesa had wrung his hands as his eyes passed over this hoard. His lip had quivered. He’d practically begged Martin to take the whole lot away with them. “What harm will come to me here? And if it does come, what good will it do, protecting one lonely old man from skinned knees and paper cuts? The two of you—where you are going—the gravity of your mission!” At this point he’d seized one of each their hands. “Everything I have that even might help, you must take it. Please.”

“I—yeah,” Martin stuttered. “This is—really helpful, yeah. We’ll take as much as we can fit in our bags.”

Salesa had let go their hands by this point, and crossed his arms. “Right, yes, bags, of course, the bags. Are you sure you don’t want my truck?”

“Oh, well, thanks, but I don’t think either of us knows how to—”

“To drive a truck?” Salesa uncrossed his arms and began to reach for Martin’s shoulder. “I could teach you—”

“It won’t work without the camera anyway,” pointed out Jon. “We have to walk.”

Martin sighed. ”That too. ‘The journey will be the journey,’ as Jon keeps saying.”

“I said that once,” Jon protested.

No such success on this return visit. They found a small pile of miscellaneous screws, one of which Martin said would work (though it was the wrong color, he alleged, and had clearly been meant for some other purpose), but the screwdriver they needed remained elusive. “I mean, I can’t be sure they’re not in here—the place is as bad as Gertrude’s storage unit. We could spend all day here and still not be sure—”

“Let’s not do that,” said Jon, pushing an always-warm candlestick with a pool of always-melted wax out of Martin’s way with his sleeve for what felt like the hundredth time.

“No arguments here.”

“Where to next?”

“I guess it makes sense that they’re not here. This room’s all stuff Salesa brought, and why would he bring home-repair stuff when he didn’t even know where he’d wind up.”

“Except for the screws.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t look like he keeps screws here, remember? There’s just a couple random ones lying around, like he forgot to put them away or something.”

Jon peered between the clouds in his mind, trying to catch sight of Martin’s thought train. “So you’re saying the screwdriver should be…?”

“Somewhere less… frequented, I guess? They’ll probably still be wherever they were when Salesa found the place.”

“Not somewhere that was open to the public, then.”

Martin sighed. ”I mean yeah, probably. Not that that narrows it down much.”

“Somewhere… banal, less posh.”

“Not sure how much less posh you can get than this place. But yeah, I guess. Have I mentioned how weird it is you’re the one who keeps asking me this stuff?”

“I’m sorry. I’m trying to help? I just…” Jon closed his eyes, which itched with the warehouse’s dust, and rubbed their lids with an index finger. Odd that his eyes weren’t immune to dust, when leaving them open for seventy straight hours hadn’t bothered them. And why didn’t the syringe keep dust away? In Dr. Snow’s day (not far removed from Smirke’s, n.b.), Jon seemed to recall that dust had been used as a euphemism for all waste, including the human kind Dr. Snow had found in the cholera water. It was like how people today use filth—hence the word dustbin. And hadn’t Elias once called the Corruption Filth? Jon opened his eyes and watched Martin swirl back to full color. “I can’t seem to corral my thoughts here,” he concluded.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s actually kind of fun, it’s just—I’m so used to being the sidekick,” Martin laughed. “Besides, I miss my eldritch Google.”

“Should I go back out there, ask the Eye about it, then come back?”

Another laugh, this one less awkward. “No. That won’t work, remember? This place is a ‘blind spot,’ you said.” The words in inverted commas he said with a frown and in a deeper voice.

“Right, right. I forgot,” Jon sighed. He lowered himself to the floor and examined the finger he’d felt snap back into place when he let go his cane. During the five seconds he’d allowed himself to entertain it, the idea of heading back out there had excited him a little. A few minutes to check on Basira, verify what Salesa had told them about his life before the change, make sure the world hadn’t somehow ended twice over. Give himself a few minutes’ freedom of movement, for that matter. Out there he could run, jump, open jars, pick up full mugs of tea without worrying a screw in his hand would come loose and make him drop them. He could stand up as quickly as he thought the words, I think I’ll stand up now, without his vision going dark. God, and even if it did, it wouldn’t matter! He would just know every tripping hazard and every look on Martin’s face, without having to ask these clumsy human eyes to show them to him.

“Honestly, it’d almost feel worth it to go back out there just to formulate a plan to find them. At least I can think out there.”

“Hey.” Martin elbowed him slightly in the ribs. Jon fought with himself not to resent the very gentleness of it. “I think I’ll come up with the plan for once, thanks. Some of us can think just fine here.��

Was it just because of Hopworth that Martin’s elbow barely touched him? Or because Martin feared that Jon would break in here, in a way he’d learnt not to fear out there?

“Oh—I know,” Martin said, clicking his fingers and pointing them at Jon like a gun. “We passed a shed this morning, remember?”

Jon squinted. “Not even remotely.”

“No yeah—on our walk with Salesa. I tried to ask him what it was for, but he kept droning on and on. By the time he stopped talking I’d forgot about it.”

“Huh,” said Jon, to show he was listening.

“That seems like a good place to keep screws and all, right? If it’s so nondescript you can’t even remember it.”

“Sure.”

“Great! Are you ready now, or d’you need to sit for a bit longer?”

“I’m ready.” This time he accepted Martin’s hand, not keen to trip on something cursed.

“Anyway, if we don’t find them and Salesa’s still out there, we can ask him on the way back.”

Jon’s heart shrunk before the prospect of inviting Salesa to be the hero of their story. Please, Mr. Salesa, save us from our screwdriver-less hell! They would never hear the end of it. It would inevitably remind the old man of the countless times in his youth when he’d been the only man in the antiques trade who knew where to find some priceless treasure. Let Salesa open their stuck door and they’d find Pandora’s bloody box of stories behind it. He winced and let out a grunt as of pain before he could stop himself. “Let’s not tell him, if we can help it.”

“Of course we should tell him,” Martin protested. “We can’t just leave it broken like this.”

“But if we can fix it without his help—?”

“What? No! Even then, he’s our host. We have to tell him. It’s his door, he deserves to know its—I don’t know, history?” Martin sighed, shoving one hand in his hair and holding out the other. “If he’s got a doorknob whose screw comes loose a lot, he should know that, so he can tighten it next time before it gets out of hand. I mean, we’re lucky it only chipped the paint when it—when it fell off, you know?” (Jon, for his part, hadn’t even noticed this chip of paint Martin referred to.) “And—and suppose he’s only got this one screw left,” tapping the one in his pocket, “and the next time it happens his last screw rolls under the door like this one did.”

“And what is he supposed to do to prevent that scenario? There aren’t exactly any hardware stores in the apocalypse.”

Big sigh. “Yeah, fair enough. I still think we should tell him. It just feels wrong to hide secrets from him about his own house, you know?”

“Fine,” sighed Jon in turn. ”Should we tell him about the scorch marks on the window sill as well?”

“No?” Martin turned to him with an incredulous look. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“I mean—I was, but—”

“Please tell me you get how that’s different.”

“Enlighten me,” Jon said wearily.

“Seriously? Of course you don’t tell him about the?—those were already there! If we’d put them there, then yeah, of course we’d need to tell him.”

“So it’s about confessing your guilt, then. Not about what Salesa makes of the information.”

“I mean, I guess?” Martin looked perplexed, lips drawn into his mouth. “Actually, no. Because those are just scorch marks, they don’t—you can still get into a room with scorch marks on the windowsill, Jon.”

“And yet if you’d left them you’d tell him about it?”

“Well yeah but if I told him about it now it’d just be like I was—leaving him a bad review, or something. It’d just be rude. ‘Lovely place you have, Salesa. So kind of you to share your limited provisions with us refugees from the apocalypse. Too bad you gave us a room whose windowsill could use repainting!’”

Jon laughed. “Yes, alright, I get it.”

Martin’s sigh of relief seemed only a little exaggerated. If he hadn’t wiped pretend sweat from his brow Jon might have bought it. “Okay, that’s good, ‘cause”—when Jon kept laughing, Martin cut himself off. “Hang on, were you joking this whole time?”

“Sort of?”

“Were you just playing devil’s advocate or something?”

“I mean—not exactly? For the first seventy or eighty percent of it I was completely serious.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. It was just—fun. It felt nice to take a definite sta—aaaa-a-aa.” Something in Jon’s lower back went wrong somehow. An SI joint, probably? The pain caught him so much by surprise that when he stepped with that side’s leg he stumbled forward.

“Whoa!” Martin’s hand closed around his upper arm. Jon yelped again, from panic more than hurt this time, as his shoulder thunked in its socket. “Jon! Are you okay?”

“Don’t do that,” Jon hissed, trying lamely to shake his arm out of Martin’s grip. It didn’t work. The attempt just made his own arm ache, and produce more ominous clunking sounds.

“I—what?”

“It was fine. I don’t need you to catch me.”

Martin let his arm go. “You were about to fall on your face, Jon.”

“I’d already caught myself—just fine—with this.” He gestured to his cane, stirring its handle like a joystick.

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“I don’t know, look?”

“It’s not—?” Martin scoffed. “Look when? It’s not like a rational calculation. I can’t just go ‘Beep. Beep. See human trip. Will human fall on face? If yes, press A to catch! If not, press B to’— what, stand there and do nothing? It’s just human nature; when you see someone falling that’s just what you do. I’m not going to apologize for not calculating the risk properly.”

“Fine! Yes, okay, you’re right. Forget I said anything.” Throwing up his free hand in defeat, Jon set off again—tried to stride, but it was hard to do that with a limp. Even with his cane, he couldn’t step evenly enough to achieve a decisive gait.

It was fine, Jon reminded himself. He’d had this injury (if you could call it that) a thousand times before. When it came on suddenly like this it never stuck around long. Sure, yeah, for now every step hurt like an urgent crisis. But any second it would right itself as quickly as it had come undone.

“No, no, I understand! Point taken! Note to future Martin,” the latter shouted from behind Jon, voice troubled by hurried steps; “next time let him fall and break his bloody nose.”

Trusting Martin to shout directions if he went the wrong way, Jon pressed on, rehearsing comebacks in his mind. Is this not a boundary I’m allowed to set? You don’t let me read statements in front of you. Isn’t that part of human—isn’t that my nature, too?

Oh, yes, human nature, that must be it. You didn’t lunge after Salesa at ping-pong the other day, did you? I saw you opening doors for Melanie when she got back from India. You stopped for a while, did you know that? You all did, everyone in the Archives. And then—it’s the strangest thing!—you all started up again after Delano. Maybe you lot don’t see the common factor here; people always do seem to think it’s more polite not to notice.

So what if I had broken my nose? You nearly broke my shoulder, catching me like that. Does that not matter because you can’t see it? Because it wouldn’t scar?

They were all too petty to say aloud. Too incongruous with the quiet. He could hear his own footsteps, and Martin’s, and the clank of his cane’s metal segments each time it hit the ground, and a few crows exclaiming about something exciting they’d found on his right. Nothing else.

“Looks like Salesa went inside,” Martin shouted from behind him.

Jon stopped walking and turned around. “What?”

“Left a couple things out here, but yeah.” Martin jogged to catch up with him, from a greater distance than Jon would have expected given how much limping slowed him down. He must have veered off course to inspect the clearing Salesa had vacated. In one hand he carried an empty wine glass by its stem, which he lifted to show Jon.

“Huh.”

“Yeah.” When he caught up with Jon, Martin stood still and panted. “Guess it won’t be as easy to ask him about it as we thought. If we don’t find what we need in there,” he added, glancing demonstratively to something behind Jon.

Following Martin’s eyes, Jon finally saw the shed. Nondescript boards, worn black and white by the elements. Surrounded by hedges three months overgrown.

Turned out it wasn’t a shed anymore, though—Salesa had converted it to a chicken coop. “Explains the boiled eggs,” shrugged Jon.

“God, they’re adorable. Do you think it’s okay to pet one?” Martin crouched in front of a black hen with a puffball of feathers on top of her head. (Martin called her a hen, anyway, and Jon trusted his authority on animals other than cats). “I don’t really know, er, ch—hicken etiquette,” he mused, voice shot through with nervous laughter.

The black hen sat alone in a little box, and didn't seem to want attention. A little red one they’d found strutting around the coop, however, ventured right up to Martin and cocked her head, like she expected him to give her a present. While Martin cooed over her and the other chickens, Jon went outside and laid flat on his back in the grass under a tree. “Take your time,” he shouted. “I’m happy here.”

Sure enough, when Martin emerged from the coop and helped him stand back up, whatever cog in Jon’s pelvis or spine he had jammed earlier was turning again. And by the time they got back to the house, Martin had talked himself into the idea that maybe all the house’s doorknobs that looked like theirs came loose a lot, and Salesa had taken to keeping the screwdriver to fix them in, say, the hall closet, or in their toilet’s under-sink cabinet.

“I think we’re gonna have to find Salesa and ask him about it,” concluded Martin, when these locations turned up nothing they wanted either.

“If you’re sure.”

Jon sat down on the closed toilet seat. Hadn’t that been what he said just before the last time he sat down on the lid of a toilet before Martin? He’d dutifully turned away, that time, as Martin undressed, wanting to make sure he knew he’d still let him have some privacy. But then, of course: “Where should I put these, do you think? —Er, my clothes I mean.”

“Oh. Um.” Jon had turned his head to look at the stain on Daisy’s ceiling, for what must have been the tenth time already. “I can hold onto them if you like.” Which then meant Martin had to get them back on before Jon could undress for his own shower and hand him his clothes. As he’d piled his trousers into Martin’s hands a tape recorder fell out of one pocket and crashed to the floor, ejecting the tape with Peter’s statement on it. “Shit,” Jon had hissed and ducked to the floor to pick it up, trusting the slit in his towel to reveal nothing worse than thigh.

“Shit,” Martin echoed. “I hope that wasn’t your phone.”

“No—just the recorder.” Still on the floor, Jon clicked its little door shut and pressed play. Sound of waves, static, footsteps. He switched it off. “Seems alright.” Thank god, he stopped himself from adding. Jon didn’t want to lose this one, this record of how he’d found Martin, in case he lost him again. But he didn’t want Martin to hear the sounds of the Lonely again so soon, either. That was why he’d stayed with Martin while he showered, rather than waiting in the safehouse living room. He wouldn’t have insisted on it, of course. He didn’t exactly believe Martin would disappear again? But long showers were such a cliché of lonely people, and steam looked so much like the mist on Peter’s beach, and when Jon asked how he felt about it, Martin said that thought hadn’t occurred to him,

“But as soon as you started to say that, I.” He’d stood with his teeth bared, half smiling half grimacing, and bringing the tips of his fingers together and apart over and over. “Yeah, I think you’re right. Heh—it scares me too now, if I’m honest. That’s… a good sign, I guess, right?”

They had come a long way since then, Jon told himself. They were more comfortable with each other now. On their first morning here, they’d showered separately, but after (Martin’s) breakfast Jon’s irritation had faded and he had resolved to pretend along with Martin that this was a holiday. So they’d got to use the enormous bathtub after all— the one at whose soap dish Jon now found himself staring as he sat on the lid of the toilet. When the heat made him dizzier, as he’d known it would, he had relished getting to rest his cheek on Martin’s arm along the rim of the tub, where it had grown cool and soft in the few minutes he’d kept it above the water.

“Let’s have lunch first,” Martin said now; “you’re getting all….” While he looked for the right word he dropped his shoulders and jaw, and mimicked a thousand-yard stare. “Abstract, again. Distant. People food should help a little, yeah? Tie you back down to this plane a bit?”

“Probably,” Jon agreed, smiling at Martin’s tact.

But to get to the kitchen they had to pass through the dining room—where they found Salesa snoring in a chair at the head of the table. “Let’s just ask him now before he gets up and moves again,” maintained Martin. Jon shrugged his acquiescence and leant in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot. Why hadn’t he used the toilet before letting Martin lead him here?

”Um, Mikaele?” Martin inched a few steps toward him, but a distance of several feet still gaped between them. “We have something to ask you, if that’s—hello? Mikaele?”

A likely-sounding gap between snores—but nope. Still sound asleep. Salesa sighed, licked his lips, then began to snore again.

“Mikaele Salesa,” called out Jon from his post at the door, rather less gently. “Mikaele Salesa!” He turned to Martin, meaning to suggest that they eat now and trust the smell of food to wake Salesa, but stopped himself when he saw Martin creeping timidly toward Salesa with his hand outstretched.

“Sorry to disturbyouMikaele,” Martin squeaked out, so quickly that the words blended together. He gave Salesa’s shoulder the lightest possible tap with one fingertip, then snatched his hand back with a grimace of regret as Salesa’s own hand reached up, belatedly, as if to swat Martin’s away. “Oh, good, you’re—”

Salesa interrupted with a snore. Martin sighed and turned to Jon. “What d’you think? Should I shake him?”

Jon pulled out a neighboring chair and sat on it. “No need for anything so drastic. Try poking him a few more times first.”

“Right.”

Once he’d tired of rolling his cane between his palms Jon bent down to set it on the floor. He’d learnt his lesson about trying to hang it on the back of these chairs, though in this fog it had taken several incidents to stick. Every time it ended up crashing to the floor, when he scooched his chair back or when Martin tried to reach an arm around him. Then again—he conjectured, bent halfway to the floor with the cane still in his hand—if he did drop it, that might wake Salesa.

Two nights ago Jon had got up to use the toilet, and knocked his cane down from the wall on his way back to bed in the dark. It crashed to the floor; Jon swore and hopped on one foot back from it, imagining the other foot’s poor toenail smashed to jagged pieces as it thumped to life with pain. Meanwhile he heard rustling from the bed, and Martin’s voice, querulous with sleep. “Jon? Jon, what’s—happened, what—are you.”

“Nothing it’s fine go back to”—he’d hissed as his knee decided it had enough of hopping—“don’t get up, just. I’m gonna turn on the light, if that’s alright.”

“What fell? Are you okay?”

“The cane. I knocked it over in the dark.”

“Oh.”

He got no verbal response about the light, but guessed Martin had nodded.

From a distance his toe looked alright—no blood, anyway, so he could walk on it without risking the carpet. Jon picked his cane up from the floor and steered himself to the foot of the bed, where he sat down. His toenail had chipped, it looked like—only a little, but in that way that leaves a long crack. If he tried to pick it straight he’d tear out a big chunk and it would bleed. But if he left it like this it would snag on the sheets, on his socks, until some loose thread tore the chunk of nail off for him. What could he do for this kind of thing here? At home he’d file the nail down around the chip, then cover it in clear nail polish, and just hope that’d hold out until the crack grew out and he could clip it without bleeding. But here? A plaster would have to do, he guessed. They had plenty of those now.

Jon hated bandaging, ever since Prentiss—in much the same way that Martin hated sleeping in his pants. He’d had time to learn all its discomforts. How sweaty they got, the way they stuck to your hairs, the way lint collected in the adhesive residue they left. Didn’t help he associated them with that time of paranoia. They didn’t make him act paranoid, understand; he just habitually thought of bandage-wearing as what paranoid people do. It made an echo of his contempt for that time’s Jon cling to his perceptions of current Jon. On his first morning here, when the ones on his shin where Daisy’d bit him peeled off in the shower, he hadn’t bothered to replace them. After all, the bite only hurt when something pulled on it or poked or scraped against it, so he figured his trousers would provide enough protective barrier.

“That healed fast,” Martin had remarked, when he noticed the undressed wound in the bath—and then, when he looked again, “Yyyyeah I dunno, I think you might still want to bandage that. We don’t want dirt getting in there.”

“Do I have to?”

“Humor me.”

When they got back to their room he’d let Martin dress it himself. Martin had sucked air through his teeth. “This is days old—it shouldn’t be all hot and red like this.” According to him these were early signs of infection, which would get worse if they didn’t take better care of it—i.e., keep the wound freshly bandaged and ointmented. Jon refrained from pointing out that when the cut on his throat had got like that he’d left it uncovered and been fine. But he did ask what worse meant. “Really bad,” testified Martin. “I had a cut on my finger get infected once. Really disgusting. You don’t want to know.”

Jon smiled at him, raised his eyebrows. “After Jared’s mortal garden I think I can handle it.”

Martin smiled too, but wrinkled his nose and shook his head. “There was pus involved.”

“Oh, god! How could you tell me that!” gasped Jon, hand to his chest.

“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it also hurt? A lot? And it can make you ill. So we should try to avoid it, yeah?”

He’d tried to disavow the disappointment in his sigh by exaggerating it. “Yes, alright.”

“Don’t know why you’d want to leave it exposed anyway. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Well, sure, when you do that,” Jon had muttered, flinching away. As he asked the question Martin had lightly tapped the skin around the gash through its new bandage. A second or two later Jon added, “Less than when I got it? It’s hard to tell; it’s… different here.”

With a sigh that caught on phlegm and irritation, Martin asked, “Different how?”

He hadn’t been able to answer then, but he knew now, of course. It hurt the way things do when you’re awake. Not with the constant smart and throb it had when he’d first got it, but, it snagged on things now. Had opinions on how he moved. When he bent his knee more than ninety degrees, that stretched the skin around it painfully. Also if he knelt, since then the floor would press against it through his trousers. And stepping with that foot felt odd. Didn’t hurt, exactly, but sort of… rattled? Like a bad bruise would. This all seemed so small, compared to the moment of terror for his life that he’d felt when Daisy bit into him—that gaping wound in his new self-conception, which his healing powers had sewn up so quickly. The ritual of bandaging it every evening seemed so otiose, so laughably superstitious. He despised the thought of adding another step to it.

While Jon went on examining his toe, Martin asked, “What was the... thumping. It sounded like.”

“Oh—no—I didn’t fall; it’s fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“No—yes—stop, it’s nothing, don’t get up. I just forgot I left it on the—leaning against the doorwall” (he hadn’t decided in time whether to say doorway or wall and ended up with half of each) “so I walked into it, er, toe first.”

“Oh,” Martin said again. Jon could hear him subsiding against the pillows behind him. “It came down?”

Big sigh. Jon’s fingernails met his palms. He set his foot back on the floor, and when his hip whined in its socket he clenched his teeth and kept them that way. In his mind he heard days’ worth of similar jokes. When he couldn’t get a jammed jar open: So you’re saying it wouldn’t… come off? When they got back their clean laundry: Can you believe all those grass stains came out?—oh, sorry: that they came off, I meant. Always with an innocent laugh, like Jon’s original phrasing had been just, what, like a Freudian slip, rather than something perfectly comprehensible that Martin had refused to engage with, taken from him, and rendered meaningless on purpose. “No it did not,” he snapped, “and I would appreciate it if you’d quit throwing that back in my face.”

“Whoa, uh. O…kay. What’s… going on here exactly?”

“You—?”

His heart plummeted; his face stung with embarrassment. Came down, Martin had said—not came off. He’d just been confirming that Jon’s cane had fallen down.

“Oh, god—nothing, never mind. You did nothing.”

“Well that’s obviously not true.”

“I just—I thought you’d said ‘came off.’ I thought you meant, had my toe ‘come off.’”

“Oh,” said Martin, yet again. When Jon turned to look he found him still blinking and squinting against the light. “Do you… need me to not say that anymore?”

“Not when I—?” Not when I’ve hurt myself, Jon meant. But Martin hadn’t done that, so this grievance didn’t actually mean anything. He’d been seeing patterns where there were none, and now that he’d seen through the illusion Jon knew again that Martin never would say it like that. “No, it’s fine. Do whatever you want.”

Martin turned the tail end of his yawn into a huff of false laughter. “Nope. Still don’t believe you.”

“Everything you’ve said makes perfect sense with the information you have. It’s all just—me. Being cryptic again.”

“Okay, uh. Are you waiting for me to disagree? ‘Cause, uh. Yup—you’re still being cryptic. No arguments there.”

Jon just sighed, really scraping the back of his throat with it. Almost a scoff.

“Sooo do you wanna fill me in, or.”

“No?” With an incredulous laugh. “Well, yes, just.”

He hadn’t known how to start from there, while so tightly wound and defensive. It seemed cruel to raise such a sensitive subject when Martin sounded so eager to go back to sleep. Or maybe he just didn’t want to hear Martin whimper apologies. Didn’t want to deal with how fake they would sound. They wouldn’t be fake; he knew that. But they would sound fake, which meant it would take an effort of will, a deliberate exercise of empathy, to accept them as real. He wasn’t in the mood to hear yet another person say I’m sorry, I didn’t know; much less to respond with the requisite It’s okay; you didn’t know. It would take a strength of conviction he didn’t have right now.

“Y—you don’t have to explain it tonight? I’ll just, I’ll just not use that phrase anymore, and maybe in the morning you’ll be less in the mood to lash out at me for things that don’t make sense.”

And what was there to say to that? It had taken Jon three tries to force out, “Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Good night, Jon.”

“Good night. I still need the light, for.”

“That’s fine. Just turn it off when you come back to bed.”

“You won’t wake him up,” a new voice interjected.

Annabelle. Jon couldn’t see her, but he had learnt by now to recognize that voice, with its insufferable upbeat teasing inflection like every sentence she said was a riddle. He caught a glimpse of movement, then heard the click of her shoes on the floor. She must have poked her head round the doorway at the far end of the table while she spoke, then scuttled off again. At last he got a good look at her, as she put her blonde-and-gray head through the closer door.

“He’s a very heavy sleeper,” she informed them, with a smile and a shrug. “You can shake him all you want; it’s not going to work.”

Martin cleared his throat—trying to catch Jon’s attention, presumably. But Jon feared Annabelle would vanish again if he took his eyes off her. Not that he wanted her here, either, but?—he at least wanted to know which direction she went when she disappeared.

“What are you doing here, Annabelle.”

She shrugged two of her shoulders. “Just offering you some advice.” Then she used the momentum from the shrug to push herself backward, out of the doorway back into the corridor. Before the last of her hands disappeared off to the right, she waved to both of them.

“Well, how about some ‘advice’ about this, then—”

“She’s already gone, Martin.”

“Seriously? God—which way did she go?” Jon pointed; Martin bolted down the hallway after her. “Oi! Annabelle!”

“Shhh!”

“Annabelle! Do you know where Salesa keeps the—”

Jon did his best to follow him, praying all his limbs would go on straight this time. “Don’t!”

“What? Why not?” he heard, from the other side of the wall. Thankfully he could no longer hear Martin’s pounding footsteps. He overtook him in the hallway, just about able to make out his face around the dark swirls in his vision. “She’s as likely to know as Salesa, right?” Martin continued. “And it’s not like she’d lie about it. I mean, what would be the point?”

“I just don’t think we should give her any kind of advantage over us,” Jon snarled. The attempt to keep his voice down made the words come out sounding nastier than he intended.

Martin scoffed. “You don’t think maybe this is a bit more important than your stupid principle about not accepting help from her?”

“Is it?” Jon took hold of Martin’s sleeve, having just now caught up to him. “The new room’s fine. It’s even nicer than the old one, right? We could just stay there.”

“I already told you, Jon. I’m not just gonna leave it like this.”

“’Til Salesa sobers up, I meant.”

“If we have to, yeah, but—? All our stuff’s in that room. The statements’re in there.”

“I just don’t think we should show her that kind of vulnerability,” Jon hissed, shifting from foot to foot in his eagerness either to sit down or go somewhere else. “I don’t want to give Annabelle something she can use over us.”

“How does this make us more vulnerable than we are eating her food?”

“It doesn’t, alright? That doesn’t mean we should add more to the pile!” He watched Martin shrug and open his mouth, but cut him off in advance: “Last time we had this argument you were the one maintaining she was dangerous.”

It was on their first night here—their first awake here, anyway. They’d been heading back to their room, Martin lamenting that he’d not packed anything to sleep in when they left Daisy’s safehouse. “Won’t make much difference to me,” Jon had shrugged at first.

Martin had shaken his head, grimaced at something in his imagination. “I hate sleeping in my pants. It’s just gross. Dunno why anyone would choose to do it.”

“How is it gross?” Jon had laughed. He’d expected to hear some weird thing about its being unsanitary for that much leg to touch sheets that only got washed every two weeks, and to argue back that in that case shouldn’t he sleep in his socks. Disdain for the body seemed damn near universal, and yet manifested so differently in each person whose habits Jon had got to know up close. Georgie had heard that underarm hair helped wick away the smell of sweat—so she let that hair grow out, but shaved the ones on her stomach for fear they’d smell like navel lint. And Daisy, a woman who used to sniff her used-up plasters before throwing them in the bin, would spray cologne in the toilet every time she left it. Jon had enjoyed getting to know which of bodily self-contempt’s myriad forms Martin subscribed to.

But this turned out not to be one of them. Instead Martin explained, “It’s so sweaty. Like sitting on a leather couch in shorts, except the leather’s your other leg? Ugh. I hate waking up slippery.”

“That’s why I put a pillow between mine,” laughed Jon. “Suppose I will miss Trevor’s t-shirt, though. Now that I don’t have to worry about showing up in people’s dreams like that.”

“Oh, god, right—what is it? ‘You don’t have to be faster than the bear’—?”

“‘You just have to be faster than your friends,'” Jon completed, in the most sinister Ceaseless-Watcher voice he could muster. Martin snorted with laughter.

And then they’d opened the door to discover Annabelle had done them a fucking turndown service. Quilt folded back, mints on the pillows, and a pile of old-timey striped pajamas at the foot of the bed. “Huh. Cree…py, but convenient, I guess. Least they’re not black and white, right?” Martin unfolded the green-striped shirt on top, then handed it with its matching trousers to Jon. “These ones must be yours.”

“Mm.” Jon let Martin hand him the pajamas, then tossed them onto the chair in the opposite corner of the room (from which chair they promptly fell to the floor). The mint from his side of the bed he deposited in the bin under the bedside table.

“So who’s our good fairy, d’you think? Salesa, or.”

“Annabelle,” Jon hissed. “Salesa was with us all through dinner.”

Martin nodded and sighed. “Yeah.” He sat down on the bed, still regarding the other set of garments—these ones striped yellow and blue—with a puzzled frown. “God, I’ll look like a clown in these. You sure I won’t give you nightmares about the Unknowing?”

But Jon said nothing, still hoping he could avoid weighing in on Martin’s choice whether or not to accept Annabelle’s… gifts.

“It’s probably Salesa’s stuff, at least. Not Annabelle’s. I mean,” Martin mused with a brave laugh, “he’s got a lot of weird outfits on hand apparently.”

“Unless she wove them out of cobwebs.”

“That’s not a thing,” Martin groaned, making himself laugh too. “Spider webs aren’t strong enough to use as thread.”

“Not natural ones, maybe,” Jon said with a shrug and a careful half smile. With no less care, he turned the sheets and counterpane back up on his side of the bed, restoring the way it’d looked when he and Martin made up the bed that morning. Stacked the frontmost pillow back upright against the one behind it. Punched it a little, more as a way to break the silence than because it looked too fluffy. Then sat down in front of them and put his shoe up on the bedside table so he could untie it—glancing first at Martin to make sure he didn’t disapprove.

“I mean, I guess,” Martin mused meanwhile. “Not sure why she’d bother, though. Maybe it’s”—with a gasp and a smile Jon could hear in his voice—“maybe she’s put poison in the threads, and that’s why yours and mine are different. Mine’s got—I dunno, some kind of self-esteem poison, like, a reverse SSRI, to make me feel like you don’t need me, so when she kidnaps you I won’t try to save you. And yours….”

As Jon pulled off his now-untied shoe one of the bones in his hip jabbed against some bit of soft tissue it wasn’t supposed to touch. He gasped and dropped his shoe. It thudded on the floor.

“You alright?”

“Fine. Some kind of dex drain, probably.”

“Ha.”

After a silence, Martin spoke again: “Are you sure you’re okay staying here for a bit? Sorry—I kinda bulldozed over your objections earlier.”

Jon finished untying his other shoe, then paused to think while he shook the cramp out of his hand. “No,” he decided. “You didn’t bulldoze, you just…questioned. And you were right to.”

“Still, I mean. It might not be a great idea to stick around here with the spider lady who’s had it in for us since day one. Have you re-listened to the tapes from the day Prentiss attacked, by the way, since you got them back from the Not-Sasha thing?”

“Right—the spider, yes.”

“Yeah, exactly! You wouldn’t even have broke through that wall if it hadn’t been for the spider there!”

Jon nodded and scrubbed at his eyes, trying to muster the energy to match Martin’s tone. This was an important conversation to have, he knew. And a part of him shuddered with recognition to hear Martin talk about those tapes. He had re-listened to them—first at Georgie’s, one night in the small hours as he cleaned her kitchen, thinking clearly for the first time in months and trying to pinpoint the exact moment his thoughts had been clouded with paranoia, so that he might know what signs to look for if something else tried to infect his mind like that. And then again after Basira found the jar of ashes. That time he’d just wanted to suck all the marrow he could from the memory of Martin with his sensible corkscrew and his first answer to Why are you here, even if it did mean having to hear himself ask if Martin was a ghost. A few weeks later, however, after Hilltop Road, he’d done a fair bit of obsessing over the spider thing with Prentiss, yeah. He just wished he could remember what conclusion he’d come to.

All he could remember was going for those tapes yet again only to find them missing from his drawer. But he’d been chasing phantoms all day; it was late at night by then, and when he’d dashed out to tell Basira his fear Annabelle had stolen them, stolen his memories from him just like the Not-Them had, he’d stood there over her and Daisy’s frankenbag for what felt like an hour, mouth open, unable to utter a sound. It felt too much like going to wake up his grandmother after a dream. So he’d told himself to sleep on it—that he’d probably left the tapes in some other obvious place, and would find them in the morning. And when he remembered his panic, the next day at lunch, and checked his drawer again, the tapes were back, right where he expected them. He’d dismissed it as a dream after all. But no—Martin must have borrowed them. He must’ve been worried about the Web, too.

“It’s… it should be okay. I don’t think it’ll be like that here.”

Martin sighed. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“That thing where you just—decide how something is without even telling me why you think so. I mean it’s one thing out there, when you ‘know everything’” (this in a false deep voice) “and can’t possibly share it all, but here? When you’re just guessing, like everyone else? Why don’t you think it’ll be like that here? And what does ‘like that’ even mean?”

“I'm sorry—you’re right—I just mean, I don’t think she has her powers here. Based on what Salesa said about the camera, and on what happens when I try to use my powers….”

“Salesa just said the Eye can’t see this place, though. What about that insect thing he said found its way in?”

“I mean.” Jon shrugged. “We managed to find our way here without the Eye’s help.”

“Yeah, but if the Web has no power here then how could she have called me on a payphone? She had to have known where I was to do that, yeah? And she couldn’t know that from here unless the Web told her to do it, right?”

“Maybe? We don’t even know if the Web works like that.”

“Told her to do it, made her want to do it, gave her the tools to do it, whatever. You know what I mean. Look—we know the Eye’s not totally blind here, since it can still feed on statements. Right?”

Jon wondered now how either one of them could have been so sure of that. “Apparently,” he liked to think he had said—but more likely he’d replied simply, “Right.”

“So then by that logic the Web still probably likes it when she—I don’t know, when she manipulates people here. It probably still gets, like, live tweets from her about it. How do we know it can’t use that information to weave more plots around us?”

“If that’s even how it works,” Jon had replied again. “The other fears don’t work like that—they don’t plan, they just.” He tried to sort his intuition into Martin’s live tweet metaphor. “The fears just like their agents’ tweets, they don’t… comment on them, o-or build new opinions on what they’ve read. It boosts the avatar's… popularity, I guess? Their influence?” Jon hadn’t even logged into Twitter since before the Archives. “But unless the Web is different from all the other fears, it doesn’t—it’s not her boss. It doesn’t come up with the schemes, it just.”

“Isn’t it literally called the ‘Spinner of Schemes’, though? The ‘Mother of Puppets’?”

And Jon couldn’t remember what he’d said to brush off that one.

“Of course she’s dangerous,” Martin said now. “I just don’t see what sinister plot of hers we could possibly be enabling by asking her where to find screwdrivers.”

Jon scoffed. “She’s with the Web, Martin! The ‘Mother of Puppets,’ the ‘Spinner of Schemes’? You’re not supposed to be able to see how the threads connect. Anything we ask her gives her another opening to sink her hooks into.”

“So what, you just don’t want to owe her a favor?”

“Yes?” Jon blinked—on purpose, needless to say. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I mean—why do you think she’s here, Martin, ingratiating herself with us?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because it’s the one place on Earth that hasn’t been turned into a hell dimension?”

Jon snarled and set his head in his free hand. The dizziness was coming back. “In her statement Annabelle said the trick to manipulating people was to make sure they always either over or underestimate you.”

“Okay,” granted Martin, as though prompting Jon to explain how this was relevant.

“She’s trying to humanize herself,” he maintained, scratching an imaginary itch behind his glasses. “We shouldn’t let her.”

“I mean, she is physically more human here.”

“Is she? She doesn’t seem to be withdrawing from the Web; she’s not—like this.” Jon turned his wrist in a circle next to his head.

“Yeah but she’s been here for months, right? Maybe she’s passed through that stage.”

A bitter huff of laughter. “So you’re saying she’s reformed.”

“No. I’m saying the fact she’s not all—loopy here doesn’t necessarily mean she still has any power.”

“She’s got four arms and six eyes, Martin!”

“And you sleep with your eyes open and summon tape recorders, Jon!”

“Well,” mused Jon with a wry smile, “not on purpose.”

“That’s my point! You’ve only got—vestiges here, yeah? I’m not saying we should trust her; I don’t wanna be friends or anything. I’m just saying I don’t think the actual concrete danger she poses here is what’s making you hate the idea of asking her for directions.”

“What about that insect thing Salesa said she chased off. Does that not sound spidery to you?”

“We don’t know that! Maybe she waved his syringe at it.”

Jon took a deep, shaky breath through his nose. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to bring up this next part; he feared it might make Martin too afraid to stay here any longer. “I think she’s plotting against us.”

Blink. “Well, yeah. Of course she is. She’s been plotting against us for—”

“Here, I mean. I mean, I think that’s why she’s here. She’s been hiding from the Eye on purpose so she could lure us into her trap with her spindly little”—Jon thought of the earrings that dangled from Annabelle’s ears like flies, swinging with her every sudden movement. Unconsciously he struck out with his hand as if to catch one, closing his fist around empty air. “Without my being able to see either her or the trap. At best, she’s here gathering information about us so she can report it back to her master.” He pictured the thousand spiders he’d seen birthed during Francis’s nightmare crawling back and forth with messages between here and the nearest Web domain—

“I thought you said the fears didn’t work that way,” pursued Martin—

“And every little thing we tell her is one more thread she can use to pull on us.”

“Okay, but, even if you’re right, ‘Hey Annabelle, our doorknob’s busted, can you help us find the tools to fix it’ isn’t actually a fact about us.”

“But that’s just the best-case scenario, Martin! The worst-case scenario is that she predicted we’d get locked out of our room, or even loosened the screw herself—”

“Not this again—”

“—because she knew we’d have to ask her for help, and wherever she tells us to look for the screwdriver is where she’s laid her trap! Think about it—this couldn’t happen outside the range of the camera, right? It would only work in a place where I can’t just know where to find something. That’s the only scenario where we’d ever ask her for directions.” Martin sighed, crossed his arms, rolled his eyes. Jon looked right at him, hoping to catch them on their way back down. “What if her plan is to trap us here forever so we can’t go stop Elias? What if by trusting her with this, we give her the tools to keep the world like this forever?”

Again Martin sighed. He bit his lip, at last seeming not to have an argument lined up already.

“I can’t actually stop you from going after her”—Jon heard Martin scoff, but pressed on—“but I can’t take part in this.”

“You sort of already did stop me, Jon.” He lifted his arm, pointing vaguely in the direction she’d gone. “We can’t catch up with her now.”

That wasn’t quite true, Jon knew; Martin had chosen to stop and listen to him. Instead of pointing this out in words Jon smiled, meekly, and reached for Martin’s hand. “Guess that’s true. Are you, er, ready for lunch now?”

His answering scoff sounded fond, indulgent, rather than incredulous. “Yeah, alright.”

With Martin’s hand still in his, Jon turned around—an awkward business, while holding hands in such a narrow passage—and began to walk back towards the dining room. At the end of the corridor stood a tall, thin, many-limbed figure, holding a water carafe, a stack of glasses, and four steaming plates of food.

“You boys getting hungry?” As she stepped toward them her shoes clacked against the floor. How had they not heard her approach? And what was she doing back at that end of the corridor?

“How did you—?”

“I have my ways. I’ve brought lunch for you both, if you’re amenable.”

“Oh—well, thanks, you’re, you’re just in time, actually.” Jon didn’t dare look away from Annabelle Cane long enough to confirm this, but suspected Martin had directed that last bit at him as much as her. “Can I help you with those?”

Annabelle managed to shrug without dislodging anything from the four plates in her hands. “You can take the napkins if you want,” she said, extending toward Martin the forearm from which they hung.

Jon sat back down in the chair he’d left at a haphazard angle—though it felt weird, since he usually sat on the table’s other side. He thanked Martin when he handed him a napkin, and allowed Annabelle to set an empty glass and a plate of food in front of him. It was a pasta dish, with clams—from a can, he reminded himself. A can and a jar of pasta sauce. Couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes to put together.

“Salesa’s still out of it,” observed Martin. “Don’t think he’ll make too much of his.”

“A shame,” Annabelle agreed. She set a plate down in front of the sleeping Salesa anyway. “Maybe the smell of food’ll wake him up.”

“Are you going to eat with us?” Martin asked, as he and Jon both watched her deposit a fourth plate across the table from them.

“I may as well. We do still have to eat to live here, don’t we?” Jon could tell she meant this comment as an invitation for him to join their conversation, but he didn’t intend to take her bait. “Besides,” Annabelle went on, “this way you’ll know I’ve not saved the best for myself.” With one hand she picked up her own plate again; another of her long, thin arms reached out to take Jon’s plate.

He dragged it to the side, out of her reach. “No, thank you.”

“Alright. Martin,” she said, looking over at him with a patient, patronizing smile. “Will you switch plates with me?”

“Oh, my god,” Martin groaned into his hand. “Sure, why not.”

Something small and gray skittered across the table toward her. For half a second Annabelle took her eyes from Martin. Her nostrils flared; one of her eyes twitched; Jon heard a stifled squawk from behind her closed lips as she swept the skittery thing over her edge of the table. He made no such effort to hide his scoff. Did she think she could play nice, by declining to hold little spider conversations in front of them? That they’d think she was on their side as long as they couldn’t see her chatting to her little spies?

“Thank you,” Annabelle sing-songed meanwhile, returning her gaze to Martin. “You’re sweet.”

On their first morning here, after showering and then shuddering back into their filthy clothes, Jon and Martin had barely left their room before Annabelle dangled herself in their path, with cups of tea (Jon refused his) and an offer to show them to the pantry. From this tour Jon had concluded that all food in this place was tainted by her influence. And he didn’t actually feel hungry at that point? He remembered Martin remarking on his hunger before they’d both fallen asleep, but Jon had felt only tired. Surely that meant he still didn’t need food here, right? It’d been like that before the change, after the coma—he’d needed sleep and statements to keep up his strength, but could function just fine without… people food. So he’d resolved to accept nothing offered him here—or at least, nothing Salesa and Annabelle hadn’t already given him and Martin without their consent. No tea, none of Salesa’s booze, no use of the huge industrial washing machines, no food.

That resolution lasted about nine hours. He knew because on that first day time still felt like such a novelty he and Martin had counted every one. Once he’d tried and failed to compel Salesa—once he’d heard him give a statement and managed to space out for half of it, rather than transcending himself in the ecstasy of vicarious fear—Jon started to grow conscious of his hunger. After two hours he felt shaky; after four he started picking quarrels, first just with Annabelle when she showed up with snacks, then with Salesa, and then even with Martin; after six he felt first hot, then cold. Finally around the eight-hour mark he was hiding tears over an untied shoelace, and figured it was worth finding out how much of this torment people food could solve. He sat through dinner, flaunting his empty plate—then stole to the pantry for something he could make himself. Settled for dry toast and raisins. “Couldn’t you find the jam?” Martin had asked him.

“Didn’t think of it,” Jon lied, once he’d got his throat round a lump of under-chewed toast.

“You want me to get some for you? That looks pretty depressing without it,” Martin said, with his eyebrows and the line of his mouth both raised in a pitying smile.

“Better make it one of the sealed jars.”

“What, so Annabelle can’t have got to it?” Jon nodded, chewing so as to have neither to smile back nor decide not to. “You know she made the bread, right.”

Of course she had. Jon dropped his head onto his fists. “Fuck.”

“What did you think?” mused Martin with a laugh. “That Salesa just popped down to the supermarket?”

“I don’t know—that they’d taken it from the freezer, maybe?”

“I mean, that’s possible,” Martin granted with a shrug. “Should I get you that jam?”

Big sigh. “Fine.”

In reality he’d stared up at the row of jam jars in Salesa’s pantry for a full ten seconds before deciding not to have any. He feared spiders would spill out of the jar onto his hand as soon as he got it open. But he also feared he might not be able to open it at all—only hurt himself trying. Way back in their first year in the Archives together, Martin had once seen him struggling to get open the jar where he kept paperclips. Jon hadn’t realized he was being watched—or, that is, that Martin was watching him. In the Archives the sense of someone watching was so omnipresent one soon lost the ability to distinguish Elias’s evil Eye from other, more mundane eyes. Anyway, after three minutes’ effort and nothing to show for it but a misplaced MCP joint in his thumb, Jon had given up on paper-clipping the photos Tim had pilfered for him to their relevant statement and begun hunting through his desk drawers for a stapler instead. And then a high-pitched pop above his head made him startle so badly he gasped, choked on his own spit, and flung the picture in his hand across the room like a paper airplane.

Around the sound of his own cough he could hear Martin shouting Sorry, and Tim and Sasha laughing on the other side of the wall. Martin’s laugh soon joined theirs, though it sounded desperate, sheepish. He dove after the photo Jon had dropped, and then, when he came back with it, explained, “Got the paperclips for you.”

Jon frowned. “This is a photograph, Martin.”

“No, I mean—?” His laugh came out like a whimper; he picked the unlidded jar up an inch off the table, then set it back down. “Here.”

Okay, so, not exactly an auspicious start, but, it still became a thing? Martin opening his paperclip jar. At first he’d wished he could just remember not to seal it so tightly; he could get it just fine when he stopped turning it earlier. At least when the weather hadn’t changed since the last time he opened it. But then when they all started leaving the Archives less often, and the break-room fridge filled up with condiments that all seemed to have twist-off lids… he’d kind of liked that? Martin would hand him the peanut-butter jar, with its lid off and pinned to its side with one finger, before Jon had even finished asking for it. This seemed to be the pattern behind all his early positive impressions of Martin: the jar lids, the corkscrew, the way he managed to make mealtimes at the Institute feel like proper breaks. Martin had seemed like such an oaf to him at first—clumsy, absent-minded, always seeming to think that if he professed enough good will with his smiles and cups of tea and I know you won’t like this, but, then no one would notice his impertinent comments and all the doors he left wide open. All the dogs and worms and spiders he let in. He’d seemed to Jon the human embodiment of a fly left undone—more so than ever after the morning he’d walked in on him wearing naught but frog-print boxer shorts. But he had this easy grace with things that needed twisting off. Banana peels, bottle caps, wine corks, worms.

And then when he came back after the Unknowing Martin was never around. Jon and Basira and Melanie all lived in the Archives, like Martin had two years before, but by that point he wasn’t on Could you open this for me? terms with any of them. But he hadn’t needed people food anymore, and if he subluxed a joint it would heal instantly anyway. So he’d just struggled and sworn, feeling stupid for shrinking from the pain even after having chopped off his own finger. And it got easier with practice. By the time he and Martin reunited, he’d got so used to it that sometimes he’d hand jars to Martin already unlidded. Martin hadn’t seemed to notice. Finally, one evening a day or two after that row they had over the ice-cream thing, Jon had opened a jar of pasta sauce (he’d taken up people food again at Daisy’s safehouse, if only to make their time there feel more like a regular holiday), and reached out to hand it to Martin—then paused and retracted the hand that gripped the jar, remembering his promise to be more open about.

“This is, um.” He’d glanced up at Martin, then back to the floor as the latter said,

“Huh?”

“This is one of those things that’s got better since the coma. Since I became an avatar. I can, um. I can open jars now? Without.” He’d almost said Without hurting myself, then remembered that wasn’t technically true. Deep breath. “Without lasting harm. It—it hurts for a second? But the Eye heals it instantly. That's why I’ve been.”

“Oh,” Martin said, seeming to stall for time as he absorbed this information. He accepted the jar which Jon again held out to him, and turned it around in his hands, eyes on its label. “Yeah, I—I noticed, you’re really good at opening jars now,” he went on with a laugh. Again he paused, and blew a sigh out of his mouth. “Right. Okay. Thank you for telling me?”

“I’ll try and be better about….”

Martin nodded, turning back to the stove and beginning to stir sauce into the pasta. “Yeah. I, uh—I didn’t know that was why you used to need me to open them for you?” Since the other night’s argument, Jon had gathered as much. He nodded too. “I thought you were just, heh, you know. Weaker than me.”

“I mean, I am—”

“Well yeah but you know what I mean.”

“I do. I should’ve told you.”

“No, I—actually I think you’re in the clear on that one, if I’m honest. I just—it’s just weird? I thought I was done having to” (another blown-out sigh punctuated his speech) “having to reframe stuff I thought was normal around some unseen horror. Sorry,” he added when he’d finished beating sauce off Daisy’s wooden spoon; “that’s probably not a great way to.”

“No—it’s fine?”

“Suppose it sounds like an exaggeration, now, after all we’ve.”

Mechanically, Jon nodded, without deciding whether he agreed or not. Around an awkward laugh, he confessed, “‘Unseen horror’ might be the nicest way I’ve ever heard anyone describe it.”

“Er. Yikes? That sounds like you might need some better friends, Jon.”

“Maybe,” he conceded, laughing again. “I—I just mean, it’s nice to hear something other than?” Jon paused and pushed his little fingers back the hundred or so degrees they each would go. First the left, then the right. Other than what? Well, doubt, for a start. Though most of the doubt he heard from outside himself was implicit. Careful silence from people he told about it; requests people made of him seemingly just so he’d have to tell them he couldn’t do that; impatience, bafflement, suspicion from strangers. Why are you out of breath, the woman behind the Immigration desk had asked him at O’Hare, as if breathlessness incriminated him somehow. But that wasn’t the response he’d subconsciously measured Martin’s phrase against. What he had in mind now was more like… bland support. Hurried support. Assurances quick and dutiful, yet so vague he could tell the people who gave them were thinking only of the mistakes they might make, if they dared to acknowledge what he’d said with any more than half a sentence. The I’m sorry you’re in pain equivalents of Right away, Mr. Sims.

That was it—unseen horror was an original thought. Martin had put it in his own words, rather than either borrowing Jon’s or using none at all. “Other than a platitude.”

So at Salesa’s when Martin came back with the jam jar he handed it to Jon. Jon made a show of trying to open it, but could feel his middle finger threatening to leave its top half behind. It frightened him, in a way he’d forgot was even possible. For such a long time now, pain had just been pain? He’d grown so unused to the threat it held for normal people. The threat of actual danger, of injury. He’d set down the jar on the table in front of him, and crossed his arms in front of it.

“Can’t get it, huh?” Martin asked; Jon shook his head.

How much danger, though, he wondered. Earlier that day, after he and Martin got out of the bath, his left index finger had popped out while he was buttoning his shirt. It still ached when he used the finger, or thought about the cracking sound it had made—but didn’t throb anymore without provocation. Not much danger there; not even much inconvenience. He supposed if he hurt his middle finger too then he might have some trouble with his trouser button the next time he had to pee? Right, yes, what a cross to bear. I hurt myself doing x; now it hurts to do x. But it already hurt to do x, didn’t it? Didn’t x always hurt, before the change? Why did he so fear to face an hour or a day where it hurt more than usual, but not so much I can’t do it?

“So you’re saying it won’t… come off?”

“Ha, ha.”

“Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”

“What if I open it and it’s full of spiders?”

Martin had smiled, rolled his eyes, pulled the jar toward him, and twisted its lid off with a pop. “See? No spiders in this one.

“While you’re here, Annabelle,” Jon heard Martin say, “I don’t suppose you know anything about where Salesa keeps his screwdrivers?”

Annabelle tapped her chin and said, very pleasantly, “Hmmm. Perhaps they’re where he left them after the last time something broke.”

Martin’s lips drew closer together. “Yeah,” he nodded, “probably. Any idea where that might be?”

“Perhaps he keeps them next to whatever screw comes loose most often.”

“And do you know which screw that is?”

She shook her head, though who knew whether that meant she didn’t know or merely that she didn’t mean to tell him. “Perhaps he only uses the item when he’s alone,” she said, with a shrug and a sly smile.

“…Ew.” Annabelle cackled like a school kid pulling a prank. “Right, great,” sighed Martin. “Thanks a lot. Forget it. You done, Jon?”

Jon glanced sleepily down at his plate. Only half empty, but cold by now. “Yes.”

“Nice of you to grace us with your presence, Annabelle,” Martin said, sliding his and Jon’s plates toward her side of the table.

Instead of energy, lunch gave Jon only a slight queasy feeling—like one gets from eating sweets on an empty stomach.

“God”—hissed Martin, with clenched fists, as they ambled back to their room—“‘Perhaps he keeps them next to the screw that gets loose most often.’ Yeah, figured that out already, thanks! Can you even believe her? Sitting down to eat with us, as if she’s all ready to help, and then the best she can do is,” he paused and straightened, then said with a finger to his chin in imitation of Annabelle, “‘Oh, hm, guess he only uses it alone. Oh well!’”

“Don’t know what else you expected.”

Martin sighed, his arms crossed now. “Guess I should’ve done what you asked after all, since that accomplished nothing.” After a moment he went on, “Least it wasn’t a trap, right? I tried not to give her anything she could use against us.” With a smile Jon could hear without looking at him, “You notice how I pointedly didn’t offer to help clean up?”

“No, I didn’t,” Jon confessed, laughing a little.

“No?!” Again Martin paused on his feet, frowning, incredulous. Jon wished he wouldn’t; standing still made him dizzier, took more effort than walking, like that poor woman in Oliver’s domain. Daniela? Martin shook his head at himself. “Ugh—then who knows if she noticed, either. I thought I was being so obvious!”

“I mean—”

“Wait, hold up, let’s double back.”

“Are you going to go back and tell her it was on purpose?”

“No, just”—he echoed Jon’s laugh—“no, of course not. I just wanted to try that wing’s toilets next. Didn’t want her to see which way we were going.”

“Oh.” By this time Martin had turned around and started to walk the other way; Jon hung back. “Er. I thought—I thought we were going to our room first.”

“What, the new one you mean?” asked Martin, turning his head around to look back at him.

“…Yes,” Jon decided. Until this moment he’d forgot about that, and been daydreaming of their original bed.

“Sure, if you want. Do you need a break?”

“I… I think so, yes.”

Martin turned the rest of the way around, shuffled toward Jon and looked him over, with a concerned frown. He took his free hand between his fingers and thumb, brushing the latter over Jon’s knuckles. “Yeah, okay. You still seem pretty out of it. How are you feeling?”

“Not great,” answered Jon, though he smiled in relief at Martin’s willingness to change the plan for him.

“Food didn’t help?”

His stomach seemed hung with cobwebs; his mind, like a large room with half its lights burnt out. His light head seemed attached to his heavy, aching body only by a string, like a balloon tied to an Open-House sign. He still needed the toilet. “Not really?”

“Yeah, thought not. You need a statement, huh.”

Jon shrugged, avoiding Martin’s eyes. “Probably.”

In the interim bedroom Jon sat down at the edge of the bed, bent down over his legs, and untied his shoes, wondering why his life always came back around to this. His hip got stuck like a drawer that’s been pulled out crooked, so he had to lever himself back up with his arms, trapping fistfuls of counterpane between thumbs and the meat of his palms. It made his hands cramp, but that helped—the way it would have helped to bite his finger. When he’d got himself upright again he sat and blinked for a few seconds, hoping each time he opened his eyes that his vision would’ve cleared.

Martin sat down next to him and put his hand on Jon’s arm. “You’re blinking again. You okay?”

“Just… kind of dizzy? It’s an Eye thing.”

He let Martin pull him towards him until their shoulders touched. “Yeah. Makes sense. Nap should help. Statement’ll definitely help.”

“Right.”

They agreed to lie on the bed rather than properly in it, not wanting to have to put the covers back together afterward. Jon set his head on that squishy part of Martin’s chest where it started to give way to armpit, knowing to angle himself so the scar tissue pressed the hollow part of his cheek rather than anywhere bonier. It was normally dangerous to lie half on his back, half on his side like this, but he’d lately discovered he could use Martin’s leg to keep his hip from falling off. He could feel the muscles in his shoulder twitching and cramping, whether to pull the joint out or keep it in who could tell. But it’d be fine as long as he shrugged the arm every few minutes.

All the ways they knew to spend time in each other’s company had come together in Scotland, where he’d had none of these worries. Even after the change, on their journey, with nothing but sleeping bags between them and desecrated earth, he’d borne only the same aches he’d been ignoring since he read the statement that ended the world. Jon imagined lying next to Martin like this on the cold stone of a tomb in the Necropolis, surrounded by guardian angels’ malicious laughter. Not feeling the cold, or the grain of the stone against his ankles and the bandage on his shin—just knowing it was there, like when you watch someone suffer those things in a movie. Less vivid even than a statement about lying on a tomb; in Naomi Herne’s nightmare he’d felt the stone in her hands.

“Hfff, okay—ready to get back to it?”

“Mrrr.”

“…Jon, are you asleep?”

He shrugged his hanging shoulder. “No.”

Nose laugh. “Come on, wake up.”

“Mmrrrrrrr.”

“My arm’s asleep.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It won’t wake up ‘till you get up off of it, Jon,” said Martin, gently, between huffs of laughter.

“Hmr.” Jon rolled away to face the wall with the window, freeing Martin’s arm.

“Do you want me to go look without you?”

“Okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mhm.”

Cold air washed over his newly-exposed arm, ribcage, side of face, the outside of his sore hip. It was cold on this Martinless side of the bed, too. He rolled back over into the shadow of his warmth, but that still wasn’t as good as the real thing. Maybe he could pull the covers halfway out and roll himself up in them.

“Aaagh, no—Jon”—Martin’s cool hand on top of his as he tried to hook his fingers round the counterpane— “we’re trying to leave the room the way we found it, remember?”

“Hmmmrrgh.” He consented to leave his hand still when Martin’s departed from it. A few seconds later, a rustle against his ear, the smell of smoke and old clothes.

“Here.”

Jon crunched the jacket down so it wouldn’t itch his ear. “You won’t need it?”

“Probably not.”

“Hm.”

“I’ll be back for it if I have to go outside again, yeah?”

“Okay.”

In his mind’s eye they trudged into the wind, hand in hand. It blew Martin’s hood off his head, and inverted Jon’s cane like an umbrella. He shrunk himself further under Martin’s jacket, relishing the new pockets of warmth he created as his calves met his thighs and his hands gripped his shoulders.

“Ooookay…! Wish me luck?”

“Good luck,” managed Jon around a yawn.

Martin had been right about the wallpaper. Not only was the red too bright to look at comfortably; it also had the kind of flowered pattern just complex enough that every time you look back at it you’re compelled to double-check where it repeats. Every fourth stripe was the same as the first, right? Not every second? And that weird little scroll-shaped petal—he’d seen that one too recently. Was it the same as?—No, that one was a bud. He pulled Martin’s jacket up so it covered his eyes.

They’d put their jackets through the laundry with everything else, their first day here, but that hadn’t got the smell out. Enough time had passed between the burning building and their arrival here for the smoke to embed itself permanently into their jackets and shoes, like how duffel bags once taken camping always smell like barbecue. And everything they’d ever shoved in those backpacks still had some of that odd, sour, Ritz-cracker smell of clothes left unwashed too long.

Daisy used to smell like smoke and laundry, too, once she quit smelling like dirt. It was the smell of the old green sleeping bag she’d zipped up to Basira’s. She said she’d have showered it off if she could; she didn’t like it. To her it was a Hunt smell—it reminded her of her clearing in the woods. But there weren’t any showers in the Archives. She’d point this out every time, in the same wry voice, so Jon was sure she’d intended the metaphor. No showers in the Archives: you couldn’t hide your sins in a temple of the Eye. This had comforted Jon—or maybe flattered was the word, though he knew her better than to think she’d have done so on purpose. He just wasn’t sure he agreed. He’d hid his sins pretty well from himself, after the coma. It was easy; you just had to lose track of scale. No one could remember all of them at once, after all. Others had had to point the important ones out to him.

Were those footsteps he could hear out there? Not Annabelle’s—? No; her clicky shoes. These were blunter. Could be Salesa, awake at last, come to invite them to play a game with him. “How do you two feel about… foosball?” he would say, drawing out the last word in a husky whisper. Only then would he swing the door wide open to reveal himself in a shiny jersey, shorts, and studded shoes. He set his fists out before him and turned them in semicircles, pretending to manipulate the plastic rods of a foosball table. Jon curled still more tightly into himself at the thought of Salesa’s face, how his showman’s grin would crumple like a hole in a cellophane wrapper when he realized the fun one had gone and that he faced only the Archivist. “Oh—hello. Jon, is it? Where has your lovely Martin gone?”

“Oh, uh. Martin needs a screwdriver to fix our door, so I.”

He watched Martin march his silent way slowly, solemnly down a corridor that grew darker, grayer, vaguer with every step until the webs that lined its every side and hung in laces from the ceiling began to catch on his shoes, his belt, his glasses.

“I let him go off alone.”

Jon’s whole body flinched. He gasped awake—oh shit. How had he just let Martin go? He had to—couldn’t stay here—find Martin—keep him out of Annabelle’s clutches—

Stick-thin bristling spider legs tapped the floor of his mind like fingers on a table. Find Martin. Jon instructed himself to sit up, swing his legs over the side of the bed and reach down to grab his shoes. He twitched one finger. See? You can do this. In a minute he’d try again and be able to move his whole arm, push himself up onto one hand. Find Martin.

Also probably go to the toilet. With an empty bladder his head would be clearer, he could figure out which direction to look first.

After Hopworth, while he laid on the couch in his office waiting for the strength to throw himself into the Buried, Jon had imagined Martin and Georgie and Basira and Melanie all stood around that coffin, wearing black and holding flowers. Denise? No, it definitely had three syllables. A scattered applause began as Jonah Magnus emerged from his office, closed behind him the door printed with poor dead Bouchard’s name, and stepped up to the podium. Georgie, not knowing his face, began to clap; Melanie stayed her hands. Elagnus’s shirt, hidden behind suit except for the collar, was striped in black and white. A ball and chain hung from his sleeve like an enormous cufflink. He opened his mouth to speak, and a tape recorder began to hiss.

“What are you doing here?” asked Basira.

“Never underestimate how much I care for the tools I use, Detective. I wouldn’t miss my Archivist’s big day.”

“So they just let you out for this.”

Elias shrugged with false modesty. His chain jingled. “When I asked them nicely.”

“How did you even know he was dead?” interposed Melanie. “Basira, did you tell him about the—”

“She didn’t have to,” said Elias, raising his voice to cut Melanie’s off. “Nothing escapes my notice, and I like to keep an eye out for this sort of thing.”

“Well—it’s—good to see you.” Tim’s voice. Unconvincing, even then.

Jon steeled himself to hear his own voice stammer out, “Yes—y-yes!” but heard nothing except the hissing of the… tape. Yes, that was the wrong tape—the one from his birthday.

“Anyway. Somebody mentioned cake.” Elias jingled as he arranged his hands under his chin.

Tim scoffed. “They didn’t serve cake at my funeral.”

“I preferred going out for ice cream anyway,” pronounced Martin, his arms crossed and his nose in the air. Jon pushed himself up on shaking hands. Find Martin.

They had gone for ice cream at John O’Groats before the change, while living at Daisy’s safehouse. Martin had apologized on behalf of the kiosk for its measly selection—no rum and raisin. Jon pronounced a playful “Urgh,” assuming Martin had cited this flavor as a joke. “I think I’ll manage without that particular abomination.”

“Wait, what? Why did you order it at my birthday party then?”

Jon stood still with his ice cream cone, squinted into space, and blinked. “I did?”

“My first birthday in the Archives, yeah!”

“Huh. That’s… odd.” Martin placed a gentle hand on Jon’s back to remind him to resume walking. “I suppose I must have been—huh. Yes,” he mused, nodding slowly as his hypothesis came into focus between his eyes and the ground. “I must still have thought I was tired of all the good flavors at that point.”

He heard Martin scoff a few steps ahead of him. “What, and now you’re happy with plain old vanilla?” Then he heard arrhythmic footsteps thumping toward him from Martin’s direction; he looked up to find Martin reaching his napkin-draped free hand out toward Jon’s ice cream cone. “You’re dripping again,” he explained.

Jon mumbled thanks and shrugged a laugh. “I-I’ve, uh. Come back around on most of them.”

“Except rum and raisin?”

“No—I’ve come around on it, too, just, uh.” He tried to make the shape of a wheel with his ice-cream-cone-laden hand. It flicked drips of vanilla across his shirt. Martin came at him with the napkin again. “Thank you. I just disliked that one to start with.”

“…Right. Okay, so what revolution occurred in your life before the Archives that overturned all your opinions on ice cream flavors?”

So Jon had told Martin about that summer when his jaw kept subluxing. He’d used that word, assuming Martin was familiar with it already—incorrect, as he knew now. Presumably Martin had gathered from context that Jon meant he’d hurt his jaw, in some small-scale, no-big-deal way whose specifics he’d let slide as an unimportant detail. But then as the anecdote wore on he must have begun to feel the hole in his knowledge. And lo, at last Martin had invoked that dread specter the clarifying question.

“Okay but so your grandmother had no problem with you basically living off ice cream all summer?”

“Well, she did when I could chew. But not when it was that or tinned soup.”

“Ah—right. ‘Cause you hurt your… jaw, you said?” Jon nodded. “What happened exactly?”

“Oh. Uh. Happened? Nothing, just my—I was born, I guess. Just part of my genetic condition; I happened to get it especially bad in the jaw that year. I-it’s much better now, though,” he hastened to add when he noticed Martin’s frown.

“What genetic condition? You never told me you had one.”

“Didn’t I?”

At the time, the anger in Martin’s answering scoff had surprised him. “No, Jon, you never said.”

“Oh. Sorry? I—I mean, you’ve seen me with this for years—I just?—thought you knew.”

“Seen you with—what, the cane, you mean? I thought that was Prentiss!”

Jon glanced to the doorway to double-check that was where he’d left his cane.

“What? No,” he had mused. “Of course not. I’ve had this since….”

“But you never used it.”

“No—surely, I—”

“Not once before Prentiss.”

Even as he’d said the words, Jon’s memory of that time had returned to him and he’d known Martin was right. Before Prentiss attacked the Institute he’d brought his cane with him to work in the Archives every day, and every day left it folded up in his bag. All out of an obscure notion that if he’d used it before Elias and before his coworkers, they’d take it as a plea for mercy, an admission of weakness or incompetence. God, he was naïve back then. He’d used the cane often enough back in Research; why hadn’t he worried Tim and Sasha would find its new absence conspicuous? That they’d worry just as much about his refusal to use it? The whole thing seemed even more stupid, too, now that he knew Elias must have noticed the change. How it must have pleased him, to see his shiny new Archivist so obsessed with proving he was fit for the job.

“Yeah but,” Jon pursued, instead of voicing any of this, “Tim never—?”

Martin nodded and shrugged. “I don’t know; I figured Tim didn’t get them in the legs as much as you did. I didn’t see you guys after the attack, remember? Not ‘til you got out of quarantine.”

“Right, no, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry,” said Jon mechanically, already consumed with the question he asked next. “Martin—did you think it was the corkscrew?”

From Martin’s sigh Jon figured he’d been expecting this question. “Kinda? At first, yeah. Half for real, half just—you know, as a habit? Like, ‘Look, a way to blame yourself!’” He splayed out his hands, rolled his eyes.

“Yes—I do that too.” Jon barely got the words out above a whisper; he couldn’t not smile, but fought to keep it from showing teeth. A muscle under his chin spasmed with the effort.

“But then I noticed you switching sides with it a lot, so, yeah. I knew it couldn’t be just that.”

“Really?” He waited for Martin’s answering shrug. “You’re the first person who’s ever noticed that. Or at least commented on it.”

“Sorry?”

“No—it’s.”

This attempt to communicate a similar sentiment, Jon recalled as he reached for his shoes, hadn’t gone as well as the one a few days later (over unseen horror &c.). Beholding had at that moment presented him with the image of a fat, hunched woman in shorts. She shuffled forward a few steps in a queue at Boots, next to him, and shifted her weight so the cane in her right hand supported her nearer leg. He felt a strong impulse he knew wasn’t his own—one born partly of resentment, part exasperation, part concern—to tell the woman that was bad for her shoulder, that she should switch hands too. But knew if he tried she’d either pretend she hadn’t heard it, or tell him off for criticizing her. Jon didn’t know what she would say more specifically; the Eye didn’t do hypotheticals. It had given him no more than this single moment of preverbal intuition. After the change he could have sought out other conversations Martin had had with his mother, and they might have given him a pretty good idea. But he’d promised Martin not to look at things like that.

He managed to dislodge a finger while tying his shoe. The other shoe he’d pulled off without untying; in a fit of impatience he tried now to shove his foot into it as it was. No good—he got the shoe on, but it just made the other index finger, the one he’d hooked into the back of the shoe behind his heel for leverage, pop off to the side too. Jon was afraid to find out what shape it would end up in if he pulled his finger back out of the shoe like that, so he had to untie it after all, one-handed. Then carefully extract his finger. It sprung back into place as soon as he removed the offending pressure (namely, his heel), but he still whimpered and swore. The corners of his eyes pricked with indignation when he remembered he still had to pee.

In this case, for once, Beholding had told him the important part: that that was why Martin had noticed. Had he noticed Melanie, too, Jon wondered, when she got back from India? She would switch hands sometimes, too—but, of course, without switching legs. He wondered if that had picked at the same unacknowledged nerve of Martin’s that his mother’s habit had. It had bothered Jon, too, but in a different way. He’d resented it a little, but also felt humbled by it, the way he always did by others’ discomfort. Getting shot in the leg seemed so big? Like such an aberration. So uncontroversially important—probably because it was simple, legible. Georgie could convey its hugeness to him in three words. She got shot. Obviously there was more to the story than that; there were parts he could never…

Well, no. There was a part of it he felt he should say he could never understand: that she’d kept the cursed bullet because she wanted it. In fact he was pretty sure he did understand that. But he didn’t have the right to admit it, he didn’t think. And no reason to hope she would believe him if he did. The second he’d learnt the bullet was still in there, after all, he and Basira had rushed to dig it out. Surely, from her perspective that could only mean he didn’t and could never understand. Or maybe he just wanted her to see it that way—wanted her to get to keep that uncomplicated resentment of his ignorance. It made his perspective look stupid and ugly, sure. But the truth made it look self-absorbed and pitiful. The truth was that until Daisy insisted otherwise, he’d assumed only he could see his own corruption and assent to it: that the others must not have known what they were doing.

Then again, maybe even if Melanie knew that, she would see only that he had underestimated her. Maybe it didn’t matter how much she knew.

Melanie switched off which hand she held her white cane with now, too. But that was probably healthy? Jon knew no more than the average person about white-cane hygiene. He just remembered feeling the floor drop out of his stomach when they’d got coffee together during his time in hiding and he had seen her switch her original, silver cane from hand to hand. Part of him had wanted to scoff or rationalize it away. How much could the shot leg hurt, really, if she still noticed when her arms got tired? But another part of him shuddered at the thought one arm alone couldn’t compensate for the weight her leg refused to take—that she had to keep switching off when one arm got weak and shaky from supporting more weight than it should have to. It wasn’t that he hadn’t experienced pain or impairment on that scale. He had, though the thought of a single injury sufficing to cause it still made him feel cold inside. It was that he kept seeing proofs, all over, everywhere, that the parts of his life he’d only learnt to accept by assuming they were rare weren’t rare.

Leitner hadn’t made the evil books; he’d just noticed they were there. And then had his life ruined by their influence, like everyone who came across them. Jon had had no time and no right to deplore the holes Prentiss had left in him and Tim, because on the same damn day he learnt someone had shot the previous Archivist to death. Alright, so it was him, then, right? Him and Tim—just doomed, just preternaturally unlucky. Tim, handsome face half-eaten by worms, estranged (as Jon then assumed) from a brother who seemed so warm and accepting in that picture on his lock screen; Jon, saved from Mr. Spider only by his childhood bully, now fated to take the place of another murder victim—and also half-eaten by worms. But no; he and Tim had got off lightly. Look what had happened to Sasha the same fucking night. The very thing whose influence convinced him the world had it out for him? Had killed Sasha. Literally stolen her life. How many lives around him got stolen while he mourned his own?

“I want you to comment on it,” Jon had managed to clarify. But Martin had scoffed as he stood in the foyer of Daisy’s safehouse, hopping on one foot to pull off the other shoe:

“Yeah, well. You haven’t exactly led by example on that one.”

“How could I?”

He accepted Jon’s scarf and long-discarded jacket, hanging them up beside his own. “Gee, I don’t know—commenting on it yourself?”

“On… switching which side I used the cane on.”

“Don’t play dumb, Jon. On this ‘genetic condition’” (in a deep, posh voice, with a stodgy frown and fluttering eyelashes) “you’ve apparently had this entire time. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“I thought you knew, Martin! Why would I mention it in a childhood anecdote if I didn’t think...?”

“Well I didn’t know, okay? You never told me. You never tell anyone anything about what’s going on with you, you just—you just make everything into another heroic cross to bear.”

“That’s not—?” He wanted to tell Martin just how little that made him want to say about it. But he guessed Martin was really talking less about the EDS thing, more about how he’d spent their whole first year in the Archives pretending to dismiss the statements that scared him. How he’d sent Tim and Martin home when he’d found out about Sasha. How he’d stayed away from the Institute even after his name got cleared for Leitner’s murder. “What do you want to know.”

“Why you never—?” In a similar way, Martin seemed to reconsider his initial response. “Yeah, okay, right. Object-level stuff, yeah?” Jon nodded and wanly smiled. “Okay, so. What’s it called?”

After taking a minute to ditch his shoes, wash the sticky ice-cream residue off his hands, and drink some water, he’d sat down on the couch with Martin and told him its name, what it was, what it did. What does that mean, though, Martin kept asking, so he’d explained how it applied to the anecdote about his jaw. Martin asked why it meant he needed a cane.

“Be…cause all my joints are like that.”

“Yeah, but why does it help with that? What is the cane actually for, is what I’m asking.”

Jon hated being asked that question. “It—it means I don’t fall over when one of my joints stops working? A-and… also makes walking hurt less. I suppose.”

“So, when they’re working right, that’s when you don’t need it?”

“No—yes?—sort of. Now sometimes I just need it when it’s been too long since I had a statement. I get sort of. Weak.” Quickly Jon added, “But I don’t need it for stability so much since the coma.” He’d shown Martin how now, when he pulled out his finger, the Eye would just sort of erase that version of reality—how the dislocation wouldn’t snap back, but simply cease to exist. As if his body were a drawing on which the Beholding had corrected a mistake. He put his palms together behind his back, in the way he’d been told one couldn’t without subluxing both shoulders, and told Martin to watch how the hollows between his shoulder bones vanished. He opened his jaw ‘til it jarred to the side, and told Martin to listen for the static.

But Jon had never shown Martin how these things worked before the coma. Martin had no reference for this kind of thing; he understood only enough to find the sights unsettling. “That’s—no, that’s okay, I’ll”—he stuttered as Jon fumbled with his kneecap in search of a fourth example—“I-I get it. I’ll take your word for it.”

“I just thought.”

“No, I—? I don’t need you to prove it to me, Jon.” (The latter nodded, blushing, trying to smile.) “I get… I’m sorry. I guess I get why it’d feel easier not to say anything if? If you think it’s either that or have to convince people it’s a thing.”

Again Jon nodded. He suspected Martin wasn’t through talking yet. But Martin still wasn’t looking at him, eyes squeezed tight against Jon’s party tricks. So, to show he was listening, Jon said, “Yes. Er—thank you, Martin.”

“I just don’t like it when you hide things from me.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You could at least ask if I want to know about them, yeah?”

Even at the time, Jon had doubted this. If they’d had this conversation after the change, he might have pointed out to Martin that when you mention something the other person has no inkling of, you make them too curious to decline your offer of more information, even if afterward they’ll admit they wish you’d never told them.

“Or ask me if I even recognize what you’re talking about, the next time you start going on about some childhood anecdote where you incidentally had a dislocated jaw. Honestly, would it kill you to start with, ‘Hey, did I ever tell you about x’?”

“No, it wouldn’t. You’re right. I’ll try. What… kinds of things did you—? For the future, I mean. What kinds of things did you want to make sure I tell you about.”

Martin sighed, in that way he did when he thought Jon was going about something all wrong. But after a pause to think, he did ask, “About this, or in general?”

“Either—both—first one, then the other.”

“Okay. I guess… I want to know when you’re hurt, mostly. Like—I can’t believe I even have to say this—that’s kind of important, actually? How am I supposed to know how to behave around you if I never know whether you're secretly in pain or not?”

This seemed weird—both now and at the time. Jon figured he must be missing something. If Martin thought he only needed the cane because of Prentiss then, sure, that might have affected how he imagined Jon’s discomfort to himself, but? Wasn’t the cane itself an admission of pain? Why did Martin think he owed him more than that—that he had owed him more than that at the time, no less? Did he not realize how fucking private that was? What a surrender of privacy the cane represented?

But, no, he reminded himself now; nondisabled people don’t realize that, unless you tell them about it. Repeatedly. Over and over. It only seems obvious to you because you lived it already.

“Er.” At the time he’d just shown Martin his teeth, with the points of his left-side canines joined. Nominally a smile, but more like a show of hiding the grimace beneath than an actual attempt to hide it. “That’s harder than you might think? Technically I’m always….”

“Oh.”

“Sorr—”

“—What do you mean, ‘technically’?”

“I’m—not always aware of it?” He disliked that phrase, in pain—how it implied a discrete and exclusive state. One could not be in Paris and at the same time in London; similarly, most people seemed to assume one could not be in pain and also in a good mood. In raptures. In a transport of laughter. That when one admits to being in pain, one implies that’s the most important thing they’re conscious of.

“Well that doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, I know—‘if a tree falls down in a forest’—blah blah blah.” With a gentle smile to acknowledge he’d picked up this mode of speech from Martin. He turned his wrist in circles so it clicked like an old film reel. “Philosophically speaking, if you’re not aware of pain, you can’t be in it. Maybe ‘technically’ isn’t the right word.”

“Oh yeah ‘cause that’s the angle I want to know about this from.”

Jon sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. I just mean, it doesn’t always matter to me.”

“Well it matters to me,” Martin scoffed.

“Yeah—I’m getting that. Is there any way I can explain this that you won’t jump down my throat for?”

Martin sighed, groaned, pulled at his hair a little but made himself stop. (He doesn’t pull it out, Jon knows—he just likes having something to grab onto during awkward conversations. Usually emerges from them looking like a cartoon scientist.) “Okay, yeah,” said Martin. “I get it. I’m sorry too.”

“I mean—when you get a paper cut, that hurts, technically, right?”

“Well yeah, a little, but that’s not the kind of—”

“But just because you notice that hurt doesn’t mean?” He paused to rearrange his words. “You’re not going to remember it later unless someone asks why you’ve got blood on your sleeve.”

“Y—eah. Sure.”

“Is that…?”

“When you’re suffering, then. I want you to tell me that. And—whenever something weird happens? Like, before it stops being weird and you talk to me like I’m stupid for not already knowing about it.”

“What if”—this far into his question, Jon worried it might come off as a smart-alecky, devil’s-advocate thing. So he paused, pretending he needed time to formulate its words. “What if I haven’t decided yet whether it’s weird or not.”

“That in itself is pretty weird, Jon.”

“Fair enough.”

“I want to be part of that conversation. I want you to trust me enough to bounce ideas off me! It’s not like—? I mean why wouldn’t you do that?”

Jon had shrugged and grimaced, hands in his trouser pockets. “Not to worry you?” he’d suggested. But as he bit his lip and shimmied down from the bed Jon knew now that that was the sanitized version—and probably, if you’d asked him a day before or afterward, his past self would have known that too. Most things you told Martin, he’d either ignore them completely or latch onto them, refuse to let them go, and interpret everything else you said in the light they cast. Jon had learnt not to raise any given topic with him until he was sure he wanted to risk its becoming a long, painful discussion. This was part of why he hadn’t kept his promise, he told himself as he turned their interim bedroom’s doorknob. Why he’d said so little about anything weird that had happened to him at Upton House.

“Martin?”

“Oh hey, Jon—you’re awake.” Martin glanced in his vague direction but stayed bent over his work, so Jon could not meet his eyes.

“You found the screwdriver.”

“Yeah! And a screw that matches better, see?” He fished the first one they'd found out of his pocket and held it up next to the door for comparison. Jon supposed they looked a little different—bright yellowy gold vs. a darker gold. “They were in the library, of all places. There’s a little box full of ‘em that he keeps right next to his reading glasses, apparently. Guess he must break them a lot. How are yours, by the way? Any bits feel loose?”

Dutifully, trying to keep his dazed smile to himself, Jon pulled off his glasses. Folded and unfolded each arm, jiggled the little nose pieces. He shook his head. “Don’t think so. You can have a look yourself though, if you like.”

“Remind me later. Should’ve brought the whole box, probably,” Martin said, voice strained as he twisted the screw that last little bit. “There!” His open mouth broadened into a smile. “Time to see if it worked. You wanna do the honors?”

Jon shook his head, breathed a laugh through his nose. “You should do it. You’re the reason it’s fixed.”

“I mean, yeah,” shrugged Martin as his hand closed round the doorknob, “but I’m also the reason it broke.” It opened with a click. “Ha-ha! Success! Statements—our own clothes—our own bed! Er. Ish.”

Something tugged in Jon’s chest; he’d forgot the statements were why Martin thought this quest so urgent. He lingered at the side of the bed while Martin rummaged in his backpack, remembering for once to toe his first shoe off while standing.

“Man. Looks sorta underwhelming now, after the other room, huh?”

“Least our wallpaper’s better.”

“Tsshhyeah, and our view.”

Jon didn’t turn around, but surmised Martin must be looking out at that tree he liked. “Is it four already?”

“Uhh—nearly, yeah. You were out for a while; took me ages to find that damn thing. Here you go,” announced Martin as he slapped a zip-loc bag full of statement down on the bed.

(“So they won’t get water damage,” he had answered a few days ago, when Jon asked him why he’d individually wrapped each statement like snacks in a bagged lunch. “What? It’s not like we have to worry about landfills anymore. If I put them all in the same bag, you’d take one out and not be able to get it back in.”)

“What happened to my jacket, by the way? And yours?”

“Uhhh.”

“Right, okay,” Martin laughed; “I’ll go get them before I forget. I’ll put this away too, I guess” (meaning the screwdriver still in his hand). “Don’t wait for me, yeah? I don’t mind missing the trailers.”

Jon smiled. “Sure.”

As Martin hurried off, Jon sat down to untie and pull off his other shoe, threaded the lace back through the final eyelet from which it’d come loose, picked up the first shoe and untied that one, then stood up and set them by the door next to his cane. Both hips and all ten fingers behaved themselves throughout. As he walked by the vanity he grabbed the coins he’d removed to do laundry the other day and stuck them back in his trouser pocket. Useless, of course, but he’d missed having something to fidget with. He squatted down and peered under the vanity for the hair tie he’d dropped, for the fifth or sixth time since he’d misplaced it. Didn’t find it. That was fine; he had another one around his wrist. His knees felt weak, so instead of standing back up he crab-walked to the foot of the bed and sat down with his back against it. Straightened his legs out before him on the floor. Then he dug the coins from his pocket and counted them. Yup—still 74p.

Danika! Not Daniela—Danika Gelsthorpe. God, he would never forget one of their names out there. Never underestimate how much I care for the

“I'm back. What’s down there? Did you find the screw?” asked Martin as he hung their jackets up behind the door.

Jon shook his head. “Forgot about it. I was looking for that hair tie.”

“Well you’re on your own there; I’m done finding things today. The screw can wait,” Martin laughed—“he’s got a whole bag inside that box in the library. Do you need a hand getting up?”

He let Martin help him. Both knees cracked; the world’s edges went dark for a second. “Thank you,” he said, and it came out more peremptory than he’d meant it.

“Statement time?”

“Right. You don’t mind? I can wait ’til we’ve both had a rest, if you don’t want to be in the room while I.”

“No, I’m alright; I’ll stay here.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you hated statements.”

Martin shrugged. “Not these ones so much, now that. Heh—they’re almost nostalgic, if I’m honest. ‘Can it be real? I think I’ve seen a monster!’”

“They are a bit,” agreed Jon, looking down at the plastic-sleeved statement and making himself smile.

“Go on. Seeing you feel better will make me feel better too.”

That made it a bit easier to motivate himself, Jon supposed. From the moment he’d lain down on the bed he’d felt like he was floating on gentle waves—like if he let himself listen to them he could fall asleep in seconds. But that wouldn’t make Martin feel better. And no guarantee it would him, either, once he woke up again. He rearranged the pillows behind himself so he’d have to sit up a little; this might help keep him awake, and it meant he could rest his elbows on the bed while he held up the statement, rather than having to lift them up before his eyes. It made his neck sore, a bit, this angle, but that was fine. That might help keep him awake, too.

He sighed, readying himself for speech. Then heard a click, and felt a familiar buzz and weight against his stomach. The tape recorder had manifested inside his hoodie’s kangaroo pocket.

“Statement of Miranda Lautz, regarding, er… a botched home-repair job. Heh. Seems appropriate. Original statement given March twenty-sixth, 2004. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, the Archivist.”

[Image ID: A digital painting of Jon and Martin on an old-fashioned canopy bed with white sheets and orange drapes. Jon sits on the near side of the bed, reading a paper statement. He frowns slightly, looking down at the statement in his hands; he wears round glasses perched low on his nose. He’s a thin man, with medium brown skin dotted by scars left from the worms, and another scar on his neck from Daisy's knife. His hair is long and curly, gray and white hairs among the black. Jon sits supported by pillows—several big, white, lace-trimmed ones behind his back, and one under his knees. His right leg is slightly crossed over his left ankle, on which a clean white bandage peeks out beneath his cuffed, dark green trousers. He wears an oversized red hoodie and red-toed brown socks. Sat on the far side of the bed, next to Jon but facing away from both him and the viewer, is Martin—a tall and fat white man with short, curly, reddish brown hair and a short beard. He has glasses and is wearing a dark blue jumper and gray-brown trousers. Past the bed on Martin’s side, the bedroom door hangs ajar; in this light, it and the wall glow bluish green. On the near side, though, the light grows warmer, the orange canopy behind Jon casting pink and brown tints onto the white pillows and sheets. End ID.]

It seemed to be a Corruption statement, or maybe the Spiral. Possibly the Buried? A leak in Ms. Lautz’s roof caused a pill-shaped bulge to appear in her kitchen ceiling, about the size of a bread loaf. Water burst from it like pus from an abscess (as she described it. Nothing else Fleshy though, so far). Ms. Lautz repaired the hole in her ceiling, but every morning a new one reappeared somewhere else. Sometimes they appeared bulging and pill-shaped like the first one; other times she found them already burst, covering the room in water shot through with dark specks like coffee grounds.

Jon wished he’d refilled his empty water glass before starting to record. His mouth was so dry that every time he pronounced an L his tongue stuck to its roof. At this point he’d welcome a hole to burst in it and flood his mouth with water. Then again, he did still have to pee.

Eventually she and her spouse hired someone to find out what was wrong with the roof. She described hearing boots tramping around up there for half a day while they checked out all the spots where she and Alex had reported leaks. The inside of Jon’s trouser leg pulled at the bandage on his shin, making it itch. The repair men told Ms. Lautz it’d be safer and barely any more expensive to replace the whole thing. The ring and little fingers of Jon’s left hand were starting to go numb from having that elbow too long pressed against the bed. Miranda and Alex thanked the roof people and sent them off, saying they’d think it over.

He began to regret crossing his legs this way. He’d balanced his right heel in the hollow between his left foot’s ankle and instep, and in the time since he’d arranged them that way gravity had slowly pushed his foot more and more to the side, widening that gap. By this time he was sure it was hyperextended—possibly subluxed? It hurt already, and, he knew, would hurt more when he tried to move it. This rather ruined his fantasy of heading straight for the toilet when he finished reading.

Martin was right; these old statements seemed positively tame, now. He knew he owed it to Ms. Lautz to engage with her fate, but?

No. No buts. Whatever hell she lived in now, it looked just like the one she was about to describe for him, only worse. You can’t even pretend you’re sorry she’s living out her worst fear if you stop in the middle of reading that fear’s origin story. Never underestimate how much I

Once the repair men had left, Miranda Lautz wandered into her kitchen for lunch. She found her ceiling bulging halfway to the floor, with the impression of a face and two twisted arms at its center. Like someone had fallen through her roof, head first. Jon’s stiff neck twinged in sympathy. Miranda screamed and strode to the other side of the house in search of beer, figuring she'd find better answers at the bottom of a bottle than in her own head. When she got back to the kitchen with them, the beer bottles didn’t know what to do either, but said—

“God damn it. Not ‘ales’—‘Alex’. Obviously.”

He let the statement’s pages flop over the back of his hand, let his head tip backward until the top of it bumped against headboard and his eyes faced the ceiling. That settled it, then, didn’t it. If he had the Ceaseless Watcher looking through his eyes, he wouldn’t make a mistake like that—and he certainly couldn’t change position while recording. On top of his more substantial regrets, Jon had spent their whole odyssey before they came to Upton House ruing that he’d sat at the dining-room table to read Magnus’s statement, rather than on the couch or the bed. The chairs at that table had plain, flat wood seats—no cushion, no contouring for the shape of an arse. When he opened the door to the changed world, the cataclysm had preserved his bodily sensations at that moment like a mosquito in amber. He’d had a sore tailbone and pins and needles down his legs for untold eons. Right up until he and Martin crossed from the Necropolis onto the grounds protected by Salesa’s camera, where his tailbone faded out of awareness and his head filled up with cotton.

“Ohhh. ‘Alex’. Okay, that makes a lot more sense,” laughed Martin meanwhile. Jon could feel Martin’s shoulder bouncing against his. “She must’ve written it in cursive, huh.”

“I can’t do this right now, Martin.”

“Oh—okay, yeah. You rest; I’ll finish it for you.”

Jon closed his eyes and let air gush out from his nostrils. But you hate the statements, he knew he should say. Wouldn’t this make it easier, though? To let Martin have out this last bit of denial first?

The tape recorder in his pocket still hissed, still warmed and weighted down his stomach like a meal.

“Thank you,” he said.

The operator on the phone said she and Alex should wait for the ambulance to arrive, rather than try to free the man in the ceiling by themselves. Jon turned his neck back and forth, hoping Martin couldn’t hear its joints’ snap/crackle/pop. He picked his elbow up off the bed and shook out his hand. But when the paramedics cut the ceiling open, only a torrent of water gushed into their kitchen—water flecked with a great deal of what looked like coffee grounds. A day or two later the roof people called, to ask if they’d decided whether to have the roof repaired or replaced. They assured her none of their employees had gone missing. At the time of writing, Miranda and Alex still hadn’t decided what to do about the roof. A week ago, they’d found a squirrel-shaped bulge in their bedroom ceiling; they’d packed their bags and come to stay with Alex’s sister in London.

“Right! That wasn’t so bad.” Martin set the statement down and stretched his arms over his head. “Huh.”

“Hm?”

“Oh, I don’t know, just—it’s been a while. Thought it might feel, I don’t know, worse than that? Or better, I guess, since the Eye’s so ‘fond’ of me now.”

“I don’t think they work here.”

“What?”

“The statements. The Eye can’t see their fear.”

“Oh.” Jon could feel Martin deflating. He let himself avalanche over to fill the space. “You don’t feel better, do you.”

“No.”

“Maybe it’s just—slower here, like it’s taking a while to load or something. Remember how long the tape recorder took to come on last time? It was like—you were like— ‘“Statement of Blankety Blank, regarding an encounter with”—Oh, right,’ click.”

That was true. The tapes had known Salesa would give a statement before it happened, but with these paper ones they’d seemed slow on the uptake. Martin had also sworn the recorder that manifested to tape Mr. Andrade’s statement was a different machine than the one Salesa’d spotted that first morning. Jon wondered which machine the one in his pocket was.

Not relevant, he decided. He shook his head in his palm, stroking the lids of his closed eyes. “No—if they worked here I wouldn’t be able to stop in the middle of one.” As soon as he said it he winced, bracing himself for argument.

After the change he remembered wailing to Martin about how he couldn’t stop reading Magnus’s statement—how its words had possessed his whole body, forced him to do the worst thing any person ever had, and forced him to like it, to feel Magnus’s triumph as they both opened the door. Martin had pressed Jon’s face into his clavicle, rubbed his nose in the scent of Daisy’s laundry soap, covered the back of Jon’s head with his hands. Tried to interpose what he must then have still called the real world between Jon and what he could see outside. He’d said over and over, I know, and We‘ll be okay. Jon had known that meant he wasn’t listening, and yet still hadn’t been prepared for the argument they had later, when he mentioned in sobriety the same things he’d wailed back then.

“Hang on”—Martin had pleaded—“no, that can’t be true. I’ve been interrupted in the middle of a statement loads of times—and I know you have too.”

“By outside forces, yes, but you can’t decide to stop reading one. Believe me, Martin, I wouldn’t have—”

“Tim did.”

“No, he didn’t—”

“Yes he did! He was gonna do one and then Melanie—”

“No, Martin, I’ve heard the tape you’re talking about. Tim introduced the statement but didn’t actually start—”

“He did so! He read the first bit, and then stopped. ‘My parents never let me have a night light. I was—’”

“‘Always afraid, but they were just’....” Behind his own eyes he’d felt the Eye shudder and throb with gratitude. Just that sort of stubborn, it had seemed to sing, in a bizarre combination of his own voice with Jonah’s with Melanie’s, which doubled down when I screamed or cried about something, instead of actually listening.

“Yeah,” said Martin, forehead wrinkling. “And then he said, ‘This is stupid,’ and stopped.”

“You’re right.”

Jon still had no satisfying answer to that one, and cursed himself for having opened that can of worms back up again. It had been Tim’s first-ever statement, he reminded himself, and maybe Tim had never intended to get even that far. Maybe he’d been waiting for someone to interrupt him, as Melanie eventually did. Even out there, the Eye couldn’t really show him things like that. He could find out what Tim had said—could look it up, as it were—and what he’d thought, but motivation was a bit too murky, multilayered, complicated. It wasn’t real telepathy? The vicarious emotions the Eye gave him access to worked in broad strokes, generalities—just like common or garden empathy. Sure, he could imagine other people’s points of view more vividly, now that he could see through their eyes. But he still had to imagine them to life, based on the clues around him and what emotions those clues stirred in him. It didn’t work well for situations like this; he could hear Melanie’s footsteps and feel Tim’s reluctance to read a statement, but that was it. Enough to concoct plausible explanations; not enough to pick out the truth from a list of them. Plausibilities were too much like hypotheticals.

In the timelessness since that argument with Martin, though, Jon had also wondered whether it mattered if Tim had read the statement before recording it. He didn’t have footage, as it were, of Tim doing so; either the Eye had more copies of the statement’s events than it needed already and so had deleted that one from storage, or, conversely, perhaps it could no longer see versions of it that relied too heavily on the pages Mr. Hatendi had written it on, since Martin had burned those. But Tim’s summary, before he started reading. Blanket, monster, dead friend. It was bad, sure (like the assistants’ summaries always were, a ghost of past Jon interposed). But it sounded like the summary of a man who’d read it with his mind on other things. Inevitable and gruesome end. How he tried to hide; he couldn’t. Not at all like that of someone skimming it for the first time as he spoke. He did rifle through the papers though? So Jon couldn’t be sure. The suspicion ate at his mind, especially here. Could he have kept the world from ending just by—reading Magnus’s statement, before he went to record it? The way he used to way back at the start, before he trusted himself to speak the words perfectly on the first try? You didn’t mean to record it, did you? No, I’m sure you told Melanie and Basira you were just going to

“Guess that makes sense,” Martin said now. “So, you’re still feeling…?”

“Not great?”

“Yeah.”

“I… I feel human, here.”

“Oh wow. That’s—”

Jon told himself to put the hope in Martin’s voice to bed as soon as possible. “I know I’m not—not fully.” He allowed a smile to twitch the corners of his lips, flared his nostrils around an exhale that almost passed as a laugh. “Most humans don’t spontaneously summon tape recorders. Or sleep with their eyes open.”

“Yeah, but still, you don’t think maybe—?”

Again Jon hastened to cut Martin off. “A-and even if I was, it’s. I know that should be a good thing? But—”

At this point Martin interposed, “Should be, yeah! You don’t think it might mean you could—I don’t know, go back to normal? If we stayed here for a while?”

“Maybe? I-I might stop craving the Eye so much, but we’d still have to go back out there eventually, to face Elias, and. To be honest with you, Martin?” He huffed a laugh out, bitterly. “My ‘normal’ wasn’t exactly...”

“Right.” Martin sighed. “So you mean you feel like you used to, as a human. Which was…”

“Not great.”

“Right.”

“I haven’t been very well, here.” Jon shrugged for the excuse to duck his head. He could feel himself blushing, the heat spilling from his face all down both arms. Good thing the tape recorder in his pocket had gone cold.

Next to him, Martin puffed air out of his cheeks. “Yeah, I know.”

“I’m dizzy and confused without the Eye, and it—it can’t fix me here? When I.” He drew in breath, lifted his heel off his ankle and set that leg to the side, letting its foot roll into Martin’s shin. Bit his lip and scrunched his nose in preparation. Flexed the other foot’s toes, trying to isolate the lever in his ankle that would—there. Clunk. Then a noisy exhale: “Jyyrrggh. When that happens,” he choked out, voice strained by both pain and nerves. “It’s like before I became an avatar. I have to fix it myself, and it doesn’t just.” Magically stop hurting, he hoped went without saying; already he could hear Martin sucking air through his teeth. It made Jon’s cheeks itch. “Shouldn’t have let myself get used to a higher standard, I suppose.”

“What? No—of course you should have. Did you think I was gonna say that?”

“No, of course not; I just meant—”

“You deserve to feel healthy, Jon.”

“Do I? Health is clumsy, it’s callous, it, it lets terrible things happen because they don’t feel real—it can’t imagine them properly, can’t understand what they mean….”

“Okay, first of all, ouch.” Jon snarled a laugh at that, without knowing whether Martin meant it as a joke. “Second of all, that is not why you—why the world ended, okay? Especially, ‘cause, you weren’t ‘healthy’ then. You read Elias’s bloody statement because you were starving, remember?”

“Hmrph,” pronounced Jon, to concede he was listening without either confirming or denying the point.

“And thirdly, you’re not ‘callous’ out there? You don’t”—a scoff interrupted his words. “You don’t ‘let things happen because they don’t feel real’—that’s sure not how I remember it. Okay? I remember you crying for—god, I don’t know, days, maybe? Weeks?—about how you could feel everything, and couldn’t stop any of it. That’s the thing we’re hiding from here, Jon, so if you don’t actually feel any healthier here then what even is the point?”

In a voice embarrassment made small Jon managed, “I mean? I’m still kind of having fun.”

“Really? You don’t seem like it—”

“Not today, maybe—”

“Right, yeah, no; spending all day trying to fix a doorknob isn’t exactly—”

“But I don’t want to leave yet. I should still have a few good days left before the distance from the Eye gets too….”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” For a few seconds he tried to think of something better to say, then gave up and told the truth, though in a jocular voice to hide his self-consciousness. “Always was the person who got ill on holiday.”

“Oh, god, of course you were—”

Voice growing higher in pitch, Jon pleaded, “It didn’t usually stop me from enjoying it?”

“What about America?” laughed Martin. “Did you still enjoy that one?”

“Of course not—I got kidnapped.”

“I mean, yeah, but you were pretty used to that too by then, right?”

“God.” Jon sniffed, crunchily, reeling back in the snot he’d laughed out. “Besides. That was a business engagement.”

Martin acknowledged this comment with a quick Psh, as he turned himself around on the bed to face Jon a little more. “Can I trust you to”—he stopped.

“Yes.”

“No, let me—that wasn’t fair; I can’t ask you that yet.”

“Oh. I’m sorry, Martin; I didn’t—”

“Of me, I meant, it wasn’t fair.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. I’ve been ignoring your distress all week because I wanted it not to matter.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it ‘distress,’” pointed out Jon. “Plus, I have been sort of, er. Secretive, about it.”

The exasperation in Martin’s sigh was probably meant for him, not for Jon, the latter reminded himself. “Yeah, but you’re not subtle. I can tell when you’re hiding something. It wasn’t exactly a big leap to figure out what. But I told myself it was temporary, and that you were acting like.”

Jon laughed preemptively. “Yes?”

“Like a little kid in line for a theme-park ride.” Again Jon laughed—less at the comparison itself than at how much Martin winced to hear himself say it. “I’m sorry. I should’ve taken you more seriously.”

“And I should have told you what was going on with me.”

“Yup,” concurred Martin at once.

“I know you hate it when I keep things from you.”

“I do—I hate it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry too.” Martin waved this away like a fly. “I just—you said you think we’ve got a few more days, before it gets too much or whatever.”

“Yes.”

“Can I trust you to tell me when we need to leave?”

Jon tried not to answer too quickly, knowing vaguely that that might sound insincere. “Yes,” he said again, after pausing for a second. “You can trust me.”

“Okay? Don’t try to spare my feelings, or anything like that. Like—don’t just go, ‘Oh, well, he’s having a good time. That’s fine; I don’t have to.’ Yeah? ‘Cause I won’t have a good time if I’m worried you’re secretly suffering.”

This Jon did know; it sent a thrill of recognition down his spine, as he remembered their first day’s ping-pong adventure. “Right. I’ll do my suffering as publicly as possible.”

“Uh huh.” Martin’s arm tightened around Jon’s shoulder. “Just don’t worry about disappointing me? I mean, sure, I like it here, with the whole ‘not being an evil wasteland’ thing, but I’d much rather be out there with you happy than with you than spend one more minute in paradise with her.”

With a smile, Jon replied, “That might just be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Yeah, yeah. Come on. We’ve got a job to do.”

“I suppose we do.”

As they walked on out of the range of Salesa’s camera, Jon glanced backward one more time and thought, Yes, that makes sense—but couldn’t quite recall what he had expected to see. It was like when you look at a clock, and tick Check the time off your mental to-do list, then realize you never internalized what time it was. “Pity,” he mused.

“What?”

“It’s, er, going away. That peace, the safety, the memory of ignorance.”

“That’s… Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Do you remember any of it? W-What Salesa said? Annabelle?”

“Some, I think. It’s, uh… do you mind filling me in?”

“Wait, you need me to tell you something for once?”

“I guess so. It’s, er… it’s gone. Like a dream. What was it like?”

After a pause Martin said, “Nice. It was… it was really nice.”

“Even though Annabelle was there?”

“I mean, yeah, but she didn’t do anything,” shrugged Martin. “Except cook for us. That was weird.”

“She cooked?” Jon watched Martin nod and smile around a wince. “And we let her do that? I let her do that?”

With a scoff Martin answered, “Under duress, yeah.”

“Huh.” Jon twirled his cane in circles, wondering why he’d thought he would need it. “Well, she didn’t poison us, apparently.”

“Nope. And believe me, we had that conversation plenty of times already. Er—maybe just let me put that away for you before you take somebody’s eye out, yeah?”

Jon nodded, folded his cane and handed it to Martin, then made himself laugh. “Was I… a bit neurotic about it.”

“About Annabelle?” Again Jon nodded. “Oh, we both were. We kept switching sides—one day I’d be like, ‘But she’s got four arms, Jon!’ and the next you’d be like—”

“She had four arms?”

“Yup. And six eyes. But your powers didn’t work there, so we thought maybe hers didn’t either? Never did find out for sure. God—you remember the day we got locked out of our room?”

“Er….”

“So that’s a no, then.”

“Sorry.”

Martin’s lips billowed in a sigh. “No, don’t be sorry. It’s not your fault.”

“So… what happened? Who locked us out? Was it Annabelle?”

“No, no, no one locked us out. It was just me, I uh—I sorta broke the doorknob? God, it was awful. Went to open it and the whole thing just came off in my hand, like” (he made the motion of turning a doorknob in empty air, and imitated the sound Jon figured it must have made coming off) “krrruk-krr.” Jon fondly laughed; he could imagine Martin’s horror at breaking something in a historic mansion. “It was just one screw that came loose, though, so you’d think, easy fix, right? Except the bloody screwdriver took forever to find. Turns out Salesa kept them in the library, of all places.”

“S-sorry—what does this have to do with Annabelle?”

“Oh—nothing ultimately, just.” Martin grimaced at his own recollection. “God, we had this whole argument over whether to ask her about it, and when I finally did can you guess what she told us?”

“What?” managed Jon; his throat felt small and weak all of a sudden.

Martin put a finger to his chin, and blinked his eyes out of sync. “‘Perhaps he keeps them next to something that breaks a lot,’” he recited, with an inane, self-congratulating smile. For a fraction of a second Jon could recognize it as Annabelle’s I’ve-just-told-a-riddle expression. But the memory faded and he could picture her face only as he’d seen it in pictures before the change.

“O…kay. And was that… true?”

“I mean, yeah, technically. Useless, though. And after we spent so long agonizing over whether it was safe to ask her….”

Jon allowed himself a cynical laugh. “Are you sure she didn’t orchestrate the whole thing?”

“Ugh—no, it wasn’t her. We had this conversation at the time. You made me check for cobwebs and everything.”

“And you… didn’t find any?”

“Of course not, Jon; it was a doorway.”

“Right. Doorway, yes.”

“Are you sure you’re feeling better? You still seem a bit….”

“No, I’m—I feel fine, I just can’t seem to. Retain anything concrete about… where did you say it was? Upton House? God that’s strange, that it would just be….”

Part of Jon felt tempted to deplore it as a waste of space, on the apocalypse’s part. These stretches of empty land were one thing, but a mansion? Couldn’t they at least get a Spiral domain out of it?

“I mean, not really. He told us all about it, remember? With the magic camera?”

“Right, yes,” Jon agreed.

“Well, we got it all on tape, if you want to listen to it later.”

“Yes, that sounds—all of it?”

“Well not the whole week or anything. It just came on whenever it thought it was important, I guess.”

“So not the part about the doorway.”

“Nope.”

“Pity.”

#tma fic #the magnus archives #rqbb2021 #rusty quill big bang 2021 #jonmartin #jonathan sims #martin blackwood #suddenly a tma blog #scri wrote something

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writingwife-83 · 5 years

Text

Accidental Research, ch 7- A Conclusive Study in Marriage

Sherlolly Appreciation Week, day 7- Favorite HC

“Don’t even think about it.”

Sherlock’s brow lifted. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes you do. You were thinking about how long till Anderson returns to the morgue and whether you have time to kiss me.”

He smirked. “If we bother discussing it, of course there won’t be any time.”

Molly lifted a warning finger as she saw him take a step closer, clearing her throat as she heard Anderson returning. Sherlock rolled his eyes and motioned for her to follow him.

“You! Keep working,” Molly instructed Anderson gruffly. “We’ve got to get some supplies out back.”

They’d barely rounded the corner before Sherlock had her in his arms, pressing a kiss to as much of her mouth as he could manage around the inconvenience of the mustache.

“Mr Holmes, that is quite enough,” she whispered. “You cannot take these sort of risks!”

“I agree, but these two months have been absolute torment!”

“It’s been six weeks.”

“Actually, it’ll be seven weeks tomorrow, which is very nearly two months.”

Molly laughed, shaking her head as she caressed his face. “It’s endearing, the way you can’t endure this process.”

Sherlock very intentionally dropped his voice to a low rumble, leaning in to whisper in her ear as his hand perched on her waist.

“And you can?”

Pulling back to see her half lidded eyes staring back at him with pupils blown wide, he gave her a smug little smile.

Molly licked her lips, squaring her shoulders in an attempt to maintain composure. She gave him a somewhat playful glare.

“The fact is that you and I both need to endure if we want to do this right.”

Something hit him at her wording, like a bolt of lightning, and suddenly...he knew.

Sherlock grasped her hands, staring at her intently. “What if we already have?”

Molly’s expression was definitely one of confusion. “Pardon? Already have...what?”

“You said we needed to do this right. Well, what if we already have? For us! Perhaps for us, courtship has long since been done and over with!”

“Holmes, do be serious,” she laughed.

“I have never been more so,” he replied, and by the shift in her features, she was beginning to believe it.

“Marry me,” Sherlock added, soft but insistent. “Come to the courthouse with me this evening. Or tomorrow.”

“Wh-what?” Molly stammered, her jaw hanging open and cheeks getting pink. “Marry you?!”

Sherlock paused, pressing his lips together in thought for a moment. “Forgive me, I forgot the question aspect. Don’t think I’ve forgotten your instructions after that case some months ago,” He cleared his throat. “Miss Molly Hooper...will you marry me?”

Molly lifted their joined hands and kissed his knuckles. “Holmes, you know I want to marry you. But...rushing off? Just like that?”

“Just like that!” His eyes brightened with the thrill of it, and if he wasn’t mistaken, he saw that light reflecting in hers as well. “What more do the two of us need to know of one another? How many more weeks and months of agonizing chaperoned dinners at the Watson’s?”

Molly snorted a little laugh.

“Have we not learned more about each other even before courting than most do after two years of these silly little rituals?” Sherlock dropped his voice. “I know I want you, I know I want to make you happy, I know the rest of my living days will be better having you with me,...and I know I love you.”

Molly swiped at her eyes. “Good heavens, I never thought I’d be proposed to while looking like this.”

“Well?” he prompted, peering at her, feeling on the edge of his seat. “What do you say?”

She drew a deep breath and released it, smiling at him. “What else can I say but that I echo every one of your sentiments. I love you too, so so dearly. And yes...let’s get married.”

~~~~~~~~~

Molly rolled over, squinting at the unrelenting sunshine streaming in through the uncovered window. She wasn’t the only one offended by its intrusion.

She smiled to herself, hearing Sherlock curse softly under his breath before standing from the bed and pulling the drapes tightly together, once again wrapping the room in the comfort of darkness.

When he climbed back under the covers, she shifted over, sliding an arm over his middle and letting out a contented little groan as she settled her cheek against his chest.

“Forgive me, I didn’t think to shut the drapes last night,” he whispered, pressing a kiss to her rumpled hair.

Molly tilted her head up, lifting a brow at him. “I can’t imagine what else commanded your rapt attention before falling asleep.”

“Oh, can you not, Mrs. Holmes?”

Molly let out a little squeal of laughter as she found herself very suddenly shifted to her back as her husband’s lips descended to the side of her neck. Not just anywhere of course, but the exact right spot. Because of course it had taken Sherlock Holmes less than three bloody days to pinpoint what turned her to absolute mush in his arms.

“Mm, that’s right...now I remember,” she murmured.

Sherlock left the side of her neck, instead bringing his lips to hers, slanting one way and then the other, kissing and releasing over and over again in a teasing little dance. Unable to endure a moment more, Molly’s fingers threaded into his hair, closing in a fist as she brought him in for a much more substantial kiss. All evidence taken into consideration, he seemed to very much appreciate her initiative.

Molly smiled inwardly, thinking she might just be learning how to turn him into mush as well.

As quickly as their passion had ignited though, a blanket was thrown over the flame when they both heard footsteps on the creaking steps up to 221B.

Sherlock inclined his head a bit, still hovering over her as he listened carefully. After a moment of subtle noises, followed by then descending footsteps back down the creaking steps, he turned back to his wife and smiled.

“Just Mrs. Hudson, bringing the morning post and tea.”

“Ah,” Molly breathed in relief. “I admit some tea sounds delightful.”

“Ask and you shall receive!” Sherlock proclaimed, pressing a kiss to her forehead before throwing his dressing gown on and leaving the bedroom.

Molly stretched languidly in Sherlock’s- well, their bed. It still felt unreal and almost as if she were doing something wrong, having spent the past three nights in this bed with him, doing things that made her blush to remember. But she kept reminding herself with a smile that this really was now her bed, her husband, and the celebration of their new life together.

Sherlock returned quickly, balancing the tray of tea and the post.

“I believe Mrs Hudson is taking things a bit too sentimentally, since she’s included flowers on the tray.”

“I think that’s sweet!” Molly leaned in and took an appreciative sniff as he set it down on the bed.

As she poured the tea, Sherlock was silent for a moment, sitting next to her and thumbing through the post.

“Anything interesting?” Molly asked, taking the first warm sip.

Sherlock didn’t respond at first, his eyes riveted to one particular envelope. Finally, he grinned, holding it out to her.

“Actually yes. It seems you’ve received your first post. And I do believe it’s someone who has decided to send us, and especially you, a gift.”

“Really?” Molly cocked her head. “I thought only your family and the Watsons and Mrs. Hudson knew.”

“Yes, that’s right. This gift is, strangely enough I believe, from my brother.”

“Oh! How lovely of him.”

“It is, yes,” Sherlock agreed, nodding and handing the envelope over.

Her eyes first took in the name written meticulously on the front- Mrs. Molly Holmes.

Sherlock set the post aside and scooted over as Molly opened it up and took out the paper to begin reading, seeing that the heading read, “a gift, dear sister.” She began scanning the words, barely getting through the first paragraph before clasping a hand over her mouth. What she read was far too good to be true.

“Can this really be?” Molly questioned in ecstatic disbelief. “I’ll be working at St Bart’s hospital? Really me!”

“Congratulations,” Sherlock replied softly, giving her a little kiss on the cheek.

“Did you do this?”

He pursed his lips. “Not exactly. But a few days ago when we decided to marry, I did go to my brother and explain that living as a married couple would make your current professional situation considerably more difficult. I told him this was a concern of ours, and if it was possible to remove that concern completely, starting married life might be much improved. I suggested that perhaps he try to speed things along regarding your employment.”

Molly’s smile spread slowly, and she managed to carefully place the letter from Mycroft and the tea tray aside before leaping back onto the bed and practically tackling her husband back against the pillows, sprinkling words between kisses.

“If I thought...I couldn’t love you...more than I already did...I was wrong! And I definitely need to thank your brother!”

“In a very different way, I hope.”

Molly laughed, curling up against him, her hand comfortably nestled inside his dressing gown and atop his heart.

“A week ago I never would have believed this would be my life,” she whispered.

“It does all seem rather sudden I suppose,” Sherlock admitted, his arms locking around her and fingers nestling in her undone hair.

“Though...in a way I feel as if we’ve been building up to this for quite some time. Even before we knew it. As if the evidence was slowly gathering around us until suddenly it all just pointed to one undeniable conclusion.”

“Undeniable indeed,” Sherlock agreed, turning to kiss her soundly.

One kiss led to another, and then another, and very soon they sunk back down into the world of pillows and covers together. Both husband and wife found they were in complete agreement, albeit nonverbal, that despite a conclusion having been most certainly reached...there was always plenty more research to be done.

#sherlolly #sherlollyweek2020 #TAB au #victorian sherlolly #THAT’S A WRAP!#it’s been fun!

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crzcorgi · 6 years

Text

Negan’s Miracle

A Negan x Twin Sister Christmas story for @cherieann-2001

Negan x Cherie (Tiny)

1700 words

Just some Negan language

Merry Christmas!

Fucking Christmas, again. Why does it have to happen every year? Why can’t people just give it up, forget celebrating. It’s the fucking end, the apocalypse upon us. But no, everyone is in the “holiday spirit”, the Sanctuary filled with the sounds of Christmas music, children laughing. The smells coming from the kitchen so unlike the usual odors. Decorations hung from every unused space. All my sweet sister’s doing.

Since the end, since we found this place, the Sanctuary, she insisted we make everything seem like it was before the dead walked. “For the children, Negan!” She’d say. But I knew how much she fucking missed our old lives. Before everything went to fucking hell. So, we celebrated every fucking holiday. For my Tiny.

I was on another run, never able to just trust my Saviors to go on their own. Sighing, I stepped into yet another trash heap that was once a store, a toy store to be exact.

“Fuck! Remind me again why the fuck you fuckers thought a toy store could be a hidden gem?” I stepped over and through crumbling debris, shaking my head in disbelief.

“Well bossman, it’s full of shit, people figure there’d be nothing here useful. So…”

“So you figured we’d be the fucking idiots to check it out.” I sighed. Jesus fuckity fucking Christ.

The place was full of toys of all fucking kinds, but seemed to be void of walkers. Fucking odd, but I wasn’t gonna question it. But I still didn’t see the value of a fucking toy store. I was just about to lay into Simon again when I spotted it. I couldn’t be positive I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. I stepped through all the shit and debris until I reached it. I bent down, picking it up and shaking it off.

“Jesus, oh my fucking god. Un-fucking-believable!”

“Boss?” Simon yelled from a few aisles over. I didn’t realize I had spoken aloud.

“Nothing man, keep working.” I flipped my find over and over in my gloved hand. Fuck. It was a plush rabbit, a bunny. But not just any stuffed toy, it was the same one that my baby sis had owned, had adored. Her first toy. It went with her everywhere. Up until the end and it was left behind.

It was brand new, but probably looked worse than Cherie’s did, after years of her love. But I knew how she loved that little fucker, how much she missed it. And this would be the perfect gift for her. And I was suddenly very glad those assholes decided on checking this dump out.

After making sure the bunny was well hidden, I made my way out to the trucks to see what the fuckers found. Which was amazingly some nice, surprisingly useful, shit. As we made our way back to the Sanctuary, I began fucking daydreaming, something I usually didn’t allow myself. But that damn rabbit triggered me. Memories fucking flooded my brain. It was actually a welcomed reprieve from the shitstorm that my life had become.

Back at home, I headed right up to my room, figuring out how I would clean up the little treasure I’d found. And how I would keep it hidden from my nosy as fuck, Tiny. I was able to clean little “BunBun” up to look almost fucking new. I was ec-fucking-static. I was never good at gift giving, before the end I always depended on others to pick my gifts, my dear wife Lucille always buying the gifts for my sweet baby sis. And now, I mostly relied on Dwighty Boy, sometimes even one of my wives, to find something for my girl.

But this was all me, I found what I imagined would be her favorite post-apocalyptic present. I went searching for some sort of festivy paper to wrap it in, finding some glittery shit in my wives quarters, and fucking hightailing it back to my room.

“Negan!!!!” Shit, Tiny.

I slid the paper behind my back, hoping she wouldn’t spot it. “Hey sweet cheeks, thought you had something goin’ on at the nursery?”

“I do, but I forgot something. Whatcha got behind your back Neg?”

“Nothing doll, just something for Simon. Now why don’t you go on, I’ve got some paperwork to go over.” I carefully moved closer to her, lightly kissing her forehead.

“Fine, don’t tell me!” She placed her small hand on my chest, patting gently. As she turned to leave, she looked back over her shoulder at me. “Downstairs at 6, party, you better be there Negan. I don’t want to have to come back up here and drag your ass down!” She giggled, sashaying out the door.

“Language little one!”

“I’m the same age as you silly!” I could barely hear her, as she made her way down the hall.

I made quick work of wrapping the bunny, not the best job but I think it looked fucking fine. Making my way downstairs, fucking dreading every minute of it. It was a highlight to my sweet sister, so fucking important. And somehow every year, fucking drama would ensue, usually involving one or more of my wives. They were jealous of my relationship with my Cherbear, they didn’t understand. Never would. And I didn’t give a fuck, she would always come first. No ifs, ands, or fucking buts.

I turned the corner, stepping into the dining area, my mouth dropping open. It was decorated, head to toe, streamers, tinsel, garland, ornaments. Everywhere. It was honestly fucking breathtaking. She’d really outdone herself. She fucking amazes me, every fucking day. She is the fucking future, she is what this world needs. My sweet tiny.

“You came on your own Neeeeeegggg!!!!” She threw herself into my arms, almost knocking me on my ass. She began peppering me with teeny kisses on my cheeks, making me smile and laugh.

“Fuck Tiny, you're killin’ me here!”

She was now hanging on to me like one of those fucking teeny monkeys. “Oh stop being such a drama queen!” She patted my cheek. She looked down, seeing the package in my hand. “What’s that Neg? Something for one of your wives I suppose.” She made an irritated snort.

“Well,” I smiled, “it is in fact for my favorite girl.”

She tipped her pretty head, I could see the cogs turn. “Me?” She questioned me hesitantly.

“If you want it darlin’” Before I could even finish my words, she’d shimmied down out of my arms, snatching the wrapped toy out of my hand. “Whoa princess! Watch Negan Jr!”

She looked up at me, her nose crinkling up. “Eww, Negan!” Her smile quickly reappearing. “Can I open it?” Her eyes, so big, so fucking childlike making me dream of years past.

“Sure baby girl, I hope you fucking like it.” I watched as she ran over to sit on a bench. She turned it over in her hands, almost as if she was savoring the moment. And just like that, the pretty paper was on the floor and the furry find was in her hands. Her eyes ever growing, her mouth falling open. Was she happy? Fuck, was she upset? Did I fuck up?

“Negan?” She stood up slowly, gliding across the floor to stand in front of me. “It’s BunBun, you found BunBun!” Her voice cracking from emotion, tears beginning to fall down her rosy cheeks.

I reached up to wipe them away, cupping her face in my large hand. “It’s not really BunBun, but it’s definitely his fucking cousin!” I laughed, a nervous laugh, not sure how she would react.

She had drawn the toy up tightly in her arm, her free arm snaking up around my neck. “I know Neg, but you remembered him, and that’s what matters, right?” I pulled her into my arms, taking in all of her. My sister, my Tiny. I’d be six feet fucking under if it wasn’t for her.

The emotions were getting to be too much. “Hey, you go enjoy your party, I’ll hold Bun for you, okay?”

She giggled, rising on her tiptoes to give my cheek a peck. “Okay, keep him real close, okay?” She smiled, that smile that kept me sane.

“You know I fucking will baby sis.”

As she walked into the crowd, she turned and hollered back at me. “I’m not the baby Neg!” Her smile turning into a full fledged laugh.

I sat down, watching the party goers, kids, adults, all laughing, dancing, singing. Not a fucking care in the world. All because of one small girl. His Tiny.

Fuck it, I’m tired. I stood back up, scanning the room to say goodbye to Cherbear. The bunny still safe within my hand.

“Dwight, you seen my sis?”

“Hey boss, last I saw she was talking to Simon by the doors.” I patted his shoulder and headed out. “Negan, sir.” I looked at him and noticed he was pointing towards the doors. At my sister. At Simon. Who were fucking kissing.

“SIMON! What the fuckity FUCK!” I started walking, jogging towards them, my free hand clenching, unclenching , itching to be holding Lucille.

I could hear Dwight running behind me. “Negan, it’s just the mistletoe, everyone is kissing there, it might not mean anything at all.”

Tiny broke away from Simon, coming towards me with both hands out. “Neg, don’t start! I’m a grown woman, it’s Christmas, it’s mistletoe for fucks sake!” I was fuming, my eyes never leaving Simon’s. “Give me BunBun before you squeeze all his stuffing out.”

Dwight had grabbed Simon and the two of them had gone back into the crowd. “Fucking coward.” I mumbled under my breath. I felt a hard slap on my forearm. “Shit, baby girl, why’d you hit me?” I began rubbing it, it fucking stung.

“He’s not a coward, you’re just a way overprotective brother.” She placed her arm through my uninjured one, guiding us out the door, but stopping before completely exiting, pointing up. “How about a kiss under the mistletoe for your favorite girl, hmm?” She tapped her cheek with a tiny finger.

I smiled. “Sure Tiny, but I don’t see Sherry anywhere?” I acted like I was looking around when I felt another slap. “Fuck girl! You trying to incapacitate me? Jesus!” I leaned down, kissing her cheek sweetly. “You’re always gonna be my favorite, you know that.”

“I better be, Neg. I better be.”

Fuck, I love her.

#negan #cherieann-2001 #negan x tiny #negan x twin sister #negan fanfiction #the walking dead #crzcorgi requests #jeffrey dean morgan #crzcorgi crz 4 negan

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bruceweek · 6 years

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Hi, uh, ive been thinking about starting a character week,,, i just dont really know how to start it. Is there any advice you'd give? or is it not that hard

Hey.I can give you a quick rundown on how we did Bruceweek.First of all, find at least one other person to be a co-host. You might think you can do it all alone but believe me, it is good to have a second person on board. I was really glad to have someone. Almost every post you see from us or ask answered were checked from both of us. One of us had the idea for the event but it is OUR event because we equally put time and effort in it. Then it depends on what kind of fan event you want to do. A gift exchange or just a week like we did. What kind of content do you accept? What rating do you want for your content? We decided very quickly on no romantic ships to make sure everybody can enjoy all the content to matter the ship. Make a checklist of everything you need to do and who does it. We had none and I forgot to create the Ao3 collection.

Things like creating the side blog, one of us did first and the other than checked and pointed out what was missing. For the prompt list, we created one each and then picked from each others list and then discussed it again to make sure everybody was happy with every prompt. We still decided to give people the option to create things regardless of prompts because honestly there isn’t anywhere enough content and we didn’t want to limit the creativity of people.

Another important thing is to give people enough time to hear about the event. A month in advance at least, a month with all the info already. Because no matter how much you think you got everything covered, there will be lots of asks, which is good because you can’t possibly think of everything. You can scroll through our ask tag on the blog to see what kind of questions the people had. For additional questions, please don’t hesitate to ask again!

#gamma-vision

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johobi · 7 years

Text

When You Least Expect It | 08

Pairing: Jungkook x Reader x Taehyung

Word count: 6.4k

Warnings: angsttttt, some vulgar language

AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16732419/navigate

A/N: Splitting the chapters won by literally one vote, lmao. Thank you to everyone who voted, and I hope those who voted for me to keep it as one chapter can enjoy it just as much. :(((

Next: 09 || WYLEI Masterlist

You’re in love with your childhood friend, Taehyung. The problem is, you treasure your friendship with him far too much to ever risk losing it. Oh, and he’s quite the Casanova. At your wits’ end with feelings you can no longer hide as diligently as you once did, you ask him to set you up with someone, anyone, in a last-ditch attempt to avoid a heartbreaking conversation.

You moaned the words with an almost sexual fervency. “Oh, God, Tae, this is the absolute best.”

The picture you painted, however, couldn’t have been any less steamy. Rather, you were indiscernible as human, and instead resembled something akin to a synthetic fleece burrito. Taehyung, crunching chips with an open mouth and absent stare, reeled you closer by the arm slung around your shoulders. “I knew you’d like it,” he mumbled, acknowledging you with a lax turn of his head. His eyes were a little slower to catch up, like this episode of Storage Wars could rival Greek tragedy for dramatic value. Belatedly, he granted your form – huddled tightly to his side – an appraising look. “You should wear it permanently.”

He was, of course, talking about the slanket he’d offhandedly gifted you upon your arrival at his apartment. On its presentation, your eyes had rolled into their sockets with an unnerving eroticism. Taehyung had stood there, bemused – likely a little scared – as you immediately flung away your coat and pulled the criminally soft wrap over your head, birthing yourself from the neck and sleeves, entering the world anew.

Maybe an exaggeration. You were, in any case, certainly snugger.

“I wish,” you croaked, the sum of your sodium-saturated snack consumption leaving your mouth as barren of moisture as a desert wasteland. “Someone would kidnap me and put me on the front of a flying bike.”

The reference wasn’t lost on Taehyung. “Just like the good ol’ days, huh?”

The memory was an intangible vapour lost to the abstract of the past, and yet, as he summoned it to you now, it was as if it had never been anywhere but at the back of your mind, awaiting his call. “I totally forgot we used to do that. You made a good ET.”

His downturned mouth pulled lower. “I don’t know why you always made me be ET.”

“Because you were the weird one, that’s why,” you grinned, reaching for another handful of health-averse treats. Taehyung wasn’t going to let that slight pass, apparently, because one moment you witnessed your hand outstretch, and the next, darkness devoured you. He eclipsed your face with the hood of your plushy covering. “Don’t use the slanket against me!” came your dampened protest, your unintelligibility cracking you into a fit of giggles that roasted you in the sweltering enclosure.

Brokering your freedom with a swipe at his face, you emerged from the cocoon a dazed, sweaty mess and slumped into the remedial coolness of his leather sofa. Taehyung, unperturbed by your scuffle, was immersed, again, more in reality TV than reality. Still, he continued your reminiscence. “I don’t know why I believed the bike would fly one day.”

Your chest heaved with a single, weary chuckle. “Because you were cute like that,” was the undisputable truth. You observed the dappled plastering of his ceiling with a listless appreciation. “You believed it so much that, eventually, I started to believe it too.”

Taehyung’s head lolled lazily in your direction. Tremors of laughter rattled him when he caught sight of your sluggish, blanketed splaying. “Really? A cynic like you?”

You nodded minutely, numbed by the warmth of wine and exertion combined. “Yep, a cynic like me. That’s the power of Kim Taehyung.”

“I was convinced I had super powers, when I was a kid. Like I was some special snowflake,” he mused, clouding the sides of his wine glass with breath as he took a hearty gulp. It was impossible not to stare when he pulled away. Not when his tongue swabbed, so indecently, at what lingered to stain his lips. “I guess, when you feel like that freak, you hope, at least, it’s for something.”

The amusement arching your features mellowed. “You did have super powers,” you attested, hunching forward to refill your own glass. A few weeks ago, you would’ve balked at the idea of risking your uninhibited mouth listing every which way you wanted to fuck him. And although those thoughts maintained a significant presence still, they’d been diminished an encouraging amount by your textual entanglements with Jungkook. It was a peculiar notion, for sure, that you were preoccupied more with the promise of your next date with him and what it would bring, than the muse of the Gods that sat next to you.

Okay, well, not entirely.

Not entirely, when Taehyung was no longer engrossing himself in TV, but burying you under the weight of his full attention, beckoning you to calamity in the depths of his murky eyes. This picture of him, heavy-lidded and mildly inebriated, was how you’d – time and again, to your immense shame – envisioned Taehyung in many of your post-coital fantasies.

Okay, not at all.

A sole brow arched. “I did? And I didn’t know about them? Ooh—” Taehyung lurched closer, his impressive wingspan seizing half the couch as he clutched animatedly at its sides. “Am I, like, a time-traveller? That doesn’t know he can time travel until this very moment? Have you been meeting with later versions of me and that’s why I’m none-the-wiser? Oh my God—”

“No, Taehyung,” his off-tangent raving inspired a fond twitch of your lips. You weren’t entirely convinced that his spiel was farcical, though. Taehyung was easy to excite and gullible to a fault. “You don’t actually think—” faux concern rounded your eyes and mouth— “You know you’re not The Doctor, right?” you swept aside his bangs and smacked a heavy hand to his forehead, surveying the smooth expanse for fever. “You know your closet isn’t a TARDIS, yeah?”

A stream of air deflated him in defeat. He peeled away from your palm and into his cushioned nook. “Yeah, I know.”

“Plus, I sure as shit wouldn’t be your assistant. You’d be mine. But anyway—”

It was the last thing you should’ve been doing, but you quaffed another mouthful of Rosé nevertheless. “Remember when I was in my last year of high school, and told you–drunk, of course– the evening before Valentine’s, that I’d never gotten a card? Because I thought none of the boys thought I was worth it? And you assured me that I would that year,” you poked an obstinate finger at him. “I’d never gotten one, ever, before that. Then, ‘lo and behold, I got one the next day! Those are the kind of super powers I’m talking about, Tae.”

His bastard, beautiful lips clung together tantalisingly at the corners as they opened. And then he deadpanned. “Really?”

Taehyung’s tone triggered a flurry of vacant blinking. “Really, what?”

The bowl of his wine glass narrowly escaped a beheading for all the force he clapped it onto the table with. “Oh, my God,” his torso shook with silent laughter. It was rather concerning how little sound he was emitting. “I can’t believe this,” he wheezed, throwing himself into the back of the couch with the vigour of someone unhinged from sobriety. “I actually can’t believe this,” he repeated ambiguously, ducking behind his slender fingers.

Your impatience and confusion manifested itself in the form of a testy huff. “Can’t believe what? Stop being a jackass, Tae.”

Stalwartly unforthcoming, you slapped his thigh out of irritation and to unfurl him from the hunched, snickering coil he had become. That was a mistake. Goddamn did even that most fleeting of contact set you all aquiver. He wore his denim wickedly tight.

Taehyung flinched inward on himself in that instinctual way men do when they think you’re going to focus your physical admonishment on their genitals. “I’m just—I can’t believe you never realised. After all this time, too.”

Your throat, raw from the abrasion of fried potato snacks, protested the growl building there. “Realised what, you fucker? Out with it.”

Unmasking a perplexed expression, Taehyung stared dumbly into middle distance. You could practically see him sifting through your innumerous memories together. His lips parted in a silent gasp of realisation. “So that’s why nothing changed afterwards. I thought you were so embarrassed that you just decided to pretend that it had never happened.”

That was his last chance.

You sprung up, a bat-winged silhouette of Red Riding Hood and towered over him, pressing the full weight of your bony knee into his thigh. He squirmed beneath the uncomfortable pressure of your punitive measures and waved his hands frantically. “Ow—okay, okay!”

You relented, but eyeballed him from above and behind crossed arms that demanded answers. “Well?”

Taehyung soothed his leg with brushes of his palm and a protruding lip, though he couldn’t maintain the surly expression for long. His mouth gave way to a showcase of pearly-whites. “I sent you the card.”

You flapped your arms once, like a flightless bird. You’d misheard that, right? “What?”

He poised a thumb to his chest, deliberately enunciating each word. “I,” withdrew it to jab a finger up at you, “sent you,” carved a rectangle out of the air with his index fingers, “the card. The Valentine’s card.”

Half-present, and half-adrift upon the winds of time sweeping you ten years prior, you recalled your discovery of the unassuming envelope, embellished by an inscrutable hand. You stood, torn between two time streams, watching your pestilent, unrequited love infect nostalgia.

With a flourish of his wrist, Taehyung had whipped the tablecloth clean from beneath you, and catalysed your subsequent topple. The impact scattered you into irretrievable pieces. “N-No, you didn’t,” you sputtered with a voice that wasn’t your own, with a mouth that moved apart from the rule of your brain. Distantly, you sensed Taehyung’s scrutiny, but God only knew what expressions he saw materialise. With a marked woodenness, you turned away from the man that debilitated you so and plopped – some distance away, like that would help – onto the sofa, like a marionette whose puppeteer no longer manipulated the strings of.

“Yes, I did,” Taehyung stated with a firmness bolstered by the depth of his baritone. “I told you I went through a—” he faltered somewhat, “—a phase.”

Four lines of text swam before your eyes with clarity. Four lines that had engrained themselves as precious reminders that there’d once been someone who valued you beyond the wet welcome between your legs. “Tell me what the card said, then.”

From your periphery, you saw Taehyung shrug one shoulder. “I don’t remember,” he muttered, though there was a strain to the words delivered.

“Then I don’t believe you. Stop ruining my precious memori—”

“Brittle shell, tender flesh

Near you, lungs are born afresh

Take this hand, possess this soul,

In these two arms is shelter, whole.”

Your jaw would lock if it remained as distended as it was. Taehyung had snatched your uttermost attention from the first line, but, quite at odds with you, the verse flowed from him with an aloofness you couldn’t comprehend.

Had he been so clueless?

Had he no idea how much the gesture had meant to you, during a time you’d felt at your most despicable?

How you had longed for the bard to whisk you away from those corrupt crowds; all those diabolical decisions?

Somehow, you found it in you to spit some venom. “God, that was cruel, Taehyung. What a fucking prank to pull.”

Resolutely glued to the TV, Taehyung only presented you with the most indecipherable of looks. No longer were his thoughts so readily available. “It wasn’t a prank. I told you, I was going through a thing at that time.”

A high-pitched bark. “Hah! A thing. You jerked off a few times, Taehyung,” the man in question’s face pinched a little at the rescindment of his shortened name. “I actually hoped this guy from the card was real, for a long time.”

“He was,” a gust of a sigh left him. “But that was a long time ago. You wouldn’t have spared me another look, anyway, I was only 15 at the time. I knew that, but I wanted you to feel a little better, at least.”

He was real?

Taehyung?

All in a moment, your body, so faithfully constitute of flesh and bone up until this revelation, reduced into something altogether more gelatinous. It was incredibly difficult to smother the emerging quiver that threatened to expose you. And all attempts to summon Jungkook - kind, wondrous Jungkook - to the forefront of your mind were impeded by flashes of teenage sentiment, scribbled with a $2 biro.

All you could do was settle yourself somewhat with the truth of Taehyung’s words. At that point in time, you hadn’t ever considered Taehyung a viable hook-up. He’d been so cemented into some weird, sexless void of a platonic role that you wished upon wished he would return to now. Honestly, adolescent you had pinned all your hopes on the budding poet being the teacher you’d harboured a debilitating crush on.

Mr. Miller had been a man and a half, that’s for sure.

It occurred to you, then. “Your poetry was no joke. You wrote that at 15 years old?”

Taehyung sagged with released tension. He seemed to have been bracing himself for an incendiary reaction. “Yeah, I spent ages on it.”

A wistful smile hitched up the corners of your mouth. “That’s really cute. Thank you,” you mumbled awkwardly, and you meant it. Looking past the tangle of your present-day feelings for him, you were able to see his intent unclouded. You tried not to dwell too much on the perceptiveness of his vision, though. That he saw you, with such lucidity, as the weak, vulnerable girl you tried so hard to mask. There was little room for alternative interpretation of his verse.

“Do you still have it?” he ventured out of the deep blue, and it began to irritate you how intensely he still scrutinised the TV.

“Yes,” you admitted, pulling your knees to your chest and draping your feet with a slanketed canopy. “I’m throwing it away as soon as I get home, now that I know who it’s from.”

“Wow,” Taehyung choked on his mirth. “Fucking rude.”

A change of subject was direly needed. “Why are we watching this? Put Netflix back on.”

“You know I like to know how much money they make!” he framed the objection with an appealing whine and an even more appealing pout. Luckily for you, even such indomitable charms were nothing in the face of your hatred for Storage Wars.

Your nostrils channelled a dubious snort. “It’s scripted, Tae, you know that,” you lurched for the remote lying vulnerable, but a ridiculously large, besocked foot landed on the table with a thump, rattling the contents atop. So blasé was the slight kick he delivered, nudging the prospect of Netflix out of reach.

So aggravating.

“It’s not,” Taehyung smirked, his twisting lips the only acknowledgement of the disrespect he’d so smugly dispensed.

Comically outraged, you lunged for the remote once more. “Get your stinky foot off the table! Gross.”

Somehow, despite his lack of fondness for all forms of physical activity besides bumping uglies, Taehyung was swifter than you to claim it. He swooped in with all the airborne dexterity of a bird of prey and held it far aloft in his perfectly manicured talons, taking to his feet to ensure that you wouldn’t get your way. The most infuriating aspect of his underhandedness, however, lay purely in the fact that he was still engrossed in that stupid fucking reality show. “It’s my table, I’ll do what I want,” he mumbled, indistinct, around a fistful of chips. One he’d deemed safe to dive in for when the bastard diverted your attention with some enthused finger-pointing. “Look! That guy’s gonna make so much, look at all those fucking retro comics.”

Successfully distracted and consequently enraged, you gave up ever being able to reach the suspended changer. You sank to the heels of your feet and glared at his profile. “Yeah, because they weren’t planted there, or anything.”

“I don’t believe you. I don’t believe that Top Gear is scripted, either,” he went on, fully flexing his capability to rile. The intermittent flicker of his devotedly worn indifference gave his ploy away. “Or Jersey Sh—”

Anyone walking in on the scene unfolding could have assumed that Taehyung was, in this very moment, being violently assailed by some cloak-toting cultist, and they’d only have been half wrong. You threw yourself onto his back, and like some gaudy, red phantasm, flapped your preternaturally webbed arms, stretching for your quarry from this more accessible vantage. “You said we could watch more Doctor Who!” you bellowed, the sudden introduction of your weight sending him off-kilter and veering to the side in his desperate attempts to avoid colliding with the coffee table. “We only got to the end of season four last time!”

Taehyung had been armed with some suitably smartass riposte, that much you were sure. However, you rendered him incapable of voicing it by the hand slapped over the bottom half of his face. One you used to gain leverage into another stretch.

Fucking hell, he had freakishly long arms.

The remote hovered, still, maddeningly out of retrieval range. And though you were loathe to admit it, your greatest ally was fast becoming your greatest impediment. Because despite appearances, the slanket didn’t bequeath to you the gift of flight. Rather, it limited your reach to a noticeable degree. You shrugged the defector over your head and let it drop down your back.

Who knew cheap, faux material and varnished hardwood weren’t partners in traction?

A panicked gasp tore from Taehyung when his foot snagged the overhang of your fleecy parachute. The earth’s pull further compelled his submission when you chose that most inopportune of moments to make an ambitious lunge at his wrist. A sudden weightlessness embraced you as he plummeted, face-first, to the floor. “Fuck!” you screamed, crippled into passivity by mental images of the broken nose and ribs he would surely sustain.

Fortunately, for someone as beauteous as him, his face wasn’t the first part of him to make impact. He bore the brunt of the force with his elbows and a winded grunt, which he drew immediately beneath to soothe, bending below you concave. Well, as concave as he could become with you still saddled atop your fallen steed.

Muted panic set in with the ebb of adrenalin. Your belated assessment was that burrowing your knees into the small of his back probably wasn’t a comfort. And so you took initiative - for once in your life - employing his ass as a makeshift seat and planting one either side of his torso. Inclining toward him, you shooed away the muss of hair masking his scrunched features. Seeing him so anguished sent your anxiety rocketing. “Oh, Jesus, I’m so sorry, Tae,” you whimpered pathetically. “Are you okay? Sh-Should I call someone?”

“Ungh—no, I’m—fine,” was his crack at stoicism, heaved between revealing gasps. “Just, let me—” he groaned, rotating under you to a more comfortable position. Supine, now, and with the lines of a grimace carving their permanence into the crest of his nose, he breathed a little easier for the shift. “That’s better. Just let me get my breath.”

But you couldn’t get your own. Because it occurred to you, very much, with the tantalising twist of his body beneath your legs – and not to him, apparently, not just yet – that your crotches, now, were closer than they had ever been, separated only by the tease of double denim. Prompted by his perilous repositioning, you strained yourself to engage in some unsustainable, half-hovering, half-seated feat of quad strength that you were destined to fail. Your thighs and brain toiled alike trying to decide whether it would be better or worse to dismount. If you did, he might take note of your discomfort. If you didn’t, you were legitimately afraid he’d be lost to the flood from your petrified pussy.

Unathletic and waning in stamina, your legs began to tremble with the duty they had been charged with.

They gave out, of course.

Your full weight landed on his groin, and with a stunned, reactive jerk, Taehyung folded in on that most precious of points against potential damage. Hands and legs flew to brace the unexpected load, his fingers rooting themselves to your hips with a vehemence that contused. His thighs were the sturdy bookend to your back that held you captive to the bruising, breath-stealing pressure. Your hands, however, had nowhere to go. You clasped them to your chest, wishing you could just disappear. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.”

Taehyung’s eyes were wider than saucers; dinner plates, even. No doubt they’d flown open in the dismay of having you pressed so adamantly to such a sensitive part.

A second passed, and then two.

But he didn’t release you.

You would have shifted uncomfortably, had the situation not been so inappropriate for such subconscious movement. “Uh, sorry, I’ll let you get up,” you offered again.

But he didn’t release you.

Instead, with a predatory narrowing of his eyes, he sunk his claws further into you. So much so, that your denim-clad curves strained past the gaps of his fingers.

Breath deserted you. Only a croak remained. “Tae?”

This moment, five years ago.

Here it was again.

Only, you didn’t topple into him.

Gravity failed, and he fell into you.

The last thing you saw was the alarming velocity with which his face neared yours, and then all was dark. Because as soon as your lips received that first touch of his generous mouth, your eyes closed with an innate understanding of what you were about to receive. Like it had been pre-determined; like your body had led its life waiting for this exact happening, groomed to take receipt of something so prized.

Taehyung kissed you with such unshackled ferocity that your back protested under the strain of his handling. Nothing could temper its complaints but the ten fingers that breached your shirt's flimsy barrier without resistance. His touch scalded as he roamed, grasping at your flesh like a carnivore starved. It was then, at the base of your spine, that his hands settled into an intimate kneading, and it was also then that confusion gave way to sense.

Because though it felt like time had stretched long — far beyond the span of human life – in the mere seconds that he’d seized you in a firepit of arms and prowling hands, it was still insufficient for your comprehending. Yes, cognition had been well and truly ousted, ejected by a potion of disbelief and fluster. A potion expertly concocted by the apothecary that sucked avidly at your bottom lip, tonguing for reciprocation.

The fragment of you that remained – against overwhelming odds – tethered to this earthly plane, was traitorously, indecently slow on the uptake.

And if you didn’t disengage now, it would soon be joining the rest of your rational mind. Another witting victim, lost to Taehyung’s thrall.

You unfastened your mouth to bark an exclamation you’d not yet formulated, but Taehyung commandeered the move for his own purposes. With a moan whose bass sent shudders through you like you were the mouthpiece of his most treasured instrument, he took ownership of the recesses of your mouth, dominating your tongue into subservience with every satin slide.

Jungkook was far more yielding to your influence than Taehyung. This, here, was a man that commanded obedience. And he did it all with wordless, hungry lips.

Oh, fuck.

Jungkook.

The swathe of stupefaction dispersed when the boy with bunny teeth materialised behind your eyelids. And though your hands were already on course to deter Taehyung from assimilating you altogether, he was the one to break your oral connection. “I-I’m—” his throaty splutterings lured open your eyes. His, however, were darting wildly to and fro, as though decrypting the most inscrutable of cyphers. You prayed he would have some success, because you were far from capable.

Taehyung lay like a slab of stone beneath you, barely breathing. “Noona,” he tried again, when a response was not forthcoming. The moniker no longer rang with an innocent affection; it had been dirtied, tainted by the tongue thrust into your mouth unbidden. “N-Noona—”

And then it hit you.

Oh, God.

What had he done?

Every torturous tear, every painstaking step you’d taken to overcoming this—this all-consuming pining— had been for nothing. The two of you stood astride a line that was nothing, now, but a smudged indication of how things would never be the same again. Because this couldn’t have been anything more substantial to Taehyung than a drunken grope. Your years of watching him parade model after model of woman without as much as a lingering, loaded look in your direction, confirmed that. But to you, it was far more.

Too much more.

And so it was odd, looking upon the world, now. Nothing seemed quite the same anymore. Like colours had traded places, or been imbued with properties anew. Properties that were elusive to identification; unnervingly intangible. Everything seemed slightly out of place, and though you were certain nothing could have shifted, of its own volition, during your brief embroilment, the unsettling unfamiliarity of objects you’d seen time and again left you unsure.

It was wholly unpleasant.

First kisses should paint the world technicolour. That’s what young women are always sold.

But for you, it was far the opposite.

All had now become dullened, muted. Tarred by the brush of an artist fond of the dreariest of shades. Colour bled from his canvas, as it did from your life.

With Taehyung’s curse of a kiss, you’d shifted to a dimension that, on its surface, was as misleadingly mundane as you’d ever known. But you weren’t so welcome here, nor wanted.

This wasn’t your home anymore.

And when Taehyung lifted his eyes to your face, your home wasn’t there anymore, either.

“I’m sorry, I—I don’t know what that was, I—” you’d not seen him so inept at forming words since childhood.

You could do nothing but stare at him without really seeing. Taehyung’s cock, snuggled perfectly to the seam containing your thumping core, both encouraged and discouraged you into standing. Its warm, swelling insistence was a compulsion, a choice. To stay, and be granted your heart’s desire, however fleeting. Or to go, and never look back at the anaemic scene, nor the man that stood in its ashen ruins.

Something chose for you to stand, though your legs barely supported the decision. Your silence appeared to worsen his incoherency.

“____, I’m sorry, please. Look at me,” he urged, the velvety timbre to his voice fraying into desperation. “It was an accident, I didn’t plan to—I don’t know what happened.”

But you couldn’t.

You couldn’t, because it was a truth that one more look at him in his dishevelled, ready state would stir you into indecent action.

And you couldn’t, because he wasn’t your friend anymore. It wasn’t Tae.

This was Taehyung.

A man–an ideal–you’d long been infatuated with past what was healthy or sane. A man you had perched atop a pedestal in your idolatry, elevating him to some unmerited, God-like status. A man, that, despite the disparate aching of your nether regions, you were disappointed in for being, so absolutely, a man.

And a woman—a casualty—came to you then, skimming the outskirts of your mind like a banished spectre. "Poor Tara,” you whispered, two words you’d never envisioned leaving your mouth as a handheld pair.

Taehyung hitched a pitch higher out of panic. “It didn’t mean anything, I swear to God. I swear to God, it meant nothing. Please, ____, look at me.”

It meant nothing.

It meant nothing?

An assertion that should have overjoyed you. And yet, it did nothing less than skewer your waning heart, demanding it suffer an excruciating, prolonged end.

It wasn’t much of a revelation, no. But it was agony all the same, because a mere sampling of his lips, a meagre whiff of his musk – so utterly Taehyung – would never be enough. And the only thing that had strengthened your fortitude in the face of such temptation had been your ignorance to his delectability.

And now you knew.

Ignorance was no longer bliss. No, bliss was partaking of his mouth-watering aroma, his luscious tang.

So, as much as you wanted it to mean nothing, you wanted it, more, to mean everything.

Tears slid so unobtrusively down your cheek that they only begged notice at the seam of your lips. Raising a hand to your face in numbed confusion, the discovery of their presence was underwhelming. You were crying? But you were so serene inside. Accepting, even.

This was the end.

You pivoted lethargically toward him. “Alright,” you said simply, watching his face twist its way around a carousel of feeling. Shock, that gave way to horror, that gave way to concern.

“No, it’s not,” Taehyung’s assertion wavered when you halted his approach with a calmly raised hand.

“It is. I’m going now,” you watched, out of body, this phantom of you, blank and flowing tears. “Good night, Taehyung.”

“Wait!” he plead, rounding on you with a blur of honeyed hair. Rather than exert the little energy you had left by raising your gaze to meet him, you watched, asunder, the way his throat bobbed around each vocalisation. “I don’t want you to leave until I know you’re okay. This—this was just—I don’t know—just completely out of the blue. God, ____, can you look at me? Please!”

At his urging, you did. But your eyes felt akin to lead bearings when they rolled with such difficulty to acknowledge him. “I understand. It’s fine.”

Whatever he saw there distressed him. “I-I’m going to ask Tara to move in with me,” he blurted, like this was supposed to pacify you. The gut-churning words, though, had no place in this conversation.

Erupting without notice, a potent rage wrested control from your resignation. “So? Why are you telling me that, Tae? What do you want me to do?!”

Taehyung had never been burned by such fire. His eyes shimmered with tears unspilled; diamonds you were spoiling for. “I-I don’t know,” he scrambled, searching your face for answers. But he would find none. Just an eerie placidity, disturbed only by the droplets that rolled, without end, down its surface. “I want us to be okay. I just want you to know that things won’t be different.”

“It feels pretty different to me, now that you’ve had your dick between my legs and your tongue down my throat,” you spat, and you nearly convinced yourself of the distaste with which you coated the exclamation. His manhandling of you had, of course, been nothing but delicious. “And I feel so fucking guilty, even when I tried so hard not to—”

“Not to what?” Taehyung interjected with a zeal that only stoked the flames of your wrath. And yet, you would have been incapable of concluding the utterance anyway.

Even now, you couldn’t admit to the one thing that had a place in this exchange. Surely, a better opportunity would never again present itself. Even now, in the aftermath of the irrefutably intimate moment that had transpired between you. And, yes, between you. Because although Taehyung was guilty of initiation, you had abetted the unsavoury act with your inaction.

And as much—as much—as it was so incredibly simple to convince yourself that you had merely been startled into unthinking, disarmed into paralysis, it could never be the whole truth. The anger that bubbled within was a testament not only—not even half—to what Taehyung had done. It was anger at yourself, at your willing complicity in his act of infidelity. You had been one second away—perhaps less—from allowing him to have you whole.

“What, exactly, are you trying to do, Tae?” you sighed, wearier on this day than all your previous years combined. “We had a bit to drink. You just wanna fuck and dump me like the rest of your girls, right? I must mean nothing more to you than that. Not if you’re just going to randomly seduce me when the mood takes you.”

Taehyung surged forward again, hands outstretched to, without a doubt, grapple you into a suffocating reassurance. And again, you stepped back. God, you’d never seem him so pale. “That’s not it at all, I swear to fucking God!”

Your response perfectly portrayed how little faith you had in receiving a credible answer. You granted him the most sluggish of shrugs. “What, then?”

“You mean more to me than any of them. Than anyone. I would never do that to you. I just—”

Again. “What?”

“I’m just tipsy, and, well—you were sitting on me, and, I don’t know—God, ____! What do you want me to say?” his reasoning was as disorderly as you’d been expecting.

You barged past his withering blockade, snatching your coat from the chair over which it was slung. Except, the material wouldn’t be moved more than a few inches from where it rested. Wheeling around, you bared gritted teeth in warning. “Let me go, Taehyung.”

His eyes swam afloat an ocean of regret, close to capsizing. And the only lifeline binding him to the surface lay in the silk lining of your coat his fingers were so forcibly entrenched in. “What do you want me to say?” the reiteration faltered on his tongue. It came softer; sincerer, this time. Beseeching, even. He looked precariously close to unravelling.

He genuinely didn’t understand.

Taehyung still didn’t know.

“Just the truth,” was the only bone you were charitable enough to throw him.

Why, even now, did you pray to hear those most sacred of words fall from his lips? When the scope of your encounter went no more beyond a momentary lapse of judgement? And not even a sober one. The whole, unfortunate thing had been spurred into being by an ill-advised tipple.

Why were you so adamant on scaffolding your way to the top of a hope that fatally gave way, every time?

Why, even now—

The query came hushed, almost shy. “Are you happy with Jungkook?”

Your hands left your sides, possessed by a desire to express what words couldn’t. They hovered, palm-up and gesturing at nothing, powered by incredulousness alone. “What has that got to do with anything? You’re the one who kissed me—”

“Just answer me,” Taehyung tipped his head back, like the position would better stem his watery show of emotion.

“Yes,” was your honest answer. “I’m very happy.”

Sure, Taehyung still possessed the uncanny ability to manipulate your physiological and emotional responses like he burnt effigies of you on the regular. But—and this only enraged you further, because if he’d only given you more time—Jungkook was already forging himself a tentative place in the chambers of your cramped heart. Cramped, because Taehyung furnished it fit to burst. Jungkook’s residence was fragile; a fledgling bird constructing his first nest. Taehyung needed only crow and he would scatter him from a territory he guarded so ferociously.

So unwittingly.

Looking at him now, he appeared all of a king usurped. With his crown knocked askew, you succumbed to the doubts about your previous assumptions. Maybe your bond hadn’t been a bond at all, but another example of an unextraordinary friendship waiting to sour. The hastily whispered secrets, the solicited solace, the unflinching, even blind, loyalty; maybe none of that had been special. Perhaps you had romanticised your childhood connection past the bounds of the corporeal.

Taehyung was a man, flesh and blood. Not a telepath. Not an intuit. He was just as unperceptive and fallible as his fellow fuckboys.

And so were you.

The mortal before you closed his eyes to the world, an inscrutable twist to his brow. And then, with an ambiguous nod, he cast you a gaze fresh with resolution. “I’m really glad,” Taehyung’s lips remained stubbornly downturned despite the smile that angled their edges. “I mean it. I’m so glad you’re happy, that’s all I’ve ever wanted for you. And I’m thankful that I played a part in that, somehow.”

A jerk of the head. “You should consider monetising your matchmaking services,” you quipped, though any humour the comment may have contained shrivelled as soon as it hit an atmosphere so desiccated of jovial banter. Neither of you laughed, at any rate.

Taehyung’s grasp had long loosened from your captive coat. Swinging it around your shoulders, you nodded again for no discernible reason but to announce your wordless departure. And as he led you to the door, you allowed yourself one last, wistful look at the silhouette of the boy you so grievously loved. Allowed yourself to trace each strand of his sumptuously soft tresses, miraculously untousled for having escaped the clutches of your overzealous roughhousing. The view of his back was far simpler to lay bare your vulnerability to, safe from the singe of his discerning eyes.

And desolation wracked you, then. Because this outline of him was so indelible, so evocative of the many juvenile jaunts the two of you had embarked on in brighter days. Days that saw you shouting, to that very back, unheeded discouragement as he charged off, sure as shit, into one impending injury or another. Days that were uncomplicated by adult misjudgement. Unsullied by physiological urges that hadn’t yet emerged.

He stood, a melancholic figure, by the open door. “I’ll text you soon.”

The promise held no weight.

You flashed him a smile far too brief to be convincing. “Okay. Good night, Taehyung.”

There came no offer of a parting embrace, and no consequent enquiry as to why. As the door closed behind you, it was as if you had fully stepped over the threshold into this new, grim reality. A reality that seemed as dreary, as much a torment as the days when the candle you held for him burned in solitary.

At a glance, your uneven, stumbling gait could well have been attributed to the influence of alcohol. It wasn’t too much a reach. But it had nothing to do with that, and all to do with your withdrawal from a substance, a person far more potent. As you staggered to the bus stop, face freshly overflowing with tacit devastation, every step away from him no longer felt empowering.

It heralded the onset of a protracted, creeping affliction.

Next: 09 || WYLEI Masterlist

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deepdickdaniel · 7 years

Text

Kang Daniel | Gift

prompt: daniel forgets that it’s your birthday but does his best to arrive to spend the last few hours of it with you.

note: day 6 of DANIEL WEEK aka MY BIRTHDAY WEEK!!! this is the week i post seven days of daniel stories as a treat to myself! the inspiration for this fic = me actually forgetting to write a birthday fic for myself AND THIS ADORABLE PICTURE OF DANIEL LMAO.

you woke up on your birthday to the dings of text messages from all of your friends and family

and you felt like you were getting phone calls every ten minutes or so

but for some reason, the person you cared for the most didn’t seem to say anything about your birthday

daniel had sent a good morning text as per usual, but there wasn’t anything different about it

you were wondering (and hoping) that he was just planning on surprising you or something because he couldn’t have possibly forgot...

...right?

but the day went on and 4pm came around - you came home from breakfast and lunch with friends who insisted on treating you

you hadn’t heard much from daniel aside from his usual update texts whenever he went to a new venue for work

sighing, you decided to just sit on the couch and wait it out

as for daniel’s perspective...well, he really forgot...

he walked back into his dorm after his managers told him that his schedule was free for the rest of the day

he was glad to have a little break and plopped his body on the couch, greeting the members that were already home

a good 20 minutes passed while the members stared at daniel, who was just playing games on his phone, before one decided to speak up

“uhhh, hyung? shouldn’t you be getting ready?” it was daehwi

daniel hummed and continued to play, “hmm? for what?”

“you said you had a special dinner to prepare for tonight...” daniel felt his heart drop at this

“...that you had a big surprise for —” but daehwi didn’t get to finish, because daniel was already running around the place, taking off articles of clothing on his way to the bedroom

“shit, shit, shit!”

daniel rushed to get ready and put on an outfit that he had preplanned and hung in his closet, running to do his hair and getting your gift together

he finished in a record time and greeted ong and jisung, who were walking in while daniel zoomed out

“hi! bye!”

both of them looked at the rest of the boys who were sitting on the couch

jisung looked confused for a second but clicked his tongue in realization, “he forgot, didn’t he?”

a chorus of “yup”’s and nods

about an hour later, you heard a frantic knocking at the door, so you looked through the peephole and saw your panicked boyfriend

when you opened the door, you could tell by his panting and nervous eyes that he had forgotten

you tried not to smile - he was dressed in an outfit that you mentioned you wanted to see him in one time

he had on a white button up shirt with a red bowtie, with round glasses adorning his face

he also had a huge bouquet of all your favorite flowers in one hand, and two bags in the other

“happy birthday!”

“you forgot, huh?”

he knew you were a bit disappointed in him and he felt even more guilty when he saw the big number balloons of your age that your friends had gotten you in the corner of your living room as he stepped in

you sat on the couch, all pouty with your arms crossed, praying that you would be able to stay upset at him for even a few minutes

“kid, i’m really sorry. i don’t know what happened to me, i have your birthday on every calendar in the dorm, on my phone, on everything! it’s my favorite day of the year!”

“can’t believe you forgot your ‘favorite day’ so easily then” you muttered as you closed your eyes, willing yourself not to give in to his cute face

he sighed and set down the things he was carrying on your coffee table

“i’m here, i’m not too late! and i have your favorite cake and flowers...and a little something else”

you peeked one eye open and scolded yourself internally - he was doing the puppy eyes you knew you could never resist

so you put your arms out instead and he placed the flowers in them, “there, almost as beautiful as you”

“shut up”

he laughed and opened one of the bags to reveal a box of cake, getting up to find a candle and a match somewhere in your kitchen

he lit the candle and placed it on your cake, holding it up and singing to you,

“happy birthday to you! happy birthday to youuuu! happy birthday to my shortyyyyy~ happy birthday to you!”

you completely caved and laughed at his song, blowing out the candle and kissing his cheek

“thank you, daniel”

“thank you for forgiving me! i really am sorry...the guys had to remind me and everything. i guess i was just tired from my schedule, but that’s not an excuse. i should’ve been here from the moment you woke up”

“it’s okay, you’re here now and that’s what matters”

daniel smiled weakly at first, but then picked up the other bag to hand to you

you opened it and pulled out the purple and yelllow nerdy jacket in your size

“now we can match”

he then handed you a stuffed envelope with a happy grin on his face

“what’s this?”

“an envelope”

“and what’s with the outfit? you look hot, though”

he laughed at that, “thank you, you said you wanted to see me in a bowtie so i wore one for you. now enough questions, kid. just open the envelope”

you carefully opened it, laughing at all the cat, peach, and smiley face stickers that were keeping it sealed

out of the envelope came folded pieces of paper, flowing onto your lap

you picked one up and read it aloud with the eager prompting of your boyfriend who was gesturing to them with his head,

“i promise to eat more”

picking up another one, you read, “i promise to try my best to give my hair a break”

before you read another, you paused and looked up at daniel, who was smiling shyly

“daniel, what is all of this?”

he wrapped an arm around you and brought you closer to him on the couch, kissing your forehead softly

“i know that the thing you want the most in the world is for me to be healthy, so i made all these promises. if i write them down, they’re easier to keep, you know? and i included a bunch of other promises that are going to give me the opportunity to spoil you for once”

you sniffed, feeling yourself getting emotional, and lay your head on his shoulder while you picked up the next piece of paper,

“i promise to get us at least one more cat by the end of this year”

daniel wiggled his eyebrows and gave you a hopeful look with his bunny smile, “great, no?”

“this sounds like a present for you more than me...”

“you told me that when i’m happy, you’re happy!”

you rolled your eyes and laughed, using your free hand to try and tickle him

but he caught your moving hand with his hand that was resting on your lap, kissing your fingertips one by one

“i hope i’ll be able to hold this hand for all of your future birthdays”

you knew he was being cheesy, but the honesty in his eyes was too much for you to handle, so you blushed and coughed, returning to the paper pieces

the two of you continued to cuddle, laugh, and get mildly serious as you read through the rest of his promises

he had written as many as the age you were turning

when you arrived at the last one, you noticed that it was tucked into the corner of the envelope tightly, as if needing to stay there until the very end

you tugged it out and daniel started to get excited once more,

“this is it! this is my actual present!”

you rose an eyebrow at him and looked around your coffee table where the bouquet, the cake, and the jacket lay,

“this wasn’t enough?”

he squished your cheek lightly and bopped your nose, “i could give you all the riches in the world and it wouldn’t even come close to what you deserve, babe”

“you’ve been hanging out with ong too much”

“shhh, just read it”

scoffing, your eyes moved from daniel to the paper, scanning over its words not once, not twice, but three times to make sure you were actually reading it right

“i promise...to spend my week long vacation next month with you wherever you want to go”

you looked up at him, eyes squinting in suspicion

“is this some prank?”

he put a hand to his chest, looking hurt “kid, you act like i’m good at lying”

“then you actually have a full week off?!”

he laughed at your excited face and poked your forehead, “yes! and you can also pick wherever you want to go. i’ve saved up enough for this!”

you thought for a moment and daniel smiled as he watched you

“i want to go to busan”

he froze for a second and furrowed his eyebrows, “um, are you sure? we could go to europe or hong kong, or anywhere you want”

“i’m sure”

“why don’t you think about it more? you have a lot of other options”

“daniel, i want to go to busan” you said firmly, eyes daring him to oppose you

he laughed and ruffled your hair, then he pulled your head in even closer to him to give you a big hug

“you’re too good to me. it’s your birthday, but i’m the one who keeps getting surprised”

“i know you miss your family, especially your mom and the cats. i miss them, too...” you went on to ramble as he stared at you adoringly, face mesmerized by your inner and outer beauty

“...and i want you to show me around where you grew up and i want to meet all of your friends and the people who taught you how to b-boy! i want to know everything about you!”

when you finished your reasoning, daniel grabbed your face and stared into your eyes, unable to find the words that described his feelings for you

so he captured your lips with his, the searing passion of his love emitting through his warmth

he pulled away every few seconds to whisper words of affection, his hands traveling up and down your back as the two of you continued to kiss

your hands were rubbing his shoulders and chest, your fingers playing with his bowtie every now and then as you lost yourself in his love

when he pulled away, he rested his forehead on yours as his face quickly returned to its normally fluffy, sweet state

“thank you so much for being born. it’s your birthday but it’s the most important day of my year because it’s a reminder that you’re really here and that you choose to be with me every day. thank you, i love you”

he whispered this so lovingly that you felt like you would melt

you were on the top of the world in his arms and despite the day not starting off as you would have liked it to, you wouldn’t have changed a thing

#kang daniel #wanna one #wanna one scenarios #kang daniel scenarios #kang daniel imagines #wanna one imagines #daniel scenarios #daniel imagines #daniel #everyong #daniel week 2017 #ariane's bday week 2017

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yuriplisetsky-rp · 7 years

Text

Sitting Down: Couple Interviews [Part One]

//This was co-written with @guanghongvoice who wrote Guang-hong. I wrote Leo, and the Interviewer, with any of the interview’s comments about what GH is doing coming from the exchange this is based on.//

February 1, 2017

With the Olympics fast approaching, we are highlighting some of figure skating’s couples. We are starting with Guang Hong Ji of China and Leo de la Iglesia of the US. Here, we discuss what’s going on in their lives, plans for next season as well as some more personal questions.

Welcome, and Thank you both for joining us here today, I know you must both have very busy schedules with the Olympics coming up soon.

Guang Hong: Yes, we have been very busy. I feel like my life has been moving so fast recently.

Leo: Yes, same it's been a whirlwind year for sure!

I'm sure it has! So, how long have you two been together, exactly?

Guang Hong: Oh gosh um...heh....oh this sounds...odd because it hasn't even been a year and we're already engaged...

Leo: Yes, our one year anniversary isn't for another few months, I think, but it's been amazing.

Guang Hong: I'm not complaining, definitely, just..it might seem odd to some people. But we've known one another a very long time.

It sounds exciting! Guang Hong certainly agrees as he’s blushing right now.So, any wedding plans at all? Have you two talked about when or are you two keeping it slow?

Guang Hong: I'm just happy we're engaged- we're not in any rush for a wedding- though I have a little idea binder.

Leo: Exactly. And we're still so young, too, and neither of us is going anywhere, so there's no need to rush. It'll happen when the time is right.

An idea binder... Have you seen this binder, Leo? Have you two discussed the things in the binder yet, or is it more for... information gathering?

Leo: Um, somewhat! We haven't talked about anything in great detail, but occasionally, things are mentioned.

Guang Hong: Oh, just um, information gathering and ideas, you know, things for the reception that would be nice to leave out for the guests, dress ideas, how to include a deceased relative in a ceremony - Yeah, information gathering.

Okay, sounds interesting, and Guang Hong went nearly purple there towards the end. Very interesting. So, you two were friends for a long time before getting romantically involved... any bumps in the road worth noting after that?

Leo: Um, like any other couple we've had things happen, and with his life being in China before, money issues were a thing at one point, but we worked through it together, just like we always do. Life throws things at you, and we dealt with it.

Guang Hong: Yes, um...yes.

Okay, I seem to have struck a chord there. Guang Hong was almost in tears, and Leo had to rub his back, so we are going to move on. So, Leo you have a great season, and Guang-hong, your season has been up and down. How is it watching your partner go through their season when yours is either not going they want you it or it is and theirs isn't going the way they want it?

Guang Hong: I honestly hold my skating career and my relationship with Leo as far apart as I can. I support him, but we don't even always tell one another our choreography or really discuss much about skating when we're at home (unless I would like advice from him, as he's a gifted choreographer). I'm so incredibly proud of Leo. I can't seem to find my rhythm right now, but I know I can do it again.

Leo: I believe in him completely, and like he said, we don't talk about it too much. I'm proud of him, even though it hasn't gone the way he wanted, but I have complete faith in him.

That is wonderful to hear, and they are holding hands now which is adorable. With you not qualifying for the Grand Prix Final, Guang Hong, was it hard to be there and not be competing with him?

Guang Hong: Honestly...it wasn't as hard as I thought. Getting a gold that season, my first, was a huge achievement and I was comfortable with that being my take away for the season. For Leo, I was just so excited for him and to see him skate that day. I knew he'd be amazing.

Now, there were reports that you and Yuri Plisetsky were... screaming during the warm-up? Is this true, or is it over exaggerated?

Guang Hong: Oh....oh gosh wow that...

Leo: Let's just say I could hear them.

Guang Hong: Sorry, I needed a second there- that was not intentional, and Yuri and I occasionally get competitive- we were definitely being too loud- wait, you could? I was /that/ loud?

Leo: Just a little, but yes. It was more of... "Wait, is that him? No." because there's a lot of other noise, but they were seated pretty close to the rink, so...

Guang Hong: Aiyah... It um, we were having a discussion about what it means to be supportive, what the right things to say are, and yes, we definitely forgot where we were and what we were doing.

If everyone could see them right now. Leo is trying not to laugh, and Guang-hong is in shock right now. He went from holding his head in his head to turning bright red. Let's move on! With the Olympics coming up, is it more special doing it together? Leo, this will be your second Olympics, but Guang-hong, this is the first year you are age-eligible.

Leo: It is very special. I'm so happy to have this experience with him, and I wouldn't trade it for the world

Guang Hong: Oh, I know! I mean...it was always going to mean a lot, being my first Olympics, but the fact that I'm there with Leo...for me, Leo has always made everything better.

Leo: We'll be staying at a hotel in Gangneung together, and I can't wait.

They're giving each other such looks if you could see them now, and Leo just squeezed his hand. It’s very cute. So, besides the competition itself, any other plans during the Olympics?

Guang Hong: Well besides I'm not really sure...I've actually been worried about finding a place for our dog while we're in Korea.

Leo: Yes, we just got a dog, but I'm sure we'll find a place... It's just, it's three weeks, so it's a long time, you know? We have to be there before the 1st, because Official Practices for the Team Event start then, which we are both participating in. And we'll be there for a month, so it's a long time, but we definitely will probably be seeing other events.

Guang Hong: Oh I know, but your parents have Sol and I don't know how they'd be around one another and I don't like the kennel I che-oh, I am /so/ sorry.

Leo: It's fine, love, we'll think of something. We have plenty of people who care about us and will help out.

Guang Hong: Yes, um, anyway- we are very excited to see the other events and I know I'm excited to see old faces and meet the new athletes like myself.

Well, I do hope you find someone for the new dog, but speaking of other events - any, in particular, you want to watch while you're there?

Guang Hong: Oh, I always love watching the skiing and sledding events. Leo wants to try it - he's a little bit of an adrenaline junkie.

Leo: Yes, that's the big thing I want to see, but I also would like to see if I can fit in some hockey or short track, but we only have so much time!

Guang Hong: Oh I know! But we'll get around really quickly with me there, Shizi, we don't need to worry about that.

And they are both laughing now, and they are being quite cute. Now, post-Olympics, a lot of skaters skip Worlds, are you two skipping Worlds or are you planning to compete there?

Leo: I want to compete there. I absolutely do and have no plans not to compete there.

Guang Hong: Same here, actually, I want to go beyond the Olympics.

Leo: The Olympics is great, but Worlds is important, too. That's where we determine the Worlds spot for next year, and where your Grand Prix spots are determined from. If you want to be top-seeded in the Grand Prix, you need to be there.

Guang Hong: Exactly. I already have to miss one competition this year too, and that's one less chance to make my mark for next season. I want to make up for it.

Leo: And I want to get the US Men our three spots back, and I think between me and Michael Anderson, we might be able to do that, It'll be tough, but we both have to show up to do it.

Guang Hong: Oh? You sure sound confident, Shizi.

Leo: Well, I - I am certainly going to try, though I think you and Cao Bin have a better shot and getting the Chinese Men their three spots back.

Guang Hong: Hmm, we might. Thank you for the vote of confidence. *smiles to let him know he was only teasing*

Such cute banter between these two! Even cuter in person. And after Worlds? Any plans for the off-season? Either professionally or personally?

Guang Hong: Oh um, we've been talking about taking a big vacation, actually!

Leo: Yes, we've taken a few little ones, but nothing big and it'll be nice to have a break.

Guang Hong: And Leo thought maybe Disney World - and I've NEVER been and I've always wanted to go, so that's where we're looking at heading.

Leo: Yes, that would be exciting, but it's still in the planning stages right now.

Always something to see! Just a couple more questions now... Do you two prefer competing at the same competitions or separately, or does it matter?

Guang Hong: I... the first time I met Leo, I had just gone to stay in America for the first time and he approached me. He introduced himself and asked to see my jumps. Since then, Leo has always helped to keep me calm. If I don't do as well as he does, then it's not my day and I'm proud of him."

Leo: I hate being away from him, so it doesn't matter if he's competing or not, but I need to have him there. He keeps me centered.

Okay, folks, these two are simply adorable. Guang-hong is leaning against Leo, and they are gazing lovingly at each other, smiling and... very, very cute and romantic. One more question! What is something about the other that you think fans should know?

Guang Hong: Leo is talented in so many ways and so kind and loving and I'm the luckiest person in the world.

Leo: Guang-hong is even more amazing in person, he's the sweetest, most attentive fiance that anyone could ask for.

Okay, these are truly adorable, maybe the most adorable couple I've ever seen. Guang Hong is now hiding back Leo after he squealed from that comment Leo made. Anyway, that's all the questions I have. Thank you both so much for joining me.

Leo: Thank you for having us.

Guang Hong: Yes, thank you.

#fake news article #couple interviews #article #news #blog canon #guanghongvoice

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falteringfaith · 4 years

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20 things I learned in 2020

1. The only certainty in life is uncertainty.

This is obviously true in the case of, you know, a global pandemic, but even moreso is the way this permeates every aspects of our life on earth. Fundamentally, nothing in certain. No time has ever been ‘precedented’. This year was a reminder of that, but so was clerkship in general. Every month, every new rotation forced me to confront the difficulties I had managing uncertainty. As a person who needs to know EVERYTHING at all times, I was forced to accept that I simple could not know it all in these clinical scenarios. This doesn’t mean it made it any easier to deal with - I still get pretty anxious the night before a new rotation, but I certainly deal with it easier than before.

2. Ask for help.

Ask and so you shall receive! Why stumble around the hospital by yourself, sweating anxiously and checking your watch nervously as the minutes tick by closer to when you’re supposed to be at X or Y destination, when you can ask someone who is (in my experience - literally always) willing to help? Now, I stride in and ask the first person I see where I can find what I am looking for. People want to help - you just need to ask. Whether its for finding something or letting someone you can confide in know that you’re struggling - ask.

3. You are what you do every day.

Aristotle said it best, so I won’t mince his words. What we spend our time doing each day reflects what is valuable and important to us. This year, for the first time in my life, I began to work out for myself and made it a habit. I wasn’t doing it to lose weight, to participate on a team, or for any other reason than for me. I noticed myself get stronger, happier, feel better. I made it a habit to the point where when I don’t do it, I feel off. I didn’t think this was something that was possible for me - rather, that I was destined to a life of just not being an exercise person. But here’s the thing - everyone is and can be an exercise person. You just have to be doing it for the right reasons - for wanting to move your body in a meaningful way each day because thats what makes it feel right. I hope to come to love my body and all it does for me in the coming years. I would lie to say that I love and am truly accepting of it right now, because I know I am not. But I do know that I am treating it a whole lot better than I ever have before.

4. Be vulnerable/STOP PEOPLE PLEASING

Holy fuck --- this !!!!!!!! You do not need to have it all figured out. You do not need to pretend that you are unphased by things or that you are the ~chill~ girl. This does not benefit anyone, and it certainly does not benefit yourself. People want honesty. They want to know how you’re feeling. All you do by shutting that away is harbor negativity and resentment that end up exploding later. I was taught to hide these emotions growing up for whatever reason - shame, embarrassment, whatever - but I will stop doing this. You cannot begin to unpack the why of how you are feeling, and try to achieve more, if you don’t do this. You should be open and raw - tell people why you love them (like when you messaged people you felt grateful for over twitter and facebook last summer) or why you felt badly about things (like you did in your relationship). You deserve to be heard.

5. Take a walk.

The power of going for a walk to clear your headspace and give you time away was truly found this year. Nature is grounding. Fresh air feels like it lifts the weight off your chest. Spend time outdoors - don’t feel badly if you cant - and breathe deeply. Feel the earth against your feet as you propel forward and deal with emotions. Whether it was 5 minutes between virtual clinics or 5 hours walking around when you were upset and in an argument with Felipe, taking a walk was the answer.

6. People like people that they like.

This year, in clerkship, I learned that it is not always important to be the smartest or wisest or wittiest. You dont even have to be smart, wise or witty. You just have to be trying, responsible, likable. A good team player. On most days, being just me, at my baseline, was more than enough. I think this year I realized that I am likeable (or affable) as one of my strengths. It was the CL psych nurses (Karen telling me “you are a star” on my last day and making me tear up on my walk down the hill back to my car parked on Strachlan), or it was the R3 on gen surg (”you have a good energy”) or whoever else. Not necessarily things or fields I knew the most about, but just who I am. And that was nice to hear. Stop the imposter syndrome - you are enough.

7. Non-fiction books can be enjoyable.

Fiction is still better, but there is lots to be learned in a good non fiction.

8. Get comfortable being uncomfortable.

You bawled your eyes out on your birthday morning, at Felipe’s house on James. You sat on the balcony and couldn’t control all the tears that wanted to come out. It was blackout tuesday, and where was the validation that your year MEANT something if it wasn’t shown via birthday posts on instagram? More than this, people ARE DYING IN A GLOBAL PANDEMIC, SARA. And even moreso than that, you were flooded with, dare I say, WHITE GUILT that this was the way you were feeling in the midst of pronounced racial, civil unrest. For the first time, I think you were really confronted - every day, for weeks - with the fact that you were white. You knew this before, of course, but this was blaring at you from every angle, even on your fucking birthday. And here’s the thing - things will never go bac to the way they were, when you were afforded the privilege of being blissfully ignorant and unaware of your race. When it wasn’t something you had to think about, at all, because you were obviously part of the majority and benefiting from your race in innumerable ways each and every day. We’re not going back there. The only way forward is through. Get over your guilt, we’ve got shit to do.

9. External vs. Internal validation

I think this year you really realized how much you depend on external validation to feel valued and confident. I wish for you to see in the coming years how much more you are than just what people tell you. You are bold, brilliant, confident, clever and strong because you are - not because others tell you so.

10. Recognizing my emotional dysregulation

This year, I became a lot more aware of the fact that I emotionally dysregulate and have extreme tempers or profound sadness with a baseline of general bubbly/contentment/joy. Now, it’s going to be all about managing it...

11. Envy/comparison is a thief of joy.

12. You’ll never know if you don’t try.

I am proud of all the ways in which you put yourself out there this year and applied to things. You got rejected - a lot. Whether it was awards and scholarships (OMA ambassador, all the general scholarships through MacMed) or leadership opportunities (where to begin? OMSA day of action lead or even being part of the OMSA day of action), or the million times you vowed that you would not apply for Ontario Regional Director. There were so many times that week you wanted to quit - to not write a script, to not attend a zoom session, to pull out even when you just saw the competition - but you didn’t. You learned a lot, you practiced giving a zoom speech, and you chatted with some interesting people. You lost the election, but you personally did not lose anything. While at that time it was a tough pill to swallow, here you are. Now you have more time to dedicate to your YWCA partnership, and isn’t that a beautiful thing after all?

13. Stop putting things off - do them right away!

Still working on it lol.

14. Popcorn

15. Being a good friend/girlfriend/daughter is a skill.

Noone ever tells you, I feel, that having strong, close relationships is hard work. You can’t just sit idly by. You also can’t expect that giving a gift or saying some nice words is enough. Especially in a year of social distancing - you had to get creative. Face times, flowers delivered, watching netflix simultaneously on the extension with Felipe (money heist anyone?), zoom hang outs, picnics at Oakville lakeshore, scheduling monthly hang outs with Sharon.. relationships are about making the time and investing into it like you would with anything else. You don’t necessarily have to be doing fancy things like this either - but emotional intimacy is important and necessary, too.

16. If you’re not doing it because you love it, it won’t give you any contentment.

All the extracurriculars in the world don’t matter if they dont make you tick.

17. The opportunity for learning/gratitude is everywhere.

Whether its from patients sitting right in front of you (listen to them, always), podcasts, or anywhere else. There are opportunities to learn all around you. Likewise, there are always, ALWAYS things to be grateful for. Take a moment to pause and think about what you learned or are grateful for in a day. There is always something.

18. You’re actually really good at procedures.

Why did you think you weren’t? Were you indoctrinated to believe that only men were good with their hands? Regardless... don’t be nervous. You’re good at them!

19. Routine, good nights of sleep are not overrated. Not at all.

20. Residents are the unsung heroes of the medical student experience. They make or break a rotation, and influence it more than any other factor. Future Sara you better be a fucking good resident to your med students.

Honourable mention goes to this awesome moment this year that I almost forgot happened, but thankfully tweeted about - “No better way to spend International Women’s Day than on the Labour & Delivery floor witnessing the strength, power & tenacity of mama’s in labour! First delivery of the day - unmedicated () with a beautiful baby girl joining the world!”

Another honourable mention to coming together with a fun crew to create COVIDreview, which unexpectedly got lots of media attention and praise but, most of all, was a fun way to get to know people in my class that I didn’t normally speak to.

On other notes, I will cherish the fact that I got to spend 3 months in my parents home with them for the first time in many, many years. We watched movies, did yoga, baked (a LOT), and went for many, many, repetitive walks. I love them more than words can describe and cannot imagine a life without my parents (and my brother). My family is everything.

I am also very appreciate to be in a relationship with Felipe that is constantly pushing me to be better and to recognize things about myself I didn’t know (or didn’t want to know). These things sometimes upset me, but ultimately I recognize they are important for my growth and leading me into becoming more of who I want to be. I am learning so much about myself, what I need and want in a partner, and how to communicate more effectively to convey these things (versus not communicating this at all in the past). Things aren’t always easy but I cherish the moments that happened this year (starting the year off travelling Arizona with him, meeting his sister/niece/nephew, him meeting my family, coming to Blue Mountain, going on an impromptu trip to Niagara, all the biking expeditions, going to Stratford for his birthday!!). I also must (MUST!!!!!) stop comparing my relationships to others.

Overall, I find it ironic that the year marked by a GLOBAL PANDEMIC is the year where I was finally forced to stop, pause, and prioritize my health. My physical health, in building a habit for fitness that finally stuck, my emotional health in learning to recognize what I want in relationships and *starting* to ask for it/be vulnerable, and my mental health in taking the time for sleep, walks, and meditation (sometimes more than others). Lets continue to take these lessons into 2021.

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iliveiloveiwrite · 7 years

Text

Secrets.

Hi! So this is my post on Tumblr for any piece of my writing. I usually post on wattpad and AO3. My main blog is @hairdye-enthusiast and this is my side blog.

This piece is apart of @because-imma-lady-assface ‘s Will & Grace challenge, I love everything to do with the show so I had so much fun writing this. I’m posting it early because I won’t have time tomorrow to get around to it due to a full day at university and then I’m working all night.

Warnings: Drugs mention but nothing incredibly serious.

Pairing: Bucky x reader

Words: 1′140

“You’re married to him!” Steve shouts. “How can you lose your husband?”

Your eyebrows furrow before your eyes widen in realisation. “It’s drugs. He’s doing drugs. Without me.” Steve looks at you, exasperated at what you just said. “Not that I do drugs, but I’d like to be asked.”

Steve sighs before walking away, shaking his head.

“Steve! Get back here! My husband is doing drugs without me!”

You watch him walk away, puzzled, you’ve absolutely no idea as to where your husband is. In all the time you’ve been married, he’s never pulled a stunt like this. Sure. he’s disobeyed orders on missions and he sometimes won’t pick up his towel after a shower but he’s never just up and left. You were worried, how could you not be? Your husband was the Winter Soldier for crying out loud, he was a ghost for decades.

Groaning, you drop your head into your hands. Bucky had been disappearing for a few hours every day for the last week now and you were at your wits end trying to figure out where he goes and what he’s doing. He wasn’t cheating, that much you knew; he was a faithful man. And he still trains, albeit not with you but according to Steve, he comes to his sessions and they both spar for a couple of hours or until they grow tired and that’s when Bucky comes to seek you out. You know his day is done when he comes to your shared room and drops on your bed next to you. You’ll be reading or watching some show on TV, and he’ll grab your hand and place it on his head, silently telling you to run your hands through his hair. It’s the repetitive motion that helps him get to sleep; it’s been years but he’ll struggle falling asleep and then waking up from the inevitable nightmares. You help though, he makes sure to remind you that you help him more than you know.

Smiling at the thought of your husband, you resolve to confront him tonight. the curiosity was driving you insane now.

You head to your room and try to get some paperwork done before Steve lectures you about having it done on time (though you know he’s never handed in paperwork on time too).

It’s only a couple of hours later when Bucky walks through the door and throws himself dramatically onto the bed; huffing as he does so. He turns onto his side and stares at you with his cerulean blues. “Why are you so far away? Come warm me up.”

“Because, my dear, we got back from a mission two weeks ago and I still haven’t finished the paperwork.”

“Please tell me you aren’t choosing paperwork over your dashingly handsome husband whom you love so much you just want to cuddle up to him to warm him up.”

You laugh, turning from your seat at your desk to look at your husband who is now pouting at you. “Stop laughing at me! Come over here!”

Sighing, you put your pen down and make your way to Bucky. He opens his arms and you huddle into him, his arms wrap around your back and start to rub up and down. You burrow your head into his chest and sigh in contentment. Bucky kisses your head, murmuring sweet nothings to you. You both bask in the bubble of warmth and love and you almost don’t want to break it because it’s so perfect but your curiosity is getting out of hand.

“Bucky?”

“Yes, doll?”

“Where have you been going for the last week? I’ve honestly no clue what you’ve been getting up to and my curiosity is driving me insane.”

He chuckles, his metal arm rubbing your back, “You sure you wanna know?”

“Why wouldn’t I want to know?”

“Because, doll, it might freak you out.”

“James.” You deadpan. “I’m an assassin, there’s very little that freaks me out these days.”

He laughs, “Ah yes, I forgot you’re as assassin. Well if you really want to know, you’ll have to follow me.”

He stands up, turns to you and holds his hand out to you. You grab it, you’d follow him anywhere, into anything; he’s the love of your life. Linking your fingers together, he pulls your hand up to his mouth and places a kiss on the back of it. He smiles and pulls you towards the garage where Tony keeps all his cars, he grabs a set of keys and gets in. You follow him and soon you’re both heading off into suburban New York. You’ve no clue where Bucky is taking you, but you have absolute faith in your husband so you smile and reach for his hand across the console.

It isn’t a long drive, an hour from the compound at the most. You pull up outside a house, Bucky turns off the car and turns to you. He points towards the house and says “There you are, that’s where I’ve been going for the past week. I kinda hoped I’d have longer to work on it before you asked.”

You look at the house, it’s colonial definitely, with a large porch and a large garden. It’s amazing, you love it from just one look.

“Can I go inside?” You ask.

“Of course you can, it’s ours doll.”

Now you’re shocked. “Ours? What do you mean ours?”

“Remember at our wedding when Tony said our gift had two parts. The first part being that he paid for the honeymoon even though we said not to. Well the second part was that when we were on the honeymoon, he bought us this house. It was a little run down, and Tony had started refurbishments, and keeping everything simple because he knows how you don’t like things completely over the top. When we got back from the honeymoon, he puled me to one side and handed me the keys. He said to move in when we feel ready, that it’s always there for us. I’ve been going and just finished the rooms up before even suggesting moving to you.”

You look at your husband; your beautiful, incredible and thoughtful husband. And you start to cry, you can’t believe that Tony had bought you a house and that Bucky had been re-decorating it to just how you would like it. You married a selfless man and your heart swells just looking at him, you love him with your entire being, every part of you is gravitated towards this man, and you’ve never been so thankful that he loves you too. You pull him in by the collar for a long kiss, pouring all emotion into it. When you pull away, you only have four words to say to him.

“When do we move?”

#ash's 300 w&g challenge #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky x reader #bucky x you #marvel fanfiction #james bucky barnes #james buchanan barnes #bucky barnes #bucky imagine #fluff

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catholicliving · 7 years

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An Essay on “Practical Catholicism”

So a few weeks ago, two of my coworkers were talking about different religions and how people practice their respective faiths. I didn’t really take part in the conversation, but simply listened in as it was near my desk, and I couldn’t help but hear. One of them made a remark to this effect: “I don’t see why people need to go to a special building to worship God. I can worship him in my house, or out in nature, or anywhere. I don’t need a special building for that.”

And, to a certain degree, she’s right. We can worship God anywhere. In fact, Jesus tells us that we should go to our inner rooms and pray to our Father in secret, and our Father who sees what is secret will repay us.

There is certainly merit to private prayer, do not get me wrong. We should all be comfortable with private meditation whether at home or on the go, and we don’t need a “worship space” – a church, a chapel, a grotto, or whatever – to pray.

All that being said, that doesn’t take away from the fact that we DO need to be comfortable with communal worship as well. As one of my favorite Christian musical artists Ron Kenoly says, “Learn how to worship with the person standing next to you / Because when we get to Heaven, that’s what we’re gonna do.”

We need to have and do both.

But, let’s not overlook why so many people do go to church, and have gone to a central place of worship for hundreds of generations: the practical one – it’s a community center.

Think back to the 1800s, and those rural communities out in Farmland, USA (or any country, really). Your neighbors were sometimes several miles away, and, without cars, that was easily a half-day’s journey just to go to your friend’s house for a chat, grab a thing of sugar and then head back home. It was much easier for everyone to gather at the church, a central location, on Sunday and hear the latest news — that couple just had their first baby; so-and-so is on their deathbed; Mr. Smith fell and broke his leg and is on bedrest for several weeks. But, because these were also people of Faith, that meant that they could take action on anything that they felt needed to be done. Bring the new parents some food; help Mr. Smith’s family with their chores and other tasks; offer so-and-so’s family words of consolation, etc.

Even today, politicians realize that if you want to get the African-American communities involved, you go to their churches. You talk to the pastor, or the youth minister or whomever, because if they can get their congregation involved, your collective goals will be accomplished very quickly. This can be said for other communities, too, don’t get me wrong; but the African-American community is well-known for seeing the church as a gathering place for everyone to come together and plan how to get things done. (See: the Civil Rights movement.)

And as I thought of all these things later, after my coworkers’ conversation was long over, I began to realize how many aspects of our Faith hold not only a spiritual reason, but a practical one as well.

For instance: stained glass windows. Yes, they’re pretty. Yes, they should raise our thoughts to God and His work throughout salvation history. But, really, the reason they were first used in churches was when the majority of church-goers were illiterate, and the church leaders (priests, religious, etc.) needed a way to instruct both children and adults about the stories of the Faith. Thus, stained glass windows as a visual aid for whatever important Biblical figure or story you needed to teach people about.

Candles seem so archaic and ritualistic now, but up until electricity was invented, that was the only way to see. Yes, they also serve a liturgical and spiritual purpose; but, honestly, they were there to help the priest read the Missal and everyone else to see what was going on. If your church had a lot of windows and natural light, great! But, on those days when it was dark, or cloudy, or the church couldn’t afford windows… candles were the only way to see things.

(EDIT: When first writing this essay, I forgot to add the very important example below, on confession. I will also mark where the new content ends and the old content begins, just for clarification.)

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a while, and I remember mulling it over again after I saw this reblog on my “When you have to confess a really embarrassing sin to your favorite priest” post

This is one thing I envy Catholics for. I know I can lay my sins directly before God in private confession and prayer, but I feel like I would get more closure from confessing my transgressions in person to someone like a priest. It might feel more real, more permanent, than whispering a prayer by myself, and wondering if I was sincere enough. I mean, it is so much scarier to go to a real person and confess my shame out loud! But I would be able to trust them, and they would remind me of God’s forgiveness, and I would feel that my extra effort proved my repentance to be sincere. And I know God’s forgiveness depends fully on Jesus’s sacrifice and not on the sincerity of my plea for it, but the mental shame game is still a toughie.

This is something I’ve always appreciated about confession. Several times I’ve wanted to just confess my sins to God and just hope in His Mercy and not have to bring them to confession, because I just felt so embarrassed about them. Why can’t I just tell God I’m sorry? Why do I have to go to a priest? Can’t I just ~assume~ that He’s forgiven me and move on?

But, I cannot tell you the relief I feel every time I do take those sins to confession and hear the words, “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Go in peace.” I know, with 100 percent certainty, that I am forgiven.

And, even more practically speaking, in hindsight, it’s so helpful to bring those sins to the priest who can give you counsel and advice on how to avoid giving into those temptations in the future. If you’re Catholic, I’m sure you understand how many little tidbits from confession you end up remembering. Whether you carry them out or not is another matter, but they stick with you. If you’re not Catholic, I sincerely ask you to investigate what I mean – ask Catholics you know about confession and how it helps them; talk to a priest; etc. Granted, the priest doesn’t always give you advice or counsel, but when he does, it’s almost always something you needed to hear, whether you knew it already or not. He can tell you not to beat yourself up over your weaknesses, more practical steps on avoiding certain sins, or ways you can beef up your prayer life. It’s like spiritual direction with a bit of therapy thrown in there.

(EDIT: Old content begins here.)

One of my favorite parts of the liturgy that falls into this category is when the priest washes his hands after receiving the gifts (bread, wine, monetary donations) from the congregation. He says a prayer, “Lord, wash me of my iniquities and cleanse me of my sin,” and has the server pour a bit of water on his hands. The gesture is more for a spiritual purpose now than a practical one… But it didn’t start out that way. In the days of the Early Church, the priest did this to wash off all the gunk he got from touching the livestock, produce and other things that people donated during the Offertory. Now, of course, its practical purpose is gone, but that history is still there.

Many of the things that we do, if traced back enough, can also be seen from a practical perspective, and not just a spiritual one. For instance, the relics of the saints that every church has in its altar is a reminder that many in the Early Church celebrated Mass in the crypts beneath Rome, because that was — practically speaking — the safest place to do it. It was secret, out of the public way, and you could only really find it if you knew about it. Similarly, the ichthus, or the “Jesus fish symbol” as we always called it when we were kids, was a way for Christians to identify each other when their religion was forbidden. One person would trace the symbol with their foot or their stick in the sand or the dirt, to see if the other person would recognize it. If so, they were a fellow Christian. If not, you could just smudge it out or claim you had restless leg syndrome or something and it wasn’t anything.

Practically speaking, we have a Pope, because we need a “lead guy” whenever something goes wrong or we need to make a decision. Yes, he makes those decisions in union with a council of bishops, so it’s not just him acting by himself. But, at the end of the day, the Pope can always be regarded as The Official Spokesman® for the Catholic Church. If some Catholics do something that’s bad, the Pope can be the one to say, “Yeah, no, that’s seriously not what we believe. Don’t listen to them if they tell you that we do.”

Our society is starting to see this a lot right now among the Muslim community. We have some Muslims in the Middle East who are killing Christians and other non-Muslims, and claiming jihad, and doing all sorts of violent things — all in the name of Islam; all claiming that their beliefs are justified in the Qu'ran. Yet, there are Muslims in America who believe Islam is a peaceful religion, that attacking people of other faiths is never justified, and that the other Muslims have taken the Qu'ran out of context. Who are we non-Muslims to believe? Is Islam peaceful or not?

Granted, even if there were The Official Spokesman® for the Islamic Faith, I doubt those conflicts and quarrels would go away. However, it would give us non-Muslims someone to look to and say, “S/he speaks for all the true Muslims and those who disagree are a splinter group.”

Even within the Catholic Church, there are plenty of “Catholic” politicians who are pro-choice, even though the Church has spoken out against abortion several times, and asked people not to approve of it in any way, especially politicians. Yet, there are groups within the Church who don’t listen to or follow these teachings, and do their own thing, yet still claim to be Catholic. Who are we to believe? Is Catholicism pro- or anti-abortion?

I don’t want to get too bogged down in the political dealings. The ultimate point was that we Catholics have someone to look to as a sort of final authority (on earth), a spokesman, and a guy who gets the deciding vote (if there were ever some kind of disagreement within the church about something) before proclaiming doctrine on Faith and Morals.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things that we do in the liturgy that are wholly spiritual in nature. Kneeling, for instance — there’s really no practical reason to kneel. We do it to show reverence for the King of Kings, who is present in the Blessed Sacrament.

I simply mean to say that so much of our faith, our prayers, our rituals, our liturgy, our structure of the Church involves what I would like to call “Practical Catholicism.”

We are hylomorphic beings after all. That means that we are both body and soul. Some Christian denominations say that humans are merely souls temporarily trapped inside meat bags. That our bodies are unimportant. Merely prisons from which we must free ourselves. And while our souls are certainly more important, that doesn’t mean that are our bodies are nothing. Our souls affect our bodies, and our bodies affect our souls.

There’s a reason that my spiritual director always encouraged people to drink coffee before trying to pray in the morning. There’s a reason why you’ll start feeling depressed if you’re inactive for too long. There’s a reason why if there are certain hormones in your system, you’ll probably have to fight harder against lustful thoughts and actions. We are both. Yes, our souls will go to Heaven (or Hell) when our bodies die, but at the End of Days, we are going to get our bodies back — New and Improved® bodies.

So, the next time you wonder why Catholics’ rosaries have five sets of 10 beads (it’s because we used to count on our fingers); or why the choir loft is usually above the congregation and at the back of the church (it’s so our voices and instruments can carry better); or why Hispanic Catholics only ever seem to use guitar / mariachi-type music at church (because guitars and trumpets are hand-held, portable instruments, making them perfect for processions, or minstreling through the town, and are generally cheaper than a piano or organ); or why we use only precious metals to contain the Eucharist (not only is it spiritually respectful, but precious metals typically last longer); or anything else about the Catholic Faith, I merely ask that you try to see not only the spiritually relevant reasons, but the practical ones as well.

Because, ultimately, whether you believe in God, whether you practice a faith, whether your Catholic or another Christian denomination… learning to cooperate and work with others to achieve a common goal is central to not only our society, but society in general.

Thus, if ever anyone asks you or complains about not needing a special building to worship God in… just say, “You know, we don’t just go to church for only spiritual reasons.”

#catholic #catholicism #catholic church #christian #christianity #christians #christian faith

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mirkwoodshewolf · 7 years

Text

Father-daughter rebellion Charles Xavier x teen reader

Thought I’d take a break from posting up Loki fics (don’t worry there are more) and post up some X-men mainly Charles Xavier (young) all of these mainly come from requests from my wattpad I haven’t really thought of one on my own since I grew up on Xmen the animated series plus the first three movies when I was a kid but then grew out of them and now I only tolerate them but I enjoy reading the fics you guys make and I’ll do any Professor X requests if more come my way (same thing with the other Xmen characters after all I did watch them when I was a kid and liked it a lot)

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It started off as any normal day at Xavier’s school for the gifted youngster, I wake up, head downstairs for breakfast, get dressed, then I head outside for a little exercise before I start my three hour training session with Jean and my dad yeah you heard right, Charles Xavier the headmaster and founder of the Xavier school is my father.

Anyways after the training session I do lunch with Jean and the rest of our girl squad, after lunch we hit the mall then head back just before dinner and at night when my dad is retiring for the night, I head out to the gardens to meet with my boyfriend Peter Maximoff otherwise known as Quicksilver. We sit, have a small picnic together, listen to his tunes and then he runs me back to my room when it gets late and my day starts all over again. Pretty good life if I may say so myself, but that’s just me well anyways goodnight all until tomorrow.

The next morning, I woke up at 7:45am and headed downstairs for breakfast.

“Morning everyone” I said. They all greeted me back, I then walked towards my dad and pecked his cheek saying, “morning daddy”.

“Good morning (y/n), oh today I want to have a private training test with you today at 9 sharp”.

“Okay, where are we going?”

“Our special training field, don’t be late”.

“Sir Yes sir” I mocked saluted. He scowled at me playfully and swatted at me but I managed to retreat to the kitchen to grab me a plateful of Hank’s delicious pancakes.

At 9am just as dad requested, I met with him in our private training grounds. It was gym sized filled with different variations of objects for me to practice my telekinesis on. There was also a section for meditation and to practice my mind-reading powers, I tell you being the daughter of a telepath can be stressful but luckily dad is always there to help me.

“Now then, I’d like you to practice your attacking. You’ve already shown much progression in the levitation and defensive skills, now you must learn to control your attacks, you go too hard on your attacks and must learn to control the amount of force you use to attack, do you understand?”

“Yes father”. I stated. He then wheeled himself to the control room behind a two way mirror and his voice came out.

“Remember, less anger, more defense”. I took a deep breath then exhaled as my hands began to glow red as did my eyes. Soon guns appeared from the ceiling and fired right at me. I created a shield around me to protect myself when I spotted a huge pillar that I could use to throw at one of the guns. I lifted my hand and the red mist surrounded the pillar as I then threw the pillar at the gun destroying it immediately.

Once that gun was destroyed, I then used my powers on another gun to take control of it and let it shot at the other guns. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom each on exploded after a few rounds into them then once that was done I slowly crushed my hand into a fist which short circuited the gun I had under my powers until that one exploded.

When all was said and done, my dad soon came out and he said as he wheeled up to me.

“Not bad, not bad at all, using your powers to control one of the weapons to destroy the rest, you’re improving very well (y/n), I’m proud of you”.

“Thanks dad”. We soon left the training room and as we walked down the corridor he said to me.

“Maybe by the end of the year, you could become an assistant teacher and help me teach the other telepathic X-gene students”.

“Oh I don’t know about that, if anyone should have that job its Jean, she’s so much better at it than I am”.

“You give yourself very little credit, you need to believe more in yourself, you have more power than you realize (y/n). I really mean it”.

“I know you’re just saying that because you’re my dad”.

“No not just that, trust me (y/n)”.

“Okay, well I promised Jean I’d meet her and Ororo at the mall, see yah dad!” I waved goodbye to him and ran off out of the mansion and rode my red Ducati 1199 panigale and drove off as fast as I could to the mall.

When I got there, I was suddenly take by the waist and spun around. I laughed along with the man who had me and I said.

“I’d thought for once I would’ve beaten you”.

“Baby, you can try all you want but I am always one step ahead of you”. I turned around and faced Peter who was grinning like a little kid who just scored the biggest candy bar from beating his friends in a game of cards.

“I guess I can never outrun someone who calls themselves ‘Quicksilver’”.

“Oh babe I can do so much more with my speed”. I squealed softly and slapped him playfully across the arm calling him a pig but he teased me back, “but you love me”.

“Yes, yes I do”. We kissed each other passionately then we both went inside the mall and just spent the entire day together. We walked around the mall, shared a milkshake at the diner, saw Star Wars and to end it, we walked around the park until nightfall.

When it got late, Peter and I rode back on my bike and quietly snuck inside hoping we wouldn’t alert anyone that we were just coming in since it was almost midnight. We parted ways with a single kiss and I quietly tip-toed towards my room but when I got inside I was shocked to find my dad sitting there.

I screamed quietly and took a breath trying to calm my heart down and I said.

“Jesus Christ dad”.

“Where were you?”

“I thought I told you I was with Jean and Ororo, we got kinda sidetracked after shopping we saw a movie and took a stroll through the park”.

“Ahh I see, but first of all tell me this (y/n), if you were with Jean and Ororo then why were they teaching the young ones all day today?” Ahh shit I forgot, they teach the younger students their abilities and today was their days of teaching. “I’d also like to ask this (y/n) because I’d really rather not pry, what happened to your neck?” I quickly covered up the right side of my neck that was baring what looked like a bruise as I thought to myself,

‘Damnit Peter, I thought we both said no to going overboard on the necking’.

“Now spill it (y/f/n), what is Peter?”

“So what if it was?”

“(Y/n) how many times do I have to tell you that boy is a scoundrel!?”

“No he’s not. He’s a really sweet guy, you just never taken the chance to get to know him”.

“He’s like any other boy (y/n), hormonal and only wants one thing from you!”

“Oh and you weren’t? The way you always talked about Aunt Raven I swear I thought you two would’ve hooked up had you not met mom!”

“What Raven and I had was different! Now I don’t want you seeing Peter anymore and I don’t want to hear any more of this discussion, are we clear?” I glared at him and said.

“You may be done with it, but I’m not. There’s nothing you can do or say that’ll stop me and Peter from seeing each other”. I then used my powers to move my father out of my room and bolt my door shut before I leaped into my bed angrily before finally falling asleep.

The next few days passed by with dad pulling the overprotective father card now, he made sure that me and Peter could not meet with each other by increasing both of our training sessions and made them start at the same time.

But somehow and some way, Peter always made sure to come and sneak into my room late at night and leave me little gifts like flowers, my favorite candy or small notes with goofy and cheesy rhymes on them.

One morning I woke up to see a small white rose on the pillow beside me and tied to it was a note. I untied it and unfolded it and it read the following statement.

Meet me at the rooftop at midnight, I’ve got a surprise for you.

I smiled softly and put it with in the drawer where all my other notes were kept and I quickly headed downstairs and let my dad think it was a normal day for me. I ate my breakfast, did my training and school work and just let the day pass by until it was curfew time. My dad kissed me goodnight and headed towards his room while I went to bed and went to bed but of course I didn’t fall asleep, but I made the play of me seeming to be asleep in case my dad ever came back to check on me.

When it was five till midnight, I quietly snuck out from my window and levitated myself up to the rooftop to find a beautiful picnic all set up with juice pouches out and candles lit up.

“Romantic dinner for two madam?” Peter said as he suddenly appeared beside me with a lily this time in his hand. I awed him and kissed his cheek and allowed him to guide me towards the blanket picnic and we both sat down and snacked on some of the treats Peter had picked out for us. “God I missed you” he said as he leaned his head on his hand while he was lying on his side looking up at me lovingly.

“I’ve miss you. God my dad can be such a pain sometimes, I can’t believe he thinks he can stop us from seeing each other”.

“You know we could go away, anywhere you want”.

“Thanks but I’d rather not have you stealing just to make me happy”. He smiled and leaned forward and captured my lips with his. I softly moaned and he wrapped his arms around me. Soon things started to get a little hotter as I was now softly pinned to the ground and felt Pete kissing up and down my neck when suddenly the candles were blown out and the juice was suddenly tipped over soaking the blanket and me and Peter. I squealed and gasped to see my dad glaring at us with such anger.

“Daddy!” Peter quickly got off me and we both stood up and he said.

“I was fortunate to get up here when I did. (Y/full/n) you are in so much trouble”.

“But dad—”

“I tell you to stay away from him and you still go behind my back! That’s it, Peter Maximoff you are expelled from the mansion and I don’t ever want to see you near my daughter or I will press charges”.

“WHAT!?! DAD THAT’S NOT FAIR!!”

“What’s not fair is that you lie to me and see him behind my back. Your punishment will come later!”

“You always do this to me! You never let me even try to have a normal life for once! Peter has given me a normal teenage life and all you care about is the training. If you expel him then you’re gonna have to expel me too because I hate this! And I hate you!!” I then levitated myself and flew away from the mansion in tears and ended up on top of the church. As I cried softly at the rooftop of the church, I then felt a sudden wind coming from beside me and a gentle hand stroking away the hair from my face. “Oh God,” I groaned.

“You know you gotta be careful about flying out in the streets at night, seriously you don’t know what kind of freaks are out there” Peter stated nonchalantly.

“Peter I’m so sorry you had to see that, oh God now you probably wanna break up with me now huh?”

“You crazy babe? Hey look at me,” I looked at him with sad teary eyes and he continued, “nothing in this whole world can make me break up with you. You have been the best thing that has ever happened to me in my whole life, I’d be a idiot to even think about ending things with you, I mean who else can be both my best friend and my girlfriend all rolled together? Who else gets my references and laughs at all my jokes even when they suck?” I smiled lovingly at him and softly laughed, “there’s my girl. Now that’s how I like to see her. Listen, why don’t you crash at my place for a while? You can cool down a bit and then if you want you can go back to the mansion”.

“You sure that’ll be okay with your mom?”

“Oh she loves you (y/n), she’s actually told me to never let you be the one to get away from me since you keep me under a hard leash. And my little sis Wanda adores you so much that she’s been pestering me with calls on when you’ll be coming back for another tea party”. I laughed then I said.

“Okay, thanks Pete”. He kissed me and whispered.

“No prob babe, now hold on tight” He suddenly picked me up bridal style and made sure to cradle my neck and soon we were off like a shot.

We soon arrived at his house and for a brief second Peter had disappeared on me but then came back with one of my travel bags probably filled with my clothes from the mansion.

“Now who gave you permission to touch my clothes?”

“It comes with boyfriend privileges doesn’t it?”

“Not on your life you little perv, you better not have snuck one of my underwear’s in that pocket of yours”.

“Aww babe, I am hurt. Look I’ve been shot right in the heart, I’m dying ugh~” he dramatically proclaimed as he struggled backwards towards the couch and fell into it and “died”. I shook my head laughing softly and stood over him saying.

“You are such a cheese ball”. Suddenly he grabbed me by the waist and soon was hovering over me with a cunning smirk saying.

“Yes, but I’m your cheese ball, and might I say that I am very delicious” I giggled as he came closer and captured my lips in his once more. After a brief make out session, we both got ready for bed once I came out of the basement bathroom Peter had just pulled out the bed out from underneath the couch cushions and we both cuddled together and fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Three days later as I was helping Peter’s mom with some of the chores around the house, the doorbell rang and just before I went to answer it, Peter’s mom said she got it and I went back to cleaning. I then felt a tug at my shirt and I looked down to see little Wanda all dressed up in her beautiful tutu.

“Are you ready for our tea party (y/n)?”

“Almost princess Wanda,” I picked her up and twirled her around hearing her happy cheers then I stopped as I felt my father’s presence in the room. “Umm Wanda, why don’t you head to your room and I’ll meet you there as soon as I’m done here, okay?” She nodded then as I set her down she took off running while I walked out of the kitchen to see Peter’s mom and my dad talking in the living room.

“Oh (y/n), your dad is here, I guess I’ll leave you two alone for a moment”. As soon as she left I glared at my father to see him so broken hearted in his eyes.

“You look terrible” I stated.

“(Y/n) please just hear me out—”

“There’s nothing to talk about alright now just get out and leave me alone!” I walked away from him but I soon heard the small kitchen TV turn on and my father appeared saying to me.

‘(Y/n) please you must hear me out. I never meant to put so much pressure on you’.

“Well you did now just leave me alone”. I used my powers to turn off the TV and I went up to Wanda’s room to start our tea party when his voice came out from Wanda’s mouth.

‘(Y/n) you can’t run from this forever’.

“I can sure as hell try. And don’t you ever bring Little Wanda into this, get out of her head!” I ran out and soon Peter’s mom came up to me taking me by my arms and said in my dad’s voice.

‘I’m not leaving here without you or at least until you let me talk to you’.

“Dad enough! Stop messing with my mind and leave me alone!” I got out of her grip but I kept hearing my dad’s voice.

‘It’s pointless to run. You know I will always find you, no matter where you go. Please (y/n) don’t run away from me, please let me in’.

“SHUT UP!!!” I let out a scream and my powers went out of control and blasted out destroying the Ms. Maximoff’s garden and Wanda’s little playground. I collapsed to the ground silently crying and I felt my dad come beside me.

“(Y/n)—”

“Why did you do this to me? Why didn’t you get rid of me when you had the chance?” I looked up at him with red eyes filled with tears, “do you have any idea how many thoughts go through my head? Everytime I go out in public with the girls? I can hear all of them judging me and they don’t even know me! I can’t take it anymore! I hate hearing all their hateful voices inside my head! I hate hearing other people’s thoughts! But with Peter I—I can only hear the love he speaks of me, so I know that he isn’t just playing with my affections because his thoughts always speak of how beautiful and funny I am. He is the only person whose thoughts keep me from going insane. Why can’t you understand that?”

“I do now. When you left from the rooftop and Peter confronted me on how much he really did care for you, I looked into his mind and saw all of his memories of you and each one of them were of pure love. His thoughts also screamed out wanting to find you and make sure that you were safe.” He placed his hand to my cheek wiping away the tears that were falling down and our psych linked became one as his voice said, ‘I’m so sorry I never put your emotional consideration into check, but didn’t you tell me about this?’

‘Because you deal with it every day, I just—I didn’t want to appear as another burden you carry, with Peter I could be more myself around him’.

‘But darling, you never have to act any differently around me. You are never a burden to me’. His forehead leaned against mine as his voice rang strong, ‘Never. Be afraid to come to me with problems like this, that’s why I’m here. I know you say you can be calm around Peter but you can also come to me. That’s what I’m always here for, I may be your instructor but I am and always will be your father first. Nothing is more important to me than you and your wellbeing. Do you understand?’ I nodded then I spoke out verbally as I hugged my father as tight as I could.

“I’m so, so sorry daddy. Can you forgive me?”

“Shhhh, shhh. There’s nothing to forgive my little sparrow. I love you”.

“I love you too”. We stayed there for what felt like an eternity when a familiar voice said.

“This is awesome. This is awesome, you both are finally breaking down walls you’re healing. You’re—” my dad and I looked up to just stare at Peter and when he saw us staring at him he stopped and said. “I ruined the moment didn’t I?”

“Yes you did” my dad snapped. Peter nodded awkwardly and pointed back inside and softly said.

“I’m gonna go make some tea” he then quickly zipped off. I smiled softly shaking my head as my dad said.

“I can almost see why you chose him”.

“Yeah I know, he’s a pain in the butt, but he’s my pain in the butt”.

#x-men #charles xavier #daughter reader #charles xavier x reader #peter maximoff x reader

237 notes · View notes

promptistrashqueen · 7 years

Text

Afternoon Gifts (Babyfic)

For starter’s, I decided to post this now because it’s growing larger than I want to wait for. Also this is a “Fuck you the ten year time skip never happened and no bodies fuckin’ dead” AU! Featuring SunPrince Prompto and MoonPrince Noctis (because I love them and they get to be gay married okay)

Noctis sucks in a breath, staring at the floor, his hand still on the doorknob as he tries to find the words he’s about to need.

How the fuck...his dad might’ve managed to ask the impossible in having Noctis deliver the news.

Next time, he’s definitely just going to make sure Prompto comes with him to a “one-on-one” with the King. After all, Prompto’s a Prince now too and more than capable of handling the job.

“Hey Noct!”

Prompto’s footsteps are familiar, quick and light like he’s not fully tethered to the ground but stopping hard, like he almost forgot to stop moving forward. Noctis closes his eyes and sighs, looks like he’s out of thinking time.

“Oh...bad meeting?”

Noctis shakes his head, hand sliding off the door as he straightens up and leans back, brushing his hair off his forehead and looking at the ceiling, anywhere but his husbands face.

“Not...bad. Dad just wanted to talk about some “future” stuff…”

Prompto frowns, Noctis can practically hear the sound of his lips turning down but he tips his head back down to look just in case he’s wrong. He’s not.

“What kind of “future” stuff?”

He really, really wishes Prompto didn’t already sound so worried, but he supposes he has the right. After all the last few times this sort of thing had come up it had resulted in Noctis and Regis fighting, since Regis had initially not wanted Noctis to marry Prompto and then later Noctis hadn’t wanted to face his father’s mortality.

“It’s the ‘Noctis you must produce an heir’ kind. I was kinda hoping he’d forget about that.”

Prompto’s expression is concerned and worried for a brief moment and then a smile spreads and he laughs, like Noctis doesn’t recognize the defenses by now.

“Oh! Well we can’t have a kid dude, so what, does he want you to cheat on me?”

Noctis groans and shakes his head, moving to the couch in their apartment and flopping down on it, loosening his tie as he goes.

“No, of course not, he loves you too much. He wants...he wants us to look for a surrogate.”

Prompto huffs but starts tugging off Noctis shoes anyways, “That’s a lady to carry your baby yeah?”

Noctis snorts and nods, letting his eyes slip closed as he relaxes a little.

“Do you have to sleep with her or can we just...I don’t know, turkey baster thing it?”

“It’s called in vitro. Turkey-baster...you’ve been watching shitty 80’s movies again haven’t you?”

Prompto laughs and Noctis feels a little more of the tension leave him, it’s a genuine sound and he’s glad Prompto’s at least willing to talk about this, even if it is awkward as hell.

“I only watched like..a couple! And you’re not answering my question Noctis!”

The slight raise of Prompto’s voice belied his genuine concern and Noctis opened his eyes again, sitting up and catching one of Prompto’s hands in his, stroking his thumbs over the skin.

“Hey, hey...I don’t have to sleep with her, at least, I shouldn’t. We can do IVF stuff and everything. WE have to agree on who it is too...I told dad I wouldn’t do it if you were too against it or we couldn’t find someone we both liked.”

He presses a kiss to Prompto’s freckled cheek and tugs his lover’s hand again so he steps around the arm of the couch and sits, letting Noctis scoot around until his head is in Prompto’s lap.

Long fingers shift through his hair and Noctis smiles a little against the fabric of Prompto’s lazy day yoga pants. He always likes coming home to him, but even more when Prompto’s dressed comfy, Noctis’ own smell clings to him in his borrowed shirt and the Prince relaxes further.

“I have no idea who to ask even...and they have to be willing and in good health.”

Prompto hums thoughtfully, “What about Cindy?”

Noctis groans, Prompto’s maybe still a little infatuated with the royal mechanic. His husband chuckles and pokes his cheek.

“Not that! Dude, she’s...she kinda looks like me.”

Prompto’s tone takes on an odd strained note and Noctis rolls too look up at him, seeing the way he tries to hide what he’s thinking, but it’s there still, to Noctis.

“Oh.”

Prompto gives him a quick smile and a raised eyebrow.

“You think it might look more like our kid then?”

Prompto’s nod is a little sheepish and he bites at his lip, but Noctis takes a moment to imagine, not a child of his and Cindy’s, but a baby with Prompto’s almost curls and blue-black hair, big blue eyes and a smattering of freckles, Prompto’s nose and Noctis’ mouth. His chest tightens oddly and he looks away from Prompto, staring at the ceiling.

He thinks about how Cindy’s features will change the image, maybe green eyes and skin more tan, true curls. It’s too close and too far at the same time and he swallows hard.

“I dunno man.”

Prompto shrugs, “Yeah, freckles and your skin? Probably not a great look.”

He still looks a little put out though and Noctis taps his nose.

“It’s not the freckles Prom. If anything, it’s the accent.”

That draws a laugh from him and Noctis grins, leaning up for a languid kiss. “We’ve got time.”

He mutters, against lips that are quickly becoming more interested in not-talking.

“I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up a list of options for you and Prompto to consider. They are by no means the only women who might be suitable, but certainly those I thought you would be comfortable with.”

Noctis accepts the file with all the grace of an alligator with indigestion and Ignis frowns at him.

“Iggy...come on, it’s a bit early for all of this don’t you think?”

Ignis presses his fingers together, leveling his trademark advisors stare at Noctis,

“Normally I would agree, but the council is pushing for a decision to be made. You’ve been married nearly two years now and it’s no secret how long you dated before then, they seem to believe you should be looking toward your duty now. You’re father’s health is not declining nearly as quickly as it was before the treaty, but they are cautious. No one can know how long it may take to conceive and if your first choice is not...optimal, adjustments must be made.”

Noctis flinches, fingers pressing harder where he’s gripping the file, too many reminders of how little time there may be until he finds himself crowned.

“And they know that once I put on the ring, I’ll hardly have the energy to raise a child.”

He can’t help the bitterness of the words as he looks aside, it’s something he tries not to think about, something Prompto’s good at dismissing, even though they both know there will come a day when he can’t keep up with the energetic blonde. It’s an icy grip around his heart now.

Ignis’ voice breaks through the melancholy, “Noct, you can’t know that. The draw of the crystals lessens all the time. The scourge is being eradicated and it’s power isn’t so needed.You’ll have plenty of time. I...I believe taking this, “ he touches the folder, the advisor is gone, replaced by the friend, “and thinking about the woman you’re looking for will calm the council’s frenzy, give you and Prompto time to find who you want and to adjust to the thought of a child. It’s why I took this task as well, so there would be no one pushing for a hasty choice.”

Noctis nods slowly, watching Ignis sit back in his chair, light blue dress shirt perfectly pressed, well fitted grey slacks and perfectly matched belt, shoes, and cufflinks. He looks down at himself, a loose tee and a borrowed pair of Prompto’s work out pants, barefoot.

“I...I haven’t thought much...about the actually having a kid part.”

Ignis seems to know, as usual, what his concern is, “That’s why I thought it important for you to have time. For what it’s worth, I believe you and Prompto will make very capable, if somewhat unorthodox, parents.”

Noctis swallows, the folder in his grasp weighs more than it should,

“Thanks, Ig.”

Prompto’s notes are filled with smiley faces and Noctis just rolls his eyes and he moves the one covering the woman’s name. It’s not particularly familiar and it takes him a long moment to place her face.

“The wedding...she came with someone?”

Prompto shrugs, “Dunno, I thought she was pretty, you should have pretty babies.”

He scoops another bite of fro-yo up, “but she’s also got a few health problems and we don’t know her at all, so...eh?”

Noctis snorts and pulls her information out, settling her into the pile of “no” that is growing far too quickly beside them on the large bed. He finds there’s a few of them he might be alright with but Prompto’s good at pointing out the cons of most of them. He’s trying not to be too happy about that, after all it would be easier if they could just chose someone.

He dismisses the next woman immediately, he remembers her, the way she sneered at Prompto, “Common folk are not welcome at my gala’s, but I suppose our young Prince is still learning.”

Prompto glances at her face and sticks his tongue out at the photo, “She was so displeased when I didn’t let her come to our reception.”

Noctis raises an eyebrow at him, even as he takes a bite and says, “what?” around a glob of fro-yo.

“Ignis is around too much if you’re saying “displeased” give me my husband back.”

Prompto grins and immediately has to slurp a little of the melting treat off his chin. Noctis just bumps his shoulder and looks back at the folder, a surprised sound tumbling out.

“Luna?”

Prompto sounds just as surprised, his notes ended the one before, though after a moment’s thought he nods, “Doubt Nyx’d like that.”

Noctis just stays quiet, touching the picture of the oracle. He glances at Prompto, who has already dismissed her, and back to the photo.

“I mean...we do know her pretty well.”

Prompto’s face goes blank so fast that Noctis feels his stomach curl, “Yeah. We know you’re almost-wife really well. I love Luna Noct, but it’s not a good idea.” “

Why?”

It’s more accusatory than he means but Prompto doesn’t get angry, just sets his spoon and bowl aside and takes a deep breath.

“There’s still people who think it shoulda been her right? If you have a kid with her...it’s only gonna get worse. Our marriage will seem weaker and Luna’s having the same trouble we did since Nyx is kinda like me. We don’t wanna do that to her, or to us. I...I don’t know if I’d be okay with it too.”

Prompto rubs his hand over his wrist and Noctis bites back his instinctive comments, thinking. Prompto’s right and really, looking back at Luna’s picture, he can’t imagine having a child with her now, not to mention the Blood of the Oracle mess it might make. He sets the photo aside and leans to swipe a finger through Prompto’s yogurt, kissing his cheek apologetically.

“You’re right but this...ugh. It’s so stupid! How are we supposed to choose some woman? What if they want to raise the kid too? They have to be someone we can be around a lot, because I don’t want to make them stay away or anything...I just thought...Luna would be easier for us that way.”

Prompto nods, “I know Noct. I have no clue dude, who else is left?”

They scoot closer, shoulder to shoulder in the middle of their bed and look at the next person. Crowe’s a friend, but she’s already told them both she never wants a kid, too much chance of her dying in service and she’s just..not good with them. They don’t say anything as they set her aside, there’s no way Ignis could’ve known.

The last person in the file makes Noctis cough and Prompto whistles, Iris Amicitia.

“That’s….”

Prompto doesn’t have to finish the sentence as he stares at the picture of Iris, old enough now of course but still he remembers her a few years back. Noctis just groans and flops back, disturbing their pitiful yes pile.

“If Ignis wants us dead, he could just poison us.”

#babyfic #part 1 #FFXV FAnficition #Promptis #Prompto argentum #noctis lucis caelum #ignis stupeo scientia #picking babymoms is hard mmmkay #Iris Amicitia #SunPrince #MoonPrince #established relationship #babies!

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brokenhearted-queen · 7 years

Text

Fading Into Happiness

-Author’s note: sorry about the format I posted it on mobile. hope you enjoy! A special thanks to @fishfingersandjellybabies who made me less nervous about posting this! Also to @alextimeexpress who was my proofreader-

Summary: After a confrontation with Bruce, Damian is left to make a decision. One that would change everyone’s lives.

Slowly, Damian made his way down to the cave. He was in need of his Father’s assistance with a school assignment. He only had problems with history, since the way they taught it at school was the Americanized version of events. They never seemed to teach the children how everything really happened. He stopped as he heard Grayson and his father arguing.

“No, you don’t understand Bruce! Since Timmy died you’ve just been focusing on being Batman. The family doesn’t need Batman. It needs Bruce!” Damian heard his voice echoing through the cave.

“I need to bring his killer to justice, Dick. You know that the League needs me as well. I don’t have time for your nonsense.” Damian flinched over the cold tone of his voice.

“This isn’t nonsense Bruce! I don’t care if you ignore me! Jason’s on a mission right now, but what about Damian? You haven’t been with him at all! I had to learn from the Titans that not only did you miss his birthday, but were completely ignorant to Ra’s Al Ghul’s threat to Damian.” Dick snarled at the end of his sentence.

Bruce stalked towards Dick, he was so close Dick could feel his breath on his face. His hands shook by his side as they slowly formed into fists. It was so tight Damian could hear the squelching of the leather. “He never informed me of this.” Bruce said, his voice shifting from defensive to enraged.

Damian looked at the floor not knowing what to do. He wanted to tell them that they were foolish to believe he couldn’t handle himself, but at the same time he was really hurt when his father missed his birthday.

“He was about to give himself to Ra’s! He was willing to sacrifice himself again and become the monster he so desperately tried to escape! And you were nowhere to be found! Goddamn it, Bruce! We already lost Tim. Are you really okay with losing Damian? Are you okay with him dying AGAIN? ARE YOU GOING TO LET HIM DOWN AGAIN?” Dick scream at Bruce.

Suddenly, Damian heard a smack. He let out a gasp and ran downstairs. He stared at Grayson, on the floor holding his now bruised cheek.

“Grayson!” He yelled as he went to him and helped him sit up.

“Father! That was unnecessary! Apologize now!” He said glaring at his father.

“Don’t worry Lil’ D everything’s fine. We just had a misunderstanding.” He said ruffling his hair.

“Father had no right to hit you.” Damian said looking at him.

“He should not have yelled at you for simply caring about me…” He trailed off feeling overwhelmed, thinking that maybe his father did not care for him as much as he hoped.

Bruce look at him as he sighed and rubbed his face.

“This was so much easier with Tim…” he muttered under his breath.

Damian heard him and his eyes widened as he took a step back unconsciously.

“No, wait Damian that…that wasn’t what I meant” Bruce said realizing his mistake.

“Tt, well I am sorry Father but I am not Drake.” He pulled away from his father and ran upstairs.

Dick went after him, hot on his heels. “Wait Lil’ D! Dami! Damian!” He yelled as he was able to catch to him and pull him into a hug.

He rubbed his hair and Damian struggled a bit, but ended up leaning into his embrace.

“Hey, how about you stay with me for a few days? Jaybird’s coming and we would very much like your company. I think I can convince him to give back the Red Hood doll.” Damian was only able to nod against his chest. Not trusting his voice to betray him and display his weakness.

He already had clothes in Grayson’s house so he didn’t need to pack any clothes.

He let Dick manhandle him onto his back. He leaned in and enjoyed listening to his brother’s heart and breath. Dick felt reassured by the weight on his back and feeling his little brother’s heartbeat echo. Because his little brother was here and alive. He almost lost him again because he didn’t want to burden his family again. He had to tell him that sacrificing himself wasn’t the answer. He had to stop trying to take on everything himself, to let them take some of his burden because they care about him. But that was a conversation for another day.

Eventually he heard small snores coming from his back. He took out his phone and called Jason.

“Hey Dickie Bird I got us two extra meat lovers pizza.” Dick smiled at his brother.

“Hey Jaybird, could you ask for a vegetarian one? Lil’ D is joining us.” He heard Jason grunt.

“Baby Bat’s coming? Ha! I should just get another meat lovers!” He said teasingly.

“He’s had a rough night, Jay.” Dick sighed out. Jason’s voice turned to concern.

“Did the brat get hurt on patrol? I thought he wasn’t supposed to go on patrol today.”

“No, he didn’t go on patrol today, and he isn’t hurt…well not physically at least. He had a rough couple days to be honest. And Bruce didn’t help.” Jason started cursing up a storm.

“B and his emotional constipation. I know my dying didn’t mean shit to him-”

“Now, Jason you know that’s not true. Bruce was heartbroken with your death.” Dick interrupted softly.

“-but Damian, he’s just a kid for fuck’s sake! Bruce should care more dammit. After everything we went through to get him back. I would think he would actually jump at the opportunity to be a good father. Hell after what happened to Timmy…” he trailed off feeling his anger fading to sadness.

“Yeah, that’s also part of the problem…he compared him with Tim.” He heard Jason start cursing again.

“Real smooth B real smooth.” He snarled.

“Hell I’ll get a vegetarian pizza and some strawberry Ice cream for the demon spawn.” He said with a snort. Dick chuckled sadly.

“I know he misses Tim…we all do, but he’s letting that get in the way of taking care of Damian.” He said softly as he approached the safe house.

“I’m here. I’ll talk to you inside.”

During that moment, Dick forgot that Damian was a light sleeper and he managed to hear the entire conversation. Damian had to admit that he also missed Drake. They were finally able to get past their differences and could have been brothers…but now he doesn’t have a chance to.

Dick made his way inside the safe house with Damian still on his back. Jason looked up and just felt a little pang in his heart. Because Damian actually looked like a kid on Dickie Bird’s back. Something that the both of them never really had the chance to be. Maybe they could work on that with Damian. Dick smiled at him softly.

“I guess he hasn’t gotten much sleep these last few days.” He said as he gently tried to wake him up.

“Hey Lil D we’re here wake up.” Damian decided it was time to stop pretending, so he woke up and slowly rubbed his eyes.

“Todd.” He said in acknowledgement. Jason rolled his eyes and picked him up from Dick’s back and threw him to the couch. Damian let out a small “Tt” but said nothing about it. They all got comfortable and settled into a nice atmosphere, laughing and joking around.

“So Babybat I heard you had a couple rough days. What happened?” Jason asked, but Damian just sighed and shrugged.

“The usual.” He said simply not going into details.

“Come one Demon Spawn. Don’t give me that bull. Just tell your Big brother what’s wrong.”

Damian looked at him and gave him a half hearted shrug. As he stared anywhere but at his brother.

“I received a ‘gift’ from my grandfather on my birthday. It was a dead robin. In the gift he specifically told me that if I do not reclaim my position in the league he will kill me. Since Father was occupied, I decided to gather and form a team. They were targets as well, but we managed to defeat Grandfather and that’s all there is to it.” Damian said like he was explaining a stroll in the park instead a murder attempt by his grandfather. Dick actually glared at Damian.

“From what Starfire told me, there’s a lot that you’re leaving out. Now why don’t you tell us what’s missing.” Damian glared at him and crossed his arms over his chest.

“I decided that statistically, it would be a better plan for me to surrender to my grandfather. That way he would spare the lives of the Titans and no one had to die. Which was one of the more preferable outcomes” Damian said like he wasn’t talking about destroying his life.

“Damian…why didn’t you call me? Or Jason or Bruce! We would’ve helped you! You can’t keep doing this! ” Grayson exploded saying the last part. Damian stood up roughly from the table.

“Yes Grayson, tell me how exactly? You weren’t exactly taking phone calls! Todd was in a undercover mission and was unavailable. Father was on League business. I did not want to be a burden so I handled it myself.” Damian snarled and Dick and Jason just stared at their little brother not sure what to respond to the truth.

The silence was suffocating as everyone tried to figure out what to say next.

“Is it true?” Damian voice rang out and echoed through the room. Jason and Dick look at each other not sure what he meant.

“What do you mean Lil D?” Dick asked as he watched Damian sit back down.

“Is what Father said true? Was it easier with Drake?” He spoke in a low voice.

Dick eyes widened in horror as he felt like he was stabbed by a knife ten times. Because he heard the underlying meaning to what his little brother just asked. Was it easier to trust Drake? Was it easier to confide in him? Was he easier to love? If the room silence was suffocating before, now it was deadly and one false move will hurt Damian. Jason’s jaw was on the floor as he was stunned for what he just heard. He just couldn’t believe anything, that Bruce could be such an ass.

“Damian…that isn’t what Bruc- you know what let’s forget about Bruce for a while. They are many different things between you both and they’re not so easy to understand or to explain. But no, it wasn’t easier to be Tim’s brother. It was equally easy to love both of you. It was equally as hard to lose both of you as well.” Dick admitted softly as he took his little brother in his arms and gave him a hug.

Damian didn’t respond just let himself be held. Jason nodded in agreement and threw his arm over his brother’s shoulder. They stood there in a comfortable silence. Until Damian spoke once again.

“Do you miss him?” Dick nodded quickly and simply said “very much.”

Jason huffed softly “it isn’t the same without babybird around.” Damian had a contemplating look and gave a court nod.

“Would you be happy if Drake was here?” Dick sigh deeply.

“I would be extremely happy to have Tim back.” Jason just grunted in agreement. Damian nodded and got out of Dick’s embrace.

“I am heading to bed, thank you for your hospitality.” He said and just headed to his room Jason patted Dick’s shoulder, trying to bring his brother a sense of peace.

Damian went to bed for the night, but Jason was going to talk to him make sure he understood that it’s because they cared about the little brat and wanted him safe. He also was going to have a talk with Bruce with his fist on his face. Jason never expected him to win father of the year award, but the least he could do was keep the damn kid alive after just getting him back.

Meanwhile, Damian went to one of the bedrooms in the safe house. He was extremely confused and hurt about what happened today. Not that he will ever admit it aloud.

He did what his father and Grayson had taught him he protected the innocence no matter the cause. Instead of being praised for his behaviour, he was reprimanded and compared to Drake. He had mixed feelings about his brother. He may have never been close but he learned to cared for him.

The only reason for their initial mistrust was his heritage and the way he was raised. In his case, Drake represented his father’s perfect son and partner, one that he chose and wasn’t stuck with. He was the son his father wanted.

Drake to him, represented an obstacle that he had to overcome so that he could win his father’s trust…his father’s love. He tried, he truly did and it took him so long to prove to his father he could be good.

He was beginning to get along with Drake, but he still saw him as a competitor for his father’s trust. He came to realize that maybe he didn’t need to see him as an enemy. That yes, Drake had a hard time believing he could be good, but he was. Then he died and he could finally see proof that what Drake said was true… that he was evil, so evil he went to hell.

He was brought back by his family, yes, including Drake and so he thought 'if Drake can give me another chance, then the universe can too.’ He went and decided to atone for his sins…but many bad things happened.

In the end he died once again saving the world, thankfully it was just a momentarily endeavor. After many other things he was back to being his father’s Robin, trying to do good. They started to become distant but Robin wanted to believe it was because Gotham and the Justice League needed him more than he did.

Then Drake died saving the world and the legacy became so much heavier. Bruce almost became completely nonexistent in his life. He tried to make him proud, he even went as far to rebuild the Teen Titans. He knows his father did everything in his power to bring him back…but now he wonders if given the option, would he choose Drake over him. And that kind of thinking destroyed him, because he wanted Drake to be alive. He felt guilty thinking that he came back, the unwanted child who had to earn his father’s trust. Instead of Drake, the prodigal son who his father chose to love. A part of him just wanted them to accept him and to love him. The other part, the bigger part of him just wanted to make him happy but he had no idea how. He went to bed trying to think of different ways of making his family happy. After a while, he fell asleep. In that moment he didn’t realize he had a choice to make. One that would change everything forever, one that could grant his wish and make his greatest nightmares come true.

It started as a dream, that’s what he believed. One that he did not understand. The only way he could explain it was a void that went out for miles and miles. He could only see darkness and had no sense of direction.

Damian tried to move around but he had no control over his body as gravity did not exist in this dream. Even though Damian had a hard time admitting it, he was worried and scared. His mind was telling him that it was just a dream but his body knew that it wasn’t, that something wasn’t right.

His suspicions were confirmed when he felt another presence. He could feel his heart speeding up as he tried to get into a fighting stance just to end up floating around. He let an annoyed “Tt” as he tried to regain control.

“You must calm down, little one.” A voice echoed through the void bouncing off the non-existent wall.

“You intolerable fool, I am not little!” Damian snapped, not being able to help himself. He let out a gasp as he actually saw the creature who had spoken to him.

There was no simple way to explain this creature. Damian believed there was no word to describe the magnitude of this creature’s height. He was simply even more than colossal. In a way he created an illusion that he was even taller than the heavens in the sky. He had the shape of a human body, but he had no face. It look like he absorbed every single star and light source from the universe, cursing us to eternal darkness. But in a way the creature wasn’t blinding. You could stare at it in awe for centuries and not be tired. The creature was simply breathtaking.

Damian, for once, was speechless and the creature just tilted his head to the side in a gesture of curiosity.

“You must understand, little one. I mean no harm. I only seek understanding.” The voice rang around the void and Damian had no clue as to where the voice was coming from.

He could see the creature right in front of him but he could not pinpoint the voice location or even tell if it was the creature speaking to him.

“Understanding?” Damian huffed.

“I am the one confused here! Where am I? Why am I here? What the hell are you?” Damian screeched and the creature just observed. Or that is what Damian believed as he could not see that it had eyes.

“Those are very good questions, little one. Ones that I can answer, some that I can not. You are in a safe place, one that cannot be tainted by evil. I…do not know how to explain my existence to you. I am known by many names by the humans. You are here, little one. To make a choice.”

Damian was unsatisfied by the answer he got. It was so vague it just created even more questions. Damian looked up at the creature not sure what it all meant, but he was going to make sure he found out.

“So what am I supposed to call you? Because from what I can tell so far, you just respond to ‘fool’.” Damian hissed at the creature to which made no difference to it.

“There is no need to be rude little one. I have many names. None of which I am incredibly fond of. Names are just ways to address a person. I see no use of having one. If you are so inclined of me needing one. You may call me as you wish, little one.” Damian raised an eyebrow at the creature’s roundabout way of thinking.

Names were important to Damian, they represent who he is, who he was. Wayne, Robin, Al Ghul they were not only names, but titles that defined a person. Damian ‘Tt’ once again annoyed with the lack of understanding of the creature

“I shall address you as Sirius then.” Damian concluded and he could feel the atmosphere lighten a bit

“So tell me Sirius, what is that you wish to understand and what is that choice I need to make? And how did I get here?” Damian lash out one question after another not even taking time time to breathe.

“I seek to understand you, little one. You came here of your own volition. You wish for happiness, not for you, but for your love ones. I have no understanding as to why you wish for others’ happiness above your own.” The voice echoed through the void and replayed itself in Damian’s head again and again trying to understand what he meant.

“I did not come here of my own free will!” Damian protested. Sirius actually inclined his head forward in the form of a nod.

“Your desire to make your family happy no matter the cost brought you here, little one. If you wish to leave, you can do so. If you do, that will be your choice.” Damian stared up at Sirius as goosebumps started to paint his body.

“You keep talking about a choice…what do you mean?” Damian asked as he gulped down his nerves.

Sirius hand stretched out and stopped in front of Damian. He stared at Sirius confused and eventually he went and stood up on his hand. Sirius slowly lifted his hand and what felt like an eternity later Damian was finally face to head with the creature. Damian body shivered as he look at the creature with no face.

“Little one, you are here because you wish for something that I have the power to give you.” Sirius explained.

Damian looked up at him shyly.

“You…can make them happy? All of them?” Damian ask hopefully.

Sirius just nodded.

“I do have the power to do that, little one.” The creature’s voice resonated inside of Damian giving him a new hope.

“Even Drake…?” He asked with innocent and hopeful eyes.

“Yes little one, Timothy is included in the deal.” Damian looked at the creature dubiously.

“How can you promise so much? You are even offering bringing back Timothy. What are you?” Damian exclaimed feeling concerned with the possibilities.

“I am the guardian of this reality, Little one.” Sirius admitted.

“This…isn’t a dream that I created to indulge in my delusions?” Damian stated more than asked.

“Little one, this is very much real. I can grant your family the happiness that you wish for them. There is a way I can do that for you.” Damian looked down at his hand and sighed.

“What is the catch? It is a choice isn’t it?” Damian said getting straight to business.

“I am the guardian of this reality, but I do not have the power to change reality and keep it the way I wish to permanently.” Sirius explain and Damian scowled at him.

“Why have you offered me something that you cannot give me?” Damian snarled wanting to punch the creature for giving him a glimmer of hope.

“But you have the power to change reality, little one. It does come with a price. It is your choice, I do not gain or lose anything because of it.” The creature said as he lowered Damian just a bit.

“Then why offer me a choice? Why help me when you have nothing to gain from it?” Damian said as he tried not to cry.

“I felt your deep conflict inside. You desperately wish for your family’s happiness and never thought of your own, little one. I heard your wishes and I believe if anyone is worthy of this opportunity it would be you.” Damian wiped away the stray tears that managed to escape.

“What is the price I must pay?” Damian finally asked after a while. The creature just 'stared’ at Damian until the voice started echoing again through the void.

“I can change the current reality and make it into one where your loved ones are happy. Little one, in this reality you can not exist.” Damian gasped and stumbled backward falling on his rear. He sat in the creature’s hand contemplating the situation.

“Are you saying…that in a world where I exist, my family won’t be happy?” Damian said feeling overwhelmed by the situation.

“No, little one. There are realities where everyone can be happy, but in this scenario, that is the only one that’s possible.” Damian looked up at Sirius.

“I have to die for my family’s happiness.”

“Little one, you are not going to die. You are going to become one with the reality. Your soul will act as the cement that will hold the new reality and make it permanent. You will not die, but cease to exist.” Sirius explained softly.

Damian looked at him and just thought over his options. With everything that has happened over the last few weeks, his family deserved to be happy. He even offered to bring Timothy back. Everyone missed Timothy, his father hadn’t been the same since…He could make them all happy.

He died once already, Damian thought to himself, he actually died more than once. Maybe… maybe it would be better that way. Damian looked up at Sirius as he felt himself cave into the pressure of making his father happy.

“Are you sure? That you can bring Timothy back? Make them all happy?” Damian asked desperately as he swallowed down his fear.

“Yes, little one. I give you my word.” Sirius said nodding to him.

“Will it hurt?” He questioned shyly and he shook his head “at the end only.”

“Deal,” Damian said finally and Sirius nodded.

“Little one, there is something that you must remember. This is your choice.” Damian nodded and just stared blankly ahead not really focusing on anything.

He had no way to explain what just happened. He just agreed to give up his existence for his brothers…for his father. His gaze snapped back to Sirius.

“I want to make sure that you keep your word and bring Timothy back…I would also like to say goodbye as well.” Damian said but trailed off in the end.

“Of course little one. At dusk, Timothy will appear before you in your favorite part of woods. And by the end of nightfall you will disappear from their lives. There is something you must know little one…because you are giving up your existence for this…it would mean that you would have never been born. There is a very large possibility that they will not remember you at all.” Sirius warned, to which Damian just scoffed.

“Good, that way they won’t let my efforts go in vain.” Damian was left alone.

He woke up with a jolt back in his own room. He was sweating buckets and breathing harshly. He stared at his hand waiting for something, anything to believe what he just witnessed.

He had no proof that he really made the deal with Sirius but he felt it in his gut that it was true. He looked at his cellphone and he slept most of the day. It was already around two and he had a lot of preparations to do.

He stood and and dressed himself quickly. He went to the kitchen where he saw Jason and Dick. Dick’s smile brightened as soon as he saw him.

“Hey Lil D! You finally got some sleep huh? Here! Jason made breakfast and I helped!” Dick said cheerfully while Jason snorted.

“You mean I made breakfast and made sure you didn’t burn anything?” Damian raised an amused eyebrow at that.

Which only made Dick laugh some more and shake his head. Damian took a piece a paper and wrote down some coordinates and a time.

“I am heading to the manor. I need you to be here at this time. It is important.” Jason looked at the paper and back at Damian.

“Sure squirt, if you say it’s important I be there right on the dot.” Damian nodded satisfied and loomed at Dick hopefully.

“Hey Dami…maybe I should go with you to the manor. I can help you get the stuff you need and then we can head to the meeting place. You-” Dick was interrupted by Jason’s hand softly landing on his shoulder.

“Nah, don’t worry Dickie Bird. Look at his face, he knows what he’s doing.” Damian gave him a small smile and left.

Steadily Damian made his way to the Manor. He could see his hands trembling as he could feel sweat drops run down his face. He was having trouble thinking exactly what to tell his father.

They had fought, he had stormed out and now he had no idea how to fix it. He took one of his trembling hands and lifted it up to his face. His breath shook as he tried to gain control of it. The tremors became stronger and his breathing became erratic.

Eventually it turned into gasps as he tried to get a lungful of air. He stopped walking a long time ago and his mind kept racing. Before he knew tears started rolling down his face and small sobs overtook him. As he had no idea what he was supposed to tell his father. Or if he even should. Damian started to scold himself as he knew he couldn’t be weak, not now, not after accepting the opportunity for his loved ones’ happiness. He couldn’t be selfish, not now.

He harshly rubbed his eyes as he tried to regain control. In his mind, he already wasted too much time. When Damian was finally able to calm himself he arrived at the Manor. He walked in where he saw Pennyworth.

He approached him and straightened his spine as he held his head up. At that movement, he faltered, as it ended up looking stiff and uncomfortable. Alfred raised his eyebrow in a knowing way.

“Hello Master Damian, it is a pleasure to see you again.” Damian’s spine relaxed at the gentle tone and Damian manage a tiny smile.

“Likewise Pennyworth. I wish to speak to my father.“ Damian’s hands started trembling softly again.

"I am sorry to inform you, Master Damian. Master Bruce was called up for League business. He will not be back for at least two days.” Alfred informed him matter-of-factly.

Damian’s heart deflated as huge disappointment crushed his soul.

“Two days? Is there any way he can make an early return?” His voice cracked a bit on the end of his question.

“Master Damian, it seems it was an emergency. There is no possible way for him to return earlier than that.” Damian let out a miserable “oh.”

Damian scoffed as he rubbed his puffy eyes. He looked at Alfred as he open his mouth and close it once again.

Damian was not sure how to act without arising any suspicion from what he was planning to do. Damian felt his body shaking as he abruptly turned around, making sure to keep his expression hidden from the butler, that he saw more like a grandfather.

“I wish to see my pets Pennyworth.” He started walking towards the cave as he felt himself slow down his steps.

He took a deep breath and turned around. He made his way and saw himself in front of Pennyworth. Without thinking about it too much, scared that he would change his mind. He hugged Pennyworth. He pulled his arms around him and hugged him tightly. He put his head on his chest as felt the warmth of the butler spread through him.

“Oh my word! Young Master.” Alfred said startled, but did not hesitate to return the hug.

“Thank you Pennyworth. For everything.” Before Alfred could react, Damian let go and went to see his pets.

He made his way down the cave where all his pets were. One by one he hugged and kissed them muttering how proud he was of each and single one.

“You guys are my family too. Sirius said he will make my family happy. I am confident that you guys will have a glorious life such as you deserve.” He said to Alfred the cat, Titus and Batcow.

He made his way towards Goliath and hugged him as Goliath nuzzle against him.

“Don’t worry, I am certain that you will be with your family again because of this. I am sorry for taking them away, but you’ll be happy now.” He hiccuped the last part. He was aware that he did not have enough time to wander anymore.

“I must go. Thank you for taking care of me.” He said and left.

He made his way to the forest arriving ten minutes before the meeting time, his hands having not stopped trembling since he left the manor. His chest felt heavy as many different emotions swirled inside his head. Fear and worry were the emotions he felt most.

Time seemed to slow down as Damian could only hear his own heartbeat. He looked at the sun nervously as it would soon start to set. He started fidgeting as he realized that maybe it was all a dream, that maybe his desire overtook his mind and it was just playing a cruel joke in his mind. But he felt in his soul that Sirius was not a dream, but a being that had the power to make his family happy.

He took deep breath as he close his eyes as he force himself to calm down. His heart picked up its pace with every second that went by and he could not see either of his brothers.

His back slowly started to tense up and soon became as tight as a rod. He looked around desperately as he tried to locate any of his brothers.

In reality they weren’t late they still had five minutes before the sun started to set. He realize he should have asked them to come sooner as he had no idea on how this would play out. Not a second, later he saw both Jason and Dick making their way towards him.

In that moment his body relaxed a little as he saw Grayson smile and Jason smirk.

“Hey Babybat sorry we’re late but Dickiebird here decided to bring the entire apartment with us!” Jason said playfully as he rolled his eyes and showed Damian a picnic basket.

“Well of course! You only wanted to bring meat! And you know Damian’s vegetarian. Lil’ D don’t worry, big brother’s got you covered.” Dick said as he started pulling out some of Damian’s favorite snacks.

The only ones Grayson knew he like. A knot got stuck in his throat as he saw his brothers chatting happily, playfully setting up a picnic. Just because he asked them to come. No other reason than that. He tried to swallow down that knot but nothing, he didn’t feel any better. As he stared at the sun and noticed it descend.

“Richard, Jason.” Both their head snap towards Damian as their jaws dropped hearing their full names coming out of Damian’s mouth.

“Lil D…?” Dick’s voice went up slightly.

“I-” Damian started and then cut himself off as he struggled to figure out what to say. He hadn’t thought this through. He turned around and looked as the sky started changing into a curtains of oranges, reds and purples. Slowly dancing together, bringing out hope and the promise of a new tomorrow, a new future and most importantly, happiness for his family.

Damian was mesmerized by the sunset for a minute thinking that he was glad that he shared this place with his brothers.

When he turned around his brothers also looked mesmerized as they observed at the scene in front of them. Damian stared at the way Dick smiled and his eyes sparkled with the juvenile joy that he like to tease him about. Then he turned to Jason as his mouth curved into a small smile and his body was in a relaxed stance. In that moment, Damian decided that he actually prefered that view much better than the sunset.

Slowly his eyes widened as he unconsciously took a step back as behind his brothers, Timothy suddenly appeared. Alive…breathing. He actually was able to bring him back. He gasped and that broke his brothers trance as their eyes snapped towards him .

Dick’s eyebrow furrowed as he stared at Damian, whose whole demeanor changed in disbelief, wonder and…fear? Dick thought to himself in confusion.

“Dick…Jason…how?” A voice behind them asked.

Dick and Jason breath got stuck in their lungs as they slowly turned around. Dick hand went to his mouth as tears ran down his face in utter amazement.

“Babybird?” Jason asked as he took a hesitant step forward.

Happiness, relief and most of all surprise could be seen on Tim’s face as he nodded desperately. He tried to walk towards his brothers but he stumbled as his strength started to leave him. In an instant, both brothers were broken from their trances as they went to help thim. Dick ran towards Tim and he grabbed his face in his hands as he sobbed happily.

“How…? I thought…Tim you were dead….you were dead.” Dick said between hiccups as he touched Tim forehead with his own.

In the meantime, Jason helped both his brothers stay standing. Tim shook his head desperately.

“No…no they took me…and you guys…how?” Tim said confusion heavy in his voice.

“How were you guys able to save me? Where are we? Why are we here?” Tim ask question after question rapidly without even taking a second to breathe. As he tried to understand what was happening.

Dick was to focused on making sure that his little brother was actually there. That he was safe, that he was real, that it was really their Timmy. Jason was the one who answered his questions.

“I don’t know Timmy…we thought you were dead….we came here because Damian invited us here. We thought it was just for a picnic…Damian?” The moment Jason look up he was shocked.

Damian stood there with the saddest smile he had ever seen. He looked content, but at the same time, resign to the scene in front of him. He didn’t move to join his brothers and just stared at the scene before him as he felt at peace with what was happening. He, at the moment, had all his brothers’ attention.

“What did you do?” Tim ask quietly as his eyes widened in horror. Damian…he was disappearing slowly. The scene was heartbreakingly beautiful.

Damian stood there as the sky started to fade from orange to dark violets and blue. In the dark of the sky Damian was the only source of light that they had. As little fireflies started appearing where Damian started to fade. Starting with his legs and steadily working its way up. The fireflies adorned the night as they mixed with the darkness and the sky making it seen as they were surrounded by stars dancing in the night. Damian stared down at himself as he let out a wet laugh.

“What did you do?” Dick yelled scared as he saw as his little brother slowly disappear before him.

Damian looked up at them and gave them a watery smile. Tears ran down his face leaving a glowing trace.

“I fixed it.” He said hiccuping at then end. He lifted his hand as he slowly saw it start to glow and fade into hundreds of fireflies.

“Now you can be happy…finally happy.” Damian eyes begged for them to understand him.

“I made a deal…and they promised me your happiness. They said they could bring Timothy back…your happiness means the world to me.” Damian admitted as he stared at his brother, love resonating with every single one of his words.

“Damian…what was the deal?…no….break it..don’t do it! You can’t! You can’t die! Not because of me! Not again!” Timothy was the one to yell this time and Damian shook his head softly.

“No…Timothy I can’t I made my decision. I-” Jason cut him off with a snarl.

“No! You listen here Damian. We went to hell to bring you back! I won’t let you throw that away with your sacrificial bullshit! What makes you think this is what we want? Dammit Damian! We care about you! Don’t do this to us…not again-…” Jason finished the last part begging. Dick took a hesitant step forward as his body shook with uncontrollable sobs.

“Lil D what are you doing? We need you! I NEED YOU! Please think of what your doing we can find another way. Please don’t go…Damian you can’t die on me again. I love you…I love you…you’re my son please…Don’t make me lose my son again. I love you I love you I love you.” Dick repeated over and over and over.

Damian stared at him as he smiled at them sadly.

“I also love you…I love all of you…You deserve better…this is why I am doing this. You all deserve to be happy. I have the power to do it…so why not?” He stared at them and even Jason was crying at the moment.

“Shit kid…no, I’ll give you the Red Hood doll if you don’t go.” Jason tried to reason as his brother started to disappear more and more.

Damian let out a wet chuckle and shook his head.

“Don’t go, please, not again. What makes you think that you not being here would make us happy? You can’t do this Damian. I FORBID IT!!” Dick’s voice broke as he yelled and started walking towards Damian.

He simply smiled at Dick and open his arms. Dick sprinted towards his little brother, his son. He jumped toward Damian trying to hold him, to keep him here, to save him.

“I love you Dick…please be happy.” Damian said so softly, so tenderly that Dick felt every ounce of truth in it.

Dick put his arms out to catch Damian to hug him, but the moment he touched him. Damian’s body disappeared completely. Dick fell to the ground as he open up his hand and a lone firefly flew out and disappeared. Taking with it their little brother.

“NO!” A broken sob was the only thing heard through the quiet, dark echoes of the forest.

#damian wayne #richard grayson #jason todd #bruce wayne #tim drake #batman #angst #fluff and angst #long post

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