#I wanted to throttle myself so god damn badly

[piningpercussionist]

Soooo at the risk of sounding insensitive… what happened that night when you and knives… made out. Like did you start it or did she start it or?

Good grief... how did you even hear about that? I seriously doubt Knives is talking about it, but yeah, here we go, since that's apparently just. Out there now. Fuck's sake... I'm drinking to cope with thinking about this one, but I'll answer you while I'm still clear headed first.

Honestly? I can barely remember a good chunk of that night. After we got back from the beach and kept drinking, it gets sort of blurry for me? I was already pretty wasted when we got back to house, anyway.

I think I noticed Knives go skulking off by herself upstairs at some point, and I was... concerned. I mean, we'd been letting her drink with us, and I don't know if that was her first time or what, but I didn't want her to be sick all by herself if it was. That shit sucks, and I don't think anyone else was gonna step up to be there for her.

She wasn't sick though anyway, she'd just needed a breather- and apparently some advice. I remember her practically dragging me to the floor so we could sit and talk about one of my least favorite topics- Scott. Well, boys generally at first, but I knew she wanted to be talking about him, so in a very embarrassing move on my part, I decided to talk to her about Scott and I a little.

She seemed to really appreciate it, at least. But then...

Ugh, I seriously feel so disgusting trying to parse through this again...

I don't know who started it. I mean, she was complimenting me before and stuff, so maybe it was her? But I just have this sinking pit in my stomach that it was me. Talking about Scott and our history always messes me up, bad. And having to see him and Ramona suck faces and be all over one another doesn't help in the slightest, obviously. I would've been pent up enough to snap from that alone, I just... I guess until then, I hadn't been concerned about being capable of something like that. Or maybe I just assumed I'd never be caught dead drinking with a seventeen year old, let alone...

*Kim lets out a very long sigh and hangs her head back for a bit, thinking.*

... she said that stupid line, and then it happened. I find it really hard to believe it wasn't me. I'm just glad that's all that happened.

Things have been a little awkward with her since, at least for me. The way we talk sometimes, I don't even know if she remembers it. I mean, I barely do! I probably had a lot more to drink than she did, though. But I like Knives, really- she's fun and she's sweet, and she genuinely cares about our music. If she can behave like nothing happened, I can do the same no problem. I like having someone that isn't a meathead to talk to during practice, so if she's not running, screaming, for the hills, then I'll honor that, no matter how exhausting it may end up...

[ninjanonymous]

I’m pissed off, and sad, and scared, and I have a lot to say right now. This all needs to be said, for my own sake if not for anyone else’s.

Very recently, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that employers under the Affordable Care Act are now allowed to roll back access to birth control for their employees, as long as their religion disagrees with it. This ruling was made in the name of religious tyranny, and NOT that of religious freedom. Christian-run businesses can now force their beliefs onto their employees by actively denying them the healthcare that they very much need.

Can you imagine the outrage there would be if SCOTUS decided that it was suddenly okay for a Muslim-run business to break FLSA standards during Ramadan? After all, if a Christian-run business shouldn’t be forced to pay for all ACA-protected aspects of an employee’s healthcare, why should a Muslim-run business have to sacrifice profits when eating lunch during Ramadan is against their religion?

“Oh, but there are federal protections to keep something like that from happening.” Are there? Are there really? The ACA gave employees FEDERALLY PROTECTED access to birth control through their employers, because an employer’s religious beliefs shouldn’t be used to control the freedoms or hurt the wellbeing of others. Now look where we are.

This court ruling essentially dictates that religion can make you exempt from federally-mandated rules for the sake of profit. It puts the employer’s beliefs above the beliefs and wellbeing of their employees. It puts any company’s self-proclaimed God over the law, and allows them to forgo worker protections because, according to them, it’s what Jesus would want.

And where do we draw the line? Should a company that’s run by a Jehovah’s Witness be allowed to deny coverage for a needed blood transfusion? Can a religious company claim that any illness is a righteous punishment from God, and the use of modern medicine to treat it would be sinful? What would that mean for something as devastatingly expensive as cancer treatment? What if the CEO doesn’t agree with vaccines? And really, why even stop at access to healthcare when there are any number of ways that a company could encroach on their worker’s rights in the name of God?

Too many people in this country are entirely dependent on their employers for their health insurance. Healthcare costs in America are the highest in the western world by far, and life-saving treatment is often prohibitively expensive without it. This SCOTUS decision may ultimately deny many Americans their constitutional right to life.

Employers pay private insurance companies to provide care for their employees. This is a blanket expense. They don’t get an itemized bill for the healthcare that they’re covering. They’re paying for general healthcare coverage to be provided by insurance company, and that’s it. The employers are not the insurance companies themselves. They are not the ones processing the claims and choosing which to deny and which to cover. Your medical record is private, protected information. Your employer does not have access to that information under HIPAA. If your employer isn’t allowed in the room with you during your doctor’s appointment, they absolutely shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose what care you can and can’t receive.

These companies are literally just saying, “see that person right there? I don’t like that they’re on birth control, because I’M a Christian, and that’s against MY beliefs, so now THEY can’t have it.” A Christian forcing their beliefs onto someone else isn’t religious freedom, just like a Muslim forcing their beliefs onto a Christian wouldn’t be. This is religious tyranny the and Christian-backed persecution of women.

And for this specific ruling, it really is that arbitrary. This ruling is a poorly-disguised move to further strip away the rights of women in the name of Abrahamic theocracy. The idea that this decision would save money for these employers is completely asinine, considering good reproductive healthcare and access to birth control reduces long-term costs overall (I will be adding the stats and sources to back this up in a later post).

And here’s an important reminder for you all: reproductive healthcare is still basic healthcare. Taking care of one’s needs regarding their reproductive system benefits their overall health. And even if you disagree with me there, “birth control” is a pretty damn big misnomer. While it is commonly used to prevent unwanted pregnancies, there are a myriad of other reasons that a woman might need it for.

Birth control can control hormonal acne. My own mother was put on it for this reason back when she was a teenager.

It can be used to help regulate one’s mood. A dear friend of mine is on it for this reason. She suffers from severe depression, occasionally to the point of suicidal ideation. I am fucking terrified about what this court decision could mean for her.

It reduces one’s chances of getting uterine cancer. I have a family history of uterine cancer, and it can be hard to detect. They only found it in my grandmother by chance when they were performing an unrelated surgery.

It reduces your chances of forming ovarian cysts. Women with PCOS often suffer from these, and they can be quite painful. My mother had to have a football-sized ovarian cyst removed from her abdomen, and histology found that it contained pre-cancerous cells.

It can relieve symptoms of PMS and PMDD. Again, this is a form of hormonal mood regulation, as well as a means of controlling many of the unfortunate physical side effects of the menstrual cycle. PMS and PMDD are often topics of ridicule, but their symptoms can have a serious negative impact on one’s day-to-day life. I’ll add more information on this later, since there’s a lot to cover.

It can help regulate one’s menstrual cycle. For reasons I shouldn’t have to explain, knowing when blood and viscera is going to start pouring out of your crotch really helps with being prepared to deal with it. It also helps to avoid really embarrassing situations in public, or the need to clean bloodstains out of clothes and furniture. Irregular periods are a gruesome guessing game. I’ve been there. I don’t want to go back.

It can make your periods less painful. Periods happen when, once a month, the uterus sheds its inner lining. As in, the person having their period is bleeding internally, because one of their organs is shredding and expelling parts of itself from the inside. That shit hurts. Many women have reported vomiting or passing out from period pain. For me, the average period cramp can be compared to really bad gas or diarrhea pain. You know, the kind that has you breaking out into cold sweats on the toilet while you silently beg for mercy to any god that might be listening. Fun, right? I’d recon my pain level is about the average, too.

It can be used to manage menstrual migraines. Did you know some women get migraines in conjunction with their periods? Migraines are debilitating. Imagine having them chronically, getting them frequently around the same time every month, then being denied affordable access to the one medicine that was keeping it in check because your asshole boss says that Jesus wants you to suffer. Bonus points if you get fired because the migraines had a negative impact on your ability to work.

It can reduce your risk of anemia. Some women get really heavy periods. Like, crazy heavy, to the point where they bleed so much that it’s unhealthy. Technically speaking, I fall into this camp. I’d hemorrhage to the point of needing a transfusion if I went long enough without birth control. Gee, I sure hope the insurance-throttling company that I work for isn’t run by a Jehovah’s Witness.

Birth control is the only non-invasive way to control uterine fibroids, which often go hand-in-hand with endometriosis. These are non-cancerous growths within or around the uterus can cause uncontrolled bleeding, and may be quite painful in and of themselves. A ridiculously high number of women have this, myself included. Most women that have them have no or very few symptoms. I was not so lucky.

And that’s just a few of birth control’s many uses. And actually, let me talk about my fibroids some more for a second, just so you all have a better idea of what it means to live with this shit. TMI time. I take birth control. I’ve been taking it regularly for about five years now. I’ve never had sex before, and I don’t plan on it any time soon. This is the one and only reason I’m on the pill.

Five years ago, during my freshman year of college, I started bleeding out of the blue. Really, really badly. This “spotting” was sudden, and heavy, and unrelenting. I’d completely bleed through a super tampon in less than two hours, when one of those would last a good eight hours on my heaviest day during a normal period. I had to sleep with towels on the bed, and set an alarm to wake up early so I could take deal with the shed blood before it got too bad, and to give myself extra time for cleanup before classes. After going from horizontal to vertical for the first time in several hours, getting to the bathroom was a race against time and gravity.

I lived like this for a full month. Tampons and pads, for those of you that have had the privilege of never needing to buy them, can get really pricey. Doubly so for a broke college student, triply so when they need to be extra-large packs containing extra-large products, and quadruple-y so when that broke college student is still managing to bleed through those products at an absurd rate. And, it hurt. The pain was worse than usual; the camps were sharper, more persistent, and sometimes it felt like someone was jabbing a big needle into my abdomen and twisting it around. I was taking OTC painkillers constantly, and they barely made a dent in the pain.

The bleeding started just over a week after my last period had ended, so it was way too early for it to be my next cycle. I figured that maybe my cycle was syncing up to my roommate, or some other chick on my floor had some weird hormonal imbalance, and the outside interference from other people’s hormones was screwing with me enough to make my own body act weird. I figured I’d just have to wait out this one bad period, and everything would settle back down to normal. But, two weeks passed and absolutely nothing changed. The bleeding wasn’t slowing down, and I started to get worried that it wasn’t just an abnormal period. I waited a couple more days, then booked an appointment at the health center. It was more than a week until they could see me.

The consensus was fibroids. They couldn’t give me an official diagnosis without an ultrasound, but all signs pointed to that one conclusion. They said that the only way to make the bleeding stop was by taking birth control. I wasn’t happy about it, since my mom had me convinced that birth control would actually increase my risk of cancer (not true, as I later found out), but I agreed anyway. The nightmare was over a few days later.

So, off topic but still related, I had surgery on my foot a couple months ago. It had to be immobilized for a while, and I was put on blood thinners to prevent any clots from forming while I recovered. Birth control pills can actually increase the risk of blood clots, so I made the choice to hold off on taking those for a while, just as an added precaution. Sure enough, only five days later, the bleeding and the pain was back. Again, it had been only a week since my last period.

I still need to be on birth control. It is a medical necessity for me. My fibroids are still around, and I’ll still spot and cramp up if I miss a pill. I’ve recently been told by my doctor that a permanent fix, and my only other option for treatment, is a hysterectomy. I am 22 years old. Most surgeons would never dream about performing that procedure on me, even if it didn’t already come with its own health risks.

And hell, even if it is used just to prevent pregnancies, what gives someone else the right to deny a woman her bodily autonomy? Human beings are sexual creatures. They’re going to fuck, regardless of whatever laws or religious doctrines are involved. We are quite literally built to have sex, and it’s entirely healthy to do so. There are plenty of peer-reviewed studies that go into detail on the matter; just hop onto Google Scholar and see for yourself. And, maybe, preventing pregnancy is a need in and of itself. What if a woman has a condition that would make pregnancy extremely high-risk? Is she not justified in taking birth control to protect herself from grievous injury? If she’s married to a man, does that married couple not have a right to sleep together without fear of one of them literally dying for it? Even by Christian standards, it doesn’t seem right.

This decision that the Supreme Court has made is utterly shameful, and countless law-abiding American citizens will now be denied access to needed care that they otherwise couldn’t afford without insurance coverage. This is truly a loss for America and her people, and one that will cause suffering for decades to come.

[weepylucifer]

Let‘s Go in the Garden - Ch. 4

Nightingale goes over some backstory. David discovers recent history. Peter’s therapist WILL hear about this.

Nightingale got his permit to grave-rob. Well, officially we were following a lead connected to a cold Falcon case that had suddenly warmed up. Inofficially, we were... actually in fact doing that, but we were also very much opening the grave of DCI Nightingale’s former boyfriend.

The military cemetary was depressing in its uniformity, the way places like this usually are. It must have been thousands of identical headstones. The fact that many of these graves were empty, because in a staggering amount of cases the body couldn’t have been recovered, did not make the environment any more cheerful.

The Folly practitioners were all buried close to each other - those that were, in fact, buried here and hadn’t been left spread over Germany - as they would have liked, Nightingale said.

“Officer present,” he muttered, patting one of the headstones, a twist to his mouth that sent a little stab to my chest.

“Would be weird, huh, if they came out and saluted?” I said, maybe attempting to lighten the mood. Maybe it was just another case of me being unable to keep my damned mouth shut.

“One has,” Nightingale remarked in that wry way of his. “Look, this is Ballantine. I knew him at Casterbrook.” He peered down the long line of graves. He was introducing me to his friends, I realized, and it felt horrible. “And next to him is Smith, and Dance. There’s Simmons, he was only nineteen. Blaise, he could do this impression of Churchill that had us all in stitches. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds... you know? Here’s Greenway, a good friend of David’s. And here we are already at our destination.”

Many of these graves were bare, no one having visited, evidently, in a while. David Mellenby’s grave was not so. Two tiny paper flags were stuck in the damp earth below the headstone, crossed, a union jack, then another one. It was even the new-fangled rainbow, I noticed, with the black and brown stripe added. London pride had been three weeks ago, so I could probably deduce where he’d gotten that. There was a flower too, now wilted, the petals almost completely crumbled into nothing, but even with my limited knowledge of botany, I could recognize a rose when I saw one. There was a sudden lump in my throat. Let nobody tell you that ancient, stern magicians can’t be sentimental buggers when the mood strikes.

I had expected Nightingale to have some spell at his disposal that would instantly remove all the soil in our way, but he just handed me a shovel and waited. Honestly, I sometimes wondered how he’d ever gotten anything done before acquiring his own constable. (He... hadn’t, mostly. He hadn’t at all.) The colleagues at Belgravia could have had an excavator here to get this done within minutes, what the Folly had, especially after the commissioner had gotten acerbic with us recently once more about our budget, was myself and a shovel.

It wasn’t every day that I had to dig a large hole, and soon I was sweating. It was beginning to run down my back when my shovel hit something solid.

I guess I had somehow managed to avoid thinking about the fact that I was standing in an open grave digging for a coffin. But now I had to awkwardly crouch in the hole and unearth the damned thing, and while it was the middle of the day, not at all conductive to a spooky cemetery atmosphere, it was still eerie.

The coffin was partially covered by a length of rotting fabric - “That would be the flag,” Nightingale said - but the wood of it was still entirely intact and very well-preserved. That smelled fishy right away, seeing as nearly eighty years had indeed gone by. I checked for vestigia, but if there was anything, it was very faint and very faded. Nightingale slid into the hole with me, rather elegantly really.

“Shall we open it?” he suggested, and I had to remind him to put a pair of one-way gloves on, which he did, and then we cracked the coffin open.

“Well,” I said after a moment of just staring, “I don’t know what the hell that is, but it’s not human remains.”

What we saw lying in the coffin had the rough shape and size of an adult person, but the resemblance was very much cursory. It was a life-sized construct, a doll of some sort, woven from what had to be thousands of small wooden branches, layered on top of each other to evoke the approximate shape of a head, a torso, legs, arms crossed over the chest. There was no discernible face, no hair, and only a few scraps of clothing that had long since rotted away.

I poked the strange figure with a gloved finger. The ancient, dry wood crumbled under my rather light touch. “What is this, sir?”

“Hmm.” Nightingale eyed it thoughtfully. “It seems to be a changeling construct. You don’t see many of these anymore. That’s... clever. Very unconventional. Very David, but he couldn’t have created this by himself. He had to have an accomplice in the demi-monde.”

“A changeling?” Immediately, I had to think of my adventure in Herefordshire. “Like Nicole Lacey?”

Nightingale shook his head. “Changeling is another one of these umbrella terms. This is an artificial construct, not a living being. The high fae didn’t always substitute members of their own societies for the people they took. In some cases they would leave constructs like this one behind. A fae would have woven something like this from twigs or reeds and enchanted it to mimic life for a short while. When the glamour inevitably collapsed, it would look like the person had died.”

“Could David... Mr. Mellenby... could he have used it to mimic a dead body? And the spell would have worn off after the funeral?”

“That seems to have been the purpose of this arrangement,” Nightingale agreed. “But again, David couldn’t have created a changeling. It’s entirely possible that he called in a favor from one of his contacts in the demi-monde. He was always seeking out the fae, forging friendships, researching. Very odd, for that time.”

I wondered why he had to have asked for help from a fae, and voiced that question. According to Nightingale, not even Mellenby with his unorthodox faerie friends could avail himself of their type (brand? flavor?) of magic. Creating a changeling was simply not something Newtonian practitioners were trained to do, and the demi-monde at that time had been even more tight-lipped regarding their secrets than they were at present.

“He really was serious about faking it,” I said, “Manufacturing a fake corpse... he wanted to drop off the map really badly, huh?”

Nightingale nodded. “Yes, it’s all... a bit much, isn’t it? I understand wanting to quit the service making a clean break, but this seems excessive. Moving somewhere quiet and avoiding the reunions usually does the trick. Hell, I don’t attend the reunions, and I’m left alone these days.”

“Is it... uncharacteristically excessive, do you think?”

Nightingale directed a thoughtful look to the grey, cloudy sky as he pondered that. He’s not a copper in the blood, in the Sam Vimes kind of way, he’s always been a soldier happening to be doing police work, and I suspect he always will be. But enough coppering had rubbed off on him that he knew where this line of inquiry was going.

“No,” he said at last. “David could get extremely melodramatic sometimes. About important things.”

I tried to imagine how Mellenby must have felt, right after Ettersberg. Guilty, Hugh Oswald had hinted at. He had shared knowledge with people who had turned around and used what he had shared to build Ettersberg, to commit unspeakable crimes against humanity there. Hundreds of his comrades had died in an attempt to get their hands onto that knowledge, to, in a way, correct the mistake he’d made trusting the wrong people. He’d gotten back to England in place of his boyfriend. He had thought that his colossal fuckup had to have claimed Nightingale’s life.

“He must’ve been really serious about no one coming to look for him,” I said.

Nightingale’s expression grew as clouded as the sky. “Oh, certainly,” he said. “He might have taken over my duties, had I not returned home.”

“Huh?” I asked eloquently.

“Command enjoyed his scientific expertise during the war,” Nightingale said, somewhat scathingly. “Besides, he’d never been wounded...” (Because you were there ensuring that, I thought but did not say) “...he would have been in an ideal position to inherit mastery of the Folly. I was considered missing in action at the time, as were a number of other, even likelier candidates. It’s not a duty either of us ever aimed for or desired. So he ran away.”

Like a coward, he didn’t add but I could almost hear it nonetheless. Now Nightingale, when faced with the duty of guarding the ruins of British magic, of remaining the last one standing, of shouldering responsibility for all of Britain’s magic-related concerns, had accepted it unflinchingly. He must have also been tired, physically and mentally, he’d been shot, he’d lost everyone he’d held dear. But he hadn’t run for the hills. He hadn’t always done the most stellar job as Britain’s last official wizard, but at the very least he’d been there.

“So that’s why you’re so mad at him, huh,” I assumed.

Nightingale shrugged. He looked very... resigned. “Is that it?” he asked. “Can I fault him for doing a runner? There were others who could have continued to serve in some capacity, not many, but there were a few. They chose to break their staves. Can I begrudge them that? They were my men, my lads, and I wished for them to heal. To get to enjoy life in peace.”

God, that noble, self-sacrificial bastard. I really wanted to throttle him.

“What is it then?” I asked instead. “Why is it still all weird and sad? I mean, no offense sir, but if I had a dead boyfriend and he suddenly came back, I would be dancing in the streets or something.”

Nightingale sighed, and then, right there at the open, empty grave, I got the full story.

----

So apparently on the eve of Ettersberg - well, not the literal eve, the actual operation had been a few weeks off yet - but when select officers were first briefed on the mission, there had been some disagreement on how to proceed. Hugh Oswald had already told me some of it, back in Herefordshire, that Nightingale had been against it from the get-go. That he’d wanted the site bombed from altitude and nothing else to do with it. Now, as a Captain he hadn’t held nearly enough sway to affect command decisions of that magnitude. But The Nightingale wasn’t just any Captain. As perhaps the most gifted and capable practitioner the Folly had turned out in his generation - he didn’t say that to me, but I extrapolated from what I recalled Hugh Oswald having told me - and one of Britain’s most experienced combat practitioners, he had enjoyed a certain reputation. And above all, he had held the unswerving and unyielding loyalty of his men.

That loyalty was hard-earned and entirely reciprocated, and when Nightingale had heard, after years of fighting the Nazis for every inch of ground, that they were sending all available troops into a death trap hundreds of miles beyond the front, he’d gone a bit ballistic. He had appealed to command to reconsider, and he’d voiced his opposition loudly and clearly, and word had gotten around to the enlisted men.

Now, in your ordinary army, the disarray would have stopped there. Command structures and the prevailing culture would have ensured it. But the Folly battallion hadn’t been composed of ordinary foot-soldiers. The Folly practitioners had been, to a private, sons of England’s proud upper middle class. They’d been men who came from money, men of privilege, men used to having their voices heard. So someone got it in his head to start petitioning against the objective, to take a stand, to rally around the Nightingale. He himself had had nothing to do with the petition, he told me; it had been the work of some fool NCO and he in fact only found out about it later.

But army hierarchy had still applied, and Nightingale had summarily been dragged off the field, into battallion command and thence back to London before a board of generals. He had been told in no uncertain terms that what he was doing was considered an act of treason against King and country, and that, out of respect for his service record and the loyalty of his men, he would be offered a choice: retract his opposition, stand down, be a good soldier and go to Ettersberg, or have himself and everyone who’d backed him up court-martialed, lined up against a wall and shot for mutiny.

“At that point, I would have let myself be shot alright,” he told me, “if I thought it might help prevent the worst. But all of my men, no. So I chose compliance... I granted the lads the fate of uncertain over certain death. And a handful of those petitioners actually did end up making it home.”

It was rare that I ever got a war story out of him, so of course I listened. This one was dreary, though, and I couldn’t believe they’d still gone around executing their own men by firing squad all the way in 1945. A less civilized age, indeed.

“What does that have to do with Da- with Mr. Mellenby?”

“Lieutenant,” Nightingale corrected absentmindedly. “Lieutenant Mellenby. Well, while I was opposing Operation Spatchcock, David was in favor.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I told him of the risk. I told him it would be a suicide run. He called me paranoid. He said surely they wouldn’t muster all we had left and send us off to die. Surely that was a ridiculous proposition. I told him he had always been a bit naive as to the way the world worked.”

He sighed. “He gave me a lot of regurgitated rhethoric from the mission briefing about hindering the fascists from their heinous atrocities, for the sake of their prisoners, for the glory of the empire. We got into a right row about the role of the empire in the world. Not that David really cared about the British empire any more than I did. No, David had been personally slighted, and David wanted his research back. And he seemed willing to delude himself so far as to believe he wouldn’t have to climb over the bodies of our lads to get it back.”

Reader, even if I’d known what to say to that, I genuinely didn’t dare interrupt Nightingale now. He was far away again, but this time his expression held none of the dull grief and shell-shock that seemed to be his constant companions. At this moment he was frighteningly alive, standing tall, encased by vivid fury. For a moment, I could see the man he’d been, the war hero. If I’d been some dude named Hans in a Wehrmacht uniform in 1945 catching sight of him, I honestly probably would’ve just shit myself.

“The thing is,” Nightingale continued, and even his tone had gone cutting and militaristic around the edges, as though he was giving an after-action report, “that petition was almost successful. Command really did stick their heads together for a moment and attempt to calculate whether the prognosticated loss of life could be considered worth the empirical value of the Black Library. To determine the answer to that question, they consulted a scientific expert. A scholar on the topic.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

Nightingale looked at me, and seemed to simmer down. The years settled back across his shoulders like a soft but heavy blanket, the incensed soldier vanishing again. “Indeed,” he said. “And David told them yes, in his opinion, it would be worth it. He got what he wanted. He really must have hugged himself that night. I certainly didn’t. And when the time came to face the consequences, he ran away.”

“I guess I get now why you punched him,” I said.

“Take some samples of that wooden doll for Abdul,” Nightingale said, tossing us abruptly back into the present. “I hope you thought to bring a forensic bag.”

----

Mellenby took the news that he was undeniably himself pretty well. It was just about the only thing that went right that afternoon.

It all started going sideways when we got back to the Folly and ran into Molly in the atrium, as was often the case. When Nightingale asked her where David was, she pointed a finger downwards, indicating the basement, and I swear to god all colour went out of Nightingale’s face within a single second.

“Molly, he’s not... in the old lab, is he?”

Molly nodded.

I think me still being there was the only reason Nightingale didn’t break into a sprint.

I followed him as he power-walked down the stairs and down the hallway leading to the laboratories. Most of them were still unused to this day, but Nightingale stopped in front of a particular door. It was quite a solid door, but I was a bit unsettled by the silence beyond it. I knew Nightingale and I were thinking the same thing.

I kept my eyes fixed on his back, the tense line of his shoulders in the sturdy tweed he considers his work suit, as he reached out for the doorknob. I could spot a slight tremor in that hand. I heard his breath, a bit heavier than normal. For a moment, his hand hovered, an eternity caught in a second. Then he seemed to snap out of it, and in one decisive movement he turned the handle and wrenched the door open.

The air was stale in the room beyond, evidence of how long it had been in disuse. Most of the furniture had been covered by dust sheets, now torn down and haphazardly stacked in a corner. One of the closets was open, revealing dusty, out-of-date equipment. There were several desks, the surfaces tiled, the wooden lab benches shoved underneath worn smooth by continuous use decades ago. There was an ancient enamel sink with faucet, what had, in the old days, probably passed for an eye wash station. And there, by the ancient sink, David Mellenby was patiently and intently cleaning a beaker.

“David,” Nightingale said. It came out in one big whoosh of air.

Mellenby looked up. Today he was wearing a jumper over his shirt, overlarge and a bit worn, but cozy-looking. “Thomas!” he exclaimed with a smile, “And Peter... Constable Grant... hello.” So he wasn’t sure what to call me either. The feeling was mutual.

“You don’t intend to use this lab again, do you?” Nightingale demanded. Mellenby’s smile fell against the banked emotion in his voice, and whatever he saw gleaming in his eyes.

“It’s my laboratory,” he said. “Of course I intend to put it back to use. You left everything as it was, correct?”

“I suppose I can’t keep you from your... work, huh,” Nightingale said.

“You’re keeping me from my magic already.” Mellenby tugged at the cuffs he still was made to wear. “There’s not much I can do here without it, but... I must work. I must experiment. I know why you’re hesitant about it, believe me I do understand your doubts exactly, but I can’t not do my job.”

“You don’t have a job here now,” Nightingale remarked. Ouch, I thought. Me, I would be stung if someone - if he - told me that.

Evidently, Mellenby was too. But he only amended, “Say my calling, then.”

“Your calling.” Nightingale exhaled forcibly. “I can see there’s no stopping you. But, in here?”

“Why not? I always used this room.”

“You scared me,” Nightingale admitted. “When I heard you were down here... goodness, David, what was I supposed to think?”

“Now, it’s not... you know now nothing actually ever happened in here. I can move past that, can’t you?” Mellenby turned, and devoted his attention to the beaker in his hands again. He finished dusting it off, and reached for another one.

“Move past that! Just like that, hm? Of all the obstinate, insensitive--”

“You’re calling me insensitive? Ever since I got back here, you’ve been impossible, posturing like some--”

“Oh, now I’m posturing? It’s morbid, that’s all...”

“It’s not like anyone ever actually died in here, you know! But I suppose you command where I go within your Folly--”

Mellenby had said that last resolutely glaring at the vial he was polishing. Nightingale stepped into his space and slapped it out of his hand. Glass shattered all over the floor. Such a rash, aggressive, juvenile gesture from Nightingale shocked me.

“Now you look here, David--”

I ducked out of the door, not least to avoid the glass shards, but moreso to avoid this absolute scene. Molly was hovering a few steps from the door, hands clenched into her dress and a worried look on her face.

I gave her a frown of sympathy, and we both shrugged, because what can one do?

Something else shattered within the laboratory, and I chanced a quick peek inside, fearing that they were full-on fighting now. They were pressed up against a desk, hands clenched in each other’s lapels, kissing furiously, and I mean furiously.

It was a good thing they’d stopped noticing me a while ago, because I couldn’t stop staring if they’d paid me to. It’s not every day you get to see Nightingale be anything but unflappable, and to see him now, my distant, regal guv’nor, all but wrapped around another bloke, one of David’s hands in his hair, messing up that careful side-part, tugging to what I imagined was the point of pain, to hear him muffle some noise against David’s lips, ugh, well...

Feeling a bit hot under the collar suddenly for some reason, I turned back to Molly, who had arched an eyebrow but was looking no less worried.

“God, what the fuck,” I said to her. “Were they always like that?”

Molly shook her head. It occurred to me that of course, she’d already worked and lived here since before the 1920s, she’d know - perhaps - what they had been like.

“Wonder what it was like,” I said, not knowing what I was expecting from her. Did I want her to, what, whip out a notebook and start taking down the story?

Then Molly did something... weird.

For a moment she paused, her head cocked as if she were deliberating something. Then she suddenly grabbed me, something she had never done before, and she was very close, and I could see all her teeth, and--

I  was stood in the same hallway, but different, observing from the outside, somehow. Molly was no longer in front of me, but on the stairs holding a broom, sweeping down. Just to test my hypothesis on what was happening here, I went up to her and waved a hand in front of her face. She didn’t react. So this was... elsewhere, elsewhen, even with her looking like the same old Molly.

I heard steps down the stairs and soon a young man appeared, one I had some initial trouble recognizing as Nightingale. I put this Nightingale in his early thirties at most, and not only was he not nearly as buttoned up as the Nightingale of the present, his whole demeanor was markedly different. There was a skip in his step, that smile on his face that made him look all of fourteen openly and permanently displayed, his hair artfully ruffled rather than strictly parted. There was a carelessness to him that was, to me, entirely alien.

“Hello, Molly,” said the Other Nightingale. “Is he in?”

Molly nodded.

“I’ll just...” He maneuvered himself past her on the stairs with a natural, fluid grace. “...pop on in then.”

Molly put a finger to her lips. The Other Nightingale laughed.

“Yes, yes, careful. I know, I’m always careful. You keep an eye on the hallway, yes? Splendid.” He sauntered, I noticed, towards the same door I had just exited. Halfway there, he turned around again. “Thanks, Molly. Don’t know what we’d do without you.”

Molly shook her head, in a display of fondness, I thought.

The laboratory, when he went in, was different, all surfaces clean to the point of shining, not a speck of dust in sight, but very much in use. All kinds of equipment and folders with notes covered the desks, all but one at which Mellenby was working. He was in a lab coat, and also looked younger, but it was undeniably him. He was doing something fiddly with a pipette and large petri dish, in which some unknown liquid was currently drying.

“Davey, thought I’d find you in here,” Nightingale said, giving Mellenby a fetching grin, which was met with an absentminded smile. Mellenby looked up from his work with an expression in his eyes that communicated both preoccupation and inordinate fondness.

“Ah, good morning, Thomas.”

“Morning? It’s almost noon.” Nightingale sat down on a lab bench as if he was in the habit to, like he was in and out of here every other day. “Been holed up in here since before breakfast, have you?”

“Yes, I’m... afraid I missed it, didn’t I?” Mellenby crossed the room from one desk to another, scribbling something in an open notebook. “I was going to go up and grab a bite to eat, but time got away from me.”

“And you with your nice new watch.”

“Hmmm.” Mellenby picked up another notebook, leafing through it. For a while he worked silently, peering at samples of something through a microscope and taking notes. Nightingale observed him with an expression of good-natured ignorance on his face, but I saw him grow bored by degrees. Soon he adjusted his tie, shifted in his seat and ran a hand through his hair. Only when he huffed theatrically, a bit of a pout on his face, did I understand that he was preening for his boyfriend’s attention, and I was glad they couldn’t hear the sudden laugh this shocked out of me.

When he wasn’t getting what he wanted, Nightingale leaned back on the lab bench in now starkly evident boredom and cast a tiny werelight. He popped impello and something else on it that I wasn’t familiar with, which enabled him to bounce the werelight off the table and into his palm like a small, glowing tennis ball. He did that a few times and then started shifting it between his fingers, obviously just fidgeting to keep himself occupied.

It got Mellenby to pay attention to him at last. “Thomas, stop. Your magic in here might taint the emulsion.”

“Oh, by all means.” Nightingale extinguished the werelight, looking just slightly put out. “I’ll get out of your hair, then, lest I taint your emulsion.”

That finally got Mellenby to put his many notebooks down. “Is something wrong, Thomas?”

Nightingale sighed. “Nothing. Well...”

Mellenby rounded the table, until he was stood directly in front of Nightingale, resting those large, clear eyes on him. They weren’t touching, anyone barging in would have seen nothing but an intent conversation between friends. But to someone in the know, which I was, there was a sort of intimacy in it, in how they leaned so close together. “Well?”

“I’m only in the country for another week. Once I leave, we might not see each other for half a year. I was hoping we might do something together, something other, that is, than me watching you work.”

“Oh.” Mellenby looked startled. “Oh songbird, oh no. Of course I want to go out with you, these experiments are rather time-sensitive, that’s all.”

“Well, you knew a month in advance when I’d be at the Folly. Yet you simply had to start a time-sensitive experiment just now. If it’s something I did, will you please let me know?”

Mellenby inhaled sharply. “Oh dear. You’re right, that was thoughtless of me. Of course you did nothing wrong. I’m overjoyed to have you here, to talk to you in person, to... just to see you. I was simply so enthusiastic about getting results here, I clean forgot we didn’t have all that much time.” For just a second, he leaned in, resting his forehead against Nightingale’s. “I’ll see if I can wrap up here by tomorrow, alright? Will you forgive me?”

“Tomorrow? But yesterday you said it would take several--”

“There’ll be time enough to start anew once you’re back in Lahore. And I’ll tell you what.” Mellenby disengaged, stepping back behind his desk and retrieving a folded piece of paper from a drawer. “This is a letter from my father. He owns this hunting lodge, out in the countryside. Not that he goes there anymore, on account of his injury. He’s been asking and asking me to go out and check on it. Next time you’re in the country, we could go there together. Hmm? Make a real holiday of it.”

Nightingale cocked his head. “You don’t even like to hunt.”

“We wouldn’t have to. It’ll be us two and the wilderness. Nice fishing pond, too. No one else for miles. Just you and me and a sizeable bed at our disposal.”

“What...” Nightingale lowered his voice to a near-whisper, “Share a bed?”

Mellenby grinned. “If we take enough provisions along, we won’t have to get up for days.”

“Davey!” I swear, not once has Nightingale ever been this gleeful in my presence. He swept around the desk and caught Mellenby in a hug, tilting his head to bring their lips together.

“Thomas!” David hissed. “If someone sees!”

“No one’s here to see,” Nightingale murmured against his lips. “No windows. Molly’s outside watching the door. Come on, just this once. Admit it, you’ve always wanted me in here.”

Mellenby huffed out a startled little laugh. “More to the point, you’ve wanted me in here. Distract me from my work like the menace you are.” Even as he said it, he was backing them up against the desk, hands coming around to rest on Nightingale’s backside and squeezing.

“Mh.” Another kiss, this one deeper, hungrier. “My diligent scientist. I would never.”

“Liar. Tease.” Mellenby stifled a moan, eyes falling closed as Nightingale’s thigh rubbed up between his legs. “Oh- songbird. My sweet songbird.”

I was pretty sure where this was going, and that I didn’t necessarily need to see any more. Thankfully, Molly seemed to share my view, or maybe she too had stopped watching at this point back then. In any case, I felt a sudden, painful, nauseating tug, and I stood out in the hallway again with Molly’s cold, bony hands on my forearms. She let go of me immediately and took a step back, as if apprehensive, maybe afraid she’d overstepped. Had she wanted to share this memory so badly? And most importantly, how had she done that? I leaned against the wall. I was dizzy.

Just as I decided to go upstairs and maybe sit down for a bit, Nightingale came back out of the lab. He gave me and Molly a somewhat quizzical look. He was just slightly ruffled, his tie a bit askew, his lips... oh dear... his lips red and slightly raw from kissing.

“What are you two still doing out here?” he asked.

Molly gave him a look that in essence communicated that she wasn’t standing here for any particular reason, that she did have every right to stand here, that she was going to stop standing here anyway, that she had much better things to do than stand here, and anyway who was he to ask? Then she turned and swept off.

I settled for a simpler shrug.

“Was there anything you needed, Peter?” Nightingale asked me. Behind him, Mellenby stuck his head out of the door. His lips also were very pink and plump, the lower one even bleeding a little. My boss had bitten someone bloody. It should have just been ridiculous, but it sent a chill down my back.

“It’s nothing, sir,” I said. “I was headed for...” Well, what would I be headed for? I’d followed him down here in the first place because I, too, had been worried about this bloke I’d known for a little over two days now. The gym, I might say, because that was this way, or the firing range. But honestly I didn’t feel up to actually going either of these places. I’d already dug a huge hole, unearthed a coffin, and been subject to whatever Molly had just done to me. All I wanted was a break.

“I was going back upstairs,” I said. “If there’s nothing else on, I’ll just be in the tech cave.”

Nightingale nodded. “Do go. You look a tad... worn.”

And you look kissed. I didn’t say that, but I got embarrassingly close. It was weird, how my eyes kept wandering towards his lips. Could I spot a remnant of some moisture there? From Mellenby’s mouth? And why did I care, anyway? It was weird, watching Nightingale get handsy with his boyfriend in Molly’s memory had done nothing to or with me. That had been a stranger I’d been watching, a person I’d never known, not my... not the Nightingale I was familiar with. But the man right in front of me right now was very, very real.

And... so what? He was allowed to have a life, I guessed.

----

Bev was in class right then, but she still answered my texts. How are things at the Folly? she wanted to know.

Still no new case for us, I told her.

I meant the Nightingale and his boyfriend situation.

It’s like watching a telenovela but with old white men, I texted her back. All cattiness and dramatic fight scenes and wild accusations and throwing stuff around. But old white men.

I didn’t tell her about my strange recent observations on Nightingale’s lips; it wouldn’t have been fair on her. Or would it? I needed more time to think about it, and at the same time, I wanted to avoid investing any further thought in it at all. I mean, why did all this even weird me out so much? Sure, I’d never seen Nightingale with anyone before, romantically, nor had he ever mentioned anything like that. But we weren’t attached at the hip, were we? We spent plenty of time apart, during which he might have gotten up to conceivably anything. Why did that thought seem so strange?

I just wasn’t used to thinking of Nightingale like that, I supposed, precisely because I never saw him... date, or whatever, and he never spoke about it. He had seemed, to me, as completely platonic as, say, Molly, or a potted fern, or a lamp. Objectively a good-looking bloke, sure, but I’d pegged him as completely uninterested in any of that. Well, you know someone until you don’t, as experience had proven.

If anything, I reckoned that while I’d been out looking for fun, I had pictured Nightingale in the Folly as always, reading... a slim volume of metaphysical poetry, or something, or sitting in a wall closet plugged into a charger until duty called. Well, maybe that was a bit much. The man wasn’t a robot. He was... he was an institution, was what he was. Nightingale was the Folly. I’d just supposed whenever I was out with Bev, or Lesley back in the day or even Simone, Nightingale would be... here. Not going anywhere. Always waiting.

(Waiting for what?)

(Waiting for me to come back...?)

I dwelled a bit on Molly’s memory, the one she had shared with me. She’d chosen a good one to get her point across. Nightingale and Mellenby had once been a normal couple: in secret, sure, given the times, but still... a normal couple who had pet names, made plans, bantered lovingly, had problems sometimes but talked them out in a level-headed and harmonious way. There was nothing level-headed about that mess now.

It’s not my relationship drama, I reminded myself once again. Sure, the novelty of Nightingale having a love life drove me to pay attention to it, but really it was none of my business.

I was thinking about just taking a look at what was on TV, when I remembered I had a Latin translation yet to finish. I groaned and reached for my textbooks when I heard somebody knock at the door.

Assuming it was probably Nightingale, I called out, “Come on in,” and went to open the door, which revealed David Mellenby instead. He looked... serious, grave.

“Thomas said you would be up here,” he said.

“Anything I can do for you?” I asked.

He nodded. “There’s something I’d like to discuss. May I come in?”

I stepped aside and let him enter. He wandered into the room, momentarily distracted by the changes I’d made to the tech cave. His eyes caught on my laptop that functioned as a HOLMES terminal and then the flatscreen mounted to the wall. “What is that?” he asked.

“It’s a television.” At least he’d picked the easier one to explain. If he’d wanted an intro to computers, we’d most likely be sat here until tomorrow.

“They’ve changed a lot, it seems,” Mellenby remarked. “This must be almost like the cinema.”

“Guess that’s the goal,” I said. “Feel free to come up here if you ever want to watch anything.” It wasn’t like I’d be getting as much use out of it as I once had, what with Bev capital e Expecting and everything. I’d started to wonder, lately, whether I’d soon move into her house completely, and take all of my stuff from the Folly. But Bev probably wouldn’t let me set up a HOLMES terminal at her house, and the Folly was still very much my nick, and would remain so especially if we got new apprentices in at some point in a vaguely defined future, and I simply didn’t have it in me to deprive Nightingale and Molly of their means to watch the rugby or the bakeoff respectively. I wondered idly what Mellenby would want to watch. Documentaries, maybe, or he and Nightingale could cuddle up on the couch and stream Queer Eye. I almost chortled out loud.

“Thanks,” Mellenby said, maybe a bit stiffly. “Much obliged.”

“Hey, not a problem. Um, you said you wanted to talk about something?”

“Yes.” He took a deep breath, as if fortifying himself. “Earlier, in the basement, you were stood before my laboratory. What did you see?”

I wondered where he was going with this. “Drywall?”

“No.” He sighed. “There’s no beating around the bush. Did you see Thomas and myself...?”

“Oh. Did I see you make out? Yeah.”

Mellenby grew pale. “God, I knew this would happen someday.” He was starting to wring his hands.

A bit belatedly, I remembered what he must be thinking now. “I don’t mind,” I said. The treacherous “Many of my friends are gay” was at the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t get to say that, or anything else, because within the blink of an eye, something about Mellenby seemed to... change. Within a second, he grew from nervously agitated to deeply, deadly calm.

“Thomas has rebuilt a life here,” he said, stepping forward. There was something in his eyes, something... wrong, like he wasn’t... wholly here, mentally. “I will not have anyone endanger that now. We have made it this far.”

He raised a hand, and I could feel that gush-of-air buildup of his signare again and it took no thought at all to raise up a shield as I propelled myself behind the couch and ducked and-- nothing. Whatever forma he’d been trying to build was suddenly, abruptly aborted.

Only then did I remember the inhibitor cuffs.

And then the door slammed open, and there was Nightingale, followed on his heels by Molly, and he threw his larger, much more impressive shield between us, and he was livid, I could see it in his face.

“Stand down!” he barked at David, who was so startled he snapped into parade rest. “See, this is why the bloody cuffs stay on!”

He peered over the backrest of the couch down at me, crouched on the floor in a defensive position. “You stand down too,” he said in a much softer voice. “Are you hurt?”

“No, sir.” And thank god all the electronics had been powered down too, I couldn’t afford a new laptop right now. Well, my phone had been on, I’d been using it to text Beverley. Another one ruined. “Just my phone.”

He waved that off. ”I’ll buy you a new one. Are you otherwise alright?”

Was I alright? My first response had been to duck, to make a shield, to defend, and it had come startlingly swiftly, without consulting my brain at all. Otherwise I would have remembered that Mellenby was unable to cast anything. “Well, my therapist will hear about this.”

Nightingale muttered something that sounded like “sorry to hear it” and gave me an absentminded pat on the shoulder as he turned back towards David. “And you! What were you thinking, trying to attack my apprentice?”

At some point, Mellenby had sunk into a squat on the floor. He was now staring down at his hands and avoiding Nightingale’s eyes. It was like all that power I had just now seen and felt in him had poured away again. “He said he saw us... earlier... I was just so scared.”

“I clearly remember telling you that Peter can be trusted with anything you’d trust me with,” Nightingale said sharply. “Including...” He gestured between them. “...this.”

“I didn’t... I forgot. I was just so scared,” Mellenby repeated. “And then for a moment it was like I was... back there.”

“In combat? Hmmm.” A tad gentled, Nightingale put a hand on David’s shoulder and guided him to sit on the couch. “I see, but there is really nothing to be scared of here.”

Mellenby looked exhausted. I doubted Nightingale’s words really registered. Of course, we should have probably considered that he’d be in a volatile mental state seeing as the war was still, to him, very recent. Besides, I doubted Nightingale had had the time or capacity to sit him down for a recent history lecture.

I tried to feel the scope of it all like he had. All the hiding, the extralegal nature of their relationship back then. All that sneaking around. Punishable by jail time, Nightingale had said. If anyone sees... keep an eye on the hallway... it was a lot. Suddenly, I wanted to be the one to give David the good news.

“It’s not a crime anymore, you know,” I said.

Mellenby looked up at me, pure incomprehension and confusion in his face. “What?”

“Oh, yes. That’s true,” Nightingale said, his hand still on David’s shoulder. “They decriminalized same-sex relations in the sixties. We don’t go to jail for it anymore.”

Mellenby sat in silence, mouth opening and closing for a moment. He looked like a guppy. “You’re telling me... what? When?”

Nightingale rubbed a thumb across David’s shoulder, and for a moment it looked like everything would be okay. “July 27th, 1967. That was the day. Just shortly after I started growing younger. When I tell you I wept over the newspaper.”

“What... does that mean?” David asked. “Is it... we can... in public?”

“Indeed.” Nightingale gave him a lopsided half-smile. “You always did say it was all a temporary quirk of our society, that prejudice.”

Mellenby beamed. “I did say that! I knew that a more enlightened era would dawn someday, and that we’d leave all that behind. Everything is change!”

And just like that, Nightingale’s face turned solemn, and cool, and detached again. “Yes. And then there I was, experiencing the new era without you.” He got up. “I shan’t deal with this right now.”

And then he left.

He left me alone with his boyfriend.

Mellenby looked torn between a lot of different emotions. He seemed like he didn’t know what to feel or think first, much less what to do.

“I am deeply sorry,” he said at last. “If I’d known about... this... I wouldn’t have attempted to... attack you, good lord, Thomas is right, what was I thinking?”

“You literally called him ‘the man I fell in love with’ yesterday. I was right there. It’s... I knew.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I,” he muttered. “How could I have forgotten? It’s as though I lost all control of my actions. All I felt was the panic. Someone having caught us...”

I wanted to say that it was probably at least partially a PTSD thing, but he wouldn’t have known what that was either. Besides, the poor guy did urgently need a crash-course on all the history he’d missed, and it didn’t look like Nightingale was up for it. Inwardly, I sighed. Another item for the to-do list.

“Is he telling the truth?” Mellenby then asked. “Is it... did they really... it’s not illegal now?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” At least here was something nice to talk about. “You know what, if you wanted to, you could walk down the street holding hands with Nightingale, and no one... well, I won’t pretend that some idiots might not still catcall. But no one can arrest you for it. They have flags now, and a pride parade every year where they celebrate being gay and having rights and stuff, and when someone discriminates against you, you can sue them.”

Mellenby sniffled. “A parade? Of people... ahem... people being like this? How many people would possibly attend such an event?”

“In a city like London?” I said. “Easily a million.”

He stared at me for a lengthy moment. Then he said, “I... never dared to imagine there were a million of us in all the world.”

That kind of got to me. How lonely he must have felt. “Welcome to the 21st century,” I said.

Mellenby shifted in his seat, I could see he still had a question. “And I could even... kiss him? On the street?” He asked this almost in a whisper, as if we were discussing some illicit, raunchy behavior.

I grinned at him and tried to imagine Nightingale being kissed on the street. “If he wants that.”

----

I wanted to go spend the rest of the day with Bev, finish my Latin homework with her curled up against my side while she studied for her midterm, in peace and quiet, and also explain to her why I’d stopped replying to her texts, and how I’d managed to break yet another phone. But when I tried to step out, Molly and Foxglove both lingered by the door and stared at me until I got the message. They weren’t comfortable being left alone, with tension steadily mounting until the air in the Folly seemed to hum with it. And, well, fuck. I thought about all the things I didn’t know about Molly, all the things I did know of Foxglove, and why they’d be nervous in such an environment. I couldn’t just leave them.

I texted Bev from a burner phone and did my Latin homework in the mundane library all by my lonesome, but by dinner I wished I’d left after all. There wasn’t much talking. Toby, who had been hesitant about Mellenby at first, had grown to adore him because unlike Nightingale, he’d feed him scraps from the table. Molly placed a giant shepherd’s pie on the table before us, and Mellenby chirped, “Oh, my favorite! Thank you, Molly.” and Nightingale sniffed disdainfully and said “I see how it is, Molly,” and otherwise, the only one who spoke up was me, to inform Nightingale that I had finished my translation and left it at his desk in the reading room. It seemed like whenever fate deigned to nudge the two of them back together, my guv’nor, with the keen eye of the true DCI, unearthed something else to be mad about.

I excused myself once I was done eating and left them to sit and stare at opposite walls or whatever it was they did. But I’d promised Molly and Foxglove that I wouldn’t just go back to Bev’s house, and I was going to have to keep that promise. So I made my way up to my room and settled in for a long night.

[punkahudsonia]

Happy Candlenights, y’all! I participated in the @thecandlenightszone exchange this year and I’m really excited to finally be able to share this with someone besides myself :3 

@lupsbro was my recipient and she requested Lup and Taako content with fluff, warm & fuzzy feelings, and their first Candlenights together after S&S so I hope this hits those spots!

Things are good in Taako's world. He's got a gorgeous boyfriend, he's once again famous and beloved (and hey, not wanted for murder!). He's got friends he can trust and a family he can actually remember and as of last weekend? He's got a twin sister who's got her body back. It's a godsdamned Candlenights Miracle.

Taako's never been one to leave Miracle shit to just happen on its own, though. Not when he can improve upon it, which he almost definitely can.

Example: it's Lup's first Candlenights in a decade. She's able to touch and taste things again. Taako's gonna make the biggest, most lavish feast of delicacies Faerun's ever seen. He's gonna go all out. Perfect preparation, flawless presentation, that certain Sizzle It Up je nes c'est quoi. It's gonna be perfect.

As soon as his dumb sister starts cooperating.

"Fantasy lutefisk." Lup says, flicking to the next page of her magazine. She's laying draped over the couch in Taako's living room, feet hooked over the armrest, barely even looking up. Taako knows she's trying to bug him. 

Problem is it's working. "I'm not bringing fish slime into my house."

"Celery aspic." Another flick of the wrist, another page. Lup sounds entirely too cheerful.

"You're a monster. Try again."

"Vinegar pie. Like Auntie used to make." Lup grins with all her teeth. It's extremely off-putting.

Taako narrows his eyes and jabs a finger at her. "That's gross, you're gross, and I hate that you're like this."

"Lies." Lup sticks out her tongue and goes back to her magazine. "Beef Wellington with homemade puff pastry."

Taako relaxes a tiny bit. Okay, now they're getting some --

"I want the pastry to be Flamin’ Hot Fantasy Cheeto flavored."

Gods. Dammit. Taako grabs the brim of his hat in both hands and squeezes until it crumples, waiting for the understandable urge to throttle his sister to pass. "Lup. Darling sister. Light of my life, moon to my sun, heart of my own heart. Will you please. Take this seriously?"

"Absolutely bonkers of you to assume you're the sun in this relationship." Lup tosses the copy of Better Castles and Caverns over the back of the couch. At least that means she's paying attention, sort of. "You know what I want for Candlenights dinner already, you goober."

Taako resists the urge to grind his teeth. "I obviously don't, because I'm asking."

"You do, though." His sister folds her arms over her chest and stares at him, no hints in her expression. Damn it. 

"Don't."

"Do."

"Don't." This is stupid. They're gonna be here until it's actually Candlenights at this rate. "You want me to guess? Is that what this is?"

Lup's forehead creases just a tiny bit. "What? No." She rolls fluidly to her feet, suddenly actually serious. "Hold up. Is this whole thing not a goof? Are you actually not screwing with me?"

"What?" Taako feels momentarily disoriented. Dizzy like voidfish ichor shifting all the puzzle pieces in his head around until they click.

"Damn. You're really not, huh." Lup crosses the space between them in two long strides and yanks him into a hug. She squeezes him too tight, her dumb too-bony shoulder jabs him in the collarbone, and it's perfect just like always. Taako leans into it.

"I want to make you the perfect thing." He says, hugging her back now, mumbling into her shoulder. 

"But you don't know what that is? Really?" Lup sounds doubtful. 

Which is maybe fair because . . . Okay because yes, he does know all her favorite things and exactly what she loves most for special occasions. But also . . . but also for ten whole years he didn't know any of those things. Is it really realistic to think they filled back in perfectly and he can just trust himself to nail it?

Lup can tell what he's thinking. Of course she can. She squeezes him until the breath huffs out of his lungs. "You know what I want most, Koko. Don't be a dumbass and overthink it."

Taako takes a second and tries to take a deep breath past the crushing hug. Closes his eyes and thinks about the best parts of every Candlenights meal going back the two-hundred-odd years they've been siblings. 

Then he grins because hey, look at that. All of a sudden he does know exactly what she wants. His sister is right.

It's a Candlenights Miracle.

***

Barry pokes his head cautiously into the kitchen. He and Kravitz have each been banned from helping for different reasons.

("You reanimate one turkey carcass . . ."

"You make one jello salad!")

Taako and Lup have it on lockdown, though. They're moving like the parts of a specialized machine, making space for one another as they prep and saute and laugh and joke. Taako tosses a spice jar high in the air and Lup snatches it without missing a beat. Lup nudges Taako with her hip and Taako smirks at her, hands still busily in motion dicing pancetta. 

They're whole again, relaxed and together, and Barry grins and closes the kitchen door silently.

Kravitz looks up from the chess set on the living room coffee table. "Everything okay?"

Barry nods and settles back into his place across from Kravitz (this is their third game and Krav is losing. Badly. Again. Turns out Barry's new supervisor, contrary to popular belief, is absolutely awful at this game).

"Yeah," Barry says as he picks up a pawn, smiling as his wife's laugh rings out from the kitchen, the sound of somebody who's finally gotten something she really, really wanted.

"Yeah. They're all good in there."

[crossbows-and-moonshine]

Let The Flames Begin (Chapter 26)

A long one for you lovely humans. I considered splitting this into two chapters, but I couldn't find a good spot to do it. I know as a reader I prefer longer chapters. It gives me something to really sink my teeth into. But as a writer, sometimes it hard to stretch a chapter too long. Sometimes it just feels right to end it and move on to the next. So sorry if my inconsistent chapter lengths annoy people, I can't help it looool

-----------

Daryl was sat in his tent watching Charlene sleep peacefully. She had been back now for a few hours but neither of them had left the tent. After Merle had come in, interrupting fuck knows what, Charlene had told them both everything that happened after she got lost. After that, she looked worn out so Daryl had demanded she lay down. She did and fell asleep within seconds. Merle left after that and Daryl had just sat here staring at her. He couldn't believe she was actually here. He couldn't believe that for once he had some good fucking luck. He had not taken his eyes off her for a second, like he was scared she might dematerialise if he did. It just felt so foreign to him, that something went his way. He had been convinced that was it, but it wasn't. She was back here with him and Merle and he couldn't find the words for how grateful he was. Now she was sleeping peacefully he could really look at her. He hated how unwell she looked, knowing she had struggled and he wasn't there to help her. He tried to remind himself of her words just hours earlier. She didn't blame him. He blamed himself though but he was trying to stuff it down. She was here and fine and that's what mattered.

He kept thinking about what might have happened if his brother hadn't come in. She leant down, almost like she might kiss him. His brain couldn't seem to wrap his head around it, because he knew she would never kiss him in a million years. It annoyed him to no end that Merle had to interrupt them, so now he was left wondering and confused. Maybe she was just gonna lean her head on his again like she had done earlier. He liked being that close to her. He knew emotions were high in the moment, it was the only reason why he had grabbed her and pulled her on his lap. He’d never be able to pull that shit otherwise. But he had been so desperate to make sure she was real, that she wasn't just a ghost in his mind coming to torture him. He hated being in his own head, wondering what might have happened. He knew what he wanted to happen but it was just a fantasy, it would never be a reality for him.

He glanced to the side, noticing her shirt and the rabbit's foot. His face flushed a little realising the girl had seen him clutching them both. Prolly thinks I’m a fuckin’ pussy now. His stomach was growling, it had been for hours. But he hadn't been able to drag himself away from her. But after the billionth time, the painful rumble in his belly won out. She was safe here anyway, sleeping soundly in his tent. He got out of the tent, making sure to zip it back up before walking over to the RV. They kept most of the food in here and he hated how he had to walk through people to get any. Before he could even get there Shane was stood in front of him with a stern face and Daryl clenched his jaw. He didn't like Shane one bit. It wasn't just the fact he was a cop. Daryl never liked cops much anyway, they always tried to pin shit on him just because he was a Dixon. But that wasn't his issue. The guy was a fucking asshole and he hated the way he looked at him and his brother, like he knew he was better than them. There was something off about him. Daryl couldn't put his finger on it but he didn't like it.

“What ya want?” Daryl asked roughly, glaring at him. He wasn't in the mood for this bullshit.

“We think you should wake Charlene up. We haven't really had the chance to introduce ourselves properly,” Shane had this look on his face. A condescending look that made Daryl want to throttle his damn neck.

“Nah, she’s stayin’ put and no one's gonna fuckin’ bother her,” Dary sneered, going to take a step around him. Shane sidestepped him though and Daryl clenched his fists by his side.

“We just wanna talk to her man,” Shane shrugged, looking like he thought he had a say in this.

“Think ya talked enough when she fuckin’ got here and ya’ll ambushed her,” Daryl scoffed, shaking his head.

“We got kids here, we need to know if we can trust her. So you need to wake her up for me,” the policeman in him was seeping out and Daryl wanted so badly to kick him in the face.

“I ain't gotta do shit. We trust her, that's enough,” he growled, glowering at him. Shane snorted, looking more than amused.

“Oh right, because we should take the word of you and your junkie brother?” he asked with a smirk. Daryl stood a little straighter, scowling at him.

“Yeah. Or we can go somewhere else and ya can see how long ya fuckin’ survive without the redneck trash catchin’ ya food,” Daryl snarled, his voice low, menacing almost. Shane squared up to him a little and Daryl never wavered as he glared him down.

After a tense minute, Shane scoffed, moving away as he shook his head and walked away. Yeah, fuckin’ walk away ya piece of shit pig. Daryl went back to the task at hand, going into the RV and grabbing a random can. He heard Merle before he saw him, he would recognise his brother's footfalls no matter what.

“What’s deputy dipshit want?” he drawled with a snort, standing next to him. Daryl glanced at him and shrugged.

“Wants me to wake Charlene up so they could fuckin' prod at her,” he huffed, stabbing his knife into the can and opening it.

“What ya say?” Merle asked curiously, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Told him it ain't gonna happen and if he don't like it we can leave. See how long they last without us gettin’ their food,” he replied. Merle barked out a laugh and clapped Daryl on the back, making him flinch a little.

“Shit son, I’m proud of ya,” Merle laughed. Daryl didn't know how he felt about that. Merle’s approval had been something he had been desperately seeking since a young boy. But if he was proud of him for being an asshole then he knew it wasn't a good thing.

“How’s she doin’?” Merle piped up after a moment of silence as Daryl ate. Daryl heaved a weary sigh and tossed the can in the small trash can before he turned fully to look at his brother

“She don’t look well. Skinny as fuck, worn out,” he said tensely, making Merle nod.

“She’s been through a lot without us there to help her. But she's alive,” Merle said firmly. Daryl lowered his gaze, chewing his thumb and Merle squinted at him.

“Don't make me hit ya, boy. I know its still botherin’ ya. It’ll take some time to get used to the fact shes here again. But it ain't yer damn fault,” Merle scolded. Daryl scoffed bitterly, meeting his eyes.

“Is my fault. I told her to run and she got fuckin’ lost. Now shes half-starved and exhausted,” he huffed, scowling at him.

“Ya blame yaself. I get it. I blame myself too. If I hadn't let my guard down for a second I wouldn’t have got knocked out by that damn biter. We can both blame ourselves brother but it don't change a damn thing. She's here. She's fine. We get some food in her belly and get her to rest up, she’ll be as good as new in no time,” he insisted. Daryl looked down again before nodding. He was right, it wouldn't change a damn thing dwelling on it. He still blamed himself but he needed to move past it.

Merle left to do God knows what. His brother always seemed to just disappear and Daryl didn't know if he wasn't sneaking off to use or if he was just terrorising people here like usual. He couldn't bring himself to care too much. He wanted to get back in case Charlene woke up. He left the RV and when he glanced at the tent, he saw Lori loitering around it looking nervous. He stomped over, so done with people and their bullshit.

“Don’t y’all ever get tired of bein’ annoyin’?” he scoffed, making her glance up to him. She looked wary and Daryl stood up taller. He knew he was being intimidating but that was the point. These assholes needed to leave his girl the fuck alone.

“I just wanted to talk to her, I have some spare clothes if she needs them,” Lori said softly, shrinking back a little when Daryl took a step forward.

“Then come back when she ain’t sleepin’ and not a second before,” he growled, unzipping the tent and getting inside. He zipped it back up and heaved a sigh as he sat down.

Being in a group was going to be taxing, sharing her attention with all the others. He didn't like it one bit. He watched her as she stirred in her sleep, and she yawned a little. Her eyes snapped open and she looked around frantically, but when her eyes landed on him he saw her relax infinity and snuggle back into his blanket. He knew it would take some adjusting for her too. She had told him how she had been sleeping up in the trees to stay safe. He was proud of her. She had survived two weeks without him and she did fucking good.

“Sleep alright?” he rasped, making a sleepy smile grace her pretty little face.

“I did. It’s nice to feel safe again,” she muttered, rubbing her eyes as she sat up. His heart constricted. He would never get used to the fact she felt so safe around him. It made his chest swell with pride and he tried to ignore it.

A few hours later and Daryl found himself brooding just outside of his tent. He was working on a trail snare, hopefully they would grab some rabbits at some point. As soon as they had stepped foot out of the tent, Lori had ushered the girl away from him and since then he hadn't been able to talk to her. He had no desire to go over as she spoke to Carol and Lori, he just sat outside of his tent with a scowl etched on his face. He was engrossed in his task, trying to ignore the burning jealousy that was scorching his veins from the inside out.

“Daryl?” his head snapped up when he heard her timid voice, looking up at Charlene as she stood there looking somewhat awkward. He squinted a little, not sure why she was acting that way.

“S’wrong?” he asked gruffly, thinking the worst as he always did. He noticed then she had a bundle of clean clothes in her arms, some shampoo and a brush lay on top of them.

“I wanted to wash in the quarry, but I don't wanna go alone,” she said softly. He tilted his head and quirked a brow at her.

“Alright…?” he asked slowly, clearly not getting why she was telling him this. Shouldn't Lori or Amy or someone go with her? He just blinked up at her for a moment and she looked down, her cheeks flushing and it only confused him further.

“Will you come with me?” her voice was almost a whisper and he was more than certain he hadn’t heard her right. She wanted him to go with her? Whilst she was naked? Washing herself?

He looked up at her dumbly for what felt like forever until he realised she had in fact asked him that, and now she was stood glaring at the floor with pink cheeks.

“I...uh…” he looked down, feeling the tips of his ears burning as he tried to compose himself. Fuck sake, just do it. Act like a fuckin’ man.

“Alright,”  he said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. She looked at him with a little smile and he swallowed thickly as he stood. He grabbed his bow in case he needed it and lead her down to the quarry. She set the clean clothes on a rock near the water's edge and the shampoo and brush within reach. He stood there, eyes flitting about and when they landed on her, she was looking at him expectantly.

“Are you gonna...you know, turn around?” she asked looking somewhat amused. He turned around, sneering at himself as he cursed inwardly. Just fucking stood there like he expected her to get naked in front of him like that. Fuckin’ idiot.

Charlene got undressed, keeping her underwear on because she didn't feel too comfortable with being naked out here like that. She got in the water and Daryl sat on a large rock near the edge, keeping his back to her.

“The waters nice and cool,” Charlene mused as she started scrubbing the dirt and grime from her body. Daryl just grunted and nodded. It was pathetic how much his mind was running away with him. He wasn't even looking at her and he felt like a pervert for just being there. He stayed quiet for a while and then he heard someone walking towards them. He raised his bow on the off chance it was a biter, but instead, Shane came into view. Daryl had to fight himself to put the bow down, glaring at him.

He didn't fail to notice how Shanes gaze wandered to Charlene in the water and Daryl bristled, sitting up straighter, completely tense. Shane walked over to him, sitting on the rock opposite with a smug look on his face. Daryl didn't want him here, Daryl didn't want him facing the girl while she was trying to fucking clean herself.

“The fuck ya here for? Can't ya see she’s tryin’ to get clean?” Daryl sneered at him. Shane gave him a smirk and raised his brow.

“Could ask you the same thing. Didn't take you for a peeping Tom,” he chuckled. Daryl inhaled a deep breath, resisting the urge to deck him.

“She asked me here,” he growled, anger flashing behind his baby blue eyes. Shane cocked his head a little as a slow smirk spread across his stupid fucking face.

“Is that so? She your girl?” He asked, his tone mocking almost like he knew Daryl wouldn't ever get a girl like her in a million years.

“Yeah, she is. So ya best put ya damn eyes back in ‘fore I scoop ‘em out and fuckin’ feed ‘em to ya,” he snarled. Shane looked almost surprised for a moment before he chuckled. He raised his hands like he was surrendering as he stood up. Daryl glared as Shane took another look at Charlene in the water before he sauntered off.

Well shit, how the fuck do I explain that one? The anger was simmering, about to boil over as he tried to breathe through it. Shane was a fucking prick.

“Daryl?” he heard from behind him. She sounded like she was right behind of him now, out of the water. He was about to look when he remembered her lack of clothes and he stilled completely.

“Yeah?” he asked warily.

“Could you help with my hair? It's really bad,” she lamented with a sigh.

“The fuck I look like, ya damn caretaker?” he snapped, regretting the words as they left his lips. It was the panic in him causing him to lash out. Not only had he told someone they were together and he knew damn well the group liked gossip, now she wanted him to wash her fucking hair. He’d be close to her, whilst she was partially naked. He stood tense, his mouth unable to form an apology because he was a pig-headed asshole and he glared ahead of him.

Charlene pursed her lips, she didn't know why he was being a dick all of a sudden but it sent a rush of anger through her.

“Maybe I should ask Shane,” she muttered. She wasn't sure why she said that, maybe it was because he had just been there so it was the first person she thought of. It was almost childish but it still left her mouth anyway. She didn't know why but it was clear Daryl didn't like the man for some reason or another. And apparently, Daryl wasn't the only person who liked to push buttons when they got mad. Daryl turned around, scowling at her, her undressed state forgotten as he squinted at her.

“That supposed to be some kinda joke?” he spat, his right eye twitching with annoyance. Why the fuck had she said that? Did she know he was jealous? Because if she did that was fucking awkward. She just looked up at him defiantly and he had to fight to keep his gaze on her face.

“No. I’m just saying, if you don't wanna help me I‘m sure someone else would,” it was like something inside her had snapped a little. She was already aware he would never see her in that way and it irritated her that it was such a big deal for him to help her just because she was partially undressed. Like she was that vile to look at it made him snap at her.

He glared at her, the image of Shane washing her hair making his brain hurt and he clenched his jaw., but when he really looked at her, he saw just what she meant when she said her hair was bad. It was all knotted and caked in blood and he felt the pang of guilt in his chest. It was his fault that she was this way, he had failed her. The least he could do was swallow his pride and fucking help her out a little. Besides, he had a thing for her hair for the longest time. It would be a shame if she had to cut it.

“Fine, I’ll help,” he relented, looking at her sheepishly.

“You sure? I mean you aren't my caretaker and all,” she huffed, rolling her eyes as she padded back over to the water. Daryl shook his head with a deep sigh. Why did he have to fuck things up all the time? She had been back a few hours and already it was back to the same bullshit. Him lashing out whenever he felt cornered and her thinking he didn't care about her. He toed off his boots, rolling up the legs of his pants to his knees as he followed her. He couldn't help but look at her heart-shaped ass in nothing but panties as she got in the water. He wouldn't forget that anytime soon.

He sat on the edge, his legs in the water and she went over to him, standing between his legs. He grabbed the cup she had brought with her and started to pour water on her hair, her head tilted back. Her hair was a mess and he worked carefully, trying to pull apart some of the matts in her hair. He grabbed the brush and pulled it through some of the knots.

“Ow!” she yelped, turning to look over shoulder at him with a glare. He looked at her sheepishly and bit his lower lip.

“Sorry,” he muttered as she turned back around. He was more careful after that as he tried to brush out some knots, he wasn't used to being so gentle. He alternated between water and the brush for a bit and then he grabbed the shampoo. He wasn't sure who it belonged to but he wasn't sure about it. He didn't want her meadowy scent to be overridden by it. He massaged her scalp with his fingers, relishing the feel of her hair and getting the chance to touch it like this. After a few more washes and brushes, her long hair was once again clean and knot-free.

“There ya go,” he said, still feeling ashamed of himself for his earlier outburst. She turned around in her water to face him and his eyes went to her small breasts without him meaning them to. He caught himself though and brought his eyes back up to her face. She didn't seem to notice since she didn't hit him in the nuts.

“Thanks,” she said, looking somewhat sad. He stayed sat there with her between his legs and he chewed his thumb.

“Look, about before…” he started.

“Let me guess, you didn't mean it?” she snorted bitterly. His heart sank at her words and he furrowed his brow as he looked down at her. See, she’s already gettin’ sick of this bullshit.

“I didn't mean it Charlene and ya know I didn't. I fucked up...again,” he bit out, feeling angry with himself.

“I get it Daryl. You don't like looking after me and you certainly don't wanna be stuck with my ugly half-naked ass,” she frowned. Daryl looked at her like she had grown another head. He was about to speak up, to tell her just how wrong she fucking was with every bit of that statement but he was interrupted.

“Room for one more?” Merle grinned. Daryl closed his eyes and groaned, of course Merle had to do this. He noticed how Charlene moved closer to him, hiding herself behind his legs almost. Her breasts were pushed against his thigh and her arm against his crotch. He hoped to fuck his dick didn't decide to wake up with her being pressed against him like this, things would get real fucking awkward if that happened. He was confused why she was so at ease with being in her underwear around him. Even letting him wash her hair, yet she shied away from Merle who she was also close to. Nothing was making sense today.

“The fuck ya want Merle?” Daryl sighed, casting a glance to his brother. Merle had a smug grin on his face and Daryl wanted the ground to swallow him whole. He knew his brother knew how this was affecting him. His brother knew he liked her after all.

“Just comin’ to see how my favourite little lady's doin’,” Merle smirked, plonking himself down on a rock near the pair of them.

“I’m kind of busy here Merle, and half-naked,” she snorted, her face flushing little as she pressed even closer to Daryl. Dear God, I take back every bad thing I said about ya. Please don't let me get a fuckin’ boner. I’ll do whatever ya want. Fuckin’ go around bible bashin’, baptise people in the fuckin’ quarry. Name it and it's yours, just don't let me get hard.

“I noticed that. Seem awful cosy here huh?” Merle smirked. Charlene's eyes widened and she looked down, her cheeks heating up. Did he know she liked Daryl? She couldn't even look at either of them. Daryls felt the heat creep up onto his face as he glared at his brother.

“Keepin’ an eye out. Shane thought it was appropriate to come down here and catch the show,” Daryl spat, his anger resurfacing as he remembered. Merle’s face darkened a little and he pursed his lips,

“Hm...is that so? Might have to have a little word with him,” Merle mused. Daryl smirked inwardly. Merle was just as protective of her it seemed and he actually wanted to see what would happen if Merle had those words with the jackass.

“Guys, shut up okay? Just leave it alone. I know how you talk Merle and it's with your fists. Can we just have no drama for once?” she huffed.

“Anyone would think ya got a thing for him,” Daryl muttered bitterly. He shocked himself. He had thought about it, but he hadn't meant to fucking say it out loud and make himself sound like a jealous bastard. Merle's grin widened at his words and Charlene glared up at him looking unimpressed.

“What's wrong? Jealous?” she sneered as she moved away a little. Not so bashful about her lack of clothes now she was getting angry. She knew he wasn't jealous, but he was being an asshole so she was being one right back.

“The fuck would I be jealous about?” he growled, standing up and grabbing his boots and his bow. Merle shook his head looking at him incredulously as he started walking away.

“How the fuck did ya ever get laid before all this Darlina?” he snorted. He really didn't understand how bad his brother was at this. He liked her and he was being a dick. Daryl shot him a glare before stomping back off to camp. Leaving Charlene with Merle.

“The fuck is his deal?” she asked angrily, climbing out of the water. Merle looked down, averting his gaze as she grabbed the clean clothes and tugged them on. It was uncomfortable since she was still wet but she was mad and didn't care.

“Don't worry about him sweetcheeks. He doesn’t know his ass from his elbow right now. Think his heads all over the damn place, with ya comin’ back from the dead and all,” Merle muttered, glancing back to where Daryl had been moments before.

“I wasn't dead,” she huffed, finally dressed. She put her hair up in a high ponytail to let it dry and get out of her face. Merle stood then, dusting himself off a little.

“I know. But we thought ya were. I don't think ya get just how bad it was sugar. We really thought ya weren’t comin’ back. Daryl just...shut off. He wasn't there for a while. And when he came back he was just angry. Only ever seen him like that after Ma died,” Merle frowned. He hoped by sharing this with her she might cut his dick of a brother some slack.

She chewed her lower lip a little. She couldn't fathom why Daryl had been so upset but she knew Merle wouldn't lie to her. She knew Daryl had issues. Especially when it came to failing at things. He had said he blamed himself for what happened so in her mind, the only logical explanation for how upset he was, was the fact he had failed again. That was the only reason he could be that upset.

“I’ll just stay out of his way until he cools off,” she sighed, making her way back to camp with Merle by her side. Merle knew he needed to talk sense into his brother. If he didn't want to admit how he felt, then fine. But he didn't have to keep lashing out at her like this. His damn mood swings were giving them all whiplash and it wasn't fair to her. If he wanted to ignore his feelings he needed to fucking man up and do it right.

Taglist; @risingphoenix761 @arlaina28 @daryldixonandfrogs @divadinag @keeperofwonderlandus @jodiereedus22 @easnuppa @fand0m-fiend @txladyj-blog @walkingdead-dixon

[tveckling]

“who the hell did this to you?” with Merc and Paris (and Val)? I'm in a Escalus-fam mood apparently

Mercutio closed the door behind him as carefully as he could. Hopefully no one would still be awake, and even if there might still be servants or guards around he would be able to make them stay silent. The guard stationed outside the door had only sighed heavily when he spotted Mercutio.

The way to his room was slow, especially with his limp, but at least he didn’t meet anyone. Every part of his battered body ached with every step, but Mercutio bit his tongue and focused on his task. As soon as he was in his room he could fall into his bed and sleep. It would all be better the next day, and he would have been able to come up with a fitting lie by the time he had to face his uncle. Considering the shape he was in it would have to be a spectacularly good one this time.

“You finally see it fit to return home?”

It was close that his leg gave out as he stumbled, but Mercutio managed to keep standing by leaning on the wall. He closed his eyes and cursed silently, while at the same time thanking God for who had caught him. At least it wasn’t Valentine or his uncle.

“Paris, cousin,” he said, pouring as much tiredness into his voice as he could manage, and leaning more heavily on the wall. It was dark, and Paris’ candle shouldn’t be strong enough to show how badly off Mercutio really was. “If I woke you up I deeply apologize, but won’t you please find mercy in yourself to let me beg your forgiveness tomorrow instead? I am tired and my head aches—I fear I have drunk a bit too much tonight. I will make whatever amends you see fit tomorrow.”

Paris scoffed and came closer, and Mercutio hid his face, pretending the light was too strong. Hoping Paris would fall for it.

“You know uncle invited the Capulet family to dinner tonight, where we would breach the subject of my marriage to the lord’s daughter. It was important, and the whole family was supposed to be there. You included.”

Mercutio rolled his eyes but held back the scathing words he wanted to send Paris’ way. As though everything regarding him was so damn important. Instead he sighed and waved a hand in Paris’ direction, talking a few steps forward. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You can tell me how it went tomorrow, and I’ll apologize again, and I’ll make it up to you in some way.”

Paris made a frustrated noise and walked fasted, stopping in front of Mercutio. “You’re not listen- what have you done? You’re- who the hell did this to you?”

Mercutio sighed and stopped trying to hide, just pushed past Paris’ gaping form and limped away. Soon Paris came after him, repeating his questions in a worried tone that made Mercutio’s heckles rise. “It’s nothing. Just a little fight, you know how it goes. Or maybe not, since respectable Paris never visited a lowly tavern. Whatever. Get out of my way.”

Paris refused to move, staring at him with intent eyes. It made Mercutio more conscious of how he might look than he liked, but he had discovered he needed the wall to keep his balance. The night really hadn’t gone at all according to how he had planned.

“A little fight. Are you honestly expecting me to believe that? I have seen you after fighting in the street over and over, and you’ve never looked like this. Cutio, tell me what happened.”

“It’s none of your business, so let it be. I can take care of myself,” Mercutio spat but realized it had been the wrong thing to say when Paris’ face took a determined look. “Come on, no-”

Paris didn’t listen to his protest and grabbed his arm, raising his voice in a shout that would surely rouse most of the palace. “Someone call for a physician!”

Mercutio groaned, but he didn’t have any choice but to lean against Paris, heavier than he liked to. He had to think of a good explanation, and that fast. Even if no one would believe him he wouldn’t tell them the truth.

If worse came to shove he could always hope his uncle throttled him.