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Tangerine Dream: Changing Use of Technology, Part 1: 1967-1977

Published December 1994

October saw the release of a giant Tangerine Dream boxed set from Virgin Records, 'Tangents 1973‑1983'. In the first of this two‑part feature, MARK PRENDERGAST considers Tangerine Dream's groundbreaking use of emergent synthesizer technology during their first decade. This is the first article in a two‑part series.

In December 1993, when Virgin approached me to work on their forthcoming Tangerine Dream boxed set, it seemed like a thrilling but difficult task. Then, I knew only that the box set dealt with the Virgin years (1973‑1983), and did not even know which tracks the group would select for final inclusion. The story of Tangerine Dream's long career involves over 40 album releases and continuous changes in personnel, played out against a backdrop of three decades of massive advances in available music technology. Because of this last point, it was important to show how such a progressive group as Tangerine Dream adapted as new equipment became available. To help unravel this story, I interviewed members of Tangerine Dream in depth. Further research produced a 74‑page booklet for the boxed set, in which my purpose was to highlight the legacy of the group, and to convey their pioneering attitude towards recording electronic music. In recent years, this attitude has attracted great attention from those involved with modern electronic dance music, and consequently, like their contemporaries Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream have seen their sounds widely sampled for re‑use in House music.

During the course of my interviews with them, Edgar Froese and Christoph Franke came up with a great deal of fascinating background to the recording of each album, which was a just credit to their dedication and tenacity. Today, electronic equipment is pretty easy to use. You just buy it, study the manuals, and connect up the leads. In Tangerine Dream's heyday, equipment was all about trial‑and‑error, trying to obtain certain sounds from frankly unreliable machines. Today, 10 million album sales later, their story is still unique, for in many ways, as the group's founder Edgar Froese says, the history of Tangerine Dream is the history of modern electronic equipment.

The Roots Of A Dream

Tangerine Dream's roots lie in the 1960s. Edgar Froese was a Lithuanian who loved classical music, surrealism and The Rolling Stones with equal fervour. Like many progressive rockers, he began his career as an artist, studying painting and sculpture in Berlin, even visiting Salvador Dali a couple of times, only to be caught up in the prototypical multimedia madness which surrounded the crazed genius in Cadeques. Unhappy with the rock scene, Froese returned to Berlin, and founded Tangerine Dream (named after a line on the Beatles' Sergeant. Pepper album) in the autumn of 1967. The early TD was unstable and home to various stabs at experimentation, using flutes, violins, and organs as well as the more conventional rock instrumentation of drums, guitar, and bass. They performed intense psychedelic sets at the Zodiak Free Arts Lab (founded by Cluster member Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler), but these rock gigs proved a cul‑de‑sac until Froese met Klaus Schulze. Schulze, like Edgar, was a classical guitarist, but had turned towards rock drumming in the Hendrix‑inspired Psy Free. Together with Conrad Schnitzler, they decided to take a chance on a completely experimental rock album. It was called Electronic Meditation. In an SOS interview in February 1993, Klaus Schulze described it as "the primary electronic album". He went on to say: "We were experimenting with a lot of random stuff, putting things through loads of effects and making up our own sounds". Recorded in a rented factory on a 2‑track tape machine, it was a stab at free electronic rock which owed much to Hendrix and Pink Floyd. The album credits list Froese on 6‑ and 12‑string guitars, Farfisa organ and piano; Conrad Schnitzler on cello, violin and additator; and Schulze on percussion and metal sticks. More recently, Froese elaborated on the experience: "It was very exotic. Sounds were made using everyday objects — for example a sieve filled with dry peas, an old office calculating machine, two old iron bars, and hard parchment paper, all recorded with a microphone and sent through reverbs and delays to create unusual sounds. The results could not always be used musically — it was all quite different from the commercial pop sound. Technically, the studio was very sparse. As we didn't have a lot of money, all the resulting sounds were directly mastered onto a Revox quarter‑inch machine. It was pretty rough and adventurous. We never dreamed that anyone would want to press this recording onto vinyl..."

But luck was on Tangerine Dream's side, as Ohr Records took up the option. However, before the album was even released, Schulze quit during a European tour, and Froese found himself again fronting an unstable outfit. It was at this point that Christoph Franke joined the group. Eight years younger than Froese, Franke had impeccable credentials. He came from a family of musicians, and had won several brass competitions before turning to percussion in the group Agitation Free, which he founded when only 13. Within two years he was already working in his own electronic recording studio, having had his interest in electronic music encouraged by his music teacher, Thomas Kessler. Franke subsequently went on to join the prestigious Les Percussions de Strasbourg, which he now describes as "an avant‑garde percussion thing, with a lot of Asian and Indian influences, and a lot of contemporary jazz. I liked jazz, I liked rock, I liked Indian. I was pretty much open‑minded to everything I could hit. At the same time, though, I had the classical study — I studied the trumpet, the violin, the piano and composition, harmony and stuff. I met Edgar at the Berlin studio. He had just lost Klaus and needed a drummer. He struck me as a serious thinker, into playing regular concerts. So we just improvised, and liked each other's ideas. After a few concerts, I decided to stay. Then Conrad [Schnitzler] left, we got Steve Schroeder in, and recorded Alpha Centauri".

Alpha Centauri, Zeit, And Atem

1971's Alpha Centauri established Tangerine Dream as primarily a space‑rock band. Instrumentation was even weirder than on the debut, with Franke handling lotus flute, piano harp, zither and VCS3 synth. Schroeder played Hammond and Farfisa organs, while a Roland Paulyck played a second VCS3. According to Froese: "The record company provided the use of an 8‑track studio, which was an expensive luxury in those days. We had borrowed a VCS3 synth from the WDR radio station in Cologne in order to record unusual sounds with better quality. Unfortunately, none of us knew how it worked, and we only had one and a half days to figure out the most important functions. Our enthusiasm for everything new, for unusual equipment which had never before been used for a rock or pop production, kept us working through one day and one night. The results of this recording sound poor compared to today's standards, but back then we thought it was sensational. Choirs were produced on guitars using an iron bottleneck, sounds of water were recorded at high and low speed and then mixed in with the electro sound. The backwards voice on one track is me reading the back of a ferry ticket from Dover to Calais".

Chris Franke has slightly different memories of the album: "We found an interesting studio around Cologne run by Dieter Dierks, which the record company had recommended. It was 8‑track, the latest thing then. Dierks was into what we were doing, as an engineer. We had all kinds of organs, endorsement deals with Farfisa, and also all these modules, tremolo things, ring modulators, all kinds of gates which opened and closed sounds, oscillators, and, of course, all these echo machines. It took hours to set up 10 different modules, and they were very unstable. The electrical impedances were also sometimes not compatible. Then I heard that EMS Putney in London had developed a way for all these things to be put together in a compact way. I immediately called them up, went over and got this box, called a synthesizer, which was all very new then. Alpha Centauri was a transitional album, from Tangerine Dream being a very loud group to being a very quiet meditational group. You see, I loved avant‑garde music. I brought all my Stockhausen and Ligeti records to Edgar, and taught him that there was more to music than Hendrix and Pink Floyd".

According to Franke, he brought Peter Baumann into the band because Steve Schroeder had become too "drugged out of it" to play. Froese maintains he saw Baumann playing excellent keyboards in a group called The Ants. Franke remembers that "when Peter joined, the group became more stabilised, and seriously started working on keyboards and synthesizers. Peter had been in a band called Burning Touch at the American school in Berlin. He played organ and was very into pop music. He spoke very good English, and was interested in surrealism. So his way into the new music was through art, even though his father was a composer".

The first thing that Froese, Franke, and Baumann (to this day the classic Tangerine Dream line‑up) did was to record a completely experimental album, with no recognisable beats or melodies — Zeit. The equipment line‑up was simple: Franke on VCS3, cymbals and keyboards; Froese on glissando guitar and various noise generators; and Baumann on VCS3, organ and vibraphone. The double album was all completed in 10 days in May 1972. Froese recalls: "That's all including mixing. We invited Florian Fricke (of Popol Vuh) to the sessions . He owned the only big modular Moog synth in Germany, but we didn't know how to use it that well. So we were forced into learning how the thing worked. Since we didn't want to use any rhythm on Zeit, we didn't have to worry about sequencers". Chris Franke remembers Zeit as an album born of "dreams and meditation. After three years of aggressive music derived from frustration with teachers, the classical system, guitar rock, and every other political thing, we came into this new phase of exploring the finer things. Fricke's Moog on that album was the key" (see 'The 800,000 Mark Synth' side panel).

By the beginning of 1973, the group had another weird album in the bag, Atem. Franke was still using the VCS3, but as he says, "the significant thing was that we started to build up the rhythms again, which had disappeared on Zeit. Another big change was the introduction of the Mellotron". Froese recalls: "Atem was recorded in the same 8‑track studio in Cologne as Zeit. We used the Mellotron for the first time, but since the tape loops in it only played for seven seconds when you pressed a key, several compositions had to be fitted to this playing technique. Looking back, the sound is horrible, the loops are in part irregular, hard to tune and have hardly any high frequencies, since they play back at about 9kHz. One certainly has to listen to the album with 'historical ears'! Christoph Franke played drums for the last time on that album, on the track 'Wahn'. The whole production lasted 15 days, including mixing. Farfisa organs, guitar and two VCS3 synths were also used".

Moving To Virgin,And Phaedra

Although Atem was voted John Peel's 'Album of 1973', there were significant problems within Tangerine Dream. Firstly, Peter Baumann left the group to go travelling in the East. Chris Franke sold his drums, and he and Froese were in limbo. Eventually, they decided to go into Skyline studios in Berlin, and record some music to present to Virgin, who had shown an interest in the group. The resultant album, Green Desert, wasn't released until 1986, and is best described as a collection of tone‑poems. It did, however, boast the use of a new batch of equipment, including a PRX2 Rhythm Controller, a MiniMoog, and a phaser. Though unreleased at the time, it landed Tangerine Dream a record deal when Virgin heard the tapes. Franke actually remembers Green Desert with excitement: "We got all this stuff and began experimenting. The phaser was really new then, and cost $1000. It did pitch‑shifting and also flanging and chorus effects. The Rhythm Controller was a surprise — it came from Italy, from a company called EKO, who made all these cheap warehouse organs. They had come up with this science‑fiction‑looking machine, a console with eight rows of 16 big knobs which lit up! It worked like a sequencer, which was great, because there were no drum machines in those days. I could programme a rhythm that the machine could remember. It was completely analogue — you pushed the buttons and they made the contact — and it was polyphonic! The lights blinked, like on an early Moog sequencer. And when the sequence or rhythm was still running I could change it — I could delete, skip, and change the rhythm while it was playing. I always liked this aspect of any sequencer. The internal sounds were pretty lousy, but the control panel looked great, and was nice to operate. Later, I built trigger outputs and triggered other synths with the thing, so it became a controller. Years later, I saw Manuel Goettsching play it live on stage in Paris".

With Baumann back in the group, the Green Desert tapes secured a five‑year contract with Virgin, and Richard Branson had the group come to England to work in The Manor, where Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells had been so successfully recorded. Chris Franke used part of the Virgin advance to buy a Moog modular synth he'd been practising on at the Hansa recording studios (see 'The 800,000 Mark Synth' side panel). "I bought it for a mere $15,000, an incredibly low price." It made a difference, for the following album, Phaedra, was a triumph of sequenced rhythm and electronic washes. The new LP flew up the charts on its release in February 1974, and went gold in seven countries. Froese's memories of the recording session are still fascinating: "We started in November 1973. Before, we had improvised, but now many things had to be structured, because of the Moog with its driving bass notes. Tuning the instrument took several hours each day, because in those days there were no presets or memory banks. By the 11th day, we only had six and a half minutes of music on tape. Technically, everything went wrong — the tape machine broke down, there were repeated mixing console failures, and the speakers were damaged, because of the unusually low frequencies of the bass notes. After a two‑day break in the country, things improved. 'Mysterious Semblance' was recorded in one take on a double‑keyboarded Mellotron while my wife Monique turned the knobs on the phasing device. Even 'Phaedra' was done in one go. Chris had pressed the button to start the bubbling bass note, but it wasn't right, so after a while the bass drops out. Then he started tuning the bass note while he was running it, and all the time, the engineer was recording. So what you hear today was in fact a rehearsal!"

While in England, Chris Franke was offered another cheap Moog synth, which had belonged to The Moody Blues. Today, Franke laughs when he thinks about it. "They hated it because it was so unstable, its oscillators kept drifting up and down. So, suddenly, I had two of these boxes, and was surrounded on‑stage by an electronic altar. The group were really boogieing with sequences and fat sounds... I was very happy at that time."

Rubycon

Most of the rest of 1974 was spent performing in strange locations, particularly European cathedrals. Back in England, TD returned to The Manor in January 1975 to record Rubycon, possibly their finest achievement. Choral and pastoral elements added to the impression that Froese, Franke, and Baumann had really absorbed the innovations of Stockhausen and Ligeti decades before. On the equipment front, Franke added a modified Elka organ, while Baumann introduced prepared piano and ARP synth. Not surprisingly, Rubycon charted higher than Phaedra on its release three months later. Edgar Froese remembers the recording: "Unlike Phaedra, there were no breaks in creative flow. The sequencers could now be technically better equipped, although many of the technical alterations had to be custom‑built. This was a very extensive undertaking, and most of our Phaedra earnings went into new equipment. I had orchestral instruments recorded by the BBC for my Mellotron, at the time a very luxurious thing to do. The biggest problem was the inconstant power supply at The Manor — power cuts which forced us to interrupt recording sessions to connect synths to electrical generators. Chris's Moog also played random sequences at times, because of the unstable current driving the oscillators".

More problems with Franke's Moog plagued the group on a subsequent Australian tour, when it was damaged in transit, an experience that led TD to re‑think their entire live transportation setup. According to Franke: "All the modules had been built into one big case, to save time setting up on stage. The large case was shipped upside‑down, and after 48 hours on the plane, the heavy transformers came loose and fell through the circuitry. When I first plugged it into the mains in Australia, I got a heavy electric shock. It wouldn't make any sound, and two days were spent repairing it and flying stuff in from Germany. That was a nightmare — I nearly lost my life on that one".

At the end of 1975, TD released Ricochet, an album culled from the cathedral performances in Europe. 'Part 2' was quite brilliant, opening with flute and closing with a suite‑electronique which wouldn't sound out of place on the latest ambient House album. Franke was quite proud of it: "Ricochet was the first album we really had a concept on. We had 16 tracks, so it was the first album where we really got in touch with overdub technology — it was much more formed".

With no let‑up, the group began 1976 by retiring to Berlin to record the soundtrack for William Friedkin's film The Sorcerer. The collection of 13 short compositions combined throbbing rhythm with chilling suspense. Froese recalls: "Sorcerer was recorded on an old 8‑track Ampex in Berlin. It was one of the four machines that were in Abbey Road Studios in London, and which were sold after the Beatles era. We had rented an old movie theatre in Berlin, and made a small studio out of it. The Moog was very useful, and by this stage we were quite versed in its use. We also used a Fender Rhodes piano, guitars, and even Revox tape machines as delay units".

Franke: "William Friedkin had heard our music in Los Angeles. He rang up and said he liked it, that it was innovative and new, and that he'd like to do a film with it. He was interested in having the music playing for the actors on set. We felt very independent — it was just us in a room in Berlin, with an 8‑track and the script".

Into The Stratosfear

Sorcerer was the beginning of a great period for Tangerine Dream. The next album, Stratosfear, elevated them alongside Pink Floyd as lords of so‑called space rock. Recorded in August 1976 in Berlin, Stratosfear merged sequenced rhythms with splashes of Mellotron strings, harpsichord, and acoustic guitars. 'Invisible Limits' was particularly representative of this new sound. Edgar Froese, though, remembers the production as nerve‑wracking: "Peter Baumann had had this huge computer sequencer built for him by the Berlin electronics company Projeckt Elektronik. It was technically much more comfortable to use, and the tuning was more stable. But it had taken them a year to build it, and it was only completed two weeks after recording had begun. Peter had a lot of problems with it, and anything that could go wrong, both technically and musically, did. Me and Chris often left the studio in a bad mood. The recording time cost a fortune, and the production went on for weeks". Froese's memories of the recording of Stratosfear include broken‑down multitracks, exploding Dolby units and much else. "So much happened during those sessions — master tapes disappeared from the studio, finished tracks were mysteriously erased, and the mixing console finally went up in smoke!"

Chris Franke has happier memories: "A special favourite, Stratosfear. I especially like it because it has a feeling of open space. We tried out a new location, Audio Studios in Berlin, which was used for orchestral recordings. I remember playing music for up to two hours at a time non‑stop — it was so fluid. Usually, improvising electronic music is a process of planning, starting and stopping, but on Stratosfear we really got into these long phases. We also brought back some more acoustic sounds bit by bit to add more colour. It was really the first blend of all the possible material we could play. For me, Stratosfear was the next big step after Phaedra."

End Of An Era

Stratosfear soared up the British and American charts, and in the spring and summer of 1977, Tangerine Dream played two sell‑out tours of the United States (see the 'Live Dreaming' side panel). Encore, a live album from the tour, was released in October 1977. It captured the full stylistic Dream sound over four tracks — from guitar rock to ambient, sequenced compositions to sound paintings. Franke today admits that the tour involved a lot of improvisation, and that every show was recorded. "It was very expensive to do a good live recording at that time. We used a 4‑track Ampex deck." As well as being a good summation of their musical career up to that point, Encore proved to be the end of a golden period for the band, as the album was the last to feature Peter Baumann. After the last concert of the tour at Boulder, Colorado in September 1977, Baumann left the band for good. Friction between him and Froese had come to a head, and his solo career had taken off with Romance '76. A second solo album, Trans‑Harmonic Nights (released in 1979) was a crucial recording, on the way to electro‑bop and House music. Baumann described it as "near the edge points of pop", and won global critical acclaim for its creation. But for Tangerine Dream, Baumann's departure was to prove a serious set‑back...

Next month, in Part Two of this feature, Chris Franke and Edgar Froese look back on how they overcame the difficulties caused by Peter Baumann's departure , and how they spearheaded the development of digital sampling technology over the course of the next decade.

The 800,000 Mark Synth: Chris Franke On The First Moog In Germany

"I didn't have a synth at the time of Zeit, but occasionally I would practice on the big Moog modular in the Hansa recording studios. They had got it inexpensively from The Rolling Stones, who used it for a film in 1967 and then saw no further use for it. Fricke and Eberhard Schoener were definitely the first people in Germany to own a Moog, and had paid 800,000 Marks each for the privilege! Anyway, nobody in Hansa knew how to use it. So I got involved, but wasn't allowed to take it out of the studio until 1973. It didn't have a user's manual, so for two years I kept rehearsing on it. Every night I'd go into the studio and explore the Moog with its bad patching and unstable sound. But what I discovered about it was the sequencing side, its ability to generate an ongoing rhythm. Its sound, to me, had analogies with the repetitive rhythms of Indian music. It wasn't boring, so I just spent hours and hours creating sequences. Later, Edgar heard it and thought its driving rhythm was perfect for Tangerine Dream's music."

Live Dreaming: The 1977 US Tour

By the time of their 1977 American tour, Tangerine Dream's arsenal of electronic equipment was quite formidable. Chris Franke had bought a new Oberheim 8‑voice polyphonic synth, and was using both the Projeckt Elektronik sequencer and a Computerstudio digital sequencer. Alongside the Moog, Mellotron M400, ARP and Elka synths, Franke had an Oberheim sequencer and electronic percussion. Peter Baumann had an identical set of Projeckt Elektronic, ARP, Elka and Mellotron gear, but augmented it with the Fender Rhodes and an EMS Vocoder setup. Edgar Froese, meanwhile, played several guitars, the other big Moog, a twin‑keyboard Mellotron Mark V, a Steinway grand piano, an Oberheim 4‑voice synth, an ARP Omnistring, and a PPG synth, in addition to operating a Projeckt Elektronik time control system. Visually, the group used a new Krypton gas laser system to generate spectacular moving images.

Not surprisingly, all this equipment was extremely difficult to transport and set up quickly. Franke remembers: "Because we needed much more time than a rock act to set up, we had to fine‑tune. We had special cabling requirements and new lighting ideas. We had to halve our setting‑up time, and the only way to do it was to be more compact. We did things that are now standard, like having the racks on wheels — you just open the front and back, and the rack is there. We had these snakes built, multicores with 120‑pin sockets, so it would take us only half a minute to plug everything in. Everything had to change in order to keep playing advanced concerts. Hartmut Heinze of Projeckt Elektronik worked for six months before the tour, and even came with us to oversee things, make little adjustments and repairs to the equipment throughout".

Departure Time: Chris Franke On Peter Baumann's Exit

Chris Franke's memories of Peter Baumann are quite interesting today. "Peter was a very smart person. But we always wondered if he was a musician by deep heart. He could play music but could do other things too. Myself and Edgar were born for music and we had to do music. Peter played the game with us, and for a long time understood exactly what we were up to, so we shared a lot of musical experiences. Peter's speciality was in conceiving the music — we discussed it, and then we played it. He knew that great music not only comes from virtuosity, but also from the mental state. That concept was very important to us, because we were making free‑form music. But Peter always had a desire to go further on. He dreamt about a life that was more chic and yuppie‑oriented, while myself and Edgar were more interested in being down‑to‑earth and continuing along the path."

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tinydooms · 3 years

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I am so sorry to hear about your situation, I hope you are otherwise doing well. May I please request a prompt for Evie and Rick having a reading day (specifically set right after the first film, so they still are a little awkward around each other but still love and trust one another... I don't know, what ever you write, I love, so hopefully this gave you some inspiration but take it where you please :))

Thank you for your kind words! It's been a hell of a week, but I'm finally feeling better. Here is your fic: I hope you like it!

Cairo, October 1922

Evie woke up from her nap slowly, coming up out of deep sleep to find her Fort Brydon bedroom full of afternoon sunlight. The ceiling fan hummed overhead; the apartment was quiet save for the soft sound. Evie stretched, relishing the pull of her muscles and the softness of the bed beneath her. It was good to be back.

Her stomach gurgled and with a sigh, she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Time for tea. Hot tea, and lots of it, and maybe a sandwich or three. She was starving. There was nothing like roughing it in the desert to bring one’s attention to the blessings of home and a fully-stocked larder. Would the men be hungry? Probably. She had left Rick and Jonathan to their own devices after Dr. Wilkinson had looked them all over earlier that day; he had prescribed plenty of water and rest after their long, hot trek back from Hamunaptra. Opening her bedroom door, Evie looked around for the men. Jonathan’s bedroom door was closed; he was probably napping. Rick was where Evie had left him earlier, lying on his cot by the window with a couple of ice packs soothing his cracked ribs, head cushioned on a stack of pillows, a book in hand. He looked up as she came into the room.

“Hey,” Rick said, flashing her that sideways smile. “Did you have a good sleep?”

“Yes, thanks,” Evie said. “What are you reading?”

Rick waved the book at her. “Ah, Persuasion. I went through your bookshelf; I hope you don’t mind.”

Evie blinked. “You’re reading Persuasion?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard it’s one of Austen’s best and I didn’t feel like reading anything related to ancient curses. I’d only read her other one--I don’t remember the title in English--Orgueil et préjugés--the one where they despise each other at first because her family is obnoxious and he’s really shy and arrogant.” Rick lifted an eyebrow at the look on Evie’s face. “I do know how to read, you know.”

She realized that she was gaping at him, open-mouthed. Shame boiled up in Evie; of course he knew how to read. “I’m sorry. I just meant, I didn’t have you down as the type to read social satire.”

She hadn’t had him down as the type to read, period, but then, Rick had mentioned liking Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes, hadn’t he? And there had been a couple of books in his suitcase last night, when she looked through it for clothes to lay out for him.

Rick grinned. "It’s okay, Evelyn. I know what I look like. We’re still getting to know each other.” He shifted, laying the book down on his stomach. “Actually, I really like reading. I’ve made it a point throughout my life to maintain membership at whatever public libraries are available.”

This was new and intriguing information. Evie sat down in the armchair and curled her legs under her.

“What sort of things do you like to read about?”

Rick cocked his head, thinking. “Honestly? I’ll read just about anything as long as I can understand it. I like detective novels and adventure stories, though I think I’m going to go off those for a while.” They grinned at each other. “I read a lot of art history books before the War, and I like a good popular history. I’m not educated; I only went to school through the eighth grade. Maybe if my mom hadn’t died, I’d have finished high school and gone to college, but, well…”

He shrugged. Life hadn’t worked out that way.

“But you read,” Evie said. “My mother used to say that anyone can learn anything they like if they are willing to read about it.”

Rick nodded. “My mom used to say something like that, too. She absolutely refused to let me quit school and get a job in a factory, even though it would have helped.” A shadow passed over his face; Evie saw him push it away. “Would you like something to eat?” he said, rising up on his elbows. “Your stomach is rumbling.”

“Oh! Yes, I’d come out for tea,” Evie said, scrambling to her feet. “Don’t get up; you’re supposed to be resting.”

Rick blinked. “I’ve been resting all day. It doesn’t hurt as bad as it did, you know.”

“Still.” Evie bustled off towards the kitchen. “You’ve looked after me so well these past weeks, it’s time for me to return the favor. Would you like a sandwich? How do you take your tea?”

Rick sat up, moving slowly. “Strong, with milk and a little honey, if you’ve got it. Thanks.”

Evie smiled at him; he smiled back. She bustled around the little kitchen, setting the kettle to boil and making up sandwiches, and when everything was ready she carried it through to the table and held out a hand to help Rick up. He took it, looking at her in a way that made her blush, and followed her to the table.

“Thank you,” he said, looking from the plate of sandwiches to Evie. “All this, I don’t-- Thank you.”

Evie smiled at him again; again, he smiled back, and for a moment they stood grinning foolishly at each other. It was all so new, this togetherness, this friendship. Funny how one could learn everything there was to know about a person’s character by their actions, and still know hardly anything about them as a person. Evie gestured for Rick to sit, and they fell on the sandwiches.

“So tell me,” Rick said after they had spent a few minutes quietly eating. “What’s your favorite book? Besides the Book of Amun-Ra. I’m sorry about that, by the way. Jonathan didn’t mean to drop it.”

“I know.” A pang flashed through Evie as she remembered the splash the book had made as it hit the water in the crypt’s brackish pool. “But we made it out with our lives, and we have all of the rubbings and sketches we made before we, er, raised him, so it’s not a complete loss. And as to your question…” She sipped her tea, thinking. “Do you mean favorite novel or favorite book? Because I’m not sure I can pick just one.”

“Top three, then.” Rick leaned on his elbow, watching her with the same interest he had shown at Hamunaptra. Evie felt herself blushing. She could get used to this.

“Well, then, I would probably have to say Professor Walter Emerson’s book on hieroglyphics, since it was a huge influence on me when I was a child; Flinders Petrie’s book Naukratis, and well, Persuasion.”

Rick grinned. “Which is why it was here, among all the books on Egyptology.”

“Quite.” Evie brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She hadn’t bothered to pin her hair up. “What about you?”

Rick sat back, cradling his teacup in his big, strong hands. “I’d say my favorite book is Around the World in Eighty Days. I have a sentimental attachment to it; it was my favorite as a kid. I’ve read it in the original French, but I like the English translation better. But if I had a top three…” He paused to sip, thinking. “I don’t know, actually. I really like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and John Carter books, and I like Rudyard Kipling. I read a lot of Dickens after Gallipoli; they had his complete works at the hospital my regiment was sent to afterwards.”

“You were injured?”

“No.” A shadow passed through Rick’s eyes. “I mean, yes, I got shot in the side, but it was more a flesh wound than anything else. No, they sent us to rest and recuperate before going back to battle. It was a good break.”

He put the teacup down and reached for the pot. Evie hastened to lift it and refill. She brushed Rick’s hand as she scooted the milk jug towards him. He had such beautiful hands.

“I’ve never read Dickens,” she admitted, and he gave her a surprised look. “His writing never grabbed my attention,” she added. “I was much more interested in ancient stories than modern ones.”

“You don’t say.” Rick looked amused. “And you, a librarian. Is that what you got your degree in?”

“Library science? No, I did that afterwards. I, er, I studied Classics and Antiquity at university.”

Rick shifted his hands on the table, moving them close enough to tap the back of Evie’s hand. “Tell me.”

“You don’t mind that I went to university?”

The question leaped out before she could stop it, the tiny insecurity that Evie had always carried deep inside her and only rarely acknowledged. So many men were threatened by academic women. Rick looked astonished.

“Why would I mind that you went to university?” he asked. “Everybody should have the chance to go to university. I’d have loved to go to college. And anyway, of course you’re educated, I mean, look at you. With everything that’s happened the last few weeks, we’d all have died if you hadn’t known exactly what to do and how to read those hieroglyphs and all.”

“I know. It’s just...academic women are...frowned upon by society,” she said. “And I know we met in extraordinary circumstances, but I’ve never...You don’t think I’m ridiculous?”

Rick shook his head. “Nah, Evie, I’m crazy about you.”

And the little flame of her worry flickered and died. Evie smiled at him, folded her fingers around his. Rick squeezed her hand and raised it to his lips. They were going to be just fine.

#asks and answers #prompts #my fanfics #The Mummy #Rick and Evie #Rick O'Connell #Evelyn Carnahan #it amuses me to write Rick as a reader #I mean why not?

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smoochi-dazai · 4 years

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Hmmmm.... #50 with Poe please? ;) You know who it is my lovely writer! Can't wait to see more!

✿ “ Mysterious ” ✿

—> Bungo Stray Dogs, Poe Edgar | Reader

—> Sweet | Prompt

—> Description | While Poe introduces you to one of his new mystery novels, you can’t help but be intrigued while at the same time worrying about studies. His smile is too much of a distraction, and you couldn’t resist it.

✿ 50. A kiss, followed by more that trail down the jaw and neck.

Also, hello friend. @writing-for-me-at-this-point

“ Sweet pea! ” The voice of your normally shy boyfriend echoed in the halls of your home, making his way into your bedroom. Bangs covered his face while hugging his latest masterpiece with the grasp of his hands, being sure to not drop it. God was his grin the most adorable sight in the world, how innocent. However, being too caught up in work you missed out on seeing the work of art. Humming gently in response, trying your best to stay focused.

“ Ranpo acknowledged my story today, he said it’s improved!! ” While you sat in a chair, mindlessly studying for exams- your beloved Poe sat himself down right next to you on the shared bed. Meanwhile, his little raccoon friend curled up on your desk, it’s tail swishing some of your papers away. You couldn’t find yourself to be mad, setting you to work aside for a moment to look at Poe. “ Really? I’m happy for you. ” You smile softly, an endearing glance is spared to him before looking back to your work. You didn’t have much time to dwell, what’s more important- Poe or your work. Seeming to notice how he rudely intruded without knocking, Poe can’t help but quietly apologize. His bangs reveal his eyes for a moment, they were almost trembling- even though his lips curl into a small awkward smile before your eyes.

“ I’m sorry for intruding, I really should have knocked first... ” he whispers. The fact you have been with him so long was a blessing, he never saw the day he’d learn the mystery of love. It remains the toughest of them all, maybe he could write about love someday- surely no one could answer it if he doesn’t know either! Maybe Ranpo knew more about love, he will ask for some advice soon. He then continued where he left off, “ I can leave if you need to study. I wouldn’t want to get in your way- I just was incredibly happy and wanted to show you! You and Ranpo are amazing. So I thought... you’d give some feedback as well?”

That caught your attention, raising a brow, a curious glint in your eyes. You sat up from your chair while switching your small table lamp off, for now, you shouldn’t be long. His cutie of a raccoon friend jumps on your shoulder, following you with each step you take. Poe watched you every movement, eyes sparkle with excitement and shock- his beloved was going to read his story? How delightful—

Poe carefully hands you the book, caution evident in his every action. Poe watches as you open the book, first reading the back and tracing your fingers on the cover. It was a beautiful red and gold, hardcover book. You’ve always wanted to collect his books, always so well drawn out. Not as much of a masterpiece as him though. That boy was an angel, even in his fair share of awkward moments. Boy was his nerves thriving at the sight of you holding his book in your hands, the care you put into holding his beloved stories never went past him. Kind as you were, he could never describe just how good you made him feel. There always lingered a sense of euphoria in his heart due to your subtle contact.

“ It’s great, I’d say it’s your best story yet! ” Your smile radiates pure sunshine, he felt like he was in the grace of an angelic disciple. Did you mean what you said? Of course, you did! Boy was he fanboying now. “There are a couple of minor errors on page 2... and a couple of others. But from what I’ve seen so far, your introduction is perfect. You’ve always been talented, I’m sure you’ll stump Ranpo someday!”

“ Y-...You mean that, sweet pea?...” Pie whispers curiously, overwhelming joy excited his heart to no end. “ Why would I have a reason to lie? ”

“ I suppose you’re right... I’ll continue to work as hard as I can! I’ll stump Ranpo by the end of this year with this progress and your encouragement! ” Poe exclaims, whenever he rambles about his writing he almost seems to be a different person entirely, but no matter how acts- Poe is your Dear Boyfriend, and even a possible fiancé.

While he was swept up in his speech of improving to bewilder Ranpo, you found yourself scoot closer to him on the bed. Smiling at him, your hands cup his face, brushing the hair out of his face so you meet eye to eye. “ I believe in you, you’re going to be the most successful author one day. Alright, Dear? ”

The closeness between you both made a blush swarm his pale cheeks, the warmth flooding through his body and pounding of his heart was a clear sign of embarrassment. Unsure of what he should do, he attempted to look away, squirming a little beneath your gaze shyly. Looking down at his lap, only for you to lift his chin again. Leaning closer to him, you praised his work within a mere whisper against his ear. Closing the space between you two, you keep your eyes open to see how he’d react. Poe awkwardly wrapped his arms around your waist while shaking like crazy, poor boy was a nervous wreck. Poe tried his best to do what was right, leaning into the kiss as well to deepen it. Just as you pull away, he was going to speak but panicked when you began to kiss down his jawline. Each kiss left eerily warm tingles, not making any attempt to push you away. A small whine escaped his lips the more you kiss him, 1...2...3... you trailed each kiss against his flared skin. From his lips to his jaw, below his ear and even down to his shoulder. Your hands roam as well, one grasping his hand while the other combs through his hair, the attempts on brushing it out from his eyes ended in failure, always falling back into place.

Moments later, you finally pull away. Satisfied with yourself, you grin. Brushing his hair back again— holding it back to appreciate his eyes. Trying to read him like a book. “ I love you and your stories, but I think you’re the real mystery to be uncovered. ”

Que Poe blushing incredibly all night, becoming a stuttering mess whenever you called his name.

~fin~

#bsd #bungo stray dogs #bungou stray dogs #bsd x reader #bungo stray dogs x reader #bungou stray dogs x reader #Poe Edgar #Poe x reader #Edgar x reader #Edgar Poe x reader #Poe Edgar x reader #The guild x reader #kiss prompts #smoochi dazai

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sweater-daddiesdumbdork · 4 years

Text

Life After Snowpiercer: Adjusting To The Everyday Life

Summary- 5.4k Curtis Everett x You. The new way of life is becoming routine, and your starting to adjust. Curtis does his best to help you along. Warnings- swearing, hints of smut, talk of pregnancy.

A/N- yea, it's a slower chapter, I suppose like a filler. But this was the mood I was in, so this is what happened.

A/N2- To see the story behind the picture, read this short- Surprise

Chapter 10 / Masterlist

Slowly the new room was becoming 'Home', it had been a couple weeks since Curtis brought you to the room, and together you two cleaned it out of the personal stuff that couldn't be used, and you took the time to bring down yours and his few belongings. Since settling in, he brought you two a couple changes of clothing, and for the first time in years, you were able to give both of your clothes a proper wash. A few things were just unable to be saved, one of his jackets, you just couldn't salvage, but the other couple you could. Part of you wished you were able to clean out your bunk in the tail-end. But it was a days travel through the deep snow to get back to the car, and you couldn't bring yourself to mention it to Curtis, not when there was so much going on.

Maybe someday.

But there was one thing you knew made it from the tail-end, cause Curtis carried it with him everywhere, and that was the slightly smudged charcoal drawing you commissioned back when you knew it was close to Curtis’s birthday before the riot, and you had seen him tuck it away when you two first moved in. So when you opened the drawer and it wasn't safely tucked in the folds of your few clothes, you felt your heart catch. “No, where is it?!”

Starting to pull out the items from the drawer, and shaking them out, your panic got the best of you, and you were searching among the bedding stored there when Curtis walked into the room to find you on your knees, looking under the bed, among all the stuff on the floor. “Baby, what is going on?” And he was shocked further to see you come out from under the bed with tears brimming your eyes. “Curtis I can't find it, and I saw you put it away.”

Confused, he used his boots to gently push stuff aside and squatted down next to you, gripping your chin to have you look at him. “Put what away Babygirl?” His brows are raised well above his beanie in concern and you sniffle in his hold. “The drawing of us, the picture. I could have sworn you put it in the dresser before your shower the other night, and now...” your hands pick up one of his shirts as if the picture will just fall out from underneath it. Curtis’s blue eyes snap in understanding and he lets you go, opening his jacket and pulling out a slightly bent out of shape paper.

“I got it right here, sorry Babygirl. I just usually carry it on me for safekeeping. I put it away the other day cause we were going to be working on the water, and didn't want it to get ruined.” He handed it over and your teary face turns into an uplifted one, careful when you took it. “Of course! Curtis, I don't know where my head's at these days. Everything is just... “ You sigh, and looked at him apologetically. You've been terribly emotional the past few days, and you've either been mad at Curtis or crying over nothing. Shaking his head, he grunted to move to a stand, taking your hands and drawing you up.

“It's okay, I don't need to carry it anymore.” He used the sleeve of his shirt to wipe at your cheeks. “What did you want to do with it?” You look at the picture and smile again, it simply made you happy and you pointed to a spot above the door. “Can you hang it up? Then this place can be officially home.” You held it back out and he took it, there was a lip of steel running along the wall just above the door, and Curtis arched to his toes to get high enough and set it on the beam, stepping back. “How's it look Babygirl?” His arm moving around your waist and pulling you in front of him. Letting yourself lean back against his chest while studying the picture sitting above your doorway, you tilted your head up to look at him. “Perfect, Welcome Home.”

It was so easy to make you happy, Curtis let his hands slide around to your midsection and just hold you there, kissing your tilted back forehead. “It is perfect.” He really couldn't remember when he had been happier, everything was going okay, the people were settling in and accepting this new way of living, the greenhouse was thriving, as well as the remaining animals that survived the crash. People were eating actual food, for the first time in 17 years, at least for the tail-enders. You actually we're coming around to more affection, although he would wake up to find you worrying yourself in the dark now and then, you were far easier to coax into his arms and fall back asleep. Assuring you that whatever happened, you two would deal with it together.

That was the last part, waiting to see if you were actually pregnant or not. I could see it worrying you, making you fret when you thought no one was paying attention. And Matt. Matt, Curtis was at a loss of what to do with that fucker. He was still locked in the Car they stuffed him in weeks ago. But you insisted on once a day walks with him, and Curtis to. There was no way in hell he was leaving you alone with Matt. Brother or Not. Speaking of which, Curtis knew what was coming and you turned to look up at him, the question in your eyes.

“Can we go see Matt now Curtis?” you worried your bottom lip, always seeming to be nervous to ask, although he never told you no. Today was no different, kissing your forehead.

“Only if your up for it Babygirl.” He said with a bit of hesitancy, simply cause not even 20 minutes ago you had been in a full panic. But you nodded with affirmation, and grabbed at your jacket, and stuffed a hat on your head since usually you all went outside for the fresh air and sunshine, although still bitterly cold. So many years in the dark, you especially couldn't get enough of the sun. Curtis would find you often standing outside, lips blue with your eyes tilted into the sun, seeming to soak it in. The man pictured you soaking it in, light was drawn to light. Why you were drawn to him, he didn't know. Leading you down the aisle, his hand resting in the small of your back.

Snapping open the heavy door between cars, you leaped over the gap, and worked Matt's car open, and light spilled into the darkness to show Matt leaning against a wall. One arm hooked over his knee, lifting his head to scowl at the two of them, you went in wringing your hands and smiling hopefully. Curtis right behind you, a dark imposing figure scowling. The complete opposite of your hopefulness. “Hey Matt, how you feeling today?”

Matt snorted and tugged on the heavy livestock chains around his ankle. “Fucking fantastic Dear Sister. Living the fucking dream.” Curtis snarled out while digging for the locks keys in his pocket and handing you off a knife for protection in case Matt happened to overpower him. “Cut the shit, Matt. She didn't come here for you to be a little bitch.” Cutis squatted down and yanked his leg into the light enough so he could see the lock. Matt seemed to somber a bit. “Been better Y/N, thanks for asking.” His hand moved to his now bare ankle rubbing at the red ring. Curtis stood and reached to grasp Matts forearm, bringing him up to a stand.

This was ritual by now, You and Matt walking ahead just a little, Curtis not far behind. Close enough that should Matt try to put a hand on you, Curtis would snap your brother's neck. It was a promise he made to Matt when you first started this. Otherwise, Curtis didn't interfere with your conversation. Most of the time. Your hands were stuffed in your sleeves as you trudged along, your voice optimistic, hopeful that Matt would engage back. “The greenhouses are really thriving Matt, they survived the crash intact for the most past. A bit of the pipework bringing the water in got damaged, but we've been regularly melting snow to compensate.”

“You think You all will be able to keep up with that? Eventually, the water is going to run out. Without the train moving anymore, it's not gathering any to store in the tanks.” Matt smirked as if he was dropping some devastating news, looking between you and Curtis.

“Were keeping a close eye on the tanks, and only using that for stuff absolutely necessary. Everything else... well we're covered in snow.” You kicked at the Frozen snow covering the ground. But he was right, eventually the water would become an issue, just like the power. The whole train was temporary. Eventually they will have to move, see if they can find something more suitable for the group on the outside of one of the cities. Of course, they were estimating where they were on the tracks. Curtis, Edgar, and John having dug through Wilford's main car a few weeks ago and came across maps. If their estimations are right, they were somewhere in what was once Russia.

A massive landscape staring at the map. But dotted with cities. All Curtis had to do was convince the council that packing up a small scouting party and seeing if they were near any of the major cities, it would mean more supplies available to them. They had to get off the train, all its resources were going to run out eventually. Wilford never prepared for the Snowpiercer to ever be at a standstill. These worries were settled at the back of Curtis mind, but these walks with Matt, he was sure to remind them of it. Even you sobered a bit after Matts little jibe.

“We will deal with it when it comes up Matt.” You wanted to reach out, staring at Matt. God, he looked so much like your father, just not the coldness. Your father always so welcoming and open, Matt though sniffed either from the cold or distaste to your answer. “Well, we were able to deal with it till your man insisted on crashing the train. We would certainly not be stranded in the middle of fucking Russia. Couldn't have planned that a little better Curtis. Crashed us somewhere with resources at least? But you never think ahead, do you Everett. Always just brute Force and no couth, is there anything between those ears?” Matt hissed at him, his rage crossing his face once more.

Once more he got the best of your temper as he was bad-mouthing Curtis for those few seconds before Curtis could put a stop to Matts ranting, you pushed against your brother's chest, sending him sprawling in surprise. Curtis actually had to hide a chuckle of surprise himself, but you were furious and snarling at your brother. “Jesus Christ, your just... Cruel all the time, aren't you. Fuck you, Matt. Curtis, I'm done.” You turned away and brushed past Curtis, in which he shook his head, and went to collect Matt, grabbing him by the collar of his jacket and pushing him forward. “Ya know, you would think you would learn to at least treat her decent since shes the only one who gives a shit about you and why you're still alive.”

Matt snorted as he trudged back through the snow, following your quicker paced form as you reached the outskirts of the camp once more.

“Maybe it's time she grew up Curtis, quite thinking that any of us are out for more than ourselves.”

“Well your certainly proving that to her aren't you,” Curtis growled as they to reached the outskirts of the camp, the snow here all pounded down from people walking on it all day long. “When that day comes and she gives up on you entirely, what do you think is going to happen to you?” Curtis said darkly, and Matt eerily grinned. “Be the day I end up going free.”

“We will see about that.” Curtis pushed him back up the stairs and into the darkness of his car once more. Matt plopped on the mattress while Curtis went to lock him back up, Matt watching him closely, and to the open door, debating. Curtis even though he wasn't looking at him knew his thoughts. “Try it and it won't end good for you Matt.” Wait, we got to wait... The younger man thought, instead getting himself comfortable. Their guard won't be up forever.

You just had to get away, even managing friendly conversations was out of your wheelhouse right now, and you stomped back to your room, and slammed the door behind you as if you were a child all over again, grabbing a pillow off the perfectly made bed this morning and sitting on the edge of it, you screamed into it. What was it going to take to get the meanness out of Matt?! You have done nothing but be good to him short of letting him go free, had even managed to get Curtis to reluctantly agreed that if there was any change, they would see about giving him a bit more freedom. But nothing you tried softened him. Nothing. Ripping off your jacket and hat, you shoved them away into the chair when you sat down, and you just suddenly felt drained. All over, like it all just seeped from you.

Sighing, you lift your hands and rub at your face, glancing up at the picture hanging above the door. That made you smile, thinking back on earlier when Curtis hung it up for you. Maybe it's not all bad, and you shrug off the negativity being around your brother brings on you. Changing into something not as warm, you decide the best way to spend the rest of the day was helping in the greenhouse, and maybe the kitchen. Things would be okay, you were doing more than surviving, you all were actually living.

When you left the car and headed towards the greenhouse, you didn't even glance at the car that held Matt, giving it a wide berth, entering the greenhouse, immediately the earthy smell the plants gave off was as good to you as feeling the sun on your face. A musty heaviness of dirt, greenery, and water. All over the labors of the past few weeks showed with healthy trees bearing apples, bright and red. Green sprouts of leaves down rows and rows, all edible. Even now one of the people who worked the kitchen was picking bundles, piling them in her apron. “How do you know what is ready?” You asked, wandering down the aisle while piling your hair behind your head and trying it off.

“Easy child.” The older worker said, holding out a leaf that was full and vibrant for you to take. “Go ahead, taste it.” You ripped off a piece of it and slipped it in your mouth, when the tender leaf crushed between your teeth, vibrant fresh bitterness flooded your mouth, your taste buds still getting used to food. “When these bunches are all full like this, it's meant to be picked.”

“What is this?” Unable to help yourself, you ripped off another piece and chewed on it, getting the same overwhelming effect from before. “Kale. I will sautee this just a bit in some marrow, and put it in a soup for the camp today. Shave off some of that meat off a hock in the freezer, add those new baby potatoes we have at the end.” The older woman continued on, bringing you to where the rows of potatoes were hidden from view, her fingers digging into the dirt and dragging up the bulbs, shaking the dirt off them. “We get enough of them, and you have yourself a meal.”

You dug your fingers into the moist wet dirt, the sensation oddly familiar and weird, bringing back memories of planting flowers with your mother in the front of the house. The woman watched her with interest, taking in your reaction to it all. “Yer from the back, aren't ya?” You nodded slightly, and carefully brushed off the dirt encasing the baby potatoes. “Yes, one of the tail enders who came up with Curtis.”

“Ahh, yes. Thought you looked familiar. What your man did letting us go took a lot of guts, not many would have that. Trust me, very few of us have much to thank Wilford for or have any reason to give him loyalty. My name is Tess by the way.”

“It was touch and go, but it was the right thing to do. We can't start living a new life following the old ways.” You shrugged and Tess smiled at your words, her wrinkles lining around her eyes deepening.

“Like hearing wisdom come right out of the babes mouth. I could use your help if you don't mind. Getting this camp fed is a couple people process, It's my turn to water but I got to get this all started up. Feeding all these people is a lot different than just cooking for Wilford.” She continued placing potatoes in her apron. “all-day process, and the only way we don't burn through what we got stored. You mind watering for me?”

“Be a pleasure to.” You assured her and you took over where she had left off. Curtis came later to find you, having poked his head in earlier to see you were settled into a project after dealing with Matt, he didn't want to bother you. But now it was getting late, and after pouring over the maps in what they turned into a meeting space of sorts with the rest of the “council” they formed, passing ideas of where to go, and how to proceed, he was tired. The sky was starting to darken, and spending a quiet evening with you really was all he wanted at this point. Figuring you would be where he had left you, Curtis shrugged off his jacket as he went into the humid car, glancing around, and walking down the aisle, checking the rows till he found you, kneeling while using your hands to churn dirt, snipping off any dead leaves on each individual plant, a small trailer left behind you.

“There you are... was wondering where you had gotten off to.” Heavy boots thudded the floor and you looked up in surprise. Your hair curling around your temples and a streak of dirt across your forehead, you gave him the sweetest smile that Curtis would have sworn made his heart skip a beat. “You've been in here all afternoon, think it's time we call it a day.” Hand reaching for yours, you hesitate cause yours are dirty, but a wiggle of his fingers, enticed you, and you let him pull you up. “It can't be that late, it's still light.”

“In here, artificial lighting for the plants.” Leading you to a window, you leaned into his side, looking at the way the sky was painted in so many vibrant hues.

“Alright, maybe I did lose track of time. I only meant to stay in here for a couple hours.” You admitted and he laughed, his arm resting around your waist.

“Come on, let's go eat.”

As becoming another regular was all eating dinners together. Tess would bring out whatever, and those that didn't have something stored away would come to get a bit of whatever she made that day. Groups of you would sit together, and slowly it was a mingling of people. Today you sat at Curtis’s side, sipping from a cup he brought you, and across from you, Edgar and Yona did the same as you, Yona talking about what she was doing with the kids. The kids, it was hard to think of them as the trains orphans anymore. They simply seemed to just belong to everyone now, no longer separating the train in classes as before.

“Teach them some manners, the little shites.” Edgar teased Yona, and you nudged your boot against his leg to get his attention.

“Excuse you, you were no peach either Edgar. Always sassing when you didn't get your way.” You smirked back at him over your cup as you sipped from it, Yona giggling at his side, and he narrowed his eyes at You. “I was a great kid! I listened. Kinda.”

“Right. Just as good as you listen now.” Curtis laughed deeply, moving to get up, and held out a hand to take the emptied dishes to bring them back to the kitchen. You moved to a kneel, beckoning Edgar to turn around. “Let me look at your back, see how that scar is healing.” Pushing himself from the wall, he twisted, and hiked the back of his shirt up. You leaned in closer, tracing around it for a moment. “Sore any? It looks really good, considering what happened.”

He pulled away and tugged his shirt down, giving a roll of his shoulder. Whenever the matter of his scar came up, he would go quiet. “It’s a'right. Tender once in a while, especially when hauling stuff.”

“Yea, you probably should have waited to do the cleanup.”

“Well, it had to be done.” He stated, and Yona next to him frowned slightly studying him. But Curtis coming back distracted them from the conversation, and you yawned, pushing to a stand.

“Doesn't matter if it had to be done, still should have waited. Night.” Biding your goodbye to your companions, a hot shower sounded excellent, and Curtis came up behind you, wrapping his arms around your middle.

“You okay?” a soft kiss was pressed just at the hollowed curve of your neck, and you let your hands weave over the top of his around your stomach. “Yea, just super tired suddenly. Been feeling this way most of the day. I'm sure it's nothing. “

He lifted his head and frowned hearing that. “You sure you shouldn't go see Price? Could be something.” You turned just as you reached the door, and pulled yourself in close against him with a fist of your hands in his shirt, leaning up to tease your lips against his. “Handsome, I'm fine. Tired is all... I promise.” Blue eyes looked slightly doubtful, but he relented and the two of you went into the room.

“Would you tell me if you thought otherwise?” Curtis locked the door while you started stripping out of the dirtied clothing to escape into the bathroom. Curtis caught just a glimpse of your backside, and inhaled sharply. No sex for the past month and half was starting to in ways he didn't care for. But it didn't matter, there was no way in hell he was going to try anything until you were ready. Instead, he set about taking off his boots, sitting on the edge of the bed to untie them, make himself comfortable.

In the bathroom, you turned on the water and slipped in before it got hot. Not wanting to waste any water, and tipped your head back to moisten your hair, and start scrubbing it, getting the dirt and sweat out from earlier. Then getting ready to wash your body, you looked down and saw red swirling by your feet. Your hands start roaming over your body quickly without thinking, a panicked cry out. “Curtis!” You twist in the shower, looking behind you to see if your cut anywhere and it hits you.

You had your period. If came... You weren't pregnant.

And that moment relief flooded you so intensely, you slid to the floor of the tub, somewhere between a cry and laugh of relief, Curtis burst into the bathroom, in response to you calling his name. “Y/M?! Baby, you okay?” He opened the curtain to find you sitting on the bottom, and immediately scanned you going to his knees. Cupping your face as you had it pressed to your knees, making you lift up to look at him. Your body shaking slightly under his hold. “What is wrong?” and that's when he caught the bit of red escaping down the drain. “Fuck, where are you hurt?” He is shifting you forward and you finally regain yourself enough to put a stop to him.

“I'm fine, I'm okay. Turn the water off and hand me a towel?” You ask and he reached over to turn it off, worried eyes finding you again and his hands seeking to look for whatever was causing you to bleed, but you grab his hands to make him focus on you. “It came Curtis. I'm not pregnant.”

His face is just stunned, his shirt half clinging to him from where he had leaned into the spray to check on you, and you couldn't help but giggle at the way he looked, blinking water out of his face before he repeated what you said. “You're not pregnant...?” the realization flooded his expression to relief and you nodded with a grin. “You're not pregnant!” He repeated and drew you into his arms, hugging each other out of relief. “Oh Babygirl, thank god. Are you okay?” He leaned back to look at you, and moved to get up and grab a towel, holding it open for you. Pulling yourself to a stand, you step into it, feeling prominently better then you had since you were raped.

“Relief Curtis, I just feel light as air. I didn't know what we were going to do if I was.” You pressed your face into his chest, breathing in deeply while he rubbed your back through the towel.

“We would have done everything we could, just like for any other child,” Curtis assured you, thanking everything under the moon and stars though that you weren't made to go through that as well as everything else that had happened. You mumbled in his chest, and lifted your face to look up at him. “I will go see Price in the morning, just to be sure.”

“Thank you.” Curtis kissed your forehead and let his hands cup your face, kissing you in that slow way that made your heart flutter, you opened to him, your tongue sliding with his and a soft moan between you two. Curtis pulled back and let his forehead rest against yours, his hands had fallen to your hips and his fingers flexed through the terry cloth. “You better get dressed Babygirl.” Both your eyes closed, merely breathing in each other before he moved to kiss your forehead and released you.

Curtis left you to pull on a large tee, it swept well down your thighs that you've been sleeping in as we as well as a pair of panties with a liner, brushing all your hair out, and debating about putting it up, you recalled that Curtis loved your long hair. Spreading it around your shoulders, you brush it out more till it's soft waves were shining, and once you checked to make sure any mess was gone. Flicking off the switch you came into the room being dark, Curtis sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for you to get in since you always slept against the wall. When he saw you, his hands opened up and you happily stepped into them, resting your cheek against the top of his head.

Nuzzling against your ribcage for a moment, and his hands sliding up and down along your sides, you let your fingers slide through the back of his head, and along his neck. “Today was a good day, right?” You ask softly while lifting your head to look at him. Your hands settled on his bare shoulders. Curtis lifted his head just a bit and looked up at you, flattening his hands against the small of your back and pulling you in closer. “It was a good day Babygirl.” His hands lightly pressed against the back of your thighs and you shifted to straddle him, letting your forehead rest against his. “Even with everything that happened today, it was a good day.” His arm tightened around you and shifted back with a slight roll so he could lay you down and shifted to his side next to you.

Loping an arm around your hip and kissing your shoulder, you slid in closer to his heat while he dragged the blankets that was collected. You felt him relax under your fingers playing in his hair, and although you didn't fall into the same lull that he did, his breathing turned shallower, soft snores rolling from his chest. Twisting to your side, his hand instinctively tightened around you, but you weren't going anywhere. Your gaze was able to follow the lines of his face from the window right behind your head, casting the room in a silver glow. Your thoughts drifted.

You were lucky, You knew it. Curtis had been with you since practically you came on the train, kept you alive and safe. You've done what you could to show your love back over the years, but you knew in this you wouldn't still be here if it wasn't for him. Even these past few weeks, surviving through the revolt, he didn't even realize it was coming back to him that saved her from the attackers. Everyone was so focused on surviving, they forgot why they survived.

If it wasn't for Curtis, they would be wasted away in the darkness, a forgotten memory of a past life.

And he never asked for anything in return. Not really. Not even during this time where you were slowly opening back up did he push for me. And another day, another time you would have fallen into that mind-frame that he no longer wanted you. But you knew better, just that morning you happened to see him relieving himself in the shower, barely catching whispers of your name, just under the sounds of his grunts. You knew he was trying to be quiet, not wanting to pressure you.

A soft shift and your name brought you out of your thoughts, and Curtis was leaning on his elbow, blue eyes searching your face. “What's on your mind Babygirl?” he had expected you to deal with some conflicting emotions since finding out that you were not pregnant, but you just looked at him with a soft expression, leaning into him and kissing him deeply, your hands clutching his shoulders and leaning back, bringing him along, and the kisses turned more feverish. Curtis groaned against your lips and down along your jawline, hissing softly against your neck. “Are you sure?” His head lifted, his hands cupping your face to search you for any doubt, any sign that you didn't want him to touch you and make love to you.

Your hands splayed over his chest raised just above you, spreading your fingers through the crisp dark scattering of hair and hummed softly in appreciation of the feeling against your palms, nodding. “Please Curtis... I miss you. But I'm scared.”

His head tilted and those kisses against your neck went to your face, each one a well placed soft brushed of lips warming you. “scared of what Babygirl?”

“What-what if I'm broken?” Your brows furrowed, and your fingers eased to his back, tracing along the flexing of muscles.

“Babygirl, you're not broken. I promise.” Curtis rubbed along your hip under your shirt. “But there's no rush Y/N.”

Your eyes roamed him and then your hands folded into your shirt and you pulled it off, letting it fall off the end on the bed.

“Show me.” You lean back into the pillows, and then Curtis shifted, wide shoulders blocking out the rest of the room as he leaned over you, leaving you gasping underneath him. Tilting your head back to give him access to your neck, outside, the stars.

There were so many stars and those desired kisses on your neck, his calloused hand sliding along your skin.

Your breathing came out in rushes, the stars going blurry in your vision. Curtis's hand grasped your chin lightly and made you look at him.

"Babygirl, I got you. Your safe."

@what-is-your-plan-today @p8tn0lish @jtargaryen18 @stardancerluv @princess-evans-addict @patzammit @fckdeusername @that-damn-girl @curtisbbq @jeremyrennerfanxxxx123 @thatweirdwalangpake @simsadventures

#curtis everett #curtis everett x reader #curtis everett and reader #curtis everett x y/n #curtis everett x you #snowpiercer #snowpiercer fanfic #snowpiercer fic #curtis everett fanfiction #curtis fanfiction #curtis everett fic #chris evans fanfic #chris evans fic #snowpiercer fandom #fanfiction #curtis fic #snowpiercer fanfiction

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toloveawarlord · 4 years

Text

Ch. 2

Pairing: Greer x Lancelot

Tagging: @plumpblueberry @thetwinkims @sakura-1819 @ikemen-lover159

A/N: Wow it’s been a hot minute since I wrote the first chapter of this. I meant for this chapter to introduce her to Edgar and Zero as well but then her and Lance had some alone time and I decided to end it on a fluffy note. Next chapter, there will be angst XD

[25 Days of Christmas 2020 Voting]

“Excuse the intrusion.”

The three maids assisting the young woman in dressing and straightening up the room, gave a respectful bow and made themselves scarce. Greer easily recognized him. After all, her brother complained about him in every letter he wrote her when he still served in the army. “Good morning, Jonah.”

“Yes, good morning, Mrs. Kingsley.” The way he spoke sounded forced. He wasn’t pleased with the secrecy of the arrangement and it likely bothered him that she bore the Atlas name before taking Lancelot’s.

“There’s no need for formalities. I’d prefer to be called Greer.” She offered him a warm smile, fiddling with the ring awkwardly snug around her finger.

Jonah gave a curt nod, dutifully doing as asked of him. “I’d like to escort you to breakfast in the dining hall.” He had plenty of questions that he needed answers to. King Lancelot had refused to speak of it, only giving orders to make sure Greer was treated well.

“That would be lovely. Thank you.”

Greer had few memories of Jonah, only seeing the man from afar. Their family’s cordial and she was sure that she’d spoken to him a handful of times, if only to say hello. She did remember that he could always be found with Lancelot, his admiration going all the way back to childhood.

From the upstairs window, the training yard below held a unit of soldiers headed by one of the other Chosen Thirteen. The woman paused, drawn in by the uniformity and focus. “I’ve never seen it so closely.” Her brother preferred for her to be kept at a distance.

“As the King of Hearts wife, you should familiarize yourself with certain subjects, including the army.” Jonah observed her fascinated features. How many women had he walked down this hall for audiences with his King? All had complained about the headquarters or pretended that they weren’t in the presence of soldiers.

Greer didn’t find this place frightening.

“Yes, I agree. I have much to study.” Her golden eyes turned from the training yard to the Queen of Hearts, finding his amber ones. “Would you recommend some documents and books? I would greatly appreciate any assistance. I know so little about this part of Red Territory.”

Jonah was certainly surprised. She genuinely wished to rise to her new position, not something that most high-born women would agree to. “Of course. Whatever you need, I shall arrange for it.”

Honestly, she was nothing like he had been imagining. Sitting across from her in the dining hall, Jonah could find little fault in her manners and etiquette, although it was taught to all who bore a Chosen Thirteen family name. She gracefully answered each of his questions without becoming defensive or annoyed, as most did.

“Why did you marry King Lancelot?”

The undertone of the question really asking: why did your family push for this arrangement? For power? For higher status?

One that Greer knew she’d be answering time and time again. Most of the highest families in Red Territory wanted a clear line of succession into the army, so there wasn’t too much intermingling of the Chosen Thirteen’s families in the marriage aspect. Alliances were one thing but claims to certain seats in the army were expected to be clear.

And as such, an Atlas marrying a Kingsley had caused an uproar, especially with their seat forfeited to a man that had no pedigree.

Greer set her teacup onto the saucer without a sound, quietly considering the question before speaking. “Wouldn’t it be lovely to say that we married for love?” She posed the question with a weak smile. “But it’s never so easy.”

The Queen of Hearts waited in silence. He hadn’t gotten a satisfactory answer from Lancelot, instead being told that the reason was irrelevant. The younger Atlas nothing like he’d imagined. Not at all like her elder brother. Jonah might even admit that he found her a good fit for his King, but it depended on this very important question.

“I don’t believe that I can give an answer that will suffice. Lancelot needed a bride to calm the fighting in his family, and I needed a husband for the same reason. It’s as simple and complicated as that.” Greer paused, squeezing her hands together in her lap.

“Then I am correct to assume that your family wants a claim to the King of Hearts position.”

The young Atlas nearly nodded. It was the truth, one that wasn’t hard to figure out. “What my family wants and what I want are not in alignment. Lancelot is aware, as well. It’s quite selfish, but I said yes to the marriage as a means to escape the Atlas family. Lancelot has promised to keep me safe.” Or at least, that is what Greer wanted to believe. The influence of her family would not be easily escaped. Even at the headquarters, they would find a way to get to her.

They wanted a child, a way to extort the Kingsley family for power and status.

Greer simply wanted to be happy, something almost unattainable in the world she resided in. Something that she had yet to experience. Mousse had escaped. He found purpose in being a diplomat. The family had shunned him, blaming him for shaming the Atlas name.

She couldn’t admit that her family still had their claws deep in her. Even though she knew how they would view her and Lancelot’s child, Greer thought she would be thrilled to be a mother. And yet, how much of that want was her own?

“I see.” Jonah observed her for a moment longer. There was no ill intent on her part. He would personally look into her family and do whatever necessary to protect his King and his new wife. He cast a glance at the clock and rose silently from his seat. “If you require anything, please ask and it will be done.”

The kitchen staff swiftly removed all the dishes from the table. Their curious gaze flickering to the woman, all having heard the rumors of Lancelot’s bride. They scurried back to the kitchen to gossip, but their whispers weren’t quite low enough to evade her ears.

I heard the Atlas family practically has been begging for her to be married for years now.

The family may be disgraced but I feel bad for the poor girl having to marry into the Kingsley family. Everyone knows that King Lancelot is cold-hearted. I bet she’s miserable.

I’ll wager he gets rid of her before the end of the month.

Don’t say that! You’ll get in trouble with the head chef!

But it’s the truth. He’ll send her away and some tragic accident will befall her--

“Excuse me. May I have another cup of tea?”

All three heads swiveled toward her voice with varying degrees of shock and embarrassment, having been caught. Jumbled apologies spilled from their mouths as they bowed respectfully. “Of course, just one moment-”

“I’m surprised you’d speak so poorly of the King of Hearts.” Greer watched them visibly shrink at her words. It wouldn’t do to have rumors spreading about a weak wife. It would only cause discourse and put her in danger. Their silence prompted her to continue. “It would be wise to consider more carefully before so casually spreading false information.”

The three were moving around the kitchen stiffly, unable to look directly at her.

“I do appreciate the worry for my wellbeing.” She twisted their words with expertise expected of her status in the territory. Although she would not hold quite as much power as any man, there was still a healthy amount of respect to be given to the wives. Greer would not be needlessly cruel, but she wouldn’t allow there to be rumors of her painted as weak and pitiful or rumors of her husband treating her poorly. “However, there is no evidence of any ill treatment, and you’ll do away with such speech whether in the presence of us or in secret.”

Putting to rest this distance between the couples would be best.

“I’ll hear nothing else of this. Our marriage is not subject to your petty grievances. You will be respectful of both King Lancelot and I. Am I understood?” Greer had no reason to raise her voice. Her words stood on their own without the volume.

Many talked about how Lancelot was cold and aloof. The women who were rejected by him would gripe endlessly at cordial parties but would attempt it again and again. Staff that had served in the army spoke in a similar fashion. As if they had any idea what his position took from him, what he must do in order to protect and serve Red Territory.

Much of which Greer had little knowledge of but vowed to learn so that she could better support him. Their public image had to be maintained, otherwise they became targets to tear down in order for others to gain power.

The last thing they needed was more enemies.

“Here you are, Lady Greer. We sincerely apologize for our carelessness.”

Satisfied with their remorse, she accepted the cup and went on her way. The moment the dining hall door closed behind her, she leaned back against it. A soft sigh passed her lips. This would become a regular occurrence, she was sure. At least she’d had the practice of explaining her brother’s departure from the army to those who criticized.

The layout of the building just as Jonah described to her. Soldiers passing her in the hall gave curious looks. It was tiring, but they had to courtesy to whisper after she’d gone by. They wouldn’t dare blaspheme their King.

Greer found the office with little trouble. The cracked door easy to slip through and she found Lancelot at the desk, alone, with a stack of documents. Clear blue eyes rose when she placed the cup of warm tea in an empty spot.

“You don’t need to trouble yourself with bringing me tea.”

“I wanted to.”

Lancelot set his quill down, plucking the cup from the saucer to take a sip. “I heard you had trouble with a few of the kitchen staff but handled it well.” He nearly laughed at the way her brow knitted in confusion.

“How did you already hear about that? It was only moments ago.” Greer couldn’t call seeing anyone leave the office that would have knowledge of that. The staff themselves would never admit to their blunder, lest they lose their job.

“There’s little that happens here that I don’t know about. You shouldn’t bother yourself with such nonsense as idle gossip. I’m in no need of protection.” He’d grown quite used to the rumors surrounding him. His wife would be subject to the same treatment, and he’d known that before agreeing to a marriage.

She brushed a strand of brown hair away from her face with a gentle smile. “Perhaps not, but it’s us now, together. The more we allow people to pry and insinuate, the more problems that are going to arise. I was simply putting out the sparks to a potential fire.”

Rumors about either one affected the other.

Lancelot could honestly say that he hadn’t expected her to react in the way that she did. There were two kinds of women in high society that he’d come across. The ones who wielded their power above others to entertain themselves, and the quiet ones who found their identity solely in their husband, choosing to blindly follow.

Greer was neither of them.

And he quite liked that about her.

“Would you like to join me for a walk?” He’d surprised himself by asking that. His better judgement failing him. It would be safer to keep her at a distance. This arrangement only for show, to satiate the wolves for the time being. But, after witnessing her display through the mirror, Lancelot desired a little more time with her.

The air outside brisk even in the late morning. It held little bite, but it was enough to cause the young woman to shiver. Fall had descended on Cradle, turning the green into brilliant shades of orange, red, and yellow. The sun shining down on them aided in a little warmth.

“You seem to have made quite the impression on Jonah, as well. It’s only your first day here.” His Queen of Hearts shuffling around the topic in their meeting, praising her and calling her well-suited for the position she now held. He hadn’t expected her to do so well.

Greer lightly laughed, tugging her white cloak a little tighter. “Jonah is exactly as I imagined he’d be. Mousse wrote about him often. He’s loyal and strict but he cares deeply for his country and for you.” Golden eyes turned upward to meet his, a gentle smile on her lips.

“Yes, he does. Approval from him is a difficult task and yet you received it with one conversation.” The leaves crunched beneath his boots. Of all the proposals he’d received, Greer remained the one that wouldn’t leave his mind. She was kind and fair, smart but willing to expand her knowledge, and today he’d learned that she also stood up for herself and him. She continued to surprise him at every turn.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that he approves of me. Just that I’m a few steps above my brother in his eyes. It’s going to take time for the people to accept me and accept us. We’ll have to work quite hard to gain public support.”

The King of Hearts hummed in agreement. Even if their marriage was one of necessity, there were still hurdles to overcome. Their lives would be picked apart. They’d be forced to prove their affection and commitment to each other, especially since the wedding happened in private and so quickly.

He was brought out of his thoughts when she took his hand in both of hers.

“We both want the best for Red Territory, and for now, I think that’s enough to make this work. I meant what I said at the altar. I’ll do everything within my power to help achieve the peace in Cradle that you’re striving for.” Playing the dutiful wife had been her families plan, but Greer wanted to be more than that. She would be whatever he needed.

Lancelot didn’t doubt her sincerity, not the first time she said it nor now. “Yes, I’m quite sure you’re willing, but I’m not going to risk putting you in harm’s way. There are going to be times that I cannot allow you to assist.” The defiance in her golden eyes was unusual for a new bride, but he didn’t dislike it. “However, there are matters of my family that need to be settled and you will help me quell the fighting.”

Her shoulders relaxed and a satisfied smile tugged at her lips. “Of course.”

Greer didn’t know why he’d done it. Was it the soldiers watching as the patrolled the grounds, or the staff peeking through the windows? It was likely for show. To prove to the onlookers that they were, at least on the outside, a committed married couple.

And yet, it didn’t feel so empty. His warm lips against hers, a tender kiss that drove away the cold from her body and replaced it with fire. His arm around her waist to hold her body against his, giving a sense of safety and comfort. He lingered, giving her heart a little too much to hold onto.

She didn’t love him, nor did he love her, but…

Greer imagined she could get addicted to this.

#ikemen revolution #ikerev #lancelot kingsley #greer atlas #jonah clemence #red army #there are beauty and beast undertones coming #its just a slow process #also please vote in my 25 days of christmas!

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emachinescat · 4 years

Text

The Casket of the Armadillos (by Edgar Allan Nope)

A Psych Fan-Fiction

by @emachinescat

@febuwhump day 9 - buried alive

Summary: When Shawn confronts a grad student turned murderer, he learns a very important lesson a very hard way: Don’t piss off English nerds - especially the homicidal ones.

Characters: Shawn, Gus, Juliet, Lassiter, Henry

Words: 5,924

TW: panic attacks, buried alive, claustrophobia

Note: If you liked this classic lit-inspired Psych fic, you can always check out this one I wrote, inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird: The Finch and the Mockingbird

Keep reading here, or on AO3!

If you enjoy, please consider liking, commenting, or re-blogging, and you can follow me for more content like this! :)

I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!

- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”

Her name was Olivia Hale, she was a twenty-three-year-old grad student at UCSB, and she was working on her doctorate in American lit. She was attractive in a cute librarian sort of way - short and petite, with long, curly auburn hair she kept in a bun and oversized glasses with thick lenses, and a smattering of freckles across her slightly upturned nose. She knew a little bit about everything when it came to literature as a whole, a rather impressive amount about American literature, and absolutely everything there was to know about the life and works of one Edgar Allan Poe.

She was also batshit crazy and currently pointing a .22 pistol directly at Shawn’s head.

“Don’t move,” she growled, disengaging the safety.

Shawn did a cursory glance around the empty classroom, looking for anything at all he could use to his advantage, to distract her or attack her with or - worst case scenario - to use as a shield. But Olivia had found him snooping around on the tiny fourth floor study room that she’d been given to use by the department chair as her thesis headquarters. She’d really made herself at home here, piling books and journals and what seemed like hundreds of loose sheets of paper on every available surface.

But he was stranded in the middle of the room, with nothing close enough to use as a weapon, and so Shawn used the most powerful tool he had, one that had saved his life and many others, wooed women all over the country, and ordered more chili cheese dogs than he could count.

He started talking.

“Look, Olivia, I get it,” he said soothingly. Slowly, in the most non-threatening manner possible, he lowered his hands. Olivia gripped the pistol tighter but didn’t shoot. “I know what happened. You didn’t mean to kill him.”

Her eyes were wide and fierce, her lips pursed into a thin line. “No,” she admitted. “It was an accident. But he was going to--”

“Yeees,” drawled Shawn, slowly raising his left hand and putting it to his temple, very well aware that he was probably pushing the limit with all of this movement after she had expressly ordered, at gunpoint, for him to stay still. “I see it. Dr. Graves was feeling guilty, wasn’t he? A fifty-five-year-old professor with a fancy PhD and tenure, and a devoted wife and three kids and two grandkids, to boot. The perfect life. But oooh, it wasn’t enough for him, was it?”

Shawn immediately answered his own question, something that he had become exceptionally good at over the years since he was usually the only one who could keep up with himself. “Of course not! What’s the perfect job and family when you’ve got a smokin’ hot, super smart student in her mid-twenties who thinks you’re the most impressive man on the planet?”

She sneered, and Shawn noticed with some trepidation that the hand holding the gun trembled just the tiniest bit. When she spoke, her voice warbled with rage. “My age and appearance had nothing to do with it - and even if it did, there was nothing wrong with our relationship! We were perfect for each other, intellectual equals. We were on each other’s levels - he was my soulmate! So don’t you dare belittle what we had like that!”

Ah. So he had hit a nerve. This could now go either one of two ways, in Shawn’s extensive experience in being held hostage: Either she would get fed up and send a bullet screaming through his body, Garth Longmore style, or she would let her emotions distract her, and cause her to make a stupid mistake. Obviously, Shawn hoped for the latter.

Now Shawn had to make a choice, because he could proceed in one of two ways: Either he could back off and try from another angle, or he could further antagonize her into (hopefully) making a mistake. Naturally, Shawn went with the latter.

“Sure, sure,” he agreed airily. “Older men and younger women do it all the time. But to say there was nothing wrong with your relationship? The man was married, and you were his student. I’m not the headmaster here -”

“Dean,” she corrected sharply, and this further proved that Shawn had pegged her correctly as a know-it-all literature wunderkind who had to be right one thousand percent of the time. “This isn’t Hogwarts.”

Shawn gave a tiny shrug. “To be honest, all big schools look like Hogwarts to me.”

“Because you have the mind of a child.” The words were accusatory and patronizing, but Shawn flashed a dazzling smile.

“Thank you,” he said. Before she could respond, he continued his earlier thoughts, “Even though you were the ‘perfect couple,’ you were furious with him for even suggesting that you stop seeing one another. The affair was too risky, and he missed his wife. He wanted to tell her the truth, fix things.”

“It would have ruined everything!” Olivia hissed, and the sound of her voice sent shivers down Shawn’s spine. There was an unhinged quality to it, something raw and dangerous that he hadn’t sensed before. He fought the sudden urge to backpedal as far away from her as possible. “We were perfect together! And if he told his wife and she let it slip, I would be kicked out! All my research, all my time and work here, everything would be gone! He had no right to make that decision for me, to take away my future!”

“Maybe,” said Shawn, and it was like he was watching from outside his body, because he knew that what he was about to say was a big mistake, but he was helpless to stop the words from tumbling from his lips, “you should have thought more about your future before you pursued your married Shakespeare teacher.”

Fury etched itself into every feature of her face, turning her from a beautiful librarian to a feral monster, but her voice was slow and measured as if it was taking every ounce of self-control she possessed not to shoot him where he stood. “He taught Southern. Gothic. Masterpieces.”

Shawn tried to backtrack, to undo whatever damage had been done by his unpredictably big mouth. “But,” he pressed. “Killing him was an accident. You didn’t mean to push him down four flights of stairs.”

She considered this. “No, I didn’t mean to kill him,” she reaffirmed, and then an odd calm smoothed out the angry crevices between her eyebrows - the peace, perhaps, of having come to an important decision that she knew was absolutely right. Shawn recognized the look because he’d seen it on others’ faces before (very rarely, if ever, had he seen it upon his own). “And I don’t think I will kill you, either.”

Whatever Shawn had been expecting, this wasn’t it. Everything about this woman screamed insane and vengeful. If Shawn lived, he would turn her into the police, and she would go to jail for a very long time. She was incredibly intelligent - surely she knew this!

And then she clarified, and the world started to make sense again - though Shawn would have honestly been perfectly content in this alternate reality where the bad guy suddenly has a miraculous change of heart. “Well,” she amended, “I won’t kill you directly. I’ve never shot anyone before - I only have this little guy here because I’m a young, pretty girl on a big college campus, and I have two night classes. Besides, your death shouldn’t be so easy.”

Shawn swallowed. “Olivia, you don’t have to do this. You haven’t intentionally killed anyone yet. If you turn yourself in now and cooperate, your sentence will be a lot shorter than if you kill me - directly or not. Because make no mistake, even if you kill me, you will still get caught. The SBPD has some damn good detectives, and they’ll bring you down even if I don’t.”

She didn’t respond to him directly. Instead, her expression was flat save for the dark gleam in her eyes, and she intoned words that in and of themselves had no meaning to Shawn, but that still managed to strike a chord of fear deep inside of his soul. “‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.’” Shawn was utterly unnerved by this point; it was like she had been taken over by something both sinister and incredibly well-spoken.

And indeed, in many ways she had, as Shawn soon found out, she was quoting the beginning of a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

Presently, however, Shawn had no context for her strange words or sudden shift of demeanor. His skin crawled and his heart pumped with more get-up-and-go than he’d ever been able to muster in his whole body before. “Uh, Olivia…”

“Move,” she ordered.

This time, though it was contrary to his nature, Shawn did what she said without arguing. This side of the student, with stolen words sliding evilly from her mouth, was a million times scarier than the enraged Olivia who had very nearly shot him between the eyes.

She marched him out of the room and down the three flights of stairs to the main lobby of the English building. It was dark outside, nearing midnight, and Shawn kicked himself for thinking he was clever for coming to investigate this late. He’d thought she’d be at home sleeping. He should have realized that as a grad student, sleeping was the one thing she wouldn’t have time for! And now he was in very deep trouble, alone, and no one knew where he was. He should have waited until morning, until the building wasn’t deserted, should have at least called Gus and told him what he was doing. But it was a college campus, and she was a tiny little literature nerd - it should have been safe!

As she forced him down one flight of stairs, then two, then three, and finally, into a stairwell off the beaten path that had to be unlocked with a key card - which she had - she continued to encant, her voice slowly losing its flatness and growing into something twisted and sing-songy with every word.

“‘You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point, definitely, settled - but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk.’”

“Olivia--”

It was as if she hadn’t heard him as she shoved him into the basement, and now her voice stilled from a chant to a slow, measured whisper.. “‘I must not only punish but punish with impunity.’”

Shawn wasn’t sure what impunity was, but it sure as hell didn’t sound good.

Their final destination ended up being a small, partially finished storage room near the back of the basement. Dusty boxes and rusted cabinets and archaic old computer monitors lined the walls and cluttered most of the walking space. Shawn was reminded grimly of a school supply graveyard.

Olivia stopped him when they came to a brick wall that had been busted through to fix some issue with the pipes - Shawn saw the water stains on the concrete floor near the break in the wall, and there was a brand new water pipe joined to an old, yellowed one at about eye-level in the small open space between the bricks and the drywall beyond. Shawn also noticed that the new bricks had been neatly piled up near a sealed bucket that almost certainly contained mortar, right outside of the hole. Someone was in the process of walling this section back up.

“Nice wall,” Shawn joked, relieved that Olivia had finally stopped her creepy recitation and desperately trying to lighten the mood and bring things back to some sort of normal - honestly, he’d take being threatened with the gun again to the horror movie stuff he’d just witnessed. “I bet all the other walls are jealous of it.”

It was a lame joke, but her eerie dramatics had him all kinds of messed up. He expected her to tell him to shut up, or to threaten to shoot him again, or to actually shoot him, but instead she asked him a question in that same cold, calm voice as before. “Have you ever read ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ Shawn?”

Shawn blinked. “I make it a point not to read anything that’s not a magazine from the 80s or WikiHow articles on ‘How to Escape from Dangerous Forest Animals.’”

The corner of her lips lifted in a mockery of a satisfied smile. “Good. Then you’ll get to experience it for yourself, first hand. Just wait until you get to the ending! You’re going to love it.”

Somehow, Shawn doubted that very much.

Still holding the gun on him with one hand, she reached her free hand into the cross-body bag she wore and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. Shawn groaned.

“Come on! What college student just carries handcuffs in their school bag?” Then he remembered that this particular student had until recently been having a passionate affair with her teacher. “Wait - never mind. It makes perfect sense.”

She laughed, even though what he said wasn’t even remotely funny. The sound of it was strange and discordant - light and tinkly with a threatening undertone that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Then she gestured at the hole in the wall and ordered, “In.”

Shawn had known it was coming, but had tried to shove that knowledge into the corner of his mind - something that was quite difficult to do for someone with a photographic and eidetic memory - in an effort to convince himself that even she wasn’t that cruel. He tried to appeal to her one last time: “Olivia, it’s not too late to stop this. I mean, are you really going to do this to another human being - seriously, look at this place - it’s dusty and moldy and I’m almost certain there’s no room service! If you’re going to chain me to a pipe, why not do it in a five star hotel?” When she nudged him with the gun, eyes gleaming with something dark and triumphant, he reluctantly stepped into the small space and implored, “I’ll even settle for a seedy motel off a poorly lit backroad. I’m not too picky.”

She didn’t answer him as she stood on her tiptoes and handcuffed Shawn’s wrists around the pipe, cinching them so tight that the metal dug into his skin and he doubted that even his dad’s lessons on escaping handcuffs wouldn’t be much help here. Already he could feel his fingers going numb, and his shoulders and back had started to ache from the hunched position he was forced to take due to the height of the pipe and the awkward angle of his arms.

Well, Shawn thought glumly as she smiled at her handiwork and carefully backed out of the small space, maybe all wasn’t lost. Surely someone would come down here and find him. This place was dusty, but it couldn’t be abandoned - work still needed to be done down here, after all. And he could always yell for help once he was sure Olivia was gone. She was booksmart, but maybe she wasn’t criminally minded. He might be in for an uncomfortable night, but in the morning someone would find him and he could have his vision and the cute little psychopath would go to jail for a very long time.

He waited for her to leave, but instead, she used a crowbar to pry the lid off the bucket of mortar, and the pit in Shawn’s stomach became a whole-ass trench. He should have seen this coming - his heart pounded madly against his rib cage as if trying to free itself, with or without him. He couldn’t blame it. “Olivia, please,” he said, and this time, there was no joke, his voice imploring and terrified. “You don’t have -”

Again, she cut him off. “How would you like to hear a story before you die, Shawn?” she asked in a tone so casual that she could have been asking him if he wanted to grab a taco.

“How about you tell me a story and then I don’t die?” Shawn bargained weakly.

“Mmmm… If you stay alive, my whole life will be ruined,” Olivia reasoned. “And I have worked far too hard to allow that to happen. So. You just stand there - quietly - and I’ll tell you the story of Poe’s most beloved tale of revenge. I won’t tell you word for word, of course - we don’t have time for that - but for posterity, I do have it memorized.” She sounded grotesquely proud of that fact. “It’s my favorite of his stories, after all.”

And so, as she slowly began to brick up the hole in the wall, with Shawn trapped, helpless and in a dissociative state of panic, she told him the story of two men with really stupid names that Shawn somehow managed, despite his raging fear, to file away for later as possible nicknames for Gus.

“Our story starts in Italy, during the carnival, and our narrator is a man named Montresor, who has a grudge against his once-friend, now-foe, Fortunato…”

The story was an interesting one, even to Shawn, who preferred watching over reading and especially over listening any day. And as it turned out, Olivia was a really good storyteller. If he had been in any other position, Shawn might have actually enjoyed the suspenseful tale of revenge.

But as he stooped there and was forced to listen, all he could think about was about how terrified this Fortunato guy must have been, and then he started wondering how long it had been before the man hadn’t been able to hold his bladder or… other things… anymore, and then about what had happened when he was too tired and dizzy to stand up, if the manacles on his wrists had pulled so hard against his flesh that they cut into him, and if lack of water or oxygen killed him first, all the while he knew that he wasn’t asking these questions for the sake of the fictional character. He was asking them for himself. Olivia had made it exceedingly clear - for a literature scholar, she was surprisingly un-subtle about any underlying meanings or motives - that Fortunato’s story was now to be his story.

It wasn’t until she had begun discussing with rapture the brilliance of Poe’s use of the Italian carnival as the setting of a story about murder (because of its abandonment of social order, whatever that meant) and had built up all but the last two bricks, leaving a hole around Shawn’s eye level, that came to the most horrifying realization yet. He’d been so focused on his own thoughts and fears with Olivia’s words washing over him like an acid bath that he’d barely registered that the dim light in the hole had been darkening incrementally with each new brick placed. Now he came to the bone-chilling understanding that once she placed those last two bricks, he would be completely in the dark.

He was going to die, alone, terrified, and in utter darkness with fear as his only friend. He thought in that moment that he might die of a heart attack before he could even think about dehydrating or suffocating. Honestly, it sounded like an easier way to go.

“Well,” said Olivia finally. “I can’t say that it’s been a pleasure to meet you in any way, Shawn, but I suppose I should thank you. Ever since I found out about this unfinished wall down here, I’ve had this unscratchable itch to recreate the titular scene from my favorite Poe story. You gave me the means and justification to do it!”

Shawn was so overcome by the surging sea of fear and early-onset claustrophobia that he couldn’t even muster up the gumption to make a joke about the word titular. Instead, as Olivia knelt down next to her bag, rooting around for something, he jerked madly against the handcuffs, desperately searching for any give in the metal or the pipe he was handcuffed to (or even his wrists, at this point he wasn’t picky). But the pipe was new, and it was sturdy, and so was the fitting that connected it to the old one, which itself didn’t seem too keen on budging, either.

A sick grin teased at Olivia’s parted lips. “Oh, Fortunato tried that too. But then he stopped crying and struggling and chose to die with a shred of dignity. But I highly doubt dignity is something you’re capable of.”

And then, with the finality of fitting a lid to a coffin, she slapped a piece of fluorescent pink duct tape over his mouth and a fresh wave of panic ravaged Shawn’s everything. He didn’t remember this happening in her retelling of the story! Then again, the Fortunato guy had been sealed into catacombs deep underground. Shawn was in the basement of a heavily trafficked university building. Someone would actually hear him if he called for help, so she took his voice away from him too. He couldn’t even sing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to pass his time or distract him from the inevitable. As if it wasn’t bad enough that he would die in the dark, he would die in the quiet too - and silence was, as his incessant need for chatter plainly proved, Shawn’s worst enemy.

“Goodbye, Shawn,” Olivia said, and she added one brick, layered on the mortar, and then gave her captive one last satisfied glance before adding the last brick and leaving Shawn in total, impenetrable darkness. He would never forget that last, terrible look in her eyes before his world went black - she was no longer human; she had elevated herself to the level of the storytelling gods and she relished in the twisted power she held over the life of another human.

As her footsteps clipped away, her voice, obscenely gleeful, called out, “In pace requiescat!”

***

The next ten hours were the worst of Shawn’s life, and they consisted of five main elements all bundled together into a nightmare that would stalk him for the rest of his life.

Cold. It was the middle of January, and though it couldn’t have been less than forty-five degrees outside, the basement - especially behind the walls - was chilly, and with the musty smell and the dust and the pitch black, Shawn was reminded far too much of a grave and knew that he might as well be in one, because this was going to be his. It was the kind of cold that bit deeper than the skin and wormed its way into the very core and dug its icy fangs in and refused to let go - the chill of death, an open invitation from the dead to join them in their home beneath the ground. He shivered a lot, but he couldn’t be sure if it was the cold, or the panic. It was probably a little of both.

Dark. The darkness that surrounded him had an unreal nature that could easily trick the eyes into thinking that they were already closed. It was oppressive and thick, pressing in from all sides, inky black water dredged from the depths of the sea.

Shawn had never been a fan of the dark, but neither did he exactly fear it. That changed the second that the last brick was put into place and he found himself in a darkness so severe that were in not for the feeling of floor beneath his feet he could have been suspended in the depths of space so remote that not even stars could reach. The darkness swarmed his senses - it had a physical presence, and it didn’t lessen, never permitted Shawn’s eyes to adjust to it in the slightest. It just hung there, surrounded him, assaulted his mind with its infinite arsenal of nightmares.

After experiencing true darkness, Shawn would never sleep without a nightlight again (which unfortunately meant he couldn’t judge Gus anymore for using one, either).

Pain. At first it was just the pull of his shoulders, the ache in his back. Then, about five minutes after he’d been sealed up, he realized his wrists were screaming with agony - he must have torn them badly when he fought to get away, but the adrenaline staved off the pain until now. He vaguely wondered how deeply the cuffs had cut - it felt like the skin on his wrists had been flayed - but quickly remembered that it didn’t matter where he was going.

Then there were the hunger pangs, and they mingled with the cramps from holding his bladder longer than he ever had before, and at some point muscle spasms in his arms and chest and legs joined the choir of suffering. At one point, he shed a few tears, but they could have just as easily been from anxiety or exhaustion, which itself produced its own kind of pain - he longed to sleep, but his body refused to allow him even that comfort until the very end, right before he was rescued, as if he were being forced on pain of death to endure the pain of death right up until the very moment of his painful death.

At least he didn’t have too much trouble breathing. There must have been a crack somewhere in the wall in front of or behind him, because fresh air was entering somehow. He did, several hours into his imprisonment, begin finding it difficult to pull in a full breath, and by the time he was rescued he was giddy with light-headedness, but he didn’t know if it was from the air quality or exhaustion or panic or from being forced to breathe only through his nose for hours, but he really didn’t care.

Quiet. Even worse than the cold and the dark and the pain was the quiet. The tape over his mouth prevented him from doing the one thing that could bring him comfort in even the most difficult of situations. Talking was what Shawn did - he utilized mindless prattle to distract bad guys, to make people underestimate him, to quell fear and panic in himself and those around him, to annoy and wheedle those whose opinions meant the most to him (and who he was most afraid to be real with), and most importantly, to distract himself from all the pain and baggage that his exceptional memory had filed away for him throughout the years. Talking nonsense meant that he wasn’t thinking about or acknowledging the parts of himself that arguably needed the most attention, those bits that were scared and unsure and hurt and vulnerable.

Shawn had always detested silence, and now it had invaded so intimately that even he could not drive it out.

And all of these culminated in a constant, agonizing state of absolute, unrelenting fear.

Panic attacks are horrific things that take your natural instincts in potentially dangerous situations and turn them against you in the cruelest of ways. They suck the air out of your lungs and make your heart pound so fast and so hard that you are convinced it’s going to give out in pure fatigue and never make it to that next beat. It makes your skin crawl like there are thousands of spiders nesting there, and your chest hurts and your breath is short and stunted and you know you are dying, that the next breath will be your last, but it isn’t, and the fear just continues and sometimes you curl into a ball or rock back and forth or scratch at your skin.

Panic attacks generally last anywhere from five to twenty minutes. Shawn was stuck in a state of raw, unfiltered panic for ten hours. When the EMTs at the scene took his heart rate, it was 160, had been the entire time he’d been buried in a collegiate tomb, knowing that he was going to die.

Put simply, Shawn Spencer spent ten hours in his own personal hell.

***

It was nearly three in the afternoon when Detectives Juliet O’Hara and Carlton Lassiter, with the help of a frantic Gus and a worried Henry that tried his damndest not to show how worried he was, made the final connections in the case and tracked down the woman who had slept with and then killed her lover like a hyper-intelligent, book-loving black widow. Juliet and Gus remained on the college campus to continue investigating while Lassiter and Henry went on to the station to question Olivia. She had refused to say where the missing psychic detective was, however, and only offered one bitter phrase, spoken in another language that sounded to the questioning party like a curse being placed on their heads:

“Nemo me impune lacessit.”

It was Gus who figured it out after Lassiter related the cryptic saying over the phone.

“I know that phrase!” he exclaimed to a swell of raised eyebrows. “It’s Latin! It means no one wounds me with impunity!”

“You speak Latin?” Juliet seemed impressed.

“Not much. But I recognize that particular saying, because it’s from a story that gave me nightmares my entire sophomore year of college.” He shuddered. “It’s from the second-most terrifying Poe story.” He didn’t elaborate on what the first-most terrifying one was, largely because he didn’t want to give the others fodder to use “The Tell-Tale Heart” against him like Shawn already did. Then the full implications of the words sunk in and he gasped, “We have to find Shawn, now.” The horror in his expression sent a chill down Juliet’s spine.

“Gus - what the hell are you talking about?” Henry was no longer trying to hide the panic in his voice.

“It’s from ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ Gus clarified, his own panic making it difficult to express himself clearly.

“Guster, this is hardly the time for you to have a glass of wine,” Lassiter barked. “Now stop talking in riddles and just spit it out!”

But Juliet had now made the connection as well and answered for Gus. “Oh my gosh - isn’t that the one where the guy is sealed into a wall and left to die?”

The dread in Gus’s eyes said it all.

“He’s got to be somewhere on campus,” Henry reasoned, and his voice shook the tiniest bit. “Lassiter and I are on our way back to you now. In the meantime, check with the school and see if there are any places that are easily accessed and under construction.”

No one said it aloud, but the possibility that her words hadn’t been a hint at all and that Shawn was somewhere else entirely hung in the air amongst them. It was funny, Juliet thought - though it wasn’t funny at all - she urgently needed Gus’s theory to be right, because otherwise they would have no leads, but at the same time, she was terrified of the implications if it were true.

Her heart felt as sick as Montresor’s when he placed the last brick as she and Gus raced to the administration building and prayed they weren’t too late.

***

When they broke through the wall, the sight that greeted them was one that would never leave them - any of them. Even Lassiter, who made it his sacred duty to remain unfazed by anything his job threw at him was visibly disturbed.

A moment of silence, a beat where time stood still and everyone was afraid to move, and then -

“Shawn!” The four rescuers surged forward as one, but Henry got there first, his trembling fingers groping for a pulse - thank God, but it was racing, dangerously fast, and in the background he heard Lassiter radioing for an ambulance.

Shawn woke up as Henry gently peeled the hideous pink duct tape (an affront to all duct tape everywhere) off of his mouth. It wasn’t a gentle waking, a flutter of eyelashes or the murmuring of a name - it was violent and erratic, fueled by terror.

Henry had had to deal with panic attacks before - mostly Gus’s when he took the boys camping together, but once or twice when Shawn was really young and he’d had a bad dream. This one was the worst that he’d ever seen - Shawn woke with a muffled yell, panting through his nose, writhing, tears streaming down his face, eyes squeezed shut against the trauma he’d been subjected to, and he threw himself against the handcuffs so fiercely that Henry feared he’d break his wrists.

Soon his wrists were freed, though, and Henry, with the help of Lassiter, helped a weakened Shawn out of the wall and into the basement and lowered him to the floor. Henry sat with him and rubbed his back and spoke quietly to him, Juliet took his hand, and Gus reassured him while Lassiter ran up the stairs to check on the ETA of the ambulance.

Twenty minutes later, Shawn had been placed onto a stretcher and carried up the stairs and out into the sunlight - sensing the warm rays, he opened his eyes only to pinch them shut again as the brightness after so many hours in the dark nearly blinded him. He had been given something to calm him down, and he would be going to the hospital to be checked over and observed overnight, and a psychiatrist would be sent in to evaluate him in the morning, and everything was moving so fast that Shawn leaned over the side of the stretcher and deposited the remnants of the last thing he’d eaten, nearly twelve hours before.

“There’s one thing I still don’t get,” he gasped as he was eased back onto the stretcher. “Where do the armadillos come into her plan?”

The EMTs exchanged a concerned look at the stretcher, probably wondering if there had been some carbon monoxide poisoning after all. Gus, however, just rolled his eyes.

“Amontillado, Shawn. It’s a kind of wine.”

“The story is called ‘The Casket of the Armadillos,’” Shawn argued stubbornly, going so far as to cross his arms over his chest, pulling at the IV in his right hand.

Gus was going to argue, to insist that he’d actually read the story (and why the heck would someone fill a casket with armadillos?), but then Gus saw the plea in Shawn’s hazel eyes, that need for jokes and silliness, and understood that his best friend was clinging onto his last shreds of control.

“You know what - I forgot,” Gus corrected, shaking his head and giving himself a light smack on the forehead for good measure. “It is ‘The Casket of Armadillos.’” He glared out at Henry, at Lassiter and Juliet and the EMTs, defying them to challenge his claim. No one did, but they all shared a similar baffled expression.

Well, they could deal with their confusion, Gus thought protectively as he watched Shawn and Henry disappear into the ambulance. Shawn had been through a night of unspeakable horror, so if it was armadillos he wanted, then it was armadillos he was going to get.

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deadlymodern · 4 years

Text

Gen 1. Summary

Hello!

I know it might be a bit hard to keep up with legacy stories, so I tried my hardest to summarize the major events in the Norman Legacy so far just in case someone who is not up to date and has no time to go through all the posts wants to catch up!

It's quite a read for Tumblr standards (a bit less than 6 google document pages, to give you an idea), but I think it does the job. I hope this will help things make more sense to newcomers c:

This post will be linked in the Norman Legacy main page so you can easily access it if you'd like.

Once I update my theme (an endless wip), I will create a page fully dedicated to summaries of generations. But for now, I hope this will do.

So, without further ado:

Summary under the cut!

In the early 1870s, the young married couple, Edgar and Theresa Norman, built a farmhouse in the English village of Brindleton.

They had four children together: Bethany, Edward, Matthew and Phillip. But, due to complications in labour, Theresa passed away giving birth to their last son.

Theresa wanted her children to receive equal education. She enrolled her daughter in school and, on their way to Beth's first day, they met a little girl named Mary McNeill. However, after Theresa's death, Edgar pulled Bethany out of school so she could help him with the farm and house work.

Mary would visit Beth often and a very special bond between the girls flourished. Also, during her time away, Beth developed a passion for reading and writing as a way to express her feelings.

At the same time, Edward was crushing on his classmate Susana Harrison. They had a rocky start to their friendship, but eventually Ned apologized for hurting Sue and they became inseparable.

Time went by and, when Phillip was old enough to go to school, Edgar allowed Bethany to return to her studies. Beth and Mary started seeing each other every single day in class and were attached by the hip.

***

A few weeks before Mary's 16th birthday, Bethany and her were talking. Beth expressed her insecurities and Mary comforted her, assuring that she was utterly beautiful and that someone would most certainly ask her to dance on her birthday ball. The girls, then, wondered how it would feel to be kissed. Mary took the opportunity to tell Beth that "they should practice together", kissing her for the first time.

It all seemed fine to Beth until she realized Mary started to avoid her on the following days.

The girls spent a couple of weeks apart until Mary apologized for her coldness, explaining she was just scared of what she was feeling. She, then, convinced Beth to attend her birthday and they got ready together, trying to get back to how their friendship was before.

During the ball, Beth was trying to contain her jealousy as she saw Mary dance with her suitor, Timothy Laurence. She was having a bad time until she was asked to dance by a gentleman called William Carrington. He taught her the basics of the waltz and she had a lot of fun, until she noticed Mary leaving the ballroom with a saddened expression.

Beth followed her friend to the roof and, amidst tipsy giggles, Mary kissed Bethany again. This time, with a lot more meaning to it.

A few days after the ball, Beth went over to Mary's house but was greeted with bitterness. Mary told her they couldn't be friends anymore since she only had "sinful thoughts" when they were together. She also told Beth that she was to go to Finishing school in the Summer and, afterwards, marry Timothy.

Bethany, who didn't usually let her emotions out, was devastated and Ned consoled her.

Eventually, Edgar married a woman named Elizabeth Reginald and Ned & Sue fell in love with each other.

***

One day, while running errands in the nearby town of Battlemere, Beth met with William again. He asked if she was in town to apply for the Battlemere College entrance exam. She had never believed that was even a possibility for her, but after their banter, she became motivated to apply and take the test.

These news weren't well received by Edgar, who scolded both Bethany and Matthew, who gave her a ride. However, Matthew stood up for his sister and reprimanded his father for being absent as a parental figure ever since their mother's death. Elizabeth consoled the teenagers once Edgar stormed out of the house.

When Summer came, Mary's mother invited Bethany to her daughter's farewell dinner. She decided not to attend, as she hadn't spoken to her friend in months. But, for her surprise, Mary showed up at her house after said dinner and asked for Beth to come see her off in the morning. Mary also apologized for her behaviour and confessed to be in love with Beth.

Both women spent the night together and said a bittersweet goodbye in the morning with a promise to exchange letters.

Around the same time, Phillip met Dorothy Turner at the music group and they became good friends.

By mid-summer, Beth discovered that she did not pass the entrance exam. To cheer her up, William decided to take her to watch a film after they accidentally met again. From then on, they developed a good friendship.

Once she arrived home, Edgar announced that he'd allow her to study and retake the college exam, just as long as she got married first. Bethany felt conflicted with the deal and, to make her feel a little better, Matthew offered himself to help her with her studies.

***

After celebrating the end of the school year - and Bethany's graduation from school - Edward received Susana's father's permission to propose.

Beth and Mary kept their promise and wrote each other weekly letters. But Edgar also kept his end of the college deal: he started receiving possible suitors for his daughter. And, once Edward announced he was going to propose to Susana, Edgar made sure to add extra pressure on Beth by saying Ned was to marry only after his sister.

That same night, Beth and Ned had an argument that made her realize her brother was more similar to their father than she imagined.

For the next couple of months, Edgar and Ned decided to update the farm house. During the reforms, Bethany stayed at Susana's house. One day, Ned brought Beth a package from Mary, but found very peculiar how his sister's eyes filled with tears as she removed herself from the room to read her letter.

Finally, after the farmhouse remodel, Ned proposed to Sue and they got engaged.

***

Phillip and Dorothy were very excited after knowing they were to perform at the village's Winterfest. During the event at the main square, Mary showed up and surprised Beth.

William felt a bit jealous to be utterly forgotten by Bethany once her friend arrived and, then, realized he was in love with her.

While Flip and Dottie performed with the music group, Edward noticed how both Mary and William stared at his sister in a similar loving way, but Sue made him cast the very idea aside.

Throughout January, Beth and Mary spent every waking moment together, enjoying the little time they had until Mary had to return to Germany. One day, the women hiked up to Whitecliff to spend some safe time alone. There, the girls confessed their deep love for each other and their desire to be together, promising to run away once Mary is finished.

At the same time, Flip and Dottie started spending more time together as well. For the first time in years, Phillip spoke about his mother and the guilt he carried for feeling "responsible" for her death. Dottie advised him to learn more about his mum as a healing process. So, on his 14th birthday, Phillip asked Edgar about his mum and Edgar showed his children a box of things that belonged to Theresa. That comforted Flip a little.

On Mary's birthday - the day after Phillip's - Beth decided to giver her the ring that belonged to her mother as they would never have a proper engagement ring. During Mary's birthday dinner, Edward noticed the ring and confronted his sister about it, only to be shunned down. Their relationship was going sour.

Beth and Mary spent their last night together and said a hopeful goodbye in the morning.

***

In Germany, at the Windenburg Finishing School, some of the girls began commenting on the amount of letters Mary would receive from Beth.

Odette Bourguignon, Mary's roommate, told her that one of the girls, Rose Courtenay, had started some "vile rumour" about her and Bethany. She advised her friend to invite her suitor to the Easter Banquet as a way to make the gossips end.

Back in Brindleton, another gossip was going around. Edward and Susana heard that two men were spotted kissing near the Battlemere Lake. Beth was surprised and excited about the idea of having more people like her living in the Bay area, but Sue didn't know much more information about the men.

***

Mary decided to follow her friend's advice and invited Timothy to the Banquet. While they had a lovely time together exploring the manor, the situation backfired once Timothy asked for Mary's hand in marriage.

The woman denied him, which made her father, Charles, furious. Before leaving the venue, Charles told the school governess, Mrs. Wagner, to let him know of any suspicious behaviour Mary may have and gave her permission to pry into her personal things.

While things seemed to go badly in Germany, Beth and Will had fun spending time together and trying to discover who the "Battlemere Two" were. Bethany was very grateful to William for being supportive of an interest of hers that wouldn't be considered ladylike, and both bonded even more.

A few days after the Easter Banquet, Mary discovered that the box she kept all of Bethany's letters had gone missing. In the middle of her panic, she indirectly confessed her relationship with Beth to Odette.

Trying to calm herself down, Mary hid from everyone, but soon she was found and learnt that Rose had been in her room the day before. Right after, Mrs. Wagner told her that her father wished to see her.

Upon arriving at the hotel, Mary saw her box on the coffee table. Charles said he had read all of the letters and was absolutely revolted by them. He gave Mary two options: she could either get married to Timothy or watch him expose Bethany to the whole Bay area.

Mary agreed to his terms but couldn't help her crying even when Timothy arrived. Tim tried to comfort his friend telling her he also did not wish to marry. He confessed to be in love with another who was not suitable for him, and said he was obliged by his father to propose.

With no other choice, Mary and Timothy got engaged.

Mary was required to stay for tea afterwards. Her parents started to excitedly plan the wedding. To make sure Mary would not get the chance to see Bethany in Brindleton before getting married, Charles suggested the wedding was held in the town of Normouth, right after the woman's graduation.

Once Mary got back to her room, she wanted to write to Beth, letting her know of her situation. However, she was interrupted by Rose, who confessed to have taken Mary's box not only by Mrs. Wagners orders, but also by curiosity to know if Mary was truly "like her"...

Rose tried to make a move on Mary, claiming that they would both end up in a sad marriage and should have some fun before. Mary pushed her away and yelled at her, ending that terrible day by herself.

#gen1 recap #norman legacy

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kaitycole · 4 years

Text

Tiptoeing with Temptation

Summary: Jackson is still reminiscing; Constantine goes to Portavira, Bianca heads back to Texas while Jackson and Eleanor find themselves alone at Valtoria.

Word Count: 3216

Pairings: Constantine x Eleanor, Eleanor x Jackson, Jackson x Bianca

Warnings: Mentions of divorce, mentions of s*x, mention of adultery

A/N: i just want to thank everyone who reads this series and any of my writings. You guys bring such joy into my life and I can never fully repay that. Sorry for the sappiness, I’m a tad emotional right now.

Song Choice: Gravity by Sara Bareilles

Part 14 of WP. To catch up, read here.

Tag List: @fromthedeskofpaisleybleakmore @kingliam2019 @texaskitten30 @glaimtruelovealways @bobasheebaby @bascmve01 @burnsoslow @the-everlasting-dream @ao719 @sirbeepsalot @janezillow @i-bloody-love-drake-walker @kimmiedoo5 @choices97 @marshmallowsaremyfavorite @lodberg @edgiestwinter @marshmallowsandfire @hopefulmoonobject @iaminlovewithtrr @cordonianroyalty @rafasgirl23415

The thing about summer is it’s full of heat and passion, but fall always follows and brings cooler weather. And just as sudden as the heat of the royal couple appeared, the coolness fall brings crept in almost as fast.

It had begun as a tiny misunderstanding. Wires got crossed and Constantine misheard Eleanor’s request. The small incident was amplified when Constantine made plans to break the peace treaty between Cordonia and Auvernal due to talks of a coup. While it had been years since she has even stepped foot on Auvernese soil, it was still her home country. A place she assumed he knew was off-limits. She took it personally and decided to hit back.

When Constantine asked for support of a new trade route, which excluded Auvernal, she blocked it. The same when he tried to entertain political engagements for both of the Rys princes. Up until now, the couple had been able to separate business from pleasure, but as the days progressed it started seeping into their personal lives.

“I’m planning on taking the boys with me for the trade summit in Portavira, okay?”

“Are you asking or telling?” She refuses to look at him, keeping her focus on removing her jewelry. The two have been at somewhat of a stalemate for the last three days. He didn’t talk much about his political dealings with her anymore and she found no reason to involve him in hers. Constantine continues to try to mend things, but Eleanor refuses to hear it.

He pinches the bridge of his nose as he tries to calm down, she really knew exactly how to get on his last nerve. “I’m trying to see if you would like to join us.”

“No.” She gets up and brushes passed him, walking into the bathroom.

“It would look extremely rude for most of the royal family to go and the queen remains at home. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“But I’m not staying at the palace, so it will simply look as though our plans overlapped. You will send my regards, won’t you?”

Constantine stares at the wall in front of him, truly contemplating bashing his head into it. Or at least finishing the conversation with it, since it just be more talkative than his wife. He hears her turn the shower on and leans against the door frame. “And where pray tell are you going to be?”

Eleanor finishes undressing before she slides the glass door open. She steps in and before sliding it closed answers him, “Valtoria.”

Taking yet another deep breath, he wonders if his father Edgar or his grandfather Augustus ever had moments like this. Arguing with their wives in the bathroom instead of any other room in the whole damn palace. “And why are you going there, my love?”

“I can’t hear you. You’ll have to get in if you wanna talk or you can wait until I’m done.”

Shaking his head, he walks away from the bathroom door and sits on their bed. He couldn’t believe this, he was king of an entire damn country yet he couldn’t get his own wife to just hear him out. He knew that she knew exactly what she was doing, that he’d cave. He always caved for her which was why when she got upset over talk of breaking their peace treaty with Auvernal, he ended the discussion. He did all that for her, but she refused to even hear him out anymore.

Several moments pass before Constantine pushes himself off the bed and storms into the bathroom.

“Why are you going to Valtoria?”

“I told you join me or wait.”

He slams his hand on the sink counter. Losing his cool for the first time in months. He hates that he’s like this again, his anger getting the best of him, “Dammit, Eleanor, could you act like an adult!”

The water immediately cuts off, she opens the door wide enough to pull in her towel before she walks out, fully wrapped in the towel. “Happy?”

“Overjoyed. Please answer my question.”

She sighs as if he’s the one that’s being stubborn, “I’m looking into the budgets of surrounding duchies, seeing if and where I can make cuts.”

“You can’t just reschedule that? Or ask the maids?”

“That’s the cop out way. As queen, I should go.” She brushes out her hair before walking out into their room. “I have already made arrangements, it’d be rude to cancel.”

He knows he isn’t going to win. Her mind is already made up and all he can do is go along with it. “Okay. Have you decided on the guards that will accompany you?”

Her head snaps over to him. That had been the last thing on her mind, typically she always went places with Constantine so she didn’t have to plan such things. She plunks a night gown from her dresser and gets dressed ignoring her husband.

“I’ll take that as a no. I’ll assign a few to your trip.” He walks by her, stopping to kiss her on the cheek. Eleanor watches as he leaves, knowing he’ll just end up sleeping on the couch in his study.

* *

“Are you sure about this?” Jackson looks at Bianca with an uneasy feeling.

“Yes. Tonya needs me, she’s going through a divorce.”

He runs his hand through his hair and down his neck before sighing, “I understand that, but taking the kids?”

“I think they will be good for her. She’s never even met Savannah, so she’d love to spoil them.” She stops packing and looks at him, “Plus, it’d be good for kids to get away from here for a bit.” Bianca has never told him outright, but he knew that she’d been uneasy about his position since the ball and the rumor. She felt that their children would be better away from court life and rumors, no matter how much Drake and Liam enjoyed being friends.

“At least let me go with you. Both kids on a plane won’t be easy.”

“You just took two weeks off not too long ago. We will be fine; I’m used to handling them alone anyways.” She shrugs, Jackson picks up on her subtle jab.

Before he could protest any further, his phone starts ringing. It was a private number, so he knew it was coming from a secured line at the palace.

“I have to take this.” Bianca makes a face before shaking her head, “It’s work.”

“Officer Walker speaking.”

“Could you come in? You have a new assignment.” Bastien asks.

“On my way.” He walks over to his wife and kisses her on the forehead, “I shouldn’t be long.”

* *

“I apologize for the late-night call.” Constantine says as Jackson walks into the study. Bastien and Timothy are already there.

“It’s no trouble at all, sir.” He looks at Timothy who gives him a quick shrug, clearly no one knew why they were called in.

“It appears the queen has decided not to travel to the Portavira summit and instead traveling to Valtoria.”

The three guards share a brief look, it was extremely rare for the royal family to make different trips at the same time. Typically, at least one monarch would stay at the palace to protect the throne; leaving it open was a risk.

“I know it’s untraditional, but the trip is important to her and I was hoping that since Officer Lykel will be accompanying me and the princes, that either Officer Walker or Officer Monroe would travel with Queen Eleanor?”

Neither say anything, the whole situation feels off. Neither wants to get in the middle of whatever was going on between the king and queen.

“I’ll go.” Jackson finally speaks up.

“What about Bianca and the kids?” Timothy says, side eying Jackson.

“She’s taking the children to Texas for a while, so the timing all works out.”

“Would you like a guard sent with them? I don’t mind sending someone.” Constantine asks.

“Thank you for the offer, but I have to decline. Bianca would lose her mind having someone following her.” Jackson gives the king a small smile.

“Officer Lykel. Officer Monroe, you are both dismissed. I need to discuss details with Officer Walker.”

Bastien and Timothy bow and take their leave. Constantine motions for Jackson to take a seat.

“Scotch?” Jackson nods, accepting the second glass that the king pours before Constantine takes his seat again. “I’m actually glad you offered, I know my wife’s safety is important to you.”

For a minute Jackson starts to panic, wondering if the king ended up hearing about Barthelemy’s actual rumor. However, he was quickly reminded of the ‘story’ they told Constantine about why they were alone in her study.

“Of course, your majesty.”

“Let’s talk shop, shall we?”

* *

After talking with Eleanor, Constantine made sure the trip to Valtoria would begin once Bianca got in touch with Jackson saying she made it safely. The entire ride was awkward for both Jackson and Eleanor, the pair hasn’t spoken to each other in weeks.

Typically, whichever guard was on duty would drive, however Constantine assigned a driver as well which meant Eleanor and Jackson sat one seat apart in the back of the town car. Eleanor flips through her planner, making notes while Jackson scrolls on his phone. The silence is broken when it begins to ring, his face turning red.

“It’s Bianca.”

Eleanor looks up and nods before he answers it.

“Hello? Oh, hey Drake, how are you buddy?”

Eleanor’s attention drifts from her planner to Jackson’s conversation. She smiles listening to how he speaks to Drake and how happy he sounds talking to him.

“I know Aunt Tonya can be a lot, but she means well.” Jackson laughs, “Yes, she does talk very loud.”

Jackson turns to Eleanor and mouths ‘I’m sorry’ but she waves him off. She really didn’t mind; she enjoys seeing this side of Jackson, she’s missed it.

“I know you like Bear, but we aren’t getting a dog. When you turn eighteen I’ll get you one. I love you too. Tell your Mom I’ll call back later.”

Eleanor is looking at him when he hangs up, but she doesn’t say anything.

“Bianca’s friend is getting a divorce from my friend. She went there to be supportive.”

Eleanor simply raises her eyebrows before engulfing herself back into her planner. Jackson leans his head back and tries to ignore the weird tension filling the car as they get closer and closer to their destination.

* *

Their first day in Valtoria is awkward. Neither of them speaks to the other, Jackson remains posted outside of whichever room she’s in which was mostly the study where she was reviewing the books. Even though Valtoria didn’t have a duke or duchess in charge, the royal counsel still kept tabs on it. Meaning tomorrow the member of counsel in charge of it would arrive and that was none other than Barthelemy Beaumont.

The second day was more eventful, but still awkward. Jackson stood posted outside the grand hall which was were Eleanor and Barthelemy were chatting about the books. To his and Eleanor’s surprise, he was extremely civil, only making one snide comment: “I should’ve guessed he’d be the guard to accompany you.” Other than that, when he first arrived, he was on his best behavior and while Eleanor didn’t like most of the choices he made with the budget, his reasoning behind them were justified in her eyes. Though he wasn’t pleased when she told him that the Crown would be taking over Valtoria, so he would no longer have access to the duchy.

The next day started off just as icy as the last two, but by dinner warmth crept in. They both ate their meals alone: he ate breakfast before her since he woke first, lunch came after her and dinner wasn’t eaten until she retired for the night. But that night, she grew lonesome and told him that if he was already there, he could just eat with her now. She apologized for her cold shoulder and he acted as though it didn’t bother him. By the end of the meal, the two were buddy buddy again, just as they were during the time they spent each Friday night together.

But on the fourth day, something happened that changes everything. Eleanor is standing on the balcony, looking at the waterfall in the distance when she hears footsteps behind her. A smile spreads across her face as she looks to her side and sees Jackson standing there.

Her chest begins to flutter, feeling something, she hasn’t felt before. When it came to Constantine, she did love him, but she wasn’t in love with him. Even though they had been on better terms lately, she could never see him more than someone she married to have an heir. Constantine gave her the feeling of security, but with Jackson there was more of an adventurous feeling.

Jackson takes Eleanor in, she’s not in her traditional attire. She didn’t have any meetings or any visitors today, so she was wearing straight legged jeans with an oversized V-neck sweater, truly channeling her inner Princess Diana. He likes this version of Eleanor, this laid back and comfortable side of her that he’d give anything to see more of. Tomorrow the two of them will be heading back to the palace, back to queen and guardsman and back to pretending they didn’t feel anything when they looked at each other.

“I’m not ready for tomorrow to come. To go back to our assigned roles.” She says, breaking the silence and turning to look at him. Since they didn’t have anything formal at the duchy, she practically demanded he dressed down for the day. So here he was in a plain white tee, slim-fitting jeans with cowboy boots: a look she didn’t think she’d be into, but couldn’t look away from.

Jackson places a hand on her cheek, caressing it with a callused thumb. He has no comforting words for her, nothing to say to sooth the pain of what tomorrow will bring. Hell, he isn’t sure how he’s going to be able to go back, how he’s supposed to let the woman he loves go.

“If we had somehow met in a different way…a different place. Do you think all of this…could’ve been different…between us?”

Tears begin to form, she tries looking anywhere but at him, “Everything would’ve been different.”

With his hand still on her cheek, he steps closer to her, filling the gap between them. He tilts her head upwards as she leans in, her baby blues pleading with him. Their lips meet instantly, the space between them vanishes as his hand slides to her neck, pulling her completely into him.

Lips part, tongues dance and twirl together as the kiss deepens. It’s not their first kiss, that was back in her boutique and had a sense of urgency to it. That kiss was the first time they made it a point to stand so close to the line that divided them. This kiss is a plea trying to hold on to something that feels fleeting. Breathlessly they part, long enough for her to jump into him; arms and legs wrapping around him as he staggers back against the wall.

His hands tightly grip the bottoms of her thighs, supporting her weight as her lips trail down his neck. A small groan leaves his lips as she softly bites up his neck. He can feel the smile on her lips as he walks them both towards her bed before she untangles herself from him. Piece by piece, clothing is shed, hands fumble together as they eagerly drop the fabric to the floor. She slides herself to the middle of the bed, Jackson lays beside her; their lips meeting once more. Goosebumps cover her skin as Jackson’s fingers lightly trail up and down her side, stopping only briefly to rake his nails against her hip bone. His lips and tongue leave a fiery trail as they explore down her body, exploring every inch of her. A gasp leaves her lips as he kisses the inside of her thigh before he tastes her. His tongue gently explores her folds each flick of his tongue teasing her more.

He takes his time as he slowly works his way back up her body, his fingers gently tease her wet core as he pushes a finger into her before adding a second. Her back slightly arches off the bed and his lips crash into hers. She drags her hand down his torso until her hand is wrapped around his length; her thumb pressing against its head, pulling a moan from his lips. They share a look, one mixed with longing and consent before Jackson roughly grabs her hips. He sinks into her. A mixture of moans and expletives fill the room as they start to move together. Her nails dig into his back, trying to ground herself as his thrusts increase. She buries her face into the curve of his neck as her body trembles beneath him.

Jackson feels Eleanor begin to tighten around him. He pulls her up, wrapping his arms around her to hold her up as he sinks deeper into her. Her head falls backwards as his name leaves her lips over and over, getting closer to the edge. He pushes into her once more before he feels her fall over the edge, her body constricting against his as her body is flooded by pleasure. Watching her come undone brings Jackson to his own orgasm, spilling his seed into her before they both fall back onto the bed. He lays on his back, chest caving in as he breathes heavily while she weakly drapes her arm over his chest; laying close to his side. There are no words spoken between them, there’s no need for them. Steady breaths and heavy eyes take over and they both fall asleep.

* *

Eleanor wakes up, the clock next to her bed tells her it’s around 2AM. She smiles as she sees Jackson sleeping, the two still intertwined together covered by just the thin top sheet. Carefully she slips out of his arms; she walks back out onto the balcony wrapped in her robe. Leaning against the railing, she lets herself get lost in thought.

Not too much time passes before Jackson wakes, feeling the emptiness beside him. He looks around before seeing her standing outside, deep in thought. Quietly, he steps into his boxers before leaning against the doorframe watching her. He’s truly in awe of the woman in front of him, no one has captivated his heart as she has. She smiles when she feels his arms wrap around her, his chin resting on her shoulder. She doesn’t want to leave; her life could be perfect just staying here with Jackson.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

She lets out a soft sigh, “Just thinking about tomorrow and how I’m not going to be able to act like that didn’t happen.”

“Then don’t,” she turns around, his arms still around her. “I don’t want to pretend. I don’t want to go back to our stations.”

“Jackson…”

“I mean it, I love you, El.”

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withhowsadsteps · 4 years

Text

better off without them (matthew connelly, HATYM)

a/n: I’m writing instead of studying but to be fair I just realized I could write something based on Billie’s Xanny while listening her album today.

–

As much as you hated being around people who were way too intoxicated, you found yourself in a party after another. Why? Because you were stupid, that is why. Or perhaps because you were too loyal to your friends. You couldn’t understand why would anyone like to get high? I mean yeah probably the feeling when the drugs kicked in was nice, sure, but what about the day after? No thank you. Hangovers after drinking too much were bad enough. But, you still went to every party. You definitely were the mom friend, checking that each of your friends got home safe.

What is it about them? I must be missing something They just keep doing nothing Too intoxicated to be scared

This was probably the third or fourth time that the boys had gotten pills somewhere. Your friends lost the last bits of common sense they had in them when they took those. They became feral, especially Kearney. He got into fights even more easily, if that was even possible. Mostly because he tried to fuck every woman he laid his eyes on. That included you. Sure, he wasn’t bad looking. But you had feelings for Matthew. No one knew. Not even Jen. Sometimes you debated if you should try just something simple, maybe that would give you courage to make your move on the man. But then you shook the thoughts out of your head. You were so much better off without them.

Better off without them They're nothing but unstable Bring ashtrays to the table And that's about the only thing they share

Why did all of these people even bother gathering together? They were all in their own little worlds, even if they sat with each other, smoking cigarettes and drinking lord knows what kind of cocktails. In your eyes it seemed that they all were having out of body -experiences. Their bodies were there, sure. Some of them even danced, talked to each other, fucked in the bathrooms, whatever. But you were pretty sure their minds were somewhere else.

I'm in their second-hand smoke Still just drinking canned Coke I don't need a Xanny to feel better On designated drives home Only one who's not stoned Don't give me a Xanny now or ever

You couldn’t take the smell of cigarettes, weed, and sweat anymore. You got up and decided to head out, to get some fresh air. You grabbed your Coke can with you, Kearney would probably spike your drink in a second in hopes of you going home with him tonight. You felt disgust creep trough every inch of your body just thinking about the way he had been looking at you tonight. “Oh come on, Y/N, stay. Try one, you won’t regret it”, he said the minute you turned your back towards the group. Without even turning around, you flipped your middle finger behind your back.

Morning as they come down (come down) Their pretty heads are hurting (hurting) They're awfully bad at learning (learning) Make the same mistakes Blame circumstance

You almost left the party without going back inside, but your guilty conscience didn’t let you do so. So, after you had had enough of fresh air and calmed your mind, you went back in. And as always, you helped everyone, even the asshole Kearney, get home safely. Matthew was most sober of them all and the lived nearest to you, so he was the last one you got home. He pleaded you to stay with him. He said that he didn’t want to be alone in the morning. Was it a good idea to stay with him? You honestly didn’t know but if this was all he would give to you, you were definitely gonna take it.

You didn’t sleep at all. It was 4am when you arrived at his place and tucked him in like a child. You sat on his bed and found a book somewhere in his room. You didn’t know why he had a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems, but you were glad to find something nice to read. “Why in the hell can’t you stop us from drinking too much”, you heard after a couple of hours. Matthew sat up groaning. He looked like he had been hit by a freaking truck. “Because you are a grown ass man, shouldn’t you know your own limits?” “Fuck off”, he says but apologizes to you in seconds, “Sorry Y/N, at least you really spent the night here with me”, he sends you a quick smile. You melted right then and there. You were tired and sleepy and wanted to go home, but you found yourself sleeping in Matthews arms as soon as he had found himself some Aspirin.

Please don't try to kiss me on the sidewalk On your cigarette break I can't afford to love someone Who isn't dying by mistake

You started hanging out more. Just the two of you. He would be sober every time you were together. He was actually much smarter than he let people believe. You realized soon that you didn’t want to see him at those parties anymore, so you stayed out of most of them. Even Matthew didn’t realize the reason and how could he? You didn’t tell him that you were falling for him. For the real fucking him. Until one day when you went to see him at his work at the mechanics. He was smoking a cigarette, leaning on a wall. His whole demeanor changed when he saw you. He stood straighter, a wide smile on his face. A couple of the older men working with him checked you out like prey and Matthew seemed to notice it. “There’s my girl”, he said and wrapped his arms around you, tightly. He winked at you as a sign to play along, and threw his cigarette away, attacking your lips with his own. You were quite shocked. Was he serious? Is this really the way he was kissing you for the first time? You did kiss him back though, duh. As if you hadn’t been dreaming of this moment. “You know Matthew, I’d really be your girl if you dropped the drugs”, you whispered to him after the kiss. His smile dropped and you could see from his eyes that he was trying to process what you just said to him.

Come down Hurting Learning

#here are the young men #dean charles chapman #dean-charles chapman #dean chapman #dean charles chapman x reader #matthew connelly #hatym

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bellemorte180 · 4 years

Text

Degas

Caroline Forbes had her life mapped out. She was not about the let anything stand in her way; including the unexpected appearance of her soulmate. The fact that he is her professor, might make this a bit complicated.

Written for Klaroline week, Day 7-Trope x Trope- Soulmates mixed with Professor/Student

Thank you @klaroline-events

The thing about soulmates was the fact that were rare. The words were written on the forearm of every person but that never meant that anyone would actually hear those words spoken by their soulmate. It was more common than not that the words were never uttered. Someone could hear their soulmate speak for years but if the words were not directly spoken to the person who had them inked on their skin; the soulmates would never connect.

It was rare for someone’s words to be spoken and Caroline was not about to put her life on hold for a daydream that most likely would never happen. At first in her early teens, she swore up and down that she would find him. Then she dated Damon during her sophomore of high school and vowed to never again arrange her life for a man. It was not Caroline’s fault that Damon did find his soulmate but that she died so soon after their meeting. Although, he did try and live his life after the loss of her but Caroline never measured up to Damon’s version of perfection. He called her shallow and useless. Stating that Caroline could never possibly get into a university such as Duke. So, out of spite Caroline worked her ass off and did just that and on a full ride.

While Damon was never physically abusive, he could never stop comparing her to the ghost of Katherine Pierce.

“Caroline, are you coming?” Bonnie, Caroline’s roommate, asked. Bonnie and Caroline met during freshman year of college and have been friend’s ever since. Years later, the two still lived together through ups and downs, boyfriends and breakups. “Earth to Caroline.”

“Almost finished.”

“Care, you’ve proof read your thesis outline a thousand times. I’m sure it is perfect.” Caroline turned to glare at her best friend. This was the thesis for her master’s degree, it had to be more than perfect. There could be not even the hint of a flaw, especially if it would help her get into Duke’s doctoral program for art history. “Besides, if you don’t go now, you’ll be late for class.”

Caroline looked at the clock on her phone and jumped up.

“Shit! Bonnie! Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” She hissed out as she put the pair of small black go-to boots on her feet. She quickly pulled her hair back into a messy bun. Her jeans and tank-top would have to do. She grabbed a matching black hoodie in case the lecture hall was cold and seeing that Caroline thought seventy-degree weather was freezing, she knew it would be. That and it was common practice for people to keep their words covered and Caroline had no time to search for her arm band.

“I tried but you were in that ‘Caroline study trance’ you get when you’re super focused, it took a minute to get your attention.” Bonnie said, watching her friend rush around in amusement. “I am covering Professor Fleming’s class today and need to leave so I figured I’d pull you from it now before you miss class completely. I’ve heard how Dr. Mikaelson is about attendance.”

“Not only that but he runs the doctoral program. I cannot be late for this class.” Dr. Niklaus Mikaelson’s classes were hard to get into. Caroline never managed it during her under grad and now that she was in her second to last semester before completing her master’s, she was finally able to land one of his classes. “I need him to like me.”

“It’s because he is hot? Isn’t it?”

“Bonnie!”

“What? He is. And that accent…”

Dr. Mikaelson was a prodigy in the art world. Caroline did an extensive google search of him when she was deciding if she wanted to pursue her masters at Duke or move onto another university. It was his work that kept Caroline there. He graduated secondary school by the age of fifteen and got a full ride to Oxford-completing his bachelors degree in just under two years. From there he achieved a masters and doctoral degree before moving to work at the Louvre all by the age of twenty-seven. The last few years saw him teaching at Duke and taking over the entire art history department in the process; and he was only thirty-three.

“His attractiveness is not what I need him for.” Caroline stated as she ran down the hall of the apartment. “Dinner later?”

“I have papers to grade. Remember? Joys of being a TA.”

“Right. See you tomorrow then. Bye!” Caroline replied as she grabbed her bag and left the apartment. She all but frantically drove towards the campus. Once parked she had to run towards the lecture hall and she made in it enough time to take her seat before the Professor strolled in and began his lecture. He opened a PowerPoint that showed a famous painting of ballerinas dancing on a stage, appearing as though they were in the middle of preparing for a performance.

“Edgar Degas. He is claimed to be one of the founding fathers of impressionism. However, as many of you know it is claimed that he hated that title. He preferred to be called a realist.” Dr. Mikaelson pointed to the painting on the screen. “Ballet Rehearsal on Stage is a prime example of his reasoning. The painting does not follow the typical style of impressionism painting. It lacks the color and the technique used is far different. It is far darker…”

Caroline leaned forward, engaged in his voice. There was something comforting in how he spoke, and it was not just the English accent. She could see the passion he had for the art he taught and his love for the painting. While his biography on the school website and what she found through her various digging, there was little to go on about his personal life. While Caroline agreed with Bonnie that the man was very attractive, Caroline was more interested in his work and how it could possibly help her get her foot in the right direction. It was only the second week of classes but Caroline knew she needed to make an impression sooner rather than later if she was going to get into the doctoral program next year.

He went on and on about impressionism, Degas and those ballerinas on the screen. Caroline took notes, switching from highlighter to highlighter and using her post-it note system that used to drive Bonnie insane. She jotted down her questions, points and theories she might need for a paper later on in the semester. She was tempted to click at her pen but knew, after years of dirty looks, that most would not appreciate such an action in the middle of a class.

“It is said that Degas fascination with painting the ballerinas were because he viewed that as the perfect example of the human condition. Towards the end of his life he made comments about the limbs of the dancers and how they moved. How they became one with the music and that is what he was trying to capture.” Dr. Mikaelson leaned against the desk and looked at this class. “Now, most of you are at the point in your studies where you have developed you own opinions on an artist work and what is art without interpretation? Any thoughts?”

Caroline among a few other students raised their hands. Dr. Mikaelson chose a young girl by the name of April that Caroline recognized from a couple classes she had with her previously. April, while bright, always seemed a bit shy.

“I always thought that the ballerinas were beautiful but in an artificial way. That they showed what the ideal beauty was during the late 19th century in France.” April smiled. “Kind of like in today's society, we are bombarded with what we should look like. The dancer always reminded me of that ideal.”

“It is true that young woman during that time were pressed to act in a certain way.” He replied, pointing at the screen again. “Dancers especially were encouraged to dance not for themselves but for the pleasure of men. It was not uncommon for the dancers to become lovers of wealthy gentleman and they did so in order to keep their place in the ballet before they came to an age that was deemed no longer desirable for the ballet. While Degas was a talented painter, he was also a man. Perhaps he painted the ballerinas for the simple fact that he admired their beauty.” He looked around and saw the students writing. “Anyone else?”

Caroline raised her hand again and this time, Dr. Mikaelson pointed to her. While she had attended every class they had thus far, which was only three since it was only the second week of classes, this was the first time he picked her. She admired how he tried to choose a different student every class and how he liked to keep the students engaged in the lesson.

“Honestly? There is something eerie about it.” She saw him freeze but Caroline pressed on. “The use of the shading and the dark colors make me feel as though he was always on the outside looking in. Like, his obsession with the dancers was far darker than we realize. He was a grown man who watched young girls dance and painted pictures of them. It is kind off-putting once you think about it. Almost predatory.”

Dr. Mikaelson did not move. He was looking at her as though he had seen a ghost of a long lost loved one. She was not the only one who seemed to have notice his hesitation but quickly enough, he seemed to shake himself of his thoughts.

“That certainly is an interesting perspective and not uncommon.”

And then, she felt it. She felt the slight burn on her left forearm. Her eyes grew wide and she felt as though she could not breathe. Dr. Mikaelson turned away from her and called on another student but Caroline could not look away from him. She did not understand how he was able to go on teaching when both their lives were just turned upside down. Everything changed and yet not a single person in that class realized what just happened.

He listened as one student droned on and on about Degas, and in truth, Caroline could not even focus on what was being discussed. She just watched as he moved around the podium that was perched in the front of the class. She noticed how his fingers seemed to trace over something and then his eyes searched the class again. He was looking at the seating chart they filled out on the first day.

He was looking for her name.

“All valid opinions, then again. Are not most opinions valid? Well, almost all.” He stated, cutting the student off. There was a slight chuckle echoing through the class. “We can all agree that there are many different interpretations of Degas’s work and that brings us to the major assignment of this class. If you read the syllabus, which I am sure you have, you know that you each will be required to pick an artist and study their style of painting, sculpting or whatever their choice of expression was. I want more than a biography and a regurgitation on their methods. I want your opinion. I want to know what your honest opinion of their work. I want to know how it makes you feel and what you believe drove the artist. Dig deep inside and find that inner artist yourself. Basically, I want you to woo me.” That caused another round of chuckles and Caroline could not help but notice how his eyes flickered to me. “The paper is to be submitted a week before the end of the semester. For further instructions, look at the syllabus or contact me during office hours. Dismissed.”

The students around her began to gather their belongings but Caroline was unsure on what to do next. Did she gather her textbooks and hurry of the lecture hall? Did she hang around trying to get a word? She noticed that if she did not move soon, she would be left sitting there and that would just be odd, so she began to gather her things and walk down the steps. She looked down and noticed that he was speaking with April and by her flushed cheeks, it was obvious that April had a crush. Caroline could not explain the rush of possessiveness she felt but she did not like the idea of anyone else having feelings for her soulmate.

“Ms. Forbes?” Caroline paused at the bottom the steps near the front row of the class, he had been watching her; waiting for her. “May I have a word?”

“Of course.” Caroline replied and waited as April walked past them, giving Caroline a small wave as she went. Caroline, however, was only able to give her a tight smile. Once the smaller woman was out of the room, Caroline felt as though all the air was sucked out with her. “Dr. Mikaelson.”

“Klaus.”

“What?”

“Call me Klaus. I believe you have the right to do that.” Dr. Mikaelson, Klaus, was smirking at her. He was gazing at her in a way that made her feel as though she was being studied; paying attention to her as he would one of Degas’s paintings.

“Klaus. Right. Short for Niklaus.”

“It is.” He moved his right arm over to his left and began unclasping the cuff-link. He rolled the sleeve of his white button-down dress shirt to reveal his forearm. There upon his skin were her words written in black ink…. spanning down a good portion of his arm. Caroline felt her cheeks flush in embarrassment but he only seemed amused. “I wondered for a long time about the woman who would have such an opinion on grown men drawing pictures of dancers. I never expected her to be in one my classes. Or about Degas.”

“You know, I wanted nothing more last year than to be in one of your classes but they were always filled. I never expected you to be my soulmate. In fact, I never expected to find my soulmate at all. And yet here you are, someone whose work I admire and had hoped to pursue my doctorate under…and oh my god.”

“Caroline?”

“You run the doctoral program here for the art department.” Caroline began to feel her chest contract and her breathing to become uneven. “I’ll have to leave this class; I won’t be able to pursue my degree here. It’s too late to transfer now. I am set to get my masters next semester!” She started pacing back and forth, feeling as though everything was crumbling around her. “Everything I worked for will go out the window.”

Klaus slowly made his way towards her, as though he was approaching a lion who was about to strike. He placed his hands on her shoulders and despite the hooded sweatshirt she wore, she could feel the heat of his touch through the fabric.

“Caroline, look at me.” Her breathing was still going rapid but she followed his direction. “You will not have to give up your dreams. I will not allow you to give up now, okay?” Caroline nodded. “Now breath. Slowly. In and out.” It took a few minutes but she began to feel herself calm down. Klaus drew small circles on her the sides of her arms and she focused on that feeling his touch invoked. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yes. Thank you. Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Klaus paused before speaking again. “Do those happen often?” She looked at him confused. “The panic attacks?”

“What? No. Sorry.” Caroline replied, blushing bright red again. “I’m so embarrassed. I was just so nervous and then realizing that this would be a major issue if I continued studying here. I mean, you’re my soulmate. If that isn’t crossing that line.” Klaus just started to laugh at her lightly. “Oh, come on! You know what line I’m talking about. You know the cheesy stereotype of the professor getting involved with his student!” At this point Klaus was full on laughing at her and despite the panic attack she had earlier, hearing his laughter calmed her frayed nerves. “I’m serious! This is serious! And you’re laughing! And I’m rambling on and on…. ugh, I do that when I’m nervous. Clearly.”

“Good to know.” Klaus was still smiling at her while Caroline found it hard to look at him without embarrassment coursing through her. “I won’t lie to you and say that there will not be road blocks in our path. I am your teacher, that is true and it is most definitely something we have to consider. However,” Klaus reached down and picked up her left hand. He pushed up the sleeve of her sweatshirt to reveal his words on her skin “finding one soulmate is rare. I spent the majority of my life curious as to who you would be. I’m not about to let that chance go now.”

The feel of his skin connecting with hers sent chills shooting through her entire body. Their eyes locked and she lost herself in the bight blue orbs. She could see excitement, uncertainty and vulnerability coursing through them. Caroline found herself wanting nothing more than to crawl inside of him. The feeling of his touch went beyond anything sexual, although the attraction was there, but it was more intimate than anything she experienced before.

“I don’t think I could let go now if I tried.” Caroline whispered and Klaus smiled widely. His smile was breathtaking and Caroline though it was unfair how beautiful he was. His dimples along made her heart flutter. She had always thought he was attractive but she was so focused on his work that she never bothered to think about the man behind the work.

And now she could think of nothing else.

Klaus dropped her wrist when other students began filing in. He went to the desk, unplugged his laptop from the USB cord and closed it, not bothering to turn it off first. He picked up his briefcase, shoving the laptop inside and motion toward the door. The next class would be starting soon and neither one of them needed an audience. They left the lecture hall together but Caroline noticed that he was keeping a respectable distance. She was unsure if she should be grateful or hurt. She knew that even though everything changed for them, the world still spun around the sun and he was still her teacher. The rules did not end with her life taking a drastic but joyful turn.

“Have dinner with me. Tonight.” Klaus stated. He paused in the middle of the courtyard just outside the lecture hall, not caring that it was a Tuesday afternoon or that they both had places to be the next day. He turned to look at her with a warm smile. “I would say let us just take the afternoon to know one another but I unfortunately have another class; and as you pointed out, I head of the doctoral program and have students to advise.”

“Okay.” Caroline nodded. While she was disappointed that she had to say goodbye, she was partly relieved. She realized, as the North Carolina sun beat down on her that she met her soulmate in an over sized sweatshirt, jeans and had her hair thrown up in a messy bun. She looked like the typically college student and that was embarrassing. “I don’t have plans tonight, unless you count obsessively studying and working on my thesis. Which, I honestly feel is coming along great but it more difficult than I anticipated. Not that I thought it would be easy, and you’re laughing at me again.”

Klaus couldn’t help himself but smile and shake his head.

“You’re rambling.” His tone was soft and full of affection, which made her only laugh alongside him. “You have no reason to be nervous with me. I promise.”

“Okay. Right. Dinner.” Caroline pulled a notebook out of her bag and ripped a piece of paper out of it. She grabbed her pen and jotted down her phone number and address. “Here is my address. Pick me up at seven. I love pizza and all things Italian. The spicier the food, the better.”

“Good to know.” Klaus smiled that devastating smile again, making Caroline’s skin heat up. She swore it was from the sun; not his stupid smile. She could see that he wanted to lean in and kiss her or simply touch her again; but in the middle of Duke’s courtyard was not the time or place. “I’ll see you tonight Caroline.”

With that, Klaus turned from her and Caroline watched him stroll across campus. There was something pleasing about the way he walked. It took her a moment but she noticed that the sleeve of his button-down was still rolled up to his elbow; letting the words out for the world to see. She couldn’t explain it but Caroline felt proud that those where her words on his skin.

Realizing that she was standing in the middle of a college campus, ogling her professor (who happened to be her soulmate), Caroline pulled herself from her stupor and moved off into the opposite direction. She had another class in about thirty minutes but she knew that she was not going to be able to focus for the rest of the day. While she was not typically one to blow off her classes, she would make an exception just this once and ensure that she studied extra hard over the weekend to make up for it.

As she walked to her car, Caroline dug out her phone and dialed Bonnie. She knew that Bonnie’s class that she taught for Professor Fleming sometimes would be over and that she most likely was in her office; either meeting with a student or grading Fleming’s papers. While Bonnie enjoyed being a TA, Professor Fleming had a tendency to push all her work on her TA’s. It as free labor and Isobel Fleming certainly took advantage of that.

“Come on Bonnie. Pick up.” It rang a few times before clicking to voicemail. Caroline huffed in frustration as she heard her best friend’s voicemail kick on. “Call me immediately. I have a friend emergency. Like life changing emergency.”

It wasn’t until Caroline was home and staring at her closet in abject horror; realizing that she had nothing to wear that screamed, you won’t regret being my soulmate, that Bonnie’s name flashed up on Caroline’s phone.

“Thank god Bonnie. I need you.”

“Sorry. I was helping a student. A completely useless student but a student nonetheless. I totally get why Fleming hates actually doing her office hours.” Bonnie stated. “What’s up?” “I met my soulmate.”

“What?! Seriously! Oh god that’s….Caroline!”

“I know!” Caroline screeched his excitement. “We’re doing dinner tonight and I literally have nothing to wear. I met him in that black hoodie I wear pretty much to hide my bloating during my period. It was embarrassing and I need something spectacular. Please, help me.”

“Hold on.” She heard a rustle and Bonnie speaking in the background to someone. Caroline, in the meantime, picked up a red dress that she wore for special occasions that she was sure she was going to get laid, but decided that it was a bit much for a first date. Maybe the second date. “Okay, Luka is going to take Fleming’s evening class and I’ll grade my papers at home after you leave. Now, you go shower, shave and do all of that. I’ll meet you at home in about thirty minutes to help you get ready.” Caroline smiled widely and expressed her thanks. “What time is he picking you up?”

“Seven.”

“Okay. That gives us four hours to make you look drop dead hot. Now go shower, I’ll be there soon.” Bonnie hung up and Caroline plugged her phone in by the bed before running to the shower. She turned on the shower and took a good look at her legs. She winced slightly at the neglect and grabbed a brand-new razor. By the time she was done in the shower and had herself wrapped in nothing more than a robe with a towel on her head, Bonnie was in her bedroom throwing her entire closet around the room. “Your phone has a message. Unknown number…”

Caroline dived for her phone and pulled it off the charger. She gave a smile as she read the message.

[Klaus][3:42 pm]:I made reservation s at La Rustica. Fire roasted pizza?

[Caroline][4:03 pm]: That sounds perfect.

[Caroline][4:03 pm]: I can’t wait.

[Klaus][4:04 pm]: Me either. I’m having trouble focusing in class. And I’m the teacher. Pretty sure my students are starting to notice.

[Caroline][4:04 pm]: Off your game?

[Klaus][4:05 pm]: I have them watching a documentary on ancient cave paintings from the bronze era. A move I typically use for my into to art classes. Not my doctoral ones.

[Caroline][4:05 pm]: So they are bored. Got it.

[Klaus][4:05 pm]: Very.

[Klaus][4:05 pm]: That and a certain soulmate has me smiling like an idiot. Its drawing a lot of attention.

[Caroline][4:06 pm]: Blaming me for your inability to focus in class?

[Klaus][4:06 pm]: Of course.

[Caroline][4:06 pm]: Well, don’t blame me. Go teach. Use that big brain of yours because I have a date to get ready for and SOMEONE is distracting me.

[Klaus][4:07 pm]: I suppose I can focus on my students instead of you. But trust me, you’ll have all my attention later.

[Caroline][4:07 pm]: I better.

“So, I just wanted your facial expressions for the last three minutes and I have to say, it was a roller-coaster ride. Wish I had popcorn.” Bonnie replied and Caroline stuck her tongue out at her. She tossed the phone on the bed and sat down on it. Bonnie went over to her manicure kit that Caroline assumed she grabbed from her room. “Here, pick a color to pain your nails. We can build an outfit around that.”

“I’m thinking blue. Matches my eyes. Oh, and we are going to La Rustica so, nice but causal.”

“Good starting place. Now spill.”

“What?”

“Details. I want them. Now.” Bonnie cocked her head at Caroline. “I just watched you have a conversation with who I’m guessing is your future father of your children and I’ve never seen you smile like that. Ever, so, details please.”

“You’re never going to believe it.” Caroline sighed and told her everything from the moment she sat down in class to Klaus inviting her to dinner afterwards. “I always knew hearing him speak that there was just something about him. At first, I figured it was the accent. I mean hot British professor. Come on, even you said he was hot. But the moment he spoke the words.”

That certainly is an interesting perspective and not uncommon.

“You’re happy.” Bonnie looked as though she was about to melt. Caroline nodded. Bonnie did the most un-Bonnie like thing, Caroline had ever witness from her. She squealed. Loudly. “I’m so happy for you. And incredibly jealous.”

“Thank you!” Caroline laughed.

“I mean it. After everything you told me about douche bag Damon and watching your awful relationship with Tyler…” “Hey! My relationship with Tyler was just fine!”

“Care, you never spent any time together and that is probably why it lasted two years. Every time you guys were together, you fought. Trust me, that break up was a mercy for everyone.” Bonnie looked at her seriously. “But now you met your soulmate. Literally, you probably are the only person I know who has met them and frankly, screw you I’m jealous.”

“Give it time Bonnie. Maybe you’ll be next.”

“Caroline, the words on my wrist literally say Pardon me darling, but I think you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. My soulmate sounds a drunk frat boy picking up girls at a frat party.” Bonnie replied and Caroline gave a snort. “But enough about me, let’s get you looking beautiful so he forgets that you wore your period sweater when you first met.”

Over the next three hours, Caroline painted her nails a baby blue color, had Bonnie dry and style her hair into waves. She applied some light makeup, preferring something more natural looking, while Bonnie continued to root through the closet to fine the perfect outfit. Caroline kept anxiously looking at the clock, watching as the time slowly ticked by and she couldn’t help but fidget.

“What about this?” Bonnie asked, pulling out a nice white lacy tank-top and paired it with a blue cardigan she typically wore to summer weddings. “Add jeans and wedges. You’d look good.”

“Ehh…”

“Wait. I think I have an idea.” Bonnie rooted through her clothes, Caroline wincing at the fact that her color coordinated system was ruined, and pulled out a pair of simple skinny jeans, matched it with the lacy tank-top and slipped Caroline’s favorite pink leather jacket over top. “Cute, casual, but will have him eating out of your hands.”

“I do have those pink stilettos that match that jacket perfectly.” Caroline mused. “I like it.”

“And this.” Bonnie pulled out a large white purse that Caroline rarely ever used for fear of it getting dirty. “Slip a pair of flats in there as well as a top and a change of underwear. You’re all set.” Caroline narrowed her eyes at her. “What? I’m just saying that I don’t plan on waiting up for you. It will make it easier to leave for class tomorrow if you don’t have to swing by here first.”

“I don’t know if that is going to happen. We might want to take it slow. I don’t know.”

“Caroline. You shaved. I know you. You’re planning on it.” Bonnie replied in a matter of fact voice. “Which means, you need to pick something to wear under your clothes. I suggest a strapless bra.” Caroline rolled her eyes, not willing to let Bonnie know she had a point. She got up and went to her dresser, searching through her underwear drawer. She had a few pieces that had not seen the light of day in a while and tonight did give her a very good excuse to wear them.

And she wanted to see Klaus’s eyes bulge out.

Bonnie stepped out and let Caroline get dressed. She pulled on a matching baby-blue bra and pantie set before slipping on the skinny jeans. She looked at herself after she put on the lacy white tank-top, just to ensure that it wasn’t see-through. There was a slight peak of the blue bra at the top but it did not look trashy. One would have to be really looking to see it and she wanted Klaus to look.

It was decided. She was going to do something that she never thought herself capable of.

Caroline Forbes was going to fuck her professor.

When she was getting her purse ready, with all of Bonnie’s suggestions and a few extra needed items, Caroline heard the slight knock on the apartment door. She glanced at her phone and noticed that he was exactly five minutes early. Her lips perked up and she knew that they most definitely were made for each other. Caroline hated being late. She heard Bonnie yell that she would answer the door while Caroline quickly added a few more items to her bag.

“So, you’re the soulmate huh?” Caroline heard Bonnie’s voice, before Klaus could reply, Bonnie pushed on. “I’m Bonnie Bennet, the best friend and person who will cut off your dick if you hurt her. Got it?”

“Bonnie!” Caroline screeched as she came around the corner. She paused when she saw Klaus standing there, torn between amusement and concern. He was dressed down compared to class earlier. He had on a pair of fitted jeans, a grey Henley and a black jacket. That feeling she felt when he first said the words on her wrists returned. Her heart stopped for a moment and she couldn’t stop the smile that grew on her lips. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Okay. Yeah. I’m going to go grade papers now.” Bonnie stated as she looked between the two of them. She moved towards Caroline and smiled. She wiggled her eyebrows at Caroline which made her nervousness fade slightly. “Have fun.”

“Bye Bonnie.” Caroline laughed at Bonnie before gripping her purse and walking forwards the door. “Sorry about her. She is my best friend and means absolute every word she said to you. So, you’re forewarned.”

“Noted.” Klaus teased. “Shall we?”

Caroline nodded and the both headed out the door. Unlike their walk across the campus, Klaus did not keep his hands to himself. He wasn’t indecent but he did touch her just ever so slightly. As they walked out to his car, he put his hand on the small of her back. As he drove, his left hand stayed on the wheel while his right held hers. It wasn’t until they pulled up to the little pizzeria that Caroline realized she had been drawing little circles with her thumb the entire way there.

“So, did your students find class any more interesting? Did they become engaged in Neanderthal art?” Caroline teased as they walked towards the door. Without thinking, she grabbed his hand, lacing their fingers together again. At the skin on skin contact, Klaus couldn’t help but smile.

“Not in the slightest.” Caroline laughed. “This is a small class, with about five students total and they all know one another. I think they were all more interest in the fact that I was texting in class than actually teaching.” Klaus opened the door for Caroline, which just earned him bonus points, and looked toward the hostess. “Reservation under Mikaelson.”

The small pizzeria was upscale but didn’t feel as though it was intimidating. The walls were made of brick and there were fairy lights drifting from one side to the other; giving the space a romantic glow. As they walked to their table, Caroline could see wine racks lining the walls that had different types of wine. The tables had a modern rustic look to them that fit in with the cozy romantic feeling the pizzeria was trying to achieve. The hostess led them to a table in the back that would let them be undisturbed but not completely out of view.

“Now, I don’t think that’s fair!” Caroline replied. “We were only texting for about five minutes tops. For all they knew, you could have been texting your mother.”

“If I was texting my mother, trust me when I say that my facial features would be one of annoyance not the, what did young Joshua say to me, ‘love-struck’ expression my face held.”

“No! Seriously? A student said this to you?”

“Small class, Sweetheart.” The waitress approached their table. “Do you prefer white or red wine?”

“White.”

“A bottle of Pinot Grigio, please.” The waitress wrote down the order and left. “Like I was saying, small class and I’ve gotten to know them all fairly well over the last few semesters. Most of them have been my students since they were in their working on their masters. Only a one or two were transplants from other universities. Joshua is a bit braver than the others. He had no problem teasing me for, what the term, ah yea, ‘sleeping on the job’.”

“The gall!” She laughed. “I mean to be honest, you did better than I did. I skipped my next class and if you see Professor Saltzman, feel free to take all responsibility.” Klaus laughed at that. “I’m serious. First class I’ve missed in about ever. Last year, I had that nasty stomach flu and I still showed up to class.”

“I admire your dedication.” He reached across the table and took her hand. Klaus flipped her hand over and began tracing his words on her wrist. Their eyes locked and Caroline could hardly breath at just feeling his fingertip tracing the black ink. It wasn’t until the waitress came back to pour their wine that he removed his hands. “So, tell me, if pizza is one of your favorites, what kind? Let me guess, pineapple?”

“No, but I fully believe that there is nothing wrong with pineapple on pizza.”

“We will have to agree to disagree on that, love.”

“While there is nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned Hawaiian pizza, I can’t help but enjoy the classics.” Caroline looked to the waitress, who wore a soft smile and looked down at Caroline’s uncovered wrists, (knowing fully well that these two were soulmates). “We will take a classic margarita pizza please.”

“I admire a woman who takes charge.” Klaus replied, wearing a smirk. Caroline bit her lip as her mind went a very dirty place that she should be ashamed of. However, by the look Klaus was tossing her way; she could tell that his mind had followed the same path. Gone was the professor who was so engaging in art and the history behind it and was replaced by a man who by the intense stare she was getting, was very passionate.

“Get used to it.”

“I plan to.” The dimpled smirk was back and that did nothing for Caroline’s resolve. What she wanted to do was drag him from the restaurant and screw him in his car but the more rational part of her brain wanted to at least know him just a bit better first. Caroline cleared her throat and pushed a blonde lock behind her ear.

“So…from your comment, I know you have a mom but any other family?” Caroline asked. “Because I googled you. Hard. Beyond stating that you are from London and are practically a genius, it didn’t say much about your personal life.”

“Trying to find out if a girlfriend?”

“No! Wait? Do you? Because that would make this really awkward. Like, what happens if soulmates meet and the other person is like, married or something!” Caroline’s eyes grew wide. “Oh god! You’re not married, are you? Because I’m not. Very single…...very very single.”

“No, love. I’m perfectly unmarried and single, or at least I was until this morning.” Klaus laughed, finding her ramblings refreshing and adorable. “Let’s see where to start. You obviously know about my professional career and yes, I do like to keep my private life…private.” He gave her a heated look again that caused her skin to flush, something he clearly enjoyed doing to her. “Yes. I have a mother but we are not particularly close, distance and all that. I speak to my father maybe once or twice a year. I am one of seven children-”

“Your mom had seven children?” Caroline breathed out, eyes growing wide. That was a lot of siblings. She chose not to comment on his relationship with his parents, figuring he would open about that as their relationship grew. “Wow.”

“Yes. My eldest sister Freya, is a doctor in New York. Neurosurgeon actually. My brother Finn is also a doctor but has a small practice in Oxfordshire, England where he lives with his wife Sage and their five children; who I am perfectly comfortable being the uncle who just sends gifts in the mail.” That made Caroline chuckle. “Don’t get me wrong love, I like kids but my brother’s children are a nightmare.”

“Good to know.” They exchanged a look, an unspoken understanding passed. One day, they would have kids. “Were they soulmates?”

“Finn and Sage? No but they were childhood sweethearts.” Caroline nodded. Soulmates were rare and she realized how lucky she was to have found hers. “Then there is Elijah, he is a dean of a boarding school for spoiled little rich kids in England, although he makes a significant number of trips to the States. Not sure if it is the students or close proximity to our mother.”

“I take it your mother is a character?”

“Harsh and cold would sum it up. You know, typical English upper-class woman. Part of the reason why I pushed myself to graduate secondary school at such a young age.” Klaus replied, brushing past the description of his mother. “Then there is me. Fourth and typical middle child.” Caroline laughed at that. “Then there is Kol. At twenty he picked a random city out of a hat, ran off New Orleans with his college fund and opened a bar…well a year later he opened one when he realized that the drinking age was twenty-one here. He doesn’t get out of bed until well after twelve in the afternoon, just in time to kick his latest conquest out of bed.”

“So, the rebellious child?” Despite his unflattering description of his younger brother, Caroline could hear a hint of affection and exasperation at him. While he seemed distant from his parents, she could sense that the siblings where all close. “And here I thought the Mikaelson clan bred only geniuses. We have two doctors, a dean of a boarding school, a prodigy professor and then a bar owner…what happened there?”

“A question we have all asked at one point or another. My parents were very disappointed, which only made Kol even more pleased. He’s an odd one.” Klaus smiled. “And then there is Rebekah.”

“Uh oh. Let me guess. Spoiled little sister?”

“Very.” Klaus shook his head. “Freya is a lot like our mother in a way. Cold and hard but she has a work ethic that I applaud. She rarely has a social life but is very dedicated to her patients and her field, while Rebekah has not worked for a single thing in her entire life. She was supposed to be the last child so our parents doted on her. She lives primarily off of her trust fund and spends most of her time on some yacht of her boyfriend of the moment; before showing up at one our houses. Unexpectedly of course.”

“She sounds…”

“She is a complete brat but I love her. One day maybe she will settle but lord knows we all have tried to tame her.”

“And your youngest sibling?” Klaus froze slightly, a small shadow passed over his eyes but then after a second, he gave a small smile. Before he could speak, their waitress was back with their pizza and some plates. It wasn’t until the each grabbed their own slices that Caroline had the courage to press forward. “Are you okay? If you don’t want to-“

“It’s okay.” He sighed. “Henrik was the youngest and unexpected baby of the family. After Rebekah, my parents did not want anymore children. Six kids were enough but Henrik came along and made everything better, if that makes sense. He was shy and funny and loved to laugh. He was genially a good soul.”

“What happened to him?” Caroline did not miss how he used the past-tense when he spoke of his youngest brother. She reached across the table and took his hand in hers. Klaus ran his thumb over her knuckles and she could tell that her touch brought him comfort.

“I was working at the Louvre at the time. Henrik was supposed to come and spend the summer with me that year. He was seventeen and like I said, he had a heart of gold. A friend of his had gone to a party and had one too many and was too scared to call his parents. Both my parents were working that night and the only other person home was Rebekah. So, he left alone and went to pick his friend up. Two other kids from the same party did not call a ride and left, they both were heavily intoxicated. Ended up running my brother off the road. Henrik and is friend died instantly.”

“I’m so sorry.” Caroline had tears streaming down her face. She did not know what to say other than that. She could tell that Klaus felt the loss of his little brother deeply. She wished that she could take that pain away but knew nothing she said would make it better. Klaus leaned forward and wiped away the small tears from her cheeks.

“I don’t like seeing you cry.” That made her smile instead. “It was six years ago. Yes, it hurts but I’m to the point where I can remember him fondly.” With that he pulled away and picked up his pizza, something Caroline completely forgot they had. She followed suit but her mind still on Klaus’s brother. “What about you, any siblings I should know about?”

“Nope. Just little old. My mom often tells me that I broke the mold and she couldn’t handle another one of me.” Klaus burst out laughing, drawing attention from a few other people in the pizzeria. “Shh.” Caroline turned to a few other patrons and mouthed her apologizes.

“I may have only known you for a few hours but I think your mother is right. You seem like a handful.” Klaus teased her and tossed her an innocent expression yet his eyes had mischief written all over them.

“Maybe. Are you up to the challenge?”

“Most certainly.” Klaus lifted his glass of wine to his lips and Caroline couldn’t help but lick her lips as his tongue peaked out eve so slightly. He gave her that look that sent heat straight to her core; and by how he was eyeing her; Caroline could tell that she was having the same effect on him. “I find it very unfair that you were able to google me and all I could find was your college transcripts in your student file.”

“You read my file?!”

“What else was I supposed to do during a documentary about Neanderthal cave drawings?”

“I don’t know? Teach?”

“I learned a good bit of interesting facts about you.” With that, Klaus pulled out his phone and began to scroll. “Let’s see, shall we. You were Miss Mystic Falls your junior year of high school, which I had to look up by the way because I’ve never heard of it. Small town Virginia, looks charming. You were the chair of the Mystic Falls beautification committee and the director of the policeman’s yearly raffle.” Klaus shot her a coy look. “On top of maintaining a 4.0 GPA average in high school. Very impressive. My favorite part, of course, was your essay. ‘When I am accepted,’ really liking the use of ‘when’ here, very confidant, ‘I intend to redefine excellence and above all, I promise to aspire, inspire and perspire…obviously we ran out of words shortage of words ending in ‘spire’.”

“Oh god.” By this point, Caroline was covering her hands with her face. She was silently cursing herself at the moment, no matter how joyful Klaus seemed in that moment. It was clear that he was just waiting to bring that up. “Laugh it up. I can’t believe you found that. I almost wish you photo stalked my Facebook instead and found unflattering pictures of me.”

“Well, you just secured my plans for later.”

“Play your cards right and you might be too busy.” They shared another fiery look that spoke volumes. Caroline had to look away, focusing on her pizza and grabbing another slice before being able to peak at him. He was still watching her, clearly imagining what he was going to be doing to her later. “You’re staring. It’s creepy.”

“Is it?” They both knew the answer. Klaus leaned back in his chair, with his arms crossed; enjoying her flushed cheeks. “So, what was not on your college application and other academic transcripts?”

“Well…” Caroline thought of what to tell him. Frankly, compared to what she knew of him, there wasn’t much in her life that she found impressive about herself. “As you know, only child. Parents divorced when I was about fifteen. My dad turned to be gay and as I’m sure you can imagine how that strained the marriage.” Klaus nodded, his eyes widening slightly. “My dad and his partner Stephen live in Charlotte but I don’t see them often. My mom is the sheriff of Mystic Falls and very keen on teaching me to shoot a gun.”

“Sounds like Bonnie is not the only one I have to worry about?”

“Nope. My mother will most definitely get to you first.”

“I was talking about you Sweetheart. You seem like you can take care of yourself.” Caroline smiled at the hint of pride in his voice. “I wasn’t lying earlier Caroline. I like a woman who can take charge and care for herself.”

“Good.” Caroline chuckled. She took a sip of her wine and Klaus reached over for the bottle and poured her another glass. He was driving so he was sipping his glass slowly but there was no reason why she couldn’t indulge slightly. She trusted him. “So, you said Finn and Sage were not soulmates but did any of your siblings find theirs?”

“No.” Klaus shook his head. “Rebekah had this dream to find hers but…her words faded before she got the chance.” Caroline nodded. It was not uncommon that the words written on someone’s wrist to fade. It meant that their soulmate passed away in some fashion. “She was seemingly okay though. I had thought that she would be devastated but Rebekah bounced back and went on her merry way. Despite the fact that she is spoiled and bratty, she is a strong woman and I admire that about her.”

“Good for her. For bouncing back.” Caroline could tell that out of all of his siblings, he was closest to this wild child of a sister and Caroline wondered how the she would get on with her. Caroline vowed to do her best because she wanted this to work and could not imagine being on bad terms with Klaus’s family. “Sometimes, that is not the case.”

“You speak like you have experience in that?” Klaus asked lightly but Caroline looked down at her plate. She did not expect to get into this now. She did not expect to be revealing her deepest shame on the first date, over really good pizza to her professor. Yet, she trusted Klaus. She knew that he would never hurt her. “Caroline?”

She looked up to see him giving her a concerned look. She did not like that look on him. She wanted to see him happy, laughing and flirting as he had been all night. Their pizza was almost gone and the night would progress onward. Yet, this wasn’t just this night in play here. It was the rest of her life. Her entire outlook changed in the span of a few hours and no matter what happened, Klaus would be there. At least, she hoped he would be. Some things were never certain.

“I knew someone whose soulmate died.” Klaus nodded, not saying anything but was eyeing her with worry. She reached over the table and grabbed both his hands into hers. She needed contact with him. Even though she only knew him for a few short hours, she felt as though Klaus gave her strength. “I was sixteen. Rebelling hardcore. My parents were pretty much absent. Dad was with Stephen and mom threw herself into work. That is when I met him.” Klaus froze but gave her hands a comforting squeeze. She could see that his mind was going a mile a minute; thinking of the worst scenarios. “His name was Damon and he was about six years older than me. Bad boy. But if there was a bad boy within a five-mile radius, I would find him.”

“What happened?”

“At first, I thought he liked me. He was first in everything.” She gave him a significant look and Klaus understood her meaning. “I was young and stupid. He told me stories of his soulmate. Her name was Katherine and she died six months after they met. House fire. He never really got over it. He drank sometimes, he would either pretend that I was Katherine or just be mean…”

“Did he hurt you?”

“Klaus..”

“Caroline, did he hurt you?” Klaus asked again. She could tell that he was trying to stay calm. He was imagining the worst ways a man could hurt a woman and Caroline began to panic. That wasn’t the case. While Damon was mean and controlling, he wasn’t violent. He wasn’t a good boyfriend but he never laid a hand on her.

“No! No. Nothing like that.” Caroline vowed and Klaus’s shoulder’s sagged in relief. “I’m sorry. This is coming out all wrong. Damon and I’s relationship was complicated. He was older and hurt and I was so young and naive. He prayed on my insecurities and made me feel worthless but he never laid a hand on me. In anyway. I promise. My mother would have killed him if he did. Although, honestly she didn’t know about the relationship until years after it took place.”

“Okay.” Klaus nodded. He let go of her hand briefly and picked up his wine glass. He took a long drink and sat it back down. Klaus looked at her and there was such conviction behind those bright blue eyes that she quickly began to adore. “I want you to listen to me. You’re not worthless. You are by far the most amazing person I have met. You’re fascinating, strong and so full of light. Even before our words were spoken, I noticed you were beautiful.”

“Really?”

“Yes”. He laughed. “But I was your professor and you were my student. Like you said this afternoon, there is a distinct line that should not be crossed.”

“But one we are crossing?”

“Oh, most definitely.” Caroline bit her lip in understanding. Their hand where still connected and Caroline thought that if she let go, the moment would crumble and reality would set in. “You know, your transcripts were not the only thing I looked into this afternoon.”

“That documentary must have been really boring.” Klaus smiled.

“This was during my office hours actually.” Caroline just gave him a mock impressed look causing that dimpled, cheeky smile to appear. “I looked at my contract. There is, as you would imagine, a clause about professor and student relationships. Of course, it says that anyone in a position of authority should not have intimate relations with a student.” For a split second, Caroline looked forlorn but Klaus pressed on. “However, there was a sub-clause regarding soulmates. If a professor happens to find his or her soulmate in one of their students, the rules are…different.”

“Different how?” Caroline’s breath froze. Despite the overwhelming joy she felt at finding her soulmate and the fact that Klaus was everything she imagined him to be, part of her was still worried over how this would affect her academic career. She had worked hard to prove herself at Duke. She built a life and wanted to continue on this path she mapped out for herself. She didn’t want Klaus, who she already knew she would be unable to give up, stand in the way of that. Then of course, the last thing she wanted was for Klaus to be punished for having an inappropriate relationship with a student. Universities took those situations seriously and it was not unheard of that a professor would lose their job if he or she was found taking advantage of a student. She didn’t want that for Klaus.

“I can’t advise you on anything. I can’t grade your papers or if, for example, you were to pursue your doctorate at Duke, I can’t be apart of it. I would have to remove myself from the board who would oversee your research. You can continue with my course but with the understanding that I will not be the one who you go to with questions.” Caroline nodded. “I will have to report this to the Dean and there will be protocols to follow.”

“You haven’t already told him?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see how this went.” Klaus admitted. “I wanted to see how dinner and tonight went first. It would be nearly impossible for me to give you up. After that brief encounter in my class this afternoon, I knew I wanted to be with you.” Klaus paused, searching her face before he spoke the next few words. “But if you wanted to wait until you finished with your doctorate, I would wait.”

“But that could take years!” Caroline looked at him with a slacked jaw. He would have waited for her. However long it took, he would have sat by while she completed her dreams. Even if it took her a decade, although, this was Caroline Forbes, it would not take her a decade, to complete her degree, he would have waited. “We need to go.”

“What?”

“Like right now. Check please.” Caroline raised her hand, trying to get the waitress’s attention. Klaus continued to question her but she ignored him. Her mind was made up. They needed to get out of this restaurant immediately. The waitress came over quickly and Caroline asked for the check. Klaus looked at her with a baffled expression. “Look, you just said you were willing to wait, I don’t know at minimum four years for me, which is a long ass time. You pretty much spelled out that you want me to complete my dreams. If anything is getting you laid. It’s that.”

“Oh.” Klaus was speechless. He did not know exactly how to respond to that but continued to look at her with amazement. “Yeah. Check please.”

The waitress came back quickly and before Caroline could protest, Klaus pulled out his card and handed it to the waitress. The look he shot her told her not to argue and accept it. No matter how much Caroline was an independent woman, the southern belle in her liked to see a gentleman pay for dinner. So, she allowed it.

There was a tension that sizzled between them. It was a low burn that they both could feel. Neither spoke but instead waited for the check to come. Caroline tapped her fingers on the table while Klaus swirled his wine in the glass. When the waitress finally appeared with the check; Klaus signed quickly and held out his hand for Caroline.

Eagerly she laced her fingers with his and he all but pulled her from the chair. Quickly, Caroline grabbed her purse and the two of them made their way out of the pizzeria. Their pace was quick but Klaus was mindful of the fact that Caroline was in stilettos; a fact that he learned from having a diva little sister. Their hands where still linked together as they walked towards Klaus’s car.

“Wait.” Caroline paused as Klaus was opening the passenger side door for her. He stopped and looked at her with questions in his eyes. He would only go forward if she was certain, he wanted no doubts on her part. “I just want you to know that I don’t do this. I don’t jump into bed with anyone on a first date. I like to get to know them. Make sure they are not going to bury me in their basement or wrap me up in their carpet to let my body decompose in the woods.” Klaus raised his eyebrow in question and a smirk playing on his lips. “My mom was a cop, okay?! I think of these things. The point is. We kind of just met…only not really because I’ve been in your course for like less than two week-“

Klaus stepped forward and latched his lips on to her. Caroline, once she got over her split-second shock, Caroline melted into the kiss. Klaus placed his hands on her hips and Caroline wrapped her arms around his shoulders. If she thought the mere holding of hands sent her into a tailspin, it was nothing compared to his lips upon hers. She could taste the wine on his lips mixed with his saliva. For a moment, she forgot they were in a parking lot or the fact that she just really met him. All she could think about was how good it felt to kiss him. When they broke apart, Klaus held her in his arms, his forehead pressed against hers.

“I know Caroline. I know that this isn’t the run of the mill for you because it isn’t for me either.” Klaus kissed her nose and Caroline laughed lightly. “To be honest, it has been awhile since my last relationship and awhile since anyone has been in my bed. I don’t sleep around and I want you to know, that from this point forward, it’s just going to be you. I can’t explain it. Maybe it is the soul mark or whatever deity was kind enough to let us meet, but I just want you.” Caroline kissed him again but it was light this time. A simple peck upon the lips to let him know she heard him. “Just…you. I want you. So, for all that is holy, please get in that car before we are arrested for, I don’t know, something indecent.”

“Okay.” Caroline nodded and Klaus opened the car door and ushered her inside. The drive itself went quickly despite the fact that she felt that Klaus was obeying way too many traffic laws for such an occasion. When he pulled into a drive of a small craftsman house, she couldn’t help but smile. Briefly she wondered if he had a roommate or if one of his many siblings were visiting. “Do you…live alone?”

“Completely.”

“Thank god.” She stepped out of the car and followed him up the porch steps. He fumbled with his keys before letting them inside his house. The lights were off so Caroline did not really have a chance to take in his decor and before she could comment, Klaus had her pinned to the door.

His lips were on hers the second she felt the wood of the door hit her back. His lips molded to hers and Caroline could not help but press her body into his. Klaus’s hands wandered down her body; touching each and every curve that he could find. Caroline weaved her hands through his hair, scraping his scalp with her nails as she went. Klaus hissed in pleasure.

Caroline pushed his black coat off his shoulders, hearing it hit the ground behind him. Klaus’s hands moved inside of her own leather jacket and soon enough, she felt it slip from her shoulders. She pushed off the door in order to allow Klaus to pull it from her completely. The moment it was gone from her shoulders, Caroline found herself pressed against the door again.

Their lips broke apart and Klaus started kissing his way down her neck. His hands moved up her body, cupping her breasts while Caroline arched into him. Her head tilted backwards against the door, allowing him access to her neck. The feel of his lips against her skin made Caroline shiver. Her foot moved up his leg until her entire leg was hooked around his hip.

Klaus thrusted against her; Caroline hissing at the feeling of his covered erection grinding into her core. They dry humped against Klaus’s front door while Caroline continued to dig her nails into his scalp. Klaus hissed when she pressed with slightly too much pressure.

“Do that again.” Klaus demanded and Caroline obliged, letting her nails drag through his hair. Klaus’s hands roamed upward, cupping her breast and running his thumbs over her nipples. Dissatisfied with the lack of skin showing, Klaus ripped her tank-top in two; tossing the scraps to the side.

“I liked that shirt.”

“I’ll buy you a new one.” He kissed her again, his hands feeling her flat stomach. His fingertips dipped ever so slightly into the waist of her jeans. Caroline began pulling at his Henley, lifting it across his muscles. Klaus pulled away, rising his hands; allowing Caroline to pull it off of him. She tossed it somewhere into the dark house. She spied a tattoo etched into his shoulder blade. It was too dark for Caroline to really get a clear look of what the tattoo was but either way, she leaned down to place her lips against the design. “Caroline.”

Her name came out like a prayer. She looked up and locked eyes with him. The lust mixed something deeper was far too much for Caroline to process. Her hand slowly made its way up his chest, latching onto the silver chain that hung around his neck and pulled his lips to hers. The kiss set a new fire through Caroline. The slight contact of his flesh against hers was not enough.

“Your bed. I want in it.” Klaus bit gently at her bottom lip before pulling away completely. He grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the darken stairway. She stumbled slightly, not being able to see and they both chucked slightly. Klaus reached for a light switch at the top of the stairs and illuminated a hallway. At the top of the stairs, when she could see him clearly, Caroline reached for his left hand. She brought his wrist to her lips and kissed the long monologue that she knew he had read at least a thousand times.

Never before had she loved Degas so much.

“This way.” His voice was hoarse and filled with longing. His head tilted towards a room just shy of her left. Klaus pulled her down the hallway and into a darkened room. Instead of reaching for the light switch on the wall, he went to the bedside table and turned on the table lamp, dropping her hand as he went. He didn’t want the overhead light on, overpowering the feeling of the moment but he wanted to be able to see her.

Caroline, not being able to tear her eyes from him, reached behind her and unhooked her bra. It drooped slightly before she pulled it off completely, tossing it to some unknown part of the room. Klaus’s eyes lingered over her breasts and she could see him swallow in desire. Klaus stepped forward and reached out to touch her. His hand cupped her breasts, his thumb gracing over her nipple. She hissed at the contact. Not being able to take another second, Caroline pulled him to her, kissing him. She pressed her chest against his, feeling her erect nipples gracing his skin.

Once they broke apart, she placed her hand on his chest and pushed him onto the bed. He sat down, just watching her every movement. Enjoying his eyes on her, Caroline kicked off her heels and began to unbutton her jeans. She pushed them down her legs and stepped out of them. Klaus reached out to grab her hips, feeling the lace of her blue panties in his hand.

Caroline placed one knee on the bed and lifted herself in order to straddle him. She sat on his lap and began to grind herself against him. She leaned in to kiss in on the lips before leaving a trail of caresses down his neck to his throat. She sucked on the spot where his neck met his shoulder, not caring if she left a mark. Let his students know he was taken; claimed only for her. She thrusted her hips down, pressing herself against him; the friction almost unbearable.

“I need you.” Klaus whispered as her teeth grazed his skin.

“I’m not stopping you. I’m all yours.” Not being able to handle being at her mercy a second longer, Klaus gripped her hips and flipped them. Caroline found herself underneath him, her legs spread and him grinding into her. It wasn’t enough. She reached down and unbuckled his belt before pushing the offending fabric down his legs. Klaus crawled off of her, something Caroline did not like in the slightest. “Hey! Come back.”

“Patents Sweetheart. I’ll be right here.” Klaus replied as Caroline propped herself up on her forearms. She tiled her head when she realized that he was taking off his jeans. Realizing her interest, he could not help but make a show out of it. Inch by inch, he dropped his jean and boxers; enjoying the feel of gaze on his skin. Biting her lip as she took in the sight of him. Her fingers traced a path over her pantie line as she gazed at his impressive erection. “Remove those panties love, they are in the way.”

Caroline did as she was told and lifted her hips, sliding her panties down her legs. Once they were at her ankle, she couldn’t help but kick them at him. Klaus caught them easily. He could feel the lace in his hand and the dampness from her arousal seeped into the fabric. He dropped them onto the ground before crawling between her outstretched legs. He reached towards his bedside table but Caroline grabbed his wrist.

“I have an IUD. No need for condoms.” Klaus smiled widely at that. He leaned down and kissed her. “I’m clean too. No need to worry about diseases. Completely not sexy. Diseases I mean.”

"No. Not at all.” Klaus leaned kissed her again. “No need to worry about that on my end.”

“Good.” Caroline reached down to grasp him in her hand. She stroked him slightly, enjoying how his eyes fluttered shut at the contact. She brought him close to her clit, coating his member her in arousal; moaning as she did so. The feeling of her clit pressed against his penis, Klaus’s eyes shot open and he gazed down at her. He reached down, their fingers brushing as he aligned himself with her entrance. “Please. I need you.”

Klaus slid into her, filling her as far as he could. The feel of connecting with one another was something neither was prepared for. It was more than fireworks going off behind one’s eyes as the stories foretold. It was more than coming home after a long day. It was the sense of belonging or finally understand the meaning to existence.

They were connected in a way neither expected. They just laid there together for a moment; adjusting. When it became to much for Klaus to bare, he slowly withdrew his hips and then thrusted forward. Caroline whimpers of pleasure encouraged him forward. His movements were slow at first but once they were able to develop a rhythm, his pace picked up.

“Harder. Oh god, please go harder.” Caroline cried out and Klaus obliged. His slammed into her as fast as he could. Caroline’s nails dug into his shoulders, scarping down his backs. The pain mixed with pleasure had Klaus crying out. He buried his head into her neck; his lips sucking at her neck. She had marked him earlier and he wanted nothing more than the imprint of his lips to mare her skin. “God yes! Klaus!”

The bed creaked under their weight. The headboard banged off the wall and the springs of the mattress whimpering in protest. Skin hit skin and the smell of sex lingered in the air. Their sweaty bodies continued to intertwine until Caroline’s walls clenched around Klaus’s member. Her orgasm shook her, and sent shock-waves down her body.

It wasn’t long before Klaus toppled over the edge; a few more thrusts and he was done for. He released himself inside her; his hips jerking forward as he came. Caroline leaned up and kissed his lips until he regained himself. His eyes slowly opened and Caroline smiled up at him. Seeing her happy expression peering at him made return the beam down on her.

Klaus pulled himself from her body and laid on his back, his heart still pumping as though he had run a race. It had been a long while since he had good sex; and sex with Caroline proved to be exceptional. The woman in question crawled up to align her body with his and rest her head on his chest. Klaus pulled her to him; his arms around her.

“Well damn.” Caroline muttered, not knowing what else to say. Klaus’s chest rumbled with laughter. He leaned down at kissed the top of her head in affection.

“No rambling monologue for me now? Pity. I do enjoy those.”

“How are you teasing me right now? My brain is mush! I have no comebacks! Be nice and wait until my brain is not in a sex induced fog.” Klaus couldn’t help himself. He started laughing and Caroline didn’t know if she should be insulted or join in on the laughter.

“Please, Sweetheart. Never stop scolding me or telling me off in your insane rambles. Your mind is a marvel and I cannot wait to hear what you say next.” Klaus stated, knowing full well that he liked how she often took him off guard. He could never predict what she was going to say next.

“Always…I think.” She leaned up to kiss his chest. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me now.”

“Good.” He kissed the top of her head. “Because I can’t imagine anyone else I’d rather be stuck with.”

#klaroline fanfiction #kcauweek2020 #klaroline #caroline x klaus

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youllallriseintheink · 4 years

Text

Like It Never Happened, chapter 2.

Susie found work in the city fairly quickly. It was just as a store clerk, but she said that the first thing she needed was an income, and she could focus on having a real career when that was settled. And anyhow, it seemed like a pretty nice place to work. Her only complaint was the hour-long commute each way.

Sammy found out about this while they were talking during one of their dates. At first he didn’t ask if she was planning on moving into the city, opting instead to ask about her coworkers. He saw the opportunity, but the longer he could keep her only seeing him during dates, the longer they could pretend that nothing had happened. It was Susie who had brought it up, and Sammy couldn't resist the urge to ask.

“It’s awkward. I don’t know that I want to live by myself again. Which I know, I’ll have to, and I am looking for a place-"

“Want to move in with me?”

Susie was a little taken aback. “You sure you're okay with that? We’ve only been seeing each other a couple weeks.”

“Sorry. It’s kind of hard to tell where I’m supposed to treat this like a new relationship, and where I’m supposed to act like we can just pick up where we left off. We were fine living together back then. But I understand.”

“No, let's do it. It sounds great” There was a long pause. “I’m going to try and make this as much like before as possible, alright? You’re going to have to be patient with me.”

“Okay,” Sammy had said. After that, they agreed on the day she would move in, and then changed the subject. Sammy wondered what she’d meant by that, but he supposed he would find out. Any signs of trauma she had, she was hiding well. He almost hoped, sick as it sounded, that she was doing worse than him. He’d hate to be the one testing her patience.

Their first week of living together went by without any serious issues, but there was one thing that Sammy noticed, and that was that Susie seemed to be avoiding music. He started noticing the pattern when he’d tried bringing it up once or twice, and she’d immediately changed the subject. Later in the week, he'd decided to play banjo in the apartment while she was around, and she quickly decided that she had elsewhere to be.

"Where are you going?" Sammy had asked.

"I'm going to get some milk." Her eyes were shifty- clearly she was lying.

"We have milk."

"Well, there are other things we need," she said before leaving. Sammy returned to his banjo. He supposed it was Susie's right to not want to listen to him, but still, he was frustrated. When Sammy heard her unlocking the door some time later, he turned on the radio. He wasn't much for 60s music, but he wanted to give her one last test. As Susie came in, carrying a few non-perishable grocery items they'd use eventually, she turned it off.

"Hey, Susie. Since coming out of ink hell, I found a nice little church. I'm going to a service this Sunday, and I was wondering if you'd like to come with me."

Susie looked a little... stunned. Sammy supposed he should have made it less obvious that he was studying her. “I didn’t know you were religious,” Susie said.

Sammy shrugged. “My parents took me to church maybe five times a year. I think I went about ten times in my entire adult life. Believe it or not, it was my experiences with my cult that convinced me that I should go back.”

“Cool, you wanna tell me more about that?”

“Not really.” Sammy could remember years of comforting the barely sane creatures that came to him for guidance. Back then, he’d been the most stable creature around. Now, well, Sammy was glad to have the luxury of being the lost sheep, coming to others for guidance and community. Plus, Susie surely realized that the church would play music, and he still wanted to test her comfort level with it. His little bird being afraid of music seemed just perverse to Sammy, and he wanted to know just how bad the damage was.

"Okay, then. I'll go," Susie said. Good. And hopefully she'd fucking enjoy it.

---

Sunday morning rolled around. Susie had been rather uncomfortable coming to Sammy's church, being that she had strong suspicions about why he wanted to take her there, but once she was there she saw no real reason for it. It was a fairly standard church, full of friendly old people that Sammy introduced her to. Of course, Susie knew there would be music, and she was ready for that. As the service began and the choir began to sing, she focused on the visuals in the room, averting her eyes from anything with an angel on it. It still made her tense, but she was managing. Then, her eyes landed on Sammy's face. He had been staring right her, studying her, just like he had that one night. She realized that she looked rather distressed and spent about a second trying to fix that before she got up and left.

Sammy followed behind her. “Susie, what's wrong?”

"Why don't you guess? You already have your theories, don't you?"

"It's the music, isn't it?"

"No, it's you!" she snapped.

Sammy could tell they were in for a fight. “Maybe we should talk elsewhere.” He’d hate for the other churchgoers to overhear them fighting, especially if Susie had figured it out.

“Fine. We’ll talk at home. Should we go back in there?”

“Are you going to break down because of the music?” Sammy felt like the father of a petulant daughter.

“I'll be fine,” she growled.

And she was. Grumpy, but fine. No worse than uncomfortable when there was music. The church service was fairly average, which for this church meant quite pleasant, though Sammy would have liked to stay at the end to talk to the other churchgoers. Ah, just like old times, Sammy thought, Susie going into theatrics and taking it out on whoever’s closest. Which just so happens to be me.

After they got home, Sammy asked, “Okay, where were we?”

“I was going to tell you that it wasn’t the music. Yes, it does make me uneasy because of ink-related craziness, but what really upset me back there is that you have been... I don’t know... testing me about it. Did you think I couldn’t tell? I’m not stupid, Sammy, and I don’t appreciate you making weird plans like that instead of talking to me, alright? I'm not your daughter. I'm not for you to go planning stuff behind my back like in the you did in the forties. Alright? I need you to respect me.”

“Alright, I hear you.”

Susie sighed. “Okay. I’m sorry for overreacting. Is that everything? I'm sorry I didn't just tell you about this when I first suspected you were testing me.”

“Well, I guess I would like to know if you're planning to get back into music.”

“I don’t know. Probably. I mean, who am I without it? But not right now. Sorry. Voice acting I definitely still wanna do, though." There was a pause, and a heavy sigh. "Sammy, have you ever read 1984?"

“Yes, decades ago."

"I know that music is a lot of what we had in common. I just hope we're not like Julia and Willson after room 101- too damaged to still love each other. And it'll be all my fault since you don't seem to be having hardly any trouble with this at all."

A part of Sammy was honestly just relieved he was apparently hiding it so well. "Actually, Susie, I'm struggling a lot. When I first came out, I was pretty much jumping at shadows. Even now, going anywhere new is pretty hard for me. And there's a reason why I'm just as tired as I was back when Joey was working me to death. I have a lot of trouble getting to sleep, and when I do, I have some pretty ugly nightmares. It is kind of like you said- I don't really know who I am anymore. Am I the person I became in that dimension, or am I the person who helped ink everyone in the first place? Neither of them are very good people, and I know I'm not exactly like either of them. I guess, we just have to be the best version of whoever we are now."

"I guess you're right. I might have a solution to the sleeping thing, though. I know that you aren't normally one for sleeping together, but, well, my sister's dog started crawling in with me when I was having nightmares, and that helped me. We could try it."

"Sure," Sammy said. It was mostly to indulge her. He remembered the nights they'd slept together in the 40s, before Susie was put away. Of course, then it was because she was freezing cold due to being made out of ink. Sammy would have refused her, but he half suspected that that was half the reason they were even still together. The two of us sleeping together because ink-related issues. Nothing ever changes.

---

Alice Angel turned on the record player. "Sing," she ordered, letting Susie into the forefront of her consciousness.

Susie blinkered awake. She wasn't really in the mood to fight. She got up anyhow, intent on finding a knife.

Alice took back control immediately and sat back down. "Don't you even think about it. Do that, and I'm popping the eyeballs of the next ink creature we get in here, and you'll have to watch. Now, sing. I need your voice to hit the high notes." Alice restarted the record and allowed Susie back out. Susie began to sing. It was the Alice Angel theme song- one of her headmate's favourites. After she'd gone through it a couple times, she got up. Alice didn't seem to try to stop her. Susie kept singing, as though doing so would keep her placated. She didn't know what was going on, but she wasn't about to waste the opportunity it presented. Her voice caught on the high notes as her breath grew unstable. She made her way to the tool drawer, retrieved a kinfe, and began cutting through the ropes that were holding a captive Edgar in place. She could barely hear the music of the record player now, and she was more muttering the words under her breath than singing them. Her hands were so tense she could barely handle the knife.

The knife flew into the Edgar's eye socket, and Susie was thrown out of her locus of control. The creautre wailed and writhed in agony. "You were never in control, Susie. Remember that. Even when I let you control certain parts of us, you're never in control."

Of course, that wasn't true. There were times when Susie took control by force. Still, she felt utterly helpless. And without a body to pilot, she couldn't even curl up and cry.

Susie woke up with wet eyes. She touched the gloxinia plant she kept beside their bed. It felt green. Its velvety petals felt purple. She felt her pulse (as useless a feature as that had seemed), and it felt red. Then, she felt Sammy beside her, also struggling with a nightmare. She snuggled into him, calming him down. Everything was fine now. It was all over.

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #susie campbell #sammy lawrence #sammy x susie #my fanfiction #Like it Never Happened

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whispersafterdusk · 4 years

Text

Lost in Time - ch 9

With one of the Flying Pigs standing watch up above (and since they were camping out here anyway there would ALWAYS be someone watching the entrance) Arlo and the rest of the Civil Corps were free to head down into the facility to help herd the scholars along. With the power still off they had to drag around the power stone brackets still if they wanted overhead lighting rather than relying on flashlights and lanterns; Arlo was getting pretty practiced at opening up the wall paneling and wiring those up now and was looking forward to having the facility's lights powered properly so he wouldn't have to do that every time the scholars moved on to a new room.

Today wasn't especially exciting; the scholars had picked one of the floors full of the dorm rooms (but free of skeletons) and were carefully examining each room and taking copious amounts of notes on each and every item inside, where it was sitting, and, in the case of the technological gadgets left behind, what its function was (or what they THOUGHT it was - Eli was downstairs with Petra and Mali so she wasn't available to confirm or correct their guesses). He wasn't paying close attention to the scholars or their note-taking - it was very easy to be distracted by the thought that he was standing inside some ancient person's home; all the other ruins he'd been in previously had all been industrial and manufacturing, not domestic. It was a strange feeling to catch a glimpse of one way that Old World people had lived, and aside from the technology it...didn't seem all that different from his own room. ((Continued below cut))

For one fleeting moment he wondered if in another three hundred years they'd be studying what existed now but considering a Calamity was what put them in this current situation in the first place...he certainly hoped people in the future wouldn't need to study his time period in this manner. It was a good thing to know history but he felt there'd be a big difference between studying what was LEFT of a civilization compared to studying the PAST of a civilization.

He was pulled from his thoughts by the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps in the hall behind him; as Arlo stepped out of the doorway he could just spy Selene approaching in the dim light.

"Trouble?"

Selene shook her head at him and waited until she was closer to respond. "Nope! I've got the tool - well, tools - done. All shined up and ready to go. Had a small problem with air bubbles in the first casting but these are attempt number two and seem to be perfect."

Arlo nodded to her then gestured for her to lower her voice. "Eli, Mali, and Petra are downstairs somewhere. I'm babysitting up here."

"Oh." Selene's face scrunched up. "Well, that throws a wrench into things."

"How's that?"

"Well, Paulie wasn't free today and we might need muscle. I figured you'd be willing to come along to get that panel loose. Guess I should've asked someone up top to come down as back up."

Arlo blew out a sigh and looked over his shoulder toward the room the scholars were poking around in; he'd been told not to leave them alone, no matter how safe it seemed. And he didn't want them underfoot while they were trying to repair whatever this relay box thing was. "I can't really leave this group alone otherwise I'd be happy to come lend a hand."

Selene ran a hand through her hair, huffing. "All right...uh... I'll just pop back up top and get Asher to come do it, or take your place, or something."

"You know, between you, Mali, and Eli, you might not NEED extra muscle," he called after her as she turned to head back the way she'd come.

She waved over a shoulder to him but didn't turn around. "Not taking that chance!" was her reply, and then she was little more than a distant silhouette in the gloomy lighting.

"Something the matter?"

Arlo turned to find Edgar poking his head out of the room. "-nah. Nothing at all," he replied. "How much longer did you all plan to be down here?"

Edgar squinted at him a moment, then licked his lips and pulled a small, battered pocket watch out of his jacket. "Let's see... Was about half past ten when we got to this floor and -- hrm. We HAVE been at it a bit."

Being as he didn't carry any time pieces himself Arlo actually had no concept of how much time had passed. "Maybe a break is in order?"

"Let me..." Edgar trailed off as he ducked back into the room, and Arlo could hear a murmur of voices inside.

After a moment it occurred to him he could possibly catch Selene before she got too far - if this group was going to go take a lunch break then he wouldn't have to babysit. "Selene? Selene!" He jogged down the hall, trying not to inhale the little puffs of dust wafting up from the old carpet as he went.

------------------------------------------------------

"I question how we can even get all the ones we've found out of here."

Mali's voice echoed strangely in this room; it looked like a conference room, or maybe a classroom. Eli knew they'd already been in here but it had been a quick scan and then back out - no one had died and been left behind in this particular room so the first time through they hadn't looked too closely but now they'd returned to check for any doors they'd missed on the first sweep, and to also check on all the doors they'd assumed went to closets or other such storage areas.

"I'm...not really sure," came Petra's voice from the other side of the room. "We need to do it soon, and respectfully of course - we can't just toss them into baskets, but the skeletal remains are dry and loose and they won't keep together if we try to move them."

Eli was only half-listening from her spot at the door, fiddling with the inner bits of the panel next to the doorway; they had a cluster of the power stone brackets they were hauling along with them to patch into the lighting system and this one was proving especially tricky to hook up. It looked like the original wiring to this room had been shorted out at some point, and whoever had replaced the wiring had picked the cheapest wiring in existence; each time Eli tried to clear a bit of the wire coating to wire the bracket in the bared section seemed to disintegrate and begin unraveling.

In the far distance she heard a ding of the elevator opening, and not long after a concentrated beam from a flashlight began to flick up and down the floor back where the hall didn't have any brackets wired in. Eli clicked the torch off and returned it and the snips she held to the toolbox she'd borrowed from Selene, then rubbed the palms of her hands against her thighs to scrub away the grime as she stood to meet whoever it was coming down the hall. Eventually Arlo and Selene came into view and Arlo turned the flashlight off once they reached the lit section of the hallway.

"Hey, you two. What's the word?"

Selene grinned widely at her and waved her hands at her; in each hand she held two tools apiece - they were long-handled and glinted in the light. "Are you ready to pop a panel free?"

Eli chuckled; the last she'd asked the builder about those tools Selene had explained some issue with air bubbles in the cast that meant she had to redo it but now, here she was with the tools in hand. "As ready as I can be since we don't know what's gone on behind it." She moved away and into the room, picking out where Petra and Mali were now both working at prying open a door on the left wall that had been tucked between two built-in shelving units that had effectively hidden the door from view if you were standing in front half of the room. "-hey, Selene's got the tools done."

"That's good news," Mali grunted. She and Petra together shoved and the door grated open and slid into the wall to reveal a storage area that was litle more than a short hall lined on either side with floor to ceiling shelves. "-would you look at this - this one isn't empty."

Not empty? Eli jogged over, leaving Arlo and Selene in the hall; inside this storage area were boxes of more manuals and textbooks. "I wonder why there's so much emptied, and then random little spots like this that've still got things in it."

Petra carefully pulled a manual free and thumbed through it. "I haven't seen or heard of anything like this one before."

Eli looked over her shoulder - it appeared to be a technical readout of the inner wiring of some sort of machine but she didn't immediately recognize it. She gestured for and then was handed the book and turned it over to read the title: Surgical Veterinary Assistant Guidance System. "...starting to get a real weird feeling about this place if now we're finding animal texts in here." She turned it over in her hands a couple of times - why would there be a veterinary-based surgical machine manual down in a research center, but no hint of anything animal related?

With a shake of her head she returned the book to the box and led Petra and Mali out into the hall to meet back up with Arlo and Selene - they'd already grabbed the toolbox and some of the brackets out of the hall. "Seems we've got tools to work with - time to go see if we can get into that relay box."

It was a bit of a walk from this floor to the correct one; on the way down in the somewhat crowded elevator she found herself wondering how she ought to be feeling about this.

The relay box was basically the last remaining obstacle between her and the All Source AI -- between her and finding out what happened here so long ago. It felt a bit like a massive monolith just beginning to peek over the horizon, with it growing ever bigger the closer she got to it: she was walking toward something that was certainly going to crush her, one way or another, and yet she needed it to, no matter how much it was going to hurt. But the problem with gargantuan things toppling over is oftentimes other people got caught in the crush radius too...

When the doors dinged open Eli cleared her throat. "Can I ask a favor?"

They all stepped out onto the landing and paused there, waiting for her; Eli moved out behind them, and for a moment paused to wonder if what she was about to ask would be for the best. Or even if they'd agree to it.

"When we get the All Source on, I'd like to privately talk to it first," she continued. "I'd rather not have what personally happened to me broadcast to a group of people before I get a chance to reconcile with it. All I'd need is an hour, give or take, to get my questions out of the way."

"Seems reasonable to me," came Arlo's immediate answer. As he looked between the other two Eli waited and fixed her gaze on some indeterminate point further down the darkened hall.

"I have no problem with that," Mali replied.

Selene nodded. "Me neither."

Eli blew out a breath she'd not been fully aware she'd been holding. "Ok. Great. Thanks." That had been easier than she'd thought...whether that was a good or bad thing remained to be seen.

They trudged down the hall in silence then until they came to the reinforced paneling that hid the relay box (or, as Eli suspected, hid the maintenance tunnel that accessed the box). Selene plunked the toolbox down and carefully sat the special-made tools on top of it, then began to feel along the edge of the paneling to check the bolt heads there.

"None of these seem broken or the heads stripped out," the builder murmured as she inspected. "Assuming we've got the elbow grease needed to pop them loose I think we'll be fine."

Eli glanced over the tools again; they all looked mostly the same except for varying thickness in the necks, shafts, and sockets. "Do we want to try just one at a time or one on each side of this panel at the same time?"

Arlo bent to pick up one of the tools, hefting it. "Let's try one at a time first to see how hard it is." He stepped up beside Selene and fit the socket of the tool over one of the bolts.

"Righty tighty lefty loosey," Eli said, standing off to the side to avoid being in the way but also so she'd have a clear view as he tried to get the bolt loose.

He checked to make sure the socket was on all the way and tight, then began to push; Eli could see him straining almost immediately -- despite his own muscle and utilizing a bit of his own body weight as well it didn't look like it was enough (he seemed like a fairly strong man so she assumed it was more the fact that bolt hadn't moved in over three hundred years moreso than any suggestion of his actual strength).

"That doesn't seem like it wants to budge," Arlo finally puffed, stepping back and panting a bit. "Maybe we can pick a lower one for better leverage."

Leverage...ah. Eli bent down and sat the spare tools off to the side, then opened the toolbox and rummaged around until she found a ratchet wrench with a large enough hole in one end that it could slide over the end of the bolt tool. "Here, try this." She slipped it into place and stood back; it added a little over a foot of additional length to the handle.

Arlo stepped up to try again and Mali moved up with him as, with the added length, there was enough room for both of them; on Arlo's count of three the two of them began to push and finally, just barely, the bolt began to turn. It took several more minutes of huffing and puffing but finally there was a tinkling of metal hitting the floor as the bolt was freed and bounced down the hallway several feet.

At the look on their faces Eli chuckled. "There we go - one down, nineteen more to go."

----------------------------------------------------

The bolts thankfully had been the hard part; actually muscling the panel out of the way had been a simple task, and then they were greeted with the sight of a claustrophobic access tunnel stretching off into the dark. Eli ducked into the opening and shone a flashlight up the tunnel to reveal an absurd number of pipes, cables, and electrical panels lining otherwise plain concrete walls to either side with an equally plain concrete floor beneath their feet.

She knew what a relay box looked like but had zero idea where it'd be back here. "All right...I'm going to head in and look around. There's not a lot of room back here or anything to see so stay put until I find it, then bring the tools on in and we'll see what we're dealing with."

"Do you think you can fix it?" Mali called after her as she began to head down the tunnel.

"I know HOW to fix it. Whether I CAN is going to depend on what's needed and what tools we have," Eli called back over a shoulder.

The light of their headlamps grew more faint as she got further along; there was something oddly comforting to be surrounded on all side by things she found familiar. She could almost pretend she was...home. That all of Dubei was still above her head.

Don't think about it.

The tunnel stretched on for quite a distance - enough so that she had to turn off her own flashlight to catch a glimpse of the lights from where she'd come from - and then abruptly she smelled...dirt. Rock. Dust.

'Oh come on - please don't let this section be caved in...'

She didn't have a great mental map of this place yet but if where she was currently was in roughly the same quadrant as the cave in that had collapsed part of the room with the tubes...

"Oh thank the Three," she muttered as finally, up on her left, a gigantic blocky box marked with all sorts of hazard stickers and warnings appeared in her flashlight's beam. There it was - the relay box. Wherever the dirt she was smelling happened to be it wasn't an immediate problem.

Pauline hadn't been able to tell them what was wrong with the relay's connections, only that some connection error had occurred and that as a result everything had been taken offline as a precaution - there was roughly a 50/50 chance it could be a major problem. Wedging the flashlight between her shoulder and the side of her head Eli ran both hands along the relay box's outer edges - if this thing was locked that was going to be a hassle but typically things kept behind secured panels didn't also have keys to worry about. She found a latch that was molded to fit over a handle but it was thankfully not locked down and also wasn't fused in place from age; she flicked it open and then had to struggle a bit to get the handle to turn but soon she was swinging the door open and finally looking over the inside of the relay box.

A familiar array of switches, buttons, screens, fuses, and several neat bundles of wires were inside and at first glance nothing seemed amiss. Taped to the inside of the door was a handwritten maintenance schedule and she could just barely make out the names and dates in faded ink -- it looked like the routine was checking roughly every three months which was at least proof that people had been doing what they were supposed to be doing so, theoretically, there shouldn't be any other missed issues that might have occurred prior to everything going to hell-

Don't think about it.

Experimentally she reached out to rattle a few switches; they moved without too much protest so she took it as a good sign that the hardware wasn't too ravaged by time. Now to just...figure out what went wrong and where, fix it, and then get power to the signaler inside (it was usually hooked to a battery back up but that would definitely be dead by now) so it would in turn signal back to the reactor that everything was back in working order.

Then, assuming nothing else had broken in the system, everything ought to start coming back online. And they'd probably have enough time, if they hurried, to get from this floor down to the AI's room and be there when it "woke" up.

She reached up to grab the flashlight off her shoulder and then rotated her neck a bit to work out the cramp that'd been forming due to the awkward position that was basically trying to press her ear to her shoulder with a flashlight between the two; it was a quick jog back to fetch the others and lead them to here, and then while she, Petra, and Selene stayed behind to examine the relay box Mali and Arlo decided to move ahead to look for the source of the earthy smell.

"Ok..." Eli muttered. Where to even start... Nothing looked wrong so they'd have to check everything, piece by piece. "Let's start with the wire bundles. See the connectors on the end? There's a trio of screws holding each end in place - do you have a screwdriver that'll fit those?"

She moved aside to let Selene get closer; the builder woman eyed the nearest connector for a few breaths then bent down to her toolbox and dug around. "I think I do. I know I've got a couple pocket knives with blades thin enough to slip in there if need be." She popped back up with three screwdrivers in hand and carefully tried each before returning one of them to the box. "-all right, I've got two."

"You and Petra get to work disconnecting the bottom connectors on these bundles here, and I'm going to try and get that screen worked loose so I can get check the inner bits."

It was a bit cramped working in such close quarters together but Petra had a steady hand, Selene never seemed to tire, and both of them were paying enough attention that they weren't tripping over each other or Eli down in the floor working on a lower screen. By the time she'd worked the screen free they had all the wires loose and ready for her to inspect.

"Did you notice any damage?" she asked as she stood.

"I did, actually," Selene answered. "One of these connector rings was cracked, and the little...um, what's the term..."

Eli stretched a bit before focusing on the wire end Selene had in hand -- at first she didn't see anything odd but then Selene turned the end toward her and there, glinting dully, was the issue. "Aha. How the heck did that happen..."

The connector end had a pattern of pins inside it - several were visibly bent and a few of those were reduced to fragile, corroded needle-like remnants. It was anyone's guess how the pins had been bent, or when -- it could have been an unnoticed factory defect, or a careless worker. Whatever had caused the pins to bend they hadn't been bent enough to completely lose contact with the receiving socket, meaning this wire wouldn't have been plugged in securely and those pins would have had just enough contact to be steadily damaged by uncontrolled arcing until it reached an error threshold letting the system know something was awry.

She was only vaguely aware of Selene at her elbow snapping fingers and going "pins! That's the word" as she looked the end over. There was no chance in hell anyone could make a connector like this - not anymore. And it would be a simple thing to switch out if this place hadn't been mostly emptied. There was the one hastily converted storage room down on the same level as the All Source where they'd found replacement components for various things but there wasn't a guarantee they'd find the correct connector piece down there...there was a slim chance they'd find another storage closet that still had things in it, like Mali had earlier, but still there wasn't a guarantee they'd find what they needed.

Eli blew out a sigh and looked around. "All right...here's our choices: we backtrack down to that one room that had the cords and lightbulbs in it, and hope we get lucky. Option number two is we hope we come across another closet that happens to have what we're looking for in it. And then there's option number three, where we play everyone's favorite game."

She trailed off, thinking back to what she'd already walked by; those had all been smaller boxes, it wasn't likely they'd have the same connectors as the relay...

"...a game?" Petra repeated, looking puzzled.

Eli looked over at her and smiled. "The name of the game is 'What system can we take apart to make a more important one work?'" She dusted her hands off and stepped around Selene to head back down the hallway to take a closer look at the individual power boxes.

"That sounds like an awful game," came Petra's response behind her, along with her footsteps following along.

"It is. But it's a good game to know," Eli laughed. "I'll sweep this hall first and see if I can save us a trip."

--------------------------------------------------

Selene loved the fact that each time she came down here she learned something new about Old World tech. Today's lessons were how to beat the 'game' Eli had introduced them to, and how to dismantle most of the room-sized generator that was the auxiliary power unit of this place; Arlo and Mali had found where the walls and ceiling had buckled further along the maintenance tunnel but in an intact room before that point they had found the aux power generator, and they'd all spent several hours painstakingly taking it apart and looking for the correct wire end. Then, she'd watched Eli splice the new end on, plug everything back together, then Selene learned how to patch in "battery" power (which was just a power stone bracket, of course) to get a signal sent to the main reactor.

And then, a few minutes later, a deep hum rumbled through the entire facility a few moments before lights began to flicker back on.

It was incredibly exciting to see the halls completely lit, as they'd been three hundred years ago. And when they'd gotten down to the All Source's floor that middle glass-enclosed section was lit up with a soft white, all the way around -- like the glass itself was glowing.

This place seemed a lot more inviting now that everything was lit up like it was supposed to. Eli had gone in to speak with the All Source AI Stewart, and the rest of them had detoured into that one storage room to take inventory and more closely study the crates of texts left behind. It was definitely easier to carry out both tasks with an overhead light as opposed to a lantern or flashlight and Selene was amazed to see that the printed words and illustrations in the books hadn't faded at all despite their age. The manuals probably wouldn't be too useful right now since they were for machines that didn't exist anymore (MOSTLY didn't exist...there WAS a manual for what looked like the same type of machine as the Uplifter but it wasn't the same company - the one they'd found was by the Xander Company, and this manual was for a Surgitech) but there were anatomy books galore and quite a few that detailed diseases and injuries and their treatments.

'This room is a doctor's treasure trove,' she found herself thinking, and then giggled a bit at the thought of how much studying Dr. Xu would be doing -- would he want to learn everything himself and then teach others? The university in Atara would definitely be interested in these books too...the thought of transporting them anywhere felt unreasonably risky to her though, the more she thought about it. She could very well be holding information no one on the planet knew anymore, and to risk losing that information to accidents, or theft, or... It was information that needed to be taught to the doctors of the Alliance as well as their allies but it was faintly nauseating to think how easy it'd be to lose this knowledge again.

And some of these manuals, geez... They were definitely worth hanging on to just in case they ever found any of these parts or the machines themselves but it was such a depressing reminder of how much the Old World'd had, and how little progress they'd made to claw their way out of the Age of Darkness. She'd thought they'd been doing well with the small factories (her own included) and the recovered relics...ha. It seemed like a big joke now with it spelled out in front of her face in printed text, nevermind the fact they were walking around in a massive reminder of what the world had been like once. At the very least if, in the future, they had the means to reproduce these parts, they already had the technical read outs to assemble everything. It wasn't much but it was a small silver lining.

Selene stood and stretched, and plopped down three more texts into a crate they were going to carry up tonight. "Do you think the clinic is secure enough to hold these?"

Mali didn't look up from the text she was thumbing through. "You think someone would try to steal them?"

"It's a possibility, isn't it? We've had break ins at the Research Center and the like. If someone decides Old World knowledge isn't worth keeping no matter what the subject matter is..."

Arlo lifted down a crate from a chair to the floor, carefully closing the crate's lid. "It's a possibility but I don't think it's a very high possibility. There's a lot more than just books that a thief could take from the clinic - things that would probably be more valuable to your typical thief and easier to use or sell, and they would have to know the books are even there before they could be tempted to break in to take them."

"It's likely the university will request to take custody of these," Mali said. "We can make sure they stay safe while in Portia and if or when the university requests them I'll make sure they're well-guarded on the trip there. I might not be a medical expert but these could be the most valuable things we've ever found."

They kept sorting in silence for a bit then; they were making good headway on getting everything sorted by subject matter and re-packed into crates. If Selene brought her wheeled dolly down (the one that converted into a sort of wheeled platform, not the one you piled things on and leaned back) they could get ALL the book crates out in two trips. That would leave just the component crates down here and those probably should stay down here where they'd be close to the things they belonged to...would be rather silly to carry something out only to need it later and have to tote it back down.

Speaking of later, how long had they been in here? Eli had wanted an hour or so but none of them had a watch to know how much time was passing.

"I'm going to go peek in at Eli," Selene announced into the silent room. "Check up on her, you know?"

No one seemed to have a problem with that so she headed out of the storage room and around the curved glass wall with its soft white light illuminating every step until she came to the door that led into the All Source's room. It was still wide open but when Selene poked her head around it she was surprised to see the room was empty save for a--

Eli had said the All Source was a mobile model, so that...that weird looking thing in the middle of the room near the pillar with the screens and door had to be it. It looked like a jointed doll about six feet tall and was a mix of smooth white metal with silver accents that glinted under the ceiling lights, and across its back and on the backs of its arms and legs Selene could see various sizes of sockets -- which made sense as she knew AIs, living or otherwise, had to be able to connect with some sort of power source or computer system. When the AI turned to face toward the door Selene saw its head was a near perfect oval with a projection of a face hovering out in front of a smooth "face" dotted with tiny glass spots that she assumed was the source of the projection.

She watched that facial expression change from an idle look to one that looked generically friendly - like someone trying to look as non-threatening as possible.

"Greetings, human. May I know your name?"

"Uh..." Selene blinked at the AI - whatever she'd expected to find in here, this wasn't it. "Selene."

The AI's expression flicked briefly to a "!" symbol and then back to a more casual smiling face. "Aha - I know you from Pauline's logs. A pleasure to meet you face to face."

"Likewise...uh, Stewart, right?"

"Correct. I am this facility's All Source AI."

"Where's Eli?"

Stewart's expression flickered again, rapidly switching between what she could only describe as surprise, alarm, and uncertainty before returning to its smiling one. "Ah. Well. After our discussion she wanted some time to mull things over. -- oh, yes. She asked me to make certain you or one of your companions took this to the surface."

The AI smoothly moved over to a nearby computer console and picked up what Selene thought was just a piece of paper; she noticed as Stewart moved that his head remained at a stationary height - sort of like what chickens did if you picked one up and moved them around. She extended a slightly shaking hand to take the paper from him and found herself holding an itemized print out with...

"Are these names?" she asked, looking between the AI and the paper. It looked like names with a string of alpha-numeric information after it.

Stewart nodded. "They are - names, as well as location designations. Pauline's logs were limited to what personnel had access to her services - MY logs encompass the entire facility. This is the list of missing persons that, according to various factors including logging or clocking in and out and biometric readings, did not make it out of this facility when Dubei was attacked."

Selene looked the list over again and then looked back to Stewart, eyes wide. "There's over three hundred names on this!"

"Indeed. We - and largely Dubei - were not prepared for what we suffered that day. Many did not make it out to safety."

"But...but...we've not even found all the people Pauline said were missing. How can there be almost two hundred more people down here?"

Stewart clasped his hands behind his back in a strangely human way. "You will note I've provided the last known locations of every person I am aware...expired, so to speak, down here. I am also aware that I have no sensor activity in well over half this facility so I imagine if you haven't found them yet they are within the half that I have no access or contact with. Likely due to catastrophic damage."

Over half the... Oh. There was one entire side of the elevator shaft leading down here that they couldn't open -- they had tried to pry one of those doors open and found a hallway with its ceiling just barely hanging in there and holding back the tons of earth and rock over it. Dana had said it was way too dangerous to try and fix the hallways on that side so they'd built over it and reinforced everything to keep it from collapsing further. "Yeah, there's...there's an elevator down here and the western side was in danger of caving in further. We shored it up and closed it off."

Stewart nodded, then his face disappeared and the projection grew in size; Selene jumped back a bit as suddenly a giant 3D map was hanging in the air between her and the AI and then stared in amazement at a towering building reaching into the sky and deep into the ground -- this was a full map of what she was standing in, including a detailed visual of what the above-ground building had looked like over three hundred years ago.

"Based on what I can 'see,' so to speak, and what I can't, I believe your missing personnel would be located in these places-"

The above ground portion flashed red several times and then became grayed out; below it were what looked like a half dozen elevators but all but one of these also flashed red then grayed out along with the floors they connected to. Along the one remaining elevator the western side of it turned a bright red and traced along all the connecting lines of the map to outline what Selene knew was the half of the facility they could no longer access -- this place, in its prime, had been nearly four times as large as what they'd already explored!

In the reddened western part of the map circles began to appear around rooms across various floors, and then in the side that she and AI stood in more circles began to appear as well. She didn't think there were three hundred total circles but considering the level of detail that would be needed to show that it was probably for the best - the projected map would need to fill this entire room to avoid clusters of visual clutter that would happen with individual circles for every person missing.

"Geez..." Selene whispered, backing up a bit more to try and take it all in at once. She tore her attention away from the floating map to stare down at the list of names in her hand; Gale wanted a list of the persons so they could be carved into a memorial but...

Oh.

Oh wait.

A name caught her attention - Darren Summers.

"Stewart - who was this?" she asked, jabbing a finger at the 27th name on the list.

The map disappeared, leaving afterimages in her eyes, but soon Stewart's face returned and the AI carefully bent over to look at the list as Selene hastily turned it over so it wouldn't be upside down to it. "-ah. Yes. Well. I imagine you can guess already, if you're asking me about it."

Stewart's floating face switched to something resembling discomfort and embarrassment, and Selene had to fight to keep herself from balling up the list of names and chucking them across the room.

"Where did she go?"

"Back to surgical lab 3948A9-Z1."

Selene almost tripped over the edge of the door as she turned around and ran for the elevator; when she got back to the room with the tubes, where they'd found Eli in the first place, she was out of breath and the ever-present cold air down here hurt to inhale.

But, there she was.

Eli sat in the floor near the base of the tube she'd inhabited for over three hundred years; she had one leg tucked under her, and the other leg was bent at the knee and pulled in to her chest so she could wrap arms around it and rest her chin on them. When Selene came in Eli looked up at her, expression blank and eyes dull.

"...Eli, are you ok?" Selene asked quietly - so quietly in fact she wasn't sure if Eli could ever hear her at this distance.

For a long moment there wasn't a response, and it wasn't until Selene was almost across the room to her that Eli stirred a bit where she sat.

"You know," the woman started, voice low and catching a bit. "It was a lot easier to pretend that maybe he lived out the rest of his life, to the best of his ability, while the world fell apart around him."

On the run down here Selene had, despite her best efforts, somewhat crunched up the list of names; she smoothed it out between her palms and looked again at the 27th name.

Darren Summers, surg. lab. 3948A9-Z1.

#Lost in Time #lit #Lost in Time - ch 9 #Arlo #Builder #Mali #All Source AI #Petra #My Time at Portia

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