#Lenny has done nothing wrong ever in his life | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

vanderlindemangofarm · 4 years

Text

The Van der Linde Gang - Jobs in a Modern AU

I’ve been really inspired to write about this lately and I’d love to hear your takes! These are the occupations that I think each gang member would have in a modern AU. Some were more challenging than others, but hopefully you guys can see where I’m coming from with each!

Arthur: Film location scout. His natural eye for photography and framing makes Arthur the perfect member of a pre-production team. His no-bullshit approach to everything means he keeps to deadlines, although he’s known to go wandering off into the wilderness for unknown amounts of time. He enjoys the lone working side of his job and finding exactly the right spots that would make the film come to life. He doesn’t always like the films once they’re finished (in fact he’s often bought cinema tickets and walked out half way through, grumbling that it wasn’t worth the popcorn) but he can’t deny the excited buzz he gets every time he gets hired. In his early years as an assistant he met Bertie Mason, a nervous but talented photography intern. Despite an ill-advised hookup after a week joined at the hip they have remained close friends and still go out on shoots together.

John: landscape gardener. John? Flowers? Yes, alright, I found it hard to believe too. But look, it’s not about the flowers, even if he does get misty-eyed at the sight of a sunflower in the early morning light. It’s about the challenge, the outdoors, and solving problems. After all the renovations he did to his house and garden (some more successful than others) John found how much satisfaction he got from digging and reshaping and planting. Don’t get me wrong, he’s often without a shirt, even in the colder months, much to the delight of some and the horror of others. He always makes friends with the household pets and is wonderful with the kids, always dropping his task to throw a frisbee around for a bit or cheekily accept an ice cold glass of lemonade from their mothers. Whenever he drives past one of his projects he feels himself glowing with pride - “I did that!”.

Dutch: philosophy lecturer. As always, late with Starbucks. Will he actually grade your essay? Will it mysteriously disappear? Keeps you on your toes, doesn’t it? Sitting precariously on the very edge of his desk, leather jacket hanging off his shoulders and losing his balance every 15 minutes, Dr Van der Linde is nothing short of a wonder. For the love of all that is holy, do not get him started on Kant. Kant has no place here. You want to talk about your precious Kant? Get your butt down to Dr O’Driscoll’s class, he has plenty to say about Kant. Perhaps a little too fond of Socrates. Plato who? Completely illegible handwriting and definitely sleeping with several members of the faculty. But somehow his students always walk away with excellent grades. At the end of each term Dutch takes everyone out to a local bar for drinks, insists on buying tequila which no one really fancies at 11am. Claims to ride a motorcycle called The Count which no one has actually seen. Impossible to hate, and he writes everyone great references for their summer internships.

Hosea: social worker. In a crisis, there’s no one better to knock on your door. Hosea has seen it all and he’ll see it all again, but that doesn’t stop him from treating every single case he gets with the upmost respect and care. His no-nonsense approach to his work means he gets things done, but he never sacrifices his compassion. He mostly works with teenagers and has a way of being able to connect to each individual without coming across as patronising. He’s been in the field for over two decades and is an invaluable mentor for any newcomers, always willing to share a word or two of advice or be a shoulder to cry on.

Javier: guitar teacher and music therapist. During his worst years, Javier’s guitar was his lifeline. And he wants to help others find their lifeline, too. He works on a freelance basis, mainly going into mental health hospitals, schools and prisons. He runs workshops focusing on guitar playing, but brings other instruments (mainly percussion) to try too. He’s a gentle teacher, always with a joke in his back pocket for when you need it most. He has nicknames for everyone and remembers everything they’ve ever told him. He’s patient and never lets anyone feel bad for making a mistake. Javier also runs an after-school guitar club at the local middle school alongside playing his own music at gigs whenever he can. No, he doesn’t reply to DMs no matter how thirsty they are.

Sadie: self-defense instructor. After surviving an attack several years ago, Sadie used her ferocity to get her qualification in self-defense to teach other women how to fight back should they need to. Her husband Jake helps out in her classes, happily allowing himself to be thrown around and slammed onto the mat as many times as required. Her students are terrified of her in the best and nicest way. Sadie also volunteers at a women’s refuge, providing emergency care and taking phone calls.

Charles: environmental campaign manager. Charles has always been drawn to charities and started doing voluntary work for Greenpeace when he was at university, securing an internship with them in Canada which led to a full time job. Whilst Charles mainly hosts meetings and organises events, he also works closely with elementary schools and runs workshops with outdoor activities, crafts and music. Last week they made bird feeders! It was awesome. He’s also a keen activist and regularly meets up with Javier to go to protests and community events, most recently for BLM.

Micah: motorcycle mechanic. Micah is massively invested in motorcycle culture and treats his beloved bike better than his own mother, if he still spoke to her. Although he pretends not to care, fixing bikes is his greatest passion and almost looks...happy when he’s doing it? Maybe? He likes knowing more than the people who stop by his shop and makes sure they know it. Occasionally he leaves his number on a scrap of paper inside women’s handbags when they’re not looking but for some reason none of them call. Like it or not, he’s incredibly skilled and will have your motorcycle singing a tune if that’s what you want. Euphemism? Of course not.

Abigail: nurse. She was so shy when she realised she wanted to pursue nursing - would people laugh at her? Was she too impatient, too nagging, too shrill? Her dyslexia always put her off going into further education and she was always discouraged by her parents. But with lots of encouragement from Hosea (who helped her to fill out her applications and other forms) and her friends, Abigail went to university in her 30′s to get her degree. She graduated top of her class and now works full time in her local hospital, based mostly in the emergency room. From drunken brawlers to tearful children and grumpy old men with lumbago, Abigail has learnt to keep her cool and to have faith in her own ability.

Molly: holistic therapist and masseuse. It took years to get that bastard of a philosopher out of her head (and out of her bed - damn those happy hour drinks “for old times’ sake”), but she’s finally free. Molly radiates a kindness that few took to the time to see, and she wanted to take strength from her past struggles to help others who may need someone to listen, just as she did. Molly took a bunch of online courses in various holistic therapies, including aromatherapy and massage, as this was something she had always been interested in. She runs a tiny clinic on a quiet street, the rooms filled with sunshine and the scent of geraniums. She also has a quite popular ASMR YouTube channel, Emerald Eyes ASMR, which she shyly admits just reached 500k subscribers. Her most popular video, ‘Irish Girl Helps You Fall Asleep (soft spoken, tapping, mouth sounds)’ just reached over a million hits.

Kieran: veterinarian specialising in equine care. Much like Abigail, Kieran didn’t like the idea of going back into education. He’d had a rough time of it as a teenager, dropping out of high school early and working a string of menial jobs for the next decade. They paid his rent, but he still felt poor. His favourite job, however, was working at a stable. The horses made him feel calm and he found that he could read them better than most people. He went to the library and read as much as he could about them. From there, he got himself an apprenticeship which paved the way for him to earn his degree in veterinary science. He smiled so hard in his graduation photo his eyes disappeared into his cheeks. He travels all over the local countryside, visiting farms and ranches to care for the horses. His confidence picked up after the first few blunders, and little by little he’s saving up to buy his own ranch one day.

Lenny: political science student. You know that kid who always looks amazing, even in 9am lectures? Yeah, that’s not Lenny, but he’s sat just behind. See him? Yep, the one rubbing sleep from his eyes as he pushes through the effects of another all-nighter. It’s not due to procrastination, but from perfectionism. He spends hour agonising over references, appendixes and even titles. One time he was so tired he signed his work “Ynnel”. He’s completely in love with his course and relishes every class he takes. Oh, he’s taking Dutch’s ‘History of Western Philosophy’ module by the way. Sitting in the front row, middle seat, directly in front of Dutch, his eyes glinting wickedly. Poor Dutch. Lenny has a counterpoint for absolutely everything and can barely stifle his laughter as Dutch gets more and more flustered. He’s been dating Jenny Kirk, an English Lit student, for the past few months and it’s going well. So well in fact, that he might stop hiding his Doctor Who merchandise every time she comes to his dorm room.

Tilly: business student. Tilly started university at the same time as Lenny and they still always go to the library together, rolling their eyes at each other over their morning peppermint lattes. Tilly is at the forefront of any and all on-campus activism. Think of Sam from Dear White People - that’s our Tilly. She wears her Ravenclaw scarf all autumn and winter long and posts scathing Instagram stories about the cafeteria food. But she’s powerfully kind and very ambitious, taking on a part time job tutoring kids with dyslexia in their reading and writing.

Susan: midwife. Think having a baby is scary? Try crossing Nurse Grimshaw. She’s here now, and that baby is coming out of you one way or another. She’ll hold your hand through thick and thin but if you dare say “I can’t do it” one more time she’ll unleash hell. Susan will make sure everyone has a job to do. Partner just standing there like a lemon? Not on her watch. She’s harsh but kind to her trainees and will always offer a cup of coffee and a shoulder to cry on, but there’s a time and place for slacking and it’s not on her labour ward.

Trelawny: talent agent. Our Josiah is cunning, infuriatingly charismatic and with an eye for the best of the best - what else could he do so effortlessly? He’ll wrangle you a 10 second role as a latrine cleaner in a non-profit film and he’ll still make you feel like the next DiCaprio. You’re a diamond, don’t you know? Of course you could nab Elphaba, we’ll worry about the singing later. How do you feel about cat food commercials? No no, it’s not pornography, it really is cat food this time - he double checked. On top of this, he knows everyone in the business. No, really. He can’t move 3 feet down Broadway without someone booming his name. The tone of said boom depends, of course, but who hasn’t been caught with his bottom out in that director’s wife’s en-suite?

Sean: outdoor activity centre instructor. You mean you can actually get paid to swim in lakes, ride ziplines through the forest and eat roasted marshmallows?! Sean couldn’t believe his ears. But it was true, and he’s living his best life. He may be on his penultimate warning for unruly behaviour, but he knows he could never really get fired. How could they? Everyone loves him. And to his credit, he’s a fantastic instructor, especially with kids. Everything from canoeing to caving, wild swimming to climbing, Sean has mastered it all and he always makes it fun. No one is allowed to feel left out or silly for not being able to do something. Sean has a way of making everyone feel included, even if you can only make it up the first few rungs of the ladder. Hey, that’s still off the ground! He once knew this feller Bill who cried because a moth flew into his face. You’re doing fine.

Mary-Beth: librarian and YA author. Sweet Mary-Beth, how could she be anywhere else but surrounded by books? She adores her job at her small, local library and is always looking for ways to make it even better. She often gets tangled up in the stories she reads whilst organising shelves, but it’s quiet enough most days that she’s rarely caught. She loves helping people find their books or recommending her favourites. She also runs the toddler storytime groups and a writing club for older kids. Of course, she’s also writing her own books. The first of her ‘Valentine Mysteries’ books made a modest profit and she’s excited to write more about the adventures of Leslie Dupont.

Karen: actress. Realising that she had a knack for accents and even after an especially successful high school lead role as Roxy Hart, Karen didn’t really acknowledge her would-be passion for acting for a long time. But she used her talents to get herself and her friends into X-rated films, dive bars and successfully pull off dozens of prank calls. It wasn’t until one of her friends was going to an open-call audition for a short film and wanted someone to go with her that Karen had her epithany. She was cast on the spot, much to the dismay of her friend. Since then, she’s been in a handful of arthouse films, a commercial here and there, and recently enjoyed a short run as Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a small theatre downtown. Does she want fame and fortune? Honestly, she hasn’t really thought about it. Right now, she’s just enjoying the ride. And the phone numbers left for her at front of house from many admirers.

Strauss: financial loan adviser. Oh boy, perhaps you saw this one coming. Then again, maybe not. Old Leopold isn’t quite the two-pronged-tongued eldritch horror people often mistake him for. In fact, he actually advises people against loan sharks. He had his fair share of debts y’see and he genuinely doesn’t want anyone else to go through the same thing. He’s not exactly sweet and cuddly, but he might let you have a free pen if you call by his office. I mean, technically they’re not free but...never mind, just take it.

Bill: plumber. It was purely accidental that Bill bashed his way into his career. No, really. His sink was blocked and after an hour of poking and prodding the pipes he started hitting the poor thing with a spanner out of pure frustration, cursing all the way. To his shock, it worked, and he suddenly had running water again. What shocked him more is that he realised he wanted to know how. So, he bought a book. And he read the book. And one thing led to another, and now he’s the proud owner of Williamson Plumbing Inc. The money is very good, but for Bill that’s not it. You have to understand that for him, it’s the act itself of fixing something that brings Bill immense satisfaction. And Bill isn’t used to knowing more about something - anything - than those around him. For the first time perhaps in his life, he can sit down, solve a problem, and know that he’s done a good job.

Swanson: AA group leader. After getting completely sober almost a decade ago and staying that way, Orville wanted to give something back to the people who had helped him out so greatly. Becoming a volunteer to help those who were trapped where he was seemed like the only path, and it felt so right. Orville is there in meetings, making coffee, handing out donuts and training new volunteers. If anyone wants to talk about their faith he’s all ears, but he never pushes it as a cure-all in any situation. Orville’s sobriety has also meant that he’s learnt to make the most phenomenal mocktails.

Pearson: grocery shop manager and cooking teacher. Simon has his small grocery shop on the edge of town which has a wide range of regular customers. But he wanted to do more, so he set up a small class to teach fellow veterans how to cook. His wife helps out, and they grow the ingredients together in their garden and down at the allotment. It’s just an therapeutic for him as it is for his students, as he’s only just realising how much he wants to talk about his time in the navy.

Uncle: unknown. For the longest time, everyone thought Uncle worked at one of the worst dive bars in town, as whenever they stumbled in for a nightcap he was there, behind the bar, happy as a pig in shit. Turns out that he just started going there one night and no one could get him to leave. And so every evening he’ll appear like a phantom, sit himself in the half-broken chair behind the bar (clearly labelled “not for customer use”), order the cheapest beer on the menu and sit there until midnight. No one can understand how he gets the means to live as he ragingly denies receiving any government handouts despite his lumbago. Claims to be a veteran but hasn’t fought in any wars anyone has heard of.

298 notes · View notes

alarawriting · 4 years

Text

52 Project #30 (Writeober #15: Mortality): Everybody’s Happy As The Dead Come Home

Ever since my mother died of breast cancer a few years ago, I’ve been making time to go visit my elderly father about once a month. That may be conjuring up the wrong image in your head, so let me clarify. My father’s over 70, but he still has a lot of the energy he had as a younger man. He works as a consultant for the big corporation he spent his entire adult pre-retirement life working for, for about three or four times as much money, and he enjoys it. He’s got an active social life, spending time with friends he had shared with Mom as a couple, and new friends he’s made from his bereavement group or his consulting work. And my sister, the baby of the family, lives with him, and my two younger brothers come to visit him a lot more often, since they live a lot closer than I do. So if you’re imagining a lonely, stooped old man pining away in a house that smells like stale cat food – that’s not my dad, and I can’t imagine it would ever be.

I arrived late on a Friday night, as usual. My sister met me at the door, and actually looked me directly in the eye. Stephanie’s autistic; she never looks anyone in the eye. “Eleanor,” she said, and that was another strange thing, because she almost never calls anyone by name… unless she’s doing it for emphasis. “When you find out, don’t say anything about it,” she said.

“About what?” Most of the time Stephanie makes sense, but every so often she says something that sounds like her mind has jumped ahead in the conversation without realizing all the missing pieces she never bothered to say.

“You’ll know,” she said. “And you’ll want to ask ‘why’ and ‘how’, and I’m telling you that you can’t do that. Don’t ask any questions. Just come talk to me after you’re done.”

“Done with what?” I asked.

And then a voice called me from the TV room. “Lennie? Lennie, is that you?”

Only my mom and dad are allowed to call me Lennie. And that was a woman’s voice. I froze in place.

“Go see her,” Stephanie said, and headed off to her room.

I turned toward the TV room, slowly. “Lennie! Come out and see me!” my mom’s voice called.

I didn’t know whether to be terrified, or to start crying and fling myself into her arms. I walked very slowly, very cautiously, to the edge of the kitchen, where I could see my parents in the TV room. Both of my parents. My dad was smiling.

“Lennie!” my mom said, standing up. She hadn’t been able to stand up without help for months before she died, but here she was, standing up easily. She didn’t look any younger than she had when she died, but she looked healthier. The extreme thinness she’d suffered from at the end after it had metastasized and she’d barely been able to eat was gone; her flesh was filled out, her skin as taut as you could expect from a woman her age, and healthy-looking. Pale, but her natural paleness, not the weird, sallow, almost yellow color it had been at the very end.

“Mom?” I whispered.

“Come here. I need a hug,” Mom said, sounding exactly like she always had – joking, but there was always that note of truth under it. She didn’t wait for me to make my way to her – she never had, not until she was too ill to get up – but came straight for me and gave me a hug, and she smelled like herself. Not like a rotting corpse, not like ozone or nothing or whatever a ghost is supposed to smell like.

When I was a kid, my brother Jeff and I watched the miniseries version of “The Martian Chronicles”. In particular, he was always impressed (and terrified) by the part where the astronauts meet their long-lost loved ones, who turn out to be Martian shapechangers luring them to their deaths. I always wondered, if the people they saw on Mars were dead, how did they fall for it? How did they not know that dead people could not somehow be on Mars?

As I held my mom, who’d been dead a few years now, I understood. They’d wanted to believe. I wanted to believe. Stephanie had warned me not to ask anything – no “how are you not dead”, “how can you be here”, “why are you alive,” nothing like that. I assumed that was what she’d meant, anyway.

“Mom, I’ve been trying to trace some of my past that I’ve forgotten. Do you remember the name of my third grade teacher?”

“Huh.” My mom seemed to be thinking about it. “I think it was Mrs. Wilder, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. Second grade was Ms. Jenner, right? And fourth was Mrs. White?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t, in fact, remember my third grade teacher’s name, and neither did my dad. The Martians in the story had been telepaths; they’d been able to perfectly impersonate the astronauts’ loved ones because they could read the astronauts’ minds. Now I had a piece of information whose answer I didn’t know, and no way to easily confirm it unless Jeff remembered; he was only two years younger than me and had had some of the same teachers. But some of the people I had friended on Facebook were high school classmates, and a tiny number of my high school classmates had also been with me in elementary school, and might remember my third grade teacher’s name.

“I haven’t seen you in so long,” my mom said. “What’s going on in your life?”

“Oh, you know,” I said. “Things are going okay. Mom, if I’d known you were here I’d have brought the kids.”

“You can bring them up next time,” Mom said.

This was so weird. My mom was definitely dead. I had seen her body in the coffin, lying in state, looking nothing like she had in life. But here she was, impossibly, and I was holding an almost normal conversation with her. “Have Jeff or Aaron come over since you’ve… been here?”

“Jeff was here last weekend,” Dad said. “And Aaron lives next door, so he’s been over nearly every day.”

My grandparents used to live next door. When they died, my mom and my uncle inherited the house. My uncle bought out my mom’s share and rented the house out, and my youngest brother ended up renting it. My other brother lives in an apartment down in the city; I’m the odd one out, living in a completely different state, with a husband and kids.

So all of them had known, and none of them had told me. I expected Stephanie and Aaron to never tell me anything, but I was more than a little irritated with Jeff.

“Let me go drop off my stuff,” I said, since I was still carrying my bag.

I went back to Stephanie’s room, which used to be my room, a long time ago. The boys used to room together, but my room was too small for Stephanie to share with me, and she had needed a lot of space of her own… so they’d converted the loft in the garage into a bedroom. It had never been warm in the winter, though, so as soon as I moved out, Stephanie had moved in.

Stephanie was, as usual, on her computer. I shut the door behind me. “Okay. What the hell is going on?”

“She’s not the only one,” Stephanie said, without looking away from her computer. “I’ve been doing research. They’re all over the place. There’s no explanation yet, and apparently none of them will talk about it. I asked Mom and she said I was really rude, and sulked and was really passive-aggressive.”

“So we’re not worried about Mom turning into a Martian shapechanger or vanishing, we’re just worried that she’ll get mad?” To be fair, making Mom mad had always been a thing worth avoiding at all costs. “When did she come back?”

“I don’t know exactly, but presuming that she came to see me right after she came back, it would have been Monday around 3 pm.”

“And no one told me? You have my email address!”

“…It just didn’t feel right, telling you something like this in email. I felt like I should wait for you to be here.”

“And Jeff didn’t? And Aaron didn’t?”

Stephanie shrugged. She still didn’t look away from her computer. “They probably felt the same way.”

“Does Dad… know? Like, does he even remember that Mom is dead, or does he think this is normal?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

I sat down on her bed. “Steph, I’m asking you to make an informed guess. Has he said anything to you that would either suggest that he’s aware this is abnormal, or that he isn’t?”

“I don’t read minds, but I haven’t heard anything from him one way or the other. He’s very happy, though.”

“I got that impression,” I told her. I went to the guest room, which used to belong to the boys, opened up my laptop, and sent Jeff a question on Facebook about my third grade teacher.

Mom appeared while I was debating whether or not to also ask him why the hell he hadn’t told me about her. “Lennie, don’t hide in your room. Come out and talk to me and your dad. You need to catch me up on your life!”

Part of me wanted to break down crying. Part of me wanted to run to the car. Part of me was annoyed the way I always used to be annoyed when my mom wanted to spend time with me and I had stuff to do. And part of me hated myself for being annoyed by my mom for any reason at all. She was back from the dead and I wanted to hide in my room? But I wanted to hide in my room because I wanted to do research to figure out if this was really my mom or not. And what had Stephanie meant by “all over the place”? People all over the place had returned from the dead? Why wasn’t this all over the news?

What I said was, “Okay, mom,” and I went out to the TV room to talk to her.

***

Here I was, having a completely mundane conversation with a dead woman.

Yes, my husband was doing well at his consulting business. Yes, my oldest daughter was doing well in college. My youngest daughter had a rough spot a few years ago but was doing better. The daughter in the middle was putting a lot of time into her music, and was getting really good. I didn’t mention that my oldest daughter had gotten a diagnosis of autism like her aunt, or that my middle daughter was failing all her subjects because all she cared about was music, or that my youngest daughter was openly bisexual and dating a nonbinary teen in her class, because those would be fraught topics around here. My mother would be openly disapproving of the failing in school – as was I, but I wasn’t here to listen to a lecture about what I should be doing differently to make sure Rhiannon passed her classes – and she’d be what she thought counted as supportive about the other things. Are you sure it’s a good idea for Janie to have an autism diagnosis on her medical record? Lots of people will discriminate against her, just ask Stephanie, it’s not a good thing to admit to the world. And if Lori wanted to date a person who claimed to have no gender, good for her, but was she sure it was a good idea to admit to the world that she was bi when the world is so prejudiced? Blah blah blah. No. I wasn’t going there, not with my mother back from the dead.

All the questions I wanted to ask. How? How was she back? Why? Was there an afterlife after all? What was it like? Are you absolutely sure you’re not a telepathic shapechanger who wants to eat us? Is anyone else coming back or is it just you? But I couldn’t do it. My mouth wouldn’t make the words, and I felt like Mom being alive was a soap bubble that might burst any moment. If I said she was dead, would she disappear? I couldn’t take the risk.

Now I knew why Jeff and Aaron hadn’t told me. The compulsion not to talk about it, the fear that talking about the circumstances of her death and her apparently-no-longer-deadness would cause her to stop being no-longer-dead. I wouldn’t be able to tell my husband about this, or my kids, not unless they came here. Not without feeling like Mom might disappear if I did.

Which was probably how Stephanie had gotten away with it, in the beginning. If this was some kind of emotional pressure, something emanating from the presence of a dead woman... Stephanie was typically immune to emotional pressure. Or pretended she was, anyway. She hid behind her monotone and her face that barely expressed anything until she couldn’t, and then she’d go and have a meltdown in the bathroom. But she wanted to please Mom. We all wanted to please Mom. So if Mom had told her she was rude for mentioning the death thing, Stephanie would be unable to mention it again. Because she wouldn’t want Mom to think she was rude.

This felt very much like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Dead mother back to life, check. Weird inexplicable pressure not to talk about it, check. But Mom clearly remembered things that had happened shortly before her death, and showed no evidence of knowing about anything that had happened since, unless it was public knowledge. She talked about interests the girls had had three years ago, interests they’d all outgrown since. She talked about my plan to remodel my own garage – I had completely forgotten that was even a thing we’d planned at one point, because I’d lost my job shortly after Mom died and then the money wasn’t there for the remodel. She didn’t know I was working with my husband in the consulting business now, which a telepath would obviously know because it dominates my life nowadays. Obviously a Martian telepathic shapechanger would have to pretend not to know things that supposedly happened while they were dead, but if I’d forgotten about the garage, what were the odds a telepath could pull it out of my head? There had to be more accessible thoughts in there, after all.

I didn’t know what to ask Mom. How do you feel? That was always a good one, back in the day, because Mom’s chronic illnesses meant there was always something she could complain about, but she wouldn’t do it until she was asked… she’d just quietly resent the fact that no one had asked her. But did dead people still feel things? Would that intrude on the topic I wasn’t supposed to talk about? What’s going on in your life? Oh, nothing much, Lennie, I’m back from the dead, how about you?

So I talked about myself. I was learning to work leather and I’d made myself a wallet, but I left it at home, I could bring it to show her next time. I was also learning to repair dolls. The girls had all abandoned theirs and I felt bad about it, so I was cleaning them up and repairing them and putting them in dioramas. Mom was very interested in both topics, and asked if I could repair some old dolls she had up in the attic. I was pretty sure I’d already done it – if it was the dolls I was thinking of, Dad had given them to me right after Mom died, and they were the ones I’d learned on. But was it safe to talk about? Dad wasn’t saying anything; had he forgotten he gave me the dolls, which was entirely possible, or did he think it wasn’t safe to talk about either?

I’d wanted for three years to be able to tell my mom that she was wrong about all the weight loss advice she’d given me because now it had come out that scientists had never proven that fat made you fat and the low-carb diets were probably better for you than the low-fat ones, but I didn’t know if she could still eat. Also, my mom was back from the dead and I wanted to start an argument with her about a topic I’d always hated when she talked about? Didn’t I have anything better to do? That really kind of made me a shitty person, didn’t it?

When Mom had been dying, I couldn’t talk to her about the future. I didn’t know how to bring myself to talk about things she’d never see. I’d never known how much my conversations with her consisted of me talking about future plans until I couldn’t any more. Now I couldn’t talk about the future or the past, at least not the past three years, and large parts of the present had to be left out too, because I didn’t know what would remind her that she was dead and make her go back to her grave. Even though, logically, I knew that was unlikely to happen because Stephanie had done it and had just gotten a rebuke that that was rude.

At the same time… I knew I had to say something that Mom could talk about, because if I just talked about myself all night, later on she’d probably make some passive-aggressive remarks about how everything always had to be about me. In desperation, I asked her if she’d seen anything good on television lately.

“Oh, I haven’t been watching anything in a while,” Mom said. “It’s been so long since I felt well enough to go anywhere, so I’ve been going for walks, and your father and I have been taking trips to museums and historic sites. We’re going to be going up to Boston next week.”

“I have a client up there,” Dad said, “and they want me to do a training thing. And I was telling them, no, no, Boston’s too far, but I remembered how much your mom loved Boston, so I asked her if she wanted to go and she said yes, so now we’re going. We’re going to fly, though. The days I was willing to drive that kind of distance are long over.”

“You could take the Amtrak.”

Dad made a dismissive gesture. “It’s gotten so expensive. Flying’s actually cheaper.”

“When are you going?”

“Next Wednesday we’re going to fly up there,” Mom said, which said something about her opinion of the future, at least. “Your dad’s got his presentations to do on Thursday and Friday, and I’ll wander around the city, and then we’ll spend Saturday seeing the sights together.”

“There’s this fantastic restaurant I went to last time I was up there on business,” Dad said, “and I checked their web page, and they’re still open. So we’re going to go there.”

So Mom could eat. Or Dad wasn’t afraid of talking about eating with her, anyway. Maybe ruled out vampire, but Martian shapechanger was still on the table.

I didn’t literally believe my mom – or the entity that appeared to be my mom – was a telepathic shapechanger from Mars like in The Martian Chronicles. But it was obvious that something so far outside the norm that it was only imaginable by making references to fantasy and science fiction was happening.

I tried, very carefully, “How have you been feeling, Mom?”

“I’m great!” She laughed. “I haven’t felt this good in ages. Sugar’s under control, I can see pretty well, none of the usual aches and pains… I’m doing pretty good!”

Did she remember she had died of cancer? Did she even remember that she’d died?

It was 2 am before I got to go to bed.

***

6 am and I was up and out the door before there was any chance of my mother or father being awake, assuming my mom even slept anymore. But at the very least, she was in her bedroom with the door closed and no view of the driveway I’d parked my car in.

Do I sound like a terrible daughter when I tell you I’ve never visited my mom’s grave? I haven’t been back there since the funeral. I always knew my mother wasn’t really there – that if any part of her had still existed in any form, it wasn’t trapped in a coffin under six feet of dirt. It made it somewhat difficult to find the graveyard, though, because I couldn’t remember where it was, or its name, or which church it was associated with, and it wasn’t exactly like I could ask my mom. When I finally found the place– it wasn’t that hard in the end, my parents live in a small town and there aren’t many graveyards – it took me half an hour to find her grave.

It seemed undisturbed. But if Mom had been back from the dead since Monday, that would have been time to fill in a grave. I went looking for the caretaker.

They get to work early in the graveyard caretaking business, I guess; I found him pushing a lawnmower over on the other side of the graveyard.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“This is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But I got an email from a jerk I used to know in high school claiming he was going to dig up my mother’s grave, and I just wanted to make sure nobody’s touched it.”

“Nobody’s touched any of the graves, ma’am,” he assured me. “Aside from a couple of funerals we’ve had this week, no one’s done anything to disturb the ground here at all.”

“Thanks,” I said, “that’s reassuring. He was talking like he was actually going to do it, but I guess he was all talk.”

“Well, if anyone comes by and disturbs any of the graves, we’ll have them arrested,” he said.

I had my answer. My mother had not climbed out of her grave. Which seemed impossible anyway, now that I knew enough about the funeral industry to know exactly how hard it would be to smash a coffin open, let alone dig through six feet of dirt. I couldn’t rule out her turning immaterial and floating out of her grave, but my mom had seemed very material and biological when she’d hugged me. I’d always thought of ghosts as something that were almost never solid enough to interact with the world, if they even existed.

***

If I was going to get up this early, I was going to get a pancake breakfast at the diner. My parents still think sugarless cold cereal is a reasonable thing to eat for breakfast. They were always night owls; I made myself breakfast and school lunch every morning but the first day of school, every year after about third grade. I was also a night owl, once I didn’t have to get up for school anymore, but I used to make my girls a lunch every night and store it in the fridge for them. Now they’re too old and too cool for Mom lunches. They’re eating something, but it might be cafeteria food, lunch they pack for themselves, or for all I know sandwiches from 7-11 or Starbucks with their allowance.

The point is, I hardly ever get a nice breakfast, because I am hardly ever willing to wake up early enough to cook myself one, and my parents certainly weren’t going to. So I went to the diner.

Normally I don’t talk to anyone at a diner, beyond smiling at them and telling them my order in an upbeat, cheerful voice because waitresses get too much shit from too many people for me to add to it inadvertently. Also because I don’t want them to think I’m eating alone because I’m a sad, lonely bitch no one would love; I want them to know I’m doing this because I really, really enjoy not having to socialize. But today I had something I needed to know.

“I’m a writer,” I told the waitress, “and I’m doing research on ghost stories in the area. Have you heard anything, you know, Halloweeny or spooky? Ghosts appearing, dead people walking around, poltergeists, that kind of thing?”

“Can’t say I have, but I’ll ask around, see if any of the girls know any good stories,” the waitress told me.

And then she took my order back to the kitchen, and I surfed the net on my phone while I waited, and then I got my pancakes, and I ate them. I was chasing the last blueberry around on the plate when another waitress approached me. “Stacy told me you were collecting creepy stories for a book?”

“From the local area, yeah.”

“I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, but… my cousin says that a lady on her street, her husband died a few years ago? But she just saw the guy walking with the lady down the street, having a conversation like the guy never died.”

“Do you think you’d be able to give my email to your cousin and have her reach out to me? That sounds like exactly the kind of story I’m looking for.”

“Uh, sure.”

I gave the waitress my email address. This was probably going to come to nothing; I doubted the waitress would even remember to give it to her cousin. But it’d be really good if I could get the details from someone who knew more about it.

***

Jeff’s more of a morning person than I am. I got a response on Facebook, but I had to wait to get back to my parents’ house, where my laptop was, to read it. On mobile, Facebook will only let you read messages if you have the app, which tells Mark Zuckerberg exactly where you are and what you’re doing with your phone, all the time. I don’t have the app. Sometimes this means I can’t read messages on mobile, but I prefer that to having an evil data empire know everything about my movements.

My parents weren’t awake when I got home. Or they were still in their bedroom. They used to do that a lot. Mom’s desk was in there, and Dad had a laptop… which he usually used on Mom’s desk, since she died. I wondered where her machine was, and if she had made a thing about it once she came back.

“I’m not sure I remember what your third grade teacher’s name was… I can barely remember my own third grade teacher. Were they the same? I can’t remember. I think my own teacher’s name was… Wil-something? Wilber? Wilkins? You’d be better off… well, you’re at the house now, or are you back at your home? Kind of important to know, because I could give you some advice about who to ask, but it’d be a different thing if you were at Dad’s house.”

He meant, “You’d be better off asking Mom, but I don’t know if you know Mom is back from the dead or not.” I was pretty sure, anyway.

I responded. “I’m at Dad’s house. Wondering how I’d be able to tell the difference between someone who’s real and a Martian shapechanger. Could the name have been Wilder?”

Five minutes later I got my answer. “Mom isn’t a Martian shapechanger. It was the first thing I thought of, so I checked.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

That answer I didn’t get until half an hour later. “I… just didn’t feel right, talking about it in an impersonal medium like the internet. I know you have a cell phone and I probably even have your number somewhere, but I remember you’re not the biggest fan of actual phone calls, so I didn’t want to disturb you.”

I replied with my phone number and the message “Call me.”

And then I had to sit by my phone, doing nothing important, nothing that would engage my attention in any serious way, waiting for him to call. Which took twenty minutes, despite the fact that I could see that he was online.

Finally the phone rang. “You raaaaang?” I answered in my best parody of The Addams Family.

“I’m pretty sure I must have, or you wouldn’t have known to pick up,” Jeff said. “Of course, I might have buzzed. You could have your phone on vibrate. Or maybe I sang, depending on what you have for a ringtone.”

“’You saaaaang?’ doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi to it.”

“Wow, how long has it been since I heard someone put je ne sais quoi in a sentence? I think we’re old. I think that’s an old person expression now.”

“What’s going on with Mom?” I asked, quietly, in case anyone might be in the hallway to hear me.

Jeff sighed. “I don’t know what is, but I can tell you what isn’t,” he said. “Stephanie confirmed that she eats, sleeps and goes to the bathroom normally, and I confirmed all of that for myself. The toilet in their bedroom is still broken enough that they don’t flush it unless they have to.”

I winced. That was a level of detail I could have done without. “So, not vampire or undead. How did you solve the Martian thing?”

“On Monday, Dad woke up and she was laying next to him in bed. If the goal was to kill him, it would have made more sense to do it then, before he woke up, than to put on this whole elaborate performance.”

“You’re taking me too literally. I’m not worried about aliens trying to take our family off guard so they can kill us. There’s any number of things they could be up to, and they don’t have to be aliens. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Stepford Wives. My Little Pony.”

“…My Little Pony?”

“There’s creatures called Changelings that feed on love. They impersonate ponies and take the love that other ponies feel for the ones they’re impersonating, as food.”

“Kind of psychic vampires mashed up with Martian shapechangers.”

“Yeah, but without the telepathy, so they’re not as good at it as you’d think. It’s a children’s show; they have to telegraph to the kids that these aren’t the real ponies. In real life, anyone who did something like that would be more competent.”

“How much verisimilitude do we need, though? She’s got moles in the same places Mom had moles. She’s missing a toenail just like Mom. Things I didn’t consciously think about, things I might not have remembered if you asked me to describe Mom.”

“That just means that if it’s not Mom, it has the ability to rummage deeper into our memories than we’re consciously aware of. That’s why I asked you my third grade teacher’s name. I genuinely don’t remember. Mom would, I’m pretty sure. Dad wouldn’t and Stephanie and Aaron were both too young.”

“I’m not sure I remember, but when you said Wilder, that sounded like it could be right. Do you know anyone from elementary school? Some of them went to high school with us.”

“I have some Facebook friends from high school, and maybe one or two went to the same elementary we did, but I haven’t been able to locate any actual people that I remember from elementary school. They don’t have a Classmates.com thing that works for elementary—”

“It says it does.”

“It lies, there’s nowhere to enter your elementary in your profile. All it lets you put in is high school, and it’s from a drop-down, not even freeform.”

“Huh. Guess I never tried it. I’m still in touch with anyone I cared about from back then.”

“I literally don’t care about anyone from back then, but that makes it hard when you’re trying to figure out your third grade teacher’s name.”

“If she can probe our memories,” Jeff said, “then nothing you or I know, or ever knew, would be safe. You’d have to come up with something to ask her that Dad wouldn’t know, or me, or Aaron, or Steph, or yourself, but that you know Mom would know and that you know someone else who would know it too.”

“I could ask Mariana for something.” My mom’s close friend and high school classmate was one of my Facebook friends. We don’t generally communicate directly with each other, but I follow her posts.

“That’s a good idea.” I heard the sound of a whistling teapot in the background. “That’d be my hot water for my oatmeal. If you get anything from Mariana, can you tell me about it?”

“Yeah.” I’d wanted to tell him about the story I’d heard in the diner, but no one got between Jeff and his oatmeal. “I’ll talk to you later. Probably online. Voice is making me paranoid.”

“I know what you mean. Do you need me to come up this weekend? I could make a day trip tomorrow.”

“That might be a good idea. I want to talk to Aaron, do you know what schedule he’s on?”

“He works nights now, so you’ll want to get him around 2 pm or so.”

“All right. Enjoy your oatmeal.”

“I will!” he said, putting a ridiculous amount of emphasis into it as a joke.

***

Before I could finish writing a message to Mariana – before I could really start, honestly, because how could I explain why I needed what I needed without admitting Mom was back from the dead? – someone knocked on my door. It was Mom. She was wearing one of her usual kind of shapeless but colorful nightgowns, and her hair was not brushed, so it was kind of a wreck. I noticed for the first time that it was grey. Mom had always dyed her hair since she started going grey, and it had still been auburn when she’d died. I’d never seen it fully grey. “Your dad and I are going to the arboretum,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

“Since when have you been into trees, Mom?” My mother had always been fascinated by history, and to some extent natural history like dinosaurs, but I’d never seen her express an interest in nature per se.

“I never was, much,” she admitted, “but the world is so beautiful. I was always more interested in the way humans shape the world than the way it came out of the box, but things like arboretums, Japanese gardens, zoos and aquariums… they’re made of nature, but they’re made by humans, and they say something about the people who chose to make them the way they are. And you know that your dad has always enjoyed nature.” My dad was interested in science, in general, and considered the natural world part of that. He was not exactly the kind of guy who would go camping.

In the past, I would have said “no, thanks.” I was never all that interested in nature myself, certainly not trees – maybe beautiful rocks or interesting landscapes, but looking at trees wouldn’t have seemed interesting to me. I still didn’t care much about trees… but my mom was back from the dead. I’ve gone much stupider and more boring places than an arboretum with her in the past, and now… if this was really her, if she was really alive again, I was going to spend all the time with her that I reasonably could.

“Sure, I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take my own car, though. Just give me the address.” I always took my own car if I possibly could, because I’d get carsick if I wasn’t the one driving. “Should I ask Stephanie if she wants to come?”

“Sure, you can ask. I doubt she will, though.”

Stephanie, however, surprised me. “Yeah, I’ll go with you. We’ll meet Mom and Dad there?”

“Yeah.” Dad had texted me the address, so I pulled it up in my GPS. “About half an hour from here.”

In the car, she asked me, “Have you found anything out? I know you were looking into the whole Mom thing.”

“Jeff thinks she’s really Mom. We have a plan to get Mariana to give us a question that we don’t know the answer to, but that Mom and Mariana both would, so we can confirm she really knows things and isn’t just reading our minds. And a waitress at the diner said her cousin has seen what looks like someone else coming back from the dead.”

“It’s all over the place, actually,” Stephanie said. “I’m finding reports from everywhere.”

I glanced at her. “Why wouldn’t this be making the news, then? People coming back from the dead!”

“I feel like maybe no one wants to go on the record.” Stephanie looked out the window. “Nothing on Twitter or Facebook. No pictures of dead people on Instagram. I’m seeing things on Reddit and Tumblr – places where people use a consistent pseudonym, not like 4chan, but where that pseudonym can’t be tied to their actual identity. I’ve posted about it in both places, but I can’t make myself tweet about it.”

“Any idea why not?”

“It—” She shrugged, hands exaggeratedly widespread and head canted forward slightly. “It just feels wrong,” she said. “Like… we’re getting away with something. There’s a natural law we’re breaking here. I can post as toomanymushrooms or u/catonahottinroofsundae and no one knows who I am, but if I post as Stephanie Robbins and I tell everyone that my mom Suky Robbins is back from the dead…”

“What if that brought it to the attention of, what, some kind of authorities?”

“Yeah, pretty much. And even if I was just posting under my own name… I don’t have to say Mom’s name. I don’t have to put a mention to her Facebook in a post. But everyone knows my mother’s name, or they could find out from my name if they wanted to.”

“And you think maybe there are a lot of people with these weird feelings?”

“I don’t think so, I know so. A lot of posts explicitly talk about the fact that they can’t bring themselves to say anything in public, or talk about it with their real names on it.”

“Are they all parents?”

“No. It’s all kinds of people. Best friends, siblings, spouses, children… the only pattern I see is that nobody died a long time ago. It’s all, ‘my brother who died last year’ or ‘my aunt who died two years ago’ or something. Longest I’ve seen anyone talk about was a son who died five years ago.”

A thought occurs to me. “I can add something to your pattern, though.”

“Yeah?”

“You’d expect that, even if everyone with a resurrected relative feels this sense of dread about telling anyone about it with their name attached, because they feel it will, I don’t know, maybe cause the dead person to disappear back into their grave… you’d think somebody would do it anyway because they don’t care. Someone whose alcoholic abusive father came back and they wish he’d go away again, someone’s asshole brother, someone’s former best friend who betrayed them. But so far, no one has. How many people have you seen talking about this?”

“It’s hard to say because no one’s using their real names. Someone might post from their main blog and their side blog, or maybe they have a different name on tumblr vs reddit but they posted to both. But I’ve tracked thirteen separate names, and of those, I can tell for a fact there are at least nine unique ones because they talk about different people.”

“Thirteen isn’t ‘all over the place’.”

“I didn’t mean all over the Internet, I meant people coming from all over. I’ve tracked the UK, California, North Dakota, Ontario, France, India and New Zealand. Nobody’s tagging their posts and no one is willing to contribute to a master list, so it’s hard to find anyone outside of the people I follow or the subreddits I’m in, and I don’t know where everyone comes from. But it’s geographically widespread. I suspect it may also be happening in other places where people don’t generally speak English or maybe don’t have Internet access.”

“And what’s their sentiment? Like, are people frightened? Upset? Excited? Weirded out?”

She took a moment to think about it. “They’re happy. People are happy it happened. Weirded out, yes. But happy.”

“No whacked-out conspiracy theories about how it’s the contrails raining down adenochrome or something?”

“Not from the people it’s happened to. There was one flame war I saw where a religious person was saying that the person whose sister was back from the dead had to repudiate her. She’s not really your sister, she’s a demon from Hell sent to trick you, et cetera. And the person whose sister was back turned out to be just as religious, and they threw a holy fit. Literally. A holy fit.” She giggled. “A whole lot of stuff about how the righteous were coming back and Jesus had granted some people eternal life and this was that, and how dare you call these beings demons when they’re obviously blessed by Jesus himself and you’re the kind of person who would have called for Jesus’s crucifixion if you’d been alive then, and all that kind of thing.”

“Did anyone else who’d had returned people say anything?”

“This was Tumblr. None of the people who have had returns are communicating with each other in any way I can see. I reached out to a few on Tumblr private messaging but no one has answered. The only places I’m seeing conversations about it between people with returns have been on Reddit, because it has a forum structure. Tumblr is more like a whole hanging web of disconnected strings.”

“Still, you’d think that someone would be publishing a news article about it. Even if no one is willing to go on the record with their real name…”

“Maybe it’s not enough people. Nine unique instances, maybe up to thirteen, maybe more in places I haven’t surveyed. It’s not like I have access to literally all of Tumblr, after all. But that’s all I can confirm, and what if there isn’t any more?”

“If anyone came back from the dead I would expect the news to take notice.” I turned onto the final road; the arboretum was at the end of this stretch. “I went to the graveyard today. Mom’s grave hasn’t been disturbed. I checked with the groundskeeper. So either Mom’s body floated ethereally through the grave dirt, and her coffin, or her original body is still in there and whatever she is now, it’s not the same as what she was then.”

“It’s too bad we can’t have her exhumed,” Stephanie said.

“It probably wouldn’t tell us much anyway.”

“She’s younger-looking than she was before. Not by much, and the grey hair hides it, but she’s healthier-looking and less wrinkly. And I don’t see any evidence that she still has diabetes, or that she’s taking any pills at all. I haven’t seen her take any insulin shots, or anything.”

“Huh.” She wasn’t restored to her youth, or her hair wouldn’t be grey and there would be no wrinkles at all. She wasn’t restored to what she was at the moment of death, obviously. She wasn’t restored to what she’d have been at the moment of death without the cancer that killed her, if she didn’t have diabetes anymore. I felt like there had to be a pattern here I wasn’t seeing. I really wanted to talk to some of these other people having this experience.

I pulled in to the arboretum’s parking lot. Mom and Dad weren’t there yet; Dad doesn’t drive like an old man, but he doesn’t drive as fast as he used to, either. “Do they do this kind of thing a lot? Arboretums, parks, et cetera?”

“They don’t usually invite me, and I wouldn’t usually come if they did, so I don’t know. They do leave the house a lot.”

Dad’s car pulled in, and he and Mom got out. For the first time I could remember, Mom was actually moving a bit faster than him. Both Mom and Dad were the kind of people who walked quickly everywhere they went, but for a long time, Mom was slowed down by her various illnesses. Dad was still healthy for his age, but he’d slowed down a good bit since Mom’s death – grief was hard on his health, it seemed – and now Mom seemed healthier than he was.

“Did you know there are people who come here from all over just to see our leaves in the autumn?” Mom said.

I did know that; it was typically a factor in making it hard for me to come visit during the autumn. “I think it’s the mountainsides. There’s leaves turning colors all over the country, but not on mountainsides.”

“In California they don’t even consider these mountains,” Mom said. “They call them hills when they come visit.”

“No respect for the elderly,” Dad said.

“Yeah, these young mountains think they’re all that, but wait 100,000 years and see how tall they are then,” Stephanie said.

We strolled around, looking at the trees, reading what it said on the plaques in front of them. American Elm. Yellow Birch. Eastern White Pine. I’d seen trees just like these my whole life, and a good number of them, I’d never known the names.

“You never think about how beautiful the world is,” Mom said. “We’re all rushing through it, trying to accomplish the next thing. Or entertain ourselves. Read a book, watch TV. So few of us really want to interact with nature.”

“Careful, mom, your hippie roots are showing,” I said, teasing.

“I think if my generation had remembered what we were back when we were the hippies, the world would be better off.”

“We didn’t forget, Suky. The hippies were always big news, but you know as well as I do how many people our age just wanted to go punch a clock, buy a house, vote for Ronald Fucking Reagan… We thought we were the generation that would change the world, but it wasn’t our generation, it was us. People like us, who wanted to see a better world and weren’t content to just live like the sheep our parents were… but there’s people like that in every generation. And they’re always outnumbered by the assholes.”

“Actually, they’ve done a study,” Stephanie said. “The reason generations get more conservative as they get older is that at every point, the poor are more likely to die than the rich, and the rich are more conservative than the poor. So by the time you get to middle age, a lot of the people looking for social justice and diversity are dead. And there’s a lot more dead by the time they’re elderly.”

“I don’t buy it,” my dad said. “There’s entirely too many stupid poor people in this country who are brainwashed into supporting causes that help out the rich people and screw themselves over. They’re not living longer than anyone else in this country. The math doesn’t work.”

“Let’s not talk about politics,” Mom said. “I think we all know there’s something more important we ought to be discussing.”

“Mom?” Stephanie said, and looked at her, which is not a thing Stephanie does very often.

“Suky?” Dad said.

I didn’t say anything. I watched as Mom looked up at a tree and said, “It’s time we dealt with the elephant in the room, don’t you think?”

“Are you going to tell us about—” I couldn’t say anything more. I couldn’t bring myself to make the words.

“About the fact that I was dead, and now I’m not?” She looked at all of us. “I think we should talk about it, yes.”

It felt like there were eyes, watching us. I wanted to yell to my mother, to tell her not to talk about it, that someone might hear… but who? And why would it matter?

“Is that something you’re okay with, Suky?” Dad asked.

“I’m fine, but I’m getting the impression the rest of you aren’t,” she said. “Why haven’t any of you brought it up, except Stephanie, the once?”

“Well, you told me it was rude,” Stephanie said.

Mom sighed. “I guess I did. I’m sorry. This isn’t really easy for me either.”

She sat down on a bench, and Dad sat with her. Stephanie and I sat on a short stone wall around a tree. “I suppose I should start by saying, I don’t really know much more than you do. I don’t have any memories of being dead. I woke up in bed, next to your dad, on Monday morning, and for a while I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there… I assumed I went to bed the previous night, but I couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. I couldn’t pin down anything I remembered as to exactly when it happened, not in the recent past. And when your father woke up, the shock on his face and the fact that he kept asking me if I was really here made me think, wait, the last thing I remember was that I was in a hospital dying of cancer, so why am I here now?”

“So you don’t remember any kind of afterlife?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I believe I had some sort of existence, but I don’t remember anything about it. When I wake up, I have flashes, feelings that I dreamed something about it, but I can’t hold it in my head long enough to write it down or even talk about it. It just… disappears, leaving behind only the memory that something was there a few minutes ago.”

“You know how unlikely the idea that an afterlife exists is, scientifically, though. Right?” Dad said. “Consciousness is an emergent property of a trillion neurons working together. Imagining that there could be some sort of construct that exists outside the brain and body is like imagining that a video game character could be waltzing around in front of us.”

“And yet I’m here,” Mom said.

“Time travel or a Star Trek transporter with some modifications would make more sense than something supernatural, like an afterlife,” Dad said stubbornly.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stephanie said. “If Mom doesn’t remember…”

“Have you had a medical exam?” I asked.

Mom laughed. “I don’t have health insurance anymore. I’m dead, remember? I can’t even begin to figure out how we’re going to address getting me a legal identity again, and to be honest… I can’t know I’ll be around long enough for it to matter.”

“None of us know that,” I said, “about ourselves or anyone else.”

“True, and it’s going to be hard to travel if I don’t have a legal identity. So I suppose I’ll have to address it eventually, if I last that long.”

“Thank God your state ID hasn’t actually expired yet, or there’d be no way we could fly to Boston. The passport’s expired,” Dad said. Mom had been legally blind when she died, so she’d had a state ID rather than a driver’s license.

“Is there any reason you might not? Aside from the things that could kill anyone?” I asked.

Dad said, “Your mother and I discussed… when she first appeared, I found it nearly impossible to talk about the fact that she’d been dead. When she broached the topic, I could talk about it to her, but I couldn’t tell you kids.” He shrugged. “My working theory is that there’s some kind of alien experiment going on or that time travel is somehow involved, but the fact that none of you kids were able to tell each other about it until you knew the other one knew suggests to me that someone with the ability to directly affect human emotions or thought is, for some reason, making it hard to talk about this. Maybe that means it’s a short-lived experiment.”

“Maybe I escaped from hell and no one wants to talk about it for fear the devil will take me back,” Mom said, but she was laughing. Mom had never believed in hell. Dad was an atheist; Mom definitely had strong spiritual beliefs, but they were kind of a package of woo that included reincarnation and ghosts, even though she’d been raised Catholic.

“There are others like you,” Stephanie said. “None of them have talked about it themselves, but family members or friends have talked about it online, under pseudonyms. I haven’t found any evidence that anyone has mentioned anything under their real names.”

“A lot?” Mom was surprised.

“So far I count between nine and thirteen unique individuals, plus Eleanor heard a rumor that someone who might live in town might have come back. We don’t know any details, though.”

“We need to find them,” Mom said. “I need to find them. I have a second chance at life, and I’m not ashamed of it. I won’t be silenced about the fact that I exist.”

“It might not be the best idea, Suky,” Dad said. “There are a lot more crazies out there than there were when you died—”

“—there were plenty of crazies then, Dee—”

“—right, and even then it wouldn’t have been a good idea. There might be some religious nut job who thinks that if you were dead you should stay that way. Or someone else thinks that you know how you came back, and wants to force you to tell them.”

“Those are valid points,” Mom said, nodding. “And to all of those people who might want to harm me because they think I shouldn’t be alive or they think I know how I came back, I say a hearty ‘fuck you.’ I won’t be silent because there are crazy people in the world. I’m not afraid of death, not anymore.”

“You’re going to risk Eleanor’s kids?” Dad asked sharply.

“I agree with Mom,” I said, standing up. “Nobody should have to keep quiet about the fact that they exist. But I have to tell Will.”

Stephanie made a face. My family doesn’t like my husband. They have justifications, but in the past few years, since Mom died, Will’s gone to therapy and has done a lot of work on himself. Mom was the only one in the family ever willing to forgive anything, though, so I’ve never tried to get them to change their minds.

Mom said, “Well, is he still a total asshole?”

“He’s… been trying not to be. He’s in therapy, and we’re doing couples counseling, and he’s working through a lot of baggage from his upbringing.”

“Why not tell him to bring the kids up and join you here, then. Coming back to life, might as well start a clean slate and see where things go from there. And you’re right, he needs to be involved in the discussion. Your girls, too. They all are old enough to understand what’s going on here, and what could happen.”

“You know I will never stand in the way of anything you want,” Dad said, which is the kind of thing Dad says rather than “I love you”. Things like, “If they ever fail to respect you, I will smite them” – talking about us and our treatment of Mom – or “You have always been my worthy opponent.” Yes. Sometimes my father talks like a comic book character.

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Stephanie said, “but I know you taught me to be who I am to the world and fuck anyone who gives me shit about it, so… same principle. I don’t think you could be you and lie about who you are.”

“And we need to involve Jeff and Aaron,” Mom said. “I’ll call them and get them to come here.”

“We turned off your cell phone ages ago,” Dad objected.

“Dee, we still have a land line. I know we do because I hear it ring, and sometimes you even answer it.”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s right, we do.” Dad shook his head. “This world where everyone carries around their phone in their pocket all the time… it’s strange how you get so used to a technological or societal change that you forget that you did it a different way for 67 years.”

Nothing ever stopped my mother when she wanted something strongly enough, if she believed it was right. I hadn’t even thought of the considerations my father brought up before he talked about them, but I’ve never believed it’s okay to hide in conformity and live in fear. I didn’t think Will had ever believed in doing that, either, and my daughters had grown up going to political protests.

“We need to find out more about these other people,” I said to Stephanie on the way home. “See if we can contact them directly, find out if any of the actual returned people are planning on going public like Mom. We could coordinate if they are. Strength in numbers.”

“The religious right are going to crap their pants,” Stephanie said, laughing. “A Deist who believes in reincarnation, is married to an atheist, and has a gay son, came back to life. Jesus Christ hasn’t got a monopoly anymore.”

“That is probably going to be the most fun part of this going public thing,” I said.

***

So now I don’t know what will happen. My husband’s driving up from home with our girls, my oldest younger brother’s on a train, and Mom’s been looking up contact information for journalist friends she had once, checking which ones are still alive, using Facebook – we never deactivated her account – and my dad’s LinkedIn. Stephanie’s found two other people who have family members who came back from the dead, and one of them’s been willing to talk to her in private messaging on Tumblr.

I still have a hard time telling anyone who doesn’t already know, but it turns out, I can write about it without feeling the pressure, the fear. Don’t know if I can post it, yet. I guess we’ll see. I’m hoping that if I can get more information from more people who’ve been through something similar, maybe we’ll find a pattern, a point of commonality… maybe even an explanation for why we all feel this pressure not to talk about it.

Tomorrow we’re all going to talk about whether we’re going to do this or not, but I know my family. What my mom wants, she gets, if it’s possible and if it’s ethical. My husband and my kids are going to be in favor of her going public, and my brothers won’t stand in her way any more than my dad would. So we’re going to do this. The thing we’re really going to talk about is how to keep ourselves safe when we do.

Everything in the world is going to change. I just don’t know exactly how yet.

***

Obligatory notes because I’m so fucking late with this piece:

I have fucked up royally. I went into this without an outline and about 6,000 words in I realized I had attempted to consume a ball of energy larger than my head. This is going to end up being novel length, most likely. I struggled really hard to find a place I could reasonably end it as a short story, and yeah, it is absolutely not an ending. No followup on the Martian shapechanger thing, new idea is brought in and then treated like it’s the climax, protagonist is almost entirely reactive and passive. As a short story, it’s shit.

Unfortunately I found this out after I was already late. Not going to bore everyone with why this was a week late except that it’s allergy season and I’ve been exhausted lately. So there was no time to try to write something else. I hope you found it entertaining, if somewhat frustrating; it’s shit as a short story because it’s plainly a piece of a novel. Which I’m not going to write real soon because I have like 3 novels ahead of this one in the queue, but if I live long enough it will get done.

It’s kinda cute that story #30 falls on the 30th now because I’m late and story #31 is the last of my Spooky 5 Halloween-appropriate stories. But not cute enough to justify how late this is.

BTW, while this is not as autobiographical as “Radio” from Inktober, it is heavily drawn from real life. I altered some things because this is fiction, but the mother and the father in this story are pretty close to real life. Except that my mother hasn’t come back.

#52 project #writeober 2020 #alara's october 2020 prompt fics #spooky5 #late!

54 notes · View notes

dammitadolfnomorecake · 3 years

Text

Once Bitten, Twice Stupid prt 212 prt 2 (end)

Nope. They may not have had a birth plan, but Lance was clear about “not pooping out a baby”! Keith snapping at Coran

“He’s not supposed to be!”

Coran snapping back at him

“Yes, I know he’s not supposed to be and yet here we are. Lance...”

Lance just wanted it to be over, begging Keith in stumbled words

“I want to push... please let me push...”

“Can his body take it?”

“I...”

“Coran, can his body take it?!”

“I’m not entirely sure... The anus is not designed for birth. The muscle structure is completed wrong and there would be significant damage to the area... but Lance is a vampire... and he is a breeder. The area is softer and has begun to adapt...”

Lance’s arse did lots of wonderful things that made having sex with him much easier than when it was the other way around... Keith was all for the c-section. It was safer for Lance and the twins and something had to be wrong with the amount of blood Lance had lost. Both of them lost to Lance’s instincts. Bearing down his lover growled through another contraction, his “scary face” coming across his features as he slumped back tiredly

“We’ll need another two bags of A positive blood. Lance, you stubborn fool, I will never forgive you if this goes wrong. I want you to let your contractions build for me, then I want you to push with all your might on the next big one. Keith, keep him conscious. Even with drugs I fear he’s going to feel this”

Lance seemed to regret all his life choices with the cry he gave as he pushed longer and harder than the previous times, Keith’s legs firmly squeezed together as he tried not think about what was going on below the sheet. His vampire may have only sat up a little as he bore down, yet for Lance he might have well been bending himself in half

“And stop... stop... let them build again. One more big push to get those shoulders out and they’ll be here...”

The look Lance shot Coran spoke volumes on how he wished the fae would shut up, Keith braver than Coran as he tried to calm Lance back down

“Hear that, baby. You can do this. My good mate. One more big push and we get to meet our first little baby”

Lance went to glare at him too, but his expression soon turned soft as their eyes met

“You can do this. We all know you can do just about anything you put your mind to”

“They... never warn you about the pressure... makes the contractions the easy bit”

Keith would take Lance’s words for it. All he had in comparison were memories of bleeding arse from taking a huge dumb. Somehow he didn’t think the two compared

“Okay, babe. Remember, the next push is the big one”

Lance was crying just as hard as Keith was as their baby girl was delivered. Reaching for her, Coran placed her against Lance’s chest, using a soft cloth to clean her goopy face. Keith had thought Lance was truly the most beautiful thing he’d seen in his life, but his little girl took his breath away

“Keith...”

Lance’s face shone with pride and wonder as he stared at their daughter

“She’s perfect...”

“She’s so red... is she meant to be red?”

“Never mind, number two. As the blood flows through her body and she takes her first breaths, her colour will start to even out”

“But she’s so red”

A tiny slimy red hand lay on Lance’s chest. Her fingers were itty bitty, Keith repeating himself again

“She’s so red”

Tiredly Lance moved his hand to rest on her back, his mate had done so good. With an exhausted chuckle, Lance put him in his place

“We’ve already got Blue, you can’t name her Red”

If ever there was a time for dramatics, this was it. Placing his finger in their daughter’s hand, she gave a small cry. Instantly he knew he’d die for her. She was so beyond everything he thought he’d feel

“Nurse, if you’d be so kind, she needs to be cleaned... and you two, we’ve got another baby to deliver”

Twenty minutes after their daughter, their son arrived. Unlike his sister who was polite enough to wait a few moments, he was barely in the world before he let out his first cry. Keith finding himself unsure what to do now they had two. Lance wanted to see their daughter, the nurse bringing her over, swaddled up, just before the final push. With her eyes closed, she looked so much like Lance, except she already had the tell tale wisps of his black hair. As their son was laid on Lance’s chest, Lance let out a sleepy yawn, back to smiling again as Keith moved his hand to help Lance hold their baby boy. Both of them were so tiny. Every month of development didn’t feel possible when they looked so damn tiny.

Out of it on medication, Lance didn’t want to let their son go to the nurse for cleaning. Keith didn’t want anyone other than them touching their twins, but he firmly squashed his ego down as they had to make sure both babies were okay, while Coran dealt with things between Lance’s legs. Distracting his fiancé with their daughter, the werewolf sat himself on the side of the bed, pulling down the blanket enough for Lance to see her face. No words came close to his happiness. Peppering kisses to Lance’s sweat soaked hair, he couldn’t stop looking at their daughter

“She looks just like you”

“She’s got her daddy’s hair... Keith... she’s perfect”

“Just like you. I’m so fucking proud of you”

“Don’t swear in front of the babies... we’re finally parents”

“Yes you are! That was very dangerous and Lance will need time to recover properly. But congratulations to you both”

Having a few more moments staring at their daughter, Lance all but snatched their son from the nurse as he was brought over. His tiny little hand gripping the blanket, with the grumpiest look on his face. Lance was all smiles once he had their boy cradled to his chest, chuckling as he poked their sons hand with his finger

“Oh dear. He’s got your personality”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a grumpier baby”

Keith frowned, probably making the same expression as their son

“He’s perfect”

He’d been as red as his sister... now swaddled up, he looked as angelic as her... maybe like a grumpy angel instead of a sleepy on. Again, not to be dramatic, but they had his heart wrapped around their tiny little fingers. He was a goddamn apex predator... who couldn’t stop crying because their twins were the most perfect being imaginable. He couldn’t get over how red and chubby babies were... or how he and Lance had managed to make two such perfect little lives.

“Now for the important bit, do you two have any names picked out for our little ones? Coran is a fine name”

The “important bit” to Keith was that Lance would be okay. He’d feel more reassured about it all, if he hadn’t seen what Coran had removed between his fiancé’s legs

“Will Lance be okay?”

Coran opened his mouth as if he was going to make a joke, then reconsidered. Lance was too distracted by their son to be listening to the fae

“He may take some time to heal. He may also experience some agitation from his ego. You have to realise he is exceptionally vulnerable right now. I’m quite sure if he to be separated from the twins for any length of time, he’d go quite crazy to find them. Birth is extremely hard on the body. He may partially transform, or he may experience accelerated healing. Nothing to worry about, he’ll be in tip top shape before you head back home”

Apparently he’d been too distracted by Coran, Lance whining softly

“Keith, no more questions... look at our babies”

He hadn’t taken his eyes off them for longer than split second

“I’m sorry, baby. I had to know you’ll be okay”

“I’m tired... but they’re... so perfect... so red”

“Yet when I said that, I got in trouble”

“I did the hard work”

“You did. You gave us a scare there”

“Had to push... the pressure was too much... look at him. He looks like more like me... with your expression”

Their son’s lips were all Lance. The frown on his face really did seem to come from him genetically. Hopefully he hadn’t inherited his lead foot. He’d have made Krolia proud with his driving

“He’s perfect... you’re perfect. I don’t... babe...”

His English failed. He loved their twins. He loved Lance. He loved their twins. Lance got it. He got how overwhelmed Keith was because they both were

“Shh... it’s okay. Coran, can we be alone?”

“I... uh, yes. Yes, I suppose I can give you a few moments while I fetch some fresh blood bags. Keith, please ensure he remains awake”

Blood still clung in the air as Keith sat beside Lance. Only Lance would try to move over and make space so shortly after giving birth

“Babe?”

Sighing softly, Keith turned his attention from their daughter back to Lance

“Sorry. I’m...”

Lance sniffled as he nodded

“Me too... I didn’t know it’d feel like this”

“I didn’t either...”

“Do we have... names?”

Keith had a name in mind. He’d had a name in mind of a while now. He’d had a name in mind since certain things stuck out, or failed to stick out, on Lance’s ultrasounds

“Miriam...”

His fiancé’s lip wobbled, Keith trying for bad humour. There’d only been one Miriam that had meant the world to both of them...

“You won’t let me call her “Red””

“If she’s got your fiery spirit, that’s a perfectly good nickname... but... I didn’t think you’d say... Mami’s name...”

“Do you not like it?”

“I... can’t believe you thought of her...”

“Hey, we don’t have to...”

Lance shook his head, their son scrunching up his face a stray tear dropped on cheek

“It’s not that. I... like Laith for a boy, but I... I’m not making sense”

Keith peered at his son. Was he a Laith? What did Laith even mean? It sounded like a tool used in construction

“Laith?”

“It means Lion... our little lion cub...”

Their son did look like he could let out a roar at any moment, or an unhappy scream to let the world know he was there

“You know, I kind of see it... it’s better than Yorak”

Lance snorted, he tried to bring his hand up to wipe his face, yet lacked the strength. Keith using his hoodie sleeve to wipe Lance’s nose for him, forgetting momentarily to be scared of dropping the baby

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what your mum was thinking”

Keith rolled his eyes, heavy on the sass

“Does anyone ever? He’s definitely not a Lenny...”

Sighing at him, he knew he had to get over his dislike of Lenny eventually. The joke had work thin

“Forget about Lenny... Charlotte? It means hurt, and my butt hurts from pushing”

“We’re not naming our daughter Charlotte Miriam because your butt hurt”

“Badum-tss”

Why did he adore this idiot? He’d walked right into that one

“You should feel bad”

“Oh, babe. I feel totally bad... I’m so tired but I don’t think I can ever take my eyes off them”

“We don’t have to name them now...”

“Mmm, but you heard Coran, I don’t know how long I’ll sleep... I wanna know their names...”

Keith had a thought

“What about Laith Hunter Kogane-McClain? I... was a hunter when I met you...”

Lance hummed, their grumpy boy not giving away how he felt about his name

“What about Laith Hunter Kogane? There’s enough McClains out there... and some day soon it’ll be my last name too”

Fuck it. He was already crying, he wasn’t crying harder because he loved Lance so damn much

“So we have our little lion hunter... and our Red Princess Miriam”

“Oh, so she’s a princess now?”

“She’s our princess...”

“I think Blue will have something to say about that... She’s so cute... I’d... I’d like Miriam... as her middle name, if that’s okay. Mami... Mami would have... would have loved them”

Krolia would be out there waiting for him, but Mami wouldn’t be there. This wasn’t fair

“Oh, baby. She would have been so proud. I’m so proud...”

“I’m sorry... I... feel so emotional right now”

“I feel the same way... you know, “Crimson” and “Scarlet” are both perfectly acceptable names”

Once again his bad humour brought a smile back to Lance’s lips

“You can call her Red all you like, once we find the right name... Lancella?”

“Lancella with photographer for a boyfriend? I think not. What do you think when you look at her”

“Well... to me... to me I think “Lena”, but I named Laith”

Lena Miriam Kogane and Laith Hunter Kogane... Yeah. Yeah... That felt right...

Two hours later, Lance had been moved to another room. Their twins sleeping as Keith finally drew himself together enough to face their friends. Carrying the bundle in his arm carefully, Keith opened the door to their room. Coran had been out to reassure everyone, Lance had been through a couple of bags of blood, showing signs of healing before he passed out. Keeping his voice low, he didn’t want to wake up the sleeping bundle suckling on his finger

“Hey, guys”

Krolia, Curtis and Shiro, were sitting on the few chairs in the hall, the others sitting on the floor, both sides of the corridor. Fuck, Keith’s ego was way beyond massive with his pride. Certificates of birth had been signed, Coran knew how to register the birth and all those details.

“Keith... is that... are they okay?”

Hunk tripped over his words as he hurried to his feet, Keith beaming with pride

“The three of them are okay. Lance lost a fair bit of blood, but he’ll be okay. Coran said it might take a bit for him to recover once he fell asleep. I know we kept you guys waiting, but he fought falling asleep until he couldn’t fight it any longer”

“And?!”

Pidge couldn’t contain herself usually, this time it was Allura demanding to know. Yeah. He’d hit one hundred percent smug arsehole about his family. Coran pleasantly surprised after taking the measurements, saying “they were ready to walk out”

“Laith Hunter Kogane, and Lena Miriam Kogane. Lena was born first at 2:12pm, April 30th, 51 and 6 pound 1 something. She’s for wispy black hair and the bluest eyes. Laith kept Lance exhausted for an extra 20 minutes, 53cm , 7 pound 2 whatever it is. He’s got the grumpiest little expressions, and like his sister, he’s got my black hair and Lance’s blue eyes. Lance didn’t want to hyphenate our last names because he plans on taking “Kogane” soon”

Pidge let out a squeal, before clamping her hand over her mouth so as not to wake his sleeping baby

“Congrats, baby brother... and congrats on the engagement”

Now seemed as good as any time to come clean

“Actually, we’ve been engaged for a few weeks now”

Matt spluttered

“But at the party...”

“It’s true the box was empty. We wanted to keep it to ourselves for a while... I don’t think any of expected today to be the day he went into labour. Coran said the general sickness was a sign leading up to labour, so was the stomach cramping Lance didn’t tell me about, he thought it was Braxton-Hicks being annoying again”

Krolia stepped forward

“Can I...?”

“You guys can come in... but this baby boy is staying in my arms”

Shiro seemed to hesitate, before asking, Keith trying to keep his face as neutral as he could at the coming question

“Can we see?”

Lowering the side of the blanket, Lance had his teeth in Keith’s finger, suckling down his blood. His fiancé had shifted back into a bat shortly after falling asleep. Keith had forgotten how absolutely adorable lance was as a bat. Coran seemed to think it was his body’s natural reaction to all the stress and exhaustion of birth. None of them found it funny, Krolia looked ready to hit him

“You could have told us...”

“Lance is baby. He’s feeding on my finger seeing he was a bit uneasy when he fell asleep and we couldn’t get an IV line in... anyway, come on in. Just don’t make any sudden moves. My ego’s pretty much out of control right now”

His ego being out of control meant nothing as Keith was drawn into a tight hug from his brother. The hug was everything he’d needed that morning when he’d been on the phone

“I’m so happy for you”

“I’m pretty happy for me too... Don’t forget, you and Curtis are the godfathers. You’ll have to give up being lame, you’re both going to have a huge responsibility on your hands”

“We won’t let you down... God, Keith. I’m so proud of you. Adam would be so proud of you, too”

“Thanks, Shiro. I know Lance would thank you too... Fuck, this has been a roller coaster”

“And I’m sure the journeys just begun. Now, I want to meet my niece and nephew”

“I have to warn you, they’re pretty incredible”

“I don’t doubt that for a moment”

Lance remained a bat for the following two days. He felt as if he’d been run over repeatedly when he finally came back to his senses. The happiness he felt when he held his twins... he’d truly never felt anything like it. He didn’t know if it was normal to love someone so instantaneously, but his dramatic arse would die for the pair in a heartbeat. Laith had all of Keith’s expressions down pact. He’d taken to feeding like a champion, unlike his sister who wasn’t too sure at first. Yeah, Lance had balled his eyes out over how precious they were. Their grumpy little boy screaming the first time he had his photo taken by Krolia, who had the flash on on her phone. Shiro had given Keith his camera, Keith making sure to get plenty of photos during the time he missed. He knew he’d never get that time back, but because his body had forced him to rest and heal, he felt like a better father for it... plus, he had the memories of their birth, and the precious first cuddles and hours of their lives.

After a week of rest, they were finally released to go home. There was nothing wrong with their twins, he and Keith hadn’t wanted to be apart and Lance couldn’t go home until Coran was sure he’d okay. A small neat gold diamond ring now on his ring finger, Keith deciding the right time to pull it out was just after Lena had thrown up on his chest. Lance knew that “being a diva couldn’t be genetically inherited” but he saw so much of himself in her. Romance would forever be Keith’s middle name, after slipping in the ring on his finger than awkwardly stuttering out “I got you a ring”. Keith was very lucky Coran had sorted things out with the police, or their “second engagement” might have been a bit awkward had the police pulled him over and arrested him for doing a runner. There was nothing Coran couldn’t fix, including his broken arse, though that had needed stitches to help along the healing and next time they decided to do this, he was definitely booking into VOLTRON a month early.

13 months, nearly to the day, his house was invaded again by two “strangers”. One a dark haired beauty, the other a little brother, grumpy at the world but secretly loving cuddles. Two strangers that would turn his life upside down again... and he wouldn’t have it any other way. It was time for a whole new adventure as their journey continued... doubly so when Keith finally went back to work, learning that it was okay that he was werewolf that preferred to be human outside of the moon. Neither of them asked for the monsters beneath their skin, but together, they made a damn good team, even if Lance did say so himself.

#once bitten twice stupid #oncebittentwicestupid #ashratherose

10 notes · View notes

splat-dragon · 4 years

Link

The man that looked him in the eye on that mountain, though, was Dutch. The one he’d known for twenty years, that had cradled him and loved him and known him and taught him. He knew his tells, knew his eyes.

And that man, the one who was silent though he’d never known him to be, was his Pa.

‘Pa, please don’t go. I don’t want to die alone.’

Thank you to @thedoodlenoodle-wa who got my butt in gear to finish this that has totally not been sitting in my WIPs for over a year

Written to this version of Knockin' on Heaven's Door

He couldn’t breathe.

His face was throbbing, his chest was burning. Micah had done a number on him, and his only solace was that he would die of his wounds instead of his illness. But… he didn’t want to die. There was so much he still wanted to do, he was terrified. He still had so much he needed to do.

He needed to talk to Dutch, get him to see that he was wrong. That following Micah would only drag him further into ruin, further down than he was already, if that was possible. He had already lost Hosea, had lost those he had raised as sons and daughters, to death and to leaving in hopes of a better life. What more could he lose?

His life, he supposed. But with all of his gang lost, everything he had built up destroyed, did he have much of a life left to lose?

No, not really. As much as Dutch had changed, he still loved them: the gang was as much his family as they were Arthur’s. If Arthur lost them… he would be crushed. He’d never be able to go on. Would go insane, most likely, lose his mind—they were all that was keeping him together. He’d rather die than lose them, couldn’t imagine a future where he wasn’t surrounded by his brothers and sisters in arms.

‘I don’t want to die.’

He wanted Hosea.

Desperately.

When he was a kid and he was sick or hurt, or just needed attention, the old man (although he hadn’t been that old back then) would sit with him, tell him that it would be okay, would card his fingers through his hair. Read aloud to him from whatever book he was reading at the time, even if Arthur didn’t understand a word of it. Tell him about one of his favorite cons or heists, and Arthur would be just as fascinated as the first time he’d heard it, even if it was the hundredth time.

But Hosea was dead, wasn’t he? He’d been shot in front of him, captured in that damned bank robbery that had gone so, so wrong. He’d been made to watch him turn to stare his death in the eye, collapse to the ground in a spray of blood and writhe pitifully in pain. His pa’s death hadn’t been dignified, or peaceful, or even something worth telling stories of as he had wanted; he hadn’t died in some amazing shoot-out, or protecting his family. He’d been shot down in the streets like some mangy, flea-ridden dog. Made the most horrific sound as he’d been torn open, punched through by a bullet and put down without a second thought.

If Hosea was still alive… well, this wouldn’t be happening. He would never have allowed Lenny to be shot on that rooftop, Micah to bring in Joe and Cleet, Dutch to stir the pot that was the Wapiti and the government. Would never have allowed Susan to be shot down as she had been. He would have been horrified, heartbroken, to see Dutch walk away from their sons and Arthur wondered if, perhaps, it was better that the man wasn’t around to see how far his pa had fallen.

Could Hosea have fixed things? Dutch had been falling for years, but he’d only gotten worse since Micah had joined them, worse since he hit his head, worse since Hosea died. No, maybe not. But Hosea could have lessened the impact. Could have gotten them all out before Dutch broke, could have kept them from being hit by the shrapnel, from being collateral damage. Could have restrained the ticking time bomb such that only Micah and Joe and Cleet were affected, so that only they were left to deal with the fall-out when Dutch drew the Pinkertons down on their heads, when Dutch turned on his family.

But Hosea was gone, and they had all been damaged. Shrapnel had dug deep, the shock-wave doing damage that no one could see, but that they would feel for the rest of their lives. Still, though, he wanted Hosea. He was sick, sicker than he had ever been. He wanted Hosea to sit with him, to run his fingers through his hair and read Rip Van Wrinkle or Robin Hood or any of those other books he seemed to always be re-reading, or even those books that Arthur could never remember even the title of, never mind the contents.

‘I want Hosea.’

Dutch wasn’t saying anything.

He wasn’t sure what he, himself, was saying. There was some sort of disconnect between his mouth and his brain, his mind fuzzy, his ears buzzing, and the edges of his eyesight had gone grey, but Dutch was a solid figure, as sturdy and unchanged as always.

And he had nothing to say.

For as long as Arthur could remember, Dutch always had something to say. He was always talking, always moving. Gesturing, pacing, orating.

But when it mattered, he was silent.

And then the pressure lifted from his hand, released his broken fingers, and Dutch made some sort of noise, an involuntary sort of one, a moan or a groan or a gasp, and then he was walking - staggering - away.

Perhaps it was Arthur’s fading mind trying to comfort him, but he could have sworn that he saw a tear in his Pa’s eye.

‘Dutch, please don’t leave me.’

He’d never been one to fear death.

It was part and parcel of their life. When your job included bullets flying, being chased by the law and by bounty hunters, then you became desensitized to death. He’d gone through being sick with the Russian Flu as a teenager, with Hosea and Dutch at his side for fear he might die alone, had suffered Scarlet Fever much the same. Had been bitten by more snakes than he could count on both hands, been bed-ridden by near half of them, had nearly died from so many bullet wounds that it was almost a common occurrence for him.

When he’d nearly died of an infection of the blood after escaping the O’Driscolls, he’d been angry and indignant, not mad. He’d sworn up and down that he would see Colm dead before he died, to protect his family from the man’s machinations, and he’d be damned before he died of an infection of all things.

And Hosea had, laughing wearily, said that it was that anger that had made him live. He was just too damn angry to die.

But now? Lying alone on the cold stone, bleeding out, drowning in his own blood, watching as his father walked away, abandoning him to whatever death took him?

‘I’m scared.’

They’d always been there for him.

From the moment they’d pulled him from the mud, shivering of the cold, his lips tinted blue, a sigh in Hosea’s chest and an offer on Dutch’s lips, he had always been able to count on them.

They’d fed him up, put a gun in his hand and taught him to read. Hadn’t needed to - he’d have been a perfectly good little soldier if he were illiterate - but had done so out of the goodness of their blackened hearts. Had sat for hours, put up with his sulks and whining, spent years shoving books in front of him until he could read even Dutch’s philosophy books, even if he didn’t understand them.

When he’d fallen from the saddle, his pa never having taught him how to ride proper, they’d been there to pat the dirt from his shoulders and to boost him back up, to teach him that you always get back up on that horse, and to teach him how to ride a horse. How to sit a trot, how to show it how to go, how to hold on as you let it have its head when fleeing the law. How to break a wild horse, how to coax away a stolen horse.

And when he’d had his son, his baby boy Isaac, they’d been there to hold him close, to smile proud as any grandpas would be, to love and adore him, to give him gifts they’d made themselves, to hum and sing even if Dutch didn’t look particularly comfortable, afraid he’d break him.

And when Isaac and Eliza had been killed, they’d mourned with him.

They’d been there as he grew up, as he grew sour. Talked him down when he turned surlish, snarled and snapped, knew when to pull him aside and tug him in close, squeeze him tight and tuck his head under their chins until he stopped shaking, until the world stopped thrumming and he could breathe again.

No matter what, they’d been there for him. When he was scared he could turn to them, find them there, ready to lend an ear or just sit as he sketched, or look at the stars, or nothing in particular at all. Sometimes it had seemed suffocating, as though he couldn’t take a step without stumbling over them, but at that moment he’d give anything to have them back.

‘I want my dads.’

They’d never turned their backs on him.

Not when he’d been cruel - when he’d turned to the bottle after his baby boy had been killed, taking out his agony on the world, not when he’d tried to test them when he was young and mad at the world, at everyone and everything, terrified of them, sure that they had some motives he couldn’t yet see and trying to test them.

But they’d never turned their back on him. Sometimes they’d step away, take a breather if he was drawing their ire, but never did they give up on him. They’d pull him to sit by the campfire, try to talk to him or just sit with him, wait for him to cool down and wait for calmer heads to prevail.

Maybe… maybe things had changed as the world raced ahead of them. Dutch had grown suspicious but, even then, he’d never turned his back on him. Not until Lone Mule Stead - before then he’d accused him of being a traitor, of intending on betraying him in the future.

But he’d left him to rot there, to be tortured and to die. He’d sworn, up and down, that he’d been intending to come for him, but Arthur had known him for twenty years and though Dutch was a fantastic liar, it came with the territory after all, he had his tells.

And Dutch had been lying.

But then he’d been Dutch again - playing, racing him and calling him his son, taking he and Hosea fishing and singing in the boat, eyes bright and clear and playfully directing them as they all sang their ridiculous songs.

And he’d saved him on the cliff. Could have fled, left him to be chased by the military. But he’d even covered his back and sent him ahead. Curled around him as they leaped into the river, risked wading into the current to grab his arm and haul him out, waited as he fought to breathe, fighting his traitorous lungs, only leaving once he was breathing steadily or, at least, as steadily as his breathing got these days.

But then came the oil fields, and he’d turned his back and left him to die. He’d been so happy only moments before - “Arthur… we are nearly there…” - and then he’d looked him in the eye, his hands on his guns (and Dutch was a quick shot, it was a shot he’d made thousands, if not millions, of times before), and walked away.

Dutch wasn’t his Dutch anymore, he could tell that now.

Wasn’t his Pa.

Wasn’t the man who laughed and distracted him from the pain of his wounds being tended with ridiculous stories, who would put on weird hats as he told of how he got them. Wasn’t the man who held him in his arms and rocked him when he suffered the sadness he got from his mother, who knew how to talk him down when he lost himself to the anger his father gave to him.

Wasn’t the man who hummed and cradled John when the kid woke up screaming, clawing at a noose that wasn’t there. Who laughed and played horsy with Jack when he thought no one was looking - wasn’t even the man who snuck treats to Cain behind Pearson’s back, who twirled Molly by the campfire and took in Sadie up in Colter.

The man that looked him in the eye on that ledge, though, was Dutch. The one he’d known for twenty years, that had cradled him and loved him and known him and taught him. He knew his tells, knew his eyes.

And that man, the one who was silent though he’d never known him to be, was his Pa.

‘Pa, please don’t go. I don’t want to die alone.’

25 notes · View notes

jornthur · 4 years

Text

“Unshaken” Chapter VI

Originally posted: March 29, 2020

Arthur Morgan x Reader, Slow-Burn Romance

(Art specially requested/Credit: @tylerzart)

Summary: You save a mysterious man who is dying on a mountain. Finding out he has Tuberculosis, you use your knowledge and skills with herbs and natural remedies to save him from death and help nurse him back to health. As he slowly starts to recover, you can’t help but wonder: Who is this man? Why had you found him the way that you did, beaten and ill? Only time, patience … and perhaps love … will tell.

•••••

I hate them, every outlaw out there.

The words rang in his head, and Arthur didn’t know how to react. He was almost nervous by the tension he felt rising between them now, but the feeling was only one-sided on his part.

She was completely unaware of the conflicting thoughts he was having now from those words. She had taken him in, nursed him back to health, and all the while she had never known who he was … what he was.

Murderers, thieves … outlaws. They had stolen her mother from her, someone close to her heart. Was he any different from them?

He understood her pain, the loss she felt for having lost someone she loved.

Not knowing how to react or what else to do, he continued rubbing his hand up and down her back in an effort to try and comfort her. “I’m truly sorry, Y/N. No one deserves to go through somethin’ like that.”

She let out a little sniff as she raised her head to look at him, wiping at her eyes and cheeks to get rid of the wet tears that had escaped. “You … You said you know how it feels to lose someone, Arthur.” Her sad eyes looked up at his, “Who did you lose?”

Arthur tensed.

He hadn’t been prepared for that question.

He was unable to figure out how to answer her, not without revealing himself and who he truly was.

He’d lost so many people. His entire gang, his family, either lost or dead. But he couldn’t tell her about any of them. He couldn’t reveal the people he’d lost without risking her recognizing any of those names and finding out who he’d been. He wasn’t sure if she even actually knew any of them, but he didn’t want to take that chance.

Besides, it wasn’t like he could’ve gone back to that life now. His old life was gone, and there was nowhere else to go.

But still … what the hell could he possibly say?

Now that he knew what she’d gone through, there was no damn way he was going to let her know what he’d been. She’d been through enough, there was no sense in allowing her to find out who he truly was, all the things he’d done. After all the care she had shown him she deserved to know him as a normal man.

So that’s who he was going to be.

He thought about Hosea, he thought about Dutch, he thought about the rest of the gang. He thought about Charles, of Lenny, of John …

Arthur lowered his eyes to the ground, emotion nearly tearing through him. “I lost a family,” his voice was hoarse, nearly gravel in tone, “they were very near and dear to me. Though we wasn’t related by blood, we stood by each other, keepin’ each other safe,” he lowered his lids, memories of them flooding him. “We did everythin’ to protect one another, no matter what damn mess we got ourselves in.” He could feel Y/N’s stare on him, and he turned his head to face her. Her expression was sympathetic, her eyes watering all over again. For him.

“I’m so sorry, Arthur,” her voice was cracked, as if she felt the same feelings that he did for the ones he’d lost.

He gave her a small smile. “I ain’t got no one now since you saved me from that mountain.”

It wasn’t an accusation, it was just the truth. He just wanted to let her know where he was in life now. Hell, he wasn’t even sure himself. His friends, any of them that were possibly left, he had no doubt they thought he was dead.

And John.

Arthur thought about the deer from his dream, about the fact that it had had John’s eyes. That it had turned away from him, heading towards an ominous storm.

He shook his head to clear the thought.

He had sent John away to lead a normal life with his own family.

Arthur couldn’t possibly try to reach out to John, not without risking even more than what both of them already had.

If he ever found John, there was no doubt him and John in the same place would attract dangerous and unwanted attention eventually. There was just no way in hell that it would ever end well.

Even though he desperately wanted more than anything to reach out to his brother, Arthur had to believe that John and his family were safe.

He had to let him go.

Arthur ran a hand through his chestnut-brown hair, squeezing the rough strands between his fingers. He grimaced, trying to focus on that small feeling rather than the pain that welled in his heart.

If he were truthful with himself, he wasn’t sure he was ever going to be able to move on.

He was supposed to have died on that damn rock.

But here he was.

He had to accept the fact that he needed to make a new life for himself … one way or another.

•••••

You watched as Arthur’s face seemed to twist in pain as he grabbed at his hair. You couldn’t bear to see him in that sort of agony. Reaching out you placed a hand on his arm, trying to get him to let go of his hair so he didn’t pull any of it out. “Arthur, please,” you whispered softly. “I’m sorry if I brought back any painful memories for you.”

He just shook his head as he lowered his arm, placing the hand on his journal instead as he stared down at it. “It ain’t your fault,” he said roughly, “Just gotta lot on my mind right now.” He cleared his throat, then patted hard at his chest with his other hand.

You observed his physical behavior closely, then you stood suddenly.

Arthur raised his head to look up at you. “Somethin’ wrong?”

You shook your head, “Not particularly. I just need to do another check-up on you.” You turned away to walk into the cabin, smiling a little as you heard his disapproving groan. As you gathered all the supplies you needed, you glanced over at his satchel. Maybe he would like to have it so he could carry his journal around easier, you thought. If he was going to be outside, it wouldn’t hurt to bring it out to him. You grabbed the brown bag and stepped back outside.

Luckily, Arthur hadn’t moved from his position on the bench. After having heard his less than favorable reaction to your statement earlier, you’d half-expected him to flee, though he probably wouldn’t have made it that far. Maybe that was the reason he was still here.

Either way, you knew that he knew you needed to look over him. Professionally, of course.

Sitting back down next to him again you placed your supplies on the small porch table by the bench swing. You held out his satchel to him, and when he gave you a puzzled frown you said, “I just thought it would make it easier for you to carry your journal around in, if you’re going to be outside for the day. You can keep the pencil, too.”

Arthur gave an amused smile as he let out a soft chuckle. “Thank you, honey,” he said as he reached out to take it, bringing the strap over his head so that it was looped around his neck, the bag getting tucked securely underneath his arm at his side. Then he placed the journal inside the satchel along with the pencil you had given him.

You gave him a smile, unable to help but blush a little from his gratitude. “You’re welcome, Arthur.”

Once you had all the supplies prepped, Arthur cooperated throughout the routine. It was almost second nature to him by now, no doubt. The stethoscope, listening to his heart and lungs, examining his mouth and throat. You smiled at him as you placed everything back on the tray. “Everything is looking wonderful, Arthur,” you said in a cheerful tone. “Honestly, I’m amazed at how quickly your body is healing.”

Arthur shrugged, his big shoulders tensing as he lifted them. “All cuz of you, honey,” he said teasingly with a grin, his deep drawl sending shivers up and down your spine.

Again, how on Earth could a man possess such a voice, you thought. Whoever was going to end up with him was going to be one lucky woman.

You froze, surprised that that thought actually sent a feeling of jealousy through you. But, why? The man clearly wasn’t interested in you in any way whatsoever. At least — he hadn’t shown any signs that he was. Sure he called you honey sometimes, but he’d told you it was simply because of the natural remedy you had been treating his tuberculosis with. So there was nothing romantic in that word, therefore it wasn’t an endearment, right?

You shook yourself mentally, feeling ashamed at the horrible emotion. You had no right to feel jealous over him. He was gorgeous, you had to admit, but that didn’t give you a right to him, not even if you saved his life. “How is everything feelin’ right now, Arthur?” You asked him, trying to get your mind away from that state. “Anythin’ hurting in your chest or throat?”

Arthur’s expression lifted as he shook his head. “Nothin’, Y/N. I don’t feel any pain at all.”

You nodded, happy with his answer. “That’s very good, Arthur. I’m very glad to hear that.” Grabbing a small glass vial from the tray, you pulled out one of the small leaves and held it out to him. “I need you to take this now.”

Arthur took the small leaf between his fingers, giving you a puzzled look. “This looks familiar.” He said, holding the leaf up in the light as he examined it closely.

“It’s Hummingbird Sage,” you informed him, “It should help give you a little bit of energy today.”

He smiled at you as he placed it in his mouth, and you watched as the bob in his throat moved, indicating that he had swallowed it. “Thanks, darlin’.”

You gave him another nod. “You’re welcome, Arthur, I’m just glad you’re doing better.”

His sharp blue eyes suddenly narrowed at you, “What about you?” He asked. “Have you been keepin’ yourself safe from the damn disease?”

He was referring to his tuberculosis, you knew. From that first night, when he’d tried to get away from you in an attempt to keep you from catching the disease, you’d tried to assure him that you were taking your own treatments, giving yourself the necessary herbs to kill off any potential bacteria.

“Yes, I’m just fine.” You replied.

He gave you a small smile, his beautiful blue eyes softening. “Good.”

You returned his smile. “Besides, you shouldn’t be infectious anymore. The medicinal properties should have killed off any active bacteria by now, if my past treatments are anything to go by.”

“I’m human.” He reminded you, his deep voice amused.

You blushed, “Yes, I know, Arthur.” You said, entwining your fingers around the glass vial nervously. “But I’m saying that if you wanted any sort of physical contact with anyone,” your blush grew hotter, but you reminded yourself that you were just giving him professional advice, as a doctor would to his patient, “there’s nothing to worry about. In fact, Tuberculosis can’t actually be spread by mouth or any sort of physical contact. Only just the coughing.”

You fiddled with the small vial, watching the tiny leaves shift back and forth within the glass. “But again, you don’t need to worry about us. I’ve treated this disease before and our herbs have never let us down in keeping us safe.”

Arthurs’ blue eyes just stared at you, his expression one of amusement, “You are way too smart for your own damn good, woman.” He teased.

You laughed, and your reaction made him smile. Both of you sat in silence for a moment, facing each other as the bench slightly swung back and forth.

Arthur’s blue stare skimmed over to your garden, and he asked, “So, you grow these herbs yourself?”

You rubbed your fingers together shyly as you glanced over at the variety of plants growing together. “Yes, I … I take notes in my mother’s journal about them. Whenever I discover anything new, that is. Any ailments they may treat or cure, what sort of treatment they need, how to grow them properly, how to prepare them for use or consumption. You name it, it’s all in there. Everything she and I know.”

“And this journal of yours, you fill it out yet?” Arthur asked, his tone amused as he turned his gaze back at you.

You gave a small laugh. “More like a book now, really. I’m very lucky my mother decided to get herself such a thick journal. Honestly, she filled up most of it. I’ve just been adding what I can, including some notes here and there on what she already wrote down.”

Arthur nodded, his eyes looking down slightly has he took in what you said. After a while, he looked back over at you again. “So how long you and Austin been livin’ up here?”

You looked over you shoulder to watch Austin working as you answered, “He and I, we’ve been up in these woods for about three years now. We used to live on our plantation with our father before Mother died. But I decided I didn’t want to stay cooped up there anymore.” You let out a long breath, lowering your gaze to your hands. “Father didn’t want me to leave. After what happened to Mother, he was scared to lose me. It took a long time to persuade him, but he finally gave in, but he insisted that Austin was to go with me for my own protection. Even Austin agreed.”

You smiled at the thought of your brother and his over-protective nature. “They didn’t want it any other way, and my brother came up here with me. We built this cabin since the , and it’s truly been a crazy few years up here.” You let out a small laugh at the memories.

Arthur grinned at your humor. “So what do you do up here usually?”

You watched as Austin picked up a pitchfork to lift up a patch of hay. “We mostly get by on our own. My brother hunts for us while I grow vegetables and fruits in the garden.” Your smile faded as you spoke the next words. “It’s been hard lately though. With winter coming up in a couple months, Austin has been finding it harder to find anythin’. He’s … he never quite learned how to hunt or track, he’s sort of … self-taught,” you confessed.

Arthur’s eyes widened at that, “So you two been strugglin’ up here off and on all this time?”

You nodded, hating to admit it, but it was the truth. “That’s why Austin was so mad when I took you in. I’m sure he never hated you personally, he just … he just worries, is all.”

Arthur stared at you for a moment, his blue eyes unmoving as he seemed lost in thought. After a few minutes, he finally asked, “Would you like me to teach y’all how to hunt?”

You jerked your head back over to him, your expression and voice surprised, “What?”

He looked over at Austin and back at you again. “I have a few skills under my belt, if y’all are interested in learnin’ how to track and hunt. Hell, I’d be glad to, it’s the least I can do to return the favor for now.” With those words he suddenly stood.

His action surprised you, but he didn’t give you any time to respond as he walked off the porch and headed towards your brother. What had just happened? You stood up to follow him. He was getting quicker on his feet since his body had been getting better, and him being a big man you already had to run to catch up to him. By the time you finally did he was already approaching Austin.

Austin noticed Arthur as he walked up to him and straightened up from the hay he was spreading on the ground. “Hey, cowpoke,” His voice was a teasing tone, but Arthur wasn’t amused.

“Don’t test me, boah,” he said, his blue eyes narrowing dangerously. He placed both his hands on his belt, then said in an amused tone, “Your sister here says you don’t know how to hunt.”

“What the hell, Y/N?!” Austin snapped furiously, a blush showing up in his cheeks.

“I didn’t say it like that!” You snapped back furiously, then stepped back. You brought your hand to play with your hair nervously. “Well, not exactly like that, anyway. I just — I just told him you’ve been havin’ a hard time with it because you were never … properly taught.”

Austin’s eyes narrowed at you, his expression still shadowed with anger. “Why would you tell him that?”

Arthur intervened into the conversation, his deep voice penetrating the air as he lifted his arms from his sides. “If you’re interested, boah, I’ll teach you how to track and hunt so you can catch more game.”

Austin looked back over at Arthur, his eyes nearly wide, his entire expression looking stunned. He almost looked like the young boy that was just told he was getting a horse for his birthday all over again. “You … you’ll what? You’d teach me to do all that?” He voice nearly sounded breathless, almost excited. He was clearly thinking back to when Arthur had shot that jackrabbit, the way he’d done it so flawlessly with such little effort. “I would — I would like that,” he stuttered, actually admitting to the truth to your surprise, again almost like a star-struck child. “When you’re better, I mean, I … Yeah, that might actually be fun.”

You knew how hard it was for your brother to admit to something like that, you thought, especially when it was about one of his flaws. But this could probably be a chance for the two of them to get along better.

Arthur nodded. “Sounds good, feller.” He looked around, placing his hands back on his belt as he took in the surroundings. “There anythin’ you need me to do here now? I need to find somethin’ to do other than lay on a damn couch all day,” he said, his voice sharp at the last words.

Austin looked taken aback, seeming a bit surprised that Arthur actually wanted to do some work. He nodded slowly, “Well, we need to catch some fish.” He looked over to the stream, “I was plannin’ to do it after this but I would really appreciate it if someone else did it for me. I really need to take the horses for a ride, give them some exercise outside their pen.” He narrowed his eyes at Arthur, “Do you know how to fish?”

“’Course I do,” Arthur said assuredly, giving a single nod.

“Good, cuz Y/N sure don’t.”

“Austin!” You snapped.

“Eye for an eye, sister, plus it’s the truth,” your brother stated, a grin stretching that stupid loud mouth of his.

You growled as he turned away, heading over to the small shack by the stables. He pulled out a large metal bucket with fishing supplies and a long fishing rod. He came back, holding the bucket out to Arthur. “Got everythin’ you need in here. Bait, lures,” he held out the fishing rod, “And here’s this.”

Arthur took the rod, but before he took the large bucket you snatched it out of your brother’s hand. “I will be holding this,” you said, looking at Arthur sternly, “I won’t be lettin’ you lift anything heavy.”

Those blue eyes lit up in amusement as Arthur smiled at you. “Alrighty then, darlin’,” his deep voice teased, “You’re strong, aint’cha?”

His comment nearly surprised you, you had expected him to protest you taking a share of the load, which would’ve annoyed you. But he hadn’t. He saw you as a completely capable woman able to carry your own weight. He was clearly not one of those high-society types, you thought, your heart lifting with a smile.

“Hey now,” Austin interrupted, “I ain’t toleratin’ any of that sweet-talk toward my sister.” His tone was light-hearted, but you could hear a trace of protectiveness underneath it.

You realized at that moment that that was the very first time Arthur had actually called you any sort of endearment right in front of your brother. Now that you thought about it, he’d never even called you honey when your brother was in the same room. Why was that?

Austin was right back to being his usual self again. “Alright, then. I’m going to take the horses out on their run. I’ll be back in about an hour or so.” He gave Arthur a dark look. “Don’t you dare try anythin’ with my sister, mister.”

Arthur’s dark brows furrowed, his expression amused at the fact that Austin was daring to talk to him like that, but he seemed to understand. Austin was just acting as a normal brother would. “Don’t you worry, feller,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact, “Your sister’s safe with me.”

Austin gave him a quizzical look, “She’d better be. Otherwise, I know she has her shotgun to take you out if I ain’t here.”

Arthur looked over at you and winked. His unexpected action made you blush, and you looked down at your feet to avoid those piercing blue eyes.

Austin nodded, as if he was sure he’d made his point. He came over to give you a hug, “I’ll be back soon, alright, Y/N?” Then he whispered in your ear. “Make sure he don’t try nothin’ stupid.”

You smirked at his words, even after a whole month Austin still had his doubts sometimes. You returned his hug, “Alright, Austin. Take care of Lily and stay safe.”

Since Butch was loyal to Austin, your brother often rode on Lily whenever he took them for a ride, knowing the war horse would follow him anywhere. It was better than tying poor Lily up to a rope and leading her with another horse like some kind of wild animal.

“You know I will. I’ll see you soon.” Austin gave you a peck on the forehead and headed towards the stables, waving over his shoulder. You watched as your brother climbed onto Lily and lead the horses away, taking them down a beaten path and disappearing into the thick woods.

“Alright,” Arthur huffed, “let’s get to it,” He grinned at you and started walking over to the stream with the fishing rod. You followed closely behind with the bucket. As you both reached the waterline, you set the bucket down on the large stump and sat down on the thick fallen log next to it.

Arthur knelt to the ground by the stump and reached into the bucket, pulling out a few lures and two cans of bait along with a can-opener. You watched as he got to work on setting everything up, tightening up the fishing line in the reel and attaching one of the lures to the end, his fingers working flawlessly. He made it look so easy.

“So, how long you been fishin’, Arthur?” You asked as he opened one of the cans with the small metal tool.

He looked up from his work briefly, “I was taught at a young age,” he answered, “Hosea showed me how.”

“Hosea? Who’s he?”

Arthur seemed to still, stopping what he was doing. Then a dark shadow went over his eyes as he appeared to get lost in thought.

“He was like a father to me.�� He finally said, his voice nearly hoarse, “Took me in when I was about fourteen, raised me ever since.” He lowered his head, “I lost him not that long ago.”

You brought a hand up to your mouth, suddenly feeling terrible for having asked about the man. Arthur looked so pained now. “I’m so sorry, Arthur.”

He just gave a weak smile. “It’s fine,” was all he said for a long while, but his voice sounded far from sincere. “Don’t worry about it. What’s done is done.”

You gave Arthur a sympathetic look as he pulled some bait from the can and started attaching it to the lure. “I’m know he’s looking down on you, Arthur. I’m sure he’s proud of you,” you said, trying to comfort him. You didn’t know who Hosea was, but the man had raised Arthur from a child. And having seen the kind of man Arthur was assured you that Hosea had no doubt a good person.

Arthur looked up at you and gave a soft smile. “Thanks, honey.” After a long moment he went back to work on completing the task of connecting the bait to the lure.

“Okay,” He grunted once he was finished, standing back up to his feet, “We’re ready now.”

He walked over to the waterline. Bringing the rod over his shoulder, he swung the thing forward, and the lure travelled swiftly through the air, landing onto the water’s surface in the middle of the wide stream.

He playing and yanking at the fishing pole, cranking the reel every so often.

“What are you doing?” You asked, curious to his small actions.

“What d’ya mean?” He didn’t look back at you, his mind completely focused on his task. “Yankin’ the fishin’ line?”

You nodded, “Does that attract the fish?”

He looked over his shoulder at you then, a look of surprise on his face, “So Austin was tellin’ the truth, then. You don’t know how to fish?”

You lowered your head in embarrassment, shaking it back and forth in a ‘no.’

Arthur laughed, and his reaction surprised you. Why would that be funny? You narrowed your eyes, slightly offended.

“C’mere,” he motioned with one of his hands at you, prompting you to come forward.

You hesitated for a few seconds, but then you stood up from the log and walked over until you were standing next to his tall form. Arthur reeled in the line til the lure was withdrawn from the water.

“Here, take this,” he said. He held out the fishing rod to you, and you took it with a shaky hand. It was a little heavier than it looked, and you almost dropped it, but thankfully you managed to get a good grip on it with both of your hands.

“Alright,” Arthur said. “Stand right here.” He stood behind you and grabbed both your shoulders with his big hands, positioning you right at the edge of the water. His closeness astonished you. Did he even realize the blush that was starting to form on your face? Did he even register how close he truly was, or was his mind just on the fishing lesson?

“Now,” he said, his deep drawl firm, “Once you get a good stance, you’re gonna throw that fishin’ lure into the water.” He stood at your side then and imitated the action from earlier, moving his arms to show you how to throw the line properly. “Now once you toss it, ya need to let go of the reel so that it can unravel.

With slight hesitation and a lot of confusion, you held up the rod and snapped it forward, but you forgot to let go of the reel, causing the line to whip around and catch you on your thigh. “Ouch!” You shouted, grabbing at the lure that was now stuck on your pant leg.

“You alright?” Arthur sounded concerned as he walked around you to look at the hook now snagged in the cloth.

“Yes,” you said, catching your breath, “it just pinched me a little.”

“Here,” Arthur reached out with his hands and worked the hook loose. “There we go.”

You gave him a grateful smile as he stepped back around you. “Thank you.”

He chuckled. “Least I can do, wanna try again?”

You thought about it then nodded, smiling at him. “Sure, why not?” You tried a few more times, all the while Arthur mimicking how to throw the lure in an effort to help. Your throws were weak at first, but on your fifth attempt you finally managed to get a good toss and the lure flew through the air, landing out in the middle of the wide stream. “I did it!” You shouted happily.

Arthur smiled, “That you did, honey.” He came to stand behind you. “Now, you gotta pull at the fishin rod to get a fish’s attention. It won’t give a damn about the lure otherwise. You need to make the lure act like prey just asking to be eatin’.”

You nodded, then started yanking at the pole.

“Not so hard, now,” Arthur said with a chuckle, placing a hand on your wrist. “You gotta do it in short bursts. Little twitches here and there.” You did as he said. “There ya go, darlin’. Now, slowly start bringin’ the line back in, the lure will look like a small fish swimmin’ across the surface.”

You cranked the reel slowly, bringing the line in at a snail’s pace.

Suddenly the lure was yanked hard.

“You got one!” Arthur shouted.

“What do I do?” You asked frantically.

“Calm down, just start pullin’ the rod and reel that big sucker in.”

You struggled to pull but the fish was fighting you hard. How on Earth did such a small creature have so much strength? Arthur reached over to help you pull the rod back and you started reeling the fish in until it was at the shoreline. Finally you yanked it out of the water.

“You got yourself a Muskie there, honey!” Arthur exclaimed, his grin wide, his face glowing as if he were proud of you.

“I did it!” You said happily, all but ecstatic. Arthur helped you to undo the hook from the fish’s mouth and placed the fish into the large bucket.

“Good job,” Arthur said as he came back over. He reached out and patted you hard on the shoulder with his big hand. “Your first fish, and a big feller at that.”

You smiled widely, “That was so exciting, I want to try that again!”

Arthur chuckled, “Go for it, honey. You need my help?”

You thought about it. Arthur had used up quite a bit of energy helping you haul in that fish, and truth be told you actually wanted him to take a break. You shook your head. “No, Arthur, I got this one. Do me a favor?”

He looked at you expectantly.

“Go sit over on that log and rest for a bit.”

He closed his eyes in a huff, “Why did I get the feelin’ you were gonna tell me somethin’ like that?”

You gave him another one of your playful sad looks to try and appeal to him, “Please, Arthur?”

He let out a long, loud sigh. “Fine, honey. I’ll watch you on this one.” His words sounded stoic, not thrilled at all to be left out of the action. But he did as you asked, going over to sit on the large fallen log.

•••••

Arthur had known the woman was going to say something along the lines of ‘you need to rest.’ Dammit, he’d been hearing those words endlessly over the last month.

And honestly, why did he listen to her? He wondered that as he sat down on the thick log, facing Y/N so he was able to watch her fish. As he watched her throw the lure back out to the stream, he remembered the answer.

She was persistent, absolutely ruthless when it came to his health. Whenever he protested, she never let up.

Y/N cared about him, he had no doubt in his mind about that.

He couldn’t help himself as he took in her form, appreciating her body again. Damn, she was beautiful, he thought. A strong woman with a strong mind. He needed a woman like that, someone who wasn’t afraid to back down from him.

As she reeled in the lure and threw it out again, he thought about what she’d said to him earlier, about everything she’d gone through. The hardship she endured from having lost her mother to outlaws, moving away and living out here off the land with her brother.

He wondered who her father was. She’d said that she had lived on a plantation, and he wondered which one, if he would recognize it if she told him.

He smiled as he heard her curse under her breath.

Y/N was a damn god-send, he thought. She had saved his life, with no thought or worry for her own needs.

He needed to find a way to thank her. He wanted to help her in some way, to repay her somehow.

Arthur scratched at the underside of his jaw with the back of his thumb, thinking about how he could possibly repay her for all she had done.

He smiled to himself as he thought about her telling him about the white lily, her favorite flower, how much it meant to her. She’d said that they couldn’t grow in this area and that she couldn’t grow any for herself.

He knew what they looked like, maybe he could —

Arthur froze, a single thought sitting in his head. He immediately opened his satchel and pulled out his journal, opening it to another blank page. Without a second’s hesitation he began to sketch.

•••••

You huffed, starting to get irritated at the lack of any fish biting. You started to think that you were damn lucky in getting that other fish, let alone such a massive one. After about twenty minutes you reeled the line in, done for the time being. Fishing was clearly fun, but only when there were actual fish.

Turning around you walked back over to Arthur, sitting down on the log next to him and propping the fishing rod up against it. He was giving you a strange look, his blue eyes almost sparkling. “What is it, Arthur?”

“I … ,” His voice sounded rough, his eyes still having that strange look. He opened his journal and tore out a single page with a drawing on it. “I thought you might like this, Y/N.” He handed the paper over to you and you took it.

The sketch you saw instantly had your eyes nearly watering.

A white lily.

“Arthur … this is … ” You couldn’t find the words, feeling like you could barely breathe at the sight.

“This is so beautiful,” you finally breathed out. “Thank you.”

Emotion overcame you and you couldn’t control yourself as you suddenly reached up and laid a kiss on his cheek.

You pulled away to see Arthur’s stunned expression.

You were absolutely appalled at what you had just done. “I’m — I’m so sorry, Arthur, I didn’t mean … I — I don’t know what came over me … I’ve never kissed anyone before.”

Those shining blue eyes glittered as he looked at you with amusement, a beautiful smile slowly lifting on his face. “Is that right, honey?”

Then with that he leaned in … and placed a kiss on your lips.

•••••

— To Be Continued

#unshaken #chapter 6 #part 6 #arthur morgan x reader #arthur morgan x female reader #slow burn #romance #arthur morgan #fanfic #red dead fanfic #rdr2 fanfic #red dead #rdr2 #red dead redemption #red dead redemption 2 #red dead redemption imagine

41 notes · View notes

the-mill-kat · 4 years

Text

Unshaken Chapter VI

Arthur Morgan x Reader (18+) Slow Burn

Posted March 29, 2020

Thank y’all so much for 250+ followers, that is amazin’!!!!! I hope you enjoy Chapter 6 of Unshaken, and please ***like/comment/reblog*** it means so much to me!

(Drawing specially requested/Art Credit: tylerzart)

You save a mysterious man who is dying on a mountain. Finding out he has Tuberculosis, you use your knowledge and skills with herbs and natural remedies to save him from death and help nurse him back to health. As he slowly starts to recover, you can’t help but wonder: Who is this man? Why had you found him the way that you did, beaten and ill? Only time, patience … and perhaps love … will tell.

I hate them, every outlaw out there.

The words rang in his head, and Arthur didn’t know how to react. He was almost nervous by the tension he felt rising between them now, but the feeling was only one-sided on his part.

Murderers, thieves … outlaws. They had stolen her mother from her, someone close to her heart. Was he any different from them?

He understood her pain, the loss she felt for having lost someone she loved.

Arthur tensed.

He hadn’t been prepared for that question.

He was unable to figure out how to answer her, not without revealing himself and who he truly was.

Besides, it wasn’t like he could’ve gone back to that life now. His old life was gone, and there was nowhere else to go.

But still … what the hell could he possibly say?

So that’s who he was going to be.

He thought about Hosea, he thought about Dutch, he thought about the rest of the gang. He thought about Charles, of Lenny, of John …

“I’m so sorry, Arthur,” her voice was cracked, as if she felt the same feelings that he did for the ones he’d lost.

He gave her a small smile. “I ain’t got no one now since you saved me from that mountain.”

And John.

Arthur thought about the deer from his dream, about the fact that it had had John’s eyes. That it had turned away from him, heading towards an ominous storm.

He shook his head to clear the thought.

He had sent John away to lead a normal life with his own family.

Arthur couldn’t possibly try to reach out to John, not without risking even more than what both of them already had.

If he ever found John, there was no doubt him and John in the same place would attract dangerous and unwanted attention eventually. There was just no way in hell that it would ever end well.

Even though he desperately wanted more than anything to reach out to his brother, Arthur had to believe that John and his family were safe.

He had to let him go.

Arthur ran a hand through his chestnut-brown hair, squeezing the rough strands between his fingers. He grimaced, trying to focus on that small feeling rather than the pain that welled in his heart.

If he were truthful with himself, he wasn’t sure he was ever going to be able to move on.

He was supposed to have died on that damn rock.

But here he was.

He had to accept the fact that he needed to make a new life for himself … one way or another.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••