#and I had to live in a shell room with bits of furniture I’d stolen from other rooms in the house

[bagadew]

I finally have bedroom furniture again lads! Now I just have to unpack my shit into it and the subsidence saga will finally be over.

[pluckyredhead]

Thanks for doing the RAICES fic fundraiser! It's inspiring to see people making art for good causes. Receipt: imgur(.)com(/)oGHPVPE Ok, so, Iron Fist was a mess but I love your Danny, you do a great job with him. So I'd like to request Danny-centric Defenders mini-casefic or team found family good-natured sass? Otherwise, if you're not good with that, I could go for some fabulous Pride lawyer silliness. Thanks!

I love writing Danny, thank you! (And thank you for donating!) This got…real silly, and ended up being as much about Jessica as Danny, and also Danny steered HARD into the goofball curve, but it was fun to write. Hope you enjoy!

Jessica had not been thrilled to be woken up by a phone call from Danny. Sure, it was two p.m. when he called - but on the other hand, it was Danny, and that didn’t seem worth getting up for any hour of the day.

But Danny had been insistent that she come over now, and so Jessica had pulled on her least stained jeans from off of the floor and sulked her way across town in a cab she fully intended on making her own personal Ralph Macchio pay for.

Now, as she stood between Luke and Matt, gaping at the thing Danny was holding in his lap, she was starting to understand his urgency.

“Is that…” Matt started to say, closed his mouth, opened it again, and shook his head.

Colleen, sitting on the couch, put her face in her hands. She looked tired.

Matt tried again. “I’m assuming that my senses are letting me down right now and that is not, in fact, a dragon?”

“It’s totally a dragon!” Danny said, beaming up at them. The green, slinky thing in his lap stretched and yawned like a cat before burping out a puff of fire. “Isn’t it awesome?”

“Sweet Christmas,” Luke said.

-

“Where the fuck did you get a dragon, Rand,” Jessica said, once she’d found some alcohol in Danny’s fridge - Mike’s Hard Lemonade because he was an actual child, but better than nothing.

“Farmers’ market,” Danny said, scratching the dragon under the chin.

“What,” Matt said.

“It wasn’t a farmers’ market,” Colleen said with a sigh. “I told him to meet me at the farmers’ market and he got lost and wound up at some weird street fair instead. With dragons, apparently.”

“You can buy dragons at a street fair?” Luke asked.

“No,” Danny said, in a tone like Luke had said something ridiculous. Well, like Luke had been the first person in the room to say something ridiculous. “I bought a dragon egg. I’ve had it for months.”

Jessica and Luke looked at Colleen. Even Matt pointed his chin at her.

“Don’t blame me for this!” she said, throwing her hands up. “This apartment has ten bedrooms! I don’t check them all on the regular for mythological beings.”

Danny shrugged. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I figured it was a scam or a dud, or just, you know, a really cool paperweight. It’s really hard to get dragon eggs in this hemisphere. But it was only a couple thousand dollars…”

“Oh, of course,” Luke muttered.

“…and even if it wasn’t a real egg it was so cool looking. You guys didn’t see the shell, it was neat. And the guy who sold it to me kept winking, like, hey man, this is the real deal. So I thought I’d stick it in a spare bedroom, crank the heat up in there, and if it didn’t hatch in a few months, that was that. But…” Danny gestured to the dragon as if anyone else had been able to stop thinking “HOLY SHIT THERE’S A DRAGON IN HERE” the entire time he’d been talking. “It hatched!”

“And then it peed everywhere,” Colleen added.

“And then it peed everywhere!” Danny agreed. Jessica had never seen him so happy.

-

If Jessica was good at anything, it was finding out weird shit on the internet. She sat down in Danny’s “office” - more like a sticker collection room than anything, honestly - and opened his laptop. “This is too nice of a computer for you to use for nothing but Neopets, you know,” Jessica muttered.

“I needed to make sure my little dudes were still alive!” Danny protested. “I was away a long time.”

Jessica rolled her eyes and started searching. “Are you going on the dark web?” Danny asked, craning over her shoulder. She put a hand on his face and pushed him away.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Luke said, then glanced at Jessica. “Are you?”

“No,” she said. “There’s this forum, Strange Tales dot com. People talk about weird stuff they’ve seen and heard, try to get confirmation of it. These days it’s mostly people debating whether it’s Avengers shit or not, but sometimes there’s sightings of, oh, a man in black backflipping off a roof. A guy punching his way out of prison.” A flying, super-strong woman, too, but she’d done her best to discredit those sightings with the several identities she’d created on the forum until she hadn’t been able to hide any longer. “If anyone knows how to get rid of a dragon, these nutbars do.”

“But I don’t want to get rid of Shou Little!” Danny protested, hugging the baby dragon to him. It bit him. “Ow. I love her!”

“Shou Little?” Matt repeated.

“The dragon I got my powers form is named Shou Lao. She’s much smaller, so…” Danny shrugged like it was obvious. “I just shrugged, sorry, Matt.”

“I know,” Matt said.

“How do you know she’s a she?” Jessica asked. If mystical kung fu monk training involved studying dragon genitals, she officially quit.

“I don’t, not really, but she’s pretty tough, so I just assumed,” Danny explained. The dragon - Shou Little, apparently, bit him again. “Ow!”

Okay. Maybe Jessica wouldn’t quit just yet.

-

“If dragons are real, what else is real?” Matt asked.

“My disinterest in this conversation?” Jessica asked, glancing away from the computer for a minute. Matt and Colleen were stretching side by side in matching and frankly implausible looking poses, while Danny lay sprawled on the floor beside them. Luke at least knew what furniture was for, and had commandeered the office couch.

“I’m asking Danny, not you,” Matt said. “Okay, we have dragons. Does this mean…unicorns are real? Pixies? Demons?”

Luke raised his eyebrows and lifted his hand. Shou Little hung determinedly from his finger. She had been gnawing on him for ten minutes, ever since he’d offered himself as a more durable chew toy than Danny. “Worried you’re going to get in trouble for biting the underworld’s style?”

“Look, we’ve already dealt with resurrection and now dragons. I’m just wondering if mermaids are next down the pipeline,” Matt said.

Danny shrugged. “Unicorns and pixies are western mythology. Shou Little’s a Chinese dragon. I have no idea if that means the European ones are real, too.”

“Okay, so what else is in Chinese mythology?” Luke asked.

“K’un-Lun isn’t really part of China per se, but, uh…fenghuang,” Danny said, glancing at Colleen.

“Nian,” she added. “Fox spirits. Spirits in general.”

“And mermaids?” Matt asked.

Jessica turned all the way around. “What is it with you and mermaids? You really into clamshell bras or something?”

Matt gave her that annoying deadpan look that meant he could be joking or just that weirdly intense. It was harder to read when he was upside down. “We live on an island! It seems like pertinent information.”

“I’d worry less about mermaids and more about water dragons,” Danny said matter-of-factly.

“Water dragons?” Luke repeated.

“Grawr,” Shou Little added.

-

It took Jessica thirty-eight minutes to sort through all the tinfoil-hat selfies and conspiracy theories to find rumors of an honest-to-fuck dragon sanctuary in Ghuizhou Province, eleven minutes of Danny and Colleen having two separate phone conversations in Mandarin to confirm that this place was apparently somehow for real, forty-seven minutes for Matt and Luke to go to the nearest grocery store with Danny’s gold card and buy all the fish they could carry to feed the little monster…

(“She likes gummi worms too,” Danny had assured them. “I checked.”)

…and going on two and a half hours trying to convince Danny that no, he could not keep a dragon in a midtown Manhattan high rise.

“It’s a big apartment!” he insisted, clutching at her. “She’ll have plenty of room!”

“Didn’t you say Shou Lao filled an entire mountain?” Colleen asked.

“Maybe Shou Little won’t get so big! Her name’s only Shou Little, not Shou Big!”

“You named her that! Today!”

“You have neighbors,” Matt pointed out. “Neighbors who will notice weird noises and floors shaking and the fact that you’re covered in blood from dragon bites all the time.”

“Says the guy who crawls half-dead into his own apartment four nights a week,” Luke muttered. Matt frowned. “What? You think Claire doesn’t tell me all your business?”

“Matt’s still right, even if he is also stupid,” Jessica said. “Do you want to be stupid like Matt, Danny?”

“Hey,” Matt said.

“No,” Danny admitted.

“Hey!”

“She doesn’t belong here,” Colleen pressed. “She was stolen. She needs to go home.”

Danny was clearly weakening, but he still clung to Shou Little. “But she loves me!” Shou Little bit him. “Ow!”

“Look, man, we can just get you a puppy,” Luke said.

“I’m a millionaire. I can have both.”

“Dragon might eat the puppy,” Matt pointed out.

“Dragon might eat you,” Luke added.

“Come on, Jackie Paper, give it up,” Jessica said. “We’ve been here for hours and I have paying clients to meet with…” Malcolm had her schedule. “…eventually. Probably.”

Colleen sat down next to Danny and put a hand on his knee. “Hey. Danny, talk to me. What’s the actual issue here?”

Danny frowned at her, then dropped his gaze back to the dragon in his lap. His eyes softened. “Look, I know she doesn’t belong here,” he admitted. “I do. But…I get what that’s like. Not to belong. And I thought that maybe if the two of us didn’t belong with anyone else…”

Matt’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s what this is? You’re looking for another fish out of water?” Shou Little raised her head at the word “fish.” “No, you had your dinner. These are metaphorical fish.”

“Stop arguing with the lizard, Murdock,” Jessica muttered.

“There wasn’t anyone like me in K'un Lun,” Danny said. “And there’s not anyone like me here.”

“You think there’s a lot of bulletproof dudes walking around this city?” Luke asked.

“Or people who can hear heartbeats?” Matt added.

“I carry a sword around a crowded metropolitan area,” Colleen pointed out.

They all looked at Jessica - well, except Matt.

“What?” she asked. “I’m completely normal. You four are the weirdoes.”

“See? And then there’s Jessica,” Matt said. Jessica flipped him the bird. “I know you did that.”

“That’s why I did it.”

“You’re not the only freak around,” Colleen said. “So why don’t you let Shou Little go back to where she belongs, huh?”

Danny sighed. Then he looked up at them and grinned. “Only if Jessica says she loves me just the way I am.”

Jessica crossed her arms. “Looks like we’re keeping the dragon.”

“Jessica.”

“What?”

-

This whole dragon thing was unutterably stupid, but Jessica wasn’t going to pass up a free trip to China if Danny was willing to cart all of them there. She’d take a week’s vacation in China over snapping dirty photos of cheating spouses any day. Even Claire and Misty and Matt’s fluffy lawyer friend had managed to get themselves invited.

Of course, it was entirely possible that Danny had invited them all because the kid was terrified of flying. He’d been deathly pale the whole way to the airport, and clutching the armrests of his seat long before they even started taxiing. Jessica was no good at comforting, so while the others kept Danny distracted and soothed up at the front of the plane, she sprawled sideways across some seats in the back, staring out the window and working her way through a few of those tiny bottles of hooch.

A scratching noise made her look up just as Shou Little - who Danny had given free run of the plane because he had a brain like a Hostess snack - clambered up onto her seat. Jessica sat still and wary as the baby dragon picked her way up over Jessica’s legs, her tiny claws poking through the denim. Shou Little sniffed at the bottle in Jessica’s hand, sneezed, then sat down and looked up at Jessica with shiny black eyes.

“What,” Jessica said.

Shou Little stared at her.

“Go on, go cuddle up to Danny,” Jessica said. “Or Nelson, he lost his mind over you.”

Shou Little didn’t budge. Jessica thought about dumping the thing off her lap, but…oh, fuck it, she wasn’t a total monster. And when was she going to get to chill with a dragon again?

“Fine, stay there if you want,” she said. “We’re landing in less than an hour anyway.”

She turned her head to gaze out the window again at the unfamiliar landscape far below. Shou Little inched closer, up over Jessica’s thighs and belly until she could peek out the window herself.

“What?” Jessica followed the dragon’s gaze to the ground. “That’s where you’re from. Whadya think?”

Shou Little stared blankly at Jessica, and Jessica realized belatedly she was talking to an animal like it could understand her. On the other hand, it was a magic animal. Who knew what the rules were?

Still, she dropped her voice so that the others couldn’t hear her. Well, Matt could still hear her, but if he tried to make fun of her for it later she had a list of burns as long as her arm that would probably make Lawyer Boy cry.

“Come on,” she said to Shou Little. “You didn’t want to stay in New York. It’s basically a pit. Way too many people and way overpriced. Plus you’d have to live with Danny and he’d probably make you do Mommy and Me yoga or something. You don’t want to sink to that level.”

Shou Little sank down against her and rested her head against Jessica’s stomach.

“Oh no,” Jessica said. “Don’t try to get around me. Better babies than you have tried. Malcolm…” Who she had eventually befriended and hired. Bad example. “Okay, Danny…” Who had convinced her to fly around the world on the silliest escapade she’d ever been a part of. “Whatever. Bambi eyes don’t work on me. And neither does cuddling."

Shou Little let out a tiny squeak of a yawn.

“…Ah, fuck it,” Jessica said, and gave in to the urge to pet the little monster, right behind her frilled crest. Shou Little closed her eyes and rested her head on her front claws.

“You’ll be okay,” Jessica told her. “Apparently there’s other dragons at this place. I guess even freaks of nature can manage to find each other.”

Something made her look up. Back up at the front of the plane, Danny was facing her, looking less pale than he had before, and Claire was leaning in saying something low and probably extremely sensible to him.

His gaze flickered to the dragon in her lap and then back up. Jessica scowled at him.

He grinned and gave her a thumbs up.

Jessica rolled her eyes and looked back down at the sleeping Shou Little. “See?” she whispered. “Even that dope. Even me.”

She looked out at the green, terraced landscape beneath them, growing closer every minute. “Yeah,” she said, running a finger down Shou Little’s spiny back. “You’ll be just fine.”

[stretchemersonarchive]

A House By The Sea

By Ceilidh Welsh

1. The House

The soft sound of waves drifts gently on the salty breeze behind my great grandmother’s house. Barnacled rocks and a driftwood-littered beach are just out of sight, there is just the sun singed grass and an expanse of sea that stretches to the horizon. There is a small koi pond in the backyard that has been long dry, just like the colorful buoys hanging on the cracking white fence. The house itself is light blue, two stories, plain. It is the last one on the street. Everything inside is faded and soft, filled with a thousand memories. Seven children have grown and gone, leaving a shell of peeling paint by the sea.

2. The Ghost

My GG’s house had a ghost. The moment I crossed the threshold I could feel it there, something extra, hanging in the quiet corners that you couldn’t quite see. I never encountered it myself, but it put me on edge whenever we visited. I refused to sleep anywhere other than next to my parents, and going up the creaky stairs by myself required bravery beyond compare. I didn’t mention it to my family back then, for fear of being brushed off and looked down on for being afraid of the dark. It wasn’t until my GG had passed away and my grandma was deciding what to do with the house that I discovered I wasn’t the only one who had felt something.

“Oh he’s always been there,” my grandma told me, “He used to sit on the edge of our beds.” I leaned in, eyes wide.

“Did you ever see it?” I asked breathlessly, giddy with the knowledge that I’d been right, not crazy for believing there could be something there.

“Oh yes!” she told me, “one night Tom saw him in the hallway upstairs. He thought it was our dad, come home from work. The next morning he said ‘Dad, why were you wearing that funny hat last night?’ and it turns out Dad was never upstairs at all.” 

I couldn’t believe it- a real ghost. I was a little skeptical that my grandma had been leading me on to encourage my imagination, but when I talked to my mother, I got more confirmation.

“Did you ever see the ghost in GG’s house Mom?” I asked casually, expecting her to laugh or look at me funny.

“Oh yeah,” she replied, to my surprise, “Cousin Janie and I would sit in the attic and gossip while the family was downstairs. One night we were up there and I was leaning against the mirror, like this.” Here she paused to show me how she was leaning, with her hand out to prop her up.

“And then all of a sudden someone grabbed my hand, except there was no one there. I screamed so loudly and ran downstairs to my mom,” she finishes, laughing. 

My mom and grandma weren’t the only ones to have experiences with the supernatural visitor either. In fact, it seemed like everyone had some sort of encounter. Cousin Jean got shoved out of the way when standing under a falling chandelier. Someone else came home to all the music boxes playing. Bookshelves were unscrewed, furniture was moved, and pages turned, all by the spirit that lived in the house. Since then, I’ve been more perceptive, seeing forms in the shadows, wondering if there are other ghosts in my life that I simply never noticed. Now that the house has been sold, and fixed up, I wonder if the spirit is still there, or if it vanished with the last traces of our family.

 3. Beef and Broccoli

My sister and I were brought up very health-conscious. We weren’t allowed to drink soda, or even juice, and we learned to like vegetables early on, artfully prepared by my father. I could never understand the children who turn their nose up at anything green.

We were visiting GG’s house along with some of the cousins, probably for Fourth of July. There were so many of us that we barely fit in the cozy dining room, and we had ordered Chinese food to avoid cooking for the masses. I, being a hungry child, was loading my plate with a mountain of beef and broccoli. 

 “Wow, broccoli?” a big voice sounded above me. I turned to see my uncle Ben, a muscular man with tattoos and prematurely grey hair from his time in the Air force. His piercing blue eyes were crinkled around the corners as he grinned down at me.

“I don’t think I ate vegetables until I was 20! You’re pretty special aren’t you?” I smiled back. It was the beginning of my friendship with and admiration for my cool, rebellious uncle. 

 He drove a motorcycle, which I was not allowed to ride on, and watched superhero movies with me, even though my parents found the violence questionable for a young girl to be ingesting. I lived for it. I was in awe of the crazy things that he did, and totally taken by his charm. 

 One year, when he and his wife were renovating their house, my family went to visit them in the hotel they were staying at. My cousins and I ran rampant in the halls, riding around on a stolen bellhop’s cart. Under my uncle’s supervision, we were allowed to do whatever we wanted. One night he took all of us girls out to the pool for a night swim– a very exciting idea when your bedtime is usually before the sun sets. I was in the water splashing around in a blink of an eye, but cousin Emma was afraid to get in because it was dark. Ben picked her up and mock threw her in, and she screamed in terror and clung to him. He laughed, and threw her in, piercing shrieks cut off by the water. I thought it was hilarious at the time.

4. The Lighthouse

The lighthouse was not so special. It was small, a one and a half story dwelling with a light tower poking out the top, just off the beach at the end of GG’s street. The inside was a museum, preserved for the sake of tourism, although I don’t think there was much. No, the only appeal of the lighthouse was its location. During low tide, a path stretched from the beach up to the rock upon which the structure sat, but at low tide, that path was swallowed by the waves. Though it would only take a small boat to get to the island, it greatly increased its mystique. There was something about its inaccessibility, the possibility of being trapped there, that was so fascinating. My mom and I would go to the beach to search for agates, sifting through the damp pebbles, listening to the water, and observing the lighthouse. My grandma grew up with that lighthouse, and has always wanted to live in one. It’s isolated, but peaceful. With six siblings, I can see why she wanted that.

 You could pay to spend a night in the lighthouse, to experience what life would have been like as a keeper. People did it for fun, though on stormy nights it must have been a bit frightening. This was a different kind of stormy night.

Uncle Ben’s mother, my Aunt Brenda, had taken my four cousins and their mother to stay at the lighthouse. It was meant to be a fun family trip, cozy and saturated with the quaint charm of the seaside city. Instead, the visit had been tense, and Brenda left halfway through the evening, leaving Tara and her daughters alone in the small building, wondering what there was to do in a tiny house surrounded by sea. The girls were just getting ready for bed when Brenda came home drunk from gambling, and broke her arm slipping on the rocks on the way up to the lighthouse. Her abrasiveness and disregard for them drove Tara to grab her kids and drive 6 hours down the California coast to my house, where I awoke to find them the next morning, much to my surprise. I like to joke that the lighthouse sent them to me.

 5. The Ghost Returns

Later on in my life, as my great grandmother got older and passed away, things began to go missing from her house. Small things at first, like antique trinkets and silverware, but before long people began to realize they were gone. I, of course, immediately thought of the ghost. 

It turns out Brenda’s gambling habit had run her dry, and she had begun to steal to pick up the slack. When confronted about it, she insisted that the items were owed to her, and anyway, they were already gone, family heirlooms traded for a few hours of fun at the casino.I wish it had been the ghost.

6. Raking Leaves 

It wasn’t until Ben and Tara and their four girls moved to Berkeley to live next door to us that I found out that my uncle wasn’t the fun, relatable guy I had always thought him to be. First, it was his depressive episodes, driving him to take too much or not enough medication, eventually landing him in the hospital. Then it was the drinking. Then we found out that he was abusive. Now, when I’m raking leaves in the front yard and his car appears, the twinge in my gut tells me to go inside, for fear of what he might do. I don’t know him anymore. Perhaps I never did.

Acknowledgments

This essay would not have been possible without the help of my mother and grandmother, who were gracious enough to provide me with details that I had forgotten. Many thanks to them for sharing difficult information freely with me, despite my being young.

*Names have been changed for privacy.

Works Cited

“Battery Point (Crescent City) Lighthouse.” LighthouseFriends, lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?id=58

Klotz, Juelann. Personal Interview. 2 February 2018

Welsh, Dana. Personal Interview. 2 February 2018