#but also like its so funny to me to put a decency leaf on the guy who is leaves

[theonewhowails]

silly thought that came to me while crafting outfits

[reallylonglies]

Taylor Swift - Demon Hunter: Part Two

The mirror bent and wavered before her. This one was different. She felt his body squirming away from her. 

“Don’t you want me to help you?” she shouted, the demon was screaming even though it hadn’t yet shown itself. 

Screaming so loud she couldn’t hear herself think.

Screaming so loud she couldn’t hear anything. 

Even when they’d met in a crowded room, lights flashing, music pounding, she’d been able to hear the notes. This one was different. Looking into the mirror she caught her breath.

“What are you?” she asked, her voice cracked. 

The demon carried on screaming, gnashing its teeth. Her teeth, her cherry lips, her blue eyes. It stared at her as it screamed. It lashed out a foot and the mirror shattered into a thousand sharp stars. 

In the morning, he told her he’d had the wildest dream. 

*****************************

“Sure I told you about them. I would not skip part of the syllabus, that would be irresponsible and foolish,” I lied.

“You’re lying,” she said, between effortless chin-ups. 

“Yes, but I have the common decency to be a terrible liar,” I replied. I was levitating gently in front of her as she worked out in order to maintain eye contact. 

“What was it? I’ve tried to get that thing out and every time it just starts looking like me and wailing,” she persisted, dropping two feet to the ground and landing elegantly. 

“Ok, but if I tell you, I want you to promise you won’t behave rashly,” I answered as she moved to a table full of throwing stars and opened a big switch that turned on her rotating targets. 

“Sure,” she answered, unleashing two stars that punctured the cardboard eye holes of her first target. 

“So you know about the story of the angels that fell? Something something, and then paradise was lost…”

“Yes, Milton most famed for his “something something” line.” 

“Look, I train demon hunters. I haven’t had a lot of time for literature over the last few thousand years,” I flinched as she decapitated a target, “Anywho, there are a few fallen angels around and they have some more tricks up their sleeves than your standard demon. You’ll have to spend a little more time with this one.” 

“How do you take out a fallen angel?” she released her last throwing star with her eyes closed and murdered another helpless cardboard cut-out. 

“Actually, it’s kind of fun if you squint a little…” 

*****************

She walked through the door with him. The air was cold. We’d lit a few scented candles to trick him into thinking he was somewhere safe and familiar. The trick with a fallen angel is to break the bond by dividing the emotions of the man as much as possible from those of the angel. Like freezing a verruca except nothing at all like that. Forget I mentioned verrucas.

Deliberately, and slowly, she removed her scarf. Scented with her perfume. To him, “yay, the scent of a sexy lady” to the fallen angel hanging out inside him, “that sure smells like someone who’s gonna drag me from my fleshy host in an unseemly manner.” 

We’d procured by nefarious means (if you call me manifesting into his mother’s kitchen in the middle of the night and stealing photo albums nefarious) some childhood photos. This confuses the angel because they don’t cope well with the idea of aging. They’re kind of timeless and the idea that you could be born anything other than fully cooked is deeply upsetting to them. 

She leafed through the album with him, sipping some disgusting autumnal hot drink that she told him would taste like “fall in a cup.” 

That was just a pun, she thought it’d be funny. It was pretty funny. I laughed. 

Because, you know, “Fall”… Like an angel… Falling out of heaven.

Shut up, you had to be there. 

Gently, she lulled him into a state of nostalgia and only mild hypnosis. Gently pressing her hand against his neck, her silver charm concealed in her palm I shot a glance at the mirror that hung over the dining room table. The angel hadn’t seen me, but it was clinging desperately onto its host, writhing and squealing like nobody’s business. 

This is my bit. I so rarely get to do a bit. The angel didn’t see me coming. 

See, one thing that holds Taylor back is that she can’t cross through to other dimensions. Her form is just a little too physical. It’s not her fault, and I’ve learned to love her in spite of that. 

So while it was busy squealing at her, I slipped through the mirror and pulled it like a calf from a pregnant cow. I wish this was like the verruca thing but honestly it’s a very accurate metaphor. 

The thing is, much like a calf fresh from a mother cow, fallen angels are also weirdly slippery. So once I’d dragged it out of the mirror it was pretty hard to hold on. Add to that the fact that  the host… Jim… Jack... Jerry… whatever, was now just a guy. Conscious. Watching a fallen angel that looked exactly like his girlfriend grappling with a sprite in the middle of his sister’s house. On top of that I knocked over his hot drink and now there was maple latte all over the carpet and the sofa. 

I don’t know if that upset him at all but I would have been peeved if that happened to my sister’s house on my watch. I don’t have any sisters because I was dug out of a cliff instead of born but I still feel like it would be an inconvenience. 

There is a demon in my office who was hewn from the same cliff face as me… But I don’t think she really counts as a sister.

Luckily, Taylor was quick to act. She caught the angel around the throat and then choke-slammed it into the pooling maple latte. 

“Hi,” she said, smiling down at  her doppleganger, “I’m going to trap you in this shard of mirror forever now.”

This is when it tried its last killer tactic. Honestly I have no idea why they think this will work but I’ve seen three of these assholes get sent back to the netherworld and every damn time they try it. 

Slowly, Taylor watched her own face start to age. Not in a graceful way. My theory is that they find aging so incomprehensible that they think it scares the shit out of everyone else. In reality it just grosses us out. 

Just as it hit the point when she was edging towards unfeasibly old, like beyond a hundred and fifty, the real Taylor rolled her eyes. 

“Yeah, you can just die now,” she slammed the shard of mirror down and pushed the fallen angel out of this dimension and into an uncomfortably small piece of glass and sand. 

The host stared. 

“Oh what like you’ve never seen someone trap a demon before,” she said, slipping the mirror into her pocket. 

“But, she was you… and she was all old.” he gawped. Is it bad that I personally preferred him when he was possessed by a millennia-old cursed deity?

“Don’t worry,” I said, on my way out, “The old Taylor is dead.” 

I picked up her scarf on the way out. 

“No, leave it, the scent from that and the stuff I put in the lattes will knock him out so badly he’ll assume this was all a weird dream,” she said, casually propping the photo albums and a few salvaged scented candles under her arm. 

“I am so proud of you,” I whispered. If I had tear ducts and didn’t dissolve if salt touched my skin I would have shed a single tear. 

I trotted gaily back to the host and draped the scarf around his neck. 

“Gotta wrap up warm,” I said, “It’s awfully nippy out.”

[khaelisfics]

Classroom War - Chapter 6

Paring: John Smith x Rose Tyler Chapter: 6/? Rating: T Word count: 2100 Tags: Enemies to Lovers, Slow Burn, University AU

Read on AO3

Tagging @doctorroseprompts for the sixth chapter of this University AU! :)

He stared at the small vial sitting on his desk and he let his hands hover over his keyboard. All it would take was one finger pressing down on one key. Maybe it was too soon. It had just been a week since they’d made peace. Well, peace. She had threatened to kill him only once in seven days, so that was an improvement. A formidable improvement, even. Improvement enough to call their current relationship peaceful. To be fair, it wasn’t his fault chemicals had exploded in the room in which he was supposed to give a class. Not anymore than being delocalized to one of her rooms was.

Of course, there had been a mix-up and she had been furious to find her room occupied, with nowhere else to go to talk about her rubbish Latin - or whatever her lesson was about. Not his fault. But she still had thrown a tantrum - he loved her tantrums - and sworn she would get his head. Maybe she wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t thrown a board pen at her face and told her to sod off. Still, not his fault. Not really.

He read the email he had written again, looked at the vial again. Maybe she had already forgotten about the incident. And if she hadn’t, well, that could be a good apology gift. He had planned for this vial to mean something else, but desperate times call for desperate measures, he supposed. He wasn’t desperate, per se, but but he couldn’t deny he would love to spend more quality time with her, no board pens and death threats involved.

He looked at his vial one last time and hit the key. Come what may.

Would you like to eat me at the canteen in half an hour? I have something nice to give you and I’m quite sure you’ll like it. Dr Smith

She grinned at the message that popped open on her screen and stifled a snort.  After what had happened two days before, she was sure he must have spent at least an hour writing this and an hour more pondering whether he should send it at all. She knew him so well, it almost scared her. But she also knew herself, and she knew there was no way she could let that opportunity to tease him fly by. How he had missed the mistake after reading the sentence a hundred times, she didn’t know. But he had missed it.

That’s a bold offer from someone who owes me an apology. But okay, we can try to hide behind your plant, second row on the left. Hope you won’t be as loud as you were on Wednesday, though. See you there. Dr Tyler

He blinked as he read her answer. Definitely not what he had expected. He had ranked no answer in his list of possibilities first. Sod off, second. No, third. A sexually connoted joke about a single missing word, now, that had come last. Hadn’t come at all, if he was honest with himself.

He tried to rub his blush from his cheeks and tried to think of an answer. He could shrug it off as a ridiculous mistake, or he could taunt her about her lack of inventiveness. Or he could keep the joke going - give her something she wouldn’t expect either. He knew it wasn’t a good idea, because he was enjoying it too much, and not in the proper way. He had this image of Doctor Tyler floating around his thoughts, and he knew indulging in dirty jokes of the kind wouldn’t do wonders to his infatuation. Still, maybe that was an open door he could walk through.

Maybe she was trying to seduce him. After all, she did seem to fixate a lot on his attributes. He could only hope she wasn’t interested in said attributes alone and that he had something to do with it - if she was interested at all, that might just have been hazardous interpretation on his side.

He grinned at his screen and typed an answer. If she was trying to seduce him with her jokes, no reason why he couldn’t do the same. If it was just a silly game she liked, it could not hurt much more than feelings he wasn’t sure he even felt. If it meant more to her, well, playing along could make her understand he was interested, too.

If I get too loud, science room B47 is soundproof. And I’m the only one to have the keys. Dr Smith

This time, she couldn’t help the laugh that rose in her throat. She couldn’t help the blush that rose on her cheeks either. She realized she didn’t know him as well as she had first believed. He could be bold. Bold and funny. She knew she liked him - when he wasn’t making her life a living Hell - but this… This was a side of him she had never really seen before. She liked it. Really liked it. She wondered if he had meant something more than a simple taunt, sending this message. It was unusual, coming from him. The ever serious Doctor she had rarely seen laugh or smile - probably because when they met it was to jump at each other’s throats and scream, most of the times. She had always thought he was much too different from her to consider hanging out with him, but maybe she had been wrong. Maybe she could actually enjoy his company.

She typed her answer, sent it, and turned off her computer.

Good to know. Maybe the science department does have a few perks. See you. Dr Tyler

He smirked at the message, turned off his computer and snatched his lunch box in his bag before he hurried to the canteen. He didn’t know if he could consider this impromptu meeting a date, but it sure felt like it to him. Share a lunch with his favorite Doctor. He even had a gift. Oh, he couldn’t wait to see her face when he’d tell her what is was. The face she’d make would be his answer. He hoped. Hoped she would smile and thank him and maybe take his hand and kiss his cheek. He could only hope.

He spotted her immediately behind the large plant, on the small table meant for two, and he realized she had really known about this table all along. He was horrified that she had probably seen him spy on her on several occasions, but he simply couldn’t point it out, lest he’d spontaneously combust. Better to play it casual. Casual was good.

“Nice spot, isn’t it?” he beamed at her as he dropped his lunch box on the table and plopped down on the plastic chair.

“Doctor Smith,” she greeted around a chip she was nibbling. “Nice spot indeed, I wondered what was so good about it you spent half a lifetime behind that plant. D’you mind if I finish my chicken before I eat you?”

His fork bounced on the tiled floor, and he was quite sure his face reappeared from under the table redder than it had ever been. If she dared make such comments face to face, not hidden behind a computer screen, he doubted his composure would survive. He doubted he would survive.

“I, huh, I mean, please, do,” he stuttered, flipping the lead of his box open with shaky hands. “That’s not the reason why I asked you…”

“Out?” she grinned at his blush and the way he stabbed a tomato. “Well, I say out… I just had to cross two corridors. Inside.”

“I asked you for lunch,” he hurried to correct, stuffing a salad leaf into his mouth. “That’s not the kind of place I would take a woman on a date, Doctor Tyler.”

“Oh, and where would you take her, then?”

“Dunno. B47?”

He instantly regretted the squeak - because it most definitely didn’t sound like a letter and two numbers - that fell from his lips and looked down at the content of his box, suddenly fascinated by the shape of a piece of cheese.

“Of course, where was my head,” she laughed, gently kicking his shin under the table. “So, you mentioned a gift?”

“Hm, quite right.” he nodded, glad she was the one to take the conversation to safer territories - if there ever was a safe territory with that woman at all.

He reached into his pocket and took out his precious vial, carefully putting it down next to her plate. She picked it up, examined the brownish liquid with a suspicious eye.

“Go on, open it,” he urged between bites.

“Is that another one of your horrible jokes?” she couldn’t help asking, not really reassured by its colour. “It’s not diluted mice crap or fermented piss?”

“You have an awfully vulgar vocab for someone of your stature, Doctor Tyler,” he grinned, wiping the corners of his mouth with his napkin - if she did want to kiss him on the cheek, he wanted to be sure she wouldn’t hesitate because of a bit of salad or a drip of vinegar. “But no, I promise it isn’t. Just smell it, will you?”

“If I puke, I swear I’m doing it in your lunchbox,” she warned, flicking the lid open with her thumb.

She brought the vial to her nose, not really knowing what to do with the grin plastered all  over his daft face, and she took a sniff. Her eyes widened at the smell of it, and his grin bloomed into a full-blown beam.

“Damn, that smells nice,” she acknowledged, running a finger on the opening to gather the fragrance on her fingertip. “Where did you get that?”

“Homemade perfume,” he announced proudly - though she would have expected a smugness way beyond the limits of common decency, he looked merely pleased, which she found rather impressive and maybe just a bit charming. “I noticed how you liked yours, so I made some research and… Tada!”

“What’s in this?” she asked, taking another long inhale of the sweet smell.

“Lilac, blueberries and, sorry to say, roses. Took me over two months to find the perfect balance between the three and find out how long I needed to centrifuge the ingredients to get the adequate fragrance potency. Do you like it, then?”

“I do, I really do, this is amazing, John. But why? I mean, I really appreciate the gesture, I’m just wondering why you’d go the trouble at all.”

“I’m… Good with dates?”

“Dates, as in…?”

“As in today is the twenty-third of March, and it’s been precisely five years since we started working together. That was my first day in this university, and you were the only one who bothered to show me around. You helped me settle in, you answered all my questions, and you even said…”

“Better to have a hot science geek as a neighbour than a decaying bald dinosaur,” she finished for him with a smile. “Yeah, I remember that.”

“And I never really thanked you for your help, so I thought… You know, small gift. It’s not much, and I think I’ll need a thousand bottles more of this to properly make up for everything I put you through, but it’s a start isn’t it?”

She chuckled at his embarrassed shrug, rose from her chair and her hand landed in a friendly hold on the side of his neck.

“Thank you”, she said softly after she pressed a quick kiss much too close to his mouth.

“Well, thank you.”

How his you’re welcome had turned into a thank you and made him feel like a proper arse, he didn’t know. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to let Doctor Tyler’s lips anywhere near him, in the end.