#danny who is about to start bawling his eyes out:

[greenglowinspooks]

(DCxDP) The obligations of a rogue versus those of a parent (pt. 2)

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Tw: N/A

Will be crossposted to AO3 eventually

(Pt. 1 here) - (Pt. 3 here)

(Masterlist/subscription post)

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It was a beautiful morning. Somehow, against all odds, the sun was shining through the thick smog perpetually covering Gotham.

And Danny hated it.

He was in pain, he was exhausted, he was grieving, and all he wanted to do was sleep for at least a week.

In an act of celestial mockery, the sun shone regardless.

After around twenty minutes of tossing and turning in bed, trying to get back to sleep, Danny gave up and pried himself out of bed.

He stumbled through the hallway and into the living room, staring openly at every splash of color he saw in the small apartment. He hadn’t forgotten what color looked like in the time he was in the lab, but it was comforting to see.

Someone cleared their throat. Danny whipped his head around, eyes falling on a scrawny, gangly man sitting down in a worn armchair, hunched over a laptop. He was looking at him with a dull, bored expression.

Right. Scarecrow.

His escape.

The chase.

His mom.

“You look a lot less terrifying without the mask,” Danny blurted out, slapping his hand over his mouth. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t call my normal appearance frightening,” Scarecrow hummed, focusing his attention back onto the laptop, “that’s what the costume is for, after all.”

“Oh.”

After a brief moment of excruciating silence, Scarecrow spoke.

“You any good with computers, Danny? Hacking, and all that?”

Danny jolted. Scarecrow needed his help with something! This was great! Now, he’d have more of a reason not to get rid of him!

“Oh, uh, yeah! Not as good as my friend Tucker, but I think I’m pretty good.”

“And you’re familiar with the GiW’s systems specifically,” Scarecrow continued, beckoning him over. Danny complied, shuffling over awkwardly. “Right?”

“Well, I guess? My friends and I got into their stuff a couple of times before they…”

“Wonderful,” Scarecrow said, standing up with a stretch. He shoved the laptop into Danny’s hands and gestured for him to sit down on the couch. “Then you can hack into their system and extract whatever files you can find.”

Danny stared at the man like he’d lost his mind. He looked back at him expectantly.

Danny sat down.

“Yeah, I-I can do that. Tuck and I built a back door into their system ages ago,” he said, checking the screen. It was clear that for all the skills that Scarecrow had, hacking was definitely not one of them. “But, uh, don’t you have someone else that usually does this sort of thing for you? Not that I’m complaining!”

Scarecrow scowled, and Danny felt his heart fall into his ass.

“Usually, I do,” Scarecrow huffed, “but I chose to leave my most recent job with the Penguin early, so now there’s no way that he or Eddie will help me with anything until I make it up to them somehow.”

“Oh,” Danny said.

He had no clue whatsoever who Eddie was.

Danny got to work quickly, hoping that if he ignored the gangly man, he would leave him be. Luckily, he did just that, leaving to go work on something in another room.

Danny checked the laptop’s security before continuing Scarecrow’s progress, making sure that the GiW wouldn’t be able to grab their location.

It was…threateningly good. Whoever Eddie was, he had somehow crammed the functionality of a top-of-the-line PC into a tiny, beat-up old laptop. It almost reminded Danny of Tucker and his terrifying competence with his PDA.

Tucker.

Amity park.

Home.

Danny snapped himself out of his thoughts, tabbing back into the application Scarecrow had up and began to work his magic.

He had near full access to the entire GiW database within half an hour.

Mumbling out a quick thank-you to Tucker, he called Scarecrow over to appraise his work.

“Fixed up some food for you while you worked,” the rogue said, handing him a bowl of oatmeal, taking the laptop into his lap as he did so, “didn’t know how well you could eat, considering you’re recovering from… surgery, so I decided to stay on the safe side.”

Danny had no clue what this guy’s deal was.

He definitely did not tear up at the first genuine thoughtfulness he encountered in weeks, and he did not look away as he ate so that Scarecrow couldn’t see his face.

At least Scarecrow was too focused on the laptop to notice or care.

Or, maybe, he was just mercifully ignoring him.

Either way, Danny ate slowly, not wanting to make himself sick. He allowed himself to absentmindedly look around the room for the first time, taking everything in.

It was strangely homey. The space was filled with warm browns and yellows, a few splashes of color on the wall in the form of (obviously gifted) paintings. There was a beat-up bookshelf against the wall, clearly second-hand, filled to the brim with psychology books. On every available surface there was a different colored candle, all at different stages of use, clearly collected over the course of years.

Danny knew that the man next to him was a crazed, murderous criminal, but his home was oddly reminiscent of Jazz.

He was not about to cry.

“Danny,” Scarecrow hummed, snapping him out of his spiraling, “can you explain this to me?”

He looked over. The rogue was pointing to a new report, seemingly posted only a few hours ago.

Nodding, he took the computer into his lap, pouring over the contents.

He read the report again.

And again.

And again.

Danny swore loudly, crumpling like a wet paper bag, head in his hands.

“What?”

“It’s…” he swore again, glancing back at the laptop, “they…since you became liminal from synthetic ectoplasm, when we’re within about 500 meters of one another, our ectoplasm signatures resonate, and they can’t track us with any of their technology.”

“How is that a bad thing?”

“If we’re not that close to each other, they can track us down from anywhere in the world.”

Scarecrow went dead quiet. After what felt like the single longest minute of Danny’s life, he let out a truly exasperated sigh, slumping over in his seat.

“Yeah, me too,” Danny mumbled, utterly miserable.

“…I’ll have to move my plans back a little,” Scarecrow sighed, “I can’t drag an injured child with me when I attack the Gotham GiW base, you’ll just get in the way.”

“Oh come on,” Danny whined, “I can take care of myself just fine. Besides, Batman brings kids with him to do dangerous stuff all the time, and he’s fine!”

“Might I remind you that the second Robin died violently,” Scarecrow snapped, “and that Batman most likely has more traumatic brain injuries than all of the Gotham rogues combined. That really isn’t the winning argument you think it is.”

Danny paused, trying to think up some way to win the argument. Then, he realized what he had ignored before.

“Wait, Scarecrow, you’re gonna attack the GiW?”

“That’s the plan,” he nodded, “and call me Dr. Crane. I’m only Scarecrow when I’m in the mask.”

But,” Danny sputtered, “Sca—uh, Dr. Crane—that’s insane! The weapons they’ve got- they’ll rip you apart!”

“Not my first time,” Crane said, making Danny wince. “Besides, I have plenty of experience avoiding gunfire. I’ll live.”

“You…” Danny was silent for a while, trying to think of something to say, “fine, but you have to take me with you wherever you go. As soon as they see either of us on their radars, they’ll hunt us down.”

Dr. Crane sighed.

“…Fine. I need some time to plan anyways. Now, you’re going to help me download these files, properly format them, and send them out.”

“…Why?”

“Well, some of the other rogues might appreciate the heads up, and I’d quite like them to be indebted to me. Besides, I still need to pay back the Penguin for ditching him, and he loves knowing things that other people don’t.”

Danny paused.

“That’s an awful idea, no offense. If any of the rogues know our weaknesses, they—”

“Danny, we’re censoring everything. The only things they need to know about are the GiW specifically, and any sort of laws surrounding them.”

Danny snorted.

“You care about laws now?”

“Yes, because if we get taken to Arkham, they’ll hand us off to the GiW the moment they ask, and it’ll be completely legal.”

Oh. Danny had honestly forgotten that Arkham was an option.

“…Ok. I’ll help you. Who are we telling?”

“I don’t think you really need to know,” Dr. Crane said, the faintest shadow of an amused look on his face, “but I’ll humor you for now. We’re sending the files out to the Penguin, Riddler, Poison Ivy via Harley Quinn, Two-Face, and Red Hood.”

Danny nodded. He could live with that.

“Alright, then let’s get to work.”

—

[gerrydelano]

SKINDEEP

Rating: M Words: 13.3k Characters: Jon Sims, Tim Stoker, Martin Blackwood, Danny Stoker, Sasha James, Melanie King, Caroline Brodie, Callum Brodie, Gerry Keay (in memorium)

Relationships: Gerry/Tim, Martin/Danny, Sasha & Tim, Melanie & Caroline Brodie, Danny & Tim

Synopsis: Alternate ending for Pharos by Right (inspired by this anon) where Tim doesn't manage to stop Danny from swinging the hammer while Gerry read the incantation to start the Change — i.e., Gerry is killed to save the world, and then the world goes quiet.

(Actual ending of PBR will commence after posting this because I needed to get it out of my system. Got possessed.)

To those unfamiliar, PBR is my massive Archivist!Gerry series, and this requires the context of most of it, but especially my most recent chapter. If this intrigues you at all, there's 430k more words where this came from!

CWs: Character death; Head trauma; Severe injury; Grief; An intense breakdown ft. drowning imagery; Mention of drug use

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

Jon opens his eyes to the sound of screaming, burning, and a loud ringing in his ears. He coughs against the ash in his mouth, halting in his attempt to roll onto his side as his ribs clip a hard object underneath him. He must have been thrown backwards into something when the—

When the bombs went off. The bombs went off. It’s must be over.

But the screaming. Oh, the screaming, it’s louder than the ringing and the burning and the voice that he can almost hear saying shhh, it’s alright, I’m right here! Oh, G-d, somebody help! The voice calls his name. His name is Jon. His name is his name again.

Stiffly, he rises to his elbow and coughs again, his chest sore and his legs weak and oh, G-d, his leg— there’s a gash in his leg, a large one, and he can feel the blood running down into his sock.

His name is called again, and he’s almost afraid to rub soot into his remaining eye even on the off chance that he might clear it and find the source of the sounds, the screaming, the voice. Bleary, he stumbles forward onto his less-injured leg, peering around in the smoke for a shape he might recognize.

There is a shape, tall and upright, but it’s silent. A spire in the fog. Not the source of his name.

He keeps looking. He keeps listening. He crawls.

“Jon, where are you! Judith? Tim! I need help, somebody help me!”

Martin? That’s Martin’s voice, high and desperate and rough with smoke, too, there’s smoke everywhere, they need to get out of here. They need to leave, before the police arrive, before the structure collapses, before—

The screaming has transitioned into bawling, deeply pained cries for help, and only when he finally sees Martin’s shape hunkered over a spasmodic, outstretched body does it click. Danny is hurt. He was hurt in the explosion, and Martin needs help with him. Jon drags himself over to Danny’s other side and reaches out for his arm to find his sleeve wet with blood, but not torn. Danny screams again at the contact of his hand, startling Jon into letting go.

“How—” Jon coughs again. “Where is he hurt, what—”

“I-I don’t— Everywhere!” Martin panics, his hands on Danny’s chest like he’s about to start compressions. He doesn’t, of course, because Danny is horrifically alive, and there is blood seeping through his ringmaster’s jacket like the fabric has just been lain upon a dark puddle.

Jon reaches out for his hem to lift it, earning a smack from Danny’s frantic, bloody hand. He persists. He gasps.

The open wound is a perfect split down the middle of his stomach, disappearing at his groin, and most certainly extending up his chest into a V. He’d heard about the autopsy seams. He could never have imagined they would split open again.

Quickly, Jon lowers the shirt again and presses down on the wound, earning another guttural sound of agony. Martin is weeping but trying not to let it slow him down, trying to pin Danny’s arm to his side with his knees. Jon tries to do the same, but then who will get his legs? They surely go down his legs, too.

“Tim?” he hears himself croak out. “Tim, where are you?”

No answer. He could assume the worst, but he remembers that tall shape and turns around. It’s still there, standing a distance away in utter stillness, like another wax statue that hasn’t been taken down in the blast or a troupe member that refused to be exterminated, but Jon knows that sound. The sound of phantom water.

“Tim!” he shouts. “Tim, come over here and help your brother!”

No answer.

Jon turns around again and waves a hand through the smoke. There is daylight shining through a busted out window, casting beams onto the filthy, ruined floor. Tim is hovering a few yards away, staring down at the ground and soaked to the bone as water pours from the top of his head all the way down his body. He doesn’t look injured — why would he? He’s still clenching his fist around what Jon can only assume is the detonator.

“Tim!” he shouts again. “Tim, we need you to— oh.”

At Tim’s feet, there is a dark pool. It creeps slowly across the floor towards Jon’s own extended shoe, glinting red in the dusty daylight. Jon traces the seeping to its source, and meets Gerry’s open eyes.

“Oh, no… No, no, no.”

The blood is pouring fast from his head, spreading out from under the mess of his hair. His mouth is parted almost in surprise, frozen around an unspoken word, like he’s been interrupted from a dream.

This has to be a dream.

“Jon, could you please focus!”

Jon realizes he’s let go of Danny entirely. Jon stutters back around, stutters his next half-words. Nothing comes of his violent nausea. He almost wishes it would. Maybe it would wake him up.

“I— Martin, Gerry is—”

“I know!” Martin snipes, and then takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I know. I know, and I can’t think about that right now, not when— Danny is still alive, please, help me keep him that way!”

“We need… We need an ambulance, we need… Where’s my phone…?”

Jon pats at himself, feeling the tack of bloody handprints on his clothes as he goes. When he finds his phone, he finds the screen cracked, but it still works when he presses his sticky thumb to the sensor. His free hand moves back to Danny’s arm, squeezing his bicep hard.

“Y-Yes, hello? We’re at the House of Wax. Yes, that one, in— in Great Yarmouth. There’s been— There’s been an explosion, people are hurt, we need… please, send an ambulance. Send two. Send all of them! I don’t care, please, just— please, help.”

Jon doesn’t realize he’s started to cry until he’s bowed forward enough over Danny that the next time his arm flails, it clips him on the face. He recoils and nearly drops his phone, barely catching it to put it back into his pocket before he secures his hands around Danny’s arm again and holds tight. He dreads turning his head again, but he has to.

“Tim,” he says more carefully this time. “Tim, you need to move. You need to do something.”

No answer.

“Either help us, o-or go find Judith, or the Hunters, or see if any of the troupe are still alive.”

No answer.

“Anything, Tim! Can you hear me?”

No answer.

“He can’t hear you,” Martin sniffs. “I don’t— I don’t think he can hear anything.”

The water in his ears may be too much. He may be frozen in his avatar state, consumed by repulsive satiation. He may be lost, too.

When Danny’s screaming dies down into whimpers, his thrashing into mere twitches, Jon finds himself just as worried as Martin. He lets Martin take up the mantle of trying to keep his attention — Danny? Angel, can you hear me? Stay with me, stay awake! I can’t lose you here, not like this! — because what could Jon possibly say? What could he offer to either of the Stoker brothers now?

A clattering sounds from afar. Jon snaps his head up to look for the source of it, spying Judith stumbling over a pile of rubble to reach them. She’s covered in soot, clutching her arm and limping. When she reaches their pocket of the room, her eyes go to Gerry first.

“Oh, G-d.”

Jon swallows hard. “Where are the other Hunters?”

“Dead. Think they fragged each other.”

Her voice is dreamy and distant. She crosses over to Tim, and bends down to pick something up off the floor. Gerry’s walking stick, forgotten in between the two scenes. She doesn’t wipe the blood off of the handle, inspecting the head of the hammer in the light for something Jon can’t see. He watches her study Tim like a marble statue in a museum, until his eyes drop once again to meet Gerry’s.

This has got to be a dream.

“What happened to him?” Judith asks of Danny.

“I— I don’t know,” Martin struggles. “I think a lot of his old wounds opened up, but I don’t know how, I don’t see why they— Jon, how long until the ambulance gets here?”

Jon blinks. “I didn’t ask.”

Martin doesn’t chastise him, instead nodding with a tearful sound. He’s come to lean his forearm across Danny’s collarbones, his other bent to cover as much of the vertical line down his chest as he can. Like he’s holding together some little paper art project, waiting for the glue to dry. His wrist is angled strangely, and for the first time, Jon notices his gritting teeth. He’s hurt, too, and he’s fighting through it.

“I’ll go wave them down,” Judith says, starting to step over the growing lake of Gerry’s blood. A thin branch of it is close to touching the edge of Danny’s.

“What’s our plan?”

“Plan?” Jon almost mocks. “What can— What can we even do now?”

“You were all about contingency plans before,” she says dryly. “You didn’t plan for something like this?”

“Well, obviously not, Judith! Of course I didn’t think—”

Didn’t think… what? That only some of them might die? That the rest of them would have to live with it? Of course he didn’t plan for that.

“I say… let it get sectioned.” She shakes her head at the scene. “Let it all get put away.”

“How do we do that?”

“Tell them that something unbelievable happened, that they got caught in the crossfire, that you don’t know what happened to them because something was happening to you, too. Isn’t that the truth?”

It sounds too easy. “Won’t we be detained anyway until they decide we’re not lying?”

“We all need a hospital. I have a feeling we’ll be fine, when they see the rest of the scene. The choir’s dead, too.” Judith turns to Tim once more. “…I’ll put this in my car before they get here.”

She leaves with the help of the walking staff, calm and direct, and Jon doesn’t think he has it in him to be a Hunter, after all.

Tim pays her no mind, still staring stone still at Gerry’s body. He’d landed on his back, mostly, one leg tipped to the side and his hand delicately curled in the puddle. The other is resting serenely on his hip, almost like he’d been posed that way. One of his eyes is severely bloodshot, grey shining up through the darkness of it like a coin. The longer Jon looks at him, the clearer the sunlight is through the window. It’s a beautiful day outside. It’s the middle of summer. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

“How did— How did this happen?”

“There was an explosion, Jon,” Martin mutters.

“No, I know, but— but the rest of us… We’re fine, we’re… Why him?”

“I don’t have an answer for you. I didn’t see what happened.” Martin lifts an arm for a split second to wipe his nose, leaving a smudge of red on his face. He stares down at Danny’s face, paler than fear has ever left it, one-track minded as ever. It’s not as if Jon can blame him. What else in this room is worth worrying about now? It’s all over. They were just in time, and they were too late.

Jon forgets until the sound of sirens. He spins around to face Tim again, to tell him that he needs to control his leaking before someone sees, but the only evidence that Tim was ever standing there in the first place is a small disturbance in the blood where it has been thinned and expanded with water.

Firefighters first, police, and then the paramedics with their stretchers and their questions and their back away, let us take over. Martin tries his best to explain the extent of Danny’s wounds, launching into the true lie that Judith encouraged without rehearsal.

“We were just walking around, and something weird started happening, there— there was music, and dancing? But it was terrible dancing, not bad to look at but bad to be a part of, we couldn’t stop, there are— there are more people lost in here somewhere, I just know it, but I don’t know where they are. There was—” A sob. “There were people without skin.”

Danny can pass very well as a mere victim of whatever supernatural nonsense had taken place, certainly. His wounds are too severe and his clothes too close to pristine over them to make any sense to the ordinary eye.

Jon is asked about Gerry.

“I—” His throat stops up with a cry. “I didn’t see. I think… I think the blast must have… I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Should he mention the Magnus Institute? Will that hurry up the Section Eight process? He doesn’t know what to do. When a paramedic asks to see his leg, he’s powerless to do anything but obey, limping out of the building with the help of a firefighter.

Martin isn’t permitted into Danny’s ambulance, the paramedics too frantic to stabilize him. Jon catches one of them noting the texture and colour of his blood in confusion, in distress, and looks down at his hands to find them more maroon than crimson in the sunlight. He sways.

While he’s being bandaged on the back of an ambulance, a stretcher carrying a body bag is rolled by and loaded into another. He watches as a series of dark, wet spots form on the ground leading up to the step into the back before the doors close.

Good. Someone should stay with him until the end. Jon only knows Jewish funerals, the strict customs that being sectioned might not care to honour. Perhaps Gerry wouldn’t care one way or another if someone were to guard his body, but he still shouldn’t be alone.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

They bring him straight to the morgue.

Tim follows behind the man with the stretcher in silence, in absence, and cares nothing for the mess his footsteps leave behind. When the swinging door shuts in his face, he steps right through it. He watches the man handle his lover with ambivalence, with some anxiety, and waits as long as it takes for him to leave. He is going to be alone with Gerry if it kills someone else.

When there’s no one left in the room, he releases his grip on disappearance and watches the perfect stillness of the black bag. He doesn’t feel that old sense of being observed anymore. It’s his turn to stare.

He reaches for the zipper.

Pulling it down takes an eternity, his hands numb with hate. When he’s peeled back the sides to free Gerry’s face, to let his body breathe, he takes in the sight without so much as a shaken gasp. Gerry’s eyes are still open, the one damaged with the impact to his skull, the other clear as day, but catching no light. Not anymore.

Tim reaches out to shut them with his fingertips. To wipe a speck of blood from his forehead. To stroke dust from his cheek.

Gerry’s head lolls with the touch, no control left to be had. The fluorescent lights cast a shine on the blood-matted depression in his skull.

Tim’s eyes catch on the purple bruise on the side of her neck, nestled sweetly just above her collar. His fingertips drift down to touch it, to beg for a pulse. He remembers why he never bothered with prayer.

Gerry never bothered with it, either. What would he want to happen next? It’s up to Tim now. One decision he never wanted to make for her.

Tim remains by his side until the morgue doors open again, at which point he makes eye contact with a startled hospital employee. Water pours from his head and shoulders to spread across the tile floor at his feet, his hand still resting on Gerry’s lifeless breastbone. The worker doesn’t scream, staring back and breathing hard, until Tim forces two words past the outpouring of water from his mouth.

“Get— out.”

Now, they scramble to run, and he turns back to his love for one last, long glance. The next time someone interrupts him, he’ll have to leave. He can’t keep Gerry like this forever. It wouldn’t be fair.

He needs to be out in the waiting room as family when someone finally comes looking for some. He needs to be composed. He needs to be human. To handle this like a husband.

Tim reaches for Gerry’s chin to straighten his head again. Dignity.

Gently, he reaches his hands behind her neck to feel for the clasp of her collar first, and then the chain that holds her padlock. He can get the rest of his jewelry and his jacket back when they strip him for cremation. No one else should get to touch these. Not for anything.

Gerry would choose cremation. He wouldn’t want to be locked in a pine box, slow to decompose. He wouldn’t choose to leave remnants for desecration should someone feel like fucking with the Archivist just a little more. He feared the sink even more than he feared burning. He wouldn’t choose to be Buried.

That doesn’t mean it sits right with Tim. For there to be nothing left of her, just like that. Like she was never here.

He knows what Gerry wanted. He knows exactly what happened.

Tim tucks the collar and padlock into his pocket, no regard for the blood on them, and looks down at Gerry’s bloodless, peaceful face. Carefully, he bends down to place his lips over hers one last time, as if he had a final breath to give her. All he’s ever had was a kiss. He’s still colder than she is.

He zips the bag shut, but lingers just that moment longer.

When the doors open again — the same worker, this time with reinforcements and a right there, see! — Tim lets himself be seen before he revokes the privilege, disappearing with all that he can take with him. He walks past them as any live man ordinarily would, sure to brush shoulders with the one that he knows now will never forget his face. The shudder makes him stronger, and he needs it. There is nothing else left in him.

He walks back into the world in an empty hallway, and keeps going until he finds Jon and Martin in the waiting room. Jon shoots upright when he sees him, stumbling on his new injury. Tim takes a seat beside him. Jon’s questions are a blur of sound and disinterest, until a long silence passes and Tim hears him say:

“I don’t understand.”

“It was the bomb, Jon,” Martin tries. “Something must have hit him when it went off.”

“No,” Tim says, his voice foreign in his throat and his own ears. They need the truth. “It was Danny.”

Martin recoils with a curled lip, disgusted by the notion. “No, that’s not true. You don’t know that.”

“I do know,” Tim refutes. “They had an arrangement.”

“An arrange— what?” Jon shakes his head. “You can’t be serious.”

“You knew about this?” Martin demands. “You knew and you just—?”

“Choose your next words very carefully, Martin.”

Martin shuts his mouth. Jon’s better leg bounces with tension. He breaks the next silence with a question that Tim wishes he couldn’t hear.

“What do we tell the others? When, h-how?”

Tim stares at the floor. “In person, when we get back. I’ll do it.”

“We have no idea how long we’re going to be here,” Martin tells him. “Danny’s in bad shape. He might be stuck here for a long time.”

“If you want to stay with him, you should. I won’t.”

Martin almost looks offended, hurt, before he reins himself back in with a cleared throat. “They won’t let me see him yet.”

“It takes a long time to suture the entire body,” Jon contributes. “Those wounds went down to the muscle.”

Tim would wince if he could. Martin does, leaning forward to scrub at his face with the one hand not in a sling. He’s washed the blood off of his hands, but his clothes are still soaked in it. Jon’s are, too. Tim doesn’t feel the need to tell them that their bags are in the trunk of the car they drove here. They’ll change when they remember.

“It feels wrong to be so calm,” Jon says suddenly. “I feel like I should be throwing the biggest conniption of my life.”

“That’d be a pretty big conniption,” Martin mutters.

“It would be, yes. But I can’t seem to… access it.” His brow creases, as if in confusion. “This still doesn’t feel real.”

“It’s real,” Tim says simply. “Gerry’s dead.”

Jon’s face scrunches up in refusal as he turns away to lean into his hand. Martin stares at the floor at Tim’s feet for a while before he speaks up.

“I’m sorry, Tim.”

Tim has nothing else to say.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

Martin bolts out of his chair when Danny stirs, fingertips to the edge of his bed.

“Danny?” he asks, tentative. “Danny, can you hear me? It’s Martin, I’m right here.”

Danny whines in protest. His arm shifts barely a centimeter before he seizes up with pain again, eyes flying open as he gasps. Martin freezes; he learned from the sore spot on his cheek. Don’t get too close.

“Look at me, over here. That’s right, right over here. See? It’s only me.”

At first, Danny says nothing. His eyes are bleary with the frankly lethal amount of sedatives they’d given him after the last time he’d lashed out at an orderly when she tried to change his bandages, his mouth slack and weak. His chest heaves with shallow breaths, but he looks at Martin and keeps his eyes locked on him. Martin will take that.

He sits back down in his chair, pulling out the magazine he’d gotten from the waiting room. It’s hard to turn the pages one-handed, his left arm still in the sling. “I was just reading this trashy thing here, but none of the gossip is all that good.”

Not that he expects a response or anything. He just wants Danny to get used to the sound of his voice again, to his presence in the room. Eventually, it feels stupid to make this kind of small talk, though. He tosses the magazine down at the very foot of the bed and leans forward on his knees.

“Can I… get you anything? Water?”

Danny licks his lips, but says nothing. Martin can hear his breath trembling.

“Okay… when you change your mind, you let me know. The doctor said we might try to sit you up a little bit today, if you’re up for it? Just a little bit, not too far. Only until you’ve had enough. I… I think it’s a good idea to try.”

It’s difficult to look Danny in the eye when he’s still so drugged out, so silent. Martin regrets looking away, though, because then all he can see are his heavily bandaged limbs. The padded cuffs around his wrists.

“I wish I could just take these off of you, but… but you hit an orderly, so—” Martin lets out a curt breath. “It’s for your own protection, too. So you don’t rip your stitches. It’s been a few days, though, and you’re doing a little better, so maybe they can start weaning you off the morphine, a-and if you’re more alert, you won’t get so scared anymore when somebody comes by to help.”

“Tim.”

Danny’s voice is wrecked from screaming, reduced to a small, thin whisper. Martin looks down at his laced hands. “Tim isn’t here.”

He takes a long moment to form a second word, licking his dry lips again. “Where?”

“He’s— Jon is… teaching him how to sit shiva.” If Martin could lower his head any more, he would. “They’re about halfway through.”

Danny’s eyes glaze over as they drift up to the ceiling. Martin gives him a moment; that might have been a confusing thing to say while he’s still only partially in his head. It was devoid of context, it was a stupid way to answer that question, dammit, he’s going to need to start over.

“What, um… What do you remember?”

There is another stretch of quiet while Danny seems to think. The sound of hospital machines chews on Martin’s bones. In the end, Danny only comes up with one murmured, deadened word.

“Crack.”

Martin’s stomach solidifies into a brick inside him. He fights the way his leg wants to shake, running his hands over his thighs and pressing down hard. “You remember that?”

Danny nods minutely. “The dancer… thanked me.”

“…But you didn’t do it for her,” Martin suggests. “You did it for Pharos. Right?”

“Right.”

An empty little echo, barely an exhale. Danny’s eyes slip shut, finally, and in the bright light from the window, Martin can see the faintest glint of a tear stuck in the corner of just one. It doesn’t dislodge to fall when he looks up again, clinging instead to his lashes. Martin aches for him in a way that perhaps no one else has it in them to ache.

“I won’t… claim to know what sort of ‘arrangement’ you and Pharos had, or why, but… I know you. I know you wouldn’t have done it without an honest reason.”

“Honest,” Danny huffs.

“I know you,” Martin says again. “I know you’d never—”

“Stop. Stop it.” Danny shifts and shock-stops again, a pained sound caught in his throat. He keeps his eyes screwed shut tight. “Please, don’t. Just stop. Stop.”

“Okay,” Martin murmurs. “Okay, I’m sorry.”

He sits in helplessness as Danny fights the pain of trying to turn away and hide, as he struggles against the wave of grief and regret that Martin can see written plain across his face. Tears build up in Martin’s throat, too; he’s only cried in private since that day, too set on being strong for Danny. No one else could stay in Great Yarmouth just to wait around for Danny to wake up or become a more cooperative patient or explain himself. Tim couldn’t stay in the city that rushed to burn Gerry’s bones.

To be so absent from the mourning process back in London makes Martin feel like a terrible friend. He can’t cite feeling less than close to Gerry as a reason for it; of course his death makes Martin want to curl up into a hole and stay there, but there’s— there’s another factor in the situation, and if no one else can stomach it, then he will. Why stop now?

“Can I hold your hand?”

Danny makes a disagreeable noise. Martin accepts the rejection as gracefully as he can, sitting back in his chair to diminish the temptation to reach out anyway.

“Maybe I could get you that water—?”

“Leave,” Danny spits out on the tail ends of a sharp breath. “Just… please, go. Go home.”

“Well, no, I won’t be doing that much. I can leave the room for a while, I’ll go down to the waiting room again, but… No, Danny, there’s no way I’m just leaving you here. It’s a three hour drive, and you’re in no shape to be by yourself. You need someone to bring you home when you’re ready.”

It must hurt like hell to cry. Martin can see the tendons in Danny’s neck standing out with how harshly he’s turned his head away, his body jolting painfully as he tries to keep himself quiet. How could anyone possibly be expected to hold all this in? Martin isn’t judging him. He wants to cry, too.

“I love you,” he says, even knowing it might even make things worse. Just on the off chance that it doesn’t. “I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

He stands up without waiting for a response, grabbing up the magazine from the foot of the bed. The waiting room is a better place to check his texts.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

Every desk in the bullpen filled, but an empty Head Archivist’s office. Sasha glances towards it every now and again, still half-expecting it to creak open and to see Gerry yawning in the doorway. They haven’t erased the nap counter from the white board. They haven’t been touching the calendar, the last blue dot left behind on the day before they all left for Great Yarmouth. It’ll simply gather dust, she suspects, because what function does it serve now? No more estrogen. No more joy.

There is no joy left in Tim. It’s been wrung out of him in a way that Sasha has never seen before. Never in his wildest depressions or losses has he ever looked this grim. His eyes sink into shadows when he turns his head the right way in the light. The wet spots on his shirt could almost be mistaken for sweat if he didn’t radiate such a coldness that sitting across from him makes her want to tighten her cardigan around herself. She hasn’t seen him smile since their meeting in the safehouse, when the corners of his mouth turned up in a halfhearted attempt at saying I’ll see you soon before she hugged him goodbye the second time.

She joined in on Jon’s attempted shiva. They all had, except for Martin. Jon explained the rules; only some of the restrictions, as Gerry was not a Jew, but he said that for the time being, they were to see themselves as Gerry’s immediate family. Who else would mourn him properly? It not being his custom hardly mattered in this case; it was something where he would otherwise have nothing. According to Jon, shiva was meant to contain the grieving process into something manageable. To allow for the full depth of it to sink its teeth in, to truly sit in it, and then when the time came, face the world again with renewed strength. It was the only way he knew how to grieve, and so it was all he could do to share it.

Tim had followed the rules in silence. Sasha watched him from her low cushion and waited for an opportunity to touch him, to console him, but he never gave her one. On the morning of the seventh day, Jon took it upon himself to say play the visitor and recited a blessing in front of Tim, bidding G-d to comfort him among all the mourners in Jerusalem, and reached to help him up off the floor. “Arise,” he’d said, and Tim had.

It just wasn’t Tim’s custom, either. It’s been a week since they returned to work, and he’s still a stone gargoyle in his desk chair, empty of light and effort. Jon told her that for spouses, the mourning period will be considerably intense for at least a year.

A year. Two years. Three years, four. Eventually, the years without Gerry will outnumber the ones they had with him, and Tim will feel it like no one else. Sasha looks at him, and she feels moths crawling underneath her clothes, trapped there in her own grief.

Sasha has lost enough sisters. This one is especially cruel.

“So…” Martin begins, breaking the long silence. “What exactly are we going to… do now? Here, I mean, at the Institute.”

“The same thing we’ve been doing, I presume.” Jon sets a pile of papers off to the side. “The Unknowing was only one ritual of many potential rituals. I think it’s only natural that we should keep trying to stop as many as we can.”

“But—” Martin bites his tongue for a moment. “I mean… sure. But something has to happen next, right? I mean, Elias—”

“Elias is mine.”

Tim’s voice doesn’t even sound like his voice anymore. Sasha shifts in her seat.

They’ve talked about this already. Judith went back into the rubble to find Begging the King and bring it to her father, who studied page 77 with a thoughtful face. There was only so much he could speculate about the incantation, but the long string of words at the end made him surmise that it was an attempt to bring forth all of Smirke’s Fourteen at once, and that the results could have been catastrophic. None of them knew how far Gerry must have read, or if he’d even been reading it at all by the time Danny swung the hammer, and so it’s difficult to say that the sacrifice was worth it.

But it looks like they wiped the chessboard entirely. Elias can’t come back to the Institute and reinstate himself as Head, he can’t ‘promote’ anyone to the Archivist position and start over whatever the hell he’d been doing with Gerry the whole time, he can’t show his face while it’s still Faraday’s. Whatever game he was playing, he’s lost.

Sasha doesn’t know if she’s allowed to feel triumphant or if she should just settle for being afraid of the retaliation that could creep up on them should he switch bodies again, or send something after them, or pull another gun. She wants to believe he won’t risk it; not with Tim still around to want revenge. She’s willing to bet he’s more afraid of Tim than he ever was before.

“…Okay, but, after that.” Martin’s skepticism is hesitant, but reasonable. “I just feel—”

“Lost,” Jon suggests, sounding far away.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Sasha repeats, too. Tim has the right idea, in his almost-vow-of-silence. There’s not a whole lot else to say.

Another length of quiet sweeps through the Archives. Sasha can’t bring herself to touch her laptop, or get up for a box of folders. She can’t imagine recording statements onto her phone. She can’t imagine moving, paralyzed into her chair by the crawling sensation at the small of her back, the bend of her knees, in her sleeves.

“Hellooo?”

Sasha, Jon and Martin all jump in their seats as Divshah elbows her way into the Archives. She’s carrying a tray of coffee cups with both hands. Dread drops into Sasha’s stomach like a cement block.

“Oh, um—” Jon swallows. “H-Hello, Divshah.”

“Hi!” she chirps. “I haven’t seen you guys in a while, so I thought I’d bring something by! Scoot, scoot!”

She hops over to the bullpen and sets the tray down in front of Sasha and Tim. Sasha numbly accepts the biscotti as Divshah passes it to her, watching the cups as she distributes them by memory until there’s only one left in the very middle. Divshah takes it into her hands and straightens up to look around the room with a smile.

“Where’s Gerry?” She gasps gently. “Is he asleep?”

Sasha looks up at Tim to find him entirely unmoved. There is a droplet forming at his hairline. One glance at Jon and Martin tells her that she’s going to have to get up from her chair after all, because this conversation can’t happen in here.

“Um… Divshah, come with me really quick.”

Confused, Divshah places the last cup down on Sasha’s desk. “What’s going on?”

Sasha doesn’t respond just yet, shaking out her clothes a bit as she stands. If she doesn’t look down and around for the moths, they may just fade away.

Divshah follows her to Basira’s old room down the hall, her cheerful smile traded for something more apprehensive. Sasha shuts the door and sighs, catching her own face in both hands for a moment before she bites the bullet.

“You don’t have to bring cocoa for Gerry anymore,” she begins.

Divshah wilts. “Oh, no! Does he not work here anymore?”

“No, he doesn’t. Because, um.” Sasha swallows roughly. “Because— he died, Divshah. About two weeks ago.”

For a moment, Divshah just stares at her. She’s not like them, though, and she’s quick to blink. “What?”

“There was an accident. He… took a bad blow to the head. It happened really fast. There was nothing anyone could do.”

Instant are the tears. Divshah covers her mouth with both hands, shaking her head. “No, that’s— How could that happen? That’s not right, I don’t— He couldn’t—”

“I know,” Sasha interrupts, her own throat stopping up again. “I know, come here.”

Divshah slips into her arms like a river, clinging tight to the back of her cardigan. If there are moths around, she doesn’t seem to notice them, or care. Why would she? She’s been touched by the Corruption, too, and nothing seems to faze her. This is the first time Sasha has seen her look anything less than simply happy to be alive.

It takes a while for her to stop crying, pulling back to sniff so hard it must hurt. “How’s Tim doing?”

“Not well,” Sasha admits. “He’s really not himself right now.”

“Oh, I can’t imagine,” Divshah says nauseously. “I’m so— I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to make it worse with the— with the cocoa, I just wanted to—”

“I know, sweetheart. You didn’t do anything wrong.” Sasha pets her hair; her dark roots have grown out past her ears, the bleach-fried ends freshly lopped off. “Just… He needs some space. They all do, they were all there for it.”

“Oh, G-d.” Divshah hides her face again, letting out another round of tears. “That’s— That’s awful.”

“Yeah, from what I gather, it… it was.”

She could be more comforting, probably. She could be better. Or she could be honest, and cry a little bit, too. Divshah hugs her one more time, and Sasha plucks off her glasses to bend and bury her face in her shoulder. She hasn’t done this with Tim yet. She doesn’t know how much longer she can take it.

“I’ll, um… I’ll go.” Divshah wipes her face, stepping away and towards the door. “Enjoy your biscotti.”

Sasha steps out after her, watching as she pauses in front of the Archives doors and looks in through the window with a tearful face before she carries on towards the stairs at a brisk walk. Good that she didn’t go back in. She has some tact after all.

That was mean to think. Sasha taps her own cheek in reprimand, to shock the tears back inside, before she goes back into the Archives with a straight face. Tim is still sitting with his back to the door, the cocoa still sitting in front of him. Jon meets her eyes with concern, arms wrapped tight around his stomach. His kurta today is pink.

“She’s gone,” Sasha tells them, sitting down.

“What did you tell her?” Martin asks.

“What else? I told her the truth.” Sasha stares down at the cocoa cooling in front of her. “She didn’t take it very well. Cried a lot.”

Jon and Martin both nod, but only Jon voices his opinion. “Good. Someone ought to. S-Someone other than us, I mean. Anyone, really.” And then he gasps. “Oh, G-d, someone has to tell Tazia.”

Sasha winces. “You do it. I can’t. Not after Divshah just now, I— I can’t.”

He pulls out his phone to scroll through his messages for the large group chat they’d made back in Venice. The only way that anyone would even have her number. The only other person that Sasha can think of that knew Gerry, really knew him, and will care that he’s gone.

Tim moves, suddenly, to take the cocoa from the desk and swipe it into the bin.

The remainder of the day moves like molasses. The moment the clock strikes 5:00, Sasha stands up and requests that Tim follow her. He rises and does, and the drive home is silent. He waits on the doorstep for her to find her key and use it, perhaps consciously stopping himself from walking straight through. Without another word, he retreats to his bedroom and shuts the door.

Sasha doesn’t know what to do with the rest of her evening. She spends most of it on the couch, texting Melanie. Danny got home yesterday, having left the hospital against medical advice, and is largely immobile in bed. He still won’t speak much, either, apparently. Sasha can’t wrap her mind around the fact that she currently lives in a world where the Stoker boys — of all people — have gone speechless.

It’s half past midnight when she hears the crash. It jolts her out of bed and into the hallway, towards Tim’s room, before an even scarier noise halts her worried footsteps entirely. A garbled wail, like a scream underwater, interspersed with loud, hacking sobs. She looks down at her feet; there’s water seeping out from under his door. When she knocks, the only response is another item shattering — the bedside lamp? A picture frame? Sasha reaches for the doorknob to find it locked.

“Tim?” she calls out against the door. “Tim, can you hear me?”

The drowning noises don’t stop for her. Every image her mind conjures up of what he might look like right now only serves to split her heart further apart. She almost doesn’t want to see, but it feels like she needs to know. She needs to know in order to fix it. She needs to be able to hold him, to shush him, to simply be with him until the pain eases. She needs him to want her to.

“Tim,” she repeats, pleading. “Open the door, let me help you.”

“No!” comes the shout, hysterical. It’s barely intelligible as a word through the slosh of water that must have spewed from his mouth alongside it. “Go— away!”

Fine, then. If he wants her to do this the hard way, then she will. Sasha leaves the hall to dig through her room for the new lock-picking kit Melanie got her for her most recent birthday. The lock on his door is simple and plain like all the others in the house’s interior, so it barely resists when she fits the tool inside it. The phantom water is cold under her bare feet as she stands in the growing puddle, until the lock pops open and she ventures inside.

The floor is almost entirely flooded, and there’s a large wet spot on the center of the bed. She was right, the bedside lamp had been thrown to the ground, pieces of glass scattered in the water. She can’t see yet what else had been broken in the dark, but she can see Tim’s shape in the moonlight through the window, curled up between his side table and the edge of his mattress on the floor. He grasps at his chest like he’s suffocating all over again, water cascading down his body at an almost threatening speed. It’s a wonder there’s any room for him to cry through the outpouring.

There is no splashing sound when she walks through the flood to reach him, the water only as real as they believe it to be. Sasha chooses to believe he could breathe through it if he wanted to. That he will, eventually, when this has run its course. It’s been such a long time coming.

She sits down on the floor under the window, her dressing gown skimming the top of the puddle. Tim jolts like he’s in the tank again, his head banging against the side table, and Sasha lets herself wince because he’s not even looking at her. He can’t yet. He’s not ready.

So, she waits. She watches as it all comes rushing out of him at once, until he’s reduced to trickles and trembling and softer cries that finally sound more like weeping than a waterfall. He leans against the mattress and she finally sees what he’s been clutching in his fist; Gerry’s padlock on its chain.

There’s still nothing to say.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

Melanie zips up her backpack with a sigh. “Martin, come on! You’re coming with me!”

“No the hell I’m not.”

“You have to! I’m down an assistant, and you know Callum. You went to his birthday party this year!”

Martin slams his mug down on the counter hard enough that she sees some of his tea splash out of it. “I’m not going to be a part of this video, Melanie. I don’t know how many times I have to say it.”

Melanie crosses her arms. “You’re really not even going to give me a statement for it, either? You don’t have anything to say about our dead friend?”

He whirls around with a vengeance. “What do you want me to talk about, Melanie! The time I stole his keys and went behind his back and got Leitner all NotThem’d, so he compelled me and made it really clear that he’d never trust me? Or the time I nearly strangled him to death and proved him right? Or maybe for something lighter, how about the time we went to a flesh witch’s house and he hacked up his tonsils in front of me, that was a blast!”

“Okay, I get it!” Melanie cuts him off. “Fuck you.”

“Just— go do your thing, and don’t bring this up around me ever again.”

With a scowl, she turns around to snatch up her bag and storm out of the house. She hates this Martin. He’s worse than punctuation-user Martin, because now he uses punctuation all the time and he’s mean in person. Even when he had that bullet inside of him, he wasn’t quite so cutting.

She knows it’s because of Danny leaving, but it’s been three bloody months. He should be starting to level out again. He should be starting to— well, to get over it would be unrealistic to expect of him. How are any of them supposed to get over any of this?

Maybe she’s faring better because she’s the one Danny said goodbye to. The only one, because she was the only one he could trust not to beg him to stay. She’s the one who gets pulse check texts now and then, and sometimes the name of whatever continent he’s made it to. When he said he was in South America last weekend, she almost called him a liar.

Melanie doesn’t want to be angry at Martin, but it’s hard when he’s angry at her. For harboring something that he’s been deprived of. For persisting in the face of the paralysis that’s taken over the entire Archives, still, to this day. For being almost relieved by it, because Danny’s absence gave her enough space to breathe to decide on her next, long overdue project. One that he could never have helped her with.

It starts snowing halfway through her bus ride, speckling against the windows to dissolve into droplets. Melanie watches them trickle away, going over the intro to her video in her head again and again and again.

This is a video I’ve wanted to make for a long time, but it’s also one I never wanted to have to make at all. I’m going to start this by asking for some basic courtesy, because while I know this is the internet and I’m broadcasting from a channel about supernatural crap that a lot of skeptics like to make fun of, I’m going to be telling you about that close friend of mine that passed and I will not tolerate disrespect towards his memory. There will be times where I can only give so much proof, because some of the events I’m going to outline are from a long time ago, and yeah, have to do with supernatural crap that didn’t exactly leave behind a lot of clues. Long time viewers will know that the real stuff can’t always be captured digitally, and I want to finally tell you who opened my eyes and changed my entire career path with that knowledge: his name was Gerard Keay.

It was hard to deliver the lines into the camera when she first started recording. Took way too many takes, and she’s still not sure about the script. She might have to rewrite it a third time, maybe a fourth before this is over. This is going to be a big project. It’s going to be all the more difficult without Danny’s help.

One thing that makes it easier are the number of witnesses willing to appear on camera and speak on it.

Divshah wanted to tell her story the very day that Melanie asked her if she would, eager to tell the world the truth about how Gerry saved her from an abusive relationship without even knowing her name, and how he was never unkind to her, or dismissive of her disposition. She knows she’s a lot to handle, but Gerry never put out the idea that she was too much. He was accepting, and friendly, and he always put something in the tip jar.

Melanie sent Timothy Hodge an email. She plans to put a screenshot of his reply in the video, too, with his permission; he wants to put Jane Prentiss behind him, but he will admit with no hesitation that the only reason he’s alive today is because of Gerry. Gerry noticed, Gerry saw the signs, and Gerry personally saw to it that he was brought to a hospital. Gerry did that.

Next on her list is Caroline Brodie.

The snow is sticking to the grass a little bit as she walks up to the door and knocks. Caroline answers quickly, expecting her at this time. She ushers her inside and to the living room, where she sits on the couch to wring her hands in anxious hesitation.

“Thank you for doing this,” Melanie says after she’s taken out her camera and tripod. “I know it’s… out of the blue, after all this time.”

“No one could have predicted that this would have happened.”

“Still, it’s been… what, a little over a year? Since—”

Since Basira took the umbra from Callum. Since Gerry scared him to save him. Since the worst time of this family’s lives finally came to a tentative end.

Caroline nods. “Just about, yes. It feels like so much longer ago, but… also like it was only yesterday. Do you ever get that feeling?”

“All the time.”

Melanie offers a small smile, and then turns on her camera. Caroline shifts to sit up straighter, presentable, nervous.

“So, you’re making this video as… a memorial?”

“Sort of. But also… there’s a lot of people out there who have some really wrong beliefs about who he was. And people who did know him only got him in passing, he was like some… mythic figure, even to me at first. So, now that he’s not here to have his privacy invaded more, I figured it’s finally time to shed some light on the situation and kind of… clear his name.”

Tim had granted his assent, though not in so many words. He knew she wouldn’t be exploitative about it, but the real root of his reason was clear: everything is pointless now, so it didn’t matter what she did. Jon and Sasha had already given a few accounts each, full of stories and love. They’ll surely think of more to add as time continues to pass, in the absence of any contribution from Tim. Melanie won’t press him the way she pressed Martin earlier. It’s different.

Caroline wraps her mind around it, and doesn’t pry about what his name needs clearing from. “What is it you want me to say?”

“Just… the truth of your experience, I suppose? This video is about Gerry, about the person he really was, everything he did to help people… So, whatever you remember about him, I’d really like to hear it.”

Caroline nods again, clearing her throat. Melanie gives her a thumbs up when the camera starts recording, gesturing for Caroline to look at her while she speaks. It takes a long moment and a deep breath, but she does.

“I didn’t know Gerry very well. I only met him a few times, and the most prominent of those memories was the scariest moment of my life. Even scarier than losing my child was watching him— tied to a chair, and afraid. It worked, is the thing; the scary thing worked. I-I couldn’t even begin to recount it for you, what the process of… freeing him, was like, but it saved his life. It gave me my baby back.

“And just before the scary part began, I remember Gerry… sitting in front of him, just talking to him. He showed him a scar that I can still see in my mind if I think back on it — a big, black handprint on his leg — and told him that he wasn’t alone in what he was going through. That letting people notice that he’s hurt and letting them help him was the only way to heal. I remember him pulling his rucksack into his lap and showing him all these little trinkets he’d gotten from people over time, and one of them was—” She laughs wetly. “One of them was from Callum. They’d met before on a bus one day, and my son flicked a paper ninja star at him. Something I might’ve scolded him for had I been there, but then… maybe Gerry wouldn’t have flung it back. Maybe they wouldn’t have had their fun, and my son would have one less fond memory of a kind stranger who paid attention to him. Gerry kept that ninja star pinned to his bag that whole time, because he must have been short on fond memories, too. I didn’t know him well, but I know that’s the kind of person he was. The fond sort.

“And Callum listened to him. He has friends, now. Good friends who come over and stay the night sometimes, and lightbulbs don’t break in our house anymore. He’s happy. He’s healthy. He’s safe. And we’re closer than ever, we’re in a good place. That whole time was… very dark for us, so dark, and if you’re asking me about Gerry… I’d say he did his best to shine just a little bit of light on the future he wanted for my son. No one made him do that, no one made him care. He just… did. And I wish I had taken the chance to thank him for that.”

After a hesitant hand motion from Caroline, Melanie shuts off the camera and dabs at the corner of her eye. She hadn’t been there for Callum’s rescue, or his second saving, but she’d heard the stories of their respective horrors. She didn’t know about the sentimental part of it, but she believes it. She knows it.

“Thank you, Caroline,” Melanie says again, and she’s taken off guard by the swelling of pain in her throat that comes with the words. She turns her face away to roll her eyes up to the ceiling, bouncing a hand on her leg. She’s not supposed to cry, not here.

Caroline gets up and rushes back with a box of tissues, handing the whole thing to her. Melanie laughs, and accepts it, letting herself let just a bit of it out before she forces it all back inside. Another mumbled thanks, and an equally quiet you’re welcome.

“Are you done already?”

Melanie jumps, snapping her head back around to see Callum standing at the foot of the stairs. His hair is in need of a trim, his shirt baggy around his arms and hanging low past his waist. He stares at her sullenly, one hand on the banister as he sways with the clear desire to enter the room.

“I don’t know,” Caroline says to him, and turns to Melanie. “Are we?”

“I, um— I think that’s just about all I needed, yes. We can watch it over and you can tell me if you want to do another take, but I think… I always think interviews are best kept organic, you know? We never recall things the same way twice, and we can’t… replicate the same emotion.”

Caroline agrees, looking down at her folded hands before she glances back up at her son. “Were you listening?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you want to come and talk with us?”

He gives Melanie a wary look before he slumps over to the couch to sit beside his mother. He doesn’t react much when she runs a hand through his hair and rubs his back once, his eyes tracing the camera and Melanie’s belongings.

“Why can’t I do one, too?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Caroline says. “We’d be telling the same story, wouldn’t we? I don’t want your face on any more… computers, or televisions, or any of that.”

“But he died.” He says it so plainly. “Shouldn’t I say something?”

“What would you say that she didn’t say already?” Melanie prompts.

He looks at the camera again. “Turn that on.”

“Why?”

“Because if I have to say it twice, I’ll get it wrong.”

Melanie looks at Caroline for permission. Caroline hesitates a moment longer, petting Callum’s hair again.

“Are you sure, honey?”

He nods. “A lot of people… have died, for me. And maybe he didn’t die for me, but he died, and I knew him. I want to do this.”

Caroline’s eyes well up again, and after another beat, she relents. She scoots over to the other side of the couch to let Callum take her seat in front of the camera, and Melanie starts to fiddle with her equipment again. Before she hits record, Callum asks her a difficult question.

“When’s Danny coming back?”

Melanie swallows. “I don’t know yet, kiddo. But I’m still in touch with him, so when I know, you’ll know.”

“Okay.”

She readjusts in her seat and angles the camera a little lower to focus on his face, and starts recording.

“Whenever you’re ready, go ahead.”

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

He listens to the rumble of the train around him in place of any sort of music, no headphones on his person since he left. Self-deprivation, perhaps, but that was almost the point. Instead he’s filled his life with the sounds of the world around him, voices to mimic and borrow, the machinery of travel and distance. No nice little daydream to get lost in. He hasn’t earned that.

His bag is light on his lap. He’d only brought enough with him that he could carry on his person at all times, replacing things when he needed to the same way he’d swindled his way onto planes, boats, trains like this one, when he wanted to take his time instead of traveling through mirrors. Excuse me, that’s my seat. Oh, you already punched my ticket. The same way he’d grifted their way to Greece the first time he left home with Martin and—

Home. What a lost notion.

It’d be a lie to say he didn’t still daydream. His dreams are different now; no longer limited to the Circus the second time, no longer Watched by that haunting pair of silver eyes. They’re broader again, now with new hammersplat sounds and Tim is there, turning away from him. Sometimes they’re not about anything at all, ordinary dreams that he didn’t realize he could still have. Ones that leave him emptier than the ones that wake him up with chills or a shout, because he hasn’t earned those, either.

But some mornings, he would wake up in a motel without arms around him and sincerely wonder where they went. Had Martin gotten up to get them coffee? Was he showering, or off finding a vending machine? Will he be back soon?

The illusion never lasted very long. It was always a source of stinging while the rest of him stayed numb and distant, removed from the experiences he could be having in Zimbabwe and Costa Maya and Sydney if this were a vacation. If this were anything but a chance to think. Mostly, he wandered.

He’s finished, now.

The train comes to a screeching halt, and he rises with his bag to exit. His legs have had eleven months to heal, nearly ten of them spent walking, and still they ache with each step. He doesn’t need a taxi for the rest of the way, or a bus. He’ll bide his time now that there’s so little of it left.

It’s the first of July. The crickets are loud in patches of grass when he reaches the start of the lawns, and the sun warms the back of his neck. He doesn’t count the minutes on a watch, or pull his phone from his pocket. He wouldn’t search for a mirror to jump through even if he thought he could land right inside the house. He still doesn’t even know if he’ll be welcome there.

Try as he might to stay numb, his stomach twirls up into tighter and tighter knots the closer he gets to the street. The more his legs ache for him to stop and rest, just for a little bit more time. The more he wants to turn around and go back to somewhere, anywhere, that no one could ever have the chance to know him.

He can’t, though. It’s been long enough. He can’t let the world creep into August; hah. August. The worst time of Tim’s life, and death. He must have replaced the losses in his heart by now. Danny keeps coming back, against all odds. Gerry never will.

Danny stops walking to breathe against the memory, the knowledge. The shame that builds and builds heavier and heavier with every day that passes, no matter how long he’s taken to deconstruct it. Maybe that was another one of Gerry’s gifts; all that Weight. Reva told him all about the sink. Whenever they were out instead of him, that’s where he would be, without fail. That was his home in their head.

So maybe that’s Danny’s punishment, too. Every morning, he is lowered back into that tank, and he thrashes all day until someone has their twisted idea of mercy and pulls him out to let him sleep, only to start all over again tomorrow. He never drowns like Tim did. His fault, too.

It doesn’t feel like punishment enough.

He leaps away from a speeding car before it has the chance to honk at him for drifting into the road. Adrenaline tingles in his limbs, his lungs, just the barest little taste of something alive. He looks ahead at the street signs and knows he has to keep going, he has to turn left, and to do that, he needs to forget how to feel again. Just until he gets onto the doorstep.

When he does reach it, he stands there for a while. He hasn’t earned the right to knock on the door and say hello, certainly not to smile and wish for one back. But he’ll be standing here all day if he doesn’t, and he can’t waste any more time. It feels like taking, but he does it.

Melanie answers the door. Her face falls in an instant, her eyes wide and skipping over his body as if in search of wounds or changes or evidence that he’s only a mirage. He lets her process his presence in silence until she finally finds it in her to speak.

“Holy shit.”

“Hi.”

“Hi!” She laughs, backing up to usher him inside. “You didn’t tell me you were coming home.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s— Well, I won’t say anything is fine, but I’m just… really glad to see you. You haven’t been texting.”

“Sorry.”

She makes a piteous face, pausing on her way to the kitchen. He knows she’s going to offer him tea in the mug with the holographic telly on it and he’ll accept it to be gracious, not because he thinks it’s fair. For a moment, they hover in place at a distance from each other, equally at a loss for words, or affection, or mending.

“Um…” she recovers, pointing towards the hallway. “I’m… going to go get Mar—”

Again, she pauses, this time in a cold startle. Danny turns his head to face the music; Martin is already standing in the mouth of the hallway, staring at the pathetic scene with the flattest expression Danny has ever seen on him. Danny keeps his own face just as empty, careful not to betray the depth of how that expression makes him feel. It wouldn’t be fair. He has no right to beg.

“…Ah.” Melanie clears her throat. “You know what? I’m gonna— I’m actually going to head to the store, we don’t have… milk. I’m going to go get some milk.”

“Sure, Melanie.” Martin doesn’t bother to look at her. “Go get some milk.”

His voice is different. Not in tone, but in quality. His hair is different; shorter, in an unfamiliar stage of hopefully-growing back out. It was only a matter of time before Martin cut his hair. Danny remembers stopping him the first time he held scissors down to the scalp, convincing him it wouldn’t be worth it to cut it out of anger. He’s been angry, and Danny wasn’t here to stop him.

Of course he’s been angry. That is something Danny deserves.

As Melanie grabs her keys and leaves the house, Danny turns his body to face Martin fully, his bag still on his shoulder — he can’t set it down yet, he can’t make himself at home. He braces himself for the tirade, the accusation, the hatred. All things he’s earned.

Martin takes a step forward. Danny doesn’t realize he’s taken a step back until the look on Martin’s face is more hurt than hollow. This conversation will be held across the room.

“Happy Birthday,” Danny tries.

“What were you thinking?” Martin says instead of ‘thanks.’ “You disappeared.”

“I’m sorry.”

“How could you do that to me?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop— saying you’re sorry, and tell me what was running through your head!”

“I couldn’t be here, Martin!” The confession leaps forth without another hesitation, prompted forward by Martin’s demand. “I couldn’t just— exist here, waiting for Tim to be able to look at me again! I couldn’t just wait around for him to feel obligated enough to forgive me, and you know my being here would have put that pressure on him. I couldn’t— I couldn’t think here!”

“So you went to Tanzania?”

“Yes! Yes, I did, and I went just about everywhere else, too, and did almost every drug known to man, and I didn’t have a lick of fun because I was running! You have to know Elias is probably after me, too, after I fucked up his plans. I couldn’t stay anywhere for more than a few days, I had to just keep moving, I barely— I barely processed any of what I was seeing, I just needed to think.”

“About what?”

“About why I did it!” The bag slips from his shoulder, and he hardly notices the sound of it hitting the ground past the blood in his ears. “You said in the hospital that I did it for Pharos and I agreed with you, but was I just agreeing because you said it? Or did I do it because I knew it’d be the best thing for Nikola?”

“You wouldn’t have—”

“But what if I did!” He can’t fight the smile as it pulls at his mouth. “What if I did, Martin?”

Martin stops arguing. Danny battles to neutralize his face again, and fails. The best he can do is continue to explain himself.

“I had to figure it out on my own, I couldn’t just— let your belief in me influence how I remembered things.”

“No one really— remembers the whole Unknowing, I mean. It was the Unknowing. You can’t try and force yourself to recall every single detail of an event like that, the whole point was to confuse us.”

Danny scoffs. “Don’t you think I know that? I soaked in that for years before you people dragged me out of it by the hair. I learned to navigate it, I learned to cause it, and you think I wouldn’t have been able to coast on that during the ritual? You think it’s that impossible that I could have just slipped back into my old role? Seriously, Martin? You still love me enough to lie to yourself like that?”

You still love me at all? Danny can’t take the words back. Martin crosses his arms, leaning against the wall to look down at the floor.

“And what conclusion did you come to?”

“A different one every day.”

He sees the minute shake of Martin’s head, the disbelieving desire to scoff as he turns his eyes back up to the ceiling. “So, what you’re saying is that this was pointless. You didn’t come back with some big epiphany, you didn’t have your come to Jesus moment in Cambodia, it was all just— a waste of time.”

“No,” Danny says firmly. “I still couldn’t just be here. I need you to understand that.”

“What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just tell me.”

“Because you would have tried to stop me, or asked to come with me, and I wouldn’t have been able to say no to you! I needed to be alone, Martin.”

“Since when has ‘alone’ gotten anyone anywhere good? You said before you did every drug known to man, h-how is that a good thing? How did that help you?”

“It helped me forget sometimes.” Danny curls and unfurls his fists. “You don’t know how hard it was to look any of you in the eye before I left. Any of you, even you.”

“I never blamed you for—”

“Maybe you should have. Maybe I wanted you to! Maybe I needed someone to blame me, because it can’t just be me blaming myself! I can’t trust myself, you know that.”

“But if no one blames you, then isn’t that a signal that it wasn’t your fault?”

“I swung the hammer, Martin! I did that. And I still don’t know for certain if I did it for Pharos or not, so no, it’s not a signal that it isn’t my fault. It just tells me that no one takes my actions seriously, even when they’re catastrophic.”

“You saved the world, technically.”

“Don’t.”

“You did, though,” Martin insists. “Adelard said that incantation could have been the end of everything—”

Danny shakes his head. “We have no idea how accurate that is.”

“And we’ll never know! Because it’s over, and because Pharos saw it coming. He trusted you.”

“And what about Gerry, then, huh? What about the one all of you actually miss? The one I took away from Tim without a second of hesitation because Pharos decided that the collateral would be worth it?”

“That sounds like a Pharos problem. And it sure sounds like you put a lot more thought into what Pharos was asking of you than you were probably thinking of Nikola in the moment.”

“G-d, you’re not even listening!” Danny can’t control his gestures, arms frenetic and jerking to grab for his own head. “Martin, I murdered the love of my brother’s life! I killed him, he’s dead because of me! No amount of justification is going to change the result! I don’t care about the incantation, I don’t care about the end of the world, I care about the world I have to live in now! I always have, that’s all that matters to me! There needs to be a consequence for what I did!”

“Is that another reason why you left without so much as a note?” Martin asks. “Inviting some kind of consequence?”

“Maybe it is! Now, are you going to deliver one or are you just going to— forgive me?”

For a long time, the adrenaline of raising his voice had kept the tears at bay. He doesn’t know precisely when they started to burn in his throat, but all at once, the notion of forgiveness creates such a deep longing in him that he can’t help the way it jumps out. He can’t retract the way it sounded; like a lie, like bait, like pleading. Danny does his best not to drop his head, muscling through as his eyes water, looking Martin in the face as if he stands a chance of challenging him. He feels like the frenzied bull in the arena, while Martin stands calm and resolute in the distance, daring him to come closer.

It’s Martin who steps forward again. Danny backs up one more step, instinct over impulse, but there’s only so far he can go before his back hits the wall. Martin is slow in his approach, reaching out with his hands first to show that they’re empty, they’re open, they’re safe. Danny is powerless to him, then, when Martin pulls him down into his arms.

“I’m going to forgive you, Danny.”

Danny sobs into his shoulder. “Why?”

“I don’t— I don’t like being angry, it makes me mean. Just ask Melanie, I’ve— I’ve been awful to her this whole time. I don’t see the point in holding a grudge against you for… for what happened to Gerry, or for you leaving to sort out your thoughts. I can’t punish you any more than you’ve punished yourself. I refuse to even try.”

“Why?”

Martin cradles the back of his head as he shakes. “It wouldn’t do any good. Not like… actually trying to fix things might.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“You’re home. That’s a start.” Martin kisses the spot behind his ear. “And don’t get me wrong, I’d love to keep you all to myself as long as I can, but Melanie’s going to be back with that milk we don’t need, and… I think the person you really need to talk to is Tim.”

For a while, the most Danny can do is weep. He hasn’t cried much since he left, if at all — hell if he remembers anymore. The wall behind him and Martin’s sturdy frame in front are the only things keeping his legs from giving out underneath him, the Weight still there and still suffocating and still too oppressive to dig himself out from. He lets Martin hold him until it makes more sense to let him lead him to the couch, and then time distorts until he’s lying with his head in Martin’s lap, breathing slower.

He hasn’t earned this, but he’s selfish. He needs it.

They decide to text Sasha, not Tim, just to make sure he’s home, and leave it at that. Danny takes a shower before anything else and changes into a fresh set of clothes from his dresser, still full of his things. He looks at himself in the mirror and wills it not to crack. The scar on his forehead. The scar on his lip. His identity in seams. He can’t face his collarbones, or his wrists.

Martin offers to go with him, and he finds the strength to say no. The most he can give is leaving his bag in the house, a promise to come back. Today, he thinks he keeps his promises.

Tim’s house is too far to walk to, so he takes the bus as close as it’ll bring him. He hopes that Sasha doesn’t answer the door, too tired for another round of what happened with Melanie and Martin. He wonders if he’s earned the right to want this to be direct. To the point. Not painless, but bearable. He can bear quite a lot before it breaks him. He could take any comeuppance Tim has to offer as long as it isn’t forgiveness, too.

It won’t be. It couldn’t be. Not this time.

With hands unfeeling, he knocks. He listens for the heaviness of the footsteps that approach the door, for a moment forgetting if Tim’s are still audible at all. When he doesn’t hear anything, he figures that no, they aren’t, and why would they be? Tim is more of a ghost than ever. Danny doesn’t know how to prepare himself for what he’ll see when the door opens.

Tim is dry, at least. His hair is down, no longer or shorter since the last time Danny saw him. They’re the same, in that regard; Danny’s hair still hasn’t grown a centimeter since he first encountered the troupe. Tim can’t cut his for anything now because there’s every chance it’ll never grow back.

His eyes are vacant, empty black holes in his head. Frightening to passersby, no doubt, but to Danny, it’s something else. Something words can’t describe, so he doesn’t try.

“Hey,” he starts, because Tim doesn’t say it first.

For a long moment, Tim doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move to let Danny into the house, or step onto the porch to join him. Simply stands in the doorway like a statue, studying him for change the way that Melanie and Martin had. Studying his eyes for traces of… what, guilt? Shame? He’ll find it in abundance.

“I just came by to tell you… I’m done running, now.”

The calm question comes up from inside a deep well. “Where were you?”

“Um… around.” Danny looks down at Tim’s shirt and shrugs. “All over.”

Tim hums, and still he doesn’t move. “Have fun?”

“Not especially.”

“Alright.”

Danny thought he could handle the comeuppance. “I just didn’t… think it’d be right to tell you over the phone.”

“When you left, or when you got back?”

“Either.” Danny tucks his hand behind his hip to fidget in private. “…Tim, I’m sor—”

Tim holds up a hand.

“What’s done is done.”

“Which part of it?”

“All of it. You can’t take it back. I don’t want you to try just to be disappointed that I can’t forgive you yet.”

“I don’t want you to forgive me yet,” Danny admits. “…Or at all, if you really can’t. I know Pharos said that I’m the only one you might be able to—”

“Might.”

“Exactly. And I left because… I didn’t want you to feel obligated to honour that just because he said it. I left so you could have some time to yourself, without me… pressuring you to move on.”

“You left for yourself.”

“That, too. I needed time, I thought… I thought we could both use the time. I didn’t expect to walk back into welcoming arms.”

Tim doesn’t need to say good for the sentiment to come across. He’s silent for another long while, unmoving in the doorway. A barricade between the outside world and his private space, so empty now with his loss.

“What’s done is done,” Tim repeats. “And I don’t forgive you yet. But… you’re back now. Which means we can start to try and get there someday.”

Danny’s throat closes up. “You don’t have to.”

“I know. And you didn’t have to come back, but you did.” Finally, Tim’s eyes shift to look over Danny’s shoulder at the street. “You did the one thing I couldn’t do for him.”

“I’m sorry,” Danny rushes out before Tim can stop him again. “If I could go back—”

“You can’t. He wouldn’t even want you to. What’s done is done.”

Danny drops his head. “What’s done is done.”

“Yeah.” Tim turns his eyes back to Danny’s face, his stare so deadened that Danny can feel the blood on his hands. “We can talk about this some other time.”

“Okay.”

There is a beat of quiet before the door is shut in front of him. Danny swallows the rejection and forces his eyes to stay dry, forces himself to turn around and step off the porch and head for the bus stop. One step at a time, one speculation after another; when will some other time be? What will tomorrow look like?

There’s so much left to say.

───── ⋅◆⋅ ─────

[perfectlywrongformend3s]

I need you-Cole Walter

A/n: Well I might have fallen for yet another fictional character. So please be prepared for many with him. Now on to the story...

-Samantha

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cole's POV

I was sitting around my dining room table with my brothers due to getting in trouble at school. I was growing tired of sitting here not wanting to talk to Alex after he told the school how I bawled to mom and dad about when my football dreams ended, even though I didn't start any rumors about him. Danny was reading his lines, making everyone get annoyed. 

" Yeah, I'm with Isaac. Stop. And you guys, can you just, like, figure this out? Because, like this fight is affecting all of us now." Nathan said  

" Really? It seems like it's mainly affecting me, though, right?" I then moved my head to my eye. " You know, the one with the black eye?" I stated 

Which made all my brothers look over at me, I let out a sigh before saying,  " All right, fine, I didn't spread the rumor about you crying like a little bitch, I wish I had, of course cause you snitched me to Dad, but I didn't." 

" I didn't snitch." Alex said 

All I did was give him a look which made him sigh. " Okay. I should have said,"no" instead of nothing to Dad, but I didn't because of what you said about Jackie and Y/n at the bonfire." 

Which only got the rest of the talking, " What did you say about them at the bonfire?" Lee questioned 

" Yeah, I kind of wanna know too." Danny said 

" You guys, can we focus?" Nathan questioned 

" You know what, Alex? I forgive you for punching me. But I'm really sorry that you can't get over how jealous you are of me." I said 

He leaned up some more. " Jealous? Who could be jealous of someone who clearly peaked their sophomore year of high school?" He said 

I didn't even listen to the others. All I did was get up to go fight him again. " Come over and say that again?" I said only to get stopped by Danny.

" Maybe I will." Alex responded 

" Yo, Nathan, Guys, Nathan!" Lee shouted 

I immediately stopped and went down to him. " Mom! Somebody get Mom and Dad. Go!" I said panicking 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We were all in the waiting room. All I could do was stare at the wall in front of me. The doctor came which made me stand up along with everyone else, after he told us things Mom and Dad went with him while I sat back down. I pulled out my phone to call Jackie, but decided to call Y/n. I couldn't help, but feel super anxious while listening to the ringing. 

Your POV

I was finishing up some homework when my phone rang. I picked it up to find it was Cole. Even though I was still mad at him I answered because he normally never calls me. 

"Hello" I said 

All I heard was his sigh of relief. " Cole, you never call unless it's important." I said leaning back into my chair. 

" I'm in the hospital..." he started, but immediately got interrupted by me. " What! Are you okay?" I said panicking 

" It's Nathan...he had a seizure...and I'm scared." he replied 

I stood up rushing to my closet to put shoes on. " Is there anything you need?" I questioned with concern holding my phone to my ear with my shoulder while I slipped my shoes on. What I heard next made me feel butterflies. " I need you." he whispered with a voice crack

Which made my heart break. " I'm on my way, Cole. Hang in there okay." I said 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I quickly found a parking spot and rushed inside the hospital. I scanned the waiting room and quickly found the Walters. I ignored the other ones for right now, my main focus was Cole who was leaning forward on his knees. 

" Hey, come here." I softly said when I was close

He stood up and put his arms around my waist and pulled me into him. I gently drew circles on his back to calm him further. " I'm right here, I'm not leaving." I whispered 

Danny's POV

I looked up when I heard Y/n's soft voice. She completely ignored us and I'm pretty sure it wasn't on purpose. I just watched them hug when I heard Isaac questioned me, " I thought they weren't talking right now?" I sighed, " Yea, but it's Y/n. She would do anything for him even if she was mad." I explained while still watching them. I then heard more footsteps to find Mom and Dad again. 

"All right guys, um Nathan's going to be fine. He'll come back home tomorrow so why don't you guys head back home." Mom said 

Your POV

I pulled away from Cole to find Katherine and George. She looked surprise to see me. " Oh, Y/n I didn't know you came." She said

I walked up to them. " Sorry, this one called and I couldn't not show up." I said pointing to Cole. She nodded and pulled me into a hug. " Well, I'm glad you did. I swear he's always in a better mood when you're around." 

I smiled before pulling away then hugging George quickly. " Well if any of you want to ride with me I don't mind. I only saw Cole raise his hand a little. I nodded before giving the others quick hugs before heading out to take Cole back to the ranch house while Danny drove the rest. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We were about 10 minutes away from the ranch house. I glanced over at Cole in my passenger seat. " You doing okay, Cole." I whispered while moving my eyes back to the road.

" Yea, I'm sorry for what I said." he softly said 

I let out a shaky breath. " It's fine, you know I can't stay mad at you." 

" I..." I stopped him

" Let's just talk when you are more rested." I suggested 

He nodded, I then parked my car and waited for him to get out. " You know you can come in." he whispered 

" It's okay, I just wanted to make sure you were okay." I said leaning my head on the headrest. 

" But I want you to come in." he said softly 

I glanced over at him and felt bad for him. " Okay..." I whispered while I got out of my car after I shut it off. 

We both walked to the front door and walked into his house after he unlocked it. " You want to go lie down?" I whispered closing the door

He didn't answer. All he did was walk up the stairs. I followed him up the stairs, we then walked right into his shared room with Danny. I saw him just lie down. I sighed a little and went to pull his shoes off. " Hey you don't need too." he said sitting up

" No, it's fine. I don't mind." I said 

" Here, let me change and fine something for you." he said 

I stopped and watched as he got up to get clothes. He walked over to me with one of his shirts. "Here you can wear this." He said handing me the shirt. I smiled a little and moved to change in the bathroom. 

Once I was done I walked back to his room, to see him in bed already. " Come in." he whispered 

I smiled a little and climbed in. " You know, Cole. Your brother is going to be okay." I whispered to him

" How do you know?" he whispered back

I turned to face him. " Because Nathan is strong and he will not let this ruin him." I softly said 

He looked over at me with a slight smile. " Thank you, Y/n/n." 

" No, need to thank me. Get some rest." I whispered going deeper into the covers. He let his hand intertwine with mine before he fell asleep. I smiled before also going to sleep. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay so I really hope you all like this one. I'm hoping it makes sense, I think it does but definitely let me know. Please enjoy!

-Samantha

[mysteriousooze]

Any Valerie Gray headcanons?

Ohohoho now where did I put that soapbox...

Valerie eventually has to come to terms with her own ghostly nature. She has been imbued and empowered by nanobots and ectoplasm, and even when she isn't using any of it, she is different now

Technus is capable of mind controlling Valerie. Fortunately, he is stupid. He doesn't think to do so for a very long time, and it's obvious the moment he does

They never actually figure out how to prevent technus from controlling her. But thankfully he never gets good at it. Instead, he learns to fear being beaten like a pinata by teenagers

Eventually, the GIW is able to pick Valerie up on their sensors due to her super suit living under her skin

Valerie is not a halfa. She doesn't have ghost powers. To any ecologists, she seems highly contaminated and likely overshadowed.

Any attempt or even success in removing the ectoplasm and nanobots from her system will kill her.

Valerie was that kid who never missed a day of school even if she had the flu and everyone would have been safer if she had stayed home. Being sick just makes her stubbornly determined to persevere.

(Valerie stays home from school the day she realizes the anti-ecto acts apply to herself)

If Valerie were to ever come into contact with blood blossoms, she would feel pain within her entire body, followed by muscle spasms as if being jolted with electricity, and—with prolonged exposure—sores would open on her skin and start leaking ectoplasm.

Blood blossoms alone wouldn't kill her, unlike Danny. But they would weaken her immune system enough that something else likely would.

Valerie eventually develops a sort of sixth sense for electromagnetic fields

If Danny transforms into a human and keeps a lid on his powers, he can hide from the GIWs sensors. Valerie can never hide.

Valerie's eyes are opened to her own behavior toward ghosts after the GIW treat her as subhuman.

It's not Danny who saves her. It's Sam Manson.

Valerie's dad and Sam's parents work with the teen girls as they spearhead the ecto rights movement. Valerie becomes a figurehead. She hates it, but she hates the GIW more

Eventually when Valerie joins team Phantom, she learns that Tucker has been able to track her location using her nanobots this whole time

The more she learns about Danny's weird friends, the more she comes to respect them

Hey friendship with Sam is frightening to behold. The bond over the destruction of their enemies

She doesn't touch romance with a ten-foot pole, and is thankful nobody brings up feelings. Team Phantom have flashes of rage or betrayal or yearning, usually followed by an awkward silence. But mostly it's because they're low-key being hunted by the government

(Publicly, the government isn't hunting them at all. They strike indirectly, or when ghosts can take the blame. They place substitute teachers in Casper High, which is always badly understaffed. It's a strange cold war.)

Valerie never has the problems with controlling her nanobots that Danny did his powers, but sometimes her reflexes get the better of her.

Valerie would rather get angry than cry

She almost shot her dad once when he tried to wake her up from a nightmare. She bawled for two hours while he held her

Valerie sees herself as an adult after becoming a ghost hunter. She occasionally doesn't see Youngblood bc of this

She's honestly such a daddy's girl tho it's kind of embarrassing. If Young blood tried to sneak up on her while she was with him, he would immediately be spotted

Valerie never becomes one of the popular kids again, but rises above it all. She's the kind of powerhouse of a girl that kids part like the red sea to get out of her way

She doesn't become a leader so much as a linchpin of teenage civil disobedience

She knows everyone in Casper High. She has their phone numbers. She has their secrets. And she knows most have been trained with Fenton Blasters and are willing to use them

With a single mass text that the GIW is cornering Phantom, a flood of teenagers takes to the streets for their hero

Valerie isn't the leader of a teenage militia. But isn't not NOT a leader iykyk

Valerie eventually develops an affinity for controlling technology

Technus decides that she is his daughter

It's like a much less dangerous version of the relationship between Danny and Vlad

He still wants to take over the world but also considers himself to be a good father who does not fight his daughter

Team Phantom can recruit him as an ally

As an unrepentant daddy's girl, Valerie is filled with unquenchable rage at the presumption of this undead weirdo

Technus might have tried challenging Valerie's dad if team Phantom didn't keep gaslighting him that he couldn't tell humans apart "omg Technus that's not even her dad. He has a completely different eye color"

Valerie accidentally activates the nanobots inside of Jazz. They can't do all of the things that Valerie's does, but between the two of them, they figure out how to strengthen her, as well as make her immune to overshadowing

Nanobot buddies:)

Tucker is a mite envious

Dani is the little sister Valerie always yearned for; she feels like a partner in crime and like her baby girl all at once.

Jazz is the big sister she never wanted

Danny will never feel like a brother tho lol

Valerie and Danny have solidarity in helping each other avoid therapy with Jazz

All of their parents (except her own dad) trust Valerie implicitly for some reason. "Well if Valerie's there then whatever you're doing is okay" kind of deal

It baffles, outrages, and amuses the trio, bc Valerie is just as bad if not worse

Valerie is a force of nature

Valerie will continue to hone her ghost hunting abilities. Not bc she hates ghosts; to protect the ghosts closest to her heart

Bc Vlad Masters is the real monster, and he is escalating. Someday, someone will have to put him down. And he's already in her sights.

[auroralightsthesky]

Top Gun Gang/Family Headcanons (Because I fucking need this in my life right now)

Some OCs were involved in the making of this list, major feels ahead people!!! (Note: I will be doing face claims for the OCs somewhere along the line so bear with me)

Penny and Mav

Maverick’s basically been Amelia’s dad ever since she was born

Amelia’s biological dad basically walked out on Penny when she told him she was pregnant

But Maverick promised her that he’d go to whatever lengths he could to help, even if it meant legally adopting Amelia

And when she was born?? Oh holy shit, the man who we’ve never really seen cry, bawled like a little girl

From day one he had that girl wrapped around his finger like an out of control ivy vine

Penny and Maverick were together for about twelve years

And that’s when they got a call that changed their lives for the better

Maverick had recently lost one of his brothers and his sister-in-law was out of control and had gotten arrested

But they had two three-year old twin boys, Danny and Thomas

Maverick and Penny took them with no questions asked and since Mav was a Navy Captain, the paperwork went through quicker than they could blink an eye

The boys were flown right to the base. Bob, Rooster, Hangman, Coyote, Phoenix, Fanboy and Payback all came to greet the newest members of the family

The boys bolted away from the social worker who had brought them and ran right to Mav, screaming “UNCLE PETEY!!!” at the top of their lungs

Mav and Penny scooped them right up, laughing the entire time

Finally, after years and years of waiting

Penny and Maverick made it official

They got married at the base with like half the Navy in attendance

Plus Maverick looked hot as ever in those Navy dress blues

He loves taking the boys up in the planes

Because it reminds him of when he used to do it with Rooster when he himself was their age

Penny can’t imagine life without her boys

Because the day Danny and Thomas were adopted, life was complete

Rooster and Rusty

Rooster and his girl, family call sign: Rusty, have twin boys as well, Nicky and Pete

Nicky is almost exactly like Rooster and his grandfather/namesake

Rooster will stick the two boys on top of the piano when everybody comes over

And he’ll play Great Balls of Fire of course

Whenever he looks at the boys they finish the verse

And those cute little voices singing “goodness gracious, great balls of fire!!” has everybody laughing and melting at the same time

Don’t even get me started on the painted brothers incident

One day Rooster came home to find his boys a painted mess and Rusty exasperated

“Whose idea was this? Who got into the paint without askin’ Mommy?” 

The boys just shrug

And Rooster was a laughing mess. He didn’t care if Rusty was giving him dirty looks

Because it was kind of hard to discipline the kids and not laugh at the same time

Maverick and the other guys saw the video Rooster took of Nicky and Pete and couldn’t stop laughing for hours

And they know that they’ll still be laughing about it many years from now

Hangman and Gretchen

Let’s face it, Hangman’s a girl dad all the way

And Gretchen with her thick Georgia accent, gives him a run for his money, just like their daughters

Molly is the one who will willingly play football with her dad and her uncles on the beach

And she’ll wear his aviators when he brings her to the base, she even has a little American flag tank top and a tiny flight suit she loves to bring with her when daddy flies

Missy tends to stick close to her mom and Aunt Penny

And her Aunt Natasha. Whenever Daddy’s up in the air with Molly, Missy gets to wear the headset and talk to them from the ground while Phoenix has her on her shoulders

Even though hangman does want a boy someday in the family

He’s pretty content with the girls, his queen and his two princesses

Because God only knows that whatever boys he and Gretchen have one day are going to be the worst kinds of troublemakers

Bob and Moira

Bob and Moira had always wanted kids

But Moira was a bit on the twiggy side and had been prone to health issues over the years

So when Bob found out she was pregnant he couldn’t have been happier 

But the baby came early.....like scarily early

Their son was immediately taken to the ICU where the nurse had put him in an incubator

Moira and Bob were both terrified that he wouldn’t make it 

Bob didn’t even want to go back to work because he was terrified to leave them 

Until Maverick stepped in and gave him a reason to go back

Bob worried every day about Moira and his son who they had named August Peter Floyd

One day Bob was coming back from a flight practice with Phoenix, Hangman and Coyote

And Maverick came running up with his helmet in his hands

Bob saw the look on his face and panicked

So the five of them rushed to the Navy hospital 

Bob was still scared when the nurse told him that August was having trouble with his heart

So she let Bob hold him

Bob was super shaky when he took his shirt off and held August against his chest

Because Auggie was still really tiny

But lo and behold, he let out a tiny, shaky cry and looked right up at his father, mother, uncles and aunts

There wasn’t a dry eye there that day and later on, Bob and Moira had the Navy chaplain come in to have Auggie baptized

The little bean grew up with hardly another issue after that

He loves to go flying with his Daddy

Good God the two are carbon copies of each other

And Bob and Moira are forever grateful that they were blessed with their son and his siblings who came after

Coyote and Raquel

Coyote met Raquel after the fam went to Rio de Janeiro while they were on leave

Next thing you know everything fell into place and soon they were married with a family

But being a Navy wife wasn’t easy at all, there were nights where Raquel had called Penny in tears, wishing Coyote was there with her

But their kids, Paloma, Carla and Tiago gave her a reason to keep going while Coyote was away

Tiago has told his dad time and again that he wants to play football for both America and for Brazil, which makes his mom happy to no end

Coyote even keeps a picture of the four of them on the dash in the cockpit and in his pocket at all times

Because just like Raquel, seeing his loved ones gives him a reason to keep going

Phoenix and Cole

Both are military which is really difficult for their son, Gabe

Cole is a Navy SEAL and sometimes he’s away on super dangerous missions

Which leaves Gabe to have to stay with Penny or Cole’s dad half the time

Every day Phoenix makes it a point to call him and talk to him, especially since he’s only in first grade

Gabe tag teams alot with Bob’s son, August, they’ve even picked their own call signs already

Gabe made his uncles laugh when he said his call sign was “Tater Tot” 

And August’s was “Mr. Potato Head” 

Phoenix and her husband all live for moments like this

Because when they’re out on a mission they remember what they’re fighting for

Fanboy and Jewel

Fanboy, like Coyote, met his wife in a foreign country, in fact in his family’s native Colombia

Jewel’s a bit of a hippie, like not in a bad way, just that she knows alot about nature 

Isabella is their princess, she always brings flowers from her mom’s garden to Aunt Penny when they bring her to visit The Hard Deck, but Rodrigo and Sebastian are always running around with their little matchbox planes

And after Fanboy came back from a mission they all ran to him and cried

Because they missed him so much while he was gone and so didn’t Jewel

It was actually the first time Fanboy had cried too

Because he realized what family really meant to him

Payback and Aasha

Aasha is a girls’ softball coach and sometimes brings Payback and their daughters along

They love wearing their Navy jerseys to the Army/Navy softball games 

Payback has literally carried them onto the tarmac to see their aunts and uncles, Geneva on one shoulder and Nevaeh on the other, loudly announcing “I’ve got my trophies with me!!!” while the girls are giggling

One day the daughter of another officer was acting like an entitled brat

And the girls threatened her with payback

Until their dad stepped out from around the corner

“No, this payback!” Nevaeh proudly announced pointing to her dad

The girl saw who he was, got scared and ran away

And every time someone is mean to them, they threaten whoever is being mean to them with “Payback” 

Needless to say Payback laughs

Because they’re “his little bugs” and nothing is ever gonna change that

Sorry the headcannons were so long guys there was alot to fit in here (lol)

[makeitp1nk]

PROCRASTINATE IN P1NK

Y’all I’m three weeks behind on hw so today I read a shitton of fic instead of catching up. I’ve been screaming about a couple of these throughout the day but I want to consolidated & attempt to form a coherent thought b/c I’ve been in all caps amazeface mode all day. Here it goes -- 

Unresting Death - Anon, Part of Blackcest Fest 

One of my favorite *themes* in *anything* is the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. I *love* horror. I’m known to go to the theater to watch horror flicks by myself without issue, but throw me a Haunting @ Hill House Mind Fuck™️ and I won’t sleep for days. & psychologically fucked characters, ahem Hannibal, love them. The end of the this fic had me screaming. 

For Sale by Owner: Rose Weasley-Granger’s Virginity - @vukovich

This fic is part of FUCK HIS DAD fest. What’s funny is that it reminded me of that Bible verse -- “He is the stone which was rejected by you, the builders, but which became the chief corner stone.” Except it’s Rose and she fucked his dad. Watching her become the chief ass corner stone is glorious. Especially because she’s the thirstiest character you’ve ever read. The pining is also magnificent, as well as the characterizations of the extended family. Molly Weasley takes the cake, and the little ritual she shows Rose is just empowering as all hell. And don’t even get me started on the fabulous one-liners in this fic. Just go read it, kids.

The Best Kept Secrets - @danni-the-puff

I’ve screamed about this fic incoherently in three separate posts, so this is my attempt at being a sane person. I hate Hinny with a passion (no judgement if it’s your ship, it’s just not mine). Yet I read this Hinny because I figured it wasn’t endgame. Though the writing had me doubting it at times, the journey that the characters go through in the process to endgame Snarry is beautifully handled. There’s so much growth, and so many tough lessons learned that only *one* character gets to profit off of lol (well maybe two... ) Also, I don’t read cheating in fics, it hurts my little heart. But this fucking fic was incredible. The cheating wasn’t gratuitous, it was handled in a way where you condemn it but it’s not bitter/sour if that makes sense. It’s a sad face instead of a gut-punch, which is what infidelity usually feels like for me. Anywayyyyy the emotional complexity in this fic is next level. It has so much heart, and it’s hot as fuck. Looking back, my heart feels so good at having met these characters and how things turned out for them. You walk away having fallen in love with them all and happy with where they landed. Highly highly highly recommend.

Extra Credit - Other Things I Read This Week Because I Enjoy The Anxiety of Working On a Deadline, Apparently

After (I’ll Never Let You Go) - @famoustruth

I don’t usually read T or G fics 😉, but the premise pulled me in and I fell in love. The characterization is spot-on, it’s so well written you can *see* it and *feel* it. Overall, it’s sweet like candy and you’ll love it.

Keep Swinging Your Bat My Way - @veelawings

Dron Call Me Daddy Fest entry by Veelawings. Need I say more? I’ve been waiting for some sort of post to go around about this fic on Tumblr so I can scream about it but I haven’t seen it. So here I am, being the change I want to see in the world. This fic is fire. Ron is fire. It’s less than 1K of locker room sex perfection that is v much worth your time. 

Crawl Back Into Your Open Arms - @academicdisasterfic​

Grab the tissues, y’all. This fic resonated with me on a visceral level as someone who fell for “projects” back in the day. (I just cringed typing that sentence) So Part 5 was just gorgeous to me, I just *ached* for Draco. There’s this sentence where he says he’s a bad person when he’s in love, and I felt that deep in my bones. I knew Rooney would give me that happy ending but still bawled my eyes out when I got it. There’s so much heart in this fic, can’t recommend it enough.

Look at all the coherent sentences I wrote!!!!! If you read this far, high five!!!! I’m gonna go do my hw now 😘 maybe

[msmischief101]

♞Pairing: Steo ♞Characters: Stiles Stilinski, Theo Raeken, Kira Yukimura, Corey Bryant, Mason Hewitt, Brett Talbot ♞Warnings: Underage drinking ♞Words: 3016 ♞ Writing Prompt: “5 times Person A thought they were in a relationship with Person B and 1 time Person B finally catches on that their own pining is definitely not unrequited."

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part 5/6

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Stiles cards his fingers through his hair, squeezing past a group of guys bawling a song nobody can quite decipher. He reaches behind him, and Kira grabs his hand. This party was a questionable decision, but it’s a lacrosse thing. So, they obliged. Even Liam, Corey, and Mason returned a day early from their little trip to Mason’s grandparents to be here. It’s a team bonding experience. Allegedly. But ever since Jackson and Danny left this team has been more than a little fractured — and they’re defeated because of how much they suck. After all, Devenford Prep isn’t the only team that wipes the floor with them. Devenford Prep is also the reason they’re invited to this postseason party.

Or rather, Brett is.

Stiles takes a deep breath as they’re finally past the epicenter of idiocy, drinks securely in their hands, and they walk to the lakefront. They’re halfway down the small path when Mason starts waving them over, gesturing to a blanket Corey is spreading across the sand.

“There you are.” Brett grins up at them. “I thought you’d never come.”

“My jeep refused to cooperate.” Stiles sits down on the blanket.

Kira follows suit. “We had to walk back to my place.” Her smile is bright but apologetic. It’s not like they have to apologize, but Brett makes everything sound like an attack, and neither Kira nor Stiles are good at leaving things without an explanation.

“Where’s your worse half?” Brett inquires, raising a brow as he gets into a more comfortable position on his blanket.

Stiles sips on his drink, pulling a face at the strong taste of vodka under all that orange juice. Holy shit. So, that Ryan dude is never going to mix his drink again. “Theo’s working.” Next to him, Kira coughs and puts her red cup down. Looks like she’s agreeing with him on that. Carefully, he sniffs at the drink. Maybe he should’ve done that earlier. This already smells like alcohol poisoning.

“Theo is working?” Mason sounds utterly surprised.

It pisses Stiles off. Sure, Theo doesn’t have a sparkly clean record, and he’s a bit messed up after all those years living with mad scientists, but it’s not like he can’t be a functioning member of society. “He works at a Wolf Sanctuary. There was some kind of emergency, and his boss called him.”

"A wolf sanctuary?" Mason repeats.

"Yes, a place for wolves that—"

"I know what a wolf sanctuary is!"

Stiles sips on his drink, narrowing his eyes. They all agreed on giving Theo another chance after he saved his ass from the Wild Hunt, and now Kira and Stiles are the only ones who are even trying. This isn’t what they agreed on. Not even in the slightest. Is Stiles slightly biased because he has the worst crush on Theo? Maybe. But in the end, the rest of the pack pushed for Theo’s second chance. Stiles was against that. At the beginning at least. His traitorous body made him change his mind really quick.

“That’s—” Corey elbows Mason in the ribs, not even trying to be subtle about it. Mason coughs and smiles. “Great. That’s great.”

Kira huffs out a breath. “He’s doing a wonderful job. The wolves love him.”

“Colour me surprised.” Brett leans back onto his elbows, quirking a brow in amusement.

Stiles suppressed the urge to smack the back of his head. This is progress, and he’s not going to be a dick about it just because it’s easy work. For them, it might be easy as hell, but Theo isn’t like them. He’s different. Being sociable is harder for him, especially over a longer period of time. Working with the wolves has helped Theo too. He’s happier, more relaxed. At least it looks that way.

And hopefully, this has to do with the wolves…

Stiles swallows and takes another sip from his drink.

Brett sits up, nudging Stiles’ upper arm with his elbow. “I’m glad your boyfriend is getting the hang of being social.”

“Boyfriend?” Corey echoes, sounding almost more surprised than Stiles feels. Because what the hell is Brett talking about? Did someone snitch on him? Somebody must’ve told him that Stiles has a crush on Theo. How else would he— Liam. Stiles is going to strangle this little rat. That’s for sure.

Stiles clears his throat. “Theo isn’t my boyfriend.”

“What?” Kira whips her head around, staring at him in surprise.

Why is she surprised by this news? She’s been hanging out with them for the past month. It’s not like Stiles and Theo have acted like a couple. They haven’t held hands or hugged or kissed. They haven’t kissed once. Not even in private, and it’s killing Stiles. He wants to kiss Theo so bad it makes his head spin. Maybe he should do it before they’re leaving for college. They’re all going to go their separate ways anyway. That could be his chance to test the waters. “We’re not dating,” Stiles mutters, trying to sound nonchalant. Because even though they never dated, his heart aches to a wild degree.

Brett scoffs. “Does Theo know that?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Brett squints at him for a few seconds that feel like an eternity. Not fun. Not fun at all. “I’m itching to show you, but I’m so not interested in getting punched in the face.” He taps a finger against the ground. “Not that he can reach my face.” Whatever is going through his head plunges him into what seems to be an existential crisis. “Okay.” With a sigh, Brett sits up again and gestures for Stiles to come closer. “Let me in on a secret.”

Although Stiles is convinced that this secret is going to be utter bullshit, he’s too curious for his good. He scoots over without hesitation. “I’m listening.”

Brett leans over, mouth brushing against the shell of his ear. He’s doing it intentionally, and Stiles wants to strangle him. “Theo,” he whispers quietly enough that he’s hard to hear over the music, placing a hand on Stiles’ neck, “wants to fuck you.”

“What—”

His grip on Stiles tightens slightly, almost as if he suspected that he’d react this way. Chuckling, Brett continues. “And he wants to, well, take care of you — emotionally. He also wants to make sure that you eat and sleep and don’t kill yourself by being a reckless fucking idiot.”

Stiles pushes at Brett’s shoulder until the werewolves decide to bring a bit of distance between them. “Are you kidding me?”

“This is not a joke.”

“Then why are you laughing?” Stiles narrows his eyes.

Brett leans back onto his elbows. “Because you’re a dumbass.”

“Hey, hello, hi.” Mason raises a hand as if he’s in class. “What’s this about?” He gestures back and forth between Stiles and Brett. Talking about this with the noisiest person at their school around is probably not a great idea, but walking away now would only pique Mason's interest even further.

Brett ignores him. "I'll prove it to you."

"Yeah, right."

"Scared?"

Despite the horrendous taste, Stiles takes a long drink of whatever monstrosity Ryan created and closes his eyes. He's not scared because there's no way in hell Theo's ever going to reciprocate his feelings. It's just not a thing that could happen. He’s not that lucky. Not even in the slightest. “Fuck you.”

Brett snorts out a laugh. “I don’t have a death wish, but thanks for the offer.”

“Fine.” He’s never been good at backing down from a challenge, but ever since he’s hanging out with the supernatural crowd, Stiles is driven by the urge to prove himself. It’s not a good combination with his poor impulse control. “Fine. Do whatever you want, but I can already tell that you’re wasting your time.”

“You owe me.”

“We’ll see about that.” Stiles takes another sip from his drink, and by now, it’s not even tasting all that bad; which is probably a good thing because Stiles doesn’t like the devious glint in Brett’s eyes at all. This is going to be one hell of a party.

----------

After Hayden and Liam had a fight, every party needs at least one couple yelling at each other, and that’s why Mason had to leave early. Corey, however, stayed — and Stiles is pretty sure Mason asked his boyfriend to linger so he’s getting all the details. Theo agreed to drive him home later tonight. Since some of the alcohol is laced with wolfsbane, it actually affects Kira and the werewolves, so, for the first time in forever, they are in desperate need of a designated driver. Theo was more than happy to agree — under the condition that next time, someone else is going to drive their asses home. Stiles was more than happy to agree. He’s fine with staying sober during a party.

“Are you going to be done with that anytime soon?” Stiles asks, turning to look at Brett.

Kira snacks on her salt sticks, defending them from everyone with glares and shooing gestures. She’s gotten very protective of these things after her second cup of Ryan’s drink. Stiles learned that the hard way.

“Art demands work,” Brett informs him without looking up.

Kira cackles.

Corey rubs his hands together, gaze darting from Stiles to Brett to Theo and back again. After getting drinks with Theo, he’s gotten very silent and very stressed.

“It’s a fucking drink,” Stiles says, fumbling for his phone. “Get it over with.”

“So bossy.”

Theo clears his throat, and Stiles looks up. On a normal day, Theo is super distracting. Right now, Stiles is laser-focused on everything he does — and he cannot decide if it’s better or worse that he’s sitting opposite instead of next to him. No, no. It’s better he sits where he sits right now. God knows, if Theo sat next to him, Stiles would make an ass out of himself and find reasons to touch him. He’s way too affectionate when he’s tipsy. It’s not great. Especially not when he’s trying to hide a crush. Stiles smiles at Theo, then drops his phone between his legs without.

“So,” Brett says, shaking the bottle in his hand, “this is pretty strong, just as a heads up.”

“I’m a big boy. I can handle myself.” He smirks at Brett and offers his cup, quirking a brow. Although Stiles can feel Theo’s eyes on him, he forces himself to keep his focus on Brett. He’s going to spend the rest of the night with Theo at Theo’s place. Alone. It’s just the two of them. Kira’s parents aren’t home, and although Stiles knows his dad wouldn’t necessarily punish him — except for the stern Dad speech — he’d rather not run into him hungover. So, Theo’s place it is. Not staring at Theo now might save him in the long run. Even though Stiles is pretty sure that ship has sailed some time ago.

Brett chuckles and fills his cup up. “Good,” he says in a low voice. “This wouldn’t be fun otherwise.”

Theo shifts again, and like a fucking moth drawn to light, Stiles flicks his gaze to him. He puts the cup to his lips, looking at Theo, and Theo is still looking at him, face unreadable in the soft lighting of the torches and moon. Swallowing dryly, Stiles takes a long drink from whatever Brett has spent way too long mixing. It tastes— very different. Which is probably because of the wolfsbane mixed in there. Stiles only agreed to try this after Brett promised that this is will not make him hallucinate anything. “Oh god,” Stiles mutters, scrutinizing the bright red liquid. “There’s a lot going on here.” It doesn’t taste bad, and it doesn’t taste nearly as strong as Ryan’s drink, but Stiles couldn’t pinpoint the taste to save his life. It does taste like something fruity, and Stiles has no idea what alcohol that. “But it’s not bad.” He takes another sip.

Brett fills his own cup. “You’re that guy who never ceases to surprise, aren’t you?”

“I like to be an enigma.” He grins or tries to. Truth of the matter is, although he talks a lot, he doesn’t talk much about himself. Strictly because he always feels like people aren’t necessarily interested in anything he has to say unless it helps defeating the latest monster. In fact, there are some things Scott doesn’t even know about him.

“Oh,” Kira breathes, scooting closer to him and pats his thigh. “I love that song. We should dance.”

Stiles snorts out a laugh and gives her the cup. “Dance?” he echoes, turning to look at her.

Kira pokes his thigh. “Yes." Her eyes light up. "Let’s dance."

"Yeah, let’s go dance." Brett clicks his tongue and straightens, bending one knee. The glint in his eyes does not bode well, but Brett said he could prove that Theo is reciprocating his feelings.

Right.

Brett empties his come in one go. "Come on. It’s a party." His smirk turns positively dangerous "We should have some fun."

Again, Stiles' gaze flits towards Theo. For the first time, he doesn’t find Theo looking back at him. Instead, he’s studying Brett with a clenched jaw. Stiles’ stomach contorts, and he forces his gaze away, watches the liquid in his cup swirl around. Not for the first time, he wishes he would be as relaxed as Brett. His no-fucks-given state of mind is enviable. Stiles is pretty sure the guy doesn’t overthink every single move he makes, stresses himself out over every little word he says, every expression that could have been read wrong. Instead, his heart attacks his ribcage fiercely, and Stiles follows Brett’s example, emptying his cup in one go. Now, he can feel the alcohol burn on its way down his throat. He curls his lips then pushes his empty cup into Brett’s. An edge of frustration gnaws at him.

Fuck.

"Fine. Let’s dance." Stiles is going to eat his words. He’s so going to eat his words. At this point, he should know better than to push Brett when he’s having an agenda.

Kira scrambles to her feet almost instantly, pulling Stiles with her before he even has the chance to get his feet underneath him. “I love that song.” She grabs Stiles by the wrist, pulling him along.

Laughing, he looks over his shoulder. His heart sinks when he spots Theo talking to Brett. Even with the werewolf towering above him, he seems angry enough to be arguing with him about something. Stiles wishes he were better at lip-reading because he has no clue what Theo could be angry about right now.

Brett gestures briefly over his shoulder. Whatever he says pisses Theo off even further because Corey grabs his arm, stopping him from doing something stupid. It’s the last thing he sees before the dancing crowd blocks his view of them. Theo hasn’t been in a fight for a while, and Corey is good at keeping people calm. This is going to be fine. He doesn’t have a chance to make sure anyway because Kira is pulling him further into the crowd.

Stiles is sure they’ve crossed the whole dance floor until Kira is satisfied. Letting go of his hand, she spins around. She’s grinning, falling into the rhythm easily. For the first time, Stiles is glad his mother enrolled him in a dance course when he was younger because he really doesn’t want to look like an idiot when Theo’s coming here.

Stop thinking about him.

Stiles is almost a little jealous of how carefree Kira is. Having a crush is fucking painful; especially if it’s this unattainable.

Okay, that’s enough.

Someone bumps into him. “I didn’t know you could dance.” Theo’s mouth is close to his ear, and Stiles almost chokes on nothing but air. That’s close. That’s very close. That’s almost a bit too close. But they’re on they’re in the middle of a dancing crowd. It’s not like they actually have a lot of space. Of course, Theo has to come really close if he wanted to talk to him. That’s just… that’s how it is. Right? So, if Stiles turns around now, and he’s really close to Theo’s face, it’s just because he wants to talk to him. Nothing else.

Stiles swallows and turns around. Yup. Close. Oh god. Very close. He can smell Theo’s aftershave. His fingers itch to touch. He wants to touch him so bad. Scratch that. If he were allowed to kiss him, Stiles wouldn’t stop. But just like every single time before now, he puts on a grin and pretends as if everything’s fine. “I was hiding those dance classes really well when I was younger.”

“Shame. I’d love to see you dance more.” Theo shifts closer, licking his lips.

Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. He’s so fucked. “Then… this is a good place for that.” Stiles steps away and almost immediately bumps into Corey’s who’s appeared behind him without warning.

Theo stares at him in what Stiles could only describe as bewilderment, and he keeps staring at him even as Brett bends down to whisper something in his ear. For the flicker of a second, Theo’s eyes narrow, and his lips twitch dangerously. Then he shakes his head and fumbles for his wallet of all things. Who in their right mind would get their wallet out in the middle of a dancefloor? But Theo is unperturbed and fishes out a banknote. After a second of contemplation, he pushes it in Brett’s waiting hand.

“Pleasure doing business with you.”

Theo shoves his wallet back into the pocket of his pants. “Piss off.”

Stiles raises a brow. “What the hell was that all about?”

“I won.” Brett winks at him and vanishes into the crowd. Won what, exactly? What kind of bet would Brett and Theo make? The two hardly talk to each other, and now they’re making bets? Stiles doesn’t trust this. He doesn’t trust this at all.

Before Stiles can question it further, Kira pops up next to them, grabbing their wrists. “Dance! Let’s go.”

[slashedthroughtheheart]

Patched up with the doc

'For a request, would it be okay if I asked for Herman taking care of a reader who got injured outside of a trial? I do kind of want it to be an angsty moment at first, but it just turns into fluff and comfort. I don't want smut or anything. Just Herman being a gentleman and showing the reader his affectionate, caring side. They both might not admit it at first, but they really like each other and always wanna be extremely close; Hugs and cuddles.'

This was the prompt, and here's what I went with! Enjoy a bit shorter of a fic featuring our good doctor, Herman Carter, taking care of a slightly belligerent reader!

It was just like any other day. You’d gone to the saloon in Glenvale with a few other survivors to just hang out. You couldn’t remember what you went out onto the upper deck wrapping around the saloon for, but you were cursing yourself for it now.

It was humiliating to be dangling with one leg partway through the broken floorboard. Whatever reason you had for coming out here was not worth it as you tried to pull yourself back up without further hurting yourself.

You weren’t having much luck, low curses leaving you as you prayed no one would come out to check on you. The last thing you needed was any of the other survivors, or entity forbid, any of the killers, to see you in such a pathetic position.

Being clumsy and mucking up a gen or two was bound to happen. Not making it to a pallet in time, no big deal. But something this pitiful was not something you wanted anyone to know about or see. You would never live it down.

You could picture the laughing stock you’d become if people caught wind that you literally fell through the floor and hurt yourself. You fell from greater heights during trials and had no problem rolling through it on the balls of your feet. Hell, there was that place in the Gideon meat plant that was way higher than the saloon and you’d never had trouble with that.

One last growl of frustration left you before a sharp intake of pain left you holding still after you definitely stabbed yourself on part of the broken board.

A barely audible whimper followed not soon after, the splintering wood jabbing at your torn skin. You could feel the blood dripping down your shin from where you had scraped yourself up, and from the fresh stabbing from trying to free yourself.

And just as you were going to try to move a different way, you heard the footsteps make creaks from somewhere behind you.

This was the worst case scenario, you could hear it was someone heavier than any of the survivors that had come with you. There’s no way Feng’s or Meg’s footsteps would be that loud.

Dread filled your heart as you whipped your head around, grimacing as your shift made the wood dig into you again.

And the eyes that landed on you lit up green when they saw the position you were in, awkwardly hunched onto the deck, obvious pain on your face and one leg dangling at just above the knee into the broken hole.

“Here, let me help you, my dear.”

Herman took purposeful steps towards you, intent on helping you free yourself and seeing to your wounds he caught the slightest glimpse of when you shifted in place.

“NO!”

He stopped, shocked at your sudden outburst.

You held an almost trembling hand up, as if that would keep him at bay. And it did, for a moment.

“I-I’m fine. I can do it myself. I don’t need any help, I’ll be fine.”

And as if the universe was amused in your suffering, when you tried to lift yourself once more from the jagged hole, a piece of wood lodged deeper into the beginning of your thigh, causing you to gasp out and almost choke on your pain.

“You don’t seem fine, y/n. Please let me at least assist you in getting out, I insist.” He’d moved forward a few steps, approaching slower, and eyeing the floorboards cautiously now.

You struggled again, throwing the same hand back up as you grit your teeth.

“I said no! I don’t want your help!” The tears were pricking at the corners of your eyes, stinging like you’d just cut up onions. Your nose burned as you held them in. The pain and humiliation leaving you a mortified and stubborn mess.

He hadn’t stopped in his approach, moving to the side and gently touching your arm with his hand, rubbing a small soothing circle on your shoulder.

“While any other time you saying no I would listen, I really must insist. You have injured yourself quite seriously, and are having a difficult time freeing yourself. I’ll get you up and out of that, and then we can head to Lérys and get you cleaned up. You’re sure to have splinters, and those are nearly impossible to remove on ones own, especially at the angle you’ve got them at.”

He sounded so matter-of-fact that you couldn’t even argue further, just holding in the tears and trying desperately not to sniffle and sound even more pitiful than you were sure you looked.

You tried to reason with yourself that at least it was Herman to find you and not someone like Danny or Frank. They would have probably laughed at you and gotten everyone else to come out and point and laugh with them.

You tried not to break down into tears of frustration as Herman moved around to your front, being careful of where he stepped and testing out the weight first before fully committing to the step.

He bent over, taking a moment to observer where the most damage was that he could see, the front of you leg just above the knee.

He simply hummed out in acknowledgment as he saw a rather large sliver of wood having made its home in your thigh, looking rather painful.

“Alright, I’m going to move you back just a bit and then lift you straight up. You might bump into the boards, but I’ll be able to get you up and standing just fine.” His hands moved to under your arms, taking care with his grip so as not to cause you any further discomfort.

At this point, you mutely accepted defeat, simply letting him take the lead as he adjusted you minutely before finally lifting you up, your leg not even brushing against the boards.

You felt even more miserable as you realized just how easily he’d gotten you out versus your own painful struggling that ended up with you hurting yourself more than doing any helping.

Once he had you out of the hole, you’d expected him to set you down on your own feet, but you were not expecting him to only rest you on them for a moment only to lean down to scoop you into his arms, injured leg on the outside.

At your bewildered look, he smiled gently. “Can’t have you walking with your leg like that, and Lérys is a bit of a walk.”

You wanted to protest, but at the same time you were getting your first good look at your leg, and maybe you really should just let him help you patch it up.

You weren’t even sure if Claudette could truly help fixing it up at this point.

So instead of fighting him on it, you nodded numbly, withdrawing into yourself so you wouldn’t give into the urge to start bawling like you’d been struggling with the whole time.

He went down the back steps, avoiding alerting any of the others to your condition, having noted that you were not in the mood to have anyone see you like this. You hadn’t even wanted him to help you, going so far as to try to pull yourself up and hurting yourself further.

No words passed between the two of you as he made his way towards Lérys, avoiding anyone else that you might have gone by with ease.

The relief you felt when he finally crossed the threshold into his realm was visible, pulling a very soft chuckle from him. It was nothing like his usual laughter. This laugh held a gentle mirth in it, a light but non-judgemental amusement.

“Rest assured, y/n. Your dignity is safe with me.” His thumb rubbed a small but soothing circle on the arm it was pressed against as he finally made his way into the building of the hospital, making a beeline for the closest room with the right equipment in it he’d need.

After carefully placing you on the hospital bed inside the room, he immediately went about gather the supplies he would need onto a rolling tray.

It did not take him much time at all to ready everything. There was a bottle of antiseptic, two pairs of tweezers, one big and one small, some gauze, a needle and some suture thread. It seemed you’d be getting stitches today.

At least these would be in a sterile environment with steady hands, unlike the ones you received during trials.

A meek “Thank you.” barely made it past your lips, your gaze staring at the gashes in your shin and the bit of wood protruding from your thigh.

Herman looked up from his readying of items, a soft smile gracing his features.

“It is not a problem, y/n. You were in distress, and I am more than happy to help.” He reached out, patting your uninjured leg for a moment before returning to the task at hand.

At his touch, you felt a warmth blossom in your chest, but you didn’t want to think about that right now. So you instead locked your gaze on your leg as he started meticulously cleaning your wounds and removing all the splinters you’d managed to get.

After the first touch sent near white hot pain through your body, you’d decided it was probably best not to watch so you laid yourself back, staring instead the ceiling as you balled your fists in an attempt to stay as still as possible.

Thankfully, the good doctor was precise in his movements and had you sufficiently patched up in seemingly no time at all. Considering the amount of damage, having to sit still for 20 minutes really hadn’t been that bad.

You let out a shaky breath in response to his question of how you were doing, still trying to hold your tears that had never left you in.

The weight of his palm against your upper arm startled you into opening your eyes and looking up at the now blue eyes of the doctor.

“It is okay, y/n. It’s understandable that this kind of injury is quite painful, especially considering the entity will likely not heal it until your next trial.” There was understanding in his face, a tenderness you’d never seen on him before.

It was foreign, but not unwelcome. You still felt plenty embarrassed by your situation, but the voice inside your head happily reminded you that it could have been worse.

Although, at the gentle press of his hand, the dam that had been holding back your emotions finally burst.

Hot tears trickled out the sides of your eyes to disappear into your hair behind your ears, the sensation feeling strange and only adding to your already frazzled nerves.

You sniffed once, twice, then let out a small but frustrated sounding whimper as your hands came up to rub almost viciously against your eyes.

Why of all times to loose your cool was it in front of a killer? Granted, he’d helped you and had never treated you poorly outside of trials, but this was beyond mortifying.

Your outburst didn’t phase him, knowing that the survivors already had a stressful enough existence with the trials and not having their own places unlike the killers. Living in a makeshift tent with just the campfire to keep the place lit up wasn’t easy for any of them.

He moved his hand to the top of your head, gently running his hand down it a few times, effectively petting your hair while he let you cry it out.

You instinctively turned into the touch, your body curling in on it’s side while you reached out blinding to grab the hem of his shirt while you tried your hardest to cry quietly.

Content with just letting you take your time, he continued the gentle petting of your hair, taking a small step closer so your arm wasn’t so outstretched.

A low hum left him, intent on soothing you in any way he could.

He’d been a bit off put by your almost venomous refusal of his help at first, but looking down at you as you slowly stopped crying, the hiccups starting and seeing you scrub your sleeve at your face to try and wipe away the tears there.

His other hand moved to stop you from rubbing your face anymore, offering you the pocket square he always had one him.

“No need to dirty your clothes when this is here. It is what it was meant for, after all.”

His encouraging smile was enough to have you taking it with no resistance.

And after you’d dried your face and blown your nose, he helped you sit up, hand lingering at your arms for a moment before he tilted his head.

“I know this is rather unorthodox, but would you like a hug? I believe it would benefit you, and to be completely honest, I wished to comfort you so this whole time.” His eyes were a gentle white now, as he waited patiently for your response.

A light blush took over your face, trying not to feel any smaller than you already felt.

Turning your face away before giving a small nod had him smiling at your own bashfulness.

And that’s how the first hug you’d received after coming to the entity’s realm happened. And there was many more to be had with the doctor, as you had been quick to find out.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad accepting help sometimes.

[eleanorbloom]

All I Ever Wanted (Bryce Lahela x f!MC)

Warnings: Angst, cursing and smut. The second half of the chapter is NSFW and not suited for minors (I left a mark for those who want to read the first part fic but are not comfortable with smut).

A/N: Hello!  

I swore to myself that I’d only write my series and a collab I was invited to do, but chapter 12 left me wanting for more, so here we have the love and smut that was missing in that 30💎 scene.  I’m a hopless romantic so prepare yourselves for a bit of cheesiness.

I’m using the same tag from my BrycexMCxEthan series, thinking you would be interested in read this, so, if you want to be removed from this post, just let me know!

A/N2: I apologize in advance for any mistakes, English is not my frist language.

That’ll be all. 

Enjoy!

Taglist @utterlyinevitable  @shanzay44 @choicesficwriterscreations @laiba-the-person​ @starrystarrytrouble​ @lahellacute​ @lucy-268​ @aylamreads​ @binny1985​ @romewritingshop​

_____

 All I Ever Wanted

The chatter of people had decreased into an unstable hiss from the few people left in the room.

Bryce had said goodbye to Bobby’s and Danny’s family and was waiting for Eleanor, who was immersed in a joyful but melancholic exchange of memories with Danny’s mother.

When he found a picture of the hospital staff at a picnic a few months ago, he couldn’t help but smile at the happy faces of colleagues and friends having a good time, without the worries of daily routines.

No one could’ve ever imagined at that moment that two of those smiling faces would leave so soon. Nor that it could have been four.

As he sensed his eyes starting to burn again, he blinked swiftly to keep the tears at bay.

“You okay?”—Her voice was soft as a whisper, careful enough to not startle him as she appeared beside him out of the blue.

Bryce turns to his right, where Eleanor was looking at him with a worried expression.

“Yeah, it’s just… I know we deal with life and death every day, but it feels different to lose our people and so unexpectedly.”

Especially when someone you love was so close to death, he says in his head.

“Yeah, I know”

Eleanor looks around the hall as one of the volunteers starts packing up chairs. There were a few groups at the corner, mostly family and relatives of the heroes of Edenbrook. All their friends had gone by now.

“I’m ready if you want to leave”

“Let’s go, then.”—Bryce says as he heads to the door. Eleanor follows suit, instantly.

Outside, the sky is completely closed with thick, black clouds, threatening with rain any minute now.

“Should we take a cab?”—He asks, looking up the sky.

“No, I’d like to walk, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t.”

As they start to walk, they notice how quiet the street was. The only noises accompanying them was the clicking of her shoes, and a few cars passing by a couple of blocks away. Bryce couldn’t help but get lost in the sound of her steps. The confirmation for the umpteenth time that she was alive and walking by his side. As if the last few days, the last few hours hadn’t been proof enough.

Since the moment he knew Eleanor could die, every moment with her feels like a treasure to him. A challenge to not take anything for granted, especially her existence, and to make the most of his time with her. They couldn’t waste any more time.

With that in mind, Bryce looks down at her, searching for her hand. She had both hands pocketed and as she saw he was offering his hand, she tangled her fingers into his.

Although her face was pale and gloomy, Bryce noticed how her eyes softened at the touch of his skin. He felt tickles at the sensation of her soft touch in him.

They walked in comfortable silence the few streets that separated the reception center from Eleanor’s apartment. Every few feet, they would stare at each other and smile imperceptibly, Bryce just for having her by his side, Eleanor for having him when she needed the most.

Once they reach her apartment street, a thunder roared loudly above them, waking them from their deep thoughts.

“I guess the sky is angry too.”—She says looking up as she stops in her tracks, waiting for the bolt.

“Yeah.”

And all Bryce can think of, is if Eleanor wouldn’t have made it that night, the sky would have broken the earth in two. His earth, his world, his heart. Everything would have fallen apart if she’d gone.

Then, the sky turns white and shiny for an instant. The stroke of lightning like an enormous photograph flash illuminates their faces and makes them realize how wonderful life can be with just so little. 

After a moment she turns to him, looking for his beautiful brown eyes. But she can’t get enough as Bryce just take her by the nape of her neck and kisses her like he was gasping for air. His lips were cold, but in a matter of seconds, they were melting every inch of her skin he touched, his tongue roaming her lips, then her lips sucking his lower lip impatiently in an almost-too-fair exchange of kisses.

As Eleanor lets out a moan, a shower of rain comes down, soaking them in an instant. Neither of them seems to mind. Somehow the rain was all that they needed at that moment: something that washed them for all their fears, the loss, the pain. The uncertainty.

Eleanor rests her forehead in his, panting.

“Would you stay with me tonight?”—She pleads.

“I’d love to, Elle”—He replies before taking her by the hips and kissing her again, this time softly.

After a long moment, he embraces her, burying his face in her wavy, damp hair.

He breathes the sweet scent of her shampoo, bringing memories of the first time he discovered it.

Donahue’s was packed. Everyone was there celebrating the first day of residency. Eleanor had agreed to play darts with him. The bet was a kiss. The moment she turned to him, all victoriously, a trail of pomegranate scent reached his nostrils. And that night, even if she won, Bryce felt like a winner too, as they’d share the second kiss of that day. 

 “Should we go inside?”—Bryce doesn’t respond, still lost in memories.—“Bryce?”  

He pulls away reluctantly. There’s a mix of longing and vulnerability in his eyes she had never seen before. As if he was opening the doors of all the mysteries he had kept sealed since... Always.

“Yeah, it’s just… I’m so glad you’re still here. I can’t help but feel thankful every moment I’m with you.”

“Me too. I feel thankful for being alive and to have you by my side.”

She gives him a quick peck in her wet lips and then she takes him by the hand, pulling him to the building. The rain still pouring.

“Do you think Keiki will be okay if you stay?”

“Yeah. I’ll text her to let her know I’m not coming home, anyway.”

By the time Bryce and Eleanor enter her room, Bryce was pocketing his cellphone back into his jacket.

“All settled. She kinda assumed I would spend the night with you”—Bryce replies, sheepishly.

“Your sister is always two steps ahead of you, it doesn’t surprise me at all.”—She retorts as she balances herself in one foot, taking off her Mary Jane stilettos. Then she continues with her coat.

Bryce stands there, at the door, watching her silently, studiously.

“Are you okay, Bryce? You seem… really pensive.”—She asks, walking towards him.

He can’t help but feel a wave of tenderness as she is now at her natural height. About 3 inches shorter.

She cups his cheeks both hands and caresses him with the tip of her thumbs.

“Mmh?”

“Honestly, I-”—He clears his throat, feeling it tight.—I feel a little out of control. One minute I’m laughing and telling a story about some prank Danny and I pulled on the OR staff… the next I want to bawl… the next I feel terrified. Of what could’ve happened to you, of what could happen tomorrow…”

“I feel the same.”—She admits—"Every little thing knocks me off balance. Somehow today made everything that happened seem more… real than it did before."

“That’s it exactly. Before, I was somehow still able to keep it all in the ‘work’ portion of my brain, but now…”

“Now it’s taken over.”

Now Bryce was realizing how things would have been if she hadn’t made it. If the team wouldn’t have gotten the antidote. Or if Rafael wouldn’t have been there to protect her. She would have left this planet just as soon as Bobby Gunderson did. Without a chance to say goodbye, without a chance to tell her how much she meant to him.

A sob escapes in his breath, and suddenly he wraps her tightly, this time like he is clinging onto life. As if he frees her from his arms, she'll become thin air and will be gone completely oblivious of what he feels.

Tears were streaming down all over his face, a grimace of terror and hollowness that shattered her heart the moment she saw it.

“Bryce…”—She whispers, her eyes shimmering with tears, containing her own sob at the sight of him so vulnerable.

“The… the night I stayed with you I… I couldn’t even close my eyes, afraid that you could be gone any second. And… I couldn't stop thinking about how much I wanted to tell you what you mean to me, but I felt like if I did it at that moment, would be like a farewell, like a confession in deathbed, and I couldn’t think that way.”

His lips were quivering while trying to find the exact words to continue.

"Since the moment I knew you would be okay, I realized that I wasted so much time all these months, Elle. Trying to play it cool, hiding my feelings, my worries. Trying to keep my walls up, just to be strong and be the support you need. As if I didn’t need anything. And I realized that somehow, I was unknowingly pushing you away when you have been the person I’ve open up the most. About my family, about what I lived in college because of my parents. And at the thought of you leaving… without knowing how much you mean to me, it felt selfish… unfair.

“Bryce, it’s okay. We all have our times...”

“This is not about time, Eleanor, it’s about fear, about pride. But after what you have been through, I felt stupid for fear something as absurd as my own pride. My charade of having all under control.”

Eleanor wiped the tears in his cheeks.

“I love you, Eleanor.”—He said in the most steady voice he could—You’re the only person that from the moment I met, knew you wouldn't let me down as so many others did, even my own family. But somehow, it took me this long and all this tragedy to finally tell you how I feel about you. I’m sorry… I’m so sorry."

Large tears run down her face. But her eyes were shining with a warmth he hasn’t seen in weeks.

“Bryce…”—Eleanor saw the raw vulnerability of Bryce Lahela. The person she had grown to love even if she knew half of the depths and torments of his mind and heart. But now that she was knowing him at his lowest, it only increased the affection and care for him.

She observed the features of the man who was taking the biggest leap of faith and, becoming the bravest man she knew by showing all his vulnerability, even if it was his biggest fear. Then she kissed all the spots she had look: His forehead, his temples, cheeks, nose, jawline, chin, eyes, to finally his lips. Each peck filled with adoration.  

"Bryce, you don’t have anything to be sorry for.  I've been afraid too, because since the moment I met you you’ve been the one in my heart, but I was afraid of scaring you away, or lose you because you might not feel the same. But the truth is... I love you. I love you since, I don’t know. It feels like forever.”

On a normal day, Bryce would've retorted something flirty or cocky like "Of course you would, I'm too irresistible", but that day wasn't a normal day.

The rain had washed all his charades, all veils of confidence, carelessness, self-assurance, and all his flirty retorts. All that was left, was his deepest fears and hollows of his heart: to grew up in a family that never really cared for him; to lose his parents at the age of seventeen: to have to endure the consequences of his parents' actions, and always end up alone, without real friends, without anyone who would love him unconditionally.

Since the age of seventeen, he had always been on his own. His own emotional support. There never was a single person who would be there for him to vent up, to process feelings, emotions, stress. And since the moment he met Eleanor, he knew it would be different. But he had been carrying the fear for ten years. It wouldn't be easy to let all those walls go. But when it happened, when Eleanor found out about his sister, it was so easy to let the walls crumble. And even if he was used to seeing the judgment in everyone's eyes after finding his truth out, the only thing Eleanor gave him was understanding, support, empathy, generosity. Love. Unconditionally love.

“Let me take care of you”—She whispers, caressing his cheeks in the most tender way. As if he were about to break. —“You don’t need to carry all by yourself. You’re not alone anymore.”

He nods imperceptibly, as Eleanor kisses his forehead and he rests his head on her chest. She strokes his head as he hears Bryce sobbing, letting all out.

“I’m with you, love.”

How many nights she had dreamed of calling him that way. More than she could remember. And it felt so right.

How many nights he had dreamed of being called that way by her. More than he could remember. And it felt so right.

It enlightened his heart that had been buried deep inside all his fears and traumas. He felt alive like never before.

After a while, his breath steadies and he pulls himself out of her grip, looking at her in the eyes.

“Thank you.”

Bryce leans, kissing her chastely in the lips. They stare at each other, smiling.

**NSFW**

After a few seconds, they kiss again, but the connection lingers, an innocent and sweet peck that soon turns into something more. Feeling the softness of his lips on her unleashes a desire that starts to flow quickly through her veins.

She opens her mouth in response to the desire, capturing his lips between her teeth, their breaths becoming one.

“Bryce, I want you…”—She parts from him a single moment, just to let him know her mind.

“And I need you, Eleanor”—Bryce gasp loudly before kissing her again, this time drawing a trail of kisses down her neck.

After feeling dead all those days, immersed in confusion, pain, and fear, she had made him feel alive. And he wanted to spend the first moment of his awakening by adoring her in the sweetest and exquisite way.

Soon, Eleanor unbuttons his tux and shirt, leaving kisses in every inch exposed, discarding it on the floor.

Then Bryce turns her to unfasten her black dress in the back, facing the same fate as his shirt. He embraces her for the back, roaming his hands all over her curves, pinching her hips, her waist, and then cupping her breast with both hands while leaving sloppy kisses in the crook of her neck. A wave of popcorn and vanilla intoxicates him with more desire. He pulls her tight against him, groaning as her lower back presses his crotch.  He grips her throat with one hand, arching her head back, kissing her fiercely, while Eleanor roams one hand between his tights, making him release a moan in her mouth. 

Eleanor frees herself from his arms, and bringing her hands to his belt, working on his pants until she sends it to the floor like the rest of their clothes. Then she takes off her pantyhose, and when she ups her head to look at Bryce, she finds him looking at her silently, contemplating every inch of her body.

“What?”

“Have I told you how beautiful you are?”

“Maybe a million times.”

“Make that one million and one, then. You’re absolutely gorgeous”.—He whispers, starting to suck kisses down her jawline, and staying at her chest for a few more moments, while he unclasps her bra and tosses it to the floor. After that, he buries her face in her breasts, cupping them with his hands and feeling the exquisite aroma of her skin concentrating in the apex of her breasts.

He slides his lips softly to her nipples, sucking it delicately at first, but then he nibbles them hard, making a moan escape from her throat.

His touch is like never before. Is gentle but confident. He knows exactly what he's doing, but somehow he touches her with new delicacy, with adoration. Thanking for being alive with every inch of skin he kisses.

As he goes down, Bryce takes her by the hips and pushes her to the bed, pulling her panties out. His kisses along her stomach and belly feel like fire, as he is getting closer to her sweet spot. Eleanor gasps with anticipation. 

Bryce grips her tights and opens them while leaving kisses and licks in her mound and just around her folds. Eleanor breaths heavily, her hips moving involuntarily as his soft kisses tickle in her core.

She thought he would tease her for a minute or two. But that night wasn't about teasing. Was about need and adoration. And he didn't want to waste another second without adoring her most sweet and satisfactory way.

Eleanor tugs the quilt as she felt his tongue sliding slowly through her folds and towards her clit.

“God”—She whispers.

After a few moments working on her core, Bryce places one finger inside her, then two. Then he curls them gently while looking for the right spot until she indicates he has reached it.

“Yes, yes, there, there!”

Without leaving her nub, Bryce goes up, leaning to Eleanor, kissing her breasts to then brush his lips into hers. The moment they meet, Eleanor takes his head desperately, moaning in her mouth while his fingers keep moving in circles and entering in her.

"Yes"—She breathes desperately, Bryce observing every feature of her face. The way her mouth was making a perfect O, the crease in her forehead when she frowns as the pleasure overtakes her.

Bryce picks up more speeds, and her hips began to shake uncontrollably. Bryce looks at her as a deity professing all her powers.

And her power works like a painkiller to him. Seeing her like that, reaching the peak of satisfaction the human nature can have, is the best proof he can get of how alive she is.

Her whole body shudders and then her voice is off, unable to articulate another sound. She can only return the kiss he gives her before tumbling beside her.

As Eleanor catches her breath a few moments later, she steals him a kiss, gripping his arousal. Then she mumbles in a sultry voice:

“How you want me?”

He wasn’t expecting that question, but after a few moments of deliberation, he answers:

“On all fours”

As if her patience was extinguishing, Eleanor stands up immediately, takes his underwear off, and then she crawls onto the bed as Bryce asked.

Bryce places himself behind her and grabbed her by the hips and enters her.  Slowly at first, sensing every inch of her as he pushes and pushes until all his length was inside her. Eleanor leaned on her elbows, stroking her hair as Bryce began to thrust her. The feeling of him inside her sends shivers down her spine, waking every fiber of her again. She feels alive, desired, loved.

“Bryce”—She groans.

Suddenly, Bryce takes her by the wrists, pulling her body to his chest, without stop pounding her. With one hand he cups her breast, with the other, he slides his finger to her clit. Eleanor arches her back, leaning the nape of her neck on his shoulder while tugging his hair in the back of his head.

“You feel incredible, babe”

"Don’t stop, please"—She cries in a tiny voice, as Bryce began to thrust her harder.—”Yes…”

“You like that?”

“Yes, y... you?”

“I love it”—Now his finger picks up speed.

“Fuck, yes, Bryce.”

Bryce kisses her jawline before pushing her back to the mattress, now taking both wrists and crossing them on her low back, holding them there.

As he pounds her faster, the noise of their bodies colliding fills the room, a maddening melody that brings them higher and higher.

“Fuck, yes… I wanted you exactly like this, Bryce”

“Like what?”

“Fucking me hard”

Bryce groans as her words invade his mind.

Their bodies connected was another proof of how alive she was, and how alive he was.

But something was missing.

He pulled away, got on his feet, and turned her in one swift motion, her body, shimmering in sweat, now facing him. Eleanor looks at him, expectantly.

“At least this time, I don’t wanna miss your pretty face while you cum.”

She grins naughtily, biting her lower lip.

Placing himself over her, he grazes her nipples, to then go up to kiss her.

After a few moments lost in her mouth, he stands and takes her hips, raising her a bit, reaching her sweet spot, and making her squeeze on the inside

“Bryce, yes”

Every thrust harder, nosier. Every thrust breaking the chains of the fear, of the loss, of what wasn't said. Of what he could've done. Every thrust getting them near to the edge, to the end of that once endless road of loneliness, of charades, of pretend.

There was no return now.

“Elle"—He breathes, sensing his body was losing control, her body tightened around him, making him explode any second now. 

“Come here, please”—She sighed.

Bryce lowers to her. Eleanor captures his lips instantly, as she was about to choke out of air.

“Bryce, you’re incredible"—She says, dizzy—“I’m… I’m… Ahhh!"—She buries her mouth on his shoulder, as she reaches her long-awaited orgasm.

The raw moan is enough to make him cum against her, growling while he motions erratically over her, as the sensations overwhelm him. Then he collapses by her side, both trying to catch their breaths.

They stay in silence for a couple of minutes, the big smiles never leave their faces.

“Is your need satisfied?”—She asks, turning to him.

“Honestly?”—He replies, placing a hand in her waist—“No, I’m not done, yet.”

“Good, me neither.”

Bryce wraps her in a warm embrace and Eleanor nuzzles in his chest, drunk of tenderness and love.

The rain had stopped falling. The room was quiet. They could only hear their breaths. The basic and simple proof that they were alive at that moment. Alive and absolutely aware of what they felt about each other.

“I love you”—She says softly.

“I love you too, baby.”

There was nothing left to say, but words of reaffirmation for a lifetime.

______

[oingos-bitch]

Steely Dan Goes to WalMart

Continuing from his last adventure. . .

Thankfully he just had to wait 20 minutes before Rubber Soul and Devo came walking out of the accursed building.

Dan doesn’t hesitate to stomp over and yell at them – why didn’t they tell him where they were going?! He was walking around for hours and he hadn’t passed by them even once, how could he have missed them if he walked around at least twice?! And where’d they get that ice cream from? He doesn’t remember there being an ice cream booth.

Rubber Soul tells him that ditching him was a conscious decision, while Devo informs him that there was a café on the store’s last floor, surely he had passed by it.

Dan is fuming at this point.

Rubber laughs as he snatches the keys away from him to get into the car, accidentally hitting his head as he stooped down, making Rubber laugh even harder.

It’s early evening at this point and they’re halfway home (with Dan looking forward to it more than the others).

Until. . .

Devo finishes his ice cream and asks Rubber if they can stop by WalMart to throw the cone away.

Dan absolutely loses it and screeches at him.

“WHY do you need to throw the cone away?! Just eat it like a regular person, you dumbass baby! And if ya need to throw it away, WHY does it have to be WalMart?? Can’t you just wait until we get to the mansion??”

“No can do,” Devo says, “I gotta get a few things from there.”

“And just NOW you tell us?!”  

“No, I told Rubber when we were still in Ikea.”

Rubber jokingly tells Dan that he would’ve known if he stuck around with them, but his little quip isn’t appreciated.

Dan is completely silent, and he’s seriously contemplating using Lovers on Rubber just to torture him for a bit. Well, he would, if it were not for the fact that Rubber would most certainly get him back for it, and Dan wouldn’t want to die so soon, no sir.

He grumbles to himself throughout the whole ride, even louder once the near the parking lot.

He stumbles out of the car and he’s the first one to reach the entrance, prompting a “Wow, you really wanna go to WalMart, huh,” from none other than Rubber Soul.

Dan walks faster.

Inside the store there’s a split second of peace before the group disbands yet again, with Devo making a beeline for the arts and crafts section and Rubber heading straight to the fishing gear aisle.

“But- BUT YOU DON’T EVEN FISH!”  Dan’s voice carries through the now-empty space near him, unheard.

Might as well make the best of it, he figures.

He weaves in and out of each aisle with even more disdain than his little adventure at Ikea.

He has such a fun time making commentary about the store’s fashion selection.

“Neon. NEON??”

When no one’s looking he stuffs it into his shirt. “Maybe Soul would wear this. . . “

Speaking of Soul, the arrogant booger’s probably long moved on from the fishing aisle.

Dan’s getting tired and he thinks to himself, ‘Thank god WalMart’s not as big as Ikea.’

And with that burst of confidence, once again he sets off to look for his ‘friends.’

Blinded by his hubris he walks right past Devo, who bothered to call out to him and even offered to walk with him to the cashier.

But no, Dan couldn’t hear him past his conscience applauding himself for touring the store and memorizing the layout, more or less.

He turns the corner of the snack aisle (“Rubber’s probably hungry by now”) and surprise, surprise! He’s not there.

His smugness drops by 2%, but not to worry, there’s plenty of other aisles to go!

He walks past the raw meat fridge, no sign of him there. He passes by the seafood and all the crawfish are gone, but he’s nowhere to be found.

He hears footsteps in the aisle next to him and he sneaks up to the end of the passageway, turning on his heel and popping out from behind a display of canned beans.

A small child takes one look at the exasperated kebab man’s sneer from between his massive tiddies and shits a brick.

He starts bawling his eyes out, begging for his mom to come save him and Dan’s face reddens as he backs out of the aisle.

It only gets worse as he bumps into another shopper whilst backing away.

“HEY, WATCH WHERE THE FUCK YOU’RE GOIN-” They looked him over and quickly apologize before trying to chat him up.

He gets visibly more and more nervous as he tries to politely decline their advances, but to no avail.

Once they offer him their number he snatches the paper from their hand and jogs to the checkout.

Oh, poor Danny boy, you should’ve just walked away once they turned around.

Now there’s a line at the cashier’s that rivals that of Chicago’s In-N-Out Burger on its opening day, with the end of the line reaching half of the store.

Good thing he has little to no sense of morality.

Making sure to keep out of the security cameras’ sight he rips the tag off of that hideous neon shirt before stuffing it back into his own shirt.

He spots Devo at the exit and strides over to him, asking about Rubber.

Devo points across from him and sure enough, there’s Rubber in all of his shirtless glory, getting kicked out by WalMart security for indecent exposure.

[fungalnebula]

Prologue

Chapter One (will be linked when published)

Please leave critiques and suggestions in replies and/or reblogs!!! Click the cover image for a surprise!

There was a large tube inside the basement of the Fenton building. It was closed off by a large, military grade door, securing the emptiness of the tube. This machine had been sitting in the basement of the Fenton building, unused, since its conception two long years ago.

“Danny, why didn’t you tell us about this?” One of Danny’s best friends, Sam, asked as Danny punched in a code to release the contents of the empty tube. “This is so cool!”

Sam loved the Ghost Aesthetic. Danny felt a little bad for not telling her about the broken portal because of that.

“It didn’t work so I thought you guys wouldn’t care,” Danny said. “It was broken anyway…”

“Dude, it’s still a ghost portal!” Danny’s other best friend, Tucker, exclaimed. “Even if it doesn’t work, all the bones are still there.”

“I’m sorry, guys. I didn’t know it would be that interesting.”

“Are you insane!?” Sam exclaimed, “this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Let me take a picture of you!”

“No way, Samantha.” Danny groused, “there is no way I’m getting in that thing. What if the reason it didn’t work is because of loose wires or something? I don’t want to die.”

“You won’t die and you know I hate it when you call me Samantha,” she chastised. “You said it’s been broken for years! There’s no way it’ll work if it hasn’t already. It’s like a dead bear, it can’t hurt you.”

“Oh, yeah?” Danny laughed at her analogy. “You can still fall on a dead bear and get maimed by its teeth AND SLASH OR claws, Samantha.” Danny mocked Sam, waving his hands with each syllable of her name.

“Yeah, bad metaphor, just get in there. You won’t get electrocuted or anything. Your parents probably disconnected it from the power when they gave up on it.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Danny finally conceded, “let me at least wear one of the suits my parents made for me. You know, just in case.”

“Is it insulated?” Tucker chuckled.

“Yes, Tucker,” Danny retorted. “It is insulated, as a matter of fact.”

Danny walked to a cabinet labeled “Ecto Suits” and pulled out a white jumpsuit with a black collar. He adorned it as well as some black gloves and black boots. He noticed Tucker smirk as Sam attempted to suppress a snort. Danny stuck his tongue out at his two best friends in the world. He’d do anything for those jokers. Danny zipped up his new outfit and took a hesitant step towards the defunct portal.

“You guys really want to do this?” Danny had to force this last word out of his throat. He had been assured that he was safe, but was he really?

“Yeah,” Sam was gentle now. “You’ll be fine. All I want is a little picture of you in that neat thingy.”

Tucker put his hand on Danny’s shoulder. “Don’t worry man, it’s unplugged.” Tucker pointed to a plug on the ground nearby, assuming it was the power source for the portal.

“That makes me feel a bit better.” Danny sighed, relieved. He took another few steps and was in front of the portal. It was eerie and echoey. “Oooo” Danny made a noise and heard it bounce off the metal walls inside.

“Go on,” Sam pushed Danny lightly.

“Hey! Okay, I’m going!” Danny took a step inside the portal. It felt … empty and big. Much bigger than it was. Longer too. The tube felt more like a tunnel at this point, Danny could see the end of the tunnel, but it felt like it was miles away. Danny felt heavy just taking one step inside. He took another and felt his body weigh him down even more. It was just the anxiety, Danny thought to himself. Your body gets heavy when it’s dreading something, right? But there was nothing to worry about, Danny assured himself.

Danny took a few more steps inside the portal and turned around to face the outside. He tasted ozone and he felt like his blood was made of lead. There was the quietest of ringings bouncing around in his head making him somewhat dizzy and his eyes felt like they were vibrating.

“Danny?” Sam asked.

“Yeah?”

“Are you okay?” Sam looked concerned.

“Yeah, I’m fine, it’s a bit spooky in here, though,” Danny let out a slight chuckle. “I’ll just suck it up for the picture.”

“Yeah, alright…” Sam trailed off. “Can you do a cool pose? Maybe put your hand against the side and lean or something?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Danny began to place his hand on the side of the portal. As his hand neared the wall, the taste of ozone intensified and his nose started running. His hand was almost to the wall when Sam snapped a picture with her polaroid camera.

“Oops,” she looked nervous as she took out the not-yet-developed picture and handed it to Tucker.

Danny knew she wanted a better shot so he finally put his hand on the wall. Millimeters before his hand made contact, Danny’s fingers felt like cold metal replaced all of his bones. He let his hand rest on the wall to his left as he felt a button depress. Immediately, his heart started racing as he felt panic run up his chest. Daniel Fenton suddenly felt the most excruciating pain he had ever and will ever feel in his life. He felt hundreds of knives stab him at once in every single nerve in his body. An army of knives marched through his nervous system, stabbing down hard with every step. This march of pain within his body moved incredibly fast but at the same time that it moved agonizingly slow.

Danny didn’t feel his throat open up to release a blood curdling scream of pure, horrific pain. He didn’t feel himself drop to his knees, but he did feel that militia of marching, stabbing pain start again at his knees. All he saw was green, neon green, everywhere. He tasted blood and ozone, the lower half of his face, beneath his nose, was wet and sticky. His lips felt like they were drenched in lip gloss that tightened at every breath he took. His left wrist felt like he had laid on it for hours and suddenly moved. Danny knew he was dying.

When his face smacked the metal floor of the now functioning portal, he didn’t feel his nose break, just the pain get more intense and the struggle to breathe increased with his mouth submerged in a shallow pool of blood escaping his nose like a dam had been opened. Danny didn’t feel himself being dragged by his friends out of the portal and he didn’t see the horrified looks on their faces when they saw all the blood and smoke coming from his body. He didn’t feel Tucker grab a broom and poke him with it, he didn’t hear Sam smack Tucker and throw the broom to the wall. Danny didn’t hear his sister pound down the stair and scream at the sight, he didn’t hear Sam wailing and sobbing and pleading with Danny to please wake up, he didn’t hear her whisper, “I’m so sorry Danny, I’m so sorry, this is all my fault, why am I so stupid,” to his head. He didn’t hear his sister, Jazz screaming through her tears at Tucker, “What happened to him? Why is his hair white? Where did all this blood come from?” He didn’t hear Tucker crying, “I’m sorry, I thought it was unplugged, I’m so sorry Jazz, I’m so sorry.”

Danny did hear a ringing, though. He heard waves too. Or was that wind? Danny heard someone whisper but they were so far away.

Then, Danny saw black. Danny saw black and a very dark red. “What did you say?” Danny tried to say, but it was so much less than a whisper. Danny heard a thump, like someone dropping down to sit on a tile floor and the red he saw got brighter.

God, his eyes were so heavy. His lips felt like he had just eaten Elmer’s glue, like he used to do in Kindergarten. When Danny smiled a slight smile, as much as he had the strength to, his lips cracked and he relaxed his face to appease the pain.

Daniel Fenton cracked his eyes. Slowly, sound came back. A ringing gave way to someone screaming, “How could you let this happen? I thought you cared about him.” Someone else bawled, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t want this to happen. Please, I’m so sorry, I love him so much.”

Danny was confused. Did he just walk in on someone's death? He couldn’t have, his back was cold and against the tile floor in… his basement? Who died in his basement?

“Oh, god.” Danny felt his stomach drop to his toes. “Did Tuck get hurt by some of Mom or Dad’s ghost shit?”

The room went silent. Danny pulled his eyes open, worried by what he might see.

“What the fuck was that Samantha,” Jazz had murder in her eyes. “Tell me what that was right now.”

“What was what?” Danny asked. He saw Jazz huddled over something in the middle of the room with Sam and Tucker near her. The body wasn’t Tucker’s.

Danny walked over to Jazz and his friends when Tucker looked his way and screamed as loud and as hard as he was capable of screaming. This spooked Danny who took a step to the side and looked at what was on the ground.

It was him.

Danny was looking at his own body on the floor. His now white hair was singed, his left arm was black, contrasting against his pale skin which had been exposed by a large rip in his not-so-insulated suit. It looked like the hand and half of the arm on the left side of the suit had burned off.

Suddenly the body moved and Danny saw the ceiling and his Sister looking over him. He turned his head and saw two scenes. He was looking at Sam while also looking at the now functional ghost portal with a different set of eyes. Danny moved his head back and was now only looking at his sister again.

Danny attempted to move to a sitting position, coughing droplets of blood when he tensed his muscles.

“Oh, my god.” Jazz breathed a sigh of relief, “Danny! Don’t sit up, here. I’ll help you.”

Jazz sort of dragged, sort of pushed Danny’s body closer to the wall, glaring at Tucker and Sam when they moved to help her. Jazz picked up Danny’s head and sat him against the wall of the Fenton Laboratory basement and inspected his face.

“God, Danny.” Jazz’s voice was soaked with concern. “There’s blood all over this place. Your nose is broken.”

Danny realized he couldn’t feel the ground beneath him the second he felt himself fall an inch and hit the ground. He saw a flash as he noticed a ring of light circling around his waist.

“Sam,” Jazz screamed, “what the fuck? My brother almost dies and you think this is the best fucking photo op to snag?”

“I’m sorry Jazz, I-I,” Sam stuttered, “I saw something.”

Jazz turned her head back to her brother, and gasped. “Danny! Your hair is back to normal!”

Barely audible, Danny mumbled; “myhairwasn’tnormal?”

“It was white,” Sam whisperspoke.

“And your suit went all reverse,” Tucker added at full volume from halfway across the room.

“I taste metal,” Danny stuck his tongue out, it looked like he had just been licking blood off of something.

“Probably from all that blood in your mouth.” Jazz’s forehead was the rocky mountains of concern. “And on your chin, down your shirt, all over the floor. God, Danny. We need to take you to the hospital.”

“No!” Danny and Tucker yelled at the same time.

“I’m fine, I feel fine, watch this!” Danny stood up and quickly fell back down demonstrating how not fine he was.

“Sorry, I just hate hospitals,” Tucker murmured. “I didn’t mean to say that…”

Sam waved a polaroid in the air, then gave it to Jazz.

The picture showed a bloodied Danny on the ground wearing a reverse colored “insulated” suit. It’s just a fucking picture of my almost-dead brother, Jazz thought. Then she saw it. There were two rings of light around his waist that looked like they were revealing the outfit Danny was wearing when he went downstairs. A NASA T-Shirt and blue jeans were peaking through the two circles of light. Jazz looked at Danny again and realized he wasn’t wearing the black version of his ecto suit anymore. It went away with the white of his hair.

“Danny, you’re still going to the hospital with me.” Jazz insisted. “Your nose is broken.”

Danny touched his nose and was immediately met with searing, red hot pain.

“Don’t touch it, idiot!” Jazz smacked Danny’s hand away from his nose. “When a part of your body is broken, that’s not an invitation to touch it!”

Danny looked at Sam and Tucker, scared.

Sam smiled at Danny. “We can talk about it after you go to the hospital. Do you want to have a fucked up nose for the rest of your life?”

Tucker walked closer to Danny and put his hand on Danny’s head. “I’m so fucking happy you’re okay, dude.”

“Can you walk?” Jazz asked as she stood up and reached for Danny’s hand.

Danny grabbed her hand and tried to get up for the second time. He watched his hand disappear from his sister's hand as her grip tightened around nothing. Danny fell back to the floor and screamed at his missing hand before it came back.

“Danny,” Jazz hissed, “we are going to the hospital now.”

Danny stood up on his own and followed his sister up the stairs to her car, parked outside. They drove to the hospital.

[whimsimmortal]

Plot Bunny

Wow, I’m alive! And posting fanfiction on tumblr, as if I have any idea what I’m doing!! Please check it out on AO3, where I am actually capable of navigating the website: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27441853

Plink. Another small, innocuous sound scarcely registered past Danny’s homework-induced stupor. It could have been a stray raindrop or a kamikaze bug. He had more important things demanding his attention; namely, the book report due tomorrow. This was at least the fifth time he’d rewritten the same paragraph. Words had lost all meaning to him by this point, but he was so close to finishing.

Tip-tap. Clonk, the noise emitting from the bedroom window insisted. He glared suspiciously towards the disturbance, envisioning ethereal arrows or blob ghosts intent on breaking in. He hadn’t sensed anything ghostly nearby, but given his luck, the paranoia was usually warranted. Emitting a groan from the depths of his soul, he rose from his desk to inspect the noise. He spared a second to stretch and shake the pins and needles out of his fingers, trying to wake up. Just in case it was something serious, y'know. Tink. “Alright, jeez, I’m coming,” he muttered, pulling back his curtain.

There weren’t any ghosts, of course. That was somewhat of a relief, even if going down swinging  was preferable to succumbing to a failing high school education. The early sunset gleamed amber off the windows across the street, and the sky was clear, except for— chink— the pebbles bouncing off his window. A lone kid was standing on the sidewalk below, no older than eight or nine. He looked vaguely familiar. He was pulling his arm back to throw more stones and bawling his eyes out.

Danny yanked open the window, sliding up the screen to fully stick his head out. His core vibrated, unsettled. There wasn’t any obvious danger, and the kid didn’t look hurt. Where were his parents? Why was he here? “Hey! What’s wrong, buddy? Are you okay?”

“You, you, you,” the kid tried to start, but great hiccupping sobs interrupted him. He scrubbed his face with his fists, obviously trying to regain his composure. “You’ve gotta send the ghost hero out!”

Danny jerked back, unintentionally smacking the back of his skull on the underside of the window. Well, now he was awake. What? “Uh, a ghost? Here? No, there isn’t—I can’t—what are you talking about?”

The boy was right up against the side of the house now, sniffling loudly and staring straight up at Danny with wide, sad eyes. “Please?” He whined, winding his hands up in the fabric of his sweater nervously.

Well, now he was stuck. Some random kid was going to out his whole identity, but the urge to help was almost overwhelming. “I can’t—there can’t be any ghosts here, but give me a second and I can just come down?” He offered. “Do you want me to find your parents?”

“Noooo!” The kid wailed and stomped his foot, banging on the wall with his tiny fists. “Don’t lie to me! I’ve seen the superman ghost go in there! Let him out! I need him!!”

Oh, crap, someone was going to hear. This kid’s parents were going to freak out, or his own parents were going to notice, and what if they took that kind of claim seriously? Shoot. Literally. He chuckled nervously. “Hey, hey, shhh, okay! You win! I’ll, uh, summon him, or something! But you have to be quiet, or you’ll, y’know, scare him off.” The child nodded solemnly, wiping his nose on the back of his sleeve and stifling his sobs.

Danny ducked back behind the curtain, gracelessly crumpling to sit with his back against the wall. He ran his hands through his hair. He’d been seen? When? He’d tried so hard to be careful, and use invisibility whenever he was close to the house. Maybe he’d gotten lazy. Maybe, sometimes, he let the promise of sleep take priority over precautions. Stupid.  He smacked the palm of his hand into his forehead, frustrated. How long had this kid known? Who else had he told? He couldn’t just scare him into silence, he was too little. That was just messed up, he’d give him nightmares or something.

He wasn’t going to figure anything out by sitting here moping. He triggered the transformation, the familiar prickling electric feeling swiftly replaced by the soothing cold. He turned to peek over the edge of the window, checking for anyone else around. It was still just the same kid, kicking at a pebble on the concrete while he waited.

He floated down slowly, not wanting to startle his impromptu visitor, who turned and saw him as he touched down. The little guy gasped, forgotten tears slipping away from unblinking eyes.

“Hi there,” Danny prompted gently. “Were you looking for me?”

The kid kept ogling, mesmerized, and a few seconds passed by before he could shake himself out of it. “Wow, you’re the real superhero guy,” he whispered reverently.

Oh. That was pretty cute, actually. He couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, that’s me. You can call me Phantom,” he offered.

“I’m Wyatt,” the kid mumbled, covering his damp cheeks with his hands shyly. He tipped his head down, still staring through his eyelashes.

A neighbor’s front door opened down the street, and Danny swiftly disappeared. Wyatt startled, blindly swinging his hands back and forth through the seemingly-empty space. “Wait! Come back!” He recoiled with a yelp when his blundering reach made contact with the specter.

“It's okay, I’m right here,” he reassured the kid. “But we can’t let people know I’m here, okay? They’ll—um. I’ll get in trouble.”

Wyatt squinted, reaching forward again. Danny offered his hand, and the little fingers gripped his glove tightly. He looked like he was offering the empty air a fist bump. “Right,” the kid agreed earnestly.

“Seriously,” Danny pressed. “You can’t tell anyone that I li-” he bit his tongue. Don’t say ‘live’. That’s so dumb. “Uh. Hang out here sometimes. Not even your friends, okay? Promise?”

Wyatt’s little dark eyebrows drew together, and despite his trembling chin and small stature, he looked profoundly serious. He shook the hand. “I promise.”

Well, that would have to do for now. “Thanks. Uh, what did you need me for?”

The kid’s eyes immediately started to well up again, but he squeezed Danny’s fingers and pressed his lips to put on a brave face. “C’mon, Phantom, you’ve gotta-” he sniffed. “You gotta save Fuzzy,” he warbled, turning and pulling. The ghost floated behind like a balloon on a string as the pair stepped down from the curb, heading across the street.

Oh, man, if this was about a dead pet, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. That was closer to Jazz’s expertise. He swallowed his mounting dread. “Who’s Fuzzy?”

Wyatt’s face scrunched up. “He’s my bunny,” he explained, looking away. “I was just tryin’ to show ‘im to Audrey, and—and then,” he sobbed. “He went under the house! And he’s gonna get lost and stuck, and I’m-, never-, gonna see him ever again!” He let go, burying his face in his hands and howling.

Danny rested a hand lightly on Wyatt’s little shoulder, throat tight. He’d never had a pet like that, but he could understand the fear of losing loved ones a little too well, and empathy always felt more forceful when he was in ghost form. Probably something related to ectoplasm being shaped by residual emotional energy, blah blah ecto-science theory. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him.”

The unusual duo walked two more houses down the block and cut through a side yard to a modest backyard, strewn with outdoor toys and an overturned wire fence—likey an outdoor pen for Fuzzy. An even younger girl sat on the paved patio, chewing on the end of her braid. She leaped up as they drew close. “Wyatt! I told my dad about Fuzzbutt, and he’ll call the—um, animal people. But they’re not here yet. Did you find him?”

Wyatt glanced a little to Danny’s left with a guilty expression. Well, crap, so much for his secret. He bit his lip, trying to keep his cool. First things first. A cursory scan of the area didn’t show anyone else in the immediate vicinity, so he faded back into visibility. The little girl—‘Audrey’, he guessed—gave a muffled shriek. “Ghost man!”

“Hush,” Wyatt scolded, voice quavering. “He’s a secret.”

“Oh,” Audrey whispered back. “Hello, mister normal guy man. I think you’re cool.” She beamed up at him.

“Hello, small ordinary human,” Danny quipped, and Audrey giggled delightedly. Wyatt dropped to his hands and knees, crawling up to the house, where a gap between the foundation and dirt was evident. The other two peeked over his shoulder, but there wasn’t any bunny visible past the darkness.

“Fuzzy,” Wyatt choked out. “Hang in there, we’re gonna rescue you!”

Danny turned intangible, letting his molecules seep down through the dirt past the level of his nose. He drifted close to the base of the house, juicing up the glow from his eyes. “Just wait here, okay?” Two grim, round little faces nodded back, and with that minor assurance, he delved beneath the house.

The weight of the floor above loomed. It was claustrophobic, like being buried… well, half-alive. The musty, dank mildew smell was gross, even though he wasn’t breathing. He could taste it. “Here, bunny, bunny,” he muttered. Please don’t be hurt.

A tiny pair of eyes reflected green through the gloom. The little ball of fluff was backed into a corner, and it snorted like a tiny angry bull, stomping its feet. Danny hadn’t even known rabbits could make that sound. It probably didn’t like his creeping, unnatural aura, like most rational animals. “Shhh,” he cooed, reaching for the tiny, grubby ball of fluff and dimming his glow. “I’m not gonna hurt ya.”

Fuzzbutt wasn’t convinced. In a courageous move, it darted through Danny’s forehead, wedging itself under a crooked board and squealing. Danny reached easily through the plank and wrapped his hands around the unhappy creature, sharing his intangibility. It writhed and fussed, trying to bite through his gloves. “Stop that!” He clutched it close to his chest; if he dropped it here, the stubborn thing really would be stuck. He swooped back out into the backyard, startling the anxiously waiting kids.

Audrey shrieked and tipped over. Wyatt recovered first, leaping to his Velcro-sneakered feet expectantly. “Is he okay?”

Danny recovered a more solid form, holding up the wiggling rabbit. Wyatt gasped, fresh tears glittering on his eyelashes. He reached out for the beloved pet, unable to contain his joy at the reunion. “Fuzzy! You’re okay! I love you, Fuzzy!”

“Let’s go inside first, so he doesn’t get away again?” Danny suggested. The last thing anyone needed was an instant replay. Audrey darted to open the back door, and Wyatt led the way inside. He sat on the wooden floor with open arms, and as soon as the door was firmly shut again, Danny deposited the squirming animal into his lap. Fuzzy looked marginally more content to receive numerous sloppy kisses from his adoring owner. He was actually a pretty cute little guy, black and white like a panda.

Even footsteps padded around the corner. “Wyatt, baby? Did you find-” the woman’s question cut off abruptly as she noticed the glowing stranger in her living room.

Crud. At this rate, the whole block was going to find him out before the week was up. He edged back a little, rubbing the back of his neck. “Sorry, I was just, um,” darn it, wrong persona. He cleared his throat and squared his shoulders. “Doing my heroic duty, ma’am,” he finished in a falsely deep voice.

Audrey giggled (he didn’t sound that bad!), and the woman smiled nervously. Wyatt hopped to his feet, still cradling his bunny. “Mama! Look, he saved Fuzzy! I’m gonna rename him Fuzzy Phantom,” he declared.

Mama Wyatt dutifully stroked the bunny’s dusty ears. “Fuzzy Phantom needs a bath,” she commented, before looking back up to meet Danny’s eyes. She held out her clean hand, and it took him a second to recognize the offered handshake. He started to reach back, thought twice about his messy glove, and hastily peeled it off to shake her hand. Her fingers were delicate, but they didn’t falter at the chill. “You look taller on the TV,” she joked lightly. “It’s nice to meet you. Phantom, right?”

He nodded. “Uh, it was nice to meet you, too, Ms.-?”

“Sylvie Rosales,” she supplemented. Audrey snuck around her to flounce deeper into the house, taking the adult’s distraction as an invitation, and Wyatt started to follow her, but hesitated. He snuck a hand out around Fuzzy to tug on Danny’s arm, so he leaned down accommodatingly.

Wyatt stood on his tiptoes to whisper in his ear. “Can I come see you sometimes?”

Oh, heck, no. That would be truly asking for disaster. “No,” he quickly replied, but before Wyatt’s pout could evolve into a true objection, he added, “but if you really don’t tell anyone how to find me, I could drop by sometimes.” He looked towards Ms. Rosales. “If that’s okay?”

Wyatt looked over to his mom pleadingly, stars in his eyes. What have I gotten myself into, Danny wondered, but he couldn’t help feeling charmed. Ms. Rosales looked like she was thinking along the same lines, with her thin-lipped smile and folded arms. “As long as you don’t cause any trouble,” she hedged.

“Thank you!!” Wyatt hugged Danny spontaneously, smushing his face into his shoulder. Fuzzy grunted his objection.

Danny ruffled the kid’s mop of hair. “I should get going. Take care of Fuzzy,” he grinned, pulling away. “And stay safe,” he added in his false baritone with a mock salute.

“You, too,” he heard Ms. Rosales call after him as he phased through the wall. He looped above the street once cheerfully before disappearing to sneak back home. He’d left his window open; rose-tinted light and a handful of moths had spilled onto his bedroom floor. This time, he didn’t reappear or turn back until he’d stealthily drawn the window and curtains closed.

He still had an hour or so to plug into his homework. He hummed as he started back in on the paragraph he’d been stuck on. It didn’t seem as daunting now, even with the lost time and near reveal. He’d have to keep an eye on his nosy little neighbor, but in the end, maybe it was the moments like today that made the whole gig worth it.

[halo-jpeg]

Pre-entity in high school for Danny and Frank when they go to prom and their Best Friend (future S/O) sees her BF cheating on her. They see this and go up to her and as her to slow dance with them.

I L O V E THIS. I don’t know why, but I saw this ask and just... got SO pumped!!

Pre-Entity Danny and Frank Seeing their BFF Cheated on at Prom

Danny ‘Jed Olsen’ Johnson

Prom sounded awesome! Danny didn’t have anyone to go with, but you did, and he wanted to be there to support you, so he was. He was a total third wheel, but you didn’t mind.

It had been going great. You were dancing away with your S/O, smiling like the stunning person you were, oblivious as your S/O excused himself to go to the bathroom- only to go the opposite direction from the nearest one.

Sure, that could have been coincidence, your S/O simply going to another bathroom, but Danny, ever sceptical, pointed it out to you. He instilled a paranoia in your heart that you couldn’t not investigate.

Danny waits as you hurry after your boyfriend, sitting just outside the schools gym where the prom music boomed. When you came rushing down the hall with tears streaming down your face and your apologetic S/O running after you, Danny put two and two together.

Danny steppes between your and your date with a withering glare that sent them running away to their side date. Then, he turned to you as you bawled and wailed, wrapping an arm around your shoulders and guiding you to the front doors of the building.

The two of you sit on the front steps to the school in your fancy prom outfits as he calms you down, hugging you tightly. You can faintly hear the music from outside, and he can’t help but have an idea.

A slow song starts and he rises to his feet, extending a hand to you. “Care to dance?” He asks, with the softest smile. You can’t say no.

Together, you sway to the beat with your tear-streaked face, away from the crowds and cheating bastards. He won’t force you to fall for him, but at that moment, he definitely falls for you.

Frank Morrison

Frank was reluctant to go to the dance at all, only agreeing because you wanted him there. He let you drag him along as well as your S/O, who Frank had never gotten along with.

Frank spends most of his time sitting down with a cup of punch, watching from afar as you enjoy yourself. As he goes to grab another cup of the liquid, you rush to meet him with a beaming smile.

You go ranting about how perfect everything is going so far. And then, you turn around to find your S/O gone. It only takes a second to find them again, trying to hide from you as they suck face with another person.

The shock, the fear on your face sets something off in Frank. How could your S/O take you for granted?? His legs move themselves as he storms towards your date, ripping them away from their side bitch with ferocity and swinging a fist rapidly across their face, like the crack or a whip.

A collective gasp passes through the crowd as you race to Franks side. You don’t say a single thing to your date as they clutch their bleeding and broken nose, but you do spit on them. The crowd lets out a chorus of cheers, just as a slow song comes on.

All eyes are on you, and Frank wants to help divert the attention, setting everything back to normal. “Come on.” He says flatly, taking your hand and guiding you out to the dance floor. “I know how to treat a damn angel right.”

He’s never liked dancing, and you can see the discomfort in his stuff posture, but he’s helping to set the night back on track, calming everyone down after his outburst. You can’t help but smile despite your date having turned out to be an asshole.

“I’ll whoop their ass better tomorrow, okay?” He promises, and at last shows any sign of content- a shit-eating grin.

[early2000smovieimagines]

Meeting and Dating Rafe McCawley

(My gif) (Requested by @minigranger )

(I’m so sorry this took so long! I’m trying really hard to write more often on all my blogs!)

- You and your family lived in the same town as Rafe so even though you didn’t directly meet him until you were older, you still saw him around a lot growing up. 

- For as long as he could remember, he had always had a massive crush on you. No, not just a crush, this boy was in love with you ever since he first saw you at the general store when you were kids. 

- Anytime he saw you, he’d stop and stare like an angel just walked past him. And to him you were an angel, one he needed to have for himself. If only he had the guts to talk to you. 

- He did in fact gain the courage to ask you out on a date but only after he got older and grew out of his awkward gangly teenage phase. 

- You were genuinely surprised when he approached you for the first time, introducing himself with such urgency and determination that you couldn’t help but feel as though you were the most important thing in the world. He really powered through his confession like his life depended on it which was honestly pretty adorable to you. 

“Ma’am? My name is Rafe McCawley and please excuse me, but I just need to get this off of my chest. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen, inside and out, and you would make me the happiest man on Earth if you were to say you’d join me on a date.” 

- Who could say no to that?

- The smile you gave him once he was finished made his knees weak. He almost couldn’t believe his ears once you agreed, it was like all his dreams had come true. He quickly told you he’d pick you up at noon the next day before clumsily making his exit, running home to tell Danny everything that had happened. 

- He was so excited for your date that he literally arrived at your house thirty minutes early and waited outside, checking his watch until he deemed it appropriate to ring your doorbell. He was nearly speechless when you answered, handing you a bouquet of flowers before finally forcing out a “god, you are so beautiful”. 

- He took you to a gorgeous lake where the two of you sat in the shade of a big  willow tree and had a pretty little picnic. He was adorably clumsy throughout your whole date which only made you fall for him even more. He confessed that he’d liked you for a long time now and you confessed the same which caught him completely off guard. 

- The thing about Rafe is that deep down, he’s a shy loser. He can’t flirt for the life of him but god can he make a girl swoon without even trying. He wins your love with earnest compliments and sweet nothings that come straight from his heart. 

- You have your first kiss that same day, bathed in the setting sun and surrounded by the smell of warm dry air and flowers. It’s deliciously soft and beautifully slow, making your heart race and your mind stop. 

- You’ve been two fools in love ever since and you’ve got no intention of stopping anytime soon. 

- He wants everyone to know that you’re together so expect a lot of pda. Handholding, soft kisses, hugs, his arm wrapped around you, etc. It’s all very innocent but it sends a message and makes you both happy. 

- You catch him watching you a lot, often with this little smile on his face that tells you exactly what he’s thinking. How did I get so lucky. 

- Passionate kisses. 

- Spontaneous and adventurous dates and decisions. Most of them get ruined somehow but neither of you mind, the temporary thrill is amazing and the get-away is always amusing. 

- Even though you don’t come from much, he tries his best to make you feel like the classiest woman alive. Champagne, roses, diamonds, whatever he can get his hands on. 

- Folded cranes and other sentimental gifts. Both of you smile every time you see them. 

- He likes pressing kisses all over your face before he finally captures your lips in his. He adores the little giggles you make whenever he does it.

- He wraps both his arms around you in a bear hug when the two of you cuddle. He can hardly sleep without holding you close, almost as though he’s afraid you’ll disappear in the night

- He’s pretty clumsy so you’ll have to take care of your fair share of cuts and bruises. 

- Hearing about all of his adventures with Danny. Some of them are so outrageous that you can’t believe they’re real no matter how much he laughingly assures you they are. 

- He’s going to give you a complex with how much he compliments you. It’s kind of funny though because as much as he compliments you, he often gets pretty flustered when you do the same. 

- He uses a lot of pet names on you but you think you like it best when he calls you by your name. There’s just something so nice about the way he says it. 

- Sitting on his lap and snuggling close. 

- Soft caresses, he can never seem to keep his hands off of you. 

- Pulling his hat off his head so that you can kiss him. When you pull away, he likes to teasingly place it on yours, calling you captain and asking what you feel like doing. 

- There’s a lot of teasing in your relationship but it’s the “so sweet it’ll rot your teeth” kind of teasing. 

- Getting carried around bridal style. 

- Taking long walks together. He likes having a chance to get away from everybody and just spend some quality time with you. 

- He’s taken you on a plane ride at least once, he’s either very glad that you share his love for flying or finds it cutely amusing when you get scared. 

- Even though he’s fond of thrills, he does enjoy just spending a quiet night in with you. 

- Whenever he goes to order food or drinks for the two of you, he’ll hand you some money to go spend on the jukebox while you wait for him. He thinks it’s cute when you skip off all excited to pick a song. 

- Going to the cinema together. 

- Photo booth pictures.

- Going dancing. 

- Sneaky butt touches, he tries his best to act innocent but you know he’s a liar. 

- Tight hugs, he often lifts you up and spins you around whenever you wrap your arms around him. 

- He always tries his best to act like he isn’t sick or hurt but he rarely manages to do so convincingly. A lot of the time he can’t help but give up, apologize and admit that yes, he feels about ready to die. He want’s you to think he’s all tough and macho but he doesn’t have quite the pain tolerance or acting skills for it. 

- He likes for everything to be special when he’s with you, he loves making memories together and having things to look forward to the next time he sees you. 

- It always warms his heart to hear you talk about your future together or how much your parents like him. He loves knowing that you’re planing to stay with him and that he’s already a part of your family. 

- At the start of your relationship, he tried desperately to hide his disability from you, thinking that, for some ungodly reason, you’d stop loving him and think that he was stupid. You reassure him that that would never happen and help him whenever he needs you to. 

- Sometimes he just likes having you read different books to him or recount the plots of books that you’ve read. He loves your voice and being able to experience stories without the difficulty of trying to read them. 

- He’s insecure but in a secretive, no one would know, type of way. Anyone who doesn’t know him well would never be able to tell but you can see through the cracks and know exactly what he’s thinking most of the time. 

- He’s a pretty jealous guy, he takes people flirting with or being interested in you very personally and has definitely gotten into fights over you. He just cares about you too much to let someone “disrespect your relationship” like that. 

- He might be willing to let you go if you don’t love him anymore but god will it be hard for him. He firmly believes a part of him will always love you no matter what happens between the two of you. 

- You rarely ever fight, there’s hardly ever a reason to, your relationship is pretty much perfect. But on that rare occasion that you do, you’ll both just calmly get everything off of your chest before you resolve whatever needs to be resolved. 

- He doesn’t lose his temper with you very often. The very thought makes him sick so if he feels he’s like he’s going to snap, he’ll take a few moments to calm down on his own before attempting to fix things with you. It doesn’t take long for everything to be sorted out and for you to go back to your happy, in love selves. 

- He always tries his best to be there for you, offering you reassurance and a shoulder to cry on whenever you need. 

- He often treats you very gently even though he knows you won’t break. It’s just been drilled in his head that you treat a woman with care because they’re “gentle creatures”. 

- He’s very protective of you, he always makes sure you know that he’d never let anything happen to you. 

- He does everything he can to see you as much as possible especially after he gets accepted into the army.

- Sending each other letters when he goes away. 

- He keeps a picture of you on him at all times. He’s probably kissed it a few times. 

- He also has a necklace of yours that you gave to him when he first went away. It helps to keep him from missing you too much. Whenever he see’s it shining in his reflection he can’t help but feel better yet melancholy at the same time. 

- No matter how many times he has to do it, saying goodbye never gets any easier. He hates having to leave you, not being able to see you for such long lengths of time is torture. 

- He always promises to come back as soon as possible and you hold him to that promise, saying you’ll drag him back yourself if you have to. 

- Having your entire world shatter around you when you receive the news of his death. You bawl your eyes out for weeks, not being able to believe that it’s true. 

- Thinking you’ve died and went to heaven when he arrives at your door safe and sound. All you can do is fall into his arms and refuse to let go. Nothing will ever top the feeling of getting him back. 

-  Constant “I love you’s” not a day goes by when he doesn’t say it to you, at least when you’re together in person. He can’t help but swoon every time you tell him the same, especially when you say it out of nowhere, 

- He dreams of settling down with you, starting a family and living on a cozy little farm together. A future with fields of green, laughter and love. What more could a man ask for? 

[dreams-madeof-strawberrylemonade]

Bad Moon Rising - Part 5

Warnings: angst A/N: FRIDAY THE 13TH-- let that sink in folks  Word count: 1.9 K+ The photos and GIFs that I use are not mine. Credits go to the owners.

To be added to the taglist, DM me or send me an ask!

Sam Kiszka x O.C. [Jane Morrison]

Bad Moon Rising Masterpost // Fanfiction Masterpost

Jane was already on the bus on her way to Nashville, Tennessee. Her head was resting against the cold window and her eyes were halfway closed. She was tired, cold and just to top them all, she was starting to get carsick. She wished that Sammy would’ve come with her, but his promises from the evening prior that they’d go on a hike maybe in British Columbia once she’d come back home encouraged her to pull through it.

As she sat in the nearly empty bus, Jane couldn’t take her mind off Sam. The way how he had always been there for her and the way she made her feel – both of these were constant thoughts in her head, urging her to get off the bus and return home, in his arms. She already missed the taste and feeling of his lips on hers and the warmness, comfort and safe feeling of his arms. She wanted to go home.

Meanwhile, from the comfort of his home, Sam was thinking of Jane. He was thinking of skipping two or three days in the studio to go visit her, but then he thought that he would come off as too clingy in front of Jane.

He walked around the house aimlessly. He drove Jane to the bus station early in the morning. Now it was only 8 am. He looked around the kitchen, wanting to eat something. The fact that outside was pretty gloomy didn’t help elevate his mood in any way. Sam felt like now that Jane was away, the sun went away, too. With a sigh he pulled a can of beer out of the fridge and popped it open. He looked at the can for a couple of moments before taking a sip and putting it away. His mind was blank, covered in a thick layer of dullness. He got unused to it with Jane around him all the time, but now that she was gone, it came back, and it came back stronger than before.

Jane fell asleep and woke up only multiple hours later, when the guy from the seat in front of her poked at her shoulder because they got to their destination. Jane was slightly startled, but she forced a smile while whispering a “thank you” to the stranger in the dark coat that woke her up. She looked out the bus window. The sun was hidden beneath the grey clouds that were announcing that rain was on its way. She also saw a man, not that tall, standing in the station, his hands shoved down his jean pockets. He had a patch sewed to his jacket, but Jane couldn’t really make out any other words other than “club”, so she guessed that that was the guy waiting for her.

In no time she was off the bus, her small sports bag thrown over her shoulder. She approached the man as she took in a deep breath. “Hi, are you uhh – mister Curtis?” she asked with a forced smile.

“Yes, that’s me, you must be Jane Morrison. Call me Adam though,” he answered and shook her hand. “May I help with your bag?”

Jane softly shook her head, politely denying his request. It was much chillier in Nashville that day than it was in Detroit the day before. She wished she were still with Sammy, her Sammy, the person who opened her eyes to the beauties of this world.

On the way to her rented apartment, Adam couldn’t shut up for sixty seconds, but Jane pulled through it and tried to be as polite as possible.

The room was actually quite nice. The mattress of the bed was a little too soft for Jane’s tastes, but in rest it was all right. She sat down on the wooden floor the suitcase that she had brought from Detroit and started unpacking as a mean to pass the time. It didn’t take her long to finish unpacking since she hadn’t brought too many things, so soon enough she found herself overwhelmed with boredom. She wasn’t in the mood to watch TV, nor to read anything. She wasn’t sleepy either.

Then, she had an idea – what about going for a walk around the shopping center? There was enough time until that night’s gig started and she could use a little walk. Maybe she would get something for Sam from there. She instantly started making a list in her head of all the records that Sam had ever mentioned that he’d want to get and she smiled to herself.

After a quick shower and a change of clothes, Jane hung her camera around the neck and was out the door, strolling on the sidewalk.

“Hello ma’am, excuse me, where is the closest shopping center?” she asked politely a woman who was probably five years or so older than her. Jane really liked the way she dressed – with skin tight leather pants, knee-high boots and a leopard print shirt, with lots of jewelry around her neck and on her hands.

“Sure, darling. You cross this street and you keep going straight, until you reach the next street corner. There, you turn right and keep straight until you see it,” she answered with a smile on her lips.

The red light turned green and she crossed the street, along with the other people waiting to do so. There she parted ways with the woman who helped her; Jane kept going ahead, while the woman turned left. Jane kept the instructions in mind and strolled down, looking up to the sky from time to time. It looked like the sky was cornered from every direction by the skyscrapers that shadowed the streets.

A bling sound from her phone made her snap out of her thoughts and she slowed down her pace as she pulled out the phone.

Hi honey, hope you are having fun in Nash! Wish I were there with you :( I just left practice and I’m going for a drink with Danny and maybe some thrifting, too. Feel free to call me whenever you want! Kisses! Sam x

A smile bloomed on her lips and her heart fluttered as she re-read the text again. Sam called her “honey”; Jane didn’t know that he could get even sweeter than he already was, but yet there he was. She pushed the phone back in her pocket as she made a mental note to call Sam as soon as she gets where she set to go.

When she reached the next street corner, she remembered that she had to go right from there. She stopped at the red light and crossed her arms over her chest, softly tapping her fingers to her arm following a rhythm in her mind. When the light turned green, she started crossing the street. She always looked both left and right before crossing a street, just to make sure, but only this one time, she forgot to do so.

She was about midway on the crosswalk when the thought that she forgot to check the street crossed her mind. She violently turned her head right, and saw a car approaching fast, with no chances to stop before it reached her, but still too fast for her to back up to safety.

She felt as if time stopped as well as the things around her. In those moments she remembered all of her happy and sad memories from her life.

In no time she was back in the day she first stepped inside the new place she’d call home in Frankenmuth. She remembered seeing three boys and a girl peeking at her and her parents as they moved in all their belongings. She remembered seeing Sam for the first time, his first words to her being “Hey, wanna listen to some music with me?”. She then remembered her graduation from Frankenmuth High and that one time she went with the Kiszkas camping in Michigan’s wilderness.

She remembered meeting her ex-fiancé at a concert and their first kiss, then their breakup and all the heartbreak. Then she remembered Sam coming in the fitting room and staying with her while she bawled her eyes out and then she remembered the moment when she realized that Sam was the person she was actually in love with. She remembered their first kiss and the way her heart raced every time since then and the way his lips felt on hers and on her skin. She remembered everything.

“Sam, I...” was all she could whisper before the sense of reality came back to her and time started flowing again.

***

Sam looked down at his phone, nervously turning the screen on and off and wondering why didn’t Jane call or text him by then. It was getting late and he was starting to have a bad feeling forming in his stomach. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t shrug it off.

He jumped on the couch as he turned on the TV and scrolled through his list of contacts until he reached Jane. He touched her name and her profile showed up. As a contact photo, he chose one that they had made together in last year’s summer, while on a trip in Washington State. She had a radiant smile on her face in that picture as she kept with one finger a strand of Sam’s hair over her top lip, like it was a mustache.

Sam smiled at the memory and pressed the call button. As he waited for an answer, his heart deepened in his chest.

A terrible accident took place earlier today in Nashville, Tennessee, mid-day on one of the main streets, downtown. A woman got hit by a car, driven by a drunk man. Thankfully, the ambulance got there quick enough to assure that the woman won’t lose her life, even though she is gravely injured.

Sam looked at the TV screen as in front of his eyes flashed images of a wide street and a car crashed a few meters after the crosswalk. Then the news channel played a video submitted by a vigilante showing doctors rushing to a woman lying on the street.

Sam let his phone fall from his hand on the couch as the video zoomed in on the chaotic movements of the doctors, rushing the woman to the ambulance. The face wasn’t seen, but Sam spotted it – Jane’s camera; the one she never left behind. To confirm Sam’s biggest fear, he also saw one of the patches that they had sown together to the synthetic camera strap.

Sam’s heart started pounding against his chest, making an unbearable noise, almost driving him crazy. “No, no, no,” he kept whispering to himself as he stood up from the couch absentmindedly and started pacing around the room in circled, running his hands through his hair.

He eventually reached the stairs leading to the upper floor where he had his bedroom, an extra bathroom and a balcony. He let himself fall on the bottom stair and grabbed ahold of his head in his hands. “Fuck…”

Tears started threatening to roll down his cheeks as soon as he let his head fall back. Bringing his knees to his chest and holding them there, a first tear fell, wetting in one spot his white t-shirt. The affectionless and dull voice of the TV reporter, the loud heartbeats, the clock ticking nonstop on the wall – it all drained out. It was silent, as if the universe wanted to let him remember, think, pull himself together and do something.

Tags: @myownparadise96​, @satans-helper​, @jeordinevankiszka​, @littlegeekwonder​, @songbirdkisses​, @pomegranatecurses​, @angelstraightfr0mhell​, @freeeshavacadoo​, @karrotkate​, @mountainofthesunn​, @bigthighsandstupidguys​, @november-rain-roses​