#harper and daphne should have run away together

[greatcometdeservedbetter]

My hottest White Lotus take is that i don’t think anything happened between Harper and Cameron. Harper lied about something happening to make Ethan feel as crazy and paranoid as she did when he refused to come clean about the hookers and drugs. Either way, it ends with them in the same fucked up mind games as Daphne and Cameron, but I was genuinely shocked Harper didn’t dangle the possibility in Ethan’s face, forcing him to either admit or hide his affair with Daphne and putting them back on the same metaphorical playing field.

[viosoul]

Beyond What Lived Beneath- Chapter 2

"You think it's a good idea?"

Robbie and Elliot were currently looking through the current guest list. It wasn't very long: Robbie's mom and her partner, their mutual friends from college and a few they've kept in contact with from high school, and a few close friends from Pine Springs. Four of the names stuck out like sore thumbs on the same hand to him at the end of the list.

"We don't have to invite them if it'll be too hard for you guys." Robbie said. "We haven't sent out the invites yet-"

Elliot shook his head. "It's okay. I think we should invite them." He said to his fiancé. "They're some of our closest friends."

Indeed, one of the common threads Elliot and Robbie had with Chief Parker Shaw, Danni Asturias, Imogen Wescott, and Tom Sato was that they all knew Harper, the last of those four more so than just friends. It made his reaction at the funeral all the more troubling, as even with his best friend's help (Andy, Elliot believed), he couldn't get through his eulogy without breaking down into quiet sobs. He wound up being led off the podium with said best friend finishing the eulogy for him. He wasn't the only one who had trouble getting through it, but he clearly had the hardest amongst the four friends who made up the Scooby-Doo gang.

Elliot always believed Tom was the group's Velma, of sorts. He seemed to know the most about what the five had faced together. Chief Shaw had been the most like Fred to him, leading the group and being something of a team dad, not that he was ever called that. But Elliot saw that it was there, just unspoken. He couldn't really figure out which ones Danni and Imogen were. Maybe Imogen was Daphne, solely for the rick kid status and nice-girl attitude despite that. Danni was harder to pin down, and after a while, he gave up trying to match her to anyone.

Harper had been impossible to match up to any of them too. She was a little bit of everyone.

He was snapped out of his thoughts when Robbie tapped his shoulder gently. "Elli?"

"Sorry, Rob, just off in my head again."

"I know." He hugged him. "It's okay. I don't blame you."

'You never do.' Elliot thought, bringing a small smile on his face as he returned the hug. He broke the hug as he glanced at one of the coffee cups on the table. "We forgot about the coffee. It might be cold by now."

Robbie pulled away, and chuckled. "Oops. It's okay, we can just get another order. The coffee here is worth it anyways. So we're sending invites out by tomorrow?"

Elliot smiled in appreciation and kissed Robbie's cheek. "Yeah, if the list is good with you. It is to me."

Robbie smiled, and nodded. "Then tomorrow it is!" He laughed as he stood up to get the two of them new coffees.

Sitting alone, Elliot looked out the window of the Compass Café. He noticed someone running off in the distance, though he couldn't make out who it was.

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AN: Hi again! I'm happy to bring the next chapter of this out! Still not done writing it but hopefully I'll be able to update this on a more regular basis. Thank you for reading, and see you next time!

[eablevinswrites]

“The Big Book of True Loves” Continued

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A different day.

Everyone knew that Principal Lash protected the hoard of confiscated items under the floorboards of his office.

Everyone knew it, but still some idiot tried once a year to get their phone back.

This year, that idiot was Harper. Or, more specifically, Felix with Harper standing lookout.

Leprechauns didn’t have many friends, and Felix had fewer than most. Harper understood the need to be left alone, so she and Felix got along okay. They’d known each other for as long as she’d been friends with Melody, so... most of their lives. Harper had never been afraid of climbing too high or running too fast or snarking at the bigger kids, and Felix had never turned down an opportunity for mischief, which was why he kept dragging her into his shenanigans.

Harper crossed her arms and leaned against the countertop as the school secretary, Mrs. Glass, used her one large eye to search the box behind the counter for the earring Harper had “lost.”

“Is this it?” asked Mrs. Glass, coming up with a silver hoop.

“No,” Harper murmured, trying to make her shoulders slump convincingly as her foot tapped against the floor. What was taking so long?

Mrs. Glass disappeared back into the lost and found box. “What did you say it looked like, dear?”

“Silver,” said Harper, spotting the shift of the principal’s door and slumping in relief as Felix slunk silently out and crouched at her feet with a huge grin and a wink. “With a little ballerina charm on it. And the ballerina’s dress is pink.” Felix caught her eye and made a face, and she shooed him away. The fake earring story needed to have details, and she did used to have ballerina earrings. When she was seven. Melody had given them to her.

He’d just crept out into the hallway when Mrs. Glass rose back up. “I’m so sorry, sweetie, I can’t find it. Why don’t you sign the ledger here, and we’ll let you know if it turns up.”

Harper shrugged and picked up the pen from the dusty blue book Mrs. Glass thumped in front of her. She put her name and a description of the item below rows and rows of entries by other students, thanked Mrs. Glass, and left.

Felix waited against the wall by the corner, flipping a large gold coin and catching it. “The luck of the Irish,” he said in a terrible imitation of an accent.

Harper only raised a brow. Leprechauns did have more luck than most. “All that for a coin?”

He held it up between two fingers, letting the light play off of it. “Pure gold,” he said with obvious pleasure. “Saved up for ages to buy it.”

“And yet you lost it.”

He tilted his head, the green in his eyes twinkling at her. “Thus the rescue mission.”

He flipped it again, but his cocky expression fell when a leathery hand snatched it out of the air.

Principal Lash, who had just turned the corner, examined the coin and turned a speculative glower on the two of them. “My office. Now.”

Harper glared furiously at Felix, who winced. He’d just had to show off his prize.

Mrs. Glass blinked at them as they followed Principal Lash into the back.

Lash lifted two floorboards and poked around in his hoard, looking for something. Harper saw cell phones, rubber lizards, packs of chewing gum, mp3 players, firecrackers, cigarettes, a whoopie cushion, and at least three magazines with naked women on the cover.

Principal Lash rolled the coin over and over in his hand as he searched for the matching item in his hoard and did not find it.

Smoke billowed from his nostrils, the human skin of his face thinning so that ridges of scales peeked from beneath, and he turned eyes like burning brands on the two students.

Felix whimpered as the old dragon dropped the coin into the jumbled pile and nudged the planks into place with his foot. Harper elbowed Felix sharply in the ribs, making him jerk his gaze from the place where his coin lay.

She shook her head at him, and Felix seemed to curl in on himself in defeat.

So much for leprechaun luck.

Harper crossed her arms and glowered at the floor as Principal Lash sat behind his desk and pondered their fate. In the olden days, those found plundering a dragon’s hoard died an ignoble death, but things were more progressive now. He might want to roast them alive, but they’d probably just get detention. Every day. Until they graduated.

Maybe longer. He looked pretty pissed.

Really, it was Felix’s fault. He should have known better -- he used to think he was a dragon because of his hoarding instincts and had researched them for months before someone had suggested leprechaun, and then his powers had bloomed.

The gold had been the tip-off. It was true that some dragons specialized their hoarding, but most usually had at least a theme, and Felix just hoarded gold -- not silver or diamonds or pearls, just... gold. The purer the gold, the more he wanted it, and he could sniff out metal impurity almost instantly. This trait made leprechauns great at jewelry-making, but you never saw gold in a leprechaun’s shop. Just silver and platinum and gemstones. They always kept the gold for themselves.

They’d also been known to steal gold, especially from each other, which was why leprechauns didn’t hang out together like pixies or mermaids or centaurs. Too paranoid.

Which was also a dragon trait, so nobody had been surprised when Felix thought he might one day breathe fire.

But for all leprechauns had damned good luck, Harper was starting to think this one was her own personal bad luck charm.

“I can’t decide if this is worse than the time I almost drowned because you wanted to try cliff diving,” she muttered.

“You owed me for the mountain climbing,” he replied in an equally low voice.

Harper rolled her eyes. She and Nora and Daphne had joined Melody’s family for a camping trip the previous summer, and Harper had felt inexplicably drawn to the small mountain nearby with its crags and rocks and uneven surfaces. Nobody else had wanted to go, so Felix had shrugged and promised his parents he’d keep an eye on her. They’d climbed, and Harper had loved being up high with the sun beating down on her head and the wind picking at her hair. When they were a third of the way up, two hours into climbing, Harper had slipped on a narrow ridge and started to tip backward. If Felix hadn’t been there to grab her, she probably would have died.

They hadn’t told anyone. They’d turned around without speaking and climbed back down, both shaken by the near miss, and had kept it to themselves.

The rest of the trip, Harper had tried not to let her eyes drift to the mountain too often or with too much longing. She didn’t know why, but it had touched something inside of her that she didn’t understand.

Felix, when she’d mentioned this, had suggested that she was probably a mountain goblin. He’d ducked the pine cone she’d thrown at his head (mountain goblins were ugly) and proceeded to badger her into cliff diving because no one else had the guts. The only thing that had swayed Harper was that he’d saved her life and also Sabrina would be in the water and able to help if they needed her.

Felix, with his double handfuls of luck, had sliced cleanly into the water, but Harper had hit her head on a rock. Sabrina had had to pluck her from the water, dazed but conscious, and deliver her to shore where the trio’s mother fussed over her with the manic energy of an anxious pixie.

Harper had spent the rest of the trip with a headache and a bad attitude, testing everyone’s patience until they left her alone with her grump.

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