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wokeuptired · 4 years

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every perfect summer

Finn is steady on her own two feet but Niall is a hurricane, determined to bring to the surface what she’s long buried. If only he weren’t so beautiful at sunset, she might be able to resist.

written for @majorharry ‘s 20k fic celebration

prompt #29: “stop looking at me like that.”

niall/ofc, 6.2k

Summer in California is hot and sticky, the kind of sticky that makes you feel silly showering, because as soon as you walk outside, you’ll be sweaty all over again. Even with the fan on full blast, Finn’s thighs are sticking to the leather of the couch she took from her mom’s house when she moved out. She’s read the same page a hundred times, over and over again. The heat makes it hard to think.

The heat makes it hard to breathe.

And mostly, the heat makes it hard to write.

Finn’s about to put the book down when she hears footsteps on the stairs outside. Her apartment complex is a series of buildings each containing a dozen apartments. Finn shares the landing of her staircase with the apartment next door, but it’s the wrong time of day for Cindy and Ralph to be returning home, which means—

“Your new downstairs neighbor is hot,” Jocelyn announces as the apartment door slams shut behind her, the gust of warm air ruffling the pages of Finn’s book. She looks up to roll her eyes.

“You think every guy is hot.”

Jocelyn dumps her shopping on the kitchen table and scoffs. “I do not. Just the hot ones.”

“Aren’t you engaged?” Finn glances down at the big shiny ring on Jocelyn’s finger to emphasize her point. Even though Jocelyn moved out six months ago, when her boyfriend popped the question, sometimes it feels like she never left. Right now is one of those times. “What’s Marcus think about all this looking you do?”

“What he doesn’t know won’t kill him.” Jocelyn punctuates her statement with a saucy flip of her hair and begins unloading her bags onto the small kitchen counter. She holds up a carton of ice cream. “Should I bother putting this away, or do you want to dive in right now?”

Finn holds her hand out for the rocky road. “You know me so well.”

“You’re welcome.” As Finn digs into the tub of ice cream, Jocelyn begins putting things away in the fridge. “You know,” she says into the veggie drawer, “I’m not kidding about your new neighbor. He’s got this angelic frat boy look to him. Have you met him yet?”

“Yeah,” Finn says. “Last week. He offered to carry a package upstairs for me. Very polite, and totally not my type.”

“Exactly.” Jocelyn sits on the couch with another spoon and slides the ice cream out of Finn’s grasp. “As your older sister, it’s my job to advise you on everything. Starting with your interest in men, which is, to be frank, utter shit.”

Finn opens her mouth to object, but she can’t find fault with Jocelyn’s statement. Her last boyfriend wouldn’t come to any work events with her but insisted she attend all of his art shows. He had an ego the size of the Milky Way to make up for his abysmal lack of talent.

“You need to stop dating those neurotic, artsy types,” Jocelyn continues, “and date a man who can, like, actually kill a spider.”

“I’m perfectly capable of killing my own spiders.” As long as they’re small and not moving, but Finn doesn’t feel the need to share that caveat.

“So am I,” Jocelyn says. “Do you want wine?” She doesn’t wait for Finn to answer before she gets up and goes straight for the cupboard that holds the long-stem glasses. “Anyway, that’s not my point. You need to stop dating boys who look good on paper and start dating men who are good. In real life.”

Finn closes her book so that it doesn’t have to listen to this conversation. She accepts the wine glass from Jocelyn’s outstretched hand and swirls around the liquid within. It doesn’t go with the ice cream, but she’s 25 years old, so that doesn’t matter.

Jocelyn scowls at the closed book. “Virginia Woolf again, Finn? Are you ever going to read anything written in this century?”

Finn rolls her eyes. If there’s one thing her sister excels at, it’s being unsatisfied with all aspects of Finn’s life. “Are you here just to criticize me? Or are we watching ‘The Bachelor’?”

Jocelyn grins, spoon still in her mouth. “Oh, we’re watching ‘The Bachelor.’”

-----

The thing about “The Bachelor,” Finn decides that night as she’s brushing her teeth, is that, for the women involved, the ones competing for the bachelor’s heart, there are no consequences.

Oh, small consequences, sure. Your decision might make somebody else cry, or your heart might be slightly bruised, but at the end of it all, you’ve got thousands of new Instagram followers and you’re famous in your small town and everybody wants to date you, even though you chose, of your own free will, to engage in the skeptical that is a dating game show.

But there are no big consequences, no bad consequences. A few months later and the next season’s airing, and everything you did, every dumb thing you said, every kiss you exchanged—it’s all forgotten.

Maybe that’s the way to go, Finn thinks.

Maybe next year, she ought to audition. She develops the pitch in her head: 25 year old ghostwriter of bestselling romance novels; lives alone in Los Angeles; has been considering, for an entire year, the adoption of a cat; has never been in love.

It’s that last part that would sway them, she thinks. The producers would imagine her doe-eyed and innocent, maybe a bit naive. She’d be pitted against the season’s villain, the girl with dark hair (a visual contrast to Finn’s blond bob) who would stop at nothing to win her man.

“How can she write romance novels when she has never known love?” audiences across America would wonder.

Perhaps the bachelor himself would even inquire. Finn would smile shyly, bat her impossibly long eyelashes up at him, and say something coy like, “You could tutor me.”

Jocelyn would love that. She lives for the drama, for what the editors create in post-production. She doesn’t care that it’s fake.

And every week Finn watches and wonders how she can keep selling love in her books when this show proves, without a doubt, that it doesn’t exist.

-----

The new downstairs neighbor works out in the mornings on his patio. Finn hears his music the next morning, drifting in through her open sliding door, around 8:30 AM. It’s not early enough for her to be justifiably annoyed at him, but she’s annoyed nonetheless, because she’s just sat down at her laptop with the intention of writing something today.

Something. Anything. Words on the page, that’s all she needs.

Instead, she sighs, closing her laptop and crossing the room to the balcony. She slides the door open further, pushes the screen out of the way, and goes outside. When she and Jocelyn first moved in, the balcony was a huge appeal. “Outdoor space!” they’d squealed when they first saw the apartment listed online. But now Finn’s been here for two and a half years, and the balcony is just another space for dust to collect.

It’s directly over Downstairs Neighbor’s patio. Finn looks down through the wooden slats and tries to catch a glimpse at him. She can hear Jocelyn’s voice in her head: He’s hot, right? I told you he was hot!

In truth, though, Finn can’t see much through the small gaps between the planks. She can’t tell if he’s lifting weights or doing jumping jacks or playing a very enthusiastic game of cat’s cradle. He’s definitely grunting, though.��

Finn shakes her head, trying not to focus on the noises he’s making, and crosses the balcony. She leans her arms on the railing and looks out over the beauty of Los Angeles. Beauty referring, of course, to the parking lot. Finn can see her car, about thirty feet away, parked beneath an evil tree that drops red berries. It really needs to be washed.

Maybe she should take it today. Maybe today will be the first day in a month that she’s gotten dressed in pants that have a zipper and a button, and she’ll go to the carwash and—

Feeling something crawling on her arm, Finn looks down, and oh, shit, it’s a spider. Not a little spider, not a daddy long legs, but one of those ones that’s big enough where you can see its body. It looks like one of those spiders a little kid draws around Halloween.

Oh, shit. Finn lifts her arm, waving it wildly, trying to shake the spider loose before it bites her and turns her into Spider Woman, and that’s when she throws her mug of coffee into the air.

“Oh, shit,” she says out loud. Time seems to slow as she watches her mug descend, coffee flying everywhere as the cup turns a full 360 degrees before landing with a crack on the concrete below.

“What the fuck?” It’s Downstairs Neighbor.

“Oh, shit,” Finn says again. Which, no doubt, Downstairs Neighbor heard. Oh, shit. That one’s in her head, at least.

She hears a grunt as he, she imagines, lowers his weight to the ground, then the snick of his sliding glass door, then the sound of his front door opening, and then, oh, shit, there he is, standing on the ground, looking at her broken coffee cup.

Oh, shit, Finn thinks again as she drops to her knees, hiding herself from view.

Apparently unsuccessfully, as not thirty seconds later, she hears, “I can see you, ya know.”

Finn rises slowly to her feet and looks down. It’s hard not to admit that Jocelyn was right as she looks down at him, messy hair and blue eyes and muscles visible through his sweaty t-shirt.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi.” His eyes twinkle, and she knows he’s trying not to laugh at her. “This yours?”

“Yeah. Sorry I interrupted you.”

He laughs then, a light, musical sound that she can feel in her toes. Oh, shit. That’s not good. Finn’s characters feel laughter in their toes, but she certainly doesn’t. Feeling someone’s laughter in her toes is not a real thing, she’s always thought, except, apparently, it is.

“What happened?” he asks.

“There was a spider.”

“A spider.”

Finn nods, cheeks burning. “It was a big spider.”

“You gonna come clean it up?”

Finn nods again. “In a minute.”

“Okay.” He grins up at her and she blushes back.

Finn turns around and goes inside, sliding the door shut behind her, and waits, listening for the sounds of Downstairs neighbor reentering his own apartment, shutting the door, locking it. When a minute has passed without any of that, Finn realizes that he must be waiting for her.

Oh, shit. Finn doesn’t have to be Jocelyn to know that this is not the ideal situation in which one wants to interact with Hot Downstairs Neighbor. But it seems like she doesn’t have a choice, so she slips on the flip flops she keeps by the door and goes downstairs.

He’s still there, standing in the sunshine, squinting when he smiles. “There you are,” he says.

“Here I am.” Finn looks down, surveying the damage. The mug has split into several large chunks, and maybe if Finn were better at diy-ing she’d be able to fix it, but as things stand now, it’s destined for the garbage. “Damn, I really liked that mug.”

“I’ll buy you a new one,” Downstairs Neighbor says, which is such a strange thing to say that Finn startles, turning to stare at him.

“Thanks?” she says.

“You’re welcome.” He smiles, holding out his hand. “I’m Niall.”

Finn accepts the handshake. “I’m Finn.”

His hand is warm and a bit clammy, a bit like California in the summer, and her stomach goes topsy-turvy. She yanks her hand back.

“Nice to meet you,” Niall says. “I guess you’re the neighbor who watches ‘The Bachelor’?”

Jesus Christ, Finn thinks, dropping to a squat. She gathers up the pieces of her destroyed mug and doesn’t answer him. How nosy of him, asking her that. But then, she was the one listening to him work out this morning.

“My sister likes it,” she says. “I’m just along for the ride.”

“Hey, there’s no shame in liking ‘The Bachelor,’” Niall says, dropping down beside her. They reach for the last piece at the same time, hands brushing. Finn draws hers back, trying to ignore the tingling in her fingertips. “Here.”

Finn accepts the final shard. “Thanks,” she says. “And I don’t like ‘The Bachelor.’ I think it’s silly.”

Niall smiles at her again, all teeth and sunshine. “What’s silly about love?”

Finn blinks at him, trying to decide if he’s an idiot or just bad at small talk. Maybe both. “That show is not about love,” she says. “Have you ever seen it?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “But I’ve heard it through the ceiling.”

Jesus Christ, Finn thinks again. What a neighbor. She can’t wait to tell Jocelyn about this, to prove to her that Downstairs Neighbor may be hot, but his positive qualities end there. He’s intrusive and nosy and way, way too good looking.

“You can get back to your workout,” she says, standing up straight. He follows, forcing her to look up to meet his eyes. “Sorry for bothering you.”

“Not a bother,” he says. “It was nice to meet you, Finn.”

“Yep,” she says, offering him a half smile before she turns tail and dashes up the stairs, back to her safe, quiet, Downstairs Neighbor-free apartment. Back to her laptop, and the manuscript due in three months that she hasn’t managed to crack yet. Back to being hot and sweaty inside her apartment, instead of outside.

“Have a good day!” he calls after her. She doesn’t return the greeting.

-----

The next morning, a knock on the door wakes Finn up from a dream, the kind of dream that you know as soon as you wake was a good one, but it’s too late, you’ve forgotten it, and you won’t be able to get it back.

“No,” she mutters, turning over in bed, burrowing into the pillow. “I’m sleeping.” But then the knock sounds again. “Damnit.”

Finn climbs out of bed and reaches for her phone on the nightstand. 8:27 AM on a Wednesday. An acceptable hour for someone to be knocking on the door, she supposes. Except she was up till 1 o’clock trying to make her messy notes into something resembling an outline that could someday (someday soon, she hopes) be a book.

The morning person disturbing her sleep knocks again, eliminating the possibility that it’s just UPS dropping off a package. Finn drops her phone on the bed and makes her way down the hall to the living room, where sunlight blares in so sharply it makes her squint.

“Gah,” she says to herself as she pulls open the door. And then, “Oh, it’s you.”

“It’s me,” Hot Downstairs Neighbor—Niall, Finn corrects herself—says. “UPS dropped off this package at my door, but I think it’s yours.”

Finn looks down at the envelope he’s holding out, but the label is blurry. Oh, shit, her glasses. “If you say so,” she says. “I’d have to grab my glasses to know for sure.”

Niall smiles at her, she thinks, but the details of his face are a bit blurry. “I can wait,” he says. “We should make sure it’s yours.”

Finn frowns at him for a second—He can read, can’t he? Shouldn’t he know if it’s her name on the label?—before deciding that it’s too early for an argument. “Fine, whatever,” she says, turning around and leaving him in the doorway.

That’s where she expects him to stay, but when she returns to the door a minute later with her glasses perched on her nose, he’s inside her apartment, poking around the bookshelves on either side of her television. The package he brought over has been discarded on the coffee table.

Finn ignores him for a second as she picks it up. Yep, it’s definitely hers. It’s a proof of her latest Isobel novel, if she had to guess. But she’s not going to open it now, not with Niall here.

Niall, who is currently nosing around her living room, looking much too closely at things she’d rather he not see.

“What are these?” Niall steps closer to the bookshelf, his eyes scanning the spines. “You read romance novels?”

“Not exactly,” Finn says. Which lie should she tell this time? She has a few prepared: “they’re my sister’s” or “my roommate forgot them when she moved out.” Said roommate is said sister, but for the sake of the lie, that wouldn’t matter. But then the truth slips out. “I write them.”

“You write them?” Niall repeats. He pulls one of the books out, Summer’s Dalliance, about two yoga instructors who find love during a training retreat in the Maldives. “You’re Isobel Soleil?”

Finn can tell from the way Niall says Isobel Soleil that he’s heard of her. Who hasn’t heard of her, these days? Her books are in grocery stores and airport shops and on bestseller lists and there’s a series in development with HBO.

As a ghostwriter, Finn isn’t involved, but she knows the show will help move sales, which means bigger checks, which means maybe, eventually, she can write something she actually cares about.

“Not exactly.” Finn takes the book out of his hand and returns it to its place on the shelf. It’s not as if she’s proud of it. That’s not why she has it out. It’s just a placeholder until she publishes a book she’s actually proud of. “Isobel Soleil isn’t a person. She’s a brand. Her books are written by half a dozen different people. How do you think she can pump them out so quickly?”

“How quickly?”

“Three or four a year.”

“And you wrote all of these?” Niall’s finger runs along the spines. “How many are there? Ten?”

“Eight,” Finn corrects. Eight cheesy, embarrassing, don’t-let-your-mother-see-you-reading-that novels. “But they’re formulaic and simplistic. They’re not… they’re not good.”

Niall shrugs. “They’re not high literature, you mean. Someone reads them, though, right? And the people who read them enjoy them. So who cares if they’re not high literature, Finn?”

Finn swallows the sudden lump in her throat. How has Niall managed to get to the quick of things so, well, quick? “I care, I guess. This isn’t what I imagined I’d be doing when I was little, telling people I wanted to be a writer when I grew up.”

“So write something else,” Niall says.

Finn sighs. She wishes it were that easy. If only she could break out of the mold she’s put herself in and write something else, something that’s not about two people falling in love. If only she could write something she actually believed in.

But she has a contract and a deadline and an agent and an editor on her back, and no choice but to finish this Isobel Soleil novel.

“Maybe next summer,” she says.

Niall considers her, nods. “Speaking of this summer,” he says slowly, like he’s thinking about what he’s going to say as he’s saying it, “I have free tickets to LACMA, and I just moved to town so I don’t know a ton of people. Want to go with me?”

Say yes or no more ice cream, Jocelyn’s voice says in the back of Finn’s mind.

“Sure,” she says. “But you know my secret”—she gestures to the bookshelves—“so now you have to tell me one of yours. So I know you’re not a serial killer or something.”

He smiles at her and, damn, he’s good looking. “I’m a lawyer,” he says. “My new job doesn’t start till August, so I’m working remotely with my old firm until then.”

“That’s not a secret.” Not a secret at all, but a great career for a hero in a romance novel. Finn makes a mental note.

“Okay,” Niall says. He crosses his arms over his chest and leans back, lifting one hand to his chin, a classic thinking pose. “How about this? I’m not from here.”

Finn shakes her head. She’d already guessed that from his accent, a soft, lilting Irish one that makes everything he says sound like a poem. “Not a secret either. You get one more try.”

“One more try!” he says with mock shock. “I’ll make this good, then.”

He thinks and Finn waits, and in the thirty seconds it takes him to come up with a good secret, she wonders what the hell she’s doing, flirting with Hot Downstairs Neighbor in her living room while dressed in her pajamas. Oh, shit, she’s not wearing a bra, is she?

Finn crosses her arms over her chest and considers backing out of this conversation entirely by making something up that will put Niall off and convince him that she’s the worst possible LACMA companion.

But then he says, “I can’t swim,” and that is distracting enough to make her forget everything else.

“You can’t swim?” she asks. “What the hell are you doing in southern California?”

Niall shrugs. His smile makes her insides go wonky. “Maybe you can teach me.” Then he holds out his phone. “Here, give me your number. I’ll text you and we can make plans.”

She obliges, all the while wondering what exactly she’s gotten herself into.

-----

LACMA day comes much quicker than Finn anticipates. When she and Niall first made the plans a week ago, Saturday seemed like ages away. There was so much she was going to do between now and then: repot all of her plants, make bread from scratch, work on her manuscript. But instead, she putters around her apartment, typing words here and there, ignoring how bad they are, and not baking bread.

It’s a waste of a week, and not just because Niall is there, in the back of her mind, the whole time.

Jocelyn’s excited, of course, for LACMA day, and insists on coming over the night before to help Finn select her outfit. Finn keeps reminding her that it’s summer in Los Angeles, so it’s a thousand degrees out and she will melt no matter what she wears, but Jocelyn doesn’t care.

Which is how Finn ends up knocking on Niall’s door on LACMA day dressed in a romper that’s giving her a wedgie, a purse she never carries slung over her shoulder. Jocelyn even forced her to wear lip gloss.

“Lip gloss makes you a different person,” Jocelyn said last night on her way out. “I left you three options. Please wear one.”

“I don’t take advice from the Sweet Valley Twins anymore,” Finn had retorted as she shut the door in Jocelyn’s face.

But she’s wearing the lip gloss anyway. Her hair has already gotten stuck in it three times, and all she’s done is climb down the stairs.

She knocks again, half hoping Niall hasn’t changed his mind and half hoping that he has. If he has, she can go back upstairs, put her pajamas on again, and continue to stare at her blank Word document. But then he opens the door.

“Good morning!” His smile is so bright it makes her squint. “Coffee?”

He holds out a travel mug to her, waiting for her to take it.

“Good morning,” she says after she takes a sip. The coffee is exactly the right temperature and perfectly sweet, which is almost enough to make her smile. “This is good coffee.”

“It’s from Ecuador,” Niall says. He steps out onto the welcome mat and closes the apartment door behind him. “Hold this for me?”

Finn holds his travel mug as he locks the door and turns the knob a couple of times to make sure it’s secure. Then he turns around, his smile lighting up his face.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Ready,” she says, though she’s pretty sure she isn’t.

She learns, over the next few hours, that Niall’s energy is nonstop. He talks constantly during their drive to the museum, talks as they park the car, talks as they ride the elevator to the top floor and begin making their way through the galleries. He tells her where he’s from and where he went to school and what his favorite sports teams are.

And she finds herself talking too. She tells him about her sister and where she went to school and how she got started writing Isobel Soleil novels, and the entire time, she’s taking mental notes about him, about the way he holds doors for her and grins down at her and laughs even when her jokes are barely funny.

This is how the heroes in her novels behave. They are handsome and well-meaning and have substantial life goals. They are polite and conscientious and make the heroines feel brave and important and valued. And that’s how Finn finds herself feeling: like if she had something to say, Niall would listen to it.

After the museum, they stop for lunch at a restaurant Finn found on Yelp as they were leaving the parking structure. It’s small and bright inside, but as Niall pulls out Finn’s chair for her, it occurs to her, for the first time, that this might actually be a date.

Jocelyn had said as much last night, but Finn had ignored her, as she does with most things Jocelyn says. But now, seated across from Niall, with nowhere to look but at him, reality dawns, and it’s blinding.

But, she decides, she won’t address it, and she carries on with the meal as if they are recent acquaintances and neighbors, which is, she reminds herself, exactly what they are.

-----

After LACMA day, Niall texts Finn about the movie he’s watching, and she imagines she can hear it through the floor. Later that evening, he texts her good night, and then, the next day, he texts her good morning. The next weekend, they go to Venice Beach together, and they see a movie in a classic theater downtown the following Tuesday. That night, he comes over for dinner, and they cook together, finding their way around each other in Finn’s small kitchen.

And all of a sudden, this summer is different, hot and sticky like all the others, but different because this summer has Niall.

Niall on the couch, bare feet up on the coffee table, listing all the reasons that golf is superior to all other sports.

Niall in the passenger’s seat of her car, singing along to the radio even when he doesn’t know the words, the sun setting behind him, lighting him up as if it’s saying, “Look, he’s beautiful.”

And he is beautiful. Niall in her thoughts, Niall on the back of her eyelids when she blinks, Niall in her dreams. Niall, beautiful.

And Niall in her manuscript, try as she might to keep him out. In sticking with the proposal she made to her editor back in the spring, she’s writing about a doctor and an artist who meet when they’re sharing a wall in a duplex summer rental on the coast of Oregon. By midsummer, she’s written thirty thousand words, enough to reassure her editor that she’s still writing, that things are fine, and, upon rereading, she realizes that the doctor has become Niall.

The doctor, so sure of himself, driven and determined and sexier than any other hero she’s ever written. He is confident and has beautiful eyes and magic fingers, and the heroine, the artist, is head over heels in love with him before she’s even thought to like him.

And the artist. Finn is the artist, the confused, prideful creative soul who doesn’t want love, is afraid of it, just wants to be left alone. But now she has the lawyer, the beautiful, handsome, intelligent, lovely lawyer who makes her want to stop hiding. He makes her want to feel things. He makes her want to reach out for him, to push her fears aside and let her have what she wants.

July brings that realization and an unseasonal thunderstorm that forces Finn to bring out a bucket and email her landlord about that leak in the roof from December that still hasn’t been fixed. That’s a momentary distraction, at least, from thoughts of Niall, thoughts of Niall that are plaguing her every moment. Awake, asleep, Niall. Always Niall.

It’s thundering overhead when there’s a knock at her door. She opens it, and there he is, like she’s conjured him.

“I brought wine,” he says, holding out the bottle.

“Come in,” she says. She thinks of how much has changed since she sat on her couch a month ago, drinking wine with Jocelyn. She wishes, for a moment, that she could go back. But then she looks at Niall again.

And she doesn’t want to look away, like the artist doesn’t want to look away from the doctor. When you find something this perfect, why would you ever look away? Why would you let it go?

Finn knows from experience, though, that sometimes you don’t get to choose when people leave. Sometimes they leave you, aching and cold and alone. Sometimes it’s not up to you.

“Come in,” she says again. She grabs two wine glasses from the kitchen and joins Niall in the living room, where they sit on the couch, thighs pressed together, and he picks a movie for them to watch.

She isn’t paying attention, though, as she downs two glasses of wine and wonders if Niall will kiss her tonight. She’d like him to, she decides, just as much as she doesn’t want him to. It’s like the Schroedinger’s cat of kisses—if they never kiss, she will never know the kiss, but she will also never know what happens after it. She will never know if they go further, if they stop abruptly, if he breaks her heart and leaves her in pieces, smashed on the concrete like her broken coffee mug.

But she will also never know if it will be beautiful, like the loves of the characters in her novels, characters who risk their hearts when they don’t know what the outcome will be. The difference between Finn and Niall and the artist and the doctor, though, is that Finn can control the artist and the doctor. She can decide their ending, she can choose the words for the last page.

And maybe, with Niall, she doesn’t want a last page.

Two hours later, Finn is wine-drunk and sitting on the floor, her back pressed against the couch. Niall is next to her, the table pushed away from them to accommodate his long legs. She leans her head on his shoulder, thinking, in the way only a wine-addled mind will allow, that she’d like to keep this night forever, seal it into a locket and wear it around her neck.

“Tell me again why you don’t like your books,” Niall says. He has her newest proof in front of him on the table. It’s littered with post-it notes, changes Finn would’ve made to it had she had more time. But it’s too late now, and it will print as is.

“They’re not good,” Finn says, her go-to explanation. “I can do better.”

Niall shakes his head. “But they are good. I read Sunshine in Your Mouth, and it’s good. You’re a good writer, Finn.”

“Oh, no.” Finn ducks, covering her face with her arms. “You read it? I can’t believe you read it.”

“Yeah, I did.” Niall tugs her arm away from her face. “Stop hiding from me.”

Oh, if only he knew how apt that statement was, then maybe he wouldn’t say it. Finn puts her arms down and refills her wine glass. She knows she shouldn’t drink any more, but maybe if she does, she’ll stop thinking about how blue Niall’s eyes are and how soft his fingers feel against her arm.

“Tell me the truth,” Niall says, thumbing the post-its in her proof copy. “Why don’t you like being Isobel Soleil?”

“Because I’m not her. I’m not like her. I just don’t believe in love,” Finn tries to explain. “It’s like—”

Niall laughs. “Love’s not like the tooth fairy, Finn. You don’t have to have felt it to know it’s real.”

Finn looks at him, at his soft cheeks and his pink lips and his messy hair. In another life, in another version of this world, maybe she and Niall have known each other forever, since they were kids. And maybe Finn loves Niall. Maybe she always has. Maybe they fit. Maybe it’s the easiest thing this other Finn’s ever felt.

But the Finn that lives in this world, the one sitting on the floor of her apartment with her knees pulled to her chest and a half-empty wine glass in her hand—this Finn doesn’t feel things easily. Feelings are heavy and feelings hold you back and feelings stick around long after the people who brought them on are gone.

“My parents,” Finn says, “they got divorced when I was five.”

“Finn, you don’t have to—”

“It’s fine,” Finn says. The wine is talking now. The wine and the smell of Niall’s shampoo and the plunk plunk plunk of rain hitting the bucket on the kitchen floor. “My dad was sleeping with his secretary. Such a cliche, right? And it took my mom years to leave him. Years. He was sleeping with his secretary while my mom was pregnant with me. She kept thinking he’d stop, that he’d finally realize that he loved her, that he loved his family. She kept waiting, until she couldn’t anymore.”

Finn feels Niall’s fingers brush against hers where they rest on the rug. “That’s why you don’t believe in love?”

“No.” Finn closes her eyes, her head tilting back against the sofa cushion. “That’s why I don’t let myself feel it.”

“Finn.”

She doesn’t answer as Niall moves closer. Eyes closed, she can feel him entering her personal space, can feel the heat of his hand as he takes her wine glass, hears the clink of glass on wood as he puts it on the table. Feels his fingers on her cheek as he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Finn. Look at me.”

So she does, opens her eyes and meets his, and it’s too much, it’s all too much, the way he’s looking at her like he can see her feelings, can read them as if they were written across her forehead.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.

He smiles. “Like what?”

“Like you like me.” The words are out before she can stop them, slipping from her lips like a sigh.

“Finn.” He’s closer now, impossibly close, his hand on her cheek. “Finn, I more than like you.”

“I—” Finn starts, but she doesn’t know what to say.

She doesn’t know what this feeling is, the one taking over her chest and spreading to her stomach and traveling up her throat all the way to her eyeballs. It’s a headache and nausea at the same time, plus a sense of doom in her stomach, maybe the unconscious realization that this can’t last forever.

Because feelings never do. Niall likes her now, likes her a lot, likes her enough to maybe kiss her against her dirty car in the parking lot fifty feet from their building. But that won’t last. He’ll like her for a bit and then he’ll like her less and less until nothing remains but the memory of the fire that used to burn, a bit of leftover smoke drifting skyward.

And that’s when it will hurt.

This will hurt, Finn thinks, but she jumps anyway.

“Then kiss me,” she says.

So he does, and in his kiss, for as long as it lasts, she lets herself feel everything: lets herself feel the sticky heat of summer and the sticky heat of a love so big it sucks you under, leaves you breathless, makes you hold on tight.

She slides her hand into his hair and thinks, I will hold on tight.

When it’s over, Niall pulls back, leans his forehead on hers. He’s breathing heavy when he says, ��I’ve been wanting to do that for ages.”

“I want to do it again,” Finn says. She slides her fingers under the collar of his shirt.

Niall’s hand tightens on her waist. “Is that the wine talking?”

Finn shakes her head. “No,” she says. “It’s me. And I more than like you, too.”

Niall grins, bright and beautiful. “Good,” he says. “You’re my perfect summer.”

He leans in to kiss her again, and Finn decides, in that split second before their lips meet, that even if all she gets with Niall is a summer, it will be beautiful and it will be perfect, the stuff of novels. The stuff of her novels.

But, something in her gut tells her, Niall will be around for more than a summer.

He does live right downstairs, after all.

#1dff #niall horan fanfiction #majorharry20k #look I wrote something!#this is my dream summer if there was no pandemic lol sad

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merakiaes · 4 years

Text

I’m Here - Draco Malfoy

Pairing: Draco Malfoy x reader

Requested: By @darkness-is-mystery and 2 x Anons.

Prompts: #4, #7, #24, #29 and #33 from the angst-list and #7 from the hug-list.

Warnings/notes: To the anon who requested #29 from the angst-list and #7 from the hug-list, I hope you see this, because your ask disappeared from my inbox :-( This is probably one of the worst pieces I’ve ever written but I have five more Draco one-shots coming up so hopefully they’ll end up better. Just stay with me😭 Not proofread, so I apologize in advance for any possible mistakes.

Wordcount: 2381

Summary: After losing your parents at the merciless hand of Voldemort, leaving you to stay with the Weasleys, your relationship with Draco isn’t in the best of places.

You were born in 1980, the first and only child to two pure-blooded parents who held a high ranking in Voldemort’s inner circle during his reign, right alongside the Malfoys and the Blacks.

After the end of the First Wizarding War and Voldemort’s death, your parents just barely managed to escape imprisonment and realized quickly that they much preferred the peaceful life, something they hadn’t even considered before you were born.

Like the Malfoys, they just went on with their lives, thinking their Lord wouldn’t be coming back and raising you alongside Draco.

But then, when you were fifteen years old, he returned, and when he started showing interest in you and Draco, your parents realized they had no other choice but betray the dark wizard for the sake of your safety.

Voldemort had been back for about six months when they turned up at the doorstep of 12 Grimmauld Place, seeking out the Order.

At that time, there was still not many who believed Harry Potter’s claims of Voldemort’s return, not even when Dumbledore had confirmed them himself.

But when your parents turned up, throwing in their wands to show them they posed no threat and offering their services, they knew for sure that war was soon to come.

In exchange for the reassurance that you would be protected and taken care of if something was to happen to them, your parents reported inside information to the Order of Voldemort’s plans to make his comeback, something the Dark Lord was not happy about when he found out.

Narcissa had tried to warn them, but she was too late, the other Death Eaters already on your parents’ trail.

They died, mercilessly killed for their treason, leaving you in the care of Molly and Arthur Weasley like agreed; something that was very much frowned upon by your Slytherin peers.

Draco and yourself, who had been attached at the hip up until then, drifted apart now that you were, in his parents’ words, a traitor by association, and you were no longer welcome in the circle of friends you had previously been in.

You’d think you would be welcome in the Gryffindor house now that you were living with four of them but no. Ron was weary of you, just like he was everyone who wore the colors of green and silver, and in turn, everyone else were too.

You were alone, apart from the very few times that Draco went against his parents’ orders to stay away from you to meet up with you in the shadows, away from prying ears and eyes, and being alone and forced to carry the weight of your parents’ deaths all by yourself was bound to blow up in your face eventually.

Almost a year had gone by since their passing now, and you had managed to keep yourself together for so long. But one could only bottle up so many emotions, and when you one day overheard Pansy Parkinson talking crap about your parents in the hallway, you couldn’t take it anymore.

You collapsed on the cold stone floors in panic, not being able to breathe and your surroundings melting together as tears blurred your vision.

You’d have to be more or less carried to the hospital wing by Professor Snape and McGonagall for all eyes to see, when Hermione had been kind enough to go fetch them, most likely out of pity.

But you were pleasantly surprised when she stayed by your side and Harry and the entire Weasley clan showed up too, all of them sticking by your side in the hospital wing until you got moved to a private bedroom for the night at the orders of Dumbledore, to allow you to calm down.

You didn’t know what exactly had changed, seeing as they had all avoided to even look at you earlier that same day, but you didn’t complain, realizing slowly that maybe you were the one who had made yourself too unavailable and that’s why they had stayed away.

But no matter how happy you were to finally be welcomed into their circle, the only person you could think about when you laid alone in your temporary bedroom was Draco.

Before your parents’ passing, back when they had still been loyal to Voldemort and the Malfoys, he had been the one you went to with your problems and vice versa, but now he couldn’t even look at you when people were around and it hurt, probably more than anything.

He would only show up when no one else was around, to talk to you as if nothing had changed.

But when you needed him, he was never available, simply turning away from you and pretending that he couldn’t see you, as if you hadn’t known each other for the past fifteen years of your lives.

You sighed, closing your eyes as the countless memories of the silver-haired boy flicked through your mind in a sequence.

And then, all of a sudden, just as that the thought passed through your head, a loud bang on the door sounded through the room, causing your eyes to shoot right back open.

Your eyes instantly flickered over to the dark wooden door, your heart thumping loudly in your chest and your breath getting heavy.

You knew exactly who it was, and suddenly you didn’t want to see him anymore.

More specifically, you didn’t want him to see you, because you knew that he would, now that you were alone, ask about how you were, about what had happened, and after everything that had happened, you didn’t know how to talk to him without breaking down anymore.

“Open the bloody door, (Y/N). I know you’re in there.” His muffled voice reached your ears, followed by another harsh knock.

Sighing, you started to push yourself up from the bed, knowing fully well that he wouldn’t give up until you let him in, so you might as well do it immediately to save yourself from minutes worth of listening to his knocking.

Your head was still spinning and hurting from the amount of crying you had been doing in the hospital wing and more than anything you just wanted to lay back down and go to sleep, but you forced yourself to push back the exhaustion and depression and approached the door, twisting the key and pushing down on the handle.

You didn’t even bother to stay behind to let him in, leaving him to let himself in while you walked back into the room, stopping in the middle and leaning against the frame of the bed, meeting his eyes as he walked in after you and closed the door behind him.

His eyes were hard and his lips pulled into a tight line as he watched you, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed.

He was silent for a moment, just standing there in front of the door with his fists clenched tightly by his sides, until he finally took a step forward.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were in the hospital wing?” He asked you.

“How did you know I was here?” You asked back with an emotionless expression, but he didn’t miss a beat.

“Answer my question.”

His voice was quieter now, but the scowl was still evident on his face, seeming to be permanently etched onto his sharp, perfect features.

You could only swallow, pushing back the thoughts that began entering your head. “Why would I?” You asked flatly, crossing your arms over your chest.

“We’re friends.” He replied as if it was the most obvious things in the world, the tone of his voice sounding awfully offended and strained.

“Are we friends, though? Are we really?” You asked, glaring. “Everyone hates me because of my parents’ treachery and I see you, laughing along with them when they talk about me. You don’t even talk to me unless we’re alone where no one can see us. That’s not what I consider a friend.”

He stared at you, silent for a moment, and then he nodded.

“You’re right. We’re not friends. We’re more, and you know it.” He replied, again without missing a beat while walking closer to you. “I know how things must look. But you’re the one who’s shown me what love can feel like, and I-“

“Don’t.” You interrupted, holding up a hand and shaking your head, giving him a pointed look. “Don’t even go there. Don’t stand there and lie to me like that.”

“I never meant to hurt you. I’m not lying.” He finished with a soft look, but nonetheless stopped in his tracks when you motioned for him to.

At this point, your entire body had grown stiff and rigid where you stood, the need to defend yourself growing more and more for every second passing.

“You didn’t.” You assured him, plastering on a tight smile. “I’m fine, so you can go now.”

Draco Malfoy was a lot of things, but stupid was not one of them, being able to see right through your tough façade without any trouble and giving you a glare. “Don’t do that. Don’t shut me out.” He said, and you snorted, swallowing when the familiar stinging feeling returned to your eyes.

“You can’t keep this up forever. Just let me help-“

“I don’t need help!” You interrupted again, your voice rising into a yell. “I’m not broken so stop trying to fix me! You’ve been gone, Draco! You haven’t been there for me when I’ve needed you so don’t start now!”

His face fell, obviously taken aback at the sudden change of volume in your voice.

The first tear rolled down your cheek then, and that’s all it took for you to break down to the floor again, your knees giving out underneath you and your back sliding down against the end of the bed.

Draco was at your side in an instant, hand slowly reaching for you where you sat with your knees pulled up to your chest and your head buried in your arms as you cried.

He moved carefully, unsure of what to do, but after a moment, he slowly wrapped his arms around you, and you responded almost instantly, turning in his direction and letting him take you into his arms.

He held you so carefully, as if you were made out of glass and you would break on the spot if he squeezed you any harder, and in turn, that only made you cry harder.

His hand came up to the back of your head and you trembled, sniffled and cried, holding on to the front of his shirt as if your life depended on it.

“I loved them more than anything in the world and they’re dead because of me.” You finally spoke through the thickness of your throat, and above you, you should feel him shaking his head.

“It wasn’t your fault.” He denied, and at that, you immediately tore yourself out of his grasp again.

“But it was.” You shook your head, looking at him. “And I don’t want to get any closer to you because my heart wouldn’t be able to handle losing you, too. So please, please, leave me alone.”

Despite the words leaving your lips, your body was giving off the opposite impression, your hands holding on to the fabric of his sleeves.

Draco noticed this and shook his head, holding you tighter. “I’m not going anywhere.” He said. “So talk to me, please.”

Your lip trembled, your eyes squeezing shut to prevent the tears from falling. “I don’t want to talk.” You whispered.

“What do you want then?” He asked, and you let out a shaky breath, taking a moment to collect yourself before looking back up at him through blurry vision, tears still falling down your cheeks at a rapid pace.

“Never mind what I want.” You stated, shaking your head. “What do you want? Why are you here? Why can’t you just leave me alone completely, rather than stringing me along and then leaving me when I need you the most?”

Draco swallowed, his face unsure. “You.” He replied simply, his voice coming out as a mere whisper. “I’ve always wanted you.”

Your crying was slowly beginning to slow down, your face pulling into one of confusion. “Why?”

“You know why.” He didn’t miss a beat in answering, a stern and determined look overtaking his face. “I’m not leaving you. Not this time.”

You let out another shaky breath, closing your eyes and tiredly leaning your forehead against his. “I’m just tired. I’m so tired.” You mumbled.

“I know.” He whispered back, and your eyes fluttered back open when feeling his thumbs brush over your cheeks, wiping away the tears with a concentrated look on his face.

You found yourself unable to look away from him, and once his eyes flickered back up to meet yours, his gaze never wavered either.

It wasn’t until your lips brushed together, after the two of you had absentmindedly leaned in closer to each other, that you finally allowed yourself to look away from each other’s eyes, your eyelids instead fluttering shut as he pressed your lips fully against yours.

Your heart instantly swelled in your chest, your stomach being overtaken by butterflies and for a moment, just for a moment, you felt whole again.

But then you realized where you were, who you were with and what situation you were in, and hurried to pull away, moving your hand up to your lips and shaking your head rapidly.

“No.” You mumbled against your fingers, looking down. “Your parents would never allow it. We can’t.”

“I don’t care.” He scoffed, and as you looked up at him again, you found that his face had now pulled into a nasty scowl again. “They can do what they want, but they’re not going to keep us apart anymore. I won’t let them.”

He was met with only silence, but in that moment nothing else was needed because somehow, the silence always seemed to connect you in a way that words never could.

He pulled your face back to his and kissed you again, and this time, you didn’t pull away.

After that, there was no going back, as he finally admitted to the things you had always hoped would one day become reality.

“I love you. I’m here.”

Tagged: @writing-is-my-guilty-pleasure @peakyhermione @fanficflaneuse @okaydraco @lucillethings

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#draco malfoy #draco malfoy fanfic #draco fanfiction #draco x reader #draco malfoy fic #draco malfoy fanfiction #draco malfoy x reader #draco malfoy imagine #draco imagine

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arcticdementor · 3 years

Link

Stefanie Gray explains why, as a teenager, she was so anxious to leave her home state of Florida to go to college.

“I went to garbage schools and I’m from a garbage low-income suburb where everyone sucks Oxycontin all day,” she says. “I needed to get out.”

She got into Hunter College in New York, but both her parents had died and she had nowhere near enough to pay tuition, so she borrowed. “I just had nothing and was poor as hell, so I took out loans,” she says.

This being 2006, just a year after the infamous Bankruptcy Bill of 2005 was passed, she believed news stories about student loans being non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. She believed they would be with her for life, or until they were paid off.

“My understanding was, it’s better to purchase 55 big-screen TVs on a credit card, and discharge that in a court of law, then be a student who’s getting an education,” she says.

Still, she asked for financial aid: “I was like, ‘My parents are dead, I'm a literal fucking orphan, I have no siblings. I'm just taking out this money to put my ass through school.”

Instead of a denial, she got plenty of credit, including a slice of what were called “direct-to-consumer” loans, that came with a whopping 14% interest rate. One of her loans also came from a company called MyRichUncle that, before going bankrupt in 2009, would briefly become famous for running an ad disclosing a kickback system that existed between student lenders and college financial aid offices.

Gray was not the cliché undergrad, majoring in intersectional basket-weaving with no plan to repay her loans. She took geographical mapping, with the specific aim of getting a paying job quickly. But she graduated in the middle of the post-2008 crash, when “53% of people 18 to 29 were unemployed or underemployed.”

“I couldn't even get a job scrubbing toilets at a local motel,” she recalls. “They told me straight up that I was over-educated. I was like, “Literally, I'll do your housekeeping. I don't give a shit, just let me make money and not get evicted and end up homeless.”

The lender Sallie Mae at the time had an amusingly loathsome policy of charging a repeating $150 fee every three months just for the privilege of applying for forbearance. Gray was so pissed about having to pay $50 a month just to say she was broke that she started a change.org petition that ended up gathering 170,000 signatures.

She personally delivered those to the Washington offices of Sallie Mae and ended up extracting a compromise out of the firm: they’d still charge the fee, but she could at least apply it to her balance, as opposed to just sticking it in the company’s pocket as an extra. This meager “partial” victory over a student lender was so rare, the New York Times wrote about it.

“I definitely poked the bear,” she says.

Gray still owed a ton of student debt — it had ballooned from $36,000 to $77,000, in fact — and collectors were calling her nonstop, perhaps with a little edge thanks to who she was. “They were telling me I should hit up people I know for money, which was one thing,” she recalls. “But when they started talking about giving blood, or selling plasma… I don’t know.”

Sallie Mae ultimately sued Gray four times. In doing so, they made a strange error. It might have slipped by, but for luck. “By the grace of God,” Gray said, she met a man in the lobby of a courthouse, a future state Senator named Kevin Thomas, who took a look at her case. “Huh, I’ve got some ideas,” he said, eventually pointing to a problem right at the top of her lawsuit.

Sallie Mae did not represent itself in court as Sallie Mae. The listed plaintiff was “SLM Private Credit Student Loan Trust VL Funding LLC.” As was increasingly the case with mortgages and other forms of debt, student loans by then were typically gathered, pooled, and chopped into slices called tranches, to be marketed to investors. Gray, essentially, was being sued by a tranche of student loan debt, a little like being sued by the coach section of an airline flight.

When Thomas advised her to look up the plaintiff’s name, she discovered it wasn’t registered to do business in the State of New York, which prompted the judge to rule that the entity lacked standing to sue. He fined Sallie Mae $10,000 for “nonsense” and gave Gray another rare victory over a student lender, which she ended up writing about herself this time, in The Guardian.

Corporate creditors often play probabilities and mass-sue even if they don’t always have great cases, knowing a huge percentage of borrowers either won’t show up in court (as with credit card holders) or will agree to anything to avoid judgments, the usual scenario with student borrowers.

“What usually happens in pretty much 99% of these cases is you beg and plead and say, ‘Please don't put a judgment against me, I'll do anything… because a judgment against you means you're not going to be able to buy a home, you’re not going to be able to do basically anything involving credit for the next 20 years.”

…

The passage of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 was a classic demonstration of how America works, or doesn’t, depending on your point of view. While we focus on differences between Republicans and Democrats, it’s their uncanny habit of having just a sliver of enough agreement to pass crucial industry-friendly bills that really defines the parties.

Whether it’s NAFTA, the Iraq War authorization, or the Obama stimulus, there are always just enough aisle-crossers to get the job done, and the tally usually tracks with industry money with humorous accuracy. In this law signed by George Bush, sponsored by Republican Chuck Grassley, and greased by millions in donations from entities like Sallie Mae, the crucial votes were cast by a handful of aisle-crossing Democrats, including especially the Delawareans Joe Biden and Tom Carper. Hillary Clinton, who took $140,000 from bank interests in her Senate run, had voted for an earlier version.

Party intrigue is only part of the magic of American politics. Public relations matter, too, and the Bankruptcy Bill turned out to be the poster child for another cherished national phenomenon: the double-lie.

…

Years later, pundits still debate whether there really ever was an epidemic of debt-fleeing deadbeats, or whether legislators in 2005 who just a few years later gave “fresh starts” to bankrupt Wall Street banks ever cared about “moral hazard,” or if it’s fair to cut off a single Mom in a trailer when Donald Trump got to brag about “brilliantly” filing four commercial bankruptcies, and so on.

In other words, we argue the why of the bill, but not the what. What did that law say, exactly? For years, it was believed that it absolutely closed the door on bankruptcy for whole classes of borrowers, and one in particular: students. Nearly fifteen years after the bill’s passage, journalists were still using language like, “The bill made it completely impossible to discharge student loan debt.”

…

The phrase “Just asking questions” today often carries a negative connotation. It’s the language of the conspiracy theorist, we’re told. But sometimes in America we’re just not told the whole story, and when the press can’t or won’t do it, it’s left to individual people to fill in the blanks. In a few rare cases, they find out something they weren’t supposed to, and in rarer cases still, they learn enough to beat the system. This is one of those stories.

…

Smith’s explanation of the history of the student loan exemption and where it all went wrong is biting and psychologically astute. In his telling, the courts’ historically sneering attitude toward student borrowers has its roots in an ages-old generational debate.

“This started out as an an argument between the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers,” Smith notes. “A lot of the law was created by people railing against draft-dodging deadbeat hippies.”

He points to a 1980 ruling by a judge named Richard Merrick, who in denying relief to a former student, wrote the following:

The arrogance of former students who had received so much from society, frequently including draft deferment, and who had given back so little in return, accompanied by their vehemence in asserting their constitutional and statutory rights, frequently were not well received by legislators and jurists, senior to them, who had lived through the Depression, had worked their ways through college and graduate school, had served in World War II, and had been paying the taxes which made possible the student loans.

Smith laughs about this I didn’t climb the hills at Normandy with a knife in my teeth just to eat the debt on your useless-ass liberal arts degree perspective, noting that “when those guys who did all that complaining went to school, only rich prep school kids went to college, and by the way, tuition was like ten bucks.” Still, he wasn’t completely unsympathetic to the conservative position.

…

This concern about “deadbeats” gaming the system — kids taking out fat loans to go to school and bailing on them before the end of the graduation party — led that 1985 court to take a hardcore position against students who made “virtually no attempt to repay.” They established a three-pronged standard that came to be known as the “Brunner test” for determining if a student faced enough “undue hardship” to be granted relief from student debt.

Among other things, the court ruled that a newly graduated student had to do more than demonstrate a temporary inability to handle bills. Instead, a “total incapacity now and in the future to pay” had to be present for a court to grant relief. Over the course of the next decades, it became axiomatic that basically no sentient being could pass the Brunner test.

…

In 2015, he was practicing law at the Texas litigation firm Bickel and Brewer when he came across a case involving a former Pace University student named Lesley Campbell, who was seeking to discharge a $15,000 loan she took out while studying for a bar exam. Smith believed a loan given out to a woman who’d already completed her studies, and who used the money to pay for rent and groceries, was not covering an “educational benefit” as required by law. A judge named Carla Craig agreed and canceled Campbell’s loan, and Campbell v. Citibank became one of the earlier dents in the public perception that there were no exceptions to the prohibition on discharging student debts.

“I thought, ‘Wait, what? This might be important,’” says Smith.

By law, Smith believed, lenders needed to be wary of three major exceptions to the non-dischargeability rule:

— If a loan was not made to a student attending a Title IV accredited school, he thought it was probably not a “qualified educational loan.”

— If the student was not a full-time student — in practice, this meant taking less than six credits — the loan was probably dischargeable.

— And if the loan was made in an amount over and above the actual cost of attending an accredited school, the excess might not be “eligible” money, and potentially dischargeable.

Practically speaking, this means if you got a loan for an unaccredited school, were not a full-time student, or borrowed for something other than school expenses, you might be eligible for relief in court.

Smith found companies had been working around these restrictions in the blunt predatory spirit of a giant-sized Columbia Record Club. Companies lent hundreds of thousands to teenagers over and above the cost of tuition, or to people who’d already graduated, or to attendees of dubious unaccredited institutions, or to a dozen other inappropriate destinations. Then they called these glorified credit card balances non-dischargeable educational debts — Gray got one of these “direct-to-consumer” specials — and either sold them into the financial system as investments, borrowed against them as positive assets, or both.

…

Smith thought these practices were nuts, and tried to convince his bosses to start suing financial companies.

“They were like, ‘You do know what we do around here, right?’ We defend banks,” he recalls, laughing. “I said, ‘Not these particular banks.’ They said it didn’t matter, it was a question of optics, and besides, who was going to pay off in the end? A bunch of penniless students?”

Furious, Smith stormed off, deciding to hang his own shingle and fight the system on his own. “My sister kept saying to me, ‘You have to stop trying to live in a John Grisham novel,’” he recalls, laughing. “There were parts of it where I was probably super melodramatic, saying things like, ‘I'm going to go find justice.’”

Slowly however, Smith did find clients, and began filing and winning cases. With each suit, he learned more and more about student lenders. In one critical moment, he discovered that the same companies who were representing in court that their loans were absolutely non-dischargeable were telling investors something entirely different. In one prospectus for a trust packed full of loans managed by Sallie Mae, investors were told that the process for creating the aforementioned “direct-to-consumer” loans:

Does not involve school certification as an additional control and, therefore, may be subject to some additional risk that the loans are not used for qualified education expenses… You will bear any risk of loss resulting from the discharge.

Sallie Mae was warning investors that the loans might be discharged in bankruptcy. Why the honesty? Because the parties who’d be packaging and selling these student loan-backed instruments included Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, and Deutsche Bank.

“It’s one thing to lie to a bunch of broke students. They don’t matter,” Smith says. “It’s another to lie to JP Morgan Chase and Deutsche Bank. You screw those people, they’ll fight back.”

…

In June of 2018, a case involving a Navy veteran named Kevin Rosenberg went through the courts. Rosenberg owed hundreds of thousands of dollars and tried to keep current on his loans, but after his hiking and camping store folded in 2017, he found himself busted and unable to pay. His case was essentially the opposite of Brunner: he clearly hadn’t tried to game the system, he made a good faith effort to pay, and he demonstrated a long-term inability to make good. All of this was taken into consideration by a judge named Cecilia Morris, who ruled that Rosenberg qualified for “undue hardship.”

“Most people… believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” Morris wrote. “This Court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.” The ruling essentially blew up the legend of the unbeatable Brunner standard.

Given a fresh start, Rosenberg moved to Norway to become an Arctic tour guide. “I want people to know that this is a viable option,” he said at the time. The ruling attracted a small flurry of news attention, including a feature in the Wall Street Journal, as the case sent a tremor through the student lending world. More and more people were now testing their luck in bankruptcy, suing their lenders, and asking more and more uncomfortable questions about the nature of the education business.

In the summer of 2012, a former bond trader named Michael Grabis sat in the waiting room of a Manhattan financial company, biding time before a job interview. In the eighties, Grabis’s father was a successful bond trader who worked in a swank office atop the World Trade Center, but after the 1987 crash, the family fell out of the smart set overnight. His father lost his job and spiraled, his mother had to look for a job, and “we just became working class people.”

Michael tried to rewrite the family story, going to school and going into the bond business himself, first with the Bank of New York, and eventually for Schwab. But he, too, lost his job in a crash, in 2008, and now was trying to break the pattern of bubble economy misery. However, he’d exited Pennsylvania’s Lafayette College in the nineties carrying tens of thousands in student loans. That number had since been compounded by fees and penalties, and the usual letters, notices, and phone calls from debt collectors came nonstop.

Now, awaiting a job interview, his phone rang again. It was a collection call for Sallie Mae, and it wasn’t just one voice on the line.

“They had two women call at once,” Grabis recalls. “They told me I’d made bad life choices, that I lived in too expensive a city, that I had to move to a cheaper place, so I could afford to pay them,” Grabis explains. “I tried to tell them I was literally at that moment trying to get a job to help pay my bills, but these people are trained to just hound you without listening. I was shaking when I got off the phone, and ended up having a bad interview.”

Two years later, more out of desperation and anger than any real expectation of relief, Grabis went to federal court in the Southern District of New York and filed for bankruptcy. At the time, he, too, believed student loans could not be eliminated. But the more he read about the way student loans were constructed and sold — he’d had experience in doing shovel-work constructing mortgage-backed securities, so he understood the Student Loan Asset-Backed Securities (SLABS) market — he started to develop a theory. Everyone dealing with the finances of higher education in America knew the system was rotten, he thought. But what if someone could prove it?

The 2005 Bankruptcy Act says former students can’t discharge loans for “qualified educational expenses,” i.e. loans given to students so that they might attend tax-exempt non-profit educational institutions. Historically, that exemption covered almost all higher education loans.

What if America’s universities no longer deserve their non-profit status? What if they’re no longer schools, and are instead first and foremost crude profit-making ventures, leveraging federal bankruptcy law and the I.R.S. code into a single, ongoing predatory lending scheme?

This is essentially what Grabis argued, in a motion filed last January. He named Navient, Lafayette College, the U.S. Department of Education, Joe Biden, his own exasperated judge, and a host of other “unknown co-perpetrators” as part of a scheme against him, claiming the entirety of America’s higher education business had become an illegal moneymaking scam.

“They created a fraud,” he says flatly.

…

Grabis doesn’t have a lawyer, his case has been going on for the better part of six years, and at first blush, his argument sounds like a Hail Mary from a desperate debtor. The only catch is, he might be right.

By any metric, something unnatural is going on in the education business. While other industries in America suffered declines thanks to financial crises, increased exposure to foreign competition, and other factors, higher education has grown suspiciously fat in the last half-century. Tuition costs are up 100% at universities over and above inflation since 2000, despite the 2008 crash, with some schools jacking up prices at three, four times the rate of inflation dating back to the seventies.

Bloat at the administrative level makes the average university look like a parody of an NFL team, where every brain-dead cousin to the owner gets on the payroll. According to Education Week, “fundraisers, financial aid advisers, global recruitment staff, and many others grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009,” which is ten times the rate of growth for tenured faculty positions.

…

Hovering over all this is a fact not generally known to the public: many American universities, even ones claiming to be broke, are sitting atop mountains of reserve cash. In 2013, after the University of Wisconsin blamed post-crash troubles for raising tuition 5.5%, UW system president Kevin Reilly in 2013 admitted that the school actually held $638 million in reserve, separate and distinct from the school endowment. Moreover, Reilly said, other big schools were doing the same thing. UW’s reserve was 25% of its operating budget, for instance, but the University of Minnesota’s was 29%, while Illinois maintained a whopping 34% buffer.

When Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice looked into it, he found many other schools were sitting atop mass reserves even as they pleaded poverty to raise tuition rates. “They’re all doing it,” he said.

In the mortgage bubble that led to the 2008 crash, financiers siphoned fortunes off home loans that were unlikely to be repaid. Student loans are the same game, but worse. All the key players get richer as that $1.7 trillion pile of debt expands, and the fact that everyone knows huge percentages of student borrowers will never pay is immaterial. More campus palaces get built, more administrators get added to payrolls, and perhaps most importantly, the list of assets grows for financial companies, whether or not the loans perform.

…

“As long as it’s collateralized at Navient, they can borrow against that,” Smith says. “They say, ‘Look, we've got $3 billion in assets, which are just consumer loans in negative amortization that are not being repaid, but are being artificially kept out of default so Navient can borrow against that from other banks.

“When I realized that, I was like, ‘Oh, my god. They’re happy that the loans are growing instead of being repaid, because it gives them more collateral to borrow against.’” Smith’s comments echo complaints made by virtually every student borrower in trouble I’ve ever interviewed: lenders are not motivated to reduce the size of balances by actually getting paid. Instead, the game is about keeping loans alive and endlessly growing the balance, through new fees, penalties, etc.

There are two ways of approaching reform of the system. One is the Bernie Sanders route, which would involve debt forgiveness and free higher education. A market-based approach meanwhile dreams of reintroducing discipline into student lending; if students could default, schools couldn’t endlessly raise costs on the back of unlimited government-backed credit.

Which idea is more correct can be debated, but the one thing we know for sure is that the current system is the worst of both worlds, enriching all the most undeserving actors, and hitting that increasingly prevalent policy sweet spot of privatized profit and socialized risk. Whether it gets blown up in bankruptcy courts or simply collapses eventually under its own financial weight — there’s an argument that the market will be massively disrupted if and when the administration ends the Covid-19 deferment of student loan payments — the lie can’t go on much longer.

“It’s just obvious that this has become a printing money operation,” says Grabis. “The colleges charge whatever they want, then they go to the government and continuously increase the size of the loans.” If you’re on the inside, that’s a beautiful thing. What about for everyone else?

#matt taibbi #substack #long #read the whole thing #student loans #student loan debt

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captainjimothycarter · 4 years

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Prompt: Peggy & Morgan Stark 😍🙏

I’m gonna try out my AU where Tony goes back in time and uses the time stone to make his Auntie young again. This is so not what you asked for and I am so sorry. I just kept adding to the back story.

The last few weeks seemed something out of a dream if you ask Peggy. Her godson had shown up to her dying body just over a month ago, missing an arm and scarred all to hell, but seems so happy, so proud over something. She should know that glint in a Stark’s eye by now, young or old. Before she could even gather enough energy to ask what he was doing or what in the hell happened to him, he’d pressed a glowing stone to her body and Peggy found herself...well, simply put, young again.

She couldn’t even think of to describe the sensation, no matter how many times Tony asked. It felt like her entire body was vibrating, every single cell, molecule, atom inside of her was vibrating at an intense rate but on the surface, she felt fine. When she opened her eyes next, she was young again.

Not only was she young, where she could breathe on her own, where she had her own mind in whole again, she wasn’t alone. She laid in some bed, much comfier than the hospital bed, in a much smaller room that wasn’t her own. The smell of the woods wafting through the sweet breeze came through the open window, washing away the stench of the city certainly told her she was no longer in the city.

She wasn’t alone. Tony sat beside the bed, looking pleased and both relieved. Enough to drop to his knees beside her and hug her frame to him, crying into her shoulder like he was seven years old again and terrified of Howard coming home to find the mess he made.

“I’m sorry,” He whispered in a choked voice. “This was selfish of me, entirely selfish. Not that isn’t on-brand for me.”

Wiping at his face, he pulled away with another watery grin. “You just...missed so much and have so much to see, to do, to live, Auntie.”

She did as any auntie would do and calmed him down, smoothing his hair back and held him close, mindful of his injuries. She had so many questions on the tip of her tongue and he answered them all after he calmed down.

She was in the year 2023. She was at his lake house. She was in the body of her 29-year-old self and yes, the scar along her shoulder and abdomen were still there. Tony told the tale of how he got to be this way, a tale she almost didn’t want to believe. Stark men were well known to boast about their accomplishments and drag them out, but there was something in his eyes that told her that he wasn’t lying.

“Did anyone…?” Peggy wasn’t sure if she could finish that question.

Luckily Tony seemed to know the answer and as always, there was the rude but if not on-point timing of Steve bursting through the door. And she does mean bursting. It’s like he’s fresh out of the machine and figuring out his body on the serum again, blowing through the door and tearing it off its hinges.

Steve doesn’t even seem to notice as he stares at her, but she notices. She sees the pain in his eyes, the guilt, the weight of the world he bore on his shoulders time and time again without anyone asking. She notices because she sees through the mask he wears, figuratively, and literally.

It’s all Peggy can do not to cry when he drops beside her and holds her close, almost bruisingly close, but Peggy finds she likes the closeness. The smell of his musk. His soft touch despite how calloused and rough he could be. She likes to see the pain melt from his face as he touches her, pink lips parted, and baby blues wide, as if this is a dream.

If so, she doesn’t want to wake up.

“Tony,” Steve breathes, his voice hitching slightly.

“On it, Cap.” He paused, looking down at the pair with a warm look in his eyes. “You two got the east side to yourself, just don’t knock down my walls.” He still pauses in the doorway, shaking his head with that same fond Stark look. “Happy birthday, Cap. Told ya...it was worth sticking around for. Told ya she’s important to me too.”

It was the next morning before Peggy was introduced to everyone else. Sam, someone she’s met a few times before, who laughs and hugs her tightly just as Steve had done. Sam, who grew up with Uncle Gabe, a Howling Commando. “You and Gabe had something going on,” he teases, making Peggy both flush and roll her eyes. “Admit it and settle this bet between me and him that he took to his grave.”

“Uh, Sam,” Steve warns before Peggy chucked a biscuit at his head. “Told ya not to bring that up.”

Thor, a vague memory of an incident in Mexico flashing before her eyes. She is still struggling with memories and Tony promises they will come back, just give it time. Stephen Strange, this doctor whoever it was, insisted she’ll recover fully in time. His eyes light up when he sees her and calls her a warrior before pulling her into a bone-crushing hug before promising to wrestle later.

Bruce is an interesting character, Peggy notes. She’s met Doctor Banner once or twice, just a bare handshake before she’s rushed off. But this...Banner before her large and green but with a smile all his own makes some sort of pride twist in her stomach.

Natasha introduced herself when Peggy was getting out of the shower, quiet and standing in just the doorway but she’d noticed her. “You’re real,” is all she says, touching Peggy’s arm as if to confirm it to herself.

“Real as the day Barton and I brought you home,” Peggy snorts, shaking her head. “Glad to see you made a name of yourself, Natalie.”

“Thank you for making that call, even if Barton took the rap for it.”

“Barton’s never had much sense. Where is he anyway?”

Natasha’s eyes look outside and she follows, to see two figures on the other end of the lake. A blonde that’s taller than a brunette with a metal arm. That’s all Peggy needs to know.

Clint makes himself known to her in his usual fashion of making her trip over his boots when she’s coming inside. Tony had to leave to make an important trip so she was just saying goodbye. He’s there to catch her before she falls with that stupid grin on his face.

And clearly has learned a few moves when she twists them so he’s on the floor, but finds herself pinned before he helps her up.

“Good to see you again, Director,” he purrs before his head tilts towards the door. She can see the flash of purple aids and something in her chest pulls. Those weren’t there before. “Someone wants to meet you.”

That’s the last face she ever thought to saw. Steve had warned her, struggling to find the words that Bucky was alive and gave her the brief rundown of the Winter Soldier and Hydra, but seeing it was far easier than believing it. Her mouth fell open into a perfect O as she watched Steve lead inside a very nervous Bucky.

“Dear Lord,” she whispered, ignoring Barton’s snickering. Her hand tries not to cover her mouth but she gives way to the motion. “Sargeant Barnes.”

Bucky, for all his might, is trying to make himself look so small and it works. He looks so incredibly small tucked into himself, tilting his left side away as if she could make out the golden laced arm. Yet, for all his might, flushed face, and newly cropped short hair, she sees that trademark, annoying Barnes smile. Even his sister possessed it.

Peggy’s hold is tight around him and she feels him collapse to his knees, holding her around the waist as if he’s a sinner begging to be forgiven. She knows the crimes he’s been forced to commit, but they’re not him. They never were. She’s lost personal agents to him, friends, family even. She doesn’t blame him. She’s met him personally and he’s almost killed her, crushed her throat even. She still doesn’t blame him.

She drops to his knees and holds him for as long as he needs it, letting him be the one to pull away. He holds her face carefully as if the arm is new and he’s trying to be careful with the strength. His silver eyes gloss over with tears before his forehead touches hers.

“You do realize now that I win our bet, right?” He asks, washing away any sedimental moment that makes her want to snort.

“I love you too,” she breathed, pulling him into a tight hug. “And technically I do. You died, by all records mean.”

“Technically I didn’t. Frozen is not dead, ask Steve.”

“Steve is not a part of this. He was declared dead too.”

“You just don’t want to lose.”

“Of course not. I’m not giving you a year’s worth of chocolate for Christ Sake.”

“Yeah, well it’s shit anyway.”

When the car pulls up later that afternoon, Peggy is called outside by Tony’s voice. She untangles herself from Steve’s side where they sat by the fire, quietly holding hands while listening to Bucky and Clint talk about some baseball game. There’s a knowing smile on Tony’s lips when she’s out in the sweet, summer air. She can make out two figures in the car. One feminine and one...small.

“Tony, what’s going on?”

The answer makes itself known when he helps a woman out of the car, slim with strawberry blonde hair, and a poised demeanor that matches Peggy’s. They’ll get along great. In her arms is a five-year-old little girl with Tony’s brunette hair, but her mother’s eyes.

And that trademark Stark scrunch of her face when she’s trying to figure out the situation.

Oh.

“Auntie, this is my wife Pepper and our daughter Morgan.” He paused, pride just emitting from him as he looks up at Pepper and reaches out to take Morgan into his arm. “We’ve talked it over and...we’d like to carry on the tradition. We want you and Steve to be Morgan’s godparents.”

“But Steve and I aren’t…” The protest falls from her lips at the pair’s looks.

“Please, give it a week and he’ll get over the shock and pop the question if you don’t do it first,” Tony sighed, rolling his eyes.

“He’s already looking at rings,” Pepper noted.

“You two are horrible,” Peggy teased, rolling her eyes. “Horrible for each other.”

“Love you too.” Tony is grinning from ear to ear. “Morgan, do you wanna meet your Auntie? She’s come a long, long way to see you.”

Morgan is unlike Tony. She’s curious, intelligent, but she’s cautious and Peggy can guess that’s a sheltered life growing up so far and she can understand why.

Peggy slowly gets on the little girl’s level and offers her a charming smile. “Hi, Morgan. I’m your dad’s auntie. I can tell you all the embarrassing things about him later to make sure you get extra ice cream.”

She hears both Pepper laugh and Tony’s groan before Moran is in her arms and that’s that. It’s a sealed deal between them.

Morgan is unlike Tony, Peggy notices. She’s almost an exact copy of half and half. Curious, rambunctious, but with the free spirit of a child who doesn’t have the world on her shoulders even at such a young age. Forced to grow up in the media light.

She takes to Peggy as a fish takes to water, grabbing her Auntie’s hand and running out to have ‘tea parties’ and asking hundreds of thousands of questions in a single breath.

And Peggy loves it all.

She teaches Morgan how to ride a bike with her parents, much like she taught Tony. She’s there to help her bake, and the first one there when she has a nightmare and sleeps with her in an impossibly tiny bed. She knows Steve and Tony have photos of that night. She intends to destroy them.

After breakfast of muffins and a day of tinkering with some little robot, Morgan has, of course. She’s learned from the best, after all.

Peggy is in love with her goddaughter in the same means she was in love with Tony. She’s fiercely protective and loving and refuses to let the love get in the way of a life lesson, but there’s plenty of hugs and kisses to go around.

Morgan is a big part of Steve popping the question and as things go with her and Steve, it is a wonderful disaster that still ends in a yes. Except for Morgan and her dress are both smoldering after catching on fire. Steve’s suit is singed and the tie he was wearing is now around her arm to stop the bleeding.

Still, Morgan is happy that they’re getting married and declares herself a flower girl. As if Peggy was going to tell her no.

“Hey, Pegs,” Pepper asks her one morning over coffee. “Morgan needs some new shoes, do you wanna take her into town?”

Never one to say no to shopping, Peggy agrees. Steve just tags along with her like the loyal golden retriever that he is.

The day starts with shopping for shoes. Shoes that light up, shoes that have ridiculous bells in them, shoes that squeak when you walk, shoes that even have skates in them. Peggy enjoys them all and in their most ridiculous state. She buys them all too, even if Morgan might outgrow them in a month because they’re adorable and she loves how happy they make her goddaughter.

Plus, the bells will be payback for that god-awful cowbell Mr. Jarvis had given Tony when he was a kid.

They stop for lunch at a cafe, the girls going to sit while Steve brings them their food. Morgan instantly declares she has to sit in her Aunt's lap.

After lunch is dress shopping for the wedding and of course, traditions are traditions that are meant to be broken, so Peggy allows a flushing Steve in.

“What colors should the wedding be?” Peggy asks Morgan as she looks at an overpriced and sequin dress.

Morgan’s nose scrunches up from where she’s sitting on Steve’s knees, kicking her feet. “Pink,” she declares proudly. “Wait, no. Purple, like Uncle Clint’s hearing aid!”

“How about blue and red?” Steve muses, making Morgan gasp loudly.

“Yeah! That one!”

Peggy laughs, beside herself. She’s outvoted, even if she agrees blue and red seem to be the colors of their life.

Their dresses are fit to order and promise to come within two weeks. Tony has already made promises on a suit, even if Steve insists he could wear the old WWII dress uniform and Peggy scoffs at him.

The ride home is quiet, Morgan soundly asleep with a belly full of food and holding onto a teddy bear she’d been eyeing that Peggy couldn’t say no to.

It’s late by the time they’re home. She tucks Morgan into her bed, smoothing her hair back and kissing her temple.

“I made many promises to your dad that I couldn’t keep,” Peggy whispers, kneeling down beside Morgan’s bed. “Some through the fault of my own, I will admit, but mostly Howard and his vile change of heart. I regret everyone I had to break because I knew that put us further and further apart. I wanted to protect Tony, protect him from this world, from Howard, even from himself, and I couldn’t do that. I failed as his godmother, no matter what he says and I promise, I will do everything to make it right and protect you, little one.

#Steggy #Steggy Prompt #Peggy Carter Prompt #Auntie Peggy Carter #StevePeggy #Peggy & Tony #Peggy & Avengers #Peggy is broght back with the time stone #this one is easier if you want more tony & peggy emotions #but also I love a future-knowing Peggy #Y'know her and Steve fucked right?#That poor bed #Peggy & Bucky #post endgame

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doitwritenow · 3 years

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I'd ask all 35 of the ask game, but I feel that might be a little too much. Instead, I'll choose: 2, 5, 6, 7, 12, 23, 29, 31, 33, and... oh that's way too many. Uhhh, feel free to not answer some if you feel overwhelmed. If not, go ham! I'd love to read more about your writing/writing process. :)

Oh WOW thank you! These are so fun. Hm...

2. Why do you write fanfiction? Recently answered this one! Here’s what I said: I write fic because of the spaces between the lines of a story. The gaps and unanswered questions in canon encourage me to come up with deeper mechanics, more complicated lore, and complex character motivations in order to explain. Sometimes, one of those pieces will click into canon so well that it becomes inspiration. And then there’s nothing else to do but write! Lol. Stories are so wonderful because of what we can do with them, individually and all together, and I really like being a part of that.

5. What’s the fic you’re most proud of? While EoI is kind of my magnum opus, I really really adore Sunrise Loves To Go Down. Something came together in that fic, some tone and some thread of style, and I am immensely proud of how it turned out. I started writing it when I had been evacuated from my house due to a wildfire, lying on a hotel bed and typing on my phone in the middle of the night, and so it felt different to write than my other works. Maybe that’s why it feels different to read, too.

6. What element of writing do you find comes easily? Easily? I have to say dialogue. It’s often my favorite part of any scene, and I love the way it determines tone and establishes character. Though it’s not my absolute favorite part of writing, I dance through dialogue scenes feeling like I’m on a caffeine high. Of course, lots of times getting dialogue right is a lot of work, but there’s an ease to it that some things don’t have.

7. What element of writing do you struggle with most? Hnnnngk the answer is pacing. It’s pacing. I struggle to pace things. I do enjoy long projects and feel proud of my ability to commit to them, don’t get me wrong. But I’d love to get better at structuring a plot to allow for the same tone without needing an overly generous amount of words. My go-to answer with pacing is always ‘write more’, but I don’t think that’s always strictly necessary. I want to be able to use the other tools in my arsenal to tell a story that’s just as complete but even more gripping. Me: *challenges pacing to a death battle* Me: *dies*

12. Tell us about a WIP you’re excited about. Okay so a friend and I were laughing about how funny it could be to write about what happens to Odin after Loki sticks him in a retirement home on Earth. The Mystic Artists would obviously know he was there, what with all that cosmic threat sensing bullshit, and things would devolve from there. Like, can you imagine? The Adventures of Odin Allfather and the Home for Elderly People. Series of one-shots. Each titled something like: Odin vs. Thursday Bingo. Odin vs. His Roomate. Odin vs. the Grumpy Wizard. Odin vs. the Craft Store. And slowly other characters start to show up. Ned’s grandma is in the same nursing home, and he and Odin hit it off, so obviously Ned introduces him to Peter. Stephen comes to check up on him occasionally and Odin stages the most dramatic escape attempts of all time with no real intention of going anywhere. Now I dislike Odin in canon but how comical could that be I’m serious--

23. Do you prefer prompts and challenges, or completely independent ideas? I like prompts and challenges, but generally I work best with completely independent ideas. I can’t force my one-shot muse, so whenever it strikes I buckle down and write there and then. So yeah, prompts and challenges are really fun, but the inspiration has its own plans for my hapless self.

29. Have you ever gone outside of your comfort zone for a fic? How did it turn out? Comfort zone? What comfort zone? Lol. I suppose I do have bounds of what I’m willing to write and share, but they’re not particularly limiting. Each story I write extends the limits of what I’m used to; I try not to hesitate. And most of the time, I like where things end up!

31. Do you have any OCs? Tell us about them! OCS YES I DO HAVE OCS THANKS FOR ASKING. Most of my Marvel OCs show up in EoI or were created specifically for it. But I have some other lovelies floating around, my three favorites being: - Silas Ewyn, a necromancer detective. He’s basically a vigilante archeologist, using his abilities to interact with bones to solve the mysteries of foul play victims. Silas doesn't care about politics or reasons; all he cares about is facts and bringing voices back to the dead. In the lawless Roughs (yeah, he’s a cowboy, fight me) he takes that justice back into his own hands. Though he doesn't kill, he'll go to great lengths to punish perpetrators, and he always takes a bone of the murder to bury with the bones of the victim to ensure the victim gets their justice in the afterlife, too. Which bone depends on the severity of the murder. During one of Silas’s investigations, however, he was murdered himself. Oops. But he woke up three days later with his soul rattling around in an entirely different body with no memory of the event. The only way for him to discover the truth is if he finds his old bones and solves a whole new murder... His own. Anyway I love him and I could talk forever about the truth behind his murder and all the details of the Roughs and everything but we’ve got a limited amount of time and I still have to tell you about: - Sohcahtoa and Pemdas! If their names look like math acronyms, that’s because they are. Sohcahtoa and Pemdas are kind of children’s comic book characters in my mind? Sohcahtoa is a superhero; she travels through the Sciverse bringing people together and solving scientific and mathematical problems between others who are concepts come to life. With her meter-stick sword and her protractor throwing star, she’s a force to be reconed with! Pemdas is her trusty sidekick. He’s a cuttlefish with immense knowledge of operations and formulas, and Sohcahtoa keeps him in a cube on her belt. Pemdas checks her math and gives her any theorems or formulas she might need. Lol I’m a nerd next question.

33. Is there anything you wish your audience knew about your writing or writing process? Just want to say: I’m not some sort of warlock, I promise! The reason I can post so consistently for EoI is not always because I write consistently; it’s because I have a cushion of chapters between what I’m writing and what I’m posting. Sometimes I’m completely barren of words and I can’t write for days on end, and sometimes I just fly through things in hours. But all that inconsistency balances itself out in the end and keeps the chapter cushion intact, so my readers get to see only me looking like I have everything under control. I’m just as chaotic as you, I promise. (Prophets is not like this with the chapter cushion. I am a bad girl when it comes to Prophets. XD instant gratification is my arch nemesis.)

Anyway! This was super fun Ish. Thanks for the ask!

#ask me anything #fanworkstuff #ironstrange #ocs #fanfiction #fanfic

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myblacknightworld · 4 years

Text

NiNi’s Flower Fluff June

Prompt n. 29, soft purple lilac

AO3 previous next

@june-of-flower-fluff did I do this right this time???

It had been during the last days of summer, when Marinette had met Tim. She was enjoying the last few days of freedom and warm weather before being forced to sit on a desk, when she’d stumbled upon Tim. Literally.

Neither of them were watching where they were going: Marinette was drawing on her sketchbook, and Tim was busy taking photos of his surroundings. They had crashed into each other, and Marinette, being the lightest between them, had ended with her ass on the sidewalk and her sketchbook laying at Tim’s feet.

“I’m sorry!” she’d told automatically, without raising her eyes from the feet in front of her. “I wasn’t looking at where I was-” When she finally did raise her eyes to look at the person she’d run over, Marinette had been greeted by a stretched hand and concerned blue eyes. “... going...”

“Are you okay?” The stranger’s face was pretty, and it wasn’t something she’d ever thought of boys, but his was. Marinette didn’t even notice she was staring until he coughed slightly.

Immediately she shook her head, “Uh... Yes! Thank you!”

She grabbed his hand and let him lift her from the ground, then he crouched and picked up her things.

“Here.” He told her. “And uh... sorry, I wasn’t really uhm... watching my step either, so... uhm... sorry again...”

In a flash, he had turned and basically ran away. Marinette stood there watching him weave his way through the crowd.

Marinette met him once again the following day. She’d just entered the bakery, walked in right after a customer. Her mother was behind the counter, but she was busy with another customer, old Mme. Guillard from two doors down the street, and she’d only waved at her in greeting.

“Hey Mari, please come help!”

She’d nodded, running to join her mother.

“Hello, what would you like?”

When she had raised her face to talk to the new customer, the same blue eyes from the day before had met hers with twin surprise to hers. Her voice got stuck in her throat.

“So your name’s Mari?”

That was not what she was expecting. That was definitely not what she was expecting. He was looking at her, well, he was trying to look at her without looking like he was trying to.

"Actually it's Marinette…" she told him sheepishly. "But anyway, how can I help you?"

He brought a hand to his neck, embarrassment clear on his features, as he looked at the multitude of pastries they had on display. "Uhm… I think… uh… maybe… a mille-feuilles? Please?"

She nodded, "Sure! Take away or eat here?"

"Uhm… take away, please. I'm Tim, by the way… I’m here for uhm... studying? I’m staying a few months... And you’re the first nice person I’ve met so like... uhm... yeah..."

After that she’d shooed him away with a - if she didn’t know herself better, she would’ve said fond - smile and a promise of “come find me if you need a tour guide!”.

As it turned out, he’d held her to her promise readily, since the next morning he was at the bakery’s doorstep at nine sharp. Marinette smiled at him from the glassdoor of the bakery, and waved at him to come in.

“Hey! Didn’t expect to see you this soon!” she greeted him, “How’re you?”

Tim smiled at her, a smile as bright as the sun, and shrugged. “Pretty well, thanks. You?”

Marinette shrugged, “Pretty good, all things considered! Finished a project last night, so now I’m free to start on that dress I’ve wanted to do for ages, you know?”

“You make your own clothes?” There was awe in his voice, and Marinette would be lying if her ego didn’t boost out the roof at that.

“Yup! I finished this shirt yesterday, what do you think?” Marinette did a twirl to show off her work, then smiled back at Tim.

“Looks awesome! You could do this for a living, you know... I’m pretty sure you’d be rich in like, a year and half.”

“And why only a year and a half?” she asked while they walked out of the bakery, “I bet I could be rich in under a year!”

And Tim laughed at that, quietly, but he laughed. “You’re so on for that bet!”

Marinette only grinned.

Marinette spent that day and the following week dragging Tim around Paris. The city wasn’t small by any means, and there were lots of pretty unknown places she wanted to show him, like that one small square behind the historic centre, or that one perfect tea house near Nino’s place, and of course all the most prominent attractions, like Notre Dame and the Tuileries and the Tour Eiffel. And Tim was a delight to show around to, always with questions ready in his mouth and his camera seemingly rooted to his hands and ready to take the most unexpected shots.

She had asked why he didn’t take classic photos of classic monuments and such, he had smiled, and then had turned to take a photo of a squirrel holding a nut in his little paws. They were at the Tuileries, that day, to spend the afternoon lazying around: Marinette was defining some details for a sketch she hadn’t had the time to finish in the past few days, and Tim was writing something on a notebook.

“My photos,” he had said, “they’ve got unusual angles and subjects because I try to capture the hidden beauty of the world. Beauty is subjective, of course, but there are some things we’ve been conditioned to think are beautiful because society found them agreeable with its standard of beauty. I like to think that’s only the surface. Sure,” he had added then, “some are undeniably aesthetically appealing, but they’re not beautiful. Only pretty.”

Neither of them spoke after his confession.

One day, suddenly, Tim disappeared. It had been the last day of summer holidays, and they had planned to meet to go spend the afternoon at the Louvre, finally, but Tim wasn’t at the meeting point. Marinette had waited, and waited, and waited, until she’d understood that no, Tim wasn’t going to come, and she had gone home.

There was an envelope waiting for her on her desk.

“It was in the mailbox.” her maman told her when she asked, “And it’s for you.”

There was a note, inside.

Marinette, I’m sorry for bailing on you today, but

unexpected circumstances have led me to have

to leave France in a hurry. I’m really sorry for

not telling you anything firsthand…

Hope we can still be friends,

yours,

Tim

P.s. I’ve finally found my favourite photo and subject

Inside the envelope there were a few pressed little flowers, purple lilacs, if her memory didn’t fail her, and a photo. And Marinette widened her eyes, a fond smile playing on her lips, at the sight of herself working on a design, tongue sticking out of her mouth and brows furrowed in concentration. Her eyes fell on the small flowers, wondering why among so many, he’d chosen those.

#MaribatFloweringFluff #maribat #timari

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bobasheebaby · 4 years

Text

100 Buffy Prompts

I had a lot of fun compiling this list. I was cracking up more than once and now I want to binge Buffy. If there is a show you want let me know because these seriously help me shut of my brain during this covid hell.

1 “NAME, your mouth is open, sound is coming from it. This is never good.” – Buffy Summers

2 “I just want to be alone and quite in a room with a chair and a fireplace and a tea cozy. I don’t even know what a tea cozy is, but I want one.” – Buffy Summers

3 "They were supposed to be my light at the end of the tunnel. I guess they were a train.” – Buffy Summers

4 “I don’t know what’s coming next. But I do know it’s gonna be just like this – hard, painful. But in the end, it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the one’s left standing.” – Buffy Summers

5 “I don’t handle rejection well. Funny, considering all the practice I’ve had, huh?” – Xander Harris

6 "Just because you’re better than us doesn’t mean you can be all superior.” – Xander Harris

7 “I’m leaning towards blind panic myself.” – Rupert Giles

8 “Since the picture you just painted means that I will never touch food of any kind again, you’ll just have to pick it up yourself.” – Rupert Giles

9 "With all the rubbish people keep sticking in my head, it's a wonder that there's room for my brain." – Spike

10 "Oh, I don't know. Looking in the mirror every day and seeing nothing there...it's an overrated pleasure.” – Angel

11 "Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping, waiting, and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir. Open it's jaws, and howl. It speaks to us, guides us. Passion rules us all, and we obey. What other choice do we have?" – Angel

12 "Anyway, for real now, I'm gonna ask you something, and you gotta promise you'll be honest and not spare my feelings just 'cause I could kill you. You promise?" Faith

13 "You gotta give me something to do. There's no way I'm sleeping. Don't you need anyone dead? Or maimed? I can settle for maimed.” – Faith

14 "You know, I honestly don't think there's a human word fabulous enough for me.”- Glorificus

15 “I’m cookie dough. I’m not done baking. I’m not finished becoming whoever the hell it is I’m gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I’m ready. I’m cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m — or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that’s fine. That’ll be then. When I’m done.” — Buffy Summers

16 “Seize the moment, ’cause tomorrow you might be dead.” — Buffy Summers

17 “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live.” — Buffy Summers

18 “No weapons. No friends. No hope. Take all that away and what’s left?” “Me.” — Angelus & Buffy Summers

19 “Don’t you have an elsewhere to be?” – Cordelia Chase

20 “God! What is your childhood trauma?!” – Cordelia Chase

21 “Gee, can you vague that up for me?” – Buffy Summers

22 “I laugh in the face of danger. Then I hide until it goes away.” – Xander Harris

23 “I don’t know what your problem is, what your issues are. But as of this moment I officially don’t care.” – Xander Harris

24 “You’re really campaigning for bitch of the year, aren’t you?” – Cordelia Chase

25 “I mock you with my monkey pants!” – Oz

26 “Funny how preparing looks an awful lot like sitting on your ass.” – Spike

27 “That’s fairly freaksome.” – Oz

28 “Do you have any tact at all?” – Giles

29 “I’ve known you for two minutes and I can’t stand you.” – Spike

30 “Great. Now I’m gonna be stuck with serious thoughts all day.” – Cordelia Chase

31 “You didn’t happen to take a lot of drugs, did you?” – Willow

32 “I’ve seen honest faces…they usually come attached to liars.” – Willow

33 “Can I be blind, too?” – Xander

34 “Gee, I hope I’m not interrupting anything really depressing.” – Riley

35 “And you just accepted that? I only said that because I thought that’s what you wanted to hear.” – Anya

36 “This is the crack team that foils my every plan? I am deeply shamed.” – Spike

37 “We’ve got to face it, we’ve changed. Well, not you—you’re still sadistic and self-centered.” – Giles

38 “Sometimes the most adult thing you can do is ask for help when you need it.” – Giles

39 “Did everybody have their Crazy Flakes today?” – Xander

40 “Do you love me?” “What?” “Do you?” “I love you. I don't know if I trust you.” “Maybe you shouldn't do either.” “Maybe I'm the one who should decide!” — Angel & Buffy

41 “Six a.m.!" NAME cried. "I know that's a number on my clock, but I've never actually been awake to personally witness it!” — Xander

42 “Bored now.” — Vampire Willow

43 “We’ll go be heroes.” — Spike

44 “You have a plan?” “I am the plan.” — Giles & Buffy

45 "Strong is fighting. It's hard and it's painful, and it's every day. It's what we have to do. And we can do it together." — Buffy

46 "I make it through this and the next thing and the next thing, and maybe one day I turn around and realize I'm ready." — Buffy

47 "You have to take care of each other. You have to be strong. NAME, the hardest thing in this world is to live in it. Be brave. Live, for me." — Buffy

48 "Make your choices. Are you ready to be strong?" — Buffy

49 “Weird love’s better than no love.” — Buffy

50 “The who having wha with huh?” — Buffy

51 “Whatever you choose, you’ve got my support. Just think of me as… as your… You know, I’m searching for supportive things and I’m coming up all bras. So, something slightly more manly, think of me as that.” – Xander

52 "A lot of things that seem strong and good and powerful, they can be painful." Angel

53 "To forgive is an act of compassion, NAME. It's-it's... it's not done because people deserve it. It's done because they need it." — Giles

54 "In the end, we all are who we are, no matter how much we may appear to have changed." — Giles

55 "I don't have time for vendettas. The mission is what matters." — Buffy

56 "I don't want to protect you from the world. I want to show it to you." — Buffy

57 "Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?" — Buffy

58 "Recognizing power in another does not diminish your own." — Joss Whedon

59 “Out. For. A. Walk… Bitch.” — Spike

60 “You can’t see the stars, love. That’s the ceiling. Also, it’s day.” — Spike

61 “Is everyone here very stoned?” — Spike

62 “I feel safe with you.” [Chokes] “TAKE THAT BACK!” — Dawn & Spike

63 “I love you.” “Oh, my god.” “Hey, no. Look at me. I... love you. You're all I bloody think about... dream about. You're in my gut... my throat... I'm drowning in you, NAME. I'm drowning in you.” — Spike & Buffy

64 “Just... give me something. A crumb, the barest smidgen. Tell me maybe, someday there's a chance” “NAME ... the only chance you had with me was when I was unconscious.” “Oh, wha-“ [screams, then shouts] “What the bleeding hell is wrong with you bloody men/women? What the hell does it take? Why do you bitches torture me?” “Which question do you want me to answer first?” — Spike & Buffy

65 “You can't deny it. There's something between us.” “Loathing. Disgust.” — Spike & Buffy

66 “Could do without the laugh track, NAME.” “But it's so funny. I knew... before you did. I knew you loved the NAME. The pixies in my head whispered it to me.” — Spike & Drusilla

67 “Damn right I’m impure! I’m as impure as the driven yellow snow.” — Spike

68 “I love you.” “No, you don’t. But thanks for saying it.” — Spike & Buffy

69 “This with you, it’s wrong. I know it. I’m not a complete idiot.” — Spike

70 “You always hurt the ones you love, pet.” — Spike

71 "When I say ‘I love you,’ it’s not because I want you or because I can’t have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I’ve seen your kindness and your strength. I’ve seen the best and worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are." — Buffy

72 "I’m just gonna go home, lie down, and listen to country music. The music of pain." — Buffy

73 "I have feelings for you. I do. But it's not love. I could never trust you enough for it to be love." — Buffy

74 "Weird love's better than no love." — Buffy

75 “People don’t fall in love with what’s right in front of them. People want the dream — what they can’t have. The more unattainable, the more attractive.” — Buffy

76 "Trust is for old marrieds, NAME. Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes." “Until there's nothing left. Love like that doesn't last." — Spike & Buffy

77 "This isn't some fairy tale. When I kiss you...you don't wake up from a deep sleep and live happily ever after" — Angel

78 "I love you. I try not to, but I can't stop" — Angel

79 "If I may suggest, ‘This time it's personal.’ I mean, there's a reason why it's a classic." —Oz

80 "Well, to the casual observer, it would appear that you're trying to make your friend NAME jealous, or even the score, or something. And...that's on the empty side. See, in my fantasy, when I'm kissing you, you're kissing me. It's okay, I can wait." — Oz

81 "NAME’s our friend...except I don't like him/her.” — Xander

82 "What am I gonna do? I think about sex all the time! Sex ... Help! Four times five is thirty ... five times six is thirty-two ... Naked girls. Naked women ... Naked NAME ... Oh, stop me!" — Xander

83 "Man, NAME! My whole life just flashed before my eyes. I gotta' get me a life!" — Xander

84 “NAME. You're really campaigning for bitch-of-the-year, aren't you?” “As defending champion, you nervous?” — Cordelia & Buffy

85 "Tact is just not saying true stuff. I'll pass." — Cordelia

86 “Oh please. Like shame is something to be proud of.” — Cordelia

87 “I’m going to give you some advice: get over it.” — Cordelia

88 “Oh, and you’re welcome.” — Cordelia

89 “I’m not a sniveling little cry-NAME. I’m the nastiest guy/girl in PLACE history. I take crap from no one.” — Cordelia

90 “I think it. I say it. It’s my way.” — Cordelia

91 "I don't like spiders, okay? Their furry bodies, and their sticky webs, and what do they need all those legs for anyway? I'll tell you - for crawling across your face in the middle of the night." — Willow

92 "I don't want danger. Big 'no’ to danger.” — Willow

93 "Let's get this straight. I don't understand it. I don't wanna' understand it. You have gross emotional problems. And things are not okay between us." — Willow

94 "NAME, I got so lost." "I found you. I will always find you." — Tara & Willow

95 "But you like him/her, and when you think about him/her, you get that good down-low tickle, right?" — Faith

96 "You hurt me, I hurt you. I'm just a little more efficient." — Faith

97 "Just relax ... and take off your pants." — Faith

98 "I am, you know." “What?" “Yours." — Tara & Willow

99 "I don't have time for bondage fun." - Buffy

100 “It's fine, I don't need to be snuggled.” — Willow

#buffy prompts #buffy quotes #btvs #writing prompts #dialogue prompts #drabble prompts #buffy summers #angel #cordelia chase #rupert giles #xander harris #willow rosenberg #faith #spike #quaratine sucks and making these keeps my mind busy #i live in covid 19 hell

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ssa-montgomery · 4 years

Text

Requests Are Open!

Hey everyone! Since we’re all stuck inside at the moment and I seem to have found my writing inspiration again I thought I would open up my requests again! Of course if you want to make a request you don’t have to use these so feel free to send me any requests, I just thought this might be fun!

To make a request just send a number(s) from the list below and a ship or show! You can send me a bit of plot if you have an idea of what you would like to see but if not just send me the number! You can send me up to three prompts for one request :) You can send me the request through a message, a comment on this post or an ask.

The Fandoms I mainly write for are:

Supernatural

Once Upon a Time

Shadowhunters

Hannibal

Merlin

Lucifer

I will write character x character and character x reader as long as the ship is legal! Of course the ship doesn’t have to be a romance ship! It can be friendship/family/enemies too.

I will complete your requests as soon as I can!

1. “You scared me!” “Well, I am naturally terrifying.”

2. “I’m fine.” “You don’t look fine.” “Then stop looking.”

3. “Where is Death when you need her?”

4. “You are all remarkably well behaved tonight. What did you do?”

5. “You look…” “Beautiful, I know. Can we move on?”

6. “Ohh so you think I’m cute when I’m angry? Well, get ready because I’m about to be GORGEOUS!!!”

7. “I don’t give a damn.” “You give so many damns they’re visible from SPACE.”

8. “Tell I’m going to die, tell me the sun is going to explode, tell me the world is ending and there’s nothing I can do about it because if I hear it’s going to be okay one more time I. Will. Scream.”

9. “I hate you.” “Why? I’m lovely.”

10. “Who are you?” “Demon to some. Angel to others.”

11. “Yeah, I have a plan.” “Is it a good one?” “I have a plan.”

12. “You love her don’t you?” “Was it that obvious?”

13. “I hate the sight of blood.” “Then maybe you shouldn’t kill for a living.”

14. “Are you sober?” “I’m moderately functional.” “I’ll take that as a no.”

15.“I’m trying to have a serious conversation with you!” “And I’m trying to subtly avoid it.”

16. “On a scale from one to ten, how bad do think it would be if-” “At least a twenty.”

17. “Well, aren’t you a little ray of pitch black.”

18. “So… I just realized … that I’ve been shot.”

19. “Did you hear that scream?” “Yes, I’m the one who screamed.”

20. “Only a fool would fall in love with someone as deadly as me.”

21. “Excuse me I have to go make a scene.”

22. “I warned you not to hurt his sister.”

23. “How does it feel, my dear? Losing the best thing that has ever happened to you.”

24. “Oh darling, you are so very broken and no cares to notice.”

25. “All that blood looks good on you. It really brings out your eyes.”

26. “I have to go … iron … my cat.”

27. “If I go through with this, I die. If I don’t go through with this, we all die.”

28. “I’m trying my best to be polite, but if you move that knife a centimeter closer to me I will tear you apart.”

29. “I can’t keep kissing strangers and pretending that they’re you.”

30. “I’m not completely human anymore. Remember that next time you want to punch me in the face.”

31. “I am either going out for ice cream, or to commit a crime. I’ll decide in the car.”

32. “Don’t think about it too much or your head might explode.”

33. “I’m with him. For better or for worse. It’ll probably be worse. I knew that the day I met him.”

34. “I don’t hate you. I hate them for turning you into this.”

35. “Loving any of us is a death sentence isn’t it?”

36. “All I know is, one of us is right. The other one is you.”

37. “Hold on, you died.” “Yeah, well it didn’t stick.”

38. “Why are they all afraid of you?”

39. “I can’t go back to sleep after that. I need coffee- no. I need a drink, a stiff one.”

40. “Just know that I love you. I love you with all of my fucked up piece of shit heart.”

41. “You here to finish me off, sweetheart?”

42. “Oh. Hello. Excuse all the blood.”

43. “Guess who came back?”

44. “I made it through the day without beating anyone with a chair. I’d say my people skills are improving.”

45. “You keep pointing that gun at me and blabbering on about how much you’ve been wanting to kill me. I’m beginning to doubt your commitment…”

46. “It’s only murder if they find the body. Otherwise, it’s just a missing person. Just saying.”

47. “I can’t do this anymore.”

48. “The worst feeling in the world is knowing you did the best you could and it still wasn’t good enough.”

49. “Because to you I am merely a monster. And in the end that’s all I ever was. ”

50. “And if I asked you to name all the things that you love, how long would it take for you to name yourself?”

51. “You already know how this will end.”

52. “Don’t you understand? You were her happy ending.”

53. “Lord give me patience or an untraceable handgun.”

54. “Did you actually think you mattered to him? Silly girl.”

55. “You can’t love someone unless you love yourself first. Bullshit. I have never loved myself but you, Oh god, I loved you so much I forgot what hating myself felt like.”

56. “It’s okay. You don’t have to love me.”

57. “There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.”

58. “Foolish child. Thinking the stains of your sins can be washed away by your tears.”

59. “I wanted you to fight for me and you didn’t.”

60. “it’s scary what a smile can hide.”

61. “You had me at “we’ll make it look like an accident.”

62. “Is this one of those times when you want me to lie to protect your delicate emotions?”

63. “I’m surrounded by idiots!”

64. “You gotta stop doing that.” “What?” “Saying things that make me wanna kiss you.”

65. “If you’re going to get in trouble for hitting someone, might as well hit them hard.”

66. “I never said thank you did I?” “For what?” “For… well … everything.”

67. “I’ll find her and bring her home. I promise.”

68. “Dance with me and pretend the world doesn’t exist.”

69. “What are you afraid of?” “You.”

70. “You’re ok. Breathe. Just breathe. Open your eyes. Come back. It’s ok. It’s over now. You’re ok. Wake up. Please wake up. Don’t do this to me. Don’t do this to me. Don’t do this to me. I love you so fucking much. Come back.”

71. “Can I ask you a dumb question?” “Better than anyone I know.”

72. “If we’re going to get out of here, we’re going to have to work together. After that, we can go back to killing each other.” “Oh fine.”

73. “If it is destroying you, then it’s not love my dear.”

74. “ I never stood a chance, did I?” “That’s the sad part -you did once.”

75. “Eh, screw it. Let’s just blow it up and call it a day.”

76. “Underestimate me. That’ll be fun.”

77. “The problem is, if I kissed, I don’t think I don’t think I’d be able to stop.”

78. “Lie to me again.” “I love you.”

79. “Why are you avoiding me?” “Because … because I think I’m falling in love with you, okay? That’s why I’m avoiding you.”

80. “Whos ass are we kicking today?”

81. “I could strangle you.” “You aren’t tall enough.” “You’ve sunk low enough for me to reach.”

82. “Wait, did you just flirt with me?” “Have been for the past year but thanks for noticing.”

83. “Maybe I deserve someone else, but I always wanted you.”

84. “Darkness. When everything you know and love is taken away so harshly, all you can think about is angry, hatred and even revenge. And no one can save you.”

85. “For God sake! Who have you killed now?”

86. “Please point your gun at me if it helps you relax.”

87. “Tell me not to do something and I will do it twice and take pictures.”

88. “there is not enough salt in the WORLD to protect us from the hell you’re trying to unleash.” “Oh don’t be such a worrywart. The demon and I go way back.”

89. “You wanna know who’s beautiful?” “Aww who?” “Me.”

90. “In my defense, I was left unsupervised.”

91. “Wow can we just pretend, for one second, that you’re not a complete douchbag?”

92. “Are we there yet?” “Get out.” “We’re going 85-miles an hour down the highway in the middle of nowhere.” “Did I stutter?”

93. “Oh, honey, no. I love you too much to let you humiliate yourself this way.” “Bitch please, you don’t think I can beat you at Mario-kart? ”

94. “Fix me up with six cups of coffee and we’re good to go.”

95. “When someone gives you the "don’t pull your gun out of the back of your pants” nod, don’t pull your gun out of the back of your pants!“

96. "Do you feel guilty? Like, at all?” “I don’t have time to feel guilty. and neither do you.”

97. “Hey man nice tattoo.” “I don’t have a tattoo.” “Okay, how drunk were you last night?”

98. “Are you always stupid or is today a special occasion?”

99. “Literally everything about this is illegal.”

100. “I need something that’s more than coffee but less than cocaine.”

101. “Pay me enough, and I didn’t see a thing.”

102. “Sorry I hung up on you, I didn’t mean to answer the call.”

103. “Today I’m wearing a lovely shade of I slept like crap so don’t piss me off.”

104. “Hey, I didn’t kill anyone today!” “What do you want? A gold star?”

105. “Since I met him, he carries more anger and pain than a thousand armies could ever bear. He was betrayed, deceived, hurt. Believe me when I say he had already crossed hell, and the only time I saw peace in his eyes was when he saw you. You are the only reason he’s still alive.”

106. “Touch her, and you’ll learn exactly what’s worse than death.”

107. “I don’t want to look like a princess, I want to look like a formerly evil queen who reluctantly redeemed herself for the side of good.” “You read too much.” “Damn right I do.”

108. “You’re not as evil as people think you are.” “No. I’m much worse.”

109. “No. Not you. Anyone but you.”

110. “One of the hardest things you will ever have to do, my love, is to grieve the loss of a person who is still alive.”

111. “It goes away, that ache in your chest when you hear his name.”

112 “I feel like everything in my life has led me to you. My choices, my heartbreaks, my regrets. Everything. And when we’re together, my past seems worth it, because if I had done one thing differently, I might never have met you.”

113. “Don’t go.”

114. “If he cared, he would have made an effort.”

115. “You love him, don’t you?” “He’s not mine to love.” “But you still do?” “More than she ever will.”

116. “This is what, the third time I’ve crashed my own funeral?” “Fifth.” “Really? That many?”

117. “Y’know… that’s not what an apology sounds like.” “Bite me.”

118. “Don’t try to shut me out of this. I’ve been here since day one. I’m more a part of this than you are.”

119.”…. At least the snow’s pretty.”

120. “Don’t give me attitude, darling. I have one of my own.”

121. “I want you to remember you deserve this.”

122. “I’ve lost count of how many times you’ve died in front of me.”

123. “I don’t care if I don’t get any sleep tonight. As long as I can be there for you.”

124. “I should have told you a long time ago.”

125. “Letting you go was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

126. “Silly girl, can’t you see the truth right in front of you? This is his little kingdom, and you’re not the Queen anymore.

127. “If we get arrested, it’s your fault.”

128. “Wow, I can’t believe I said that out loud, please excuse me while I go die of embarrassment.”

129. “How sweet, sacrificing yourself for her, when did you get a heart?”

130. “Let me go! I can still save them!”

131. “She’s my best friend. That hasn’t changed.” “It’s clear you feelings for her have.”

132. “You made your choice and I made mine. Just because you can’t live with yours doesn’t mean you should shame me for living with mine.”

133. “If someone gets nosy just .. you know … shoot ‘em.” “Shoot ‘em?” “Politely.”

134. “Show me your scars.” “But.. why?” “I want to see how many times you needed me and I wasn’t there.”

135. “It’s okay, it’s over now.” “No it’s not. It hasn’t even begun.”

136. “It’s like you want to ruin men/women for me.”

137. “Look. I’m glad you’ve saved everyone and all that, but it’s time someone told you to take care of you.” “I’m fine.” “No you’re not and furthermore, if you don’t take care of you think of all the people who will need you in the future who won’t have you.”

138. “I want you. Right here. Right now”

139. “Tell me what you want.”

140. “You look so fucking hot right now.”

141. “You say “I hate you.” But all I hear is “fuck me.”

142. “You think you’re the boss of me just because you’re hot?”

143. “You make me feel .. you make me feel and I don’t like it. I want it to stop. Now”

144. “You survived what you thought would kill you. Now straighten your crown and move foward like the Queen you are.”

145. “What I lack in common sense I make up for in sarcasm.”

146. “Because I am the big brother. I’m sorry I wasn’t better at it until now.”

147. “Aw look at ‘em - so young and willing to get themselves killed.”

148. “You’re kind of turning me on.”

149. “Studies show that I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

150. “You alienated everyone you loved , and now? You’re all alone.”

11 notes · View notes

fragilevixenfic · 5 years

Text

She Walks at Night

Title: She Walks at Night

Rating: M

Category: RST, canon-divergent/AUish, a little bit of UST (leading to that RST), humor/Mini-casefile/Some smutty goodness

Summary: (Post Agua Mala) Mulder’s knack for getting himself and Scully into sticky situations leads them to the heart of NOLA at the tail end of Hurricane season after barely surviving a Floridian storm—to investigate a rumor of a notable Voodoo Queen and missing girls trying to bring her back.

“Voodoo girl, but she knows she has a curse on her, a curse she cannot win. For if someone gets too close to her, the pins stick further in.” –Tim Burton

“The moon has awoken, with the sleep of the sun, the light has been broken; the spell has begun.” -Midgard Morningstar

Note: Hurricane Mitch really didn’t flash toward the coast of Louisiana until it was a tropical depression, near the 4th of November. I’ve moved the date up and made it just a touch more intense than it actually was.

Bouzen = Bitch

@starbuck09256, I truly hope that you are ok with the stretch on your prompt. I wanted you to really adore this without going too far outside of your constructs or, worse, grossing you out.

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Spooky_2019/works/21118628

Tagging @monikafilefan @suitablyaggrieved @peacenik0 @rationalcashew @gaycrouton @xfilesfanficexchange @today-in-fic @piecesofscully @poolsidescientist @kyouryokusenshi for the fic lovers

The world is full of

Monsters with friendly faces

And angels with scars.

-Heather Brewer

Thursday, October 29, 1998, 7:15 PM

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

It had been drizzling all night within the stained, cracked walls of a legacy that had stood the test of time in the French Quarter. The high tombs and altars curved, saturated, and marked by generations of memories down to the nearest doused candlestick. The wind howled through the trees and whipped the rain against marble, the thick tapping nearly drowning out the soft, scattered taps of footsteps as they weaved through the gravel and dirt. Three palm guarded candles under darkened hoods lit the faces of their individual holders—their features highlighted by red lips, white, black, and deep red dot and line pattern around the eyes and down their cheeks. They were spiritually awake, open…ready.

“Did you bring it?” The tallest, in the center, with a thick, Haitian Creole accent kept her eyes forward, wincing as the wind nearly dragged her protective wear off of her head.

To her left, the shortest, less inclined to listen and weaker of the two, nodded in spite of the lack of light around them, her voice bursting through like nails on a chalkboard. “You concentrate on not falling on your face, I’ll worry about the incantation, Madeleine.”

“Bouzen,” Madeleine wanted to knock her over as the Creole slang slipped off her tongue, while they passed a line of high ossuaries with various angels and oddly shaped gargoyles.

“I’ll do this without you both if you don’t stay quiet,” Their third, the quietest, with an equally thick Creole accent snapped her fingers and nearly blew out both of their candles, her deep, mahogany and green eyes burning as she stood in front of them. “We got work to do.”

The hostile night sky was brewing another storm as a flash of lightning streaked across the rolling black clouds, momentarily illuminating the expanse of the multi-century old cemetery in a blanket of hot, blue and white light before returning to the dim. With All Hallows’ Eve just days away; the energy was already rising and the pathway was already well worn with white petals to that had been offered to their lady. It wasn’t simply to remember a fallen hero or heroine but to seek the favor of a Queen. Not just any Queen but the Voodoo Queen that lay beneath the stone and marble, with the etchings and typeface on the exterior wall of her sepulcher. Most would assume the gravesite was being defaced and degraded but every mark was left by those that came before—to ask for good fortune, be granted a wish, or favors of their lady.

As they always say, however, every request comes with a sacrifice.

“Marie Laveau, Voodoo Queen, Mother to two daughters of the same name, in this, your resting place, we bring you offerings of light,” Madeleine enunciated carefully as the three knelt at her marker, at her plain yet remarkable altar, guiding their candles against the side of the stone away from the pelting rain as the wind seemed to change in their favor.

“Our priestess, we bring you wound tobacco, three gold coins, and the mark of Papa Legba wrapped in silk and lace to conjure your strength,” The second, Ayanna, gathered a small satchel, arranging it carefully in front of their candles, creating a little circular offering platform for their items.

Finally, the third, Kya, pulled a needle from a cushion, jabbing her own finger as she stared at the plaque with the inscription about Marie’s legacy, her voice strong as she revealed her hair and face to the air. “I offer a sacrifice, mother of conjurers, daughter of spirits, to summon your form—to walk among us once more.”

Each pinprick was marked with an X on the wall, in blood, to seal their gift to her, asking for only her presence, even in death. As if finalizing the request, the thunderclap reverberated above them and shook the hallowed ground beneath their feet. They knelt and tilted their candles with synchronized movements, spilling the black, melted wax across the stone in a singular circle while chanting ‘it is done’ to properly seal their unique, unusual even, plea to the revered Marie Laveau. It might’ve appeared as an oddity but this was a commonality as they stood and brought hands to the sky, drenching fingers in the falling rain as another streak of lightning danced across the sky.

It illuminated the top of the fence—and the visage of shadows that couldn’t possibly have existed.

“How do you know if it worked?” Kya held the front of her cloak shut, concealing the pretty dress beneath it as the rain took aim, soaking her braids.

Madeleine turned toward her, sneering at her as though she could bear witness to the expression, but all Kya could see were the dots subtly moving as her face contorted. “The Voodoo Queen will make her presence known.”

They didn’t wait to find out if their imperfect conjuring had made an impact as the wind bellowed through the willows, dragging the branches across angels with their heads bent in eternal devotion while they moved toward the front gate. Their diminishing silhouettes, in the gloomy maze of the dead, groped their way toward an exit; absent of steady light as the skies opened in another downpour. The wind ripped through the consecrated grounds and the rain battered the formerly white stone, embellishing each Mary’s tears until they were real. The lines of purple and pure, electric snow angled across the clouds, mimicking a Voodoo ritual dance, illuminating the tomb of Marie Laveau once more.

As the light faded and the thunder rolled, the soft, halo lined contour of a woman in white manifested against the backdrop of the candles still burning at her feet. She stood, motionless; her hair wrapped high, eyes piercing in the gloom, hands folded carefully in front of her with a charm hanging freely between her palms. As quickly as she appeared, she vanished with the dampening of the thunderous booms overhead…leaving the three candles extinguished, their smoke hovering in the air in a circular motion toward the skies.

Friday, October 30th 1998, 5:30 PM

New Orleans International Airport, Rental Parking

New Orleans, Louisiana

“I know you want to say it, Scully, and I think, if you want me to keep this Lumina on the road, you’d better choose your words wisely,” Mulder was already soaked from the walk to the car from the rental counter and the umbrella was inside out in the backseat, tossed haphazardly after catching a gust of wind from the wrong angle.

Scully, hair already dampened from the precipitation, watched the wipers stutter and drag across the windshield, the squeak just loud enough to be evident as they did next to nothing to get rid of the collecting droplets. “I was only going to ask where we’re staying and if you know where we’re going?”

“I don’t even need to turn my head to know you’re full of it,” Mulder was already miffed that he accidentally took the wrong road as he took the entrance onto interstate ten and merged, narrowly avoiding a big rig who didn’t want to give him space. “We’re staying down at one of the few places with a vacancy in the French Quarter that I could find with such short notice…that wasn’t crawling with college students looking to do kegs stands.”

“What? Didn’t feel like living it up in the middle of an incoming hurricane?” Scully tilted her head toward him as the blackened skies swirled, pouring down around the cars and trucks on the highway while the headwinds gathered and rocked against the driver’s side. “We left one storm for another storm and Hurricane Mitch has already been doing damage all over Central America…why are we here, Mulder?”

“A file came across my desk this morning with a newspaper clipping and a missing person’s report on a teenager from the French Quarter. Her parents are questioning the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, pushing for an investigation of an underground trafficking situation…but her connections in the community are a little more…odd,” Mulder hovered over the word ‘odd’ as he approached their exit, veering toward the right lane to merge.

Scully had a look on her face as he explained the situation, her eyes rolling and lips parting as the air escaped in a puff that conveyed every bit of her mood. Mulder knew that expression all too well and felt the deep, slow blink that preceded her piercing stare through the side of his face as he swallowed hard, refusing to look. This is what he had meant about choosing words wisely—but he should’ve aimed the comment at himself rather than at his enigmatic partner in the passenger seat, who was close to informing him how ridiculous he was. Sometimes, one does not need to hear the words you’re a moron before getting to check into the motel and that was exactly where Mulder’s thoughts were residing as he came to a red light with his blinker on.

“Define odd and try not to glitter it up with words you think I can’t understand because they are heavily rooted in something extraterrestrial,” Scully raised her eyebrows and nearly coaxed a nervous laugh from him, the old world hidden beneath palm trees and yellowing greenery.

“Do you remember our brief stint at the INS processing compound in North Carolina?” Mulder was circling the reality of what resided in the newspaper clipping, in the information regarding the teenaged Haitian.

“Haitian Voodoo?” Scully smirked and leaned her head back against the seat, reveling in his discomfort as she heard him grunt before fidgeting in the driver’s seat. “Did Skinner laugh at all when you brought this proposal to him or was he just that glad to get us out of his hair for another few days?”

“I should’ve lied and said it was the Chupacabra, you’d be flicking me a lot less shit,” Mulder knew she was delighted and part of him was relieved that she wasn’t mad, which was shades different than the trip to Florida. “At least with the Chupacabra, I’d have a body for you to slice and dice.”

“Aren’t you thoughtful?” Scully wasn’t upset with the locale this time as she marveled at the attention to detail on the historical buildings on the final few streets toward the hotel, her attention on the balconies as they dripped with water and barely sheltered the structures from the weather patterns. “You wouldn’t have been able to lie for long…not here…wrong state for that mythology.”

Scully had only witnessed the spectacle of New Orleans through the scope of history, through books that her parents would never have approved of, and word of mouth via trips that others had taken over the years. As they drove, it was more than a little apparent that this was an entirely different situation from third party information as the sounds and sights were already saturated even in this weather. She wasn’t fully prepared to witness the elaborately painted faces, elaborate dresses, and costuming before the consumption of alcohol had really begun. It was hedonistic, it was traditional, it was mildly erotic and plastered just feet from their faces…a notion that had her rethinking the buttoned-up look she had put on this morning. It couldn’t have looked that bad, though, she had already caught Mulder staring twice since final call in DC.

Not that she minded it—it was the instant need for him to look away that left a bitter sting she felt in her bones.

“The young girl, named Kya, had been associating with a couple of girls who were dabbling in Haitian Voodoo for the last year or so to an end that they had been borrowing books on conjuring spells from local, known Voodoo associates,” Mulder leaned forward a little bit, squinting through the windshield at the street signs to navigate where they were, reticent to really delve into it before unloading the trunk. “Her friends aren’t talking.”

“Refusing or are they afraid?” Scully was actually curious as she found herself fondly reminiscing about the ghostly little boy that had suckered Mulder into buying a charm from him. “You have me morbidly curious.”

Her words were like foreplay as a chill went up his neck while he hesitated to divert his field of vision toward her for a moment, thoroughly intrigued at her level of interest in the unknown for a change. “Both…kept rising their protection emblems from around their necks that had been doused in soot. I don’t know the implications of such a maneuver but it can’t be good.”

“Did anyone bother to ask where the ash came from?” Scully had been keeping her knowledge of the occult and Voodoo traditions close to the vest but flexed her intellect as Mulder pulled into a spot near a row of two-story buildings at the corner of Burgundy and St. Peter Streets. “Inn on St. Peter…Mulder, there’s no way this was approved by the Bureau to stay at.”

“It was when I lied and said the only other place available was a hostel with a half roof and no windows in the middle of hurricane season,” Mulder flashed his teeth with a smile and turned off the ignition, the broken umbrella in his peripheral less than pleasing as he opted to skip even reaching for it. “I don’t think anyone bothered to ask about the type of ash on a bronzed pendant.”

Scully joined Mulder on the sidewalk, the melancholic and oddly rhythmic melodies of a funeral procession blending with the celebration songs from both directions without concern for the weather’s plans. The daylight had barely begun to fade as they dragged a couple of suitcases into the Spanish influenced building constructed in the 1800s, the brick painted a deep burgundy, dripping rainwater across the textured tiles. Scully stayed near the doors as Mulder went to the check-in desk, her growing fascination with the surroundings only intensifying as she watched the funeral parade through the muddied glass of the only window that hadn’t been shuttered. It was haunting and poetic as men and women in a myriad of colors, black lace shrouding faces, danced along muddied sidewalks and alleys with their brass instruments and drums, scattering white petals in their wake.

“Don’t be mad…” Mulder startled her out of the trance with a palm to the small of her back, his warm fingers radiating through her damp jacket.

“What did you do this time?” Scully wanted to be surprised as she wiped the excess of water droplets off of her forearms, angling her head to judge him just a little better.

“I, apparently, wasn’t listening all that well when I made the reservation,” Mulder was watching her use that unnerving smirk as he searched for the right words to explain his massive oversight. “The woman that I spoke with insisted that she told me it was for one room with two beds and I remember it as two rooms with a bed each.”

“So, you get to explain that to Skinner when he asks for the printout on the second room, then?” Scully’s voice elevated as she reached for her luggage at her side then raised her eyebrows toward the hallway and stairs. “Lead the way.”

9:45 PM

Between St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 and No. 2

French Quarter, New Orleans, LA

A puff of smoke and a flash of almost turquoise and orange flames danced in front of Mulder and Scully as they meandered through the amassed crowds that had already begun to block sections of the street, with or without permission. They felt underdressed or overdressed as casual clothes looked out of place in the sea of elaborate, well-thought-out attire to pay homage to the dead. The celebration, a cross between a masquerade and a Día de los Muertos festival, had the theme of death, resurrection, and Voodoo at its center, marked by the makeshift tents with markings that represented each sect. They had been tipped off to the location of their two witnesses and had been seeking out their wares for just over thirty minutes, all the while being approached by every creature with an offering.

“You look like you are in need of a reading…and a charm,” A woman with her long, dark locks wrapped carefully atop her head in tight, desperately meticulous braids and satin strands with elaborate beadwork intermixed stepped directly in front of Scully, disregarding her personal space. “Come.”

“Wait, what?” Scully was taken aback as the woman, clad in a deep purple and red French Pompadour dress already had her by the arm, tugging her toward the shadows of a small, hut style tent with a single side drawn open. “Ma’am…wait.”

“It is tradition,” Her unassuming yet demanding, deeply Creole voice caught Scully off guard and before she could protest further, a generous yank of her wrist had her separated from Mulder before he could fully realize. “Now…you sit.”

“This seems like something that is more my partner’s speed, maybe you should have him do this instead?” Scully made eye contact with him through the sliver of light at the doorway, the flashes of fire dancers illuminating him as he shrugged his shoulders and became engulfed in the crowd.

“I don’t think you want your strictly platonic to know you don’t want to be strictly platonic,” The words slipped from the raven-haired Voodoo soothsayer like she knew Scully’s entire story in only a few glances, the power of which had her gasping for air.

Scully spun around, disbelief in her voice as she hovered by the door, the wind dancing against the back of her neck as she narrowed her eyes at the trickster before her. “What did you just say?”

“You’re a lot of things, Dana Katherine Scully, but naïve and stupid, you are not,” Each syllable was a torture device and yet, Scully didn’t want to look away as a perfect stranger proceeded to call her by her full name with no sense of irony. “Now sit.”

“Now, how exactly would you know my full name?” Scully sank into the wicker, the cushion saving her backside from the bite as she fidgeted her fingers underneath of the tablecloth. “Do you have a name or do you prefer to just be nameless?”

“I’m very good at what I do,” She reached across the small, rounded table, gesturing for Scully’s palm as she elevated her own in the middle, on a velvet doily with the burned ashes of an incense stick. “I am Ayida…given name was good enough for what chose me.”

Scully reluctantly elevated her hand across the table, her palm facing up as Ayida winked at her and marked lines of perfumed, purple-tinted incense across her palm. “I could guess you’re a palm reader but something tells me you’re about to tell me that I’m wrong…”

“The lines on our hands tell a story but they only tap the surface of a person’s story. Your name, divulged from your eyes, while your adoration of your partner out there…well, that came from your pulse point,” Ayida dabbled a little dot along the center of Scully’s middle finger and inhaled a deep breath, exhaling away her Cheshire cat grin. “You hide from your heart, Agent Scully…”

Scully didn’t like personal information unfurled in this fashion as she uncomfortably chewed on the inside of her cheek and squinted at the lines on her hand. “You’re just making guesses. Anyone could make that leap.”

Ayida took the comment as a challenge, blatantly calling out her craft as a candle flickered in the corner, the flame deepening in color, matching the hue of red in her dress for a moment as she burrowed her stare into Scully’s soul. “You’re here chasing a shadow when the one you should be looking for is your own. You’ve battled sickness with light at your side—but you keep turning away from crossing its path. You’re afraid that you’re not good enough.”

It was enough to rattle Scully, even if it sounded vague and indirect, as she swallowed hard and looked over her shoulder, praying silently that Mulder couldn’t hear any of this. It wasn’t that she wanted to hide from him or keep a part of herself locked away but that she didn’t want to be exposed with no hope of the hammer to fall in her favor. She could hear him in the distance in awkward conversation with a group of people amidst the music and mixture of chants, drumbeats, and melodies that she’d never heard before. Ayida wasn’t menacing, by any stretch, but there was a part of her hardened, damaged heart that was crying out to know more, to see exactly what she was seeing in spite of the repercussions.

Morbid curiosity had always been a vice.

“That isn’t the only thing that terrifies you,” Ayida finally dug deep enough that Scully’s actual worry manifested in a barely audible yelp as the candles flickered in unison, burning blue in a series of flickers she snapped her fingers in the air. “Someone very close to you, long ago, gave you a crystal once upon a time, didn’t she?”

Scully ripped her hand free, eyes wide as she held the puff of air in her lungs, jolting backward while the tears formed along her waterline. “Wait, just a damn minute. That’s…that’s…”

“Too close for comfort? Your sister believed in so much more than the spiritual,” Ayida was calm, almost too calm, as she gestured for Scully to move back to the table as she opened a small satchel of silver charms and a single length of matching chain. “That crystal represents healing, strength, and compassion in Voodoo rituals. I saw you from afar, wounds no longer healing, and knew you no longer keep visible to forget her memory.”

“This is too much,” Scully managed to keep the lines of incense perfectly intact on her hand in spite of wringing her fingers to the point that they were hurting as she deepened the focus on her palm. “This is all too much.”

Ayida held a section of her skirt away from the edge of the chair and carefully crossed her legs, returning the fabric to the floor as she was shocked to find Scully extending her hand across the doily, her free hand wiping errant tears. “Is there something that you want to know or are you simply challenging me to push further into your open wound? I am not into that kind of Voodoo…as much as you might disagree.”

Scully had a picture in her mind that had been brewing for years, one that had taken shape from purely self-doubt to one of regret as she nodded slowly, her voice softer than intended. “The decision I made…to do…this with my life.”

“Your line of heart, your line of life, and your line of head have points of intersection but the Girdle of Venus is light, yet fanned, you hide your sensitivity in spite of it being an ally. You hide that quality from everyone,” Ayida dragged the answer out as she dipped a feather into a container of palm oil then pulled it across the center of Scully’s palm. “Loneliness is consuming and you are in the dark with the key at the door.”

“Hey…Scully…” Mulder was wide-eyed as he pushed through the canvas opening and nearly scared Scully right out of her skin, his ears catching half of Ayida’s last words as he went off a little half-cocked. “Am I…Interrupting?”

Scully shook her head and saw that Ayida had cleared her hand of the marks, leaving only the residue of pleasantly scented palm oil along the bottom of her hand up to the tips of her fingers. “No, I think that about covers it?”

Scully knew that she wasn’t obligated to pay but she slid at least twenty dollars across, covering it with the edge of the doily and stood, embarrassment written on her face as Ayida blocked her from leaving. Confusion would’ve been an easier emotion to experience for Mulder as he watched Scully blink twice as she was stuck in the crosshairs of the palm reader that had kept her from their investigation for well over twenty minutes. Mulder cleared his throat and was met with a soul-piercing fixated look from Ayida that had him swearing her eye color changed as though she were silently delivering a warning. He knew not to move—it was the kind of glare that mothers give when they are pushing that last nerve.

“I do have one more thing,” Ayida gathered the chain and put it up and over the top of Scully’s head, letting the charms attached rattle against each other as they fell against her chest, “Wear these, for protection, for the answers you were seeking about the life you chose…and about the loneliness, if you hope to discover where you are meant to go, to do…if they come off, they must be hung near where you sleep…to remind you.”

Scully was petrified over the notion of Ayida saying that out loud in front of Mulder, but she agreed with a quiet nod and sipped the charms underneath of the material of her shirt without fully looking at them. She didn’t necessarily want to linger too long over them knowing that she had seen them before—and knew exactly what they represented. Ayida watched, like a raven hiding in the trees, as Scully moved closer to Mulder’s arm, casually seeking refuge in his familiarity without it being painfully obvious to anyone but, perhaps, the clairvoyant in the corner. Mulder furrowed his brow and assisted her with the heavy canvas, letting her back onto the sidewalk where the chilly rainfall met the heat in Scully’s cheeks and only made them more apparent as she put distance between herself and that tent.

“Scully?” Mulder barely touched the curve of her shoulder and felt her push into his palm as she tilted her head to meet his gaze.

Scully pressed her lips together and glanced around at the growing sea of faces clad in various paints and glitters, some with elastic held masks, purposely shrouding their identities from one another, her eyes slowly wandering back to Mulder. “I’m okay, I’m okay…did you find the witnesses?”

Mulder knew, beneath her shroud of grit and placating strength, that she was breaking but he held back and wiped the moisture from her face, not needing to know if they were tears or rain before pulling her hood onto the top of her head. “I did a little better than that…I found someone who knows where they went last night and is willing to get us there.”

“Are we taking a walk in the dark, Mulder?” Scully was still shell shocked as the weighty presence against her skin, hidden by her shirt, as Mulder’s eyes were doing their best to slip under her skin, into her life force.

“I promise there won’t be any broken bones…or accidents leading to either of our demises,” Mulder gestured toward an alleyway, a smile forming on his lips beneath wet, tousled hair while he tore his eyes away from hers to lead her toward their next destination.

Scully followed Mulder in the direction of a split in the crowd, where the unlit corridor of the alley hinted at secrets, lies, and more questions than answers as Mulder’s guide waited, dressed in blue, umbrella above her head. As they came to the edge of the crowd, the rolling thunder emanated from the sky, shaking the foundations of the historical French Quarter. The vibrations didn’t phase the atmosphere of praising the ultimate passing of time and the afterlife as the flames danced through the zigzags of bodies in motion. The flames dotted into an arc and married with the jagged lines across the sky as the blues mixed with the reds, casting light over the crowd.

It was then, at the center of the crowd, that the woman in white took shape, shrouded by a haze of blue smoke, smile perched on her lips, eyes glowing red as she shook her necklace full of charms around her neck. She kept her stare in the direction of Mulder and Scully before undulating like a walking serpent into the blackness.

10:30 PM

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

“Daliah, how big is this cemetery?” Mulder was fascinated by the sprawl of the above-ground burials in spite of the decline in conditions, some parts worse than others as lack of upkeep was an ongoing problem.

“A full city block, it isn’t even our largest of the historical sites,” Daliah had Voodoo protection charms around her neck, along with a few that Scully didn’t recognize, but lacked the face paint of a priestess of any sect, her accent native to Louisiana, leaning toward the French aspect as she carried both dialects in her twang. “We don’t have much further to go—the tombs are hard to navigate at night, even with a versed traveler.”

“Thank you for doing this, even under the circumstances,” Scully kept her pocket light aimed at the ground as she matched pace just behind Daliah, the sounds of faint, distant murmurs just enough to keep her from feeling completely at ease.

“Naïve little Voodoo girls come out to Marie Laveau’s resting place and expect to become equal to the High Priestess in one incantation,” Daliah ranted as they turned a corner, passing the angels bowed in devotion, and the offering of Mary, her voice shaking as the chill brushed past her lips. “Nothing good comes from playing with the dark arts when you are not ready to dabble.”

“So it’s common?” Mulder nearly biffed it as he took a step over a white brick that had tumbled into the pathway, tripping across it and into his partner, who managed to hear him grunt prior to him vaulting forward. “Sorry, Scully…”

“You’ve got two left feet, Mulder,” Scully had held onto him at the bend of his elbow and his ribs, instinctively, and for longer than necessary as he re-established his balance.

“Common is a relative word,” Daliah turned her head to glance at the commotion and the display of affection that hadn’t meant to be caught as she cleared her throat. “A lot of novices, non-believers, believers, and highly skilled Voodoo priests and priestesses come to her for an ask—a wish. It’s not usually something massive, because, the bigger the payoff…the higher the price.”

“An expensive quid pro quo,” Scully stopped in her tracks as the sound of branches snapping apart had the hairs standing on the back of her neck, the chills down her spine. “What was that?”

“Try not to let the noises in here lure you in and unravel fear, Agent Scully,” Daliah kept her eyes forward, unbothered by the sounds that were mimicking footsteps from behind them, a concept that would have rattled anyone else. “There’s too much history within the gates to not have a few, lingering spirits that want to take advantage of the scent of fear.”

“No one is going to be able to smell fear above the odor of garlic and spicy sausage on my breath and all over my clothes from dinner…woof,” Mulder cracked the joke, much to Scully’s chagrin, and pressed a hand to his chest as the stonework of Marie Laveau’s marked up vault came into view in the spot of Daliah’s flashlight. “Is that it?”

“The very same,” Daliah crept closer, muttering a subtle blessing under her breath as she rubbed her protection emblem that rested in the center of her neckwear. “These candles were big before they expired, a circle of poured wax, and those large, centered X’s? Blood.”

“I would assume that isn’t a good sign,” Scully knelt next to Daliah as she pulled a small satchel from her pocket, the contents of which were heavy in her hand. “What is that?”

“Protection…” Daliah poured a swirling line of salt between them and the altar, keeping her hands away from the improperly conducted divination spell. “These girls didn’t know what they were doing and I fear that they’ve done something stupid without even realizing the gravity of it. I’m not going to pay the price for their improperly sealed conjure.”

Daliah’s focus was fixed on the altar, the smeared and splattered droplets of red along the sides of each candle, wrapped delicately at the base with smudged, soaked hair around two of the three. Her eyes opened and the gasp left her lips like a wisp of a whistle as she considered not uttering a word of it to Mulder or Scully. It was not a good sign—and one looked significantly less bright with crimson than the other. They were already paying a price for their request. A soul…cannot rise without a considerable sacrifice.

“That doesn’t exactly give me the warm-n-fuzzies about the chances of anyone finding the missing girl alive, Daliah,” Mulder could hear, and see, out of the corner of his eye, apparitions of silhouettes moving from grave to grave, ducking behind the high walls of the burial sites, a phenomenon that he believed in, but never truly experienced until now. “You’re right about this place…plays tricks on your vision.”

“You’ll be lucky to find any of them when this case is said and done, Agent Mulder,” Daliah stood and turned away from Marie Laveau’s grave, tossing the last of the salt in the air as the precipitation began to come down a little harder to meet the power of the wind from the south. “Bodies and all…”

“I know that the locale is perfect for a little cryptic delivery on the clues, but I don’t plan on being in a cemetery all night listening to riddles,” Scully felt her boots squishing in the developing mud beneath her feet as she shifted her weight and held onto her hood while the wind howled through the trees like a distant siren.

Daliah didn’t want to be here anymore as she pushed past them, gripping the handle of the umbrella as she turned her flashlight toward them. “This was blood for blood. Two of the three candles are wrapped with hair. Once the third has the same ornamentation…Laveau will be intended to walk amongst the living until sunup on the 1st. They didn’t know that their sacrifice would be each other for a night of glory for the Voodoo Queen.”

“They cannot just vanish into thin air,” Scully was elevating her voice as the lightning returned like a cipher in the air, barely making her move as she glanced to her left. “That doesn’t happen.”

Scully moved the spot of her flashlight toward the side of Marie Laveau’s reliquary and caught a glimpse of the unreal in the form of hollowed wraiths of two young Haitian girls with vacant spaces where eyes should be. As quickly as the wights presented themselves, they were gone, leaving Scully to flick the light back and forth in hopes of finding them again. It made her stomach roll and the worst of it was that Mulder hadn’t been paying attention to her motions to realize that anything had happened. As she inhaled and exhaled slow, Daliah was looking at her with her eyebrows raised, fingers wrapped around the center of her necklace again.

“You don’t know Voodoo, Agent Scully,” Daliah had power in her voice to warn them as she desperately gripped the umbrella to keep it from pulling free of her fingers, shaking her head defiantly. “Neither of you do…and if you stay here any longer? They’ll know who to come for before they finish it.”

11:30 PM

Inn on St. Peter

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

“Scully, you’re going to wear a hole in the floor if you don’t stop pacing—these rooms are old,” Mulder looked up from a reclined position in his tee-shirt and sweatpants, his toes wiggling freely while he flipped channels in their dimly lit room on the second floor.

Scully’s dark blue, satin pajamas were swaying with every step and did little to hide what resided beneath them as they clung to each of the right spots without her even noticing. Mulder definitely did as he watched the angle of her backside until she buried it against her bed and let out a frustrated groan in the process. Scully was preoccupied and wasn’t the least bit concerned over the likelihood of Mulder staring at her in her pajamas…at least until she turned her head to see his head already angled in her direction. There was nothing more obvious of being caught than a sudden jerking motion of one’s head to look as though innocence were actually a possibility.

With Mulder? It usually wasn’t.

“You aren’t the least bit concerned about the chances of not finding your missing girl?” Scully yanked a pillow onto her lap and hugged it to her chest, the charms rattling against each other as she adjusted the fluff to her chin. “Especially after the speech that your little tour guide, Daliah, delivered out there next to Marie Laveau’s crypt?”

“Two…” Mulder noticed her eyebrows going up as he came up to a seated position, tossing the remote down by his knees as he leaned against the head of the bed and felt her signature, irritated stare against his skin. “While you were showering…the local PD informed me that Ayanna, the second of the three girls, never came home tonight.”

“You can’t be this calm about an investigation that unfolded in a matter of hours,” Scully could hear the wind whipping against the shutters behind her and the spray of rain that it brought, the air in the room thick with moisture. “I’ve never seen you this calm over an unknown escalation…it’s disconcerting.”

Mulder had the remote in his hand again, his nose wrinkling as he kept his eyes looking straight on and exhaled slowly, loudly. “I’m not calm. I’m thinking and I have a lot whirling around about what happened out there—but you’re jumpy, moreso than ever. Do you…think you want to talk about it?”

Scully had been dreading the inevitable as she felt herself reaching for the charms against her chest, almost willing the fortitude to process her own thoughts as she diverted her eyes to the floor. “That woman, the Voodoo palm reader, knew things that she shouldn’t have been able to know and I wasn’t really expecting it. I know that I shouldn’t even put a second of my time into extrapolating anything from any of it but…The experience made time stop. I haven’t been able to shake the feeling I had when I walked out of the tent.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being affected by something so outside of your normal,” Mulder knew how tough it was to open up about being adversely influenced by an experience, especially when it concerned anything out of her comfort zone. “I was surprised that you stayed in there as long as you did—and I’m a little shocked she didn’t go straight for me.”

“I think that’s why she went after me,” Scully thumbed the chain and made eye-contact with Mulder, searching his face for an affirmation to delve deeper. “She saw my fear written on my face and knew I’d be resistant to what she’d divulge. I don’t know how to feel about it except for exposed.”

The lights flickered and the shutters shook against the windows, popping one of the mechanisms free that caused the door to the balcony to swing wildly with the gusts. Mulder scrambled for the shutter at the door, pulling it in until it snapped back into place and the lock flipped tight, the vibration of the wind rattling against his hand until he could close the door behind it. He had been exposed to the wind and ricochet of the downpour for only a moment, but it was enough to spray his face and soak the front of his shirt. Mulder turned around just as Scully had gotten to her feet, the pillow still in her hand as the room went completely dark, filling it with silence.

“Power’s out,” Mulder broke the quiet with a quip and had Scully letting out an awkward, necessary laugh while he groped across the floor, toward her. “You think they equip these rooms with candles?”

Scully turned on her flashlight and aimed at the nightstand, pulling the drawer open to find a stack of emergency candles to her surprise. “Ask and you shall receive…looks like someone had issues with the power here once before?”

Mulder had them lit and arranged along the two nightstands, illuminating enough of the room to keep from tripping over everything, or each other. It was eerily quiet aside from the rumblings of the storm surge outside, enough so that they could hear the other guests shouting at each other for matches and candles. Everything unexpected had happened and left both of them retreating to the confines of their beds while the distant thunder started nearing their proximity. Scully was the first to get under the covers while Mulder was still meandering through the pile of crap on his bed including a bag of sunflower seeds he had been devouring. He pushed them onto the stool sitting at the end of the bed and slid between the sheets, the chill mixing with his body heat to the point that he had goosebumps almost immediately.

“How long do you think they’ll be up yelling for candles?” Mulder was staring at the ceiling while Scully’s back was to him, widely gaped at the windows, tension through her.

“I don’t know but if I hear gunshots, I’m not moving…” Scully looked over her shoulder at him, his cadaver-esque positioning making her wonder if he was just as uncomfortable as she was. “Mulder?”

“Hmmm?” Mulder turned his head toward her, the subdued, delicately dancing light of the cast against her face as she rolled over completely.

“You can say no if it’s just, out of the question,” Scully lifted her head and leaned against her palm, the charms falling away from her skin with a clang while she swallowed her pride, her fear. “Can I sleep with you?”

“Get those things off your neck and bring another pillow, mine are flat,” Mulder was secretly losing his mind over the prospect of being inches from Scully, with no more than the thinnest, softest material keeping her skin away from a caress, but he kept his cool. “None of that, sticking your cold feet on my legs, either…I kick.”

Scully carefully dangled the charms from the lampshade, looping the chain around the top until it swung carefully from the bottom, tossing the pillow onto Mulder’s face as she slid into the bed. “I’m cold from the neck down so watch yourself.”

“Jesus, fucking, Christ,” Mulder let out a laugh as Scully’s fingers and toes simultaneously touched the side of his arm and halfway down his leg, sending a chill through the material of his sweats in the process as he pushed the pillow under her head instead. “You weren’t lying about being fucking cold…scoot that way, you’re just plain mean trying to steal my body heat!”

“Come back, you’re warmer than I expected,” Scully tugged at the bottom of his shirt and found bare, surprisingly hot skin along his abdomen, while he tried to maneuver away from her, half flailing his right arm until he was almost to the edge of the bed. “You’re going to fall off the bed and all I’m going to do is laugh…now stop, you’re making it colder.”

Mulder rolled onto his side and gave the blankets a yank to his shoulder, enveloping them both as he found himself rubbing her arm over the top of the satin pajamas, fixating on the charms as they swayed above the lit candles. He hadn’t had a chance to really look at them since Ayida had put them on her but he was seeing them clearly now, glowing in the light of the emergency candles below. Mulder squinted—protection, love, and incite lust—that last one had him inhaling a breath as though it had been revoked from him, weakly contemplating the reasoning for them. Voodoo was more than superstition; it was a way of life for so many and Scully was already following the instructions of a woman who had, admittedly, frightened her.

“Scully…why did that palmist mention something to you specifically about choices and loneliness?” Mulder had his chin close to her forehead, his hands pulling her closer to give her as much of his heat as she needed, comfortably cradling one arm underneath of her upper body. “Do you have regrets or are you questioning life?”

Scully thought back to the prophetic words from Ayida about guarding her emotions from the man that she was now intertwining limbs with, close enough to feel his heart beating against her own. She replayed the actuality of just how badly it hurt to be this close to him with no real hope still burning in her eyes. She had been running from her heart, from the possibilities that taking a chance might possess, even as they presented themselves with clear opportunity. It was never that simple—at least it never seemed that simple. Even as she felt the warmth of his hands against her back, her arms, her shoulders, something felt complicated and tentative from within her soul that she never placed until now. She never felt like she was quite enough for more.

“I don’t know if me saying it out loud will really change things,” Scully marked circles with her index along his shoulder-blade through the material of his shirt, looking up at him as though something might flicker back. “Even if I did…would it matter?”

“Anything you say to me, matters,” Mulder’s voice unexpectedly dropped an octave, teetering somewhere between affection and desire, capturing Scully’s attention as she angled her head back to really look at him.

“Ayida, the palm reader, managed to expose something about me that I was not ready to face,” Scully couldn’t fully concentrate with Mulder’s leg wrapped around her own but she held on, breathed through it, and looked into his pools of green and brown with flecks of deep gold in the center, his lashes fanning with every blink. “I don’t regret the life I chose…but the things I keep doing are the makings of an awfully lonely life. I’ve shut you out of so much and kept you away because I didn’t think you’d want to hear it, or be there—"

Mulder cut her off with an unparalleled gesture, masterfully capturing surprise and elation with the unexpected, the necessary, the singular unfolding of years of holding back. It was as though Mulder had been tacitly conceptualizing this moment for years as the hand once residing against her arm slipped to the curve of her jaw where it met cheek, stroking that place as his mouth came alive. Scully held on, lips parting to let him in and hands feverishly groping along the back of his neck, awakening the part of her guarded heart that had been crying out his name for far too long. It went beyond a twinge as the swaying of the flames mimicked their every move, reaching in the dark as Mulder rolled and encouraged her thighs around his own, wheedling a breathy moan that reverberated against his tongue.

“Mulderrrr…” Scully couldn’t help it as her head tilted back and left his lips along the curve of her neck, lavishing her with kisses while a not-so-subtle erection pressed against her inner thighs.

“I can stop if it’s too much,” Mulder could hear it in her voice as the sound of his name went ragged from her lips, the resonation of which had his head swimming as he met her waiting gaze.

“No, don’t stop,” Scully shook her head and dragged her fingers down his back until they found skin, tugging at his shirt while she fumbled with her words, agonizing over the way she must’ve sounded. “I have wanted this for so long.”

“It wouldn’t have taken walking in on a palm reader for me to want to know if you ever wanted the same things that I did, Scully,” Mulder put his weight against the flex of his arm and elbow, dotting his lips along her collarbone while painstakingly unbuttoning each pearl finished dot from the bottom up, his eyes trained on hers. “The day you walked into the basement office…I wondered how you would feel, how you would sound in so much more than conversation, and how your mouth might taste. I couldn’t keep it out of my head on the flight to Oregon, then you went and dropped that robe in front of me? I tried not to think about it but what would you have said?”

“Oh, God,” Scully bit down on her lip, the muted glow against his bedroom eyes as he found that top button and nearly disconnected it from the threads as well as the loop, his thumbs just barely between the gap in the material. “Say it…please, say it…”

“I want you,” Mulder gradually exposed porcelain skin to the air and dragged his fingers along the space between her breasts until he could see the gooseflesh appear across every inch of unveiled Scully. “Jesus…Christ…you’re fucking beautiful.”

Scully would’ve inspired a full prayer from Mulder as the meticulous, pale form beneath him was more than he expected, more than he could’ve hoped for. She licked her lips instinctively and guided his tee-shirt up and over his head, taking the time to admire every mark across his chest as she discarded it on the floor. Mulder brought her to his mouth, his arm guiding her torso up to guide the satin sleeves off and away from her, tossing it into the general direction of his shirt. Mulder allowed her back to find the pillows all over again as his hands grazed across delicately raised and hardened flesh, earning a low, stuttered moan from Scully as she arched against his hands, the shockwave of electricity flowing straight to her core. Scully dug her fingers into Mulder’s shoulders and met a look drenched in pure, raw sexuality as he lowered his lips anent her breasts.

“Yes, yes, yes, keep going,” Scully enjoyed the gradual building of every one of her senses but wanted to urge him on, as she felt his index fingers barely pulling at the waistband of her bottoms, thrilling her with the agony of taking his time.

Mulder guided her out of her bottoms, leaving her in a pair panties that seemed to match the texture of her pajamas, much to his surprise. “Eager, Scully? I would’ve thought that I’d be the one to express that…given the confession I just made.”

“Eager doesn’t go far enough,” Scully’s voice shook as she guided his hand to the space between them, pressing against the thin, diaphanous material of her panties until he could feel the heat and wetness seeping through. “That happened the second you slipped your tongue in my mouth…I can’t wait any longer.”

Mulder wanted to tease her a little more but his own, growing problem was pushing against her, throbbing against the spot just below his hand as he dragged his thumb across the silky material until Scully was undulating up to him. Scully had been concerned with being seen as fragile or breakable but as Mulder’s thumb strummed her like an instrument, she nearly sailed over the edge. Mulder dragged his fingers only once more, this time to free her of the confines of her panties, leaving her naked beneath him. Scully had her lip between her teeth as she gazed up at him, giving him the lightest of tugs to bring him back to her lips, back to the place that had started it all. There was a secret yearning to take his time but the woman already halfway to spilling over had his thoughts jumbled, knowing that they’d already taken their time to get to this point.

They had both supposed it was years of foreplay, in the oddest way deemed possible.

“Fuck,” Mulder’s mouth popped free as he felt his erection slip free, only to realize that it was Scully that had brought that action into motion as her perfect, graceful fingers gripped him just enough to make his eyes roll back. “Scullyyy…holy shit!”

Mulder inhaled sharp and connected that gaze with hers, as the distant thunder finally arrived and rolled overhead. He lingered for only a moment, caressing her thigh as her free hand glided along his midback, memorizing the details of his body in the same fashion that he had already been doing with hers. They fit together, like perfect puzzle pieces, and Mulder was careful with his first thrust as the mattress sighed beneath them and the lightning flooded through the gaps in the shutters. Rhythm slowed and hastened as their passion set the bed ablaze while the candles continued to flicker in the dark, wind whistling through the cracks in the windows and doors. They didn’t care if anyone could hear them as the moans became frantic, stuttered, and mixed with the thudding of the headboard against the wall. It was long overdue as their heartbeats met and synchronized.

He couldn’t have been more in love and she had finally given him all of her heart—as the storm raged on outside.

Saturday, October 31st 1998, 5:30 AM

Inn on St. Peter

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

They had only slept for a few hours, through the heart of the storm, and woke to the sound of the phone ringing on the nightstand between the beds. It would’ve been easier to ignore it as Mulder felt the warm, barely stirring Scully still cuddled against his chest, her arm draped up to his neck but the lull in sound only meant that the person on the other end was simply calling back after no response. Mulder groaned and smirked at the half-awake, disheveled Scully as she tilted her chin up at him, mouthing “what the fuck” as the jarring sound echoed in their room. They’d both had enough of it as Mulder rolled halfway out of the blankets to get it, glancing at the mess of nightclothes on the floor in the process.

“Mulder?” He couldn’t shake the sound of agonizing sleeplessness from his voice as he looked over at Scully with the sheets across the center of her back. “Well, that happens when you call at 5:30…Okay, you’re going to have to repeat that for me, Sergeant…two of the three girls are confirmed missing, the third hasn’t been seen since late last night?”

“What?” Scully kept her voice low as she sat up, wrapping the sheets around her in the process, her hair a wreck as she ran her fingers through it.

“It’s Halloween…you’re going to have strange shit all over the place,” Mulder paused, his face turning white as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, frustrated that he couldn’t enjoy the memory of last night for a little longer. “Okay…We’ll investigate from our end…you get people out there looking for possible bodies, as much as I don’t want to go there, these families deserve to know what happened to their daughters…Bye.”

Mulder placed the phone back on the receiver, his eyes on Scully as she reached for his hand. “What’s going on?”

“You know how Daliah mentioned last night that the three girls made a blood deal when they went to Marie Laveau’s burial site?” Mulder reached for a pair of boxer-briefs from the pile of clothes, the frustration climbing in his voice. “Officers went out there this morning after someone reported hearing screams coming from the cemetery—when they arrived, they found a jar.”

“Mulder?” Scully didn’t like where this was going as he turned, his face less than pleased with the situation.

“The jar was filled with embalming fluid,” Mulder’s tone was somber, sober even, as he rubbed his eyes again, index lingering along the bridge of his nose. “…and six eyeballs.”

Saturday, October 31st 1998, 8:30 PM

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana

The task force had been working busily through the day, in spite of the weather destroying nearly all particulates and evidence that could’ve been used to find who could’ve orchestrated this morbid experiment. Mulder and Scully had been overworked throughout the day, interviewing every person that saw Ayanna, Kya, and Madeleine since before their experiment in the cemetery. It was another dead end—stories full of holes, people that had sworn they’d seen each of them, at the same time of the day, in opposite places, which had given the agents little hope in finding the three teens alive. The investigation, in all of its yellow, Do Not Cross tape, had only confirmed one thing; that the eyes they had found matched their young, missing Voodoo conjurers.

“Mulder, this is a literal dead end,” Scully could see him squinting into the dark as the sounds of celebrations began to interrupt their work, the drumbeats and chanting had begun to flood along the outside walls. “We’re not going to find anything here…not in this weather, not in the dark, not with this going on in the background.”

“We found parts of them, like breadcrumbs in the most macabre way possible,” Mulder moved closer to her, into her personal bubble, his hand on the small of her back as though he were protecting her from the wind. “They were out here and someone is doing this…”

The reverberating chants were barely discernible above the thuds of drums and wailing of trumpets as the flashing red and blue lights of local PD seemed to add to the hovering from mystics. The shadows were now blending with the fog, the air thick with moisture as the lingering storm continued to bring the wind, rain, and an intermittent thunder. Lightning blitzed across the sky and had the Agents looking up instead of down, taken aback at how intense the colors were as they skidded across the sky, leaving behind a fraction of a second long halo before the thunder cracked all the way to the ground. Neither of them would have ever noticed the woman, with her hair wrapped tightly, eyes glowing red, floating in the background in the midst of the flashing lights, her silhouette barely visible as her smile appeared and faded before she disappeared into the shadows.

An officer shouting “we got something!” from the corner had Mulder and Scully jogging to meet them, to discover what could only be described as another piece of the morbid puzzle. Mulder’s stomach spun and Scully heaved a heavy sigh as their confirmations of dread had been met—finalized by the spilling of too much blood. Mulder didn’t want to admit that he knew what it was, even as he stood, in disbelief, of the carnage that someone had inflicted on three, unlucky teenaged girls. It was too much for them to contemplate alone—it was exactly as Daliah had foretold.

“What in the fuck?” Mulder looked at the tangled mess spilled along the dulled white surface of the walkways, just feet from Marie Laveau’s tomb.

“Entrails,” Scully winced and felt the blast of cold air to the back of her neck as instructed officers clad in protective gear before turning her head away from the grisly scene. “I need someone to make sure that we identify if it belongs to one…or all of them. Start searching the surrounding area for the bodies.”

It must have been poetic justice, by design, that Mulder had missed this moment for a second time, as Scully witnessed the misty apparitions of the three teenagers just behind two angels in prayer. She blinked and the clear as day manifestation was gone, leaving her to simply grip the chain around her neck, reminding her of the gift she had been given and what it meant. Mulder squeezed her hand, pulling her focus, and nodded symbolically at her, as though her expression said what had happened, without saying anything at all.

#x files #fanfic #xfspooky2019 #fanfiction is life #MSR #Mulder and Scully #writing is life #inspiration

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that-weird-fandom-girl · 4 years

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Prompt List And Who I Will Write For

When requesting a oneshot you can but are not required to choose a prompt off this list (which is one of @marauder-exe‘s prompt lists that im using because i physically cant produce prompts lol) and just tell me what character you want it with (i will list characters and ships that i write for at the end)

Send requests here

Angst

1. “I love you ! Is that what you wanted to hear ?”

2. “I love him/her, and I know that I shouldn’t.”

3. “Can you just shut your mouth ?”

4. “wHY DO YOU KEEP LYING TO ME ?”

5.“We both know that I should walk away, but I can’t.”

6. “Wait, he/she has a girlfriend/boyfriend ?“

7. “I lo—-” “No, please… Don’t say that. You love her/him, not me.”

8. "Could you just take this pain away ? It hurts, so much… Help me.”

9. “You’re safe here, I got you.”

10. “Don’t ask her out again, please… You’re killing me, every single time you ask that.”

11. “Look, he/she wants you, just make him/her happy.”

12. “If you go, I’ll know that you never loved me.”

13. “We never were just friends, and you know it.” “I know it, but you deserve someone better than me.”

14. “SHE WAS CRYING BECAUSE OF YOU!!!”

15. “You love me like I’m the person who actually deserves your love.” “But you are the only one who deserves it.”

16. “I know for a fact that you’re not “fine”.”

17. “You’re looking at me like.. you’re disgusted. What did I do? Just tell me what I did, please!”

18. “What happened between us?”

19. “Nothing has changed!” “Yes it has, and you know it.”

20. “Love isn’t supposed to hurt this badly.”

21. “You said you needed space. You were 5,000 miles away for a year, and you’re still unsure. I’m starting to think that an entire universe apart wouldn’t be enough space for you.”

22.“I remember when he/she/they used to look at me that way”

23. “I want you to list every lie you ever told me. Then I’ll forgive you.”

24. “I don’t hate you. I hate that after all of this, you’re still trying to lie to me”

25. “I can’t keep this secret for you anymore.”

26.. “I’m sorry I’m not what you signed up for.”

27.“Why she/her/them? It could have been anybody, and you chose to betray me with her/him/them.”

28. “This will be the last time you lie to me.”

29.“You never loved me, did you?”

30. “You made me miserable and I still loved you.”

31. “Everytime something goes well, I momentarily forget how much I despise you.”

32. “We’re never going to have a happy ending, just remember that.”

33. “Don’t pretend like you’re not happy to see me like this.”

34. “Your mind must be a horrible place.”

35. “Hand me the gun and I’ll kill him myself.”

36. “And I thought you loved me.” “ And I thought I loved you.”

37. “ Aren’t you even going to cry?”

38. “I didn’t expect you to wait forever. I just hoped…”

39. “Did you always know that you were going to leave?”

40.“If you cry, I’ll stay, and if I stay that will just give you another reason to hate me.”

41. “I’m addicted and at this point I don’t think anything could make me stop.”

42. ”If you wanna know, then ask.”

43.“You never asked because you knew I wouldn’t tell you what you wanted to hear.”

44. “We grew apart, and at this point I’m glad.”

45. “Find somebody else to kiss your ass.”

46. “When are you going to stop clawing for something that’s never going to happen?”

47. “What you’re doing is going to kill you one day.”

48. “It was easier to believe that the you I knew was dead than deal with the fact that I still have to see you every day.”

49. “What you’re doing is going to kill you one day.”

50. “Why do you have tO BE SUCH A HYPOCRITE ALL THE TIME” (this is my prompt bc the numbers were being weird)

Fluff

51. “You’re hair is really soft after you wash it.”

52. “Ssh. Stop fussing. I’m just braiding your hair.”

53. “You smell really nice.” 54. “Would it be all right if I borrowed your sweater? It smells like you.”

55. “I might have slept with your robe when you were gone.”

56. “If you steal the blankets, I am going to put my cold feet on you.”

57. “Here, let’s share the blanket.”

58. “You’re comfy.”

59.“You are very endearing when you are half-asleep.”

60.“But I want to hear you sing.”

61.“Don’t get up - I’ll do it.”

62.“Care to give me a back scratch?”

63.“I think I love you.”

64.“Your bed head is really cute.”

65.“How about a kiss?”

66.“You made this for me?”

67.Aw, you’re blushing.”

68. Uh oh, I know that look. What do you want?”

69. “Let me help you with that.”

70. “I don’t want to forget this moment.”

71.“Are you really flirting with me right now?”

72.“I like the way your hand fits in mine.”

73.“You have something in your hair, umm… Do you want me to get it out?”

74.“It’s nice that your voice was the first thing I heard today.”

75.“This movie is really scary, but you’re into it so I’m trying not to cover my face the whole time, but- WHAT IS THAT?”

76.“Wait, don’t pull away… Not yet.”

77.“Half the time I get too embarrassed to say anything”

78.“No, it’s fine. I can wait until you’re done talking to them.”

79.“No, like…. It’s just, I can’t believe you’re actually wearing my clothes.”

80.“You’re a big piece of inspiration for this, honestly.”

81.“I’ve been trying to get ready for like an hour and a half, because I know you’re going to look so good and I need to try and match up.”

82.“I wanted to say “I love you” for the first time without stuttering, but that failed.”

83.“My friends get so annoyed by how much I talk about how sometimes.”

84.“No, mom, don’t tell him/her I said that about him/her!”

85.“I can’t get over how a few months ago I wanted to learn your name and now you’re having breakfast with me in my sweater.”

86.“ You are so beautiful — So fucking beautiful. “

87.“And just WHERE do you think you’re putting your hands?”

88.“Wow, you look even better in the daylight.”

89.“I don’t remember ever having this many hickeys. But I don’t mind.”

90.“We could order pizza and just stay like this all day.”

91.“It was always you.”

92.I love you in every possible way.”

93.“I didn’t mean to love you so much.”

94.“Don’t you hurt a single hair on his/her/their head.”

95.“Duck, you idiot!”

96.“Hey. Pal. I’ve got a wand and I’m not afraid to use it.”

97.“Shh, you’re safe. I won’t let you go.”

98.“It’s not a double date. We’re just third and fourth wheeling.”

99.“Look, I know we don’t know each other that well, but I’m still worried about you. No one deserves to be alone.”

100.“I remember practicing how to ask you out in the mirror..”

Sarcasm

101.“Define normal.”

102.“Do I get bonus points if I act like I care?”

103.“Just remember if we get caught, you’re deaf and I don’t speak English.”

104.“Don’t look for any redeeming qualities. I don’t have any.”

105.“It’s amazing how fast the world can go from bad to total shit storm.”

106.“I love you. You enormously stubborn pain in the ass.”

107.“And you wonder why you’re still single.”

108.“Remind me to kill you. Please.”

109.“That’s a little melodramatic, don’t you think?”

110.“She’s crazy. And just when you think you’ve reached the bottom of her craziness, there’s a crazy underground garage.”

111.“She may seem like lollipops and rainbows but I bet behind close doors she’s latex and whips.”

112.“If my day gets any worse, I’m asking hell if they’re having an exchange program.”

113.“Sorry. I don’t speak skank.”

114.“My middle finger salutes you.”

115.“I don’t have enough middle fingers to let you know how I feel.”

116.Somebody’s cranky.” “Somebody needs to shut up.”

117.“Oh darling. Go buy a brain.”

118.“Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

119.“All due respect, but that’s a bunch of crap.”

120.“I am one of the few people in the world who can murder you and leave no forensic evidence behind.”

121.“Excuse me. I have to go make a scene.”

122.“What did I tell you about calling her/him the devil?” “That it’s offensive to the devil?”

123.“I heard that!” “You were supposed to!”

124.“I need therapy after this.”

125.“You didn’t get in trouble for lying. You got in trouble for lying badly.”

126.“I turned out liking you a lot more that I originally planned.”

127.“I think you’re weird.” “I think you’re boring.”

128.“I’m afraid I’ve been thinking…” “A dangerous pastime.”

129.“Wow, there’s a big surprise. I think I’m going to have a heart attack and die from surprise.”

130.“I’m gonna hit you so hard, it’ll make you ancestors dizzy.”

131.“Sarcasm is the body’s natural reaction to stupidity.”

132.“Well, excuse me, psychic wonder!”

133.“Don’t look in her eyes, she might steal your soul.”

134.“She’s hot, but she’s evil.”

135.“Do I regret it? Yes. Would I do it again? Probably.”

136.“I already know that I’m going to hell. At this point it’s really go big or go home.”

137.“I’m not a damsel in distress. I’m a damsel doing damage.”

138.“So stick that in your juice box and suck it.

” 139.“Never take life seriously. No one ever comes out alive anyway.”

140.“Sometimes I question my sanity. Occasionally it replies.”

141.“Why should we date?” “Because we are attracted to each other.” “I am attracted to pie, but I do not feel the need to date pie.”

142.“Neither one us is drunk enough for this conversation.”

143.“You’re questioning my methods.” “I’m not questioning it, I’m saying it’s stupid.”

144.“Wow, somebody needs a Happy Meal.”

145.“I didn’t do it!” “Then why are you laughing?” “Because whoever did it is a freaking genius.”

146.“Idiots. I’m surrounded by idiots.”

147.“You couldn’t handle me even if I came with instructions.

148.“Obviously you have mistaken me for somebody who gives a shit.”

149.“Rule number one: don’t bother sucking up. I already hate you, that’s not going to change.”

150.“You make no sense to me.” “Welcome to my life.”

Drama

151.“Can you stop thinking about yourself for once?”

152.“Can you stop thinking about yourself for once?”

153.“Don’t think I forgot about what you did last time.”

154.“I know you lied to me.”

155.“I’m not even sorry.”

156.“You backstabber!”

157.“I never want to see you again.”

158.“You never mattered to me.”

159.“I knew this was a bad idea.”

160.“Rot in hell.”

161.“It was supposed to be a secret!” 1

62.“No one loves me.”

163.“He/she/they is/are so petty…”

164.“You made me cry.”

165.“I don’t know who you are anymore.”

166.“How DARE you?!”

167.“I know you’re not talking to me…”

168.“I SAW you with him/her/them!”

169.“Just leave me alone.”

170.“What did you do?!”

171.“I told everyone that I didn’t want to talk but I’m actually dying for attention.”

172. “Just admit that was extra…”

173.“I forgive, but I don’t forget.”

174.“Did you see what he/she/they was/were wearing?”

175.“So what if I had sex with your ex?”

176.“There’s something I have to tell you…”

177.“I can’t do this anymore.”

178.“You weren’t there for me when I needed you the most.”

179.“I never loved you.”

180.“It’s too late.”

181.“Quit ignoring me.”

182. “Don’t you get it? It’s because I love you!”

183.“I love you. I’m sorry.”

184.“I don’t want to be friends.”

185.“Can we please pretend I never said that?”

186.“Friendzoned again.”

187.“You should’ve loved me when you had the chance.”

188.“Fuck you for toying with my emotions like that.”

189.“I was there for you when no one else was!”

190.“Alright – I can tell a ‘no’ when I hear it.”

191.“I’m sorry I acted so creepy.”

192.“Fuck. It’s like what they say – nice guys finish last…”

193.“I’m tired of keeping this secret. Even if you don’t love me back.”

194. “I knew that’d be your answer. That’s why I never told you before.”

195.“When I said I loved you, I meant it.”

196.“Is there any part of you, deep down, that might love me back?”

197.“You were the one that left all those notes for me?”

198.“You’re in a relationship with another person – you know this can’t end well.” 199.“We agreed this was just physical!”

200.“I love you. I know you don’t love me, so don’t say it back.”

Characters/people i write for

Marvel

Steve rogers

Clint Barton

Scott Lang

Tony Stark

Sam Wilson

Thor Odinson

Loki Laufeyson

Bucky Barnes

Peter Quill

Peter Parker

Pietro Maximoff

Bruce Banner

Stucky (ship)

Criminal Minds

Spencer Reid

Derek Morgan

Aaron Hotchner

Greys Anatomy

Alex Karev

Mark Sloan

Andrew Deluca

Actors

Matthew Gray Gubler

Chris Evans

Tom Holland

Tom Hiddleston

Johnny Depp

Jensen Ackles

Sebastian Stan

Daveed Diggs

Colin O’Donoughue

Once Upon A Time

Killian Jones

Jefferson

Harry Potter

Fred Weasley

Sirius Black

Remus Lupin

Draco Malfoy

James Potter

wolfstar (ship)

Miscellaneous

Steven Hyde (That 70s Show)

Jack Sparrow (Pirates Of The Caribbean)

Dean Winchester (Supernatural)

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