#i need to commit arson. or maybe one or two homicides

[kaiaprax]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[ace-oreos]

Hamilton 51

Wow, this only took me a few thousand years to finally finish.  😅 😅 But I did include Mereel again, so there’s that! 

“Did no one ever bother to teach you about operational security?” Alpha grumbles. 

Mereel just laughs like there’s nothing wrong with showing up in the middle of enemy territory without bothering to tell anyone. 

“I forgot you haven’t been in the field in a while,” he says, and osik, what Alpha wouldn’t give to wipe that smirk off his face. 

Well, he’s assuming that Mereel is smirking, since he can’t actually see the other ARC’s face.

“Protocol’s gone out the window, vod’ika,” the Null continues. “Besides, I haven’t gotten you killed.”

“Yet,” Alpha grumbles, because if he dies here he wants it known that it was not blind trust in an incompetent Null headcase that did him in. 

“Yet,” Mereel concedes amiably. Alpha waits for him to launch into an extravagantly embellished monologue about the events that somehow led here, but Mereel seems content to sit in the mud, humming to himself. 

“Di’kut,” Alpha mutters for good measure. 

“So how long is your sentence?” 

“What?”

“How long are you stuck here for?” Mereel asks. “I’m assuming this is punishment for finally throwing someone in the skylane.”

Alpha squeezes his eyes shut and blows out a long breath. His rifle is resting in the crook of his arm, which means it would be all too easy to - 

“So it wasn’t murder?” Mereel sounds disproportionately disappointed by the notion that Alpha did not, in fact, commit homicide. 

Alpha wonders absently if he should take his chances now, on a planet somewhere between the middle of shabla nowhere and the shebs end of the galaxy; the justice system is practically nonexistent in places like this. (Which is just as well, because arrests make for a lot of paperwork and he isn’t exactly equipped financially to bail himself out.)

“Arson?” Mereel offers hopefully. 

“I - no, you idiot, it wasn’t either of those,” Alpha snaps. 

Mereel pauses in his idle tracings in the mud. His helmet tilts at the horizon like he’s deep in thought. Knowing all too well it won’t last, Alpha takes advantage of the temporary silence to reign in his temper. Mereel’s vaguely stalker-ish tendencies aren’t enough to warrant putting a round through his head, however tempting it might be. 

Which is really too bad, because Alpha suspects it would be highly therapeutic. 

He carefully adjusts his position - he’s hardly getting old, but lying prone for upwards of four hours will make anyone stiff - and scans the area through his scope. Maze had insisted that reducing CIS presence on this planet was critical to maintaining the Republic’s hold on the entire sector. However much Alpha might be inclined to disagree, he’ll do his job, and do it well. 

Suddenly Mereel gasps. Alpha is on his feet in an instant, searching for the threat, but the landscape looks the same as it has for the past two days.

“Do you mind?” he demands crossly when he’s satisfied that he’s not about to get his head blown off. “I’m on a mission, for kriff’s sake!” 

Mereel doesn’t seem to hear. “It was a woman, wasn’t it?” 

The question throws Alpha off his anger long enough for him to growl grudgingly, “What?” 

“You stole Maze’s woman, and now he’s made sure you’re out of the way by giving you this assignment,” Mereel declares confidently.

There’s a beat of utter silence during which Alpha tries to process this. 

“What is wrong with you?” he yells when he can finally form a coherent sentence. 

“I’m just saying, it all makes sense now - ”

“Why are you like this, you useless chakaar?” Alpha fumes. “You’re not even supposed to be here - I don’t want to know why you’re here, and then you pull osik like this - ”

“Oh, wait,” Mereel interrupts. “Wrong one. You’re ace, aren’t you.”

“I’ve only told you about a hundred times,” Alpha snarls.

“Minutiae, vod’ika,” Mereel says airily. “There’s three million of us, you know, I can’t be expected to remember everything.” 

“One would think, the number of times this topic has come up, you might finally get it through your thick skull,” Alpha rants. “But no-o, you can’t remember anything beyond your last hookup.”

“You’re so open-minded about these things,” Mereel comments. 

“What is it going to take to get rid of you?” 

“Suitable entertainment and more credits than you can afford.”

“Gods, you’re annoying.”

“Mm-hm. Mind giving me the scope for a while?”

“Suit yourself,” Alpha snaps, and thrusts the rifle into Mereel’s arms.

Mereel touches two fingers to his helmet in a casual salute. Alpha manages to return the gesture with only one finger.

“Such a well-mannered young man,” Mereel mutters. 

Alpha huffs and folds his arms. Much as he hates to admit it, he’s thankful that someone else has taken up the glorious duty of monitoring the desolate landscape for hostiles that are unlikely to show themselves. 

“If you blow this op, I might just forget we’re on the same side,” he warns. 

“You really need to chill.”

“You really need to find someone else to harass.” 

“But you’re my favorite little brother,” Mereel says, sounding hurt. 

“Shove it up your - ”

“Oh, just go to sleep already,” the Null interrupts. “You wouldn’t be half as grumpy if you’d actually slept for more than an hour or two.”

“‘M not tired,” Alpha grumbles. Too late he realizes his words are evidence to the contrary. 

“Look, if it’s that important to you, I promise not to get trigger-happy and ruin your record. Well. Maybe not promise, ‘cos promise is kind of a strong - ”

Alpha cuts him off before he hears exactly how Mereel plans to derail the entire mission. “Fine. Knock yourself out.” He fixes the Null with a stern look. “But at least tell me if I’m about to get my throat slit.” 

“Deal,” Mereel says, still cheerful, still impossibly annoying. 

Alpha hesitates a little longer. He knows from experience that leaving a Null ARC to his own devices can have unfortunate consequences.

Mereel lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Look, if we’re about to die an unpleasant death, I know where to find you. So piss off, I’m watching the show now.” “Not much of a show,” Alpha mutters, but he backs off for the time being and shuts his eyes. If they’re going to be ambushed, the last thing he wants to see is Mereel making a fool of himself. 

He thinks he hears a quiet “You’re not half bad, vod’ika” but ultimately puts it down to sleep deprivation. He and Mereel have reached an agreement: taunting is allowed, physical harm is generally acceptable, and murder will be judged appropriately should the occasion arise. 

As he falls asleep with only a Null for company, Alpha wonders if that agreement will change by morning. 

[feisties]

choose your own adventure

pairing: blue sargent x henry chang x richard gansey iii prompt: college AU word count: 1,107 warnings: none notes: #13 from this, written for nonbinarycasmund. it’s a tiny bit different from the original prompt but i hope you like it!

There’s a lot of things from living on a co-ed floor that Blue can tolerate. She can live with the kitschy pranks, the perpetual smell of weed, and the occasional excessive banging of a headboard against a wall. She can even learn to appreciate the stilted but well-meaning greetings with acquaintances in the bathroom. But she reaches her breaking point tonight.

Tonight, someone is playing the song September on their floor.

Loudly.

On repeat.

The worst part is that the music plays in surround-sound; the source of the song keeps moving from one spot to the other. It sounds almost as if the band Earth, Wind, and Fire is wandering around hopelessly on the fourth floor of a university dormitory with no way out.

She starts to go crazy around the tenth time the song replays—who’s counting? She certainly isn’t—but after the eighteenth play there’s finally a long, forgiving silence, like maybe the source has decided to put itself out of its own misery. 

She breathes out a heavy sigh of relief.

Then the beginning of September plays for the nineteenth time.

It’s basically an invitation for homicide, at this point.

/

Blue’s already climbing out of her bed on the twenty-second play, ready to search everyone’s room and possibly commit arson, when someone knocks at her door.

The knocks come fast, frantic, and utterly without consideration for the person on the receiving end. When she swings open the door, a male voice immediately blurts: “Do you have our roomba?”

Blue blinks. 

There’s not just one male standing in front of her, but two of them. Unfortunately for her, they’re both upsettingly handsome, wearing pajama bottoms and threadbare T-shirts which hang off their shoulders in ways that she hates herself for admiring. One of them watches her behind pretentious wide-rimmed wire glasses and the other has an astonishing amount of product in what looks like gravity-defying hair, despite it being midnight. 

The two of them are looking right back at Blue with the same startled curiosity, like she’s an alien species or perhaps a small, missing lap dog that’s run away from home. Either way, there’s a hint of a feral fascination behind the poor attempt not to gawk.

“What?” she squeaks.

The one in the glasses recomposes himself fairly quickly, with an easy, charming tilt to his mouth. 

The one with the giant hair seems to make no indication of recomposing himself and smiles rakishly. 

“I like your pajamas,” he says.

This time Blue gawks.

She is suddenly, horribly, vividly aware of the cat print on her pajama bottoms, and even more aware of how both boys’ eyes flicker to the spot where her shorts meet her bare legs. The simultaneous urges to blush violently, preen under their gazes, and yell at them for staring makes her so apoplectic she can barely breathe.

She finally manages, “Excuse me?”

“Sorry about him,” says the other boy wearily without additional explanation, seemingly pulling himself out of his own reverie, but the way he’s peering down at her now over the gold rims of his glasses suggests that his apology may not have been all that sincere. “We’re being extremely rude for knocking on your door this late. I’m Gansey. This is my roommate, Henry. And your name is…?”

“Blue. Blue Sargent.”

He regards her. 

“Are you sure?”

She sputters. “Am I sure about my name?”

“You look like a Jane to me,” he says thoughtfully. “Is Jane your middle name, by any chance?”

Once again overcome by seething disbelief, she doesn’t answer.

“So, Blue Sargent,” Henry interjects with his alarming energy, “as I mentioned, we’re looking for our roomba.”

“Your roomba,” Blue repeats.

“Yes,” says Gansey. His smile indicates that he has all the time in the world, but the faint sound of September playing for twenty-third time clearly pinches at the edges of his mouth. He looks a bit wan, almost apologetic. “Perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s a mobile vacuum cleaner. It runs on its own.”

“I know what a roomba is,” she answers crossly. 

“You might also have heard the music playing on repeat—”

“Oh, that?” Her voice is only a little scathing, but both boys flinch in front of her like they’ve been slapped. “Yeah, I might have heard it around a few times.”

“It’s connected by bluetooth,” Henry explains. “We’ve been playing music to find it.”

“And you needed to find it in the middle of the night.”

“I suppose we did,” Gansey answers breezily, but the edges of his voice are clipped, as if it actually is a concern of his that he’s refusing to voice out of courtesy.

There’s only one dignified response to that answer: it’s a loud, long-suffering sigh that she indulges in with an emphasis that’s not entirely necessary but wholly deserved.

It doesn’t seem to be having its usual effect.

Henry seemingly pushes past it with a determined geniality. He leans a lazy, tanned arm against her door frame and surveys her room enthusiastically. 

“So. Is the roomba in your room?”

She chokes out a strangled laugh. “Do you think it’s here?”

“Do you have any information on its whereabouts?” Henry presses. “Have you seen it nearby?”

“I—no.”

In the distance, the song fades out. 

Then the guitar in the opening sequence blares tinnily for the twenty-fourth time.

“God, at this point, I’ll go find it myself,” Blue cries without meaning to.

She regrets the words the instant they leave her mouth. 

Two pairs of eyes snap to hers.

“Jane,” Gansey says. “That’s a fantastic sentiment.”

Blue blanches. “It was a joke.”

Their heads tilt pensively at the same time to study her, boyish and unabashed. She has a vague feeling that she should be annoyed, but for some reason she can’t muster up the energy to bristle. In fact, she might even be a little charmed by how bright their expressions are. 

She’ll blame it on being sleep deprived.

“Blue Sargent,” Henry says solemnly, “how would you like to go roomba-hunting with us?”

There are a million reasons to say no. But the way the two of them are pouting at her, shamelessly hopeful and a little juvenile, makes her forget most of those reasons. It’s—unexpectedly disarming. 

Then Henry’s tongue darts out to wet his lips, and something flexes in Gansey’s forearms when he crosses his arms across his body which—okay, is an unfair amount of disarming. A criminal amount of disarming. Especially at once.

“We’re great company,” adds Henry, flashing bright, white teeth at her.

“And then we’ll make it up to you,” Gansey promises.

The sincerity of his tone is just enough to convince her. And from the way they exchange glances, conspiratorially, meaningfully, and fix lingering looks at the way she folds a leg over the other, she has a feeling that they’ll make it up to her in very thorough, voluntary ways.

Well. It wasn’t really like she was going to get much sleep tonight, anyway.

Blue huffs. 

She tucks her arms across her chest.

She pinches her mouth together to suppress a smirk.

“It sounds like the music is coming from the left,” she says finally, hiking up an eyebrow. She slips between the two of them and the warmth from both bodies feels exciting. Worth the late night, she thinks grudgingly. “And close the door behind you, would you?”

/

[quicksilver-rain]

The Bee Mariner (p.7)

“I should have know it was you.” (It was always you)

It’s fairly warm, despite the fact that it’s very nearly approaching winter, and Trixie is standing out in the middle of a field that’s usually bursting with wildflowers, watching smoke rise into the sky. It’s her day off, and usually she lazes in bed for a few hours before going shopping for the week’s groceries, but today she’s woken up early and has made the snap decision to set something on fire and make s’mores. Well, it’s either that or take apart the toaster, and Sierra threatened her with a wickedly sharp chef’s knife last time Trixie got the urge to dismantle their kitchen appliances.

It’s not a very hard decision, even if Trixie doesn’t think Sierra has the guts to actually commit to homicide.

She shakes her head and looks out across the aforementioned field. The flowers are dying and there aren’t many bees around, despite the fact that Sierra’s told her that the little bastards won’t go into hibernation until around the first frost. There’s something sad and lonely about the whole thing, like the field and dying flowers stretch out forever and she’s the only person around for miles and all this smoke and fire is all just an attempt to prove to herself that she isn’t alone.

Sierra would say she’s got a poet’s soul. Trixie would argue that winter’s depressing.

Either way, she shakes the thoughts away, looking down at her more smoke-than-fire flirtation with arson, breathing in hickory scented smoke and  turning over her marshmallows before they can burn.

“I should have known it was you.”

The sound of another human being makes her jump, and the feeling that there’s more to the blase statement rubs her the wrong way.

Trixie turns to find Nix standing by the gate she’d climbed to get into the field wearing a puffy vest in lieu of a proper jacket, hands in the pockets of his jeans as he studies her. There’s a large, wrinkly dog standing next to him without a lead, watching her silently. He looks amused and she can’t help the way the corner of her mouth ticks upward.

“You mean I’m not the only thing you think of?” she asks, watching as he laughs and rolls his eyes, removing his hands from his pockets and hopping the fence in one fluid movement while the dog crawls under the beams a few feet away.

He stops beside her and the dog stops beside him, both watching as she crouches down and removes her marshmallows from the fire to make a pair of s’mores. Trixie’s immediately endeared by the look of surprise that flickers over Nix’s face when she offers one to him. He accepts it and takes a bite, somehow not getting all sticky in the process, “are you bribing me?”

She lifts her eyebrows and takes a bite from her own s’more instead of answering right away. Her face gets all sticky, but she brought a pack of wet wipes for exactly this eventuality, so she ignores it, “should I be?”

Nix directs his attention elsewhere for a moment popping the rest of the s’more in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully before looking back at her. “Technically, you’re trespassing on my property,” he offers, though he doesn’t sound like he’s going to tell her to pack her shit and go.

Trixie laughs, “am I? I don’t see your name on it.”

He actually reaches for her then, pausing to let her push him away and placing a hand on her shoulder when she doesn’t. He pulls her around better face the gate they both climbed over, gesturing at a sign tacked to one of the posts that she ignored but probably states that Nix Nightingale owns this field and please stay out of it without permission.

Trixie smiles up at him, looking back and resting her head on his shoulder, since he hasn’t let go of her yet, “you gonna charge me?”

Nix laughs again and drops his hands, returning them to his pockets. Trixie straightens and stays close enough that their arms are brushing. “No, but your fire’s smoking out my bees. They need to finish stocking up for winter, or I’ll end up having to feed them soda syrup.” He somehow pronounces the ‘y’ in syrup and Trixie wants to laugh as she reaches down to feed the dog a marshmallow.

Instead she looks down to study her makeshift fire pit, it’s small and surrounded by bricks she’s stolen from the pile out near their back door, an empty reminder of that time her father decided to make a walkway from the back door to the front door before promptly getting too wrapped up in painting to actually finish the project. She looks back up at her companion and thinks that her father would like to paint him, too. He looks so stark and enigmatic against the cloudy grey sky that even Trixie wants to give it a try, and the best she can do is smudgy pencil drawings of engine parts.

She mentally shakes herself.

“You feed them soda syrup?” she asks, genuinely curious about bees for the first time in her life.

He nods, and then shakes his head as if he can’t make up his mind, “it’s sugar water, actually, and I try not to if I can’t help it.” He pauses to watch the dog chew on it’s marshmallow. There’s drool everywhere and Trixie notices that he hasn’t actually told her to put out her fire yet. “I will if they can’t make enough honey to last the winter, though.” He gestures at the smoke the fire’s belching into the sky.

Trixie shoves the rest of her treat in her mouth and leans down to grab the bucket of water she’d collected from one of the many water pumps dotting the surrounding area. She dumps it on the meagre flames with very little preamble, thinking maybe she should have put up more of a fight as she waves her hand in front of her face when more smoke pours from the little fire pit when the water hits it. She coughs a little and debates stamping out the rest of the embers, but Nix hasn’t made a move to leave and she actually sort of likes the company.

At least it keeps her from getting all philosophical and morose.

Silence filters between them for a few seconds while they watch the smoke die and it takes effort for Trixie to look back over at him, “hey.”

He blinks, as if some spell’s been broken and directs his attention back at her, “what’s that?”

She bites her lip and says the first thing that pops into her head, “is Nix your real name?”

He barks out a laugh that leads Trixie to believe that whatever he’d been expecting, that isn’t it. “Yeah, yeah. It’s an old family name on my mother’s side, but I think she named me Nix to spite my father.” He looks amused and sad and Trixie feels terrible. “Apparently she bribed the nurses in the maternity ward to fill out my birth certificate before my father had the chance to name me something halfway decent.”

“I’m sorry,” she doesn’t know what else to say.

He smiles in a way that screams that something’s eating at him. “Don’t be. They’d be divorced if it weren’t for the clauses in their marriage-contract.” His smile falters a bit and then he shrugs, “sometimes, I’m surprised they haven’t killed each other, much less that they had me.”

This makes Trixie stare, because her father loved her mother, and still loves her mother so much that it hurts them both some days and Trixie can’t imagine having two parents, much less two parents that hate each other. She heaves a sigh and tries for nonchalance, “probably so they could give you that god-awful name and turn you loose on the world.”

He smiles again, still feral, like always, but more genuine than the last one. “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

Trixie nods, even though she thinks it fits him, and silence falls a second time.

“What did you think my real name was?”

She thinks for a moment, trying to recall a conversation she had when she was half asleep and dizzy from sleep-aides. “I don’t know. Nathan, maybe… or Joseph?” She lifts her shoulders, “Gabriel?”

“God, anything but Gabriel, please,” and then he laughs a lot harder than Trixie expects him to, given that she’s just all but told him she thinks his name is stupid. She even laughs a little bit herself, because Nix doesn’t look anything like a Gabriel and she’s not sure why she ever thought he did in the first place.

The dog presses its wet and sticky face into her hand, looking for more marshmallows, no doubt. She crouches to pet its face, jumping when it ducks its head so she can’t scratch behind it’s ears.

“You’ve got to go under his head,” Nix offers, watching her try to pet his dog like she’s something precious, “he can’t see your hand if you go over, because of his wrinkles.”

Trixie does as she’s told and ends up nearly getting bowled over by the dog as he pushes closer to her. “What’s his name, then?”

“Socrates,” Nix answers, watching the dog look back at the sound of his name, before going back to trying to climb into Trixie’s lap.

She laughs, “it looks like terrible naming practices run in the family.”

“Nah,” he answers, still content to watch her pet his dog, “Socrates is a real philosopher, aren’t you, boy?”

Trixie gives in and sits on the ground, letting Socrates climb into her lap so she can lavish more attention on him, “what’s he philosophise about?”

Nix is quiet for a long moment, and Trixie nearly thinks she might have bested him in a battle of wits she didn’t know they were having. Then he smiles and says, “who’s a good boy?”

She laughs, even though it’s a stupid joke, and Nix smiles again.

Eventually, they quiet down and the smoke has died, there are no more embers glowing on the ground and it looks like they’re going to go their separate ways.

“I’ve got a fire pit in my back yard, if you want to make s’mores again,” Nix says, taking Trixie by surprise. She looks over Socrates’ head at him and he points toward the woods that surround the field, “you know where Longwood Drive turns into a dirt road? If you follow it half a mile down and take a left at the first fork, you’ll eventually get to my place. You don’t have to ask permission or anything, just knock on the door in case someone’s home, so you don’t scare the shit out of Mossy or something. Socrates knows you now, so he won’t be a problem.”

Trixie smiles up at him and takes his hand when he offers it down to her, shooing Socrates off her lap so she can stand.

“I might just have to take you up on that offer.”

He chuckles, “I knew you would.”