#i’d be running on 5 hour energies and a dream | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

piermanwalter · 11 months

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I had a dream aliens invaded and released gas into the upper atmosphere that absorbed visible light. You could stand outside in the pitch black darkness, but still feel warm and get sunburned. This was pretty tolerable until power was cut, so going outside meant the only public light sources in a 30 meter radius were a car battery someone rigged onto a lamp post and a trash can filled with burning grease.

Advance warning for how long and gruelling this story is.

People were trying to evacuate from the peninsula the city was on, but there were ankle-high floods in impossible locations like hills and sandy ground. If you touched the water, it would slowly drag you towards the ocean to drown. I eventually got used to the floods and lost the compulsion to help people, since I knew I would get dragged away with them. I knew the floods were coming when I heard screams in the distance, then I’d hide on an upper floor of a building for the next several hours, as the screaming people were dragged slowly down the street outside.

If we gathered in large groups outside, tiny metal gas grenades fell from the sky to block out light even more effectively. In this situation, your only options were to dive in a hole and hunker down, or run blindly away into the darkness. People who stayed above ground in the gas cloud disappeared.

News was still getting to us from leaflets dropped from the sky, but when the last leaflets we received announced this city was officially a lost cause and no further effort would be made to evacuate people or send aid, people began panicking and hoarding food. The public light situation got even worse as fewer people maintained it.

It seemed like the aliens knew what they were doing, because there is no better way to disrupt and demoralise a social diurnal species. After a couple months, pretty much the only people out and about were complete misanthropes who were able to ignore others getting dragged into the ocean and fine with avoiding large groups. A lot of people were hiding in groups underground. I tried to join them multiple times, but by this point it was too late. At best, I’d be sent on my way with a can of tomato juice or something like that. The reputation of above ground people was already terrible, and me appearing to be harmless and approachable only made people more suspicious that I must be truly horrifying if I wasn’t already underground.

It was dark for so long that plants were sprouting soft pale etiolated shoots, which were pretty tasty. Few other people seemed to know they were edible, probably since they looked so creepy. More for me. Everyone above ground carried portable light sources. Even after I had better options, I continued carrying tea candles because I found that the small flickering light made others less likely to attack me.

Whether the alien gas itself was poisoning people, or the general psychological effects of no light, dwindling food, flood attacks, alien invasion, and being abandoned by the rest of humanity, it became known that constant gas exposure above ground would over the course of several weeks make you lose stamina until you died in your sleep. Everyone started taking huge amounts of stimulants to stay conscious for longer. Pretty soon, normal stimulants like coffee and prescription drugs were exhausted and people started making meth and breaking open allergy inhalers to eat the drug saturated sponges inside. This did not make us above ground any less weird and misanthropic. I broke into the back of a convenience store I knew everyone avoided because it was in the middle of a giant flat parking lot completely exposed to near constant flood attacks, and found a huge pallet of energy shot bottles, which I filled a duffel bag with whenever I needed. Even though I drank 5 energy shots a day, which should equal 25 hours of energy, I could only be active for 4 hours a day. I was awake longer than that, but I didn’t have the energy to move or stand. My days revolved around using what little active time I had to get somewhere safe, hopefully with food, while contending with whatever I encountered on the way.

I got really good at identifying flood attack water. Aside from the obvious signs like floods on slopes, flood attack water was also perfectly clear and still no matter how dirty the ground it was on. If something fell in it, it would sink straight to the bottom no matter what angle it fell from, and make no ripples for a few seconds. Then, as if the alien operating flood attack water was snapped out of distraction, ripples would appear, often nowhere near where the object landed. Sometimes the water made completely BS parallel or polygonal ripples. Since the water moved so slowly, as long as you were careful to not get cornered, you could safely hang out near the flood attack water and throw things in it to see how it rippled. If you simultaneously threw like a hundred tiny things into it, the water would “deactivate” for a few seconds, and you wait for it to naturally flow away, or make a run through it to escape. Counterintuitively, it was safest outside when it rained because the flood attack water couldn’t be maintained while rain drops were falling in it. I started carrying around a bag of glass aquarium gravel in case of emergencies.

On average, I ran into 20 people per day. About half the time we would ignore each other. I became aware of a pattern of behavior where someone noticed me, looked at me with an expression like “I could easily overpower this person”, approach me, stop, change expression like “Wait if this person is alone but still this calm and functional, there must be something deeply wrong.” and then leave. Every couple weeks or so, someone would try to steal from or attack me, so they got the mortice chisel. I’d run away after that, and if they followed me, I’d run towards flood attack water, throw gravel in it to make it normal, then run through it to hang out safely on the other side.

One time, a guy chasing me was trapped in flood attack water, and he pulled out a handgun. I extinguished my little tea light and listened to him fire blindly into the darkness as he was slowly dragged towards the ocean.

But a majority of interactions were good. We’d talk for a few minutes to exchange information.

“Did you know so-and-so has a working car? You can siphon gas and trade it to her for all kinds of goodies.”

“The grocery store on 3rd got swept out by floods, but it left all their stuff behind.”

“There’s an army command base hidden somewhere in this city. That’s why the aliens won’t leave us alone.”

“Have you seen my daughter? She’s got my hair and eyes. She has a big yellow coat. She’s about this high.”

I told people how to identify flood attack water, but I didn’t tell them how to deactivate it since I was worried someone might follow me through it. I assumed most people would figure it out on their own like I did.

I rarely saw the same person more than once. We were all like flies blundering against windowpanes looking for an escape whose true direction ran the opposite of our instincts.

Starting a couple months after the city went dark, I kept finding a place to hide out, but then discovering someone had already died there. After six months, I could smell the dead bodies from outside and knew not to go there.

Living off energy shots and tree shoots made me incredibly paranoid. I stabbed a guy in the neck with my chisel for no reason. I immediately regretted it as I was running away. He saw me wandering aimlessly with my little tea light way too close to flood water and was probably trying to help. I went back to where he fell after I stabbed him later and he wasn’t there. I had chopped fingers off people who went for my bag of energy shots and hacked teeth out of someone who licked me, but this was the first time I might have killed someone, and it was for no reason. Ever since the invasion, there were rumors that drinking alien blood would cure alien gas fatigue. Supposedly people were travelling north and braving fire, explosions, building-sized raindrops, and falling aircraft to find dead aliens in the forest. Early on, I ignored these rumors, especially after the one time I tracked down a guy who supposedly had a dead alien in a backpack he was draining blood out of. By the time I found him, he claimed he only got a couple pints of blood out of it and there was none left. But as things worsened, I started seeing people walking outside with no light source. They never spoke to me and I could never chase them down. Maybe I was losing my mind and hallucinating shadow people. I didn’t want to stab anyone else for no reason, and at this point my other options were dying in my sleep or doing meth, so I set out to find alien blood. I asked around and heard there was an alien living in a swimming pool on the top floor of a hotel downtown, who would give you blood if you brought clean water and played dominos with it. I knew the most obvious sources of water were probably depleted, and giving the alien flood attack water felt about the same as trying to bribe an enemy soldier with a sandwich soaked in liquid mustard gas, so I started searching office buildings for water coolers. Because my stamina was so low and elevators weren’t working, it took an entire day to search the building. After I found a full 5 gallon tank and a rolling pallet to move the tank, I was too tired to move so after I ate a pile of sugar packets and creamer powder and drank as much as I could out of another water tank, I went to sleep. I left the water tank in the office building for a few days as I gathered enough tea lights, lighters, and energy shots to do the job. I also spent some time practicing rolling the water tank around and carrying it up and down stairs.

When it was time to move the water tank, I woke up and drank five energy shots. On a normal day before the city went dark, it would take me less than an hour to roll the water tank from the office building to the hotel. Sticking to public light to save on candles, avoiding groups of people, and waiting out flood attacks, it took my remaining 4 hours of stamina to get within sight of the hotel. I was almost there when I was stopped by a guy who knew what I was doing. Even when I first spotted him in the distance next to this huge array of concert stage lights, I felt suspicious about his neatly buzzed hair when everyone else looked like an old paintbrush, and how he was alone beside a public light. It was obvious he was trained how to fight even before the city went dark and did everything to avoid losing a single waking second. I should have snuck around him, but the hotel was so close I decided to risk it. The second the spotted me, he charged forward, grabbed me by the collar, and effortlessly swung me off my feet against a lamp post, then yelled into my face, “You’re a stupid fucking traitor giving precious water to them. We live in hell because of them. They kill thousands of us every day. What makes you think they care enough to save you?” and things like that. The wind was knocked out of me and I was too stunned and tired to reply. After 15 minutes or so, he got tired of yelling and beat the lamp post with me a few more times for good measure.

Having decided I looked sufficiently shrunken and remorseful, he put me down and moved to take the water tank. I embedded my chisel in the side of his head. Instead of pulling the chisel out, I followed through with the stab and felt a hideous crunch vibrate through the handle, saw the skin of his forehead suddenly jut outwards as a chunk of his skull broke off beneath it. With very little effort from me, the chisel skidded and scraped against his skull, finally freeing itself from a massive gash that ran to nearly the back of his head. Maybe you’d still be in one piece if you didn’t buzz all your hair off, idiot.

I kicked the water tank over and ran after it as it rolled downhill. I finally stopped six blocks away, now much farther from the hotel. I felt pretty amped and alert, but knew I would crash once the panic wore off, so I preemptively drank two more energy shots. I entertained the notion of feeling bad about stabbing this guy the same way I felt bad about stabbing the other guy, but then decided it was justified this time. I then began to move the water tank to approach the hotel from the opposite side. I probably didn’t need to give this guy such a wide berth, since I just trepanned and halfway scalped him in the middle of the street. But judging by the looks of him, it was highly likely he was packing the wound with half a kilo of pure uncut cocaine and gearing up for Round 2.

Fortunately, I didn’t run into him or anyone else. He seemed to be the only person with the noble quest of stopping people from getting alien blood. Scattered outside the hotel were bodies of people so badly burned I didn’t recognise them as human until I stepped over them. Most of the bodies were of varying degrees of decay, but there was around 30 fresh bodies piled against one wall. I wasn’t about to scout the entire circumference of the hotel, but I estimated there were at least 200 bodies.

This was the most dead I had seen at any one time. I saw far more people than this dragged away in a single flood, but arguably that didn’t count since they were still alive and struggling. This shook me so badly I debated turning back, but decided to keep going. Even though I lost the rolling pallet escaping from the guy, I couldn’t use it to get the water tank up 50 floors. On the way up, I continuously sipped energy shots. I’d put down the water tank, walk up to the next landing, put the tea light I was holding on the landing, then walk back down, pick up the water tank, carry it up, put it down, then pick up the candle again. So on and so forth for every landing. When the wax was used up or my hands shook too hard and the candle went out, the feeling of the hotel combined with the day’s experiences made me fight the urge to scream. Eventually I stopped caring about being noticed and screamed whenever I felt like. After I screamed so hard I threw up, I decided to stay quiet and focus on moving the water tank. I was dreading seeing bodies in the stairwell. The alien either did excellent housekeeping or everyone who tried to find the alien was seriously formidable, because there weren’t any.

I realised way too late that there was no advantage to using tea lights where there was nobody nearby to pity me, so I finally used the flashlight I forgot I had. By the time I made it to the 38th floor, I drank 6 more energy shots. Even so, I was so tired I left the stairwell to find a hotel room to rest in.

I was surprised how clean the hotel rooms were. Even though the most rich and nutritious sodas and liquors were gone, as well as all the water bottles, there was still lots of diet soda. I ate a puck of compressed dried figs and a jar of almond butter I dug out of someone’s luggage and drank 5 cans of zero sugar root beer, whose unholy flavor was noteworthy even in these circumstances. I passed out on a hotel bed. I felt the sun’s warmth as I left the office building earlier in the day, and when I woke up in the hotel room, I could still feel it. Either I passed out for less than an hour, or an entire day.

Looking out over the water on such a tall building, I could see a line of lights on the horizon. It was the nearest city across the ocean. I had completely forgotten it existed. Sitting on the clean white sheets, looking through clean unbroken glass at the lights of the other city, as bright as ever, if I ignored the dark streets below and how bad my back hurt from hauling the water tank around and getting slammed into the lamp post, I could pretend I was tired from a night out partying downtown. Two small blinking lights steadily drifted across the sky, slowly settling down among the other lights on the horizon. It was a plane.

I ate all the shoots off an etiolated tree next to the unusable elevators and a rock hard dried salami and drank 3 energy shots mixed in a bottle of Diet Coke. When I finally carried the water tank up to the roof, I expected a pool party death match situation where dozens of people competed for the alien’s favor while it blasted anyone who displeased it with ray guns. I was alone on the roof. The pool was almost completely empty, the remaining water forming a foul bacteria algae sludge on the floor. There was no alien in the pool.

This didn’t make any sense. There were freshly incinerated bodies surrounding the hotel, and I was certain no human being in the city had the knowledge or equipment to incinerate bodies so precisely without at least destroying the hotel in the process. Unless the alien literally left while I was climbing, it was still here. Setting wood and canvas poolside chairs on fire and throwing them off the roof to see the way down, I figured that the rotting bodies scattered around the hotel were from when the alien lived in the pool and was throwing them off whatever edge of the roof was nearest, while the pile of fresh bodies was from after the alien moved out of the pool into a hotel room and threw bodies out of the same window every time. Instead of searching everywhere, I could search just the side of the building facing the pile of bodies. Soon I saw a gradient of smoke staining the ceiling that pointed me towards a penthouse suite. I willed myself to enter by drinking five energy shots. The rooms and furniture inside were severely burned, but somehow still held together, sheets of ash hanging off curtain rods and charcoal floors supporting my weight without denting. The floor was damp. I headed into the bathroom, which was so badly burned the walls and floor were completely carbonized. Only the metal, porcelain, and stone fixtures retained their original color. The alien was in the bathtub. It looked like a cartoon falling star, with a “head” made of large blunt points and a tapered neck emerging from a cluster of around 15 little hollow tube feet. The alien was completely covered in beige and white feldspar or some other grainy opaque crystal, separated by thin lines of metal. It had no discernible features beyond that. What by now I was very familiar with as flood attack water had overflowed from the bathtub and pooled in the corner and along the wall next to it. In the water were 15 small rectangular pieces of beige and white feldspar with rounded tops. It did not respond when I approached, but when I put the water tank down, it spun its head and slowly moved its points about like a sea urchin. I thought about breaking it open with my chisel. When I unsealed the water tank and began pouring it into the bathtub, I saw that the alien was not laying its entire body down the bathtub like a human, but standing on its little tube feet in the corner. I wasn’t too surprised, since I got the general sense how small they were from how they could fit inside a backpack and didn’t have a lot of blood. I poured a third of the tank before the bathtub was filled to the brim, then sat on the floor and watched as the alien slowly and deliberately made its way from the corner to the center of the tub. It leaned forward and made the bathtub overflow. I fell backwards to avoid touching the water, but then, whether it had control over the water or its limbs had the same refraction as water and were invisible while in water, the alien made the tub un-overflow, carrying one of the white feldspar pieces with it. It placed the white feldspar on the edge of the bathtub and leaned back into the corner where it stood motionlessly while I thought about how to respond. I remembered we were supposed to play dominos with it, which was probably how someone rationalised what to do with the feldspar pieces. I very carefully lifted a piece of white feldspar without touching the water it was in and put it on the edge of the bathtub next to the other one. The alien made the tub overflow again, knocking the piece I placed onto the floor without knocking over the piece it placed. I put the white feldspar piece on the bathtub edge again and it knocked the piece off again. I did it again and it knocked it off again. I put a beige piece on the edge of the tub. It knocked the piece off. I put a different beige piece on the edge of the tub. The alien did nothing this time. I picked up the beige piece and put it back down again sideways. The alien knocked it off, but then placed it back in its original position, along with a second white piece next to it. So it wanted the pieces to be in the correct order, the orientation of individual pieces didn’t matter, but it preferred them to be standing up. I took a tea light out of my pocket and put it on the edge of the tub. The alien sank down until only the top of its head was above water and slowly moved its points about for over a minute before it knocked the tea light onto the floor. I picked up a white piece and placed it on the edge of the tub. The alien knocked the piece off. By trial and error I managed to get most of the pieces in the correct order, but there were a few pieces I couldn’t reach without touching flood attack water. I’d reach as far over the water as I can, but the alien kept alternating between receding the water until I could almost touch a piece and sending it surging back. I scattered a handful of aquarium gravel across the floor, stepped directly into the water, and took the remaining pieces out while it was deactivated. The alien was apparently very excited about this, since it started running around the tub. It took over 10 seconds for it to run one lap, which was the fastest I saw it move. Since I didn’t want to get incinerated, I slowly backed off to the opposite side of the bathroom and hopefully made it obvious with big exaggerated gestures when I put the bag of aquarium gravel in the sink. I stood with my empty hands out until the alien stopped moving and the water on the floor became clouded with soot. The flashlight went dim, so I lit up a few candles and put them on the sink counter. It was a very nice spa day. When I finally got the pieces in order, the alien knocked all of them off the edge, then went completely motionless. I assumed it wanted me to put them all in order again, but while I remembered the sequence of colors the pieces went in, the alien could distinguish same color pieces in ways I could not. I trial and errored my way into getting the white pieces in order, then the beige pieces in order, then combined them. It took several hours to get all the pieces in order twice and by then I was nearly delirious. The alien opened one of its head spines along the seams. The flesh inside was dark and blobby like a sea cucumber. It began sucking water up through its tube feet and pouring it back into the tub via a hose from the center of its head. While it silently cycled water, I drank another energy shot. The alien reassembled its head, knocked all the pieces off again, laid one of its tube feet on the edge of the tub, and squirted out a syringe. Then it returned to the corner I found it in. I took the syringe, and all my stuff except the water tank. Looking back at the alien as I left the suite, it splashed water up the wall facing it. As the water crashed back down, it turned the bathtub faucet’s crystal handle back and forth. As the handle turned, the alien turned its head to match it. If the alien was at all impatient or unreasonable, I would have died a thousand times already. I had the sense some of the incinerated bodies were from people who survived the alien but didn’t survive the syringe. I was too tired to deal with that, so after I put some distance between me in and the alien by stumbling down a few floors, I passed out in the stairwell before suddenly becoming very paranoid that someone else looking for the alien would find me, then dragging myself into a clean room to pass out again. When I woke up, it was cold. Examining the syringe more closely, the needle was stuck into one of those wedge-shaped pencil erasers and it was filled with 0.2 ml of clear viscous liquid. According to the label, the syringe contained testosterone at one point. It had been inside at least one alien and who knows how many people. I thought about selling it. Who would possibly be convinced that this nasty suspicious syringe held real alien blood? Anyone desperate enough to believe me was likely desperate enough to kill me for it.

Regardless of whether or not I survived the syringe, I didn’t want to give the guy outside the satisfaction of seeing my incinerated corpse. After drinking 3 energy shots, I spent the day’s active hours extensively searching the next few floors down, gathering food and supplies, keeping an eye through the windows on which parts of the city had changing public light. I figured the shadow people would use lights less, and would turn the lights off during the day. If they got that way through alien blood, it’s probably better to shoot up among people who went through it, instead of figuring it out myself.

As it got colder, one patch of waterfront suburb lit up. Either the lights were run by shadow people who could see during the day, or there was an organised effort to improve public light. I decided to head there tomorrow.

Luckily, I didn’t see anyone on the stairs down. I got tired of carrying the duffel bag, took the most precious and fragile things out of it, and kicked it down the remaining 30 floors of the hotel. I took the long way to the suburbs to avoid the guy. I could see the stagelights from several blocks away. Either he survived and still kept watch over the lights, which would have been taken apart if they were left alone that long, or he was replaced by someone even scarier. Regardless, I was still worn out from getting beat up and hauling the water tank up 50 floors, and did not feel confident I could deal another skull-shattering blow.

As I approached the suburb, I could see much fewer people out and about. It became very difficult to tell if I was actually seeing shadow people. I think they were stalking me from a distance. As the buildings became shorter, the wind became stronger, and I fumbled to load batteries I took from hotel fire alarms into my flashlight because my candles kept blowing out as I heard footsteps crunch around me. I shouted, “What do I do with alien blood?” into the darkness, with the occasional reply of “Cool!” and laughter.

As I wandered around the suburb, gorging myself on etiolated shoots, I saw shadow people in the distance, standing still long enough for me to see the combined curiosity and disgust on their faces before they ran off into the darkness. I kept asking, “What do I do with alien blood?” and eventually an empty-handed middle aged woman, freshly bleached hair in a neat bun, wearing a tank top, capri shorts, and flip flops, looking like she had just gotten up from lounging on the porch with a beer and a big bowl of pretzels after sending her kids to swim practice instead of the creatures of instinct I and many others turned into.

She said, “Don’t drink alien blood. I don’t care what you heard. Don’t drink it. Get it in a syringe. It doesn’t make sense, but don’t shoot it into a vein. If you can’t find a syringe, you need to cut yourself open and pour-” “I already have a syringe.” “Good. Pick the limb you want the least.” And then she left.

I could hear her following me as I kept walking. After some searching and avoiding buildings with lighted windows, I found an empty house with plenty of etiolated plants. Its previous occupants had left in a hurry, but it seemed that the people in the suburbs were living far better than we in the city did, since there were big tubs of peppercorns and garlic flakes and bottles of fruit vinegar left behind in the kitchen. The deadbolts on the front and back door still worked. I locked myself in. I wished she stayed with me.

Sitting on the floor of the living room, I disinfected myself with a little squeeze bottle of hand sanitizer and decided to inject into the top of my right foot, right underneath the big ankle bone lump, between the 3rd and 4th tarsal. The instant the needle bit into my skin, the skin under the edges of my toenails turned black. Early morning blue leaked weakly through the window blinds. This was the first time in over six months I had seen sunlight. I pressed down on the plunger, but instead of injecting the liquid into me, my blood was being drawn up into the syringe. I forced the plunger down. A massive bruise suddenly spread across the entire top of my foot, which felt like it just got ran over by a motorcycle.

Despite my effort, blood was still being forced into the syringe, pushing the plunger back up, diluting the clear liquid inside to a cloudy orange. It looked like very little of it had gotten into me. Panicking, I slammed my palm against the plunger. The liquid in the plunger fought back, and I had to hold it in place with both thumbs to prevent my blood from overflowing from the syringe and spraying all over the floor.

Each time I injected the liquid back into myself, the light through the window got brighter. I was holding the syringe in place in a fist, frantically hammering the plunger down with my other hand using the full weight of my body. By the time the room had become a blinding bright yellow, the entire length of the needle was forced into me, the glass container of the syringe flush against my foot. I was bleeding, but instead of the blood flowing down like normal, it beaded around the injection site like a grape. I pulled the plunger up, this time putting effort into filling the syringe. The bead of blood shrank and I injected my blood back into myself until it disappeared. My foot hurt so bad I passed out.

When I woke up, it was still bright outside. My foot hurt even more than it did before, but I felt much more stable than I had been in months. I sat up. I didn’t remember pulling the needle out before I passed out, but it was next to me on the floor. The bruise worsened while I was sleeping, expanding up the outer side of my ankle. There was a 2 inch wide hole at the injection site where my flesh was completely eaten away. I could see my bones. The hole was filled with clear water, which stayed in place no matter which angle I held my foot at. Blood was still pumping through detached vessels, flowing down the sides of the hole, pooling beneath my bones, then flowing back up the opposite side to enter the other end of each vessel in thin isolated streams. It hurt an incredible amount, but I could move and feel my toes even though my nerves and tendons were severed, so signals and forces were somehow getting through.

I was accustomed to darkness, so I kept the blinds closed for the next few days as I recovered. The bruise was slowly fading and soon I was on my feet, not able to go at any decent speed but still walking around, but the hole didn’t heal at all. Water never spilled out of the hole like I was afraid it would, but, annoyingly, if I wore a sock, the water soaked into it. I figured out I could duct tape a piece of plastic sheeting over the hole. The shadow people, which I was technically one of now, knew where I was, since I could hear them circling the house and trying to peer through the blinds at all hours of the day.

Leaving the house to deal with a crowd was grotesque to me. Even if they treated me kindly now that I was one of them, stumbling around in the darkness while those who could see couldn’t even be assed to talk to me meant that I didn’t want to be part of whatever nice deal they had for each other. Once my foot healed enough, I got into the habit of waiting until dark when no one was around and sneaking out through the roof.

One night while exploring the neighborhood, I was stopped by a shadow person carrying a giant sniper rifle, who thankfully didn’t seem to be affiliated with the shadow people surrounding the house. He must have assumed I recently left an underground hideout or something because he gave me a crash course on flood attack water, which I made of show of being interested in. Half of what he said was concise information recited from memory of something he definitely didn’t write, and the other half was rambling personal stories.

He was about to start a speech about alien gas fatigue. I silently drank two energy shots, which made him change subject to who to buy alien blood from, in case I decided I needed it. This was actually interesting since I didn’t know more than him about it. “Look for mass graves, if it’s not too scary for you. Not that alien blood dealers set up in mass graves on purpose. Anywhere alien blood dealers set up turns into a mass grave.” This tracked with what I saw around the hotel. I asked if there were any alien blood dealers who were aliens themselves, and he laughed, then apologized for laughing.

He pulled a severely chipped slab of white feldspar out of his pocket. “Aliens’re covered in this stuff. When they’re fresh, all their guts still inside. You ever seen somebody hack up loogies chewing a fat wad of dip? Starts out that nasty and just gets worse. After a couple days, it all festers and leaks out of ‘em.”

He said sometimes dealers would pick up dead aliens washed up on the shore, but these were always rotted to hell, and it would be better to wait for someone to come down from up north with a freshly killed alien. “A lot more dead aliens dealt now. I know it’s ‘cause more people want alien blood now and dealers got better ways to find aliens. Still like thinking it’s ‘cause we’re winning.” He also said not to buy any alien blood unless I personally saw it drained out of an alien.

I asked him if there was any way to drink alien blood without dying, or if there was anything to watch out for after drinking alien blood. He smirked widely but didn’t laugh this time. He said the safest way to get alien blood was by draining all the syrup thick clear blood out of the alien in one go, then diluting the blood 1:20 with distilled water.

He said to inject, not drink, this dilute mixture, no more than 1 mL. “Injecting a little alien blood straight’s same danger as injecting same mixed with water. Dealers do it to make it easy to measure. More to sell, too. Be careful. Looks like a half-mL’ll be more than enough for you.” He said if you did it right and were lucky, you’d be fine, and if you did too much or were unlucky, you died within minutes. “Aw man, I shouldn’t’ve chickened out my first injection. I didn’t get enough. More injections don’t do more. Now it’s all dim.”

I asked him if he knew the death rate of fresh alien blood. “Eh. It’s about the same as bad blood. It’ll get better once all the dealers stop selling as much as they can before it goes bad. Dealers’ll kill you with bad blood. Dealers’ll kill you with good blood to get rid of it before it goes bad. You got to watch out for yourself. Remember: fresh blood, fresh water, 1:20, 1 mL injection.” The alien gave me 4 maximum doses. He didn’t mention beating the syringe down or water holes. There was no way I could ask about it and not out myself.

“Are there any good dealers out there?”

“They’ll learn.”

“What’s the death rate for bad blood?”

“Bad. Mass graves, remember?”

“Why do people want good blood if it’s the same?”

“How’d you feel if alien blood didn’t work ‘cause it rotted? Now you got hepatitis, and alien blood’ll never work on you. The bad blood doesn’t work and it’s poisonous, and the good blood works and it’s different poisonous. It’s a horseshoe theory.”

“What about ok blood? Is it safe?”

“Nah, ‘cause it gets better one way it gets worse the other way. Actually it’s a W theory.”

“So are slightly bad blood and slightly good blood safe?”

“Nah. It’s all bad. Forget it. I’m just talking.”

“Iron bar theory, then.”

He laughed.

“I got a conspiracy theory. The aliens are catching on to us. Used to be, freshest alien the safest, simple as that, but now the best dealers with the freshest aliens and cleanest needles. Sometimes they get an alien who kills everybody they inject. Aliens are poisoning their dead ‘cause they know we’re injecting their blood. Now everyone’s waiting for someone else to inject first. But they’re waiting and the alien rots. Wha’d’you think about that? That’s just the sick smart thing aliens do.”

“Sounds like it.” He looked relieved, as if expecting me to dismiss him. “It makes sense they would do something like that. Do you think aliens only do that after they die?”

“Wha’d’you mean?”

“If the aliens need to fill their dead with poison, or if aliens can make their bodies poisonous while they’re still alive like a poison frog or garlic or something.”

“Aw man. I hope it’s the first one, ‘cause if the aliens figured out the second one, all dead aliens are poisonous now.”

“Maybe aliens turn poisonous after getting super scared, and if you sneak attack one, it’ll die without turning poisonous. Or you could find a cool alien and it gives you blood.”

“We’re just saying things. It’s a new science. They’re still figuring things out.” They? Who’s they?

“I have a conspiracy theory, too. Do you want to know?”

“Yeah! Tell me. Please.”

“Maybe every soldier up north has night vision goggles and six kilos of cocaine all the time. But I think some of them accidentally got alien blood in them from explosions, or they got really hungry and ate a dead alien, or something, and that’s how we figured out it could make us see.”

“Yeah, the guys on the ground were feeling real useless and getting real desperate. Took a real long time for the stars to find out. ‘Cause the guys in the air see just fine above clouds. And the stars are in bunkers so they don’t deal with any of this shit.”

“Wow.”

“You know what happened when they found out? The stars reclassified us biohazard ‘cause too many kept dying. Nobody knows how alien blood works. They said there might be mind control and diseases and spyware and shit in it.”

“Oh man, that sucks. Where are those guys now?” He went silent for a long time.

“It’s what I heard, is all. I don’t know where rumors come from.”

The same place you and your giant rifle came from. You said too much. And now I have to figure out if this was a heartfelt outpouring of grief or you’re debating the best way to silence me.

“I hope those guys are ok.”

He started talking about how dangerous the shore was, acting as though the previous conversation didn’t happen. I knew he was withholding information because it was all rambling, but he especially emphasised how the shores were so dangerous because there was almost nobody there, and it was far safer inland where there were plenty of people. Of course, this meant I had to stick to the shore.

I thanked him and left.

“You see any dealers with rotten aliens and bad measures, tell me!”

I turned the nearest corner away to get out of line of the rifle as soon as possible. I made my way back to the house before morning. In case the guy changed his mind and decided to go after me, I didn’t leave the house for the next 3 days. I hated him for not finding me before I injected the syringe into myself.

It was shocking how easy things were once I no longer had to ration my active hours. I didn’t need to eat as much, since I figured I was burning energy uselessly from jittering after too many energy shots. I think the bottles were seriously damaged without my notice from when I got slammed against the lamp post or kicked the duffel bag down the hotel stairs. After standing the duffel bag against the wall of the house for several days while I ate freeze dried espresso powder, liquid had run out of the broken bottles, trapped by waterproof lining, and pooled in the end against ground, drying into an inescapably sticky mass that fused broken plastic bottle shards, intact bottles, and tea candles together in a thick gunk slab like God’s most detested panforte.

Alien blood made me need less caffeine. I still drank 5 energy shots a day, but didn’t need any more to stay up longer or do more strenuous activities. It was probably a good idea to wean myself off energy shot dependency, but in the meantime, I still needed it to function. I consolidated the remaining liquid into a troublingly few number of unbroken bottles, and if worst came to worst, I could eat the gunk. Time to head back to the convenience store in the city. There were probably many other sources of caffeine nearby, but I didn’t want to waste any time searching and risk getting surrounded and trapped in unfamiliar little houses instead of skyscrapers and giant shopping complexes I was used to. Let them think I died alone in that house.

It was a lot windier near the waterfront than near the city, so I started putting bigger candles in a hefty glass holder to protect them, which quickly filled with liquid wax. I had to be more careful about this than tea candles. The sky turned bright by the time I left the neighborhood. I pulled my jacket hood down over my eyes because I still wasn’t used to the light.

Walking along the rock piles at the waterfront, holding a candle I didn’t need out of habit, there were a lot of things I was better off not seeing. The few surviving trees were throwing out shoots as long as they could, the rest of them collapsed under the weight of useless pale limbs. I could see now, but I still hoped the sky would clear up before winter killed all the plants. Also I didn’t want to deal with flood attack water when it freezes. Swarms of flies flew from open windows in buildings where people died. Thousands of pristine unrotting bodies as far as the eye could see floated beneath the surface of the ocean.

A shadow person found me standing staring over the water and kept their distance, shouting from 20 feet away, “Watch out for bloaters! If you see someone near these parts walking like a wet sack of eels, the aliens filled a dead body with water. To make it look alive.”

“You’re just saying this to scare me.”

“No! I swear on my life. Bloaters creep the fuck out of me. I think aliens send them up here to find groups of people. So if it sees you, don’t run to your friends. It’ll follow you. You look like you’re up for it... Never done it myself. Mess up a bloater’s face real bad, water’ll run out of it and it’ll drop. That’s how you make them stop following you.”

“That sounds like a lot of effort for something that doesn’t work. The aliens can’t be that stupid.”

“They figured out we look at faces. If aliens get the hang of it, we’re fucked. Why else are they keeping our bodies fresh? I bet you can’t tell who’s dead or alive in a couple months.”

I kept walking along the waterfront and that shadow person retreated back inland. If bloaters were real, I probably would have seen one by now. I was almost completely alone near the waterfront, and I knew there were crowds of shadow people inland. I would rather stab someone who was already dead. The rock piles gave way to an artificial pebble beach. I refilled my bag of aquarium gravel and stood on a big driftwood log as a wave of flood attack water delivered the latest batch of corpses. I had always thought of flood attack victims as alive and screaming, and was glad they drowned before being dumped in the corpse-filled ocean instead of dying among them. I thought about pulling a corpse out of the water and making a show of hacking its face apart so the aliens know not to make any bloaters in front of me. I threw a handful of pebbles into the flood attack water and trudged off the beach before I could act on this thought.

I continued along the waterfront until late afternoon, then stopped on a boardwalk and ate incredibly stale popcorn and solid butter flavored grease out of an abandoned vendor cart. I could feel the thuds of corpses colliding against underwater pillars supporting the boards beneath me. The unpopped kernels were too hard to eat, but I took a sack of them with me to figure out a way to eat later and also if things were truly dire I could throw them into flood water.

“You shouldn’t be here.” A shadow person snuck up behind me. She was at least 6 inches taller than me, wearing a long puffy lavender down coat and steel toed boots. There were no signs of starvation or addiction on her face.

“Why are you here?” I backed away from her.

“I’m here to protect people like us. I can tell you’re new. You shouldn’t be near the waterfront. Sometimes the dead rise from the water-”

“Yeah. Bloaters.”

“You aren’t safe from them until you damage their faces-”

“I know.”

“Can you bring yourself to-”

“I know.”

“Listen to me. The shores are especially unsafe for us.”

“Who’s us?”

She was exasperated with an are-you-serious expression, but when I didn’t say anything else, she began looking uncertain.

“I don’t have alien blood. I can’t see.” I held out my candle for emphasis.

“I saw you looking at the dead bodies in the water.”

“I was looking at the lights from the other city. I think there’s speedboats.”

“Why are you- You saw the speedboats. The military is sweeping for darkworlders like us. I don’t know what happens to us when we get caught, but I have never seen anyone they took away ever again.”

“Why do they want people with alien blood?”

“Because whatever they’re doing with alien blood isn’t effective. They need us because too many of their people are dying from it. Look.”

She pointed to a corpse in the water. It used to be a fit man in his early twenties, wearing a white tank top and camouflage pants. There was a massive cluster of overlapping round holes in its left upper arm, like someone had gone hog wild with an ice cream scoop on him. If that injury was on my arm, it would have been eaten clean through, but he was so muscular that it barely reached bone. We watched silently as a particularly strong wave rolled it over. Instead of spilling out the holes, water stayed shimmering inside even while its shoulder surfaced and turned in the air.

The idea of the military trying and failing to give their own soldiers alien blood and resorting to kidnapping shadow people didn’t sit right with me.

If we had enough manpower and clearance to do sweeps in a supposedly lost-cause city, it would be better spent retrieving whatever we were still fighting in the north over, or sending reinforcements into the city if it couldn’t be moved.

The stage light guy I fought on the way to the hotel was obviously a soldier even though he wore no uniform, but was actively discouraging people from getting alien blood. The rifle guy too, but he seemed to want people to get alien blood. These guys were too well-equipped with stage light power and huge caliber bullets, things impossible to find in the city, to be deserters acting on their own will, so why did they have such conflicting goals?

The rifle guy’s rambling made me severely misjudge his intelligence. He was deliberately ingratiating himself with shadow people. He’d let a few of us get alien blood, then use our trust to find and kill alien blood dealers, leading to much fewer people getting it overall.

Maybe the soldiers with alien blood were forced out of the main conflict and sent into the city with a vague order like, “Prevent people from dying of alien blood.” After floods and alien gas forced them to scatter and work alone, the rifle guy interpreted it as “Make people take alien blood safely.” because he had good effects from it, and the stage light guy interpreted it as “Fuck all of you.” because if I got kicked out for alien blood, but still couldn’t see or stay awake, I’d also be a jealous vindictive asshole.

If the military were suspicious of shadow people enough to kick them all out, why would they be collecting civilian shadow people? If they wanted us dead, wouldn’t it be easier to kill us on the spot instead of taking us somewhere else? Did the corpse in the water even die of injections? If shadow soldiers were sent into the city to eradicate shadow people, why were they so ineffective that shadow people neighborhoods formed around them?

If I was military, I would have autopsied and histologied those who died of alien blood injections into thousands of tiny specimens, or at the very least burn them to stop alien blood from escaping. There’d be no bodies to dump. Then again, there were plenty of times the military negligently dumped tons of incredibly dangerous substances before the invasion. Or maybe things were going so bad that this was beyond their ability.

But then, if things were so bad, there wouldn’t be any speedboats available to sweep. Or maybe things had gone even worse and soldiers were completely out of control, doing random kidnappings and massacres along the coast. But in that case, the line up north wouldn’t still be holding.

“I can’t see that far in the dark. What’s going on?”

“Oh for the love of- There’s a dead soldier in the water. He died of injuries only possible from alien blood injections. I’ve seen countless more dead military experiments like him.”

“Are you lying? If I got lonely, I’d lie to keep talking.”

“Oh, honey. I’m not lonely at all. I save everyone I can from the shore. People like us stick together.”

“Why are you alone?”

“What is wrong with you? Do you want to live at all?”

She was approaching me, and I was backing away, but I didn’t want to be trapped at the end of the boardwalk or go inland, so she was following me in wide circles.

“Yeah. Of course I do.”

“Let me help you. I don’t know why you’re acting like this, but I’m sure you’ll start feeling like yourself again once I introduce you to everyone. Darkworlders are all in this together.”

“I’m not in this with you.”

“If you don’t want to be with us, you have to leave. If you stay here, you’ll be spotted by speedboats and they’ll capture all of us.”

“I was already leaving. I’m not staying here. I’m going back to the city center. And they won’t get me because I can’t see.”

I gestured with the candle so hard it went out. I stared aimlessly, feeling around for the latch of one of my duffel bag’s outside pockets for a lighter.

“I can’t trust you. We will never be safe with you still here.”

“I won’t be here after I leave.”

“You’ll get everyone killed.”

“I won’t get anyone here killed after I leave.”

I was stalling the conversation to circle to a position where I was closest and she was farthest from land so I could make a break for it without running toward her.

“You need help. I saw you eating rotting food out of-”

“Popcorn doesn’t rot. It stayed dry.”

“You aren’t leaving. You are here for food, you will stay here for food, and the boats will see you and everyone will die because of you. I let it happen before. Never again.”

“I won’t be here after I leave. I’m trying to leave. You aren’t letting me leave.”

“I can’t trust you. You’ve done absolutely nothing trustworthy. You are putting everyone in danger.”

“Are you friends with everyone in the city except me?”

“I can’t believe it. You’re doing it again. This is why I can’t trust you.”

“I’ll leave. You can follow me inland to make sure I leave.”

I was closest to land. I broke into a run, shielding the candle with my other hand, shouting over my shoulder, “See? I’m leaving!”

I was hoping she would let me run away in peace, but she chased after me. My foot started hurting and she was gaining on me. I thought about tossing away my duffel bag, but decided not to, since if that made me fast enough to escape her, I’d be out of energy shots and aquarium gravel. Maybe she was just accepting my offer to follow. I slowed down. She grabbed my wrist and began pulling me with her.

I imagined being frog marched back inland, or being forced to interact with her group of shadow people until I found a way to escape, would suck pretty bad, but not nearly as bad as withdrawal migraines or dying in flood attacks.

But she wasn’t pulling me inland. She was pulling me back onto the boardwalk over the water. I forced myself to relax until she let her guard down, letting me trail behind her. I twisted my arm out of her grip, grabbed my chisel, and drove it straight down between her neck and shoulder. I felt something crack, but it couldn’t possibly be bone, since it was directly under the down coat. The shout she let out had an “Aha! I knew it!” sense instead of shock or pain.

I got her twice more as she turned to face me, once in her kidney and once in her stomach, but these blows were weaker than the first one, both deflected by something underneath the down coat without even breaking anything. She had a look of pure beatific satisfaction on her face.

I stabbed at her arms which probably weren’t protected considering how easily she could move, but now that she was facing me, she blocked the square shaft of the chisel instead of the sharp edge. I couldn’t even rip the down coat sleeves, let alone injure her.

She pulled a long knife out from under her coat. She slashed in wide arcs as if to mock my chisel’s limitations. Because her arms and knife were much longer than my arms and chisel, I couldn’t attack her without getting in range, but that didn’t matter since I kept using the windups needed to make these big showy attacks to back away towards land. It didn’t look like she was seriously trying to hurt me.

But she was probably doing this for the same reason I relaxed in her grip. I dropped my chisel from where I was holding it at chest level down to my side, suddenly stepped so my foot was pointing towards land, turning to look towards land for an instant.

She fell for her own plan. She tried to lull me into believing she was just showing off with the scary looking but ineffective knife arcs, and once I looked like I was running away, she took the knife in both hands and sprinted at me. She was so confident that her knife would be buried in my retreating back that she didn’t change trajectory or seem to react at all as I braced my duffel bag in front of me. She continued charging forward, embedding her knife up to the hilt into the duffel bag with a loud scraping crunch of breaking plastic. I tried to stab the inside of her elbow joint while both her hands were occupied, but she turned and tanked the blow directly to her chest. Once again, my chisel was deflected.

She regained balance, trying to pull the knife out of my duffel bag where its serrated back was stuck in the dried energy shot gunk slab with one hand, immobilising my chisel arm with the other. Using my free candle arm to press my duffel bag as hard as I could against my body prevented her from taking the whole bag from me, and also further encased the knife in gunk. It was solidly stuck.

Our pinpoint mind games had descended into a tugging match over the duffel bag. She managed to get the bag’s strap over my head and was pulling on it out of chisel range, not that it mattered, since I had both arms wrapped around the duffel bag, pulling in the opposite direction, candle flame flickering and guttering as wax sloshed inside the holder. She threw herself backward, and instead of doing the same, I jumped towards her and used her strength to launch my knees at her head. This sounds very impressive, but she was falling backwards and I wasn’t actually that high off the ground.

Of course, I missed, passing a couple feet next to her head instead of into it. But the bag’s strap caught under her right arm, and as the bag and I sailed over her, the strap jolted her backward so hard her feet left the ground.

I hoped hitting the boards with the full force of her, my, and the duffel bag’s combined weight would knock the breath out of her, but she rolled through the fall past where I landed and got to her feet 3 meters away. Meanwhile, distracted keeping the wax from spilling out of the candle, I hit the boards side of my ribcage first, and was struggling to breathe. She looked unarmed and didn’t go for any more weapons hidden under her coat, but I had to do something before she closed the distance.

Still laying on the ground, I rolled over to unlatch the duffel bag pocket that had lighters in it. The candle had gone out.

This move confused her so hard she stayed standing still, hand on her right shoulder, long enough for me to kick the duffel bag, knife and all, under a raised podium, relight the candle, catch my breath, and stand up. She glanced at the podium and I knew she knew if she dove under it for the knife, she’d get stabbed in both knee pits.

I went for her face with the chisel like I should have to begin with. She dodged it, grabbing both my wrists. The candle was slipping out of my sweating fingers, and while I struggled, I let her pull me towards the end of the boardwalk rather than drop it. I kicked wildly at her legs, and she kicked back. The plastic sheet on my foot burst and I collapsed in pain. I dropped my chisel, but the candle had to stay lit. She continued dragging me to the end of the boardwalk. I regained enough control to hook my legs around a bench bolted to the boards. She repeatedly kicked me in the stomach and I was so focused on keeping the candle upright it did not immediately occur to me that she was trying to make me let go of the bench and not the candle.

Water soaked freely out of the hole in my foot, and the pain was clawing up my knee. No matter how hard I struggled, she dragged me to the end of the boardwalk, evidently doing some thinking in the meantime. In the middle of trying to lift my full uncooperative weight off the ground by my wrists to pitch me over the waist high railing into the ocean, she suddenly stopped. By this point, I was so angry I started crying.

“Why didn’t you just let me leave?”

She yanked my arm upwards so the candle was level to her face, and made a show out of taking a long inhale. I leapt to my feet, pushed her sleeve up her arm with my face, and bit a chunk out of her.

Six months of holding tea candles desensitised me to their steel cases and liquid wax spilling over my fingers. I had forgotten how hot they were. I felt the warmth radiating from the candle holder and blood flowing down my neck as my teeth clicked together through her arm. This was the first time I felt bad about something in the middle of doing it.

Might as well make a clean job of it. I bit down harder and threw my head side to side like I remembered sharks did until her flesh detached. She didn’t make a sound except for a hissing exhale which luckily missed the candle. Instead of letting go, her grip on my wrists increased to crushing pressure. I met her eyes and was terrified by her look of cold disgusted hatred. I knew she had given up on pitching me over the railing until she had beaten me entirely to death.

I tilted my hand and burning liquid wax streamed down her injured arm. She finally let go of me. As she frantically batted against her burning sleeve, I staggered away. Clumps of burning feathers and melted polyester dropped from her, setting the wooden boards on fire where they landed.

Not even being set on fire could break her silence. I could barely walk, and if she decided to ignore the fire, she could easily catch and kill me. There was an abandoned curly fries cart on the boardwalk. There were metal barrels of old fry oil behind the cart. Sure enough, while I was searching the cart, she was sprinting straight for me, burning coat streaming behind her. I unscrewed the cap off the lightest barrel and swung it at her. The same sharp reflexes that enabled her to kick my ass so easily made her instinctively raise her burning feather clad arms to defend herself from a gout of oil. Her coat exploded into flame. I knocked over two full barrels directly in her path and threw my lighter into it, and the wall of flame blocking off the entire boardwalk finally made her stop.

It wasn’t enough. She was still standing.

I uncapped a gallon jug of clean oil and tried to tear the foil seal off with my teeth, but couldn’t make any purchase on it because the chunk of her arm was still in my mouth. I spit it out and tore the seal off. Before I could throw it at her, I caught a glimpse of her expression through the wall of flames. Trapped at the end of the boardwalk, her stoic bravado finally broke and she collapsed. I flung the jug over the railing into the ocean, pushed a cold drinks cart over into the flame wall, which I figured was the least flammable, stepped onto it, grabbed her hair which was the only part of her not on fire, and hauled her onto the cart.

She flung desperate punches at me before realising the new situation and crawling off the cart before it caught fire. As I backed away, she tore off her burning coat, which was less being taken off and more falling apart in flaming pieces. She was not as badly burned as I expected, but patches of molten polyester had fused to her arms and legs and her hands were already so blistered and swollen she couldn’t bend her fingers.

Ceramic slabs fell and clattered to the ground out of their carbonised pockets on her legit-looking body armor as she struggled to her knees, shuffling away from the approaching fire.

There were carts to salvage. She was also here and wasn’t much danger in her current condition, so I might as well talk to her.

“Hey. Let me leave if I feel like.” She chuckled bitterly.

“Oh, because you definitely can’t leave on your own without my permission.”

“Where’s the sweeps?”

“What?”

“If I was the military, I’d take a look at the fire. Aliens do that sometimes.”

“We could really use someone like you. Since I can’t protect the shores as I am now-”

“Ok.” There was big tub of gummy worms.

“Thank you. It means a lot to all of us.”

“Didn’t mean that. I mean it’s ok that you can’t protect the shores.”

Gritting her teeth, she pressed her blistered hands against the boards and rose to her feet.

“You can’t leave me like this.”

I picked my chisel up from where she forced me to drop it.

“How should I leave you?”

“I’ll never forgive you if you don’t help me.”

“That’s not important.”

She was taking slow jolting steps, bending in strange angles to avoid pulling the molten polyester.

“Look. I understand if you hate me after everything I did to you. But it’s not just you and I. It’s for the sake of everyone. I can’t keep everyone safe like this.”

“Safe from what? You said standing around is enough to make the military sweep, but the boardwalk just fucking exploded and there’s no sweeps.”

“It’s not about-” She grunted as a hand-sized sheet of molten polyester sloughed off her leg, the skin underneath coming with it. Forget about what I thought earlier. The smooth shiny polyester and her frankly terrifying pain resistance hid injuries worse than I expected. Even if I decided to help her, assuming the other molten polyester patches were as bad as this one, I couldn’t do anything about it. “They look for patterns.”

“This fire’s making some nice patterns.”

“No! They look for behavior patterns. Awake during the day. Travelling without lights. Not on meth. Darkworlders are the only people in this city who still act like human beings.”

Yes!!!!!! Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Beef jerky!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Carry lights and sleep during the day if being swept is so scary.”

There was an unopened bottle of ketchup. The rest of the condiments had completely molded over. Her look of disgusted condescension at the thought of demeaning herself by carrying light like a normal human being removed what little remaining politeness towards her I had. Or maybe it was the mold. Either way.

“You got alien blood for less than six months and you’re already coming up with reasons to kill anyone you want. I don’t fucking know if it wears off or not-” Her eyes widened in terror. “You don’t fucking know either! You never even fucking think of it because of how scared it makes you! And even if! It never wears off! And you stay a darkworlder forever! If the aliens win, do you think any of them will give a fuck how well you see in the dark? And if we win, there will be no fucking dark you can see in. If you keep thinking you’re special enough to keep doing shit like this, I’m setting you on fire again.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Cry. Scream. Act as delusional as your little heart desires. Hurt people who are only trying to help you. You only survived because you are one of us. Your sanity is so far gone you almost convinced me you aren’t one of us. You are a darkworlder. Yeah. That’s right. I said it. You’re a darkworlder. You’re a darkworlder. Darkworlder! Darkworlder! Dar-” She coughed as a plume of smoke engulfed her.

“I don’t care.”

“Darkworlder!”

“I don’t care because it doesn’t fucking matter if I have alien blood or not. You’re the only person doing this because even other darkworlders think you’re a fucking idiot. That’s why you’re alone. You’re so fucking alone that you’re begging someone you brutalised for no fucking reason to watch you die.”

“Everyone will know what you did to me. You won’t make it out of-”

By this point I was completely sick of these violent power-tripping savior types, so I left.

I forgot the duffel bag.

She was in the distance still stoically making her way ahead of the fire, seemingly ignoring me. It was only after I retrieved the duffel bag from under the podium and turned away inland that she started screaming. I didn’t hear what she said over the fire crackling and carts exploding behind her.

I finally left the boardwalk like I fucking said I would. There was a guy with a pair of binoculars on the shore. He had been watching us for some time now, judging by the cigarette butts on the ground in front of him. Or maybe he just got here and the sight of the boardwalk on fire was so harrowing he took half a pack of cigarettes in his mouth and power-sucked them all to ash in one breath.

I couldn’t leave without getting close to him, so I asked from 20 feet away, “Are you her frie-” “NO!”

I squeezed my chin and flakes of dried blood coated my hand. There was no recovering from this first impression, so I continued along the waterfront. In case her friends were close, I couldn’t head inland. I walked until I couldn’t see the boardwalk, but the fire still carried swarms of sparks into the sky that could be seen from miles away.

I felt I could head inland now. I knew I was closer to the city since I was struggling to haul myself uphill. As I turned to take my last look down at the boardwalk, half of it was consumed by fire. 30 meters from shore, she pulled herself forward along the railing, barely ahead of the fire. The railing collapsed and fell into the ocean. She fell and rolled towards the center of the boardwalk. The guy was still on the shore, looking at her through binoculars. The two of them were alone. There were still no speedboats.

Although I regretted leaving all the food here behind, I knew I couldn’t come back any time soon. The shadow people circling me in the house were looking for me. By now, the rifle guy must have realised he said too much. The boardwalk lady was definitely out to kill me, and her friends would definitely join her. Although she’d be in no state to fight for at least a few weeks. I was dressed pretty nondescriptly, so her friends would be going off something along the lines of “chisel candle girl”. I had the sense she would exaggerate, since getting obliterated by someone as unassuming as me, after being known as strong enough to fight off the military, would be pretty humiliating. If I changed anything about myself, I’d be much safer. I blew out the candle.

I could hear people speaking in the distance. I was too exhausted to continue without more energy shots, but since I wanted to be less dependent on them, and didn’t want to risk another fight, I found another abandoned house. Looking at myself in the floor length mirror on a closet door, dried blood covered my face and ran down the front of my thankfully waterproof jacket.

There was a cut in my jacket. I took it off. A bloodstain spread out from the center of my torso. There was a hand-sized bruise forming around a thin cut right underneath my sternun, as long as the knife was wide. I fell backwards. The knife was still stuck in my duffel bag. There was a cut in the side of the duffel bag. I pulled on the knife’s handle. It stayed stuck.

I opened the duffel bag and pushed the food I salvaged out of the way. The six inch length of blade sticking out the inside of the gunk slab was entirely coated in dried blood.

I took a deep breath, then coughed several times, as hard as I could. The stab hurt, but not nearly as much as where my ribs hit the boards, or my bruise-covered stomach. Blood didn’t spray out of my mouth, or the stab. I had completely stopped bleeding some time ago.

I pressed the edges of the cut closer together. Drops of clear water welled up out of the cut, but instead of flowing down, they stayed on the cut like tears on eyelashes. I let go. My skin sprung back in place, and the water drops were sucked back into me.

I found a new shirt, put it on, and went to sleep.

I woke up next morning, expecting another water hole I could see my ribs through, but the stab had scabbed over like any other injury. I felt terrible, but still much better than I did than I did two weeks ago after I got beat up by the stage light guy in front of the hotel. I was incredibly thirsty, probably because I lost so much water out of my foot hole during the fight. The surface tension on my foot water hole was so strong, it repelled fabric and the aquarium gravel I dropped on it bounced straight off. I drank all the blue Fanta I had, and my foot water hole stayed tense.

I still couldn’t get the knife out of my duffel bag, so I slowly scraped the gunk off the blade with my chisel and ate it until I had freed the knife enough to wiggle it out the rest of the way.

I dub thee Gunkscalibur, and I claim the throne of caffeine. My chisel was more damaged from this single fight than the entire prior six months, but I couldn’t throw it away.

After repairing my stuff and cleaning myself until I no longer struck instinctive fear in anyone who laid eyes on me, I left.

As I walked down a transmission tower lined road, I saw a field of purple leafed corn. These were the first healthy living plants I saw in months. There were shadow people nearby. They were tending to all kinds of purple vegetables. They let me hang around, but kept their distance and didn’t trust me with any farm equipment. As I got closer, I saw that only a quarter or so of them were shadow people and the rest of them were in substation building basements.

It didn’t seem like these shadow people went to the shore or the city often, probably since the vegetables took too much time for that, because some of them began asking me about how things were going elsewhere.

I did the classic “I got lots of energy shots. *opens bag, revealing a coagulated mess of broken plastic* Oh no! I only have three left... *the rest are hidden under a bag of candles*” snake oil salesman scam and traded three energy shots for a colossal head of purple cabbage and a few handfuls of little beets.

I asked if they could farm regular plants using electric grow lights. This was a pretty contentious topic. The general consensus was that electricity had better uses for other things. I thought about trading my popcorn kernels for better food, but then decided against it, since their main value of growing into more popcorn wasn’t possible since they weren’t purple.

We talked about alien blood. These people got all their alien blood premixed from a pretty reputable dealer, until he killed half the farm one day with injections from the biggest, freshest alien anyone had ever seen, accompanied by a hands around 1.5 meters apart gesture. The survivors beat him to death. Since then, most remaining people were too scared to get alien blood, and dealers were too scared to visit.

I showed them my foot water hole, and most of them were pretty freaked out by it. Apparently none of them had water holes, but there was a guy who drank alien blood, with an entire water jaw and windpipe visible through his transparent throat, who came through every few weeks.

The pallet of energy shots was still in the convenience store.

A lot had changed in the three weeks or so I had been away. The aliens must have figured out our hiding strategies, because the streets were full of people recently forced out of the ground by floods, in newfound terror at what the city had become while they were gone.

The shadow people who had once disturbed me so much now appeared stupid and reckless, walking too loudly, too quickly, too close. I kept my candle lit out of habit, and if the shadow people ignored me because of that, that’s their own problem. One time, a shadow person stepped in front of me into a doorway, away from view of candlelight but in broad daylight. As I made a show of looking wildly about, the shit-eating grin on his face was so infuriating I blew out my candle and turned to stare into his eyes for 30 silent seconds before relighting the candle and walking away.

I always wondered what made people disappear after gas attacks. After following a large group of around 150 people at a safe distance, yelling, “Go away! Separate! Stop being together! You’ll all get killed by alien gas!” and getting shot at in response while they clustered even closer, gas grenades finally fell from the sky. I assumed they were metal, but upon closer and brighter examination, their cases were made of thin shiny layers of ice, melting as they lay broken on the ground. Makes sense why nobody ever found a case after the gas attack was over.

“Run towards my voice! Get out of the gas cloud!”

None of them were on tons of stimulants, so as the gas cloud engulfed them, they instantly collapsed to the ground. Thin lines of water flowed down, connecting each unconscious figure to the sky. Bubbles formed where the lines came in contact with each person, swelling to sizes impossible for plain water. I expected them to inflate like balloons and float each body into the sky, but as soon as the bubbles were the size of oranges, they popped.

I reflexively threw my hand over my eyes, but spots of light were already burned into my vision. A deafening roar came from the ground in front of me as hundreds bubbles formed and popped. I ducked into a building, kicking long rotten bodies aside as I ran upstairs. Looking down at the street from a safe distance, a roof twelve floors above, each stream of explosion-tipped water moved to fresh areas as the bodies vaporised layer by layer beneath them like a CNC laser. The bodies were gone in less than 10 minutes.

I waited for the streams to disappear before heading back down to examine the site of the gas attack. Dropped objects were still intact and unharmed. The area was so hot I could feel it radiating from 5 feet away. The end of a metal gun barrel laid on the ground. The rest of it, trapped beneath a body, was vaporised. Nothing was left. There wasn’t even a smell.

Someone in the crowd had fallen and rolled under a truck. She was unconscious, but still breathing. I pulled her onto the sidewalk and searched through the bags left behind until she began to move. I stood beside her as she sat up. I pointed to where the group fell.

“The gas made them pass out. They couldn’t move, so they were all killed.”

She glared at me, stammering out incomprehensible sounds. Suddenly realising how gleeful and enthusiastic I must have looked to her, I made my expression more neutral.

“The- You didn’t-”

“I didn’t do it. The aliens did it.”

“Why did you save me?”

“You fell under a truck.”

She leaned her entire body against my leg and her shoulders began to shudder, clearly expecting to be comforted, but the best I could muster was “Don’t be in a big group outside.” She clung to my legs and wept, and it took all my willpower to not drive my chisel through the back of her skull. I should have lied and said they were safe elsewhere.

I sat down next to her and pressed a red candle and a lighter into her hands. While she was confused, I quickly got up and left. But she recovered much faster than I expected, lighting the candle, slinging a backpack on, and following me.

“If you stay with me, you’ll see things like this all the time.”

But that didn’t deter her. I kept walking, and she kept following, talking nonstop of her life underground as if she was afraid the darkness would wait until she went quiet to eat her. I could hear people following us. I thought about blowing out my candle. I decided against it and led her to a place I knew was a well protected underground hideout. They had set up a series of shoulder-high cement walls around the entrance of an underground shopping promenade to deter floods.

“Let her in! She’s from underground!”

No response.

“Let me in! I won’t cause any trouble! I swear!”, she joined in.

A shadow person was looking out of a window several floors above the entrance. I blew my candle out and pointed straight at them.

“I see you in the window! Can you let her in?”

She was looking at her candle with grim determination.

“You don’t need to do everything I do.”

She looked relieved.

No response from the shadow person. I left her staring frantically into the darkness. I waited until I was 5 blocks away before relighting my candle.

People who were underground these last 7 months weren’t subject to the same brutal selections we were. They didn’t know better and kept approaching me, so I had to leave. I heard the downtown area the hotel was in got destroyed. I headed back towards the hotel.

Buildings were completely gutted by fire. As I got closer to the hotel, the density of destroyed buildings increased. The stage light array was dark, generators and fuel stripped from it, but the lights themselves were left behind. The guy was gone and not replaced. The hotel itself was about as intact as I remembered, albeit surrounded in mountains of bodies. Instead of being unrecognisably incinerated, it looked like these most recent bodies had one serious burn on a vital spot. It was the most horrific sight in this part of the city.

All doors to the hotel were blocked by bodies, so I broke a window. The alien apparently continued housekeeping to the bitter end, because I saw no bodies inside. I gorged myself on canned food in the kitchen. Over the course of two weeks or so, I searched every open room and slowly made my way back up. Half of the roof had collapsed into the penthouse floor underneath. Looking from above, the adjacent building was not only collapsed, the center of it had melted and solidified into glassy sludge.

The suite that once held the alien was no longer mysteriously intact. Piles of empty plastic bottles that weren’t here before had partially melted into the floor. Fabric and furniture collapsed into ash, and the bathtub had fallen through the carbonized floor. The beige and white feldspar pieces were gone, as well as the crystal faucet handle. I looked through the room below where the bathtub landed and they weren’t there either.

I left the hotel as quickly as I could, before it collapsed completely.

8 months after the city went dark, now that lots of people were suddenly forced above ground, there were was great demand for guards and guides on the way to new safe hideouts, or for any other reason, like getting alien blood or futilely searching for a missing loved one. I figured since I could see in the dark and wasn’t on a boneshattering quantity of meth, I was as good as anyone else at surviving above ground, so I went to the working streetlight guides were known to congregate around. They had hauled one of the stage light guy’s generators halfway across the city, so they must have been legit. I was treated like a potential customer until I said where I recognised the generator from.

I seriously lacked the look for this career. Most of the guides were guys who looked scary enough to deter riffraff, but not so scary you didn’t trust him with your life. All of them carried guns, but I knew very few of them had bullets. My harmless appearance combined with implicit presence among the guides sent most people into a state of paranoid uncertainty. People liked me, but they didn’t feel I could protect them.

When was the last time I made someone feel safe and cared for? The underground girl didn’t count, since she would have clung to anyone. I also abandoned her in the dark after they didn’t immediately let her in. Was she still alive? If the binoculars guy felt at all safe and cared for while watching me bite a chunk out of someone, that said more about him than me. The only time I showed a basic level of courtesy to anyone was when I was at risk of getting my head blown off by a giant rifle. The alien was the only living being I ever looked after other than myself.

No wonder I couldn’t get a job. I was entirely unsuited to caring for other people. I left the guide light. A month had passed, but the least I could do was see if they let the underground girl in. She wasn’t there. THANK YOU was written on the cement wall closest to the entrance in red wax.

Even if I wasn’t directly involved, I couldn’t help but enjoy what the underground people brought to life. They held trust and optimism to a degree that had been beaten out of us. I looked up at a newly occupied apartment building with glowing windows, laughter coming from inside. If they had any chance of lasting through the end of the invasion without becoming like us, someone had to keep them alive through crises they didn’t understand yet.

There must be people who didn’t know about the guide light. I walked around aimlessly, fighting the urge to avoid crowds until I saw someone trapped in flood attack water. I ran up, threw a handful of pebbles over the water and dragged her out. She pulled me into a bear hug. I chopped her eyebrow in half with my chisel and ran away.

It was getting cold. By now, all the trees in the city had died and were beginning to get cut down for firewood. The same trust and optimism I was so enchanted by compelled the underground people to behave in ways that inevitably got themselves and each other killed by flood attacks and alien gas, no matter how much I warned them. Within a few months, things had gone back to normal, underground people either returning underground to guard their few remaining hideouts even more jealously, or losing their minds the same way we did.

Ultimately, it proved a good idea to not go into the guide business. Demand dwindled until only a few guides, all the best of the best, could find steady work more productive than running around searching buildings for food. People were trying and failing to hire guides with a single sriracha packet. I got a job from underground people to search for space heaters, warm fabric, and furniture to take apart for firewood. Annoyingly, snowflakes floated on the surface of flood attack water and did nothing to deactivate it, and sometimes flood attack water lurked under the surface of snowdrifts, trapping me in a building for days.

One day, a plane flew overhead, dropping the first flyers in 7 months. The flyers described an amazing game-changing development of putting anti-submarine torpedoes on fighter jets, and promised we only had to hold out for a little longer before the city was liberated. It would have been very uplifting if there was still a population to uplift. On average, not counting guaranteed places like entrances to underground hideouts or the guide light, or bloaters I made a point of disfiguring, I ran into another person every 10 days. Essentially everyone above ground had alien blood, so any comparative advantage was lost. There were actually far fewer fights now than before, since we all knew everyone still alive definitely wasn’t worth fighting, aside from the one time I flayed the back of someone’s hand off for going after my duffel bag. Also the one time someone kept firing shots at me out of a window, so I set the entire building on fire.

The shore guy’s prediction turned out correct. Bloaters grew more and more convincing and physically dangerous. It was very difficult to tell if the silent expressionless figure standing in front of you with clear water spilling from bloodless wounds was a bloater or a shadow person who had entirely given up on fighting back.

One year and two months after the city went dark, floods stopped receding. As the water rose over the tops of buildings, I saw people being lifted into the air along arches of water that curved over the city, all pointing in the same direction. As freezing cold flood water lapped around my ankles, I lunged towards an arch as it formed beside me. I fell through it, drenching myself in the process. I slowly spun around, dragged by the water hole in my ankle. My right foot was embedded in the arch of water. I was dangling upside down over the city, suspended by my ankle, moving slowly towards the ocean. Blood rushed to my head.

There was no point in struggling. Other people were flailing wildly, dropping lower and lower, until the string of water connecting them to the arch thinned and snapped. They fell into the flood water below. Thousands of shimmering arches crossed the city, each bearing at least one person. I assumed the arches would end in the ocean just past shore, special containment for the most stubborn humans. But the arches kept going, so far I couldn’t see their ends through the clouds above.

I was being carried over the ocean. I turned to look back, and instead of a level flood, water had piled up in a giant mound over the city. No new arches were forming. As intermittent lashings of rain hit me, I saw arches collapse shortly after losing all their passengers. Looking back at the city dislodged my ankle and I suddenly slipped downwards.

I tried to stay still, but the strand of water connecting my ankle to the arch gradually thinned until it was the diameter of my water hole. I panicked, thinning the strand even more. I took my chisel in both hands and drove it into my thigh. A second strand of water extended down from the arch connected to the water hole formed by the stab. Both strands began to thicken, pulling me closer to the arch. Leaving the chisel stuck in my thigh, I drove the knife through my left forearm. A third strand of water connected my arm to the arch, pulling me upright.

Looking up, I saw an enormous shifting blob of water in the sky, forming and dissolving millions of intricate lacelike streams and arches, each wider than city streets. A dull roar like a distant waterfall emanated from it. Flashing patterns of lights spread across its underside, the force of millions of simultaneous colossal bubble explosions propelling its unfathomable weight upward, holding it in place. The blob widened as it extended further into space. Countless tiny stars swam in formations through it. Although I knew the floods and arches were controlled from it, it was completely separate, floating hundreds of feet away from the peak of my arch. I wasn’t ending up there.

Arches began collapsing around me. Were the aliens trying to drop us from as high as possible into the middle of the ocean to ensure we died? I began to slowly descend, still being pulled along the arch. The arches of water connected to the shore of the city on the opposite side of the ocean. People were still breaking their connections to the arch and falling into the ocean, but more and more often, the arch deposited people on the opposite shore before collapsing.

Soldiers climbed down the extensive city-wide flood dams, carefully approaching us on the opposite shore. Warning shots rang out. By the time my arch put me down, most of the arches had collapsed. Soldiers were isolating us in groups of 3 to 5 at gunpoint and marching us inland, holding us at the foot of the outermost dam. Even this city was at risk of gas attacks, although it didn’t make sense for the aliens to kill us immediately after expending so much effort to carry us across the ocean.

It seemed like everyone who survived the arches had a particularly horrible water hole. The water jaw guy I heard about at the purple farm made it across. His gruesome injury was drawing lots of attention. Some officer came to shore to yell at the soldiers to disperse and guard everyone more evenly, but stopped several minutes to gawk. Soldiers were staring at the knife and chisel stuck in me with great apprehension. I pulled them out bloodlessly, stood up, and said, “I’m ok.”, which scared them even more.

Explosions rang out from across the water. People began shouting. I turned to look back at our shore, where skyscraper-sized bubbles formed and cavitated within the flood dome, which had flattened and expanded to cover the entire city in a ten mile radius.

Whatever reasoning or sheer blundering ignorance the aliens used, less than a thousand of us made it out of the city alive before it was slowly and methodically vaporised out of existence.

_______________________________________________________________

This dream didn’t come out of nowhere. A couple months ago, I had a pretty bad injury that took me out of work for a while. Now I have a scar on my finger that visibly caves in when I get dehydrated.

A month ago, I accidentally flooded my apartment so bad it shorted out the entire floor below, and physical holes had to be patched up in the ceiling of the unit underneath me. A maintenance guy hammered on my door at 3 AM to help soak up the remaining water I spent all night bailing out and took pictures of the damage.

I dreaded getting hit with thousands of dollars of repair bills. To prepare for the worst, I took a ton of overtime and night shifts at work. I drank way too many energy shots to stay awake, and walked halfway across the city to catch the last bus home at 1:30 AM. If I missed the bus, I had to hang around and stay alive for 3 more hours until the 5 AM bus came.

I had a dream about being driven by floods and fatigue to wander the dark streets on a medically inadvisable amount of caffeine with a weird water injury and a chisel because I was driven by floods and fatigue to wander the dark streets on a medically inadvisable amount of caffeine with a weird water injury and a chisel in real life.

I think I subconsciously prepared myself for whatever happens by going, “Oh, you think you have it sooooo bad. Are you feeling sorry for yourself? WATCH THIS.” and then cooking up a scenario so much worse that I am genuinely grateful that the streetlights are still on, I can hang out in groups and watch each other’s backs at bus stops, help people out when they collapse in the rain-flooded streets, and talk my way out of situations without ever needing to use the chisel.

Anyway, the situation resolved itself out of nowhere like it did in the dream. For reasons that scare me more than everything I saw in the streets combined that I won’t get into here, I later realised the maintenance guy never told the building management about me. The bills were pinned on someone else, who has since moved out.

I had more pressing things to worry about in the dream than the aliens’ motivations, but now that I’m awake, it becomes clear to me that the whole invasion was a disastrous misunderstanding. You can have a different interpretation, but it’s my dream.

Pressure is too low. Cosmic rays are too strong. There’s nothing to breathe, let alone complex nutrients to eat. The idea of intelligent life on land is as inconceivable to them as intelligent life in the vacuum of space is to us.

The only reason aliens group together is to form megastructures. The aliens assumed we had control over our buildings the same way they did, so if they killed the specific people willing buildings into existence, surely the city would collapse. Any large group of humans is automatically a threat. What if they get together and will another aircraft carrier into existence?

The aliens had no concept of tool use. They had such fine control they could separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, then ignite it using cavitation bubbles. Everything they needed, from weapons to spaceships, was formed at will from water, and once they stop thinking about it, it turns back into water. The only thing they left behind after death were their own bodies. The idea that a being could create a weapon, die, but the weapon persists after they die and could be used by someone else for a totally different reason is existentially horrifying to them. This means the bathtub alien made tools to communicate with us in a way it thought we could easily understand, then learned how to use our tools to dispense its blood. The bathtub alien thought it made the most sense to make tools, things that remain after death, out of pieces of itself.

So we have a situation where the aliens feel ok with killing large numbers of obviously unintelligent life, are initially unaware that our lives have no correlation to the continued existence of our tools, realise they were killing sapient beings this whole time, but later are deeply disturbed by how our tools persist even after we die.

#personal #weird dreams #this is the second dangerous and antagonistic entity made of feldspar to help me in my dreams #this dream was heavily influenced by me finishing a 24 pack of energy shots in a week in real life #speculative biology #alien invasion #graphic injuries #drugs #food #fire #flood #body horror

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thelaughingmuse · 2 years

Text

Down on the farm (not)

I am planning to move out of the metro area, buy acreage, build a net-zero house, and grow several types of vegetables. I want to do this for several reasons:

I prefer to interact with my neighbors as infrequently as possible, but I still want to be able to enjoy the outdoor spaces of my home.

I enjoy nurturing plants...to an extent. If I can't eat it, I don't want to put the work into it.

I like being able to try different spices, and think it would be very cool to be able to share the "excess" spices with others.

I know that I do not have the stamina to care for farm animals, even animals as seemingly low-maintenance as ducks/chickens/pigeons.

Caring for animals is EXPENSIVE. I have five delightsome cats, and their food and medical bills are not cheap. And I do not want to become the kind of microfarmer who has ducks or chickens that don't lay enough eggs to be profitable, or have health issues and so aren't both consistent and safe egg-providers.

I want a house that will be liveable as I get older and become less mobile. That means a one-story house...and since more people now want single-floor homes, they cost more than multistory homes, even multistory homes with more square footage. An "age-in-place" home can also include power outlets higher up the walls, wider doors and hallways (to more easily accomodate walkers and wheelchairs), toilets with grab-bars, and showers with grab-bars and a bench. Yes, it's possible to retrofit an existing house to have the shower-with-bench and the grab-bars without breaking the bank. It costs a lot more money, though, to rebuild an entire house with wider doorways and hallways.

I want a house that recycles my grey water (flushing the toilets and/or watering the plants) and gets most of its energy from solar (particularly a battery or two that can run the essentials during a 15-24 hour outage), but is also hooked to the electrical grid so that I can have enough power even in the winter. It is possible to add solar panels to the roof of an existing house...but if the roof doesn't face the right direction or is partially shaded, the output isn't as much as it could be.

I also need to have high-speed internet. That means broadband. I don't want to use DSL (that's so 1990s) or be stuck relying on satellite internet (because fuck Elon.) I can take care of this by doing my research before I even go to walk a property.

I can buy land and build custom, or I can hunt around for a rambler with just the right orientation that's available, buy it ($500K and upward), and then spend another $100K+ retrofitting it. I'd rather just go with Option A.

Ideally, I'd get 15-20 acres and have several tiny homes for friends and friends-of-friends to live in for 5-10 years and contribute toward annual property taxes while they save up money for a downpayment on a house of their own - or land of their own, whichever. (Saving a downpayment is difficult even on a tech-industry salary, and saving a downpayment while also paying other bills is nigh-on impossible.) I know I'd have to do a lot of research on that first, though: what legal restrictions are in place for such a thing? What kind of contracts would I need people to sign (because while I would not be charging monthly rent, this would be a tenant-landlord situation. I need to be able to hold tenants to a maximum term, and if someone's a disruptive asshole I have to have remedies to evict them. They also need to know that I'm not going to suddenly evict them on a whim, or suddenly start charging them a whole lot more rent than they initially agreed to pay. And other bits.)

(I don't want to be a vacation-home hostess. Too much work, too much bother, too many strangers traipsing about my property.)

I don't know how long this will take, but if there's a big ol' housing crash in the next year my dreams may go up in smoke - or may be delayed until the economy recovers, which might take 5-10 years. My home has appreciated an insane amount since I bought it, and selling it at its current estimated value would give me enough money to buy at least 5 acres of land, build a custom net-zero home, and have a very small mortgage - even with the recent rate hikes. But that's not a step that I can take without more research and planning...like, how to find architects who are familiar with building net-zero homes that still comply with local permitting regulations. It isn't impossible. It's just...a lot.

This is going to be the ultimate project manager job.

Too bad I don't like being a project manager, because this would be a HELL of a resume-item.

#net zero #age in place #homesteading #my daily life

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rudolphsboyfriend · 2 years

Note

Dear lenpa,

I truly do not have the energy to write this down on paper, so I’m just typing it. I am sick. I think (hope) it’s just a cold. Yesterday I was super tired and just fell into bed at 8pm. I then spent the next 6ish hours in this strange fever dream state where I’d sleep for about 5-10 minutes, then be plagued by really strange thoughts (all about arguing and debates, I think philosophy class is affecting me). These periods spent awake would feel like hours even though they were just like 20-30 minutes (basically this night has felt eternally long). Eventually (around like 1 am) I decided that I wasn’t going to sleep and read a little. After 40 minutes of reading, I dropped the book and decided that the light made my eyes hurt, so I wanted to turn them off again and try to sleep once more. That worked for like half an hour before I felt like I was going to throw up, so I creeped over to the bathroom (almost falling over twice while doing so). There I attempted in vain to throw up, only succeeding in making my nose run like a faucet and me sneeze nonstop (and not like cutesy sneezing but yelling sneezing). Surprisingly, that did actually make me feel a little better and I am back in bed (now it’s like 3:20), once more having given up on sleep. I’m pretty sure I won’t be going on the trip to the amusement park today.

Love,

Lizzy

Omygod I'm so sorry i only saw this rn i REALLY need to start checking my inbox

Sis that's so!! I'm sorry u went thru that :(( I've been thru that sleep-delusion state and its sooo annoying and frustrating?? Bcuz ur justt conscious enough that it's taking a toll on u aghh

Also sneezing a lot feels so not fun but i usually do feel a lil better after it! It clears up my nose and airway a bit, which is the point of sneezing after all i guess lol.

Please take care!!! R u still feeling ill?

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i-like-yoongi-a-latte · 2 years

Text

I was tagged by the lovely Siyuan @ambivartence thank you!! 💕

Name: Elena

Sign: Gemini ♊

Height: 168cm / 5'6 the last time I got it measured, idk if I have shrunk lol edit: I swear I wrote 5'6 first but then my brain went bleep and I wrote 6'5???? bruh

Time: 13:34

Birthday: 12th June :]

Favorite band/artist: I have so many and I will forget someone HERE WE GO!!! BTS, Agust D, Stray Kids, Twice, Monsta X, Ateez, One Direction, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan, 5 Seconds of Summer, JVG, Cheek, Sunrise Avenue...

Last movie: uhhhhhhhh....... I can’t remember when I’ve last seen a movie? Despicable Me 2 was on the tv one day and I watched a bit so that??? lol

Last show: Peaky Blinders (I just started season 2 and I’m hooked.) I also finished The Heirs couple days ago, it was probably the fourth or fifth time I watched it....

When I created this blog: December 2016 baby!

What I post: It’s very random. Lately I’ve been more inactive but haven’t written it anywhere because I’ve felt like I didn’t need to do that. Moving on, sometimes I write my thoughts here to yell them somewhere! I reblog a lot, nowadays it’s mostly kpop, sometimes 9-1-1 and sometimes hockey and other stuff. To put it simply - I post about what I like.

Other blogs?: Bold of you to assume I had time or enough energy to keep up other blogs + I’d probably mix them up lol. So no, just this one big dear mess of mine <3

Do I get asks?: Rarely, for some ask games mostly and I appreciate every one - I love doing ask games so if you see me reblog one, don’t hesitate to send a question if you’d like! I might take forever to answer but I will one day!! Promise! And a reminder, my ask box is always open for song recs! Or if you want to tell about something you’re a fan of or book recs or what happened to you today etc

Followers: are so cool, and awesome! 💖

Average hours of sleep: So, here’s the thing. Sleep schedule who?? Idk her?? Something between 7-10 hours maybe. I like to think I could keep a sleep schedule but in reality it’s not possible!!

Instruments: I wish I knew how to play something, like piano it would be so cool

What I’m wearing: Oversized black t-shirt and oversized lavender sweatpants, it’s a very comfy outfit

Dream job: Uhm... I have such mixed feelings about everything now so idk, something to do with the law

Dream trip: Norway, especially the Lofoten islands, Switzerland, South Korea

Favorite songs:

Swipe by Itzy

That That (prod. & feat. Suga of BTS) by Psy (sue me it’s a banger)

Run BTS by BTS

Euphoria by BTS (forever favorite)

Dar+ing by Seventeen

Maniac by Stray Kids

Airplane pt. 2 by BTS

More by j-hope

Moonlight by Agust D

People by Agust D

... I have too many the list goes on- wait

Life Goes On by BTS

I like to think I’m funny hit like if you agree <3 (SOMEONE STOP ME)

Tagging: @sepastian-ahoey @firefighter-diaz @diazactually @fangirlinglikealoon @heiskasmiro @suklaakuppikakku @blubblubsano @boyz-4now if you like to, no pressure!! also sorry if you’ve done this recently and I haven’t seen it

#these are so much fun!!!!#tagged #tag game

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mikeo56 · 2 months

Video

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This Self-Heating Concrete Melts Snow – No Power Needed

How do you get the snow off the sidewalk in front of your house? Our apartment building has a snow-duty schedule for the winter, and let me just say I’d often wished the sidewalk would just clear itself. A team of material scientists at Drexel University in Philadelphia just made my dream come true. They’ve invented self-heating concrete that warms up on its own when temperatures drop below zero. It’s basically magic, except it’s physics. Let’s have a look.

In Reykjavik they heat sidewalks with hot water from geothermal sources. But people in more boring countries don’t have that luxury. So we salt and sand and sweep and swear and now we could be using this concrete. This new magic concrete is infused with a type of paraffin that absorbs energy when temperatures are above 5 degrees Celsius and then gradually releases this energy when temperatures drop to zero and below. It’s what’s called a phase change material that releases energy when it turns from a liquid to a solid.

They embedded the paraffin into the concrete with two different methods. One is to just mix the stuff into the concrete as a fluid, the other one is to use microcapsules and mix those into the concrete. They then, well poured the concrete in several slabs and put them out in the Philadelphia winter. You can see the result here for yourself. In this time-lapse video from some cold Philadelphia nights, you see the concrete with the microcapsules on the left and the one with the fluid mixed in in the middle. You can clearly see how the self-heating concrete accumulates less snow and also that that the fluid-mix works better than the microcapsules. In their paper they write that the warming effect works 6 to 8 hours or so and down to minus 5 or minus ten degrees, depending on exactly what type of phase change material they use. It’s designed to kick in when night temperatures drop below zero and actually a very practical range. It could cope with up to 2 inches of snow which is more than we get most winters, so sign me up. Of course there’s the question what putting the liquid into the concrete does to the durability of the material. Well, I guess more work is needed, but the researchers think that overall, it will benefit the material. Because one of the major reasons for cracks in concrete and street covers is that water gets in, freezes, expands and then creates cracks. Pouring salt or other chemicals onto streets degrades the materials further and can also damage the environment. Self-heating concrete might therefore not just save us the work of removing the snow but in the long run also be more durable and more cost efficient.

Sounds good. But what about this phase changing material, that is some sort of paraffine. These types of phase change materials are produced from fossil fuels, tend to be expensive and if the stuff leaks into the ground that’s not all that great for the environment. Then again, some labs are working on bio-compatible alternatives from animal fats or plants and maybe these could become used in the future. This self-heating concrete is just one example of a “smart material”. There are many more in the works. The defining feature of smart materials is that they have a custom-designed response to their environment. According to a recent report by Globe Newswire, the global market for smart materials will grow over 7 percent by 2030. I think it’s one of most underreported trends in science. A simple example of a smart material that has been around for a while fluids that change viscosity in response to magnetic fields. These are now often used as dampers in which the dampening strength can be controlled by an electromagnet. There are also materials that change colour in response to temperatures. Several companies are now putting them to use for example to track whether a food item or medicine has been consistently stored at low temperatures.

At Stevens University in New Jersey, materials scientists are creating self-healing concrete. It contains polymer fibres that, when the material develops a crack, spill into the crack and pull it back together.

Then there are smart paints like this recent invention by a group from the University of Vienna. It’s white paint that sheds off dirt when light falls onto it. And along the way it cleans the air too.

To be fair many of these smart material ideas are far away from hitting the consumer market. Maybe some of them turn out to be not robust or durable enough. But there’s a lot of promise in this research area. I think we underestimate the relevance of material science because let’s be honest it sounds kind of boring. But there’s a reason scientists classify prehistory by materials: the stone age, the bronze age, the ion age. It’s because the ability to use certain materials made such a huge difference to people’s lives.

Smart materials aren’t going to change our life in a snap, but they’ll be a quiet revolution that will make our entire living environment more responsive and efficient. It won’t be long, and our walls will be more intelligent than we are.

#self heating concrete #materials

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jasonblakeerc · 1 year

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I’d like to get “really real” with you for a minute. That cool?

Our ‘system’ is broken... And I’m a classic example.

Throughout my early years in school, I was made to feel “bad” because I was creative and high energy.

I was reprimanded, disciplined and sent to detention because I couldn’t sit in my seat for six hours a day.

In 5th grade (ten years old) I was stuck in the corner for hours at a time in a cubicle backed against the wall, isolated from the classroom.

Even though I came up with the same math answer as the teacher, I was “wrong” and given consequences because I didn’t work the problem the same way she did.

(By the way, I haven't used 98% of the math in my real, adult life that I suffered through learning in those early years). 😒

My entire early-life school years were simply preparing me to become an employee.

A robot.

Someone void of creativity and ideas and groomed to stand in line, be quiet and blindly take orders from a boss.

By age 12 I had little-to-no self-worth.

I was insecure.

I doubted myself.

At times I even hated myself.

My grades were my only value and when those began to slip I suddenly felt like I had no purpose in life.

I found substances to ease the anxiety of test taking and homework.

I had no social skills or healthy coping skills.

I didn’t know how to talk about my feelings.

I felt alone.

I dropped out in 9th grade, became a teenage father and my substance addictions took over.

For the next 10 long years I went from casual user to everyday addict.

All the dreams and aspirations I had of growing up to be a professional baseball player at 5 years old vanished like a thief in the night.

This is my story.

And as grateful as I am to be writing this to you today clean and sober for many years, and am now a successful business owner, husband, and father….

Similar stories are happening to millions of people all over the world.

Those who do “make it” and graduate to higher levels of education are forced into choosing their career path at 18 years old and taking on a boatload of personal debt (before their brains are fully developed to make life-altering decisions of that magnitude).

The American Dream for us is camouflaged as “opportunity” when in reality we’re simply preparing to become slaves to debt and work the next (and best) 40 years of our lives to pay it off.

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This is the information that changed my life, and I'm willing to share it with you if you're willing to put it to work.

What I teach inside the Online Business Builder Challenge is the same exact business I run everyday...

...and have been running for 8 years without fail or interruption.

It works because it's not based off "tricks" or "gimmicks"...

But instead from real and reliable strategies that work regardless of who uses them.

And for the first time EVER I'm going to show you how to setup and launch a freelance digital marketing business by following my go-to strategy that I've kept "hush-hush" until now.

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By the time you're done with my Online Business Builder Challenge, you'll have the foundational training you need, an actual physical business plan to follow, your funnel and your email list set-up properly and ready to launch to the world.

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harishjagtani-hospital · 2 years

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7 Valuable Experiences from my Entrepreneurship Expedition – by Mr. Harish Jagtani

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes and from various backgrounds. For instance, a fast-food vendor, or a newspaper shop owner is an entrepreneur, just as business magnates like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg were when they started out.

If you are planning to embark on such an entrepreneurship journey, you have to realize certain things. First, you should remember to believe in yourself and know that it is a hard and arduous journey. But, at the same time, know that it is exciting and adventurous, too, although a lot depends on yourself—your attitude and grit.

Going back in time to my childhood, i remember the one thing I’d always wanted to be. My own boss running my own company! I was quite clear about that. Whenever anyone asked me what i wanted to be, unlike some of my friends who wanted to become doctors or engineers, i wanted to be a businessman. I had many plans and, as i grew up, i became more focused, my ideas getting clearer. Here, I’ll share with you some tips that i used to make my dreams come true…

1. Always believe in yourself

I was always certain of myself. One of my friends is a founder of a successful digital media company, who has notched up great achievements with good growth in the past three years. He has even won awards like ‘entrepreneur of the year’ from a renowned business house. Despite these, he keeps worrying about what others are thinking about him. My advice to you is, do not give into these negative thoughts because they take away a lot of your energy. Try to keep faith in your own strengths and abilities, no matter what others expect from you. At the same time, try to know your weaknesses and get rid of any egos you may have. These will make you stronger.

2. Learning must be continuous

It does not matter which industry you are from, you should keep educating yourself, especially so in this fast-evolving world with new technologies coming up to help businesses perform better. Be it learning about best practices of business, government policies, or general knowledge, you must set aside a certain time for learning, along with reading good books and magazines.

3. Listen well to others’ advice

You will be lucky if you hit upon a great idea. But you must also discuss it with others to know if it really is great. Be open to modifying the idea once you talk it out with your audience to make it the best fit for the market. Listening can be easy ask your customers for feedback and see how you can improve your products and services. It can also contribute towards an awesome company culture.

4. Be ready to deal with failure

A very important lesson you should always remember while starting a new business is that failure is not the end of the world. If you fail, try to learn the lessons it teaches you and start with fresh energy. The moment you set foot on this journey, you should factor in failures, too. If you keep that in mind, failure cannot dishearten you, nor pull you down. By learning your lessons well, you will soon bounce back and reach success with some more hard work.

5. Build a team of the very best

When you build a team, try to employ the best people. It may take some time, but it will pay off in the long run. Recruit smart people who will add to your strengths, and only take on those you really need. You should remember that the people you employ will be your greatest assets and, by choosing the right ones, you will drive your business faster towards success. Remember to connect with your employees, customers, vendors and investors regularly. Reaching out to them will help build trust and a great organization.

6. Work hard and play harder

Successful entrepreneurs are known to be extremely hard-working. You will hear of more than an 80-hour week and may think that, if you do not work like that, you won’t be considered a good entrepreneur. It is true that entrepreneurship is difficult and one must put in long work hours, but that does not mean you have to sacrifice everything time for family, friends or yourself. You must pursue sports, reading, or whatever else your passion is besides business. Go out and spend time with your loved ones. Also consider building strong relationships beyond your family to create a strong business network.

7. Learn to give back to society As you build a profitable business, look for opportunities where you can give back to society and make positive changes to the world around you. You can start by making small donations and, then, as you grow, make bigger donations or host camps to help educate children from the economically weaker sections, or take care of the old and infirm who have no one to look after them. You can also find a green campaign, or take up an animal cause. And, in no time, you will find you are making larger contributions to the society you live in.

Mr Harish Jagtani

Source: https://harishjagtani.com/2022/10/14/7-valuable-experiences-from-my-entrepreneurship-expedition-by-mr-harish-jagtani/

#harish jagtani #hj hospitals #hj foundations #business

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harishjagtani123 · 2 years

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7 Valuable Experiences from my Entrepreneurship Expedition – by Mr. Harish Jagtani

1. Always believe in yourself

2. Learning must be continuous

3. Listen well to others’ advice

4. Be ready to deal with failure

5. Build a team of the very best

6. Work hard and play harder

About the Author

Mr. Harish Jagtani, a philanthropist, visionary, businessman of Indian origin, currently based in Democratic Republic of Congo for more than 20 years now, is one of the most reputed business owners in the Indian diaspora as well as the entire expat business community in DRC. The business house caters to multiple domains, including but not limited to Domestic as well as International Air Cargo, real Estate and infrastructure development, healthcare, hospitality as well as CSR.

Coming from humble beginnings from Jaipur, Rajasthan, Mr. Harish Jagtani has come a long way in building this conglomerate with a strong and clear vision, sheer dedication and grit. Starting with a small job in sales, Mr. Harish Jagtani today is a proud and righteous owner of a fleet of airplanes and multiple businesses that cater to the basic and advanced needs of the people of Dem. Rep. of Congo in different sectors.

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aforestt · 2 years

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Here’s what’s happened so far -

Went manic a few months back now and haven’t been the same since

Feeling like I’ve relapsed mentally

Everything has come back so strong

- unstable can’t figure out my mood or stay in the same emotion long-

Been pretty zoned out but just realized when my partner mentioned it - having hard time ordering my own food in public - walking to the store - doing anything out in public is hard for me again-

Fears of death are strong again -

Frustration with life and adulthood

Scared about life and future

Finances but mostly my mental health

- when I take my pill I sleep 15+hours solid with naps after in between.

- when I am awake I have no energy and have a hard time motivating myself to do simple tasks

- taking breaks again in between tasks - before I could go go go -

- not eating all day but snacking more than I should when I am awake - not really food more snacks -

When I don’t take my pill I am awake basically for 24 hours until I take my pill again or something to sleep -

Body is tired but mind is awake and running -

Feels wired

Mind dissorginized and can’t focus zones out in a days - wants to do stuff but can’t bring myself to do anything -

Pill has kind of put me in a weird state that I can’t explain much because it’s new to me - I don’t feel stable but on the other hand I’m not doing anything that shows signs of mania or whatever other than being awake periods of times - more confused like takes longer to understand or relay information - forgetting to do things until I’m told or have a sign - like feed the cat - or go to the washroom when I need to - I don’t go until I HAVE TO - weird -? My memory is crap - I can’t tell you much just specific events - that I remember -

Don’t know what to do right mow with life and where to go and start again or what’s right for me and trying things was fun but now it’s scary and intimidating and putting in effort and my 100% for it not to work out like angers me and depressed me like my last job-

Smoking the same amount daily - often - I don’t drink but I try to for some reason - I buy booze and make a drink and have a sip or two than pour it out and have done that everytime for the last month about 4-5 times now. I for some reason when I’m needing to take a clonazapam I don’t - I just don’t do anything to help myself when I’m in a bad state - I just suffer till I’ve snapped out of it … taking my meds every night is something I now hate because of how many I have to take and it just makes me think I’m so messed up and if I didn’t have these I’d be off my rocker and god knows what and it’s sad to me …and just taking that many pills knowing I’m messed up it’s just hard but I manage to take them 6-7 days out of the week or I’ll take em every week and the next week I’ll forget a day - so it’s not often but it does happen-

I used to call my mom almost everyday and talk to her and I don’t do that anymore and I don’t know why to much I don’t really want to dig into that at the moment -

I’m having dreams of my past a lot and events or times that were bad or not good - dreams of me dying still and my father being alive and me seeing him die in weird ways in my dreams -

Still haven’t touched his ashes or looked at them or thought about them since I got them about a month ago

Can’t keep a conversation- I get bored or my mind wanders or I “get to lazy”

Not ever feeling the agony of being so physical needing to move and do something or being bored like I used to complain about - I don’t really get bored well I do I don’t really feel it as I did - I kinda just lay around zoned out and maybe sigh here or there when I am feeling bored right now - but when I am so bored and wanting to do something I can’t because I can’t do it alone and also I’m currently afraid of trying new things or meeting someone in my mental state right now -

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fortuositywritings · 3 years

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I Said No (Wanda x R): Pt 4

Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3

Summary: You try to be friends with Wanda. Frankly, you could try a little harder. (Ice cream date, but it’s not really a date, but like it is but it’s not)

PS: There are like three swear words, mentions of exercise, and you eat a lot of pancakes but that’s cause you’re hungry. It’s not a problem. Also, if you are actually athletic, are fit, or like to exercise, you aren’t and you don’t. Not in this house.

You wake up the next morning with a sore neck. As you sit up, you see Nat standing beside the couch looking at you over her coffee cup scaring the life out of you.

“So, how’d you sleep?” she asks.

“Like a princess,” you sarcastically reply. Stretching, you hear your body popping in all different places. Maybe you will take Pietro up on his offer.

“I know what will help. Some exercise. Get ready. We’re going on a hike.”

You finally take in Nat’s appearance and see her sporting the attire for a hike.

You groan. “You say hike, but I know you really mean running at an incline.”

“Come on. Don’t be a baby. Exercise is good for you. When’s the last time you got any?”

You want to make a joke because of how she worded it, but your mischievous smile gives you away.

“Exercise, Y/N. When’s the last time you got any exercise,” she clarifies.

“The last time you asked me that.”

“A year ago?”

“And my body is still sore. Ask me again in a few months,” you go to lie down again but she throws a couch cushion at your head. “Okay, okay. Jeez, woman. I’m up.”

When you return from your hike, you are heaving. You don’t ever really think about how unfit you are, which makes sense when you don’t spare 5 minutes to do any kind of exercise, but a hike with Nat will surely remind you. You are sweating buckets and just want to pass out when you enter the house. Everyone is awake presumably having breakfast. You can smell the pancakes from the living room. Your stomach growls. You want to eat but even chewing sounds like too exhausting at the moment. You just want to knock out. You head over to your sleeping quarters for the week, but before you collapse on the couch, your cousin says, “I don’t want any sweat on my couch, Y/N.”

“Ugh,” you complain but comply and go to take a shower. There is no warm water. You assume all the guests had probably had their turn while you were out. You don’t mind it too much. The cold water wakes you up and you feel refreshed. Soon you are sitting with everyone else making plans for the day, but unlike everyone else at the table you are scarfing down pancake after pancake, hardly chewing between each swallow. The conversation dies down as everyone starts to look your way. You’d be embarrassed at your table manners but honestly you’re too famished to care.

“Woah, slow your roll there, Y/N. Where was this energy on our hike?” You hear Nat’s voice come up behind you. You don’t bother looking at her, showing her the middle finger behind your back so the kids won’t see. She chuckles as she sits on the empty seat beside you.

“You might be faster than me,” Pietro comments.

“You know it’s not gentleman-like commenting on the way a woman eats,” you answer, mouth full and all.

“It’s also not lady-like to speak with your mouth full of food,” Laura reprimands you.

“Cooper doesn’t care. Right, Cooper?” you turn to the kid in question still chewing on your food.

He answers you with a mouth full of food as well, “Right!”

Your cousin sighs as you reach over to give Cooper a fist bump. Wanda laughs at the interaction from beside Cooper. You give her a quick wink before settling back in your seat. She just rolls her eyes.

They all go back to their conversation and you go back to eating your delicious pancakes in peace. Once you are satisfied, you sink back in your chair letting out a happy sigh.

“Are you sure you don’t want another one? You hardly ate anything, Y/N,” Nat sarcastically says.

You roll your eyes in good nature. “Honestly, I do want another one but my stomach might explode. I’m going to be dreaming of these pancakes tonight. I’d wed whoever made these bad boys but sorry, cousin,” you turn to Laura, “you’ve got a husband and kids, and I just can’t tear a family apart.”

“Also, she’s your cousin,” Nat emphasizes.

“Obviously that was implied, Natasha,” you say her full name obnoxiously.

“I’d love to take all the credit, but Wanda actually made breakfast. So if you’re marrying anyone for the pancakes, it’s Wanda,” Laura says.

“You hear that, Wanda? I’m going to make an honest woman out of you.” You wiggled your eyebrows her way.

“If anything, it’s the other way around, Y/N,” your cousin teases.

“Don’t egg Y/N on, Laura,” Clint quips.

“But then who is going to make me pancakes like these, Barton?” You pout.

“I can,” Pietro pipes up. “I’ll even bring them to you for breakfast in bed.” He winks as Nat and Clint wrinkle their noses in distaste and Wanda stifles a laugh.

“What?” Pietro asks his sister.

“Pietro, you can’t boil an egg.”

“Yes, I can. I can make many things. I even helped you with this breakfast,” Pietro insists.

Everyone watches the siblings squabble in amusement, especially when Wanda turns to you to stage whisper, “He burnt two pancakes.”

“I did not!”

“Ask Peter. He had one,” Wanda says in turn. Peter shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

“It was a little crunchy,” Peter says after much hesitation. Sam pats his shoulder, shaking his head. “Poor kid. No one should have to eat crunchy pancakes.”

After breakfast the kids decide they want to play basketball with the hoop Clint had placed over the barn doors. You break into teams of 3. It’s you, Lila, and Peter versus Sam, Cooper, and Pietro. Nat and Wanda sit on the sidelines watching and cheering. Your team is not doing so great. If it wasn’t for Peter pulling the team, you would cry in embarrassment. The guys on the opposing team start to get cocky. Sam rubbing the score in your team’s face, Cooper repeating whatever Sam says, and Pietro begins making flirty remarks about teaching you one on one and so on. You want to ignore his remarks but you kind of also want to wipe the smirk off his face. You do just that a few minutes later when you finally make a shot after Peter screens him allowing you to shoot. You look to see if Wanda saw but frown when you notice she’s not there anymore. You play for a few more minutes but you are quickly getting tired.

Laura comes up beside Nat and yells over to you, “Y/N, I need you to run to the store for me.”

“Oh, thank god.” You sigh in relief as you go over to your cousin and take the list she holds out to you. “Nat, sub me in?”

“Gladly.” She walks confidently over to take your place. You hear Sam and Pietro whine behind you when they realize Nat is playing in your place.

You chuckle as you read the list. “Are we having hamburgers tonight?”

“Gosh, you really were not paying attention while eating those pancakes. Clint wants to grill tonight.”

“Can you blame me? I’m getting that pancake recipe,” you say with complete determination. “Speaking of, have you seen Wanda?”

“Y/N.” Your cousin gives you a look.

“What?” You say innocently, knowing exactly what that look means.

“Clint told me about that little talk he and Nat had with you.”

“So, what now? I can’t be her friend?” you scoff.

“Friend. Mhmm, sure,” she laughs in disbelief and shakes her head. Why does no one in this damn house believe you?

“Mhmm,” you repeat as you are walking back to the house.

“Check the guest room,” Laura says last minute. Well, at least your cousin’s got your back. You give her a thumbs up in thanks.

Sure enough, Wanda is in the guest bedroom. She’s sitting in bed with a book in her hand. You softly knock on the door. She looks up, notices it’s you, frowns, and goes back to reading. You tilt your head wondering what has her in a mood. Is she back to thinking about her ex? Maybe you can help distract her as a good friend would do.

You walk over to the bed before deciding to sit in front of her cross-legged, elbows on knees, chin on the palm of one hand. “Whatcha got there?”

“A book. Ever heard of one?” she replies without bothering to look up.

Sheesh. “Oh, my god. Is it real? Can I, like, touch it? I’ve always heard about books but I’ve never seen one in person,” you say sarcastically, hoping to get some positive reaction from her. You see a slight upturn on the corner of her lips before it disappears. Though it was miniscule, it was a step forward no less. You sit there for a minute staring at her and thinking of how to proceed. You don’t want to worsen her mood with one of your dumb jokes.

Wanda can feel your eyes searching for some kind of sign from her. She gives up trying to read her book, having been repeating the same paragraph over and over again. She puts the book down and huffs. “Can I help you?”

“Actually, you can,” you say. “I’m going into town to get some stuff for the hamburgers and I was wondering if you wanted to come?”

Maybe you are simply confusing Wanda’s boredom for an unpleasant attitude.

“Didn’t you ask Piet? There’s no way he refused going with you.”

Or not.

Her sardonic tone is not lost on you. So, it’s about the brother and not the ex. You want to scream. This is why you have the twin rule. Though you want to bang your head on a wall for not listening to your own rules, you keep your composure as you stand to leave the room. Before you go, you tell Wanda, “I haven’t asked Pietro. I thought of you first, but if you’re not feeling it, I’m sure he would say yes like you say.”

You turn and head out to the hallway dejectedly, but you perk up when you hear Wanda stop you. “Wait! Let me put on my shoes.”

You wait for her in the hallway, smiling to yourself in part because you would not have to spend hours with Pietro’s constant advances but mostly because you got to spend time with Wanda without supervision. You are a grown ass adult, eh, not really, but legally you were an adult. You don’t need to be supervised. It’s not like you needed someone to watch you else you throw yourself at Wanda. Sure, you like to tease here and there but it’s not bothersome. Is it? Oh, god, were you annoying Wanda?

Those thoughts are quickly dispelled when Wanda meets you with a smile. “Ready.”

No, Wanda wouldn’t have agreed to go with you if you were really a bother. You’re sure of it.

It’s a 20 minute ride into town. With Wanda’s mood having done a full 180, you find yourself enjoying your time with her as she recounts a slight hiccup on Steve’s behalf on a mission. Soon enough you are driving up the main street looking for a parking spot. Luckily you find a spot not too far from the store. You head inside and grab a cart. You and Wanda wander around the aisles looking for what you need. Wanda takes over cart duty when you keep bumping into things because you’re distracted with either looking over the list or looking over at her. You say a quick hello to a few people you recognize.

“Well aren’t you popular,” Wanda comments as you both turn into the frozen food aisle to look for hamburger patties.

“Yeah, that’s not always a good thing,” you say when you spot a woman you know in the same aisle. You move to walk real close behind Wanda, trying to hide your face.

“What are you doing?” Wanda asks when she feels your forehead resting between her shoulder blades.

“Shhh, just keep walking,” you command without any explanation. Your really sad attempt at hiding was all for naught when you hear your name.

“Y/N? Is that you?”

You take a deep breath, plaster a fake smile, and leave Wanda’s space. “Hi, Mrs. Townsend. How’s it going?”

“I thought that was you. You can’t hide from me, you know. Not that you were ever any good at it,” she says knowingly. You cringe at the memory of her finding you in her daughter’s closet. This woman disliked you from start to finish, which made sense given that her daughter had broken up with her boyfriend for you only for you to break things off a few weeks later.

“Yeah, I know,” you smile sheepishly. She looks over your shoulder at Wanda. She looks curious but not in the best way. “And who is this?”

Wanda introduces herself with a polite smile. “Hello, I’m Wanda. Pleasure to meet you.”

“You look familiar. Have we met before?” Mrs. Townsend asks.

“No, I guess I just have that face,” Wanda responds with no hesitation having practiced that line so many times on missions. Mrs. Townsend’s stare weighs heavy and Wanda begins to feel uncomfortable.

“A very pretty one at that. Y/N sure knows how to pick them. Is that an accent I hear? Where are you from, dear?” Mrs. Townsend asks, with faux intrigue. Now you’re uncomfortable too.

You know you shouldn’t speak for Wanda but you don’t want to subject her to be in this woman’s presence any longer. “Actually, she’s just a friend visiting from New York. She and a few others are staying with Laura. And actually, she’s expecting us to return soon. So, have a good day, Mrs. Townsend. Come on, Wanda. Let’s go.”

You lead Wanda away by pulling the cart behind you. When you’re nearly clear of the aisle, Wanda stops and reminds you that you never got the patties. You tell her to go ahead and get in line to pay while you go back for the patties, them being the last thing to get from the list. Mrs. Townsend is still in the aisle now talking on the phone very displeased. “Yes, she was right here and with another girl-” she cuts herself off when you’re in her vision reaching to get what you need.

You give her a sarcastic smile. As you pass by her for the last time, you smirk and lean in to say, “Tell Abby I say hi.” Then you wink, leaving Mrs. Townsend very angry, and head over to the checkout area where Wanda is waiting. Wanda doesn’t say anything other than “Well, she was lovely” to which you laughed. Apart from that, she stays quiet at the checkout and as you put the items in the car. Before she has a chance to open the door to get in the passenger seat, you stand in front of the door blocking the handle.

“Hey,” you begin, but Wanda is looking at her shoes, her hands fiddling with the rings on her fingers. You take her hand to shake her arm in an attempt to get her to look up. “Look at me.”

You wish you hadn’t asked that of her because when she does look at you, it tears you apart. If you did not think your presence was needed more here, you could storm right back into that store and give Mrs. Townsend a piece of your mind.

“Mrs. Townsend is an asshole. You should never take what an asshole says to heart cause it’s all shit,” you say in all seriousness. Wanda giggles and raises her free hand to rub her face. You pull it away from her face. Holding both her hands you continue, “She’s just a grumpy lady holding a grudge over something I did like two years ago. It’s nothing to do with you and all to do with me. So don’t listen to anything she says, okay?”

It takes a moment but she finally nods. “There we are.” You pull her into a hug, one she accepts easily, hoping to give further comfort. You can’t help but think how nice it is to hold her, moreso, when she hugs you tighter.

“So, she was lying when she said I was pretty?” Wanda tries to joke, adopting your method of lightening the mood.

“Oh, absolutely,” you answer. She quickly pulls back from your hold but you don’t let her go too far, holding onto her elbows. “Cause you are breathtakingly gorgeous,” you finish.

She smiles and a blush takes over her face. You decide to add, “In fact, I can’t even breathe right now standing so close to your beauty.” You dramatically gasp for air making Wanda laugh and smack you.

“Ow, if this is how you Avenger women treat your adoring fans, I’d hate to see how you take down the bad guys.”

“Oh, so you’re a fan?” Wanda asks adorning a sly smile.

“Mhmm, since day one.”

“Is that so? Because from what I remember you called me Crimson Witch just yesterday,” she teases you.

“And I stand by what I said,” you respond. You cut her off when she opens her mouth to argue. “But if I have offended you, let me make it up to you.”

She narrows her eyes, looking at you skeptically as if you were up to no good making you want to laugh. “How?” She asks warily.

You lean into her space once more to say, “I know a place.” You wink and without allowing her to respond, you take her hand dragging her along behind you. “Come on.”

Your destination is just two blocks away. Wanda speeds up to walk beside you but she never lets your hand go. Not that you mind it in the least. You stop her when you arrive and reluctantly let her hand go to make a grandiose gesture with your arms. “Ta-Da!”

“An ice-cream shop?” she asks you, clearly unimpressed.

“Not just any ice-cream shop. The Ice Cream Shop!” You can’t help but say enthusiastically. Wanda on the other hand does not look enthused. You can’t believe she’s not excited for ice cream. “Oh, come on, Wanda. Don’t tell me you don’t like ice cream. The only excuse I’ll take is that you’re lactose intolerant or vegan. Just don’t tell me you prefer frozen yogurt. Oh, god. You do, don’t you?” You gasp dramatically, your hand clutching your chest.

She shakes her head and rolls her eyes in a light hearted manner at your antics. “You’ve made your point. Just open the door.”

“Bossy,” you laugh, but do as she wishes though you make a show out of opening the door. You bow and motion for her to enter as you hold the door open. “After you, m’lady.”

She sighs. Passing through the door, she mumbles, “I could be in bed reading right now.”

“Ah, but then you would’ve missed the opportunity to hang out with someone as cool as me,” you say as you and Wanda go to stand behind the group of teenage girls ordering their ice cream.

“Oh, are they meeting us after? Do you think they’ll buy me frozen yogurt?” she retorts, amusement shining through her eyes. You generally find quick witted remarks annoying. Mostly because you’ve always been surrounded by smart-alecks all your life. Your cousin is one. Then she married one who had one as a best friend. Somehow, you find the same quality in Wanda kind of attractive. Oh god. This can’t be happening.

“Quit being so grumpy. You’re gonna thank me when you try it. It’s only the best there is.”

“You should listen to her, but hey, I may be a little biased,” the woman working at the counter backs you up. The teenage girls are long gone.

“Thank you, Tanya,” you reply, stepping forward to the middle aged woman you know to be the owner of the shop. She was actually the one to give you your first job at this very same ice cream shop. Maybe you were also a little biased.

“I wasn’t expecting you to be in town so early, Y/N.”

“Well, I just missed you so much, I couldn’t wait to get here,” you explain.

“Uh, huh. I’m sure that’s it.” Her voice is full of disbelief. You laugh.

“Actually, I got here yesterday. I wanted to come earlier to help out Laura now that she’s phwwt,” you whistle and make a belly bump gesture like it’s a scandalous secret.

“She’s married and this is baby number three, Y/N. You can say pregnant,” your old boss laughs.

“But that’s no fun,” you pout.

“And who is this little thing?” She turns to Wanda, who timidly smiles still two steps behind you.

“Come on, I don’t bite, hun.” Tanya gives her a sincere smile, one much different from Mrs. Townsend’s. Wanda slowly approaches after you wave her over encouragingly. When she is close enough, you hold her forearm to introduce her to Tanya, trying to ease her nerves. It seems to work. You feel her relax and lean into your side as she says, “Hi, I’m Wanda.”

“Pleasure to meet you dear. I’m Tanya. See, no need to be shy.”

“She’s not usually like this as far as I can tell. She’s actually quite chatty. Sometimes I don’t know how to get her to stop talking,” you joke. Wanda scoffs and bumps your hip with hers.

“Whenever Y/N begins to annoy you, just put on some earphones and hide them with your hair. It works wonders. She can talk to herself for hours,” your old boss advises Wanda.

“I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

“Hey!” You interject. “Tanya, where is your loyalty? So quick to team up against me.”

Wanda giggles beside you. You turn your head to playfully glare at her, missing the way Tanya smiles at the interaction in front of her.

“So how’d you two meet? I don’t think I’ve seen you in town before, Wanda.”

“She’s a friend and um, coworker of Clint and Natasha. She’s here for the week.” You hope Tanya didn’t catch your little hiccup there. However, you miss the implication of her question. Tanya tries to remember who Nat is.

“Natasha. Is she the intimidating red head always wearing tight jeans?” You and Wanda laugh. You affirm with a finger to your nose. “Didn’t you date her sister?”

You let go of Wanda’s arm to throw your head into your hands. “Ugh, how could you possibly know that?”

“Small town. Word gets around fast. People are probably already talking about you two, especially when you’ve got someone as beautiful as Wanda with you.”

Wanda blushes at the insinuation. “There’s nothing to talk about,” you tell Tanya.

Tanya raises an eyebrow, “You mean, you’re not dating?”

“Please, Wanda here is way out of my league. I mean, funny, polite, pleasant, and gorgeous. Maybe even a little pretentious. I caught her reading a book… for fun. Who does that? Ow!” Wanda smacks your arm and Tanya laughs. “Did I mention violent?”

The bell above the entrance door chimes informing you three that other customers are coming in. “Okay, so what can I get you?” Tanya asks, moving this along.

“I’d like two scoops of rainbow sherbert on a cone, please.”

“And for you, hun?” Tanya asks Wanda after handing you your cone.

“Um, may I have two scoops of strawberry, please?”

“Of course, you’d get red,” you taunt.

“Here you are.” Tanya hands Wanda her cone. You take out a ten dollar bill from your pocket to pay but Tanya won’t have it. “My treat, ladies.”

“But this is sort of an apology cone I promised Wanda,” you try again.

“Y/N! Apologizing with a three dollar ice cream cone is not a real apology. You can do better.”

“It’s like you read my mind, Tanya,” Wanda says. You want to laugh at the irony.

“It wasn’t for anything serious,” you try to argue.

“Whatever it was, you can treat her to something nicer,” Tanya reprimands you.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?”

“The fair is in town. Take her to that. Now shoo, I’ve got customers waiting. Nice meeting you, Wanda,” she says.

“You too. Thanks.”

You exit first, holding the door open for Wanda without thinking about it. She smiles and loops her arm through yours as you both head back to the car at a leisurely pace. You look to see if Wanda likes her ice cream. There is no doubt about it as she begins to hum in happiness. You want to say something like “ I told you so” but she warns you before you have the chance to open your mouth. “Don’t.”

You smirk and turn to your ice cream. You try to savour it, but you demolish that ice cream. You pout when you see it all gone. Wanda still has half of hers.

“Quit being so grumpy,” she says, throwing your words from earlier back at your face. “Here, you can have some of mine.”

She lifts her cone to your mouth. You happily go to take a bite when Wanda shoves the rest of her cone in your face. It wasn’t much but you can smell the damn strawberry ice cream as it drips from your nose. You’re too shocked to move for a minute. She laughs as you try to process what just happened. You hear the shutter noise of a camera. You see Wanda holding her phone up. That snaps you out of your daze. Wanda takes off running the second she sees the look that settles on your face. She doesn’t have to be a telepath to know what that look means. You chase after her.

She gets to the car before you but can’t open the door. She turns around, hands out in front of her body which is shaking from nervous laughter. “Wait, Y/N. I’m sor-”

You pull her into a hug and shove your ice cream riddled nose to her neck smearing the strawberry flavored dessert on her. “Stop, okay. I’m sorry. Stop, that tickles!” She bursts out laughing. You take pity and let her go, but your feet stay planted where they are. You both quickly sober up when you see how close you are. You feel the tension from yesterday return. You know what you want to do but you know you shouldn’t. Wanda is not making it easy looking at you the same way. Before either of you make a decision, your phone rings ruining whatever that was. You awkwardly clear your throat and back away. You give Wanda a smile before reaching for your phone. You answer it without looking at the name of whoever is calling. It’s Laura asking if you are on your way. You tell her you’ll be there soon.

You unlock the car and open the passenger door for Wanda. She gives you a quiet thanks. The drive to the house is awkward to say the least, a total contrast to the ride into town. The music in the background does nothing to alleviate your discomfort. In fact, you think it might have made it worse.

You let out a little sigh of relief once the barn enters your line of sight. Wanda on the other hand can’t take it anymore. She turns off the radio and turns to you expectantly. You take a deep breath knowing what was coming. Having a feeling this conversation could get loud, you slow down the car to a stop before you could pull up to the barn. You’d rather not let anyone overhear knowing how nosy they all are.

“What was that back there?”

“You started it, shoving the ice cream in my face.” You play naive.

“Don’t do that.”

You don’t know why you thought you could get away with lying to her when you know she can literally read minds.

“I’m sorry. I wanted to. I did. I do.”

“Well, I do too,” Wanda says.

“You do?” you ask. You don’t know why you sound so shocked. You had a gut feeling already, but it surprises you hearing her say it aloud anyway.

“You know I do. So what’s the problem?”

The problem is you can’t. The problem is you promised Nat, Clint, and yourself you wouldn’t. The problem is what Nat said at dinner struck a chord with you. Sure she could have been a little nicer about it and maybe not say it in front of everybody, but she was right nonetheless. The problem is your habit of touch and go, the one you never wanted to admit you had, only hurts people. You are the problem and you‘ve decided to fix it, starting with Wanda. You won’t allow yourself the chance to break Wanda’s heart. You don’t think she deserves that.

“You don’t get to decide what I deserve. Neither does Nat. Neither does Clint. I get to make that decision for myself. If I put it all on the line and end up heartbroken, then that’s on me. I make that choice.”

You nod, “You’re right. That is your choice and I can respect that. But it’s also my choice to decide I can’t be the one to break your heart. Can you respect that?”

A heavy silence settles in the car, but you have said all you needed to say so you wait for Wanda to respond. When she realizes your mind is set, she nods. After another minute of silence, she asks, “What now, then?”

“Cliché, but friends?” you suggest. When Wanda scoffs in disbelief, you have to ask, “What?”

“You and me?” Wanda asks as if for clarification.

“Well, I don’t see anyone else in the car. Yes, Wanda. You and me.”

“Have you ever been just friends with anyone before?” Wanda asks, placing no kind of faith in your ability to maintain platonic relationships.

“Are you asking if I can keep it in my pants? Not to bruise your ego, but I can be in a room with you without wanting to jump your bones, Maximoff. I have plenty of strictly platonic friends. Like... Nat.”

She laughs at the choice you made for an example. “That’s only because Natasha doesn’t want to sleep with you.”

“So, what you’re saying is this friendship won’t work because you can’t keep it in your pants?” you counter and watch with amusement Wanda’s face flush and her try to defend herself.

“N-no,” she stutters weakly.

“Great,” you say cheerily. “It’s settled then. We can be friends.”

“There are rules though,” Wanda warns you as you start driving toward the house again.

“Already? Had I known this friendship came with terms and conditions, I might have never suggested it. Fine, lay them on me.”

“No more flirting with my brother.”

“I have never flirted with your-” you start to deny, but when she gives you a knowing look you quickly agree. “Okay, but if he’s putting in all the work, who am I to keep him from living out his dreams?” You jest. She punches your arm.

“Alright, new rule! No more hitting me.”

“No.”

“Okay.”

You were beginning to see the rules to this friendship were not going to be in your favor.

_____________________________________________________________________

So, I lied when I said this was going to be most likely 5 chapters. It turns out I really like dialogue. I'm hoping max is 8 chapters.

Your assignment in preparation for the next chapter: pick a nice outfit cause you're going to the county fair.

Extra Credit: Name the county. (I'm prob going to pick one from the comments)

taglist: @madamevirgo @marvels-writings @gayarchnemessis @myperfectlovepoem @purplemeetsblue @magicallymaximoff @b0mbdotc0m @helloalycia @ironscarletwidowsoilder

#wanda maximoff x reader #wanda maximoff imagine #wanda maximoff x you

467 notes · View notes

imagining-in-the-margins · 3 years

Text

Here to Misbehave (Pt. 23 | S.R.)

Summary: Spencer’s birthday plans get interrupted by a case. Frustrated by Reader’s busy schedule, Spencer finds a unique way to spend time with her. Couple: Spencer Reid/Fem!Reader Category: Smut (NSFW, 18+) Content Warning: Mild exhibitionism, fingering, penetrative sex, unprotected sex, Dom/sub, light choking, degradation/praise, sub space Word Count: 7.3k

MASTERLIST

—————————————————

Waiting for Spencer Reid was an interesting position to be in. It was also, unfortunately, very, very common. You would think the IQ points would translate to efficiency, but you’d be very wrong. The only thing that boy does fast is read, and even that didn’t follow through to text messages, considering he’d read none of the six I’d sent him in the past hour.

So, naturally, as one does in an emergency, I called him. Unsurprisingly, the phone barely rang a second time before he picked up. Talking was, as we were both aware, his forte. Without even waiting for my greeting, his groggy voice came through the receiver with a song-like sound.

“Hello, little girl.”

But it wasn’t his turn to sing, and he knew damn well why I was calling. I could hear the smirk on his face so well that I could also envision exactly what he looked like in that moment, with his fluffy hair sticking up from constantly running his hands through it and his eyes only half-open as he tried to finish reading whatever horrible thing that he had in front of him.

It wasn’t how anyone should be spending their birthday. Especially not him. There wasn’t really anything I could do about it, though that didn’t make it any easier to hear the exhaustion and sadness behind that scratchy voice.

“What’re you doing up late? It’s past your bedtime, you know,” he chastised before I even had a chance to speak. He wasn’t wrong — It was 3AM where I was. But where he was, it’d just hit midnight.

“I just wanted to wish a happy birthday to my favorite old man,” I purred back once I’d managed to calm my fast-beating heart. I wondered if I’d ever get used to the brief rush of adrenaline and relief when I heard his voice for the first time after some time away.

I hoped not.

Spencer didn’t seem impressed by my reasoning, though. “You’re sweet. Go to sleep.”

“You’re up, too,” I whined, still picturing the way he would undoubtedly pull the phone further away to lessen the noise. I almost asked if he was also picturing me but stopped when I realized that whatever he had in mind was probably a lot more exciting than reality. Then again, he often told me that moments like this were his favorite. When we’re both too tired to keep our eyes open but too happy to be with each other to let them close all the way.

“Barely,” he corrected.

“Besides, I had to stay up. It’s your birthday.”

I’d meant to lift his spirits, but the long pause after I finished made it evident that my efforts were for naught. He almost seemed even more upset than when he’d answered, and I tried to convince myself that it had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t that hard, considering he was probably staring at images or words of dead people.

“Yeah, sure feels like it.”

His tone alone ensured me it was worse than my imagination.

“Put your work down and pay attention to me instead,” I suggested as softly as I could with the neediness bleeding through, “That’s the first part of your present.”

“You’re my present?” he asked through a gruff laugh that made my heart skip a beat, “I like that present.”

He was trying. I could feel it in his voice, and I wished more than anything that I could teleport to where he was and hold him until it was too difficult for his mouth to form a frown.

“You already have me. That’d be like regifting,” I pointed out with only a pinch of self-deprecation. It was still too much for Spencer, though, who swiftly shot back the ever cheesy, “Every day with you is a gift.”

“Gross, don’t get all sentimental with me,” I ordered playfully.

He returned the energy with all the sass I always knew he was capable of. Once his whining ceased, he mumbled, “Do you come with a gift receipt?”

“No returns or exchanges allowed, I’m afraid.”

Spencer just let out a strained sigh, and in my head, I imagined how it would feel to climb onto his lap as he leaned back in his chair. I could almost feel his arms wrapping around my waist and his lips peppering kisses wherever he could reach. I could feel his love for me flowing across the country, persisting past the cell tower obstacles to make its way back to me.

“I can’t wait to see you again,” he whispered, his first purely sincere statement of the night.

It was an unfortunate choice, too, because it also reminded me of the biggest bummer that I unfortunately had to share.

“Oh, I meant to tell you, it’s midterm season, so…”

He was, thankfully, not as bummed as I was expecting. He was almost certainly thrilled to have a chance to sleep spread out on his bed without having to satisfy the very needy girl beside him, but he still managed to come up with enough bratty energy to scoff, “Are you telling me that I don’t get my gift when I get home?”

“It’ll just be a few days. Promise,” I spoke through the biggest, cheesiest smile I’d had yet. “You’re very distracting, Dr. Reid.”

“When are your exams?” His enthusiasm gave away just how disappointed he was with the news, but any frustration was clearly aimed at my poor professors.

“My last one is on Wednesday.”

The gasp that left him was too funny not to laugh, followed by exasperated, blubbered nonsense that didn’t ever get much clearer. I barely managed to understand him when he cried, “Don’t they know Halloween should be a national holiday?!”

“You should call my professors and yell at them.”

He actually considered it for a moment, but then returned the same silly intonation, “Maybe I will.”

“Do it. You’re probably more qualified than them to teach me, anyway.”

After a short silence that was filled with more sexual tension than I’d expected considering how the phone call started, I heard Spencer gruffly comment, “You’re a cocky little brat tonight.”

It was so familiar to me that I jumped on the opportunity, giggling through my sleep deprived delirium, “I’m in rare form for your birthday.”

The explanation earned me a chuckle, but not much else. At least, not that I could see. The static on the other end of the phone sounded a lot like the way it looked when Spencer leaned his face against his palm and tried to see something that wasn’t there.

But I was there. Sort of. We’d done a lot more with a lot less, after all. So, that’s what I offered him.

“You know… we could have a redo of the last time I called you late at night on a case.”

“That did not end well for me last time,” he droned. I tried not to laugh at the manufactured memory of Spencer holed up in a hotel bathroom because he just had to have me in whatever way he could.

“Only happy endings for your birthday. I promise.”

But then, as it always did, work got in the way. Filled with only the greatest sadness and regret, Spencer quietly but honestly replied, “As much as I would love to, I don’t think it’ll be possible on this case.”

“Is it that bad?”

“Unfortunately.”

I bit my lip because there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t help Spencer with his work any more than I could fix the distance. All I could offer him was a safe home to return to. He would always find that with me.

“Well, in that case, I will be equipped with cartoons and kisses upon your return,” I offered with grace.

But I wasn’t the only one in rare form. Without skipping a beat, Spencer corrected with a smug sadness, “You mean your return. Considering you’re abandoning me on my birthday.”

“Oh my god, the drama!” I cried before remembering that it was, still, in fact, 3AM. The light grimace I gave after remembering would be the only apology my neighbors would get from me. I was too busy building a narrative happy enough to drown out the horrors in front of him. “You’d think I was the one who was away all the time.”

“I’m allowed to be selfish; it’s my birthday,” he sang, and I soaked in the sound, storing it away for any rainy days.

“Fine. What do you want, brat?” I asked in the worst attempt at an impression I’d ever given.

He was just waiting for the question. Drawing out the first couple of syllables, he laughed through the stupidest birthday wish of all time.

“I want… you to go to bed.”

“Ugh!” I yelled again, not even bothering to feel bad about it that time. My exasperation fell on deaf ears, both from a willful desire to ignore my suffering and a literal ringing from the constant yelling.

Still, that impossible man drummed up enough compassion to gloat with a simple, “I love you.”

“I love you, too, jerk,” I grumbled, only to be swiftly corrected with a playful, “Try that again.”

“I love you, too, old man.”

He was satisfied enough with that answer, despite the sarcasm dripping from it. He still knew that the words were true, and that was all that mattered. Any punishments that might be necessary for my broken promise to behave for his birthday could always be doled out later. When the distance between us was narrowed to inches and clothes could be removed like cheap wrapping paper.

“Thank you, little girl. Sweet dreams,” he whispered, reminding me once more of just how empty my bed felt without him. I stared at his pillow for just one second before I threw myself into it. He chuckled at the sound of rustling sheets over the receiver but said nothing else.

“You get some sleep tonight, too, okay?” I asked, uncharacteristically and openly vulnerable in a way that used to scare me.

Spencer’s voice was filled with pride and love as he answered, “You can’t see it, but I am giving you a pinky promise.”

“Good.” Burying my face in his pillow again made it easier to remember that it wouldn’t be forever when I said, “Bye, Spencer.”

“Goodnight, little girl.”

—————————————————

Autumn on campus felt pretty similar to the rest of the year. I wished that it were different, a little more exciting, to reflect how I felt about the impending holiday. But no, it was just students stumbling into their usual classes and hectically scheduled midterms with hangovers and a total lack of holiday cheer.

It was, in a few words, a complete bummer. The only thing that kept me going through the last of my exams was the knowledge that I’d be seeing Spencer. Unfortunately, he was still doing that rather annoying thing where he refused to answer my text messages. It wasn’t until he ignored even my most ridiculous threats that I realized something was going on.

The ‘Read’ notification sat menacingly on my screen, and I was so fixated on it that I almost didn’t notice the familiar mop of brown curls visible in the front row of the auditorium. But once I saw it, the phone was forgotten faster than ever before. I ran down the steps at a ridiculously dangerous pace, dodging the others still grumbling from their previous exams.

I landed in front of him with only enough breath left to sneer, “You’re in my seat.”

“Surprise,” he said with my favorite smug, self-assured smile.

“Adorable. Now move,” I ordered with a wave of my hand. As much as I loved the guy, I wasn’t about to change my seating arrangement for him. It was beginning to make sense, though, why my friend told me that she wouldn’t be sitting with me today.

“Fine,” he sighed, taking his sweet time moving seats and watching me happily bounce on my feet in the meantime. I snuck behind him into the seat before he’d even fully stood up. That little amount of friction between our bodies seemed to be enough to cause the tension to mount. It’d only been seconds, but I was already seriously considering abandoning the class. To hell with the professor who’d already seen me.

But Spencer’s eyes locked on mine, and he leaned onto the armrest with that same silly smirk.

“It’s a workday, Dr. Reid,” I whispered, forcing my arm next to his and watching the way his pupils grew as I came closer.

“I might have pulled a few strings,” he replied just as quietly, keeping the illusion of secrecy despite many prying eyes around us, “Might’ve told Hotch I was invited.”

“But you weren’t,” I snorted.

Spencer’s head hung in just a little bit of shame, but his wide smile never waned. It was still there, bright and pure in its simplicity as he softly admitted, “Yeah. I lied. But I’m here now.”

There were no complaints about that fact, either. His pinky reached out to mine, twining together in the dim light of the auditorium. Somehow, for a brief second, I forgot about everything else. The noisy chatter meant nothing to me, the two of us lost in some alternate pocket universe that felt safe and warm from the cold air outside.

But time resumed, and I watched as Spencer took his eyes off of me first, turning instead to the lecturer watching us with a knowing glint in his eyes.

“Good morning everyone! We have a special guest with us today.”

I wanted to pay attention to his little introduction, but I couldn’t. Every word that was said about him sounded so clinical. It felt so empty compared to the truth I knew about him. He was so much more than a collection of publications and PhDs.

He was… indescribable. Even as his mouth formed a flat line and his awkward handshake was granted to the crowds of disinterested students, all I saw was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Even if it was only from the shadows of his greatness. Then again, I don’t think he’d ever let me feel that way.

Speaking of…

"Dr. Reid, the only thing I ask is for you to give these wonderful students a chance to show you what they know,” my professor started with a laugh before he so kindly continued, “So go easy on them."

In any other situation, I might have let it slide. I would have accepted the fact that Spencer was far beyond my intellect and not stand up for myself. But this time, Spencer was on my turf.

"All due respect to Dr. Reid, I don't think he needs to go easy on us,” I called from the front row, only audible to the other dutiful students that cared enough to sit up front. I heard Spencer laugh beside me, shaking his head just a little bit at the challenge. He didn’t say anything though, and I returned my eyes to the professor who was already familiar with my antics as I boasted, "At least not on me."

While Spencer caught on to the fairly obvious double entendre, shifting his crossed legs closer, the professor just wrote it off as my usual academic pride.

“I did try to warn you that that one might get competitive,” he commented. At this point, everyone had definitely figured out my relation to the man next to me. It was kind of hard to hide a bullet wound from your school. But again, I was so caught up in the man beside me that I didn’t even feel a little shame at their playful teasing.

Spencer’s commentary was the only thing that mattered, and he gave it with a dreamy sigh. "I'm not offended at all. I'm sure she's very clever."

The little bit of light left in the room started to fade, and once I was shrouded by the shadows, I felt confident enough in my plan to dig through the bag at my feet to pull out probably the nerdiest item in it.

A fucking back-up clicker. Which, I promptly handed to the man beside me.

“You’re in seat B4,” I whispered gruffly, earning yet another snarky chuckle from my boyfriend.

“Is that a challenge?”

I didn’t answer. Not him, anyway. What I did answer was the question that had appeared on the screen.

“Ms. (Y/n)?” My professor called, recognizing my seat number without even looking up.

Luckily for me, today was nothing but a review day of the midterm I’d already taken. While I knew all of the questions and, what I’d hoped were the right answers, Spencer had to read the questions from scratch. Really, it didn’t give me an edge. It just put us on equal playing ground.

As I gave my answer, I watched in my peripherals as Spencer’s eyes narrowed and tongue peeked out from lips that I still hadn’t gotten the chance to kiss today.

It was a bad thing to think about, because my brief reverie of the things that mouth was capable of reminded me of another one. I didn’t even notice another question had appeared on the screen, and when I heard the familiar buzz of an attempted answer, I shared my Professor’s temporary confusion.

“Ah, Dr. Reid,” he laughed, probably already regretting welcoming the bastard here, “Please explain the answer.”

But there was another thing working in my favor: My boyfriend’s giant fucking ego. Really, it should be impossible that someone who was normally super insecure could enjoy showing off as much as he did. My professor didn’t mind, because Spencer’s long-winded answer was a wonderful review of… basically the entire course, and I didn’t mind because it granted me the one thing I needed.

Time. Time to slowly remove my jacket and reveal the sweater underneath. Spencer’s eyes caught the motion, glancing over only a couple of times while he managed to give his answer. It wasn’t until I started to remove the sweater that he cut his answer short.

His throat clearing told me he wanted my attention, but I was still just too distracted for him. I fanned my chest that felt warm for reasons other than the temperature of the room, guaranteeing his eyes would stay there long enough for me to catch the next question before he had a chance.

Or so I thought. Because before the question appeared, I made the positively stupid mistake of meeting his gaze. As soon as I did, my mind was stuck there, drowning in molasses and honey and—

“Dr. Reid, please feel free to continue to do my job for me. Lord knows I would love a break,” the professor joked, and I almost felt guilty for just how genuine he sounded. Not like Spencer would have noticed passive aggression if it existed.

Not like either of us would have cared. Per usual, we were so lost in the space of B4 and B5 that we didn’t care about the rest of the alphabet. All we cared about was winning. It was growing more and more obvious to me, though, that I would have to become a little more ruthless if I wanted to bring down the bona fide genius.

The sound of his voice rang through the auditorium loud, clear, and confident. He didn’t need to worry if he was right or not, because he knew he was. The smugness was grating to my ears. I knew I couldn’t trick him into making a mistake, but there was one thing I could do.

I’d learned one thing very well in my time with Spencer, and that was how to manipulate that pretty little voice of his.

For example, if I wanted to hear it catch in his throat and come out a few pitches higher, all I would have to do is touch him. The riskier the touch, the higher his voice would go. Which was why I spread out the jacket over my lap, making sure that our legs were close enough that it covered him, too. Then I waited, calmly and kindly listening to him drone along until there was a natural enough inflection to hide evidence of any nefarious actions. Just as his voice started to rise, I slid my hand over his knee.

Spencer barely stuttered, just enough for me to know he was affected, but not enough for anyone else to notice. He took the loss with grace, quickly ending his answer with a summary that contained only half as many words as he would have normally provided.

He kept a few for me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he hissed, shifting close enough to me that I could feel his breath on my ear.

“All’s fair in love and war,” I hummed. His breath caught again when I began stroking my thumb over his leg that had just started to bounce.

“This is wildly inappropriate.”

“How perceptive,” I returned with my own little smirk. The interaction caught us both, trapping us in the alternate dimension that existed when we held each other. His hand found its way to mine, and his thumb brushed over the back and sent goosebumps shooting over my skin.

I’d practically abandoned our pursuits altogether when I heard my friend’s voice as she took the question that we’d both missed. I should’ve been upset for losing after all that I’d gone through for my strategy to succeed, but it was hard to feel anything other than butterflies when Spencer was still looking at me like that.

Even when I looked away, he stayed, patiently waiting for me to take the final question in the review. I granted him a chance to take it, but he just shook his head, implicitly asking me to take the win for the both of us. Even when we were competing, we were always on the same team.

There were no more distractions as I explained the answer as simply as I could. I was positive the rest of the class was tired of hearing our voices, but Spencer never stopped smiling. I could feel the pride rolling off of him, his hand growing tighter around mine as he took in a deep breath.

“Very good, (y/n),” my professor announced, signaling the end and initiating a large sigh of relief from everyone else.

Spencer sighed too, although his was with a different kind of relief; a dreamy, soft sound as he muttered under his breath, “Just like I said. Very clever.”

The air felt positively electric, and I never hated my class more than I did in that moment. The rest of the period ticked by so slowly that I almost swore the clocks were broken. Once we were allowed to leave, Spencer insisted on sticking around to thank the professor for his hospitality.

I knew it was necessary, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. I tried to be as patient as possible, even though it seemed pointless. Spencer’s little grin told me he knew very well what he was doing. The conversation had dragged on for practically five minutes of agony while I idled by the door.

But then my professor passed, and I felt the adrenaline course through my veins in seconds. As anticipated, we didn’t even make it out of the building before the tension broke. We’d barely even made it down the goddamn hallway before I shoved his scrawny ass into the first empty classroom I found. Once the door clicked shut behind us, the roles were quickly reversed.

I hadn’t seen him that excited in so long that I’d almost forgotten how easy it was to get swept up in his undertow. I couldn’t keep track of his hands or his mouth as they marked any bare skin they could find. But no matter how frantic and uncoordinated the movements were, they never ceased to send chills down my spine.

“This is wildly inappropriate, Dr. Reid,” I managed to slur between sloppy, heated kisses. It was barely comprehensible through the pent-up lust that had driven us there in the first place, but it still felt worth saying.

Spencer, however, made his feelings very clear with a gruff, forceful, “I don’t care.”

His hands were already roaming over my hips, pulling me so close to the edge that I nearly fell off the counter entirely. While I was laughing at his haste, he was busy leaving angry marks on my collarbone, pulling the top of my shirt down to grant him more access. And despite how badly my body burned with desire and need, I drummed up just enough self-preservation to force out a few, regrettable words.

“Take me home.”

Even though I tried to make it sound more seductive than a normal request to stop, it brought the momentum to a halt. Spencer immediately stopped his kisses, but let his hands continue to stroke loving patterns over the sides of my thighs.

“Don’t you have other classes?” he asked. The feeling of his breath against my ears making me second-guess my already voiced decision. But as enticing as the idea was of having him now, having already waited over a week, I knew we could have so much more fun with a little bit of privacy.

“Don’t you have work?” I teased, hoping that it would spur him to take the action we both knew was safer. At the same time, I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to poke fun at the academic in him.

“Unless this is your way of telling me you've always wanted to fuck a girl in a lab because, I must admit I'd be more than happy to oblige."

Spencer’s whole body tensed as he imagined just what it would feel like to take me in such a public place. After a couple seconds that I can only imagine were filled with fantasies and a reasonable fear, he pulled me from my seat on the counter and placed me back on the ground.

“Let’s go,” he said, pulling me by my wrist towards the door.

I only barely managed to stop him with both hands on his arm. He turned back to look at me like I’d done some horrible thing, but I was too busy trying to stop the laughter that was spilling from my chest.

“You’re uh—” I cleared my throat, pointing to the very noticeable tent in his slacks before I keened through the giggles, “You’re gonna have to do something about that.”

With a quick glance down, Spencer remembered the very unfortunately obvious trait of the male anatomy. “Fuck,” he stated plainly.

I couldn’t resist.

“I mean, I’m down,” I joked one final time.

“Shut up!” Spencer laughed, too, trying and failing to adjust himself in his pants while I just enjoyed the show.

After all, we both knew that once we were alone, he would get a reprieve from my ridicule. He would get whatever he wanted.

—————————————————

The chaotic clashing of hands and mouths continued seconds after we’d reached our destination. The empty apartment had all of the sounds of our desperation echoing back to us, and after soaking in the melodious noise for a few seconds, I snapped back to reality.

“Okay, she doesn’t get home for another 30 minutes at the earliest so, we’d better hurry,” I urged, trying to shove Spencer off of me to convince him to move. It barely worked, with his arms clutching tighter the harder I struggled to get away.

Wrapped together just like that, the two of us barely made it a few feet before we almost tumbled to the ground. That was just enough of a reminder of our lack of coordination for Spencer to finally, begrudgingly, release me. Kind of. His hand still held tight to mine, and our laughter still combined the whole way to our bed.

From there, Spencer felt confident in our privacy to answer, “That’s fine. I usually tear open my gifts pretty quickly.”

It was a very good metaphor for the way his hands worked over my clothes. I didn’t even try to pinpoint the moment where being naked no longer made me feel nervous. I let the scar tissue show because neither of us were going to look at it, anyway. We were too caught up in the slight shifts and nuances of our faces as we rushed towards our one mutual goal.

“I missed you,” I mumbled, the words feeling as natural as breathing itself.

“I missed you, too,” he returned, and I felt the raw emotion, the sincerity and desire in every syllable. But once it was over and he had finally managed to remove everything but my underwear, all that was left was an all-encompassing, mind-altering level of lust.

“God, watching you in class was so fucking frustrating,” he strained, his upper lip curling with disdain as he watched my body squirm against the sheets.

“Why’s that?”

“I wanted you so badly.”

There was no denying that it was the honest truth, and I didn’t even want to try. I wanted to gloat and bask in the confirmation that his presence was dangerous for my academic career. Not to mention my sanity.

“Like I said. You’re very distracting.”

Then, to prove my point, that brilliant bastard shoved his hand under the band of my underwear. He only held me softly for one second before he slid his fingers through the slickness and thrust them roughly into me. It hadn’t been that long, but the emptiness I felt before was even more apparent now that I had any part of him inside of me again.

“Am I?” he chimed with a smile.

I wanted to be bratty, to fight the tension that was building and appear unfazed by his ministrations, but there was simply no pretending. Not when my body was already on the verge of spasming around his fingers that seemed to stroke the perfect place within me with every movement.

“Jesus Christ,” I sighed. I should’ve known better than to give him ammunition.

“You’ve resorted to blasphemy already?”

Spencer partnered the tease with a ruthless thrust, burying his fingers to the knuckle inside of me and holding them there. He waited until I ran out of breath and struggled to take another while also trying not to scream in a mixture of frustration and devastating need for more.

“I thought I told you we had to hurry?”

“We’ve got time,” he shot back without pause, “You’re just being a needy little brat.”

“Yes, I am,” I whined just as quickly, “I’m a fucking brat and I need you.”

He almost seemed disappointed in my compliance. His fingers began moving again, eliciting noises that were louder, higher, and sweeter after the anticipation. He tried to draw the attitude out of me by stopping again, waiting for a quip that didn’t come.

“Awww, no fight?” he cooed.

“I can’t. It’s your birthday,” I grumbled before biting my tongue. The pressure was becoming so unbearable I thought I might honestly draw blood. But after another few seconds of torture that felt like a lifetime, Spencer withdrew his hand completely.

He was testing the limits, watching how far I would let him go before begging. But even when he took the same soaked fingers and began rubbing me from the outside of my underwear, I only opened my mouth to steal quick, soft breaths and give pitiful whines.

“Oh, I like this…” he laughed, apparently having gotten past his concern about my sudden compliance, “I could get used to you behaving.”

The song-like cadence got to me, threatening to spark and ignite everything I was holding back. I almost bit back. I almost let the desire scorch my throat with a few choice words for the very rude genius, but I didn’t. The only thing that stopped me was the feel of cotton sliding down my thighs as he removed the final barrier between us.

“You’d miss my misbehaving,” I said with a chuckle. The sound mixed with another, a deep moan that filled my chest when I felt him press himself against my entrance. My back arched, causing him to slip inside of me just enough for us to both lose our words.

“I don’t know…”

If I’d wanted to say anything, my mouth wouldn’t have let me. It was too busy singing his praise while simultaneously begging him to silence it. My lips floundered for a kiss that he hung just far enough away from me to deny. Satisfaction was painted over every feature as he started to enter me, brushing his lips against my mouth every few seconds just to pull away before I was granted the intimacy I sought.

“You do look rather cute when you’re begging.”

It was strange, the way my body started to predict his movements. I met him in the middle of every motion, and I swore even our breath became synchronized in its rapid firing. It wasn’t until his hand rested over my throat we broke the rhythm. I wasn’t going to complain, letting the energy flow down my spine that arched towards him on instinct. His hips never stopped, and I could tell by the way his breath hitched and his fingers grew tighter around my neck that the new angle was as wonderful for him as it was for me.

“You look so sweet when you let go of every ounce of self-preservation and dignity you have and put your life in my hands,” he whispered with an affection that almost seemed odd considering the context. But then there was something else in his moans, a genuine gentleness that made my already arrhythmic heart beat faster.

“You know I’ll take care of you, don’t you?” he asked as his movements stayed calm and careful. Loving and safe.

I didn’t even notice my eyes had closed, but it ultimately didn’t matter. Because when I opened them, I saw the same man that existed in every image behind my eyelids. The only indication he got that I was still capable of communication was the gentle curve of my lips that dropped open in a pleased sigh as his hips continued a slow, tender pace.

It still felt like too much, but not in a bad way. It was too much in the sense that I was reminded once again just how ruined he’d made me. And the smug little shit knew it, too.

“You don’t have a single thought in that pretty little head, do you?” he cooed, dragging his hand up the column of my throat to force his fingers against my tongue. True to my word, I didn’t try to fight back. I soaked the digits that still tasted like me with my jaw left open. His pupils dilated as he watched the spit pool in my mouth that awaited his instruction.

“You just want to be used. Like the perfect little doll you are.”

Unlike my own, his smile was more of a smirk. A crooked, ever so slightly wicked quirk that made my muscles tense around him in their own version of an affirmative answer. He took it, happily. His body crashed into mine, but it merely felt like an extension of myself returning home like the waves meeting the shore. I could feel him claiming his rightful place at the deepest parts of me, making his home with every powerful motion of his hips.

I could hardly breathe, let alone think. I didn’t want to. It felt unnecessary.

“My sweet little girl,” he muttered with an unbelievably chaste kiss in the center of my forehead, “You’d do anything to make your daddy happy.”

I felt detached from myself in a way that didn’t feel me with fear or pain. I could feel myself through his hands, strong and working the pliable flesh of my thighs as he held them up so that he could drive into me harder.

His eyes, also only half open, burned with intensity. I could feel the determination, the undying desire to grant me a serenity that no one else could. His need for me to feel safe and loved with the seemingly contradictory brutality.

But it wasn’t contradictory. The power behind every movement, the insistence on being as close to me as he possibly could, might have caused some physical pain, but it was nothing compared to the pleasure of sharing this space with him. Of sharing my body with him just to see what he would do with it. I already knew, but I wanted to feel it again and again. Because with each stroke of his hand and thrust of his hips, I felt it.

Spencer had free rein to do whatever he wanted, and he chose to love me.

“I’m so close. You know what I want,” he pleaded despite holding all of the power. He handed it to me with a low groan, trying to kiss my lips while he commanded, “Do it. Come for me.”

My body obeyed his command, falling to pieces around him with shockwaves breaking over every inch of me. My vision went white, crafting a halo of light around him as he also found himself reaching a peak that seemed different than the times we’d shared before.

I tried to figure out what had changed, what about this time made it unique. But as the euphoria faded, all I saw staring back at me was the same face as always, radiating a joy and understanding that warmed damp, chilly skin. Spencer’s release provided a similar warmth within me, and my body clung to him even tighter despite the exhaustion.

My breathing took its time to even out, but I was in no rush to leave him. I would have stayed like that forever, with Spencer covering me like the silliest, boniest blanket. If it wasn’t for the dead weight he eventually dropped on me, we probably would’ve spent the whole day lost in the covers. But he could thank the scars for me being a little less forgiving.

Of course, thankful is not the word to describe him at all. Whiny was more like it. Even as I turned our bodies together so that I would still be sitting on his lap, he did nothing but groan and bitch about it. That is, until I silenced him with a kiss that barely brushed over his lips.

That was enough to turn his frown back to the dopey smile I loved so much.

“Happy birthday, old man,” I purred, enjoying the way his hands grabbed me tighter at the loving nickname. But age wasn’t what was on his mind. I could see it in the way his eyes tore past my defenses and he held me closer like we could actually become one if he tried hard enough.

“I’m so in love with you, it’s infuriating,” he whispered.

“I’ve heard that one before.”

Spencer wasn’t in a joking mood, though. All of his humor seemed to be expended earlier in the day, and now he was just left with all the mushy, romantic innards that I normally kept at bay.

It wasn’t that bad, though, I thought as his hands framed my face so our foreheads would touch. There were worse things to be trapped with.

“It’s true,” he mumbled with his voice still high and slurred together, “I look at you and there is just… nothing that can be said that would ever explain the way it feels.”

“Gross,” I joked.

“Get used to it,” he returned. And if that wasn’t enough to make me laugh, he stuck his tongue out in the most childish display I’d seen from him since he’d fucking licked my hand on our picnic. It was also just charming enough that I was willing to let the sappy stuff slide.

“I’ll be nice to you this time,” I grumbled. “But also, speaking of time, you��d better hurry up if you don’t want to do the walk of shame with an audience.”

Spencer’s arms fell limp with a dramatic cry before he used them to cover his face once more.

“Ugh. Go,” he ordered. Despite his words, he still made me fight against greedy hands to wrestle my way out of bed. It would have been smarter to let me go quickly. I really don’t know what he was thinking, but he would learn his mistake soon enough. Because as I was finishing up in the bathroom, I heard a very amused voice chiming down the hall on the other side of the door.

“Good afternoon, Spencer.”

I debated not opening the door and freeing Spencer from the unbelievably uncomfortable position he’d just found himself in, but ultimately decided it was too cruel. Still, the stalling had taken up enough time that the poor guy felt compelled to reply.

And, of course, the only thing he could think to say was a pathetic, high pitched, “Hi.”

Somehow managing to contain the absolutely riotous laughter I felt in my gut, I opened the door with the straightest face I could muster.

It wasn’t enough. Spencer saw the pleasure I took in his humiliation and practically shoved me out of the bathroom to take my place behind the doors. While I found the action endearing in the most awkward way, my roommate was mostly just confused about how the fuck I’d managed to find someone as stupid as me.

“I didn’t know he was coming,” she said once she managed to smile at the silly situation.

Clearing my throat, I tried to sound sincere in my bullshit apology. “Me either, sorry.”

In a way, I think the fact I couldn’t pull myself together worked in my favor. Normally, she would have scolded me (albeit playfully) for not alerting her of what she might be walking in on, but this time, she just tried to withhold the smile that still stretched over her cheeks despite her best efforts.

“You’re fine,” she sighed, giving in to the desire to go against her usual grumpy demeanor before retreating to her own room. “Have fun, you hooligans.”

Once her door clicked shut, I heard shuffling on the other side of the door next to me. Spencer’s shadow was visible from the light peeking out underneath, and I waited a few more restless seconds before I announced, “You can come out now, Spencer.”

Cautiously, the door creaked open just enough for his head to poke out and confirm that I wasn’t trying to trick him.

“I’ve never been a hooligan before,” he said with a bounce in his step and his eyebrows halfway up his face. To think that he was the same man who threatened to arrest me for existing at a nightclub was, in a word, hilarious.

“Well, good news for you,” I purred, and the sound must have reminded him of my more devilish nature, because his jubilance quickly shifted back to an obvious anxiety. I wrapped my arms around him even when it meant that his muscles tensed, dragging him down so I could whisper in his ear, “I was just about to ask if you wanted to help me play hooky.”

“And do what?”

It felt strange to say that I hadn’t really thought about it. That the second I’d seen him I knew that the day would be good and free and fun. That everything felt so perfectly fine that I didn’t even want to challenge it with a schedule.

Spencer looked at me, his answer apparent in the way he started to relax the longer we stayed wrapped up in a shitty apartment hallway. It didn’t matter what I said. Spencer would have followed me, just like I would have done for him.

And without the angst or uncertainty of what could go wrong, there was only one thing left for us to do. With a shrug and pout, I proposed the riskiest plan we’d had yet.

“Whatever we want.”

—————————————————

| Finale |

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