#laetitia cuvier

[buckaroo-blue]

ash818 we're gonna need a beach fic about the two noobs when you get a chance

[ash818]

Sorry to spam your inbox! Did oliver ever learn that Tish once stood between Abby and a loaded gun?

Never be sorry for that!

Oliver learned about that almost as soon as it happened. That’s one of the reasons he was so quick to take her in, both during that story and a few months later when she was in danger.

[ash818]

What did the Queens give Tish as a graduation present? What did Jon (meaning Abby) pick out for Tish? And this is something that's been bugging me rereading the earlier stories: pretty please Oliver's reaction to learning that Tish stood between Abby and a gun, when the Arrow found them. Loving loving Legacy so much!

Tish has learned to accept gifts she considers inappropriately extravagant. She may never be used to them, but after Jon showed her the balance in the trust fund that became available to him on his twenty-sixth birthday, she at least understood the scale he was working on.

For graduation, an appointment with a bespoke dressmaker was one of his subtler presents. Mr. and Mrs. Queen, who are more careful not to overwhelm her, only took her to a very nice dinner.

[ash818]

Y’all, it’s chapter three!

Team Arrow runs down a lead on Paul Kord’s attempted abduction, and nothing goes quite to plan.

[ash818]

hi ash, how are you? Was wondering what Jon and Tish were up to these days?

It is not possible, as it turns out, to involve yourself with only one Queen.

They are all hopelessly tangled in each other’s lives, and to love one of them is to surrender to the rest, who will adopt your troubles as their troubles and your triumphs as their triumphs. Aunt Thea settles in next to you, swirling a glass of wine, and smiles as if she knows your secrets just before deftly teasing them out of you. Mrs. Queen tiptoes up to the edge of her children’s boundaries, but she can’t resist peeking over; mostly, she is too sincere to refuse. Abigail doesn’t even bother to tiptoe. Mr. Queen is the most hands-off, but even he quietly smooths over little difficulties behind your back. You don’t find out that he’s done it until months later, if ever.

So when Mrs. Queen was struggling to find an administrative assistant not long after my graduation, I suppose she found it perfectly natural to ask me.

“I can’t exactly post ‘occasional vigilantism’ as a requirement on LinkedIn,” she told me. “But the secret is safe with you, and you have the requisite skill set. I think you’d be perfect. Ideal. Sans pareil.” She tilted her head faintly. “Did I say that right?”

I tried to be gentle when I pointed out, “My boyfriend’s mother would be my boss.”

“Is that weird?” She wrinkled her nose. “I’m Jon’s boss, and it’s not weird. You know if you get tired of him, you still get to stay. I hope that’s not your concern. You can keep coming to family dinners and everything.”

That honestly had not occurred to me. “Wouldn’t the rest of the office consider it blatant nepotism?”

“With Jon, they got over it as soon as they realized he wasn’t useless. You’ll be fine too.” She leaned closer to me and said earnestly, “Look, I could really use the help.”

I knew as much; Jon had been complaining for months that she shouldn’t be going it alone anymore.

“I know you’re looking for something in your field, but it seems like that might take some time. This is only a first job to get you started and build a little work history, just until you find something better.”

As I said, Mrs. Queen is too sincere to refuse.

When I came into the office to formally accept her offer, she shook my hand across her desk and said, “Don’t breathe a word to Jon. I want to surprise him.”

My first morning at Panoptic, she called Jon into her office to meet her new admin, and she had a good giggle at the look on his face. But the shock wore off in about five minutes, and at the first opportunity, he tried to back me against a wall and put his hands up my shirt.

“This was nowhere in the job description,” I said, once I had worked up some self-control.

“Nope.” He bent down to kiss my neck. “This is just perks.”

It took me longer than it should have to push him backwards, but eventually I managed it. “Your mother did not hire me to make your life more fun.”

“Of course she didn’t. That would be messed up.” He sighed theatrically. “So no bending you over my desk.”

Heat washed through me, and I closed my eyes and let myself imagine it for just a moment. With an effort, I shook my head. “No inappropriate use of any desks.”

In my first week as Felicity Queen’s admin, I learned to navigate her unusual scheduling software, the source code of which she had modified heavily to suit her preferences. I learned to document meetings in her idiosyncratic system, to recognize her frantic hand signal for, “Tell them I’m busy,” and to brew coffee strong enough to wake the dead.

A few of the employees - mostly protectors who had guarded me in the past - welcomed me enthusiastically. The others reserved judgment, and I overheard at least one joke in the break room, speculating on what I had really been hired to do here, which cemented my resolve about desks and the uses thereof.

On my sixth day at Panoptic, I met Jeremy Price Longwood.

“I’m sorry, who?” Mr. Queen asked at dinner the previous night.

“Think Chris Hemsworth,” Mrs. Queen explained. “Or Pratt or Evans or Pine. Really, any of the Chrises.”

Mr. Queen blinked, just once, where a man less stoic might have grimaced in distaste. “Ah.”

“We’re guarding his face,” Jon said. “Specifically his face. It’s insured for half a million.”

“Much more than that, certainly,” I said.

He gave me a look.

The next morning, Mrs. Queen called together the team delegated to Mr. Longwood’s case. “He’s in Starling to shoot a Romeo and Juliet ‘reimagining,’ as if we needed another one of those. Ever since that werewolf movie, he’s been seeing an uptick in creepers. Nothing he hasn’t handled before, but we’re going to keep somebody nearby. We don’t want some poor deluded soul running on set and shoving a bundle of love letters down his shirt. It’s embarrassing, and he’s had enough of that this year.”

“Enough love letters down his shirt?” said Ms. Ramirez.

“Enough embarrassment.” Mrs. Queen gave a little shudder. “The werewolf thing. Poor guy.”

He had his shirt off for half the movie. Personally, I thought he had nothing at all to be embarrassed about.

“Sounds pretty standard,” Jon said, getting to his feet. “Who wants the first evening shift?”

Not half an hour later, the man himself came striding through the front doors with a small styrofoam cup in his hands, and he came straight to me at the front desk. “Hey, sorry I’m late,” he said. “Y’all know the numbers have rubbed off the elevator buttons?”

On film, he was lovely, but in person, he was devastating. It took me a moment to answer him. “I apologize for the confusion. Can I get you anything? Water or coffee?”

He raised the styrofoam cup. “Your neighbors one floor up - the divorce law firm? - they hooked me up.” He gave me a conspiratorial smile, and my heart skipped a beat. “No one tell my wife I walked in there.”

I would have loved to joke right back. All I managed was, “Of course not.” Hopefully my cheeks weren’t visibly pink. “I’ll show you to the conference room and lets Mrs. Queen know you’re here.”

“How did you find out about us?” was among Mrs. Queen’s standard battery of questions for new clients.

“A friend gave me your name,” said Mr. Longwood. “You came recommended by Bruce Wayne, so he figured you must be the real deal.”

Mrs. Queen looked unduly pleased by that, considering.

By the time he left an hour later, half the staff was as charmed as I was.

“Aw, he’s gonna be easy,” Darius said. “I can already tell. No clubbing, no foolishness, no babysitting his drunk ass. This dude lives in the gym and eats unsalted chicken breast.”

“Certainly looks that way,” Ms. Ramirez agreed. “Did you hear he called me ma’am? I love when these Southern boys do that. It means they’ll fucking listen.”

Once everyone else had cleared out, I turned to Mrs. Queen. “Didn’t Mr. Queen and Mr. Wayne have a bit of a falling out?”

“They did, but he never fell out with Panoptic. Bruce used to have Dig guarding him every time he was in Starling.”

“Was that, ah, strictly necessary?” I said delicately. “For Batman?”

“Of course not. Bruce just thought it was funny.”

Within a few days, Mr. Longwood left us all utterly disarmed.

Except for Jon. Very few people can disarm Jonathan Queen, and Jeremy Price Longwood is not among them. After a week of protective services and one more office meeting, Jon’s ultimate assessment was: “What a cheeseball.”

“I think he’s sincere,” I said.

“That’s because he’s a skillful cheeseball.”

“Ah, of course, he fooled the silly little girl,” I said, crossing my arms. “But you see right through him with an unbiased eye.”

“He makes you all fluttery. Admit it.”

“Darius and Ms. Ramirez also found him courteous and friendly, and you can’t accuse either of them of getting fluttery.”

“Jones likes anyone who pays for lunch, and Ramirez likes dumb golden retrievers who sit and stay on command.”

“You weren’t this mean about the oil exec making business trips to Angola - the one who almost definitely had a genuine personality disorder. But this one, you can’t stand.”

“This one expects me to like him. The BP guy had the decency not to give a damn.”

I sighed. “All right, Jonathan.”

It’s not difficult to understand, in the end. Jon is a good-looking man, if I do say so myself, and he is in fantastic shape. But he lives in a permanent state of three-day scruff, and he will always look more boyish than debonair. He is in the kind of shape optimized to slam into you like a hammer, not the kind engineered to look good on camera.

Perfectly gelled and professionally dressed Jeremy Price Longwood is standing right there, and of course Jon is supremely irritated by him. It’s like when I have to stand next to willowy Elaine Diggle, magnified severalfold.

“Tell me something,” I said, mostly as a distraction. “What was so funny about asking Mr. Diggle to guard people who didn’t exactly need guarding?”

“Oh, that.” Jon shook his head. “My dad spent years pretending to lose sparring matches to Dig, just to make sure everybody knew what a helpless marshmallow he was. Drove Dig up the wall.”

I never quite understood the dynamics of combat sports. “Why would he care, if it was all part of their cover?”

“You know when you get old enough to realize your dad is letting you win at Battleship or whatever?”

No, I couldn’t say I knew how that felt.

Jon cleared his throat. “It’s condescending as hell. Especially when he thinks it’s hilarious, and you can’t make him stop laughing, because if you try he’s just going to lay you out on the floor again.”

“He did this to you as well,” I surmised.

“He wears ties and reading glasses,” Jon said, rolling his eyes. “He’s just a boring middle-aged public servant, play-fighting to stay in shape. He doesn’t even know how to break someone’s neck. Honest.”

“You Queens are a strange tribe.”

Jon shrugged. “You joined. What does that make you?”

What, indeed?

That summer, I learned Panoptic inside out. I took notes on Mrs. Queen’s consultations with a businessman who traveled extensively in Mexico, with one of Laurel Lance’s attorneys recently assigned to an organized crime case, and with a woman who wore a cast on her left wrist and who had recently procured a restraining order against her husband.

Most of the people who came through our doors were terrified for one reason or another. Mrs. Queen coaxed information out of them with a practiced cheerfulness that should have felt inappropriate, but which they mostly found comforting. Jon did it much more bluntly, which occasionally rubbed people the wrong way, but more often inspired shockingly unreserved trust.

“That’s one of the upsides of a runaway mouth,” Mrs. Queen said ruefully. “People notice you’ve fumbled the reins, and they assume that’s the same thing as honesty.”

I shook my head. “I think it’s because they can tell he’s genuinely listening. Most people wait for their turn to talk.”

“You know,” Mrs. Queen tipped her head at me, “not one of his teachers, through twenty-ish years of school, ever singled out listening as one of his strengths.”

“Mr. Queen is the same way,” I pointed out. “He looks you right in the eyes, and you feel like you have his complete and undivided attention.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Even when he’s actually thinking about the fastest way to get you out of his office.” She grinned, swiveling back to her computer. “Oliver worked hard at his politician face.”

By September, I knew more about my boyfriend’s mother than anyone reasonably should.

I knew that she could only stare at a screen for three hours before she got a headache. She took her disgusting coffee with a disgusting amount of artificial sweetener. She got anxious before Skype meetings with Dig and Lyla, because this was their baby she was raising. She wore a size six or eight, depending on the brand, and a nice man named Warren dyed her hair every seven weeks.

“I suspect Thursday nights are date nights,” I mused out loud to Jon one afternoon. “She rarely leaves after five, and she sometimes sends me to Martin’s Wine Cellar first.”

“That’s nice,” he said vaguely. “Thursdays are Bordeaux sex. Everybody loves Bordeaux sex.” A few moments later, he looked up from his glassbook to frown at me. “Do you think my family has boundary issues?”

I shrugged and went back to my backlog of emails.

Over the course of Romeo and Juliet’s shooting schedule, Panoptic intercepted a few cringeworthy letters to Mr. Longwood, and our protectors turned away the odd paparazzo or pushy fan, but altogether the job was as easy as Darius predicted.

“Longwood’s got a solid right straight too,” Darius said. “Apparently stage fighting isn’t complete bullshit.”

Mrs. Queen narrowed her eyes at him. “You’ve been beating up your principal?”

I glanced at Jon, who looked both annoyed and intrigued.

“He’s gone to work on some strike mitts with me, that’s all,” Darius said. “I told you, this dude lives at the gym.”

“Just don’t mess up his face,” Jon advised with mock seriousness. “Be very careful with the face.”

“You want to take a swing at him,” I said, as soon as Darius left the room. “Don’t pretend.”

His shrug was not denial.

“He’s an excellent client, and you may not hit him,” Mrs. Queen said. “No matter how annoyingly pretty he is.”

“That’s not the - “

“Yes, it is.” On her way out the door, she patted his cheek, and then she nodded meaningfully at me. “She thinks you’re adorable. Good enough, right?”

She winked at me, and then she headed for her office.

Jon rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed heavily. “I think the boss just gave us permission to flirt at work. I don’t like it.”

I gave him a couple of consoling pats. “It’s just perks, darling.”

When Romeo and Juliet wrapped, there was no call for Mr. Longwood to return to our office, but he dropped by to say thank you and sign autographs. He had that kind of class. For Jon, he offered an especially strong handshake and his most sparkling Southern smile - “Thank you for all you do” - and Jon returned it warmly.

As soon as the door closed behind Longwood, Jon muttered, “Extremely punchable face, though.”

Mrs. Queen and I exchanged a smile, and we went back to work.

[ash818]

Waaaait, are they officially living together?? When did THAT happened???

Oops, I didn’t mean to imply that.

It just seemed likely to me that Tish spends enough time at Jon’s place to get annoyed with his wet towels on the floor and his dirty workout clothes wherever he happened to take them off and his protein smoothies crusted on the blender.

[ash818]

Would wish be willing to share her recipe for lait chaud a la cannelle? Everytime I read about her making it I want to make it and taste it!

Tish:

It’s so simple that I don’t actually have a recipe, and there are endless variations.

In a saucepan over high heat, mix a cup or two of milk with a dash of vanilla and whatever sweetener you prefer. (I like brown sugar or honey best.) When the mixture comes to a simmer, sometimes I add a splash of half and half for decadence. Then I whisk in cinnamon, and sometimes nutmeg or ginger or allspice or cloves. Once or twice, I’ve melted in some chocolate chips.

It looks quite pretty served with a cinnamon stick or grated nutmeg on top.

[ash818]

Anon asked:

Love hearing stuff from Tish's POV & despite how greedy it is there's (at least) three scenes I'd love to see from her POV if you ever got round to them: when Jon woke up after she & he had been held by Risdon and she'd found out he was the Arrow; the night of the riots when she first thought of kissing him(per previous drabble from her Pov); when he came to see her in the hospital after her poisoning.

Here is the second of those scenes, set during chapter ten of The Man Under the Hood.

“Hey, have you seen Jonny?”

“Not for an hour at least.”

Abby glances around the room fretfully, and her knuckles whiten on the doorframe.

Tish sits up, frowning at her. “I promise he’s not hiding in the closet.”

“Right.” Abby shakes her head, shifting anxiously from foot to foot. “Sorry, I’ve just run out of places he could be, and he’s not answering his phone.”

Mayor-Elect Queen has already been summoned to the protest lines, and the news alerts popping up on Tish’s phone have progressed from Unrest at Bioethics Conference to Duwamish Blocked Off and finally to Fires Set in Nuxalk Corridor. She is fairly certain she knows where Jon has gone, but she offers up a perfectly reasonable alternative: “Perhaps he just needed a little time to himself.”

“Then he should have told someone,” Abby grumbles, pulling her phone from her pocket for a quick check. “This is not a good time to disappear. I promise you, if Uncle Roy were here, he’d be pissed.”

Tish hardly knew the man, but his name gives her a twinge anyway. You can’t spend days with a family, immersed in their grief, and not feel some of it yourself.

The afternoon she first sat down in Roy Harper’s office at Panoptic, he wore a stylish side part, a reassuring smile, and the grace of a man very much at ease in his good suit. You’d never guess that the Glades raised him, or that he didn’t learn to knot a tie properly until his thirties.

“Mr. Harper,” she said, “I didn’t feel unsafe until men with earpieces started following me around everywhere.”

He came around his desk to lean against the front of it. “Look, chances are nothing happens. I’ve read a lot of hate mail, and what your dad’s been getting? Ten to one it’s all bullshit.” The word sounded strange coming from just above that beautiful necktie. Apparently the Glades still shone through sometimes.

“So I should only be a little bit worried.”

He shook his head. “Nah. We’re going to do the worrying.” Then he smiled at her, and oh, he might have been a married man thirty years her senior, but that smile could give anyone a little flutter. “We’re not going to let anything happen to you, Miss Cuvier.”

When Jon told her, with a shoddy attempt at secrecy and discretion, that some of his “colleagues” would be watching over her while she met with a mob captain, she was grateful that one of them would be Mr. Harper.

They buried him this morning. For a data library full of bleeding edge medical research, the Black Hand was willing to torture and murder. Papa was willing to let her die. And Roy Harper stood up straight and took a bullet through the neck.

Tish is in so far over her head, she doesn’t even know which way to kick for the surface. She is in a house full of strange and extraordinary people with more money than God, more tragic backstory than a Bronte novel, and far more hugging than she is accustomed to. They discuss painful, wrenching family matters in front of her, and they scoff every time she offers them their privacy. In their home she feels snug and safe in the depths of an exotic foreign country, comfortable and uncomfortable by turns.

Now Jonathan has disappeared, while somewhere out there in the dark, a sociopath is running loose, and he knows the Arrow’s name.

One problem at a time.

Tish and Abby make another pass through the house, which is littered with empty glasses and leftover trays from the funeral reception. They find Mrs. Queen at the kitchen table, talking very quietly to her sister-in-law, who hardly seems to register a word.

Mrs. Queen frowns at Abby. “He wasn’t upstairs?” Her frown deepens at the answering head shake.

Thea Queen leans her elbows on the table and rubs her temples. Weariness is the first human emotion Tish has seen her express all day, aside from anger. A missing nephew is one more complication than she is equipped to handle tonight.

Mrs. Queen presses her lips together, and she gives her ponytail an irritable little toss. “Baby gates. I swear, we’re going to go back to leashes and baby gates.” She lays her hand over Thea’s - they all touch each other so casually - and says, “I’m sorry to run out on you, but - “

“Go,” Thea says, waving her off. “Go on.”

Mrs. Queen gathers her coat and purse, hugs her daughter, and heads for the door.

After it closes behind her, Abby sinks into her vacated chair and casts an anxious, sideways glance at her aunt. “We’re assuming he snuck out,” she says, hunching her shoulders and hugging herself.  “Remember that time Mom disappeared out of our backyard while three hundred people and a whole team of bodyguards were here?”

Thea reaches out and squeezes Abby’s shoulder. “He snuck out, baby. It’s all right.”

Tish starts gathering plates, and Thea and Abby only surface from their separate reveries at the sound of running water. “Don’t wash dishes,” they tell her, but what else is there to do? Stare into space or compulsively refresh the newsfeed.

Fifteen minutes later, a text burbles up on Abby’s phone.

“Found him,” she reads aloud. “He decided to pick up an evening shift.”

“So he’s fine,” Thea says wearily. “Taking care of business.”

Abby turns to her in startled indignation. “His arm was in a sling this morning.”

“If he’d asked my permission, I wouldn’t have given him the go-ahead.” Thea heaves a sigh and slumps lower in her wheelchair. “But he didn’t.”

Tish has already made bets with herself as to which of Jon’s various mentors wore the hood before him, and she revises the odds on Roy Harper drastically upwards. To his wife, these are old, familiar fears.

Not so for Abby. “He just took off,” she fumes. “Didn’t bother to tell anyone where.”

Eyes closed, Thea nods. “Yeah, hooding up with no one on Watchtower is a dumb risk.”

Surprise flickers in Abby’s face; clearly she hadn’t thought of the extra risk. She turns a shade paler and says, “It’s just, I thought the top secret classified confidential sneaking around was over.”

With the city on fire, she’s angry about being excluded. Sweet as she is, the girl is fifteen and very much the baby of her family.

“He’s got backup now, and there’s nothing we can do to help from here,” Thea says, forcing herself a little more upright and gripping the handrims of her wheelchair. “I’m going to bed. Wake me up if something happens.”

“We’ll let you know,” Tish says quietly. She does not have Thea’s nerves of steel, and she knows better than to believe there is any chance of sleep tonight.

Thea spins on the spot and heads for the doorway, where she pauses and glances over her shoulder. “Scratch that. Wake me up if you need me.”

Tish takes one more look at her drawn face and defeated posture, and she resolves only to wake her in the event of disaster, death, or dismemberment.

At the last second, Abby hurries to catch up and hug her aunt. Tish hears a muffled murmur.

“Love you too, junebug,” says Thea, and kisses her head. “Thanks for everything you did today.”

When she’s gone, Abby gives Tish an embarrassed little shrug and says, “I didn’t really do anything.”

Yes, she did. Tish watched her do it all day, hovering near whichever family member needed her most. It was not always the person whom Tish judged closest to crying. In fact, most often it was stoic Mr. Queen whose arm Abby linked hers through at the funeral or whose shoulder she headbutted at the reception.

Abby projects the evening news on the kitchen wall, and Tish puts the kettle on. If they plan to hold a vigil, they’ll need tea.

The helicopter cam pans over a burning police car, trash cans blazing in the streets, and shattered glass glittering in the reddish light. Chanting devolves to shouting then somehow resolves to chanting again. Reporters stand in front of destruction, describe the obvious, and portentously enumerate the things “we do not know at this time.”

No one set a single fire until they found out about Papa. Tish turns away and starts hunting for Earl Grey.

“Dad’s somewhere out there,” Abby says, eyes peeled for him. “I don’t know what he thinks he’s going to do in that crowd. Who could even hear him?”

The kettle whistles. Just as Tish takes it off the heat, the news anchor fills the screen with solemn urgency. “Breaking news. Just a few moments ago, an unknown gunman opened fire on City Hall. Three shots were fired, and Mayor Lee has sustained at least one gunshot wound. He is currently being rushed to medical help. The severity of his condition is unclear at this time, but - ”

“They’re shooting mayors now?” Abby sucks in a deep breath. “That’s on the table?”

They will shoot at teenage girls, or they will break their arms to make their fathers talk. They will pay each other in people, and they will kill for secrets pried out of tortured bodies. Everyone you know wears a mask, and sometimes when they take it off, they only become more strange to you.

Everything is on the table.

Onscreen, the anchors exchange worried platitudes, and the crawl at the bottom of the screen announces street closures. “We have word from the convention center that this news is being badly received by the gathered protesters. We are hoping to get some clarification on - ”

Then, a sudden cut to -

“ - and I’m not going anywhere.”

It’s a familiar voice, booming across Duwamish Square from a source Tish can’t pin down. The GNN camera drone swoops across the convention center and zooms in on the Arrow, who casts an imposing silhouette on the concrete facade behind him. He is lit up bright and larger than life, and his face is half shadow.

“When this is over, the conference speakers and half of these protesters are going home. Those of us who have to stay and pick up the pieces - what kind of city do you want?”

Tish’s brain stalls out momentarily. “What is he…”

“Talking the crowd down from something stupid,” Abby supplies.

He has no real power here, Tish does not say. All they have to do is ignore him.

But they don’t. He makes a surprisingly punchy speech, and with thirty years of history giving his words weight… Starling listens. And then, with a parting one-liner in which Tish recognizes Jon Queen for a moment, the Arrow disappears again.

Abby seems totally unsurprised that he pulled it off, but the news anchors are, by the standards of a stoic profession, absolutely over the moon.

“The Arrow hasn’t addressed the city like this in over thirty years,” they say, and old footage flares to life onscreen. The man standing atop the car in the wreckage of the Nuxalk corridor, yelling across the crowd, looks like he could be Jon, brought there by a time machine.

But it isn’t over.

Brawls have broken out in the streets, and masked vigilantes are out in force. Abby cheers at a glimpse of the Canary, and a cameraman onsite audibly gasps when he catches a few frames of the Batman.

The original Batman was active long before Tish was born, and his successor only appeared in her senior year of high school. Gotham was abuzz with the news, and Papa, who liked to hold forth at the dinner table, vocally disapproved. After the fourth or fifth boring tirade on the subject, Tish developed a vague affection for the Batman out of silent spite.

Now she listens to the reports of him breaking up street fights, and she feels a surge of pride.

GNN locates the Arrow again quickly, and they cut to a drone feed in the Central Business District, where an office building is burning. Fire hoses sweep the ravaged top floors above the flashing lights and sirens and ladders. “A pipe bomb was detonated on the fifteenth floor,” says the anchor. “And a moment ago, the Arrow was spotted touching down on the roof.”

“I don’t see him,” Abby says anxiously.

“There.”

He rappels down from the roof, quick and confident, and on the third floor from the top he shoves powerfully off the wall and then cannonballs feet-first into a window. Cracks shoot through it to the frame. He shoves off again, and this time - smash. He tumbles into the smoke and disappears.

“The vigilante has entered the building!” the reporter repeats several times, and they replay the footage in fuzzy closeup. “The Arrow is inside!”

Tish only realizes she’s holding her breath when Abby releases hers.

“Did he just break into a burning building?” Abby whispers in abject horror.

“It’ll be all right,” Tish says, wrapping an arm around her again. “You saw how he climbed in, like he’s practiced a hundred times. He knows what he’s doing.”

“What he’s doing is stupid!”

On the right-hand side of the building, a dark shape swings down from above and clings to the ornate facade. The Batman looks shadowy and dramatic by the light of a burning office building, and he skitters a few meters sideways as easy as walking on flat ground. He finds a window already busted in by the initial explosion, and he slips inside.

“There,” Tish says, with forced optimism. “Jon’s got backup.”

Abby only shrinks deeper into herself. She cannot have failed to notice that the Bat and Terry McGinnis showed up in town at the same time, or that one is watching the Arrow’s back as closely as the other watches Jon’s. It feels like bad manners to discuss it out loud, so Tish only squeezes Abby tighter.

“I can’t see them,” Abby says.

“Give them a moment.”

Abby takes a deep, purposeful breath, and for a few seconds she manages to keep still. The onsite reporter provides useless, repetitive narration while they watch and wait.

And wait.

When the suspense starts to fray her nerves, Tish closes her eyes and asks for a little courage. Lord, you are my refuge and strength, an ever-present help in times of trouble. Watch over them and -

“They should have come out by now,” Abby says, and she writhes out of Tish’s grip as if she cannot stand the inside of her own skin.

“I have no idea how long these things are supposed to take. Just give them time.”

An almighty crash sends dust and flames blooming from the windows, up at the rightmost corner of the building. Metal shrieks, bricks crumble from the facade.

Tish jumps in her seat, and a horrible nauseous flutter goes through her whole body. Next to her, Abby sucks in a high-pitched gasp that sounds almost painful.

The reporter onsite startles too, then puts his fingers to his ear. “The fourteenth floor has partially collapsed.” He pauses, listens. Continues: “It has already been cleared. I repeat, the collapsed floor was cleared. No evacuees or first responders remain on that level.”

But Abby doesn’t seem to hear him. She has frozen like a prey animal, white and wide-eyed. Tish has seen her this way once before, and she tries to stop the anxiety attack before it can escalate.

“No one was on that floor,” she says, putting her arm around Abby again and holding her firmly. “Jon wasn’t on that floor.” She isn’t certain that’s true, because it’s unlikely the fire department can precisely track the Batman or the Arrow’s whereabouts. But there was no reason for them to be on that floor if no one else was. “It’s all right.” Breathe in, breathe out. Big and dramatic enough for Abby to feel it and fall into rhythm. “It’s all right, he knows what he’s doing.”

“I hate this,” Abby whispers after a few moments, and if she can talk, Tish counts that as success. “I really hate this.”

Tish reaches for the remote. “We don’t have to watch.”

Abby twists around to look her in the eyes. “It’s Jonny.”

So it is.

Twelve days ago, he and Tish nearly died together. For the rest of her life, however she may feel about him, she will never be indifferent to Jonathan Queen. She can’t look away any more than Abby can.

It is probably all right to say this out loud: “Lord, please watch over them and keep them from harm.”

Abby turns to her in surprise, but then she nods, leans into Tish’ side, and says, “And maybe send us some chill, if you’ve got extra.”

Twenty seconds grind by like twenty minutes. Finally, the reporter announces, “The vigilantes have just exited the building on the south side! They have a survivor with them.”

Coverage flips to a drone cam swinging around the corner, and through the smoke a green hood and a black cowl come into view down on the sidewalk. The Batman and the Arrow are each supporting one end of a makeshift stretcher. The woman strapped to it is holding tightly to the Arrow’s wrist.

Abby’s breath leaves her all in a rush, and the first thing she says is, “Is that a coffee table they put her on?”

Faintly, Tish nods. “I think so. With the legs snapped off.”

First responders rush to take the coffee table off the vigilantes’ hands, and on the sofa the girls relax against each other.

Then the Batman and the Arrow turn right back around and run into the smoke.

Abby lets out a disbelieving noise.

“Oh,” Tish says quietly.

“Damn it, Jonny.”

It’s a very long night.

For hours they track the news coverage, straining for a glimpse or a mention of anyone they know. Six times over, they watch the same clip of the Black Canary ending a street brawl with two swipes of her staff. They watch shaky cell phone footage of the Batman scaling a fire escape to fall on a cornered cop before he can pull his gun, and the surrounding masked men scatter.

“That’s right,” Tish says with a smile. “Give them a little Gotham.”

Mr. Queen appears periodically, often standing outside one of SCPD’s mobile units, deep in conference with Detective Hall. A few times, he gives a terse update to the cameras. Yes, this fire has been doused. No, we have no further information on Mayor Lee’s condition. Please, for your safety, we ask that you avoid the following streets.

He does not have the flashy presence of the Arrow, standing on high with hundreds of watts of spotlight making him larger than life. But he commands attention as though it were his due, and he gives orders in the comfortable expectation that they will be obeyed. Tish wonders if he learned that in a board room.

It would be impolite to ask Abby where else he might have learned it, especially if she has no such suspicions herself.

They go through two pots of tea and one of coffee, and they watch the flames burn themselves out. An hour after the city has fallen quiet, both girls are still too wired and wrung out to sleep.

Besides, they’re waiting on someone.

At sunup, Jon eases through the back door, moving stiffly and holding his injured arm close to his body.

Tish has been watching him all night, and that feels strange. All she wants now is to mother him, and that is strange too. She wants to sit him down, administer bruise cream, and feed him soup and ibuprofen. He looks like one good hug would turn him to complete marshmallow - perhaps the kind of hug he gave her the night Risdon came to Papa’s house, right after she watched enviously as Abby walked into Mr. Queen’s arms. She isn’t sure she has the right, and besides, someone else has precedence. She looks to Abby.

Who promptly snaps, “Don’t ever do that again.”

Jon tips his head back, and his hooded eyes would look insolent if you didn’t know how many consecutive hours he’d been awake. “Do what?”

“Disappear.”

Tish presses her lips together while Abby fusses at him. Had anyone else greeted him with a lecture, they would have been getting off easy with a sarcastic dismissal. But for Abby he stands there and takes it. In fact, he takes it very much to heart.

Funny how everything he says sounds more sincere when he’s saying it to her.

Finally, curt with exhaustion, Abby says good night and goes upstairs. She leaves her dirty dishes on the counter, as her brother and her aunt often do. Mr. and Mrs. Queen will be annoyed if they come home to sticky plates and mugs. Automatically Tish gathers them up.

“Hey, um.” Jon gives one last guilty glance to the doorway she disappeared through. “How bad?”

It’s difficult to explain how intensely Abby seems to feel everything - as if her nerves have been stripped bare, and there is no layer of protection between herself and the world. It is not Jon’s fault, and Tish doesn’t want him looking so miserable over it. Gently, she says, “She was pretty upset.”

“Like, piano lid upset?”

She is tempted to lie, but finds that she can’t when he is looking directly at her. “I was worried for a minute, but no.”

He collapses onto a stool at the kitchen counter. “God damn it.”

There is only one thing to do now, which is the same thing Mama used to do when someone was at her kitchen table in need of comfort. This will require a whisk, a saucepan, and the high quality milk and cream in the fridge. The rest depends on whatever is hiding in the spice cabinet.

Tish pulls down vanilla and honey, and with her back to Jon, she says, “We watched you on the news.” Then, because someone ought to tell him: “You did some really incredible things last night, you know that?”

He only grunts in reply. Then he deflates, his head falls onto his arms, and he makes more discontented noises while she searches for whole nutmeg and a little grinder.

The ritual of lait chaud a la cannelle is soothing in itself, and by the time Tish has frothed up two mugs of it, she is feeling warm and a little drowsy. She sets one down next to him. “Here.”

He gives her a look. “Stop being nice to me.”

It is what she has been feeling since the night the Queens took her in. She still cannot fathom why they have decided to make her safety their responsibility, and every day she wants to tell them, Thank you, but that’s enough. Don’t pour on more kindness I’ll never be able to repay.

So she answers Jon just as they have, with the same heedless good humor. “Nope.” And she dares to pet him a little bit, the way his mother or his sister or his aunt probably would, if any of them were here.

He sighs deeply, his shoulders unknit, and he drinks what she made for him. It’s an odd thing to take pride in, but she does.

Then, almost casually, he leans his head against her arm. She blinks in surprise and holds perfectly still, as if a wild bird were eating from her palm. His cheek is cool against her upper arm, and she can feel his breath on her skin.

It would be easy to lean down and kiss him, if she wanted to.

Before another thought can follow that one, she whispers, “Go get some sleep.”

Wordlessly he heads upstairs, and she clears away the dishes.

[ash818]

Can I ask why Tish still calls them Mr and Mrs Queen after everything they've been through together?

The in-universe explanation is that she is, by temperament and upbringing, a prim, proper princess who uses Judith Martin’s prescribed forms of address and doesn’t feel comfortable calling her incredibly accomplished, esteemed elders by their first names.

The meta answer is that the writer is from a region and culture where sir and ma’am are still used without sarcasm. Growing up, all my friends’ parents were Mr or Ms Smith to me, until I was invited to call them the somewhat more familiar Mr John or Miss Jane. To me it felt disrespectful for Tish to address the Queens by their first names unadorned.

The Mr or Miss Firstname construction is a Southernism mostly used by young children, so I went with Mr and Mrs.

Tish is from Gotham, which I’ve chosen to write as analogous to New York City, and now that I’m thinking about it, this usage might stick out like a sore thumb there. It might sound strange to Starlingers’ ears too, up there in the Pacific Northwest.

Anybody from around there want to throw in their two cents?

[ash818]

it's breaking my heart how aware Tish is that she wasn't loved like Abby and Jon were. Are the Queen parents and kids aware of how she feels/?

Tish:

But I was, once. I do remember what it feels like. I don’t know if that makes it easier or harder to go without.

Felicity:

I was listening on the comm when her father let Ana Desilva count down from zero. I heard the click when Risdon pulled the trigger. I know it outraged Jon, and it shocked the hell out of me.

I can imagine what it did to Tish.

I don’t think it matters how old you are when he turns his back. It’s not just pain, it’s also panic. The idea that he could stop loving you, or love something else more... it feels like one of the foundations of the earth just crumbled away underneath you. How do you trust anyone, ever again?

So, yes, we get it. Oliver certainly knows why Tish mists up after he does something fatherly for her, and I’ve tried to explain to him why she’s so skittish about it beforehand.

[ash818]

By anon’s request here:

“Jon’s awake?” Tish says, hovering in the doorway of Mrs. Queen’s home office. The hoarseness of her own voice surprises her.

Mrs. Queen offers up a wan smile. “He was for a little bit. You want to see him?”

Tish has not seen him since dawn, when Mr. Diggle and Mr. Queen carried him through the back door on a simple plastic backboard that looked odd in civilian hands. He was wrapped in a gray blanket, and he was nearly as pale and bruised-looking as Papa laid out under bright lights on the medical examiner’s table.

Abby got to her feet, just as Mrs. Queen and Elaine Diggle came through the door. Mrs. Queen held up a hand and said a preemptive, “It’s all right. He’s going to be fine.”

“He doesn’t look fine,” Abby said. “What happened?”

Tish had known the whole time. She had curled up on the sofa where Mr. Diggle left her, and she had watched Abby get more and more worked up about what the hell happened to Jonny. Knew. Said nothing.

For hours, said nothing and nothing. Felt - cold.

“We’re going to let him explain when he can,” Mr. Queen said, making the kind of extremely deliberate eye contact that would force Tish’s eyes to the floor if it were aimed at her. Abby, however, just looked back with an open, searching expression, as if she’d believe anything her father told her right then. “For the moment, let’s just focus on getting him taken care of.”

“Why isn’t he at a hospital?”

“Abby,” said Mrs. Queen, in a voice flat with exhaustion, and her eyes shone with tears. “You will get an explanation. Soon.”

Tish reached for Abby’s wrist and tugged her gently down onto the sofa next to her. The whole tired, miserable procession disappeared upstairs.

In the twenty-four hours since, Tish hasn’t spoken once, not even to answer Abby’s kindly meant questions and condolences. She has slept only briefly, because she’s been startled awake repeatedly by a gun at her temple. Click.

Perhaps that’s why her voice sounds so strange in her own ears. “If he’s feeling up to it, I’d like to talk to him.”

Mrs. Queen nods. “Next time he wakes up, I’ll come get you.”

Sleeping off a beating and near-drowning and gunshot wound apparently takes some time. It’s a few hours before Tish gets the go-ahead, which should be plenty of time to collect her thoughts.

And yet, when she leans in Jon’s doorway and finds him awake and propped up on pillows, she cannot think of a single thing to say except the idiotically obvious, “How are you feeling?”

He gives that the attention it deserves, which is none. “Have a seat.”

She takes the armchair right at the bedside, and she does not know how to begin. This close, she can see his eyes are red with burst blood vessels, and bruises are blooming on his brow and cheekbone. She remembers the noises he made when he got them.

How do you talk to an acquaintance, knowing how they sound when they drown?

“Relax, princess.”

Ah. He’s going to treat this as completely and totally normal. That’s how. “No, thank you. Not for a while, I don’t think.”

In the brief silence that follows, he casts about for something to say. Lands on, “I’m sorry about your father.”

Condolences grate like lies. Tish is not sure that even she is sorry Papa is dead.

It must show on her face, because Jon changes tack. “I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

It’s the right thing, the kindest thing, and she doesn’t want it from him. Her fingers twist together in her lap. “Please don’t say that. You’re the one who got hurt, and I think it might have been my fault.” She does not mean to keep talking, but perhaps things have built up in all of her silence since she walked out of the morgue. “Your family has been frighteningly nice to me anyway. Your mom just started lending me clothes, as if it went without saying that I’d stay here, and your dad’s only explanation was, ‘You need a safe place to sleep.’”

In her peripheral vision, she can sense Jon’s expression tipping closer and closer to pity, and she doesn’t want that from him either. The point was not to come in here and make him feel sorry for her.

Finally, she looks him in the face, and what she sees there is not pity. No, she would call it compassion.

She whispers,  “I thought we were going to die.”

“Yeah, me too,” he says with a smile. “‘Specially when you took the gun.”

For the first time in what feels like days, she laughs. It feels strange, and it untwists something in her chest. His smile broadens at having made her smile, and on her next exhale she knows exactly what she came in here to say. “This is going to sound selfish, but when the blindfold came off, and I saw who you were, the first thing I felt was relief.”

Before that, she’d been terrified the Arrow would die, and she would be alone with a psychopath and a corpse. Then Risdon ripped away the blindfold, she opened her eyes, and part of her was surprised that the Arrow had a face at all.

But most of her was seeing the guy who knelt on the practice room floor with his sister, laid her hand on his chest, and said, Breathe with me.

Jon’s mouth twists wryly. “I guess when you’re that scared, any familiar face will do.”

“Not because of that.” In the car, he didn’t seem to mind her holding his hand. She is almost bold enough to do it again, but she stops a few inches short. “You know Abby feels very safe with you.”

At first Tish took him for arrogant, and to some extent he is. But just occasionally, compliments make him glance away with something like shyness.

She waits until he looks back at her to say, “I knew there had to be a reason.”

“Thank you for jumping him when you did. Saved my life.”

It was a team effort. “Thanks for the scalpel.”

“I was aiming for Risdon.”

She giggles. “Oh my God, that is terrifying.”

Again, he looks pleased to have made her smile, and this time she is bold enough to slip her hand into his. His eyes are glazing over a little bit, and she should probably let him sleep soon. But there is one more thing he needs to understand.

Before Mr. Diggle took her to the morgue to identify her father, he sat her down in the Queens’ living room on their cream-colored sofa.

“Tell me the truth,” she said, staring at the floor. “Should I have gone to the police instead?”

“You’d be dead.” He pulled a plush blanket from behind her and wrapped it around her shoulders. “The Hand has a policy.”

Her stomach twisted.

“None of this is on you, sweetheart.” He pulled up a chair nearly knee to knee with her, and he leaned on his elbows and looked her in the eyes. “Now. Can you tell me what happened before we got there? Just walk me through it.”

She did not try to describe the gasps and gurgles and muffled screams. Instead she tried to recall with perfect precision every word spoken, question posed, and threat made. All except the one against Abby that made Jon’s face so blank and empty.

“It’s all right,” Mr. Diggle kept repeating, and every time he said it, she realized dimly that she was shaking. “You’re doing great. What happened next?”

When she was finished, he held her gently by the shoulders and said, “Now listen, this is important. The police are going to ask you to tell this same story, and when you do... you were taken alone. Jonny - the Arrow - he wasn’t there with you.” He was giving firm orders, but she could see in his earnest expression how well he understood the power this secret had put in her hands. “There was no tub of water, no fight, no gunshot. Just you, tied up ‘til we came to get you. Do you understand?”

“So you’re a vigilante too,” she said quietly.

He released her shoulders and sat back in his chair. “I’m someone who cares about that kid.”

How to make him believe this? “When I asked for help, he showed up. I’m fairly certain he could have escaped and let them kill me, but he didn’t.” She pulled the blanket tighter around her. “I’m going to keep his secret, Mr. Diggle.”

He crossed his arms and gave her a deep nod.

So when McKenna Hall said, “Tell us as much as you can,” Tish did exactly as she was asked. She told as much as she could, and no more.

Now Jon’s fingers are slowly relaxing, curled around hers, and she can see his eyelids getting heavier. Mrs. Queen said they’d been rather generous with the opioids.

So, one last thing: “You know I’m not going to tell anyone about your, um, volunteer work.”

His only answer is a vague, pleasant hum.

She isn’t ready to leave quite yet. Instead she lays her head down on her arm and waits for him to fall asleep.

Mrs. Queen wakes her some time later for dinner, and she disentangles her hand from Jon’s and goes downstairs.

[ash818]

Y’all remember when I accidentally wrote a little bit of time travel AU where Oliver and Felicity’s son gets thrown into 2013 Starling on the night of the Undertaking?

Because I tripped and fell into more.

In the days after the earthquake that destroyed the Glades, a couple of time travelers did not stand out as weirdly as we otherwise might have. We were just another pair of shellshocked survivors, and social services did their best to connect us with resources. A few changes of clothes, a cot in a high school gym, packaged foods in unfamiliar brands.

We did not see Roy Harper again, though we kept an eye out.

“What’s your name?” said a kind woman with a clipboard our first morning in 2013.

Tish paused, but there was no reason to lie. She whispered, “Laetitia Cuvier.”

The woman looked to me next. “Jonathan, um - ” Moira Queen was on TV in the background, warning the city about the Undertaking and admitting to complicity. “Cuvier.”

Tish’s eyes widened ever so slightly, and the woman made a note.

The worst of being a refugee is the boredom. Lucky for us, we had endless speculation to fill the hours.

“Do we go to STAR Labs?”

“Can’t. They’re still run by a supervillain at the moment, and Barry Allen isn’t much of a runner yet.”

“ARGUS?”

I did not dignify that with a response.

“Right.” Tish sighed. “Our best chance of getting home is probably the metahuman.”

“Assuming he can take us back. Assuming he’s still stuck here in this time with us. Assuming we can pin him down and force him.”

“I want Team Arrow’s help,” Tish confessed.

“That’s going to take some convincing.”

That night, I slept fitfully and Tish not at all. The third time I woke up, I overheard her talking to our neighbor on the next cot.

“You guys from over in the Bywater?” the woman said.

It was one of the gentrified neighborhoods in the North Glades. In our home time, a friend of mine recently bought a house there for 1.2 million. In the teens, it would have been up-and-coming.

Tish made a noise of vague assent, then tacked toward the truth. “We were near Washington Square Park when the quake hit.”

“You were outside?” the woman said. “I got under a table and hung on to the legs. Oh, shit, I think your husband’s bleeding through his shirt. Here, I got extra gauze.”

Tish had me sit up so she could change the bandages. “So you’re taking my name,” she murmured in my ear. “That’s sweet.”

“We’re newlyweds,” I muttered back. “You’re still in that crazy honeymoon phase where you can’t get enough of my - ow!”

Tish sighed and rested her chin on my shoulder. “Tomorrow we have to start finding our feet here, don’t we?”

“We might be here for a while. Let’s start planning as if we are.”

We started with our most basic problem: in 2013, we didn’t legally exist.

In every story I’d ever heard about Team Arrow spiriting someone out of town, Dig “knew a guy.” He had always phrased it in that specific way, followed by the kind of laugh usually attendant on a terrible dad joke. I found out later this was because the guy’s name was Guy.

Guy was difficult to find, which was promising. He was not happy to see me, which was less so. He was extremely happy to see Tish’s set of South Sea pearls. Two days later, Jonathan and Laetitia Cuvier had social security numbers, Gotham birth certificates, and drivers’ licenses.

That evening, I accidentally-on-purpose bumped into John Diggle at Big Belly Burger. It had taken two days to find the one where his brother’s widow worked, and two more for him to show.

I almost didn’t recognize him. The Dig I knew was a solid guy, but this one was absolutely fucking ripped. Also, he was moving stiffly and carefully; the rooftop fight against Merlyn had taken its toll. He eased down into a booth, and his sister-in-law brought him iced tea.

I spent five minutes trying to figure out how to strike up a conversation. Then he ran out of napkins. In deepest irritation, he started hauling himself upright to fetch more.

“Here, let me.”

“Thanks,” he said absently, accepting a handful from me. Then he did a double take.

“What?”

He shook it off. “You look familiar. Have I seen you around?”

I shrugged. “I work private security. A lot of people see me hanging out in the background.”

From there, it was dead easy.

I spoke industry, and I treated him like an old friend, mostly because I couldn’t do otherwise if I tried. I just had to hope he wouldn’t dig too deep into a Panoptic, LLC headquartered in Gotham. By the time I mentioned the quake, he was asking me questions about myself with genuine interest.

“Since then, Tish and I have been - ”

“Sorry, who?”

“Laetitia. My gir - ah, my wife.”

He glanced at my left hand, double-checking that he hadn’t missed that detail before. “Fairly recent, huh?”

“Yeah, I’m still getting used to calling her that. Anyway, since the quake, she’s taken the lead on finding us a place.”

“Carly usually knows somebody who knows an SCU student looking to sublet for the summer. That sound about right?”

I could see in his eyes that he had decided to take me on as a project. “That sounds perfect.”

“How is Dad?” I was dying to ask him. He was hurt really bad that night. Where did you take him? He just lost his best friend. What is he doing now?

But Jonathan Cuvier had no reason whatsoever to concern himself with Oliver Queen.

I thanked Dig, and I went back to the cot in the high school gym.

[ash818]

always love thinking about the time travel shenanigans! thanks for sharing that piece!

It’s just so much fun to imagine, say, for example, Felicity seeing through whatever lies and fake identities Jon and Tish concocted to get close to Original Team Arrow. And when she calls them on it:

“So who are you really?”

On my nod, Tish says, “My name is Laetitia Cuvier.”

“Ok, that sounds kind of made up,” Felicity says on a wince. Then her expression turns thoughtful. “Then again, if you were making up a name, you wouldn’t pick something that sounds so obviously made up.”

“And I’m Jonathan.” I already had a fake last name and didn’t expect to need another one, so I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind: “Cuvier.”

Thank God Tish doesn’t react to that.

“Oh,” Felicity says, pointing at both of us. “Siblings or married?”

“Not siblings,” I say with more force than I intended. “Definitely not siblings.”

“Very recently married,” Tish supplies, casting me a glance I can’t read at all.

“Congratulations,” Felicity says rotely, still frowning at us. “Why the fake identities?”

“You wouldn’t believe us if we explained,” Tish says. “We’re kind of… think of us as refugees. We’re stuck here for the foreseeable future.”

Aaaaand we’re off!

[ash818]

could you write a little tiny(or super long-i dont mind) ficlet about one of Jon and Tish's snug harbor kinda sorta dates from before they started dating. maybe a little funny one or maybe one of them does something that makes the other fall a little harder.. prettyy please??

Tish learned to dance standing on Papa’s shoes.

On nights when he and Maman shared a bottle of wine with dinner, Maman would tug him to his feet and command the speaker, “Jouez-nous Louis Prima, s’il vous plaît!” She grinned at Papa and twined his arm around her waist. “Ce soir, nous avons besoin de Louis, ne penses-tu pas?”

Playful as he was in those days, Papa dipped her dramatically and then started to spin her across the floor. Tish knelt backwards in her chair to watch, until, laughing, Maman invited her to cut in.

“No shoes, no shoes!” Papa protested, because he knew little Laetitia thought he sounded funnier in English. “Take them off before you stand on me.”

Giggling, she plopped onto the floor and unbuckled her scuffed pink sandals.

“All right,” Papa said when she stepped barefoot onto his loafers and took his hands. “You know how to be Ginger Rogers?”

She shook her head.

“You do everything I do, but backwards. And here we go!”

There were other nights when Maman finished that bottle alone, and after she died there was no more dancing. But Louis Prima was no less real for that.

Tish has not thought of it in years.

Between sets at Snug Harbor, Jonathan Queen sinks stiffly onto the bench seat along the wall and stretches out his bad leg. One second he grimaces in pain, and the next he smiles up at her. “So where’d you learn to do this?”

“Dance?” She takes a seat next to him, because it seems more polite than hovering. “I did theater in high school, and you learn all kinds of things for shows. Cinderella is the reason I can waltz.”

“You can waltz?” He looks her over in a way she’s not sure she likes, and he goes back to rolling his ankle. “Of course you can waltz.”

Tish draws herself up to take offense, but then she realizes that the smirk is really more of a fond smile. Instead she says, “Are you in pain?”

“It’s just muscle cramps.” He props his ankle on his knee, digs his fingers into his calf, and starts working his way down toward his Achilles’ tendon. “They rub right out.”

She feels a sudden and inexplicable urge to do it for him, so strong that she actually leans forward. Then reality reasserts itself, and she freezes at the edge of the bench seat.

There is nothing strange or inappropriate about wanting to take care of him. He has risked his life protecting her more than once, and all she has given him in return are a few mugs of sweet steamed milk. It would absolutely be strange and inappropriate to kneel at his feet on the dirty barroom floor and work her hands up his calf. Dear Lord, please don’t let him see her burning cheeks in the dim light.

“Time for their next set,” Jon says, eyes on the band as they take the stage again. “You want to go again?”

After two songs, it is clear that the muscle cramps have not rubbed right out. His rhythm falters, and though it would probably be unnoticeable to a casual observer, Tish nearly falls out of step with him. Compensating for an injury is hard on the rest of the body; in the brief moment that her arm loops around him for an open position, she can feel the sweat at the small of his back.

“I’m a little bored with this song, to be honest,” she says, the next time he pulls her into closed. “Do you mind if we sit down for a bit?”

“Sure. You want another drink?”

“I think I would. But excuse me for a minute first.”

In the restroom mirror, she dabs sweat from her neck and pins a few loose curls back into place.

When she suggested dancing as physical therapy, she did not think it through much farther than, “We’ll spend an hour goofing off to innocent sixties pop.” She failed to imagine the breadth of Jon’s hand on her shoulder blade. She did not anticipate the smell of his soap or the roughness of his fingers. She swallowed hard the first time she stepped in close and found herself eye level with his buttons.

He once collapsed from blood loss right into her arms, and her attempt to catch him quickly devolved into a controlled descent to the floor. She should have remembered his sheer size, at least.

She pulls a tube of lipstick from the pocket hidden in the folds of her skirt, and she reapplies. War paint, as Jon called it. British Red always steadies her nerves.

She has danced with co-stars who grabbed her by the inner thighs for lifts, or who bent her back dramatically for stage kisses. There is really no need to be so adolescent about Jon Queen’s calluses.

She returns to find him flirting unsubtly with the older woman on the barstool next to him, who seems more amused than interested. As Tish comes within earshot, the woman snorts into a laugh too undignified to be anything but genuine.

Jon seems to count that as a win by itself - just charming someone for a few minutes. It’s an interesting side of him. Brash, loudmouthed Jonathan Queen has at least some small part of him that looks very young and very earnest and says, “Like me, like me, like me.”

“Oh, there you are,” he says, pulling out the barstool for her. “Morgan, this is my friend Tish.”

“Hey, there,” Morgan says with a broad, knowing sort of smile. “I was just telling him he should think about letting you lead. You might teach him a thing or two.”

It is a familiar joke. The conversation will go flat as day-old Coke if Tish tries to explain that leading and following are very different skill sets, that she can’t break with her left foot anyway, and that she wouldn’t have the first idea what to do with a Jon prepared to move on her say-so. Instead she says, “What makes you think I haven’t been?”

Morgan pats Jon on the shoulder. “Oh, you watch yourself with this one, honey.” She gets to her feet, and she raises her drink to someone across the room. “It was nice to meet y’all. Take care.”

Tish takes the seat Jon saved for her, where a beautiful cocktail already stands gleaming with condensation. A candied orange slice floats in it, dusted with cinnamon. She has had two already, and this one is likely to make her silly.

“I stole a few sips,” Jon confesses. “It was just as good as it looked.”

It is the kind of thing he does to his sister - assuming the right to drink from her glass and eat from her plate. Tish gestures to the Collins glass in his hand, bristling with mint. “Then let me try. Fair is fair.”

It is what Abby would say.

Jon looks prepared to laugh when Tish takes a sip, so she braces herself for something bitter and horrible. Instead - “I can’t even taste the alcohol.”

“That’s because there is none,” he says, taking it back. “I’m driving you home, remember?”

This is a perfectly sensible answer, and there is no reason to melt over it. He has every incentive to drive sober regardless of whether she is in the car with him, and this bare minimum of adult responsibility is not for her benefit.

“It was my father who taught me to follow a lead,” she says before she can stop herself. “As soon as I was tall enough.”

Jon’s expression freezes, and then he very deliberately shifts toward her on his barstool. “It’s, um. It’s hard to picture him doing that.”

It is not difficult to imagine, had events played out two degrees off-angle from their actual course, that Jon might have shot Papa. It is not difficult to imagine taking him dancing and wanting to rub his sore muscles anyway. “I don’t mean to convince you that he was a good man, but he wasn’t always… what he became. There was a time before Maman died when he could be very - there was a time when he let me dance standing on his shoes.”

Jon nods for her to go on, though he cannot quite smooth away his opinion of Abel Cuvier. His jaw, his fist - something always clenches resentfully when Papa is mentioned.

“I think he liked the idea that I might grow up to be a dancer. He was always generous about lessons and shoes and costumes, and the one recital he was able to attend was some of the most lavish praise I ever heard from him.”

The line between Jon’s eyebrows softens. “Yeah? What’d he say?”

Maman beamed in the front seat on the way home, just listening to Papa’s glowing review. “He called me a little swan, and he couldn’t wait to see me en pointe.”

“With the toe shoes, you mean?”

Tish nods. “He didn’t get his wish, in the end.”

“What happened?”

How to put this delicately? “Oh, adolescence. It became pretty clear that I was not going to have the ideal ballet body type.” She hesitates, and then she tells him the other, more honest half of that story. “I might have stuck with it anyway, but then Maman died, and I lost interest.”

The line between Jon’s eyebrows has reappeared and deepened, but she feels no judgment in it this time.  “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” she says, so quietly that the band must drown it out.

“If it’s any consolation, random strangers in bars still think you’re hot shit,” Jon goes on. “That woman who was here a minute ago asked me if you dance professionally.”

Tish laughs. “No, she didn’t.”

“Swear to God.”

“Then she must not have seen many professional dancers.” But she can feel herself glow with the compliment, so she lifts her glass to hide a smile in another sip.

No one would describe Jon as sensitive, but it is surprisingly easy to tell him things. She has trusted him with her safety since the mask came off, and now, time and again, in small ways, she finds she can trust him with the things that are most difficult to explain. If she were just a little drunker, she might even tell him that sometimes she misses Papa.

“Hey, are you hungry?” Jon says, pushing his half-empty glass away. “I don’t mean for bar food. You want to go to Sukho Thai?”

They ate dinner at his parents’ house just a couple hours ago, but if he needs another meal to satisfy his staggering caloric requirements, she’s happy to tag along. “I could be in the mood for a spring roll.”

Somewhere in the middle of sipping jasmine tea and watching Jon ruthlessly hunt down a stray noodle, it occurs to Tish that this entire evening - drinks, dancing, dinner - strongly resembles a date. Had Jon flirted with her instead of a stranger on the barstool next to him, then there would be no other interpretation.

“Best physical therapy ever,” Jon announces, leaning back in his chair. “I’m going to fire that torture technician with the exercise ball.”

Tish casts her eyes down and sets her teacup aside. Had this been a date, it would be in her all-time top five.

“You all right?”

“One drink too many,” she says quietly. “I think they’re catching up to me.”

He chuckles and pushes his plate toward her. “All right, lightweight. Have some carbs and finish that water.” And he starts glancing around for the server.

When Jon drops her off in front of her apartment building a little after midnight, she leans across the center console to kiss his cheek. “Thank you so much.”

His smile looks a little bemused. “Yeah, of course. You want to do this again next Friday? It’s Eighties Night.”

No, she does not want to go on not-a-date with Jonathan Queen again in a week. Yes, she wants him to hold her comfortably in closed position again, and she wants his hands to move her through a spin, and she wants him to smile at her just like this. Her imagination shies away from what comes after that.

Nothing needs to come after that. After all, it is only dancing.

“Next Friday,” she agrees.

She glances back on her way to her front door, and she catches a glimpse of him rubbing absently at her lipstick print on his cheek.