#pls I mean soft!simon ... I cannot

[tearsofastraeax]

just thinking about you and Simon enjoying your day off at home together. you notice him looking at you out of the corner of your eye, so you turn to him, staring right back, ready to fight, or at least pretend till he lets you win. 'what?', you demand. but he just smiles at you, and tells you how much he loves you :((

[caitybug]

KiSseS iN tHe RAin😭🥺💖💖💖

Kisses in the Rain!!

(Tagging @ninemagicks too bc she asked for this. Beanz, I’m still doing your prompt but I have a twist I think I’m gonna do pls let me know if that’s alright.)

Baz, Penny, and I are sitting in the living room watching a movie.  

It has to do something with Cinderella. She said it is called A Cinderella Story, but I’ve yet to hear anything about princesses. Just a girl who works at a diner trying to get into Princeton. 

Baz and I are on the sofa, watching as the main character (Sam) is at her high school football game. 

“Do you think this is what American high school is like?” I whisper up to Baz. 

It’s been fairly dramatic. There was a big scene just moments previous where Sam had walked to the quarterback (love interest) and told him off.

“Waiting for you is like waiting for rain in this drought; useless and disappointing,” she told him.

I couldn’t imagine walking into a dressing room like that. Let alone to tell someone off.

(Although, I’m sure I would have followed Baz into his if I felt it necessary. Almost did once fifth year. Penny grabbed me by my collar and pulled me back.)

Penny turns and shushes us.

Baz frowns at her and then leans down to whisper in my ear.

“I wouldn’t know, I was too busy defending dragons from the local atomic bomb.”

He laughs, but I pinch his thigh. 

After a moment of teasing, Penny tells us to pay attention. 

The quarterback (why do Americans call this football? I’ve watched. It’s mainly played with your hands.) passes his helmet off to another player, seemingly giving up the whole match. It’s the final play (whatever that is) before the game is over, so everyone is up in arms. He doesn’t seem to be, however. The quarterback (I know they’ve said his name, I truly cannot remember what it is though.) looks more sure than I have seen him the entire movie. He pushes past various people and up to the girl (Sam.) 

A rumble of thunder distracts me for a moment.

But when I turn back I see them kissing. 

A drop of rain hits his cheek. 

“Look, the drought has ended!” Penny says, turning to us. 

We both hold a thumbs up in response. 

Kissing in the rain seems to be a common theme in these movies. 

There’s a swell of music, a declaration, a kiss. 

I look at the window, the way rain is hitting it, and think of an idea.

Baz and I haven’t kissed in the rain before.

And I think…

I think I have a declaration I could make. 

I go through the list in my head, seeing if this is something we’ve done before.

Surrounded by flames. There were bits of ash and smoke, but no rain. 

In this flat. (Many times, more than I could count. The closest I could say we came was the time when he kissed me while I was doing the dishes. I splashed a bit in his face and he dumped a handful on mine.)

In America. It was fairly dry then, however (surprisingly.) (I wonder if it rains much in America. It seemed like we only had sun and desert.) 

There are more, of course. But, none in the rain. 

The movie fades into credits and Penny yawns, declaring it to be bedtime. 

I look up to Baz.

“I have an idea,” I say, jumping off the couch. 

My wing almost clips Penny in the face.

“Sorry, Pen,” I say, making sure she is alright.

“It’s alright, just don’t do anything stupid.”

She looks straight at me knowingly before walking off. 

“Spell my wings hidden,” I demand when she turns the corner.

“What? Why?” Baz asks, standing up.

“Well, my plan involves us going out those doors, so either you spell them or you’ll be the one explaining to people how a half-dragon, half-boy seems to exist.”

He crosses his arms across his chest, before deciding to give in. 

“Fine, but please make it quick, I’ve got plans of my own,” he states, quickly after muttering a Nothing to See Here. 

I blush for a moment, but then the groan escapes without my meaning it to.

“Baz, you know I hate that spell.”

I grab my trainers, not bothering to put on socks. 

This won’t take long.

(I hope.)

When we have shoes on I grab Baz’s arm and pull him through the door and down the stairs. 

“Are you going to tell me exactly why we are doing this, Snow?”

“You’ll see,” I say, pulling him closer.

We reach the bottom steps and I open the door. 

“Snow, I haven’t got an umbrella,” he says, looking at the rain outside. 

“That’s okay, we don’t need one,” I tell him, taking a step out the door. 

I expect him to follow, but I see him still loitering in the doorway, looking hesitantly at the rain pouring outside. 

“Are you daft? Simon, it’s pouring.” 

It is. I can’t deny it. But that makes it better, right?

My hair is already sicking to my face from getting drenched.

But I don’t care.

Come on Baz.

Do this with me.

“I know but, that’s what always happens in the romantic movies, right?” 

I could swim in the amount of water currently occupying my shoes. 

He frowns again, so I take a step closer to the door and reach out my hand.

“I promise we can take a shower after,” I say quietly. 

“Snow, it’s cold,” he says in reply.

His features are softening. I’m close.

“I’m warm though, I’ll make sure you don’t freeze.”

A moment passes.

My shirt is sticking to my chest.

He sighs and puts his hand in mine, wincing as I guide him outside.

“Only one kiss, Snow,” he says begrudgingly. “Then it’s a steamy shower and a hot cup of tea.”

I nod, pulling him closer, pushing my feet up slightly from the ground.

(Baz tells me not to do this, that it ruins my shoes. Says he can lean down to kiss me instead, but I don’t mind. It’s quite nice.)

I lean in and kiss him softly at first. Water falls from his forehead to my nose.

His lips are cold, but they always are. 

I can warm you back up, Baz. 

He pulls my hips closer, deepening the kiss. My hands move into his hair.

It’s wet but still soft. 

I think about the time we kissed in the forest. Flames surrounding us. I could feel the heat on my cheeks as it inches closer. I felt fearful. Not for me, but for Baz. 

This is different though.

It’s a silly idea on a rainy Wednesday night. We’ve both got work in the morning. But we are young, in love (I pause for a moment to remind him. He smiles and replies back, kissing the tip of my nose before going back to my lips.), and we are happy.

It has to be several minutes that pass as we kiss. The only light nearby comes through the window of the front door to the building.

I hear a car drive slowly by, its tires kicking up a little water as it moves. 

Music softly pours in from an open window from the building across the road.

(I know I’ve no room to talk, but who leaves a window open when it’s raining like this?)

Then I remember.

A declaration.

A question, in this case. 

It’s the sound of thunder that knocks us both apart again.

I look at Baz. He has swollen lips, pink-tinged cheeks, and a lovestruck smile.

I knew this would be a great idea.

“Now come on with you,” he says, taking a step near the door, “we need to get back inside before you get sick.”

“Wait, one more thing,” I say, stopping him. 

He looks like he’d rather not spend another waking second out in the rain, but he does. 

For me.

“Move in with me,” I say.

Better to just get on with it, right?

He freezes, looking me up and down.

“Please.” I finish. As if he were waiting for me to use my manners.

What’s the magic word, Snow? He’d ask with a cheeky grin on his face. 

He steps forward and kisses me.

We stay like that for a moment before I begrudgingly pull away.

“Is that a yes?” I ask, hopefully. 

“Yes,” he responds. “Maybe we could get our own. I'm sure Penny would prefer not to have the two of us living with her.”

I smile, nodding in agreement.

Somehow he took my idea and made it better.

(He always does.)

He takes a step towards the door again, guiding me inside. 

I follow him willingly.

(I always will.)

“Wait, Baz, you’re a mage,” I state as we go up the stairs, dripping water on the wood steps.

“Good of you to notice,” he replies back, turning the doorknob to get into the flat. “What will you say next? That I am incredibly handsome?”

He’s smirking as he holds the door open for us. 

“You could just spell us dry,” I point out, trying to take off my wet shoes. 

“And deprive you of suffering through a plan of mine?”

I look up, confused.

“When you figure out your laces, I’ll see you in the shower, Snow,” he says, placing his shoes near the door, walking to the bathroom.

I pause, open-mouthed, watching as he walks away.

He’s completely soaked and…

Well, I’m not mad about what that’s done to his trousers. 

The door closes behind him and I get to work, quickly taking my shoes off, running (stumbling if we are being truthful) to follow.

[notapaladin]

me: I love the James Asher vampire series but it’s obscure and hard to tag so I can’t find the fandom!

also me: I WILL BUILD THIS FANDOM FROM THE GROUND UP.

With that in mind, have a snippet of a modern AU! No vampires, but Simon is certainly more than human (and also an assassin bc you Gotta Have The Murder). Different AU snippets/etc can be found on my AO3.

&

>simon

>simon are you there

>SIMON WHEN YOU SEE THIS CALL ME

The phone rang once. Twice. Simon Ysidro gently shoved an inquisitive cat away and closed his eyes, breathing out hard through his nose. For the first time, he began to wonder if a proper, permanent cellphone might be an acceptable risk in his line of work. It was something he’d never considered before meeting the Ashers—no, he corrected that line of thought, before befriending the Ashers. One tended not to trust the man holding you at gunpoint and demanding your aid. That they trusted him now was a miracle. That he in turn extended his trust to them…

(A cheap motel in Budapest, all three of them crammed into a single bed. A train to Istanbul with Lydia’s head on his shoulder and her hair a crimson glory spilling over his coat as she slept, trusting him to keep her safe for the night. Waiting for rescue in a Chinese mountain cavern, knowing they wouldn’t abandon him. The first time he and James had broken out of a cramped London basement together, and he’d looked at the man in the moonlight and thought--)

Lydia’s voice snapped through the connection, a leash wound tight around lurking panic. “Jamie is gone.”

No. He clenched his free hand into a fist, nails digging sharply into his palm. “For how long?”

“Since I messaged you!” She sounded close to screaming. Or sobbing.

Three days, then. “...Ah.” He’d been on a job; he cursed it now. Lydia had needed him, and he’d been busy. ‘Twould serve him right if she blocked him on all her social media. Jesu Maria, I really ought to get a proper cellphone. “I assume he did not vanish at the very instant you typed those words?”

There was a faint noise. He suspected she was biting off all manner of foul language, but when she spoke her voice was admirably controlled. Still, he knew this didn’t mean he was off the hook. “No. He went to work—as you’re quite aware, we do have actual jobs—and then he never came home.”

Neither of them needed to speak the words. The cabal calling itself the Hand of God had tried to kill each of them before; after they’d been stopped from slaughtering Simon’s compatriots in a bid to reverse-engineer the serum that had given them their unique capabilities, he suspected they held a grudge. He should have shot them all. “Have you a list of their likely safe houses?”

She took a deep breath—calming herself, he thought. “I’ve been able to narrow it down to three based on Blaydon’s last known aliases, but I can’t...”

She was no trained killer. The closest she had ever come were cadavers on the dissecting table. Simon’s eyes were vaguely focused in the direction of the far wall, but his mind remembered the way she and James smiled at each other, how they held hands when no one was looking. How once, in Budapest, they’d tugged him onto the bed between them when he would have taken the floor. “Lydia.” Emotion threatened to choke him, and he swallowed. “Send me what you have. I will find him.”

--

James Asher knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the men calling themselves the Hand of God were going to kill him. They’d been almost polite at first once the chloroform had worn off, but that hadn’t lasted long. In truth, he was surprised they hadn’t finished him off already; his ribs were surely bruised if not broken, and they’d seen to it that his left eye was entirely swollen shut. Always the same questions, and he could never answer them.

“Where is the serum?”

“Where is Subject No. 1555?”

Subject No. 1555. Of over a thousand subjects, less than two-thirds survived—and less than half of that lived long, once the scientists that had made them realized their supposed “genetic reconfiguration” made them into near-silent, near-unstoppable killing machines. Ysidro had been one of the few to survive the grinder of the initial training; James shuddered at the thought of the Hand of God getting him in their clutches again. The mental image of those glittering eyes dulled and drugged, his hands meticulously flayed open for Blaydon to see how the nerves connected—a pointless cruelty, there were no physical differences—made him long for a pistol in his hands.

He wasn’t even sure he could hold one now. One of the men had stomped on his dominant hand; by the swelling and the stiff agony every time he tried to move it, he was sure some of the bones were broken. That had been the second day. And still they asked the same questions every time they brought him food, and even if he could answer, he knew he never would.

Lydia. Lydia, darling, I’m sorry. Ysidro…

He closed his good eye and rested his cheek on the cold stone floor. His thoughts shimmered hazily; there, Lydia carefully applying her makeup in the morning; there, the cornsilk of Ysidro’s hair against his cheek. Their voices, low and indistinct over his head as he’d drifted in and out of consciousness in an abandoned graveyard.

The sound of a gunshot.

Awareness returned, bringing pain with it. Movement was slow and excruciating, and even if he’d been able to sit up the door was utterly free of any sort of grates, grilles, or bars which would have let him see what was going on. Instead, he focused his ears; the house they’d taken him to had remarkably good acoustics, even if the vents had been made annoyingly too small for even Ysidro to possibly fit. By the sounds of it, the Hand of God was under attack; there were a few more gunshots, scattered and wild and likely to attract police attention if they hadn’t taken him out of the city entirely. Something hit his door with a thump and a choked-off cry, and he braced himself for a struggle. An enemy of his enemy wasn’t necessarily his friend.

The door swung open. At first James only registered the basics—pale skin, pale hair, dark clothing, blood and the glint of steel—and then the figure in the doorway resolved itself into a young greyhound of a man striding towards him with a smirk on his narrow lips.

“Why, Mr. Asher. We really must stop meeting like this.”

He let out a shaky breath. “Simon.” Too late, he realized he’d never called Ysidro by his first name; by the color in his cheeks and the fractional widening of his eyes, Ysidro knew it too. Still, it was too late to take it back—and they had more pressing concerns. “What are you—how did you find me?”

Simon knelt by his side, eyes soft and joyous. “Your wife is a marvel, and you are the luckiest man in the world to have her. Come—can you stand? I have dealt with the Hand of God, and we have transportation waiting.”

He took a shallow breath, braced himself, and attempted to sit up. He made it perhaps a few inches off the floor before he couldn’t suppress his cry of pain, and then Simon was there with strong, cool hands steadying him. “I—think—“

“You cannot.” Sighing, Simon moved; James was cognizant only of a moment of disorientation and brief, vivid pain, and then he was being lifted to his feet. Though he instinctively put an arm around Simon’s shoulder, he knew it was a formality. Simon would never let him stumble.

Not even over the corpses of men with their throats neatly slashed. He grimaced as they skirted a spray of blood; the Hand of God had taken his shoes. “And you’re sure they’re all dead?”

“Stairs.” It was a while before Simon spoke again, letting James catch his breath on the landing. “I have slain every man stupid enough to be present in this building. Looking at how they’ve treated you, I would do it again.”

His voice was so quiet and fierce that for a moment, James wasn’t sure he’d heard it; when he risked lifting his gaze from the floor to meet Simon’s eyes, the heat in them made his heart skip a beat. “Simon...” I would do the same for you seemed paltry. Thank you seemed worse.  Not for the first time, he remembered a morning in Budapest with Simon curled against his chest and Lydia’s arm and hair flung over them. Not for the first time, he thought I really need to talk to Lydia about this.

Simon turned his head away even as he took James’s shoulder again. “Come. We haven’t much time before the police get here.”

By the time James was buckled securely into Simon’s utterly nondescript gray car—nondescript, that was, unless you looked at the engine—he’d filed all thoughts of emotions away for a time when he could mull them over properly. When he could think rationally about the future, instead of dwelling on intertwined fingers in Paris and the messages he’d seen on Lydia’s phone.

Lydia. She’d be clear-minded, surely. She’d tell him Simon was their friend and nothing more, that even friendship was a risk to their lives and livelihood. She’d be sensible about it.

--

sdcY has joined the chat!

>Hello, Professor, Doctor. Are you both quite well?

>simon we were talking and

>we were thinking that after you’ve been such a good

>My wife and I were discussing the prospect of...ah, I will let her say it.

>friend

>to us

>Did you disconnect? James, has Lydia dropped her phone?

>Lydia and I were wondering if you would like to go to dinner with us. Venue and time at your discretion.

>thx darling

>hsd.fsdfge;[68

>Forgive me, that was the cat.

>I THOUGHT WE BROKE YOU.

>I assure you, it would take far more than that to break me. I must, however, question: is this intended to be merely a meal?

>no

>...If you would prefer that.

>I think I would prefer to have this talk in person. To better ascertain your intentions, you understand. I will be there in half an hour.

>sIMON

sdcY has left the chat!

>Ysidro pl—damn it.