#potential student from the modern era: what in the ao3 shit is this

[ghostselkie]

I see three possibilities for when Lenore remembers the nickname she had for Annabel.

The most likely one: Lenore remembers the nickname during the divorce arc and purposely refuses to use it until she and Annabel make up and make out. I think this could be very powerful if done well. The boring one: Lenore only remembers it after she and Annabel make up, and promptly starts using it.

The funny yet potentially angsty one: She remembers it during the divorce arc, and it just fucking slips out. If in public, the misfits (and poentialy the cluster fucks) would get suspicious. Lenore would likely be screaming internally. Annabel would be ecstatic, that her Lenore returned to her, but then remember that that Lenore is fucking pissed at her rn. Que angst. If it happened in privet it would be almost all angst.

Regardless, I think it would be really funny if the two people the whole school thinks hate each other, start calling each other by fucking pet names. Like Annabel already does, but people likely think it's a condescending nickname. But for Lenore to start calling her Annie, that's going to raise a few eyebrows

[theshatteredrose]

Relic Keepers: Awakening of the Red Lily (Chapter 1) - Original Fiction

Title: Relic Keepers: Awakening of the Red Lily

Summary: A 1000 years after an apocalyptic event called the Bombardment, humanity have learnt how to harness the power of mana. Silverleaf Military Academy is a learning centre for Indigo Children, those who have the ability to use Mana. And they are divided into two classes; the Elites, who’s skills make them superior on the battlefield. And Passives, who’s skills do not belong outside of the Academy. Supposedly. Eishirou is classed as a Passive. He is also a Chronicler. Gathering lost information, finding relics, learning about the far-flung distant past is what he does. And he enjoys it. However, his life changes when he gets called out to his first expedition in the field with his new roommate, Zayne – a powerfully protective Elite!

Genres: Young adult, suspense, action, adventure, treasure hunt, scifi fantasy, romance, slow burn romance, gay romance

Notes: Ok, here it is. M y first attempt at an original novel! A little nervous to be honest, but I’ll try my best to be entertaining! I’ll also try my best to keep the chapters under 3k for easier reading. But, you know, things happen. Now, this will be a very long project and I will attempt to maintain weekly updates. I do hope you'll give this story a chance. And I hope you'll enjoy reading~

Ao3 | Wattpad | Inkitt | FictionPress

Chapter 1:

Eishirou huffed a tired sigh to remove an annoying strand of brown hair from his eyes. His eyes, normally a honey brown, were no doubt darken and possibly even bloodshot from staring at a bright computer screen for a few long hours.

He enjoyed his role as a Researcher and Chronicler. But staring at data for hours on end certainly got boring really quickly.

“Eishirou? You’re still here?”

Looking up from his work screen, Eishirou glanced over at his fellow Chronicler and friend.

Reddish brown hair and vivid emerald green eyes. Misaki. He was a good guy, friendly and considerate. Protective. He did have an intimidating glare of death, though. Guy knew how to scare the shit out of newbies, that was for sure. And some of the veterans, too.

“Yeah, but not for much longer, I hope,” Eishirou replied as he returned back to his work screen. “Someone was reported to have messed around with a few archives. I’m just making sure they didn’t actually mess with the data.”

Eishirou didn’t need to look over at Misaki to know that his usual friendly smile had turned into a deep frown. “Someone hacked the data? Do you know who?”

“Nope. Just that someone did.”

“I see,” Misaki murmured. “I will find out then.”

Eishirou wasn’t able to suppress an amused snort when he heard Misaki’s footsteps move away. He felt sorry for them, whoever they were. For a few seconds at least. Messing with the data was a bit no-no.

The information he was inspecting was basic, but needed to be preserved regardless. It was information he had seen all before. He knew it by heart, honestly. So, he would be able to get through it all quickly.

The prestigious Silverleaf Academy, a military university where students possessing mana-infused abilities came to train. It was located in Araluen, a Sanctuary City. Set in the middle of an island, surrounded by a large stone wall. And that was located ten miles from the shore of a vastly inhabitable continent. A continent that was reportedly to have once been as Australia. A place they now referred to as Main Land.

"Be sure to book now for the 1022nd Anniversary of the Bombardment!" the large plasma advertising board on the other side of the information centre robotically sounded, momentarily distracting Eishirou from his work.

Oh, was it that time of the year again?

The Bombardment was the name for an era in time, over a thousand years ago, where several asteroids impacted the earth within minutes of each other. Several large cities were wiped clean from the surface. Millions of lives where taken. Many more to follow in the apocalyptic aftermath. Life as those who knew it back then was irreversibly changed.

Of course, they didn't have the exact time or date when the Bombardment had occurred. Information from that era was largely lost and destroyed. And the information they had uncovered mostly contradicted itself. It was difficult to tell between all the fake propaganda and the truth. Not to mention that ruins seemed to date back further than a thousand years. Ancient. No mentioning of them in any form of text or data.

The common consensus was that the Bombardment happened over a thousand years ago. And had brought modern civilisation to its knees.

It also brought the use and discovery of mana.

The scientific community all agreed on one thing; if humanity had not discovered mana and found a way to harness it, then humanity would have been destroyed, too.

By using mana and infusing it within their inventions, they were able to rebuild society. Restructured cities. Learn how to live off the land. Learning how to harness mana within the human body.

The mana itself was largely a mystery. It was a source of energy. Mostly invisible until it was condensed and concentrated, which would then be presented in a glowing light.

However, the scientific community was divided in regards to where said mana came from. The asteroids? Or were rich mana deposits hidden within the Earth the entire time and it took a cataclysmic impact to reveal them?

There were a lot of…discussions about that topic. And certain scientists would often times get violent and confrontational.

Eishirou didn’t have a preference either way. Far as he knew, both scenarios were likely. And did it really make that much of a difference where Mana came from a thousand years ago? It wasn’t going to affect your average Joe’s way of life.

Those born after the Bombardment were often referred as Indigo Children. They were born with the innate ability to use Mana. And they fell into two categories; Elites and Passives.

Some form of discrimination was still rife amongst the Indigo Children. Elites verses and Passives. Elites are those born with battling abilities. Creating swords or other miscellaneous weapons out of mana. They were the ones who fight against the creatures known simply as ShadowDwellers.

ShadowDwellers were, simply put, abominations. Deformed creatures that also possessed the ability to use Mana. Again, the scientific community was divided with where they came from. Again, the asteroids? Or deep within the Earth itself? Some even believed that they were once humans themselves, mutated by mana in some way.

Silverleaf Academy had several Elite Squadrons that ensured the safety of students and residents alike.

Eishirou was a Passive Indigo Child. He didn’t fight in battles. Though, he could enter the battlefield if necessary. Only as a Medic, however. He possessed no fighting skills whatsoever. What skills he did possess was useful for research and archaeology.

He was a bit of an oddity, if one went by the Academy Hierarchy. He was a Chronicler, someone who dealt with gathering information and ensuring its safety for future generations. So, many Elites would refer to them as Paper-Pushers.

But he was also a Medic. And according to the Hierarchy, he was off-limits. No harm was to come to medics, no matter what. Anyone who dared to harm a medic deserved severe punishment.

So, Eishirou was both a nobody and someone of immunity.

In short, the Academy Hierarchy was stupid.

Chroniclers and Information Gatherers were important, however. The ‘modern’ civilisations from a thousand years ago seemed to have believed that they were the pinnacle of evolution. And they possessed all the information that there was to be known.

And yet, many of the ruins that have been discovered date back potentially millions of years. Civilisations deep underground and within the seas. Places and locations that were believed to have been impossible during ‘modern’ civilisation.

Either they were completely arrogant. Or completely ignorant.

A mixture of both, perhaps.

Scientists of today refuse to make the same mistake. They wish to document everything, no matter how controversial or ‘wrong’ that information appeared to be. Fact over fiction. Truth over lies.

Well, the document seemed perfectly intact. Done! He was a free man.

A buzzing sound from his communicator, however, stopped him dead in his tracks. Typical.

With a drawn-out groan, Eishirou slumped back into his chair and picked up his communicator. He didn’t need to see who was ringing him to know who it was. “Prof, you’re slipping. I didn’t even get my butt out of the chair this time.”

The hologram scene of Professor Chryses chortled. “I’ll try harder next time.”

As long as he didn’t catch him in the shower again. If he did, Eishirou was just going to ignore it. No matter how many times he rang.

“Let me guess; you got an assignment?” Eishirou asked.

The middle-aged man on the other side of the communicator nodded. With his dark sun-burned skin and deep wrinkles around his eyes, he was your typical off-the-grid researcher. The best at the Academy, to be completely frank. And he was Eishirou’s mentor.

“That’s right. And you’re coming with me.”

That surprised Eishirou. The only field research experience he had was helping in the restoration of relics and runestones that Jacob and his fellow researchers had discovered. He hadn’t been away from the city before.

“Really? Where to? Are we heading for Main Land?”

Jacob shook his head. “No. A small but tropically dense island thirty miles from here. It should be a rather short assignment. A damaged stone tablet was discovered.”

Ah, that was why he wanted him to join him. That, and he was old enough to start gaining some field experience. “And you need my expertise?”

“Correct,” Jacob smiled. “See you in an hour. Elite Team 3 will be meeting us at the Hanger 12.”

“Elites?” Eishirou repeated in a surprised tone.

“ShadowDwellers had been reported in the area,” Jacob explained simply.

Ah, that explained a lot. Though, there seemed to be an increase in ShadowDweller sightings and occurrences lately. He briefly wondered why that was.

“Right, see you in a bit,” Eishirou returned before he ended the call.

Well, no point dawdling now.

Eishirou grabbed his shoulder bag from the floor of his work desk and stood up. The small door which encapsulated him at his desk slid open noiselessly, allowing him to step out onto the stairs.

“You’re heading out again?” a feminine voice practically whined at him.

He turned to look over at another Chronicler. Long purple hair, dark pink eyes, quite fragile in appearance. Lyvia. She worked full-time within the Communication centre. Her frail body prevented her from joining field missions.

“The ol’ slave driver wants me to join him on an assignment,” Eishirou explained. “A short one, he claims. But we all know what that means.”

Lyvia’s pout quickly transformed into a smile and she nodded. “I heard Elites. Which team?”

“Team 3.”

“Oh!” her expression brightened unexpectedly. “I heard they got a new member. Ernesta practically forced him to join.”

That sounded like something Ernesta would do. She was very mild-mannered, peaceful in some ways. But she was terrifying when angry. Oooh, boy, Eishirou never wanted to get on her bad side.

“You might get to meet him,” Lyvia continued before she gave a telling giggle. “He’s supposedly cute.”

Eishirou rolled his eyes. “I’ll be sure to let you know.”

He bid his fellow Chroniclers farewell as he turned and walked up the pathway toward the exit. He walked past the main Observation Deck and out through the automatic sliding doors. He noted that the Observation Deck was empty. Which was usually a good thing. Nothing untoward was occurring throughout the Academy and city. Whenever the Communicator Commander was there, it meant trouble was about to go down.

Eishirou hadn’t had the pleasure of being on duty when Professor Jalen, or Communications Commander, started barking orders. He was a Chronicler, but he dealt more with the field work. Often aiding Professor Chryses. He only ever used his Chronicler privileges when he needed some classified information. Or just information in general.

He had the ability to access any information at any given time. It was easier within the Communication Centre, but anywhere he could get access to the internet, he could get the information he wanted.

The buzzing of his communicator pulled Eishirou from his thoughts once more. When he pulled it out of his pocket, he half expected to see that it was the Jacob again. Instead he was surprised to see it was his dorm superintendent.

“Katsuto, what’s up?” Eishirou asked as the hologram of a man with a stern expression flickered into view.

“Just informing you that you have a new roommate,” Katsuto stated in his usual brisk and stern manner.

He stopped dead in his tracks. Wait, roommate?

“What roommate?” Eishirou immediately asked. “No one said anything about me getting a roommate!”

Katsuto barely even blinked at his response. “You do now. He’s waiting for you. Play nice.”

“W-wait a minute-!” Eishirou spluttered. But it was useless. Katsuto finished the call on his end and Eishirou was left staring at the screen of his communicator.

He sighed loudly as his shoulders slumped forward in defeat. Asshole. Could have at least warned him a few days in advance. He knew he was to get a new roommate one day, after his old roommate had unfortunately taken ill and had to move to a dorm closer to the medical wing.

But that was beside the point. A bit of common courtesy from Katsuto wouldn’t have gone astray! And he didn’t even mention the guy’s name!

Ugh…

He uttered another sigh and kept walking. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. He had an assignment to skip off to, anyway. He couldn’t play host for very long. Even so, he hoped the guy was easy to get along with.

After a few minutes of walking, he finally reached the door to his room. He took a minute to gather his composure before he used his key card to open the door. And he stepped inside.

His gaze immediately flickered over to the bed located on the left side of the room. And yup, there was someone there.

He appeared to have been going through his luggage. Tall guy, a couple of heads taller than Eishirou was. So…over six feet. With floppy dark blue hair. His eyes appeared purple. His skin was a light tan. Perhaps it was natural, or it meant that he had spent quite a lot of time outside.

No matter.

“Ah, you’re my new roommate,” Eishirou greeted, gaining the new guy’s attention.

The guy turned in his direction and gave him a thankfully friendly looking smile. “That’s me. You must be Eishirou.”

The door slid closed behind him as Eishirou moved into the room. “And that’s me.”

“The name’s Zayne.”

As Eishirou shook the other guy’s hand in greeting, he noted that he had an Elite emblem on his jacket. He had to fight the urge to do a double-take. Wait, an Elite? Why would an Elite be rooming with a Passive? Especially as Passive like him?

Although, he was…kinda cute, he had to admit. He had the body of an Elite; subtle muscles, sleek form, straight back, and oozing with confidence. Hoped he retained that friendliness after learning that Eishirou was a paper-pusher.

“Sorry, can’t stay long to chat,” Zayne suddenly stated with a wry grin. “First day here and I’m already on an assignment.”

“Doesn’t take long, unfortunately,” Eishirou returned with an empathetic tone. Before he, too, grinned. “I have one, too. Where you headed?”

“Hanger 12 for now.”

Wait…

“Ah, what Elite team, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Team 3,” Zayne answered quickly, completely unbothered that Eishirou knew he was an elite without asking.

So, he was the new guy on Elite Team 3? Eishirou wasn’t entirely sure what to feel about that. Some Elite’s don’t like the prospect of acting like bodyguards to Passives.

Well, one way to find out.

“Well…looks like you’re escorting me there,” Eishirou commented, earning himself a confused tilt of the head from Zayne. “I’m a Passive. And you’re going to be acting as a bodyguard for this assignment.”

[ahumanintraining]

sign out (ch. 3 of “follow up”)   a shallura modern era hospital au ft. dr. allura and patient shiro  [link to ao3]

— notes: and yes here is the allura pov chapter that you all have been waiting so patiently for. (and yes, happy shallura day! i say this two days late but we all know that every day is shallura day anyway)

chapter three: sign out

Allura almost squeals.

But fortunately, she’s able to hold it all in until she’s absolutely certain that the phone call ended.

Then she thrusts her face into a pillow and makes the strangest sound she’s come out of her mouth since she matched into residency.  

Today had been a complete series of emotional chess, starting from the moment she walked in to see him, not at all expecting the patient with the uncomplicated right distal radius fracture in bed 24 was going to be an ultra-cute man with the shyest smile and the most curious streak of white hair over his forehead.

She was caught so off guard she almost couldn’t even appropriately perform the final physical exam to discharge him. His gaze was so intense and he had such an entrapping calm demeanor that made her forget about the hustle and the bustle of the emergency department behind the curtain. If talking to him to recap his injury history wasn’t already making her trip over her words, she absolutely stuttered as she told him the physical exam findings, close enough to smell the light cologne wafting from his skin and see the light stubble over his jaw — honestly thank god none of the nurses or technicians were also present in the room because without doubt they would have dragged her about it in the break room if they had witnessed her.

If she wasn’t wrong in reading him, she took a chance on his fast heartbeat, his jagged breath, and the light blush over his cheeks and gave him all the hints that she was absolutely interested in seeing him again outside of the hospital context.

It was a huge risk — she worried that maybe he was just embarrassed about the whole situation or about his entire story falling off the monkey bars, which actually wasn’t all that ridiculous when it came to the emergency room. Not to mention, when she gave him her number, she was technically still overseeing his health care so it was a little weird in the doctor-patient relationship.

But it was fine, right? Technically she just gave him her business card, which she has done to patients she wanted to follow up even beyond the emergency room because of the complexity of their case.

This would just be another someone she wanted to follow up with. Well, maybe not for the same reasons, but…

She groans, pressing her face into the pillow again, remembering how she circled her cell number and even winked at him — so stupidly embarrassing!

How could she have just put herself out there like that so obviously? What if she just read all the signs wrong and completely misinterpreted?

Of course, now that he had actually called her back, she supposes she made the right decision after all.

She — Allura Altea, three years an attending at Olkarian General with her ass still deep in government federal student debt — had a date.

Or something. He did mention he wanted to “at least return the thanks.”

She doesn’t know. It’s unclear.

Regardless, she was going to get to see him again. She giggles to herself again, uncharacteristically giddy with excitement. She throws aside her pillow and reaches again for her agenda book, looking at the Thursday column. She raises her pen point just below her 6 PM shift, twirling her pen a few times to consider what to write.

“8 pm – DATE!!!!!” is too embarrassing even for her to look at — and then what would happen if she opened her book and one of her other colleagues happened to see the colorful all-caps? She’d never hear the end of it.

“8 pm – Date” doesn’t look right either. And moreover, what if it wasn’t even a date? What if he was just trying to be polite? Although… he did ask for dinner, not lunch. Or at least, he did at first…

She shakes her head to herself. Focus, she tells herself.

Maybe “8 pm – Takashi” would be most appropriate. She writes it in but then frowns when re-reading it.

This makes him seem like a consult call or some kind of referral. Maybe she can doodle in something to make it look more friendly…

Before she knows it, she scribbles a small heart next to him — and immediately regrets it. She scratches it out, but then finds that she ends up just coloring in the heart, making now a very clear and very solid heart next to his name.

“Oh my god, what am I? A high schooler? I’m 33 going on 14.” she moans out loud, flopping back onto her hardwood floor, casting her agenda book to the side.

Hearing her distress, her cat mewls, jumping down from the windowsill and climbing on top of her.

“I know. I must be so annoying to deal with right now, huh, Blue?” she mumbles, lifting her cat off her stomach and rolling onto her side to curl around her.

Allura lays there for a long time, replaying the last hour in her head, regretting lots of things she said. What was she thinking?

Oh, yeah, pull rehearsed statements out like ‘I appreciate you taking the time to call me’ or ‘I really like to hear how my patients are doing.’ For sure, yeah, that’ll really tell him that she’s interested in him as more than just a patient.

And then telling him that Thursday evening would work perfectly because she didn’t have anywhere to be the next day? What was she trying to say?

“I’m such an idiot,” she tells Blue.

But Blue is tired of cuddling and of hearing her shit, gingerly stepping out of Allura’s reach. Allura frowns, watching Blue take residence in a solitary corner, before subsequently doing the splits and starting to lick its hindlegs clean. Allura sighs. Her eyes trail back to her phone, strewn a few feet away, and she crawls over to it, scrolling hesitantly over the last message in her voicemail and looking at his familiar set of unfamiliar numbers.

Is it too optimistic for her to save his number into her phone? Probably. Allura knows better than anyone that romance does not work out the way it does for princesses in fairy tales, no matter how sure a princess thinks she’s found her paladin.

She bites her lip, and then pokes her screen to play his voicemail again, pressing her phone close to her ear. She smiles, hearing the croak in his voice as he starts talking.

Um… it’s Takashi Shirogane. I was your patient the other day. I guess I was just giving you a follow up call. Thanks for everything. Hear from you soon.

Such a short message. Barely a full ten seconds. It’s not nearly long enough. She plays it again, listening again for that beginning rumble of his voice when he first opens his mouth.

Takashi Shirogane.

She repeats his name to herself softly. She loves the light r of his last name, and how he says it in a gentle flutter. She hopes that she pronounced his name in exactly the same way during their last call, but she knows better than anyone else that her language skills are actually horrid and for as much as her dear father really tried to get her fluent in Spanish and French, she had no chance with the small amount of patience she had and the little tenacity she had to study anything but medicine.

She catches herself with a stupid smile over her face again, and she shakes herself out of lovesickness.

This is ridiculous. She hasn’t felt this way in such a long time.

She checks the time. It’s close to the time she needed to get herself into bed, so she showers, brushes her teeth, and crawls into bed after downing a few extra gulps of water to hit her daily hydration goal.

But it’s pointless. She doesn’t sleep at all, lying in bed well past her bedtime, dreaming of cute smiles and soft hellos.

The next couple of days is so mundane that when Thursday approaches, she almost completely forgets about the “8 pm – Takashi” line in her agenda until she opens her book in front of Dr. Coran Hieronymus Wimbleton Smythe, aka the chief of emergency medicine, and sees the crime-implicating solid heart.

Her eyes freeze on seeing the reminder, and she instinctively presses the pages against her chest.

“So, we’ll have our monthly department meeting on the twenty-third next month instead of the twenty-fifth as usual. Are you on shift that day?” Coran asks, scrolling through his phone, not seeming to notice her flushing and sudden protectiveness of her agenda book.

Cautiously, she flips a few pages forward, seeing a night shift on said date. “I should be off my 7 to 7 by then,” she says. “Meeting still at 7 am?”

“Yeah,” he affirms. “Lots of quality statistics to discuss, so try not to be late.”

“You implying I have some improvements to make?” she teases.

He looks up at her, twirling his ginger moustache and chuckling. “Even if you are one of our exceptional physicians, you know I just need to enforce the same expectations for our entire team.” He nods his chin at her unused computer, monitor black from inactivity. “As long as you’re still picking up patients.”

Ah. Funny he should say that.

“Alright, alright,” she says, swiveling her chair around and shaking the mouse.

“Aside from all of this, anything new going on in your life these days?” he asks, tucking his phone into his white coat pocket and leaning over the counter. “Haven’t been able to properly talk to you ever since the new residents joined us over the summer.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, shrugging. “But honestly nothing too much has been going on.” She clicks on the EMR to assign herself to the 53-year old male with chest pain in room 18 and turns to the stack of EKGs next to her, searching for the matching EKG to her patient.

“Really? No new potential suitors?” Coran asks. “I feel like you were complaining plenty about that in the last conversation I had with you. Something about someone moving into your apartment building?”

She rolls her eyes. “The Lotor guy is still bothering me,” she tells him. “But at least because he likes me I can ask him favors. He takes care of Blue for me when I’m out too late.” She finds the matching EKG and interprets it quickly, writing in left ventricular hypertrophy. “But you know it’s funny you ask me that now because I actually have a date tonight.”

Coran raises both his eyebrows. “See that is exciting,” he declares. “Who’s this date of yours?”

As much as Allura wants to tell Coran, she doesn’t want to mention that her date may just also happen to have been a patient in the emergency room just a couple days ago… and also just happen to have a patient chart with her signature on it.

“Uh… well just someone that I met at random,” she lies, of course, realizing she executed the confabulation terribly.

Coran gives her a look that tells her he knows her bullshit. “At random, huh?” he replies, not prying. “Well, I suppose you’ll tell me at some point.”

She just smiles and shrugs, then choosing that moment to stand and get to her patient in room 18. “Maybe at some point,” she promises him.

“I’m sure I’ll hear about it if it ends up turning out horrible.”

“Probably,” she agrees, waving him a short goodbye as she steps past him.

But for some reason, she has the most undoubtable feeling tonight’s date won’t turn out horrible at all.

She doesn’t get home until 7:45 pm.

Well, so far tonight’s date is going pretty horribly, she thinks to herself, rushing to get her keys into the keyhole to unlock her door.

Once in her apartment, she hurls herself in, dropping the day’s handbag on the floor and pulling off her shoes as she walks in. She reaches up to pull off her hair tie, shaking her hair out as she makes her way to her closet, already half-undressed.

She did absolutely everything she could in order to optimize getting back home once the clock hit the end of her shift at 7 pm — even going so far as to beg Sendak to cover the last few codes she technically should have been doing so that she could instead rapidly finish closing her charts because she had no option to just close them on her next shift because the next time she’d be in the hospital would going to be more than 24 hours later and Coran would never let her hear the end of it if she didn’t sign her notes within the mandatory time frame and she would definitely be roasted at the next department meeting.

Needless to say, she is frazzled.

She holds her head between her hands, frowning as she looks in the mirror. She looks at the clock on the wall. Damn. She is not going to have time to look nice. Damn. She doesn’t even have the time to take a shower. And damn it, of course this would happen to her on that one night she has a date with someone she thinks she might actually like?

Well, a maybe-date date. Because what if all this time he really is just taking her for dinner out of the goodness of his heart? After all, he did call her to update her about his arm and to thank her… and he didn’t actually bring up the idea of dinner until after she carried the conversation…

She calms herself down. It’s fine, it’s fine, she tells herself. It’s going to be all —

Wait, check your phone, she reminds herself. Because what if he is already outside waiting —

She taps her phone screen and sees no notification.

She can’t help but frown. Maybe she is really is getting too excited and hopeful about this maybe-date date. If he liked her, he definitely would be a little early right? Or texted her earlier today to check in?

Or maybe he forgot about their dinner?

Damn, maybe she should have texted him earlier today. But no, she didn’t want to overstep and over-text him either.

She groans one more time and ceases her internal dialogue, telling herself to just focus on her outfit for tonight. It doesn’t matter how much time she has; every single second she has left before this maybe-date date of hers is valuable to get her act together.

She flips her phone to the ring setting and hitches up the volume to max so that there is absolutely no way that she would miss a call, walking back to her closet.

She makes another frustrated sound as she sifts through her outfits. All throughout her emergency training, she was able to get away with wearing scrubs, which was great for her at the when she didn’t have the time to figure out what to wear on the sleep-deprived mornings before a shift but right now, as she looks through her severe lack of nice dating-material clothing, she is regretting her options.

She doesn’t even know exactly where he’ll be taking her. Should she wear something more formal or something more casual? But this is okay. She’s been in this situation at least one hundred times before — there’s a few dresses that can pass for most events aside from an underground rave late at night or a Board of Trustees meeting, but she’s pretty sure that he’s not taking her on any of those extremes.

Her hands stop at a white dress with a floral print — kimono v-neck, mid-arm sleeve, about knee-length — and she looks it over with pursed lips, her eyes tracing one of the pink flowers and its surrounding dark green stem and leaves along the waist.

Her favorite dress. She doesn’t wear it often because she’s afraid of getting it dirty and because otherwise she’d be wearing it all too often.

It was the last gift her father gave her, and the first thing she thinks of when remembering him.

Her thumb rolls over the silky material as she muses for a moment, and then slips it off the hanger, lying the dress over her bed before she pulls it over her head, flipping her hair out from under the collar as she looks at herself in the mirror.

She frowns. The dress fits her well, of course, but her hair is a tangled mess. She sighs and rolls it back up into some kind of a loose bun. It looks almost purposefully messy, some of shorter strands of her hair peeking out from behind her ears, but it also looks like she just got out of a twelve-hour work shift and like didn’t care about this date when she actually really did want to impress him and set herself up in the best way possible for this to be an amazing night.

Maybe at least some light makeup? She rushes over to her makeup bag, pawing through it before a loud ring emerges from her phone.

Her eyes dart to it, her heart rate suddenly jolting. Another ring emerges — a long one that she knows means that someone is calling her and who could it be but him… She rushes over, looking over the caller ID and seeing the familiar set of numbers.

She swallows. “Hello?”

“Hey.”

Her heart flutters again. “Hi!” she says, almost too excitedly, but then clears her throat, mollifying her enthusiasm. “Um, hey,” she tries again, stupidly. She briefly pauses, and then unable to figure out what else to say, adds, “What’s up?”

Silently, she hits her forehead with the palm of her hand. What’s up? Was that the only thing she could think of to say? What was she thinking?

“I just want to apologize for calling you so last minute about this,” he starts.

“Oh, no, I mean, I was just getting ready myself. No rush,” she blurts. She’s not sure why she says all this when she could have just said ‘oh, no, that’s okay’ but then again, so far, she doesn’t have a great history of saying exactly what she wants when he talks to her.

“Oh,” he says, pausing in a way that makes her regret what she said. “Well, I was going to apologize about tonight. I, um… well, I’ve had a bit of a change in plans.”

He says this, and her heart sinks.

[link to chapter 4!]

notes: oh no would could have possibly happened???

(also if you think that I’m going to get away with this modern AU without putting in as many Voltron references as possible, you are very very wrong. call me out on all the lame ones :P)