#the way he eyed the first one before pinching their lil cheek 😭

[doll-elvis]

there’s really nothing cuter in this world than Elvis interacting with babies 😭

footage from “Elvis on Tour”

[nycorix]

Full Circle

[fic post!!] So while procrastinating on my various other writing projects during my vacation this past week, I churned this thing out instead 😂😭 It is utterly ridiculous and probably the most lighthearted (lol) thing I will write for this fandom lmao Posting directly to tumblr bc it’s short! 

Archivist Wasp drabble in which the ghost supports (and incessantly makes fun of) Isabel and she hates it (false). Or: the ghost and Isabel take lil morning walks together now. Takes place at the tail end of Latchkey ✨

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Every morning at sunrise, Isabel went out to check the barricades, and the ghost went with her. 

She never invited him, and he never asked; yet they went together all the same, him trailing three paces behind her like a second shadow. 

They didn’t speak. Didn’t need to. After all this—time, misunderstanding, grief—the company was more than enough for them both. 

It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth rotation that she realized it was no longer a chore that she dreaded. That in fact, most days, it was the thing she looked forward to the most. 

The weather was finally turning. 

Each morning, the bright first wash of sun warmed their faces, but the air was brisk, suggestions of the first frost borne in the breeze that teased their hair into their eyes, that caught the hems of their coats and turned the tips of Isabel’s fingers to ice. 

Somewhere along the way, she started wearing the mittens Sairy had made for her last winter. They were big and cozy and the softest shade of gray that, oddly, matched the ghost’s eyes almost exactly. They did not suit her at all.

They were perfect. 

She caught the ghost eying them once. He said nothing, though, and looked away when he noticed her pointed scowl. 

Before, when she checked the barricades alone, she would check the waypoint on Execution Hill first—peering up at the cliffs from below, squinting at the vague outlines of ghostgrass stalks waving before the silvery glow before moving on. Now that he was with her, she saved this one for last. With him present, she was able to bring herself to risk the hike up to the ledge on the good days, though she’d never admit how deep her reliance on him went, even to herself. When the two of them climbed up that ridge, though—Isabel picking her way up with the help of a walking stick Foster had made her, the ghost a step behind, ready to steady her with a gloved hand if she slipped—it made all those fucking years of loneliness, of regret, feel like a distant fading dream. However temporary, however much they’d both lost, in those moments she felt more whole than she had for as long as she could remember.

If the proximity to the ghostgrass bothered him, he gave no indication. He hung back from the barricades themselves, sure, but if being near them caused him any discomfort or pain, it did not show on his face. The nearest to it that Isabel witnessed was when her knee buckled as she was hanging a fresh bundle up over the fissure in the tunnel and her arm swung a little too close to his head while she overcorrected. Even then, though, he simply leaned a few inches to the side, nose wrinkling briefly in some vague measure of distaste before he smoothed it away. It also didn’t stop him from, when it happened a second time, wordlessly taking the bundle and hanging it up in one efficient sweep, not so much as a flinch passing over his features as he held it pinched between thumb and forefinger for much longer than even gloves should have allowed him.

It was turning toward noon when they headed up to the hill. The sun soaked into the dogleather coat, making Isabel sweat; but the wind bit at their faces and tousled their hair, increasingly bitter as they climbed. Halfway up to the ledge, Isabel’s cheeks were wet with thin traces of tears lashed from the corners of her eyes, and her nose was threatening to run. The acrid-sweet smoke drifting up from the eastmost warn-fires stung her eyes and throat, and it was all she could do to keep her breathing even.

But today was a good day, and she refused to turn back. It was just a little farther, she could make it.

She was just about to step out onto the ledge when her foot snagged on a loose rock and she nearly went down, catching herself on the cliffside at the last second and scraping most of the skin off her palm even through the coarse weave of the mitten. Spitting curses, she kicked at the rocks and sent them skittering behind her, the biggest one thunking against the toe of the ghost’s boot.

The ghost, whose reflexes were miles beyond anything she could even begin to wrap her head around, bore no discernable reaction to either her slip or the rocks, which was strangely (and, though she’d never admit it, annoyingly) uncharacteristic; and a choice jab regarding this was on the tip of her tongue when a sharp breath from the ghost turned her around.

“What, don’t tell me that hurt—” she started, only to find him in the last stages of a sneeze.

It was quick, emphatic, pressed away into the back of a gloved wrist and so very incongruous to the whole of him that her brain failed to process exactly what had happened until several long seconds had passed.

Weirdly unsettled, she turned her eyes out to the valley below, brow furrowing. “Chooser-look-away-from-you,” she muttered, the gesture and the phrase falling out of her automatically as she squinted through the wind and the smoke.

Another second passed, during which two things happened: her brain finally caught up with the moment, and suddenly she could feel the full force of his stare boring into the side of her head.

She turned back, and his expression when their eyes met was a perfect mirror of hers. Bewilderment, disdain, annoyance. A touch of alarm. In essence, a recoil in facial form, though for very different reasons.

“What,” he said, blinking, “did you just say to me.”

“What did I—” Isabel choked on the words, the sheer ridiculousness of the past few seconds threatening to wring a nervous giggle from her throat. She smothered it in a scoff, because she would never live down the former if it escaped her. “What did you. You,” she gestured, a little rudely. “You shouldn’t be able to—I mean you’re—”

“Dead?” His lips twisted, faintly. “Yes. I’m aware.”

“You’re a ghost,” she said. “You don't even have lungs.”

“‘Chooser-look-away-from-you?’” he repeated, squinting down at her with that maddening placidity. Pointedly ignoring her. 

“Yeah. Yeah,” she snapped, suddenly flustered for some Ragpicker-taken reason. “It’s just a thing you say. When someone sneezes. To be—”

“Polite?” He finished. Again with that not-quite-twist of his mouth, as if his face couldn’t decide whether to perform amusement or derision or something else entirely. 

“Sure.” She scowled at him, resisting the urge to swipe the windblown tears from her cheeks. “Are you telling me they didn't have anything like that in the Before-time, because—”

“‘Bless you,’” he said, slowly. Brow furrowed, as if he was dredging the information up from somewhere long-unused. “And ‘gesundheit.’”

She snorted. “What does that even mean.”

He shrugged, infinitesimally. “‘Good health,’ I think.” The wind picked up again, carrying more smoke into their eyes, making Isabel cough. He sniffed, a vague measure of discomfort ghosting his features before he blinked it away. 

She chewed the inside of her cheek, eying him. “Well. It’s like that, then,” she said, gruffly. “Wards off bad luck or whatever.” She felt strangely embarrassed, though she couldn’t pinpoint why. It pissed her off. 

A huff from the ghost, either a laugh or another sniff. “Sneezing is bad luck?”

“Could be.” She found herself bristling under the vast calm of his regard, knowing in her bones that beneath it all this dead thing was making fun of her. “I don’t know, you tell me what it means when a fucking ghost sneezes.”

“Nothing in particular,” he returned, more readily than she expected. “When you’re able to smell the individual chemical signatures of six different fires and detect the presence of eleven pollen varieties and twenty-two distinct species of mold in the air without even trying, you tell me how well your nose handles it.”

She stared at him for a long moment. He stared back, eyebrows incrementally raised.

She was just about to roll her eyes and turn back up toward the ledge when he sneezed again, twisting into the crook of his elbow with the same efficiency and economy of motion he applied to everything, the sound of it echoing faintly off the cliff wall behind them. 

To her credit, Isabel did not jump. 

There was the barest of moments where he visibly had to recover, gray eyes watering with a faint shimmer of silver. Once again, Isabel had to swallow several different wildly inappropriate emotions, none of which she had the energy or desire to parse. 

His eyebrows climbed higher when he glanced at her again, as if to say, is there a problem?

“Oh, fuck you,” she bit out, shaking her head. “Are you done, or—”

“Thank you for your concern,” he said, effusing that ice-pure brand of hauteur that made Isabel want to dump him off the side of the cliff—and this time when she wheeled to glare, the corners of his mouth twitched up in what was unmistakably a smirk. “Ready when you are,” he added, drawing a very deliberate finger beneath his nose to accompany an equally deliberate sniff. 

She gaped at him, speechless for a full six seconds, and she could have sworn that the ghost energy that wreathed him flared for just a moment, a sheer silver-green that sang in her back molars when she looked at it too long. 

She shoved her hands deep in her pockets to quell the temptation to punch him and whirled around hard enough that one of her boots skidded in the dirt. 

“And watch your step,” came the warning in her ear. His hand to her elbow, the frostbite and vertigo blast somehow the most comforting sensation Isabel had ever known.