#tumblr keeps doing a thing where it switches between normal reblog and quick reblog but i like tags

[foxtophat]

(still trying to figure out how i link these but whatever)

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!! i decided to just sit down and hammer out the last edits for this lil one-shot so i could get it out today!

i’m gonna be real with you: the only reason i wrote this fic is because i couldn’t get the idea out of my head.  you weren’t supposed to see mercyverse for another month, honestly!!! but it’s been cold as fuck here and it’s made me fantasize about classic bed-sharing tropes, and so here we are!

this is a bit of a slice of life, to sort of give an idea of how day-to-day these guys all interact, especially now that carmina doesn’t have to pretend john doesn’t exist.  plus, i’m starting to see how the caches might be involved in the overarching plot???? awesome!!!

as usual, the full text is below the cut for my friends who don’t wanna leave tumblr.  i hope you enjoy -- feel free to leave a comment, i loooove hearing from readers. likes and reblogs are also great! kudos are fantastic! adding to the hit counter is just fine by me!!! anything you do to show support for fanfic is a good thing imo.  i hope y’all have a happy wintereenmas or whatever and i will see you guys in 2021 with more mercyverse :)

The best thing Nick can say about the blizzard currently sweeping the county is that he could see that it was coming. They'd gotten almost a foot of snow the night before, which gets him worried about getting snowed in, and as the day progresses, the sky grows an ominous gray that Nick recognizes from a lifetime of living in the area. He knows that they probably only have a few hours left before they're going to want to get inside and avoid the worst a winter storm has to offer.

Nick and John spend the entire morning hauling wood into the house, while Kim does her best to clean out the broken chimney and ensure they won't die of smoke inhalation. They also pull in some pre-made stock that Kim had left in the freezer after it had gotten cold enough to use, as well as a few smaller pieces for miscellaneous projects. But with the storm rolling in overhead, they don't have long; they end up leaving a lot of things for later as the wind whips up around them and turns the snow sideways.

By two in the afternoon, they've closed the doors to officially bunker down for the rest of the blizzard. They have enough wood to last them three days, plus their military rations and plenty of coffee, so Nick isn't particularly concerned about their safety. The only thing he's really got to contend with is boredom, which is easier to stave off in the first few hours of captivity than it is later in the evening.

For the most part, Nick passes the time by sharpening their knives, cleaning their guns, and checking the radio every hour for any emergencies. The blizzard ensures that not many people are on, but at least he gets to check in with Jerome and make sure that Grace is safely in her bunker. It's unlikely they'll get in contact with the trailer park until after the worst passes, but that just means Nick's gonna worry about those jackasses all night.

Kim is probably the only one comfortable with the downtime, making the most of things as she chews on the radio's instructions. When the technical jargon gets to be too much, she switches to entertaining Carmina, who gets bored quick when her only job is to keep the fire going. The easiest distraction comes from card games; the deck they'd had in the bunker had shrunk to only 32 cards, but now that they've got a full deck to work with, Carmina is eager to relearn and master games like Go Fish and Old Maid. Nick doubts Jacob planned to be entertaining kids with his survival gear, but it's not like the guy's gonna complain.

Carmina isn't the only one that Jacob is keeping busy beyond the grave. Ever since they found that cache of his, John has been borderline obsessed with figuring out what the point of it could be. He'll go all day without mentioning the puzzle plaguing him, but any available downtime has him staring at the map and its coordinates. Nick and Kim have both been keeping an eye on it, just in case it turns into something worse than his usual tunnel-vision, but so far it hasn't gotten out of hand. If anything, John seems more aware and alert now that he has something to focus on, and now Nick can even pretend he's a normal guy for conversations at a time before being reminded otherwise.

Of course, the blizzard's making it impossible to find alternate distractions. John does spend part of the afternoon in his room, but eventually, he can't help but come downstairs to mull over the map. There's only one problem with that — they've hung the map up in the radio room, so there's about ten minutes every hour where Nick has no choice but to sit in John's presence. It probably wouldn't bother him so much if there was somewhere else either of them could be, but they're stuck for the foreseeable future. John's looming is just going to be part of Nick's life until the storm passes.

In the interest of keeping the peace, Nick reluctantly tries to have the same level of interest in the random dots that John shows. His attention, however, is distracted by the penciled-in changes that he, Kim and John have all been making to the landscape. The river's wider in some places now, and there are doodles of trees in spaces that were once open fields. A few X's mark places where bridges have collapsed, and Kim's circled anywhere they've made radio contact with. Their notations have scattered across the valley, and have even spread over to the river region thanks to Hurk and his raider gang, but they still don't know anything about the mountains, or even the spaces that are supposedly occupied by bow-wielding religious nutjobs. It's going to be a while before any of them get the nerve to go poking that particular hornet's nest.

John has his little notebook open, but he's not writing anything down. Nick's not sure what he would even put down, since they haven't gotten any more leads since early autumn, but he's always got the thing tucked in a pocket nowadays. Maybe Nick should be mad he outright stole that resource from the rest of them, but — well, come on. He can't yell at the man for taking up journaling, not without flying in the face of every therapist Nick had pretended not to listen to. It's just... well, what the hell is there for him to write down?

"Are you staring for any particular reason?" John asks, because of course he does.

"That's rich, coming from the guy lurking over my shoulder all day." Nick flips off the static-ridden radio frequency, leaning back in his chair so that he can get a better look at the map push-pinned to the wall. "I hear if you look at it just right, you can see a sailboat."

John's clearly not much of a Kevin Smith fan, because he only sighs heavily at Nick's flat joke. "If you have something better for me to be doing, I'm all ears," he says, revealing to Nick at last just how bored he really is. Weirdly enough, being in the same boat as John is somehow reassuring.

"Okay, fine. At least tell me what you're staring at, so I know what to fake interest in."

Even though it's mostly a joke, it lands softly enough that John doesn't take offense. Stuffing the notebook in his back pocket, he shakes his head, gesturing at the map. Getting John to explain himself is usually like pulling teeth, but right now he seems relieved to have someone to bounce his thoughts off of. It's a long way away from the guy Nick remembers saving, enough so that it almost catches his full interest.

"It's nothing in particular, really. I've already spent hours staring at this thing, but I'm... still looking for a pattern, I guess. Jacob was paranoid and secretive, but if there's a hidden code buried in these coordinates, it's beyond me to see it. And the snow was already keeping us from traveling too far — now with this blizzard, we're likely stuck with no new information until spring ..."

John sighs, rubbing his forehead as the pretense finally abandons him. "I just don't know what I'm supposed to do until then."

That's certainly a feeling that Nick can relate to. Nick is less of a workaholic than John might be, but that doesn't mean he won't go stir-crazy without his own set of chores. Hell, that's why he's been hanging around the radio in between games of cards with the girls and cleaning whatever he can get his hands on. It must suck extra for John; the guy's been spinning his tires in the dirt for years, probably, and being this close to having a purpose beyond doing whatever chores Nick sets him to must be irritating.

Nick props one leg up against the wall, tapping his boot against the wood as he ponders the dots scattered around the map. There are a few still in the valley, but there's no driving until they thaw out. The points in the mountains are probably inaccessible to anybody, and who knows when they'll get to investigate the old vet center or find the Wolf's Den. There are a couple points nearer the trailer park, though, and not for the first time Nick tries to measure the distance from Hurk to the various red dots. There's one near the lumber mill, and one near where that godawful statue was, and of course one right smack dab in the middle of the original Peggy compound.

Nick can't imagine his truck making it all the way there and back, not without more information about the roads. Hurk might not have the same trouble. "I could send the trailer park a couple coordinates," he points out. "They might get to search before us, and it could cut the work in half."

Despite John's scowl, he only sounds tired as he replies, "I've considered it, but I don't trust them. Then again, I hardly trust myself, so who knows."

"I guess you're shit outta luck, then," Nick says. John takes obvious offense at Nick brushing him off, but hey, what else is Nick supposed to do? "God's giving you a freebie with this blizzard. Maybe you should try catching up on your sleep, or something."

"And ruin the precarious schedule I'm keeping?"

"Jesus, then go read a book! Just — you know, quit hovering over me all day. Don't you know how to entertain yourself?"

John seems unphased by Nick's half-hearted outburst. "This is how I entertain myself. Maps, resources, legal documents — that's probably the only decent outlet I've ever had." He stares at Nick's boot, unwilling to meet his eyes. "At least, it's the only one healthy enough to keep."

That is probably a safe bet, Nick realizes, quickly trying to backpedal away from the open scab that is John's history. "Uh, well, what about before the cult?"

John surprises them both with a brief laugh. "If I could source some coke, then yes, I would be entertained."

"Jesus, John."

"I'm not known for my healthy self-care habits," John points out, a little too smug to be truly self-deprecating. At least he seems to understand what Nick had been getting at originally, deferring with a vague hand-wave. "Is my loitering in the kitchen going to be too smothering for you, too, or is that okay?"

Nick rolls his eyes, flipping the radio back on to scan the channels once again. "It's fine, whatever. Just as long as you've got something better to entertain yourself than snaking the whiskey Jacob left."

"I'm more of a gin guy," John admits.

"Of course you are."

It's still a relief, though, knowing they aren't keeping an alcoholic too near his fix. On top of that, John's relaxed disregard for his past vices settles nerves Nick hadn't even realized were rattled. Sure, there's probably a whole other box of American Psycho- esque worms waiting to be opened up from John's time before Eden's Gate, but at least he seems to have comfortably packed that part of his life away for now. Unlike talking about the cult, John has no trouble dropping the conversation, just as casually as he'd brought it up. He retreats into the kitchen to mull over whatever he's written down already, leaving behind no traumatic story or sad-eyed stare — just the casual admission that he would really like to do some drugs.

Weirdly enough, that is probably the most respectable thing about John to date.

Nick spends another fifteen minutes checking the radio, scanning the channels he knows people use most. He winds up with nothing to show for it — either the storm is making radio communication impossible, or everybody else has given up on their radios. It's only after he's cleared the range twice that he flips the radio off and escapes back to Kim and Carmina, leaving John in the kitchen with a broad, somehow-sarcastic gesture towards the now unoccupied radio nook.

Carmina ropes Nick into a game of Go Fish, which Kim seems keen on losing. Nick isn't surprised — Carmina is a wily player, which is to say that she tries to bluff her way through hands with all the grace of a sledgehammer. Kim's not as willing to put up with cheating as Nick is, but neither of them are capable of even pretending to believe Carmina's poker face. It's going to be a problem one day, but Nick isn't exactly ready to teach his daughter how to lie to his face.

Well, that is until she and Nick are on their third round of Go Fish, and Nick has had to pretend not to see through all of Carmina's gambits.

He asks her if she has any threes, and she scrunches her nose up as she glances meaningfully at her cards. "Go fish," she says, making Nick regret not having Kim sit right behind their daughter as a referee.

"Fine," he grumbles, "If you say so."

Kim blinks skeptically at the pants she's fixing, but she doesn't offer Nick any out. If it weren't for his clumsy hands, maybe he could use darning socks and patching shirts as an excuse to quit playing, but as it stands, the only thing he has other than getting trounced is staring at the map with John. And since he already tried that and found it to be mildly aggravating at best...

"You know, this would be more fun with more people," Nick says, desperately glancing at Kim.

Kim, of course, gives him no quarter. "Why don't you ask John," she suggests rhetorically.

"John," Carmina calls out, "Do you wanna play Go Fish?"

Nick opens his mouth to chastise Carmina, but he realizes there's nothing to discipline her for. Especially not when John flippantly replies, "I think your father's looking to play with fewer cheaters, not more."

"I'm not cheating!" Carmina exclaims, not-so-surreptitiously pressing her cards into her lap to ensure nobody's looking at them. Between that and her guiltily furrowed brow, there's no hiding it. Her poker face needs a lot of work.

"Go Fish isn't even worth cheating at," Nick sighs, gesturing for her cards. "If that's the way you wanna play, at least do it the right way. Here, gimme your cards — John, come over here so I can teach my daughter how to lie to your face."

As if playing a game of cards with John wasn't enough to excite Carmina, she's doubly over the moon when he tells her the rules. After all, a ten-year-old girl is the prime demographic for the game Bullshit, especially when she's given carte blanche to shout cuss words at her dad. On top of that, it seems like bluffing really is half of the fun for his daughter — which is a little intimidating, sure, but at least he knows she's smart enough to understand the utility of lying.

John is... unenthusiastic, to say the least, but that only makes the prospect of humiliating him that much better. A few weeks ago, Nick would've thought John was too fragile to be messed with, but now there's a bounce in his step that will make taking him down easier. He's got to do something to remind himself that this nearly-tolerable man is usually a miserable sonofabitch.

Unfortunately, John has a fantastic poker face. Nick figured that from the get-go, but it's still daunting to play against a bored, uninterested party. That's probably why Carmina avoids John in favor of hounding Nick, calling out "bullshit!" with delightful glee whenever she thinks Nick has dropped the wrong face card or played a nine instead of a King. On the one hand, Nick appreciates that he can read her as well as she can, but on the other hand, he'd really like a chance to beat John. So far, he's the only one who's called John out, and all he has to show for it is the extra six cards in his hand.

Although Kim is on standby for this round, she keeps flashing Nick amused grins whenever Carmina calls bullshit. Nick almost hopes John can hold it together to be mundane for two entire rounds of cards because he wouldn't stand a chance against Kim.

Case in point, John lays down two cards that are meant to be threes, and Kim clicks her tongue disapprovingly. Carmina frowns up at her mom, who only shrugs and suggests, "I would call him out, if I were you."

John's neutral frown doesn't change. "Last I checked, you weren't playing," he says.

Kim only shrugs in response. Nick furrows his brow at Kim while Carmina squints suspiciously from the discard pile to John and then back again. Of course, encouraging a ten-year-old to swear is always going to win out, and so Carmina wrinkles her nose and calls John out with a slightly uncertain, "Okay, bullshit."

Without so much as a grimace of defeat, John lets Carmina flip his played cards — one three, and one dirty, rotten, lying, bullshit seven .

"That's what I thought," Kim says, flippantly triumphant. "Guess you're not as hard to read as you thought."

Nick sure can't tell what John's thinking as he lifts one shoulder noncommittally. "I stand corrected."

"Wait," Nick asks, "What gave it away?"

"I'm not helping you too , Nick," Kim laughs. "That wouldn't be fair."

"It's not exactly fair to help Carmina," John points out. Nick bets he's just as interested in what tell Kim noticed, although he manages to be less obvious about it. At least he can't crack Kim's smug smile any better than Nick, which is some small compensation.

Nick manages to win this hand, if only because his play strategy involves lying as little as possible. That seems to work against Carmina no problem, but Nick suspects John threw the game out of personal disinterest. If it weren't for the howling winds whistling through the roof and second story, John would probably excuse himself from another hand by retreating upstairs, but as it is he manages to sit through one more round of cards, this time with Kim joining in.

Carmina's poker-face doesn't improve by leaps and bounds, exactly, but she manages to fool Nick into picking up a fat stack of cards, so that's something. Too bad he'd been trying to teach her to lie to John , not her parents. Well — at least she's a nice enough kid to only do it for fun. He hopes, anyway.

Kim makes John's loss look more organic, at least, and she doesn't rub it in too badly when she wins. It's extra kind of her considering Nick is the one who called her last play bullshit, leaving him to rot in miserable third place after both his girls. Well, fine . At least Carmina seemed to have fun, even if Nick is now sitting with nearly half a deck in his hands. If the blizzard keeps up for too long, they might have to graduate to poker.

Before they can play any more card games, though, they take time out for dinner. It's almost normal, sitting around the fireplace with their military rations and some hot broth — if they were eating Marie Calendar pot-pies and watching Christmas movies, Nick would even be able to ignore John's presence sticking out like a sore thumb.

The next best thing to watching movies is talking about them, which has become something of a tradition between the Ryes. It all started in the bunker, where Kim and Nick ran out of normal Christmas stories and began taking turns narrating whatever holiday movies they could remember. They've run through all the memorable Rankin & Bass flicks, as well as a couple more contemporary ones, so they're starting to reach for their personal favorites or the very bottom of the barrel plots.

Nick intends to be paying Jingle All the Way a tribute tonight, but as soon as he mentions that the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle is one of his favorites, he's interrupted by John snorting derisively.

"Let me guess," Nick snaps, "You're one of those jackasses who pretends Die Hard is a legitimate Christmas movie just so he doesn't have to watch good, family-friendly content."

"It is a legitimate Christmas movie," John responds, just petulantly enough to tell Nick he hit the nail on the head.

"Look, Kim and I have already had this discussion — just because it takes place during Christmas doesn't make it a Christmas movie . Set dressing alone isn't enough!"

John raises his eyes towards the ceiling, which is as subtle as his eyerolls can get. "Whatever you say, Nick."

"What's Die Hard about?" Carmina asks, excitedly guessing, "Does Santa get to shoot people in it?"

"That would be a good Christmas movie," Nick replies. "No, it's just about some guy who has to fight bad guys in a building."

"During Christmas," Kim points out.

"Okay, fine during Christmas. But nobody's dressed up like Santa, nobody sings any carols, and there sure as hell isn't any Christmas magic that saves the day, so it doesn't count!"

"So what does happen?" Carmina asks.

Damn it — Nick should have known that talking about an action flick would immediately disinterest her towards any sloppy story about consumerism. She doesn't even know what a mall is — but she knows how to shoot a handgun, and now that Nick's thinking about it, she might need to use the duct-tape shoulder holster trick one day. It would be pretty bad-ass if she knew how, anyway.

"Okay, fine, I'll do it real quick. I don't remember all the parts, so Kim, you gotta help."

Real quick turns out to take almost as much time as the movie itself had. Kim interjects whenever Nick forgets a plot point, but at least he remembers the core conflict. Sort of, anyway — by the time he's done recounting John McClane's tale, John looks visibly dissatisfied, and Kim has a "well, sort of" expression on her face that implies he didn't quite nail the execution. Well, who cares what they think? All that matters is that Carmina is entertained, and of course she is. After all, narrated or not, it's still Die Hard . Just so long as she doesn't ask about the sequels, they should be okay.

The wind is still whipping overhead, and Nick can see nothing beyond the windows. There's no telling how late it's gotten. Although his internal clock insists it can't have been that long since sundown, Carmina has been yawning for a while now, and the fire's gone down again. It looks like sleeping through the storm is the only pastime left for Nick to try.

Carmina takes over stoking the fire for the final time before bed, while Kim makes her way upstairs to gather as much of their bedding as she can carry. John follows reluctantly behind, clearly unhappy with the prospect of facing his own cold room, but Nick figures he can deal for five damn minutes. For his part, Nick busies himself checking the radio one last time, just in case there's an emergency. He doesn't know what they'd be able to do if there was one, but that doesn't stop him from checking anyway.

With the radio situated just under the stairs, it's easy to listen in to Kim stomping around in the room above, desperate to keep her temperature up. Nick had put off too many attic repairs before this winter — he's going to have to make up for that in spring, when he and John can worm their way into the rafters and ensure that their next winter won't turn the bedrooms into a cold wasteland. Of course, even if they did patch up the gaps in the floorboards and do their best to insulate the attic, not much can beat a genuine fire in the middle of a snowstorm.

Nick isn't even paying attention to the radio, so he flips it off and trusts that everyone can keep themselves safe for another night. He hears the whump of fabric as Kim tosses their two biggest, least moldy blankets down for Carmina to start with, and the creak of footsteps on the landing overhead. Kim's voice isn't raised, but it carries down to Nick clear as a bell.

"John, you'll freeze if you stay up here," she says. "Get your stuff and come downstairs."

"It's not that cold," John says, attempting to deflect from one weak excuse with another. "I doubt Nick approved that suggestion."

Well, not technically, no, but Nick had sort of assumed they were already all on the same page. What does John think Nick's gonna do, force him to freeze upstairs so he can hog the fireplace all to himself?

Kim doesn't give the excuses a chance to breathe, replying with parental exasperation. "He and I both agree it's too cold to sleep upstairs." Nick can hear the teasing plain as day when she adds, "Just don't be weird about it."

Sure enough, suggesting John might be making things awkward is enough to get him to shut up and follow orders. Nick briefly longs for the days when John would mutely nod and do as told without any additional goading, but only for a second. Even that is long enough retrospection to remind Nick of how creepy and genuinely alarming it had been. Sure, John might get argumentative or exasperated now, but at least there's an actual person to communicate with. Nick might want to kick his ass more now than before, but he absolutely hated dealing with the hollow-eyed monster John had been.

Besides, it's way more satisfying being a dick to him now that he actually gets offended.

Despite John's furrowed-brow glares, Nick doesn't comment whatsoever on him trailing downstairs after Kim, clutching two actual blankets and a tarp that's weather-worn enough to pass muster. He stands and waits for someone to point him in the right direction as Kim and Carmina do their best to bundle together a soft place on the floor, but Nick studiously ignores him until he makes a decision himself. John takes a spot close to the fireplace, off to the right of where the girls are setting up. It's still plenty removed enough, so that nobody will get the wrong idea and think John is supposed to be welcome down here. Nick wonders who he's trying to convince, but there are so many damn demons in the man's head, it's anybody's guess.

With the fire roaring for the last time that night, all the blankets arranged and everybody looking exhausted despite not doing anything all day, Nick finally gets to crawl into bed and put this whole goddamn blizzard behind him. Hopefully, the weather has the common sense to clear up tomorrow — for now, it's time to shut out the cold entirely.

He must be tired. Nick barely stays conscious as Kim and Carmina climb under the blankets, the cool air rapidly warming as they begin to shift around and get comfortable. He rouses a few times at first as Carmina kicks his leg and Kim bumps into him, but eventually, he finds himself dozing in the silence of a quiet house. Far above them, the wind is whipping through the attic, but from down here, it sounds like a generic white-noise machine; coupled with the crackling fire, Nick is lulled to sleep by the sounds of peaceful normalcy.

Who knows how long it is before Nick finds himself conscious again. Even then, he only wakes enough to hear the dying fire popping by his feet. Maybe he should stoke it. But that would mean moving, and Nick is weighted down on either side beneath warm blankets, so that's a hard no. He tries first to roll towards Kim and Carmina, ready to curl into a ball and conserve even more heat, but his right arm is stuck. It takes a few bleary-eyed blinks to realize what's pinned him down, but he's barely coherent enough to make sense of it.

Sometime in the night, John must've migrated from the no-man's-land he'd made for himself towards the Rye's pile of blankets. Unsurprising, really — but more than a little awkward, given how he's pressed into Nick's side, pinning Nick's arm in place. Worse yet, half of his blankets have been absorbed into the mess that Nick's been using to keep warm, which is going to make extracting himself tricky if not impossible.

While he tries to figure out how to avoid making this mortifying situation worse, Nick watches John for any signs of consciousness. The guy usually sleeps light, but Nick watches his breathing for a solid minute and doesn't catch anything. Either his poker-face is just that good, or John is actually asleep. Deeply, peacefully asleep. Nick had assumed that was impossible.

If Nick were a better person, he'd probably be thankful to see it. Glad to know that John's insomnia might finally be coming to an end. But Nick is mostly just an exhausted, anxious mess, and now he's just wondering how to get out of the situation he's found himself in.

John shifts, and like a guilty ten-year-old, Nick immediately closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep. If he's lucky, John will roll away of his own volition, or at least move enough to let Nick roll over himself. If only he'd decided to sleep on Kim's side — she wouldn't have the same trouble Nick has. She'd just kick him away and be done with it.

Slowly, John moves away from Nick. The relief is short-lived as John pulls back the covers enough to send a cold chill down Nick's side; it's a split-second decision that John immediately regrets, hissing under his breath and letting the blankets fall back into place as he recoils from the freezing temperatures.

Nick can't help his quiet huff of amusement — which is enough to break the illusion that he'd been asleep in the first place. He could probably still fake it, but if he does, John will definitely try to move his blankets, and that is going to be a much bigger problem than tolerating John in his personal space.

"Quit squirming so much," Nick mutters. "Gonna let in the cold."

John is silent and tense beside him, but he does stop squirming. It's like lying near a tense bar of iron. After a brief struggle to figure out what to say, John's embarrassment catches in his voice as he apologizes. "I'm sorry," he rasps. "I — must have been tired."

Nick sighs. "Just don't crush my arm again."

Even though John moves as though Nick threatened him, he stops short of retreating from the blankets entirely. Nick can only imagine how cold it must be — every breath of his that makes it above the blanket-line comes with a faint puff of visible air. No matter how humiliating it might be to cuddle up to Nick, it doesn't seem like John had much of a choice in the matter.

Before John can decide to try escaping again, Nick repeats, "Whatever you do, don't let in the cold."

In for a penny, Nick decides, worming deeper into the makeshift bed so that John can have more room. Rolling over is the easiest way to avoid the mortifying process of finding a comfortable sleeping arrangement. Eventually, they wind up back-to-back; Nick normally wouldn't be able to stand John touching him, but the additional body-heat does a lot to soothe Nick's reservations. Who knew all he needed to tolerate John's physical presence would be cold weather and exhaustion?

The Deputy, probably, which only makes Nick grin in tired relief. At least they would be glad to know that Nick's grown as a person. They'd probably be glad to learn he's finally gotten on-board with not murdering the Seeds in cold blood — even if it took an apocalypse to get there. If they could see the shit he's gotten himself into now, they'd probably...

He sighs. It must be a heavier sound than he imagined, because John whispers, "What?"

"Nothing," Nick says immediately, as default an answer as John's yeses are. But that's not fair, he doesn't think, because they never let John get away with his obvious deflections. As late as it is, it's easy to blame his guilt on his exhaustion. "Just thinking about Rook," he admits.

"Oh."

John is clearly uncomfortable with the topic, but he doesn't react when Nick continues sleepily, "They'd get a kick outta this, is all."

John hums. It's a quiet noise, but Nick can feel it vibrate through John's shirt. If there are two people Nick hates bringing Rook up around, it's Sharky and John. Sure, Sharky's crush was the one that was reciprocated, but Dep had always treated John's flat-footed overtures like creepy compliments instead of outright threats. They'd probably figured John's crush was superficial, whereas Sharky's had been more real than probably anything else Nick had seen the poor sap go through. John's infatuation had been about power, control, and Joseph goddamn Seed. Still, Nick can't help but wonder just how much of it might've been real to John at the time.

"They had a bad sense of humor," John finally responds, quietly enough that Nick almost misses the hurt.

"Terrible," Nick agrees.

When John sighs, Nick recognizes it as a sign of defeat. Whatever he's debating with himself, he's clearly lost. Although he doesn't speak up again, Nick isn't sure he's gone back to sleep. He sure hopes he didn't just instill another restless night in the guy, but that's John's burden to bear. Maybe he can use it to finally find some common ground with Sharky.

Nick isn't even sure that he can fall back asleep, but that doesn't seem to matter. Before he knows it, he's being woken up once more — this time by a glance of sunlight coming in through the upper part of the windows. It's just enough light to wake him, but he spends an exhausted minute staring at the wall over Kim's shoulder as he debates whether or not he's really committing this time. He's going to need to use the bathroom sooner or later — and just thinking that is enough to tell Nick that he's not getting back to sleep again.

John's back is still facing Nick, and Kim rolls away as soon as Nick starts to squirm, which leaves his path to escape much more open than it was a few hours ago. He manages to pull himself free without waking anyone else, but as soon as he does, John worms into the warm spot left behind. Nick should probably be upset, but mostly he just needs to pee. He can kick John out of his spot after he takes care of himself.

Nick leaves the rest of them to sleep as he tiptoes across the living room to the front door. Unfortunately, the door only wedges open an inch before it hits a wall of snow. Unwilling to wake anyone else up with catastrophic noise, Nick heads upstairs, going for the broken window in John's room. It's freezing up here, cold enough to keep meat until spring, and Nick pulls his flannel closer as he crosses the room, trying not to take too much stock of his surroundings. He doesn't care about the tallies John used to carve in the wall by his bed, and he definitely doesn't care to snoop through the pile of clothes that John's been growing in the corner. What he does care about is how easy it is to crawl out onto the roof from the window — after all, this isn't the first time Nick's been snowed in, and he's made escaping his childhood home an art-form.

There's a good three and a half feet of snow on the ground below, blocking any exit from the first floor. At least the gray sky above is calm, and the weather seems to have calmed down some. They'll have to prepare for another couple of inches before the week's out, but Nick bets the worst of it is over. Now he can think about breakfast — more specifically, coffee — and debate the best way to clear the doorways. They need a path out to the hangar, although they can wait another day or two before they'll need to press the matter. Nick's still convinced there's a set of tire chains hiding away in there, but it's not like the roads will be in any condition to drive on for a while yet...

Nick spends so much time thinking about what he's got to do, he forgets to consider how willing the rest of the house will be to pitch in. The top-of-the-snow sunlight isn't enough heat to make up for the lack of a fire, and getting Kim out from under the blankets is gonna be like pulling teeth until he does something about it. Worse yet, John's rolled into the spot Nick had occupied — not exactly sprawled out, or anything, but the guy is irritatingly close to Kim's sleeping back. If he decided to roll one more time, he'd probably end up smacking his face into her shoulder.

Nick considers throwing a fit on principle, but honestly, that's too much work. It's much easier to sulk, glowering at the bed he's definitely not getting back into before getting some logs to stack in the fire. He drops them noisily by John's feet, although he makes every effort not to accidentally pull a Misery on the guy.

The sound of hollow wood clattering on the ground is enough to stir John, who wakes with a sharp inhale, and cause Carmina to groan and turn away from the noise. Kim has probably been awake for a while now, but it won't make a lick of difference until the fire's on.

He turns away to toss the logs semi-haphazardly into the fireplace, then remembers the kindling and turns to get it. John has propped himself on his elbows, but his half-waking confusion causes him to overlook Nick entirely as he stares around the room. Seeing Kim and Carmina asleep next to him is initially met with confusion. He barely seems to recognize the shapes bundled in the blankets, but when he does he recoils in shock. All the nasty comments Nick had thought up take an abrupt backseat as he stops to marvel at the physical repulsion John shows. He's not sure if he should be offended or not. Probably not, but this apocalypse has got Nick wired all wrong.

"She's not gonna bite," Nick says. John whips his attention back to Nick the moment he raises his voice, only for Nick to realize that looming over the guy with a thick block of wood in hand might send the wrong message.

Sure enough, John catches sight of him, jerking back with a startled hiss. " Jesus !"

"Shit, sorry." Nick turns and drops the log, wincing at the noise that he'd moments ago been deliberately making. "Well, judging from that reaction, looks like this isn't the first time a man's caught you in bed with his wife."

John's withering glare is enough to lift Nick's mood right up. He turns his attention back to starting the fire, listening as John slowly shifts his way free of the blankets. Part of him wants to make a few more jokes at John's expense, but that can wait until John's coherent enough to be snide in return.

Nick gets the fire going and turns to follow John, who's made his way into the kitchen to peer out the window. "Completely snowed in," Nick tells him as he gets the instant coffee and the beat-up kettle. "But it looks like the worst of it's over."

"Seems to be," John agrees, adding, "We forgot the shovels in the truck. It's going to be difficult digging them out now."

"Not a lot of other options, unless you wanna stay inside until the big thaw. Don't worry, I'm sure Carmina will be excited to help us dig."

John hums in assent, although his mind seems to be somewhere else. Nick can't help but notice that John's pensive states seem damned near reasonable nowadays. He has plenty to think about, and he seems to be keeping one foot in the here-and-now. He's aware enough of his surroundings that he stops Nick before he can leave John to it.

He tries to stare Nick down, but he can't quite manage it. "Thank you for not..."

John gestures vaguely as the rest of the sentence fails to generate. Nick could probably wait it out, but he's just as embarrassed as John apparently is, and he would rather move past the whole thing.

"Don't worry about it," Nick says. "Just don't get too comfortable cuddling up to me."

Rolling his eyes doesn't hide John's faint smile, but he turns away before Nick can see if it lasts. "That won't be a problem, trust me."

Nick is surprised that he does, even for something as small and inconsequential as a joke. "Grab the mugs when you're done looking for Santa," he says, turning back for the warmth of the fire. A few months ago, Nick might've resented how eroded the line has become between John and his own family, but it's honestly too much work to keep up. At a certain point, they're just going to have to include John in their daily routines — Nick just hadn't expected that point to be made by sharing blankets during a blizzard.

Well, there's one good thing about that, Nick supposes — it means that somewhere up there, the Deputy is watching over them. After all, there's no way in hell random chance has the same shitty sense of humor as Rook had.

[oracleofimladris]

An Apology

To everyone who’s been around to day and who’s had the misfortune of wondering what in the hell has been going on.

Below the cut as this is going to be lengthy af, just for the record.

Simply put: I was not aware, that on a website where the main medium by which people communicate is reblogs, that there were people who assumed that their followers would not reblog their posts.

Sometime last night or this morning, I reblogged a post from elerondo in the form of a family tree - which I mistakenly assumed was a canon depiction, but was in fact, a personal headcanon (a headcanon they did not which to see reblogged at all).

After doing this, as it was still quite early, I continued with my morning roll-call of social media (tumblr, facebook, instagram, snapchat, discord, etc), and proceeded to the bathroom, and then to shower. Upon exiting the shower, as I sat my ass down, wrapped in a towel and drying, I checked my phone again, and noticed at some point in the last hour, I had received a tumblr message - or three to be exact. You see, I couldn’t have noticed this earlier, as I don’t have notifications enabled on any form of social media. I don’t like to be tied to my phone, and I found that when I did previously, I spent more time on my phone than I would have liked.

The messages are as follows:

Now, these could of course be interpreted as polite, however, I personally felt more like this took the tone of a 3rd and final warning, as opposed to a first interaction. 

Note: I have never before today spoken to the owner of this blog, as you can tell from the lack of messages prior to this morning.

Now, despite the very stiff tone of those messages, my initial reaction was to immediately delete the post, and to then go back to the message to reply and say that I had done so, only to find that I could send a message back.

I thought several things:

- Maybe they don’t have messages enabled (unlikely as they had sent me a message).

- Maybe they enabled it to send the message and disabled it immediately after (again, unlikely, I told myself, as tumbler would probably has deleted the message or something).

- Maybe I have universal messages enabled, whereas they only have “followers” enabled (which, again, is strange, because I was following them, but still, I thought maybe I didn’t remember the options clearly, and opted to send an ask instead).

The ask would have read something as follows:

The post was deleted. Could you at least tell me why, since I’m not a fan of one-sided conversations that benefit no one, and I can’t seem to send you a message back?

Note: I can’t confirm the exact wording as I didn’t copy the message before sending it.

Note: I thought it funny that the blog wasn’t loading as I went to send the ask from mobile, but let’s all be honest here, who hasn’t experienced technical difficulties with tumblr - especially tumblr mobile?

I thought it was weird, but I was in the bathroom, in the innermost part of our appartment, in a giant building made on concrete. I could be sitting by the window sometimes and not get cell reception, much less expect the wifi to travel all the way down the hall is still function at maximum capacity. So yeah, I let it go.

I got up. I dried my hair. I got dressed. I made my bed and sat down at my computer... But a thought was still nagging at me. The blog was still not loading properly on my phone an hour later, so I loaded the message on my computer. Fine. I checked the blog. Fine. I clicked-through on the pm. Bingo!

Nothing. Or whatever the tumblr message is for “you’re not seeing anything here because you’ve been blocked.”

At this point, I won’t lie, I was pretty insulted. In under an hour, I’d been sassed and blocked by someone I’ve literally never spoken to in my life, for doing nothing more than what’s expected of all of us on this god-forsaken hellsite - reblogging a post.

I was upset - angry, even - but I was nearly content to leave it be. However, going back to my first point that the messages struck me as though they were saying “you should know this.”

So I went back to the post and read it over again... No warning. I checked the tags... No warning. I checked the blog description... No warning. I checked their about page... No warning. I checked their rules page... No warning. Something similar about “interactions” - threads? - but nothing about headcanons. No warning whatsoever that this person didn’t want their headcanons reblogged.

Hence the posts you saw from me here, and on my other blog, regarding the reblog function being the cornerstone of tumblr (and elerondo, more like elerond-no). 

I decided to take the matter up with a few friends. I thought, yknow, maybe I’m over-reacting? Maybe I imagined this entire slight? Maybe the message I sent is what made them block me? I don’t even know...

I recounted what happened - to a handful of people now - and each of them weighed in, each of them claiming that they hade never before heard of people not wanting their headcanons reblogged - despite this clearly being what OP was upset about.

Note also that while I made these posts on my own blogs, blogs that were blocked by the OP, I was greeted with notes from a certain thisblogisgettingdeleted.

Now listen, I wouldn’t normally have made a fuss of it, but as this person insta-blocked me (effectively making sure I wouldn’t have a means to reply to them with), but made the very clear effort to make sure I knew they’d seen my messages, I felt rightly insulted.

At this point, I decided that since the only way to communicate with them would be through a blog that wasn’t blocked, I’d need to create a new one, and in order for the message to be posted if they ever replied to it the message would need to be anonymous.

That said, it certainly didn’t come out as nicely as my first message would have:

I made this side-blog for the express purpose to reiterrating my original message, and informing them that they were mistaken in assuming that it was “common knowledge” that people shouldn’t reblog headcanons. And that I thought their manner of going about things was childish at best, though obviously left that part out.

To this, they responded as follows:

Now, I don’t know if everyone is reading this the same way as me, but my first and foremost impression of this, upon reading it was that “first of all, I wasn’t passive-aggressive. I was full-on aggressive,” struck me as an odd choice of words. 

Surely, being full-on aggressive shouldn’t be something to brag about?

Note the following “you can’t accept that I blocked you,” preceeded by their creating of a side-blog to not only revisit my blog, but to interact there as well.

Followed closely by myself not being civil for not sending them a simple message... Note the steps I had to go through for them to even get this one.

Here they mention messaging me with their request, and their request not being met... An hour, guys. A single fucking hour - in which I shit you not, I was in the shower. That’s what I was given to respond to this. And yo, that’s the amount of time between when I checked my tumblr. That’s not even guaranteeing they sent me that message right after I switched apps. For all I know it could have been 30 minutes, or less.

Note: “do not reblog my ooc posts if it doesn’t include you,” still does not refer to headcanons, and I foresee them having this exact problem again in the future.

Now I was presumed to be online because I was still reblogging things... A mistake on our dear OPs part. Dears and dolls, if you’ve been following me for any significant period of time, then you know my queue is always full. Ergo, my blog is always running, even when I’m not around.

For this person whom I have never spoken to to assume anything about my life, much less to assume that I’m around to cater to their every whim, frankly astounds me. Even if I was online, which I wasn’t, I wouldn’t necessarily have seen the message right away eg. if I was on my computer and had a dozen or more tabs open, if I was in the process of looking at another blog, which cuts off the tool bar, or whatever other scenario.

Following this post, several comments were added by both OP and a follower of theirs:

After comments like these, I’m supposed to believe that “a message saying [I] have deleted of sth would have sufficed for [them] to unblock?”

Highly. Doubtful.

That said, I took it upon myself to also message the person in these comments, as they clearly weren’t going to waste any more time than OP did in finding out what happened.

As you can see from the following, they fare no better:

Blocked. Again.

Deserved? At this point, I don’t even care.

For those who were around to see it, my response to elerondo’s post was made on my personal dump as it was the only place associated with my main blog that would be able to post it.

For those who didn’t, you can find it HERE, or below:

In the end, I’m not writing this because I want this shit to keep going. I’m writing it because I got a lot of advice from various different people and the truth is this...

TL;DR:

The apology is for those of you who’ve been wondering what’s going on all day, not for the persons involved.

I did not send the message anonymously because I wanted to be anonymous. I really don’t care either way, because what I did was was not wrong. In no way is reblogging a god damn post on tumblr, of all places, wrong. However, the initial response I got, and the confirmation that it was indeed meant to be aggressive, have shown me that elerondo - and likely the company they keep as well - have no interest in being polite, or even in remaining civil, but instead are quick to insult and play the victim.

In essence...

Talk shit.

Get hit.

And if you can’t handle it, you probably shouldn’t be on the internet.

Sincerely,

Me.

[stormlight1]

Feral - A Labyrinth Story

Just wanted to say a quick word of thanks to those who are reading/liking/commenting/reblogging. I’m getting used to Tumblr’s platform so bear with me.

Two

     Sarah lay on the bed in the guest room that had served as her bedroom for the past eight months, a cold compress over her eyes. Despite the relatively early hour, she kept the lights dimmed and the shades drawn, hoping it would help ward off the tension headache she could feel developing in that spot right between her eyes. She'd just gotten off the phone with her divorce lawyer, who'd wanted to go over the proceedings of tomorrow's court case one final time, to make sure she knew what she was supposed to say and do in order to get her fair share of monetary assets out of the deal.

     How ironic, came the humorless thought. She'd never realized just how much getting a divorce resembled putting on a play. Move just so, say exactly this, or else it could all be shot to hell, and the act would be ruined.

     "Say your right words," she mumbled as her lips curled into a sardonic smile.

     Honestly, she didn't really care how much money she got out of it. She knew she wouldn't get the house—that wasn't up for debate—but she didn't want it anyway. And what in the world would she do with furnishings when she had nowhere to put them? The only concerning matter to her was her daughter. In terms of child support, she would put on her little play and make sure she squeezed every penny she could out of that heartless bastard, if it meant ensuring that Katie would be taken care of until she turned eighteen. Augustine was wealthy enough, thanks to his family; he'd been left with a small fortune when his father died three years ago, so he could damn well see to it that his only daughter never wanted for anything.

     It was the fact that, within those pages and pages of documents she'd repeatedly gone over with a fine-tooth comb, not a single mention of her husband's parental rights had come up. As far as she could tell, he hadn't asked for anything regarding joint custody. He'd asked for visitation rights, but it looked as if he had no interest in helping to raise his own daughter. No weekend visits, no splitting her down the middle, living six months in one house and six months in the other…

     Not that Sarah wasn't relieved by this. She had spent the first two years of her parents' divorce in just such an arrangement, living in Manhattan with her mother (and Jeremy) over summer vacation and winter breaks. Spending the other nine months in the house she'd been born and raised in, so she wouldn't have to transfer schools. Life there was all so normal and boring.

     As a teenager she'd loved the excitement of living with her actress mother, spending as much time behind-the-scenes in the playhouses as she did at home. She'd felt like a grownup when her mother took her to bars with her friends after a successful show, celebrating all through the night. Cocktails and expensive food and beautiful, glittering clothes and jewelry … it had all been so glamorous, and Sarah was determined to have such a life for herself when she grew up.

     Then, of course, her father had decided that such a hectic lifestyle was no place to raise a teenaged girl. Especially one as strong-willed as Sarah, who was so clearly influenced by the behavior of the adults around her. He'd filed for full custody, having just remarried himself, and the courts had granted it.

     Sarah's mother didn't even put up a fight.

     Sarah had hated her father for that, and she'd been sure her "evil stepmother" was the one to blame for convincing him to take her away from that life. Add a new little half-brother into the mix, and she'd been certain it was all some elaborate plot to gain a free babysitter and household slave.

     So many years later, though, Sarah could admit she'd been ridiculous. She'd so often accused Toby of being spoiled rotten but she'd been spoiled herself, by her mother, her mother's friends… Her father had been right to pull her away from that world and force her into a life of stability. And now the thought of her own daughter possibly going through such an ordeal made Sarah shudder.

     So, really, she should be grateful that her husband didn't want Katie. Had he demanded joint custody—or, heaven help her, full custody—she wouldn't have stood a fighting chance. After all, he was the one with the house, the money, and the steady, full-time career. Everything the courts thought important to properly raise a child.

     Sarah, on the other hand, was currently homeless, stuck living in her parents' house, working two part-time jobs in an attempt to save enough money for an apartment close to the neighborhood. Just so she wouldn't have to uproot Katie's life any more than it already had been. Now she wished she'd tried to finish her college courses on top of raising a child, because it seemed a mere high school diploma just wasn't going to get her very far, career-wise. And on top of that, while she was relieved that she wouldn't have to fight Augustine to keep her own daughter, she was also completely outraged on Katie's behalf. Exactly how was she supposed to explain to a seven-year-old that Daddy didn't want her anymore?

     A hot tear slipped down Sarah's cheek from the corner of her eye. She irritably brushed it away, knocking the compress to the floor. Outside, a flash of lightning briefly outlined the half-drawn shades, illuminated the wooden floor. She mentally counted to five seconds, before the low growl of thunder followed. A storm was approaching, it seemed. More silence, and then another flicker of light. She only got to three when the rumble followed it. It was coming on fast. She frowned, thoughtful. Toby had taken Katie to the park to play, and it was a bit of a walk. They probably wouldn't make it back before the storm hit, and she didn't like the idea of them out in the middle of it by themselves.

     Inspiration struck, and she abruptly sat up, headache forgotten as she scanned the floor for her sneakers. She'd go out and meet them halfway. A walk would clear her head a bit, and besides, she'd always liked the way the air smelled just before a storm. Sharp and fresh, like ozone and rain. As a kid, she used to go walking in storms, just for fun (and as an added bonus, it drove Karen crazy when she came home sopping wet, trailing mud and water). There was always the hum of tension in the air, a slight crackle that brushed the fine hairs on her arms, as if the world held its breath in anticipation.

     She slipped on her shoes and grabbed a light sweater, pounded down the stairs to snatch a pair of umbrellas out of the stand beside the door. Her parents had gone out to dinner to meet some of her father's old college buddies. They didn't plan to be home until very late, or very early. Which, of course, left Sarah to keep an eye on the kids. Just like old times, she thought dryly, although Toby hardly needed a babysitter anymore. She pocketed a house key and was just about to step out when the telephone rang in the hallway.

     She muttered a curse and answered with an impatient "Hello?" A loud burst of static greeted her and she winced and moved the handset away from her ear. "Hello?" she repeated, a bit cautiously. More static, what sounded like a few garbled words that she couldn't quite catch through the white noise. She thought one of them might have been her name. Thunder rumbled again, an ominous warning. She glanced toward the open front door. "Look, I can't understand you," she said loudly. "The storm must be interfering. I have to step out for a bit, so try calling back later, okay?" And she unceremoniously hung up. It had probably just been her lawyer again, wanting to go over the details of her case for the umpteenth time. She personally thought him a bit anal about the entire event, but she supposed that was what made him good at his job.

     She stepped outside and closed the door behind her, hopped down the porch steps just as the wind picked up with a sudden shriek. It buffeted her back as she hurried down the street, whipped her hair into a frenzy around her face and tempted a little giggle from her lips despite her sour mood. Two blocks away, she came upon the children, hunkered down against the gale. Katie walked in front as her uncle walked just behind her, pushing her along. "Ahoy there, mateys!" Sarah called. "Need a little help?"

     "Mommy!" Her daughter raced ahead and threw herself into Sarah's arms. "The wind almost blowed me away!" she exclaimed, breathless. "Just like Dorothy and the tornado!"

     "It did, did it? I was wondering where that flying monkey had come from!" Sarah nudged her brother's side playfully and gained a light punch in the arm in retaliation. A fat raindrop landed on her cheek, another on her upturned hand. The sky growled its displeasure. "Uh-oh!" she gasped in mock terror. "The maelstrom is about to break! The rain goblins are almost here!"

     "Oh no!" Katie shrieked in delighted terror. "They sound really mad!"

     "Don't worry, we've got force-fields!" Toby grabbed one of Sarah's umbrellas and opened it as a short torrent of cold drops hit them. He held it in front of himself and Katie like a shield, but the wind had other ideas, abruptly switching directions and threatening to turn the flimsy umbrella inside-out. "Goblins … too … strong!" he gasped as he wrestled with it. "Force-field … failing… She cannae take much more o' this, Captain!"

     Sarah laughed loudly as another torrent of drops splattered her face. "Then there's only one thing we can do!" she announced dramatically, and swooped down to scoop Katie over her shoulder. "Retreat!" She broke into a sprint as the sky opened up and released its furious downpour.

     Toby whooped and followed, easily surpassing the girls as his bellows of "Red alert! Red alert!" echoed down the street, and Katie's joyous screams of laughter threatened to drown even the roiling thunder.

     The phone was ringing again when the sopping trio finally made it into the house. Sarah unceremoniously dumped Katie into Toby's arms and hurried to answer it, but the machine picked up before she could reach it. She waited patiently for the recorded greeting to finish, notepad and pen in hand to jot down the caller's information. Instead, another burst of static came through the speaker. She grimaced, again picking up a few random, garbled words through the static before the connection abruptly cut off.

     Along with the rest of the power in the house.

     "Aw … damn it," she muttered, and heard a snicker and a scandalized giggle from just behind her. She wrinkled her nose. "Sorry."

     "Mommy has to put a quarter in the Swear Jar," Katie whispered loudly to Toby. "I've almost got a whole five dollars saved up now."

     Toby sniggered again.

     "Har har." Sarah fished a crumpled dollar bill from her pocket, slightly damp. "Here. Prepayment." She handed over the bill and the small flashlight she'd dug out of the drawer under the phone. Katie accepted both with another giggle and scurried up the stairs to her bedroom.

     "Think Mom and Dad'll be home soon? Think they're okay?" Toby shifted uncomfortably as he glanced out the living room window. He wasn't afraid of storms, but dark places always made him edgy. Sarah often wondered if his fear of the dark wasn't some throwback to that night so long ago, when it had been storming just like this and she'd summoned the Goblin King on him. Some deep part of his subconscious could still potentially remember, right? She tamped down a stab of guilt. What was said was said. No amount of wishful thinking would make it otherwise.

     "I don't think they plan to be home until really late this time," she explained. "Don't worry, I'm sure they're fine. That was probably them calling just now to check up on us." She switched on another flashlight and held it under her chin. "If you're bored, we can always sit around the coffee table and tell ghost stories," she teased.

     He pulled a face. "Eh. Can't you just teach me to play poker or something?"

     She laughed. "We need to play something Katie will enjoy, too. How about Snakes and Ladders?"

     After several games of Snakes and Ladders, and then a few more of Candy Land (with a fine dinner of peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and potato chips in between), the power had yet to turn back on, and the camping lanterns Sarah had dug out of the closet were running low on fuel. The storm had raged a good two hours before finally blowing itself out, and she wondered how many power lines it took out with it. It had been a long time since she'd witnessed a thunderstorm that fierce.

     She glanced at the clock. Ten-fifteen, and long past time for little girls to be in bed. Or big ones, for that matter, she thought. She did, after all, have her day in court tomorrow. It wouldn't do to show up exhausted. She tended to get emotional and overstressed when she was exhausted, and her lawyer had made it clear that she needed to remain cool and level-headed. "Okay," she announced, "I think it's about time to put games away and go to bed." She ignored the expected protests and ushered the kids up the stairs to their bedrooms. Toby's old nursery looked far more like a twelve-year-old's playground now, and was just about as messy. Sarah gave him a lantern and hastily bid him goodnight before her neat-freak tendencies could kick in and she started tidying up the place. She'd always hated a disorderly bedroom.

     Katie's room still looked as it did when Sarah had occupied it way back when. The furniture sat in the exact same spots. The curtains still framed the window just so. Shelves overflowed with stuffed animals and books, knickknacks lined neatly along the edges of the dresser. Posters and pictures had been tacked all over the walls, although Katie clearly preferred her hand-drawn illustrations of horses and kittens over Sarah's former choices of newspaper clippings and theater production posters. A tattered teddy bear held its place of honor on Katie's pillow and Sarah smiled to see it. She tucked her daughter under the familiar worn quilt with its fraying edges. "Did you brush your teeth?" she asked.

     "Yup!" Katie confirmed with a nod.

     "Did Launcelot brush his teeth?" Sarah teasingly bopped Katie's nose with the bear's.

     "He doesn't have any teeth!" Katie squealed around her giggles.

     Sarah laughed and ruffled her golden hair. "Okay now. Settle down and go to sleep. Launcelot is tired."

     "You're tired," Katie accused.

     "I am. So I'm going to sleep now. Goodnight, Katydid." Sarah kissed her and headed to her own room, slipped from her clothes into a pair of cut-off sweatpants and a T-shirt. She probably looked about as sexy as a bag lady in the getup, but it was comfortable and these days comfort was all that mattered. Besides, Augustine had stopped being impressed with her more risque nightwear a long time ago, so she'd long since given up wearing it.

     She sighed, pursed her lips as she examined the scattered papers on the bed. Practically a book's worth, she thought. One of those thick, boring ones a person was forced to read in school for their least favorite class. With a sort of childish satisfaction, she gripped the edges of the designer comforter and gave a mighty shake, up-heaved its contents to send papers scattering and flying every-which-way. "Serves you right," she murmured as she slipped between the cool sheets, pulled the comforter over her head to block out the world for a few hours. She'd be forced to face it again soon enough. For now, at least, she welcomed the comfort of sleep, ready to just forget everything for a little while.

     "Mommy!"

     Sarah slowly roused, groggy and disoriented. And strangely warm. The air was stifling; in her half-asleep state, it took her several moments to realize that she'd fully buried herself under the blankets. She sluggishly clawed around until she found one end and lifted it to allow cool air to flow into her makeshift nest.

     "Mommy!" the little voice said again, and she felt something prod at her, trying to shake her awake. She poked her face out from under the covers, squinted up at the small figure hovering over her.

     "Katie, it's—" She glanced at the clock on the nightstand. "—one-thirty in the morning! What are you doing up? Did you have a bad dream?"

     The little girl shook her head, expression oddly grim. "There's a funny man asking for you," she half-whispered, as if afraid someone else might overhear.

     "A funny man?" Sarah frowned and scrubbed sleep from her eyes, feeling slightly more alert. Not quite alert enough to understand what her daughter was talking about, though. "Are you sure you didn't have a dream?"

     "Nu-uh." Katie shook her head emphatically. "He said the telephone didn't work, so he had to call you this way, instead."

     "The tele—" Now Sarah was really confused. "Was he the one trying to call earlier?"

     "Yes, but it didn't work."

     She sat up, ran her fingers through her tangled hair. "He isn't at the door, is he?" Her heart slammed against her chest at the thought. But both of the kids knew better than to answer the door to strangers, especially in the middle of the night! Unless … this man was already inside the house. And that thought drove any remaining sleep clear out of her head. She scrambled out of bed, shoved her feet into the first pair of shoes she found, looked around the room for a suitable weapon. A tall, slender bronze statuette on the corner of the dresser caught her eye. A naked lady in art-deco style. The thing was ugly as sin and had probably cost a small fortune. She hefted it, testing its solid weight. It would do. "Okay, where's the funny man hiding?" she asked, pushing Katie behind her as she crept into the hallway. "Is he in the living room? Your bedroom?"

     "No, he's not in the house. He's in the mirror." Katie spoke as if that should have been the most obvious thing in the world.

     Sarah froze, felt the world tilt crazily and realized she'd braced one hand against the wall to keep from tipping right over. "The … mirror?" Her voice emerged as a squeak. "A funny man … is in your mirror."

     "Yup!" Katie regarded her mother strangely. "Are you sick? You look weird."

     Sarah swallowed hard and straightened, walked in slow and measured steps down the hall toward the bedroom located at its end. She pushed open the door to find it illuminated in pink from the rose glass of her daughter's bedside lamp; apparently, power had been restored overnight. She started to step in, hesitated as she glanced at Katie. "How about you go sleep in my bed, okay?" she requested. "I want to talk to the funny man for awhile."

     Katie shrugged, unconcerned, and trotted back to Sarah's room without argument. Oh, to possess the courage of a child, Sarah thought dryly as she stepped into the bedroom and shut the door behind her. From her position, she couldn't see very well, so she moved further in until she could get a better look. The top of the dressing table glowed softly in a way that had nothing to do with the lamp, and her eyes widened when she stopped directly in front of it and got a first good look at the mirror.

     It was definitely not her own reflection staring back at her.

     "H-Hoggle!" His name escaped, hardly louder than a whisper as her heart thumped hard against her ribs. A myriad of emotions flowed through her, come and gone so quickly that she hardly had time to feel them, much less sort them out.

     "Hello, Sarah," Hoggle replied, and his gravelly voice sounded so dearly familiar, and he looked so genuinely glad to see her that tears sprang to her eyes.

     "Where have you been?" she gasped, as the bronze statuette she still held slipped, forgotten, from nerveless fingers. It landed with a heavy thud on the floor, and the startling noise made her jump. "Do you know how worried I've been? You all just … disappeared! Without so much as a goodbye, and I had no way of contacting you or knowing if anything had happened to you and—" She had to stop talking, then, because the lump in her throat had grown too big and tight to speak around. So she stood there and glowered at him, swallowed convulsively to ease the ache in her throat, and swore that she wouldn't break down and bawl like the little girl she no longer was.

     Hoggle had removed his cap and now twisted it in his hands, his expression so full of remorse that Sarah almost felt guilty for going off on him like that. Almost. She'd owed him a good chewing-out for just abandoning her, and he owed her one heck of an explanation. "I'm sorry, Sarah," he began, soft and contrite. "I knows just sayin' that won't fix anything. Should've tried harder t' comes back, but it just gots too difficult. Too dangerous t' try an' talk to yas anymore. We thought … it'd be better t' not risk it." He gave her a one-shouldered shrug and a crooked smile. "Figured after a bit, you'd get over it an' go on with life, like you was supposed to."

     "How could you expect that?" she exploded, throwing her hands out. "You three were my best friends! How could I just forget?"

     "But humans ain't even supposed t' keep in contact, ya know? They ain't supposed t' remember. When they get sent back, they ferget all about the Labyrinth. 'Course, none o' them ever did what you did. You beat Jareth's game, beat the Labyrinth. Don't surprise me none that you remembered, even after we … lost touch." His smile was equal parts smug and impressed, and his eyes gleamed with pride. "'S why I'm here now," he added. "'Cause I thinks you can help. I shouldn't evens be talkin' t' you—Jareth'd boot me straight into the Bog if he found out—but it's worth the risk."

     Sarah's stern expression melted into confusion, touched with alarm. "Help with what?" she pressed. "Hoggle, what's going on? Did … did something happen?" She absently worried a thumbnail. "I always felt … maybe something was wrong, back when you three started visiting less and … acting strange. And when you disappeared I wanted to find my way back but I just didn't know how. I'd even considered calling on Jareth to get there. That's how worried I was." She offered a sardonic grin at his snort.

     "Good thing you didn't. He'd've never let you go again."

     "Yeah." She nodded. "I figured as much." She shifted on her feet, settled herself into the wooden chair to be more eye-level with him. "Will you tell me what's happening? Why did you stop visiting? Why are you risking Jareth's almighty wrath to contact me now?"

     He shifted, brow furrowed. "Well, honestly, Jareth ain't in much of a position t' do much about anything, even if he knows. An' I'm pretty sure he does know, tied to the magic as he is."

     "What do you mean?" Despite herself, she couldn't tamp the flicker of alarm that caused her heart to quicken in her chest. "I-is something wrong with him?"

     Hoggle's sigh was deep and weary and filled with a decade of hopeless struggle. "We tried t' get him t' ask you for help a lot earlier. But you'd … moved on by then. Like we wanted. He refused. Too proud fer 'is own good." He snorted in disgust. "Kept sayin' he'd handle it hisself. Flat-out threatened t' dunk us all in the Bog an' then banish us t' the Wastelands fer good measure just fer thinkin' about askin'. We didn't dare disobey."

     "Hoggle, what happened?" Her voice was sharp with worry, and she took several deep breaths in a useless attempt to calm down.

     He shifted again, placed his wrinkled cap upon his head, and met her gaze. "Started not long after you left here, an' got lots worse the more time passed. Ain't nothin' anyone can do. Not even the Goblin King." He shook his head, hands twisting his shirt in place of his hat. "Jareth—the Labyrinth—Everything's dyin', Sarah. An' we thinks you's th' only one who can fix it."

Chapter Three

[captainwhogotthecanary]

Update

Not looking for sympathy, just an explanatory post. My blogs (this and @ficcingcaptaincanary) might fall behind for a little while. Medical stuff follows, and discussion of death in the family, and probably oversharing of what happened, but I needed to put it somewhere. Not a happy ending. I’ve tagged, put a “keep reading,” and marked as sensitive.

My grandmother fell Christmas morning on her way to my parents’ house to join us for brunch. She was carrying presents for my kiddo and my niece, and she didn’t break her fall. She landed badly and called us when she couldn’t walk.

She HATES going to the hospital, and my parents (first responders) wanted to keep an eye on her, just make sure it wasn’t a bad bruise before taking her for treatment she didn’t want anyway. When she still couldn’t put any weight on her leg by time we finished eating and she’d given the kiddos their presents (she was SO excited about it), me and my mom took her to the ER. They scanned her hip and her head (she bumped it when she fell, but not hard, was 100% lucid, no headache for hours) and saw she had a small fracture in her hip, and her head CT looked completely normal.

Though the surgery for the hip would be minor (less than an hour, weight bearing by the end of the same day), they needed to keep her overnight before the surgery in the morning. Her blood pressure was high during the ER stay and the last time they checked before she got settled into the orthopedics department, but she seemed fine. She wasn’t even in pain unless she was having to move the bad hip. I volunteered to stay with her so she’d be more relaxed, and told my mom to go home.

Grammy and I were chatting, talking about tv shows (x-files and mash, specifically). She said how thankful she was I was there, and I told her I wasn’t leaving that night, and I’d be at the hospital as much as I could the following days, if her stay was long. It was a great day with her, probably the most I’ve enjoyed her company since I was about 11; she got progressively meaner the older I got, brought me to tears more than once.

But the time with her this Christmas was good.

Until it wasn’t.

She said she needed a bedpan, so I went and retrieved one from the nurses. I was gone maybe two minutes at most, probably closer to one. When I got back, I couldn’t make her understand I had the bedpan. It didn’t seem like she understood what she was seeing. A nurse came in just a couple minutes later (maybe less), when I was just about ready to go ask for help. Grammy got progressively more confused very quickly, couldn’t understand what was going on, kept mashing the call button once the remote was put in her hand (she’d asked how to page a nurse). I told the nurse that this was not her, not normal, and she started asking Grammy questions. She still knew exactly who/when/where she was, but she started slurring. She still couldn’t understand we had the bed pan, kept saying she was going to mess the bed if we didn’t get her a bed pan. The nurse called in a senior person for a quick consult, and about 30 seconds later, they put out a code for a probable stroke.

A team rushed in, quickly did assessments. My grandmother started yelling for someone to help her because she still had to pee. When they went to wheel her out, she relaxed for a second, started patting the doctor who was helping her on the butt. There was a chuckle on both their parts, and then they all left.

From my heading to the nurses station to her being wheeled out was between 5 and 10 minutes. They had her back in CT only a minute or two later. What had been a clean head scan hours before now showed stroke, with brain bleed already having claimed almost a quarter of her brain, including what controls movement on the left side. She was mostly unconscious by time they got her from CT to ICU, and they had to put her on a ventilator because she wasn’t getting enough air, half her body already failing to respond normally.

My mom got back about 20 minutes after that (they don’t live very close to the hospital). By that point, the neurosurgeon had come to talk to me. Best case, he said, he could do surgery. She would probably live, but she’d be in a home for the rest of her life, go from independent and mobile to unable to needing a nurse 24/7. And that was best case. He wasn’t sure she would want that but left it up to us as the ones who knew her.

The discussion with my mom after she got there was one of the hardest ever. I hope to never have another like it. Based on the doctor’s descriptions and his not-quite recommendation, we chose to forego the surgery. If she was basically unable to move, and as limited as was likely, she’d be angry, every waking second of the rest of her life. We told the doctor, and we went to see her.

She wasn’t actually awake, but she wasn’t as gone as he’d made her sound. She was aware we were there, seemed like she was moving both sides, even if the left was far less. It seemed like she was fighting.

We told the doctor to do the surgery. If she was still fighting, we weren’t going to give up for her. She might hate us, but she would be alive to hate us, and we’d do everything we could to make sure her life was as good as possible. Before she was taken to surgery, we told her that if we were making the wrong call, this was the time to show us.

She made it through the surgery.

We went to a hotel and got about 3 hours of sleep before heading back, getting to the ICU when they were supposed to be opening for visitors and were going to have results from a follow-up scan. It showed she was still bleeding/bleeding again, but slower, and the doctor was reasonably confident it would stop. We stayed and kept Grammy company for several hours until she seemed to be resting comfortably, then went home for dinner and a full night’s sleep, heading back to the hospital early, ready to settle in for the weeks or months it could take for her to wake up, planning to trade shifts so we didn’t have to leave her for so long again.

She wasn’t really aware of us, that next morning. She was barely responding on either side, and the nurse wouldn’t/couldn’t tell us what the newest scan showed. We waited with Grammy, talking to her for a couple hours, hoping she could hear us or was just resting and less aware for that reason. I knew what was coming, at that point. My mom didn’t, or at least not consciously.

The doctor finally came to talk to us. The bleeding had progressed. Half her brain was gone, and looking back at the earlier scans, had been pretty close to it the day before, after the surgery. The other side, the healthy one, was also showing damage and swelling. The only thing that might have a chance at saving her life would be even more drastic surgery that he didn’t recommend, didn’t think would likely be successful, and would put any part of her that was aware into even more pain. I don’t think he would have agreed to do the surgery even if we’d asked him to.

We didn’t ask him to.

We switched her to palliative care. The rest of the family came in to say their goodbyes, and Mom and I settled in. We kept talking to her, reassuring her. I held her good hand for probably 20 of her final 24 hrs, including while I was asleep. It took about 22 hours after she was taken off the ventilator.

And now she’s gone. I’m doing as much as I can to help my mom with any arrangements, cleaning out her apartment, canceling utilities, all of that. I’m okay sometimes and not others, going from happy to crying. She was very clear on her wishes after death, though: she didn’t want anyone crying over her, just an irish wake, people happy to remember her.

I’m trying.

Anyway, stuff is going to be a lot for the next few weeks. It’s possible I’ll need an active distraction and actually reblog or post a lot. It’s possible I won’t touch tumblr for three weeks. I’d rather nobody ask whether I’m okay, if you can avoid it, in case I’m needing to not think for that moment, but I appreciate any positive thoughts/prayers for the family as we get through this, for my grandmother as she moves on.