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woewriting · 7 months

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cold coffee

pairing: tara carpenter | fem detective reader warnings: mdni! no major warnings, fluffy and soft moments, implied sex; this take place after scream vi events. word count: 3049 a/n: this one is for you, @wesstars 🫶

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“Think you can warm me up?”

The low request came almost unnoticed by you, making you take a step back and look carefully at the ball of blankets on the couch.

Hidden there, under a couple layers of cozy blankets, a small Tara appeared with a red nose.

You smiled softly at the adorable view in front of you.

“I can’t, babe, I have some reports to look at, and it’s getting late.”

She pouted, looking at you with doe eyes that never failed, wide, soft with shining little stars dancing in the brown as she looks at you.

“Please? Just until I fall asleep.”

How could you say no to that?

You fold in the same second, forgetting that you have long pile of files to look at, carefully placing your mug filled with hot coffee on the side table, you took off your slippers and slid under the thick fabric, opening your arms towards the younger one.

Like she always does, Tara threw her legs over yours and hugged your torso, resting her head on your shoulder.

“You know…” you started, pulling her closer to you. “You wouldn’t feel cold if you wore more than just underwear and a tank top.”

“I don’t need to wear clothes; I have you to keep me warm,” Tara said back, looking at you with soft, sleepy eyes.

You smiled fondly, caressing her thigh with your hand. Leaning forward, you placed a kiss on her forehead, admiring the way the corner of her lips slightly tugged up, eyes closed and tip of nose red, the freckles spread on her face like stars in the dark night; Tara was a work of art.

“I love you so much, did you know that?” You whispered close to her lips.

She wrinkled her nose, “I know, but I don’t mind hearing you saying again, and again…”

Stopping her rambling, you pressed your lips on hers, sighing with such familiar taste of cherry of her lip balm. Tara was all soft, and when she was like this, calm and patient under your touch, it made your heart race.

When you first met her, during a rainy night at the police station, the girl could barely sustain your eyes, always avoiding them and fixating on somewhere or something else, like on her older sister, Sam. She came in because some idiots from a frat house were harassing her and her sister following the events from last year. You didn’t know much about the Carpenter’s sister, it was only your first month as a detective in New York, only heard rumors and whispers about it.

You ignored the others eyes on her, taking off your jacket to cover the small body that was trembling, being closely watched by the older Carpenter. Carefully, you placed the brown leather jacket around her shoulders, taking a couple steps back once you did, giving her a safe space.

Tara went home with your jacket that night, and when she brought it back, leaving it at the front desk, 5 days later, a small note was inside the pocket, written in a delicate handwriting, a small “thank you :)”. You smiled, keeping the note inside and going back to work.

The precinct was a place filled with gossips, theories and lies made up to creep you out. Your colleagues — if you could call them that — weren’t the most delightful people to be around, as most of them were men, you felt misplaced, an outcast, even thought you were on a higher level than them, mere police officers with a giant ego. Respect was a word that, apparently, wasn’t taught to them during life. You could count on your fingers the ones that were truly a nice officer and decent human being.

As the days went by, more talking took over the place, annoying ones that always got your rolling your eyes and ignoring them, the Carpenter sister’s being the subject of it 90% of the time, it’s like the big apple only had two young girls living in it and they were the reason to all the chaos that perpetuate in New York.

One day, late at night, you were finishing some reports to call it a day when a familiar voice caught your attention, the short blonde hair and leather jacket automatically bringing a smile on your face. You closed your computer and stood up, grabbing the brown leather jacket from the chair’s back and tossed over your shoulder.

“You’re too loud, did you know that, agent Reed?”

The woman turned around the same second your known perfume filled the room, a big smile tugging on her lips. She waited for you to get closer, annoyingly punching your arm as a form to say ‘hi’. Standing in front of her, the younger Carpenter was awkwardly looking at you, curiosity in her eyes as she watched you and your old friend interact.

You didn’t notice, but Tara was carefully watching you, the way your eyes light up whenever Kirby said something that happened while you were away from each other, crazy stories like the one where she almost got killed, again, a couple months ago. Funny ones, like when a common friend of yours got scared during a mission and yelled like a little girl because of a cat hidden inside a locker, causing you to throw your head back as you deliciously laughed. She smiled too, tilting her head to admire the way your nose scrunched or how your lips moved when you talked, or how your browns furred when Reed told what happened last year during Halloween, only then your eyes met Tara’s for more than a few seconds, a pinkish color painting her cheeks.

You didn’t know much about it, choosing to ignore the comments as you never knew what was a fact or what was a lie purposefully made up to destroy the sister’s images. All you were aware off, was that the masked killer that terrorized your colleague, and friend’s, life years ago in Woodsborro came back and worked at the precinct.

Kirby wasn’t the type of person that spoke about her fears and the horrors that haunted her over the years, all you knew was what she chose to share and the reason to why she decided to become a detective. You didn’t push her to talk, patiently waited for her to open up to you by choice because she trusted you. It took a long time for the moment to come, but one day, the alcohol in her made her talk and boy… she really had a lot to share, and it was very graphic — you swore you could feel the knife twisting inside you.

And now, with your eyes connected to Tara’s, a girl that seemed so sweet and kind, had gone through the same traumatic event as Reed did and, knowing her the way you did, you could only image the scars that hung onto the young Carpenter’s body and soul. You smiled at her, reaching your hand to hers.

“It’s nice seeing you again, miss Carpenter.”

Her hand was soft, warm and delicate against yours.

“You too, detective.” She smiled, hand still on yours. “I didn’t know you and Kirby knew each other.”

“Well, when I joined the force,” you started, forcing yourself to break the contact. “Reed was the first one to reach out to me and invite me for some beer after out shift.”

“She’s a very quiet girl, but it’s a great listener.” Kirby said with her costumery side smiled. “If you ever need someone to talk to, Tara, she’s the one you can go to.”

You looked at Kirby with pursed lips, head tilting in a silent ‘what the fuck are you doing?’

Tara let out a small laugh, “It’s good to know that, Kirby. If you trust her, then I do too.”

“Well, I don’t believe in that,” you said, licking your lips as you gave your attention to the girl. “I rather earn your trust than Kirby just giving it away. Trust is a very precious and intimate thing, Tara, you should only trust someone you know.”

“In that case, we should get to know each other better.” She smiled. “Don’t you think, detective?”

“I think that’s a great idea, miss Carpenter.”

That night was the first time you went out with Tara; Kirby tagged along in the first two hours but went home after a few rounds of beer, the alcohol getting to her way easier than you remembered. Helping her into the cab, you made sure to share her live location with you before sending her home, an old habit you had acquired after the truth about her life in Woodsboro.

“You know…” Tara started, her index finger messily playing with the sweaty, half empty, beer glass in front of her. “It’s sweet what you did there.”

“What do you mean?”

You have always been strong when it came to alcohol, maybe it was due to your position as a detective or you had a really good regenerating immune system — even a common cold couldn’t get to you.

Tara, apparently, wasn’t like you. She was leaning against the table, playing with the glass cup like a little kid that was sleepy but refused to close her eyes and drift away in slumber. You carefully watched her, afraid that she would eventually fall off the chair.

“The location, I saw you sending her live location to your number.”

You shrugged, taking a sip of your beer. “It’s nothing, really. I just want to make sure she gets home safe.”

“Still,” her hand reached yours on the table, thumb softly brushing your skin. “it’s sweet. You’re sweet.”

“And you’re drunk.” You laughed awkwardly, finishing your beer in one long sip, still allowing her to touch you. “Come on, let’s get you on a cab.”

Her hand grabbed yours when you threatened to stand up, ready to pay the bill. “No, please. I want to get to know you better.”

“We can do that some other time, miss Carpenter.”

“Promise?”

You didn’t like promises, it carried an obligation that you didn’t like, but you just couldn’t get yourself to say no when her big, sparkling eyes stared at your soul.

You sighed with a small smile, “I promise.”

When you were paying the bill, Tara was standing close to you, holding onto your arm as if you were going to run away from her. It was cute, you had to admit as you looked at her while the cashier waited for your card to approve the payment, the different height between you two very noticeable when her head barely reached the top of your shoulder.

Before you could put her inside the cab with her apartment address on it, you made sure to save her phone number and share her location with you, just like you did with Reed over the years.

“Text me when you get home?” Tara asked through the open window when you closed the door for her.

“I will.” You smiled, turning to the old driver. “Take her home safely, please?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

You stood there for a few seconds, watching as the yellow car drove away, Tara’s happy face outside the window waving at you. You waved back, heart warm at how adorable she was.

When you got home that night, you weren’t exhausted even after the busy day and all the beer you had, you felt alive and giddy as you texted the newly-added number, telling her you were safe and sound at the comfort of your home. The reply came in the same second, telling you that she was in bed already with a kiss blowing emoji next to it.

Now, a year after that first night out with Tara, you had the young girl sleeping safely in your arms, the morning sun breaking the thick, rainy clouds and invading the apartment, waking you up. Tara was hidden in the hollow of your neck, her calm and heavy breathing tickling your skin, still sleeping soundly.

You looked around the scene, still half asleep. Your coffee mug, now cold, still on the side table. The birds were chirping for the first time in a while since the winter arrived in New York. Some blankets had fallen to the floor, leaving only one covering your bodies. It was true, Tara only needed you to keep her warm.

Feeling your eyes on her, she stirs in her sleep and you’re fast to tighten your arms around her, but after all the incidents that happened around her in the past years, she was a light sleeper.

“You’re suffocating me.” She giggles, hand resting on your neck.

“I should suffocate you after you made me skip work last night.”

“Did I? I don’t remember putting a gun to your head and making you cuddle me.”

Your eyes widened, pulling back just enough to find hers.

“You did worse! You looked at me with Bambi eyes and you know I cannot say no to that.”

She laughs, “You’re very weak for a detective.”

Rolling your eyes, you ignored the fake teasing, caressing the scar on the right side of her belly.

“I’m only weak when it comes to you. You’re my only weakness, Tara.”

Her expressions softened, eyes analyzing your face. She knew you weren’t lying, just like she knew you would do anything to protect her, other than the four core, you were the only one that took her walls down.

“Well, then I guess I’ll have to use this against you so I can have you all to myself.”

“You’ll always have me all to yourself.”

“I know,” she shrugged. “but sometimes work steals you from me.”

You smile, “I have to keep my girlfriend safe, don’t I?”

“I guess you do, but today,” the tip of her fingers slid under the collar of your sweater, noticing the lack of bra; she wet her lips. “I have you all to myself, and I am not letting you go.”

“I certainly don’t want you to.”

Tugging you by the collar, she climbed on top of you, the blanket falling to the floor with the sudden motion.

For the first time you could fully see her as she sat on your hip; black panties and an equally black tank top, slightly wrapped around her thin waist, the tip of her scar visible, messy hair cascading down her shoulders.

Biting your lower lip as your eyes followed her curves, hands on her thigh following to her hip, then her waist in a strong squeeze. When she leaned down, lips oh so close to yours, you jumped when a low clearing of the throat coming from the kitchen filled the room; your instinct quick to pull a blanket from the floor to cover Tara’s body and pull her against you.

Standing in the corner of the brick wall, Sam was avoiding looking in your direction until her sister was fully covered, arms crossed in front of her chest.

“Please, tell me you two weren’t going to have sex on my couch, again.”

Tara hid a laugh against your neck, unlike you — who felt heat rising from your toes all the way up to your face, cheeks burning with Sam’s disgusted look. This wasn’t the first time the older Carpenter walked on the two of you, but it was funny that this happened twice on the same week, at least this time you both were fully covered…

You opened your mouth in an attempt to say something, an apology, or maybe try to convince her that this was not what was happening at all, but all that came out was a struggled sound that caused Tara to laugh muffled against you.

Sam took a deep breath, reaching out for her keys that were settled next to your mug. She adjusted the black beanie as she walked to the door, unlocking the 4 sets of locks and turning to you with a tired expression, “If you two are still on my couch when I come back, we’re gonna have a whole different conversation. Got it?”

You nodded fast.

“Good.”

And left.

You let out a breath you didn’t even realize you’d been holding when you heard the jingling of keys on the other side of the door and distant steps going down the stairs.

Removing the blanket from her head, Tara looked at the closed door before staring at you, a loud and delicious laugh breaking the almost palpable tension that was left in the room.

“How can you laugh like this when your sister walked on us like this, again?” You were in disbelief, heart beating in your throat.

“If you could see your face, you’d laugh too,” she whipped the corner of her eyes, pressing a fast kiss on your lips. “I might be your only weakness, but Sam is your only fear.”

You huffed, agreeing with your girlfriend.

“I’ve seen what she’s capable of, I am not risking having my hands cut off, I’d miss them a lot!”

“Oh, trust me, I know,” she leaned in, hands on the side of your head, a hard grip on the cushions you laid your head on. Tara brushed her lips on yours, a fainted smell of cherries filling your lungs. "I would miss them too... more than you could ever imagine.”

Before you could close the small gap between your lips, the jingling of keys got you sitting up, arms firmly wrapped around the youngest waist, walking to bedroom at the end of the hallway, a giggly Tara clinging to your body for her dear life; you kicked the door close and leaned against it, breath caught up to your throat as you faced Tara with pursed lips.

Sam had her eyes closed when the door swung open, one hand on the door knob and the other covering her face. She had forgotten her cellphone. When she was met with silence, her index finger moved up a little, enough for her to peek at the scene.

The living room was a mess, blankets all over the floor, your slippers and Tara’s lost in between, a couple cushions in the middle as well, but what made her take a deep breath to keep from freaking out was the overturned mug on the side table, cold coffee dripping on the wooden floor.

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lassieposting · 7 months

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Concept:

Post-tadpole, Tav offers to help Astarion find a way to walk in the sun again, and she starts by going to different libraries and repositories and archives around the city to look for books that might be relevant. Astarion, obviously, has to stay in the rental room with the shutters closed during the daytime, so he can't come with her.

At some point, this takes her up to the posh part of the city, where the fancy ✨ scholarly ✨ archive is. She remembers most of the walk - it's not too far from the graveyard Astarion took her to, in the neighbourhood where he once used to live.

And like, it's never actually occurred to her that he could still have Actual Blood Relatives still living? It's not a topic she's ever thought to raise with him. But she has to sign in and out of the archive, and she just happens to notice the name three or four lines above hers: an initial and a surname she recognises.

Ancunín.

The same name from Astarion's gravestone.

A parent? A sibling?

A niece or nephew Astarion has never even met?

Thus begins a secondary quest of trying to reunite a broken family. Astarion is willing enough to talk about the few memories he still has of the thirty-nine years he had with his family before turning - a drop in the ocean compared to the 200 years spent suffering under Cazador - but he shuts down when she nudges him towards the likelihood that Mr & Mrs Ancunín are still alive. He retreats back behind the selfish, catty survivalist he was when she first met him and claims he has no interest in ever reconnecting. The pain in every clipped syllable says drop it, so she does.

But then he asks her, very quietly, several days later, what the initial was. He doesn't really react when she tells him - there's no obvious recognition, and he doesn't ask any follow-up questions or try to discuss it further. He just goes back to his book. She watches him out of the corner of her eye though, as she skim-reads her own giant tome of magical artifacts. A very long time goes by before she sees him turn a page.

For a good long while, the family issue gets put firmly on the back burner. They have other shit going on. Sometimes, it's following promising leads on a possible workaround for Astarion's sunlight allergy. Other times, it's the kind of ugly, ragged-edged breakdown that so often follows a period of relative safety and stability after a major trauma. He's been running in survival mode for two centuries, and now he's finally starting to feel secure enough for the rest of his mind to come back online, and all the trauma he couldn't handle at the time, all the pain and fear and tangled emotions survival mode was protecting him from, is catching up to him. During those sporadic episodes, trying to keep him from falling apart is her top priority and, well, time gets away from them and by the time he brings up his parents again, months or more have gone by, and they have a fairly good idea of what artifact of daywalking they need to find.

By the time it comes to actually meeting with them, still more months have passed, and they have already found it.

It's horrible, and heartwarming, and heartbreaking, and healing, and hurting, and so many other conflicting things that for a while - a long while - Tav doesn't know whether she actually did the right thing encouraging him to reach out to long-lost loved ones. It's a mess of moments that makes her heart ache for a dozen reasons. She finds out that Astarion looks most like his mother, but has his father's nose. She holds him for hours while he shakes and sobs into her shoulder because they never even left the city, they were here the whole time, and they never found him - and he's so angry and full of grief he doesn't know what to do with himself. She accompanies him to the home he was raised in, and the once-familiar surroundings jog memories he thought lost for good - he's glassy-eyed, recounting them to her, but she's fairly sure it's the good kind of glassy-eyed, so she doesn't mention it. She tries to make conversation at family dinner while he stares at his hands in his lap, dissociated, looking even more uncomfortable than she feels, utterly lost in a world that once fit him like a glove. There are a lot of feelings to try and mediate. They are all hurt, all damaged, all afraid, all looking for the ghost of a loved one in the face of a stranger.

But, eventually, there is a day where she overhears Astarion having a conversation with his father, and he sounds like himself - not the persona he puts on in public - and his father laughs at something he says in a way that's entertained rather than awkward. There is a day where his mother reaches out and he doesn't shake his head or step away - he lets her hug him goodbye. They have not slipped back into the graves they crawled out of in each other's lives - they are all very different people now - but they are learning new ways to fit together, and he seems to be pleased about it.

So she thinks, yeah, it was worth it.

#bg3 #bg3 headcanons #astarion x tav #tavstarion #tav #so i saw a post mentioning that astarion's family could still be alive bc elves #and now i have Feelings #so!!!!! yells screams flings this into the void #also pry astarion having to start processing what hes been through once he's safe from my cold dead hands #also his poor folks lmao #his mother telling him that someone desecrated his grave not long after he died by digging it up #and then again recently by defacing it #and hes just 'actually both of those were me'#astarion ancunin

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