hi!! can i ask for #27 with empires joel or maybe life series bad boys, whichever u think fits the song better? :D
love this song :D it's in french so i'm going entirely off of vibes 😎👍
Joel always feels the smallest when he's walking next to Lizzie.
She towers above him- all blue scales and flowing pink hair like a waterfall down her back. Her tail swishes lightly behind them, almost inseparable to the trailing fabric of her dress. A webbed hand holds his as if he's something precious, and Joel can't help but feel so small.
He's been working on it with Jimmy. Being small around Jimmy is as easy as breathing, but being small around Lizzie is hard! What if she thinks he's weird? Or that he's weak and can't handle himself? Or what if she sees him have an accident?
He squeezes her hand and tries not to think about it. To his surprise, she squeezes back.
He tilts his head up. A cloud halos her head, glowing a lovely pink in the fading light of sunset. She smiles, and Joel's breath escapes him.
She's beautiful.
"Hi," he whispers.
She laughs, light and beautiful, like the kind of bell that would give an angel its wings. "Hello, Joel."
He's feeling brave. "Can I paint you?"
"Paint me?" Lizzie repeats as they step carefully into the Mezalean Matral Palace, nodding to terracotta guards and making their way up to where she knows Joel's bedroom is. "You can, Joel, but right now it's bedtime."
"Please?" he asks, a breath of a thing. He nearly trips over his own feet, eyes locked on Lizzie's. She catches him, looking down again, and he gives her his best puppy-dog eyes, "jus' fast before bed?"
Lizzie smiles, then sighs and reaches over to ruffle his hair.
"Fine. Just fast before bed."
He beams, grasping her hand in both of his and practically drags her all the way up to his room.
Once there, he releases her hand, ducks through the curtains that make up the door, and bounds across the room to the dresser that holds all of his chalk. He pulls it open, yanking a bit when it catches in the middle, and digs through it, pulling out all the blues and pinks that he can find and dumping them onto the floor.
"Oh, careful," Lizzie calls, "don't break all your chalk!"
"I won't!" he shouts back.
Once he's got all of them out, he turns, makes the front of his shirt a pouch, and scoops all of the chalk into it. Then he walks along the wall and finds a place that hasn't been drawn on- a spot in the middle of a small field of sunflowers. He thinks he was saving this spot for something else, but he doesn't remember anymore. It was probably supposed to be him and Lizzie.
He kneels down and dumps all his chalk on the floor again, whipping his head around to see where Lizzie is. She's laying pajamas out on the bed.
"'izzie!" he calls.
She looks up. He pats the spot on the floor next to him. She laughs and makes her way over, a towel draped over her arm.
"Sit sit sit," he says, patting the ground again. She crouches, and instead of sitting like he wants, she removes the crown from his head and fluffs out his hair. "Hey!"
"Just a minute, pumpkin," Lizzie leans down, kissing the top of his head, "I'm going to get everything ready for bedtime, and then I'll come sit, okay?"
Joel pouts.
"I promise," she shifts the crown into her other hand and extends a pinky. "Pinky promise."
He pouts more, but reluctantly wraps his pinky around hers and shakes it once.
She kisses his cheek. "I'll be right back."
He squirms away, giggling, and turns to the wall as she walks away. Before she can disappear, he gets a blue off the floor and starts with an outline.
He's drawn Lizzie a hundred million times before- usually in paintings of the ocean, or in her office, or high up in a tower, or flying through the air on a trident. Many of the drawings are hanging on his walls, in fact, or scribbled in the margins of his notebooks, doodled on the backs of napkins or on blank pages of old books, always careful, always detailed, never as breathtakingly beautiful as the real thing.
Joel grips the piece of chalk tight and vows to make this the best drawing he's ever done.
The chalk scrapes gently against the wall as he works. A bathtub fills in the other room. The wind chimes on his balcony sing, rocked by a gentle breeze. He adds himself next to her- sticks his tongue out between his teeth in concentration- squints at the wall, completely absorbed in his task.
He looks up at the swishing of skirts, and finds Lizzie carefully tracing her fingers along the shapes of sunflowers as she approaches.
"'izzie," he whispers.
Lizzie looks up. Her smile makes her eyes crinkle.
He pats the floor in front of his drawing, and she comes over, obediently kneeling down in front of it. He sits in her lap, pieces of chalk in both hands.
She wraps her arms around him, content.
Then, she gasps. "Is that us?"
Joel nods, trying to scoot forward while still staying on Lizzie's lap. She lifts him and shifts closer to help him reach.
"What are we doing?" Lizzie asks, the gentle tone of her voice warm and safe and wonderful.
"Dancing," Joel answers, finishing the brown on either side of the green stripe in his hair. Then he whispers, "do you like it?"
"I love it," Lizzie whispers back, "you're doing amazing."
And there they sit for an hour or so, listening to the quiet scraping of chalk on the walls and Lizzie's gentle questions. When Joel is properly covered in colorful streaks of chalk dust, his head drooping, Lizzie carefully removes the chalk from his hands and scoops him into her arms, kissing his forehead on the way to the bathtub.
He protests, but quickly settles in the warmth of the water, the flush of his face hidden by mountains of bubbles. After a bath, Lizzie carefully dries him off with a towel, helps him into brightly patterned pajamas, then tucks him into bed with another kiss to the forehead.
She slips across the room to gather up piles of chalk when he calls out to her.
"'izzie?"
She looks up, straightening her posture to meet his eyes, "yes?"
"You're nod'eaving?"
"Not yet, pumpkin," Lizzie answers, returning to her task, picking up three more bits of chalk, "I'm going to clean up first."
"Can you stay, p'ease?"
She pauses. Looks up again.
"For how long?"
"All night," he whispers, pleading, "p'ease?"
She smiles, "of course."
He beams, shifting to one side of the bed to make room.
"I'm going to finish cleaning up first, okay? I'll be there in just a little bit, love."
He nods, fast, and Lizzie returns yet again to her task.
She finishes quickly. Calls for a maid to retrieve one of her spare nightgowns, sings a lullaby to Joel while she waits. When it's brought she changes quickly and climbs into bed next to him, the curl of her tail reaching all the way around him, the tip of it pressing lightly on his back for only a moment.
He's barely awake now. She leans forward, kissing his forehead yet again. This time he doesn't open his eyes, letting out a gentle sigh.
"Love you, 'izzie," he murmurs.
She smiles, "love you too, Joel."
//
The morning brings embarrassment. She'd expect nothing less- he's always embarrassed after regressing.
He apologizes. She tells him he's cute. He blushes a lot, insisting he isn't cute, that he's never been cute, but Lizzie boops his nose and his words dissolve into meaningless fluff, and he buries his face in his hands and lets himself be scooped into a hug, pressed against her chest.
She can feel his heartbeat. She tucks him under her chin and hums.
They have to get up eventually. Lizzie has to go run a kingdom.
Before she does, Joel spots the drawings on the wall.
"What's this mess?" he asks, but the flush on his face suggests he remembers what happened, knows exactly what it was. Lizzie smiles.
"It's us," Lizzie answers, "we're dancing."
Joel smiles, his eyes full of nothing but fondness as he looks up at her. "So we are."
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