#COUGH COUGH DARRYL WHITEFEATHER | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

notbang · 5 years

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Whitefeather crew sans caffeine

“That’ll be ten dollars,” AJ says cheerfully, and Nathaniel nearly hands over his credit card before he can process the total.

“Sorry, what?” he asks, frowning. “Ten dollars? I only asked for a coffee.”

“Uh-huh,” AJ confirms. He leans over the counter to indicate the price board with a sunny smile. “New pricing came into effect this morning.”

Nathaniel raises his eyebrows, incredulous. “I bought a coffee here yesterday and it was three dollars. That’s over a sixty percent increase. What the hell kind of profit margin is that?”

“Don’t look at me. I don’t make the prices, just the pretzels.”

He can see Rebecca hovering in the back, her focus intently fixed on the dough she’s pummelling into the countertop in front of her with slightly too much force to be convincingly casual, her gaze too determined not to lift for her to not be listening in.

Nathaniel’s eyes narrow. “I think I’d like a word with your manager.”

AJ’s eyebrows quirk upwards and he makes a quiet oohing noise that is entirely too salacious to be appropriate for a cashier-customer exchange, but it’s a testament to how much West Covina—and the inhabitants of it that Rebecca chooses to surround herself with in particular—has gotten to him that Nathaniel barely batts an eye.

She’s still playing it coy when she makes her way over at AJ’s entertained insistence, brushing her hands together and creating a cloud of white flour around her that has him wrinkling his nose.

He’s having none of her innocent airs, though. “I know you and I didn’t exactly part on the best terms, but I thought we were past all the dr—”

“You think I’m overcharging you for a cup of coffee because we broke up?” Rebecca scoffs, pulling off her apron and tossing it down between them. “Please, don’t flatter yourself. That price is on the board for everyone—you’re not special. I’m charging you ten dollars for coffee because I understand how supply and demand works, as well as the direct correlation between productivity and caffeine at a law firm. So either pay your ten dollars—plus sales tax—” She widens her eyes and makes a shooing motion towards the elevator. “—or carry on.”

He straightens up, effectively unruffled. “Oh, so now you’re collecting sales tax? On hot beverages?” He jabs a finger at the drink in question and smirks at her as if he’s won. “This coffee is to go.”

“You’re not leaving the building with it,” Rebecca contests, crossing her arms over her chest, matter-of-fact. “Ergo, you’re consuming it on the premises.”

“Come on, that’s a stretch, even for you. Besides, it’s in a takeaway cup.”

She snatches the disposable cup off the counter and tips it unceremoniously into a white porcelain mug, placing it back down in front of him with far more force than is remotely necessary and a challenging jut of her chin. “You can drop it back on your way out. After you settle your bill.”

Evidently she thinks the conversation is over, the way she spins lightly on her heel and moves away to busy herself with straightening the items in the display case, but he’s not so easily dissuaded. He mirrors her movement from the other side of the glass, earning himself an eye-roll and an exasperated sigh as she bends over to get at the trays in the front.

“The security guard bought a coffee just before me,” he says. “He didn’t pay ten dollars.”

“Leonard’s a regular. He gets a discount.”

Nathaniel pulls a face. “He’s been here, what, a month? You barely know him. We worked together for a year.”

It’s a laughably inadequate summary of their history, and she can’t help but respond with dripping sarcasm. “And despite that heartwarming professional connection we share, approximately how many pretzels have you purchased in support of my small business endeavours since we opened? Oh, that’s right—none.”

“You know I don’t eat carbs,” he sneers.

Rebecca straightens back up, letting the door of the case fall shut with a clunk. “You do realise I know how much money you have, right? The what—seven dollars?—that you’re disputing right now is barely a drop in the ocean of your oversized bank account. You could pay to have coffee flown in from Italy by private jet, if you wanted to. Nobody is forcing you to buy it here.”

It doesn’t matter that she has a point—the standoff has already been entered into, and he has a horrible inability to back down when it comes her. The amused creases at the corners of her eyes and the infinitesimal twitching of her lips tells him she knows it, and the stubbornness only hardens in his gut.

“This is profiteering,” he tells her. “This is price gouging. It’s illegal, you know, to drive up the price of a commodity in a state of emergency.”

Rebecca tips her head back in a biting peal of sardonic laughter. “You think your office coffee machine being broken is a state of emergency? Send George or Maya out for a new one if you’re so desperate.”

His mouth twists, head tilting up and away. “It’s getting replaced next week,” he bites out at her. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“What’s the matter?” she asks innocently, pouting, deliberately doe-eyed. “Daddy take away your pocket money?”

Bristling, he reaches into his wallet and grunts when he finds nothing smaller than a twenty. “Keep the change,” he says, slamming it onto the countertop and snatching up his cooling cup of coffee.

“You’re not supposed to tip the proprietor of an establishment,” she pitches across the counter to yell at his retreating back, but only receives a rude hand gesture over his shoulder in response as he disappears into the elevator.

“Not a word,” she tells AJ when he comes to stand beside her, lips curling along with the tea towel in his hands as she aggressively jams the money into the cash register.

“Here we are—a hot cup of joe for a hot dame to dip her bill in, on the house.”

Paula accepts her freshly filled and steaming Office Bitch mug with gratitude, settling back in her chair. “Thanks, Cookie. You are a life saver.”

Rebecca makes a dismissive don’t-mention-it motion and continues to wipe down the bench with broad, circular swipes, dropping her donned accent. “How are office operations going sans caffeine, anyway? Who’s showing signs of cracking?”

“Well, let’s just say you do not want to be around Darryl when he’s detoxing—especially now he’s a sleepless single parent—because it somehow sets him vibrating at an even higher frequency than normal. Mrs H has one of those portable espresso machines locked in her desk drawer that she’s patrolling like the National Guard and I think Tim only half understands how thermoses work? Jim was making nice with a secretary from the second floor in an attempt to gain access to their coffee pot, but they figured out what he was up to and had him thrown out.” Paula takes a deep pull of her drink. “I am so lucky to be in with the owner of this place. God bless nepotism.”

Beaming back at her, Rebecca slides a pretzel onto a plate—one of the pink ones, overloaded with marshmallow fluff—and sets it down in front of her best friend.

“Ugh, I’m so glad I don’t work there any more,” she groans, scrunching up the dishcloth and lining it up to the sink like a basketball. In an unusual fluke of coordination, she lands it in one, giving a triumphant fist pump before collapsing in the chair opposite Paula. “I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’m like, totally bummed we don’t share a break room anymore—but Nathaniel and his daddy issues were exhausting enough before involuntary withdrawal got thrown into the mix.” She tears off a piece from the pretzel, the pink fluff sticky against her fingers. “Have you guys worked out who the culprit was, anyway?”

“Mm, no,” Paula manages to get out around her own mouthful of pastry, shaking her head. She swallows with an audible gulp. “But my money’s on Tim. He makes things malfunction just by looking at them and thinking stupid Canadian thoughts in his stupid oversized Canadian head.”

Their catch up is temporarily interrupted when someone stops by from the newspaper on the first floor for a chipotle and cheese, adjusting their choice of beverage to a cola slushy when they eye the hot drinks column of the amended price board with thinly veiled confusion.

“Hon, is this price hike actually going to make you any extra dough? Pun absolutely intended,” Paula asks once they’ve left, pausing to give herself a self-congratulatory grin. “Isn’t it going to lose you business, pushing it up that high?”

“We don’t actually sell that much coffee,” Rebecca says, with a shrug. “I mean, we don’t actually sell much of anything, to be completely honest, but the pretzel to coffee profit ratio is definitely skewed in the pretzel’s favour. I’m kind of just enjoying being an agent of chaos. Not to mention I get to see that one angry vein dilate up the side of Nathaniel’s forehead, so I’m gaining more than I’m likely to lose in this case.”

“Well okay then,” Paula concedes, swilling the last of her drink and pushing reluctantly to her feet when she notes the time. “I do hope this whole Nathaniel-versus-Bert-and-Plimpton-Senior wraps up soon, though. Quibbles over expenditures aside, the place has kind of been a giant mess since you left. I know I’ve been a little bummed since Brendan’s left home, but I did not sign up to parent an entire office of barely functioning man children in his wake.”

It’s another day later when AJ sidles into back room and makes a coughing noise that is far from subtle, eyes flicking in the direction of the front counter. “Someone here to see you,” he sing-songs, the smirk evident in the sound of his voice as he nudges her out of the way and takes over on twisting duty.

Nathaniel straightens and sets the white mug down in front of him when he sees her. Freshly washed—an unmistakable peace offering.

He clears his throat. “Hi. I’d like to make a standing order.”

She glances up from her disinterested studying of her notepad in surprise. “What? What do you mean?”

After a second of fidgeting Nathaniel presses the tip of his pointer finger down against the counter, his fingernail cycling from red through to white under the pressure. “From now until next Friday, I would like to order one coffee per person on the Mountaintop payroll, twice daily. 9am and 2pm. Preferably delivered, but if your assistant—”

“Employee,” she corrects with an eye-roll.

“—employee has trouble dealing with that many cups, I can send George to assist.” He finally looks at her, spreading his hands in a no-nonsense gesture. “Just plain black coffee, nothing fancy. And they can sort out their own creamer.”

“I thought the budget was too tight for coffee this quarter,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him.

He pushes his credit card across. “This won’t be going on the expense account.” Clearing his throat again and as dispassionately as he can muster, he presses, “So? Do we have a deal?”

It’s no small request—both in size and in terms of his pride—and she can’t help but be wary of his sudden change of heart.

“We only have one coffee machine,” she says after considering for a moment. “So it’s going to take awhile, if you want them all at once. I’m just saying. Thirty three coffees—”

“Thirty two, on Tuesdays,” he cuts in.

“Right. No Brad. And Paula—”

“—has class on Thursday afternoons. I know. We can fine tune the semantics.”

She bites her lip and shifts all her weight to one leg. “What I’m saying is, that’s a lot of coffees to be ready at one time.”

“Are you saying you can’t fill the order?”

“No,” she says quickly. “I just want you to… appreciate the work involved.”

“Hmm.”

He brings his hand up under his face to examine his fingernails, running the tip of his thumb over each bump of a blunt edge in an obvious attempt to feign nonchalance.

“We don’t do discounts,” she blurts out, dragging his attention back to her.

“Pardon?”

“For bulk orders,” she explains. “We don’t do discounts, because it makes things harder, not easier, having to—”

“I’m not interested in one,” Nathaniel interrupts. “The price that’s on the board. Nothing more, nothing less.”

She jerks her chin up at him. “Well, good. Because that’s what you’re getting. And… good.”

They both flinch a little at the harsh tearing noise her piece of paper makes when she rips it agitatedly off her pad.

There’s no previously established protocol in place for taking preorders—she struggles enough to get them in real time, let alone in advance—and she’s keenly aware of the show she’s putting on, scratching down miscellaneous details in a meaningless arrangement across the page that she’s only pretending is important.

She pauses and eyes him sidewise.“Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”

“Purely in the interest of productivity,” he says, impassive. Then, after a beat, “And I… wanted to support a local business.”

Rebecca studies him for a moment, exuding a suspicion that gradually relaxes out of her shoulders as she stares. She knows a Gesture when she sees one, and math and money has never been her strong point but she’s not stupid—what he’s asking for could pay for a new machine several times over. Which means he’s not only doing something nice, he’s doing something nice in layers, and it only makes it all the more confusing.

“Of course,” she says, ducking her head with an unexpected, curious sense of shyness. “How noble of you.” She scribbles something else down and slides it towards him for his perusal. “We don’t really have an ordering system, here, so you’re just going to have to trust in my semi-legible handwriting.”

He skims the summary she’s written, finds it satisfactory, and signs.

“You know, if you wanted to invest, you could have just said so,” she says as she takes back the pad.

Nathaniel scoffs at that, his gaze sliding over the decor with exaggerated disdain. “In this place? Please. I still have standards. You’ll be lucky if you don’t go belly up in a year.”

It surprises them both, her short burst of laughter.

“That is… probably true.”

Their lips both twitch as they fight twin grins.

“But with you working upstairs?” Rebecca goes on to mock, hand flattened over her chest. “Not a chance. You know, with this order alone, this month we might just break even.”

Smile dissipating almost as soon as it took shape, Nathaniel’s brief flare of joviality shifts to sincerity.

He hesitates, working his jaw back and forth a few times, debating whether or not he actually wants to speak and eventually settling on letting out a heavy breath. “I wanted to tell you this place is beneath you,” he begins, then holds up his hand when she opens her mouth to protest. “I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t. Because you seem…” He trails off, evidently unable to find the right word. Starts again. “Even if I don’t understand what… all this is, I want you to know that I hope you find what you’re looking for.” The nod he tacks on is firm, matter-of-fact. “I mean that, Rebecca. I do.”

He reaches over to squeeze her lightly on the arm, and she’s still so taken aback by every word that just came out of his mouth that she doesn’t have time to think about the pleasant warmth that starts to radiate outwards from where he’s touched her. Before she can bring herself to say anything back, he’s gone.

She hand delivers the first cup herself, an hour and a half before she helps AJ make a start on the others, sure to leave the wooden stirrer poking up and out the side.

It’s only after she leaves that he notices the loyalty card she’s tucked into the carry tray, right next to where she’s marked the sleeve Nathaniel.

mini fic prompt meme.

#crazy ex girlfriend #rebecca x nathaniel #it's hot here in hell so ship it all away #my fic #mini fic prompt meme #i vomited 85% of this up the other night then kind of immediately lost interest #but i forced myself to finish it #and i'm still not entirely sure what i think of it #also i'm not proud of myself for turning a gen prompt r/n-centric #but this was the bunny that bit me!#anonymous #replies

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notbang · 5 years

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gimme the commentary for you're the fire and the flood, anything you have to say about the section starting with "He wakes to the acrid burn of smoke in his nostrils and his throat, one of the overhead smoke alarms apparently clinging to the last of its battery power long enough to sound a pathetic wail in warning." and ending on “Drink some three year old tequila with me?”

send me a scene from one of my fics, and I’ll give you the equivalent of a dvd commentary on it! - you’re the fire and the flood

He wakes to the acrid burn of smoke in his nostrils and his throat, one of the overhead smoke alarms apparently clinging to the last of its battery power long enough to sound a pathetic wail in warning. His first foggy thought is Rebecca, his arms reaching for her out of repressed habit but coming up empty, and when he pushes himself bleary eyed up onto his elbows on the couch he can’t see her on the bed, either. Once he discerns the soft grey haze is filtering out from the kitchen he scrambles to his feet in a panic.

Since one of the central conceits of this fic is that Rebecca has been in jail for the past three years -- and Rebecca has cut off all communication with everyone for the past two -- something I was playing around with was the jarring sense for the both Rebecca and Nathaniel that they’ve gone from zero contact to being trapped not only together but in this fucked up time capsule Nathaniel has left of their stuff in his apartment after moving out (dude, get some fucking therapy, stat). So for Nathaniel in particular, the memory overload is wreaking a little a havoc on his dreams (which may or may not also have something to do with those pesky Santa Ana Winds). He’s just spent the night dreaming of a moment they shared back when they were together, so when he’s pulled from slumber Rebecca is immediately on his mind.

She’s flattened against the wall when he finds her, eyes wide and vacant as she stares at the sink where the flames are already starting to lick up the wall. When he calls her name she’s unresponsive. He tries again, rougher this time.

“Rebecca.”

She snaps out of it, then, coughing and crumpling against him before mirroring his movements and tucking her mouth into the crook of her elbow.

“The water,” she chokes out, batting helplessly at the smoke. “There’s no water coming out.”

Since it’s the apocalypse and all, we had to up the stakes a little beyond trapped in an apartment with someone you don’t want to be trapped inside an apartment with and cut off the water supply. And the most [in]convenient moment for that to become apparent was of course when Rebecca decided lighting a small fire in the sink was a good idea.

He nudges her aside and goes for the rug in the entryway, pushing past her to get back to the sink and slapping at it with the heavy fabric until he’s managed to smother most of it out, the sides of it singeing in the heat but the lack of oxygen ultimately winning out. When the smoulder is contained to the basin again he returns with one of her saucepans of water, extinguishing the remnants with an angry hiss against the stainless steel.

I just... really liked the idea of Rebecca being accidentally prepared for the apocalypse? Being in jail for three years has affected her in different ways, and I think she’s learned to hone the more manic aspects of her personality into a very specific brand of survival. The apartment ends up fully stocked with food because she goes kind of overboard hoarding all the things she’s missed out on eating for the past three years (and incidentally, things Nathaniel wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, which was hilarious to me). They still have water because she took some advice she heard on the news (which she’s been obsessing over as a means to reacquaint herself with the world) to the extreme. Plus I enjoyed the mental image of this already ridiculous mishmash apartment being added to with a minefield of miscellaneous vessels filled with water.

He drops the pot in the sink with an aggressive clank before turning back to face her.

She hasn’t moved from the spot the entire time, still stood frozen and numb, and he grunts in annoyance before hoisting her into his arms and carrying her out of the smoky kitchen over his shoulder, finally waking her up.

“Put me down,” she growls, pummelling him angrily with her fists. “I’m fucking serious. Put me down, you asshole.”

He deposits her unceremoniously back on her feet near the foot of the bed, sidestepping before she can hit him again and raising his hands defensively.

“Are you insane? What was that?”

“I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry. I was stupid. I wasn’t thinking.”

“What were you even doing? Did you start that fire on purpose?”

So this entire fic is basically just one continuous fire metaphor for Rebecca’s inner tumult. I’ve always been intrigued by her association with fire in canon, and in a way this was a 22k extrapolation of that. As we know, Rebecca has a tendency to set things on fire when she wants them seared out of her life, and apparently being stuck in the middle of a wildfire apocalypse is no exception. In fact, I kind of imagine she drew inspiration from the wildfires raging outside when she made the very deliberate decision to start her own fire in the sink. This time, she’s not burning her ex boyfriends’ stuff, though -- she’s burning a stack of photos from Darryl of this universe’s equivalent of Hebecca, because she’s struggling with much the same multitude of emotions we saw her wrangle in 4x09. (As an aside: in this universe, the baby is named Bianca, meaning ‘white’ -- a reference to Whitefeather and White Josh.) The baby was born the night she was arrested, so even more so than what we got in canon Rebecca has been happily pretending she doesn’t exist for the last three years. Add to her internal unrest the fact that half the town has already gone up in flames -- she’s not just dealing with the existence of her biological daughter, but the fact that her life could very well be in danger. So almost understandably, Rebecca decides to Nope out of that mental mess in typical destructive Bunch fashion.

He notices the way she’s favouring her left arm, tucking it into her chest and his nostrils flare as he snatches at it, yanking her closer so he can see.

“Ow!”

“You burned yourself? Jesus Christ, Rebecca.”

Grip like iron around her elbow he drags her over to the dining table where she’s been keeping her collection of makeshift water vessels; tripping over her own feet from the angry force of him Rebecca yelps, aiming a protesting kick towards his shins in self-defence but stumbling in the process, coming to an abrupt stop when he shoves her forearm down into the portable foot spa Valencia had gifted her as a pre-wedding present so many moons ago.

“Stop it, you’re hurting me,” she snaps, and only then does he let her go, her skin imprinted faintly with red where he’d been holding her.

“Oh, sorry, I’m hurting you? You seem to be doing a pretty good job of that yourself.”

She scowls, but keeps her hand submersed in the tub anyway, the room-temperature water for the most part ineffectual at soothing any of the sting.

Nathaniel closes his eyes and tries to calm himself, tries to breathe through his heart beating hard like it’s going to break through his chest on overdrive. They’re both a little panicked, he knows; fraught with fire-related tension and highly strung, and as his pulse slows back to a steady throb he feels the shame creep in at adding to her distress—it’s never been his intention to frighten her. His own brief flare of terror still strums insistently in his fingertips, though, and he can’t keep the accusation out of his voice.

As we find out a little later, once the tequila gets involved, the last three years haven’t exactly been kind to Nathaniel. He left West Covina to move on, but he’s still very much affected by the pervasive sense that he’s doomed to feel like he’s losing Rebecca over and over again -- when you take her suicide attempt, their two break ups, her pleading guilty and then later taking him off her visitor’s list into account and add all to that the fact that the way she re-entered his life was in a hospital bed, the dude’s understandably got a bit of a complex going by this point. I hesitated at having him get so (however briefly) physical with her, but I think the important distinction here is that it’s nothing to do with anger. She’s just scared the absolute shit out of him, again, and he’s course-corrected a little too hard in trying to protect her.

“What the hell, Rebecca?” he demands. “You are crazy. You could have gotten us both killed.”

“I know! I am crazy. I’m losing my fucking mind, Nathaniel. Because I’ve spent the last three years of my life behind bars and now I’m finally out I’m just trapped all over again. I just want to start over but I can’t, because I’m stuck in this stupid town, and now I’m stuck in this stupid apartment with all this stuff, with you, and with all these reminders of everything I’ve missed and I feel like I can’t breathe.” She pulls her arm out of the flooded foot spa and gestures erratically at her chest, sending out a spray of dislodged droplets, eyes wild and wide and welling with tears. “I’m suffocating and I don’t want to be in here anymore. I can’t…”

If Nathaniel’s feeling the cabin fever at being trapped, Rebecca’s feeling it tenfold. If it weren’t a violation of her parole, she wouldn’t even be in the state right now, so her current circumstances are A Lot. So while it was mostly about her complicated feelings regarding what she’s missed out on in her absence, her starting the fire had an undercurrent of self-sabotage to it, too.

She lets out a strangled sob before promptly bursting into tears, crumpling forward, collapsing against him and burying her head in his chest. Force of nature that she is it’s so easy to forget how small she is until she’s tucked against him, over a head of height difference and two years of uneasy silence between them.

“Please. I just—I just want to get out of here,” she hiccups into his shirt, hands fisting in the fabric. “I feel like I can’t—”

“Breathe,” he says quietly, cradling the back of her head on autopilot. “Hey. Just breathe.”

He’s never really consoled anybody before but it seems like he’s doing something right; her hand not nursing the burn pulls tighter at his shirtfront but her choked sobs ease somewhat, her breathing eventually slowing into synchronisation with the gentle back and forth of his palm across her shoulder blades. For a half-second he thinks he should be disgusted by way she’s snivelling into his shirt but the disdain never comes; all he feels is an unexpected rush of latent tenderness for her and the overwhelming urge to encase her firmly in his arms.

Hugs!!!! Emotionally overloaded hugs!!!! An R/N staple. That is all.

She’s embarrassed, so embarrassed, not just about the fire but the hopeless way she’s clinging to him and she can’t bring herself to let go because she doesn’t want to see his face or let him look at hers, doesn’t want to look at anything in the apartment for a moment longer. Her nostrils fill with the familiar scent of him as she inhales deeply, shakily, and crushes her nose into his collarbone.

“You’ve been through a lot, Rebecca,” he murmurs into the crown of her head. “You’re going to survive this too. I promise.”

It’s the softness in his voice that finally gives her the courage to pull away, rubbing the back of her palm across her snotty nose and glancing up at him with wet, abashed eyes.

He steps back but moves his hands to her waist, holding her gently as if he’s not entirely convinced she can keep herself upright.

Up until this point their every interaction has been rife with tension -- a mixture of unavoidable sexual tension and the resentment they’re each carrying over how certain things have played out between them -- but here they stop and take a breath together, and it’s kind of like the fire in the kitchen was the high-pressure crucible that’s made reforging their dynamic possible. Rebecca’s letting herself be vulnerable, rather than angry, and Nathaniel -- dumb smitten dweeb that he is -- has just melted at their physical contact.

“Truce?” she surprises herself by offering with an ungraceful sniff, not much more than a mumble but he hears it all the same.

There’s a beat, and then he drops his arms away from her and nods. “Truce.”

His eyes don’t leave her back as he stands there mutely, watching her make her way across the room to rummage through some boxes in the corner until she finds what she’s looking for and turns back to face him.

She sniffs again, and raises the bottle.

“Drink some three year old tequila with me?”

Because adding alcohol to the mix is always a good idea!!

#catty-words #replies #my fic #dvd commentary meme #thaaaanks #i'm not feeling very articulate today but hopefully this is some level of interesting insight

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