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female-buckets · 2 years

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Buddy Blog with Bird & Dee

Throughout the 2007 WNBA Playoffs, they will continue to talk about anything and everything that comes to mind, all the while keeping each other up on how the other is doing in their travels and the march towards the Finals.

[Buddy Blog Chronicles part 2 under the cut] [read part 1 here]

Back On The Bus

Posted by Sue Bird on Monday, July 23, 2007, 1:02 p.m. ET

Sorry it's been so long since I've really written, but I was so busy with rehab that I had nothing left to give. Then I just saw you last week in Phoenix and we said everything we needed to say in person. But now it's time for an update. I'm stuck on a bus driving from New York to Washington and have nothing else to do...

We've actually never done this bus trip before. I'm glad we did it because the weather in the northeast is bad. Delays everywhere on all flights. It's about four hours long and we're just over two and half into it. I slept the first two and the only reason I woke up is because we stopped for bathroom break and food. Everyone else is eating and watching a movie, Perfect Stranger.

Did you watch Beckham's first game in L.A. this weekend? I was totally tuned-in and highly entertained. I watched the hour-long special beforehand. His house is ridiculous, like the ones from Laguna Beach with the pool overlooking the cliff. It's unbelieveable. He puts L.C.'s house to shame. And I feel bad for him, too. If it wasn't his first game, he probably wouldn't have played at all. Everyone was expecting all of these crazy things out of him but he only played for like 12 minutes. The amount of cameras following him was good and good for soccer. To see all of the famous people there was funny. But afterwards on ESPN's bottom ticker, they showed the score and said "David Beckham entered the game in the 75th minute (Did not score)." I was like, wow. That's rough. What were people expecting in 15 minutes? Sometimes people expect too much from these star athletes. Especially in soccer, you're not going to score every game.

Back In The Saddle

So the first time I practiced was last Monday, the 16th and I really didn't know what to expect. I went to practice and the trainer originally said no contact. We talked about it and I suggested going with it and seeing how I felt step-by-step. When drills first started, I did a couple and sat out a couple. As practice went on, I felt better and better and when it came time to do full-court five-on-five, I stayed in for that. Must have been beginner's luck because I was hitting every shot, passing well, playing defense and felt really comfortable. So when we played your guys the next day, I joked that if it had been Game Five of the WNBA Finals, I would have suited up. But, the doctors said two weeks and I had to stick to that timeline and waited.

This is actually the first time I've come missed time due to a procedure performed on the lower part of my body. I've never missed games for anything other than my broken nose and the difference with the nose is that you're wearing a mask and then not thinking about it. The knee is something you have to think about and be conscious of and do a mind-over-matter kind of approach. There were definitely times in the last two games back when I thought about it, but I just kept playing. If you're going to be tentative and think about it constantly, you're not going to enjoy yourself.

The hardest thing, really, is my conditioning and getting back into that comfort zone. I was doing pool work-outs, bike work-outs, pre-core work-outs and treadmill work-outs, but nothing can simulate a real, live game. And aside from my shooting woes, I feel pretty good. Hopefully I'll be ready to go the next time we play you guys. It was good being able to be there for the game last week and definitely for the event at Majerle's. You guys did a great job of setting up the event and anytime you can see Thunder Dan, it's a good thing. Just another excuse to have a good time with friends with all of the proceeds going to a good cause. Nice work on the attempted bartending, too. I think you and Lauren made like two drinks and then that was it. You guys should have waitressed. I don't think I'd be a very good waitress, though.

I Was Told There Would Be No Math

That reminds me, did I ever tell you about the time I worked in the food services industry? I've blogged about our house in Saratoga (Upstate New York) near the racetrack when I was younger, but I don't think I mentioned that I worked there, too. My dad's friend managed to the concession stands that sold all different things... the hot dogs, burgers, sodas, etc. They also had little carts scattered around the track and I spent one summer working a cart that sold chipwiches. I was maybe 14 years old. I got up every morning, set up the cart and sold chipwiches for the entire day (there were some other things like ice cream and sorbet bars), but the hardest thing about the job was the dry ice. If you spend all day reaching into the cart, you get burned. I had burns all over my arms. It was the worst. But it taught me some valuable lessons that I've taken with me through my life... like avoid dry ice at all costs.

I also had trouble making change, especially when I had to add up a few different things that cost like $2.25, $4.75 and $3.50 and someone gives you a $20 bill. I had to be quick on my feet and math was not my strong subject. I think you're like 10 times better at math than I am, at least with the easy stuff like addition and subtraction. Long division, I'm not so sure about. Still better than me. I need a calculator for everything.

I certainly don't keep track of my shooting percentages. It was easy when I was 0-for-6 yesterday, but I made the big shot when it counted in New York. The play was actually off of a jump ball, so it's not like it was called for me. Izi played great last night. She always does against New York. So we had a play set, Janell Burse set a back screen for Izi on a flare as the ball went up and Lauren tipped it to Izi. It was designed perfectly as I was sitting there watching it unfold. I was waiting for her to shoot it, chilling at the top of the key and she took a dribble, made a good read and found me. I had missed the shot before, so after I hit the final shot, I was telling people back down the floor that there was no way I was missing that shot twice. I'm glad it worked out for us.

Back to life on the road... Lauren is sitting behind me and wants to make a guest blog entry for you while I eat my food. Hold on...

Lauren's Cameo (Posted by Lauren Jackson on Monday, July 23, 2007, 1:12 p.m. ET )

Hey. How's it going? I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to be talking about here but since this is to Dee, it really doesn't matter. I guess it's good that Sue is writing this blog and not me. It's good that she gets all of the attention, too. It's great. I'm not really an outgoing person. I'm a bit shy, really, so I think the fact that you two get all of the attention is brilliant. It's all in good fun, though.

Someone recently asked me if I had to choose one of you to play with for the rest of my career and only one of you, who would I choose. It was a horrible thing to ask and I answered it diplomatically. I couldn't say either but would say both. In addition to the All-Star Games, people may not know that I got to play with both of them in Russia together this past year. We have so much fun together. When we're overseas, it's just fun. We live together and play together. We're going to be doing it again for another six months. There is always a smile on our faces. No drama. Easy-going. I've never had a little group like this, people who I rely on for everything so it's nice.

Diana makes everyone laugh, Sue is the planner who gets us out and I'm the one who wants to stay at home. Then Sue tells me we're going out and Diana's like We're going out. So I say okay and go along with it. Don't leave me behind. So I just didn't want to feel left out. Here's Sue again. Thanks. Bye.

Last Thing

It's me again... Still eating but wanted to say one more thing. Lately, all that fans want to know is how come you didn't rock the ponytail like you waid you would? Where is the ponytail? I've been giving you the benefit of the doubt... maybe she'll pull it out later in the season, she still has time, etc. So now don't make both of us look bad now.

Two Weeks To Go

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Tuesday, August 7, 2007, 3:45 p.m. PT

I realize it has been like years since I last wrote and that's my fault. Starting now, you're going to get daily updates. No, not daily, hourly. At the very least, weekly. Or monthly. Either way, I'm on board. But this Blog is going to be amazing because we have so much to catch up on. We've been on the road for the past ten days, which hasn't been easy. But thanks to my teammate, Kelly Mazzante, for keeping everyone informed during our road trip. Have you been reading?

Since I last wrote, we actually clinched a spot in the Playoffs. That's a big achievement for our team. We still have five or six games to go, which is always interesting when you clinch this early. But I'd rather be in this position than where we were in the last three years where it comes down to another team winning or losing. I'm happy for what we have done, but this is truly just the tip of the iceberg for us. Home court is now the goal and it really is so important. It's so hard to win in Sacramento, Seattle and San Antonio so whichever team gets the homecourt advantage really does have... the advantage.

Even though we've clinched, I wouldn't say the pressure is off of us. Yes, there was that monkey on our backs that we hadn't made the Playoffs, but eight teams make the Playoffs. Going deep into the postseason is something that is definitely in our sites and pretty realistic. This team is talented enough to make a lot of noise. If things finished right now as is, we'd play you guys. Phoenix vs. Seattle in the first round. But do I care who we play? Nah. Whatever team it is, it is. We can't really be concetrating too much on anyone else at this point. We want to finish the season strong and be playing our best basketball as the season ends. I'm sure it's the same for you guys. And if it happens, we'll have more to write about.

Home Sweet Home

We are currently in Los Angeles where the X-Games are wrapping up. I'm not sure how they got all of the dirt out of Staples Center, but I was just there for shootaround and you would never know the difference (unlike going into an arena after the circus has just left town). I actually used to go to the X-Games when I lived out here when I was in high school. Did you see the skateboarder who fell and his shoes popped off? That was some crazy shi... stuff. Those guys are amazing.

L.A. is where I grew up, you know. Last night I went back to Chino and spent the night in my house and got to see my family. It's nice being back in familiar territory. It's no Syosset, but it's still fun. You have that bagel place but we have the best donuts in the world. Oooh. Mama's Donuts. Mama's Donuts will knock anything else out of the ballpark when it comes to breakfast. Aww yeah. It's the bomb. They had this sugared donut that I grew up on. We used to hang out at this place all the time because it was open 24 hours. Nothing beats a donut at 2 a.m.

Speaking of donuts, I have NOT seen the Simpson's movie so everyone needs to stop talking about it. I heard it's funny and I'm a big fan, but we know that's what Russia is for. Rome second season just came out today and I'm going to go buy that and put it away, I'm also going to get Big Love and then I'll be ready to go overseas. In four months. Maybe I'll go early. It's always good to show up to work early and they do pay me a lot of money so I have to go.

Also in L.A... It's Beckham Mania! I love that guy. He's doing great things for the sport even if he hasn't played much yet. People here love not only the sport, but also how big of a celebrity you are and that's what it's all about. He has made such a big impact already. Look at the coverage soccer is getting!

What It's All About: The Stats

I was driving down Rodeo Drive with Ilene from Nike, Lindsay Kawaggga and Cappie when I heard that I was Player of the Week. It was a big moment in my life. Do you get a trophy for Player of the Week? It's nice, though.

I do think Lauren has the scoring race wrapped up. Scoring and putting up big numbers just happens when you get into a groove. It's something I don't even think about and it just happens. At least that was what happened when I won it last year. I was in such a zone, and that's what Lauren has been in all year long. Someone told me I'd need to average 52 points per game over the last two weeks to win it. I could probably do it if they don't foul me out. 50 is definitely realistic. I know you led the league in assists a couple of times, but leading the league in scoring is much tougher. If I concentrated 40 minutes on passing the ball, I could easily get five assists. Actually, passing is a lost art in this league, something that only a few like you, Lindsay Whalen, Ticha and a few others do well.

At this point, though, the scoring title means absolutely nothing to me. It was fool's gold for me last year and I realize that if it takes an individual that much work, the team may not be better for it. The thing about our team this season is that we have all five starters averaging in double figures. I don't know when that has happened in the WNBA, but it can't be too often. I'll tell you what, though. I am averaging a career-best in blocks per game. That's something I've always tried to do in college. I'll bet I'm like Top Ten all time in blocks at UConn. I used to foul out a lot and Coach Auriemma used to hate it. I just like to play aggressive and this year I've just found myself in some good spots. And I'm bringing them down. I block shots like Dikembe Mutombo.

Things To Close With

I've been busy these past few days with Shark Week. Is there anything better? I've been watching since I was in Fourth Grade. Amazing stuff. I was talking to my brother-in-law last night about swimming with sharks. I want to do it. You can actually go shark diving in San Diego where you go down 35 feet and swim with great whites. That's a rush that I would love to do. They're just sharks. I'm a person. Actually, I probably won't be doing it anytime soon.

I see you're back on track, playing well again. Every time you see us, you have a heck of a game. 111 points on Sunday against us. Thanks for that. How come no one brings up the fact that you gave up 101 points, though? Lol. You won the game, but what's the difference if you win 51-50? I guess people do like the scoring. It's what the league needs more of. I think the league has made some good rule changes and it's paying off and we're seeing things go in the right direction. And I will serve on the Competition Committee, if called upon. If anyone's listening or reading...

I was also reading that Sheryl and Tina are considering retiring. We'll see. I'm telling you, the minute Sheryl is healthy, she is one of the best players in the world. Hands down. I see her going out with a good year. Tina, too.

The ponytail... I might still pull it out for the Playoffs. Why not? I'll just throw that out there. It's something that the people want. I know you also want a guest blogger. Penny's in her room right now, so another time.

So I have some friends coming into town later this week to hang out and I'm just excited to see a lot of friends and family at the game who I haven't seen in awhile. I'll see you down the road, too, at some point. Maybe sooner rather than later. Until then...

P.S. - Remember you have to call Bed about our vacay. Special plans. Gonna be huge...

Relaxed and Ready

Posted by Sue Bird on Friday, August 17, 2007, 9:12 a.m. PT

It's Friday morning here in Seattle. Our last regular season game is tonight at home against the Sparks. It's an interesting day for everybody.

From a basketball standpoint, it's going to be a relaxed and fun game, but a game that we want to win. We really just want to play well. Even though there are no playoff implications on the line for either team, it will still be a competitive game. For us, much like you guys in your remaining games, we want to end on a good note with some momentum, feeling good about how we're playing. The Playoffs will mark a new season for us. It is a time in which anything can happen. We can let go of what has happened in the regular season because, to some degree, we have underachieved. But the Playoffs can tell the story for the year. People will forget about our disappointing regular season.

On the other side of things, a lot of media around here is asking us about how it feels that this may be our last regular season game at KeyArena, or in Seattle? You know, not until this last home game did I even think about it or even mention it. Even when we've talked, you and I, or some other friends, it isn't anything that really came up. So this is the first time I've thought about it. I'm sure a lot of fans are feeling uncertain as well. It would be sad if that was the situation, this being our last game, but you never know what's going to happen in the future, so we'll see.

Would I Rather...?

At this point, we just have to do it. Hopefully when the lights are on and it's a big game, everybody will show up and we will be on the same page. I don't think there are any words that can be said or drills we can do in practice. It's just one of those times now where we have to play and play well. We have to show up. A lot of people are asking me who I'd rather play in the first round... you guys in Phoenix or San Antonio. To be honest, I don't have a preference. The top seed is still being decided and I wish you the best of luck. It really would be a huge accomplishment if you were to get first in the West. I know it's just the regular season, but it still says something.

We've had better luck against the Mercury this season, while losing all four games we've played against the Silver Stars. But you can look at it either way. If I said we wanted to play Phoenix because we've already beaten you two out of three games, that doesn't mean anything in the Playoffs. Or I could say we'd rather play San Antonio because the law of averages says we're due. Does that really matter? Whoever we get, we get. It's actually nice to have been locked into a seed for the past week. We've been at home relaxing, knowing we're hosting the first game on our court. As for who we're playing, I guess we'll find out in a few days. Regardless, we're looking at one of the two best teams in the West and we'll have to go through one or both of you to get to the Finals. Doesn't matter who is first.

I won't do any trash talking now... that will commence once we know who we're playing.

LJ FOR MVP

My M.V.P, vote would definitely go for Lauren and making her case is not that hard. I know people will think I'm biased, but it's not about that. It will likely come down to Becky and Lauren, don't you agree? I have so much repsect for Becky's game as a point guard. Generall speaking, point guard's numbers aren't something that stick out. But Becky has both the leadership thing going as well as the numbers. She's top three in scoring and has led the league in assists pretty much all season. She's had a great year, taking over team that didn't do as well last year. I know they've added another pieces, but Becky is what makes them go.

But... come on. Look at what Lauren has done this year. She leads the league in scoring, rebounding, blocks, double-doubles, has a 47-point game. She'll probably get Defensive Player of the Year. As great as any other player is in the WNBA, if I were starting a team, Lauren is my top pick. You'd be up there, Tamika, Becky, all these great players. But here's what separates her. No one else sees double- and triple-teams every single night and continue to average 20+ points, 10+ rebounds, etc. That has always been my point and case for her. I'm sure Lisa Leslie faced the same thing, but that's what makes an M.V.P. Seriously, just to drive this home, the one night this season Lauren did not get doubled, she got 47 points.

And any time we don't have Lauren, it's a struggle for our team.

Coming Together As a Team

Last night was a fun night for us as a team. We've been home for awhile and tonight's our last game. With Wendy Palmer's parents in town, they wanted to cook for us. Her mom is actually an amazing, amazing cook. Some of the apartments that my teammates live in are kind of small, not that mine is much bigger (you've seen it), but she asked if I could host everyone and I was like, sure. I was the host, Wendy's mom was the chef and we had pretty much everyone over. A couple of people couldn't make it but it was fun. We had the New York-Washington game on NBA TV and everyone was eating their "soul food." We had mac-and-cheese, pork chops, ribs, chicken casserole, pound cake for dessert and some banana pudding. We tore it up.

And then, of course, we finished off the night with a little Guitar Hero. Some of the older crowd left, but I have to admit, Izi was killing it. For her first time, the Brazilian has some moves on the guitar. It was fun to just hang out and we have a team that really likes each other and gets along so it was good to come together...

Now I'm off to shootaround, so we'll talk next week. We might have some interesting things to discuss... Good luck this weekend.

It's Destiny

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Monday, August 20, 2007, 5:38 p.m. PT

Monday night, four days until the first game... I've been waiting all weekend to write this baby.

Isn't it destiny that this is the matchup after we've been blogging like this all year long? But I'm excited for it. Our whole team is really excited. Four years of no Playoffs and we finally broke through this year. We're going in playing well, too, so that's what I'm most excited about. And this is what fans wanted, right?

There are a lot of good individual matchups in our series, don't you think? With any series, you know what you're going to get out of the starters, which is why I think the bench is so important. That's why we've been playing so well, because my teammates off the bench have really been productive. I think that's actually going to be the key to our series. Both team have good people in those roles... I like our chances with Mazzante, Snell and Schumacher. Our bench is pretty strong.

To win, we're going to have to play our best basketball. Having won at other levels, I know that it's the teams that really go out there and take the game from the first minute to the 40th minute. That's what we're going to have to do to beat you. I'm not falling for the whole 1-4 seed thing or the difference in records. Please. The Seattle Storm are a championship team that still has been there and won it. You've done it. It's fair to say we've been in a lot of big things in my basketball career. Final Fours, USA Basketball, All-Star Games... but this is the biggest thing we've ever gone against each other in, I think.

Keeping It Real

Today we had the day off and I just did some chores around the house. I made myself unreachable, laid around the house, did my laundry, washed the dishes and just scrubbed down my dinner table. Keeps me busy. Tomorrow we have practice and then get into Seattle on Thursday early afternoon. We may actually practice early in the morning here. I know it's going to be exciting for everyone involved. It's going to be intense in Seattle, I'm sure, because you have a great crowd. I think the last game we played in Sacramento was probably the closest playoff atmosphere I've been in since I got to this league so this will be different.

So I know this is the playoffs and we're fighting to win championship, but we should still get together, get some sushi. I do want to see you and Lauren and Ashley Robinson, my old old friend since 8th grade. People kept asking me too if we'd rather play another team since we did lose a couple of times to the Storm already, but you know what? Not really because to me, you guys are amazing basketball players. I always feel like to win a championship, you have to go through the best. We have a lot of respect for the Seattle Storm. We know we'll have to play really well to win.

Let Our Play Do The Talking

People are going to expect the smack, the trash talk this week. You know what, though. We really don't trash talk that much. You don't really talk that much on the court at all. The last time we played you in Seattle, I tried to talk to you and you wouldn't give me the time of day so I'm done talking to you on the court. But I don't really talk that much smack. People think I do, but I don't. I only talk to my teammates, never the other team. I will say I'm a little loud on the court, but I think I'm really just misunderstood. Lol. I'm just having fun. This is basketball. It's a game. If you can't have fun playing, then you shouldn't be out there.

It's funny how this all plays out. We spend so much time together and probably even more time talking when we're not together. Teammates and opponents. If I had a choice, I'd obviously rather play on your team than against you. I'm not at all ashamed to say that Sue Bird is an amazing basketball player and really does know the game better than anyone I know. I've learned a lot from you on the court. But it is fun playing against you because you are such a competitor. Beating you is fun, too, when we can. Keep playing hard and keep wanting to win because you are my hero, Sue Bird.

Oh, and I hope you got your Sidekick working again. That's always a good excuse for not calling people back.

Predictions

Well obviously I want us to win. That's for sure. But I see this as a very competitive series. Every game will be close. The team that makes the most plays is obviously going to win. I say Mercury in three... our fans deserve to see as many playoff games as they can since they haven't done so in nine years or something like that.

We played Sacramento yesterday and the game obviously didn't mean anything from a standings perspective or seeds, but our fans were so appreciative and had a sellout. It felt so good going into the playoffs knowing that we have their support. The city of Phoenix just loves basketball, so let's give them a good show.

Loser Buys Dinner

Posted by Sue Bird on Tuesday, August 21, 2007, 3:30 p.m. PT

Isn't that a great picture of us on WNBA.com? It looks like we're playing Battleship.

Anyway, I just got back from the grocery store and picked up some essentials, milk and orange juice. I know we're heading on the road this weekend, but I ran out.

I read your Blog from yesterday and, yeah, this series really will be all about who shows up. You can talk about who's more talented and who has the better team on paper all day, but it's about who comes to play as a team. It's going to be an interesting series. I do think this is the first time we've met when it mattered. Regular season is one thing but the Playoffs are a whole different ballgame.

I touched upon this a bit the last time I wrote, but I don't think much changed when we knew for sure that you and the Mercury were the opponent in the first round. It doesn't really matter who you play or when you play them because, as you said, in order to win, you have to go through the best teams at some point. Right now, you guys are the best in the West so it'll be a good series. Regardless of what happened in the regular season, I don't think about it at all. I don't think anyone should at this point. The WNBA is too good and all of the teams are too good to base it on previous performances.

Advantages and Disadvantages

The media today was asking us about playing you guys... number one in the West, three All-Stars, but the one thing they said you didn't have is playoff experience. But you know what? I think you've played in enough big games, Penny led Australia to a gold medal at the World Championships last year and Cappie played in a lot of big games in college as well. I understand that it wasn't necessarily the WNBA Playoffs, but I told them that everyone on your team has been in enough big games. So I don't necessarily see experience as our advantage. Hopefully it will be, though. Only one way to find out.

The three-game format for the first two rounds doesn't necessarily let the higher seed establish home court advantage. In Russia, we play three-game series as ome-away-home formats. That is a home court advantage. But when you play away-home-home as the better seed, the travel makes tougher for that team. Phoenix has to travel to Seattle for Game One, which is tough, then turn right back around and fly back again. We've been home for more than a week. That's where you lose your advantage. I understand that the next two games are back at home, but you end up traveling more, which makes it a disadvantage. Think about it.

Now... I'm not saying we can tire you our because I think you may be in the best shape of any team in the league. At least from what I've heard about your practices. You run a lot. So tiring you out will not be our game plan. The reason why I think we've matched up well with you well is because we like to run and score as well. But teams playing against the Mercury really need to pick and choose when to run and when not to. We don't want to get caught up in your game or style because that's how you beat teams. By outscoring them. I just know it's not going to be easy.

Matching Up

The last couple of times our teams have played, you've played a zone... then when Lauren got hot, we saw a box-and-one. You were that one lucky lady who got to guard Lauren, following her everywhere. It's an interesting match-up, whoever guards Lauren, because she gets double- and triple-teamed so frequently. I wonder if you'll still stay on her in that box-and-one. I do think that you guys are a very tough team to match up with on defense. We don't have a very big backcourt. Izi is probably 5-11, I'm 5-9 and Betty is probably like 5-7. It's you, Kelly Miller and Cappie. Cappie may not be tall, but she's strong, which makes up for it.

We're in a situation where that first game is really important for us. We're at home. Of course, I'll tell you how we have to win that first game, but I know we won the first game in each of the past two years and ended up losing the series both times. So what do I know? Of course, winning that first game helps. It's the one game we have on our home court and we really play much better at home than we do on the road. I think that's true for every team.

So it will be important to get our crowd into it early and get this thing going. Then we'll head back to Phoenix and see what happens. I think the regular season does a good job of preparing for the quick turnaround of games. At this point, everyone is used to traveling and playing a lot of games in a short period of time. The stakes are just higher. I hope it's a good series. Two good teams, though we've kind of underachieved a bit this season. Hopefully we can put it together at the right time.

Talking About Talking

I do remember you trying to talk to me last game. I don't even know what it was, but I did not pay attention, you're right. It was something stupid. I remember what it was. You were asking me about Russia and I told you I'd talk to you later about it. And yeah, you're not the kind of person who will be like "You can't guard me." I try to explain to people that you actually try and have conversations when we're out there. You think you're the number one conversationalist in the world and will talk to anyone. But that's just who you are. Loud and out there. I wouldn't go far as misunderstood, but it's fun.

The thing about you when you play, you're always having a good time. One of the most competitive people ever, but always have fun and that's why you can play your best. It's when you're not having fun, that's when we see the arguing and the other antics. No other players can make you made, but it's just the way the game is going or sometimes the refs. There are a few people in this world, and I think Lauren also falls into this category, where the madder they get, the better the play and the more focused you get. And I think you're one of them, too. Not many people can play well when the emotions are running high, but I definitely see that in you and Lauren. I'm not like that. I try and control it, but when I get mad, I'm not as focused and am thinking about other things.

But enough about basketball, because everyone else is going to be talking about this for the next couple of days... I just sat down with my turkey and cheese sandwich and juice, freshly bought from Safeway, and turn the television on, and what's on HBO? The best movie ever, Prime, with Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep. Remember I made you watch this movie like 100 times? I think it may be the greatest movie ever. It's a chick flic, but we are chicks. I know you hate it. Ironic, don't you think?

The only thing I will say that even resembles trash talking is that, as usual, the loser has to buy dinner. The same rule stands. The dinner's won't change, I know they won't...

Of course... I'm sure I'll talk to you between now and the game.

Adjusting Ourselves

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Saturday, August 25, 2007, 4:11 p.m. PT

Saturday afternoon, just landed and got back to Phoenix after a late night in Seattle. We had to be up early for the 9 o'clock bus, but there was no practice. We went to the airport, flew here, I stopped at Wendy's on my way home and now I'm in my house eating a taco salad. Wendy's taco salad is the best.

So you're probably wondering what I thought of the game last night. When we rebound, we do a pretty good job of getting out and running. We rebounded well last night and set the pace. That sets a tone of the game. You know, people talk about how we can put up big numbers and are so offensive-minded. But just because we give up a lot of point does not mean we're not a good defensive team. The way we play, there are going to be more shots and more opportunities for another team to score. At the fast tempo we like to go at, there are more possessions for both teams. But I don't think we care about being underappreciated on defense. We're not trying to get anyone's respect but our coaches, our teammates and our fans. We're confident in what we do.

Winning on the road was great for us because we went in, worked hard and just grinded it out. The mindset of our team is a good one. We treat every game the same and the playoffs are no different.

The Post-Game Meal

After the game, a bunch of us went to dinner, as you know since you were there... got some sushi. That's our go-to. But nice to see Ashley, Lauren, Barb Turner who was also in town... so that was nice. But it's cool that we don't have to talk about the game. The game is the game. I do everything in those 40 minutes, but once its over, I can't really do much to affect the game anymore so I don't even talk about it at all.

I know Coach Auriemma would be proud. I know he reads our blog and wants to get in a guest appearance on here. He's down at his beach house in the Jersey Shore and he got NBA TV there just so he could watch our game last night. I think the Auriemma family enjoyed watching all of the Huskies that were in attendance last night, though I know he was obviously rooting for you. It is no secret that he likes Sue Bird more than he likes Diana Taurasi. But I did get him more shine and he hasn't won since I left. The proof is in the pudding. He must look great right now, though, sporting a tan like the good ol' Mediterranean Sicilian that he is.

Excuse me for a second. I have a little bit of cheese stuck in my throat.

There, that's better.

Game Two

Teams make adjustments in the playoffs. That's what happens. I expect you guys to come back out and give us another hard game. The Seattle Storm are still a dangerous team. We just have to be ready for those adjustments and guard against your desperation. We'll make some adjustments, too, of course.

This series is far from over. That's why it's a three-game series and we still have a lot of work to do. I haven't been able to watch any other games in the postseason so far because of our practice and travel schedule, but I know that every team that won the first game then lost Game Two today and those series are tied. That's a lesson for us right there. And with all the lopsided scores, I will just say that it's tough when you travel, it's tough to play your best but on any given night, any team can win. That's why this league is so exciting.

We're about 24 hours away from Game Two, it's an afternoon game here in Phoenix, but that doesn't really affect the routine at all. We still have shootaround in the morning, we'll get to the gym, rest up, take a nap and just get to the arena a little bit earlier. Tonight for the rest of the night I'm just going to chill. I might have some family coming into town tonight or tomorrow morning so I'm just going to shut it down a bit, watch some television, read up some of the other players' blogs and chill.

I thought about seeing Superbad, the new movie, because one of my teammates saw it and gave it rave reviews. It's a bit raunchy (which is my middle name) and not for kids, but we gotta wait to watch it on DVD. I'll wait for you if you wait for me.

One + One + One = Three?

We have a great staff, from selling tickets and energizing the city to making sure we're taken care of. Every staff member is a part of the Phoenix Mercury and the Phoenix Suns and we all take pride in that. We traveled with a banner that demonstrates their appreciation for us and it has become our mission. One city, one team, one goal. It was great to have it in the lockerroom in Seattle and gave us a bit of a home feeling on the road.

Someone actually told me something that was quite perceptive. One city, one team, one goal. One plus one plus one equals three. And that's pretty self-explanatory - three being a special number for me. But I don't think that was by design to fire me up. It was probably designed to mean one plus one plus one equals one. One championship. Lol.

And ultimately... one goal, one life, one death. That still equals three. I like it.

A Time For Reflection

Posted by Sue Bird on Wednesday, August 29, 2007, 10:01 a.m. PT

So you probably thought the blog might stop just because I'm done playing, but you thought wrong. I'm IN at least until we head off to Chile together for USA Basketball and then go to Russia. Doesn't make much sense to write each other when we're roommates. Maybe we just get a webcam for our place there and broadcast live 24-7. Or maybe not...

It has been a few days now since the end of our season (thanks to you) and I have had some time to reflect and think about things. Whether a season ends with a championship or with a loss, there is always this anti-climactic feeling that comes with it all being over. I know you can totally relate to this, but you go from having all of these little things to think about, travel and practices and preparing for the next opponent, what you need to do in the game and what to eat, what time to sleep, small things... to nothing on your mind at all. Nowhere to be, nothing to do. All of my teammates are starting to leave town. This is the roughest time of the year, especially when we finished the season the way we did.

Bottom line is you guys are a very good team. I know we got swept and I don't think we played our best basketball in those two games, but when a team plays as well as the Mercury did and are as good as you are, you have to come to terms with it. There's a reason why you were the number one seed and we were fourth. You played like it. We definitely gave you a run there in the second game but just came up short. Not just this season but the past three really, we have been good enough to make the playoffs but not advance past the first round. The culmination of these three years is really getting to me now (though we did win a championship in Russia and I do count that).

Of course, there were highlights in the series as well as the season overall, but for the most part, everyone is disappointed with how it ended. I just hope that we'll be able to be back in Seattle next year. We'll find out soon. Now that the season is over, I definitely have been thinking about it a lot more. I think it's only natural to reflect at times like this, but we always think about how we'll get 'em next year. And we don't know if there is going to be a next year. There are also a lot of players whose contract situations are not yet determined, myself included, and Janel Burse, Betty Lennox, Wendy Palmer. We don't have that many players signed and the uncertainty of where we're going to be plays a role in their decisions.

It is a weird feeling, and more so because I live in Seattle. My whole life could be totally different in a year, but hopefully that's not the case. We really have a good thing going with this franchise. And you are certainly someone who knows this as well. Whenever you come to play here, you always talk about how loud and great the fans are. The support they give us is truly amazing and I would put them against any franchise's fans around the league as the very best. So a lot of emotions going on, but for the most part, just going to think about things I can control.

USA Basketball training starts September 7 as we get ready for Olympic qualifying. I have about a week to take care of things and I will be busy. On Friday, I have a photoshoot with Kevin Durant to be on the cover of American Way, the magazine for American Airlines. That'll be cool since a lot of people fly and a lot of people read those magazines. So they'll see my ugly face and Kevin Durant. After that, I'm heading to Las Vegas to visit my dad. Vegas, baby. Vegas. I haven't ever been there to visit him and he's been there for a long time. I have to go check him out, but he has a pool so this will be my weekend getaway. Then I head back to New York on Monday, spend a few days there with family and friends and get ready for training camp all over again.

Hopefully you will not be there for that. You always have to cheer for the team that knocked you out. You never want to lose to a team that loses in the next round. So I am now officially a Phoenix Mercury fan. Though if you play against Detroit, I'll be rooting for Swin, too. I will say that, as a spectator, these playoffs have been amazing. I don't always get to watch games because I'm so busy, but I have really enjoyed watching these games. Whether overtime game, thrilling endings or great players playing great... look at the New York-Detroit series. The defending champions are stacked with talent taking on a team that no one thought would do anything this year. But here they are going down to the final moment of Game 3 on Detroit's court. Even though we got swept, that series is proof that 1 vs. 4 seeds mean nothing and anyone can beat anyone on any given night. But the Indiana-Connecticut series was, by far, the best. I was pulling my hair out watching Game 3 in that one. At least in my career, this playoffs has been the best to watch.

As far as the final four that remain, I think it's going to be... Phoenix against... I want to say Detroit. But the Shock cannot play the way they did in the first round and think they are going to advance. Bill Laimbeer is probably all over them for it, but I think Indy will be ready for them. I think a Detroit-Phoenix Finals will be tough and go four or five games. I see the Mercury pulling it out, too. I know Detroit beat you guys in the regular season, but that doesn't matter now. The way you are playing right now, it's hard to stop offensively. The only thing to do is keep up and score, but even that is a tall order for any other team right now. It's easy to tell you really enjoy playing with each other and the city is behind you.

I think this is your year.

By the way, this week's sign that the apocalypse is upon us... Donnie Wahlberg talking sports on ESPN2's morning show.

Good luck and I'll catch up with you later,

It Wasn't Easy, But We Got Here

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Thursday, August 30, 2007, 12:50 p.m. PT

We're ready to go. Finally settled in San Antonio with the big game tonight, but let me tell you something. The past 24 hours have been a major pain in my you-know-where... just a terrible travel day.

We met at 7 o'clock in the morning to go to the airport for a 9 a.m. flight. So we're on the plane looking around thinking, "Man, there's a lot of weird looking people on this plane. So when we land, we find out that San Antonio is hosting the Narcotics Anonymous annual convention and we are here with thousands of recovering addicts. I wish them the best.

So we arrived in San Antonio, but our bags didn't. Only about half the team's bags even showed up. Not mine, not Penny's, not Schuey's, not Corey Gaines'... it's a mess. We're bagless. We went to the gym anyway to meet with the media, but we couldn't practice. We didn't even have our shoes. I was thinking about what would happen if our uniforms didn't show up, maybe we'd play shirts and skins. Hey Sue, do you remember the one year at Connecticut when they lost our uniforms and we had to play a game on ESPN with our practice jerseys?

But my night didn't really get any better from that point. I end up falling asleep around 12:30 after a good dinner, deep REM mode there for a bit, only to be woken up at 2:30 by a knock on the door. It's the bellman with my bag, finally. So I'm happy it's here, but not happy to be awake. So I finally get back to sleep, but then my phone rings at 5 o'clock. It's my wake-up call that I had scheduled for 10 a.m. I tried to explain that I really wanted it five hours later. But then at 8:30, I hear drilling outside my door and find out that they're taking apart a door frame across the hall. Are you kidding me with this ruckus?

It's a good thing that I don't believe in omens. But I should have believed in Ambien.

So where are you again, fishing in Lake Minnetonka? No, Las Vegas will be nice. Have a good time with your dad. I've had an early vacation the last three years, so I won't say I'm jealous that you're relaxing and resting right now. I think I can suck it up for another two weeks and then come hang out with you.

We have Game 1 tonight against the Silver Stars. We're excited and ready but know it's going to be tough. They have been playing great basketball so we have to match that tonight. I'm not sure what people are saying or writing about at this point because this us the first year where I haven't read anything or paid attention at all to the web sites or anything like that. I'm just focused on one thing now, and that's winning. In the meantime, I'm just listening to my music hard night now. I've been concentrating on a couple of bands like Enigma, Massive Attack... a lot of trip-hop. I'm tripping and hopping everywhere. Just focused.

The beauty of our team is that we keep on sticking to what we do and don't really focus too much on the other team. If you spend too much time on the opponent, you forget to do what it is that you do well. Make sense? Coach reminds us what we've been doing all year and tells us to stick with it. If we're good enough to win, we will. If not, we'll go home. But I'm not ready for that.

Let's go!

At The Finals: Day One

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Tuesday, September 4, 2007, 7:08 p.m. ET

So we made it to Detroit… finally. Nothing like a five-hour flight and an hour-and-a-half bus ride the day before a game, but hey, that’s basketball. We didn’t even check into the hotel when we got here. We went straight from the airport to the Palace. We got there around 6:20 ET… too bad we were supposed to be there for media at 5:30. Oh well. Got to catch Nancy Lieberman shooting around as we walked onto the floor, she’s still got the stroke. Linda Cohn was shooting too, but we won’t talk about that.

We met with the media and answered a lot of questions about our style of play and what will happen if the fast break slows down and we have to play in the half court. But I think we’ve learned to win games like that this year. No matter what, the last four minutes of the game, we want to take care of possessions, too. If there are two or three minutes left, we can slow it down and go to stuff that we’re good at, which really means us just getting out of Cappie’s way.

But we can’t change the way we play now that we’re in the Finals. That’s what got us here. They play the way they play, and we play the way we play, so it’s going to come down to who can control the pace.

I'm guessing you heard about Catch by now? I just heard about her tearing her Achilles and needing surgery. All I could say when I heard it was “wow.” I was stunned. Especially because on that play it really didn’t seem like much happened, but I guess that’s how it happens sometimes. But you knew it was serious because you never see her cry or stay down. Even on that play she was still trying to call timeout. Then she tried to go back out there for the jump ball. I was like, “She’s a monster!” Going to Chile for USA Basketball without Catch is going to be tough.

So, who do you have in this series? I know you picked us to win after we knocked you out so I hope you're sticking with it... I know Detroit beat us both times we played this season, but that was like a month and a half ago. The game at home we played without Cappie and we lost that game in the last 20 seconds. The game here in Detroit, we played a good first half and then the second half they just went off and had an amazing game.

I don’t think we were half as good back then as we are now. We’ve put it all together. Our mindset has changed tremendously. After we got back from All-Star, we got together in the locker room and realized that this season is really up to what we want to do with it. We have some strong individuals and some strong personalities that had to mesh, and once they did that the things on the court started working out.

We really don’t worry much about how we played them a couple months ago. They’re a different team, we’re a different team. We can’t concentrate on what they do. They’re world champions for a reason and we’re trying to get there, but we’re going to try to go about it a different way.

You know in anything you do that you always want to play against the best. I think that’s the only way you become a better player, a better team, so it seems right that we’re playing Detroit, because they are the most dominant team in the field.

Still, we’re coming in here to win just as much as they are. We’re playing on the road, it’s the first time in the Finals for most of us and it’s definitely an experience for us, but once you throw that ball up, it’s 40 minutes of basketball. We’re not going to be nervous. We’re excited. If anything, we’re anxious to get the series underway.

Even though we haven’t been in the Finals before, we have people with a lot of experience. Kelly Miller has been in the playoffs three or four times, Tangela Smith went deep into the playoffs with Sacramento, Cappie played in big games when she was at Rutgers and Penny played with Australia in the Olympics. The big-game scenario isn’t going to rattle us. We just have to go out there and play good basketball. That’s how you win games: by making plays and doing it for 40 minutes.

We’ve got our work cut out for us, though. When you play Detroit, the boards are huge. That’s the first thing you think of about Detroit: they’re so big and they go after offensive and defensive rebounds like no other team in the league. That’s what makes them so hard to beat. Rebounding is kind of our Achilles heel, but when we do rebound well, we cause problems for other teams. It’s going to be a test of our will against theirs.

And we’ve got to win at least one at their place. We’ve won a couple road games in the playoffs and I think once you do it one time, it gives you a feeling that you can go into someone else’s gym and be ultra-focused like we had to be to go into San Antonio and Seattle and win tough games. That gives us a little confidence now that we can come in here and win a game or two.

You know there’s a certain feeling you get when you walk into a gym and there’s 20,000 people rooting against you. How much do you want to win in that setting? I think that’s when your true character really comes out.

So, you’ve been here before, what advice do you have for me in my first Finals? I was looking at what LeBron did this year in his first Finals. A lot of people said LeBron was shaky in the Finals, but I think he had a great series. He was poised. If there is one thing I can take from him is how poised he was, no matter what happened. You’re going to go through some difficult stuff when you’re playing against the league’s best, but he kept his composure as well as I’ve seen anyone do it.

Well enough about me and the Finals… what’s up with you? I know you’re getting ready to train with USA Basketball. You’ll be playing five-on-five at four o’clock in the morning – ooh wee – yeah, I think I’d rather be here trying to win a championship, which you have already. Swin has two already, so Swin doesn’t need any more either. Really, Swin, how many is enough?

Did you see Ann playing on Monday for Indiana? She played really well. Swin was great Monday also, especially after not playing up to her potential in Game 2. You have to love Swin’s perseverance, but she’s always been like that.

Swin’s mom is throwing a barbeque on Thursday and I’ll be there. Wish you could be here for that. Anyway, have fun at USA training, say hi to everyone for me. I’ll be here, eating at Morton’s Steakhouse, trying to win a WNBA Championship. I’m going to have dinner with Dan Orlovsky, my man from the Detroit Lions, he’s a good friend from Connecticut. He used to jock me, but I never gave him the time of day. He’s a third-string quarterback in Detroit, but I liked the wide receivers.

Responding After Game 1

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Thursday, September 6, 2007, 3:50 p.m. ET

I didn't sleep so well last night. Actually, I don't think I slept much at all. Whenever you play a game like I did last night, you find yourself replaying it over in your mind, remembering things that you did wrong and the things that did work. So I was up until like 4:30, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling.

Even though I didn't sleep much, I feel great. I got plenty of rest. Rest is a state of mind and sleep is the cousin of death, so I guess I'll sleep when I'm dead.

But we're not dead yet. This was just one game. This isn't the NCAA Tournament where you lose one game and you start crying. This is a long series that will see adjustments, corrections and us responding the next day and proving that we're meant to be here. So that's the plan for Saturday.

Last night was a tough game, but like the great Ashley Valley said, "you can't cry now, the milk already spilled. There's milk on the floor, but you just have to clean it up." So we'll be ready to play.

We didn't go too hard today, just went over a few things in practice and broke a sweat. We also did some film work, nothing too serious. There will be adjustments that we'll make on zone adjustments and shifts that we're going to make a little bit better.

After practice, we came back to the hotel and are chilling out. I'll probably go shopping a little bit later, hit up Neiman Marcus and Saks. Shopping therapy is always good after a loss. You know I'm a t-shirt freak. Nice Collective, Hub Clothing, Huey, Juicy... I like doing it on my own or with teammates. It's not like I have a personal shopper, though having Jen Lacy around so I don't need one. And shopping in Detroit is good because it gives you something to do. There's not much else... you can't sit in the hotel all day.

Swin also invited me over to her house today. She's having a little barbeque with her family, cooking and watching opening night of the football season. So that'll be nice. Colts and Saints. So I might check that out and get to hang out with Swin away from the game. Then tomorrow we practice again and just lay low. Get a movie at the hotel or go see "Ball of Fury," the new ping pong movie. You know I love me my table tennis. And you know I finished with like a 102-3 record in Russia, so don't go thinking you're better than me, I know you've said that before. I'm unstoppable.

Oh, so our team has a thing that we're doing, all wearing black nail polish. It's to go along with our whole "Fade to Black" theme. We're trying to fade into black this year and win it all. Actually, I always do black and everyone decided to copy me. But you won't see it on me unless you know where to look. The people probably won't see it on television, but I'm wearing the black nail polish on my toes right now. My toes were done by Jing Ling on Scottsdale and Camelback. She's an amazing woman. Believe it or not, I see her about every other week. I don't really like the stuff on my fingers, though. It's too distracting when I'm playing. I just take care of them myself. I have clean hands.

Sue, good luck in practice tomorrow. That should be fun.

There, I'm blogged out.

New York and the U.S. of A.

Posted by Sue Bird on Friday, September 7, 2007, 11:23 p.m. ET

So while you've been keeping youself busy, figured I might as well let you know what I've been up to.

I'm back in New York and glad to be home.

Naturally I watched Game 1 and it's been a great match-up so far, but for me it's always hard to watch. Both Detroit and Phoenix have been doing a great job and I expect this series to continue to be an entertaining one.

So Game 1... What is up with the fouls? I know we already talked about this, but the minute that game ended, I was watching with my mom and I told her that you're going to have like 50 in the next game. I just know it. I know your going to bounce back. But you have to watch out for those fouls, dude. They are calling fouls, so why are you sticking your hand in there? Katie Feenstra is like 6-8, you are not going to block her. I could hear Coach Auriemma screaming at the TV all the way from Connecticut.

It was a great game, otherwise. I know you only had 22 minutes, which is tough for one of the best players in the world, but it was still a four point game with under two minutes to go. Penny was a monster, as usual. Cappie played great and I know Phoenix can play a much better game. But you do have to give credit to Detroit. It is because of them that Phoenix struggled a little but offensively at times. And, of course, their inside play. Wow, even without Cheryl Ford they were able to really bring it. Kara Braxton had a great game and Katie Feenstra as well. But Plenette is just so good. You know what you are going to get from Katie Smith and Deanna Nolan and Swin. I just can't wait for to Game 2 tomorrow.

So since the season ended, I did make it to Vegas to visit my dad and then I came back to New York. I have been here since Monday, so I went home to Syosset for those five days, just hanging out, seeing my friends, obviously seeing my mom and just catching up. I really have been doing nothing. I have been enjoying my mom's cooking and just hanging out. I hit up the Greek place, "It's Greek To Me." It's all about the Greek place with the best Gyros. And of course, the best bagel place. I like to pump up my hometown food. I think it is the best and Dee, you can second me on that.

Otherwise, I have just been resting, worked out a couple times and am back in New York City with the U.S. Team.

USA Basketball is going well so far after one practice tonight. We miss all those guys that are playing in the Finals and wish them the best. Also miss a lot of the other regular who aren't here, like Catch. I know how hard she is going to work to get back to full strength and know she'll be better than ever. We wish they were here, though. But it's been good. It was only the first day and we just ran through some things and are starting to put our defense in. We put our offense in, nothing crazy. I am sure it is going to get harder and harder as we go along.

I am looking forward to having you join me on the U.S. Team here. People don't realize how much fun it is to play together and it has been a while since we've played together.

The last thing I'll say is that the young players here on this team are very good. Candace Parker is an exceptional player and you can go down the list from there. Courtney Paris, Sylvia Fowles, Candice Wiggins... It is really cool to hang out and meet those guys and to play with them. I'm telling you, they are great. I don't think there were players around like that when I was in college. They come in here and they have fresh legs and they are wide eyed. It is fun. Although they are starting to make me feel old.

Reminder, my birthday is in a month. Note to Dee: good gift.

And yes, I am excited to go back to Connecticut with the U.S. Team next week. We are playing against a great Australian team, so it will be good to get some practice in against the defending World Champions. I am sure a lot of UConn fans and a bunch of our friends will come out to the game and just want to hang. It will good to see all those people, as well.

So keep on working, good luck in Game 2 and I'll save a seat for you on the bus here.

Mission Semi-Accomplished

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Saturday, September 8, 2007, 6:58 p.m. ET

Just winding down now after a nice day of basketball. A good win, a fun press conference and now we have a win in our column.

We are really glad to have gotten the split, but I'm not going to say this is "Mission Accomplished." We wouldn't want to say that prematurely, now would we, and we know that this is just the first win. We need three wins. "Mission Accomplished" will be getting those three wins. So this is "Mission Somewhat-Accomplished." Or "Mission Semi-Accomplished." Or even "Mission On-the-Road-to-Being-Accomplished."

Pick one and go with it.

But you always want to get one on the road. It's just huge for us. The win tonight was great and it felt nice to be able to stay out on the court, but I come into every game with the same mindset. To be aggressive and let the flow come to me. Sometimes you get into a game like the one today and you're feeling it and others where you're in foul trouble and it's a nasty mess. It happens.

It's funny because after I picked up my second foul tonight, I was like, "Here we go again." I looked over to Corey Gaines and he was just like "Don't reach." He has a great relationship with all of us, so when he said that to me, it was just calming and kept me in the game.

So I'm just happy for our team. I feel like we crossed that bridge. No matter what you say coming into the Finals, and you can say that you're not nervous, but until you get that first win in your first Finals, it's a new experience for everyone. And maybe we played like newcomers in that first game. Tonight I thought we played more like we have been in the last couple of months.

Next game is Tuesday, I think. We will probably have the day off tomorrow since Coach is good like that. I have to get him some new shoes, so it's good that we'll have some free time to do that. Then we'll get back on the practice court on Monday morning. Back to work like the rest of the world on Monday morning. We're not going to look at it like we need to win both games. We're just going to worry about Game 3. We want to win that and then worry about Game 4.

Consider this my invitation the entire city of Phoenix to come to the game. I want every Phoenician there ready to go. The crowds have been great for us all season long and that's what makes it a homecourt advantage. The volume, the energy and what they do for us cannot go unappreciated by any of us.

I like the city of Detroit, it's a nice little place. It has been a beautiful five days here even though it has been raining. I'm ready for the Detroit reign and the Detroit rain to end. And I really do not want to have to come back here for a Game 5. But if we have to come back, we'll come back. I'd rather head to Philly and hang out with the Bird and my USA teammates. I just hope we didn't wake up a sleeping giant in the Detroit Shock. They're going to come to Phoenix and be ready to go. Without a doubt. And we just have to concentrate on each other, what's gotten us to this point and what has made us so successful.

So we have tonight to relax, which I'll do as soon as I finish up writing this Blog, actually :). We're not leaving to go home until tomorrow, so we'll hang out, grab some dinner and rest up. That's the nice thing about early games is that we get to take care of business early and then have the night to ourselves. I'm ready to go home and sleep in my bed and in my home, what I call the "Cluttered Cluster." I like it messy. The clutter makes me feel comfortable. Even though I have a maid who comes in once a week.

Bloggity Blogging

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Monday, September 10, 2007, 8:44 p.m. PT

Well hello, friends and fans reading along on WNBA.com. Welcome back to Phoenix where it is a balmy 104 degrees today. Sue, how's that rain in New York treating you?

So tomorrow is Game 3 here in Phoenix and we're all ready. We had a good practice today, did some shooting drills and our regular stuff. That Kelly Mazzante is one good shooter, let me tell you.

But being home is nice for another reason. When we landed yesterday, it was great because there were like 30 or 40 people waiting for us at the airport. I love our fans. It was crazy. It was nice to see the fans, and you know they know everything, our fans. The got out flight info on the internet, probably checked out the WNBA.com Blog that was writing live from the airplane. I think they also have our email addresses, phone numbers and My Space pages covered, too.

So we got back into town, chilled out for a little bit and I had my typical off-day meal, the burrito. I love me my Chipotle, I'm a huge burrito fan. Then I went on a bit of a TV tour with my PR man, Vince and hit up all the stations to talk about the game. Then I finally got to see Balls of Fury, which was fun-ny. It was unbelieveable, let me tell you. It's a great movie. Loved it. Caught the end of the VMA's last night, though it was terrible. It's a joke.

Kanye is always awesome, though, and he was putting on a show out there at The Palms. Wish I was there. I actually had the new Kanye playing on in the lockerroom during practice. Bootleg! I got it for free because I have DJ's who have sources who know DJ's with sources who have it covered. I know he's got his big duel planned and I like Fifty, but I'm a big Kanye fan.

I'm hoping we have some local celebrity representation in the crowd tomorrow night. I expect them to be here, definitely a few Suns players like Stevie Nash and I know Amare is getting back from vacation and will be there. And even my boy, Matty Leinart (the second best looking guy named Matt in Phoenix this week behind my web man, Matty Wurst). So hopefully we'll have a nice little crowd there.

So this one's for Sue. In honor of the great Sandy Koufax's decision not to play in the World Series on Yom Kippur, I considered skipping Game 4 of the WNBA Finals for Rosh Hashannah. I gave up my Jewish beliefs last Monday so it won't affect me. But Sue, I think you should honor your heritage and sit out of Thursday's USA practice. Just say no to Anne Donovan

First Blog of The New Year

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Wednesday, September 12, 2007, 4:51 p.m. PT

Happy New Year, Shoshana Birdinsky!

As I'm writing this, I realize that this could be my last Blog of the season. But it's not going to be the last Blog of the season. We're going to do this until we die. I said it after Game 1 and I'm saying it again. We're not dead yet. We've come too far to die now. But like that night after the first game, I didn't sleep well. I went out to dinner with some friends after the game, but it just didn't sit right. The game, I mean. Not the dinner.

This morning I was feeling a little anxious, feeling ready to get back out and play. Everyone got to practice a little bit pissed off at each other knowing we let one get away. We played hard and tough, but we just didn't make plays. I'm still a little bit miffed from the game last night. Despite the missed shots, I thought we played well. We rebounded well and played hard.

We had opportunities last night and just didn't take advantage of them. And that hurts, especially in a series against a really good team. In playing like they did and coming back after a loss, they showed why they are the defending champions last night. I think it's possible to learn things from other teams and hopefully we can learn from them. Sometimes the other team just makes plays and that's what happened last night.

We didn't shoot the ball particularly well from the free throw line, which is disappointing because we were the best team from the line all year. But sometimes you make them and sometimes you don't. Tomorrow we had better make them or we'll be going home. Or staying home.

We are two competitive teams who are going toe-to-toe. It's going to come down to who makes the plays in the last two minutes. But we have to get rid of those feeling and come tomorrow REALLY ready to play.

So tomorrow is the first game we've had to play in the Playoffs where we're facing elimination. But I think we've been tested enough. We have been tested all year in different ways with people being out and other circumstances. So there is no doubt as to how we're going to respond. No sense of nervous, tentativeness or anything like that. We're going to go full-force like we've done all year.

We've got about 27 hours or so until game time and I'm going to do what I usually do. Finish this Blog, go tanning for ten minutes, get another burrito from Chipotle, watch a movie, chill out, text, IM and then come back for shootaround tomorrow at 9 a.m. ready to go. That's my plan. I might watch some game film, but I'm going to lay low, put on some piano classicals that I downloaded on iTunes. I pay for it all, I'm on the up and up. Legal in most ways, at least.

So I'll write again on Friday on my way to the airport or from Detroit Rock City. I cannot wait to go back there. Troy, here we come, baby. Big Beaver!

One Win Away. Seriously. One Win.

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Thursday, September 13, 2007, 9:11 p.m. PT

Things are finally quieting down around here so I figured I'd steal a moment before heading to Detroit. Boy, that feels good to say. Going back to Detroit for Game 5. But I love this time in the arena when people are nearly all gone except the fans waiting for autographs, ushers looking for sleeping children in the seats like on the day camp bus and our families and friends waiting patiently for us. It's amazing that just an hour or two ago, this place was packed and rocking.

What a game tonight. It was emotional and hard-fought. Even though Penny and Tan had tough nights, we were never really worried about anything and we never felt any extra pressure or anything like that. They were playing well, just not making shots. They were working their tails off on the other end and we really wanted to stop Detroit on the defensive end and we have some momentum to build on. Sometimes you have good nights, sometimes you have bad nights.

But we have to get the Game 4 high out of our system as soon as possible. It really didn't mean anything. It now just means we have a chance to play for it all. That's what we have to concentrate on.

When the ball left Pee Wee's hands on that last shot, to be honest, I didn't even see the ball once it left her hands. I got pretty close to her but fell back to the ground to eliminate any possibility of the refs calling a foul. I didn't want to touch her, I didn't want to go near her so I didn't see the ball go off the rim. You know those people who have been near death and see that little bit of white light? Well that was sort of what I felt like. I kind of saw the entire season, all that we had worked for, all that we have accomplished, pass before my eyes. It was like my "Six Feet Under" moment.

I just heard the crowd and knew it was all over and all good.

So right now I'm finishing up here, waiting for some people to get ready, then I'm going to shut down and go have some dinner with Coach Auriemma, his wife and some friends. Maybe Penny and Gil will come along, too. They're in town so rarely, so it will be nice to show them around. As long as he's paying, though. And I'm going to be sure to ask Geno what he's been saying about me on the air. He was probably killing me, but I love him. He's one of the great people in my life who has really helped me.

So on to to Detroit. We are back on a plane tomorrow morning, returning to the D. I'll tell you, winning Game 2 and knowing that we can win in their building will really give us a lift and a confidence that we can beat them. We know we can go in there and play well. We'll see.

It might just be the biggest game of my career. One game to win it all, I have been in that situation before. This one is going to be ultra-physical, ultra-intense. So I'd say it will be the biggest game of my career.

And I'm ready for it.

WHOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!.

Posted by Diana Taurasi on Sunday, September 16, 2007, 8:41 p.m. ET

Let me just start off by saying...

Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I really don't have much time as we've already been at the arena for a few hours since the game ended doing pictures and talking with the media, and, oh yeah, CELEBRATING! But this Blog has been my baby all year and I'm not missing this last chance to do it now.

The Blog Finale! I love it.

Through everything, thick and thin, through diamonds and coal, we did everything we could to win. People doubted the running game, they doubted Small Ball, they doubted the Rover defense and we say YES to all of the naysayers, doubters and haters. We did it.

We are Phoenix. We run-and-gun, we shoot the three and we win championships.

This is the culmination of it all and it is a beautiful thing. Tonight we made beautiful music with beautiful people.

It's been a great trip and I loved almost every second of it. Back in the middle of the season when we were struggling we put the pressure on ourselves and this feels amazing. And I know the Sonics have a lot of money, but I think Paul Westhead should stick around and be the highest paid WNBA coach in the history of the league. He deserves it.

So to all of the Blog fans out there, thanks for reading all season long and I love you so much. To the Phoenix fans, some of you who we got to celebrate with tonight and the rest of you to whom we are bringing home the trophy, I cannot wait to share this with you.

Next year, back-to-back sounds good to me.

And to my blogging partner and my good friend Sue Bird, I'll see you in Chile. I got the ring, BABY!

#sue bird #diana taurasi #wnba #seattle storm #phoenix mercury #lauren jackson #penny taylor #cappie pondexter #swin cash #detroit shock #wospo #uconn huskies

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thorsenmark · 2 years

Video

flickr

What a Beautiful Range of Mountains! by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: On a nearby sign at this overlook to Washington Pass, there's a poem by William Stafford entitled "Silver Star." It's written about a mountain and its life. The end part mentions a voice from the sky saying with a praise and reward "well done!" As I looked across this mountain valley to Silver Star Mountain and then further northeast across the ridgeline of Vasiliki Ridge and the South Washington Pass range, I could only think to myself "well done"...these mountain peaks were truly amazing and a sight to see! For the image, I later used some CEP filters (Low Key, Polarization and Graduated Neutral Density) in Capture NX2 which seemed to best bring out look I wanted for this mountain setting in the North Cascades.

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prurientpuddlejumper · 4 years

Text

Guerrerita

Part 2 ->

Summary: Nevada takes you out on a fancy date and things go poorly.

Nevada Ramirez x Feral Female Reader

Warnings: allusions to domestic violence but no actual domestic violence, just some assumptions based on Nevada being generally an asshole. A bit of regular violence though. (OK, you know that trope where the Honorable Tough Guy beats up a stranger’s abusive husband to teach him a lesson?) Mature content, but no smut this chapter.

1,796 words

While most people would consider a romantic dinner at a sophisticated restaurant relaxing, everything about it had you on edge. It was too fancy for you to belong there, even in the elegant dress Nevada bought for you. The dress was too form-fitting, too low-cut. It made your cleavage look ample, and though you were getting accustomed to wearing such pieces in your new employment, your confidence in the feminine was still lacking.

You hunkered low in your seat, trying to be as small as possible so no one would look at you. Of course your nervous fidgeting only made them look more.

Not helping matters was your date, sitting across from you at the small, intimate dining table. Nevada Ramirez cocked his brow sarcastically as he made an inappropriately sexual comment about the aforementioned dress, and the aforementioned way your breasts looked in it.

“It’s almost distracting enough that you don’t notice the—” he gestured at your face with a mocking smirk, and laughed almost cruelly as he saw your eyes flash wide.

Your jaw clenched and you thought of a million biting comebacks you could shoot at him, and briefly envisioned flipping over the table and decking him, but instead you shrunk further in your chair.

“Come on, guerrerita, don’t be like that,” he frowned. He seemed genuinely upset that you were shriveling instead of being riled into taking his bait.

Never in a million years would you have imagined yourself with an asshole like Nevada. Vulgar, loud, rough around the edges. A gang leader who earned the nickname of a ruthless dictator. But your life had been in a downward spiral, and Trujillo found you at the bottom of it. He recruited you into the crime family, and gave you a purpose when everything in your law-abiding life was falling apart.

It was a recent development that you’d admitted your feelings for each other, and until now your relationship (outside of work) had been limited to passionate, desperate, intense sex. Fucking Trujillo was like fucking the illegal fireworks he sold, but this was the first time you’d allowed yourself to be seen out in public with him—in decent company, anyway.

He’d insisted on taking you out to celebrate with something nice, just the two of you. None of his men lurking over your shoulders. Something he thought you’d want, even though all you wanted was to go back to the Heights and rip his clothing off. Now you were too pissed off and embarrassed to even want to fuck him.

You thought he might tone himself down for the upscale venue, but Vada had been his usual obnoxious self all night, and more genteel diners were glaring. Honestly, this was why you couldn’t stand him at first, even though he was incredibly handsome. But his boorish exterior belied a cunning, organized businessman who had all of Washington Heights under his thumb, who earned his community’s loyalty through fear, yes, but ultimately, by taking care of them. There was, underneath the showy performances of flippant laughter and casual brutality, a certain sensitivity you had grown keenly protective of.

He saw the value in things others overlooked. He recognized all the anger and pain stamped inside you behind those mild suburban manners—things polite society considered flaws—and told you that you were exactly what he needed. That those things were an asset to him. That you were valuable.

No one ever said that to you before.

You weren’t in love with him. He would always be a ruthless criminal, and one day you’d want your normal life back. But you had grown… attached.

One of the glaring diners was eyeing Nevada with particular suspicion, not just briefly glancing up when he laughed too loud or made a rude remark to the waiter. He shot Vada a profoundly dirty look and held it long enough to raise your hackles. He sat at the bar about four table lengths away, had shoulder-length hair, a messy stubble beard, and a solid physical build. You would have mistaken him for a surfer except you were on the wrong coast, and your instincts told you he was dangerous. You quietly assessed the potential threat while maintaining your meek posture low in the chair. A cop? Or a rival gang leader? Unlikely to make a move inside the restaurant with so many witnesses. You’d watch the exits when it was time for the check.

The waiter brought the main course to the table, and blessedly, digging into a meal finally shut up Nevada’s feisty tongue. Instead of sleazy remarks, he made small-talk about how good everything tasted. Maybe it wasn’t just having his mouth stuffed that mellowed him. There was a softness in his eyes now—a look reserved for when you were alone together, when he knew something was bothering you. You guessed he finally caught on that you were not having a good time.

Nevada never took anything seriously, until suddenly he did. You’d seen him throw opponents off balance by dropping from sardonic laughter to spine-chilling hostility, and the effect was equally potent when he dropped into affection.

His foot bumped into your leg—those shiny black leather shoes that looked like someone cut off a tacky cowboy boot at the ankle—and slowly brushed against it under the table. It wasn’t an aggressively sexual maneuver, just an affectionate contact letting you know he was there. It worked. You lanced a slice of filet mignon on your fork, and felt your shoulders relax with his change in attitude. It was a simple gesture, but the warmth of his leg spread tingling waves through your skin, making your face flush. A private, intimate moment, like a sharing secret. That was the most thrilling part of the relationship, really—the secret that the fearsome Trujillo had a tender side. In a way, you were like two opposite halves that fit together perfectly.

Before long, you were comfortable enough to start gushing about the day’s victory you were there to celebrate, and the staring stranger had slipped entirely from your mind.

***

You excused yourself to use the bathroom, and as you washed your hands in the mirror, you got a good look your swollen black eye. You’d taken a glove to the face hard, but it opened your opponent’s guard and let you hit them back harder until they went down, and you walked away with prize money from the biggest tournament you’d ever won. Nevada was so turned on by your aggression, it took all his willpower not to barge into the locker room and fuck you right then and there. Instead, he treated you to dinner at a nice place like a gentleman, which was a very sweet, if misguided effort.

The bruise had spread and darkened in the hours since you received it, and your makeup no longer did anything to hide it. And there you were all innocent, in a cute little dress, slouching nervously across from a character from Breaking Bad. Oh fuck, no wonder everyone was giving him dirty looks.

An icy fist clenched around your heart as you remembered surfer-hair sitting at the bar, and you suddenly didn’t feel right about leaving Nevada unguarded. You shook the water off your hands and rushed back out into the dining area.

You were just being paranoid, of course. No one would start a fight in the middle of the restau—

Fuck.

Your table was empty. And so was that spot at the bar.

Worst-case scenarios ran through your head and your field of vision narrowed. A waiter hurried past with a tray of dirty dishes and you grabbed him by the arm hard enough for several plates to go flying as you whipped him around. “Did you see where the man at that table went?!” you demanded, pointing.

Indignant protests died half-formed on the surprised waiter’s lips and turned to terror at your intensity. “I-I think he went out to smoke! The side door!”

You dropped his arm without a thank you and marched with purpose to the door, which pushed open into a dim back alley.

“If you ever lay a hand on her again—” surfer-hair was snarling, pinning Nevada against the side of a metal dumpster, fist raised about to strike.

Nevada’s lip was bleeding, but he wore a cocky grin, letting fly a string of filthy Spanish expletives.

“You think it’s funny beating on a helpless girl? Let’s see how you like it.”

Nevada was scrappy, but not especially large. He’d gotten in a few hits, but was losing, badly. He was more the brains of his criminal operation, which was why he was always accompanied by protection. And now you were seeing red.

The man got off another punch to Nevada’s smirking face before you could reach them, the dull impact unlocking a boiling rage that rose in your blood and turned you into someone you wouldn’t recognize once the heat had passed. As he reared back for another, you used his momentum to keep him sailing backwards, off balance.

“DON’T YOU”—you kicked him in the chest, staggering him back—“FUCKING TOUCH HIM!” you roared.

Carrying forward on the momentum of the kick, you threw your entire body into punch after brutal punch, hissing and snarling like an animal, driving him back and down, your primal fury relishing the sensation of fists slamming into solid flesh and bone. You were going to break this fucker for daring to hurt Trujillo. “I will kill you! I will kill you!” you screamed, thrashing him in a relentless onslaught that never gave him an opening to regain his footing. The man might have given a better showing, but he was still recovering from the shock of being beaten senseless by a demon he had assumed was a fragile soul in need of rescuing.

You felt a hand grasp your shoulder and threw a vicious elbow, stopping yourself inches before seeing whose nose it was you were about to shatter. “Princesa, princesa—calmate. Tranquila, baby girl…” he cooed, pulling you off.

“I’ll fucking kill you!” you kept shrieking, legs and arms kicking out at the air, trying to continue raining blows down on your enemy as Nevada restrained you. You struggled against Nevada’s arms, your hammering pulse chanting murder in your ear, but never striking a blow against him. Even in a blind rage, your instincts recognized he was yours to protect.

In the way his long fingers gripped you, the rhythm of his breath in your ear, and how close he held his body firm against you, he was clearly turned on.

He cackled at the would-be do-gooder. “You don’t wanna mess with an MMA champ’s boyfriend, comemierda. I don’t think she’s kidding! Better run while you can.”

“Alright, alright, Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered, guarding his face. “Who the hell are you people?”

Nevada’s smile could have split his face in two. “She’s my bodyguard.”

#nevada ramirez x reader #Nevada ramirez #Raúl Esparza #reader insert #trouble in the heights #female reader #protectiveness #reader is once again completely feral because all my readers are feral #but I really went all out on this one hahaha #my writing

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stxrrywildflower · 4 years

Text

brother

pairing - spencer reid x reader

summary - you lose your brother to the hands of a killer

warnings - cursing, blood, injury details, character death (not major, just mentioned)

word count - ?

note - this was kinda just a little idea i had and wanted to write it :)

the team walked into the conference room on monday, ready for whatever case was presented. once sitting down, everyone seemed to notice that you were missed.

“where’s y/n?” morgan asked, looking over at spencer for answers. he shrugged, “i haven’t talked to her since last night.”

the second strange occurrence was that hotch motioned for garcia to sit down. he took the remote and stood in front of this team. all eyes were on their boss as he took a deep breath.

“i have to warn you, this case is going to impact us all emotionally,” hotch spoke. just as he hit the first button, pictures of two victims appeared on the screens and tablets; one male and one female. “is that?” j.j. started.

“lake placid, new york. two victims, clara smith and benjamin y/l/n. yes, this is y/n’s younger brother. she took the first flight out this morning upon hearing the news. we were called in due to the fact that benjamin had y/n’s name carved into his right arm.”

with the information presented, the team felt like a bomb was dropped on them. everyone met benjamin at least once. for spencer, he had met benjamin on multiple occasions.

“of course y/n is going to be affected by this, that is obvious but we need to be there for her. she is also most likely going to bring her in for questioning. then, she can pick whoever she wants to talk to and we go from there,” hotch spoke before adding, “wheels up in 20.”

after the team briefed on the plane and got their assignments, spencer moved away from the team and over to one of the seats in the corner. derek noticed the younger agents absence and sat down in the seat across from him.

“what’s on your mind kid?” morgan asked.

spencer rubbed he bridge of his nose before speaking, “y/n, she lost her brother to a killer. we saw how that affected hotch, i can’t imagine what’s going to happen with her.” derek leaned forward and rested his arms on the table between them.

“kid i know you’re worried about her, and you have every right to be. and i know you lost someone too, don’t act like i don’t know you and benjamin were friends. but right now, we really just need to be there for her and catch this unsub.” spencer presses his lips together and nodded. he thanked the older agent before going back to his own thoughts.

the team arrived in lake placid an hour and a half later. j.j. and hotch were going to the police station to set up, rossi and spencer were going to the morgue to look at the first victim, and derek and emily were going to where the latest victim was found. the body of benjamin remained there due to how little time had passed since he was found as well as the markings on his arm.

derek and emily pulled up to the hill overlooking the lake where benjamin was found. a couple local police officers were scattered around, checking for other evidence. however, they noticed a familiar figure, squatting down by benjamin’s body.

you stood up upon hearing a car pull in on the dirt being you. you then turned around to see derek and emily stepping out of the suv. you kept your eyes on the grass hill as the other two agents took in your appearance.

you were dressed in leggings with a white simple tank top and your black combat boots. a tan knitted cardigan that fell long down your back and was a little oversized in the sleeves. your eyes were red and puffy, no doubt from crying.

emily took a hesitant step toward you as derek moved past you to the body. no words were exchanged between the two of you as emily pulled you into a hug, cradling your head with her hand as you pressed your forehead into her shoulder.

“why don’t you go to the car. we’re going to the police station after we are done here,” emily spoke in such a calm and reassuring voice that you followed her orders and sat in the back of the car.

the other two agents made their way back to the after just a few short minutes. the body was being brought to the morgue for further inspection. the drive back was painfully long. as emily drove, derek noticed you in the back seat visible shaking. your head was pressed up against the window as you bounced your leg.

once arriving at the police station, derek jumped out of the car to alert the team of your presence as emily helped you out of the car. she kept her arm around your waist as she led you into the building. you felt all eyes on you as you walked in. you pressed your lips together and slowly looked up at your team. off to the side you noticed your parents, talking to one of the police officers. honestly, you weren’t close with your parents at all and you already greeted them.

spencer was the first to notice the tears begining to fall down your cheeks. he tossed down the file onto the desk before slowly walking over to you. “y/n,” he spoke in a soft voice. you didn’t say anything but instead wrapped your arms around him. he pulled you into a tighter embrace, not caring that his shirt was getting wet from your tears.

the team watched on as spencer whispered something in your ear. it was inaudible to them but upon seeing him lead you over to a chair before sitting down and pulling you into his lap was explanation enough.

“when she’s ready we’ll see who she wants to interview her. for now, morgan and j.j. interview the parents. find out what you can on the personalities and social life of these victims. rossi, head down to the morgue and find out the similarities. everyone else, victimology,” hotch ordered.

it took you close to a half an hour for you to fully calm down. rossi was just walking back in the doors when you had told spencer you wanted to do the interview.

“i’m ready,” you told your boss with a slight smile, trying to put on a brave face.

“alright who with?” hotch responded. you looked around the room at your team who were all doing their own things. “you,” you responded.

hotch nodded before leading you to the interrogation room. once entering, you took a seat as your team gathered in front of the window to watch your interview. they wanted to get better information but at the same time, wanted to be there for you.

“alright y/n, just for record, what is your relation to benjamin y/l/n,” hotch asked first. “older sister,” you simply stated.

“why don’t you start out with telling me anything about benjamin. then we will go into actual questions, okay?” you nodded to hotch’s words as you mentally prepared yourself.

you took a deep breath before starting, “benjamin and i were always close, practically best friends. since we’re two years apart, a lot of my friends were his friends and the same with my friends. we never had the cliche of not wanting to be around each other in high school. when i committed to nyu, he was so proud. prouder than my parents i would say. i was just so scared of leaving him. we really relied on each other. but deep down i knew he would be fine. benjamin wasn’t exactly popular but he was so nice to everyone. kinda became what he was known for,” you let out a slight chuckle at that.

“and then when i was 20, he committed to university of south carolina. being so far away from my brother was difficult but we made a habit of talking two or three times a week. and that stuck to today. when i told him i was applying and then got accepted into the fbi acadamy, i wasn’t sure who was more excited, me or him. he told me that he knew i would be such a good agent because i loved helping people. i moved to washington, d.c. and him to new york city. i didn’t get to visit him as much as i would like but again, we called. he was only supposed to be up here on a visit. he loved meeting the team so much. him and spencer got on so well because they both had such similar interests. and it really made my so happy to see them bonding,” you spoke.

“deep down you always have a fear that this job is going to take someone you love. whether it’s a significant other and a family member. i just never thought it could happen to benjamin and i don’t know what to do. should i be mourning him or jumping right back into work? nothing feels right. i just feel so fucking guilty that he’s dead. the killer wanted me here and took away my brother because of that. my own name was carved into his arm. i just don’t know what to do,” you managed to choke out. hotch stopped for a moment, moved slightly by your speech. before he would have to ask you the tough questions, he decided to give you advice.

“when i lost hayley, i felt like there was such a big gap missing. foyet took away someone i loved. but, i had jack and the team. both kept me going and helped me grieve but also move on and continue a sense of normality. the team is all here for you as well as your parents,” hotch said to you. he was about to respond but stopped when you rolled your eyes and laughed slightly. “i doubt they really care,” you grimaced.

“excuse me?” hotch responded, confused on your comment.

you leaned forward and rested your elbows on the table. “you know know deep down you have the feeling someone doesn’t like you? with both their body language and words? that’s how benjamin and i felt growing up. our parents made sure that they were around just enough that was legal and allowed but they never really seamed to care about us. when benjamin and i both went to college, they absolutely didn’t care. didn’t get a goodbye either. didn’t even show up to our graduations. they always hated us for not visiting but benjamin and i agreed that we wouldn’t unless we both felt that it was right to do so. i’m shocked if their mourning right now,” you revealed.

derek suddenly stepped away from the integration room just as hotch was asking you more questions and went over to the phone. just as the team followed, they heard him ask garcia for records on your parents.

“i think we need to look into y/n’s parents. i got a bad feeling from them when interviewing and i think what she said might be a key,” derek spoke in a hushed voice. from there, the team dispatched.

you and hotch exited your interview twenty minutes later. you were mentally exhausted from having to recall all these memories about your deceased brother. j.j. was the only one in the station. you heard her tell hotch where each individual member of the team went. you sat down at one of the desks and looked at the case file of the first girl. she was a high school senior, you had no clue who she was or why she was the first victim.

you decided to do some digging and dialed garcia number. “hey pen,” you spoke softly into the phone. “oh y/n, how are you feeling lovie?” the technical analyst responded. “i’m coping. this is just a curiosity question but did clara have any siblings?” you asked.

“she had an older brother. he moved to los angeles from new york and is currently on a flight back home,” garcia informed your. “alright thank you penelope, you’re the best,” you said as you hung up.

“hey hotch,” you spoke softly, gaining the attention of your boss. “clara had an older brother who moved away from home. i think that this might connect our victims,” you informed him. hotch obviously didn’t like that you were doing work but he dismissed it and looked at the file. “maybe he’s punishing the older siblings for leaving their younger sibling,” you suggested. hotch nodded and with a quick ‘good work’ to you, he was on the phone and out of the room.

days later, the team had a lead. your parents had rushed to the police station upon hearing this. the unsub wasn’t working alone but if they found one, they could find the others. as the team was begining to grab their gear, you reached to your side to make sure your gun was there. instead, you found nothing but an empty holster.

“hotch where’s my gun,” you asked sternly. hotch glanced up and motioned with his head over to where rossi stood. the oldest agent had your gun secured to the other side of his hip. “you aren’t coming,” was all hotch said as a response.

“like hell i’m not!” you exclaimed.

hotch as well as the team looked at you. “you are too emotionally invested in the case. we do this to any agent who is directly linked. stay here and we will be back soon.” with that, the bau team rushed out the door and to the cars.

you collapsed into a chair and put your head in your hands. all you could do was wait.

an hour later, the team walked into the station holding a man in his early 20’s. he held a wide smirk as morgan pushed him in. you stood up, stoned face with shaking hands.

“he did it?” you asked morgan, your voice barely above a whisper. derek nodded grimly.

“oh so you must be ben’s older sister! shame mommy dearest had to kill him. i don’t blame your parents, it really was your fault after all,” the unsub taunted.

your parents? you turned around to where your mom and dad were now standing. the pieces slowly clicked in your mind. you stormed over to your mom, pushing her into the wall and holding her neck against it with your arm.

“you killed him?” you asked sharply. your mom didn’t respond but you instead pressed your arm further into her neck. “answer me!” you yelled, tears welling in your eyes. the team had never seen you so angry and aggressive before.

j.j. and spencer rushed forward, pulling you away from your mom. spencer wrapped his arm around your waist and led you out of the police station. once in a more secluded area, you broke.

sobs racked your body as tears openly fell. spencer kept you in a tight embrace the entire time. you cried for your bother. you cried over the fact that your parents had murdered their own son. you didn’t even consider them parents anymore.

it had taken you awhile to calm down. spencer’s phone had started ringing, causing you to pull away. you managed to catch a glimpse of the caller i.d. and once seeing your bosses name, you nudged spencer. he shot you a smile before standing up and answering the phone.

a minute later, he returned. “hotch wants to know if you are staying here or returning back to d.c. with us tonight,” spencer spoke softly. “d.c.,” you responded blandly. your boyfriend spoke to hotch again briefly before hanging out.

“i don’t think i ever want to come back here again.”

on the jet that night, the team was in one corner, talking quietly amongst themselves, while you were in the other. spencer was convincing you to try and sleep. he stayed by your side, rubbing soft circles on your thigh as you slowly drifted off. once you were fully asleep, spencer stood up and took a seat next to emily.

“you think she’s going to be okay?” morgan asked.

spencer sighed, “i don’t know. her brother was murdered and she found out it was by her own parents? there’s a lot of trauma there.” hotch looked at his team. “i’m making her take two weeks off minimum. then, after a psych evaluation, she can return,” he informed them. they all knew you wouldn’t want to take a longer break than you had to.

spencer looked over at your sleeping figure before standing up. he was satisfied with the teams short conversation and made his way back over to where you slept, taking a seat next to you. you immediately leaned into his side as his arm draped around you. j.j. tossed spencer a blanket, smiling at the two of you.

spencer sighed, content before shutting his eyes and drifting off beside you.

#criminal minds #criminal #spencer reid x oc #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x you #spencer reid #derek morgan #aaron hotchner #jennifer jareau #emily prentiss #david rossi #penelope garcia

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malecsecretsanta · 3 years

Text

Merry Christmas ninwrites!

For @ninwrites. I was so thrilled to get you for Secret Santa this year as your Malec fics are some of the very first that I ever read when I fell into Shadowhunters way back in 2016. You gave me so many great prompts this year that I really struggled deciding what to write, especially because I know we share so many common interests! Part of me wanted to write a sweeping sci-fi, and another part of me wanted to write a clever procedural, and then I know how much you love superheroes and I also love superheroes, so that could've easily happened ...

But in the end, I decided to strip everything down and write a story about second chances. About seemingly unrequited yearning and human connection and liminal spaces and time unravelling backwards and friends-to-almost lovers-to-strangers until serendipity intervenes. Of course, I went drastically over the word limit but this happens every year so I am no longer surprised.

Merry Christmas! I hope you enjoy this little microcosm of a story!

Tags: malec | rated: t | extended oneshot | human AU, roadtrip, friends-to-lovers-to-strangers-to-lovers, hurt/comfort, surrealism

Read on AO3

*****

saudade in the key of highways

saudade

/saʊˈdɑːdə/

noun

(especially with reference to songs or poetry) a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again. It is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, and well-being, which now trigger the senses and make one experience the pain of separation from those joyous sensations. However it acknowledges that to long for the past would detract from the excitement you feel towards the future.

"as we fall / into the common, suspended disbelief of love, you ask / will I still be / here tomorrow, next week, tonight you ask am I really here."

— Olga Broumas, Beginning with O; “Bitterness”

first chord

There is rhythm to this loneliness.1

The endless darkness. Passing headlights; the hum of the engine; the splutter of the heater fighting against the cold that claws and scratches at the windshield. The highway, deserted, is like a strange and eerie dream that travels on and on and never ends.

The rental car: new. Nondescript in its newness. Two hands on the wheel; the faded hum of the radio, a soft accompaniment to the bright beam of the headlights. The car has a cassette player, but no cassettes. It never has any cassettes.

There’s a gas station like a beacon in the distance: a faint glow of sodium yellow that slinks along the horizon but never draws closer, spilling light like fuel out across the open fields.

Alec prefers driving at night. There is never any need to ask for directions because he never passes anyone he could ask for directions; he might be the only car he’s seen in fifty miles.

The radio crackles, then laughs, ‘ we know it’s only November but nothing gets us in the mood for Christmas like -’

Almost immediately, the signal drops, but the interluding white noise is familiar too. It fills the silence with unimportance, an invisible presence in the passenger seat who doesn’t require conversation or stops to stretch their legs, but is company enough for long drives across the country.

Moments on the road are filled like this: a hundred similar soundtracks for a hundred indistinct highways, their miles wearing down the tread on Alec’s tires and the lines of Alec’s palms, where he grips the steering wheel for hours without a break, in much the same way.

‘So if you’re listening at home, or you’re stuck on a late-night shift, or if you’re driving cross-country and need a pick-me-up, give us a ring and tell us about your favourite ever Christmas song!’ says the radio. ‘But to get us started, we have Marnie from Portland on line one -’

Alec punches the buttons on the radio until he finds a classic rock station. He taps the steering wheel, not to the beat of the song, but to dispel some of the restless energy that tingles in his fingertips.

A sign on the roadside passes him by at high speed; it tells him that he’s a hundred miles from nowhere in particular - but at the last intersection, a similar sign told him he was a hundred-and-one, and now he’s acutely aware of creeping ever closer to his destination.

It’s a destination he’s not sure he wants to reach. A destination he calls home.

There is rhythm to this loneliness . Alec is used to it: the anxious churning of his stomach, the longing for the road to continue beyond its end; the endless, perpetual, and pointless journey of back-and-forths.

One: drive across the width of the country. Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Oregon, again and again. A country of ochre-yellow wheat; plains and flatlands; tractors abandoned on the roadside.

Two: report to the local field office, where he’s given a desk too small for his long legs and a computer he doesn’t have a password to. Talk to the county sheriff who snaps at him, ‘ the FBI has no business out here, we can handle this on our own ,’ and then to the man who refuses to open his door wide enough for Alec to get a good look at his face, but whose eyes skip over Alec’s badge and land on the gun on his hip and he thinks the same thing as the sheriff.

Three: avert his eyes from the body lying on the steel table in the morgue. Pretend that federal intervention was warranted, even though he knows this case is another crime of opportunity and the sheriff was right. The sheriff is always right. ‘ Waste of the FBI’s time, if you ask me. ’

Four: write up another field report that uses all the same words as the one before. Mail it back to Washington. Hopefully it will reach the Assistant Director before he does.

Then, five, begin the drive home.

Rinse. Repeat. Repeat again. Avoid his mother’s calls when he stops for the night at an interstate motel. Make excuses not to see his father when he’s in town. Pretend like he’s not bothered missing out on another promotion, because that would mean moving to a desk job and he likes being out in the field.

He likes driving. This is the mantra he repeats in his head rather than listening to the song on the radio.

There is rhythm to this loneliness .

The car’s engine rumbles on an empty stomach and Alec glances down at the fuel meter, ticking ever closer to the red with each passing and uncountable mile. The gas station in the distance begins to draw closer, finally allowing Alec to catch up, as its cluster of lights shift and reform into the familiar shape of civilisation.

Alec’s turn signal lights up the immediate stretch of highway with flashing orange and a click-click-click sound in the front seat of the car. There’s no-one behind him and no-one ahead of him, but he slows almost to a stop as he eases the car off the road and onto the crunch of hard-packed sand.

A single streetlamp overlooks the highway, casting a pool of unsettled yellow-white light across a phone booth that stands slanted upon the roadside. The gas station lingers a little further back: a small, stout building with a flat roof and a pile of browning-Christmas trees propped up out front. Its two gas pumps advertise diesel at a discounted price, but one of them appears to be out of order.

Beside the gas station, there is a diner; it’s old and clapped-out and almost empty at this time of night, but the bright light beaming through its windows in all directions is painful to look at. The movement of people inside is like a scene playing out in an old movie, stuck on repeat over and over again, the tape unable to skip forward. A repeated moment, and one which Alec has played his part in too many times to count.

Again, his stomach rumbles loudly and he guides the car to a stop before pulling up the handbrake.

He’s alone at the pumps. As he steps out of the car, the silence greets him; the wind falls and the road is swallowed up behind him by an encroaching night, compressing the universe into a single point. A single flicker in time.

Alec retrieves his service weapon from the glove box and clips it onto his belt, pats his chest for his badge tucked into his breast pocket, before drawing his overcoat tight around him. He won’t linger out here, not when it feels like something just out of sight is holding its breath and shifting in and out of bounds; he’s far too afraid of falling back into the passage of time.

Instead, he turns towards the diner; the bell above the door jingles the same as it always does. The TV in the corner is on mute but hums with static. The sound of plates clattering in the kitchen is enough to drown out his shoes on the chequered floor as the waitress looks up at him but doesn’t say hello.

Corner booths are best placed for people-watching and people-hiding and Alec, in his non-descript suit that matches his non-descript car, sinks onto the squeaky red-leather bench without being seen at all. He sighs heavily, rolling the stiffness out of his shoulder that has been bothering him for the last fifty miles.

There are scuffs on the leather and old coffee stains on the table, but he fishes his keys, wallet, and badge out of his pocket and tosses them on top of the menu; he already knows what he’s going to order and there’s no need to look. He’s been craving something greasy since he left Portland this morning, fuelled only by a cup of filter coffee from the machine in the motel lobby.

Alec grinds the heels of his palms into his eyes, a soft groan catching in his throat. In the same moment, the lights overhead seem to flicker, although not for long. Must be a short circuit. The waitress rubbing down the bar doesn’t look up, focused too intently on a coffee-ring stain that isn’t really there.

Diners late at night are strange places. Liminal places. Places of beginnings and endings and threshold moments and tangled journeys, forever caught in that feeling of arriving or departing - but the longer one lingers, the more reality begins to distort.

Alec is not alone in the diner, but the diner is alone in the night that laps and recedes against the windows that look out over the parking lot. Beyond, the gas station hums with a familiar argon sound, bright and electric and not-quite-right in the dark and, behind that, the edge of the highway outlines this displaced moment.

There is nothing else. Alec’s eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark, and for all he knows of the endless fields of wheat that stretch out to the horizon, he cannot see them. The bell above the door chimes again and a young couple slips into the diner, their arms slung low around each other’s waists, giggling as they take up two stools against the bar. Three seats down from them, an old man in a trucker hat and a Chicago Bulls’ jersey is frowning at the TV above his head, trying to lip-read the late-night news anchor because there are no subtitles. In the far corner of the diner, a group of teenagers are tossing fries at each other and one of them makes a milkshake bullseye.

Alec doesn’t know why these people are here, in the middle of a late-night nowhere. He can’t remember the name of the last town he passed through, but it wasn’t more than a handful of houses and a couple of telephone poles kept upright by plywood and nails.

He glances back out at the parking lot, but his rental is the only car there. Strange.

Strange, but not unexpected. He has learned not to question it, these fragments of unaligned reality, because soon enough he’ll be on his way again, a burger in his belly and bacon grease smeared across the corner of his mouth, and this diner will cease to exist as soon as he’s out of sight and over the ridge of the highway.

Perhaps it will appear again somewhere else. Perhaps he will come across this place again, another mile or two down the road, inhabited by a different group of late-night travellers who will watch him from the corners of their eyes but not say a word, because a lone man in a cheap suit is no more out of place here than they are at two in the morning.

The waitress brings over his burger and a side of fries, setting a mug down in front of him and filling it up with coffee from her pot. Alec nods at her in thanks and she blows a bubble of gum that pops across her mouth and sticks to her teeth, before she retreats behind the register and starts again on that stain.

Alec doesn’t waste any time tucking a napkin into his shirt collar. His tie is cheap and he doesn’t really care if he ruins it; there’s a spare in the bag in the trunk of his car anyway. He takes a large swig of coffee, and then a bite out of his burger, and ketchup and burger juice leak out through his fingers, splattering on the paper wrapper that covers his plate.

It tastes the same as it always does. His stomach growls loudly as he takes another bite and ketchup drips down his thumb.

Movement through the window catches his eye. He looks up and there, on the very edge of the light emanating from the gas station, is a man in the phonebooth next to the road. His back is to Alec but he’s gesturing wildly as he talks into the receiver, and the wind, now returned, billows through his long woollen coat.

A slice of tomato falls out of Alec’s burger with a distinct plop . He’s not sure why the man draws his attention, but Alec has long since learned to trust his gut - it’s an invaluable skill to have in the Bureau , his father would say. It will get you places. It will make people see you as someone they can trust to watch their back. You can’t buy that sort of loyalty, Alec.

The man is tall. He has dark hair and long legs and he grips the edge of the phonebooth with his free hand. He seems to be having a very intense conversation, unlike the hum of background noise that surrounds Alec now.

The man is an anomaly. He is not someone Alec has seen at a diner before - not a truant teenager or a trucker or a pair of lovers on a late-night tryst - and he doesn’t fit the narrative.

Alec wolfs down the rest of his burger, barely pausing for breath, and washes it down with a swig of coffee that burns slightly too hot. He leaves his fries untouched and throws down a twenty dollar bill, stuffing his badge and wallet into his pockets as he makes for the door.

The bell jingles a third time. Alec wipes the back of his hand across his mouth as he steps out into the cold, no doubt smearing ketchup across his chin. He knows his suit is creased and his shirt is rumpled from the drive, his hair upswept by the sudden gust of wind that threatens to knock him off his feet, and he can almost hear Jace laughing in his ear, alright, G-Man?

Alec passes by his car and heads straight for the phonebooth, but the closer he gets, the more he can hear of the man’s one-sided conversation.

“And there’s no way you can get a guy out here tonight?” the man is saying. “I can pay extra for the trouble. Uh-huh. Yes. Yes, it’s pretty urgent.”

Alec draws to a stop when the length of his shadow steps upon the backs of the man’s shoes. He shoves his hands into his pockets so as to appear as unthreatening as possible when the man inevitably turns around, but -

“I don’t see how a service can advertise itself as 24-hour and then not be available in an emergency,” the man says into the phone. He sounds stressed; there’s something about the cadence of his voice that rumbles through Alec’s chest and draws the hair on the back of his neck up on end. Something decades-old familiar. “The least you can do is give me the number for another rental service. A cab company. Something. Anything .”

The man turns away from the phonebooth, catching sight of Alec from the corner of his eye and holding up a finger as if to say hold on a minute , but he stops, whatever words on his tongue extinguished into roadside dust.

Alec’s eyes widen. He knows this man.

Fuck. He more than knows this man. He remembers the first time they met, the firm confidence of his handshake, the bright colours of his shirt, the way Alec thought, at the time, this man is going to change you .

It’s Magnus. Magnus Bane.

Alec never expected to see Magnus again. Not since -

Well, not since then .

“Magnus,” says Alec, like an exhale. And God , his mouth has not formed that name in years; he’s heard it, sometimes, inside his memories, but never beyond. “What are you -”

Magnus stares at him in disbelief, and Alec can hear the man on the other end of the phone line asking hey, are you still there? Hello? where Magnus holds the receiver away from his ear.

Something doesn’t make sense here, but Alec can’t put his finger on it. Not once has he met someone at a diner who he recognises. They’re all meant to be faceless people; people he could meet again a hundred times and still not recognise.

But Alec would recognise Magnus Bane with his eyes closed. It’s been years, and yet the feeling that floods his chest now, is -

An ache.

“Yes, sorry,” Magnus says suddenly, half-turning back to this phone call. His disbelief becomes a scowl. “No, it’s fine. I’ll call them myself. Thank you. Okay. Goodnight.”

The man on the other end of the line hangs up first and the dial tone echoes in the night for a moment, and then another, and then another.

Alec swallows thickly. He draws his hands out of his pockets and folds them behind his back, clenching his fingers in a tight grip where they can’t be seen.

Carefully, Magnus sets the phone down inside the phonebooth, and turns back to Alec, and then - he smiles.

“Alexander Lightwood,” he says, with a shake of his head. His smile grows broad, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “God, what are the chances? Any other night, and I’d think this was a figment of my imagination, but with the way today’s been going, I-” He stops himself and takes a half-step forward. “I haven’t seen you since -”

“Since before Quantico,” Alec interrupts. He knows he’s staring but he can’t help it. “Ten years. Yeah.”

Ten years, three months, and twenty one days. Alec has been counting. If he looked down at his watch, he would know the amount of time that has passed to the minute, to the second, in fact, but he’s not about to admit to that.

He never expected to see Magnus again, and yet -

He hoped.

“Ten years, really?” Magnus remarks, folding his arms across his chest. Alec follows the movement with his eyes. “Yes, I suppose it must be. 1985, wasn’t it? Christ, that makes me feel old.”

He looks Alec up and down, focusing on Alec’s dust-scuffed shoes, and then on the gun that sits snug on his hip. The corner of his mouth lifts, and his smile becomes a little more genuine.

“I see it’s Special Agent Lightwood now, though. Congratulations.”

“Alec’s still fine,” Alec says quickly. “I mean - you can still call me Alec. That’s fine.”

“Alec,” says Magnus, sounding it out. He’s always held Alec’s name with a special sort of care, but now, he says it like he’s saying it for the very first time. “Alexander.”

Alec doesn’t know what to say. He stares at Magnus, at the space between them that is too large for strangers who have just met, and which belongs only to two people who once knew each other well.

Serendipity laughs at Alec now; it sounds like the dull hum of neon light in a desert. It sounds like a hundred unanswered phone calls stretching back years.

“Alec -?”

“Sorry, this is - this is weird, I’m being weird,” Alec blurts. “I didn’t, uh - I really didn’t expect to see you, especially - especially here . I mean-” He squeezes his fingers tightly behind his back to stop himself from talking with his hands. “What, uh, what are you doing out here? I thought you still lived in L.A.?”

Magnus rolls his eyes. “Where to start?” he says softly, “I had some car trouble. The tire blew like a mile back and I swerved off the road and hit the fence. It won’t start now, which is something of a mild nuisance - because apparently we’re so deep in the ass-end of nowhere that I can’t get a mechanic to look at it until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest - but not as much of a nuisance as the meeting I will definitely miss if I’m stranded out here for the next God-forsaken twenty-four hours.”

Alec’s eyes flick to the highway, as if he might be able to see a mile into the distance and find the 1970 Dodge Challenger that Magnus had, far too many years ago and long-since sold for scrap, wrecked upon the roadside. It is, of course, too dark to see much of anything.

“I don’t even know if I’ll be able to call a cab out here,” Magnus continues, his mouth drawn down into a frown. “And I’m far too old to be hitch-hiking. The thrill of climbing into a potential serial killer’s car lost its appeal some decades ago.” With a brush of his fingers, he flicks away hair from his temple and huffs. “I suppose if I started walking now, I might reach Salt Lake by, I don’t know, Friday morning at best.”

Alec’s eyes snap back to Magnus. “You’re heading East?” he asks, far too eagerly. “Are you coming home?”

Something minute pinches in Magnus’ expression at that word. Home . Alec doesn’t miss it.

Magnus shakes his head.

“No,” he says, and he looks away, but there’s nothing there to pretend to be looking at. “No, not quite. If I had the time to drop by and see everyone, I would, but - I’m due in Baltimore in four days for a meeting with our investors.” He smiles wryly to himself. “And I thought it would be, oh, I don’t know, meditative or something equally asinine to make the drive across the country myself, rather than fly. See the sights. Enjoy being off-grid. Which, in hindsight, was very, very stupid.”

“What are you gonna do?”

Magnus shrugs. “Wait, I suppose. There’s not much else I can do. My cell phone is out of battery and I used up the last of my change on the payphone, so it looks like I’m stuck here until tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Alec says awkwardly.

“Yeah,” agrees Magnus.

In the glow of the gas station, reality trembles, hollowing out the shadows on Magnus’ face and flickering across the back of Alec’s knuckles. The motion of coming and going calls Alec back to the road and he glances back at his rental car.

It makes sense to offer Magnus a lift. Alec is heading in that direction, and he has an empty passenger seat and a working heater in the car, and a Bureau credit card in his back pocket.

It makes sense, and yet, he still hesitates.

“Well,” Magnus announces, “I don’t want to keep you. I might as well see what sort of coffee this place has on offer if I’m to be stuck here until tomorrow. I don’t suppose I could interest you in a drink before you go -”

“I’m actually on my way back to D.C.,” Alec says, thumbing over his shoulder at the car. He wets his lower lip with his tongue. “Baltimore’s not that far of a detour, so I, uh. I could give you a lift. If you want.”

“If I want?” Magnus repeats.

Alec swallows and nods. “If you want.”

Magnus’ face softens and he smiles at Alec. “Well, I’m not going to say no, am I? Although I don’t think I’m going to get my deposit back on my car.”

He looks over Alec’s shoulder at the rental. His expression changes, and if Alec were a kind stranger offering a ride to a man in trouble in the middle of the night, perhaps he wouldn’t notice.

But they’re not strangers, and in Magnus’ eyes, there is something Alec can’t quite place. It seems a little wistful. A little sad.

He says, “I would like that very much, Agent Lightwood.”

interlude

It’s 1985 and a man stands on the edge of the sidewalk, watching as a car turns right at the end of the street and disappears. He waits, half-expecting it to come back, circling around the block and pulling up beside him, the window already rolled down, but it doesn’t.

Ten years pass, and it doesn’t, and the man has to live with it.

Empty spaces and hands on the steering wheel and loneliness and want . In the end, that’s what everything boils down to.

I want you to come back. I want to see you again. I wanted you to stay.

This is the rhythm Alec knows well, played out in the key of highways.

I want something I still don’t have a name for.

second chord

The soundtrack to night-driving is a composition of three things: the car heater as it puffs out warm air; the rental wheezing in the cold, coughing and spluttering with seasonal flu; and the deep stretch of silence.

Usually, Alec welcomes the silence.

In the passenger seat, Magnus shrugs out of his overcoat and tosses it into the backseat, scrubbing his hands together in front of his mouth as he wills circulation back into his fingers. His shirt, open at the throat, looks thin and flimsy and hardly warm enough for a Midwest winter, but the soft shimmer of the satin is devoid of the harsh shadows that cut across Alec’s chest like the black line of a seatbelt.

Alec forces himself to look away. Keep your eyes on the road, he tells himself. And think of something to say before he thinks you’ve forgotten how to talk entirely. He fiddles with the dial on the radio until he finds the company of static, but it morphs all too quickly into Wham!’s Last Christmas .

Alec grumbles below his breath.

“Still a Grinch, I see,” Magnus says with a smirk. “Where’s your festive cheer?”

Alec returns both his hands to the wheel. “It’s too early for Christmas songs,” he replies, “Thanksgiving was literally three days ago and it’s not even December yet.”

“Are you saying the dulcet tones of George Michael don’t do it for you?”

“I prefer Mariah Carey,” Alec mutters. It makes Magnus laugh.

Alec glances at him from the corner of his eye as Magnus begins tapping his finger to the beat of the song against the door handle.

Alec, too, feels restless, but in a different way. He can’t stop looking, stealing glances at Magnus in the rearview mirror. Perhaps he is a trick of the light. Maybe Alec has been driving too long without a break and now he’s seeing people from his past who shouldn’t be here - but are.

Nothing that happens on the road is real, after all.

He digs his fingernail into the skin of his thumb and begins picking.

He’s lived this moment before; he knows he has. Him and Magnus alone in the front seat of a car and Alec’s tongue heavy in his mouth with all the things he doesn’t know how to say, and all the things he couldn’t say ten years ago, because he wasn’t brave enough then.

Hell, he’s hardly brave enough now. He wonders if Magnus remembers any of it.

The space between them is too large for small talk. Conversations that begin with All I Want For Christmas Is You is overrated though, now that you mention it , or so, how is your mother?, or even do you remember the last day we saw each other? are not enough to bridge the gap carved out by a decade of silence.

The thought stretches Alec so painfully thin. He picks at his thumbnail until it begins to sting, then winces, and draws it to his mouth to soothe it with his tongue.

“So,” Magnus begins, in the same instance. He’s still drumming his fingers to the beat of the radio, but now he’s slightly out of time. “What are you doing all the way out here in Idaho?”

Alec could laugh. “I was in Portland,” he says, “Local P.D. request FBI consultation on a case, so. Yeah. Turned out they didn’t need my help.”

“And they made you drive all the way out there?” Magnus asks, and Alec nods. “Sounds grim.” He stops tapping and runs his index finger across the dark polish on his thumb in thought. “Are you still living at home?”

Alec clenches his hands on the steering wheel. “No, I - I moved,” he says. “Uh, not long after I graduated the Academy, actually, but only to D.C.”

“Ah,” Magnus remarks. He pauses for a moment long enough to become awkward. “Still close enough to see your mom on the weekends, though.”

Alec nods again. Close enough , yes , but he doesn’t say it out loud. Close enough for New England ghosts to haunt every intersection between the city and his parents’ big white house in the country whenever he makes the drive upstate.

In ten years, he’s barely moved fifty miles, and Magnus -

Well. The same cannot be said for Magnus.

Magnus clears his throat, louder than the hum of the radio. “And your parents?” he asks. “Isabelle?” He scans the horizon, fixed on the markings in the road disappearing beneath the wheels of the car. “How are they? Well, I hope?”

“Same as always,” Alec shrugs. “Overbearing. Dad’s retired now, and Iz moved to New York for work last year. Max is in college, so mom’s started questioning him about his life choices instead of mine.”

“Only took thirty-five years,” Magnus chuckles. “How is your mom? Are you seeing them for the holidays?”

Alec makes a noise that amounts to yeah, something like that .

What he doesn’t say is this: his parents’ marriage has been strained a while now - not as many years as Magnus has been gone, but close enough - and Alec is thirty years too old to be used as ammunition, or worse, a bartering tool in a messy ending. The divorce is only a matter of time now.

If only the road continued on forever, he would not have to go back home for the holidays. He wouldn’t have to sit through another Christmas of icy silences and thinly-veiled insults and his mother trying to butter him up while his father does the same to Isabelle. He wouldn’t have to lie awake in his childhood bedroom and listen to his parents screaming at each other downstairs, all the while wishing for the tap-tap-tap of pebbles thrown against his window, begging for it to be open.

A lot has changed since Magnus last saw him, and Alec didn’t have to move across the country for that.

A lot has changed since Alec stood on the sidewalk and watched Magnus’ car turn the corner at the end of the street for the very last time and not come back.

A semi-truck appears in the distance: first, as a pin-prick of light, and then as two beams of headlights striking the highway and the growl of its engine. The whole car rumbles and Alec grips tight to the steering wheel as the headlights blind him and shapes dance across his eyes. The light bleaches through Magnus’ dark hair and streaks across the skin visible beneath the open collar of his shirt; he holds his hand over his brow and winces.

The truck is thunder: a brief jolt and a flash, and then it’s gone, an aftershock of red light disappearing in the rearview mirror.

For a while, there is only silence. A mile, maybe more. Long past the truck vanishing from view, its light fading into the dark; and it’s the sort of silence that is thick and heavy and awkward.

At the five mile mark, Magnus inhales and turns in his seat to look at Alec.

“So, the FBI,” he says, like he has an obligation to fill the quiet, because letting it stew is somehow worse. “What’s that like? Maryse must be proud.”

“Yeah,” Alec mumbles. “She is.”

“It suits you, you know? Alec Lightwood, Special Agent. Not that I didn’t always know that it would.”

Alec’s mouth twitches, a smile in another lifetime. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Magnus gestures with his hand. There are rings on his fingers that fail to catch the thin and distant light, but his fingers, long and slender, draw focus.

“You’re smart. Logical. Far too severe for your own good, which I imagine serves you well in law enforcement. You’ve always had a keen sense of justice,” he explains. His voice softens. “You know I’ve always thought that about you.”

Alec swallows thickly. “Magnus, you don’t have to -”

“And besides,” Magnus interrupts. “I always knew you’d look good in a suit.”

Alec looks down at himself. “What, even a suit off the rack?”

“Well, I didn’t want to say anything.”

Shakily, Alec laughs under his breath, but he relaxes his hands on the wheel and his knuckles fade from white back to pink. He lets the tense line in his shoulders fall flat.

“I don’t really have anyone to give me advice on what I should be wearing anymore,” he admits. “Or what colour ties match my -”

“Complexion?”

“Yeah. That.”

“Green. It’s dark green,” Magnus says. He smiles to himself, amused by something far back in time. “Do you remember that time when-”

“Yes,” Alec says. Yes, of course I remember. I haven’t forgotten a single thing . “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I still have that tie, the one you picked out for me that Christmas.”

“And the pocket square? They were a matching set -”

“Still the only pocket square I own,” says Alec.

Magnus chuckles to himself, swiping his thumb across his lower lip in thought. The nostalgia becomes him; his expression softens with the memory of something fond.

The same cannot be said for Alec.

If only pocket squares could be metaphors for other things. For years gone by and silences that were once not this awkward and filled with jilted conversation. Or for a place once frequented but now abandoned; or a past that Alec still calls his now .

Alec is too clumsy at this; he doesn’t know how to step back into a space once occupied with ease, making smalltalk and laughing about Christmases in 1979 as if they were yesterday and they haven’t gone ten years without talking.

He’s not like Magnus; he couldn’t drop everything and leave it all behind. He didn’t get to move on. He had nowhere to go, trapped in this endless back-and-forth of travelling, always returning to the very same place once departed.

interlude

On a postcard never sent:

What is worse: the separation, or the place where we will meet again, afterwards, that looks and feels like nowhere and is no longer familiar?

I miss you. I am afraid that I will no longer know you when I see you again.

third chord

Two motel room doors. Two identical rooms with identical twin beds and box-set TVs with only five channels and VCRs that don’t really work. Two sets of keys, although the weight of the fob in Alec’s hand feels more like brass than cheap white plastic.

He’s been here before: a shared dorm room, long, long ago. And then, after that, two houses on the same suburban street, sharing the same zip code. And then, finally, two cities, half a world apart.

He and Magnus, half a lifetime spent apart.

Alec did not notice the growing distance until it was too late; in hindsight, he’s not sure if that hurts more or less, to be blindsided by a farawayness he never saw coming. But here, now, there’s five-and-a-half feet of space between his shoulder and Magnus’, standing in front of their respective motel room doors, and happenstance has crossed their lines again.

Alec looks down at the key in his hand and then back up.

Beside him, Magnus casts a long and lonely shadow, thin and black as it stretches back into the dark. The wind ruffles his hair and plunders the pockets of his coat in an act of midnight robbery. The cold has chapped his lips already and he grumbles below his breath as he jams his key into the lock with frost-bitten fingers.

Alec doesn’t mean to be looking, but he is. He’s not sure he’s looked away since Magnus stepped out of that phone booth, as if slipping through a gap in time connecting two unrelated places that somehow ended up overlapped.

Magnus’ door clicks and he pushes it open with a soft, “aha!”, flipping on the light inside. The light tumbles out of the room - cheap, yellow, glaring - and Magnus bends down to grab his bag from his feet.

He pauses, then, in his open doorway.

“Well, then,” he says, looking at Alec with a half smile. “Until tomorrow, I suppose?”

“Yeah,” says Alec. He clenches the key in his palm until the metal digs into his fingers. If Magnus notices, he doesn’t let on. “Listen, Magnus. About what happened, when you left-”

“I’m glad, you know,” Magnus interrupts. “For whatever serendipitous force brought you to that gas station tonight. It’s good to see you. I mean it.”

“It’s good to see you too,” Alec replies. “I didn’t think - I didn’t think that day was going to be goodbye. I didn’t realise. If I’d known, Magnus ...”

“I didn’t either,” replies Magnus. His voice becomes softer. His eyes, too. Apologetic in a way that might take Alec years to unravel - or seconds. “But these things happen. You can’t stay stuck in one place forever, Agent Lightwood.”

Alec nods stiffly but says nothing.

Magnus offers him another smile, leaning heavily on his door frame.

“Alexander?” he asks, as if oblivious.

Alec squeezes the key tighter in his hand. “Yeah?”

A pause, then. Deliberate and weighted, and for a moment, Alec wonders if Magnus is going to answer the question that hasn’t been asked.

(Do you remember the day you left?)

(Let’s not talk about it. Let’s not talk. It’s in the past and we’re both different people now.)

But, instead:

“I’ll see you in the morning, Alec,” he says. “Goodnight. And thank you, again.”

The door closes and the light vanishes, and Alec is left suddenly in the darkness, gazing at the space once occupied. The night around him is cold. A whisper sets heavily upon his tongue but goes unspoken.

Everything always goes unspoken.

interlude

Somewhere between here and 1985, there is a man who doesn’t regret letting his feelings go unsaid. There is a man who moved on with his life; a man who doesn’t live in a moment years ago, with someone else’s hand playing idly in his hair.

There is a man who meets an old friend at a gas station in rural Idaho and it doesn’t hurt in a way he can’t ever explain.

Alec wishes that he knew him.

fourth chord

It’s always night, on the road.

As with endless highways and endless diners, other things begin to repeat themselves too. Alec prefers driving at night. It’s quiet; he can hear himself think; he can run red lights without being pulled over, without anybody in the world seeing him at all. He affords himself this one little thrill, the knowledge that the power to swerve off the road is clenched in his fists.

A fuel tanker passes the car on the opposite side of the highway, the sound of its exhaust like a fog horn parting thick cloud; for a moment, the low hum of the radio is wiped from existence. Alec eases the car over into the middle of the lane with the barest adjustment of the wheel, avoiding the spray of wet grit kicked up by the truck’s wheel arches. As the rumble fades, the melody of late-night jazz begins anew.

He glances sideways at Magnus in the passenger seat. His temple rests against the window and his eyes are closed but he’s not asleep; Alec can tell by the way he’s drawing his thumb in tiny concentric circles against his index finger again, as if deep in thought.

It was always a tell of his.

There is so much of him that hasn’t changed. So much of him that has crossed the threshold from Alec’s memory and fanned out into reality, and Alec is not quite sure where it all meets and blends together. Magnus is half a stranger and half a man ten years younger than he is now, with expensive clothes and the same aftershave and a twinkle in his eye and a strange, unspoken grief on his face whenever he thinks Alec isn’t looking.

But Alec is always looking.

There are memories in the footwell and on the dashboard and in the usually-unoccupied passenger seat of his rental car. Memories that Alec often revisits on other long and inconsequential journeys as a way to pass the time as the odometer climbs.

Magnus is always the main feature of those memories.

It’s 1978 and Alec is a junior in college and Magnus is stumbling into a lecture hall half-an-hour late with a thermos in his hand. He’s wearing the shortest shorts Alec has ever seen, and he’s slumping into the seat next to Alec, whispering in Alec’s ear that he’s so hungover he’s about to revisit Thanksgiving dinner.

Then, it’s 1981 and Magnus is trading secrets with Isabelle at a drive-in movie theater while Alec buys the popcorn; and he’s flattering Maryse’s cooking while leant across the kitchen island, chin in his hand; and he’s slamming the door to his and Alec’s shared dorm, before sneaking back in an hour later, only to find Alec waiting up for him with an apology at the ready.

It’s 1982 and he’s laughing. He’s giving Alec the grand tour of his mother’s home, three streets down from the house where Alec’s parents live. I can’t believe it took moving away to college for us to meet , he says to Alec. We’ve lived this close for so long and we didn’t even know.

It’s 1984 and he’s curling his hand over the back of Alec’s neck, feeling out the knobs in Alec’s spine. His breath is warm against Alec’s jaw as he whispers gentle words into Alec’s ear.

It’s 1985 and he’s packing up his car for the very last time.

Yesterday is tangled in Magnus’ hair. Memories twist time out of alignment and rearrange it into something, and someone, that Alec does not recognise. Ahead of them, in the distance, on the horizon, is a year from a decade ago.

But here in the car, moonlight makes crosses on Magnus’ body. He is beautiful, still. Older, more refined, more improbable , but the composition of him is something that makes Alec’s heart ache as if he’s eighteen again and they’ve only just met.

The mole above his eyebrow is too familiar.

The lines around his eyes that appeared only after his mother passed. Alec remembers that summer well. He remembers listening to Magnus cry as he stood in Magnus’ kitchen doing the dishes that had been neglected for a week.

The map of his hands. A journey that Alec never took but longed for. Longed for and left to gather dust, like an atlas tucked away on the highest shelf of a bookcase.

In the dark, Magnus cracks open one eye, as if aware of being scrutinised. Alec turns his attention back to the road, but it is too late. He’s been caught.

“What is it?” Magnus asks, and his voice is smooth and rich and fills the car like music, even so shortly after waking. “Are we out of gas already?”

“No,” says Alec. “We’ll be fine for a while.”

“Hungry, then? We could stop for a late dinner. Or early breakfast. I’m not entirely sure what time it is, but I can always eat.”

Alec doesn’t reply, but he presses his mouth into a thin line.

Magnus’ eyes narrow. “What is it?”

“What’s what?”

Magnus scoffs. “You’ve always been many things, Alec, but able to lie to me is not one of them.” He laughs a little. “You think I’ve forgotten the look on your face when you’re trying not to spill your heart?”

No , Alec thinks. No, of course you haven’t. You should’ve, but you haven’t. You should’ve, because then at least one of us could say they moved on.

Alec exhales through his nose and flexes his fingers on the steering wheel. He glances in the rearview mirror, but there’s nothing behind them for miles. Much like pocket squares, perhaps that is a metaphor too.

“You never called,” he says, trying to sound casual.

Immediately, Magnus tenses. He shifts in his seat and sits up a little straighter, angling himself to look at Alec.

“I did,” he says, “At the start. You never answered.”

“You were in L.A. The time zones -”

“Oh, come on,” Magnus laughs. “You could’ve called me, you had my number. I know you did, because I wrote it down for you and left it on your bedside table, the day I moved.”

Alec squeezes his eyes closed; for a brief moment of respite, the road ahead of him vanishes. He thinks about letting go of the wheel at 90 miles per hour - not because he wants to, but because the thought of picking up the phone and hearing Magnus’ voice on the other end was always something that felt like driving his car into a ditch.

It’s the fear of impact. It’s the old hurt of being abandoned. It’s the longing to have run after Magnus’ car and asked to go with him that day in 1985. It’s all such a blur. Alec cannot sift between it all.

Magnus sighs heavily, knocking his head back against the seat. He looks at Alec from the corner of his eye and studies him at length.

“Maybe we should stop,” he says slowly. “The next town, find a diner. Get some food.”

“It’s fine. I’d prefer to keep driving,” Alec says, “If we keep stopping, you won’t make your meeting in time.”

Magnus frowns.

You clearly want to talk about it , Alec imagines him saying. Evidently, there are things that went unsaid.

Magnus says none of those things. His phone begins to ring and it shatters the strange tension in the front seat, splitting it like a sudden burst of lightning. Magnus twists around and reaches into the backseat, rummaging through his bag. He returns with a cellphone in his hand, pulling out the antenna and flipping it open.

He meets Alec’s eyes in the rearview mirror as he presses it to his ear.

“Magnus, speaking.”

Magnus listens to the voice on the other end of the line and taps his fingers on his knee. He makes a low noise of disapproval to whomever he’s speaking.

“Yes, yes, Raphael, I know,” he says. “My battery died and I didn’t have a chance to charge it - do you know how much payphones cost? Do I look like the sort of person who carries change in his pocket?” A brief pause. “Don’t answer that.”

Alec reaches for the dial on the radio, intending to turn the volume down, but Magnus’ free hand darts out and swats his fingers away.

He mouths the word no and returns to his phone call, but Alec’s hand remains outstretched.

There’s a tingle in his fingertips, a short spark of static that leapt from Magnus to him, and he stares down at his hand as if he’s been burned.

And it makes Alec realise, oh.

So you’re lonely -lonely.

“I’ll be in Baltimore in four days. I ran into an old friend who offered me a lift,” Magnus continues into his phone. He listens to the other speaker for a moment, glancing briefly at Alec’s hand and frowning. “You’re lucky I phoned you at all after all that car trouble. It was a courtesy only.”

The radio briefly breaks into static before the song resumes again. Magnus begins drumming his fingers on his leg, listening intently to his phone call. He uhms and ahs and says something about investors and capital and shareholders and begins talking numbers that are too big for Alec to really understand.

He opens up the glove box and pulls out an old diner napkin that Alec shoved in there three states ago, and scribbles down a note, but he has to tap his pen against his thigh for the ink to flow.

Alec curls his hand into a fist and rests it on his thigh, but the tingle doesn’t go away. He listens to Magnus talk - this whole other person that Alec doesn’t know, but who he was clearly always meant to be - but all he can think about is how long he has gone without being touched.

Do you know? he thinks. Do you know that the last person who touched me was you? Do you realise at all?

interlude

Driving is like running. The rhythm of the road; the splattering of rain against the windshield; the thrum of a heartbeat as the speedometer tips over ninety. Clear head. Relentless motion.

Forward, forward, forward, always and forever. Try to keep up. Don’t stop. Keep going. Don’t look back.

fifth chord

The diner is the first sign of civilisation that Alec has seen in over a hundred miles - and it is the same diner as it always is, an eminent glow on the 3AM horizon that creeps closer and closer like a spaceship hovering over the fields and drawing circles in the wheat and the barley.

It draws circles around Alec too, this singular moment in time. This microcosm that exists in the form of red leather seats and bright, fluorescent light, and the same empty parking lot and abandoned phonebooth on the highway verge. The waitress changes; sometimes, the group of teenagers in the booth at the back is an old couple embarking on a long trip south before they get too old to make the drive; and instead of a man at the bar watching the baseball, every few miles there will be an off-duty sheriff nursing a cup of diner coffee.

In the end, it’s all the same. A small pocket universe that Alec has crossed a thousand times in a thousand different rental cars.

Perhaps the people in the diner do not exist outside of it. Perhaps they are like pictures on a TV screen that cease to be once the lights have gone off and the static has fizzled and died.

Perhaps they exist only because Alec and Magnus are passing through, creating the world around them as they go. The Midwest has that quality about it.

“I can’t remember the last time I ate diner food,” Magnus says as Alec holds the door open for him and the bell jingles above their heads. “L.A. is on a health kick right now. Everything is kale. Try ordering a steak at any restaurant within a half-mile of downtown and they’ll have the bouncer throw you out on the sidewalk with your drink still in your hand.”

“Not sure they know what kale is out here,” Alec murmurs, leading the way to a booth by the window. He slides onto the bench as Magnus slumps down across from him, dramatically throwing his head back and closing his eyes. “You’re probably safe here.”

Magnus cracks open one eye to look at Alec. Beneath the table, his toes nudge against Alec’s, and then he shifts so that their knees knock together too. He throws a grin at Alec and expects a volley.

Alec tucks a smile into the corner of his mouth and rolls his eyes. He feels fragile, but he’s always been good at acting like he’s not. He picks up the menu and pretends like he doesn’t already know it like the back of his hand.

The waitress approaches their table with a megawatt smile that only brightens when Magnus turns his focus on her, casting her in spotlight. She laughs, tucks her hair behind her ear, and asks where they’re from. Magnus says Los Angeles. The waitress tells him she has a dream of becoming a singer and moving out West, seeing Hollywood and all that .

Alec has never been, but there was a summer back when Alec was in college, where Isabelle decided to follow a boy to California, swept up in the promise of love and adventure and new opportunities. Jace and Alec had protested, their mother had expressly forbid it, but Izzy had gone anyway, and it had ended in heartbreak six months later, as these things always do.

“Everybody in L.A. is from somewhere else,” Izzy had told him, when she came home for Christmas and Alec picked her up at the airport, her life packed up into suitcases in tow. “I don’t know how to explain it. You’re drawn there because of all the - you know, all the sparkle. The glamour, Alec. But really, people there are just running away from somewhere else. Somewhere they don’t really want to be.”

“You don’t want to be here?” Alec had asked.

Izzy shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s more … you don’t realise what was good in the place you left until you’re somewhere else. But then you’re too far to phone, or it costs too much to get a plane ticket, or you just don’t want to give people back home the satisfaction of knowing that they were right.”

Back in the diner, the waitress scribbles down their order on her notepad, pours Alec a coffee, and then tells Magnus she’ll be right back with his seltzer water.

Alec can’t help himself. “Seltzer water,” he murmurs. “And you say you don’t fit in in Los Angeles.”

Magnus laughs. “I didn’t say that .”

The diner coffee is cheap and watery; the burger Alec gets has no bacon, but too many gherkins soaked in brine. The fries are soggy, left bathing in grease all evening, but the waitress brings them an extra portion at no extra charge, because she mistakes Magnus’ friendly conversation for flirtation. Her number is tucked on a napkin beneath the plate.

Magnus rolls his eyes as he shows Alec, but he’s too good a person to crumple it up and toss it to the side. Instead, he slides the napkin into the pocket of his jacket, a keepsake. A souvenir of someone else’s dreams for the future. In that sense, it almost seems precious.

“What?” Magnus asks when he notices Alec staring. “What’s the matter?”

Alec turns his attention back to his food, pulling out a soggy gherkin from his burger and draping it across the edge of his plate. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. I was just thinking.”

“Thinking?”

Alec’s eyes dart to the pocket of Magnus’ jacket and then away again.

“Alec,” Magnus gently scolds. His smile becomes sympathetic. “Just ask me what you want to ask.”

“Are you gonna call her?”

Magnus shrugs. “Probably not. But who knows. Sometimes the people you meet by accident re-enter your life further down the line and become important. I don’t know where her story might take her.”

“What about your story?”

“My story?”

Alec nods, but says nothing.

Magnus leans forward across the table. “You know my story, Alec.”

A man lights a cigarette at the table two rows behind them; he draws smoke into his lungs and it escapes through his nose, a thin grey stream falling upwards, towards the tiled ceiling. Alec watches him tap the filter on the ashtray in the middle of his table and a clump of ash disintegrates from the lit end; it lands silently, like snow. Like dust on the highway.

Magnus follows Alec’s line of sight and turns in his seat, glancing over his shoulder at the man. When he looks back, he has one eyebrow raised expectantly.

The smell of cigarette smoke fills the diner - acrid, bitter, and faintly earthy. It takes Alec back to college, to sitting out on the back porch of Magnus’ mother’s house before Magnus sold it because he couldn’t bear to look at it any more. He can picture the pack of Morley's tucked beneath Magnus’ thigh. He can still remember the way the unlit cigarette bobbed between Magnus’ teeth as he told his secrets to both Alec and the dark.

“I quit, you know,” says Magnus, in the present. “They say it’s bad for you.”

“I always told you it was.”

Magnus smirks at him and leans forward again, his elbows resting on the table. He steals a limp fry from Alec’s plate and pops it into his mouth. “I listened, didn’t I?” He nods over his shoulder towards the cigarette-smoking man. “What do you think his story is?”

“Huh?”

“What do you think his story is? Why is he here, alone at a diner in the back-end of Wyoming, past midnight in the depths of November? Smoking a cigarette? He must have a story.”

Alec’s never really thought about it. He’s always imagined the inhabitants of the diner as a backdrop, not as characters in their own story.

He looks harder at the man now: he’s older than both Alec and Magnus, salt-and-pepper hair thinning at the back. Once handsome, perhaps, but the years have stretched out his face and made his jaw sag. He’s wearing an ill-fitting suit, his shirt rumpled and his tie missing, the top button of his collar undone. He takes a deep puff of his cigarette, looks at it, and then extinguishes the lit end, grinding it into the ashtray.

“I don’t know,” Alec says slowly, looking back at Magnus. “Some sort of business trip?”

Magnus’ mouth lifts at the corners, drawing Alec in. “Perhaps, but I don’t think so. You see how he’s fingertips aren’t yellow? He’s clearly not a smoker, but he’s stressed enough to do it now.” Magnus reaches across the table and taps his finger against Alec’s fourth knuckle on his left hand. “And he’s not wearing a wedding ring, although looks like he was until recently. You see the mark?”

Alec steals a glance at the man, and then shuffles forward on the bench, so that he might drop his voice low and conspiratorial.

“Divorced, then?” he proposes.

“Maybe,” Magnus grins, “Or cheating, and he’s about to go back home and face his wife and pretend like his fishing trip with the guys from the office didn’t turn up much success, so they’re going to try again next weekend. He’s probably never fished in his life.”

Alec laughs then, loud enough to draw some attention. The sound is foreign in his mouth and a flush surges up the back of his neck as he sinks lower in his seat, hunching his shoulders and biting down on his smile.

Magnus looks delighted; in his eyes, Alec sees the reflection of the fluorescent lights above their heads, laid out like stars.

“You just made all that up from looking at him?” Alec asks.

Magnus beams at him. He reaches out and touches Alec’s fourth knuckle again. “Why, of course,” he says, and then he nods his chin towards the sheriff sat alone at the bar, making smalltalk with the waitress. “Now, how about him?”

sixth chord

The sun rises over the endless Nebraskan fields in shards of light.

Alec adjusts the rearview mirror. He will remember this moment later in figments of pale winter blue, snow-hazed pink, and November sky through the passenger window as Magnus gazes out across the passing countryside: a blank canvas for a painter to fill with bodies.

The color changes depending on where Alec chooses to angle the reflection of the mirror. Slightly to the left, and Magnus’ hands are stained in a pale wavering indigo, a purple so rare that it is only ever seen in the fleeting hour between twilight and sunrise. Move the mirror to the right, and that colour becomes orange, then gold.

Magnus swipes his hand across the condensation forming on the inside of the window, smearing colour across the landscape, but the story he might paint is hidden from view. Alec knows the start and he knows the middle - the brushstrokes the ones Alec remembers, but it’s the details that differ now - and it’s the end of the story that is vague and undefined in sepia.

Alec thinks about cigarettes again. He wants to ask Magnus who it was that finally got him to quit. Or when exactly he started drinking seltzer water instead of shitty beer from Walmart, or decided that listening to the dial tone while waiting for Alec to pick up the phone was too much.

‘Let’s start the morning right with some ‘old but gold’ ,’ announces the radio. ‘ We’re going back twelve years to 1983 with this first track …’

Magnus makes a nose of protest in the passenger seat. The indigo has already faded from his hands, moving on to become something else, something more.

Faithfully by Journey begins to play. Alec recognises the song; in much the same way that a breath of fresh air on a cold winter morning can take him back to another place and another time, the first note paints a picture in his memories.

“This song played at Isabelle’s quincea ñ era,” he remarks. “D’you remember?”

“I remember,” Magnus says, tipping his head back against the seat and staring up at the roof of the car. He closes his eyes and basks in the light of the early morning sun. His smile grows gold. “That was the summer she dragged us all to see them in concert, wasn’t it? Jace had me make a tape for her, for the party. She played it on repeat all night.” Magnus pauses for a moment, letting his words sink in. “I also remember asking you to dance to this.”

Alec remembers that too. “Dad didn’t like that. He was pissed.”

”I’m not surprised. He tolerated me, at best. He was clearly jealous.”

Alec huffs on a laugh. “Jealous? How’s that, exactly?”

“Mhm, jealous,” Magnus reminisces. “Specifically of when I spun you around and dropped you on your ass in the grass and you laughed like I’d never heard you laugh before.”

Alec’s neck grows warm, a flush curling around his throat. He pinches at the skin between his thumb and forefinger where his hands both rest on the wheel.

“I was drunk,” he says, like an excuse. “I don’t remember much after that.”

That’s a lie. He was drunk, but he remembers being sprawled out across the grass and staring at the sky and laughing, until Magnus dropped down beside him, his hands planted either side of Alec’s head as he bent over him, and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. And he had laughed it off like it was nothing, pulling Alec back to his feet, but Alec spent the rest of the summer picking that feeling out of his teeth.

Magnus turns his head to gaze out the window again. The curve of his smile speaks of fondness, of a quieted sense of longing and looking back. He seems at peace.

“I was drunk too,” he says, after a beat, to the countryside.

And oh, Alec wants that. He covets that like he covets touch. To be able to look back and not feel all this … regret.

Isabelle’s fifteenth birthday was the first and only time they kissed. Magnus probably doesn’t even remember that night, not beyond the dancing, the beer, the spinning around and around in dizzying circles. There’s no way he would remember a kiss that wasn’t really a kiss.

Alec never once told him how he wanted to do it again.

That was the problem, in the end.

interlude

“You haven’t moved on?” says a man, once, in a bar. He’s tall and handsome, with curly blonde hair and large hands that Alec has imagined once or twice upon his chest, although it never makes his heart leap like it should.

His name is Andrew. He works in the building next door to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. They met at a coffee cart on the corner of the block, and this, now, is their third date.

Alec had thought it was going well.

“What?” says Alec, turning to look at Andrew, leant beside him at the bar. “What do you mean?”

“You haven’t moved on from whoever it is that you loved first,” says Andrew. He pulls his American Express from his wallet and passes it to the bartender to settle their tab, but they’ve only had one drink so far. “And you know, that’s okay. I get it. The first is always different, especially when it gets left unfinished. But I can’t see this working between us if you’re still in that place. You’re a good guy, Alec, but I deserve more than that.”

seventh chord

“Take the next left.”

Alec scowls at the road before turning to look at Magnus. He is bent over an atlas he found beneath the passenger seat - it’s not Alec’s and must’ve been left behind by whoever rented the car before him. The pages are dog-eared and coffee ring-stained, and Magnus’ finger is pressed against the thin line of the highway that divides Nebraska in two.

“What? Why? This is the quickest way.”

Magnus glances up, a look of mischief on his face. He grins at Alec.

“There’s something I want to see and we’ll be passing right by. Seems like a shame to miss it while we’re here.”

“What is it?”

Magnus’ tongue pokes out between his teeth as his smile broadens. He mimes locking his mouth with an invisible key, tucking it into his shirt pocket.

Alec huffs. “Magnus, we’re in Nebraska. All they have here is grass. And nothing. And more grass, and more nothing.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” Magnus folds the atlas up and sets it on his lap. He pats it with his hands. “What’s so wrong with a little spontaneity?”

“Uh, the fact that you have to be in Baltimore in three days? For an important meeting?” Alec says, gesturing with his flat palm at the road ahead. “You know I’m still on the clock, right? This is Bureau time you want to waste.”

“It’ll be an hour’s detour. We can afford it.”

“ Magnus .”

Magnus just grins at him. It’s the same grin that used to get Alec into so much trouble back in college; it leans against his doorframe with arms folded and a come-hither look in its eyes, and Alec has never been able to say no. Not to Magnus.

Magnus laughs. “Wow, they really did shove that stick right on up your ass at Quantico, didn’t they?”

Alec glares at him, but Magnus reaches out and pats Alec on the forearm, gently curling his fingers around Alec’s wrist. His touch, unfairly, is warm.

“Come on. The turning’s coming up,” he says. “Time to make a decision, Agent Lightwood. You don’t always have to play by the rules. Live a little.”

Alec rolls his eyes, but flicks the turn signal and merges into the outside lane, slowing as the turning approaches. Magnus beams at him and his laughter is buoyant, delighted as he claps Alec on the shoulder. His hand lingers, fingers pressing into Alec’s shirt, thumb against Alec’s pulse point.

Alec takes the turning.

He takes the turning and he wishes, only once, that Magnus might tell him exactly what those rules are. For a situation like this, he wonders, when you’re in the front seat of a car on an endless highway with a man you haven’t seen in years and who, once upon a time, you would’ve followed anywhere.

Although, in the end, not everywhere.

A sign on the roadside welcomes them to Alliance, Nebraska, but instead of houses and street lamps, it’s grass that stretches for miles in every flat direction, endless swathes of frostbitten green. The road, now, is dirt and dust, and in the distance, a single white building and a cluster of standing stones appear as a landmark on the horizon.

Alec slows the car, but as the stones come into focus, he realises they’re not stones at all.

“Are those … cars ?” Alec asks, squinting into the distance. He looks sharply at Magnus. “Magnus, what -?”

Magnus holds up the atlas, his finger pressed against a roadside attraction labelled Carhenge .

“Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Alec says.

“Stonehenge replicated entirely out of cars, you mean?”

“Yes. That .”

“Well, it’s not as exciting as the World’s Biggest Ball of Paint , sure,” Magnus grins. “But when in Rome, Alexander. When in Rome.”

Alec pulls off the road, passing by the visitor’s sign that reads: Carhenge and Car Art Reserve. Welcome! The parking lot, little more than a field worn thin by tire treads, is scarred by muddy trenches that have frozen solid in the night and not yet thawed, and the rental’s suspension works hard to navigate them.

Alec huffs as he pulls up the handbrake and cuts the engine, but Magnus is already twisting in his seat to reach for his coat. He shoots Alec a cavalier grin as he opens the car door and tumbles out into the cold, and the blast of icy-cold air hits Alec square in the face.

Alec grimaces, but in front of the car, Magnus knocks his knuckles against the hood and gestures for Alec to follow him. Alec grumbles and pats himself down for his keys-wallet-ID-gun , before grabbing his own coat and shoving open the driver’s door.

The only other vehicle in the parking lot is a campervan, shiny and white and sparkling in the winter sunlight, either a midlife crisis or an early retirement investment. An older couple - a man and a woman - are standing in front of it, peering over a large DSLR camera. He’s in socks and sandals and she has binoculars looped around her neck, and if the weather was any warmer, Alec is sure they would both be in cargo shorts too.

“What attracts people to places like this?” Alec mutters, stuffing his hands into his pockets and turning up the collar of his overcoat as he hurries after Magnus. He hunches his shoulders, but the wind feels like it’s gusting through him, with nothing to stop or hinder it across the plains. “Why would you drive all the way out here to see … this ?”

“It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey, Alexander,” Magnus teases, walking backwards so that he can face Alec. “Why do we do anything without purpose? Because it’s there, and because we can.”

Behind him, the large circle of cars stands out of the landscape, spray-painted grey to look even less like standing stones. Alec grits his teeth.

“It’s about those little moments that break up a long drive,” Magnus continues, nudging Alec’s arm. “Or making small and inconsequential memories that can be revisited whenever one needs something slightly absurd to fall back on. It’s something to do with another person, even if that person is insistent on being a grouch the entire time we’re here-”

“Alright, alright, I get it,” Alec grumbles. “Let’s just hurry up and look because it’s fucking freezing out here and I wanna get back in the car.”

Alec’s dress shoes sink straight into the mud as they traipse across the grass towards the circle of cars; the squelch-squelch-squelch of his feet is loud enough to be heard over the wind. Along the horizon, the sun is weeping yellow, low in the sky and sinking moment by moment towards sunset, and the shadows that stretch out lengthways from the stones-that-are-not-stones are long and warped.

Alec stops when his toes meet one such shadow and he looks up at the stack of cars towering over him. He tilts his head to the side, but it looks no better from an angle. Magnus steps away from him, meandering over towards an information sign.

“ ‘Carhenge is formed from vintage American automobiles, all covered with gray spray paint,’ ” he reads out. “‘ Built by Jim Reinders, it was dedicated at the June 1987 summer solstice in memory of his father. ’ Huh. How about that.”

“My dad would kill me,” Alec mutters.

“Oh, yes, mine too,” says Magnus. He bends down and squints at the smaller text on the sign. “‘ Carhenge consists of 39 automobiles arranged in a circle measuring about 96 feet in diameter.’ ”

“That seems excessive.”

“I think it’s strangely compelling, actually,” Magnus says. “There’s something about roadside Americana that has its own distinct charm. It’s a product of human eccentricities and I like that.”

“Oh yeah, and what are you seeing?” Alec says, gesturing with his hand. “Because all I see is a 15ft tall metal monstrosity.”

Magnus wanders back over to him, pressing up against Alec’s arm for the sake of warmth. He folds his arms across his chest, shoving his hands under his arms, and huffs out warm air that forms white clouds. He gazes up at the monolith above them.

“Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, Alexander,” he says. He frowns then, studying the twisted shapes of metal and fibreglass as if they’re some extraordinary work of art kept behind velvet ropes and a glass case and only allowed to be looked upon for a fleeting moment, and not an old car barely spared from rusting. “Michelangelo despised the roof of the Sistine Chapel, and yet it’s one of the most impressive feats of Renaissance art that still exists.”

“ Magnus ,” Alec presses.

“Mhm?”

Alec pauses. He studies Magnus’ face in profile: the line of his nose, the sharp cut of his jaw, the purse of his lips as he contemplates some deeper meaning that passes Alec by. High in his cheeks, the cold paints his skin red.

Alec thinks he understands a little, then. Nobody really comes to Alliance, Nebraska to see thirty-nine vintage cars spray painted grey and stacked together like some prehistoric monument from halfway across the world. There are other things worth looking at.

Alec shrinks down into the collar of his coat. “Michelangelo is overrated anyway,” he grumbles.

interlude

Here is the creation of a new memory: the orange-gold of a sunset, the cold metal of a rental car against the back of Alec’s thighs, and the warmth of a cheap coffee in his hands, steam rising and obscuring the face. The sky, shifting into navy, into darkness, into the pitting of stars as the temperature plummets and each breath becomes a plume of smoke rising heavenward.

Here, sat together on the hood of the car, Magnus touches him. Not an accidental brush of the fingers or a friendly hand on the arm while driving, but instead, Magnus tips his head to the side, letting his temple rest on Alec’s shoulder.

Here, Magnus’ whispered name crosses Alec’s lips. A question posed to the night, painful and tender and purple like a bruise (‘ what are you doing? ’), but Magnus doesn’t reply. He hums and turns his head and presses his nose to Alec’s coat.

Alec’s doesn’t dare move. Magnus’ hair tickles his jaw, and Alec wants to turn his head and press his nose there and breathe him in, but he doesn’t. Ten years ago, maybe. But not now.

So, he looks up, and he exhales as the last fragments of the sun shatter into a thousand tiny pieces. The night sky, in its infiniteness, mirrors the high plains of the Midwest: how endless, how deep, how black it all is, away from the city.

How less lonely it is with another body tucked against his shoulder. How much it hurts.

eighth chord

They find a cheap motel, afterwards, on the outskirts of the Alliance city limits. This time, there’s only one room left. One room with two twin beds made up in ugly floral sheets, and a TV without cable, and a minifridge, because that’s how it always is; how it’s meant to be; how it was, once, years ago.

Standing in the doorway of the room, Alec thinks back to their college dorm. He thinks about being eighteen and away from his parents’ home for the very first time - only one city over, but far enough, far enough to breathe - and Magnus crashing into that room, laden with boxes and a bright smile.

He thinks, aged eighteen, God, he’s the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen .

He thinks, aged thirty-something, that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.

Magnus, in the present, slumps down on the bed furthest from the door with a heavy sigh and immediately toes off his shoes and flings off his coat. His suitcase is beside him on the bed, but Alec’s bag - Alec’s bag is still clenched tightly in his fingers.

He doesn’t move from the doorway. He can still feel Magnus’ head against his shoulder, Magnus’ weight against his side, and he’s not sure he’s taken a proper breath since; but then Magnus looks up and catches his eye and tilts his head as if to say, what next, Alexander?

He offers Alec a smile which Alec can’t return.

Alec swallows thickly and nudges the door closed with his hip. He pads over to the other bed, his feet sinking into the plush carpet and leaving tracks, and he sets his bag down on the very end of the mattress, and -

What next, Alexander?

There was never a what next . That’s the problem; it’s always been the problem. Alec, afraid to put a name to the feelings in his chest and step outside his comfort zone, and Magnus, unwilling to push him. This is the point they always reached: the touches, the glances, the wondering. The waiting for someone to do something. Around and around again, until Magnus couldn’t do it anymore.

This is always the point. The moment, repeated, just like the highway. Just like the diner.

Magnus exhales and cards a hand through his hair, combing it back against his head. He looks away from Alec, eyes drifting across the room until they settle on the cheap plywood door that leads to the ensuite.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he announces, and then he’s up, grabbing a towel off the bed and disappearing into the bathroom.

The shutting of the bathroom door is too soft and too careful, and Alec sinks down onto the end of his bed and rests his head in his hands. He closes his eyes and focuses on the outline of his badge in his jacket pocket, digging into his chest. The weight of his service weapon on his hip. The scratchy linen of the bed, the stains on the ceiling, the fuzzy TV as it cycles back and forth through the few sparse channels, even though the remote is on the bedside table and out of Alec’s reach.

He tries not to listen to the sound of rushing water through the walls.

He goes to shower, after. When Magnus emerges from the bathroom with wet hair and a freshly-scrubbed face, there are no words exchanged as Alec passes him by.

The bathroom is small and full of steam, windowless and ventless and hot like a sauna and that’s definitely a fire hazard. Alec peels out of his suit and tugs the tie from his collar. His undershirt goes next, and then his belt, which hits the floor with a heavy clank. He stares at himself in the mirror but the reflection that stares back at him is blurred by condensation, and Alec’s finger is drawn to it, if only to leave a mark.

He wonders what Magnus would say if Alec told him of how he would write Magnus’ name in the steam on his mirror in the days after he left, standing in front of it to watch until it faded.

And it faded every time, until Alec stopped doing it.

He steps out of his pants and underwear, a puddle of creased suiting on the floor, and climbs into the shower, turning the dial up as hot as it goes. He stands beneath the spray until it scalds his skin pink, and then, once done, sits on the edge of the tub with a towel wrapped around his waist and finds himself craving a cigarette. He doesn’t smoke, not really. He just needs something to do with his hands.

When he leaves the bathroom, the TV is quiet and the light is off. A faint, electric glow escapes the bottom of the curtains, the same blue colour as the NO VACANCIES sign that overlooks the parking lot outside.

Magnus has his back to the bathroom door, his hands tucked beneath the pillow where he rests his head. He’s not asleep yet; Alec can tell from his breathing, not yet slowed. He will be able to count every long second that Alec spends staring at him, watching the rise and fall of his body beneath the covers, and he will be able to hear the moment Alec sighs and turns and leaves, padding across the room to his own empty bed.

Alec has lost count of the number of times he’s rolled over in the dark of a shuttered room that smells of mothballs and stale cigarette smoke, and reached for something that’s never been there. That hasn’t been there for years.

His mattress dips in the middle with the weight of one body. The pillow scratches at his cheek. He sets his service weapon on the bedside table, within easy reach, but hides his badge within the pocket of his jacket, out of sight but not quite out of mind. This is how it always is.

He listens to the rustle of blankets from the other bed and wonders, briefly, if Magnus has turned to look at him in the dark. He wonders what Magnus’ expression might be, and if Magnus stares at him now with the same sort of regret that Alec fails to hide.

He is still in love with Magnus. He never stopped being in love with Magnus. This, too, is still the same.

interlude

In a wealth of human experience, the worst, by far, is what if .

ninth chord

Magnus taps his fingers against the car door, beating out an inconsistent rhythm. Alec knows it’s not a love song, but it could be something similar - a song about lost chances or maybe second chances. Sometimes, it’s difficult to distinguish between the two.

‘ THE PEOPLE OF IOWA WELCOME YOU ,’ reads a passing road sign, and it catches Magnus’ attention for a moment long enough to falter his rhythm. ‘ FIELDS OF OPPORTUNITIES. ’

There is little else to distinguish the crossing of the state line: the fields still stretch in endless directions, swathed in a fog the colour of glass. They set off late from the motel this morning because Magnus overslept and then insisted on breakfast, and refused to ask for the cheque until he had seen Alec consume something other than filter coffee.

He had offered to drive too, but Alec remembers what his driving is like: one arm propped on the wheel and the other fiddling with the radio, eyes barely on the road because, to Magnus, highways are straight lines from point A to point B and he has no time for speed traps or taking corners slowly or braking .

Alec, meanwhile, always has his hands at ten and two.

“Alexander, can I ask you something?”

Alec reaches for the dial of the radio and turns it down; this time, Magnus doesn’t try to stop him.

“I’m not stopping at another Carhenge,” Alec says. “Once is enough.”

Magnus rolls his eyes and continues tapping his finger against the car door.

“No,” he says, “No, I’ve seen my fill, I think.”

“But?”

Magnus smiles a little. “What makes you think there’s a but?”

“Because you haven’t said a word since I told you there’s no way in Hell you’re driving,” Alec chuckles. “And you’ve been thinking about something. I can tell. You do this thing with your hand -” He mimics the rubbing of his thumb and forefinger together, and then the touching of his ear. “And then you touch your ear. You used to have that piercing, remember? You’d always fiddle with it when something was on your mind.”

Magnus tugs gently at his earlobe. “I didn’t think I was so easy to read.”

“You’re not,” Alec smiles, “I’ve just known you too long. Or, uh. Knew you too long.”

Magnus hums at that. He begins spinning one of his fingers around his forefinger.

“Do you think I’ve changed? Since then?”

Alec shrugs. He’s never been that good of a liar, not in front of Magnus. And Magnus knows that; he told Alec as much, two days ago “A bit. It would be weird if you hadn’t.”

“Hm,” Magnus considers. “You’ve changed, you know. And it’s like the strangest sense of deja-vu, because I know I know you, and yet there are these little details, these little things that seem slightly off. That I don’t recognise and I don’t know where they came from.” Abruptly, he stops fiddling with his ring and curls his fingers into the palm of his hand. He smiles wryly to himself. “And why should I? You don’t stay the same person your whole life.”

“I don’t think I’ve changed,” Alec murmurs, chewing on his lip. “I’m pretty much the same person I was back then.”

Magnus shakes his head, his smile fading. “That’s not true. I can see it in your face. You laugh more. You roll your eyes at me. Tell me no. You didn’t used to do that and I would drag you into so much shit , Alec. God, I was such a bad influence on you back then.” He pauses then, and his expression sobers. “But then, sometimes, when I catch you looking at me now, you seem ...”

He trails off, searching for the words with a flick of his hand. Alec doesn’t know what he means.

“I seem like what?” he asks.

“You seem so sad .”

Alec laughs in disbelief. “Sad? What - Magnus - I’m not sad, what do I have to be sad about?”

Magnus runs his thumb over his lower lip in thought. “That’s what I wanted to ask. Last night, in that motel room, I wondered - well. I wanted to ask if you resented me, after I left.”

Alec’s hands clench on the wheel. “If I resented you?” he repeats carefully. “Magnus, I didn’t resent you. Where’s this come from? What - what sort of question is that?”

“A genuine one,” says Magnus. “Just humour me a little. I want to know.”

Alec’s heart thumps in his chest. He forces himself to stay focused on the road. “Why are you asking about this now?”

“Why not two days ago when I found you at that gas station, you mean?”

No , Alec thinks. Not then. Before. Ten years ago, maybe.

Why didn’t you ask me then?

“Yeah,” Alec lies. “Something like that.”

Magnus frowns. “Do you not want to talk about it?” he asks.

“Do you?”

Magnus hesitates. He presses his mouth into a flat line and with his clenched fists, he taps his knuckles against the glass of the passenger window. The beat is one-two three-four , like a pair of heartbeats.

“I want to make sure you know why I had to go,” he says, eventually. “You understand that, right?”

“Right,” says Alec, unconvincingly.

Magnus huffs and leans his head into his hand, rubbing at his temple. When he continues, his words are addressed to the horizon and the straight line that leads them there and disappears into a singular point in time and space.

“I know I hurt you, Alec,” he says. “And I think you’re still hurt, in a way, because you’re both the most obtuse person I’ve ever met and yet the only person who I was always able to - who I can always see . And ... can I be honest here?”

Alec nods, but says nothing.

“Right, well,” Magnus continues. “How do I explain this? It’s … it’s frustrating . Sometimes. The way you keep looking at me out the corner of your eye like it causes you suffering to do so but you can’t help yourself. The way you didn’t pick up any of my phone calls, back then. The way we just … the way we just ended. Snuffed out like a candle.”

“But you’re the one who left , Magnus,” Alec interjects. “You’re the one who - it wasn’t me. I didn’t decide that.”

“I didn’t want to be stuck there. I wanted a career, Alec, I wanted to see what else there is ,” Magnus says, gesturing with his free hand to the open road and empty Iowan landscape. He sounds weary. “And there is so much else, so much more than a nice house in a nice neighbourhood with a white-picket fence and a dog and two-point-five kids. I couldn’t wait around for you to - I didn’t want to live the life my mom lived. She never left that place, not once. The same four walls, the same dead-end Middle American town until the end of her days. And that ... that was too small for me.”

He talks about getting out the same way painters talk about muses, the same way a traveler searches for God in the landscape: something they had to see before they died. A holy calling.

He always has.

Perhaps Alec is the ghost lingering at those New England intersections that keeps Magnus far and away from home. Alec, too afraid to cross over the threshold of a highway, destined to haunt the same small town for the rest of his life.

Too afraid to wander so far from home that he might not be allowed back. Too afraid to say something that he can’t recant, even if it’s the truth.

Alec chews on the inside of his cheek. “Didn’t you ever ... didn’t you ever think about that sort of life? With the house, and the yard, and the dog?” he begins. “Just a little? Just a bit?”

Magnus shakes his head. “I didn’t want that,” he murmurs. “It’s not me. You know that. And after my mother passed and I sold the house, I - God, sometimes I would sit on the front porch and watch all the cars go by, passing through that town like it was nothing, like it wasn’t even a blip on their map, and I would think the world moves on without you . It doesn’t care if you don’t catch up. It doesn’t care if you’re - if you’re waiting for someone to say something they never want to say.”

He glances at Alec as he says it, and Alec realises then that he knows.

Magnus knows. Perhaps he’s known a while; perhaps he’s known since they were young that Alec loves him but refuses to say it. It is Alec’s worst kept secret, after all.

“I had to get out, Alec,” Magnus continues. “Sometimes I thought, if I stayed, I’d suffocate.”

I was suffocating too , Alec thinks. A gay man in the early 80s didn’t get to breathe . That’s just how it was.

Magnus, of course, already knows that. Alec would only be preaching to the choir if he said it aloud.

Instead, he mumbles, “I wanted to say it.”

“What was that?”

“I wanted to say it,” Alec repeats. He sinks his teeth into the inside of his cheek and wishes he could squeeze his eyes closed for just a moment - but there’s the road. There’s always the road. “I just - I couldn’t. Not then. But I wanted to say it. The thing you were waiting for. From me.”

Magnus’ mouth falls open a fraction, as if, somehow, he is surprised by such a revelation. Alec feels Magnus’ stare boring into the side of his face and he fights every muscle in his body not to turn and look back, because he knows exactly what he’ll find in Magnus’ eyes and he’s not sure he can stomach it.

He has looked at Alec this way before. Hell, a thousand times before. He’s trying to understand Alec - why here and why now, why are you finally saying something after all these years of pulling me along at the other end of a string, leaving me hoping and desperate and in love with someone who couldn’t ever say it back - but Alec is not that complicated.

He’s just scared. Scared of change. Scared of veering off the side of the highway that he has driven all his life, even though a part of him wants to know what it feels like. A part of him longs for the impact because, at least then, it will all be over.

And Magnus -

Magnus has always been so difficult to pin down, so close to chewing through his own foot to get away (and Alec had always hoped he’d never quite manage it, so that he might stay with Alec, forever, in some selfish vision of the future). It’s inside of him, that need to wander and see the world and meet new people and learn from them and be better and be something . The need to throw the roadmap out the window at high speed.

“Was that -” Alec begins, but clears his throat again. “Was that not enough? For you to stay, I mean?”

Magnus’ expression softens. His shoulders slump and his hand falls away from his temple and his mouth curves upwards at the corner and he says nothing. In his eyes, however, Alec finds an answer.

Sometimes, you cannot wait to be loved at someone else’s pace. Sometimes, you deserve more than that. I deserved more than that.

And maybe -

And maybe I’m still waiting.

interlude

Another postcard, this time purchased from a roadside gas station and then left crumpled in the glove box of a rental car:

I loved you then. I love you now. I still don’t know how to say it.

tenth chord

The day Magnus left was a Sunday. The beginning of August, 1985. The sun was bright that morning, harsh on the roof of Magnus’ new car as he piled boxes and suitcases into the trunk.

Alec had not understood what ending meant until he was standing on the sidewalk and watching Magnus pack up his life into ten square feet. He had not understood that some endings aren’t peaceful or satisfying or tie up all the loose threads of a story tangled by the writer; some endings are excoriations. They leave you raw and wounded.

The realisation, now, is that letting Magnus go a second time will be a worse experience than the first. This time, Alec already knows what it’s going to feel like.

In the rental car, the heater works hard to circulate warm air into the front seat. The windshield wipers battle against the thick blanket of fog that has rolled in across Lake Michigan and which obscures the signposts for Chicago from view. Frost covers rural Illinois in a comb of silver, not quite yet snow, but soon. Soon enough, the country will be white and glistening in the low sunlight as far as the eye can see.

Magnus has his coat draped over him like a blanket, his arms backwards through the sleeves and his head resting against the window. He hasn’t slept, but he’s been quiet for a while now, watching the world pass by with little commentary, save for when a song to which he knows the words plays on the radio.

On the side of the road, timber-frame houses disappear in and out of existence, reappearing in various states of disrepair. A barn, an old farmhouse, a disused gas station, a tiny church built on stilts that extends out over a frozen lake on a wooden walkway.

Magnus makes a noise of interest as they pass it by, turning in his seat to look back at it as it vanishes into the fog.

“Did you see that?” he asks. These are the first words he’s said to Alec in nearly a hundred miles. “That church.”

Alec glances in the rearview mirror but, as always, they are the only car on the road and the fog swallows up the passing seconds behind them. He’s not sure how long they’ve been on this road without a turning, nothing but an undeviated line for miles, and sooner or later, the end of the road is going to take them by surprise.

Alec takes his foot off the gas and presses down on the brake instead, and the car lurches to a near-stop. Magnus jolts forward in his seat, his seat belt cutting into his chest and stopping his momentum. He turns to stare at Alec, but Alec throws his arm over the back of his seat, knocks the gearstick into reverse, and spins the car into a three-point U-turn.

Magnus sits up in his seat, his coat slipping down from his shoulders and onto the floor.

“Baltimore not on the cards anymore?” Magnus asks, as Alec turns the car around and begins driving back the way they came. “Alec, what’s going on?”

Alec leans forward over the steering wheel, squinting out into the fog. The shape of the gas station reforms out of white cloud, and then, beside it, the shimmer of the frozen lake and the small church that sits atop it. A place for prayer amidst the smell of petrol fumes and gasoline and road dust.

A traveller’s chapel , Alec notes. It seems apt.

The church is small and squat and built of dark, gnarled wood, falling apart at the seams. From a distance, it seems almost black, but the need to pull off the road possesses Alec and he pulls into the parking lot of the gas station, before locking the handbrake.

Once parked, he turns to look at Magnus, both hands still clenched on the wheel. The radio crackles with white noise, interspersed with the tune of a Christmas song that Alec doesn’t recognise. Magnus reaches out and turns the volume down.

There’s never really been a need for words.

Alec unclips his seatbelt first. He doesn’t pat himself down for keys-wallet-ID-gun . He grabs his coat from the backseat and leaps out into the cold, and doesn’t look back when he hears the passenger door slam and Magnus follow after him, albeit at a distance.

What Alec finds is this: the wind is brittle and the walkway that leads out over the lake creaks and groans beneath Alec’s weight, but doesn’t make a noise for Magnus. On the highway behind them, a truck rumbles past, but the fog is so deep that Alec cannot see it, save for the glow of its headlights. There is a small placard nailed to the outside of the church that reads: Visit Your Roadside Chapel and a big red arrow points down at the doorway.

Alec reaches for the doorknob and gives it a twist. Behind him, he can feel Magnus watching him, arms folded across his chest to ward off the cold, in silence. He says nothing to Alec, no witty remark about the FBI’s predilection for breaking and entering, no tired smile, no weary remark about how he’s tired of waiting, which they both know means far more than it seems.

The door to the church is not locked and it opens with a fair shove, and out spills the smell of damp wood and dust and old smoke. Magnus coughs lightly, wafting his hand in front of his mouth, but Alec steps inside.

The church itself is small and cramped, barely wider than the span of Alec’s arms from wall to wall, and the cold sweeps through the gaps in the walls, carrying with it the earthy smell of burning. There are no church pews, but a padded piece of wood for kneeling in prayer sits beneath a floor-to-ceiling cross, and bible verses are scratched into the plywood walls in a messy hand. Empty beer cans and extinguished cigarettes litter the floor, and cobwebs are strung like garlands above Alec’s head, which he reaches up to swipe away.

A row of candles stand where the altar should be. Soot still clings to the wicks, as if freshly extinguished.

Alec steps forward and his feet crunch on dried leaves that have blown in through the door. He lifts his foot and looks down and finds a crumpled receipt stuck to the sole of his shoe, grey with running ink and dozens of footprints that have come before Alec’s. The date on the receipt is fifteen years ago. It was issued in Dallas, Texas.

This is a space of comings and goings. Of passing throughs. The afterimages of a thousand travellers linger here like memories and, carved into the cross above Alec’s head, he notices the words: what is more important to the traveller, the journey or the destination?

The silence sings, or maybe it hisses, like the wind rustling through the endless miles of wheatfields between here and where they’ve come from.

What is more important to the traveller, the fact that we got lost along the way, or that we made it back here, in the end, and met again?

Alec looks back over his shoulder, and Magnus is there, standing in the open doorway, waiting. His nose is red with the cold. The light behind him casts him in the pale yellow of a winter twilight. He is watching Alec with an expression that Alec doesn’t understand.

“Magnus?” Alec asks, low and gentle.

“Yes?” he replies.

“Do you have a lighter?”

Magnus’ mouth tips upwards at the corner. “I said I quit, remember?” he says, but he reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a shiny, silver Zippo lighter, engraved with his initials. He places it in Alec’s outstretched hand, but his touch lingers against Alec’s wrist and the staccato of his pulse. “Here.”

Alec turns to the candles and flicks his thumb along the lighter. The flame is summoned into existence, its light dancing across Alec’s thumbnail as he lights the wick of the tallest candle.

He lights it for his mother, and then, once it catches, he lights another for Izzy, and then one for Jace and Max and his father. He recites the Catholic rotes his grandmother taught him beneath his breath, in Spanish, a whisper. Then, a prayer for Magnus, and for his mother too, wherever she might be.

And lastly, a prayer for himself, aged eighteen and away from home for the very first time. Aged twenty-three and in his graduation gown, Magus’ mortarboard on his head and Magnus’ arm around his shoulders, laughing in his ear. Aged ten years younger than he is now and standing on the sidewalk of his parents’ house, watching Magnus’ car pull away.

Magnus joins him at his side, his head bowed and his hands clasped in front of him. An inch of space exists between their shoulders, but, even now, Alec can feel the warmth of him through his coat.

Alec has missed this. He will miss it again, he’s all too sure, but maybe it’s okay to have it only for a moment.

Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it has to be.

“Alexander?”

“Yeah?”

“I meant what I said yesterday,” Magnus says quietly. He tugs on the sleeve of Alec’s coat and turns Alec to face him. His eyes are bright - not wet, but earnest - and drop to Alec’s lips before returning upwards. “That it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. You know that, right?”

He squeezes Alec’s arm. He wants Alec to understand something that still remains out-of-focus.

“What do you mean?” Alec asks.

“I am sorry for the way we left things,” Magnus says, “And I’m sorry that it hurt more than I realised it would. I really am. But it doesn’t have to end the same way this time. You can change the way you remember it. Make it mean something, something fond that you can look back on. You can make it good, if you want.”

Alec frowns. They’re a day away from Baltimore. In forty-eight hours, Alec will be back home in D.C., and in a week, Magnus will return to L.A. and the life he has built there, where he drinks seltzer water and no longer smokes and talks a mile-a-minute on an expensive cell phone about investments and equity and big-ticket numbers, and is loved by Alec at a distance.

It’s not like the highway extends into the sea. All roads eventually end, and this one must too, amounting to nothing more than four days in a nondescript rental car with Christmas music playing on the radio, but -

This doesn’t have to end the same way this time.

“Doesn’t it?” Alec asks, unable to help himself.

Magnus shakes his head and lets go of Alec’s arm. He takes a step forward and lifts the last unlit candle, holding its wick to the flame of another until it catches.

“No,” he says. “No, it doesn’t.”

interlude

Nothing that happens on the road is real. This is what Alec tells himself between diners and gas stations and faded markings down the centre of the highway.

I can love you now, while the engine’s still running. And you might love me too, while the engine’s still running. Sometimes I think that you do, when I look at you from the corner of my eye.

In the distance, Chicago rises from the fog, lit up in one thousand pin-pricks of light. It makes the world glow in the colour of cities and concrete and it feels a bit like a dream after so long passing through nowheres.

If we drive far enough, we might make it back to the place we once called ‘now’. If we drive fast enough, maybe that day will end differently and you’ll stay.

The speedometer tips over ninety and the countryside blurs into rooftops and stop lights and traffic backed up across the bridge that spans the highway. Streetlights line the side of the road and pass across the rental car in flashes of strobe and yellow.

“I don’t want you to stay there,” says Magnus, in one such patch of light. Sometimes, it’s like he can read Alec’s mind. “I want you to write a different ending, Alec. I want you to want it.”

eleventh chord

Chicago is behind them as they cross into Indiana with the stroke of midnight, a dull orange glow that seems too bright for the eyes after so many repeated nights driving in near blackness.

Their destination is getting closer, and Alec eyes each passing road sign that counts down the miles to Cleveland, then Pittsburgh, then Baltimore, then home with a heaviness in his heart that beats a slow rhythm.

It’s the rhythm that he knows - that lonely beat that matches the roll of the odometer on the dashboard - and yet it seems too fast now, accelerating towards an end point at which he has a choice to make.

He tries to match it, that rhythm. He tries to strike a chord with the bouncing of his leg in the footwell, with the tapping of his fingers on the steering wheel. He glances across at the passenger seat to see if Magnus is looking back at him, but he’s not - he’s staring ahead through the windshield and holding himself unnaturally still.

Alec wants to slow down below the speed limit; put his foot on the brake; stall the car. Drive it off the side of the road and into a ditch and then shrug and say, guess we’re stranded for another night ‘til the tow-truck can get here . And maybe that’s dishonest - or too honest, because the thought of spending the night in the car together, crowded around the heater as if it’s a bonfire keeping them warm, does something strange to Alec’s insides - but the relentless momentum if the car is no longer a balm on his nerves.

He can’t help but think about what lies in wait at the end of the road. Another goodbye. A polite smile and a parting hug and some kind and empty and wistful words; longing and loneliness and more of the same heartbreak, made worse by the fact he knows, now, what they could’ve had, if things had ended differently the first time.

Alec doesn’t want to leave this car; he wants to keep Magnus here forever, the two of them trapped in this rocking motion of roads and highways, where Magnus tells him over and over again that it doesn’t have to end and Alec believes him.

Alec wants to keep driving off the very edge of the continent and into the Atlantic Ocean. He wants to arrive in Baltimore and say, take me with you . He thinks about grabbing Magnus’ hand when he steps out of the car, and saying, don’t leave me behind this time. Take me with you. Take me somewhere that isn’t here. I’ve had enough of coming and going back to the same place as before. You’re right about that. You’ve always been right about me.

Magnus shifts in the passenger seat, clearing his throat.

“We should probably find a motel. It’s getting late,” he says. He doesn’t need to say it, because Alec is already thinking it: tonight is the last night. Tomorrow, Alec will be in his own bed, and Magnus, in some fancy hotel room paid for on a corporate credit card. “We both need a good night’s sleep. For tomorrow.”

“Right,” Alec echoes. He clenches his jaw. “Tomorrow.”

The air in the car is thick and heavy, so Alec reaches for the radio to try and suffocate his own thoughts. He skips through the stations until he finds one that sticks, and then turns up the volume. The voice of a man quoting late-night scripture fills the front seat:

‘So, flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord for a pure heart.’

Magnus exhales through his nose and runs his palms up and down his legs, digging his fingers into his thighs. His eyes catch Alec’s in the rearview mirror.

A decision, then. Alec has seen this look before.

“I really think we need to find a motel,” Magnus says again, more forcibly this time. “Let’s check the map. Can you pull over?”

“Huh?” says Alec, “Just switch the light on, it’s okay. I don’t mind. Pick somewhere that sounds good and tell me which exit I need to take.”

“Alec,” Magnus insists. “Pull over.”

Alec looks at him, confused. “What? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Really. I just need you to stop driving, please.”

“Okay, uh. Okay. Hang on, I’ll just -” The turn signal flashes and Alec steers the car off the side of the highway and onto the grassy verge. The tires sink into the mud and the car jostles them from side to side until, finally, coming to a stand still.

Magnus unclips his seatbelt and reaches for the glove box, retrieving the atlas from inside. He spreads it out on the dashboard between them, running his fingers down the page until he finds where they are, and then flicks on the cabin light above their heads.

The car becomes an island, then. The sky is clear and the road behind them is almost empty, and the world outside is completely black and they are floating in an endless void. And all that exists is Magnus leaning across the gearstick and grabbing Alec’s hand and pressing his fingertip to a point on the map and saying, “there.”

“There?” asks Alec, looking up at Magnus’ face. His voice is a whisper now. “What’s there? A motel?”

“A motel,” Magnus agrees, shifting forward on his seat, closer to Alec. His grip on Alec’s wrist is vice-tight, his rings cold against Alec’s skin. “What do you think?”

Alec pauses. There is an unasked question here, hidden in the silence between words. It’s a proposition and Alec wants to get the answer right.

But Alec also wants to kiss him. He can smell Magnus’ cologne, the aftershave patted onto the slope of his jaw in the bathroom of a cheap motel that morning. He can feel the heat of him. He can feel the flutter of Magnus’ pulse where Magnus’ thumb is pressed insistently against his skin.

He wants to kiss him and muster the courage he could never find before, and he wants to say fuck it . Give him that moment of undoing, or redoing, or whatever the fuck it is that he wants the last few years to have meant.

He’s pretty sure that’s what Magnus wants too.

“Alexander?”

Kiss me now while the engine’s still running.

“I don’t want this to end.”

“I know you don’t,” says Magnus. “I don’t either.”

“No. No, Magnus, you don’t know. You don’t - you can’t ,” Alec insists. “You can’t know because I never said anything. That’s the whole point. I never said anything, even though we both knew how I felt. We both knew. And despite all that, we still didn’t do anything about it because in the end, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. I loved you and I think you loved me and it didn’t matter.”

He and Magnus exist in a not-time. This place isn’t real; Alec can speak to these feelings and not be beholden to them in the morning, or at the end of the road, or wherever it is that they’re heading. Not if he doesn’t want to.

But he does want. He wants more than one man with a body can bear.

I loved you then but it didn’t matter. But it matters now because I can say it. Because we have circled around and found each other again after all this time and that -

That has to mean something.

Magnus’ hand relaxes on Alec’s wrist; his fingertips brush across the back of Alec’s knuckles, across the roadmap between them on the console. It is tentative and questioning and even now, still says, you can drive away if you need to.

Alec inhales deeply. He shakes his head.

He meets Magnus’ eyes on purpose.

“I was afraid that the next time you walked into my life, I wouldn’t know how we fit together,” he whispers. “I was worried that something inside of me, inside of you, would’ve changed, because things always change after this long, but - it hasn’t.”

Beneath Alec’s palm, Washington lies hidden. In the dark, the paper rustles.

“You haven’t, Magnus. Not when it comes to me.”

interlude

The radio sings, ‘It will never be the same, baby.

We will always be the same, baby.’

twelfth chord

Alec’s hand shakes as he fumbles with the key in the motel room door.

Magnus stands a half step behind him, his breath forming white clouds that float and dissipate over Alec’s shoulder. The smell of his aftershave carries. There’s a deliberate space left between their bodies, greater than the distance that has existed between them in the car for the last four days.

It’s the furthest they’ve been apart since Alec approached that phone booth back in Idaho.

“Fuck,” Alec mutters, as the key sticks in the lock and refuses to turn. His palm is sweaty and anticipation licks up the side of his throat where the collar of his shirt is too tight. “Sorry, just give me a sec-”

Magnus leans over his shoulder and takes the key from him, sliding it into the lock with ease. The door clicks, and then swings open.

This motel room is just like all the rest: two beds, one TV, the oddly stained carpet. Thin plywood walls. A single light that plunges the whole room into that low-res yellow of cheap nighttime lodgings.

Alec places both their bags on one of the beds, exhales, and then, when he turns back, Magnus is standing against the closed door. His head is tilted back, his chin aloft, and his arms are folded across his chest, the sleeves of his coat tight around his arms.

His eyes are dark and molten. Where Alec is an unlit cigarette, he is the match.

And that’s enough. All things end and all endings are terrible in their own way, and Alec doesn’t know why he shouldn’t lean into the inevitable if it’s something he can’t avoid.

He abandons the bags and steps towards Magnus, grabs him by the lapels of his overcoat, and kisses him.

Immediately, Magnus opens his mouth to Alec; the sound he makes into the kiss has the hairs on the back of Alec’s neck standing on end. They stagger back against the door with a thud , and Magnus grabs at Alec’s coat, shoving it from his shoulders, then pulling Alec’s shirt out of his belt, his hands slipping beneath Alec’s undershirt so that he can feel skin.

Something rattles around inside of Alec and maybe it’s his heart come loose at last. He kisses Magnus ever deeper for it; his chest aches; his heart aches. He should’ve kissed Magnus sooner, and yet it feels like this is the only moment in time and space where it’s meant to happen: some dingy motel in rural America where it’s just the two of them and Alec has made a choice where he refuses to let this separation be the same as the last.

They’ve never needed to speak. The span of time hasn’t changed the connection between them; Alec could be his twenty-three year old self; he could be his eighteen year old self; his self from five days ago, picking up the keys to a rental car in the backwoods of Oregon state - he would still be in love with Magnus, whether or not he has said it out loud.

Alec cups the sides of Magnus’ jaw and tilts his head back, deepening the kiss. Magnus’ tongue presses into his mouth, his hand flat against the small of Alec’s back, his fingers pressed against Alec’s spine. He pulls Alec closer until their bodies are flush.

And oh, it’s so easy for Alec to lose himself to the push and pull of it: the lick of Magnus’ tongue, the pliance of his mouth. His hands are so warm as they settle on the slope of Alec’s waist.

Alec feels like he’s standing in the middle of a highway, staring down the headlights of an oncoming truck, willing it to move first or be moved . His heart is pounding loudly in his chest. The light is so bright that he is blind to everything else.

Is this driving off the edge of the road or is this the impact?

The kiss leads to the bed. The bed leads to shucked clothes and kicked-off shoes and Alec tossing his badge and service weapon blindly onto the bedside table as Magnus kisses down his throat and the blood rushes to Alec’s head.

Magnus pins him back against the starchy motel pillows, one hand splayed on Alec’s chest - stay still, don’t move - while his other hand cups Alec’s hip and his thumb slips into the band of Alec’s underwear.

No. It is the destination.

Magnus runs his hands down the inside of Alec’s legs, his palms smoothing across Alec’s thighs. His eyes meet Alec’s as he presses his mouth against Alec’s knee.

Alec’s eyes fall closed.

He wants to say something about endings, to gasp, to whisper it. He wants to ask what happens next: if he is to leave Magnus on the side of the road in Baltimore tomorrow and never hear from him again; or if Magnus will fly back to Los Angeles in a week’s time and only look back on this moment as one of those pocket memories of his, something fond to warm him on colder nights.

Alec doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want to be an uncalled telephone number in Magnus’ diary again; he doesn’t want to stop here , with Magnus’ mouth slowly kissing up his inner thigh. He cannot let Magnus slip through his fingers a second time, so he reaches out and pulls Magnus towards him, up the length of his body, crushing his mouth against Magnus’ and swallowing Magnus’ untethered gasp. He kisses Magnus’ jaw, and then the side of Magnus’ neck, and then he presses his nose to Magnus’ shoulder and breathes him in.

He says nothing, but he has to screw tight his eyes to stop himself from doing something stupid, like letting a stray tear roll down his cheek and wet the pillow. Magnus wraps his arms around him and holds him tight, words whispered in Alec’s ear that he’s been waiting ten years to hear and which Magnus thinks must all be said in one night.

Alec is too old for messes of the heart like this, but maybe that’s the problem: how long they’ve delayed this particular end, to the point that neither of them know how to exist in a world after .

interlude

The final postcard never sent:

“The boy in the yellow shirt walks like there is all the room in the world. I am standing on the edge of what is an ending world.” 2

I read this in a book that Catarina leant me. I think it’s about us, or at least it’s about me, the first time I laid eyes on you.

Come to L.A.

thirteenth chord

Alec wakes up alone in the bed, his arm outstretched across the mattress, his hand palm-up to the ceiling. There is an ache in his legs, bruises scattered across his thighs like the shattered glass of a windshield spread across the road. The smell of sex hangs heavy both in the air and on his skin where sweat has dried and not been scrubbed away, and when he tries to speak, his voice is hoarse and raspy.

Beside him on the bed, the pillow is cooling - but not yet cold.

Disappointment curls in Alec’s gut, but in his head - well, that’s empty, devoid of the constant noise that has existed there for the past few days, if not years. He hasn’t noticed until now that it mimics the sound of a car engine, a forever rumble.

There is simplicity to the silence now. The carpet is cold when Alec’s feet hit the floor, a draught slicing beneath the bed. Magnus’ suitcase is gone from the other bed; his clothes gathered from the floor. The smell of his cologne has faded, replaced by the musty smell of floral bedsheets and mothballs and wallpaper that has absorbed the smoke of a hundred cigarettes.

The only evidence of Magnus being here is his absence.

His absence - and the way Alec’s mouth tingles when he brings his fingers up to touch his lower lip.

Alec brushes his teeth to the sound of the faucet running, water gushing down the drain. He splashes his face and dresses in the crumpled clothes from yesterday that still smell like the front seat of the rental car and shakes carpet fibres out of his overcoat where it still lies by the door.

Keys. Wallet. ID. Gun. He moves through the motions on autopilot, patting his pockets and then his chest as he mentally tallies up the parts of himself worth collecting - but then stops. Standing in the middle of the motel room with his bag in his hand, he turns to look at the unmade bed, the sheets kicked into a pile, a backdrop to a journey he has taken so many times before.

The difference, now, is in the details. It feels significant. It’s worth remembering.

Crossing to the window, he throws open the curtains and sunlight streams into the room, flooding every dark corner. Alec squints against the light, raising his hand to his face to shield his eyes. A faint sheen of frost forms fractals on the outside of the glass and, beyond that, the roof of the rental car, the prelude to the first snow of winter.

Leant against the side of the car is Magnus.

Alec inhales deeply, his breath clouding upon the window. The cold draws down into his lungs - a sharp ache inside of him that he holds for a count - and then he exhales. Deflates. Sinks back into a rhythm that is both familiar and somehow different to the one he has known for so long, as if the world now beats in imperfect time.

Magnus is propped against the hood of the car with his eyes closed and his head tipped back to catch the sun, and he doesn’t stir when Alec shuts the motel room door behind him and the gravel of the parking lot crunches beneath his shoes. On the side of Magnus’ neck, there is a hickey bitten darkly into his skin. It’s the colour of rare indigo.

Alec doesn’t feel the need to avert his gaze now.

“Have you ever been on a roadtrip?” Magnus asks, opening his eyes when he feels Alec’s shadow cross his body.

Alec frowns at him as he bends down to grab Magnus’ suitcase, before tossing both their bags into the backseat. “Isn’t this a roadtrip?”

Magnus waves his hand aimlessly. “No, this is serendipity, Alexander. I’m talking about a comprehensive tour of all the worst diner coffee in the continental United States. Hiking in the Grand Canyon. Exploring the redwood forests of the Pacific Northwest.” He looks at Alec and smiles a coy smile, pushing away from the car. “You know, in Indiana, they have the World’s Largest Ball of Paint? I’d like to see that sometime. All the best roadside Americana that the country has to offer.”

Alec rounds the car to the driver’s door, opens it, but doesn’t get in. He leans his arms on the roof of the car and Magnus, on the other side, turns to face him.

“But Baltimore,” says Alec.

Magnus’ smile softens. “But Baltimore,” he agrees, across the span of the roof. He glances at his watch. “Providing we don’t hit gridlock outside the city, I should be right on time for my meeting and Raphael won’t have the pleasure of removing my head from my shoulders. You always were excellent at keeping me punctual.”

Alec smiles quietly, ducking his head. “Yeah, well, one of us had to live in the real world.”

He climbs into the car and Magnus follows, folding himself into the passenger seat and draping his coat across his lap. He buckles himself in and then leans back to look at Alec as Alec slots the key into the ignition.

“What?” Alec asks. He reaches up to touch his neck, in the same place where the bruise forms on Magnus’ throat, but can’t find any tenderness. “Is there something on my face?”

“No,” Magnus says gently. “No, not at all. I was just thinking that sometimes the real world is rather overrated. In my experience, the longer one can put off returning to it, the better.”

Alec turns the key and the car splutters into life. The heater blows warm air into the front seat, condensing upon the windshield, and when Alec reaches out to direct the flow of air downwards, Magnus covers Alec’s hand with his.

It’s a reflection of the night before, but without the urgency.

Magnus curls his fingers around Alec’s hand and brushes his thumb over Alec’s knuckles. Then, he brings Alec’s hand up to his mouth and presses his lips to Alec’s fingers, his eyes falling closed and his eyelashes casting feathered shadows on his face.

Alec holds his breath. He waits for Magnus to say something, to say so let’s not go back to the real world yet because I’m happy here , but he doesn’t.

Happy is too vague a concept. Not that Alec isn’t happy here, in this particular not-real moment, but it’s a feeling that belongs to strange, liminal motels and repeated diners. It is hard to grasp, and harder still to fathom how it might slip into the spaces occupied by a life back in the city at the end of the road.

Magnus sets Alec’s hand down on the gearstick between them, and settles back into his seat, kicking his feet up on the dashboard. He tips his seat back and rests his head against the window as Alec puts the car into reverse.

The road is quiet but not deserted. Alec knows that they will meet traffic before too long, but, for a moment, he imagines the highway stretching beyond the horizon and continuing into the sky, winter-blue and endlessly deep, leading above and beyond the curve of the Earth.

There’s a very thin dusting of snow on the hard shoulder, and the sun, shockingly bright, refracts off it with a white glare. It’s the sort of daylight that possesses Alec, that fills him up and makes him feel separate from his body.

If Alec rolled down the window, that daylight would spill in and flood the car, crisp and cold and foreign. But here in the warmth, he unspools a story in his half-awake mind: him and Magnus and the unending road. If they stop moving, they’ll die. If they stop driving, they’ll die. There was a Keanu Reeves movie about that recently , Alec thinks. It probably didn’t end well.

“Do you mind if I smoke?”

Alec glances sideways at Magnus. “What happened to quitting?”

“Oh, I did,” says Magnus. He produces an unopened pack of Morley’s from the folds of his coat and inspects it curiously. “But I got this from the motel reception this morning on a whim and it feels like a waste otherwise.”

Alec rolls his eyes. “Right,” he says, but he cracks open the driver’s window and the cold rushes in. The wind ruffles through his hair, funneled by the cuffs of his jacket up the length of his sleeves and into his coat. A shiver ripples down his spine and he grimaces.

Beside him, Magnus pulls a cigarette out of the pack with his teeth and cups his hand around his lighter as he lights it, before holding it out to Alec.

“I haven’t smoked in years,” Alec says, but he takes the cigarette anyway and taps the lit end against the ashtray on the console. “You can’t laugh.”

Magnus lights a second cigarette, the clink of his lighter sharp, like metal. He draws in a deep breath, pulling smoke down into his lungs, and then exhales. The grey plume rises towards the roof, only to be sucked suddenly out of the open window.

Magnus coughs, clearing his throat, and takes the cigarette from his mouth, only to pull a face at it.

“Tastes like what I imagine licking the floor of that motel would be like,” he says, before stubbing the cigarette out in the ashtray. He frowns at the packet in his hand, before throwing it into the glove box. “Let’s stop at the next gas station. I need something to wash that out of my mouth.”

“Okay,” says Alec, unable to stop himself from smiling. His cigarette warms his fingers. His stomach growls at the thought of cheap diner coffee and a greasy bacon burger for breakfast. He presses his foot down on the gas and shifts the engine up a gear.

A passing road sign reads: Baltimore, 405 km . About a five hour drive.

Alec will miss this rental car.

interlude

In the dark of a motel on the night before, Magnus’ eyes are almost black. Alec studies him from across the pillow, their noses nearly touching. Magnus’ hand, splayed on Alec’s ribs, draws gentle circles into Alec’s skin, while Alec’s ankle lies tangled with both of Magnus’ legs.

Magnus’ body is warm. It’s rhythm is familiar in the way that it matches Alec: how he moves, how he breathes, how the sound of his heartbeat disturbs the silence of the motel room.

If Magnus were to speak, he would say, ‘something is only beautiful because it does not last forever .’ But he does not speak, so Alec cannot say back, ‘ that’s not true. You’ve always been beautiful .’

Instead, he leans forward and he kisses Magnus and he earns a soft groan for his troubles as Magnus curves into him like the other side of a parenthesis, ‘til now unpaired.

Magnus’ hand slides upwards, cupping the back of Alec’s head. His thumb caresses the shell of Alec’s ear and the soft hair above it.

He pulls himself against Alec’s chest, his other hand trapped between them, pressed over Alec’s heart.

He kisses Alec back.

outro

The woman in the apartment above Alec’s has Christmas lights in her window: red and green flash in alternating patterns and Mariah Carey’s faint warble can be heard from the sidewalk as Alec gazes up at his building and allows himself to watch, if only for a moment.

His bag is heavy on his shoulder and his suit is stiff across his back; the thought of a shower is calling him home, but he wants to linger outside a little longer. The cold is sharp against his face and draws a red flush to his cheeks. His breath escapes him in white clouds, tumbling upwards. Baltimore lingers on his skin with the memory of a parting kiss.

He is, now, alone.

On his doorstep, his neighbour has left him an early Christmas card; she has done the same for the last few years, concerned for the young man who lives alone and never has his family visit once December comes around. As Alec unlocks his front door, he slips his finger beneath the seal of the envelope and tears it open, and the message inside is the same as it always is, wishing him and his loved ones well for the holidays.

He places the card on the sideboard by the door as he toes off his shoes, and wanders into his living room, dumping his bag on the floor as he goes.

The stillness in his apartment is strange: the air is musty, the windows unopened for nearly two weeks now, and while there’s no dust on his coffee table yet, the scattered paperwork and unwashed coffee mug are somehow disturbed by his presence.

There are dishes in his kitchen sink and his bed is still unmade; the space is exactly as he left it, and returning to it feels a little like disembarking an airplane after a long journey spent cramped in one mindset, and now having to reacclimatise to solid ground.

Alec is not sure why he expected his apartment to be changed. Even in some small way, like the rotating characters at a diner, or the different coloured carpet at each roadside motel, or the occupancy of his passenger seat by a man he thought he’d never see again, he hoped for something new. Something welcomed but unrecognised, symbolic of a new start or, perhaps, a second chance.

Oh. Maybe he’s the one a little changed, then.

It’s not about the destination , after all , he tells himself, reaching for the remote to turn the TV on for background noise. It’s about the journey.

Briefly, he wonders if this happens every time: if each successive back-and-forth across America wears him down just a little, like the treads on car tires, and it’s only now that he has changed enough to notice that he no longer fits into the routine once occupied with ease. In his footsteps, he brings the liminality of the road into his own apartment, the threshold moment between one state of being and the next.

And Alec is okay with that.

He locks his service weapon in the safe on his desk. Loosens his tie. Pulls a bent postcard from Carhenge, Nebraska, a receipt from a gas station just outside of Baltimore, and a nearly-full pack of Morley’s from his jacket pocket and sets them all on the coffee table, before throwing his coat over the back of the couch to take to the dry cleaners tomorrow.

His suit jacket goes next - two days old and creased around the elbows - and then his belt, a heavy thunk on the floor, before he pads into the bathroom and turns on the shower so that the water might have time to heat up before he gets in.

He strips down to his underwear and wanders back out into his living room, and it’s then that he notices the red flashing light on his answering machine: a voicemail.

He hits the play button - ‘ you have three unread messages ,’ says the disembodied voice - and he pours himself a glass of water as he listens first to Jace ramble on about not coming home for the holidays, and then to his mother discuss her plans to visit her solicitor next week.

Alec empties his glass and sets it in the sink to be washed later. He heads back to the bathroom, rolling the stiffness out of his shoulders, and the answering machine beeps to signify the final message.

‘ Alexander, it’s me. ’

Alec stops and turns to stare at his answering machine as if it might come alive in front of him.

‘ You’re probably not even back in D.C. yet, but - well ,’ says Magnus. ‘ I made it on time to the meeting, in case you’re interested. I’m never going to hear the end of it from Rafael, of course, and he’s never going to let me drive anywhere alone again, but it’s looking like we’ll be able to close a deal before Christmas. It sounds like I’m going to be back and forth between L.A. and Baltimore a lot next quarter.’

In the background, Alec can hear the sound of people, of a bustling street, of taxi cabs blasting their horns as Magnus tries to hail one down.

‘ But I all that aside, this couldn’t wait and, I suppose, serendipity can only get you so far.’

Alec reaches for the handset, poised above the redial button, but then something in Magnus’ tone changes. In his words, Alec can hear the sound of his smile.

‘ How far is the drive from Los Angeles to Indiana?’ Magnus asks. ‘No, wait, how far is the drive from Baltimore to Indiana? I’ve been thinking a little more about the World’s Biggest Ball of Paint. Perhaps you’d like to see it with me.’

The beat of Alec’s heart shifts in its rhythm once again. He holds his breath. He imagines himself taking a step over that imaginary threshold.

‘There are too many things I haven’t told you yet. ’

*****

“They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there - and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see.”

― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

#ninwrites #malecsanta20 #*fic20 #*gifts20

17 notes · View notes

eloquent--asshole · 4 years

Text

My Date With the President’s Son Volume 2

a/n: So I just want to say WOW y’all have been so patient waiting for this. I was not expecting to get so many messages for a part 2 and I really appreciate everyone who has read or sent an ask! And I’ve been sitting on it for the last couple weeks because I wanted it to be well.. in my eyes, perfect. I hope you all enjoy :)

If you’ve missed it you can read Volume 1 here

I don’t remember how long I stood in that hallway in the White House. I don’t remember when I let my tears start falling. I don’t remember when Niall came around the corner and enveloped me in a hug. I don’t even remember what I saw on the drive home when my vision was blurred with tears.

What I remembered is how Harry’s normally olive eyes turned black. How his voice shook me like I was experiencing an earthquake. I remember how tight my chest felt hearing how upset he was. And I remember my breath leaving my body as I heard his bedroom door slam shut.

What once was Niall’s hard and cold attitude toward me turned warm and gentle when he dropped me off. “We’ll figure it out, okay? He just needs some time to calm down. I’ll talk to him” I recall him whispering, giving me one last hug before I got out of his car.

***

Sunday came and went as I laid in my bed, not daring to check my phone for any potential messages from Thompson.

“Hey, Y/N.” I glanced over my blankets to see Derek, Summer’s boyfriend, standing in my doorway. I moved my gaze back to the wall, barely acknowledging his presence.

I hadn’t told Summer or Ashlie about what had happened. All I said was that whatever Harry and I had was over. I heard Derek sigh before coming to take a seat next to me on my bed.

“How are you?” his voice was tender, like it scared him thinking I may throw a punch. I like Derek. He’s always been kind. When he and Summer started dating in college, he fit right in with our tight-knit group. He always knew what to say to Ashlie or me when one of his fraternity brothers would piss us off and helped us pass our chemistry exams.

“I’m okay,” I sighed, pushing the blankets from my chest. “I’ve been better.”

“Summer and Ashlie are worried about you, you know.” He placed a hand on my shoulder and quirked a grin, “Said they haven’t seen you like this since Professor Neuman wouldn’t let you take that final you missed.”

I cracked a smile with him. Of course that’s what they would compare this to. “Okay, Professor Neuman knew how badly I needed to pass that class.” I looked down at my hands sitting on my lap, “Besides, she was a bitch.” I mumbled.

He let out a cackle, “Yeah, that she was, kid. That she was.” I noticed Derek fiddling with his thumbs, avoiding eye contact with me. “Look, Y/N, I’m by no means a love expert. But whatever happened, and whatever will happen, I know that you’re tough and you can handle it. You work for the fucking FBI, dude. You need to remember who you are.”

“Derek, that’s the problem right now. I don’t know who I am. I took a mission thinking it would be a breeze because my boss and team had my back. And it blew up in my face when I couldn’t keep my personal life separate.” I paused so I could sit up against my headboard. “Am I really the girl that can’t keep up with the guys because I’m emotional? Niall has been working with Harry since President Styles got into office. How can I – “ My eyebrows scrunched, and I shook my head, trying to find the words. “I don’t want my personal and work life to be so tangled.”

Derek kept his gaze steady on me while taking in the information I just unleashed. “Okay… So untangle it.” My eyes flicked to meet his.

“What?”

“You heard me. Untangle it. Separate those again and come back to it.” With that, he got up and headed for the door. “Also, do you want some pizza? One’s being delivered in about 5.” I could only nod in response, still taking in his advice.

***

Thompson called me later that Sunday night. Should I even answer? “Hello?” I greeted Mr. Thompson.

“Hey, kid.” His voice was eerily quiet. “Niall called me.” Oh, great. Niall told Thompson everything. “He told me Harry found out… About the mission.” I felt the confusion cover my face, my mouth went dry, and a clammy feeling started on my palms.

“Oh, Mr. Thompson I – ”

“So here’s what we’re going to do,” Thompson interrupted, “While I’m working on damage control this week, you’ll still be working. But I’m going to stick you on desk duty for the time being.” He grumbled. What? Not fired? “We’ll discuss your employment next week after we’re finished with damage control.” There it is.

When Thompson hung up, I lay my phone back on the nightstand. I had a few notifications from Ashlie and Summer asking if I wanted to talk, which I ignored. I should go for a run or to the gym. Something, Y/N. Something.

***

Walking into work was terrifying on Monday. Eyes followed me around the office as I went to my desk. I settled in and turned on my monitor.

“Miss. Y/L/N,” I looked up to see Thompson standing next to my desk.

“Mr. Thompson,” I welcomed him.

“Miss. Y/L/N, we’re moving you for the week.” What? “We’ll be sticking you in an office. Just for your peace of mind.” I nodded my head and picked up my bag to follow him down the hall.

We stepped into a compact room near the back of the office. The office filled with filing cabinets and papers askew from other workers. Thompson gave me a curt nod and excused himself to go back to work.

Sighing, I set my bag on the desk. The wavering lights were dim, almost dim enough to hurt my eyes. I turned on the monitor and logged into the database. Desk duty is probably the worst thing to do. All you do is research. Although, researching criminals sometimes got interesting.

I researched some of our most wanted suspects, finding where they were living, what they were doing, anything I could find. I came across a file that particularly caught my interest. Greg Patterson – Attempted assassination. Why haven’t I heard of this? Maybe it’s from a long time ago.

As I dug deeper into the file, I noticed that he had a connection to Harry, and to the government. Greg was a congressman’s son. Unfortunately for me the file didn’t have much in it except some basic information and a picture.

Last known location: New Orleans, Louisiana – December 2018.

Wanted for: Attempted assassination.

Reward: $1,000,000

I started looking at Harry’s social media connections, checking Facebook friends, Twitter followers, Instagram followers, everything.

Harry had posted nothing in the last week. Harry’s always on social media. I would know.

I scrolled through Harry’s Twitter followers, a username catching my eye. G_Pattsy. I clicked on the profile and was met with a picture of a single emerald eye; I looked back at the computer to compare the colors. Greg’s pictured shows that he has brown eyes, not green. I looked harder at the picture. Wait. That’s Harry’s eye.

I scrolled to the most recent update. It was a picture of the Washington Monument saying So good to be home😈.

Not good, Y/N, not good.

I printed the documents I had up and grabbed them, immediately going to Thompson’s office. The door was slightly cracked.

“Mr. Horan,” I heard Thompson’s gruff voice, “I don’t understand what you’re saying.” I peeked into the room to see Niall standing in front of Thompson’s desk and Thompson facing the windows overlooking the 695.

“Sir,” Niall’s voice shook, “I haven’t seen him in two days. I don’t know where he could be.”

Haven’t seen who? Harry?

“Then you better fucking find him. You better get the entire TEAM sweeping this city to track him down!” Thompson roared. His voice ringing through my ears, and I’m sure Niall’s.

“Yes, sir.” I scurried from the doorway and hid behind a file cabinet. I watched Niall exit Thompson’s office and rush out of the building. My thoughts whirled to Harry. Where is he? I should call him…

I waited a minute before deciding to interrupt Thompson with this information I just found on Greg Patterson.

“Come in,” Thompson demanded after my soft knock. His face lightened only a bit when I entered the room. “Miss. Y/L/N, what do you need?” His voice is dismissive. He’s not happy with you. What had been Thompson’s relaxed demeanor from our time on the mission was replaced by his original hard exterior.

“Mr. Thompson,” I started, walking over to the empty chairs and taking a seat, “I was doing some research and I think there may be a potential threat to the Presidential family.” Thompson’s brows drew together, taking on a frustrated expression.

“What are you talking about, Y/L/N.” Thompson’s voice was so low, I almost couldn’t hear it over the soft hum of the air conditioning.

“Does the name Greg Patterson sound familiar?” Thompson glanced at the papers in my hand and reached for them. He started flipping through the few papers I brought with me before meeting my gaze.

“What did you find?” He interrogated.

“I believe he’s back in D.C,” I informed him, thinking of the picture printed on the page with the screenshot of his Twitter update.

“Damn it.” Thompson reached for the phone on his desk and began dialing numbers. “You’re dismissed, Miss. Y/L/N.” I hesitated to get up from the chair. I found this information. I want to help. “Miss. Y/L/N,” Thompson stopped me, “Have you been in contact with Mr. Styles as of late?” I shook my head. He nodded and motioned for me to leave. “Get me Joe.” I heard him bark into the phone as I shut the door.

***

If it was two weeks ago, I’d be seeing Harry after work. This week, after work, I would go home and sulk in bed.

On Thursday night, I finally decided I should do something instead of sulking about how I failed. How I failed the director of the FBI because I couldn’t keep it together. How I failed Harry because of my lies. But most importantly, how I failed myself by putting my job above my feelings and letting it interfere with my personal life.

I got up and grabbed my leggings with the pistol holster in the back. I slipped the one I kept in my drawer into its holder. They trained us to carry a gun at all times. Whether it’s in my purse, my boot, or my waistband. I always had it. Harry never knew you had a gun on you.

I looked over to the hoodie laying over my chair. It’s Harry’s. I wonder if he wants his clothes back. A few times when he was over, he brought an extra shirt, hoodie, sweatpants, because “I think you’d look fantastic in my clothes.” Well, he wasn’t wrong. I grabbed the hoodie and tossed it to the pile of his things lying in the corner of my room.

I went to my closet and pulled out a long sleeve NASA t-shirt to slip over my head. Why didn’t I just become an astronaut?

“Hi, you!” Summer welcomed me happily when I walked into the kitchen area. She turned to face me, and I caught Ashlie’s eyes from her position on the couch. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay, I’m going to go for a run. I’ll be back,” I stated, opening the front door and shutting it behind me. I could just make out Summer and Ashlie having a conversation through the door, but I couldn’t tell what they were saying.

I let my feet carry me closer to the downtown area, my music blaring in my ears. I ran past an alley and saw a man limp against the brick wall. He was being cornered by 3 others in black jackets, hats, and I could just make out sunglasses covering their eyes from one that was slightly turned to the side. I came to a stop just past the alley and took my headphones out. I noticed I was stood next to an entry of a bar. I listened to see if I needed to intervene.

“Come on, Styles. We know you’ve got something on you. What is it?” The voice was muffled from facing the other direction, but it was hard, callous, and aggressive. Harry? I reached around my back and grabbed my gun, peeking around the corner of the building into the alley. I looked at the ground to see if there were rocks that would shuffle as I stepped forward.

How stupid are they? Not one of them is facing the street to see if anyone is coming by. My eyes wandered around them, not seeing any guns or knives.

“I don’t have anything, I swear.” Harry pleaded. His face was cast at the ground. He was clutching his shoulder. “Greg, I swear.” Greg? Greg Patterson? Oh, God. Help me.

I took a few more steps, so I was standing about 6 feet away and raised my gun, pointed at the man talking.

“Step away from the boy,” I muttered. Harry’s head snapped in my direction. His eyes looked thankful to see someone standing there but grew withdrawn when he saw it was me. Greg slowly turned to face me. A lopsided grin taking over his features.

He twisted his torso to face Harry again, “Hey, isn’t this that girl you were seeing for a bit? Turned out to be a narc?” He took a stride towards me, “What’re you gonna do about it baby girl?” he belittled, lifting his shirt to let the light glimmer off a knife sticking in his waistband.

“Unless you want me to shoot you, I suggest you get out of here,” I said, my voice turning hostile.

“You wouldn’t dare.” He taunted, taking another step toward me.

“Oh, yeah?” I quickly pointed my gun at the ground a foot in front of him and shot. The fire rang in my ears, “Do you seriously want to test me?”

The two other men grabbed him by the arms and started dragging him out of the alley passed me. “You will regret doing that, bitch!” I heard him yell. They started running when I aimed at the wall and released another bullet. I glanced at Harry, who was still slack against the brick wall.

“Harry,” I rushed to his side. “Are you okay?” I gripped his arm and went to put it around my shoulders.

“You didn’t have to do that,” He griped, pulling himself out of my grasp.

“Oh yeah, and let them kill you? No way.” I laughed sarcastically. Harry started walking towards the street, rubbing his shoulder.

“They weren’t going to kill me,” He brushed off.

“Harry, that guy had a knife,”

“A little nick is nothing compared to what I’ve been through recently.” He paused. Ouch. “What are you even doing here? What, did Thompson send you here or something?” His tone was demanding,

“What? No. I’m just out.”

“Sure you just happen to be passing a bar I used to frequent. And just so happen to make an appearance when I catch a bit of trouble?” His interrogation sent a chill down my spine. He turned on his heel to look at me, inches from my face. “I didn’t need you to defend me.”

“Harry, what are you even doing here? Without security? Your entire team has been looking for you for four days! And I was just trying to help…” I whispered, my eyes falling to the ground.

“I don’t need your help, okay?” His voice rattled my eardrums. I took an involuntary step back. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. His eyes were glowering, fixed on mine. “I think you’ve done enough ‘help’ in my life. And I certainly do not need your permission, or Niall’s, to leave my own fucking house.” He spat, turning toward the street again.

“Say what you want, okay?” I said, my voice shaky, tears brimming my eyes. “But I care about you, Harry. I wanted to tell you! I have cared about you the entire time. You were and are getting back to being an absolute mess, Harry. Okay, maybe I was used as a prop by the FBI, but –“

“See that’s just it, Y/N,” Harry turned to face me again. His eyes soft, glistening with a few tears. “They used you as a prop. You used me to advance yourself. I thought,” He paused and ran a hand through his long locks, looking at the ink shaded sky. “I thought you were feeling the same thing I was.”

“I was!” I shout, not caring if any passer-byes could hear me. “I was feeling the same thing you were! I wanted to tell you everything! I –“ I took a deep breath to compose myself and looked into his darkened eyes – “I was scared.” I admitted, my voice lowering to a mumble. My eyes flashed around the alley, not daring to meet his gaze.

“Scared of what?” He questioned, furrowing his brows. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him. “Of Thompson?”

“No.”

“No?” He affirmed, confused. “Then what were you so afraid of?”

“Well, yes. Thompson. But I was afraid of you…” My voice trailed; my eyes fixed on the pavement between us.

“Me?” He brought his palm to his chest “You were scared of me?!” His tone deepened. “What did you think? That I’d have you fired or something?”

That was something I hadn’t thought of. Can Harry have me fired? Did he have that much say in the FBI staff?

“I was scared,” I played with the hem of my shirt, “It scared me to think that you’d wonder if everything I told you was a lie. And I was scared you’d be done with me, and that you’d just…” I briefly met his expressionless gaze before settling it back on the ground, “Just walk away without getting a chance to know me. The real me.”

“Well,” Harry stiffened. “I’m sure we’re both glad we don’t have to worry about that anymore.” My gaze snapped to his. “I know exactly who you are, you’re nothing but a con artist who got exactly what you wanted.” He turned his back to me and walked out to the street.

“This is not what I wanted!” I called, he stopped in his tracks, “At the end of the day, I wanted you to know the Y/N that is compassionate and strong. I wanted you to know the Y/N that started falling for the kind, caring and utterly incredible man that you are.” Without a response, he kept moving. I waited for him to round the corner before following. I watched as his back disappeared into the boisterous bar.

I stood on the sidewalk for a couple of minutes before deciding he wasn’t coming out. I turned on my heel to continue my jog home.

***

My heart began racing like never before every time I thought about going into work on Monday morning. Meeting with Thompson. The looks I would get from my colleagues as I packed up my desk. The only contact I’ve had with Thompson since Tuesday was him texting me to tell me about our meeting on Monday morning.

Friday and Saturday brought me to the gym. Employees of the FBI had exclusive access to a gym on the north side of the city. I stepped on the treadmill and began my jog, upping the intensity every couple minutes. Beads of sweat formed on the back of my neck. I wiped them away, staring out the window at the trees across the field. My feet began to pound harder as I thought back to Thursday night and my actual run-in with Harry.

How could he be so hardheaded to think that someone sent me there?

I looked down at the moving treadmill under me. A pair of feet caught my eye, climbing onto the treadmill next to me. I turned my head to see Niall standing there. I scrunched my eyebrows at him as he motioned for me to take out my headphones.

“Hey…” I said as I pulled them out and pressed the pause button. The treadmill came to a stop, and I faced Niall.

“Hey, Y/N.” He greeted, a hint of a smile on his face. “How are you?”

“I’m okay,” I panted, trying to catch my breath. “And you?”

“I’m alright.” The silence took over as both our eyes wandered around the empty room. “I’ve been wanting to get ahold of you.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“Harry’s been to the office a few times, since that night.” He started, my eyes widening. That’s why Thompson moved me. So we wouldn’t see each other. “I don’t know what’s going on but – “ There’s something he’s not saying.

“Are you still working with Harry?” The question slipped from my lips before I could fully process the question I wanted to ask.

Niall harshly blinked, taken aback by what I asked. “Oh – “ he mumbled, lowering his eyes to the space between us. “Yeah. Harry was pretty upset with me, but I think he’s doing better.” I figured.

“Well, that’s good.”

“Y/N, Harry’s just really hurt. You know, by everybody. Not just you.” Niall’s sympathetic tone seeped into my mind. “And, I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry, Niall?” I asked, picking up my water bottle to take a sip. “It’s my fault, not yours. I should’ve known better than to let my emotions get in the way of this.” I finished after gulping my water down.

“No, it’s my fault too. I should’ve seen it.” He concluded, his eyes staring out the window at the trees. He glanced at my face before continuing, “I should’ve seen the way you two were looking at each other. I should’ve seen how real it was for both of you.”

Why was Harry at the office so often? Was more than just my job at risk now?

Niall stepped off the treadmill and headed for the front door. I watched him as he exited the building, my legs not allowing me to follow and ask more questions.

***

Do you ever try so hard to forget something, but then it keeps popping in your memory even more? That’s how I feel with my conversations with Harry and Niall. What is Niall not telling me? What does he know that I don’t? And how can Harry forgive Niall and not me?

Derek broke my thoughts when he walked through our front door, 3 friends in tow. “Hey, Y/N. How was your day?” He asked, heading towards the kitchen.

“It was – “ I glanced at his friends and felt anxiety consume my heart. I can’t place the feeling, but it certainly wasn’t a pleasant one. “fine.”

Derek nodded, filling a glass from the cabinet with water. “Oh, Y/N. These are some friends, Mike, Tyler, and Greg,” Derek said, taking in my blank expression, and pointing to each man standing in my kitchen.

I couldn’t place the faces, but I felt like I’ve met them. “Hi,” I said, giving a slight wave. “Um – Have we met before?” I asked, gesturing between me and the men I learned to be Tyler, Greg, and Mike.

Greg looked at his friends then back at me, “I – I don’t think so?” A smirk took over his features with a glint of mischief in his eyes. “Maybe in a past life.” Flashes of a knife went through my brain. Greg. G_Pattsy.

“Anyway, where’s Summer? She said she’d be home,” Derek spoke, obliviously breaking up the tension slowly building around him.

“She’s in the shower,” I said getting up from the couch. “I have to run an errand.” I grabbed my purse from the counter, side-eying the men standing there once more.

“Problem, sweetheart?” A chill ran down my spine from his menacing tone. “Don’t worry, I know the effect I have on people.” Oh, we’re going to have a problem.

“Don’t ever for a second think you’d have the privilege,” I uttered over my shoulder, slamming the door on my way out. I pulled out my phone and dialed the only number I could think of. “Hey, can you meet me?”

I hung up and made my way to the nearest bar. It was only 8 pm, so it wasn’t that packed. “Hey, you,” Louis said wrapping an arm around my shoulders. “What can I do for ya?”

“Do you want something to drink first?” I laughed, motioning to the liquor sitting behind the counter.

“Oh, yeah.” Louis waved the bartender over and taking a seat on the chair next to me. “Bumbu, rocks, please.” The bartender made his drink and placed it in front of him. Louis took a sip before turning in his chair to face me completely. “So.”

“You’ve known Harry for a long time, right?” I asked, running my fingers around my glass, avoiding his eyes.

“Yeah, since I was about 3, I think.” He said, gazing off into the distance. “I heard about what happened. That it didn’t work out, and I’m sorry. You two seemed good for each other.” Louis confessed, placing a hand on my shoulder. How though? How did we seem good for each other?

“It’s okay.”

“Anyway, yeah. A long time.” He spoke, bringing his hands back to his lap. “Why?”

“Can you tell me about his friendship with Greg Patterson?” I asked, lifting my eyes to meet his.

“Greg? Patterson?” He questioned as I nodded. “Well, there’s not much to tell. Harry and Greg were friends through high school. After that, Greg kind of fell off the grid. Got into a… a more dangerous crowd. Harry didn’t say much about what happened.”

“But what did he say then?” I pressed. Louis looked at me with a frown, tilting his head slightly to the side.

“Uh – “ He ran his hand across his jaw, leaving it there for a second. “I know they got into a tremendous fight. Greg landed in the hospital, Harry walked away with a few scrapes and a broken nose.” Louis lowered his hand, clasping the glass in front of him. “Something about drugs.”

“Was Harry selling?” I asked nonchalantly. I flipped my hair over my shoulder and tucked some strands behind my ear. I took a glance at the door, eyeing the couple walking in. “Or buying?”

“No, no. Harry never got into that.” Louis waved off, shaking his head. “But he knew people that were. Greg wanted in. He didn’t believe Harry wasn’t in on the deals.”

“Have you seen him recently?”

“Who, Harry? Not since the benefit.” Louis glanced at my blank expression. “Oh, Greg? I never knew him. Just of him.” Louis knocked his fist on his chin gently, deep in thought. “You know, I think I heard from someone that he was back in the D.C. area though.”

I thought about Louis’ last comment almost the entire way home. I thought about how the man that is wanted for attempted assassination has gone this long without being found. More importantly, I thought about how that same man had been standing in my kitchen not even two hours ago and every possible way that Derek knew that man and brought him to my house. Does he know?

I pulled up to my building and shifted my car into park, taking notes of the blacked-out SUV sitting a couple of spaces away. I eyed it, warily. Many people drive blacked-out SUVs, not just Harry. I had to remind myself. I slowly got out of my car and walked towards the door, eager to know if Derek was still inside.

I couldn’t see if anyone was in the SUV, but I prayed the Thompson didn’t have it out for me now.

“Derek?” I called as soon as the door latched. “Are you here?”

“In here,” I heard him call from Summer’s room. I made my way, checking my phone for anything from Thompson. “What’s up?” he greeted when I entered the room.

They were sprawled across the floor, Boy Meets World playing softly on the TV. “Can I talk to you about something?” I asked, taking a seat on the floor next to them. He sat up and stared at me expectantly. “How’d you meet those guys from earlier?” Derek’s mouth slightly parted, confused. “Like did you meet them recently? Or have you known them for a while?”

Derek’s eyebrows scrunched together, “Do you know them?”

“No, but I was just wondering.” I shook my head, trying to laugh it off.

“Did Greg say something to you? I’ll kick his ass.” Derek slammed his palms on the ground like he was ready to track him down. “I swear if he fucking said something, I’ll-“

“Derek, no” I laughed, “I think I’ve seen him around or something.”

He raised his hand to scratch the back of his neck, “Okay, good. I met them in NOLA, actually.” I raised my eyebrows. That’s right. Derek went to New Orleans like two years ago. “They were cool, got us into all the good clubs down there,” he looked at Summer who was nodding her head in agreement. “Told him to hit me up if he was ever in DC. Guess he decided to take me up on the offer.”

“I think I may need your help.”

***

The next day, I was once again sat in the conference room. It was around 9:00 pm and my breath was hitching every other second. I’m nervous about how everything will go. Thoughts swirled my mind. How will Niall react? What are we going to do? I can’t believe I looped Derek into this. This is insane.

“All right,” Thompson started, clapping his hands to get everyone’s attention. My gaze shifted around to each person in the room. Niall, Joe, Thompson, Derek, and a few others from secret security I didn’t quite recognize. “Derek, first and foremost, thank you for joining us and helping us.” Derek nodded nonchalantly. “Here’s the plan.” I started spacing out. I knew I wouldn’t be a part of it. No matter how much I wanted to be. I’d be in the van, with Joe, Thompson and the others. Of course, Niall got to make the arrest. He’d be with them, watching from afar.

What felt like an eternity passed before Thompson’s voice rang in my ears again. “Understood?” His voice was loud, angry, stern. Everything you would expect from the Director of the FBI. Everyone started getting up to pack the van and move. “Y/N,” Thompson stared at me. He motioned for me to wait while everyone else filed out of the room. “You don’t have to come.”

“Sir?”

“If it will be too much. Just let me know.” He said gently.

“Mr. Thompson,” I said, my voice hinting irritation, “This is my job. I love my job. And I want so badly to see that sucker put away. I’m not letting what happened interfere with this. At the end of the day, it’s my duty to protect and serve.”

He gave me a curt nod and gestured for me to exit, quickly following suit. We made our way to the vans and got in. Niall and Derek got into their respective cars to meet up with the suspect and the bait. Everyone had their gear on, ready to intervene if need be. Everyone except me. “It’ll be for the best. He won’t be thrown off.”

When the van started moving, all the men started chatting about work life, home life, “Did you hear about Linda in the office today?”, and everything going on in the White House. Thompson’s voice kept me sane. This isn’t a crazy dream I had thought up. This is real life. I kept my mouth shut through it all. Everyone knows what happened. Niall probably told everyone at the White House what happened. Don’t dig yourself a deeper hole.

We pulled up to the dingy bar that somehow became remarkable after one encounter. Niall pulled up behind us and got out of his car. He came up to Thompson’s window to get his earpiece and mic before heading off into the bar. The static on the radio in the back of the van let us know the mics were on. The voices and music started flowing through within seconds.

“Hey,” Niall’s voice came through. “Thought I might find you here.” His voice was hard to hear with all the background noise, but I distinctly heard a chair screeching across the floor. Niall’s sitting down.

“What are you doing here?” Harry’s words slurred, he sounded far away. How much had he had to drink already? Suddenly I didn’t know how to breathe. Oh, how I missed the sweet voice that I no longer had the privilege of hearing.

“Just came to check on you. I know you’re still upset.” His voice was sympathetic. For once, I was grateful it wasn’t for me.

There was a lengthy pause. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Harry’s voice sounded beaten. He sounded rough. And though I couldn’t see him, I knew his eyebrows had a crease between them. “I mean, how could she do something like that? How could you do something like that?” Okay, going right in then.

“Harry,” Niall stuttered, “We were just trying to do what’s best. Look, I’m not here as your guard tonight. I’m here as your friend. If you want to get fucked up and party, I’m here. If you want to get fucked up and talk, I’m here.”

About 30 seconds had passed before I stopped holding my breath. “I just, I could really see something with her.” He has to be careful. Niall’s lack of response confirmed my thoughts. He knew that we were all listening. “Anyway, thanks for letting me do this, Niall. Thanks for being here. It’s been a rough week.” I could basically see the smile on his face, dimples making a full appearance.

“Hey,” Niall’s voice broke. “I know you’re hurting. But you’re not alone, okay? She’s hurting too.” A smile crept onto my face. Thanks, Niall. I didn’t dare look at Thompson, scared he would see the brokenness and weakness hidden in my eyes. I kept my face straight, fading the smile to be more serious for the situation, and for the sake of being within a foot of my boss.

“So you like this bar, huh?” A voice from another speaker broke through, much clearer than the last. A gruff voice I recognized from my kitchen. Someone remind me why I thought this would be a marvelous idea.

“Yeah, been coming here for a short while with my girl,” Derek’s voice was smooth, he had always been a talented actor. Hiding me and Ashlie in his room and straight-up lying to his brothers saying he hadn’t seen us. Pretending to be someone else’s boyfriend so a creep at the bar would back off. Sometimes I’m still amazed and the stuff he can pull off.

“Awesome.”

A couple of minutes passed as Derek and Greg made their way to the bar, we were outside of. Their voices on the speaker grew cluttered, voices from all around them being picked up. Joe turned down all the speakers, so the van wasn’t being bombarded. Soon after, Derek, Greg, and his two friends arrived and entered. Now it was only a matter of time.

The unfortunate part of tonight was, our eyes were Niall. We don’t have any cameras in the bar, or on our people. All we had to go off of were conversations. Greg and Harry were completely in the dark. But we needed them together to make the arrest. What if Harry gets hurt? You’re at fault for that. My eyes widened at the thought. But if you had said nothing, Greg might’ve tracked Harry down and the outcome would’ve been so much worse. My conscience was trying to rationalize everything happening, but I couldn’t keep up.

“Y/N, I want you to go inside.” I looked over to Thompson to see his serious face.

“What?”

“You heard me,” He reached into the center console pulling out an earpiece and a body camera. “Here, put these on. And go.” I took the pieces with shaky hands. I strapped the camera onto my torso and stuck the piece in my ear.

“Ted,” Joe leaned through the seats from the back, ‘Are you sure about this?”

Thompson looked at Joe with enough blaze in his eyes to put hell to shame. “Yes, she’s discreet enough to not be seen.”

My body was on autopilot walking into the bar. I looked around. Derek had strategically placed himself and Greg at the bar near the bathroom. Niall had taken Harry to the opposite side of the bar. Niall looked in my direction with wide eyes. I hurried to the corner, narrowly avoiding Harry’s eyes as he turned around. I could still hear everything from Niall and Derek’s mics. I was the eyes of the men in the van.

“Hey, I’m going to the bathroom. I’ll be right back,” I could just make out Harry’s voice above the music and other people talking. I pulled my hood up and looked at the table, catching his feet walking passed. I angled the camera to follow him, hopefully.

I saw Greg take a glance over his shoulder at the passing body. “I gotta take a piss.” Spotted. Greg had spotted Harry. Greg got up from his stool and followed behind Harry.

“Derek, go wait about 6 feet from the bathroom, let us know what happens but don’t do anything. We don’t want you getting hurt. Horan make your way outside to the east alley. That’s the only other door to the bar. Y/N, stay there.”

“Got it” “Moving” Derek and Niall’s voices filtered through the noise. Niall made his way out the front door. My mind went to the alley. The same alley where Harry looked defeated. The same alley we fought because of my job. The same alley he could’ve been killed if I hadn’t been there.

“They’re moving, heading towards a side door,” Derek stated, making me forget anything I was thinking. I felt the color drain from my face. I saw Greg and Harry walking down the hallway.

The door burst open. The last thing being seen was Harry being shoved to the ground as it slammed shut. I felt my heart break at the scene. I couldn’t hear what was being said. Niall was too far away,

“Move!” Thompson screamed; my eardrum felt like it was about to bust. I heard a gunshot go off. Muffled voices and commotion coming through my earpiece.

I got up, grabbed Derek by the forearm, and rushed out the front, knocking a few people out of the way. People on the block were ducking for cover or scrambling into the nearest open shop.

By the time we got to the corner of the building, Greg was being put into handcuffs. Niall helped Harry up and placed his hands on his shoulder. “You okay?” Harry nodded, blank-faced.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned my head to look at Thompson. “Good job, kid.” It was short, but it made me feel secure. I did something right. “Come on,” Thompson ushered me back to the van. Derek walked towards Niall, Harry, and the other men.

I walked towards the van and clutched the door handle. I turned my face towards the alley. My heartbeat sped up as I locked eyes with familiar olive ones. I sighed and pulled open the door, climbing in.

Looking back to the alley, Niall, Harry, and Derek were walking toward the street. Niall gave a thumbs up in our direction. “Horan, you can take Harry home, or to another bar. I will sweep the area before we leave.” As Thompson continued talking my eyes glazed over, thinking about how crazy tonight had been. Derek helped save Harry’s life. Niall helped save Harry’s life. I saved Harry’s life. Who knows what would’ve happened if Greg found him out and about by himself?

I watched as the three boys disappeared down the road. Who knows where to? Harry was glancing back every few seconds. Almost as if to convince himself he saw me. And Derek, well, he had just made friends with my coworker and Harry. The men in suits walked Greg across the street towards the van behind us. “The boys are going to take Greg in that van. Do you want me to take you home?”

“Ted,” Joe spoke from the back, “I’ll take her.” My eyes shifted between Thompson, and Joe. Thompson pursed his lips, giving Joe a nod. “Come on, kid,” Joe said as he pats my shoulder. I took the body cam and earpiece off and handed them to Thompson.

“I’ll see you Monday,” Thompson spoke slowly as I opened the van door. I nodded at him before shutting the door. What happens to my job now?

“You need a drink,” Joe commented and motioned towards a bar across the street. I didn’t say a word as we began walking towards the entrance of the bar.

We sat at a table near the back, waiting for our drinks. “So,” Joe started. “How are you?” How am I? Really?

“I’m okay,” And it was true. I was okay. I had my breath back, the boy I had fallen for was safe, the guy who was wanted for trying to kill said boy was being put away, and I’d be okay if I had to transfer or be fired if it meant I could leave everything that had happened in the past.

“Y/N, I’m not your boss. You can talk to me. Person to person.” Joe smiled, putting a comforting hand atop mine on the table.

“Honestly?” I asked. Joe nodded, giving me the go-ahead. “I’m so exhausted and disappointed.”

“Disappointed? With what?” He asked, grasping his drink after the waitress sat it down. Joe thanked her before turning his attention back to me.

“I’m so disappointed in myself,” I stated.

“Why? You’ve done brilliant work. I would know. We’ve been watching you since you got hired.”

I let the confused expression on my face speak for itself. Completely ignoring his second statement I questioned him, “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Know about what I did.” It was Joe’s turn to be confused. “How I completely messed up my mission by putting my feelings above my job. How I couldn’t keep it together. How I let myself, Harry and the FBI down. How – “

“Woah Woah Woah, Y/N. Slow down.” Joe laughed. “What are you talking about? You didn’t let anyone down.” He paused, glancing at the glasses between us, “Look. I’ve worked with the Styles’ for over 5 years. Sometimes we have to do dreadful things in order to get good results. When that happens, we often forget all the wonderful things we did. You did a good job, Y/N. Don’t sell yourself short. And don’t let anyone else either.”

“But what about Harry?”

“Harry? Honey, that kid's crazy about you. He’d be crazy to let you go.” I took a sip of the rum and coke I had ordered. I had grown to like them after having tasted it on Harry’s lips at the benefit. “After seeing you two gallivanting around at the benefit, we all knew.”

“Knew what?” I asked, taking another look around the room. Young couples all around. Being handsy under the table, whispering into each other’s ears, grabbing each other’s hands to pull the other towards the door.

“We all knew that something real would happen.” I let my gaze settle on Joe again. “You were scared, and that’s why you ran and caused some trouble. Stop running. He might surprise you.” Joe dropped the subject after that and refused to answer any of my cut-off questions. He brought our attention back to work and regular life. We finished our drinks and walked outside. The cool air felt nice on my warm skin.

He pulled out his car keys and unlocked the Mercedes sitting in front of us. “When Ted called me about this, I knew I was going to pull you aside.” He shrugged off my unasked question. I pulled open the door and slid in. The drive was short and quiet. The only sound being the soft playing radio tuned to the Queen station on SiriusXM. “I’ll see you soon, kid.” Joe winked when he pulled up to my building. I gave him a tight-lipped smile and got out, taking a deep breath before walking up to my apartment.

I pulled out my keys and turned to the stairwell when I heard footsteps coming behind me. “There you are,” I twisted to see Derek walking up the steps. “Been waiting for you to get back. That was crazy, right?” I laughed as I unlocked the door.

“Wild.”

***

It was exactly 8 O’clock on Monday when I looked at the clock on the wall. The atmosphere of the conference room brought me back to the first time I had an interview with Thompson. His demeanor was tough, cold, and stern. My nerves reminded me even more of that day. My legs bounced under the table, my palms were sweating, and my eyes couldn’t settle on a single object for too long. I was completely prepared to possibly turn in my badge, gun, and ID.

When Thompson entered the room, his intimidating nature followed. He closed the door and sat across from me at the table, setting some papers down between us.

“Miss. Y/L/N,” Thompson started, taking a second to clear his throat. “Good morning.”

“Good morning, Mr. Thompson,” I greeted him, exhaling a shaky breath.

“How are you?” I scrunch my eyebrows in confusion. How am I? That’s how you want to start my termination?

“I’m – I’m nervous,” I confessed.

“Nervous?” he casually asked. “Why are you nervous?” Thompson started shuffling the papers he had laid on the table. I glanced at them, trying to figure out if they were the agreements I signed when I first started.

“I – “ I pointed to myself, “Am I getting fired?”

Thompson snickered at my question. “Fired? Why would we fire you?”

“I thought – “ I paused, blinking harshly. Am I being punked? “since Har – Mr. Styles found out. I thought I would be fired.”

“Y/N, Mr. Styles has made it very clear we would be stupid to fire you.”

“What?” The question fell from my lips. I was taken aback. Why would Harry tell them not to fire me?

“When Niall called to tell us he let it slip last week, we called in Mr. Styles to talk about it and explain why we did it.” Thompson started, “We talked about suspending your employment for 6 months or transferring you out of D.C. He was pretty adamant about it. But Mr. Styles came in yesterday, unannounced I might add, to tell us if we suspended you or transferred you, well. We’d be out of our minds. In better terms.”

I fell back into my chair. So I’m not fired? Thompson answered my question before I could ask, “We’d be stupid to let you go. Especially after Saturday night.” My eyes flicked to his. “Y/N, one thing I noticed when we first met was how much you reminded me... of me. You are strong, ambitious, willing to do whatever it takes. Those are qualities we need in this job.”

“So, I’m not fired?”

“No,” he laughed, shaking his head. “But we’ll be putting you on desk duty for the next two weeks. For disobeying orders of the mission.” Damn it.

I nodded my head, accepting my two-week punishment. “Thank you, Mr. Thompson.”

“Don’t thank me.” He said, waving me off. “Thank Mr. Styles.” He dismissed me and I picked up my bag, ready to head for the door. “And Miss. Y/L/N,” Thompson said, stopping me. “Don’t mess it up.”

I left the conference room confused. Why would Harry save my job?

I took a seat at my desk and pulled up the database. Researching was tough, but even more so when my mind kept wandering to Harry. Why’d he do it? Why would he come in here to tell them not to fire me? Maybe because you saved his life. Who knows what Niall or Derek told him? The questions filled my mind for the rest of the day. So much so, I could barely get any work done.

***

I left the office after a few of hours of researching some wanted suspects. I found myself strolling the streets, coming to a halt as I passed the café where Harry and I first met. I wandered inside and ordered a grande iced vanilla soy latte. A drink I genuinely came to enjoy from my times with Harry. When my order came up, I took a glance around the café to pick a place to sit. My eyes landed on a familiar stranger facing the window.

Stop running, Y/N.

I took a seat next to him at the bar, sitting my coffee down, and facing the man. I propped my head on my hand, with my elbow resting on the bar top. “Is this seat taken?” I asked him.

He cracked a smile at me, turning his face to me. “How’d you find me this time?” Harry probed.

“Oh, I didn’t,” I laughed. “I just came here for some coffee. I had a fantastic first ‘date’ here.” I said putting air quotes around the word date. A comfortable silence fell over us. “Why’d you do it?”

“Why’d I do what?” he asked, grabbing his cup to take a sip of his coffee.

“Why’d you save my job?” I asked, dropping my hand, so it hung over the edge of the bar.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, you were pissed at me,” I stated raising my eyebrows.

“Yeah, I was.” He confirmed. “But also, after last Thursday – and Saturday for that matter – I started thinking. And I realized that everyone, at some point, is going to hurt you. Even the people who truly care about you and want what’s best for you. We can’t control that. What we can control, though, is how we react to that, and we get to determine if the person who hurt us is worth it.”

“What’d you come up with?”

“I came up with some people are. The people that make you look at yourself and want to be a better person.”

I stared at him for a few seconds, before taking a deep breath. “Harry I – “

“I don’t want you to tell me you’re sorry, Y/N. You’ve already said it.”

“What do you want me to say then?”

“I want you to tell me what you want.” I scrunched my face at his request. “Thursday night you told me this isn’t what you wanted. So tell me what you want.”

“I want us to start over. I want you to know my actual life.”

Harry stuck his hand out to me, “Hi, I’m Harry. And you are?”

I looked at his hand before taking it in my own, “I’m Y/N. Y/N Y/L/N.”

“Hi Y/N, I’m the President’s son. What do you do for a living?” He let go of my hand and placed it around his cup.

“I work for the FBI,” I smirked.

“Oh, that’s nice. I’ve heard outstanding things about their work. An agent saved me.”

“Saved you?” I giggled.

“In a way, she saved me from myself, really. I was a proper mess.” He broke into a grin and laughed.

“Oh, really?” I laughed with him.

“She kind of made me realize that I was, yeah.” He looked down at his thighs before his jade eyes met mine. “Do you want to go for a walk?” I nodded as he started to get up. He held the door open for me. We walked out and he interlocked our fingers, rubbing circles into the back of my hand.

We started down the street. I pulled his hand as I stopped on the sidewalk. “Hey, Harry?” I bit my lip and looked at my feet. “Are you sober right now?”

“Yeah?” His eyes held the confusion that laced his voice. I reached for his face and pulled his lips to mine. He wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me into him. He pulled away briefly, “At least we don’t have to worry about them,” He mumbled, nodding his head toward the blacked-out SUV sitting across the street. I giggled as he pulled me back for another kiss.

Maybe, just maybe, we could be real.

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