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wandering-winchesters · 1 year

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Who Did This To You?

Pairing: Dean x Reader Word Count: 4,077 (Oops) Summary: Sam and the reader are close friends, Dean on the other hand is kept at a distance. The reader has a boyfriend, who turns out to be abusive. What will happen when Dean finds out? Trigger Warnings: Mentions of domestic violence, bruises and brief mention of blood. Requested: No, just something I thought up. A/N: I am really happy with how this turned out, please let me know what you think. <3

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I press the accelerator down further, hot tears brimming in my eyes, frantic to get back to the bunker. Back to safety and Sam. I need to talk to Sam, he always knows how to calm me down. My boyfriend, Chris and I had fought tonight and it had been bad, he had gotten in my face and screamed at me over the smallest thing. I put up with it for almost an hour, before I got up and left. What had started out as utter rage had slowly turned to gut wrenching sobs throughout the long drive home. I pull into the driveway for the bunker, parking next to the Impala and quickly making the walk from the car to the door. I unlock it quickly slipping inside, I kick my boots off at the front door and head to the kitchen hoping to find Sam. Much to my dismay, the face looking back at me is indeed not Sam, but the other Winchester, Dean. He looks up at me, his eyes searching my face and his brows drawing together when he notices my expression and the tears on my cheeks. I sniff, quickly wiping them away but it’s too late, he’s already seen them.

“Where’s Sam?” I ask, drawing on every ounce of strength within in me to keep my wits about me for a few more minutes. Dean takes his time to answer, taking a sip from the beer he is holding as he studies me carefully. I shift my weight from one foot to the other, waiting anxiously for his reply.

“He went out for a bit, said he needed to get out of the bunker. Can’t say I blame him.” He says, tucking his bottom lip between his teeth momentarily before taking another sip of his beer. I give Dean a short nod and mutter a thanks before turning on my heel, intent upon heading straight to my room but his voice stops me once again.

“You’ve been crying.” He states, matter-of-factly. I freeze in my tracks, weighing my next options carefully. Why does he care? He’s seen me cry before and it hasn’t exactly made him kinder to me. I square my shoulders and turn around to face him once again, his eyes still locked on me. He looks as if he is carefully analyzing my every move, every breath I take and every word that I speak. He’s leaning against the counter top, one leg bent resting on the cabinet behind him. His arms crossed across his chest, supporting the hand that’s holding his beer.

“Why do you care?” I ask, my voice a bit more volatile than I initially intended. I am too tired to put effort into being nice to him, a sentiment that he rarely ever gives to me. He is slightly taken aback by my words, a fact made obvious by the way he holds his hands up to the side, shrugging his shoulders slightly.

“Just thought you might want to talk about it, since Sam isn’t here.” He replies, his tone soft and gentle, something I’d never received from him before. It wasn’t like we were enemies or anything, but he didn’t particularly care for me and I shared the same sentiment about him. We butted heads over everything, he always tried to hold me back on hunts, making me feel incapable and inferior.

“Ill be fine.” I mutter, moving to walk away once again, and once again he stops me his words cutting through me like a silver knife.

“Did he hurt you?” He asks, his voice unreadable, but his face screams danger, depending on my answer. I look at him, my eyes searching his face for any explanation of where this was coming from, but he’s impassive other than anger. I don’t trust my voice, so I shake my head no. It wasn’t exactly a lie, he hadn’t physically hurt me, he didn’t need to his verbal threats were enough.

“I’m just going to go to bed. Thanks anyways.” I say and he nods slightly but he’s not fooled. I turn and actually walk away this time and make it to my room before my tears start to fall again. I sit down on the edge of my bed pulling my phone out of my pocket, intending to send Sam a text, but I am distracted by the multiple messages flooding the screen. Beginning with anger and threats, before changing to apologies and begging for my forgiveness. I toss my phone onto the floor, too tired to deal with the nonsense tonight. The interaction with Dean replays in my head, his kindness strange and cause for reflection. It isn’t as if he was ever a complete asshole to me, but he was never fond of me. I had always been Sam’s friend and Dean just put up with my presence. Neither one of them ever intended for me to start hunting with them, it was a matter of wrong place wrong time. Sam and I had met in college and I went looking for him when he disappeared from classes, the week I found him happened to be when the yellow eyed demon came calling a few years ago, and I had stuck with them ever since. Intent upon learning everything I could about the supernatural. Sam had welcomed me in with open arms and Dean had been dragged along kicking and screaming, metaphorically speaking. Well, mostly metaphorically, he did a lot of yelling. So the concern Dean had for me tonight, was well concerning. It was throwing me for a bit of a loop, curiosity sparking within me. Did he actually care about me and his disdain for me was just a front? No, surely not. I had been with them for three years and this was an utter first. I brush the thoughts aside and close my eyes, hoping that sleep will over take me. Hours later, it finally does.

I wake to knocking on my door, I yell out a muffled come in, and Sam sticks his head in, his expression apologetic.

“Hey sorry to wake you, I am about to head out but I wanted to check in on you before I do. Dean said you were upset and looking for me last night, you could’ve called me Y/N, I would have come back earlier.” I had sat up in bed to look at him and he had opened my door the rest of the way. I smiled softly at the tall man standing in front of me, his hair messy and the collar on his flannel offset.

“Its okay Sammy, you have a good night out?” I ask and he grins sheepishly, nodding his head in response.

“Yeah, actually, I met a girl at the bar. I am heading back to her place now actually. You doing okay?” He asks me, his smile contagious. I chuckle, shaking my head slightly, but smile back at him.

“Yeah I am good, go get ‘em tiger.” He laughs at my response, and jogs off down the hallway yelling a see you later over his shoulder. He had forgotten to shut my door behind him, I sigh throwing my blankets to the side and standing up beside my bed.

I stretch my body, groaning slightly as the tension in my shoulders works it way out. I throw on the jeans I had worn yesterday, before finding a new shirt to wear, I settle on my favorite green tee, a memento from my college years. I pick my phone up from the floor, scanning the mass of texts and calls all from one person. Before sending him a quick message,

8:33 A.M. I’ll be over shortly, I just woke up.

I take a deep breath and grab my keys from my dresser and head towards the entry to the bunker. Dean is in the kitchen again, this time making himself breakfast. He gives me a slight smile as I walk past him towards the door. I smile back but keep on my path to my boots, still left haphazardly by the door where I had tossed them last night. “Need breakfast?” Dean calls from the behind me, I look back over my shoulder and see him standing in the doorway to the kitchen, skillet in one hand, towel in the other.

“Not hungry, thanks though. I’ll be back later!” I say, beginning to head out the door to the bunker. I hear him call out something along the lines of ‘be careful’ but I don’t stop to question it, our interaction from last night still weirding me out.

In hindsight, I should’ve gone back inside this morning. Had breakfast with Dean and ignored Chris’ frenzy of messages. Going over his place this morning was probably the worst idea I have ever had, it hadn’t gone well, worse than I had ever imagined. His messages to me last night and this morning had me convinced that he would apologize for his actions and yet that is the farthest thing from what happened. By the time I had gotten there, he had switched from apologetic to angry again. Instead of his words, he let his fists do the talking. The first time catching me so off guard it knocked me off my feet successfully splitting my lip, the second time I had dodged his blow, stepping out of his reach and yelling at him to keep his hands off of me and trying to leave. But the third. The third landed square on my jaw, knocking me unconscious.

I had come to from Chris shaking me and crying apologies. His touch sending waves of nausea through me, revolted by the thought of him. Glancing at my reflection in the surface of his coffee table I noticed the rapidly forming bruise. A mark that would serve as a vivid reminder of his actions and my inability of acting like a good, obedient girlfriend. Or so he said, after spending the morning accusing me of cheating on him with Sam. No matter what I said, it wasn’t enough to convince him that we were just friends and he had just lost it on me. I had left in a rush when he went to the bathroom, leaving everything but my phone and my keys behind on his couch. The ache in my body spurring me to move faster out of his place and into the safety of my car. The seconds it took me to get from his living room to the drivers seat, felt like an eternity. I had driven as fast as I dared back to the bunker, checking my rear view mirror constantly watching and waiting for him to appear behind me, but he didn’t. So here I sit, outside the bunker, debating the best way to get into my room without someone noticing the bruises still forming on my face. Not wanting the attention or, more likely the “I told you so’s” from Dean. I grabbed the hat from my passenger seat, tugging it low over my face. I rearrange my hair, framing it around my face in such a way that it covers as much of my jaw as it can. I take a deep breath and exit my vehicle, taking the few steps required into the bunker.

I shut the door as quietly as I can, taking soft steps towards my room. I hope to make it into the safety and silence of my room without anyone noticing, I am not even sure who is home at this time but I don’t want to see either of them. I had nearly reached the safety of my space, but I head Dean’s door swing open behind me.

“Y/N, you’re home sooner than I expected. Sam isn’t back yet.” He says and I freeze in my tracks, praying he doesn’t continue the conversation.

“Okay, thanks!” I say, my voice coming out shrill and unsteady, the opposite of what I was trying to sound like. I hear him move to close his door, but he hesitates and I can feel his eyes burning a hole in the back of my head.

“What happened to your jeans? Why is there blood on them?” He asks, and I internally curse myself out for my stupidity. I had wiped my hand across my thigh after wiping the blood off my busted lip. I must have taken too long to give him an answer, because I hear him moving closer to me and I close my eyes waiting for the moment that I had hoped to avoid. “Y/N, look at me.” He says and I can feel him ever so close to me. I turn around, keeping my eyes trained on the ground and my face angled away from him. He reaches out and gently grabs my chin, pulling it towards him so he can see me. I bite my tongue to keep the slight gasp from slipping past, his touch on my bruised jaw causing a ripple of pain to travel throughout my nerves, but he notices and his touch lightens. The opposite of his face, his expression darkens, eyes traveling over my skin. His other hand comes up and pulls my baseball hat off my head, revealing all of the color spreading through my skin, reds and purples mainly at this point in time.

“Who did this to you?” He growls, not waiting for a response his hand drops to my wrist and tugs me behind him. I follow his lead back towards the kitchen, when we get there he points to the counter muttering one word through his angry stupor, “Sit.” I don’t, but he doesn’t notice immediately, his attention turning to something else. He walks over to the freezer and digs out the ice packs that we kept frozen for any injuries that might surface.

When he turns around, his eyes are trained on me, a scowl engrained in his features. He sets the icepack down, before he turns to me, grabs my waist and lifts me up onto the countertop. I am caught off guard by his actions, a gasp leaving my lips from his sudden movements. His hands on my hips the most amount of physical touch that has ever been shared between the two of us.

I train my eyes to the floor, not daring to meet his gaze. He had stepped away again, digging through the cabinets for what I think is the first aid kit. I begin to let my thoughts wander, the dull ache in my jaw pulling me back to the moment that it happened. The pure evil hidden behind his eyes, the look of absolute enjoyment he had as he watched me struggle, his hands rough and violent against my body. But I am snapped back to reality by Dean’s gentle touch, his fingertips gingerly raising my chin to look at him. Tears are beginning to form in my eyes, adrenaline wearing off and emotion taking back over. I take a deep breath, hating the way my lip quivers, still dreading showing weakness to the older Winchester. He notices, he notices all of it, but he doesn’t say anything. He gently wipes away my tears and brings a cold cloth to my lip, cleaning up the cut from the first punch. I can feel anger radiating off of his skin, even though his touch is displaying the complete opposite.

“Did Chris do this?” He asks, his attention moving from the split in my lip to the gash on my forehead. I hiss as he wipes it clean, an antiseptic wipe pinched between his fingers, he mutters a slight apology, but continues patching me up.

“Yeah, he did. He lost it on me this morning, over nothing. It’s my fault though, I ignored all of his messages after I came home last night, so he was angry.” Dean freezes, his fingers stilling on my skin. I look up at him, confused as to why he stopped and I notice his jaw is clenched so tight that it has to be painful.

“Don’t ever say those words again, you hear me?” He locks his eyes on mine, fury absolutely radiating off of every inch of his body. “None of this, none, is your fault, you got it?” His words are sharp and pointed, his intent clear. I nod in response, he obviously didn’t want to hear anymore, got it. I would keep my mouth shut.

He continues patching me up, before he stills, looking me over from head to toe once more. He hands me the ice-pack he had laid out and instructs me to keep it on my jaw. He turns his back to me and washes his hands in the kitchen sink.

“Where does the fucker live?” He asks, his voice low and so calm that it scares me slightly.

“Why Dean?” This is when he snaps, the anger that has been coursing through him coming out in one big tsunami of a wave, now that he knows I am okay.

“Because I am going to go beat the absolute hell out of him, show him a bit of his own medicine.” He says, each word leaving his lips like a bullet leaving a gun. Dangerous and aimed at one specific target.

I sit quietly, unsure how to respond.

“Why? I didn’t think you’d care this much, figured-“

“Oh for fucks sake!” He interrupts me and I jump from the sheer volume of his voice, he walks back over to me and stands directly in between my knees, he rests his hands on my thighs and his eyes meet my own once again.

“I have always cared about you Y/N, from that day you showed up at our motel. Your search for Sam finally at an end. I have watched you let men into your life that don’t give two shits about you, I have watched how they treated you and I have hated every single one. None of them deserve you, they are all pitiful excuses for boyfriends. I heard you crying to Sam, each time one of them broke your heart and I had to sit back and not do anything about it. You deserve more than anyone can give you, including myself. Which is why I never said anything, I kept you at a distance. I can’t do that anymore, I can’t keep watching you put yourself into these situations. God, if you hadn’t left, he could have killed you. Probably would have killed you, and then I never would have been able to tell you that I-, that I love you.” He says, his voice growing less angry after each word leaves his mouth. My brain is spinning by the end of his speech, his words swirling around my head making me dizzy. He squeezes my leg gently, causing me to snap back to reality once again.

I blink at him, once, twice, three times before his words finally settle over me and I am completely speechless. I never saw this coming, I admit I have feelings for him, but I had pushed them so far away because of his hatred for me.

“Dean, I-I don’t know what to say. I always thought you hated me, so I supressed my feelings for you, I dated other men because I thought you would never want anything to do with me. I’m sorry, that I hurt you. I love you too.” I whisper, my hands coming to rest on top of his. He tugs me towards him, his fingers digging into my hips and sliding me across the counter into his embrace.

“God, Y/N, I am so sorry he did this to you. He will never lay a finger on you again, I promise.” He says, his voice barely registering because of how quiet he is speaking. I can hear how close he is to tears, but don’t mention it to him. I hug him back and relish the way his touch makes me feel. How safe I am in his presence, every fear melting away.

I hear the door to the bunker open and Sam calls out a greeting. Dean pulls away from me slightly, but keeps his hand resting on my thigh.

“In the kitchen Sammy.” He calls out, and gently squeezes my leg in reassurance.

Sam rounds the corner and stops dead in his tracks, his eyes locking on my bruised face and anger quickly replaces the initial shock.

I look away from him, shame creeping over me. I put myself into the situation and this was the outcome, now both of them are aware of what I got myself into and it is crashing down on me in waves. I hear Dean talking to Sam, explaining everything that had happened. By the end of it, both boys were rearing to go track him down and give him a taste of his own medicine, or worse. Little did we all know, they were about to get their chance and they wouldn’t even have to leave the bunker.

A knock sounds at the door and Sam trails off mid sentence, glancing between Dean and myself, an obvious attempting at asking if we were expecting someone. Neither of us were, and suddenly it hit me. He’s here, he had followed me. My heart is in my throat, my breathing is heightened and shallow. My eyes meet Deans and he knows exactly what I am thinking. “Stay here, sweetheart. Sam, let’s go.” He says, giving me one last look before the two of them walk out of the room and towards the source of the incessant knocking. I don’t listen however, I slide down off the counter and hurry after them. Not wanting to be left alone and waiting to find out the outcome of this visit. Dean throws open the door to the bunker, immediately grabbing my now ex-boyfriend by the collar of his shirt and pushing him backwards away from the entrance. Sam is quick to step outside next to Dean, the boys creating a wall between me and Chris. Dean withholds the fury of his fist and issues quite a few colorful threats, instilling a healthy fear into Chris. He pulls him up by his shirt again and shoves him towards his car. They stand, watching him leave before turning and heading back into the bunker. Sam is quick to be by my side, pulling me into a hug. Apologies flying from his lips. I reassure him that I am okay, my eyes remaining locked on Dean. Hoping that the moment that we had shared wasn’t a one time thing, dying to once again be in his arms.

I excuse myself from the two of them, heading to the bathroom to clear my head. I spend a few minutes in there, my hands gripping the edge of the sink. Taking breath, after breath, trying to pull myself together. The whirlwind of a day, completely blindsiding me. I open the door to the bathroom and scan the hallway, empty. I take a chance and cross the hall towards Dean’s room. Knocking on the door and being beckoned in by his voice on the other side of the door.

I open the door and cross the threshold, closing the door quietly behind me. His eyes are on me immediately and I stare back at him, my heart nearly beating out of my chest. Four words hang heavy in my throat, fear of rejection constricting my voice. I clear my throat and finally utter the words I had been thinking.

“Did you mean it?”

“Of course I did, Y/N. I will always mean it.” He whispers, and that is all it takes for me to cross the room and throw my arms around him. He immediately hugs me back, tugging me as close to him as physically possible. His lips press against my forehead, sending shivers down my spine. The warmth his body provides is all consuming and like heaven on earth. A feeling that I had never had before, it was clear that this was where I was meant to be.

“I will always keep you safe Y/N, I promise you that. I love you.” Dean says, his lips brushing against my skin as he speaks. I knew he meant it with all of his heart and that was more than enough for me.

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yeyinde · 5 months

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fever in a shockwave

pt., iii | stagnant on my betterment

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

WARNINGS: angst, pining, yearning; eventual smut; trauma; grief and the existentialism of moving on; recovery; poor/unhealthy coping methods; codependency; reference to drug use (but it's just weed); reader has a backstory; spoilers for the series

WORD COUNT: 14,7k

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an update; this isn't the final part lmao dangerous words coming from someone like me oops. there's probably going to be three more parts after this.

There is no sense of closure when you watch the jagged pieces of a broken man fall to the floor by your feet. The splintered edges offer no succour, no victory, when they come to rest along the scattered ruins of a delusional love affair: alcohol bottles—Kraken, Captain Morgan—and grease-stained boxes of takeaway, most unfinished in favour of satiating yourselves on flesh, sex.

(Booze, more often than not.)

Seeing him struggle to find meaning in what you say—watching that ethanol-soaked resignation filter through hazy, electric blue—brings a fresh pain instead, taking space in the hollow gaps where you expected vindication and self-worth to bleed through.

You're doing the right thing, after all. Aren't you?

Aren't you? (please, someone, anyone, say yes—)

Uncertainty is an uneasy, nauseating feeling inside your guts. Much like a broken bone, it emanates a visceral sense of perturbation through your body. Every synapse fires in protest; every nerve screaming out. They bellow one thing in unison: something is wrong and not quite right.

You feel their cries deep in your being. Each muscle twitch and frayed thought that passes carries the echo of it.

This pain, it seems, is cracking your ribs apart and exposing the rotting marrow to the open air. Slurping from the putrefying sludge, satiating itself on the sickness eroding you from within.

It's all wrong. It feels wrong.

Bear swallows. You watch the way his throat works around the bitterness that lashes across the cut of his brow; gyres darkening in his eyes. Storms on the horizon.

(You think you'd welcome the squall. Might embrace anything to get out of this place—)

“That's what you want?” He rasps, thick and gritty, and you think about the last time he sounded like that—all torn up, and broken. Words mangled in his throat. Husked out when he told you about Rip, about the boy, his daughter, and—

No. No.

None of this is what you want, and it pains you that he can't see that.

(Such a selfish, broken man.)

Inside the festering slurry of your marrow, an urge wells up. Bubbles in the putrid pools until it's frothing, raging against the walls keeping it trapped until it seeps through the cracks, leaking into your muscles, your tissue, your bloodstream.

This silly little body of yours carries it up to your heart where it sinks talons into your pericardium, subsumes the serous in this terrible essence, this idea, this whim—

(“what?” the scoff he lets out trails on the coattails of what might have been a laugh in another life. if he was another man, maybe. you, more honest with yourself. but you are just two broken people in a run-down bar. humour exists somewhere in the muzzle of a loaded pistol. “got a saviour complex or something?”

or something. or something—)

Because the thing is: you do.

You spend most weekends wandering around antique stores because you're convinced that everything deserves a home. A place of its own. You find the unwanted, the unsellable, and you let it take space in your lonely, cramped apartment.

And why not? No one else will buy it. You're, technically, helping the environment. It's a win-win.

(and more lies you tell yourself.)

These false promises are always made that one day, one of these days, you'll find something to do with it all—maybe you could learn how to make something out of it; stitch all the unuseable parts, the unwanted pieces, and create something that everyone will want—but so far, none of your rescues has ever been finished. Saved. They sit in a corner taking up space. Untouched. Unused. Collecting dust.

That insidious whim curls inside of your heart, and whispers:

it's never too late to try again. maybe this time, it'll work out for you—

It's the same one that lures you in, making you purchase a complete set of ugly-looking dolls because some ladies were recoiling at the sight of their lumpy, antediluvian faces, and you felt bad thinking that they were doomed to end up sitting on the shelf until they were unceremoniously tossed into the bin with all the other things that won't sell.

And the one, now, that stares at the terse set to Bear's shoulders, the lines rucked across his broad, the helplessness etched into ashlar, and considers that maybe all he needs is someone. A friend, maybe.

(And maybe, maybe, that it could be you—)

“Bear—” it would be so easy to swallow the words back down until you choke on them.

You breathe in. Taste nicotine in your throat; the phantom burn of a memory from long ago: one once buried under the rubble of your crumbling foundations, now rearing into this yawning abyss as you waver on the precipice. This vacuum that syphons you dry. Leaves you empty, gaping.

It’s your mum leaning over the railing of a mezzanine as she smokes a cigarette—the eighth in the last three hours, pack near gone—and tries (and fails; always, always, always) to find some temporal kinship with a higher power as you sit on the porch swing and drink in the scraps she tosses your way.

(Today, it’s the way the smoke curls in the periwinkle sky like a naked gospel; grand televangelist to a crowd of one.)

She scrambles within the ruins of her own making to seek answers to compensate for the lack of worth that slips from the cracks. Left behind again. Again, but it’s not her fault. It’s never her fault.

(You should know best, she tells you—you suckled from the shattered parts of herself before you broke away from the cradle of her arms. Genetics leaves you wrecked for company, for permanence.

It’s just not made for us, baby. We’re unloveable only because we love too much—)

An epiphany comes in the middle of her eighth cigarette, and she divines enough wisdom to come to the succinct conclusion that those broken pieces are not the cause of her misery.

(How could they be when they’re a part of her and she’s a part of everything?)

Can't fix a broken man, she murmurs into the midmorning fog, blood-red mouth splitting into a sneer. There was beauty, you thought, to be found in the pale yellow of her teeth against the pastel dusting of dawn. Rapturous, almost. You couldn't look away even as the words snaked through the underdeveloped fibres of your mind. They're like someone who's drowning, you know? They'll grab on to anyone that gets too close and try to pull them under, too. Maybe because they want to save themselves, or maybe because they don't want to die alone. Better to leave them behind.

Can't fix a broken man, (but maybe—)

Your dad tried to fix me, she adds, and it comes in the same cadence of an afterthought, blase; but the thinness in her voice, the reedy pitch of barely veiled urgency, all feigned indifference to the topic, all give her away. She's been waiting for this, you know. Gearing up in steady increments so that the blow lands harder when it's thrown.

Isn't that stupid? And he couldn't even bother to stick around. What a joke… But I guess some people are like that, huh? Couldn't be me, she scoffed, jabbing her finger in your direction. You could see the yellow of her nails beneath the pock marks in her chopped, blue nail polish. And don't let it be you, either. The best thing you could ever do for yourself and someone else is leave. Don't cheat. Don't be the other woman. Just fucking—

The bubble bursts, and in that breaking, a truth is revealed to you in some strange, hangover-induced epiphany brought on by dehydration, malnutrition, and the terrific idea of going home with a man who has never once talked to you while being completely sober. It screams—first and foremost—you are an idiot, but beyond that, you really are your father's child, aren't you?

Lost amid your memory, the emergence of a forgotten fallow, it’s Bear who shakes you awake when he reaches for you after the silence sat for too long. Fingers touching, too tender and too rough at the same time, and the juxtaposition makes you quiver as it ploughs disquiet into your being.

Tears pebble in your lash line, threatening to spill over. You haven't cried in a long time and yet, yet—

His hand folds over your wrist, tight and unrelenting. Shackles against your bones. Grinding them into soft, fine powder.

“C’mon,” he slurs, pleads; tugging you closer as if distance is what makes you say these things to him and not the heavy, overwhelming scent of alcohol wafting off of his numb tongue. “You don't know what you're saying right now—”

His fingers tighten. The midnight scabs on his knuckles tear from the strain, the stretch. Blood wells under the slit that lifts from his broken, battered skin. Pebbles like a tear-drop on the wrinkle of his bruised knuckle, and then sheds itself free. Running down the yellow mess of moulted flesh until it meets the cliff edge of where his palm rests against yours.

“You don’t mean it. You can’t mean that. Stay with me, stay—”

The alcohol makes him sway where he sits, eyes upturned but focused inward, lost to thoughts and feelings and places unreachable to you. Ephemeral lines in jaded, blue sands. It slips, too, from between his fingers. Uncatchable to anyone but the flush under his skin, the slur in his words.

Can’t fix a broken man.

The motion dislodges the droplet and it waterfalls over his palm until his blood kisses the clean, unmarred skin of your hand.

He doesn’t notice the way he bleeds on you (through you, in you; drowns you in it, in him—): outside of a thready determination built on drunk devotion, he doesn’t seem to see much at all. Clouded. Overcast. Those hazy eyes regard you with a thin, untouchable distance. Filmed over and too far gone for you to pull him back—

(and you can’t help but wonder if he even notices you or if, in those unending crevasses, an icy, broken bergschrunds, the misshapen silhouette of you strikes a different chord to him; if these slurred hymnals are just a hollow orison for someone else in your stead.)

—so you stop trying. Let it sit, let it rot. Smell the infection in the air as the wound splits apart. Gangrenous and beyond palliative help.

Something must flicker across your face sharp enough to cut through the fog he drowns himself inside because his eyes widen slightly, and his hand tenses around your wrist. Tight. Unyielding.

As his fingers dig in over your pisiform, deep enough to bruise—to mark you once more with his stain, his touch—you’re struck by the sudden thought of brittleness. It’s not something you’d ever considered yourself as—delicate, fragile—but with the way he holds you now, not at all dissimilar to the way he held on last night, fingers loosely wrapped around your wrist as he used your joints as a stress ball to calm himself down, you feel vulnerable. Swallowed whole, caught.

What once felt like a comfort, a sense of security as you moulded yourself into an anchor point, a lighthouse on the sandy, dark shore, for him to find, to swim for amid the roaring waves dragging him down, now feels like dead weight.

For the first time since you've met him, you taste chlorine in the back of your throat. Feel the pull of the currents dragging you down.

You know all too well what it feels like to drown.

You pull away. He clings tighter.

“Bear, please—”

Please, you think. Please, please, please—

(If you keep stripping yourself bare, you'll be nothing but bones—)

He doesn't even notice. Nothing, it seems, will pull his fixed attention from every minuscule expression that flickers across your face as if the mere notion of weakness, of hesitancy, will give him reason to hold on just that much harder.

“Can't just give up on this—” the words are tangled in his throat, caught on the end of a snarl, and vicious. He tugs on you, pulling you closer. “On us.”

“There's no us, Bear.”

And it isn't a lie. Of course, it isn't.

There's an empty chasm between you both, void of any tangible substance. Whatever he thinks this is, it can't work. Won't. Not in the real world. Not outside of the bottom of a bottle.

You won't be his crutch. His bad habit. His midlife crisis amid a downward spiral.

You can't be.

Won't be.

(you will not be the other woman. you will not be your father's child.)

And it isn't remotely the same, you know. Bear's wife is—

Dead. Gone.

—and yet, this whole situation still makes you feel like a homewrecker even though the home you demand he returns to is empty.

Selfish, you think, but you can't even begin to know who you're referring to in this beautifully devastating moment. Bear, for chasing ghosts, drowning them in alcohol and bad choices and vices that end with bringing strange women back to his lonely hotel room just to feel more than the vicious bite of grief in his chest.

Or you, for pulling away from this drowning man because you're not strong enough to save him and yourself at the same time.

(or—something sneers—you just hate the idea of being like either of your parents, but what can you do when you've stolen all of their bad parts for your own?)

You think of the man in the bar. One hundred dollars to send him back home. Where he belongs.

(...he can't destroy himself like this. You'd know that, though, as his friend.

send him home, alright?)

“Go home,” you say, harsh and severe. All the things that your mother wished she said to him. Regurgitated words spat out by his feet because borrowed doctrines are you've ever known.

A fissure crackles across his expression, cutting through the fog. It's anger, bitterness, pain—some strange, fantastical amalgamation of the three—and it coalesces into broken defiance where it sits, clinging to the glossy grease around his brow, his nose.

It makes your fingers itch with the urge to soothe—to unfurl the wrinkles in his brow, to tuck this grown man close to your chest until the tension in the thick set of his shoulders liquifies in your hands, and he melts into malleable putty.

(Another trinket to collect dust on your mantle.)

You swallow it down—the salt and blood, and the pathetic pulse of your heart, and all. Hurt him, you think. Hurt him deeply. Deeper, still. Push him away and run. Run. Keep running until your legs give out, until your lungs collapse because if you don’t, if you don’t, you know you’ll stay with him until he throws you to wayside, until he wakes up one morning and decides that you are not enough compared to the big, wide world just outside his door; that your walls and your roof are not big enough for him—

“Please. Go home. Go home, Bear—”

Your words land like you knew they would, and he reels back for a moment, as if struck, but the anger, the twisted pain etched in the lines of his unkempt beard, his greasy brow, make stand firm. Unmoving.

You catch the acrid scent of gasoline on his skin when he leans forward, forcing himself back into your space with his chin dipped low, eyes blazing with a defiant inferno. His scarred, battle-battered hands drop to his splayed knees, gripping tight. Holding firm.

(Or holding himself back—)

His voice is a matchstick when he speaks. Smouldering embers sparking to life. Renewed with a sense of purpose you can't make sense of. What set him off? What made him flip—

(You're not worth it. You're not worth it—)

“M’not giving up on this.”

His jaw is slack. Laxed. The words slip out slow, languid. Curling with a touch of humid derision, mordant humour, at the idea that after all of this, everything (nothing, you think—nothing, nothing, nothing), you could just walk away unscathed.

If I burn, the crackle in his throat says, promises: then you're burning with me.

“Bear—”

“I'm not giving up on us.”

He leaves, and takes another part of you with him.

(You sever a part of yourself and leave it in the mouldering hotel room that still reeks of stale sweat, cheap whisky, and sex.)

The aftermath goes like this:

A tsunami of regret and indecision dredges up terrible, awful things—phantom memories and stains in the shape of fingerprints that pollute the inside of your psyche—ones that should have been left to rot at the bottom of your buried trenches. It makes leaving harder than it should have been considering the abrupt nature of this—whatever it is.

(Untitled. Unnameable. Unknowable.)

There's betting on losing dogs, and then there's this:

Pacing all your cards, all your coins, on one that wasn't even in the race.

One foot in, one foot out doesn't apply when Bear has never even stepped over the threshold. That notion roots itself in the scorched fibres of your chest, knotweed in your alveoli, as you scent liquor on his breath when he speaks. A cavernous distance grows between want and reality.

You thought you knew him. Learned and memorised all his hard lines, his soft valleys, the thick thatches of hair that dust his body like the dark depths of a riverbed; a nebula of loosely connected scar tissue—Orion's belt made of fine, silvery lines—and pock marks from blemishes and bumps born from the rich, enigmatic tapestry of his life beyond the mere sliver of you. Crows' feet in the corner of his eyes, but only when they're crested in pleasure, twisted in that tender sort of humour only comfort brings.

It takes you a weekend to map out the burly topography of a man, and only seconds to realise you know nothing about him outside of this rapacious intimacy.

And even though you want to feel like this was the right choice—because it is, it was—you can't seem to stem the sheer brutality in which regret tears through you as you stand alone in a desolate parking lot under the waning sun. A whimpering ending to a desolate beginning.

Was it loneliness that brought you here, or just the mundanity of fearing failure? It's these unanswerable questions, these skewed thoughts, that tumble over themselves, struggling to stay buoyant in the molasses of your sicky grey matter.

(Let them sink. Let them drown.)

These distant sentiments barely echo in the gaping vacuum of that is your mind. Untethered, whispering by as you stare, transfixed, at the broad strokes of pretty pastels in periwinkle, tangerine, and bluebonnet are rapidly consumed by the darkening sky that opens like a chasm above your head. The sight of it a little too close to the colours that danced in the aether when you both broke, finally, meeting somewhere in the middle, tangled webs. Broken people coming together in a cataclysm that was always, always, headed down a single path to devastation.

(The perfect conclusion to a story without a beginning.)

It's something you shouldn't think about. Let them sink. Let them drown—

This looping, knotted thread is a dangerous one to follow—the agony of watching Bear storm off (even after asking, demanding, that you let him drive you home; an offer you quickly refused) is still raw and gaping; a pulsating wound in the back of your throat—but you're brittle enough to want it to hurt, maybe. Chasing that unequivocal high only self-flagellation brings.

Masochism in failure. In heartbreak by your own design.

And it should hurt, right? This lonely climax (not with a bang, but a fizzle) should devastate you. Cut you to the core. Leave false starts on your bones. Scars on your ribcage. A meteor shower in milky white. Something tangible. Permanent.

But instead, it feels unfinished. More of a sudden paroxysm than a defining choice you've made. Concretely. Absolutely. It's a hollow win for your bruised ego. Your battered pride. It slinks, somewhere, in the depths of this renewed pain, and licks at the tender wound made when you pierced your chest and ripped your heart cleanout.

Threw it at the floor by his feet.

Quid pro quo, maybe. Or a desperate bid to rid yourself of the Bear-shaped hole now taking residence inside.

(It's fine, though. That pesky thing, all wrapped up tight in thick layers of duct tape, has never really felt like it belonged to you, anyway—)

It's all such a beautifully horrific panoply, you find. Paradoxical. Oxymoronic. Smothering and somehow claustrophobic at the same time. Being burnt alive and dying from hypothermia.

The cudgel of pain to your chest is white-hot and vicious, but there's a seismic polynya in the lavascape of sadness that drapes through the topography of your being like a sluice, and in that little island of ice sits the unrelenting sense of flat resignation.

You left Bear of your own free will, but in the jaded fibres of your being, you know it was all—

Inevitable.

And fuck—

(fuck, fuck, fuck—)

Was it? Was it all inexorable or are you just making up flimsy excuses for yourself?

Yes, you think. And then: no. Maybe. Maybe.

(you are your father's child—

and your mother's broken daughter.)

You want to cry, and scream, and break the pain against something willing to fight back, to cut you just as deeply as you hack at it, but all you have are fragmented memories swarming you in this vacant parking lot on the wrong side of Virginia Beach, and—

(don't let it in, don't—)

—you chase it, lure it all in as you compare the blue in the sleepy gloam to the colour of his eyes, and then—

Your back against a brick wall, his knuckles sticky with blood closing around the nape of your neck, pulling you closer. Closer. The wide expanse of his palm swallowing your wrist as he led you to his truck; then, heavy on your thigh the entire—ill-advised—drive to the Motel 6 down the road where you stand now, fragile, raw, and all alone.

When this all started, when you finally had the cobbled remains of Bear’s lucidity in your arms, the flat press of his attention against your jugular, you considered it to be a victory—

(a victory in amber)

—but hindsight is a cruel, mocking laugh in the back of your head. Twisting the knife deeper, severing the fraying threads that anchor you to yourself. With a sadistic glee it tells you that while you might have won the battle over the bottle, you lost the war (—abysmally, and without even the haze of a fever in your veins to numb the hollowness of your loss).

You just can’t fix a broken man, and you certainly can’t keep him afloat all on your own when you’re too busy trying not to drown yourself.

It's just that the weight of your shared brokenness was incompatible and insurmountable to the grief in Bear’s heart, but really. You just wonder if it was inevitable that everything you offered would be passed over in favour of numbed indifference at the bottom of a bottle. For someone, something, else. And while you might have been the one to leave first, but somewhere in the misplaced hurt inside of your chest threatening to collapse in on itself, folding into a black hole that devours all of your messy, ugly parts, you know that Bear was never really there, anyway.

That thought stings more than it should because you know, you know—

It’s just not made for us, baby.

—and maybe it’s all your fault for forgetting that inevitability in the first place.

(shame on me—)

The thread you warned yourself not to chase gets tangled around your throat, choking you with the very same line you should have stayed far away from. It feels like hollow cyclicity—a gluttonous ouroboros gorging on itself—when it all, eventually, leads back to the beginning.

Your fault, again, for trusting broken guidelines in the dark. For betting on losing dogs. For picking up another stray who already had a home. Another trinket to gawk at that ended up being chock full of arsenic, killing you with every touch.

But He's gone, now, despite the fire that raged in his eyes, he still left you here to burn on your own.

(inevitable—)

You should learn when to let go, you suppose, and fight the urge to bite your nails down to the wick just to taste blood in your mouth that isn't his.

For the most part, though, you’re fine.

You’ve always been a good liar (“terrible, actually,” Bear snorts, and it’s the closest you’ve ever come to seeing him roll his eyes. “Jesus, never play poker if I'm not around—”), and especially to yourself, so after a moment of self-reflection in the form of a scalding bath and a purging cry in your car as you shoddily cut the Joe Graves-shaped cancer from your aching heart before it can metastasise and infect you further, you come out of it all standing, somehow.

It might be the pastiche of indifference you slip into; a facsimile of the one, jaded and so bone achingly tired, that fell over you when you stumbled out of the bathroom, ready for something more only to find a man half-gone already to a bottle in the span of a few moments alone with his thoughts.

Regardless of what it is, it works (—in shades, and only as long as you cling so tightly to anger that your fingers bleed and your joints ache—), and you let the familiarity of your unpractised trot to some gnarled finish line lead you forward.

A clean break, you think (—hope: plead, bargain; wishing so hard on every eyelash that falls, every eleven you come across so that something, someone, listening might cradle the delicate splinters in their arms and nurse this whim, this want, into fruition), and you'll be fine. Fine.

You have to be.

But the thing is this:

Despite your best efforts to put some sense of distance between you and the heartache that must be, at least a little bit, on par with being gutted, a clean break is never clean, is it?

Case in point—

Thinking about him makes you bleed, and you think about him constantly.

(Regret, then, is a wellspring in which the pain drinks and you didn't know a body could thirst this much.)

And it's made even worse when you realise just how bullish a man like Joe Graves can be.

Maybe it's the thought of everything that had built up between you shattering into pieces that awakens this sense of urgency within him. Clinging, perhaps, to the only form of comfort he knows. The only one who toughed it out—in part, due to your employment obligation; the rest? an unresolved saviour complex when it comes to the people even a contrarian wouldn't place a bet on. Maybe.

(Probably. Undoubtedly.

You stopped trying to find the reason why you kept picking up the strays who always bite you in the end.)

Whatever the reason, Bear is persistent. Relentless.

He makes it Wednesday (you'd left him behind Sunday evening—day of the Sabbath, you learn; how fucking ironic) before his campaign starts.

It's forty-six missed calls, half a dozen texts (because he doesn't like texting—he likes talking. Face to face. No fallacies, no bullshit), and thirty voicemails (twenty-seven of which are drunken ramblings you don't even bother to listen to, and the rest—

Pick up. We need to talk.

Listen, I—

I fucked up. I fucked everything up—

Delete. Delete. Delete.

What are you supposed to do with any of that, anyway?)

The crux of the issue that Bear seems to miss swims in ethanol and leaves behind a five-minute voicemail filled with slurred I miss you's amid a background chorus of a rowdy bar. Then, a woman's voice—a woman who isn’t you—urging him back for more shots.

You can imagine how the rest of that night unfolded.

(You wonder if the word meant for you—I miss you—was still on his tongue when he followed her back.)

It's your fault (again; always) in the end because while you don't answer him—neither text, nor call; all voicemails deleted—you can't bring yourself to block him, either.

You let it sit somewhere in the murky middle. Untouched but looked at. Longed for.

It would be so easy to just give in. To let Bear back into your life—properly this time, maybe—and to take him up on those slurred promises made at two in the morning about coffee shops on the boardwalk, and breakfast at the Gulfstream, and movies and dinner, and talking until three in the morning, fucking in the back seat of his pick-up truck—

But that's the thing about yearning, isn't it?

Everything seems sweeter when you want it bad enough.

So, you drown yourself in him. Stand as close to the fire as you can without burning alive.

Dousing yourself in the scent of ethanol cleaner. Clinging to broken pinky promises. Thinking about peanut butter and bacon staining your fingers. Prying information from rotting timber, and keeping the saprophyte that falls off the wood in your pocket for safekeeping. Filling space on a drumroll because you talk too much, anyone ever tell you that?

(ad infinitum.)

Taping the ugliest bible verses to the back of your eyelids just to get closer, to feel closer, only to come to the realisation that you have no stake in religion to care about the deeper meaning behind it all. Metaphors and imagery are hollow when they mean nothing at all.

There's no comfort, no succour, to be found in the thin pages.

(You roll them up and smoke them instead. Easier to digest that way, you find.

Bear would probably hate it, and that alone balms the hurt some. Marginally, infinitesimally, because nothing can cauterise this gaping hole in your chest so you might as well fill it up with paper mache instead. Origami cranes with how much you hate him miss him need him want him written on the inside.)

You ache. Moulder. But you let it all rot inside of you until it's a congealed mess of putrefying memories and the moulted remains of the yearning you kept locked in shackles; the one that keeps biting, gnawing at the limbs of its cage to free.

It's easier to let it all decay together in a controlled space so that you can bisect the necrosed mass in a single go. Sever the limb to save the body. It's a mantra you repeat as you call in sick to work over and over again.

The flu, you say, and if the sniffle you give is from crying, and the cough from the weed you've been smoking all morning (blue dream, the shaggy-haired kid tells you with a nod; adds: the good shit), well. No one—especially your shitty boss and his shitty work ethic—has to know. You balm the hurt in a way that makes you feel good, smoothing it all over with trashy reality television (though, the Japanese dating show you end up dozing off to is pretty good, admittedly), and junk food.

Moving on—even some sad, pathetic facsimile of it—helps. Routines forged in wilful avoidance take the edge off of the livewires inside of your body, nerves overstimulated and burning up with a fever much too hot, too vicious, for you to palliate with home remedies.

And so, you throw yourself into it. Become a human battering ram against the ghosts in your head.

Things quickly become more of a coping mechanism than a potential, but that's fine. It's all fine. It'll work in the long run until the bruises that line your flesh fade along with the want and the hope, and the terrible memories, too.

(Terrible, in the way only a desperate, all-consuming one-sided love can be.)

All of it up in flames, in smoke.

You burn through an ounce in retaliation while watching his name flicker across your screen, and then spend an hour googling whether or not weed is really addictive (it isn't, but the routine, the habit, can be), before deciding that this whole affair is stupid, anyway.

It's a carousel of self-pity, spite, and masochism that feels like it might never end. Your efforts to palliate the sickness amount to a week of paid sick time spent watching a slew of old romantic dramas on repeat, and ignoring the string of texts that pour through (talk to me, let me fix this, let me—). All voicemails are immediately deleted before you can even hear the hitch in his voice.

It's duct tape over a gaping wound. Drifting aimlessly along Lethe, careless and indifferent, but all the while, desperately reaching down and cupping water into your palm for a sip that never seems to quench the thirst in the back of your throat.

You think you could drink until you're just standing in a dry riverbed and still feel parched. Effloresced by your own hand.

(as usual. as always—)

But this wound is still raw, still tender, even beneath the tape.

Ignore it. Ignore it—

(—before the edges begin to tear. Cloved down the middle.)

Another buffer is born when you get a text message from your boss—u comin in tmrrw?—and realise you can't avoid it, work, forever.

The prospect of going back on Friday evening—tomorrow, you suppose (the days have been slipping like molasses through your spread fingers)—makes you nervous.

You're not ready to see Bear.

But more than that (deeper than it, too), you’re not ready to see Bear unaffected by all of this. Sitting in his usual spot, in their chair he barely fits in, ordering the same drink over and over and over again.

Moving on, too—in his own way. Meeting someone else.

(His horoscope holds no punches when it tells you a past relationship may re-enter your life, which may open your eyes to a world of new experiences—)

It isn't as if he usually pairs celibacy with his whisky, and with the plethora of ignored messages (read receipt turned off), unanswered phone calls, and deleted voicemails, you know it's inevitable for him to give up. To get the hint—whatever that might be. Move on, maybe?

(get your shit together and chase this properly, Bear, jesus christ—)

You consider calling in again, but without any paid sick days left at your disposal, you know you can't afford to. So, you swallow it.

(And if it takes a little longer than usual to get ready for work, then so be it.)

Even with all of the false bravado you can scrape together come Friday, your nerves are frayed. Raw. The anxiety rolls off of you in waves, noticeable enough that even the regulars loitering outside (the ones who usually try and bum smokes off of any passersby, yourself included) offer you a cigarette.

(Politely turned down, but fuck—fuck—you wish you took it.)

The first hour into your shift is spent trying to pretend you're not aware of the way your roaming eyes skirt to the door in thirty-second intervals. Traitors. Or the involuntary flinch each time the door opens.

It would be easier to get lost in the familiarity of this desolate dive bar on the fringes of town, and so, you do.

(Try to, anyway.)

Immersing yourself in the routine of it all—the motions of pouring drinks, sizing the newcomers up (profiling their personage down to a drink and a random idiosyncrasy); the astringent scent of alcohol, the mild barley and hops; the noise of hushed conversations lulling between the static rumble of the television (sports, per usual).

The clock ticks down the seconds, the minutes, hours. You pour drinks. Clock the local gossip. Listen to the patter of condensation dripping into the tin bucket beneath the hole in the roof. In between the threadbare stirrings of routine, you find yourself waiting with dread gnawing at your insides until they're shredded and raw, pulsing ligaments burning with the fever of infection.

But it's moot. All of it.

He doesn't come back to the bar.

Where you expect to see his broad shoulders slouched over the counter, head hanging low over his steady accumulation of shot glasses (a drinking challenge with only one participant; his demons the spectators), the seat he usually occupies remains empty.

And maybe you're idealistic and stupid and wet behind the ears, but a part of you expected him to. To wander up to the counter with roses and chocolate and sobriety etched into the Neptune blue glow of his eyes, and to pick you, to choose you, but—

A fairytale.

The box on the counter—complaints—$5—is picked up by some wayward frat boy, and the mocking laughter that follows makes you think of cobalt blue, and peanut butter and bacon burgers in the empty parking lot near the beach, watching the endless midnight black ocean rock against the sandy shore. Talking. Talking. Talking.

Everything. Nothing. All the things in between.

You told him about college—failed the first semester, and then my dad… well. Anyway, had to drop out for a bit. But. I went back. Stupid, I know, and it doesn't matter but—

His hand falls on your arm, fingers a little greasy from the sweet potato fries, the ones he kept sneaking from your pile when he thinks you aren't looking, and he says:

It matters to you.

And it did, but only because it was something your dad mentioned a long time ago—I'd be proud if you followed in my footsteps—and despite everything he'd ever done, his attention, his affection, was all you'd ever wanted.

Yeah, you'd said, and stared out at the vat of blue until your eyes burned. Yeah, I guess so.

Well, he had peanut butter staining the corner of his mouth when you blinked the sting from your eyes, and turned to him. What do you wanna do?

Nothing. Everything.

Your dad once picked you up from practice, hands tight around the steering wheel. He filled you in about his day (stupid fuckin' guy from upstate came down and bought all the houses we were fixing to sell), complained about your mother (god, you know, that woman didn't even tell me what school to pick you up from? Said I should know where my daughter goes to school, as if I'm not working all damn day to keep you fed, and—), and gave you the biggest piece of advice you'd ever get:

"Look, no job is better than real estate. All that crap you think you want to do? Not important. All you need is four walls and a roof, and that's it. The rest is secondary."

(If that was true, why weren't you enough for him? Why weren't your four walls and roof enough to keep him?)

A shrug. I don't know. I've never been good at anything. You think of bruised knees. Scraped skin. Chasing a car, a dream, that never once slowed down. Can't even run right, it seems.

I can teach you. He clears his throat when you look at him, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand twice but somehow misses the dollop of peanut butter tangled in his beard. M’used to training men, I'm sure I can whip you into shape. Teach you how to run. Put you through the wringer until you come out sprinting on the other side.

"Teach me how to swim instead."

The bark of laughter he let out was cut off when you held your pinky up.

His brows bounced, incredulous. "Really?"

"A Taurus always keeps their promise."

"Christ's sake," he shakes his head, and you count the lines on his forehead when he turns, and rubs his fingers against his temple so hard, you wonder if he's trying to chisel through his skull to get at where it hurts the most. "I might not even be a Taurus."

"When were you born?"

His tongue pokes out from between his teeth, chin dropping to his chest when he huffs. You watch the way his shoulders shake, the flesh softening around his neck when he dips it low, and wonder if this is what it was like to yearn.

His eyes spark, Neptune blue, when he looks up. He says nothing, but holds his pinky up to yours, the digit swallowing yours whole.

It's a promise. He squeezes your hand in three pulses. One. Two. Three. You think you might get lost in the canyons that keep dividing inside of his eyes.

"Bet you were born in April."

"Not even close." He grins, all teeth, and drops your hand. Motions to the fries spilling over your console with his chin. "Finish up."

"Oh, did you even leave any for me? Thought you ate them all."

"Watch it."

Your stomach churns at thoughts, the memories. Plagued by him, it seems. So tantalisingly out of reach, and yet—your phone vibrates in your pocket; another voicemail left for you to listen to in your car and pretend that this whole thing is fine—so close.

He's everywhere, it seems. The scent of this place makes you think of him, and the stench of sickness—

Every square inch brings back some reminder of him.

When he got too trashed the first few visits and stumbled into the washroom. His bulk falls into the cheap door frame, and sends the ugly photo of what might have been the boardwalk crashing the floor. His call of: take it outta my tab when it shattered into pieces.

(You didn't. You hated that picture, anyway.)

When he knocked over his shot of tequila when you told him you thought he'd look really handsome in a beanie—a touch too bold, high off of the ethanol that leaked from his pores—and the rubescent smear over the bridge of his nose that followed. The ruddy stain on the counter—nail polish, you think, from that time a group of bridesmaids stumbled in after a wedding on the beach, and used the washroom to freshen up—matches the shade of his blush.

You spend an hour before closing scrubbing the counter down until your fingers are cracked and dry and burning from the chemicals you douse on the cheap, aged wood. It doesn't come out. Nothing you do will ever make the table unsticky. It's too far gone.

Like him. Like—

"Whisky," a man barks, slapping a dollar bill down on the stain. "Two shots."

Four walls and a roof, right? Right. Right. Right.

The walls here bleed condensation from the humidity outside, and the roof leaks when it rains. Always. It's patched up with duct tape and pipe dreams.

(Like you—)

The box on the counter catches his attention, rheumy eyes skimming the words. He scoffs. "Funny. Make me a drink worth a tip, and maybe I'll—"

"You know what?" You snap, throwing the wet cloth down with a splat that sends droplets pelting across his abdomen. There's a vindictiveness in seeing the splatter on his smooth, unwrinkled shirt.

Your eyes sting from the bleach, the lemon cleaner. Pebbled tears in your lash line threaten to spill over, but you swallow it all down. You won't cry. Not now. Not anymore.

Your hands twitch, an aborted motion to scour the wetness from your lashes, but you stop it in time. Curl your fingers into fists instead.

(And stupidly, nonsensically, you have the sudden, passing regret over washing your hands of the blood he'd spilled on your skin.)

"I don't work here."

"Since when?"

"Now. Get your own whisky, and take your shitty tip, and shove it up your ass—"

Quitting your only source of income certainly isn't the wisest decision you've ever made—but you've never been wont to make good ones, anyway, and so, you think it's all perfectly fine, considering.

Considering.

If anything, it's better than waiting around for the inevitable collapse of this shaky, patchwork foundation of paper-mache you cobbled together (reinforced with pipe dreams) to come crumbling down around you when Bear wandered in.

(If he ever would—

Fuck. You hope he does. Hope he doesn't.

Get better. Come back—)

You sit in your car at the end of your shift—the very last one after several odd years of growing roots down into the worn floorboards, and keeping more secrets about the occupants in this town than you care to admit—and just—

Breathe.

Sort of.

It's twisted in a way that makes you entirely too aware of what everyone would think if they knew about it. So, you cup this little secret between the palms of your hands, and cradle it to your chest, only exposing it to the outside world when things become too much. It's easier to say you count to ten—in, out, in, out—than to admit that your methods of self-soothing, of quelling the visceral sense of anxiety from pinballing around inside your guts like a marble, is to lean back, close your eyes, and pretend that you're back in the deep end of the swimming at the local chapter of a YMCA.

Drowning, of course.

Or some fictive version of it.

It comes to life in smeared yellow against hazy blue. A cacophony of muted sounds in the background—exultant shrieks of children, splashes in the distance, the low chatter of garbled conversation—is all you can hear in your underwater sanctuary, but only just. Noise is distorted and strange. A warbled mimicry of noise.

Your world is pressed into a cerulean marble, untouchable and inescapable. You linger in the centre, floating aimlessly in stagnation.

Down here, nothing matters. Everything is dissolved in the heavy chlorine that saturates the cold waters, and whatever resilient pieces remain sink low to the pool floor, scattered around the yellow goggles just within arm's reach.

You sink with them. Your thoughts become liquid; mercury slinking around your head. Intangible. Nonsensical. And above all else—silent.

Or they're supposed to be.

But even down here where nothing can touch you, where no one noticed you haven't surfaced in ages, your thoughts are carried by the lulling currents. Saved from your murky grey matter, from the sap that traps them in the mouth of a pitcher plant, they buoy to the surface, unmoored now. Free to scream at you in whispers.

You think of Bear.

Or rather, you think about not thinking about Bear.

About other things. And nothing—forced white noise. Static. What you're going to do now that you don't have a job. The scabs on his bloodied knuckles. No. Work, maybe. Finishing up that degree you promised yourself you'd get, if only to fill some absent void in your chest—or a futile obligation to a man who forgot your birthdays. Who spelled your name wrong on holiday cards—on the rare occasions he ever bothered to send them.

Other things. Other things—your faucet is leaking. You'll need to call the property manager to fix it. You need to get gas, too. Groceries.

Faintly, you catch the musk of his cologne still clinging to your passenger seat when you breathe in. Hold it, count to ten. It makes you remember the warmth of his humid breath on your cheek when he leaned in close, tapping your console as he pointed out your CHECK ENGINE light was on. Had been, you confessed sheepishly, for a few weeks up to that point.

Stupid pothole, you grumbled around the electricity running down your spine when his arm brushed yours as he leaned back with a derisive snort.

You caught the headiness of white oak, musk, when he turned his face to you, decidedly unamused by your answer, and flatly told you that you were driving around in a death trap.

Things not even on its last leg—it's in the damn grave.

Whatever, you shrugged. I'll just hit another pothole on the way home and it'll turn off.

Jesus Christ—

He didn't smell terrible. Faded cologne from a few days ago. Something woodsy. Cedar, maybe. Leather, smoke, pine. Sweat from the unrelenting humidity. Loam clinging to his skin. Spiced rum around his collar when he spilled his drink down his chin (you, eagerly, hungrily watching the amber droplet roll down the length of his neck—). He always seems to smell like he had been working in a thick, taiga forest in the dead of winter. Cindersap. Evergreen. Sweat-soaked leather. Chopped wood.

It congeals in your senses. Glueing to soft tissue, embedding itself in your skin. Permanent, unshakeable.

Unwashed sheets shouldn't be appealing. Motel shampoo. Cheap soap. The muted smell of old, stale cigarettes.

And yet, in this marbleised world, you think of it.

Of his skin, and the way it feels against yours. The slight sheen of grease along his nose when it nudges the soft slope of your neck. The rough drag of his beard over your pulse. Wry curls that end up on your tongue after he'd kiss you.

Any plans on shaving?

He dragged his cheek over your collarbones, eyes lidded, heavy. None at all. That a deal breaker?

You hold your breath until your lungs start to quiver, to ache; until you're dangling precariously on the verge of hypoxia with ink blots splashing across your vision in a garish Rorschach (they're all butterflies. with knives. what does that say about me, doc?). Phosphenes scatter in a nebula of colour. Your throat constricts around nothing, empty. Empty. The urge to swallow follows on the coattails of a pitifully fleeting euphoria. Temporal and untouchable, but you still reach out, grabbing and grasping with straining fingers because you'll hate yourself forever if you don't try. Scrambling, desperately, to catch cosmic dust on the tips of your fingers. To imbue your disjointed cracks with the chemical makeup of a Magellanic cloud until your broken parts burn incandescent. Kintsugi in cuts, scraps, of Andromeda.

But for as much as you want to shatter your lungs into infinitesimal pieces, and scatter them across the universe, your body has a failsafe against stupidity.

It forces you to gasp, gulping down thin, crisp air until you feel the burn in your chest from overexertion.

You open your eyes, and wish the world around you was still draped in teal and hazy yellow. That you could taste chlorine in the back of your throat. It's a brutal awakening to find a gossamer of silken midnight draped over the parking lot in the back of the dive bar. Empty, barren, save for yourself and the chef. A man you guess you'll never see again.

Soft, crushed ochre smears a hazy ring in the east. The dawning sun of a new day.

Leaning against the old leather of your car, your eyes cut to the console briefly. The CHECK ENGINE light is off. You made Bear groan, out loud, when you hit a pothole on the freeway and it flicked off, like you knew it was. Problem solved. More duct tape over what is probably something wrong with your engine (probably dented the filter in your catalytic converter, Bear grumbled, and you nodded along, pretending like you knew what that meant).

A light catches your eye. Your phone buzzes on the dashboard, screen illuminated in the reflective surface of your window.

You could pretend you were getting a call from RAEB if you tried hard enough. Answered it, maybe, and feigned ignorance while you chatted away to him like nothing happened. Like you sometimes don't try to drown yourself on land.

You reach for it, fingers tingling at the last vibrations before the screen cuts out, and bring it close.

It takes a second, but the voicemail icon pops up in the notification bar beside a text from your friend sent hours earlier begging you to come out next weekend (haven't seen you in forever okay?? come out w us!!).

You don't know why he keeps trying. Why he's so persistent over something that is, quite decidedly, nothing.

The icon taunts you. You hate seeing it—always have. It can't be swiped away. Can't be hidden. It irks you somewhat, seeing this little symbol.

Make it go away—

You shouldn't. Not when your insides are this raw, this fractured. Broken. But you turn your phone over in your hands for a moment, mood mulish and itching for something. A fight, maybe. Something to be angry about, justifiably. To vent your frustrations.

You tap it before you really think things through, watching as it dials VOICEMAIL and the automated message pops up after a ring.

Please enter your password—

You have one new message. To play your messages, press one—

It starts shaky—like he's moving. You can hear the shuffle of his body, the rasp of his shirt. A door slams. He huffs.

Look, uh. I'm not… I'm not good at this kind of thing. I was hoping—hoping we could talk… but. I guess I, uh. Anyway—

It goes quiet. You reach up to hit SEVEN on the keypad, delete the message like all the others, but a noise stops you. The screen hums under your finger.

I've been thinking lately. About a lot of things. The team, myself. You. I made—some bad calls. Got some good men…uh, into some trouble. The kind of trouble you… don't walk away from.

It made me think about Rip. I told you about him, right? In the—the motel. Rip is—Rip was… important to me. To us. Saved my life. In Iraq. Mosul. Bullet nearly hit me but somehow, he pulled me back just in time, took the bullet instead. Right in his stomach. And you know, he, uh—he huffs. It sounds like a laugh, but one he's choking on. He got right back up and took the bastard out. Just—wasted him. I owe him my life. Always have. It's muffled, as if he has his hand pressed to his mouth, keeping the words in. Should have saved him, but I couldn't. Couldn't do a damn thing to help him. I let him get that bad and I knew. I fucking—I knew. I saw it. Watched him spiral. And now—shit. Now I'm—uh, talking to your voicemail at four in the morning—

You think you catch what am I doing before the line cuts out.

Fog settles in the midmorning dawn. You lean against the headrest, clutching your phone, and try not to think at all.

(wash, rinse, repeat)

The hole in your chest, filled in with clay and papier-mache, crumbles under the seaspray.

What am I doing. It stays with you.

These flimsy excuses become a house of cards.

It doesn't surprise you much at all when they wobble, falling on top of you.

It's his name flashing across your screen—just Bear—as you lay in bed days later, pretending not to think about him that starts it all.

(again, again, again)

This is all a cruel sort of timing, you think, and feel the harsh thud of your heart so strongly against your rib cage that you wonder if the silly thing might break through them yet.

You shouldn't answer. Know, without any hint of uncertainty, that Bear has the potential to pull you back in—fish to a pretty, glimmering lure—and that the moment you acquiesce to one thing, others will immediately follow in rapid succession, much too quick for you to keep up with.

There will be no stopping the deluge once it breaks.

And yet—

What did you expect?

The words thrown back into your face echo in the small of your flat as the walls around you wobble, teetering on the edge of collapse.

Like most things when it comes to him.

After the second buzz, one that sends a thrill through your spine that you refuse to give attention to, you hesitantly press your finger against the green answer key and slowly bring the phone up to your face, inches away from your nose, before stopping. Abruptly.

You can handle Bear at a distance, you think, and so, deciding better than to have him murmur directly into your ear, you quickly tap the speaker button, and stammer out a muzzy greeting.

“...Bear?”

There's a sharp inhale that threads through the speaker, and you know, all at once, that he hadn't expected you to pick up. Was, instead, ready to meet and reluctantly embrace the cool, blithe distance of your voicemail.

“You answered,” he hedges, and you wonder if the wariness in his tone means anything deeper. “I didn't think you would.”

Despite his honesty, there are shades of derision tainting the gruff timbre.

“I wasn't going to,” you volley back, matching the fickleness of his misplaced scorn with your own.

“Then why did you?”

“You know why,” you admit quietly.

No one is around to see your boundaries crumble. To watch as the cards you kept so close to your chest dip once, quick enough for him to glimpse them, to see what is tucked in the palm of your hand.

In that loneliness, you find a sense of freedom that you had been missing. One tinged in the bitter coat of nostalgia.

It feels too much like those nights spent arguing about the meaning behind the perfect pour (and why yours would always be trash), and showing him abysmal creations on Instagram in a thinly veiled attempt to make him see that you weren't, objectively, the worst at it.

Back when you held the patchwork remains of your bruised, duct tape heart out over the countertop that never seemed to ever be clean as an offering to a man who bluntly looked down into the nozzle of his bottle instead.

He huffs a little, then. Put-off, maybe, by the distance you pitch when giving in is always just within reach. “I don't see the problem.”

“Well, yeah…” you mutter, shuffling in bed to get comfortable. You drag your knee to your chest, as the other stretches out in the sheets, and lazily wrap your arm around your shin, fingers digging into your flesh. Bruising, biting. It centres you, this fleeting pain. “You wouldn't, but I'll have you know—”

It's comfortable. The thought is a battering ram, one that hits hard, vicious, and dredges up the realisation of just how much you missed this. And just how easy this all is with him, even know when your heart is in tatters and you can hear the slur in his words (though, that might be his usual mumble—the man is hard to understand on a sober day, what with his penchant to grit words out between his teeth, as if he needs to tear them to shreds, to chew on them, before forcing them out), the normalcy in all of this, or as normal as this abnormal situation can get, is a bludgeon to your resolve.

“...what, huh? What'll you have me know?”

You'll get suckered back in again, but this time, all the way to the event horizon. Inescapable.

“You know, Bear.”

It's flimsy when he huffs, and sounds too much like relief when he growls: “Then why fight it?”

“I don't want to talk about this right now.”

The line goes still, but you catch the hitch in his throat all the same. “We should. I can fix this. We can fix this. You can't just decide—”

You can, you think, and drop your forehead to your knee, letting the phone slide down the valley of thigh and stomach where it comes to rest on the clothed crease of your hip bone. A prison. Your body is the cage.

Not being able to see him gives you some sense of power back, and you reach for it. Needing to wield something decisive and distant before the rough timbre of his voice, his desperation, scoured your resolve into thin powder.

“ Just give up, Bear. It's over. There's nothing to fix because there was nothing there to begin with.”

“Nothing there, huh? Is that what you think?”

Overtaking the bitter resignation is anger. A bone-deep fury that simmers to the surface, dredged up from the bottom of the bottle you thought you lost him to. You can hear it in the sharp breath he takes, the little growl he lets out.

“Fuck that,” his viciousness stabs into your defences like a battering ram. Unrelenting, dizzying. You make to step back, but he fights you on it. Keeping you close. Blazing anger so hot, it nearly burns you. “You waltz into my life, chasin’ after me and then, what? You just decide it's too much for you? I warned you. I fucking warned you, didn't I ?”

“I—I know. I just—”

What, you wonder. What? Because was it ever as simple as wanting a hurting man to be a little less lonely in an empty pub?

It's moments like this that make you contend with your self-sabotage, the unmaking of yourself (morality, compassion, kindness) by your own hands. Your complicity in all of this is staggering, and suddenly the idea of a clean break feels vile.

How could you drop a man you spent months pursuing, expecting him to change overnight?

Your faults, and flaws, soften the part of you that wants to run, fleeting into the dark to avoid the consequences of your actions.

It takes two to tango, and the idiom bludgeons through the headache like a battering ram.

“I guess I just wanted to help, at first. To be your friend. You seemed so—” lonely. Sad. One bad day away from slipping too deep into the bottle that he couldn't climb out again.

His laugh is ugly, biting. “What? Pathetic? A sorry fucking drunk—”

“Alone.”

It quiets him, this soft confession.

“Can't save everyone,” is what he says after an agonising beat, and you think of the priest he tore into viciously for uttering the same sentiment. Bruising with his words, his tone, instead of his fists. Creating walls from the craters it left behind.

“Doesn't mean you can't try.”

“Wasted your time, don't you think?”

“No.” The word is immediate. Forceful. “With you? For you? No. But Bear. The thing you don't get, what you don't understand, is that you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. And maybe it's selfish, and honestly, I know it is, but you always risk your own life whenever you try to save someone from drowning, and I know I'm not enough to help you.”

He's quiet. “Reading up on being a lifeguard?”

“In my spare time.”

A huff. It's barely a ghost of laughter. “Yeah. Yeah. Well. Hope it all works out for you.”

You can imagine the grim twist of mouth as he says it. The downward pitch to his chin, dipping in his misery.

“I hope the same for you.” You whisper, and it feels like finality.

Moments ago, the thought might have brought a sense of bitter relief to you, but now it just feels sickeningly like loss all over again.

“Shit,” Bear grouses suddenly, and then draws a sharp breath once more. “I miss you,” he rasps on the exhale.

You don't know why he would, but you understand, maybe, because you do, too.

(So much, so much, so much—)

“I miss you, too, Bear.”

The tentative words seem to shake him, and all at once, he's commandeering again. Authoritative, in that way only he can be.

“I'm getting better,” he rumbles. “I gotta. For the—for the team—”

It's the wrong thing to say, though, and he seems to realise it midway through. A quick course correction comes with a rushed, and for me, too, that reminds you too much of all the times you heard this same thing from behind the counter as you topped up their third, fourth, fifth glass.

You know better than to believe in this hollow gospel, this midnight epiphany, and for the most part, you don't. It's all empty words. False promises from a prophet, spoken as a defence mechanism against the ugly reality of what happens when people catch on to their bad habits.

But it's Bear.

Out of everyone who murmured the same phrase in that exact tone, you believe in him just a little bit more than the rest.

(Stupid, stupid, stupid—)

It's his intense tenacity. That gritty determination seems ingrained within his very being. Inseparable.

You wonder when you started divining truths from its scripture.

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

“Bear—” It's late, and your thoughts are just running themselves aground. Turning into a tangled, indecipherable mess. “I need to get some sleep. Can we—can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? Will you answer?”

It's deserved, of course, but you know that particular knife twist hurts him just as much as it does yourself, and whatever little vindication he finds from it is swallowed, quickly, by regret.

“I just…want to talk to you.”

You imagine that somewhere between the lines, the things unsaid, sits the glaring truth of his sudden devotion, his obsession:

there's no one else.

(never anyone's first choice—)

“Sure. Okay, yeah, we can. We can talk. You're—” you need distance. You need space. A minute, maybe, to sort through the ugly thoughts making webs in the back of your head. “You're my friend, Joe. We're… we can be friends, again.”

“Friends?”

It's not what he wants. That much is clear by the threadiness in his tone, but at two in the morning and with your thoughts liquifying into syrup, it's all you can offer him, all you're willing to give.

Friends. It makes you remember the limbo you sat in before, the murk and heartache of watching him ply himself with overpriced liquor and then stumble out the door, sometimes with company but most often, all alone and with just ten minutes to spare before closing. The yearning. The pining. The want that made you feel sick to your stomach with guilt for some unseen, unknown woman back home.

(“Dead. She's dead—”)

It sickens you even more to think about that. The ring he kept, the sadness that draped over his shoulders in a swath of agony. The one he didn't take off, not even for you. The warning signs were there.

You just ignored them all.

Friends, you murmur again, and wonder where, in all this, you went wrong. The beginning, maybe, when you looked at him and couldn't bring yourself to look away. Friends. We can be friends, Bear.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Best friends,” you echo back, hollow and thin. “With matching bracelets and everything—”

“Thought it was a tattoo?”

“That, too.”

“Okay,” he acquiesces quietly, but you can hear the threads of obstinacy in his voice when he says it. The combativeness, the steadfast refusal to fully submit, rears in the things he doesn't say, pitching bivouacs in his tone. This isn't over, it says. You're not over. “Friends.”

It's scornful, and you hate the way it blisters under your skin. Burning hot, the same feverish delirium that turned you incandescent with just his touch.

Everything about Bear tells you to relent. Submit.

It would be so easy to just give in.

And the thing is:

You want to. Desperately, achingly.

His certainty, his acuity in all of this, has a way of dismantling your sense of reason. Or, at the very least, your rationale for why you're keeping him at a distance. It's not just being diametrically opposed, though; this is the unerring knowledge that your complicity needs to be curbed. That you are, in small parts, responsible for this barren husk of a man. For aiding and abetting in his spiral, sure, but mostly for expecting him to greet you with sobriety when he woke up, as if spending an entire weekend between your thighs was enough to negate all the demons clawing at the walls of his skull. Scarring bone. Chiselling into marrow.

Simply put: you're not enough. You knew this, and yet—

Pursued, persisted. Laughably, even echoed the same words you repeat now to a man on the verge of going nuclear under the pressure of his rage, his grief.

It's impossible to make a levee out of skin and bones, and no matter how much Bear might want to try—maybe has tried with his late wife, with a bottle, with vice, with bloodied, bruised knuckles and a chip on his shoulder deeper than a canyon—it's just not feasible.

Too bad, you think, that this bone-weary epiphany didn't come sooner. That you didn't kick him out when you realised those beautiful valleys in his eyes were really just trenches.

Hindsight, of course.

(How were you supposed to know that the rough growl in his timber wasn't a security blanket against the world but just the aftereffects of inhaling too much artillery fire?)

You should have, though. Your mum was a how-to manual on the things to avoid. She could channel wisdom directly from a man's marrow, and you—made in her spitting (vitriolic) image—seem to have learned nothing at all about divination.

And you—forgotten ilk—can barely tell the difference between a portend and good fortune when you sift through clumps of barley tea at the bottom of your cup.

For all of her stolen wisdom, you make a promise to yourself that you won't tear yourself into pieces just to make a safety net for him out of your flesh. Or set yourself on fire to keep him warm.

(Not anymore, anyway—)

But then, cruelly, viciously, you wonder if you ever really helped him at all, or if this is just a manifestation to assuage your own guilt. Doubtless, you find. What have you done for him that wasn't, in some part, mutually beneficial? All this time, you've been gambling equivalence with a broken man, and then ran the moment those jagged pieces cut you.

And maybe a little bit of this hesitancy is rooted in fear as well. A fickle thing you try to ignore in favour of something that makes you seem more altruistic than you really are, but still lurks in the shadows, in the words you, too, won't say.

Things like:

He's never met you sober. Not completely. And certainly not in a way that counts.

Each interaction is marred with some form of a buffer between you both. Distance shaped in sips of his (fourth, fifth) beer; a shot of whisky.

What if he doesn't like what he finds sober?

You heard enough jokes at the bar about falling in love drunk and then waking up sober. If this is that, you don't know how you'd regain any sense of ground back.

The precipice you clawed your way up to is endlessly steep, treacherous, and yet: you still let yourself fall. Still took the risk in opening your hand just to show him your still-beating heart.

Return to the sender, you think a touch hysterically, deliriously.

In the suffocating silence, his voice rings out. Quiet, rough, as if his vocal cords were made of charred wood, smouldering embers, and not warm, wet tissue. It's just your name, but the sound of it seems to drag you down to yourself, if only in increments.

“You good?” He asks when you hum noncommittally in response.

With your forehead braced against the slope of your knee, it feels like bowing your head in a confessional when you whisper, paper soft, “I'm tired, Bear.”

It sounds like he is chewing on glass when he sighs. Throat torn, raw. The ghost of it whispers across your chin; fingerprints tapping over a tender bruise.

“Haven’t been sleeping much these last few days. Been thinkin’ of us. Of you. And the team. All the people I let down—”

“Bear…”

“And I—I want to see you soon. When you're ready. I'm not going to rush things this time. Not gonna mess it up again—”

He speaks like this is settled. Over. As if you've already climbed into the palm of his hand, and all he has to do is just close you up tight in his fist. A little flower he can carry around in his pocket. Kept safe. Kept close.

It's—

A lot. Overwhelming. He sounds sober enough, and you know that he's not wholly dependent on drinking—it’s palliative; a coping mechanism to numb himself from the reality of everything else that happened to him—but there's a real crutch there that can't be erased by determination alone. But thinking about that—the future—makes your chest feel like it's going to cave in on itself; collapse and become another black hole in the Milky Way, swallowing everything down.

You need to breathe. You need to think—

“You should get some sleep, Bear. And—”

Don't drink. Stop. Get help. Talk to someone.

But the words are empty. Hollow vessels to placate your sense of responsibility. Your own guilt.

Coward. You've always been so good at running—

“Take care of yourself.”

“Yeah,” he rasps. The hushed timbre makes you tremble. “You too. Get some sleep. I'll talk to you in the morning.”

And so, this delicate dance made of putting duct tape over fractured promises and palliating the sickness in patchwork hope begins again, working in pieces.

There's a distance that lingers between the folds of you both, unspoken hurt and distrust—a lingering symptom of letting yourself get swept away by the idea of a man rather than the flesh and bone cut of one—but despite it all, each misgiving that passes your mind when you see Bear’s name flash across the cracked screen of your phone, it works.

Somehow, somehow.

It isn't as deep as missing puzzle pieces, because as much as you and Bear seem to connect on a level beyond sex, and booze, and fleeting highs to numb a phantom ache in the pit of your chest, the idea of soulmates seems to be frangible for your fractured selves; with all of your jagged, sharp edges, something so soft would break into pieces, shatter apart. But it is something.

And that might just be enough. So, you let it root. Let it grow limbs, and leaves, and curl around you like gentle, strangling wisteria until it reaches up to your chest.

This delicate, fragile thing makes a home, again, inside the empty landscape of your heart.

(shame on me, you think, but still pick up his call as this tender, soft thing you're nurturing snakes across your jugular where it's the warmest, leeching heat from the fever that thrums under your skin.)

Despite his bold declaration, though, he seems to waver on a full pursuit. Content, almost, to maintain this idea of closeness without shattering the bubble you've reconstructed.

It's odd, though.

Bear is a man who seeks logic out but always ends up relying on his hunches. Emotional in the sense that he places all confidence in himself beyond the scope of what he might be able to deliver. If his determination can't bring him across the finish line—well, then it was unwinnable from the start.

For a man so tenacious, so driven, his hesitation in all of this surprises you.

But something has to give eventually.

It always does.

Bear isn't terrible at texting, but he prefers phone calls. Something he admits has less to do with his occupation (no, I won't have to kill you for telling you this, you need to stop believing what you see on tv), and is more just a way of gleaning nuances he can't with written word.

Though, not always.

There's a softness when he speaks tonight, a quality you're unfamiliar with, as he confesses on a hushed memory, half musing aloud when the world is dead asleep and the sun is a distant idea in the back of your head, that he used to write letters to his wife whenever they weren't on the phone talking. Or Skyping each other.

“Deployment with a group of guys doesn't leave much room for privacy,” he says, as if he hasn't just unravelled this hidden part of himself at three fifteen on what was meant to be a rather mundane ending to your Thursday. “They're not really, uh, sensitive to that. We're on top of each other for most of it, anyway. Asking a whole room to clear out just so I can talk isn't happening. So, uh, we—uh, me and Lena, we wrote letters.”

There's a stutter in his voice when he relays this to you, and you're struck numb by it all. Lena, you think, putting a name to a concept.

“Oh,” you say, and you're not sure what to think about it. So, you don't. You tuck it aside, where all the other things you've learned about Bear go. The ones revealed to you in shambles. “That sounds— romantic. ”

It makes him scoff, and it's this terrible, broken thing. “Romantic, huh? Is that what you think?”

You hum, taking it in. The grand reveal of his ex-wife (she… we, he corrects and clears his throat like it burns: we decided to separate. See, uh… see other people), and his marital problems, you connect the dots lingering in the foreground.

You're not completely ignorant of his intentions.

It's the first move on a fresh chessboard: a show of his commitment to this—whatever it might be—and how serious he's taking it all. Where you'd been the only one to dare pry open the rusted nails keeping your secrets at bay before, he's taking the initiative to do so now, to meet you somewhere in the middle where the olive branch still grows. Placing his bets before the race. Offering himself, and his secrets, up as collateral in this strange game you found yourself in.

But does he know that you can still hear the slight slur in his voice when he speaks, or notice the way he seems to skirt around the conversation of his drinking habits on the days when it must be hitting him harder? Surely, he must.

And yet, he still calls. Still decides to gamble with your devotion in maintaining a strange facsimile of friendship with whisky on his breath, slurring his words, and gives out the pretence of playing for keeps under the table.

Maybe he knows you'll still give him the chance to keep playing no matter how many times his luck runs dry. It makes sense, considering.

You'd always had a weakness for men like him.

(Stupid—)

Outside of the tipsy phone calls, you've yet to hear him completely gone. A testament to his dedication, maybe, but you know the first week is always the easiest. When the high of the epiphany roars through their bloodstream, and the weight of the world doesn't feel as crushing as it once had, it's easy to make deals you don't have the means of keeping up with. But the debt is insurmountable to those who aren't fully invested, and the collectors are vicious.

Still. Still.

This is as close to sobriety as he's ever been, and you soak up his unbridled attention like you're starving for it.

And in all honesty, you are.

Bear is a strange, complex web of a man. Full of grit, anger. Misery curls in the corners of his eyes, hidden there amongst the powder keg of obsessive devotion just waiting to go off. You scented kerosene on his skin—napalm drenching his pores—when he'd lifted two fingers up and nearly snarled his order from across stained cedar wood.

Having the brunt of his fire listing your way is a character study in restraint, in penance. It taps against the delicate binds holding everything back, and loosens the ties with every piece of him you're given.

It's hard, you think, to stay so far away from someone when you're wobbling on the brink of devotion. Love, in shades of obsession. The taste of which settles in the back of your throat like a sickness, aching each time you swallow.

You're not sure what it is about Bear, about this particular brand of miserable, angry man, but his very existence feels like it was constructed, handspun, to make you hunger for a taste.

And then, you know. It's just that, isn't it? Miserable, angry man.

(saviour complex, maybe. maybe, maybe, maybe—)

It feels deeper than that, though. It might have been the cause for this unravelling, this unmaking between you both, but the rest—the helplessness and the anger and the worry; answering his call even when you swore you wouldn't, leaving him in the motel room like a bad dream smeared across your pillow only to pick him up again, another bad habit in a sea of others—is than just a simple desire to fix problems that are not your own.

(especially when they aren't your own.)

“Never really been the romance type,” he rumbles, shattering this strange, introspective reverie you've fallen into.

“You seem to be doing okay for yourself, though,” you volley back, a touch too cautious compared to how it all was before. When you'd read him his horoscope, and pester him about trying your audacious food combinations he'd complain about, but eat, anyway.

“Is that what you think?”

“It's what I know.”

You expect him to pick up your jab, turning it on you instead. Something caustic, something severe. Something equally mean and mordant in the way only Bear could be. But he doesn't. He lets it fall to the wayside instead, humming under his breath in something that might be acquiescence, or maybe avoidance of the topic entirely, and shifts back into neutral territory.

How was your day? He asks, as if that wasn't one of the first things he'd said to you when you answered the call.

“Fine,” you hedge, breezing the word out between your teeth. “It was okay. Bear—”

“I, uh, have a meeting tomorrow,” he steamrolls through your concern like it's made of paper instead of the broken remnants of your heartache. “Another eval., to see if I'm fit to return to training. Make my way back to being an Officer.”

More secrets are revealed to you in the slow dawn of his unfurling fist. Held out like a beacon, a piece of candy. Good job, it says when you reach for it like the good, obedient dog you are.

Pavlov's finest.

“That sounds…” You're not really sure what it means, in all honesty. Words coming together to form a sentence. The meaning is absent from between the lines. You could infer, but you've never been good at guessing. So, you stagnate. “Good. Um, really good, Bear.”

He huffs, and you take it as a laugh—or as close to one you'll get from him. “Gotta pass the eval first.”

“Should be easy for you.”

“Should be,” he mumbles, and you catch the faint end of a muffled groan. “But I've been slacking. Put on extra weight. Need to burn it all off before I can really get into the old routine. Gonna fall behind worse than a newbie.”

Newbie being growled out in his flat intonation makes you snort.

“You find something funny? ”

“Ha, no—” his words turn over in your head—put on extra weight—and, damningly, you remember what all that extra weight felt like, stretched out beneath you; arched over your body, heavy and suffocating, and—

Fuck.

Bear catches the hitch in your breath, and makes a questioning noise in response. You can't let him ask. Can't let him know that you keep painting a picture of his hairy belly brushing against yours in the forefront of your mind. His biceps. Burly is what you'd thought of him before. Thick. Husky. A heavy man, in more ways than one.

The softness around his waist belied the hard muscles below. You could feel it pressing firm against your palm when he rolled under you, bracing your hands over his chest as he let you ride him.

That's it, sweetheart. Just like that—

“No,” you swallow around the desire welling up inside of your throat. “Nothing.”

He hums, and it's tainted in disbelief. Like he knows, somehow, what you were thinking of. What you keep thinking of—especially after these phone calls, his voicemails, when you're lying in bed with your fingers whispering between your thighs—and you almost expect him to call you out on it. To demand an answer.

Instead, he offers a tender truth that nudges against the soft pulse in your throat.

“...Not drinking as much helps.”

You almost want to call him out on the as much he tacts on to the end of his confession, to question the logistics behind those two words. To quantify it in a number, in tangible data. Something concrete you can plinth your hope on. But the answer scares you.

Too much and you'll fall all over again. Too little and you'll have no choice but to run.

So, you retreat in the face of his truth. A coward.

“That's—It's good. That's good, Bear—” and it is. Of course, it is. Great, even. He isn't even yours and this silly notion of pride staples itself to the front of your chest for the world to see. “I'm, um. I'm proud of you.”

It sounds hollow, pyrrhic, coming from you—repentant enabler—but the airiness in his voice strikes something deep inside. Pulses against a dormant place that comes alive, fecund with the bittersweet stirrings of hope germinating in the fibres.

Skingraft over the wound.

“Proud, huh?”

And the sound of his voice cuts that thread as soon as it forms.

His voice is pitched low, throaty. He draws the syllables out as he says, at length, “I, uh, keep thinking about you.”

You should warn him away. Tap the impish fingers sneaking to the cookie jar—a thorough chastisement to keep wandering hands in check. Bad dog, is the passing thought, and you try to swallow down the hysterical giggle that bubbles in the back of your throat.

You should.

But you don't.

It comes out breathier than you intended when you say his name, and it sounds much too malleable in the face of this tactile man.

“Been thinkin’ about you a lot.”

“Yeah,” you whisper. Too much. Too much. “Same. Uh, me too.”

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Going out with some friends. Probably going to get dinner. Watch that new movie that just came out. And, um, have a few drinks after.”

“How're you getting home?”

“Taxi, most likely.”

He hums low, throaty. The sound seems to reverberate through the phone and tremble deliciously down the length of your spine. “That so?”

“I'm not going to be drinking much.” You weigh the ethics of discussing your intentions to drink, to get completely wasted, and maybe go home with someone who isn't Bear, who doesn't even so much as look like him, before waving the thought away before it can take shape. “It's just—social. Getting caught up. Haven't seen them in a while because of school and stuff.”

And because you've invested so much of your free time spinning in circles around a man who didn't even really seem to look at you (who insisted on calling you kid to force distance and indifference between you) until a few months ago, letting your social life dawdle on the wayside.

Not that there was ever much one. It's easier, sometimes, to push people away than to explain the inner workings of your borrowed scar tissue.

He hums again—and he really needs to fucking stop doing that before you do something stupid, something reckless, like remember the way he sounded when he lifted his head up after coming deep inside of you, panting in your ear from exertion, and groaned just like that when he shifted forward, inching his softening cock further you, seemingly content to stay like that as you melted into the mattress that reeked of stale sweat and sex.

“I'll drive you.”

Your breath catches. “You don't have to.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, but it's decidedly noncommittal and comes completely undone when you catch the crackle of iron in his mulish tone as he adds: “but I want to.”

And he will, is the underlying promise that brims to the surface, wrapped up neatly in a way that brokers no real room for a counterargument. Not that he'll give you the chance to make one.

Still. You try, if only to snatch at some modicum of control that slips, gossamer thin, between your fingers.

“It's fine. Making you go out all that way is kinda…”

“Don't worry about it. Beats paying for a cab, anyway.”

“Bear…”

It's firm when he says: “let me drive you home. Make sure you get there safely.” Final. But to soften the blow, he adds, voice tender like a bruise: “Just let me do this for you.”

And how are you supposed to stay no to that?

“Okay, Bear.”

(Answer: you don't.)

#joe graves x reader #joe graves x you #bear graves x reader #joe bear graves x reader #joe bear graves #barry sloane #joe graves #six (2017)#seal team six #history six #bear x reader #bear graves x you

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bowieandqueen11 · 2 years

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Dating Dream of the Endless Would Include...

Thank you all so much for being so sweet about my last two Dream headcanons, here are the dating ones to complete the set (and also the longest ones)!

Also shock horror I know, but I still have about three episodes of the show left so sorry if this is suddenly very out of character lmao I just love him to the moon and back my petty king

This got much longer than I thought it would oops, so any and all comments are much appreciated!! Thank you ily guys I hope you liked my silly similes lmaoooo

(I do not own the Sandman or its characters, all rights go to creators. Gif credit goes to @thekingofkawaii.)

☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°

Since people seem to love these opening sentences so much and I adore writing them lmao... Dream you pathetic ass cape draping eyeliner scrungle of a wet hissing cat, living for the drama dumbass with the smile of a brick I literally love you in every single way you are impeccable. He’s so stupid bless I want to bonk him with a baguette and give him a big ‘ol hug until he awkwardly shoves me off and mopes away. Well guess what sir, this time you are NOT running away from your feelings you’re happy and in love now biss so guess what you’re getting ALL the fluff ‘cause it’s what y’all deserve.

Dream introduced you to everyone as fellow ruler of his realm pretty much straight after your first kiss (my man intense). As soon as he took you by the hand and led you back to the throne room, his hands settled on your shoulders and turned you to face the erratic shards of the stained glass windows. ‘Everything I have’, you feel him whisper against your ear as soft as mist, ‘everything I am... it is also yours.’ He reaches round to tilt your cheek up, until the back of your head is flush against his chest and he’s able to run his finger down the curve of your neck. ‘If you so wish. I will be yours forever... in both dreams and the waking world. Wherever you need me, or want me. I will be there.’

To be completely honest, too many times he’s been afraid that you’ve still left him, so overwhelmed by everything. All that panic twisting in his gut, only to find you talking over Rose Walker’s dream journal in the library. You’re standing near ear to ear with Lucienne, the two of you bumping fingers and pouring over the contents to understand where exactly her poor brother is, the whole time Mervyn yapping at your side. I mean, they all adore you from the get go: they’ve seen over the last few decades how the mere thought of you has been the only thing stopping Morpheus from spiralling too far into despair. As soon as your feet stepped down onto the whirling sand, you were marked as a pretty integral part of the dreaming, human or not.

Plus, all the ravens that you’ve found encroaching on your roof and landing to hop on your shoulders in the waking world finally make sense. Lucienne was under strict orders to keep an eye on you, to make sure you were safe at all times.

Or you’ll wander off, and Dream will come sauntering away from the palace and down the winding path towards the House of Secrets, knowing from instinct that it’s where he'll find you. That same tide tugs him forwards forward into the suffocating mists, until he emerges in front of a pile of crumbling dirt and sees your smile alight the dusk, as piercing and ruinous as the sun. Goldie is perched upon your shoulder, squawking and sneezing into your eyes from time to time. You just laugh, and the sound is enough to double Dream over in grievous endearment. Abel is sitting by your right, still half-leaning in the pit as he giggles and continues his wild story about the King of Dreams from long ago. You turn around only when you hear a rare chuckle, finally spotting Dream standing with his eyes crossed behind you, and an amused eyebrow raised at you and your friends’ antics.

You expect him to ask you to leave, or to at least lead you inside, but to your surprise he sweeps his coat behind him and takes a seat on the squishing dirt beside you. He doesn’t settle until he feels his knee rest against your own, doesn’t feel comfortable while Abel continues spouting his story, until you take his hand and cradle it in your lap. It’s cold, almost contorted like the first dawn’s mist against your skin, but even now it shakes in your hold. It almost makes you laugh: the mystical, awe-striking, beyond marvel King of Dreams so terrified of loving you that he’s shaking like a barn mouse hiding from the overwhelming world around it. The same man who had spent over one hundred years locked like a Greek statue behind solid glass, only to be finally brought to his knees by the one thing he could never escape: his soul’s serendipity.

Eventually the clouds begin to roll over the stars, as if the sky’s painter had thrown buckets of brown paint over her canvas and left the streaks of ribbed sand to sparkle across the gloominess. Yet the King of Dreams just sits there, still as stone, not even daring to look down at you despite how much fondness tugs him too. Sometime during the night your head has fallen against his shoulder and you’ve fallen asleep against the warmth of his coat. He doesn’t want to move you, until eventually he leans down to kiss your head. He joins you in some of the sweetest dreams he can muster: the two of you lounging out amidst a field of flowers on the eve of spring. The firecracker reds and warm sugar plum violets frame his smiling face and the glimmer in his eyes as he lies admits the reeds, gazing up at you. He begrudgingly allows you to weave daisy petals into his hair, after a while of him running after you through the meadows and picking you up, holding you hostage in his arms until you promise not to tell his family about it.

Speaking of, when you eventually get to meet his sister Death, she loves you just as much (or even more) than her brother does straight away!!! She just immediately wraps you up in a big, excited, squealing, full body hug before tugging you off by the arm and leading you off towards the coastal market. She leaves a very confused and huffy Dream to fend for himself for a while, or perhaps gives him the time to visit his old friend Hob at the New Inn. She leads you to her favourite quaint ice cream parlour, where the two of you spend the afternoon sharing a sundae as siblings do, out on the arching thatch seats. Eventually she squints through the sunlight to look at you a little more seriously. ‘That’s the happiest I’ve ever seen my brother, like... ever I think! Thank you. No, seriously, thank you. He’s had enough time to sulk about, it’s good to see him look himself again.’

You and Dream reconvene in the square and spend the rest of the day feeding his treasured pigeons. He keeps looking at you out of the corner of his eyes with that twitching-lip smirk, with all the stars and constellations in the universe burning in them. He tries to be smooth, stealing a pinch of your baguette and throwing the crumbs at you, just to be able to wipe them off. His slender fingers brush over the pulse point on your neck like butterfly wings flitting over the dawning petals of a blooming rose. Then up to your chin, then gliding upwards till they’re hunched, tracing over the outline of your lips. Your heart fizzes as he leans down to kiss you for the first time ever in public, his frame shadowing you, yet bottom lip so welcoming and caressing as he brushes between your own.

Too often has Lucienne walked into the throne room, only to have to clear her throat to try and get Morpheus’ attention. He has his coat wrapped around the two of you like an inky bat like cocoon, sitting together on his throne as you read through the latest census. He stops every so often out of wild amusement when you gasp and point out a new entity. In pride at how well accustomed you’re becoming to his work that he carefully kisses your forehead and leans his own against it.

When it’s raining he’s the type to look confused at first as to why you’re shivering under your jacket and trying to run under London arches. Eventually it finally clocks in his head and he takes his coat off, holding it over your head during the whole journey to your destination, getting soaked himself by the smacking downpour nonchalantly. It’s a kind of second nature, to protect you, that he doesn’t even bat an eyeliner lined eyelid anymore. It’s innate and as natural, easy to him as dreaming.

Sometimes you’ll find Dream skulking around the palace steps like a disgruntled skunk recently kicked out of a bin, still upset after the events with John Dee. Lucienne and Matthew have attempted every possible solution to talk him out of it, but you’re the only one who can bring him back round. The only presence in any realm that feels more like himself than he does. The only one that understand his every idiosyncrasy, every twitch of his face, until you’re sitting by his side as one entity. He’s too stubborn to ever admit it, but he does indeed like it when you trace your pointer finger down the tip of his nose before tapping twice against his lips as if mockingly chiding him. He always peers down above his bottom lashes with wide, almost crossed eyes as he tries to follow you, but it does ground him again. Eventually, without anything even being said, he groans and jumps up to a stand with a ‘thank you, you’re right... of course... my dream’, and then saunters off again as if he owns the catwalk.

He tries to take you out to visit other dreams, even though you’re still terrified of the waters. He slides his fingers between your own, pulling them up to rest above his heart on the docks. He carefully and calmly talks you through everything that’s about to happen, and how he will be in control of every whiff and whim that could occur. He’s still a dramatic ass though, so before he’s even finished counting down to one he’s pulled you off the decking and into the swirling depths. In the darkness, you grasp onto him like a lifeline as he pulls you further down into the macrocosm than you ever thought possible.

It is worth it though... perhaps after a lot of snuggling and apologies from Dream. You end up in the dreams of young Irish man: one who hopes to become a zoologist after his time at university. You get to enjoy a peaceful night in a canopy beneath the stars, lying side by side with Dream as he points out the constellations that swirl gold like koi fish in the grand pond of the sky. He’s still not quite used to physical touch, which is why he seems to start and flinch back when you wind your arm to rest and rub above his abdomen. He’s spent so long... so so long never really getting much attention, or care from his family, so you’ll have to coax him into realising he can trust and relax in your presence. He does eventually let his guard down after a few hours of cuddles, until he eventually slides to sit up and falls dramatically over your knees. It’s the first time he’s ever allowed you to play with his hair, lying there in the darkness as normal lovers set alight do.

I mean, you’re family, right??? Dream begs you to come along to the family get together dinner (mainly so he can have a sparring partner of equal wit and finally get one up on his sibling Desire). He swaps the placards said sibling placed around the fire-lit table so you’re sitting next to him instead of Delirium. Between meals Dream takes your hand under the table and places it on his knee, stroking his thumb over your palm to try and calm himself down. Desire catches wind (thanks to an eagle eyed Despair), and makes some bitter laced remark with a growl of their lips, flick of their hand and sip of their red wine. This ends up with you lunging for him over the candelabra, with Death barely holding you back and Dream leaning back in his seat with a grin so wide on his face he looks like a smug, satisfied cat lmao

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distortionbobble · 9 months

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Royal Flowers Chapter 9

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series masterlist

summary: y’all know the drill now

series warnings: eventual smut, mentions of death, palpy

a/n: oops

Anakin forgot how beautiful Coruscant is. He can’t recall the exact number of months he’s been away; he stopped keeping track of time around you, but it’s enough to make his skin buzz at the feeling of Coruscant’s humidity. He’s not staying in the Jedi Temple, which is unusual enough to him, but is instead staying with you in the diplomatic lodgings provided by the Senate. It’s strange; he spent every night since he left Coruscant by your side, sleeping next to you, but now that he’s here, it feels so much more intimate. It could be the size of the bed, it could be the reminder of his responsibility and role of a Jedi here on Coruscant, but whatever it is, his heart skips a beat at the thought of sleeping by your side.

The two of you had reached quietly and checked into your lodgings, with him playing the role of the affectionate husband. You seem to be okay, at least as far as he can tell, but you’re certainly quieter. He’s glad for it, but there’s still some part of him that wants to sweep you into his embrace, pull you tight and shield you from the awful parts of the universe. He doesn’t want to dwell on it for too long, but the desire is inescapable. He still doesn’t know what it is that you, Padme, and Obi-Wan had discussed. All you’d said was that Padme had heard something that meant there wasn’t much time left. He’s watching you now from the corner of the room, scanning the room constantly for any threats.

“It feels like it has been too long since I was in Coruscant,” Anakin says finally. It doesn’t feel like his home anymore, and that scares him. No, home in his mind is now back in the Royal Chambers of Naboo, spending every waking moment with you.

“I’m sure. I apologize for the nature of my mission, it must be hard to be away from home for so long,” You say, turning to smile at him. “But hopefully it’ll be over soon, yes?” You say with a hopeful smile. The thought of leaving you twists a knife in Anakin’s gut, but it’s one that he’s learned to accept. It’s always there, always looming, and the only thing left for Anakin to do now is get used to the dagger in his stomach. He’ll have to leave you, sooner or later. But that doesn’t make the thought of it any less painful.

“Anakin… about your friendship with Chancellor Palpatine,” you speak to him from the seat of the vanity as you get your hair ready for bed. “We—“

“He’s a good man,” Anakin snaps at you before you can say anything negative about his friend. Chancellor Palpatine has guided him through so much, and he can’t imagine where he’d be without him.

“I didn’t say he wasn’t,” you respond coolly. “What makes you think I’d say otherwise?”

Anakin hesitates before he sits down on the bed, mesmerized by your elegant movements. “In the past, both Padme and Obi-Wan have cast their doubts about him. But I can’t imagine the idea of their suspicions panning out to be anything. He’s an honorable man, even if they don’t like it.” You nod quietly, and he can’t gauge a thought in your head before you rise and flip the covers to get into the bed.

“I believe you, Anakin. If that’s the case, I think your friend deserves to know you’re still alive, right?” You ask him quietly, laying down sideways. Your statement makes him pause. He should tell Sheev, shouldn’t he? But that would make it all so real, the ending of this. And you look like an angel born of the earth, like the muse of all things beautiful, and he almost wants to say he doesn’t want to tell him, just so he can keep the farce of being yours up for just a little longer. But the feelings spark such shame within him that he just nods, his throat dry, and lays down next to you.

As he sits there in the darkness, listening keenly to the slowing of your breathing, steady and quiet, he realizes something. Nothing in this universe is guaranteed. He is promised nothing by the universe, and he’s seen it countless times; his mother, ripped away from him, the other younglings at the Order rejecting him. But the universe has guaranteed one certainty; when he’s next to you, he can sleep peacefully.

~~~

“Chancellor,” your voice floats above the din of the Senators as you address the man. “If I might borrow your attention?”

“For the Queen of Naboo, my attention is yours to own,” Chancellor Palpatine jests, coming to stand by your side. “Milady, I must ask… what brings you to Coruscant, and to the Senate, no less?”

You allow your painted lips to form just a hint of a smile. You have a thin line to walk now—if he’s a Separatist, of which there is only a slim chance, he can’t think that you truly want to help your people. But if he’s not, you still hold a responsibility to your people. “My people feel as though the urgency of the Separatist threat is not being handled with urgency. I come as a representative for Naboo in order to request the Republic have a stronger role in protecting Naboo… however, I know that our forces get so busy. It’s a shame, isn’t it?” You say, echoing the words that Darth Sidioius had spoken to you before.

Chancellor Palpatine’s face remains a smooth, unmoving mask in response to your words. A little too smooth. Either he’s a horrible chancellor, or you were right to have your suspicions. But you can’t act on inaction. You cough, deciding to move on. “I suppose I shouldn’t delay it much longer. But… Chancellor, keep it a secret, will you?”

“Keep what a secret, Milady?” He asks, tailing you as you stride into one of the nearby conference rooms.

“My husband wished to see you,” You smile, stepping to the side as the door eases shut. Anakin is standing before the glass, soft light catching his hair. At the sound of the door, Anakin turns around with a smile.

“My old friend,” He says, striding over to embrace Chancellor Palpatine.

“I thought— Oh, Anakin, I thought you were dead!” He sputters, embracing Anakin back. “Why the farce? Please, you must tell me everything.” He lets go of Anakin and takes a seat at the long table. Whatever suspicions you may have of him, his excitement and relief of seeing Anakin, alive, does feel authentic. Perhaps he is innocent, and your suspicions are entirely misdirected. But that’s not something you can take a chance on. Nonetheless, you’ll give the two their space.

“I’ll leave the two of you to reconnect,” You say with a smile, tenderly stroking the side of Anakin’s face before you leave the room.

“I know,” Anakin says before the Chancellor can speak. “It must seem so confusing to you. But it’s better this way. I couldn’t bear the thought of going through the process of leaving, announcing my intent to leave and bringing such shame upon my former Masters. And because of my importance, I don’t imagine they’d let me go so easily. My skill in the Force is unmatched by any other Jedi I’ve seen. But…”

“You’re in love with her,” Chancellor Palpatine finishes. Anakin smiles wistfully, swallowing the guilt of lying to his friend. But he needs to sell this. Palpatine also cannot know that you were stationed there to protect you, but he deserves to know you’re alive. Plus, you have some sort of idea that he can help you in uncovering the truth. And Anakin trusts you.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt like this before,” Anakin responds, tilting his head back and closing his eyes as the image of you fills his head. The faint smell of jasmine in your hair, the shape of your nose, your lips, the softness of your cheek in his hand and the way you look at him. You look at him like you see him for him, and still trust him. It puts all the rage in his body to rest. He may need to sell this to Sheev, but Anakin’s not sure it’s entirely an act. You do make him feel safe. At the same time, you make his heart race with each little quip you make. You challenge him, frustrate him, and he needs you with him, always. You’ve taught him to love without attachment, the true Jedi way, because he knows he can never truly have you. You’re not his to love.

Sheev smiles. “Young love. It is such a beautiful thing, to be free of the restraints that others have placed upon you and to be able to accept that without guilt.” A bitterness sits in Anakin’s throat as he smiles. If only his friend knew how much he longs for that.

“Well, it would be a shame for your powers to go to waste,” the Chancellor says. “I do hope you find something worthy of it being used. The Force has blessed you, and I believe that you’ll be able to achieve even greater things without the Jedi Order shackling you with all their rules.” His lined face lights up in a smile before he places a hand gently on Anakin’s shoulder, catching Anakin’s eyes as he heads back to the Senate. “But perhaps that’s a conversation for another day. Until then, Anakin.”

“Until then,” Anakin echoes.

~~~

Anakin can hear you screaming. He doesn’t realize it’s you at first; he’s too busy looking at Padme. She’s sobbing, tears rolling down her face as she tries to say something to him. He can’t make out the words, can’t hear them coming out of her mouth. All he feels, all he sees is pain. He’s surrounded by it. Always has been, always will be. And the sound of your screaming, shrieking, drowns out any sound that Padme makes. He tries to turn to you, tries to see where you are but Padme grabs his jaw and turns him back to her. Her nails are digging into his skin and it hurts, it hurts but he just wants you to stop screaming. You’re in pain, he’s in pain, and none of it will stop. Padme’s touch grows hotter and hotter on his skin until he’s sobbing, the heat of it scorching as fire begins to light upon her skin. It engulfs her dress, spreading to her hair, until she lets go. He doesn’t hesitate to run to your voice, the sound of your screaming where you lay there, your body limp as you struggle against something he can’t see.

“Help me,” You beg him, reaching towards him. “Please, Anakin, help me,” You plead. Your fingertips begin to unravel into little tendrils of smoke, reaching towards him as more and more of your body is taken by the smoke.

“No,” He whispers, trying to grab the smoke, holding your body as it disintegrates in his very hands. “No!”

“Anakin,” Your voice cuts through his visions. He wakes up with a start, sweat making strands of hair stick to his forehead. He looks at you with bleary eyes, sitting straight in the bed as you look at him in concern. “Hey. Are you okay? You were talking in your sleep,” You say, sitting up as well. He doesn’t answer, just grabs your wrist and shuts his eyes at the feel of your pulse.

“Hey, it’s okay,” You say. “It was just a bad dream,” You say gently. Anakin feels sick. He’s supposed to feel safe next to you. It’s been months since he had a vision like this, months of blissfully quiet sleep. He was so sure it was because of you. Maybe you’re not close enough. Or maybe it’s this damned place. Anakin leans into you, circling his arms around you and pulling you tightly to his chest. “Do you want to talk about it?” You ask him, allowing him to hold you as he breathes slowly, working his way out of the darkness of his dream.

“I dreamt I lost you,” He murmurs into the crown of your head, squeezing you tightly as he remembers the feel of your lifeless body. “The worst part of it is I know I’m gonna lose you anyways. You’re going to be gone, soon enough, and I’ll have to go through all of this alone, all again.”

“I’m always gonna be your friend,” You reassure him. Your breath meets his bare chest and he’s reassured by the fact that you’re alive.You feel warm, warm and full of life a

“I dreamt that you died,” He says simply. “And I can’t have that happen.” Not again. Not like what happened to his mother.

“Anakin,” You say, pulling yourself off of his chest. “I’m okay. You’re protecting me.”

“But what if there’s something I can’t keep you safe from?” He asks, meeting your eyes. His fear is plain as day, and he knows you could piece together what that means in an instant. Why he’s so fearful of losing you. You matter to him, even if he hasn’t said it.

“If there’s something you can’t keep me safe from, then it’s not your fault. Know that. People die sometimes, even if we do our best to keep them safe from it,” You respond. Your voice is surprisingly even despite the gravity of Anakin’s emotions. He doesn’t understand how he hasn’t dragged you down into the depths of his misery but he’s grateful for the anchor that you provide him. “Anakin, the most important thing is the safety and security of the galaxy. To do the most good for the most people, that is what we are born into this universe to ensure. And if—” your voice breaks, and you lean your head back into his chest. “If I do die under your protection, I will know that you’ll have done your best to keep me safe. But more importantly, I’ll know that you will carry out my work and see to it that those who come after us will see a better place. With me, without me, the universe will move on.”

“I don’t accept that answer,” Anakin frowns, but you just laugh.

“It’s the truth. My life will never be more important than the fate of the universe. But you’re stressing about nothing. I’m here, I’m okay, you’re okay. Just… try and go back to sleep, will you?” You ask, shivering before he draws the blanket above the both of you. He’s never really held you like this before. He isn’t holding you to make your pain stop, he’s holding you to make his pain stop. And he doesn’t want to let you go. But that’s what makes him let go, allowing you to go lay down while he sits up, watching as you fall asleep.

You’re not his to keep, anyways.

#smut #fic reblog #my writing #anakin skywalker x reader #fic #distortionbobble's fics #anakin skywalker #reader insert #anakin x reader #star wars

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seresinslady · 8 months

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Just Between Us - Prologue

Bradley has been in love with you since you were thirteen. He would do absolutely anything for you, including fake dating you so that your parents didn’t find out about your secret older boyfriend.

High School AU Bradley Bradshaw x Best Friend Mitchell!Reader

Warnings: 27 year old OC dating a 17 year old Reader. Goose is alive…….. and he’s kind of an antagonist……. Oops. Not proof read bc it’s 4am and I have work tomorrow.

At seventeen years old you were old enough to know the signs of a guy liking you. And maybe Bradley had checked all of those boxes, but you just couldn’t bring yourself to acknowledge it. Growing up as an only child, he was your person. A best friend, a confidant, a shoulder to cry on, a person meant only for you. “What if they get married someday” quickly turned to “they’re definitely gonna get married someday” in the conversations your parents would have about you behind your backs. Pete Mitchell, Ester Mitchell, Nick Bradshaw and Carole Bradshaw watched on painfully at every interaction the two of you had. Whether it was hanging out watching tv, doing a class project together, or miserably failing at baking, three things were always extremely evident to all of them.

1. Bradley was hopelessly in love with you. 

2. You had no idea. 

If Nick was honest, the intensity in which Bradley loved you scared him a little bit. There was a running list of reasons this incited fear in him, but he would never say it out loud. He was pretty confident that Bradley would come to him for advice about the situation one day, and he would use that moment to steer him in the right direction. Until then he would keep his thoughts to himself and he certainly wouldn’t tell his wife. She has been planning your wedding ever since she noticed that glint of lovestruck awe in her son’s eyes.

It’s not that he didn’t love you. You had always been like a daughter to him, in the same way Bradley was like a son to Pete. Nick just has a gut feeling that if you asked Bradley to walk into oncoming traffic, he’d do it with a smile on his face and that is what worries him.

“I thought y/n had a study group tonight?” Nick casually mentions to the small group of parents as he sees your figure blur pass the entry way and up to Bradley’s room.

“She was supposed to. It probably ended early or something…” Pete trails off and looks over at his wife who is giving him a queasy look. “I- I’ll go check on them. I mean her. I’ll go check on her.” He put down his drink and walked up the stairs.

3. You and Bradley were sleeping together. 

A topic of conversation that had begun amongst the group when Carole walked in on the two of you curled up in bed a few weeks ago.

“Well, did they have clothes on?!”

“I don’t know, I just bolted out of there! I don’t think they even saw me, they were sleeping!”

“Did they have clothes on?”

Pete shoots his wife a pointed look as he bounces back down the staircase. “Yes, and not funny.” Pete was in extreme denial that his precious baby girl even knew what sex was. He was wrong.

“She said her study group ended early because a few kids had track practice,” he explained.

Upstairs you were throwing yourself onto Bradley’s old leather beanbag, a giddy smile on your face. He was reading some magazine about airplanes that you had bought for him at the convenience store yesterday. “I have a secret!” Your mischievous smile beamed across the room towards him.

He eyed you with an unserious fearful look. “What…?” He said cautiously. It wasn’t often, if ever, you two kept secrets from one another.

“I wasn’t at a study group.”

“But you just told your dad-”

“I know what I told my dad, Bradley. But I couldn’t tell him where I actually was or he’d lose his shit.” You explained.

Bradley sat up on his bed, laying the magazine face down on the blue quilt. You had peaked his interest now. He looked at you expectantly, waiting for you to reveal your previous whereabouts.

He raised his eyebrows, “well are you gonna tell me?”

“Tell you what?” You said with faux confusion.

“Where you were!” Bradley laughed.

“Oh… sure I’ll tell you… for a price.” You bargained.

“Ever the hustler, huh?” he rolled his eyes playfully. “What do you want?”

“I want your cookie tomorrow at lunch!” You seemingly pulled that out of your back pocket.

Your immediate response had taken Bradley aback, but he laughed at you as your eyes sparkled with pride. “Fine, now spill it.”

“I was on a date!” You whispered with excitement.

Bradley felt that ever so familiar heart drop. A date. You had been on a date.

He couldn’t even get out a response before you started your way over to him, phone in hand. You plopped down next to him. Your perfume smelt so good today. Had you put it on for your date?

Bradley watches your side profile as you scroll through your phone, letting the screen illuminate your face. A strand of your neatly pulled back hair suddenly fell out of place, but before Bradley could reach up to fix it, you brushed it behind your ear without a second thought and quickly turned to face your phone towards him.

“This is him! Isn’t he cute? I mean, I know you probably can’t tell cause you’re a guy, and guys can’t tell when another guy is hot but-”

As you rambled, Bradley’s face morphed into terror while looking at the photo. He gently took the phone from your hand to get a better look. “Y/n. How old is this guy?”

“But I figured you’d– Oh, he’s only like twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-seven?!” Bradley shouted as he stood abruptly from the bed.

“Bradley, keep your fucking voice down!” You stood up to face him, glancing at the door to make sure it was shut all the way.

“Twenty-seven!” He turned his full shout, to a whisper shout. His shock still hadn’t worn off. “Y/n, you’re seventeen.” Bradley reminds you.

“Oh thanks for reminding me, I didn’t know that.” Sarcasm twisted in your tone but he ignores you.

“Y/n, this is serious, you’re a minor. He’s 10 years older than you. Does he know you’re seventeen?”

You huffed in annoyance. “Yes, he knows and he’s fine with it.” Bradley’s shock only grew more as he paced away from you. “Dude, can you just be cool about it? My dad is 8 years older than my mom, it’s not that big of a deal.”

Bradley angrily turns on his heel to face you.. He was visibly stressed and pissed. “Dude, the big deal is that he’s a full grown adult and you’re in highschool. He’s a fucking pedophile, y/n!”

“A pedo- I’m not a child, Bradley-”

“UH, legally, yeah you are!” He interrupts you.

“Well, legally, I’m an adult next month.” You retorted, throwing your hands up. “So…”

Bradley seemingly loses the strength to fight with you on this any longer, as he sits down in his desk chair, placing his elbows on his knees and puts his face in his hands. He lets out a deep sigh.

“B…” You said quietly, walking over to him. When he didn’t look up, you sat down in front of him and gently pulled his hands away from his face. He looked at you, eyes full of anxiety and exhaustion from your mini fight. “B, I understand why you’re worried, but you gotta trust me. I’m being careful and we haven’t had sex or anything. I haven’t even kissed him, I just really like him and I think he likes me too.”

The mention of sex makes Bradley’s heart stop for a second. He was happy to hear you say you hadn’t done anything with this clearly disturbed man, but he still felt nauseous at the fact that you even had it on your mind.

“I-I don’t know what to say, y/n.” Bradley gives up.

“Just… say you trust me.”

Trusting you is far different than trusting this stranger, but it wasn’t a lie when Bradley responded “I trust you.”

“Good! Now, tell me about your magazine!”

And just like that, Bradley had gotten over his anger with you. Your sweet face looking up at him with a small grin. You were trying to cheer him up and distract from the argument that had just gone down. You both knew that this conversation would definitely pick up another time, but for right now Bradley would just tell you about his magazine.

AN:

Okay this is the first TGM piece I have ever put out but I’m pretty excited about it. I use to write Bucky Barnes fics before I deleted my account but I’ve been reading TopGun fics for about a year now. ANYWAYS!! lmk what you guys think.

It’s gonna be loosely based on Dear John and All Too Well.

#bradley bradshaw x reader #bradley bradshaw x mitchell!reader #bradley bradshaw au #rooster x y/n #best friend!bradley Bradshaw x reader #tgm fic

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scoops-aboy86 · 7 days

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♠️♥️Famous Rockstar Eddie leaving the spotlight mysteriously and going off the radar for the next 10 years. Unbeknownst to the world, it was because he broke up with his then secret boyfriend Steve Harrington. Steve wanted to settle down, Eddie wanted to play for the world. The love never left but they both had dreams they wanted to pursue. Then very randomly he's spotted by paparazzi with a cute hubby, a wedding band on his finger, and 100lbs more than he had 10 years ago, enjoying brunch like he wasn't quote unquote "missing" to the public. 😂

Aww. I’m picturing a mostly amiable breakup… They’re both bummed to do it, but Eddie wants to leave and Steve wants to stay. It’s the 80’s, so no cell phones, no email… Much harder to keep up a long distance relationship. Both of them feel like they’re setting the other free.

Cut to ten years later. Corroded Coffin made it big, and they’re coming up on the end of a tour that they’ve already said will be their last public appearance in a while. Gareth has a fiancé he wants to settle down with, Jeff is already married with a kid on the way, and Freak is thinking about going back to school for… something, he hasn’t decided what yet.

Eddie is toying with the idea of doing a solo album or something, nothing big, but music is his life. It’s basically what he replaced Steve with after the breakup. He’s maybe leaned into food a little, especially during tours, but mostly burns it off with his on-stage antics. Over the years, he’s stuck pretty exclusively to hookups and situationships, nothing serious. As long as he has his music, everything’s fine.

Which is why he’s dreading the end of the tour. After the second to last concert, right after they get to the next city, he does something he doesn’t usually do: he goes out and gets fucked up. (He saw what drugs and alcohol did to his parents when he was little and things were starting to fall apart, and No Thank You, but. It’s not bad if he only does it once, right? It’s fine.)

The city happens to be Chicago. Eddie goes out, accepting just about anything anyone hands him like a moron… and wakes up having blacked out on everything except the vague impression of pop music blasted too loud for even his concert-hardened ears. The bed he’s in is comfortable in a very not-hotel-room sort of way and smells like the essence of a warm hug. He burrows into the blankets and pillows on the principle that maybe if he snuggles in deep enough he can hide from the raging hangover.

It doesn’t work, of course, and a few minutes later he drags himself across the room on all fours to hurl his guts out into a waste basket. Which turns out not to have a liner. Oops.

That’s when the door opens, and a mildly exasperated voice says, “Eds, seriously? I left you a bucket on your side of the bed.”

Blearily, Eddie turns and sees, of all people, Steve Harrington. Standing there in a yellow sweater and both hands on his hips like a blast from the goddamn past. He’s still handsome, still has the amazing hair, and the glasses he’s wearing lend a new kind of adult-ness to his face that hadn’t been there when he was twenty. He looks good.

Eddie, meanwhile, feels like a stepped-on cockroach. It’s not fair.

“Woke up facing this way,” Eddie rasps, but his heart leaps at the way Steve says your side. Like it’s still his. And it’s true, he does still prefer the left side of the bed, despite usually sleeping alone. “How are you… here? Where am I?”

Steve brings him a glass of water. “This is my apartment, I’ve been here for about three years now. I brought you here last night after you propositioned me because, and I quote, ‘You look just like the love of my fucking life that I walked away from like the dumbest idiot alive, wanna fuck and maybe marry me if my dick’s good enough? I’m kind of rich and famous, I could write so many songs about your eyes.’”

“Jesus H. Christ.” Eddie takes a sip of water, feeling like he might throw up again from embarrassment. “Did we…?”

“Nah, you passed out practically before finishing that second sentence. I carried you here to sleep it off, and answered your cell when Jeff called to check on you.” Steve, helping Eddie stand up at this point and guiding him back to the bed, raises an eyebrow. “He was extremely thorough in explaining that you don’t usually do things like this.”

Eddie groans. “Fuck… Is he sending a car or something? We’ve got a concert in… in… soon.”

“Two days,” Steve fills in easily. “Don’t worry, you have time to recover. I’ve made breakfast, if you think you can stomach it.”

Groaning again, Eddie face-plants into the pillows and realizes that wonderful scent is Steve and that’s why it was so nice when he first woke up. That smell still means home to him, even after a decade apart. “No, can’t do cereal and pop tarts right now.”

Steve snorts. “Excuse you, but one of us has learned to cook over the years and Jeff assured me it wasn’t you. There’s bacon, eggs, pancakes, and fresh strawberries. Vanilla ice cream in the freezer, too, if that still helps settle your stomach.”

“…It might,” Eddie mutters into the pillow.

“Okay. Well, whenever you’re ready, there’s clothes at the end of the bed, and Advil and more water on the desk. I’m just going to, uh, take this basket out to the dumpster.”

Sorry, Eddie bites on his tongue to avoid saying. He’s just now realizing that he’s stripped down to his boxers and undershirt, which, like. Doesn’t even show off the coolest of his new tattoos. Not that that’s important, fuck, but it’s the first thing his hungover brain spits out about the whole situation other than, you know.

The fact that he randomly ran into The Ex of All Time while so loaded he doesn’t even remember it happening. And Steve is acting like this is just normal even though they haven’t even been in contact for years.

Eddie falls asleep while freaking out about this, and feels marginally more human by the time he wakes up. The clothes Steve left him are… Christ, it’s one of his old Metallica shirts, and the sweatpants that were technically Steve’s that Eddie had always stolen to sleep in, back when they were together. He doesn’t know how to feel about it. Stumbles his way out of the room to a bathroom, noticing along the way that the couch has a pile of folded blankets at one end. Because Steve probably slept there instead of his own bed.

“Coffee?” Steve asks when Eddie finally puts in an appearance in the kitchen, passing him a mug that’s already doctored exactly the way he likes it. Eddie takes it and sips cautiously, but his stomach seems to have settled now and nothing bad happens, so he takes a longer, grateful gulp.

The food is still waiting for him, kept warm in the oven with tin foil over the plates and heat set to low. Eddie sits down and feels something well up in his chest, in his eyes, at the first bite of scrambled eggs; it’s like eating clouds, they’re so damn fluffy.

“‘S good,” he mumbles through a full mouth, then swallows and turns his tired eyes towards Steve. “I… I didn’t even know you’d moved to Chicago.”

Steve gives him an amused smile. “It wasn’t exactly news worthy of Rolling Stone, dude. Don’t worry about it.”

“Kinda have to,” Eddie mumbles, and jams bacon in his mouth. “I mean, I—Holy fuck, Steve, this is good. Are you a chef or something?”

The smile turns sheepish. “Sort of. It’s a long story, but I kinda teach cooking classes now? It’s a program for teens and preteens who’ve had trouble at home or with the law and need, like, better outlets that are also practical life skills. Robin’s girlfriend hooked me up, she teaches yoga and self-defense stuff at the same place.”

“Wow.” Eddie stares blankly at him for a second, before physically shaking off the surprise and looking back down at his plate. Steve had spent the past decade learning new skills and helping kids, whereas Eddie has written songs about sex, drugs, rock and roll, and… Steve’s eyes. “That’s great, Steve. You sound really happy.”

Because he does. And Eddie feels really, really bad about barreling accidentally back into Steve’s life, probably throwing a huge monkey wrench into it since there’s no way a guy this handsome and this good and this fantastic in the kitchen isn’t seeing anyone. He’d be snatched up in a second by any discerning man or woman with, like, eyes and a heart and taste buds. Which is what Steve deserves, really. He deserves someone who won’t run off at the first whiff of potential fame and fortune somewhere he can’t follow.

“I do alright,” Steve replies modestly.

“I’ll replace your waste basket,” Eddie blurts out. Because Steve deserves someone who doesn’t ever get fucked up enough to puke in and ruin his stuff, even if it’s not something he does regularly. “And, this is great, really, thank you for breakfast, but I should get out of your hair. I’m… sorry for ambushing you last night, or whatever it was I did, I can’t even remember—”

His hand is clenched around his fork so tight that his knuckles have gone pale, and he almost jolts out of his chair when Steve puts a hand over it, massaging his grip into loosening slightly. “First of all, I got that thing at Costco,” Steve informs him. “It’s not a big deal. Second, you didn’t ambush me. I mean, I was surprised, for sure, but… it was nice to hear that I’m still the love of your life.” Steve gives his hand a gentle squeeze. “Really nice, Eds. And third, you didn’t exactly walk away. You asked me to come with you, I was the one who wasn’t ready to leave Hawkins then. We agreed, remember?”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He feels like careening back into Steve’s orbit now must count as some sort of violation of that agreement, or something… and yet Steve is still holding his hand.

“I actually…” Steve hesitates, looking unexpectedly shy for someone who Eddie must be bothering. Then, instead of finishing the sentence, he lets go of Eddie’s hand to pull something from his back pocket and lay it on the table.

It’s a ticket. A VIP meet and greet pass for the Corroded Coffin concert in two days.

“Everybody pitched in and got this for my birthday,” he says sheepishly. “They went on presale on the exact day, Dustin kept saying it was a sign.”

Eddie, who’s never paid much attention to ticket sales in general, much less the dates they become available, can only stare at it. His throat feels tight knowing that he would’ve seen Steve anyway, that it could’ve happened while he was riding the adrenaline high of performing instead of feeling like roadkill freshly scraped off the asphalt.

“Which, if it was a sign, I’m guessing it wasn’t on purpose, since you didn’t even know I live out here now,” Steve continues. “But, well, they got it, and… I told Robin I wasn’t sure if I’d go, but I knew from the second I opened the envelope it was a done deal.”

“What about… A-aren’t you seeing anyone?” Eddie asks. He remembers, in wistful, rosy detail, Steve being in his element as a boyfriend. Knows that he loves having someone to share everything with, to learn through and through, to kiss and murmur I missed you even if it’s only been an hour, even when it wasn’t safe for two guys to do that openly in small town Indiana and he’d had to limit himself to a fleeting touch and saying it with his eyes.

“No.” Steve shrugs. “I tried putting myself out there on and off, but there was never enough of a spark to make it past three or four dates. I always knew you were it for me, Eddie, even if we never got another chance. And this…” He taps the concert ticket. “I was going to ask if you wanted one, because god knows I’d give it to you. You don’t have to answer now, because going by how you look you must feel like crap—”

“Oh fuck you, dude.” Never one to sit stoically through Steve’s teasing, Eddie groans and hides a grudging you’ve got me there smile behind a handful of his own hair.

Steve grins. “Sorry,” he says, not sounding or looking sorry at all.

Which is where they leave it, for now. Eddie finishes his breakfast, clearing his plate and dishing up seconds because once he starts eating in earnest his stomach settles and he’s starving, and it’s all so good. And it’s not like they’re magically back together—Steve had slept on the couch instead of in the bed with him, they haven’t been close enough to share so much as a meal and conversation like this for ten years, but it’s a start. A chance to get to know each other again, see if they still fit.

Fast forward another ten years. Eddie’s solo career is doing well but he doesn’t do public appearances, got all of his recording done at home in his private studio. He’s pretty much a homebody, which surprised some of the people who know him but not the ones that know him well.

Steve still has the same job, not because he needs to work but because he loves it. He’s also Eddie’s de facto private chef, and he loves that too.

But he’s not cooking today, because it’s their anniversary and Eddie is dead set on painting the town red. “Of course I still want to,” Eddie assures him again, nuzzling sleepily up against his unofficial husband (they’re holding out until it becomes legal in either Illinois or Indiana, whichever comes first) when Steve wakes him and asks if he’s still sure about their brunch reservations. “I want to take you out and show you off. Remember how I promised you how rich and famous I am and how cool that would be?”

Steve huffs in amusement, leaning into the nuzzling. “First of all, it was more of a statement than a promise. The actual promise was to write so many songs about my eyes. Second of all, you don’t remember that.”

“Kept the promise either way, didn’t I?” Eddie nips at his collarbone, bare because Steve never was one for sleeping with a shirt on, even when the weather turns cold. “I’ve written songs about your eyes, your smile, this ass…” He grabs at it with a little growl, leaning more of his weight onto Steve to reach and enjoying the way his sweetheart happily squirms.

“Mmm, yeah,” Steve sighs. “But we could still stay in… have breakfast in bed…” His own hands find Eddie’s love handles and settle there. “Not have to get dressed.”

“Nope.” Eddie props himself up on one thick arm and kisses him on the nose. Then yawns hugely. “It’s about time I get some fresh air, and I’m taking you out, baby.”

So Steve crawls out of bed, fetching Eddie the clothes he asks for and gamely taking suggestions for his own outfit—though he anticipates every article with a smirk, starting to grab each hanger before the words are fully past Eddie’s lips. Jeans that are just a little on the tight side and highlight the ass that Eddie so loves to grab (and sing about grabbing, the horny lovesick goblin man), a t-shirt that shows off his muscles and broad shoulders (because he may be turning forty next month but he takes damn fine care of his body), and the leather jacket from Eddie’s Corroded Coffin days that no longer fit their original owner.

Because Eddie, who loves Steve’s food, has put on at least a hundred pounds in the past decade,maybe more. Most of it has gone to his belly, but he’s pretty round and soft all over—except his ass, for some reason, which is his excuse for how much attention he regularly bestows on Steve’s.

That’s not why he’s stayed out of the public eye for so long though. It’s more because he got his fill of being a rock star, being recognized everywhere he goes, being photographed all the time and known for his wild antics. He’d wanted that when he was younger, so badly, needed the accolades and acknowledgement as someone who hadn’t gotten a lot of that as a child. But that rock star life took him away from Steve for so long, which he both regrets and doesn’t because it all worked out in the end. He’d been in it just as much for being able to make and share his music, too, which he can still do, so he’s happy. Happy and so, so in love.

Their day is back to back reservations at various restaurants, all selected by Eddie because of dishes he knows that Steve will want to try and recreate at home. “Inspiration for your craft,” Eddie tells him with a wink, his own cheeks pink and grin lazy with the pleasure of overindulgence.

Pictures are taken, more by cell phones than paparazzi because it’s the 2000’s now (not long before the Supreme Court of California issues a finding that allows that state to start issuing same-sex marriage licenses out on the West Coast, and Steve and Eddie fly out for Robin’s backyard wedding). They circulate the internet, with thousands of people weighing in on whether that really is Eddie Munson, the “missing” front man from Corroded Coffin. There are comparisons between old photos and these new ones, in depth analyses that range from “he wouldn’t get that fat” to “wow he really let himself go” to “looks like he’s living his best life.”

Eddie and his sweetheart—who is a total unknown except to some of the kids at the program who see the pictures and flip out because since when is Mr. Harrington so close with a famous metal guitarist omg, he’s so lame with all his sweater vests and dad jokes—remain unaware and unbothered as Steve helps Eddie tuck his already full belly back into his pants, get him all zipped up again, and leave brunch for their next stop.

And they have a very lovely day.

Permanent tag list (ask to be added): @hotluncheddie @tangerinesteve @lawrencebshoggoth @sofadofax

#wg steddie #scoops words #chubby eddie munson #rockstar eddie munson #regular guy steve harrington #this can be read as post-canon or no UD... i didn't have either particularly in mind while writing #♠️♥️ anon #ask #slight dumbass use of drugs and alcohol

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kharmii · 4 months

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I wrote this as a reply to a post, but maybe it should get added to the tags so anybody getting into the ship has a place to look up origins all in one place for context. There are too many people with 'Queen Bee Syndrome' going around pissing in people's cheerios telling them what they can and can't ship. It isn't as bad as they say, yo. It was supposed to be humorous! Anyway....

I've been seeing so much Catholic guilt on Twitter these days where people be like, "I can't believe I used to like Trainwreck! It makes me want to vomit! Why would I think it was sexy to see a guy beating up another guy!" It's either pretentious virtue signaling, or it's coming from scared young girls being brow-beaten by the threat of cancel culture into having to prove how good and perfect they are in fandom. Get over yourselves and check out my collection of vintage Trainwreckshipping posts that (facetiously) explain the context of why violence was funny.

Emmet goes to fight God but Arceus hides behind a pillar and points to Volo.

Manipulative Volo laughs about what he did but...oh no! Here comes the pissed off brother!!

Princess bride meme rough handling of Volo.

Emmet chokes Volo.

TAKE THAT YOU VILE FIEND!! (Emmet punches Volo meme)

Emmet chases Volo riding on Arceus.

Emmet chokes Volo but ends up with a knife pressing into his gut.

Volo plays a mean prank to mess with the twins.

Sexual tension with a knife part 1.

Sexual tension with a knife part 2.

Sexual tension with a knife part 3.

Volo so smug and manipulative; Emmet so crazy.

Death threat.

Emmet bloodies Volo's nose.

Where Volo is actually evil and bad ends Emmet.

Emmet coming to whoop some ass.

Giratina possessed Emmet threatens to assault Volo.

Emmet goes after Volo with a brick.

Brave soul who is still doing toxic trainwreck in modern times.

Oops (It never gets old).

Me taking the piss part 1.

Me taking the piss part 2.

If I missed any, please pm me and I'll add them (and I'll keep adding to this post as I finds 'em).

This might be an unpopular opinion, but if someone gives you a hard time for being into this ship, you could always reply along the lines of, "Fuck you, pretentious, virtue-signaling twat. I don't owe you or anybody else anything. Nobody should be judging a person's morality based on what silly thing they ship" It might not get you any friends now, but I'm holding out hope we one day get past cancel culture. Currently, we give too much power to seasoned bullies who use the current political environment as a way to get around the social stigma of anti-bullying campaigns.

#context #classic trainwreck #submas #subway bosses #emmet #volo #trainwreckshipping #collection #the classics #fandumb fail #srsly tho #stop it #queen bee syndrome #fuck off #ingo #arceus #pokemon: legends arceus #toxic culture #ask me about my million stupid bj aus

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boygiwrites · 15 days

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Harley D. Dixon 32

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Herschel still looks like he's sleeping peacefully after a long day's work on the farm, with one of his arms flopped over the side of the bed, handcuffed to the frame. His fingers, curled loosely around nothing, refuse to twitch no matter how long I stare at them.

Maybe that's why it's so hard for me to imagine him as one of the walkers.

It's easy to forget that they used to be people.

"You best wake up soon," I tell the motionless old man, trying my best to sound like I mean business. It ain't lost on me that my Dad was in this same position last year, laid up in bed after he took that bullet to the guts and refused to die. It was Herschel that had saved him, only outta the kindness of his heart and nothing much else at all, 'cause he ain't got a bad bone in him, not even one. "We need you."

Crouched at his bedside, Maggie squeezes her eyes shut, a tear slipping down her cheek as she holds his hand.

When she opens them again, they're green and watery like fresh grass after a sun shower.

Even though Carl and I got an earful from our Dads about sneaking off, I'm glad we managed to get the supplies from the infirmary.

His leg — Or should I call it something else, now that half of it is gone? Is there a word for such an impossible thing? — is wrapped up in clean, white bandages, no longer pourin' blood. I know any one of us would happily give him one of ours, but we just can't.

"Thank you," Carol glances from me, to Carl, to Glenn. "By the way. I couldn't have done this without your help."

Glenn smiles a bit. "Should I say it was no problem?"

"Probably not," She chuckles softly, going back to tidying up the thin gauze around the wound.

Herschel was always so kind to me, even when I wasn't kind in return. There are just some people who are like that — Good. Like Dale — and can't ever be anything else. I used to think it was a weakness, because what good is an animal that doesn't know how to bite? How's it meant to survive? Nobody I ever knew was brave enough to be gentle, but Herschel was. He took us in when we needed help, fed us warm tea and potato soup when all we had to give in return was trouble. He cleaned the blood from my wounds, gave me a clean bed to sleep in.

No matter if somebody is as mean as a snake or as loyal as a dog — In my case, if they're both — we all bleed the same.

"Harley?"

Everybody turns at the sound of Beth's voice, the blonde girl peering around the doorframe.

"Yeah?"

"Could you come help me with somethin' real quick?" She asks, adding, "It won't take long."

"That reminds me, actually." Carol tells Glenn, "I need your help with something, too."

"I don't think I can leave Herschel again," He says.

"Let's talk about it outside."

"Um. Sure thing," I nod to Beth, standing from the metal seat and following her outta the cell, and into ours. "What is it?"

She kneels down on Carl's mattress where Mouse is napping, picking up a bundle of brown cloth and laying it across her lap. "He's gonna have a hard time walkin' around with one side of his pants draggin' on the ground. He could, you know, trip or somethin'."

She takes a tiny sewing needle and sticks it through the fabric.

Trip?

Her Daddy's on his deathbed and she's worried about him tripping?

"I just need you to keep the string from knottin' up," She explains as I sit in front of her. "So I can focus on the sewin' part."

Taking the string and picking the tangled pieces apart as she continues weaving the needle in and out, her thin fingers trembling, I decide to humour her, because it's the right thing to do. Some people cry when they're nervous, but I guess others sew up pantlegs.

"I asked Maggie to help me earlier," She muses, frustrated. "But she wouldn't do it."

I almost lose my grip on the string as she tugs harshly on it, catching it at the last moment.

"Oops."

"Apparently, she didn't want me to get my hopes up too high," She says. "You believe that? It's like s-she thinks he's gonna die."

I struggle to know whether or not I should tell her that's exactly what Maggie thinks, and that nobody can blame her for it. I thought my Dad was gonna die when we were on the farm, but it was never because I didn't have faith in him. I was just scared.

Feeling my stare on her, Beth looks up at me through her furrowed brows, pouting, "What?"

I shake my head. "Nothin'."

"Just say it, then." She slumps. "You think the same thing, don't you?"

Gesturing to her with the ball of string, I try to convince her, "Well, I'm helpin' ya, ain't I?"

She sighs as she looks back down at her needle. "Yeah, but I know you're just feelin' sorry for me. I felt sorry for you when your Dad was unconscious. You were like a sad little puppy dog waitin' for her owner at the door, but I couldn't do anything to help."

"I'on think he's gonna die," I insist, because it's true. "I think he's either gonna die or wake up, and that's totally different."

She pulls the needle through with a long, sweeping motion. "Sorry. I'm just... I appreciate you gettin' the medical supplies."

"O'course."

I ain't gonna lie and tell her I didn't second guess going with Carl, but what matters is that I only ever had Herschel in mind.

If you were to ask my Dad, though, he'd say that's exactly what the problem was.

She adds, "Just... Promise to be more careful, next time?"

"Who bribed ya to say that?"

"Nobody," She giggles, biting the string with her teeth and tying it off. "Nobody needs to be bribed to care about you, Harley."

"What'd they give ya?"

"Nothin'!"

"If it was cookies, I want one."

"Oh, shut it." She smooths out the pantleg before holding it up to look at. "There. These will do. Decent, right?"

I smile, "Yeah, you're really good at that."

"Thanks." Folding them neatly and grabbing the next pair of pants, she says, "My Mom taught me all about textiles when I w—"

"Oh, my God!"

Mouse's head whips up.

"Maggie?" I call out worriedly, throwing the string aside and running outta the cell. "What's wrong?"

She's backed up against the wall when I come to a stop outside Herschel's cell, staring wide-eyed at him, shuddering somethin' about, He ain't breathin', He stopped breathin', as Lori pushes past everyone and presses her ear to his chest.

"'Stopped breathin'?'" I exclaim but I don't know who to, horrified it means, dead.

"Oh, Lord," Beth croaks.

Lori lifts her head and without wasting any time, she starts pumping his chest, grunting with each brutal squashing of his sternum. I watch on, unsure what I can do, unsure if I'm gonna stop breathin', too. His heart's stopped, and I know that means dead.

Lori's hair hangs down, tickling the end of his nose like a feather.

"Come on," She's gritting through her teeth, "Come on."

I swear his nostrils twitch.

I'on even have to think about it. I pull my gun out, point it at his head, watching for any sign that he's waking up in the wrong way. It ain't like all the other heads I've had hovering on my sights. It ain't mishappen, rotted, peeled back, leaking. It's just our Herschel.

The handcuffs rattle.

I gasp.

All the little hairs on my arms stand up.

Lori squeals as his body lurches up like he's being sick and his arms reach out for her, Maggie pulling her into her side.

They hold each other, gawking at him.

Has he turned? Is he gone?

I'm about to move my finger onto the trigger when he lets out a thin sigh, slumps back down on his pillow, and starts to snore like a happy baby, none the wiser to any of the horror he just caused us. Well. I'm glad somebody's havin' a good time.

Lowering the gun, I look at poor Maggie, Beth, and Lori, suddenly quite ashamed that I had drawn.

When I look to my left, Carl's shakily lowering his gun, too.

"It's okay," Maggie soothes us after a breathless moment has passed. "It's— It's okay."

"I'm sorry," I say. Even if he had turned into a walker and I was forced to shoot him, it still would'a had her Dad's face on it.

"Don't be, honey. It's okay." She says. "He's okay."

Beth suddenly breaks free of them and marches outta the cell.

Not wanting her to be alone after what just happened, I holster my gun and follow after her, Mouse at my heel. I don't care that I'll probably be stuck with her for hours. Some people sew up pantlegs when they're nervous, but I guess others help them hold the string.

Beth and I have finished tailoring and folding away all of Herschel's pants by the time Rick, Dad, and T-Dog return to the cellblock, approaching Carl, who's standing in the doorway of Herschel's cell, telling them, "Herschel stopped breathing before. Mom saved him."

"It's true," Glenn nods as they crowd into the cell with us, Rick coming to his bedside, sadly gazing down at him.

"I almost shot him, Dad," I whisper, thinking of the night he was forced to raise his gun to Dale's head. "Thought he turned."

His expression solemn, he reaches down and wraps a hand around the nape of my neck, squeezing reassuringly.

"S'alright," He rasps quietly, leaving the rest unsaid.

I let the pressure calm me as I watch Herschel's sleeping face, his wrinkled mouth parting as if to speak a silent word.

Wait.

His mouth is parting.

Realizing the same thing, Maggie rushes to his side.

"Daddy?" She softly calls out to him, searching his closed eyes for something. "Daddy, we're here."

"We're here," Beth agrees.

Please, I think to myself, This has to be it, right?

I feel Dad move his hand onto my shoulder, stopping me from reaching for my holster. He rests his fingers on the grip of his gun. Rick gently puts his hand on Maggie's back, glancing back at him with a tense sort of look before focusing on Herschel again.

Then, without any grand affairs or a single word from anybody in the room, his eyelids slowly flutter open, and they're not milky, or bloodshot, or twitching, or anything. They're just a tender blue, focusing and unfocusing on the bottom of the bunk above him.

The first thing he turns his head to look at is Maggie's tearful, laughing face. Beth lets out a squeaky cry, and the corner of his mouth pulls into a weak smile as his hand twitches in the handcuffs, tryna reach out for them in the human way, gentle and loving.

He's okay. He really is.

Dad relaxes, removing his hand from his gun.

Taking the keys from his belt, Rick unlocks the handcuffs and they fall away, letting Herschel embrace Maggie's wet cheek.

"Hey, sleepyhead," Beth sniffles.

"You scared us," Maggie adds, putting her hand over his.

He looks over her shoulder at Rick, at me and Dad, at Carol and T-Dog, at Lori, Glenn, and Carl, and lastly, at smiling Mouse.

"I hope my bed hair isn't going to s-scare you all over again," He says hoarsely, making us all chuckle. "How long?"

"About half a day," She says. "We dressed your leg up real good. Got the bleedin' to stop. You're gonna be okay, Daddy."

"Of course I am," He smiles.

"Let me get you some water," Carol says as she turns outta the cell, leaving everyone to bask in the moment, sharing relieved glances.

We got no choice but to believe him when he sounds as certain as he does. He's a tough one, alright. Tougher than all of us combined.

When she returns, Maggie shuffles outta the way to give her room to crouch down, helping him take a long sip.

"Easy," She cautions, pulling away. "We want you rested up."

"Yes, I think that's a good idea," He agrees, peering down his belly at his half-leg, giving it a bit of a wiggle.

"Does it hurt?"

"Oh," He chuckles. "Only my pride, my dear. You did an excellent job."

"Well, I had an excellent teacher," She says proudly, brushing some of the hair back from his face.

"And, Rick," He reaches out for the man, who takes his bony hand in his strong ones. "I think I owe you just about everything."

He shakes his head. "No more than I owe you."

"I haven't quite taken an axe to your leg, yet, son," He jokes, releasing his hand to point at him, "S-so, not exactly."

Dipping his head, he laughs, "Fair enough, old man."

Taking Maggie's hand again, Herschel's eyes begin to droop sleepily before he falls back asleep, a faintly happy look on his face, like he's having a nice dream. Maggie kisses Beth's cheek and holds her Daddy's hand under her chin, placing another kiss there.

"Let's leave him to rest," Carol says, gently guiding everyone out. "He needs it if he's going to be up and walking."

Stepping into the cell hall, Rick sighs heavily, "That was a relief."

"He's a tough son of a bitch," Glenn agrees.

Rubbing her belly, Lori asks, "What happened with the prisoners?"

"We tried to take cell block C with them," He explains, his brow splattered with wet blood and gunk, but with no wound. "I mean, these are guys who thought we might have a phone for 'em to use, so you can imagine how it went. The rest, I'on think the kids should hear."

"So, where are they now?" Carol asks.

"Two of 'em are in cell block C," He says, leaving me to wonder where the other three are. "It's a mess, but they agreed to stay."

I ain't sure how I feel about havin' neighbours in here. The prison is definitely more than big enough to share with them, but some neighbours are just better off dead, even if they give us dry corn and canned beef. It's not what Dale would've said, I know, and I think that's the reason Rick let them live. For now, at least. It's not as if they've threatened us, unlike that group of bandits he murdered last year.

Yes, the prisoners' leader did have his gun aimed at Rick's head, but Rick had one aimed at his, too.

"Hopefully they stay out of our way," She shrugs, though she doesn't look very happy. "Nothing else we can do."

"Don't worry. We're keepin' an eye on 'em," T-Dog reassures her.

"Well, I'm gonna go clean myself up," Rick announces, his exhaustion suddenly obvious. "I need a good sleep."

"Ditto," Dad groans.

That night, I think we all rest more than a little easier knowing that Herschel will survive.

My knife sinks into the soft meat of the walker's knee, the bone popping open as I twist the blade like a key.

It gives out a gurgling cry, gripping the fence with its blackened fingers as it falls to its knees, tonguing at the wire.

SQUELCH.

Stabbing it through the eye, the rotting lady's jaw goes slack, right before she slumps over and another walker replaces her.

"Nicely done." Dad says. He's making good on his promise to let us help clear the courtyard. "How many's that now, girl?"

"Eight," I pant.

He's standing a few feet down the fence from me, holding his hand over his brow and sneering against the glare of the sun. Behind him, Carl deftly drives his knife into the knee of a walker and then its head, pulling it out with a spray of blood.

In the background, Mouse is busy doing his own thing, sniffing weeds.

"Good. Make it ten." Dad approaches me and takes my knife from me, wiping it on his thigh. "And remember to keep this clean."

With the newly gunk-free blade, he swiftly kills the walker in front of me.

It drops to the ground.

"Like I said, it don't gotta be sparklin', but you don't want all that sticky shit dryin' on there and makin' it harder for you to pull out," He explains, handing it back to me. He watches me stab the knee of the next walker, breaking the bone. "That's it. Now the head."

Its face presses up against the fence, eye level with me, only managing half a growl before I stick the blade through its eye.

It's all the more satisfying when I imagine it's the walker that tackled me on the farm, or the one from the hospital, or the one from yesterday. It sure feels good being able to kill a thing that wants to kill me. With each kill, I'm gettin' better, faster, more accurate.

"And you, boy?" He calls over to Carl. "How many?"

As the walker in front of him collapses, the boy grins. "Ten. Guess I've mastered the class, huh, Daryl?"

"Ten?" I sass. "You lyin'."

"Make it twelve," Dad orders, wiping the smug look from his face. "Remember yer footin'. S'why you're stumblin' all over the place."

I can't help but snicker.

Dad unlocks the small gate as I cripple and take out one more walker, bringing me to ten kills, one for every one of my fingers.

Dad pulls his bandana over his head. One of the many walkers shuffles toward him, but before it can do any damage, he effortlessly lunges forward with the fabric and braces it between its teeth, dragging it into the courtyard and tying a knot behind its head.

As Mouse starts barking at it, I soothe, "Shh, boy. It's okay."

Dad kicks the gate closed, and with the walker angrily chewing on the bandana, he muscles it over to us.

"We're gonna practice without the fence."

I remember we did this a few months ago on the side of the highway when we were first learning how to properly kill walkers.

Until then, we only knew the basics — Aim for the head!

Now, he makes us practice every few days.

It's one of my favorite pastimes. Even better'un playin' soccer and ridin' our bikes!

"Y'all know the drill. It can't bite ya." He reassures us, the walker's thrashing no match for the strong grip he's got on it. "I'm gonna let it go and you're gonna take it down however you feel is best. But you wanna keep on its eight and four. Why ya gonna do that?"

"That's its blind spots," I recite. "And ya don't wanna get behind it, 'cause it might fall on ya."

"Easier to dodge," He agrees. "Harley, you're gonna go first. Carl, you get seconds. Hold the dog. Ready?"

Carl crouches, holding Mouse still. "Yep."

"Ready," I nod.

"I'm right here if things get messy." Dad shoves it forward. "Alright. Meathead, in the ring. Show 'im who's boss, girl."

The walker locks eyes with me.

Without anything to hold it back, it starts to clumsily stride toward me with purpose.

"You got this, Harley," Carl cheers, Mouse whining worriedly.

"I'mma kill it, Mousey," I reassure him. "It's okay."

Let's do it. Eight and four, eight and four. As soon as it's within arm's reach, I dodge it, ducking under its arm. Confused, it looks around, sniffing at the air to find out where I went because it's a fuckin' idiot. Rearing my knife back, I drive it into the back of its knee.

It stumbles drunkenly, landing on its stomach, but with my hands still wrapped around the knife, I fall with it.

Landing against its thigh, I grunt.

Mouse's whining gets louder.

"I'm here. Stay calm," Dad coaches me as Carl shushes the dog. "Get that knife out 'fore it gets back up."

Righting myself, I pull the blade out and crawl up to its head, stabbing the nape of its head.

Pink brains and blood leaks out.

It's dead!

As I stand back up, heart racing, Dad comes forward and starts untying his bandana from the walker's mouth.

"Good work," He says, shaking it out. "You know why you fell, right?"

"I ain't took the knife out quick enough. Pulled me down with it."

If I was up against any more walkers, they would'a piled on top of me while I's on the ground. Eaten alive, in Rick's words. Eugh.

Not a good pastime.

"Was only practice," He soothes, kissing my hair. "Next time, give it a bit of a wiggle and it'll free up quicker."

"Alright."

"You didn't warn us about us falling on them, Daryl," Carl jokes, releasing Mouse, who runs straight for me.

"Shut up, Carl," I smile, petting the dog's big snout. "It was only practice."

"Woohoo, Harley!"

We all look up at Glenn standing out in the field with Rick, grinning and holding a bunch of firewood.

"Good job!" Rick adds, waving.

Dad scoffs. "Didn't know we had an audience."

I cup my hands around my mouth. "Thanks!"

After that, Dad dresses up another walker for Carl to practice on. While he don't fall over like I did, he keeps nervously dancing around it like some sorta twinkle-toes ballerina, until my Dad's patience wears thin and he shouts at him to make a move, and he finally kills it.

SQUELCH.

"Alright," Dad says, "Back to work."

Fifteen, I count in my head, pulling my knife free, when the door behind us suddenly swings open.

What was that?

At first, I think it's more walkers spilling into the courtyard, but when I turn around, I see it's not walkers at all.

It's the prisoners.

The white guy with the ugly moustache and the black guy that wanted a phone to call his family.

That's them, emerging from the dark.

"Oh. H-Hey, guys," The shorter of the two greets us breathily, holding up his hands as the door shuts behind them. "Fancy se—"

"Back the Hell up!"

Dad's got his crossbow aimed at their heads before they can take a single step toward us, his finger curled around the trigger.

Mouse starts bark, bark, barking at them, but I lunge toward him, holding him back.

"Holy shit," The prisoner exclaims, looking like he's about to wet his jumpsuit, or cry, or both. "Man, w-we don't want no trouble."

If he ain't careful, he's gonna get an arrow to the head and a dog bite to the neck.

"What do you want?" Dad growls, blocking their view of me and Carl with his body. "Cell block weren't cozy enough for ya?"

"Please, mister. We know we had a deal," He begs. I ain't never heard nobody call my Dad, mister, before. He must really wanna get on our good side, but what he don't understand is that when it comes to strangers, we don't got no good side. "But you gotta understand! We can’t live in that place another minute, you follow me? All the bodies. People we knew. Blood. Brains everywhere. There’s ghosts!

Rick, Glenn, and T-Dog must have noticed all the commotion, rushing into the courtyard.

Frowning hard, Rick demands to know, "What's goin' on? Why're they out here?"

Lowering his crossbow, Dad sneers, "Fellers got cold feet, is what I'm hearin'."

"We just can't live like that," The taller one says. "We can't."

"Why don't'cha move the bodies out?"

As Glenn herds me and Carl behind him, T-Dog scoffs, "You ain't done that, yet? You should be burnin' them."

"We tried," The blonde blubbers.

"The fence is down on the far side of the prison." The other explains, making everybody share tense glances with each other. A downed fence ain't good at all, if we wanna fortify this place. "Every time we drag a body out, those things just pile up."

Well, that's what they're best at. Piling up. That, and bitin' into people like they's burgers.

It's a bible-level miracle these two ain't dead, yet.

"Look," The weaselly little man says, becoming even more antsy at our prolonged silence. "We had nothing to do with Tomas and Andrew. You tryna prove a point? Yeah? W— You proved it, bro! I swear, we’ll do whatever it takes to be part of your group!"

When he gestures to me and Mouse, Dad's hands twitch around his crossbow.

"You—? You got a dog? I mean, that's awesome," He puffs. "Clearly, you been doin' well for yourselves. What's his name?"

"Don't'chu fuckin' talk to my daughter, man," Dad scolds him.

"It's just, I love— We love dogs. I actually used to have a labrado—"

"Man, will you stop?" His friend tuts. "Have some balls."

Mouse gives a little huff.

He don't like 'em, neither.

"I'm just sayin'," He sighs, "I really, really, really don't wanna go back to that cell block again. Please don't make us."

"Our deal is non-negotiable," Rick replies coldly. "You either live in your cell block, or you leave. We have kids here."

"We ain't pedos, mister. Swear!"

"Jesus Christ," Glenn mutters under his breath, because this guy is embarrassing.

"We ain't here to test that theory out," Dad scowls.

Rick agrees, "You even think about steppin' into our cell block, and you can consider yourselves dead."

"You know, I told you this was a waste of time," The tall one scoffs, smart enough to ditch the begging route. "These guys ain’t no different than the pricks who shot up our boys. You know how many friends’ corpses we had to drag out this week? Just threw ‘em out-like. Those were good guys! Good guys who had our backs against the really bad dudes in this joint, like Tomas and Andrew!"

None of these guys were put in here for no reason.

Everybody used to say that only bad guys went to prison, but I never believed that. I saw the people I cared about be rounded into cop cars and driven away into the night more time than I cared to count, always watching the flashing lights disappear down the road while standing on the porch with Merle, shivering in the wind in my pyjamas. No, I knew it was only people the police ain't liked that went to prison.

Whether it was because they was murderers, or brawlers, or tax-dodgers; or if they had only given 'em a sour look.

My Dad, he was all'a those things, but it weren't no sour look that got him put in handcuffs in the end.

He ain't like Herschel and Dale. Ain't all good. He's nasty and he swears and he's killed people, but that's only part of him.

I feel a little bad for these two.

They're clueless, like babies. They don't even got a word for the walkers, yet. But I know that even though our group love my Dad for who he is, and they know he's been to prison, and that it don't make him all bad, they won't feel the same way for these two strangers.

The most important thing we have is each other.

I've seen first-hand what we do to anybody that threatens that.

"Now, we’ve all made mistakes to get in here, chief," The man continues uselessly. "And I’m not gonna pretend to be a saint, but believe me — We paid our due. Enough that we would rather hit the road, than to go back into that shithole for one more second."

He doesn't know he's just described to a T what's about to happen.

Rick levels them with an indifferent look. "Then you're on the road."

His face falls.

And it's probably not because he won't get to pet Mouse.

"We'll die out there."

Again, Rick shrugs.

Raising his crossbow once more, Dad herds them outta the courtyard and into the field.

Author's note.

I enjoyed writing this chapter! Probably because nothing bad happened. We have low standards here at Harley D. Dixon.

As always, I sincerely hope you enjoyed reading! 💙

@poetoflawed

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