#i obviously hold Allan deep inside my heart.

[emachinescat]

The Casket of the Armadillos (by Edgar Allan Nope)

A Psych Fan-Fiction

by @emachinescat

@febuwhump day 9 - buried alive

Summary:  When Shawn confronts a grad student turned murderer, he learns a very important lesson a very hard way: Don’t piss off English nerds - especially the homicidal ones. 

Characters: Shawn, Gus, Juliet, Lassiter, Henry

Words: 5,924

TW: panic attacks, buried alive, claustrophobia

Note: If you liked this classic lit-inspired Psych fic, you can always check out this one I wrote, inspired by To Kill a Mockingbird: The Finch and the Mockingbird 

Keep reading here, or on AO3!

If you enjoy, please consider liking, commenting, or re-blogging, and you can follow me for more content like this! :)

I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up.  Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones.  For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them.  In pace requiescat!

- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”

Her name was Olivia Hale, she was a twenty-three-year-old grad student at UCSB, and she was working on her doctorate in American lit.  She was attractive in a cute librarian sort of way - short and petite, with long, curly auburn hair she kept in a bun and oversized glasses with thick lenses, and a smattering of freckles across her slightly upturned nose.  She knew a little bit about everything when it came to literature as a whole, a rather impressive amount about American literature, and absolutely everything there was to know about the life and works of one Edgar Allan Poe.

She was also batshit crazy and currently pointing a .22 pistol directly at Shawn’s head.

“Don’t move,” she growled, disengaging the safety.  

Shawn did a cursory glance around the empty classroom, looking for anything at all he could use to his advantage, to distract her or attack her with or - worst case scenario - to use as a shield.  But Olivia had found him snooping around on the tiny fourth floor study room that she’d been given to use by the department chair as her thesis headquarters.  She’d really made herself at home here, piling books and journals and what seemed like hundreds of loose sheets of paper on every available surface.  

But he was stranded in the middle of the room, with nothing close enough to use as a weapon, and so Shawn used the most powerful tool he had, one that had saved his life and many others, wooed women all over the country, and ordered more chili cheese dogs than he could count.  

He started talking.

“Look, Olivia, I get it,” he said soothingly.  Slowly, in the most non-threatening  manner possible, he lowered his hands.  Olivia gripped the pistol tighter but didn’t shoot.  “I know what happened.  You didn’t mean to kill him.”

Her eyes were wide and fierce, her lips pursed into a thin line.  “No,” she admitted.  “It was an accident.  But he was going to--”

“Yeees,” drawled Shawn, slowly raising his left hand and putting it to his temple, very well aware that he was probably pushing the limit with all of this movement after she had expressly ordered, at gunpoint, for him to stay still.  “I see it.  Dr. Graves was feeling guilty, wasn’t he?  A fifty-five-year-old professor with a fancy PhD and tenure, and a devoted wife and three kids and two grandkids, to boot.  The perfect life.  But oooh, it wasn’t enough for him, was it?”  

Shawn immediately answered his own question, something that he had become exceptionally good at over the years since he was usually the only one who could keep up with himself.  “Of course not!  What’s the perfect job and family when you’ve got a smokin’ hot, super smart student in her mid-twenties who thinks you’re the most impressive man on the planet?”

She sneered, and Shawn noticed with some trepidation that the hand holding the gun trembled just the tiniest bit.  When she spoke, her voice warbled with rage.  “My age and appearance had nothing to do with it - and even if it did, there was nothing wrong with our relationship!  We were perfect for each other, intellectual equals.  We were on each other’s levels - he was my soulmate!  So don’t you dare belittle what we had like that!”  

Ah.  So he had hit a nerve.  This could now go either one of two ways, in Shawn’s extensive experience in being held hostage: Either she would get fed up and send a bullet screaming through his body, Garth Longmore style, or she would let her emotions distract her, and cause her to make a stupid mistake.  Obviously, Shawn hoped for the latter.  

Now Shawn had to make a choice, because he could proceed in one of two ways: Either he could back off and try from another angle, or he could further antagonize her into (hopefully) making a mistake.  Naturally, Shawn went with the latter.

“Sure, sure,” he agreed airily.  “Older men and younger women do it all the time.  But to say there was nothing wrong with your relationship?  The man was married, and you were his student.  I’m not the headmaster here -”

“Dean,” she corrected sharply, and this further proved that Shawn had pegged her correctly as a know-it-all literature wunderkind who had to be right one thousand percent of the time.  “This isn’t Hogwarts.”

Shawn gave a tiny shrug.  “To be honest, all big schools look like Hogwarts to me.”

“Because you have the mind of a child.”  The words were accusatory and patronizing, but Shawn flashed a dazzling smile.

“Thank you,” he said.  Before she could respond, he continued his earlier thoughts, “Even though you were the ‘perfect couple,’ you were furious with him for even suggesting that you stop seeing one another.  The affair was too risky, and he missed his wife.  He wanted to tell her the truth, fix things.”

“It would have ruined everything!” Olivia hissed, and the sound of her voice sent shivers down Shawn’s spine.  There was an unhinged quality to it, something raw and dangerous that he hadn’t sensed before.  He fought the sudden urge to backpedal as far away from her as possible.  “We were perfect together!  And if he told his wife and she let it slip, I would be kicked out!  All my research, all my time and work here, everything would be gone!  He had no right to make that decision for me, to take away my future!”

“Maybe,” said Shawn, and it was like he was watching from outside his body, because he knew that what he was about to say was a big mistake, but he was helpless to stop the words from tumbling from his lips, “you should have thought more about your future before you pursued your married Shakespeare teacher.”

Fury etched itself into every feature of her face, turning her from a beautiful librarian to a feral monster, but her voice was slow and measured as if it was taking every ounce of self-control she possessed not to shoot him where he stood.  “He taught Southern. Gothic. Masterpieces.”

Shawn tried to backtrack, to undo whatever damage had been done by his unpredictably big mouth.  “But,” he pressed.  “Killing him was an accident.  You didn’t mean to push him down four flights of stairs.”

She considered this.  “No, I didn’t mean to kill him,” she reaffirmed, and then an odd calm smoothed out the angry crevices between her eyebrows - the peace, perhaps, of having come to an important decision that she knew was absolutely right.  Shawn recognized the look because he’d seen it on others’ faces before (very rarely, if ever, had he seen it upon his own).  “And I don’t think I will kill you, either.”

Whatever Shawn had been expecting, this wasn’t it.  Everything about this woman screamed insane and vengeful.  If Shawn lived, he would turn her into the police, and she would go to jail for a very long time.  She was incredibly intelligent - surely she knew this!

And then she clarified, and the world started to make sense again - though Shawn would have honestly been perfectly content in this alternate reality where the bad guy suddenly has a miraculous change of heart.  “Well,” she amended, “I won’t kill you directly.  I’ve never shot anyone before - I only have this little guy here because I’m a young, pretty girl on a big college campus, and I have two night classes.  Besides, your death shouldn’t be so easy.”

Shawn swallowed.  “Olivia, you don’t have to do this.  You haven’t intentionally killed anyone yet.  If you turn yourself in now and cooperate, your sentence will be a lot shorter than if you kill me - directly or not.  Because make no mistake, even if you kill me, you will still get caught.  The SBPD has some damn good detectives, and they’ll bring you down even if I don’t.”

She didn’t respond to him directly.  Instead, her expression was flat save for the dark gleam in her eyes, and she intoned words that in and of themselves had no meaning to Shawn, but that still managed to strike a chord of fear deep inside of his soul.  “‘The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.’”  Shawn was utterly unnerved by this point; it was like she had been taken over by something both sinister and incredibly well-spoken.

And indeed, in many ways she had, as Shawn soon found out, she was quoting the beginning of a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

Presently, however, Shawn had no context for her strange words or sudden shift of demeanor.  His skin crawled and his heart pumped with more get-up-and-go than he’d ever been able to muster in his whole body before.  “Uh, Olivia…”

“Move,” she ordered.  

This time, though it was contrary to his nature, Shawn did what she said without arguing.  This side of the student, with stolen words sliding evilly from her mouth, was a million times scarier than the enraged Olivia who had very nearly shot him between the eyes.

She marched him out of the room and down the three flights of stairs to the main lobby of the English building.  It was dark outside, nearing midnight, and Shawn kicked himself for thinking he was clever for coming to investigate this late.  He’d thought she’d be at home sleeping.  He should have realized that as a grad student, sleeping was the one thing she wouldn’t have time for!  And now he was in very deep trouble, alone, and no one knew where he was.  He should have waited until morning, until the building wasn’t deserted, should have at least called Gus and told him what he was doing.  But it was a college campus, and she was a tiny little literature nerd - it should have been safe!

As she forced him down one flight of stairs, then two, then three, and finally, into a stairwell off the beaten path that had to be unlocked with a key card - which she had - she continued to encant, her voice slowly losing its flatness and growing into something twisted and sing-songy with every word.

“‘You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat.  At length I would be avenged; this was a point, definitely, settled - but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk.’”

“Olivia--”

It was as if she hadn’t heard him as she shoved him into the basement, and now her voice stilled from a chant to a slow, measured whisper..  “‘I must not only punish but punish with impunity.’”   

Shawn wasn’t sure what impunity was, but it sure as hell didn’t sound good.

Their final destination ended up being a small, partially finished storage room near the back of the basement.  Dusty boxes and rusted cabinets and archaic old computer monitors lined the walls and cluttered most of the walking space.  Shawn was reminded grimly of a school supply graveyard.  

Olivia stopped him when they came to a brick wall that had been busted through to fix some issue with the pipes - Shawn saw the water stains on the concrete floor near the break in the wall, and there was a brand new water pipe joined to an old, yellowed one at about eye-level in the small open space between the bricks and the drywall beyond.  Shawn also noticed that the new bricks had been neatly piled up near a sealed bucket that almost certainly contained mortar, right outside of the hole.  Someone was in the process of walling this section back up.

“Nice wall,” Shawn joked, relieved that Olivia had finally stopped her creepy recitation and desperately trying to lighten the mood and bring things back to some sort of normal - honestly, he’d take being threatened with the gun again to the horror movie stuff he’d just witnessed.  “I bet all the other walls are jealous of it.”

It was a lame joke, but her eerie dramatics had him all kinds of messed up.  He expected her to tell him to shut up, or to threaten to shoot him again, or to actually shoot him, but instead she asked him a question in that same cold, calm voice as before.  “Have you ever read ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ Shawn?”

Shawn blinked.  “I make it a point not to read anything that’s not a magazine from the 80s or WikiHow articles on ‘How to Escape from Dangerous Forest Animals.’”

The corner of her lips lifted in a mockery of a satisfied smile.  “Good.  Then you’ll get to experience it for yourself, first hand.  Just wait until you get to the ending!  You’re going to love it.”

Somehow, Shawn doubted that very much.

Still holding the gun on him with one hand, she reached her free hand into the cross-body bag she wore and pulled out a pair of handcuffs.  Shawn groaned.

“Come on!  What college student just carries handcuffs in their school bag?”  Then he remembered that this particular student had until recently been having a passionate affair with her teacher.  “Wait - never mind.  It makes perfect sense.”

She laughed, even though what he said wasn’t even remotely funny.  The sound of it was strange and discordant - light and tinkly with a threatening undertone that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.  Then she gestured at the hole in the wall and ordered, “In.”

Shawn had known it was coming, but had tried to shove that knowledge into the corner of his mind - something that was quite difficult to do for someone with a photographic and eidetic memory - in an effort to convince himself that even she wasn’t that cruel.  He tried to appeal to her one last time: “Olivia, it’s not too late to stop this.  I mean, are you really going to do this to another human being - seriously, look at this place - it’s dusty and moldy and I’m almost certain there’s no room service!  If you’re going to chain me to a pipe, why not do it in a five star hotel?”  When she nudged him with the gun, eyes gleaming with something dark and triumphant, he reluctantly stepped into the small space and implored, “I’ll even settle for a seedy motel off a poorly lit backroad.  I’m not too picky.”

She didn’t answer him as she stood on her tiptoes and handcuffed Shawn’s wrists around the pipe, cinching them so tight that the metal dug into his skin and he doubted that even his dad’s lessons on escaping handcuffs wouldn’t be much help here.  Already he could feel his fingers going numb, and his shoulders and back had started to ache from the hunched position he was forced to take due to the height of the pipe and the awkward angle of his arms.  

Well, Shawn thought glumly as she smiled at her handiwork and carefully backed out of the small space, maybe all wasn’t lost.  Surely someone would come down here and find him. This place was dusty, but it couldn’t be abandoned - work still needed to be done down here, after all.  And he could always yell for help once he was sure Olivia was gone.  She was booksmart, but maybe she wasn’t criminally minded.  He might be in for an uncomfortable night, but in the morning someone would find him and he could have his vision and the cute little psychopath would go to jail for a very long time.

He waited for her to leave, but instead, she used a crowbar to pry the lid off the bucket of mortar, and the pit in Shawn’s stomach became a whole-ass trench.  He should have seen this coming - his heart pounded madly against his rib cage as if trying to free itself, with or without him.  He couldn’t blame it.  “Olivia, please,” he said, and this time, there was no joke, his voice imploring and terrified.  “You don’t have -”

Again, she cut him off.  “How would you like to hear a story before you die, Shawn?” she asked in a tone so casual that she could have been asking him if he wanted to grab a taco.

“How about you tell me a story and then I don’t die?” Shawn bargained weakly.

“Mmmm… If you stay alive, my whole life will be ruined,” Olivia reasoned.  “And I have worked far too hard to allow that to happen.  So.  You just stand there - quietly - and I’ll tell you the story of Poe’s most beloved tale of revenge.  I won’t tell you word for word, of course - we don’t have time for that - but for posterity, I do have it memorized.”  She sounded grotesquely proud of that fact.  “It’s my favorite of his stories, after all.”

And so, as she slowly began to brick up the hole in the wall, with Shawn trapped, helpless and in a dissociative state of panic, she told him the story of two men with really stupid names that Shawn somehow managed, despite his raging fear, to file away for later as possible nicknames for Gus.

“Our story starts in Italy, during the carnival, and our narrator is a man named Montresor, who has a grudge against his once-friend, now-foe, Fortunato…”

The story was an interesting one, even to Shawn, who preferred watching over reading and especially over listening any day.  And as it turned out, Olivia was a really good storyteller.  If he had been in any other position, Shawn might have actually enjoyed the suspenseful tale of revenge.  

But as he stooped there and was forced to listen, all he could think about was about how terrified this Fortunato guy must have been, and then he started wondering how long it had been before the man hadn’t been able to hold his bladder or… other things… anymore, and then about what had happened when he was too tired and dizzy to stand up, if the manacles on his wrists had pulled so hard against his flesh that they cut into him, and if lack of water or oxygen killed him first, all the while he knew that he wasn’t asking these questions for the sake of the fictional character.  He was asking them for himself.  Olivia had made it exceedingly clear - for a literature scholar, she was surprisingly un-subtle about any underlying meanings or motives - that Fortunato’s story was now to be his story.

It wasn’t until she had begun discussing with rapture the brilliance of Poe’s use of the Italian carnival as the setting of a story about murder (because of its abandonment of social order, whatever that meant) and had built up all but the last two bricks, leaving a hole around Shawn’s eye level, that came to the most horrifying realization yet.   He’d been so focused on his own thoughts and fears with Olivia’s words washing over him like an acid bath that he’d barely registered that the dim light in the hole had been darkening incrementally with each new brick placed.  Now he came to the bone-chilling understanding that once she placed those last two bricks, he would be completely in the dark.

He was going to die, alone, terrified, and in utter darkness with fear as his only friend.  He thought in that moment that he might die of a heart attack before he could even think about dehydrating or suffocating.  Honestly, it sounded like an easier way to go.

“Well,” said Olivia finally.  “I can’t say that it’s been a pleasure to meet you in any way, Shawn, but I suppose I should thank you.  Ever since I found out about this unfinished wall down here, I’ve had this unscratchable itch to recreate the titular scene from my favorite Poe story.  You gave me the means and justification to do it!”

Shawn was so overcome by the surging sea of fear and early-onset claustrophobia that he couldn’t even muster up the gumption to make a joke about the word titular.  Instead, as Olivia knelt down next to her bag, rooting around for something, he jerked madly against the handcuffs, desperately searching for any give in the metal or the pipe he was handcuffed to (or even his wrists, at this point he wasn’t picky).  But the pipe was new, and it was sturdy, and so was the fitting that connected it to the old one, which itself didn’t seem too keen on budging, either.

A sick grin teased at Olivia’s parted lips.  “Oh, Fortunato tried that too.  But then he stopped crying and struggling and chose to die with a shred of dignity.  But I highly doubt dignity is something you’re capable of.”  

And then, with the finality of fitting a lid to a coffin, she slapped a piece of fluorescent pink duct tape over his mouth and a fresh wave of panic ravaged Shawn’s everything.  He didn’t remember this happening in her retelling of the story!  Then again, the Fortunato guy had been sealed into catacombs deep underground.  Shawn was in the basement of a heavily trafficked university building.  Someone would actually hear him if he called for help, so she took his voice away from him too.  He couldn’t even sing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” to pass his time or distract him from the inevitable.  As if it wasn’t bad enough that he would die in the dark, he would die in the quiet too - and silence was, as his incessant need for chatter plainly proved, Shawn’s worst enemy.

“Goodbye, Shawn,” Olivia said, and she added one brick, layered on the mortar, and then gave her captive one last satisfied glance before adding the last brick and leaving Shawn in total, impenetrable darkness.  He would never forget that last, terrible look in her eyes before his world went black - she was no longer human; she had elevated herself to the level of the storytelling gods and she relished in the twisted power she held over the life of another human.

As her footsteps clipped away, her voice, obscenely gleeful, called out, “In pace requiescat!”

***

The next ten hours were the worst of Shawn’s life, and they consisted of five main elements all bundled together into a nightmare that would stalk him for the rest of his life.

Cold.  It was the middle of January, and though it couldn’t have been less than forty-five degrees outside, the basement - especially behind the walls - was chilly, and with the musty smell and the dust and the pitch black, Shawn was reminded far too much of a grave and knew that he might as well be in one, because this was going to be his.  It was the kind of cold that bit deeper than the skin and wormed its way into the very core and dug its icy fangs in and refused to let go - the chill of death, an open invitation from the dead to join them in their home beneath the ground.  He shivered a lot, but he couldn’t be sure if it was the cold, or the panic.  It was probably a little of both.

Dark.  The darkness that surrounded him had an unreal nature that could easily trick the eyes into thinking that they were already closed.  It was oppressive and thick, pressing in from all sides, inky black water dredged from the depths of the sea.

Shawn had never been a fan of the dark, but neither did he exactly fear it.  That changed the second that the last brick was put into place and he found himself in a darkness so severe that were in not for the feeling of floor beneath his feet he could have been suspended in the depths of space so remote that not even stars could reach.  The darkness swarmed his senses - it had a physical presence, and it didn’t lessen, never permitted Shawn’s eyes to adjust to it in the slightest.  It just hung there, surrounded him, assaulted his mind with its infinite arsenal of nightmares.

After experiencing true darkness, Shawn would never sleep without a nightlight again (which unfortunately meant he couldn’t judge Gus anymore for using one, either).

Pain.  At first it was just the pull of his shoulders, the ache in his back.  Then, about five minutes after he’d been sealed up, he realized his wrists were screaming with agony - he must have torn them badly when he fought to get away, but the adrenaline staved off the pain until now.  He vaguely wondered how deeply the cuffs had cut - it felt like the skin on his wrists had been flayed - but quickly remembered that it didn’t matter where he was going.  

Then there were the hunger pangs, and they mingled with the cramps from holding his bladder longer than he ever had before, and at some point muscle spasms in his arms and chest and legs joined the choir of suffering.  At one point, he shed a few tears, but they could have just as easily been from anxiety or exhaustion, which itself produced its own kind of pain - he longed to sleep, but his body refused to allow him even that comfort until the very end, right before he was rescued, as if he were being forced on pain of death to endure the pain of death right up until the very moment of his painful death.

At least he didn’t have too much trouble breathing.  There must have been a crack somewhere in the wall in front of or behind him, because fresh air was entering somehow.  He did, several hours into his imprisonment, begin finding it difficult to pull in a full breath, and by the time he was rescued he was giddy with light-headedness, but he didn’t know if it was from the air quality or exhaustion or panic or from being forced to breathe only through his nose for hours, but he really didn’t care.

Quiet.  Even worse than the cold and the dark and the pain was the quiet.  The tape over his mouth prevented him from doing the one thing that could bring him comfort in even the most difficult of situations.  Talking was what Shawn did - he utilized mindless prattle to distract bad guys, to make people underestimate him, to quell fear and panic in himself and those around him, to annoy and wheedle those whose opinions meant the most to him (and who he was most afraid to be real with), and most importantly, to distract himself from all the pain and baggage that his exceptional memory had filed away for him throughout the years.  Talking nonsense meant that he wasn’t thinking about or acknowledging the parts of himself that arguably needed the most attention, those bits that were scared and unsure and hurt and vulnerable.

Shawn had always detested silence, and now it had invaded so intimately that even he could not drive it out.

And all of these culminated in a constant, agonizing state of absolute, unrelenting fear.  

Panic attacks are horrific things that take your natural instincts in potentially dangerous situations and turn them against you in the cruelest of ways.  They suck the air out of your lungs and make your heart pound so fast and so hard that you are convinced it’s going to give out in pure fatigue and never make it to that next beat.  It makes your skin crawl like there are thousands of spiders nesting there, and your chest hurts and your breath is short and stunted and you know you are dying, that the next breath will be your last, but it isn’t, and the fear just continues and sometimes you curl into a ball or rock back and forth or scratch at your skin.

Panic attacks generally last anywhere from five to twenty minutes.  Shawn was stuck in a state of raw, unfiltered panic for ten hours.  When the EMTs at the scene took his heart rate, it was 160, had been the entire time he’d been buried in a collegiate tomb, knowing that he was going to die.

Put simply, Shawn Spencer spent ten hours in his own personal hell.

***

It was nearly three in the afternoon when Detectives Juliet O’Hara and Carlton Lassiter, with the help of a frantic Gus and a worried Henry that tried his damndest not to show how worried he was, made the final connections in the case and tracked down the woman who had slept with and then killed her lover like a hyper-intelligent, book-loving black widow.  Juliet and Gus remained on the college campus to continue investigating while Lassiter and Henry went on to the station to question Olivia.  She had refused to say where the missing psychic detective was, however, and only offered one bitter phrase, spoken in another language that sounded to the questioning party like a curse being placed on their heads: 

“Nemo me impune lacessit.”

It was Gus who figured it out after Lassiter related the cryptic saying over the phone.

“I know that phrase!” he exclaimed to a swell of raised eyebrows.  “It’s Latin! It means no one wounds me with impunity!”

“You speak Latin?”  Juliet seemed impressed.

“Not much.  But I recognize that particular saying, because it’s from a story that gave me nightmares my entire sophomore year of college.”  He shuddered.  “It’s from the second-most terrifying Poe story.”  He didn’t elaborate on what the first-most terrifying one was, largely because he didn’t want to give the others fodder to use “The Tell-Tale Heart” against him like Shawn already did.  Then the full implications of the words sunk in and he gasped, “We have to find Shawn, now.”  The horror in his expression sent a chill down Juliet’s spine. 

“Gus - what the hell are you talking about?”  Henry was no longer trying to hide the panic in his voice.

“It’s from ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ Gus clarified, his own panic making it difficult to express himself clearly.

“Guster, this is hardly the time for you to have a glass of wine,” Lassiter barked.  “Now stop talking in riddles and just spit it out!”

But Juliet had now made the connection as well and answered for Gus.  “Oh my gosh - isn’t that the one where the guy is sealed into a wall and left to die?”

The dread in Gus’s eyes said it all.

“He’s got to be somewhere on campus,” Henry reasoned, and his voice shook the tiniest bit.  “Lassiter and I are on our way back to you now.  In the meantime, check with the school and see if there are any places that are easily accessed and under construction.”

No one said it aloud, but the possibility that her words hadn’t been a hint at all and that Shawn was somewhere else entirely hung in the air amongst them.  It was funny, Juliet thought - though it wasn’t funny at all - she urgently needed Gus’s theory to be right, because otherwise they would have no leads, but at the same time, she was terrified of the implications if it were true.  

Her heart felt as sick as Montresor’s when he placed the last brick as she and Gus raced to the administration building and prayed they weren’t too late.

***

When they broke through the wall, the sight that greeted them was one that would never leave them - any of them.  Even Lassiter, who made it his sacred duty to remain unfazed by anything his job threw at him was visibly disturbed.

A moment of silence, a beat where time stood still and everyone was afraid to move, and then - 

“Shawn!”  The four rescuers surged forward as one, but Henry got there first, his trembling fingers groping for a pulse - thank God, but it was racing, dangerously fast, and in the background he heard Lassiter radioing for an ambulance.

Shawn woke up as Henry gently peeled the hideous pink duct tape (an affront to all duct tape everywhere) off of his mouth.  It wasn’t a gentle waking, a flutter of eyelashes or the murmuring of a name - it was violent and erratic, fueled by terror.  

Henry had had to deal with panic attacks before - mostly Gus’s when he took the boys camping together, but once or twice when Shawn was really young and he’d had a bad dream.  This one was the worst that he’d ever seen - Shawn woke with a muffled yell, panting through his nose, writhing, tears streaming down his face, eyes squeezed shut against the trauma he’d been subjected to, and he threw himself against the handcuffs so fiercely that Henry feared he’d break his wrists.  

Soon his wrists were freed, though, and Henry, with the help of Lassiter, helped a weakened Shawn out of the wall and into the basement and lowered him to the floor.  Henry sat with him and rubbed his back and spoke quietly to him, Juliet took his hand, and Gus reassured him while Lassiter ran up the stairs to check on the ETA of the ambulance.  

Twenty minutes later, Shawn had been placed onto a stretcher and carried up the stairs and out into the sunlight - sensing the warm rays, he opened his eyes only to pinch them shut again as the brightness after so many hours in the dark nearly blinded him.  He had been given something to calm him down, and he would be going to the hospital to be checked over and observed overnight, and a psychiatrist would be sent in to evaluate him in the morning, and everything was moving so fast that Shawn leaned over the side of the stretcher and deposited the remnants of the last thing he’d eaten, nearly twelve hours before.

“There’s one thing I still don’t get,” he gasped as he was eased back onto the stretcher.  “Where do the armadillos come into her plan?”

The EMTs exchanged a concerned look at the stretcher, probably wondering if there had been some carbon monoxide poisoning after all.  Gus, however, just rolled his eyes.

“Amontillado, Shawn.  It’s a kind of wine.”

“The story is called ‘The Casket of the Armadillos,’” Shawn argued stubbornly, going so far as to cross his arms over his chest, pulling at the IV in his right hand.  

Gus was going to argue, to insist that he’d actually read the story (and why the heck would someone fill a casket with armadillos?), but then Gus saw the plea in Shawn’s hazel eyes, that need for jokes and silliness, and understood that his best friend was clinging onto his last shreds of control.  

“You know what - I forgot,” Gus corrected, shaking his head and giving himself a light smack on the forehead for good measure.  “It is ‘The Casket of Armadillos.’”  He glared out at Henry, at Lassiter and Juliet and the EMTs, defying them to challenge his claim.  No one did, but they all shared a similar baffled expression.

Well, they could deal with their confusion, Gus thought protectively as he watched Shawn and Henry disappear into the ambulance.  Shawn had been through a night of unspeakable horror, so if it was armadillos he wanted, then it was armadillos he was going to get.

#febuwhump #febuwhumpday9 #psych #shawn spencer #fanfiction #burton guster #henry spencer #carlton lassiter #juliet o'hara #whump fic #buried alive #entombed #claustrofobia #panic attack #tw claustrophobia #tw panic attack #tw buried alive #angst #hurt/comfort #edgar allan poe #cask of amontillado #classic lit inspired #i created a monster #mystery #i've heard it both ways

[everlarkficexchange]

Dissever My Soul From Yours (part 2)

Written by: @alliswell21

Rated: Mature  *Smut Ahead*

Warnings: Modern AU; Age Gap; Mourning; Grief Stages; Hurt and Comfort; Angst; Brief Description Of Domestic Abuse; Implied Past Child Abuse; Smut; Guilt; Canon Typical Anger Issues; Fasten your seatbelts, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. All mistakes are mine.

Synopsis: Losing a loved one is hard enough, losing a child is torture. Peeta Mellark struggles to move on from the loss of his son, so he clings to the last piece of him left alive, his son’s girlfriend. Based on Prompt 106: Katniss is Rye’s girlfriend when he dies. Katniss and Peeta (Rye’s father) start to hang out to go through their grief together. [submitted by Anonymous]

Acknowledgements: Thank you Anon for this prompt, I wish I knew who you were to dedicate it to you, but I guess this way the story simple belongs to the universe :) Also thank you @kleeklutch for reading this through and helping me get my ideas straight… I truly loved your insights! lastly, thank you Everlark Fic Exchange from bring us all together! 

Other Notes: Excerpt of the lyrics to “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” by Randy Newman (Toy Story, 1995)

Excerpts and rewordings for the poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe; featuring the poem “Alone” by Edgar Allan Poe

This fic got away from me. I had outlined it to be around 8-10K words, but this monstrosity grew up to be close to 32K… this is the second part, and when I post the story to AO3 there will be an epilogue. 

KPKPKPKPKPKPKPKPKP

I press the call button, but chicken out after the first ring and hang up tossing the phone on the couch next to me and putting a cushion on top of it for good measure.

  My childish fix doesn’t help one bit. The phone rings under the cushion all the same, because stupid smartphones are snitches. I miss the 80’s when the most technologically advanced phone was a wireless wall unit.

  “Hello?” I answer, pretending to yawn. I’m not sure what does that help.

  “Hey! Were you trying to call me?” She asks.

  There’s something about hearing her voice that makes my heart stutter. Suddenly I want to see her. Badly.

  “Rye’s headstone is ready.”

  There’s a pause on the other side of the line.

  “I’m coming over.” She says determinedly.

  I hear some shuffling, her breathing pattern fluctuating while she does who-knows-what. Then she asks if I need anything, if I’m okay. But I only make some nonverbal noises. I just want her here. I’m about to tell her I’m going to put the phone down, we can talk when she comes, but I hear the unmistakable turn of a key in my front door, and when I look up, there she is, walking into my apartment.

  Her hair is down, I’ve only ever seen it down a handful of times, but it’s the first time I feel the urge to run my fingers through it’s length. Pull on it a little. See what sounds she’ll produce if I do so.

  My groin area grows warm and tight, and for a moment I lose myself in this devious reaction to her, a primitive hunger unfurling in my core, all consuming and blinding to the rest of the world. I hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing but the scent of her. I watch her with sicken glee as she hurries towards me. I twitch excitedly when she drops in the couch next to me, willing her to just come closer.

  Yes pretty girl, come closer, put your sweet little arms around me, so I can… so I can… so I can…

  The scary voice of the mutt inside me gets fainter the longer I repeat the the last three words.

  So I can… Do what?

  So I can do what?

  “Peeta!” She squeezes my hand, breaking the cursed spell.

  I tear my hand out of hers as if her finger had burned my skin. She retracts her hand and her face turns scarlet in embarrassment, but when my eyes can’t focus on anything, her gaze fills with concern.

  “Hey, where did you go just now? Are you okay? I’m here.” She tells me soothingly, chancing a pass of her hand over my shoulder.

  I have the feeling she’s been trying to get me out of it for a while. I wish I could tell her I’m fine, but the truth is that I’m shaky.

  I don’t know what exactly just came over me. I felt like the wolf, disguised and salivating for Red Riding Hood’s tender flesh. I feel predatory. Dirty. Despicable.

  I start crying. It’s all I can do to release this darkness inside.

  I’m furious with myself when she mistakes my odd behavior as grief, and pulls me down to lay my head on her lap as the rest of my body curls into itself, because I should ask her to leave, I should tell her I may turn into a beast and devour her whole, but I refuse to deprive myself from her touch; because I’m selfish, because I’m disturbed in the head, because I’m a fucked up, lonely failure in love with his son’s girl.

  Somewhere deep down, I’ve always knew I a was goner, and I hate myself for being weak, perverted and a bad father. The worst part, I can’t make myself want to stop falling for her.

  ——-

  Rye’s headstone gets placed on his grave on a Thursday morning.

  It’s cold and windy out, though the sun is shining. I’m surprisingly calm through the whole event. It just feels like it’s the end of the story. He’s gone then, for real. Nothing will bring him back and his name glaring at me in that fucking rock is the proof.

  My father is bawling though. My mother can’t even look at the stone, it’s as if it hurts her, just glancing at it.

  The cynical part of me rejoices that finally something happened to force her show she actually gives a damn. The vindictive side of me wants to scream at her, that she’s a hypocritical bitch, she tossed me out on my ass when I told her I was raising the baby on my own.

  “If you think you’re big enough to ruin your life, then you must be big enough to be on your own.” Those words will be etched in my mind for the rest of my life.

  At the end, after everything was said and done, it turns out my mother loved Rye, doted on him even. Grandbabies have that effect on people. They make the most unfeeling individuals softer, loving, sweet. I’ll never know what that feels like, loving your child’s child. My hopes for grandchildren are buried with Rye.

  As if in autopilot, my eyes find Katniss and I stare at her, scanning her navy blue peacoat clad form from head to toe. Beautifully sculpted legs asides, I stop on her middle and stare where my grand babies should’ve bloom and be given life.

  She’s free to find someone else to fill her belly with children. Though she says she doesn’t want them, I’ve seen her interacting with my nephews, she’s amazing with kids.

  A possessive thought sinks it’s claws in my mind. Her womb should be filled with Mellarks, not some faceless schmuck threatening my legacy. But Rye’s is really dead, who’s stopping her from falling in love with someone else, marrying them, have children… be happy with a family of her own, where I have no place in.

  Now I’m angry at Rye for dying.

  He left me alone. He took my potential family with him into his grave.

  Katniss wanders off after paying her respects to Rye. Her mother and sister trail after her like a family of ducklings.

  When the three of them are together, is clear to see who the head of the Everdeen household really is.

  Prim came to the cemetery with two small bouquets. One she placed against the shiny, new headstone of one Rye Joshua Mellark, the other, I see her place in a vial on the mausoleum where ashes are put to rest.

  Something tells me that if I came snooping around, I’d catch a glimpse of Mr. Everdeen’s last resting place.

  “Bread Boy, when are you heading home?” Jo startles me, when she sidles closer on my left.

  I turn to look at her, but she’s staring at the Everdeen’s in the distance.

  “As soon as she’s done,” I gesture to the Everdeens vaguely.

  Jo frowns, so as way of plantation I inform her, “She came here with me.”

  Jo gives me a disapproving stare that I ignore. After a while she simply sighs. “That was ballsy of you. Stealing and rewording Annabel Lee.” She says in reference to a line I commissioned to be etched at the bottom of the headstone.

  She entones,

“Wingèd seraphs of Heaven   Coveted him. And this was the reason that,   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

My beautiful Navy seaman”

  I glare at her for a moment.

  “I thought Rye hated Poe.” She adds flicking her fingernails, and old habit of hers. It means she’s holding back.

  “He still knew it by heart.” I deadpan.

  “Because it was your favorite! You used to bored him to tears with it. How come you’re still trying to shove it down the poor kid’s throat?”

  All gloves are off now.

  “Because of her!” I point in the direction of Katniss, hissing and whispering harshly. “She loves Poe! and then he did too! I just didn’t know it until the wake. Then, she shows me some of his letters; he wrote the most beautiful poetry I’ve ever read, and he was fucking amazing, Jo, the kid had a natural talent with words we never knew!” I’m so angry at Rye.

  I’m also jealous. I feel like he hid something we could’ve have in common, bond over probably, and shared it with someone else instead. I feel he kept part of him from me, and that just hurts deeply.

  I paw off an angry tear from my eye, “He credited me for his love of dark poetry.” I say bitterly. “Apparently, lying to his girlfriend about how he adored her favorite author, instead of telling her he felt indifferent about it, was what got him into her pants. I don’t know, Johanna. It was Katniss’ idea, to include Annabel Lee since it was Rye’s favorite poem according to her.”

  Johanna’s face remains hard the whole while.

  “Did it occurred to you, that maybe your son did like your pal Eddie after all? Obviously he was into emo chicks I find hard to swallow. And since when did he have to show you his love poems? You were his dad! He loved you, but he was his own person too, Peeta.” She starts to walk away from me.

  “Tell me when get your head out of your ass. I’ll be here waiting with tequila, seeing as you refuse to listen to me.” She tosses over her shoulder heading towards my dad and brothers.

  I’m mad at her too!

  On the ride back home, we’re both quiet. Our hands kept brushing against the other over the center console the entire ride.

  We stop at a restaurant, because we are not ready to go back home to face our new reality after Rye.

  My hands keeps finding her waist, the small of her back, the end of her braid. She seems content with my proximity, leaning into me, holding on to my arm when we walk, and when we’re finally seated, the touches just get bolder. At one point, my forearm rests on her knee while we play thumb war on the table with our free hands.

  The waiter wishes us to enjoy the rest of our date, and she smiles brightly at him and thanks him. We hold hands the rest of our meal, all the way to the car and all the way up to my place. She spends the night in the spare room Jo hasn’t stayed in in 7 weeks. I’ve been counting.

  We change out of our nice clothes, I miss seeing her in a dress and heels, but I like her in her yoga pants more. I’m in basketball shorts and a plain white t-shirt with my socks clad feet on the coffee table, watching Impractical Jokers.

  She plops sideways next me, so her whole back is resting on my right side from our hips up. My arm goes around her automatically. This closeness feels natural, right, comfortable. Domestic.

  She’s reading some book, only glancing at the tv when I’m laughing very hard. During a commercial break, she asks if I’d like a drink or a snack. I’m not used to anyone catering to me this way, but she kisses my cheek, patting my chest, and all I do is nod.

  She comes back with a bottle of Mike’s and a bowl of popcorn, the resumes her place up against my body.

  “What about you?” I ask curiously.

  “What about me?” She questions not looking up from her book, twirling the end of her braid around her fingers.

  “You don’t want a snack?” I ask her, squeezing her side a little.

  She makes a face, “We’re sharing!” She looks at me with a ‘duh’ expression that simply shuts me up.

  I chuckle a little, and pull on her braid wanting to be playful, “Why do girls sit like that all the time?”

  “Like what?” She turns her head to look at me.

  “Crisscrossed applesauce.” I point at her legs. “It doesn’t matter where you guys sit, your legs always go like a pretzel under yourselves.”

  She looks at me under her lashes for a second, and shrugs.

  “Is comfortable.”

  “How? I’ve seen girls sit on the bakery chairs that way. It looks painful as hell.”

  “Don’t know what to tell you, Peeta. I’ve never thought about it.”

  “Yeah, but… isn’t it weird that every. Single. Girl does it? Hell, Jo sits that way!”

  “Then why do you ask Johanna about it?” She snaps aggravated.

  Well, I didn’t expect this vipery response. Girls do this regarding other girls too. They get catty.

  She goes back to her book moodily. I simply hug her. Rye’s mom used to have this same reaction to Jo. A hug usually mollified her, and as Katniss starts to relax in my embrace, I think I’ve succeeded, so I also go back to watch the tv.

  “Why does Johanna hate me?” She asks casually after a while.

  I turn the volume of my show down, though her nose is firmly planted in the book I realize with a jolt is one from the box I gave her a few months ago. Girls also like to seem casual about things that truly bother them. I remember that from Rye’s mom.

  “She doesn’t hate you.” I say softly, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “That’s a strong word.”

  “Could’ve fool me.” She says under her breath.

  She doesn’t say anything further, and I wait a minute longer just in case, but I go back to my show since she’s yet to stop reading.

  Ten minutes later, she adds. “I don’t like her either. So I guess we’re even.”

  The truth is that neither has to like the other. I like them both and that’s what matters, but I know for a fact that saying that will just make her angry enough to leave, and I don’t want her to leave, so I keep my mouth shut.

  She leans her head on my shoulder a few minutes later, and without thinking about it, I place a kiss on the top of her head and rest my cheek on it.

  “How come you didn’t tell me this were all your books? I was bound to figure it out at some point. You’ve scribble on most of the margins. Which isn’t entirely kosher, you know. You’re defacing the books.”

  I chuckle, dropping another kiss to the crown of her head, “It wasn’t important. Sorry if my notes bothered you.”

  “I wasn’t bothered. I’m just telling you that other people would find that off putting.” She snuggles into me.

  She doesn’t say anything for a bit. Then she speaks quietly.

  “Rye told me once he felt like you were more involved in our relationship than he was. He was joking of course, but he said that he didn’t mind it as long as we kept the geeky to ourselves when he was around.” She closes the book and lowers it to her lap, her face finds the crook of my neck, but she doesn’t stay there long.

  She sits up. “You know what I thought about today?”

  I shake my head, my hand still resting on her hip, willingly her to sit back as she was.

  “I thought, that now that he’s officially gone, we don’t have to hide ourselves anymore.”

  She turns to face me, her eyes are filling with tears.

  “Does that make me a bad person?”

  She doesn’t let me answer. She’s up and inside the spare bedroom in the blink of an eye. She cries the rest of the night, locked behind the door. I just sit on the floor with my back on her wall and let her say her final goodbyes.

  ———

  It’s May 8th, Katniss’ 22 birthday, and she warned me to not even think of congratulating her. She’s going to see her sister and mother this weekend, back home in Panem, but today I took the day off and left the shop in my store manager, Rue’s, capable hands.

  Rue and Katniss met a couple of years ago at the bakery and hit it off despite there being a few years age gap. They speak a language of their own those two, and though I knew of Katniss’ birthday because of Rye, it’s Rue who insists I do something low key for her.

  At 6:15 I rap on her door, and rock on the ball of my feet holding a tiny bouquet of wild onions and katniss blooms behind my back.

She scowls at me as soon as she opens the door.

  “Wipe that silly grin off your face, Peeta. I’m warning you, I don’t do birthdays.”

  “Come on!” I cajole stepping into her apartment when she stomps back in. “You don’t even know what I’m here for!”

  She just glares at me, and I smile widens. I stick the flowers and inch from her nose, unable to say any of the words I had practiced on my way down to her floor.

  Instead, I just say, “I’m taking you up!”

  She’s staring at my flowers, still not taking them from my hand, but her eyes are as big as silver dollars.

  “Where did you get these?” She asks in awe caressing a petal of a katniss flower.

  “Garden on the roof,” I say nonchalantly.

  “What? That’s impossible!”

  “Not really. There’s a bunch of the things up there. If you wanna see it, then put on some shoes and I’ll show you.” I tell her easily.

  “I’m in my pajamas!” She protests.

  “So? I think you look cute. Plus nobody goes up there anyway.”

  We’re out her door and in the elevator in a heartbeat. She’s exuding excitement and it’s contagious. When we step in the 13th floor, there’s a flight of stairs we have to climb and then we’re on the roof of the building.

  Her mouth drops open in astonishment when she sees the sea of wild flowers all over planters in every inch of the roof, and in the very middle, there’s a picnic set up.

  “Where did all this come from?” She whispers out softly. Her hand gliding over the cheerful blooms closest to her.

  “Well, technically, they all came from Panem!” I say simply.

  “How?” She faces me demanding my answers.

  “I had your sister’s boyfriend find them for a fee, and then I just transplanted them here.” I say trying to shove down the ever increasing anxiety I’m feeling. “The duck potatoes were the hardest ones to get to take… you can recreate their habitat without water.”

  Her eyes snap to me dangerously. “What kind of fee did you pay?”

  “Monetary kind.”

  “How big of a fee? Because these plants are basically weeds in the woods back home, and if Rory dared to rip you off—“

  “Katniss! Can you for once, just enjoy something nice some has done for you? let someone else worry about costs and such for once.”

  Her eyes soften. “You didn’t have to go through this trouble,” she gestures around us.

  “Just say you like the flowers, and that you’re hungry, and we’re even,” I smile at her.

  She smiles back, albeit reluctantly and nods.

  We’re both wearing crowns of dandelions she weaved for us, dipping cheese buns in hot chocolate, when she asks seriously, “How did you come up with this idea?”

  “You said you wanted to go home. And I know you’re going to say you’ll be in Panem Friday evening, but when you talked about your favorite birthday being out in the woods with your father, gathering wild onions, and katniss tubers, and mint leaves… I wanted you have that memory back, but I’m not your father, I’ve never set foot in woods in my life. I know how to tend a garden, and I figured the city needed more pretty wildflowers, like you.”

  “Peeta…” she sighs my name, and I swear I’ll never forget the effect that sound had over my body and soul. Her eyes search mine, imploringly. “Why are you so nice to me?”

  I stare at her for a moment, the words that come of my mouth, escape without my consent.

  “You know why,”

  “I do?” Her voice is breathy, and dances away with the swift breeze.

  “You have, no idea the effect you can have…” my voice matches hers.

  I don’t think she meant to speak the words, since her lips barely move, but I heard them all the same, minute and ethereal, here a moment and gone the next, “kiss me?”

  And who am I to deny her anything?

  In the blink of an eye, I lean forward and pull her lower lip inside my mouth, I release soon after, to kiss her properly, and my hands move in to trap her face and pull her closer to me. Her hands take hold of my wrist and she just sighs contentedly against my mouth.

  In a matter of seconds, she’s migrated to my lap, and the kisses turn into a straight up makeout session. Things just escalate from there without any kind of brake. We are free falling, and neither of us cares.

  My lips and tongue seek her skin hungrily and she’s just too happy to oblige dipping her head back granting me access.

  Is an unseasonably warm evening, so we’re both wearing shorts, hers is a flimsy material that matches her tank top. I’m taking complete advantage of her skimpy sleep clothes, my hands caress the supple olive skin of her shapely legs all the way down to her ankles, then creep back to her hips.

  My lips are attached to her jaw, my tongue dances across her neck and collarbone. At some point, we ended up laying on the picnic blanket. I’m hovering above her.

  “Is this okay?” I whisper into her ear, nipping her lobe before sliding my hand into her hair to undo the braid.

  “Yes,” She sighs.

  I kiss her some more and she speaks raggedly against my lips.

  “Peeta. You make my heart race…”

  She takes my hand, and slips it flushed against herself from her hip, all the way to her chest, where her heart is indeed beating frantically. The palm of my hand is half on her breast and half over the spot where heart beats. Her tank rides up as she drags my hand up her body.

  I swipe my thumb over her nipple under the thin fabric of her shirt, and she arches her chest to meet the slight touch. I take it as permission to dip my hand under her top, and almost cry when I’m met with bare flesh. I push the tank top up and she raises her arms so I can pull it over her head. After tossing her shirt to the side I dive in to devour her perky, pretty breast.

  She digs her fingers into my hair, to keep my head in place. She didn’t need worry. I’m not going to stop sucking on her nipples any time soon.

  I’ve pinned her lower half to the ground with my hips, but I don’t dare move for fear that I’ll explode in my shorts. Katniss is making the most delicious noises I’ve ever heard, undulating her body against mine, and I have to give her something to stimulate her, so I bring a hand to her knee and let my hand travel slowly upwards and inward, as I suck and kiss her breasts non stop.

  I’m only aware of how big of a mistake touching her there is for me, when I find the cotton of her panties soaking wet and hot. She shouts as soon as my fingers find her.

  “Peeta… please…” she begs.

  So I slip one finger under her underwear, and find the glorious mess of her arousal, dripping wet and warm.

  “Fuck, Katniss… you’re soaked.”

  “Your. F-fault.” She meowls twisting under my weight.

  “My fault? Do I make you wet often?” I tease her slit unhurriedly.

  “Y-yessss. Ah… lot…”

  “When?”

  “I don’t. Knooow. All the tiiiiimeeeee?” I slide my finger inside her and her head rolls back.

  “Peeta… don’t… tease!”

  Her own slim hand snakes down our bodies, and palms the bulge in my shorts. Is too much, I pull away but she whines. She opens her glassy eyes, and stares me down until she’s wrestled my cock out of my shorts.

  Her grey eyes grow determined, she pulls my erection in her tight fist making me grunt with want. I push her panties aside, just as she positions the head of my cock at her entrance.

  “No more teasing!” She breathes out sternly.

  “Whatever you want, Katniss. Just answer me this question first,” I plead, and she nods. “Are you in love with me?” I hear the shakiness in my voice, the desperation, “I need to know.” I whisper into her ear, leaving a kiss in the shell.

  “Yeah,” she breathes out against my cheekbone. “Been for a while.”

  I picture in my head all the times I’ve caught her staring at me, blushing and smiling sweetly. I know in my heart she’s accepted her feelings and come to terms with them before now, I want to give her anything she wants, including my heart, if she asks for it on a platter!

  I press into her slowly to give her a chance to adjust to my girth. She gasps, and her clever dainty fingers curl around my shoulders tighter the deeper I go. She’s so wet and welcoming, her body offers no resistance whatsoever. Her walls envelop my erection like a fitted glove, accepting the intrusion with a warm, snug hug.

  She feels like heaven.

  Once I’m completely sheathed in her, all I can do is hold on to her hips for dear life while I wait for my lungs to breathe naturally. I’m scared I’m going to blow my load if I move, it’s agony trying to tell your body to calm the hell down when all I want is to get lost in the sensations.

  She seems to understand I need a minute, because one of her hands let’s go of my biceps, caress my face lovingly, then she kisses my jaw and nuzzles her nose on the side of my face.

  “We have all night, take me slowly.” She breathes into my ear.

  My forehead drops to the crook of her neck for a moment. It’s been so long since a woman has shown me affection, I want to soak it all up and live in her warmth forever. I kiss a path from her cheek to her mouth, and start moving slowly within her.

  Pulling almost all the way out, then plunging back in quickly, thrusting all the way to the hilt. The elastic of her panties rubbing on the side of my dick drives me insanely hard. Her hot breath hitches every time I enter her hightnenig the feeling.

  She barely makes any noises, her mouth forms a silent scream, I’m convinced I just expelled all the air out of her body when I slid in.

  I pick up my pace, when her feet lock around my calfs, thrusting faster and harder; that does it for her, and I swear is the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.

  She moans my name over and over, her body seizing under mine, and her walls fluttering around me ushers my own release.

  I slump on top of her and she attacks my chin and neck with tight lip nips. She actually bites the collar of my t-shirt and pulls on it like a playful puppy.

  She giggles, and starts playing with a curl of hair that’s fallen on my eyes. My whole body shakes with her laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask her curiously cracking one eye open so I can look at her disheveled, beautiful, flushed face.

  Her hair falls wildly around her head like an inky halo. I love it. I love her.

  “Nothing really. I was just mentally calling myself a horny hoe… you felt so thick inside me, I was wondering how long I’d have to wait to see your hard dick properly? I was wondering if next time we could be completely naked? I could give it a lick if you think that’ll help…” she trails her short nails down my arm blinking her lashes innocently.

  Then, she purrs, “Can’t wait to give you head.” She has the fucking audacity to suck her bottom lip inside her mouth giving me a peek of her teeth and pink tongue.

  I’m rock hard and ready to go, just like that.

  She oomphs when I scramble off the ground pulling her up by the waist. I grab her top and shove it in her hands before picking her up and throwing her over my shoulder, like a sack of flour. She squeals and kicks at first, but then she just giggles as I bound down the stairs, leaving behind the picnic to deal with later.

  Her shorts and panties are still askew from before. I run a finger down her messy slit and inform her, “You can have me naked and in your mouth in a minute. But I’m eating you out first, so brace yourself sweetheart, I’m not done with you just yet!”

  ———

  I wake up to a rain of sweet, loving kisses peppered all over my face by luscious, warm lips.

  I try to trap her in my arms, but she’s sitting in a very weird position just out of my reach. She giggles pecking my eyelid.

  “I have a meeting with a professor in an hour. I have to go.”

  “Is he hot? Your professor?” I ask sleepily.

  She chuckles. “No. Professor Lattier is awfully smart and a great mentor, but I don’t find him attractive.”

  “I don’t like having competition… the brainiacs are the worst!” I lunge at her and drag her back into the bed as she yelps. “They always end up charming the pretty girls, at the end of the movies.”

  She turns in my arms laughing, until she’s laying across my body. Punctuated with lazy kisses on the lips, she assures me, “You. Have no. Competition. Anywhere!” She smiles down at me, “I happen to like the jock, wrestling champs, with hearts of gold type… like you!”

  “Good! Everything is right with world then.”

  We kiss again. Languidly.

  “I’ll bring take out for supper this evening?”

  “But I texted Rue that I wasn’t coming in today either, so I could stay in bed with you all day!” I pout. “Can’t you just meet with the professor real quick and come home right away?”

  She giggles again, and kisses me all over.

  “I think we need a little break to rest ourselves, don’t you?” She combs my hair back off my forehead. “You can have me all to yourself tonight, I have to finish my graduation project this week, otherwise…” She runs the palm of her hand down my bare chest with a wicked smirk. “That was some birthday gift!”

  She’s fast though. Before I can move to pin her under me again she hops off the bed and blows me a kiss from the door.

  “You minx!” I call after and her melodic laugh trails down the hall and dies when she leaves the apartment.

  I try to sit up, but every muscle in my body screams. My junk is chafing too. She’s probably right about that break; I can’t imagine how she feels. I took her in every conceivable position I know, and made her cum at least twice as many times.

  I lay back down and reminisce on last night’s events.

  It wasn’t all just mindless fucking, we had some quiet moments filled with meaningful conversations or just easy banter. Our age difference was never an issue last night, and although in the last few years I’ve gotten a bit of a flabby belly, she seemed to enjoy my body as much as I enjoyed hers.

  It was what I’ve always pictured a healthy, mature relationship would feel and look like. I can’t wait to be with her again, and I don’t mean in bed.

  I want to take her out on dates, or just sit sit somewhere quietly and sketch her. My mind gets away from me, planing future trips to Europe, because once, she mentioned how she’d love to travel but never had the means to since growing up she had to help support her sister Primrose.

  I’m not a millionaire, but I’m pretty loaded. I could take her anywhere in the world. I think we should start with London, so she can visit all the places she knows from literacy. I bet she’d get a kick out of Paddington Station. We could get a Sherlock Holmes and also a Harry Potter tour… she’s so well read, my Katniss!

  But the human mind is just as much a pitfall of despair, as it is a well of dreams and noble ideas.

  MY Katniss?

  She isn’t mine.

  She belongs to Rye.

  Guilt, shame and self loathing hits me like a ton of bricks.

  What have I done?

  The roiling in my stomach gets painful and I have to rush to the toilet to vomit.

  I get up, shower, avoid looking at myself in the mirror for fear of what I’ll find in my reflection.

  The out of the blue, I have to see.

  The white hair in my temples looks painfully obvious now that my hair is damp and a shade darker. My two day stubble is also sprinkled with the white fuckers, mocking me.

  Suddenly I’m questioning if any of her actions were real. Did she mean anything she said last night about liking me?

  Our age difference is so stark and jarring when she’s not around to muddle up my thinking process. I can’t think straight when she’s around. I’m not sure is my memories of her are real or not. Looking back, everything has a shiny quality to it, too hypened.

  After getting dressed, I pull the covers off the bed and switch them for clean ones. I febreze the entire bedroom, because it’s smells like sex with her, and I can’t deal with the emotions her scents stirs in me.

  But I’m jumpy. I need something to do, so I go through a box I haven’t dare touch since packing it back in winter. I’m not ready for this, but in the dark recesses of my mind, some nagging voice suspiciously similar to my mother’s says that I deserve punishment for being a weak creep.

  My hands tremble when I grab Rye’s duffle bag. He never got the chance to fully unpack.

  I’m a despicable piece of shit! Here I was planning some romantic trip with his girlfriend, when I never once asked him if he wanted to go somewhere. Granted, we did travel some when he was young, we visited most of the important landmarks all over the continental US, and when he graduated high school, before boot camp, we went with Jo to Hawaii for two weeks. He tried to look excited, but I knew he missed Katniss the whole time. I wish I had asked her mother permission to bring her with us.

  Could I’ve been that dad that condones their underaged children have sleepovers with their sweethearts? Did any parent in the world actually allow that?

  I gave my child the best life I could; why do I steal from him in death, is beyond me.

  The tears start falling freely as soon as I unzip the bag and I’m met with my boy’s scent. The first t-shirt I pull out of the duffle, I recognize as one he’s had since high school. I completely lose it.

  I bring the worn cotton to my nose and breathe my son in. I hug the shirt to my chest and scream in pain. I can’t go on for maybe an hour, and really I should just stop, find one of those hermetic storing bags, so every ounce of my Rye’s precious essence is preserved. But I need to atone for what I did. I can’t even think of it or call it by its name, but the ugly sensations twisting the pit of my stomach into a knot won’t let me have a reprieve, so I keep unpacking, and then I see it, rolled up into a sock, stuffed into a boot, a tiny black box.

  I don’t wanna open it, I don’t wanna know what’s inside, but what else could it be?

  And now I’m filled with full hot white rage. So much so I want to go find her, yell at her, tell her how much I hate her for what she’s doing to me, to Rye. To his memory, but I don’t, I just sit there and cry.

  ————-

  “Knock, knock!” Her voice is cheerful, carefree, innocent, and grating in my ears.

  Up until this point, I’ve only blamed myself for the betrayal of Rye. But now that I hear her, I realize she was an all too willing participant in this debacle,

going as far as inciting the events. She has a responsibility too in this mess.

  A small voice in the back of my mind tries to tell me that I’m just projecting my own guilt on her, that my anger is unwarranted, that she has no idea of what I’ve been stewing in my head all day, but I want to be angry, I want to lash out, I want her to feel as sad and hurt as Rye probably does right now!

  ‘It’s the grief talking’. “It’s the truth!” I argue with myself with low growls.

  She walks in the kitchen and the smell of fried rice attacks me, making my stomach churn uncomfortably.

  “Hi handsome!” She greets obviously to the storm brewing in my chest. “Did someone forget it was my turn making dinner?” She asks playfully when she sees me hard at work kneading some dough.

  “I didn’t forget. I just don’t want Chinese food” I say quietly.

  She had been unpacking bags but abruptly stops, I glance at her for the first time since she left this morning, and I punch the dough harder than is necessary.

  She’s so beautiful it’s gutting me out.

  The smile etched in her face slowly falls as the tension in the room mounts.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I bought all this food because I’ve been ravenous all day after last night. I could’ve gotten something else.” She chuckles nervously.

  I stop kneading, and take a beer from the fridge.

  “I think you better leave.” I say flatly, take a nice long drink from my bottle the whole time staring her down.

  “Are you… is this… did I miss something? what’s- what’s the matter?” She’s visibly stunned, there are around 10 little containers of take out sprawl on the counter, she eyes them wearily, but starts putting them back in the plastic bags she brought them in.

  I have to hold onto the back of a chair, just to feel in control of myself.

  I can see the concern in her eyes. I know her well enough to know she’s trying to tamp down her own emotions, she’s very wise that way. If she doesn’t understand something, she waits until she can see the whole picture.

  “I just… I can’t deal with y— ‘it’ right now.” I bow my head and squeeze the back of the chair until my circulation cuts.

  “Did I do something wrong?” Her voice is thin and broken.

  That’s when I scream at her.

  “You don’t think cheating on your dead boyfriend is enough wrongdoing?”

  She flinches at my outburst, frozen in place.

  “He bought you a fucking ring, you know, and you repay him by sleeping around?” I accuse her viciously.

  She’s panicking, but I don’t feel anything right now, other than shame and guilt, and she’s the cause of it. The floodgates of hell have been opened, I can’t stop the vile that comes out of my mouth, even though I know I’m being completely unfair.

  “My son hasn’t been in the ground five months and I’m fucking his girl raw! But you ask if you’ve done something wrong? You’re letting me, a man 18 years older than yourself, fuck, you who can barely rent a car legally! You should be mourning my son, not sleeping with me, that’s what’s wrong!”

  I take a lamp from the corner of the counter and throw it across the kitchen until it smashes on the wall besides her.

  She shrieks and slings herself the opposite way.

  She doesn’t move for a minute, huddle by the refrigerator. She looks terrified and my heart breaks into a million pieces.

  “I— Katniss—” I try.

  She shakes her head, extends her arm and gives me her palm to stop me, to keep distance between us. She grabs the bags of food trembling like a leaf from head to toe, muttering under her breath between choked whimpers something about the homeless around the corner, and how much they’ll appreciate a nice warm meal.

  Her face is a mess of tears and snot.

  I want to rush to her, wrap her in my arms and apologize a million times, whispering in her ear that I didn’t mean it, that it’s not her fault, that I’m a jerk and a fuck-up just like my mother always told me I was.

  But I don’t move and inch. I’m not just an useless fuck-up, I’ve turned into a monster, an abusive mutt. I’ve turned into my mother.

  I’m paralyzed. My body doesn’t respond to my frantic commands, not even when she hightails out the kitchen.

  “Katniss?” I plead choking back a sob.

  But the front door slams after her.

  ———-

  It’s been a week since I scared Katniss away, and I feel like shit.

  I run into her in the lobby. She perks up, standing straighter, and I can’t help my wandering eyes.

  Her hair is loose today, and she’s got makeup on, she’s wearing slacks and a nice flowy blouse. I wonder where is she coming from, but instead of talking to her like a normal person, I ignore her.

  My eyes flit back towards her, then I board the elevator and we just stand face to face, staring at each other mutely. She’s chewing on the inside of her cheek and holding to her big girl purse as she calls it, for dear life. Neither of us move but eventually the elevator doors start closing.

  There’s a fraction of a second in which her eyebrows arch expectantly, like she’s giving me a chance to do something; her gaze searches my eyes, but I see the disappointment dulling down her usually sparkly eyes. She finally lets her eyes fall away. The last thing I see before the doors are shut, are her shoulders hunching.

  My eyes are stuck on the spot I last saw her, but in front of me is only my own reflection on the buffed steel surface of the elevator.

  I look even older.

  Is better this way. I have no business messing with a 22 year old. She can do so much better. She did so much better. She used to have Rye. Now she’s got no one because I took myself from the equation.

  The next day I come home to a neat pile of books on my coffee table that weren’t there when I left for work in the morning. On top of the books is a note hastily scribbled in Katniss’ loopy handwriting, and on top of the note, the spare key to my apartment she had never gotten around to return until now.

  My eyes prickle with unshed tears.

  She returned even the books she took the day of the wake.

  With a pang to the heart I pick up the note and stick it on the fridge, right on the place she had leaned her head to cry on, because I deserve to be reminded everyday of the things I’m not allowed to want, let alone have.

  ‘Alone’

From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still— From the torrent, or the fountain— From the red cliff of the mountain— From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold— From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by— From the thunder, and the storm— And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view—

  Edgar Allan Poe

  ———

  It’s been over three months since I last saw Katniss. Closed to 9 months since laying Rye to rest.

  Thanks to Rue I know Katniss graduated college last week. Her mother and sister were here for that, and she got a job her professor recommended her for. She didn’t even interviewed for it! It doesn’t surprise me. She’s so smart and clever, she is also such a hard worker.

  I was so proud of her, I think I smiled the whole time Rue was talking about Katniss’ accomplishments.

  “You should call her.” Rue says and my smile fades. “Whatever fall out you two had, it’s obvious you miss each other.”

  “No. I’m being realistic, she doesn’t need me holding her hostage to some loyalty to Rye. He’s dead, she’s not, she deserves to live her life.”

  “I understand you want her to move on, but so should you, Peeta. Loving someone is not a sin. But not fighting for that love… well, that’s just tragic. Don’t look at me like that, mister!” She sasses when I just stare at her in disbelief. “I’ve known how you felt for her for ages.

  “You think you’re so discreet? Well, it’s pretty much written all over your face. That lovesick puppy face you make when you say her name is a pretty obvious giveaway.”

  “What? you’re exaggerating.” I protest.

  Rue just cocks her head to the side, stares at me and says, “But, am I?”

  ———-

  I get a ping on my phone and I’m surprised to see it’s from her.

  17:55

Katniss: Hey! Can we talk?

  I delete the message. It’s taken me too long to get her out of my system to fall into this rabbit hole again.

  The next day, she calls, and I let it go to voicemail. She calls two more times and I let them ring until the phone goes silent. She leaves messages, but I don’t hear them before erasing them.

  She texts again two days later.

  18:33

Katniss: When will be an appropriate time 2 call U?

  28:34

Katniss: Or U can call me. I’m free anytime

  I ignore those too.

  Johanna finally comes to the city, once I tell her I cut Katniss completely off my life.

  She dusting a picture of Rye wearing his 8th grade quarterback uniform.

  “He hated football.” I say glancing at the picture. “He hated wrestling. He hated baseball. He hated art. He hated everything!”

  “He loved track and swimming.” Jo says smiling down at a picture of baby Rye eating a lemon wedge.

  “Two things Katniss is good at.” I grimace. I didn’t mean to say it aloud. But all comes back to her at the end.

  “Good riddance.” She breathes out. “I’m so relieved you’re not seeing her anymore.”

  My heart squeezes tightly in my chest. I feel like Johanna during Christmas all over again, when I didn’t want to go to Panem and she could understand why I wouldn’t just get over my sadness and join my brothers with all their living sons and have a merry holiday.

  “Why? What did Katniss ever do to you, Jo? What is it about her you hate so much? She’s a sweet, caring, smart, beautiful girl. She doesn’t deserve all this hostility!”

  Johanna is just staring at me weird.

  “WHAT? Goddamnit?” I yell.

  “You’re crying.” She says simply.

  I hadn’t notice. Having tears rolling down my face is so commonplace now, I don’t even feel them anymore.

  Johanna breathes deeply, gets up from her spot and gives me a hug. “I don’t hate her. I just don’t think is healthy for you to hang out together.”

  “I know that! You don’t think I know that? But is not the way you’re thinking. You think she’s gonna hurt me, when in reality I’m the one who hurt her. That’s the reason I let her go, because she needs to be protected from me.”

  Jo looks perturbed, and she doesn’t know half of it. So I fill her in on my doomed relationship with Katniss. The whole time, she just made faces, interjecting here and there, piecing the story together.

  “Peeta! Please tell me you didn’t sleep with her?” She asks anxiously and a little grossed out.

  When I don’t answer she says my name again in disappointment. “Were you at least safe?”  

  I refuse to answer and her face tells me just how bad I’ve fucked up as if I need her judging me, it takes her a while to look at me again, but she finally resolves that the next thing I need to do is have hot date, expensive food, and a good fuck with a lady more on my age bracket, and I’ll be good as new.

  I don’t want to date and fuck anybody other than Katniss, but I let Jo convince me that her remedy will work, because it’ll be like a rebound. I’m not sure about her logic, but I let her set me up in a date, for the next weekend.

  On Saturday night, I open my front door, and jump back startled, when I find Katniss with her knuckles poised to rap on my door.

  I frown. She’s persistent.

  And as pretty as ever, if a bit fuller looking. Johanna would have a field day talking about how round and rosy Katniss’ cheeks are.

  She’s startled too, but undeterred.

  “Hi, Peeta!” She says shyly, “Um, do you have a minute? I’ve been wanting to talk to you. It’s kind of important—“

  “Sorry, I’m late for a date.” I say stepping out of the apartment and locking the door.

  “Oh?” Her eyes flit away, I see the pain in her face, and it sucks.

  “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime next week.”

  “Mmm, m-my lease is up actually. I’m moving back to Panem in a few days. But I have to t—“

  My phone rings, and it’s my date.

  “Sorry, I have to take this… I’ll try and catch you up?” I walk away, and see the agitation in Katniss’ gray eyes.

  “I just need a minute, just a minute,” She practically begs. But then holds back, standing in the middle of the hallway.

  I answer the call and my date tells me she’s 10 minutes away from the restaurant, so I hurry away to the elevator. When I turn around Katniss is still standing there, dejected.

  It strikes me as odd. Her eyes are always so sparkly, even during Rye’s funeral her eyes sparkled, but right now they look dull and sad.

  I’ve just walked away from the girl I once sworn didn’t want to lose. And a conflict unfolds inside me, on the one hand Rue’s telling me to fight for her, on the other, Jo keeps telling me I’m better off without her.

  Who I’m I gonna listen in the end?

  ———-

  I’m pissing drunk. I can barely hold myself up, but I do my best, until I’m in front of the door I’m looking for through slitted eyes.

  I pound on the door as savagely as the coordination of a man with this level of intoxication can muster.

  And then I start slurring loudly.

  “Kantiss! You cock-blocking, cock-blocker!

  “Kantsissss. You win goddamnit!

  “I miss you!

  “Hell, I’m fucking in love with you!

  “Kat-niiiiith!”

  I pound on the door again, “I’m yours! And I’m sorry I’ve been such a… mmm… Kat—” I slip a little.

  When I get up, I start just chanting her name.

  “Katniss, Katniss, Katniss, Katniss, Katniss, Katniss,”

  A door two apartments down the hall flies open, revealing a bewildered Katniss in yoga pants and a loose t-shirt. Her hair is piled up on top of her head in a messy bun. I sigh like a schoolboy when I see her stalk me, looking positively angry.

  “Heeeey, purty thang!” I smile dreamily at her.

  “What the hell are you doing, Peeta? You’re gonna get us in trouble!” She pulls me away from the door I’ve been hollering at.

  “Wait!” I exclaim alarmed. “Where we going? I been knockin’, and callin’ and tellin’ ya shit… you-you came out of the wrong door!” I look back at the door but still go willingly after her when she tugs on my hand.

  “Uh, sorry to break to you, Peeta, but you were about blast down the wrong door.”

  “Na-uh! You live in D12!” I inform her proud of myself.

  She glares at me. “I know! It’s been my address for a few years now. But you were screaming at D10, you’re lucky Dalton is out of town.” We are about to cross under her threshold, but she turns around sharply. “Did you drive here? How did you get home?”

  “I drove myself silly! But first I stopped at the vodka store, because you can’t get smashed without vodka!”

  “So you did this to yourself intentionally,” She rolls her eyes and pulls me inside her apartment.

  “Duuude! This is exactly like your old place! Look it, it even has the same stain of pasgetti I left on the carpet!”

  She huffs. “Come on. Let’s get you cleaned up and in bed.”

  “Are we gonna… do… IT?” I whisper the last two words as if I’m saying something naughty.

  She shuffles me inside the bathroom, and frowns a little with her fists on her hips. Without turning to look at me she says in a no nonsense voice, “We are not gonna have sex, Peeta.”

  “Whyyyy?” I whine. “You’re hotter than a hapaleño! Wait, that ain’t right… ñalapeño, haranero?”

  “It’s either habanero or jalapeño. Sit down here and take off your shoes and socks.”

  “Yeah! That’s it! hañavero!” I smile goofily, doing as she commanded.

  I’m not very coordinated so she has to help, and once my feet are bare, I wiggle my toes at her.

  She bats my foot away before gesturing with her hand. “Shirt.”

  I raise my arms so she can pull of my shirt off, but it’s a button up, so she has to undo the top three buttons before pulling it over my head.

  “You didn’t tell me why you won’t let me do you?”

  ”Pants and underwear off. We’re not having sex because I’m angry at you, Peeta. Plus, you’re skunked and smell horrible.”

  “I love you!” I tell her.

  This makes her stop for a second to glare at me, before continuing.

  “I love you too. Even though you’re a jackass.” She deadpans. “Sit tight for a second, I’m gonna get the water.”

  She takes her own close off real quick and we get into the steaming shower together. She washes my body as if I was a toddler. She even bats my hands away sternly when I try to touch her breasts.

  “You have amazing boobs! I think I’m in love with your boobs.”

  “I know. Turn around and rinse off.”

  Once she declares us cleaned, she gives me a towel and I do a mediocre job drying myself. I follow her to bed. We climb naked under the covers, I’m so tired I don’t even try anything funny.

  “Marry me, Katniss. We should get married,” I stare into her face, while she settles next to me.

  She combs my hair softly, not quite smiling.

  “Ask me again when you’re sober.”

  “Willyousayyes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hey, Katniss, have I ever tell you about Lavinia?” She shakes her head. “She has auburn hair and dark green eyes that you’d think are emeralds. She was the first girl I fucked. We fucked like bunnies. In the car, in the movie theatre, in the public library bathroom, in her folks bed, in my dad’s bakery closet. You name it, we’ve fuck there. I knocked her up. She wanted to have an abortion, I told her I’d support anything she wanted, because I was scared shitless.

  “Lavinia’s daddy was a preacher. He didn’t let her have the abortion, but she didn’t want to keep the kid. So, the day Rye was born, I fell in love for the first time, ever! I felt bad I wanted Lavinia to abort him. The child was a joy to be around. So sweet, so funny and opinionated. Lavinia only met him a couple of times. She didn’t come to his funeral because she felt guilty. Her loss. My boy had a family that doted in him, and family who adored him, and a gorgeous girl to call his own, he never really miss her as a mom.

  “But that made think. Maybe, just maybe, Rye was here on borrowed time? And then I think back on all the wonderful times we had together… he was my greatest treasure, my greatest accomplishment and my greatest love. I wish I had given him siblings. I love babies, but the right woman never came along until you showed up, and I feel terrible that I’m stealing from Rye, but I went to see him tonight instead of going on that silly date. I mean, I went to the restaurant, but one small conversation with Ms. Cashmere sweater- whatever her name is- and I knew I wasn’t gonna stay long, and she didn’t regret it either.

  “But, yeah… I went to Rye’s grave, I came clean to him. I told him how I felt for you, and I asked him to forgive me. I told him, that if you’d have me, I’d try my best to honor and cherish you as much as as he did. And I would treat you with love and respect… and then, a breeze started blowing. Sweet and fragrant and warm. It felt like he gave me his blessing, which was further confirmed when I got to my kitchen and was drinking my vodka, and in my head, I heard him reciting some words, and then he said I could borrow his poem. So, here it goes:

  “— Our love it was stronger by far than the love   Of those who were older than we—   Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in Heaven above   Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul   Of the beautiful Katniss Everdeen; For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams   Of the beautiful Katniss Everdeen; And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes   Of the beautiful Katniss Everdeen; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

Katniss Everdeen.”

  I pause and look up at her, she has tears in her cheeks, silent ones, but not angry ones.

  “Did you see what I did there?” I ask her trying to wink. I’m still pretty drunk, but this, I’ll remember in the morning.

  She smiles sadly, “Yeah. You replaced Annabel Lee’s with mine. So clever, Peeta. Just one problem, won’t mr. Poe be angry for your plagiarism?”

  “What are you? Poetry police? Nevermore!” I shout and she finally gives me a real smile.

  “You’re impossible.”

  “Nevermore!”

  “Nevermore yourself!” She chuckles, “Go to sleep, you crazy man. Who goes to the graveyard at night?”

  “I had important business with my boy.” I yawn. “Hey Katniss. I won’t forget to ask you to marry me tomorrow. I remember everything about you! So think about your answer? I’d like to know what’s in your mind. I know you don’t want babies. I’m okay with just being us two. But if you ever change your mind, that’s cool too… just think about it. Say you’ll think about it,”

  I don’t hear what she says, sleep catches up with me, but I’m okay since my beautiful Katniss Everdeen is next to me. All my nightmares nowadays are about losing her.

  ———-

  “Peeta?”

  I hear her voice coming groggily from her bedroom. I would’ve answered, if I knew where my voice had gone to.

  I hear shuffling and moving in the other room, then she pads almost silently to the living area. I hear her sighing and walking again. The bathroom door opens and she screams when she turns the light on and she sees me sitting in the tub.

  I don’t turn to face her.

  I can’t.

  My eyes are fixed in the grainy, black and white picture I snatched from the fridge door this morning after getting dressed and attempting to make some very strong coffee for myself.

  I’ve been sitting in the bathtub with my knees drawn to my chest staring at this image ever since.

  Once she recuperates from the jump scare, she walks cautiously inside, lowers the toilet lid and takes a sit. She says nothing, but feel her inquisitive eyes on me.

  All I can think to say is, “Is this what you were hounding me to talk about?” I caress the glossy picture with my thumb.

  My eyes flit to her quickly.

  Her hands are neatly clasped on her lap.

  She nods slowly. “It is.” She confirms.

  “Why didn’t you say anything last night?” I ask her holding her eyes for a short moment.

  “Your were drunk as a skunk! Your head wasn’t in a very good place, and earlier when I went to see you, you acted like you couldn’t get away from me fast enough.”

  I release a stuttering breath. She’s right, I did dismiss her without giving her the chance to say her peace, and later I just barged in here like a mad man.

  “And… You’re keeping it?” I’m trying hard to tamp down any emotions I’m feeling, which are confusing at best.

  “I am. I really want it.” Her voice is small but there’s a hint of a smile on her lips.

  “Is this why you’re going back to Panem? What happened with that job offer here in Capitol City?” I ask nervously.

  “I turned down the job. My mama said I could come back home, she’ll cut down on her hours at the hospital to help watch the baby, while I figure what to do for a job. I could apply for few positions there, it shouldn’t be that bad. And Prim…” she hesitates grimacing. “Prim will go to medical school as planned with her scholarship and grants and the small chunk of money my father had the foresight to save all those years ago.” She shrugs, “We’re gonna make it work.”

  “So… your mother knows?” I keep running my thumbs over the sonogram.

  “Of course she knows. I had to tell someone. Who better than a highly qualified nurse practitioner who’s also my mother?” There’s a hint of reproach in her tone.

  I feel like such a tool right now. “Does she know who the daddy is?” I enunciate.

  She frowns. “I didn’t have to tell her actually. She… she kinda just knew. She wasn’t even mad, just… disappointed.” She sighs.

  “Okay. And… what about me?”

  “About you? I guess is up to yourself.”

  Then before I swallow down the words, because I know it’s a terrible, terrible, terrible stupid thing to ask, my mouth runs idiotically in the worst possible question ever. “Any chance I’m gonna be a grandpa?” I grimace right away. I know this is costing me mayor points with her, and I can’t afford that as it is.

  I’m surprised she still responds.

  “I would have to be 19 months far for this child to be your grand baby, if that was even a remote possibility.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Not that I have to justify this to you, but FYI, including yourself, I’ve slept with only two people my whole life, and neither is related to the other.

  “Rye and I never had sex. We never had the chance. The night he got murdered would’ve been our first time. He wasn’t concerned with sexuality, in fact, sometimes I wonder if he was asexual or something. I guess we’ll never know. Now, can you stop with the weirdness?”

  Well, this is news.

  Katniss and Rye were serious since before he was deployed. I never actively thought about Rye having sex, it’s just too strange, disturbing and gross to think about, but it actually surprises me more to hear he and Katniss weren’t physically intimate than the opposite. Too many implications that only the two of them understand.

  The way he spoke about her,  or how he looked at her like she was the sun. I know my son was smitten. I can’t imagine him not wanting her sexually.

  But I guess, you don’t have to be physical to express love for somebody. Besides the one crazy night of passion, Katniss and I have never been romantically involved, yet we had a level of intimacy I’ve never experience before, and I’m completely smitten with her.

  “Katniss, I honestly don’t wanna know about Rye’s sexual life—“

  “You brought it up!” She snaps.

  “Sorry.” I mutter sheepishly.

  “You should be!” She’s fully scowling now, “The issue with sex with Rye was always a touchy subject for me. For the longest time, I thought that there was something wrong with me, or that he was a closeted gay guy with a girlfriend, wouldn’t had been the first sailor to do something like that.” Her legs are crossed now as well as her arms.

  I’m no body language expert, but she looks very defensive and unapproachable right now.

  “Look, my bladder’s shrunk to the size of a lima bean. I’ve been holding it all this time because I think it is important we have this conversation, Lord knows we have too much shit to deal with, we may even need professional help depending on the direction we’ll take with this, but I have to pee, badly, and I really want a break from this conversation, because you keep putting your foot in your mouth, and my patience is running thin,”

  I assent, knowing she’s right and willing to start being the man both her and the baby deserve, I climb out of the tub heavily. I pass her still sitting on the toilet, bouncing one leg impatiently and her arms still crossed over her chest.

  My mind starts wandering down the wrong path, but I force myself to bring it back and keep it on the straight and narrowed. I won’t let go of the sonogram though, and I’m not sure what am I gonna tell her, but I’m keeping it.

  Once in the living room, I don’t know what to do with myself. I keep pacing in a irregular circle, from the kitchen to the tiny two chair table that doubles as her dining room, around the couch and back to the kitchen to start my loop again. After three laps of that, I start wondering if the baby is hungry?

  I should’ve asked Katniss when was the last time she ate. I should make her breakfast! I have cheese bun ingredients upstairs. She likes those!

  I knock on the bathroom door and speak loudly. “Hey, Katniss… I’m gonna go make us something to eat. Text me if you want me to bring it down here, or we can eat up if you like.”

  “Okay,” comes her response. “I’m feeling nauseous right now, but I can eat!”

  The idea of someone saying that, for real, tickles me, but something tells me laughing out loud about it right now will be counterproductive.

  I’m almost giddy hopping on the elevator and waltzing through my apartment door. I turn on my oven, gather all my supplies, set Pandora to something cheerful; I’m feeling ska, because is that kind of morning, old school but colorful.

  30 minutes later, my buns are in the oven, and my figurative “bun in the oven” rings my doorbell.

  I sigh dreamily when I see Katniss.

  I wonder if the fact that I know she’s pregnant makes any difference in how I look at her? So I indulge myself in simply staring at her in a way I’ve never allowed myself before: unapologetically hungry.

  Her hair is wet and tightly braided, she’s got clean comfortable clothes on and is barefooted. She realizes I’m starting at her feet.

  “I just felt like it,” She says jutting her chin out at me.

  I raise both my hands in surrender. I’m not going to say anything. I’m smarter than that. Instead, I direct her to the breakfast bar where I’ve set my best china, glass and silverware. I wanted to put flowers on the table for her, but I don’t have even a measly fake one in here, so quickly I whipped up some frosting, in a few several colors, and voila!

  Flowers!

  Sugar flowers stuck to an upside down mixing bowl, but still, flowers. A whole bouquet of wildflowers, like the ones I used to have out on the roof, before everything fell apart, and I never returned to tend my garden.

  I usher her to her seat, and help her on the stool, though I know she’s perfectly capable of getting on it herself, I can’t curb the need to touch her… any part of her.

  “For you!” I plate two cheese buns on a dish I’ve pipped wild onion blooms on the edge of.

  Katniss’ eyes go wide.

  She takes one cheese bun delicately, and bites into it with relish. She closes her eyes while chewing, and after swallowing, the floodgates lift.

  I panic. I jump from my stool and round over to her, I pick her up bridal style, and carry her to the couch.

  “What’s the matter, sweetheart, tell me what’s wrong and I’ll fix it!”

  “Nothing is wrong!” She cries loudly. “The buns are perfect.” She heaves a deep breath.

  Now I’m at a loss, wondering what triggered this episode. “Okay, but why are you crying then?” I try to be as gentle as possible.”

  “I’ve missed cheese buns! I’ve been craving them for weeks, but you were ignoring me, and I went to the bakery to buy me some, but they were out… and I was so hungry! I ate a whole large pizza all by myself, and threw it all up after… now I can’t even smell pizza, I start gagging.”

  She gives me look of misery, then asks me in a tiny voice.

  “What if the same happens with Cheese buns? What if this baby decides to hate them. They’re my favorite food ever! I don’t wanna have to start eating gluten free. I want my bread to be gluten full!”

  “That’ll be ironic, actually. I mean, It’s a baker’s baby.”

  She cries even harder after my attempt at a joke.

  “This isn’t funny, Peeta! Your baby is making me sick! She hates food!”

  “She?” I ask, Katniss isn’t even showing, but I wonder if science is advanced enough, you can tell a baby’s gender so early on.

  “It’s a She… Everdeen’s only give girls,” She grouses.

  I smirk, “Mellarks only give boys,” I smile at her. “Ask my mother, she’ll complain about it. No daughters or granddaughters for her.“

  I lean back on the couch, and she falls on my chest like a rag doll. I start rubbing circles on her back and feel her relax on top of me.

  “One thing I learned in biology when I was a kid, is that men give the gender chromosome. So maybe is a boy…”

  Then all the excitement of the news, crazy as they are gets smashed to smithereens.

  “So… I’m not looking to replace my son.” I say bluntly.

  She sits up and looks down at me wearily.

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  My arms fall off of her when she stands from my lap. I let her go, because I need my space right now.

  “What are you asking then, Katniss?” I cringe internally, I sound accusing even to myself.

  “I’m not asking you anything!”

  “Really? Because you sure as hell wanted to tell me I knocked you up, very badly!”

  She blushes violently. Her eyes are on fire.

  “Is the responsible thing to do!” She yells. “You have the right know. In the sea of irresponsible shit I’ve done in the last few months, this I wanted to do right, because I owed it to everybody: you, Rye and the baby and myself. Whatever you do with the information is totally your prerogative.”

  She’s crossed her arms again, but let’s her shoulders fall. “I was hoping you wanted to be part of the baby’s life. I know you already raised a baby from infancy and this is like starting over again, so I’ll understand if this isn’t for you—“

  I dig the heels of my hands in my eyes. And then say what’s on the tip of my tongue.

  “Let’s get married, then.”

  She frowns. “No.” She answers emphatically.

  I roll my eyes in frustration. “Why the fuck not?”

  “Because last night you were drunk as fuck, borderline alcohol poisoned, and you still managed to do a better proposal then.” She says throwing her hands in the air.

  I did propose to her last night, at least twice, and it did sound better than what I just said.

  “I don’t want you asking me to marry you, because I’m pregnant.” She deflates plucking a cheese bun from her plate, then sitting on the corner of my coffee table facing me.

  “I want the baby, though.” I stress. “I just don’t want to replace or replicate Rye.”

  “No child could ever replace another.” She says looking older than her age, not for the first time.

  Sometimes I forget Katniss is truly and old soul trapped in a young, hot body.

  “Peeta, this baby complicates many things. I’m going back to Panem because my mom wants me there until I know what I want to do about my future.” She pauses. “I’m terrified.” She confesses. “Not of the baby! I want this child so much I feel like I’ve been living a lie forever. Which is scary in a different way.” She explains.

  She takes a bite of bun and I just stare quietly. Not moving a muscle.

  “People will gossip,” I point out stupidly.

  She shrugs, “Prim’s not talking to me at the moment. She called me a hussy. What do I care if other people talk about me?” Her lip quivers.

  I’m beyond pissed off at Primrose. I don’t understand how she could’ve said something like that to her big sister who has always sacrificed for her.

  “Don’t go back to Panem then. Stay in the city.”

  She shakes her head, staring at her half eaten cheese bun. “Mama says Prim’s just in shock. She’s grieving Rye, and she’ll come around when the baby is here.” Katniss shivers.

  “But Prim was so nasty when I told them you were the father. She yelled that I went after you because I’m some kind of horrible gold digging cunt.” She breaks down. “I never thought my little sister could be so mean and angry…”

  I grab her in one swoop move and sit her back in my lap, where she belongs.

  I kiss the shell of her ear, her neck, her jaw.

  Her hands grasp my shoulders, and her mouth opens up when I kiss her lips. I feel our lives aligning again.

  “Everything is gonna be fine, sweetheart,” I tell her raining kisses on the side of her face. “We have each other.”

  She relaxes against me, letting me hold her close. She moans softly into my mouth. I bring us down from the steep road we’re taking. It’s incredible to me how fast we go from zero to banging just with a couple of kisses.

  “I’ve wanted you for so long. Sometimes I’m convinced I’ve wanted you even before Rye was taken from us. If anyone is a hussy, that’s me, not you. You’re so… pure! An angel. The only bright spot in my sad, dreary life.” I hesitate for just a moment, but I take her hands in mine, and look her straight in the eyes. “I love you, Katniss.” I say seriously.

  She blushes, but her smile is more radiant than the sun. She tries to hide it thought.

  “I know,” she mumbles, the ghost of her smile hovering. “You blurted it out a few times last night.”

  “And, you?” I ask nervously, “You love me. Real or not real?”

  “Real,” she smiles softly.

  “Marry me?” She makes an unconvinced face, so I rush, “We will go at your pace. We will do as you say. I’ll support your decisions, always.” I kiss her lips again and rest our foreheads together. “I don’t want you to go back to Panem. Will you consider moving in with me? Or at the very least renewing your lease?”

  “I told my mother I wouldn’t go back to you until we got some things worked out.”

  “You… told your mom about getting back with me? Like she knew you’d want to come back?”

  “I told mama everything. And I mean, everything! She knew you’d try to lure me back in eventually. She asked me if I’d consider it, knowing how badly things went? I said I might. I loved you enough to think about it. So… we’ll see.”

  “So. You’re saying there’s a very good chance?” I know I’m pushing it, but I need to make sure.

  She huffs. “If we do this, Peeta, I have a list of demands:” she announces business like, “I want you to seek anger and grief counseling, because I’m not a fucking statistic! I will not live with you in fear that something would trigger a hijacking episode and you’ll yell at me and destroy shit in a fit of anger. I get that you grew up watching your mother doing that exact same thing, I just want it to be clear, I won’t tolerate that behavior. You never did it to Rye, which means you can control it. So, control. It.”

  I grimace. “Katniss, I already felt like shit about the whole thing. How do you think I feel now, knowing I threw a lamp near you, and you were already pregnant?” We just stare at each other for a moment, “You want me to get help? I will! Today!”

  “Good… I’ll consider your many proposals, then”

#Springtime Edition 2018 #alliswell21 #prompt 106 #submission

[evescole]

End Game // Peter Parker

word count: 2,309

pairing: peter parker x female!reader

warnings: swearing, middle fingers, penis parker

summary: you’ll do anything at this point to get peter parker to notice you and mj is definitely willing to help.

a/n: okay so second one in the reputation series whoop whoop. i was requested to write a second part of new girl (which i honestly didn’t think anyone would read lol) so i’ll be working on that too. this has been stuck in my to do list for a while and i finally finished it so, enjoy!

part of the reputation series

masterlist

ask me stuff

--

Another day, another disappointing experience.

It was your fault, really. You kept getting your hopes up just for them to fall over and over again.

You had an issue. Yes, an issue, and a big one at that. You were absolutely head over heels for your best friend, Peter Parker. That doesn’t sound awful, right? I mean, you’re best friends for a reason so obviously you like each other a little bit.

Yeah, no, it’s awful. While your feelings belong to him, his are with someone else. Liz Allan, the girl who held Peter Parker’s heart, unintentionally, that is. She was the most popular senior in the school so of course he fell for her. (Literally he did in the hallway one time, Ned has it on video, it’s great.) You didn’t have anything against Liz. In fact, she was one of your close friends. You just wish you could get Peter to look at you for once and not her.

“Still no luck?” Michelle frowned at you as she approached your locker. You had just tried to invite Peter to movie night but as usual, he declined.

You sighed, “What do you think?”

Michelle leaned against the lockers. “Well, I just so happen to know that you have the bestest friend ever who has an idea.”

That got your attention. “Tell me, tell me, tell me!” You shook MJ’s shoulders in excitement.

She grabbed your hands off of her gently. “As long as you never do that again.”

You pulled your hands back, holding your backpack tightly. “Yeah, okay, sorry. Tell me!”

Michelle tilted her head, smirking slightly. “Liz is going to have a party this Friday. Go. Make him regret pushing you to the side. Wow Peter into forgetting all about Liz.”

“Okay, okay. That might work. The problem is, I don’t know how to wow people, MJ!” You freaked, grabbing the ends of your hair.

Michelle rolled her eyes at you. “Yes, that’s why I am going to help you. I pinky promise he won’t be able to take his eyes off of you.”

You sighed, taking a deep breath. “We can do this. This will work, right?”

Michelle patted your head before walking. “This is gonna work, babe. I promise.”

--

Flash forward to Friday night and you were absolutely panicked. Michelle had helped you pick out a stunning outfit. You had decided to ditch the leggings and sweatshirts for a black dress and a jean jacket. You had also stolen a pair of black ankle boots from Liz to complete your look.

She wasn’t kidding when she said wow Peter completely. That’s how you ended up in the bathroom with Michelle’s hands sorting dye through your hair. You had been completely against it but she didn’t really give you an option.

“MJ, I don’t know if this is a good idea,” You mumbled as you looked at the color of the dye.

She rolled her eyes at you. “Y/N, how many times do I have to tell you, this is going to be worth it?”

Michelle had chosen two boxes: one an icy blonde and the other an almost black color. She had used the darker one for the roots of your hair and faded it into the icy blonde for the rest of it. You were terrified to see the results.

“Alright. We just have to wait a while and then rinse it all out. I’m not letting you see it until it’s done, you know that right?” She smirked at you.

You continued to scroll through your social media on your phone. “MJ, honey, I wasn’t doubting that for a second.”

“Good!” She pulled the gloves off her hands. “In the meantime, I’m going to sort through all your makeup and get mine and we’re gonna give you a makeover.”

You looked up at her. “As if dying my hair wasn’t makeover enough.”

She rolled her eyes and threw the gloves in the garbage before leaving you in the bathroom. You glanced at the mirror, seeing the dye all on top of your hair. Your phone buzzed in your hand, regaining your attention.

Liz Allan

iMessage

You sighed as you opened her text.

Hey, Y/N! Are you coming to the party tonight?

You smiled at the message, your fingers typing back quickly.

Yeah, I think so. If I can work up enough courage to not wimp out.

You watched as the little bubbles appeared at the bottom, signalling that she was replying.

You’ll be fine. Come find me when you get here :)

You responded with some form of thank you before locking your phone. You sighed, setting it on the bathroom counter before closing your eyes to take a quick nap. With how everything was looking, you were going to need all the energy you could get for this party tonight.

--

Two hours later, your hair had been freed of dye and washed before Michelle braided it to the side. Makeup followed as your friend put product after product on your face. You weren’t going to lie, it made you a bit uncomfortable but after seeing the results, you were more than thrilled.

The only issue you had was that you were letting this happen. Of course, you didn’t think you should have to dress up and wear makeup for a boy’s attention. You had to constantly remind yourself that even if Peter didn’t look at you, you were happy with who you were. Granted, MJ had you take a few risks but you felt great and you looked even better.

Outfits were put to use and before you knew it, you were hunting down Liz in her own house. The party was already in full blast with Flash playing overrated club songs in the living room. You had retreated to the kitchen in hopes of finding the hostess, just wanting to find some familiarity while MJ was eating.

“Y/N!” Liz smiled brightly as she crossed the kitchen floor. “Wow, you look great. Did you dye your hair?”

You played with the ends of the braid awkwardly. “Yeah, MJ did it for me. It’s a little risky, but I really like it.”

Liz nodded enthusiastically. “It looks awesome, girl! You look awesome! Parker’s definitely going to like it.”

“You think?” Your cheeks went red as you grabbed a water from the fridge, staying away from the red solo cups that had been littering the counter.

“Definitely!” She smiled again before her name was called from another room. “I’ve gotta go, but I’ll catch you later, okay? Be confident!”

She gave you a thumbs up as she disappeared around a corner. You took a deep breath before exhaling, gulping down some water to calm your nerves. You couldn’t even decide why you were nervous but there was no time to think on it seeing as the reason walked in the room himself.

“Peter! Hey.” You caught yourself before you came off too enthusiastic, leaning against the counter casually.

The boy’s eyes looked over to meet your form, his lips parting as he took in your appearance. “Oh, wow. Uh, hey, hi, Y/N. Wow, you look amazing.” He took a few steps forward, dragging a gaping Ned with him.

You felt your cheeks go red again as you attempted to keep calm. “Thanks. MJ worked some magic before this. Did you guys just get here?”

Peter looked back at Ned to make sure he was still breathing before replying, “Yeah, yeah. Aunt May just dropped us off and why am I telling you this, you probably don’t care and I should stop talking before it gets awkward.” A shy smile formed on his lips as he shifted his stance.

“It’s okay. Um, would you wanna join me outside? So we can get away from the crowd?” You twisted the water bottle nervously in your hands.

Words weren’t working for the Parker teen so he just pressed his lips together and nodded. You smiled at him, feeling a bit risky. You held your hand out to him, prompting him to grab it. He looked back at Ned in disbelief before grabbing your outreached hand and letting you lead him from the party.

In the years that Peter Parker had known you, he had never seen you this way. It was a whole new you, flirty and outgoing. If anything, it made him fall even further for you and he didn’t think that was possible.

The music was still loud enough that you could hear it outside. You sat down by the edge of Liz’s pool, pulling your boots off your feet so you could dip them in the warm water. A few other teens had come to the outdoors to escape the rave that had formed inside.

Peter situated himself beside you, still in shock that you had invited him to join you. You were kind of out of his league and that’s why he had done everything possible to avoid you without being rude. I mean, you were friends with Liz Allan for crying out loud. That should be proof enough that he would never have a chance. He was just trying to protect himself and his feelings from getting hurt when you rejected him.

You on the other hand, were surprised Peter agreed to hang with you. Your heart was beating a million times per minute and you just hoped he couldn’t hear it pounding through your chest. You couldn’t believe you had managed to get him out here with you, seeing as he had practically avoided you all week. Even though you were friends with people like Liz, you loved hanging with Peter, Ned, and MJ more. They kept you grounded, down to earth, and you appreciated that more than they would ever know.

“So, how’d your week go?” You asked, fumbling for anything to talk about. You sucked when it came to having conversations, especially with boys.

Peter shrugged. “The usual. Homework, Stark Internship, self-pity.”

You looked over at him. “Self-pity? Why?”

Peter’s eyes widened as he scrambled to fix his words. “I uh, I mean I’m just-”

“Peter, is everything okay? You haven’t talked to me all week and you keep avoiding me,” You blurted, just going for it.

Peter’s attempt to find a response stopped as his cheeks went red. “Um…”

You weren’t finished yet. “And don’t lie, please. We’ve been friends for who knows how long and you just started ditching me the past few weeks.”

You were being honest. He had been avoiding you as subtle as he could but it wasn’t working. All you wanted was to be with him. Yeah, it didn’t start as that but that’s where you were now. You had fallen for the Parker boy and you had fallen hard. You wanted to keep him safe from all the other girls out there that you knew would tear him to pieces and just use him for his kindness. You didn’t want to watch that happen.

“Y/N.” The way he said your name made a chill run down your spine. “I didn’t mean to. It’s just I…” He took a deep breath, eyes looking across the calm pool water. “I think I’m falling for you and it terrifies me.”

Your heart started pounding again as you reached over and grabbed his hand.  “Glad I’m not the only one.”

Peter blinked a few times in surprise. “What?”

“I like you, Peter. And I’ve been trying to get closer to you these past few weeks but you kept avoiding me so I enlisted MJ to help me. I was hoping you’d see me for once, instead of Liz.” You shrugged, your fingers still intertwined with his as if it was second nature.

“You had my eyes on you all along, love. It’s just you’re, well, you, and I’m just Peter.” Hiss red cheeks showed he was more embarrassed than he wished but he wasn’t about to let go. “You really like me?”

Rolling your eyes, you leaned over to press your lips against his. “I’ve always wanted to be your endgame.”

“Woo!” Cheering from behind you made the two of you move apart from each other quickly. None other than Ned had been cheering as Liz and MJ stood next to him. It was your turn to blush at your friend’s actions. Liz gave you a thumbs up before disappearing into the house to make sure nobody was breaking anything while MJ just flipped you off with a smile.

You grinned back at your friends before your eyes landed on Peter. To your surprise, his eyes were already on you, taking in every bit of detail you included. The corners of his lips moved into a sly grin as he moved forward, attaching his lips to yours again. You didn’t pull away this time, your hands finding their way behind his neck as he squeezed your hips.

It was all romantic and peaceful until...

“When I say Penis, you say Parker. Penis!”  

You pulled away from the shy boy in front of you to shout his last name to open air, earning a groan from said boy. He shook his head at you, keeping his hands on your hips. “On second thought, I hate you.”

You ruffled his hair as you stood up, offering him a hand. “Come on, Parker. Let’s go give Flash the biz before we ditch this party and head home together.”

And just like that, Peter Parker let the girl he fell in love with drag him back into a party, chanting his name here and there. He couldn’t even be mad. No, not at all. Not only did he have the hottest girlfriend ever, but you were also his best friend and he didn’t think it was possible to be happier with you by his side.

#peter parker #peter parker x reader #peter parker imagine #peter parker smut #peter parker mcu #spider-man #spider-man x reader #Spider-Man: Homecoming #spiderman imagine #spiderman #spiderman x reader #spider-man imagine #tom holland #tom holland imagine #ned leeds #ned leeds imagine #liz allan #liz allan imagine #zendaya #tom holland x reader #marvel #Marvel Universe #marvel imagine #reader insert #x reader #female reader

[theopentable]

Nurturing Kindness, Calm and Contentment in Children with Spirituality

At home we have a couple of those small labyrinths you can run your fingers through. Jobe (5) and Pearl (2) will often trace their little fingers through the grooves slowly and carefully towards the centre and back again.

Yesterday, as Jobe was quietly winding his way into the centre he asked me, “What’s in the centre?”

It was a good question. Most likely a practical question given he picks the labyrinth up often enough and probably wonders why it has this apparent dead-end in the middle. Risking turning the conversation into a deeper conversation that was happening more in my head than his I mentioned that all of life is really a journey to the centre. We’re always moving in and out of the centre. Sometimes we’re far from the centre and we’re trying to find our way back in. 

And then I asked what he thinks is in the centre. Pearl who was quietly colouring in next to us chimed in confidently, “Love.” Together they added a bunch of other descriptions of our inner lives when our kindness and calm systems are whirring away nicely (calm and brave feelings, kindness, goodness, happiness and so on). Alongside these the kids also include God in their reckoning. God is in this place. God is in the centre alongside all the other stuff.

Sometimes we’ll talk about the ‘centre’ as our heart space which helps give a bit of language for our contemplative practices. Sometimes as a family we’ll sit in quiet together in our heart space. We talk about how Jesus is always in this space and we can be with him here. Pearl will get the “gonger” (meditation bowl), we’ll have a little candle, and we’ll keep our eyes closed and our hands on our hearts while the bowl rings out (Pearl, in her sincerity and sweetness, is probably at peak cuteness when she does this). We breathe slowly and sit together. Sometimes we might use our imaginations and think a little bit about some imagery that relates to divine presence (life-giving breath, the warmth and light inside us). Sometimes I’ve asked Pearl if she can see Jesus when she has her eyes closed. I’ll ask her if he says or does anything. Last time Pearl spoke about how Jesus said “I love you” and was doing work on her. I have no idea what she meant by that but I do know what it means in my own life and how much I need lots more work done on me! 

These are very simple contemplative practices that we do together but they offer a way of sitting in compassionate presence and imagery and that can play an important role in helping to activate our soothing and contentment system so central to our wellbeing. Whatever the kids think or understand about spirituality I can at least say they connect prayer with encountering kindness and love in a personal form. This love lives inside them, is accessible to them, and connects them to others in an unbreakable way[1].

Obviously not everyone embraces spirituality in this same way, or, even if we hold something of this, our understanding of spirituality takes a million forms depending on our various traditions, world-views, experiences and beliefs. Largely speaking though we can say that spirituality remains a pervasive aspect of what it means to be human. Perhaps spirituality is something like an underground stream that is always bubbling away in some form, whatever our awareness or language. Whether we claim regular access to deep springs or whether we simply experience times where the water seems to bubble up to the surface of our lives we all seem to have some awareness and experience of spirituality - encounters with depth, with mystery; encounters with something vital that speaks to the truth of who we are and reaches right into our being. These experiences help to pull us from the margins of our lives into the centre where we make contact with that which is enlivening, beautiful and sacred. We enter into the school of our own experience. We wake up. We kiss aliveness. We are drawn into authenticity, flourishing, meaning and hope. We appreciate the many ways we are part of a greater whole, swimming in a sea of relationality and connectedness.

Of course how we make sense of any of that with language or practices is one of the great challenges of our lives. Our ability to describe our experience will always remain slippery and imprecise, a clumsy work in progress. This challenge is obviously present when it comes to nurturing spirituality with little ones, but not on account of experience. There is wide acceptance that children, like all of us, have an innate capacity for spirituality. Lisa Miller says that a child’s spirituality precedes and transcends language, culture, and religion and describes the way ‘It comes as naturally to children as their fascination with a butterfly or a twinkling star-filled night sky’[2].

David Hay and Rebecca Nye, in their three-year research study into young children's spirituality, have sought to describe the characteristics of children’s spirituality. Nye describes the ‘relational consciousness’ that is core for children and provides the foundation of their relationships with themselves, with others, with creation and with God. Within this comes capacities for joy, wonder, awe and imaginative wondering and is given further expression in the search for identity, meaning and purpose[3].

Noel Keating, leaning on the insights of Ken Wilber and Allan Combs, describes the way children are able to access very deep states of spiritual consciousness even with limited cognitive development:

‘Children are too young to understand very much about life. In their simplicity, they are comfortable with the limited and emergent nature of their knowledge, with not-knowing; they know they have so much to learn about the world. Because of this they remain open to possibility. They have a trust in their innate way of knowing, in their perceptual knowledge. By comparison, as we grow into adulthood and our capacity for conceptual knowledge enlarges we begin to doubt the validity and value of perceptual knowledge. As we become more rational, we tend to think that everything can be explained in words and concepts and we tend to distrust perceptual knowledge. While adults generally feel the need to analyse, to explain and to control their environment, children are open to allowing life to unfold its mysteries. Whereas adults are often deeply uncomfortable with anything that cannot be expressed clearly in words, children seem to embody the understanding that while knowledge may be complex, wisdom is simple. They are able to leave themselves open to whatever may transpire in the silence, without having to understand it or explain it.’[4]

There are beautiful gifts here - gifts of simplicity, receptivity, wonder, wisdom and the embrace of mystery (perhaps we could say the “beginners mind”) that we ourselves as adults may struggle to open our own hands to. This is part of the beauty of the spirituality of the child. Which might even mean that our children may be the ones to help guide us adults into the centre. And that, when it happens, is a very beautiful thing.

                                                        *    *    *

[1] Jobe, as a three year old, once argued with us about a place that he insisted he had been before. We had been, but he hadn’t. Or at least in our own way of seeing and understanding. Jobe had his own way of understanding time and place and the ways we’re all connected. 

He explained to us that he had been there before because before he was born he was with God, in God’s heart. That’s what we had always explained when he asked about where he was before he was born. He was embraced in God’s loving awareness, bound up in intimacy and connection, longing and purpose.

And Jobe would also ask where God is now, and so we have always spoken about how God is present before all things, but also about the special way the way that God dwells within our very hearts. So God couldn’t be closer and where we go, God goes. Jobe, the contemplative, then argues his case with us. He was at all those things with us before he was born. Because Jobe was in God’s heart and God was in our hearts. And so he was there - past, present, future, all held within the divine life. If God was with us, so was Jobe because Jobe was with God. Love connects us in an unbreakable way, across life, death, and time.

[2] Lisa Miller (2015), The Spiritual Child. Miller’s work highlights the biologically based, identifiable, measurable, and observable capacity in children for a felt relationship with a transcendent loving presence that is part of our inborn nature and heredity.

[3] David Hay and Rebecca Nye (2006), The Spirit of the Child (Revised Edition)

[4] Noel Keating (2017), Meditation with Children: A Resource for Teachers and Parents

#spirituality #children #compassion #kindness #contemplation

[iffeelscouldkill]

How to Be a Superhero Love Interest

Fandom: Spider-Man: Homecoming/Marvel Cinematic Universe

Pairing: Michelle Jones/Peter Parker (Spideychelle)

Summary: Twin confusing things are happening to MJ. One, she's getting an unusual amount of attention from their friendly neighbourhood superhero, Spider-Man. And two, she might be starting to develop a crush on her ridiculous dork friend and teammate Peter Parker. More to the point, she thinks he might actually... like her back?

Being MJ, it isn't long before she manages to put two and two together. After that, it's just a matter of figuring out how to be a superhero love interest.

Author’s Note: I finished Part 1 of my Spideychelle fanfic and decided to post it to Tumblr! You can also read it on AO3.

Peter Parker is obviously hiding something.

Michelle prides herself on her sharp observation skills, but it doesn’t take a person with any observation skills whatsoever to know that Peter Parker has a secret. He is, in point of fact, one of the worst, most obvious secret-havers in the history of having a secret. And in that list, she includes Mr. Medley, the librarian, who is clearly and indiscreetly having an affair with Ms. Burns from the science department. (He’s forgiven her more than a few overdue fines for keeping that one quiet).

But even though Peter is obviously hiding something, with his disappearances and his inconsistent excuses and his sketchy and conveniently vague “Stark Industries internship” that goes far beyond anything that a normal internship would require, Michelle is not going to investigate further. Because in the course of being observant, she has discovered that people don’t like it when she confronts them with her observations.

“God, Michelle, you’re like a hound dog,” her older sister, Evelyn, had groaned the last time Michelle interrogated her about why she’d come home late, reeking of cigarette smoke. “No wonder you don’t have any friends.”

“I don’t want any friends,” Michelle retorted flatly. More to the point, she doesn’t need friends, because friends make you compromise your beliefs in order to fit in. Michelle is her own person. And without friends, she also has way more free time.

Sure, Michelle has people that she’s on friendly terms with, whom she refers to as ‘friends’ for the sake of seeming socially acceptable. She sits near Peter Parker and Ned Leeds at lunch because their weirdness means that everyone else keeps their distance, and she doesn’t mind being associated with them by proxy. They’re good guys.

But for most of the time, when she walks between classes and when she walks to and from school in the morning and the evening, Michelle is alone.

It’s during one of these times, as she’s walking home from school, that she looks up and sees Spider-Man. He’s swinging her way, an acrobatic red-and-blue figure getting larger as he swoops from building to building.

The sight of him triggers a kind of falling feeling in her gut, and the world spins briefly as she’s taken back to DC and the terror of staring up at a shaking, collapsing building with her friends inside, knowing there was nothing she could do to help them.

But she also remembers a lithe, costumed figure impossibly scaling the side of the building, defying helicopters and threats to get inside and save them.

As Spider-Man swings closer, Michelle raises one hand and waves at him. She’s just one person in the throngs of people crowding the sidewalk; she doesn’t expect him to notice her. But to her surprise, at the peak of one of his swings, Spider-Man waves back.

The action causes him to fire his next web just a fraction too late and he fumbles it, missing the overhang he was aiming for and attaching to a window ledge lower down. As a result, his next swing takes him too low, and with a comical yell of shock Spider-Man goes crashing into the side of a dumpster. Michelle hears a series of clatters and a muffled, “Shit!”

She can’t help it – she giggles.

As Michelle continues on her way, she doesn’t notice a red and blue figure crawling up the side of a nearby building and perching on the rooftop, watching her go.

Michelle has a strict policy of non-intervention.

She watches, she learns, but she does not interfere. Mostly because she doesn’t care, or claims not to care, about the petty disputes her fellow students get into over whose job it was supposed to be to take the chemistry equipment to Mr. Cobbwell after class (even though she knows it was Lucy’s job, not Betty’s like Lucy claims), or when Ms. Beckett blames Jayden for writing dick jokes on the chalkboard in their English classroom when the handwriting is clearly Trisha’s.

Even on those rare occasions when she does care, she keeps her mouth shut and saves her energy for the arguments that matter. As an activist, she’s learned to pick her battles; you have to, otherwise you wind up angry and burnt out, of no use to anyone. And she’s definitely not about to start fighting anyone else’s for them.

And yet in spite of all that, when she hears Flash call Peter “Penis Parker” for the fiftieth time, she snaps.

“You know what, Flash? If you took all the time that you spend coming up with supremely unoriginal nicknames to insult people whose intelligence makes you feel insecure and channelled it into actually studying, you might be worth more to the Decathlon team than just dead weight.”

A dead silence follows her words. They’re in homeroom, five minutes before the first bell, and Flash is half-turned in his seat with one arm resting on the back of his chair, the cocky smirk sliding off his face and giving way to taut anger.

Peter, in the desk behind Flash, and Ned, next to him, are both staring at her gobsmacked, mouths hanging open.

Dimly, Michelle wonders if she just compromised her position as Declathon team captain by insulting a member of the team, but she doesn’t care. She flicks a curl of hair out of her face, plunging on before Flash can muster a response.  

“Oh but go on – insult me, too; I can take it. Because deep down I think you’re just scared of us. You see, Flash, unlike you, we aren’t afraid to be individuals. So we won’t go trailing around after you trying to kiss your ass. What a shame.” And she finishes by drawing an imaginary tear down one cheek.

There is muffled snickering from around the room. Flash’s face is slowly turning purple with indignant rage; he opens and closes his mouth, but before he can get any of the words out, the bell rings.

The tension in the room breaks, and the noise level immediately rises as people start to laugh and chatter more openly. Michelle allows herself a small victory smirk. Flash is still staring at her, but she holds his gaze, unblinking, refusing to be the first to look away, until Ms. Gardner sweeps into the room and calls for quiet.

Two seats away, Ned is grinning at her like she’s Christmas, his birthday and the Fourth of July come all at once. And Peter—

She glances over at Peter and immediately looks away, her cheeks flushing, because he’s giving her this look that she’s never seen before on another person.

It’s respect, fondness, amusement, and admiration all rolled into one. Even when Michelle’s not looking at Peter, she can still feel his gaze on her.

She stares down at the table top, aimlessly twiddling a pen and wondering why her stomach suddenly feels so weird. This is Peter Parker. Peter Parker, of the infamous puppy-dog crush on Liz Allan, which he’s definitely not over even though she moved out of state a month ago.

Peter Parker, whose brain-to-mouth filter is non-existent, whose love for science is matched only by his love for Lego and Star Wars, and who spends all his time when he’s not at school sticking together said Legos in his bedroom with his equally dorky friend, Ned Leeds, and coming up with weird new elements for the periodic table.

Ms. Gardner begins taking attendance, and Michelle answers automatically to her name. Peter eventually looks away from her, which is a relief, but her heart is still going at twice its usual rate.

It could be leftover adrenaline from the confrontation with Flash, but Michelle knows better. Flash doesn’t scare her. It has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the boy sitting in the desk behind him.

“You should’ve seen the look on Flash’s face! I thought he was going to bust a kidney!” Ned crows at lunch.

“Why a kidney?” Peter asks him.

“I dunno, but he nearly did.”

Michelle rolls her eyes and wishes she’d gone to the library like she originally planned. She’d thought that scooting her chair even further than usual away from Peter and Ned would have given them the hint that she doesn’t want to talk, but Ned had simply sat right down next to her with his lunch tray. Peter had hovered awkwardly, like he was torn between respecting her wish for space and sitting next to his best friend, and eventually followed suit.

“It was awesome,” Ned repeats reverently. “And Flash couldn’t even say a thing! I think he’s scared of you.”

Michelle snorts, though he’s right; Flash hasn’t said a word to her since homeroom, hasn’t even glanced in her direction. She isn’t going to kid herself that she’s safe, though; they have Decathlon practice right after school.

She glances over at Peter, and finds him giving her that look again. He’s also not saying anything, which from a normal person, would be weird. From Peter “motor-mouth” Parker, it might just be a sign that the world is ending.

She feels like she might claw out of her skin if she doesn’t do something, so finally she demands, “What, Peter?”

“Thanks, MJ,” he replies, with warm sincerity in every syllable.

The feeling in her stomach multiplies by about a hundred. Goddamn it.

Michelle enters the hall for Decathlon practice that afternoon with a poised calm that masks the apprehension she feels underneath. She’s not afraid of Flash, but if he tells Mr. Harrington what she said about him earlier, she could lose the team captaincy.

She’s not sure exactly why he got under her skin so badly earlier. She doesn’t like bullies, true, and she’s long thought that Flash needed to be taken down a peg. She’s sure that most of homeroom, for all that they pretend to like Flash, were secretly rooting for him to go down. But even so, the intensity of the anger that she’d felt in that moment surprised her.

Ned waves at her cheerily from the edge of the hall, which she ignores. She glances over and sees someone talking to Mr. Harrington, and her stomach lurches – but it’s not Flash, it’s Peter. He’s saying something earnestly (which is pretty much his default setting), gesturing widely with his hands while Mr. Harrington nods.

Michelle walks past them and goes up to the stage, where Abe and Cindy are mucking around. Flash is sitting off to the side, but he’s completely silent, and doesn’t look at her.

“All right, guys,” she says, and even without raising her voice, the group instantly quiets down. “Let’s run some drills.”

She tries not to pay attention to whatever Peter is still discussing with Mr. Harrington as she drills the team on general knowledge questions, but she can’t help but hear when Mr. Harrington calls Flash over to them. He looks sulky as he walks over, and only looks more so at whatever Mr. Harrington is telling him.

Peter, meanwhile, has wandered over to join the group running drills. Ned gets up to let Peter take his seat and his buzzer.

“Nice of you to finally join us, Peter,” says Michelle sarcastically. It’s no big deal really, but she wants to try and make him squirm a little bit.

“Sorry, MJ,” says Peter with a contrition that only makes her narrow her eyes more. With Liz as captain, he bailed on nationals with less remorse than he’s showing her right now. “I just had to clear something up with Mr. Harrington.”

Michelle lets it go, but after practice she corners him before he can disappear out the door in point five seconds like he usually does.

“So, what were you talking about with Mr. Harrington that was so important? And what did it have to do with Flash?”

Flash had also rejoined the group about two minutes after Peter, looking mutinous. She hadn’t said anything, and neither had he, even to make his customary snide remarks about Peter’s ‘Stark internship’. However, he’d answered several questions in the quick-fire round, and even got most of them right.

Peter grins at her sheepishly. “Well, y’know, I just wanted to clear up a couple things with him, about earlier.”

“Earlier,” Michelle repeats.

“Yeah. I figured Flash might try and get you in trouble with Mr. Harrington over what you said, ‘cause it was about the Decathlon team, so I wanted to try and make sure you didn’t. Get in trouble, I mean. So I just told him that there was an argument, you stood up for me and might’ve said some kinda harsh stuff, but you were defending me. And he said it was okay.”

“Just ‘okay’?” says Michelle.

“Well, he said it was between you guys and that you and Flash could sort it out between yourselves, without involving the Decathlon team,” Peter says with a diffident shrug. “So, y’know. No worries!”

Michelle treats Peter to a long, hard look before punching him lightly in the arm. “I don’t need you to play the hero for me,” she tells him.

“You’re welcome, MJ,” he replies with a brilliant grin.

The problem with breaking her policy of non-intervention is that when she does, Michelle always winds up getting involved. With people.

To be more specific, she thinks that she might actually be becoming friends with Peter and Ned. Not ‘on friendly terms’ friends, but actual friends.

After that day, she somehow never goes back to sitting two or three seats away from them at lunch. At first, she still keeps her distance conversationally, silently reading her book and ignoring Peter and Ned’s chatter, but then she finds herself somehow getting drawn into one of their dumb debates about which Star Wars movie is the best (Rogue One, obviously).

After that they somehow get on to debating the Lord of the Rings and Eowyn’s characterisation in the books versus the movies (Michelle has very strong opinions; Tolkien is great, but he sucked at writing women) and whether or not another set of Harry Potter movies was a good idea. Michelle is slightly unnerved to find that she has a lot in common with these dorks.

Peter and Michelle keep a whispered debate going all the way through History and up to the final bell, with Peter contending that creators should have the right to keep making new works in their franchise, and Michelle arguing that they should release the IP into the public domain so that fans can have a go at making their own versions. (“But then we wouldn’t have Rogue One, and you said it was your favourite!” Peter needles her. “We also probably would’ve got a diverse Star Wars a lot sooner,” Michelle retorts, and grins when his face falls.) She’s smiling as she says goodbye to them, and she carries on smiling all the way home.

Maybe having actual-friends isn’t so bad after all.

She’s wrong-footed, though, when Peter invites her over to watch Firefly with him and Ned at his house two days later. Ned stayed back after Geography class to talk to the teacher, so it’s just her and Peter at their usual lunch table. Peter has set his tray down next to hers but isn’t sitting down yet, nervously shifting on the spot as he looks down at her.

“…And so I thought it might be cool if maybe, you know, you came over and watched it with us? My aunt’s cool, she won’t mind. You could stay for dinner,” Peter rambles.

Michelle opens her mouth, unsure what to say. Sitting together at lunch and arguing about geek culture is one thing, but going over to someone’s house, meeting their mom (well, aunt) and staying for dinner is something else entirely. She’s a solitary person by nature, and she needs her time alone after spending the whole day around people.

Plus, she can’t help thinking it would be awkward with just the three of them – she doesn’t know them that well, not really – and it would make this whole “situation” with Peter, the one where they keep accidentally catching each other’s eyes for too long and then blushing and awkwardly looking away, so much worse. It’s bad enough at school, but in close quarters with no good escape route? Ugh. Recipe for disaster.

“I actually have this book that I really need to finish for English-” Michelle starts.

“Oh, yeah, no, of course, I get it – though I mean, you could bring it with you?” Peter offers.

“-and I have to be home by 8 o’clock anyway on a school night, my older sister is kind of strict,” she finishes over him.

It’s not a lie, but it’s a half-truth; Evelyn never holds her to the 8 o’clock curfew that their parents set, and she wouldn’t care if Michelle went out for the evening or stayed over a friend’s house. Michelle just hasn’t ever wanted to before.

“Sure, yeah, right…” Peter says, looking for all the world like a puppy whose tail she just trod on. “Maybe some other time.”

He sits down, and Michelle returns awkwardly to her lunch. Fortunately, Ned arrives before the tense silence can drag out much longer.

“Hey, guys! Sorry that took so long. So, did you ask her yet?” he says to Peter. Michelle’s face grows warm.

“Yeah, uh, I did,” says Peter in a despondent voice, not looking at her. Ned somehow fails to pick up on his tone.

“Great! So, we’ll see you later?”

“Actually, I have a- uh-” Michelle begins.

“She has stuff to do, and, um, her mom-”

“Sister-”

“Sister, yeah, sorry, is kinda strict.”

“Oh.” Ned looks between the two of them, then shrugs. “That sucks.”

Michelle leaves five minutes later, mumbling something about having to go to the library.

She doesn’t know where all this guilt has suddenly come from, but it sits in her stomach all day. The thought of another evening spent by herself in her room, reading, suddenly seems cold and empty rather than appealing.

She fidgets distractedly all through Spanish, and eventually pulls out her copy of Brave New World and skimreads the last few pages under her desk. Then as the bell rings, she pushes her way through the crowd of students in the hallway and hurries to catch up with Peter and Ned.

“-sure she didn’t mean it like that, dude, she just-” Ned cuts off mid-sentence when he sees her. “Oh, Michelle. Hey.”

“Hey,” Michelle says awkwardly.

There’s a pause, during which she resolutely forces herself to swallow her pride, then goes on,

“So I managed to finish my book during Spanish, and I was wondering if the offer to watch Firefly with you guys is...”

“Yeah!” Peter interrupts her eagerly. “Yeah, if you’re sure your sister won’t-”

“I already texted her, so it probably won’t be a big deal,” says Michelle. In fact, Evelyn’s reply to her off-handed text about spending the evening at a friend’s house had been,

what???? you???? who died and gave you a social life???

She’d decided to interpret that as an okay.

They go to Peter’s house, and she manages not to embarrass herself in front of his aunt (who is surprisingly young, and also endearingly pleased to meet another friend of her nephew’s).

Up in his room, which is just as nerdy as she had predicted, they sit shoulder to shoulder and watch Firefly on Ned’s laptop. Michelle has seen the show half a dozen times before, and she keeps up a running commentary of random trivia and dry remarks about the actors’ terrible Mandarin, which entertains the two boys to no end.

All in all, it’s not a terrible evening at all, and when Peter suggests that they hang out again on Friday night to finish the second half of the series, she doesn’t think twice before agreeing.

One problem with being friends with Peter and Ned is that it becomes a lot harder for Michelle to ignore the fact that Peter is hiding something.

But she manages to forget about it for a little while, right up until she gets to Peter’s house for the second half of the Friday marathon and Ned answers the door.

“Oh, uh, Peter had to cancel on tonight. Something came up.”

Michelle frowns. “He didn’t say anything at school,” she points out. In fact, Peter had been looking forward to their evening, and had checked with her at least three times to make sure she was still coming over. What was so important that he had to bail at 5pm on a Friday?

“Yeah, no, it was really last-minute,” Ned explains, although Michelle doesn’t really buy it.

“So… what are you doing here?” Michelle asks. The ‘this isn’t actually your house’ is implied, though to be fair, she doesn’t know anything about Ned’s home situation, so maybe half-living at Peter’s house is normal for him.

“Uh, May invited me to stay for dinner,” Ned says awkwardly.

“Oh.”

There’s a pause, during which Michelle tells herself not to be stupid; of course she’s not on the sort of terms yet that would see her invited to a guy’s house when he’s not even home. That’s lifelong-best-friend shit.

“Well, I’d better get going, then,” says Michelle, and turns to go.

“Hey, um-” Ned calls before she can get too far, and Michelle waits. “Do you… wanna stay for dinner, too? I’m sure May won’t mind, she always makes extra…”

Michelle half spins around. “I wouldn’t want to bother her, really, I’ll just head home and-”

“It’s fine, I swear – May? Can Michelle stay for dinner, too?”

So, reluctantly, Michelle steps inside just as Peter’s Aunt May comes into the front hall, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “Oh, Michelle! How good to see you again!”

She smiles, but Michelle thinks there’s something a little strained and brittle about it. “Of course you can stay for dinner.”

Michelle mentally instructs herself to stop being in observation mode; she’s been invited over as a guest, she needs to stop analysing things. “Thanks so much for having me, May. I don’t want to intrude.”

“Really, I insist! Peter should be back later, anyway; he just had to, uh, run an errand.”

‘Run an errand’? Michelle thinks. Clearly being a terrible and unconvincing liar runs in the family. But she says nothing; it’s none of her business, and whatever this weird secret is that Peter has, at least his aunt is in the know.

Dinner is a strange experience. Ned and May both seem on edge, and Ned keeps checking his phone the whole time. Occasionally Michelle will have her head bent over her food and at the edge of her vision, catch him exchanging looks with May, silently communicating something.

She could try to fill the silence, but she’s never really seen the point of small talk. Occasionally May will seem to realise that they’re acting weird and brightly inject a question about school into the silence, which Michelle answers as normally as she can. All in all, it’s sort of a relief when dinner is over.

Michelle offers to help wash up, but May waves her off. “Don’t be silly, you’re the guest! I got this. You two go upstairs and watch a movie or something.”

Ned looks at her uncertainly. Michelle likes Ned well enough, but it’s not the same dynamic without Peter around, and she can already imagine how awkward it would be sitting down to watch a movie with just the two of them. “That’s okay; I should really be getting home. Thanks again for dinner.”

Ned, obviously relieved, offers to see her out.

“So, uh, see you at school tomorrow,” he says as she shoulders her bag.

“Monday,” Michelle corrects him dryly. “Tomorrow’s the weekend.”

“Oh yeah! Right.”

“Tell Peter I said hi, when he gets back from… Whatever it is he’s doing.”

Michelle and Ned look at each other for a moment. Michelle can see in his eyes that he’s waiting for her to ask the obvious question of just where the hell Peter is and what he’s doing. A big part of her wants to ask. But she doesn’t want to hear another flimsy lie, and besides, she promised herself that she wouldn’t try and figure this out.

Even though she really wants to.

“Night, Ned.”

#Spideychelle #peter/michelle #spider-man: homecoming #fanfic #fluff #marvel cinematic universe #secret identity #identity reveal #MJ is genre-savvy

[ladycapuletwrites]

Can I get an edit

Some corrupt cops are sitting at the table next to us, I’m stoned and eating pizza.

We had a big night on the bags last night; me and receptionists and some dorm mates.

Natasha is sitting next to me, we’re trying to concentrate on this weird movie we’re watching, but I keep phasing out, and I feel like there’s things I need to do but I can’t remember them. Virgo is at the reception desk. He looks tired. I’m not surprised. A lady came into my dorm room at 10am when he was supposed to start work to tell him he was running late. She stood in the doorway as he awkwardly tried to put his clothes back on without her hawk eyeing his dick.

I remember the hazy details of the night before. He’s one of those tall, art nerd types that I’m so attracted to. Long blonde hair like Legolas. I helped him edit his application letter for a job, and we celebrate him getting offered the position by buying a few grams of coke each and getting so high we can’t decide what’s real and what’s an echo of our thoughts. I mean, it all is really, isn’t it?

He suffers from coke dick in this situation just like many who came before him. Or more accurately, didn’t.

We end up falling into a kind of distracted and uncomfortable buzzed slumber together, after stealing some warm beers and sculling them.

I don’t remember what happened to everyone else, but here are the remainder of us, sitting on this long couch, forcing ourselves to eat pizza and watching a movie that none of us can comprehend.

 We’ve ordered it from the Colombian version of Dominos, which is a thing in Medellin. It was only down the street, so it was the ultimate choice.

It occurs to me that I’m leaving tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

I’m headed to Cartagena to find Allan and Lucy for the first time since the beginning of the trip. I feel like a different person. I feel detached, in a way. What happened in Mancora has burrowed its way into me, and the anger and resentment that I hold towards myself spews out onto other people. I am disappointed that Allan wasn’t there for me, though I never asked him to be.

  I look at the television. “Does anyone actually know what’s going on in this thing?”

Natasha looks up, piece of pizza rotating slowly.

“Ah, yeah yeah. His mate is a werewolf and he has sex with his mum. Also there’s this weird girl with a droopy eye whose face turns blue when you touch it... Oh yeah, and this guy saw a dragon as well.”

I look at her, quizzically.

“No but seriously, what is happening?” I ask, pushing the pizza box away, laughing.

She starts to giggle. “Look, the moon is in the alley, okay?” We erupt into laughter and the next thing I know, I’m furiously inhaling my last bump of cocaine before I jump in a car on the way to the airport.

 Drake gives me a wide hug and I hop into the cab, trying to speak Spanish, but I’m talking too fast, and he’s shaking his head. Eventually, I ask him, sweatily, if we’re going in the right direction. It feels like we’ve turned around. My palms are sweaty, and my I can hear my heart in my ears.

“We go back.” Is all he can say in English, and I don’t understand his Spanish for about three explanations until I realise he’s telling me that I left my passport and wallet back at the hostel and Drake has told him to come back and get them.

By the time he shoves my stuff at me through the window of the cab, I’m already late. “Go quickly! Otherwise they’ll know how fucked you are!” he laughs, but it freaks me out, and I have visions of that one time I smuggled cocaine into Ecuador not long ago and if I get caught in Colombia I am well and truly fucked.

 Somehow, I pass through the gates. A few people in the line for the check in look at me sideways, or so I think, I’m so high I can’t tell the difference between paranoia and general instinct. I manage to smuggle my huge second bag onto the plane, much to the discord of the other passengers, I got it through all gates though, all five of them. Swapping the bag from one side to the other, each time I move through a gate.

I’m sure my pupils are the size of dinner plates. I get into my seat without looking at any of the stewardesses.

 I'm about three sheets to the wind, maybe four, but I've managed to ask in Spanish, appropriately, whether I can have a beer.

I mean it is six in the morning so there was every chance that she would say 'no', but she didn't.

She says 'in five minutes', which is basically the magic words, but five minutes too late.

I have realised that I'm going to rock up at Angel and Shaina’s pretty drunk, but that's not really a problem, I guess.

That being said I've literally written a bunch inane drivel that doesn't make any sense at all in my last note piece so I can only hope for the best, and for beer, obviously.

“Sinco minut” turns to “diez minut” and I'm still wondering where my fucking beer is. Thinking about calling the air hostess, but worried about seeming so keen that they say no to my beer request. Within a minute they're rolling their trolley down the isle. Bringing mercilessly slowly, my beer. Every second seems to etch itself across my soul and the cocaine pumping through me exceeds time and space. Wow, I have had a lot of cocaine. I think we got into about five bags, and I can’t remember how or why because the last thing I can think of is the girl with the blue face and the moon in the alley and the size of my hangover.

I can see they have a beer perched on the top of the tray. I'm pretty sure it's for me; the one I asked for. They are rapidly approaching and I think about the state I want to arrive in.

Maybe I want to be drunk today.

Some other people have ordered beers.

They have had to get more from the cold fridge at the back of the plane.

They hand me my beer. I think "I've made it", I successfully caught a plane when I'm a million miles from sober. I also am pretty happy that by the time I finish my (second) beer we will have landed.

Just at the time they talk about landing I ask for another beer. The lady doesn't even bother asking me to finish it quickly because I've just suckled a cerveza in seven minutes. I've been counting, had she? Well, yes.

But she's also got the most ridiculous face paint on, for Halloween, so she looks at me disparately from her tiger painted, somewhat pitiful face.

She must either think I'm terrified of flying, or correctly, that I am high as a fucking kite trying to fight off the oncoming existential I may have once whatever the coke was mixed with wears off.

It's an hour flight. You're in the air, and then you're not.

I’ve never landed with a beer in my hand, and even as people around me are unbuckling themselves, I’m still cradling it like a newborn.

This has been the easiest flight I’ve ever had, and I have a moment of terror that the plane might blow up at any point because things can’t be this easy.

 I shuffle off the plane and am blindsided by the incomprehensible heat. It is so thick I am gulping at air, feeling like it is never going to go in.

 I wait for my bag to come off the belt, and drag all three of my bags and all the layers of the clothing I’ve removed in the onslaught of heat out to the taxi rank.

I push all of my things into the back seat, but something is missing. My rainbow jacket. I had it just a second ago.

I pull my things out of the car and head back inside, frantically checking every step that I had taken before the conveyor belt.

 There is no sign of it, but I spent the next hour in confusion wandering around the airport asking confused vendors if they’ve seen it. I’ve never been so attached to an item of clothing before, and it feels as if someone has abducted my child.

It’s a small airport, so after three rounds of looking I am forced to confront the fact that someone has in fact, stolen it. The thought punctures an artery of emotion in me and if I wasn’t still balls deep in whatever it is that is keeping me high I would start to cry huge, sweaty tears. Why the fuck does a person in Cartagena, the hottest place on Earth, have need for a jacket?

 As I fold myself into the air conditioning of a taxi after an exhausted search, I start to feel the dread of what I have lost settle over me. All the pieces of new baggage I now carry with me, because every action takes up a little piece of your psychic space, and right now, I am carrying a heavy cargo.