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loving-barnes · 4 years

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TED MOSBY – THE ONE (1)

(A/N): I needed a change and I have decided to write a HIMYM fanfic. This might have two or three parts. I have been watching the whole show again and honesly, I am obsessed with Ted. So... if you like or love HIMYM, this one is for you. Also, this is around season 5 mixed with an AU.

Pairing: Ted Mosby x reader

Warnings: none

Words: 2013

TED MOSBY – THE ONE

After all the break-ups and girls, he was ready to settle down. Usually, when he found a girl and started dating her, he would tell his friends that someone new came into his life. Maybe because of that his relationships didn’t work out. Maybe… This time, he decided to keep it as private as possible and not tell them about the new woman in his life until they were ready. It was a mutual decision. She was glad that he proposed the idea because she was only in one relationship before Ted and so, she wanted to take things a bit slow.

They would hang out together when Ted’s roommate was away or they would stay at her place because she lived alone.

“My friends come and go into our apartment, so it’s better we are mostly crashing at your place. And besides, I love it here,” said Ted to Y/N when they spend their three-month anniversary at her place. It was a simple Chinese takeout night with Star Wars. Ted wanted to watch it, just to be sure she loved the movies as much as he did.

“This is my favourite part,” she squealed excitedly.

Ted’s eyes widened and he looked at her. He stopped breathing for a moment and just stared at her face, noticing how her eyes were sparkling and he just knew that she was the one, at least the one worth saying those three powerful words.

Y/N turned to him with a smile. “What’s up?” she asked.

“I love you,” he said – simple, short and powerful.

Her hand reached for the remote control and she paused the movie. After that, she put down her plate with food and again turned to him. “Really?”

Ted nodded, still smiling. It was a genuine smile that she loved so much. “I mean it. I love you.”

And then she was on him, kissing him deeply. Then she realised one unpleasant thing. She pulled away from him. “I’m so sorry, my breath after the spicy chicken…”

“That’s alright,” he leaned to her again, capturing her lips with his.

After the kiss, she curled to his side with a plastered smile on her face. “I love you too, Ted.”

In the end, it was a good thing they decided to keep it low-key. This way, they could enjoy their time together and cherish their moments without being interrupted by Ted’s friends, mostly Barney.

Even though Barney had a thing for Robin, he would hit on Y/N a lot – Ted was sure of it. Deep down, he was scared to introduce his new girlfriend to Barney.

“Ted?” Y/N asked him the next morning when they were having a very early breakfast before work. “If you agree and if you want, I would like to meet your friends. I think I am ready,” she said.

As much as it made him happy that she wanted to meet the people he considered as family, his gut was telling him to wait a little more. “Uhm-“ he started slowly, carefully considering his next words. “About that,” he took a deep breath. “I am so glad you want to meet my friends, but could we wait a bit more, please?”

She put down her mug with coffee. “Sure,” she didn’t know what to think. “No rush. Can I at least know why? Should I be worried or scared?” she kinked a brow.

Ted took a deep breath. She needed to know some information about his friends. “They mean well, I know that, but sometimes they can be either overprotective or make everything to make fun of me. I don’t mind the second one it’s just… it might scare you off.”

She laughed a little and bit her lower lip. “Go on,” she goaded him.

“I will come clean with you. There is this girl in our group – Robin – and we used to date for a year. I don’t have any feelings for her. She is just a friend and a family, nothing more. Lily, she still thinks I might have feelings for her. I don’t. The only feelings I have are that I love you.”

“Alright,” she nodded.

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

Y/N shook her head. “Honestly, maybe a little but overall, no. I would be more worried if you met someone after me. That I would be more worried about,” she admitted. “Anything else I should know?”

Ted was pleasantly surprised that she was fine with it. “Uh, Barney, he is a womanizer and a sociopath. In the end, he is a very good friend of mine. I just want to warn you that he might hit on you, a lot.”

“And the one named Lily?”

“Right, Lily is married to Marshall. We studied at the same university. Marshall is my best friend. Lily occasionally wants to meddle in someone’s business or relationship. Usually, it is not a bad thing.”

Y/N laughed. “Seems like you are trying to say all the negative things about your friends so I wouldn’t be too shocked.”

“Pretty much,” he nodded. “So, would you still like to meet them?”

She stood up from the chair and went to him. Without a word, she sat on his lap and gave his lips a peck. “They are your friends. I want to meet them. If they don’t like me, there is nothing I can do about it.”

“God, you are amazing,” he kissed her one more time. “How about Friday night? I will come for you and we will go to McLaren’s where we hang out most of the time.”

“Sounds like a deal,” she accepted his idea.

…

He hadn’t seen the gang for over a week. When he was done teaching architecture, he went straight to the pub where his friends would already be. And he was right. They were all sitting in their usual booth, drinking beer.

“Well, look who decided to show up,” said Lily when she noticed him coming towards them. “Where have you been most of the time? We barely have seen you this century.”

Ted took a chair and sat at the head of the table. “Sorry guys, I had a lot to do at work,” he said it as if it was true. “Sometimes, it is not easy to be a teacher.”

“Seriously Ted, what is going on?” Marshall asked him.

“Nothing, really.”

“Where’s the poop, Ted?” Lily questioned.

“There is no poop, Lily. I had to create several tests for my students, prepare the lectures and had a meeting with the school council.” He said it while directly staring into her eyes.

They were quiet for a moment until Barney decided to open his mouth. “Alright, since you are here, we shall play our favourite game to get you laid.”

“Barney, no.”

“Come on, Ted. We haven’t played it for months. FOR MONTHS, Ted,” he stood up from his seat with his scotch in a hand.

While he was babbling about it, Ted’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He received a text from Y/N.

Hi, I am passing by your street and I was wondering if you would like to hang out or something?

As much as he tried not to smile, he failed, and Robin was the one that noticed it. “Ted Mosby smiling at his phone? Something is definitely going on.”

I’m inside McLaren’s with the gang. Come here and meet everyone, if you like.

“There definitely is a poop. Spill it out, Mosby,” Robin mocked him.

He kept his mouth shut, not telling them anything. “Oh man, what did you do?” Marshall was concerned. “Ted, tell us. You have never been this silent. What happened?”

“Wait a minute,” Barney sat down and pointed at Ted’s face. “I know this face.”

And before he could say that he might meet a girl, a young woman approached the table carefully. “Ted,” said Y/N softly.

He turned his head and smiled at her. He stood up, helped her with her jacket and offer her his chair. Afterwards, he grabbed himself a new one.

“Y/N, this is everyone. Everyone, this is Y/N, my girlfriend.”

Barney almost choked on his drink and thus sprayed it on Marshall and Lily who were sitting opposite them. “What? No, no! You are supposed to be my wingman. You are not supposed to date anyone for at least five years.” He left the booth and went somewhere else to cry.

“So, I guess that is Barney,” said Y/N while looking into Ted’s eyes.

“Exactly,” he nodded.

Lily was the next one to finally speak. “Hi, this is a surprise,” she stuttered. “Honestly a big surprise. I’m Lily and this is my husband, Marshall,” she pointed at the tall man next to her. “H-how long have you been together?”

“For over three months,” they said simultaneously.

“You kept it a secret for over three months? How? How did you manage to keep your mouth shut for that long?” Marshall couldn’t believe it.

Y/N was glad for a second that she was not the centre of the attention. They were bombarding Ted for trying to keep this relationship a secret. In the meantime, she ordered herself a beer.

“So, Y/N, tell us something about you? Or better, how did you two meet?” Lily turned her attention to her.

Y/N shrugged. “Honestly, there is nothing special about how we met. We simply bumped into each other on the street when suddenly, everything was on the ground and Ted was apologizing,” she smiled at the memory. “I was running to an important meeting and Ted was late for class.”

“After that, we met like a week later when I happened to be at the right time in the right place,” he looked into her eyes. “Some of my students told me that there was a reading in the library after class. I was not interested in going at all,” he admitted. “Then, they showed me the leaflet and there she was.”

“There I was,” she repeated almost inaudibly.

Barney came back to the booth with another scotch in his hand. “Traitor,” he said it out loud. “Marshall, you are my new and only wingman.”

“In your dreams,” he declined.

“Just wait, Mosby. This thing,” he pointed between Y/N and Ted, “will end soon and then you will be begging to be my wingman.”

“So, what do you do for a living?” Robin tried to turn the conversation where it was before Barney interrupted them.

“I am a writer. I wrote the Noble Blood trilogy and am currently working on another fantasy book.”

“I love the Noble Blood series,” Marshall almost scream from the sudden excitement. “You are Y/N Y/L/N. Holy crap, I can’t believe you were able to get her, Ted. Finally, someone normal.”

“I’m glad you like the books,” she smiled at him.

“I love them,” Marshall continued. “They are written for both boy and girls. What inspired you to write something like that?”

“Star Wars,” she said simply.

“She loves Star Wars?”

“She loves Star Wars,” said Ted.

“She loves Star Wars!” Barney exclaimed. “You just went from a 7 to solid 11.”

“Thanks?” Y/N was a bit offended and confused.

Robin joined the conversation. “Hey, I work for Channel 12 and I would like to make an interview with you.”

“You work for the news channel? That is so cool. I would love to. We should arrange something,” Y/N happily accepted. “One question, though: Is Sandy Rivers still there and being such a pig?”

Robin nodded, immediately annoyed by that man. “Sandy Rivers is a pig, but he is not working with me.”

“S-so, you’ve seen my show: Come on, Get up New York!?”

“Surprisingly yes. When I had to leave for Europe to promote the book, I would watch it while packing or getting ready for the flight.”

“My girlfriend is just awesome,” said Ted triumphantly and he quickly kissed her cheek.

“Alright, next round is on me. I am so happy to meet you. Really,” she gave them an honest smile and went to the bar.

#Ted Mosby #Ted Mosby x reader #HIMYM #How I met Your Mother #Ted Mosby fanfiction #HIMYM fanfiction #fanfiction #How I Met Your Mother fanfiction #Ted #Lily #Marshall #Barney #Robin #enjoy

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midnightsvns · 4 years

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Now I see daylight — a Twilight fanfic

summary: Edward spent his life so long in a ninety-year midnight. Now, all he sees is daylight. A short story about Nessie’s first prom. “How could I ever tell her how grateful I was? Grateful that she could always see past the worst of me and my mistakes. Grateful that she had unlimited selflessness, giving us the family I’d envisioned for her, but thought impossible for me. Grateful that she was all too happy to be the first and only love of my existence. Grateful that cruel fate, after our various ordeals, had turned merciful to bring us to this heaven.” words: 8,280.

AN: so. i was absolutely wrecked after reading the very sad note on which midnight sun ended. to lick my wounds, i wrote this fic, set 12 years after breaking dawn, on the day of nessie’s prom. 404 plot not found just fluff of edward & bella being happy with their now adult daughter. title/summary inspired by the t.s. song daylight. full text under the cut!

Bella and I walked with hands intertwined in the woods behind our house, on our way to the cottage a few miles away that served as our daughter Renesmee’s “room.” When she turned seven, we decided she deserved a space of her own, a space that was removed from her supernatural family who could hear every move she made even if she had a whole floor of the house to herself. It was not unlike the first cottage the three of us had lived in together, back in Forks, in the first year of Bella and I’s marriage. To me, those days seemed as close as yesterday—in reality, twelve years had passed like the blink of an eye. Our daughter was all grown-up now, about to graduate high school for the first time, and today was her very first prom.

We walked at human pace, enjoying the lights and the sounds of early morning in the forest. Before Bella, I would have hated moving at such a glacial pace, always wanting to reach my destination as fast as possible, never lingering under the sunlight long enough to contemplate the diamond-like sparkling of my marble skin. A constant reminder of my inhumanity. But now I relished having the chance to see my wife in the light of day. I knew that all the poets and philosophers who, for two thousand of years, had tried to define beauty, to describe it, had irrevocably failed—because none of them had been fortunate enough to witness Bella smiling and shining under the golden rays of sunlight. I squeezed her hand and chuckled to myself.

Bella, of course, noticed my jocularity. “What are you thinking about?” she wondered.

“I thought that was my line,” I replied, grinning at her. Bella easily controlled her gift now, raising and lowering her mental shields at will. Except in special moments of communication, her shields were always up. She could maintain shields around other people, too, granting peace for me and privacy for my family. The quiet that resulted inside my head was a balm; I could be thankful for it for a hundred years and it would not be enough.

She sighed, and her eyes were suddenly downcast. “Well, I’m glad one of us is cheerful enough to laugh today.” She stopped walking, let go of my hand, and sought shelter under the shadow of a large evergreen tree. I regretted seeing her move away from the sunshine.

Her mournful tone surprised me. “What’s wrong, love? You’ve been looking forward to Renesmee’s prom for weeks now.” It was all I heard the ladies at the house discussing as of late. Alice, our very own literal visionary, was making all their dresses, works of art that were sure to rival even the most revered of Paris’ haute couture scene. Rosalie was browsing our family’s sizable collection of jewelry—composed of heirlooms from our human lives and the very many anniversary gifts from over the decades—for the perfect sets of accessories that would go with Alice’s creations. Esme was renovating and redecorating the front room, the staircase, and the porch, in preparation for today’s sure-to-be endless photo opportunities.

Bella looked up at me, her golden eyes looking regretful. “I just… can’t help but be a little sad that she’s grown up so fast. She’s only twelve, Edward. I spent more time as a clumsy, awkward human child than I’ve spent as her mother,” Bella said, sighing again. “And now she’s graduating and going off to college for the first time? She’s not an adult! How are we even sure she’s fit to be by herself in the human world already? How is she gonna eat? How will she hunt? What if she needs us, or she gets hurt and Carlisle can’t get to her in time? She can’t just go to a human doctor!” Her voice got more and more agitated with every worry she voiced. “And what if she starts dating? And she doesn’t tell us because we’re not there?! She says she’s not interested in anyone romantically now, boys or otherwise, but it’s her first four years in college! She’s bound to catch the sights of some… some no-good jerk who—”

“Stop, Bella,” I said gently, interrupting her before she could spiral any further. I had to resist the urge to laugh at her tirade. It reminded me of the time I went on a very similar, equally anxious rant. Emmett had thought I was a crazy person, worrying about the myriad things that could wipe the human girl I loved out of existence. This time, though, these worries were much easier for me to assuage than when I was fretting over Bella’s mortality and her uncanny ability to attract danger.

I joined her under the cover of the tree and held her marble face in my hands. “Love, I understand wholly all of your anxieties. They’re mine, too. But we need to put a significant amount of trust and faith in our daughter if we want to stay sane during the next four years,” I said earnestly, cracking a little smile, and then started addressing Bella’s concerns one at a time.

“I’m also sad that it has been just twelve short years, and already, we have to let her go. And as much as we may not like it, she is an adult now. She has been for five years. I know she grew up too fast, but if that is the small sacrifice that makes the miracle of her existence possible, then so be it. And she’s had no problems being around humans since she started high school with us when she was eight. As for her eating habits, well, I am worried about the amount of junk food she’ll consume once she is left unsupervised. And she doesn’t need to hunt as frequently as we do…. Once, maybe twice, a month, she can come back here and any one of us would love to go hunting with her. She is also not so fragile that she would ever need the care of any other doctors than Carlisle, Rosalie, or me. As for her first romantic relationship, well... she’s smart, strong-willed. We have to trust that we have raised her well enough that she’ll be responsible, that she’ll know how to protect her heart, and that she’ll be comfortable enough to turn to us for any questions she might have. You are a good mother, Bella. You raised an amazing young woman.” She looked as though she was about to argue, but she said nothing. She must have lowered her shield because I heard her thoughts instead: We raised an amazing young woman. You, Carlisle, Esme, Rose, Alice, Emmett, and Jasper… Even Charlie, Sue, Jacob, and Seth. It really does take a village. Her smile was wry.

I shook my head and smiled back at her. She was still bad at taking compliments. “We just have to trust Ness, love. As much as I would never want to see her hurt, we have to let her make her own mistakes. To let her take risks. And we have to give her freedom while she still thinks it’s ours to grant. If she thinks she’s not ready for this yet, or becomes overwhelmed in any way, she knows she can come back home at any time. All we can do is be there for her, and as long as she knows she’s not alone in this, that she never has to carry the world on her shoulders because we’re supposed to carry part of it for her… She will be fine.”

I looked straight into my wife’s eyes, still holding her face, hoping I had eased her anxieties a little. She visibly relaxed, then placed her hands over mine.

“You know, I really hate it when you make sense,” Bella stated matter-of-factly, glaring at me and pouting a little. I laughed and gave her a soft kiss on the cheek. Then I pulled her close to my side and led us back on the way to Renesmee’s cottage. If, thirteen years ago, anyone—even Alice—had told me that someday I would be trying to soothe Bella after a bout of anxiety instead of the other way around, I would have laughed in their face.

We made it to the cottage in companionable silence, and Bella’s mood seemed cheerier than before, back to being excited for the day’s events. She knocked on the door, calling for Nessie to wake up, but our daughter opened the door in a flash, greeting us with a chipper hello and a wave to indicate that we should let ourselves in.

“Good morning, Ness. You’re up early,” I commented. Not that our daughter was a late sleeper, but she was also not what one would call a morning person.

“I’m very well-rested, thank you,” she said, walking to the couch in the middle of the cottage’s main living area and plopping down onto it.

“How many hours did you sleep last night?” I asked, suspicious. Half-human, half-vampire hybrid though she was, Carlisle’s recommendation was still at least seven hours of sleep a night, and she often ignored it.

“Seven,” she replied too fast. I raised an eyebrow.

“Okay, six. Maybe five total…” she grimaced, sheepish now. “I was reading books! And I finished a movie.” I was unhappy to hear it. We really didn’t have an exact number of how many hours of sleep she needed each night, but I was sure five wasn’t enough for anyone, human or otherwise. I shook my head and sat next to her on the couch.

The cottage was a cozy place, with a kitchenette in the main room, one bedroom and a small bathroom down a narrow hallway. The main area was where Nessie spent most of her time, a rectangular room with big windows that let in a generous amount of natural light. The wide wall in front of the couch served as the canvas for a mural of the turquoise sea and white-sand beach at Isle Esme, painted from memory by Bella and Renesmee. The three of us had spent two weeks there a couple of years ago to celebrate Nessie’s birthday and my tenth wedding anniversary with Bella. It was my favorite painting in the world.

On the eastern wall was a bay window, Renesmee’s favorite reading nook, flanked by two tall bookshelves. And in front of the couch was a low coffee table, cluttered with books, stacks of paper, journals, pens, paints and paintbrushes, canvasses, coffee mugs, and a laptop. I sighed. The organized chaos, as Ness often referred to it, reminded me much of her mother’s old room at the Swan residence. Bella started tidying up the table immediately, replacing books onto the shelves and rearranging the mess on the table. I turned my attention to the kitchenette’s dirty dishes and the haphazardly discarded clothes on the couch, shaking my head at the untidiness. She spent her days with us either at school or at the main house, and sometimes even slept there when she felt like it. How could one girl create so much disarray after one night?

“Mom, Dad, stop it, I’ll do that later…” Nessie admonished us halfheartedly, but we were done cleaning up before she finished speaking the sentence.

“Did you already have breakfast, honey?” Bella asked.

Ness nodded and grinned. “I had cereal and two Pop-Tarts.”

Wonderful. Clearly she knew how to make healthy choices. I almost wished for the time before she had outgrown her distaste for human food. At least on a diet of animal blood, we knew she was getting some nutrients.

Bella rolled her eyes, although I knew she wasn’t really annoyed. “Esme will make you eat some fruit at the house. Are you ready to go now? Alice wants to do a final fitting of your dress, just in case she needs to make any changes.”

“It’s too bad Aunt Alice can’t see me in her visions. She could just decide to make any changes and then know which ones are right,” Nessie mused, then shook her head and bounded up from the couch, walking quickly down the hallway and into her bedroom. She came out a second later, hands deftly fastening a necklace on the nape of her neck. It was the necklace Rosalie had given her as a present for her birthday last year, a thin platinum chain and an oval pendant with the family crest on it. We filed out of the cottage, and Bella locked the door behind her.

The three of us walked together, Nessie in the middle. I asked her what books she was reading last night that she had gotten so little sleep. Instead of communicating verbally, she held my hand and showed me.

I started seeing her memories from only a few hours ago, implanted into my mind as seamlessly as though they were my own. I saw her reading all seven books of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series and watching the first film adaptation. I saw how much she’d enjoyed them. Then, I saw her thoughts on the character Aslan, the wise talking lion and savior of Narnia. She admired him, his kindness and wisdom and compassion…. Suddenly, I saw my own face mixed in with images of the lion. She was trying to tell me the lion reminded her of me.

It shocked me. I’d enjoyed the world of Narnia at the time they were published and became widely popular in the 1950s, and even Bella had told me it was one of her favorite book series. As a lonely immortal, I’d always taken comfort in the fact that I had an Aslan-like figure in my life to look up to. My father, Carlisle. It never occurred to me to think that I could ever fill that role for someone else.

I must be doing something right, I marveled to myself. If Renesmee could liken me to someone who reminded me so much of Carlisle, then perhaps fatherhood wasn’t as lost on me as I had so often felt it was. It was like I was walking on a cloud, an invisible weight lifted off my shoulders. I wrapped my arm around Nessie as we walked, trying to let her know how much I appreciated the privilege of her sharing her thoughts with me. And then she surprised us by speaking in a serious tone.

She moved away from under my arm and moved a few paces ahead, turning around so she could face us. She walked backwards as she talked, her footing steady and sure. “Momma, Daddy, I don’t think I’ve thanked either of you yet… for allowing me to go and study on my own. I know you’ve always tried to let me have a normal childhood, to make sure I never missed out on anything. I love living with you guys. I love talking to Grandpa Carlisle about history and art. I love helping Grandma work on houses. I love shopping and appreciating fashion with Aunt Alice and Aunt Rose. I love playing chess with Uncle Jasper and Uncle Emmett. I love our piano lessons, Daddy, and our two-person exclusive book club, Momma. I love going back to Forks on holidays to visit Grandpa Charlie. I love our baseball games. But now I’m ready to experience the world for myself. I know it must be hard to let me go and that you’re scared for me. I’m scared, too….”

If my heart were still alive, it might have grown in size from the joy I felt. Renesmee rarely addressed us this way anymore. It was always Mom and Dad or Edward and Bella, if we were in public. It carried me back to the days when she was still just a little child. A rapidly growing, highly intelligent child, but still our little child. She was always so perceptive; it was as though she’d sensed the essence of the conversation Bella and I had had before we reached the cottage, and this sober declaration was her way of telling us she understood.

“You have nothing to thank us for, sweetheart,” I said quickly, at the same time that Bella hurried to ask Nessie what she was afraid of, concern in her voice.

Our daughter blew out a long breath. “I’m scared of living alone, of being completely responsible for myself. But I’m really excited about it, too, and most of the time the excitement overpowers any doubts I have. I’m certain I wanna do this, and don’t they always say that something isn’t worth doing if you’re not at least a little bit afraid?” she asked, her smile reaching her deep brown eyes.

Bella paused and left my side to grasp our daughter by the shoulders. “All we want, Nessie, all we will ever want, is your happiness. And we want you to find out what that means for you on your own terms. If you decide tomorrow that you’d be happy never going to college at all, none of us will argue with your decision. But I can see how sure you are about going. I can’t promise you that I won’t be worried sick and that I won’t be calling you multiple times a day until you’re very, very annoyed with me… But I know you can take care of yourself now, and I can’t wait to see what you do next, baby.” Bella’s lovely voice sounded assured, no trace of the anxiety she’d confided in me just moments earlier. This was what I meant whenever I told Bella she was a good mother, and seeing her in action never failed to earn my awe.

“Thank you, Momma,” Renesmee said sincerely, circling her arms around Bella, and Bella hugged her back. “And I promise I will never be annoyed by your calls, even if you call a hundred times a day,” she said, grinning. “I won’t ignore yours, either, Daddy.”

This made me and Bella laugh. Of course Nessie would make time to take her crazy parents’ calls. No one was sweeter than our daughter.

Their hug ended, and we kept walking. Suddenly there was a glint of mischief in Renesmee’s eyes, and then she touched my arm and Bella’s to tell us we were being challenged to a race. Before the thought was even fully communicated she had already taken off running to the house. I shook my head and chuckled as we hurried after her. She couldn’t quite run as fast as vampires, but the head start might be enough to guarantee her win.

When we reached the house, my brothers were waiting outside for us to arrive. They both had cameras in hand—Jasper a professional digital SLR and Emmett a Polaroid instant camera. With Bella around, I couldn’t hear their minds, so I raised an eyebrow at the both of them in question. What were they up to now?

“Nessie’s already in the house, you rusty old slowpokes,” Emmett said in greeting, mocking me and Bella. But mostly me. “And to think you used to be the fastest, Edward. What a fall from grace. Let me take a picture of this really embarrassing moment for you real quick.” He positioned the instant camera near my face and pressed a button, and it started whirring as it printed out the picture. He grinned and deposited it into a large red handbag, presumably Rosalie’s, that he had slung over his shoulder.

I rolled my eyes at my brother and asked what they were doing with the cameras instead of responding to Emmett’s attempts at vexing me. It was Jasper who answered. “We’re having a photography competition. Whoever contributes the most shots for Esme’s photo albums will win. She’s planning to keep one for us and one to send to Forks for Charlie, so we’ll need a lot of pictures.”

“Yeah, and the winner—who will definitely be me—gets to skip the bake sale that Esme is going to for some hospital fundraiser,” Emmett explained with an arrogant smile. I rolled my eyes again. Of course my brothers had found a way to turn this day into some kind of contest.

“Doesn’t the Polaroid give you a pretty significant disadvantage, Em?” I pointed out, wondering how much film he was lugging around in Rose’s handbag.

“Just because it’ll be more challenging doesn’t mean I can’t still win,” he replied, shrugging. “The pictures I take will be better. Plus, the easy way is overrated, don’t you think?”

Jasper shook his head at Emmett’s smugness, then told me and Bella to pose for a picture. I turned to Bella and she turned to me, and I held both of her hands. I smiled adoringly down at her as she stared back up at me with her deep, amber eyes. We weren’t looking at the cameras, but I heard the workings of the two small devices as my brothers captured the moment.

“Aww, you two are disgusting,” Emmett chuckled as Jasper showed the photograph to all of us on the camera’s tiny screen. “Esme’s going to love that one.” The Polaroid Emmett had taken was still developing, and he shoved it inside the red bag with all the others. Then they went inside to find better subjects for their contest.

Bella and I made our way inside as well. The house was alive with the whole family looking forward to tonight’s events. I heard Alice, Rosalie, and Nessie in Alice’s room, chattering and working away on their gowns. I heard Esme in the kitchen, making breakfast for Renesmee or perhaps practicing some recipes for the upcoming bake sale. I heard Jasper and Emmett running around everyone like a couple of paparazzi, taking pictures left and right. Only Carlisle was absent, hard at work at the hospital, but he’d be back in time to see us all off to prom tonight. Bella kissed my cheek in farewell before joining Nessie with her aunts upstairs.

I gravitated towards the piano, as I often did. I scanned the perfect mental repository of all the music I knew, trying out a few bars from different pieces—some my own compositions and some written by better musicians than I—but none of them spoke to me…. Until one did. I sat down and began playing the first notes of “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” from Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets. It was a piece that sounded abundantly better when played by a full orchestra, but I enjoyed it regardless. My hands glided quickly across the piano keys to produce the quick, jaunty chords of the exposition. Then the development came in ritardando, varying from the cheery main theme to take a strangely calm, nostalgic turn. Although it evoked feelings of nostalgia, it wasn’t sad. Only pensive about a time already past. The piece concluded a tempo, returning to the happy and powerful main theme. I didn’t realize how much the song reflected my mood until I was already finished playing it.

Knowing her thoughts were protected by Bella’s shield, Esme offered me her kind compliments out loud from the kitchen. “That was wonderful, Edward,” she gushed. “I have always been so fond of that piece. Please play some more, darling.” I murmured a thanks, then obliged my mother and started playing her favorite, the very song I had played for Bella the first time I brought her home to meet my family. Even though the memory was tainted by the agony and danger of the events that followed, I still looked back on it with some joy. That was the night Bella became a part of our family.

The day went on that way, calm and peaceful, everyone busy with their respective tasks. Nessie came down to join me once in the afternoon and let me hear a new composition she was working on. It was her best yet, and I told her as much. Bella came downstairs as well, listening to me play and rereading Persuasion by Jane Austen while she sat beside me on the piano bench.

Before long, it was time for us to get dressed and ready for the prom. I quickly changed into my dark brown suit. The color had been my only stipulation, the rest decided by Alice’s keen sense of fashion. Since that overcast Thursday morning—the day that had been my turn to ask questions—my favorite color had never wavered from brown. The chocolate-brown color of Bella’s human eyes was not just preserved fondly in my memories, but alive forever in Nessie, and it was beyond the bounds of possibility for me to separate such a color from the meaning of all my happiness.

After I was dressed, I tried to peek into Alice’s room to see if they were ready to go, but Alice, annoying as ever, blocked my entrance and told me to wait with Esme and Carlisle downstairs. I rolled my eyes but followed her instructions. Arguing with Alice was almost never worth it.

Carlisle was just arriving home from work right as I was coming down the stairs, and when he saw me, his eyes lit up. “Why, you look great, Edward,” he praised, setting his medical bag down on a table in the foyer. I thanked him humbly. He reached up and loosened his tie, likely more out of habit than out of a need to be more comfortable. It struck me as a very fatherly thing to do. Esme came out of the front room, greeting Carlisle with a bright smile and a quick kiss. “You’re home just in time, dear. I think the girls are almost done helping Nessie get ready.”

I snorted. At this rate, we were never going to leave the house in time. “Alice, we’ll be late!” I shouted in the direction of the stairs, knowing she could hear me perfectly.

“No, we won’t!” Alice chimed back confidently. I sighed.

Jasper and Emmett were already in their tuxedos and bounded quickly down the stairs, cameras still in hand. Rosalie was the one who joined us next, looking devastating in a burgundy mermaid dress. Emmett looked like he was about to combust. Jasper smirked at our brother’s dumbstruck expression, snapping a few pictures.

Then it was my turn to be dumbstruck as Bella started down the stairs, moving at full speed to be at my side in an instant. “Alice wouldn’t let me see Ness wearing her dress yet,” she complained, but all my attention was on her at that moment. She looked positively incredible wearing a knee-length, square-necked light azure dress, held up by thin straps with flutter sleeves and inset with a thousand little rhinestones that looked like stars. My wife could have been Selene herself, come down from the moon. I ran my fingers gently through Bella’s long, straight brown locks and pressed my palm to her cheek. And for the nth time in so many years, I was glad for the deal I’d made with Bella on our first wedding anniversary. “You look beautiful, love. Absolutely arresting,” I said honestly.

“I know,” Bella said, beaming up at me, and I laughed happily. This was our deal: whenever I told her the indisputable truth about how beautiful she looked, all she had to say in response was that she knew. In exchange, I was forbidden from spending money on gifts for her for exactly five years, and five years was such a short time for creatures such as we that the zero-gifts rule felt like it was lifted immediately. I circumvented the moratorium, anyway, by getting gifts that were for both Bella and Nessie, or both Bella and Esme…. It may not have been the fairest of contracts, but my intentions were of the purest kind. I leaned down and pulled my beautiful goddess of a wife into a deep kiss, and I felt her wide smile as her arms wrapped around my neck. We only broke away from each other when we heard Alice skipping down the stairs, dressed in a white two-piece cocktail dress that made her look like a mischievous fairy.

“Get ready, everyone!” Alice squealed, clapping her hands in anticipation. “I can’t wait to see your reactions, I know you’ll all just die.”

My sister was right. Renesmee—our only daughter, the greatest joy of our lives—stood at the top of the stairs in a gorgeous, peach pink off-shoulder gown decorated with the same little rhinestones that were on her mother’s dress and delicate leaf-patterned lace appliques, and she was a sight to die for. As she walked slowly down the stairs, one hand on the banister, Emmett and Jasper took pictures fervently, documenting the entire moment. I saw Bella press her hand to her chest, eyes soft and adoring.

“Well, how do I look?” Nessie asked when she reached the bottom of the stairs, a half-smile on her face. Her soft bronze hair fell in long, spiral waves down her shoulders, and on her neck, she still wore the necklace she’d put on this morning. She spun around in a circle, indulging the attention we lavished on her, understanding that today would not have been such a significant event for us if not for her. Esme made me, Bella, and Nessie pose for pictures by the staircase, then on the couch in the front room, and then outside on the porch. After Esme was satisfied with the pictures of the three of us, Jasper and Emmett set up a tripod and took a photo with all nine of us in the front room, our latest family portrait. When the photoshoot was done, we all filed into our vehicles to make our way to school. Bella and Nessie rode with me in the Volvo, and my siblings rode in Rosalie’s M3.

We made it to the high school just in time, and even from the car, I could already hear the booming electronic dance music and the excited prattle of hundreds of human children crowded around in the school gym. I prepared myself for the barrage of human thoughts I would have to hear tonight; the only people Bella would shield here were our family. Although Bella could shield a roomful of people from me easily, I still needed to be on the lookout for any suspicious minds when we were in public like this. The three of us met the rest of my siblings at the doors to the gym and joined the throng of high schoolers, looking like they were having the time of their lives. Little did they know how many lethal supernatural creatures had just descended upon this party. If they knew, maybe they wouldn’t be so happy.

“Are you ready for your first—but definitely not last—prom, Carlie?” Emmett asked my daughter, grinning. Nessie went by her middle name at school to be less conspicuous. At first, Bella was greatly displeased by the necessity of this precaution, but she couldn’t deny the rationale. We stood out more than enough being newcomers in a small town like this one, with our sheer number, our wealth, our beauty, and our semi-frequent ‘family trips’ to avoid the sun.

“Time to dance the night away!” Nessie said, grinning back at her uncle. She bounded away from us to meet a couple of her classmates, two girls who reminded me of Bella’s human friends, not physically, but in their manner and thoughts. Ness didn’t have many friends, and we had started to worry that her only interaction with other living beings was isolated to her family, but she rarely found her human classmates interesting, and when she did, it was because she genuinely had something in common with them.

The girl who was like Jessica, a brown-haired girl named Lindsay, shouted over the loud music at Nessie in greeting. “Oh my God, look how gorgeous you are!” Jesus, she looks like she belongs in some runway show right now. I wonder what designer this dress is by? Probably cost a million bucks…. I kind of hate her. Lindsay’s thoughts were petty and vitriolic, and I resisted the urge to march over there and shield my daughter from the bitter girl. That would have done more harm than good, so I settled for rolling my eyes and whispering in my wife’s ear about the girl’s thoughts. It was gossipy and ungentlemanly, but I had to share the burden of being powerless to protect Nessie from a fake friend.

“Oh, that girl is in my English class,” Bella said, looking unsurprised. “I knew she was mean, but I liked her Shakespeare essays. Nessie thinks she’s smart.” I scoffed and tuned in to the other girl’s thoughts—Annie, a girl with short, pink-dyed hair who made me think of Angela. She greeted Nessie with a hug, and thought, Wow, she looks like a princess. I should ask her to take a selfie with me! My mom will be super bummed if I don’t take a lot of pics tonight…. Annie pulled out a smartphone, and the three girls smiled as the little device flashed and snapped their ‘selfies.’ And then they ran to the dance floor together, jumping and laughing to the music.

I stayed with Bella in a darkened corner, and we watched Renesmee enjoying herself. Occasionally, one of my siblings would pull us away and make us dance to the upbeat music, but neither of us were particularly fond of the DJ’s infernal choices. The DJ, a baby-faced young boy called Drew who had Spanish class with me, exclusively played EDM and bastardized remix versions of classic love songs. By the ninth EDM song in a row, I finally put my proverbial foot down and crashed the DJ booth on stage to bribe him with a fifty dollar bill so he would play a song of my choosing. The boy was astonished and could barely say anything back to me, but as I walked through the crowd to reach Bella again, Johnny Ace’s “Pledging My Love” started blaring through the loudspeakers. I took Bella’s hand as we walked to the middle of the dance floor, and once we were there, I pulled her close to me and led us in a slow, intimate dance.

“This is the most romantic song I know,” Bella whispered, her head resting on my chest as we swayed slowly in a circle.

I chuckled. “Once upon a time, in a very old and decrepit truck, this song came on the radio and provided an apt soundtrack for the most romantic day of my life. Do you still remember that?”

Bella lifted her head from my chest and looked up at me, her eyebrows knitted together playfully. “My God, thirteen years and you’re still hating on the truck? I think you’ve got some issues to sort out there, honey,” she said, her beautiful lips turned up in a smirk. Then her face became more earnest. “But of course I remember. That was one of the best days of my life, too.”

Her amber eyes looked so full of love, so full of sincerity, that I felt like falling to my knees. As a mature vampire, more than a decade after her transformation, she should have no more than a few blurry recollections of her human life. But Bella felt so strongly about me, about the memories we’d made, that she vehemently held on to our past, even as each day, each minute, and each second brought us further away from it. I kissed her, always trying to let her know how precious she was to me. The song was nearly over, and I sighed. I could have stayed there dancing with her forever and never need anything more.

“Smile, please!” I heard Renesmee say, Emmett’s Polaroid camera in her hand. She snapped a photo of us. Then she turned the camera around, sandwiched herself between her mother and I, stuck her tongue out goofily, and pressed the button on the camera to take a picture again. Bella laughed.

“Where did your friends go?” Bella asked. “I was starting to think you guys would never get tired of dancing together.”

“Oh, they went back to their dates,” Nessie said nonchalantly. “So I decided to annoy Uncle Em by taking his camera.” A folky, lullaby-like acoustic song was now playing through the speakers.

“Oh—I love this song so much!” Nessie gasped. “Please dance with me, Dad?” She whispered the last word to keep any humans from hearing.

How could I refuse her? “Of course, sweetheart.”

Bella smiled and took the camera and the Polaroids from Nessie, saying something about finding Emmett and his big red bag. I led my daughter in a slow dance around the crowd, her hands resting on my shoulders.

“You and Mom looked amazing dancing together like that,” Nessie said casually, but by the look on her face, I could feel how serious the conversation was going to be. “I know the story, Dad. I know everything you went through before you could get here. And I am so happy that it worked out for you. Seeing how much you love Momma, how much she loves you… it makes me never wanna settle for anything less than that.”

My brows furrowed. “Is that why you said no to the boys who asked you to be their date tonight? Because you don’t love any of them?”

We kept swaying to the music, and Nessie chuckled. “Kind of. It’s true I said no because I don’t feel a connection to any of them, but also because I didn’t want tonight to be about some stranger hanging out around our family. I wanted it to just be us, so we could be ourselves.”

My heart swelled. Nessie always thought of our family first. That wasn’t her responsibility, and we would’ve been all too happy to pretend to be human and normal for any prom date of her choice, but she thought of us first. She was so like her mother in some ways.

“What did you mean, then? About never settling for anything less?” I asked. Something about the way she’d said it worried me, made me feel as though there were insecurities underneath her positive tone that needed to be addressed.

She took a deep breath. “I just… I realized that real love like I’ve seen with you and Mom, Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle Em and Aunt Rose, Uncle Jasper and Aunt Alice… it’s rare and it’s wonderful. And I think I would prefer waiting for a love where I could feel everything there is to feel rather than try to force something with anyone I’m not sure about. And I realize I could be waiting forever if I keep waiting for something perfect, but that’s the point, isn’t it? And I can’t imagine how I would ever find something like that. And that’s all right, I think.”

Renesmee’s words were full of conviction, and I started thinking about how, someday, the day would come when we would be dancing just like this—I would be in a tuxedo and she would be in a big white dress—at her wedding, for the father-daughter dance. Like her, I could not imagine yet the person she would marry, but I saw our family there. I saw Charlie desperately trying to ignore how our faces still remained unchanged. I saw Jacob, whom Renesmee considered her best friend, taking a break from managing his own auto repair shop to be there as her best man. It would be the happiest day of her life, just as how my wedding had been one of the happiest days of mine, and it saddened me that she couldn’t see herself finding that happiness one day. But I understood Nessie’s conclusions—or maybe more accurately, her fears—about not finding love. When I was still alone, I’d come to similar conclusions that the kind of happiness I saw in my family was simply not meant for me. Even when I’d found Bella, I always chose the saddest path, never daring to hope that I could have happiness with her forever.

“I admire your position about refusing to settle, Ness, because you deserve only the best. And I was just like you once. Before I found your mother, I never saw the point in pursuing relationships that I knew weren’t going to be meaningful. But you shouldn’t let yourself believe that you won’t find what you’re looking for.” I brushed a stray lock of curly bronze hair behind Nessie’s ear, hoping she could hear the honesty in what I was saying. “You know that for our kind, waiting through decades of being alone before finding who you’re meant for is more common than finding that right away….So please, don’t be so resigned. You are entirely too young to resign yourself to an eternity of being alone. It will work out, somehow,” I finished, echoing Esme’s confident words to Bella long ago when our relationship was at its very beginning.

Renesmee nodded, and I hoped my reassurances had lifted a little of the weight off her shoulders. I didn’t need to have Jasper’s gift for empathy to know that existing in both our world and the human world, not quite belonging in either, was a difficult thing to process. I didn’t know what the future held for my daughter—none of us did—but I looked forward to it with the same optimism my own parents had always had for me.

The acoustic ballad we were dancing to ended softly, and I escorted her away from the dance floor so we could rejoin our family.

“My feet kind of hurt,” Nessie complained as we found Bella sitting beside Rosalie on some folding chairs, but a smile was still bright on her face. She was having such fun tonight.

“Do you want to go home, baby?” Bella asked as Nessie dragged over another chair to sit down between Bella and Rose. Nessie rested her head on Rose’s shoulder, and Rose circled her arm around Nessie in a one-armed hug. “You’ve been dancing all night, I’m sure you’re tired.”

“Yeah, I think I wanna go home,” Ness said, sounding a little sleepy.

Suddenly, Lindsay and Annie appeared out of the crowd as an upbeat pop song started playing. “Carlie, come dance with us!” one of the human girls said.

Nessie perked up. “Wait, I love this song! Just one last!” she said enthusiastically, heading back to the dance floor with her friends. I shook my head, amazed at her energy. I sat down on the seat that Nessie had just vacated.

“We’re still a go for tomorrow, right, Rose?” I asked Rose discreetly. If the weather was safe enough for us to be out, we were going into the city tomorrow so Rose could help me pick out Nessie’s very first car. She learned how to drive when she was seven but always used the cars that belonged to the rest of the family. Now that she was going to college, she needed a vehicle to be able to get around on her own. Bella was coming with us, too, to be the voice of reason. Apparently, Rose was just as likely as I was to pick a car that Bella would deem—and this was her word—‘overkill.’ Rose only nodded in response, but I saw the corners of her mouth turn up a little.

We all watched as Nessie danced to one last song with her friends, and I could pick her lovely voice out of the babble of other noise as she sang along. “There’s a mountaintop that I’m dreamin’ of…. If you need me, you know where I’ll be!”

“She’ll call us constantly once she’s in college, right?” Bella asked me in an emotional whisper, looking at our daughter jumping up and down and singing with her friends. Since she became a vampire, I rarely thought of my wife as vulnerable anymore, but she looked vulnerable now. If our bodies were still capable of shedding tears, I wondered if she would be crying. Honestly, I realized I wanted to cry as well. Renesmee was ready to create her own life, and she needed us less and less every day. Years ago, I’d thought loving Bella was the greatest accomplishment of my life, the only good thing I would ever do. I’d thought that, after a hundred years of emptiness, loving Bella as thoroughly and as completely as I did was the strongest feeling I would ever experience. But Nessie—she proved those assumptions wrong, time and again. It was an honor to have raised her, and I knew Bella felt the same.

I held Bella’s hand and kissed her temple. “I’m sure she will, love. I’m sure she will.”

After a few moments, the song was over, and Nessie was saying her goodbyes to her friends. When she had made her way back to us, she cried, “My feet are killing me! Please never let me dance all night in heels ever again.”

Bella let out a short laugh. “It’s fine, baby. You can take off your shoes and your dad will carry you to the car.”

“Oh, bless!” she exclaimed. Bella laughed again. Nessie pulled off her heels, which Bella promptly carried for her, and our daughter let me lift her up in my arms. As we walked, Bella wrapped her arm around my waist. I glanced up at the night sky and saw the pale moon untrammeled by the usual gray clouds, bathing the high school parking lot in its ghostly light. It conjured up memories of a similar evening. Another prom night—Bella’s very first. I’d carried her in my arms just like this, and I remembered how desperate I’d been, how important it was for me that she did not miss her prom, in case her future children ever asked about it. I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t have an empty story for them because of me. And here we were, thirteen years later, with the miracle of our own child in my arms, Bella’s arm around me. Not even the sweetest of my dreams could compare to the reality we lived in now. I stared at Bella’s face, wondering if her thoughts had taken the same turn mine had. She pressed a hand to her throat, remembering how I’d kissed her there that night. We shared a secret smile.

When we reached the car, Bella opened the door to the backseat, and I sat Ness gently down in the middle, making sure her limbs were in comfortable positions. “Thanks, Dad,” she whispered, looking seconds away from succumbing to sleep. Bella got in beside her, and I sat in the driver’s seat to take us back home.

At moments like this, I still struggled to believe how I could have been given so much happiness, so much unadulterated joy that went beyond the ambit of anything I had ever dared to dream of for myself.

It felt like a reward I didn’t deserve. Maybe it was futile, looking for reasons when I knew I would get no answers. But in all my musings, the only conclusion I came to that made any kind of sense was that… it was because of Bella.

Because of Bella and her goodness, that rare kindness I saw only in her—she was why I was allowed all this happiness. And I was just the fool lucky enough to be in the range of her shining sun. Lucky enough to love her and be loved by her.

How could I ever tell her how grateful I was? Grateful that she could always see past the worst of me and my mistakes. Grateful that she had unlimited selflessness, giving us the family I’d envisioned for her, but thought impossible for me. Grateful that she was all too happy to be the first and only love of my existence. Grateful that cruel fate, after our various ordeals, had turned merciful to bring us to this heaven.

I looked back at them again, Nessie now sleeping soundly on Bella’s lap, and Bella absentmindedly twining her fingers through the mess of bronze curls fanned out on the soft fabric of her dress. “She’s dreaming,” Bella whispered. I could see Nessie’s hand on Bella’s arm, inadvertently letting Bella see the pictures she was swimming through in the land of her dreams.

I was sure that no words in any of the languages I knew could ever sufficiently reveal the feelings of peace and contentment that I felt, staring at them, the two halves of my heart, at ease in the backseat.

Bella caught me looking then, her golden eyes piercing through mine in the rearview mirror. She smiled, lowered her shields, and allowed me to hear one thought: I love you.

“I love you, too, Bella,” I whispered. I willed the past and the future that stretched out infinitely before us to give those words weight, seeming too simple and inadequate to convey the depth of what I felt.

No, I didn’t have the words that could tell Bella how grateful I was for her. For Renesmee. For our family. Perhaps I never would…. But that was fine. I had the rest of forever to try and find the words. Forever and forever and forever. I smiled and felt lighter than if my heart were not made of stone, and sped up the car to take us faster towards home.

#writing #twilight fanfiction #kellythepitiablefangirl #thethoughtsofafangirl #edwardsmidnight #magicandmyth #mafitheedwardhoe #← thanks once again to my friends for prereading this and giving me feedback u guys are the bestest #midnight sun still has me very 🥺🥺🥺 and this entire fic was just an exercise in reminding myself that e/b are living their best lives now

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screenhead15 · 3 years

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ok so, like I said in the last post, I have a The Owl House fanfic I’ve been working on (and by been working on I mean I wrote the start of the first chapter in half an hour and never touched it again), and I said I would post it even if only one person showed interest in it, and someone did so...

Here you have it, sorry if it’s trash:

The Owl House: Coming out over and over again

I breathed in sharply, wrinkling the essay I had spent weeks perfectioning. “I can do this!” I told myself, but in reality I wasn’t sure I could. No, no, no. If Azura taught me anything was to never be afraid of being myself. With that thought in mind I walked over to the door of my room, ready to open it, walk out and tell Eda what I’ve been meaning to tell her for weeks. But just as I was about to grab the handle I stopped, my hand shaking as I finally retreated it away from the door, overthinking if this was the right thing to do. I had seen so many coming out videos, I knew how to do it, I was prepared for it! Or was I? There were so many different coming out stories out there. Some that went well… and some that… didn’t. I knew the various outcomes that could come with me coming out, from getting kicked out of the owl house to getting microaggressions from Eda and King. Truth is, I was terrified. What if Eda and King misgender me constantly and never bother to correct themselves? What if our relationship changes and it never goes back to what it used to be? What if they start treating me differently? I start hyperventilating, feeling as if my eyes were getting watery. I try to calm down, sitting in front of the door and rewatching Kiran’s coming out video for the last time, taking even more notes from it (just in case). Eventually, I get up, take a deep breath and step out of the room, essay still in hand, just in case I forget anything. I find Eda in the living room, sitting on the sofa, reading a magazine with King sleeping on her lap. I try to say anything but I immediately forget everything I had been rehearsing for the last few weeks and the few things I hadn’t forgotten get stuck in my throat. Suddenly I feel my whole body shaking, starting at my hands and at my legs and spreading through my whole body. My eyes get watery again and I start to feel as if I had a knot in my throat, I look down at the paper to try to refresh my mind, Eda hadn’t noticed me yet so I had some time before I actually said anything, but when I thought I had already remembered everything my mind went blank when I looked up from the paper. I tried to breath in and out slowly to calm myself. “I can do this!”

-H- hey, Eda? -Eda looks up from her magazine-. There’s something I’ve been… meaning to tell you…

-Well, what is it kiddo?

-I…

I try to just get it out there, to just say it, but the words once again get stuck in my throat, in that knot that had been bothering me for weeks every time I thought about this moment, except, even then the anxiety I felt wasn’t as overwhelming as it is now. I try to remember Kiran’s coming out video as I look down at the essay once more to re-read the notes I had written down just minutes ago. “Stay positive” says one of them. “Easier said than done” I say back in my head. Usually I would be positive, I’m always positive, but for some reason I can’t get the thought out of my head that Eda isn’t going to react well to this. I feel an overwhelming fear at the thought of Eda kicking me out.

“You are a disgrace to every single witch in The Boiling Isles, you are a woman and will always be one, you can’t change biology kid. Now, get out of my sight, I don’t want anyone to associate me with someone like you.” Oh man. I feel my whole body shake violently at the thought of Eda saying something like that. But Eda wouldn’t do something like that, right? She did say she loved me, didn’t she? I feel like barfing.

-Wow, kid, are you ok? You’re shaking a lot -says Eda.

I feel my eyes getting watery again. “I can’t do this, I want to go back, this was a horrible decision, I should just stay in the closet, this witch thing is just for the summer anyway, why did I feel like coming out? No, I can do this, and… I want to do this because I want to be able to be myself. I don’t want to leave without telling Eda and King, they deserve to know.” I swallow the vomit that was coming up my throat and breath in and out slowly, I look at Eda straight in the eye and say it:

-I am non-binary-I say as I feel my voice getting quietter, then I immediately break down crying. I fall to the ground and practically cry my eyeballs out.

-Luz! -screams Eda, getting up from the sofa, accidentally dropping King on the ground who wakes up with an “Ouch!” and running to my side, kneeling down in front of me.

-Hey, what the h- Luz! -says King as he woke up. I on the other hand can’t stop crying and screaming, I had been holding this in for so long that finally letting it out felt incredibly relieving. But now I had to wait for their reactions, oh no their reactions. For a few seconds I managed to forget that and just get “I am non-binary” out of the knot in my throat. But now I had to face the consequences, if there were any, to my coming out.

-Luz, I- come on, get up -Eda offers me her hand to help me get up from the ground, when I’m already up she gestures me to sit on the sofa with her, King sitting between us, still not understanding what’s happening but willing to help in any way he can. We are “boo-boo buddies” after all, at least I hope we still are after this.

“Kid, what was that? What happened? I don’t know what you were trying to tell me but I barely heard it, if you don’t mind telling me again -Eda smiles at me to reassure me that it’s ok, but I don’t see myself capable enough of doing that again. The words get stuck in my throat once again and I just feel like crying, Eda notices this and hands me a piece of paper and a pen instead.

“If you can’t tell me, then you can write it down.

I smile at Eda. I pick up the pen and write it down.

-Ooh, ooh, let me read it, let me read it! -screams King enthusiastically. I let King pick up the paper and read it out loud.

“I… am… non-binary… Please use… they/them pronouns… when refaring-”

-Referring, King.

-Pfft, I knew that. “To me” -says King as he reads the last two words of the paper. He had a lot of trouble reading it, but I don’t blame him, my hand-writing was extremely messy due to my shaking hands. Suddenly Eda and King turn to look at me, I feel my heart clench.

-Wait, kid, really? -asks Eda.

I nod my head slowly, feeling my eyes getting watery again.

“Oh, kid, that’s… unexpected but, it’s ok, we love you just the same.

-Yeah, “boo-boo buddies”, remember? -says King as he lifts up his little paw and shows me the band-aid I applied to him. I break down crying once more, with even more weight lifted off my shoulders now that I knew they accepted me. Eda puts her arms around me, moving her hand up and down my back reassuringly, King hugs me from behind since Eda is in the way. After a while, I stop crying and both Eda and King break the hug.

-Come on kid, It’s already getting late -she says as she guides me towards my bedroom, King following on her heels, clearly determined to sleep right next to me-, go to sleep and I’m sure you’ll feel just fine tomorrow.

I was about to close the door and go to sleep like Eda said, when she suddenly stopped the door from closing.

-Oh, and hey, if you ever feel like you don’t belong or like we won’t accept you for being you, remember what I said to you the first day we met: us weirdos gotta stick together -then she closed the door. I got in my sleeping bag, with King already sleeping right beside me. I quietly cried in it, but this time they were happy tears.

#writers on tumblr #edalyn clawthorne #luz noceda #king #the owl house #fanfic

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mortedeveles · 4 years

Text

Bookworm.

SUMMARY: You’re lucky enough to meet your favorite Pro Hero Red Riot at your local libraries a few times and you slowly begin to pin after him but you’re not a fool- he’s a Pro Hero and you’re a simpleton civilian, nothing could ever happen- which is why you decide to go on a blind date. You’re stuck in a loud and noisy club, and Kirishima’s the last person you expect to see there, sliding into the stool that was once your date’s.

PAIRING: ProHero!Kirishima Eijirou x fem!reader

THEME/GENRE: romance, pining? [ONE-SHOT]

TW: mentions of drugs, cursing and attempted physical and sexual assault.

A/N: I wrote this oneshot with this prompt!

- “Hey,” A says, sliding over on the bar stools to get B’s attention. “Don’t drink that. I think your date’s trying to drug you.”

this is my first Kiri fanfic! lmk what you think! if you enjoyed, please leave a like, reblog, follow and/or comment! i really appreciate the support! fb is always welcomed ^^

as for my mha anonnie, i’ll start working on your request! afterwards i’ll be focusing on finishing the bonuses of model for me, then resume with ‘a letter to my love’! i also have a secret project coming up <33

‘’In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.’’

You bite your lip in excitement as you flip through the pages of the book, feeling your heart soar at Mr. Darcy's words. However, your peaceful moment was quickly interrupted by a loud voice. You sigh in annoyance and strain your ears in a pitiful attempt to block out the bothersome voice, but it only gets louder.

''Where is it? Darn it...'' Slowly, you raise your gaze from the book. You spot a guy in the aisle in front of you, that you managed to see through the empty spots of the bookshelf and once you recognize the guy- you freeze.

It's Red Riot. One of the top Pro Heroes and your favorite Hero. He's the manliest hero in history! You make sure to inhale and exhale shakily before you pass out from shock.

You pinch your arm to make sure you aren’t dreaming. Red Riot, a top Pro Hero, fussing in the same library as you?! A small sting of pain confirms your suspicions- it’s reality.

If it wasn't for his red spiky hair and teeth, you wouldn't have recognized him. Slowly, you take a deep breath and walk into the aisle he's currently standing in. A smile breaks on your lips when you see him searching through several books, fussing and muttering under his breath.

''H-Hey,'' your voice is low and you stutter more than you'd like, but it's loud enough for him to hear. He immediately raises his head and smiles brightly at you.

''Hi there!'' the toothy grin on his face makes your cheeks warm up.

''I, it looks like you're struggling with something. I don't work here but,'' your eyes dart to his outfit. He's wearing a black hoodie of Ground Zero and a pair of black sweatpants with red sneakers. It's simple but looks irresistibly good on him. You quickly avert your gaze.

''I thought you could use some help. Is there anything you're looking for?'' your grip on the book tightens.

His face brightens- more than possible, you believe- and he nods.

''Thanks! Yeah, I'm looking for a book called Pride and Prejudice?'' your eyes widen.

''Oh,'' you say. It's the book that you're holding.

Kirishima seems like an eager reader- who are you to deny him the book? You've read it twice, it won't harm you to share it for once.

''Here you go,'' you raise the book with a smile.

Kirishima raises an eyebrow. He doesn't accept the book and you cough awkwardly. You hadn't even mentioned which book it was.

''Oh! I'm sorry for not explaining earlier,'' you feel like an idiot as your face warms up. ''I had the last copy of Pride and Prejudice.'' The Pro Hero's face immediately lights up and he takes the copy in his hand. His finger brush against yours and the touch makes you slightly shiver. Not in disgust nor pleasure but...something else. Though short-lived, it’s a pleasant feeling that makes your heart speed up.

You quickly retracted your hands with a strained smile.

''Wow!" he stares at you and then at the book with awe. ''Thank you so much! That's so manly of you!'' your heart flutters at the compliment. ''Are you sure you don't want it?''

You're quick to shake your head with a polite smile. ''No, it's fine! I've already read that book two times...'' you laugh awkwardly and much to your surprise, Kirishima laughs with you. His laugh isn't forced and sounds like music to your ears- masculine but so cheerful that it makes your body relax.

''Okay then,'' he smiles toothily. ''Thanks um....,'' you quickly realize that he's asking for your name.

''Y/N!'' you make sure that your voice is clear and confident. ''I'm Y/N L/N. It's a pleasure to see you around, Mr. Red Riot,'' you cringe at the odd honorific but Kirishima smiles warmly.

''You can call me Kirishima,'' he walks past you and squeezes his hand on your shoulder.

''It's a pleasure to meet you, L/N! See you soon.'' he shoots you one last toothy grin before pulling up his hoodie and walking away from you.

You're speechless- you've just had a proper conversation with your favorite Pro Hero- and barely manage to wave in response.

The next week, you were back at the library. You had been a bookworm since a child and while some found solace in friendship and social gatherings, you found peace and solace in books.

This time, you unconsciously made sure to not look like a homeless like you usually do- and wore a pair of skinny jeans, a loose t-shirt, and a pair of vans.

A part of you said that it was in case you bumped into Kirishima again, but those were just silly fantasies. He was a busy Pro Hero, defending the citizens of Japan. What chances did you have of bumping into him again at the same library?

Turns out that you had every chance in the world since you spotted him slouched in a chair, a new book in his hands. You smile warmly at the sight of him. His red hair makes him even more noticeable but thankfully, the area he's in is pretty much empty so no one has noticed the Pro Hero.

''Hello, Kirishima,'' a smile plays on your lips as you look down at him.

He immediately perks up at your voice and quickly rises from the chair, greeting you with a lovely smile.

''Hey, L/N! I'm glad I caught you here. How are you doing?'' his voice is earnest and you fight back a blush.

''I'm doing great, thank you. How are you doing, Kirishima?'' you sit down on the chair next to him and he quickly repeats your actions.

''I’m doing okay, but I feel better now that I’ve seen you,'' you can't help but stare at the faint blush that covers his cheeks. Did he blush because of you? Was he...flirting with you?

You giggle at the thought and smile at him with confidence.

''So, what did you think of the book?'' you inquire. You notice that his right foot is tapping the floor repeatedly- is he nervous?

''The book?'' he sounds confused for a couple of moments. ''Oh! I loved it! The writing was so alluring and I think it was quite romantic,'' he grins widely and you can't help but agree with him.

''I'm glad to hear that,'' you smile softly. ''Are you here for another book?''

Kirishima nods vigorously and you laugh quietly. He seems like an eager child.

The two of you engage in some relaxed chatting- exchanging some gentle touches and by the end of your conversation, both of you are blushing.

You continue to visit the library weekly and so does Kirishima. He's incredibly kind, respectful and such a gentleman, you can't help but develop a small crush on him.

It brings you immense joy when he asks you out on a date. It's nothing too fancy, he told you with a sheepish smile. The two of you would meet at a park and perhaps get some coffee.

You wait impatiently for the day of your date. And finally, you're starting to get dressed for your date when your phone rings with a message. The contents make you frown.

Kirishima: Good evening Y/N,

Kirishima: I'm so sorry, but I won't be able to make it for our date today. Some Pro Hero business came up.

Kirishima: I hope you can forgive me. Can we reschedule?

Your heart drops and all your insecurities begin to seep into your heart. A part of you wants to believe him- he's a Pro Hero, after all, his agenda must be pretty busy- but the insecure part of you suggests that he decided that he wasn't interested in you anymore.

You type out your reply with a heavy heart.

Y/N: It's okay, Kirishima

Y/N: Sure, let me know when.

Once you send the message, you immediately call your best friend. Your date being canceled has put you in a foul mood and your best friend always knows how to cheer you up.

━━━━━━━━━▼━━━━━━━━━

''I think you should try going on a blind date, Y/N?’’

‘’You two aren't dating after all and I think you should still have your options open,'' your friend suggests but you frown. By the way, she phrases it, sounds like she's considering your romantic partner options as objects.

''Actually, I know just the guy!'' your friend exclaims. She drops her yogurt on the table and claps her hands together.

''You do?'' you ask absentmindedly, swirling your yogurt with a wooden spoon. Your eyes drift to the customers that are entering and leaving the yogurt shop.

''Trust me, you'll love him. He's extremely attractive, charming and I can guarantee that at least if you don't date, you'll have a great night,'' she winks and you laugh briefly.

Maybe your friend was right. There was no reason why you should limit your options.

You're a nobody, a mediocre citizen, the insecure part of you whispered. He's a famous Pro Hero. Did you expect a date with him? He’s way out of your league.

The insecure thoughts make you swallow visibly and shove yogurt into your mouth in an attempt to distract yourself.

Your friend's words lead you to your current situation- standing outside of a loud club. Clubs weren't particularly your favorite spot, but the guy had told you to meet him there. He said he would show up in a denim jacket, black tee-shirt, and jeans. His hair color was a light brown.

You patiently waited for him to arrive since you had arrived early. Once you spotted him between seas of people, you wave vigorously with a forced smile.

The moment he spotted you, he smirked and waves back. You've only known for a couple of seconds, but there's a feeling of dread and fear boiling in your stomach.

''Hi!" you eagerly greet him once he's in front of you.

There's a confident smirk on his face and he introduces himself as Fumihiro Bando. The two of you quickly slip inside the club and linger at the bar, having a light conversation.

Even though he hasn't done anything wrong yet, there's something about him that you can't wrap your finger around. Something about him makes you want to run away, but he's been nothing but polite to you, so you decide to brush the feeling away.

''Here,'' he speaks loudly over the booming music and hands you a drink. ''I'll be right back, I'm going to get more drinks,'' You open your mouth to disagree but he quickly turns around.

A sigh escapes your lips as you toy with the straw of your drink. He was attractive- you couldn't deny it, but you didn't feel any type of connection with him. Not to mention that something about him didn't feel...right.

“Hey,” A voice speaks up next to you. You stop nursing your drink and turn to the left, and stifle back a shocked gasp. An oddly familiar bulky redhead is sliding into onto the stool next to you.

Kirishima is sitting next to you and the look on his eyes makes you furrow your eyebrows. Being so close to him makes you blush and goosebumps rise on your skin, he's so close that you notice how he smells like. It almost feels...intimate.

You aren't strangers with the man, he's talked to you before in the library but this is different- it feels different. The environment isn't like before. You're not in your usual baggy clothing and neither is he- you're wearing a revealing skin-tight outfit that accentuates your body and he's wearing black jeans, a white tee-shirt that presses against his muscles and to top it all of it, a black leather jacket. He's oozing seduction.

It seems that all the confidence you gained from the alcohol evaporates and for a few moments, you feel painfully sober as you attempt to speak.

''H-hi...'' is all you can manage. Even though you sound like an idiot, Kirishima offers you a sympathetic smile before his gaze drifts to the drink in his hands. His eyes narrow.

“Don’t drink that. I think your date’s trying to drug you.” his voice drops down to a whisper. Your eyes widen and your hands immediately loosen around the glass you were carefully holding seconds ago.

''What...?'' you swallow nervously and search for an answer in his expression. He seems to be on alert- his eyes are constantly changing focus- surveying the entire club.

''How do you know that?'' you murmur. ''Why...um,'' your voice dies down when you spot your date from afar. He hasn't spotted you yet and he's weaving through crowds but it feels like someone dumped a bucket of insects on your head. You can feel goosebumps crawl all over your skin.

Kirishima seems to notice this and presses his hand on your back, steering you away from the bar.

''Let's go,'' he whispers in your ear as you rise from the stool. ''It's best if you lose him. I'll get you somewhere safe, okay?''

You can barely walk and keep up with his long strides, your legs are trembling and your toes feel numb.

During the entire time, Kirishima keeps his hand on your back- it doesn't lower or move at all, but he keeps his grip firm as he helps you weave through the crowds of dancing bodies.

Once the two of you are outside of the club, you breathe in the fresh air and feel your body tremble harder.

Kirishima begins to rub circles on your back and whisper comforting words. You can feel your breathing regulate and you slowly regain your composure.

''There you are.'' the cold voice of Fumihiro Bando makes you freeze.

Kirishima turns around to face him and places you behind him.

''Hey there,'' Kirishima's tone is friendly, but his eyes are narrowed. ''Do I know you?''

Fumihiro scoffs and looks at the redhead with disgust.

''Ditching me for another guy? I've barely met you for a few moments and I can tell you're a fucking whore,'' he snarls.

Your pride stings with his words and Kirishima stiffens at his words.

''That isn't very manly,'' he says calmly. ''Apologize to her. It's unmanly to disrespect woman.''

Fumihiro snickers and steps forward, glaring daggers at Kirishima.

''Why don't you shut the hell up and fuck off?!'' Fumihiro pushed Kirishima, but he didn't even budge. The push did absolutely nothing to him. Fumihiro seemed to notice this, as he swallowed visibly and took a step back.

''Do you realize who you're talking to?'' Kirishima said coldly. ''I would calm down if I were you.''

He scoffed and glared at the redhead.

''What? Your gym muscles aren't scaring anyone, buddy.''

''Those aren't gym muscles, you dickhead,'' a new voice growls. You jump and tighten your grip on Kirishima's arm.

A tall, lean but muscled guy with spiky blonde hair and blood-red eyes steps out of the club and glares at Fumihiro- and it takes you a minute to recognize who it is- Pro Hero Ground Zero!

Oh dear, you think. Your legs are jittery- meeting two Pro Heroes in one day? You're ready to faint.

''You're disrespecting the Pro Hero Red Riot, you piece of shit,'' Ground Zero growls. Fumihiro's eyes widen. ''And me, by being here. Now fuck off before I get angry.'' Fumihiro scowls but scrambles away and once he's out of your eyesight your body relaxes. Kirishima brings you forward, a hand on your back. Ground Zero's narrowed eyes drift to you.

''Thanks, Bakugou!'' Kirishima says with a toothy smile.

''Tch. Whatever. Who's this?'' his tone is brash and rough, but you can tell he's good friends with Kirishima.

''Oh! This is Y/N, a friend of mine,'' your cheeks feel warm.

Bakugou grunts and gives you a nod of acknowledgment which you return with a small nervous smile.

''I'm going to walk Y/N home, Bakugou, so I'll head out early today. See you,''

The blonde grunts in response and retreats into the club. Once he's gone, the environment is oddly silent. The faint echo of the music inside the club makes the walls vibrate. You swallow nervously and raise your gaze to Kirishima, who's already watching you with a comforting smile.

''Thanks,'' you murmur. And then you realize how everything must've looked like- the moment he canceled out on your date, you left to leech onto another guy. God, you slightly cringe. This is not good.

''It's not a problem,'' Kirishima's voice is smooth and lighthearted, a big contrast to yours.

You sigh and pinch your nose. ''I'm sorry, Kirishima, I...'' you trail off. Kirishima clutched your right hand and squeezes it. He offers you an understanding smile.

''It's okay, Y/N. I don't want to imagine how you felt and I'm sorry for canceling. I was really busy that day.''

Your heart feels heavy at his words. He's so sweet and nice your heart feels like it's about to explode.

''I know Kirishima but, I shouldn't have gone on this date. My friend convinced me into going and the dude tried to drug me...'' you groan and force down the desire to cry. ''I'm such an idiot. I'm sorry. I'll understand if you don't want to see me again...''

Wiping your eyes harshly, you lower your gaze to Kirishima's fancy shoes and sniffle.

''Hey, hey,'' he grabs your chin gently and presses a hand on your shoulder.

''Don't feel bad, sweetheart. It's not your fault. I'm not mad, you don't owe me anything, okay?'' he murmurs the last few words, brushing his finger on your chin.

''Th-thank you.'' without hesitation, you lean forward and wrap your arms around his back.

''You were free to reject me or decide to move on. I won't judge you, because it's your decision and not mine. Okay?''

His bright red eyes are staring directly into yours. Your entire body feels body and you sniffle.

Your hug takes him by surprise- he tenses before relaxing and wrapping his arms around you. He's so tall you can barely reach his collarbone. You sniffle and bury your face in his chest.

''I'm sorry for crying... I've just had a long day.'' Your words are muffled but Kirishima understands them perfectly.

''It's okay,'' he rubs his hand in circles on your back. ''You have nothing to apologize for.''

The two of you stand there for a few minutes until you gain back your composure. His arms are warm and strong, you feel at home in his hold.

Sniffling, you pull back and rub at your eyes. ''Thanks for watching out for me, Kirishima. I don't know how I can ever repay you.'' you bow politely.

Kirishima chuckles. He smiles crookedly and crosses his arms over his chest.

''Of course.''

''Well...you could repay me with a date.''

Your face warms up and you smile.

Kirishima's grin widens and he steps forward. You giggle at his actions.

''I'll be looking forward to our date. But for the moment, I think I'll walk you home. Is that okay with you?''

''So...'' you fiddle with your keys. ''Thanks for everything, Kirishima.''

You nod and smile brightly. Kirishima smiles and the two of you begin to walk towards his car.

The two of you exchange a comfortable conversation during the car ride and before you know it, Kirishima and you are standing at your doorstep.

He smiles in response. ''Call me Eijirou.''

Your eyes widen but you nod in response. Before you can lose the little amount of courage you've gathered, you stand on your tiptoes and press a kiss on his cheek.

''Thank you for everything, Eijirou.''

His eyes widen and you giggle as you watch his face redden and his hand hovers over the spot you kissed him.

''No-no problem!" his voice is squeakier than usual but there's a bright grin on his face.

''I'll text you in the morning?'' he asks uncertainly. You nod and unlock your door, stepping inside your house.

''I'll be waiting for your message,'' you say with a teasing smile.

Kirishima smiles and nods. ''Good night, Y/N! Sleep well.''

You softly bid him goodbye and close the door behind you. With a smile, you lay on your sofa and press a hand over your beating heart.

The way Kirishima makes you feel is a powerful feeling- scary to an extent, but you're more than ready to explore this feeling with him.

a/n: as always lovelies, please leave a like, reblog, follow and/or comment if you enjoyed! <3 have a good day!

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tookishcombeferre · 3 years

Text

Klaus Fanfic: “A Tether”

I wrote a self indulgent thing for the Klaus 2019 fandom. Klaus is a Christmas movie. I’m trying to be sensitive and not post too much Christmas stuff.

But, I really like this movie, and it was an Oscar nom. The art is phenomenal, and I really like the characters.

That being said, obvs you don’t have to read it.

This is sort of a self projection fic? I wrote about Alva reflecting on the Spanish Flu of 1918 in a teacher’s point of view because I am burnt the fuck out.

“I haven’t heard from Jimmy Krum in 2 weeks. I’m worried. He said in his last letter that his family wasn’t doing well. He was trying to help his son apply for some kind of boarding school program in the city that I recommended last year.” Alva ran a hand across her face as she spoke to herself pacing across the floor of the post office attic. “Although, I can’t remember if he said they might wait until he turned 11 next year or not to send him out.”

“And you probably won’t hear from him until I can safely get out there again. I won’t let you go out. You’ve only just recovered.” Jesper opened the hatch to the attic and stuck his head through. “Go rest.”

“Jesper you know I can’t. I’ve been cooped up for so ...” Alva bit back a cough. “And you’re one to talk!”

“Nice save. Really, you are so convincing. I’ve been fever and cough free for a week. You on the other hand ...” He sat next to her, pulled her close, and kissed her temple. “Need to stop worrying. Everyone is fine. You sent enough homework with me to them, before we all boarded up, for two years. I promise.”

Alva sighed, and she supposed he was right. But, it didn’t stop her worrying. Despite the phone being a relatively old invention, most families in Smeerensberg didn’t own one. She couldn’t call and check in on kids the way she’d like to. Sure, some of the more well to do families had a phone, and she made good use of theirs to call those she could call. Jesper had to remind her to slow down often, especially in those first months of the pandemic, when they were still debating boarding up.

The town eventually chose to shut down after Jesper could no longer deliver the mail. He’d only stopped his deliveries when his own children got sick. This had been in late October.

The kids had gotten the flu, somehow, despite all their precautions. Then, for Alva, it seemed that everything really was over. She and Jesper were up at all hours of the night comforting their children. Alva had never seen Jesper cry so hard as she did when he thought he was alone on the phone with his own father. Jesper’s father was lucky enough to be spared the worst of the illness, and he was in sound enough headspace to listen to his son’s terrified sobbing for nearly an hour before Alva finally stepped in. She had listened to him cry begging for the illness to take him instead of his children, and Alva simply cried with him. There wasn’t much else they could do besides try to nurse their children as best they could and cling to one another in desperation.

In about two weeks, the children had recovered enough that they felt safe sending them to live with Espen Krum. Epen’s son had just recovered from the illness and war wounds, and Espen was more than happy to take in two young children that would cheer his son up for sure. Alva remembered how the thought of the two kids living there for awhile made Jesper smile. They both recalled how Jesper mailed the love letters back and forth between young Broderick Krum, the first toy recipient, and Greta Ellingbow during his time in The Great War.

Alva couldn’t help but be thankful that they’d sent the children away before they had the opportunity to see their father in the worst throws of the illness. Alva knew the illness preyed on healthy people almost more than those who had reasons for complications. She shuddered at the images of Jesper’s thrashing as he cried for his father, for her, and for Klaus. He begged her forgiveness as he sat trapped in the memory of all those Christmas Eve’s ago. She stayed with him as he begged Klaus’ understanding, promised he’d changed, and pleaded with her to still love him despite it all. Gone was the loving goofiness of the man who tucked their children in with jokes about stamps and letters. In its place, her strong husband shook with terror, and his fears of abandonment were laid bare before her. It was two weeks of caring for Jesper, and reassuring their children, before Jesper finally recovered enough for her to be satisfied.

It was only then, when she felt certain of his recovery, that her body finally succumbed to the illness. She had little recollection of the two weeks she was tended to by her husband, but he’d assured her that she hadn’t said anything too damning, and on the whole, she was more compliant than when she was healthy. He’d called the children faithfully each night, and he remained by her side all the other moments of the day. He rested with her, and he kept her cool. She still remembered just days ago, in the very first days of December, when she finally woke up and saw his face.

His eyes had sparkled with tears as he looked at her and whispered, “I knew you could do it.”

“Alva? Yoo-hoo?” Jesper waved a hand in front of her face.

Alva blinked herself back to the present moment.

“Sorry. I was just thinking about Lydia and Willem. It’ll be good to have the kids back before the holiday.” Alva leaned into Jesper’s shoulder.

He hummed his agreement. “Yes. Oh! Speaking of which. I have a surprise.”

Jesper helped his wife to her feet and guided her down the ladder and into their living room.

“Surprise!” He placed his chin on her shoulder. “I decorated it while you were sleeping.”

Alva smiled. It was far simpler than most years. The four stockings were hanging on the fire place. The tree was wrapped in a small amount of garland and maybe half of their ornaments were put up. She noticed the cookie plate already waiting with two glasses set out for the annual appearance.

Alva turned and stared at Jesper. “I sometimes wish he was still here. I have so many questions.”

Jesper hummed and pulled her close.

“As do I,” he said in a soft voice.

The two of them stood and surveyed the scene in silence for a few moments. Jesper placed his hands on Alva’s shoulders when they tensed suddenly.

“What is it? If you’re worried about Lydia, I just got word from Espen Krum that she’s had no complications. And, Willem has slept through the night soundly without bothering anybody for the last week.” Jesper reassured. “They’re doing fine. Also, we still do have a phone. I’ll let you pick 3 people to call as a treat. It is St. Nick’s Day after all.”

She blinked at him before face planting into his chest.

“I feel so useless.” She sobbed into his chest.

“Now, why would you think that? You’ve done so much for me, for the kids, and for your students. All through October, you taught every damn day, and made all those stupid work packets to last them until we could go back safe. You gave them book lists. You told them to call you if they had phones and were stuck. You even answered most calls until our own kids got sick. Alva,” he lifted her chin and kissed her forehead. “What more can you do?”

“I-I ... I don’t know.” She sobbed as she fell further into his chest. “I don’t know. But, it’s so hard. I can’t let it go back to the way it was before when the kids here could barely speak and poor Jimmy Krum was 13 and couldn’t write his own name. I can’t let that happen. What if they forget everything?”

“It won’t. You know why?” He wrapped his arms around her waist and swayed her side to side. “Because, you’re the best damn teacher this place has ever seen. You took kids who could barely speak and taught them to be kind, to think for themselves, to report the misdeeds of their parents, and to stand up for themselves. So what, they forget how to write the letter “a?” Or so what, Heather’s daughter still mixes up 0 and 8 like her mom did on her return address most of the time she was a kid? Those are all things that can be retaught. But, you’ve got heart again, now. You’ll make it work.”

Alva felt a fresh wave of tears bring her to her knees. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just ... I want to stop worrying, but I can’t. I want it to be over, Jesper. I want it to be over. I’m so tired.”

“I know.” Jesper knelt next to her. “Do you want me to hold you or will that make it worse?”

“Hold me?” Alva reached out to him.

They sat there on the floor for a long time as Alva clung to Jesper and cried. Jesper just rubbed her back and told her it was going to be okay in the end, but he recognized that it sucked right now. He reminded her she had every right to be sad and stressed, and he let her cry. He told her that she’d carried the weight of their family and town for too long. She had laughed and said they both had, and they both cried. They cried because the house was empty of the two people they loved most apart from each other. They cried because they’d never had the chance to mourn the moment they each thought one almost lost the other.

For, they knew, they would fade into the dark abyss of depression without one acting as the rope to tether the other from being lost in the icy sea.

Eventually, they rose on creaking limbs to sit in their chairs by the window. The two of them cast long glances at the snow outside.

“Do you think he knows? Or will I have to tell him?” Jesper’s voice was quiet and somber, in ways it so rarely was. “I don’t want to tell him that I almost lost you.”

“I don’t know, Jesper. But, something tells me that, somehow, he knows.” Alva patted his hand.

He nodded. “I was thinking that next week I would send for the kids and reopen the post office. Mail for Klaus is likely pretty backed up.”

Alva hummed her acknowledgement. “I think that would be a wise idea. Thank you for waiting that long. I know it’s hard for you.”

“I just ... I’m nervous. But, not about being out there. I just ... I never want you out of my sight again.” He clasped her hand tightly. “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t.” She kissed his cheek. “It takes a lot more than that to get rid of me.”

He laughed lightly despite everything. “Good thing I actually want you around then.”

He stood, and they held each other for a moment before sharing a chaste kiss.

The two of them walked to their room, and they nestled down together in each other’s embrace. Tomorrow would find them still snuggled together as the rays of dawn poked through the window.

*******************The End **************************

Some notes on my thoughts about the timeline of events leading up to this/other weird headcanons.

I kind of assumed the movie was set in late 1890ish (based on fashion and some of the tech people had - such as the type of boat, the lack of whaling, and the items on Father Johanssen’s desk - I thought I saw some kind of phone which would have put the film at at least 1876).

Also, women’s fraternities began forming in the late 1860s-1870s. Considering Alva is a graduate of a university of some sort, we can infer that she would have gone to school during a time in which it was at least somewhat more normal to see women being educated. My sorority was founded in 1870 and we’re one of the oldest.

I would assume Alva is about 23-25 during the film considering she probs would have graduated at like 20ish. I thought she said she’d been there for like 3 years or so. So, I kind of assumed she’d graduated in mid to late 1890s and took her job in 1895 (20) and 3 (23) years later wanted to head out.

I also head canon that Alva was a member of the Sami tribe and left on less than great terms to go to the city to be educated. This is why she took the job in Smeerensberg in the first place. The Sami are pretty isolated from the feud and don’t really seem to know about it (to our knowledge). So, it would make sense that she might want to come home and patch things up by teaching nearby. It would also help to explain why she speaks and is able to translate Sami.

The only thing that kills this theory is the lack of cars. I suppose, since, those were invented in 1886? But, cars didn’t fully replace horses until 1907. Also, I’m pretty sure Smeerensberg is exempt from the car rule anyway.

Based on my weird digging into accurate time frames for the movie, I assumed the first Christmas was around 1898. That being said this takes place approximately 20ish years after my thoughts on when the film took place. The fic is set during the height of the Spanish Flu of 1918.

Further timeline clarifications: Alva and Jesper dated for about 3 years. They were married in 1901 (26/29). They had their first child in 1905 (30/33), and they had their second in 1908 (32/35). Klaus died 1910 (34/37) (12 years after the first Christmas in 1898). The original children would be in their 20s-30s ish (I pegged most of them to be about 5 and the oldest at about 13). Therefore, some of the older ones have kids of their own. Jesper and Alva’s kids are 13 (Lydia) and 10(Willem). Alva is approx 43 and Jesper is 46.

#klaus 2019 #spanish flu #artists of the pandemic #christmas mention #Jesper #Alva #klaus #christmas movies #my fan fic #pip writes things #pip rambles #pip does life #special interest

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myheartrevealedocs · 4 years

Text

Untouchable - Ch 7: The Fisher King: Part 2 (S2E1)

Summary: A Spencer Reid x OC fanfic that retells select episodes, starting in season 1, from the point of view of Lydia Ambers, a forensic scientist.

Warnings: mentions of death, swearing, death threats, graphic injuries

Ch 6 | Ch 8

~ ~ ~

When Lydia got back to the conference room, Spencer was the only one there. He stood directly in front of the whiteboard, murmuring to himself. He’d written ‘Possible Book Titles’ across the top, but so far had nothing listed.

“The rest of the team leave you to figure this out on your own?” she asked.

He startled slightly, not having heard her walk in. “Um, JJ and Morgan are going to interview Rebecca Bryant’s parents… and Hotch and Gideon are interviewing the guy who brought the numbers to Haley.”

“Someone found him?”

“He turned himself in,” Spencer explained. “So, now it’s just me and the evidence boards.”

“Now it’s us and the evidence boards,” she corrected. She sat down and picked up the medication bottle from the table. “Sorry I stormed out.”

“Sorry you were so stressed,” he mumbled. “We didn’t mean to push you.”

“You didn’t. It was important for you to know. I’m just… so done with this, you know?” She stopped herself. “Sorry, of course you do. You were on vacation when you got these weird messages. I was just home doing my schoolwork.”

“Lydia, stop apologizing,” he argued. “This is very stressful, we’ve all been here a long time, and you got a package delivered to your door. I can easily understand why that’d freak you out.”

She shrugged. “I just feel like I should be able to piece together these clues the unsub’s giving us and I can’t.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” he agreed, indicating to his empty list.

She looked over the label on the bottle in her hands. There was a patient name, a doctor’s name, drug, and an RX number. Prescription bottles always had more than that. They had instructions, pharmacies, manufacturers, fill dates, expiration dates.

“This number must mean something,” she wondered out loud. “He didn’t put any unnecessary information on it, but there’s a long RX number.”

“Read the number out loud,” Spencer told her.

He wrote it across the board as she went. “3-1-5-1-2-1-2-5-3-2-0-1-5-1-8”

“Okay,” he stepped back. “We can start with the basics. A equals 1, Z equals 26.” He got to work, writing the corresponding letter underneath the number.

C-A-E-A-B-A-B-E-C-B-

He stopped at the zero. “That’s definitely not a word. But some of the letters have double digits, so… let’s see if we combine everything we can combine…’C’ stays the same. The 1 and 5 could be fifteen, which is ‘O’...” He began again.

C-O-L-L-E-C-T-O-R

“Collector?” He stepped away. “That mean anything to you?”

Lydia shook her head.

“Alright. Collector. Collecting things. He’s collecting things.” He snapped his fingers so sharply Lydia almost jumped. “Collector! Baseball cards, music boxes, butterflies, skeleton keys. These are all things people collect!”

“That can’t be a coincidence, can it?”

He shrugged. It was basically impossible at this point to rule anything out.

“Medieval,” she rambled. “Collectable things. Numerical codes. What else have we got?”

“We’ve got this note from the music box?” he offered. “I think I’ve heard it somewhere, but I can’t place it… And I think the book was published in 1963.”

“Why’s that?”

“That’s the year on the baseball card, but it’s not the year Gideon went to all those games. If the unsub knows Gideon likes Nellie Fox because he went to almost all the White Sox games in 1959, why give him a ‘63 card?”

“Okay,” Lydia agreed. “So, the type of butterfly JJ got, that probably means something too, because she collected butterflies, not pale clouded yellow butterflies.

He nodded. “Let’s get Garcia to look up some of these things and see if we find anything.”

She followed him out as he dashed towards Garcia’s office. He was very stiff and awkward when he was in a rush, she noticed, but he refused to run through the office. She was glad for it at the moment, seeing as with her foot, she probably couldn’t keep up with him, but it was almost comical, the way his feet skipped underneath him with repressed anticipation.

Garcia looked up when they walked in, then turned back to her computers. “This guy is infuriatingly good. He routed his IP through major corporations, crisscrossed it through countries, bounced it off satellites-”

“I thought you already tracked the hacker,” Spencer said, pausing behind her and glancing over her shoulder.

“No, I only found what he wanted me to find,” she huffed. “Apartment where Giles was dead. Reid, a hacker capable of getting into my systems is going to have amazingly sophisticated equipment. Did Giles’s apartment have that?”

“He didn’t have a couch,” he responded.

“Exactly. Giles was a smokescreen I should have seen through. But now I have this glorious program I wrote, tracking the hacker through his other identity: Sir Kneighf.”

“Sir Kneighf?” he cried.

Lydia’s eyes widened. “The doctor on the prescription bottle!”

“The what?” Garcia flipped her chair around and Reid leaned over to see the name on her screen

“K-N-E-I-G-H-F. That’s an odd spelling.”

She waved him away. “Do you need something?”

“Yeah, is there a database, which lists all the books published in a given year?”

“Individual publishers have lists, but I don’t think there’s anything like a master one. Plus it would depend upon the year, because the further back you go, the less likely there’ll be any database at all.”

“1963.”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, ok, that would be an example of extremely less likely.”

He hummed in contemplation. “Could you do me a favor? Type something into a search engine for me?” She pulled herself back up to the keyboard. “‘Never would it be night, but always clear day to any man’s sight’.”

“Okay, that’s from a poem, ‘The Parliament of-’”

“Fowls!” He jumped in recognition. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Chaucer! My-” He hesitated. “My mom used to read me that. It’s widely considered as the first Valentine’s poem.”

Garcia chuckled. “Your mom read you Valentine’s poems? Hello, therapy.”

Lydia smacked her over the shoulder.

“Chaucer. Chaucer. ‘Parliament of Fowls’.” He began mumbling to himself again, trying to fit pieces together. “It has to be at least 283 pages long. Something published in 1963… A butterfly indigenous to Great Britain. Why? Something born. Something from Great Britain… Medieval. Chaucer. Chaucer was Middle English. Middle English spelling of the word Fowls… F-O-W-L-E-S…”

Lydia thought he was losing it, but somehow, this rambling was productive, because he blinked and ran back over to Garcia’s side.

“There- There was a contemporary british author-- Fowles. John Fowles. Will you type it into a search engine?”

“Uh… He wrote The Magus, he wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman-”

“Anything in 1963 published in Great Britain?”

She narrowed her search and her computer started beeping. “Yeah. The Collector.”

Lydia wanted to scream. Finally, they were on the right path. “Are you serious? The code on the bottle was the book title.”

Garcia clicked on the book and the cover photo showed up, which ruled out any chances of the book being a coincidence. Three objects were displayed underneath the title of the book: a butterfly, a skeleton key, and a blonde lock of hair.

“I’m gonna start calling libraries. We need a copy of that book immediately,” Lydia said, leaving abruptly.

~ ~ ~

“Hello, my name is Lydia Ambers, I work for the FBI. We’re in desperate need of a very specific book to help us on a recent case. We’re looking for a copy of The Collector by John Fowles, but it has to be a copy that was published by Jonathon Cape. Would you have any of those?”

Lydia followed Reid and Garcia to one of the interrogation rooms, to talk to Hotch and Gideon about their findings, but she was thoroughly distracted by her call and ended up stepping on their heels a few times accidentally.

“According to our database, we should have two copies, but it’s going to take me a while to search for them. Can I call you back once I’ve found a copy?”

“Yes, thank you.” She hung up and promptly tripped, falling between Reid and Garcia’s shoulders. She would have run directly into Gideon if Reid hadn’t grabbed her by the arm and held her up steady. “Sorry!”

She shuffled back behind her two friends and let them talk to Hotch and Gideon.

“We know what the book is,” Spencer explained. “The Collector by John Fowles.”

“You sure?” Gideon demanded. They were both clearly on edge. Hotch had his arms crossed which didn’t look comfortable in his suit and Gideon was punchy. She didn’t fail to notice the way he and Garcia avoided each other's gazes, Garcia more than him. He was still pissed at her and she was probably thoroughly embarrassed. And hopefully, a little pissed too, because Lydia believed he’d been way too harsh on her.

“Not absolutely. Not until we see if the code works, but Lydia’s called four separate libraries to search for the 1963 edition published in Great Britain.”

“Well done,” Hotch complimented the group, tiredly.

“Agent Gideon,” a woman called, approaching the group of them, “there’s a call for you on line two. Says it’s extremely urgent.”

“Is there a name?” he asked.

“Sort of. He calls himself the Fisher King.”

Lydia groaned before she could stop herself. Everyone raised an eyebrow at her.

“Sorry. The Fisher King is the one who guards the Grail. You know, the one that ‘Sir Percival’, over there is supposed to find.” She pointed at Reid, who was grabbing the notepad the woman had in her hands.

“This could be the unsub, guys,” he confirmed. “‘Sir Kneighf’ is an anagram for Fisher King.”

“The Fisher King is at the end of all Grail quests,” Gideon agreed.

They rushed to the bullpen, all crowding around a nearby phone.

“Line two trapped and traced,” Hotch demanded of one of the nearby agents and Gideon put it on speaker.

“Gideon.”

“What I had to do was not my fault,” the unsub replied, his harsh voice unmistakable.

“Excuse me?”

“It was distasteful and barbaric.”

“Who is this?”

“No one else had to be hurt.”

“Call yourself ‘The Fisher King’?” He was trying to throw the unsub off his rhythm. Gideon had been training her to speak to hostile people and profile what responses to give them, so she followed along his game.

This guy had clearly planned what he wanted to say and expected them to shut up and listen. If Gideon made him interrupt the strict script in his mind, he might slip up and give information he didn’t want to or forget his point.

“I told you there were rules.”

“I’m actually more interested in exactly how you got all those burns.” Different tactic. Make the unsub think we’re closer to catching him than he thinks.

“Remember this next time you decide to step outside my instructions,” he warned. “Agent Greenaway did not have to die like that.”

The phone buzzed as he hung up the call.

~ ~ ~

After many attempts at calling Elle, Hotch got ahold of Agent Anderson, who was in charge of taking her home. Anderson explained that Elle had been shot and the ambulance was on its way to a nearby hospital. And then, he and Gideon were off, leaving Lydia, Spencer, and Garcia to work on piecing together this mystery.

“Mrs. Valez, are you there?” Reid asked, putting the librarian who’d just called them back on speaker phone.

“Yes, Dr. Reid. I am. I have a first edition of The Collector, published in Great Britain in 1963.”

“Wonderful.” As they spoke Garcia cleared off room on the whiteboard to copy down the code. “Mrs. Valez, I’m going to read you a set of three numbers. The first is going to be a page number, the second a line number on that page, and the third, a word number in that line. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“All right, the first is page 222.”

“Page 222, got it.”

“Line 23.”

“Line 23. Got it.”

“What is the 16th work on that line, Ms. Valez?”

“The.”

“The,” he repeated. “Great.”

Garcia wrote it up on the board and Lydia suddenly very much regretted not going along with Gideon and Hotch. But just in time to save the day, her phone started going off with a call from the unit chief.

She dismissed herself quickly and stepped outside to answer.

“How’s Elle?” she asked, figuring greetings could be dismissed for the time being.

“She’s in surgery. Ambers, I need you to go to her house and look for any evidence you can find. And if you can, I need you to tell me what exactly happened when she got home. Anderson will meet you there.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get back to you when I have something.”

She quietly signalled to Reid that she was leaving before grabbing her FBI windbreaker and latex gloves and running off to the elevator. She hadn’t taken a company SUV since her first case (after which she learned she wasn’t supposed to be driving them on her own because she wasn’t supposed to be unsupervised while working), but she figured that, if caught, she would be forgiven, given the circumstances.

The street was littered with cop cars by the time she got there and it took a minute for them to recognize the car and jacket she was wearing and let her through. Once she had parked, she ran across the front lawn and inside, looking for Anderson. Right now, the only reason she hadn’t been thrown off the scene was her jacket and until Anderson arrived with his badge and the orders to clear the place, she was at the local PD’s mercy.

“Excuse me, miss,” a man called to her as she walked into the living room. She shut her eyes tightly. Damn it.

“Hi. My name’s Lydia-”

“Ambers,” Anderson greeted her, stepping past the cops to speak to her. “CSU’s on the way, but Hotch wanted you to survey the scene before they processed it.” He turned back to the officer she was just speaking to. “Hello again, Detective Markes. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask your team to leave, as you’re currently on a crime scene under federal jurisdiction.”

As he went on to argue with the detective, Lydia flipped around to make her initial determinations. Elle had lost a lot of blood. Lydia could assume she’d been shot in the abdomen, because it was the only area of the body where she could survive long enough to get to the hospital and into surgery while she was losing blood at that rate. Elle had a comforted seat built into an indent in the wall where the blood trail started.

The coffee table was awkwardly placed in the center of the room, so the paramedics probably moved it to get to her. And from the marks on the carpet, it looks like they had to drag her body onto its back in order to perform CPR. Then, there was the looming note on her wall in blood: RULES.

“Can I do anything to help?” Anderson asked. When Lydia looked up at him, it was clear to her that he’d been crying. His eyes were rimmed with red and his voice was shaky.

“Did the police tell you what happened?”

He nodded, rubbing his forehead tiredly. “There is evidence of forced entry on the back door. The unsub probably broke in and waited for her to get home before he shot her. She dialed 911 herself before she passed out. And her badge and gun are nowhere to be found.”

“She dialed 911 before she passed out?!” Lydia exclaimed. “Unless the unsub let her… but no, he thought she was dead. He was in the room with her and wrote in her-” Lydia took in a deep breath and started to put her gloves on. “Try something with me, Anderson.”

~ ~ ~

“What did you find?”

“CSU lifted a partial print from the unsub’s message,” Lydia told Hotch, driving back to Quantico.

“What message?”

“Rules,” she responded. “This is about the press conference.”

He sighed. “Did they get anything from the print?”

“They aren’t sure if it will be enough, but they’re running it through their systems now.”

“Good. And what did you find?”

Lydia’s breath hitched. “Me?”

“I asked you if you could figure out what happened. How did the unsub get the upper hand and shoot Elle?”

Lydia glanced at her phone, which was on speaker beside her, as if Hotch would be there looking sternly back.

“Here’s my theory,” she began. “We know he broke in through the back door and waited in the house. If he was in the dining room, he would have been able to hear her set her stuff down and lie on the couch. Now with her eyes closed, he’s able to walk into the room and aim a gun at her before she can react. At some point, Elle makes a move off the couch and he shoots her. The blood pattern indicates she was falling when she got hit. That makes me think her gun was on the table across from her. But anyway, she’s shot and is lying on her side, between the seat and the table. Elle has got to have an insanely high pain tolerance, because she was still conscious when he wrote on the walls in her blood. But somehow, she had him convinced she had died when he left. Then, she calls 911 and passes out.”

“Good work, Lydia. When all this is over, we need to talk.”

Her phone beeped to indicate he had hung up and it took everything in her not to pull over and call him back immediately.

A talk? What the hell did that mean?

~ ~ ~

When Lydia finally made her way back to the bullpen, she was exhausted. So, it was a bit of a relief to see Spencer there at his desk, simply toying with a pencil between his fingers.

“Did you go to Elle’s house?” he asked, softly, as she took off her jacket and placed it on her desk.

“Yeah… It’s a crime scene.”

He nodded, understanding what she meant. It was bloody.

“How did the book code go? Did it work?” she inquired.

“‘The path to the end began at his start to find her first calm her long broken heart’,” he recited. “‘She sits in a window with secrets from her knight. Is it adventure that keeps him out of her sight?’”

“Any clue what it means?”

Reid opened his mouth to explain, but Garcia approached and started talking to him. “She’s okay,” she said, sitting on the edge of his desk. “Your mom. Agents picked her up.”

“Your mom?” Lydia startled. “What happened?”

The panic in Garcia’s eyes was evident. “Lydia! Sorry, I didn’t even realize you were back yet.” Her eyes darted between the two of them. “I’ll… I’m gonna go now.”

“No, no, no!” she assured her. “It’s fine. If this is private, I can leave.”

“It’s not private.” Spencer looked slightly amused by the anxiety both girls felt, but it didn’t last long. “It’s… pertinent to the case.”

“Is everything okay?” Lydia asked him, standing up next to Garcia at his desk, so that the conversation didn’t drift around the room.

“She’s flying here right now,” Garcia explained, and Reid nodded, looking down at an evidence bag.

It was the poem they’d found in the music box. The valentine’s one that he’d said his mom read him.

“I forgot she used to always read me this poem.” He sighed. “It’s funny, huh?”

“Funny?” Garcia asked.

“I should have realized this sooner,” he admitted. “I mean, nobody knows things like the fact that JJ collects butterflies except for me. People tell me their secrets all the time. I think it’s ‘cause they know I don’t have anyone to betray them to… except my mother. I- I tell her pretty much everything.”

“I don’t think anyone would mind,” she grinned.

“Do you know that I write her a letter everyday?” he continued.

Garcia’s eyes watered slightly, but her smile didn’t let up. “That’s nice.”

“It depends on why I write her.” His eyebrow furrowed. His demeanor had changed considerably and Lydia started to piece together what she had missed.

This unsub had gotten all this info on them from his mom. Maybe he’d been stealing her letters or just talking to her, but he knew her and that’s why Reid was bringing her to Quantico.

“What do you mean?” Garcia asked.

“I write her letters so I won’t feel so guilty about not visiting her.”

The girls exchanged a look. Reid had just been in Las Vegas. He said he was going home. So, why was he claiming he didn’t visit her?

“Did you know that schizophrenia is genetically passed?” he asked, randomly.

At least, she thought it was random. Until Garcia gasped under her breath. She excused herself quickly, leaving Lydia with the fidgeting doctor.

“Spencer, are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she spoke up. She kept her voice low and her town concerned, undemanding.

He was clearly on edge. He wouldn’t look up at her, eyes focused on the poem in his hands. “‘The path to the end begins at his start’... I’m the ‘him’. And my start is my mom. So, she’s the key to lead us to the Grail. ‘She sits in a window with secrets from her knight’. The doctors tell me my mother loves to sit by the window and read my letters.” He dropped the bag suddenly and clasped his hands together. “Lydia, my mom is a paranoid schizophrenic who lives in a mental hospital.”

His knuckles started turning white and the muscles in his arms shifted under pressure. He was getting tense. Lydia knew exactly what he was doing. Normally, when she felt her anger manifest itself physically, she would excuse herself to blow off steam, but something told her Reid wasn’t about to find an empty hallway and start punching the walls.

But even with that knowledge, she never would have consciously done what she did to calm him. Her impulses took over and one of her hands reached out and settled itself on top of his fists. She bent down slightly, not forcing herself into his line of sight, but making it easier for him to turn to her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “That must be hard on you… does the rest of the team know?”

He shook his head, turning one of his palms over to hold onto her fingers. Lydia’s heart sped up, but she swallowed down her feelings. He was looking for comfort, not a relationship. Besides, they weren’t even holding hands, really. He was just grazing his thumbs over her knuckles.

“Lydia,” he began, finally meeting her gaze. “Earlier you left because Hotch brought up your mom…”

Here it comes. She braced herself for the inevitable question.

“...and when you came back, you had bruised knuckles.”

She almost choked on her own saliva. He wasn’t going to ask about her mom? And how had he even noticed that?

Awkwardly, she slipped her fingers out of his grasp. “I wasn’t hitting anything alive, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she informed him, suddenly closing off again. “I just had to let off some steam.”

“Lydia, I wasn’t insinuating anything-”

“It’s fine, Spencer,” she replied, far too quickly. “If you need any help with anything before your mom gets here, let me know. And if I get any updates from Hotch or Gideon, I’ll tell you.”

He spun his chair around in an attempt to stop her, but she was already leaving, trying to look dignified as she walked into the conference room. She didn’t want to make him feel guilty when he was already dreading his mom’s arrival, but she couldn’t have that conversation when there was work to do.

It wasn’t until she was staring at the evidence boards that she realized, there really wasn’t any work to do.

What was she running from?

~ ~ ~

After hours of pacing and repeating the clues the unsub had given them outloud, Lydia had ended up back at her desk, absolutely drained. She pushed everything aside and lay her head down. She’d just been… off today.

She felt so guilty about abandoning Spencer. He needed more help than she did. His mother was involved in a murder case and probably wasn’t stable enough to look out for herself. And Lydia was just wallowing in her past.

She had no right to do that to him.

So, what was it? As far as she knew, Spencer didn’t even know her mom was dead. He had no idea what the mention of her mother could do to her. He wasn’t pressuring her to tell him about it. And even more so, she’d never struggled to tell anyone her mother was dead before. Her first day in Quantico, she told Gideon and Garcia.

Lydia rarely talked about the cause of her mom’s death. If that’s what the team needed to know, then she could forgive herself for being on edge, but they didn’t. No one had asked her to say out loud how her mother had died. And if they did need to know, Hotch, Gideon, or Garcia could probably tell them. Her mother’s death was definitely in Garcia’s files.

What is it? She asked herself. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you just-?

“Lydia!” Garcia cried. Her head shot up to watch the blonde woman running by, making a beeline for the conference room.

She ran after her, just catching up as she opened the door and grabbed the attention of Spencer and an older woman with a pixie cut.

“Reid, I got to the end of the IP string,” Garcia started, barely even noticing the other presence in the room. “Sir Kneighf? The Fisher King? His name is Randal Garner. He’s Rebecca Bryant’s biological father.”

~ ~ ~

Once the air in the room had settled, Spencer introduced the other woman as his mother, Diana Reid, before quickly distracting them with work. Lydia sensed that he didn’t want his mother to be a part of the conversation.

Lydia stepped aside to call Hotch, listening to their conversation as she explained to him what they’d found.

“Our file says that Rebecca’s father’s name is Joseph Bryant,” Spencer argued. “Who’s Randal Garner?”

“Rebecca’s mother and brothers died in a fire when she was four and her father was so badly burned that he couldn’t take care of her, so he gave up parental rights and she was adopted by the Bryants,” Garcia informed them.

“Okay,” Hotch responded over the phone, pulling her back to the conversation she was having. “I’ll tell Gideon and be there soon. Find out everything you can on this guy.”

“Doing that as we speak,” she replied, putting her phone back into her pocket.

“I can’t believe she’s real,” Diana mumbled.

The three of them trained their eyes on her.

“What do you mean?” Garcia asked.

“Whenever he talked about Rebecca, he never said she was his daughter.” She said all this directly to her son, her stance nervous, almost defensive. “He said all his children died in the fire. He spoke of a Rebecca, more in the abstract. I really thought she was a metaphor and not an actual human being. An ideal.”

“A grail,” Reid said, confirming her thoughts. This man honestly didn’t see her as his daughter anymore. His daughter had died. And this girl was a prize to be won. “He thinks he’s the Fisher King.”

“Who does?” Morgan asked, entering with JJ.

“Randal Garner, our unsub,” Spencer responded.

“He believes you’re all modern-day knights of the round table,” Diana explained, gesturing around the room.

Derek raised a hand and they could see his question about who this woman was coming a mile away.

“Uh, Derek Morgan, this is my mother, Diana Reid.” Spencer ran around the table to step between his colleague and his mom.

“This is your mother?” He pointed at the woman almost accusingly, but seeing Spencer’s tight smile, pulled back and said, “Ma’am it’s a… it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Finally, the last of their group stormed in, Hotch’s footsteps audible from across the bullpen. “So, where are we on finding this son of a bitch?” he demanded.

“Gideon?” Lydia inquired.

“Hospital.”

Everyone sat down around the table in time with one another.

“I rechecked all the clues,” Spencer began. “There’s nothing that points to an address.”

“The adoption records for Rebecca listed an address of the fire, so I made a call to Nevada, and it’s vacant. No one ever rebuilt,” JJ continued.

“Nevada?” Hotch scoffed. “So we don’t even know what state he’s in?”

“I’ll search the tax records,” Garcia offered. “See if he owns any property.”

“Excuse me,” Diana said, catching the attention of the team. She was leaning forward in her seat in the corner of the room.

“Mom, do you want to wait out-” Spencer started, trying to usher her out of the room, but She was already making a move towards Hotch.

“Just before the agents got me from the hospital,” she fumbled for something in her purse, “a man delivered this to me. It’s a photo of a house with an address on the back.”

She held it up for them to see the scrawl on the back of the card: 1024 Winston Dr., Shiloh, VA. 22485.

“Shiloh, Virginia?” Morgan muttered. “That’s only ten miles from here.”

She flipped over the photo. The house looked more like a castle, with multiple stories and barred windows. It was made with gray bricks and black roof tiles with a circular extension that looked like a tower.

The team filed out quickly, with the exception of Spencer, who was telling his mom to stay put until he got back.

Garcia ran back to her office and Lydia sat at her desk, still unable to go on raids with them.

Almost over, she told herself. This whole thing is almost over.

~ ~ ~

“We’re sending Rebecca to the hospital now and then we’ll be back,” Hotch informed her. “Any news from Gideon?”

“Elle just got out of surgery. Doctors say she’s gonna be fine.” It was already the next morning and Lydia couldn’t wait to go back to her apartment and sleep for the rest of the day. “Randal Garner?”

“Dead,” he responded and Lydia didn’t bother to ask how or why. “Why don’t you start clearing off those evidence boards?”

“Yes, sir.” She put her phone down and walked up to the round table room.

When she got inside, she startled to see someone else there. Spencer’s mom sat on the sofa underneath the window and was writing something in one of the journals she brought with her. She hadn’t seemed to notice Lydia walk in.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Reid,” Lydia started, politely, walking over to the evidence boards. “I forgot you were still here.”

After a second of silence, Lydia got to work, making piles of evidence, pictures, and all the pins they had used. She didn’t take the woman’s silence personally, knowing that schizophrenia could cause dissociation. She figured she’d leave her to her journaling for now.

As she was finishing up, however, the woman looked up at her, an eyebrow raised. “Is it time for lunch yet?” she inquired.

“What?” Lydia asked softly.

“I’m lecturing everyone on Tristan and Iseult,” she explained, scanning her journal suddenly like an analysis paper. “They’re all gathering in my room after lunch.”

Lydia was intrigued. Clearly, Diana was not in touch with reality and Lydia wasn’t sure how best to deal with it, but her curiosity won over her common sense.

She wanted to know who Tristan and Iseult were.

“I’m here to attend the lecture, ma’am.” She smiled and sat down on the floor, like a kindergartener.

“Let’s get started, then.” She went on to talk about the basis of the myth: Tristan was sent to bring Iseult back to his uncle, King Mark of Cornwell, with whom she was to marry. On their journey however, they consumed a love potion (whether or not they were aware had varied throughout history) and fell for one another. They were forced to have an affair behind Mark’s back, despite them both holding a lot of respect for the king, because the effects of the potion were too strong for them to ignore. When the king caught them, he sentenced them both to death, but Tristan escaped and saved Iseult and they ran off together. When King Mark finally found them again, Tristan agreed to give Iseult back to the king and flee Cornwell so long as neither of them would be harmed. And eventually, he found another young woman named Iseult and married her instead.

Diana was just beginning to explain how this compared the Arthurian legend and the love triangle between King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, and Guinevere, when Spencer walked in.

“Mom, we found her. Rebecca’s safe.” The two women turned their heads to the newcomer and Spencer flushed, seeing Lydia sitting quietly on the floor across from his mother. “Lydia! I’m sorry, I didn’t-”

“Young man, we are in the middle of a lecture,” she reprimanded. “May I ask why you’ve so rudely interrupted us?”

Lydia covered her mouth to suppress a laugh and Spencer looked shocked by his mother’s scolding. “What?”

“I am giving a lecture on Tristan and Iseult,” she repeated, impatiently. “Are you here to attend or do you want to just keep standing there and gawking?”

He seemed to understand his mother’s headspace, but his confusion returned when he remembered Lydia. She gestured for him to sit with her, smugly, and turned back to Diana. “You can continue Mrs. Reid, he was just late.”

“Has he read any of the material?” she asked, suspiciously.

Lydia raised an eyebrow at Spencer, teasing him despite the fact that she definitely had not read whatever it was that Diana would have previously assigned.

His face was gentle, almost unsure, and slowly he sat down besides Lydia. “I’ve had them read to me.”

Lydia knew he was talking about his mother. He’d grown up listening to her read valentine’s poems and old mythology. It was honestly really touching and she wondered if she should leave them to have a moment together but couldn’t bring herself to get up.

“Wonderful,” Diana sighed. “That’s the best way, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am. By far.”

They sat there for a few more minutes, listening to her thoughts and analysis of different versions of the story. Lydia would glance over at him at times, checking to see if he was still smiling, which he always was. Sometimes he’d catch her in the act and they’d share a look of amusement before turning their focus back to their temporary teacher.

Unfortunately, it had to come to a sudden end when Hotch walked in.

“Ambers.” His tone was serious. “I was worried you’d left. I need to speak with you.”

Lydia could see Diana’s frustration at yet another interruption, so she quickly stood up.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Mrs. Reid,” she apologized, shuffling out behind her boss.

He nodded for her to follow him to his office. Was this about what he said earlier? They needed to have a talk?

She wondered if it was possibly the fact she took out an SUV again despite being informed not to after the last time. Or it could be about her harsh comments that morning towards Gideon and around Haley. Or even worse, about her mom and how she stormed away.

She sat across from him, waiting for his exasperated voice to come through, but it didn’t.

“Lydia, I think we need to have a discussion about your future,” he started, unexpectedly. “I created an internship into the team for you because we’ve never had the need for a forensics expert before, but for these past several months, you’ve been an incredible help. You’re knowledgeable in crime scene analysis, lab work, and, as you proved today, profiling. So, I’ve brought you here to tell you that I’ve discussed with Chief Strauss the possibility of giving you a full-time job in the BAU and she has agreed to speak with you and myself about creating you a position as a government contractor. You can’t apply to be an agent until you’re 23, but I want to be able to lift the restrictions on you and have your help on the cases I see as necessary. If Strauss likes you, you’ll be allowed to make calls for yourself, carry a badge, take the gun qualifications tests, and work without agent supervision, which if she asks, you haven’t been doing already. Would you be interested in such a position?”

She blinked, completely floored by the offer. “Agent Hotchner, I… wait, ‘proved today’?”

It was not what she wanted to say in the moment, but it had thrown her off slightly.

“Today, you walked onto a crime scene and told me an hour later exactly what had happened. You could identify when and from where the unsub entered the room, how Elle was positioned when she got shot, and what happened between then and her call to 911. Yes, I asked you to go there as a scientist and to look for evidence, but when I asked what you thought had happened, you became a profiler and you’re clearly fit to join the team. Again, you becoming a profiler is something we can discuss but not act on for another year, so hopefully contracted work is okay with you.”

“Okay with me?” she laughed. “That sounds amazing. So, just like I’ve been doing in the past, I’ll only be called in when you want me on a case and not for any office work?”

He nodded. “This is dependent on Strauss’s approval, but yes, that’s what we discussed.”

Lydia grinned. “So, how does one get Strauss’s approval?”

~ ~ ~

Lydia didn’t get back to her apartment until around 6 AM and promptly slept for most of the day. She was startled awake by her ringtone in the early afternoon and prepared herself for Hotch to ask her to come back in, but it wasn’t him. Interestingly enough, it was Spencer whose name popped up on her screen.

“Hello?” she answered, sitting back against her headboard.

“Hey, Lydia. Sorry, I’m sure you’re still exhausted after everything. I would have waited a few days to call you, but if I don’t do this now, I’m not sure I ever will.”

Her eyebrows knit together. “Is everything alright, Spencer? Did you make it to Las Vegas okay?”

By the time she’d finished talking with Hotch, Spencer had left with his mom and she’d heard that he was planning to fly with her back to the sanitarium, because she had a fear of planes. After everything, she expected him to stay with his mother for a few days, so she hadn’t thought she’d be hearing from him anytime soon.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’ll be back in DC tomorrow. But I have something to admit to you. I didn’t realize this earlier, but I know why Randal Garner sent you what he did.”

Lydia’s breath hitched. “What do you mean? Have you… did Garcia tell you?”

How did he know? Maybe he’d just guessed with the whole scene she made about the bupropion. Garcia had told her that she wouldn’t spill any of her secrets. But would Hotch or Gideon tell him what happened to her mom?

“What? Garcia didn’t tell me anything. I think you should wait for me to explain, so that you don’t accidentally tell me something you don’t want me to know.” His tone was joking, but there was a wavering nervousness that she could hear over the line. “Lydia, when you worked that poisoning case… on the jet back the whole rest of the team was asleep and you had a conversation with Hotch. You said that seeing an orange prescription bottle made you angry because it reminded you of your mother… I overheard that.”

She waited a minute for him to go on. She thought for certain he was going to say he’d figured her whole past out. He was going to tell her that he’d profiled her fidgets and glances and found out every last detail of her mom’s death, but he didn’t. That was all.

“That’s okay, Spencer,” she reassured him. “It wasn’t… I’m not keeping secrets from the team, I just don’t really like to talk about it.”

She faintly heard him huff, frustratedly. “No, I mean, the unsub got all this information on us from my mom. From all the stuff I’d tell her about my team… I told her about you,” he admitted. “I told her about how I’d overheard that conversation and I’m so sorry that you had to go through all this because of me.”

Lydia’s fingers ghosted lightly over her face as she processed this and shut her eyes tightly. It didn’t bother her as much as she’d thought it would, in fact, she didn’t seem to mind at all. The only thing on her mind when he said that was her stupid crush and the fact that he’d been writing to his mom about her.

She shook it aside. He talked about the whole team. It wasn’t a big thing. But… the unsub had, in his fantasy, assigned them two characters who were in love…

“I really appreciate the thought Spencer, but this isn’t your fault. I never said anything to Hotch about the bupropion, so you couldn’t have known about that. The unsub probably just did some research on me or looked through my files. Even if he chose the bottle because of your letters, he had everything else to torment me. Please don’t put this on yourself or your mom.”

He hesitated. “Are you sure you don’t hate me?”

“I can change my mind if you’d prefer,” she laughed.

He joined her for a moment, but fell silent far too fast. Lydia suddenly racked her brain for whatever she’d done to cause him to freeze, but hadn’t come up with anything before he spoke up again.

“Hey, Lydia? When I get back to DC, do you, uh… want to get something to eat?”

Lydia’s heart stopped. She wasn’t a profiler and definitely not an expert on asking people out, but she wasn’t about to let this crush rot in her brain. These past few days were torture enough. “You mean, like a date?” she prompted.

Bad move on her part. He flipped suddenly trying to deny it and she had to interrupt him before he hung up on her in mortification. He was so flustered she wasn’t even sure he was speaking English.

“Spencer. Spencer!”

He tried to mumble a quick apology, but she wasn’t about to let him close off just like that.

“Spencer, I’m not going to get food with you unless it’s a date. I don’t play mind games like that.”

“You wha- So, you’d like to- I’m sorry, it’s just… Mind games?” he finally spit out.

He was a funny one. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen so quickly for some dork. When she was a kid and all the other girls would ask her ‘What do you want your future boyfriend to be like?’ she never recalled saying, ‘A real mess. Just a true goof.’

“Yes, Spencer,” she responded. “Mind games. Getting food together could easily be misinterpreted as a date and I want to go on a date with you. But if we’re going to do that, we need to both be on the same page about it. If we go get something to eat, will it be a date or are you just suggesting it to be nice?”

“I would like that. I mean, yeah… it’d be a date. If you want! I don’t wanna pressure you or- are you sure that a date is-”

“I’m still fairly new to the Virginia-DC area,” Lydia interrupted, knowing that if he wasn’t able to form a complete sentence, he’d just keep starting new ones. “Is there anywhere in particular you want to go?”

“Um… well, what do you like?”

A grin graced her face, glad to hear him finally calming down. “I’m sure whatever you like I’ll enjoy as well.”

This was it. She’d scored herself a date with the bumbling boy genius.

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sandalaris · 4 years

Note

DVD Commentary A: Lesson in Navigation - The End of Chapter 5? Starting with: "She wakes to the sounds of the shower running and an empty bed across the room." (it may be slightly longer than 500 words, but only by like 60, don't cut off this line: "It reminds her a little of the way he'd case a potential score, half-lost in the calculations and newly revealed details, and she fights a shiver, looking away as she ties her laces and stands." cause it's one of my favorites)

A. Send me any passage of 500 words or less from any fanfic I’ve written, and stick that selection in my ask. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what’s going on in the character’s heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

She wakes to the sounds of the shower running and an empty bed across the room. There’s a pounding behind her eyes, a physical protest against the late night and too short hours of restless sleep, and an irritation at the world under her skin.

This was a mixture between my personal dislike of developing a crush, because it feels awful in the beginning and I don’t get anyone who says they like feeling that way, and my being convinced that Kate didn’t sleep well after her realization the night before that led to Kate waking up cranky and with a headache from a bad night’s sleep.

Not gonna lie, I’m a little proud of the line “an irritation at the world under her skin.” I made a point not to cut it when my editing almost reworded it in such a way that it didn’t work.

She wants to roll over and escape back into unconsciousness for a few more hours but the digital clock beside her tells her its already well into late morning. Her stomach grumbles in hungry protest as Kate slips from the bed, blinking groggily in the muted light from the curtained window.

I probably spent way too long trying to figure out exactly what time motels stop serving breakfast, especially when I didn’t even specify what time it actually was that Kate woke up, but that’s a big part of writing, doing a bunch of research you never actually use. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the timeline so that I could stick as close to canon as I could, and I needed it to be late enough that they wouldn’t arrive at Uncle Eddie’s too soon but also wouldn’t have to skip out eating. Parts of the breakfast scene were already written and I really didn’t want to have to chuck them all and make them eat in the car.

The shower turns off and Seth appears a few minutes later clad in boxers and pulling his undershirt on over his head.

Seth was always going to come out in some kind of clothes, but I did amuse myself with the idea of writing him coming out in a towel and a flustered Kate grumpily dealing with that.

It’s such a small thing, I doubt anyone’s noticed or cares that much, but I try very hard to only call Seth’s white tanks “undershirts.”

Lingering patches of moisture glue the thin material along the lines of his chest and torso and Kate’s eyes catch and stick for a moment, a faint echo of heat pulsing low in her stomach.

Because now that Kate’s realized she’s attracted to him, she's going to notice such things in a way she didn’t quite before. And Seth seems like the kind of guy to not fully dry off before pulling some of his clothes back on (but not all, because pants on damp skin doesn’t work). They’ve also developed quite a bit of casual intimacy with each other by the time season two starts, and coming out in what is essentially his underwear falls under that.

I was also wanted to touch on the idea that Kate finds her feelings/attraction to him a bit inconvenient. Not only does she have to deal with everything else going on in her life, she’s now distracted by Seth in a damp undershirt and runs the risk of being caught staring.

I’m also asexual and do not understand the appeal of visual stimuli in a purely sexual context. I read a lot various slowburn romances dealing with sexual attraction in hopes that I could get Kate’s physical attraction/noticing of Seth across in this and the chapters following. I know this is just a short line, but “a faint echo of heat pulsing low in her stomach” was practically agonized over as I tried to figure out if that was something that was plausible. *shrug* It’s easier to imagine/write about when there’s touching and/or emotions involved.

He pauses when he sees her, gaze flicking down to her bare feet before coming back up to her sleep mussed hair.

“Sleeping Beauty finally wakes,” he greets almost cheerfully and Kate scowls at him.

It’s a cliche and I don’t care, Seth one-hundred percent noticed her wearing his shirt and only his shirt, especially with her just-out-of-bed hair. He’s also more than a little amused by Kate’s sleepy state, because sleepy people are adorable and you can’t convince me otherwise.

The fandom refers to Kate as a Disney princess enough that I just had to put a reference in as well. :P And Seth will take a teasing opportunity when it presents itself, especially after last night and her new awareness of him. And I’m stopping there because I do have his version of this scene written and I don’t want to spoil everything that’s going through his head.

And of course, grumpy!Kate.

Seth, she’d discovered shortly into their life on the road, is a morning person. Even when hungover he’s able wake-up fairly alert and ready to get moving, while Kate has always needed time to shed the lingering effects of sleep. “Get dressed. Breakfast ends in forty-five minutes.”

“Yeah yeah,” she mumbles, rolling her eyes as she heads towards the now vacant bathroom.

I took most of that from canon and just expanded on it a bit. We only see him wake up the once, but he definitely got up and got moving really quickly. It wasn’t much to decide that he’s a morning person.

She finds her clothes folded haphazardly on the bathroom counter, pausing with a flash of muted embarrassment at the sight of her underwear sitting on top of her jeans.

It amused me to think of Seth catching sight of Kate’s clothes on the shower and then having to pull them down and poorly folding them. Just the domesticity of it, of sharing a living space with another person and all those little things that you end up doing/seeing. But it also takes on a different, more embarrassing context when you like someone and you realize they’ve seen your bra and panties sitting out.

It’s ridiculous, Seth must have seen every article of clothing she owns at some point or another, either when doing laundry or because life in one room motels doesn’t leave a lot of space for modesty, but there’s something about knowing he had to pull her delicates down from the top of the shower curtain that leave her self-conscious and eyeing the simple faded green cotton critically.

I was thinking of those moments when you run into your crush and suddenly you’re thinking about how your shirt still has that coffee stain from this morning or how messy you’re desk/apartment/workspace/etc looks and just becoming suddenly self-conscious of how they are taking in you and your stuff. And again, the whole he saw her bra and panties thing and then had to move them out of the way.

She shakes it off, brushing her teeth and using the restroom quickly before pulling on her panties and jeans.

I’ll admit, this line was mostly because I didn’t want to forget that these are people and they need to do basic human things like use the restroom.

Her shirt from the day before is full of weird wrinkles and her bra still too damp from where the lightly padded cups absorbed their fair share of water and she hesitates only a moment before shoving them both in the plastic shopping bag.

Part of this was an excuse to get Kate in Seth’s shirt for a bit longer (for reasons), although the bra part was more inspired because I noticed Kate wears bras with slight padding and I know they can take too long to dry.

Folding the sleeves of Seth’s shirt up to her elbows and removing the smudges of make-up from below her eyes go a long way to making her look presentable, but she still morns the loss of her few cosmetics and face wash. Or god, even a hairbrush, running her fingers through her hair only does so much.

I hadn’t entirely realized the implications of Kate and Seth running into Carlos right after their dinner and then having to flee until the conversation Kate had with Sonja in the parking lot. (I’m a pantser, I set write something and then think about the consequences after :P) In the first draft, Seth didn’t come back with anything after getting a room so there was no bag or Tylenol for Kate’s headache or toothbrushes. But he also didn’t get much, and I wanted to show the consequences of running with virtually nothing and how much you miss the little things.

Seth’s brows knit together when he sees her, but he doesn’t comment.

Seth and seeing her wearing his damn shirt and the statement it implies... yeah...

He watches her though, throwing on his suit jacket and buttoning it closed as Kate pulls on her socks and shoes, something thoughtful and a bit intense behind his eyes. It reminds her a little of the way he'd case a potential score, half-lost in the calculations and newly revealed details, and she fights a shiver, looking away as she ties her laces and stands.

Seth is a strategist guy, and when he’s casing a job he’s figuring out angles and how to best approach. He knows how to work the job, how to study all the pieces and get everything set up to give himself the best possible outcome. Its a rather focused look he has, his attention devoted on gathering as much information as he can and working out the steps he’ll need to take. Not to imply that Kate is something he's going to steal (although he kind of already did that) or that he’s got some grand master plan here, but rather this newly discovered (on her part) possibility between them and the statement she’s subconsciously implying and just this shift in their relationship... there’s a strategy to courtship and Seth knows strategy.

“C’mon,” she mutters, shoving what little possessions they have into the bottom of her bag. “I’m hungry.”

I’ll be entirely honest, I struggled way too much with how to end this scene. I swear that line gave me more trouble than the rest of the scene combined.

#my writing #asked and answered #sethkate

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jane-fucking-seymour · 4 years

Text

Slander, Libel and Blasphemy

I owed @ichlugebulletsandcornnuts a fic SK here y’all go

Jane was told not to read this article.

That’s exactly what Katherine had said to her, having stormed into Cathy’s room the night before, angrily yelling about things that Jane couldn’t really hear thanks to the other sounds of the flat and surrounding area. She did, however, hear “how could they say that about Edward?,” which made Jane more than curious about what was going on.

She had tried to talk to Kat about it, but the girl refused to say anything, winded from her yelling at Cathy. Instead, she had asked to go downstairs, to be excused from the conversation. Jane obviously let her, though it did not quell her worry.

Later that night, Katherine had “wandered” into the living room, curled up to Jane, and went on and on about how brilliant Edward was, how he reminded Kat of Jane, of how she can see his mother in him now that she’s met her.

It’s all but confirmed that she needed to find whatever Katherine had read.

She goes to her number one suspect: Catherine Parr. Before she even opens her mouth, Cathy gives her a sympathetic smile and a magazine.

“Page 74,” Cathy says. “I won’t deny you knowledge, but...” she frowns. “It’s rough. And, from my personal experience, I can say that she’s wrong.”

[[MORE]]

Jane simply nods silently and moves away, back to the living room, where it was safe from Katherine’s observant gaze and away from anyone that could possibly hear her, if she kept her voice down at least.

She takes a deep breath, opens the page to 74, and her heart instantly shatters.

The title:

“Edward Could Have Been Worse Than His Father If He Had Lived Long Enough”

Jane sucks in a deep breath, tears already starting to form. She reads word after word, paragraph after paragraph, the details of the argument fueling a rage inside of her that she hasn’t felt since back then.

They call him cold and heartless.

They call him strict and emotionless.

They don’t call him her son.

It’s like she’s reading about some other boy, about someone that truly isn’t Edward. How could they vilify him so much? He was just a boy, he died so early, and people had the gall to still desecrate his name and image centuries after his last breath.

Was he truly to be the villain if he lived longer?

Had she failed as a mother in more ways than she originally anticipated?

What did this mean?

Before she realized what she was doing, Jane was on her feet, moving upstairs. She moved past Anne’s room, past Anna’s, past Cathy’s and Katherine’s and her own, straight to...

“Jane?”

The sleep in Catherine of Aragon’s voice made it clear that Jane’s sudden barging in had woken her up. Maria, who had been visiting overnight, sat up from her side of the bed with a curious look.

“Jane, what’s wrong? It’s 2 AM-“ Catherine starts, looking at the clock, but her attention is immediately diverted to the article that Jane thrusts in front of her.

Catherine turns on the nightstand, wincing at the light, before she looks down at the magazine. Maria reads over her shoulder, gaze going from curious to angry to sympathy.

“Oh, Jane-“

“They said he would have been a monster,” Jane growls out with anger she hasn’t expressed in decades. “They said he would have turned.... h-he would have turned out like him. Like Henry.”

“He wouldn’t have, Jane,” Catherine tries, but Jane is seeing red, a rare display of raw emotion from the third queen.

“Do they even know what they’re doing when they write this shite?” Jane asks, voice a harsh whisper. “Do they understand that he was a child, that’s what he is. He wasn’t even a young adult when he died, he was a child. And they just... they try to murder his reputation for what?” She shakes her head, shaking with anger. “They take my boy and they make him-“

“Into a monster,” Catherine finishes the sentence. Jane stops and turns to half-face Catherine. Maria has gently hugged the girl from behind, but even in the pale moonlight Jane can tell that no tears will be shed by the first. “I can relate to that. Then turning your child into a monster.”

It suddenly strikes Jane why she came here in the first place.

It calms Jane down a bit, starting to catch her breath. “I didn’t-“

“I know,” Catherine says, understanding and soft. “I know. But I think you also did know, in a way. I think you understood.”

Jane looks away in shame, and Catherine chuckles.

“So theyre trying to push this narrative on little Eddie, huh?” Catherine asks, tone a bit more playful and amused than it probably should be. “He was brilliant, from what I heard from Cathy.”

“He was,” Jane says, tone resolute. “He absolutely was. And he would have been if he hadn’t-“

“He had Cathy,” Catherine replies, giving the magazine to Maria to read through fully. “He wouldn’t have. He loved her.”

Jane nods. “Like she was his mother, yeah.”

A moment of silence, then Jane continues.

“I don’t blame him. Cathy is... and incredible woman.”

“She is,” Catherine agrees. “And she raised him well, when you couldn’t. Same with Elizabeth, same with my Mary.”

Catherine gently stands, moving to Jane and pulling her into a hug.

“It’s okay, love. They’re going to do this regardless of what we do. It will be okay.”

“It all sounds like a fanfic or something,” Maria mumbles, which gets Jane’s confused attention.

“A what?”

“What Maria is trying to say,” Catherine butts in, “is that this is all someone’s theory. That it’s not something that people actually believe, it’s just something that someone’s made up.”

“Which means the narrative hasn’t set in yet,” Maria says. “You don’t have centuries of so-called “history” to dismantle. You’ve got a few theories and short stories to debunk.”

“It’s a good thing,” Catherine assures. “People are already on your side. If you’d like, tomorrow, we can draw up a plan on how to respond.” Catherine smiles, gently pulling back to fix up Jane’s hair and grabs a tissue to dry Jane’s eyes. “I’m sure Cathy and the others would love to pitch in. Most of them knew him, too, after all, and Anne has Elizabeth’s account from the history books. It’s human.” Catherine leans forward, kissing Jane’s head. “And I’m sure it will be enough. With all of us together taking on this rather new theory... I’m sure we can nip it in the bud.”

Jane smiles at that, relief clear on her face. “I... thank you, Catherine. Thank you so much.”

The Spanish Queen smiles and nods, gently leading Jane not to her own room, but to Katherine’s.

“Go on then, Kat is a good cuddle and I’m sure you could use some,” Catherine quips, smiling as Jane gets as close to Kat as possible, tucking both of them in. Katherine, in her sleep, mumbles something and curls into Jane more. Jane chuckles, smoothing out Kat’s hair as she gets comfortable.

Catherine steps out of the room, leaving the duo to their slumber, and quietly returns to her own room, where Maria was still reading.

“This is rubbish,” Maria mumbles as Catherine moves into the bed. “It’s the same author as the one that wrote that hit piece on Mary the other day.”

“It wasn’t really,” Catherine says with a sigh. “That was far more factual. She didn’t put in her thoughts until the end, and I think she made some good points. Whatever drivel she wrote about Edward, though, is just... well, I don’t know what else to call it but rubbish.”

Maria nods, tossing the magazine onto the floor and letting Catherine curl up.

“We’ll make sure it doesn’t get farther than it is,” Catherine says with a nod. “I’ve no doubt in my mind that this will all be sorted once we get everyone together in the morning.”

Maria nods. “You’re a very good person, Catalina.”

Catherine chuckles. “He doesn’t deserve to be fed to the wolves. He was a child. And, if I’m being honest... I don’t know if my Mary would agree with me, but I don’t want Edwards legacy to be tarnished more than it has been.”

Maria sighs, murmuring in Spanish, and Catherine has to laugh before she simply burrows her head in the crook of Maria’s neck.

“Quiet you,” Catherine quips. “Bedtime, or I’m kicking you back to the living room.”

“Can’t believe you thought I was going to sleep on the couch after a full day of dealing with the cousin’s antics,” Maria mumbles, but she settles and Catherine soon falls into a light sleep.

She dreams of Mary. Of what could have been.

Of how she didn’t have the chance Jane currently does.

Of how, tomorrow, she will change that.

#six the musical fanfic #six the musical fanfiction #six fanfic #six fanfiction

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carlatsukinamistolemyhamsandwich · 4 years

Note

These Fanfics of Shin and Carla of nice and all...but we want the story on how Carla Tsukinami stoke your ham sandwich! The greedy bast*rd he is...

Anon, this is one of my favourite asks ever and I love you. Thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to shamelessly insert myself into the world of DL I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it :)

I wrote myself as a nameless herione (because I don’t think most of you know my name) which also means you can treat it as a reader insert if you want to, but bare in mind this is based on how I would react in this situation and there are some details that are a bit specific to me.

“Hm, I wonder if I’m allowed up here?” The girl glanced back at the door to the rooftop of Ryoutei Academy, trying to spot any sort of kanji that could translate to “Keep Out” but found none. Shrugging to herself she concluded that if anyone caught her up here when she wasn’t supposed to be, then she would have to play the confused foreign student card and hope for the best.

A mild scolding seemed better than going back to the cafeteria anyway.

She looked down at the slightly sorry looking lunchbox in her hands and loosed a sigh. It was only her second day at her new school and already she felt herself desperately missing her friends and the familiarity of her old school.

The other students had all been pleasant enough- aside from the boy with glasses in her class, who she’d caught eyeing the hemline of her skirt with obvious disapproval, as though it was somehow her fault that whoever made the school uniform had not done so with five foot nine female transfer students in mind- but the thought of trying to navigate getting food when almost all of the signs were in kanji she didn’t recognize made her gut roll with anxiety.

Besides at least the rooftop was pretty, with troughs of well kept roses lining the space and a perfect view of Kaminashi town, just beyond the iron railing, the lights from the small shopping district a warm glow against the midnight blue sky.

The girl walked over to the edge of the rooftop, intent on giving herself a moment to admire the townscape when a nearby rose caught her eye. It’s petals were such a dark red, they looked almost black in the modest illumination provided by the few lights lining the roof. She crouched down on the balls of her feet and set her lunchbox carefully to the side. Something about the scene, the dark flower with the night sky behind it, made her fingers itch with the urge to sketch it.

“I don’t think I could do the dark colors justice with my watercolors and I can’t do realism with markers so maybe colored pencils would be best?” She muttered to herself she tried to find the perfect angle for some reference photos she could use later, while reaching into her pocket for her phone. “Acrylics could work I guess but I don’t have any canvas here and I-”

“What are you doing?” A low voice came from right beside her ear. The girl let out a high-pitched shriek and jolted in surprise, barely catching her balance in time.

She loosed a breath before turning her head in the direction of whoever had spoken, but before she could, they spoke again.

“Hahh, that’s no good… Hmph!” A rough shove sent her sprawling into the roses. Thorns scratched at her skin and she cursed as her hands plunged in the damp mulch, just barely stopping her from face-planting into the dirt. The rest of her however, was not so lucky, and she knew from the way her torso had landed in the soil that her skirt’s hemline had just become the least of her worries as far as her uniform was concerned.

A cruel laugh came from behind her and she turned to look up, filled with some mixture of anger and embarrassment.

But whatever had been brewing petered out the moment she laid eyes on the culprit. He was quite possibly the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen; short choppy, strawberry blonde hair framed pale face with an eye the most incredible shade of gold.

He was utterly stunning.

The effect was promptly ruined however, when he opened his mouth, face twisting into a sneer.

“Haha, how pathetic, crawling around in the dirt.” He continued to chuckle as she pushed herself up onto her hands and knees, wincing slightly at the way they stung where they’d scraped against the ground.

“Heehhh, aren’t you going to say something?” The boy asked, the humor in his expression dying down as he regarded her as one might a spot of mould on a piece of bread. “Or is it that you’re so stupid, you can’t understand what I’m saying?”

The girl froze slightly, unsure how to navigate whatever was going on. Was this guy a bully? Her strategy for dealing with bullies until now had generally been to avoid them or ignore them, neither of which seemed like a good idea here.

“Oiii Miss idiot, are you going to keep ignoring me until I do something like this?” Before she could react the boy placed a heavy black boot on her hand and started to put his weight onto it.

Shit.

“What do you want from me?” She blurted out, praying silently that she hadn’t messed up the Japanese grammar, which really shouldn’t have been a concern given this encounter could feasibly end with a broken hand.

The pressure stopped briefly and she took the chance to tug her hand out from her under his shoe and get to her feet. The girl was a little surprised to find that the boy was no taller than she was, although his general aura of menace certainly made him intimidating enough without needing any extra height.

“Ah, so you can talk. As for what I want… why don’t we start with an apology for shrieking in my ear earlier? It hurt you know?” He made a show of obnoxiously cleaning out his ear with his finger and the girl found herself completely lost for words. Well, that wasn’t entirely true, there were a lot of words swirling in her brain, all of them English and not to be used amongst polite company.

Biting back the urge to tell him to fuck off, she reminded herself that she was currently alone with this guy on a rooftop and angering him further probably would not end well. “I apologize for shouting in your ear, you surprised me. I’ll be going now.” Lunch forgotten, she went to make a hasty retreat to the rooftop door but was stopped short when the male put himself directly into her path.

“Not so fast, you haven’t answered my question yet. What were you doing up here, sticking your head into the roses like some kind of animal?” The girl tried to keep her breathing even, as she felt panic rise in her veins.

“I wanted to take pictures as drawing references, I didn’t realize that-” an arsehole like you would show up “-someone else was already here, forgive me, I’ll be on my way.” She went to take a step around him, when the boy took a step towards her, forcing her to take one back. Soon her back was pressed up against the railing and she internally cursed.

“You just wanted to draw some pictures of the flowers? Isn’t that a bit childish? Well, I guess you still wear kid’s underwear so I shouldn’t be surprised.” The girl spluttered and instinctively went to yank down her skirt, a slightly ridiculous action, considering he must have seen everything when he pushed her earlier.

“That-that doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she said, eyes on the ground as her face burned with shame. “Please, just let me leave.”

“You know, you still sound pretty demanding for someone who’s shaking and is covered in mud. Also,” he paused, sniffing the air briefly before glancing down at her knees, “ah I wondered where that awful scent was coming from, geez human blood really isn’t appealing at all.” The girl looked at her legs and caught sight of red liquid staining her knees, but that wasn’t what made her pause.

“Human blood? What are you-” A cold dread spread through her as she looked back up at the boy and the inhuman color of his iris. This had to be some sort of awful prank right?

“Oh, maybe I spoke too much, but that reaction isn’t bad, haha. Hey, what do you think I am?” He asked her, opening his mouth just wide enough to reveal a pair of gleaming white fangs.

“That’s… There’s no way… You can’t…” The girl struggled to process the image in front of her, trying to find some sensible sounding explanation. He had to be a nutjob with fake fangs right? A nutjob who liked to terrorize girls on rooftops and happened to go to a night school.

“Ah how boring. Shouldn’t most girls be crying with fear by now? I don’t want to but, would you react a bit more if I pierced you with these fangs?” He lowered his face and panic surged through her. Lunatic or something else, she had no intention of being bitten by him. The girl went to shove him away from her, but before she could blink he had her arms pinned above her head.

“It seems you still haven’t learned that I’m not the sort of person you should fight back against. Hey, how much would it take to make you cry?” His grip on her wrists tightened and she winced at the strength in his grip. “Your wrists are pretty thin, I’d barely have to use any of my strength to snap your bones.”

“Please stop!” She begged, as she silently prayed for someone, anyone to intervene.

“Oi Shin, what are you doing?” An incredibly deep voice came from the entrance to the rooftop and the girl said a silent word of thanks.

“Huh,” Shin looked over his shoulder, allowing the girl a glance at her savior. He was tall, with long white hair, that appeared dyed pink at the tips. A dark scarf covered the lower half of his face, while above it were a pair of piercing golden eyes.

A shudder ran down her spine as her gaze locked with his for a moment, suddenly feeling a lot less safe than she had just a moment ago.

“Ah brother, I was just having a bit of fun.” The girl wasn’t sure which part of this statement horrified her more. That her so called savoir was actually related to the demonic pile of steaming garbage in front of her or that this was Shin’s version of fun.

“That’s enough, we have matters to discuss.” The man walked over from the door to the roof, his footsteps stopping just behind Shin.

“Tch,” Shin let go of her arms, only to grip hold of her chin, moving his face uncomfortably close to hers. “Hey, if you tell anyone about what happened here, I’ll rip your tongue out, got it?” His fangs caught the light as he spoke, and the girl felt very close to tears as she muttered a soft yes.

Shin flashed her that nasty smile of his before letting go. “Well then, get out of here!”

Needing no further prompting, she hastily got away from him, pausing only to grab her school bag. As she did so, she caught sight of her lunchbox in the older boys hands and faltered.

“Go!” Shin yelled and the girl concluded that the ham sandwich and peanut butter flavored chocolate bar contained in the hundred yen tupperware were not worth her life as she borderline ran to the rooftop door, slamming it shut behind her.

***

Carla watched the girl flee from the rooftop with a dispassionate expression.

“What exactly did you do?” He asked, more concerned with trying to keep their low profile as they furthered their objective than anything else.

“Nothing much, I just toyed with her a bit. She’s only a human so it doesn’t really matter does it? More importantly, why did you keep hold of that?” Shin nodded towards the plastic container in Carla’s hands.

Carla said nothing as he opened up the box and pulled out a modest sandwich wrapped neatly in clingfilm. Removing some of the wrap, he sniffed it briefly before muttering.

“I thought so.”

Shin took a deep breath through his nose. “Ah, I see, a dry cured ham sandwich huh?”

“Normally I would never eat something prepared by human hands but to take away the taste of that polluted blood, it can’t be helped.” Carla lowered his scarf and took a bite of the sandwich, chewing a few times as he deemed it to be palatable before swallowing. “Oi Shin, take this.” He threw a plastic wrapped bar at his brother and Shin caught it without effort.

He turned it over in his hands before spotting the reason why his brother had given it to him. “Peanut butter huh? Well at least it seems that girl’s good for something.”

#own post #my writing #self-insert #I realise that the heroine/me is a bit lackster but that's because while I get embarrassed chronically easily #I don't get angry very easily at all and my normal strategy when faced with anything unpleasant is to try and leave by all means necessary #Also I genuinely do stop to take photos of flowers because I want to draw them #I love that upon being given a chance to insert myself into DL I just used it to have Shin bully me #I could have gone on longer with this but i think 2000 words of me is enough for anoyone #This is based on the idea of me being 18 (which I was when I started this blog although I was in Uni already)#and spending my final year of highschool at Ryoutei Academy

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bilgisticallykosher · 4 years

Text

Devil On His Shoulders And Lesser Demons All Over The Place; AKA Well, There Goes The Metasphere

As a note, I actually don't believe that Mandy is that angsty. The rumors of her sadism have been greatly exaggerated. As another note, I'd just like to apologize to everyone. Inspired by Devil On My Shoulder by Lime. Or the shortened version, DOMS. Which is ridiculous; clearly Mandy is the only dom here.

Words: Just under 2000

Lime sighed, careful not to cause too much movement to his little "shoulder devil" as he secretly liked to think of her. Mandy was great, and the scenarios were fun to think about, but he could never actually write them. He loved his characters too much to ever hurt them permanently. And yet…

Well, at any rate, he was still out of ideas. And this little (heh) theoretical session hadn't helped any. Maybe he'd have to start from scratch after all. The curtains fluttered in the windless atmosphere, and a bright light flickered from beyond them. Lime squinted. What in the heck?

"...and since he doesn't know about the others living in his house, he doesn't get them out from the flooding!" Mandy concluded her dreary thought. She looked up and blinked. "Hey, what's that-" She cut herself off with a soundless noise that might have very well been a curse, as a fire bird flew in out of nowhere, and landed lightly on Lime's other shoulder.

He flinched, but it turned out to not be hot, just pleasantly warm.

"Um, hi?" He greeted, bewildered.

"I know I'm not exactly one to talk," the phoenix began, definitely actually talking, "but I think you can do a little better than Miss Not-So-Infinitesimally Angsty." Mandy gasped.

"How dare?!" The phoenix, who Lime now realized was Phoenix, rolled their eyes.

"I'm just saying, there's maybe an imbalance there on hurt/comfort you know?" They had a point.

"Hey, I know how to do comfort!" Mandy huffed. "I get plenty of comfort from readers screaming in the comments." Lime groaned. Phoenix, being one of her screaming readers, slapped their face with their hand- er, wing.

"Alright, I think I need some backup," they said, muffled through their feathers. They dropped their wing and sent out a fire symbol. Lime couldn't quite see what it was, or if they used their mouth like a dragon, or if it was a feather or something. Pretty awesome, though.

And suddenly there was a purple butterfly hovering in front of him. At least this newcomer wasn't too hard to figure out.

"Nyn?"

"I hear you're having trouble with some plot ideas?" She seemed excited and willing to help, something Lime was very grateful for.

"Yes, thank you so much, I can't seem to get away from the really awful permanent death ones." Lime stared obviously at Mandy, who just shrugged nonchalantly, spinning her magic pen around.

"Ah. Yes. Well, I've got the perfect solution!" Her voice was so sweet-sounding, it was like music to his ears. Phoenix nodded their head.

"Yes?" Lime listened raptly.

"Kill 'em anyways." He froze. Surely, he must have misheard.

"Wh-" he floundered for coherent English. "What?"

"If you wanna kill them, kill them!" There was a snort from his shoulder.

"But your stories are usually so cute! And fluffy!"

"Usually,” she emphasized. "Unless Mandy picks the wrong number." Lime turned to Mandy, horrified.

"Whoops," she deadpanned.

"I wrote a fic about the werewolf getting a kitten," Phoenix said reproachfully.

Then he got distracted by a voice at his feet.

"Heya!"

"Aah!"

"Woah!"

"Geez, now I know how Virgil felt," the voice joked. Lime looked down. It looked like...a box? With little cat features? That was adorable, but admittedly very confusing. He had to contain himself from petting. His talons twitched.

No! Big, scary dragon! Rawr! He wouldn't cave to some weird kitty box!

… Who was he kidding? He'd be cuddling it within the hour.

Mandy squinted, staring down at the creature. She steadied herself on Lime's shoulder before sliding down his arm. He grumbled something about safety that went unheeded.

"Kat?" She asked, tilting her head. "Is that you?" The box- Kat, apparently- nodded.

"Yep. I'm here to help out!" Mandy squinted.

"Why the heck do you look like that?"

"Well, like my username. You know," she sighed, Callboxkat? Box Kat? Box cat? Yeah."

"Wait, isn't it supposed to be a callbox? As in a telephone booth?"

"Yeah, but the author doesn't watch Doctor Who." Kat watched Nyn fluttering back and forth, repressing her newfound cat urges.

"Wait. I thought we were the authors?" Phoenix furrowed their eyebrows.

"Listen, this is already so meta, does it really matter?" Kat raised an eyebrow.

"Fair point." Mandy jerked her thumb back in Lime's direction over her shoulder. "So, do you have any suggestions?"

"Do I?!"

"Do you?" Lime echoed back at her.

"So I was thinking," she box-stepped over to one of the lower-set universe basins, "you take some of your tiny characters,"

"Yeah…" He considered the few universes where he had borrowers.

"Then you slap a tail on them, and have them almost drown!" She concluded triumphantly, lithely swaying her own tail at the mention of them.

"Almost drown them?" Lime asked warily.

“Almost drown them?" Mandy asked with a gleam in her eye.

"Okay, that's it." A new voice called out. Lime thought he recognized it, turning his head to confirm. Yep, there Allison was, dressed in her own witch outfit of purple and teal. "You," she pointed at Mandy with her magic quill "have had enough angst for the day. You're being cut off."

"No!" Mandy pouted, readying her puppy dog eyes.

"Yes," Allison crossed her arms triumphantly.

"Um, not to encourage her," Phoenix spoke up, turning to face her, "but haven't you been just as guilty of angst recently?"

"What do you mean?" Allison frowned, confused.

"Yeah!" Kat turned to her, "all those Perspectives lately have been pretty heavy and angst-laden."

"Wh- hey, first of all, recently is subjective, we wrote those a while ago. And we've had a lot of fluff in there, too!" Lime considered this.

"Vampire Perspective, Pet Perspective…" he listed off.

"Mandy's been choosing the wrong numbers," Nyn nodded.

"And! And Lilliputian, Freezing, those were also recent-ish!"

"Face it," Mandy suddenly appeared next to Allison, leaning her arm on her friend, "we're in the same boat now." She flopped over dramatically into her arms. "I've corrupted you."

"Noooo…"

"Hey, Allison, what's that building on your hat, by the way?" Phoenix asked. She sighed, and threw a photo version their way.

"Arc."

"Oh my god." There were snickers around. Mandy was still draped over Allison, shaking her head at the truly awful pun.

"PSSSST!" Everyone turned around. There, as if summoned by the bad humor, was a stick figure, looking shifty-eyed, and unmistakably Lefay. She was wearing a trenchcoat, and hat. Of course, the hat wasn't the typical hat associated with a trenchcoat. It was, instead, an umbrella-hat.

"Um," a new voice came in before they could address that. They turned back, seeing a small snail with a dorsal fin on his back. Fin. Lime was starting to see a terrible, terrible pattern here. "I was also invited, but, I don't know, maybe I should leave? You guys are all so cool, I think I probably don't belong here."

"Fin, please!" Everyone chorused together.

"Alright, alright!" He acquiesced, really taking in the room. "Hey, I guess not everyone's cool, you're looking pretty hot, Phoenix!" He made finger guns at them somehow, and they laughed at his antics. Lime smiled, before remembering the previous interruption.

"Hey, Lefay," Lime started, slowly, turning back to her, "why's there an umbrella on your head?"

"The costume store was out of trench hats-"

"There's no way that's what they're called," Allison balked.

"-so I decided to go with the rain theme. And I got this instead!" She patted the umbrella headband happily before tensing, and crouching inward, voice lowering to what was definitely not how she spoke a second ago. "Pssst. Hey, hey kid. C'mere. I hears ya need some help with your woiks."

Lime took a moment to mentally translate this. He was uncertain, but he did need help with his works. He twisted his long, scaly neck over to where she stood.

"Yeah, alright."

She opened her trench coat wide, causing a flinch or two throughout the group, to reveal what was lined on the inside. Lime could identify a turnip, a rutabaga, celeriac, a parsnip, a yam, taro, a daikon, and jicama. "Um…" Lime was confused. "What-"

"Oh my god" Kat put her paws over her face.

"Did youse need help wit' some titles?" Lefay waggled her eyebrows. There was absolute silence, aside from some traitorous snickering from some of the others.

"..............No," Lime decided on as his response. "Titles I can figure out later, but I just need some story ideas to title in the first place."

"Oh, why didn't you say so!" She responded in her normal voice. "I can totally help with that!" Lime brightened. Lefay smiled back, and then promptly fell to the floor, pillow under her head, asleep.

Lime flinched back, and turned back to the rest of the room, slumping his head in his hands.

"This is never going to work," he lamented. "I'll never get a new idea like this!"

"Well," Nyn cut in, "maybe that's your answer." Lime slowly lifted his head, squinting in confusion. "I mean, if you're not coming up with ideas this way, maybe this way isn't the way to go about it?"

"Right," Allison agreed, as Mandy un-flopped from her. "Just because this works for some people, or even if it's worked for you before, doesn't mean you have to use this method."

"Inspiration comes differently for everyone." Kat piped in, tail swishing in excitement. "You shouldn't feel pressured to choose one specific way and stick to it."

"And if you're forcing yourself to come up with ideas, doesn't that negate why you're writing in the first place?" Phoenix added.

"Heck yeah!" Fin shouted. "Writing fanfic is supposed to be fun!" Mandy gently put a hand on his arm.

"You shouldn't feel pressured at all. If you can't think of something to write, you don't have to." Lime looked up at her, she smiled gently down at him. "You're allowed to not write. You're allowed to take a break. You're allowed to put yourself first." Lime sniffed out a laugh, before looking at all the smiling, encouraging faces of his friends and fellow fanders.

"Okay, I give. You guys are right." He stood up on all fours, nails clacking against the wood floor. "Now let's get out of this…" he looked around again, frowning. "Wait, where are we?"

"Looks like a stage of some sort?" Kat voiced, uncertainly. A voice sounded from all around them.

"I'm a theater, sweetheart." Brook responded. There was a rimshot.

"You know, it's things like this that make me really glad that I picked my authorsona myself." Lime deadpanned. Allison and Mandy nodded.

Over in the corner, a shovel fell over onto a sketchpad in agreement.

"Yeah, I don't know who's doing this," Mandy spoke a little too nonchalantly, "but these are really, really bad. Like, objectively terrible. I mean just completely awful. As if whoever did it started with zero sense of humor, and then got worse." Hey, watch it, witchy, I’m in control of this story. "And I'm in control of a lot more stories, I can make angst like you wouldn't believe," she cheerfully stated, appropriate of nothing, according to the others' perspectives.

…I surrender.

Mandy smirked, satisfied, before bounding over to Lime's back. "So, wanna give us a ride back?"

"Sure," Lime offered his hands out, palms flat for everyone (except for those with wings) to climb on. When everyone had settled, he spread his wings, and took flight. As he faded into the horizon, he mumbled to himself, "Maybe I'll write something with Virgil…"

About a minute after he left, Lefay jolted awake.

"Alright! I've got like six more plausible ideas for AUs, there's this one where-" Lefay paused, looking around. She seemed distressed for a moment, before continuing. "-but I never figured out what happened with the incident with the noodles. TIME FOR MORE RESEARCH!" She pointed dramatically up to the sky, before immediately flopping back into sleep.

BONUS!

There was a ringing sound. Every set of eyes snapped to the source.

"Are you ringing from your body?” Allison asked Kat incredulously.

"I've got a phone in the box," Kat blushed, fishing it out.

"Getting a call, box-Kat?" Mandy grinned wickedly. Kat barked at her. Mandy frowned.

"Why-"

"I love dogs," she shrugged.

@callboxkat @delimeful @hiddendreamer67 @theatresweetheart @lefaystrent @infinimay @enby-phoenix @arc852 @justanotherpurplebutterfly @eatingashovel (not by name but you make an appearance)

#callboxkat #arc852 #delimeful #hiddendreamer67 #justanotherpurplebutterfly #infinimay #my stories #authorsona #enby phoenix

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davey-in-a-minivan · 4 years

Text

and i never have to let you go

i.e. guess who wrote Alice By Heart fanfic instead of doing homework word count: 1382 mood: sad

“It’s late.”

“You’re back!” Alice spun to greet him. If it weren’t for a raised hand of warning, Alice might have flung her arms around Alfred’s neck. Instead, she hugged herself, beaming as she drank in the familiar sight of him: wry smile, drooping eyes, rumpled schoolboy uniform.

“You haven’t been sleeping enough,” he said, with no sting behind the accusation.

“And you,” she said, rifling through the stacks of paper covering the kitchen table, “haven’t been visiting enough.”

“Alice--”

“I went to the library like you suggested, and wound up my soul like a wind-up toy. The librarian was happy to see me again.”

“Did you talk to your aunt any more?”

Alice hesitated, fingers hovering over a poetry anthology. “I wrote back.”

“About the bunker?”

“About Mother and Father.” Alice shook her head, flipping through her book. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore. I found a poem for you.”

He looked across her disordered table with pity, taking in the dirty dishes, the unopened envelopes and half-finished letters. “Alice, you can’t keep living like this.”

“It’s a good one, a Yeats one. Wine comes in at the mouth, and love comes in at the eye; that’s all we shall know for truth before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, I look at you, and I sigh.” She pressed the poetry book to her chest with one hand, lifting her other hand to her forehead and sighing dramatically.

He wasn’t able to restrain the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, though he rolled his eyes. “Maybe you should try lifting a glass of water to your mouth,” he said, gesturing pointedly at the coffee cups scattered around the table. “When was the last time you slept?”

“Oh, that reminds me of another one.” Leaning against the table, she opened the book again.

“Drink some water and then you can read it to me,” Alfred said.

“If you insist, dear rabbit,” she said, setting down her book to fill a glass from the creaking tap. She beamed over the rim as she took a sip. “And what would I have to do to get you to sit next to me as I read?”

There was that little smile again. It made her heart ache to see him here, in her dingy little kitchen, shaking his head the tiniest bit, the way he always had when she teased. “Maybe you could eat something,” he suggested. “You’re all bones.”

“And what would I have to do for a kiss?” she asked. His smile vanished like a rabbit down a hole, extinguishing the warmth in her chest just as fast, and suddenly her breath was shaky.

“Alice, you know you can’t--”

She cut him off, afraid that hearing the words aloud would scald her. “I know, I know.” If she never said it, if she never let him say it, maybe… she turned away, not daring to even think about it. She felt his gaze on her neck as she made a show of searching her cupboards, nudging aside empty jars and expired cans.

“You haven’t been to the grocery store.” She jumped at his voice so near her ear, nearly dropping her half empty glass. He peered over her shoulder, raising an eyebrow when she met his glance.

“I didn’t have time,” she lied, shaking a few stale pieces of bread from a paper bag. “I’ll go in the morning.” Her distress drained slowly, drawn from her like poison by his presence. She had to dance around him to navigate between the table and counter, depositing her glass and retrieving her book, and his nearness made her body hum. She curled into her armchair, tucking her feet up beneath her and lifting her chin in invitation. He followed her, settling onto the armrest beside her and draping one long arm over the back of the chair. She broke off a piece of bread, scattering crumbs across her lap, and stuck it in her mouth, realizing suddenly how hungry she had been. “Jush a mimit,” she mumbled, stuffing another hunk of bread into her mouth before she had properly finished the first.

He laughed. “Take your time, love. There’s no hurry.”

She wolfed down the rest of the bread, then leaned her head back against his arm. She hadn’t been this close to full in… several days, at least. A feeling of comfort washed through her. Alfred sat beside her in contented silence; soft fingers combed through her hair. She closed her eyes for a second, relishing his presence, and then fought back to consciousness, sitting upright and blinking rapidly. “I was going to read you a poem,” she said.

“You can sleep if you want,” he said.

“No,” she insisted. “You’ll be gone when I wake up.” He didn’t argue, and she couldn’t waste a precious moment with him. “Here, Sonnet 30.”

She read to him until her throat was sore and the pages were fuzzy before her eyes, unwilling to give up his closeness, his fingers in her hair, his lanky legs stretched beside hers, the faint smell of starch lingering in the air. The clock struck one. The clock struck two.

When the clock struck three, he got up at last. “I need to go,” he said softly.

“I’ll come too,” she said, standing in an instant, scattering crumbs about the floor.

“No.” She froze. “Alice, you can’t keep doing this.”

“What do you mean?”

“This,” he said, pressing his hand to his chest. “The late nights, the poems, all of this.” He gestured at the mess of her flat. “You can’t keep chasing after me.”

Her voice rose, shrill and pleading. “What do you want me to do?”

He looked at her with eyes full of pity. “I want you to live your life, Alice. I want you to be happy.”

“I’m happy when I’m with you!”

“There are some places you can’t follow me,” he said.

“But I miss you.” She flung the words at him desperately, and they found their mark; he winced. “I miss your smell and the cracks of your voice and the way you roll your eyes at me. I miss you when you’re gone and I miss you when I can see you right here. I miss you so much, Alfred.” Her voice failed her on the last word, and she pressed her lips together, her nails digging into her arms to keep herself from falling apart. His image swam in his eyes. She would have given anything for a true hug, for the warmth and solidity of his arms around her, shielding her from the world. He just looked on helplessly.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“I just want to stay with you a little longer,” she begged. “This is the last time.” The first part, at least, was true.

He pressed his fingers to his eyes. “Alright,” he said. “You can come. But you have to promise me that you’ll tell your aunt what happened in the bunker. You need someone more than me-- someone who’ll be there when I’m not.”

She took a shaky breath, clinging to the concession like a lifesaver. “I’ll talk to her. I promise.”

He smiled wanly, running his hand through his hair so it stood up like tufts of grass. “Put your coat on, then,” he said. “It’s cold out.” She wiped her puffy eyes and took her coat, sliding her arms into the patched sleeves, then she opened the door and stepped out into the muffled darkness of early morning.

The church clock chimed a quiet quarter hour as she climbed over the low picket fence. It was only September, but the night already held the promise of winter, and she was grateful for her coat.

“I am tired,” she admitted, stumbling over humps in the lovingly-maintained grass.

“Of course you are,” came Alfred’s soothing voice. “It’s time for you to rest, love. I’ll watch over you while you sleep.” At last, her tired eyes found what she was searching for. Sinking to the ground, she curled up against the headstone, her fingers finding the grooves of the familiar letters. A-L-F-R-E-D H-A-L-L-A-M. The breeze ruffled her hair like an affectionate hand, and at last she fell asleep.

#alice by heart #abh #fanfic #abh fanfic #alfred hallam #alice spencer #i'M SORRY

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pandawritespoorly · 4 years

Text

IFD 2020

Author’s Note: Here's something for IFD 2020. A commenter on With Time said I should write something when I brought it up. I wrote it quick and I haven't really reread it so I hope you enjoy!

Summary: An Akuma attack brings Ladybug and Chat Noir to the... AO3 Work Search page?

This akuma was… slightly different. It had only one goal: show Ladybug and Chat Noir ‘all their fans’.

Whatever that meant.

It only went after them. If a stray projectile went towards a civilian, then it would disappear before they were hit.

Inevitably, they were hit, appearing in an empty room that reminded Chat of pixelator. There was a large screen in front of them, a little taller than the teens. A gray rectangle with several search bars took up most of it. Being the nerds they were, they both recognized it.

“Hey, that’s the AO3 work search page!” Chat says first.

“Yeah…” Ladybug approaches cautiously. She puts her hand out, touching the screen and trying to scroll. Sure enough, the page moves, and they both watch as she goes through the page.

The ‘Fandoms’ bar is filled in, and the way it’s grayed out makes them guess they can’t change it.

“‘Miraculous Ladybug’?” Ladybug reads. “I know people write fanfics about us, but isn’t under like ‘Miraculous Heroes’ or something?”

“It’s actually, ‘Heroes of Paris’,” Chat corrects. Ladybug raises an eyebrow, and he blushes a little. “It’s not like I go above the T rating!”

Ladybug’s face goes red. “Oh, Kwami, I hadn’t even thought of that.” She hurriedly selects the ‘General Audiences’ rating. “Let’s think of the children.”

Chat nods, hitting ‘No Archive Warnings Apply’ and ‘Gen’ for her.

“I’m assuming the akuma just wants us to read some fanfics right?”

“Probably.” Chat shrugs. At the ‘Characters’ bar, Chat types in her name quickly using a keyboard that appears on the screen.

He’s focused on the keyboard, and doesn’t notice how Ladybug stares in shock at the suggested names.

“H-How?”

“You good, Bug?” Chat glances back at his partner, whose mouth is hanging open in surprise.

She doesn’t respond. He glances at the screen and sees the results.

“Oh.”

Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug

Tikki (Miraculous Ladybug)

Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug)

Ladybug

Master Fu (Miraculous Ladybug)

Wayzz (Miraculous Ladybug)

Nooroo (Miraculous Ladybug)

It went on for a few more lines, but Chat didn’t read all of it. He and Ladybug just stare for a few quiet moments.

“E-Even if they f-figured out… my identity… the Kwamis, and Master Fu….” Ladybug manages, doing her best to stay calm. “Do they know yours?”

“Do you want to know?”

She laughs, a hysterical edge to her voice. “I-I mean, why not?! At this point does secrecy even matter?! This-”

Chat cuts her off, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Maybe you should sit down.” She nods, sitting on the ground of their empty white whatever-this-is.

Typing in his hero name, Chat sees that, yes, his identity is right there.

Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir

“S-so. Adrien, huh?” Ladybug (Marinette), asks, oddly calm.

“Yep.”

“Maybe we should talk a-about this l-later.”

He nods, and she finally approaches the screen again. She hesitates, then types in the first word she thinks of into a different bar.

Akuma Attack

Akuma Possession

Akumatized Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir

Akumatized Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug

Original Akuma

Akumatized Main Character(s)

Akuma Battle

“Oh gosh, people want to see us akumatized? That would be a disaster!” Ladybug exclaims.

“Makes for a good story, I guess.” Chat types in a new word.

Plagg Is So Done (Miraculous Ladybug)

Plagg is a Little Shit (Miraculous Ladybug)

Protective Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug)

Supportive Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug)

Plagg Cares (Miraculous Ladybug)

Plagg Appreciation Week

Plagg Being Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug)

Plagg Is a Troll (Miraculous Ladybug)

Parent Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug)

Cheesy Enough For Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug)

Poor Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug)

Plagg Swears (Miraculous Ladybug)

Plagg Loves Cheese (Miraculous Ladybug)

Unhelpful Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug)

Plagg Swears (Miraculous Ladybug)

Minor Plagg/Tikki

Plagg Ships It (Miraculous Ladybug)

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Chat grumbles.

Ladybug laughs. “Are two of them really about cheese?”

“I’m surprised it’s only two. I smell like camembert 24/7 for only two tags.”

“I think he sounds like a sweetheart.”

“Of course you do.”

She rolls her eyes, typing in her own Kwami’s name. A lot are similar to Plagg’s, but there are a few notable ones.

Cat Tikki (Miraculous Ladybug)

Human Tikki (Miraculous Ladybug)

Cats Plagg and Tikki (Miraculous Ladybug)

Dog Tikki (Miraculous Ladybug)

“I’m sorry what?” Ladybug frowns. “Do they not know she’s a ladybug?”

“They’re probably for AUs.”

She frowns, still not convinced. Chat decides to leave her to her gumbling, and types something else. Eventually they’re both distracted by looking through the tags for both of their best friends.

“What’s with them both being matchmakers? I’ve never noticed either of them getting any couple together?” Chat questions.

Ladybug coughs, choking on air. He looks at her in concern and she waves him off, recovering and hurriedly typing in her parent’s names.

“‘Sabine Cheng and Tom Dupain Know’? Know what, that I’m Ladybug?”

“I guess so?”

“Well I don’t think that they actually know. I hope.” Ladybug crosses her arms.

Chat looks slightly panicked. “Oh you don’t think my Father knows, do you?” He’s already typing it in.

Hawk Moth is Gabriel Agreste

He stares blankly, frozen.

“No.”

Looking to comfort him, Ladybug scans the suggestions quickly. “Well, hey, look this one says he isn’t Hawkmoth!”

They both know it’s weak, especially given that just about every tag lists him as the villain they’d been fighting with this whole time.

Chat hasn’t moved, and Ladybug goes to the ‘Character’ bar, looking to get some final clarification.

Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth

“No,” Chat whispers, shaking.

“Oh, Kitty. I’m so sorry.” Ladybug turns to him, worried.

“It’s n-not y-your fault.”

She opens up her arms, and he collapses into the hug.

She’s still holding him when the white fades away, and they’re back in Paris as if no time has passed.

Ladybug gently extracts herself from Chat, whispering for him to just take a moment to rest, and faces the akuma.

“Find anything interesting?” It chirps, looking far too proud of itself.

She doesn’t respond. This is the akuma that forced her partner to find out the worst possible thing in an awful way.

It’s going down.

---

Author’s Note: Wow, today is not a good day for Adriens written by me, huh? Maybe I can post something else soon that's fluffier. Just need to get that ending worked out.

#miraculous ladybug #ladybug #chat noir #akuma attack #international fanworks day 2020 #ifd2020 #sadrien #protective ladybug #ifdrabble #identity reveal #hawkmoth reveal #poor baby #meta #characters reading fanfiction about themselves #or just tags i guess #fanfic #🐼✏️

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vampqueersarchive · 4 years

Text

In a World Uncertain, Say You’ll be my Stone

Okay this is a original fic by me im sorry if its shit i was listening to an Alessia Cara song when I wrote this and used Troye songs in this as well idk its cute and i love it

Rating: G Word count: 4,427 Warnings: Accidental outing Summary: Freddie a makeup youtuber and his best friend Reese a singer decide to fake date after Freddie accidentally outs himself aka FRIENDS TO BOYFRIENDS (This is straight up fluff yo!)

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An annoying buzz was the first thing Freddie heard, a buzz he wanted to stop. Turning over with a groan he pulled his phone to his face, seeing his sister Katherine's name blinking across the too-bright screen. With weak still slow from sleep hands he finally answered with a sigh. "Hello-" He started voice gruff from just waking up. "You have got some explaining to do Mr." Katherine started in a soft, yet demanding tone. "Mum is going to kill you!" "Kat, the love of my life, Mum can kill me later, it's too early." He mumbled sleepily turning his face into the plush pillow. "Freddie, you're on the front page of every magazine, they caught you kissing Hayden." At that moment Freddie felt everything well up in his throat, suddenly all the drinks he had the night before had turned against him. He felt moments away from crying but also getting sick. "No..." he trailed off, "It can't be." he half-whispered to himself and his sister. "Kat, tell mum I'll call later." without letting her reply, he hung up his almost dead iPhone and did what he couldn't do on the phone. Freddie let himself cry, he couldn't believe he let himself get so absorbed into the night before. He could not believe he did what he promised himself he would never do until he felt that the time was right.

Freddie Barnes outed himself.

It wasn’t the fact that Freddie wanted to stay in the closet or the fact that he didn’t feel comfortable being himself. Hell no! That wasn’t Freddie, as most of Freddie's friends could attest to Bi Pride day he wore pink, lavender and blue as if his life depended on it. People. Biphobic people, homophobic people, transphobic, aphobic, nonbinaryphobic people were the ones he couldn’t handle. As strong as Freddie was he couldn’t handle all the hate that would be directed to him. Freddie knew the feeling all too well, back in Doncaster when he came out and all of his friends left him abandoned. Then a few years ago when his best friend came out and the internet flooded with so much love, but love is always drowned out by the unbearable hate. “Hayden,” Freddie spoke in a small brittle voice. Hayden Sanders his best friend who had to deal with all this hate long before, now getting even more all because of a drunken truth or dare game. All because of me Freddie thought to himself, It’s all your fault. Before Freddie could get any more down on himself a soft knock came from the other side of his door. “Come in” he softly spoke trying not to give the person an indication that he had been crying for the better part of an hour. Hayden slowly stepped through the door, looking about as rough as Freddie did. His long curls in an unruly heap that was meant to be a bun. Tear stain’s running from the waterline of his lashes, in long unforgiving streaks down to his chin. His clothes a wrinkled mess, still in the same outfit from the previous night. And worst of all he refused to meet Freddie gaze. “Hayden please look at me.” Freddie pleaded, his wobbly voice betraying him. However, Hayden still would not look into his eyes, he shuffled across the room towards Freddie bed taking Freddie tight in his arms and releasing the sobs Hayden tried so hard to keep in. This sent Freddie reeling, only tangling his fingers into Hayden’s lilac jumper, sending the tears he tried to hold back down his cheeks. “I’m so sorry Fredd.” Hayden whispered in his thick low voice. “I am so sorry.” Either of them could say any words, they only curled closer into the embrace. ~ It felt as though days past when Freddie woke up to the sound of glass clacking together. Sleepily rubbing the sleep from his eyes, pulling himself out of his large round bed and going to look for Hayden. With each step on the cold hardwood floor, Freddie remembered the hours before. The call from Katherine, another step Outing himself, another step Hayden coming crying, another step After being hit with a repeat of everything Freddie quickly made his way to his small kitchen, only to be face to face with Hayden. Hayden wasn’t himself, his usual bright cheeky smile reached his eyes. But now his eyes were dull, and his smile was just a fake one. As if he was trying to be strong for the both of them. “I made you tea, no milk like you like it,” Hayden said sliding a cup towards Freddie, placing his hands on the small island in the middle of the kitchen. “Freddie, I am so sorry. I can fix this I swear.” He pleaded, his smile faltering as his voice choked with the urge to cry. A few tetras weld up in Freddie's eyes only for him to shake his head. “H, there’s nothing you can do. What’s done is done. It was bound to happen at some point.” He shrugged, opening his arm nodding at his best friend to come in for a cuddle. “Now, all those fanfics of us will double, who knows maybe we’ll be some uni students looking for a new year’s kiss,” Freddie smirked as he sipped on his tea, causing Hayden to groan in response. “I didn’t even think of all the people that ship us. It’s rather cute though don’t you think.” Hayden mused, wrapping his arm around the small of Freddie back, making them connect seamlessly as they always do. Freddie giggled nodding, “I quite like the ones where we fake date each other to be honest. But that’s off the record Sanders.” The stern voice only to be compromised by the joyful expression, sending crinkles up to his eyes. A pleasant silence consumed the two of them before the elephant in the room became too much to bear. “Why don’t I call the lads?” Hayden suggested, looking at the wobble of Freddie's lip. “Please?” ~ Hours later and a distraction of pizza and makeovers lefts Freddie feeling better, that was until he decided to check his phone. As soon as he plugged in his rose gold iPhone, he went about his usual routine and clicked on twitter. As the app loaded Freddie nerves kicked in, dropping his phone to the ground causing Hayden, Ashton, and Liam to jump in their seats. As if in an instant, the boys were all wrapped tightly around Freddie, whispering sweet compliments into his hair. This went on until Freddie was finally calmed enough and stopped crying, mumbling a soft thank you in return. “Lads,” Hayden spoke up only nodding his head before it was just Freddie and Hayden in the room. “Freddie, I have an idea.” At this moment Freddie was up for any idea, that even included running through the streets of London with a bi-colored suit that read out “Freddie Barnes Is Bi” in big glittery letters. “Freddie I think we should fake date.” “Fake date?!?” Freddie screeched. “Hayden you have got to be kidding me, you finally got over all this hate about you being pan. You can finally kiss whoever you want in your videos without being bombarded with hate. Why would you do that?” Freddie whispered, looking down at his lap in defeat. “Fredd, I know how it feels going through this alone. I know how scary it can be, Freddie I don’t want my best friend to ever feel the same thing I did. Please let me help you for once.” Racking his brain with every negative outcome that could happen, Freddie suddenly was met with the widest pair of bright green eyes he had ever seen. At that moment Freddie knew all of his hindsight went out the window. “Okay, Hayden.” - It took Freddie a 30 minute laughing fit, followed by incoherent whispers of “I’m going to pretend to date my best friend” before anyone started to worry. Liam tried to help by bringing Freddie out some tea with lavender, to calm his nerves. While all the laughing made Ashton anxious and thus started to laugh too, causing Hayden to have to take a video of Ashton’s full out hollowing. When Liam finally came back in and connived Freddie to drink the tea, the room became far more relaxed. “So, someone please fill us in on what just caused all of that?” Ashton sounded horse from the laughing fit he just put himself through. “Hayden asked Freddie to fake date him,” Liam replied simply as Hayden nodded next to him. As soon as Liam spoke the hot tea came full force back out of Freddie's mouth in a spit take, sending him into a coughing fit. “Wait you knew?” Freddie coughed out. Liam just shrugged taking a sip of the tea he made for himself. “Who do you think gave him the idea? Look, Barnes, before you get all upset it’s better for the both of you. Coming at this purely from a pr standpoint, you can come out, be happy about your self, Hayden can spend more time with you, and either of you have to deal with any of the hate alone.” Ashton nodded, “Plus that means we can finally tweet about all the adorable shite you two do before you started to date.” He chipped in adding air quotes around ‘date’. “Fredd,” Hayden stated, “It’s the least I can do for you, and you have already done so much for me.” It took Freddie sometimes to think over it before he finally managed to agree. “So what’s our plan?” ~ Freddie knew exactly how this was going to go down, a simple coffee date, a few pap pictures, they hold hands news hits the stands, and then Freddie makes his coming out video. Even though having it all written down on paper helped, it also really didn’t. Things weren’t that simple. Freddie knew if they didn’t make this look believable enough it could all come shattering down around them. His nerves were in high gear making it almost impossible to even fill his brows properly much less try to do a flawless winged eyeliner. Holding up his rose lip liner from NYX he noticed his hands shaking making him even more nervous for the day. Adding his pink macaroon butter gloss, and then adding subtle glittered highlighter Freddie knew he was going to do this. And he was going to be the best fake boyfriend anyone could ever be. Well, that was until Freddie arrived at the coffee place. It was a small hole in the wall place that of course, Hayden would pick out. It looked like a try-hard hipster place that just didn’t feel right, maybe it was the deception he was about to do, or just the place itself but Freddie wasn’t sure about the plan any longer. As if on cue Hayden was right next to him, smiling his wide dimpled grin that melted the heart of everyone Hayden met, and Freddie could not be any more thankful for it at that moment. “H, what if we can’t do this?” Freddie whispered, trying to make sure that his fear didn’t lace his voice. Hayden only grinned wider in response, “I got you, I’ll keep you afloat.” Freddie felt his nerves melt instantly. His hands were no longer shaking, his racing heart slowly coming down to a soft tempo and everything clicking into place. - The date went much the same as any other time Freddie and Hayden are together, at least one picture of the other doing something silly, tons of banter and a few compliments (but of course Freddie still had to make at least one jab, now that Hayden is famous he doesn’t need an ego), and of course plenty of platonic kissing and cuddles. Now it felt so much more forced, causing Freddie to shy away every time Hayden’s hand lingered a bit too long. “Fredd,” Hayden spoke up trying to distract him from any negativity he may be having. “It’s just me it’s okay.” He tried to console only to make Freddie shy away more. “H, it just doesn’t feel right, it’s not for us anymore it’s for everyone.” Hayden could only frown in response as the waitress came to pick up their empty cups, “I’m sorry to intrude,” she started, a thick welsh accent rolling off her tongue “Would you mind if I get a picture?” The pair looked towards each other only to be interrupted by her laughing. “No with me silly, the two of you blokes. Hayden, I’ve been listening to your stuff forever, and Freddie you are just so sweet. The both of you just make me so happy, I kinda just want to see you two the same way.” They both agreed to get up from their seats cuddling close to each other for the picture, as she took the photo Freddie looked over and seen what she meant. Hayden looked so happy to be with Freddie, his eyes light up more than the stars in the night sky. Freddie wanted to name one for Hayden at that moment, but his thought was broken when Hayden asked she send the picture to him on twitter. Freddie knew at that moment everything was going to be fine. - “Fredd,” Hayden hummed out, as they walked out hand in hand into the chilled autumn air of London. Freddie only made a nose in return nuzzling his face into the sleeve of the brown leather jack Hayden sported. The conversation, however, was abruptly halted by the sounds of the camera’s clicking, and whispers of the people behind them. Freddie could only sigh in response before he smiled up at Hayden. “Come on, Boo lets give them something to take a picture of.” Before Freddie could comprehend what was happening, Hayden had to take Freddie and twirled him around, both of them giggling and squealing with delight as their two bodies left almost no space between them. There was a clear crimson blush lining both of there cheeks as another snap went off. Maybe they could do this. ~ The next day Freddie woke up to another annoying buzz of his phone, of course, he knew exactly who it was this time. Hayden's contact name popped up on the screen, Freddie couldn't help but smile and feel so much love when he saw it. “Hel-” He was cut off by screaming in the background from none other than Ashton. “Boo,” Hayden whined into the phone. “They released the pictures and Ashton won't believe me that we aren't dating.” Even though the phone Freddie could tell he was pouting. The usual Hayden pout where he tried to look all angry yet sad, and end up just looking like an oversized toddler. “Put the wanker on the phone,” Freddie giggled rolling his eyes. The phone switched over and a very excited scream erupted through the phone. “Holy shit, Ash can you be even more excited for a little fake relationship.” “Fredd you can't lie to me. I got those Irish instincts and you lot are lying.” Ashton huffed out in pride. Freddie could only smirk at the wildness of his friend. “Yeah, yeah Mr. Ireland. Give the phone back to curls now will ya.” “Give the phone back to curls! Now that's going on twitter.” Ashton shouted as the phone was handed back to Hayden. “Boo I thought you said you were going to fix this,” Hayden said in a mock sad tone. “But it's Ash, what will ya do?” Hayden chuckled out his thick voice spoke in a slow soothing hum, sending a pleasant wave of warm down Freddie's spine. Freddie nodded humming in response before he realized why Hayden called in the first place. “Did the pictures turn out well?” “Fredd don't worry everyone is talking about them, I'm pretty sure Frayden is trending on twitter right now. But I was meaning to ask you something?” “And what would that be the love of my life?” “Hah ha very funny Fredd, but Liam thought it would be a good idea if we did more stuff together. Ya know after you make your coming out video.” That hadn't even crossed Freddie's mind having to make that video, the video where he couldn't turn back. The video where he had to lie and say his best friend was the person he was dating. “Yea,” he whispered into the phone. “Hayden can you be there when I record the video, please I need it.” “You don't have to ask Fredd, you're my best friend. Our friendship comes first.” A smile spread across Freddie's cheeks sending crinkles to the corner of his bright blue eyes. “Come over tomorrow okay?” - Freddie spends the day procrastinating, usually, that meant going on twitter but that was the last place he even wanted to look at. Instead, he decided to do something big tomorrow. He was going to do a coming outlook. Putting on his old vans and a pink knitted beanie he went to the closest drug store and found everything he needed from NYX. Picking up white eyeliner, the ultimate shadow palette, and the matte lip cream in soule, Moscow, and Paris. As he headed for the check out a young boy came up to him and hugged him without any warning. “Hi, Freddie!” The young boy chirped in excitement, “My mum is letting me get makeup thanks to you!” The boy smiled his whole face lighting up. Freddie couldn't hold back the pride he felt in helping this little boy become confident and feel okay to wear makeup. “That's amazing little lad, make sure to-” Freddie was cut off by the little boy finishing his line “Get Nyx because Nyx is best!” the boy smiled hugging Freddie one last time before he went off to get his make up. Knowing by just having his makeup channel he made that much of a difference he knew coming out could only make an even better one. ~ “Thanks for watching everyone and I'll see you next time.” Freddie smiled huffing a sigh as soon as Hayden turned off the camera. “Fredd that was amazing you did so well.” Hayden grinned opening his arms pulling Freddie into a tight hug. “But I hope you realize you're gonna have to do a pan look for the next pride.” “Nahh, you can watch the tutorial.” Freddie giggled pulling away from the hug, finally getting to look in the mirror without so much anxiety running through him. Freddie felt amazing, light pink and purple on his upper lid, flowed into a blue making his eye pop and a white-winged linger flicking out to a dramatic curve. His lips mimicking the bi flag and the sliver and purple glitter lining his cheeks. He then looked up behind him where Hayden was sanding smiling at his best friend with so much pride. “Thank you for being here, H.” “Anything for you Boo,” Hayden said his thick warm voice filling the room. “Liam wanted me to talk to you about something though.” Freddie's mood dropped instantly thinking that he would have to go through his alone. All of his fears welling upon his face as Hayden looked back over to Freddie with a frown. “Fredd, no don't worry. It's nothing bad I promise.” He said taking Freddie's hand and leading him to sit on the bed. “He said we should try kissing in front of the paps, or even when we film one of the videos or when you come to my concert with in the next two months..” He trailed off slowly toning his voice into a mumble. Freddie didn't really know how to respond. He gently squeezed Hayden's hand to try and clam him a bit. “Liam wants to make it look natural?” Freddie asked tracing his finger along the lines of Hayden's anchor. Hayden could only blush and nod, “Um... Yea.” “Well let's practice.” Freddie leaned in first, tipping his head slightly to the left as Hayden leaned to the right. They both fluttered closed, as their lips connected in what Freddie felt like a spark. Freddie hands trailed up and tangled his fingers into the ends of his curls. Hayden moved his arms to wrap around Freddie's waist. The feeling of safety and love spread throughout Freddie traveling to his fingertips. His fingers felt like sparks as he tried to pull Hayden closer when their lips worked together in what felt like a perfectly tuned orchestra playing in a beautiful symphony. To Freddie, the world felt as if the world stood still until the moment they pulled apart. The pulled apart blinking at each other in a form of shock and content, giggling like school kids who kissed their crush out in the schoolyard. A blush spread across Hayden's cheeks only causing Freddie to smile wider. “Come on, Romeo” Freddie started. “Let's film our first video.” ~ The first month went by with ease for the most part. The fans and paps loved their chemistry. They became the most talked about couple in all of 2016 Kimaye be damned. The fans loved when the two of them started to live stream, and even when Hayden made Freddie sing one of his songs. (The hashtag Frayden Sing Youth trended for almost two days.) However, with all the love came hate. Many people would come on Freddie channel and just say he was using Hayden for fame. Others would send biphobic messages to Hayden over Freddie only to get blocked in return. But for the most part, they were accepted. Ashton wasn't helping on the casual dating front though. Every time the lads were together Ashton would tweet something cute they said or even post a picture. Ashton convinced their fans at one point they were living together and adopted a kitten when he posted a picture of Freddie kissing Hayden's cheek as Hayden held up a small sphynx kitten in his hand. In all everything was starting to become Freddie life. Every Tuesday film two videos of his own and maybe one with Hayden. Wednesday was their best friend breakfast date that over the last month turned into a fake dating date. And on the weekends Freddie helped Hayden filming for his new music video series. And today was finally the release of Wild and also the day of the concert. In all Freddie felt a bubble of excitement well up. To celebrate the event Freddie and Hayden were going to do a live stream of them dying their hair matching colors before the event. It was 10 o'clock and Hayden still wasn't there. The hour soon changed over and Hayden still wasn't there. Freddie didn't know what to feel, he tried calling and it was straight to voice mail, he tried texting and no response. It was only 3 hours until the video premiere so Freddie texted once more before starting the live stream. The stream ended as the video went up and Freddie couldn't be more stressed. He kept running his hands through his new bubble gum pink hair as he refreshed his phone waiting and hoping for Hayden. But no call no text, he got nothing from Hayden. That's when the night came crashing in when Freddie got a text from Liam saying “Hayden's sorry.” - Day's went by and there was still no message from Hayden, everyone was tweeting asking when the next live stream would be, or even asking if the two of them were okay. It took a full week before Freddie shut down on himself. Every time he looked in the mirror and saw pink it made him want to shave his head. When he saw the tattoos, he had to pull on a sweater before he would start to cry. One drunken night Freddie could not hold back his feelings anymore, so he called Ashton. “Fredd, hey are you okay?” Ashton's voice seemed just weak as Freddie did until he realized it was 3 am. “Ash, I made my best friend hate me, he won't even talk to me anymore. Why did I do this? Why did I say yes to him.” Freddie sobbed before his words became incoherent. The other end of the line was quite before Freddie whispered in a wrecked voice from crying, “Ashton?” “Barnes,” Ashton started. “H fell in love with you.” ~ Freddie woke up again the same way he woke up two months prior. His phone buzzing but this time it was Hayden. Freddie picked up but he couldn't talk he felt so weak like he couldn't. “Fredd,” Hayden whispered in a soft rough voice from what sounded to be crying. “Can I come in?” “Of course.” and with that, Freddie heard his front door unlock as Hayden made his way into the room. Freddie met him there opening the door and let him in. “So,” Hayden looked town paying with the hem of his pullover. “I guess the cats out of the bag.” Freddie laughed only going back to the stony expression he started with. “Don't you dare make me laugh Sanders I'm still mad at you.” the room went silent as Hayden looked up to meet Freddie's eyes. “Why didn't you tell me?” “Because, why would you love me back? You're Freddie Barnes, you are perfect and amazing, and my best friend. I never meant for it to get this far.” He said voice wobbling try to hold back his tears. “H, you're always going to be my friend, but-” “No Boo, don't 'but' me” Hayden pleaded but before he could get any more out Freddie pulled him into a kiss. “You're always going to be my friend first, and my boyfriend second.” - The two stayed intertwined for the next few hours, nothing could get in between them. They felt content in each other's arms as they talked about nothing and play with each other makeup. The two of them feeling so happy and comfortable with each other they knew it had to be fiat. It was days later when they finally deiced to post a picture. Hours before Hayden finally dyed his hair and they thought it would be the best time to show it off. The picture was posed with Freddie's pink hair and Hayden's soft mint hair as they sat cross-legged holding hands while they kissed then captioned it “Friends before anything else.”

~Fin~

#screaming #i am having a name crisis rn so no name #my writing #original work #original fiction #writing #writingblr #authors on tumblr #authors

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