#three months later…… | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

adelaidedrubman · 3 months

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COMFORT MY CHARACTER. (from this prompt list) + jestiny +☀️ - a nice day outside (requested by @simplegenius042) + 🧸 - a soft plushie (requested by @blissfulalchemist) + ✋ - a hand carding gently through their hair (requested by both!)

notes: hello hello, look who is coming in three months later to finally answer these. i am sorry for the delay and ofc no pressure to read, but i decided this would be good to pivot and post for valentine’s day. also, avoiding spoilers but if you want a visualization on 🧸 you can find it here. this is set in hook, line, and sinker verse, but the only context from it you really need is that john and jestiny are fake dating. wordcount: 2.3k warnings: animal death, fleeting detailed fantasies of violence against humans, and threats to do violence to humans. pretty tame all things considered.

A gentle breeze kicks up to ease the heat settling into Jestiny’s cheeks and tickle her jaw with the feathery ends of her hair, and as she draws in a deep inhale of the scent of pine carried on the air it dawns on her that this truly is her definition of a perfect day.

The sun beats down on the back of her neck to bake the skin and draw a pleasant coating of sweat that flushes cool with the wind. The glittering waters of Snowshoe Lake lap gently at the thick heels of her boots stuck into mud.

Three trout float defeated and bled dry in the cooler she pulls a fresh beer from, a fourth cutting ripples into the water as it moves to flirt with her hook. The glass on her bottle of Two Hearted Ale kisses her inner thigh with its crisp coating of frost as she props it against her leg.

Hank is tucked away in the bib pocket of her overalls and firmly in the grips of a food coma courtesy of the extra scoop of bait Adelaide threw in for him, pointy pink fingers still curled around the batch of crickets he grew too full to finish.

And any threat of tranquility stagnating to tedium is kept at bay by the sudden plop of her bobber to sink into the water, causing Jestiny to perk up and brace herself just in time for the satisfying tension of weight pulling against her rod.

Jestiny licks her lower lip as she begins to reel, muscles of her arms tensing and tugging on instinct with the perfect amount of pressure to meet the force of the fish in a smooth, elegant dance — a back and forth quickly rewarded as her catch leaps from the water. An opportunity she gladly seizes, reeling it to its doom.

She feels Hank begin to slowly stir against her chest as she pierces her knife through the fish’s brain, his head poking from her pocket for his whiskers to brush against her chin as she drops the trout into her cooler.

A somehow still surviving cricket leaps from Hank’s clutches as he unfurls his fist in a waking stretch, landing at the top of Jessie’s head as the rest of the insects fall lifelessly into the depths of her pocket.

“Hank,” she chides without malice, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she grins down at the opossum. “What did I tell you about goin’ and wastin’ bait?”

Hank claws his way up Jestiny’s chest as she rewards herself with a hearty gulp of beer, climbing over her shoulder to cling to the back of her head and reach to pluck the cricket from her hair and plop it into his mouth.

And to Jessie’s relief he doesn’t scramble back down to grab for the bait she slides onto her hook, instead remaining perched on her shoulder as she casts her line, his fingers tangled in her hair.

Hank combs the fingers through short locks as Jestiny leans back to settle in and watch the water, his snout nudging against her as he sniffs for more bugs, licking to groom out anything he finds.

His sharp little claws send a relaxing tingle along Jestiny’s scalp as they rake along the skin, gliding down her spine to ease the tension from her shoulders.

Yes, in Jestiny’s mind it is truly a perfect day. And with the bright blue of the sky stretching out without a cloud in sight, she felt certain that nothing could happen to ruin —

The low rumble of an engine tears Jestiny from her thoughts, followed by the thud of a car door slamming that tells her the driver is close.

“The fuck,” Jessie mutters under her breath as she glances to her phone. “Shouldn’t be a fuckin’ soul around here but —”

“Ah, there’s the fisherwoman I’ve been looking for!” a devastating familiar voice calls, the surface of the water suddenly busy with the ripples of fish swimming away.

“No,” Jestiny says before she’s even turned around. She jumps to her feet to face the man strolling towards her and shout louder, “No. Absolutely not!”

“You certainly know how to give a lover a warm welcome,” John replies as he plants himself in front of Jessie.

“Never fuckin’ call yourself that,” she says with a grimace, taking suspicious note of the giant, glossy gift bag slung over his shoulder. “Never call anyone that,” she tacks on, a disgusted shudder texturing the words. “And never fuckin’ bother me when I’m fishing,” she snaps. “How did —” she runs a frustrated hand through her hair, pushing it back into the face of the opossum still clinging there. “How did you even find my spot?! You stalkin’ me now?”

A sharp grin carves itself into his face to push back the modest rounds of his cheeks and deepen the sag of his laugh lines, his eyes lighting up with an irritatingly proud twinkle.

He slides a hand beneath his vest, pulling out a sleek smartphone with a cross insignia on its case. “Scathing negative reviews of Snowshoe Lake suddenly popped up last night on Fishbrain, FishHub, ANGLR — even AllTrails and 27 Crags mentioned the nearby mountain pass being subpar.”

“You saw somewhere with shitty reviews and figured you belonged there?”

“I figured it was the work of my clever, reclusive little angler slyly marking her territory.” A slow, dramatic bat-batting of his eyelashes punctuates the statement. “And lo and behold, here you are.”

The hinge of her jaw; her nose twitches. “I like my privacy,” she drawls slowly, so that he may understand. “Now that we’ve gone over the how, maybe we can move on to why the fuck you’re here? And when you’ll be fucking leaving?”

If it’s within the next ninety seconds, perhaps she can still salvage her perfect day.

“Why, you haven’t been keeping track?” His tongue clicks against his teeth with a furrow of his brow in a contrived display of woundedness. “We’re celebrating our one month anniversary today!”

She snarls and bugs her eyes. “Great! Our fake relationship reached a fake milestone I wouldn’t even celebrate if it was real!”

“Do you think that attitude could have been a contributing factor to the death of your real relationship?”

She thinks how beautiful her fishing knife would look lovingly buried to the hilt in his jugular, the sweet glug glug glug he would make choking on his own blood. She thinks about how pretty he would look with that sharp grin sliced to gape and droop like a catfish’s mouth.

“I think interrupting my fishin’ time is about to be a contributing factor in your death,” she settles on. “The only way you’re gonna be any good to me around here is if I chop you up into little bits and use you as bait for my fucking hook.”

“Well, for all that empty posturing you’d think you would better understand the importance of keeping up appearances,” he muses as he rifles through the bag at his side. “We’re pretending to be a happy couple — the kind that would spend their anniversary together.”

“Well, nobody’s here! So how ’bout we don’t and say we —”

Jestiny is interrupted by a hand shoving a bundle of red roses against her chest, full enough to block her vision so that she must snatch them by the tissue paper and ribbon wrapped stems to lower enough for her to glare at the man stepping back to gaze at her with a self-assured smile.

“Aw, John,” she coos with a sweet flutter of her eyelashes and beaming smile. “You shouldn’t have,” she fusses as she leans in to stick her nose in the petals and inhale. “You really shouldn’t have. Because anyone who’d actually been dating me for a month would know —” she hurls the bouquet to the ground, stomping a foot down atop it. “That I! Fucking! Hate! Getting! Flowers!” she screams as she grinds the blossoms into the dirt beneath her boot.

“Ah, well,” his unaffected sigh draws her attention to the repetitive shuttering sound filling the background. “Luckily, I don’t think anyone would suspect as much from looking at you.”

She looks up from crushed petals to see John holding up his phone with screen pointed towards her, her own sarcastically smiling face as she clasps a bouquet greeting her.

“And image is what matters,” he purrs, stepping back and tucking his phone into his vest pocket just as she swings for it.

“Then how about you get the fuck out of here before I wreck that phone and that pretty face of yours?”

He positively glows at the threat. “Come now, you didn’t really think I’d call it quits at a puny dozen roses, do you?”

“I’ll shove the next bouquet so far up your ass your mouth is gonna win an award for best rose garden!”

“Not roses,” he replies, holding out a bright red heart-shaped box.

“Great,” she grumbles, snatching the box. “Another thing I don’t fucking wa —”

He catches her hand as it moves to throw the box to the ground. “Just open it.”

“I don’t fucking like chocolates,” she replies, holding no particular distaste for chocolates. “Especially this stupid fucking February 15th drugstore clearance aisle —”

He lifts the lid himself with a huff.

She sees there are in fact no chocolates in the container. Instead, its five sections are filled with a menagerie of bait — a tangled ball of earthworms in the left round at the top, a school of dried minnows in the right, one pile of crickets and one of grasshoppers in the center, and a cluster of doughballs at the pointed bottom.

“Mm,” she grunts in begrudging appreciation. She pinches the leg of a grasshopper between her fingers, lifting it above her head to offer up to Hank before she grabs the lid from John to place back atop the box.

“Doesn’t make no goddamn sense to have doughballs and insects in the same damn container — where am I finding catfish and trout together outside of a stocked pond?” She snorts with laughter at the ridiculous thought of fishing at a stocked pond before clearing her throat and setting the heart-shaped box down by her cooler. “Still, I guess it keeps me from using you to bait my hook.”

That proud glow of his brightens until he’s absolutely luminous at her walking back of the death threat.

“Don’t oversell the proclamations of love, Jessie dearest — it has only been a month,” he says with a dreamy sigh, leaning into her as if blooming towards the sun itself.

“You wanna quit while you’re ahead?” she offers with a tilt of her head towards his car.

“Rule of threes, my love,” John answers breathily. “What would flowers and chocolates be without a cute stuffed animal?”

Her eyebrow twitches. “Should have quit while you’re ahead,” she snaps. “I am a twenty-eight year old woman, not a schoolgirl looking for a teddy bear to hug at —”

Another flourish of his hand cuts her off, palm outstretched to display a soft plush of pink and gray.

“Not a teddy bear,” he purrs.

It’s not a teddy bear. Its round little ears are bare felt and marbled pink and black, the beads of its eyes pinpoint tiny beads, bubblegum pink tail curling around its body. It’s —

“An opossum,” she mutters to herself, a small, giddy huff of a laugh passing through her lips against her will. She brushes her fingers against its soft faux fur before she can stop herself, and John’s free hand reaches out to cover hers and wrap it around the plush to hold it on her own before retracting his.

She coughs and shoots him an obligatory glare before looking back to the opossum plush, eyes drawn to take notice of the opening in its middle — finding a second tiny opossum head peeking out.

Her eyes widen, and in spite of herself she laughs out under her breath, “It’s got a baby in its little pouch…”

She pulls the smaller stuffed opossum from its place nestled inside the larger plush, holding both up in proud display to no one in particular.

She feels the scraping of claws and a the tickle of tiny, sniffing exhales against her cheek as Hank climbs down to perch atop her shoulder and inspect.

His clawed little hand reaches out to grasp the smaller opossum, holding it to himself in ownership, then tucking it into the pocket of Jestiny’s overalls before climbing down her chest to curl up beside it.

“Ha!” Another laugh bursts out before she can stop it, looking up with a delighted grin on damnable reflex to check that her company saw the precious sight she did.

Blue eyes sparkling bright with pride meet her. Jessie’s cheeks sear under their unbearable heat.

She clears her throat.

“Well, Hank likes it,” she mumbles, spinning on her heels to turn her back to him as she tucks the larger plush into her overalls. “Gotta keep it, I guess.”

“Is that all it takes?” John asks, his breath falling hot along the back of her neck as he crowds behind her with every step she takes back towards the shore, like a trout chasing a lure. “Perhaps Hank can put in a good word for me, then?”

“Opossums can’t talk, dumbass,” she scoffs in reply as she reaches into the heart-shaped box to pull out an earthworm to slip onto her hook. “And people who expect to be allowed to hang around while I fish shouldn’t either.”

Another dreamy sigh and a rustle of clothing against grass as weight sinks beside her in the mud.

She focuses herself on the pleasant plop of her bobber landing in water, breathing in the crisp mountain air and ignoring the encroaching warmth of a knee casually pressing against her own as she spreads her legs to shore up her fishing stance.

Perhaps her perfect day would have to be chalked up as another one that got away.

An arm stretches out behind her to press its palm onto the ground on the opposite side, its owner’s head indiscreetly turned to the side to stare at her rather than the water, and this time she chooses to blame the heat crawling along her cheeks on the afternoon sun rather than the scrutiny of his adoring gaze.

But a bad day of fishing beats a perfect day of anything else, after all.

#also was my excuse to force myself into playing around in present tense more thinking ‘‘oh this will be quick and easy so’’#three months later……#oc: hank the opossum #oc: deputy jestiny ellen #otp: stop bothering these nice folks #praying to the valentine’s gods this queues correctly

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