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alltheirdamn · 2 days

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Killing Me Softly | (Joel x teacher!f!reader)

Chap. 5 Nevermore

Chp. 5 Summary: It's hard to understand why everything feels so right. Rating: 18+ Explicit MDNI Word Count: 5.5k Warnings: Pre-outbreak AU, language, heavy kissing, unprotected piv sex, semi-rough sex, creampie, praise kink, (kinda) size kink, aftercare, fluff and a LOT of angst, light banter, lots of emotions, mentions of past trauma, brief flashback of trauma, another cliffhanger (sorry) A/N: Well, if you're here, I hope you're prepared for what's coming. A HUGE shoutout to @loonmartell for helping co-conspire the trajectory of this story. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it as always <3

Masterlist | Ko-fi

I think he’s already falling in love with you. I think he’s already falling in love with you. I think he’s already falling in love with you. I think he’s already falling in—

“Miss Smith?”

Your head jerked up at the sound, and the pencil you were drawing circles with fell against your desk. Bradley, one of your students, was standing at the edge of your desk with his test in hand.

“Sorry about that, sweetie,” you smiled, extending a hand. “Thank you.”

Bradley eyed you curiously before turning and skipping back to his desk. You dragged a hand over your face, wanting to crawl into the furthest corner of the world and never be seen again. Beth’s words had been plaguing you for days since you called her. Over and over again, they annihilated your thoughts, a constant broken record that you couldn’t shut off. You still had your nightly calls with Joel, talking past midnight and falling asleep together, but you kept making excuses not to see him.

“I’ve got lesson plans to make,” you lied.

“I’ll help,” Joel had offered.

“You’re a distraction.”

“I ain’t that bad,” he huffed.

The next night, you lied and said you were going out with Maria, which was an even worse lie since you were avoiding her at all costs. Telling Beth the news was one thing, but telling Maria was another matter. She was nosey and a bit too loud-mouthed to trust. The last thing you wanted was for the entire faculty to know your dirty secrets. Joel had to remain a secret—at least for now.

It’s not like you wanted to avoid Joel; you were just scared. You were not ready for this new territory, and if Beth was anywhere near correct in her assumptions, it only made you want to shy away more. The only problem was parent-teacher conferences this week, meaning you’d have to see Joel and Sarah…together.

The class bell rang, and your free period between classes began. You dropped your head on the desk and took a few deep breaths, trying to wrangle some semblance of calm back into your body. The final class of the day would be Sarah’s, and you’d be lying if you said you were prepared to see her. The blaring reminder that her dad had fucked you sore over the weekend still hung over your head, and you couldn’t help but feel slightly guilty for it. How was your fall break, Sarah? Oh yeah, mine was great. Your dad fucked me so hard I ended up having a complete breakdown.

Fuck.

You wanted the day to be over.

The free period went by much faster than you wanted, and as you watched the next slew of kids take their seats, you made a conscious effort not to stare at Sarah as she walked in. She wore her usual smile, the impression of her dimples digging into her cheeks. Some wild thought popped into your head that you had no time to recover from: if you and Joel went any further, God help you, you’d be Sarah’s step-mom one day. Your stomach rolled with nausea as you tried to will those thoughts away. Joel wouldn’t stick around that long; you were a lost cause. There was no chance that would happen. Right?

Clearing your throat, you rose from your desk and made your way over to the projector to set up the lesson for the day. Since the school year was nearing Halloween, you decided it would be fun to teach Edgar Allen Poe, completely forgetting you had chosen “The Raven”—which was about losing someone. This would have a bite to it that you weren’t ready for.

“Okay, everyone,” you announced. “Did we all finish the reading assignment this week?”

There were a few nods and murmurs of agreement, and you quickly shifted to the first few slides of your presentation.

“Alright, so who can tell me the overall theme for Poe’s ‘The Raven’?”

Georgia, one of your top students, shot her hand up without a beat.

“Yes, Georgia?”

“It’s about his grief for losing Lenore,” she answered.

“Good,” you smiled. “Can anyone tell me what other theme the poem contains?”

“Madness!” Another student chimed in, causing an uproar of laughter amongst the students.

“Okay, okay, settle down. Very good, you guys.”

You switched to the next slide, staring blankly at the words typed out. Lenore is gone forever. Something struck you as you silently read it, realizing you weren’t too far off from Poe in his grief. Although Bennett wasn’t dead, he wasn’t coming back. That fact hadn’t hurt as deeply throughout the last few weeks, especially with Joel around, but it still threw salt in the open wounds still scattered over your heart.

“In stanza two,” you cleared your throat. “In stanza two, Poe refers to Lenore as ‘nameless,’ which can imply that she has died, and he’s now consumed with grief. Where else did you guys find his grief prominent?”

Georgia quickly raised her hand again, and you motioned for her to speak.

“In stanza four, he talks about his dreams, which I think he means he’s dreaming of her to return to him. But if she’s dead, there’s no way she’s going to come back,” Georgia said.

Fuck. You felt the sting of tears rim your eyes and briefly paused to gather your bearings. Bennett left. He left, and you had spent years dreaming he would return.

“Good,” you choked out.

You glanced around the room, your eyes connecting with Sarah’s. It took all your strength not to break down and cry as she studied you with the same concerned furrow in her brows as her dad would do.

Clicking to the next slide, you exhaled, focusing on the following theme to discuss. Madness.

“Now, with the theme of madness, where do we see this begin? Obviously, the dreams can be interpreted as his descent into madness, but what else do we find?” You asked.

To your detriment, Sarah was the one to raise her hand.

“Sarah,” you sighed, nodding.

“It’s the raven,” she said plainly. “The raven is what drives him mad.”

“What does he do to drive Poe mad?” You questioned.

“The raven only says one word,” she explained. “And that word drives him mad until the end of the poem.

“And why does it drive him mad?”

Sarah shifted in her seat, looking around at her classmates before responding.

“Because it’s the answer Poe doesn’t want to hear. Poe doesn’t want to be reminded that Lenore is dead, but that’s the only response the raven will give.”

You were swaying in place, trying to hold yourself together as the memories started ricocheting back into your mind. Now wasn’t the time to collapse, not in front of twenty students staring at you, confused and concerned. You only responded with a nod and flipped the projector off.

“Good job, you guys. Now, does anyone have any questions on this unit? Any questions about the stanza format or the themes?”

Sarah raised her hand again.

“Did his madness kill him?” She asked.

“Who?”

“Poe.”

“Oh, um, no. Well, it’s a mystery, really. Some people say he died of delirium, so, I guess, madness. But other people speculate he drank himself to death.”

The class grew morbidly quiet, which made it harder for you to continue. No one else spoke up after Sarah, so you resorted to handing out the quiz and sinking back into your desk chair.

One by one, the students came up to turn in their quiz, and you averted your gaze each time with a nonchalant ‘thank you.’ When the final bell finally sounded through the room, you hardly had the energy to wave goodbye.

Sarah was the last to leave, and that same concerned look lingered on her face as she shuffled out.

That night, you didn’t pick up the phone when Joel called. You stared as it rang repeatedly, watching the light fade from the screen when the ringing stopped. You buried your head under the covers and tried to sleep, but then the nightmares started.

You woke up to your alarm, hyperventilating and drenched in sweat. Squinting at the morning sun streaming through the blinds, you grabbed your phone to check the time. Your fingers froze as you read the screen.

Seven missed calls from Joel

Two voicemails from Joel

With shaky fingers, you pressed play on the first voicemail.

“Hey baby, it’s me. I just wanna make sure you’re okay. I’m hopin’ you’re just asleep, but if you’re up, please call me.”

Then you played the next.

“Baby, it’s me again. I miss you, and I’m worried ‘bout you. Please don’t shut me out, okay? I just wanna hear your voice and hear ‘bout your day. If you don’t wanna talk, that's okay. I understand. Just please lemme know you’re alright. I’ll drive my ass out to you if I need to just to make sure you’re okay. Call me when you get this. G’night, baby.”

You dug your knuckles into your eyes to try and force the tears back. Last night, you had the worst of the nightmares: the memory of something you tried to forget. You hadn’t touched that memory in so long. It was just the brutal realization you were truly at fault for everything with Bennett. No matter how badly you wanted to blame him, it was always your fault.

Glancing back at your phone, you rechecked the time: 7:35. Fuck, you were running late, and you really didn’t want to call Joel back right now. At least not right now. You’d muster the energy and strength to do it later, but you needed to gather yourself and get ready for work right now. Tossing off the sweat-slick sheets, you rushed into the bathroom and quickly showered. You couldn’t bother to put makeup on, so you opted to go without it and found a simple dress to wear. It was still in the high eighties in Austin, and a dress was the easiest option for the day.

Scrambling for your purse and keys, you ran to the garage to start your car and head to the school.

It wasn’t until you pulled into your parking spot that you realized you left your phone on the nightstand.

“Okay, what’s going on?” Maria questioned, sipping her lukewarm coffee.

She had nagged you into spending your free period in her classroom, demanding that you tell her everything that you had been withholding. You sat on the edge of her desk, your dress flowing over your knees as you stared out her class windows.

“Nothing, Maria,” you lied.

She said your name sternly, forcing your eyes to snap to hers. Her usual chipper demeanor was replaced with that ‘mother’ look, her lips pursed and eyes narrowed.

“Something is going on,” she pressed. “Could have something to do with Mr. Miller?”

“Maybe,” you mumbled, fidgeting with the hem of your dress.

“You did it, huh?” She raised a brow.

You exhaled heavily, nodding your head—no point in lying now.

“We talked on the phone the entire break, and when I got home, he insisted on taking me on a date. Then one thing led to another… and yeah, we had sex.”

Maria squealed, clapping her hands and grinning wide. You stared at her blankly, unamused by her reaction to your words.

“This isn’t a good thing, Maria,” you said pointedly.

“Why wouldn’t it be? You’re finally putting yourself out there! Oh my god, was it good?”

“It was,” you sighed. “It was good—really good. He’s so sweet and caring.”

“I feel like there’s a ‘but’ in there somewhere,” she interjected.

“But I can’t let it go any further,” you finished.

Maria leaned forward and placed her hand on your knee.

“Does he make you happy?” She asked softly.

“So fucking happy, Maria. I hate it.”

“You deserve to be happy, sweetie. That’s all I’ve been saying for years, and now you have it! Don’t force it to fail before it even begins. I saw the way he looked at you at the father-daughter dance. You can’t fake that.”

“I know. I know. I just—ugh,” you slid off the desk with a groan. “He’s too good for me. I’m still trying to get over Bennett and everything that happened. He doesn’t deserve to be on the receiving end of all my misery. That’s not fair to him.”

You were pacing around the room, your eyes darting between the science posters hanging along the walls of Maria’s classroom. You heard her desk chair scrape against the floor as she approached you. She gripped you by the shoulders and leveled you with a heavy stare, but her eyes remained soft.

“He’s still around, right? I don’t think he’s going anywhere, sweetie. If anything, I think he’s in it for the long haul.”

You didn’t know how to respond, so you leaned into her, letting her wrap you up in a motherly embrace. She rubbed circles against your back, hushing you as you wept quietly.

The rest of the day passed by in a numbing blur. You packed your things quietly and headed to your car, ready to drown yourself in a glass of wine.

Joel’s truck was parked in front of your house as you turned the corner onto your street. His tall figure was leaning against the driver’s door; his eyes focused on your car as you pulled into the driveway. You inhaled sharply before putting your car in park, mentally preparing yourself for whatever anger he might unleash.

You barely shut the car door before Joel had his arms around you, tugging you into a warm embrace. You couldn’t make sense of it; why wasn’t he mad? He should be angry at you.

“Joel?” you whispered, your fingers twisting into his shirt. He smelt of cedarwood and smoke, the lingering scent of the workday still on his clothes.

“I was so fuckin’ worried ‘bout you,” he muttered into your hair. “Been tryin’ to get ahold of you all day.”

“I left my phone at home this morning,” you explained. “I listened to your voicemails from last night. I’m sorry I didn’t call back. I was just running late this morning.”

“Why didn’t you pick up last night?’ He asked, pulling away.

“I needed some space. I’m just trying to figure this all out. I want you—I want this. I just don’t know how to be fully vulnerable. I know that’s silly to say since I’ve cried every time I’ve seen you.” You laughed at the thought of it.

“You coulda just told me that, baby. I would’ve understood,” Joel sighed.

“You’re not mad at me?”

“Of course not,” he smiled softly. “Had me worryin’ like crazy, but I ain’t mad. I know this is all new, and you’re scared. Just don’t shut me out, ‘kay? I wanna talk to you and understand what’s goin’ on with you. I told you I wanna work on it with you.”

“I’m s—.”

Joel was pressing his lips against yours before you could say those two words. The kiss was all-consuming and tender, strong enough to erase every thought in your mind. Your mouths moved in unison, tongues intertwined and exploring. It was dizzying to be kissed this fervently; the first kiss couldn’t hold a torch to this moment. You tangled your fingers into the curls at the base of his neck, slanting your lips to open yourself even more to him. Joel’s hands twisted into the fabric of your dress that hugged your hips and pulled you tighter against his body. You whimpered at the feeling of his cock straining in his jeans, and he hauled you upwards until you were wrapping your legs around his waist.

Spinning you around, he pinned you to the metal of your car door, breaking away from your mouth to kiss down your neck. Was it possible to be branded by a dozen kisses? He left a trail of sweltering kisses over every exposed part of your upper body, and all you could do was pant and moan helplessly. To hell with the neighborhood and their lingering eyes; the world around you could collapse, and you’d still be clinging to his body.

“I told you I didn’t wanna hear those apologies,” Joel muttered against the hollow of your neck.

“What are you gonna do about it, Joel?” You moaned, his teeth grazing your collarbone.

“All I want right now is to hear you screamin’ my name, so you better invite me inside before I fuck you right here.”

“Jesus Christ,” you whispered.

“Wrong name, baby.”

With one strong arm braced around your back and a firm hand on your ass, Joel carried you out of the driveway and through the open garage. You wrapped your arms around his neck, pressing open-mouthed kisses against the bare patches in his beard. Joel stumbled into the living room and sat you on the edge of the couch. You clung to him, refusing to lay back, too afraid to disconnect from his body. There was something so addicting, so right about being in his arms—almost familiar.

“Y’look so beautiful in this dress, baby,” Joel breathed. “Turn around.”

You unattached yourself from him, spinning until your thighs pushed against the leather of the couch. Joel’s hands roamed over your calves, dragging your dress up until it piled against your lower back. You gasped as his fingers tore apart your underwear, the scraps falling down your legs and piling at your feet. It was embarrassing how wet you were already, your slick coating your inner thighs.

“Joel,” you whined as he swiped a finger through your wet folds.

“Use your words,” he hummed, slowly pushing in two fingers.

“I need you, Joel.” He curled his fingers against the spot that left you breathless, coaxing you to speak more. “Need it rough—please.”

You needed to feel how bad he needed you; you needed to show him you wanted him, even if it meant doing it without saying it aloud.

“Y’want it rough, baby? I can do that. If it’s too much, you tell me, okay?”

“Okay,” you exhaled.

Joel pulled his fingers from you, bringing them to your mouth and smearing your arousal over your parted lips. You hummed as you tasted yourself, pushing your ass back into him. You heard the clang of his belt and the soft sound of his jeans hitting the floor before he swiped his cock across your slick entrance.

“Don’t be gentle,” you moaned.

“Anythin’ you want, baby.”

That was all he said before splitting you open, the fullness of his cock inside you robbing you of all the breath in your lungs. Joel kept his hips flush with yours, his fingertips drifting down the fabric of your dress covering your spine.

“Joel,” you whined.

You shifted yourself onto the tips of your toes, nudging yourself back until the tip of his cock rubbed against the right spot inside you. You mewled at the sensation, wiggling your hips to find some sort of relief from the pleasure churning inside your stomach.

“Impatient, baby?” Joel teased.

He moved against you slowly, letting you adjust to his size. You had been in such a haze last time you hadn’t realized how big he actually was, but now you felt every glorious inch of him inside you. You let out another frustrated whimper, and Joel responded with an onslaught of forceful thrusts. Your body shoved further into the couch, your midsection rubbing against the edge every time Joel snapped his hips against yours.

Joel’s hand snaked around your neck, drawing you back into his chest, the angle of his cock spearing deeper inside you. Your wails turned to sobs as you listened to Joel grunting harder behind you, his fingers squeezing rhythmically around your throat.

“That’s it, baby,” Joel crooned. “That’s it. Doin’ so well for me.”

You gasped for air as the desire coiling within your core became agonizing and all-consuming. Your fingers wrapped around his hand holding you up, clawing at his skin as his thrusts became erratic and determined. You were teetering on the edge of euphoria, your body buzzing with pleasure.

“Touch yourself, baby,” Joel whispered into your ear.

You fought against your dress to find your clit, the instant connection of your fingers causing you to cry out. Joel’s mouth ravaged your neck, sucking marks into the skin as you drew tantalizing circles over the sensitive bud. It was right there— that explosive pleasure bubbling under the surface.

“Don’t stop,” you begged, your voice strained under his grip. “Don’t—right there. Right there, Joel!”

Joel quickened the pace, your eyes blurring as your orgasm raced through your veins and set your nerves ablaze. Your sex clenched around his cock, forcing him to slow his thrusts as he groaned into your ear.

“S’fuckin’ good, baby,” he punched out, releasing your neck.

“More,” you heaved.

“Think y’can take it?” He asked, pinning you down onto the couch cushions.

“Just want you, Joel,” you said. Your words were muffled into the couch as you exhaled, “Want everything with you.”

You didn’t know if Joel heard you, and you prayed he didn’t. Your brain was lost in some euphoric haze, dizzying you and your ability to control your emotions. Joel knew every part of your body, like the back of his hand. He knew exactly what you needed and what you wanted, and it was so confusing.

But all your thoughts grew quiet as the lewd sounds of your arousal and his ragged breathing echoed around the house. Joel’s hand pressed into your hair as he pushed you further into the couch. Bent over this way, you were entirely at his mercy, putty in his hands, and helpless.

“Swear y’were fuckin’ made for me, baby,” Joel grunted. “You’re mine, baby. Mine.”

“Yours,” you cried. “I’m—.”

You couldn’t finish your sentence as Joel seized up, choking out your name as he spilled into you. His body slumped over yours, the weight of his chest heavy against your back. The hammering of his heart matched yours as you both recovered in silence, the house growing quiet aside from your labored breathing.

“Too rough?” Joel muttered into your hair.

You shifted your face to the side, rewarded by his lips pressing into your cheek.

“Perfect,” you sighed. “It was perfect.”

“You weren’t lyin’ when you said you weren’t a fan of vanilla, huh?” Joel chuckled, pulling out of you.

You slumped further into the couch, laughing softly.

“I was talking about cake, Joel. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“Sure you were, baby. Stay right there, okay?”

You heard his footsteps disappear toward your bedroom, the distant sound of water turning on and off floating down the hallway. A second later, Joel was behind you again, the cool touch of a towel making you jerk away in shock. He gently rubbed the cloth over your inner thighs, taking extra caution of your sore entrance. You’d feel him everywhere tomorrow, and you didn’t hate that for some reason—you wanted the reminder of him.

“C’mere,” Joel urged, helping you stand.

He pulled you over to the couch, curling you into his arms and bracing you against his chest. Joel intertwined his fingers with yours, his breathing evening out as you shimmed further into his embrace. Maybe it was the sex, maybe it was just being around him, but all your doubts and worries seemed to fade away. It was just this moment; you and him with limbs entangled together.

“Tell me somethin’ no one knows about you,” Joel whispered.

“Only if you tell me something in return.”

“Of course, baby.”

You paused, considering all the possibilities of what you could share. You had forgotten pieces of yourself over the years, the layers of heartbreak and trauma suffocating the person you once were. You still weren’t sure if that girl you had once been was still inside you.

“I hate pancakes,” you said.

Joel laughed, his body shaking behind you as you buried your head into the couch.

“Pancakes? Really?” He teased.

“I just don’t like them!” You defended.

“Y’gonna tell me why?”

“I don’t know,” you grumbled. “They’re just too sweet.”

“So y’don’t like sugar in your coffee, and y’think pancakes are too sweet,” Joel mused. “What do you like?”

“Don’t tease me, Joel.”

His fingers prodded your sides, forcing you to shriek at the contact. You hated to be tickled and hated it even more when he kept you pinned to your chest with nowhere to go. You rolled toward him, squirming against his touch. Joel leaned in to kiss you softly, muffling your protests as you settled into his arms.

“Your turn,” you sighed.

“Hmm, well, I like pancakes.”

“Be serious, Joel,” you frowned.

“Okay, okay. I love watchin’ cartoons.”

You giggled, watching that grin stretch across his face.

“Been watchin’ them with Sarah since she was a kid,” he chuckled. “I still do sometimes, even if she ain’t home.”

“That’s cute,” you smiled.

You brought your fingers to his face, scratching at the stubble covering his chin and jaw. Joel’s eyes shut as your touch drifted over the patchy spots, your fingertips drawing circles in the places his beard disconnected.

“Tell me somethin’ else,” he said.

“I think you’re really handsome.”

It was a quick response—almost too fast—but you couldn’t swallow back the words. You glanced up at him, peeking through your lashes to see his brown eyes soften.

“Handsome, huh?”

“Well, I can’t call you cute,” you scrunched your nose. “It doesn’t fit you. I like handsome more.”

“I like it,” he smiled. “Call me handsome all y’want.”

You dragged him to your mouth, saying everything you couldn’t form into words. Joel moved with you, his head tilting and mouth molding to yours. He made everything feel so simple; maybe that’s what scared you. It was too easy with him—falling into this idyllic routine. Joel mumbled your name, pulling himself reluctantly from your lips. You chased one more kiss and settled back into his chest.

“Did you know it’s good luck when it rains on your wedding day?” You thought out loud.

Joel tensed up, his arms flexing around you.

“Superstition says it means your marriage will last,” you continued. “I’ve always thought it was funny, you know? I used to believe in that before my wedding, but after that, I figured everyone had lied to me.”

“Baby,” Joel whispered.

“No, it’s okay. There’s a point to this, I promise.”

“Tell me,” he urged softly.

“I think the rain was good luck. Maybe not in the way people think, but I don’t think Bennett and I were meant to get married. My sister hated me for going through with it. We didn’t really talk once Bennett and I got engaged. Everyone warned me about him; they told me he wasn’t who I should be with. I was so stubborn to make things work. He—he was there for me during a really awful time in my life. I thought I owed it to him to stay.

“But then here you are, and it makes me re-think everything. The rain? It’s still good luck, just in a different way. I wasn’t meant to be with him because maybe… maybe I was meant to be with you.”

Joel was painfully quiet, his eyebrows furrowing together as he closed his eyes. Oh, fuck. You had rambled out everything you were scared to say, and now it was biting you in the ass. This was why you were too afraid to acknowledge your feelings: the rejection. Joel didn’t see it the same way; he didn’t think of you in the same way, and you just made a complete idiot of yourself.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” you muttered, trying to pry yourself out of his grip. You kept the tears at bay, trying not to let yourself succumb to the heartbreak shattering inside you.

Joel’s hands wrangled you back to his chest, his eyes leveling with yours. You inhaled sharply as his fingers brushed away the rogue tears falling down your cheeks.

“There ain’t a doubt in my mind y’were meant for me, baby. I’m thankin’ God every day for bringin’ you into my life,” Joel confessed. “I know this is all new, but I promise to keep provin’ myself because whatever this is between us, it’s real.”

“It’s real,” you echoed.

“Don’t run away from me,” Joel pleaded. “Gimmie all the good and bad stuff. I swear I can handle it.”

“What if you get tired of me? What if I’m not enough?” You rambled.

“I could never get tired of you, baby. If anythin’, I keep wantin’ more.”

You snuggled further into his embrace, inhaling his scent as you pressed your nose into his chest. Joel ran a hand through your hair, his fingers catching on a few knots left from earlier.

“What’d you mean when you said he was there for you durin’ somethin’ awful?” Joel asked after a beat of silence.

Flashes of the crash came back into your mind, or at least the ones you could recall. You squeezed your eyes shut as your nightmares began to see the light of day. It was a memory you never liked to revisit.

“Easy,” your mom whispered. “Easy, honey. Don’t move too much, okay? Take it slow.”

Your eyes fluttered open, the harsh lights above you burning into your retinas as you tried to adjust to the room fading into the forefront. You were tucked into a hospital bed, IVs and tubes sticking out of both arms. Your head was pounding, and everything hurt. That’s all you could focus on. Everything hurt so fucking bad.

“Bennett?” You croaked, searching the room.

Your mom, dad, Beth, and Stella were all grouped around the foot of the bed, their eyes glassy with tears. Bennett was nowhere to be found. Beth’s fear-stricken eyes shifted from your mom to your dad before she bolted from the room.

“I’m going to go get the doctor,” your mom announced, turning and leaving the room.

Stella shifted uncomfortably and promptly followed, leaving your dad alone at the foot of your bed.

“How’re you feeling, peanut?” He asked, rounding to the side of your bed.

“Pain,” you cried softly.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he assured. “It’s all gonna be okay.”

“Baby?” Joel said cautiously.

“S–sorry,” you mumbled. “I don’t know if I really want to talk about it.”

Joel’s brows scrunched together, his eyes staring at you with concern. You turned away from him, lifting yourself from the couch. Pacing the living room, you stared blankly at your bookshelf beside your entertainment center, still collecting dust after two years. You heard Joel shift against the couch behind you and glanced back to see him staring at you intensely. Anxiety was thrumming in your chest the longer you stood in front of him, too many thoughts reeling inside your mind. You never talked about the accident; you didn’t want to be reminded of what had been the catalyst in your relationship's failure. Because that’s what it was. You owed everything to Bennett for sticking by your side through it all, and in the end, you weren’t enough. Nothing you did was enough to salvage what had been your life with him before it all.

“Hey,” Joel exhaled. “C’mere.”

“I—I need a minute,” you cried.

You bolted from the living room and went down the hall, gasping for air when you reached the edge of your bed. The room was spinning as you dropped your head in your hands, the nausea surging up inside you the longer you stayed stuck in the memory. You needed out of it; you needed out. You needed—.

Joel rushed into the room, falling to his knees in front of you as he said your name over and over to coax you out of the trance. Nothing was working. Your head was throbbing in pain, and you couldn’t work around it.

“Breathe with me, baby,” Joel whispered. “Breathe.”

You heaved in a lung full of air, only to choke on it and gag back the nausea crawling up your throat. Joel rubbed his hands over your thighs, the sensation of his touch jarring you enough to make you cringe.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he crooned, a distant echo of your dad's words. “It’s okay.”

The shrilling sound of your phone ringing pulled you both from the moment, and you crawled over the bed to grab it.

Beth

“Fuck,” you groaned. “I can’t—I can’t answer it.”

“Give it to me, I’ll do it,” Joel offered with an outstretched hand.

You practically tossed it at him while you crumpled into the sheets with your hands clutching your head.

“Hello?” He answered with a brief pause before he said, “This is Joel.”

Silence.

“Fuck, okay. Gimmie a second,” he replied.

“Baby, she needs to talk to you,” Joel said.

You stifled your cries before taking your phone from his hand, already hearing Beth’s frantic voice on the other end of the receiver.

“Beth, what is it?” You asked, your body shaking.

“It’s dad, sis. You’ve got to come home, okay?”

#joel miller x reader #joel x reader #joel x teacher #joel x f!reader #joel miller #joel miller fanfic #joel miller smut #joel miler tlou #tlou #pre outbreak!joel #the last of us fanfiction #fluff and angst #so much angst

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4rtificialfolio · 2 days

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It’s Complicated, My Darling - Chapter 1

Chpt. 1: “Cat got your tongue, doll?”

“Ada is an operative in the 1940s from Brighton in England, sent over to New York City to work with the Americans, uncovering secrets and spying on potential suspects. She meets a handsome young man, Nick Folio, on the train into the city; little does she know how that moment would change the trajectory of her life”

Parings: Nick folio X OFC (Ada Chapman)

Word count: 1.6K

Chapter Warnings: brief mention of war, slightly suggestive, explicit language, fluff

Series master list

(see masterlist for overall warnings, chapter begins below the cut)

Ada

May 20th 1941

New York City, USA

7:00 am

Dear Diary,

Yesterday is still a haze and I barely slept all night, tossing and turning thinking about him. I still can’t believe my luck or lack thereof. Things are always too good to be true and yesterday proved that. God damn you, Nick. It had to be you didn’t it? Who am I kidding, we met once and he’s cute but that’s it. I don’t know him, he was just an attractive man on the train who just so happens to be the man I’m being told to track. It can’t be so different from any other mission, can it? I can do this, I’m bloody brilliant at this job and this mission will be a piece of cake, I hope.

In other news, Dad sent another letter. He thinks they might have to evacuate soon, after the raid on the Portsmouth docs the whole town is on edge but hopefully, it won’t come to that. Denis is already missing and I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Dad and Peggy too. I can’t think about that, I shouldn’t.

Anyway, I’ll be back tomorrow.

I’m sure I’ll have a more interesting update after I’ve started my undercover work today,

Ada

The Precinct, 9:30 am

My train was delayed today, my first day on the cover job and I’m already late. Great first impression Ada!

“Miss Chapman, I presume?” a middle-aged man, with a not-so-flattering navy blue suit and a grey homburg hat that he definitely should’ve thrown away in the 30s, calls my name from across the ground floor.

“A little late but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt considering It’s your first day”. By the affirmative tone of his low, grumbling voice, I assume he’s the captain; Michael Brewer. I wonder if he knows he’s missing a button on his shirt?

“Yes sir, nice to meet you. Apologies for my Tardiness”

“Please follow me, I’ll take you to your desk so you can settle in. We run a tight ship here Chapman and I expect the very best from my employees, no less. let's hope you can keep up” I internally snicker at the tight ship remark. If it truly was a tight ship, I wouldn’t be here. If not for the fact I’m here undercover, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at that sentence; but something about it unsettles me. Alarm bells ring in my head. Michael will be on my watch list.

The tour is pretty mundane, I’ve only been hired as the secretary for my department so there’s no need for me to see the entirety of the precinct however, one room, in particular, catches my eye. The captain’s office, I’ll have to make a mental note of its whereabouts. Michael has been rambling on about the pride and joy of the precinct, and how he’s “built a family he can trust”; I refrain from laughing, being late on my first day is one thing but being fired for rudeness on the first day? I think I’ll pass. Before I know it, We’ve already reached my department floor. It’s nothing too extravagant but it’s certainly the biggest. The criminal investigation department has the most employees in the entire precinct, from the constable to the detective team, the sergeant, translators, the medical examiners and then there’s me, the secretary. I know Nick is a detective and, in fact, I’m pretty sure he’s the lead detective. Speaking of him, I wonder if he’s in today?

Before I can allow myself to get carried away with my wondering thoughts, Michael finally finishes his boastful rant and shows me to my desk.

“Right chapman, this is your desk. You’ll be doing the majority of your administrative work here but it’s important to store any important and private documents in the file room and I expect them to be logged at the end of each shift. Understood?” Having to lock them away might be a slight problem, I need solid evidence for this case but having access to the file room could be beneficial.

“Yes sir”

“I’ll leave you to settle in and meet your colleagues, we’re happy to have you, Chapman”

“Well look who it is!” an oh-so-familiar voice averts my attention, making me turn away from my desk.

“Nick? Uh I mean Mr Folio” Addressing another boss of mine by his first name, today is just tip-top.

“What’s with the formalities Doll? Please everyone calls me Nick around here, Mr Folio sounds way too formal for my liking”. My breath hitches and I chew on my bottom lip as he calls me ‘doll’. Doll, I like the sound of that. He looks extra sexy today. Sure he looked handsome in a black tank top, but now? He’s wearing a white spear point collard dress shirt paired with navy blue suit trousers with white stripes, a brown, white dotted tie and brown leather oxfords. I can’t help but stare, the top two buttons of his shirt are unbuttoned and his sleeves are rolled up to his elbow, showing off his tanned, veiny arms. Heat flushes across my body down to my core, he’s hot. Real hot and I’m flustered.

“Cat got your tongue, doll?” He smirks. There’s that damned nickname again.

Everything about him entices me and I know these feelings are wrong, but I just can’t help myself. I’m supposed to be working against him, spying on him and digging for info but he’s just so sweet to look at.

“Sorry just a little tired, what did you say?”

“I said I was about to go on lunch and you owe me a lunch date, care to join?” A date? I’m sure it’s just a figure of speech.

“Sure! You’ll have to pick where we go, I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the city yet” Nick quickly grabs his suit jacket and grey fedora from his desk at the back of the room and gently puts his hand on the small of my back to lead me out of the precinct. A tingle surges up my spine at the light contact, causing a slight shiver.

Nick takes me to a cute little diner about a block away. There’s a yellow and red sign that reads “Fred’s cafe & diner” and a couple of cars parked out front including a new, mint green chevrolet fleetline. Dad told me about these new cars in one of his letters, he thinks they’re an eyesore but I quite like them.

We settle into a small booth in the corner, right by the window that overlooks the narrow street next to the diner. I’m conflicted, I’m sat across from one of the most, if not the most, handsome men I’ve ever met. His eyes are so dreamy; he’s practically eye-fucking me from across the table, looking down ever so slightly at my lips, as I make small talk about the fleetline out front, and my stomach turns to goo. I begin to wonder what what his lips taste like, how he’d look pushing me up against the wall; but it’s a fleeting thought. Stay on track Ada. A waitress takes our orders and there’s a tense silence among us.

“So doll, how are you enjoying the city so far?” I wish he’d stop calling that.

“It’s not too bad, I really miss the beach and my family but I love the livelihood here. It's a nice change” Home, I miss home. All I want is to hug Peggy and Dad but until the war is over, this is home in the meantime.

“Damn I don’t know why you’d pass up the seaside to live here of all places, but I’m glad you did” Leaning forward on his arms, he smirks.

“Really?”

“Sure, I get to look at your pretty face every day. Sounds like a nice perk to me” He winks. My cheeks turn a subtle shade of pink whilst I find myself attempting to stop a cheesy grin from spreading across my face.

“How about you? How does life here compare to Maryland?”

“Hmm It’s good, I love the job but I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the war. I used to be a detective back in Maryland but I was relocated here to help with the war effort” Sometimes I forget about the war; moments like these make me feel normal and happy as if there’s not a single care in the world. But then I read the paper and I’m brought back to reality.

“Watch’ya thinking in that pretty little head of yours?” Concern starts to grow on his face.

“I was just thinking of home and the war, you know? I miss my family and life before it all started” My heart sinks thinking about it all.

“Oh doll, we don’t know each other too well yet and I know I can’t compare to your real home, but I promise I’ll do my best to make you a home away from home. Can’t stand to see a pretty face frown.” Is this the right guy? I mean, really? This is the so-called dangerous man who’s supposed to be stealing money from the precinct? I’ve never met such a gentle, caring soul; and not to point out the obvious but, fuck he’s handsome, I wouldn’t mind feeling his hands on my hips sometime. No, no I can’t think like that. I have a job to do, I mustn’t lose my focus. My thoughts are quickly averted as Nick says my name from across the table, signalling our lunch break is almost over. Come on Ada, snap out of it.

“Thank you, Nick. I’m sure I’ll feel right at home with you”

With you? Shit.

I am royally fucked.

AN: Sorry this took so long! I was in a really long writing slump but i'm hoping to get a chapter out every two weeks (no promises). I'm really looking forward to you guys seeing what happens between Nick and ADA. Ada has very quickly become my favourite character I've ever written. Please let me know your thoughts! Again, please let me know if you'd like to be added to my tag list for this series :)

reminder my inbox is always open if you’d rather send your thoughts about this series or any of the omens members anonymously (no fic requests).

Tag List: @iknownothingpeople , @dsireland86 , @vinyardmauro , @thatchickwiththecamera , @blackveilomens

#nick folio #bad omens #bad omens band #noah sebastian #jolly karlsson #nicholas ruffilo #bad omens fic #nick folio smut #nick folio fic #fish boy #4rti #4rtificialfolio #it's complicated my darling

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apparitionism · 2 days

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Asleep 2

For the anniversary this year, I have the second “half” of my @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange story for @kla1991 : an involuntary bed-sharing situation that turns not sexy but disastrous. The first part took on Myka’s perspective; this conclusion is written from the other side of the bed. A confession: I find in-universe Helena’s head voice a somewhat difficult register to compose—because while she can’t be fully insane, she needs to teeter or list, sometimes more than a little (but without falling into histrionics). Which is to say that if you don’t entirely buy the turns of thought and/or coping mechanisms I’ve given her here, your skepticism is well-placed. Ultimately I hope it’s the case that a person can be broken but still want in a way that’s... pure? Justified? Sweet? Reciprocatable? Maybe just “vaguely recognizably human”?

Anyway, this is long, first because it extends well beyond the point at which the first part ended, but also because when a Bering and a Wells get to talking (as they at last do!), they need to work things out at their own pace...

Asleep 2

My arm is asleep.

Under normal circumstances, a person would, upon becoming aware of this, shift position so as to restore blood flow.

Under normal circumstances.

But very little is normal about the circumstances under which Helena’s arm is asleep.

She is in a hotel-room bed, in the dark of night, lying on her left side, with her left arm, her now-asleep arm, pinned beneath her. So ends the disturbingly limited “normal” portion of the situation.

Here begins the larger portion: she absolutely must not move.

Irony guts at her with that, a shiv-and-twist remembrance of bronze restriction—but that prohibition had involved a significantly different auxiliary verb: “cannot” rather than “must not.”

Grammatical particulars aside, her immobility now is barely less a torment. This is because her other arm, her alive right, terminates in an even-more alive sensate hand, one that now rests—but is in no way at rest—on Myka’s right hip.

Myka, too, is lying on her left side, a small distance in front of Helena, lying in this hotel-room bed. Such proximity in such a space might, under other circumstances, signify the fulfillment of a long-held dream... but here, now, it seems a nightmare. For Myka is Helena’s colleague and no more; they are in this bed for sleep and no more; and Myka is playing her part correctly while Helena is not, in contravention of what she has sworn to herself she would do no more.

Such drowsy sense the placing of that hand had seemed to make, when she had found herself facing Myka’s back. She had in the past regarded that length covetously, relishing the idea of touch both salacious and tender.

For all her coveting, however, she had in fact only once laid hands on that back, both hands with intention on the clothed blades of Myka’s shoulders: a terrifying embrace, one that was in the most basic physical manner right but overall searingly wrong, screaming bodily truth but surrounded by words that said nothing they should. A perversion of promise, like so much else that had happened in Boone.

Yet Helena had clung to its memory all the same.

She’d thought, here in this unexpected proximity, to supersede that, to touch once again, once again but brief, once again though brief. To erase and replace.

First she touched the right blade, light; yet her hand wanted stillness, more connection than a mere pat against cotton-clad bone. And there was Myka’s hip, a beckoning promontory jut... a place to rest. Rest, however brief.

Once placed, however, her hand had proved reluctant to retreat.

Brief, she reminded it.

No, the hand had responded. I belong here.

Helena knows this is true. She knows also that it cannot be true.

But she is no stranger to holding contradictory thoughts in her head. This has been essential to establishing and maintaining, in these new Warehouse days, a functional equilibrium. Functional. Indeed her goal, in this “reboot,” has been to function, which she has lately defined as something on the order of “to move through time nondestructively.”

This definition had come about due to her realization, pre-reboot, that her difference from others, her inability to fully perform a modern self—her arrogance about that inability, even as she attempted to hide both the inability and the arrogance—chipped at, chipped from, the good (the good nature, the good will, the goodness) of those around her. Over time, such chips accrued as wounds.

Nate. (Adelaide.) Giselle.

She had as a result finally understood that coming back to the Warehouse would mean, at the very least, that those with whom she interacted had already made a bargain, perhaps even a peace, with the inevitable violence of history: with the way the forces of the past could—would—affect, even infect, the present. Helena herself was, at her simplest, merely one more of those forces.

She did consider requesting that she be re-Bronzed, now absent any pretension of traveling through time, but rather as a way of neutralizing a dangerous, and demonstrably unstable, artifact. But then an image had come to her, possibly as an omen, possibly as only a desperate wish: Myka’s devastated face upon hearing such news.

Boone all over again.

Thus the reboot. Because the most significant entry under “function,” with additional emphasis on the “nondestructive” portion of that definition, was her resolution to spare Myka pain. In the past, Helena had been both careless and careful—surgically so—in her infliction of damage on Myka above all others. But she had sworn to herself that those days were done.

Done, but Helena knew she had not paid anything near a sufficient price.

So. To maintain distance, no matter how troublesomely ardent her wish to close it, was—had to be—part of her penance. And to do so decorously was—had to be—the gentlest approach. That was what Helena told herself in her more rational moments.

This moment, in this bed, is not one of those. If it were, she would simply remove her hand. Simply remove it, then roll over.

But her mind races, finding complication: She doesn’t know what sort of sleeper Myka is. Had Helena’s placing of hand awakened her? If she had awakened, has she now fallen asleep again? If she has, would she then be reawakened by the hand’s removal? Or would she, if still awake, draw some negative inference about the entire situation based on removal?

Ideally, Helena would maintain a facsimile of entirely blameless sleep while engaging in that removal, but can she make such a performance believable?

Never in her life has Helena been so concerned about her ability to mislead convincingly as when she has attempted to deceive Myka. That was the case in the past, even at her most nefarious, and now she worries day-to-day that her strictly disciplined disguise of near-constant wishing ache will slip and fail. A simple I am asleep should be... well... simple. But it is not, and Helena is reminded of Claudia’s tendency to observe, in situations both dire and banal, “Here we are.”

Here we are, because Myka is apparently indifferent to the idea of sharing a bed with Helena.

Here we are, because Myka is apparently indifferent to history.

Here we are, and that latter indifference is a surpassing irony, due to the fullness of—

Helena sees that she needs to divert her train of thought, as descending into unjustified anger will help absolutely nothing.

First, she entertains a fantasy of sitting up, turning on a light, and explaining to Myka that this entire situation is untenable, and that if they are going to share a bed, they should share a bed. But it’s true that Myka did not seem even to consider that as a possibility, which seems ludicrous, given the past... no, that’s back to unjustified anger, for who is Helena to resent what Myka wishes not to consider? And indeed, who is she to interpret the past in such a way as to believe she understands what Myka would have considered?

Focus on the facts, she tells herself. What actually happened in that nefarious past. And do so dispassionately.

Regrettably, the word “dispassionately” brings to mind another word: “passionately.”

Again. For she had thought that word not long after she and Myka had first entered this room, first entered it to find, as Helena’s unrestrained fantasies might have conjured, only one bed. That they were clearly intended to share. Thus her mind’s unruly leap to... an adverbial manner in which they might do so.

But Myka had said not one word about the accommodations, so Helena had held her tongue as well. She nevertheless couldn’t help but feel it an elaborate lack of remark on both their parts, the silence practically baroque in its fullness.

Baroque too had been the courtesy with which they jointly prepared for bed, a you-first-no-you stutter-choreography of politeness that ensured privacy, yes, but also reinforced the barrier between their past and their present.

Which Helena understood was necessary. It did nothing, however, to mitigate the breath-hold of preparing to lie down beside Myka.

Once she had managed that lying down, however (with a relative aplomb for which self-congratulation was not, she felt, unjustified), she hoped her torment might ease. A bit. If she could manage the additional task of pretending the body beside her was no more significant than any other human. Some flesh, recumbent.

But when they were situated thus beside, Myka spoke. “You seem a little upset,” she said.

Helena had barely been able to restrain a snort. Now Myka saw fit to comment? As if allowing this portion of the play to pass without remark would create some undue strain upon collegiality? As if their incongruous bonhomie might buckle under the weight of that silence? Oh, that was rich.

Bottling her pique, Helena questioned: “With?” To make Myka say it. Mere saying wouldn’t hurt. Would it?

“You haven’t been yourself since you put that camera in the static bag. Was it a problem, seeing it again?”

Helena held herself rigid so as to keep her body from betraying neither her disappointment at the question nor, contradictorily, her relief...

It was a reasonable question. A good question. Not one on which Helena particularly wanted to focus (although it indicated a certain attention on Myka’s part, an attention on which Helena suspected she should not dwell), but it did deserve an answer. “It closes a door, doesn’t it,” she told the ceiling, for turning her head to address the other body directly seemed an invitation to peril. “That one I opened so nefariously, long ago.”

“Or—and—maybe it closes a loop,” Myka said.

Unexpected. “A loop?”

“Right after college, I went through a self-help phase,” Myka said. She paused, and Helena found herself on relative tenterhooks regarding the applicability of this (new!) information to the current situation. Which reminded her how much she had missed talking with Myka... because of the very sound of her voice, yes, but also because her conversation could range so unanticipatedly. So rewardingly unanticipatedly. Helena had known few people who could lead her on such unpredictable, yet productive, journeys.

Was Myka’s apparent willingness to begin such a journey now indicative of... anything? A softening, perhaps, of relations between them? Not a rebooting of their once-burgeoning intimacy, for that had to remain taboo, but could it be that some restoration of their previous intellectual engagement might be, at the very least, neutral rather than harmful?

Helena had moved a tentative pawn in that direction during their conversation on the airplane. Perhaps this was Myka’s answering move?

With an exhale that seemed like resignation at what she was about to say—to reveal?—Myka said, “I felt like I needed to be someone different—someone better.”

Another pause. Helena considered that such a feeling seemed very Myka (and she heard that phrase in Claudia’s voice), but also very misguided. Of course she was not at all placed to make such judgments, and even less so to convey them to Myka. Thus she said a simple, “Did you,” to encourage without prejudice.

“So I read a lot of books,” Myka said, to which Helena had responded internally, Of course you did. “One was about how to get things done.”

“All things?” Helena asked.

“Sort of.” That was followed by yet another pause. Yet another puzzle.

All these pauses. Was Myka on the verge of sleep? Helena said, soft, thinking she might go unheard, “Perhaps I should read that book. As a help to myself.”

At that, Myka had laughed, more delay, but also soft. “I don’t think it’s any kind of help you need. The guy who wrote it had a big system, all these rules, and I love rules, but these... I admit I didn’t stick with most of them. Honestly, any. But an idea that did stick was actually a pretty minor part: open loops. Stuff you track subconsciously, all the time, because it’s incomplete. How troubling that is. And what a difference it makes when you close a loop, when you each a resolution. I mean, he was talking about stuff like answering emails.”

“Emails,” Helena echoed. So far from artifacts.

“Which this is so much bigger than,” Myka said, exhibiting, not for the first time, an uncanny ability to scoop from Helena’s thoughts. “But maybe the principle holds. You don’t have to tell me. But I hope you have fewer open loops now than you did. Before.”

“Yes. The number. Fewer,” Helena said, factually.

She of course couldn’t say out loud (but it was equally factual) that Myka herself was the loop most capaciously open. The one that gaped, superseding, never mind the number of lesser.

Indeed, however, that number was now minus-one. Oscar. Oscar and his ballad... that loop closed.

Helena had in fact, while handling the camera, begun to ideate a wish that someone (Steve? Claudia?) might be persuaded to use the camera to capture her image... for it had occurred to her that a spark of art, some production on which to concentrate, might animate this reboot... something to pursue, rather than to be pursued by...

But. Lying abed, still and strangely hopeful—a state she should have known would not endure—a realization had struck her, as an open hand to the face, a realization of why Myka had brought up loops and the closing thereof: she had somehow discerned Helena’s wish, via that scooping of thought, and was discouraging her from pursuing it.

So much for any softening. This was instead a warning: Helena should not open a loop that Myka might be obligated to close. And Helena had no trouble grasping that the warning was in no way limited to the use of a single artifact... no, it doubtless applied to any burdensome loops Helena might be thinking of opening, any new incompletions that might come to trouble Myka.

“I understand,” Helena had said, regretting that pawns could not be moved backwards.

At the same instant, Myka said, “I’m glad.”

That collision had canceled communication entirely; in its wake, Myka had turned out her light and turned away from Helena.

Leaving Helena to her thoughts.

Well, fine, had been the first of those.

Next had come an equally mulish sniff of And I will have no difficulty directing any subsequent away from this shared bed.

Whereupon she had proven herself both wrong and right, thinking about history, about the fact that, whatever Myka’s commentary or lack thereof had or hadn’t signified, the fact of Warehouse agents lodging together, sharing beds completely platonically, was certainly nothing new.

This line of thinking had enabled Helena to distract herself by recalling a mission with Steve and Claudia, one in which Steve had announced, after checking in at their hotel, “Bad news. Just a king room left, but they said they’d bring up a cot.”

He had then immediately assigned Claudia to said cot, prompting her to protest, “No way! This situation screams rock-paper-scissors tournament! Loser gets the crappy night’s sleep!”

“No way,” Steve protested back, far more mildly. “The father of science fiction gets first dibs on the lumbar support, and my back’s got a decade on yours, so I call second. If that father agrees.”

Helena had. Sharing with Steve had been fine.

Sharing with Myka should of course have been no different.

Should of course have been...

But now, here in the impossible present, as Helena’s left arm slumbers and her right hand sparks, what should have been? Isn’t isn’t isn’t.

She needs further distraction, so she casts her mind again to Claudia and Steve, to the compensations they have offered her during this strange and estranging reboot: at first Claudia, who had welcomed Helena back so unreservedly and continues to offer wholehearted allyship; and then Steve, who had quickly become an unanticipated boon companion, a partner upon whom Helena has felt increasingly, and increasingly exceptionally, lucky to be able to rely.

And yet these compensations, though Helena hopes she conveys all appropriate gratitude for them, are never sufficient, for Myka—necessary yet unreachable—is always present.

She’d been so, even during that cot-delineated retrieval. Its aftermath had (so much for distraction) involved a significantly Myka-related incident, for Helena had dared, as she, Steve, and Claudia were relaxing in the hotel lounge prior to retiring, to broach Myka as a topic of conversation. As one might do, she’d thought: speaking about a colleague.

“I have an inquiry,” she’d phrased it. To make the ensuing question sound... scientific?

Dispassionate, she jeers at her recalled self.

She jeers also at what she’d said next: a too-bald, “How is Myka?”

She had known, even at the time, that what she had truly wanted was to say that blessed name, to speak about that blessed person. She could not speak to Myka in any meaningful way, and she was starving.

Steve and Claudia had then shared what seemed an extremely charged glance, so Helena hastened to dissemble, making sure to use questions so as to prevent Steve from finding her immediately untruthful: “Given that her liaison with Pete ended? They’ve... recovered, as it were? Both faring well?”

But her tone had struck her own ears as too bright; a desperation rippled behind it, and Helena knew from experience that behind that tiptoed a still deeper threat of rupture, which required work to be kept at bay. As Helena had been instructed by her most successful therapist to do when such awareness overtook her, she began to breathe with attention.

Neither Steve nor Claudia spoke as she did so.

When the danger passed, she smiled, as best she could, to signal to them her appreciation—and to herself, her success.

Steve then said, “You’re not asking about Pete.”

Helena valued—as a personality trait—Steve’s discerning willingness to push. She did not in that moment value how he thus so easily revealed a glaring flaw in her initial approach: she should have asked about Pete; with that as her entrée, the talk might organically have turned to Myka. Foolish of her to think so unstrategically... or was her failure to do so a paradoxically positive sign?

“Give it time,” Steve said, and Helena knew he was making no reference to Myka and Pete’s recovery.

“My relationship to time,” she said, with contempt. Time: she’d taken it. Now she had to give it? A forfeit. Well, that was fair.

Claudia said to Steve, “Speaking of, we’re wasting it. Are we gonna do the thing?”

“Only if H.G.’s on board,” Steve told her. It was an unexpectedly mind-your-manners utterance.

“What is the thing?” Helena asked.

“Claudia’s trying out alcohols,” Steve said. “We can’t do it around Pete, obviously, which means retrievals are our—”

“So many questions to answer, right?” Claudia interrupted, her avidity increasing. “You know, am I über-suave James Bond with the martinis? Or a fights-against-my-general-cool-geek-vibe Carrie Bradshaw with a cosmo?”

Helena had had no idea what she was referring to, but the investigation seemed entirely fit for someone her age. “What have you determined thus far?”

“Turns out cosmos don’t work for me,” she said, “as the prophecy foretold, and Bond-wise, I like a martini all vodka, no gin; sorry, Vesper.”

“Is that all?” Helena asked.

Further avidity: “Oh god no. Vodka drinks aren’t perfect: white Russians are way too sweet. Also in the white family, the wine category pretty much bores me. Also there was this one time Steve ordered a gin drink called a white lady that I couldn’t even think about because it had an egg white in it and one look made me retch.”

“Quite the wide-ranging experiment,” Helena said, hoping to forestall further off-putting description. “Not conducted with inappropriate... ah... intensity, one hopes?”

Steve patted Claudia’s shoulder, at which she rolled her eyes. “I’m supervising,” he said. “No more than a few tries in one sitting, and we’re doing it mindfully.”

Claudia abandoned her attitude and nodded. “Paying attention to what I’m tasting. How to find, you know, notes and stuff. Except for the disgusting egg-white thing, it’s honestly been fun.”

“I’m not opposed to fun,” Helena said, and she was a bit surprised—but pleased, and pleased to be pleased—that Steve didn’t squint in response. “So, Mr. Supervisor, what’s next?”

“I’ve been pushing for the wide and wonderful world of beer, but—”

“Seems too jocktastic,” Claudia said. “You know, ‘Beer me, bro.’”

“I don’t know,” Helena said.

“Anyway that’s really not me,” Claudia continued, as if Helena hadn’t spoken. She did have a tendency to ignore Helena’s ignorance, a tendency that Helena enjoyed and found frustrating in equal measure.

“Her beer perspective is severely limited,” Steve lamented.

“I myself have always found a strong stout ale quite enjoyable,” Helena said: her contribution to Steve’s cause. It was also true, the fact of which he seemed pleased to affirm with a quirk of lip and a quiet “so you have.”

Claudia’s expression remained skeptical, but she shrugged weakly and said, “I guess I could give it a shot?”

“Oh, because H.G. says so,” Steve twitted.

To that, Claudia squared her shoulders. “Yeah. Don’t you know who she is?” she demanded.

“Who I was,” Helena hurried to emphasize, “and given that Steve assigned me the bed on that basis, he—”

“Who you are,” Claudia corrected, throwing the emphasis back.

“And who is that?” Helena asked. What distinction did Claudia imagine was relevant?

“The person who told me my destiny was glorious. You’re still that guy, right?”

Relevant indeed. Helena was taken aback, indeed taken back to that extremity, back in a novel way. She had been so mired in the Myka of it all in the intervening time, that she had lost her view of the bright salience of Claudia’s presence. Wrongly. “I am,” she said. She hoped Claudia believed her.

“Okay,” Claudia said. “So I’ve got this big-as-Pete’s-biceps incentive to hope the stuff you say is true. And by the way, one of you has to casually drop in front of him how I said that, because I want the points.”

Steve snickered and said, “I know my job. But in the meantime, I think I’d like to toast to all these sentiments, and to the agents offering them. With a strong stout ale.”

They tasted the three strongest the hotel bar had on offer, and Claudia pronounced that her favorite, one purporting to convey roasted notes of coffee, chocolate, and other darkness, was “way too complicated for your average broseph.” Which Steve seemed pleased by, as a judgment, so the overall experience scored a success.

There was no further talk of Myka, however, the avoidance of which topic seemed quite deliberate... as if Steve and Claudia had determined that Helena would not benefit from it.

Or that she did not deserve it.

For the best, Helena had concluded. Either way.

Now, in a similar “for the best either way” sense, she makes to raise her hand, with that intended overlay of feigned sleep, so as to shift away and at last regain equilibrium, restoring feeling to her sleeping arm and calming that oversensitive hand. But instead—in what she can interpret only as a stupidly id-driven attempt to bank some never-to-be-repeated sensation, to the memory of which that desperate id might cling in a touch-deprived future—she moves her hand, not away from Myka, but further down her leg.

And her worst fears are instantly realized: Myka’s body reacts violently, as if in revulsion at the very idea of Helena touching her.

It was only a hand at rest, Helena begs, with no conception of why or to whom she is rendering that supplication. That was all.

Alas, that was—is—not all, for in the next split second Myka is falling from the bed and crying out in pain.

Helena, at a loss, attempts a faux-innocent inquiry, which Myka answers unintelligibly. In trepidation, Helena ventures to the mattress-edge, then lowers herself to the floor next to Myka—and she is appalled, for the situation that confronts her is all debility, even more so than the absurd “my arm is asleep” with which this farce began: Myka’s shoulder is dislocated.

Further, Myka is now unconscious.

Spare Myka pain. How utterly unsurprising Helena finds her inability to obey such a dictum in even this most basic physical sense.

Unsurprising... worse, dispiriting, and it brings her low, such that again the incipient rupture asserts its subterranean power, urging Helena to give up, to run away and leave this broken Myka to someone else to bind up and save.

You’ve done it before.

That resounds in her head as both accusation and affirmation, and the voice pronouncing it might be Myka’s, or some deity’s, or that of any of the other personages who jockey audibly for primacy in that space, including Helena’s own.

She initiates breathing with care, even as an eddying undertow tempts her to entertain the notion that escape, too, might be rebooted, tempts her to entertain and revel in its ostentation as a response to Myka’s indifference, her rejection of history, even her revulsion.

Here is my answer to all that, a departure would declare.

Helena labors to breathe herself away from such perfidy, but the scenario creeps along, with an undertone of sinful relish, as she imagines leaving Myka to awaken alone and in pain.

But then—because her labor leads her there—she further imagines the various permutations of “someone else” who might be called upon to save the day in her absence. Whereupon the thought strikes her that moving through time nondestructively requires her to think seriously of, and to think seriously out, such knock-ons... how, for example, would Steve and Claudia respond to having to clean up this mess, knowing that Helena had made it?

Moving through time nondestructively. Interesting, here, the overlap with moving through time selfishly: selfishly, she does not want to destroy Claudia’s image of her as someone whose opinion matters. She does not want to destroy Steve’s image of her either, for it seems to have at least some positive components. Further, she does not want to destroy the fellowship they three are building.

If for no other reasons than those, she concludes that having caused this quite specific damage, she must fix it.

Because she can.

The fact of the matter is, Helena cannot fix most things. She has tried mightily to maintain the pretense that she can... but she has been forced over and over to confront the absurdity of that bravado. This very specific fix-it, however, she can perform. And while that performance—inconveniently, in the present circumstance—requires touch, here it can be functional. Perhaps in success she might in some way efface her earlier invasiveness...

Yet she can do nothing without two functional arms. She thumps her still-insensate left against the bed, hard—too hard, for Myka’s eyes open. She mumbles out something Helena decodes as “whatareyoudoing.”

“Preparing to remedy a situation,” Helena says.

“Okay.” Myka murmurs. She seems oddly comforted by the answer, to such an extent that she relaxes, losing consciousness again.

That’s fortunate, given the required manipulation.

Helena prepares herself to do it quickly, efficiently, as she has done in the past... rather dramatically on one occasion, as she recalls, for an agonized Wolcott... but she should not think of Wolcott. For the regret.

She sets that aside, preoccupying herself instead with the necessary activity. Her manipulation, determined and strong, is rewarded: what begins as a sluggish resistance resolves into a slip-pop of relocation, one that shudders a familiar path through her own bones. She then cushions Myka’s arm with a fresh towel and uses a pillowcase to fashion around it a tight sling.

Levering Myka up onto the bed would most likely cause further injury, so Helena sits beside her on the floor, ensuring periodically that she continues to breathe. The wait is calming, cleansing, its peace a renewal of a soothing activity of which Helena has been long deprived: observing Myka closely, at actual leisure. At no point since her return—so at no point in, literally, years—has she had such an opportunity.

She’s reminded, in that observation, of the true fundament: this precious person. Who could never be merely some flesh.

After a lengthy time, during which Helena is pressed to consider, to remember, to value Myka’s singularity, that precious person’s eyes flutter open.

That person tests her bound arm, a tentative physical investigation that approaches elegance in its delicacy.

But Myka’s delicacy and elegance, too, Helena should not think of. For the regret.

“I’m not in the hospital,” Myka burrs.

Reasonable, practical. This is what Helena should think of. “Not yet,” she says. “But we’ll go if necessary. If you’re in pain.”

Myka’s face contorts. “Not if. I am. Some. More than some. I’m sorry.”

“For being in pain?”

“That. But also, for changing this whole thing.”

Helena leaves the latter alone, for she cannot begin to interpret it. Focusing on functionality, she asks, “Can you dress yourself?”

Myka nods, but she winces far too much with even that motion, so Helena screws her courage to it and says, “I’ll change and then help you.”

Herself, fast, then Myka: Functional, she snarls internally as she addresses the situation, and even faster. She’s relieved to find that Myka’s trousers and boots are less complicated than she’d feared, and as it happens, preventing Myka suffering additional physical pain—even while undressing and redressing her!—is, paradoxically or not, far easier than navigating emotional shoals, or even hand-on-hip physical shoals. Focusing on Myka’s face for twists, listening for labors in breath, adjusting accordingly... it’s distractingly, satisfyingly concrete. Only the present moment matters.

Only the present moment matters. This is the mantra Helena iterates internally as they proceed to the nearest urgent care facility.

Yet as they wait there for attention, Helena finds herself increasingly unable to ignore why they are waiting there for attention. In the present moment, which matters. She begins—or does she intend it as an ending?—with, “I’m assuming you flung yourself to the floor in an attempt to escape a circumstance.”

Myka hiccups a laugh that makes her cringe in protection of the shoulder. “That’s weirdly accurate. As an assumption.”

Helena recoils at the confirmation, but she must acknowledge it. “A circumstance in which I touched you in a way that was unwelcome,” she agrees, with gloom.

“Unwelcome,” Myka echoes.

It’s so... definitive. It was one thing for Helena herself to think it, believe it, say it aloud. Quite another—though it shouldn’t have been—to hear it from Myka.

A punctuating end to what never truly began between them: there is some consolation, if only philosophical, in the idea that after so many starts that were false, they may at least enjoy a finish that is true.

“Of course it was,” Helena says, following with, “and how could it have been otherwise.” She puts the final period upon it by adding a bare, spare dig: “Given history.”

Myka closes her eyes... in acceptance of the cut? When she opens them, they are glistening. Tears? Helena is egotistically gratified by such a response, never mind that it means she has yet again failed to hold to her resolution.

“Helena,” Myka says, and now Helena is gratified simply by Myka’s low utterance of her name. Myka does not always use that deeper voice, and Helena does love (yes, love) the rare pleasure of hearing her name in it. “I’m so tired,” Myka says next.

That is less gratifying. It’s yet another utterance Helena should leave alone; of course Myka is tired. But in what she is sure is a mistake, Helena says, “Of?”

“Everything. But particularly, you.”

A dagger, that was. A cut back. Testimony to Helena’s concatenating mistakes.

“This you,” Myka adds.

The additional twist of blade leaves Helena unclear on the devastation Myka intends. “Of course” is all she can think to say.

Myka closes her eyes and exhales heavy, a near-sob. “Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” she intones, but what need has she to apologize? “That was the pain talking—or, no, I still know you well enough to know you’ll hear that wrong. What I mean is, I’m saying something I could keep holding back if the pain wasn’t cracking me open.”

The pain. Cracking her open. Which would never have happened in the absence of Helena’s stupid, thoughtless touch. Which in turn makes abundantly clear that the stupid, thoughtless person who applied that touch is the “this you” Myka means.

If Helena is to remain in this situation she must take measures, so she lengthens her inhales and exhales, entirely ashamed both at needing such a crutch and at having to exhibit that need.

After a moment of silence, Myka asks, “Are you breathing differently than you were just a second ago?”

Myka isn’t Steve. Helena could at least attempt to lie about this, to cloak her shame... but it’s effort, either way. “Yes,” she says, choosing the unpredictability of Myka’s interpretation over the unpredictability of her own performance.

“Is that good or bad?” Myka asks. “Or both?”

The questions stop Helena, stop her in the same way her at-leisure observation of Myka had. I still know you well enough, Myka had said, and it is true. This is why, Helena would say if she could. Your knowing to ask that.

But she can’t say it, and, worse, she doesn’t know what she should say. What should come next.

Apparently Myka doesn’t either. That not-knowing persists, hanging, until “next” arrives, as an intrusion from outside their suspension: medical attention is at last directed Myka’s way; she is escorted out of the waiting area and taken elsewhere.

“We’ll call you when you can see her,” Helena is told.

Alone in the waiting area—for no other human seems to have suffered damage this night—and uncomfortably situated on a hard plastic chair, she tilts her head back against a similarly unforgiving plaster wall.

She closes her eyes. She’s had no rest, no rest for so long. She is drained. Physically empty.

Philosophically as well.

She imagines trying to sleep... or rather, she imagines not trying to remain awake.

Doubtless futile, either way.

She next imagines constructing an airtight argument that could not help but persuade all who hear it—Myka in particular, but all others as well—that this entire situation is Artie’s fault.

Also futile.

This despite its being the fact of the matter, for indeed he did bring the situation about. Perhaps not in a proximate sense, but in the ultimate... the idea of which, after a moment, strikes her as both comic and tragic: Artie as the ultimate cause? Of anything, from the universe on down? Though he would doubtless like to imagine himself so... even at the Warehouse, however, he must be not even penultimate, given the bureaucracy that sits over the entire concern...

Helena thus spends the bulk of her time in the waiting area stewing about—stewing over? stewing under?—the relative positions of god, Mrs. Frederic, and various Regents in the universe. None of it, however, requires her to alter her breathing; rather, she composes in her head the opening paragraphs of several publishable monographs on these and related topics. It isn’t restful. But is evidence of something other than emptiness.

When someone does at last call her to see Myka, everything has changed.

Well. Not everything. Helena herself hasn’t, as her bureaucracy-pantheon thought may have been philosophically valid but made no difference.

Myka, however, has changed entirely: her arm is now professionally dressed, but more importantly, the knit of pain has left her face. “They medicated me,” she says, giving the word “medicated” a rapturous cast. “The X-rays said I didn’t break anything, so we’re waiting on results of a scan to see if I need surgery but in the meantime I feel better than I maybe ever have in my life and I am so happy to see you. All these doctors were like ‘why did she think she could fix you’ but I knew why and it was because it’s you. and that scan? It’ll shout out how Helena Wells relocated Myka’s shoulder so she didn’t need surgery, and they don’t know this, but actually H.G. Wells relocated Myka’s shoulder, which is even more amazing. Wait, that’s not more amazing. You’re the most amazing when you’re you than when you’re that guy. Even though I guess you are that guy. Sort of. Wait, Claudia’s been saying ‘that guy’ a lot now. And I cut and paste from her so much, but I don’t like it. The way things are.” She heaves an enormous sigh and blinks at Helena, as if she’s just re-understood that another person is present.

Is there some ideal way to answer this flood? Helena settles for an antiseptic “I’m pleased to see you out of pain.”

Myka gasps and flails wildly with her uninjured arm, which gesture eventually resolves into an index finger directed at Helena. “That’s it exactly. I’m out of pain. All out. No more pain to give. Particularly not to you. So saying I’m tired of you? I regret it, and I apologize for it, and I promise that’s the end of it. I was wishing to get something back, and you don’t want it back, and so I have to be fine. Without it. Without you.”

Without you. Helena supposes she should be impressed by how concisely Myka can foreshadow disaster. “Should I not... be here?” She braces herself for the answer.

“Of course you should. I have to be fine without how you were,” Myka says, very quietly. The collapse of her volubility gives Helena pause.

She knows it would be better not to probe; she ought to, as Claudia says, “take the win.” But “Of course you should” is only facially a win... “How was I?” she asks. To wound herself by making Myka clarify what has been lost.

“Oh, how you were...” Myka says, her words dragging. How much—any, all?—of this might be due to the varying effects of the medication? “Putting me into this story,” she continues. “It was so big, and I didn’t understand what it was, really or at all, but it felt so big. Yearning and tragedy, and there I was, still me, but in it, so in it, all in it, next to you. Bigger than life, and I... loved it? Needed it? Something to take me over. But my wishing for any of it back, when of course you don’t?” She raises that free arm, then lets it fall. Futility, it says. “So small. Only somebody little and desperate would want to make you revisit any of that.”

Medication effect or not, Helena can’t let Myka keep on with this. “Make me revisit it? Yearning and tragedy? I’m the one who inflicted that, and with malign intent; I damaged you. And I cannot imagine a scenario in which that debt is discharged.”

Myka squints. “Debt,” she says, as if articulating a new noun, but not one that names an abstraction; no, this thing is big and blunt, a dumb object that takes up space. Unfunctional furniture. That I carry on my back, Helena moods.

“Oh!” Myka then yelps, her tone shifting to excitement. “But I just damaged myself. So now we’re even!” She delivers that last bit big and broad, for all the world as if she’s the comic lead in a panto.

Helena has not spared a thought for panto in years. “That makes no sense at all,” she says, because it’s the case, but also to scorn the memory. This is no time for that past.

“Would you like me to dislocate your shoulder?” Myka asks, as if it were a reasonable proffer. Still comic, but now strangely sincere.

Helena meets this bizarrely compelling, ridiculous combination with as much severity as she can muster. “Honestly no. I would not.”

“I see,” Myka says, and she points again, this time without preambling flail. “Some prices you aren’t willing to pay.”

Helena can at the very least be honest about this. How nice it would be if Steve were here to verify. “Willing to... in the sense of volunteering to? No. In the sense of understanding that I deserve to? Certainly. So do me damage if you must. In particular, do me damage if you think it could even the score between us. It won’t, but if you think it could? Please do.”

“That’s pretty twisted,” pronounces the only arbiter who matters.

“You sound like Claudia again,” Helena observes. To push the judgment away? Yes, and she tries to make certain of it with, “Is that another cut and paste?”

“Maybe. But now that I think about it, she sees things pretty clearly a lot of the time. Don’t you think?”

“I would like to think,” Helena is compelled to admit. Hoist by her own petard.

At this point—suspending any resolution—a doctor reenters the curtained area. “Good news: no surgery,” she tells Myka.

“See, I told you she fixed it,” Myka preens.

“You did,” says the doctor. “Several times,” she adds, dry.

Helena says “I’m so sorry,” only to hear Myka say, at the same time, “Sorry not sorry!” Another echo of Claudia... this one, however, clearly heartfelt.

The doctor turns to Helena. “Don’t try anything like this again. You got ridiculously lucky.”

“That’s kind of her M.O.,” Myka says. “Except when it isn’t.”

The doctor sighs. “I’m pretty sure that’s my point. And listen, make sure to follow up with your local doc. They’ll prescribe a ton of PT, so brace yourself.”

Myka snorts. “Brace myself? Sure, but not for the PT; my boss is going to flay me alive.”

The doctor barely reacts. “Oh, maybe this one can fix that too,” she deadpans, directing an eyeroll at Helena, accompanied by a murmured, “not a suggestion.”

“Oh, she’s in for the flaying,” Myka says, with more than a little cheer. “If not for this, then for something. Eventually.”

The doctor shakes her head, eyes unfocused. “Good news for me: I don’t have to care.” She points at Myka: “You go to PT.” Now at Helena: “You don’t try to practice medicine.” At both of them, her eyes flicking back and forth with purpose: “Got it?” Helena nods; she senses Myka doing the same. “Excellent,” the doctor says. “Or whatever. I’m done with you now.”

She conveys with her rapid exit that interacting with both of them has been a most exasperating experience.

While Helena does not appreciate being chastised—and especially not for attempting to care for Myka—she does appreciate expertise. Especially when it contributes to Myka’s well-being. It’s a conundrum. “I find your doctor’s aspect strangely appealing,” she says. “Speaking of bracing.”

Myka grins. “I was totally thinking the same thing.”

“And yet I would practice that medicine again.”

“For me that’s good news.”

As they prepare to depart, Helena says, “I confess I’m curious as to what you intend to tell Artie.”

Myka offers a slight stretch of her right shoulder in the direction of her ear: the only version of a shrug available to her, bound as she is. “Maybe I should leave that to you. You’re the writer.” Forestalling Helena’s reflexive objection, she adds, “I know, I know. The research. The ideas.”

“And yet I don’t have any. I certainly don’t see a path to inventing anything that would—”

“How about I take your photo with that camera? Think that’d help?” This is accompanied by a different grin: sly.

Whither the warning? Or is this a test? Myka isn’t Steve, yet Helena goes with truth: “It might. With any number of things.”

“If only,” Myka says, inscrutably. “Anyway I intend to tell Artie that this is all his fault, because he sent us on this retrieval in the first place. Obviously I won’t say what really happened.”

While Myka bestowing such grace is not surprising, it moves Helena all the same. “Thank you,” she says.

Myka opens her mouth, then closes it. She does it again. This wait... it’s grace too. “You’re welcome,” she eventually says. “I mean I’m tempted to tell him how you saved the day—the arm—but I know I shouldn’t, because I don’t want to draw attention to the hotel charging us extra.” To Helena’s quizzical eyebrow, she says, “For the missing towels and pillowcase. Which I tried to talk the nurses into giving back to me, but they’d already tossed them as hazardous waste. Or something. Or maybe I’m just not very persuasive? Or clear in what I’m asking for?”

Helena would very much like to explain that her own answers to those questions are negative and affirmative, respectively: no, you are persuasive; but yes, you are unclear.

“On the other hand, they did medicate me,” Myka says, perking up. “I keep thinking it’ll wear off, but not yet!”

The consolations of intoxication. “To the delight of your shoulder I’m sure,” Helena says. To my delight as well, she wishes she were free to say.

Their return to the hotel room offers another “everything has changed” hinge: no longer a stage for new and awkward performances of politesse, the space is now familiar, a place they have reentered. For the next act of the play?

Myka, who has preceded Helena in, stops and sways—just a bit, but Helena instinctively steps close, taking her by the elbow of her uninjured arm with one hand, stationing the other around the curve of her waist.

She feels Myka’s breath catch at the contact; immediately, she curses herself, loosens her hold, and says a terse, “I’m sure you want to lie down.”

“More than maybe anything. Or, wait, no, not anything.” Myka turns and catches Helena’s eyes with hers, but Helena cannot use that gaze as the basis for any inference.

She backs away as Myka lowers herself onto the bed; eventually, she backs her way into the room’s one armchair. It lacks give. It also lacks arms at a height that might provide anything resembling support. Helena slumps down, trying to be grateful that it exists at all.

Long minutes pass. As in the hospital’s waiting area, Helena imagines trying not to remain awake.

Similarly futile.

She chances a glance at Myka, who meets her eyes again and says, “That looks uncomfortable. Or what I mean is, you look uncomfortable. Which honestly is pointless, unless you’re doing some hair-shirt thing, because we’ve got this big bed. Not a lot of hours before we have to leave it, but we’ve got it for now.”

“That went poorly before.”

“I think circumstances have changed. Don’t you?” Weighted.

Circumstances are always changing, Helena could say. Usually for the worse. Instead she ventures, “You’d let me lie down with you?”

“I never wouldn’t.” Myka squints. “Wait. Did that come out right? Anyway, yes.”

Medication: not yet worn off. “You’re sure?” Helena asks.

“I’m pretty sure this bed is almost as big as a field where Pete’s favorite sport happens. It’s at least as big as an ice rink anyway, and those aren’t small.”

Helena refrains from pointing out that that was no help in the previous disaster. She doesn’t, however, appreciate being able to recline. For the first while, the fact of being beside Myka is less relevant than the slow loosening of her lower back and hips.

“Can you sleep?” Helena asks, as they are both evidently lying with eyes open to the ceiling.

“Not now,” Myka answers, and the sentiment seems clear: not after all of this. All of this with which we must deal.

The bed first, perhaps.

She turns to look at Myka, if minimally. “Did you request a cot?” she asks, because she doesn’t know. Because the answer might reveal... something?

Myka’s eyes widen. “Oh my god I should have,” she says. Stricken.

“Why didn’t you?”

“It didn’t even cross my mind.” She’s talking more to herself—or perhaps to the room at large?—than to Helena. Is this continued evidence of the medication?

“And do you know why that is?” Helena asks, hoping for that revelation, even if drug-induced.

“Honestly I think I thought I was being given an ultimatum. Like it was something I had to be fine with or else.”

“Fine with ‘or else.’” Helena means the echo as rueful agreement.

But: “Sharing a bed with you. Platonically,” Myka says, taking it instead as a request for explanation.

“Platonically,” Helena scoffs, unable to avoid the idea that agreeing to accept that adverb would, paradoxically, usher in others. (Passionately.) (Speaking of paradoxically.) “That word is so often misused.” It’s a push-off. A push-away.

“But I’m using it correctly.” Myka sounds not offended, but rather self-satisfied.

Fine. Harden the position. “You are not referring to our consciousness rising from physical to spiritual matters.”

“Well... but how about love for the idea of good? As a path to virtue?”

Myka is well-read. In this moment, that fact is not entirely pleasing. “I suppose we were both attempting to be courtly,” Helena concedes.

“I mean I’ll grant you that nobody ended up transcending the body,” Myka says. Helena is about to agree, to snap away from churlishness, to express regret and apologies, when Myka exclaims, “Hey! I just had the best idea for a joke. So you’re not a hologram anymore, right? So you know what you were trying to be? Last night, in bed?”

Jokes. They confound Helena nearly as completely as metaphors do Steve. “I have no idea.”

“A Platonic solid,” Myka declares, triumphant.

Helena is mortified to find that in this case, she “gets it.” “Myka,” she sighs.

“Too soon? But come on, it’s not bad!”

“Alas, it is.” This quality, Helena can recognize.

“Right, but the good kind.”

Helena is not made of stone. Or bronze. How much easier everything had been then, sans choice and sans reason... and most importantly, sans the near-irresistibility of this one human. “I did always enjoy the word ‘icosahedron,’” she tenders.

“See,” Myka says, now in indulgence rather than triumph. “Pretty sure you have more than twenty faces though.”

“You do as well. Some revealed only under the influence of opioids.”

“Here’s one I don’t think I’d have the guts to use otherwise: my explain-it-to-you-using-words face.”

“Explain what to me?” Helena asks. It’s a surrender. She should better have said she did not wish that face revealed, but that would never have stopped a determined Myka.

“Why I flung myself to the floor.”

“I thought that had been explained? You were attempting to escape a circumstance.”

“First, the flinging was more involuntary than an attempt. And second: your hand.”

“Perhaps you don’t remember”—a strange thing to say to Myka—“but we had this conversation previously.” Helena does not want to have it again.

“Not this conversation. In that one, you drew the wrong conclusion. Or relied on an invalid assumption. Actually both of those. Anyway, your hand.”

“Please stop saying that,” Helena requests. Begs.

“Fine, I’ll finish the sentence: Woke up every nerve in my body,” Myka says, causing Helena to cringe and wish she could this very instant construct a truly useful time machine so she could fly backward, overleaping this latest passage so as to muzzle Myka before she could say that, because she believes it but knows it leads nowhere functional. To her continued mortification, Myka carries on, “Woke them all right up.” This, she says rhapsodic. Helena feels that tone in her gut, a hot twist of something she deserves as pain, but that manifests, shamefully, as pleasure. “Then your hand moved, and it shorted out the system—my system—and I fell out of bed, and the rest is history.”

“On the contrary, the rest is quite present.” Helena tries pushing all of it away, striving for detachment. For function.

“So, your hand,” Myka says again.

Helena raises the offender. “Also present.” Detachment. Humor, even; pushing, pushing, pushing. Trying to maintain.

“No, I mean why,” Myka pushes in turn.

Helena bats back, in faux innocence, “Why is it present?”

“Why was it present. On me.” Low now, her voice, just as compelling as, and even more commanding than, when she uses it to utter Helena’s name.

“I have no excuse,” Helena says.

“I don’t need an excuse. I need a reason. Do you have one?”

“It isn’t exculpatory.”

“As long as it’s explanatory.”

No escape now. No excuse, and no escape. “Here is my reason: I wanted to touch you. So against all better judgment, I did. Intending only that, nothing more.” Myka’s response to these words is an exhale. Loud. Unlike the hospital sob, however, this is slow and controlled. Helena allows a decorous pause, but no words ensue, so she goes on. Myka deserves an explanation that is complete. “But then I found myself unable to... un-touch you. Competently. And the rest will at some point be history, upon which I will never cease to look back and berate myself.”

Waiting for whatever may come next, Helena feels exhaustion inch through her, infiltrating her eyes, limbs, brain, sapping every vestige of energy... her surrender to the creeping leach is imminent when Myka says, “I like that reason.”

All right then. Awake and aware. “You do?”

“You really can be impossible to talk to. Listen to me: if I did that—touched you—I would find myself the same. Unable to un-touch. Do you understand?”

What would be the cost of abandoning her resistance? “I don’t know...” she begins, then reverses course and begins again. Truth, never mind the cost. “Yes. I do understand. But I don’t know what to do about that.”

Myka turns her head full toward Helena, twisting her long neck. Helena turns her own head, but that isn’t enough, so she shifts onto her side—her left side, punitively aware that it will be weeks before Myka can turn in such a way.

They look at each other, Helena both knowing and fearing how her guilt must freight her gaze. Regarding Myka so close, looking now into eyes that are open, is a boon she does not deserve.

After a time, Myka says, “I know what I want to do.”

Her intent is abundantly clear. The entirely of Helena’s being balks, stranding her again in Boone: if she makes a move for the momentary better, it will most likely end worse. She cannot find the... courage? or is it foolish disregard for consequences?... to reach for that moment of joy. Neither, however, can she find the discipline to dismiss its possibility.

“But I also know I shouldn’t,” Myka says, breaking with clarity into Helena’s indecision.

Well. Helena can certainly see the wisdom of that, so perhaps at last they are approaching a real accord that will render all hopes and wishes moot, so that neither courage nor discipline features in the—

“I can tell the meds are messing with my head,” Myka says, “and if there’s one thing I want to remember in picture-perfect detail, it’s this.” She moves her right index finger near to Helena’s lips, then withdraws it.

Unable to un-touch. That withdrawal reaffirms that Myka believes what she says. “This,” Helena echoes, mesmerized.

“So I’m going to wait till tomorrow to—listen to me saying it out loud—kiss you. For the first time. I want to be all there when it happens.”

There is a practicality to Myka’s thinking, and to Myka, that Helena worships. She tries to match it with a bit of her own: “If it happens.”

Myka’s jaw drops. “Come on! I said it out loud! It’s real now!”

“It’s been real for some time, hasn’t it? But I’m being realistic about the circumstance. You might not remember that you wanted to.”

“Seriously? I’ve remembered it since we met.”

Helena has remembered it just as long. She has. Denying it is pointless. But she has a larger concern, and though this is the wrong time to address it, perhaps medicated Myka will afford an unfiltered read...

“Or you might think better of it.”

“Of kissing you? I don’t think so.”

“Of what could ensue. The possibility of a... relationship. Between us. What if it doesn’t work?”

“Relationship.” After she says the word, Myka’s lips part and close, as if the very word is savory. “What if it does?”

It is savory. However. “I’m asking as a practical matter, not philosophically. I’m constrained: I can’t leave again. That’s why I came back.” The thin strand to which she is clinging... refraining from attempting to rekindle an intimacy hasn’t been only to keep Myka safe. It has also been to keep the Warehouse safe for Helena herself to inhabit.

“Then don’t leave again.”

“But what if that means you do?” This is not philosophy either. This, too, is history.

“If I do, then I do, but I’d like to think I won’t. We’ve both had our walkaway crises, and they didn’t take. So if it doesn’t work, we put it behind us like adults. If Pete and I could, then so can you and I. But I’d rather not have to. So let’s be careful.” She pauses. “Breathe however you need to.”

The words are an embrace. A physical clasp might be more galvanizing, but right now, Myka is managing just fine with words. “If this works, it will be because you say things like that.”

“Good news, because I mean things like that. And I intend to keep saying them. Hey, speaking of saying, do me a favor and write down what I said just now, about the adults and the careful, because I want to remember it.”

Sluggishly, Helena ideates rising, going to the room’s desk, finding logo-bearing paper and pen, writing...

****

Helena and Oscar are in a salon. They are engaged in a dispute regarding choices and consequences. Helena is standing at a lectern, and Oscar is reclining on a lavishly upholstered chaise longue, kicking his right leg such that its calf bounces in a languid little rhythm against the low cushioned edge.

Kick. Kick. Kick.

“The choices that create a circumstance will not, repeated, resolve it satisfactorily,” Helena says. Is she reading from a monograph? “As we see in the case of your own Ballad of Reading Gaol, do we not? And yet injury need not lead inevitably to future debility, so clearly some choice in the matter is—”

“Helena,” Oscar says, interrupting her monologue. “Helena,” he repeats. He sounds nothing like himself, but rather someone else, and Helena is straining to connect the voice to the correct person.

Kick. Kick. Kick.

“Time to wake up,” Oscar-as-someone-else admonishes. Encourages?

“I know,” she tells him, hugely frustrated, fighting. “I’m trying.”

His impassive mien is no help. It never was.

Kick. Kick. Kick.

Trust Oscar to cast some part of himself as the pendulum of a particularly annoying clock—

“Seriously, wake up,” Helena hears, and consciousness jolts at her: Myka’s voice.

Oscar dissolves. Into laughter or tears, no doubt, as he was wont to do...

Helena’s eyes open, meeting Myka’s, and she is brought back to it all: the hotel, the bed; the shoulder, the hospital... then hotel again, bed again... and finally words, as if for the first time.

Myka is lying on her right side, facing Helena. Her eyes are bright, her gaze intense.

“Are you in pain?” Helena asks.

Myka leans forward, as if that were a signal. The signal: for Helena is the astonished, grateful, transported recipient of a kiss, a first kiss—the first kiss—one that is swift but soft, gentle, genuine. Like morning... “Better now,” Myka says when she pulls back. “I’m going to brush my teeth. Stay there.”

Better now. Not lost on Helena are all the ways that signifies, including: better that this happened now than at some point in the desperate past. Then, such a kiss would have been a tragic wish for all they would never have. Now, instead, it can stand as a reward for having survived all of that, as well as, universe willing, a mark of embarkation.

By the time Myka returns, Helena has sat up, stationing herself on the edge of the bed. She has also realized that she must apologize—for they should not embark on this new voyage with yet another of her many faults unaddressed. “You charged me with writing down part of our conversation. I didn’t. I fell asleep instead.”

Myka hesitates before joining her on the bed’s edge, clearly considering which arm should be next to Helena. She chooses the functional right. “It’s okay. Even if I don’t remember exactly what we said, I remembered what we needed to do.”

“Needed to,” Helena reprises. She could supply words of her own, but why? Myka is saying the ones that matter...

“Needed to,” Myka affirms. “So where were we?” She raises her useful hand to Helena’s cheek, cradling. Helena leans into it, saying nothing, because silence now says everything.

This is a longer kiss, more wandering, more suggestive of possibility, more likely to lead to such possibility... Helena is the one to this time pull away. “A place quite new,” she says.

“And yet I’m pretty sure we’ve been headed here all along.”

“It wasn’t inevitable,” Helena says. She is thinking now of dream-Oscar, who is slipping from her mind, dropping, like a poorly initiated painting, but he must have obstreperously been maintaining something about inevitability. He always did.

“No,” Myka agrees. “And it still isn’t. So let’s be careful.”

“You remember that part? Despite my stenographic failure?”

“Even if I didn’t—but I do—I’d know it’s important.”

Helena turns and touches her right hand to Myka’s right hip. She would certainly not be able to do this now if she had not done so in the night... the night’s ontogeny recapitulating the phylogeny of their shared history. Myka covers Helena’s hand with hers, and there is healing in the simple fact of their sitting. But eventually that is not enough, and another kiss ensues, longer still, and lips outweigh quiet hands—or no, lips add to quiet hands, but hands are not content to remain so calm, and so this continues and might continue—

Myka makes a noise that is clearly not of pleasure; she moves entirely away, her right hand pressing protectively at her left shoulder. “We’re going to need to be careful about this stupid shoulder too. I’m so, so sorry.”

“You’re sorry? I’m the one who can’t keep my hands to myself.” Ontogeny, phylogeny.

“It’s not like I’m some paragon of self-control... and I am sorry, because I’d like to be able to participate fully. But also I’d like to not have to hurry on account of catching a plane. In good news, eventually my shoulder will heal. I know we can’t stay here till then, but...”

“It would help,” Helena supplies.

“If only because we have to come up with how this supposedly happened. I still think maybe I should take your picture. Or you could take mine? Because by the way, here’s a funny thing: I was trying to write a novel.”

“You were?” More that is new... “Speaking of icosahedra,” Helena notes.

“I want to tell you about it.”

“You do?” Trying to convey her incredulity. That Myka would allow her such... access.

“I want to tell you everything. But in the meantime we have to tell Artie something... I guess we’ve got both flights plus the layover in Denver to get our story straight.”

Stories. Narrative. Novels? “But we’ll tell Steve the truth. Won’t we?”

“Of course we will. And Claudia, right?”

“Also necessary. Although most likely mockery-inducing.”

Myka smiles. It’s a sunrise. “Stress testing. If we can take it from her, we’ll be fine. Then again we might need the time on the planes to rest up for that.”

“Weren’t you able to sleep, this past while?”

Myka shakes her head, and just as Helena opens her mouth to express regret and apologize again for her own sleep, Myka silences her with a kiss, one that lingers, lingers, lingers... still half against Helena’s lips, she says, “The un-touching part really is difficult. But don’t worry about my not sleeping: for the first time in a long time, I was happy to be awake.”

END

#bering and wells #warehouse 13 #fanfic #Asleep #part 2 #B&W holiday gift exchange #kla1991 #also anniversary!#which this year arrived a bit unexpectedly #so I decided to do this mashing up of occasions #because I apparently cannot work fast or well anymore #but as for this story #something something sleep and wakefulness #and when one finds oneself in those states #and whether one recognizes the state one is in when in it #or when finally out of it #and of course there are also the transitions

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laylajeffany · 2 days

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targeted ad ii - microfic

saw these on insta - ya'll might already know they exist sorry i'm old but they are for Wednesday and Enid for sure, so have a tiny scene of Enid convincing her moody lil gf to wear them

“You’ve already managed to convince me to join you in a cabin that doesn’t double as a hideout for family members running from federal agents. On the first full day of this trip, I’ve eaten your sugary version of breakfast, listened to your KPop morning stretch routine playlist, and now you expect me to wear matching clothes? I already wore a snood with you to hunt a monster.”

Enid wiggled her shoulders, holding a tie-dyed canvas tone in her hands with her bottom lip curled out. “Yeah, and you let it get all torn up! Come on, Wednesday – it’s practically a tradition!”

“This is our first time traveling together. The only tradition we’ll have is going to be you waking up breathing each day after the insufferable teenage whimsy you have me entertaining on this so-called vacation.”

“Okay, not so much a tradition, but it’s like, a thing that couples do together! At least all the ones on Instagram do it when they travel!”

Wednesday opened her own suitcase, a vintage piece assembled with fine leather. Whatever low-quality, polyester excuse for ‘fabric’ that Enid had likely ordered from a sweatshop was not going on her body. “Good news, I’m not on Instagram; you don’t have to worry about meeting vapidly set expectations of social media on my behalf.”

“But I got them special for us, so that we could still be coordinating and you could keep your aesthetics up, even though there would be no one here to see it. And I promise, I won’t post it on my stories or anything, I’d just…maybe hope that you’ll let Thing take a Polaroid of us for our cute little collection of pics on the string lights...”

Once Enid was full-blown pouting, Wednesday gave her a glance after taking out her organic, linen, hand-dyed pants that were stitched by the family seamstress and sighed. “What garment-factory-fire-waiting-to-happen clothing have you obtained?”

Enid scoffed as she reached into her bag. “I’d think the idea of a factory fire would be exciting to you.”

“I support exploiting people for their stupidity, not their labor,” Wednesday muttered and crossed her arms as she watched Enid pull out sweatshirts. One as an offensive baby pink and the other was black.

Matching? Hardly.

“These are from a small business I saw on that social-media-app you hate so much -”

“Did you fall for targeted advertising again? Enid, we’ve discussed the need to more strictly adjust your privacy settings so that your personality can’t be packaged and sold to you-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, breach of data – Russian bots, we’ve been through this. Anyway, this is a cute, women-owned online shop, not from some planet-killing application. I thought that these were particularly appropriate for us, and actually match this exact moment we’re in, right now.”

She turned them around, and Wednesday almost let out a puff of air in amusement, though she managed to conceal it before it could escape.

On the black sweatshirt was a pink heart, with a little spiderweb motif around it and the phrase ‘might bite,’ while the pink one had the same style, but the script read instead, ‘might cry.’

“Fitting,” Wednesday finally decided.

“Let’s see if they fit us!” She cheered, pulling the bright colored pastel top over her head and giggling, approaching Wednesday bravely, tugging the neck hole over her braids.

“Enid, it has pink.”

“Like, three inches of it on top! We’re alone in the woods, no one can see you. And I’ve got Benadryl for bug bites, if you break out in hives from your ‘color allergy.’”

Wednesday let out a long sigh through her nose as Enid actually took her arms one at a time and weaseled them inside the sleeves of the crewneck. She stared straight ahead, unfortunately – the maneuver long had lost the effect of unnerving Enid.

“Eek! You look so cute.” Enid tugged her over to the mirror on the back of the door of the log-built lake house they’d rented for spring break (a place for her to wolf out during that night’s full moon and for Wednesday to have plenty of target practice with a variety of weapons she’d packed). “I mean, intimidating – of course, not cute. Never cute.” She let out a series of bubbly laughs yet again, hooking an arm over Wednesday, who stared at their reflection.

It was a bit chilly that morning – but certainly not cold enough for the jacket she’d packed in case the weather was uncooperative…

“I will wear this for exactly the twenty minutes it will take us to walk to the lake.”

Enid squeaked and kissed her cheek, squeezing their matching sweatshirts together in a hug before pulling back and admiring their attire again, rubbing up and down Wednesday’s back mindlessly as she stared in the mirror. “We look adorable. I mean, deadly. We look very deadly in these.”

“You’re going to be dead if you don’t take your hands off my black and pink sweatshirt,” Wednesday clarified.

“Oh, please. You love it when I touch you,” Enid teased and Wednesday nearly wrinkled her nose at how much that was true. “What, are you going to prove that true and bite me if I don’t stop?”

“You wish,” Wednesday retorted, working very hard on keeping her eyes from rolling all the way back when Thing managed to capture the moment with Enid’s instant camera as she’d hoped. Enid let go and brought her arms up in a victory pose before milling around and gathering entirely too many unnecessary supplies for their morning hike while Wednesday watched her intensely in the mirror. She would admit – she liked the oversized top, and how it fell over her hands and went mid-length down her thighs. Adding her more usual pair of pants to go with it, she laced up her boots and waited as Enid debated between tinted lip balm. “The mosquitoes are going to find you delicious no matter what color your lips are.”

“It has SPF in it! Very necessary,” She said, putting some on herself when she finally picked one, then approached Wednesday, taking her by the back of her head and putting it on her as well. The fountain of positive thinking and insane levels of bravery that was her girlfriend shocked her into allowing it. Even more boldly, she followed it up with a kiss to those tinted lips that Wednesday almost returned. “Now you can leave a cute little lip imprint when you bite me,” She winked.

Tugging her close, Wednesday wrapped her black-clad sleeves around her pink middle, tucking her cheek against the plush fabric. In a move indicating surrender, she muttered, “This sweatshirt is adequately warm.”

“I knew you’d like it,” Enid kissed the top of her head, giving her a long embrace in return.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t have to. And even if you’re just entertaining me,” She pulled back to look her in the eye. “Thank you. Now come on, you getting all affectionate on me might make me cry happy tears if we don’t get moving!”

Black Menagerie update is late because real life is sometimes better than fanfiction | purchase a sweatshirt for you and your moody gf here

#wednesday addams is whipped #wednesday 2022 #fanfic #wenclair #layla's >5k challenge #ghoulbabe #written in a supply closet at work and unbeta'd forgive

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tenpintsof-sundrop · 1 day

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Nisha, did you know I would step on some legos barefooted for you? Anyways can’t wait to read for another fandom I have never stepped foot in and would probably never engage with the canon in just because you decided that’s what to make, and I’ve decided to read it anyways. Home cooked meal. -Rotten Anon

The opening line of this message made literal cartoon anime hearts appear above my head, just so you know <3

Also you have inspired me to post a rundown of my WIPs because I am really excited about what I have been working on. And for two of these fandoms, I know you have said you know nothing about the canon, but for the third, I am not sure, so we'll see.

My Current WIPs April/May 2024

Heaven's Gate (for The Walking Dead) - Daryl Dixon x GN!Reader. Strangers to Lovers/Soulmates/Lovers Reunited. Angst, Fluff, Hurt and Comfort. Set during Season 1 to Season 5. 17k in counting (will be a oneshot). You can find a preview here. In this fic, you and Daryl get separated when the Governor attacks the prison, and though you both believe the other person is dead (or long gone) you find each other at the most unlikely time, in the most unlikely place.

I am super excited about this fic, and the themes of hope that I have woven into it. Because yes, I unironically love writing about hope and how the human spirit can persevere - which is something that my favourite moments in The Walking Dead show. This is first draft complete and just needs to be edited.

The Jaws of Life (for DC Titans) - Jason Todd x GN!Reader. Sequel to Emergency Contact. Lovers Reunited. Extreme Angst, Smut, Hurt and (some) Comfort. Set during Season 3. 21k in counting (will probably be a oneshot - if it needs to be split up, it will be put in two parts, but I hope I can get away with a oneshot). (I highly recommend that everyone go read the original in the meantime, because it is one of my best fics ever.) In this fic, you and Jason struggle with the new meaning of your relationship after what happened with Deathstroke - only for this tentative change to be harshly disrupted by the Joker. And you're still heavily mourning when a red hooded stranger breaks into your apartment one night, seeking medical care because apparently - you owe him one.

Everyone give Jaycen @nctzenkane a big fucking round of applause for this one, because he was randomly talking to me about Jason Todd today (we were having the 'some characters are only fuckable in costume' discussion) - and I got talking about how this version of Jason from Titans makes me so passionate to write about the character. And it is solely because of him that I opened up this fic and took a good look at it - I have been thinking about this fic for months, wanting to finish it because I know I am gonna be proud of it, but I kept hesitating because I thought I had a way bigger mountain to conquer with it. But the conversation I had with Jaycen really inspired me and I wrote 5k on the fic just today, and I realized that with this momentum, I could have the first draft done by the end of this month. So I am promising myself that this is gonna be done soon.

Speaking of which - when The Jaws of Life is first draft done, I wanna host a poll so you guys can decide which of those two ^^ fics goes through the editing process to be posted first. Both will be posted (hopefully) by the end of May, but I do wanna know which one you guys wanna see posted first. Which leads me to:

Nasty (for Stranger Things) - Sub!Eddie Munson x Dom!Fem!Reader. Established Relationship. Smut/PWP. 3k (this is gonna be a shorter fic lmao). In this fic, you and Eddie have been dating for a while, but you don't like that all of his attempts to have sex with you have him taking on a (seemingly fake) dom persona. When you finally tell him that you prefer to be more dominant in bed, he isn't disgusted like you thought he might be - he loves it.

This is one I have been sitting on for a while, and right before it was ready to be posted - my brain lost interest in it like tiktok does micro trends. But I think this is gonna be really great to post while the poll for those other fics is cooking because it's short and sweet and for the past few days, whenever I have seen the cover for this in my drafts, I have gotten excited about it again. So I am excited to finish it and show it off to everyone!!

#rotten anon #anonymous #sundrop answers #curren wips #wips #daryl dixon x reader #the walking dead #jason todd x reader #dc titans #eddie munson x reader #stranger things

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theladyjojogrant · 2 years

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I’m BREATHING it’s FINE I’m GOOD not crying or anything—

(p.s.)

#me @ Tommy Knight: BRO where are you?!#tbh I’d be surprised if he didn’t at least have a cameo though #Anyway I’ve been hoping this would would happen!!!!#But I honestly didn’t think Clyde would be in it!#just please BF don’t make their dynamic weird by trying too hard to make them ‘not shippy’#counting on you #Sja #(how long has it been since this fandom had news lol)#Dw #doctor who #big finish #rani chandra #clyde langer

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itslikeaspaceship · 11 months

Text

She’s not used to this kind of affection really. It’s odd, scary kind of, the way he’s so gentle with her. Maybe it’s because after the hospital she was convinced it was a one-time thing, that he’d only done it because she was to fragile for him to treat her any other way, but the longer they lived in Jackson the more she realized that Joel was just like this.

For such a large man, he was so insanely attentive.

At times it was even intimidating.

She remembers the first time he’d ever wiped food off her face. He had sighed beforehand, staring at her as she rambled on and on to Tommy about whatever dinosaur she was currently fixated on. She could see him out of the corner of her eye, and every second that passed with him staring at her, the more she’d talk. This wasn’t the first time adults had gotten mad at her for being excited, but Ellie wasn’t gonna back down just because he wanted some quiet.

Eventually the sighing stopped and he instead reached out his hand toward her face. That’s when she flinched.

Joel was a tough guy, sure, but she’d never gotten the impression he’d hit her. Apparently she was wrong.

She pulled back, taking a deep breath to prepare for the sting, but nothing happened. Peeking open an eye she saw that his thumb was resting against her chin, and he was simply just frozen in place. Even Tommy had stopped eating.

“You had some soup on your face kiddo.” He said, clearing his throat.

“Oh.” She leaned back into his hand then, allowing him to swipe his thumb along the juice on her face.

The rest of dinner was quieter, and she knew they were watching her, silently talking back and forth with their eyes.

It wasn’t like it was that big of deal, FEDRA agents did it all the time, it’d just been so long that he’d taken her by surprise.

Joel however didn’t see it that way.

When they’d gotten home, he’d ushered her inside, sitting her on the couch and demanding her to stay there. “I’ll be right back, don’t move.”

She listened for about five minutes until curiosity got the better of her and she ended up peeking through the curtains. She watched as he paced back and forth, jaw clenched while he muttered to himself.

She couldn’t understand why he was so angry about this. It wasn’t like she actually thought he was gonna hit her, it was mostly just muscle memory, and besides, it was a normal adult thing to do. Right?

When a kid messes up, that kid gets punished. She was talking to much when he might’ve wanted her to stop, so he was punishing her. Except obviously he wasn’t and maybe he was mad because she was convinced he was.

She bit her lip at the thought. Why wouldn’t her brain just fucking shut up for once?

“Ellie.” The door creaked and she jumped from her spot at the window, throwing herself back down on the couch.

Joel’s footsteps were heavy as he made his way to her, but his face wasn’t as harsh as before. She couldn’t decide if that comforted or scared her.

“Look Joel-”

“No ma’am.” He said, one finger flying out from his clenched fist. “It’s my turn to talk.”

Her breath was caught in her throat at that. Maybe she was wrong, maybe he was angry at her.

He was quiet for a moment, mouth opening and closing until eventually he began to speak. “When we were at dinner tonight, and I went to get that food off your face, why in gods name did you flinch?” Maybe he could see the fear in her then, and so he made sure to clarify. “I’m not mad, I promise, I just wanna know. I need to know.”

Even then she wouldn’t look at him, eyes glued to whatever surface looked the most interesting at the time. “It’s not even that big of a deal Joel. I knew you weren’t gonna hit me.”

From the corner of her eye, she saw his own widen for a split second. “Ellie.”

She groaned, tossing her head back. “Seriously Joel can you just let it go. I get it, I had food on my face and you were wiping it off. Now I wanna go to bed.”

She tried to jump up from the couch, feet carrying her as fast as she begged them to go, but Joel was faster.

“Ellie we are not done here.” He grabbed her wrist, making her jerk around.

“I don’t understand why you’re making such a big deal about this. It’s not your fucking problem.”

“The hell it isn’t. Ellie you thought I was gonna hit you, your insane if you think that’s not something we address.”

And maybe it was the confusion about this whole situation, but something in her snapped. “Why the fuck do you care?! You said it yourself, you’re not my dad, and I’m not your fucking kid so stop acting like this is something it’s not.”

She saw hurt flash in his eyes then and it made her feel physical pain knowing she was the one who caused that, but for some reason her mouth just wouldn’t stop.

“I know your pissed okay, but just let it go. It’s none of your business and-” Suddenly his arms were reaching out, and though she tried to fight it, he was wrapping them around her, pulling her as close to him as possible.

She didn’t react at first, body tense and arms straight at her side, but then Joel did something he’d never done before. He kissed her head.

“I’m sorry.” He whispered against her hair, his lips falling against her temple once more.

For some reason every bit of fight left her body then, and she completely crumbled against his chest, arms looping around him and squeezing him as tight as she could.

“I’m so sorry kid.” She didn’t mean to cry, but a few tears escaped anyway, and she just wiped her face on his shirt, relishing in the utter warmth it brought.

“I’m sorry that I ever made you feel like you were anything less then my kid.” He rubbed her back as he spoke, voice so gentle she swore it wasn’t really him talking. “And I would never ever hit you. No matter what you do, how bad it is, we keep our hands to ourselves. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” She whispered.

After that day, he saw the incident as cause to treat her like actual glass. His hands were so light everytime he touched her, cradling her against him like she was this precious thing. It was so confusing.

It would be different if she didn’t care, it wouldn’t bother her so much, but it hurt worse when she started craving it, and it became almost a problem when her body felt as if it was failing just because he didn’t kiss her head bye.

There was one day where he was leaving for an early patrol, and of course, he was late. And instead of the regular forehead kiss and Joel hug, he just yelled out his goodbye and ran out the door, promising he’d be back before dinner.

She hated that day. Every hour that passed all she could think about was how she wanted Joel. She didn’t eat lunch and barely touched her dinner.

Joel stared at her the whole time, trying to gently encourage to take a few bites, but it was like a switch flipped. Sure Joel was here but she hadn’t felt him, so why would she want to do anything at all?

“Ellie?” He gently toed her with his boot, eyes all soft and easy. “You gotta eat something baby.”

She just shrugged her shoulders, pushing some more food around with her fork. “I’m not hungry.”

“Not even for cheesy potatoes?” He said lightheartedly, putting his fork on her plate. And despite her mood, she couldn’t help but smile.

Cheesy potatoes were in fact her favorite, but the catch was, she never put them on her own plate. Instead, she let Joel get them in bulk and then she’d steal whatever she wanted from the pile, knowing he’d finish the rest. He always teased her about it, telling her to get her own food, but she saw the smile and the little shakes of his head that came with it, indicating he was in fact amused.

But tonight she hadn’t even looked at him or touched his plate for that matter, she opted instead to stare at her own food and dwell on why she felt so weird. It was a feeling she assumed that not even cheesy potatoes could fix.

“No.” She sighed, putting down her fork altogether.

Joel looked absolutely flabbergasted at that. “You’re not eating cheesy potatoes? The world must be ending. You feelin okay?”

She shrugged for probably the millionth time today. “Yup, just not hungry.”

He gave her a hesitant look, stopping his movements as well. “Hey, you sure?”

Fuck, why did he have to be so nice about it? So fucking gentle?

“Mmhm.” She mumbled, running her sleeve across her face to catch those stupid tears she hadn’t even meant to cry.

“Ellie.”

“No it’s good, I’m good.” She gave him what was probably the least assuring smile ever, and picked her fork back up to push some more food across her plate.

Joel didn’t like that, and so he stopped eating altogether. “Why don’t we just go home?”

She knew it wasn’t a question, and yet she still argued. “No it’s fine Joel, just finish your food, you’re hungry.”

“Mm, not really.”

“Jo-”

“I think I’ve had enough cheesy potatoes to fill both of us for a week, let’s go home.” Though this statement was said with love, she heard the demand in it. It was time to go home.

“Okay.” She said quietly, slipping on her jacket and racing out the door.

More tears threatened to spill over as she raced to the house, feeling Joel’s stare as he walked behind her. She didn’t understand why he couldn’t just fucking let things go. They didn’t need to talk about everything, which of course was what he was gonna do, but things would all be so much easier if he would just fight with her. If they would yell and scream, hell, sometimes she’d prefer him to just dig a hole and throw her in it. For some reason she felt it would hurt less then actually telling him what was the matter.

It would also be less embarrassing.

She swears she’s in the clear when she pushes the door open, already forming a plan to get him off her back, but she’s barely even inside for a minute before he’s right behind her, telling her to stop.

“Ellie.” That’s all it takes, one single word and she’s turning around, feet glued to the ground.

“I’m going to bed.” It’s defiant, an opening to an argument, but it’s easier then admitting what she really wants.

“No ma’am you’re not, sit down.” He points to the couch, slipping his coat off and tossing it on the rack.

Every muscle, every bone in her body says to keep walking away, to start a fight. But her mind won’t let her. She must stand there for what feels like forever debating whether or not it’s worth it, but when Joel looks at her, eyes still soft besides the gruff sound to his voice, she caves immediately. With a groan she begins stomping over to the couch, hearing Joel mumble something about dinosaur feet on his way to her.

Any other day she’d laugh, come back with some stupid statement about how he’s older then a dinosaur, but all she can think about now is the way he gently placed his hand on her shoulder when he walked by, how the place where it was is warm and tingly. How she feels like there’s a piece missing from her just because it’s gone.

“You gonna tell me what the hell is goin on or am I gonna have to beat it out of ya?” He says it with a smile, a ploy to get her to laugh. She doesn’t.

“Nothings wrong.”

“That’s not what I said.” He replies, hands clasped in front of him as he leans forward. “Talk to me kiddo.” He just stares then, waits for her to speak, to yell, anything. But she feels stuck, like she’s walking through quicksand, going so far down she can’t breathe, can’t see anything other then her own fear.

“Ellie hey,” He grabs her hand, running his thumb over her knuckles. She cracks a little more, eyes growing misty as she feels his callouses touch her newly soft skin. Why is this so hard?

“Look at me honey.” He crouches down, hands on her knees. There’s warmth everywhere on her body now, reaching from the tips of her toes all the way up to the top of her head, and yet somehow she’s still so fucking frozen in place.

“I can’t” She croaks out, a little sob shaking her upper body.

This obviously scares him, she feels it in the way his jaws ticks a bit, his hands tightening their grip on her own. “Ellie I promise you, whatever it is, no matter how bad it is, you can.”

She fights for a little while longer, Joel’s thumbs keeping her grounded as they brush along the skin of her hands and every now and then her knees.

How does she explain this? Where should she even start? Hey Joel, I feel like a fucking mess whenever you don’t hold me all the time because I’m a little baby with absolutely no self-worth and can’t function unless you kiss my head goodbye.

That wouldn’t do. No matter how much it was true, it wouldn’t do.

The frustrations of not being able to voice it made her chest feel even tighter, her fingers instinctively curling around Joel’s as she fought to breathe.

“I can’t.” She says again, eyes closing shut.

She hears him sigh before he readjusts to sit on his butt, hands never moving from hers. “Try.”

“I-”

“Ellie try.”

She inhales deeply, still struggling to find her own footing. It’s like a war inside her brain. Tell him, don’t tell him, back and forth nonstop. The only thing that seems to quiet it is when he lifts her hands to his lips, kissing her knuckles and massaging her tense hands. “Try.” He whispers again, in what she reads as a plea.

But how?

“You know,” The words come before she can even understand what’s happening, and she starts to stop, but he whispers it again and so she keeps going. “You know in the mornings when you like, when you hug me bye or like,” She sighs, still struggling. “I don’t know, when you kiss my head and stuff.”

She thinks she sees recognition flood his face and for a moment can breathe. “Oh Ellie, if you don’t like that just….” Everything goes quiet and her ears start ringing. Just kidding, he doesn’t get it.

“No.” She says quickly, “no please it’s not that.”Confusion now, and she feels even worse. “It’s, I like it when you do that.”

“Ellie I’m not understandin. I’m sorry.” She inhales again, trying not to cry. It’s not his fault he can’t read her mind and it’s not his fault she doesn’t know how to speak it.

“Promise you won’t make fun of me? No matter how crazy.”

“I promise.” He says it with no hesitation, without even blinking. She thinks that’s a good sign.

She takes a deep breath. “I don’t like it when you don’t do that. Like this morning when you left without a hug and you didn’t do anything like at all I thought I was gonna explode the rest of the day.” She’s quiet for a moment. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me?”

Joel gives her a little smile, cupping her cheek. “Baby there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Yes there is.” She says frantically, pulling everything away from him. “I’m almost fifteen, I should-I should be able to function by myself. I should be able to go to sleep without you around, I should be able to have a normal fucking day at school without needing your hugs. But I can’t do it.”

He opens his mouth to reply, eyes going even softer as he watches all of her frustrations fall into his hands. “Ellie.”

“No there’s-there’s something wrong with me, I know it. I’m like a baby and I shouldn’t-”

“Hey now,” He says, grunting as he moves next to her on the couch. “Don’t talk like that, you’re not a baby and there’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Yes there is.”

“Ellie listen to me.” He guides her eyes to meet his, rubbing his thumb along her cheek. “You’ve gone your whole life without anybody to hold your hand. Nobody to say it was okay when you were scared, nobody to take care of you when you’re sick. And your goddamn tough for that.”

She smiles a bit at that and he takes it as a window to keep going.

“But you’re still a kid, and kids need affection. It’s normal, hell,” He laughs, “Sarah still cuddled the same damn way you do. So it’s okay.” Ellie sniffles, nodding her head at his words. “And really the only difference between that babygirl and this one is that you have a shit ton of catching up to do. But it’s okay.” He repeats it, needing her to get it through her thick head. “You hearin me?”

He leans their foreheads together, his lips gently kissing her temple and she just closes her eyes, reveling in the feeling of his utter presence “Yeah.” She thinks she does.

“Good, now no more theatrics.” He says jokingly, pulling her to his chest. “Okay?”

“Okay.” She laughs, nuzzling into his side.

It’s still not easy really.

It takes her weeks to finally walk up to him and just wrap her arms around him in a hug, but she does it, and a little bit of the weight loosens when he rubs his hand over head.

He takes the whole thing like champ, tries to make it easier for her to come to him. She doesn’t understand what he does differently or if he even changes anything, but everything else seems to just fall into place on its own until eventually it becomes normal for her to randomly walk up to him and fall against his chest. No matter where they are or who they’re with she learns that it’s okay, cause he’s gonna pull her in close and keep her shielded from everything and everyone, every single time.

And now, instead of feeling likes she’s walking through quicksand, it’s like she’s standing in a field of flowers. Easy, safe, and most importantly, home.

#um yeah #don’t even wanna admit how long I’ve been working on this #and i would not get your hopes all crazy because I’ll probably come to the conclusion that to many things said are out of character #then h delete it #I’ve done it before 😭#anyway I do love this fic…….for now #and I sincerely apologize about the tense change and take full responsibility ✋#I didn’t even know it happened but it was honestly the only way I could get the story to flow #so apologies all you fellow writers #ellie williams #joel miller #the last of us #tlou #joel and ellie #these guys make me insane #but I love them

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