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schrijverr · 3 years

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Hold Me Together

Chapter 3 out of 4

Eliot gets hurt on a job and then sick. Hardison and Parker waste no time to jump in to care for him and it becomes harder and harder to say no to their care when it’s just so nice. After he has a nightmare, they’re there for him and feelings come to light.

AKA Eliot has a terrible time physically (and partly emotionally), but gets lots of cuddles and two partners in the end.

On AO3.

Ships: Thiefsome OT3

Warnings: Eliot's low self esteem and the flu

~~~~~~~~~~~

Hold Me Tight

Eliot ate his soup under the watchful gazes of Hardison and Parker. It was good soup, but he felt guilty about having the kitchen staff cook for him, deciding to thank them profusely later. He also made a mental note to yell at Hardison and Parkerlater about burning a pan, hoping it hadn’t been one of his nice pans.

For now though, the soup was heavenly on his throat and its warmth was great for his cold bones, so he just leaned against the headboard and ate his soup, spotting the stuffed mushroom on his bedside table.

Once it became clear, he wasn’t going to explode, or whatever those two thought he was going to do, they relaxed and started babbling about all sorts of things. While Eliot had been sleeping, they had also taken a nap, before the failed soup experiment, after which Hardison had taught Parker how to play Thief: Deadly Shadows, which Parker found too unrealistic and critiqued the stealing animations, until they had decided to keep him company.

Their chatter was relaxing and despite the fact that Eliot had been asleep for sixteen hours, not to mention the car ride before that, he found his eyes drooping.

“You tired?” Hardison asked kindly and Eliot’s gut instinct was to deny it. He couldn't go to sleep again, it was embarrassing and unnecessary. Still, he was tired and they had been so nice, but if he went to sleep they would leave him again.

That train of thought had taken a quick turn and Eliot was frustrated that he didn’t have a good control over his emotions and thoughts due to the fluof all things that was making him dazed. He blinked the thought away and shook his head.

“So you’re not tired?” Parker filled in with a confused frown. And Eliot wanted to deny it for real this time, but instead he yawned.

“I somehow find that hard to believe,” Hardison quirked a brow playfully.

God, they were so nice to him and he didn’t deserve that, but it was so nice and he wanted them to stay with him and not go to sleep, even if he was tired. He pushed down the tears threatening to well up in his eyes, before whispering: “Don’t want to sleep yet.”

It was pathetic and he should have just said that he was fine and that he was going to get up, but he couldn’t and if anyone asked later he had a sore throat and couldn’t speak.

“No?” Hardison asked.

“No,” Eliot replied. He didn’t want to sleep, he didn’t want to be left alone and he didn’t want to be pathetic, yet there he was.

“We could watch a movie,” Parker suggested and Eliot could have kissed her. He had wanted to kiss her on multiple occasions, but this was definitely one of them- And he should really stop thinking about kissing Parker right about now, okay, pushing that away.

“That’s a great idea, mama,” Hardison exclaimed, getting up to grab his laptop since Eliot had refused to let him install a tv in his room. As he went he took the empty bowl with him.

Parker took it upon herself to built a semi-pillow fort around Eliot, before burrowing into Eliot’s side with a content sigh. Alarms went off in his head at the closeness even if it was nice, so he protested it with a raw voice: “I could be contagious.”

“We slept next to you for a night then sat on the backseat of Lucille for eight hours, bit too late for that,” Parker said. “Besides, you’re warm and soft.”

His brain short-circuited for a moment and when he came back online Hardison was there, three steaming mugs on a tray as he said: “Ahw, aren’t you two making an adorable picture,” successfully breaking Eliot again.

Next to him Parker smiled and did grabby hands to the mugs. Hardison gave her one, which was obviously hot chocolate under the pile of marshmallows on top of it. Luckily, the mug that Eliot was given was filled with tea. It was bag tea, badly prepared, but there was honey in it and he was touched anyway.

“Okay, I’m thinking 007, it’s James Bond, a classic, must see,” Hardison said, plopping down on Eliot’s other side, setting the laptop on Eliot’s lap and leaning over as he started typing.

“He’s a terrible spy,” Eliot protested, barely audible, more because if he said anything else, he would blurt out something embarrassing and bickering with Hardison about his movie taste was the safest thing right now.

“And your voice is almost gone, so you should rest it,” Hardison shot him a cheeky grin, “No complaining from you for once.”

Eliot guffawed about that, frowning, but he didn’t reply, because he wouldn't waste his voice on something so petty and childish, no matter what Hardison thought, so he just looked away haughtily to convey his dismay.

“Oeh, I know, it’s the one with the dude he thinks he’s good at what we do, but he’s not and also on the other side of the law,” it clicked for Parker and Eliot smiled when she picked his side of the argument.

“Other side of the law? Woman, do you mean the right side of the law?” Hardison said.

“I mean, it’s the other side of the law from us,” Parker shrugged and Eliot couldn't help but bark out a laugh, Hardison joining in, before everyone was distracted when it turned into a coughing fit and Eliot’s tea had to be saved by Parker while Hardison rubbed his back.

“You good?” Hardison asked when the coughing had subsided.

Still a bit out of breath and red in the face, Eliot nodded. He gestured vaguely with his hand to convey that he was fine and that they should let it go, before clearing his throat and rasping: “You know, I’m with Parker.”

“Really? You just nearly died of coughing and your first reaction is to continue a stupid argument where you know you’re wrong,” Hardison said indignantly.

“‘m not wrong,” Eliot told him, voice now barely a whisper.

“You. You stay quiet, okay. Your voice is making my throat hurt-” Hardison took the tea from Parker and pushed it into Eliot’s hands “-drink your tea and shut up, while you watch how wrong you are, okay. Both y’all.”

Eliot grinned lightly, but let them push him back onto the pillows, cradling his mug as Hardison finished setting up the movie, while Parker whispered in his ear: “I don’t get why people think he’s cool, besides the explosions.”

“I heard that,” Hardison called out, clicking play, before settling down on Eliot’s other side, bracketing him between them.

It was nice and comfortable and Eliot should really not be allowing this, because he was fine dammit and he could take care of himself. But it was really really nice and, honestly, it didn’t seem like Parker and Hardison thought him to be breakable and they had had movie nights in the past, so it wasn’t anything new. Besides, his muscles were too sore for fighting right now.

The movie played on the screen, but he couldn't focus and his eyes were closing more and more. He felt himself slide to the side and land on something warm, but no one pushed him away and to the sound of bullets flying, he began to nod off.

He fought it for a while, he really wanted to stay present with Parker commenting on the movie and Hardison defending it until a hacking scene came on and then he was really upset about the whole thing.

It felt like home, comfortable and safe and Eliot wanted to experience it for as long as it lasted, but sleep won out and soon he was out like a light once more.

When he woke up again, he was shivering and cold to the bone, it didn’t matter that there were multiple blankets piled on top of him and that he still had Hardison’s stupidly warm hoodie on. The sweat was cooling on his body and he was cold.

And alone.

Somehow that second fact hit him harder than he’d expected and he immediately hated himself for being a clingy pathetic little bitch. He knew better than this, they’d already seen enough weakness from him. They had handled it so far, but there would be a breaking point and he knew it. He had to keep them out of it, before they got there and they would leave. He had to take care of himself from now on.

Determined he got up out of bed to find more blankets and clean clothes, because still wearing Hardison’s hoodie should be weird and not comforting and the clothes were too sweaty to be comfortable anyway. His left ankle still throbbed as he got up, but he could walk and stand on it now, albeit unsteadily and with a slight limp.

He felt entirely uncomfortable, his skin itchy around him and his body uncoordinated. He wanted to take a shower, but didn’t trust himself enough to take one, so he just pulled on new clothes, a shirt and boxers – no pants because he’d already almost fallen over with the boxers – before padding out his room and to the living room where there should be more blankets. He had no clue what time it was but it was between sun and stars, either early morning or evening.

The unanswered question about the time was answered when he entered the living room and saw Parker and Hardison curled up on the couch with a blanket and pizza. Dinner. At least he hoped it wasn’t breakfast, because then he would have to yell at them and that seemed like about as much work as standing was right now.

Two pairs of eyes had locked onto him the moment he had come stumbling into the room, and he looked at them like a deer in headlights. He somehow hadn’t counted on encountering them, even if it was technically their apartment and he just had a room there.

After a moment of staring, Parker sprung up, exclaiming: “Eliot!” as she scrambled over the back of the couch with the blanket she and Hardison had been sharing.

“Hey, man, what are you doing here? You should be in bed,” Hardison had gotten over his initial surprise of Eliot appearing in just his boxers and a shirt (and he was really regretting not putting in the extra effort of pants).

Then the question registered and with a hoarse voice, he explained: “I go’ col’. Blan’e’s.”

“You’re up looking for more blankets?” Hardison asked. “Good god, you’re shivering, man. Come, sit on the couch.” Parker led him to the couch while Hardison mumbled: “How is this man cold? We left nearly all the blankets on his bed.”

Eliot felt guilty about interrupting their evening when he’d already taken up so much of their time since their last con, on which they also hadn’t been able to spend much time together, but between his clattering teeth and lost voice, his explanation got lost.

He was alone on the couch now, with both Hardison and Parker having disappeared once they’d installed him with the blanket tucked tightly around him. He was a bit lost on what was expected of him now, but soon Parker came back with the mess of blankets that had been on his bed and Hardison arrived with a steaming bowl and a hot bottle.

Hardison handed him the bottle and he tucked it against his chest, before Parker practically swaddled him. He softly protested: “You don’ nee’ to do t‘is.”

“We know,” Hardison smiled again with a bit of knowing in there as if he was aware why Eliot was protesting. It should bother him more than it did that they knew him so well. “Just drink your soup, Eliot. We want to take care of you.”

“Yes, it’s a skill you need to learn and you helped me,” Parker smiled and it was so easy to agree with the smile and just drink his soup, but he couldn't just accept help like that.

What he wanted to tell them was: ‘You two need to stop all of this, because I don’t need it and you two are dating and I’m only in the way of that right now. Just let me get to my room and I’ll be fine on my own while you have date night. This is really sweet and all, but I’ve been through worse and I’ll survive a little flu by myself.’

However, his voice had left him entirely now to the point of inaudible, so instead he moved his mouth while hoarse whispers that couldn't even be called words came out.

“I didn’t get that,” Parker said after a beat and it was just blunt and honest and completely Parker.

“Me neither, mama,” Hardison said. “I can go grab you a pen and some paper, man. You can write it down if you want?”

And that was the opposite of what he wanted. He wanted them to see he was bad in their life and not worthy of this attention, he wanted them to go away before they could see he was weak and they couldn't count on him, even if he would die before they couldn't count on him anymore. The longer this went on the sooner they would see the soft, weak parts of him and they would want to cut him out. And he didn’t want to be cut out. Of course he didn’t want to be cut out, but that would be inevitable if they stayed, because they would see his creepy feelings for them or see how much he craved contact and that would be the end.

His vision blurred and his breath came in raspy wheezes. Far away he could hear Parker and Hardison’s worried voices and he faintly wondered why they weren’t upset with him for ruining their night and falling apart over nothing.

Why couldn’t they just leave him like everyone else? It would hurt, but it would be easier.

But they didn’t leave, instead there was a bony arm around his shoulders and a soft hand rubbing his back as two voices spoke in calming tones, though he couldn't make out what they were saying. He took some more deep breaths and tried to push it all down and lock it away.

Once his vision had cleared he could see a laptop on a blank word document in front of him. He didn’t have the energy to repeat all he’d said, but he typed anyway: im aorry dioe ruinug your date nifht

He couldn't really focus, but both were quiet for a moment as they deciphered his words. Then he was pulled into a half hug by Hardison this time, as the other said: “You’re not ruining anyone’s night, man. What gave you that idea?”

Eliot shrugged helplessly at that, because how could they not see he was ruining their night by getting injured and then sick and deciding to stay here even if he had an apartment, because there was a room here. And he was really relying too much on them already for when it all came crashing down around him.

“Do you not want us to be here with you?” Parker asked, sounding sad.

He shook his head quickly, because he could never let Parker be sad, a stab of pain going through his skull as he did, before shrugging, wishing he had a voice, even if he was too exhausted to explain. He wasn’t sleepy, just tired, like he wanted to sit and stare, but not sleep.

Parker wrapped herself around him, putting her head on his shoulder as she said: “It’s okay. I sometimes also don’t know what I want. We’ll just figure it out together.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Hardison agreed with her and Eliot wanted to cry at their kindness, but instead he just nodded weakly, giving in to taking up space when they didn’t seem to mind. He accepted the soup again and focusing on eating it and the warmth of Hardison and Parker as well as the blankets around him, instead of the thoughts swirling in his mind.

The two had the good sense to let him be, while they went back to the conversation he’d interrupted. It seemed they had been discussing the ethics of pushing someone of the building. Eliot had heard both sides of the argument often enough to tune them out and just listen to the tones of their voices as his mind sank away.

Content he stared into the void for a while. He didn’t keep track of the time, but it could have been minutes to an hour. In the time he ate his soup and let the bowl get taken away gently as the hot water bottle cooled and the shivers came back. His breath was wheezy and he sniffled, regularly interrupted with a cough.

After a while they put on a movie and cuddled on the couch with him, but he could not have told anyone later what the movie was.

They helped him to bed at some point, he brushed his teeth slowlyand slept long and deep, but when he woke up he was still in that hazy staring mood. Parker brought him a few crackers with more tea with honey that he ate gratefully giving her an, in her opinion, dopey smile, even if his eyes couldn't stay fully focused on her.

It was never brought up later and Eliot didn’t remember, but when Parker had asked him why he was smiling, he had told her in a hoarse whisper: “‘s nice, not bein’ alone.” And after that, he hadn’t been alone, because Parker had told Hardison, who had gotten a sad look in his eye, before getting Eliot and carting him off to the couch.

Eliot had gone along willingly. He couldn't really do more than think ‘hmm, warm,’ as he leaned in and stumbled along, but he was glad to just sit on the couch under a lot of blankets while Parker hung in the rafters and Hardison worked on some IDs.

He was pretty sure Sophie came by and he said hi to her and she told him something about talking to Nate, but he couldn't be sure. He should ask Hardison or Parker about it, because they had talked to her more and he should be interested in who went in and out of the apartment, check for security risks. But he was exhausted and he couldn't focus on anything.

Still, he was completely sure that if something were to happen, he would be up and ready to fight as best as he could, but his brain had shut off for anyone he’d deemed safe.

That night Hardison and Parker slept in his bed again, like they’d done at the hotel and the first night back in Portland. Their presence was calming and despite the chills, he felt warm.

During the night he didn’t wake up once, which was actually rare even with the sickness knocking him out constantly. The shivers had been waking him up for short moments, along with the coughing, but pressed between Parker and Hardison, he slept like a baby.

When he woke up, however, he was keenly aware of the cooling sweat on his skin and the every present smell of sickness in the air and the horrid taste in his mouth. He also then realized that meant Hardison and Parker were smelling it too and he let out a small noise of embarrassment, before he was even aware of it.

“What’s wrong, E?” Hardison asked and Eliot would rather just sink into the ground, but he couldn't so he burrowed into his blanket and wrinkled his nose.

“Are you still a mermaid?” Parker appeared where he had rolled away from Hardison.

“We watched The Little Mermaidrecently,” Hardison explained.

Eliot nodded. He might be able to talk, but his throat hurt and none of his thoughts stuck around for long enough to form into sentences he could verbalize.

Parker was still studying his face closely, while Hardison went on a mission to figure out what the noise had meant. “Are you in pain? Do we need to get you some pain meds?”

A grumpy, negative grunt.

“Okay, okay, no need to be so touchy feel-y. I get it, no pain meds,” Hardison backed off. “Is there any other discomfort?”

And there was, the taste and smell and the fact that Hardison and Parker were in the smell and not saying anything about it. Also the fact that his clothes felt grimy from the sweat that madehis skin feellike it needed to crawl off him if he ever wanted to feel comfortable and clean again. But he wasn’t telling them that, because they might want to do something about it, which would be even more embarrassing.

“He’s not telling us something,” Parker snitched on him and while he was glad her people-reading skills had increased, he didn’t like her using them on him. So, he hid in his blanket again as protest.

“There is something!” Hardison agreed, taking his silent protest as Parker’s words having truth and Eliot hated and loved them both for how well they could read him. It was dangerous to have people that close and it would hurt when they left, but to have a family again was nice.

Having them was nice.

Oh no. Abort. Abort. Not having those thoughts while they were in his bed and he was in just a shirt and boxers.

Actually, never those thoughts.

Never.

They were happy together and he only broke things. He was bad and needed to stay away from that and he knew it. Just had to ram it in a few more times before it would stick in his thick skull and- fuck they were still talking to him.

“… never tell us anything and I know you can’t talk and shit, but you really need to give me more than those blank, panicky eyes,” Hardison looked at him, before sighing in what Eliot would call a fond manner, if he didn’t know better. “You didn’t hear a word I was saying, did you?”

Sheepishly Eliot shook his head, wincing when that every present headache made itself known again.

“He feels bad about it,” Parker observed and he would love it if she stopped reading his face to Hardison and let him vanish in peace.

“Okay, it’s okay,” Hardison smiled and a knot loosened in Eliot’s chest, even when he hadn’t noticed it had been there. “I’ll ask again. He listening, mama?”

After a look Parker confirmed: “He is.”

“Good. So, Eliot, the thing that’s bothering you, could we do something to change it and help?” he asked and there was, but Eliot wasn’t showering with them near him again, maybe they’d hold him and the last time was too intense already. His mind spun when he thought about it, so yeah, he didn’t need a close repeat of that, not if he wanted to push Hardison and Parker away.

“I’m taking your silence as a yes,” Hardison informed him, snapping him back to the present, though he could play that off. He had been distant mentally ever since he got sick.

“So, what is it?” Parker asked, poking him and, oh yeah, he realized, them knowing something was up meant that they were going to needle him for answers until they had them.

Luckily for him, he had sat through worse torture and never breathed a word.

A few moments later and he was breaking. Parker kept on poking him and Hardison kept looking at him with those open, concerned eyes while he spoke too much for Eliot too keep track of everything, until it all became too much. “Uncomfortable,” he finally said. Well, tried to say, it sounded more like ‘un’omf’r’le,’ but that was besides the point.

“What’s uncomfortable, E?” Hardison asked, not unkindly.

“E’erythin’,” he replied, tugging at his shirt and wrinkling his nose as he smacked his lips and shuddered, before the shudder turned into a sneeze and a small, miserable cough.

“You feeling yucky, buddy?” Parker asked, earning her look form the other two. Defensively she shrugged: “What? It’s what they say in those movies and shows.”

And when she mentioned it, he did feel pretty yucky, even if he would never describe it like that out loud. Hardison, however, had no such qualms and he delighted in saying: “He probably does feel very yucky. But we can take care of that. I’ll start running a bath.”

Immediately Eliot felt conflicted and made a protesting noise. He wanted a bath, god, nothing sounded better than nice hot water on his sore muscles and cold, sweat stained skin, but if he had learned anything, it was that neither of them would leave him in peace in the bath and he was trying to distance himself, even if that seemed absurd with how both were in his bed, cuddling him through the night to keep him warm.

“Don’t worry, I’ll come back,” Hardison smiled, misinterpreting his noise and sweeping out of the room before Eliot could rectify the mistake.

Parker cuddled back into his side and confided in him: “He never breaks that promise. Took me a while to believe it too, but it’s okay. You’ll get there.”

Eliot didn’t understand, didn’t get how neither of them could see how wrong they were. He wanted to rip his hair out and- oh, there was a hand in his hair, getting out the tangles. It was nice and his mind blanked as he leaned into the contact, something he would berate himself for later.

He only remembered that he should have been convincing Parker that this was a terrible idea when Hardison returned. “You two gotta stop doing this to me, man. You look like a content cat. Now get up, we got a bath to get too.”

The blanket was pulled off him and the cold swept over him. He shivered hard and tried to flee into Parker’s side before he could even think about that action too hard. For a moment, he thought he was safe too, because she wrapped her arms around him like a hug, but then she turned it against him and dragged him to his knees with her.

“Man, I feel like I’m about to slaughter a puppy right now,” Hardison told him as he took Eliot from Parker and pulled him out of bed.

“He’ll be fine once he’s warm and clean again,” Parker assured him. “He’s just being a bit of a baby about it.”

“I think he’s allowed to be a baby about it,” Hardison said and Eliot would have a lot more opinions on the conversation if the room wasn’t spinning and he was barely keeping up with Hardison’s steps, completely trusting the hacker not to drop him. “I mean, look at how he’s shivering, can’t be comfortable.”

Eliot blinked again, the room was still swaying, but it was a different room than before. There was a hot steam in the air and there were tiles around him. The bathroom. He was too late to stop them and he gave in.

If anyone he used to know could see him now, they’d never believe it. The great Eliot Spencer giving into the whims of a hacker and a thief, not even fighting getting a bath even when he knew it was a security risk and something that could blow up in his face.

Deft hands were divesting him of his shirt and soon he was in just his boxers. The door opened and closed behind him as Parker vanished, while Hardison said: “She’s gonna change the sheets and I’m here to keep you from drowning. There are bubbles in the bath, but I can understand if you want to keep your boxers on.”

He nodded, because he would like to keep the boxers on. The steam was doing wonders for his throat, but he didn’t trust himself to speak just yet.

Hardison supported him at the elbows as he stepped into the bath. The water was warm and he sank into it gratefully with a soft sigh, his muscles were already loosening and the heat did nothing against the sleepiness that had been plaguing him. His eyes closed without his permission as the water embraced him.

A hand under his chin stopped him before he could sink underwater and his eyes snapped open to find Hardison smiling at him. “Told you I wasn’t going to let you drown. Go on, relax, Eliot. It’s okay, I got you.”

It was distinctly harder to relax with Hardison holding him up, his big warm hands were very distracting and Eliot was trying really hard not to be distracted. The water was like heaven on his muscles, so that helped and he could feel the steam clearing his sinuses and alleviating the strain on his throat.

Few minutes in and Hardison’s hands were just part of the little place of niceness away from all the discomfort that came with being sick.

Eliot knew he could have just existed like that forever, floating away from his body while still feeling the nice sensations, were it not for the door making noise again as Parker came in. He perked his head up and cracked one eye open.

She smiled at him and held up some clothes, which she put down as she skipped forwards, kneeling next to the bath. With open eyes she asked: “How are you feeling? Baths always make me feel tingly in a good way, are you feeling tingly?”

He didn’t know what hisface did at the question, but Hardison laughed: “I think he’s feeling plenty tingly, mama. I saw you with your hands in his hair, wanna wash it?”

Parker lit up at that and even if Eliot had been planning to protest – which hadn’t crossed his mind before it was too late – he couldn't have told her no with that face. So he watched as they switched places, feeling kinda awkward at both of the staring at him while he was going to face a vulnerable action.

Eliot wasn’t going to ask where she had gotten the skill, but she knew what she was doing as she slipped a hand under his neck, before slowly pushing him down into the water, until he was comfortably floating. She ran a hand through his hair and the final awkwardness slipped from his mind along with most of his thoughts as he leaned into the touch.

Under the water with his eyes closed, he couldn't see Hardison’s looks that he couldn't place with his fuzzy mind, nor Parker’s excitement and apparent happiness about taking care of him like he needed their help. He could just be and feel the tender touches that no one had given him in many years, everyone always quicker to see him as a threat to be avoided.

He was even slightly upset when Parker pulled him back up, a noise leaving his throat before he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to find Parker’s hands on him nice, she had a boyfriend. A hot boyfriend, but also a no-no on the touch list.

So, he kept quiet as Parker lathered shampoo into his hair. It was her shampoo, he was almost sure of it. Her hair always smelled like it and, if he remembered correctly, it had been a gift from Hardison. Now he had to fight both the blush as well as soft pleased noises.

And he failed at both.

“Ahw, man, the moment you feel better, I am so teasing you with this,” Hardison said. “You’re just too sad for me to do it now, but I will remember this. I’m probably not allowed to film you, right, because this is great.”

His response was going to be something along the lines of ‘Dammit, Hardison,’ but Parker was faster as she spoke for him: “Hardison! Shush, we just got him to accept a bit of nice things, don’t ruin our master plan.”

“Sorry, mama,” Hardison looked chastised and Eliot wanted to ask about the master plan, but Parker just hit a knot in his hair and he shivered against her touch instead and forgot was he was going to ask.

When Parker washed out his hair, she was careful not to get it into his eyes, but she also let him float a bit longer, the silence of the water stilling his swirling mind. It was empty now, which was better than the confusing half-thoughts and admonishes.

Still, the water was cooling around him and sooner than he’d like, Parker was letting him up as Hardison got him out of the bath.

He could at least stand on his own now and Parker left the two of them while Eliot got dried off and into new clothes.

Being able to stand on his own, however, didn’t mean it wasn’t still strange. His entire being felt soft and collapsible from the bath and sitting on the toilet with Hardison rubbing him down with a towel wasn’t helping. He couldn't even remember why he was allowing Hardison to do it, instead of drying himself, but the contact was nice and he got lost in it.

Soon there was a shirt floating in front of him and this time his shoulder was good enough to slide his armin it. Hardison had dried his stitches and mumbled something about them healing well, which Eliot appreciated. He didn’t need more of his body to turn against him like it was doing now with the way he swayed towards Hardison whenever then man moved away slightly.

The pants was still awkward as fuck, with Eliot leaning one hand on Hardison’s shoulder and looking away at the ceiling while Hardison helped him into dry boxers and sweatpants, patting him on the leg when he was done.

He expected to go back to bed, but Hardison had remembered all the little details and was standing in front of him with his toothbrush. He reached out for it, but his arm was heavy and fell halfway through the uncoordinated grab.

“Yeah, okay, this is just sad, open up,” Hardison said. Eliot didn’t comply and he raised a brow, before putting on a voice and going: “Come on, say ahhhh.”

Eliot glared at him, but said ahhh with a murderous glare that fell flat in the grand scheme of it all. He let Hardison steady his jaw, before he brushed his teeth. It was rhythmic and soothing and Eliot allowed himself to get lost in the sensations as Hardison took care of him, spitting in the sink and accepting the glass of water offered to him.

Then they returned to the bedroom, Hardison a steady presence at his side as had become the norm in the past few days.

When he got to his bedroom, the sheets had been changed and he never thought he’d see the day where that would make him emotional, but there were still tears trying to well up that he pushed down, because they were just so goddamnedthoughtful and they were taking care of him even when they didn’t need to.

It was just a lot. Eliot wasn’t used to it. And his brain would have told him to not get used to it, if it hadn’t been turned to slight mush by the sickness and the nice warm bath.

So, he got into the bed and burrowed into the clean sheets with a happy smile, not seeing the ‘oh my god, he’s being adorable like a puppy looks’ that Hardison and Parker shared as he whispered a soft thanks.

“No problem,” Hardison said. “Here scoot over, Parker picked a movie.”

And he did so gladly, even if he knew it was a play to get him to sleep again. He wasn’t fighting them, his brain felt warm and he wasn’t thinking straight enough just yet, so he let them cozy up to his sides as a movie he couldn't name played.

He napped till the evening then he ate more soup and he would complain about different nutrient intakes and diversity in a diet, but he was just glad that they cared enough to bring him food – and he would really have to thank the kitchen staff later for that too – while also not burning down his kitchen.

That evening, he stayed awake through the movie, which was a shitty horror movie that Eliot had never heard about and could have gone his entire life without knowing about it.

However, sleep took him for the night just as easily and he was looking forward to the day he could stay awake and think straight again. That day was not the next day, however, which passed in a similar fashion.

But, while he felt and looked like a wreck, on the fifth day back at the brewpub, he felt slightly better. His nose was still completely stuffed but with all the tea, the bath and resting his voice, his throat was much better already, even the coughing subsiding little by little. His appetite was still shit and he had no energy, his head was also constantly thrumming and his muscles hurt like he’d been fighting for hours, on top of his healing injuries that had fallen into the background of his general discomfort.

Still, while it wasn’t a lot, his head wasn’t so fuzzy anymore either. It meant he felt all the aches more, but he liked that he had a little more control over his head.

Sadly, because he had more control over his head, he remembered how this was all wrong and he should be far away from this.

A/N:

Eliot goes from grumpy man to emotional wreck in three chapters and I commend him for that, because it takes me five minutes max

Also, it’s really hard to write a story when the person from whose POV it is written keeps falling asleep, like sir, I need you to write the fic, stop sleeping.

Fun fact!: I typed this ‘im aorry dioe ruinug your date nifht’ without looking, bc I am actually a shit typer in the sense that I type with two fingers (four if I’m in a hurry), lmao. How I get anything done is a miracle, though I am pretty fast despite it all.

I feel like I should also mention that I know nothing about taking care of sick people and this was written for the emotional care, not the realistic nursing techniques. Also don’t look too closely into what happened to all the injuries, I half forgot, oops

Btw, angstier chapter incoming, fear me >:3

#RR writing #tw: self esteem issues #tw: flu #tw: sickfic #leverage #leverage ot3 #thiefsome #hitter hacker thief #eliot x hardison x parker #eliot spencer #alec hardison #parker #leverage parker #leverage tv #Hold Me Together #Hold Me Together Part 3

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aloysiavirgata · 4 years

Text

In The Gale

Title: In The Gale

Author: Aloysia Virgata

Rating: PG

Category: MSR

Author's Notes: For @perplexistan, who asked and helped me make it better. This is shortly after settling into the Unremarkable House. I tried making sense of their legal status, but it’s simply impossible and I gave up.

Our heroes quote from Melville, Shakespeare, Sagan, Baudrillard, and (Emily) Dickens.

***

Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face And renounce the voice Because I cannot hope to turn again Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us And pray that I may forget These matters that with myself I too much discuss Too much explain Because I do not hope to turn again Let these words answer For what is done, not to be done again May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

***

She recites The Raven to herself on the drive in, lists all the state capitals in alphabetical order, and goes through the periodic table. Her body fizzes like a shaken soda, tiny anxious bubbles rising through her blood. They’ve done so much for this, called in so many favors. Mulder put his book on hold for a month, quizzing her with dog-eared notecards.

“Immediate treatment of myocardial infarction,” he’d call, and she’d say “MONA TASS.”

She feels a pang for the simplicity of the other life, the hiding one, where she just had to ring up cigarettes and herbal Viagra at gas stations.

***

She’s the new girl at the cafeteria table, awkward and alone. Mulder had prepared her a lunch like it’s the first day of school, and she stares at it, wishing for an appetite.

From the corner of her eye she sees two colleagues - an MRI tech and an obstetrician, she thinks - talking softly and glancing over. Scully thinks she hears “FBI,” and she looks up and smiles, uncertain.

They blink at her, look away.

***

Ybarra comes around the corner, gliding in his cassock like a disapproving ghost. “Dr. Scully,” he says, in his pinched voice.

She smiles thinly. “Father Ybarra.”

“Nurse Mossing was looking for the chart for Mrs. Sullivan. Imagine my surprise when I found it in Room 314 instead of Room 413. That’s a potential HIPAA violation, Dr. Scully. That’s a federal law.”

Scully curls her hand so that her nails dig into her skin. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “Father Ybarra, please forg-”

He holds up his palm. “It won’t happen again,” he says, and glides onward.

Scully closes her eyes and leans against the wall. She breathes through her nose until the ringing in her ears stops.

***

She wants to collapse into his arms and cry when she gets home, but that would be giving in. It would be letting them down.

“How’d it go?” he asks. He’s wearing basketball shorts and a Knicks shirt, a five o’clock shadow.

She smiles brightly. “It was good. Learning curve, but good. I think Father Ybarra might be a tough nut to crack, is all.”

Mulder rubs his cowlicked hair. “Put your feet up, Scully, since you won’t wear sensible shoes.”

She does, and accepts the glass of wine he holds out. “Thanks. I’ll sleep well tonight, anyway. There are miles of hallways.”

He sits next to her on the couch. “I wrote a few pages,” he says. “I deleted a bunch, but I think there was a multi-paragraph net gain.”

“I’m glad you’re able to stop focusing on my stuff now,” she says. “Both back in the saddle.”

“Go team.”

She clinks her glass against his. She drinks her wine too fast.

***

Ybarra had come in during her rounds that morning and startled her into knocking a metal bedpan onto the floor. Scully thinks the reverberations of that sound will follow her to the grave.

She’s now in the chapel, tucked into a back pew. She’s been staring at the small altar, at the stained glass windows flanking the crucifix. The Blessed Virgin smiles beatifically down at her, a wretched sinner.

Scully laces her fingers on the back of the pew in front of her and bows her head against them. “Please,” she whispers. “Please.”

***

Mulder wakes her with tea and eggs. “You haven’t been eating,” he says, brow furrowed.

She rubs her eyes, yawning. “What?”

He sits next to her on the bed, sets the plate and mug on her night table. “You just push your food around your plate, you hardly talk when you get home. What’s going on, Scully?”

She sits up, looking at his worried face. He’s sun-browned and tousled, beautiful, with a mouth that still makes her weak in the knees. “Nothing. It’s just a lot to jump back into.”

“I’m sure it is. And I still want to help you with it.” He pulls the flash cards from his pocket, touches her wrist with his other hand. “Let’s see - causes of upper zone pulmonary fibrosis?”

She looks at the ceiling, back at him. “I don’t need help.”

Mulder blinks, stung.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. You just don’t need to hover over me. You have your own things to work on. Work on your book, patch up your henhouse. ” Her voice sounds snappish to her own ears.

His changeable eyes, now mossy green, darken. He chews his bottom lip, nodding slowly. “I thought you were one of my ‘things.’ Sorry to bother you.” He rises, walks downstairs.

“Mulder,” she whispers.

The tea goes down fine. Scully tries to eat the eggs but feels bile rise in her throat. She flushes them down the toilet instead of leaving them behind, because that is love.

***

She arrives at the nurses’ station on the second floor with three dozen donuts and two cardboard boxes of coffee. She deposits them on the desk. “Good morning, Annabel,” she says.

“Anneliese,” the woman says.

Scully nods, walks away.

***

He slides his hand up her pajama top, tracing circles on her ribs, sliding his fingers around to her breasts. He kisses the back of her neck. “Scully,” he whispers, his breath warm and ticklish in her ear.

She wants to pretend to wake up, to turn towards him and lose herself in his body. She wants to tell him everything, to be held and loved and petted and reassured. She wants him to remind her that she once stared down Congress, that some backwater priest and his prickly staff should be a joke to her. She wants them to laugh together at these silly, petty people.

But she can’t, she can’t disappoint him. He’s been so proud of her.

Scully stays still, breathes evenly until his hands move away and she’s alone again.

***

Her car rattles over the driveway, through shimmering waves of heat that rise from the crisping grass. It is the kind of late July afternoon where the sun is a hazy white ball in the west, and clouds of gnats are a permanent feature of the landscape.

Scully parks, avoiding a puddle in which a peacock is standing. Mulder has recently become enamored of yard fowl. She narrows her eyes at it while opening the car door.

“Good boy, Kevin,” she calls to it, wary.

Scully picks her way over the gravel in her thin heels. The peacock mews an alarm as she approaches, but doesn’t charge. She lets herself inside, shuts the heat and sun and wildlife outside. The house smells of coffee and microwave popcorn.

She walks into Mulder’s office and finds him hunched at his desk, typing. “Hey,” she says, and drops a kiss on his head. There’s a sketch of Baphomet taped to his monitor, her worn flash cards atop a tome about Raëlism.

He turns in his chair. He puts his arms around her hips. “Hey.”

“Kevin behaved himself,” she offers.

“You two will be friends yet, you’ll see.”

She peers at the computer. “You get a lot done today?”

Mulder shrugs. “Eh, a bit. Waiting on a few emails, and I had to run that tubing to drain the sump down into the woods. Ate up most of the afternoon.”

Scully shakes her head in admiration. “I don’t know how you manage all the multitasking.”

“Well, the book helps me avoid the house, and the house helps me avoid the book. It’s a perfect system. That Ybarra guy still riding your ass?”

She chews her lip. “No,” she lies. “I think we’re okay now.”

“Good,” he says. “I’d hate to have to beat up a priest.”

***

Scully gazes at herself in the empty locker room. She looks thin and tired, and her hair is frizzing up, even pulled back like this. All her makeup has sweated off except for smudged crescents of mascara. Her bra is the color of a Band-Aid, her underwear white and sensible. Between the two is the hard white rose of her gunshot scar, like a second navel, an artifact of a second birth. It is numb when she touches it, indifferent. There are no stretch marks from William, a tale missing from the anthology of her skin. She unhooks her bra, lets it slide down to the damp floor. Scully turns to observe her body in profile. The scar is gone this way, the tattoo hidden as well, and she smooths her hands along her ribs. Her breasts seem out of place to her when they are unbound, frivolous somehow. Vestigial.

She looks away.

***

The hospital is labyrinthine, having been constructed of various additions when funds allowed. There are dead ends, pointless staircases, and a mysterious storage closet filled with old televisions. She makes little maps on notepaper.

“So where did you work before this?” an orthopedic surgeon asks her.

A diner in Wyoming.

“I was out West for a while,” she says.

***

A week in, and Mulder has made a cake to celebrate. A bouquet of Kevin’s shed tail feathers ornaments the table.

An offering, Mulder calls it, tickling her chin with one.

A week down, she thinks, and blows out the candle. She wonders when she’ll stop counting the time.

***

Shy, he gives her a chapter to read. It’s good, and she tells him so. It’s very good. She hears his voice in her head when she reads it, his passion. She loves the esoterica tucked into his gyri and sulci.

“Your prose was never this clear in your reports,” she remarks.

“Hey if you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”

Scully laughs. “You want to read a few medical reports?”

He looks at her, suddenly serious. “Yeah,” he says. “I would. It would be nice to hear about your day for once.”

She wonders if love is the weapon that lets them wound so casually.

***

“You’re late,” Ybarra says softly.

She doesn’t explain that she’d somehow ended up at the TV closet again, that the room numbering system in this hospital had been designed by nihilists, that the nursing student had Dermabonded her glove to a patient’s forehead.

She lowers her eyes like she did at Catholic school. She promises to do better.

***

“What’s going on?” Mulder asks her for what feels like the hundredth time. “Talk to me, Scully.”

She presses her hands to her face for a moment, drops them to her sides. “Nothing,” she says again, frustrating them both. “I’m tired. It’s a hard schedule.”

He places a throw pillow on his lap and pats it. “Come here,” he says. “Please.”

She acquiesces, curling on her side with her back to him. He runs his fingers through her hair, traces the Fibonacci spirals of her ear. She wants to relax, to melt into his touch. She indulges in a Mulderesque conspiracy theory that the hospital microdoses the water with tetanus toxin to keep everyone rigid and tense.

Scully gazes at the windows, at the hard white light of summer streaming in. The curtains are blue with an arabesque pattern, and they looked very chic in the store. She wonders now if they seem desperate in this odd little house. She thinks of Meg March, dressed up in borrowed finery at the Moffats’ ball.

***

Scully clomps up the steps to the porch and kicks her rain boots off next to the umbrella stand. It contains four umbrellas and a gnarled hickory limb that Mulder claims is going to be polished into a fine walking stick one of these days. She goes into the house and is dismayed to find it stale and stifling and dark. Dust motes waft in Brownian motion through shafts of sunlight, undirected by fans or air conditioning.

“Mulder,” she calls, and there is silence.

She twists her hair into a bun as she pads upstairs, old wood satiny under her bare feet. She pushes open the bedroom door, and the air is hot and still.

“Mulder?” She needs his help with her zipper, but there is no reply.

She wrestles herself out of her silk sheath, sticky and irritating, and lets it puddle on the floor. Her bra follows. She feels guilty, as Mulder has turned out to be a surprisingly diligent housekeeper. His office is filled with perilous stacks of home improvement books and arcane journals about lake monsters, the walls papered with clippings and blurry photographs, but he seems able to quarantine his own entropy.

She is trying to do the same.

Scully pulls on soft cotton pajama shorts, a gray tank top imbued with the compressive powers of Lycra. She uses lotion to rub away the mascara beneath her eyes. She goes downstairs and out the back door, shielding her eyes against the piercing sunlight. A mosquito whines at her ear and she pinches it out of the air.

“Still got those reflexes, kid,” Mulder says from somewhere off to her left.

She turns and sees him crouched next to the hulking green block of the transformer. “All the lights are off, and the house feels like a rainforest. I take it you’ve had an eventful day?”

He sighs. “Not really. Well, not the event I was hoping for, which is the power coming back on. There was a pretty heavy thunderstorm around one and that’s when the electricity blew.”

She sits on the bottom step, knees drawn up. She likes to watch him working, a side of him they’re both still learning about. There was never much call for home maintenance at Hegal Place, or living out of cash-only motels. “You call the power company?”

He huffs. “Yeah, they told me they had no reported outages and the power should be fine. I explained that I was trying to report an outage and that it definitely was not fine and she promised someone would be here between tomorrow and eventually.”

Scully smiles. “And that’s why you’re out here toying with death?”

“Not much else to do, really. Can’t write with the power out.” Mulder sits back on his heels and shrugs. “You, uh, have a good day?”

She hadn’t. “Yep. Starting to feel like part of the team.”

“Good. You need to get your career standards as high as your standards for men,” he says, getting to his feet.

“Oh, well, that’s an obviously unattainable bar.”

“Obviously.” He sits next to her on the step. “You wear that to work? You know I think bras are a tool of the patriarchy and you shouldn’t bother, but I’m just surprised Our Lady of Perpetual Shame takes such a liberal view.”

She laughs a little. “I figured as long as I tossed a lab coat over it, I’d look like a real doctor. It worked when I was a kid.”

“Hey, that’s what I did with my badge half the time. Listen, Scully. The house is pretty tropical. You want to bunk up in a hotel until they get the power sorted out?”

Scully thinks about the convenience it would afford. Maids and room service and maybe a pool, depending. But she is tired of hotels, even nice ones. She is tired of polite signs that remind her that the pillows and towels and hairdryers aren’t hers, the tiny toiletries an indicator of her temporary status. She is tired of living out of suitcases and dressers that made her clothes smell strange, tired of running from her own life. She wants to be home.

“Nah,” she says. “We’ll manage.”

Mulder looks surprised, but doesn’t question it. “I’ll call Lowe’s about getting a generator delivered tomorrow. We ought to have one anyway out here.”

She’d always had a vague idea that Mulder had money - it was the only explanation for his complete disinterest in it. But when they’d come back, when they’d talked to his lawyers, she'd been staggered. The Vineyard house alone explained his casual international jaunts. They can have things now, endless things, and there is something frantic in her that wants to spend the money. Bingeing chocolate bunnies after Lent.

Mulder peels his shirt off, wadding it into a limp ball. He tosses it so that it hooks over the doorknob. “Still got it,” he says. He preens.

“Does the NBA realize the tremendous talent they’re missing out on?” she asks. “Do they even know that, at this very moment, a six foot tall middle aged white man is out here flinging his clothing a distance of several feet?”

He snuggles up to her, wrapping his sweaty arms around her shoulders.

“Ugh,” she says, and pushes at him. “Mulder, you’re disgusting and it’s a thousand degrees out here.”

“Hoping that cold, cold heart of yours might cool me off.” She sniffs disdainfully, and he releases her. “Scully, how do you feel about bees?”

“We have a history, bees and I,” she observes, tapping the back of her neck.

Mulder curls his hand over the scar, kneads the muscles there. “Well, these wouldn’t be fancy bees.”

“Hmmm,” she says. “I’m not inherently opposed. Why do you want bees, Mulder?”

He shrugs. “I’m getting older, and I’ve got to consider funeral plans. The last one didn’t really go as expected, so I thought maybe I’d mellify myself this time.”

She nods. “Makes sense. I mean, of course, there’s no actual proof that mellification actually occurred, but that’s never stopped you.”

“I also like honey,” he adds. “And bees are good for the planet.”

“Honey often contains botulism spores,” she remarks. “Botulinum toxin is the most lethal toxin known, and it’s estimated that as little as 40 grams of it would be enough to kill everyone on earth.” She doesn’t say you shouldn’t give it to babies, that she sweetened her smoothies with dates and maple syrup so that -

“Well, nobody better piss off my bee army and me,” he says darkly.

“Everybody eventually pisses you off. Mulder, is that old tent in the shed still? We could sleep in that tonight.”

He shakes his head. “Heavy mildew and dry rot, so I threw it out. We could sleep out here if you want, though. We’ve got that big air mattress.”

“Let’s do that,” she says. “We can put it on the porch. Tell you what - you get stuff together, and I’ll even make dinner.” Scully doesn’t like cooking, but she wants to create order, to complete a finite task. She can be domesticated again, like a lost house cat finally returned to a hearth.

“We having eggs or peanut butter?” he asks, smirky.

“I’d hate to spoil the surprise,” she snips, and goes back into their sauna of a house.

In the kitchen, she stands in front of the open fridge, letting the delicious leftover cold soak into her skin. She’ll deal with the spoiled food later. Eggs had, actually, been her plan but it’s just too hot. The stove doesn’t work, and she doesn’t have the fortitude to turn the grill on. She finds some leftover shrimp pasta that Mulder has made, some vegetables, and assembles it all into a passable salad.

There, she thinks, pleased. I’d pay twelve bucks for that somewhere. She uses her foot to scratch a mosquito bite on her calf.

Her skin is clammy, hair stringy and damp from sweat. Maybe they should just go to a hotel after all. Perhaps she should stop ascribing symbolism to every damn thing and enjoy herself once in a while. But she thinks of packing, of driving, of unpacking and somehow it’s all too much and her eyes start to fill and her sinuses sting.

Scully pinches her wrist until it passes, feeling weak and hating the weakness in herself. It’s the heat, it’s the exhaustion, it’s the heavy mental load. She considers going outside for a dip in the pond, but suspects the water will be unpleasantly warm. Instead, she drags herself back upstairs for a cold shower.

She sits on the edge of the bed, weary, and stares at a framed picture of a sea turtle on the far wall. If she lets her eyes drift out of focus, it looks like it’s swimming. She tips her head back for a better angle, watches it float across her vision. It slips away then, into the black of the deep waters.

***

She startles awake when he touches her shoulder, gasps.

“Jesus,” Mulder says, and sits next to her. “Bad dream?”

Scully sits up, dazed. “What? No, was I asleep?”

“You’ve been out cold for over an hour, but I wanted to make sure you got some food. Water at least, it’s too hot up here.”

She blinks, confused. “I don’t remember,” she says. Peering to her right reveals night outside.

Mulder holds a hand out and she grasps it, letting him pull her to her feet. She wavers and he steadies her, arm about her shoulders.

“I just need some water,” she says, defensive.

He guides her down the stairs and out the front door onto the porch. The air outside is substantially cooler, a light breeze kissing her face. She settles into a chair, stares deep into the felty dark. She still can’t remember falling asleep.

Mulder hands her a water bottle from the little table and she rolls it between her palms, the plastic crinkling. “Hey, I thought you were setting up the air mattress out here,” she says.

“No air flow behind the wall,” he replies. “Drink that up like a good girl and I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

Scully obeys and feels better. The water tastes stale, but it’s cool and wet. “Maybe you should have my job,” she says, looking up. “Caring for live people is so much work.”

“Everybody eventually pisses me off,” he reminds her. “Come on, Doc.”

She follows him down the steps and around the side of the house. Their property is vast and feral, pocked with mole burrows and rabbit nests. The floodlights are out with the power, and the house is nearly swallowed up by the vast night. Scully glances up at the Milky Way, at the waxing moon, and marvels again at the sky they have out here. We are star stuff, she thinks.

“Moonstruck?” Mulder asks.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.”

“As long as you can tell a hawk from a handsaw,” he says, and tugs her along.

She follows him to the back of the house and then stops, smiling. Mulder has hammered some old two-by-fours into a frame, draped the structure in white bedsheets. Inside, the air mattress is piled with sofa pillows. Outside, camping lanterns, candles, and two strands of solar lights make it into a kind of fairy circle.

“Mulder,” she says, delighted. “This is ridiculous.”

“Indian Guide saves the day,” he says.

“Your architecture badge is definitely more impressive than your fire badge,” she says, walking over to the little tent. He’s brought her salad inside, and there is a cooler packed with ice and water bottles. Cans of bug spray sit at the flap. She crawls inside, suddenly ravenous.

Mulder joins her on the mattress, which bounces in response. “Remember my water bed?”

She laughs, piling food on a plate for each of them. “What a swinging bachelor you were.”

She remembers the water bed fondly, the leather couch and the fish and the postage-stamp bathroom in his apartment. It shouldn’t hurt still, but it does. She knew herself there, her place on the map. She eats her salad, wistful for Chinese food and beer at that battered coffee table.

“Scully,” he says.

“What?”

“Scully.”

“Just middle-aged nostalgia, I suppose,” she murmurs.

He reaches out to take her hand. “You’re scarcely middle aged.”

She smiles, squeezes his fingers. “If you go by life experience, we’re both about two hundred years old.”

“Like those Galapagos tortoises. But you need to tell me what’s going on at work. You won’t disappoint me.”

It can be very disagreeable to live with a profiler.

Scully drops his hand. She bites at the fleshy part of her thumb. This is real, she thinks. This place. It is not down in any map; true places never are. She can only deflect for so long, and her armor is rusting away. “I’m afraid,” she whispers, then chances a look at his face.

His eyes are soft, searching. “Why?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know, I don’t…” Her sinuses sting again and she presses her palms hard into her eyes. “Please.”

Mulder’s hand on her back, in endless, gentle figure eights. He pulls the elastic from her hair and lets it tumble down to her shoulders. He shifts so that her back is to him, his long legs on either side of her body.

“Mulder, what -”

“Shhhh,” he says, and gathers the hair at the crown of her head. “It’s not a real sleepover if you don’t get your hair French braided.”

Scully blinks. “Since when do you know how to braid hair?”

“Little sister, absent parents. Now stop moving and talk.”

She keeps her head very steady, thinking of her own sister’s deft fingers when their mother was too busy for anything but ponytails. Mulder tugs at another little section of hair. Scully thinks she might be okay if she isn’t looking at him, if she can’t read herself in his eyes.

Moth shadows dance across the white sheet wall, drawn to the flickering candles outside. It fascinates her that they never figure out that fire burns. “I don’t know how to do this,” she says, and her voice is thick.

“To talk, or to be still?” he says in his Oxford psychologist voice.

She isn’t sure of what she means either. “Yes,” she says, with a hiccupy laugh. “Both.”

“Me too,” he says, slipping his thumb through the strands behind her ear. “I don’t know how to do this.”

She swallows hard. “I just...I’ve always had something to consume me. I had the FBI, we traveled all the time, and then we were running and I thought it was hard but it was so easy to just survive. There were no decisions. I didn’t care about, I don’t know...plates.”

He pauses in his work. “Plates?”

Scully chews at a hangnail, frustrated. “Just things, the things you buy for a house. Long term things. I did with William and then…” she trails off, her chest tight. “I feel like I’m playing a game sometimes, like improv theater. Fox and Dana Build A Home.”

“Fox and Dana?” he repeats. “Surely not.”

“Well, we’re hardly Mulder and Scully anymore, are we?” Her stomach clenches and that’s it, she sees. That’s the fear.

He finishes the braid and fastens the elastic at the end of it. “Of course we are,” he says. “We are who we are.”

She turns to him then, the whispering anxiety back with a roar. “And who is that, Mulder? I was plain old Dana Scully until I met you. And we had this life, this strange and wonderful and terrible life where I was Scully because I was your partner and now that’s over. It’s all nothing.” She’s crying openly now, quietly, and it feels cleansing.

“You’re still my partner,” he says, and his eyes are shining too.

She wipes her nose with a paper napkin. “Am I? At what? I go to work and see patients but I forgot there’s no closure with the living. People get sick and get better and get sick again. It doesn’t end. And this house, the power is always going to go out and the chickens will always be hungry and -“ she stops, feeling hysterical.

“You don’t have to work,” he says softly. “The settlement from the FBI, my inheritance…”

She shakes her head. “You know I have to work.”

He sighs, rubs her knee. “I know you do. But it doesn’t have to be this. It doesn’t have to drain you.”

He’s right, of course he’s right, but he’s also so terribly wrong that she wonders if he knows her at all. She has to be a doctor for her father, for William. For him. She has to see something through. Scully smooths her hand over the back of her head, feeling the even ridges of the braid. Mulder is so competent with everything he does, so easy with himself. He’ll get his damned bees and become some kind of honey magnate in no time.

“People at the hospital, they ask me what I did before. And I don’t know how to answer. How can I possibly answer that question? I just say I was with the government, but that isn’t really the answer, is it?”

Mulder shrugs. He’s never felt the need to explain himself to people. “It’s true.”

Scully stretches out on her stomach across the mattress, chin on the pillows, watching the moths again. They tumble like acrobats, untethered in the thick air. “There’s this number called Graham’s number, used in Ramsey Theory, which is, well, nevermind. It doesn’t matter. Anyway, it was in the Guinness Book for being the largest specific number used in a proof at the time. And Mulder, this number is so big that writing out all the digits would exceed the bounds of the known universe.”

“Nobody likes a math nerd, Scully.”

She rolls onto her back to glare at him. “Yes they do, they give them Nobel prizes. Anyway. A whole new notation system, Knuth Notation, had to be developed to express these massive numbers. Graham’s Number, Tree(3), et cetera. And I feel like that at times. That there’s this endless amount of vital, inexpressible information inside of me that is so essential but that I have no way to share.”

She blinks a few times, spent by this unburdening.

Mulder stretches out next to her, propped on his side. “You can express it to me,” he says, massaging her temple with his thumb.

Scully closes her eyes. “I feel like a ghost sometimes. How do you do it, Mulder? How do you just keep moving forward without getting lost?”

He sighs. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but you have a tendency to compile people into perfect specimens, then measure yourself against that imaginary standard. It’s the precession of simulacra.”

She looks at him, indignant, then realizes he could be right. “Well,” she says. “It’s possible. But Mulder, is that such a bad thing, to want to hold myself to the highest goals?”

He tugs her onto her side so that she’s facing him, nearly nose to nose. Her lips feel tingly. “Yes,” he says, stroking her hair. “When the goal isn’t attainable. And when it puts everyone else on pedestals where we’re ill equipped to balance. And when it puts you in a constant state of frustration and anxiety. No one is perfect. Not even you.”

“I don’t want to be perfect,” she lies. “And I don’t need you to be either.” That part is true, at least.

He laughs in reply. “Apropos of being Galapagos tortoises, Charles Darwin once said ‘I am very poorly today, and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.’”

“He rode the tortoises,” Scully says, calming. “I can’t defend his methodology.”

“See? You’re better than Charles Darwin.” He kisses her forehead.

“Well,” she says. “Well.”

“Scully, look. You’re not alone here, feeling at sea. I went to the feed store and some guy picked a fight, shoved me pretty hard with his shoulder. And this reflexive part of my brain wanted to grab my badge, stick it in his face, and put him against the wall for assaulting a federal agent. But I ignored it and bought the chicken feed and just headed out. And I felt like, is this who I am now? Some pushover with yard birds and home improvement books?”

“You made a little fast and loose with your authority sometimes,” she says, thinking of Roche. She curves her palm against his cheek, thumbs the fine ridge of his zygomatic bone.

He bumps her nose with his. “You broke into a secret morgue.”

“You made me.” She sniffles, laughs a little. “The good old days.”

“These can be the good days too,” he says. “They can, if we work at it.” He traces her mouth with his finger.

“Okay,” she says. Hope stirs in her, a thing with feathers. “Partners?”

“Partners.”

He kisses her, in their small tent, in their ring of light.

#xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #my fic #iwtb

144 notes · View notes

notdeadjack · 3 years

Text

annual rec list 2020

13 fandoms represented:

Part 1: 55 fics total

Leverage: 13 fics Star Wars: 3 fics Star Trek: 2 fics Haikyuu!!: 13 fics Teen Wolf: 3 fics Jurassic Park: 1 fic The Witcher: 1 fic Merlin: 3 fics Borderlands: 2 fics She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: 2 fics Naruto: 8 fics Dorohedoro: 3 fics

Part 2:

Boku no Hero Academia: 211 fics here

If the read more breaks, I am truly sorry oTL

List split into two bc tumblr called me out on reading too many fics and wouldn’t let me post all of them at once boo

Leverage

https://archiveofourown.org/works/799639 your body is a war zone but you are not a ruin by postcardmystery 2k, Alec/Parker/Eliot,

“Make me a sandwich,” Parker says, so he does.

“Cut the damn wire,” says Hardison, so he does.

“Jump,” says Parker, says Hardison, and he never needs to ask, “How high?”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12475840 Well Worn, Well Loved by BabylonsFall 3k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, fluff, sharing clothes,

You would think, given everyone’s space issues this wouldn’t be a thing. But it was. And none of them were complaining.

(Everyone steals each others clothes. They're all surprisingly okay with it.)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/6363724 Hotel Heart by Laughsalot3412 45k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, canon-AU, psychic abilities, mind rape,

He had a sniper rifle scoping the girl’s bright eyes and the guy’s smile.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/1407967 The Safe and Sound Job by flutterflap 15k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, injury, h/c,

Eliot Spencer doesn't do hospitals.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3861028 like a map of a place you've never been by bydaybreak 24k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, pining, slow burn, fake/pretend relationship,

He knows it’d be so fucking easy, if he’d let himself. Because he’s easy for them, has been since that first job, since the day he hauled Hardison’s ass out of a building about to explode. It’d be so easy.

So he won’t.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3928687 the warmth of your doorways by gyzym 3k, Alec/Parker/Eliot,

Don't let me in with no intention to keep me.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/1357111 Old Dog by thingswithwings 16k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, service submission, bdsm, mild puppy play,

Eliot's their hitter, and taking on any physical threats to the team is his job, but there's something beyond professionalism – even beyond the obvious fact that Eliot relishes the fight itself – in the way he puts his body between Parker or Alec and any potential threat. Alec has a good view of Eliot's back on a lot of jobs, and he reads something in the tight line of Eliot's shoulder, in the slow turn of his foot as he steps into a fighting stance.

Something possessive.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/8823406 Motion Parallax by Laughsalot3412 8k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, outsider pov,

So, apparently Amy’s boss was part of a criminal gang.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/9071065 Wash the sorrow from off my skin by Keiya 2k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, soulmates,

He lays on his bed and knows without a doubt that his soulmates can read Fucking Genius on their skin, or maybe just Genius, but Fucking gives a ring to it.

Because he is, baby, he is.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/2854310 Love (By Any Other Name) by ChouetteAnanas41 5k, Alec/Parker/Eliot,

Eliot fell in love on a Tuesday.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3928888 Pancakes by saavik13 7k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, mentions of rape and child abuse, h/c,

Parker can't ever ask a simple question.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3556844 No Time Like the Present by waterbird13 22k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, past Moreau/Eliot, violence, murder, child murder,

Eliot's past with Damien Moreau is even more complicated than most people know about, and of course that would come up again when dealing with his incredibly complicated present feelings for Parker and Hardison. Eliot isn't a hundred percent sure how love works, but he's pretty positive it exists only to bite him in the ass.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/4542576 Guard Your Eggshell Heart by letsgostealafandom 14k, Alec/Parker/Eliot, praise kink,

Parker had a theory, and her theory was this: it made Eliot really happy when they noticed the things he did for them. It made Eliot happy when they made sure he knew they noticed the things he did for them. And when Eliot thought they didn't notice, it made him- not unhappy, but something worse, something like he knew that was all he could expect from anyone and he'd resigned himself to it a while back. Once she'd noticed it, she couldn't stop, and the realization of how often they took Eliot for granted made her stomach twist uncomfortably.

Star Wars

https://archiveofourown.org/works/5783371 This is Called Falling by Cartopathy 24k, Finn/Poe, h/c,

Poe stood and he walked, remembering suddenly his only friend on the planet was gone and there was little hope of finding a town, much less hospitality.

And yet he walked in hope.

There was a stormtrooper—he needed to find the stormtrooper. ________________________________

“Was Poe important to you? You were close in the Resistance?” Rey asked.

Finn cleared his throat. “Yes, because I’m in the Resistance and he was in the Resistance so we've known each other for a while. He was important to me, yes.”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/18546007 Stop Your Fear by gloss 12k, Finn/Poe, sex pollen, dub-con, public sex, pining,

Imprisoned by space pirates, Finn and Poe get to know each other better. When Finn gets whammied with sex pollen, Poe helps him out, not entirely unselfishly.

Afterward, they try to clean up the mess and take care of each other.

please note: sex is entirely consensual, but within a compromised situation. Dub-con, not non con.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/6904006 Against Disaster by gloss 29k, Finn/Poe, pining, PTSD,

Not that he loved Finn. There was no way he could love someone he'd spoken to for all of ten minutes, no matter how lifechanging those minutes proved to be.

He loved the feeling of it all. The thrill, the novelty, the rush. Everything he'd shared with Finn had been more exciting than the rest of his life put together, and his life had been far from sedate.

That's what he told himself, anyway.

__ Poe's a disaster and Finn's still got a lot of brainwashing to work through.

Star Trek

https://archiveofourown.org/works/849107 Treasures by yeaka 17k, Kirk/Spock, AU, pon farr, soul bond,

Sometimes the other Vulcans wonder how Spock managed to obtain such an exotic bondmate, and sometimes Spock wonders himself.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11697684 Echolocation by Darksknight 8k, Kirk/Spock,

Kirk and Spock don’t realize that they’ve bonded right away. The rest of the crew is a different story.

Haikyuu!!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21762448 discovering the smile of one kageyama tobio by Emlee_J 8k, Hinata/Kageyama, fluff,

Kageyama blinks once before a grin of his own spreads over his face. Shouyou’s breath halts in his lungs at the sight, and he wills for time to stop, just so he can drink it in. He sees it sometimes, when they’re playing - Kageyama’s fierce smile when they pull a combo off just right, when they show their opponents how possible the impossible can really be. But then there’s another serve, another rally, and the moment is gone.

'Shame', Shouyou thinks to himself, as he lets his eyes roam over Kageyama’s stupidly happy face, taking in the creases that are from joy rather than frowning, for a change. 'It’s a really nice smile.'

In which it's their third, and final, year in high school and Hinata has only one goal: to make Kageyama smile outside of volleyball.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/5479973 75% Useless Pining by ravelqueen 4k, Nishinoya/Asahi, pining, hair kink,

People often ask Asahi why he keeps his hair long. He gives them a different reason every time, from being too lazy to cut it, over saying he thinks it looks nice on him, to just ducking his head and hoping they'll move on.

The actual reason is pettier and smaller and has nothing to do with his fashion sense and everything to do with Nishinoya.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/2330126 Exception to the rule by Mysecretfanmoments 2k, Sugawara/Daichi,

In which Sugawara Koushi just so happens to belong to the .001% of guys Daichi might conceivably fall for, and it takes a confused third party for Daichi to realize it.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21580309 Just Another by Mooifyourecows 103k, Sugawara/Daichi, drama, humour, childhood friends, flip-flopping,

Everything is changing. But in the midst of exams, plans for the future, nationals, and a tumultuous new fracture to his family life, at least Sawamura Daichi can always count on his friendship with Sugawara Koushi to stay the same.

Or so he thought.

(RN: some of the best flirting i’ve ever read. also, Sugawara’s family? A++)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/2940728 boys by buu 5k, Sugawara/Daichi,

Before, if Suga had been asked to pick a type, he would have hummed and thought it over, maybe said something vague like “nice eyes” or “nice legs” or “a good personality”. Now, he can only think “Daichi”.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3189353 Perfectionism by Mysecretfanmoments 2k, Sugawara/Daichi, practise kissing, accidental boners,

“I just wish it was something you could practice before you have to… perform.” He narrows his eyes, imagining it. “Like a CPR class.”

Suga raises an eyebrow. “You want to practice it. Beforehand.”

“Yeah. Are you offering?”

((Daichi doesn't like to be bad at things--kissing included--and Suga is willing to help him practice.))

https://archiveofourown.org/works/6411370 Jealousy by surveycorpsjean 7k, Sugawara/Daichi, jealousy,

It’s so horrid- it feels like sludge in Suga’s stomach, like poison in his veins, like an itch behind his skin.

It burns, it stings. He hates it, he hates it more than anything, but he can’t help it.

He’s hopelessly in love.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/7496004 Hinata Shouyou's Fucking Face by Esselle 17k, Hinata/Kageyama,

'Kageyama doesn't know why Hinata's face rubs him the wrong way—it just does. So one day, in an attempt to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes Hinata's Shouyou's fucking face so fucking annoying, he begins to catalogue all the things that really tick him off.

This proves to be startlingly revelatory.'

A thought-provoking study and critical analysis of Hinata Shouyou's stupid face, by Kageyama Tobio.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/1831732 need a friend you can fuck, i can be that by readbetweenthelions 5k, Nishinoya/Tanaka, friends with benefits,

noya and tanaka are just really good friends who have a bit of good, not-exactly-clean friendly sex sometimes. here's the first time it happens.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/3332642 it's fine by lokh 2k, Nishinoya/Tanaka, phone sex, just dudes being bros,

have you ever wanted to jack off but you're in the middle of talking to someone and you can't exactly tell them that you've gotta jack off so you either sit through it awkwardly or make an excuse to leave? imagine that they found out and tell you that it's fine if you just jack off mid-conversation. now imagine that it's not you and it's tanaka and noya. that's the whole plot.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/5103794 find out what we're made of by sweggscellent 2k, Nishinoya/Tanaka, first kiss, frottage,

It’s weird, noticing things about your best friend when your best friend is literally the goofiest person on the planet, but Noya does; the swell of his powerful calves, the line of his back when his tee shirts cling to it with sweat, the strangely graceful determination on his face when they’re up against a particularly strong team. It almost makes Noya uncomfortable.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/6205864 Rule 4 by mean_whale 15k, Nishinoya/Tanaka, friends with benefits, friends to lovers,

Nishinoya and Tanaka are tricked into watching gay porn, and curiosity gets the better of them.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/5979136 Roundabout by Shaples 12k, Nishinoya/Tanaka, past asanoya, post-canon, emotional h/c,

“Actually I, uh. I was thinking I might stick around. Like, long term? I mean, if you haven’t already found someone to rent the other room, and you still. You know. Want to live together.”

Tanaka’s eyes widened in surprise. “I thought that you and Asahi were-”

“Yeah,” Noya said. “We aren’t.”

“Oh,” he said. And when Noya didn’t look up from the label on his beer bottle, Tanaka breathed out, “Shit.”

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13344624 And They Were Roommates by Hella_Queer 7k, Hinata/Kageyama, first time, trans character,

“I can like...eat you out if you want.”

Silence surrounds them. This was it. Three years of friendship down the tubes. Kageyama would move out, or demand he move out, and he'd be forever branded as the Pervert Roommate. No one would talk to him ever again. His life was over!

“Okay.”

“Whaaaaa?!”

Teen Wolf

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22812937 Five Times Derek Heard Something He Wished He Hadn’t, and the One Time He Did by isthatbloodonhisshirt (wasterella) 14k, Stiles/Derek, 5+1, pining,

“This place is hell,” Derek decided. “This place is absolutely hell.”

How was it possible he’d gone so many years of his life without hearing anything nearly as over the top as he had just visiting Stiles at school? This had to be some kind of record for the most disgusting things he’d ever overheard.

(I mean really, the title says it all lol)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/27872045 Can You Feel A Whole New Part of Your World? by isthatbloodonhisshirt (wasterella) 53k, Stiles/Derek, AU, neighbours, fluff,

“Can you hear me singing in the shower?” Stiles blurted out, because he had to know, now. If one of his neighbours had slid that note under his door, then it meant Parrish as another neighbour could hear him, too! He had to know if this was all a huge joke and one person had walked by and overheard him and decided to fuck with him.

Or if everyone could hear him and he now had to leave the country.

Parrish gave him a weird look at the question, but answered anyway, making Stiles’ plans to leave the country speed up in his mind.

“Of course I can. You’re actually not bad. Though you have been singing a lot of Frozen lately, getting kind of tired of the soundtrack.”

“Oh my God!” Stiles shouted in his face.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/6156885 you're never too much of an old dog to teach a duckling a new trick by driedupwishes 2k, gen, light angst,

“Y’know, it’d be real neat if someone gave me a gun,” Stiles says.

And Chris does.

Jurassic Park

https://archiveofourown.org/works/5199038 5 Times the Raptors Tried to Kill Miriam, and 1 Time They Didn’t by JulisCaesar 22k, OCs, gen, blood, science, freaking dinosaurs heck yeah!

Miriam thought the job working for InGen sounded perfect. Tropical island, good pay, first dibs on publications… At least, she thought so until she found out that she was the only behaviorist on staff. Once the eggs hatched, it became all she could do to keep up–with the dinosaurs, the science, and her health.

The Witcher

https://archiveofourown.org/works/22247587 swallow my breath and take what is mine by anacaoris 6k, Jaskier/Geralt, first time, sugar baby!geralt,

“It began with the baths.

It had been so easy to dismiss at first. Some attempted to win him over with kindness-with-a-catch when in need of something, a bed for the night, a pouch of coin, a good drink to lower the cost.”

Jaskier likes to take care of Geralt. Geralt very quickly takes notice.

Merlin (BBC)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/7287 In Want of a Wife by syllic 43k, Merlin/Arthur,

When Merlin first hears that Arthur has been betrothed, his ribs pull inwards with an odd little hitch, and he only allows himself a second—which he needs in order to coordinate spinning in place without falling on his face—before he’s running to Arthur’s chambers.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/2193282 The Frog Prince by Clea2011 58k, Merlin/Arthur, canon AU, disability,

Canon era AU. A teenage Arthur is hit by a mutation spell intended for Uther. Unable to speak and hidden away by his father because of his appearance, Arthur is left lonely and isolated. A few years later Gaius takes on a new apprentice, someone who can understand Arthur and see through the enchantment. Someone with magic.

But breaking the spell was never going to be easy.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/835089 Such a Life, a Heart, a Mind as Thine by dreamlittleyo 42k, Merlin/Arthur, sex pollen, first time, non-con, soul bond, guilt,

In which Arthur inadvertently triggers an ancient magic, but he does not face the consequences alone.

Borderlands

https://archiveofourown.org/works/8628043 How They Met Themselves by Wheat From Chaff (wheatfromchaff) 205k, Timothy/Rhys, slow burn, past abuse,

Rhys wants to change Pandora. He wants to make things better, build things up. He wants, more than anything, to prove Jack wrong.

Tim just wants to get paid.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/9951275 you'll find me buried by Wheat From Chaff (wheatfromchaff) 7k, Jack/Timothy, fight club, hate sex, dub-con,

It's not every day you face yourself in the ring.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

https://archiveofourown.org/works/16748245 tooth for a tooth by nowweareunstoppable 3k, Adora/Catra, exploration, first time, biting,

Now, though, Adora was on top of her, and her chest heaved in a way that was decidedly not sleepy. She pleaded with Catra with her eyes, then her words, “Please, I just-” before cutting off, not knowing what to even ask for.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19767655 More than Words by SimonKilnsworth 5k, Kyle/Rogelio, first time,

Rogelio gets woken up in the night as Kyle struggles with his feelings.

Naruto

https://archiveofourown.org/series/37259 Ten Years Gone series by 100demons 80k, gen, time-travel,

Thirty year old Kakashi was supposed to have been killed by Pein during the Invasion. Instead, he wakes up in the body of his twenty year old self.

(It gets a lot more complicated.)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/25538635 Better It Be You by cricket_aria 4k, Kakashi/Sakura, dodging arranged marriage,

When Sakura's parents realize that she would be ill-trained for any job in the civilian world should she ever be too badly injured to remain a ninja they decide to try to arrange a marriage for her with one of the members of a major clan, so that at least if that day comes she'll still have value within the ninja community. Too bad they didn't discuss it with her first.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14143890 the chosen fruit by theformerone 51k, Sakura/Shikamaru, AU, honey pot, sex work, exhibitionism, implied non-con, kidnapping, drama, politics,

Sakura is a rōnin, but she's good enough with a blade to find work. She's trusted at Fukiage because she's a nameless woman who can't afford to bite any hand that feeds her.

Shikamaru's awful attitude makes him a favorite in the teahouse. He makes his money on his back but his real trade is information. There is rot in Fire Country. Shikamaru sees it, and he is going to burn it at the roots.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/16304705 Being Over-Prepared is Impossible (and other mottos) by Pleasedial123 gen, 40k, canon-AU, BAMF!team 7,

In one world, Kakashi awoke, felt grieved at being assigned a team he sees his own in, and he let that grief make him a lazy teacher. He saw himself in Sasuke, Obito in Naruto, and Rin in Sakura. He woke, saw himself in them, and took a large step back, regretting accepting them as his new team. In another world he was quite hands off, merely a watcher because it was so very painful to watch. He saw himself and all his mistakes in this new team of his.

In this world, Kakashi awoke, saw the similarities, and instantly panicked. He suddenly realized what he had done, passing a team. Kakashi was left scrambling not to repeat old mistakes and regrets. This team would not suffer the fate of his team.

In this world, simply put, Kakashi became a teacher. This is the starting of a new Team seven.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13690269 there to welcome you home by theformerone 1k, Sakura/Neji/Shikamaru, fluff,

Sakura gives birth to their daughter in the bathtub in the main house on the Nara compound.

Neji comes home and nearly has a stroke.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/14902124 brown eyes steal me by theformerone 10k, Kiba/Shikamaru, canon-au, arranged marriage, mutual pining,

"You planted a -,"

"I planted a tree, Ino, I know, I was there."

"Kousa," she says, finishing as if he never interrupted. "Not very original, but cute. You think that'll be what you name your firstborn?"

https://archiveofourown.org/works/18913750 gonna give you all my love, boy by theformerone 2k, Sakura/Shikamaru, first time,

Shikamaru is a (maybe ace?) virgin. Sakura is not either of those things. It still all works out. Sexually, speaking.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/18756313 Consideration: Or, The Smart Kids Get (It) Together by cairn 12k, Sakura/Shikamaru, friends to lovers,

Noun: Consideration 1. Careful thought, typically over a period of time. 2. A fact or a motive taken into account in deciding or judging something. 3. Law: (in a contractual agreement) anything given or promised or forborne by one party in exchange for the promise or undertaking of another.

"You want to give yourself cancer?" she had asked.

"Good afternoon, Sakura," he'd drawled back. "So nice to see you so unexpectedly."

Dorohedoro

https://archiveofourown.org/works/25767034 I Am Intrinsically No Good by Medegela 2k, Noi/Shin, accidental voyeurism, sexual tension, masturbation,

They had recently renewed their partnership for the third time and things he faintly noticed and always dismissed before were amplified. He knew now that she also enjoyed watching him, he knew that the same kind of release ran through her when she saw him, and he was sure of that because of the contract.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12192696 Secondhand Smoke by dirtbag -1k, Noi/Shin, unresolved romantic tension, magical shotgunning,

They sure do this a lot, for something that's so endlessly frustrating.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12387897 Love Is a Verb by dirtbag 4k, Noi/Shin, pegging,

Shin can’t figure out why Noi is so insistent on being careful with him tonight when he’s pretty sure he’s come out of her bedroom mildly concussed before.

#notdead recs #rec list

12 notes · View notes

leverage-ot3 · 4 years

Text

notable moments from The First David Job

leverage 1.12

sophie organized the notecards for the intervention

- - - - -

Sophie: Drunk again?

Nate: Are we still unclear? I'm a functioning alcoholic, you know? And the trick is not to get hung up on the "alcoholic." But celebrate the "functioning" part of the sentence.

- - - - -

Nate: Yeah, I- I know all this.

Hardison: No, no, no. See, while you are well-versed in dead-guy art, I myself am not. My entire criminal career is based on technology built after 1981. So I am riveted. Quite so. Please, do go on.

- - - - -

Hardison: Man, am I glad I don't have to break in there. That is one sick security system.

Parker: What, with our tools? Give me three days of prep, it'd be like taking diamonds from the French national bank. That's like taking candy from a baby.

Hardison: I got it.

Parker: A very easy thing to do.

Hardison: Got...it

I love her

- - - - -

Parker: Oh, look, little buddy. (picks up fake statue) That's your new home!

Hardison: Can you please not play with the little naked man? Please.

Parker: I'm not. (sets the statue down)

- - - - -

Eliot: You guys--you know each other?

Ian: Of course. Maggie is Nate’s ex-wife.

Eliot (nervously): Oh.

eliot being completely RATTLED lmfao

- - - - -

Parker: Which conversation do you want to listen to?

Hardison: That's what stereo was invented for.

- - - - -

Hardison: Now, Nate, is Maggie a very good Art Inspector?

Nate: Yeah, she's the best.

Parker: No, no, no, we can't let your ex-wife anywhere near our little naked man!

parker: don’t talk to me or my naked son ever again

- - - - -

Hardison: No, no. Nate, we haven't done any prep. We don't have our tools.

Parker: You want me to break into a secure storage facility with whatever I can scrounge up at the buffet table?

Nate: Pretty much, yeah.

Parker: Cool. I think Sophie left some dresses in here. (turns to look through things)

Hardison: I'll go, too. I, uh, I got a white shirt. I can go wait staff.

(Parker takes off her shirt and Hardison looks the other way, turning the fake statue away from her as well)

hardison is a bashful lil respectful boy and we stan him for it

- - - - -

parker walking in in that amazing dress and everyone looking? good, it’s what she deserves (I’m gay)

- - - - -

Parker: Door's got a silent alarm. (to Sophie) You should hide. (to Hardison) We should pretend to make out.

Hardison: Make what?

(Parker grabs Hardison and they begin to kiss and she pushes the door open a little)

[Founder’s Reception]

(Nate and Eliot turn to look at the building as the sounds of making out come over the comms)

[Museum]

(Sophie goes around a corner out of sight)

Hardison: Let's talk about-- A little bit--

(Parker and Hardison continue to make out. Two guards approach and seem embarrassed. One clears his throat)

Guard: You, uh, bumped the door there. Sets the alarm off.

Hardison: You know what?

Parker: Oh.

Hardison: We, you know how it is.

Parker: Sorry.

(guards walk away and Sophie rejoins them)

Parker: Makeup. (takes makeup from Sophie) Come on. (goes through door)

Hardison: Can we talk about the pretending? That was nice.

(Sophie pushes him after Parker and returns to the party)

poor hardison’s heart must be beating wildly

- - - - -

Eliot: Which one of you did she kiss?

(Sophie sighs)

IMAGINE IF IT HAD GONE THE OTHER WAY THO

- - - - -

parker’s laser grid dodging skills are legendary + her delight when she stands up to see the first david !!!

also we stan a QUEEN who broke into a vault with only a glass of ice, a roll of aluminum foil, gum, and eyeshadow (and a fake makeout sesh)

- - - - -

Hardison: You did not just think about this on the way in from the van.

Parker: Some people do crosswords

- - - - -

Maggie: I-I just, I’m just trying to tell you that I still care.

Nate: No, I-I was –

Maggie: Care what happens to you, I mean. I've never stopped caring about you, Nate

maggie is such a genuinely good person and we love her for it

- - - - -

Parker: Ready?

(Hardison uses his phone to access remote system)

Parker: Come on, come on.

[Parking Lot]

(alarms begin to blare an all the cars)

[Security Control Room]

Guard 1: Hey, the vibration alarm just went off in the restoration room.

Guard 2: Wait. (points at monitor) Look. The car alarms all went off in the parking lot.

Guard 1: Little earthquakes.

Guard 2: Just another tremor.

that’s so smart tho???

- - - - -

Parker tosses the real David to Hardison who catches it)

Hardison: Wha-you-- Don't throw the David.

Parker: You caught it, didn't you?

Hardison: You're crazy

I would have had a HEART ATTACK

- - - - -

Maggie: Adam!

Eliot (turns): Uh, yeah?

(Eliot stops as Nate continues away)

Maggie: Let me give you my number.

Eliot: Great.

[Leverage HQ]

Eliot: I'm sorry your wife gave me her phone number.

Nate: Don't want to talk about it.

Eliot: I-It was only to coordinate where we were gonna go anyway.

Nate: Not talking about it.

hardison is enjoying it so much in the background dnjsjajsjsnnsnn

- - - - -

(Parker puts the statue on the table between them)

Parker: We just stole an $8 million statue on, like, our day off! (she shakes their shoulders happily)

SHES BABY

- - - - -

Pilot: Uh, work? W-what are you talking about?

Hardison: Spot inspection. FAA. Now, look, I want to see this plane's TCAS, VRSM, and 8.1 FM spacing in operation to make sure it's fully functional and in compliance with the new FAA regulations.

Pilot: New regulations?

(Hardison takes out a pen and writes on a clipboard)

Hardison: Pilot unaware of latest regulations.

Pilot: Oh, the new regulations. Of course. Please, come this way. I'll take you right up.

Hardison: Oh, no, no. It's cool, it's cool. I don't need to go up. Just taxi me around the building.

Pilot: Taxi? I thought you need to get up in the air.

Hardison (writes on clipboard): Uncomfortable with black authority figures.

Pilot: Sir, please don't write that.

Hardison: Oh, I will write a letter to your mama if I feel like it.

Pilot: This way, please. It's in order. I-I promise. This way. It's okay. (to copilot) FAA, he's a hard-ass.

(copilot tries to get bags)

Pilot: Screw the bags. Let's go!

this was really funny but also SUCH A GOOD WAY to con people

- - - - -

quinn’s hair did nothing for him in this episode. i said what i said.

- - - - -

(Sophie and Nate get into his car and leave while Quinn continues to take pictures from the open door of the hanger. Eliot walks up behind him)

Eliot: I'm gonna count to three.

(Quinn turns and hits Eliot hard, knocking him across the floor)

Eliot: Nate, we're blown. W—

Nate: Eliot, what’s--

(several feet away, Eliot’s earpiece is lying on the floor. Eliot tries to scramble away, but Quinn kicks him in the ribs, throwing him back, and kicks him several times more)

Quinn: That rib's broken.

(Eliot manages to get to his feet)

Quinn: He said you'd be tougher than this.

quinn: *is a really good fighter*

eliot: *surprised pikachu face*

ALSO the reason eliot was beat up so bad in the beginning was because he kept on trying to get back to his comm every chance he got INSTEAD of truly fighting back. his first priority was warning his team over his own personal safety and ugh we stan a man who cares about his family

- - - - -

,,, imagine you’re driving on a highway and see a chick jump off a bridge onto an armored car, pick its lock and then BREAK INTO said armored car ,,, wyd

- - - - -

poor hardison was ready to relax ,,, he got a soda and made himself some popcorn too

- - - - -

(Quinn and Eliot both stand hunched over, breathing hard)

Quinn: Why won't you go down?

(Eliot laughs, blood falling from his mouth to the floor. Quinn comes at him again, but Eliot catches him and knees him in the chest several times before pushing him away. Quinn falls to his hands and knees, gasping for air)

Eliot: Now that rib's broken.

(Eliot hits Quinn in the face hard, sending him to the floor. Holding his ribs, Eliot walks to the earpiece and puts it in)

payback is sweet

- - - - -

Sterling: Mr. Spencer?

(Quinn is still unconscious as Eliot walks out the hanger doors, breathing hard, limping and holding his ribs)

Eliot: Hey, Sterling. I got some dental work with your name on it. What do you say me and you hook up so I can give it to you?

- - - - -

Sophie: Sterling knows us. He knows how we think.

Nate: So we think like somebody else

THEY THINK LIKE THEIR KIDS

- - - - -

Nate: With a couple broken ribs and a concussion, I don't think Eliot can take out six guys.

(Eliot looks like he’d give it a try)

Nate: You know, but then I thought, "what would Hardison do?"

(Hardison looks at Nate in surprise)

(Eliot pulls out his phone and accesses the computer system, sending a high pitched whine into the comm. devices of the guards. They all bend over in pain. Eliot punches the one closest to him. Nate grabs Geary and slams his head down on the table. Hardison hits another guard in the face with his tied hands)

THAT MEANS ELIOT WAS ALSO THINKING LIKE HARDISON IF HE KNEW WHAT TO DO WITH THE PHONE AND WAS READY FOR IT

also YEET hardison is a badass but wbk

- - - - -

(Parker runs for Sophie. Sterling and his men run for Sophie and Parker. Parker reaches Sophie first and the dive from the roof, Sophie screaming and Parker laughing all the way down)

parker is the only character I’ve ever seen that can scream “yeehaw” and “yahoooooo” without it sounding ridiculous

- - - - -

(Eliot walks into the lobby, holding his ribs. He turns to yell over his shoulder)

Eliot: Hardison!

(Eliot follows Nate toward the door)

Hardison (breathing hard): Wait, Eliot. Eliot, come on.

(Eliot goes back inside)

Eliot: You've got to be kidding me, man.

(Eliot goes to help Hardison carry the painting out)

Hardison: Bring it out, come on.

Eliot: This is just weird.

Hardison: I painted this

okay so we all know that hardison actually hit a lot of cash in the painting but also, eliot actually goes back to help instead of just rolling his eyes and leaving hardison behind. eliot can get annoyed with him but he’d never leave him behind. not even on day one when hardison fell in the exploding building in the nigerian job. eliot was there for him then and he will be there for him for the rest of their lives.

ALSO I really hope eliot got his ribs checked out sometime soon after

- - - - -

Sterling: You're fired. Dust the whole place for fingerprints, okay? I want a forensic computer spec—

(the monitors come to life, showing Hardison’s face)

Hardison: Hey, Sterling. Get out of my house.

(display changes to a 30 second clock that begins to count down)

Sterling: Run. Run!

(all of the men run from the office, coming out onto the street)

Geary: Maybe he was bluffing.

(the entire floor of the building explodes, shooting fire)

Sterling: That's the funny thing about con men. They don't bluff.

- - - - -

the third “scattering scene” of the series

#leverage #leverage 1.12 #leverage 1x12 #the first david job #leverage season 1 #season 1 #notable moments #mine

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luluwquidprocrow · 3 years

Text

time present and time past

originally posted: december 30th, 2017

word count: 1,513 words

rated: teen

laura palmer, dale cooper

post-canon, trauma, introspection, two people having a real hard time here, on the interdimensional road trip of a lifetime (or many lifetimes), time shenanigans

summary: Dale and Laura try to reconcile some familiar faces, including their own, in their road trip through time.

opening notes:

title from ‘burnt norton’ by t.s. eliot

she is acutely laura, in this moment. most of the time, in fact, she is somewhat laura, picking through scattered and distorted memories, a hard glaze in her eyes as she tries to reconcile two lives and all the pain between them. sometimes she is a little more carrie than laura, forceful and loud and confused, like she was when they first met and they went to that house and she told dale if he was going to break her open he may as well finish the job, tell me who she is, then, who’s this laura palmer? but since then she’s been quiet and sharp and a ghost like laura, peeling off the mask of carrie page piece by piece.

but here, she is laura, eyes startling and clear.

they’ve seen a few of them. they aren’t doppelgangers. they’re just—versions. scattered around in their travels. the same faces, same souls, different people. diane was linda, and he never saw her again. one time he saw albert, or a man who looked just like him and would’ve have a different name, and dale turned away from him and didn’t look back. the morning laura pushed the curls out of her hair so it laid flat she saw a face she refused to identify to dale, but she went back to the hotel and stole a curling iron and recurled every inch of her hair and told him that carrie was on to something, with this hairstyle, said in a toneless voice that it looked better on her.

“laura,” he’d said, and she’d jumped like she was going to split out of her skin. he didn’t discount the possibility. so dale didn’t ask her who she’d seen. it’d be hypocritical to judge her for hiding, anyway.

the point is, now, here, wherever it is, whenever they are, there is a woman in front of them, behind a counter in a convenience store, where the lights are too bright and the colors too vivid and real. a same face, a same soul, a different person.

dale met donna hayward a few times in twin peaks. he knows she was laura’s best friend, back in that period of time where things, somehow, made more sense. he knows what they meant to each other. he knows what she looked like, the soft sweep of her hair and desperate kindness in her eyes.

this isn’t donna, and this is, in the way that laura is and still isn’t carrie page. and where laura is suddenly bright and sharp and so laura, this woman has a name tag that proclaims her as teresa and she seems in no hurry to be anyone else. but here she is, regardless. an open smile, a wondering face. what would it take to find donna?

he looks back at laura. her jaw is clenched tight, tension clear in the set of her spine, in how her eyes look down and away, flickering at everything else. beyond that, he has never seen someone so still. dale takes the bag of chips she’s been clutching at and puts it on the counter, does the same with the rest of their things.

“nice day outside,” says the woman. she’s still smiling. “is all this for a picnic?”

the anxiety in the air snaps apart. laura takes one step back, then another, and then turns and walks right out. dale watches her go.

“is she okay?” the woman—teresa—asks, leaning forward a little.

dale isn’t sure she’d understand any of the responses he’d give. it leaves a hole inside him, a feeling he doesn’t like. he pays and leaves.

he finds laura out in the parking lot, sitting in the passenger seat of the car, digging her nails into her palms.

“laura,” he begins.

“shut up,” laura says, voice wavering. her shoulders are hunched and trembling, her hair falling across her face. “don’t—don’t fucking talk to me.”

dale gets into the drivers seat and shuts the door. he sits and watches laura. then he thinks about albert, about the man of twenty-five years ago, the man of not too long ago, and then the face he saw. what would’ve happened, if he’d spoken to him? swallowed his pride and tried to find the remains of albert rosenfield? dale doesn’t know. in this moment, he suspects nothing good.

“god, i wish it was her,” laura whispers, squeezing her eyes tight. she puts her head in her hands, laces her fingers through her hair. “oh, donna.”

he’s not sure what to say. and it’s awful, because dale cooper was the man who always had the answers, who always looked for them, who could always put someone at ease with his presence. he had hoped, so much, to do the same for laura. but this dale cooper, twenty-five years away and still wandering, can’t find the words anymore. he brought her father to acceptance once but he pulled laura out of it. his stomach turns when he thinks of saying too much to her now.

it’s so strange to see her face, filled with all these emotions, after the calm mystery of his dreams and her corpse. sometimes he catches her staring in a mirror, like she’s trying to figure out the cause of each line in her face, each dip in her skin she can’t remember. it’s so strange to see his own face too, to know this is who he is, so mostly he avoids looking. he knows the cause of every lost space in his features.

laura jerks her head up and yanks her hands down. she dives into her pockets, fingers scrambling, searching over and over again. she pats down her jacket, her sweater, her jeans, before dale realizes what she must be looking for.

“carrie page didn’t smoke, i don’t think,” dale says.

“well, she fucking should’ve,” laura snaps. she keeps hunting anyway, until she stops. she looks back at the convenience store and then turns away sharply, pushing herself back into the seat. “well. donna didn’t like it when i did it anyway.” her shoulders shift and her mouth trembles, her voice getting quieter and quieter. “not that it mattered, i think. but i cared what she thought.”

they sit in a cool silence. dale should take his keys out, start the car, keep them going. he stays still.

“do you remember,” laura says, “the last thing you said to someone important?”

dale swallows. “i told them all i’d see them again,” he says carefully, staring down at his hands.

“no, i mean—before.” she gestures loosely with a hand, curls it through the air. “before before.”

what was it, the last thing he’d said? to albert? to harry? the words come back to him in a rush. albert, i can handle it. harry, i have to go on alone. his hands tighten around each other.

“i don’t,” laura murmurs. “i don’t know what i told her. fuck off, for all i know. i was so—and i can’t remember, isn’t that sad? that whole day’s a blur. except—and even that’s not—i remember his voice, like from a distance, and a—a dark room, and a mirror. but it’s funny.” she rubs a hand over her chest, slow. “i can’t feel it, anymore. where i died.”

dale raises his eyes to her face.

“you—” laura starts. she looks up, eyes wide. “you took it from me.”

suddenly she is the girl of twenty-five years ago, an open fear on her face, voice ragged and filled with a burning fire. she is the girl who fought and fought back until—

he is still left with his own death—so many years outside of space dulled neither the memory nor the scar between his ribs—but it’s still with him, a reminder, and he didn’t think what that would mean to take it from someone else. here is laura palmer, painfully alive.

“i am,” he says, “so sorry,” although he knows it’s not enough.

she stays hard and cold, a thick red curtain between them. long minutes go by before her face softens, and she shakes her head, all the fire dying away. “yeah, well,” she says vaguely. “yeah.”

laura seems to know what he means, which is a blessing dale didn’t think was possible and he doesn’t know if he deserves.

“i know you,” laura says. “i would’ve wanted to help you, too.” a smile pulls at her lips. “not that it would’ve gone any better.”

he doesn’t smile. he can’t just keep apologizing to her. she probably wouldn’t stand for it, now that he thinks of it.

“would you like to go back?” dale asks. even he’s not sure what he means, to go back. back where? it didn’t work before, that endless running. but he has to give her a choice in this place.

laura tilts her head back, staring at the cool blue sky through the windshield. then she wipes at her eyes and takes in a breath. “no,” she says softly. “i want to keep going.”

#twin peaks

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sunny1ace · 5 years

Text

Fix You- Part 3.2 of the FamAU

Characters: Logan Sanders, Patton Hart, Remy Hypnos

Summary: Logan gets a job offer and makes Patton sad.

Words: 2115

Warnings: Guilt, anxiety, sad feelings, let me know if I should add any more :)

A/N: I don’t like this chapter, it didn’t turn out the way I wanted, I hope y’all still enjoy it!

Taglist (let me know if I should add you): @espepspes @kaileah-kat @i-need-you-buddy

***

Logan can’t do this.

He’s not an anxious person, growing up the way he did, it’s a miracle he isn’t, but he’s not.

That aside, it’s impossible for someone to never get anxious... everything is just too confusing.

Feelings and deadlines and interviews and-

Logan’s phone rings and he stares down at the caller I.D, too afraid to answer.

Afraid.

If there’s one thing Logan wishes he could never be again, it’s afraid.

The commons are busy, alive with half dead college students wandering about. A few feet from where Logan sits is a couple fighting, on the other side two girls talking about their little sisters at home.

For everyone else, it’s just a normal day. No one else is plagued by the uncertainty Logan is feeling, no one else keeps getting these stupid calls!

As the phone rings again, Logan takes a deep breath and holds it to his ear, “Hello?”

“This is The Florida State Education Department, calling for a Logan Sanders?”

“Yes.” Logan winces, “That is, speaking. I’m Sanders- Logan.” This is already going great.

Reminding himself that he isn’t anxious about work, that other things are bleeding into his professional life, Logan takes a breath.

He’s smart. He’s capable. He knows what he’s doing.

“Wonderful. This is Cathy Eliot. I’d like to discuss a possible career opportunity for you.”

If Logan weren’t a professional, he’d be jumping up and down. Instead he clears his throat and takes a few steps away from the couple next to him. “I see, are you presenting an offer?”

“Mr. Sanders,” Mz. Eliot begins, “we have a large group of graduates we’ve been considering.”

Logan smirks, two can play at that game. “I understand there’s a high demand. Though I’ll tell you I’ve gotten multiple offers from other school districts.”

It’s not a lie, he has received other offers. He’s just… turned them all down.

Though risky, the gamble draws the desired effect from the woman. There’s a pause, and then she sighs. “What I was meaning to say, Mr. Sanders, is that though we have a lot of candidates, you are our desired individual for this opportunity.”

“That’s good to hear! Are you willing to discuss this in depth now?”

“It would suit our time better to email you the details, and set up a call later on. My file says you currently live in Michigan, is that correct?”

“That is,” Logan responds promptly, leaning against the wall.

There’s some typing noises before the woman speaks again, “our board of directors are free around one o’clock your time. Does that work for you?”

Logan pauses as he’s about to say yes. One o’clock is when he meets Patton for lunch. “Is there anyway we could do it a little later?”

“We need to know you’re serious about this, Mr. Sanders.”

Of course they do.

Logan bites his lip, tapping his middle finger against his thigh to the rhythm of a classical piano piece. “I…” He adjusts his glasses and swallows. “Yes. One o’clock works for me. Thank you.”

“Have a good day Mr. Sanders.”

He wishes he’d stop using his name so much. “You as well.”

After he hangs up, Logan leans back to smack his head against the wall. This sets off his plan with Patton, not to mention he’s never cancelled before, he hates going back on his word.

Without really thinking about it, Logan starts walking towards the coffee shop he’d visited earlier that day with Patton. He’d since finished his coffee, and the desire for caffeine is making his neck itch.

He should probably look into that.

“What can I getcha hon?” The barista asks with a smile, leaning over the counter.

Logan blinks, then clears his throat. “Black coffee.” Then, “Please,” as an afterthought.

The barista grins and turns to start making the coffee as Logan pulls out his wallet. When she turns back around to pass it to him, she shakes her head. “It’s on the house dear, any friend of Patton is a friend of mine.”

“Oh,” Logan slowly puts his money away. Patton. Always Patton. “Thank you.”

“Anytime,” she replies, and Logan doesn’t believe her. She passes him a peppermint stick and winks. “Peppermint always helps me when I’m stressed.”

Logan perks up and nods, “You’re correct! In fact, people exposed to the aroma of peppermint and peppermint oil experience enhanced memory, increased alertness and increased processing speeds, according to the International Journal of Neuroscience-“

“That’s nice,” The barista responds distractedly. Logan snaps his mouth shut and nods another thank you, then turns and leaves.

Sipping his coffee, Logan feels his phone buzz in his pocket and he pulls it out, wincing at Patton’s number.

Knowing he has to cancel at some point, Logan answers, “Patton, I was just about to call you.”

“Really?” And god, Patton sounds so excited, Logan wants to smash his own face through a wall. “Well I guess I beat you to it!”

“I suppose you did.” Any other time, Logan would be smiling.

“I wanted to ask you something, but you go ahead, okay?”

“Very well.” Logan clears his throat. “I’m afraid I- well you see something came up and- Patton I’m afraid I’ll have to cancel lunch.”

The pause on the other side of the phone is deafening.

Distantly, Logan can hear someone whispering something, and Patton saying something back. Finally, Patton’s voice gets loud enough for Logan to make out. “That’s okay Lo! Don’t worry about it!”

That’s a relief. “Excellent. Now, what was your question?”

“Oh..” Another whispered exchange and then, “I was just wondering where you wanted to meet. That doesn’t really matter anymore though!”

Logan nods. “I really am sorry Patton. So, how-“

“I’ll see you around!” Patton hangs up.

“-are you,” Logan finishes flatly. He pockets his phone and shakes his head with a huff.

It’s not until he’s halfway finished with his coffee that he realizes Patton didn’t finish their conversation with the usual ‘don’t forget how incredible you are!’, something was off with him.

Patton is hurt. Because of Logan. Again.

Suddenly, his coffee tastes as bitter as Patton describes black coffee to be.

By the time one o’clock rolls around, Logan has had three more cups of coffee, four peppermint sticks, and too many worried looks from the barista to count.

It’s taken all the self control he has not to skip class to find Patton. That, and the fact that Patton is also in class, and he’d hate to disrupt even more of his day.

Now, sitting in front of his laptop, waiting for the call from Florida, he still can’t keep his mind off Patton.

“Focus Logan,” a sharp voice says. At first, he thinks it’s his mom, he almost goes into a panic when he realizes it came out of his own mouth.

“Focus,” He says again, calmer. That reminds him of Patton, and it doesn’t help in the least.

Logan takes a deep breath and hums. “Focus.”

This time, he sounds like himself. Good.

His laptop beeps and he waits until the second one to answer, situating himself so it doesn’t look like he’s sitting on his dorm room floor with moving boxes piled up around him.

A smiling man blinks into view on the screen, wearing a blazer over a shirt with tiny sunglasses on it, on his face are another set of sunglasses.

Logan blinks in surprise. This is not what he expected by ‘board of directors’. “Hello… I’m Logan Sanders. Who am I speaking to?”

“Sup! I’m Remy. Nice to meet me.”

...What.

“Uh, yes. It is.”

For a few seconds, Logan forgets everything he’d learned about interviews, letting Remy stare him down as they sit in uncomfortable science.

“You want the job?”

Logan almost falls over, “What?” At Remy’s raised eyebrow, he fixes his tie nervously, “Er, that is, What… is the job?”

“My secretary is a ho,” Remy grumbles and then sips loudly out of a cup in his hand. “The job, Logan, is an opportunity to head a new education branch for financially challenged and er- to put it delicately, behaviorally challenged kids.”

For some reason, Logan has a feeling Remy knows a lot about the latter group. He holds back any snarky comments as excitement grows inside him. So his counselor hadn’t been lying when he’d said Logan was being looked at for high positions.

“Hello? Where’d you go, space?” Remy snaps his fingers, “Earth to space boy!”

Logan snaps his eyes up to meet Remy’s, fully aware of the stupid grin on his face. “I’d be honored, sir.”

“Please don’t call me sir.” Remy holds his pinky up to the screen, “Pinky swear you’ll email me back when I send you the details?”

“Of course I will.”

“Do it.”

“We aren’t capable of touching, I’m not sure what you mean by-“

“Shake your damn pinky and you’ve got the job.”

Logan nods and shakes his pinky in the air, the smile still on his face as Remy signs off.

He has a job.

He has his dream job.

Four years ahead of schedule!

He has to tell Pat-

The smile slides off his face. Patton.

So what? Maybe Patton was a little hurt. He can fix that! The meeting ended up going a lot faster than he thought it would. There’s still time for the two of them to get lunch.

Fumbling his phone, Logan holds it up to his ear, counting in his head as it rings.

“You’ve reached Patton! Leave it at the beep kiddo!”

“Leave what at the beep?” Logan whispers and hangs up. He could try calling again, or text.

Logan huffs as he stands. Who is he kidding, his feet are already on the way to Patton’s dorm.

Thoughts like, he should’ve brought a jacket, texted Patton to warn him, and thought about the possibility that Patton wouldn’t even be at his dorm completely escape him.

All Logan knows, is he has to tell Patton everything.

The door to his dorm is decorated with stickers, paper hearts, a sign that says ‘Hungry? We have cookies!’ and both Patton and his roommate, Dee’s name.

Logan smiles and knocks, careful to not mess up any of the decor. “Patton? It’s Logan, do you have a moment?”

No answer. Logan knocks again, “I’d assume it’s plausible that I hurt your feelings earlier, perhaps we could still have lunch now?”

Again, silence. Logan can hear his heart in his ears.

“Patton I am truly sorry, i never meant to hurt you, not again.” Logan swallows hard and takes a breath, “The fact is, I- well- I love you. Truly. And it was impossible for me to get those words out before, because of what I’ve been through, I see now that.. that is no longer an excuse. I love you, Patton Hart. And I believe- I believe I always will.”

If this were a comedy show, crickets would be chirping, and Logan would be, in fact, a clown.

The air is still, and Logan realizes he’s holding his breath. He waits, waits until his face is probably red and his jaw is locking up and his eyes are watering and telling him to breathe goddammit, and Patton doesn’t answer.

Logan turns away, gasping for air and shakes his head. His eyes don’t stop watering.

His phone dings, and he looks down, staring hard at the text to see through the tears.

‘Sorry I missed your call! Out at lunch with Dee, call you later?’

Logan laughs, he’s not in his dorm. He’s not in his dorm and Logan just confessed his love to an eccentric door.

Typical.

Logan pockets his phone, wipes his eyes, readjusts his glasses, and leaves to order another coffee.

The day pitters by, and Patton doesn’t call back.

Slowly, Logan’s fears resurface, and he starts to wonder if he ever will.

He’s still thinking these exact thoughts, sitting in the campus library at three am.

He can’t take this anymore.

Without thinking, he sends Patton a text, not expecting a reply. He gets one forty-eight seconds later.

Ten minutes after that, Patton is standing in front of him in the empty library, beautiful and kind and tired and sad.

Logan tries to remember his plan, his speech, any one of the poems he’d written for Patton over the years, some way to eloquently tell his best and only friend how he feels.

At least six cups of coffee, the rollercoaster of a day, and the late hour make this impossible.

Patton shuffles his feet and then meets his eyes, “Logan-”

“I’m in love with you,” Logan blurts.

Patton’s eyes widen.

The world stops.

#ace writes #famau #part 3.2 #logicality #logicality fanfic #logicality au #sanders sides #sanders sides au #sanders sides fanfic #patton sanders #logan sanders #remy sleep sanders #remy sleep #sleep sanders #remy sanders

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jq37 · 5 years

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The Gary Gygax Job (An Adventure in Two Parts)

I was asked to post my “Hardison forces the gang to play D&D fic” that I wrote for @alexromero so here it is. It’s actually just the set up and not the game itself because that would have been a whole undertaking but, anyway, I hope the anon who asked for it enjoys it.

Part One

BASE. Gyutou. Paris.

It's Parker's idea, surprisingly. Well, surprisingly to someone who knows Parker well but not very well. The team is breaking up, at least partially (though the kids have a secret pool running about how much wedded bliss Nate and Sophie can stand before they're ready to get back into the fight). She's not ready to lose two people from her very small inner circle.

"We should do, like, a girls' night," she suggests out of the blue, over the comms while crawling through air ducts (she has some of her best ideas in air ducts, which makes sense, statistically speaking).

"Girls' night?" says Hardison from the van. "You and what girls?"

"Me and Sophie. But also you and Nate and Eliot."

"Tha-that's just hanging out Parker. It's not a girl's night if there are guys."

She shrugs (tries to shrug. There's not enough space in the air duct). "Whatever. We should do it. I miss Sophie. And Nate," she adds, belatedly.

"Me too."

"Me three," Eliot finally cuts in. He's been providing an ambient background of grunts and things smashing into other things for the past minute or so, but that kind of thing is surprisingly easy to ignore after a while. "But can we do this AFTER THE CON???" They grudgingly decide to put a pin in it while Eliot runs his hand through his hair in annoyance. Honestly.

When they call the "Call us if you need us but please try very hard not to need us," number, they get Sophie, which is good. She'll be easier to convince and if they convince her, they've got Nate too. Parker explains her idea and Sophie is very into it: Group activity, once a month, full team.

Sophie's in so they're in business. Hardison puts all of their names into a randomizer and Parker ends up with first pick.

"Greece!" she says, immediately.

"Excellent choice, Parker!" says Sophie, picturing the food and beaches and museums. And then she remembers who she's speaking to.

"Parker, what are we doing in Greece?"

They find out two weeks later and Hardison thinks that it's a good thing he loves Parker to death, because he's pretty sure she's going to get him killed.

BASE Jumping on Zakynhos Island.

"Oh, come on!" Hardison whines as he's tossed a parachute. Sophie is also not thrilled, but she seems to think that encouraging Parker's social skills is worth 5-ish seconds of sheer terror.

The jump order is Eliot, Sophie, Nate (who is choosing to be amused by this whole thing), Hardison, then Parker. Hardison and Parker are the last two on the cliff.

"Come on you big baby," she says. "You've jumped off of buildings before."

"Not for fun."

She touches his chest very deliberately. "Then don't do it for fun. Do it for me."

He shakes his head and steels his nerves. "Sophie's rubbing off on you and I don't like it."

He is so happy to land in one piece that he immediately drops to his back and makes sand angels. From above, he can hear Parker's adrenaline-high scream. He opens his eyes, sees her parachute explode out, and then closes his eyes again. Maybe if he pretends to be asleep, she won't make him go again.

Somehow, Eliot's pick is worse.

He says they're going for a cooking lesson which sounds safe enough. The lesson is at a tiny sushi place in Brooklyn and the chef is some Japanese buddy of his. They're not allowed to know how they know each other specifically (Eliot says he's a "work friend") and they're not allowed to know his name, so they just call him Chef.

Everyone's having a good time and whatever work Chef did with Eliot before, cooking is obviously his calling.

And then…well, Hardison's not sure. It happens really quickly. The door bursts open and a man in dark clothes bursts in. There's a flash of silver from Chef's side of the room and the man drops. Hardison doesn't even have time to jump.

Chef isn't holding his knife anymore, Hardison notices. He looks across the room. It's implanted in the intruder's chest. A gun falls out of his hand and Nate kicks it away.

"What just happened?" says Hardison, trying to keep his voice level.

"It's a Gyutou," says Eliot. "Sharpest knife in the game."

"I'm not asking ab--why would you think I was asking about the knife?"

"Because the guy's Yakuza. Obviously."

"Wait, Yakuza? Like, Yakuza-Yakuza?"

"No, one of the many other Yakuzas out there. Yes, that Yakuza!" In the time it's taken them to have this conversation, Chef has dragged their attacker's limp body into a supply closet, found a clean knife, and gone back to chopping ginger.

Hardison has so many comments that he doesn't know where to start. He just throws up his hands and goes to stand in the corner for a minute. When he remembers that the corner he's in very recently had a dead body in it, he picks a new corner.

Sophie takes everyone for a weekend in Paris because of course she does.

Paris is great. No one tries to kill anyone in Paris. There's no jumping off of anything in Paris.

But…

But it's a little like being on a three-day date with your parents sometimes. And Hardison has been Team Nate and Sophie since day one basically. That doesn't mean he wants to know every museum in Paris they've done it in. Not that he's asking, for the record. But they'll walk in and give each other this kind of smug smirk and he can just tell. It's disgusting.

So, when Hardison's turn rolls around, he feels exactly zero guilt for choice.

"Dungeons and Dragons?" Eliot says with the kind of scorn he reserves for especially bad bad guys and Hardison.

"Oh, I don't wanna hear that tone from you, alright? I don't wanna hear it from any of y'all. Little miss adrenaline junkie over there," Parker blows him a kiss, "And your crazy Samurai friends," Eliot rolls his eyes, "And y'all two making googly eyes at each other for three solid days."

Nate takes a second from doing just that to say, "You're exaggerating."

"He's really not," says Parker.

"BASE. Gyutou. Paris," Hardison rattles off again. "I did your thing now you're doing mine." He pulls a d20 out of his pocket and holds it between two fingers with a satisfied smirk. "Age of the geek, baby."

Part Two

Nate claims character creation is too complicated for him to understand which is a blatant lie because Hardison has seen him rig an election and manipulate the stock market on the fly and give a guy a nosebleed with his mind like he was freaking Professor X.

"This isn't my thing, Hardison," he says. "Just make a character for me. I don't care about the details. Do whatever you want."

Do whatever you want.

Famous last words.

Hardison makes him a dwarf barbarian character with an intelligence score so low he'll have trouble scratching himself.

Nate texts him a one-word response: No.

Well if you don't like my painstakingly created character you can make your own, Hardison texts back.

Just fix it.

Oh, he'll fix it alright. But first, he has to deal with Eliot.

He tries a different tactic with Eliot.

"Alright," he says when Eliot reluctantly drops in the chair across from him, looking like he's just been plunked into the heart of Gitmo. "You don't have to make a character. I premade one for you. Check it."

He fans out the materials he's printed out that show the character he created--premade for Eliot's approval. He's a human fighter, with a greatsword as his main weapon. He's proficient in several languages, weapons, tools--Hardison had to fudge the rules a little to give him so many skills at level one but it's nothing more ridiculous than what he can do in real life. He even had a sketch commissioned--he knows from experience that Eliot is a sucker for cool artwork of himself.

Eliot's eyes scan the sheets of paper and Hardison thinks he detects that trademark grudging approval he was going for.

"Did I do good or did I do good?"

Eliot looks up, scowls, and then something clearly goes off in his head because a slight smirk replaces the scowl. Hardison doesn't trust it but he doesn't react either.

"OK," says Eliot. "I'll play your character. One change though."

Just one? He can handle that. The way Eliot was looking at him he thought something much worse was coming.

"Sure, what?"

"I want to play as a pacifist."

Hardison's brain BSOD's and reboots in time to see Eliot's slight smirk go full Cheshire cat.

"What?"

"I'll play your guy in your little nerd game, but I want to play as a pacifist."

"You're telling me, you want to play this character, this fighter--a guy whose entire skillset is based on fighting--as a pacifist?"

"Yup."

Hardison scatters the papers in front of him as he thinks of all the high-level encounters he'd planned, counting on Eliot's super buffed fighter to keep the party alive, just like in real life.

"I don't get no respect around here."

While he's reworking the campaign, he gets a text from Nate re: the second premade character Hardison sent him--a sexy tiefling ranger. A sexy, female, tiefling ranger.

You're aware that I know where you live, right?, the text reads.

Not my fault you won't be specific. I'm working on pure guesswork here, Hardison texts back.

Fix it, Nates texts again. Then he adds, Don't forget I know how to hypnotize people.

Hardison snorts: And I can hack your bank account and spend everything on My Little Ponies. Make your damn character Nate.

Sophie is confused.

"If there's no goal, how do you play?" she asks him over Skype.

He never got a chance to really explain how the game worked and clearly, she hasn't looked it up in the meantime.

"There's a goal. There's just not one singular goal. You usually get some kind of quest and then you choose whatever you want to do. It's an RPG, just without the computer." When she squints in confusion he explains. "Role playing game."

Recognition goes off in her eyes and he realizes how he needs to sell the game to Sophie. "You get to pick a character. Well not pick. Make a character. You come up with a backstory and their abilities--"

"It's like coming up with a cover."

"Yes, exactly. It's exactly like that but you can also do magic if you want."

After she makes the connection, she's sold. The next day, she comes over with her backstory prepared. Or, rather, her backstories.

"I made more than one character because I couldn't decide on playing as a bard or a rogue. They're both very me. Oh," she gasps in much more excitement than Hardison thought he would ever see Sophie Devereaux show about Dungeons and Dragons. "Is there any way I could play as a bard and a rogue?"

"I got you," he says pulling out an info sheet he'd printed in anticipation of her request. "Bam. Sophie special."

"Songfilch?" she reads from the top of the sheet.

"It's not an official class," Hardison explains. "It's kind of a homebrew hybrid I whipped up. Half thief, half performer."

Sophie lights up. "You made me a grifter!"

"I told you this was a fun game."

"One more question," she says. "Is it possible I could play as a vampire? They get the thrall ability which would be useful I think."

"Uh, well you could," said Hardison. "But vampires also can't enter homes without being invited. The whole point of being a rogue is sneaking into houses without being invited to steal stuff. You can't expect them to just open the door and let you…" His words trail off as he remembers who he's speaking to. She bats her eyelashes at him, teasingly. "Yeah. Vampire songfilch. Go for it."

Nate texts him again later in the afternoon. He thinks it's gonna be in response to the munchkin baker character he sent (not a real race or class but Nate's not gonna check) but, miracles of miracles, it's a real character. Not a full character, mind you. It's just sketchy notes for a character: A cleric turned paladin. Servant of the god Helm--god of protectors.

There's not a lot there but there's enough for Hardison to know he actually put effort into it. He thinks Sophie must have gotten to him. Either way, it's enough for him to fill in the blanks and make Nate a character he will actually enjoy playing once he gives it a chance.

An enjoyable character who kicks ass since Eliot is still refusing to.

Parker is actually pretty game about the whole thing.

Which she better be, Hardison thinks. You can't force a guy to jump off of a cliff and then get mad about a little geekery.

She picks her class easily (rogue, natch) but she has trouble picking a race.

"What are you playing as?" she asks.

"I'm not playing," he explains. "I'm running the game. I'm like the narrator."

"Oh." She frowns. "That's lame. It would be more fun if you played."

"Someone has to run the game, Parker."

"I guess," she says. "It's still lame though."

He helps her finish her rogue (halfling rogue they decide), but he's only half paying attention. By the time they're done, he realizes there's someone he needs to call.

Hardison arrives at the game sesh with a guest. "Hey guys," he announces. "This is Chris, my foster brother. He's exactly like me, minus the criminal activity and rugged good looks."

He's also white, but no one mentions that.

"What's he doing here?" Eliot asks.

"Hardison asked me to DM for y'all," Chris answers.

Parker realizes what this means first. "You're playing?"

He nods. "Elven Wizard. I'm gonna hack reality, baby."

Chris rolls his eyes. "You can't just use the word hack whenever you want to. It has a very specific meaning."

"I can if I hack the language," Hardison shoots back as he sits down.

Chris grits his teeth like he's had this argument many times before (which he clearly has). "Let's do this before I kill you. Not in the game, in real life. Are you guys ready?"

Hardison looks around the table: Fighter, Songfilch, Paladin, Rogue, Wizard.

It's a weird group.

He grins.

"Ready. Let's do this."

#leverage #alec hardison #nate ford #sophie devereaux #eliot spencer #parker #does parker have a last name?#is parker her last name?#idk bro and I need to get to work

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pagerunner · 5 years

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Self-Promo Meme

@ferociousqueak tagged me for the thing! The Thing is to post the first line of my last 10 fics and then tag 10 people. I’ve taken “line” a bit loosely and anyone who does this should to. Depending on how you count, I’ve written 10 so that works out perfectly! (ok, so I’ve written 12, but one’s a three parter that’s technically one story and i will count it as such, so there.)

Here goes. All fics are and completed (cause i’m scared to post wips lol)

The Misadventures of Grumpy Cat and Circus (Leverage meets Fraction!Hawkeye)

“I was shot at Eliot! Shot. At. With an arrow of all things, are you listening to me?” Hardison checked his coat again to be sure the close call hadn’t been closer. He liked this coat, especially here, in an alley in the middle of Bed-Stuy, which hadn’t gotten the memo that it was April dammit, and still insisted on wind chill.

(currently working on two sequels and i will finish both this year dammit.)

Pretzels / Plans / Protection (OT3 get together fic)

Whatever Nate and Sophie had gotten up to while they were away in D.C. must have involved Sterling. The Interpol pretzel cart was back, parked across the street with its bright umbrella opened against the drizzle. Eliot casually checked it out as he started unloading Hardison and Parker’s luggage, before Hardison, who’d been wrapped up in some stupid debate with their driver about a taxi service you call with an app, jumped out of the taxi in alarm.

The Food Cart Job (Peggy joins the crew for a job)

“There is no one here dressed up as a pie, Hardison, are you kidding me, man?” The voice was irate, but pitched low, and Peggy ducked her head down behind the pamphlet someone had shoved in her face earlier, pretending not to be eavesdropping on the guy growling into the phone in front of her. “NO. No couples going as salt and pepper, and don’t even get started on the— NO. For one thing, I’d be the goddamn mustard.” He was stocky, short enough that she had a good eyeline on his very impressive biceps, and if they were going to be stuck in this line much longer, she just might try chatting him up.

Context (quick musings about knives from the POV of Eliot’s HS home ec teacher)

There’s a jock in her class.

There’s a jock in her class and he sits front and center, not slouched in the corner like the other times she’s called roll on the first day and glanced up to match a name to a bored face above a letterman jacket. This one—Eliot Spencer—does not look bored.

Make Way For Ducklings (Leverage next gen that i keep intending to write a sequel to, i love them so much)

“Got one for you. See pic. Deliver it in a week or else.”

A week? Lennie owes someone money.

Josie studied the picture of a woman’s driver’s license — Irene Fisher, lives at 436 East Hadley — and smeared wasabi on her last piece of avocado roll before popping it into her mouth. The stringent spice burned her sinuses and made her eyes water as she pitched the empty container out the window of her SUV into a nearby trash can. She blinked to clear her eyes before pulling out of her parking spot. It would take her a good half hour to get to Hadley from here, so Irene might already be home from her extra unlucky traffic stop.

The Secret Santa Job (fluffy christmas fluff)

“Kidnap the Sandy Claws…”

She’s singing the song. Again. Ever since Hardison got the oh-so-idiotic idea to show Parker a movie about a bunch of monsters stealing Christmas a week back, she’s been fixated on this song. This high-pitched, sing-song chant of violence that is giving him ideas he shouldn’t be contemplating around Christmas. He’d asked Hardison who wrote the thing while he was distracted enough by some tech thing to overlook the imminent violence in Eliot’s tone, but the moment Parker’d heard the guy’s name had the word “Elf” in it, he’d been official declared off-limits.

Drifting (Eliot hangs out with an imaginary Aimee while imprisoned at the college campus)

Somewhere, far away, he’s being tortured.

It isn’t particularly effective, no more annoying than one of Hardison’s long-winded explanations...fine, so maybe a little more annoying than that, but Eliot’s not about to admit it over the comms.

Anyway, he’s just doing what he does.

The 0-8-4 Job (Leverage / Agents of SHIELD s1...and Bunny is an 084. yeah i don’t know either but i really love how it came out.)

S.H.I.E.L.D. Evidence File Status: Classified Restricted Access: Level 4 Subject: 0-8-4 Retrieval

Evidence Report

The 0-8-4 has been linked to numerous hospitalizations and fatalities of children and their guardians.

Birthdays and Blowtorches (Birthday fluff!)

“Oooh, you should get that for my birthday!---Eliot. I mean, for Eliot.” Eliot feels the tiny muscles in his ears perk at the sound of his name, like the hairs on the back of his neck raising, but for a very different kind of danger.

Finding Lost Dogs (DB Cooper Job fic about young Todd Mcsweeten)

The week after Todd McSweeten lost his bike, he found a dog.

A scruffy thing, probably white once upon a time, now a brown and gray smudge wriggling desperately under a bush, its collar caught fast in the branches. If he’d been riding his bike, he might have missed it. He knelt down, mindful that scared dogs sometimes bite, even if they don’t mean to, and carefully stuck out his hand for the dog to sniff. It didn’t snarl or snap, just struggled more frantically and, worried it would strangle itself, he reached in, fumbling a bit before he managed to loose the collar from the branch. The dog tumbled forward into his arms, whining and snuffling and licking his face all over.

I very much hate tagging (yay social anxiety) but I would also very much like to see other lists so please consider yourselves tagged!

#my fic #leverage #and a lil bit of #hawkeye #memery #i did this instead of writing fic #so i'm doing great on my writing goals #about about y'all?

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fangirlshrewt97 · 5 years

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Finding my way back home (to you)

Author(s): Fangirlshrewt97

Fandom: Leverage

Pairing: Parker/Alec Hardison

Characters: Parker, Eliot Spencer, Alec Hardison, Nate Ford, Sophie Devareaux

Rating: General

Warnings: Canon-typical shenanigans, some mild swearing

Additional Tags: Whumptober, Whump, Happy ending, BAMF Parker, Competence porn?

Whumptober 2019 Prompt: Adrenaline

Summary: Parker gets separated from the crew and has to navigate a building half on fire while dodging the Boss’s goons as she tries to escape and rejoin her family.

Link to A03: archiveofourown.org/works/20967086

-------------------------------------

Parker tried to stop her heaving breaths, it would be all for nothing if she had escaped all the goons and a bomb only to be caught because she couldn’t breathe quiet enough. Closing her eyes, she straightened up as much as she could in the cramped vent and counted to ten. She focused on what she could hear, faint footsteps to her far right, voices speaking but too far away to properly hear what they were saying.

Ok, good news, they didn’t sound like they knew where she was, or even that she had made it out of the building before they decided to blow it up. That gave her time to come up with an alternate escape route. Bad news, the explosion and previous fight had destroyed her comms, which meant her crew also did not know if she had made it out. Oh boy, Eliot was going to be so mad at her.

Assessing the vents around her, Parker decided to head in the opposite direction of the explosion and voices, trying to find an empty hallway to come out into. The vents were high up, and even if she found an exit, it would also be up high. And her grappling equipment had been lost during the fight which meant she would have to free fall. She decided to keep that as her last resort. First, she needed to find a way to get back to her team.

Moving quickly, Parker mentally kept up a tally to make sure she wasn’t going in circles. She froze when she heard voices from the other side of the wall next to her. “Any idea where she went?”

“No, the video cameras were down boss, we don’t know where she escaped.”

The boss growled. “She is one girl, how hard can she be to track?”

“Boss…” Goon 1 started, but the boss cut him off

“Have you idiots checked the vents yet? We know she made it out of the explosion, she must have gotten to the vent near the ceiling when she saw the bomb.”

“Not yet boss.”

“Well what the hell are you all doing then?!” The boss yelled as he thumped the wall, the sound echoing in the vent and causing Parker to jump, “Honestly, what am I even paying you morons for? Find her. Now!”

Well, even morons got lucky every once in a while. She really needed to get out of here. She waited for a couple minutes after the footsteps faded before using her tools to open the vent and drop into the newly vacated hallway. There wasn’t any indication for where this hallway was or what it led to, but it had video cameras, and Hardison would spot her before any of the bad guys would. Waving to the camera, she looked left and right before heading left, it felt cooler than the right one, which hopefully meant it led away from the burning part of the building. She made it to a stairwell entrance that was unlocked, so she ducked into it. Counting the number of flights, she was in the third floor. Not a good height to fall, but she could probably land safe enough to escape. Biting her lip, Parker weighed her choices before trying to clear the place floor by floor, which would give her a greater chance of avoiding unwanted attention, versus jumping and getting to an easier exit faster. Potentially. The goons were probably in greatest number near those exits though. She didn’t have to think for long though, as she heard footsteps approaching from the outside. Oh well, that was decided then.

Grabbing the stair railings, Parker gracefully vaulted herself towards the bottom of the staircase, turning over during the fall to land on her feet. The familiar shock shot up through her body, and boy her knees were going to be in so much pain tomorrow. Tomorrow was tomorrow though, and now she needed to move if she wanted to make sure she had one. The goons had opened the door above and were descending, and seemed to be heading straight to the ground floor. Straight towards her. Great. Looking around, Parker spotted a little niche bathed in shadows. She darted to the nook, folding herself so no inch of her skin was visible and slowed her breathing as the goons approached. For once, luck was on her side and they did not notice her, exiting through the door. Uncurling herself, Parker went to follow them, only to find the door locked.

“Oh come on, you’ve got to be kidding me!” she growled as she reached up for the lock pins she hid in her hair. Making quick work of the lock, Parker launched herself into the hallway, that was thankfully empty.

Wouldn’t stay empty for long though. A door a few feet to the right on the opposite side. It would have to do. She rushed to the door, hoping it wasn’t locked, and whooping quietly when she found it unlocked. She barely made it into the room before converging footsteps all met outside the door she was in. Parker glanced around trying to find a spot to hide in case they came bursting through the door, but when some moments passed and there was no attempt to breach the door, she came down and put her ear to the door to hear what the goons were talking about.

“Man, we have got to go now!” Goon 1 exclaimed.

“No way, Boss will have us killed if we are lucky, turned over to Hunter if we aren’t!” Goon 2 argued back.

“Listen to me, I would rather face Hunter than the guy out there. He just took out 10 people, barely broke a sweat. No job is worth that. Fuck this, I quit. I’m leaving.” Goon 1 retorted back. Parker stilled when something slammed the door, though judging by the growls of another unfamiliar, probably Goon 3, Goon 1 was currently pinned to the door she was crouching behind.

The guy he had described though, that had to be Eliot right? And if Eliot was here, then that meant her chances of surviving this had just gotten a huge boost. She needed to find him. Now. But how to escape a room when the only exit was blocked by a goon’s body on the other side. And where in the building was Eliot?

She moved away from the door, trying to move boxes around to see if she could find- Bingo! She used her body weight to shove against a particularly heavy box before unblocking another vent. Using her lock-pins, she opened the hatch and quickly clambered inside. She closed her eyes for a minute, trying to make out sounds. It had to be- there, a faint sound of fighting. Trusting her gut, Parker quickly moved toward it. She turned out to be right, as she approached the source of the sound, grunts and bodies hitting the floor or wall grew louder.

Parker used her lock pins to unscrew the vent grill, holding onto it as she pushed outward, knocking the goon standing in front of it to the ground. She kicked him once to make sure he’d stay down.

“Eliot!” Parker called out as she used the vent hatch to hit the next nearest goon unconscious.

The hitter turned toward her immediately, and Parker felt something inside her flip when she saw the relief flooding him when he saw her whole and seemingly safe. The expression turned to one of alarm as he called out “Behind you!”

Reacting without thinking, Parker brought the grill still in her hands to hit whatever was behind her, which turned out to a goon with a gun that had presumably been pointed at her. Within seconds, Eliot was in front of her, kicking the guy to make sure he was knocked out. He grabbed Parker’s wrist and started to drag her away from the fight. “Don’t ever dare to do that again, I thought Hardison was going to have a heart attack when he couldn’t get a hold of you.”

“I’m sorry, my comms got destroyed when I was trying to escape the goons. Or maybe during the explosion, I didn’t keep track.”

They came across another small group of goons they made quick off before dashing to the exit that was finally in sight. They burst out the building, Parker taking in lungfuls of clean air. A chill breeze swept past them, soothing the feverish skin, as Parker realized just how warm she had been feeling while inside the building.

The duo made their way over the small ridge to the clearing that hid Lucille. Hardison burst out of the truck with an exuberant “Parker!”

The thief didn’t even have time to say anything else as she was swept up in his arms, held tightly. Parker was lost for where to put her hands before encircling Hardison’s waist and clinging to them just as tightly.

“Don’t ever do that again,” Hardison whispered in her ear, “I was so scared I lost you!”

Parker felt that warm feeling from before return ass she squeezed him. “I won’t.”

“Guys, as great as this is, let’s go!” Eliot called out as she entered the driver’s seat. The two untangled themselves before entering Lucille through the back. Sophie gave Parker her own hug, accompanied by her running her hands through Parker’ hair. Nate, from the front seat, nodded his acknowledgement, to which Parker nodded back.

“What now?” Parker asked as she settled into her seat.

“Don’t worry about it, Hardison took care of it.” Nate said simply. A glance as Hardison saw him nod at her, and she wove her fingers with his. Surprise flashed through his face, before settling into a sweet grin and he squeezed her hand. That felt nice.

Parker slumped back on her seat, relaxing for the first time since the con went to hell. While she probably would not have even done this job back when she was working alone, she also knew the reason why she was able to get out today was because of her crew. Her family. What was that thing the cartoon alien had said? Family means no one gets left behind?

‘Yeah’, Parker thought, ‘I think there might be some truth to that… I can’t wait to get back home for a good long shower. Smoke stinks.’

#whumptober2019 #no. 13: adrenaline #whump #angst #leverage #leverage fic #Parker leverage #parker #alec hardison #eliot spencer #my writing #my fic #OTP: Pretzels #idk what her ship name with Alec is #please let me know what you think of this fic

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sadlittlenerdking · 5 years

Text

Crossroads

The Magicians

Queliot, Eliot/Mike

Word count: 3.1k

Summary: All you need to know is this is about Eliot and the Suicide Fountain.

They open it back up in the spring. When Sunderland makes the announcement during class, Eliot merely rolls his eyes, and carries on pretending to do his work while a first year finishes up both of their projects. But he saves it. He’s not sure why he does, isn’t even sure it’s a conscious decision. But it’s there, ticking like a time bomb at the back of his mind.

He finds himself staring at it as he walks across campus. They’re all trying to pretend everything’s normal, but he killed Mike; Mike didn’t even know—He’s not doing it consciously. Really. It’s just . . . there’s something about it that pulls him in closer. Something that makes him see it, in a way that he never has before. Maybe that’s the danger of it.

It wins.

Four days after they open it back up, he has some time before he has to meet up with Margo and Quentin. It doesn’t help that Sunderland spelled him sober, so all these feelings are bubbling up over the surface, and he feels like he’s going to fucking explode. It’s not on purpose. But, he finds himself moving towards it. He can’t even pretend that’s not what he’s doing, because otherwise he wouldn’t step foot on this side of campus. Wouldn’t even look this distraction. Never has before.

He stops about twenty yards away from it. Inhales shakily, like something’s settling in his gut and he needs to make room for it. And then he shakes his head and stumbles backwards, before turning on his heel and rushing towards the Physical Kids Cottage for whatever drugs he can find to make it all go away.

Margo would never forgive him.

But Eliot’s always been selfish.

Which is how, three days later, he’s back. Closer.

He can feel the mist from the fountain settling on his skin, he’s so close. He closes his eyes, lets himself get a little lost in the sensation.

It’s almost enough.

But he’s high. So he turns around and walks away again.

And he doesn’t think about it for nearly a week because they’re so focused on killing the Beast. But after Margo forces him to study with her—probably because she doesn’t trust him not to get unbelievably high—he passes it. And then he stops. And turns back around to face it.

He clears his throat, and looks around. Later, he thinks. He’ll deal with it later.

It. He could laugh.

Later, after they’ve finished trying to find a way to defeat the Beast, Quentin’s curled up on the couch, knocked out and snoring. Margo’s upstairs, either sleeping or reading, Eliot can’t be sure. He looks down on Quentin for a long moment. Takes in the way his hair falls over his face, and the strands on his mouth that rise and fall with his every breath. He kneels down on the ground beside him, reaches up to gently cup Quentin’s cheek.

“I think I’ll miss you the most,” He breathes, soft, before leaning up and pressing a soft kiss to Quentin’s temple. He stays there for a moment, breathing in Quentin’s aftershave, before finally pulling away and nodding to himself.

He just can’t do this anymore. They’ll be fine.

And if they’re not . . .

He doesn't want to think about that. Instead, he lets his hand slide off Quentin’s cheek, pat gently at the space above his heart, and then turns on his heel and walks out of the cottage.

The walk is short, or long, he doesn’t really know. Too lost in his thoughts. Wondering how it’ll feel. if it’ll be quick or slow, or anticlimactic. He wonders if anyone will know he did it, or if he’ll just be marked down as another missing student in the Brakebills Book of Oh God We Fucked Up. But before he knows it, he’s standing at the base of it.

Of the Suicide Fountain.

He steps up, carefully, and stands on the edge of the fountain. Gazes down into the water.

Closes his eyes. One deep breath—

“What the fuck are you doing?”

His eyes jerk open. He knows that voice.

“You’re supposed to be asleep,” He mutters without looking. He’s too lost in the ripples in the water. Too lost in general, actually. Too far gone to be saved. Go home, Q, he thinks. Just go back to the cottage and forget he’s here.

“I’m—I’m a light sleeper. What are you doing?”

Eliot doesn’t respond. Just takes in a slow breath. Quentin’s presence shouldn’t—

“El,” Quentin breathes, and Eliot can hear the drag of his shoes against the concrete. Quentin needs to learn to walk without dragging his feet. Have confidence. “Eliot.” His voice is firmer now, though it’s stunted because he sounds a little breathless and scared. What’s there to be scared of? “Look at me.”

“Go back to the Cottage, Q.”

“Why?”

He has to roll his eyes at that. “You know why.”

There’s more of the scratch-scraping of Quentin’s shoes, until Eliot can feel him standing right behind him. Like electricity bounces between them, detecting the distance. Trying to close it. “I’m not leaving you alone here, Eliot.”

“Why not? You’ve been on the ledge before. Only difference is I’m not too much of a coward to go through with it.”

He practically feels the quick inhale of air Quentin takes.

“Eliot,” He murmurs after a beat, “Don’t do this.”

“I’ve already made up my mind.”

“What about Margo?”

Eliot clenches his jaw. “Margo’ll be fine.”

“Do you really think that?”

No. “Yes.”

There’s a small sigh of resignation, and Eliot almost thinks Quentin’s going to leave. But then Quentin drags his feet forward, until he’s stepping up onto the edge of the fountain, squaring his shoulders and looking up at Eliot. “Fine,” He says, reaching out to lace his fingers through Eliot’s. His hands are trembling. Eliot looks down at their hands, mouth falling open. “You’re not doing it alone, then.”

“Let go,” Eliot murmurs. But he doesn’t move to untangle their hands. Just stares down at them, and flexes slightly to feel Quentin squeeze tighter.

“No.”

He rolls his lips together, and finally allows himself to look up at him. Which—yep, that’s why he’d been avoiding looking at him—is a mistake, because Quentin looks like a puppy. That Eliot’s kicked repeatedly. Without remorse. “Jesus, Quentin,” He mutters, though his voice comes out hoarse and slightly choked off, “Stop looking at me like I stepped on your tail.”

“Stop trying to kill yourself,” Quentin bites back.

“That’s not fair.”

“Neither is life, and yet.” He motions with his free hand, “Here we are.”

“Q . . .”

“You jump. I jump. That’s the deal, Eliot.” It’s almost scary how stiff and serious his voice is. Eliot looks away, gazes down at the water in front of them.

He inhales shakily. “I can’t—“ He breaks off, shaking his head as the words get lost. How can he even begin to put how he feels into words? It’s a mess. A big fucking ball of emotion that is clamping down on his chest, and making it hard to breathe. Like the entire world has wound itself up in him, clamping down on his heart.

Quentin squeezes his hand, and Eliot can see him nodding in his peripheral. “I know,” He says, soft. “But you have to.”

“Why?”

He hears Quentin lick his lips. “Because if you don’t, these feelings. They—they don’t disappear. They just. They go into someone else.” He pulls Eliot’s arm in closer, squeezing his hand so tight it hurts. But it’s a nice pain—tangible. Distinguishable. So different than what he’s been feeling since Mike. “I’ve—I wasn’t a coward every time I tried, El. I, uh. I did it, once. I just failed.”

Eliot turns to look at him. “What?” He blinks. What the fuck?

“I was fourteen,” Quentin supplies, looking out at the water. “Swallowed a whole bottle of pills. Woke up the next morning.” He shakes his head, and swallows audibly. “Sometimes I still—I still think about what that would have done to my dad. If I’d succeeded.” His face crumples as he turns his attention back on Eliot. “He would have been crushed. I’m—I’m all he has. He would have blamed himself.” He sucks his bottom lip in, reaching up with his free hand to wipe at his eyes. “Thing is, Eliot,” He breathes, “I—I think about doing it all the time.” He turns away and shrugs. “I know the best buildings in New York to do it, too. Least security, easiest roof access. Highest roof. Best view—everything.”

“What stops you?” He doesn’t even mean to ask, it just blurts out of him.

Quentin nods once, but doesn’t turn to look at him. “Not just my dad, not anymore. It’s—“ Finally, he looks back at him. “It’s got a lot to do with you, actually.” He shrugs. “And Margo—and, Alice. Everyone. Even Penny.”

“How?” Eliot takes a quick breath and turns to face him. “How does—how can you think about what they’re feeling if it hurts this much?” A broken little sound vibrates through his throat, and Quentin’s eyebrows furrow in response. “Q—it. It hurts. It hurts so fucking much. Alcohol doesn’t even put a dent in it. Cocaine? Heroine? Fucking ecstasy? It doesn’t go away. It—it’s taken over everything, Q.” He doesn’t realize he’s crying until he tastes the saltwater on his lips, and he exhales so harshly his stomach crushes inward achingly. “How can thinking about—other people—how’s it even possible?”

“Because if I don’t . . . it, it consumes me.”

“Doesn’t it already?”

Quentin doesn’t say anything for a few long moments, his eyes flickering between Eliot’s. And for at least a couple of the moments, Eliot thinks this is the moment that confirms that it doesn’t end. But then Quentin turns so he’s fully facing him, and reaches up, cupping Eliot’s jaw. “Not when I’m like this,” He says, so soft, Eliot can barely hear him over the fountain. “Not when I have an anchor.”

“What does that even mean?”

He swallows, loud. “Every time it gets hard. Which is like,” he rolls his eyes, looking down for a moment, “Every day. I—I think about what would happen. If someone else had this in them. If I died—and they had to live with. With knowing that I was feeling like this—and that they didn’t do anything, because i didn’t—didn’t say anything to them. I think about you,” His hand slips down to Eliot’s shoulder. “How you’d react with this in you. And Margo, and Alice. Julia—I think about everyone that. That cares about me even a little. I think about this shit—this. Brokenness. Moving into them like some kind of parasitic snake—and it makes me so angry. At me. At my brain. At—at everything.

“The anger is somehow so much—brighter? Fiercer? Stronger, maybe. Than the pain. I refuse to let this shit in me control me. I’m not—I’m not it’s puppet. I’m not it’s host. Even if it feels like it. I, just. I have to fight. Otherwise other people suffer. And I don’t—I won’t let them.”

“How is being angry better than this?”

“If I’m angry I’m not dead.”

Eliot reaches up to wrap his hand around Quentin’s on his chest. “That’s so fucked.”

“So is being so coked up and drunk that you’re barely alive, Eliot.” He shrugs, “Neither of us have great coping mechanisms.”

“Then we shouldn’t bother trying.” He doesn’t mean for it to sound so desperate, but somehow it does. Comes out high pitched and broken.

“That’s like saying because the Beast might kill us we shouldn’t try. Or—friendships are hard and take work, so we shouldn’t make friends. Love has risks, so we shouldn’t fall in love. Everything in life is a fucking battle, Eliot. We can’t just find the path of least resistance. Otherwise we’re not living at all.”

“I fell for someone and I ended up killing him.” He lets go of Quentin’s hand on his heart, and looks down at the water beneath them. “Q, I’d rather be dead than—than do anything like this. I’d rather be dead. Every person I’ve loved I’ve—“

“You haven’t hurt me.”

Eliot swallows. “Who says I—“

“I’m not an idiot, Eliot.” Quentin fits the fabric of Eliot’s vest in his fist, which is only mildly aggravating as Eliot had chosen his finest vest to wear tonight. Desperate and miserable or not, he wasn’t going to die looking like garbage. He’d even brushed his hair. The fingers still laced through Eliot’s squeeze tighter still. “I know everyone—everyone thinks I am. But I’m not. I know. I—“ He bites down on his bottom lip.

“You?”

“I know you probably think Margo’s . . . the only one that would care. If you . . .” He trails off and looks down at the fountain. “But she’s not.” He looks back up at him, eyes misty. “I would miss you. You—you are the single most important person in my life right now.”

“Q—“

“I know it’s selfish to ask you to stay. Or—or greedy, I guess. But I can help you. With this.”

“How?” Eliot shakes his head, “Q—this shit. It’s not—it’s not fading just because you—“

“You told me,” Quentin interrupts, “Back when I thought I was going to get expelled.”

“Q . . .”

“I’m not going to tell you it gets better, Eliot, because you know it won’t. It doesn’t. It just—hurts in different ways. But—I. I’m telling you you’re not alone here.” He offers a closed lip smile—the one he usually reserves for pretending he’s not upset, letting go of Eliot’s vest, and sliding his hand over his heart, “You’re not alone.”

“That’s not fair.”

Quentin lets out a wet laugh, nodding, as some of the tears finally slip over his cheeks, “I thought we already established that life’s not fair, El.”

Eliot’s chin trembles. “Q—“

“Please come back with me.” His eyes are wide and open, and he looks more like a puppy than he ever has before, and Eliot’s heart fucking clenches tight. Not the universe and the pressure and pain surrounding it—but his fucking heart. “Don’t do this. Don’t end this because you’re in pain. Nobody will ever get to meet you. Nobody will ever get to love you—“

“That’s probably for the best.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Quentin mutters, pressing his hand into Eliot’s chest. He’s so warm, like a heated blanket in the coldest winter. “Please. We can get through this. Together.” He must sense Eliot’s hesitation because he pulls in a deep breath. “Lean on me. When it gets bad. Eliot. Let me help.”

“I can—“

“So help me god if you say you can’t I will strangle you, and then tell Margo.”

“Margo would just kill me instead.”

Quentin stares at him for a long moment, before letting a little laugh bubble out. “Yeah,” He says, moving forward so he can rest his forehead on Eliot’s shoulder. “She would. But, still.” He pauses, the silence heavy. When he speaks again, his hands are shaking again, and the words come out so quiet, Eliot’s not even sure he hears them right. “I need you, Eliot Waugh.”

He brings his free hand up, cupping the back of Quentin’s neck. His thumb dips in the hairline, and he nods, tucking his chin against Quentin’s temple. “Okay,” He breathes. Quentin goes tense, before he carefully pulls away, just enough to look up at him with big, round, hopeful eyes. Eliot nods. “Okay,” He repeats. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Quentin echoes. He swallows, his adam's apple bobbing up and down, and then looks down at their hands laced together. “Okay.” He looks back up, and then very deliberately, takes a step back, before moving and hanging one food over the side of the fountain, hovering over the cement. He holds it there, raising an eyebrow at Eliot. Silently, Eliot mimics the motion, and Quentin dips down so his toes press into the concrete, and he pauses again, until Eliot follows the motion.

And then Quentin tugs him off the fountain, and drops his hand so he can wrap his arms around Eliot’s waist, and bury his face in his chest. It takes a moment, but Eliot carefully wraps his arms around Quentin, squeezing him like it’s all he’s got holding him together.

To be fair, it kind of is.

It feels okay. It’s not . . . better. It fucking hurts every time he breathes, and he can’t handle any of this, but.

Quentin needs him.

“We’d better get back,” He says after a few long minutes, nosing his way along Quentin’s hairline. “Before anyone notices.”

Quentin nods into his chest, but doesn’t move to pull away. Eliot opens his mouth to try again, but Quentin twists his neck until his chin is poking Eliot in the sternum. “No keeping it locked away,” He says, “No burying it under the drugs—talk to me. Cope.”

“Easier said than done.”

Quentin shrugs. “That’s why it needs to be done.”

Eliot bites down on his bottom lip before closing his eyes and nodding. “Yeah,” he breathes, “Okay, Q.” He opens his eyes, narrowing them down at Quentin as he unravels one arm and uses it to poke him in the side, “But if you think I’m giving up alcohol—“

“Oh god, no,” Quentin wrinkles his nose, “No, we need all the alcohol.”

For the first time in weeks, Eliot feels an amused little smile tug at his lips as he nods. “Now?”

Quentin blinks up at him with his big doe eyes. “That’s the plan. Get wasted and forget what just almost happened.”

“We could fall into bed together, too.”

The corners of Quentin’s eyes crinkle as he rolls them, “Yeah, maybe,” he says, pulling away and holding his hand out for him.

Eliot looks down at it and then back up at him. “If you’re worried—“

“I’m not. I just—I wanna. Hold. Your hand.”

“Oh. Okay.” He nods, once, and then takes Quentin’s hand in his. “Think we can . . . take the long way back?”

Quentin nods, moving to lean into him as they start walking. “‘Course.”

#the magicians #oh look i actually finished something #queliot #quentin coldwater #eliot waugh

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thebibliomancer · 7 years

Text

100 Days of Comics! 081/100: Generation X #4 (1995)

And as we begin the last twenty, our selection is another issue from Generation X, one of many books about young or perhaps new mutants that will inevitably fade into limbo (not Immortus’ or Illyana’s) once their books are cancelled.

But that’s for later. For now Chamber, Husk, Jubilee, Skin, M, and Synch at least get to star in a book. And this particular issue is a Holiday Spectacular full of happy yuletide tidings. Like prejudice and death and also an unmissed villain from the late 80s/early 90s.

I usually just take it easy and visit family but then I’ve never been enrolled in Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

So with a weird holiday gremlin of some sort?? narrating and commenting we start our fun holiday story with M, Skin, Synch, and Jubilee crammed into a car with Banshee on a field trip to Maine when they run into a road block.

The police officers tell Banshee that he has to detour because the bridge into Faybrook is closed. But after they turn around, M says that the officer was lying. There is no bridge into Faybrook.

Meanwhile, Faybrook, Maine. The police have surrounded a school building where it seems a hostage situation of sorts is going on. One of the police claims he could nail the perp but another says he’d have to be more than pretty sure before he started firing into a schoolhouse. Plus, most mutants are bulletproof probably.

Inside the schoolhouse, the alleged mutant Eliot bemoans that all he wanted was to be taught in school like any other child. The teacher Mr. Lorenzano tried talking to the schoolboard on Eliot’s behalf but it was a no go. And Eliot refuses to let the other kids in the class go and insists that Mr. Lorenzano teach him.

Elsewhere, Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. And the teachers and students not on the fieldtrip. Penance is sitting in the biosphere watching butterflies when Chamber brings her some sliced apples. While Husk spies on him and muses that Chamber does have a heart in there somewhere.

Emma Frost in a rare not aggressively sexy outfit catches her and teases her about eavesdropping on others.

Husk: “Frankly, ma’am -- you’re the last person in the world who should be casting aspersions.”

Emma: “I didn’t say you were doing anything wrong. You’re young, beautiful, intelligent, you know exactly what you want... and you’re not afraid to ruffle a few feathers to get it. Truth? You remind me a lot of me when I was younger.”

Husk: (Hmmp? Was that her version of a compliment... or a warning?)

Anyway, back in Faybrook. The police comment that Eliot’s parents should arrive any minute and then wonder who would name a monster ‘Eliot’? “I don’t think they see him as a monster...”

While unbeknowst to the police, there’s a supervillain in an ice cream truck not twenty feet away. Its the Orphan-Maker here to make an orphan and kidnap children, as he is wont to do. All for his Nanny. But something is unclear. If Eliot is a mutant, why isn’t he showing up on scanners?

Nanny dismisses the questions. They’re using crappy scanners since they went independent.

Orphan-Maker promises to make Nanny proud of him but she says he always does, leading the narration gremlins to comment “awww.”

Meanwhile, Banshee assaults a police officer. Using his sonic powers to knock a SWAT guy out. While Skin and M take out other members of the SWAT. See, Banshee has decided that its up to him and a bunch of undertrained children to take over this situation and make sure nobody gets hurt.

Banshee sure is a good guardian.

Anyway, he has Synch use his mutant aura powers to try to focus in on Eliot, find out what they’re dealing with. Meanwhile, Jubilee is infiltrating the crowd for information on whats the haps.

The haps is Eliot tried to transfer to the school but he was kicked out and came back and took Mr. Lorenzano’s class hostage.

Eliot’s parents arrive and try to convince him over megaphone to stop this before anyone gets hurt. Leaving Eliot to wonder why when people say that they never include him in anyone. Nobody cares about Eliot, they just don’t want the ‘pretty kids’ to get hurt. Mr Lorenzano tells Eliot he didn’t do anything wrong by asking to be treated fairly.

Hm. Dude is clutching his chest and sweating a lot.

Anyway, Synch doesn’t detect a mutant in the school house but does detect one in that ice cream van down there.

Inside the schoolhouse, Mr Lorenzano has collapsed. Its his heart. “‘at’s why I know... what it means... t’be diff’rent.”

And then the Orphan-Maker busts out of the ice cream van in new armor. And he’s here to be true to his name and make an orphan out of Eliot. By murdering his parents for being too frightened to protect their kid the way Nanny can.

But Banshee jumps between Orphan-Maker and Eliot’s parents and stops the bone fragment bullets (eww) with his sonic powers. And then Generation X jumps Orphan-Maker.

While the team gets busy with fighting Orphan-Maker, Banshee can only hope that he can count on Jubilee having disobeyed orders and sneaking inside the school by now.

Meanwhile, Jubilee has disobeyed orders and snuck inside the school. Apparently just in time for Eliot to have released the class because a bunch of children run past Jubilee.

She busts into the classroom and finds Eliot holding onto Mr. Lorenzano “my only friend... *HUPP* ever.” Eliot recognizes Jubilee as a mutant and asks if she’s here to help them get away.

But Jubilee realizes Mr. L is dead. And Eliot acknowledges that. All the excitement was too much for his big heart.

Outside, Orphan-Maker’s armor has been damaged and depleted by the fight and by Skin wrapping his skin around it. So he decides to amscray. Gets in his ice cream van and SHOOMs away.

And in the mean time, Synch has discovered that Eliot wasn’t even a mutant. He was just born looking not normal. So all the feared and hated for looking different and none of the comic book powers.

Skin: “A mutant without any of the benefits of being one of us?”

Banshee: “But he is one of us, son -- in the one way that truly matters. He’s someone who fell between the cracks...”

You own a castle, Banshee.

But that's not quite where the comic ends. On the last page, Jubilee reacts to the episode synopsis of next time. Little realizing that she’s reading the synopsis for Age of Apocalypse and that this book after only four issues is being rebooted into Generation Next for the next four, she dismisses the blurb as a mistake. All while the M’Kraan Crystal grows over the page and drowns her out.

Hey. Maybe it should be a rule that new books shouldn’t have any big crossovers or events for a year. Give them time to establish their own identity before you do a story that's all about ‘HEY LOOK HOW EVERYTHING IS TOPSY TURVEY WHOA WEIRD FOR WANT OF A NAIL HUH??’

What the hell does it mean to shake up Generation X’s status quo when it doesn’t have a very well established one yet?

Generation X was apparently criticized for being aimless throughout its first volume and shit like this that derailed it for four months has got to be a contributing factor.

#100 Days of Comics!#Generation X #but seriously whats the deal with the narration gnomes?

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sadlittlenerdking · 6 years

Text

Lifeboat Ch.7

The Magicians

Chapter 7 of 8

Word Count 14.7k of 65k

Summary: this is it, folks. (excluding the epilogue)

Important note: thank you @oneeyeddestroyer for being a beta and for being so kind and amazing and helpful. a hero in our midst.

here we go

“Were you serious about there being a way to tell everyone everything without them remembering later?”

He shouldn’t be surprised that Julia doesn’t even jump when she rounds the corner and he jumps up to talk to her. She just appraises him carefully for a long moment, before nodding. “Yes. Why?”

“I think—I think I have to tell you guys. I don’t. I don’t know how not to. Not anymore.” Maybe he was never supposed to keep it to himself. But after the experiment with the fairy queen, there’s no way he can keep it to himself. Not when so much of fixing everything involves the rest of them.

She furrows her eyebrows at that. “Why? What happened?”

“I talked to the Fairy Queen.”

Blinking, she stares at him for a beat, before nodding slowly. “Okay . . . You go to the living room. I’ll get everyone together.” She purses her lips, pointing a finger at him, “And this time, please don’t run off and go talk to potentially dangerous beings, yeah?”

He smiles morosely, “No promises?”

Another thing that doesn’t surprise him: she doesn’t smile.

“He did what.”

Eliot doesn’t even phrase it as a question, as he looks over Julia’s shoulder at the entryway to glare ominously at Todd. He perfects it by the time Todd’s a teenager, but as it is now; it’s still pretty threatening. And Todd feels himself shrink into the couch further, as he turns away to face the cubby. His gaze drops down to the table, where seven potions sit out. He’s not sure how Julia had time to make them, but he’s not going to question it.

They’re going to forget everything in a few weeks anyways.

That doesn’t help.

Eliot finally rounds into the room, and leans against the bookshelf, too cool—too angry—to sit down, and continues glaring at Todd. If what Jane said is true . . . Then maybe it’s his destiny to help Eliot master his glare before Todd’s even born. So when he’s a teenager, he doesn’t need to work on it at all. Todd’s the master of his undoing.

What the fuck is he even—

“Can we get this shit started already?” Kady says, from her place in the corner of the room.

Penny—not Todd’s Penny, he has to keep reminding himself—pushes away from the wall and moves to sit down on the jean chair. Definitely not Todd’s Penny. He plops down, and glances up at Kady. “Maybe you should get comfortable. You might be less angry.”

She purses her mouth, shooting him a glare, before sighing and moving to one of the couches. “Maybe you should stop talking. Permanently.”

“A lot less intimidating when—“

“Guys,” Quentin interrupts, walking in from the kitchen, “Stop—stop arguing. We’re not here to fucking argue, okay?”

Julia moves to the center of the room as Alice walks in and sits down. She looks at them, each individually, before her gaze finally stops on Todd, and she raises her eyebrows at him. “Todd is ready to tell us everything.” She nods to herself, once, and then moves to sit down next to Quentin and Kady.

All of their attention is suddenly back on him. His throat tightens up, as he moves to push off the couch and stand up in front of the potions. He rubs at the back of his neck nervously and clears his throat, once, twice, nodding as he inhales in a rush. “Yeah—okay.”

“Any day now.”

“Shut up, Alice.”

“I’m just saying, we all have places to be. And, I’m sorry, but nobody wants to listen to Todd’s fairy tales. He just wants to be a part of everything—“

“I’m the reason you all die.” It comes out in a rush, all one breath that blurts out of him like a gust of wind.

That stops their bickering, as their gazes turn curious.

“I thought we were your family?”

He clenches his jaw and nods, his gaze falling back down to the potions. “I—yes. Before—Before I tell you anything else. I, uh. I need you to agree to drink the potion on the table a—after. To. To, uh, preserve the future.”

Behind him, Margo leans forward and wraps her fingers around his wrist comfortingly. “I don’t think we’ll have a problem with that. Right?” A soft chorus of reluctant agreement follows, and her thumb brushes softly against the vein on the back of his wrist, before she pulls away entirely and he’s left alone to stare at his expecting family.

“Right. Okay.” He clears his throat again and moves around the table to stand where Julia stood before him, directly in the center of the room. “I’m going to. Tell you everything, now.” He lets himself look at Quentin, and then Eliot, and back to Quentin. “Just—know that. I’m. Doing everything I can to fix what I did. And that I am so, so sorry. I’ll never be able to make up for what I did, even if I manage to change the future.” Quentin furrows his eyebrows, and looks like he’s going to say something, but Todd turns away and focuses on the one person he knows won’t interrupt him.

Penny furrows his eyebrows, but it’s not Todd’s Penny. It’s not Todd’s Penny, so it’s okay. This Penny can’t hate him.

It’s a small comfort.

But it’s enough as he finally, finally, lets the anvil sitting on his chest float away, and tells his family everything. Somehow lighter, and heavier, all at once.

When he finishes, he doesn’t leave time for questions, quickly moving around the table to sit back down next to Margo. She doesn’t move in closer, like she usually does. Doesn’t wrap an arm around him to comfort him. Doesn’t even look at him.

It shouldn’t surprise him that they all hate him. Even Margo. Especially Margo.

He was supposed to take care of his family when she died. Instead, he got them all killed.

She’s probably considering never having a son in the first place. Saves them all from suffering in the future. Maybe she’s thinking of who else would be a good option. And, now, as she looks up at Quentin and Eliot, she’s probably realizing, that its Eliot’s sperm that creates their disappointment of a child, and that maybe if Quentin’s the dad, this shit won’t happen.

Maybe if they try earlier they’ll end up with a son that’s actually worth a damn.

A son worthy of being king.

A son worthy of them.

“Wow,” Penny says, breaking the tender silence. Everyone looks at him. “Wow,” He repeats, like he doesn’t know what else to say.

“That’s one way to put it,” Josh says, wide eyed. He slumps forward, resting his elbows on his knees and glances sideways at Eliot. “Jesus.” He exhales slowly, and sits back up, swallowing. “I can’t—“ He stops, furrowing his eyebrows. He probably doesn’t feel any better than Todd does.

Todd may have gotten them all killed. But Josh is the actual perpetrator.

Quentin’s gaze slides across the room to Todd. It feels like the anvil that was on his chest before has suddenly been replaced with one ten thousands times as heavy. Quentin’s eyebrows are furrowed, like he doesn’t know what to say. Like there are a thousand thoughts running through his mind, but he doesn’t know which one to pick.

Margo finally turns towards him. He closes his eyes, waiting for her to tell him he’s worthless. To tell him she regrets ever being his mother. He knows it’s coming. Knows she’s regretting every moment of kindness she’s offered him. Regretting the nights spent on the kitchen floor, or in his room, sitting and talking. Regretting getting to know her son. Regretting letting him get to know her.

She’s probably going to tell him he’s a piece of shit, and that she should have let him hold onto the depression key long enough that he’d have no choice but to kill himself.

He’d do it, too. If his family weren’t depending on him, he’d have done it a long time ago. He’s not sure what he was planning that day, when he walked into the woods. But he doubts he would have walked back out. As much as he loved his people. King or not. He doubts he would have survived the week, if Jane hadn’t sent him back.

He doesn’t think he should have survived.

He should have said no. At least they’d all be together in the under world.

“Todd.”

He shakes his head, jaw clicking as his teeth clench down. He can’t make himself look up from his lap. Can’t bear to see the look in her eyes. In any of their eyes. His eyes sting, and something wet drips down into his lap.

“Look at me.”

She’s using that voice. Her commanding, regal tone.

His chin trembles.

Nobody says anything for moment, but her hand appears in front of him, as she reaches forward and unclenches one of his fists to wrap her hand around his. She holds tight, squeezing like she’s trying to give him something else to focus on. She squeezes so tight it starts to hurt. He locks his gaze on their hands, and she squeezes tighter still. Her nails dig into the palm of his hand, stinging brutally. His chest is heaving. He hadn’t realized, but he can’t breathe.

His back feels like fire runs through his every vein, the muscles suddenly taut and angry as the breaths come in hazy and rushed. She moves around until she’s kneeling in front of him, and wraps her hand around his free hand. She squeezes just as tightly, letting her nails bite into his skin so hard they break through. He can feel his hands shaking in hers, but focuses in on the pain. Everywhere hurts, but her hands in his are different.

He can’t breathe.

Oh, god, he can’t—

Distantly, he hears footsteps rushing across the room, but they sound far off and underwater, and his muscles are so stiff, and his face tingles, and he can’t move. He can’t breathe, and he can’t move. He doesn’t—

A cool hand presses gently into the back of his neck. Someone nearby says something he can’t hear or understand. Or maybe they don’t. He’s not sure. He can’t focus. Can’t breathe.

His lips tingle like they’ve fallen asleep, and his breath rushes out over them like a harsh wind in winter, angry and brash and too quick to catch.

A warm presence leans over him, breathes something in his ear, a soothing tone that he can’t quite comprehend. He wants to ask them what’s wrong with him. What’s happening? Is this them deciding he shouldn’t be born? Is this what being erased from existence feels like? God, he’s so—he’s so scared. He’s ready to die. But does dying like this mean he never gets to see his family again?

He doesn’t want to never see them again. He doesn’t want to cease to exist.

Oh god.

Please, he thinks, please don’t erase me. Please. I love you—please don’t erase me.

“I’m sorry,” He chokes out, the sound angry and hoarse, wheezing out with his breath. He’s not even sure it actually comes out as words, his lips are numb and tingly, so are his cheeks and ears. He’s not even sure he’s still here, but he needs them to know before—oh god. He can still feel Margo’s fingers wrapped angrily around his. She holds tighter, and a larger hand appears, pressing harder, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing—

Somebody whispers something, a soft hand pressing to his chest. A careful calm at the center of the storm, and he wants to jerk away, wants to stop them from erasing him, but the edges of his vision go black, and he’s barely able to gasp in the next breath before his world fades away entirely.

He opens his eyes to the sun shining down on him. He turns his head to the side, neck screaming at the movement. He’s laying on the couch in the living room. Margo, Julia and Quentin all stare down at him. Julia’s eyes are wide, but more like she’s looking him over.

He’s still here.

He inhales once, shakily, and Margo moves forward to help him up. Quentin moves in, too, taking his other arm, until he’s sitting upright. They’re all still here, watching from their places across the room.

What just happened?

Nobody says anything, though, and he doesn’t think he can, either. His throat feels like someone’s stabbed a spike through it. A hot, fiery spike. Julia must realize this, because she leans in and presses a hand to the front of his throat. For a brief, terrifying, moment, he thinks she’s actually going to strangle him, but something cool envelopes his throat, and slowly the fire fades.

“Thank you,” He murmurs, when she pulls away.

She nods, and moves to sit on the edge of the coffee table.

“Are you okay?” Margo asks, raises her eyebrows as she moves to sit next to him. “You scared us for a minute there.”

He scared them?

Quentin sits down next to him as well, but he doesn’t say anything. He just watches him quietly, which is almost as unnerving as Eliot’s gaze from across the room.

“So—“ Not Todd’s Penny says, “The Penny that’s married to Kady and Julia. Is that me?”

Todd shakes his head. “No. I don’t know what happens to you.”

Penny nods. “Right. Good to know, I guess.”

Kady raises a hand. “Can we go back to the part where I’m somehow dating Josh? What the fuck is that?”

Josh huffs. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m a catch.”

“You also murder us all.”

Josh frowns, huffing. “Yeah, well, Alice. How many times have you betrayed everyone?”

“I haven’t brutally murdered anyone.”

“That we know of,” Eliot corrects.

“Guys,” Julia hisses, glaring at them, “Now’s really not the time to argue.” She turns back to Todd. “You only told us because you have a plan. Right?”

He nods.

She opens her mouth like she’s going to ask him something, but Quentin leans forward. “Jules,” He says, “He just had a panic attack. Give him a minute.” Todd’s heart skips a beat as he turns to look at him incredulously.

Is he seriously defending him? After what he did?

He’s starting to think Quentin Coldwater never changes.

He’s always been too good.

“As much as I’d love to advocate for post-panic attack calmness,” Eliot says, finally pushing away from the wall. Todd’s heart can’t take all the start-stop his families causing. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry. He’s here trying to keep Josh from killing us. And I’d like to assume that he told us everything because he has a plan?” He directs the question at Todd.

Todd blinks up at him, before realizing and then nodding, once, frantically. “Oh—uh. Yeah. A plan. I have that.” He tilts his head. “Kind of.”

“Kind of?” Josh squeaks, “No—not kind of. You need to keep me from killing everyone, otherwise I’m not taking that Jedi mind erase potion.”

“Do Jedi use potions?”

Quentin shakes his head, “No. They don’t.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“Not important!” Josh exclaims, glaring, and waving a hand at Todd, “What’s the plan here?”

Todd attempts a smile, but it falls prematurely as he shrugs a shoulder. “I think there are wolves that can help you. That aren’t murderous psychopaths.”

“Think?”

“Well, uh. I’ve met them. They didn’t—they chased me away all growley. One of them almost bit me.” He frowns at the memory, and takes a shaky breath. “You and I have to go alone. They uh—they’re territorial. Especially around magicians.”

“Oh great,” Eliot bites, turning on his heel and glaring up at the ceiling, his hand running through his hair shakily,“Yeah, let’s just leave you two alone.” The sarcasm is almost poignant.

Which. Ouch.

Todd swallows and pushes up from the couch, ignoring Margo reaching back out for him. “I’ll—I’ll be outside. Josh—you, uh,” His gaze darts around the room, desperately avoiding eye contact as he stumbles through the living room towards the entryway, “When you’re—,” He stops, and staring at the door, reaching out and wrapping his hand around the handle, “Just. Meet you out there.”

And then he pulls the door open and rushes out.

He barely hears Margo’s angry, “Eliot you fucking idiot—“ before the door closes behind him.

They’re just outside the wolves territory when Josh finally speaks up. “Everything that happens,” He says, “I think I owe you an apology.”

Todd shrugs a shoulder, “You didn’t kill me.”

“No, but I killed everyone you love.”

“You only killed one of them.”

Josh scoffs. “Yeah? Is that why you haven’t looked at me at all since the fairy queen showed you what happened?”

Todd stops, staring down at the ground in front of them, before closing his eyes and turning towards him. He inhales, once, slowly, before opening his eyes. “It’s my fault,” he says, “I’m the reason they sent you away. I’m the reason they erased you. I’m the reason you believed the wolves were your family. I’m,” He pauses, speaking slowly and carefully so Josh understands, “The reason you were brainwashed. I—I hate you for what you did. What you do. But I can’t blame you.” He shrugs and turns away again, “So don’t apologize to me.”

“You seriously think it’s all your fault?”

“Because it is.” He moves forward, “Are you coming or not?”

“Wait—“ Todd whips around, glaring and Josh frowns. “What?”

“We don’t have time to argue about who’s to blame. Who has more to be guilty for. You weren’t there. You aren’t the you that did what you did.” He pauses, frowning as he thinks over the sentence. He nods to himself once, deciding that yeah, it makes sense, and continues. “You have nothing to be guilty for, Josh. We’re going to talk to these wolves, they’re going to tell us how to stop the quickening, and then you’ll be free and clear of everything.”

Josh blinks at him, before sighing, he takes a step forward, nodding. “Fine. But you need to realize that once you fix everything, they won’t die. So you have nothing to be guilty for, either.”

Todd scoffs, and turns around to start walking.

He knows the second they step into the wolves territory. If the angry growl coming from behind a dumpster is anything to go by. And if not, the three jacked hairy guys that emerge from the alley and glare at them, teeth bared, is definitely something he can use as an identifier.

“Hey guys,” He says, drawing out the hey, “Good to see you again.”

The largest of them steps forward. His arms are almost the size of Todd’s head. Instinctively, Todd takes a step back. “Magicians,” He says, “Thought we made it clear you aren’t welcome here.”

Todd nods, as Josh takes a step back as well. “Yeah,” Todd says, nodding again, “See—thing is. I, uh. See.” He glances at Josh, before turning back to them, wide eyed and pointing a shaking finger at Josh. “Quickening.” He frowns, eyebrows furrowing, because he’s not sure that makes sense. But.

One of the wolves’ eyes go wide. “What’d you just say?”

“The—the quickening? He’s going to—“

The wolves look at each other, before the largest one sighs, deep and agitated. “All right,” He says, jerking his head to the side in a ‘follow me’ motion. “Let’s go.”

“Me too?”

The wolves roll their eyes, and Todd takes that as his permission to follow.

Josh doesn’t move. “Didn’t we agree I shouldn’t just follow after random wolves—“

“Shut up and come on,” Todd says, barely glancing back at him. “This is how we save everyone.” He turns his attention on the wolves. “Thank you, by the way.”

The smaller of the three looks down at him. “Don’t thank us yet,” He growls.

Todd nods. “No—yeah. Totally. Not thanking.” He purses his lips as the wolf turns his attention forward again. Now’s probably not the best time to ask, but. “I just—I have one more request?”

“We aren’t helping you.”

“Right, yeah. Obviously. Just. A friend of ours. Rumor has it she’s here.”

They all stop, turning to glare down at him. “Stop. Talking.”

Todd nods again. “Yeah,” He says, shaking his head, “I would love to. But I have this panic reflex, where I just—when people make me nervous, I mean. I just—“

“Who’s the friend?”

“You aren’t seriously—“

“It’ll get him to shut up, won’t it?”

“Her names Marina.”

The large wolf slams his mouth shut, and turns his attention on Todd. “What?” he asks, eyes widening like he’s surprised. “You know Marina?”

“I mean, yeah.”

“You’re a Brakebills Magician.”

“Yep. Well. Kind of. Not really. But, yeah. Mostly? Some.”

“How do you know Marina?”

Todd blinks. “Oh. Well. I don’t. Our friends do. She—tell her Julia sent me? And she’ll say she knows me. Well. Not me, me. But—“

“We get it,” The mostly quiet wolf says, holding a hand out between them. “Stop talking, and follow us. I’ll see if Marina wants to speak to you.”

Marina blinks at him from her place across the table. “Why are you here?” She asks. “I don’t know you,” her gaze darts over to Josh, “And he’s clearly far off from the quickening.”

“You know about the quickening? And you know me?”

“Don’t get all doe eyed on me, Josh,” She mutters, making a face, “You’re practically my really annoying little brother where I come from. This,” She motions to him, “Is weird.”

His shoulders slump. “Okay.”

She rolls her eyes, turning her attention on Todd. “Explain.”

“I’m from a different time line. Like you.”

“Which one? I’m told there are, like, forty of them.”

He makes a face. “This one. But. The future.”

She raises her eyebrows, before leaning in and crossing her arms over the table. “All right,” She says, “Now I’m interested. What’s happening in the future? Am I still alive?”

Todd blinks. “I—I don’t know. I’m not from Earth. I just—“ He glances over her shoulder at the wolves watching them, “I thought you. Would be able to get the wolves to accept Josh into your pack.”

“I’m not in the pack. Because I’m not a wolf.”

“No. But the hedge witches. They protect them. They protect you. Even though you’re not their Marina.”

She smirks, her ponytail swaying behind her as she sits up straight. “Doesn’t matter what timeline you’re from. When you garner respect, and come back from the dead, people—and wolves—respect that shit.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Julia really send you?”

“I didn’t exactly tell her I would run into you here.”

“But you do know her.”

“Yeah. She’s—she’s kind of a goddess now.”

She looks surprised for a moment, before a slow smirk forms and she nods. “Yeah. That sounds about right.” She looks over her shoulder and motions for one of the wolves to come over. “Jesse, we need your help over here.” Turning back around to face Todd, she adds just for him to hear, “Don’t do anything stupid. He’s nice, but he doesn’t tolerate a lot of stupidity.”

“Or any,” a man—presumably Jesse—says, sidling up next to her and taking the seat. “I’m Jesse.” At least Todd’s right about some things.

Todd smiles. “Hi. I’m Todd, and this is Josh.”

Josh waves. “Hi.”

He’s being so remarkably quiet that Todd wonders how he hasn’t forgotten he’s there. Oh, he leans back and glances down. Josh’s quaking leg is why. He doesn’t know why he’s so nervous. He’s a wolf. He’s welcome here. Todd’s the one who should be shaking like a Fillorian rat.

Jesse looks them both over. “All right,” He says, after a long moment. “When were you bit?”

“Oh, straight to business then, got it.” Josh laughs nervously, “This guy doesn’t mess around, does he?” He asks, elbowing Todd’s arm.

“No,” Jesse says, “he doesn’t.”

Josh’s smile falls. “Okay, that’s fair. I wasn’t bit.”

“Sexually transmitted?”

Josh nods. “Sexually transmitted.”

“How long ago?”

“Maybe six months ago?”

“Any symptoms?”

“Only during the full moon.”

Todd looks at Marina as they continue their back and forth. “They all get into trouble again in the future?” She asks, tilting her head. “Or is there another reason you’ve travelled to the past?”

He shakes his head. “I—they all die. I’m trying to save them.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’s it on you to save them? Sorry, but I’ve never even seen you before. Never heard of you, or anything. Everyone who runs with that group ends up on some magical creatures radar. Not you, though.”

“That’s because I’m solely from the future.”

“Who are you to them?”

“Family.”

She narrows her eyes, leaning in. “Yeah. But who’re your parents?”

“Does it matter?”

“No. But I’m curious.”

He swallows. “Margo. And Eliot.” She raises her eyebrows, “And Quentin.”

Before she can really question what that means, Jesse turns towards them. “He’s got a slow case. But I think we can help them. If you don’t mind him being around a lot.” He shoots a glance back at Josh, “I do mean a lot.”

Marina looks thoughtful for a moment, before sighing dramatically. “I guess we get to be heroes today, huh?” She shrugs. “Lets do this. But I do want to talk to Julia at some point.”

“I think we can do that,” Todd says, smiling, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Jesse’s gotta go over everything about the quickening with Josh. You can either stay or go. I know how to find Brakebills to bring him back.”

He thinks back on Eliot and the others at the cottage and shakes his head. “No—I’m. I’m okay here. If that’s all right.” He looks at Jesse hopefully. “With you, I mean.”

Jesse stares at him for a long moment. If you don’t talk, you can stay.”

“Deal.”

Josh scoffs. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him not talk.”

Todd frowns. “You’re one to—“

“Starting now.” Todd nods, miming zipping his lips and sitting back in his seat. Jesse looks at Marina. “Is this something I’m going to regret?”

She shrugs one shoulder, “Probably.”

“Great.” He takes a deep breath and focuses solely on Josh. “All right. What do you know about wolves?”

“Wolf wolves or—“

“Werewolves, obviously.” He already sounds like he’s regretting this.

“Uh. Just that on the full moon I really, really want to go run through the wolves and eat raw meat.”

“Okay. Do you shift yet?”

“Not completely, no.”

“That’s good. Do you know anything about the quickening?”

“Other than the fact that I’m going to be super dangerous and need the help of a pack to keep from murdering everyone I know and care about?”

Jesse blinks. “Right,” he draws the ‘i’ sound out, before settling back in the chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “The Quickening is basically an extreme allergic reaction. Some wolves react very quickly. Turning into a rabid wolf within three to four years after getting bit. Others . . . Like you. Take longer. It’s a slow devolve. Kind of like dementia, or Alzheimers. You know you’re fading away, but you can’t do anything about it.”

“What?”

“The good news,” Jesse continues, as if Josh hadn’t spoken at all, “Is that with the right help, you won’t go rabid, at all.” He looks him over, appraising, “Would you be willing to give someone the bite?”

“Like—turn someone into a wolf? And them maybe end up like me? Hell no!”

The muscle in Jesse’s jaw jumps. “No. The Quickening only affects sexually transmitted wolves. You give someone the bite, they just become a wolf. No chance of going rabid. Unless they fight the wolf instincts.”

“Why would I—“

“It’s a cure.”

“Turning someone into a wolf is a cure? How?”

“You have a disease. Sexually Transmitted lycanthropy works different than that transmitted through the bite. You’ve got all this extra—“

“You’re a horny, rabid wolf, who needs release,” Marina interrupts. Jesse looks at her and she shrugs again. “What? It’s true!”

“Okay . . .” Josh breathes. “But, isn’t it cruel to—to turn someone into a wolf?”

“If a longer lifespan, immunity to most diseases,” Todd’s head jerks up, eyes widening as he continues, “stronger senses, and overall better mental health is cruel, then sure. Absolutely.” Jesse uncrosses his arms and leans forward. “There’s a lot of stigma about wolves, but it’s intentional. We saw the vampire craze that shook the world after Twilight, and we thought, yeah, let’s make sure being a wolf continues being seen as this awful thing—because the last thing we need is a bunch of 13 and 14 year old girls storming our territory.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.” Todd raises a hand, and Jesse sighs, rolling his eyes. “Didn’t I say no speaking?” Todd nods, but holds his hand up, waving it slightly. “Fine. One question.”

“The bit about immunity to most diseases. Does—does that apply to diseases that are already there? That—that aren’t active yet?”

“What?”

“If, say, someone who is going to die in the future from a disease gets the bite. Could that maybe, possibly, save them from dying in the future?”

Jesse watches him for a beat, before nodding like he understands. “If their body accepts the bite, and they turn? Absolutely.”

“So if we have someone—“

“He said one question, you’re going to get us both killed,” Josh interrupts, hissing.

Jesse holds a hand up, “No. Go ahead.”

Todd nods. “If we have someone who is destined to die from some mysterious illness in the future. It’s like cancer, but magical? If we know someone like that. Could—could Josh choose to bite them? And that’ll save them? And him?”

“Providing they’re healthy enough to survive the bite, and the body accepts it. Yes.”

“What if their body doesn’t accept the bite? Does it revert back to the quickening?”

Jesse’s lip twitches, like Todd’s asking all the right questions, and it kind of feels nice to not have all the hate in the world directed at him. “No. It doesn’t.”

“Why wouldn’t just biting a hunk of raw meat work?”

“The virus needs to spread. Can’t spread if the flesh is dead.”

Todd’s mind goes wild. It sounds too good to be true.

Is this how he does it?

Is this how he saves them all? He swallows thickly. Josh just has to join this pack and bite someone. Someone who might die anyways. Someone Todd loves. Someone he didn’t think he’d be able to save.

“Your heartbeat is all over the place,” Jesse notes, “Do you know something we don’t?”

“I think I have the perfect person for the bite.”

“Hold on—I didn’t agree to biting anyone!”

Todd stops, turning his entire body in his chair to glare at him. “You were just whining about how fucking guilty you feel outside,” He says, feeling something dark and angry coiling in his gut. “You can’t seriously say you feel guilty and refuse to make this—it’s not even a sacrifice. You can save everyone by doing one simple thing!”

“You want me to turn someone else into a werewolf! Do you not get how fucking crazy that is—“

“Not just anyone. Margo.”

Josh’s eyes go wide, eyebrows rising high on his forehead, “Oh fuck that,” He says, pointing a shaking finger, “You have got to be kidding. She’s dangerous enough just as a magician. Do you have any idea how dangerous she’d be as a fucking wolf?”

“I don’t care how dangerous she’d be!” Todd exclaims, standing up and slamming his fist into the table as he glares down at Josh, “I care that she’d be alive!” Josh’s mouth closes slowly. He stares up at Todd. If Todd didn’t know better, he’d think he looks a little . . . Scared.

“Oh.”

“We can save everyone,” Todd continues, calmer, as he sits down and looks at Jesse and Marina, who are both watching him with equally shocked faces. “We can save everyone. Why wouldn’t we?”

“Margo doesn’t seem the type to let someone bite her.”

“Margo’s the type that doesn’t want to die.” Todd murmurs, looking down at his hand. The aching burn in his knuckles finally registers as he twists his hand around to look at them. They’re bright red and pulsing. The knuckle above his middle finger has a small gash that’s starting to bleed.

Marina looks down, sighing. “I’ll go get some alcohol and bandages for that,” She says, before getting up and disappearing through a door.

Josh watches after her, before turning to Todd. “Look—I get it, man. I do. I’d want to save my mom, too. But—“

“There are no buts.”

“No, there are.” He nods, mostly to himself, “Mainly that she dies when you’re really young, right?”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t look away from his knuckles, oddly transfixed by the blood.

“You don’t know what could change if she lives longer than that, man. This could just be stepping on one too many butterflies—“

He finally breaks away from the blood and looks up at Josh. “It’s my future,” He says, “Your entire future is changing. You don’t know what’s coming. It’s my future I’m changing. I don’t care what you think about it, Josh. I’m telling you right now that you’re going to bite Margo. You’re going to save my mother. And in turn, they’ll help you save yourself.” His gaze darts across the table at Jesse. “Right?”

Jesse narrows his eyes, like he’s thinking about his answer, before shrugging. “Seems to me that saving a life is a fair cost for not going rabid.”

“You can’t be serious,” Josh says, snapping his own eyes over to Jesse, “You don’t know Margo—“

“Do you want to go rabid?”

“No!”

“Then I think you’ll do what the kid wants.”

“I thought you were in charge here.”

Jesse chuckles, glancing at Todd, and shaking his head, “You know,” He says, “I thought so, too. But he makes a convincing case.” He nods down to Todd’s aching hand, “And anyone willing to bleed for their cause, has a lot to fight for.”

“What?”

“I have a feeling if we don’t agree to what he wants, he’s going to drag you around to a bunch of other packs. Packs less friendly than ours.” His gaze slides back up to Todd’s, “And I have a feeling that’s how he ended up in the past in the first place.”

Todd nods. “There were mistakes made.”

“Then lets not repeat them.” He turns his attention on Josh. “I’ll make you a deal. This Margo chic decides she doesn’t want the bite? That’s fair game. We’ll find someone who does. But, why not give the kid a chance to save his mother?”

“Because she’s supposed to die.”

Todd’s shoulders go taut.

“How do you know that?” Jesse asks. “You’re not from the future, too, are you?”

“No, but she dies before—“

“She dies because she got sick, and didn’t get the bite. Everyone else died because you went rabid.” He glances at Todd, “That’s right, right?” Todd nods, heart hammering in his chest, and Jesse turns back to Josh. “For all you know everything happened because you didn’t bite her.”

Josh’s mouth opens and closes a few times, before Marina finally comes back into the room with an ice pack and some bandages.

“Think on it,” Jesse says, scooting his chair back and shooting Todd a look. “Ask her if she’s down. If she is, then the only way you don’t go rabid, Josh, is if you bite Margo.” He shrugs, glancing behind him at a few onlookers, “We’re going to get everything ready. I have a feeling this one’s not going to take no for an answer.” He smirks down at Todd. “You’re not so bad.”

Todd blinks. “Neither are you?”

“I know.” He pats Marina on the shoulder, and turns around, walking away without even a look back.

“This is fucking insane.”

Marina huffs out a breath through her nose as she pulls Todd’s hand towards her, “You’re a werewolf magician, hanging around a time traveler. And giving Margo the bite to avoid going rabid is the insane part?”

Josh slumps back in his seat. “Yeah. It is.”

“I liked you more when you were a bad ass,” Marina murmurs, focusing on bandaging Todd’s hand. “You’re kind of pathetic now.”

When they get back to the cottage, everyone is, miraculously, still waiting for them. Quentin’s the first one to notice when they walk through the door, standing up awkwardly, and brushing his hair behind his ear. “You’re back,” He says, swallowing and stepping side to side like he’s not sure what to do.

“We’re back.”

“What happened to your hand?” Margo asks, taking a few steps closer to them.

Quentin looks down at Todd’s hand as well. “Is there—is that blood seeping through—“

“It’s not important,” Todd says, moving to the center of the room, and dragging Josh along with his free hand. “We know what we have to do. To save everyone.” He looks at Margo meaningfully.

She quirks one eyebrow. “Is that so?”

He nods. “Everyone.”

She tilts her head and sits down on the nearest surface. “And how’s that possible?”

“Josh is—Josh is going to give you the bite.”

“The bite?”

“To become a werewolf.”

“I think the fuck not,” Eliot says, storming across the room with intent, stopping to stand in between Todd and Margo. “You must be out of your already deranged mind.”

Todd’s chin trembles but he straightens out his shoulders, lifting his chin in the way he’s seen Eliot do ten thousand times, and does what his entire upbringing taught him not to; he talks back to his father. “Do you want Margo to do?” He asks, standing his ground. “Because if Margo doesn’t get the bite, she’ll die. And then not long after, Josh is going to kill the rest of you. This is how we save everyone.”

Josh clears his throat. “There’s a way I don’t kill anyone that doesn’t involving biting Margo—“

“Does that involve saving Margo?” Quentin asks.

“No, but—“

“Then why are we even considering it?”

Todd whips around, eyes going wide as everyone follows his path to look at Quentin. “We aren’t,” He says, as Quentin’s gaze slides from Josh to him. “I told the wolves Josh bites Margo, or Josh bites nobody. And they agreed.” He swallows, turning his attention back on Margo. “Unless Margo decides she doesn’t want the bite.”

“Margo doesn’t want to be a werewolf,” Eliot says.

Margo furrows her eyebrows, turning to look at him. “Since when does Eliot decide what Margo wants?” She asks.

His eyebrows rise, “Are you kidding?”

“No. I’m not kidding. What is wrong with you?”

“You seriously want to become a werewolf?”

“No, but I want to be dead even less.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Unless you want me to die a thankless death. In which case, Eliot. Please let us all know before anyone does anything stupid, like saving me.”

His face falls. “Bambi, you know that’s not—“

“Then what the fuck is the problem?”

“He is!” Eliot exclaims, pointing at Todd.

Todd’s heart falls, and he takes a step away from Eliot.

“How the fuck are we supposed to trust him?”

“I thought we were passed this, Eliot.”

“Passed what? Him lying to us and everyone eating it up?”

The last thing Todd expects is for Quentin to speak up for him, but. “El,” He says, moving towards them all. “He’s not lying to us. He’s your son.”

“I’ve played this game already—“

“No you haven’t.” Quentin makes a face. “Frey turned out not to be your daughter, but you still look at her like she’s your kid. What’s different this time? He’s from the future, which is a little ridiculous. But our lives are—our lives are insane. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility. We lived an entire lifetime together, and here we are. The same age we were the day we walked through the clock.”

Eliot makes a face, stepping away from them. “I’m not falling for this. I’ve never—“

“Jesus, El,” Margo mutters, “He even looks like us. How—“

“No. He doesn’t.”

Todd moves to stand against the wall and out of the way. “I’m sorry,” He says, shaking his head, “I shouldn’t have—I should have found a way to do this on my own. I didn’t want to create more problems. I just—I wanted to fix what I did.”

Eliot scoffs. “If any of this is real, how can you act like you care about anyone but yourself? You cared the minute everyone died. And you only care because you blame yourself.”

Margo’s mouth falls open. “Eliot!”

“At least in that aspect we’re one in the same,” Todd snaps. He shakes his head, wiping angrily at his burning eyes, “I spent my entire life trying to make you proud. And yeah, I failed on every fucking aspect because your expectations are so insanely high that nobody could reach them. I know you didn’t.” His chin trembles as he moves around the room, glaring at Eliot. “You had them erase my memory because you thought I was too fucking weak to handle the truth. What kind father does that?”

“You’re seriously yelling at me for something I haven’t even done yet. That I don’t even know I will do!”

“No. Fuck you,” Todd shakes his head. “What I did was awful. And I will never forgive myself for it. Because I got you all killed. But I won’t act like I did it out of the fucking blue. I snapped because Quentin’s the one that came at me, asking me to marry my life away. My entire life I was sure of one thing; and that was that I could count on one of my parents to love me. Most nights I questioned whether or not you loved me. Every day was about earning your favor, becoming the king you wanted me to be.

“Hiding the woman I loved because you wouldn’t approve. I idolized you. And you saw me, not as your son, but as the heir of Fillory. You loved the son that doesn’t even exist from a timeline that never happened more than you loved me! And I’m actually your son!”

Eliot’s mouth falls open. Something flashes behind his eyes, and he stumbles back a step. “How—How do you know about Rupert?”

“We haven’t told anyone about what happened in Fillory,” Quentin breathes. “Not everything, at least. Not. Not that.”

“Yeah, well,” Todd throws an arm up, “You never let me forget about him.” He keeps his gaze locked on Eliot as he clenches his jaw. “That enough to make you believe I’m not fucking lying? That I couldn’t live up to the son that probably doesn’t even exist anymore?” Eliot’s face falls, eyes softening several degrees as he looks around the room at the rest of Todds family. Todd scoffs, turning his attention on Margo. “Do you want the bite or don’t you?”

He tries to ignore the way her eyes are watering, because he knows she doesn’t want anyone to comment on it, but it still tugs at her heart. She shouldn’t have to see any of this. She reaches forward, and grabs his arm by the elbow with both hands. “You’re damn fucking right I want the bite,” She says, shakily straightening her own shoulders out. “Someone has to keep these idiots from being idiots.”

He nods, once, and pulls away. “Okay. I’m going to call Marina. Set it up. Everyone’ll live, and none of this nastiness will have happened.” He glances back up Eliot again, swallowing down the tears that want to well up in his own eyes, along with everything else he never had the chance to say because he was too afraid. “Don’t worry,” He says, pointedly, “I’ll go back to being the respectful heir when you’re alive again.”

“Todd—“ Quentin starts.

Todd shakes his head, turning back to him. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you’re not you right now. But I’m sorry. You didn’t—don’t deserve what I do to you. And I will spend the rest of my life when everything’s fixed making it up to you.”

“Todd, I—“

“How long does the potion take to kick in, Julia?”

Julia inhales quickly, standing up from the couch, “About forty eight hours. And nobody will remember until they see you again. Not baby you. This you. Nobody’ll remember until you go back. It’s like Quentin and Eliot’s alternate life. We—we won’t remember the death or any of that. Just you being here.”

“Okay.” He takes a deep breath of his own and shrugs. “Everyone should take the potion now. I’ll tell them they need to do everything as soon as possible. If it works—“

“Are you going to just disappear?” Alice asks. “How does it work; you going back?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m winging it.” He resists the urge to mention that he knows Eliot hates when he does that. But Eliot’s already dragging his feet across the room to grab himself a drink at the bar.

Kady huffs, standing up. “All right,” She says, “Can we finish with this emotional shit, handle everything, and get back to finishing the actual quest? This Todd shit isn’t the only shit going on in our lives right now.”

Todd nods. “I’ll go call now.” He looks around the room one more time, before nodding and turning towards the front door, pulling the phone Fogg gave him, out of his front pocket as he crosses the threshold.

Jesse’s enthusiastic and agrees to set up everything for early the next morning. He’s not sure why, but telling them as much feels like a goodbye. Even more so when he heads up the stairs and closes the door to his room behind him.

He rests his forehead on the wood, letting his eyes fall shut. If this doesn’t work, nothing will. If curing Josh and saving Margo doesn’t fix everything—nothing will. He pushes away from the door and heads over to the bed, pulling the blankets up and over himself once he lies down.

Not much later, he hears his door creak open, and feels someone lie down next to him.

Margo pulls the blanket down enough to motion for him to move over. When he doesn’t, she rolls her eyes and shoves him over, and forces her way under to blankets. When he just stares at her after that, she sighs dramatically, and pulls him into his, wrapping her arms around him.

“Whatever happens tomorrow,” She murmurs, “I know I’m not your mom yet, and it doesn’t really count yet. But, I want you to know that I love you, and I’m going to make sure you’re loved. Okay?”

“Margo—“

“Julia’s going to cast a compulsion to make sure we all take the potion, so you don’t need to worry about that, either.”

“I—“

“Go to sleep, Todd. We’ll figure everything else out in the morning.”

He wants to object, but he’s tired, and sore, and she’s warm, raking her fingers through his hair, and the objection dies on his tongue. He closes his eyes and curls up against her, inhaling deep.

He shouldn’t be surprised when he wakes up alone.

His bed is cold, and itchy, and he feels like he hasn’t slept in a century. Part of him wants to stay in bed, let them go handle everything alone. But he sighs sleepily, and forces himself out of bed, barely blinking as he heads across the room to grab some fresh clothes. The sun beats down on him through the open window, brighter and clearer than it’s been in days.

There’s something sweet and familiar in the air, but he’s too tired to think long on it. Maybe someones cooking breakfast. Blearily, he reaches into his dresser, somehow seemingly taller than it was the night before, and pulls out some clothes.

Huh.

The silky material rolls over his fingers, bright and beautiful. Nothing like the itchy cotton he remembers being in his dresser drawer.

He blinks down at it, thinking it might be his coronation robes. But they’re a different color. Softer, like they’ve recently been washed. Not like the angry, itchy fabric pulled down from storage he wore during his coronation.

He furrows his eyebrows and looks through the drawer. Everything in the drawer is silky and beautiful.

He turns around, frowning. It’s too early for pranks.

Of course, that’s when he realizes what the sweet taste in the air is. Why it’s so familiar. He takes a careful, testing deep breath in, eyes falling shut at the familiarity.

Fillory.

He drops the clothes, letting them carefully fall to the floor with a soft fluttering. Reaching up to rub at his eyes, he spins in place, and realizes that this isn’t his room at the cottage. The cool marble floors beneath him shine, glimmering around the room as the sun reflects off them. This is his room in the castle. He looks towards the window, and rushes across the room, sliding half way when he slips on the silk blankets that fell to the floor when he got up.

He crashes into the railing, mouth falling open, he looks out on Fillory. Green for miles, disappearing into the horizon.

He spins back around, heart hammering painfully in his chest, and stares, wide eyed at the door to his room. Swallowing thickly, he lets go of the railing and takes a step towards the door, and then another. One after another until he can reach out and wrap his fingers around the handle and yank it open.

It creaks loudly as he lets it gently bounce against the wall in his room and drift closed, until it hits his shoulder. He listens for footsteps, but hears nothing, so he leans out of his room and looks left, then right. The halls are empty. No soldiers or guards walking around. No sound echoing from any of the other rooms.

He stares for a long moment, before finally allowing himself to step over the threshold and into the hall. He holds his breath until both feet are out of the room. Opens his eyes; hadn’t even realized he’d closed them. And follows the familiar path leading to the throne room.

Each step that takes him closer makes his heart skip. Part of him isn’t sure he’ll even make it there. He’s had nightmares like this before. Dreaming of waking up in Fillory and finding his family laughing together over breakfast. Each step is a nightmare relived.

But unlike his nightmares, the hallways get shorter. And he can turn the corners. With each step, he actually makes progress. Each step brings him closer to where he’s supposed to be.

Each step leads him right up to the throne room doors.

He stands in front of them for a few long minutes, just staring up at their looming height. He’s torn between shoving them open, and just staying right here. Living in a fantasy that he fixed everything. A good dream, for once. If he doesn’t open the door he can’t puncture this bubble. If he lets the doors remain shut and looming, he doesn’t have to face whatever reality is on the other side.

But his fingers twitch. Which reminds him—he brings his hand up and looks it over. His knuckles are still bruised and battered. His heart skips a beat as he reaches up with his other hand and gently grazes his fingers over the bruises. He hisses as pain shoots up his arm, and inhales quickly as his gaze darts back up tot he door.

Don’t they say you can’t feel pain your dreams?

His stomach flips. And before he knows what he’s doing, he’s moving forward and pushing the doors open. As soon as they crack, he hears a chorus of murmuring, clanking plates and forks. He steps through, careful not be too hopeful. His eyes close of their own accord, and he stops, just inside the doorway, letting them clink shut behind him.

The murmuring stops, the sound of forks falling to plates echoing around the room. He can practically feel them all staring at them. But who are they? Wolves? Or his family?

“Todd?”

It’s Fen. It’s Fen. That’s Fen. He knows her voice. And she sounds half shocked, half relieved, and it—

He—oh god.

“You’re back.”

He opens his eyes, feels the tears fall before he can even think to catch them.

“Welcome back. How was your vacation?” Alice says, grinning. “Don’t look at me like. It’s just a good thing we have plenty of breakfast. Sit down.” It’s so . . . Her. To ignore what he’s done, and just set the motion is everyone moving on. Now that he knows her past, it kind of makes sense.

“Are you okay?” Julia asks, pushing her chair back. Her eyebrows are pursed curiously, and the closer she gets to him, the faster his heart races.

Because she’s older, and she’s his aunt. And she actually looks happy to see him. It’s a harsh contradiction to the past year.

“No, yeah. I’m—I’m—“ His chin trembles, and he can’t stop himself from running across the room and wrapping his arms around Julia as tight as he can. She pauses, tensing up, but then laughing softly and wrapping him up in the hug.

“Well, good morning to you, too.” She chuckles into his ear. The chuckle is less humorous, and more breathy and worried like she’s not sure what to think. And he can’t blame her. As far as she and everyone else is concerned, he took a trip, renounced his claim to the throne, and said he wanted no contact with the royal family. Leaves room for a whole lot of confusion. “Are you okay?” She asks, softer. “Did something—“

Eliot starts to say something from his place at the table, but stops mid word. At the exact moment, Julia jerks away, stopping to hold Todd at arms length. Her eyes go wide, and her mouth falls open. Todd looks passed her, to see that everyone else at the table has a similar look on their face.

“Todd?” Quentin asks, voice soft. So much softer than Todd knows what to do with.

The potion must be wearing off now that he’s back. That’s what she said would happen, isn’t it?

Todd looks around the table, his heart pitter pattering excitedly in his chest like it doesn’t know what to do right now. Josh is sitting next to Alice, who’s sitting next to Penny, who’s sitting next to Quentin—

Then there’s Eliot, and Fen, and—and.

Where are Margo and Kady?

He doesn’t realize he’d said it out loud until Julia swallows thickly and lets go of him. “Uh,” She says, swallowing again and tucking her hair behind her ear. “Kady’s walking the grounds with your nephew.”

There’s a lot to unpack there. “Nephew?”

She looks mildly alarmed for a minute, before her eyes widen and she nods shakily. “Yeah, she’s his godmother. Josh has a meeting later today, and his mother’s off volunteering in the village. So Kady volunteered to watch him for the day. Did you really—”

“I have a nephew?”

Her eyebrows shoot up, and she nods. “You have a nephew.”

He smiles to himself, feels something warm and fuzzy work its way down his spine as he moves in closer to the table. Julia grabs his hand, lacing her fingers through his and her free hand around his arm. “But where’s Margo?” He asks, as they close the distance between them and the table. “I want to—“ He stops himself at the look they pass each other. “What? What’s going on?”

“Maybe . . . you should sit down,” Fen says, placing a hand on the chair next to her and motioning for him to come over.

“Yeah, eat some breakfast. You must be starving—“

Todd shakes his head, stopping. “Where’s Margo?” He asks. “What’s going on?”

“At least now I know what she said I forgot,” Eliot murmurs with a deep sigh. “Come sit next to me, Todd.”

He furrows his brow. “Do—you remember what I—“

Eliot nods. “Yeah. I do. But only, like. Thirty seconds ago.” He shrugs, “Much more poignant than that is the fact that I love you, and that I need you to come over so I can hug you and make sure you know that.” He raises his eyebrows, and nods once, “So. Come give me a hug.”

Todd stares at him for a few seconds before a pitiful sound works up through his throat and he closes the distance between them to wrap himself up in his father. Eliot’s hold around him is tight and sure, his hand carefully gripping the back of his head and holding him to him. He breathes him in through his nose. This is the scent he knows. Not that of cigarette and alcohol and grief he grew to know in the past. But this. His father.

This is his father.

It’s not long before a new set of hands appear. “I think it’s my turn,” Quentin says, soft. “Unless you’re going to hog hugging him, Eliot.”

Eliot lets out a wet chuckle, and it takes him pulling away from Todd to realize he’s crying. He reaches up and swipes the tears away. “Kings aren’t supposed to cry, remember?”

“Fuck that,” Eliot says, voice slightly choked off. “Hug your other father and let me be emotional for once.”

Todd laughs, his own vision watery as he turns to Quentin and is immediately pulled into a wrought iron grip. Quentin’s hair tickles his nose, but he doesn’t care. He wraps his arms around him as tight as he can. “I’m so sorry,” He says, the words coming out muffled against Quentin’s chest.

Quentin pulls away, just enough to look him in the eyes. He raises his eyes, and makes sure Todd’s looking him in the eye. “Don’t you dare,” He says, “Don’t apologize to me, Todd. Not now. Not over this.”

“But—“

“Stop.” He smiles, his own tears slipping over his smile wrinkles, “I don’t care what happened. I love you. And you did nothing wrong.” He squeezes Todd’s shoulders, “None of it happened. We’re all here. Because of you.”

“I still left. I said—I said awful things—“

“You didn’t say anything you didn’t have a right to say,” Quentin interrupts. “Stop trying to apologize. You’re here, that’s all that matters.”

“Is Mar—mom, mad at me?”

Quentin’s eyes dart away, face falling. “Listen—“

“I just want to see her, you know?” Todd continues, “Even if she is. I’ll make it up to her. I just—I never got to see her grow old before—“

“Todd,” Julia tries.

Todd ignores her, barreling on. “And that last day—I think I may have disappeared without saying goodbye. So she’s probably peeved about that. Even though it meant that—“

“Todd, stop,” Fen says, leaning across the table to grab his hand. “You’ve got to stop, bunny.”

He frowns. “What? Why?” He looks around the table, but they’re all looking at him with the same, strange sad look on their faces. “Why are you—“ Fen’s lips twitch, and he jerks away from the table. “Why are you looking at me like that?” They just keep staring at him, and he stumbles backwards another step. “Don’t—don’t look at me like that. Stop it.”

Quentin stands up, holding a hand out between them. “Todd, it’s—“

“Where is my mother?”

“Todd—“

“Where the fuck is my mother?”

Quentin moves in closer, like he’s approaching a wild animal. “Just come sit back down and we’ll—“

“No. Because she should—“ His gaze darts around the room. Across the table, to the thrones, and back. “She should—“ He points at the throne, “That should—“ He stops, hands dropping to his side, and face falling as his looks at his fathers. “It should have . . .” His mouth falls open and he doesn’t even realize his legs have given way until Quentin rushes forward and catches him before he falls.

Quentin holds most of his weight as they fall to the ground. His arms wrap around the entirety of Todd’s body, holding him from shoulder to shoulder.

“It didn’t work.”

Quentin shakes his head against him, “No,” He murmurs, “I’m sorry, Todd.”

“I don’t understand.”

The rest of his family slowly pushes away from the table, and move to kneel on the ground around them, Eliot taking the empty space to his left while Quentin stays on his right. Fen and Julia each reach out and take one of his hands from their places. Alice, Josh and Penny take up the empty space around him.

“I bit her,” Josh says, “When you weren’t there in the morning, we all kind of assumed that meant this was the right way to do things.”

“That or you ran away.” Eliot adds, bumping his shoulder against Todd’s, “But Margo made it clear that you’d been through too much to give up when we were so close. So we kept the appointment with the pack.”

“And I bit Margo.”

“We thought it worked,” Julia says, “But not long after that, we had some . . . other major stuff to deal with it.”

“I know that,” Todd mutters, leaning into Quentin. He feels a little faint. “That doesn’t explain why it didn’t work.”

“Once we were all back to ourselves, we didn’t know what we’d done—“

“Except Margo,” Julia interrupts, “She made me exclude her from the compulsion.”

Todd sits up, jerking his gaze over to her. “What?”

She shrugs a shoulder. “She made a strong argument about if these things don’t work, she wanted to still have the opportunity to be there for her son. I was a goddess at the time . . . I couldn’t deny her that. A mothers love for her son is the strongest magic. At least I think I remember thinking that.”

“We didn’t know we needed to try again.”

“And she got sick.”

Quentin nods. “And she got sick.”

Before he can reply, the throne room doors burst open, and Kady crashes through with a toddler on her hip. “You will not believe what I just re—“ She stops short, staring at them from the other side of table. “Either you all remembered what I just remembered, or you’re just real high today.”

Todd looks up at her, and the blonde boy on her hip. “Is that my nephew?”

She takes a deep breath and nods. “Well that answers that,” She says. “And the question of why the hell I just remembered everything all at once.”

“I’m so glad you know whats happening,” Penny says, staring up at her a little helplessly, “Because I have no fucking clue what’s going on right now.”

“Oh shit,” Josh chirps, sitting up, and leveling him with a stare. “You were dead when everything went down.” He looks back at Julia and Alice, adding. “It’s probably a good thing he doesn’t know that I almost killed everyone.”

Penny’s eyes go comically wide. “You did what.” And Josh flinches like he knows he should have said it out loud.

“It’s a long story, we’ll talk about it later,” Julia says, settling a hand on his shoulder gently. “It’s why we’re not screaming at Todd for running off after Quentin was a jack ass.”

“I was wondering why nobody tried to kick his ass when he walked through the door like nothing happened.” He harrumphs, “He said he was severing all contact with the royal family. He’s just lucky I didn’t—“

“Okay, Penny,” Julia chastises, squeezing his shoulder, “We all know you’re an emotionless rock, you don’t need to prove yourself.” She raises one eyebrow as he frowns, before a smile tugs at the edges of her lips. Penny rolls his eyes, and reaches around to wrap an arm around her waist.

Todd laughs halfheartedly with his family, letting Quentin and Eliot hug him to them. At least he has this. All of them, together. Laughing and joking. Eating breakfast like nothings happened. It makes sense.

Because, to them, Margo died more than a decade ago. Nearly two.

But for Todd? He can still feel her pulling the blanket up and over them and forcefully telling him to go to sleep. For him, it was less an hour ago.

He finds her where he left her.

The token spot in the royal tombs. Apparently, before she died, she told anyone and everyone that listened that she’d better be cremated. He remembers Eliot saying she was too pretty to rot, anyways, but that he wasn’t going to not grant her one dying wish. She still has a spot in the tombs, though, at the center of Coldwaughson legacy stone. A plaque made of some of Fillory’s finest gems, and rarest metals, raised above the stone.

He stands in front of it, ignoring the tears that slip over his cheeks.

Somehow he feels like he’s failed her. She’d probably punch him, if she were here. No, there’s no probably about it. She’d tell him to stop crying, and then when doesn’t, she’d just punch him in the arm. She’d say she’s pissed about being dead, but that they got to know each other. That he shouldn’t be so sad.

She’s been dead almost his entire life. It shouldn’t hurt this much.

But he can still see her, clear as day in his memory, laughing at Quentin, or stressing about Eliot. Pretending not to care, and curling up under the blankets when it all gets to be too much.

People say he’s like Eliot. A perfect reflection of his father. And he’d believed them. Because he didn’t know her; didn’t know he could be like her.

He’s as quick to a temper she was. Quick to judge, and even quicker too, to care about people. Scared to show it, even. Full of love, unsure of how to express it. That’s one of the big takeaways, he thinks. He’d known she was the best monarch Fillory’s ever known. He knew she loved her family deeply. He knew her from his families memories, so his memories of her were tinged with their own bias’. Of which, there were many.

She was too brash. Too argumentative. Too sexual. Too demanding.

For every person in his family, and even out of it, Margo was always too much something.

Maybe it’s different for him. Maybe it’s because she’s his mother.

But Margo wasn’t too much anything. She was loud, and opinionated. Kind and courageous. Everything he always imagined she’d be. Her hugs were warm and sure. And even at the darkest moments, she didn’t leave him to fend for himself. Even when she couldn’t even be sure he was who he said he was.

“I thought I’d find you in here.” Todd sniffles, clearing his throat and looking over his shoulder. Eliot smiles apologetically. “You okay?”

Todd shrugs, turning his attention back on the plaque. God, he’s not ready for a moment alone with him.“I don’t know,” He murmurs. “I—I did it. But I still feel like I failed.”

“I figured as much,” Eliot says, soft, as he moves to stand next to him. He holds out an orchid, “Do you want to replace the old one for me? I’m getting old, and reaching up so high is just too much work.”

It’s a weak lie, but Todd looks at the purple orchid for a long moment before nodding and shakily taking the orchid with one hand, and wiping at his nose with his other. “I know I should be happy,” He says, as he turns away from him and plucks the decaying orchid from the landing and replacing it with the fresh one. “But it just. Feels like I don’t get to be happy. Like I can’t—“

Eliot places a hand on his shoulder, effectively silencing him, and gently takes the old orchid from his hand and sets it down on the table with the candles. “Let’s sit down,” He murmurs, turning him around to lead him towards the bench not a foot away. Todd follows silently, and sits down when prompted.

They sit in silence for a moment, staring up at Margo’s headstone.

“When your mother died,” Eliot finally says, “It was during the happiest time of our lives. We didn’t think she’d actually die, because it’s Margo, and god, does she endure whatever the universe throws at her.” He shrugs a shoulder, and Todd almost misses the tears in his eyes as he looks away. “We thought we were at the high point. Our kingdom was finally thriving, and we had a family. We had you. And for once, there were no magical, or nonmagical, threats trying to take it away.”

He pauses, taking a few deep breaths, like he’s trying to level himself out and be strong for Todd, before finally turning his gaze back on him. “The day your mother died, felt like my soul had been ripped in half. Like I could never be whole again.” He reaches forward and cups Todd’s cheek. “I know I’m terrible at showing it, Todd. But you and Quentin. You stitched me back together. You are my entire world, kid.”

“Dad—“

“No, let me—just. Let me.” He twists on the bench so he can cup both of Todd’s cheeks, and looks him in the eye. “I remember what you told me, the night before you disappeared. And I am so, so sorry that I’ve made you feel like you’re not enough. Because, trust me, please, Todd. Trust me when I say, you are more than enough. You are twice the man I could ever be—“

Todd’s chin trembles, and he reaches up to wrap his hands around Eliot’s wrist. “I—no. Dad. I was just—“

“Stop talking for a second, god,” He forces a smile with a roll of his eyes, which is muted by the tears it forces down and over his cheeks, “You talk so much, half the time I think you’re Quentin’s.”

Todd makes a choked off sound that’s part laugh, part sob, and squeezes Eliot’s wrists tighter.

“You don’t know how proud I am of you.” Eliot nods, holding on tighter as Todd tries to pull away so Eliot doesn’t have to see how close that brings him to breaking down. “Of the man you’ve become. Of your strength, and your courage.” He brushes his thumb over Todd’s cheek, swiping away the tears there. “Of everything you’ve done. I am so fucking proud of you.”

Todd breaks then, because of course he does. And he pulls away, just enough that he can separate them so he can bury his face in Eliot’s chest. The tears come fast and heavy, blanketed with sobs as Eliot holds him. He knows he’s not the only one crying, though, because his shirt grows damper by the second, where Eliot’s face is tucked into on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry dad—“

“Stop apologizing,” Eliot chokes out, sound muffled by the hoarseness of his voice, and Todd’s shirt. He pulls away, holding Todd by the shoulders. “I need you to know something else.” He nods, once, like he’s serious. “Margo? She wouldn’t want you to be sad. Because you know what she’s doing right now, Todd?”

“What?”

“She’s probably making all the dead guys in the underworld worship her on their knees, and taking as many suitable lovers as she wants.” He nods, as Todd makes a face, “She’s probably the new ruler of the under world at this point. Honestly. Hades who?”

“God, that’s gross.”

Eliot just laughs through his tears, nodding. “Maybe for you. Honestly, I’m rooting for her. Her favorite vibe died on her thr—“

“No!” Todd exclaims wide eyed, “Please dear god, don’t finish that sentence.”

Eliot closes his mouth, before grinning, and pulling Todd back in for another hug. “I’m glad you’re home, kid. We missed you.”

Todd swallows, wrapping his arms around his waist and nodding into the crook of Eliot’s neck. “I missed you, too.”

By the time he gets done meeting his nephew, and updating Penny on what exactly happened—and getting crushed in a hug so tight, he fears his ribs will bruise from Penny—the suns set, and his aunts and uncles have retired to their own rooms. Luckily, not much has changed in that respect.

Kady’s still married to Julia and Penny. Her relationship with Josh hadn’t been as explosively important as the vision quest the fairy queen sent him on made it seem. Them falling out of love with each other didn’t really affect anything. It just opened the door for one big polyamorous family. Josh met a girl from the village that, unlike a lot of Fillorian’s, didn’t see a problem with his lycanthropy. That’s the biggest change. The three of them sharing a tower in the castle with their toddler, Alex.

Everything else is exactly as he left it.

Which is why he isn’t surprised to find Quentin sitting alone in the armory reading one of the Fillory and Further books.

“Weren’t you the one that told me reading in the dark is bad for your eyes?” He asks, stepping through the doorway, hesitant. He’s not really sure how to act around him anymore.

But Quentin looks up, and his gaze is no different than it’s been all of Todd’s life. The only difference now, is that Todd takes the time to appreciate it. To bask it in. How had he been so naive before? It’s so blatant and clear how much Quentin loves him. It’s practically settling in the air.

He offers a tired smile. “I’ve got old person eyes. It doesn’t matter if my vision goes bad.” He scoots to the side and motions for Todd to sit with him. “Because when I inevitably go blind, I have a son who can do all my reading for me. Right?”

Todd nods, smiling softly as he takes the seat next to him. “Anytime you want.”

Quentin closes the book, and stares down at the cover for a long moment. Neither of them speak for a few minutes, until Quentin let’s out a shaky breath and breaks the silence with, “I owe you an apology.”

Todds head jerks up. “What? No—you definitely don’t.”

Quentin shakes his own head, turning to look at him. “I never should have made such a ridiculous demand, Todd.”

“But I—“

“You had every right to react the way you did.”

Todd stands up, flipping around to face him. “No. I didn’t.” He holds a hand out between them. “Stop, dad. Listen to me.” He kneels down in front of him, and stares up at him. “My entire life . . . I. I have taken you for granted.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Todd.”

“No. I have.” Quentin opens his mouth like he’s going to respond, but Todd shakes his head. “Stop. I’ve—I’ve never appreciated all that you’ve done for me. So, you can’t apologize, because I’m apologizing.” He nods mostly to himself, “So, yeah.”

“Alright,” Quentin says after a loaded minute, before nodding as well, and holding his hands out. “Get up. We have to do something.”

“Huh?”

He stands up and continues holding his hands out. “Up, Todd. Today.” Todd takes his hands and allows himself to be pulled up, raising an eyebrow at Quentin. “You, me and Eliot have a trip to go on.”

“What?” He frowns, taking a step back. Maybe all the niceness is a ploy to get him out to the middle of nowhere and abandon him, like he abandoned them—

“Stop thinking crazy things,” Quentin chastises, bumping against the back of the head playfully, “Nobody thinks you abandoned them.”

“I didn’t say I—“

“You didn’t need to.” He smiles and turns towards the hall, “Come on. Eliot’s already on the Muntjac waiting for us.”

“Where are we going exactly?”

Quentin shrugs, not bothering to look back. “Well, you’re the one with a secret girlfriend out there, so I’d imagine you’re going to be setting the itinerary.”

“Wait,” Todd stops in the doorway, “What?”

“No time to waste, Todd. Come on.”

“We can’t just—show up!”

“Sure we can,” Quentin glances over his shoulder at him. “You love her don’t you?”

“I mean—yeah. I just. Don’t you think—that I should. Just be around my family right now? Considering, you know—“ He waves his arms around frantically, “Everything?” Not to mention he’s not even sure he ever loved her, if his reaction to seeing her during the vision quest is anything to go by.

He nods. “You could do that,” He murmurs, “But there’s a box of letters from your mother that we were explicitly told not to give you until we meet the woman you love when you’re twenty three.” He furrows his eyebrows, looking thoughtful. “I think you’re twenty three, and in love, now, aren’t you?”

A box of letters? From Margo? “You can’t—“ He splutters, “That’s—that’s extortion!”

“Is it?”

“Yes! And It’s illegal!”

Quentin nods again. “Maybe,” He murmurs, turning his attention forward and continuing down the hallway, with a careful, “But we are the royal family,” called over his shoulder.

Todd blinks. Before letting his head hang for a moment and then following after Quentin.

Better sooner than later, he guesses, on figuring out if he actually loves her, or it was some stupid defiant bullshit on his part.

If it’s the latter, he’s just going to feel worse for dragging his parents halfway across the world.

He shouldn’t be surprised that they’re all waiting on the Muntjac, and not just Eliot.

But, somehow, he is.

And they shouldn’t be surprised when he’s so overcome with emotion, that he bursts into tears as soon as he sees them.

He doesn’t think they’re all that surprise, though. Because they envelope him in a weather tight hug that fills him to the brim with warmth.

He’s not sure why it surprises him when he dreams of their deaths the first night on the Muntjac. But he wakes up to Kady shaking him awake, while the rest of his family stares on worriedly. It takes him a few minutes to realize that this is real. That his dream was the lie.

That they never died.

They all sleep on the floor after that, a big pile of bodies with Todd at the center.

Two days later, he stands on the dock, staring across the village with shaking hands. He thinks he might throw up. Eliot settles a hand on his shoulder and grins down at him. “Lead the way, kid,” He says. Todd looks to his right, at Quentin, and takes a deep breath.

He doesn’t have to lead them far, though.

Because, like a cruel twist of fate—

He crashes into her as she’s chasing after her little sister through the market. He looks down at her, heart stopping and restarting as she opens her eyes and looks up at him.

One glance. That’s all it takes for him to remember he loves her. Actually—truly.

It washes over him fast and violent; a tsunami of love that he’s going to drown in if he isn’t careful.

“Oh. I’m so—“ She stops as she pulls away, slow realization dawning. Then, she shoves him backwards, glaring as her eyebrows furrow angrily. “You absolute—you—“ Her eyes go wide, mouth slamming shut so hard and fast that he can hear her teeth clank together as she moves backwards a step. “Your majesty,” She breathes, bowing slightly. “I can explain—“

Todd frowns, slightly, before realizing how this must look to her and moving forward. “Sofia—stop. You don’t need to—“

She doesn’t stop bowing, but she does open her eyes and look up, defiant. “You disappear after—after—“ Her eyes dart to his family, all crowded around them, and then back to him, locking her eyes on his. “After what you said. How shall I be expected to behave, crown prince?”

He winces. “I can explain.”

“You are royalty,” She says, finally moving to stand again, “We all know royalty isn’t expected to explain themselves.”

“I like her,” Kady says from behind him. “She’s feisty. Won’t take any of his shit.”

Sofia’s eyes dart behind him, flicking between him and his family. “What’s going on?” She asks after a moment. “Why—Todd, have you brought the entire royal court here?”

He shrugs a shoulder. “Yeah. They, uh. They wanted to meet you.”

Her eyes go wide, as she finally zeroes in on him. He can see the confusion settling in them. And the slow, cautious realization as she straightens out her shoulders. The anger’s still there, sizzling beneath the surface. “You told them about me.” It’s not even a question. She’s too smart.

God, he loves her.

“Kind of?” He says. She tilts her head, and he cautiously takes a step closer to her. “Something happened, and I had to—to fix it. And that meant—“ He pauses, frowning. “I don’t really know how to—“

Penny moves through his family and leans in, “He traveled back in time to save us all from a really shitty death.” He glances at Todd, “You’re welcome.” And then he disappears as Kady and Julia yank him back, muttering something Todd can’t hear. One of them slap him upside the back of the head. He’s willing to wager that it’s Kady.

Sofia stares at them for a long moment. “I—don’t know what I’m expected to say to that.”

“Nothing,” Todd says, shaking his head and taking another step towards her. She doesn’t back away, which, he hopes, is a good sign. “I want to say something, though.” He holds a hand out to her. She looks down at it, and back up to him, before sighing and taking it. Todd smiles. “I’d like to introduce you to my family.”

“Didn’t we agree—“

“I was an idiot.”

“Perhaps. But I’m still not—“

“I’m not asking you to. I just—I want you to be a part of my life. And to be a part of yours.”

She huffs, rolling her eyes. “That was gross.”

He scoffs. “Says the woman who—“

“You wouldn’t dare--“ She starts, narrowing her eyes dangerously.

Behind him, he hears someone laugh, and he’s reminded of where they are. He pulls her into him, ignoring her shocked gasp, and holds her to him. “There’s—Sofia,” He says, “I really want you to meet my dad.”

“I’ve already met your father.”

He shakes his head. “No,” He breathes, turning them both around so he can face his family. “I want you to meet my dad.” Quentin’s standing beside Eliot, smiling softly. Oblivious. He glances at Eliot, nudging him with his shoulder. Eliot raises his eyebrows, corners of his mouth twitching as he looks down at Quentin. “Sofia,” Todd says, locking his gaze on Quentin. Quentin frowns, looking behind him, and then back. His mouth drops open slightly, as Alice pushes him forward. He stumbles a step before straightening out and stopping in front of Todd and Sofia. “This is my dad, Quentin. Dad,” He smiles, “This is Sofia.”

Quentin looks between the two of them.

His chin dimples like he’s trying not to cry, and he pulls his lower lip into his mouth, wrapping his arms around his waist and nodding. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Sofia.” It sounds like he’s trying to remain regal, but his voices pitches halfway through the sentence, and Eliot moves forward to wrap an arm around his waist, lacing his fingers through Quentin’s at Quentins hip.

Sofia smiles. “It’s a pleasure to meet you as well, your majesty.”

Quentin sniffles, shaking his head, “You don’t need to call me majesty. Just—you can. You can call me Quentin.”

“I’d be honored.”

Quentin’s eyes dart over to Todd. “I like her,” He says.

Todd grins. “So do I.”

Sofia looks up at him, rolling her eyes. “All right,” She says, “This doesn’t get you off the hook—“

“Trust me,” Todd replies, “I’m well aware.”

“Good. Then I’d like to invite you all to dinner.” She turns back to them, “It’s not exactly food fit for a king, but I’m told my fathers stew is the best in the village.”

Quentin and Eliot grin at her, “We aren’t picky,” Quentin says. Eliot makes a face, but Quentin subtly elbows him in the ribs. “We’re just happy to get to know the woman Todd loves.”

Sofia looks back at Todd, smile tugging at her lips. “I like the sound of that.”

He stares down at her, something warm and kind tugging at his heart for once, nodding. “So do I,” He repeats, reaching down to lace his fingers through hers. “I’d also like to talk to your sister, before she takes it upon herself to throw rocks at my head for disappearing.”

“I think that can be arranged.” She glances back at his family, “Follow me. Father will be pleased to have guests.”

Later, when his belly is full of stew, and Sofia’s off talking to Alice and Fen, gathering stories from Todd’s childhood, he makes his way to the beach to stare across the water.

He wonders if he’ll ever forget what happened.

Part of him wants to.

Wants to erase their deaths from his memory entirely. Forget the vision quest the fairy queen sent him on. Forget his family hating him for a year. Forget the hopelessness. Forget walking into the throne room that day. Being crowned king. Meeting Jane in the woods. He just wants to leave it all in the past, and pretend he never went back. To be the Todd he was before his family died and he brought them back.

But there’s another part; stronger and smarter that knows he needs to keep it with him. Hold it close to his heart. Not just because he got to know his mother. Not just because he learned her quirks and bad habits, and actually felt her love coursing through him. Or because he finally got to Earth. Or because he met Jane Chatwin. Nothing so obvious.

He has to keep it. Has to hold onto the memories, like his dads did with their separate timeline, because it changed him. Sure, it broke him down, and took everything good in his life and crushed it to dust. But it changed him. For the better.

His family won’t admit it. Not even Penny. But, before, he was selfish. Spoiled.

Before, he only put himself first.

Before, he didn’t even care about Quentin, not really. Not in a way that counted.

He didn’t know how to. Didn’t know he needed to.

He didn’t know a life without their unconditional love.

Now he does. He knows what it is to be on the outside. To bare the weight of the universe on his shoulders. To watch his family die. To have his mothers love. And to be the one they can count on.

He looks over his shoulder at his family. They’re talking and laughing with Sofia and her family. He can’t believe he doubted loving her; not when she’s standing so near, smiling. Not when they’re looking at her like she belongs. Like she could one day be his bride.

He swallows thickly, smiling to himself, and looks back across the beach to the water.

A few days ago, he’d have sworn he’d never be happy again.

It’s going to be a while before he heals completely. Before he stops having nightmares. Before he stops waking up, shocked to find his family laughing and smiling and alive. Before he can really believe it’s all over.

But, at least right now, he can admit to himself that he’s going to be okay.

They all are.

#lifeboat #the magicians #riz writes #I SWEAR IF IT DOESNT POST CORRECTLY THIS TIME I AM GOING TO SPONTANEOUSLY FUCKING COMBUST

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sadlittlenerdking · 6 years

Text

Dark Places

The Magicians

Word count: 3k

Summary: Everyone but Quentin dies, and he goes to the one person he knows of that can turn back time.

Warning: This is angsty as all hell.

He barely manages to complete the quest. His body aches, and his mind’s screaming at him, telling him it’s not worth it. But they didn’t—none of this happened for . . . for nothing. There were too many sacrifices, too much lost, for him to turn his back on the quest. To turn his back on magic and, possibly, the only chance he has to fix this. If he brings magic back he can fix it all.

At least thats what he tells himself right up until magic is restored.

And then he collapses on the floor, a heap of misery and pain. There’s so much pain. It races through his every bone, courses through his veins like it’s molten lava, turning his insides into stone. He sits there for he doesn’t even know how long, his back pushed up against the stone of the castle walls. He’s not even sure how he got back to Fillory. How he ended up in the throne room. All he knows is he can’t move. He can’t move until he finds a solution.

Because he can’t do this.

He’s never been good at being alone. And he can already feel that darkness, the one he’s kept suppressed in the name of completing the quest, creeping in at the edges of his vision. The thoughts of suicide seep in at the corners of his mind, slinking in like dark shadows of the night, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. But they don’t need to wait, because Quentin is defenseless. He’s got nothing keeping him from pushing up from the floor, running to the balcony, and just—learning to fly. Or fall. Whichever comes first.

But something keeps him where he is. Cemented to the floor.

There’s got to be a way to fix everything.

He closes his eyes, his head falling back to rest against the wall. This is the first time he’s really sat down since it happened. He’s not even sure he’s slept. The tugging lull of sleep on his eyelids is more than enough to attest to that much. But he can’t give in to sleep. He knows what lies on the other side. Fully aware of what nightmares his mind will pull from his memories, and make him live over and over and over while he lies paralyzed unable to stop it.

Unable to save them.

Again.

He opens his eyes, a dull throbbing in his chest.

God.

He’d been so close to stopping them. So fucking near. Perhaps thats the hardest part. Knowing he wasn’t fast enough. Knowing that had he run just a little faster, pushed a little harder, they’d all still be alive. He had the answers. He knew why the spell wouldn’t work, even with the fairy dust. He knew what would happen.

And instead of stopping it, he’d barely been able to catch Eliot’s attention just in time to—

He shakes his head.

Fuck. No.

He can’t go there.

He has to find a solution.

As much as he wants to end this. As much as the thoughts dance around in his head, and the light of the balcony shines down on him, all warm and welcoming—as much as he wants it, he can’t. He can’t give in. He lasted long enough to bring back magic. He just needs to figure out the next step. He survived long enough to do the one thing he knew would give them all a fighting chance.

Now he just has to survive a little longer.

He owes them that much.

He can’t change the past but he can—

He can change the past.

Holy shit, he can.

His breath hitches as he finally moves, his bones creaking and aching as he nearly jumps away from the wall in search of the keys. He doesn’t even care when his bare skin grazes against the one he’d so desperately avoided all this time. Doesn’t even notice the manifestation of all his misery casually leaning against the wall watching him. Because he can’t say anything Quentin isn’t already thinking. He digs through the keys, fingers slipping over copper clumsily, until he finally, finally wraps his hands around the one he’s looking for.

He twists until he’s sitting on his knees, and cupping the key in front of him.

This is it.

He can use this to fix it.

He climbs to his feet shakily. The world goes wobbly for a second, dizzying and dancing until it balances itself out and Quentin remembers he hasn’t eaten or had anything to drink in days. But it’s okay. He can eat and drink and do whatever the fuck else when he fixes this. He blinks away the blurry vision, shaking his head slightly, as he takes a wobbly step towards the doors on the opposite side of the throne room. He takes another step, pulling the key in and clutching it to his chest. This is the only way. This is his—their—salvation.

He follows a map he’d written lifetimes ago. He’s not even sure how he remembers it. But it’s there, stuck in his mind, vague but just strong enough to outshine the memories he doesn’t want to access.

She’s not even surprised when he stumbles through the barrier.

“Hello, Quentin,” Jane says, looking up from her plants. “I had wondered when I’d be seeing you.” Quentin sways in place, and she shakes her head, waving a hand as a chair appears. “Please, do sit. You look exhausted.”

He doesn’t even spare a glance at the chair. “Undo it,” He says, taking an unstable step towards her. “Turn it back. Let us—let us redo it.” His throat is dry, and his words are hoarse from lack of use. It almost feels weird to speak again. He hasn’t said anything since it happened. Since he screamed across planes of grass…

She clicks her tongue, turning her back on him as she settles her attention on one of her plants. She reaches up and trims an out of place twig. “I’m afraid that’s not how it works,” She says, soft, as she clips another twig.

“That’s not how what—“ He pauses, swallowing thick, as she clips at another plant, “Would you please just ignore the fucking plants for five god damned seconds!”

Jane pauses, before sighing, and setting the cutting sheers beside the plant and turning around to face him. “Honestly, Quentin,” She says, and he wishes he had the energy to punch the look of pity off her face, “You really should sit down. You’re in no shape—“

“Please,” He says, instead, interrupting her. He reaches out, holding the key in front of him, delicate. His hands shake around it, as he holds it, palms up. “You’re the only one who—who can fix it. Just. Give me one more chance. Please.” His voice cracks on the last syllable, as he stretches his arms out even further, just in case she can’t tell whats in his hands.

She purses her lips. “Quentin.”

“My friends are dead.”

“It’s not the first time they’ve died.”

“But you can fix it!”

She shakes her head sadly, “Oh, Quentin,” she murmurs, holding her hands out at her sides. “You’re forgetting one thing. I’m dead, as well. I can’t leave this bubble.”

Quentin stumbles backwards a step, shaking his head. It’s more erratic than hers. More desperate. Tears sting at his eyes, and he realizes for the first time, just how much he hurts. Beyond the shock and determination. Beyond the desperation. His bones don’t ache because he’s been fighting to bring magic back. His heart isn’t heavy and practically bursting because of the quest.

God, he just wants his friends.

He needs his friends.

“Please,” he pleads, voice breaking as a sob bubbles up at the back of his throat and cuts him off. “Please. I’ll do anything. Just turn back the clock. Give me another chance to save them.” He squeezes his eyes shut as another dizzy spell washes over him, blurring the world around him. He sways in place. “Please,” he tries again, opening his eyes. Hot tears stream down his cheeks, “Please, Jane.”

“This is how it was meant to play out, Quentin. Who are we to change fate?”

Who are they to change fate? Is she actually kidding? He squints his eyes at her, his anguish suddenly morphing into something darker. How the fuck dare she. After everything she did to get her desired outcome? After everything she changed and took from them? After the lives she ruined to get what she wanted?

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” He says, rage lacing his voice. “Who are we to change fate? That’s all you do! You used us as pawns to defeat your brother—to fix the mess you made! You turned us into martyrs and addicts and victims. You—you changed our entire lives and who we were supposed to be! And now!” He takes an angry step towards her, ignoring the way the world spins around him, “You have the audacity to say no? You took everything from us! All you have to do is turn the clock back one more time! You owe them that much!”

She doesn’t even both wiping off the look of pity. “Quentin,” she says, chastising and he hates her. Oh god, does he fucking hate her. “This is not the same thing. What I did was for the fate of magic—“

“They died for the fucking fate of magic! It’s back! I know how to fucking—I know how to finish the quest. Just turn back the clock. I can’t —“ he breaks off, shaking his head again and pointing a trembling finger at her, “You owe me,” he growls. “Don’t think I don’t know that you’re the one that planted the cancer in my dad.” Her mouth falls open and he nods. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. You took Julia from Brakebills. You made Eliot an addict. You made my dad sick. All so we could be stronger when it came time to defeat the beast, right?” When she doesn’t respond, he repeats, louder, “Right?”

She clenches her jaw. “I will admit,” she says, “I did some awful things in order to—“

“You can fix it! Just turn back the clock!” His anger fades back to pleading, as he clasps his hands together, “Please, Jane. I will—I’ll. I’ll forgive it all. Just turn back the clock. One more time.”

“Quentin—“

“I am begging you.”

She rushes forward to grab him by the shoulders, “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can!”

She shakes her head, rolling her lips, and squeezing his shoulders. “Quentin, if I do what you want, I’ll die.” She raises her eyebrows, “And I’ve worked much too hard to stay alive. I’m sorry. But there’s nothing to be done.”

He stares at her for a few long moments. Nothing to be done? She just admitted that she can do it. She’s just too selfish to. Fuck that. He breaks free of her grasp, and lunges forward, stumbling across the clearing. She steps aside, and he crashes into the plant and the table it’s sitting atop.

“Quentin,” She says, too pitying, “Really, you need to sit down. Let me make you a cup of tea, and we can work out how this all—“

He wraps his hands around the sheers she’d set on the table and whips around, holding them out at her. His hands shake, but he keeps them pointed directly at her. “Jane,” He says, taking a trembling step closer, “You are going to bring them back. You’re—You’re going to think about someone other than yourself for once.” She raises her eyebrows, but he takes another step, “If you leave this bubble, you die, right?”

“That is correct.” She smiles, close lipped, “But, we both know you’re not capable of—“

“You don’t know what I’m capable of!” He bellows, the sound ripping out of his throat angrily, “I’ve lost everything! And I will do what the fuck ever it takes to bring them back!” He takes another unsteady step, “Including killing you. So,” He takes a deep, steadying breath, “You either bring them back and die doing something good for once—or. Or. You just . . . die. For nothing.” He laughs, the sound hollow and lacking humor, “Like they did.”

“Quentin, dear,” She actually takes a step towards him, holding a hand out between them, “I live every consecutive moment in this bubble. You don’t think I’ve seen this story play out? You won’t kill me. You can’t. You’re not a murderer.”

“I’m not?” He asks, blankly, tilting his head, “That’s funny. Because from what I remember . . . that’s exactly what you made me. With all your tweaking and meddling. All your time loops. I am a murderer, Jane. I’ve fucking killed gods in the name of saving the people I care about. You think I won’t kill you because you’re some character in a series that you planted in my life?” He doesn’t wait for her to respond before he’s taking two more steps, grip tightening on the sheers, “If you think my nostalgia is going to save you, you’re wrong. I—I have nothing left to live for. Nothing.” He spits the word out like it’s venom, “And that’s because of you. Now you’re going to do something useful with your life, and turn back time. Or I’m going to slit your throat.”

“If you kill me, you’ll have no opportunity—“

“Then I’ll make you suffer until you have no choice but to bring them back!” He exclaims, extending his free hand at his side. “I will do whatever the fuck I have to.”

She stares at him, her eyes flickering between his face and the sheers. He wonders if she’s thinking she can rip them out of his hand before he can react. If she can stop him, before he does anything permanent. But magic’s back. And using something as mundane as sheers isn’t good enough. So, he lets the sheers fall to the ground beside him. They plop into the grass, after a single, small bounce, and then lie there innocently. He looks down at the sheers, and then back to her, wide eyed and empty. “Jane,” He says, “Turn back the clock.” His voice is almost terrifyingly calm, and somehow the shaking and trembling has all but ceased.

Her gaze locks on the sheers on the ground, before she looks back up at him in confusion. “Quentin . . .” She starts.

“When you made us into your soldiers,” Quentin interrupts, taking the steps between them, “We learned a lot of spells. A whole lot of magic.” He reaches out at his sides with both arms, laughing, empty, “And magic’s back, Jane. I don’t need a weapon to kill you. I don’t need your sheers.” His arms fall back to his sides, fingers twitching as he sneers at her, “Turn. Back. The. Clock.”

“This isn’t you—“

“Of course it isn’t!” He yells, “I don’t need magic to survive! I just need them!” HIs chin trembles as he finally stops, barely a foot away from her, “Take them, and you take my humanity. Take them, and you take anything, and everything, that makes life worth living.” He raises his hands in front of himself, fingers flexing as he readies himself to cast a spell. “I don’t want to be empty, Jane,” He says, softer, as her eyes dart down to his hands, “I don’t want to be angry and alone. All I want is them.” He purses his lips, with a short nod, “And once I have them back, I’ll be okay again. You’re the only one that can make that possible. So, you’ll do it. Whether you want to,” His fingers fly through the air, casting with near perfection as he locks into eye contact with her, “Or not.”

She seems to realize what he’s doing only moments before he finishes the spell. Her eyes go wide, and she lunges forward as if to grab his hands, “Que—“ But she stops, her mouth falling open, and her limbs freezing in the movement. One hand is outstretched, just inches from Quentin’s. He stares at her for a long moment, his heart pounding in his chest.

“I’m sorry, Jane,” He says, stepping backwards and straightening out his shoulders. “But this is the only way.” He closes his eyes, eyebrows furrowing angrily as he wills away the tears. When everything goes back he won’t even remember. It’ll be okay. He won’t remember. He opens his eyes again and swallows thickly, before reaching up and casting the second half of the spell.

He’d read about it before they defeated the beast. A spell to take away ones autonomy. To make them a mindless zombie, to follow every command. Part of him is surprised he remembers it. The other part is just grateful that he does. She’ll die when she does it. And he’ll be back in a world without magic. All he has to do is run faster. He just has to make it to them before they blow themselves up in a magical explosion. And then everything will be okay.

This time everything will be all right.

He won’t have the memory of looking into Eliot’s eyes right before he died. He won’t have the memory of being blasted backwards while his friends scream in agony, and he crawls across the Brakebills grass, trying to get to them. Trying to save them.

He won’t have any of it.

But, he will have them.

It’ll be okay, he thinks. He won’t even remember killing her.

He finishes the spell, and his hands fall back to his side, as the dizziness returns. She stays still for a few seconds longer, until she’s moving across the clearing, reaching into her pocket and pulling out the watch and the key. He can still see her, behind her eyes, fighting it. But’s it a powerful spell, and even someone as powerful as Jane Chatwin can’t fight it. There’s no history of anyone being able to out maneuver such a spell.

His legs give out from beneath him, and he falls onto the grass in a clumsy heap. He watches her, as she casts the spell to send him back, silently working. Her eyes dart towards him a few times, but he leans back in the grass, chest growing heavier with every moment that passes.

Then there’s a flash.

And he’s running across Brakebills, screaming out their names.

#the magicians #riz writes #i wrote a thing #it has an ambiguous ending for two reasons #one because this is either a time loop where he lives this over and over again or he gets that happy ever after #and two because i couldnt decide #so you imagine lmao

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