#dc dress history | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 9 months

Text

Comet Donati [Chapter 7: Heart Attack]

A/N: Hello all! Only 3 chapters left!!! 🥰 Thank you so much for loving this fic and giving all my eccentric AU ideas a chance. I’m currently in Washington DC visiting one of my best friends, so if I’m a little bit tardy replying to your comments/messages then that’s why. Don’t fear!! I will check in as soon as I can, and I am still amazed by and will forever cherish your support. 💜

Series Summary: Sex, drugs, boy bands. You are a kinda-therapist recruited (via nepotism) to help Comet Donati through a recent crisis. Things are casual with Aegon, very not-casual with Aemond. Loosely inspired by One Direction.

Chapter Warnings: Language, references to sexual content (+18), drugs, alcohol, smoking, Shelby being a bigger plague than the locusts of Egypt, mental health struggles, references to violence and abuse, New Jersey, pregnancy, mini golf, lots of content for the Cregan girlies.

Selected Chapter Quote: “We’re meant to be together. We have so much history.”

Word count: 6.2k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @doingfondue @catalina-howard @randomdragonfires @myspotofcraziness @arcielee @fan-goddess @talesofoldandnew @marvelescvpe @tinykryptonitewerewolf @mariahossain @chainsawsangel @darkenchantress @not-a-glad-gladiator @gemini-mama @trifoliumviridi @herfantasyworldd @babyblue711 @namelesslosers @thelittleswanao3 @daenysx @moonlightfoxx @libroparaiso @burningcoffeetimetravel-fics @mizfortuna @florent1s @heimtathurs @bhanclegane @poohxlove @narwhal-swimmingintheocean @heavenly1927 @mariahossain @echos-muses @padfooteyes @minttea07 @queenofshinigamis @juliavilu1 @amiraisgoingthruit @lauraneedstochill @wintrr13 @r0segard3n @seabasscevans @tsujifreya

Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist! 💜

You type into Google as you hide in the public bathroom stall, pink tile walls and mint green porcelain, very 1950s, phantom drips of water and humming florescent lights: Can Plan B make your period late?

You scroll through the results, clutching your iPhone with both hands. Faintly, you can hear the rest of the band outside, chattering, laughing, slurping on Slush Puppies, smacking trees and rocks with their golf clubs. Yes, the consensus seems to be; Plan B can delay your period. Incidentally, so can pregnancy.

“Fuck,” you whimper. You peer down at your panties, as if you can force bloodstains to appear: sparce rosy threads of warning, dark red splotches like rust, you aren’t particular. You’ll take anything. “Fuck,” you say again, defeated. You get dressed, wash your hands, and head back out into the cloudless afternoon sunshine.

“Stargirl, it’s your turn!” Aegon shouts as you trot over to them: tenth hole, shaped like an L, featuring an intimidating loop de loop. The course is dinosaur themed; Rhaena picked it. Aegon points to Jace. “This deformed bastard wanted to skip you.”

“I told you,” Jace moans. His speech is garbled and lisping, his face comically swollen, bruised yellow-emerald-indigo and drooling blood, stitches above his left eyebrow. He just had his dental implants placed yesterday; the four teeth that he lost at Club Camelot could not be readily located for reattachment. “I can’t keep track of who’s next. I’m on like four different opiates.”

Baela frets over him. “Shh, shh, baby. Try not to talk.” There’s something about watching someone get almost-murdered that makes you want to forgive them, you suppose.

You grab your club and golf ball, dark blue, from where you left them by a tree. Rhaena gives you a covert little thumbs up and raised eyebrows. Everything good? You smile—too widely, insincere, a liar—and nod. Technically, you have yet to obtain concrete evidence to the contrary.

You take your turn, somewhat awkwardly due to the splint that still encumbers your dominant hand. You are thinking about anything but mini golf. Your ball goes halfway through the loop de loop and then comes rolling back. How many strokes? Four, five, you lose count, it doesn’t matter. Aegon is snickering, though not in a mean way, never in a mean way. Aemond is watching you. He does this constantly; you can feel his eyes—river water, otherworldly atmosphere—on you all the time, you can see him on the periphery of your vision. But when you glance at Aemond, he looks away. You’re wearing flip flops, a black NSYNC t-shirt, and bright pink shorts that Baela insists are of the very short variety. Aemond is staring a little extra hard today. Shelby alternates between glaring at him and at you.

Jace putts next. He misses the ball twice. On the third try, he hits it into a nearby pond. Golden koi fish scatter beneath the rippling sheen of the water.

“Loser,” Aegon declares mildly. “Criston, why the fuck are we in New Jersey?”

“Because you’re playing three shows at the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford,” Criston says as he putts; his green golf ball sails through the loop de loop, bounces off a wall, and then rolls straight into the cup, a hole in one. “One Direction did it, Taylor Swift did it, and now you’re going to do it too. And if you don’t make it too unbearable for me, I’ll even take you to the beach while we’re here. Okay?”

“Okay,” Aegon agrees. He slurps on his Slush Puppie. “Oh, Aemond, I need the Netflix password.”

“You forgot it again?!” Daeron says. Jace, groaning softly, lies down on the ground in a patch of shade. Baela gets a bottle of Orajel rinse out of her purse and starts pouring it into his mouth.

“Get your own account,” Aemond snaps at Aegon. “I think you can afford it.”

“Bruh, that’s not the point! I don’t know where I left off in Grey’s Anatomy!”

They keep bickering. You stop listening. You can only hear the sounds of rustling leaves, squawking seagulls, the whistling of the warm August wind. You can only feel the weight of Aemond’s half-fascinated, half-resentful gaze on you. He wouldn’t believe me, you think. If I really am pregnant, he would never believe that it was an accident. He would never believe that I was that guilelessly, unambitiously stupid. Hell, I did it and I barely believe it.

You steal a glimpse of Aemond—black shirt and black sunglasses, white shorts, Adidas sneakers—and he turns away, pretending to pick dirt off his golf ball. Interestingly, he will talk to you about things not related to that night in Tokyo; perhaps it would be too suspicious not to, a neon sign for the rest of the band to read. But he never allows himself to be alone with you. And he never touches you, not even a grazing of hands or an absentminded bump as he passes you in aisles or hallways.

Bump, you think miserably. An inauspicious choice of words.

“We should watch Se7en,” Aegon is saying now. “Comet fam movie night.”

You mutter: “We’re not watching Se7en.”

“What’s Se7en about?” Rhaena asks.

“You wouldn’t like it.”

“What’s in the box?!” Aegon shouts dramatically—quoting the beautiful yet doomed David Mills, a name he once borrowed to schedule a Zoom meeting with you—and then cackles. It’s his turn. He clobbers his golf ball and sends it flying through the loop de loop; it pops over the barrier and disappears into a bush. Startled squirrels dart out of the leaves.

“Loser!” Jace slurs as he lies sprawled across the ground, vindicated.

“Stop spitting blood everywhere,” Aemond says. He putts next, and badly: poor depth perception. “You’re getting it on my sneakers.”

“Watch it, cyclops.” Jace points to his own stitches, bruises, surgically replaced teeth. “I let you have this one. Now we’re even. But next time I won’t be so charitable.”

“You’re not even,” Aegon tells Jace, abruptly severe. He whips off his aviator sunglasses, crouches over Jace, glaring and thunderous like a storm. Baela observes this warily. “Not even close.”

Jace is intrigued. “No?”

“No. Your face will heal.” Then Aegon pokes him in the jaw and Jace screams, tears slithering down his puffy, mottled cheeks. Cregan yanks Aegon away before Baela can scratch his eyes out. Criston repossesses Aegon’s blue raspberry Slush Puppie as punishment. Luke wins the game, five under par.

Comet’s first shows in the United States this tour start just like the last few in Asia: Jace is iced, painted with concealer, thoroughly medicated, numbed into semi-consciousness. He does lines of coke in the bathroom under Cregan’s supervision. He can’t perform without it. Criston tried to negotiate a month off for Jace, but the label’s message was clear: get him on stage, we don’t care how you do it, we don’t want to know about it, here’s a blank check, figure it out or we’ll find another manager who can. Now Criston watches Jace with his arms crossed over his chest, his dark eyes wounded and anxious, his shoulders slumped beneath the weight of what he believes is failure.

The story released to the press is that Jace fell down a flight of stairs but is recovering smoothly. He can barely sing; his mic is turned up, and during Jace’s verses Cregan or Luke layer their voice with his. He wobbles and flubs his way through Night 1 in East Rutherford. You spend the show staring up at the stage without seeing it. Baela and Rhaena are with you, but you aren’t really with them; you feel like if they reached out to touch you, their hands would find only translucent emptiness like a mirage. Shelby is flocked by fellow influencers that she’s invited in from New York City. Aemond is somewhere, somewhere: lurking in shadows, brooding, avoiding, musing, suffering, jotting down starlight-colored judgments in his black-paged notebook.

Per tradition, the band and their entourage coalesce in Jace’s suite after the show. Jace himself, the gracious host, promptly collapses on a couch and lies there senseless as the party spins around him like the planets of a solar system. Baela is perched dutifully beside him, holding ice packs to his jaw, wiping away drool the color of one of Aemond’s Brambles. A tattoo artist is inking a goldfinch, New Jersey’s state bird, to the top of Jace’s right foot. Criston is across the room and speaking—rather tensely, it seems—with cigar-smoking label executives. Shelby is snapping photos with her friends; they take turns posing each other out on the balcony, adjusting elbows and wrists and knees, swiping away stray flecks of mascara, rearranging hair, recommending plastic surgeons. Aegon is typing WhatsApp messages—mostly emojis, from what you can see—to Miley Cyrus. At Luke’s prompting, Aemond begins sharing his comments to the presently sentient members of Comet. He puffs on one of his Benson & Hedges cigarettes as he reads aloud. He kindly skips over any criticisms of Jace’s performance.

You can’t stand hearing Aemond’s voice; not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because there isn’t, because you can’t stop remembering what he said to you in that florescent-white bathroom at Club Camelot in Tokyo, because he uses his words on so many people who aren’t you, because sooner or later your time with Comet will be over and you’ll only ever hear him again through Spotify songs and YouTube clips from before the accident, because he will one day be a ghost who haunts you, rattling doorknobs and chilling pockets of air but never speaking. You escape to ask the bartender: “Can I get a Coke?”

“A rum and Coke?”

“No.”

“Like…white powder coke?”

“No, a Coca-Cola. With nothing else in it.”

“Okay, whatever,” the bartender says, perplexed. He fills a glass with ice and dark liquid that pops and fizzes with carbonation, then slides it across the counter to you. You meander out into the hallway where you can be alone, where you don’t have to pretend to be okay.

The carpet is gold but frayed, the walls adorned with faux marble columns and scuffs from recklessly handled suitcases. Even the hotels are worse in New Jersey. You sip your soda—nonalcoholic, huh? you think, then push it aside—and roam past suite doors and vending machines until you reach the cove of elevators. There’s a full-length mirror hanging on the wall there, gilded, gaudy. You frown at yourself, a reflection that suddenly looks a bit like a stranger. You’re wearing a short seafoam green dress, gold earrings and sandals, and an eerily vacuous expression. You turn and move your hair aside so you can peer over your shoulder at what’s been indelibly penned there since Rome: the tiny comet, the lyrics that encircle it.

I wanted to remember this band forever. To remember Aemond. You can feel your stomach drop as it grows heavy with dread. The pulsing music from Jace’s suite has followed you down the hall, Sugar by Robin Schulz and Francesco Yates. I think I might just have more than a tattoo to remember him by after all.

One of the elevators dings and opens. A man lumbers out, towering, broad, monstrous. You gape up at him: brown threadbare coat, heavy boots, unruly dark beard, grey eyes like a bleak winter sky. There is a miasma that colors the air around him with smoke and alcohol, sweat and earth.

“Hello there,” he says, politely enough. His voice is such a baritone rumble that it’s difficult to understand. He has a British accent, but not like Aegon’s, not like Aemond’s. He reminds you of someone you can’t quite place. “I’m looking for a certain young gentleman. I’m hoping you can point me in his direction.”

“Sure,” you reply, trying to disguise your shock so you don’t offend him. He could be someone important. He could be an eccentric producer or a consultant. Or a drug dealer. “Who…uh…who was it you were hoping to speak with…?”

He smiles: sharp canine teeth yellowed by nicotine, glinting eyes like silver coins. “Cregan Stark.”

“Okay,” you stammer. Drug dealer?? “Okay, okay, I’ll…uh…I’ll go get him.”

You hurry down the hall and into Jace’s crowded, smokey suite, clinking glasses and flirtatious titters in dim lighting like late twilight. You return your empty drink to the bartender, then tap Cregan on the shoulder and inform him that someone out in the hallway is asking for him. He doesn’t seem surprised to hear this. Drug dealer, you think confidently. Cregan gulps his vodka shot and follows you out of the suite. He steps through the doorway. He turns towards the stranger. And then he stops dead. His eyes go wide. The blood drains from his face. And Cregan—immovable, inscrutable, unflappable Cregan—shrinks until he is a child again.

Immediately, you know you’ve made a mistake. You reach for him. “Cregan, wait—”

“My son,” the monstrous man sighs. And of course now you’ve realized exactly who the mirrorlike grey of his eyes reminded you of. “My son.”

You can’t stop him. How could you stop him? Faster than you can think, he has crossed the space between you and entombed Cregan in a stifling embrace. Cregan stands paralyzed, his eyes shifting, searching for escape. Tentatively, appeasingly, his hands slowly rise to hug the man in return.

“Criston?!” you shout. But within the suite, he cannot hear you over the music and the berating of smoke-veiled, bejeweled label executives.

“Did you forget about me, huh?” the man asks Cregan gruffly. And as he steps back he grips one of Cregan’s shoulders: not like Criston would, not like a father, like a vice, like a bear trap. He shakes Cregan once, not too hard. “You can fly your private jet all over the world but you can’t call your own father back? Huh? Huh?!” He shakes Cregan again, harder.

“Criston!” you scream. “Security! Somebody!”

Nobody can hear me. Nobody is coming.

You sprint into Jace’s suite, seize Criston by one hand, drag him out into the hall. On the blurry periphery of your vision, you can see Aemond getting up off the couch to follow you. The second he spots the monstrous man, Criston is roaring. “No no no, get away from him!” He pushes between Cregan and the giant, terrifying, wrathful. The man dwarfs him. Criston doesn’t seem to know it. “You can’t be here. We’ve been over this, you’re not allowed to be here—”

The man tries to reach around him to clutch at Cregan’s shirt. Aemond pulls you away from the scuffle. Criston hits the man in the solar plexus; he is momentarily stunned, wheezing. By the time he straightens up, Criston—louder than you, bellowing and fierce—has summoned security. They are swarming the man and escorting him back down the hallway towards the elevators. Aemond goes to Cregan. Criston looks at you. You’re quivering, penitent.

“I had no idea…he asked for Cregan…I would never have…I thought maybe he was a friend of the band…”

“He’s on our no fly list,” Criston says. His voice is tired yet patient. “But you wouldn’t know that.”

You try to apologize to Cregan, but he isn’t listening to you. He’s listening to Aemond. Aemond is speaking to him, low and calm, too quietly for you to hear. “I’m okay,” Cregan says unsteadily. “I’m fine.”

“It’s alright if you’re not,” Aemond tells him.

And you know that right now you are unnecessary, intrusive. Criston goes downstairs to figure out how Comet’s security guards in the lobby didn’t catch this and—presumably—to ensure that the invader is properly dealt with. Aemond slings an arm across Cregan’s shoulders and leads him back to the party where he is cared for, welcome, valued, safe. You hide in your own suite and try not to think about the dates on the calendar—missing blood, summer days ticking down towards zero—as you steep in a hot bath and attempt to scrub everything you’ve done wrong, today, yesterday, ever, off your skin. Then you change into an oversized Backstreet Boys t-shirt and your favorite Cookie Monster pajama pants.

You try to sleep but of course you can’t, surrounded by a silence that only gets louder. When you hear the swipe of a keycard and the creaking of your door, you don’t know who to expect: Cregan, Criston, Rhaena, Luke, Baela, Jace, Daeron, Shelby, Aemond, ghosts. The clopping of his Crocs gives him away, neon pink to match his tank top. “I’m really not in the mood for anything resembling sex.”

Aegon replies as he kicks off his Crocs: “Did I ask, succubus?” He crawls into the bed, throws an arm casually across your waist, rests his head on your belly as your fingers thread through his chaotic blond hair, fond and tender. He burrows into you, into your softness and your warmth and your truth and your mysteries. Sometimes you feel like you’ll give until he falls into you like a trapdoor, the bones of his hands tangling around your spine, his blood vessels spilling into all of your rage-scarlet cavities, hollows of the flesh, hollows of the soul. “You’re sad.”

You stare up at the ceiling. “I have a lot on my mind.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know what. That’s the strange thing. Usually I can tell.”

“You’ve been gone.”

He looks up at you, confused. “I’ve been right here.”

“You know what I meant.”

Aegon doesn’t argue with you, doesn’t try to defend himself, doesn’t make promises both of you know he could never keep. He only lays his head down on your belly again and pulls himself closer to you, closer, closer, melting into your melancholy, dissolving into dreams.

~~~~~~~~~~

“I was eleven when he broke my arm. Thirteen when he cracked my skull for the first time. Then I got big enough to hurt him back.” Cregan looks out over the waves: blue currents, white froth, sunbeams like glinting blades. As Criston promised, Comet is spending an afternoon in Seaside Heights. You and Cregan are sitting on the sand together twenty yards from the others. “I grew up in a two-bedroom cabin with no electricity or running water. We had a metal wash tub outside, ate deer and squirrels and rabbits, never had clothes that fit, never saw a doctor except when what was wrong might kill us. We had a woodstove and chopped down trees to burn in the winter. I had eight siblings, six of whom are still alive. Barnett overdosed. Courtland drove his friend’s Nissan into a brick wall. I’m not sure it was accidental.”

Your words are soft like a whisper, like gentle hands. “Cregan, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not…” His voice breaks. He stops for a while, composes himself, begins again. “It’s not something I talk about. Not because I’m trying to forget it. I can’t forget it, I’ll never be able to, I understand that, believe me. There’s just nothing to be gained from talking about it. I never feel better afterwards. I always feel worse.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?”

You wait, watching him. There’s something he needs to say. Down the beach a ways, Baela is doing yoga, her bare feet sure and agile in shifting sand. Rhaena, Luke, and Aemond are flying kites in the breeze: black dragons, green dragons. Shelby is, predictably, filming them from where she stands on Aemond’s good side. Aegon and Daeron are swimming so far out that you’re beginning to worry about sharks. Criston is parked under an umbrella with an unconscious Jace, reading Memoirs Of A Geisha and eating a sandwich full of something called pork roll.

“After Comet happened, I got all of them out,” Cregan continues. “My mum, my siblings. Good houses in safe neighborhoods. Security in case Dad makes an appearance. He does, every once in a while. He’s locked up, he’s free, he’s locked up again. He has nothing else to do but haunt us. I’ve been waiting for him to die since I was old enough to understand what a graveyard is.” Cregan looks at you. “Does that make me a bad person?”

“No,” you answer immediately.

“The thing is…” He holds out one large hand, palm down, like he’s resting it on a table. Then he shakes it. “Nothing ever feels stable. Nothing ever feels safe. No matter how much money I see stack up in accounts, I lie awake at night wondering what I’ll do if it disappears. So many people rely on me. I can’t stop worrying I’ll end up back in that cabin somehow. I can still hear drops of rainwater seeping in through the gaps in the roof. I can still smell burning wood.”

“The fact that you feel this way, given your history, is completely logical…even if the fear itself is not. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah,” Cregan says. “Yeah, I think so.”

“Do you think it would help if we sat down and looked at the numbers and did some math? Because I suspect that even with a hundred dependents, you’d easily be able to float them for the rest of your lifetime just using the money you already have. And there will be royalties from Comet’s songs forever. Maybe if we can show you exactly how improbable your worst case scenario is, that fear will begin to fade a bit. Not go away, not completely, maybe not ever…but I think you’ll be able to quiet it down.”

“I’ll give it a try. If you recommend it.” Cregan lights a cigarette and takes a drag. Criston glances over and then pretends he didn’t notice. “I have a daughter,” Cregan says; and you can’t stop the shock from hitting your face like a fist. He smiles faintly, wistfully. “I know. I’ve worked very hard to make sure she is kept away from…” He gestures broadly. “All of this.” Fame. Debauchery. Tabloids. Reddit threads. “I was way too young. And her mother and I…we were never really together. It was contentious for a while, but we’ve sorted through things. I support them financially, obviously. And when I’m not on tour or in the studio, I disappear up to Lancaster for a few weeks at a time and no one is the wiser.”

You study him as wind tears in off the Atlantic Ocean, as seagulls swoop and screech overhead. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate how you’ve protected her once she can understand.”

“I don’t know how to be a father. Not a good one. But I try. I don’t just show up for movie nights and birthdays. I take her shopping for school supplies. I put her back to bed when she has nightmares. I take her to the dentist, to the park, to the library. She really likes pigs, so I adopted a few from a farm animal rescue and we learned how to raise them together.”

“You caring about being a good parent puts you ahead of a lot of people already,” you say. “Nobody in Comet knows?”

“Just Aemond. Once, years ago, her mother needed something and I was out of the country. I had to let somebody in on the secret, somebody I could trust. I chose Aemond. I chose right.” Now Cregan is amused. “He’s the one who suggested the pigs.”

“Of course he did,” you say; and you can’t help but smile. “How old is she?”

“Six and a half. Do you want to see a picture her?”

“Absolutely. If it’s alright with you.”

Cregan pulls his iPhone from his pocket, swipes around for a while, and then turns the screen so you can see. She looks like him, a lot like him, but with round cheeks and long dark lashes. And Cregan is beaming as he says: “Her name is Iris.”

“So you didn’t have to do the Maury paternity test thing.”

He laughs, shaking his head. “No. I knew from the second I saw her she was mine.”

“She’s lucky to have you.”

Cregan shrugs, pensive, evasive. “I don’t know about that.”

“I do.” And he believes that you mean it; you can see it on his face. Aemond is watching you and Cregan, you notice now. He glances over, pretends he didn’t, glances again. You gesture to the crashing waves and say to Cregan: “If Aegon gets attacked by a shark, will you jump in and punch it or something please?”

Cregan chuckles. “Yeah. That’s my main job here, I think. Stopping people from dying.” And then, seriously: “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything that warrants it.”

“No. Really.” Cregan reaches out, takes your uninjured hand, squeezes it briefly before releasing you. “Thank you, Stargirl.” Then he stands and walks to the water’s edge, letting the surf rush up over his ankles, for just a moment feeling nothing on his shoulders but the sunlight.

Aemond gives Shelby his kite and, as she glares bitterly, makes his way over to you. He takes off his sunglasses so he can see you better and hooks them on the waistband of his swim trunks: black, of course, his usual color. You’re actually wearing black today too, a flowing coverup over a pink swimsuit. You feel very much like hiding. When Aemond speaks, there is perhaps a hint of envy, green like leaves of poison, gleaming like snakeskin. “What were you and Cregan talking about?”

“Fatherhood.” And then you realize how it might sound.

There is a split second where Aemond looks startled; then he remembers Iris. “Right. Not so easy for people like us to navigate.”

People like us. Celebrities, boy band members, haunted men. You scramble for a nonchalant way to feel out the subject with him. “How does Louis Tomlinson handle it?”

“He’s a saint,” Aemond says. And you think: Patron saint of baby daddies? “Freddie was very, very unplanned. The mother was a nobody, a rebound. And a lot of people assumed she did it on purpose to try to keep Louis. Or to get eighteen years of a luxury lifestyle out of him. Or to just get fame in general. Personally, I believe it was all of the above.”

“Right,” you say, sweating heavily beneath your coverup.

“But none of that is the kid’s fault, and Louis is a good enough guy to realize it. So he plays nice with Freddie’s mother and they don’t go to war through tabloids anymore.”

“So, uh…” How can I put this? “You’re good with kids too. Cregan told me you had the pig idea.”

And the look that crosses Aemond’s face, the look: caustic, incredulous, night-dark, self-loathing. “Are you insane? Have you met me? I terrify kids. And I should, but not just because of the eye and the scar. What the hell do I know about being a decent father? What do I know about being a decent anything? I’d have no idea where to start. I’d fuck it up even if I tried desperately not to. I’d end up with kids like Aegon: addicts who hate themselves, people who are irrevocably lost.”

You say meekly: “I think Criston is something like a father to you. He could be a role model.”

“I’m not half as good a man as Criston is.”

Change the topic, change the topic, before Aemond gets suspicious. And there’s something else you’ve been meaning to ask him. “Aemond…after you almost murdered Jace…when we didn’t know if or how he was going to be able to perform until he healed…did anyone ask you to come back to Comet and fill in for him?”

“No,” Aemond says. And he’s thunderstruck by the thought, appalled, petrified.

“You don’t think that it might have been a good idea? That it might make sense?”

“No,” he says again instantly.

“But…in Tokyo…when Daeron made that speech at the last show…I think the crowd’s reaction was pretty powerful, don’t you? People still care about you. They love and respect you. And I think…maybe…it might help you with what you’ve experienced. To get back on stage—even just one last time—and prove to yourself that you still have what it takes. To know that if you do leave Comet, it’s your choice, not anyone else’s.”

“They love who I was,” Aemond says. “Not who I am now. And that’s easy to do. They don’t have to look at me.”

“Goddammit, there’s nothing wrong with how you look, Aemond!” you burst out. “You look fantastic. I never get tired of looking at you. I want to look at you all the fucking time. I’d hang life-sized portraits of you on every wall in my apartment in Kansas City. That’s how much I enjoy looking at you.”

He thinks you’re joking, he thinks you’re trying to make him feel better. You can’t stop him from thinking these things. And yet still, as he turns away, he is smiling: just a whisper of a curl at the corner of his lips, secretive, fragile.

As Comet is leaving the beach, you stop at a souvenir shop on the boardwalk to buy your keepsake for this tour destination. You settle on a pink frisbee that has I love the Jersey Shore! embossed on it in large, abrasive letters. You think your parents’ Australian cattle dogs will enjoy fetching it when you get home. Home feels so much closer—both literally and figuratively—than it did just a few weeks ago.

Criston is browsing through the t-shirts. “Hey, what size is your mom, Aegon? Medium?”

“How the hell would I know? Probably.” He holds up a pair of red, white, and blue bikini bottoms that say Firecracker across the ass. “You think my dad would mind if you sent her these?”

Criston is blushing. “Aegon, stop.”

“You could get her a bikini top too. Oh look, that one over there is red, it matches. And it says MILF across the tits. So that’s pertinent.”

“Stop!” Criston cries, distressed, and flees the store.

Halfway through the hour-long drive back to the hotel, Aegon insists that Criston stop the Escalades so he can get a hoagie from a Wawa. Aegon has never had a hoagie before. He says he cannot truly experience America without one.

At the ordering counter, Jace—slightly less bruised and swollen today, and thus in better spirits—taunts Aegon: “Are you sure you need all that bread? You’re going to be wearing a muumuu on stage by the time we get to the Midwest.”

“You know, just because you said that, now I’m going to get two hoagies…”

On the television mounted inside the Wawa, CNN is reporting on a group of tornadoes that just struck Wichita. And it occurs to you that tornadoes don’t have trajectories to calculate like hurricanes or airplanes or comets; they are climatological sharks. They strike quickly, indiscriminately, and then they’re gone again. They aren’t named. They aren’t enshrined. They don’t even have a belly to cut open and retrieve pieces of your loved ones from. If they take someone, they’re just gone.

While the rest of the band is in line to order their food, and Aemond is scrutinizing the dried fruit and nuts selection, you sneak through the other aisles.

It’s time. I have to find out eventually. I have to know.

You pluck a pregnancy test—cute, pink, nausea-inducing—off a rack, purchase it with truly impressive speed at the checkout counter, and race to the bathroom. It’s surprisingly difficult to piss on a tiny stick of doom, especially when your primary hand is in a splint and only partially useable. Eventually, you manage. You put the cap back on the pregnancy test, set it on top of the toilet paper dispenser, and stare at the metal door of the stall. The Wawa speakers are playing The Fray’s Over My Head.

It won’t be positive. It can’t be positive.

You think of pregnancy test commercials you’ve seen: happy couples rejoicing, happy single women getting negatives. How are you supposed to react to bad news? Nobody ever tells you. Do you scream, sob, beg for forgiveness, schedule an appointment at Planned Parenthood? Do you kick the bathroom stall door down in mindless feminine fury? Do you throw yourself off a balcony?

There’s no way it will be positive. It was one time. Just one goddamn time.

And who knows if that will ever happen again with Aemond. This does not improve your mood.

You pick up the pregnancy test. It is unequivocally positive.

You shove it into the small rectangular trashcan for pads and tampons, things you won’t be needing in the immediate future. You get dressed, leave the stall, go to the sink and wash your hands. Then you grip the cool, slick, white porcelain and gaze at yourself in the mirror under nowhere-to-hide florescent lights. What do you feel? Everything, nothing, things you can’t name yet. You’re a raw nerve, you’re completely numb.

The bathroom door swings open. Shelby enters. She squares up with great purpose. Your eyes roll to her, slowly, with no tolerance left, not a drop of it. “Stay away from Aemond,” she demands.

“Make me.”

She is in disbelief. “I’m sorry, what?”

You turn all the way towards her. “Fucking make me, Shelby.”

“I knew you wanted him,” she says, she seethes. “I saw you in those paparazzi photos from Reykjavik and I knew you were already twisting your claws into him.”

You hold up your hands to show her; your thoughts are fuzzy, dazed, without inhibition. “I have no claws whatsoever. If I did, you’d know about it. Believe me. You’d be able to look down and watch your heart beating through the gashes.”

“You don’t belong here. Some Midwestern farm girl running around in flip flops and Cookie Monster pajama pants? You’re trash. You’re a user. You’re a nobody. And if you’re trying to steal a taken man, then you’re a whore too.”

“I’ve been called worse things by better people.”

“I can make them hate you,” Shelby says indignantly. “Comet. The world.”

“Good luck with that, Malibu Barbie. Nobody even knows I exist.”

“Stay away from Aemond,” she says again, trembling with her futile bleach-blond rage. “We’re meant to be together. We have so much history.”

“And yet no future.” You smile sweetly, breeze past her, step on one of her perfectly pedicured feet with a thoroughly unpretentious flip flop. By the time you return to them, the band is almost ready to leave Wawa.

You’re not hungry, but Aegon coaxes you into taking a few bites from his hoagie. You’re not able to focus on what people are saying, but you hear Aemond mention that he wishes Comet had time to visit a planetarium in some nearby town called Toms River. You think about what it would be like to lie side by side with him under the stars, under the sky where comets appear again after vanishing for centuries. You wonder if there’s anyplace where you and Aemond could ever be truthful with each other.

At night you can’t sleep. There is no shortage of reasons why. You wander from your bed to the gold-carpet hallway to the vending machines, where you stare brainlessly at the options. Am I supposed to not be drinking caffein? Did I get any Vitamin D today? How much sugar is too much? You buy a bottle of apple juice—surely a safe bet—and head back to your suite.

As you walk by Aemond and Shelby’s door, your steps slow. Some nights you can hear them in there arguing: Shelby reiterating all the reasons why they’re perfect for each other, clearly a rebuttal to an accusation you weren’t privy to. Some nights you hear muffled casual conversation or episodes of Cosmos. Some nights you hear nothing at all. Some nights your imagination colors in the gaps before you can stop it: his hands on her, his mouth on her, things you know you have no right to dread and yet you do. But tonight, Shelby is momentarily removed from the scene. You can hear the distant pattering of the shower, and then Aemond alone in the living room gathering up plates and glasses. He’s singing something very quietly, so quietly it takes you a while to recognize it. It’s not even a Comet Donati song. It’s Through The Dark.

You sit down in the empty hallway, your back to his door. And you lean your head against it as you listen to Aemond singing softly to himself, doubt sinking into you the same way that trapped blood fills a bruise: Maybe it wasn’t as good for him as it was for me. Maybe he doesn’t talk to me because he doesn’t want to. Maybe I don’t belong here anymore. Maybe I’ve invented a history that we don’t really share. Maybe he didn’t mean it when he said he loves me.

“What am I going to do?” you whisper, scalding tears brimming in your eyes, shivering hands settling on your belly. In a few months, you’ll be showing. “What the hell am I going to do?”

#aemond one eye #aemond targaryen #aemond x you #aemond targaryen x reader #aemond x y/n #aemond x reader #Aegon Targaryen #aegon targaryen ii #Aegon II Targaryen #Aegon Targaryen II x reader #aegon ii #aegon targaryen x reader #aegon x reader #Aegon x you #aegon x y/n

291 notes · View notes

roosterbruiser · 7 months

Text

𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐖𝐄 𝐅𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐈𝐍 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄? — 𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟒

—𝐃𝐄𝐒𝐂𝐑𝐈𝐏𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍: 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝐓𝐖𝐎 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐌 𝐏𝐎𝐏 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐑 𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐈-𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒. 𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐄𝐒𝐓 (𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐁𝐈𝐆𝐆𝐄𝐒𝐓) 𝐅𝐎𝐎𝐓𝐁𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐎𝐍, 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐔𝐒𝐔𝐀𝐋 𝐒𝐔𝐒𝐏𝐄𝐂𝐓𝐒 𝐁𝐔𝐘 𝐆𝐑𝐎𝐂𝐄𝐑𝐘 𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐄 𝐏𝐔𝐌𝐏𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐒 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐆𝐄𝐓 𝐇𝐀𝐌𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐃. 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐖𝐄𝐄𝐍 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐉𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐀𝐒 𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐅𝐄𝐂𝐓 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐀𝐖𝐅𝐔𝐋 𝐀𝐒 𝐄𝐕𝐄𝐑. —𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃𝐒: 𝟖.𝟒𝐊 —𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 —𝐏𝐋𝐀𝐘𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓 —𝐕𝐈𝐒𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐁𝐎𝐀𝐑𝐃 —𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐕𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑

𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐖𝐄 𝐅𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐈𝐍 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄? 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐎𝐎𝐓𝐁𝐀𝐋𝐋 𝐅𝐈𝐄𝐋𝐃 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐉𝐀𝐊𝐄'𝐒 𝐃𝐎𝐑𝐌 𝐑𝐎𝐎𝐌 𝐇𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐄𝐍 𝐍𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓 𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟒

The tough leather football catapults off the laces of Jake’s right cleat and soars across the true-blue sky through the yellow guideposts staked at the opposing side’s endzone. It’s clean--doesn’t so much as skim the chipped paint before it bounces off the net gloriously.

Triple.

And just like that, the game ends the way everyone already knew it would: with Jake Seresin’s jersey blown up on the jumbotron, with the home team’s score dwarfing the opposing team just barely, with the crowd roaring in abundant approval.

The loyal crowd packing the stadium, all dressed in a sea of morning yellow and teal, erupts like an undefeated crowd should. Everyone is on their feet, breaths no longer held and fingernails no longer bitten, with their hands in the crisp autumn air surrounding them. The bright stadium lights wash over the field--all the celebrating players, the exuberant turf, the moping opposing side glitter inside its glow and beneath the evening sky.

Thunderstruck by AC/DC is screaming through the speakers. At this point, you’re well-versed enough in your school’s football history to know that this song is synonymous with victory. It’s the only reason you put up with the trash.

“Holy shit!” Bob calls out. He’s grinning, his lips a bit pink and wet and his eyes wide and watered with joy. “Bullseye, man! Bullseye, bullseye, bullseye!”

Bob rarely curses so liberally--you’ve noticed this over the past year between late night runs to the corner store and lazy afternoons in Jake and Brad’s dorm. He says things like good Lord and have mercy and now just hold on a darn second there. But during football games, his lips are looser and he isn’t as quick to flush. He can say shit and damn and sometimes fuck. It is partly because of the sticky, nippy atmosphere and partly because of the few cheap beers Javy always buys for him.

“I told you! I told you he never misses!” Javy returns excitedly. “Fuck outta here, ‘Bama!”

Javy brings his pointer and his tongue to his mouth, glancing over at you to make sure you see--you do and you’re already covering your ears. He gives you a courteous warning before he whistles after he nearly made you jump out of your skin during kick-off a few weeks ago.

He heard all about it from Jake when you let it slip casually in conversation.

“You trying to maim her or something, you dick?” Jake had said with his brows furrowed, his cheeks still pink from running though the football game had ended hours ago. He took a long, languid drink from his water bottle and then drew it away and pointed at Javy with it. “How about some warning next time, big guy?”

“Let’s fucking go!” Javy calls out, his voice ragged from calling out referees and hollering Seresin and Bradshaw, the paint on his face crumbling as his mouth stretches into a grin. “Don’t Trip on your way out, bitches!”

He wraps an arm around your shoulder and pulls you into his side--he smells like face paint and sweat. Bob, all his excitement bubbling over, blows a yeasty breath out and wraps you up in his arms, too. Bob, somehow, always smells like he’s only just stepped out of the shower.

Jake can hear everything from the field--everyone screaming, the noisemakers snapping, the hands clapping, the other players cajoling, Javy’s absurdly loud whistling--for only a moment. He only experiences the win for a few fleeting seconds, teammates punching his shoulder pads and slapping his ass through his tight game pants, until he turns his face to the bleachers.

It is easy for him to find you. Maybe if he told someone that, someone like Javy or Bradley or Bob, they would tell him that it’s because he’s the one who bought your tickets, picked your seats. That he simply memorized where you’re gonna sit, glances over during practice, always checks on you.

But Jake knows better than that.

He knows that it is so easy for him to find you because he looks for you in every room now--even if it’s the chem lab he knows you aren’t even enrolled in, even if it’s his family’s living room in Texas over the summer when you’re home in Virginia, even if it’s his dorm room at four in the morning and he’s just dropped you at your own hal, even if it’s the crowded dining hall he knows you wouldn’t ever step foot in on your own.

He’s good at finding you--always has been.

And now, a year to the day he first saw you at that shitty house party that only played a few good songs, he finds you wedged in between Bob and Javy.

Jake’s chest is tight as he looks at you. You’re standing between two of his best friends, who have now become your friends, grinning like there is no other place in the world you would rather be than this close to the football field and drowning in beer breath.

There you are, like you have been since November of last year, standing in the first row of bleachers. You’re clapping and laughing as Javy and Bob hold you and undoubtedly insult the opposing team. You’re wearing the sweatshirt Jake gave you, that soft yellow thing that’s been faded with time since it was first worn by Jake’s father all those years ago, and there are little butterfly clips in your hair--team colors, of course.

It’s funny, Jake thinks. A year ago you didn’t own even one school team shirt. Not a hat, a keychain, a hand-me-down, not even one of those rubber bracelets you can get for free literally anywhere on campus.

“Didn’t have a reason to have school pride before. You know--before you. But doesn’t everyone have school pride now that we’re undefeated? I bet you’re the reason a lot of people buy sweatshirts, Trip,” you told him when he asked about it. It was December of last year and he was reclined on your bed, watching you brush your hair as you slipped into his father’s sweatshirt. “This is really nice, you know. Vintage.”

“It was my dad’s,” Jake told you softly, trying to be sly about his lingering gaze.

But still, you saw him when you turned suddenly to look at him with furrowed brows. The two of you had only known each other for a month and some change and already he deemed you important enough to will down his father’s sweatshirt.

“Shouldn’t you be saving this for some gorgeous girlfriend in a little tank-top?” You asked, only half-joking.

He caught your gaze in the mirror and shook his head.

“Nah,” he answered. “It looks good on you.”

But now, here you are, all these months later. In the same sweatshirt, the one you keep in pristine condition and wear almost every gameday. And now you have matching hair clips.

Almost instantaneously, you know he’s looking at you. Even when he’s across an entire football field, even when he’s being crowded by the rest of the football team and the coaches, even when his eyes are nearly hidden behind his helmet--you know. It’s a feeling that you get, one that is almost indiscernible from other big feelings like exhilaration or delirium.

And because you know he’s looking at you, you know that when he jams his finger in the sky and angles it--he’s pointing at you. You. That’s who the win was for. You. It’s always you. If someone were to be writing it down, they would know that every single win this season--and every single one during the latter half of last season--is dedicated to you. You own them, really. Technically. They’re gifted to you, thrusted into your lap, by Jake.

Just like you do each time he points to you after a win, you hold your hands in a heart--a juvenile and crooked thing. But you hold it high and proud in the sky as confetti reigns down from the bleachers above.

Jake’s beaming underneath his face mask, filled to the brim with unadulterated joy as you hold your hands up in a heart. It’s for him--it always is.

He can’t remember when this all started--the hearts, at least. He thinks they must’ve started the way nicknames do; on a whim, randomly, fleetingly. It’s that sweet thing where you don’t know where something begins or how it will end, but you know everything in-between because it just is.

But he does remember the first time you came to a game after you met. It was the next game, the one he promised he’d get you tickets to, and you sat in the front row like you said you would despite him offering to nab you some nosebleeders.

His fingertips tingled with adrenaline the entirety of the game, only gaining more momentum the closer the team got to a fourth-quarter victory. Everyone could tell that Jake was on his A-game, which meant that he was unstoppable.

He was the one who kicked the field goal that won the game--and with only ten seconds left on the clock. He remembers vividly the way the crowd went animalistic, the way everyone erupted in howls and cries and hollering.

Before the game, he memorized the exact seat you were going to sit in. During practice, he watched it--imagined you there. Your exuberant smile, your unrelenting good mood, which he partly attributed to the company of yours truly and partly attributed to you losing the dead weight of Spit Sabler.

And when he kicked the field goal, when he heard the crowd go wild, he turned towards where he knew you were sitting. It wasn’t even on purpose--it was just like a natural reaction. There you were, just like you said you would be. Grinning. Clapping. Laughing.

He was so overwhelmed with joy, so overwhelmed with having met you and immediately adored you, that he pointed to you.

You.

His girl.

He doesn’t remember what he was doing after wins before this--before he started looking for you. Maybe he was indulging in the celebration. Maybe he was letting Bradshaw tackle him to the turf. Maybe he was running to the sidelines. He can’t remember. He experiences this a lot when he thinks of life before you--it’s all blurry. Unimportant.

“You fucker! You dumb fucker!” Bradley laughs in his ear as he jumps into Jake’s arms, wrapping his arms around his shoulders and knocking Jake’s helmet with his own. “Just take me already!”

“You fucking goon, get off me!” Jake howls, stumbling backwards with Bradley’s entire weight on his torso. But he’s still grinning. “You’re giving the other team way too much ammunition right now!”

“Ammunition-shammunition!” Bradley says gleefully, panting and laughing as he hugs Jake close to him. They both stink--almost indistinguishable from each other. “We won! We fucking won! Let ‘em talk!”

“We always do,” Jake says, planting Bradley’s cleats back on the turf. “We’re literally 10-0!”

Bradley slaps his hands on the sides of Jake’s helmet and pulls him close so that the hard plastic clashes roughly. Jake starts to whine, but Bradley is too amped to notice or mind.

“I love you, man! I love you!”

“Stop!” Jake insists. The grin is devouring his face. “Be normal!”

“I can’t! Something’s happening to me! Something big and-and--!” Bradley’s already starting to gyrate, spreading his arms out and running in place on the tips of his toes. “Oh, God--it’s happening!”

“Don’t!” Jake warns, shaking his head seriously. “Please--just this once, don’t do it--!”

The team is already watching the two of them, amused. They know what’s coming. It’s the same thing at the end of every game that Jake wins for the team--which is almost every single one at this point.

Bradshaw is notoriously an idiot--bonafide. But he might be the most beloved member of the team; he has an irresistible goofy charm about him that even the quarterback is susceptible to. That’s pretty much what happened with you, too. You fell in love with his big, cow-like eyes and unrelenting unwillingness to be embarrassed.

“It’s taking me! Oh, Lord! It’s taking me!” Bradley cries. He’s really getting into it now, clutching his chest and marching in place on beat. “Help me, Jake! Help me!”

“Uh-oh,” Bob says with a fond smile tugging on his lips. He squeezes you and Javy. “Trouble! One o’clock!”

You and Javy grin at the scene on the field. The other team dejectedly fielding sneers and boo’s as they sulk off the field as AC/DC shakes the ground beneath their cleats. Your football team watches on in amusement as Bradley howls and breaks out in dance while Jake desperately tries to get away.

“The Bradshaw Boogie,” you sigh, beaming. “Who could've guessed?”

“Me, you, Bob, that guy over there, that guy over here, even the lady down there,” Javy lists, shaking his head. “What an idiot.”

“But he’s ours,” you sigh lovingly, leaning your head against Bob’s. Bradley tackles Jake to the ground and your chest grows warm, pulses with love. “Both of them.”

𖥔

“Doesn’t this all feel so…American?” Bob asks. He’s pushing the cart, squinting beneath the harsh fluorescents flickering above the lot of you. He’s in his costume already--a freakishly accurate Indiana Jones costume that has gotten more than a handful of compliments since arriving at the grocery store. “Going to a football game and then buying pumpkins at the local twenty-four hour superstore?”

“Winning a football game,” Bradley corrects from his spot inside the cart, knees against his chest as he cradles a few bottles of the cheapest vodka in stock. His face is partially painted--which means he just looks partially rabid. He scratches the real dog collar around his throat and the metal name tag that he sharpied the Hell hound’s name on jangles melodically. “And we’re not just buying pumpkins.”

“Yeah,” Javy echoes from ahead of everyone, skimming the aisles absently as he reads all the price tags. He’s the certified sales finder, which is always why he walks ahead of everyone. The bright read-and-white sweater of his Waldo costume, ironically, sticks out like a sore thumb in the dull, white-washed aisles. “We’re buying Bradshaw a leash, too. Finally.”

“Ha-ha,” Bob says. “Funny. But I don’t think Cujo had a leash.”

Javy pauses and glances over his shoulder at Bob and Bradley. Bob’s watching him, brows knit and lips quirked. Bradley hasn’t even noticed that the cart’s halted--he’s too busy chewing his fingernail.

“No. We were supposed to get around to it last week,” Javy says. “He keeps wandering.”

Now Bradley looks up--suddenly realizing that Bob and Javy are looking at him.

“Oh. Kinky,” Bradley grins, waggling his brows. He adjusts himself in the cart, uncomfortably packed against the metal grates between bags of Doritos and robust pumpkins, but unwilling to get out. “I like it. Wanna take me for a walk, Goldie?”

Bradley leans out of the cart to grin at Jake, like he always does when he puts the faux moves on you, but all he sees is an empty aisle. He was totally expecting a firm smack on the back of the head from Jake and a sweet laugh from you. Nothing but cereal boxes, though.

“Hey. Where’d they go?” Bradley asks, pouting. “I totally just said that for loverboy.”

“Who?” Javy returns, starting down the aisle again as he straightens his crooked glasses. “Sonny and Cher?”

“They’re Daphne and Fred,” Bob says, shaking his head.

“More like Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dumbass,” Bradley says good-naturedly. He releases his fingernail from the wrath of his teeth and then sighs dejectedly. “Anyone got any clippers on ‘em? I have a hangnail.”

Two aisles over, you’re sorting through the various bags of candy sitting on the beige shelves. Nothing is striking your precise fancy and Jake can tell from the careful way he’s watching your brows crinkle. You take your Halloween candy seriously--really, you take everything about Halloween seriously--and he knows he’s already on thin ice taking you to a superstore to get pumpkins instead of a patch.

“Who the fuck likes Dots?” You whisper to him, shaking your head disapprovingly. “Do you know someone who likes Dots? I don’t. I never have.”

Jake shakes his head fondly.

“Yeah, I do,” Jake says.

“Nuh-uh,” you say dismissively, brows loosely knit.

“I’ll give you one guess,” Jake says, tightening the orange ascot around his throat.

Glancing at him through your lashes, your belly already in a puddle at your platform heels right beside your heart, you meet his gaze. He’s always already looking at you--just like he always is. It’s one of the first things you noticed about him after you two met for coffee on November 1st of last year, a mere twelve hours since you broke things off with Spit Sabler. Jake was the one who stood from the table he snagged for both of you, the one who was watching the door for thirty minutes before you arrived, the one who called your name across the cafe and waved you over.

“Hey,” he’d said when you crossed the cafe shyly and ended up at his feet. “You look great out of costume, too! I think you could still pass for a doctor.”

“Jokes on you,” you’d told him, eyeing the ridiculously good-looking denim jacket he had shrugged over his The Innocence Mission t-shirt. “You don’t.”

You cheek your grin and whip a bit of your stringy red wig over your shoulder. When he sees you struggling, two little strands of artificial hair stuck in your lipgloss, he reaches up and carefully peels them away from your lips. His fingers graze your cheek as he retracts--a ghost of a touch, the hint of a touch, the hint of a ghost of a touch. Enough for both of you to curl your toes identically in the safety and privacy of your own socks.

Both of you pretend not to be warm from the interaction.

You clear your throat.

“Nobody likes Dots,” you insist.

Jake shakes his head smugly.

“Somebody you know and love likes Dots,” Jake insists.

He doesn’t bother checking his grin--he can hardly muster when you’re looking up at him so prettily. Fuschia eyelids and candy-apple lips, all that sweet softness and playfulness sitting in the fat of your cheeks as you try not to smile.

“You lie like a rug,” you challenge, crossing your arms indignantly. “I’m calling your bullshit.”

“Error 404. Bullshit not found,” Jake says, holding his palms up in defense. “C’mon. One guess. You’ve got it.”

“You,” you say with a devious smile.

He holds his chest in mock insult and you beam at him.

“Ouch,” he says. “No. I underestimated your ability to be wack as Hell.”

“Okay, Fresh Prince,” you bite back, open-mouth laughing now. “Then who is it? Hm? Who do I know and love that likes Dots?”

“Scrappy Doo,” he says confidently.

He watches your face contort--first confusion and then realization.

“Bradshaw really does make it hard for himself, doesn’t he?” You say quietly. “But, like--now that you say that? I can see it. Unfortunately. I can see it.”

“He went to the movie theater one time to--like, literally just to buy Dots. Brought, like, five boxes back to the dorm and ate them overnight.”

“Ew,” you say, nose wrinkled. “Did he get sick?”

“No,” Jake says, rolling his eyes. “He has an industrial stomach.”

“Shit,” you say, laughing. “Go figure.”

“Unlike someone here, he’s also not picky,” Jake says, widening his eyes and nodding towards you.

Sticking your tongue out at him, you roll your eyes.

“It’s not so easy!”

Jake glances down at the mounds of candy before you, scouring for a bag you would actually enjoy. He’s learned a lot about you--he feels like he’s learned everything about you--in the past year, so he knows how tricky this is going to be. You won’t eat coconut or dark chocolate--nor do you like non-sour gummies. You only tolerate Smarties and you can’t stomach M&M’s after last year’s milkshake incident.

“Here,” Jake says, tugging a variety bag out from the bottom of the pile. He hands it to you and nods for you to follow him as he starts down the aisle again. “That one.”

“That’s ballsy,” you say to him, not moving from your spot. You squint as you read the labels of the candy in the variety pack. “You know this is a most sacred process for me.”

He turns, now in the middle of the aisle, and watches you read it silently. He already knows--before you even do--that this is the one you’re going to choose. He knows little things about you like this--like your In-N-Out order, your favorite kind of pen to write with, your dislike of baseball caps. But he knows big things about you, too--like how old you were when your parents divorced, what your favorite color was in the second grade, who you consider to be your personal hero and why it’s Dolly Parton.

“You underestimate my fondness for you,” Jake says. Heat blooms all cross his chest and his ascot suddenly feels tight when you glance back at him in amusement. He laughs dryly. “Idiot.”

“I stand corrected,” you tell him with a shrug and sigh, slinging the candy over your arm. “And you know how much I hate standing.”

“Who hates standing?” Jake grins, shaking his head. You are slowly making your way over to him in that strangely authentic Daphne costume, the one you put together over the course of three months with him in tow. “Nobody hates standing.”

When you come close to him, you can smell the aftershave on his face, the sandalwood on his pulse points. He grins down at you, unrealistically handsome even in this truly awful Fred wig--truly, it’s less Fred and more of a tow-headed Sonny Bono.

“Someone you know and love hates it,” you tease, pressing the bag of candy in his awaiting arms. “Right?”

He looks down at you in between taking measured, deep breaths. He can’t believe how much he adores you. Well, he can because he does and he has been since the moment he first saw you. He felt like he already loved you when he saw you in the cafe the day after Halloween, when you walked across the checkered tiles with your glasses on and your backpack slung over one shoulder.

“What--you didn’t bring your backpack? Do you not care about passing midterms?” You’d asked him seriously. But you were smiling softly as your lashes kissed the tops of your cheeks. “Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of doctor?”

Sometimes he wonders when it happened--when something happened between the two of you that halted both of you in your tracks, something that stalled anything real and romantic happening at the party or the dorm room. He thinks about it when he zones out in class, when he’s trying not to fall asleep during film in the locker rooms.

Maybe it was when some John puked all over your legs. When he told you to look up at the night sky while he wiped your legs down and free from marigold flowers and puke.

Maybe it was when he didn’t walk you to the door of your dormitory. When he stayed in his truck and waited until you got into the building before he drove away. Maybe he should’ve stuck his hands in his pockets and walked all the way up to your room, should’ve met your roommate and seen what pictures you hung on the walls.

Maybe it was when he didn’t bring his backpack for coffee. When he had to sit on the same side of the little bistro table as you and read over your shoulder, when he had to borrow one of your pens to take notes on scrap paper you happened to have.

Maybe it was when you were the one to ask for his number first, scribbling it on the corner of your notebook with a smiley face. Smiley face. Not a heart.

Maybe it was on a Tuesday in April or maybe a Friday in September. Maybe it happened while the two of you were watching Apocalypse Now or Dazed and Confused. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever know--doesn’t even know if he wants to know.

But Jake isn’t one to complain, though.

Maybe you’re not what he wants you to be--his girlfriend, even though that feels too juvenile a word for what he really wants you to be--but you’re still the best person he knows. And, in a lot of ways, he considers himself very lucky to have landed you at all. Even as a friend.

You have quickly--effortlessly--become one of Jake’s favorite people on God’s green earth. He thinks about you each morning when the sun touches his face for the first time, thinks about how warm your hands always are when you pinch his cheeks. He thinks about you each night as he flicks off his lamp, glancing at the framed photograph he has of you on his bedside table--one Javy took of you on a disposable camera, one where you’re decked out in team colors and holding a foam finger with Jake’s number on it.

Sometimes, though--like right now--he gets overwhelmed with everything. It’s like there’s a ball of light in his chest that’s starting to puncture his skin. Like there’s something bright and hot and big that wants out and wants out now.

“Right,” Jake whispers now, pretending like he’s not choked up. He grips the plastic bag in his arms to keep himself from holding your cheeks. He’s watching your lips. “You are someone I know and love.”

There is a hotness radiating from Jake, but you hardly notice. If you did, you’d be fanning yourself and un-pinning your wig. But your gaze is unwavering, even if you feel like Jake isn’t quite meeting your eyes right now. Either way, you still feel seen by him. Always.

“Prove it,” you whisper to him.

It sounds like an invitation--maybe it is.

Yes, it lingers there in the air between you, the one that smells like dead leaves and artificial apple and gardenia perfume from the lady a few aisles over. You and him both see it, clear as day, as if it’s some sort of bright red mist surrounding you.

You have a supremely good eye for detail. You notice eyelashes on sidewalks and memorize license plates on speeding cars and have never once missed foreshadowing. That’s why Bradley has you proofread all his essays, why Javy has you watch football games with him, why Bob studies with you, why Jake loves to watch movies with you.

So, you notice it whenever Jake’s eyebrows pinch. Whenever he looks confused, like he’s just about to sputter out a what? and step away from you. That’s when you realize, flushed as ever before, that your faces are a mere inch apart.

“Buy my candy,” you say, straightening out and moving your face away from his.

Jake’s heart is hammering in his chest.

Fuck.

He was going to do it. He was going to ask if he could kiss you--Hell, he was just going to hold the stupid wig in place and press his lips to yours before he lost the nerve.

But it’s too late. You’re already smiling at him, expression unreadable to him even though he’s well-versed in you, nodding towards the register.

“Goldie--!”

“Hey!” Javy says when he sees the two of you. “Simon! Garfunkel! Let’s get a move on, huh? We’ve gotta get our drink on!”

Both you and Jake turn to find your three friends standing at the end of the aisle. Javy with his hands on his hips and his lips pursed, Bob smiling almost apologetically like he knows he interrupted something, and Bradley struggling to his knees in the very-full cart to get your attention.

“Hey, Goldie! I made a really good joke earlier and you weren’t there,” Bradley starts, grinning as he gestures wildly. “Okay, so Javy said--!”

“Down boy,” Bob says, nudging Bradley.

You and Jake trudge towards the three of them, a strange aura of embarrassment and disappointment permeating the air around the two of you. It’s strange because the two of you, as close as you are, never seem very embarrassed about being so obliviously in love as you both are.

“What?” Bradley asks, genuinely oblivious. He’s gesturing to you as you sheepishly make your way over to the cart. “She missed it! She’s my audience!”

“Audience of one?” Javy asks, brow raised. “Lame.”

“Boo me all you want, but I’m loyal. A one-woman kinda guy,” Bradley defends. You’re smiling at him, rolling your eyes, when he pats his thighs while waggling his eyebrows. “Hey, pretty lady. Wanna take a seat?”

Jake thumps the back of his head hard, even if he knows that Bradley’s adoration for you is purely platonic and flirtation if in complete jest. And Bradley keens at Jake, strangely accomplished.

“Nah,” you say softly. You hold your own hands and try not to breathe in too much of Jake’s cologne. “I’ll stand.”

𖥔

Technically it’s still Halloween when you and Jake stumble into his dorm room. The two of you have been in Bob’s dorm room for the better half of the evening, drinking away a couple bottles of vodka between the four of you while having a horror movie marathon.

Things feel alright now--better than they did at the beginning of the night, in the direct aftermath of whatever the fuck happened at the store. With every drink the two of you had, you moved closer to the middle of the room from the prospective sides you’d initially settled in. By the time Jaws II was being discussed, you were laying your head in Jake’s lap and letting him stroke your wig.

“Jinkies, I gotta get you back,” Jake had sighed, glancing at the clock and then you. He dropped his eye in a heavy wink, one that was not as sly as usual, and nodded towards the door. “Gotta celebrate our anniversary.”

“Oh, right,” Bradley had interjected, leaning over the two of you with a pink-tinted grin. “What’s the first anniversary? Silver?”

“Paper,” Bob corrected, slightly inebriated.

“Do candy wrappers count?” Jake had whispered, thumb pressed against your cheek.

“Yeah,” you yawned. “So does cash.”

Time is ticking by quickly and so are you as Jake shuts the door behind the both of you, a broken laugh falling from his vodka-flavored lips at something you said on the elevator. Something he can’t even remember now.

“Jesus, it’s dark,” you say as you pull your lop-sided wig off your head and let it slink to the wooden floor. It will, undoubtedly, live there for the next couple weeks. You can already imagine Bradley eating shit after slipping on it. “You live like this?”

The room is dark and empty besides the two of you, completely quiet besides the usual clanging and hollering outside his window from the drunk boys in the courtyard. And, of course, the laughter still dying on Jake’s tongue and the thumps of your heels.

You have been in this room more times than you can count--so much so that several of the floors RA’s have approached you about blowing off floor meetings. So, despite being a bit drunk and despite being in the dark, you’re able to find the radio sitting on Jake’s dresser. It’s where it always is beside a pack of gum and his favorite bottle of cologne.

“Like a hermit,” Jake says. “A Norman Bates type.”

“Spooky,” you whisper to him. “Really getting me in the mood over here.”

“Yeah? Sitting in Bob’s room and watching creature features didn’t do that for you already?”

“Nope,” you say, shaking your head despite the fact that he cannot see you. “You know I like more high brow stuff.”

“Right,” Jake says distantly as he reaches blindly for the switch to the lava lamp. “Slashers.”

“Uh huh,” you mutter. Then you clear your throat and drunkenly giggle as you sing. “Gimme, gimme, gimme some gore after midnight.”

“You know how I can tell when you’re trashed, Goldie-girl?” Jake grins, still fumbling for the switch. “You start singing ABBA parodies.”

“You like my parodies,” you whisper back.

“Love ‘em,” he says and he really does mean it.

The lamp suddenly illuminates the room. The both of you squint in tandem, on opposite sides of the small dorm room, stumbling in your steps in surprise.

“Hi,” you whisper to him.

Your makeup is smeared--bleary. His wig is gone and his ascot is untied.

“Hey,” he returns. “What are you in the mood for? Pick your poison.”

He nods to the CD’s you’re sorting through.

“Julee Cruise,” you whisper back. “She’s been stuck in my head all day.”

“On the left,” he tells you. “Towards the bottom.”

Nodding, you dig it out. Jake rubs his eyes, trying to sober up. It isn’t that he wants to even be sober--he feels good right now. But after what happened at the store, the way you have been inside of a hard shell all night between Jaws and The Blob, he wants to have a clear head.

Fumbling only slightly, you manage to start the CD. And without looking back at Jake, you wander over to his twin bed and flop down on the brown plaid bedding, sighing in relief.

“I’ve been awake for too long,” you whisper to him, blinking up at the ceiling.

He’s still standing beside the lamp, watching every one of your moves with his heart in his throat.

“How long?” He asks.

You turn to him, biting a smile and blinking your bleary eyes.

“My whole life,” you return.

Now he’s biting a grin.

“Wow,” he whispers. “You must be exhausted.”

“Yup,” you confirm. You point to your platform heels and crooked stockings. “Too exhausted to take my costume off.”

A bubble pops inside of Jake, inside of you, in tandem. You blink at him. He blinks at you. There are only a few feet separating you and him, only a few paces across a shitty rug and old hardwood floors.

He swallows hard. You notice it when his Adam’s apple bob.

He considers what could happen next. He could press forward, tell you that he can help with that. And then maybe you would sit up and draw your knees to your chest and tell him he’s just like every other guy you’ve ever been friends with. Or he could stand right where he is now and just nod like he didn’t quite hear you, then sit on Bradley’s bed while you huddle up by yourself in his. Neither of which sound palatable to Jake right now--or ever.

Your heart is racing as you watch him. Fuck. You keep word vomiting, keep accidentally inviting him, keep telling the truth too voraciously.

When he moves, he doesn’t say anything. That’s what he’s decided on--he won’t say a word. He’ll just…walk towards you. And you watch him as he crosses the floor, his footing suddenly a bit more sober than it was when the two of you left Bob’s dorm after Bradley insisted on a second screening of Critters.

Then he’s standing before you--you’re laying below him. Both of you watch each other, drink in every movement--there hardly are any. His palms are damp and your throat is dry.

His movements are slow, but calculated. His fingers wrap around your right ankle and your leg feels weightless as he lifts it and places the bottom of your shoe on his pristine Fred Jones sweater. The color of your shoe, that sweet purple-pink, is a stark contrast from the muddy print the sole of your shoe will leave.

Jake doesn't look away from your face as he reaches for the buckle.

It’s a tiny thing, flimsy and delicate. But he’s dextrous.

“Thanks,” you whisper preemptively--just to say something.

Falling by Julee Cruise is playing. You can only hear the blood rushing through your ears--you’re sure Jake hears it, too.

“Jesus,” Jake says and he’s still looking you right in the eyes. Your heart rate spikes--your back almost leaves the bed in a sudden arch at just the sound of it falling from his lips. All rasp, all football player, all Jake. “How’d you get these things on?”

“With a little help from my friends,” you say back pathetically. You shift slightly and he re-secures his grip on your ankle like you are trying to climb away from him. “You know. Fingernails.”

You hold your hands up to him weakly and he nods, still not smiling as he fingers the buckle.

“Right,” he says. “Something I don’t have.”

“Right,” you say.

“But anything you can do, I can do better,” he says.

His heart is hammering.

But you smile--smile despite the apple vodka staining the back of your throat and the heat pooling in your belly and the thoughts of him muddling your ever-present attention.

“Tell it to the heels, baby,” you whisper to him.

And, like you’ve said a magic word, he gets the first heel unbuckled.

With a raise of his eyebrows, as if to say ha!, he delicately removes the heel from your foot and sets it on the floor. He’s still holding your ankle, softly stroking the light pink nylon tights. Wishing it was your skin. Burning all the same.

There’s a muddy shoe print on his chest now. He sees it--so do you. But neither of you say anything about it. You’re too nervous to accidentally invite him to something he doesn’t want to come to--he’s too nervous to say the wrong thing and make you retreat.

Your socked foot rests against his chest even after he releases you, which is what he wants. Any part of you against any part of him.

He makes quick work of the other buckle and you watch, sobering quickly beneath the warmth of his touch and the velvety music flooding the radio.

“You’re a pro,” you whisper. Your voice is somewhere between a whisper and a jive.

He doesn’t say anything.

Here you are, below him in his bed. Here you are, your legs open and your ankles in the stronghold of his hands. Here you are, a year to the day since he first saw you. Here you are, listening to his dream pop in his dorm after hanging out with your friends that used to be his friends that you now share.

Here you are. It astounds him, really.

How lucky he is that you’re here. Now.

Right now.

There is an intensity to his gaze, one you see fleetingly, rarely in certain instances. If you were someone else and so was he, you would call those instances stolen glances or maybe pensive longing.

But you’re you.

He’s him.

So you don’t know what to call it.

“Are you okay?” You ask.

“No,” he answers.

He clears his throats, ignores the ringing in his ears.

Fuck. He didn’t mean to answer like that.

You’re already scrambling to sit up, to probably interrogate him and press your knuckles to his forehead and check for a fever, but then he’s pressing his flat palm to your belly and pushing you back against the bed.

It is not a hard touch--nor is it a violent one. It is a guidance, a suggestion. One that takes your breath from your lungs and smacks his face with it. One that renders you almost voiceless.

“What’s wrong?” You whisper.

“No, nothing, I--it’s nothing,” Jake tries, knowing how much of a liar he sounds like right now.

“But you just said--!”

“--Forget what I just said,” Jake tells you. He means it. He pushes down and feels all the skin of your belly, all the warmth and blood and flesh. You’re thrumming with life. “Really. I’m fine. It’s fine. I just…”

He stops talking--knows he’s digging himself in a deeper hole.

Swallowing hard, you think about the grocery store. Your quiet, accidental invitation. If it was really accidental at all. You still aren’t sure. You can't be sure right now when he’s looking down at you the way he is.

You have to ask. It’s overwhelming you--the thought that you did something wrong.

“Did I…do something?”

His response is immediate. Instantaneous like he’s rehearsed this before.

“What could you have done that would ever make me not okay?” He asks, a strangely kind bite to his tone. As if he were saying Don’t you know that I love you, you idiot? “I mean, really. You’re kinda the best.”

“I don’t know,” you whisper. Words are tugging on your lips. “Buy you a Red Hot Chili Peppers CD?”

A dry laugh falls from his parted lips, but he doesn’t smile. He can’t. Not when his throat is so dry, not when you two are so close. So, so close. Close enough to smell that warm amber in your hair and against your throat.

“Get serious,” Jake insists after a moment.

Shifting beneath his palm, you stare up at him.

“I am,” you try.

“No, you’re not,” Jake says back, brows furrowed.

You glance down at your costume.

“I can’t be serious in pink tights.”

Jake doesn't have time to think--doesn’t have time to stop himself. He’s reaching up, up and under your dress, hooking his fingers in the band of your pink tights and tugging on them. They come loose much easier than the buckles, practically purr at Jake’s touch as he draws them down your legs, leaving a trail of gooseflesh on your skin.

You’re gasping, nearly moaning before you choke on it, as he swiftly removes your tights. And then your legs are bare before him and your legs are still open and he’s standing and you’re sitting and your pink tights are in his fist. They’re still warm from your skin--still smell like you.

Jake drops them on the floor, not peeling his gaze from yours. They’ll live on the floor for a few weeks, too. He knows it. So do you.

Now you’re speechless, which doesn’t happen often.

Jake’s heart is battering inside his ribcage like a bird attempting to flee.

“What happened at the grocery store?” He asks.

He has to ask. He needs to know.

“What?” You sputter out. Your heart races. Fuck. You were hoping to just forget it all. “What are you--what do you--?”

“You know what I’m talking about,” Jake says. He flushes when he realizes that your legs are still open, when he realizes that you couldn’t close them if you wanted to since he’s standing so close to you. “C’mon. Don’t bullshit me.”

“You tell me,” you demand. “I thought you were gonna…I don’t know…”

You’re too flustered to continue, throwing your arm over your face under the guise of shielding your eyes from the light. Your face, your arm, your skin, your breath--it’s all so hot. You want to melt into the plaid bedding and become one with the dust bunnies.

“Marigold,” Jake says and it sounds like he’s begging. “Don’t hide from me. C’mon. C’mon, we’re friends!”

Friends. There’s that word.

You want to roll over on your side, want to just apologize and go to your dorm and pine privately for him, but you can’t. You can’t because he’s leaning forward and tugging your arms away from your eyes.

He’s suddenly infinitely closer to you. So close that you feel tipsy just breathing in his breath, all the alcoholic apples that have died there.

The two of you stare at another. You’re searching his eyes, his nose, his lips, trying to get a read on him and what he’s thinking and what he’s doing. He’s leaning over you, slotted between your legs, his hips only a breath away from your core. He feels it when you squirm--he isn’t sure if you’re trying to get closer or farther, so he shifts backwards a few centimeters.

“Did you want me to do something?” Jake asks. It’s a quiet demand. A plea.

“What do you mean?” You ask even though you know. You’re stalling. “Where? At Bob’s?”

“Don’t be a chickenshit,” Jake says, shaking his head. “Back there. At the store.”

You swallow, don’t know what to say. The light is suddenly too bright and the music is suddenly too loud. Your breaths are paralyzed in your lungs.

“Did you want me to want you to do something back there? At the store?”

He scoffs--it’s a mean, but soft sound. He needs to hear you say it. Yes, you wanted it. He didn’t overstep. He missed the chance, but he knows now. He won’t miss the chance again. If you just say it. Say you wanted it--wanted him.

“You’re impossible,” he whispers.

“I’m trying not to be,” you say back. “Sorry.”

“We almost kissed,” he says and his lips are quivering. “Right? That’s what that was, right? You wanted me to kiss you.”

When the words fall on your ears, in your already heightened state, you feel like they’re accusatory. You wanted him to kiss you. And it made him knit his brows and falter, stumble.

You’re fucking everything up.

You can’t afford to fuck everything up with the best friend you’ve ever had.

“No, I didn’t,” you whisper. Your voice is hoarse, thin.

“Yes, you did,” he whispers. His brows are totally furrowed. “You’re a bad lair.”

He almost says that he couldn’t look away from your lips all night. He almost says that he wished you were closer to him. He almost says that he wants you to kiss him, too. He almost says that he’s wanted to kiss you for a year--an aching, throbbing year.

But he doesn’t.

“Stop it,” you tell him quietly. Tears are welling in your eyes. You blink rapidly, try to ease yourself from the absolute comfort of his heat. “Why would I want that?”

Now he says nothing. There it is--that crippling fear he always has, the one where he fucks it, the one where he’s rejected, the one where he fumbles the ball, the one where he misses the goal. Except it feels realized suddenly. Suddenly as you’re looking up at him in artificially warm light, your tights tugged off your naked legs by him, you look hurt. Your eyes are watery and your lips are twisted and you’re not drunk anymore.

And he’s the one caging you in. Holding you against the bed.

At once, he lays on his back. He’s no longer between your legs, no longer hovering you and looking into your eyes. He’s laying beside you.

The both of you lay there, side-by-side, blinking up at the ceiling. You’re desperately blinking, trying to keep the tears from spilling over. And you’re curling your knees to your chest, holding yourself together with flimsy tape.

His chest is heaving. He doesn’t know what’s happening. He doesn’t know what to do.

But he doesn’t have to because as he’s running his hands over his face, shaking his head and opening his trembling lips, your hand is on his forearm.

You’ve never been one to hold a grudge. You even wave at Spit Sabler when you see him around campus. But even if you were someone who held a grudge--you know it would be fruitless when it comes to Jake. You’ve never been able to feel anything but love towards him. Pulsing, jovial love. Red-hot and American.

“Hey,” you whisper. You’re watching him, lying on your side now, trying not to sound as desperate to keep him as you feel right now. “Jake. Look at me.”

He does at once.

Plaid bedding separates your mouth from his and your eyes aren't as watery anymore. It’s good. That’s good. Jake still can’t muster a word. He can’t believe what he just did.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“We’re just drunk,” you say dismissively. And even you sound like you don’t believe that bullshit. “Saying dumb shit when you’re drunk is, like, a rite of passage. Right?”

He nods meekly after a long, sober pause.

“I’m…” he starts. His cheeks flood bright red. “I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, don’t be,” you tell him. “Like--it’s…don’t worry about it. We can talk about it when we’re sober.”

He nods. Grateful, kind of, for your grace. But also angry that he couldn’t make it work--angry that things didn’t end up the way he needs them to.

He glances at the clock just as it strokes midnight.

No longer Halloween. Time to take the costume off.

Absently, carefully, you reach forward and press the pads of your fingers against the muddy heel print on his chest. He won’t be able to wear this sweater again, but you feel like this isn’t going to be something that he throws away. And if he did--you would climb into any dumpster on campus to retrieve it. Just to hold it. Just to keep it.

“Wanna get coffee tomorrow?” You whisper.

The hint of a smile tugs on his lips. He finally tears his eyes away from the clock and looks at you.

“Yeah,” he says. “I think I know a place.”

Your lungs deflate slightly--with relief, with grief. It all feels the same.

“Don’t forget your backpack.”

Another laugh--a sad and pitiful thing. One he might regret later on. But it’s enough that his hot blood is beginning to cool, even this close to you, even with this much of your naked legs on display on his bed in his empty dorm.

“Hey, Goldie?” Jake whispers.

You worm your way closer to him, like you always do. And, like always, his arms are already open to receive you when you press yourself against his chest and inhale the mud and cologne there.

“Yeah?” You whisper.

“You’re my best friend,” he tells you suddenly and it’s true. “Like, you’re my favorite person. Forget Bradshaw.”

Tears well in your eyes again--watery and fat. And you laugh softly, knowing you’ll regret it later. It punctuates this conversation with a casual tone when in reality--this conversation is nothing of the sort.

“Yeah,” you whisper. “You’re kinda my best friend, too. Asshole.”

The two of you sit in the music for a while, neither of you looking at each other. His heart is thumping unsteadily and you graciously pretend not to hear it despite your head resting on his chest. The alcohol is fading slowly and the both of you blink lazily.

Because he can’t stop himself, because he needs something resembling a win tonight, he leans down and gently kisses the top of your head. One feather-light thing, hardly anything really.

You feel it. You always do. You never miss a thing.

“Do you wanna stay?” He asks.

“You already took my shoes off,” you mutter. “I’m not going anywhere.”

𝐅𝐎𝐎𝐓𝐍𝐎𝐓𝐄: OH MY GOD JUST FUCK ALREADY!!!!!!!

𝐌𝐘 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓

𝐍𝐄𝐗𝐓 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑

198 notes · View notes

bloustorm · 1 year

Text

dp x dc prompt idea:

Gothams history was a long and dark one, having changed over time and many misshaps with the timeline

few remembered that it used to go by a different name, before it was rebuild over and over, getting darker everytime the more death leaked into it

aka gotham used to be amity but many ghost and time mishaps among other things lead to this being forgotten, perhaps some of the old residents are even still around, as ghosts or "immortals" cursed to haunt their drenched city

perhaps a ghost boy comes visiting every few hundred years, to look how his home is farring now

perhaps he runs into a man dressed in black who wants to chase him out of his home because "Metas aren't welcome here"

#yeah idk #but the idea that gotham used to be amity is stuck in my head #as well with the idea that the people that used to live in amity are actually still alive #are they aware of it? perhaps some but not all #dp #dc #dp x dc #dp x dc prompt #blou talks #blou has ideas

408 notes · View notes

phoenixgrl1412 · 9 months

Text

DpxDC - Danny Phantom Comics Idea

I've seen a few posts where Danny and the others are huge fans of the Justice League and of certain members. Like, having posters and getting autographs and having merch. Or knowing a hero's entire public history.

But what if some of the Justice League members were the fans, and the Danny Phantom universe was a comic series in the DC universe? And many of the JL heroes grew up on the Danny Phantom comics, which inspired them to become heroes.

I'm imagining Clark Kent, Barry Allen, and even Bruce Wayne grew up in the height of "Phantom mania", when the comics were at their most popular and the phandom was reaching peak numbers. There was also talk of a television show and movies on the big screen. The comic run during their childhood is widely regarded as one of the best runs/timelines, and is the same as DP Universe we know.

The "Phantom mania" as it was called, happened before superheroes/vigilantes, villains, and metas were a thing. And once all of that did became common place, civilians stopped reading that genre. People didn't want to read about real life, they wanted an escape, and the Phantom comics were not that. There were still phans, of course, but not enough to keep the series profitable.

The Phantom comics were not the only hero comic happening at that time, but they did outlast the rest as the writers/whoever else refused to quit working on it until they had no choice. Unlike most hero comics of the time, the writers were able to give the Phantom comics a somewhat rushed and imperfect ending, giving some closure for the series. The comic issues covering the Phantom Planet incident are widely debated by the phandom, with some treating them as canon while others regard it as bad fanfic (for the purpose of this AU, I'm leaning towards Phantom Planet not being canon to the DP universe, but an attempt by the writers of the DC universe to give the series closure when so many other hero comics ended in the middle of a story arc that would never be finished).

There were a few attempted reboots of the Phantom comics, but were poorly done and so different from the "best" run and of such poor quality that they were all flops. The serialization that happened when Clark, Barry, and Bruce were kids is considered to be the last/best/official version of the comics.

For those three, and for other heroes too, the character of Danny Fenton/Phantom and his journey in becoming a hero is such an integral part of how they develop as heroes.

Does Bruce get the idea to become a vigilante/hero thanks to his childhood comic book hero, Phantom? If so, you can't prove it. And so what if he based some of Brucie Wayne's antics on things that Danny or his friends did, you can't prove that either.

(You also can't prove that he dressed up as Phantom for Halloween two years in a row. Alfred can though, and he threatens to pull out the pictures to show the batkids when Bruce is being particularly stubborn.)

For Barry, it's the lab accident. He goes through something similar to what Danny does in his lab accident in the comics (lots of electricity and either chemicals or ectoplasm). Barry struggles with coming to terms with his accident and accepting his new abilities. He isn't sure what to do at first, but he gets reminded of the Phantom comics from when he was a kid. And yeah, Danny isn't real, but his story is still an inspiration and a source of comfort.

Barry rereads through the comics shortly after his accident, and the beginning issues hit home in a way they hadn't before. Danny Fenton had a traumatic lab accident, just like Barry did. And while Barry wasn't half dead, he did come out of his accident with incredible new powers, just like Danny. Those first issues, where Danny is struggling in figuring out his new normal and learning about his abilities through trial and error, resonate with Barry. There are his fears, laid out in print for all to see. Every argument Barry has with himself about what to do with his powers is also there, and it's comforting to know that someone else, even a fictional character, gets it.

Barry decides to become a hero and calls himself The Flash. If his very first (and short-lived) costume design was black and white, and not his now-icon red and yellow, you can't prove anything.

The scenes where Danny is bullied by Dash, after Danny has his powers, might resonate with Clark more than the other bits. Maybe Clark takes the interpretation, as some of the phandom does, that Danny doesn't fight back physically because, with his powers, he could seriously hurt Dash if he did. Maybe he could even kill him if he wasn't careful. And Clark, who at the time is struggling with his own emerging abilities and identity as an alien, rereads his childhood comfort series and sees those scenes. And Clark understands in a way he didn't before, the fear that he could hurt someone accidentally with his strength. And seeing Danny struggle with being accepted by his parents and the town, but knowing he had the unconditional support of his friends and his sister, helps Clark accept himself.

And years later, when he meets his clone, Conner, Clark is infinitely more prepared for the situation and actually handles it well.

And if Clark refers to Lex Luthor as a fruitloop after that, well, only the phandom will understand.

(Lex is furious when it gets brought to his attention. He isn't a phan, but he grew up during that era and couldn't avoid the comics or people talking about them. He resents the implication that he is anything like Vlad Masters, because Lex is clearly more successful. Obviously. But he can't exactly sue Superman for comparing him to a children's comic book villain. Or can he?)

At some point, maybe after a debrief or something, a few of the Justice League members are chit chatting. They somehow start talking about nostalgic things from their childhood. Flash brings up the Phantom comics, and is surprised to learn that Superman and Green Lantern are also fans.

Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter are unfamiliar with the series, prompting a long conversation about the series and its importance. Superman agrees to lend the pair the first issues to see if they like it.

Meanwhile Batman is just standing in the shadows, wanting to participate in the phandom conversation going on but he can't because it isn't something Batman would do. He eavesdrops instead, making a mental note to acquire another set of the comics for himself.

Bruce's set of comics from when he was a kid, was discovered by a young Dick Grayson. Dick was Robin at this point in time, but the mythos surrounding Robin hadn't been fully developed yet. Dick fell in love with the series, which was one of the only comics to feature a teen hero, like himself. I'm not saying that Dick's love of puns and banter came from Danny, but I'm not saying it didn't.

And does Dick use these old comics he stole from Bruce to bond with his new siblings? Absolutely! He introduces them to Jason first, and they spend hours reading and rereading them together. Jason is the one to discover Danny Phantom fanfiction, and shares it with Dick, who is thrilled to have new Phantom content and something else to bond over with Jason. Dick eventually convinces Jason to write his own, and Jason bounces ideas off of Dick.

(Neither is aware that Bruce overhears one of these conversations and seeks out Jason's fanfic. He reads it and subscribes, and leaves a review that Jason gushes about for weeks).

(And After, when Jason is back but is so, so angry, Jason finds that Danny Fenton is even more relatable then he was before. Where else would there be a character who is half dead and makes death jokes? Reading those comics with Dick are some of the memories that he can look back on without seeing green.)

Tim knows about the comics, when Dick drags them out, but he isn't really a phan. He does like the tech though, so some of his leisure projects are trying to recreate the weapons or making a PDA he can hack the pentagon with. He says he doesn't have a favorite character because he isn't as obsessed with it as Dick and Jason, but he totally does. I want to say it would be Tucker, but that feels like a cheap take, so maybe it is one of the ghosts. Or maybe Dani?

Now, Damian isn't too interested in the story of Danny Phantom, the Halfa Hero. It is his first introduction to comics and that storytelling format though, and Damian is a fan of that. He goes on to learn about other comics and manga, but the Phantom comics will always hold a sense of nostalgia for him as they were his first. And Dick forced Damian to read them with him, and Damian does look back on that forced-bonding fondly, even if he would rather stab himself than admit it. He absolutely makes fanart or a fancomic for Dick for his birthday one year, but makes Dick swear to never show it to anyone else or reveal that Damian drew it.

Dick has put a picture of it in the family chat before Damian is even done talking.

-----

All this being said, please imagine all the chaos and fangirling that would arise if post-canon Danny, from the DP universe, somehow ended up in the DC universe and in front of the Justice League.

#dpxdc #danny phantom is a comic book series in the dc universe #comic book au #the batfam and the justice league are in the phandom #jason writes fanfiction #damian ends up making fanart once and never hears the end of it #post canon danny in the dc universe #dick absolutely had a crush on one of the dp characters #will let you decide who #bruce can't be in the phandom because he decided batman wouldn't be a phan and he is sad because of it #superheroes meet their superhero idol #feel free to add on

133 notes · View notes

zahri-melitor · 2 months

Text

The thing about reading early 1990s comics is that sometimes I have to pause here and point out:-

Dr Julia Kapatelis here is designed, dressed and coded here as an ordinary straight feminist university professor who does site work.

Quinn Thomas is designed, dressed and coded as a butch lesbian.

The MOST give away aspect of Quinn’s look is actually that cross earring, believe it or not.

#z canon read throughs #dc dress history

20 notes · View notes

professorpski · 2 years

Link

Washington DC has soooooo many museums, that sometimes people don’t realize there are some smaller themed museums including this one which I always try to visit when I am in town.

In addition to the special exhibition on Indian textiles which the Washington Post offers several pictures of in that link, there is a textiles 101 where you can learn what weaving is with enormous warp and weft to use by hand.

For more info, go here: https://museum.gwu.edu/exhibitions

#washington post #textile museum #washington dc #textile history #indian textiles #costume museum #fashion history #dress history #costume history

10 notes · View notes

averagewriter-inthedark · 1 year

Text

The Rockstar, Her Husband, & Their Dagger Ducklings 🐥🎸 | TGM Imagine

Takes place after the events of TGM

TGM Masterlist

Read ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top’ first before this!

Characters & Pairings: Captain Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell x 80s Rockstar!reader (romantic), Bradley Bradshaw x reader (mother/son-type relationship), Dagger Squad (platonic) Hondo (platonic)

Content Warnings: fluff, profanity, mentions or past drug use & alcohol, 80s references, found family troupe | female!reader (she/her) | wc: 5.3k

Premise: everyone loves a found family story. The one tells the what it looks like when you put a married couple, in which the husband is the Navy’s most famous pilot and the wife is the most iconic front-woman in rock n roll history, with their sorta adopted adult children that are the Navy’s best of the best pilots. Join Maverick, his rockstar wife, and the dagger ducklings on just some of their rock and rollin’ adventures.

Requested 📨: yes/no

Note: As soon as I finished IALWTTT I immediately started thinning about doing a little mini blurb about Mav, his rockstar wife, and the dagger squad as they become a little family. Plus I thought of how they would be if they were at the Rock n Roll HOF induction 😉 hope y’all like this and let me know what you think! -Bee 🐝

—————————————

There is only one word that could describe best what it’s like when a 60 and 58 year old couple decide to unofficially adopt seven 30+ year olds as their surrogate children…..It’s madness.

Well it’s madness about 80% of the time just because they’re basically teenagers in adult bodies whenever they get together. For example, Mav and Y/n really got a taste of what it was like when the daggers were in the same room just the night after the concert when they invited them over for Saturday dinner. The barbecue was going, drinks were passed around, music was on full blast and things were calm…..until it was time to sit down at the table.

“That is not how I got my callsign, Seresin!” Nat chucked a celery stick at the blonde. The conversation of call signs came into play about thirty minutes into the meal with Jake taking it upon himself to tell the stories he personally witnessed or heard from others. He had just got done explaining that Phoenix got black out drunk in flight school, threw up all over the dorms but managed to clean it all up, and then woke up in time the next day for training.

“That’s what I heard, Trace,” he defends with hands raised, laughing as the others try not to receive the wrath of the firebird.

“And who was your source?”

Jake doesn’t hesitate to throw him under the bus, “Rooster.”

“Dude!” The pilot shouts, causing Y/n to do an expression of, ‘nooooo.’

Nat threw a celery at him, “What the hell, Bradshaw, that’s not what happened.” Rooster sends a glare to Jake, before facing Nat with a look of plea, “forgive me, Nat. But that’s what I remembered happening.” Her reaction is one that reads, ‘are you serious?’

“You were just as wasted as I was! How the hell did you manage to remember that?”

“So you did black out and showed up in time for training?” Fanboy asks with slight awe. There was no way in hell he’d be about to do that. If it were him, he’d likely still be in bed and get chewed out for missing.

“Look,” she sighs, “the event itself happened, yes,” she ignores the sounds of ‘damn, Phee,’ ‘I knew it was true,’ the glare they receive causes them to shut up. “But I already had Phoenix as my callsign. That isn’t what gave me it, but people were just like, ‘no wonder they say you rise from the ashes.’ So, you can forget about that being the origin cause it wasn’t.”

Murmurs sound and then Y/n politely asks, “How did you get the name then, hon?” This time Nat blushes and tells the truth, “I used to be obsessed with the X-Men comics as a kid. And well….Jean Grey was my favorite character so I dressed up as her Phoenix form almost every Halloween for five years. Word got around and the rest was history.”

The rest of the night was full of laughs, games, and conversation.

“I am open about the fact I did…dabble in the white powder during my late teens-early twenties,” Y/n nodded when the question about her past drug use arose. The information was public that she and other band members smoked weed early in their careers and experimented with harder substances. In an interview with the Rolling Stone magazine shortly after the band went on hiatus Y/n confirmed the last time she used drugs was in 1988.

“Unfortunately it was common in the 80s—especially in the industry, I mean the amount of people you met who did it was longer than Santa’s list. When you have young, vulnerable kids who are new to the scene and having to migrate the spotlight like we did things tend to happen,” she waves a hand to emphasize her point. “But I only did it in social settings. It was only a few times really and the last time I did a line I swear I saw God. When I tell you it was like witnessing the Big Bang in real time—I-I immediately cut it off after that. It was so bad—never again.”

At one point Jake asked, “tell us your top five favorite moments in your entire career.”

“Oh God,” she laughed, turning to Mav who had the same expression. “Only five? That’s gonna need time to think but……” she starts counting off with her fingers, “in no particular order: the Super Bowl, duh. The first ever MTV Video Music Awards—you just had to be there. Smoking a blunt with Snoop Dogg after the 2001 Grammys,” she paused when they all hollard with cheers. “Performing with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr,” Bob made an audible sound like it was the coolest thing he’d ever heard. “And…..oh gosh there’s so many more—SNL, winning the Oscar, making out with Matt Dillion after The Outsiders premiere,” Mav rolled his eyes at that knowing she was teasing him. Of course he knew she’d been with Hollywood heartthrobs before they met, men and women alike. Mav wasn’t insecure or anything. They’d been together for so long he had nothing to be insecure for. It was just that he had met Matt Dillion in the 90s…..and could tell the actor still had lust for his woman.

Y/n couldn’t help but tease him knowing Pete was obviously jealous the night she introduced the two at a party they attended. It was just a friendly encounter with Y/n having her eyes for the pilot, disregarding the affectionate gaze from her former fling. “He won’t stop staring at you,” Pete pouted when he caught Matt’s eyes for a fourth time, once again checking his girlfriend out. Chuckling, Y/n made herself comfortable in Pete’s lap, pulling him closer so they barely had space as she went in to kiss him after saying, “Let him stare, baby. He had a chance and he missed it. Now he’s in the past and you’re my present and future.”

Yeah, Matt left the party shortly after that display.

Y/n kissed blushing Pete’s cheek and took a moment to think, “But I gotta include the first time we played at The Garden. I think that’s the moment when I really felt like I was a rockstar.”

The dogs were having a grand time with all the attention they were getting. Goose spent most of the time on Bradley’s lap, with Y/n scolding the man for feeding the pup some of the plain chicken wing meat. Plans were arranged for the upcoming months which included Mickey and Jake’s birthdays, Halloween and of course, Y/n’s HOF induction. The daggers were under the impression only Mav and possibly Rooster would get to go in person to the event, so they worked on meeting up to watch the live feed together.

Little did they know their resident rockstar was already conspiring.

Speaking of Halloween, the party was a night to remember when the holiday arrived. It had already been established that Mav and Y/n knew how to throw a party. Mickey and Jake’s birthday were just two examples in which the dagger squad, the band, and their close friends were thankful Y/n’s closest neighbors were quite the walk away. Halloween, however, was where the couple got to shine.

Not only were they best dressed as Jack Skeleton & Sally, with their dogs all dressed up as bats, but their entire home looked straight out The Nightmare Before Christmas. The front lawn was like a graveyard, with a giant inflatable pumpkin. Inside was spectacular with the sunken living room transformed into a dancefloor. One could expect the daggers were trying not to lose their mind with the amount of stars they met. Duran Duran was there, which was expected since the two bands had been friends since the 80s but also because of the induction in just a few short weeks.

Robert Downey Jr. was in attendance with his family—Fanboy pretty much shit his pants when he realized who Y/n was introducing him too. The Marvel junkie in him was going crazy. “Hey, buddy, nice to meet ya. Any friend of the Mitchell’s is a friend of mine,” Robert shook his hand, the pilot’s mouth a gape causing Y/n to chuckle and pat his back, “I think we broke the poor boy, Robert.”

Nat found herself having a drink with Carrie Ann Moss from the Matrix, who she was dressed as her iconic character. “Nice outfit,” the actress complimented with a genuine smile. Nat didn’t know how she managed to find the words to speak, but somehow said, “t-thank you. Wow um—it’s an honor.” Before she knew it the two women were talking with Carrie Ann telling her all the behind the scenes info of her most renowned sci-fi trilogy.

Fucking Serena and Venus Williams was there. Coyote just about had a heart attack and texted his mother right after meeting them saying, “You’ll never believe who I just met, ma.” He then proceeds to send the selfie they took to his family group chat. They were losing their minds just as he was.

Payback’s fan girl moment came when he ended up being challenged in a dance off with the one and only Janet Jackson. What made it better…he was dressed as Michael Jackson from his Thriller music video. It’s probably what had the singer challenge him when the song ‘Scream’ she did with brother came on. The costume Janet had involved a mask, so the man didn’t even know who he was dancing with until the song came to an end.

“Does he know that’s Janet?” Y/n came up to her husband, grinning at the sight. Mav shook his head, “I don’t think he does.” When the mask revealed the face hidden behind, Reuben forgot what the hell was even happening around him. “Holy shit,” was all he could say, grinning wide as she approached with a nod of respect, “You got moves, kid.”

Jake came up and slapped him on the back, “That was fucking awesome!” Payback was still in disbelief, exhaling with awe, “I just dance battled Janet Jackson…. while dressed as Micheal Jackson, to the song Scream by Micheal and Janet Jackson…I’ve won at life.”

Rooster, as usual, was the life of the party. A lot of the guests he already had the privilege of meeting years before. So one could imagine how stunned his friends were to see him nonchalantly shooting pool with fucking Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters. “You’ve gotten better since the last time we played,” the guitarist chuckled when Rooster hit the winning shot.

“Ain’t no better place to become pro than in a Navy officer bar.”

“Guess you’ll have to teach me a thing or two now, kid.”

Beach days were reserved for dogfight football. Ever since that first time playing it the pilots couldn’t play it any other way. Hondo or Y/n would be ref and there would be times where the band would come out with their kids so they had more players.

“Ready….set…” Y/n blows the whistle and the balls are tossed to their respective quarterback. The speaker blasting music would muffle out due to the shouts and cheers, Y/n squealing when Mav would lift her over his shoulder whenever he scored. “Pete Mitchell put me down!” A slap to his jean clad ass would result in her being tossed in the water. “Hey! Oh you little—,” the pilot was yanked down, falling into the upcoming wave to the sound of his wife’s laughter.

Sometimes the dogs would join in on the fun at the private beach. It always ended with Rooster, Mav, and Coyote chasing after Goose and Ice, the mutts stealing the balls in the middle of the game. Sweet Bella was always on her best behavior, cuddling with the younger kids who opted out of playing. “Goose, get back here!” “Ice, now is not the time!”

Four days before the induction ceremony, Y/n gathers her ducklings to the home for their monthly barbecue. “Gather ‘round, ducklings,” she taps a spoon to her wine glass. “Gather ‘round.”

“The Queen has something to say,” Rooster adds when they take too long to circle the table, resulting in Y/n to lightly smack his shoulder in a motherly way. He feigns hurt, mumbling, “rude.”

The rockstar calls the attention back to her, “It has come to my attention that you all have made plans to watch the live feed of Saturday’s ceremony. Well, I have some news I’d like to share….” She gestures for Pete, who brings over a literal silver tray with eight black and red envelopes neatly lined up. Each envelope had the pilots callsign in silver sparkly lettering.

“Was this your idea?” she muses at the silver tray, Pete and Rooster grinning like children who were presenting an art project.

“We thought it was fitting.”

“You two,” she sighs though there is amusement in her tone. “When I call your name please retrieve your present. But don’t open it till I say so.”

“What did you do?” Nat accuses when she’s the first to receive the envelope. Lightweight in her hands, she examines it closely while the others get theirs, but does not open it like instructed. Hondo is the last to get his, taking his place back between Javy and Mickey.

“Consider this your holiday present from Mav and I,” Y/n leans into her husband when his arm goes around her. “We both split the costs—though I insisted it all be on me since It was my idea,” she looks at him with a knowing look.

He just kisses her temple, “You know I wouldn’t have let you when you already do so much, honey,” Pete looks at his pilots, “But we hope you all like it and accept the offer.”

“If this is what I think it is,” Jake starts to say, catching onto what the couple were implying. Y/n’s little indication of the ceremony is what really had him suspect. “Then I’m going to scream.”

Nat quickly catches on, gasping, “I swear to God, y’all better not have.”

“Better not have what?” Bob innocently looks at the couple, who were both grinning wide. Y/n couldn’t take it any longer and allowed them to open the envelopes. Sure enough Jake screamed, but it was more of a dramatic one. With him were Mickey, Javy, Payback and even Bob was shouting. Nat immediately embraced Y/n in a hug while Hondo did the same to Mav. Before long the entire group was in a big dogpile with the pups getting in on the hype.

“You guys are unbelievable!” Nat shouted amongst the chaos, double checking the papers to see they were in fact what they were. It was a ticket to the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony taking place that Saturday at the Microsoft Theater “Wh-what!? How!?”

“I’ve had them ready since July,” Y/n told her, laughing at Nat’s jaw dropped expression.

“Thank you so so much!” Nat hugs her again after the guys express their words of gratitude, “I don’t think we can thank you enough—I mean you’ve already done so much for us. Now this!? Honestly I don’t know how we’ll make it up to you.”

“Don’t think about that,” Y/n assured, moving to the side when a play fight broke out between Mav, Rooster, and Jake with the dogs. “It makes me happy to do these things and that we get to share them together. You guys are our family now. Not just mine and Pete’s, but also the Romantics. And I would want nothing more than my whole family to be in attendance Saturday night.”

“It would be our honor,” Nat squeezes her hand, still in disbelief that she got to call the woman a friend and was privileged to experience things she never thought she could. When Saturday came Nat had to pinch herself. Sitting in the stands of Microsoft Theater with her best friends, dressed in a sparkly pantsuit and in absolute awe.

The squad was close to the stage but in the stands since the floor was where all the tables were. From their position, they could see Y/n and Pete with the Romantics and their managers. Front tables were basically reserved for the inductees. The year's inductee lineup was insane. Absolute icons: Duran Duran, Pat Benatar, Dolly Parton, Eurythmics, Lionel Richie, Eminem, Carly Simon, Judas Priest, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, Harry Belafonte, Sylvia Robinson, Jimmy Lovine, Elizabeth Cotten, and Allen Grubman.

Those who had passed were to be honored by singers and the inductees present would perform. One by one the inductees were honored. Personal friends, fans, or colleagues gave speeches for the artist/group they were inducting. Dr. Dre inducted Eminem, Robert Downey Jr for Duran Duran. In between performances took place with the crowd on their feet and singing along to iconic songs that defined a generation.

Hearing Dolly Parton live was a moment they’d never forget. So many things could be crossed off their bucket list, including seeing Dolly Parton. Together they shouted the lyrics to ‘Sweet Dreams’ by Eurythmics at the top of their lungs, the guys rapping along with Eminem. Nat felt like a teenager again singing along to Pat Benatar’s ‘Love Is A Battlefield,’ & ‘Heartbreaker’. They rocked out to Judas Priest, Duran Duran, and Loionel Richie. Everyone was having a blast and then the moment they were all waiting for came.

To induct Y/n and The Romantics, the crowd screamed in joy when Ryan Reynolds approached the podium. At the table the band were in a heep of laughter already. It was fitting having the movie star induct them considering their songs were featured in the Deadpool movies and they made a cameo in Deadpool 2. Ryan was not only a big fan of the group but had become their friend.

“Hello, hello, greetings and salutations fellow rock n rollers,” he starts, the audience roaring around. Payback brought his thumbs up to whistle. “It’s an honor and privilege to be here tonight with you all, and it’s a mega blessing to be inducting this next group,” his attention lands on the Romantics, the cheers getting louder, “which is safe to say has been long overdue.”

“Damn right!” Rooster shouts, which actually catches Ryan’s attention, the movie star pointing in his direction with a curt nod.

“Now if you’re a child of the 70s like me and had your teenage years in the decade known for religious cults and a substance sharing the name with a popular soft drink,” he pauses at the laughter that rings out, coughing lightly before continuing, “then you should know who Y/n and The Romantics are.” Microsoft Theater rumbled with the reaction of the crowd. “If you don’t,” Ryan shrugs, “then you must be living under a fucking rock.”

The camera pans to the band, Y/n with a hand over her mouth covering the massive grin she had beneath. Her bandmates were just as joyous as they watched Ryan give his speech. “At just the ripe age of fourteen, these young cats hit the streets of Atlanta and sang tunes for all ears to hear. It was 1978. The Camp David Peace Accords was signed, the first IVF baby was born, NASA unveiled their first group of women astronauts, and Japanese explorer Naomi Uemura became the first to reach the North Pole. For a bunch of freshmen in high school, their lives changed when their rendition of ‘Cry Baby’ by Janis Joplin was heard by the right person passing by.” Ryan pauses once more to let the audience cheer, at the table Pete takes Y/n’s hand in his, giving it a loving squeeze.

“Though they released their first single on New Year’s Day of 1979, the new decade emerged with a new spice to rock music. It skyrocketed these kids to stardom with their unique sound and a frontwoman with a voice that sounded like an angel rebelled from God to become a rockstar,” Y/n smiled shyly when the camera panned to her, blowing a kiss before it went to her friends. “They were every rock n roll hater’s worst nightmare. With their leather and glitter, Y/n’s iconic split dye hair and swooning every person they met, the launch of MTV in 1981 made Y/n and The Romantics overnight sensations…. and the celebrity crushes of every young Hollywood heartthrob,” Ryan smirks, nodding with the hollars of the audience.

“The way people are when it comes to securing Taylor Swift and Beyoncé tickets, was the same for us trying to see The Romantics live back in the day. You can best believe seeing grown men and women cry when they were unable to get seats for the farewell tour. I think I even witnessed a fight break out in the ticket line.”

“Oh my God,” Y/n giggled, hiding her face in her hands. Glancing at her friends they had the same reaction: flustered.

“By 2002 The Romantics had sold over 150 million records worldwide and accumulated so many awards I can’t even list them all in this speech. I’ll just name a few: an Oscar for Best Original Song,” whistles and hollars sounded at his pause between each award, “twelve Grammy awards. Over a dozen in MTV Moonmen. Billboard’s Artist of the Year. The AMA Icon Award. Ranked number 15 on the Rolling Stone list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time—cited as the greatest influence on rock music of the 20th century.”

Ryan adjusted his posture, “I can confidently say that when the news broke of their hiatus, hearts shattered across the planet—including mine,” he faked a voice crack, causing the audience to chuckle. “It felt like my parents were getting divorced—s-sorry,” he wiped away a fake tear, Y/n leaning over her chair in a heep of giggles. “It was an emotional time for me and fellow Romantics.”

“But though they were no longer releasing music their spotlight never dimmed. The members ventured out in other projects and started families. Fans might have recognized keyboardist Ronnie Jensen as Detective Josie Adams on Law & Order,” the camera panned to Ronnie, the woman throwing up a rock n roll gesture with her hand to the cheers. “If you look at the writing credits on some of the 2000s best hits for modern pop rock artists and groups, you may find the daughter of rock n roll's name at the top.” This time the camera went back to Y/n’s smiling face, the rockstar giving a nonchalant shrug.

“Oh and let’s not forget that if you watch any superhero or action movie you’ll hear ‘Thunderstruck’ on the soundtrack.” That had the crowd go wild. “And if you listen to ‘Highway to Hell’ while diving…nine times out of ten you will be pulled over for reckless speeding. Believe me, I would know.” Danny and Evan were capping their hands by how hard they were laughing, wiping away tears that brimmed in their eyes.

“Around this time two years ago we were at the height of a global pandemic. The world was shut down and there was little to hope for in those hard times. But one random day I found myself shitting my pants when the first thing I saw on twitter was The Romantics trending worldwide. I thought one of them had died honestly and was too scared to look as a panic attack arose until my lovely wife Blake slapped me and said, ‘they're getting the band back together you fool—stop crying and get it together.’ I then proceeded to faint for a different reason.” Ryan caught Y/n’s eye and he broke out into a laugh, forgetting what he was about to say next. “I-I fuck I’m sorry.” The audience laughed with him.

“T-their comeback album ‘In Rock We Trust,’ hit the the top of the Billboard hot 100 within minutes of release—going platinum in just a week. Their debut single, the title track, remained number one on iTunes for eight weeks straight and every radio station lost their minds. It’s no surprise they took home the Grammy once again for ‘Best Rock Album’ and ‘Record of The Year.’ And now 43 years after the release of their first single, they have finally earned their spot in the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame.”

As the audience screamed the lights dimmed on the stage so the video montage could play for all eyes in the theater. Those viewing at home would get a full screen picture of the video while those in attendance all shot their eyes to the Jumbotron. Down below, stage crew motioned for The Romantics to get ready for their performance that would happen once the video was over. Y/n kissed Pete, the man telling her good luck as the band did the same to their loved ones before they all followed the stage crew to their positions.

The video montage consisted of clips starting from the Romantics first starting out at just 14 and 15 years of age all the way to present day. Watching them go from shy kids to rockstars selling out stadiums and racking up award after award. Some clips were of their music videos, others were celebrities gushing over the band, including Cameron Diaz and Ralph Macchio. “I love them so much,” a young Cindy Crawford said, blushing when she added, “I just wanna party with them and have a good time.”

“They are the band of our generation,” praised Molly Ringwald on the red carpet of the 1988 VMAs. “Seeing them perform tonight is gonna be the highlight of my life.”

Their songs played over the video showing a montage of the band's most iconic performances. One of which was the 1992 Billboard Music Awards where it was raining outside and they still performed. Y/n was completely soaked with her makeup smearing down her cheeks and hair in disarray, not to mention she was wearing a white tank top with no bra and leather pants. It made headlines with people and the media trying to degrade the rockstar. A clip with Diane Sawyer trying to humiliate Y/n played, showing the woman smirk as she shrugged and said, “why were your eyes there the whole time, Diane? Did I make you look at my chest? No, you and everyone else did that on your own.” The clip immediately cut to the Super Bowl Halftime show, regarded as one of the best performances of all time.

When the video ended, the spotlight shined back on Ryan and the cheers grew louder, “It is my honor to induct your Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2022 members, ladies and gentleman gave it up for Y/n and The Romantics!!” Evan’s opening riff sent the crowd wild, everyone on the floor to their feet and the daggers whistling against the noise. Strutting up to the front of the stage, Y/n brought the microphone up to her lips and sang her heart, “Hey yeeeeahhhh, are you ready?” She smiled and winked at Pete.

“We be a guitar band. We play across the land. Shootin’ out tonight, gonna keep you up alright.”

”You hear the guitar sound, playin’ nice and loud. Rock you to your knees, gonna make your destiny.”

“In rock we trust, it’s rock or bust,” she belts the chorus, the audience singing with her. It was their first single back as a band, one that dominated the radio for weeks on end. The theater echoed with the final line of the chorus, “In rock n roll we trust, it’s rock or bust!”

After the song ended they immediately went into the opening of ‘Highway to Hell,’ which had the entire theater in a frenzy. “Livin’ easy, lovin’ free. Season ticket on a one way ride. Askin’ nothin’, leave me be. Takin’ everythin’ in my stride.” Pink was head banging, so was LL Cool J. Duran Duran were dancing with Y/n pointing at them before going over to the side of the stage where her ducklings were going crazy. “Don’t need reason. Don’t need rhyme. Ain’t nothin’ that I’d rather do. Goin’ down, party time. My friends are gonna be there too,” she shook her shoulders with each pound of Danny’s drums.

“I’m on the highway to hell!” Everyone screamed/sang. “On the highway to hell,” Y/n shook her head side to side. “Highway to hell.” Rooster whistled on the last line, “I’m on the highway to hell.”

“Y/n, you’re an icon!” Jake shouted, cupping his mouth with his hands. She must’ve heard him cause she laughed into the second verse.

The rest of the ceremony the energy was off the charts. The Romantics shared the stage with Duran Duran, singing their 1988 collab which had jaws drop and in absolute hysteria. All the inductees gathered at the end of the ceremony, all now official members of the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame. It was truly a sight to behold.

The holidays passed with more celebrations. Before long the band were releasing more songs and an album at the end of the summer. By 2024 they were back on tour and this time the daggers would attend shows without telling Y/n to surprise her. They had really become a family in just the two years they’d known each other.

“Oh this is a great song,” Jake practically moaned at the opening chord of Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone. He and the daggers were on the floor of the Staples Center, Y/n had spotted them not too long into the show and forgot her own lyrics cause she was so excited, “My ducklings are here! Ooh this next song is dedicated to them.”

Pulling on some aviator sunglasses to go with her camo pants and combat boots, Y/n shrugged on her husband's bomber jacket, “Revvin’ up your engine. Listen to her howlin’ roar,” she pointed a finger and drifted from side to side, “Metal under tension. Beggin’ you to touch and go.”

“Highway to the Danger Zone. Ride into the Danger Zone.” She shimmied her shoulders, “C’mon let me hear you!”

“Headin’ into twilight. Spreadin’ out her wings tonight. She got you jumpin’ off the deck. And shovin’ into overdrive. Sing it!”

“Highway to the Danger Zone. I’ll take you right into the Danger Zone.”

At the end of the song Y/n took the jacket off and threw it back over the railing to Pete, the man catching it in his hands, “Thanks for letting me borrow that, baby.”

That night of the show was just a few days before Y/n’s 60th birthday. She couldn’t help but awe when Pete and the squad came out with the band's families, their managers and crew with a small cake and balloons to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’

“You guys,” she wiped a tear away after blowing out the candles. Kissing Pete on the lips, she welcomed his hug and heard him say into her ear over the noise, “Happy birthday, baby. I love you so much—more than my P-51.” She threw her head back as she laughed, kissing him again before saying, “I find that hard to believe, Maverick,” she teased, kissing his cheek, “But thank you for this. You’re everything a woman could ask for.”

“Happy birthday, Y/n!” Rooster blows into the noise maker, placing a party hat on her head. The squad swarm around the couple, the confetti blasting into the crowd.

The moment felt like a full circle. Just two years prior Pete’s 60th birthday brought them all together. Now here they were celebrating her 60th, on stage with her friends, family, and fans. She really had it all.

But not to worry. There were sure going to be more memories and adventures of the rockstar, her husband, and their dagger ducklings.

………………..

TGM Tag list: @avaleineandafryingpan @caitsymichelle13 @poppyalice2001 @cutelittlepotatofry @luckyladycreator2 @americaarse @elenavampire21 @back-tooo-black @phoenixssugarbaby @gizmodear

#Spotify #pete mitchell x reader #pete maverick mitchell #pete mitchell imagine #pete mitchell x y/n #captain pete mitchell #dagger squad #dagger squad x reader #dagger squad imagine #Maverick x reader #top gun imagine #top gun maverick #top gun maverick fanfiction #top gun maverick imagine #rockstar!reader

242 notes · View notes