#ended up with the same effect of that crayon pen I used to use
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Brain empty only fish 🐟
#sundrop#fnaf daycare attendant#Luca au#mermaid au#mermaid sundrop#I should really draw moon more often#prom myself I’ll do a moon to go with this#feels like I’m returning to form with this artstyle#soft pen with colored shading#ended up with the same effect of that crayon pen I used to use#keep in mind#set the characters up more in a more interesting position it’s too far away this way#god can I ever draw my own design consistently#add fin and maybe change frills
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wanna vent about the last week and share it cause it was therapeutic to type it out and might be insightful for others
I moved out of my dad's house but my bills still go to him until we can change that. he refuses to do online money transfers through paypal or anything so I have to drive an hour to deliver cash to him then drive an hour back once a month. it's super annoying. about two weeks ago, he gave me around 12 hours notice on a saturday night that I need to bring him $1160 in cash the next morning or else he has to pay a $50 overdraft fee that he'd make me cover. (I always use my income tax check to pay my car insurance for the whole year all at once and this was the month for that, plus my car payment and cell phone bill) banks are closed on sundays, and the atm is NOT giving you a thousand in cash. furthermore, my job still hadn't given me a paycheck yet, so I didn't even have it all. (as I type this I've still only been paid for two days of the three weeks I've been there) when the atm inevitably only let me take $500, I got very frustrated
my dad is insufferable and brings out the worst in me. I felt the need in that moment to do whatever I could to hurt myself because I was angry. so I started banging my head against the walls and punching and kicking them. I aimed a kick at the metal part beside the window of the bank, missed, and kicked and broke the window. and of course with the bank being closed all I could do was leave. a couple days later, I get a letter from the bank saying they're closing my account and I would be banned from every branch of their establishment. the letter said nothing about pressing charges or making me pay, so I thought that was the end of it. I realized I was wrong when the cops showed up at my door on tuesday morning to tell me I would need to go to court and pay for the window
I'm stressed, scared, sad, embarrassed, and angry at myself. I blurt out to the cops without meaning to that I should just kill myself. it was stupid as fuck. they immediately call an ambulance and tell me they're taking me to the psych ward and I have no choice in the matter. they say I can board the ambulance willingly and possibly get to leave the same day, or they'd restrain and force me onto it and I'd have to stay at least three days. so I get in the ambulance and am taken to the hospital. after a few hours of testing and talking to different doctors, they tell me I have to stay. naturally I should think, I start sobbing and wailing and throwing an absolute fit, crying that I don't wanna be here. the doctors are humiliating me by yelling at me and treating me like a child, as though I'm reacting irrationally to being effectively kidnapped and having my rights, choices, and autonomy stripped away. I was wailing for like an hour and crying softy the rest of the day. I had to stay for two nights and after talking to seveal doctors throughout the day all saying that I really did not need to be there (no one needs to be there, some people really need help but no one needs a psych ward) they let me go yesterday after the two most boring fucking days of my life
they don't let you do fucking anything there. you can't have your cell phone. if you have a number you can call people on their phone but there's lots of limits to it. there's a community room with a tv with basic cable behind glass and some coloring books, paper, and crayons. no pens or pencils. you can read books if your family brings them to you. that's really it. that's all you can do. they removed the shower head and hose in the baths because someone tried to hang themself with it. they took the microwave out of the community room because someone tried to throw it once. now if you're not in the mood to eat at lunch time you have to eat it cold later or not at all. one person's bad decision removes privileges for everyone. and if someone tries to stab themself in the eye with a crayon, do we lose those too? if someone tries to hit someone with a book, does everyone lose the right to read? if someone hits another person with the remote will it be taken away and you'll have to ask the nurses every time you want to change the channel? there's SO few privileges and stuff to do already and you're at the mercy of everyone else's behavior or even your own emotions to keep it. and you're expected to be complacent and okay and not fucking driven insane by the maddening boredom. it's humiliating, it's infantilization, it's dehumanizing, it's fucking cruel
I was only there for two days but holy shit I definitely just developed a new trauma. I can't stop thinking about the other people there. I can't stop thinking about the old man who the nurses said was okay to leave but none of the family he called wanted to pick him up so they won't let him leave. I can't stop thinking about the people worse off than me who really need help but AREN'T fucking getting it there, who will be forced to stay far longer than I did. about the "help me" and "I'm not happy" carved into the plastic furniture and walls in several spots. about the attempted suicides and surely, inevitable few successes that occured in the rooms I stood in. about the nice guy who was similar to me that I made buddies with and talked to while I was there who seemed so sad to see me go, because he couldn't relate to anyone else there. there's nothing I can do for anyone there and this is going to haunt me
tl;dr, fuck my dad, fuck banks, fuck cops and FUCK mental health insitutions a thousand times over
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Daddys got you
1,664 words
Unedited
Steve rogers x little (gn!) Reader
Warnings: age regression, they them used for gender neutral, names like baby, little one, and daddy, etc.This was falsely labeled as ddl(gn) at one point
If you don't like stuff like this please keep scrolling thank you ❤💙
》~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~♡~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~《
You enjoy cooking dinner, not just because its stress relief or because you love seeing peoples days melt away to the consumption of something made with love and passion, but because you know whats in it, you know all the towers allergies, you made sure to ask before the first time you cooked for them.
You took account not just for your own but everyone elses health at dinner because you understand just how miserable anaphylaxis is.
You had a really busy day today and were getting home to the tower from a mission at the same time you usually had plates out for everyone, so when you walked in seeing as all the spots taken except your end seat next to steve, you smiled, whatever was made smelt amazing, after discarding your belongings in your shared room you make your way to the table placing your hand on his back cueing him to look up at you, you lean down and place a greeting kiss to his lips followed by a gentle smile shared between the both of you
You seat yourself next to him, your plate already served to you by nat, conversations continue off before, bruce and tony going on about a new project while people nod along.
Around three bites your mouth starts to go tingly " hey nat, what'd you use that doesn't taste spicy but feels like the after math of spicy?" You question honestly curious, "what do you mean hun?"
"Is it no-" you get cut off by rough coughing ripping itself from your chest, youre throat is closing "nat whats in it?" Steve places a hand on your back "everything (y/n) puts in it i just replaced vegetable oil with coconut for a slightly different effect, yours, steves and starks eyes go wide, in seconds after she responded steve was standing, pulling you in your chair away from the table, he reaches into his back pocket pulls out a clear tube flicking the cap open grabbing the epi pen out putting the blue part in his mouth pulling the epi away from it.
He leans over the back of your chair, hand on your collarbone holding you up so you dont lurch forward while coughing, "im sorry hun but ive gotta do this, youre gonna be okay" and just like that he slams the orange tip of the auto injector to your thigh making a click, ripping a cry of pain from your startled body, holding it for ten seconds counting them out to you and finally releasing it from your thigh placing a kiss you your temple, "you're gonna be okay hun i promise"
"Whats going on?" Nats voice trembling, stark answers for both of you "(y/n) is allergic to coconut, it happens we just have to be careful, you didn't mean to, you didn't know".
Bruce comes over placing his hand on steves sholder, "i gotta keep them in the med bay for at least six hours to monitor the reaction, you can stop by your room before hand to grab essentials but its mandatory to have someone in medical watch over"
Thankfully everyone was already aware of your littlespace and encouraged it when needed, so when you looked up at stevie with glossy eyes and a wobbly lip and holding your arms out as request to be carried no one questioned, he walks with you wrapped around him head on his sholder, tears still cascading down your cheeks, "youre okay dove, daddys got you" he bounces you on his hip.
Entering the room he grabs what you call the emergency little bag consisting of a few pull-ups, a basic yellow snap closed onesie and a few other essentials for little space like crayons and a coloring book, he also grabs your stuffy, paci and blankie and starts walking to the med bay with you still perched in his arms.
Steve walks you both into the readied room and sets you down on the bed handing you your stuffy, putting your blankie at the foot of the bed and the paci in the bag for now.
Bruce walks in just a few minutes later to check your vitals and see how youre doing, "alrighty kiddo im gonna ask you some questions about how youre feeling after i check a few things, is that okay with you?" You nod reaching your and out for steve to hold.
doctor banner checks a few basic things befor asking to look at your throat, "alrighty, can you open your mouth for me?, im gonna shime a light to the back so i can start monitoring your progress"
You do so and after a moment he pats your sholder, "it still looks angry and red but i think you caught it before it got too bad, im going to hook an iv to you so it can help your fluids regulate" you let out a whimper at the idea of a needle, and scoot closer to the edge of the bed looking at your steve for a sense of calm. "Its okay baby, daddys here" he looks over to bruce, "is it cool if i go get them changed into something more comfortable for little space real quick? " bruce nods and steve picks you and the bag up, you return back to the room seated in steves lap on the bed.
Doctor banner puts the iv in your arm and you settle in, daddy popping the paci into your open mouth and leaning the both of you back til youre cuddled up against his chest while laying down being mindful on the iv in your arm, he places the occasional kiss to your forehead and runs his hand up and down your back, "i sowwy daddy" you bury yourself deeper into your side "i din mean to have reaction, i shoulda ask befowe eating" he tightens his grip placing a slightly more emotional kiss to your forehead and using his free hand he moves your head to look at him.
"Im far from upset at you baby, it happens and daddys take care of their little ones when something happens, thats why daddy carries an extra epi pen with him everywhere" finishing off with an Eskimo kiss.
You nod closing your eyes to try and sleep a bit.
《~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~◇~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~》
After an hour or so of sitting in the silence of you and daddy while napping a little between Bruce's check ins, a knock at the door echoes through the room, a disheveled nat approaches, arms behind her back holding something, you wake up the rest of the way, opening your arms for a hug and she obliges, pulling away a her eyes the faintest bit glossy "im so sorry little one, i had no idea" you smile at her, "its otay, daddy and bwucie makin me feel better, i not upset" steve wakes up to your babbling and rubs your tummy smiling at nat, "i brought you a stuffy ive been saving for you" she holds it out to you, a bright lilac kitty with green eyes.
A grin grows on your face you pull her into a hug and she sets the stuffed kitty next to you and pulls away to see you again, you pick up the toy, turning and holding it to steves face pulling a laugh from nat "daddy wook , i gonna names him (name)", "mhm, thats a wonderful name for him, what do we tell nat?"
You turn quickly back around hugging (t/n) "fank you natty, i wuv him, i wuvs you too", "9f course hun, thank you for forgiving me, ive gotta get back to training but im glad to see youre doing okay" you nod, "thank you for stepping in" steve chimes in as she steps out and a faint mhm is heard from the hall.
You cuddle back into steve letting his slow movements lull you back to sleep, "youre definitely not going to sleep tomorrow but its a price hes willing to pay making sure his sweet little one is okay.
《~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~♡~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~》
After eight ling hours of check ins, naps, coloring and cartoons you were finally released back into the wild halls of the tower, surprisingly for it being so late in the evening/ early in the morning the bustle of movement among the common rooms is still high, you run, more toddle than anything but youre trying to run to the living room, once you walk in you find tony tinkering with his helmet, while the end credits of a movie play out, you plop down onto the couch and he pulls you into a side hug.
"Do we want icecream? Ive got safe icecreams (y/n) can have" half said to you half to steve, you both accept the offer, tony brings you (favorite icecream) by a safe company, "dada we watch movie?" He sits next to you sandwiching you between himself and tony.
"Of course, ill put (f/m) on and puts your blankie on top of your legs.
Around three quarters of the way through the movie, a while after you finish your ice cream you slump over against tony, he lets you put your head in his lap and steve pulls your legs into his own, helping you get comfy.
You fall asleep to a calloused hand running through your hair and another delicate hand up and down your shin.
When the movie ends steve picks you up, "were taking tomorrow off to settle" steve announces to the room followed by a few different chimes of acknowledgement.
When steve sets you in bed you stirr whining for him wanting to be in his arm, he gets in next to you after changing out of his day clothes leaving him in a pair of shorts. Pulling your back to his chest, "its okay little love daddys right here, its bed time baby" and thats what sends you to dreams, your lilac kitty clutched to your chest.
》~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~♡~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~《
I hope its okay that its not edited, i didn't expect my migraine to get bad tonight but ive gotta sleep it off, ill get the next fic out tomorrow. <3 much love
#daddy! steve x little! reader#daddy! steve rogers#steve rogers x y/n#steve rogers x little!reader#steve rodgers x reader#steve rogers x gender neutral reader#steve rogers x gn!reader#steve rogers fanfiction#steve rogers fic#steve rogers fluff#steve rogers comfort#steve rodgers imagine#steve reader insert#reader insert
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I explicitly let @everysinglepheel do whatever @everysinglepheel wants wi this picture (and its art sources) in anyway anywhere anytime, including uploads to any website @everysinglepheel uses.
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I appreciate @everysinglepheel a lot. The firs thing is that @everysinglepheel‘s blog is a neat mixture of mainstream and obscure, frequently leading me to many new art blogs. Plenty of times, the posts of the blog have a common theme. The art is also rather cute; the ‘scanned pen and crayon’ look actually helps the cute, cartoony designs of his characters, making an overall appeal.
Islacura quickly became my favourite. I always liked the look of her ventral scales, being a pattern of rounded rectangles instead of wide stripes, that pattern also lookin good when following the round underbelly.
Those ventral scales were also a delight in spriting, making a neat dither effect. I also like how she is essentially one colour, resulting i neat forms of shading and playing with different shades of pink. Add the relative simplicity of the designs and I ended up enjoying spriting her with an impressive sprite. I deliberately folder her wings, partially because they would fit, partially because I wanted something differen than the same ‘extended wing’ pose I kept doing in these sprites.
If I were to fix this, I might change the legs.
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This was part of Artfight 2021.
Islacura → @everysinglepheel
#ArtFight 2021#ArtFight2021#ArtFight#my art#Islacura#dragon#ventral scales#sprite art#dot art#pixel art
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Madness draws: Behind the Scenes of the “Alleine in der Nacht” die ärzte fan comic.
A few weeks ago I posted this comic:
This post is yet again just another drawing behind-the-scenes post but You can go and reblog the original post here.
And as always, all my ramblings are under the cut!
This one was relatively easy to do because I just woke up one morning and internally died from laughter because this idea just happened like a random pop up window in my brain. I wrote it down to my phone notes and later on also into my sketchbook:
I was laughing out loud when I was drawing those images, Bela’s face still is cracking me up :D And because I’m yet again trilingual with my comics, there’s only one word in my mother tongue and it’s: Bela laulaa = Bela sings.
And other fans might recognize the lyrics of the song, I needed to write them down in order to decide which ones would fit the comic the best.
This one is then again me trying to see how it will fit on a A4 paper. Originally I saw it in my head more like a short, regular comic strip with 3 panels but somehow I couldn’t get it to fit into 3 panels. And 4 panels was too many in a row so I decided to go for a full page then. That caused bits of trouble to me because I normally don’t draw the comic book faces THAT big and it’s surprisingly hard to draw them in bigger scale. (With pencil drawings it’s the opposite, the bigger the better. It’s much easier to draw an eye the size of a finger instead of a size of a tip of a needle.)
Here’s the first sketch! Just the shapes to see how and what I need to draw. Sorry for the awful photo quality again, my phone’s camera has really gotten really bad after these 3 years of use...
Anyhow, the third panel caused me some troubles because I knew how I wanted Bela’s arms and hands to be but I didn’t see them that good in my head so what I did next was to try different postures into my sketchbook:
I also tried this foreshortening technique I saw in a video of after a Tumblr post, even tho I don’t find that too hard to do myself anymore but it was still interesting and can really help making the eye and brain to see the image in 3D. So here I finally figured that I wanted Bela to have is arms like he was singing something very theatrically. I think it turned out pretty good.
Next I struggled with the bedsheets and I figured that I am a bit too good at blocking out information when I draw because I tried to draw unmade beds from reference photos and I’m able to follow a line but also able to completely not see any other lines around the line I’m following. Like I’d often follow a line to somewhere and suddenly notice that wtf there’s SO MUCH MORE lines all over the place in the photo but I just did not see them.
^Here’s two pages in my other sketchbook that I got for the comic stuff especially because the paper is actually white. The bigger sketchbook has light yellow tint to the paper so it can mess up with the colors when I need to try out and look for perfect colors from the colored pencils. (This sketchbook is also smaller aka A5 because Derwent sketchbooks are expensive but this was the only A5 one with a bit grainy paper in white. The A4 one is cheaper and from Mont Marte.)
After a while I was done with the besheet and the rest of the second sketch. I don’t have a photo of the comic with just the lineart, only a photo where the first panel is already colored and now I actually need to talk about the coloring.
That caused me lots of trouble because I really love playing with lights and shadows in everything (drawing, photographing... everything) and I do know how to do the night effect in black and white, but I have only once before done that with colors and it’s never that easy. Plus that one was my first comic when I started drawing again in 2018 and it was not that good to begin with.
I run some tests with the pencils, as well as some shading tests:
Käsi = hand, iho = skin. I use Derwent Flesh Pink (I have a 72 set of Derwent Watercolour pencils) for the skin color and was then trying out other colors to see which one would look the best for shading. It was actually really difficult to do and my sister suggested that I’d use only cold colors but like... how do you use cold colors on a skin without making the character look dead? :D
I imagined that there’s a moon shining in from a window that would be behind the “camera”. I almost ruined the first panel because I wasn’t exactly sure what was I even doing and what did I want from the colors:
Here’s the lineart and almost finished first panel in colors. I really liked the lineart and this would have looked so nice in black and white too, maybe even better. But I just saw that blue background so strongly in my mind that I just had to go for it.
The first panel was really difficult to do like I said and I almost ruined it at some point. But it also taught me something because with the rest of the panels I knew to start with the skincolors and end with the black (I started the first panel with black, I think... kids, never do that, always start with the light colors! :D) and I think the last panel is the best what comes to the colors in the final comic. I also added light blue here and there to make it look more like the colors of a moon at night:
I’m actually very happy with all of the other colors in this panel! It also reminds me of a book I had and used to read as a child. It was about this girl that went to an appendix surgery and all the images were drawn with either colored pencils, pastels or crayons and it looked grainy the exact same way as this one too. It also had lots of red and orange and brown colors in it. (I wonder if I still have the book here...)
Then there’s also the title and “Das Ende”. Originally I was going to do the late 80s logo they have e.g. on the 80s live vhs/dvd but then I just saw another post in my dä blog’s queue and I just needed to do this logo instead!
I had just a couple of weeks prior ordered a pack of white Sakura Gelly Roll pens and needed to test what would make the best compination and with which black!
I also had bought a white paint pen but it’s useless. As you see, it just looks grey after it dries and it just... doesn’t look nice. Plus it takes so much time to dry AND it’s extremely messy and I have paint more in my hands and a puddle on the paper but barely none where it should be. So my choice for the logo was to use either Pigma Microns or Promarkers (I think I chose the latter) and the thickest Gelly Roll aka 10. This was the result:
And I’m actually super happy about how it came out! Couldn’t do that good looking spots on the letters because can’t make splashes with a gel pen so I did a few bigger ones here and there and then just poked everywhere with the pen to make it look more random. You can actually see how it’s slightly whiter than the paper if you look closely, but it’s not too strongly whiter so it looks pretty nice like this.
So, this was less work than the “Widumihei” one but it was also an interesting piece to draw. And I think I have now this comic drawing more freshly in mind so that drawing the next ones (there’s three waiting for sketching already) will be much easier as well :)
#here take the last behind the scenes post then#I mean next ones are going to be actual new drawings because now I'm done with these I had in mind#mcrmadness draws#mcrmadness draws: behind the scenes#my comics#dä fanart#die ärzte
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New Fic: “All A Family”
At the beginning of season five, Mulder and Scully successfully attempt the IVF. When they then discover Emily, they must all work towards being a family. Rated M for sexual content. AU, fluff, lots of tropes. Also here at Ao3.
...
Mulder tells Scully on the first day, when she comes home from the hospital. He has to, because she’s smiling and alive and full of plans. “I should get a new comforter,” she says, when she’s set her things down in her room; he’s hovering in the doorway. “And I was thinking—maybe I’ll take a trip soon. Somewhere I haven’t been.” And later, when they’re having coffee at her kitchen table, “Do you think I could learn to dance?” So he tells her about the eggs.
He’s almost sorry he’s done it, at first, because she’s not smiling anymore; she looks hurt, pained, in a way he hates seeing on her face. But there’s determination in her voice when she says, “I want a second opinion,” and then he’s not sorry. She’s still making plans.
And then he’s a part of those plans, in a way he didn’t expect but maybe should have, considering how long it’s been since they had anything even vaguely resembling a normal relationship between co-workers. Which is overrated anyway. When she asks him to be her donor, he asks for some time to think about it, but that’s mostly because he doesn’t want to come on too strong. He wants to do this for her, and he tells her that, and he tries not to think about what it might mean for him.
He waits for Scully to come back after her appointment, trying not to pace a hole in her apartment floor. He tries to gauge her face when she comes in, but he can’t read it, can’t figure out if it’s yes or no, and then he admits to himself how much he’s invested in this, how maybe he should have actually used that time to think. But it’s too late to take things back now.
“Scully?” he says cautiously, tentatively. They should have made more plans, together.
She looks at him. “I’m pregnant,” she says. She’s smiling and she has tears in her eyes, and it really is too late to take things back, and that’s even before he steps forward and kisses her. What should I say now? he thinks, frantically, but that’s before she kisses him back, slowly and sweetly and more than once.
He sleeps next to her that night, under that new comforter (it’s light blue, with darker blue dots), holding her close. They don’t do anything beyond the kissing and lying next to each other, and they don’t talk about it. But it feels different from the other times they haven’t talked about things. They’re savoring being on the same page at last.
Over the next couple of weeks, they start a new routine. They almost always have dinner together—Mulder puts himself in charge of finding things that Scully will like and that won’t make her feel sick—and he usually spends the night at her place after that, although they still haven’t taken things very far. There’s been a lot of cuddling, a lot of kissing. And they’re going to have a baby together. That too.
They talk about plans, now, but they’re usually for the immediate future, things like him coming to her doctor’s appointments with her. She showed him some pictures of car seats and went through a rundown of the safety features, and he helped her narrow down the list. Mulder wonders if he’s going to be here when the baby comes (at the end of August, which simultaneously feels very close and very far off), if he’ll consider this their apartment instead of hers. From the way she’s been looking at him, kissing him, smiling when he wraps his hands around her middle, he thinks he will, and he really hopes he’s not reading things wrong. But somehow he doesn’t want to ask. He likes what they have now, uncomplicatedly happy, feeling like things have fallen into place for once. When it’s something that just is, rather than something they have to think about, something they have to decide.
“I’m going out to California for Christmas,” Scully reminds him in mid-December, as they’re looking through some files in the office.
“Oh, right,” he says. “Are you…is that good? For you to fly?” He’s been reading some books, but it seems like there are a truly dizzying array of things that might be dangerous for pregnant women and that no one can agree on what they are.
“It’s fine. It’s still so early,” Scully says, but she smiles, like she does whenever they bring up anything related to the baby. Their baby. She pauses then, rearranging the pens on the desk. “I was thinking…would you like to come with me?”
Of course he would. He’s never liked being apart from her, and right now, he likes it even less. “That sounds…that would be great,” he says. “Are you sure it’s all right, though? I don’t want to get in the way of things with your family.” He knows she hasn’t told her mom about the baby yet. He wonders if she’s planning on doing it over Christmas.
“You wouldn’t be in the way, Mulder,” Scully says. “Of course it’s all right. You’re my…” He watches as she searches for a word; he can’t blame her, not sure what word he’d pick himself. She finally comes out with “my friend-person.”
“Your friend-person?” he asks. “Did you just make that up?”
“I mean…you’re a person who’s important to me,” Scully says; her voice is soft, and she’s fiddling with the pens again. “And I’d like it if you’d come.”
“I’d like it too,” he says. He touches her hand, stills it.
...
“I hate this,” Scully informs him, sitting back down next to him on the plane; she’s just returned from the bathroom, where he assumes, based on the expression on her face when she leapt up from her seat, she threw up. “I never got sick on planes before. Never in my life.”
“It’s the first trimester,” Mulder says. “It should stop by late February.” He realizes he doesn’t sound very comforting.
Scully doesn’t seem to think so either. “Don’t give me that shit,” she says. “Just because you’ve been reading some books, you think you know everything.”
“Do you not want me to read books?” Mulder asks.
“No. No, that’s good, that you’re reading books,” Scully says. “It’s the least you can do. After you impregnated me.”
He loves the way she words it, so carefully clinical, and he loves that it’s true. “You asked me to.”
“I know,” Scully says; she settles back in her seat and takes out a mint to suck on. “And really—I can’t tell you how much that means. That you said yes. I’m just mad because I can’t keep anything down and that bathroom looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the Carter administration.”
“Understood,” he says. “You’re entitled to be.”
She manages a smile. “There’s another thing,” she says, after a moment. “I thought I’d tell my mom about the baby this week. How does that sound to you?”
“It sounds fine,” he says. “It’s really up to you, though.”
“Not just me,” Scully says. “You’re a part of this too.”
He doesn’t know what that means, exactly, and this is one of those moments where he doesn’t like the uncertainty. But he doesn’t want to push her, here in the airplane where they can’t just leave if the conversation doesn’t go according to plan. Instead he says, “Well, she’s your mom.”
“Still,” Scully says.
“Well, it’s fine with me,” he says again. “You’re going to tell her how it happened?”
“I don’t think I could get away with not telling her,” Scully says. “But don’t worry. I don’t think she’ll bug you about it.”
“I wasn’t worried about that,” Mulder says. “Just wondering.” He wonders if he should tell his mom. He wonders if he should ask Scully about that. Maybe if he did ask her, they’d wind up talking about what exactly their plans are.
They don’t talk about it that night, at her brother’s house, but they sit next to each other on the couch. They don’t share a bed either, but when they part for the night, she says softly, “I thought I’d tell my mom tomorrow,” and he nods.
He doesn’t know how she planned the conversation to go, because by the next afternoon things have changed. That’s when they find out about Emily.
...
The next couple of weeks are a blur. Mulder’s worried about Emily, and he knows Scully is too, and he’s worried about Scully worrying, about her running around nonstop. And he’s worried that if he tells her that, she’ll punch him. He tries to concentrate on what they can do to help Emily, on taking as much as he can off Scully’s shoulders. And it’s not just for Scully’s sake. Emily’s a sweet kid, shy with them, but he can tell she’s got a big mind like her mom’s. And eyes like hers too. He doesn’t like to think about her being sick, being scared. He thinks a lot about the baby when he’s with her. He wants them all to be all right.
But the drugs they find seem to have an effect: Emily gets better, after they try them, in a way that surprises her doctors, who Mulder would guess haven’t seen half of the things that he and Scully have. They go to visit her in the hospital, bringing coloring books and crayons, and the doctors say she’ll be discharged tomorrow. When she starts to fall asleep Scully kisses her forehead and smooths her hair. Then they go.
“What are you thinking?” he asks, as they walk back to the car.
“I’m going to get to work,” Scully says, “on the adoption case. I haven’t been able to think about anything but whether she’s going to be okay…but now that she is, I really need to get everything together.”
He should tell her he’ll help her. Whatever she needs. Instead, he says, “What about the baby?”
“What do you mean?” Scully asks. “I know…this isn’t what I envisioned, in terms of timing.” She says I, not we. He wonders if she’s sorry now that she asked him, that they started the IVF, that they got involved in this way. The kind of way they usually try to avoid. “But I’m going to make this work. They’ll be close in age, and that’ll be a good thing—”
“You’re going to make this work?” he asks. “By yourself?”
She’s quiet for a minute, and now he really wishes they had actually talked, in those couple of weeks before they came out to California. He wonders if she’s trying to work out how to let him down easy, if this is just too much too fast without adding him to the family. “I didn’t…I wasn’t thinking it would be by myself,” she says finally, softly. “But I don’t want you to feel like you have to do anything.”
“I don’t feel like that,” Mulder says.
“Because I know we haven’t talked about it, with the baby,” she says, barreling on, “and that was before Emily, too. I’m not trying to make you move in with me and get a white picket fence. You don’t have to—”
“I said I didn’t feel like I had to,” Mulder says. “And I think we should get one of those thick hedges. They’re more imposing.”
She stares at him. “Mulder, I’m trying to be serious here. And you’re talking about thick hedges?”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m not sure what I should talk about.”
Scully shakes her head. “It’s okay. I’m not sure either.” She pauses. “But we don’t have a lot of time to figure things out. Emily’s here right now, and there’s not even that much time until the baby. So, if you have any ideas…”
“We could get married,” he says. He’s not sure that he planned to say it, but it makes sense, once it’s out of his mouth. He knows he loves her, has known it for a long time. And if they’re going to be a family now, why should they wait?
Another pause. “That is an idea.”
“We don’t have to,” he says, quickly, wondering why this conversation is so full of qualifiers. “But I would. If you would.”
“I just don’t want you to feel—”
“Scully, I don’t know what I have to say to get you to believe that I don’t,” he says. “I want to do this.” She says something, very quietly. “What?”
“I want to, too,” she says.
...
They get married at the courthouse. They bring her mom, who asks a series of “You’re doing what?”, “The two of you did what?”, and “You were planning to tell me when?” questions when they fill her in on the IVF, the baby, the plans for a fast wedding. But she smiles during the ceremony, at least, and Scully does too, a little shyly, and Mulder knows he does, in a way he can’t contain.
They spend the afternoon visiting Emily and talking to her case worker and the night kneeling on the bathroom floor while Scully throws up; her morning sickness is unpredictable in its timing. She looks incredibly pissed off when she lifts her head. “Ugh.”
“Anything I can get you?” he asks, brushing her hair back from her sweaty forehead. “I could run downstairs and hunt for crackers or tea or something.”
She shakes her head. “No thanks. I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because we got married today,” Scully says, as if he’s missing something very obvious, “and now I feel disgusting and I look disgusting and you’re not going to want to fool around with me.”
“First of all,” he says, “it’s a little weird that you describe it as fooling around. Since, as you point out, we are married.”
“I just emptied out the entire contents of my stomach,” Scully says, “and you are going to fight me on my word choice?”
“Well, that’s what I mean,” Mulder says. “I don’t know what to say. If I say I do want to fool around, I look like an asshole who doesn’t care that you’re sick. And if I say I don’t, I look like an asshole who cares too much.” He does want to, of course, but then he has for so long; one more night won’t make a difference, if she feels that sick. “It’s really your call.” He squeezes her hand, next to his on the bathroom floor. Looks at their matching rings.
“I want to in theory,” Scully says, “but I feel like crap.”
“That’s okay, then,” he says. “We…we probably don’t want to do this here, anyway. Your whole family is down the hall.”
“Yeah,” she says after a moment. “Good point.”
He helps her to their bedroom, but only to sleep. They lie against each other. He wonders what she’s thinking. What she’d do if he told her he loved her.
They’re very busy over the next month, working on the adoption. They go to see Emily every day, and they sit on the floor and draw pictures together. They tell her a little bit about Washington, but not too much. (“Just in case,” Scully says to him. “I don’t want to make this harder for her if…” He thinks she doesn’t want to make it harder for herself either. He tells her the adoption will go through, and she squeezes his hand.) Emily still doesn’t talk a lot—mostly in response to direct questions—but recently she’s started smiling and running over to them when they arrive, which Mulder takes as a good sign.
What’s less of a good sign is that he and Scully still haven’t fooled around, to use her term, and he’s starting to wonder if it would even be possible to bring it up. He thinks maybe she took him too seriously when he said they didn’t want to do it with her family down the hall. It would be a little awkward, but he wouldn’t mind, really. But it’s not just that, anyway. It’s a lot of things, but mainly that they’re both so tired, especially Scully. They’re working hard during the day, and now that Tara’s had the baby, they don’t always get a good night’s sleep. “Do you think we should go?” he asks Scully, one night when they’re awakened. “We could get a hotel. Aren’t we kind of in the way?”
“That’s what I thought!” Scully says, eagerly. “I was even looking for places. But then my mom and Bill said we should stay. Because we’re family, and we can help out with Matthew, and they can help us out with Emily.”
“Wait, are we supposed to be helping out with him?” Mulder asks. “I haven’t been.”
“Just if anyone needs anything, my mom says she’d feel better,” Scully says. Another wail from Matthew; she sighs and burrows her head into the pillow. “I guess this is good practice for us.”
“You’re not supposed to be practicing when you’re pregnant,” Mulder says. “You’re supposed to be getting sleep.”
“I’m okay,” Scully says, yawning. “It’s not for too much longer.” But she looks exhausted, circles under her eyes. He’s seen her taking extra care with her makeup, before they go to meet with the caseworker.
“Here,” he says, “I’ll cover your ears for you.” She gives him a look, half-amused, half-tired, but she leans against him, one ear pressed to the pillow, the other under his hand. He puts his other hand on her stomach. He thinks she sleeps. In the morning, when they’re driving to see Emily, he pulls over at a drugstore and buys them both the strongest earplugs he can find.
And then, the next week, they have their hearing. And then they are parents. He knew they were going to be, but somehow, he’s still surprised.
...
Emily’s quiet as they approach Scully’s building—well, their building, now. Mulder’s in the process of working on his move; he’s given notice to his landlord, and he’s planning to go this weekend to see about his stuff. “Are you excited to see your room, sweetie?” Scully asks Emily. They ordered things from a catalogue—Emily picked a bright yellow comforter and a nightlight covered in stars—and had them delivered; Scully had her friend Ellen help out.
“I think so,” Emily says.
“All the things we picked out will be there,” Scully says. “Remember?”
Emily nods. “And can Elinor live in there with me?” Elinor is a very ratty stuffed rabbit; they rescued her from Emily’s old room, and since then she’s rarely left Emily’s arms.
“Of course Elinor can live there,” Scully says.
“We wouldn’t want her to live anywhere else,” Mulder says.
“Okay,” Emily says, softly. They’ve pulled into the parking lot now. She squares her small shoulders, looking very much like Scully, as Mulder unfastens the buckles on her car seat and helps her out of the car.
The place looks clean—Ellen must have helped with that too—and they go down the hall to Emily’s room. She looks around at everything. Goes over to the bed and leans Elinor against the pillows, carefully.
“Are you tired, Emily?” Scully asks.
“A little,” Emily says.
“Maybe you and Elinor would like to rest for a little bit before we have supper,” Scully says. “And Mulder and I could read you a book.”
“Okay,” Emily says. “Goodnight Moon, please.” That’s not a surprise, since it’s one of Emily’s favorites; they even brought it with them on the plane, just in case. They all settle onto the small bed—Mulder, Scully, Emily, and Elinor—and they read Goodnight Moon, Mulder and Scully taking turns with the pages.
They make spaghetti for supper. Elinor sits at the table beside Emily; one of her ears is trailing in the sauce, and Scully gently moves it aside. “Careful, sweetie,” she says, and Mulder watches them.
After supper, they get Emily ready for bed and read another book. This one is Madeline, Emily’s other favorite. She sits and listens while Mulder reads to her, an expression of concentration on her face. He wishes they could make her smile, but it doesn’t seem to be happening today. It makes sense, he knows, since she’s in a new place, one that’s bound to be a big adjustment. The whole situation is a big adjustment for him, and he’s not a three-year-old. But he hopes she’ll be happy.
“We’ll be right across the hall,” Scully tells Emily. “And we’ll leave the door open, in case you need anything.” That also makes sense, under the circumstances, although it means a continuation of the status quo for the two of them. Married, parents, with another baby on the way, without doing much more than kissing.
But it’s the right thing to do. “We love you, Emily,” he says. “Good night.” They each kiss her on the cheek, and then she asks them to kiss Elinor, which they do. They say good night again and go.
“Do you think Elinor could make it through the laundry machine in one piece?” Scully asks him, as soon as they’re out of earshot. “She is not clean.”
“That’s your number one question right now?” he asks. She does have a point, though; Elinor has a distinct smell, if you’re within kissing distance.
“Well, we need to take things day by day,” she says, defensively. “So yes. Right now, that’s my immediate concern.”
“Maybe we could hand wash her?” Mulder says. He’s not exactly an expert in the care of stuffed animals. Although maybe it’s a field he should start getting better acquainted with.
“Worth trying,” Scully says. “Or see if we could find a backup. I had two teddy bears who were the same, when I was her age. Brownie and Brownie Two.” She smiles. “Very creative, I know.” He tries to imagine three-year-old Scully with her two bears. He wonders if she looked like Emily. He wonders if their baby will look like that too.
They see Emily twice more that night. The first time she comes padding into the living room in her bare feet, Elinor in hand. “I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “And Elinor couldn’t sleep.” They take her back to bed, and Scully strokes her hair while he sings— “Yellow Submarine,” because he can’t think of any lullabies, but Emily’s eyes close, anyway. The second time is just as they’re getting into bed, when they hear her crying.
“I don’t want to be by myself,” she sobs, when they rush into her room. “And Elinor doesn’t.”
“You don’t have to be by yourselves,” Scully says. “I can stay with you for tonight. Okay?” But she looks so tired herself, and Mulder doesn’t want her to have to squeeze into a three-year-old-sized bed.
“Or maybe the two of you could come in with us,” Mulder says. “How does that sound?”
Emily seems to like the idea. She gets out of bed and takes his hand when he holds it out. They make their way across the hall and settle in together, Emily’s little feet cold against his leg.
He knows this isn’t a permanent solution, that it will be better for Emily if they get her comfortable sleeping in her own room. But for right now, this makes sense too.
...
They’re busy in a way Mulder’s never experienced over the next couple of weeks, and that’s with taking time off work. This must be why they usually give you nine months to get ready for a kid, he thinks: because once the kid is present, things never stop.
Emily’s still pretty quiet with them. She likes when they read her books, likes coloring together. Elinor’s always at her side, and Elinor has a lot of anxieties. She misses Emily’s old room. She doesn’t know if she’s going to like the playground near their apartment. She misses the Sims, but she doesn’t want Mulder and Scully to leave her alone, either. Emily tells them all of this in a matter-of-fact voice.
Mulder knows it’s very normal for a kid this age—especially a kid who’s been through what Emily’s been through—to vocalize her feelings through someone else, whether it be an imaginary friend or an increasingly dirty stuffed rabbit who, Emily tells them, does not want to be washed. He goes along with the Elinor stories, hoping that he can reassure Emily through her. He feels silly at first, though, and it’s a little disconcerting. He wants to tell Emily that she can tell them how she feels herself, that they’ll always be there to listen. But when he tries telling her it’s okay to be scared of new places, she says, “I’m not scared, but Elinor is.” She’s very stubborn like that. He doesn’t have to wonder where she gets it from.
It's worse at night. They’re having her stay in her own bed now, but that means one or both of them sitting with her until she falls asleep and going to her when she starts awake most nights, when they hear her crying. He wishes he could make things better for her right away. He wishes he knew the right way to take care of her.
He wishes he could take care of Scully, too, but that’s a tricky path to navigate; she tells him she’s fine, that she has to get up with Emily too and that it’s not right for it to only be him. “She needs to know we’re both there,” Scully says, “so she can feel safe with us.” He knows she has a point, but he’s worried about her not getting the rest she needs. He does everything he can, sometimes in a sneaky way, going out to do the grocery shopping before she has a chance to, not waking her up when it’s time to get Emily’s teeth brushed in the morning. He reads the nutrition chapters in the pregnancy books and makes dinner for her. He watches her a lot, trying not to let her catch him staring. She’s still not showing a lot, but she looks different, somehow. He’s not sure if he should tell her that, even though it’s a good kind of different. She’s always been beautiful, but there’s something about her now that makes it hard for him to look away, even when she turns her head and sees him.
Mostly he tries to be there for them both—to navigate on the fly, which at least is something he has experience with. When Scully falls asleep on the couch after dinner, he whispers to Emily that they have to be quiet. “Even Elinor,” he adds. “Can you ask her? I know she’ll listen to you.”
Emily giggles. “We have to be quiet, Elinor,” she whispers, holding one of the rabbit’s long ears against her mouth. “Dana’s asleep.” She looks at Mulder. “Why is she asleep so early?” she asks. “I’m not even asleep yet.”
They haven’t told her about the baby yet, since it’s early. “I think she’s just tired,” he says. “How about you? Are you tired?”
Emily shrugs. “Not really.”
“How about we go in your room and I read to you for a while, then?” he asks. “You and Elinor.” Emily nods—she makes Elinor nod too, by pulling on her ear—and they go.
He reads her Madeline, then Goodnight Moon, then Madeline again. It helps that the books are short. He gets her ready for bed, tucks her in, and turns off the light. “Will you stay with us, Mulder?” Emily asks.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I’ll stay.”
It doesn’t take her too long to fall asleep, and he tiptoes out of the room, hoping it’ll stick. When he gets back to the living room, Scully is still asleep, but she stirs when he sits down next to her. “I’m not asleep,” she mumbles.
“Yes, you are,” he says. “But it’s okay.”
“Where’s Emily?”
“She’s asleep too,” he says. “With Elinor. I read them a bunch of books.”
“Thank you,” she says. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “You need your rest. Both of you.” He puts a hand on her belly, lightly, and leans down and kisses her cheek.
She doesn’t say anything, so he’s pretty sure she’s asleep again. But she’s smiling.
...
He should call his mom, Mulder realizes. They’ve been so busy that he’s forgotten, but he’s married and a family man now, which seems like something you should tell your mom about.
He calls her one evening while Scully’s giving Emily a bath. “Fox!” she says when she answers. “It’s been a while.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” he says. “There’s been…well, a lot going on, to put it mildly.”
“With work?” she asks.
“Not work, actually,” he says. “It’s…well, first of all, I got married.”
He’s not sure how she’s going to take it, and her voice doesn’t give him much of a clue. “You got married,” she says. “Anyone I know?”
“Yes, actually,” he says. “You know Scully. My partner, Scully.” He sounds idiotic, he thinks. He’s married to her, she means more to him than anyone in the world, and he’s calling her my partner, Scully.
“Yes, of course I know her,” she says. “Well, this is new. But she seems nice.”
She’s still not giving him much, but he grasps at what he gets. “She is. She’s great,” he says. More idiocy. Time to move on to the next announcement. “And we have a little girl. Emily. She’s three.”
A pause. “Well, that’s new too.” Another. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he says. “Well, we found out about her at Christmas. She’s Scully’s…she’s ours now…well, we adopted her…it’s complicated.”
“Sounds like it,” his mother says. “I’ll be honest—none of this is something I imagined you doing.” He can’t tell if it’s a criticism or just an observation. “But it’s nice to hear,” she says, after a moment. “It’s not good for you to be alone all the time, you know.”
He thinks about pointing out that he wasn’t alone all the time before, either, or that there are a lot of reasons he didn’t have much of a family, and that she was involved in some of them. But he doesn’t. “Well, I’m far from alone now, anyway,” he says. “Never a dull moment with a kid around.” He wonders when he started talking only in trite phrases. “And we’ll be even busier soon. We’re…we’re going to have a baby. In August. Scully’s pregnant,” he adds, even though that was probably obvious, from the rest of what he said.
Another pause, a longer one. “Oh,” she says. “Is that why you got married? So suddenly?”
“Mom, no. No,” he says. And then he’s barreling on—he might as well put it all out there with her. He doesn’t have anything to lose. “That’s not why. I married Scully because I love her. That’s the reason.”
“Well, that’s good,” she says. “There’s no need to get upset.”
“I’m not upset, Mom,” he says. “I just want you to understand. Emily, too. And the baby, already. I’m…I know you’re surprised. But I love her.” A noise behind him; he turns. Scully in the doorway of the living room, staring at him. Somehow this doesn’t surprise him. Somehow it feels right, that it should happen this way. But he wants to make sure there’s no room for error, no lack of clarity now, so he says, “I love Scully,” again, into the phone.
“I understand, Fox,” his mom says. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“You didn’t. It’s all right,” he says, as nicely as he can, because Scully is still staring at him, and he really wants to get off the phone. “So that’s what’s been going on here, anyway. How have you been?”
“No news to match yours, I’m afraid,” she says. “I’ve been reading. Taking walks.”
“That sounds great,” he says. “I should…I have to go, Mom. Scully needs my help with something.” She smiles at him, from the other side of the room.
“Yes, I’m sure you’ll be very busy,” his mom says. “But call again, Fox, won’t you? If you have time.”
“Of course,” he says. “Goodbye, Mom. Take care of yourself.”
“You too,” she says, and then they hang up.
And then he turns to Scully, feeling a little shy. “Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” she says, and she sounds shy too; she’s looking down at her feet, clad in her old slippers. She should have new ones, he thinks, soft and fluffy and comfortable for when her feet hurt. He should get some for her. He can do that, now.
“You heard that?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she says. She walks over then and sits down next to him on the couch. “I heard.”
“It’s true, you know,” he says. “I do love you, Dana Scully. So much.” That’s all he can say.
She reaches out to take his hand; he can see tears in her eyes. “I love you too,” she says. “Mulder, I love you too, and I have for a long time…” She stops, then, because she’s really starting to cry, but she smiles at him too, and he knows there’s never been anyone more beautiful.
“Good tears?” he says. “Right?”
“Good tears,” she confirms. “And it’s not the hormones, either. It’s us.”
“It’s us,” he echoes, and he leans in and kisses her. And kisses her. There’s no reason to stop.
She sniffles and wipes her eyes. “I want to make love with you,” she says. “Finally. After we’ve put Emily to bed.”
He loves her for her mixture of romance and practicality, even if he wishes at this moment that they’d already put Emily to bed. “Where is Emily?” he asks. “Sorry. I got a little distracted.”
“It’s okay. So did I,” Scully says. “She’s in her room. I told her I’d come get you so we could both read to her.”
As if on cue, Emily appears in the doorway too, wearing her pink pajamas. “Dana?” she says. “You said you and Mulder would come read me a book.”
“We will, sweetheart,” Scully says. “Mulder was just talking on the phone.”
“Here we come,” Mulder adds, getting up from the couch, extending a hand to Scully to help pull her up too.
Emily picks Madeline that night, and they read it to her, this story of a brave little girl with red hair who has to go to the hospital but is okay in the end. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to figure out why Emily might like it, why Mulder’s already lost count of how many times they’ve read it. He’s glad of that now, though, because he can’t fully concentrate on reading. Not when Scully’s smiling at him like that.
They tuck Emily in, kiss her and Elinor, say good night. It’s all the same as yesterday, but everything feels completely different. They turn out the light, and then they’re crossing the hall to their own room. Scully closes the door, carefully, deliberately.
And then she’s kissing him again, like she’s never kissed him before. He’s breathless with it. “Bed?” he manages, and she nods, and they fall back together, still kissing, their hands all over each other. He cups her breast through her shirt. “Is it okay if I…?”
“Yes,” she says. “Just not too hard.” He caresses her, just lightly, but her eyes flutter closed, and the sounds she’s making are frankly erotic. “Mmmmm…. everything’s more sensitive now.”
“You’ll have to show me what you like,” he says.
“You too,” she says.
“You’re what I like,” he says, and she flushes, and it’s beautiful, and he wants to see it happen a lot more. She starts to unbutton her shirt then, but she stills when she’s halfway down, and her face looks more serious all of a sudden. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she says. “I just thought…when I imagined this, us, I didn’t think I’d be pregnant the first time.” Her hands are folded in front of her, over her stomach.
It takes him a moment to figure out what she’s worried about, maybe because he’s so caught up in everything, but then he gets it. “Hey,” he says. “You are absolutely beautiful, you know. All the time. But now especially.” She looks like she might be about to protest, so he goes on. “I mean it,” he says. “Looking at you and knowing you’re going to have our baby…” He kisses her again. “I’m a lucky guy.”
She lets him help her take her shirt the rest of the way off then, and her bra, and he kisses, caresses, her full breasts, the swell of her belly. He whispers that she’s beautiful again. He watches her face and listens to her breathing.
When they’re making love, finally, after years of longing and working their way towards each other, he looks up at her face, concentrates on her eyes to reassure himself that this is real. “Scully,” he says, “Scully, Scully,” and she gasps out his name when she comes. He’s found something so extraordinary, and in that moment, he believes.
They hold each other close afterwards, for what might be seconds or minutes or hours, and then she says that they should get dressed, in case Emily wakes up and comes looking for them. He stands behind her while she brushes her teeth, one hand on her abomen, the other holding his own toothbrush.
“Next week will officially be the second trimester,” Scully says. “Do you know what that means?”
He’s been reading the books, but he still thinks it’s a little unfair to give him a quiz now, in the midst of postcoital bliss. He tries his best. “Reduced risk of miscarriage,” he says. “Right?”
“That’s one thing,” Scully says. “And it’s a very good one. But what else?”
“Um…we can find out if it’s a boy or girl,” he says. “If you want to. Do you think you want to? We haven’t really talked about it yet.”
“I’m not sure,” Scully says. “It might be nice to be surprised. But I wonder if it would be easier for Emily to know whether she’s getting a brother or sister.”
“Do you think that makes a difference?” he asks. “It’s a newer thing, finding out, after all.”
“True,” Scully says. “I just thought it might be easier to talk about it with her that way.”
“You still want to wait a while, though,” Mulder says. “Right?”
“Right,” Scully says. “I think we should hold off with Emily for as long as possible. Until I’m really starting to show. There are still some risks, even now, and I don’t want to have to explain to her…” She trails off, and he holds her close.
“Baby will be fine,” he says. “We’ve got good luck.”
She laughs. “Since when?”
“Since we found out we were having a baby together,” he says. “Since we found Emily. Since I asked you to marry me. Since tonight. Since all those things.” He’s not usually one to trust in luck. But after hearing Scully say she loved him, he can’t help trusting just a little.
“Maybe you’re right,” she says, squeezing his hand. “You made me feel lucky tonight, anyway.” She smirks at him in the mirror. “Which reminds me. You still didn’t say what I was thinking of. For the second trimester.”
“Um…I give up,” he says. “Just tell me.”
“I’m probably going to want sex a lot,” she says; her voice is matter of fact, and her face is absolutely wicked. “That’s one of the effects. You think you can help with that?”
He spins her around and kisses her again, which seems to be enough of an answer.
...
It seems like the right time to tell Emily about the baby, the most propitious. She’s seemed much more settled in the past few weeks: she hasn’t been waking up in the night anymore, and she’s stopped saying that Elinor misses California. In fact, she goes so far as to tell them that Elinor likes it here, now. “She likes the playground,” Emily says, “and my room. And she likes when you read to us. And when you make French toast.”
“How about you?” Mulder asks her. “Do you like those things too? Or just Elinor?”
Emily gives him a look. “Me too. Of course.” And she starts to go back to her coloring then, but Mulder and Scully both have to hug her first.
So she’s doing better at home with them, and she’s doing all right in preschool too; they have her in one for children of government employees, in the mornings. Of course they’ll be on leave again in a few months, but they thought they should get Emily started now so that she’d have a chance to get used to it. She says she likes all the books they have there, and playing with the other kids, and doing art. Art seems to be the main thing they do at preschool, and dried macaroni glued to paper seems to be their main medium. At the moment it’s taking up a lot of real estate on the fridge.
Mulder knows that Scully’s still worried about how Emily’s going to take their announcement, afraid it will set back her sense of security and leave them where they were before. But they can’t really wait any longer, even if they wanted to; Scully’s starting to show too much to hide, no matter what she wears, and if they don’t tell Emily themselves someone else is bound to blurt it out. So they go over their plans when they’re in the office in the morning, before they pick Emily up. “I think she’ll be fine,” Mulder says. “Lots of kids get younger siblings.”
“I know,” Scully says. “I wouldn’t be worried if that was the only thing. It’s just with everything else…” She shakes her head. “But you’re right. And we can’t just never tell her. It’s better to do it now.”
“I don’t remember my parents telling me much of anything,” Mulder says, trying to think back to the years when they were a seemingly normal family. “Before Samantha was born, I mean. I remember sulking about it at first. But after that I liked her.”
Scully squeezes his hand. “I bet you were cute together,” she says.
“We were damn cute,” he says. “How about you and Charlie?”
“I barely remember him being born,” Scully says. “And I was the same age as Emily. But we did okay. We’d play together a lot.”
“See, she’ll be fine,” Mulder says. “Great, even.”
“I hope you’re right,” Scully says. “I just want her to—” Her eyes widen. “Mulder, quick!”
He moves to put a hand on her belly, knowing what she means. In the past week or so, she’s felt the baby moving a couple of times, but it’s always been light, and he’s never been able to catch it before it stops. He doesn’t feel anything this time, either. “Did it stop?” he asks.
“Yeah,” Scully says, shaking her head. “It’s still really light. Next time, I hope.” She rests her hand on top of his for a minute, before they straighten up, gather their things, and head out.
They wait until they’ve gotten Emily home and given her a snack before they break the news. “Emily, honey,” Scully says, “Mulder and I want to tell you something.”
Emily eats the last bite of her graham cracker. “Okay. What?”
“In a few months,” Scully says, “you’re going to be a big sister. We’re going to have a new baby.” Her voice is calm, but Mulder can tell how hard she’s trying to do this the right way.
Emily stares at them. “Where will you get the baby?”
“Well, right now,” Scully says, “the baby’s growing inside of me. Right here.” She pats the bump. “Until the baby’s big enough to be born.”
Emily’s still staring. “But I wasn’t inside there,” she says, after a minute. “Right?”
Scully shakes her head. “No, you weren’t,” she says. He knows it takes an effort for her to say that calmly, to not let Emily pick up on how she feels about what was done to the two of them. “There are lots of different ways to make a family. This is just one way.”
“Why?” Emily asks.
Scully looks a little flummoxed at that, and Mulder can’t blame her. He tries to step in instead. “Because what matters is wanting to be a family,” he says. “Dana and I wanted to be your mom and dad, and we want to be this baby’s mom and dad too.” He stoops to give Emily a hug, and from the look on Scully’s face, he guesses he’s said something right.
“Will the baby live here?” Emily asks.
“Yes,” Mulder says. “The baby will be very small at first, but later you can play together.”
“That’ll be fun for you,” Scully says. “And next week, we’re going to find out whether the baby’s a boy or a girl. So you’ll know if you’re getting a brother or a sister.”
“How do you find out?” Emily asks.
“From my doctor,” Scully says.
“Do you have to be in the hospital?” There’s a quaver in Emily’s voice. Mulder hadn’t thought about this part.
But Scully keeps her own voice cheerful. “Not to find out. But when it’s time for the baby to be born, I will go to the hospital for a little bit. But it’s for a really good reason, so the doctors can help keep me safe and we can all meet the baby.”
“So is having a baby like being sick?” Emily still sounds unsure.
“No, it’s not like that,” Scully says. “It’s a very natural thing.” Of course, it hasn’t exactly been that for them so far, but Emily nods and seems to accept it.
“Will you read to me?” she asks, after a minute, and Mulder tells her that they will. And they start in with Madeline, and she doesn’t ask anything more about the baby right then.
“That went okay,” he says to Scully in an undertone, while they’re making dinner and Emily is playing in the living room.
Scully nods. “She doesn’t seem too upset. Maybe next time we go to the library,” she says, “we can get her some books about being a sister.”
“Sounds like a plan,” he says.
They put Emily to bed that night, and once they’re out in the hallway Scully’s lips are on his. “Bed,” she murmurs. “I’ve wanted you all day…. I can’t believe my self-control.”
He chuckles against her as they make their way to their bedroom. “Good things come to her who waits.”
“What I was thinking,” Scully says; she’s already in the process of undressing. “Come being the operative word. I want your mouth on me. And after that I want you inside me.”
“I want that too.” He has to stop and kiss her first though, maybe just to steady himself. Hearing her tell him so openly what she wants—and that what she wants is him—still feels like it might be a fantasy sometimes.
Even looking at her feels like a fantasy. Especially in moments like this one, where she’s leaning back against the pillows with lust in her eyes and absolutely nothing on. He loves seeing the changes in her body—maybe he’s just being a typical guy, because her breasts are definitely getting bigger and it’s breathtaking to say the least, but he’d like to think there’s more to it than that. He likes knowing that it’s because of the baby, their baby who they created together, who they’re going to meet in a few short months.
“I love you,” he tells her.
“I love you too. Now get moving,” she says.
He doesn’t dawdle with the foreplay, because he can tell that wouldn’t go over well, but he does kiss his way down from her mouth. His head is between her thighs when he feels her start. “Wait,” she says, and she presses his cheek to her belly.
And he feels it this time—a little flutter, barely anything, but it’s there. That’s their baby moving.
“Oh my god,” he says. “Oh my god, Scully.”
“I know,” she says, almost laughing. “It’s crazy, isn’t it?”
“Completely crazy,” he agrees, pressing a kiss to the spot where he felt the baby move. “There’s a person in there!”
“Our baby,” she says. “It feels so funny, doesn’t it?”
He nods. “Hi, baby,” he says, his face still against the bump. “It’s your dad here.” Mere months ago, he couldn’t have imagined himself saying anything like this. “You know we’re so excited about you?”
“So excited,” Scully says. “We can’t wait to meet you.” They lie like that for a minute, taking it in. Then she says, “Mulder?”
“You want me to get on with things,” he says.
“You know me so well.”
He’ll do anything she needs to take care of her now—rub her back or bring her extra pillows or make a run to the store for whatever she’s craving—but none of it is as pleasurable as taking care of her like this. She tastes amazing, and she’s so responsive, and he makes her come twice with his mouth in quick succession. She comes again when he’s inside her, his hands on her hips, looking up at her as she moves, and he follows her, moaning her name.
“I’m not sure whether to chalk it up to the pregnancy or the amazing guy I’m with,” Scully says afterwards, when they’re lying there with her head against his chest, “but I’ve never come as much as I have these past few weeks.”
That does things for his ego, he won’t lie. “Maybe you could chalk the pregnancy up to the guy you’re with,” he suggests. “Kill two birds with one stone.”
“Good idea,” Scully says. “You get all the credit, and I get my eyes rolling back in my head. Not a bad bargain.”
“Credit’s not all I get,” he says. “God, Scully, you were amazing.”
She flushes, and she’s leaning in to kiss him when they hear a voice. “Dana? Mulder?”
Scully yanks the sheet up with a speed he wouldn’t have believed humanly possible but for which he’s very grateful and turns to look at Emily, who is standing by the bed, clutching Elinor, with an anxious look on her face. “What is it, sweetheart? Do you need something?”
Emily looks at them for a minute, and Mulder hopes she didn’t see too much. But her question, when it comes, has nothing to do with their state of undress. “When is the baby coming?”
“In August,” Scully says. “That’s four months from now.” She’s managing to sound remarkably unflustered.
Emily pulls at one of Elinor’s ears. “When the baby comes,” she asks, “will I go away?” Her lip is trembling.
“No,” Scully says. “No, of course not.”
“We’ll all live together,” Mulder says. “We’d never want you to go away. We’re a family.”
“Is there something that made you think you’d have to go away, sweetheart?” Scully asks. She’s still got the sheet pulled up to her chin, but she reaches out with one hand to touch Emily’s cheek.
“I don’t know,” Emily says. “Will the baby sleep in my room instead of me?”
“That’s your room,” Scully says. “The baby will probably sleep in here with me and Mulder for a little bit. And then she’ll have the room at the end of the hall. But no one is going to take away your room.”
“But you got me,” Emily says, “and now you’re getting the baby instead.”
“Not instead,” Mulder says. “The baby’s just another person. Like I’m one person, and so are you, and so is Dana. There’s no instead.” He feels terrible, looking at her sad little face.
“We love you so much because you’re you,” Scully says, “and we’ll love the baby a lot too, but in a different way. Because the baby will be a different person. And that will never, never mean that we love you any less.”
“Dana’s right,” Mulder says, but Emily still looks so sad.
“Do you want us to come and sit with you?” Scully asks, and Emily nods. “Okay, sweetheart. Will you go back to your room and wait for us? We’ll come in a minute.”
“Why aren’t you wearing shirts?” Emily asks.
“We were doing something private,” Scully says, and Mulder can’t believe how quickly she had that one ready. He salutes her. “Go and wait for us, okay? We’ll be right there.”
When Emily nods and goes, they hurry into their clothes and follow her. She’s sitting on her bed, her arms wrapped around Elinor. “Want us to tuck you in?” Mulder asks. She nods again, and he wraps the blankets around her, gently. “You don’t have to worry about anything,” he tells her. “We love you and we always will.”
“That’s a promise,” Scully says, kissing Emily’s cheek.
She clings to their hands. “Stay,” she says, and they do.
...
There’s still so much to get done, and today they’re packing it in: first they went to a childbirth class, and next they’re going to the doctor’s office, for Scully’s check-up. They’re going to find out if they’re having a boy or a girl today, and when they left the house Mulder was excited about that. Now, as they leave the class, he has other things on his mind.
“You look green,” Scully informs him as they get into the car.
“I feel green,” Mulder says. “Do you think that video was completely necessary?”
“It’s a childbirth class, so yes,” Scully says. She looks remarkably unfazed. He guesses autopsies will do this to you. But at least autopsies don’t involve that much screaming.
“It was…intense,” he says, unable to come up with a better word.
“That’s what it’s like,” Scully says. “Are you going to be okay with this? Because I’m going to need you there. And after all, you won’t be the one who’s—”
“That’s the point,” he says. “I don’t like to think of you hurting.”
“Oh, Mulder,” she says. She’s smiling, though, when she squeezes his hand. “I’m sure it’s not going to be fun. But it’s normal. And we’ll have a baby at the end of it. You don’t need to worry about me.”
He squeezes her hand back. “Well, I’ll do my best to not be squeamish,” he says. “And I will be there for the whole thing. You can count on that.”
“I know it,” she says, and she’s still smiling as they drive to the doctor’s office.
She’s smiling again when they leave the doctor’s office, on their way to pick up Emily. They got copies of the ultrasound, and she’s holding them in her hand, looking down at them every few seconds. The baby still looks like a blur to Mulder, but their blur, which is enough. “Hey, little girl,” Scully says softly, one hand on her bump, the other on the picture. “You’re awake, huh?”
“A girl,” Mulder says, savoring it. He really didn’t have a preference until the doctor told them they were having a daughter, when he became convinced that had been his preference all along.
“Are you excited?” Scully asks.
“Of course,” Mulder says. “Two daughters.”
“We should start thinking about names now,” Scully says. “Do you have any ideas?” And then, softly, while he’s thinking, “Do you want to name her after Samantha?”
He hadn’t thought about that either, but he knows the answer. “No,” he says quickly. “Thank you for asking, Scully. I mean it. But it would be too much…it would mean she was gone.”
Scully nods. “I understand,” she says, and he knows she does.
When they pick up Emily, she shows them a picture she drew. “It’s the three of us,” she says, thrusting it at them. “It’s for you.”
“Thank you, Emily,” Mulder says. “It’s beautiful.” He notices she doesn’t make any mention of the baby, which doesn’t surprise him. She’s been clingier than usual since they told her last week; he supposes it’s a good thing, in a way, since it means she’s grown attached to them, but he wishes they were able to reassure her better. When they try talking about the baby casually, about the things that all four of them will do together, Emily looks upset still; she’s been asking them a lot of questions like, “Will we still go to the park when the baby’s here?” and “Will I have to share Elinor?” and “Do we have to have the baby?” They do their best to answer her (yes, no, yes but we think you’ll like the baby), but they can tell she’s not yet on board with the idea.
They let Emily tell them all about her morning before sharing the news. “Guess what we found out today, Emily?” Scully says. “We found out that the baby is going to be a girl. A little sister for you.”
“Oh,” Emily says. “Okay.”
“Do you think you’ll like that?” Mulder asks.
Emily shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Do any of the kids you go to school with have sisters?” he asks her. “Any of your friends?”
She appears to be deep in thought for a minute. “Sarah and Hannah are sisters,” she says, eventually.
“And do they like to play together?” Mulder asks.
“Yes,” Emily says. “They’re twins,” she adds, which puts a bit of a damper on things. No getting used to a new baby there.
“Would you like to see a picture of your sister, Emily?” Scully asks. “We got some pictures at the doctor’s today.”
“I thought we couldn’t see the baby yet,” Emily says.
“We can’t see her just looking at me,” Scully says, “but they have special tools at the doctor’s.” She holds out one of the ultrasound pictures, and after a minute Emily goes over to look.
“That doesn’t look like a baby,” she says. “I don’t see anything.”
“It does look a little funny at first,” Scully says. “But see, there’s her head…”
Emily looks worried. “Will she be funny-looking?”
“No,” Scully says, kissing the top of Emily’s own head. “Don’t worry about that. It’s just the kind of picture they take. And she’s not done growing yet. But when she’s here, she’ll look just like any baby.” She looks thoughtful for a moment, and then she says, “Emily, do you know what you looked like when you were a baby?” Emily shakes her head. “Would you like to see?”
They found the photographs when they were going through things at the Sims’ house; they’d been placed in albums with clear care. There weren’t any of Emily as a newborn, but they started pretty far back. “She must be around two months here,” Scully said, staring at one photograph with an unreadable expression. She had to be feeling a lot of things all at once, Mulder knew, and he didn’t know what to say about it. So he just sat there beside her while she turned the pages of the albums, putting them all into the pile of things that they planned to take with them.
Scully gets the first album now, and she sits back down next to Emily on the couch, opening it to the first page. “See?” she says. “That’s you. Look how tiny you were.”
“Really?” Emily asks softly.
“Really,” Scully says; she pulls Emily close with her free arm and gives her another kiss. Mulder sits down on the other side of Emily, to look at the pictures with them. He knows Scully’s sometimes angry that she missed seeing these moments in person, and so is he; like he told her this morning, he doesn’t want her to hurt. But he can tell, from the tone of her voice and the look on her face, that she’s also grateful to be sharing today with Emily.
...
Scully ordered several name books, and they look through them during their spare moments, which aren’t many. There are so many names that it’s kind of fascinating, but it’s hard to know which is the right one. “Maybe she’ll go by her last name,” Mulder suggests. “A lot of people like that, I hear.”
Scully makes a face at him. “She doesn’t think that’s very funny,” she says, rubbing her belly.
“Moving around again?” Mulder asks, and when Scully nods he moves closer to her, putting his hand there too. Their daughter’s movements seem to be getting stronger by the day; he doesn’t have to strain to feel them anymore, but it’s still the strangest, most miraculous thing. “What do you want your name to be?” he asks, and even though he doesn’t get an answer, he listens.
“Hey, Emily,” he says one Saturday afternoon, when they’re all sitting around the kitchen table, “do you have any ideas for what your sister’s name should be?” The look Scully is giving him now suggests that she’s simultaneously pleased that he asked and unsure whether this is a decision best made by a three-year-old.
Emily looks up from her coloring. “Why?”
“We’re trying to pick a name for her,” he says. “I wondered if you knew any good ones.”
“She doesn’t have a name yet?”
“Nope,” he says. “We get to choose that ourselves. Pretty neat, huh?” Emily shrugs. “Are there any names you like?”
Emily colors in the sun in her picture, the expression on her face showing that she’s concentrating. “I like Madeline,” she says.
“That’s pretty,” Scully says.
“Like in the book,” Emily says, as if there might be some doubt.
“It’s a good name,” Mulder agrees.
“So will that be her name?” Emily asks.
“We’ll put in on our list,” Mulder says. “We probably won’t decide for sure until closer to when she gets here.”
But he likes the sound of it, Madeline Mulder, and he thinks Scully might too. And Emily is smiling, which she doesn’t usually do when they talk about the baby. When Scully says, “Oh, she’s moving. Do you want to feel her kick?” she puts her hand on Scully’s belly and laughs.
...
“Are you feeling okay?” Mulder asks Scully. They were out at the park all morning, pushing Emily on the swings, and it’s a pretty hot day, and she looks tired.
“I’m all right,” she says. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Want to rest for a little bit before lunch?” he asks. “I’ll get everything ready. Emily can help me. Can’t you, Emily?” She nods enthusiastically.
“That sounds good,” Scully says. “Thanks.” He kisses her cheek before she walks slowly in the direction of the bedroom.
Emily is putting their plates on the table when she says, “What will the baby call you and Dana?”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“When the baby is here,” Emily says, “will she call you Mulder and Dana? Or Daddy and Mommy?”
He can tell this is a big question, and he wants to give Emily the right answer. “Well, when she first gets here, she won’t call us anything,” he says. “Because she won’t be able to talk yet. But when she gets a little bigger…she’ll probably call us Daddy and Mommy. But—”
“Oh,” Emily says. “Do I call you that too?”
“That’s up to you,” he says. He doesn’t want to pressure her, even though he would love that, and he knows Scully would.
“You said me and the baby would be the same,” Emily says. “And you would love us the same.”
“And that’s true,” Mulder says. “Of course we will.”
“Then we should call you the same,” Emily says. Her lips are pursed, as if she’s thinking very hard.
He stoops down so he can look her in the eye. “Dana and I would like it a lot if you wanted to call us that,” he says. “But nothing will make any difference to how much we love you. Okay?”
“But I want to call you that,” Emily says. “Because you are my daddy and my mommy. Right?”
“Of course we are,” he says, and he hugs her then, and she hugs him back, clinging to his legs. “So that’s all settled then.”
“All settled,” she repeats, nodding vigorously. “All settled, Daddy.”
Scully almost chokes on her sandwich when Emily calls her Mommy during lunch, and then she stops eating to hug her too. The smile on her face that afternoon is a beautiful thing.
“I’m so glad she feels…she feels that way about us,” she says to Mulder that night; they’re lying in bed, his arms around her.
“Me too,” he says. “And just in time, too.”
“Mmm,” Scully says. “One more month.”
“One more month,” he agrees, pressing a kiss behind her ear, holding her while she drifts off to sleep.
...
They’ve planned for Maggie to stay with Emily while the baby is born; as Scully’s due date approaches, she assures them she’ll be on call. One Saturday morning, Emily’s flipping through picture books on the living room rug when Scully beckons to Mulder from the bedroom and hisses, “I think it’s time,” into his ear.
“For the baby?” he says.
“Yes, for the baby. What do you think?” She sounds a little irritated, but he probably would be too, if he were about to push a person out of his body.
“Are you all right?” he asks.
“The contractions are still pretty far apart,” she says. “But I’m going to call my doctor. And you call my mom, okay? We don’t want to be in a rush.”
They make the calls. They pick up the bag that Scully has painstakingly packed. They kiss Emily, tell her they love her, and let her know they’ll see her tomorrow. And then they go.
They’ve been in hospitals many times together, but this one feels different. Nothing’s wrong. After everything, it’s something good.
He gets Scully ice chips, strokes her hair back from her face, holds her as she braces herself against him. “You’re doing so well,” he murmurs to her. “Almost there.” She doesn’t answer him in words, but her hand finds his, squeezes it tight.
They lose time. He doesn’t know how long they’ve been there when he finally hears it. Their daughter’s cry, full-throated and her own. “Let me hold her,” Scully demands, and then they’re both bending over their baby. She’s tiny and she’s perfect and she has wisps of red hair on her head. “Hello,” Scully whispers to her. “You don’t know how happy we are to see you.”
“So happy,” Mulder adds, touching one of her tiny hands. He can’t believe this has happened, that this is what has come of what they did together nine months ago, before they even knew…
“Madeline?” Scully says, turning to him, when the nurse asks if they’ve picked out a name yet.
“Madeline,” he confirms. It’s the right name for their second daughter, for another brave red-headed girl.
“She’s amazing,” he tells Scully, when it’s just the three of them. “And so are you.”
Scully smiles. “I think she’s pretty perfect too,” she says. “God, Mulder, I can’t believe she’s here.”
“I know,” he says, holding them both close.
“Will you call my mom?” she asks him, when Madeline is asleep and she’s close to following. “Tell her to bring Emily in the morning?”
“Of course,” he says, kissing her cheek as she settles deeper into the hospital bed.
They’re there as soon as visiting hours start the next day. When Emily steps into the room, she looks a little shy. “Hi, sweetheart,” Scully says. “We missed you.”
Emily’s staring at the bundle in Scully’s arms. “Is that her?”
“That’s her,” Scully says. “Did Grandma tell you what name we picked?”
Emily nods. “Madeline,” she says, sounding very satisfied that her choice was accepted.
“Do you want to come over here and meet her?” Scully asks. Emily shrugs.
“Well, I think she’d like to meet you,” Mulder says. “She’s been talking and talking about it.”
Emily gives him a look. “She has not. You told me she couldn’t talk yet.”
“Okay, you got me,” Mulder says, grinning at her. “But I think she’d like to meet you anyway. And your mom and I would like to give you a hug.” Emily finally makes her way across the room at that, settling onto the bed next to Scully. He hugs her tight.
“Emily,” Scully says softly, “this is Madeline. Madeline, this is your big sister, Emily.” Mulder watches Emily a little nervously. While she’s seemed to accept the idea of a baby sister more recently, she still hasn’t been over the moon about it.
But she looks fascinated by Madeline. “She’s so little,” she says. “Can we talk to her? Even if she can’t talk?”
“Sure you can,” Scully says. “Why don’t you say hi?”
“Hi, Madeline,” Emily says. “You’re so little.” She touches Madeline’s forehead gently. “You’re my little sister,” she says. “And we’re all a family.”
“That’s very sweet, Emily,” Scully says. “You’re going to be a great big sister. I can already tell.”
He wants to say something similar, but he can’t speak for the moment; there’s a lump in his throat. So instead he watches the three of them together, and he’s glad.
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Las Mismas Estrellas/The Same Stars
Part 2/3
Part 1 Part 3
A03 Link
Seven months, two weeks, and three days. That’s how long she had been apart from her family. But it was more than that, the time apart was heavier than could be described with units of time. It was moments stolen, traditions lost, too many should-have-been memories she would never get back.
They had missed April’s fools, his favorite B-list holiday. She had a really good prank planned too. She was going to replace all the pens in his office with crayons and the equipment in his personal lab with a kiddie chemistry set she got at the 99 cent store. That would have made him laugh.
For the first time since she could remember, they had missed their annual summer camping trip and yearly viewing of the Peresid meteor shower. And every year on the fourth of July, they would drive to Duckburg Beach to watch the fireworks. He had the worst chili dog recipe. She didn’t think it was possible that she could actually miss it. But she did. She missed sitting on a blanket on that beach, unwrapping the world’s grossest chili dogs as the fireworks lit up the sky in brilliant bursts of blues and whites.
Instead, Drake had made hamburgers for her and Launchpad and they watched the fireworks from the top of the Audubon Bay Bridge. The hamburgers were actually pretty good, and the view was unmatched.
But it wasn't the memory it was supposed to be.
Oh, and 10 days after he first went missing, she spent her 13th birthday in foster care.
No traditional leaning-tower-of-waffles birthday breakfast. No PG-13 horror movie marathon she and her grandpa had been planning since she begged for it on her ninth birthday.
Seven months, two weeks, and two days of searching had brought her to this moment.
There he was. Right there. All that was left separating them was 10 feet.
And she couldn’t find the strength to take another step.
When he had asked ‘who are you’ she had felt the ground fall out beneath her.
Fenton’s warning echoed in her mind.
We think prolonged exposure to an alternate dimension could trigger rapid cognitive decline.
Memories of the alternate reality interweave or replace memories of the native reality.
Effects could be permanent.
But it couldn’t be. This couldn’t be how it ended. She couldn't be too late.
She took a step.
“Grandpa,” her voice came out smaller than she intended.
Two more steps.
“Grandpa, it’s me, Gosalyn. Your granddaughter.”
He had been looking forward, staring off into the distance, the late setting sun setting the world around them aglow and golden. Seated on a patio chair, with a painter’s easel- albeit, blank canvas- in front of him, there was a dreamlike tranquility to him. Even though he was only a few feet away now, he looked as if he was somewhere far far away.
He turned to her when she spoke, but only responded with a slow, confused, blink.
She had never thought of her grandpa as old before, but he looked it now.
His face was shadowed with a weariness she had never seen before. Deep lines had settled in his features.
“Grandpa?”
She closed the distance between them, placing a palm on the back of his hand.
These were the hands that held the back of her bike seat as she tore down the street without training wheels and the nimble fingers that placed bandaids on her scraped up knees not 10 minutes later.
These were the hands that cupped her own, the first time she poured a solution from a beaker to a graduated cylinder when both were too large, too heavy for her grubby little hands, back when she still couldn’t see over the lab counter without a stool.
They had been steady, broad, and warm as they guided her movements, teaching her the value of careful, precise measurements.
But now, his hands trembled, even as they rested in his lap, they held a frailty, a shakiness within them.
But his eyes, his eyes were the worst.
Her Grandpa's eyes had sparkled with laughter. There was always a glint of curiosity, or good-hearted mischief shining within them.
But the eyes watching her now, cornered with deep age lines, were almost that of a stranger. They were glassy and somber, seeming to look right through her.
"Grandpa," she whispered, voice tight and strained, "Grandpa, do you remember me?"
His eyes passed over her but there was no recognition.
Her own eyes pricked and blurred but she forced it back.
"Grandpa…Grandpa, it's me, Gosalyn." Desperation was bleeding into her voice now. "Say you remember me. Please, Grandpa. Please.” The word came out as a prayer, a plead. "I've come so far to find you."
“I...don’t know you.” He uttered it softly but unquestioningly.
Tears clawed at the corners of her eyes. A lump rose in the back of her throat and threatened to choke her.
"No, no, you're my grandpa! Your name is Dr. Thaddeus Waddlemeyer. I'm your granddaughter, Gosalyn Luz Waddlemeyer. My parents were Bert and Liliana. They…they died in a plane crash months after I was hatched. You raised me, all my life. I'm your granddaughter and you're my grandpa.
And his eyes lit up and for one moment, one terrible, gut wrenching moment, Gosalyn had hope.
"My son's name is Bert," her grandpa smiled, "Is he home yet?"
Gosalyn felt her heart tear in two.
"Oh, oh, you're crying. What’s wrong?"
Gosalyn felt like she was watching a ship sail out to a horizon. A ship carrying the person she loved the most. She recognized this man as her grandpa, the man who had raised her, but the tide was carrying him to some distant shore, to a place she couldn't reach, to a place she didn't have the capacity to understand.
And Gosalyn could embrace the urge to jump in, to thrash her arms and legs against the waves in a feeble attempt to reach him. Maybe if they brought him back, maybe the effects would reverse...but maybe not. The ship was already so far gone and even if she tried to stay, to reach him, she’d surely be pulled under the deep dark waters.
Even if she managed, by some miracle, to reach him- what would happen then? Would she drag him from the safe and dry deck, into the dark waters like some kind of siren? He had looked so peaceful with his face towards the warmth of the setting sun.
At least now she knew he was somewhere warm, somewhere safe, with someone who called him Papá and kissed the top of his head. She couldn't take him away from this glowing horizon he had found, not from a world where he was with the family he thought he had lost, a world where his son could be alive.
The day she destroyed the Ramrod, the day she had to choose between saving her family or all of reality, she had let him go in her heart. She didn't want to, she tried to snatch it back up again as soon as she did. But the moment she pulled the trigger on her crossbow, a part of her accepted that she would never see him again.
All of Drake's talk and encouragement and promises to help her find her family had been a spark of hope to hold on to. But holding onto hope was like holding onto smoke in a house of mirrors. She had let him go in her heart once, she would have to again.
Gosalyn shook her head, sucked down the sob building in the back of her throat, and wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve.
"No…no, I don't think your son is home yet."
"Oh…that's too bad... Oh, young lady? Are you crying? Is something wrong?"
She shook her head.
He lifted a hand and cupped her cheek. A comforting gesture he had made a million times before.
“It’s alright child. Don’t cry.”
“Would it be alright...if I sat with you?”
He smiled. “Of course dear.”
Gosalyn pulled up a chair to her grandpa’s side and leaned into him. He accepted, opening his arm and resting it over the back of her chair.
The last streaks of burnt orange were burning low on the horizon. Above blankets of blues and violets filled the night air. Gosalyn sat with the silence. She closed her eyes and focused on the rise and fall of her Grandpa’s breathing, of the warmth of his arm around her.
She didn’t have much time left. Once she let this moment go, it would never come again. She wished she had known then that the memories they made would be their last.
After what might have been 20 or 30 minutes she felt her grandpa’s arm shift from beneath her head.
She opened her eyes. He was opening paint tubes and squeezing them onto his painters palette.
“Grandpa…” she said lightly touching his wrist, “what are you doing?”
“Hmm?” He blinked as if he was surprised to see her.
“What are you doing?”
“She’s almost here. I can paint her.”
“Paint wh- Who are you going to paint?”
“My brightest star.”
Gosalyn became aware of the painted canvases littering the back porch. But they weren’t landscapes of the night sky, or the sunset, or even the sloping hillsides he had spent at least the past hour staring at. They looked like a paint store had thrown up on a canvas. Visual gibberish, random colors following no shape or style.
“There she is! There she is!” her Grandpa exclaimed, “My brightest star!”
The first stars of the night were beginning to peek through the pale evening sky, blinking white within a blue halo. A small comfort filled her as she realized, even in this reality, the constellations were the same as those back home.
Her grandpa moved his hand over the canvas with a new zest, one she was used to seeing as he darted around his lab, writing equations and hypothesising out loud. He made broad, ragged strokes, slashing the canvas with streaks of...nonsense. He blotted one corner of the canvas with blue only to slap yellow and red in the center, he dragged his brush vertically, horizontally, diagonally and zig zagged.
“You taught me how to chart the stars,” she said, her soft voice filling the silence. Her grandpa gave no response to indicate that he heard. She continued, if for nothing else, to fill the quiet air.
“You told me the stories that went with every constellation. You taught me a lot of things, everything I know, physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering. Most kids get fairy tales at bedtime, but you read me doctoral dissertations. While the other kids were singing the colors song, I was memorizing Von Drake’s An Introduction to the Visible Light Spectrum.”
She smiled at the memory.
“Perception of color is nothing more than our brain’s interpretation of wavelengths of light on the electromagnetic spectrum,” she rehearsed, repeating the mantra that had been instilled in her memory since she was little more than a toddler.
But, to her surprise, her grandpa spoke the next line in unison with her.
“Light contains all colors of the rainbow.”
“You...you remember?”
“Light contains all colors of the rainbow,” he repeated, gesturing back to his painting. “Yellow, blue, red, blue, purple too.”
Something cold and icy ran through Gosalyn’s veins.
“blue, purple, and green, then the yellow,” she finished in unison with him.
He looked at her and smiled.
“Grandpa,” she breathed, “Grandpa, that’s my...that’s the song …” but the words were too dry, too cracked to finish. Instead, she swallowed and took a deep steadying breath.
Heart hammering beneath her sternum, she began to hum, shaky and unstable at first. But it was enough. At the sound, her grandpa’s hand slowed, he tilted his head in her direction.
“Close your eyes, little girl blue,” Gosalyn began,
Her grandpa turned to face her fully. Beaming.
“Inside of you lies a rainbow,” he said looking directly into her eyes.
Yellow, blue,
red, blue, purple too,
Blue, purple, and green,
then the yellow.
Tears pricked the corners of Gosalyn’s eyes.
She glanced back at the dozens of canvases piled on the back porch. None of them contained any trace of pink, orange, teal, black, or white. Only the colors of their song.
“Grandpa, that’s the song you used to sing to me. Do you remember me?”
“Little girl blue,” he said pointing at the sky. “Her inner light burns bright. One day she’ll outshine us all.”
He turned back to her, the fog behind his eyes had cleared some but he still looked far away but when he looked at her, she knew that she was seen.
“I’ve... lost something….very precious. There’s something important waiting for me but...I’ve lost my way. My mind...is...my universe is shrinking. Curling in on itself...everyday the edges blur a little more...I’m supposed to get back to something...but I’ve lost my way.”
Even as he spoke, Gosalyn saw the fog returning to his eyes.
A stone, thick and jagged, clogged Gosalyn’s throat but she swallowed it down. She felt a weight on her heart she hadn’t felt since she lifted her crossbow towards the Ramrod.
“But you know what to do when you get lost. You taught me.”
She took her grandfathers hand and pointed towards the splatter of stars against a canvas of night.
“Look, there’s Ursa Minor, and if you follow the little bear’s tail…”
She guided his hand in hers, watched his gaze to make sure it followed where she pointed.
“There’s the north star.”
Unrestrained joy lit up her grandfather’s face. “There she is! My brightest star, my guiding light, I knew I would find her again!”
“The north star isn’t the brightest star.”
“She is to me,” her grandpa answered smiling.
Something inside her shifted. Something heavy. She slumped against her grandpa’s shoulders as sudden weariness glommed to her.
“Grandpa...do you remember what you told me when I was little...about travelers in distant lands...about people who have to leave their homes... what they do...what they say when they miss their family?”
Her grandpa didn’t answer.
“They look up,” she said. “They say ‘bajo las mismas estrellas’. No matter how far.”
“Yes,” he whispered under his breath. “Las mismas estrellas. Siempre.”
Gosalyn didn’t know how much time passed after that. She didn’t move again from her grandpas’ side. She stayed glued to him, wrapped herself around his arm, humming the lullaby he wrote for her while he painted a constellation out of a rainbow.
She didn’t move when she heard the back door open again.
“Ten minutes until dinner Papa,” a warm, velvety voice called out.
“Thank you Lili!” her grandpa replied without looking up.
A beat. A pause. And then the voice spoke again.
“Gosalyn, could I borrow you for just a moment?”
Gosalyn glanced back at the woman to whom the voice belonged. She smiled down at her with kind eyes.
“It’ll only be a moment, I promise.”
Gosalyn nodded. She gave one more tight squeeze to her grandpa’s arm before following the woman inside.
Drake smiled at her when she came in. He was holding a wooden spoon and gave a quick small wave. The gesture was reminiscent of the first time she saw him without a mask. She was surprised by the pebble of comfort it brought her.
The woman, Liliana, turned to her and beckoned her towards a doorway down the hall.
“Follow me please. There’s something I want to show you.”
Gosalyn gave no protest as she followed.
Gosalyn could remember being small, around 4 or 5, and wondering why her family didn’t look like the ones on t.v. So, she did what she always did when she had a question. She went to her grandpa. And grandpa pulled out the photo album from its place on the shelf, and he sat her on his lap on their small green sofa and showed her pages and pages of photos of a smiling young couple.
Pictures of the couple roller skating, pictures of the couple at the beach, clinging to one another as frozen wind whipped at the woman’s long black hair and the man’s oversized shirt.
And, as he always encouraged her to do, Gosalyn asked questions.
What was her favorite food?
“Arroz con pollo. Homemade.”
“And him?”
“Your grandmother’s ropa vieja.”
“Did she know how to whistle?”
“Yes.”
“Could he fold his tongue?”
“He couldn’t, but she could.”
“Were they in love?”
“Oh yes.”
“Were they happy?”
“Very.”
And he combed his fingers through her hair as he told her that he had never seen them happier than when they found out they were having a duckling and that they would have loved her very, very much.
And Gosalyn would stare at the smiling frozen faces with a curiosity of what could have been. But tucked under her grandpa’s arm, on their small green sofa, with blueprints scattered across the floor and her most recent science experiment spread across the table, she couldn’t help but feel happy exactly where she was.
And here now, was one of those faces in front of her. Living, breathing, blinking. Raising a slender hand to brush back wisps of curly black hair that had always remained frozen and still in the photographs.
And her eyes too, she realized, were a living thing. In the photos, the pair of eyes always smiled directly at the camera but now Gosalyn could feel the eyes looking directly at her. Large and wide and perceiving. Gosalyn felt like one of grandpa’s slides pressed directly beneath a microscope. She was helpless to escape them, as they looked directly into her.
This was her mother Gosalyn told herself with deepening conviction. More than an untouchable face in a photograph but someone who would have loved her. The person who, if life had been different, would have been the one who taught her how to tie her shoes and would have driven her to hockey practice.
Her mother.
A missing link of her family history, someone her grandpa had known and loved. Someone who had known and loved her grandpa. A part of her, a part of her that had always been missing but Gosalyn had never felt she missed. The embodiment of theoretical ifs and thens, a source of wondering and curiosity but never a deep dive into who she might have been.
Ripples of guilt ebbed through her. Here she was, a living, breathing person, who had loved and lost and surely possessed a well of ambitions, dreams, and fears as much as anyone else. A living mystery, a puzzle piece of Gosalyn that had always been sealed away.
And yet, Gosalyn couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
Liliana opened the door to reveal a small room, or maybe it just looked small because every corner was crammed with items. A desk overflowing with papers, too many paint brushes to count, tarps and plasting sheeting, jars stained with paint, a shelf full of blocks of soft clay wrapped in wax paper, strange, foreign instruments that looked like they could be dental equipment for a deranged doctor scattered every which way. The only clear space was the center of the room, where a tarp was laid out and sitting in its center was a simple stool and potter’s wheel. On the far side of the room the entire wall was covered with shelves, lined and lined with pottery of every shape and size, some painted, some not, some cracked, some not, some looked old an ancient, other looked fresh and new and if touched, would leave Gosalyn’s hands wet with paint.
“Woah,” she said as she stepped ahead of the woman. She turned in every direction before crossing over to the shelf full of pottery.
“Did you make all of these?”
A touch of laughter entered Liliana’s voice. “Well, everyone needs a hobby when painting commissions are slow.”
“Keen gear,” Gosalyn said softly as she lifted a small pot, no bigger than a cereal bowl from its place, without thinking better of it.
“So what are these flower pots or something?” she said as she examined the one she selected. It was one of the simpler ones. Small in size, simple in shape and design. It was lightly pained with blues and whites but not so much that the strokes of the brush overcrowded the reddish brown color of the clay.
“Some of them are, like that one you’ve got. Others are bowls, vases, or whatever you need them to be. Ah, that’s a good one,” Liliana encouraged as she stepped behind her. “One of the earlier ones I made. My mother taught me that design.”
“Your mother?”
Liliana nodded. “It was my family’s craft. I come from a long line of potters. Five generations of women passing the knowledge of the craft on to the next. My earliest memories are of watching my mother, my grandmother, even my great-grandmother sitting together, forming the clay.”
“I-” she was about to say, ‘I never knew that’ but stopped herself.
“My mother told me our family was like this clay. Born from the same land of our ancestors, molded by the same loving hands, the hands that held us through the night. And when Alvarez women go through the fire, we come out stronger.”
She knelt on the floor, sitting on her knees so that she was eye level with Gosalyn.
“Gosalyn, do you know what these are made for?”
“To...put things in?”
Liliana nodded, “and the one your holding?
“To...put flowers in?”
Liliana smiled. “Maybe I should explain instead of ask.”
She swept a stray strand of hair behind her shoulder. When she looked up and met Gosalyn’s eyes, Gosalyn wondered how eyes full of such warmth could ever have appeared frozen behind a photograph.
“I know what it’s like to be uprooted,” Liliana said.
“To be separated from the people you love and the world you know, to feel as though you have no ground to stand on. I came to this country with only what I could fit in one suitcase. But the most valuable things aren’t carried in a suitcase. They’re held here,” she said as she tapped a finger to her temple, “and here,” she lowered her hand over her heart.
“As long as you carry the love and the memory of your family with you, they stay with you, no matter where you go.”
Gosalyn held her mother’s gaze. It was strong, steady, and overflowing with compassion.
And something inside her...cracked. Like a chip in the center of a dam wall. The sadness she had been managing to keep at bay began rising, flooding over her walls.
“It hurts,” she whispered.
Her mother brushed back a strand of hair from Gosalyn’s eyes, which were already beginning to blur and sting.
“I know it does,” she said gently. Voice soft and soothing like wind creating ripples on a lake.
“I know. I miss my mother, and my grandmother every day. But you know something?”
Gosalyn shook her head.
“I’m still glad I came. Because if I hadn’t, I never would have met my Berto, or Thaddeus. I will always be Liliana Alvarez, formed from the clay of my home, just like my mother and her mother. But now, even if I don’t have the piece of paper to prove it, I am also Mrs. Liliana Waddlemeyer, and Thaddeus, he is my family too.”
She folded her hands over Gosalyn’s and pushed the clay bowl towards Gosalyn’s heart.
“Take it with you, let it be a reminder.”
“A reminder of what?”
Liliana smiled softly and smoothed down Gosalyn’ hair.
“Even the uprooted tree can find a home again.” Liliana tapped a finger against the clay pot. “Family trees are meant to grow. Keep your heart open Gosalyn, and I promise, you will find family again.”
Gosalyn couldn’t contain herself any longer. She rushed forward, throwing her arms around Liliana’s neck, burying her face in the tangles of her hair.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Liliana stiffened with surprise before returning her embrace, soft and sturdy, and warm.
“De nada, mija.”
And suddenly, Gosalyn could think of questions.
What was Colombeaka like?
Do you miss it?
Did you have any siblings?
What was your mom and grandma like?
Hypothetically speaking, how would one go about learning pottery?
And Liliana answered each and every one with a smile.
“You are sure you won’t join us for dinner?” Liliana asked.
“Thank you, but we really do have to be going,” Drake answered. “We- we can’t thank you enough for your hospitality.”
Liliana smiled, “My pleasure. It was lovely to meet you both.”
In the living room, Gosalyn hugged her grandfather tightly, whispering something in his ear. The old man smiled.
“It was nice to meet you child,” he said.
Despite everything, Gosalyn smiled.
When she turned, Liliana was already there, waiting for her hug. She dropped to her knees and scooped Gosalyn into her chest.
“Goodbye mija, you remember what I told you.”
When they stood again, Liliana escorted them to the door. Drake nodded a goodbye to Dr. Waddlemeyer and Liliana, he turned to step into the night air when he felt a warm hand rest on his shoulder.
In a whisper low enough that Gosalyn who was already on the porch couldn’t hear, Liliana said, “Take care of her won’t you?”
A fist squeezed painfully around his heart. A lump rose up and threatened to lodge his words in his throat. She didn’t even realize the blessing she had bestowed on him.
But somehow, he managed to get the words through without tripping over them, without breaking her weighty gaze.
"It was this way right?" Gosalyn said as she sped down the sidewalk, not waiting for a response.
“I promise.”
"Gosalyn…" he replied gently.
"Then a left turn, and then we're back at the alley?"
She marched ahead of Drake so he couldn't see her face but he could hear the tightness closing in on her throat.
"Gosalyn," he called again.
"Come on, let's go. We don’t have much time right?"
Drake wasn't looking at the watch Fenton and Gearloose had given him. He was looking at the tension in her squared shoulders, at the tightly balled her fists she held at her sides.
"Just around the…the corner right?" Her voice splintered with the pain she was trying to hide. He didn't have to see her eyes to know they were tearing up.
"Gos," he said again, extending and hand to her shoulder.
One touch was all it took and she crumbled. Her knees buckled beneath her, but Drake was already there, sweeping her into his arms as she fell to the pavement.
Finally, finally, she allowed herself to cry and it was like opening floodgates. The sobs battered their way though her tiny ribcage and shoulders.
He cupped her head to his chest.
He had been older than she was now, when he had lost the family he had, or more accurately, he was cut out of it. The day came early, far too early for a child, when he realized home would never be home again. When the deep lurking fear- that dread that filled his belly during all hours of the day and swam into his head and heart during the late hours of night- turned to reality; the only two people in the world he would have expected to love him unconditionally - didn't.
He felt his heart break all over again, but not for himself, for the small child he held now, who tried to carry a loneliness no child should have to carry, all on her own.
He raked his mind, trying to find the words he would have given anything to hear when it had been him.
"I've got you," he said. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm right here. I'll always be right here."
And because he knew it was true, he added, "I love you, kid."
He held her, he held her as half a year’s worth of grief flooded from her. Even when the violent, heaving cries slowed, even when the strangled sobs spread into taut gasps of silence, when it seemed she had cried herself dry, he held her.
Her tiny body slumped into his, exhausted, fatigued, from finally dismounting the unbearable burden.
Eventually, a small alarm trilled from their watches. 10 minute warning.
Trembling, Gosalyn tried to stand, but her knees faltered. Drake held her tighter.
“No, it’s okay,” he said, “I’ll carry you until you’re ready. You don’t have to do this alone.”
She curled herself tighter in Drake’s arms, “Thanks Darkwing,” the whisper was so small he almost didn’t hear it.
And just like that, tucked close to his heart, under a tapestry of glimmering stars, he carried her the long way home.
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The Interview (5/5)
Sanders Sides: Logan, Patton, Virgil, Roman
Blurb: A normal day at StoryTime! Inc. takes an unexpected turn when Logan goes to investigate why his coworkers have made a bet using Crofters as the prize.
Fic Type: General, Human!AU
Warnings: None
To Catch Up: Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4
Logan hadn’t meant to stay for the entire negotiations on Roman’s commission. He could have easily excused himself from the room as soon as he’d pulled up the proper forms for Virgil to read through, negotiate, and then sign.
After all, he had his own pile of work that needed to be seen to before the day was over and Roman was quite capable of hiring his own employees.
And yet.
He couldn’t help but be intrigued by what Virgil requested in exchange for each character piece that his brother wanted.
Virgil hadn’t been kidding when he said he’d followed Thomas from the beginning, and Logan should have realized when their new hire admitted to having theories on there being Two Princes at StoryTime! that he would be familiar with their work and placement within the company as well.
For Virgil had set to bartering with his brother like they were traders arguing over goods in the market.
And those goods...were their respective skill sets. For every artwork Roman wanted, Virgil had ended up negotiating what had amounted to practically a month’s worth of various lessons from The Prince himself. That didn’t mean just learning more drawing or animating techniques. Their new hire had also convinced Roman to give him a handful of acting lessons, one singing lesson, a sneak peak at a couple of scripts his brother was working on, and a copy of Roman’s Broadway performances Logan had secretly recorded before they’d been hired onto StoryTime!.
How Virgil knew about those recordings Logan had no idea. He’d kept those tapes under wraps...so he’d thought.
But not once did a monetary value cross Virgil’s lips as the price for his work as he carefully took notes on his beat up phone of every detail his brother wanted.
Logan was sure their new hire could have used the cash, but to have him seeking to improve his skills was admirable. Plus, the amount of questions he asked showed that Virgil was willing to put in the work to make Roman happy, though it was very apparent that his brother, from the ragged state of his usually perfectly styled hair, hadn’t expected him to go into quite so much detail about what he wanted in each artwork.
Virgil pulled at the tie around his neck, loosening it to the point where it looked more like a shiny ribbon than a tie. “But Princey.” He argued, his eyes sparking with the fire Logan had seen down below as he leaned forward, pushing the sleeves of his suit up. “You have to pick one face of the Mayor.”
Roman buried his head in his hands. “I knoooooow, Stormcloud! Stop badgering me. I didn’t expect that I would need to!”
Virgil scoffed, tapping his phone screen. “You didn’t expe--have you ever done commissions before, Romanji? You’re basically the driving force of StoryTime! and you can’t decide on a face? Where is this ‘You push on! No matter the hardship! No matter the voice that tells you you can’t!”
His brother pointed a finger at Virgil without looking up. “Don’t you DARE quote Psycho Godfather Wars at me! GAH!”
Logan fought back a laugh as he shook his head, pulling the portfolio closer to him. “Honestly Roman, the solution to which face of the Mayor should wear is simple.”
“Simple!” Roman scoffed, twisting in his chair to him, throwing his arms out. “How can such a choice be considered simple!”
He raised an eyebrow. Well, it would have been a simple solution if he hadn’t distracted Roman from looking through Virgil’s entire portfolio. A pity. He would need to ensure his brother properly looked through it later tonight. “Virgil’s portfolio already contains the answer to your problem.”
“My artwork? Sure it’s--” Virgil ran a hand through his hair, flushing. “ah...g-good and all, but I don’t see how--”
Artists. Logan flipped open the page to the green basilisk from earlier, sliding it to them with a faint smile.
Virgil stared at it wide eyed before face palming. “OF COURSE!”
“Of course?” Roman leaned forward. “How does--”
Virgil shook his head. “It will probably take a bit of trial and error.” He said leaning forward. “But” He shifted the paper, so Roman could see the basilisk’s scales switch from green to white. “If I can get it to work on the head--”
“We can have the Mayor wear both faces at once! Virgil you genius!” Roman clapped him on the back before eagerly pulling the artwork to him. “How in the world did you do this? You gotta teach me!”
“Te--Teach you?” Virgil managed, going pale as he rubbed the spot Roman had touched.
Logan sat back, adjusting his glasses as his brother nodded, his eyes racing over the page while he shifted the paper back and forth. “It’s an ink right? But almost like paint--this is like ah!” Roman snapped his fingers. “Specs! Do you remember in school--with the gel pens?”
How could he forget? Logan pulled the pages of Virgil’s contract from the printer, ensuring they were all there and in order before he tapped them into a neat pile. “You mean the markers you filled with glitter that--”
“Caused Miss Mary Lee to sparkle for a month straight when one exploded? YES!” Roman chuckled. “She banned me from markers for the rest of the school year.”
Which was unfortunate because she couldn’t tell him and Roman apart so Logan too had been banned from them that year. He quirked an eyebrow. “Not that it stopped you from ruining the crayons, the colored pencils, the regular pencils, every pen you touched, the chalk, the--”
“Seriously?” Virgil’s brought a fist to his lips, but not before a soft laugh broke free. “Princey, are you sure you’re not a Demon? A Destroyer of Creativity?”
Roman shot to his feet with an offended gasp. “HOW DARE YOU! I AM--”
“Definitely all those and more.” Logan interceded as Virgil jerked back, wide eyed. “At least, he was as a child.” He allowed. “He’s improved slightly since then.” He smirked, raising an eyebrow to Roman. “Slightly.”
His brother jerked a hand to his heart as if he’d been stabbed. “Traitor! I haven’t broken a pen in-”
“He’s not dead, Reese.” Patton’s tiny voice piped up from Logan’s watch.
“Wanna bet your famous pasta on that?” Her voice asked into the silence. “He’s totally been taken by a Vampire.”
“Vampire?” Virgil asked, glancing around for the source of the voices.
Roman’s lowered his hands, a smirk playing on his lips. “Oooh? You didn’t tell me the others are interested in our new hire.”
Virgil paled. “Others?”
Logan exhaled, silencing his watch. He had stayed too long. He should have realized his team would get suspicious with his long absence. “And if I say yes?”
Roman’s smile grew, humor dancing in his eyes as he leaned in. “Then I would ask why exactly did you go find my new hire, Lo?”
Logan shrugged a shoulder, moving to stand so he was on the same eye level as Roman. He would need to tread carefully here. But it wasn’t like Virgil wouldn’t find out eventually. “As I told Virgil earlier, it was noted that he’d been outside for quite some time.”
“And you went to investigate?” His brother raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “You don’t go outside Specs.”
Logan rolled his eyes, fiddling with his glasses. “You know for a fact that I do.”
“Not before dusk. Maybe you’re a vampire after all.”
Of course his brother would make them go through such a silly conversation. He turned away, breaking eye contact as he slipped Virgil’s contract into a folder and handed it to Roman “Make sure Virgl reads, negotiates the proper terms and signs this before he leaves as I regrettably-” and it was regrettable as watching Virgil interact with Roman was far more fascinating than crunching numbers and managing budgets. “-have to return to my own department.”
“Right right, but don’t ignore the fact that you’re avoiding my accusation brother dear.” Roman grinned, taking the contract with a nod. “Did you actually become a vampire and not tell me? Rude!”
Hardly. Though with everyone’s apparent obsession with the creatures Logan could foresee their MC being a vampire in StoryTime!’s next movie. “As Virgil can attest, I was fine standing in the sun. So obviously, I am not a vampire.”
“I dunno…” Virgil licked his lips, a careful humor all too similar to Roman’s sparking in his mismatched eyes as he pushed down his sleeves. “The forums did circle that particular rumor around for a while a couple years ago about you, Specs. But what is this...uh...bet? Why did you come outside to..well...see me…” He tilted his head, rubbing his arm as he studied Logan. “If you don’t usually leave?”
Roman suddenly smirked, laying the contract on the desk near his commission notes. “Ooooh. If I didn’t know better I would say this probably involves….” He paused for dramatic effect. “Cofters.”
Despite himself, Logan flinched. “No!” He denied, though from the way Roman’s eyes lit up, he’d negated the accusation too quickly for it to be believable.
Virgil frowned, looking between the two. “Crofters? The Movie?”
“The jam.” Roman clarified. “Lo here’s obsessed with the stuff. Come on.” He advanced around the desk as Logan took two short steps backwards towards the door to stay out of range. “Tell us brother mine. Why did Crofters make you go outside for my interviewee?”
Logan cleared his throat. “For the record I didn’t know who Virgil was or his purpose for being here when I ventured outside.”
“But you had your suspicions.” Their new hire said, shifting in his seat. “You asked if I was here for an interview.”
Logan nodded. “Yes, your portfolio was enough of an indication of that and Roman has lost people in his department recently, so it was a simple enough conjecture to assume you were here to interview with him.”
“Even so, dozens upon dozens of people holding portfolios have passed beneath our windows.” Roman stated, gesturing out his own windows. “Why then would you choose to interfere with my interview when you told, nay, you promised me you wouldn--”
“Alright!” Logan shook his head, spreading his arms in surrender. “I admit Crofters was the motivator for why I went outside but it had nothing, and I repeat, nothing.” He met Virgil’s mismatched eyes. “To do with me hiring you. You earned your spot at StoryTime!, Virgil. You have the talent and skill of one who’s worked with us for years. There’s no doubt there. Crofters had nothing to do with it.” He gestured to his watch. “While there are friendly bets that take place among the people who work here; policy, as is more fully outlined in your contract, dictates that said bets never involve work related matters. Since you are our new hire, no bets can be made about you or your work from here on out.”
Virgil let out an unsteady breath, giving a shallow nod. “Okay...good..yah...good to know…” He pulled the tie from around his neck, twisting it among his fingers. “So you...so this...bet?”
“Was between Patton and Reese on whether or not you would come inside the building, nothing more.” Logan said simply.
Roman blinked. “Come inside? Why wouldn’t he come inside?”
“Because the forums made you out to be freaking terrifying, Princey.” Virgil muttered.
His brother inhaled...hesitated then sheepishly shrugged. “Okay, That I can’t deny. I have a vision after all! I can’t settle for second rate!”
That was accurate on both accounts. Hence Roman’s intense pre-interview requirements for each application. Logan shifted a step closer to the door. “Regardless, your loitering outside drew their attention and so the bet was made.”
“Right on me...coming inside.” Virgil ran his fingers through his hair, the careful humor coming back into his eyes. “So who won?”
Roman snapped his fingers. “Patton.”
Logan nodded, not at all surprised he had guessed correctly. “Yes. He was quite adamant that Virgil would come inside. Offering up six jars of Crofters and his triple death by chocolate brownies before I was made aware of the situation.”
His brother whistled, clapping Virgil on the shoulder. “SIX. EmoKnightmare you already have Patton’s heart! He never goes above three.”
Virgil flushed, fidgeting in his chair. “So...Reese?”
“Bet that you would not come in, yes, but do not take that to heart.” Logan said. “She enjoys being contrary as you’ll find out soon enough.” Once Virgil signed the paperwork and finished the basic training, he would be given a full tour around StoryTime! and introduced to the various teams. After all, Virgil couldn’t become part of the FamILY if he didn’t meet everyone.
“Ten more minutes and I’m calling it. R.I.P to Specs. He had a good run.” Reese piped up from the watch.
Logan exhaled, straightening his tie. “That, I believe, is my cue to go assure the others that I am not dead and not a vampire.”
Virgil smirked, shoulders relaxing. “Being a vampire technically means you’re dead, well undead, but go off I guess.”
Logan rolled his eyes. “Finish your commission talk you two, and Roman.” He pointed a finger at his brother. “I expect Virgil’s signed contract on my desk before I leave.”
“Easy enough.” Roman winked returning to his chair. “Considering you never leave.”
He wasn’t going to live that down anytime soon was he? Logan gave them a nod. “Virgil, it’s been a pleasure. I look forward to seeing your work here at StoryTime!.”
“Ah..yah..thanks…” Virgil rubbed the back of his head, giving him a half smile. “Cya around Specs.”
With the niceties over, Logan slipped outside, heading back to his own office. Of how he had expected his day to go, this momentary distraction with Virgil had been-
“HE LIVES!!” Callie cheered as he entered the room.
“I do indeed...why would you assume I did not?” Logan asked, briefly meeting Patton’s worried gaze and offered him a small smile.
Patton straightened, giving him a blindingly wide grin in return as he laid his sketchpad on the nearest desk.
“Because you were gone for forever that’s why!” Reese stated swiveling to him. “Soooo?”
“So?” Logan rolled down his sleeves as she threw her hands out with a scoff.
“Weeeeelllll, what happened Specs? Is the kid any good at all or did you just want Patton to win the bet?”
“Virgil has been hired on as StoryTime!’s newest member of the FamILY.” He said matter of factly, glancing to Patton and Callie as they cheered.
“YES!” Patton pumped his fist. “I knew you could do it, kiddo!” He stood, looking around. “Where is he? Can I meet him?”
Like he would be able to stop Patton from darting off to find him even if he said no. “He’s finishing filling out the forms with Roman now, so I wouldn’t interrupt them just yet. BUT.” Logan adjusted his glasses, looking to each of them in turn. “Virgil was hired based on his skills, not because I wanted Patton to win the bet. It could have easily been you, Reese, if he had been found lacking.”
Reese groaned, dropping her head to her desk with a thud. “That doesn’t make me feel better, Specs. I had could have had six. SIX. Jars of Crofters and the triple death by chocolate brownies on my desk tomorrow morning. But Noooooo. You’ve deprived me of the simple joys in life.”
Dramatic as always. “You didn’t lose everything, Reese.” He said, waiting until she lifted her head before he continued. “Virgil didn’t enter the building until I invited him in.”
“What?!” Callie gasped, eyes going wide. “No!”
Reese cackled, grinning like a demon. “YES! That means candy for me!” She spun to Callie, holding out her hand. “A handful of your-” Her lips twisted. “Christmas candy, Cals. As agreed.”
“I can’t believe he’s a vampire! He was out in the sun.” She whispered, unknowingly echoing Logan’s earlier point as she pulled open a drawer in her desk.
“Well maybe he’s a hybrid.” Reese threw out. “Times have changed since the world went from black and white to color and ARE THOSE FREAKING CANDY CANES?”
Callie blinked, holding up a dozen multicolored candy canes towards Reese. “Yes?”
“Why in the world do you have those HERE already?!” She practically screeched. “EW!! Cal! That’s an affront to all things Thanksgiving!”
Laughter danced in Callie’s eyes as she shook her head. “No it’s not. I thought it was rather festiv--”
Logan turned to Patton and tilted his head towards the door in a silent question.
Patton nodded and the two of them slipped out of the room while the girls were distracted with their argument over when holidays should be celebrated.
“So? How did it go really?” Patton asked as soon as they entered Logan’s office, eagerly taking a seat. “You took quite a while to look through the kid--ah Virgil’s work before you both came inside and then you well.” He made a small poofing noise. “Vanished.”
“It went…” Logan ran his fingers along his tie as he sat down. “Well. Virgil was nervous to face my brother and so I offered to look through his portfolio for him and after what I saw….” He looked up. “I hired him on the spot.” He confided quietly.
Patton gasped, nearly falling off his chair as he leaned forward to grab Logan’s hands, eyes wide with concern. “You?!--but after last time, you knew Roman--”
“Would be upset and he was as expected.” Logan twisted his wrists so his fingers twined with Patton’s. “But the risk I took was calculated and you know how good I am at math.” He said. “Roman was quick to change his tune when he realized that Virgil was none other than his beloved EmoKnightmare478.”
”WHAT?!” Patton shrieked, bouncing in his chair, squeezing Logan’s hands. “That--How COOL! Was Roman excited?”
Logan didn’t hold back his smile. Really the odds of Virgil being the interview had been beyond extraordinary. He was sure Roman would be gushing about this for weeks. “Beyond excited. He’s commissioning Virgil to draw the entire Nightmare Before Christmas cast in the Sallyized Jack style.”
Patton’s eyes went wide behind his glasses. “Whoa.” He breathed.
“Exactly. Which is why I didn’t return right away, I was overseeing their negotiations…the kid--” Logan let out a breath, squeezing Patton’s hands. “He’s got quite the unique outlook. He has amazing, innovative designs of his own make and an active eye to StoryTime!’s future that could help us continue to reach out to more audiences and I just--”
“You just?” Patton encouraged, softly, eyes shimmering as he glanced to the door, more than likely itching to go meet Virgil in person though his hands remained steady in Logan’s.
He shrugged. “I think he’ll fit in quite well here. Plus, he and Roman are actually getting along and that’s...big.” His brother didn’t always warm up quickly to the new hires and he and Virgil already had quite the dynamic going.
“If Roman likes him, then I’m sure he’ll fit in just fine here with the rest of us, Lo.” Patton said, giving him a sly wink as he gestured to the three jars of Crofters sitting on his desk. “We’ll make the kiddo feel like he’s part of the FamILY in no time. I promise.”
End
Taglist in Reblog
#The Interview#stillebesat#Sanders Sides#Logan#Virgil#Roman#Patton#Logic#Anxiety#Creativity#Morality#StoryTime!
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Talentswap AU Prologue: Part 2
Yeah these are gonna come out weird, you’re gonna get a flood of updates when I have a random spike in motivation and then just radio silence for a month, that’s just how it goes.
Prologue: Same School, Same Rules, Different people - Part 1
As soon as the doors swung open, fluorescent lights even brighter than those in the hallway pierced his eyes, causing him to flinch back away from the door and close his eyes for a moment. When they opened again, he noticed an abrupt halt in the speaking, and several pairs of eyes were on him now. He felt a shiver run down his spine at their presence, feeling a strong aura coming from the students in this room. He couldn't let it get to him though. He knew what he was getting into by accepting the invitation, and he was prepared. Keeping the smile wide, he stepped into the entrance hall.
“Um, hi everyone! I guess I was a little late to the meeting, huh?” He said sheepishly, feeling his heart start racing when no one answered him, only continuing to stare.
“Sorry if I’m interrupting something.” He tacked on fast, trying to cover up his embarrassment. The tension grew when again, no one answered, until someone towards the front stepped forward.
“Are you the sixteenth student?”
Kaito felt surprised at that. This person was getting straight to the point. He turned to the voice and saw a small girl staring up at him with piercing red eyes. The first thing he noticed about her was that she was much shorter than he was (not entirely surprising considering his height), with brown hair in a loose ponytail and a deep red jacket that matched her irises buttoned over her uniform, which was mostly just a button up, tie, sleek black legging and dress shoes. He could feel her gaze peering into his brain, and he gulped, keeping his smile. <i>So this is what the Ultimates are like.</i>
“Yup! Guess everyone else is already here?” He asks, quickly counting the others in the room with him to make sure the number was correct. The small girl hummed in acknowledgement, stared him down for a few seconds longer, then stepped back. Kaito took the opportunity to relax a bit, not realizing he was so tense until she was further away from him. He turned away from the girl to look at the others in the room.
“So, is this all like, tradition at this school? I know this school isn’t like the others, but are all of the windows and creepy lighting necessary?” He tries to make a joke to lighten the mood of the room, but it doesn’t have the intended effect. Instead, several students made eye contact, communicating something between them that he wasn’t aware of.
One of the others, a much taller girl with sleek blonde hair in a very professional looking pink dress with a leg cut, high heels, and a feathery white boa around her neck, made eye contact with Kaito. Her gaze wasn’t as intense as the smaller girl’s, but it was still very intimidating by her sheet height alone.
“How do you remember getting here?”
That was an odd question, but considering the odd circumstances around his arrival, it may be important.
“Well, I don’t actually remember. I sort of passed out in front of the building and woke up in one of the classrooms.” He gave a small laugh, hoping it didn’t sound as nervous as he felt like it did.
At his response, the tall girl seems to get disheartened, for some reason Kaito can’t pinpoint. He hears a few sighs ring out in the group he’s in, making him more confused.
“Is… something wrong with that?”
“It’s how we all got here.” A girl with pinkish-blonde hair standing next to the one with the boa spoke up. Similarly to the boa girl, this student was dressed rather lavishly too, although more in a fashionable sense. She wasn’t wearing her uniform, and was instead wearing a several piece outfit centered around the black, white, and pink color scheme. It was fashionable, and rather provocative in some areas. She definitely had no problem showing off some skin, that’s for sure. Keeping his eyes locked with hers and away from her more… exposed areas, Kaito gave her a questioning look.
“Wait, so none of you know how you got here?” He asked, taking a step closer. Both girls shook their heads.
“Nope. At least from what we’ve gathered so far, no one remembered much after arriving at the building. Of course, we all remember the basic stuff, like our names, our families, our talents…” The boa girl trails off at the end, her eyes unconsciously traveling to a group of three standing in the corner of the room, one of which being the girl in the red jacket who’d talked to Kaito earlier.
“Well, most of us anyway.” The girl finished off, before turning to face Kaito.
“Speaking of, none of us have introduced ourselves.” She calmly offers a hand to Kaito, along with a small, charismatic smile.
“Kaede Akamatsu. You probably recognize my last name I assume.”
Kaito took a second to process this after taking her hand and shaking it. He did recognize her last name, but he couldn’t pinpoint exactly from where…
“OH! The Akamastu corporation!” Kaito blurted out as soon as the realization hit him. He heard some laughter next to him, and the crudely dressed girl leaned over, slinging her arm over the taller girl’s shoulders. Kaede seemed comfortable with this and made no move to retreat from the gesture.
“Hell yeah she is. My girl here’s got a fortune behind her name, so you better be nice.”
Kaede let out a small, breathy laugh.
“She’s joking, of course. I’m the Ultimate Affluent Progeny, which sounds sort of threatening, but it simply means I’m to inherit a large fortune when I become an adult.”
“Oh.” Kaito muttered. No matter how she phrased it, that’s still threatening, especially to someone like him, who’d never gotten an allowance over $20 before in his life.
“Yup. But she works hard for that money, so don’t go thinkin’ she’s one of those pretentious brats who get everything handed to ‘em.” The pink-blonde spoke up on behalf of the other girl.
Kaito gave them a once over, noticing their comfortable posture around one another and the fact that the pink-blonde keeps speaking up for her taller friend.
“Do you two know each other?” He questioned. They both nodded.
“My parents like me to have the best of the best, and often buy me more expensive and lavish clothes than necessary. Because of her profession, we often come in contact with each other, and we’ve become friends over this.” Kaede explained.
“Profession?” Kaito felt like he was missing some information here.
“Yup! I’m Miu Iruma, Ultimate Fashionista, baby!” She yelled out, proud and cheerful. It was a good energy to have, considering their situation.
“Oh, yeah I think I’ve heard of you before too. You’re in a lot of teen magazines.” Kaito now recognizes her from magazines he’s seen in stores before. He’d never bought any, but he now realized where she seemed familiar from.
After he’d said that, Miu looked him up and down, sizing him up.
“Don’t think I’ve seen you before though. You have to be big to get into this school, so what’s your deal kid?”
He mentally flinched at the use of the word “Kid”, as that was not one he liked to be used to describe him, but he didn’t comment on it.
“Uh, well it’s not special, and I’m not big like the rest of you are. I don’t really have a talent, I’m the Ultimate Lucky Student. It just means I got here through chance, they picked me out of a bunch of average students.”
Miu and Kaede shared a look, but it wasn’t one of pity or disgust like he’d been expecting.
“That’s still a talent nonetheless.” Kaede reassures him. Miu pipes up from behind her.
“Still better than those three.” She gestures lazily to the three in the corner Kaede had looked at earlier. Kaede elbows her friend at the comment.
“Stop being rude.”
“Wait, what’s wrong with their talents?” Kaito asks instinctively. Kaede gives the three a sympathetic look.
“Well, that’s the thing. You see, Miu and I were one of the first two to wake up and make it to the entrance hall, and we’ve been gathering people’s talents since they’ve started arriving.” Kaede pulls a folded paper from a well hidden pocket in her dress, along with a pen. As she unfolds the paper, he notices the outside of it is from the card he’d seen on his earlier with the scribbled crayon writing. <i>So everyone got one of those.</i>
“I’ve been keeping a record of names and talents, but those three over there-” She gestures to them, “- don’t seem to remember their talents, unfortunately. Well, we think the purple haired one doesn’t remember. He wouldn’t tell us that or his name.”
Kaito looks at the mentioned purple haired guy, finding him to be the shortest one of the bunch. He had dark purple hair, a shade not unlike Kaito’s own, tied in a tiny bunch at the base of his neck. He was wearing very comfortable clothes of the gray, white, and black color scheme, obviously not caring for the dress code or required uniforms. He seemed fairly normal, the only defining features of his outfit being the grey and black checkered scarf around his neck, and the military-style black hat on his head.
Kaito heard a snort from beside him, making him turn his gaze away from the short guy.
“Yeah, little asshole laughed at us when we tried to get his name and talent. I’d stay away from him if I were you, he’s definitely bad news.” Miu said, taking a moment to stick her tongue out at him, to which he didn’t respond to.
“Oh, alright then.” Kaito looks at the three outcasts of the group, standing away from the others, composed of the purple haired guy, the girl in the red jacket, and someone else he hadn’t talked to or heard about before. He was furthest away from the group, keeping to himself. He was dressed modestly, in normal everyday clothes of a darker hue. He had navy blue hair, from what Kaito could see underneath the large hat he kept his face hidden under.
Kaito broke his gaze away, realizing he was staring, turning instead to face the two girls.
“So uh, what about the others? You’ve been keeping track, so I’m guessing you know the names and talents of the other nine?”
Kaede nodded.
“The others were much more cooperative, and didn’t seem to have any trouble sharing their talents with me.”
She looks up at Kaito.
“Are you interested in learning about the others?” She asked. Kaito nodded without hesitating.
“Oh, alright then.” She looks down at her paper, and begins to read them off.
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S1E8: The Pest/The Legend of Big Kid
It’s a happy day, because we have been gifted both a Gretchen episode and a TJ episode! But it’s also a very fraught day, emotionally, for reasons you’ll soon discover. (There’s a good kicker, at least, for your trouble. No spoilers, but the ending of “The Pest” goes exactly as I’ve relayed it here.)
Read on for relationship advice, feminism, and a brief aside about white colonists in Africa:
The Pest
How To Make A Boy You Don’t Like Leave You Alone
by Gretchen Grundler
I don’t hate boys. Anyone who says that about me is simply incorrect. Four of my best friends are boys — my friend Spinelli and I are the only two girls in our group. When I’m fighting that kind of gender ratio and still enjoy their company, how could I ever hate them?
But some boys in particular are not worth my time. As a person who recently had an experience deflecting one of these boys’ advances over an extended period of time, I feel I am uniquely qualified to dole out advice on this matter.
I’m sort of spoiling the endgame here, but let me say, it is scores more effective to deal with troublesome boys yourself than to leave them to your teacher. Miss Grotke may mean well, but she’s a teacher, after all. At the core of her philosophy is law and order. Plus, in Miss Grotke’s case, she’s a much bigger proponent of letting us work out our own issues. Everyone wins.
You may feel hopeless, though, when a boy you don’t like starts bothering you in class. Maybe you want to tell the teacher. But that’s just a quick fix, and not a particularly effective one. It’s a band-aid. It won’t translate to your interactions on the playground, which is where your reputation really matters. (Okay, your academic reputation also matters. Maybe more.)
Of course, you may not know he likes you until he TELLS THE ENTIRE SCHOOL AT THE SAME TIME AND YOU JUST HAVE TO SIT THERE AND TAKE IT BECAUSE IF YOU DENY IT RIGHT AWAY THE ENTIRE PLAYGROUND WILL BE TOO BUSY LAUGHING TO NOTICE.
Whew, that felt good.
Still, nothing brings the playground together like a common laughingstock, and that was me. And when there’s a common laughingstock — the K-I-S-S-I-N-G chants were still ringing in my ears long after they happened — this empowers the boy you don’t like. Because suddenly, he’s not working for his cause alone. Suddenly, the entire playground is on his side.
What did I do? Well, I felt entirely hopeless. I tossed and turned every night, vivid dreams of this boy and I getting married and having children and growing old together disrupting my sleep. I was so distressed that I didn’t come to school the next day until lunch, which isn’t like me at all, of course. I want to stress, that was a one-time course of action. When he found me in the cafeteria, my friends tried to protect me, but alas, my lovestruck friend Mikey was starting to be won over by this boy’s persistence.
The first action I took was to simply cancel out what this boy had done to me first, declaring his love for me to the whole school. According to my calculations, it had the least risk and the most reward. Unfortunately, when a girl tells the whole school she isn’t romantically involved with a boy, they tend to believe the opposite. A boy publicly announcing his love for a girl, even against her wishes, is revolutionary, a real risk, something to be lauded. A girl publicly announcing her rejection of a boy is, well, mean. There are many high-school names a girl in my position might be called, but I won’t trouble you with them.
After even more pestering at school, even up to him talking to me through the vent that connects the boys’ bathroom and the girls’ bathroom, I had had enough. On the bus home, I told him I wouldn’t speak to him anymore, recognizing that ignoring him hadn’t worked in the past, but I was desperate for any semblance of peace and quiet, even if it was from me.
You know what he said? “I’ll take your silence as a yes,” and, “Denial is the sincerest form of flattery.” That’s not even the phrase! And if he was taking silence as a yes, why wouldn’t he take me saying “no” as a no?
The next action I took was drastic — high risk, a potential of a lifetime of punishment if it went south — but I knew it was a risk I had to take. I marched up to this boy at school the next day and called him out. I pulled out a pair of handcuffs and locked us together for eternity. The key? Gone. This boy? Presumably having the time of his life.
Except...he wasn’t. As I regaled him with all the things I would make him do that day — math club, spelling bee practice, a frog dissection over lunch — robbing him of his agency for perhaps the very first time, he broke down immediately. I pulled out the spare key to the handcuffs and set him free.
He said he just wanted to show me how much he liked me. But if we don’t call out this entitlement early, who knows when this awakening might have occurred for him? How many more girls would have had to suffer this ordeal?
“You know, Spinelli? Boys are really weird,” I told my friend when this was all said and done. “I know what you mean,” she replied. “Can’t live with them, can’t grind them into chalk dust.”
My eyes lit up as I thought of a science project I had been working on in my spare time.
“Well, actually, you could,” I said. Because I may be one to take one for the team, to put myself in harm’s way to try to mitigate future suffering at the hands of another person, but that doesn’t mean I don’t always have a backup plan.
Takeaway: Hot damn, this episode made me mad!
The Legend of Big Kid
Is Kirby Puckett the greatest outfielder that ever lived?
I'm not much of a stats person beyond the basics — field goal percentage, sacks, errors, the ones that will come up in conversation on a regular game broadcast. So, aside from a quick glance at his career numbers, which tell a story about his career, I can’t tell you if Kirby Puckett was the greatest outfielder that ever lived. (I will say that his number was retired a few months before this episode aired, which was a few years before the domestic violence allegations against him came out.)
Anyway, lucky for us, Vince and TJ can’t make this decision either, and it’s during their argument that they stumble right into the setting for this episode: the old playground that allegedly hasn’t been used since the 1970s. (Yet it’s on campus? Okay, okay, suspension of disbelief. My elementary school had a whole bunch of ways to get off campus during recess without anyone noticing, but it wasn’t done with any regularity — it’s possible they just didn’t know it was there.)
But it turns out someone has been using it, and recently, because TJ falls into a trap. As he’s hanging upside-down from the monkey bars, the two hear the rumbling of kindergarteners approaching. TJ tells Vince to save himself, but Vince instead distracts them so that perhaps TJ can get away. Vince, though, doesn’t realize how far or how fast he’s been running, because before he knows it, he’s back at the regular playground sobbing into Spinelli’s arms about how he could have done more to save his friend.
The coast seems clear, so the gang heads back to the old playground to get TJ, but he’s gone. Gretchen posits the kindergarteners must have taken him back to their pen, but that’s deserted, too. “They’ve probably migrated to their winter encampment,” she says, which doesn’t make the rest of the gang any less terrified for TJ’s safety.
We then get a jarring prisoner log from TJ, who tells us, “The unthinkable has happened. I am a prisoner of the kindergarteners.” He’s in a cage, unsure how much time has passed, and he’s not sure what his captors have planned for him. One of them — their leader, who TJ calls “Captain Sticky,” calls him “Big Kid” and tosses him some candy. TJ refuses to eat it, in case they’re fattening him up to eat him, but eventually is too hungry to say no.
Meanwhile, the gang is busy hustling the rest of the school, asking if they saw the kindergarteners, if there was a fourth-grader with them. The outcome appears bleak for TJ — everyone knows what might happen if those kids got a hold of an older kid: nothing good.
TJ, though, is...starting to like captivity, or at least get used to it. Whereas the kindergarteners first have to threaten him with weapons (crayons and paintbrushes attached to the end of yardsticks) to join them in tasks like finger painting and napping, he quickly assimilates to their ways.
Gretchen finds TJ’s shoe on the playground, lost in one of the initial scuffles, and Vince erupts in a “Noooo!” so heart-wrenching, you forget that TJ is, well, okay. Because the gang doesn’t know that. The kindergarteners are too elusive. No one knows what they’re up to except them.
But the gang acts on a more promising lead as Gretchen uncovers a still-wet lollipop. The trail is hot again!...just as we see TJ napping again, riding tricycles, and playing musical chairs. Is he too far gone?
When the gang arrive back at the old playground, they fall into yet another trap. Someone locks them in a cage, and the kindergarteners assemble, beating drums and shrieking. (We will...have to talk about how the kindergarteners are portrayed at some point in these recaps. There’s a very obvious white settler colonist, Indiana Jones, “thrilling adventures through untamed Africa!” look about them.)
The drumbeats slow, and who should walk out but...Big Kid. Well, TJ. The gang are shocked at how quickly the kindergarteners have completely taken hold of their friend, who now dresses like the kindergarteners, acts like the kindergarteners, and speaks like the kindergarteners. He won’t listen when they try to tell them who he is.
Somehow, it’s Vince talking about baseball that brings him back, though. Little League. Kirby Puckett. And TJ breaks down in tears, wailing, because he’s been through so much.
The gang finally gets him out of there, and Spinelli has to help TJ tie his shoes. “Shoes, underpants, I can’t get used to all this stuff!” he exclaims, and they don’t get it. (Gus calls the kindergarteners “primitive.” See latest parenthetical section.) But Gretchen recognizes he’s in a better place to be able to listen to reason now, so after he tells the gang he misses the freedom of being able to do whatever he wants all day, she says, “Don’t you see? Their way of life is coming to an end. By this time next year, they’ll be first graders.”
And TJ does get it. With one last nod to Captain Sticky, they part ways.
Takeaway: Growing up is hard, especially when you’re a kid and it goes by so quickly. Perhaps giving into some indulgences of yesteryear isn’t all bad, though, so long as you balance them with your current life and don’t let them consume you.
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Tips and Tricks: Watercolors Edition.
It always surprises me that more current cartoonists don’t use watercolors. I know that Will McPhail and Carolita Johnson use them, but watercolors haven’t really popped up much in the dozens upon dozens of interviews I’ve conducted over the past several years. Of course they show up more in interviews I’ve done with cover illustrators (Barry Blitt, John Cuneo, etc.), but I think a lot more cartoonists would find a whole world of opportunities in watercolor, if they were to experiment with them a bit. I’ve been painting a lot of watercolor pet portraits recently, and thinking of (and using!) some tips and tricks that I have found useful over the years, but that haven’t come up in any of the interviews that I’ve conducted on this blog, so I thought I would take the time to share them!
Here is some of my more recent work:
You can find more of my art on my Instagram, here.
-Watercolor has a similar look to ink wash, but is less permanent. You put down a layer of ink wash and you’re stuck with it. But if you use watercolor, you can take a wet rag and practically erase it! Plus, if you don’t feel confident doing linework with a brush, you can still use ink or a pen for that. Look at this landscape that I did a few years back. The shadowy sand was done by putting down opaque watercolor, letting it dry, and then scrubbing most of it away!
-If you have discovered the joys of lifting up watercolor mistakes, but have gone about it a bit over zealously, and caused your paper to pill up (but haven’t fully dug a hole through the fibers), I have discovered that the Cliceraser, a Japanese tool that Roz Chast recommended in her Case as an ink eraser, is your savior. If your paper is still wet, blast it with a hairdryer until it’s fully dry, and then gently sand off any errant paper fiber until it’s smooth enough to paint on again. Now, this would not work on printer paper (you shouldn’t be using watercolor on there anyways—I generally work on heavy cotton watercolor block), but this has helped me on more occasions than I care to admit. It is basically a grainy eraser. I haven’t tried using sandpaper, but I think the Cliceraser is more gentle, and would allow for more precision.
Image from Roz's Case
-Frank Cotham uses water-soluble crayons, which have a very unique look to them, but I’ve discovered that they can sometimes cause an unwanted glow in photographs. Say you spent ages painting a landscape, and thought it would be a great idea to use water-soluble crayons to paint the leaves. Everything looks uniform and tied together, but when you try to capture an image for your portfolio, you discover that your subtle fall foliage is garishly glaring. Devastation. Use water-soluble crayons with caution, especially when you're doing mixed media, and perhaps take photos of your work as you go along, to make sure that what you see through the camera matches what you see in front of you (or at least to ensure that you won’t be faced with any horrifying realizations at the last second).
-Speaking of water solubility, a very versatile tool that hasn’t been mentioned in any Case interview is one of my favorites, and one that I think would make a lot of cartoonists’ lives a lot easier: watercolor pencils. They blend really well with regular watercolor paint, and work great for detail work, for building up an area quickly, and for outlines (though I sometimes like to have graphite peeking through in a painting, using it for initial sketches can be helpful, especially when using light tones, because you can seamlessly blend your lines into your painting).
A lot of cartoonists will use gouache straight out of the tube for highlights, but that can require extreme precision, and sometimes, watercolor paper will eat up the paint! However, if you use a very sharp white watercolor pencil instead, the highlights won’t get absorbed. If you’re feeling fancy (or using grainy paper), you can trace over the watercolor pencil with white gouache.
Watercolor pencils can also be used for building up an area quickly. I find that if I’m using a thick cotton paper, it can be hard to get colors dark enough, so sometimes I’ll just lay down some watercolor pencil in whatever color is best suited for the task at hand, and then go over that with watercolor paint, which can lead to some interesting textures. I do that often with rocks.
-My rock painting leads me to my next tip, which is if you struggle with drawing something, that’s all the more reason to draw it. I used to struggle with painting rocks, so I sat down and said, “I’m going to paint a very rock-heavy painting,” (well, the painting itself is very light). Did I regret this decision greatly while painting all of those rocks? Yes! But I am now able to paint rocks fairly easily, so it ended up being worth the agony. This applies to many things in life besides watercolors, of course!
-Another tip (which also applies to the above rock painting) is to use the paint’s texture to your advantage. There are some really interesting paints with high levels of mineral separation, that can create beautiful grainy effects. You can do a light wash of a grainy paint over a flat wash of paint, and end up with a fascinating texture with minimal effort. This is an especially great technique for painting dirt.
-Try to use shadows effectively rather than accurately. With portraiture, as with cartooning, you are telling a story. Such as writers use various devices (metaphors, etc.) to tell their tales, we do the same thing with how we use tones. If I’m painting a dog, I want all of the information in the image to go towards showing the dog. Part of this can be using background tones. In my average pet painting, I’m not going to try to make a meticulously true to life shadow, but rather use shading to either convey space or make the dog stand out from the background. If I am painting a pet with light fur, I am generally going to paint a more expressive background in darker tones that contrast with their fur. If I’m painting a chocolate lab, I will do a light shadow to convey that they are occupying space of some sort, but that won't cause them to blend into a dark background. I always want to make sure that the darkest (or sometimes lightest, if everything else is rather dark) color on the page is on the part of the painting that I want you to see first. Cartoonists do the same thing, but in a way that leads the viewer’s eye to the joke.
-If buying a whole set of watercolors is cost-prohibitive, I recommend buying a cheap set, and then buying a nicer tube here or there as you are able. That’s what I did. A lot of high quality companies also offer smaller sized tubes, that are often significantly cheaper than the large sizes with scary prices. Coupons are also your best friend. I’ve used a coupon on almost every single tube of paint I have ever bought. Plus if you work mostly in black and white, you only need two tubes!
I hope this was helpful! I know people of many different levels of ability and knowledge read this blog, and it’s fun to be able to have artists share what they know, because the more we help others learn, the more wonderful art we get to enjoy! If anyone else has any tips or tricks, be sure to stick them in the comments! Also, if you’d like to follow my art, I have a fairly new-ish art Instagram here. Oh, and If you’d like to support the blog there is a Patreon and a Ko-Fi (essentially a PayPal account). And if you are hankering for some more art supplies on your social medias, consider following Case on Instagram and Twitter! Have a nice week!
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𝕮𝖆𝖙𝖈𝖍 𝖚𝖕 | 04/11/19
We began with a brief reminder of why we are doing this assignment in particular and where we all are individually, as well as going over where we should be at this point.
So far we have had just a few hand ins during term 1; Pick & Mix and now also movers & shakers. For Movers & Shakers, we need to hand in the following, with the deadline being Thursday the 14th November - 4 pm:
All work from Pick & Mix, completed; both folder & blog.
Movers & Shakers completed; both folder & blog but also a usb that contains all the files for this brief; this would be things such as gifs or videos of each animation as well as a showreel (mp4 file) + current working sketchbook.
For this brief and briefs to come, there are no exceptions to not be finished with everything before the deadline given. Deadlines are there to replicate workplaces in real life so you can work more professionally.
We also went over the checklists for this brief which includes one for the production file and the blog; making sure that everybody were caught up with understanding everything on these two lists:
For the blogs, it’s important to keep in mind to follow the formation of;
Introduction
Body
Conclusion/Evaluation
It’s also important that we, at this point, know what all the terminology includes and that we have a clear understanding of what all of the terms and keywords mean. Some of the more important process related terms are additive and subtractive animation; these will come up soon so it’s a good idea to have a good understanding as to what these are for future projects, tasks and challenges.
Use the questions that have been given to help articulate the blogs. It’s accessible and there to help review and evaluate all the work we do as we go along through the briefs.
For this whole term, visual language has been the root for everything, main focus. we are right now looking at tone and texture.
Can we quickly define them?
Tone: Contrasts between different colours and shades, it’s the different between light and dark. The relations of these shades that describe tone.
Texture: Texture is tactility. Raised surface.
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Quick task:
Spend five minutes in groups to discuss;
Ways to describe a texture:
Rough, smooth, jagged, silky, soft, hard, spongy, wet, raised texture, sharp, shiny, matt, gritty, solid, liquid, grainy, spiky, fluffy, scaly, pointy, lumpy, chunky, dry, brittle.
Ways to describe a tone:
Light tone, dark tone, medium tones, warm tones, cold tones, dull tones, bight tones, contrast, colour, solid, harsh, soft, concentrated, rendering, juxtaposition, positive & negative space, richness and deepness, shade, viscosity of colour, opacity/translucence/sharpness, opaque, hue, saturation, vibrancy, desaturation, shadows; chiaroscuro.
Materials and mediums you could use in this project?
Wax crayons, watercolour, ink, acrylic paint, graphite, chalk, pencil, graphite stick, foam, paper, pastels, gouache, tissue paper, foil, fabric, plastics, plasticine, cardboard, sandpaper, glitter, sequence, lino printing, oil paint, card, ORE, coloured pencils, markers, pen, string, tape.
We also went over these with the class, adding as many ideas for each point as possible.
Today’s focus and task:
Use your own footage to create a working rotoscope sequence.
I am going to use the video of a swan.
Pick a describing term/terms for both texture and tone.
Texture: Rough yet soft
Tone: Contrast, hue, juxtaposition.
Pick a medium/material/media aiming to reflect the selected texture and tone.
I am going to use ink (brush pen) on paper and let loose.
So, the first thing I did was go onto Photoshop on a mac in the studio to then import the video of the swan into the program. The final number of frames were 46 after removing ever other frame from the initial video. I then printed each of these frames out on A4 paper. After this was done, I could start the drawing process. At this point, I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted to do for this task, but I decided to start the way we started this brief (Muybridge movers); with tracing paper and some ink. I began doing some simple and rather bold lineart with a brush pen. This was time consuming, but it turned out rather successful in the sense that it reads quite clearly what is happening and what the subject is.
At this point I had finished all the frames, making sure to number all of them to keep track. Since I still, at this point, didn’t know exactly where to go with this just yet, I decided to continue by roughly colouring each frame in with the same brush pen.
As I went through, I thought about when we did subtractive animation a few weeks ago, (”Mealt”) and so by taking inspiration from that lesson, I applied what I had learnt then about this process to this animation as well.
So now with every frame outlined and coloured in, what now then? I have now finished with the tone aspect of the task, now it’s time to incorporate texture into it, and I had the perfect idea. The ink lines are quite rough or somewhat harsh, and I wanted to create juxtaposition, so what better way of doing that by using texture opposite to anything rough or harsh? The answer is bubble wrap. It’s great texture and it is soft compared to many other mediums.
So, I took my bubble wrap and began cutting out random shapes of it to then use these to glue onto each frame with a glue stick. This was a tedious process, but fun since it’s nothing like I’ve ever done before.
As I was working, I suddenly realised the potential of this sequence. There is an incredible amount of pollution happening in the world at the moment, and today there are literal islands made out of plastic, floating about in our oceans. Every day, wildlife is affected negatively to this by either getting hurt or dying from it in one way or another.
When I had finished gluing the bubble wrap onto a selection of the frames, it was time to start photographing every frame:
This was my setup. I used the back of my production file to create a solid black background for the pictures. I took all the pictures using my phone; I have learnt from the “Mealt” workshop that this is quite an effective way of doing it instead of scanning in 40+ different frames.
Above are some screenshots of my camera after photographing all the frames. Now it was time for editing them to my own personal liking, which I did on my laptop using “Preview’s editing tools. They are a bit primitive, but for the purpose of this exercise, that will do just fine.
After editing, the final number of frames came to 39, even though the initial was 46. I cut it down a little since I felt some of the frames were unnecessary; something I should have thought about earlier on when choosing which frames to use in the video. I decided to do my animation the same way I did when I did my Mealt animation; so, to do this, I replicated the process from then. That means that the next step would be to import all of the now edited frames into Krita (the program I’m going to use for this). This part is quite tedious but definitely still important to get right to avoid chattering when playing it back in the end. I’m simply just lining up each frame in order to the best of my ability. It was at this part of the process that I decided to invert all the hues of the frames. I did this to replicate how the swan originally is white; also, symbolising how pure the animal is in contrast to the pollution (black background)- and how it takes over.
Here are all of the frames put in order:
Here are the same frames, but with all the hues reversed:
After then exporting all the frames lined up to match each other better, it was time to animate it together. For this (and all my gifs) I use Giphy.com.
Like the Mealt workshop; I copied and reversed a selection of the frames to successfully make the animation loop; also, making it appear as if it’s “breathing” or growing.
Here is the finished rotoscope of the swan:
And here is the original snippet of the video:
With the use of the bubble wrap, it tells the story (which in fact is no story at all, but reality) of how the more plastic we throw out into the ocean, the lesser the population or the animals living in this environment there are. If this keeps going, all life will eventually be gone; (shown by how the bird eventually fades away into nothing) - but if action is taken globally, we can reverse this and start anew; letting wildlife thrive without plastic choking them up.
It is no coincidence that I made the subtractive element happen during the last 10-15 frames as it is meant to replicate how quickly it (plastic and pollution) can kill nature.
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Matchup for @poisoinedhope! 💕
@poisoinedhope : Gosh I´m sooo hyped up!! Can I pls have a student/ romantic match up? I am a straight, ambivert and observant female. I have brown, curly hair and dark brown eyes. I might seem athletic, but I am waay to unsporty-unless it´s a competition, than I get really competitive. I am more of the intuition type, knowing that the first instinct is usual the one to go with.Being the eldest of three formed me, so my protective side is always on, paired with a cold stare that stops anyone to even look at those under my wing. If looks could only kill, y´know xD I love writing and reading! I get so invested, that I start screaming or talking with whatever book I´m reading^^ SO yeah, despite being calm and collected, I can and I will scream louder than anyone else without any effort. I never had any realtionship, so I don´t really know what to expect of those? Despite being the cool and collected one in my group of friends, I seem to be the most innocent one? I tend to get really clingy and once I know the real you and allowed you to know me, well then, good job. ´cause I stuck with you till the end! But I can be resentful and trust me, it will last a lifetime if not correctly apologized to me. It seems that I can´t stop helping those in need and even tho I don´t want to, I can´t stop from aiding those little weaklings. I guess it´s because of my older sibling instincts? Don´t know. I try not to reveal to much at first, but it seems like everyone else doesn´t mind, ´cause they always tell me their whole lifestory! It can be a blessing and a curse at the same time. Typical capricorn here. Ohh can I also get a quirk match up???
Sure thing hun! Coming right up! I hope you enjoy and have an amazing day! 💕💗
For your romantic matchup, I ship you with Iida Tenya! 👓
WHY YOU’D WORK
You and Iida share a similar energy that would transfer over well into a relationship! Your observation and intuitive nature would pair well with his intellect, leaving you two to have interesting discussions that would never peter out. With this, it’d lead to a good understanding of each other—especially how you both share a protective nature and would do anything you can to help those in need. Iida is one to be very enthusiastic, hyperactive, and intense. This would pair well with your calm and level headed demeanor. All-in-all, the two of you would be one of the power couples in UA.
HEADCANONS
👓 People often view the two of you as the mom and dad of the Dekusquad, both protective and parental in aura, causing you to be the ones to look over the rest. It’s something you’ll be teased about from time to time, but both of you take it in stride.
👓 Being invested in learning new things, Iida would share your love of books. Though he may not always read the same genre as you do, it’s something he can find himself invested in and discussing with you often. Some of your dates include lounging at the library and reading, occasionally talking about what you’ve found and making suggestions for the other to try.
👓 Seeing you interact with books the way you do always amused Iida to no end. Especially when you start to scream at the books. He can’t help but find it a bit hilarious, always cracking a smile on his face. Though, if you’re at a library he may try and quiet you down a bit, just to avoid the two of you getting kicked out.
👓 One day Tenya came across you in the middle of one of your writing sessions, and couldn’t help but want to join in. He was very intrigued about the whole concept and wanted to learn more. Nowadays, you’ll show him your writing and he’ll provide praise and constructive criticism, wanting to help you improve as best as he can. However, that doesn’t go to say he doesn’t love what you already write—he can read your work for hours.
👓 Though it may not always seem like it, Iida can have his own bouts of competitiveness that allow you two to engage in quite the competition. Depending on what you’re doing, there are times where you’re both on par with the other—other times one triumphs. Either way, it’s all in good fun and you two never take it out of hand. However, if Iida sees you competing with someone else, he’ll always be your biggest cheerleader on the sidelines.
👓 Iida isn’t one to have any qualms over your clingy nature, finding your company to be enjoyable and liking to spend his free time at your side. You give him a sense of comfort and joy, and he always feels better in your presence.
👓 With neither of you being in a relationship until now, it’s a bit awkward at first. However, after gaining a collective amount of advice from friends, it becomes more comfortable. Often times you guys try out new things together to see what works, and soon find a rhythm that you find is best.
COMPATIBILITY — 93%
HONORABLE MENTION:
Shouto Todoroki !!
For your quirk matchup, I pair you with Written Reality! ✏️
ABOUT THE QUIRK
Anything hand written onto a piece of paper or any surface can be pulled and animated into a physical object or being. These words can be used in various ways, such as methods of travel, tools, or even weapons! Depending on the word, specific qualities and characteristics will be associated with them as well. For example, if you were to write out the word “hammer” the word would materialize made out of such tool.
STRENGTHS
✏️ No word is limited! As long as you have a medium to write and a surface to write on, including your own skin if you wish, the words can be brought to life!
✏️ Elements, beings, and other concepts are able to be used.
✏️ There is no limit to what median is used as to how the word is brought to life! It can range from pen to crayon, to even spray paint!
✏️ This isn’t limited to symbols, musical notes, and singular letters either!
✏️ Depending on what word you bring about, it can be used for close or long distance combat.
✏️ With enough practice, you may even be able to expand this to small drawings as well! Though, they’ll turn out in a way that resembles the artistic ability used to make it to the t.
WEAKNESSES
✏️ In order to animate the word, the spelling must be precise and accurate. If not, there’s a possibility for major backfire as consequence.
✏️ You must always have a median of which to write on and a surface for the ability to work, if not you are basically powerless.
✏️ Being material based, and not able to manifest your own materials, gaining what you need might be costly.
✏️ You must know the language of the word that you’re attempting to animate. Just knowing one word in another language won’t allow it to work, you must understand the full tongue.
✏️ Depending on what you may use, the word may not be able to hold form or you may not be immune to the effects. For example, if you animate the word fire, you will burn yourself if you touch it.
✏️ You have little to no control on the size of the word, or how heavy it may be. If it’s something such as bricks, the word will be manifested as how logically it could be spelled using normal sized bricks, and in turn be as heavy.
Either way, have fun with your new quirk~! 💖
#sprite writes!#bnha matchups#iida tenya#iida matchup#bnha#mha#boku no hero academia#romantic matchup#quirk matchup#iida x reader#bnha x reader
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Lost His Marbles
Even though he was 67 years old and an accomplished professional, he carried marbles in his pockets and only wrote in crayon.
Scratch that- if the document was really important he used pen. During our break at 3:00 pm on the dot he would quietly play with the marbles by himself, sometimes mumbling something I couldn’t hear. He only wore a suit when he absolutely needed to and if you looked over he’d break into a goofy smile. I mostly tried to avoid him at all costs, but it was hard to since I was an intern. At lunch, he ate weird things, like PB&J’s or pizza rolls. I wondered how someone like him worked his way up the firm.
The accounting firm was small and family-owned, with just a few locations. I’m for sure working my way up in years time. Lord knows how dense my competition is. They couldn’t even get black coffee without somehow messing it up. It was this particular day, as I watched him sit at his desk contently, that I prayed I wouldn’t ever have to work on a project with him; I knew better than to open myself up to karma.
I got a bad feeling in my stomach as we went through the daily briefing. Being an intern usually meant getting the scut work, like filing. Something told me I was in for a change today. The head of my department began describing an upcoming project for us and apparently, we’d be helping prepare local tax returns. I don’t know how we land big jobs as such a small company, but I’ve learned to accept it. This internship is coming to an end soon so it was obvious they were assigning the project to help decide which intern would get the job offer. Senior department members would be partnered with interns and lower department members to fill out the files and create a presentation.
Like a high school teacher dooming some apathetic teens to a group project, my superior read of the list of partners. My hopes for someone competent were dashed as I heard my name: “Jonathan Keys,” and then the name I had been dreading: “Claude Bairn.”
He spotted me down the row and gave me a half wave. I knew then and there I’d have to take over most of the project if I had any chance of winning the job. Half of the time it looked like all the old man could do was make copies of things. I reluctantly approached his desk after the meeting ended. Today he was wearing a blue button-up shirt that was slightly too tight with an uneven collar. His khaki pants had a stain or two on them but he didn’t seem too bothered.
I got straight to the point and told him I’d handle all the math and filing, he just had to put all my work into a presentation. I prayed that at the bare minimum he’d be able to make a powerpoint.
“Wait, Jonathan?” He called out as I walked away.
I turned and nodded.
“You don’t want this promotion as much as you think you do.”
“What?”
But Claude didn’t respond, just went back to playing with his marbles and eating his pop tart.
Delusional I thought.
The rest of the assignment, fortunately, went on without a hitch. I did all the work and Claude stuck it into text boxes and bar graphs. Sometimes he’d furrow his brow or tilt his head in a way that made me suspect he didn’t truly know what we were doing or what it all meant. We usually worked in silent derision, but I began to grow curious.
“What got you into accounting?” I asked.
“I was sort of forced into it.”
He darted his eyes and didn’t say any more on the subject.
Three days later we all had to sit outside the conference room and wait to go in. It struck me as odd that the company thought this was the best way of determining who would get the promotion. It must be one of those “alternative” and “modern” workplace practices.
After fifteen minutes of waiting and preparing, we were called inside.
“Mr. Keys, Mr. Bairn.” Greeted the Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Keres.
The higher-ups sat like a judge's table, each with notebooks and faces of stone-cold indifference. It was a rather short presentation, I started out with the bank reconciliations then moved into the general ledger entries. Claude stood to the side, silent, hunching his shoulders and rocking faintly side to side. They all stared at me with wide eyes, watching my every move.
At the end of the presentation, the panel turned and looked at each other, seemingly communicating in a secret language only they could understand. Mr. Keres opened the floor for up questions.
“Is that your natural hair color?” A man on the panel asked.
I looked to Claude then back up to the man.
“Yes?”
The panel just shook their heads in agreement and continued to scribble down notes.
“Do you have a history of hereditary diseases in your family?”
“Not that I know of,” I said.
Maybe these questions had something to do with the company provided health insurance, which would mean the job is as good as mine. I smiled at the thought.
“Excellent job, excellent job indeed.” Said Mr. Keres after a moment of silence.
“Mr. Bairn you are dismissed,” He said, “Mr. Keys if you wouldn’t mind I’d like to discuss something with you.”
“Of course.”
We walked out of the room while the rest of the panel spoke in hushed murmurs.
“If you would just come right this way…” Mr. Keres said, leading me down the hallway.
“Jonathan wait!” Claude called.
Mr. Keres nostrils were flaring and his eyes were wide but an uncomfortably big smile still sat on his wrinkled face.
“Claude, what is the meaning of this?”
“Jonathan don’t go! You don’t want this! It’s a sham and this place is just a tar baby, a tar baby I tell you!”
I saw Mr. Keres hurriedly gesture for two men to escort Claude away, as his crazy pleas got louder.
“Their evil! Evil, evil, evil! Mommy said to stay away from the bad men, stay away…”
I watched in shock, as Claude’s lips trembled and he was forcefully taken to another room. Blinking, I turned to Mr. Keres, hoping for some sort of explanation. His eyes were entirely fixed on the room Claude had been dragged into.
“It’s a shame,” Mr. Keres said shaking his head, “You see Mr. Bairn is the grandfather to our other financial advisor James Portman.”
It made so much more sense why Claude was apart of the company in the first place.
“His episodes that have only gotten worse with age.” Mr. Keres continued.
“It’s a shame indeed,” I said.
“Well,” Mr. Keres said, clasping his hands, “Shall we proceed?”
Part of me hoped he would be awarding me the promotion then and there. He lead me to the elevator and pressed the second floor. I hadn’t been there, nor did I know what was located there. When the doors opened we faced stark white walls and a hallway that has riddled with thin glass doors.
“You see Jonathan I like to think that we’re more than an accounting firm,” He said as we turned right.
I nodded, unsure of where he was going with this.
“Accounting is more of a side quest. We do important work here. Groundbreaking, life-altering type of work.”
He unlocked a door at the end of the hallway and lead me inside. It was all white as well, with two chairs and a table with all sorts of science equipment. I looked at him skeptically.
“We are trying to help humanity. Do you know what the common man’s greatest plight is Jonathan? What irrefutable struggle has incarcerated all of humanity?”
“No, sir,” I said with hesitance. Maybe Claude wasn’t the only one with a few screws loose.
He chuckled and walked to the cabinet on the other side of the room.
“Water?” Mr. Keres offered. I took it. He sat in the chair at the center of the room and gestured for me to sit.
“It is our mortality,” He stated, “Futile as it may seem we spend our short existence doing nothing but distracting ourselves from the inevitable closing of the curtain.”
Part of me felt like leaving and not turning back, but for some reason I didn’t. I should’ve.
“But someone like you and me, we can see that math, that science holds the answers.”
“Scientists at Harvard University,” He transitioned, “Discovered a protein called GDF11. When it was injected into older mice, their bone and muscle strength changed to resemble their youthful selves.”
He stood up.
“Now. Imagine if this same science were applied to humans.”
“You could...live forever,” I said, wondering what any of this had to do with me or accounting.
“I see something in you, Jonathan. An ambition, the type of ambition we want here.”
I rubbed my hands together, hoping he was granting me the promotion.
“The question is, do you want to change the world? Do you want to do more than accounting?”
“Yes?...”
He chuckled once more.
“Good. We have completed one human trial and hope to do more-”
“Here? At an accounting firm?”
“Why yes. Now the only problem is we had to take the GDF11 protein out of younger mice for it to work.”
“So you need a young candidate for the next human trial?”
“See? I knew you and I thought on the same wavelength.”
“Oh no Mr. Keres I c-couldn’t possibly, I-I would never-”
“This is the future Jonathan. An end to the infinite torment that haunts our lives. You would, would make history! Help liberate the human race!”
My eyes widened as I started to make my way towards the door.
“Don’t bother trying to leave. The drink I gave you should start to take effect.” Mr. Keres said.
He walked over to me as I leaned on the wall.
“It’s a shame. I was hoping you’d cooperate more.” He sneered. “You know the last human trial didn’t go so well. Our first candidate was much too young, following the loss of the protein he aged rapidly. Maybe you’ll do better.”
I was sitting on the floor up against the wall now. I tried yelling for help but no sound could force its way out of my burning lungs. I looked up at him, desperate to keep my eyes open, to no avail.
“After you pass out we’ll start. Congratulations Jonathan.”
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Accidentally in Love:
‘David and Mary had a one night stand when they were 18, 4 years later David bumps into Mary and finds out that he has a 3 year old daughter. They struggle with deciding on custody for Emma and both of their lives changing entirely as they go from strangers to friends... they don't want to confuse their daughter but certain feelings start to stir as they spend more time together.’
AO3 Link
Chapter 1:
David grinned as he stood in the empty apartment which he had just signed the papers for, it was officially his, and he couldn't wipe the smile off of his face. It was so much bigger and more modern than the one he had been renting in college, both he and his best friend had studied the same course, and when they had just graduated they both got jobs on the same force. And he finally allowed himself to use the money he had inherited from his father, he had spent his teenage years working hard, he looked around his apartment with pride knowing that he was finally starting to achieve his dream.
His phone started to ring and the name on it made him start for a moment but he shook his head and just answered it. “Hey mom, I just signed the papers, it’s officially mine.” He chuckled. “Mom I love your cooking, but I’m an adult, I’m living closer to you now but I need my own place. I’ll see you tomorrow, mom, I need to sort out furniture for here and I’ll pick up my stuff from home. Love you, bye.”
He shook his head, his mother was still protective despite him being an adult, he knew he wouldn’t be like that when he was a parent, in many many years time.
He glanced at his watch and was glad to see how early it was, there was plenty of time to do everything he needed to do.
David spent the day going around the large town he was now part of, ordering furniture to be delivered and buying different items he forgot he even needed. By the early afternoon the furniture was all delivered and he had the bare bones of his apartment sorted out. He collapsed on his new couch and took out his phone, he shot a quick text to his friend before pulling a clean plaid shirt heading out to grab dinner, content with his life just as it was.
He pulled out his phone again and dialed Ian’s number. “Hey Rogers, I’m heading to the diner now, I just need to stop at the store first… Yeah, see you in a few.”
Mary beamed as she walked into the playground, she took off the blazer she had been wearing for her final interview, she had just gotten a job she couldn’t believe her luck, she had just graduated from college and was officially going to be the fourth grade teacher at Storybrooke Elementary. She had worked so hard to juggle her life between college, work experience, and her life, and now she finally had the job she had been working so hard to get.
“Mommy!”
Mary heard the loud shout and looked around, she saw a tiny girl in shorts and a t-shirt barrelling towards her, her smile widened and she crouched down. Her little girl threw herself into her arms and she wrapped her arms around her hugging her close to her chest. “Hello baby!” She kissed her forehead. “I’ve missed you so much! Did you have a lot of fun? Did you have a good day?”
“Mommy I was really, really, really good mommy!” Emma told her excitedly and hugging her tightly.
Mary stood up with Emma in her arms, she was finally starting to grow but she was still easily the smallest in her playschool, to Mary she was still the tiny baby in the NICU clinging onto her finger. She kissed her face again. “I missed you my little monkey.”
“Hey, Mary!”
Mary’s head turned and she looked at Emma’s preschool teacher, Ashley. “How did she do?” Mary tried not to wince too much.
Ashley smiled, she remembered how reserved and nervous both Emma and Mary were when Emma joined, she knew that Mary thought that she would be judged for being so young, but Ashley had been through the same. She had tried her best to help them and in doing so she had become friends with them. “Emma got a gold star today.” She told her with pride. “And absolutely no timeouts.”
“What!” Mary said ecstatically and squeezed her little girl making her giggle. “You didn’t get any timeouts, I am so, so proud of you!”
“Are you happy with me mommy?”
“I am so, so, happy with you! You’ve been so good pumpkin.” Mary knew that Emma always tried her best but behaviour wasn’t always her strong suit. “I think that deserves a special treat and how about we go out for our dinner tonight?”
“Yeah!”
Ashley smiled at the two of them. “How’d your interview go?” She asked quietly. “They better have hired you if not then they’re big… they’re silly.” Her eyes flickered Emma as she tried not to call them idiots.
Mary laughed. “They’re… pretty smart… I start in September!”
“Oh my god!” Ashley squealed. “Mary that’s amazing! You totally deserve this, you’ve worked so hard, I’m so proud of you.”
Mary smiled and quickly hugged her. “Thanks Ash.”
“What did you do mommy?” Emma asked intent to be kept in the loop.
“Mommy got a job, sweetie, I’m going to be a teacher.”
“A teacher for me?”
“No sweetie, a bit bigger than you, nine and ten like Rolo.” Mary explained gently.
“Oh…” Emma’s face fell but it immediately perked up. “When I’m a little bit bigger then mommy.”
“Sure, Ducky.” Mary giggled and kissed the top of her white blonde curls again.
“Well, you need to see if your stepmom can babysit and we are so going out on the town to celebrate, a girls night, we all need one.” Ashley promised. She gently stroked Emma’s cheek. “I’ll see you next week sweetie, we’re going to be doing lots of summer things out in the sun, so bring your sun cream and put loads on.” She handed Emma’s backpack to Mary. “There’s a letter in there about a field trip and some of our activity mornings, we’re always looking for volunteers.” She hinted batting her eyelids for comedic effect.
“I’ll take a look at it.” She laughed back. “Say bye bye to Ashley honey.”
“Bye Ash!” Emma said happily waving as her mom walked away. “Food now mommy?”
Mary tickled Emma’s sides. “You’re always hungry, my little love bug, you decide on what you want to eat and we’ll decide where we’re going, we just need to go to the store first, you’ve gotten all your stars on your chart so you get to choose a little toy.” She smiled as Emma cheered and decided to get herself a little treat too.
David was still getting used to being back in the large town instead of being in a city, one of the things he was having to get used to was stores having early closing times, bar the odd few late night ones so he was rushing to get all the things. His mom had moved back to Storybrooke when he had just started college, he took time off to help her move to her farm and settle in, but overall he had only spent a few months in the town in the past four years, most of that time he spent on his mom’s farm so he was still getting his orientation.
Now that he had a new apartment and cooking utensils and kitchen equipment he suddenly remembered that he would be needing to buy food. He walked around the store collecting what he would need for the next few days. In the process he found himself turned around and in the kids aisle.
“Okay honey, you get to pick any of these, what do you want?” Mary asked crouching down beside Emma with her basket of shopping. “There’s kitties, bunnies, unicorns, monkeys, doggies, balls, Duplo building blocks-”
“- A doggie mommy!” Emma said with urgency.
Mary smiled gently, lately Emma had been obsessed with dogs, she figured it was because someone else at preschool had got a dog, plus Emma loved all animals anyway, but their apartment was much too small for one. Mary felt bad but she knew they just couldn’t at the moment. “Okay sweetie, there’s a few different ones, you take a look at them while mommy stands up okay?” She watched Emma nod before standing up, a little to her left there were stickers she knew they needed more for Emma’s sticker chart at home after Emma had decided to raid the rest the other day, just picking these made her excited to start being able to have her own class and put them in the kids books alongside her marking. She kept an eye on Emma as she started to put a few into her basket along with a new pack of crayons for Emma and pack of pens for herself.
Emma smiled as she finally settled upon a chocolate brown labrador puppy, she cuddled it close to chest as she stood up, she smiled down at her new toy as she walked over to her mom, bumping into someone as she did. She tore her eyes away from her toy and looked all the way up at the tall man towering over her she had just bumped into. The only thing that she could think was how tall he was and that he had a plaid shirt like the ones she often wore. Suddenly her mom was at her side and the man was suddenly not so scary. She reached her hand up and her mom immediately took hold of it and she cuddled into her side.
“Who’s that mommy?”
Mary bit her lip to stop herself from laughing, Emma was pretty shy with everyone, but she couldn’t be completely shy, she was simply too inquisitive to actually be shy. “This is one of my old friends from when I was little, Emmy, I used to live in this town. His name is Hank.”
“Oh.” Emma said quietly, her curiosity was settled, and now she decided instead to cuddle against her mommy’s leg waiting for her to finish talking.
Mary managed to steer the conversation to an end. “I’m sorry it’s time for Emma and I to go have our dinner, isn’t it Ducky? It was nice catching up Hank.” She smiled politely and led Emma away, picking her up when she wanted to be held, kissing her blonde curls as Emma cuddled to her . “Mama just needs to pay for all of these and then we’ll go have some food, we need to pay for puppy too Emma, then what are we going to have for dinner?”
“Erm… Pizza Mama!” She cheered.
Mary laughed. “How come I’m not surprised? I like the sound of pizza too.” She admitted joining the queue.
Mary held onto Emma’s hand as she walked down the street with grocery bags in her other arm. “I think tomorrow we’ll have to have an art day.” Mary told her knowing that her daughter enjoyed that. “And we can make some yummy cupcakes.”
“Yeah! I love cupcakes. Mommy I love you too.”
Mary’s heart sang. “I love you too Emma, more than the moon and all of the stars in the sky.” She nuzzled her face against her daughter’s. “What did you do in preschool today?”
“Mommy, a bumblebee!” Emma shouted urgently, she spotted the bumblebee on the pavement and knew that her mom had to move to save the bee.
Mary knew that voice, and quickly took a step to the right, while keeping ahold of her toddlers hand, so she wouldn’t step on the bee. But by doing so she bumped into a man, nearly
“Oh, I’m sorry ma’am-” David stopped talking. His stomach was in his mouth. And his blood pounded in his ears. He knew that face, a memory from when he was eighteen played in his mind, blurred by time and alcohol. “M- Mary?” His eyebrows shot up as he looked at her in shock. “Mary Margaret, is that you?”
Mary took in a shaky breath, subconsciously pulling Emma closer to her, but a smile formed on her face anyway. “David.” She said quietly, suddenly she felt like a teenager again, not the mature adult she had quickly turned into. “You’re here-?” She was speaking as though she was in shock and by the looks of it he was shocked to see her there too.
“I, I moved back here, recently. I thought you were moving halfway across the country at college? The last time I saw you you were off.”
“I decided to stay close to home.” Mary was getting over her shock as she felt her daughter tugging at her leg, she knew Emma was nervous just as she had been when Mary had been talking to Hank, but now Mary was starting to feel just as nervous. She was struggling to think or even breathe.
“Mommy.” Emma whined starting to feel both hungry and tired. “Mommy, me an’ doggie are hungry.”
He hadn’t noticed the tiny little girl David looked down at the blonde curls of the toddler clinging to Mary’s leg, and did the mental arithmetic, he swallowed deeply. “Is… Is she mine?”
“David-.” Mary’s voice was barely above a whisper. She tugged Emma closer to her, scared about losing her, and wanting to keep her from hearing the oncoming storm.
“Mary.” David’s voice was stern but as he asked his question his voice cracked. “Mary. Is. She. Mine?”
Mary took a shaky deep breath in. “Yes.”
#The Charmings#Charming Family Fic#Daddy Charming#Mama Snow#Charming babies#David Nolan#Prince Charming#Mary Margaret Blanchard#Snow White#Emma Swan#ouat#ouat fic#fic
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And I Will Find You in the Sunshine - A CrissColfer Fic
Today’s episode of Araliya really doesn’t have enough time to write fic but she does anyway. A kids!CC au that follows their journey through childhood through a series of vignettes.
Inspired by To Build A Home by The Cinematic Orchestra, whose lyrics are used in this fic.
Word Count: 1737 AO3
The Fifth Summer
***
out in the garden where we planted the seeds
there is a tree as old as me
***
Two little boys play in a garden. One is loud, laughing, teeth little flashes of white as his voice chatters. The other is quieter yet no less happy, a shy smile pulling two rosy cheeks up his on his face, eyes stormy and sparkling.
They make mud cakes in the grass, dirt collecting under their fingernails and soil stains smearing across their knees. Their mothers will cluck at them, will make them wash their hands and spread them out later for inspection, and the boys will share giddy smiles over their chiding voices.
The Eighth Summer
***
branches were sewn by the color of green
ground had arose and passed it's knee
***
Chris can’t remember exactly when he met Darren. All he remembers is always seeing his infectious smile, his riotous curls, his dinosaur t-shirts and grubby sneakers.
Those same grubby sneakers are swinging in the air above the shiny linoleum floor, and Chris would laugh that Darren’s feet can’t reach the ground except neither can his- they’re both the smallest in their class.
He would also laugh if it weren’t for the fact that the linoleum floors belong to the hospital.
Chris doesn’t really like hospitals. They smell funny and they’re too white and clean, and he’s not allowed to touch anything. The adults try to assure him that everything’s fine whenever they come over here, but Chris isn’t stupid, he knows it’s not.
Everything isn’t okay when his little sister gets so sick that she can’t stay at home, and instead has to lie in a bed with lots of tubes and wires and other things Chris is a too afraid to ask about. When this happens, he usually ends up in the playroom, which he likes because there are lots of books and crayons and toys.
Most times, Chris likes to sit with Hannah and tell her stories with his action figures. She’s too little to understand most of them, but she giggles when he makes enough sound effects.
Darren’s here with him today. For ‘moral support’, Chris’ Dad had said, ruffling Darren’s hair, eyes strange and tired. Chris isn’t sure what that means but he likes having his best friend there. It makes everything seem a little bit more okay. Not completely okay, like the adults tell them, but a little.
The ladies at the reception had cooed over them, and Chris thinks they wouldn’t be half as excited if Darren weren’t there with him. He tells Darren about as much, who laughs and pulls at Chris’ cheeks and tells him he’s ‘adowable’ in a gooey baby voice.
Chris gets revenge by beating him during a fight with their Power Rangers.
The Twelfth Summer
***
tables and chairs worn by all of the dust
this is a place where I don't feel alone
***
One day, Darren is gone.
It’s only for a couple of years, Darren tells him, but Chris still feels like his departure is as jarring and final as the word itself.
They can pen-pals except with emails, Darren says as he bounces on the balls of his feet, eyes brimming with excitement. Chris is angry that Darren is actually happy when Chris is the one being left behind.
(He doesn’t want to tell Darren that he has to stay because otherwise, Chris will have no one. He doesn’t want to tell him that the other boys like to push and shove and call him names. He doesn’t want to tell him that the only reason Chris doesn’t come home from school and cry is because of Darren.)
So instead he gives Darren a present to remember him by (a Mickey Mouse watch whose twin lies wrapped around Chris’ own wrist), and scribbles down Darren’s utterly ridiculous email address.
He doesn’t see Darren again for twenty-five months.
The Fourteenth Summer
***
by the cracks of the skin I climbed to the top
I climbed the tree to see the world
***
Having Darren back is a little bit of a shock.
At first, it’s Chris freaking out a lot more than he should and stuttering and stumbling his way over his words, and then it’s Darren smiling so widely all his teeth show, and then it’s like they’ve never been apart.
They find themselves in the midst of it. Chris hasn’t been much of anything lately, sticking to visiting his Grandma after school and filling notebook after notebook with tidy writing. Within weeks, Darren is the theatre kid who everyone knows the name of, and Chris is the theatre kid who has to make his own productions because he never gets cast in the school’s ones.
It’s okay, mostly, because Darren reads his stories over and over and even quotes them back to him, and refuses to participate in anything if Chris isn’t in it. So all in all, having Darren back might be a shock, but it’s a good one.
He is, of course, more beautiful than ever, but Chris isn’t going to let himself think about that.
The Fifteenth Summer
***
When the gusts came around to blow me down
I held on as tightly as you held onto me
***
The kiss, the kiss is something special. It knocks all the breath out of him yet brings him to life all at once, feels like his skin is flaring and glowing with light, feels like he might just drown if Darren pulls away.
And then it all comes rushing back to him and it’s Chris who’s pulling away, touching his fingers to his lips and blushing when they come back damp.
Words are said that leave Chris without the weight of a thousand bricks on his shoulders, and walls are knocked down that, around Darren, probably weren’t even up in the first place.
When Chris goes home, he takes Hannah’s watercolours and tries to recreate the exact color of Darren’s eyes- shining in the darkness of the nook under the stairs.
The Seventeenth Summer
***
I held on as tightly as you held onto me
***
It’s overwhelming in a way that’s not scary like you’re a step away from a cliff’s edge overlooking swirling water, but all-encompassing like you’re falling but you know that nothing will break.
Darren’s touch is feather light against his skin, tracing a never-ending path down his neck, across his chest, along the line of his waist. Sunlight ripples across their bodies as it filters through the leaves outside. It paints Darren’s body with mottled gold and brown, and Chris can’t imagine what he himself looks like, flushed and breathless, back pressed against the floorboards.
They’re in the treehouse at the end of the garden, and Chris wishes he could say that they built it themselves but they didn't, not really. They built the memories inside it, though, and as Darren would say, unapologetically cheesily, memories are what make a house a home.
Laying like this, Chris doesn’t know where he ends and Darren begins, and Chris is loath to say the cliche, but he doesn’t think he’s ever felt so at home.
Darren moves like he dances, passionate and without restraint, and Chris gives back as much as he receives without even trying.
He’s falling apart under a beautiful boy who would put him back together if he only asked so.
The Eighteenth Summer
***
'cause, I built a home
for you
***
They break up a week before graduation.
Two thousand a half thousand miles doesn’t seem a lot until it suddenly really does, and Chris decides that a clean break is better than the slow, desperate gurgle to the inevitable finish line.
Darren cries.
It is the first and only time Chris has ever seen Darren cry- he doesn’t even remember him doing it when they were little. The tears trace tracks down Darren’s cheeks as he listens wordlessly, a dull red flush blooming across the bridge of his nose and under his eyes.
What Darren doesn’t know is that with every word, Chris is taking a hammer to another part of his heart. He doesn’t know that Chris’ fingernails are bitten down to the quick, doesn’t know that Chris hasn’t slept for the past week, doesn’t know that after Darren leaves, Chris falls to his knees and clutches at his chest like his lungs refuse take in any air.
He doesn’t know that Chris curses him for being the most beautiful thing he has ever seen, even when his eyes are bloodshot with tears.
Chris barely remembers graduation. It is a blur of faces he still doesn’t know the names of and well-wishes fueled by sentimentality and the knowledge that, in a week, they’ll be all but strangers. Chris can’t tell if the feeling slowly broiling in his stomach is relief or sudden and inescapable fear.
He’s alone.
Chris has spent so long pushing everyone away, clutching at the opportunity to leave the cowtown that he’d been straddled with like a child closing its cubby fist around soap bubbles. And now he’s gone and pushed Darren away, and it’s just Chris against the world.
It’s less satisfying than he thought it would be, not when it’s always been ChrisandDarren against the world.
The Twentieth Summer
***
and, I built a home
for you
for me
***
A suitcase lies open, spilling its contents across the carpeted floor. The vent puffs air into the room, dispersing the chill and leaving warmth in its wake.
In the bed are two young men, limbs tangled, fingers interlocked.
It had been inevitable, Chris thinks. Inevitable since the day they met, inevitable since the hospital beds and Power Rangers and Mickey Mouse watches, inevitable since the tree house.
Inevitable since the text message that vibrated from Chris’ back pocket that read, I never got to fight for you. Please let me fight for you.
Darren brushes a kiss against Chris’ forehead, and the dampness from his lips evaporates slowly, leaving prickling coolness in its wake. Chris turns in a little, lets his nose brush against the soft skin at the base of Darren’s neck, lets the warmth of his arms bleed through his own skin.
Two and a half thousand miles won’t get to keep them apart.
Home is where the heart is, they say, and Chris’ heart is carefully cradled in the calloused, musical hands of a boy whose smile could light up the world.
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