Samuel Eto'o / African Nations Cup Mali 2002

on my mind :: seven

:: suna rintarou x f!reader :: playlist :: masterlist ::

:: taglist: open :: wc: 1.8k ::

After a drunken one-night stand with your ex, you thought you could get him out of your life for good. Unfortunately, the two of you can’t seem to keep away from each other. Why can’t you leave each other alone? And more importantly, why is he still on your mind?

tw: alcohol, profanity, gets a bit nsfw at the beginning, implications of sex

“Do you wanna come inside?”

Your voice may have been slightly pleading, but you didn’t care. You wanted to have this conversation with Suna, wanted to tell him how you felt, wanted to wake up next to him tomorrow morning and all the mornings after. 

“Are you sure?” Suna seemed hesitant, and you knew why. He knew that by inviting him in, you were inviting him to a conversation about your relationship.

You nodded your head and unlocked the door to your apartment. You poured two glasses of wine and then found yourself in a familiar position; you sitting at one end of the couch, Suna on the other.

“You probably know why I asked you to come in,” you said, sliding one of the glasses down the coffee table towards Suna. He nodded, and you continued. “I really wanted to wait until after the Olympics, so I wouldn’t be distracting you, but I just can’t wait any longer.” You looked him in the eye before continuing. “I love you, Rintarou, and I can’t wait any longer to tell you. I want to be with you, I want to go with you back to EJP, if you’ll have-”

Your words were cut off by a very enthusiastic Suna who had dove across the couch to capture your lips with his. You kissed him back passionately, until he pulled away to whisper to you. 

“Of course I want you to come to EJP with me. I want it to be you.” You giggled somewhat childishly, allowing yourself to be caught up in the sheer happiness of the moment. You could feel Suna’s smile against your lips, his hands roaming across your body. 

“Do you wanna stay the night?”

Suna nodded enthusiastically, pulling you up from the couch. You led the way to the bedroom, tugging Suna’s hand and leaving the half-empty wine glasses on the table. 

As soon as you crossed the threshold of your bedroom, Suna was pushing you up against the wall, hands holding your face with such reverence that you thought you might cry. You could feel his lips ghosting across your jaw, neck, and collarbone as you carefully tugged off his shirt. You put your hands against his chest, reveling in the smooth, hard muscle there. As you started working on the button of Suna’s jeans, he still hadn’t made a move to undress you.

“Rin, please,” you whispered, voice feather-light and absolutely pleading.

You could feel the sinister grin that spread across Suna’s face against your neck, and you knew you were in trouble. “Already begging for me, babe?”

You scoffed and pushed him back until his thighs hit your bed, watching as he fell backwards into the mattress. “Fine, I’ll do it myself.” You took your clothes off rather unceremoniously, Suna smirking at your own impatience. Standing in front of him in just your bra and underwear, you slid his jeans off. He continued smirking until you straddled his waist, only two layers of cloth separating you two. His hands found your hips as you leaned down to kiss him. Suna’s lips were soft, perfectly distracting you as his hands drifted. 

You allowed yourself to be caught up in the heat of the moment, your mind completely drifting as Suna took control. Whispered words in the dark made your heart beat faster, soft confessions of love and Suna’s deep voice praising you. You savored the feeling of him, strong arms wrapping around you, a hand grabbing both of your wrists, back muscles rippling underneath your fingertips. 

When you fell asleep later that night, you were tucked into Suna’s chest, his arms wrapped around your body.

---

The sunlight streaming in through the windows woke you the next morning. You found yourself stifling a laugh at the familiarity of waking up with Suna, only this time, it was under much better circumstances. You didn’t make a move to disentangle yourself from his arms, instead sinking farther in and allowing yourself to close your eyes and listen to his heartbeat. 

He stirred, leaving a gentle kiss on your forehead as he rolled to face you completely. A hand came up to rest on the side of your face. Suna’s eyes were soft, a sleepy smile on his lips. 

“I’m not dreaming, right?”

You giggled a little at his question.”No, this is real.”

“Good.”

“Why do you ask?”

He gave you a long blink before answering. “‘Cause it’s everything I’ve been dreaming of for the past eight years.”

You swatted at his arm, laughing. “You are so soft for someone who has chronic resting bitch face and never answers personal questions in interviews.”

“You watch my interviews?”

Blushing, you nodded. “Every single one. And every highlight reel. Every game. Anything to do with you.”

“Who’s the soft one now?”

His knowing grin made you groan, lifting yourself off the bed. Suna clung to your arm like a sloth. “Where do you think you’re going?”

You rolled your eyes. “Breakfast, I’m hungry.”

He released you and flopped back into the bed, burrowing into your blankets. You smiled at his antics, then got up to make coffee and something to eat. 

---

The weekend passed in much of the same fashion, you and Suna staying in bed much longer than you should, watching replays of EJP games (Suna needed your opinion, apparently) and talking. 

On Sunday afternoon, you pulled out your laptop to email a resume to EJP’s coach, but Suna stopped you.

“I already called coach, the job’s yours if you want it.”

You snapped your head up to look at him, laptop sliding off your lap. “Huh?”

“You got the job, it’s yours.”

“What do you mean? I haven’t even applied or sent a resume.”

Suna just looked at you. “You don’t need to, you’re hired already. I called coach and gave him your credentials, and he wants you to be our trainer.”

You gave Suna an incredulous look. “When did you do that?”

He smiled, “Two weeks ago.”

Your jaw dropped. “You were that confident that I would get back together with you?”

“I call it hopeful. And yes.” You rolled your eyes before pulling him in for a kiss.

“Thank you, Rin. And let me guess, I already have somewhere to live?”

“Of course, with me.” You grinned. “My apartment’s pretty big, more of a penthouse, anyway. We can move back together after the Games.”

Your smile became even wider. You liked the idea of “together”.

---

When you and Suna walked hand-in-hand into Monday’s morning practice, Atsumu laughed. 

“I fucking knew it. You two can’t keep away from each other.”

Suna punched Atsumu in the shoulder before dropping you off at your office with a kiss on the cheek. 

Practice was much better now that you and Suna were actually together. With two weeks until the move into the Olympic Village, training was picking up. The hardest would be over at the end of the week, with the week before the move-in full of easier drills and low-impact exercises. You enjoyed being able to watch Suna without restraint, taking in every move, every muscle. 

You spent your evenings with Suna, taking extra care of sore muscles and aching joints. He laughed at your fussing, but you didn’t stop. You wanted him to play at top form in the upcoming Games, and you were going to do everything you could to make sure he got there. 

Atsumu was petty about you “playing favorites”, as he put it, but his jealousy was quickly dismissed when you threw an ice pack at him. 

On the last practice before you left the National Team training center, the atmosphere was electric. Training was minimal, focusing on stretching and keeping muscles warm rather than drills and practice matches. You even watched tapes from the most recent world championship, taking notes on opposing teams and players. 

When practice was finally over, you helped Iwaizumi pack all of the training gear.

“Thank you for doing such a good job this season, y/n. I know the team will be in good hands with you.”

You smiled bright at his praise. “Thank you. I hope you enjoy Argentina, although I and everyone else will miss you.”

Iwaizumi shrugged. “It’s about time I left anyway. My fiance’s been waiting for me for quite some time.”

You laughed a little bit. “That’s quite romantic.”

“Just wait ‘til you meet him. He’s the opposite of romantic. In fact, he’s quite annoying.”

“I’m going to meet him?”

“Yeah, he plays for the Argentina volleyball team. He’s gonna be all ‘Iwa-chan, how dare you be on Japan’s side. How dare you be their trainer. I can’t believe you.’ Just wait, it’s obnoxious. You’ll wish you didn’t meet him.”

Stifling your laughter, you replied, “I’m sure that’s not true.”

Without missing a beat, Iwaizumi said, “It is, trust me.” He looked over his shoulder at you. “Anyway, I should be the one congratulating you. It seems you and Suna finally figured everything out.”

Your cheeks flared red. “How’d you know about that?”

Iwaizumi chuckled. “Atsumu, of course. The whole team’s been making bets on how long it would take for you two to get back together, for Suna to realize who took his jersey, pretty much everything.”

You paused, one of your hands still in a box of athletic tape. “He told you everything?”

Iwaizumi nodded, watching as you stomped towards the locker rooms. “Excuse me.”

Iwaizumi proceeded with his packing, only pausing slightly when he heard a very loud, very agitated, “Miya Atsumu!”

---

You dropped the heavy box you were carrying, wiping the sweat from your forehead. Suna dropped his box next to yours, then flopped on your bed. 

“Get off, Rin. This isn’t your room. And we have more boxes.”

He groaned, looking up at you. “C’mon, y/n. It’s hot, and I need to rest. Big games coming up, y’know?”

You grabbed his hands, dragging him off the small bed. “A few more boxes, Rin, I promise.”

Later that night, after unpacking the boxes of training supplies and going over schedules with the coach and Iwaizumi, you were finally settled in your tiny room in the Olympic Village. You were rooming alone, with team supplies taking up half of the space. Just as you were about to drift to sleep, your door opened, a tiny sliver of light from the hallway slipping in.

You didn’t even roll over. “Rin, there is not enough room for you in here. This bed is tiny as fuck.”

“C’mon, y/n. I can’t sleep when I’m not next to you.”

You tried to ignore the pleading tone in his voice, but you could picture the puppy dog eyes he was probably giving you. “Fine,” you sighed, lifting the blankets for him to join you.

“Thank you, babe.”

You hummed, relishing in the warmth of Suna’s chest, just about to fall asleep when-

“Hey, do you think it’s true that these beds break if you have sex on them?”

---

The bed broke. 

taglist:  @sunasexual @call-me-lulu​ @ntimacy​ @circleglasses​ @porcolie​ @keikotaro @rintarovibes​ @kenmaslov3r​ ​

Take Two: The Guardian in Gotham Chapter 3

First   Previous   Next   Ao3

Bruce sat at the head of the long oak dining table and waited for his children to make their way into the room for dinner. They came in as a staggered group; Jason arguing about some novel with Dick while Tim and Damian brought up the back as they discussed their patrol routes for the night. After Alfred and Damian helped serve the food, Bruce cleared his throat pointedly and waited for everyone to pay attention. 

Once everyone had looked up from their discussions he spoke. “Alfred has a friend named Gina; and she had called this evening to see if her granddaughter could stay with us. She lives in Paris; but her classmates were bullying her and her parents thought a change of scenery would do her some good. I have agreed to let her stay with us in the Manor.” Even before he had finished speaking the table erupted with different questions from his children.

“Bruce are you sure this is wise?” Tim questioned over Dick’s ecstatic squealing (“I’ve always wanted a little sister!!!”), and Jason’s grumbling (“Shut the fuck up Dickhead. I don’t know why the fuck B is bringing someone into this house to live with this dysfunctional family.”). Ignoring his siblings; he pressed on “I mean, how are we going to hide Batman and the vigilante stuff from her?” As Bruce paused to answer Damian stood up and scowled. “Tt. This is a moronic decision. Inform me of when this girl is to arrive and inform  her to stay out of my way.” He lifted his chin and crossed his arms before marching out of the room.

After Damian’s outburst, Jason looked over from where he was arguing with Dick and added his input “Timbo’s right, B. How are we going to hide that from her?” 

“We’ll have to make sure at least two of you remain in the manor each night so that she doesn’t get too suspicious.” He answered. “Now, the only reason I agreed to letting her stay here was namely for Alfred, and also because of what her classmates did to her” 

“What do you mean, Bruce?” Dick questioned. “Did they like assault her or something?”

“Or something” He responded grimly before sending the photo to all three of them. 

As they looked at the photo, he observed their reactions to the image. Dick was not smiling for once, and his sunny blue eyes had darkened to an icy frost. His whole body was tense; and his jaw was so clenched his teeth were grinding together. Jason was standing up with two guns locked and loaded in his hands. He had also managed to procure a knife from somewhere, which appeared as he leant forward and asked “What were the names of the people who did this again?” in a completely lethal tone. Tim, already hacking away at his computer responded “Not there yet, but from what I can find out, she goes to College Francois DuPont and she’s fifteen.” He briefly looked up and made eye contact with Bruce before asking “How fast do you think we can get our lawyers onto those kids B?” At the declarations of his children, Bruce closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “We can not file any lawsuits yet, not without Marinette’s permission.” He answered, sighing tiredly. “Marinette?” Dick questioned. “Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” Tim responded instantly. “That’s her name.” 

“She will be coming on Monday, and Alfred will be picking her up from the airport. She is also going to attend GA, so someone please tell Damian.” Bruce said as he stood from the table. “Now hurry up, we have patrol tonight, and there have been rumors about a drug ring near Crime Alley.”

---

After coming back from the hospital and having a sleepover Thursday night, Chloé and Adrien were completely sleep-deprived as they trudged into school the next morning. Settling into her usual seat beside Sabrina, Chloé silently thanked all the Kwami that she didn’t have to sit next to Lila. Halfway though class, Mrs. Bustier suddenly frowned and looked at the back row. “Does anyone know where Marinette is? She still hasn’t arrived yet!”

“Probably still sleeping at home! She’ll come in completely late as usual!” Alya cackled. At her words, Chloé felt her entire body heat up with righteous indignity. She opened her mouth to tell that wannabe tabloid reporter to get her facts straight, but then Adrien caught her eye and shook his head. He then pointed at his phone, and mimed unlocking it before pointing to her. Catching the hint, she checked her messages to see that Marinette had sent them a text.

FashionableBug: Mari said to tell Chloé and Adrien not to do anything to Lila or anyone else that starts making stuff up. (From Luka btw)

You’reUnderAgreste: Me-ouch, My Lady. I would never!

QueenofMean: shut it with the puns, Noir. Maribug, I will only listen to you because you’re injured and I’m not going to go against your wishes.

Putting her phone away, Chloé resigned herself to a miserable school day. 

---

After school, she walked into Marinette’s room and flopped dramatically onto the chaise, before letting out a long groan.

“That bad?” Mari chuckled as she scribbled sketched one-handedly in her design notebook. 

“You have no idea.” Chloé responded. 

Their conversation continued into mundane things, such as everyone’s patrol routes, and various theories on who Hawkmoth was. Totally normal topics for teenagers. As the day drew to a close, they made plans for everyone to come over to start packing the next day before Chloé left the bakery and headed home.

---

Come Saturday, Marinette, Chloé and Luka spent the morning playing board games one handed “to level the playing field” as Luka put it and eating lots of cookies and pastries-provided by Marinette’s parents of course. Adrien and Kagami were attending their various classes until afternoon, so the remaining three spent their time relaxing, and coming up with a list of things to pack for Mari’s stay in Gotham. Two o’ clock rolled around, and the bells over the bakery jingled to announce the arrival of the final members of the packing committee.  

Any plans to begin their assignment of somehow fitting all Marinette’s fabrics into the suitcase were cut short by an Akuma. 

They all transformed, even though Kagami and Luka has been  extremely reluctant to let Mari go even though the suit temporarily healed her injuries. Climbing through her roof hatch, they set out across the rooftops to defeat their latest villain.

---

Five hours later, the teen heroes dropped into her room, and detransformed in various flashes of multicolored lights. They collapsed onto the bed and chairs and silently agreed to just  sleep , and get the packing done the next day.

---

All of Sunday was spent throwing various clothes and accessories into Mari’s pink and black suitcase. There were several sweaters and hoodies (added by Chloé), as well as several leggings and many thick pajama pants (Sabine).

Adrien (with the help of Tom) had somehow managed to pack over ten different pun-covered t-shirts, and by the time they were discovered, they had been buried under piles upon piles of fluffy socks from Kagami. Luka also threw in some scarves before Marinette added some toiletries, her sewing kit, and her computer.

Picking up the backpack she had decided to use as a carry-on, Marinette rifled through it to make sure she had everything in there as well.

Spare change of clothes in case she loses her suitcase? Check. Phone, headphones, and charger? Check. Sketchbook and pencils? Check. Disguised Miracle Box? Check.

She turned to her family (Not her teammates, not her friends, but her family.) and smiled. It was small, and bittersweet, but it was a smile. “Alright guys, I guess I’m all set.” She said, before joining them all in a group hug. They offered her soft, tearful smiles before Tom carried her big suitcase down the stairs. 

That night, Marinette fell asleep surrounded by all the people she loved, and she couldn’t have been happier.

---

The next day, her Papa carried her downstairs and placed her into her wheelchair (since she had a broken foot, and couldn’t use her leg, they had given her a wheelchair) before wheeling her outside and placing her into the car waiting by the street. 

Her friends were all inside, and she gripped Adrien’s hand tightly as they drove to the airport. 

As she stood to board the plane, she turned back to catch one last glimpse of them all. Chloé was leaning into Kagami’s side who was holding her girlfriend’s hand tightly. Adrien was waving wildly, and Luka and her parents all raised one hand in farewell. Her Maman and Papa has some red rimming their eyes, but they smiled at her as she was wheeled into the plane. Next stop: Gotham, New Jersey.

Since her flight left Paris at 10 AM, she was set to arrive in Gotham at around 12 PM/noon. With that in mind, she decided to stay awake for the entire flight so that her body could adjust better. 

As they crossed the Atlantic, Marinette, sitting in first class thanks to Chloé and Adrien’s combined nagging; popped her earbuds in, and began to sketch. 

She stared out the window as she touched down, shocked by all the dog and darkness in the city. As she collected her bags, and wheeled her way outside to look for her host family, she couldn’t help but notice how everyone in this city was much more on edge than most normal people. ‘They act as though they are expecting an attack at any second of the day.’ She mused to herself. Her train of thought was cut off by the sight of an elderly man with a powerful aura standing next to a limo with a sign saying “Marinette Dupain-Cheng”. She wheeled her way over to him and smiled brightly. “Salut! My name is Marinette! What is yours, Monsieur!” She questioned, holding out her hand for a handshake.

“It’s lovely to meet you Miss Marinette, my name is Alfred Pennyworth.” Alfred responded, smiling gently down at her. “Now let’s get you and your bags in the car, shall we?” He reaches out to shake her hand, and the moment their fingers touched her vision was filled with dark blue and red. She laughed and smiled up at him. “It is an honor to meet you, noble Peacock.” She greeted him in the Guardian language, honoring his position as a True Holder. “And it is an honor to meet you as well, Ladybug.” He answered. She grinned and allowed him to help her into the back of the limo before he climbed into the driver's seat and they sped off to Wayne Manor. 

---

When he saw the young girl, Alfred was shocked to say the least. She was roughly 5’ 4” (162.5 cm), and was very petite. Her stature, combined with her wheelchair, wrist brace, and the cast on her leg, all strengthened his resolve to protect the young girl from any further harm. That was only intensified when their auras recognized each other. How could anyone place the responsibility of upholding balance on such a young child? 

As he drove to the Manor, she informed him that the Cat, Bee, Dragon and Snake were active on her team. Before he could ask her what the threat they were battling was, they had arrived at the Manor, and she had immediately tensed and gone silent.

Deciding that it was better to ask more questions later, he got out of the car to retrieve her bags and chair. Master Bruce and three of his children except for Master Damian were waiting in front of the doors to the Manor, and they all waited patiently for her as she exited the car. 

---

Marinette was nervous. Sure, taking to Monsieur Alfred was really fun, and she couldn’t wait to tell him more about Paris, but now she was meeting her actual host family! What if they didn’t like her? What if they decided to send her back?! Then what would she do?? A small cough interrupted her downward spiral, and she looked up from her lap to see Monsieur Alfred waiting in front of the open door with her wheelchair. Grabbing her backpack, she awkwardly maneuvered herself into the chair and allowed herself to be wheeled out in front so she could meet Monsieur Bruce Wayne.

---

Note: Alfred doesn’t know that Marinette is the Guardian. He just knows she’s a Ladybug holder.

Livi podcast

The guests of the podcasts are Dominik Livaković and Marjan Mrmić(who is goalie coach)

Translation under the cut

Host: Tell me a bit about your season in Dinamo. It was one of, if not the best season ever in Dinamo. What would you say, what happened? How did you guys become so good?

Livi: I guess there are more quality players now. And we worked well together and..yeah. I guess something just clicked

Marjan: He is being humble. Dominik had an excellent season and he knew how to stay calm in stressful situations and that calmed the rest of the team

Livi: *looks at the floor*

Host: was losing against Ferencvaros the turning point? What made you all be that much better after?

Livi: well I suppose it was important. I mean, I think I could almost say it was a good thing we lost so early on, considering the rest of the season

Host: I am not sure director of finances in dinamo agrees

Livi, laughing: well no, probably not but I think we brought it enough money later on

Host: you defended a penalty against Cluj. Well two actually. Was that harder to do or was watching Suba defending penalties during WC?

Livi: oh wow *laughs * that's-I mean you can't compare those two things. Completely different feelings. But I suppose there wasn't that much pressure put on me during those penalities because I didn't know they would be the last. But Suba is probably one of the best goalies Croatia ever had, if not the best. So I really don't think that's comparable

 Host: Alright, first card break. You need to choose between two things

Marjan: Nutmerg or dribble?

Livi: what?

Host: *repeats it *

Livi: *loading * oh! Nutmeg. *laughs * especially when it's Vida

Host: did that happen?

Domo: *yelling from the background * (I think he said "he didn't say that!" But it's not clear) *

Livi: *laughs * Anyway, next question

 Marjan: Meat or fish?

Livi: Hmm. Meat

 Marjan: Pizza or hamburger?

Livi: Pizza. Especially after a winning game

 Host: how did you start with your goalie career? Since most guys want to score a goal

Livi: well, I can't quite remember. I was attacker one day and goalie the next. I like the way goalies threw themselves to catch a ball I guess

 Host: are all goalies this calm? Or are you and Marjan exceptions?

Livi: I mean, there are some goalies that are crazy *laughs, shakes his head * but I am more of a calm type. Works better for me. Although there is that saying 'you are a goalie? You must be crazy' so you know

 Host: Second card break. It's who in the national team...?

Marjan: who takes the longest to get read in the nt?

Livi: oh, Vida

Marjan: Who runs the fastest?

Livi: Vida

Host: Vida, again?

Livi: *shrugs, laughing *

Livi: who has the most precise shoot?

Marjan: right now? Oršić

Host: Livi, would you agree as his teammate?

Livi: well yes, of course he is very good. But Vida is also very good, especially recently, he scored a lot

Marjan: who has the best hairstyle?

Livi: * laughs, covers his mouth*

Host: yeah, you can use Vida again here

Livi: yeah, yeah... Vida has the best hair

Livi: who has the best sense of humor?

Marjan: Vida

*all laugh, Domo yelling again from the background *

 Host: so your first, well second game, against England, what do you remember from it? Were you nervous?

Livi: yes, of course. When I read the list of names of their players...I certainly felt nervous. It has been...what? 5 years since then?

Host: 3, 4 years actually. Autumn in 2018?

Livi: Really?

 Host: who are players who you find most fun? The ones whose company you liked the most during WC?

*Livi, looking at Vida and laughing *

Host: EXCEPT for Vida

Livi: Then, there were also Šime, Dejan and Broz

 Host: except for not missing being on a bench, do you miss Suba in nt?

Livi, smiling: yes, I miss him. I miss him a lot. We have been on a coffee the other day, actually

Host: what would you say, how did you improve as a goalie? But please don't give me a generic answer like, experience

Livi: experience *laughs * I am kidding, I am kidding. But I have been working on playing with my foot a lot. That's what I concentrate on the most and I think I improved. Other goalie stuff well...you learn in every training

 Host: okay, new set of cards, but with one new rule. Who would you choose from nt but WITHOUT Domagoj Vida

Marjan: who would you choose as a singer in a band

Livi, laughing: who else am I supposed to choose? Who else?

Host: alright, alright. I'll give you that one

Marjan: who would you let babysit your kid for a few hours?

*Livi, laughing*

Host: no. No you can't

Livi: hmmm. Then I suppose either Kale or Vrsaljko. They have a lot of experience

Livi: who would you let choose your outfit

Marjan: hmmm. Dominik

Marjan: who would you choose as a co-driver on rallying?

Livi: oh, Šime for sure. When he presses accelator...he doesn't stop

  Host: so tell me, do you plan to stay in Dinamo forever? Or did you have some plans for future clubs?

Livi: I don't think much ahead. Everytime I do, it doesn't exactly end up that way. We'll see. I feel good in Dinamo right now. We have amazing results and I feel like home. Zadar is close, too

Host: Well then. Don't forget about out deal. If you sign up for Barcelona you have to go to every nt conference for the rest of your career

Livi: *laughs awkardly *

Host: I hope it still counts. I mean Ter Stengen isn't bad but I am holding onto your word about that

Livi: alright

 Host: Let's ask something more private. We know you are in a relationship and by recent covid regulations we are allowed to have bigger weddings again so...I am kidding, but in all seriousness did you think about starting a family?

Livi: well yes, of course I have. I mean, all the people I know that have children think of them as biggest blessing. I do want that, at some point

 Host: pets?

Livi, smiling again: yes, Cruz

Host: what breed is he?

Livi: pomsky. Do I really need to explain?

Host: ...a bit

Livi: * explains *He is wonderful. I mean he is mine, but...he is really wonderful. He makes you so happy, especially when you come home after being away...it's amazing

 Host: Helena used to do ice skating and according to Vida, you are the best dancer on the team. That means your first dance will be amazing

Livi: *laughs * I am not so sure about that. I think I'll need to practice a lot, even more than I did to learn how to defend a goal. But we'll see how that'll go. And I have to say that Vida lied. But maybe he is the best. He dances...really good

Host: he has a good sense for rhythm?

Livi: he rips shirts a lot

 Host: New card break. Favorites

Marjan, reading a question from the card: what's your favorite childhood moment?

Host: the one that isn't connected to football

Livi: not connected to fooball. Uff. I am not sure I remember. Hmmm

Host: that far away huh?

Livi: *laughs * yeah. I guess coming back from school and everything being alright(I am guessing he means grades wise)

Host: that moments were so rare huh?

 Marjan: Favorite series?

Livi: Game of Thrones

 Host: what's your hobbies, except for series? What so you do when you don't play football

Livi: well, I actually like to play basketball. I am from Zadar, after all. I started with basketball first actually, before switching to football

 Host: okay, I gotta ask. Why do goalies spit in their gloves?

Livi: well so the ball sticks to them better. So it doesn't fall out of our hands *rubs palms together * so they are...wet. *realizes what he said * but yeah uh. Mostly so you don't drop the ball

 Host: do you prefer long or short sleeved jersey? And how do you choose that?

Livi: I like long sleeved one better

Host: except when it's really hot?

Livi: yeah...when it's really hot I choose short sleeved undershit

 Host: Anyway, you guys told me not to make this too long considering there is a final of Europe league that you want to watch. Any preferences about who wins?

Livi: No, I think both teams are great. They have different qualities so, we'll see

Marjan: I think Manchester United will win. Longer tradition

Host: Either way, thank you guys for participating in today's podcast. And to everyoone who is watching, I hope you'll watch us tomorrow as well. Goodbye

Tease (Julie Johnston x Reader)

Anonymous Request:  Hi you’re an amazing writer and definitely my favorite but can you please write a fic with JJ where they tease each other (it can be sexual if you want) throughout training? Little bit of Soran in here. ;) 

“Better luck next time Y/N.” Julie teases you on her way by, her fingertips running down your forearm.  

You blush, running your hands down your face.

Julie had taken it upon herself to tease you every time the two of you were in proximity to one another at practice.  

You throw your head back and let out a lengthy groan.  

Julie’s teasing had been going on nonstop, going as far as to even tease you during games when the two of you were on the bench, her hand sliding onto your thigh, the woman cockily smirking.  

“Julie still trying to kill you?” Sonnett asks and you scoff.  

“Trying?” You ask and Sonnett snorts.

The blonde throws an arm around your shoulder, shaking her head.  

“You hopeless gay.” She sighs and you send her a glare.  

“Hey, you have Julie Johnston hitting on you and see how you handle it.” You gripe and Emily shrugs, cheeks pink.  

“I have my own blonde to worry about...” She mumbles, eyes widening when she realize she’d said that out loud and runs away, straight towards Lindsey.  

“I FUCKING KNEW IT!”  

“Knew what?”  

You jump when an arm slips around your middle, of course, belonging to Julie Johnston.  

“Th-That she’s got the hots for-

You jump when Julie slips a hand up the back of your shirt, her nails running down your back.  

“You feel tense.” She mumbles and you swallow hard, sighing when Julie scratches your back gently.  

A whistle pulls you out of your trance like state, your eyes darting around field, quickly locking on Emily Sonnett, the woman smirking.  

Julie’s fingertips slowly trace your spine before her hand leaves your shirt all together, your face red from more than just practicing in the heat.  

With a look over her shoulder and a wink she walks off, leaving you standing in the middle of the field completely flustered.  

                                                           ***

“Nice shot.” You smirk, surprising Julie when you slap her on the behind, the woman’s cheeks flushing as she turns to you with wide blue orbs, but all you do is wink before walking off.  

“You two aren’t going to be happy until one of you die from sexual frustration on the field, are you?” Kelley asks and Julie clears her throat.  

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She mumbles and Kelley scoffs.  

“Yeah, sure you don’t.”  

Julie makes her way to the bench where you’re standing, slipping her arms around you from behind and pulling you back against her chest.  

“What was that for?” She hums, her chin settling on your shoulder.  

You swallow hard, steeling yourself as you turn your head.  

“Was a good goal.” You smirk, Julie arching one of her perfect brows. She turns her head, your breath hitching when her lips brush your earlobe.  

“Were you just looking for a reason to grab my ass?” She asks, stealthily nibbling on your earlobe so your teammates don’t see.  

“I uhhh... Uhhh...” You swallow hard, opening and closing your mouth, trying to find your voice, but find yourself unable to speak.  

Suddenly, the woman vanishes completely, running onto the field to continue the skirmish.  

You shake your head, blushing even darker when Julie sends you a wink before turning away.  

“Will you two just bone already?” Sonnett mumbles on her way by and you groan.  

“Shut up.”  

                                                           ***

You flop down on the bench beside Julie, drenched in sweat as you slip on the bright mesh yellow vest.  

“You did great.” Julie says, patting your back before passing you a bottle of water that you take gratefully.  

“Thanks.” You smile taking a healthy chug.  

You jump, gasping when suddenly a cool towel is draped over your shoulders before being wrapped around the back of your neck.  

“You need to cool down.” Julie whispers and you nod, gratefully smiling.  

“Thanks JJ.”  

You blush when Julie scoots closer, leaning her head on your shoulder.  

“Don’t mention it.” She whispers sliding a hand on your thigh and you freeze, a chill running through your body that makes goosebumps sprout on your arms.  

Julie of course notices, grinning as her hand leaves your thigh in favor of running down your forearm.  

“Cold?” She teases and you clear you throat, cheeks flushing.  

“Not exactly...” You stammer and Julie smirks, her blue orbs shining. She leans towards your ear, her hot breath making you shudder.  

“Oh, I know.”  

                                                           ***

By the end of the game you’re a shivering mess, Julie’s fingertips tracing your forearm, back and forth, back and forth.  

Even after the final whistle, she walks with you, her arm around your middle as the two of you move to congratulate your teammates and shake hands with your opponents.  

“Great game Y/N, as usually.” One of your teammates in the NWSL, Rachel Daly from the Houston Dash says, you leaving Julie’s side to wrap your arms tightly around the woman.  

She cups your cheeks, giving them a pat before she moves back around the field, shaking your other teammate’s hands.  

When you turn back to Julie, you note her narrowed eyed blue orbs focused on Rachel Daly, her lips forming a tight line.  

“You okay?” You ask, Julie slipping her arms back around you.  

You continue you walk around the field, shaking your opponents hands.  

It’s when Julie’s fingertips start tracing a small sliver of skin, revealed when your shirt has ridden up that you grab her wrist and drag her away, under the watchful eyes of your teammate’s, some smirking at one another.  

“Is something wrong?” Julie asks innocently when you drag her into the locker room, slamming the door shut behind her.  

You shove her into a nearby wall, grabbing fistfuls of her jersey, the woman smirking before trapping her bottom lip between her teeth.  

“Why are you doing this to me...?” You whisper, your eyes flicking back and forth between the woman’s blue eyes and lips.  

“Doing what?” She says, guiltlessly and your eyes widen.  

“You know exactly what Johnston...”  

Julie shrugs, blue orbs widening when you grab her wrists and pin them on either side of her head.  

“The touching, the teasing...” You lean forwards, your nose brushing hers, the woman’s breath hitching.  

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” She smirks, gasping when you duck your head to kiss her neck.  

“Oh, you don’t?” You ask, nipping at her pulse point.  

Julie swallows hard, closing her eyes as she takes a deep breath.  

Suddenly, a number of voices causes the two of you to pull apart, putting distance between the two of you before the door swings open to reveal your teammates, all eyeing the two of you curiously.  

“Everything okay?” Kelley hums, eyes narrowed.  

You nod.  

“Yeah, everything is fine.”  

                                                           ***

It’s later that night when your relationship with Julie reaches its boiling point, the woman dancing on a random man in the club you and the team had decided to celebrate your win in.  

You’re about to make your way to get a refill on your rum and coke when someone grabs you, that someone being a beautiful brunette with a massive smile.  

“I know this is pretty forward... But would you maybe want to dance?” She asks and you smirk.  

“I’d love to.”  

And that’s how you end up in the middle of the dance floor, the woman backed up against you as you dance.  

You can feel eyes on you, eyes that are currently burning a hole in your back, but you don’t care, the woman turning around in your hold, her arms slipping around your neck.  

It’s when the woman leans in that someone grabs you by the back of your jacket and drags you away, through the mosh of dancing bodies.  

You can easy guess who the person dragging you away is, but it isn’t confirmed until you’re shoved into the bathroom by the blonde who locks the door behind you.  

Before you can blink the woman advances on you, cupping your cheeks and slamming her lips against yours.  

The bathroom is full of the sound of your soft breaths as your lips meet again and again, Julie letting out a gasp when you back her up against the bathroom’s door before hitching one of her legs up and over your waist.  

You tilt your head, changing the angle of the kiss, your fingers tangling in her blonde hair.  

You trap Julie’s bottom lip between yours, lashing your tongue against her plump bottom lip.  

Julie’s lips part with a groan and your tongue immediately invades, touching Julie’s tongue for the first time, the both of you moaning.  

Your tongue tangle in her mouth, swiping and flicking against one another as you kiss.  

Julie lets out a whine at the feel of your tongue massaging hers.  

A suddenly knock on the door has the two of you jumping apart, eyes wide.  

The knock sounds again the two of you straightening yourselves out before opening the door, moving back into the club hand in hand.  

You quickly realize you aren’t alone, two familiar blondes kissing in the hallway that leads to the restroom.  

You clear your throat, Emily and Lindsey pulling apart to look your way, their eyes huge.  

You nod to the door.  

“Bathroom’s open.” You wink, the two women blushing.  

“Uhhh, thanks.” Emily clears her throat and you smirk, walking passed the two, but not before you lean towards Sonnett, grinning.  

“I fucking knew it.” You tease the blonde smacking your chest.  

“Shut up.”

The two women scamper off into the bathroom and you turn to Julie, smirking, before you can open your mouth though she’s grabbing the front of your dress jacket and pulling you into a kiss.  

Her hands slip behind your neck, tangling in your hair as your lips tenderly meet. 

Julie pulls back, leaning her forehead against yours.  

“I never thought I’d be able to kiss you...” She confesses and you smile, tilting your head back to kiss the tip of her nose.  

“There’s a lot we need to talk abo-

You’re cut off by the sound of a loud moan from the bathroom and you snicker, Julie watching as you move towards the door and give it a kick.  

“Don’t fuck in the bathroom it isn’t sanitary!”

The women on the other side of the door go silent and you snort, turning back to Julie.  

“We do have a lot to talk about.” You whisper as you move towards the woman, gently cupping her cheeks, the woman turning to nuzzle into the palm of your hand.  

“I want this...” You whisper, the blonde’s blue orbs widening.  

“I do too...”  

Suddenly the bathroom door swings open, Emily and Lindsey stepping out, both of their cheeks red and hair a mess.  

They share a glance before slipping passed you, heads down to avoid eye contact.  

You wrap your arms around Julie, your body shaking as you laugh, Julie’s face buried in your neck as she giggles.  

“You know... The bathroom’s free.” You nod towards it, Julie slapping your chest. 

“We have a perfectly good hotel room to make out in.” She winks and you grin, leaning in to press a kiss to her lips.  

“You read my mind.”  

Body Guard | Tetsuro Kuroo

Kuroo x Fem!Reader

Fluff/Imagine

Summary: When at your first game as a new manager for Nekoma,  you run into trouble with some other players, provoking Kuroo. 

Pen, clipboard, water bottles, towels...Shit, what were you missing?

You knew something felt off, but just couldn’t put a finger on it, eyebrows scrunched together as you followed the boys into the gym.

Feeling a heavy hand drop on your head, you jumped, spinning to face the culprit; a certain spiky-haired captain with a Cheshire-cat grin plastered across his face.

Kuroo. 

Narrowing your eyes as you attempted to hide the blush spreading furiously across your cheeks, you glared up at him, prompting a snicker from the man above you.

“ Sorry Y/N,” he started, not even an ounce of remorse in his tone, “ couldn’t help it.” He winked at your stern expression. “You’re just too cute not to tease” he laughed, sauntering away to catch up with the rest of the team, leaving you a jumble of fuming and embarrassed behind him, steam practically shooting out of your ears. 

It had been almost two weeks since you had started as Nekoma’s new manager-in-training after your childhood friend Taketora had practically begged you to fill the position. Knowing absolutely nothing about volleyball, you were hesitant, only giving in when he promised to treat you to ice cream each week. 

Well, food was always your weakness you guessed, telling yourself that it couldn’t be that bad; watching some cute guys get all sweaty playing volleyball would be pretty entertaining, right? Not to mention, their captai— F/N L/N. What were you thinking?!? Tetsurō Kuroo? Snap out of it!

Blinking, you snapped yourself back to reality, trying to remember what you were trying to do earlier. Recalling the whistle you had left in the front seat of the bus, you jogged back, hoping that the driver hadn’t pulled away just yet. 

Grabbing the whistle along with an extra bottle of water that had rolled under a seat, you hopped off the bus, sneakers padding the concrete as you ran.

‘How was it that that stupid rooster head captain got under your skin so much?’ you wondered to yourself, ears glowing red at the thought. Ugh. No. You had to focus on your job, and school, and your senior year, and not let some idiot with a chiseled face and sharp eyes and muscled biceps that flexed whenever he went up for a block, and— Crap. You did it again. Why couldn’t you get him out of your head? Stop it, you told yourself, he definitely had so many girls around him because of his popularity that he didn’t pay any mind to the little conversations you had, the kind little gestures he did, helping you carry equipment after practice, never forgetting to hold the storage room door open for you, or the way those long fingers wrapped around your waist when he had lifted you up to reach the top shelf of the— 

“Ooof”, you choked out, your thoughts cut off abruptly as you stared up at the boy you had just rammed into on your way back into the gym. 

“I am so so sorry I—” you rushed; “ Don’t sweat it, princess” he smirked, stepping closer as you backed towards the court behind you, moving to go find the team as they began warm-ups. “Sorry again” you blurted, turning away as you felt a sharp pain in your upper arm. Swiveling, you came face to face with the unfamiliar man, who was now standing much too close for comfort, the heat of his breath almost reaching your cheek. A look of discomfort falling over your features, you attempted to release his grip on you with no avail. 

“Why don’t you make it up to me after my match?” he sneered, eyes mocking your failed escape, tightening his iron grip enough to bruise your skin. 

“You got a fucking problem?” you hear a gruff voice drawl— Oh god. you think, recognizing that tone a mile away: Kuroo. 

His hulking figure towers over your frame, a hand resting reassuringly on your back. 

“Do you?” the stranger challenges, getting in Kuroo’s face as he maintains his hold on you. 

“ I think you need to get your dirty paws off of my girl.” he spits out in a low growl, wrenching your arm from the man’s grasp and pulling you behind him.

As the two began exchanging swears and their volume escalated you realized that Kuroo’s eyes were burning, the look on his face hungry for blood. 

“Kuroo. Kuroo stop it, it’s not worth it” you pleaded, tugging him by the tail of his shirt backward with you. Shrugging you off, he stepped forward, cracking his knuckles— 

He froze. 

Lunging after him, you flung your arms around his torso, clinging to his muscular form, his whole body tense with fury. 

“Please. For me.” you whispered into his jersey, not letting up your hold on him until you felt him relax in your grasp. Stepping backward, he unlatched your arms, grabbing your hand in his as he dragged you away, a small yelp escaping from your lips. 

Pulling you into the hallway, he came to a stop, his back still facing you as you tried to make sense of what had just occurred. Did he—did he call me his girl? Did he mean it? No, that didn’t matter he was probably just— 

“Y/N,” he started, his expression one of concern, yes full of worry searching your face as he brushed stray hairs away, his calloused fingers brushing your cheek. “Are you alright? Did he hurt you? If he touched you I swear to god I’ll kill that son of a—”

He was never able to finish his sentence as you tippy-toed, shutting him up as your lips met his, your hand finding its way through his midnight black locks as he quickly recovered from the initial shock, forearms snaking around your waist, encasing you in the warmth of his embrace. After a moment, you broke away, your eyes meeting as the hungry gleam in his eye matched yours, lips finding one another again as he pressed you against his chest. You noticed the plush, gentle feel of his lips as the kiss deepened, your skin burning with his touch. 

Breathing heavy, you eventually broke away, your gaze locked with his as he began to set you down. 

“Wow,” he grinned sheepishly, staring down at his shoes as you flushed crimson, looking up at him shyly. 

Making your way back to the gym together, an awkward silence fell upon you, only broken when you grasped his hand, squeezing gently, earning a chuckle and a ruffle of your hair from Kuroo. 

“You drive me crazy, you know that Y/N?” he grinned down at you. You giggled, blushing; “I know.”

TIHM Ch.16 | BBH

Group: EXO

Member: Byun Baekhyun

Theme: Angst | Fluff | Rated M | University!AU | Football!AU

Word Count: 2,404

chapter 16

"I'm surprised you didn't spend your day off inside your room." Jiwon eyed you suspiciously as you walked to the kitchen. "That's unusual. Where did you go?"

You looked back at her, and saw that she was tapping her foot on the floor, waiting for your response. You knew she wouldn't stop asking.

"I just went to the mall. I needed a break." You shrugged as you opened the fridge to get milk.

"Alone?"

You tightly closed your eyes while you brought out the carton of milk.

"Did you eat breakfast—"

"Were you with Byun Baekhyun?" Your head snapped up at her when she easily hit the nail on the head. She smirked as she saw you placed down the carton on the counter. "Right. I can see the answer all over your face, girl."

Your cheeks flushed as you carefully put milk on your glass. You remembered what happened last weekend, recalling the activities you've done with Baekhyun.

It was the best day off I had in my entire life.

"What is this? Are you two a thing now?"

"N-No." You shook your head before drinking milk. Jiwon raised her eyebrows at you, clearly not believing your answer. "I swear, Jiwon. We're just..."

Acquaintances?

"...friends." You mumbled as you looked away, placing your glass on the sink. You heard Jiwon's laugh behind you.

"Really? Just friends, huh? I keep hearing that he likes you though." She said as she took a bite of her sandwich. You carefully washed your glass while listening to her. "Were you bullied by the seniors again? I heard that that bitch Lisa is involved?"

"Just the usual gossips, Ji. I can handle that much." You said while drying the glass beside the sink. You faced her with a smile. "That Lisa is all talk though."

"Oh! Tell me more!" She enthusiastically exclaimed as she patted her side. "She didn't hurt you, right? Or else, I'm gonna—"

"No, she just brought me to that abandoned building by the field—"

"What?! She fucking did that?!" Jiwon stood from her seat, eyes sharp and glaring. She clicked her tongue as she placed her hands on her hips. "That girl is going to get it—"

"Oh stop that. I handled it already. I don't think she will try anything for now."

"STILL! I'm gonna cut off her long legs, I freaking swear!"

And the whole morning was filled with Jiwon's plan to sever the girl's body.

You quickly ran downstairs, easily passing through the usual crowd in the hallways. You almost didn't get to catch the elevator.

Thank goodness, the person inside must have seen me running—

"Saejin-ssi?"

Your head snapped up as you got in the lift.

"Kyungsoo sunbae." You let out a breath as you leaned on the elevator wall. The doors closed and the lift went up. "D-Do you have class now?"

"No. I just need to grab something from the composition room. We have football practice today." Kyungsoo smiled. You bit your lip in perturbation as you stared at the pressed 4th floor button.

He's stopping on the same floor! Oh gosh.

"What floor are you going to?"

"Uh, the fourth as well."

"Just hanging around there?" He innocently asked, making you look at him. His huge eyes were like a baby's when he stared back at you.

"Y-Yeah. It's kind of my haven." You smiled as you looked away. The elevator let out a sound, signaling that you have arrived at the destined floor.

"I remember you said that before." Kyungsoo chuckled as you both went out of the lift. Your eyes followed his movements, and when he did take the left turn, you gaped. "Enjoy your time here then. See you around."

He waved before going into that room.

That room where your pianist always go to!

Kyungsoo sunbae totally knows my favorite pianist! I need to ask him about that next time.

Beaming in excitement, you sat on your usual place at the end of the hallway.

Half an hour later, Kyungsoo has already left and you haven't heard anything from the composition room. You frowned as you packed your lunch and stood up.

"Not here today as well, hmm?" You pouted while walking to the hallway, eyes darting at the last door. "My pianist seems busy these days."

I wonder who he/she really is.

—

You leaned back on your seat as you opened your notebook, preparing for the last class for the day. Silently reading your notes, the usual noisy class suddenly turned quiet.

And every time that happens, it's either when the professor's close or when Irene wants to mess with you.

You preferred the latter, but of course, fate is not on your side everyday.

"Heard you went out with Baekhyun?"

Without looking up from your notes, you heard Irene's voice along with her heels clicking on the floor. You calmed your nerves while praying to your guardian angel that you act fairly and—

"Didn't you hear me ask, Lee Saejin?"

In a swift move, your notebook was out of your hands.

Your jaw clenched as you gritted your teeth in annoyance. You let out a frustrated sigh before looking at the demanding and desperate girl in front of your desk.

Irene has her eyebrows raised, and her friends were just watching from behind her. Your eyes drifted on the floor where your poor notebook laid.

"Are you dating him now?"

"Why do you care so much, Irene-ssi?" You snapped, keeping your voice calm but stern. Your eyes bored into hers, satisfied when her eyes showed surprise and a little bit of fear. She easily recovered though.

"I'm speaking for everyone else—"

"Why? If I said that I am dating him, what would you do?" You squint your eyes at her, travelling your gaze around the room. You scoffed. "Bully me? Step on my hand again? Drag me to an abandoned building? Slap me until you're satisfied? Choke me? Or pour a bucket of cold water over my head in a cubicle" You stepped closer to her, lip trembling as you watched her taking a step back.

"I-I was just..."

"I know you won't be satisfied ever." You nodded as you bravely stood in front of her. "But I won't back down this time, Joohyun-ssi. Stop meddling with my affairs."

Taking a short glance at her friends, who were all gaping in shock behind Irene, you quickly grabbed your notebook on the floor and sat back down again. Just in less than 3 minutes, deafening silence filled the room's air.

Fortunately, the professor entered and everyone was moving again.

I hope this actions that I'm making right now won't give me punches and slaps in the future.

You smiled as you went out of the room. Your smile faltered while walking along the hallway. Your eyes kept on moving, searching for that familiar gray hair. Arriving at the staircase, you suddenly remembered Kyungsoo's words.

Oh. They have football practice today. I guess it's because the football season's near.

Ignoring the crestfallen expression you made for a second, you shook your head as you went downstairs.

He's probably stuck in practice. I'll be going to work alone then.

Trudging along the campus sidewalks outside, you began to recall your face-offs with Irene and Lisa the past few weeks. You were beginning to place them on their respective places, where they should stick their noses in.

Why haven't I done that before? If I knew that pushing them as hard as they do to me will make them waver, I would have done that earlier.

Mumbling under your breath, you shoved your hands inside your jacket's pockets.

It's because you've only realized that you don't really need anyone's presence to fight and stand up for yourself, Saejin. You fight your own battles.

Your heart said otherwise though.

You weren't really alone, Saejin. Someone urged you to be braver.

"Jiwon, yes, her." You widen your eyes as you nod your head in agreement. "Of course."

That guy may have made me realize that—

"SAEJIN-AH!"

—I'm not alone in this anymore.

You couldn't contain the smile forming on your lips as you stopped on your tracks.

"Aish, really. Hyung wanted to kill us." Baekhyun complained as soon as he got to catch up with you. He was sweating all over with a towel around his neck. He was still wearing his jersey shirt along with his training pants. "I thought I wouldn't manage to chase you."

How does he manage to look that good while being sweaty all over?

You just watched as he breathed in relief, a grin on his lips while he told you about his day. He kept on wiping his sweat with his towel as he led you to his car.

"I'm really betting Suho hyung won't go easy on me tomorrow." He chuckled as he opened the passenger seat door for you. You raised your eyebrows at him as you sat inside.

"You didn't leave without permission, did you?"

Baekhyun just grinned as he closed your door, jogging happily around the car to get inside the driver's seat. When he did, you looked at him with narrowing eyes. He noticed you instantly and laughed.

"I'm guessing you left without—"

"Hey! I told Chen to tell him it's important—"

"Important? Taking me to work?"

Baekhyun looked at you incredulously as if you just grew three heads.

"It is important to me. I'd just feel restless if I don't take you there by myself safely." He looked away as he spoke. "You'd be travelling for almost 2 hours alone at night, Saejin-ah. I'd just lose my mind in practice thinking about you."

Your cheeks flushed as you bit your lip, trying to contain the overwhelming feeling in your system. He was looking in front as he drove, but you can tell he was trying to see your reaction. You cleared your throat as a giggle escaped your lips.

Baekhyun's head had never turned that fast.

"T-That's sweet of you, Baekhyun. Thank you." You stared into his eyes, taking in the fond expression he was making at the moment. "I could handle myself, but I think it is better to have you around."

Baekhyun's little mouth was gaping as he blinked at you.

"A-Ah." He stuttered as he looked back in front of him when a loud horn rang behind his car. "Shit."

You chuckled as you watched him panic. You could tell he was flustered with your response.

I could get used to that kind of reaction. Maybe I should do that often.

Leaning back on the soft cushion, you admired his profile from the side. You took note of his perfect side profile. His pouty lips that seem kissable from an angle, his cheeks that you'd been thinking of squishing right now, his cute downturned eyes that crinkles adorably when he smiles, and his nose that makes you want kiss—

Did I just imagine kissing him? TWICE?

As if hearing your thoughts, Baekhyun glanced at you, catching you ogling at him. You couldn't look away from his gentle eyes.

Am I caught in his trap already? Saejin?! Really?!

"Don't stop staring, baby. I'm liking you more." He smirked, totally back into being the playboy you know he is. You rolled your eyes and looked away. "Hey, I just told you to keep staring at me—"

"Stop whining as if I stole your candy, Baekhyun."

"Just keep looking at me, come on."

"Shut up." You jutted your lower lip out as you glanced at him again. His dark grayish hair always catches your eyes. "I wonder if black hair suits you better."

"Any color suits me, love."

"Oh really." You unenthusiastically said, making him frown as he looked at you.

"You'd probably fall for me when I dye my hair black."

"Hmm."

He grunted as you smiled at the side.

"Surely!" Baekhyun exclaimed, making you laugh.

You're getting to me, Byun. Please don't break me too.

Despite slowly recognizing your little feelings for the said guy, your heart was still hesitant and frightened. Disappointment is one thing you fear, but then betrayal weighs much more.

You don't want to experience such things from him.

Never again.

—

Sitting on the floor while curling yourself into a ball, your eyes were blank as you stared into an empty space. Your black dress crumpled as you tightened your hold on your knees.

Your cheeks were still stinging, hands slightly shaking while you remembered what happened just a few hours ago.

It was Yong Sun's burial today.

You weren't informed and it seemed that her parents didn't want to see you in your best friend's final ceremony. You went to the cemetery anyway, wanting to see her for the last time despite the aching you felt in your chest.

You knew you weren't welcomed, but you went there.

If not hateful gazes, there were disappointed and judging ones that flew your way. You were used to that, so you didn't mind that much. You thought you could see her.

But her parents were just like everyone else.

They didn't understand you. They didn't try to.

"Get away from us! It's your fault, you bitch!" Her mother, who used to be like your own, shrieked as if she was seeing the devil. She slapped you on both of your cheeks angrily, and the people there just watched. "She wanted to die because of you!"

How was it my fault again? I didn't do anything to hurt her.

Your mouth opened as you tried to explain yourself, but seeing the hostility in Yong Sun's mother's eyes, you didn't bother. Your eyes stung, not because of her words but because of the doubt arising in your mind.

Maybe it really was my fault.

That day, you realized that people will think however they want to think about something. Yes, they are in-charge of how they will interpret situations, but sometimes, they form conclusions without seeing the whole picture.

No one will try to understand you. If they wanted to, they would have.

You realized that you were alone now.

In the empty and lifeless house, which was once full of life and energy when your grandmother was still alive. Your hands gripped on your dress, throat closing up as you bit your lip.

And then you cried.

What could be worse than these feelings in your heart?

—

Tagging my loves: ❤

@forbyun​ | @neogoturback | @jisungispilledmyuwus | @shesdreaminginoverdose | @mongryong-the-corgi | @baekhyunsdangerouswoman | @itsbaekhyunsbutt | @lalalala-lav | @thoughtsofapril | @byuniieo | @feline-xiu | @banddits | @jummyjammy | @bunniemyeon | @jddcfc-blog | @half-moon-x | @byunxo | @strawbaeri-s​ | @vishary15​ | @byunbeautifulb

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♫ Ch.17

Let Them Eat (Angel Food) Cake (Scyvie) - Phryne

A/N: Hey y'all! Here’s a drabble from Starbucks au scyvie; a little scene that takes place after the end of the fic. It’s a classic, fluffy coffee shop au and I’m hoping to have this whole fic out before Christmas. Enjoy!

Scarlet was overjoyed when she peered over the espresso machine, into the nearly barren store, and saw her girlfriend, now out of her pant suit and heels from the day’s work, holding a brown paper bag in her arms. Scarlet gave the counter one last wipe down before shedding her apron and stuffing it into her bag, rushing over to gather her up in her arms and press a kiss on her lips, mumbling Yvie and pulling into a smile as she pulled away, glad to have a familiar name on her tongue again. Yvie hummed as Scarlet pulled back, still resting her hands on her arms. “I got the cake, babe,” she said, lifting the bag up slightly. “Please tell me you got something for us too,” Scarlet mumbled to herself before letting out a light laugh as she turned to grab her bag and coat. “Well, hopefully that’ll get him off our ass.” “Ah, yes, our collective ass.” “Shut up.” Scarlet rolled her eyes, shrugging on her coat and hiking her bag up onto her shoulder. “You know what I meant.” And Yvie did. The cake was for Scarlet’s neighbor, the who shared a wall with her bedroom, and has taken to fiercely rapping on the wall and yelling in his gruff New Jersey accent any time he thought they were being too loud there, which was now often. Or at least, far more often than he grew used to over the past couple years. It was annoying. Yvie suggested baking him a cake, as a peace offering, as that worked with her next-door neighbor. Then Scarlet reminded Yvie that she could barely fry eggs, let alone bake, which lead to Yvie shrugging and adding that she doesn’t know how to bake either, so she just bought a cake, took it out of its packaging, and put it onto a nice plate, smudging the frosting a bit to look more homemade. Then Scarlet threw her arms around her girlfriend and told her she was an absolute genius. Which lead to Yvie holding up a bag containing an angel food cake from the bodega down the street. Scarlet took her hand, said goodbye to her coworker, and followed Yvie out the door and down the street to catch the train back home, ready to gift this cake and then make all the noise they pleased. After dinner of course. Scarlet hadn’t eaten since the start of her shift and she could feel her stomach collapsing in on itself. They would make the peace offering and their noise after dinner. They found a couple seats, and moments after they began moving, heard a crackling over the loudspeaker, followed by a jumble of words that after years of commuting from Manhattan to Brooklyn, Scarlet could gather meant delay and hours. Scarlet sighed deeply, deflating, staring up at the ceiling. “Oh my god, I’m so hungry.” Yvie wrapped her arm around the back of the seat. “You didn’t get to eat?” “No,” Scarlet whined. “We were busy all day. I didn’t even get a break.” Yvie rested her other hand on Scarlet’s knee. “We’ll get home soon. I’m sure it can’t take that long.” It did take that long. They’d been sitting in the same spot for about an hour, Scarlet trying to distract herself with a rousing game of solitaire on her phone. It didn’t work. Her stomach still grumbled, especially when she looked over at the bag on Yvie’s lap, the bag that held the cake they were supposed to give to Scarlet’s neighbor. “Hey, crazy thought, but what if I just—” “You can’t eat the cake, Scarlet.” Yvie cut her off, staring straight ahead, knowing that Scarlet’s hand was surely headed toward the bag. “Okay, but let’s just say I did. Like I ate a piece of it. What would we do then?” Scarlet mused, opening the paper bag with her eyes, practically salivating at the thought of taking a slice of that cake. “We wouldn’t have anything to give your neighbor, Scar.” Scarlet snatched the bag out of her lap. “I can live with that.” She placed the cake in front of her all buttery and golden, and discarded the bag on the floor underneath her seat. Having nothing to cut it with, Scarlet just grabbed a chunk off the top, far too hungry to care about the stares surely shot her way from strangers, much less her girlfriend, who already knew her brazen antics. “You want some?” she asked in between bites. Yvie studied the cake for a bit before giving in. “Yeah, I guess.” She carved out a piece. “I guess we could slice it up and put it on a plate. He won’t even know the difference.” Scarlet laid her head on Yvie’s shoulder, absently picking cake crumbs out from under her nails. It was a good plan until the hours wore on and a little boy asked Yvie if he could have some cake and she couldn’t say no. And then a group of college kids asked, and she didn’t say no again. Soon most of the train car had a piece, a businessman asking for the last bit and Yvie passing him the tray, allowing him to finish it off. And now they had no cake. “Um, maybe we could try making something for him?” Scarlet suggested, watching the man messily eat, spilling crumbs all over his shirt and tie. “Something nice and easy, from a box?” Yvie pictured Scarlet with flour covered jeans and batter on the tip of her nose, smiling to herself. “Yeah, we could try that.”

New Blog Post: Personal Uniform Update 2019

I’ve been writing about personal uniforms for a long time now [2015, 2010] and adhering to them for even longer.  While the major themes have remained the same over the years some of the specifics have gotten more specific and as I’m often asked for recommendations I find it useful to take stock once and a while so I have something for people to reference. The last time I did this I was living in Los Angeles, and traveling 100k+ miles a year, today I’m living in Tokyo and still traveling 100k+ miles a year. Tokyo gets colder than Los Angeles and has snow, but it also gets more humid. I previously tried to have things that worked in all weather, but I’m now more a fan of fabrics and cuts that are optimized for seasons.

Generally I still stick to all black or dark grey and avoid anything with logos or visible branding of any kind.

The specifics:

T-Shirt

Basic. 100% Cotton. I’m still a fan of American Apparel’s Fine Jersey which I find to be the perfect cut, thickness and softness. These were the only things I wore for years and I’d buy them a dozen at a time every 12-18 months though honestly they hold up much longer than that and at less than $10 on Amazon it’s effortless. This is my goto shirt for training at the dojo because I know it’s strong enough to hold up under abuse and I’m not worried about ruining them. Cotton rules for structure, but it’s less optimal for most other things.

Hot weather: 100% Bamboo. The best ones I’ve found are made by Onno and are almost 3x the cost of the AA Cotton shirts at about $30. Bamboo is the perfect material for t-shirts, it wicks moisture away from you and is soft and anti-bacterial.

Humid: 100% Ramie. A recent find for me, Ramie is a really interesting natural fiber and in Tokyo’s super humid summers this has become my goto option. Outlier’s Ramielust shirt is the best shirt for hot and humid weather. It’s $125, but it takes one day if walking around in 90% humidity to understand why. I found some cheaper Ramie blend shirts on amazon but they don’t feel the same. As a fabric it’s a bit stiffer than Cotton or Bamboo, but it’s also light and airy like nothing else.

Cool: 100% Wool. This is going to be my most controversial recommendation ever but Outlier’s Gostwyck Single Origin Wool is really interesting. Wool is an amazing fabric, but it’s almost always ethically bad news, so a company working with a single farm with the specific intention of creating ethically produced wool is something I thought was worth supporting and looking further into. I know some people love wool and if they are going to buy it I’d prefer they put the money towards a more sustainable and ethical option like this. These shirts are also $125, but they might be the nicest shirts you’ve ever touched. A secret some people don’t know is that Wool shirts can be worn for several days in a row before they need washing, so you need fewer of them  for a wardrobe and end up doing wash less often, so they have other environmental benefits to weigh out.

Pants

Slacks. I find the materials that Outlier are using for their Slim Dungarees and Futureworks pants to be fantastic, versatile, lightweight and durable. I was initially hesitant to buy $200 pants, but I now have 3 pairs and easily wear them 300 days out of the year. Their shorts are equally fantastic.

Jeans. I have an ongoing love/hate with denim that I continue to be unable to resolve. There was a point in the late 2000’s when I realized that not only did I not own a pair of jeans, I hadn’t owned a pair in over a decade, as I’d been wearing almost exclusively Dickies for most of that time. At the same time I had friends working with and lusting over “high end” denim and I wanted to understand it. I’ve since owned and worn many varieties of denim and from high end Japanese brands like Iron Heart & Sugar Cane. They’ve been great in some ways, and horrible in other ways and spending hundreds of dollars on pants that you know the crotch and pockets are going to blow out in, and require additional cost to keep repairing just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me these days. And while there are some minor details here and there, I don’t find them to justify the 5x or 10x cost over something like Shrink To Fit Levi’s 501s or something similar. In the end, I’m going to skip a recommendation on this one and just say individual preference is going to win out.

Socks

Darn Tough. Seriously, regardless of what style you like Darn Tough socks will be the best you can get. In addition to being super comfortable and rock solid, they have a life time guarantee so if you somehow find a way to wear a hole in them they will replace them free of charge. Forever. I don’t know how they do it, but they do and do it well.

Underwear

Update: I used to religiously recommend ExOfficio Boxer Briefs for many reasons but no longer do, a few years ago the company changed manufacturing practices and both their fabric and build quality went downhill significantly, when I first found them they were upwards of $30 each but now seem to be sub $20 and I’m quite sure they are making more money on each one due to the corners they cut. Avoid.

Warmer weather: Bamboo. $30 for a 4 pack of David Archy bamboo boxer briefs seemed too good to be true, but turns out it to be legit. Endorsed.

Cooler weather: Wool. Specifically Smartwool who are also publicly committed to ethical and sustainable wool production. They also have a lifetime guarantee which given their $45 price tag, being able to return them once they get worn out for new ones is a bonus.

Shoes and Jackets are much more personal and I can’t imagine recommendations here being worth anything. So look for the styles and cuts that you like and run with them I guess. Though I will say a good hoodie and a good windbreaker are an awesome combo.

via seanbonnerdotcom http://bit.ly/2N3zjfO

Love Mixing

Pairing: Loki Laufeyson x Stark!Reader Summary: At one time Loki thought humans and Asgardians don't mix, but his opinion is tested when he meets you, tony stark's sister, a Midgardian he thinks he might be able to mix with, his feelings are tested. Especially when a Midgardian boy starts showing up around the tower wanting to mix with you. A/N: There's a lot of overprotective big brother Tony. And Thor also gets really protective. Two big brothers and s really snarky snappy Loki. Loved writing this and I hope you'll love reading it 😍😄 "Asgardians and Midgardians don't mix." Loki warned Thor. "You don't get it because you haven't been around them. I know father thinks they're inferior, but really, they're wonderful. One day you'll see." Thor said, sauntering away. Loki scoffed dismissing his brother as being ridiculous, but it wasn't long before he discovered for himself what his brother meant. After Loki's mishaps on earth his brother worked out a recuperation plan with the avengers. Loki wouldn't be put in prison, probably because no prison would be able to hold him anyways, and he'd stay with the avengers under surveillance. Everyone was doubtful of this plan-except for Thor-until one night when they came in from a mission one night and saw Loki with a young girl. She was laying on the couch. Energy drink cans, coffee cups, and work were scattered around her. She looked exhausted, with bags etched into her eyes and sleep had finally won the battle, but the most surprising thing about the scene was that the god of mischief had laid her out co,for table on the couch and was tucking her in with a blanket. He reached to carefully stroke her face when the silence was broken. "You are way too close to my sister! Back it up!" Tony yelled. Loki turned giving him a glare that startled him into stepping back. "Shhh! Stop yelling. She's trying to sleep and she hasn't slept in days. If you wake her up she'll try to drink another one of these abominations," Loki gestured to the coffee and energy drinks, "and then she'll never get the rest she needs." "She studies valiantly. Trying to undertake the knowledge of decades within a few years." Everyone looked shocked. Tony sputtered something that was almost an agreement Thor just smiled knowingly. "Are we going to talk about this?" Bucky asked later, kind of smirking. "The god of evil-" "Mischief" Thor corrected. "-has a soft spot for a college student." Bucky finished. "Not just any college student but my sister?!" Tony exclaimed. Thor just smiled. "I think Lady Y/N can be a great influence on my brother." Thor said. The other avengers nodded in agreement. "No!" Tony said. Needless to say he was outvoted on that one. And that's the one of the stories neither you or Loki knew about how you became friends. The god of mischief had taken to spending a lot of time around you. He was nicer to you than he was to anyone else and everyone, especially Thor knew he had a soft spot for you. Thor had taken to teasing him about it. "What happened to "Asgardians and Midgardians don't mix"?" Thor asked with a smirk on his face once he finally got Loki alone after his ice skating outing with you. "You were just mixing. Just now. Gliding on this ridiculous contraptions and drinking hot drinks and holding hands. That is mixing." Thor said. "No. That is you spying and being a nosy bother. I was hanging out with a friend. In fact, it was really a training exercise. She inquired about my powers and told me about a device that could help me glide on ice and I thought that I should look into it in order to expand my repertoire." Loki said. Thor just smiled and shrugged. "Fine then. You were right I guess. Asgardians and Midgardians don't mix. Maybe that's why Y/N is attempting to mix with a Midgardians right now." Smash! Thor didn't even look to see what dish Loki had smashed against the wall. He just watched his brother's eyes darken with something he could have sworn was jealousy. ***** You felt your brother's eyes burning a hole in your back and your friends curious texts burning a hole in your pocket as you escorted the muscular football player to the door. He smiled and continued flirting with you, just as he'd been flirting with you all through the lesson. When you got to the door he hugged you and swooped down for a quick kiss "for good luck". You turned your face and squirmed out of the hug. As he left you pulled your phone out and saw all the messages from your friend. How was the study date with the quarter back? Did you get a good feel of those muscles? See if y'all can make some chemistry!! You messaged her back but you couldn't muster up her same enthusiasm. When the star football player, Brad Turner, asked you to be his tutor so many girls were envious of the time you'd get to spend with the muscular quarterback that everyone was drooling over...but you couldn't muster up any attraction to him. There wasn't a sharp mind among his mass of muscle, his flirting was clumsy pick up lines and shallow compliments. His jokes fell flat on you and his green eyes see me dull and vacant compared to the blue, cunning filled eyes that you couldn't get out of your mind. "Y/N!" Tony called. You walked into the room and saw him sitting with his arms crossed on the couch. "Who was that guy you just had in here?" He asked. "Brad Turner. He's a classmate from school. I'm just helping him out." "Why?" Tony asked. "The dean said that if I tutor Brad then he'll write me a recommendation letter and secure a paid summer internship for me." You said. "Why do you need an internship? You can work at stark industries, no need to even apply." He said. "Exactly! That's not how things work. I want to get a job because of my qualifications, my work, and my accomplishments, not because of my last name or who I know." You said. "You know I can always write you a rec letter. It doesn't even have to say anything. Just slip a check insid-" Fwomp. Tony's joke was cut off as you threw a couch cushion at him and it hit him square in the face. "So the boy was here because you were tutoring him? He was drooling over you because he wanted help?" A voice in the doorway asked. You turned, surprised to see Loki standing there, arms crossed. "Yes. Im tutoring him because he needs helps passing a class." You told him. "So playing the dumb, weak fool is now a mating ploy? Darling when you're looking for a mate don't start by looking down." He said. "Mmhm. Perfectly stated." Tony said. He held up his hand to high five Loki. Loki smiled wryly as he he touched the palm of his hand then he turned on his heel and left, leaving you admiring his figure as he walked away, while wondering where this catty side of your sweet friend was coming from. ***** "Really brother? How unexpected! You don't seem to like Lady Y/N's suitor. I thought they mixed quite well together but you don't seem to appreciate him asking for her hand." Thor said. Loki scowled. "It's not her hand he wants. And it doesn't matter because he's not worthy of her fingernail clippings." Loki said storming past his brother. "But they're both Midgardians. Don't you think Midgardian and Midgardian go so well together?" Thor asked. Loki slammed his bedroom door in Thor's face. He stared at the photo strip of you and him in the city on one of the outings you'd taken him on. A week ago You'd dragged him into a photo booth and he'd tucked the photo away to later hang it on his wall. Now as he looked at the photo, you and him, he couldn't help but think that an Asgardian and Midgardian wouldn't be so bad together. ***** You sighed as you tried to explain the simple concept to Brad for the thousandth time. He just smiled at you and tried to touch you. You moved away and read the passage to him again. When you looked at him to see if he was following he was staring at your chest. "Brad!" His eyes flickered away from your chest and he turned slightly red. "Sorry." He murmured. "Brad. You are barely paying attention to what I'm supposed to be teaching you. I think you need a tutor that you find less distracting." You told him. "What you call distractions can be motivation," he smirked, leaning back to display how his muscles strained through his jersey. "How about this. You quiz me. For every question I get right you remove-" Fwomp. The sound of Brad's jersey igniting echoed through the room even though the flame was small. Squeal. Brad squealed, high pitched like a little girl, when he noticed the tiny flame. He fanned it desperately and it spread. You reached out to help him, but you didn't feel any heat. Brad jumped up from the couch screaming and dancing as he tore off the shirt and threw it to the ground. You looked at the shirt on the ground and didn't even see any smoke. HA. Ha ha ha ha ha. Loud, guffaws of laughter filled the room. You looked at the doorway and saw Thor clutching his stomach, leaning over slapping his knee, bellowing laughter. Behind him stood Loki, looking cool and regal with a hint of a haughty smile on his face. "How's that for disrobing?" He asked. Brad was panting and stomping at his shirt. "Robe? You wanna get me a robe?" "If you want someone to take off their clothes so badly why don't you start?" Loki said again giving him a haughty glare. At that moment Tony walked up. "Excuse me?! Who the hell is taking off their clothes? No one is taking off their clothes around my sister." He said. Thor stood up and crossed his arms trying to look scary. "Tony is right. You should be more respectful to Lady Y/N." Thor said. You ducked your head embarrassed by your older brother (and older brother figure). "What are you doing here Tony?" You asked him. He pushed past Thor and Loki and you saw that he had a pizza and soda in his hands. "Well I heard that my baby sister brought home a guy. That she's gonna be spending a lot of time with. So I need to check him out." Tony said. Brad stood up with his wrinkled shirt in his hands. "Sit back down. You're eating dinner with me. I need to check you out." Tony said. "Me too." Thor announced striding behind tony to sit at table. "And I guess I should confirm my notions of your inadequacy." Loki said following suit. You mentally face palmed as all three crowded around the table with you and Brad and everyone fixed their plates. "So why are you shirtless?" Tony asked. "My shirt caught on fire." Brad said. Tony's eyebrows shot up and he gave a suspicious glance to the Asgardians. Thor grinned proudly and pointed at Loki. Tony nodded and gave them a thumbs up. Loki almost smiled. "How tragic. Are you ok?" Tony asked unauthentically. "I'm great. I was freaked out but my my muscles are good. I need these muscles. Not only do they look good but they keep me on my game, keep me QB, and they keep me winning on the field and off." He said, flexing at you. "I don't know what field you're referring to but romance, to real men, is not a game." Loki said. "No. Brad is a football player. He's the quarterback. Football is a game where you're trying to get a team of men down a field to a goal while they're attacked and tackled by other men." "Oh! So it's like war?" Thor asked. "Yeah. And the QB is like the general." You said. "So what's the object of this war? Gold? A jewel?" Thor asked. "A football. It's a ball wrapped in pig skin." You said. "So you're commander of the pig army? How fitting." Loki said. Tony snorted trying to hold in a laugh. "Guys! Can y'all stop?" You said. "Ok ok. Sorry about that. Um how did you guys meet?" Tony asked. "Well I was failing a class and I have to pass the class to play in the game so my coach told me to get a tutor. Y/N's really smart and hot and like really smart so I asked if she could be my tutor. She's really smart." He rambled. "And you certainly aren't so I can see why you found that impressive." Loki said. "I mean I was smart enough to get into school. But it wasn't just that she's smart. She's hot too." He said winking at you. "Fire is hot. The sun is hot. Your clothes, should I choose to actually set the,mom fire as I'm considering doing, would be hot. Y/N is beautiful. Exquisite. Lovely. Enchanting. Radiant. She emanates beauty from the very core of who she is. She is far too beautiful for you to reduce her down to an adjective you used to describe your food. And she's much too beautiful for a cretin like you who can't even see the extent of how beautiful she is so turn your leering, disgusting eyes away from her and find somewhere else to stick your insufficient manhood and someone else to drip your disgusting hormones all over." Loki said. "Enough! This is ridiculous." You said. You stood up from the table, grabbed Brad's hand and led him out. "Brad I'm sorry about that, about them. From now on we'll do tutoring sessions at school. One hour after school I'm the library. That's it." You said. Then you walked back into the room ready to confront your silver tongued friend about just why he'd had such a problem with your friend. ***** The room was silent for a few moments after you left. Then Tony smiled and cheered and high fived Thor. "There we go! Got rid of the fuck boy. Thanks for the backup. And Loki, that was good. You scared him off for sure. Thats what happens when a guy just wants to fuck my baby sister. He's gotta be able to withstand the heat from big brother tony if he wants her." Tony said. Loki nodded, but he seemed wrapped up in his own thoughts. "She deserved better than a mere measly unintelligent mortal man." He said. "I mean, mortal is ok. That's most of her options on earth. Well I guess there's Steve but I don't know if he's necessarily immortal just old." Tony said. Loki pushed back his chair and stood up and stalked off. Thor grabbed the remaining four slices of pizza and folded them into his mouth. "They won't be coming back any time soon." Thor said. "Where's he going?" Tony asked. "To prove himself wrong." ***** You ran into Loki on your way back. "Y/N I was just looking for you." He said. "What the hell was that?" You asked him. "That was me putting an incompetent idiot in his place and making sure he keeps his dirty hands away from what's m- from what he shouldn't be touching. I know what his intentions were." Loki said. "I know what his intentions were. And I had it handled. and what do you mean what he shouldn't be touching? I'm not an object in a museum!" You said. "Exactly. You're not an object. Not a toy to be played with or a prize to be shown off or a tool to get a grade. You're a beautiful person with a beautiful heart and mind and soul. You're talented and kind and funny and...you deserve someone who at least recognizes all that you are." Loki said. "So you meant those things you said earlier? About me?" You asked. He stepped closer, "I did." "Y/N. I hope you don't think I was being cruel. I am a good person but I couldn't stand by. Not with you at stake. You deserve more than just a simple mortal man who doesn't even recognize how amazing you are and who's so inferior to you that you need to tutor him. "Since you specified...do you think there's a non mortal man who is interested and thinks I'm amazing as you say I am?" You asked, your heart racing. "Most definitely." He said, grasping your hand. You felt so giddy, but decided to mess with him as payback. You pulled your hand from his. "Great idea. I should go talk to Thor about how he feels about a Midgard-" Loki grabbed your hand and pulled you into his arms. "My brother can get his own girl. You-" he stopped and took a deep breath. He released you from his arms but pressed you against the wall, trapping you between the wall and his body. His blue eyes were boring into yours with such sincerity. "I'm sorry." He said. "Mine. That's what you've been wanting to say. You don't want Brad putting his hands on what's yours. Thor should get his girl because I'm yours. You've been trying to say it. Loki, do you want me to be yours?" You asked him. He nodded, his hands caressed your face." "Y/N. I love you. And I do want you to be mine, but not like him. I don't want you to be mine as in be my possession. I want you to be mine as in be my love, be my treasure, be my happy ever after because you make me happy. And I love you. And I will treasure you. I will be yours. Will you be mine?" He asked you, his lips hovering over yours. "Yes." He closed the gap and kissed you. He wrapped his arms around your waist and pulled you against him your bodies molding together, fitting like puzzle pieces. He deepened the kiss, his tongue exploring your mouth. You felt intoxicated by his smell, the taste of him, his fingers left trails of fire in your skin as he traced delicate patterns up your arms and your upper back. "Oh come on! We just got rid of one of them. I don't care if you're a god you still gotta go through the process. I need to check you out and make sure you're good enough for my sister. If you can't stand the heat then you don't deserve her and you should quit now." Tony said. "Tony. No." You said pointing a threatening finger at him. Loki grabbed your hand and held it as he turned to face Tony. "I'm not going anywhere. Not when I've found someone who matches so well with me." Loki said, kissing your hand. "Don't you mean someone who mixes so well with you?" Thor said.

Chapter: 1 | 2 | 3

Title: Why’d You Come In Here (Lookin’ Like That)

Rating: M

Summary: Waverly is drowning in student debt, can’t find a good date to save her life and wants something different out of her life. When Chrissy approaches her to be on ‘The Bachelorette’, she takes it as her chance to do something adventurous, find some financial stability and maybe find love along the way. But what she didn’t realize is that the owner of the ranch they’re staying on, Nicole Haught, would be an unlikely contender for her heart.

You can read the latest chapter below or on AO3

Last time on The Bachelorette Canada!

On the first night in the mansion, Waverly sits by the pool with a handsome man. The lower third of the screen says his name is Perry and he’s an Entrepreneur. He says something that makes Waverly laugh and the scene cuts to Champ standing in the house, watching them through the window.

“Bullshit,” he says to himself, clearly inebriated. “Champ, Social Media Participant/Rodeo Star” is how the screencap describes him.

B-Train sits on the couch, legs spread and arms wide along the back of the couch. His description reads “B-Train, Hockey Enthusiast”. He nods in greeting as Perry walks back inside.

“Nice penguin suit, bro,” he says as Perry tugs at the edge of his perfectly tailored suit.

“Nice jersey,” Perry counters. B-Train wiggles his eyebrows at Perry and strokes the picture of Waverly’s face on his jersey.

“I’m not going to complain about a beautiful woman on me, especially Waverly.”

It cuts to an interview with Perry who’s shaking his head, unamused. “I thought they were supposed to find men to compete for Waverly’s heart. But all I’m seeing are boys.”

The camera cuts to an interview with Waverly, who’s blushing. “I definitely met some interesting...people today. I’m really looking forward to getting to know them better.”

She pulls her bottom lip between her teeth before smiling and blushing even more deeply.

***

No matter how comfortable the dress was initially, Waverly was more than ready to strip it off as soon as she got to her room that night. Chrissy followed her, helping her unzip it and hang it back up before Waverly practically ripped the mic pack off from around her torso. She set it on the nightstand before collapsing face first on the bed.

“No pj night?” Chrissy asks as she sit on the edge of the bed.

Waverly just groaned and turned her head so it wasn’t pressed into the pillow. Chrissy smiled down at her sympathetically and brushed some hair from Waverly’s face.

“I promise the first night is the hardest,” Chrissy said toeing off her heels and lounging against the pillows next to Waverly. “That first rose ceremony is always brutal.”

“I feel bad for sending all those guys home,” Waverly pouted.

Chrissy chuckled as she looked at something on her phone. “Better get used to it, honey. This is the first of many rose ceremonies.”

Waverly watched Chrissy scroll through her phone and her frown got deeper. “How come you get to have your phone?”

“Because I’m not going to have articles about me and all the other contestants floating around the internet like you are. You must remain untainted by the world.”

Another sigh fell from Waverly’s lips as she turned onto her back, eyes on the ceiling. Her mind wandered to Nicole and if she ever finished the desk. Waverly’s cheeks flushed when she thought of how Nicole smiled at her and how her dimples popped. Nicole was wearing a blue flannel like some sort of gay stereotype, but it worked for her. Something about the color brought out her eyes and highlighted her hair. She looked like she was strong. She wondered if she was hiding muscles under those long sleeves.

Waverly was shocked out of her daydream by Chrissy hitting her arm. She blinked in annoyance at her friend who was grinning like the cat who caught the canary.

“Who are you thinking about?” she asked conspiratorially. “Is it Perry? He’s dreamy. Or Champ? You spend a lot of time with him. He kinda reminds me of the guy you dated in high school.”

Waverly shrugged and looked back at the ceiling. “I was just…thinking,” she lied as she swung her legs out of bed and opened her suitcase. She made a mental note to unpack it tomorrow. Today was definitely not the day. She searched until she found her pajamas and slipped them on as she grasped her toiletries. As she walked into the bathroom, she casually mentioned, “I met the house owner today.”

“Nicole?” Chrissy said, eyes still on her phone.

“Yeah. She’s nice,” Waverly said noncommittally. She started to brush her hair out as she continued. “I helped her build a desk.”

“Is that where you disappeared to earlier? You almost gave poor Jeremy a heart attack.” Chrissy looked up, finally setting down her phone.

“I wasn’t gone that long,” Waverly said, trying to play it off. “I just needed a break.”

“A break with the sexy gay ranch owner?” Chrissy asked.

Waverly blushed. “I didn’t call her sexy.”

“I can see it all over your face,” Chrissy accused, “She’s off limits, Waves.”

“Jeez, Chrissy, I’m not-“ Waverly stopped herself, feeling her face heating up, “I just said I met her. Not that I wanted to jump her bones or anything.”

Chrissy stared at her for a moment. “Of all the handsome guys here, you have to go and get a crush on the one person that refuses to be on the show.”

“I don’t have a crush!” Waverly insisted as she put toothpaste on her toothbrush.

“If you say so,” Chrissy singsonged as she looked back down at her phone.

Waverly started brushing her teeth maybe a little too aggressively as she looked at Chrissy’s smug, knowing face in the mirror. She spit before shouting again.

“It’s not a crush!”

Chrissy just looked at her knowingly.

***

Most of the next day was lost to sleeping. Waverly figured going to sleep at six in the morning would do that to a person. But the day after that, Waverly woke up feeling refreshed. She wasn’t what she considered an early riser, not by a lot by shot. But she was up early enough to get a run in before things really started for the day. It really was the only thing she could do without a gym on the property. Plus she figured it would give her a chance to explore the property a little bit.

And yes, maybe in the back of her mind she thought she might see Nicole around. It was a ranch, after all. One that needed daily maintenance and all that. But she would leave it to a friendly smile and wave if she did.

So what if she picked out the cute sports bra that didn’t squish her too much and the cut off T-shirt that showed off her abs. It wasn’t on purpose. It was just exercise.

She did a quick stretch and started jogging, making her way to the edge of the fence. There was a slightly worn path, but she still was cautious about where she was stepping in case there were any holes. She got past the main part of the property and ended up in a pasture. She could see a barn in the far part of the land and what looked like a horse ring behind it. As she jogged closer, the summer heat weighing heavy on her, she heard some movement over behind the barn.

Subconsciously, or...maybe not so subconsciously, Waverly began jogging along the fenceline towards the barn. She wasn’t expecting Nicole to come out of a side gate of the barn on a chestnut colored horse, wearing boots, another flannel and a Stetson atop her head. Waverly felt her heart rate speed up a little but she blamed it on her body finally catching up with her exercise.

Nicole kicked the horse into a trot away from the barn and effectively away from Waverly. She felt sweat prickling along her hairline as she watched the way Nicole seemed to almost move with the horse, the rising sun highlighting her red locks.

Waverly sighed as Nicole stood in the saddle so Waverly could see how her jeans hugged her just right. Unfortunately in that moment she also stepped into a hole and her ankle twisted at a weird angle.

“Ow! Shit- Fudgenuggets!” Waverly yelled as she tripped forward and landed in the dirt. She groaned, cheeks a bright red as she turned over on her back, her ankle throbbing. Really, truly, she hoped Nicole hadn’t heard her yelling or worse, seen her fall into the dirt. She hoped that the tall weeds hid her from view. “Please please please have missed that,” she whispered to herself.

Of course, that was when she heard Nicole clicking to the horse and the sound of hoofbeats getting closer. Waverly kept her eyes shut as if it would help her disappear. But when a shadow moved over her face, she knew she was caught.

She peeked one eye open just as Nicole swung herself off the horse and landed on the ground next to her.

“Are you okay?” Nicole asked kneeling down next to Waverly, her brow wrinkled in concern. Waverly tried to wave Nicole off with a small chuckle.

“Oh yeah I just...got tired,” she said with a shrug, ankle throbbing, “Just needed a little break.”

Waverly watched as Nicole actively tried to keep a smile off of her face with barely any success.

“So...that wasn’t you that yelled ‘fudge nuts’?”

“Fudgenuggets, actually.”

“My mistake, fudgenuggets.”

“No, that wasn’t me,” Waverly said drumming her fingers on her stomach.

Nicole nodded slowly before sighing and offering her hand. “Waverly, can I please help you off the ground?”

“I’m fine,” Waverly insisted. She would much rather stay down in the dirt before admitting she had tripped in a hole and gone crashing to the ground while staring at Nicole riding a horse.

Nicole raised an eyebrow, hand still out. “Really?”

“Yep.”

“Okay,” Nicole said standing up and slapping her hands on her thighs, “well I guess I should tell you that there’s a serious ant problem around here right now-“

Waverly practically jumped off the ground with a small scream, wiping invisible ants off of the back of her pants. Her ankle smarted and she hissed in pain, trying to hobble on one foot. Nicole immediately grabbed her arm and Waverly leaned part of her weight on her, noticing with a rush of heat to her face that Nicole still smelled good. Like vanilla dipped donuts and...hay.

“So not just resting?” Nicole asked softly, moving her arm to loop around Waverly’s waist. She was hyper aware of the warm hand above her hip and it was hard to concentrate on anything else.

“Not just resting,” Waverly admitted.

“Are you okay?” Nicole asked, “Let me help you back to the house.”

“No, it’s fine,” Waverly said, “I’m embarrassed enough as it is.”

Nicole smiled widely, dimples practically blinding Waverly. “Why are you embarrassed? If I could tell you the number of times I’ve tripped in these darn gopher holes we’d be here all day.”

Waverly chuckled and leaned a little more into Nicole without thinking. “I mean...if you wouldn’t mind,” she sighed, “my ankle hurts like a bitch.”

“You got it,” Nicole said leading her closer to the horse. “I’ll give you a ride back.”

“Um,” Waverly stopped suddenly, “A ride?”

“Yeah,” Nicole said matter-of-factly.

Waverly just stared at Nicole wide eyed. “On that?”

Whiskey snorted, shaking her mane out, and Nicole patted her neck with her free hand. “Ssh, girl, she didn’t mean it,” Nicole said to the horse before turning back to Waverly. “Don’t worry, ol’ Whiskey here is a sweetheart. Plus I thought you were a cowgirl according to all those ads and articles.”

Waverly smiled guiltily. “I um...you know. Television.”

Nicole just nodded and tilted her head to the horse. “So...no ride?”

Waverly felt her resolve crack and she shrugged. “No, I’ll um...yeah. Sure.”

“Are you sure?” Nicole asked, “I don’t want you to do something you’re not comfortable with.”

“No no, I’m fine. Just-...took me off guard. You know,” Waverly said, trying to play it off as she looked up at the horse. “I’ll just um...get on up.”

Waverly grabbed the edge of the saddle and slotted her injured foot into the saddle.

“Wait-“

She swung herself up onto the top of the horse, one thing she still remembered from her pre-teen days when she wanted to ride horses. A sharp pain went through her ankle at the pressure and she winced. Whiskey stepped to the side and Waverly let out a small squeak, both hands clinging to the horn of the saddle.

“I coulda helped you up, you know,” Nicole said, glancing down at Waverly’s hurt ankle. “It’s a little swollen...but it should be fine if you treat it right.”

“I figure I’ll ice it when I get back,” Waverly muttered, leaning over to look at her ankle.

Nicole grabbed the saddle and lifted herself up into the horse in front of Waverly. She immediately clung to the back of Nicole’s shirt, worried she was going to be thrown off balance and off the horse.

“You know, my mom used to make a balm that would help that heal right up,” Nicole said as she adjusted her position. “You okay back there?”

“Mhm,” Waverly answered.

“Hold onto me, yeah?” Nicole said looking over her shoulder. Waverly nodded and tentatively wrapped her arms around Nicole’s waist. Her front was pressed to Nicole’s back but she tried to keep a respectable distance. The tips of her ears burned at the proximity, vanilla filling her lungs with each breath. When Nicole kicked Whisky into a slow trot, Waverly clutched Nicole tighter, no space left between them. Her arms were wrapped around her middle, hands clinging to the soft fabric of Nicole’s shirt as they rode.

She could feel quiet laughter rumble in Nicole’s chest as she pressed the side of her face against Nicole’s back, clinging on for dear life. She bounced in the saddle almost painfully and not even the feeling of Nicole’s toned stomach under Waverly’s hands could distract her.

“You okay back there?” Nicole asked as she brought Whisky back down to a smooth walk. Waverly sighed in relief and loosened her hold a little bit as she stopped bouncing roughly in her seat.

“Yep,” Waverly straightened up quickly, clearing her throat, “Just fine.”

They rode in silence for a little bit, Waverly tensing with every trip or stumble the horse took as they rode. She tried not to imagine getting thrown off the horse like when she was younger, but with each jolt she was convinced she about to go flying.

“So...are your parents living here too?” Waverly asked, hoping conversation would distract her.

“Oh, um...no. They’re um...elsewhere,” Nicole said as she shifted in her saddle, “How was your little ceremony the other night? Find your new husband yet?”

Waverly chuckled. “Obviously. The wedding is tomorrow.”

“Do I get to attend?”

“Mm, very exclusive. Celebrities only kind of wedding, you know?”

Nicole laughed and the sound reverberated through her chest, making Waverly smile.

“All this attention has gotten to your head, Earp,” Nicole teased, “Remember us little people at the end.”

“I’ll get you an autograph,” Waverly said. She peeked over Nicole’s shoulder and saw that they were close to the house and their ride would inevitably come to a close. While she was relieved on one hand, she wasn’t quite ready for her time with Nicole to come to an end. She knew there was a whole day of shooting planned and she probably wouldn’t get another moment to herself until late that night.

Waverly knew she was going to enjoy getting to know some of the guys, it was just hard in the situation. The high pressure of the cameras...having to split her attention between twenty guys...Plus, Nicole smelled nice. Really nice. Probably nicer than any of the guys and Waverly liked that. And how she was clearly strong even while she looked so...gentle. All the guys were wonderfully wonderfully ripped. All hard muscle and firmness. But that was just it. They were firm, not soft and cuddly. Usually Waverly didn’t mind...and they certainly were lovely to look at. But Nicole was firm and cuddly.

She shook the thoughts from her head and loosened her grip on Nicole’s shirt. She had to keep her mind on what was important, the facts of everything. First off, Waverly wasn’t here to flirt with Nicole. She was here to meet one of the many vetted men who were being paraded in front of her.

Second, Nicole wasn’t interested. There was nothing that Nicole had done or said that implied she was interested at all. Nicole was a flirt. That was that. Waverly really shouldn’t be letting herself get attached and yet…

She was just so nice and pretty and smelled good and -

Waverly sighed and pulled herself together. Leave it to her to want the thing she couldn’t have. As they got closer to the house, Waverly saw Jeremy run out one of the side doors, with his headset in place and the usual panicked look on his face.

“Oh! There you are!” he said jumping a little in excitement. He noticed the horse and Nicole almost as a second thought, jumping back a little. “Oh.”

Nicole slid off the horse first and Waverly’s stomach jolted when Whiskey moved and she wasn’t holding on to the horn. Nicole rested one hand on her thigh and one on the horses neck. The heat of her hand felt like it was burning Waverly through her exercise pants in a...not unpleasant way, but it didn’t last long. Nicole had her hands on Waverly’s waist as she tipped her head for Waverly to get off the horse.

“Do you know how to slide off?” she asked. Waverly nodded and swung her other leg over the saddle, stomach on the saddle as she slid off the horse and back onto the ground. Really she just kind of floated to the ground as Nicole slowly lowered her to avoid hurting her ankle. “Can you walk on it?”

Waverly tested it, taking a small step forward on her injured foot while Nicole sort of hovered besides her. She winced a little but shrugged.

“I can walk. I’ll be fine,” Waverly said looking up at Nicole with a small smile. Brown eyes caught with hazel and Waverly’s breath caught in her throat. Her entire body had basically been pressed up to Nicole just a few moments ago, but here she was turning into jelly from looking into her eyes. Waverly was sure she’d never felt anything as gay as this.

“You sure you’re okay?” Nicole asked softly, concern written on her face, “You look a little flushed.”

Waverly chuckled awkwardly, a small snort catching in the back of her throat and making her cough as she waved Nicole off. Hopefully Nicole just thought her cheeks had a permanent tint to them.

“I’m fine,” Waverly said, “My ankle already feels better. Thank you for the ride. Er...on your horse.”

Nicole smiled crookedly, charming as always. “Anytime, Waves,” she said gently. She might as well have winked too with the way Waverly’s heart took flight in her chest. “I’ll see you later.”

“See you later,” Waverly said, watching as Nicole got back on the horse and made clicking noises while using the reins to turn Whiskey around back towards the barn. She looked over her shoulder one last time and tipped her hat to Waverly. She wasn’t sure if she was swooning or having a heart attack. Or both.

Jeremy cleared his throat next to her and she forced her eyes away from the retreating redhead.

“So uh...what’s on the agenda for today?” she asked with a smile.

“Group date,” Jeremy said with a smile, “With six of the guys.”

Waverly forced her smile to stay on her face. “Super!”

***

Waverly got back to her room and took a quick shower. She taped up her ankle and threw on the clothes Chrissy and the wardrobe person had laid out for her for the day. Thankfully it wasn’t much different than what she usually wore, simple shorts and a crop top. She brushed out her hair and did her makeup, knowing the makeup girl was probably going to mess with it anyways once she got a hold of her.

Jeremy knocked a few moments later to collect her, Chrissy by his side. They ushered her into a car and headed towards their destination.

“What’s this group date we’re doing?” Waverly asked as she looked out the window for a chance to catch a glimpse of Nicole.

Chrissy smiled. “It’s like a relay race competition sort of thing based on you working at a bar. They’re going to carry some kegs, open a beer bottle with weird things, crawl through a mud pit and then make you a drink.”

“That sounds...interesting,” Waverly said as Chrissy handed her an iPad with some headshots up on it.

“These are the eight guys you’re having your date with, so remember their names now so it’s not embarrassing later,” Chrissy explained, “B-Train, Perry, Jacob, Johnny-”

Chrissy droned on the names and Waverly just nodded, trying to commit the faces to memory. Really the only ones she remembered were B-Train and Perry. She had a vague idea who some of the other ones were but they were the only two who stood out.

“Here’s the thing, Waves,” Chrissy said as she handed the iPad back to her, “You’re expected to kiss whoever wins the competition.”

“Expected?” Waverly asked with a raised eyebrow.

Chrissy nodded, “Obviously, don’t do it if you’re not comfortable. But...it’s all about good tv and...kissing him would be good tv.”

“Okay,” Waverly trailed off. She wasn’t against kissing him, she wasn’t a prude. But she hadn’t kissed anyone in front of the camera yet and that’s what she was most nervous about. What if it looked fake or unnatural? What if it felt fake or unnatural?

It didn’t take too long to get to the park where this competition was happening. They set Waverly up in a certain spot and told her all the lines she needed to say. It seemed like it was going to be fairly easy. Less of a group date and more like a group competition that Waverly just hosted and watched. Easy enough.

They set her up on her marks and she posed there with a giant smile on her face as all the guys ran down the hill of the park towards her like over excited golden retriever puppies. They stood in front of her as she explained the task at hand and she watched them all surreptitiously flexing their muscles at the mention of competition. After she explained it, she was placed under an arch that the first guy would run to. They would hand her the drink they had made and they would be the winner if it was made correctly.

Admittedly, she had fun. It was entertaining to watch as all the guys made fools of themselves to impress her. At the end, it was Champ and Perry who were neck and neck, all the way up until they had to go behind the makeshift bar and make a Mai Tai, complete with garnish. Perry pulled through at the last second, sprinting over to Waverly just in front of Champ. He stopped in front of her, dropping on one knee as he presented his drink to her.

Waverly took a sip and nodded. “It’s good.”

“Really?” he asked as he stood up.

“Really,” Waverly said with a wide smile before he opened his arms for a hug.

Waverly hugged him despite the fact that his clothes were covered in mud. The cameras surrounded them and a photographer came out to take pictures of the two of them. She remembered what Chrissy had told her in the car ride over and felt nerves take over for a moment. Perry looked down at her with his arms wrapped around her...Waverly figured it wouldn’t be so bad...just a little peck. So she put her hand on his cheek and leaned in as he leaned down, giving him a soft kiss.

It wasn’t awful. His lips were nice enough and he didn’t have a scratchy five o’clock shadow or anything. And it wasn’t as weird as she thought to kiss him on camera. But it definitely didn’t feel amazing. Maybe it was because they had an audience. That was always a possibility. It certainly had nothing to do with Waverly wondering what it might be like to kiss Nicole. If her lips were as soft and welcoming. If she would make her stomach turn from excitement. Not at all. It was the cameras. Always the cameras.

***

When Waverly got back to the mansion that night, Chrissy followed her into the bathroom as she took her shower.

“So, Nicole dropped something off for you,” Chrissy said, her voice echoing. Waverly immediately stuck her head outside of the shower door and squinted at her.

“Um...she did?” she said casually. Chrissy raised an eyebrow at her and held up a small jar.

“She said it was for your ankle,” she said looking at it. “Something about...her mom?”

Waverly smiled and ducked back into the shower to hide her blush and rinse out her hair. She wondered what had happened to her parents. Were they alive? Estranged? Dead? Why was Nicole taking care of a giant beautiful ranch seemingly by herself?

“You saw her this morning?” Chrissy asked. Waverly could hear the judgement in her voice.

“While I was out on my run. She helped me after I took an unfortunate fall.”

“Mhm.”

“Chrissy, before you say anything, I wasn’t going out of my way to see her. I was jogging, tripped in a hole and actually tried to avoid her but it was too late, she saw me,” Waverly said.

“I just...know what you’re doing,” Chrissy said as Waverly shut off the shower, “Please, Waverly?”

“I know!” she said catching the towel that Chrissy threw over the top of the shower. “I’m just making friends, okay? There’s a lot of testosterone around here.”

She wrapped her towel around her and stepped out of the shower just in time to catch Chrissy’s playful pout.

“I’m not enough estrogen for you?”

“Sometimes a girl just needs a little more estrogen,” Waverly quipped. Chrissy rolled her eyes and handed Waverly Nicole’s balm. Waverly took it and looked at the balm inside. On the top of the jar was a little sticky note with a messy scrawl on it.

Rub a little on your ankle twice a day. Three if it’s really aching. Hope this helps. :) - N

It was a simple note. Nothing out of the ordinary about it. But it made Waverly smile all the same.

***

The next day was her one on one date with Champ. Chrissy told her they were going to some batting cages so she dressed her in simple jeans and a nice shirt. She was actually looking forward to spending some time with Champ. In all the other scenarios he seemed perfectly fine and interesting enough. He was cute and charming and seemed like the exact kind of guy she would have dated in high school. Or even college.

The date went fine. He opened doors for her and was very much a gentleman. He even taught her the proper batting stance in that typical “boy-teaches-girl” way that people loved. He smelled a little bit like sweat and his hands rested a little too low on her hips for her liking, but it was fine other than that, even with the cameras constantly hovering over their faces.

At the end of the night, she kissed him. His lips were chapped and for some reason he tasted like Fritos so Waverly kept it chaste. Despite this, she felt a small thrill in her chest when they kissed.

Waverly hadn’t hated it, but she hadn’t loved it either. It had just...happened. And now she woudn’t hate if it happened or even didn’t happen again. She cursed her indecisiveness but blamed it on the cameras. It was easy, after all. Easier than admitting that maybe the person she was most interested in wasn’t one of her options at all.

***

That night, Waverly sat on the back porch of the house cradling her cup of tea between her hands, just watching as the tail end of the sunset sunk below the mountains. It really was beautiful. The air smelled crisp and clean and different. It wasn’t like she had never been in the outdoors like this, she basically lived in the middle of nowhere. But something about this ranch just felt...different.

The boys were restricted to the front part of the house for the most part and Waverly stuck to the back. The production team was very strict about them not interacting off camera which Waverly didn’t mind at all. It meant she had some built in alone time where no one could bother her.

“Fancy meeting you here.”

Waverly turned towards the voice, a smile instantly blooming on her face when she saw Nicole walking towards her. Sans horse this time. Thankfully. Her eyes lingered on the dimples that Nicole seemed to showcase with each smile, her eyes always bright.

“Hey,” Waverly managed, scooting over on the step she was sitting on to give Nicole some space to sit. “Where’s Whiskey?”

“Whiskey had enough of me for the day,” Nicole said sitting down next to Waverly. Their arms brushed together and Waverly found herself blushing. Again. Great. “Where are all your doting suitors?”

Waverly chuckled and took a sip of her tea as she looked back out at the mountains. She waved her hand behind her a little bit. “Somewhere...there. Who knows. I wonder what they do in all their spare time.”

“Probably compare dick sizes,” Nicole said a little under her breath. Waverly snorted into her tea and shot Nicole a look.

“Now, come on,” she said looking back at Nicole. “They’re not all that bad. Some of them are very sweet.”

Nicole hummed evasively and considered Waverly, her smile falling from her face but eyes still bright and trained on her. Waverly wanted to look away, she felt like she was being analyzed, but she couldn’t bring herself to avert her gaze.

“So you have a thing for them, huh? You’re gonna find your true love here?” Nicole asked.

Waverly finally looked away, suddenly finding her tea very interesting. She shrugged and leaned against the porch rail. It was an odd question because she felt like the easy answer should have been ‘yes’. That was the entire purpose for being on the show. Her presence here was based on the idea that she believed, truly believed, she would find her true love in one of the twenty-seven men that the network picked out for her. Money was just supposed to sweeten the deal...but for her it was actually the driving force behind her decision. Either way she was expected to propose to one of them at the end of the show. So far she’d only been here for three days and she’d already kissed two guys and really...she did feel a connection with a few of them.

“I think anything is possible,” Waverly said with a final nod. She looked back at Nicole who was giving her the same look as before. Like she was seeing her, really seeing her. It made her squirm. Nicole looked at her for a few seconds longer before nodding and looking away.

“I guess anything is possible,” Nicole repeated. She leaned back against the top step of the porch, elbows resting on it as she kicked her feet out in front of her. Waverly’s eyes naturally followed her movements and to the small strip of skin she could see just above her jeans. She drummed her fingers on the porcelain of her cup. It wasn’t like she wanted to run her fingers over the skin there. No. Ridiculous.

“After all,” Nicole continued, eyes on the mountains too, “I would never think it was possible for you to not have men clambering over themselves to date you. But it must be a thing or else I imagine you wouldn’t be here.”

Waverly blushed and shook her head, taking another sip of tea to give her time to think. Men. Waverly had been out long enough to know this was how people prodded the hint of a sexuality out of you. Or at least when you quickly corrected them if you wanted.

“Well, the dating pool in Purgatory isn’t very deep. Small town and all,” Waverly said with a small chuckle, “I’m pretty sure I’ve already dated every available man and women there.” She blushed and shook her head again. “Oh, god, no that sounds like I’ve slept my way through the town. I haven’t-...I’m not my sister, I-...well there were never a lot of available people to begin with.”

Waverly shut her mouth before she tripped over any more of her words and sighed, hoping her embarrassment would fade. But it only got stronger when she looked at Nicole who had an amused look on her face.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Waverly said with a small pout.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m insane.”

“That’s not what this look is,” Nicole said with a shrug.

Waverly raised an eyebrow at her. “Than what is it?”

Nicole licked her lips and Waverly’s eyes followed the movement. “This look? It means you’re cute.”

Waverly opened her mouth to respond but nothing came out. The tips of her ears burned and she could feel her blush creeping up her neck. She watched as something flickered across Nicole’s face and she looked away, eyes back on the mountains. Nicole cleared her throat and stood up abruptly, Waverly copying her movements even in her silence.

“Well, I better get back to my room,” Nicole said with a small smile. “I’ll see you around, Waves.”

With that, Nicole tipped her hat and turned back towards the barn. She walked away and Waverly just watched her helplessly, her mind still trying to catch up.

***

Coming up on The Bachelorette Canada!

We see Champ standing behind Waverly at the batting cages, helping her with her swing. She hits the ball and they both yell in celebration. Waverly turns around and hugs Champ who has a toothy smile on his face as he wraps his arms around her and lifts her up in the air. We hear his voice over the picture and cut to his interview.

“Waverly and I just have that special connection, you know?” he says with a smug grin, “I can make her laugh and I think she really needs that in her life. And I can give it to her.”

We see Waverly in her interview, she shrugs and looks coy. “I...think everything’s going really well.”

It cuts to Champ checking his appearance in a mirror of the house, messing with his hair. Perry walks by and shakes his head. Perry sighs in his interview.

“Champ is a joke. He’s only here for attention and...I think Waverly should know.” Perry looks off camera, shaking his head again. “His intentions aren’t pure.”

There’s a shaky hand held shot through a window of Perry talking to Champ, the tension visible. “Dude, are you even here for Waverly?” Perry asked.

Champ scoffed. “Shut up, you don’t know me.”

We see Champ in his interview again. “I’m just saying, that anyone who crosses me needs to watch their back.”

It cuts to a shot of an ambulance pulling up in front of the house, someone is being put in the back, clearly bleeding. It cuts back to Champ’s interview and he shrugs, looking smug. Then there’s a shot of Waverly with her hands over her face. She looks distressed and you can barely hear her when she talks.

“I just...don’t understand why someone would do this,” she says, voice thick with tears, “I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”

The dramatic music swells, coming to a crescendo as the main title plays.

Next time on The Bachelorette Canada!

The Many Saints of Newark: Undercover Cop Talks About Infiltrating The Real Sopranos

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The Many Saints of Newark has once again brought the crime family at the center of The Sopranos into the spotlight. But Giovanni Rocco had eyes on them for years. Under the alias of “Giovanni Gatto,” the New Jersey police officer was at the center of Operation Charlie Horse, a federal undercover task force that busted a boss and nine crewmembers of New Jersey’s DeCavalcante family, which The Sopranos’ DiMeo family is based on. Giovanni’s Ring: My Life Inside the Real Sopranos, co-written with Douglas Schofield, tells the inside story.

The DeCavalcante family is much more historically embedded in the mob than most people know, going back to the earliest days of the Black Hand and Mafia in America. Giovanni spent nearly three years undercover working his way into the hierarchy. The assignment ended when he was ordered by capo Charlie “the Hat” Stango to hit Luigi “the Dog” Oliveri, a made man, in March 2015.

Giovani turned his house into a fortress for months after the mob takedown. He still lives under the assumed name “Giovanni Rocco” for fear of reprisals against him or his family. Giovanni surfaced to speak with Den of Geek about the crimes, misdemeanors, and the latter-day saints of Newark.

Den of Geek: What years were you in Operation Charlie Horse?

Giovanni Rocco: That was 2012 to 2015.

What was the mob climate like at the time?

Active, it was as active as it’s ever been in New Jersey, and especially with the DeCavalcante, they were as active as they’ve ever been.

On The Sopranos, Carmine Lupertazzi says “Dons don’t wear shorts.” But you have capos having meetings at a pool in Vegas. What’s happening with this thing?

Charlie [Stango, a DeCavalcante family caporegime] had left me a message early on, when I first was introduced to him, and he decided he was going to start talking to me. And abruptly that ended. He had a nightmare, and that nightmare sparked him to turn around and leave me a voicemail saying, “Hey, don’t ever call me back, whatever you’re doing, if it’s illegal, if you’re doing something with my nephew, I want nothing to do with it.”

Knowing Charlie’s criminal history, he was a murderer, he was on parole for murder at the time, he was a gangster’s gangster. That was a very clear message he sent. So, maybe a month, I didn’t have any conversations with him, and I just maintained my criminal activity in the street. He kept his finger on my pulse by asking the Gambinos and people within the DeCavs to check on me, see what I was still doing.

Once he found out that I was still making money in the street, and everybody else was profiting from my actions and our actions together, he wanted back in, because a gangster’s thing is greed, right? Greed drives the underworld. So, he called me out to Vegas, and he wanted me to fly out to his house in Nevada, and he lived right outside the Strip, maybe 20 minutes. That’s why we were in the pool, because he was so suspicious of me at the time. We took off our shirts, we went swimming in the pool, and then once he saw, I guess he was comfortable thinking, “Okay, he can’t possibly be wearing a wire.”

You brought up the nightmare, is there a lot of superstition in the families?

It’s more intuition than superstition, I think. Superstition doesn’t play too many parts, but a guy has his intuition and he usually trusts his gut. And in that world, in the mafia world, that can get you killed in a minute. If I meet you, Tony, and we go out, things are great, then all of a sudden I get this bad feeling about you, now I got this gut feeling you’re not kosher, I can’t shake it. I’ve convinced myself that I don’t like you. And then that really drives the train.

Old school gangsters like Charlie, if they decide that you’re no good to them anymore, you know what I mean, “I’d rather cut my investment, I don’t feel right about this, just get rid of them.” Later on in the book, when I tell the story about the murder, originally it was two people that they wanted me to kill, Luigi at the end. I grew up in this life, I didn’t grow up in a gangster’s life but I was around gangsters enough in my neighborhood that I knew how it worked, and I knew how these guys were a hair trigger. I realized once they gave me the deed to kill Louie, if I didn’t do it fast enough, maybe they’ll look at me as weak, and maybe they’d decide not to do it.

Now, if they changed their mind and they pull the hit, well, what would you do? You’d get rid of me. The administration doesn’t want it getting out there that they’re trying to walk their guys. Because Louie was a made guy in the family at that time. And you get rid of all the evidence. And I was part of that evidence.

If you had done Louie, would that have been your button?

That would have been my button. It was explained to me later on. I even called Charlie out, a few times, I had said to Charlie, for evidentiary purposes, “Well, listen, if I do this, I kill this guy, yeah, that’s a good thing for the family, you all want this, this is what you want, but how does that leave me? I’m a nobody.” At that point in our relationship, he became offended, “What do you mean you’re a nobody? Don’t talk about yourself like that.” “Well, I don’t mean that, Charlie, where does this leave me with everybody? They’re going to come gunning for me, I’m killing a made guy in this family. I’m not a made guy.”

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And he would get mad, he’d start yelling, “What the fuck are you talking about? You’re with me. You be the man you were born to be, you do what I tell you to do, and don’t worry about it. There’s going to be 50 guys waiting in line to pin medals on your chest.” 

Eventually, he explained to me that the administration was changing hands, a new boss was coming in. It was most likely going to be Charlie “Big Ears” Majuri, who was a longtime member of the family, and he was going to take the seat from John Riggi, who was an elder gentleman, he was a longtime boss for the DeCavs. In November of that year, Charlie was going to get up from capo, possibly, to underboss, and that’s when he explained to me, he pointed to me in his house and said, “You’ll get up and you’ll get made as well” in November, when he was off parole.

I would have been the first to do that, wear that hat. So many came before me, Joe Pistone and Jack Garcia, we all tried to get that. But you can’t let your emotions get into it.

Getting to that point, almost being made, is there a temptation to go to the other side?

For me? No, there was never a temptation for me to go to the other side, because I knew how I lived, I lived a good life. My mother and father worked very hard to provide for us as kids, and they provided me with great morals, and that’s why I went as far as I did in my law enforcement career, that’s why I picked to be a good guy, I didn’t want to be a bad guy.

But it’s tough, when these guys are telling you that they love you, in the Italian culture, which was very familiar to me, and the bond of family is what they portray themselves to be, the gangsters. I identified with that side of it, I identified with their family, that’s why I clicked with their family so much, that’s why they found me, because I was just like one of them. But at this point in my career, I was a mature undercover. So, I was never drawn to their life or their money.

Where do you get 3,000 pills of ecstasy?

You can get them anywhere. I mean, in my career, who have I bought them from as an undercover? We’ve gotten them from Mexico, we’ve gotten them from China, we’ve gotten them from Hasidic Jews in New York. I mean, back in the day, in the 90s, they controlled a lot of the ecstasy coming in. Like any other narcotics industry, it’s out there, you just got to find it.

What are some of the scams that are working today?

Well, the scam changes, but the way they do it doesn’t change. In my neighborhood, everybody, today, it’s still the joke, “Oh, it fell off the back of a truck.” Well, those things still happen. Right? You look at it, and again, we’re talking union sites or construction sites. Now, Louie, I was giving him Timberland boots, and he might’ve been selling those Timberlands and North Face jackets, or whatever it is, materials that I’ve given him, he might be bringing them to a construction site, selling them, and he’s making his piece on it.

You look at everything. Even Bitcoin, they’ll always have a way to make money. Cell phones, technology, technology changes. Back in the day it was penny stock investments. Now it’s Bitcoin. They’ll figure out a way. They’ll massage it and they’ll figure out a way to make money on it, somehow, some way, that never dies.

When I was coming home from The Many Saints of Newark screening, there was a guy selling swag between subway cars.

That doesn’t change. And that guy gets a piece, and the next guy gets a piece, whoever he got it from. You’re dealing with the guy on the street level, where his piece is so small, but he’s just trying to survive, right? But the guys like me who brought it in by the truckload, or if we hijack something, if I brought a container of something in, or they brought a container, you make a bigger piece. If I get it right out of the container, I’m making a little bit more money on the guy that’s on a subway trying to sell it, you know?

You headed a street crew, is doing something like that easier because you had the police and bureau information coming at you?

No, I think it was a little bit harder. We never intended it to go that far into the family. Charlie put me in a specific construction company in New Jersey, because the guy needed help. Charlie put me there as protection. That’s how Charlie tested me. And then as word got back that I was doing a good job representing him, he got to the point where one day he called me up, and he was like, “Well, my son, Anthony could use a job, so get him driving a dump truck for the construction company.” And I did. And then eventually Charlie was like, “You know what? I’m going to put Anthony under you.” And I was taken aback by it. “Well, what do you mean? Number one, what do you mean by putting him under me?” You know?

And I made him explain those things. Because I never came into this saying that I was an expert on organized crime or I knew that life. I might’ve been familiar with some things from watching TV and what I heard as a kid, but I always made it known, I grew up in an outlaw biker culture. I didn’t grow up in an Italian culture like these guys did. So, there were a lot of questions I had from Charlie along the way. What do you mean you’re putting him under me? “Well, what do you think I’m doing here, Giovanni, I’m building a crew with you. I’m building a crew for you. You’re going to lead these guys. You’re driving this ship. You’re steering the ship.”

When I was young, I was a laborer and some jobs were mobbed up. Do you think those jobs were on the radar, could there be one of you sitting outside the carpenters’ shanty?

Could there have been somebody in my family?

No, a cop.

Sure. I mean, yeah. I worked construction on the side as a young cop when I was working narcotics in the beginning of my career. I would work job sites, if I wanted to infiltrate as an undercover, if anybody thought to infiltrate a union. But I don’t think they want to infiltrate the union. They want to infiltrate the crimes that are being committed in the unions. Yeah, that could have been easily done. If we had the cooperation of, let’s say your job site, if I knew there was a guy, we were looking for him, he might ask your job site, “Hey, can I put an undercover in there to look for this guy who’s wanted?” Not in your crew, but in the general area. You could easily infiltrate them. What goes on in the unions still goes on today. The docks in New Jersey and New York, and the ports, anywhere there’s a port job, there’s so much money involved there that the Mafia still has a stronghold on those places.

The Colombo family just got taken down on unions, two weeks ago, I think.

Yeah. And it’s funny, right? They say that the mob has died. The mob’s a dying breed, the mob is this, the mob is that. The mob has never gone away. The mob will never go away, because where there’s moments of social discord like there is today, that’s what the Mafia and the underworld in general feed on. That’s when they become their strongest.

Do you still look over your shoulder, and what precautions do you have to take?

I always look over my shoulder. I’ve always been hypervigilant from the minute I came on the job anyway. I was taught to do that. I take every precaution, even calling you and contacting you, all we had to go through to do that. Yeah. I’m always hypervigilant. My head is always on a swivel. I’m always aware of my surroundings. Things that I did operationally, situational awareness. I try to stay three steps ahead. Because you never know.

What did The Sopranos get right, and what does Donnie Brasco get wrong?

What I wish people would see is, now that I’m in the field of helping first responders and mental health, the message behind The Sopranos was: if you really look at what Tony does every episode, he went and saw his therapist, right? It was so about mental health and him growing up in organized crime. But at the same time, what did organized crime mean to him? How was he dealing with it? His background and how he was forced to grow up. And if you look at it from the mental health point, the two mirror each other, really.

You’re looking at law enforcement, you look at the underworld, all these guys have that persona of a man’s man. “I don’t ask for help, only weak people ask for help,” which is not the case. The Sopranos got that right. I think more people, after watching The Sopranos, if they were struggling with mental health, Tony brought that to the surface, with the Dr. Melfi episodes, the battles of delusion he had and all those things.

I know David Chase says that, and I’ll speak to what he says, The Sopranos is not based on the DeCavalcante family, but there’s so many similarities. Even the day I went on record, as I’m meeting the underboss in the meat market that we were in, it was just like Satriale’s in The Sopranos. And I couldn’t help but think, “I feel like I’m in a Sopranos episode, I feel like I’m going to get dragged into the basement.” I didn’t like the way The Sopranos portrayed Italian culture. They’re not that aggressive.

Joe Pistone, I can’t say there’s much he got wrong. I think in the end, Joe and I, and all of us undercovers, the one thing they got wrong was we didn’t get the thanks and the praise that we needed to get from our FBI counterparts. Joe got a check. I don’t know what Jack Garcia got. And then I got relocated. I’m grateful for the protection that they give me and provide to me.

But in the end, it’s almost as if you feel you did something wrong, because you got unplugged and you had to retire. A lot of people think there’s a lot of glory in it, but there’s not.

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Giovanni’s Ring: My Life Inside the Real Sopranos is available now. The Many Saints of Newark premieres in theaters and on HBO Max on Friday, Oct. 1.

The post The Many Saints of Newark: Undercover Cop Talks About Infiltrating The Real Sopranos appeared first on Den of Geek.

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The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis

Karen Russell (2013)

THE SCARECROW THAT WE FOUND lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer’s doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to countrymen and women. They lived in hick states, the “I” states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds, and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me — I was a quiet kid myself, branded “mean,” and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.) Scarecrows got planted into the same soil as their crops; they worked around the clock, like charms, to keep the hungry birds at bay. That was how it worked in TV movies, at least: horror-struck, the birds turned shrieking circles around the far-below peak of the scarecrow’s hat, afraid to land. They haloed him. Underneath a hundred starving crows, the TV scarecrow seemed pretty sanguine, grinning his tickled, brainwashed grin at the camera. He was a sort of pitiable character, I thought, a jester in the corn, imitating the farmer — the real king. All day and all night, the scarecrow had to stand watch over his quilty hills of wheat and flax, of rye and barley and three other brown grains that I couldn’t remember (my brain stole this image from the seven-grain Quilty Hills Muffins bag — at school I cheated shamelessly and I guess my imagination must have been a plagiarist too, copying its homework).

This mission had nothing to do with us or with our city of Anthem, New Jersey. Anthem had no crops, no silos, no crows — it had turquoise Port-o-Pottys and neon alleys, construction pits, dogs in purses, bag ladies with powerful smells and opinions, garbage dumps haunted by the wraith white pigeons; it had our school, the facade of which was currently covered with a glorious psychedelic phallus mosaic, a series of interlocking dicks spray painted to the scale of Picasso’s Guernica by Anthem’s tenth-grade graffiti kings; it had policemen, bus drivers, crossing guards; dolls were sold in stores.

And we were city boys. We lived in projects that were farm antonyms, these truly shitbox apartments. If flowers bloomed on our sooty sills, it must have been because of some plant Stockholm syndrome, a love our sun did not deserve. Our familiarity with the figure of the scarecrow came exclusively from watered-down L. Frank Baum cartoons, and from the corny yet frightening “Autumn’s Bounty!” display in the Food Lion grocery store, where every year a scarecrow got propped a little awkwardly between a pilgrim, a cornucopia, and a scrotally wrinkled turkey. The Food Lion scarecrow looked like a broomin a Bermuda shirt, a broomwith acne, ogling the ladies’ butts as they bent to buy their diet yogurts — once I’d heard a bag boy joke that it was there to spook the divorcees. What we found in Friendship Park in no way resembled the Food Lion scarecrow. At first I was sure the thing tied to the oak was dead, or alive. Real, I mean.

“Hey, you guys,” I swallowed. “Look — ” And pointed to the pin oak, where a boy our age was belted to the trunk. Somebody in blue jeans and a T-shirt that had faded to the same earthworm color as his hair, a white boy, doubled over the rope. His hair clung tight as a cap to his scalp, as if painted on, and his face looked like a brick of sweating cheese.

Gus got to the kid first. “You retards.” His voice was high with relief. “It’s just a doll.” He punched its stomach. “It’s got straw inside it.”

“It’s a scarecrow!” shrieked Mondo.

And he kicked at a glistening bulb of what did appear to be straw beneath the doll’s slumping face. A little hill. It regarded its own innards expressionlessly, its glass eyes twinkling. Mondo shrieked again.

I followed the scarecrow’s gaze down to its lost straw: dark gold and chlorophyll green strands were blowing loose, like cut hair on a barbershop floor. Some of the straw had a jellied black look. How long had this stuff been outside of him, I wondered — how long had it been inside of him? I looked up, searching the boy scarecrow for a rip. A cold eel-like feeling was thrashing in my belly. That same morning, while eating my Popple breakfast tart, I’d seen a news shot of a U.S. soldier calmly watching blood spill from his head. Calm came pouring over him, at pace with the blood. In the next room, I could hear my ma getting ready for work, singing an old pop song, rattling hangers. On TV, one of the soldier’s eyes was lost behind the sticky pink sheet. The camera closed in; a second later the footage switched to the trees of a new country under an ammonia blue sky. I couldn’t understand this — where was the cameraman or the camerawoman? Who was letting his face dissolve into calm?

“Let’s cut it down!” screamed Mondo. I nodded.

“Nah, we better not.” Juan Carlos looked around the woods sharply; he looked up, as if there might be a sniper hidden in the pin oak. “What if this” — he pushed at the doll — “belongs to somebody? What if somebody is watching us, right now? Laughing at us…”

It was late September, a cool red season. The scarecrow was hung up on the sunless side of the oak. The tree was a shaggy pyramid, sixty or seventy feet tall, one of the “famous” landmarks of Friendship Park; it overlooked a ravine — a split in the seam of the bedrock, very narrow and deep — that we called “the Cone.” Way down at the bottom you could see a wet blue dirt with radishy pink streaks along it, as exotic looking to us as a sea floor. Condoms and needles (not ours) and the silver shreds of Dodo Potato Chip bags and beer bottles (mostly ours) had turned the Cone into a sort of sylvan garbage can. The tree spread above it like a girl playing at suicide, quailing its many fiery leaves.

Years ago, before we started loitering here in a dedicated way, the pin oak had been planted to commemorate an Event — there was an opal plaque nestled in its roots. We knew this much but we didn’t know more — some delinquent, teenaged forefather of ours had scratched out everything but the date, “1957.”

The plaque looked like a lost little moon in the grip of the tree’s arachnid roots. I always felt a little cheated by the plaque; it was a confusing kind of resentment; I didn’t really care about the “why” of the tree at all but I didn’t like how this plaque was an open secret either, a mystery that was always itching at us. It bothered me that we were so poorly informed about the oak’s first purpose that we did not even have the option of forgetting it, using our patented June 1 method, whereby we expulsed a year of school facts from our brains in spasms of summer amnesia. (Harriet Tubman — did he invent something? The War of 1812 — why did we fight that one? For tea? Against Mexico or Sicily?) Forgetting was one of my favorite things to do at Camp Dark; I felt like a squid, sending jets of inky thoughts into the Cone. The plaque was illegible, but the oak’s glossy trunk was covered in gougings that you could easily read: V hearts K; Death 2 Asshole Jimmy Dingo; Jesus Saves; I Wuz Here!!! We’d added ourselves:

MONDO + GUS + LARRY + J.C. = CAMP DARK

The “deep end” of Friendship Park we called Camp Dark. Camp Dark was Anthem’s lame try at an urban arboretum, a sort of surprise woods bordered by gas and fire stations and a condemned pizza buffet. THE PIZZA PARTY IS CANCELED read a sign above a bulldozer. These central acres of Friendship Park were filled with young deciduous trees and naive-seeming bluish squirrels. They chittered some charming bullshit at you too, up on their hind legs begging for a handout. They lived in the trash cans and had the wide-eyed innocent look and threadbare fur of child junkies. Had they wised up, our squirrels might have mugged us and used our wallets to buy train tickets to the true woods, which were about an hour north of Anthem’s depressed downtown, according to Juan Carlos — only Juan Carlos had been out there. (“There was a river with a purple fish shitting in it,” was all we got out of him.)

Recently, the Anthem City Parks & Recreation had received a big grant, and now the playground looked like a madhouse. Padded swings, padded slides, padded gyms, padded seesaws and go-wheelies: All the once-fun equipment had gotten upholstered by the city in this red loony-bin foam. To absorb the risk of a lawsuit, said Juan Carlos; one night, at Juan Carlos’s suggestion, we all took turns pissing hooch onto the harm-preventing pillows. Our park had a poopstrewn dog run and an orange baseball diamond; a creepy pond that, like certain towns in Florida, had at one time been a very popular winter destination for geese and ducks but which had for some reason fallen out of fashion in the waterfowl society; and a Conestoga-looking covered picnic area. Gus claimed to have had sex there last Valentine’s Day, on the cement tables — “pussy sex,” he said, authoritatively, horrifying us, “not just the mouth kind.” Our feeling was, if Gus really had tricked a girl into coming to our park in late February, they most likely talked about noncontroversial subjects, like the coldness of snow and the excellence of Gus’s weed, while wearing sex-thwarting parkas.

We’d started hanging at Friendship Park four years ago, when we were ten years old. Back then we played actual games.We hid and we sought. We did benign stuff in trees. We amassed a stupidly huge plastic weapons cache in the hollow of the pin oak, including a Sounds of Warfare Blazer that as I recall required something like sixteen triple-A batteries to make a noise like a female guinea pig putting a brave face on her tuberculosis. Those were innocent times. Then we got shunted into Anthem’s combo middle-and-high school, and now we came here to drink beers and antagonize one another. Biweekly we shoplifted liquor and snacks, in a surprisingly orderly way, rotating this duty. (“We are Communists!” shrieked Mondo once, pumping a fistful of red-hot peanuts into the sky, and Juan Carlos, who did homework, snorted, “You are quite confused, my bro.”)

Participation levels varied, but usually it was the core four of us at Camp Dark: Juan Carlos Diaz, Gus Ainsworth, Mondo Chu, and me, Larry Rubio. Pronounced “Rubby-oh” by me, like a rubber ducky toy, my own surname. My dad left when I turned two and I don’t speak any Spanish unless you count the words that everybody knows, like “hablo” and “no.” My ma came from a vast hick family in Pensacola, pontoon loads of uncle-brothers and red-haired aunts and firecrotch cousins from some nth degree of cousindom, hordes of blood kin whom she renounced, I guess, to marry and then divorce my dad. We never saw any of them. We were long alone, me and my ma.

Juan Carlos had tried to tutor me once: “Rooo-bio. Fucker, you have to coo the ‘u’!”

My ma couldn’t pronounce my last name either, making for some awkward times in Vice Principal Derry’s office. She’d reverted to her maiden name, which sounded like an elf municipality: Dourif. “Why can’t I be a Dourif, like you?” I asked her once when I was very small, and she poured her drink onto the carpet, shocking me — this was my own kindergarten trick to express a violent unhappiness. She left the room and my shock deepened when she didn’t come back to clean up the mess. I watched the stain set on the carpet, the sun cutting through the curtain blades. Later, I wrote LARRY RUBIO on all of my folders. I answered to RUBIO, just like the stranger my father must be doing somewhere. What my ma seemed to want me to do — to hold onto the name without the man — felt very silly to me, like the cartoon where Wile E. Coyote holds on to the handle (just the handle) of an exploded suitcase. Latching into pure space.

The scarecrow boy was my same height, five foot five. He had pale glass eyes and a molded wax or plastic face; under his faded brown shirt his “skin” was machine-sewn sackcloth, straw stuffed. So: He had a scarecrow’s body but a boy’s head. I took a step forward and punched his torso, which was solid as a bale of hay; I half expected a scream to roll out of his mouth. I looked down — I was standing on a snarl of his guts. Would a scarecrow’s organs look like this? I wondered. Like birds’ nests. A grass kidney, a flammable heart. Now I understood Mondo’s earlier wail — when the scarecrow didn’t cry out, I wanted to scream for him.

“Who stuck those on its face?” Mondo asked. “Those eyes?”

“Whoever put him here in the first place, jackass.”

“Well, what weirdo does that? Puts eyes and clothes on a giant doll of a kid and ropes him to a tree?”

“A German, probably,” said Gus knowingly. “Or a Japanese. One of those sicko sex freaks.”

Mondo rolled his eyes. “Maybe you put it here then, Ainsworth.”

“Maybe he’s a theater prop? Like, from our school?”

“He’s wearing some nasty clothes.”

“Hey! He’s got a belt like yours, Rubby!”

“Shut up.”

“Wait — you’re going to steal the scarecrow’s belt? That ain’t bad luck?”

“Oh my God! He’s got on underwear!” Mondo snapped the elastic, giggling.

“He has a hole,” Juan Carlos said quietly. He’d slid his hand between the doll’s sagging shoulders and the tree. “Down here, in his back. Look. He’s spilling straw.”

Juan Carlos was jerking stuffing out of the scarecrow and then, in the same panicky motion, trying to cram it back inside the hole; all this he did with a sly, aghast look, as if he were a surgeon who had fatally bungled an operation and was now trying to disguise that fact from his staff. This straw, I recognized with a chill, was fresh and green.

“You got your ‘oh shit!’ face on, J.C.!” Gus laughed. I managed a laugh too, but I was scared, scared. The straw was scary to me, its pale colors and its smell. A terrible sweetness lifted out of the doll, that stench you are supposed to associate with innocent things — zoos and pet stores, pony rides. He was stuffed to the springs of his eyeballs. Put it all back, Juan, I thought hopefully, and we’ll be OK.

“Uh. You dudes? Do scarecrows have fingers?” Mondo held the scarecrow’s left hand, very formally, as if he were suddenly in a cummerbund accompanying the scarecrow to the world’s scariest prom.

“I mean, usually,” he added lamely, as if this were a normal topic to solicit our opinions on, the prevalence of scarecrow fingers.

“His body is soft.” Gus demonstrated this for us, punching it. “But his face is, like, a wax? Not-straw. Some other shit. Plastic.”

Only it wasn’t generic, like a mall mannequin. Even the dark blue eye color looked particular, familiar. His features were weird and specific, like the face of a wax actress in a museum. Someone you were supposed to recognize.

“What the hell?” Gus whispered, twisting the scarecrow’s face by its plastic chin. The chin was pocked with a fiery braille of blemishes and cuts, so convincingly nasty that you half expected them to ooze. The longer I stared at him, the less real I myself felt. Was I really the only one who remembered his name?

“Weird. His face is cold.” Juan Carlos ran a long finger down the scarecrow’s crooked nose.

“He’s not wearing his glasses,” I mumbled. Now that I knew who this was I was afraid to touch his face, as if the humid wand of my finger might bring him to life.

“His face is hard,” Mondo confirmed, knocking on the scarecrow’s forehead. “His eyes are…uh-oh. Oops.”

Mondo turned to us, grinning.

“Oh shit!” Gus shook his head. “Put them back in.”

“I can’t. The little threads broke.” Mondo held out the eyes: two grape-sized balls, an amethyst glass soaked blue by the last light of day. “Any of you bitches know how to sew?” Intense pinks were filtering through the autumn mesh of the oak. It was dusk, sunset; the park was now officially closed. “Seriously?” Mondo asked, sounding a little panicky now. “Anybody got glue or something?”

I stared at the sprigs of thread where the scarecrow’s eyes had been. Now his face was putty white from the “T” of his nose to his forehead. A little firefly was lighting up the airless caves of the doll’s nostrils, undetected by the doll. You’re even blinder now, I thought, and a heavy feeling draped over me.

Then I heard the question I’d been dreading: “Don’t we know this kid?”

Now Mondo stood on his toes and peered into the scarecrow’s eyes with a shrewdness that you did not ordinarily expect from Mondo Chu — his mind was lost inside one of those baby-fat faces that he couldn’t seem to age out of, with big slabby cheeks that squeezed his eyes into a narcoleptic squint, although outside of school Mondo could get pretty annoyingly energetic. There was some evidence that Mondo did not have the happiest home life. Mondo was half Chinese, half something.We’d all forgotten, assuming we’d ever known.

In fact, as a “we,” Camp Dark was pretty fiercely uninterested in the details of its members’ lives outside of school or beyond the fenced urban woods of Friendship Park. Silence policed the shady meeting point under our oak. I didn’t know, for example, if Juan Carlos’s big sister was pregnant or just getting large on Hershey’s Kisses, or how Mondo got the yellowish bruises that covered his flabby upper arms. Inside of our “we,” nobody would ask you about your ma’s cancer or your alcoholic aunt, your moon-eyed half sister, your family’s debts, nobody commented on the emotions that might fly across your face and raise your fists and nobody demanded a bullshit weather report from you either, a reason for your anger — not like the teachers, who were always demanding that sort of phony meteorology from us. We cracked jokes together in Camp Dark, but I think it was the silence, all those unasked questions, that bound us. At school we beat down kids as a foursome and this too we did in an animal silence. We’d drag a hysterical kid behind the red-brick Science Building — this march could look a little medieval, like some Gallows Day parade, each of us taking up an arm or a leg — and then we would hammer and piston our fists into his clawing, shrilling body until the kid went slack as rags. For us, this process was a necessary evil. We were like four factory guys, manufacturing the quiet, a calm that was not available to us naturally anywhere in Anthem. We’d kneel there, panting together, and let the good quiet bubble around our fists like glue.

It was Mondo who cracked the mystery. He didn’t solve it, I don’t mean that — in fact he made the mystery much worse. That’s what I pictured anyhow, when Mondo tapped the mystery with his little eureka! hammer — hairline cracks appearing in a round, solid shell. Yolk came oozing out of the mystery, covering all of our hands, so that we became involved.

“Oh!” Mondo fell back on his heels and let out a bee-stung cry. “It’s Eric.”

“Oh.” I took a step away from the tree.

Juan Carlos paused with one hand lost in the doll’s back, still wearing a doctor’s distant, guileful expression.

“Who the fuck is Eric?” Gus snarled.

Then Mondo, grinning loonily like a Jeopardy! champ, grabbed the scarecrow’s left arm by the wrist and made it shake hands with the cold air between us. “Don’t you assholes remember him? Eric Mutis.”

Sure, we remembered him now: Eric Mutis. Eric Mutant, Eric Mucus, Eric the Mute. Paler than a cauliflower, a friendless kid who had once or twice had seizures in our class. “Eric Mutis is an epileptic,” our teacher had explained a little uncertainly, after Mutant got carried by Coach Leyshon from the room. Eric Mutis had joined our eighth-grade class in October of the previous year, a transfer kid. One day Mutant was sitting in the back row of our homeroom; the teacher never introduced him. Kids rarely moved to Anthem, New Jersey, and generally the teachers made the New Boy or the New Girl parade their strangeness for us; but Eric Mutis, who seemed genuinely otherworldly, much weirder even than the Guatemalan New Boy, Eric Mutis arrived in exile. He sank like a stone to the bottom of our homeroom. One day, several weeks before the official end of our school term, he vanished, and I honestly had not spoken his name since. Nobody had.

In the school halls, Eric Mutis had been as familiar as air; at the same time we never thought about him. Not unless he was right in front of our noses. Then you couldn’t ignore him — there was something provocative about Eric Mutis’s ugliness, something about his oblivion, his froggy lashes and his worse-than-dumb expression, that filled your eyes and closed your throat. He could metamorphose Jilly Lucio, the top of the cheer pyramid, a dog lover and the sweetest girl in our grade, into a harpy. “What smells?” she’d whisper, little unicorn-pendant Jilly, thrilling us with her acid tone, and only Eric Mutis would blink his large, bovine eyes at her and say, “I don’t smell it, Jilly,” in that voice like thin bluemilk. Congenitally, he really did seem like a mutant, incapable of shame. Even then, at age twelve, before our glands made us all swell into monsters, I felt allergic to the kid. His ugliness panned into a weird calm, and this combination was like a bully allergen. A teacher’s allergen, too — the poor get poorer, I guess, because many of our teachers were openly hostile to Eric Mutis; by December, Coach Leyshon was sneering, “Pick it up, Mutant!” on the courts.

The courts, the grass behind them — that was where Camp Dark came to order. We did what you might call these “alterations” on the blacktop. At recess we’d descend on Eric Mutis like deranged tailors, trailing these little threads of Eric’s spittle and Eric’s blood. But his costume — the smoggy yellow cloud of his hair, his sickly bus-terminal complexion — it was his skin. We could not free him, we could not torch the costume off him. He wouldn’t change, no matter how often we encouraged him to do so with our insults and the instruction of our “pranks” and fists. We stole his Hoops sneakers, hung them up on the flagpole, we smashed his gray Medicaid glasses three times that year, his hideous glasses, with frames the width of my TV set; and then he’d come to school in a new pair of the same eyesore frames, the same nine-dollar Hoops sneakers, fresh from the Starmart box. How many pairs of Hoops did we force him to buy — or, most likely, since Eric Mutis queued up with us for the free lunch program, to steal?

“Why are you so stubborn, Mutant?” I hissed at him once, when his face was inches away from mine, lying prone on the blacktop — closer to my face than any girl’s had ever been. Closer than I’d let my ma’s face get to me, now that I’d turned thirteen. I could smell his blue bubblegum, and what we called “Anthem cologne” — like my own clothes, Mutant’s rags stunk of diesel and fried doughnut grease and the sweet, fecal waft off manhole covers.

“Why don’t you learn?” And I Goliath crushed the Medicaid glasses in my hand, feeling sick.

“Your palms, Larry.” Eric the Mute had shocked me that time, calling me by name. “They’re bleeding.”

“Are you retarded?” I marveled. “You are the one bleeding! This is your blood!” It was our blood actually, but his voice and his monotone blue eyes made me furious. “WAKE UP!” I backed away to give Gus space to deliver an encore kick. “Listen, Mutant: DO…NOT…WEAR THAT UGLY SHIT TO SCHOOL!”

And Monday came, and guess what Mutant wore?

Was he wearing this stuff out of rebellion? A kind of nerd insurrection? I didn’t think so; that might have relieved us a little bit, if the kid had the spine and the mind to rebel. But Eric Mutant seemed terribly oblivious of his own appearance — that was the problem — he wore that stuff witlessly, shamelessly. We couldn’t teach him how to be ashamed of it. (“Who did this? Who did this?” our upstairs neighbor, Miss Zeke from 3C, used to holler, grinding her cross-eyed dachshund’s nose into a lake of urine on the stairwell, while the dog, a true lost cause, jetted another weak stream onto the floor.) When we took Eric Mutis around behind the red-brick Science Building, he never seemed to understand what his crime had been, or what was happening, or even — his blue eyes drifting, unplugged — that it was happening to him.

In fact, I think Eric Mutis would have been hard-pressed to identify himself in a police lineup. In the school bathroom he always avoided mirrors. The school bathroom was tiled, naval blue for boys, which made the act of pissing into a bowl feel weirdly perilous, as if at any moment you might get plowed under by an Atlantic City wave. Teachers used a separate faculty john; I’d cracked younger kids’ skulls on those tiles before. Eric the Mute knew this much about me — that was the one lesson he took.

“Well, hallo there, Mutant,” I’d whistle at him.

More than once I watched him drop his dick and zip up and sprint past the bank of sinks when I entered the bathroom, his homely face pursuing him blurrily and hopelessly in the mirrors. This used to make me happy, when kids like Eric Mucus were afraid of me. (Really, I don’t know who I could have been then either.)

“Well,” Gus sighed, dragging down his dark earlobes, which was his baseball signal to the rest of us that he’d lost it, his patience with our dithering voices, his faith in debate fertilizing an action. “We could do an experiment, like. Seems pretty simple. One way to find out what old Eric Mutant here — ”

“The scarecrow,” Mondo hissed, as if he regretted ever naming it.

Gus rolled his eyes. “What the scarecrow is doing in the park? One way to learn what he is supposedly protecting us from? Would be to cut him down.”

“But, Gus.” I swallowed. “What if something does come to Anthem?”

“Well, Rubby…” Gus shrugged. “Then we’ll have some fascinating new information about this scarecrow, won’t we?”

We had been riffing on this: What threat, exactly, was this scarecrow keeping away from Friendship Park? Not crows, that was for sure; but what was the Anthem equivalent, the urban crow? Rabid cats? A flock of mob gunmen, or sewer rats? Those poor Canada geese that kept getting sucked into the engines of jet planes at the Anthem airport? (That one was my idea.) What could a doll of a child scare away, a freak like Mutant?

The oak shivered above us; it was almost nine o’clock. Police, if they came upon us now, would write us up for trespassing. Come upon us, officers. Maybe the police would know the protocol here, what you should do if you found a scarecrow of your classmate strung up in the woods.

“I’m with Larry. I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore, either,” said Mondo. “To cut him down. What if something really bad happens? It would be our fault.”

Juan Carlos nodded. “Look, whoever put this up is one sick fuck. I don’t want to mess with the property of a lunatic…”

Juan was still enumerating his understandable concerns when Gus, who had fallen quiet, walking around the tree and finishing everybody’s brews, stood up. A knife sprang out of Gus’s pocket, a four-inch knife that nobody had known Gus carried with him, one of the kitchen tools we’d seen used by Gus’s pretty mom, Mrs. Ainsworth, to butterfly and debone chickens. Down went Eric.

“GUS!”

We stood up just as the scarecrow shucked the oak permanently, and plummeted into the sky.Watching him go over, I felt dread without a drop of surprise — it felt like we were watching a horror movie that we’d seen a thousand times before, The Scarecrow of Eric Mutis Dives Into the Cone! I can still see the stars swarming around the pin oak and Gus sawing at the rope, Gus giving Eric Mutis’s doll a little push — joylessly, dutifully, like a big brother behind a swingset — the plaque catching at him like a stumbling stone, illegibly flashing, the doll launching over the roots, headfirst, into a night that shrank him, into the Cone’s collapsing sky, the doll falling and falling and then, not. He landed on the rocks with a baseball crack. I don’t know how to describe the optical weirdness of the pace of this event — because the doll fell fast — but the doll’s descent felt unnaturally long to me, as if the forest floor were, just as quickly, lunging away from Eric Mutis. Somebody almost laughed. Mondo was already on his knees, peering over the edge, and I joined him: The scarecrow looked like a broke-neck kid at the bottom of a well. Facedown, his limbs all scrambled on an oily soak of black and maroon leaves and strata of our glass. Had it lost more straw? Black plants waved down there and I couldn’t tell which weeds might have belonged to the scarecrow. One of his white hands had gotten twisted all the way around. He waved at us, palm up, spearing the air with his long, unlikely fingers.

“OK,” Gus said, sitting back down next to where he’d dug his red beer can into the leaves, as if we were at the beach. “You’re all welcome. Everybody needs to shut up now. Let’s start the clock on this experiment.”

We emerged from the park at Gowen Street and Forty-eighth Avenue. A doorman waved at us from a fancy apartment building. Awnings sprouted above all of the windows like golden claws. When the streetlights clicked on without warning, I think we all stifled a scream. We stood on the dirty tarmac of the sidewalk, bathed in a deep-sea light. Even on a nonscarecrow day I dreaded this, the summative pressure of the good-bye moment — but now it turned out there was nothing to say. We split off in a slow way, a slow ballet — a moth, watching the four of us from above, would have seen us as a knot dissolving over many moth centuries underneath the green air. It occurred to me that, given the lifespan of a moth, one kid’s twitch would occupy a year of insect time. The scarecrow of Eric Mutis would have twirled down for moth aeons.

“What the hell is so funny, kid?” the doorman shouted. I had been spawning a slow smile on my face, imagining the decades of moth time going by as my smile grew: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, sleigh bells ring, Mr. Moth, here comes spring…

That night marked a funny turning point for me; I started thinking about Time in a new way, Time with a capital “T,” this substance that underwent mysterious conversions. On the walk home I watched moths go flitting above the stalled lanes of cars. I called Mondo on the phone, something I never did — I was surprised I even had his number. We didn’t talk about Eric Mutis, but the effort of not talking about him made our actual words feel like fizz, just a lot of speedy emptiness. You know, I never tried to force Eric Mutis from my mind — I never had to. Courteously, the kid had disappeared from my brain entirely, about the same time he vanished from our school rolls. Were it not for the return of his scarecrow in Camp Dark, I doubt I would have given him a second thought.

I am in the shower, Eric Mutis is where? I tied myself to mental train tracks, juxtaposing my activities against Eric Mutis’s imaginary ones — was he blowing out twisty red and white birthday candles, doing homework? What hour of what day was it, wherever Eric Mutis had moved? I pictured him in Cincinnati squiggling mustard on a ballpark frank, in France with an arty beret (I pictured him dead too, in a dreamy, compulsive way, the concrete result of which was that I no longer ate breakfast). “You don’t want your Popple, Larry?” my ma screamed. “It’s a Blamberry Popple!” The Blamberry Popple looked like a pastry nosebleed to me. What was Eric eating? How soundly was he sleeping? (“Did we break Mutant’s nose?” I asked Gus in homeroom. “At least once,” Gus confirmed.) Now each of my minutes cast an hourglass shadow and I divided into two.

But inside the Cone, as it turned out, the scarecrow of Eric Mutis was subdividing even faster.

Every day for a week, we went back to stare at the facedown scarecrow of Eric Mutis in Friendship Park. It lay there in the sun, sleeping it off. Nothing much happened. There was a mugging at the Burger Burger; the robber got a debit card and a quart of milkshake. Citywide, bus fare went up five cents. A drunk driver in the Puerto Rican day parade draped a Puerto Rican flag over his windshield like a patriotic blindfold and crashed through a beautiful float of the island of Puerto Rico. Nothing occurred on the crime blotter that seemed connected to Eric Mutis, or Eric Mutis’s absence. No strange birds flew out of exile, no new shapes came to roost in the oaks of Friendship Park now that the scarecrow’s guard was down. Downed by us, I thought angrily, like a cut power line. Drowned in air, like the world’s stupidest experiment.

Had Eric Mutis’s scarecrow been babysitting a crop? Some Jersey version of the Amish seven grains? Years of city trash and plastic guns, that was Camp Dark’s harvest. I thought of the slippery weeds crushed underneath his face, the rocks and cans glowing like blind fish in the ravine.

“Did Eric have a dad? A mom?”

“Wasn’t he a foster kid?”

“Where did he move to again?”

“Old Mucusoid never said — did he? He just disappeared.”

At school, the new guidance counselor could not help us find our “little pal” — the district computers, she said, had been wiped by a virus. Mutis, Eric: no record. His yearbook slot was an empty navy egg between the school-mandated grimaces of Omar Mowad and Valerie Night. ABSENT, it read in red letters. We consulted with Coach Leyshon, whom we found face deep in a vending-machine cheeseburger behind the dugout.

“Mutant?” he barked. “That dipshit didn’t come back?” We broke into Vice Principal Derry’s file cabinet and made depressing, irrelevant discoveries about the psychology of Vice Principal Derry — his top drawer contained about five million pointless green pencils, a Note to Moi! memo, in pen, that read BUY PENCIL SHARPENER, and a radiant mélange of glues.

Next we consulted the yellow pages at the city library, Ma Bell’s anthology of false alarms — we thought we found Mutant in Lebanon Valley, Pennsylvania. Voloun River, Tennessee. Jump City, Oregon. Jix, Alaska, a place that sounded like a breakfast cereal or an attack dog, had four Mutis families listed. We called. Many dozens of Mutises across America hung up on us, after apologizing for their households’ dearth of Erics. America felt vast and void of him.

Gus whammed the phone into its receiver, disgusted. “It’s like that kid hatched out of an egg. What I want to know is: Who made him into a scarecrow?”

Again the yellow pages got consulted. This time we weren’t even sure what sort of listing to scout for. Who made a doll of a boy — some modern Mary Shelley? An artist, a child taxidermist? We looked for ridiculous things: SCARECROW REPAIR, WAX KIDS.

I found an address for a puppeteer who had a workshop in Anthem’s garment district. Gus biked out there and did reconnaissance, weaving around the bankers’ spires of downtown Anthem and risking the shortcut under the overpass, where large, insane men brayed at you and haunted shopping carts rolled windlessly forward. He spent an hour circling the puppeteer’s studio, trying to catch him in the act of Dark Arts — because what if he wasmaking scarecrows of us? But the puppeteer turned out to be a small, baldman in a daffodil print shirt; the puppet on his table was a hippopotamus, or perhaps some kind of lion. This Gus learned on his twentieth revolution around the workshop, at which time the puppeteer lifted the window, gave a friendly wave, and told Gus that he had just telephoned the police.

“Great,” sighed Juan Carlos. “So we still have no clue who made that doll.”

“But how the fuck you going to confuse a hippo and a lion, bro!” Mondo grumbled. Often Mondo’s reactions would miss the mark entirely and slam into a non sequitur, as if his rage were a fierce and stupid bird that kept landing on the wrong tree, whole woods away from the rest of us.

“Chu, you have a brain defect.” Gus stared at him. “Something that cannot be helped.”

“Maybe Mutant did it,” I said, almost hopefully. I wanted Eric to be safe and alive. “Did he know that we hang out in the park? Maybe he roped the scarecrow there to screw with us.”

“Maybe it was Vice Principal Derry,” said Juan Carlos. “One time, I’m walking to the bus, and I see Mutant in Vice Principal Derry’s office. Through that window that faces the parking lot, right? And I sort of thought, ‘Oh, good, he’s getting some help.’ But then Derry catches me looking, right? And he stands up, he’s fucking pissed, he shuts the blinds. It was so weird. And I saw the Mute’s mug — ” I could see it too, Mutant’s leech white face behind the glass, I had seen it framed in Derry’s office window, Eric Mutis swallowed in Derry’s leather chair, wearing his queer gray glasses. “And he looked…bad,” he finished. “Like, scared? Worse than he did when we messed with him.”

“Why was he in Derry’s office?” I asked, but nobody knew.

“I saw him get picked up from school,” Mondo volunteered. “After second period, you know, cause he had one of his twitch fests? The, uh, the seizures? And this dude in the car looked so old! I was like, Mutant, is Darth Vader there your dad?”

This too was something we all suddenly remembered seeing: a cadaverous man, a liver-spotted hand on the steering wheel of a snouty green Cadillac, tapping a cigar, and then Mutant climbing into the backseat, the rear window as foggy as aquarium glass and the Mute’s head now etched dimly behind it. He always climbed into the backseat, never used the passenger door, we agreed on that. We all remembered the cigar.

Gus hadn’t stopped frowning — it had been days since he’d told a truly funny joke. “Where did Mutis live in Anthem? Does anybody remember him saying?”

“East Olmsted,” said Mondo. “Right? With a crazy aunt.” Mondo’s eyes widened, as if his memory were coming into focus. “I think the aunt was black!”

“Chu,” Juan Carlos sighed. “That is not your memory. You are thinking of a Whoopi Goldberg movie. Nah, Mutant’s parents were rich.”

“Oh my God!” Mondo clapped a hand to his face. “You’re right! That was a great movie!”

Juan Carlos directed his appeal to Gus and me. “Kid was loaded. I just remembered. I’m, like, ninety percent sure. That’s why the Mute pissed us off so bad…wasn’t it? Dressing like he was on welfare and shit. I think they lived in the Pagoda. Serious.”

I almost laughed at that — the Pagoda was an antislum, a castle of light. Eric Mutis had never lived in the Pagoda’s zip code. In fact, I had visited the house where Eric lived. Just one time. This knowledge was like a wild thumper of a rabbit inside me. I was amazed that no one else could hear it.

Wednesday morning, I went to Friendship Park on an empty stomach, alone. The sun came with me; I was already an hour late for songs with Miss Verazain in Music I, a class that I was certainly failing, since I stood in the back with Gus and made a Clint Eastwood seam with my lips and sang only in my mind. It was the class I loved.

That day we were set to sing some classical stuff, words floating uselessly on the surge of one of those “B” or “C” composers, Bach or maybe Chopin, these dead men whose songs sawed through time with violins and uncorked a forest to let a soft green light flood out, and into the voices of my friends — back then I would have said that Music I calmed me down better than pot and I didn’t like to miss it. But I had my own business with the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. I’d been having dreams about both Erics, the real one and the doll. I twisted on my pillow and imagined it loaded with straw. In one dream, I got Coach Leyshon’s permission to sub myself in for him, lashing my body to the pin oak and eating horsey fistfuls of a bloodred straw; in another, I watched the doll of Eric Mutis go plunging into the Cone again, only this time when his scarecrow hit the rocks, a thousand rabbits came bursting out of it. Baby rabbits: squeamish, furless thumbs of pink in the night, racing lemming quick under the oaks of Camp Dark.

“Eric?” I called softly, well in advance of the oak. And then, almost inaudibly: “Honey?” in a voice that was not unlike my own ma’s when she opened my bedroom door at night and called my name but clearly didn’t want to wake me, wanted instead who-knows-what? A squirrel watched me with an aggravating fearlessness as I entered Camp Dark, scratching its chest fur like a man in a soiled little shirt. I kicked it away and got on my knees and held on to the oak’s roots like my bike’s handlebars, peering down into the Cone.

“Oh my God.”

Whatever had attacked the scarecrow in the night had been big enough to tear his arm off at the root. Green and beige straw spewed out of the hole. You’re next, you’re next, you’re next, my heart screamed. I straightened and ran and I didn’t slow down until I passed under the stone arch of Friendship Park and saw the violet-gray speck at the bottom of the hill that became the glass umbrella of the #22 bus stop. I did not stop until I burst into Music I, where all of my friends were doing their do re mi work. I pushed in next to Gus and collapsed against our wall.

“You’re very late, Señor Rubio,” said Miss Verazain disgustedly, and I nodded hard, my eyes still stinging from the cold. “You’re too late to be assigned a role.”

“I am,” I agreed with her, hugging my arm.

There was one day last December, right before the Christmas break, where we got him behind the Science Building for a game that Mondo had named Freeze Tag. The game was pretty short and unsophisticated — we made a kid “It,” the way you’d identify an animal as a trophy kill, if you were a hunter, or declare a red spot “the bull’s eye,” so that you could shoot it:

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

“Not it!”

We’d grinned and our four bodies in our white gym shirts made a grin too, where we’d gathered in the witchy grass of the back-lot ball field. We were up to our knees in the grass, advancing. Two halves of a circle. We didn’t corner the kid, Mutis, we made actual lips around him. From above we would have looked like a mouth, closing. The rules were simple and yet Eric Mutis stared at us with his opaque blue eyes, staked to the field, and gave no sign of understanding it.

“You’re it,” I’d explained to Eric.

Everybody followed me toward Camp Dark in a line.

“Here comes the army!” cackled a bum with whom we sometimes shared beers, one of a rotating cast of lost men whom Gus called the Bench Goblins. He had a long stirrup-shaped face that grinned and grinned at us when we told him about the scarecrow of Eric Mutis. Long fingers brushed at the oatmeal of wet newspapers that covered his cheeks.

“No,” he said, “I don’t see nobody come this way with no doll.”

“One week ago,” I prodded, but you could tell that this unit didn’t mean much to the guy. He had amassed a slippery skin of newspapers on his legs with headlines from early August.

All last night it had rained; the leaves were shining, the red playground foam looked like a giant’s dental equipment. We marched forward. I wasn’t the oldest or the tallest but I was the leader now, and why? Just because I knew the bad scene waiting for us behind the treeline. And, in fact, I knew a little more about the real Eric Mutis than I was letting on. I had some brewing theories, nothing I was ready to voice, about why the scarecrow had arrived in our city. It is a very good thing that we elect our presidents in America, I thought, because this had to be the wrong basis for picking a leader — if I was at this particular moment the best informed about the danger we were heading toward, I was also the worst scared.

“So what do you think did it, Rubby?” Gus asked.

“Yeah. An animal, like?” Mondo’s eyes were gleeful. “Is it all clawed up?”

“You’ll see. I dunno, guys,” I mumbled. “I dunno. I dunno.” Each word crawled like a gray mouse up the bars of my ribs to my throat. Mice dug their pink claws into my belly and my heart. (Could mice have done that to the scarecrow of Eric Mutis? Chewed off and carried away a whole arm? Could ants? Maybe the threat was multiple, pestilential, and smaller than I’d thought.)

Hypothesis 1: A human is doing this.

Hypothesis 2: An animal, or several animals, are doing this. Smart animals. Surgical animals. Animals with claws. Scavengers — opossums or something, the waddlesome undertakers of the park.

Hypothesis 3: This is being done by…Something Else.

But when we reached the Cone and they peered over the edge — I hung back, leaning on the oak — everybody started to laugh. Hysterically, a belly-clutching laugh, like three hyenas, Gus first and then the other two.

“Good one, Rubby!” they called.

I was shocked. “Why are you laughing?”

“Oh, shit, that is a good one, Rubby-oh. This is a classic.”

“This is your best yet,” Juan Carlos confirmed with a gloomy jealousy.

“Dang! Larry. You’re like a goddamn acrobat! How did you get down there?”

Eyes were rolling at me in a semicircle. I found myself thinking of Eric the Mute, Eric the Mutant, and what we must have looked like to him.

“Wait — ” I rolled my wet eyes back at them. “You think I did that?” Everybody nodded at me with a strange solemnity, so that for a disorienting second I wondered if they might be right. How did they think I had managed the amputation? I tried to see myself as they must be imagining me: swinging down into the Cone on a stolen phys ed rope, a knife in my back jeans pocket, the moon hanging over Anthem in a crescent, its light washing over the Cone’s rock walls and making the place feel even more like an unlidded casket; I watched myself approach the doll in the reeds, the doll that had been waiting for my attack with a patience rivaled only by the real Eric Mutis’s; I heard the doll’s right arm ripping away as I grunted the knife into the fabric, the moon shining on, the world watching us out of one slit eye, like a cat, a cracked Anthem stray. And then what? Did my friends think I’d swung the arm back to the surface, à la Tarzan? Carried the arm out of the park in my book bag?

“I didn’t do it!” I gasped. “This is not a joke, you assholes…”

I got up and vomited orange Gatorade into the bushes. It was all liquid — I hadn’t been eating. Days of emptiness rose in me and I dry retched again, listening to my friends’ peals of laughter echo around Camp Dark. Then I surprised myself by laughing with them, so uncontrollably and with such relief that it felt like a continuation of the retching — like disgorging my claims of innocence and crawling on my hands and knees back inside our “we.” My lungs filled with and expelled this relief, which I knew would only last as long as we could loft the joke. After a while the laughter didn’t sound connected to any of us. It was like a thunderhead, a stampede — sound poured all over us. We blinked at each other, under the laughter, our mouths open.

“And the Oscar for puking goes to…Larry Rubio!” said Juan Carlos, still doubled over.

A bird floated softly over the park. Somewhere just beyond the treeline, city buses were wheezing a cargoload of citizens to and from work. Some of these were our parents. I felt a little stab, picturing my ma eating her yellow apple on the train and reading some self improvement book, on a two-hour commute to her job at a day nursery for rich infants in Anthem’s far richer sister county. I realized that I had zero clue what my ma did there; I pictured her rolling a big striped ball, at extremely slow speeds, toward babies in little sultan hats and fat, bejeweled diapers.

“My ma’s name is Jessica,” I heard myself say. I could not stop talking now, it was like chattering teeth. “Jessica Dourif. Gus, you met her once, you remember.” I glared at Gus and dared him to say he’d forgotten her.

“Rubio? Why… ,” Juan Carlos said slowly, picking around my body like an Inquisitor, “…the hell…are you telling us this?”

I was staring down at the scarecrow’s shredded body. A gash down his back had hemorrhaged a dirty-looking straw. A golden bird was hopping around down there, pecking and pecking. Now YOU need a scarecrow, I thought, watching the bird savagely tease out straw from the old hole.

“I’ve never met my father,” I blurted. “I can’t even say my own fucking last name.”

“Larry,” Juan Carlos said sternly, standing over me. “Nobody cares. Now you pull yourself together.”

What followed over the course of the next eight days progressed with the logic of a frightening nursery rhyme:

On Tuesday morning, the scarecrow’s hands were gone. Both of them. I pictured the white fingers crawling through the park, hailing a cab, starting a new and incognito life somewhere, perhaps with a family of unwitting tarantulas in New Mexico. Eric Mutis, the real Eric, he too could be living in a painted desert now, with a new father or a new guardian. Or in a mountain town, maybe. Living at a ludicrous altitude, his body half eaten by the charcoal clouds of Aspen. By the sea. In Salamanca, Spain. In a cold cottage on the moon.

By Wednesday, the scarecrow was missing both coruscating Hoops sneakers and both feet. Everybody but me snickered about that one. We’d stolen Eric Mutis’s Hoops maybe a dozen times last year, we stole Hoops from any kid stupid enough to wear them — Hoops were imitation Nikes, glittered with an insulting ersatz gold, and just the sight of a pair enraged me. The “H” logo was a flamboyant way to announce to your class: Hey, I’m poor! Once Gus and I had gotten a three-day suspension for jerking off the Mute’s Hoops sneakers and his crusty socks and holding an “America the Great” sparkler to his bare feet — just to mess with him.

“Larry!” Gus said, clapping my back. “How did you get out of the Cone with two shoes in your hands? This is some Cirque du Soleil bullshit! You got to try out for the Olympics.” He checked the backs of my arms for fresh nets of scrapes. “What, are you flying down there?”

“I am not doing this,” I said quietly. I was getting hoarse from saying that. I realized with a grim shock that I was leaning against the oak in exactly the spot where we’d found Mutis’s scarecrow.

“Maybe,” I said in a whisper, “we can fish him up…? Hook him out? Maybe we can get down there and, and bury it.”

“Are you crying, bro?”

Everybody complimented me on my “acting.” But they were the actors — believing their easy suspicion, pretending that I was the guy to blame. OnlyMondo would let me see his smile tremble, and I felt a little better, thinking hard at him: Mondo, whatever’s happening down there, I am not behind it, OK?

On Thursday, his second arm was gone. Ripped whole, presumably, from the cloth shoulder, so that you got an unsettling glimpse of the gray straw coiled inside the scarecrow. Not-it, not-it, not-it, I’d been thinking all week, a thorny little crown of thoughts.

“What’s next, Rubby? You going to carry a guillotine down there?”

Not it! I worried I was about to ralph again.

“You bet,” I said. “How well you all know me. Next up, I’m going to climb down there and behead Eric Mutis with an ax.”

“Right.” Gus grinned. “We should follow you home. We’re gonna find Mutant’s arm under your pillow. The fake one, and probably the real one too, you psycho.”

And they did. Follow me home. On a Saturday, after we discovered that the doll’s legs had disappeared — the scarecrow was starting to look like a disintegrating jack-o-lantern, pulpy and crushed, with a sallow vegetable pallor. I was “It.” I was the only suspect. Under a dreary sky we left the scarecrow where it was, everybody but me laughing about how they’d been fucked with, faked out, punked, and gotten.

“You rotten, Rubby-Oh,” grinned Gus.

“Something’s rotten,” agreed Mondo, catching my eye.

Afterward we walked very slowly across the park toward my ma’s apartment on First and Stuckey, where we lived in ear-splitting proximity to the hospital; from my bedroom window I could see the red and white carnival lights of the ambulances. Awake, I was totally inured to the sirens, a whine that we’d been hearing throughout Anthem since birth — that urgent song drilled into us until our own heartbeats must have synced with it, which made it an easy howl to ignore; but I had dreams where the vehicular screams in the URGENT CARE parking lot became the cries of a gigantic, abandoned baby behind my apartment. All I wanted to do in these dreams was sleep but this baby wouldn’t shut up! Now I think this must be a special kind of poverty, low-rent city sleep, where even in your dreams you are an insomniac and your unconscious is shrill and starless.

When we got to my place, the apartment was dark and there was no obvious sustenance waiting for us — my ma was not one to prepare a meal. Some deep-fridge spelunking produced a pack of spicy jerky and Velveeta slices. This was beau food, suitor food, a relic from my ma’s last live-in boyfriend — was it Curtis Black? Manny Somebody? Which one had been the jerky lover? As the son, I got to be on a first name basis with all of these adult men, all of her boyfriends, but I never knew them well enough to hate them in a personal way. We folded thirty-two cheese slices into cold taco shells and ate them in front of the TV. Later I’d remember this event as a sort of wake for the scarecrow of Eric Mutis, although I had never in my life been to a funeral.

They searched my apartment, found nothing. No white hands clapping in my closet or anything. No legs propped next to the brooms in the kitchen.

“He’s clean,” shrugged Gus, talking over me. “He probably buried the evidence.”

“I do think we need to go down into the Cone,” I started babbling again, “and bury him. What’s left of him. Please, you guys. I really, really think we need to do that.”

“No way. We are not falling for that,” said Juan Carlos quickly, as if wary of falling into the Cone himself.

Accusing me, I saw, served a real utility for the group — suddenly nobody was interested in researching scarecrows at the library with me, or trying to figure out where the real Eric Mutis had gone, or deciphering who was behind his doppelgänger doll. They already had a good answer: I was behind it. This satisfied some scarecrow logic formy friends. They slept, they didn’t wonder anymore. That’s where my friends had staked me: behind the doll.

“Let’s go there one night, and just see who comes to shred and tear at him like that. We’ll be the scarecrow’s scarecrow, haha… ,” I gulped, staring at them. “And then we’ll know exactly…”

Mondo winced and snapped the TV on.

“Nice try, Rubby!” Gus crunched through a taco shell. The pepper specks that covered the yellow shell looked exactly like the blackheads on Gus’s broad nose. “Oh, I bet you’d love that. Nighttime. Phase Two of your prank. Get us all good in Camp Dark. I can’t wait to see how this all turns out, kid — what sort of Friday the Thirteenth ending you got planned for us. But we are not just going to walk into it, Rubby.”

It felt like we sat there for hours before somebody asked: “What the hell are we watching?” Nobody had noticed or commented when the station switched to pure static. My ma had an ancient, crappy RCA TV, with oven dials for controls and little rabbit ears; I always thought it looked more authentically futuristic to me than my friends’ modern Toshiba sets. Spazzy rainbows moved up and down, imbuing the screen with an insectoid life of its own. Here was the secret mind of the machine, I thought with a sudden ache, what you couldn’t see when the news anchors were staring soulfully at their teleprompters and the sitcom comedy families were making eggs and jokes in their fake houses.

Eric’s face — the face of scarecrow Eric — swam up in my mind. I realized that the random, relentless lightning inside the TV screen was how I pictured the interior of the doll — void, yet also, in a way that I did not understand and found I could not even think about head-on, much less explain to my friends, alive. My apartment was as silent as the rainbowed screen; with the TV on mute you could hear a hard clock tick.

“Hey! Rubio! What the fuck we watching?”

“Nothing,” I snapped back; a wise lie, I thought. “Obviously.”

For three days, little pieces of the doll of Eric Mutis continued to disappear. Once the major appendages were gone, the increments of Eric’s scarecrow that went missing became more difficult to track. Patches of hair vanished. Bites and chews of his shoulders. By Monday, two weeks after we’d found it, over half of the scarecrow was gone; with a sickening lurch I understood that it was too late now, that we were never going to tell anyone about him. Nobody who saw the wreck in the Cone would believe that it had been a doll of Eric Mutis.

“Well, that’s that,” said Juan Carlos in a funny voice, gazing down at the quartered scarecrow. In the Cone, his light spring-and-autumn straw was blowing everywhere now. All that bodiless straw gave me a nervous feeling, like watching a thought that I couldn’t collect. His naked head was still attached to the sack of his torso, both of these elements of Eric Mutis intact and ghoulishly white.

“That’s all, folks,” echoed Gus. “Going once, going twice! Nice work, Rubby.”

I shook my head, feeling nauseated. I’m still not sure how that silence overtook us. How did we know that we’d missed our window to tell an outsider about the scarecrow? Why didn’t we at least discuss it — bringing the police to Friendship Park, or even V.P. Derry? This might have been an option last week but now, as mysteriously as the parts themselves had disappeared, it wasn’t; we all felt it; we hadn’t acted, and now the secret was returning to the ground. Eric Mutis was escaping us again in this terrible, original way.

That Friday, the scarecrow’s head was gone. Now I thought I detected a little ripple of open fear in the others’ eyes. It was me, I realized, that they were afraid of. All of the laughter at my “prank” had fizzled out. I was afraid of my friends — terrified that they might actually be onto something.

“Where did you put it?” Mondo whispered.

“When are you going to stop?” said Juan Carlos.

“Larry,” Gus said sincerely, “that is really sick.”

Hypothesis 4.

I think this knowledge sat on the top of my mind for days and days. But it must have been unswallowed, undigested, like a little white bolus of food on a tongue — because I didn’t exactly know it. Not yet.

“I think we made him,” I told Mondo that night on the phone. I don’t know how, I don’t mean that we, like, stitched him up or anything, but I think that we must be the reason…”

“Quit acting nuts. I know you’re faking, Larry. Gus says you probably made him. My dinner’s ready — ” He hung up.

About the static — sometimes that was all you could see in Eric Mutis’s eyes. Just a random light tracking your fists back and forth, two blue-alive-voids. When we laid him flat in the weeds behind the Science Building, it was that emptiness that made us wild. The overriding feeling I had at these times was that I couldn’t stop hitting him — OK, I shouldn’t be hitting him at all, I’d think, but if I stop I’ll make things worse. The right light would return to his eyes and he would know what I had been doing. Stopping the punishing rhythm, without any warning, I’d risk waking him from a dream. Me too, I’d wake up breathless. Somehow I swear it really did feel like that, like I had to keep right on hitting him, to protect him, and me, from what was happening. Out of the red corner of one eye I could see my own wet fist flying. The slickness on it was our snot and our blood.

Only one time did anybody stop us. “Leave him alone,” said a voice approaching from the awning of the Science Building. We all turned. Eric Mutant, breathing quietly in the weeds below us, rolled his eyes toward the voice.

“You heard me,” the voice repeated, and, miraculously, we had. We stopped. The four of us followed Mutis’s example, and froze. This voice belonged to our librarian, Mrs. Kauder, a woman whose red lipped face and white hair made her shockingly attractive to us. Here she came like a leopardess, flaunting all her bones.

Somebody wiped Eric’s blood onto his own sleeve, a decoy swipe. Now we could credibly asseverate, to the librarian or to Coach Leyshon or to Vice Principal Derry, that our assault on Eric Mutis had been a fight. The librarian fixed her green eyes on each one of us — every one of us except for Eric she had known in elementary school.

“Now you go back to your homerooms,” she said, in this funny rehearsed way, as if she were reading our lives to us from a book. “Now you go to Math, Gus Ainsworth — ” She pronounced our real names so gently, as if she were breaking a spell. “Now you go to Computers, Larry Rubio…” Her voice was as nasally as Eric’s but with an old person’s polished tremble. It was a terribly embarrassing voice — a weak white grasshopper species that we would have tried to kill, had it belonged to a fellow child.

“Remember, boys,” the librarian called after us. “That is a no-no! We do not treat each other that way…” She finished with a liquidy rattle, so that you could almost see the half-sunk moon of her optimism bobbing up and down inside the sentence (this librarian was a forty-year veteran of her carrels and I think that light was going out).

“Now you, Eric Mutis,” the librarian said softly. “You come with me.”

And here’s the thing: That was just a Wednesday. That was nowhere near the worst of what we did to this kid, Mutis. I think we needed the librarian to keep reading us her story of our lives, her good script of who we were and our activities, for every minute of every day — but of course she couldn’t do this, and we did get lost.

“Do you think Eric is alive?” I asked Mondo. We were alone in Camp Dark; Juan Carlos had improbably gotten a job as a Food Lion bag boy and Gus was out with some chick.

Mondo looked up from his Choco-Slurpo, shocked. Even the junior size of the Choco-Slurpo contained a swimming pool of pudding. The junior was like the idiot adult son of the gargantuan “jumbo.”

“Of course he is! He changed schools, Rubby — he’s not dead.” He sucked furiously at chocolate sludge, his eyes goggling out.

“Well, what if he died? What if he was dying all last year? What if he got kidnapped, or ran away? How would we know?”

“Maybe he still lives right around the corner! Maybe he helped you to put the scarecrow up! Is that it, Larry?” he asked, offering me the fudgy backwaters of the Choco-Slurpo.When Gus wasn’t around, Mondo became smarter, kinder, and more afraid. “Are you guys doing this together? You and Eric?”

“No,” I said sadly. “Mutant, he moved. I checked his old house.”

“Huh? You what?” Out of habit, Mondo heaved up to chuck the junior cup into the Cone, our trash can of yore, momentarily forgetting that the Cone was now a sort of open grave for Eric Mutis; with the freakishness of blind coincidence, Mondo happened to look up and notice an inscription on the sunless side of the oak; not new, judging from its scarred and etiolated look, but new to us:

ERIC MUTIS

SATURDAY

The letters oozed beneath an apple green sap and were childishly shaped; the kid had pierced the heart with a little arrow.When I saw this epitaph — because that is how they always read to me, this type of love graffiti on trees and urinals, as epitaphs for ancient couples — my throat tightened and my heart raced in such a way that my own death seemed a likely possibility. Mayday, God! O God, I prayed: Please, if I am going to die, may it happen before Mondo Chu attempts CPR.

“Look!” Mondo was screaming. For a moment he’d forgotten that I was supposed to be the culprit, the engineer of this psychotic joke. “Mutant was here! Mutant had a girlfriend!”

So then I filled in some blanks for Mondo. I offered Mondo the parts of Eric Mutis that I had indeed been hoarding.

Something was alive in the corner. That was the first thing I noticed when I set foot in Mutant’s bedroom: a stripe of motion in the brown shadows near the shuttered window. It was a rabbit. A pet, you could tell from the water bottle wired to its cage bars. A pet was not just some animal, it was yours, it was loved and fed by you. Everybody knows this, of course, but for some reason the plastic water bottle looked shockingly bright to me; the clean good smell of the straw was an exotic perfume in the Mute’s bedroom. “You think this will fit you, Larry?” Eric held out a shrunken, wrinkled sweater that I recognized. “Uh-huh.”

“You better now, Larry?”

“Terrific. Extra super.” I was, in fact, almost out of my mind with embarrassment — I had been riding my bicycle on the suburban side of Anthem, on my way to see a West Olmsted kid who owed me money, when I felt a fierce pain in my side and I went flying over the handlebars — I landed a little way from my bicycle, where I sat in the street watching the front bicycle tire spinning maniacally with a pebble in my fist that turned out to be my tooth. I knew the car — it was the green Cadillac. It was that gargoyle from the school parking lot who had almost killed me. I was still sitting in the road, hypnotized by the blue sea glare on the asphalt, when I watched a pair of Hoops sneakers come jogging toward me.

“Hi, Larry,” he’d said. “You all right? Sorry. He didn’t see you there.”

I had been planning to say: “Is that maniac your dad? Mr. Hit and Run? Your caretaker or whatever? Because I could sue, you know.”

Instead I watched my hand slide inside of Mutant’s hand and form a complicated red-and-white mitt. It was a slippery handshake, my palm bleeding into it, my bike stigmata — I waited for Mutant to say something about that time I smashed his specs. But his ugly, big-eared face lowered to me and then I was on my feet, following him through a scarred wooden door, number 52, the knocker of which was a brass pineapple with filth-encrusted tropical checkers. Tackiness and incoherence, that’s what awaited me in Casa Mutis, as augured by that fruity knocker — the living room was a zombie zone of grime and confusion. Chaos. The furniture was arranged in a way that made it look like a family of illegal squatters, the plaid sofa rearing on its side, even the appliances crouched. Mutant made no apologies but hustled me into a bedroom, his, I guessed; here he was, going through drawers, looking for a change of clothes to lend me. If I went home covered in blood and toting the twisted blue octopus of my bicycle, I explained, my ma, terrified by how close I’d swerved toward death, would murder me. I pulled Mutis’s sweater on. I knew I should thank him.

“That’s a rabbit?” I asked like some idiot.

“Yeah.” Now Eric Mutis smiled with a brilliance that I had never seen before. “That’s my rabbit.”

I crossed the room, in Eric Mutis’s boat-striped sweater, to acquaint myself with Eric Mutis’s caged pet, feeling my afternoon curve weirdly. It was sitting on a little mountain of food, the rabbit. It had piled that food so high that its tall ears had pushed flat against its skull, which I thought made this rabbit look like a European swimmer.

“I think you are spoiling that rabbit, dude.”

Big fifty-pound bags of straw and food pellets filled all the corners of the room, sharing space with less bucolic stuff: a shitty purple tape deck and a vat of roach-zapping spray, grimy cartoon-print pajama pants and underwear that looked like free-range laundry to me, no hamper in sight. Mutis had stocked this place for the apocalypse, turned his room into a bunny stronghold. (Where did Mutis get his rabbit funds from? I wondered. He got the free lunch at school and dressed like a hobo.) Pine straw. Timothy, orchard, meadow. Alfalfa — plus calcium! said one bag below a humongous Swiss cheese–colored rabbit with what must have been, for a rabbit, a bodybuilder’s physique. The rabbit smiled gloatingly at me, flexing muscles you would never suspect a rabbit possessed.

“My Christ, do they put steroids in that alfalfa?” I peeled off the price sticker, feeling like a city bumpkin. “Twenty bucks! You got ripped off!” I grinned. “You need to buy your grass from Jamaica, dude.”

But he had turned away from me, bending to whisper something to the trembling rabbit. Seeing this made me uncomfortable; his whisper was already a million times too loud. I felt a flare-up of my school-day rage — for a second I hated Eric Mutant again, and I hated the oblivious rabbit even more, so smugly itself inside the cage, sucking like an infant at its water nozzle. Did Mutant know what kind of ammo he was giving me? Did he honestly believe that I was going to keep his lovenest a secret from my friends?

I strummed my fingernails along the tiny cage bars. They felt like petrified guitar strings. “What’s his name?”

“Her name is Saturday,” said Eric happily, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Who knows why? Because Eric Mutis had a girl’s pet; because Eric Mutis had named his dingy rabbit after the best day of the week? I’d never seen Eric Mutis say one word to a human girl, I’d never thought of Eric Mutis as a lover before. But he was kicking game to this rabbit like an old pro. Just whispering a love music to her, calling down to her, “Saturday, Saturday.” Behind the cage bars his whole face was changing. Mutant kept changing until he wasn’t ugly anymore. What had we found so repulsive about him in the first place? His finger was making the gentlest circle between the rabbit’s crushed ears, a spot that looked really soft to me, like a baby’s head. The rabbit’s irises were fiery and dust dry, I noted, swiping hard at my own with Eric’s sleeve.

Inside the cage, the rabbit twitched phlegmatically, breathing underneath waves of Eric Mutis’s love. The rabbit didn’t change at all. Not one whisker trembled. This struck me as pretty rude behavior, on the part of the rabbit. I was just a bystander to their little feeding here, and I could feel my heartbeat getting steadily faster. Behind the bars, Saturday was wrinkling her nose into a joyless, princessy expression, as if breathing air were an onerous obligation that she wished she could give up. What was the big attraction here? I wondered. This pet rabbit had all the charm and verve of a pillow with eyes.

“Want to pet her?” Mutant asked, not looking at me.

“No.”

But then I realized that I could do this; nobody was watching me but Mutant and his voiceless rabbit. Some hard pressure flew away from me like air out of a zigzagging balloon. I let Mutant guide my hand through the door of the cage and brushed the green straw off her fur. Still I thought this pet was pretty stupid, until I petted her hide in the same direction that Mutant was going and felt actually electrified — under my palm, a cache of white life hummed.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Whatever. Sure.” At that moment, it was my belief that he safely could.

Eric Mutis opened a drawer; there was so much dust on the bureau that his elbow left a big tiger stripe on the wood. There was so much dust everywhere in that room that the clean gleam of Saturday’s cage made it look like Incan treasure.

“Here.” The poster he thrust at me read LOST: MY PET BUNNY, MISS MOLLY MOUSE. PLEASE CALL ###-####! The albino rabbit in the photograph was unmistakably Saturday, wearing a sparkly Barbie top hat someone had bobby-pinned to her ear, the owner’s joking reference, I guessed, to the usual, magical algorithm of rabbits coming out of hats — a joke that was apparently lost on Saturday, whose red eyes bored into the camera with all the warmth and personality of the planet Mars. Even “found,” hugged inside the photograph, the creature was escaping its owner. The owner’s name, according to this poster, was Sara Jo. “I am nine,” the poster declared plaintively. The date on the poster said “Lost on August 22.” The address listed was 49 Delmar, just around the corner.

“I never returned her.” His voice seemed to tremble at the exact same tempo as the rabbit’s shuddering haunches. “I saw these posters everywhere.” He paused. “I pulled them all down.” He stepped aside to show me the bureau drawer, which was filled with every color of the Miss Molly poster. “I saw the girl who put them up. She has red hair. Two of those, what are they called …” He frowned. “Pigtails!”

“OK.” I grinned. “That’s bad.”

Suddenly we were laughing, hard, even Saturday, with her rumpshaking tremors, appeared to be laughing along with us.

Eric stopped first. Before I heard the hinge squeak, Eric was on his feet, hustling across the room on ballerina toes to shut the bedroom door. Just before it closed I watched a hunched shape flow past and enter the maple cavity of their bathroom. It was the same old guy who had almost mowed me down in the snouty green Cadillac on Delmar Street not thirty minutes ago. Relationship to Eric: unclear.

“Is that your father?”

Eric’s face was bright red.

“Your, ah, your grandfather? Your uncle? Your mom’s boyfriend?”

Eric Mutis, whom we could not embarrass at school, did not answer me now or meet my eyes.

“That’s fine, whatever,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me shit about your situation. Honey, I can’t even say my own last name.”

I barked with laughter, because what the hell? Where the hell had that come from, my calling him “honey”?

Eric smiled. “Peaches,” he said, “that’s just fine.”

For a second we stared at each other. Then we roared. It was the first and last joke I ever heard him try to make. We clutched our stomachs and stumbled around, knocking into one another.

“Shh!” Eric said between gasps, pointing wildly at the bedroom door. “Shhh, Larry!”

And then we got quiet,me and Eric Mutis. The rabbit stood on her haunches and drank water, making a white comma between us; the whole world got quieter and quieter, until that kissy sound of a mouth getting water was all you could hear. For a minute or two, catching our breath, we got to be humans together.

I never returned Mutant’s sweater, and the following Monday I did not speak to him. I hid the cuts on my palms in two fists. It took me another week to find a poster for Saturday. I figured they’d all be long gone — Eric said he’d torn them all down — but I found one on the Food Lion message board, buried under a thousand kitty calendars and yoga and LEARN TO BONGO! fliers: a very poorly reproduced Saturday glaring out at me under the Barbie hat and the words LOST! MY PET BUNNY. I dialed the number. Sure enough, a girl’s voice answered, all pipsqueaky and polite.

“I have news that might be of some interest to you.”

She knew right away.

“Molly Mouse! You found her!” Which, what an identity crisis for a rabbit. What kind of name is that? Worse than Rubby-oh. Kids should be stopped from naming anything, I thought angrily, they are too dumb to guess the true and correct names for things. Parents too.

“Yes. That is correct. Something has come to light, ma’am.”

I swayed a little with the phone in my hand, feeling powerful and evil. For some reason I was putting on my one-hundred-year-old voice, the gruff one I used when I ordered pizzas on the phone and requested the Golden Years senior discount. I heard myself reciting in this false, ancient voice the address of the house where Saturday and Eric slept.

At school, I breathed easier — I had extricated myself from a tight spot. I had been in real danger, but the moment had passed. Eric Mutis was not ever going to be my friend. Twice I called Sara Jo to ask how Molly Mouse was doing; her dad had gone to the Mutis house and via some exchange of threats or dollars gotten her back. “Oh,” the girl squealed, “she’s doing beautiful, she loves being home!”

Eric Mutis’s eyes, locked inside the gray corrals of his Medicaid frames, now became a second, dewless glass. Whenever anybody called him Mucus or Mutant, and also when our teacher called him, simply, “Eric M.,” his face showed the pruny strain of a weight lifter, puckering inward and then collapsing, as if he were too weak to hoist up his own name off the mat. When we hit him behind the Science Building, his eyes were true blanks. When we finished with him they had looked like a doll’s eyes — open, staring, but packed solid with frost, like the blue Antarctic. Permafrost around each pupil. Two telescopes fixed on a lifeless planet. Nobody had understood Eric Mutis when he arrived late in October and then by springtime my friends and I had made him much less scrutable.

“Larry — ,” he started to say to me once in the bathroom, several weeks after they’d come for Saturday, but I wrung my hands in the sink disgustedly and walked out, following Mutant’s example and avoiding our faces in the mirror. We never looked at each other again, and then one day he was gone.

Mondo and I crossed the playground in a slow processional. “Jesus H., are we graduating from something?” I grumbled. “Mondo, are we getting married? Dude, let’s pick up the pace. Mondo?”

Mondo had stopped walking in the middle of the playground. One of the few pieces of playground equipment that had survived the city pogrom and the red foaming were the zoo pogos, the little giraffe and the donkey on a stick. Mondo sat on it; the pogo groaned beneath his weight. He turned and looked at me with the world’s most miserable face.

“I am not going.”

I said nothing.

“I am changing my mind,” he said, the little pogo donkey listing east and west beneath him. He leaned a fat hand on its head and broke its left ear off. “Goddamn it!” He stood up, as if some switch inside him had broken off. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to convince him of anything. I was glad, even, that he was afraid — I hadn’t known that you could feel so grateful to a friend, for living in fear with you. Fear was otherwise a very lonely place. We kept walking toward the scarecrow.

“This is stupid,” he mumbled. “This is crazy. No way did we make the scarecrow.”

“Let’s just get this done.”

An idea had come to me last night, after telling Mondo the story of Saturday. An offering to make, a way to satisfy whatever force was feeding on the doll of Eric. It wasn’t a good one, but the other option was to leave the scarecrow untouched down there until it disappeared.

“Get what done?” Mondo was muttering. “You won’t even tell me why you’re going down there…”

“Do you want to go home? Do you want to wait until he’s totally gone?”

Mondo shook his head. His chubby face looked tumescent and red, not unlike the playground foam, as if his cheeks were swelling preemptively to protect him. Far away a plane roared over Anthem, dismissing our whole city in twenty seconds.

“Shut up, Larry!” Mondo yelped near the duck pond, when a car backfired and I jumped and brushed the flabby skin of his arm. “Watch where you’re going!”

Our flashlight beams crossed and blinded one another. After this we did not talk. Night had fallen hours ago — I didn’t want to be interrupted by anyone. Nobody was around, not even the regular bums, but the traffic on I-12 roared reassuringly just behind the treeline, a constant reminder of the asphalt rivers and the lattice of lights and signs that led to our homes. Friendship Park looked one hundred percent different than it did in daylight. Now the clouds were blue and silver, and where the full moon shone, new colors seemed to float up around us everywhere — the rusty weeds on the duck pond looked tangerine, the pin oak bulged with purple veins.

“How’s it going tonight, Mutant?” Mondo asked in a nervous voice when we reached the oak. He chucked something into the Cone — the plaster donkey’s ear. It landed squarely on Eric’s back. This was all that was left of the doll of Eric Mutis, his last solid part. Something had drawn its delicate claws down the scarecrow’s back, and now there was no mistaking what the straw inside it actually was, where it had come from — it was rabbit bedding, I thought. Timothy, meadow, orchard. Pine straw. The same golden stuff I’d seen bagged that day in the Mute’s dark bedroom. I took a big breath; I wished that I could imitate the scarecrow and leap into the Cone, swim down to him, instead of crawling along the rock wall like a bug.

“It’s moving!” Mondo screamed. “It’s getting away.”

I almost screamed too, thinking he meant the doll. But he was pointing at my black knapsack, which I’d slouched against the oak: a little tumor bubble was percolating inside the canvas, pushing outward at the fabric. As we watched, the bag fell onto its side and began to slide away, inch by inch, the zipper twinkling in the moonlight as the pouch pushed over the roots.

“Oh, shit!” I grabbed the bag and slung it over my shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll explain later. You just hold the rope, bro. Please, Mondo?”

So Mondo, staring at me with real fear as if we’d never met, as if I’d only been impersonating his good friend Larry Rubio for all these years, helped me to tie the eighteen-meter phys ed rope to the oak and loop one end around my waist. It took almost forty minutes to lower myself into the Cone, but in fact my friends’ suspicions had prepared me for this descent — I had already imagined myself backing into the ravine. I stumbled once and let go of the rock wall, swinging out, but Mondo called down that it was OK, I was OK (and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the love I felt in that moment for Mondo Chu) — and then I was crouching, miraculously, on the mineral blue bottom of the Cone. The view above me I will never forget: the great oak sprawling over the ravine, fireflies dotting the lacunae between its frozen roots like tiny underworld lights. Much farther away, in the real sky, snakes of clouds wound ball round and came loose.

I crouched over the scarecrow’s torso, which at this moment could not have looked less like a scarecrow’s anything — if you didn’t notice the seam of straw, you might have thought it was a battered sofa cushion. Featureless and beige. I plucked up a green straw and felt a lurching sadness. Anybody with a mirror in his house knows the strangeness of meeting himself, his flaws, in light. This doll was almost gone, the boy original, Eric Mutis, was nowhere we could discover, and somehow this made me feel as if I had broken a mirror, missed my one chance to really know myself. I tried to resurrect Eric Mutis in my mind’s eye — the first Eric, the kid we’d almost killed — and failed. A face started to stutter together, shattered whitely away.

“You made it, Rubby!” Mondo called. But I hadn’t, yet. I unzipped my backpack. A little nose peeked out, a starburst of whiskers, followed by a white face, a white body. I dumped it sort of less ceremoniously than I had intended onto the relic of the scarecrow, where she landed and bounced with her front legs out. It wasn’t Saturday — I couldn’t steal Saturday back, I’d figured that would appease or solve nothing, but then this doll wasn’t the real Eric Mutis either. I’d bought this nameless dwarf rabbit for nineteen bucks at the mall pet store, where the Dijon-vested clerk had ogled me with true horror — “You do not want to buy a hutch for the animal, sir?” Many of the products that this pet store clerk sold seemed pretty antiliberation, cages and syringes, so I did not mention to him that I was going to free the rabbit.

Mondo was screaming something at me from the near sky, but I did not turn — I didn’t want to letmy guard down now. I kept my feet planted but sometimes I’d move my arms crazily, as if in imitation of the huge oak dancing its branches far above me. When I thought a bird was coming our way, I hollered it away. Shapes caught at the corner of my eye.Would the thing that had carried off the doll of Eric Mutis come for me now? I wondered. But I wasn’t afraid. I felt ready, strangely, for whatever was coming. The substitute rabbit, I saw with wonderment, was rooting its little head into the pale fibers sprouting out of the scarecrow; it went swimming into the straw, a reversal of its birth from my black book bag — first went with its furry ears, its bunching back, the big, velour skis of its feet. I was there, so no birds dove for it or anything. I was standing right there the whole time. I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

“La-arry!” I was aware of Mondo calling me faintly from the twinkling roots of the oak, lit up all wild by the underworld flies, but I knew I couldn’t turn or come up yet. Owls, I worried, city hawks. The rabbit bubbled serenely through the straw at my feet. Somewhere I think I must still be standing, just like that.

If Ever There Is Tomorrow; Chapter 2

A/N: Sorry this took forever, I had to physically beat the words out of the muses mouth for this, I tell you. Next one should be up quicker I swear. Anyway, tagging @fictober and @today-in-fic

[Chapter 1] [AO3]

2. Where The Wild Things Are

Fall 1971

The once green leaves have fallen and turned to rust. They rustle softly in the breeze, accompanying a symphony of cicadas as they mourn the end of summer. Mulder is ten years old today, and in typical Mulder fashion, had decided the only just way to celebrate hitting double digits was a trip to the gloomy forest. Dusk seeps in like the tide; Home-time has long since passed, but Mulder has a flashlight and a story to tell.

“Once,” he begins, voice dramatically hushed. Perched on the rotting trunk of a fallen tree, his young audience leans in, eager to catch his words. “In these very woods, lived a very old, very bad man. He lived in the very tops of the trees and from up there he could the whole world. He lived on rats and owls and, occasionally, lost little girls,”

The mid-October wind picks up forcefully, a chilling wail punctuating his words, the small group shivers and huddles ever closer. “One day there was this girl, she was nearly seven years old and had long brown hair, her parents were worried, because she went away one night and never came home, so they went looking in these woods all night, but when they finally found her she was dead, in a nest of bones on the top of the highest tree and the man had chewed her face right off…”

“Stop it, Fox! You’re scaring Samantha,”

Samantha had grown visibly pale. Scully, snapped out of her trance, puts a comforting arm around her, “Don’t worry,” she whispers in the other girl’s ear, “It’s only pretend,”

Mulder’s inner circle consisted of his sister, his best friend, and his best friend’s sister, who though quite fond of Mulder was even fonder of Samantha, with her braid-able hair and a mutual love for Barbie dolls which Dana, despite her greatest efforts, had never come to share. So it comes as no surprise when Melissa jumps to her defence.

“I think I’ll take her home, Danes,” she tells them, rising to her feet and dusting off her floral skirt.

“Aw, c’mon Missy, don’t be a killjoy,” Scully groans, but Samantha stands and throws her an apologetic smile, “It’s okay Dana, I’m kinda tired anyway,”

“Don’t stay out too late or mom will freak,” Melissa says with the proud authority only an older sibling could possess, before tugging the younger girl gently behind her, until the warm glow of her lantern fades into the distance and plunges the forest into black once again.

“Well, what do we do now?” Scully huffs. “Have I told you the one about the Jersey Devil, Scully?”

She rolls her eyes towards the moon. “Only like a billion times,”

“How about hide and seek?” he concedes, “Or are you afraid of the bad man too?”

They glance up at the twisted treetops concealing the glittering night, no monster in sight. “I’ll play with you, Mulder,” Scully smirks and quickly turns, “But you have to find me first!” she calls behind her as she darts off through the trees.

Mulder shuts his eyes and counts to ten.

Fall 1978

Dana hovers nervously on the fringe of the cafeteria, a plastic tray filled with questionable mac and cheese and neon green Jell-O held in an iron grip, for which she is quickly losing her appetite. This is the part she despises. catching people’s eyes, pretending to be interested, to be interesting, trying in vain to explain where she came from; everywhere and nowhere. She hates feigning a confidence which she so desperately lacked.

Dana’s tendency to overthink was new and overpowering. Somewhere along the way, in some school locker room or some sleepover where she was just a pity invite, she had lost the invulnerability of childhood, and let insecurity seep under her skin with every whisper and sideways glance, at every failed attempt to infiltrate friendships which had already been forged in the fires of early adolescence.

Her code-breaking docs squeak on the linoleum floor, she is painfully aware that she’s beginning to attract attention. She feels too small and too large all at once, somehow taking up too much space, yet not nearly enough.

That’s when she feels the hand on her back.

“Scully,” he all but whispers, “Can we talk?”

She trips over air as she recoils. Macaroni becomes airborne, half the room turns to stare. Dana’s face matches the ketchup splattered on the floor. “I don’t have anything to say to you,” She seethes. She had been avoiding him like the plague since she ran out of the principal’s office, thinking she’d be doing them both a favor by avoiding confrontation.

“Scully, I’m sorry, I just…” Mulder stammers, his gaze intense, mournful, nervous. What right did he have to be nervous? Anger overrides anxiety as years of dormant resentment bubbles to the surface and erupts like a volcano.

“Don’t call me that. You have no right to call me that, you can’t talk to me as if you know me, like we’re still friends. Friends write, Mulder! Friends talk to each other, friends acknowledge each other’s existence! I don’t care what you have to say, it’s too late for this, Mulder, I don’t want to talk to you or Samantha or anyone…”

She’s cut off by someone grabbing her wrist, pulling her roughly away from Mulder’s wounded expression, from the hundreds of eyes trained on the scene before them and into the girl’s dingy bathroom.

“Missy, I was handling it,”

“You weren’t handling shit, Dana. Fuck.” Her sister curses as she bolts the door and cracks open the window. “Why did you have to go and make a scene? It’s been hard enough on him already,”

Dana catches sight of herself in the mirror and quickly looks away. She already hates her features, they’re worse when twisted with rage. “Hard enough on him? What the fuck, Missy, who’s side are you on?”

Melissa sighs and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, putting one shakily to her mouth, “I knew I should have just told you,”

Dana is momentarily stunned. Her mom had made them promise that they would never smoke when her grandfather passed away, after years of sucking on cigars turned his blackened lungs to ash. She’d already broken that promise several times, but she hadn’t thought that her sister ever would, and for some reason, this fills her with unease.

“Told me what?” Her fingers fumble to strike the match, but she finally sparks a flame. After a long moment of silence, she speaks. “Dad made me swear not to tell you” Smoke billows from her lips, curling and dancing under the fluorescent light, poisoning the air with her poison words. “Samantha was taken, Dana. She was kidnapped, I guess, a few months after we left Massachusetts,”

The walls constrict and the world turns on its side. All Dana could focus on was the tears trailing down her sister’s cheeks, leaving track marks in her rouge, as the things she was telling her registered in her brain. “I guess they thought… How do you even explain that shit to an eight-year-old? What if we had stayed a bit longer? you practically lived there and…”

Dana remembers how to breathe around the same time she remembers how to speak. Oxygen feels like fire in her lungs, her fury burns in her throat. “And what?” she rasps, “What? you think it could have been me?”

“Dana, don’t…” her sister pleads.

“How could you even think to keep something like that from me? She was my friend too, Missy. Mulder was my friend and…”

Mulder. Shit.

Dana bursts out of the bathroom, throughout the crowded dining hall, conversations stall. Mulder is already gone.

Fall 1993

As a child, Scully had a recurring dream of being stuck in a museum overnight, the exhibits would come alive and start to speak. The Smithsonian at this moment was dead, as she stares at the Neanderthals behind the darkened glass, Darwin’s apes learning to walk, she wonders what they would say.

Nature had never come naturally to her. While it felt like practically all her friends were getting married, getting pregnant, getting mortgages, all she was getting was older. And then there’s Mulder.

She feels his lingering presence long before his reflection appears the glass.

“You always did have a knack for running away,” his voice echoes throughout the empty room, life amongst the ruins of the ancient and extinct.

“You’re one to talk, Mulder,” she bites back, feels him flinch, and immediately wants to stuff the words back in her mouth

“I didn’t mean…”

“I know what you meant,”

This was something they were still getting used to. Their dynamic was all new, yet all too familiar, a battle of wits in an instant turn into a hesitant dance. They compliment and contradict each other to the point that it was maddening. There had always been something about this man, and the boy he used to be, which sparked an insatiable curiosity, a hunger for the extraordinary, one that could never be satisfied by homily divorcees or besotted superiors to her eternal frustration.

“Are you going to let me look at that?” she softly breaks the silence, nodding to the fresh wound on Mulder’s ribs, which he was gingerly palming through his blazer.

“You just wanna see me with my shirt off,” he grunts, “You shouldn’t abuse your medical license for personal reasons, Scully,”

“It only seems fair after Bellefleur,” She allows her self a smirk

“You have some recently un-repressed memories you want to discuss?” He laughs humorlessly, their banter turning dry as it comes back to Samantha, as it would always come back to Samantha. Scully remembers listening to his regression tapes, seeing her picture in that file, how her heart hit the floor. The doe-eyed girl in a nightdress, the girl who had cried when other kids scraped their knees or stepped on ants. Scully can see the Samantha-shaped hole her absence left behind his eyes, and she can’t blame him at all. She gives up the attempt to lighten the mood and cuts to the chase.

“I know you believe she’s out there Mulder, I want to believe she’s alright too, but…“ she chooses her words carefully, “But I don’t want to see you keep getting hurt,”

The silence is deafening, she starts to think that the wax figures might break the silence before Mulder does, but then he hooks his fingers gently around hers and anchoring her gaze to his. “I just… need to find out, Scully,” he murmurs, “Even if that means doing it on my own,”

Scully studies Darwin’s early men and thinks of how far they’ve evolved, how far they still have to go. Maybe subconsciously she feels she owes it to the girl she once was or the girl she once knew, but she feels herself being drawn in deeper down the rabbit hole, drawn back to him. She takes a deep breath and squeezes his hand, answering his unspoken question.

“You won’t be alone,”

Set-of-thee-things story: Jasper with either 2) or 9) pretty pretty please?

I know it doesn’t seem like there’s much Jasper in this, but it circles back around to her, promise! :D 

THANK YOU FOR SENDING A PROMPT, FRIEND.

2: Tiles, clacking of high heels, herbal tea

By the time back-up arrives, Connie’s barricaded herself in the kitchen, crouched on top of an overturned soup pot in the manner of a particularly uncomfortable bird sitting in a nest much too small for it, knobby knees propped up by her armpits. She’s made a helmet out of a colander, and she’s using the Rose Quartz sword to pin the pot handle to the kitchen tile, balancing herself with it. Grim determination makes steel out of her face, her aquiline profile turned to a sharp cleaver’s edge.

“Hurry,” she says to them without preamble, as soon as Steven lets them in, calling, Connie, it’s us, we came as fast - “It hasn’t reformed yet, but I don’t know if my defenses will hold!”

“Never fear,” Peridot shouts in answer. “The Crystal Gems are here!”

She barrels through the door ahead of the others - the effect only slightly spoiled by the fact she’s on the wrong side of the kitchen island, which she isn’t tall enough to see over. 

Connie gingerly unfolds herself, keeping her sword point trained on the pot as her weight leaves it.

In one smooth movement, Peridot whips it off the ground, revealing a scaly honey-gold gem underneath, which Steven punts across the tile to Lapis, who claps her hands together and bubbles it.

A pause, and everybody expels the breath they’ve been holding, all at once.

“Well, I was expecting more of a fight,” Peridot says acerbically. 

“It was hiding under the shoes in my mom’s closet,” Connie tells them, fetching the sheath from the other room and returning, sliding the sword home and buckling it around her waist. “I mean, okay, they’re mostly my dad’s shoes since he needs to have every pair he’s ever owned in black and brown, it’s a thing with him, and Mom usually keeps hers by the door. But she needed her second-best pair of heels today, so she opened up the closet and started digging - fortunately, I was there, I don’t want to think about what would have happened if I wasn’t - ”

Steven looks alarmed. “Is Dr. Maheswaran all right?”

“Yes, she’s fine - she got it on the snout with a loafer - ”

“- looks like a Topaz,” Lapis comments, studying the gem through the dark membrane of her bubble. Even obscured, it’s obviously encrusted with calcified, bone-white growths. “Or. She was a Topaz.”

“- but then I got her and Dad to leave it to me.”

“Wow, Connie,” Steven goes, round-eyed. “You really vanquished a corrupted gem all by yourself?”

“Oh, no, I called you immediately, so I knew I wasn’t going to be all by myself, it was just…”

She trails off, and then peeks out from under the rim of the colander, suddenly looking uncertain, like she doesn’t know whether to be embarrassed or proud. 

“Yeah,” she says, and slowly starts to grin. “I guess I did.”

“- only in Yellow Court, but that didn’t change, I’ve never met a Topaz who’d turn down the chance to poke their nose into other people’s business,” Peridot’s saying dryly, studying the gem in Lapis’s hands. “So if she wasn’t in a closet with the Connie’s human feet-shirts, she would have been in someone else’s trash can.”

She draws breath, revving up to full-blown lecture mode, and then suddenly the line of her mouth snags.

Lapis glances up. “What is it?”

“Steven … ” Peridot calls, cutting through Steven’s rapt preoccupation with Connie’s tale. "Can you take a look at this?“

Obediently, he circles around the kitchen island. Peridot grabs his arm, and the two of them have a hasty whispered discussion behind cupped hands. Lapis waits, looking patient and bemused, as they surface to peer intently at the bubbled corrupted Topaz.

“Yeah,” Steven says, after a long pause. “That’s her.”

“That’s the third one we’ve found, just in this area!” Peridot flings her arms up. “Do you know how far they had to travel to get all the way back here, and what for?”

“We don’t really know why corrupted gems do what they do,” Steven answers. “And the Gems have been trying to figure them out for thousands of years.”

Connie hops up onto the counter, rearranging the sword as it bangs against the cabinets. The colander wobbles on top of her head.

“Where did she come from?” she asks.

Steven and Peridot exchange a look.

“Beta Kindergarten,” Peridot answers, simultaneous with Steven’s, “Arizona.”

Ding! Connie’s eyebrows spring up like toast.

“Oh,” she says, uncomfortably.

“What kind of place is that? Arizona?” Lapis interjects, letting the bubble float over her head and frowning up at it, like she’s trying to imagine why a gem would hike all the way to Delmarva if they didn’t have to.

“I don’t think you can really count Arizona as a place, ma’am,” Connie deadpans.

Lapis nods, like that makes perfect sense. “Like Jersey.”

“OKAY WELL,” comes out of Peridot at sudden top volume, and she edges towards Lapis and the bubble in her best attempt at casual, which lands three degrees off anything remotely resembling such. “We should send her to the temple and then move on with our day! The Connie can tell us all about how she managed to poof her - “

Lapis’s expression changes.

She snatches the bubble and holds it high out of Peridot’s reach.

“No fair!” Peridot complains, hopping on tiptoes.

“What aren’t you telling me?” And before anybody can say anything, a dawning suspicion steals across Lapis’s face, like she’s starting to see the giant, woman-sized shape paper-punched out of the conversation.

Her voice comes out cold. “What was she doing with them?”

Steven, Peridot, and Connie all flinch.

Peridot recovers first, and forces out a deliberate, offhanded laugh. 

“Oh, the usual crazy stuff,” she says with a shrug, ignoring Steven’s hissed, Peridot, we don’t say that word! “Collecting them, keeping them trapped in cages, some drivel about prisoners and purging, I wasn’t paying attention - I was busy and my powers were needed,” she buffs her nails on her uniform. “Ehh, I think she mostly she was taking her own inadequacies out on gems who couldn’t fight back, because it felt good.”

Lapis’s face goes very still.

Connie and Steven exchange miserable looks.

“Oh!” Peridot continues with a snap of her fingers, oblivious. She looks over at them. “But she didn’t start in Beta, did she? You said that after the mountains, she tried keeping those corrupted jaspers in the ocean, right? That’s where you fought her?”

Usually happy to recount how Amethyst and Stevonnie rescued one corrupted jasper from imprisonment and drove off Jasper herself, Steven now looks like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

His head turtle-ducks towards his collar. “Peridot …”

Her brows pinch together. “You’re using the ‘Peridot, you’re being insensitive’ voice. Why are you doing that? She’s bubbled - it’s not like she has any feelings in that state - she doesn’t care what we say!”

With an almost crystalline snap of something frozen forced into movement, Lapis releases the bubble and taps the top of it. It vanishes.

She leaves the kitchen without a word.

“What’d I say?” Peridot blinks, and then with dawning concern, “No, wait, doesn’t matter. I’m going to see if she’s all right.”

The door closes behind her, and at last, reluctantly, Connie takes off her colander helmet.

Steven makes a face at her. “Sorry, Connie.”

This should have been your day, is implied. Connie shrugs and says, “You better go after them.”

*

Peridot was right about one thing, though:

The corrupted Topaz is the third gem recently bubbled that they recognized from Beta Kindergarten, and they didn’t have a clue what could prompt a corrupted gem to trek all the way back to Delmarva from Arizona.

Honestly, without Lapis or Peridot, Steven wouldn’t even know that the gem was a Topaz - and neither would Amethyst, since any gems outside their immediate family are as unfamiliar to her as they are to him. When it comes up, Garnet and Pearl just call them corrupted - but he thinks that has more to do with grief than ignorance; if Garnet and Pearl avoid calling corrupted gems by their names, then they don’t have to confront the likelihood that they’ll look at a monster and see a friend.

Lapis and Peridot, while not as straight-up callous as they used to be, don’t suffer the same sentimentality.

Still, Peridot’s suggestion - put forth some two weeks after the Topaz incident - is met with an immediate icy silence.

“Bait,” Garnet echoes, a single reproving syllable.

Undaunted, Peridot pounds her fist into the palm of her other hand.

“Yeah!” she says. “We unbubble one of the Beta gems we have and see if that’s the common denominator.”

Steven glances back and forth, trying to slurp quietly from the top of his mug to see if his tea’s cooled enough to drink yet. He grimaces at the taste: Connie has a five-minute presentation on why herbal teas are good for you, but do they have to taste like suffering?

“That’s not much to go on,” Pearl points out reasonably.

“Sure it is! If we just - ”

“I can kinda see Perrie’s point,” Amethyst says, and when Garnet and Pearl both turn to look at her, she shrugs. “Nobody likes to be alone, guys. Not permanently. You all remember Centipeedle? If all the Beta gems did used to be part of Jasper’s army thousands of years ago - assuming she wasn’t just crazy - “

“Amethyst,” Steven complains.

“ - then they’re gonna wanna be together. Like soldiers or whatever.” She spreads her hands, like, see? “This is our chance to round them all up.”

It’s a testament, Steven thinks, to how far they’ve all come that where once Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl would have balked at the idea of attracting any kind of attention from corrupted gems, now they’re confident that that between five weaponized gems and one Steven, not to mention Connie and Lion, they’ve got a good chance at handling whatever’s thrown at them. At least from this planet.

Garnet’s mouth makes the faintest upward twitch.

“Let’s try it.”

*

BAM!

The screen door bangs off its hinges, and Peridot comes barreling in already yelling.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake! You’ve got to come quick!”

With a low vrrrrrBMM, Garnet’s gauntlets crystalize over her hands. This, more than Peridot’s histrionics - which are often caused by other such distresses as an unpaid Netflix bill interrupting her streaming or some unknown species of spider hiding in her paint cans, convincing her it’s an invasion (”the more legs it has, the more likely it is to murder us, Steven!”) - alarm Amethyst and Pearl, who also come to attention.

“What’s wrong?” Garnet says.

“It’s Lapis! She went into the temple, and she - “

The tension in the room ratchets up so suddenly she stumbles, and frowns at them. Behind the counter, Steven sighs.

In his opinion, the civility that exists between the Crystal Gems and Lapis is nothing short of a miracle. It’s one thing to continually tell Lapis that the Gems never meant to keep her imprisoned, and another thing for Lapis to break a 5000-year habit of loathing and obsessing over how the Crystal Gems are cruel, heartless, trophy-hunting monsters. These days, Steven just shrugs off the ocean-theft, near-murder incident - so she had a villain moment, who hasn’t had a villain moment, they’re going to make a catchy musical number about it one day if Dad hasn’t already - but he sees the exact conclusion Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl leap to with that declaration alone.

“Guys - “ he starts reprovingly, but Garnet speaks over him.

“Where is she?”

“Uh.” Wrong-footed, Peridot blinks, then remembers what she was trying to say. “At the Greg-dad’s alternate housing facility?”

Whatever the Gems were expecting to hear, this wasn’t it.

“She’s where?” Pearl says blankly.

*

It’s easy to tell which storage unit belongs to Mr. Universe’s - even if it wasn’t the only one that’s open, the deep blue light pooling on the asphalt would be a dead giveaway.

At the sight, Peridot starts to dash forward, but Amethyst grabs her shoulder in a restraining hold, shaking her head, and so Peridot settles for cupping her hands around her mouth and calling out, sotto voice, “Lapis! Lapis, it’s okay, I’m here!”

“Shh,” comes the reply, and something in the storage unit makes a distinct whumph!

Pearl tightens her grip on her spear, expression grim.

Unable to stand it, Steven pushes forward until he’s almost at the garage door, wrapping an arm around Garnet’s leg and peering out.

At first, all he can make out is a mass of orange and white. Crouched in front of all that bulk, Lapis seems laughably small. The only light comes from the streetlight several paces back and Lapis’s gem, illuminating the edges of everything in a ominous, midnight glow. Somewhere back in the dark, something breathes.

Peridot speaks first.

“Lapis.” Her tone is tense, her hands fisted at her sides. “We could have used any of the Beta gems, you didn’t - “

“No,” Lapis says mildly.

At the sound of her voice, the monster shifts her chin along the cement, and Steven abruptly realizes what they’re looking at.

The corrupted gem that had once been Jasper lies on her belly in front of Lapis, her head lowered until it’s mere inches away from Lapis’s outstretched palm, the way Steven once saw the Pizza’s old dog behave with Nanefua, sitting poised and obedient as she held a piece of fish in front of its nose and made it wait. Jasper holds so still she’s almost shaking, a ripple of movement under her fur and the sickly, conical growths that encrust her head and shoulders. Steven can’t tell where her eyes are, but he can just make out her nostrils, flaring open and shut under the heel of Lapis’s hand.

She’s so big the sound of her breathing takes up the entire unit, an inhaling-exhaling rush like being trapped inside a seashell.

“You’re right, Peridot,” Lapis says.

The Peridot of a year ago might have brushed that off with a casual, I know, but now she narrows her eyes and says, “about … what?” with trepidation.

“They’ll hunt her down. All the Beta gems - she’s their common denominator. So if you’re right, if she was doing to them exactly what I did to her - “

“Lapis, no - “ Steven tries, loudly.

The next inhale comes as a low, warning growl, and his mouth snaps shut of its own accord.

“- then they’ll come to where she is.” Her calm and carefully moderated tone now drops, and Jasper’s chin inches along the cement like she’s trying to follow it. “They’ve been alone and frightened for thousands of years. They’ll leap at anything that isn’t that, even if it hurts. And then we can help them.”

“You can’t leave her unbubbled, Lapis,” Garnet says firmly.

“She won’t hurt me.”

Whumph! comes again, and Steven has a strange moment when he realizes that it’s Jasper’s tail, thumping against whatever it is his dad’s got back there. 

Is she … she’s wagging her tail! he thinks with sudden glee, and clamps down hard on the urge to smile. It’s not appropriate for the situation, Steven.

“Or you,” Lapis adds, like it’s an afterthought.

Garnet, Pearl, and Amethyst all exchange skeptical looks; absolutely nothing in their experience says Jasper’s ever tried to do anything but hurt them.

“You can’t know that,” Garnet insists. “Corrupted gems aren’t something to play around with. They’re a danger to themselves and to the lifeforms on this planet.”

“Not if she stays in here!”

A pause, and then all eyes swivel to Steven.

“Well,” he continues, carefully releasing his hold on Garnet, “it doesn’t have to be here, here, it’s probably not fair to keep her in a doghouse. Especially in the dark! But we’ve got something, don’t we? Like the Centipeedles on their ship!”

“Steven - “ Pearl clicks her tongue. “That’s different. They’re with their crew, that’s - “

Lapis stands and abruptly pivots to face them.

“What do you think I am?” Her voice is so flat you could skate across it.

Garnet’s mouth skews like she tastes something unpleasant.

Lapis meets her gaze and doesn’t flinch. She keeps one hand extended behind her, palm flat - Jasper stays where she is.

Steven wonders if they can tell how much it costs Lapis to confess that - that doing to Jasper what Homeworld had done to her, that Jasper in turn did to other gems, made Jasper hers in an unfortunate kind of way, the kind that takes bravery to admit to - but before he can say anything, Peridot jumps in, her expression apprehensive - this whole thing had been her idea. “And - if Amethyst’s right and the corrupted gems from Beta were part of her army, thousands of years ago, that means she’s their crew, too, right?”

Garnet shakes her head. “You’re asking us to let you release a proven enemy, without - “

“She won’t hurt us,” Lapis says again.

“Why not?”

And the answer, when it comes, surprises them all:

“Because of Steven,” says Amethyst.

Everyone looks at her. She looks at Lapis.

Then she folds her arms, looking grumpy. “Well? Am I wrong?”

A beat, and Lapis turns, once more crouching down in front of Jasper, who whoofs out a breath, thumping her tail in a manner that’s almost contented.

“You’re the Crystal Gems,” she says. “You’ve lived with Steven all his life, so you don’t know what it’s like, being so rock bottom you’ve got nothing else. There’s nowhere to go at that point - except there is, because the one thing you’ve got left is being what Steven sees when he looks at you.”

Steven starts to fidget, uncomfortable, but when he steals a look around, he sees Peridot nodding with perfect understanding, and - to his shock - Amethyst, too.

But how can I see something in you if it’s not already there! he wants to protest. You’re the ones who are so special, not me, and all I want is to show you that!

“The plan will work,” Lapis says confidently.

She sneaks a glance in Steven’s direction, tucking a stray fringe of hair away from her face, and he’s reminded suddenly of the shyness in Connie’s expression the day she vanquished the snooping Topaz without their help: I did good, right?

A hand descends, flattening the hair on top of his head: Garnet, conceding.

“We’ll try it once,” she allows, and Pearl heaves her this is a bad idea and I’m going to say I told you so later sigh. “And then we’ll decide where to go from there.”

The storage unit fills as Jasper draws in a huge breath and releases it gustily.

Then she tips her head forward, just barely, just enough that her nose bumps up under the palm of Lapis’s hand.

Lapis smiles.

Chapter 2 already?!

Wow you guys. I could never have expected such an overwhelmingly positive response to Four-Legged Fiend. You guys seriously are the best. I’d had about two or three chapters planned out already, so expect the delays to start popping up after chapter 3. But who knows? I certainly don’t. :)

Also I absolutely based the first two chapters on my mom’s experience with her two newest kittens, Dipper and Mabel. She “fostered” them for about thirty minutes before deciding to adopt them, then spent about two weeks trying to convince my dad to let her keep them. He resisted up until Christmas.

So I guess, in a way, I have them to thank for the beginning of this story.

This is them, by the way.

And, of course, thanks to the lovely @ask-thevagabond for giving me the idea in the first place. :D

Anyway, I finished chapter 2 quicker than expected, so I’m putting it up now. As always, you can read it here or beneath the cut. Enjoy!

Chapter 2: Another Man’s Treasure

“I told you, we’re not keeping that thing!”

Jack scowled at Geoff and scooped up the pup. “He is not a thing.”

Geoff crossed his arms. “Fine. We’re not keeping him. Is that better?”

Jack huffed and left the living room. They’d returned to their home two days ago when their contacts sounded the all-clear. As it turned out, the pup was indeed old enough to eat solid food, and he’d turned into a little vacuum cleaner. Jack swore the little thing had sucked down more than double his weight in food in a matter of hours, and he ran out of canned food only two days into their stay. With his belly full, the pup grew much bolder. He stopped hiding in Jack’s lap and explored their little hideout from top to bottom. Geoff spent the whole time eyeing the pup balefully and grumbling under his breath.

He nearly flipped his lid when the pup squatted in the corner and peed all over the power cables. It took Jack nearly fifteen minutes to remind Geoff that the pup wasn’t paper trained and he didn’t deliberately target the cables to piss him off. His partner eventually relented with the promise that Jack would keep the pup out of trouble for the remainder of their stay, and would find him a good home when they returned to Los Santos.

Jack had yet to make good on the second part of that promise.

Truth be told, the pup had won him over the moment he saw that tiny skull-face peeping up at him from the depths of the garbage bag. Jack couldn’t even imagine getting rid of the little pup now. Hell, the first thing he did after getting back to Los Santos was read up on dogs and raid the nearest pet store. There was now a box in his room stuffed to the brim with dog toys, a shelf full of wet puppy food in the kitchen, a ceramic bowl covered in dog prints in the sink, several dog beds strewn about the apartment, a leash hanging beside the door, pee pads in every corner he thought the pup could reach, and an entire slew of tiny shirts and collars residing in his dresser drawer. He’d blown a sizable chunk of his cut from the heist on puppy stuff.

He didn’t regret it one bit. Especially not when he saw the little black and white baby curled up in a corner of the giant dog bed the cashier had assured him the pup would grow into one day.

God, he already had eight billion puppy photos on his phone. He was so fucked.

Jack chuckled and waltzed into the kitchen. Most of the articles he’d found online said the pup needed plenty of food to grow into a good, strong dog. The pup ate like it was going out of style, and Jack swore he’d already doubled in size. He wiggled in Jack’s arms and pushed his wet nose into his beard. His little stick of a tail wagged as soon as Jack put him on the counter and set his bowl beside him. He had half a can left over from the pup’s breakfast, which he quickly retrieved from the fridge. The pup yipped and scampered around on the counter.

“It’s coming, it’s coming.” Jack dumped the remainder of the can into the bowl, and it was immediately beset by the pup. He smacked and slurped at the food, and little bits of processed meat flew out and spattered over the counter. Jack beamed and brushed his fingers over the pup’s back. He currently wore a shirt that proclaimed I’m a Bad Boy, with a skull and crossbones beneath the text. Out of the twenty-odd shirts Jack had bought, it was currently his favorite.

“Don’t tell me you’re feeding him on the counter again.” Geoff bumped past Jack and pulled a beer from the fridge. He closed the door, retrieved a bottle opener from the utensil drawer, and popped the top off. “We make shit on that counter.”

“You know Clorox exists, right?”

“I don’t fucking care.” He chugged half the beer in one go and burped. “The fuck is he wearing, anyway?”

“A shirt?”

“Why the fuck is he wearing a shirt?”

“Cause it’s funny and he doesn’t seem to mind?”

“Who does that?!”

“Literally everyone who owns a dog?”

Geoff shook his head. “It’s weird.”

“Is it any weirder than anything else people do for their pets?”

“You know what? I’ll tell you what’s weird. His fucking face. His fucking face is weird.” Geoff pointed at the pup. “That skull face isn’t natural. Little freak.”

“Really, Geoff? Really?” Jack patted the pup’s back a few times. “You’re not a freak, are you?”

“Number nine on Los Santos’s most wanted list, everybody.”

The pup polished off his lunch and looked up at Jack. His head tilted to one side. “That’s all you’re getting until dinnertime, champ.” He put the bowl in the sink and picked the pup up again. “How about you and me go for a walk?”

“How about you and him find him a home that isn’t here?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Says the guy who bought a dog fucking t-shirts!” Geoff tramped back into the living room and flopped into a worn armchair. “I’ll find one myself if you don’t.”

“Sure. Once you convince some assholes to come work for us, you can find the pup a home.”

Geoff groaned and let his head flop back against the aging leather. “Don’t fucking remind me. I’m talking to this guy up in New Jersey right now, but it’s like pulling fucking teeth.”

“Why are you talking to a guy in New Jersey?” Jack pulled the leash and a tiny blue harness off the peg next to the front door and set the pup on the ground. He growled and ran over to Geoff’s ottoman. “Goddammit, I know you don’t like it, but you have to wear a leash when we go out!”

“He claims he’s the best demo guy in the business, and he’s job hunting at the moment, and he’s interested in joining a proper crew.”

“So what’s the problem?” Jack managed to catch the pup and wrestled him into his harness. The pup growled and spent several minutes trying to bite the straps on his shoulders.

“The problem? The problem is we’re in Los Santos and he’s in fucking New Jersey and he’s not sure he wants to relocate two thousand goddamn miles away from home!” Geoff sipped at his beer and sighed. “I’m trying to negotiate with him, but it’s looking unlikely.”

“Then find someone closer to home.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why not? Sounds pretty fucking simple to me.” Jack clipped the leash onto the harness and opened the door. “We’ll be back in about fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Whatever.”

The pup resisted being led by the leash right up until they left the apartment. His little ears stood up straight and he immediately ran in front of Jack. He sniffed the slimy-looking sidewalk and darted over to a beer can with several cigarette butts sticking out of the aperture. Jack tugged on the leash and pulled the pup away from the debris. God, this apartment was a shithole.

While they walked, Jack mused on what Geoff had said earlier. He’d talked for several years now about forming a proper crew, but it was only when they got back from their most recent heist that he’d seriously started looking into recruiting. Apparently he’d been pinching his pennies for quite some time so he could hire what he called “the best in the business.” He promised Jack that things would be better once they got some guys. No more squatting in holes. No more fearing the LSPD would come knocking on their door. No more drug running in the middle of the night. No more kowtowing to greasy-looking shitheads who were half as old as them. They would be the ones calling the shots. They would be the ones on top. They’d sit back sipping champagne and laugh while their underlings did the dirty work.

At least, that was Geoff’s dream. God only knew how it would turn out.

Most of the fifteen minute walk went by uneventfully, save for a few moments where Jack had to keep the pup from exploring upturned trash cans and abandoned buildings. He trotted along happily enough, which left Jack to his contemplating. Soon enough it was over and they were heading home. The little pup climbed a set of three stairs leading up into the parking lot all by himself, and looked down on Jack with what almost looked like pride.

“Good job, buddy!” The pup’s tail wagged, and warmth settled over the criminal’s insides. He scooped the pup up and carried him back into the apartment.

Geoff now snored in his worn chair, laptop still resting on his knees, though it looked dangerously close to smashing on the floor. Jack sighed and put the laptop on the coffee table. “So much for that crew thing,” he muttered. The pup looked at him and tilted his head. “C’mon, buddy, let’s go take a nap.”

When Jack woke up, the pup was not in his bed. A moment of panic flashed through him and he jumped out of his bed. He ran into the living room and glanced around several times before finally catching sight of the pup. Relief washed over him, and then he let out a soft laugh.

The pup had somehow crawled onto Geoff’s lap and fallen asleep with his legs stretched out and his muzzle buried in his partner’s knees. His sock-clad back leg occasionally twitched in time with an unseen dream, and the pup let out a tiny grunt every so often.

Jack pulled out his phone and took a few pictures. The shutter sound eventually caused Geoff to stir. He let out an incomprehensible grumble and looked down into his lap. His shoulders stiffened, and he glared at Jack.

“Don’t…fucking…say…anything.”

“Say what? I didn’t put him there.”

“This…this changes nothing! He’ll be out of here by Thursday, I swear to fucking Christ!” The pup rolled over and showed Geoff his black and white underbelly. His front paws folded up against his chest and his back paws stretched out into Geoff’s lap. His mouth opened ever so slightly, revealing the tip of a bright pink tongue. Jack’s partner swallowed and tore his eyes away. “Friday. But that’s my final offer.”

“How can you look at that and still want to give him away?”

“I don’t! I mean, I do, but – shut up. Just shut up.” Geoff shifted in his chair until he was able to grab his laptop and set it on the arm of the chair. “I’m looking up good homes for puppies right now, I swear to fucking Christ.”

“Sure you are.” Jack meandered over to the kitchen and got a beer and a bag of chips for himself. When he walked by Geoff he glanced over at his laptop screen and saw an Amazon store page full of dogs wearing little suits and hats. “We’re not keeping him, huh?”

“What? Uh, it’s not what it looks like!” Geoff alt-tabbed out of the page and quickly googled ‘dog homes’. He only became more frantic when the results were all dog houses. “I, uh, you know, guy’s gotta look his best if he’s gonna win his new family over, right?”

“Uh huh. Sure.”

“Seriously. I want him to make a good first impression.”

The pup stirred and yawned widely. His tiny white teeth flashed in the light. He rolled onto his paws, shook himself and jumped onto the arm of the chair. He snuffled at the dogs on the screen and looked up at Geoff.

“Yeah? Like what you see, buddy?” Geoff rubbed between the pup’s ears. “I bet this blue deal would bring out your eyes.” He pointed at something on the screen. The pup licked his finger and wagged his tail. “We’ll make you look handsome as fuck.”

Jack just watched the scene play out like it was a movie. He hid his smile behind his beer bottle and munched on chips. The ‘staunch resistance’ looked like it would peter out soon enough.

“‘We’re not keeping him’ my ass,” he said under his breath.

“What was that?” Geoff looked up from the screen. His fingers still rested on the pup’s back.

“Nothing.”

“Seriously? This is so stupid.”

“He needs a name, dude.”

Jack looked over at the opposite wall and raised his eyebrows. “On that, we agree, sure. But this is your best solution?”

The pup’s name had been a topic of heated debate all week long. Both of them had entire lists of wonderful names that neither of them agreed on. Then, that Wednesday morning, right after Jack had finished a rather difficult carjacking job, Geoff pulled him into the living room and told him all their name troubles were solved. His ‘solution’ involved covering their dartboard in over a dozen Post-It notes with names scrawled on them in Sharpie. One toss of a dart would finally end their week long debate.

“Look, it was either this or drawing names from a hat. If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

“Nope. This is all you.” The pup ran toward them and sat down at Jack’s feet. He bent down and scooped him up, smiling when the pup snuffled at his cheek. “Looks like you’ll finally get a name now, if Geoff ever throws the damn dart.”

“I’m working on it!” Geoff picked up a red-fletched dart, which he claimed was his lucky dart, closed one eye, and cocked it over his shoulder. “Okay…aiming for Skeletor…really…feeling…Skeletor.”

“For the last time, we’re not naming him Skeletor.”

“Yeah? When this dart lands on Skeletor, you’re gonna look real stupid. Like…right now!” Geoff stepped forward and threw the dart. It thunked solidly into the Post-It note directly below the ‘Skeletor’ note. “Fuck.”

“Like I said, we’re not naming him Skeletor.” Jack walked forward and pulled the dart out of the board.

“That, uh, that was a misfire. That means I get a retry.”

“What – no you don’t get a retry! You said one shot would decide this! That was your one shot! So we’re naming him…” Jack grabbed the Post-It note and glanced at it. “Ryan. We’re naming him Ryan.”

“Oh my God, that’s the most boring name in the universe,” said Geoff. “I still say we should go for Skeletor.”

“Well, what do you think?” Jack looked at the pup in his arms. He gazed solemnly back at him. “You think Ryan’s a good name?” The pup tilted his head, and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. “Ryan it is then.”

Geoff glared at the faded marks on the red dart. “Traitor.”

Jack burst out laughing. The pup – now Ryan, he supposed – wiggled in his arms and let out a yip.

“Don’t get too excited, Ryan. Next up is your vet appointment.”

Ryan whined and ducked his head into Jack’s arm.