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shoto-chann · 1 month

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Hi there! I've been reading your stories for a while, and they're absolutely adorable 😍 if you're taking requests, and since you're writing for HoO, I wanted to request a lee! Leo and ler! Piper or Jason or any of the Seven tickling the shit out of him for pulling nonstop pranks on April Fool's. Thank you so much hehe

This idea sounds absolutely beautiful! I finally get to write for my favorite book series! My Percy Jackson Era has started! There seriously needs to be more PJO/HoO tickle fics out there with characters like Leo, Frank, Hazel, or any other characters, but I'm fine with any cause they're all so wonderful. Here ya go, friend 😁😁

There's Always A Limit

Heroes of Olympus

Lee! Leo

Ler! Percy, Annabeth, Jason, Piper, Frank, Hazel

Description: Leo keeps pulling April Fool's pranks on everyone, and after daring to get Annabeth, she and the rest of the Seven teach him why he shouldn't test people's patience

*Warning: Contains tickling

Leo silently giggled to himself as he finished setting up his next prank. "This is gonna be so good," He said quietly as he tiptoed out of the room he was in. Turning to the semi opened door, he waited for that person to wake up. He didn't have to wait long cause that person woke up five seconds later, rubbed the sleep out of their eyes, and screamed bloody murder. Leo laughed out loud and entered the room, witnessing Annabeth screaming and crawling away from what appeared to be the scariest thing in the world: spiders. Annabeth's eyes turned to Leo as she trembled in the corner. "LEO! KILL THEM! KILL THEM!" She screamed. "PERCY! PERCY!" "April Fools!" Leo said as he fell to the floor, cackling. He picked up one of the spiders and showed it to Annabeth, who only screamed louder. "Calm down, they're not real spiders" Leo said as he revealed what it actually was. "It's just paper, Annie. Oh, I can't believe I got you. Everyone said it was impossible, but I just proved them wrong. Coach Hedge, better pay up!" Leo said as he bolted out of the room with a chuckle and an evil smirk.

Later, everyone except Leo met up around the dining hall. Unfortunately, everyone had fallen victim to Leo's pranks. Percy's food was dyed red, which made Percy cry. Jason, who hardly got any sleep, was holding a now destroyed alarm clock that went off and played Jason's least favorite song at random times. Piper's wardrobe was swapped out with fancy and elegant clothing, something she hated with a passion. Frank's face was written in marker with the message saying "Leo Da Best," and Hazel had fake minerals laying around her room and around other people's rooms, scaring her almost to death. But the only one who was the most angry was Annabeth. To say she was pissed would be an understatement. One look at her made the Underworld feel like a tropical vacation. "I'm going to kill Valdez," Annabeth said through gritted teeth. "I'm not sure we should go that far," Jason said. "Don't get me wrong, I feel like flinging him off the ship and blasting him with lightning, but we should-" "I want to hurl hurricanes at him" Percy said angrily. "Maybe I can charmspeak him into jumping off the ship as it flies." "Maybe I should throw a gold bar in his face." "I can shoot him in his legs." Everyone started naming things they could (and wanted to) do to Leo for his pranks, and it was starting to get out of control. "EVERYBODY, SHUT UP!" Annabeth shouted. Everyone immediately stopped talking with fear that Annabeth might hurt them instead. "Look, we all want to hurt Leo, but there's a better way to deal with him besides breaking his bones and killing him" Annabeth said. "What do you have in mind, Wise Girl?" Percy asked. "Glad you asked, Seaweed Brain. I'll demonstrate. Get up here." Percy hesitated to move, but he did as he was told and walked up to Annabeth, who immediately judo flipped him onto his back and tickled his belly button without mercy. "GAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! AHAHAHANABEHEHEHETH! WHYHYHY!?" "This is for not coming to help me when Leo put fake spiders in my room." Annabeth said as she continued her assault for another twenty seconds before letting Percy go. "And just because I needed to let off a little steam," She said as she kissed Percy on the cheek. Annabeth stood up and sighed. "Everyone get what I mean now?" Everyone nodded at the idea of teaching Leo a thing or two.

Later that day, Leo was rummaging around for more materials he could use to get another couple of pranks in. He had the brilliant idea that involved fake snakes and a voice changer. He had almost finished creating his voice changer when all of a sudden Piper came in. "Leo, that big angry bird is back." Leo looked up at Piper. "Really?! Finally, I get to pay that stupid bird back for taking my food!" Leo got down and rushed out to the main hall to ready the weapons, only to find the bird inside and resting on a table. Leo locked eyes with the bird and smirked. "Ready to get turned into dinner, you stupid bird?" He stepped closer to the bird, but before he could make a move, the bird flew at Leo full speed. Leo was about to catch the bird, but was surprised when the bird grew arms and legs and was reaching out to-

"What the-" Leo was tackled down by what was now an angry looking Frank. Frank pinned him to the ground with one hand, his eyes looming over Leo with hatred and a small hint of a smirk. "What was that for, dude?! You almost gave me a heart attack!" Leo exclaimed. "Oh no, the horror," said Annabeth with an annoyed yet satisfied sarcastic tone. She and the other demigods walked in behind her and approached Leo. "Guys, w-what's with the sudden-" "So you think it's funny to prank everyone here?" Annabeth asked in a demanding tone. "Well...yeah. It's April Fools Day. How can I just pass this opportunity up?" Annabeth glared at him, but it wasn't her usual annoyed or angry glare. She had a smirk on her face. Leo was even more afraid of this Annabeth than angry mom Annabeth. "Well, Valdez, you have to be punished for what toy did to everyone." Everyone had already positioned themselves next to Leo, which made him a little nervous. "L-Look, we can talk about this like civil people hehehere" Leo giggled nervously. "It's a little too late for talking" Annabeth said. "I wonder how quickly you can hit your limit."

"Please, Annie-" "Only I get to call her that!" Percy said as he started tickling Leo's hips. Leo bucked his hips as he giggled loudly. Soon, Jason joined in and tickled his sides, Piper went for his ribs, Annabeth and Hazel targeted his feet, and Frank just held him down with his arms above his head. Leo was cackling right off the bat with 10 hands tickling almost every spot. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HEHEHEHE! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! GUHUHUHUYS, STAHAHAHAP! THIHIHIS IHIS TOO MUHUHUCH!" Leo begged. The others just ignored him and continued to tickle him. "Hey, Frank. His armpits are extra sensitive, especially if you're a little rough with it" Jason commented. "JAHAHASON, YOU TRAHAHAHAHAITOR! NAHAHAHAHAHAHA! FRAHAHANK! NOHOT THEHEHEHERE!" Leo's laugh increased once Frank started tickling his armpits. This shocked everyone for little bit. Frank was one to never tickle anyone without their permission and was too nice to tickle anyone for long. Apparently that didn't apply to Leo cause he was tickling him like crazy, even going as far as to tickle the spot between his ribs and armpits. Leo started screaming at the top of his lungs, but no words could come out. It only made it worse when Frank used his free hand to tickle Leo's belly. "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" "Okay guys! Rotate!" Annabeth said. Momentarily, everyone let him go so he could breathe while they rotated positions. Leo was trying to steady his breathing so he could actually get some air. "Plehehease. Noho mohohore," He begged. "Oh, Leo, Leo, Leo, you poor dumb boy. You're not even a quarter of the way done with your punishment" Annabeth said with a chuckle. Then she and the others started tickling Leo again.

For nearly an hour, everyone had taken turns rotating and tickling every tickle spot Leo had. Halfway through his tickle punishment, Leo stopped squirming and just accepted his fate. He still squirmed every now and then, but he knew he couldn't escape and he couldn't change their minds. Tears trickled down his red cheeks as he laughed harder than he ever did in his life.

Eventually, Annabeth had decided that Leo had had enough and told everyone to stop. So everyone let up and gave him space. Leo could hardly breathe while he curled up into a ball to get rid of the tickly feeling all over his body. Within seven minutes, he could form words again. "I hahate you ahahall" He said with a grin wider than the grand canyon. "Now, what did you learn from today, Valdez?" Annabeth asked. "Dohohon't mess with yohou" "Good. Now do you promise to never pull stunts like this again?" "Noho" Annabeth glared at him again. "Excuse me?" Leo sat up and looked at Annabeth. "Thahat's impossible. I can't just give up pranks." "You have one chance, Valdez." " I. Said. No." Leo crossed his arms and stuck his tongue out at Amnabeth. Percy stepped up to him like he wanted to throw him, but Annabeth held him back. "It's your funeral." "Why say it like tha-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAT!" Leo jumped a foot into the air and wiggled around as if there were something in his shirt. "GEHEHET OHOUT OF MYHY SHIHIHIRT, FRAHAHANK!" Leo demanded as he fell back laughing and holding his torso. Frank, who had shapeshifted into a mouse, responded by going to his weakest spot. Leo shrieked and rolled on the floor like a toddler throwing a tantrum as he tried to grab Frank. "PLEHEHEHEHEASE! PLEHEHEHEHEASE! STAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAP!" "Only if you promise to-" "OKAHAHAHAHAY! I PROHOHOHOMISE! I SWEHEHEHEAR! JUHUST STAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAP! I'M GOHOHONNA PEHEHEHEHEE!" "Frank, you can stop now" Hazel said. Frank immediately crawled out of Leo's shirt and scampered next to Hazel before shapeshifting back into Frank. Jason and Piper helped him up off the floor while he was recovering from hyena-itis. "You better hold up to your promise, Leo. No more going overboard with your stupid pranks, or else your punishments will be worse than what you got today" Annabeth threatened. "I promise" Leo nodded as he freed himself from Jason's and Piper's grasp and immediately bolted to the bathroom. Everyone laughed and continued talking about everything that happened.

Leo never ended up keeping that promise. He only lessened the frequency of his pranks, but they never truly went away. But he always made sure to never prank Annabeth again. He did not want to suffer under her devil fingers ever again.

The End

I hope you enjoyed my very first Heroes of Olympus tickle fic. I will write a lot more for this series because it's my absolute favorite, and the characters are so interesting and cool and everything. And of course, I have an O/C for this as well, but I'm not quite ready to reveal him yet. If you loved reading this and want more, requests and dms are always open.

That's all for now. Until next time,

❄️🔥shoto-chann🔥❄️ out

#heroes of olympus #percy jackson #annabeth chase #frank zhang #hazel levesque #jason grace #piper mclean #tickle fic #april fool's day #lee!leo #seven demigods

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alltimefanfiction · 6 months

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I’ll take any suggestions you want to give me 🫶 I really appreciate it and I’ll give the Callakarth fics a chance I’m sure they are great and I’m dying to read new stuff even though Jalex has my heart

Honstly I'm just a big fan of any fic Vampire Vengence (author of Bandana Code) puts out. Neondanger (author of Star-Crossed) has some goodies for when I'm in the mood for some filthy smut. So If you havent had the chance to do a deep dive through all their fics then I'd reccomend them.

Bellawritess also is a great author. Their fics top out with an M rating so no smut, but they have a few of my fave fics.

You may have read Erode, but the same author put out the first part of a new fic Just To Seal My Fate this year (I think?) and I am very patiently waiting the second half.

Wolf In A Lamb's Skin

Count It Down

Lit A Match (With Your Nails On My Back)

Ask For It

Old Habits Die Hard

Violet

Those are probably my top five smut one-shots off the top of my head but you may have read those already so my advice (what I do) is just search our tags for a topic that interests you and work through what you haven't read or want to read again.

-Molli

Bless you for giving the Callakarth a chance, I don't think you'll regret it. Jalex was obviously my absolute number one when I first entered the fanfiction side of this fandom (anyone recall my old URL?) but I can't tell you enough how much it will benefit you to branch into other ships because there's a lot of amazing stuff by great authors that isn't Jalex. And obviously there's nowhere near as much being written for the fandom now so looking at things that aren't Jalex just means you have more to read in the meantime.

Anyway, here's some oneshots I love of various pairings so you can dip your toes in:

As It Sank (I Thought Of You) - Jalex

Yer Old Grave - Zalex, Zack/John O'Callaghan

Anaphylaxis - Callakarth

Products/Reactants - Callakarth

Forget Me, Forget Me Not - Jalex

Save Your Heart - Merrikat

Tie Me In Ribbons - girl!Jalex

Ruined - Jack/Grieco, by the lovely mod Addyson

Wet Hot American Summer - Jalex

BJ Foe - Jalex, technically a series rather than a oneshot, and I'm sure you've probably read this or at least many other things by this author, but she is a classic!

In Which It's Valentine's Day and Gabe Buys Alex Roses - Gabex, and again, truly classic author so I'm sure you've read her stuff but there's a bunch that isn't Jalex that's really good

Black Permanent Marker - Alex/Ryan Ross

Keep Quiet, Nothing Comes As Easy As You + sequel Little Lover, You're In Trouble - Jalex (sequel is watersports)

The Boy Next Door - Jalex

And literally everything our former mod Emily has written is fucking amazing. Everything. I think it's all Jalex, or at least mostly. Same with everything by alex_g4skarth. Both authors make me cry with, like, everything even if it's not that sad and it's been that way for a decade!!! Don't know why.

Molli linked Erode above and that author is also excellent, I'm sure you've probably read their stuff from their Mibba (some of my old faves were deleted though).

Aaaaand I'm currently in the process of reading the newest (?) Jalex that we know of, A Very Festive Façade. I started it last night and only got a quarter of the way through it before I had to go to bed but I wanna give it a shoutout because Kalina is another person who still publishes in the fandom and we need that!!!

I mostly steered away from smut out of laziness, and also because there are so many faves that are SUPER popular (at least for Jalex).

If you start reading the Callakarth ones and enjoy them, please feel free to come to my inbox and be unhinged about it because I miss having fellow shippers to do that with.

-Eve

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wefoundalaska · 2 years

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i’ve been sick twice since you left, sicker than i ever remember being before.

the first time was a wet, sticky cough, something trapped deep inside me that i couldn’t get out. i wanted to dig my nails into the center of my chest and empty everything out myself. i coughed until my throat throbbed, then i promptly lost my voice. still in the midst of the pandemic, i was nervous to make an in-person appointment, but i literally couldn’t speak and wasn’t sure that’d work out over telehealth. along the way everyone took pity on me, asking only the most necessary questions, accepting head nods or holding my fingers up to communicate otherwise. and at the end of it, they couldn’t really give me anything. “the good news is you’re on the other side of it, it’s just going to take more time.” i could tell she felt bad sending me home empty handed, so instead i left with a strong prescription of a thick liquid that tasted terrible and numbed the throat completely when gargled. after a couple days it didn’t hurt anymore but my voice was still gone. i went to work and the students gifted me with a mini whiteboard and dry erase marker, eager to have me back again, even if in an accommodated way. for a few more days I suffered through it in silence, solo, mostly focused on proving to myself that i could get through this, and i did.

the second time (right now), it started when i felt so feverish i thought i would melt. for four days i slipped the thermometer under my tongue and watched it climb to 100+ degrees, while a literal heat wave swept across the country. i had to learn to sleep sitting up, as if in a hospital bed, otherwise i tossed and turned and wanted to give up. i lived off nothing the first day, raw bread and blue gatorade for two days, then small bites of rice and big cups of echinacea tea with honey when i felt slightly more hopeful on day four. all day I’d ask myself, did i want you here? would you have taken care of me? in the middle of a work week would you have made sure i wasn’t dying? an old friend came into town on day five but i didn’t want him to see me like this. “it’s not covid but i really can’t,” i messaged him through instagram, and he understood but was disappointed. i slept 14 hours each day, napped in between, couldn’t recall a single dream. remembered how much it hurt last time - how do i not do that again? and I think i’m on the other side. i was a little more gentle with myself, didn’t force a run or any work, tried to listen to my body telling me what it needs.

but what are the odds that they happen so soon after we broke up? am i that much more vulnerable now, or was i trying so hard to maintain everything back then that it was all going to come crashing down like this eventually? “it’s fine you’re just the air i breathe” says that one song, is that why I’m suddenly having the worst respiratory infections of my life, because you’re gone? i can’t tell if it’s getting easier or if i’m getting more resigned. i hate feeling like it’s all lost time, you being gone, me being sick, everything we could and should and would be doing instead. and then i remember how profoundly sad i was. maybe physically healthy, but emotionally crushed, beyond fatigued, just so worn down from living with you but not really living with you. i don’t think I’m quite happy yet, but I’m not that sad anymore. even with my throat raw, even with my fever dreams, I didn’t wanna cry myself to sleep at night. i miss you but i can never have an unhealthy love again.

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separatist-apologist · 3 years

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I have an idea for a one shot, Elucien, Nessian, and Feysand cutest couple contest and Elucien wins but then Eris and Arina walk in and actually win 😂

Okay anon, I'm sorry I sat on this for so long but it took me a hot minute to figure out how to write this.

I think you wanted fluff? Anyway you get unhinged insanity. This is the mating game (like the newly wed game) and if ANYONE says I got any of these couples besides Elucien wrong, it's because this is my first time writing them in earnest.

This is SFW though there are impolite sexual references so exercise good judgement. References to HENrietta the chicken (no apologies).

“What is this, again?” Nesta groused, crossing one leg over the other.

“It’s the mating game,” Gwyn, ever cheerful, replied. Beside her, Azriel helped organize a stack of cards, offering them to Gwyn without a word. The red-haired priestess perched on a stool to survey the group of people sitting in Rhys and Feyre’s drawing room. Though the game ought to be fun on its own, there were bottles of liquor just out of reach on a nearby table surrounded by cups and snacks.

“Why doesn’t he have to play?” Rhysand demanded, jerking his head towards the spymaster. All heads turned to look at Gwyn and Az, the two newest mates in Rhysand’s inner circle.

“Because he doesn’t want people knowing his personal business,” Gwyn offered. Azriel’s cheeks flushed as Lucien, Rhysand, and Cassian all glanced anywhere but at the females across from them. Twin black, leather couches had been rearranged for the game, with males on one side and females on the other. Behind the males, a roaring fire kept the howling wind outside from leeching cold into the softly lit room.

“Can we start or—”

“Not so fast,” Eris Vanserra stated, bursting through the twin glass, French doors theatrically. Behind him Arina, bundled in a puffy red coat, rolled her eyes and shook out long, blonde hair.

“I invited them,” Elain murmured quickly before Cassian or Rhysand could protest. “Arina is my best friend.”

“Hurtful, baby sister,” Eris intoned, joining the other males across the room. Arina plopped between Nesta and Elain, squeezing her friend tight. Azriel offered Arina a large stack of white cards and a black marker while Gwyn offered the same to Eris. It was impossible not to notice how Azriel’s eyes avoided Eris despite how desperately Eris was clearly trying to provoke him.

“The rules of this are simple,” Gwyn, perhaps sensing a squabble brewing, began explaining the rules of the game. “I ask questions about your mate, and you answer. The team with the most right answers wins that knife in the corner, generously donated by my mate, not to be used on anyone in this room.” Her eyes slid to Eris as she said that last part. Behind Azriel sat a gleaming silver hunting knife with a black, leather wrapped hilt placed just beside a matching leather sheath.

“Males first,” Rhysand decided and though Gwyn rolled her eyes, she didn’t contradict him.

“Want to take bets on who wins?” Cassian whispered.

“Shush,” Feyre shot back.

“The first question: What would your mate liked you to have served them when you accepted the bond?” Gwyn asked. All four females immediately turned to their cards. Elain began scribbling immediately, her lips upturned in a smile that very much said her and Lucien had discussed this before. Arina, too, was writing though her shoulders shook with laughter.

Nesta frowned, looking over at a furiously scrawling Cassian. “Did I not give him exactly what he wanted?” She whispered.

“No cheating!” Feyre elbowed Nesta though she hadn’t written anything either.

“Ten seconds,” Azriel warned. Everyone turned back to their cards, the only sound the squeaking of markers on slippery paper.

“Time.”

“Okay, we’ll start with Feyre. What would your mate likedyou to have served them when you accepted the bond?” Gwyn asked, teal eyes twinkling.

Feyre glanced towards Rhys, who was grinning openly. Azriel narrowed his eyes.

“No mind sharing,” the spymaster warned the pair of them.

“We’re not,” Feyre replied earnestly though the glitter in Rhysand’s violet eyes told the room he had definitely tried. “I wrote exactly what I gave him.”

“Turn your card, Rhys!” Gwyn replied excitedly. Rhys’ grin only widened.

“Oh for fucks sake,” Nesta snapped when Rhys revealed Feyre herself.

Beside Rhys, Lucien began shaking with silent laughter.

“Nesta?”

“I wrote what Feyre wrote,” Nesta replied, turning a card that read a biscuit.

“Oh…babe…we are going to lose,” Cassian said sadly, turning a card that read A nice roast.

“Ungrateful, is what you are,” Nesta grumbled.

“Elain?” Gwyn asked hopefully.

“Lucien said he would have been fine with dirt,” Elain replied, her card written neatly to reflect exactly what she said. Lucien turned his own card excitedly to reveal the word dirt written in impossibly nice calligraphy.

“The bar is so low,” Gwyn mumbled. “Okay, Arina, give us what you’ve got.”

“Eris wanted an apple pie,” she replied, flipping her card with a wink. Eris grinned, revealing his own card that had a drawing of an apple pie, followed with a little arrow pointing to his description that read apple pie.

“We cannot lose to Vanserra’s,” Cassian told Nesta.

“Then do better,” she hissed.

“Next question,” Gwyn interrupted, her teal eyes bright with amusement. “What is your mate afraid of?”

Everyone collectively groaned as they wrote. “This feels like political subterfuge,” Eris grumbled.

“Like anyone cares about your fears,” Azriel mumbled as a reply.

The responses were only a little better. Feyre and Rhysand both guessed my mate dying as their response. Nesta wrote endless warwhile Cassian responded with nothing, causing a booming laugh to escape Azriel’s mouth. Elain and Lucien also wrote my mate dying, and Eris, grinning at Arina, clapped his hands when she wrote falling into a pit trap. He’d done another drawing of a stick figure falling into a hidden hole causing the room to burst into speculation as to whether it had happened or not. The twinkle in Arina’s eyes suggested it very much had.

“Next question. What was the first thing your mate thought when they saw you for the first time?” Gwyn’s enthusiasm was unmatched and Azriel scooted just a little closer to Gwyn, his own hazel eyes bright with affection.

“Don’t get this one wrong, darling,” Rhys told Feyre as he wrote.

“I just know you two are cheating somehow,” Cassian complained.

“If we were cheating, we wouldn’t be losing to the Vanserra brothers,” Feyre shot back. “No offense, Lucien.”

“Some offense taken,” Lucien joked.

“Turn over your cards,” Azriel demanded.

Feyre went first. “I wrote, my mate is a human.” Rhys groaned, flipping over a card that read, “most beautiful female I’d ever seen.”

“That’s what I thought!” Feyre replied, outraged. Rhys merely shrugged. “We were thinking the same thing.”

Nesta, smirking, turned her card over next. My mate is terrifying.

Cassian cackled, revealing a card that read Nesta scared me.

“I know that’s romantic but…wow, Cas,” Azriel teased. Cassian merely shrugged.

“I always knew my perfect female would terrify me.”

“Same,” Nesta agreed with a smile.

Elain flipped over her card which read, oh no.

“You two sure are romantic,” Gwyn joked when Lucien’s card said the same.

“How do we know they’re not cheating?” Rhys demanded; eyes narrowed. Lucien sighed, exasperated.

“Perhaps we spend more time talking than the rest of you,” he suggested. Rhys considered that.

“Maybe. But only because my mouth is occupied—”

“C’mon!” The room complained. Even Gwyn narrowed her eyes at the High Lord, who displayed not one ounce of shame. Arina went last.

“Eris thought about how to get me naked,” Arina replied, revealing her card. True to form, Eris had drawn a rather crude image that caused Lucien to take the card from his elder brother and rip it in half.

At the end of the first round both Lucien and Elain and Arina and Eris were winning, with Feyre and Rhys coming in second and Nesta and Cassian in last place. They were given some time to talk with one another while Gwyn flipped through her cards, but the males were only interested in a rare bottle of whiskey Rhysand had recently acquired.

“This is why we’re losing,” Nesta complained when Cassian did two shots consecutively with Lucien.

“Hardly,” Elain teased as Azriel chuckled in agreement. Cassian narrowed his eyes towards his brother and Azriel shrugged.

“I heard enough up at that house.”

“Okay, okay, let’s do round two so we can all drink,” Gwyn insisted, urging everyone back to their spots. Elain winked at Lucien as Eris called, “We can’t let Lucien and Elain win.”

“Hey!” Elain cried.

“Full offense, Elain,” Eris added, earning a sharp elbow to the ribs from his younger brother.

“First question,” Gwyn called over the chatter. “What is your mates perfect day?”

The males all immediately began scribbling responses while the females watched suspiciously. Feyre went first. “In my art studio.”

Rhys groaned as he flipped his card. “In my bed.”

“You had to know I wasn’t going to write that,” Feyre chided.

“Ah but you were thinking it,” Rhys crooned.

Cassian, too, flipped over a card revealing a wholly inappropriate answer. Nesta sighed as she flipped hers over.

“Seriously? With my girls eating cake?”Cassian asked with disbelief while Gwyn rose from her stool to high-five Nesta.

“Hell yes, Cass. You know I love you.”

“Do I?”

Lucien was quick to flip over his card. “In the garden.”

Elain beamed, her own card reflecting his answer.

“That’s a euphemism, by the way,” Lucien informed the group, his cheeks-tinged pink from the alcohol. Elain spluttered, clearly embarrassed for all Lucien noticed. Cassian high-fived him with what he clearly thought was some covertness.

Eris was the last to flip his card which, true to form, depicted a rather crude drawing. Beneath it he’d written, getting absolutely wrecked.

Arina laughed. “You know me so well.” Her overturned card read Non-stop fucking.

“More information than I ever needed,” Azriel grumbled.

“Jealous?” Eris taunted. Azriel leveled an unyielding stare.

“In your fucking dreams.”

“I do dream of you,” Eris replied with a mocking grin.

“Who doesn’t?” Gwyn asked, defusing the situation with a smile. Next question, gentleman.”

“Don’t be gross this time,” Elain murmured, sending Lucien the sweetest death glare to ever exist.

“What are your mates biggest pet peeve?” Gwyn asked. All four males hesitated, glancing towards their mates as they wrote.

As usual, Rhys and Feyre went first. He wrote Tamlin which earned a round of laughter though did not match Feyre’s response (unlabeled paint tins). Cassian guessed Nesta’s answer right (being told what to do) and for the first time, Lucien guessed Elain’s answer wrong.

“Weeds?” Elain asked with an eye roll as she flipped a card to reveal mismatched patterns.

“Ah I almost wrote that,” Lucien said with a sheepish grin, reaching for the bottle of whiskey in Cassian’s hands.

“Are we going to let Eris win?” Nesta asked incredulously as he flipped over his card. It was a drawing of his face with big x’sfor eyes.

Arina laughed, her card reflecting his answer.

“I’m so afraid to go to Autumn Court,” Cassian mock whispered to Rhys. The High Lord nodded as he poured out more shots.

“Last question!” Gwyn told the room. “What is the best gift your mate ever gave you?”

All four men immediately began writing.

“Cassian I know what you’re thinking—”

“You don’t,” Cassian interrupted with a grin that told everyoneexactly what he was thinking.

“That’s my sister,” Elain reminded Cassian, who merely laughed.

Feyre got a little weepy when Rhys flipped over his card to reveal Nyx written in elegant script. She went and plopped into his lap, twining her arms around his neck. “Is that what you wrote, darling?” She showed him her card which did, indeed, have Nyx written on it.

“Ugh,” Nesta and Elain complained at the same time when the two began kissing. Cassian interrupted their moment with more crudeness.

“What?!” He asked with a laugh when she tossed her card at him. “We were losing anyway and these two—” He jerked his thumbs towards Rhys and Lucien –“Are being gross and sentimental. Is that what you want? Open, public displays of affection?”

“Were you not already?” Azriel asked with one arched brow. Nesta’s cheeks immediately reddened.

“What did you write?” Cassian demanded, picking up his card. His face softened at what he saw. “Oh Nes.”

“Oh no,” Azriel muttered when Nesta attacked Cassian’s mouth with her own. “Someone stop them.”

“Hey,” Lucien snapped next to Cassian’s ear. “Save that for later.”

“What did the card say?” Gwyn asked curiously. Nesta showed the red head her card, displaying my freedom to the room.

Lucien flipped his card quickly. “See, this is what I meant,” Cassian grumbled when Lucien revealed the word you to which Elain, beaming, revealed a second wrong answer.

“Did you really write Lucien’s best gift was the chicken you two share?” Arina asked with disbelief, looking at Elain’s card.

“Henrietta is our baby,” Elain protested. Lucien chuckled but did nothing to contradict her assertion.

“Alright Eris. What did Arina write?” Gwyn asked.

Eris had drawn a picture of what was clearly Arina in a crown. “My High Lady,” he crooned, his russet eyes filled with affection. Arina smiled, her card the same.

“It was a nice surprise,” she admitted.

“I can’t believe you two let Eris win,” Rhys chided Lucien and Elain, now sitting on the same side of the couch holding hands.

“You know, while all of you were fucking instead of getting to know each other, Arina and I spent vast amounts of time separated. We wrote letters,” Eris informed the room with just a touch of defense. Arina perched herself on the arm of the sofa Eris sat on, her hand resting on his shoulder. “I could tell you her whole routine since the moment she was bornuntil this morning.”

“I’d rather have done the fucking,” Cassian announced. Lucien choked on his whiskey as Rhys nodded in agreement. “We’ve got forever, I’m in no rush.”

“I’m boring, anyway,” Rhys added. Feyre elbowed him hard.

“This is not how I thought this was going to go,” Gwyn admitted. Azriel, his hands on her shoulders, was walking her to the half empty bottle of whiskey.

“At least we have alcohol to numb the pain,” Feyre joked. There were giggles in response.

At least they had each other.

#eluicen #eluicen prompt #some nessian #and a little feysand #the barest hint of gwynriel #no smut either #who have i become #i did think this was funny

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danniburgh · 3 years

Text

Rushingly Bittersweet (Javier Peña x f!reader) part 23

Pairing: Javier Peña x ofc//f!reader with name.

Summary: After the fall of Escobar everything starts happening way too fast for Javier; his raise, his new office, his new team, the Cali cartel’s operation, the sudden arrival of a new agent that was transferred to his team for no apparent reason, the way he was falling in love with her almost unintentionally.

And he couldn’t seem to stop any of that.

Word count: +6.4k

Chapter warnings: lmao angst and then fluff, a brief mention of food, and drugs and a dog.

A/N: This chapter is set after season three. // aAAAAAA this is so long i dont even why but it took me like ALL day FUCK FUCK FUCK anyway thanks to all my babies that got me through the desperation of wanting this to write itself lmao, also two chapters and we are DONE with the main story holy shit

ao3 // fic index // Masterlist // fic playlist

comments and reblogs are eternally appreciated 💓 let me know if you wanna be tagged

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gifs: @pascalsky

Javier groaned when he sat up and moved his legs to get them out of the bed and looked at the alarm clock on his nightstand; three forty-eight in the morning. He turned on the lamp, reached at his nape and scratched with blunt nails and reached for the pack of smokes that he left on the nightstand before laying down to try to sleep with the other hand.

He pulled the last one out of the pack and stood up to throw the empty carton in the trashcan near the door; he eyed the empty pack from the day before in the bottom of the can with the cigarette clinging to his lips thanks to near dry spit making them sticky and let out a deep sigh.

It wasn’t working.

His tongue moved to shift the cigarette from his lips and he let it fall inside the trashcan, knowing it wouldn’t be the last one he put between his lips, but at least he didn’t light it.

Javier thought of getting out of the room and raiding his dad’s bar again, but he knew it wouldn’t do him any good.

It wasn’t working.

He knew it, and it couldn't be denied any longer. He wasn’t getting any younger and his old ways weren’t helping him forget as they used to ten or fifteen years before.

Javier walked back to the bed and sat on the edge, letting his half naked body fall backwards on the mattress and looking at the ceiling, he felt his hand twitch and he felt it empty without a nicotine stick firmly pressed between his index and his thumb but did nothing to calm it down.

Ten or fifteen years before: had it really been that long? Javier huffed at nothing and scratched his chest, leaving his hand there, uselessly wondering what would it be of him if he did something different; incidentally working through years and years of missteps, mishappens, mistakes, and shaping them in some other way that would have saved him from five months of poor sleep and constant drunkenness, five months of chain-smoking and lack of sharpness, five months of only remembering the bad things he had done and the bad things he deserved.

He huffed again because of course his retirement wouldn’t be him sitting on a porch to enjoy the evening Texas breeze and a glass of scotch; even if he had tried it.

It was having nightmares every third night he wanted nothing but to shove deep inside his head, but that then, reluctantly, he had to tell his new therapist his dad had forced him to go to.

It was having to remember all the men he saw dying every time he heard the words war or coke or shooting. Having to remember them changing and fighting and dying for a cause he wasn’t sure if he still believed in. Having to remember Carrillo every time he and Steve talked on the phone.

It was remembering you each time someone sent him a letter congratulating his work or asking for consultation or asking for an interview; because he had an idea of what you had been through and he was sure he didn’t deserve all that claptrap. He did nothing but cause chaos and destruction and death and even though his therapist said it wasn’t his fault he knew it was because he aided for it to happen.

But you? You did everything you could to find yourself a way to recover what was yours, and you still lost it.

Javier sat up again and after six exact seconds of consideration, he leaned forward and opened his nightstand drawer. He took the black tape he had been clinging to for five months and held it in front of him for a couple of minutes.

He chuckled at himself and gripped the small cassette, took from the drawer his tape player, pressed the red button for it to open, let the tape fall in the slit and closed it, turned it on and rewinded the tape, trying to make the calculations in his head of how many times he had repeated that process as the tape ran to the beginning.

He put the headphones on, laid down back on the bed and pressed play.

“Hi, Javi, uhm…”

God, how he missed you.

The phone rang again, fuck the phone, you thought, and hid your face under a pillow, trying to fall asleep again despite the clear signal that you were no longer sleepy.

And the phone rang again, you lifted your head from the cocoon of pillows and eyed the clock on your nightstand, who was calling you at five seventeen in the morning?

Grunting, you got out of the bed and walked out of the bedroom to the small space that made your living room, dining room and kitchen and got to the phone.

“Hello?” your voice was a deep groan, and you cleared your throat.

“Another letter came for you, when are you gonna change your address?” your dad’s voice broke through the receiver and you closed your eyes, breathing in and out the stress it was already provoking in you.

“I’ll get to it, dad,” you replied “are you gonna send it to me or can I go to the house?” you questioned, feeling already your lower lip tremble.

“I’ll send it, your mom doesn’t wanna see you yet,” he let out in a stern voice “sorry, pumpkin.” he whispered and hung up the phone.

You sat on the armrest of the loveseat next to the phone and let your tears fall from your eyes, not even bothering about cleaning them anymore.

You sighed and nodded to yourself, letting your tired gaze roam around your tiny living space and you missed the openness of your family house, the one you had come back to and were expelled from by an angry mother that felt ashamed of the truth you told them.

But you had to give it to her, she didn’t even know you went down to Colombia, or that you’d been having drug issues, or that they fired you.

She had told you she didn’t know who you were anymore.

Neither did you.

So you left, they couldn’t be more disappointed in you than you were in yourself, so you walked out as your mom wanted and tried to find a home for yourself as you still wondered what the hell were you supposed to do. There wasn’t a handbook or a protocol that taught people how to stop being a DEA agent, the government didn’t train people to go back to civility or even offered a program to forget all the shit you had lived in the places they had sent you.

You stayed in your hometown, unknowingly to your old friends and twenty minutes away from your parent’s home and didn’t leave your house unless absolutely necessary; Albuquerque wasn’t a small town, but it wasn’t big, and you were dreading walking past someone who knew you before you had lost yourself and tried to explain all your baggage, you didn’t have the time, or the energy. And you didn’t want people feeling sorry for yourself, with the woman in the mirror you had enough.

Everything seemed pointless, and you felt heavy all the time, as if you were carrying a chain ball in each foot and shackles in your hands while being dragged down by quicksand.

In the kitchen's corner you saw the last two boxes you still didn’t have energy to unpack after moving them across the continent and let out a teary sight as you stood from the armrest and walked to them.

You opened the first box and saw it filled with office clutter; pencils, markers, some notebooks and notepads, the brown journal you had been looking for to burn on your stove; a set of keys you weren’t sure what they opened and in the bottom, folded pieces of paper.

“Oh, no.” you muttered to the air of the warm kitchen and you doubted reaching in for it… The hesitation lasted two minutes but for you it was like two hours, you knew what it was, you knew why it was in that box and when you took it it felt hot and heavy. You were holding feelings in that letter, you were holding hours of shed tears and memories you didn’t want to have anymore. Memories that still haunted you whenever you smelled roasted colombian coffee and saw an ad of Malduros on tv.

You didn’t open it. You knew what was written there. And for a few seconds you thought of burning it on the stove instead.

“Well, I don’t want this, might as well send it.” you muttered under your breath, recognizing it would do you some good to stop holding to it, acknowledging it would do you some good to know he had it. If he wanted to rip it into millions of pieces or burn it or toss it in the trash or eat it, it was his problem.

You bit your lip as you walked to the phone; you hadn’t thought of him in a while. But as you sat on the loveseat all the shit you wanted to bury if not get rid of came back to your mind like a high wave of a rough sea; sharp, cold, gritty.

“Shit.” you gasped, trying to breathe in and out several times because you didn’t want to cry. It was too early for crying.

You grabbed the phone and thought who could have Javier’s address. God, even thinking of his name made your chest flutter and your stomach churn. You had fooled yourself into thinking he didn’t have an effect on you anymore, into even assuring five months was enough to forget him. What a fool.

You dialed the number of the only person you knew for sure knew the address by heart; the phone rang three times before it was answered.

“Hello?” a sleepy nasal voice greeted, and you smiled through the few tears that had accumulated in your eyes, grateful that he still had his embassy issued cell phone.

“Stod!” your smile was making your cheeks hurt, and you wondered in the back of your head when was the last time you had smiled.

“Who’s this? Flor?” he asked and you let out a stiff chuckle. You decided not to be a huge asshole and dump something heavy as your actual name that early in the morning, so you went with it.

“Yeah, sorry to call at this hour, did I wake you?” you played with the edge of the loveseat’s armrest.

“Kinda,” a noise of shuffle was heard “but it’s almost seven here, so I’m not that mad,” he teased, making you chuckle again “how are you? to what do I owe the honor?”

“Uhm, I–‌I’m calling to take advantage of you,” you said, hearing his chuckle through the line and a whisper of of course you did, “by any chance do you know Peña’s address in Texas?” you asked, closing your eyes and crossing your fingers, wishing for him to not ask:

“Why?”

“I–‌I have something of his...” you mumbled under your breath “I just found it and I wanna send it.” you said, which wasn’t technically a lie.

“Uh…” Stoddard hesitated, and you heard a faint of a pouring noise in the back that made you sigh, a cup of coffee would do you wonders, “well I do–I don't know if I’m allowed to just say it, y’know?” you frowned.

“Oh, come on, please?” you pleaded, your leg started bouncing because of the anxiety that was growing in your chest.

“What is it? is something important?” he asked.

“Super important,” you nodded even though he couldn’t see, “he needs it.”

“How do you know?” he questioned again, and you whined under your breath.

“Uhm, I ju–‌I just know, uhm…” since when were you a twitchy, nervous mess? “can’t you just tell me?”

“Not really, no.” he muttered in that voice that made you want to punch him and hug him at the same time.

You let out the air of your lungs and controlled your body.

You had promised yourself to tell the truth when it was necessary. So you were going to.

“Look, Stod, this is long to explain, okay?” you began, and he hummed affirmatively in response, “the only thing you need to know is that the thing I have here is very important that he gets because he needs to know that I kept it for him.” you said, closing your eyes again.

“Flor you just told me nothing.” he let out, his voice was being muffled and it sounded like he had something in his mouth.

“Fuck, Stoddard, I love him, okay?” you let out “and this thing I have is a letter that I need him to have so he knows I love him!” you panted and bit your lip when he didn’t answer.

You just had said out loud you loved someone, you just had said to someone you loved Javier Peña for the first time. Shit.

“Oh,” Stoddard said after a moment and you held your breath, “you have where to write?”

“You’re a fucking king!”

Six hours later, you wanted nothing else but to turn the fucking car around.

“This is a mistake, this is a fucking mistake!” you yelled inside your car, opening the glove box to toss there your sunglasses. The highway 285 was eternal, and you hated driving through it; it was empty, there was nothing but desert landscapes and the occasional tree, but you were halfway, just crossing the state border and there was nothing in the everlasting earth that would make you drive back home, not even your fucking hesitation, not even your self-doubt.

“What the fuck am I gonna say?” you asked yourself again, chewing on your lower lip and gripping the steering wheel, “am I just pulling on his driveway and knocking on his door and saying hi I’m sorry I broke your heart I have a letter for you? Fuck!” you saw the beginning of yet another town and you drove slowly looking for a gas station, “or better yet, I read this shit to him to complete the humiliation!” you turned your head for a second at the letter resting easily in the co-pilot’s seat and you groaned, finding a gas station. You were also hungry.

With the car’s tank full and a plastic bag filled with snacks for the remaining six hours, you sighed to yourself and started driving again.

“You’re doing this because you need closure,” you told yourself, shoving your hand into a bag of salted chips and bringing three to your mouth “if he doesn’t wanna see you, too bad, he’s gonna miss your haircut,” you mumbled, chewing at the same time “you leave the letter and let him decide what to do with it.”

With the highway 285 long behind you and the sky just beginning to turn orange, you had convinced yourself of your own reasons and you even had a plan to go back home as soon as you were done in Laredo. You also had promised yourself and all your Muertos, you wouldn’t react to Javier Peña if he didn’t react to you and as you had learned in your three-year station in México, you can’t break a promise you made to dead people.

“Shit, shit, shit,” you said when the marked map told you you were a block away from the Peña’s ranch house, you were chewing the last bit of a nearly melted chocolate bar you had bought hours ago as your nervousness betrayed you and you started chuckling at your impulses, “holy fuck, I wanna go home!”

But you were already there. The gate was open and there were two trucks parked on the driveway. So you sucked everything you were feeling, and you turned off the ignition. Fuck. It.

You breathed in and out several times before you unbuckled your seatbelt, grabbed the letter and opened the door. You did it again as you walked the gravel path to the house and were grateful it was already dark, so at least the night could help you hide until the last second.

You stopped walking, rationality coming back to you.

“What the fuck am I doing?” you whispered to yourself and turned around, shaking your head as you walked back to the car.

“Mija!” you heard behind you, you froze in place and stiffened at the sound of a thick accent in a rough and warm voice.

“Oh, no.” you said under your breath.

“It’s you!” you turned around, and you saw the face of the man you had only met through an old picture Javier carried with him at all times. “viniste.” (you came) behind him walked a black, large dog that ignored the man and huffed at you.

“I’m sorry?” your voice went out thin and high, and you wanted to chastise yourself for it. You had given yourself a seven-hour pep talk on the way, and you were already breaking.

“I told him,” the man rolled his eyes behind the glasses he was wearing and gestured for you to walk closer “Jesús Peña, nice to finally meet you,” he extended his hand to you and you took it and shook it, the dog got closer to you and smelled your legs, you tried to smile at him and at the dog but tears were already gathering inside your eyes “le dije que ibas a venir a buscarlo.” (I told him you’ll come looking for him)

“I’m sorry, Mr. Peña, I–‌I do–‌”

“Mr. Peña nada,” he interrupted, “call me Chucho,” you nodded and sniffed slightly “ven,” (come) he gestured again and started walking towards the house, “Pepe, métete.” (get inside) he called, and the dog trotted to his side.

“Wait, Chucho, wait!” you called him under your breath as you followed him, he didn’t stop.

“Come on in,” he opened the house door and waited for you to get inside. He nodded his head for you to walk in and you frowned.

“You don’t even know who I am, what ar–‌”

“I know enough,” he said solemnly, walked inside and you and the dog did too and he pointed to an armchair “siéntate, mija, he’s on the back.” he turned around and walked through an archway to what it looked like the kitchen and disappeared through a door, Pepe behind him.

“What the fuck.” you sobbed out, knowing you had little time to leave the letter you were clutching in your hands on the coffee table in front of you and walk out and leave for good. But you couldn’t move, you were in Javier’s house and you wanted to stop being there, but your body was frozen in place and you felt like you couldn’t breathe. You wanted to scream at yourself, at your fucking impulses; you had all the opportunities to turn around and go back home, why didn’t you listen to your logical, rational, always right brain?

“Hi.” you heard behind your back and you covered your mouth with the hand that wasn’t holding the fucking letter.

You turned around and blinked the first two tears of what you already knew was going to be a sea of them.

He was wearing the red shirt. And God, it was his color.

Javier wanted to run away and hide.

He had just made peace with never seeing you again; he had just accepted that the only part he would have of you was that voice mail you had left him months before. But there you were, teary and gorgeous in front of him. Shaking and with your hands holding a piece of paper as if it were your lifeline.

His head was a contradiction, because he wanted to grab you and hug you all the same he wanted to grab you and shove you out of his house and his life.

“What are you doing here?” Javier asked, knowing deep inside him he wanted to tell you how good you looked and how much he liked your new hair. You let out a shaky breath at his deep voice. You had missed it.

It was the first time you saw him in five months, and the weight of your feelings for him fell again on your shoulders like a recently broken off boulder, heavy, rough edged and shapeless.

“I don’t know.” you answered truthfully, he sighed and deviated his eyes from you, you breathed in heavily and the only thing that got into your lungs was his essence. You cursed under your breath and he huffed, putting his hands on his hips and leaning to the side.

“How d'you found me?” he questioned, and you huffed through the tears.

“I have my resources.” you let out on a whisper. Trying to find his eyes, you needed to see his eyes.

“What do you want?” Javier asked again, and you deflated at the tone of his voice. The rational part of your brain yelled I told you so at your feelings and you knew it was right, you were expecting too much of yourself and of him.

“See you,” you bit your lower lip and Javier saw from the corner of his eyes how you scrunched up your nose, and he felt something inside his chest flutter, hating and loving all the same how much of you he still had stored inside his memory, “I have something for you.”

“Keep it.” he let out. You shook your head and raised your hand with the letter on it.

“Read it.” you half ordered, half pleaded, Javier chuckled and then shook his head, mimicking you.

“I don’t want it.” he knew he was lying to himself, he wanted to know what it was, he wanted to grip it and smell the paper and read it over and over but his body wasn’t responding to what his feelings were telling him and only responded, almost in automatic, to his prideful side, to that side of him that still resented you and himself.

“Alright then,” you said, standing straight after realizing you had regained the ability to read him even through your tears, and understanding there was something he was struggling with, “I’ll read it.”

“Stop.” Javier frowned and looked at you, his eyes pleading for you to do something you couldn’t decipher.

“I know, okay?” you said, trying to reassure him and yourself “I know I’m in no position to ask for shit,” Javier dropped his hands to the sides “but I just want ten minutes, just ten of your life, and you’ll never have to see me again if that’s what you want.”

You knew it was a risky thing to say, but you needed him to know, you needed him to understand you because you knew and he knew you did understand him. And he needed to know you. You and your version.

He said nothing, you took it as his queue to start so you breathed in deeply and unfolded the letter.

“Stop.” Javier said under his breath.

“No,” you wiped a tear off your cheek “I wrote this when I went back to Colombia after I got fired,” Javier looked at you and you saw his face quirk in something close to pain “uhm, before I wrote this I drove around Bogotá,” you recalled that last day in the city and how much it pained you to be there, “I went–‌I went to some of the places you told me you liked” you tried to smile and dropped your eyes to your shoes, trying to find something to cling to and compose yourself “even that little cafe you told me about, near the palace of justice, remember?” you sobbed out. And he called your name. Making you gasp.

“Stop,” you looked up at him and saw him frowning, his eyes glistening with unshed tears, “we don’t need this.”

“I do!” you let out, Javier brushed his lips with his thumb and felt his hand twitch in need of nicotine again “I need to tell you all this!” you wiped your tears away again “I need closure!” you cried out.

Javier felt his stomach turn around and all the blood of his body went to his feet. Fuck.

How could he had been so stupid? he got into his own feelings too much and he forgot that you had cried your eyes out to him all those months ago when you handed him everything you were in a couple of manila folders. He had gotten wrapped by his own feelings and the hurricane your declaration had created in his life that he had forgotten just how much you were suffering as well. Because he might have thought about you; all the time, every day; he thought about your past and your reasons and motivations. He even thought of you naked on his bed in Colombia, under his body, moaning and gasping when he needed some release, but he forgot to think about your feelings.

“I didn’t come here to ask for forgiveness because I know I don’t deserve it,” you said and Javier felt the wetness of a tear escaping his eye and making its way through his cheek, “I’m trying to get closure, Javier, please let me try.”

Javier nodded.

You cried more when you saw him brush a tear off with his thumb and chew the inside of his mouth. You wanted to run away; you were sure he was better before you came to his house and disrupted his peace; you were hurting him again, and you wanted to kneel in front of him and ask him for what you said you weren’t seeking. He made you want so much.

You sniffed and dropped your eyes to the open letter in your hand, Javier didn’t move from where he was standing.

“No amount of guilt will or can change the past,” you began, Javier crossed his arms on his chest and saw movement to his side, “that much I know. I kno–‌know that it doesn’t matter,” you sniffed again and Javier turned his head to watch the dog casually walking towards him and sitting next to his boots. You saw it too, and you let out a sad chuckle.

“Ignore him.” he just said. You nodded.

“Uhm, it doesn’t matter how much I apologize, or how many I’m sorry’s I mouth, forgiveness doesn’t come for free.” you didn’t want to lift your eyes to see him, so you continued.

Javier only saw you reading him something he was sure you had poured your heart into, and he wanted nothing but to hear what you wanted to say to him, but he couldn’t focus into listening, because there you were, again in front of him doing what he never dared to do.

Opening your fucking chest, taking your heart out and giving it raw to him.

“...knowing and realizing and acknowledging just how much I love you.”

Javier drowned a gasp, as he fell in love with you all over again, you were doing what he didn’t have the balls to do, because in his sleepless sleep he wanted to look for you, in the middle of his idle nights, just after waking up after a nightmare, he wanted to find you and go to you and tell you whatever the fuck he could to be back with you. But he never did, he never did because he was a coward, because he feared his own feelings so fucking much.

He couldn't hear anything of it after your declaration of love. God, how much he loved you. You were standing there, with your eternally hopeful eyes filled with crystalline tears and several pages of written feelings. And he realized, there, with you in the middle of his living room, shifting to the next page, that even though you were extremely similar, you were also very different.

“...with you I found a reason to give up after all the shit I've lived in…” you muttered and he found the differences inside him; you were braver than him, you were smarter and more connected with what you felt; you weren’t scared of your feelings as he was. You went for what you wanted and even though it had been five months of that dreadful day when he saw his heart squeezed out of his body by your hesitant hand, that day he still replayed inside his head when the day was just over and his brain was floating between sleep and awakeness, he still wondered why you were bothering.

“There were so many things I thought…” you kept reading as he wondered if it was possible for the two of you to connect with each other outside of shared trauma and sympathy for each other’s experiences. But he answered to himself that even if you two weren’t as emotionally available as you needed to be to build a relationship or if you both were having a hard time adapting to be and live out of the system, maybe the love was real.

You stopped reading after noticing he was just standing there with his arms crossed and his eyes on you but not seeing you; you wiped the last of your tears and chuckled bitterly to yourself. Making him blink a few times.

“Fuck this,” you crumpled the pages in your hands and dropped them on the coffee table, shaking your head. Javier frowned, “it doesn’t matter what I read, I shouldn’t have come.” you said, drowning your sobs and gasping for air. He wasn’t paying attention, and nothing about it was making you feel any better about anything.

“What?” Javier whispered, dropping his hands to his sides.

“A’right, then…” you didn’t look at him and tried to control your breathing again “I guess that’s what I wanted to do,” you walked to the door and opened it, Javier wanted to ask what the fuck was happening, he wanted to grab your arm and stop you as he didn’t do it when you were leaving his office back in Colombia “I’m sorry to have bothered you, Javier,” he winced slightly involuntarily at the way you sobbed out his name “I’ll go.”

You walked out of the house covering your mouth with your hand to muffle your sobs, your rational brain was right, it was a mistake; it was a complete and utter mistake, and you were so ashamed of yourself for even thinking it would change anything. You walked to your car feeling the sharp, stinging sensation of a migraine settling in your head. You heard steps behind you and you turned around slowly, not wanting to put hope on the source being Javier.

“Mija,” you look at Chucho trying to catch up with you, “¿a dónde vas?” (where are you going?)

“I’m going home.” you said, shrugging at the man when he stopped in front of you.

“Why?” he asked, frowning.

“Because he said nothing, Chucho,” you bit your lip and looked at the Texan night sky and huffed at yourself, “he said nothing.”

“But he wants you, mija!” he assured you, and you shook your head several times.

“If he wants me as you say,” you pointed towards the house behind him, “then how come I’m not with him?” you reasoned, “he doesn’t want me.”

You dropped your eyes to the gravel path as Chucho sighed and raised his hand to squeeze your shoulder just enough for you to feel less sad. Just how a father would do.

Chucho glared at the house, the door open and Pepe standing in the threshold; his son had been back for months, he had been living next to him, eating next to him, working next to him and breathing next to him just as he did before he went away but he knew, just like a father could, he was not the same man that left.

He reminisced over the muchacho his son was before he left Laredo, so eager to get out of the small town he grew up in and that harbored his family home, so anxious to meet new horizons, so keen to find and explore new places and learn new things; he sometimes found himself missing that boy, he sometimes missed his Javi; the one that helped him build a paddock for his own horse, the one that washed his truck without asking and without failing each friday evening, the one that took care of his Mamá’s funeral at sixteen when himself was too sad to think about coffins or tombstones; because the man that came back to him after almost two decades too far away from home wasn’t the same.

He had seen and done things that Chucho never wanted to to ask about but he imagined, his Javier wasn’t the same. And Chucho knew why, but he also knew about you. Javi had talked about you way too much for his own good, as he did everything. And Chucho also knew why, he wasn’t letting the woman that made his son come back home run away.

“He does want you,” he said, slowly, with a low voice, as if it were a secret, “mijo… es un idiota a veces, but he loves you.” (he’s an idiot sometimes)

“You don’t know that.” you refuted.

“I do,” he gave you a smile that was barely visible under the white mustache “el te ama, y yo…” (he loves you, and I…) “I’m so grateful.” you shook your head as two thick tears left your eyes.

“I broke his heart.” you sobbed out.

“Y me lo trajiste a casa, Florecita” (and you brought him home to me, little flower) you sobbed harder, not able to control it anymore, and he brought you to him, and held you.

“He told you my fake name?” you asked between sobs.

“He told me what you look like.” he muttered.

“I’m so sorry.” you let yourself be wrapped by him and you hid your face on his shoulder.

“Don’t be, without you I would’ve lost my only child.” you held him tighter.

“Please.” you pleaded for nothing and everything at the same time.

“You gotta fight for him, mija.” he muttered to your ear, and you shook your head, still leaning into him.

“I’m fighting for him!” you almost yelled “I’m here, aren’t I?” you lifted your head to look at the man and you gasped for air, dropping your hands to your sides “I drove almost thirteen hours non-stop all the way from Albuquerque just to be here!” you told him and the man stiffened as you lost your shit in front of him, you gripped your head between your hands “thirteen hours to read him that stupid letter and he didn’t say shit!”

“You did what?” you heard and lifted your head to see Javier standing behind his dad.

Chucho looked at Javier and then at you with your cheeks dampened with tears. He squeezed your shoulder again and turned to walk to the house.

“You were in Albuquerque all this time?” he said, and you nodded, noticing he was holding the letter in his hand “when you said you’d go you meant back there?” he frowned in confusion.

“Well, yeah, I have nowhere to stay so I might as well drive home.” you muttered, Javier’s frown deepened, and he stepped towards you.

“Stay here,” he said, “if you wanna leave you leave in the morning.” his voice was thin and low. You looked at his eyes and saw them reddened and wet.

“Did you read it?” you whispered out. He stepped towards you again, nodding.

“Stay.” he whispered back.

“You don’t want me.” you said under your breath as shook your head and he stepped closer.

“Who says that?” he asked, and you looked at the gravel path again.

“I won’t stay.” you felt Javier’s warm fingers graze under your chin and lift your head to him slowly.

“Don’t be so stubborn,” he chastised you with half a smirk forming on his lips “stay with us.” you shook your head again.

“You don’t want me here but you want me to stay,” you said, frowning at him “Javier you can’t have it bo–‌”

“I want you to stay,” he interrupted you “I want you to stay with me,” he whispered as his fingers moved to your cheek and wiped away a tear. “please.”

Javier had read your letter after you walked out and realized, at the prospect of you leaving for what it seemed like forever, at the possibility of you leaving him for good and he never getting to see you or your gorgeous face or your hypnotizing eyes or hearing your voice that did so many things on him, that the balance of his other losses leaned upwards when he weighed the probability of losing you.

Did he care about what you did? of course he did, it still stung sometimes deep inside his chest, it still filled him with something close to grief.

Was he willing to work it out and let it aside because he didn’t want to feel the agony and deep sorrow of not having you by his side he had been feeling for the last five months again? yes.

And the answer to that question inside his head startled him and shook him deeply.

You were there. God, you were there, there was no way he was going to let you leave.

Javier decided you could work it out later, he loved you way too much not to try. He didn’t even plan to love you the way he did, the way he discovered by reading that letter or remembering the man he was without you. He didn’t even plan to love you at all, but he did. He was madly, insanely, deeply in love with you.

Javier moved his hand to your shoulder and let the one holding the letter find its way to your waist. Find its way home.

“Don’t go.” he whispered again. He moved the last step to wrap his hands around you. You let out a low yelp at the feeling of his body so close to you, for a second you froze in place, your eyes closed and his warmth invaded your entire body as he hid his head in the crook of your neck. He inhaled your essence as you hugged him back and gripped him tightly against you.

Javier felt as if all his parts were being glued back together.

“Stay with me.” he whispered against the skin of your neck.

So you stayed.

←previous // next→

*THE LETTER*

Pepe:

pedrito's perma list: @queenofthefaceless @northernpunk @pascalesque @sleep-tight1 @cheekygeek05 @bii-aan-ckaa @letaliabane @starlightmornings @mouthymandalorianalso @supernaturalgirl @metalarmsandmanbuns @purplepascal042 @asta-lily @greeneyedblondie44 @missswriter @juletheghoul @pedro-pastel @agirllovespancakes

Javi's babies: @pulplorrd

RushBit tag list: @shestillwrites1 @alliterative-albatross @absurdthirst @thoughtfulpandawasteland @wifeofdindjarin @lank-sextburg @the-ginger-hedge-witch @helloannbananalove @diogodxlot @pascalslittlebrat @sarahjkl82-blog @pedritobalmando @a-court-of-feysand-and-elorcan @mamacitapascal @dobbyjen @callsigncatfish @feminist-violinist @jasmincita @pascalove @eury-dice3 @gingaahhhh @athalien

#javier peña #Javier Pena #javier peña x reader #javier peña fanfiction #javier peña fanfic #narcos #narcos fanfic #narcos fan fic #narcos netflix #Pedro Pascal #pedro pascal fanfiction #Jose Pedro Balmaceda Pascal #pedro pascal characters #rushingly bittersweet tag

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theonewiththefanfics · 3 years

Text

Because Hearts Get Broken - I Know That You’re Scared (Part 2/3)

Continuation of ‘Because Hearts Get Broken’ - see my masterlist for it :)

Synopsis: She’s trying to move on. He’s still hoping for a chance

Pairing: Harry Styles x fem!Reader

Genre: angsty, bruh, but with a sprinkle of fluff and a hopeful (??) ending

Warnings: swearing, emotionally distant mindset... can’t think of anything else, really.

Word count: 3656

Heartbreak isn’t loud. Y/N doesn’t even know if it had a sound what it would be like. Like glass shattering against the ground? Or maybe like a book being ripped and shredded apart, memories of time spent together ruined. Or maybe it'd like the crackle of a fire, as it slowly but surely crept up and turned everything into charred remains before it became nothing but ash and was carried away by the winds.

No one in her family talked about feelings. If they did all they received back was ‘suck it up. That’s life’. After that, it was time to move on. So, when she got together with probably the most open-hearted person in the world, it was almost laughable.

Y/N had always been the friend others went for advice, relationship or not, but she herself never asked for one, simply because she didn’t wanna bother anyone. Not that she thought the others were bothers. It’s just having grown up in a household where emotions were basically suppressed, opening up was quite impossible.

Then came Harry. Perfect, impossible, loving, sweet, kind, ridiculously open Harry. God, she just wanted to punch him because no one should be that nice.

January 2nd, 2020 he’d called her up, having gotten Y/N’s number from Sarah (after ages of pleading, because as much as Sarah sometimes couldn’t handle drunk Y/N, she’d defend and protect her until the very last breath), and they set up a coffee date.

Slowly but surely, they spent more and more time together and seeing as her job had her based in LA for a while, visiting Harry was no problem. Then the pandemic hit, and on March 18th the whole stay-at-home order was issued in California.

Y/N was in a panic. She was meant to leave LA in ten days, and the hotel her company was paying for had been paid until the 28th. With all flights getting rapidly cancelled, she was scrambling to get one, but even her firm was unable to get her a seat. That’s when Harry had called up, his tone a worried, urgent mess as to if Y/N was alright and what her plans were.

Of course, him being him, he immediately offered her a place to stay.

“We don’t even need to stay in the same room, there’s like five other guest rooms you can take up,” he tried to joke, and ease her tension.

“Fuck, Harry, just rub it in how rich you are.” Y/N cackled, and when she heard him laugh in the background, her heart did that stupid fluttery thing she’d grown so used to.

It took a little persuasion from Harry’s side, and reassurance at least seven more times, that Y/N wouldn’t be intruding on his space, and he was more than happy to spend the quarantine with someone else, instead of being alone, and that in no way her taking over a room or two would limit him and his own artistic endeavours. So, apprehensively Y/N packed her suitcases, grabbed an uber, wearing a mask the whole time, and drove to Harry’s place.

When Y/N saw the gated community and the palace he was living in, the inside of her cheek was practically bitten in half. They’d barely been together for three months, and now she was basically moving in with him, but given how it was either live with Harry in a fucking mansion or walk across the country to New York, she took the first option.

As much as Harry loved on her, pretty much shagging her brains out every possible second, and loving on her until her cheeks hurt from smiling, the anxiety about the whole situation never left.

Harry was worried about his mom and sister, Y/N was scared of what was happening in New York. So, when the state boarders opened, immediately, although reluctantly, she flew back to her apartment and her dying plants, but never forgetting to FaceTime with Harry. But they couldn't stay away long from one another.

Which is why they decided, given how she was able to work from home now, and Harry could do so as well, they’d fly over to one another every two weeks, quarantine together for the next two weeks, and then fly to the other place. Her boss actually loved the idea that Y/N was so willing to go back and forth between the two cities, so all her flights were written off as business expenses, not to mention when she said she wouldn’t need a hotel, he was more than thrilled to let her be in LA whenever she wanted, as long as her work got done.

It seemed funny to her now, that before Y/N couldn’t wait to get back to the sunny state of Cali. Now when she had to fly over (which was just a couple of times since the breakup), going through JFK security made her sweat, and landing was a vomit-inducing action. And the last time she’d gotten back to the home-base state, she’d actually thrown up, Harry’s last words ringing in her ears.

It’d been three weeks since Sarah’s New Year party, and three weeks since she’d spoken to him although he still kept calling. Every morning she’d wake up to a couple of notifications of missed calls, and each time she’d listen to the messages; it was all the same – I miss your voice. And every time she’d listen to it, her thoughts were exactly the same. You could say it was almost pathetic as to how many times she’d listened to his albums, just to hear him sing. Almost like he used to do right before she fell asleep.

But Y/N had no one else but herself to blame for it. She’d been the one to call it quits, she’d been the one who walked out of his apartment, and the one who decided she wouldn’t fight.

Now, she was sat by her small magazine table, documents spread out in front of her as if a tornado had rolled through, while an apple and cinnamon candle spread its delicious scent through the air.

Y/N would only admit it once because, well, the proof was all over the apartment, but she was very lazy when it came to taking away the Christmas décor. It made her feel warm and comfy. And it reminded her of Harry. How when she’d woken up after their first date, already in the new year, he still had colourful fairy lights strung across the curtain rods, giving everything a soft, cosy glow.

He’d also been the one who convinced her that a real Christmas tree was so much better than a plastic one.

“Yes, it’s a hassle,” he’d said through slurred words as they’d slinked away from the partying crowd after the countdown was done, and each of them had taken three shots of vodka. “But it’s so worth it. Smells like a fucking forest in your room. Like proper Christmas!”

And although she’d spent this holiday season alone, Harry had been right. Just like he’d been right about Y/N.

She tapped her pen against the glass surface and readjusted her position on the floor.

“This is the periodic table, noble gases stable, halogens and alkali react aggressively,” Y/N hummed as she highlighted the incorrect parts of the paper in front of her. “Each period will see new outer shells, while electrons are added moving to the right.”

Just as she was about to start off the second verse, her doorbell rang, and her stomach gurgled in response.

“Ugh,” she groaned to herself. “Pasta come to fuckin’ mama.”

But when she opened the door, she wasn’t greeted by the Uber Eats delivery man.

“Harry.”

Y/N was taken aback. She didn’t expect him to visit her, especially not so soon and especially to fly out to New York (as much as he was most likely there to do other stuff as well, her gut told her he was there for her).

Sure, she hoped that one day they could be friends, if not acquaintances, he was too important of a person for her to lose completely from her life, but that was looking like five years into the future.

“I bring gifts.” He raised his hand where her boxes of food hung in a paper bag. “Can I?”

“Uh, yeah, of course!” She shook her head to clear it from the shock and allowed Harry to enter into the warmth of her apartment and escape from the cold January air.

“I was on my way up when the delivery man came in, and I recognised by the boxes it was yours.” The smirk on Harry’s face was something Y/N loved to see, but usually, she liked to also wipe it away. Preferably with her own lips.

She let out a small scoff, not waiting to see if he followed inside, as she scurried to the adjacent kitchen and grabbed two plates, while he opened up the white cardboard containers and allowed the delicious smell of spaghetti Bolognese as well as a carbonara waft into the air. Y/N had wanted to eat the latter at some point during the night when the munchies hit, but she supposed Harry was probably hungry as well. “Maybe there’s someone else here, who likes Italian.”

“Probably, but only you would order from the shittiest Italian restaurant just because they have pesto and parmesan bread.”

“Hey!” She slapped his arm. “They’re not shit. They provide me with everything I need – calories, carbs and bread.”

“What more does a person need?”

“Exactly!”

Both of them let out small chuckles and then settled down on her couch to dig into the meal. They ate in silence, and despite Y/N’s initial shock, it wasn’t uncomfortable. In fact, they were sitting pretty much shoulder to shoulder, as she watched Harry re-read the spread-out articles on the table and use her marker to tick some stuff that could use re-wording. He had a knack for words, after all.

“I uh…” He wiped his mouth with one of the napkins provided by the diner before clasping his fingers together and looking at the woman sitting next to him, as she slowly set her empty plate on the small cupboard beside the sofa. “I was hoping we could talk.”

Y/N hung her head. She should’ve known he wasn’t here to just check-in and have some dinner. “We already did. Twice might I add. What makes you think this time the ending will be different?”

“Third times the charm?” Harry let out a little laugh, and she rolled her eyes. “Look, I didn’t wanna leave everything the way I did. I – I said some pretty shit things.”

Y/N fiddled with her thumb. ‘I had,’ Harry’s words echoed in her head. ‘Only she didn’t trust that I loved her the same.’ “Nothing that was untrue though.”

“See, that’s where I think both of us are wrong.”

That was not what Y/N thought this conversation would be whatsoever.

“I – “ He cleared his throat. “I know I said I didn’t think you trusted me that I loved you enough. I think you know I did – do.”

If Y/N still had any food in her mouth she would’ve choked on it, as she bit back the rising lump in her throat, but instead of interrupting him, she let Harry continue. “And honestly, it’s not your fault that it fell apart, ‘s my fault too. I pushed you to do something, you didn’t want to, weren’t comfortable with, when you told me not to… just because I wanted to feel important, ‘nd because I wanted to get a role in your life you weren’t ready for yet. And I’m sorry for doing that. I should’ve never forced you.”

“Harry…” Y/N was at a complete loss. “I – I don’t really know what to say.”

He took her left hand in his and clasped it, finally able to properly say what'd been eating away at him. “During the New Year party, I didn’t go about it the right way. I was just – I was just still so hurt, and I wanted you to hurt the same because… it didn’t seem like you cared at all, which I know you did… I know you loved me, and…” He took in a deep breath. “I hope that you still do. At least enough to give us another chance. We can take it at your pace,” he instantly added, knowing how she’d react, expecting the sigh and the almost tired and resigned ‘Harry’ that escaped her lips. But he’d say everything on his mind. “You can take how long you need to feel like you can trust me with what’s bothering you.”

“Harry,” she repeated, but it didn’t seem like he was about to stop.

“But I think we can do it, and we can do it right this time. We know where we stand, we won't make the same mistakes.”

Y/N’s hand came to rest against his cheek, and he practically melted, engulfing her palm with his as to not let her touch leave his skin for even a second. “Are you even listening to yourself?”

“Look, I know, you’re scared, and the thing is, so am I. I don’t want it to end like that or end. Period. But I do want to try again.”

And if nothing but to humour him Y/N asked, “And if it does end the same way?”

“It won’t.” He was so sure of it, she had to laugh.

“Harry, the big difference between us is – you like to talk about your feelings. You like to go through them and stuff. I don’t. I feel… icky when I even think about talking to someone of what I feel. We’re just too opposite.”

“Opposites attract.”

“No,” she pointed a finger at him, stifling her laughter, though Harry seemed not to be hiding his smile. “Do not use science against me.”

He raised his hands as if in surrender. “I’m not, I’m just supporting my point with facts. Scientific facts, that you can’t argue against.”

“I mean…” Y/N shrugged her shoulders. “I dunno… Maybe it was a good thing we ended it when we did. It was ten months – almost ten – amazing months, but… can you imagine if we’d gone so far as to think about moving in together, and then it fell apart? That would’ve been a whole different kind of a mess.”

“Do you love me?”

Y/N sighed, resting her cheek against the couch while she smoothed away his brown locks from his face. “Of course, I do. Don’t think there will be a time in my life I don’t.”

“Then that’s all I need.”

“Is that really enough for you?”

“Yes.”

And there was no lie in that single word. Did he want for Y/N to feel comfortable enough with him that she talked about whatever concerned her, however small? Of course. But he also wanted her to be comfortable enough to be herself. If that meant her keeping things to herself, and trusting Harry to support her decisions, it’d be enough.

Her Y/E/C eyes hadn’t left his green ones, and they only widened as he leaned forwards and pressed his forehead to hers.

“Haz…”

Fuck, how he’d missed her calling him that. It wasn’t an exclusive nickname by any means, but when it came from Y/N’s mouth, it was the sweetest sound in the universe.

He was her Haz when he broke a plate, he was her Haz when she threw her head back as pleasure exploded through her body, he was her Haz when he took her hand in his to quell her anxiety, and he was her Haz when he gave her tissues as they watched a movie, and she couldn’t help but cry each time a dog or cat died (or a dragon, but he was a sobbing mess as well because ‘Dragonheart’ messed with them both).

His lips were so close, and just as they skimmed over her own, Y/N’s phone rang making her physically spring back, eyes like saucers.

“S – Sorry,” she stammered, scrambling to find the annoying device between the cushions. It was Sarah’s name that lit up her screen.

“Hey, what’s up?” Y/N started, voice trembling and shaky. God, when had she suddenly gone so out of breath? And why was her head so dizzy, as if she’d just gotten off a rollercoaster?

“Yeah, he’s here,” she replied, eyeing Harry. “Yeah, just a sec,” and Y/N handed him her phone with a quiet ‘why’s your phone always dead?’

‘Didn’t know it died’, he said, but that was untrue. He’d turned it off so this sort of a situation wouldn’t happen; so a call or text wouldn’t interrupt him at the most critical moment. He had to give the universe a proper talk once he was done.

“ ‘Ello?”

Seconds of silence passed, and Y/N didn’t like how weird it was, so she took the empty plates and put them in the sink to soak.

“Now?”

She could see the frustration rise in Harry as his forehead creased, and he let a hand rake through his hair. “Fuck’s sake… yeah, I’ll be there in ten. ‘S alright,” he sighed. “Not your fault Sarah. Tell Jeff not to worry, and that I’m not dead.”

With that, he pressed the red button and ended the call, drumming his fingers against the screen. God, he really didn’t want to leave. Not now. Not after he’d been so close.

“Uh, work?” Y/N asked, arms crossed in front of her as if she was protecting herself from the answer.

“Yeah, sorry. I uh a meeting from tomorrow got rescheduled for tonight, like right now because there was some sort of an emergency from the label’s side."

“ ‘S alright, I get it. Showbiz never stops.” Y/N motioned to the door. “I’ll walk you out.”

There were a couple of times in his life Harry wanted to give himself a beating. Once when he was six and Gemma had told on him after he’d broken a favourite vase of their mothers, he decided to get revenge and destroy her favourite plushie. He’d never forget the tears Gem had cried, and how absolutely heartbroken she’d sounded. He vowed although he was the little brother, to never ever let anyone hurt her like that, and if someone did, they’d meet their maker sooner rather than later.

The second time was when he was still a teenager, One Direction on the rise, and it had gotten to his head just a little bit more than it should’ve. He’d gotten really messed up at a party (which Harry shouldn’t have even been at). The disappointment on his mother’s face as she scolded him through FaceTime was gut-wrenching enough to make him promise to always know the limit.

And Harry guessed this was the third time.

He could’ve said no to the meeting. Jeff was there and so was Sarah and Mitch. The three of them could handle it for him. It’s not like he would mind much whatever they came up with if it had given him the time to settle things with Y/N.

“It was great to see you, Harry.” She brought him out from the thoughts as she unlocked the door and opened it for him, bringing her jumper sleeves over her palms to hide from the cold outside air. “Really. I – I missed you, and honestly, I’m glad we got to talk. I uh well, take care. And say hi to Sarah from me please.”

“I – “ he took hold of Y/N’s wrist before she could turn away. “I’m holding a small concert in a week. Here in uh in New York. It’s for charity… I want you to come.”

“I umm… I’ll have to check if I’m free, but yeah. I will. Thank you.”

“ ‘S no problem… Sarah missed you like crazy now that you’re not in LA as often… ‘n yeah. Anyway. I’ll put your name on the guest list, so just bring some ID, and they’ll let you backstage.”

“Okay,” she whispered and gave him a small, genuine smile. “Thank you. I’ll really try to come.”

“Yeah.”

And he was going to go without doing anything else. Harry truly was. But as he released her wrist, going to the stairs, he gave Y/N one last glance back, and it was like his feet had a mind of their own, as they carried him back to where she stood by the still open door, grabbed her by the waist and pressed his lips to hers.

He expected Y/N to push him away, but to his very huge delight, she didn’t. Instead, her fingers wove through his hair and her legs almost on instinct rose so he could take her by the thighs, wrap them around his middle and press her against the doorway.

The groan that Harry swallowed from Y/N only ignited the fire that’d been burning ever since he met her, but it wasn’t the destructive kind, like the ones that leave nothing but charcoal behind. It was warm. Safe. Like the light of a fairy light. Like the embrace of home.

“Come to the show,” he muttered against Y/N’s lips, as they broke apart, and he set her down on the ground, not letting go until he was sure she was steady on her feet. “I’ll wait for you.”

With that, he left because if he didn’t, he’d make sure Y/N would be unable to walk for a week.

And Y/N watched him retreat while her brain fought with her heart.

What was it he’d sung in ‘Golden’, as he’d twirled her in the sea of bodies and glitter a little bit more than a year ago? ‘Loving is the antidote?’

Maybe love was the antidote to her fear.

She closed the door.

And smiled.

Tags (crossed out wouldn’t take):

Everything tags: @lumelgy @palaiasaurus64 @supernaturalbaesduh @breezy1415 @crazy--me @thatawkwardlittlefangirl @sea040561 @staryeyedgirl @deathbyarabbit @s-c-a-r-e-d-po-t-t-e-r @reblogger-not-a-blogger @m-a-t-91 @dalilx @i-need-a-hero-i-need-a-loki @maladaptive-ninja-returns @averyrogers83 @in-the-end-im-still-trash @gallifreyansass @dewy-biitch @avxgers @unlikelygalaxygiver @magicwithaknife @ollyoxenfrees @bnhvrdy @tvwhoresblog @celebsimagines @thatkindofgurl @sj-thefan @teenwolflover28 @lestersglitterglue @im-squished

Harry Styles tags: @sarcasticallywitty15 @breezykpop @girlboss99 @harrystylesdoesntknowiexist @alliyjane @sirtommyholland

A/N: I’ve been listening to ‘Fine Line’, ‘The Periodic Table Song’, ‘Welcome to the Christmas Parade’ (Welcome to the Black Parade mix with All I Want For Christmas) and ‘Rasputin’ Boney M remix exclusively... I feel like a complete crackhead... :D

Decided to tag also those who wanted a part 2 but didn’t necessarily ask to be tagged :)

P.S. I guess there will be a part 3???

P.S.S. if you wanna be added to a tag list drop me a message :)

#Harry Styles #harry styles fanfiction #harry styles imagine #harry styles fandom #harry styles x reader #harry styles x y/n #harry styles x fem!reader #harry styles x you #golden #fine line #one direction #one direction imagine #1d #1d fan fiction #harry styles angst #harry styles and y/n #harry styles fluff #harry styles and you #harry styles and reader

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be-ready-when-i-say-go · 3 years

Text

Blighted

For my precious Sunshine, @5-secondsofcolor's birthday!! Which is technically now, because it is 1 AM on the 20th of May and I am a mad woman. Love you and I hope you have an amazing day, when you see this of course.

Here is your fic, FBI/Behavior Analyst!Calum. Female OC.

Ivy says she's cursed after taking the same career path that took her father's life. Calum's new on the team, a liaison and media specialist, but he's looking to get his toes wet.

AKA your regular old jaded pessimist veteran and bright eyed rookie buddy cop story. Please enjoy!

CW: In depth descriptions of death/crime scenes. Depictions of violence, gore, and blood.

Enjoy my masterlist (on a haitus)

Search for more writing in the h writes tag

________________________

The whiteboard never leaves. It glows behind her closed eyelids. When staring down at the neck of a bottle, she sees it floating just as the bottom of her drink. She’s cursed. But she knew that the moment she tried out for the academy. The second the thought floated across her mind, she would be doomed just like her father. Ivy tried her best to reroute herself--she got into the arts, was first chair flute in her highschool’s orchestra. She was president of the Homecoming committees her junior and senior year, and worked during the summers at her church's camp.

And yet when she went into school for her degree, she gravitated towards psychology and criminal justice. She saw her mother’s fear. The closer it came to graduation and the more the two of them talked about what she would do after graduating, the more the thought lingered, I want to get into the Bureau like Dad. But she couldn’t utter that. She couldn’t say those words without tears welling up in her mother’s eyes.

Ivy suspected her mother always knew about the desires. Ivy didn’t remember all the nights clearly, but sometimes she’d peek out her bedroom door and see the glow of the light downstairs. Ivy followed it, side stepping the creaky fourth step from the top and from between the banister’s she’d find her dad sitting at the dining room table. The kitchen light glowed from behind him and his tie would barely hang on around his neck.

“Boo,” he’d say quietly, knowing the slight shuffle of Ivy’s feet.

“How’d you know I was there, Daddy?” she’d ask, carrying herself the rest of the way down the stairs and make her way through the living room to climb into his lap.

“I can hear your feet above me,” he’d respond, pointing above them.

And they’d spend an hour, sitting at the dining room table. Ivy asked about her dad’s latest trip. He only ever told her when she was young that they were helping save people, putting bad people away. Ivy wonders if this is where it started. If this was where her father casted the spell, leaving Ivy somehow starry eyed about what it really was he did. Ivy would always look at this job with a little bit of that hope that her younger self had, and she’d always be fucked to never be able to walk away from this line of work.

It would kill her--much like it had killed her dad. But unlike him, she’d see the bullet spiral out of the barrel. Her dad had her and her mother to get back too. It wasn’t a weakness. Ivy admired her father for sticking with his dreams and also making the hard calls to make sure his family knew he cared too. But the need to decide would always be a slight hindrance, would always be the key to living or dying in this line of work.

All that’s left of her father, besides the memories and a few of his old t-shirts that got remade into pillows, is the whiteboard she keeps at her desk. There’s a whiteboard for the entire team to use of course. But this whiteboard is the one that her father used in his office. The one where he made his notes, scribbles. The one she’d write notes to him in the bottom left corner that never disappeared until she wanted to replace the note with something new.

“Thomas, look alive, and enjoy.” The manilla folder hits her desk with a quiet thwack. Ivy blinks from the whiteboard up to her senior officer. Kennedy carries on, dropping folders on every desk and each one of them stands without needing any further prompting.

Kennedy’s been in the field for years. It was all over his face with the deep frown lines. His brow seemed permanently furrowed, as if he questioned every waking second. Ivy liked to tease he worried even about sleep. But no one could sink a decade and a half into this line of work and not come out on the other side with a healthy amount of suspicion.

“And where’s this new guy?” Kennedy asks, glancing over the office.

Ivy looks up from her copy of the file. She heard rumors of someone else coming by the office, assisting them occasionally on cases. But those rumors floated around weeks ago, long enough that she chalked it up to just that--rumors. It doesn’t shock her though. Things start at rumors often, and sometimes they come to fruition and sometimes they don’t. Ivy follows Kennedy’s eyeline and doesn’t spy any new faces.

“Want me to keep an eye out for any lost souls?” Ivy offers, glancing back up to Kennedy.

“Nah, I need your eyes on this one. Head up to the conference room and I’ll be there once he shows up.”

With a nod, Ivy closes the file. She swipes the whiteboard from her desk with a couple markers and heads up to the conference room. The rest of the team sat flipping through their files too, Jenkins sitting right near the front but moved down one seat. They’re not new, having been around for a couple years. But Ivy can tell their type--getting in chummy with the boss, trying too hard. They’re a good addition, but Ivy’s waiting for the day they take a hunch and it doesn’t lead to the results they want. A loss will show their true colors, how well they can handle being wrong sometimes. No one on the team is perfect, they’re all hedging bets. Ivy’s taken her lumps of hunches being made too late, or the wrong bets placed. They’re not often. No one likes them. But they happen.

Diaz, Russell, and Burke and scattered throughout the rest of the table. The three of them have been there longer than Ivy. But they all accepted her with open arms. Diaz and Burke were more muscular. They had the brains to match, but they came up the pipeline from their local PD departments and aren’t afraid to get into a tussle. More often than not, Ivy winds up pulling Burke from fights than she’d care to admit. Diaz’s much too big for Ivy to attempt physically restraining, so she referee’s those fights that he gets into.

Russell’s their man behind the screen. He was good at getting through the internet loops, figuring out how to sort databases for the information they need without so much red tape and delay. He preferred to stay behind the lines, but could handle a tussle. Ivy doesn’t count herself as the brains. But her gut had some sort of true north needle that, more often than not, was right. She could see patterns faster than most, could sniff the air after someone and assess how much she could and wanted to trust. Kennedy consulted her often. Whenever she felt like she had something, he’d hush the crowd for her to formulate the full thought. Kennedy didn’t always agree with her assessment, but had to listen to it. He needed to listen to it.

“Nope,” Russell huffs, shutting the folder. “Fucking hell. Kennedy told me it was rough, but I didn’t--I didn’t think it was this rough.”

Ivy settles in next to him sliding him a marker. She draws roughly a tic-tac-toe board. “It not getting easier for you is a good sign.”

Russell makes his first move, the marker squeaking just a little. Ivy follows up with hers. She knows if she makes it too obvious, too easy, Russell will forfeit the game. So she tries to play along, like she’s vying to win.

Russell places his second X though his hands shake just a hair. “Yeah, but compared to you guys, I feel like if someone took a gnarly enough shit it would make me queasy.”

“A bad enough shit could do that to anyone,” Diaz pipes in, his own folder still open but his forearms pressed down over the photographs. Russell’s been around the block, definitely seem some rough things, but has always had a softer view of the world. Still wants it to be good despite all the bad he’s seen.

Ivy places down her second O, noticing the pretty obvious wide open spot she left Russell but looks up to Diaz. “I think I heard through the grapevine you were on the losing end of one of those shits yesterday,” she teases.

Diaz reclines into his seat, his chest bouncing with his laughter. “All because of your cooking Thomas.”

“My cooking is not that bad,” she defends, the cap of her black marker pointing him out.

Burke snickers too with a shake of her head and opens her mouth to speak but the room fills with the voice of Kennedy. “Aren’t y’all old enough to be left alone not to talk about shit for five minutes?”

“Never too old to talk shit, sir,” Diaz returns, his smile lifting only half his face up. He’s a charmer, whenever they go out to bars out manage to get a moment’s peace not hounded by work, he never seems to be at a lack of folks coming up to him. He’s already got a girl, but with the hair that cascades always neatly placed and the dazzling bright grin, anyone could fall for it.

Kennedy huffs his laughter quickly and then shuffles deeper into the room. “We’ve got a new friend, so let’s play nice.” As Kennedy makes head way, Ivy notices the man behind him. He’s tall. The black dress pants and black dress shirt don’t hide everything beneath them, but Ivy’s not too shocked to see people who work in the field like that with some sort of muscular physique. There’s something about his face though--something about the way his brown eyes dart around the room and his smile never shows any teeth that something familiar tugs at her.

Kennedy goes around the table introducing Ivy first, then going to Russell, coming down to Jenkins, Diaz, and then Burke. Each one of them lifts a hand or nods at their name. “This here is Hood, Calum Hood. Joining us as a new liaison.”

Ivy’s no good with faces sometimes. But names she hardly ever forgets. Hood, she met him once a few years back at a lecture. Not that she did them often, but Kennedy got more face time. But he made sure to spread the love between the team. He asked her to tag along. Calum must’ve been in the crowd, had to be, and had to have asked a question because Kennedy told her to remember that name. And she had.

Kennedy continues on with something. Ivy suspects he’s warning Diaz to keep any hazy tactics to a minimum considering how much of a mess they’re walking into. Ivy nods once more at him, and then faces back to the whiteboard, the tap on her arm prompting her too. I’m a scaredy cat sure, but not dumb, it reads in Russell’s handwriting. She spies his X in the bottom corner, opposite of where he would’ve won.

“Pull up a seat, Hood. We’ll have more time for pleasantries once we’re up in the air. But I want everyone to at least be familiar with this case.”

“Yes, sir.” His voice is smooth, Ivy notes. A soft volume and accented but smoother than she would’ve pegged.

The team breaks down the file, recapping mostly what they’ve already read but Kennedy’s old fashioned this way, needing to make sure people have done their homework. It’s an extra step than completely necessary, but having the quick meetings has always made this team feel more like a second family. There’s always a common goal in mind for them and they’re always reminded of it. No matter what happens out in the field, they all want the same thing.

“We soar in forty-five minutes. So let’s hope wheels can turn in the air. Hood, I need you to keep in mind the local PD’s been taking a lot of heat for the last couple of months. So we don’t want to take too much star power, we’re only here to assist and whatever we can do to put the local’s good grace back onto that PD we need to.”

Not quite what she expected, though with his demeanor and looks, he’s sure to work a crowd or newsroom well. She’s sure he’ll be on the ground with them too.

“Understood,” he replies and with that, all of them push away from the table. “Agent Thomas,” Hood says, reaching out almost as if to touch her elbow but never actually do it. He continues to speak once she looks over to him. “I-I don’t know if you remember. But we met at a lecture a couple years back that you held with Agent Kennedy. And I just wanted to say that I’m excited to be here, working with you all.”

“Thomas, here, does not respond well to flattery. Trust, we’ve all tried,” Diaz laughs, clamping down on Hood’s shoulders.

“I appreciate it,” Ivy responds. “Glad to have a fresh mind on the team.” There’s no smile, at least, not one she’d give Russell, Burke, Diaz, or even Jenkins. But Calum watches her give another curt nod with a quick quirk of her lips, and then leave, stacking her file on top of the whiteboard.

“Don’t sweat it. She’s in work mode,” Diaz assures. “We get off the clock and she’s a hoot. But on the clock, it’s strictly business. I will warn you, Thomas will burn you.”

Calum’s left, watching Diaz, Burke, and Russell leave. Jenkins turned tail the second Kennedy got done. It’s not that he wants to mix business with pleasure. He’s just been studying Thomas, attending as many lectures that she gives as he can. She didn’t always go directly by the book, there was something about her method that used the evidence, used science, but also had some sort of intuition. Thomas just knew things and when attempting to quantify it, she didn’t always have the words for it. Calum just wants to see that in action, understand what it is about knowing that isn’t always present in the facts.

The plane ride is comfortable. Plenty of seats even though they squeak just a little. Calum watches Thomas sit and everyone seems to sit spread out from there, keeping her at some sort of center. “Mobile. They don’t mind the hustle,” Ivy starts.

“Crossing state lines is risky, especially after the escalation,” Burke interjects.

“But wouldn’t that be a reason for it? If all the crimes look different, enough crossing state lines might make the unsub feel confident, like they’re getting away with something.” The entire plane turns to look at him. Calum freezes for a moment. He knows better. He knows so much better than that. Fuck.

“Valid. But we shouldn’t settle. Travel might be part of their job. We’ve got a good cluster to possibly estimate a home base. Get comfortable, perfect the craft here and then spread out. But why come back? Local PD's hadn't quite connected anything, until the return. More families, found exactly the same. Even when they cross state lines, all points wind back to a specific geographical location,” Burke returns.

“Hood, you got the inside of the media. What does it look like?”

Thirty minutes of his forty five was making sure that he could at least nail down this run through. And it’s easy, even with the squeak of Ivy’s dry erase marker, to run down the media reports, what information has been released and what hasn’t been released. He makes note of what the team doesn’t want to get out and what they do want to keep available to the public.

All the while, Calum watches the way Ivy writes over her board, the squeak over and over on specific strokes. He wonders for a moment what she’s writing, what it is that she needs to keep written track of. But he doesn’t get a chance to fully flesh out that thought before he finishes his spill and Diaz cuts in. They’re fast, not quite settling on any one theory. More like compiling the possibilities, not wanting to eliminate things but ranking how plausible they all could be until the pieces click.

The first thing after the flight lands, they head for the precinct. The lead investigator greets them, and there’s no pause. They’re pulled into the frenzy, looking at boards. Calum tries to keep his head in the game, but he is watching Ivy. The way she settles in her chair, her marker always moving. He’s not even sure it’s words anymore, just a constant circular movement. Sure he’s here to help regulate media outlets, and he can do that in his sleep if local PD and media follow his instructions to a T.

But he needs an in, to show he’s more than just the new meat on the chopping block. He’s worth something. “Is the last crime scene still available?” Calum asks.

The room turns to him, well most of the room does. Ivy keeps circling, but she speaks. “The plan’s to go in ten minutes. Whatever’s got you preoccupied, leave it in your go bag.”

Kennedy chuckles, tapping at her foot. “Give the kid a break. He was buried in news coverage the second we got into the door. But Hood, shake the cobwebs. This isn’t your small town’s rodeo anymore. If you need to be caught up, ask. But if you’re going to be in the room, keep those ears open.”

A task easier said than done, but he nods, resting his elbows on his knees. God, they’re going to think I’m an idiot. The room goes back to its normal buzz, but Calum keeps his head buried in his hands.

“Talk to me. What are your theories?”

Calum lifts his head. Ivy’s closer now. He can see the black marks on her hand from where she’s held it up against the swirls and lettering. “Clearly I’m barely treading water here.”

“First day nerves, but you can shake it. You wanted to see the crime scene. Why?”

“Why there? We have indications that the unsub spent a lot of time there, even with the interruptions they've seemed to caused. They're still meticulous. I want to follow their steps. What did they do first? And why? What do they need from a crime scene before it’s done?”

“Good. But what else?”

“What-what do you mean what else?”

She smiles, much different than the first one. It shows her teeth, a bit of a twinkle in her eyes. “What else?”

He goes quiet, reclines back into the seat and closes his eyes for a second. What else? There’s a lot else. “I mean, the next obvious thing is why these victims? But besides that, how comfortable is this person? Do they feel a need to be rushed, fast, get-in-get-out or can they blend in? I have a hunch they can blend in. Maybe people even trust them. They are perfectly ordinary and in essence, they have to be in order for the fantasy to work. Detection means they have to get sloppy. Being sloppy’s not an option, so blending in it is.”

“Bring that to the crime scene.” Something taps his knee and Calum cracks open his eyes to see her, standing. Her whiteboard still gently rests against his knee. She’s not looking at him though. Her gaze is locked onto the board next to him, displaying the crime scene photos.

“What’s your secret?” Calum asks. He’s almost positive she didn’t hear him due to Ivy’s lack of prompt response. But then she turns to him.

“Secret?”

“Thomas, Hood, you comin’ or what?” Kennedy calls. “I can deal without Diaz, but I need you, Thomas.”

“I’ll remember that,” Diaz laughs as they walk through the glass doors of the precinct.

It’s not Calum’s first time at a crime scene. But the second Calum steps through the door a chill runs through him. The carpet and walls are still bloodstained. Everything about it the scene just feels wrong, makes Calum want to immediately step back out of the house.

“You feel that?” Burke asks. She continues on deeper into the house, slipping into her gloves.

“This is when Thomas says she’s too Black for all this and gets the hell out of dodge,” Diaz barks. He squats down to the blood on the carpet. Ivy’s already deep into the house, seemingly guided by a force unwillingly to let her go. She doesn’t respond verbally, just lifts her hand, the middle finger extended out in the general direction of Diaz.

And Calum is standing near the threshold of the door, trying to pinpoint why it feels so cold in a house in Texas in the middle of the summer. His hands feel sticky even inside the latex gloves. His first step is shaky but he stops next to Diaz. “There are drag marks from the blood,” Calum notes. “This isn’t where they were killed, just staged.”

“The unsub staged all the victims here in the living room. We know that. Pictures show the parents at the ends of the sofa, children in the middle, dog on the floor.”

“But there’s blood on the walls. We know the Dad’s 6’1,” Calum returns.

“And we don’t have forced entry. So, whoever is wreaking havoc isn’t threatening enough for someone not to answer the door.”

Calum turns to the sofa where the family was found. “It’s picturesque, poetic even. You’ve got a whole family right here, at your will. They knock on the door. It’s dusk, sun’s just starting to set.”

“They have a ruse that gets them inside. We already know they have to blend in with the community. So what can you use to get into a house? Who gets into a house without a problem?”

Diaz goes into the kitchen where in the case file it mentions when the family was finally discovered food was still out on the table. “The window doesn’t have to last long. But it has to be just right. All three families were either eating dinner, or just done with dinner. So why dinner time?” Diaz turns from the stove to face Calum.

“It’s when everyone is together. They’re not just going after a family, but very specific family dynamics. Which means both parents need to present, two kids seems to be a minimum.”

“What’s the average dinner time you’d say? With this job, I eat whenever I fucking can. But before this, excluding people like us, when is the average person sitting down to eat?”

“6, 6:30 I’d guess. That’s assuming the average person is working a job that calls it at 5PM. A town like this is either on the verge of collapsing or being bought out. So I assume a lot of people are traveling outside to the city for work, so the commute might be even later. But I wouldn’t hazard any guesses that our unsub’s just haphazardly picking houses.”

“No, no, you’re right, Hood,” Diaz states, walking over to the table. “I guess what I’m saying is the timing. No one hears anything. But our unsub’s using a gun. That’s not quiet. And there’s not a lot of city noise this far out. They’re spending hours in the house and somehow getting out undetected. But striking at dinner time, with the setting sun, means this person’s around outside the house. But no one’s noticed anything out of the ordinary.”

“Hunting seasons,” Calum returns. “No one really flinches at the sound of a gun shot because people are hunting year ‘round here.”

“And it seems like humans are on the menu.”

“An appetizing thought.”

******

Ivy’s not sure when the chill finally left over the course of the day but it returns when she walks into the precinct and sees the entire room in a frenzy. Kennedy spies her and it’s just a look. Not much different than his resting face, but somehow she knows with that slight arch in his eyebrow. Another family--while they were proding over photos the killer was already moving on, already in the midst of their attack.

And it shouldn’t shock her. Well, to be more accurate, it doesn’t shock her and maybe that’s the thing that scares her. “I’ve been doing this too damned long,” she mutters to herself. “Hood, you’re with me. Get the address and let’s see what that gut of yours cooks up.”

“How’d--Is Kennedy going to be okay with that? The call just came in a few minutes ago.”

“Get the address and tell me how you like your coffee,” Ivy says. Kennedy’s going to come to the scene anyway, but she doesn’t tell Calum that.

There’s not another word before Calum passes in front of her. “Cream and two sugars,” he answers as he goes.

“So Black, got it.”

Paused at the desk of a detective, he looks over his shoulder. “Cream and two sugars,” he re-emphasizes with a tiny smile and holding up two fingers. Police station coffee’s never the best, but it’s better than nothing. When on a case, time is also imperative and they take what they can. Ivy fixes Calum’s cup first, slipping a lid on and keeping the stirrer through the hole. She pours her cup with no additions.

“Not even creamer? Not one?” Calum questions.

“Takes too much time,” she returns. “Burke, you staying?”

“Yeah, Russell got those files over just before the call came in. Besides that crime scene’s bound to be crowded as all hell and I swear if I walk into another house and catch a chill after seven years of doing this job, I just might quit.”

The two ladies laugh. Ivy recovering first to respond, “I need you to keep me sane even though you’re just as much trouble as Diaz.”

“Which is why I’m going to say here, work with Russell. We’re going to need Hood back before the 5’oclock news. Whatever you find at the scene will help solidify our profile and we need it soon. We need the hands on this clock, because it’s ticking ahead of us.”

Ivy nods. It’s no fun being behind. “Kennedy, we’re moving or we’re dying.”

“I trust you. There’s something off about that last one that I want to walk through again.”

“Let’s rock and roll,” she says to Calum, handing him his cup of coffee. “Mr. Cream-and-Two-Sugars.”

The drive is relatively short, all thanks to Ivy’s lead foot. But they need to get there fast, while things are still fresh.

“Did you always want to do this?” Calum asks in the silence of their drive. The radio doesn’t even play. Ivy knew he had questions. He wore them on his face, brows furrowing anytime he was the slightest bit hesitant about something.

“I don’t think I had a choice.”

“What do you mean you didn’t have a choice? We’ve all got choices.”

“My dad worked with the FBI until it killed him. And I think about how he used to tell me it was his job to help put bad people in jail. And I believed him.”

“The bug bit you before you even had a fighting chance.”

Ivy nods, taking a quick glance to Calum. “But if I had a prettier face, I’d stick with liaison too.”

Calum huffs out his laughter. “I went the journalism route first, sue me. Besides, that’s you admitting you think I have a pretty face.”

“I forget faces—so don’t think too highly of it. And I’m probably old enough to be your mother. You attended some lectures, I remembered your name. How’d you convert?”

It’s silent for a moment and Calum contemplates her statement, old enough to be his mother. “Given that my mother has shared her fountain of youth with my sister and I, you might be shocked to know I’m nearing 30. And I converted because of you and your work under Kennedy and his old superior Rogers.”

“All the greats,” Ivy teases, but she doesn't sound impressed. More like tired, used to it.

“But you’re different.”

“Yeah, because somehow the Bureau hasn’t realized their mistake.”

“Mistake?” Calum asks around his sip of coffee.

“Kennedy’s going to retire soon. He's done 15 with our unit. Another ten prior to that climbing through the ranks. Then they’re going to have to find a replacement.”

“You say that like it won’t be you.”

“Because it won’t.”

“You’ve been with Kennedy for so long. He’s obviously going to recommend you, Ivy.”

“He can recommend but people higher up get the final word.”

The truck stops just in front of the house, and Calum knows the most logical thing to do is just focus on the case, walk the scene. Do his job. But he reaches across the console and wraps his fingers around hers for a second with a squeeze. “You’ll get it. They’d be dumb not to bring you to the head of this team.”

“There’s an altar or a shrine. It’s small.”

Calum pauses with his hand on the door. Ivy continues beside him. “Go to the eldest child’s bedroom. In a corner you’ll see the small shrine. Our unsub left one at the last house. And the house before, I’d bet. And this house too. That’s what Kennedy missed. What other cops missed too. Make sure you get it photographed. Besides, I’ve been doing this job too long and don’t know if I’d even want the added responsibility if they promoted me.”

“How’d we miss that?”

“We didn’t miss shit. We saw it when we needed to see it. We see things when we need them.” It's the way she says it, like she has to believe that makes Calum believe too.

The sight rocks Calum--he knew it wouldn’t be easy. But he didn’t know it’d hit him like this. The room spins, just a little. And his heart racing. Mostly because he can’t stand the thought that this could be someone he knows. These people weren’t anticipating their would be like this. And what does that even mean for him? What does his end look like?

“Hey, whoa. Whoa.” An arm comes around his waist and he follows the lead of whomever’s grabbed him.

“I’m okay,” he breathes out. “I’m okay.”

“Yeah, I’m a fudge brownie. It’s okay to not be alright in there.”

Calum rests against the side of the house and squats down just a little. His elbows hit his knees. His breath is heavy, falls from his open mouth almost like he’s going to vomit. But his stomach’s not churning anymore. Not with the fresh morning air hitting his lungs. “Fuck,” he breathes out again, eyes blurring just a little.

“But you’re okay. Take a breather.” Ivy’s shoes turn up in the dirt. "Get him a water, will ya? Hood, take a minute. It's alright. I'll be inside when you're ready." Calum just watches her go. It takes a moment for him to lift his head. It has to get easier. Or least he hopes it does. It takes him a minute, inhaling deeply before he stands up straight.

The rest of them processing the scene goes by in relative silence. Occasionally, Calum pipes in with an addition to their theory. Ivy hums in agreement. And it’s not until they step out and slip out of their gloves that Ivy says anything. “This is why I drink my coffee black.”

“I’m sorry. I really--I don’t know why this one got me.”

“It’s the kids. Kids are the worst.”

Calum looks up to the sky. There’s a few clouds, but not many. “The photos are bad, but in person is way different.”

Ivy watches Calum, the way it takes him a second to come back to earth it seems. “Don’t ask yourself if it gets easier.” When his gaze lands hers, she can see the furrowed brow again. The question drips off his face. “You’ll only disappoint yourself. And this job’s not for the weak of heart. For the people that can’t take some losses with the wins.”

“You said it yourself. You wanted to put the bad people away.”

“Eight year old me wants to believe it’s as easy as putting the monsters away. Thirty-one year old me knows for a fact what the losses are, who gets caught in the cross-fire. It’s not easy, not in the slightest.”

“Innocent lives do add up.”

“Which is why I try not to do math on the job. They all slip up. They all reach a point where their methods don’t satiate the need. They all make a fatal flaw and counting the unfortunate lives on the way to that will have you walking from the Bureau faster than you can blink.”

“So what makes you stay? If it’s all so fucking bad, what keeps you going?”

Ivy nods to the car, pulling the keys from her pocket. “We need to solidify our profile and you need to run press ASAP. But to answer your question, the thing that keeps me going is that fact that they do get caught eventually.”

******

Eventually seems to come up faster than Calum anticipates. He was sure it would take weeks. After getting back to the precinct more information in Russell’s digging found a connection between all the families, a Venn diagram that overlapped to their X on the map. Another couple of days and it all unravelled. It’s a blur, when he tries to think back to it, on the plane. The only grounding thing is when one of the children, a little girl about 6, pointed out the tattoos on his hands. In all this time, he was sure the tattoos would be a barrier to entry--they’d somehow put him in a place that others would think he was nothing but trouble. But somehow, despite the terror she had done through, that little girl liked his tattoos, found some sort of comfort in them.

When he told her they were for his parents, she smiled at him. She said she wanted one for her parents too and then asked if he had anymore and how old he was when he got them. All of which Calum was more than happy to answer while the medic checked over her. Her older brother came soon after, asking a few questions, but overall he was much quieter than his sister. Understandable for what was endured. In the end, Calum’s just glad he didn’t see them staged on a couch, bleeding out onto the cushions.

There’s a small bit of turbulence and the shakes cause Calum to open his eyes for a moment. Ivy’s seated across from him, whiteboard on her lap, headphones in her ears. A tic-tac-toe grid drawn across it in the middle, but in the corners are some swirls, a crude drawing of the shrine from the case. Calum leans forward and tugs on the board just a little. She lets it go without a fight and hands over the marker.

Calum makes an ‘X’ in the top left. “You said this job doesn’t get easier.” He looks up to see if Ivy can hear him and is relieved when she pops out one her headphones. She raises her brows like she wants him to continue with the thought. And Calum’s not even sure he should. Instead, he hands over the board back to her. If seeing death doesn’t get easier, then maybe it just means he gets better at it. Maybe it means that not being okay with death is a good motivator to keep down this path.

“The job doesn’t get easier. You’re still human. You still want a spouse and a kid. You might want two dogs and a cat. You might want that white picket fence one day. You’ll want to close your eyes and not see death. You’ll want to walk down the street and see humans as humans again. You’ll have nightmares. Don’t hide from it. Nothing’s wrong with you for wanting that. But we’re in a world now where we see the horrors--what’s on the other side of everything you wanted. It’s a liminal space and it’s heavy to wade through.”

“I just want to not freak like I did the other day. It’s not easy. But sometimes I fear that maybe I bit off more than I could chew.”

Their game of tic-tac-toe has been forgotten, placed in the seat next to Ivy as she leans forward in her seat. “You said you were converted because of me. What exactly about me was it?”

“You just know things. When you walk onto a scene, you have an air of knowing. How can you just pick up on it in a snap?”

“Well,” Ivy laughs, “if that’s the only reason you want in, I warn you to get out.”

“I want to help. I want to save people,” Calum adds on. But then it hits him. Maybe this wasn’t the business of saving people as much as it was stopping people. Sure, they prevent future murders, but that didn’t always negate for all the lives lost. But they did save that family today. He saved that little girl that wants tattoos like his. “I want to save people and I want to stop people as well,” he finally adds on.

“There will always be monsters in this world,” Ivy warns.

“And there will always be heroes.”

“Make no mistake, Calum. We don’t have capes. We don’t swoop in all the time at just the right moment. Sometimes we are late. Sometimes we’re reacting more than we are being proactive. Sometimes we fuck up.”

His heart stops for just a moment at the mention of his first name. He’s always Hood, or at least has always been Hood. Just like she’s always Thomas to the team. But she said his first name. Unmistakably so. “Did-did you just use my first name?”

“You used my first name, first.”

When had he done that? He didn’t recall, but he couldn’t combat it either.

“Look,” Ivy continues, “the fact remains. We will fail. We will make the wrong call, or the right call just by the skin of our teeth. We will walk down the wrong direction only to figure out, we know it’s the wrong one. We get it right. A lot more often, we get it right and we minimize the death count. But we’re human--you don’t have to take it on if you don’t want. You don’t have to suffer.”

“If I don’t suffer and win, then that little girl suffers and loses. Then the next person loses. And the next. Their suffering or mine--the choice is clear.”

Ivy studies Calum for a moment. She sees the resolve on his face. Just how much sacrificing himself is a no brainer for him. It was a no brainer for her too. But admittedly, she was cursed. Maybe Calum wasn’t. Maybe she could save him, even if she couldn’t save herself. But she wasn’t in the business of saving people, only stopping them.

“I can’t stop you, can I?” she asks.

“Stop me from what?”

“Stop you from killing yourself with this job.”

“If it’s killing you, then why don’t you leave?” His head cocks to the side, now intrigued by her honesty.

“It’s like you said, I got bit before I could escape. I’m cursed. Are you?”

The little girl flashes through his vision again, and his chest tightens for a second before the relief kicks in. He could chase that feeling, the knowledge that he saved someone, one person. And that he helped put away one more person causing harm. “I am now. Ruined--because even though I can’t save them all. I can save some. I can help keep some people safe. I don’t think there’s a better reward than that.”

With a nod, Ivy looks back to their game on the whiteboard. They would’ve tied, she can see it after where she placed her ‘O’. But she hands it back over to Calum. “Kennedy’s going to shit himself when he realizes he’s got too hard heads on his team.”

“You’ll shit yourself when you realize you’re inheriting the second hard-head on the team after Kennedy leaves.”

Ivy scoffs. Of course, Calum still believes in the shiny idea that hard work yields rewards. “And this is where I can still tell you’re new to this--the dreams are still shiny and ideal.”

“All the work you’ve invested, they’d be--”

Ivy interrupts him. “I know, they’d be dumb not to.”

“Then why do you keep saying it won’t happen?”

“I’d call my pessimism a curse. But at this point, I think it’s a personality trait and the truth.”

“And let me guess, this is why you take your coffee black too.”

Ivy winks at him before her smile takes over her face. “You know it.”

#calum hood #calum hood fanfic #calum hood imagine #calum hood fic #calum hood 5sos #calum 5sos #5sos #5sos fanfic #5sos fic #5sos imaagine #5 seconds of summer #5 seconds of summer fanfic #5 seconds of summer fic #fbi!calum #behavior analyst!calum #h writes #calum hood blurb #calum hood x oc

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chironshorseass · 3 years

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29 and 30 fluff for perachel or percabeth? Hehe I like both ships don’t @ me. Love your writing btw!

I kinda managed to do both...kinda lol. This was fun to do :) Sorry in advance for the bad puns.

writing prompts

“Detention? Again?”

“Look, I can explain.”

Annabeth rolled her eyes and sat back on her bed, too tired to stand up and listen to what Percy had to say, most likely.

“Sure you can.”

They’d been Iris Messaging for a few minutes now. Percy, exhausted from a day of school and homework, had taken the first chance off to fish out a drachma from his drawer and call one of the people he’d missed most since the summer.

It had slipped his mind that New York and San Francisco had different time zones. But luckily, Annabeth was still awake. He’d found her in her bedroom, curls pulled into a messy bun and eyebrows scrunched up in concentration as she read some textbook, still studying for the exam she’d talked about a week ago.

Despite her initial complaints about Percy interrupting her, he knew that she didn’t mind.

“So?” she asked, bringing him back to the present.

She pulled her legs under her and stared at him expectantly.

He blinked. “Huh?”

She raised an eyebrow, and Percy thought—in the back of his mind—that she looked unfairly pretty. At night, with the fairy lights illuminating her hair and her face, like an angel.

“Why’d you get detention?”

“Oh. That.”

“Yes, Seaweed Brain. That.”

“Uhm…” Percy scratched the back of his neck. “It’s kind of a funny story, I um…”

“Spit it out.”

Now that he thought about it, maybe he shouldn’t have said anything at all. Maybe he should’ve thought this through, to avoid any arguments. Or confrontations. Or another cold shoulder. They weren’t as awkward now that the school year had started, but the mention of her always put Annabeth on edge, anyway.

“You see, I was with, uh...Rachel.”

He paused, noticing the way she gripped her textbook tighter, slightly wrinkling the pages.

Why did I think this was a good idea? Stupid.

“I was with Rachel, and she sort of, um...” he laughed nervously, already cringing. “Made a bet?”

Technically, he’d made the bet. But that wasn’t important for Annabeth to know.

Chemistry, in Percy’s opinion, was the most boring class Goode had to offer. Useless. Irrelevant.

Confusing, most of all.

At least he was partners with Rachel. It was one of the few classes they had together. They sat at the very back, so they were rarely noticed anyway, mostly spending the forty five minutes of lectures about chemical equations doing little drawing games on their notebooks and playing hangman. Percy lost most of the time.

The teacher wasn’t that great, either. Most of the school knew her as Mrs. Jones. She was a short lady in her late sixties with thin, badly dyed hair who had a concerning addiction to gum—so to Percy and Rachel—she was known as Mrs. Gum-Gum. She turned to the board for some explanation that Percy had completely lost interest on since the first five minutes of class. Rachel let out a low moan, hands on her forehead.

“Kill me now,” she muttered.

“Sorry, I can’t. My sword doesn’t work on you.”

“I hate you.”

“Yeah,” he grinned, leaning backwards and tilting his chair. “I know.”

She hit him in the shin. “You’re going to fall one of these days, and the class will never let you forget it.”

“Eh,” Percy shrugged. “At least they’d get a laugh and you wouldn’t be so bored.”

Her green eyes twinkled with humor like she’d just remembered something. She snorted. “Okay. So this one time, a girl was doing the same thing as you, leaning back and all—and she like, fell. It was hilarious, because she just lay there, with her feet in the air.”

“Rachel Dare,” Gum-Gum called, narrowed eyes cast on them. She kind of sounded like a wounded hyena, in his humble opinion. “I sure hope you and Mr. Jackson are discussing the worksheet that I gave out.”

Rachel nodded and threw her a thumbs up, while Percy held a fist to his mouth to stop the smile forming on his face. Gum-Gum left her alone and went back to her lecture.

The class kept its monotone routine of worksheets and notes, so as a distraction, Rachel grabbed his arm and popped the lids off her sharpies, drawing little figurines. She was on his second tattoo when an idea came to him.

“Hey, Rach?” he whispered, making sure the teacher was facing the board.

“Hmm.”

“We should play truth or dare.”

She grabbed the green marker and spread the ink from side to side across his skin. “Mmm...No.”

“Come on,” he whined. “I’m bored.”

“Yeah, but we’ve done truth or dare so many times now. It’s gotten old. Besides, you’re such a pussy.”

“Am not.”

“Yes, you are. Remember that time I dared you to eat the gum from under the seat?”

Percy made a face. “That was so fucking gross. Nobody in their right mind would’ve done that. Maybe Mrs. Gum-Gum, but I am not on her level.”

“I figured, after you blatantly refused. And then there’s the time when I dared you to kiss Mary Andrews. On the cheek. And you couldn’t do it.”

“Oh my gods, I can’t just kiss girls. That’s leading them on.”

She exhaled, long and deep and stared at him as if he were a lost cause. “Okay. Whatever.”

She went back to drawing on his arm.

“If anyone’s the pussy right now,” he whispered. “It’s you.”

“Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that. You just wish you were as marginally cool as me.”

“Um...Then why won’t you play truth or dare?”

“Like I said: bo-ring.” She leaned closer to his arm, creating tiny details with the thinner side of the sharpie. “And don’t tell me I don’t do the dares, ‘cause I do. My last name’s Dare, after all. It would be a complete dishonor.”

“How long have you waited to say that?”

“Oh, you don’t wanna know. Now hold still. You’d look good with tattoos, by the way.”

He sighed. Okay, fine. She had a point, he wasn’t that great at doing “cool” stuff, likely because he was traumatized by the getting-kicked-out-of-schools thing he had going for him. You know, maybe it was that.

As Percy watched her work with her sharpies, he realized: maybe there was a way to prove to her that he could do daring stuff. A once in a lifetime thing. And in the process, he could make her smile.

“Fine,” he said. “If you don’t wanna do something, then let’s make a bet.”

“Depends on what you want to bet on, but go on.”

“How much money would you give me to flip this table, right here, right now, in the middle of class?”

The read-head stopped creating the swirly lines of the little wave she’d been working on, making his skin tingle from the loss of the pointy marker. She lifted her freckled face, watching him with raised eyebrows.

“Nah, you don’t have the guts.”

“Psh. ‘Course I do. I’m Percy Jackson.”

“Ohhh! Percy Jackson. I’m Rachel Dare, nice to meet you.” She lifted her hand like she wanted Percy to shake it.

He slapped it away. “Shut up. I can totally do it.”

“Do you not care about getting in trouble with dear ol’ Gum-Gum?”

“I’ll make it seem like an accident.”

“Nothing you do seems like an accident to teachers.”

“Good point. Still be worth it, though.” He lowered his voice even further. “Besides, I gotta prove to you that I can do cool stuff.”

Rachel snorted. “Now I could literally ask you to do drugs and you’d do it, apparently. Peer pressure is a dangerous thing, my dude.”

He grinned. “And I want your money. You’re like, rich, Dare.”

“Thanks for the reminder, Jackson.”

“No problem.”

Gum-Gum shot them an admonishing look, and they pretended to do their work.

“So,” she said after a few seconds passed. “How much money?”

“I knew you could work with me.”

“Ugh, I’m getting second thoughts from your dramatism.”

“You love it.”

They held gazes, green on green. Rachel narrowed hers and sighed.

“Again, how much money?”

Percy shrugged. “You decide.”

“Fine.” She flipped some of her fiery curls over her shoulder. “I’m betting on a hundred bucks.”

He whistled under his breath. “Damn. You want me to do it that badly?”

“I do want to see everyone’s reaction to Percy Jackson losing his shit.” He shoved her, but she continued. “Especially Gum-Gum’s. But I know we’re getting in trouble, so we might as well go all out. What? It’s true! But at least you’d get your money.”

Percy shook his head. He’d probably regret this later.

Then he thought, what would Annabeth think?

But he couldn't dwell too much on that. At least it would be funny.

“We need to clear the desk, though.”

“Duh.”

So they worked, as quietly and discreetly as they could. When they’d finished, Percy turned to Rachel and nodded. She put a hand against her mouth to muffle her laughter.

On the third count, he flipped the desk. The table crashed with a resonating bang.

Rachel leaned backwards and let out a sound of surprise, probably because she’d half speculated that he wouldn’t pull through with it in the first place.

Immediately, everyone craned their heads to the back of the room. Some jumped at the sound. Others gasped or snickered, especially at the sight of Mrs. Gum-Gum. She yelped and dropped her marker, slapping a hand to her chest and retreating a few steps as if she were about to go into cardiac arrest.

“Percy Jackson!”

He winced a bit, but all in all, he thought he was keeping a straight face. But then he caught onto Rachel’s expression, arms crossed. He doubted they’d get off freely, just as she’d said.

As they shouldered their backpacks, heading for room 1345—detention—Rachel slipped her hand in the pocket of her paint-splattered uniform skirt.

“I didn’t know I had the money with me, but it seems as though he fates are in your favor, Jackson,” she said, taking the dollar bills from her pocket and handing them to him. They both knew all too well that she didn’t care for it. Daddy issues, he recalled.

Percy raised his eyebrow. “Thanks, Rach. Now, I can finally buy a new skateboard.”

“Nice to know that this was worth it.”

“Especially since now you have to do something...daring.”

She tapped her index finger to her temple mockingly. “Oh, I see. That’s why you wanted to do that bet. So then we could be on even ground.”

“Do you agree, Dare?”

“My gods, you’re so corny. But sure. Though let's not get ourselves a detention pass the next time, hmm? I feel bad for you. How many have you gotten this semester?” She clicked her tongue. “What will your mom say?”

1343, 1344 ... 1345. This was the place. Through the window, he could see many of the students already settling in, giving the teacher the strip of paper that he and Rachel had in their pockets.

He exhaled. “I don’t want to think about Mom just yet. But honestly, I don’t mind detention. And I don’t think she would, either. Better than getting kicked out.”

“Mmhmm. And I don’t really mind spending some more quality time with you. Even if we get in trouble, I kinda think you’re nice to be around, Jackson.” She smiled and held her arm out for him to pass. For some reason, that comment made his chest feel warm and fuzzy. “Gentlemen first.”

“Isn’t it ladies first?”

“Chivalry is dead. Now go on.” She nodded towards the door. “I like being fashionably late.”

“And you say I’m the dramatic one,” he grumbled.

#anon #writing prompts #perachel #percabeth #pjo fic #also this dragged out and idk I got lazy #look mom i can write

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hellowkatey · 3 years

Text

Febuwhump Day 4

Prompt: impaling

Read on AO3

Tally Marks

For Ahsoka, the war never really felt like a war. Maybe it was the fact they fought machines rather than men. Her lightsaber sliced through the durasteel plating of the battle droids as easy as the practice dummies in the Temple. She could pull wires out of their chests and watch the light dim from the bulbs in their eyes and that was about as sentient as it got.

She's only been in this fight for a few months. She has a mental tally of every droid she's personally dismembered, and a physical one on the wall of the clone breakroom next to Captian Rex's. It's a game, in a way. They yell out numbers on the battlefield. Some of the troopers like to use their armor to keep track in real-time. Battles after battles, the tallies creeping down the walls like a life sentence.

At some point, the color of the marker changed from black to blue, and for some reason, she can't get over the idea that their tally marker spent its entire ink supply making only three-centimeter lines, day after day.

Today she reached a milestone. One thousand battle droids laid to rest by the blades of her lightsabers since she joined the war at the Battle of Christophsis. One thousand clankers that don't get the opportunity to fire their blasters again. Ahsoka walks through the center of the now-deserted battlefield with giddiness in her step. A few of the troopers who fought alongside her offer high fives as they pass, congratulating her on her accomplishment.

Ahsoka is beaming. She feels like she is floating, eager to find Master Skywalker and tell him the great news. The young Togruta decides to cut through an alleyway to the next street where she can feel the Force Presences of both Anakin and Master Kenobi. Within the alley, there is a fork, and down the straight path, she can see Captain Rex and Commander Cody standing with their backs to her.

But even so, she stares down the other path. It winds behind the front building to some residential tenements of the small city. Though her Master and friends are ahead, there is something nagging at her to turn that way. Ahsoka senses no danger in the Force, and she taps her fingers against her commlink to make sure it's there. Following her feelings, she goes the other way.

The midday sun provides plenty of light in other places, but the apartments here loom high enough to cast a shadow over her passageway. Ahsoka pulls her cloak around her tighter, glancing into the windows of the evacuated homes.

Broken transperisteel clutters the ground where bombs dropped in the area and blew out the windows of the houses. She steps over the piles of rubble and puddles of who-knows-what until the near groan of pain catches her keen Togruta ears. She stops midstep, tilting her head to hone in on the noise. It's coming from the home at the end of the street. Ahsoka jogs ahead, her heart starting to pound faster as a few drops of blood along her path turns into a trail, and then a continuous line leading straight into the blown down door.

She peers around the corner, and every muscle in her body tenses.

Lying in the far corner of the house is a young boy. His chest heaves up and down in slow heavy draws as his hand clutches his leg. To her horror, a large piece of shrapnel sticks out of his thigh, impaling his leg, and the obvious cause of the blood smeared across the floor. His head rolls to the side, and he stares at her with a glassy expression.

"Hello," he rasps. A casual greeting for such a gruesome scene. Ahsoka finds her senses and rushes forward, falling at his side.

"You're hurt," she says, tearing off a strip of her cloak to tie a tourniquet. As though that fact wasn't readily obvious. To her surprise, he chuckles. Pushes her hand with the strip of cloth away. She looks at him, his big brown eyes filled with what she can only describe as peace.

"It's too late,"

"It's not! I--I'll bring you back to the camp, we have the best medics--"

"No," he shakes his head. "I am ready to die."

Her throat feels like it's closing. She closes the pieces of her cloak in her fist. "You're so young, though."

"Sixteen," he says. "Yesterday, actually."

His face grows paler by the second. Blood is pooling around him, around Ahsoka now, but she doesn't care to move. Instead, she takes his hand, startled by its icy coldness.

"Will you bring them to me?"

"Who?"

"My family."

"Of course, yes. Where can I find them? I'll go as quickly as I can."

He shakes his head. Slowly brings his other hand up to point. Ahsoka follows his direction to a holoimage on the wall. She stands, her knee leaving a clean imprint on the floor before the blood fills the space. She takes the holo off the wall, spotting the boy in the center of a group hug by others with big brown eyes and reddish-brown hair. A mother and father, brothers and sisters with wide smiles and shining eyes.

This is his family home. He is dying in his home.

She brings the picture to him, and he holds it in his lap, staring at the people. Reaching out as though he can touch the holo.

"Where are they?" Ahsoka asks. Hoping, praying they are in a camp somewhere.

"Where I'm about to go," he whispers. His eyes look from the holo to Ahsoka, and he smiles. "Thank you," he says, "for this gift you have given me."

She doesn't tell him she has given him no gift. If anything, she is part of the reason he lies here now. She is merely a bystander in a moment she feels she has no right to be a part of, but yet his cold fingers intertwine with hers. She takes hold of the holoimage that now falls from his other hand, and makes sure he gets to see it the entire time.

Strangely, in a way that feels far too detached to be real, watching the light leave the eyes of a sentient is a lot like seeing the bulb go out in a droid.

She isn't sure how long she sits there. Long enough that when she finally stands again the blood has dried into her pants, and it doesn't flow to fill her absence any longer. She can't stop looking at the piece of shrapnel that tears through the vessels and muscles of his leg.

A piece of a battle droid. A part of the arm, it seems.

Ahsoka feels like everything around her is obstructed by static. Nothing feels real, just like a horrible dream that she hopefully will wake up for at any moment. And yet, when her commlink rings and it's a message from Anakin wondering where she is, she doesn't wake up in her bunk on the ship.

She doesn't know their customs on this planet. Do they bury their dead or burn them? Doesn't even remember the name of the damned planet, which suddenly feels like a pit in her gut. So she does her best. Takes her lightsaber out and cuts the droid arm from his leg. Takes a blanket from the bedroom and wraps him carefully in it, his arms crossed comfortably and the holo pressed between his palms and his chest. When she emerges from the house, the sun is starting to hang low in the sky, the shadow of the alley even darker than before.

And yet somehow, she sees more this time.

She looks through the windows as she passes, not seeing battle anymore but devastation. Ahsoka can see the remnants of what used to be family homes. Holoimages flicker with limited power the faces of the people that escaped the city in the night. They had no time to waste when the call came in, packed nothing but what they needed to survive, and ran into the foothills. Established refugee camps where supplies will be funneled in the weeks to come until their city is rebuilt... though it may never be the same.

Couches covered in soft blankets and pillows where families would curl up on the weekends to watch holofilms. Trinkets lining shelves that probably meant something to someone at one time. Abandoned. Covered in glass and ash. Homes suddenly uninhabitable because of a war nobody here asked for. And as she takes stock of the neighborhood, she also realizes many of the homes have painted names above their thresholds-- a memorial for the names of their dead.

She blinks back tears. Nearly every door has names painted. Many with multiple. Their own tally marks.

Ahsoka runs back to the house of the boy, trying not to look at his bundled body as she searches for paint to at least give him this honor. Her stomach drops when she finds it already sitting next to the door, the brush still wet.

The names of his family already line their threshold.

Jebra

Imi.

Hales.

Yezha.

But as she raises the brush, a sickening revelation makes her burst into tears.

She never learned his name.

#febuwhump #febuwhumpday4 #impaling #i am so sorry #i made myself sad #i told myself i wasn't going to hurt obiwan today but ahsoka didnt deserve this either #prompt kinda had me stumped for awhile ngl #i guess i figured it out???#i promise this was finished on Feb 4 thursdays are just busy because i am in lab #ahsoka tano

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katy-l-wood · 4 years

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It only takes one to help

Today I was driving home from the cabin, which is normally a two to three hour drive down I70 through the Rockies, but on holiday weekends it always turns to hellish traffic and stretches to AT LEAST four hours. It is stop-and-go or slow-and-go at best. I’ve done this many times and I knew what I was in for. Got my podcasts loaded, snacks, soda, and emergency toilet paper roll. I was ready for whatever traffic was gonna throw at me.

In the second hour of the drive, on the biggest upward stretch of the drive (which is just straight up, no going up a bit, then flattening out, then up a bit more, just miles of straight up at a pretty decent grade), I stopped twice to help push overheated cars off the road. The first was in the middle lane of the three lanes, and he’d been there long enough to have dialed roadside assistance and be struggling to describe where he was (because there’s no fucking mile markers there). No one had stopped to help, just pulled around him and kept going. I immediately put my truck on the double-wide shoulder and hopped out, waved to stop traffic, and went over to push his car. As soon as I did five other people pulled over and dashed out of their cars to help push the man and his family over to the shoulder, helped them better describe where they were to the roadside assistance, and then got back on our way knowing the family was now in a much better place to wait for help.

The second car was about ten minutes later up the road, and in the right-hand lane. The girl inside, a young woman in her early twenties with a toddler in the car, was bawling. Just absolutely panicking with no idea what to do. I found out later she’d tried to call her mom for help and her mom basically just said “you’re on your own, figure it out.” One woman was already trying to help push the car, and it just so happened to be one of the same people who got out to help me push the first car. I jumped out to help her and, again, a bunch of people joined us. We got the girl to the shoulder, got her some water, and everyone else got back into their cars to keep going. I stayed for a bit to help the girl calm down, ended up holding a tarp up to cover her while she used the restroom because she was dying and there was no other cover available on that stretch of road. We went back to her car and I helped her check it out and confirm that it had overheated. I talked her through what happened, how to let it cool down, and how to baby it the last mile up the pass (she was so close to the top when it died, which just made it way more frustrating for her), and then how to coast it in neutral down to the next town where she could get it looked at. By the end she’d calmed down, was smiling, and was clearly a lot more relaxed.

I’m not making this post to be like “oh, I did a good thing, stroke my ego!” I’m making it to say that it just takes one person to step out and start helping. As soon as one person did it, others joined in. The lady who helped me with both cars made a comment that “masks or no masks, I’m glad we’re doing this, because it’s the right thing, and we need more people willing to jump out and just help.” She was very right, and all it takes to get started is one, so don’t under-estimate the impact a single action can have.

#Colorado #Doing the right thing

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twdmusicboxmystery · 3 years

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10x18: Find Me - Bethyl Template, Part 1

All right! Analysis time! *rubs hands together* Now, I’m gonna warn you that this is long. And I know there are plenty of people who don’t like to read the long metas. So let me just ask you a quick question before I start. How bad do you want to understand what’s REALLY happening in this episode? If you want to understand why those of us in the know have more hope than ever for Beth’s return, you have to understand what I’m about to lay out for you. And yes, it’s a little wordy, but there’s just no getting around that if you want to really internalize it.

If you don’t understand this stuff, you’re going to think that everything we say moving forward is wishful thinking and that we’re grasping at straws. So, how badly do you want to understand? Which group do you want to be in? If it’s the first, keep reading, my friend.

***As always, spoilers abound below for 10x18. Don’t read until you’ve watched! You’ve been warned!***

As I mentioned in an Ask, there are two major premises you have to get your head around to understand this template. The first is that Dog = Beth. And yes, we already knew that. But especially in this episode, Dog = Beth. Dog totally, completely, 100% = Beth.

I noticed especially at the beginning when Daryl and Carol were talking, it keeps focusing on dog. So, it's literally like Daryl says something, focus on dog. Carol says something, focus on dog. Hop on the motorcycle together, focus on dog. Just before opening credits roll, focus on dog.

And I think it’s the writer's way of telling us what this is really about: Beth. I mean Dog. Yeah, they’re one and the same.

The second overarching principle you need to understand is that this episode is a template—yes, a template; I’ll give you 0.68 seconds to recover from the shock—of Daryl’s entire journey. I think it could be from beginning to end, but you could also see it from S4 up until he finds Beth. It’s a template for his journey, for the idea of him always looking for people, and it will lead to Beth eventually.

I will say that symbolism gets complicated at times. For the most part, what we see with Daryl and Leah is a replay of Daryl and Beth. I'll illustrate that for you. But for the most part, Leah = Daryl in the scenario and Daryl = Beth.

I’ll talk about this more later on, but on TTD, Denise Huth says that because Daryl is more lighthearted with Leah, we get to see the lighter side of him that we generally don't see when he's around the other characters. And that's true. There are times when he smiles and looks happier with her.

And I know that's going to make people think that he's in love with Leah. It really represents him finding some companionship and happiness. And because this is all replay of a template for Beth, I'm telling you it's really all about Beth. About Daryl being happy with Beth. Leah is just a stand-in.

Okay, so it starts by showing Dog. Then we see Daryl getting on his bike. Carol comes up to stand beside him. We start out almost immediately with tons of symbolism. He explains that there is a fallen tree 100 yards out that he thinks they could use to shore up the hole in Alexandria's wall. So, we have the fallen tree in the number 100.

But he also has a really hard time getting his bike started. He tries it many times and it won’t work. I'm reasonably sure that that is the same symbolism as when he was driving the truck with Denise and couldn't figure out the clutch. Both times it’s a vehicle he's having a hard time operating. And in that case, we had a fallen tree as well, which forced Daryl, Rosita and Denise to get out of the car and walk. So obviously because of Denise, we relate this to Beth. But also, in both case cases, Daryl had a friend (referring to Leah that way because that's what they said in the trailer) that he really cared about and lost. And both times, there's major Beth symbolism involved.

In the scene, we also get the first instance of the "strong right foot” symbolism. They say this a lot during the episode. It's obvious that Carol wants to help him start the bike but she also knows if she just offers, he’ll say no. She tells him a story about how her grandmother (as I'm writing this just now realizing that second mention of someone’s grandmother in the past two episodes) used to have a sewing machine with a peddle. She used to make all of Carol's clothes. Carol says that when her grandmother's foot got tired, she had Carol run the peddle for her because Carol has a "strong right foot."

Daryl just glares at her and says he can do it. After a few more tries, he does. Then she gets on the bike and they have more playful banter where he says he didn't say she could come. Eventually they take off together, and we see lots more emphasis on Dog.

Another important piece of symbolism is the map. The same one Daryl used to track where he had already searched for Rick. It falls out of his bag and Carol picks it up. He doesn't realize he dropped it, or that she picked it up. And when she gets in the back of his bike, she just stuffs it back into his backpack. This may just be a foreshadow of this episode. Carol sort of leads him back to his remembrance of Leah, but I think it’s more than that, too. I’ll come back to it when I talk about the storm scene.

I’m gonna skip a lot of the Carol/Daryl details for now. I think they’re important, but I want to focus on the Bethyl stuff. In short, I think this opening scene is exactly the same symbolism that we saw in 10x01 when they got on the bike together and had very similar banter. So, it points to the spinoff. I think it points to what will happen only actually take off on the bike together. It could be that they’re still fighting. Daryl doesn't really want her to come. Even though he says that playfully here, it might be real the next time. But she insists on coming. Carol says she wants to hunt whatever is left out there to hunt, which is a lot like her saying they should get on the bike to see what else or who else is left out there.

They do eventually see a dead deer. So, deer symbolism. But it’s more than that. This took me a few days and the help of my talented fellow theorists, combined with what we already know of ep 21, to put together. And this is going a big beyond this episode, but they’re basically reverse-engineering the episode Them for us. That’s where Daryl first saw the dead deer. And Carol wasn’t with him, but they were both out in the woods together, looking for water. In 5x10, they didn’t find any. Here, they’re out together, looking for food, and they go down to the river. So they find water. Carol even spears fish. So it’s more opposites going on. In 5x10, they didn’t find water. Here, they did. They found the river. And went fishing. Before, Daryl saw the deer alone. Here, Carol was with him. In Them, she gave him Beth’s knife. When their story continues, he’ll give her Leah’s knife.

I think what they’re doing is reverse-engineering events leading back to Beth. So, if we were working backward toward Coda, we would see Daryl give Carol a knife back, and the episode before that, Beth was in. Well, he’s going to give her Leah’s knife in ep 21. So, ep 22 anyone?

Along the way, Carol all of a sudden starts limping on her right foot. She says, “ow,” and when he asks what's wrong, she said she just has a foot cramp and needs a minute to stretch it out. He razzes her saying, "it's not your strong right foot, is it?" And she glares at him. So the “strong right foot” symbolism is repeated several times.

And how about the river and the fish? Well, we know Beth = water, right? So it’s a symbol for her, but more specifically, I think the river represents Daryl’s path. In between every scene and every flashback, we see a sweeping shot of the river, and we often see Daryl trudging along it, searching for Rick. So it represents his entire character path, and the people he’s searched for. Sophia, Beth, Rick, Connie, and perhaps even Leah. We’re not entirely sure how of if the fish symbol is different. But since fish are in the river, the two symbols may be one and the same.

Want more visual proof that the river = Daryl’s path to Beth? Lookee here:

Between them is a painting of a river. And Beth says, “But Daryl, you said there was a dog.”

Then Dog starts barking and running and they follow him. He leads them to Leah's cabin. There are two different sets of 3 metal spikes on the cabin.

Daryl notices a single one sticking out of a tree. My first thought was rule of threes. But the one on the tree could be a crucifixion symbol. Spike pounded into a tree.

But here’s the first big clue we get that this is a callback and retelling of Beth’s story. One of the first things Daryl looks at when he gets to the cabin is the cross marker Leah’s son’s grave, right? Guess what?

The cross is white. It’s a Grady symbol. So, Daryl is looking at this cross, and thinking about his past and what he lost at this place, It’s completely a replay of Beth and Grady. It would be the same as him going back to the hospital and feeling sad about losing her there.

Side note: I also feel like this is probably a death omen for Leah. I truly didn’t think about it until they discussed it on TTD, but when I saw the cross, I automatically knew it was for Leah’s son, because I’d read spoilers. But Chris Hardwick said that, for anyone who didn’t, it kind of seemed like the cross was for Leah’s death. So without spoilers, it might be surprising to learn at the end that she disappeared, rather than dying. It just reminds me of how they kind of tried to trick people into thinking Tyreese’s funeral in 5x09 was Beth’s. And I think it shows that Leah will die eventually. There’s just no way to know when.

This is where we get the first flashback. It says five years ago, and we see the river and Daryl sitting at by the river in his camp. He's obviously very sad.

Okay, here we go. Each of the flashbacks represent some part of what happened in his past, mostly revolving around Beth. Some of them also do indicate Rick. In this case, I think this represents his sadness after the prison went down. It might represent his sadness in general. Like, from S1 to S4. But given that Gimple took over in S4, I think that's really what the flashing back to.

You'll notice in the scene that he has a fire going. He's not facing the fire. It's burning away in a little pit behind him. He's actually facing the river. I think that’s to draw attention to the river as a symbol and show that this is his journey.

In this scene, he has his knees drawn up into his chest. So, his stance is almost identical to when he was sitting by the fire with Beth in Inmates. Which is right after the prison went down.

The next day, he meets Dog as a puppy.

Now this was the revelation that made me realize what this entire thing was. This makes me so happy. Literally, it's the next day and he is still in his camp. Again, the one that represents either Bethyl’s little camp in Inmates, or it could also represent their little camp in Still when they were eating snake.

Dog just comes running up to him out of nowhere. This scene is super cute. He picks Dog up and Dog starts licking his face and Daryl actually smiles. Almost laughs. And he says, "where'd you come from?" Then Dog jumps down and runs away.

But think about this. This is Daryl meeting Dog, as a baby. Dog = Beth. So, this is him meeting her, or noticing her when she was younger iteration of herself in 4B.

Remember what Emily posted on her instastories the other day? The pic of herself in the yellow polo that AMC posted for the Stilliversary and said, "I'm a baby?" That was not an observation. It was a hint.

We've always said that she would come back as an older, stronger character. So, what we saw of her before represents her being young. Almost a baby.

Dog leaps on Daryl and licks his face and makes him smile. A lot like Daryl did in Still when they walk away from the fire. And even His line, saying, "where'd you come from?" I feel like he could have thought about Beth. Like, “where did you come from all the sudden, into my life, making me all happy and shit?"

Looking slightly happier, he goes back to his little hut and his map.

Then comes the scene where Daryl and Carol meet and talk from across the river. Carol is really quite upset in this scene. She tells him that Maggie left, that Michonne is not really talking to anybody, and she's upset that he is staying out there and not coming back.

Daryl, however, is pretty unapologetic about it. He says she knows why he has to do this and he's not going to stop. He also says that there's a spot up the river he hasn't checked yet and he wants to check on that. She throws him some supplies and they go their separate ways.

Now, the next part is super important. The first time I saw it, I was sure it was about Rick. Now, I'm certain it's about Beth. Daryl goes to that spot on the river he hasn't checked yet. He finds an overturned boat with a walker stuck underneath. Most of the walker’s top half is under the overturned boat and we can't see it. But we see hips and legs sticking out. Reminds me of the “bottom half” Bob sees before entering the Big Spot.

Now, because Daryl hasn't checked this area before, and the walker is hidden under there, you can see the Daryl is preparing himself for the idea that this might be Rick. He really thinks it could be him. He kills a bunch of walkers that are around the boat and then flips the boat over to look down at the walker. And obviously, it isn't Rick.

Before I go on, a couple of things to notice. Obviously, there's the boat symbolism. It actually looks a whole lot like the boat that Aaron and Rick take to get to the houseboat in 7x08. That's what I originally thought it was a Rick thing. And of course Daryl is literally looking for Rick. So, in the show, it is.

We see Daryl kill several walkers, and then we get a wide shot of him standing next to the boat and there's a blonde female walker laying on the ground next to it. I'm assuming this is one of walkers he killed, but again, I rewatched it, and we don’t actually see him kill this walker. But it's lying there, and we can’t miss it. I think maybe this walker is a symbol that this is actually about Beth, not Rick.

Daryl simply sees that it's not Rick, looks a little disappointed, and then the walker animates and reaches for him. He kills it, but he gets REALLY angry. He uses his heel to stomp on it like 5x, much like Beth did to the walker in the parking lot of the hospital. But the anger is important.

Then we see him sitting in his hut in the middle of the storm. The one that destroys the map. And here's the thing. He's very obviously in shock. He sits there with this rain pouring down around him and it's like he doesn't even notice it. He’s completely despondent. Kind of like he was in S5 after losing Beth.

Not to sound judgy, but it’s kind of his fault that the map gets lost. Again, rain pouring down, and he's left the map sitting where it's going to get wet and it's made of paper. You could argue that of course he's going to lose it in that situation. But I think what they're going for is that he’s so numb that he just doesn't think about it. He looks up and realizes the maps about to wash away and jumps up to save it, but by then it's too late.

So when the map gets torn and part of it washes away, he screams as we saw the trailer. It just a lot of anger and pent-up grief coming out.

And then there’s a loud crash that literally knocks him onto his butt. (I think it’s supposed to be that the hut it hit by lightning or something.) And we hear a high-pitched ringing, as though his ears are ringing from the sound. After that, he grabs his bow and goes out into the storm. He points his face skyward and let’s the water wash over him.

Remind you of anything:

So, obviously this storm can equate to the one in Them, 5x10. It’s a replay of Daryl losing Beth, becoming depressed over it, and the storm soon afterward. But details! The emotion is in the details.

My fellow theorists pointed out that the loud crash could easily equate to the sound of the gun when Beth is shot. That’s what knocks Daryl on his butt and causes his shock. I was even thinking maybe we heard the ringing tone after the gun went off in Coda. We actually didn’t. I was wrong about that. But we DID hear it in Slabtown when she and Noah almost escape. Remember, there’s no sound but the weird ringing? So coupled with the storm and the representation of him losing Beth, we also have the sound of escape represented.

Finally, Map = Beth. That map is covered in red Xs, and he loses it here. But if you watch his behavior (yes, go watch this scene 20 times) he’s not paying attention to it. He doesn’t realize he’s in danger of losing it. Then he looks up, realizes it’s about to wash away, and jumps to grab it. But it’s too late. It’s already gone. Sound like what happened at Grady to you? So, Map = Beth. This is him losing Beth.

And that means that when he screams here, it really is a representation of his inner self screaming over Beth’s loss.

So we had the anger over the boat walker (his anger over Beth and shooting Dawn), him stomping on the walkers face (as Beth did in the Grady parking lot, while the ringing-ears tone was playing, and then actual loss, the devastated emotional reaction, and finally the storm in Them.

Everyone still with me? Let’s keep going.

Then we get, "one year later." And we see Dog fully grown. Originally, I thought maybe Daryl had seen dog a lot by this point. I'm actually kind of rethinking that now. I think this is only the second time he's seen Dog. The important parallel here is that he saw Dog as a puppy (Beth from 4b), and then a period of time passed where we saw a representation of him losing Beth, and then he sees Dog again, fully grown. So, Dog has matured and comes to Daryl again while he's out on the road.

Now, originally I assumed that this represented Beth and Daryl’s reunion that we haven’t seen yet. When she comes back and they reunite. But after some thought, I realized that this part actually represents Grady. Beth’s growth really isn’t physical. It’s in her coming to understand the world and how to survive in it, such that she doesn’t need other peoples’ protection anymore. That happened at Grady. Hence the “I get it, now.”

Other reasons I’m sure this flashback represents Grady? Dog takes Daryl to Leah, where she holds him hostage (Grady). We see her knife. (Beth had her knife at Grady.) He sees a spike pounded into a tree, which I think is a crucifixion symbol. And when he leaves, he leaves without Dog (Beth).

This is where Daryl meets Leah, and she throws the arm at him and holds him at gunpoint. Leah’s knife comes into play because she ties Daryl up in her cabin, but when he's very nonthreatening, she seems to realize that he's not going to hurt her, and she lets him go. She takes out the knife and they did focus on it with the camera for like 30 seconds. So, they very much want us to notice it. She uses it to cut his bonds and tells him to get out of her cabin.

Let’s take an aside. The way Daryl acts during this scene when she has him as a prisoner reminded me a lot of how he acted in 6x06 when Dwight had him as a prisoner. He’s quiet, docile, and even exhibits some fear, as if he’s truly intimidated.

We don’t see much of his normal, Daryl defiance, and that’s a bit out of character for him. And I truly don’t mean to say that this points to Dwight or the Saviors in any way. It’s the opposite. Dwight and 6x06 foreshadowed something specific, and I think this foreshadows the exact same thing. It hasn’t come to pass yet.

I’ll just tell you what I think it is. I don’t know whether Leah will literally be involved in the spinoff, or if she just symbolically represents something in that storyline. But I think it’s possible that she represents the CRM. Because of the black-helmeted walker in 6x06, everything in that episode did, too. So, I think the CRM will take Daryl captive at some point and the way he acts in both these episodes points to what’s happening in that arc. But I don’t think this will happen until S11, if not the spinoff.

We see a shot of Leah’s knife, which will be important later because it equates with Beth’s knife. I’m not going to say much about it here. Just keep it in mind.

Then we get (another) shot of the river. Daryl’s journey continues. Quick aside. What this reminded me of is the shot of the train tracks in 5x09. There, the camera looked as though it were moving along the tracks. Here, the camera looks as though it's moving along the river. I’m thinking that the tracks represent the Beth’s path, and the river represents Daryl's.

Six months later. Okay, I did pay attention to Daryl’s eye scar. And all of a sudden, I realized that the missing wing on his vest is also represented here. So, the first flashback five years ago, which I think represents Inmates, he still had the wing on his vest and no eye scar.

CONTINUE TO PART 2

#beth greene #beth greene lives #beth is alive #beth is coming #td theory #td theories #team delusional #team defiance #beth is almost here #bethyl

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morningfears · 4 years

Text

Rose Tattoo [Chapter One]

Rating: PG-13 | Swearing, mentions of death, mentions of a panic attack.

Summary: Inspired by this blurb. | Calum is a tattoo artist. Stevie is getting her first tattoo. She’s terrified but determined and though Cal looks tough, when he takes off his jacket, Stevie notices the marker staining his arms and realizes that he’s a gentle giant who lets his son use him as a living coloring book. They hit it off but are either of them ready for anything more? [I’ll come up with a better fic summary later, promise.]

Word Count: 8.3k

series masterlist | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five

Stevie could see the clouds of her breath curling around her face, rising and disappearing just as quickly as they appeared, as she weaved through the crowds cluttering the sidewalk. She was uncomfortably aware of the eyes on her, small-town tourists staring at the shock of green hair atop her head, as she waited at a crosswalk. She focused on the music blaring in her headphones, on the bitter cold nipping at the slivers of exposed skin, on evening her breathing and keeping her face void of emotion, as she attempted to ignore them.

She hadn’t lived in New York long, barely two months, but the adjustment period had been painfully short. She’d learned, almost immediately, the best ways to avoid anyone asking her for directions or tips about the city. She’d also learned how to navigate the city through the path of least resistance (read: tourists). She rarely crossed paths with them, usually only on the subway to and from her office, as she tried not to venture too far from her own neighborhood. However, it seemed unavoidable today.

Stevie’s job kept her in the same general area. She usually met artists she was scheduled to interview near her office for coffee or in the park nearby if the weather permitted. Her neighborhood, though not perfect by any means, had everything that she needed to live - including an overpriced grocery store and a Vietnamese restaurant whose staff knew her, and her usual order, by name. There was a gym close enough and a coffee shop that made the best chai latte she’d ever had. The only things it lacked were the things that she rarely needed, like a good tattoo shop.

The tattoo shop at the end of her block with blinking neon signs and Sailor Jerry-esque artwork covering the walls didn’t appeal to her in the slightest. The owner, and the most prominent artist, lived across the hall from her and seemed more concerned with his reputation than with good art. The shop itself catered mostly to a certain brand of wannabe Instagram influencers and specialized in a type of tattoo that she didn’t want. So, to her dismay, she found herself having to step outside of the comfort zone she’d constructed and venture across the city to a tattoo shop a friend from work recommended.

Stevie felt a flurry of emotions swirling in the pit of her stomach as she drew closer and closer to the shop. She was excited, of course, because she had always loved tattoos. Her dream as a child was to be covered in them, a dream that she abandoned when she realized that she was too indecisive for something so permanent. However, she was also terrified. Needles had always been a fear of hers. Although she’d been pierced several times, her nose and ears and belly button were all bejeweled, none of her piercings took longer than a few minutes. The needle was in and out before she could really think about the choice she’d made and that was it.

Tattoos, on the other hand, were a different story.

She knew that the appointment would be at least a few hours long and the thought of sitting there for so long, immobile as a needle was repeatedly driven into her skin, made her nauseous as she stood outside the shop and attempted to control her breathing. She knew that she would be fine once they began the process, it was just getting into the shop and getting started that freaked her out. She knew, though, without a doubt that she had to get the tattoo. She couldn’t back out but the thought of postponing briefly crossed her mind as she stared at the bright blue neon sign in the window.

After sending Calum her references and telling him exactly what she wanted, he recommended two sessions. Her tattoo consisted mostly of fine lines and intricate detail, something Calum was comfortable with but knew would take more than the standard few hours, and neither really wanted to plan a day session. The first session was for line work, to get the basic outline of the tattoo onto her skin in black ink, while the second - scheduled for two weeks later - was to be spent adding color and detail. It made sense and she was happy that he didn’t push a day session but she almost wished she could just get it all over with immediately. At least that way she would only have to begin a session once.

As she stood outside the shop, gathering herself and hoping that she didn’t look as panicked as she felt, the world around her faded. She no longer heard the noise from the street or the loud hum of neon. She didn’t see the bright blue glow or the buildings reflected in the shop’s plate glass window. She didn’t notice the people passing her by, brushing past her without so much as a glance in her direction, nor did she notice the one person who decided to stop as her nerves held a firm grip on her. It was all white noise and a meaningless blur as she breathed in deeply through her nose and exhaled through her mouth.

Stevie only became aware of the person when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

Stevie jumped, startled out of her reverie, and turned to face the stranger. She recognized him from the few photographs she’d seen on his Instagram - there were very few of his face but he’d posted one recently so she recognized the buzzcut and fading blue dye - and felt her cheeks heat with embarrassment as she met Calum’s eyes. She had hoped that she would have herself together by the time she met him, she didn’t want to give him pause, but that seemed to be out of the question as he stood in front of her.

He didn’t look nearly as intimidating in person as he did in pictures and that eased some of the worry in the pit of her stomach. However, Stevie still found herself shrinking under his gaze. A few tattoos - the majority stark black and traditional, a mixture of intricate lines and simple designs from what she had seen online - peeked out of the collar of his shirt, a few more decorated his hands, and she tried not to stare as she took him in. His eyes, contrary to the mask of indifference he wore, were soft and concerned as he moved his hand from her shoulder and let it drop to his side.

Calum stared at her for a moment. He hadn’t made it a habit to stop and chat with pedestrians he happened across, regardless of where he happened across them (including in front of the tattoo shop where he worked). In the six years he’d lived in New York, he’d learned how to keep walking. He knew how to tune out the city around him and had gotten over the deep seated desire to help lost tourists or recent transplants. But something about this girl was different.

Her short hair, an artful mix of dark brown and green, was mussed - Calum assumed it was both the wind and her seemingly nervous habit of running her fingers through it - and her knuckles were white as she clutched her jacket tight against her body. Her face, illuminated in the late afternoon sun, looked mildly panicked but he could see a steely resolution in the set of her shoulders. It was interesting, the mixture of emotion he saw swirling in her eyes, and he felt compelled to speak to her.

“Sorry for scaring you,” he began, his voice quiet and soft in the din of the city as to not frighten her further but loud enough for her to hear, “but I just wanted to see if you were alright?”

It took Stevie a moment to gather herself, to formulate a response and push it through the thick cotton of panic that had formed in her mouth, but Calum seemed in no rush as he watched her knit her brows and internally assess herself. “Sure,” she nodded quickly, the word forced from her mouth and sounding garbled as she brought a hand up to run her fingers through her freshly dyed hair, “yeah. I’m fine. I’m just, uh, just a little nervous is all.” When Calum raised an eyebrow, inviting her to continue speaking, she added, “About getting a tattoo, my first one. I mean, I didn’t just pick a random tattoo studio to have a breakdown in front of. I know that it’s silly but, yeah.”

Stevie noted that Calum’s gaze were curious, maybe a little amused, but in no way judgmental. He understood her apprehension and saw it more often than not with his clients. Getting a tattoo was a big commitment; they hurt, they could take hours to complete, they could be expensive (if they wanted a good tattoo), and they’re permanent. Although he had more than his fair share, Calum still felt a lingering nervousness in the back of his mind any time he added a piece to his ever-growing collection (though it usually faded to a sort of excitement, something of an adrenaline rush) but he remembered how nervous he had been for his first tattoo and couldn’t blame her for needing a moment to settle her nerves.

“It’s not,” he assured her with a shake of his head. “It’s normal, especially for the first one. Nerves are a part of the process,” he stated with a nod that suggested finality as he moved out of the path of pedestrians. She stepped to the side - subtly, he noted, but just enough to put a small distance between them - and averted her gaze as he glanced at his watch. He lifted his head, turning his gaze to her once more, before he asked, “You wouldn’t happen to be Stevie, would you?”

“Yep,” she nodded, placing an emphasis on the ‘p’, before she huffed out a sigh, “although I wish I was anyone but at the moment. Calum, right?” When he nodded, Stevie copied the gesture and offered him a weak smile. “Sorry you’re getting stuck with such a baby for a few hours. I have to get this tattoo. I’m just…” She paused, her eyebrows furrowed and her shoulders dropping, before she added, “Needles.”

Calum raised an eyebrow at her explanation as he took in the septum ring and the several studs and rings in her ears. He was sure he’d seen a flash of silver when she opened her mouth and he felt certain that if he looked closer, he’d see a barbell in her tongue. “You have a nose ring,” he pointed out as he glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and took in the gunmetal ring looped through her septum, “and I’m pretty sure I saw a tongue ring.”

Stevie huffed indignantly and crossed her arms over her chest as she turned her head. Her cheeks, already pink from the cold, deepened in color as the embarrassment heated her body. “Tattoos and piercings are different,” she defended as she glanced at the people passing them by, “one lasts thirty seconds, at most, and the other takes hours. I’d rather be jabbed with a needle once than have someone keep stabbing me. It’s…” Stevie paused, searching her brain for the right words to adequately describe her feelings, before she settled on, “It’s the repetition, I guess.”

Calum laughed at Stevie’s explanation and she wanted nothing more than to turn and walk away from the conversation. She imagined that he didn’t mean any harm - she hoped that he didn’t, anyway - but she didn’t like feeling like she was being made fun of. She knew that she was being overly sensitive, that her anxiety lowered her threshold for rationality, but she still didn’t like it. However, she wanted Calum to tattoo her - she needed him to tattoo her - so she bit her tongue and stood still as she contemplated her next move.

Calum, sensing the shift in Stevie’s attitude, shook his head and pushed away from the wall. “If that’s how it is for you, that’s how it is for you,” Calum offered with a shrug as he attempted to catch her eye again, “but, trust me when I tell you that you probably won’t be my worst client this week. As long as you don’t faint, you’re miles ahead of a guy I had a few days ago.”

Stevie paled at the mention of fainting and Calum realized, too late, that that might not have been as reassuring as he’d intended it to be. He’d hoped to put her at ease, to relax her before he brought her into the shop, but with how tight she was wound, he didn’t imagine he would be able to. Instead, he sighed and stepped around her to head toward the door. “You ready to head in? I’ve got some designs drawn up. We can look at them and you can decide which one you like best.”

“Sure,” she nodded as she stepped through the door and into the studio itself. “Sorry I’m so early. You know how some people are chronically late? I have the exact opposite problem.”

“You should stick around, teach us your ways,” Calum hummed as he followed her in. “No one here is ever on time.”

“Fuck you. I am always on time.” Stevie turned just in time to catch sight of a crumbled ball of paper flying toward Calum’s head. The culprit, a man with inky black hair and an array of black and red tattoos, was seated at a drawing table and smiled at her when she caught his eye.

“When you own the place, I guess you can never really be late,” Calum deadpanned as he stepped around her and gestured for her to take a seat on the couch in the corner. “Hang out here for a second,” he instructed as he reached for the crumbled ball of paper on the floor, “I’ll go grab the designs and we can talk about placement and get everything figured out.”

Stevie nodded and watched as Calum navigated the array of equipment with practiced ease. He paused for a moment, long enough to nudge the - well, the owner, she guessed - and laugh as he messed up a line, before he disappeared through a door marked ‘staff only’. She glanced around the building, her eyes raking over the various paintings and prints and flash sheets that covered the walls, and found herself getting lost in the artwork as she waited for Calum to return.

**********************

As Stevie was twenty minutes early for her appointment - something that he appreciated; he would rather clients arrive early and have to wait for him to be ready than have them arrive late and derail his schedule for the day - Calum didn’t feel so bad taking a moment to breathe as he sifted through his files to find the few designs he’d created for her. Though it was barely three in the afternoon, his day had already been long. He’d been up since four that morning and he wanted nothing more than to finish her tattoo and head home.

The tattoo itself was fairly simple in concept, a bouquet of roses in shades of red and green with a ribbon tying them together (the only odd detail was a small skull pin on the ribbon), but the tattoo itself was quite large. He’d warned her, over email, that it would likely become close to a half sleeve if he made it as detailed as she wanted and she hadn’t been deterred at all. Despite it being her first tattoo, something she mentioned, she seemed incredibly committed to making it work.

Normally, Calum wouldn’t have minded sitting for a full session. The tattoo wouldn’t have taken more than ten hours and, though he hated marathon sessions, he could’ve done it. However, their schedules never quite clicked and the only time Stevie could get into the shop was after three in the afternoon. In another life, four years earlier, Calum wouldn’t have hesitated to accept staying in the shop until one in the morning. A session that ran late into the night would’ve just been another day at work for him. But, as fate would have it, he was no longer able to schedule his life so selfishly.

The deciding factor in his availability was - and had been for nearly five years - his son.

Calum became a father at the young age of twenty and his apprenticeship (back when he first began tattooing), his bookings now, his life; they all revolved around Tāne’s schedule. He had a babysitter, one that watched Tāne after school and kept him until Calum’s last appointment of the day finished, but it wouldn’t be fair to either his son or the babysitter to accept an appointment that lasted so long. Even if it was a one off appointment, he wanted to get home, to have dinner with his son and read him a bedtime story or just tuck him in, just as much as he wanted the babysitter to be free to go home and do her homework or see her own parents.

Calum had seen friends, men older than him and even some younger, that let their lives be consumed by their work and made their families pay for it. They chose local celebrity, fleeting online fame, over their home lives and he’d seen what it could do firsthand. He’d seen them end up divorced and alone, unable to get weekends with their children despite promising to be there for them. He’d seen them depressed, missing a part of themselves they hadn’t even known they’d had until it was gone. He’d met the teenage children of older artists and had been told stories about their childhoods, dealing with the absence of their fathers. And he desperately wanted to avoid that.

Calum wanted to be present for his son. He wanted to be a steadfast figure in his life, to be there whenever he needed him, so every decision was made with him in mind. His decision to cut a ten hour session into two shorter, five hour ones was made with Tāne in mind. It gave him time to pick up his son from school - they got out at 1:00 on Fridays - and spend a few hours with him before he had to disappear to the shop. It also helped ensure that he would be home in time to tuck his son into bed before he passed out himself. It ensured that he wouldn’t be dead on his feet, dragging into the living room as Tāne begged for chocolate chip pancakes and Saturday morning cartoons. It ensured that he wouldn’t be a shell of himself, present in body but absent in mind.

It ensured that he would be able to give his son the attention he deserved.

He leaned against the counter, staring at the transfer paper in his hands without truly seeing it, and took a deep breath. He could already feel the tension in his shoulders. It was present after the long morning he’d had and he could already anticipate the aching pain that came with sitting hunched over for hours at a time. He’d done a marathon session the day before, an eight hour tattoo that ended with a beautiful piece and a customer he could count on seeing again, but it left him aching and ready for a day off. However, as he lifted his head and turned to face the shelves, he reasoned that at least this session wouldn’t be so bad with the placement of Stevie’s tattoo.

After gathering himself, after clearing his head, Calum grabbed the items he would need from the supply closet and returned to set up his station. He imagined that Stevie would be sitting on the couch, waiting patiently as she attempted not to panic, but to his (almost lack of) surprise, he found her sitting on one of the extra artist stools with her chin in her hand as she watched Ashton outline a tattoo he was working on for Michael. Ashton looked calm, happy, even, as he explained the design to her and Calum rolled his eyes.

Stevie was cute, that much he could admit. Her hair, something she’d smoothed since stepping into the shop, was a shock of green among the blacks and blues of the shop. She was a strange mixture of hard edges and soft lines with but Calum imagined that that only added to her intrigue. Her cheeks seemed permanently flushed despite the warmth of the shop and Calum imagined that it was her nerves. Ashton, however, seemed to have a sixth sense for flirting with cute, nervous clients and it was starting to get old. He told everyone it was to help them be at ease, to calm their nerves before the tattoo, but Calum imagined it was more to help him get laid.

He let them be for a moment, long enough to drop the items he’d gathered onto the stand beside his station, before he decided to interrupt them. “If I could have my client back, mate,” Calum called, glancing over at the pair of them as he unzipped his jacket and began to shrug it off, “we can go ahead and get started.”

Ashton, used to Calum’s interruptions, shot him an easy grin as he nodded. “I was just keeping her company until you were ready for her. She’s all yours,” Ashton assured him with a mock salute before he returned his full attention to the drawing in front of him.

Stevie smiled at Calum, a little uneasy grin that seemed to be a reflex more than anything, before she returned the stool to the station she’d grabbed it from and crossed the shop to join him. As he arranged his set up, his movements steady and practiced, Stevie shrugged off her coat and paused for a moment. She glanced around the shop, empty save for her, Calum, and Ashton, before she asked, “I have on an undershirt. Like, I’m wearing a tank top beneath the long sleeve. Do I just…?”

Calum glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, an amused laugh leaving his lips as he watched her hesitate. “Yeah,” he nodded as he grabbed the black ink, “long sleeve has to go. You can take it off out here or there’s a bathroom over there.”

Stevie stood frozen, seemingly unsure, and Calum almost urged her toward the bathroom but before he could, she gripped the hem of her long sleeve with one hand and the hem of her tank top with another. She tugged the black garment up and over her head, huffing as it mused her hair even further and as she hit her elbow on the corner of the countertop behind her. She remained stuck in the garment for a moment, struggling to free herself, and Calum had to bite back a laugh as she rubbed her elbow with a frown on her lips.

“Right,” she nodded after dropping her shirt onto her bag and taking a moment to watch him set up - something he felt almost too aware of. “Where do you want me?”

Calum didn’t look at her as he arranged the little pots of ink on his workstation. Instead, he nodded his head toward the designs laying on the counter of his station. “Have a look at those for me,” he encouraged as he reached for the box of gloves beside him, “let me know which one you like the most and we’ll see how it looks in terms of placement and size.”

Calum’s station was in a corner of the shop. There were mirrors surrounding him, something that he felt almost neutral about most days, but he used them to his advantage as he watched Stevie through the mirror. He watched, curious, as she carefully traced her fingers over the designs laying on the counter and analyzed the emotions on her face. She hadn’t told him what the tattoo was for, he hadn’t asked, but he had gotten good at recognizing emotion in his years as an artist. He’d always been good at reading people, it was a gift, but he’d learned how to spot grief despite the many faces it wore as he’d done more memorial tattoos than he could count. Each circumstance was different, everyone dealt with grief in their own way, but the tattoo serving as a memorial explained why she felt so strongly about getting the tattoo (including the size and details) despite her obvious nerves.

Although he was outwardly the most reserved artist in the shop, he had always been the one that felt the deepest connection with other people. He empathized far too strongly for his own good and sometimes he hated that part of his job. He sat with people for hours, inking permanent memorials into their skin and listening as they told him stories of parents or grandparents or, God forbid, children that had passed and his heart bled for each one. He never knew what the session would bring - whether they would be an open book or whether the grief was too fresh to even consider speaking - and he didn’t know what to expect with Stevie. Usually, he knew what he was hoping for - more often than not, it was a happy medium that didn’t leave him emotionally drained by the end of an appointment - but with Stevie, he found himself unsure of what he hoped for.

But, by the way her hand shook and her breathing stuttered when she followed the outline of the skull with soft fingers, Calum knew that, regardless of the session itself, he hoped that the experience would bring her some semblance of closure.

Calum was finished setting up his station by the time she chose a design. He didn’t want to push, not when he could see tears glittering on her lashes, so he leaned against the counter and waited for her to speak. “This one,” she finally breathed, her voice quiet in the nearly empty shop. “This one’s perfect.”

The design wasn’t much different than her original request, it was still a bouquet of roses with the ribbon and skull (a detail she’d insisted on), but there were a few smaller flowers throughout as well as a few more intricate lines and details. It was, without a doubt, the hardest of the drawings to place onto her skin, it would bump the session up to twelve hours instead of ten, but it was his favorite, too.

Calum never gave his opinion on which design a client should choose. At the end of the day, it was their body. However, he found himself breathing, “I was hoping that’s the one you’d go for,” before he knew what he was saying. He didn’t know why but something about her vulnerability made him want to assure her that she was making the right decision.

Stevie looked up from the counter and when he met her eyes, his heart broke for her. He could see a glassy sheen of unshed tears and beneath the layer of nerves, he could see just how lost she looked. It was a jarring change, gone were the flushed cheeks and doe eyes, replaced by sadness, and it was hard to keep himself together as he watched her nod. “Let’s get this stencil on, then, and see what it looks like,” he mumbled, his voice quiet as he reached for the stencil and beckoned her closer to him.

Stevie seemed lost in her own thoughts so Calum worked in silence. He didn’t speak as he placed the stencil on her upper arm, exactly where she’d asked for, and was glad to see that the measurements he’d used had worked in just the way he’d hoped. It was a big tattoo, especially for the first, but - and Calum wasn’t sure if this was his own selfish desire to make his tattoos look as if they had always been a part of his clients’ bodies - it looked like it belonged.

Calum stared at it for a moment, his eyes raking over the pale purple lines on her skin, and he decided that it was beautiful. It fit her perfectly, exactly the way he’d hoped it would, and she echoed the thought as she breathed, “It’s beautiful. It looks perfect.”

“The placement is okay?” he asked, just to be sure, as he nudged her toward the full length mirror to get a better look at the angle. She stared at her reflection for a moment, her eyes glued to her right arm, and nodded. Calum, happy that she was happy, repeated the gesture and pointed to the chair. “Okay. Take a seat for me and we’ll. Get started.”

Stevie settled into the chair and kept her eyes on her hands, folded across her lap, as Calum settled onto his stool beside her. He could see the shaking in her limbs, the rapid rise and fall of her chest as she tried to steady her breathing, but she was quiet. She didn’t want to give him pause, he realized that, and he admired her follow through as she was clearly panicked. The only sound that echoed through the shop was the scratch of Ashton’s pencil against paper and the sound of traffic outside. Calum almost didn’t want to break the silence. It wasn’t awkward, just pensive, but he had to get started so he said, “I’m going to start with a line, just to give you a feel for it. Remember to breathe for me and let me know how you’re doing. If you need a break, tell me and I’ll stop.”

Calum kept his eyes on her arm as he traced one line onto her skin. He heard a sharp intake of breath over the hum of the machine but, to his surprise, she kept perfectly still. She was rigid, almost alarmingly so, and had her nails dug into her palms but she nodded at him. “I’m fine. It’s fine,” she assured him, her voice tight as she stared straight ahead at the artwork on the wall, “Go ahead.”

Stevie kept her posture for the first thirty minutes of her tattoo. Those long minutes passed in silence, Calum focused on the bigger lines that gave the entire image shape, and Stevie kept her eyes on the wall. He glanced at her every so often, just to make sure she hadn’t passed out, and was somewhat surprised at how well she seemed to be holding herself together. Her anxiety faded as they went on, her body relaxing and her breathing evening, and nearly an hour into the process, Calum could feel her eyes on him.

Stevie watched him work but her gaze wasn’t scrutinizing, just curious. She was engaged in the process and Calum was glad to see that she’d calmed at least somewhat since their initial meeting. He didn’t mind silent sessions, ones where the clients didn’t speak at all, but he was curious. He wanted to know exactly what the tattoo stood for so he asked, “Why a bouquet with the skull?”

Stevie hesitated, her eyes glued to his hands as he traced another line, and he almost retracted his question. However, before he could open his mouth, she sighed and leaned her head back against the headrest. “It’s for a friend,” she offered, her voice quiet and barely audible over the buzz of the machine. “She died a few months ago.”

Calum occasionally offered his ear to clients - some he didn’t have to offer it to, they were more than willing to spill regardless of his feelings on the matter - and he felt the need to listen to Stevie’s story. So, as he paused to wipe at the ink on her skin, he asked, “You want to talk about it? I’ve been told tattoo artists are like therapists. Just, less frequent visits. For most people, anyway.”

Stevie cracked a smile at Calum’s attempted banter and he was surprised at the feeling of accomplishment that blossomed in his chest. He never really invested himself in his clients’ lives, he had his own shit to worry about, but he felt for her. Losing a friend so young - she had to be his age or younger - and one that meant enough for her to face her fear and get a tattoo for had to be hard. And, if her accent was anything to go by, she was a long way from home and likely didn’t have anyone to vent to. So, he felt compelled to offer her an open ear.

“It was cancer,” she finally answered after such a prolonged silence that Calum had almost forgotten he’d asked. He glanced up from the line he was working on and frowned as she kept her eyes on the ceiling. “Her name was Angela. We were best friends for ages. She was the first friend I made when I moved after Katrina and we did everything together. We went to college together. We were going to move up here together. But she got sick.” Stevie paused for a moment, gathering herself, and Calum almost reached for the box of tissues on Luke’s station but stopped himself as he continued tattooing. “She dropped out, couldn’t keep up with the work because of the chemo, and that was it. She died. She had this bucket list, all these things she wanted to do before before she died, and I promised her I’d finish it for her. The tattoo was the next thing on the list. She really wanted the roses. You wouldn’t have thought it, looking at her, but she loved flowers.”

“Shit,” Calum breathed, his voice barely audible despite the absence of the buzzing machine. “That’s… I’m sorry.” He wasn’t sure what else he could say.

“Don’t be,” Stevie shrugged before quickly apologizing for the movement. “She’s not suffering anymore. It got really bad toward the end. She was in a lot of pain. I would’ve preferred she got better, of course, but an end’s an end, I guess.” She paused for a moment, her eyes narrowing as she attempted to blink back tears, before she added, “The skull is this ring she wore literally every day. Her mom gave it to me.” She lifted her left hand and pulled a long chain from beneath the neckline of her tank top. At the end dangled a small silver ring in the shape of a skull with two red gems for eyes.

Calum, despite his countless jokes about how much they annoyed him, couldn’t imagine losing any of his friends. They were his brothers, they always had been, and he knew that no matter how much they exhausted him, he’d be lost without them. They made his world better, they made his son’s world better, and if he lost one of them, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to properly function. He admired what she was doing, finishing her friend’s bucket list, and felt honored to be part of the quest.

However, before Calum had the chance to tell her as much, Stevie shook her head. “Sad hours are over,” she laughed as she brought her left hand up to wipe at her eyes. “What about you?” she asked, glancing at his arm. “Your tattoos are beautiful. I really like the intricate line work - it looks good on you - but it looks like someone’s been coloring outside the lines.”

Calum was mildly thrown off by the sudden shift in her attitude but found himself glancing at his forearms, at the tattoos she could easily see beneath the rolled sleeves of his shirt, and flushed as he caught sight of the neon marker staining his skin. “My son,” he explained, smiling sheepishly at her. “He likes coloring in my tattoos. Some of them are a little too intricate for him to stay inside the lines but he likes it and the markers stain.”

Calum could see Stevie’s face light up with a smile out of the corner of his eye. The crushing sadness, the loss, that had been so clear only a moment earlier faded slightly as she took in the marker staining his skin. “That’s so sweet,” she cooed, her accent growing thicker as she brought her left hand to her heart. “He’s got a living coloring book. How old is he?” She paused for a moment, considered her question, and then added, “If you don’t mind me asking, sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” Calum assured her, a soft smile on his lips as he nodded toward the photo of Tāne he kept on his station. “That’s him. He’s almost five.”

“Four and three quarters, thank you,” Ashton, who had been silent throughout their conversation, interjected with a bright grin as he was given the opportunity to talk about his pseudo-nephew.

“Four and three quarters,” Calum agreed with a laugh, “yeah. He gets offended if you forget that part.”

“I’m the same way with my height,” Stevie nodded, “I get it. He’d adorable. He looks just like you and I’m assuming he’s got the artist thing down, too?”

“He’ll put us all out of a job one day,” Calum agreed with a smile as he glanced up at her. “He was a tattoo artist for Halloween. Had Ash give him tattoos like mine and everything,” Calum confessed with a grin as he thought back to the shock of seeing his son, dressed in a small pair of Docs and covered in Sharpie.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that was incredibly adorable but also got you a lot of funny looks.” When Calum laughed, Stevie smiled. “I’m guessing the curls are what you used to look like?” she asked, glancing at the photo once more before she returned her gaze to Calum’s buzzed and blue hair.

“Mm, yeah. Once upon a time,” Calum nodded. Calum studied her, glancing at the green and brown mess of curls, before he asked, “What about you? I’m guessing the same was true for you before you chopped and dyed yours?”

“Brown, yeah. Curly? No. I wish. My hair was limp as fuck,” Stevie laughed as she tousled the green curls with her left hand. “It was gross and unhealthy so I cut it all off when I moved up here. I dyed it, too. I always wanted green hair and people don’t give a shit about your hair color here.”

“They did back home?” Calum asked, reaching out to wipe at her skin. When Stevie nodded, Calum asked, “Where is home?”

Stevie paused, staring at him as he added another line, before she said, “I’m sure you can tell by the accent, but I’m from the south. New Orleans. Well, not really New Orleans because if I was from there, they wouldn’t have cared about the hair - they see far weirder shit on the regular, believe me, but that’s the closest city you’d know.”

Calum nodded, certain that was true - he barely knew anything about New Orleans, let alone Louisiana as a whole - before he asked, “Why New York?”

“We had this running joke,” Stevie began, shifting in her seat as the discomfort of sitting still for nearly two hours started to set in, “that I was going to move to New York to become some obnoxious fucking fashion blogger or something and that Angela was going to follow me and be my photographer. That’s not exactly what happened but, well, close enough.”

“How close is close?” Calum asked as he pushed away from her and pulled off his gloves. “We can take a break for a second. Get up, move around. I’ll grab you some water.”

It was unlike him to be so invested in a client’s life but he felt at ease chatting with her. Something about her was easy, like talking to an old friend, and he felt himself growing more and more curious about her life. So, he kept the conversation flowing and was happy to hear her answer.

“I write for Rolling Stone,” Stevie told him, her voice following him as he moved toward the back to grab a bottle of water for himself and one for her. “Angela was going to be a photographer. Her editing skills were out of this world and she had an eye for detail like no one else. All of my work, the writing samples I sent in, they were a package deal. They all came with photos from her. We both had jobs lined up but… Anyway, I couldn’t stay at home so I took the job. Packed it all up and here I am.” Calum watched as she wandered around the shop, her right hand flexing as she attempted to wake it from where she’d sat with it so still for nearly two hours. She moved slowly, carefully, and paused at each flash sheet to study it just a little closer. “What about you?” she asked after a moment of silence, turning her head to glance at him over her should. “There’s a twinge of something not New York there.”

“Australia,” Ashton answered for him, a wide grin on his lips as he stood from his drawing table and stretched his arms. “All of us hail from the land down under. We packed it all up and moved here after Cal, Luke, and Mike finished high school. It was supposed to be a temporary thing but here we are, six years later.”

“You’re a lot farther from home than I am,” Stevie noted as she returned her gaze to the flash sheets on the wall. “But I guess some places just become like home, regardless of whether you mean for them to,” she offered with a shrug and Calum couldn’t help but agree.

He hadn’t meant for New York to become his home. He, like Ashton said, hadn’t intended to stay very long at all. The goal was to get enough experience under a talented enough artist to return home and open his own shop somewhere in Sydney. He wanted to be near his parents, near his sister, but something about the city sank its claws into his heart and kept him rooted in the Big Apple. He’d decided to stay before Tāne and now, now he couldn’t imagine disrupting his son’s life. Now, New York felt more like home than his real home did, though he sometimes felt the familiar ache to return to warmer weather and familiar scenes settle in his bones.

As the conversation lulled, Stevie returned to the chair and Calum found himself surprised at how quickly her appointment seemed to pass. Her initial nerves, the crippling fear that had seen her almost have a panic attack on the sidewalk in front of the shop, disappeared after the first few strokes of his machine. Getting started had been the hard part. Every part of her body had been tense and Calum was worried that she would stop breathing and pass out on him. However, once he’d settled into a groove and got her talking, sharing stories of her hometown and telling Ashton what bars to avoid should he ever venture down south for Mardi Gras, the appointment flew by.

He didn’t get attached to clients often, didn’t truly enjoy their presence beyond them being easy to work with, but he liked Stevie. She was his dream client, easy to work with and good at sitting still. She didn’t seem to mind the pain - or, if she did, she didn’t say anything about it. She sat calmly, never forcing conversation but letting it flow naturally, and Calum found himself at ease as he worked on her. The rough morning he’d had melted as he talked with her (and occasionally Ashton) about music and he was almost surprised when he added the last stroke to her outline. Her upper arm was covered in a beautiful bouquet of roses, only missing the red and green ink, and he had to take a moment to admire the beautiful, finished (for now) product.

“Alright,” Calum began as he pulled away from her and nodded his head toward the full length mirror she’d first taken a glance at her arm in, “take a look and let me know how you feel.”

Stevie walked across the shop, groaning as she got the blood flowing in her legs once more, and stopped in front of the mirror. Calum watched her face, his eyes on trained on hers, and breathed a sigh of relief at the awed look she wore. Her left hand came up to her arm, her fingers not quite touch the fresh ink, as she stared at herself in the mirror. She was quiet, scrutinizing, but Calum could see the approval in her eyes. It looked like she’d wanted it to, exactly as she imagined it would, and that was all he wanted.

Stevie was quiet for a moment, gathering herself, before she turned away from the mirror to look at Calum. “She would’ve loved it,” she breathed, her voice cracking slightly as she smiled at him. “I know it’s not finished yet but it’s already so perfect. Thank you.”

“Of course,” Calum nodded, a small smile on his lips as he gestured for her to return to the chair, “I’m glad it’s doing her justice. Let me wrap it up and we’ll get you out of here.”

Wrapping her tattoo took only moments and, after she paid, Stevie was out the door with a final heartfelt thank you and an agreement to return the same time two weeks later. Calum watched her leave, his eyes glued to the door, and remained in his spot behind the desk until Ashton said, “She was cute.”

Calum blinked, surprised at the sound of Ashton’s voice, and rolled his eyes as he let the comment settle in his mind. “She’ll be back in two weeks,” he informed him with a sigh, “you can ask her out then.” Normally, that wouldn’t have irked him so much, imagining Ashton taking one of his clients out for drinks. However, something about him asking Stevie unsettled him and he didn’t like the annoyance he felt in the pit of his stomach as he imagined Ashton flirting with her.

However, the annoyed was short lived as Ashton tossed another ball of paper at his head. “Not for me, dickhead,” he huffed as he stood from his chair and turned off the lamp at his station. “For you. You two would look good together.”

At that, Calum turned and stared at his friend. It wasn’t in his nature to attempt to set him up, to even encourage him to date, and he wondered what the change of heart was about. However, he didn’t bother to ask as he stated plainly, “No,” and moved to clean his station so he could get home to Tāne.

“Look,” Ashton began as he crossed the shop to help him clean, “I know that you don’t want to make things difficult for Tāne and you’re still on edge after El but it’s been three years. One date won’t be the end of the world, mate.” He paused, weighing his words carefully, before he added, “You talked more with her today than you ever have with a client. You guys clicked.”

Calum was quiet as he considered Ashton’s words. He had spoken more with Stevie than he ever had any client. He’d felt comfortable with her, the conversation flew naturally and five hours passed in the blink of an eye, but he couldn’t bring himself to consider that as an option. He knew that time had passed for him to move on, he had moved on, but he didn’t want open himself up to another heartbreak. Not when the first one was still weighing so heavily on his life. So, instead of telling Ashton that he was afraid of loving and losing once more, he deflected the conversation.

“El’s lawyer called this morning,” he sighed as he returned the box of gloves to his station. “I’ve got other shit to deal with that doesn’t involve finding a girlfriend. And Stevie - she’s nice but she’s got other shit on her mind, too. Just leave it, mate.”

“Wait, El’s lawyer? She’s not still trying to get custody, is she?” Ashton asked as he stopped cleaning and turned his full attention to Calum.

“Mm,” he confirmed with a sigh as he dropped the bottle of antiseptic cleaner and took a seat on his stool. “Still thinks I’m an unfit parent. She thinks that she and fuckface will do a better job. They want to move to Boston and she wants to take him with them.”

“Fuck, Cal,” Ashton breathes as he reaches out to place a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, man. She doesn’t deserve custody and I’ll help you however I can. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” he nodded as he reached for the discarded tissues he’d used to wipe at the ink on Stevie’s tattoo. “I know.”

Calum knew that his friends would help however they could. He knew that, like Ashton, Michael and Luke would do whatever he needed of them to help him keep his son and the job he loved so much. He also knew that, when the dust settled around the latest in his ex’s attempts to unsettle his life, Ashton would return his attention to the topic of Calum’s lack of a partner and, for the first time in a long time, he didn’t exactly mind it. He was steadfast in his decision to focus on one problem at a time - his most pressing being his impending battle for custody - but maybe, just maybe, there would soon be room in his life for someone else. And maybe, just maybe, that would be the girl with the rose tattoo.

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Author’s Note: So. Thoughts? Feelings? I’m really excited for this. I’ve had this fic in mind for ages. The first chapter wasn’t as fluffy as I was imagining it would be nor is it as filled with Calum being a dad but there are some soft moments and I’m really looking forward to continuing it. I have it all planned out and I’m already halfway through chapter two I’m pretty stoked. Also, I’m trying to do it from both perspectives (Stevie’s and Calum’s because a) there are things about Stevie I don’t want you to know yet and b) it’s about single dad!Cal so. Anyway!). Let me know your thoughts!

Tag List (like this post or message me if you want to be added!): @toolazymyguy , @irwinkitten , @jamieebabiee , @glittersluke , @spicycal , @lusbaby , @everyscarisahealingplace, @brokenvirtualheartcollector , @if-it-rains-it-pours, @blisshemmings , @calumscalm , @lovemenowseemenever , @ijutreallylovezebras , @rhiannonmichelle , @p0laroidpictures , @tomscuddles , @loverofmineluke , @harrytreatspeoplewithkindnesss , @blueviiolence , @loveroflrh , @empathycth , @luckyduckydoo , @tobefalling , @bandsandbooksaremykink , @watch-how-she-burns , @megz1985 , @wokeupinaustralia , @lucidlrh , @canterburyfiction , @cal-is-not-on-branding , @t-i-n-y-d-i-n-o

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discopiratetanis · 4 years

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The words you want to hear [geraskier week 2020 | Soulmates]

TITLE: The words you want to hear | Read on AO3

AUTHOR: ficsfordummies | TanisVs

PROMPT DAY #: 1. Soulmates

SUMMARY: “They will say those words to you, my dear. Your soulmark is what you most want someone to say to you. It represents how much your soulmate loves you and cares about you. That's why only you can see your soulmark until they say it, if anyone could see them, they could trick you into thinking it's your soulmate when it's not. They are words that must be born from the heart, do you understand?”

WORD COUNT: 4795

BOOKS/NETFLIX/2002 SHOW/VIDEO GAME: Mostly Netflix.

TRIGGERS/WARNINGS: N/A (Well, there are a lot of headcanons)

RATING: M for future chapters.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: Written for @geraskierweek No beta. So here we are! This is my little contribution to the lovely and beautiful Geraskier Week 2020 initiative. It will be my only work for it, a three-chapter fic with the first prompt (soulmates) topic as its core, I hope you like it ❤️❤️❤️

I don't care about your songs if you're dead

Jaskier had read those words over and over throughout his childhood. The phrase was written with rough thick strokes, as if someone had carved the letters into his tender and delicate skin of his left forearm when he was a baby. And the ink. The words were made of dense, deep black ink, but in the light of the fire, candles or the sun itself, it sparkled with gold and grey if Jaskier turned or moved his wrist, like the scales of an iridescent fish.

“Those are all markers of your soulmate, Julian, it represents them,” His mother had told him when Jaskier had described the appearance of his soulmark when he was five.

“How will I know who my soulmate is, mother?” Jaskier had asked then.

His mother had smiled at him, softly.

“They will say those words to you, my dear. Your soulmark is what you most want someone to say to you. It represents how much your soulmate loves you and cares about you. That's why only you can see your soulmark until they say it, if anyone could see them, they could trick you into thinking it's your soulmate when it's not. They are words that must be born from the heart, do you understand?”

Jaskier had wrinkled his little nose at that time.

“Yes, mother,”

“And remember,” she had said too. “Soulmates are persons meant to be together, yes, but you can’t or should force a soulbond. If someone will be meant to be with you, you have to build a strong relationship,”

“I… understand,”

“You’ll meet a lot of people in the future, my dear, don’t worry about that now,”

“Yes, mother,”

And Jaskier had not worried much about the subject until he turned fourteen and his father began to pressure him to study more seriously. He was the son, the only son, of a viscount, and they might not be of the highest nobility, but the family had status and his parents expected Jaskier to be even more literate than many of the sons and daughters of the high nobility. For that reason, Jaskier went to Oxenfurt, and though he was too young to attend higher education classes, Jaskier took the opportunity to start to take the first step to find his soulmate.

He knew that if his soulmark spoke about songs, then he must study something that would lead him to write poetry and music. So he chose the faculty of Trouvereship and Poetry, to his father's disgust and his mother's resignation. He studied there for three years, arduously, tirelessly, determined to be the best. And yes, he was the best of his class, and of his promotion in all faculties. His teachers told him that he would write peerless poetry, that his music would be remembered forever. He believed them. Jaskier graduated with honors, and hit the road with seventeen, still too young, too innocent and kind.

Then he came face to face with reality.

Outdoors of Oxenfurt nobody liked his music o his poetry, and far away from his family and their commodities, Jaskier suffered hardship. He went hungry, cold and sometimes he had to make dubious deals to avoid dying. Many times he thought about returning to the nobleman's life, but then he would roll up his left shirt sleeve, would look at the words, those crude but precious black words that sparkled with amber and gold under the light, would take a deep breath and would keep going.

For whoever that had to be his soulmate.

Then he met Geralt of Rivia, the infamous Butcher of Blaviken whose stories he had heard since he was a child, and decided that the witcher was the best inspiration he would probably find in his life. So he followed Geralt everywhere, without realizing he had taken the second step to find his soulmate.

* * *

It had been half a year since they last saw each other. Jaskier had become more confident, but only because his new growing fame made him more secure and have more coins in his pouch. He had to thank Geralt, of course. People loved stories about witchers who, although they might seem like men of terrible behavior without morals and without principles, in the end had a heart, saved people and cared for the weak. Geralt had once told him that all that was stupid, but Jaskier had ignored him.

The truth didn’t lead to greatness.

“So, what if I invite you to ale in the next village tavern? You are going there, right? You could tell me about your latest adventures,”

“Hm,”

“Ah, yes, that one was very interesting and funny,”

Geralt was walking, guiding Roach by the bridle, with his heavy cloak waving softly behind him. Jaskier had one much more fancy and lighter that it didn’t hide his rapier and back-daggers at all, with his elven lute hanging from his shoulder. His pace was prideful, lordly.

“So, I heard of your affair with the striga in Temeria,” Jaskier said, much more serious, less cheerful, and looked at Geralt with curious.

He had grown a few inches in the time that they hadn't seen each other, but Geralt was still much taller than him. Geralt said anything, not even a grunt, and the road remained silent, a silence only broken by the happy chirping of the spring birds. Jaskier saw the grim gesture Geralt made at the mention of the striga, and didn’t press. He walked beside him until they reached the town ahead.

Then, when the first villager noticed Geralt was a witcher, Jaskier went to the tavern alone.

It was the witcher’s life. He knew that.

“A selkiemore, uh?” Jaskier mumbled while writing in his journal.

The tavern was full of a crowd of townsfolk listening to the man who had contracted Geralt that morning. Jaskier had his belly full of warm food and a decent ale, so he felt with enough energy to try to write, or at least think, about his next great song. Toss a coin to your witcher it was good, very good, and people loved that song, but he didn’t want to become stagnant. He needed more successful songs.

Songs.

He slightly touched his left forearm, over the doublet sleeve. Then he remembered why he was there, in Cintra, and remembered the letter the chamberlain of Queen Calanthe had sent to him a month ago. It was a great honor to be the main bard in the court of such an important queen during her daughter's betrothal. But he knew that it was risky. Because in his obsessive spiral of finding his soulmate sooner rather than later, Jaskier had meddled in other people's marriages, even though they were not married to their true soulmates. And some of those people were nobles. And he knew that, at least, his beloved Countess of Stael was going to be in the ceremony.

With her husband.

So he was fucked up.

A little.

Jaskier was thinking about that while he was writing the description of the monster according to the words of the fat farmer who had witnessed the fight between Geralt and the selkiemore. He smiled when the man said that Geralt was dead, because he didn't believe for a moment that the witcher was going to die in such an absurd way. So he laughed when Geralt entered the tavern, covered in blood, guts, and shit as if nothing had happened. It wasn’t the first time. He made the crowd sing Toss a coin to your witcher, knowing Geralt would groan, tired and disgusted. He collected a few coins. Geralt took a tankard of ale from a table and drank, spitting it half a second later. Jaskier snorted and leaned on the counter of the tavern.

Then he took a deep breath, and when Geralt approached him, he said:

“I need a favor,”

Geralt looked at him, silent, serious, and saw the apprehensive face Jaskier was making without realizing it. So the witcher tilted his head a little while viscous droplets of blood dripped to the floor.

“Tell me,”

* * *

“Wow, what a night, right?”

Jaskier trotted behind Geralt, who was striding along the hallways as if the Destiny itself were to appear in the palace to grab him by the neck and force him to claim his Child of Surprise before he or she was even born.

“This is your fault,” Geralt snarled, ablaze with anger.

“What? My fault?” Jaskier protested, irritated and incredulous. “Excuse me, but I’m not the one who chose the Law of Surprise as payment here, you know,”

Geralt stopped dead suddenly, break-breathing, still furious, with a remarkable frown carved in his forehead. Jaskier sighed, facing him, his lute hanging from his shoulder like always, and didn’t flinch when Geralt glared at him with amber fire.

“If you hadn’t brought me here, I wouldn’t–” Geralt whispered, still wrathful.

Jaskier pressed his lips in a thin line, feeling a hot and unpleasant sensation in the pit of his stomach.

“Don’t you dare to blame me for what had you done, Geralt, you heard me?” Jaskier mumbled back, not with the same anger but with determination. Geralt huffed, looking away from him. “You could have asked for money, for lands, for anything other than that, but you preferred the Law of Surprise,”

“I know,” Geralt growled again.

Jaskier let out a deep breath, an exhausted and long sigh. They were in the middle of an empty and lonely corridor, with the rumor of the music at the party fluttering even there. Geralt sat on a nearby stone bench. Jaskier sat beside him, thinking.

“You knew it?” he asked after a minute in silence, with Geralt staring intensely at the floor.

The witcher shrugged a little before straightening and leaning on the wall with a grunt.

“Of course not,” he mumbled, calmer. “How could I have known it?”

He sounded resigned. Jaskier threw him a sympathetic glance and felt guilty anyway. He had been a little selfish because, of course, he could have defended himself against aggrieved husbands and wives, but… He wanted to go with Geralt to the party. Maybe it was really his fault.

Maybe.

“Well, think about it,” he said. “If I hadn’t brought you with me, Calanthe would have killed that man, you saved a life tonight,"

"You would have done the same, I saw you fighting before,"

Jaskier parted lips, feeling his cheeks burning.

"Oh, yes, but I'm good at duels or like… two against one, even three against one, but an entire squad of soldiers? Thank you, but no," he saw Geralt smiling from the corner of his eye. Jaskier swallowed. "So as I was saying, you saved a life tonight, and saved Pavetta from soulrotting."

Soulrotting. He could recall when his mother had told him about that concept. He was eight at that time, and one of his mother's maids had lost her husband, her soulmate, in battle. Jaskier remembered that day. The scream of agony had heard everywhere in the Lettenhove fortress.

"How do you know they are soulmates and not two simple lovers?" Geralt asked, slowly, looking at Jaskier.

Jaskier shrugged.

"I don't know for sure, but…" he hesitated, feeling his soulmark heavier than before. He touched his left sleeve and dragged his fingers a little over it. "If my mother would be about to kill my soulmate I would scream like that too,"

"That was magic,"

"You know what I mean," Then Jaskier looked at Geralt and met those golden eyes. Something inside him tingled. Geralt looked away a second later, with a grimace. Jaskier swallowed slightly, still caressing his sleeve. "You wouldn't do it?"

"Do what?"

"Defend your soulmate against everyone and everything?"

There was a silence, a big and dense silence that Jaskier didn't understand and couldn't explain. He felt it heavy and… bitter. Geralt sighed, grunted. Again he sounded tired and resigned.

"I suppose, I don't know," Geralt murmured.

Jaskier blinked, confused.

"What do you mean you don't know?" he asked.

Another silence, thicker than before. Jaskier frowned, knowing that he shouldn't push him, but…

"Geralt?"

… but surprisingly, Geralt answered without snarling at him, his voice full of exhaustion.

"Witchers don't have soulmates, Jaskier, "

The third silence wasn't heavier than the previous two. It was strangely soft, although uncomfortable and somehow… painful, agonizing. Jaskier didn't know and knew at the same time why he felt as if someone had punched him in the guts, ripping all the air from his lungs.

"Oh," he mumbled, and wet his lips, suddenly sad. "How do you… How do you know? You don't…?"

He knew it was a dumb question. But Geralt, again, answered with much more patient than Jaskier would expect.

"I don't have a soulmark, no. Witchers don't have words on his arms," Then Geralt got up, without looking at him. "Come on, let's get out of here,"

He started to walk, not so fast than before, towards the end of the corridor. Jaskier watched him for a second, still feeling… sad, and got up too to follow him. He sighed, clenching his left hand in a fist.

* * *

Jaskier turned the rapier in his hand, elegant, keeping his balance. He stabbed the air and backed away, then he cut an imaginary opponent, spinning on his heels, chaining block, feint and attack movements again and again. When he stopped he was out of breath, sweating. Then he lowered his rapier and sheathed it with a loud sigh.

Geralt, sitting against a tree near the edge of the clearing, discovered he was holding his breath until then. He thought, he noticed, he always noticed, how gorgeous, how stunning, was Jaskier when he trained, when he used his sword, when he was such concentrated and full of harsh and intense energy. It didn't have anything to do with the strength Jaskier detached when he sang or when he tricked someone with his silver-tongue. Geralt couldn't say what oh those attitudes he liked more.

"Geralt?" Jaskier's soft voice made him blink. He saw the bard smiling, cheeky. "See something you like?"

Geralt blinked again, watching him. Jaskier had his hair slightly wet, his forehead pearly with sweat, his cheeks rosy. He was on his too much tight trousers and on his shirt, only on his laced, cute and luxurious shirt that was mid-open, and Geralt could catch a glimpse of part of his pecs and, of course, his chest hair. He felt how his throat went dry in seconds, and looked away with a loud grunt.

Jaskier laughed and sat beside him, at his right against the tree. He had rolled up his sleeves so his left forearm brushed with Geralt's right arm. Geralt stared at the clearing, knowing that in that blank skin was a soulmark, the words that Jaskier wanted the most to hear from someone.

Someone.

A claw gripped and tightened his heart and, somehow, his right forearm burned with an old and long lost memory.

* * *

Jaskier mumbled a curse, crossing out the last word he had written. Tiny drops of ink fell to the sheet, mottling the parchment of his not-yet-finished new song with a myriad of little black stars. He thought in silence with the feather under his chin. He lasted three seconds. Then he sighed and left the journal on the table, tired, upset.

The tavern was empty except for the owner, Geralt and himself. It was early anyway, and neither of them expected to see anybody until noon.

The silence was weird.

"What's wrong?"

Jaskier looked up. Across the table, Geralt was watching him, with that frown that Jaskier knew meant the witcher was a little worried.

"Nothing," he mumbled, grabbing Geralt's tankard and taking a sip. When he saw Geralt arching an eyebrow, he groaned. "Nothing, really, don't worry,"

He took another sip, and that allowed the witcher to snatch the journal Jaskier had left on the table. He opened it on the last page. He made a grimace, confused at first, curious at second. Jaskier let out a new tired sigh and take a third sip of ale.

"I know," he said, sarcastically. "It's horrible, a complete disaster,"

"It's not," Geralt replied, absent.

"Geralt, I don't doubt that with age comes knowledge but I know you don't have any idea of music or poetry, so don't try to cheer me up with empty flattering,"

Geralt turned a page, ignoring him. The journal was full of lyrics, old and new, and sheet music, both finished and incomplete. Or at least that was what it looked like, Geralt wasn't sure. Jaskier was right, he didn't have any idea about music. But what he liked wasn't the music notes or the attempts and tests for rhymes.

No.

It was his handwriting.

It was fluid, thin, delicate. Like the course of a quiet but sometimes playful river. Its stroke was slightly bowed to the right because Jaskier was right-handed. There were words crossed out everywhere. Geralt thought it was pretty.

And that it was... familiar.

Familiar.

Suddenly he felt his inner right forearm itching, a not quite unpleasant sensation. Geralt rubbed that specific zone of his arm, above the sleeve of his shirt, and frowned, uncomfortable. Jaskier, locked in the ale tankard, didn't notice that. Geralt left the journal on the table with no words, and took a deep breath.

He knew where he had seen that type of handwriting before.

He knew very well.

* * *

"You can't come,"

"Don't be ridiculous, Geralt,"

"Oh, I am the one who is being ridiculous?"

Geralt secured the straps of his swords and checked out that he was wearing them tightly to his back. Beside him, Roach huffed a little uneasily, sniffing the air of tension between the witcher and the bard. Geralt searched in one of the mare's saddlebags and extracted a couple of bottles filled with a green and silver liquid. He put them in his pouch and turned around.

Jaskier was facing him, arms crossed, with a clearly indignant and annoyed frown. He had his rapier, his silver rapier, hanging on the left side of his hip, his daggers, his also silver daggers, on the right side. His lute was safe in their room, upstairs, inside the inn. Geralt thought Jaskier should be inside the inn too, safe, without wanting to go with him to do his job. Geralt huffed as Roach had done before, patted the mare on the neck and walked away past Jaskier, towards the location where the monster that he had to kill was supposed to be.

Jaskier followed him.

"You can't face an entire pack of drowners alone,"

"Ah, you know how to do my job better than me, it's that so, bard?" Geralt hissed. "Should I tell you how to write music now?"

He didn't want to sound mean. He didn't want to be mean. He knew Jaskier was worried, he could smell his fear. But...

"No, but I can help you, you know I can help you. At least with that type of monster. I have silver, and I am fast, faster than most of the men, you always say that,"

He always said that. It was true. Jaskier was a great warrior, and Geralt would trust him with his life, with his eyes closed. But not with that, not with monsters. Not with something that could rip off his flesh in a blink and eat him while he was still alive.

He didn't want that.

He couldn't live with that.

They were in the middle of the street, rain splashing furiously as if the gods were angry. There was water running everywhere, pouring from everywhere. The perfect scenery for a bunch of creatures that lived in the sewers.

"Come on, Geralt," Jaskier grabbed him by the arm, trying to stop him. Geralt didn't flinch and pushed the bard off, grunting. Jaskier groaned too, frustrated, and trotted until he surpassed the witcher and got in his way.

"Please, let me help you with this," Jaskier said. No, implored, begged, pleaded. Geralt caught the heavy and thick scent of fear, but it wasn't just fear. No. It was panic, pure and electric terror. Jaskier feared for him, but it wasn't the first time Geralt had to hunt monsters, leaving the bard behind. Geralt avoided Jaskier and he kept walking, faster.

The rain raged and one lightning ignited the sky like a fierce and bright snake. Then, just then, Geralt felt again a hand grabbing his arm, and this time the witcher stopped.

The thunder rumbled violently and it was as if a dragon was roaring.

The clutch on his arm was strong. Geralt didn't look back, didn't look at Jaskier. He breathed in, deep, and sensed the fear more intense than before. Another lightning. Another thunder. Geralt tried to let go, but Jaskier tightened his hold. Geralt felt a growl being born in his chest. He could get rid of the grip easily, he was stronger, but he was also tired of those arguments. Jaskier should understand why he couldn't go with him.

"Jaskier," he said, low, slowly. A warning.

"Geralt," Jaskier replied, arrogant, stubborn.

Geralt inhaled deeply for a third time, and noticed that fear was no longer the only smell there, under all the rain. But he couldn't recognize the new scent, not yet. It was bitter but also sweet. Geralt growled.

"You can't come, it's not negotiable,"

"Why?" More obstinacy. "It would not be the first time,"

"Drowners aren't like bandits, or like a single monster I can make be focused on me," Geralt tightened his teeth, closed his eyes for a second, and then opened it still without facing Jaskier. "You could die,"

There was a two seconds silence, only broken by the violent storm.

"So are you," Jaskier replied, and his voice was softer than before, weaker.

"It's my job, not yours"

And I don't want you to die, he should say, I want you to be safe here, where I could return to you later, he should say. He thought about the drowners, he thought about their claws and fangs, their viscous, horrendous skin and faces. He knew it wasn't the monster's fault, really, but…

"Well, If we are talking about jobs–"

"Jaskier," Geralt growled, again, getting angry, angrier. He still didn't look back, at him.

"No, come on! If we are talking about jobs I have one, you know?"

"Jaskier, " The growl grew up.

"Remember? That one in which I sing and people throw me money?" Geralt stepped forward, only two steps. "You remember it, right?"

"You're wasting my time,"

"Because I have been neglecting my job only for you! Because you insist on not telling me anything of value for my songs, and–"

"Jaskier, "

"And! I thought, well, I understand, he is not good explaining shit, he doesn't want to talk, so if I watch how he fights and hunts monsters I suppose I can manage with that, but no! Also no! How do you want me to do my job, witcher?"

And then, the third lightning sparked in the sky, enormous, violent. And something in Jaskier voice made Geralt to burst. He faced the bard, finally, his amber eyes flaming with hurt fury.

"Jaskier, I don't care about your songs if you're dead! Do you understand that or not?!"

The third thunder erupted immediately after and devoured the other sounds. It lasted at least four long seconds. Four long seconds in which they looked at each other under the dark rain with no words. Then, slowly, Jaskier loosened his grip. And Geralt noticed his expression. Jaskier looked down, frowning a little, his hands trembling, his lips pressed in a thin line. Geralt saw him swallowing, hard. A strong and powerful scent cracked around him.

But the bard said nothing.

So Geralt took that as an advantage and turned around to walk away. He didn't say anything either. He felt strangely tired, tensed. He didn't look back, he had a job to do.

* * *

It took him four days to clean the sewers from drowners. Geralt emerged to the surface covered in green-black blood, murky water, and shit, so he seemed like one of the monsters he had killed down there, in the guts of the city. It wasn't the first time, and it wasn't the first time he had to come back to the inn covered in dirt like that.

When Geralt arrived into the room he shared with Jaskier, he found him leaning on the windowsill, reading something. At the sound of someone appearing, the bard looked up and turned around. He arched his eyebrows in surprise.

"Geralt!"

And in relief.

Jaskier moved toward the witcher with two steps and hugged him tight, exhaling a heavy breath and resting his forehead on his chest. Geralt went stiff, not because Jaskier was hugging him but–

"Jaskier, you are going to get dirt," Geralt sighed.

Jaskier squeezed him a little before releasing him and looked at Geralt with his bright and pretty blue eyes.

"I was worried," he mumbled.

He had mud in his forehead, in his right cheek, and in the front of his fancy doublet. But he didn't seem angry. Geralt breathed in and caught the pale scent of flowers, ink, and wood that followed Jaskier everywhere, alongside something soft and sweet under all his own dirt. He grunted, weakly.

"Sorry, it took me longer than I would think, "

"Right, uh…"Jaskier hesitated, looking away, and headed to the door. "I will ask the innkeeper to prepare a bath for you,"

Geralt watched him go, knowing that their fight was not resolved. He sighed again, feeling exhausted, hungry. Then he glanced at the piece of parchment that was on the windowsill, forgotten, and he felt curiosity. It had been folded and unfolded many times, and it had a red wax seal that, when he examined it closely, he recognized it.

It was the blazon of the Lettenhove. It was a letter.

Geralt backed off and decided not to pry more. It was Jaskier's. And whether or not he wanted to tell him, it was none of his business.

He rubbed his right forearm unconsciously. That thought made him feel… more tired.

Gerald needed two rounds of hot water to get rid of all the shit he was covered with. With the third bath, he let himself get enough relaxed to lingering in the water doing nothing more than leaning against the edge and wall tub with his eyes closed. It was already night, so Jaskier had lit a few candles around the room. The bard hadn't talked much in that time except for two or three nervous jokes about the dirt water Geralt had been spraying everywhere when he was leaving his two previous baths.

Geralt knew Jaskier was ruminating something.

He didn't want to push him.

But he also wanted…

He opened his eyes, slowly, and saw that Jaskier was with his back turned to him. He counted five seconds, determined to talk about the discussion they had had four days ago, determined to be the one making the effort to fix things this time. He parted his lips, just about to say his name, to call him.

Then Jaskier turned around and faced Geralt, serious, but at the same time nervous. Geralt smelled something uncomfortable, something anxious and painful.

Something sad.

He shut his mouth.

Jaskier took a deep breath. He hadn't changed his clothing yet or cleaned his face.

"Geralt, I…," he said, hesitating, licking his lips, avoiding his gaze. He exhaled, long, as if he didn't know how to say what he wanted to say. Then he bit his lower lip. Geralt stared at him, feeling on edge, vulnerable for the first time in a long time. "I want to ask you for something," Jaskier looked at Geralt, and Geralt nodded.

Then Jaskier sighed one more long breath, biting his lips again, looking away, again, and crossed his arms, almost hugging himself as if he needed someone holding him, as If he needed a shield.

"I…"

The bard frowned a little more, and Geralt saw that frown trembling. Jaskier clicked his tongue and, this time, locked eyes with the witcher. Geralt felt the intensity, determination, and… grief.

Grief.

He knew what Jaskier wanted to ask. He should have known in the first moment he had seen the letter with the Lettenhove emblem. He had no doubt.

"You want to hire me," Geralt said, low, soft, calm. "You want to make a contract,"

Jaskier parted his lips.

"Yes," he said.

And Geralt saw, saw, how just then Jaskier looked and walked away, out of the room, squeezing, clasping, his left forearm with tight and shaky fingers.

#geraskier #geraskier week #geraskier au #geralt of rivia #Jaskier #geralt x jaskier #soulmates au #my fanfiction #sorry for the netflix show divergences #i want to picture a more reliable friendship #i think

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radiorenjun · 4 years

Text

Lavender Antics

→ Pairing: Han Jisung x Reader

→ Summary: Shooting in a drama with him was your absolute nightmare. Working with your enemy and pretending that you were love interests has been the most frustrating experience of your life. Though, after saying your farewells, the scent of lavender never leaves.

→ Genre:enemies to lovers au, idol au, romance, angst, slowburn, comedy.

→ Chapters: 5, 6, 7

You came to the set with a bright smile on your face, walking in with a box of sushi in hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other. Greeting the staff members with a bow as you walk towards the makeup room.

Life was starting to look up again.

At least, that's what you thought.

"Alright, the awaited kiss scene is about to happen!" the director announced happily. Jisung choked on his caffeine as you dropped your chopsticks to the floor, frozen in place as you stared at your director with eyes wide with disbelief.

"What?" you and Jisung exclaimed in unison, glancing at the excited director to your managers who were giving you encouraging thumbs up. "Manager-nim, he can't be serious right?" Jisung laughed nervously.

"We haven't even done two episodes!" he continued. "This must be some late April Fools prank, right? I mean, you guys trick us with this too many times! It's not funny!" you gulped, shivering at the thought.

"What? You guys finally haulted your ridiculous arguments so we decided to add more chemistry with the first kissing scene!" the producer laughed as he adjusted his headphones. "Pd-nim!" you and Jisung whined.

"Just because he apologized doesn't mean he stopped being annoying!" you reasoned, pointing at the boy who nodded in agreement. You could hear Jeongin's sinister laughter in the distance, holding his stomach as you both tried to stall time.

"Come on, kids. It's just a kiss, what are you afraid of? Catching feelings?" the script writer laughed, coming over to give you instructions over what to do next. You and Jisung shook your heads aggressively, repeatedly denying.

"You gotta stop dreaming, Sunbae!" you laughed, waving it off nervously. "It's impossible! I would never like a girl who's ego is bigger than their mouth!" Jisung joked, receiving a hard hit on his shoulder by you.

"Ow!" he squeaked, rubbing the side spot as you gave him a death glare. "Then there's nothing to worry bout. It's only gonna last 30 seconds." the script writer huffed at your dramatization. "30 seconds?!" you and Jisung exclaimed in shock.

"Im guessing you two didn't read the stage directions?" your director chuckled. "You always tell us what to do, we stopped reading stage directions on the first day of the shoot back in Busan!" you stammered, your cheeks growing red at the thought of kissing the boy beside you.

"Oh suck it up and get into character. You two knew this was gonna happen sooner or later, don't you?" the stage director rolled her eyes, tapping her fingernail against the table filled with props and scripts impatiently.

You and Jisung nodded after giving out a defeated sigh, walking into the group of students who were giggling and giving the two of your smirks. "Okay, some of you also have to kiss each other okay! Don't go smirking on us!" Jisung exclaimed as he sat down next to Jeongin who was snickering away.

"Whatever, Han. You know you don't need to hide the fact that you actually want to do it." Youngheum smirked. "Yeah, you two are just being dramatic. We all know you're just dying to make out on camera!" Yeji laughed, pushing your flustered self to the girl beside you who laughed along.

"Oh fuck off, would you?" you spat from a distance, giving them a middle finger. "You know you love us, L/N!" Sayori laughed beside you before giving you a dark glare. "Be greatful you're not the one acting as if you swallowed a shot glass of vinegar." she mumbled, making you stiffle a laugh as you pat her back with sympathy.

You knew that the teasing would get even worse once the scene starts. And you don't think you're mentally ready for it. You gulped as the staff adjusting the mics above you and the camera moved their positions so that they would get a better shot.

"Hey what are y'all playing?" you smiled as you sat beside Chaeryong and Yeoreum. "OH, y/n! You're just in time!" Jinhyuck exclaimed with a bright smirk on his face. "We're playing truth or dare!" Chaeryong grinned, leaning an arm on your shoulder.

"Truth or dare? What are we? 13?" you laughed incredulously. "You're just saying that cause you're scared of getting a bad dare," Jisung taunted, his eyes never leaving yours. "Oh hush, you're also a wuss yourself, jackass." you stuck your tongue out teasingly.

"So, you in or not?" Jeongin asked as he layed a hand on his hyung before he could say another word. "Sure. It can't be that bad, right?" you shrugged, leaning back on your arms as you watch the bottle spin in the middle of your big group.

You watch as it went to your Japanese friend, who gulped as the boy who spun gave her a big smirk. He let out a loud "AHA!" before releasing a clap with his hands, rubbing them together sinisterly.

"Hey, don't be so loud, the teachers are gonna wake up at the sound of your obnoxious clapping." your friend snarled, making the boys roll his eyes before looking around as your japanese friend internally prayed to God for mercy.

"Go to the kitchen and gulp down a shot glass of vinegar." he grinned causing your friends to laugh and wave at the poor girl who gave him a look of disbelief. "Fine." she sighed, standing up in defeat to head to the kitchen. "She's gonna be there for a while, moving on!" Youngheum waved it off as we all watch her walk out of the room with her mumbling something along the lines of 'do they even have a shot glass here?'

"Nayeon, your turn!" you exclaimed, attracting your friend's attention from the door. She reluctantly spun the bottle and watched as it stopped on Jinhyuck, who gave out a muffle groan through his palms. "Have mercy." he laughed, putting his hands together to plead.

"Fine, go to Jinyoung sleeping over there and draw over his face with a marker." she smirked mischievously. "I don't have a marker though," Jinhyuck sighed in relief. "I do!" you exclaimed, fishing out a marker from your pocket which made Jinhyuck frown.

"I just finished my banner, thank me later." you smiled innocently as Jinhyuck snatched the marker from your palm with eyes boring into your skull. You and Nayeon shared a subtle high-five as your group snickered at the poor boy who tiptoed over to the sleeping class president who was snuggled up to his pillow.

A few minutes later he came back with a face filled with fear, "he's gonna kill me tomorrow." he shivered. "Don't worry, bro." Jisung giggled, patting the boy's back and rubbing it comfortingly. "I'll make sure we have cake there at your funeral." he laughed.

"I don't like cake and you know it!" he barked back. "Exactly." Jisung winked as we all shared a good laugh.

"Next up is.."

After a few turns, involving you having to drink some concoction consisting a mixture of hot sauce, mustard, tteokbokki sauce (?), wassabi and all mysterious ingredients that aren't suppose to be mixed with, your friends decided to spice up the game a little.

There's a new rule when you pick dare, you're required to choose a partner or have the person who spun the bottle choose the partner for you. Of course, whoever chose truth will be teased for being a pussy therefore everyone was choosing dare.

"Alright, my turn." Youngheum coughed after nonchalantly putting on Lee's boxers around his head like a swimming headcap, spinning the bottle eagerly. The bottle slowly coming to a stop on Jisung who gave a toothy grin.

"Bro, don't do anything harsh." Jisung raised his hands in defeat as Youngheum gave him the look that screams 'I'm gonna ruin this whole man's career'. Youngheum let out an abstract laugh, putting a hand on his chest dramatically.

"You think I'm not gonna use this opportunity to get back on you for ruining my chance with that exchange student?!" he snarled with an evil grin. "Okay, it wasn't my fault that you got in the way of me tripping over a banana peel that caused you to pour that protein shake on the new kid! You were in my way, it's your fault!" Jisung laughed nervously.

"Very funny, Sung." Youngheum rolled his eyes before looking around until his eyes laid on you. "Since I know you won't pick truth to prove that you're not a pussycat, I dare you-" he spoke before Yejin laughed at his choice of words. "Pussycat? What are you? A fucking toddler?!"

"I dare you," he rolled his eyes as he pointed to Jisung then to you. "to go kabedon with Y/n and make out for 30 seconds." Youngheum snickered. "Ooh"s went around the whole group as they smirked at the two of you who stared in disbelief at the boy who was staring with halflidded eyes.

"Youngheum." you spoke nervously, "I never did anything wrong to you right? We're friends aren't we?" you tried to reason as Youngheum gave you an innocent smile along with a peace sign. "Chop, chop you two!" Yejin clapped her hands eagerly.

"Finally something interesting is going down." Marcos sighed as he watched eagerly between the two of you. You stood up to punch the grinning evil demon across the room before you were suddenly pushed gently to the wall by your shoulder by the one and only Jisung.

His face was red as his eyes were on your collarbone as your back met with the wall. You heard squeals from your female friends and cheers from your male friends. "Get some, bro!" you heard Jeongin cheering from the group.

Jisung took a deep breath before leaning his face closer towards you as his forearms came to lean against the wall, trapping your head in between his arms. You could his minty breath coming in contact with your skin.

His face leaning to the side slightly as you felt his nose graze yours softly, his eyes staring into your lips. "You don't have to do this, you know?" Jisung whispered almost inaudibly, his voice going an octave lower as his breath fans against your skin with each word.

His words weren't in the script. But you were too entranced by his eyes staring into yours for permission as you felt an odd feeling in your gut as you tried to stay in character. He looked so serious it's hard to tell if he's actually acting or serious.

"It's alright." you manage to breathe out, you felt your heart increasing with each passing second as your eyes went to Jisung's lips, you could feel your face gradually getting redder as Jisung's half lidded eyes bore into your nervous ones.

"I-" you whispered before you felt something soft meeting your lips, Jisung's lips gently pressed against yours. You felt your heart rate increase in your chest as you pressed your lips back on to his gently.

You heard cheers behind you as your friends rooted for you two to continue, "get some, Sung!" someone said in the midst of the groups whistling and squealing. You were too entranced by the feeling of his body pressing up closer to yours as he leaned his head to the side slightly to get a better angle.

His lips breaking part with yours for half a second before pressing again. Your hands unconciously went up, one hand clutching his baggy shirt and the other going up to run your fingers over his messy locks.

The kiss stayed innocent, staying as small longing pecks but never deepening. Your hand that was in his hair moved to his cheek, slowly moving down the side of his neck. Just when you were about to deepen the kiss you felt Jisung being tugged away from you.

Jinhyuck laughing at the both of you, his hand clutching onto the shirt on Jisung's shoulder as he pulled away from you. "Stay pg 13 guys, 30 seconds are up. You can get back to sucking each others faces off later, we're still here!" he laughed.

You were panting for breath as Jisung didn't gave you a time to breathe during his kisses, you were sure your face was as red as his as he was staring into your flustered form as he tried to regain himself.

You watched as Jisung subtly licked his lips as you both have eachother a small smile, blush still adorning on your cheeks. "Alright love birds, you can fuck when we're not around. In a meantime, pick your next victim, Sung." Nayeon joked, eliciting a complain from you.

As you scolded Nayeon, you didn't notice Jisung running a hand through his hair which was now messy from you running your fingers through it as he licked his lips once again. His heart beating erratically against his chest as Jinhyuck walked over to the group.

He wasn't in the shot but he still couldn't help admit to himself that he wouldn't mind kissing you again for the next few shoots.

😳😳😳😳 HoPe YOu liKe iT bYe

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