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nineliars · 2 years

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how do you think the TD gang would spend their spring breaks?

Ooh, this is a good one! I'll break it down member by member. Continues under the cut because this one got LONG lmao.

Stevie is obviously hot off the media "realizing" that the kid she found wasn't Alice, so she's been getting a lot of emails requesting to interview her again and asking a million questions. Before, it would've made her insecure and judging her own ability to come off as smart and competent, but she knows she did the right thing. She's probably lounging around listening to My Favorite Murder, maybe picking up some extra shifts at the coffee shop* she works at, and talking to her friends through the Team Minerva Group Chat that I am POSITIVE exists even though we have no canon evidence of it.

Stevie's probably talking and facetiming with David every day, and I'll bet that after she gets off the phone with him she calls Janelle and complain about how much they both miss their partners. Stevie's less vocal about it than Janelle, but it's still hard for her.

Speaking of Janelle, she's splitting her time evenly between talking to Vi, watching the new season of Bridgerton, working on building a new kind lightbulb powered by solar energy, and checking on Stevie and Nate every day to make sure they're both doing alright. I think the three of them would watch a movie or two together on Teleparty, but it'd take them a while to figure out what to watch. Janelle wants a rom-com, Nate wants to watch a horror or slasher movie, and Stevie wants a mystery. They compromise by watching Knives Out. They all love the movie, but once Vi joins it stops being a movie night and starts being an infodumping party. Vi spends twenty minutes talking about the subtle critiques of racism and classism that the movie offers, while Stevie and Nate can't stop talking about the structure of the mystery, the way it's written and plotted and planned down to the tiniest little details. Janelle's just happy to look at Ana de Armas for two hours.

Besides that, she's happy to spend time with her family again, especially her brothers, who are fascinated by all the incredible things she gets to work on at school and are happy to relentlessly tease her for 1. her failed rube goldberg experiment and 2. how head-over-heels she is for Vi.

Nate will not tell anyone his plans for spring break, because he himself does not have any. He was instructed to work on his book while on break, a task he is loathe to complete because the last time he spoke to Doctor Quinn about his progress, she described it as "pathetic" without using that exact term. So, Nate goes home. And he sits. And he writes. He writes 200 words for Moonbright. Then he watches the entirety of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on DVD. Then he writes another 200 words. Then he watches the Hobbit trilogy. Then he writes a hundred words. Then, he decides he hates those hundred words. Then he texts Stevie and asks her to describe the most gruesome murder she can think of to him. Stevie replies in such strikingly accurate detail that it prompts Nate to text his therapist for the first time in three months. He laments his failures as a writer and a human to his therapist, and then he feels a little bit better. Then he incorporates some of those horrific murder details into his longest scene yet: A 20,000 word-long chapter in which Moonbright, the protagonist of his story, is horribly murdered by an unknown assassin. Nate types it all up in under 3 hours while the song "No Children" by the Mountain Goats plays in his headphones on loop. At the end of his spree, the chapter is gory, angry, overly detailed, way too long, and it honestly breaks his heart to read back over it. It's unusable in his manuscript. But he doesn't delete it. He keeps it in a folder on his desktop for the next eight months, until he's done the book. Because that chapter is a reflection of his own anger and depression, and maybe even some grief leftover from the events of the past few months that he hasn't processed yet. But the one thing it's not is pathetic. It is heartbreaking and hard to read and completely, wholly, his.

Vi is doing everything they can to not have an absolute meltdown over the upcoming senate primaries. They're texting with both Stevie and David every day because those are the only people that Vi knows who care as much about politics as they do. Scratch that- David cares about politics. Stevie only follows them out of necessity, and-if Vi's not mistaken- a misplaced sense of masochism. Regardless, they're the only two people willing to talk to Vi about it, and Vi's grateful.

Vi's also been spending a lot of time talking to Janelle, and thinking about her. Really thinking about her. Thinking about how smart and talented she is. How her eyes light up anytime she's able to find some common ground with her friends. How much she cares about the people around her. How brave she was to stay behind at school with them all those months ago. Vi is a realist at heart- that's why they can't bring themself to imagine that they might end up with Janelle forever, because they know how high school relationships go, and they know that the idea of losing Janelle would just shatter them in a way they don't know how to combat. But no matter what happens to their relationship, they know for a fact that they will never, ever meet anyone like Janelle Franklin ever again. And that's why they do what they did next: to prove it to her that Vi Harper-Tomo loves Janelle Franklin with their whole heart.

The plan is simple: Vi will somehow plot with their parents and Janelle's, drive from Washington D.C. to Chicago, show up on Janelle's doorstep and surprise her for their last week of break. It takes Vi a little bit to convince their mom that they really need to see their girlfriend that yes, technically they'll see next week when they go back to school anyway. But Vi says it like it is: They have to show Janelle that she's not just some high school girlfriend to them. They really, truly love her and they want to love her as long as humanly possible.

When they phrase it like that, Mrs. Harper-Tomo relents. She helps Vi call the Drs. Franklin and conspire to surprise Janelle. Early Sunday morning, Vi and their mom pack up their Prius, stuff their puffer coats (necessary for combating Windy City weather) under their seats, and hit the road. The road trip takes nearly twelve hours, and Vi is able to work through Lemon Demon's entire discography twice while in the car. While driving through Pennsylvania, Vi wishes they'd called Stevie and asked for her address to avoid using another gas station bathroom, but apparently Pittsburgh is "super out of the way" from their route. And Vi's mom is a stickler for directions.

It's all completely and utterly worth it, though, for that moment when Janelle opens the front door to her townhouse, sees Vi, and is so shocked that she nearly drops her cat on the floor. After safely setting Mr. Truffles down on the front porch, Janelle launches herself into Vi's arms and kisses them, almost crying from joy and excitement.

They spend the rest of the week wandering around Chicago together, Janelle showing them all her favorite sights in the city (The Museum of Science and Industry is visited more than once) and sampling all the best deep-dish pizzas they can get their hands on. It's the best week Vi thinks they've ever had.

Now David, on the other hand, does not see his girlfriend on Spring break, unless one counts the technological tease that is FaceTime. When he finds out about Vi's plan to surprise Janelle, he actually laughs aloud at how frighteningly competent they are to put the plan into motion in such a short amount of time, not to mention jealous that Vi actually gets to spend time with their girlfriend. David is somewhere in Iowa, working for a senate candidate that openly promotes socialism and reparations for the working class. David's father was somehow never available throughout his childhood to read any of his report cards, respond to his birthday messages, sign his permission slips, but is now readily available to send angry emails twice weekly, providing ample entertainment for both David and Stevie. David likes to read the emails aloud in his Voldemort impersonation voice while on call with her.

Other than that, he's spending most of his time studying for his GED exam. He's always been smart enough to be top of his class, but he's never been interested in being top of his class, providing a unique challenge: Actually working hard at something he cares about, something that will make his life better. The hardest part is being alone. His friends are all scattered across the country, his girlfriend is all the way in Pennsylvania, his family, though mostly stationary, are all so far apart in personality that they may as well be living on different continents. You can only feel so connected through phone calls, and text messages, and threatening emails. But the being alone part sucks. It sucks so hard that it makes David wonder if being alone was easier when he didn't know what he was missing.

And he misses Ellie. A lot. Sometimes he reads through their old text messages and thinks about where they'd be if she hadn't died. Back at Ellingham, probably. Maybe he'd be applying to college right now, though he doubts it. He and Stevie might not have ever gotten together. He's positive they wouldn't have gotten together if not for Hayes dying. And whenever that thought occurs to him, David feels conflicted. He gets to be- separated, but together- with a girl that he really, really likes, that amazes him with her brains and her ambition every day. But he's only with her because an innocent kid died before he ever got to learn how to be a good person. And now Ellie's gone too.

When he thinks like that, all David wants to do is call Stevie and tell her he misses her. More than that, he wants to go see her. He wants to actually be near her, and be sure that nothing bad is happening to her. Because he knows her, and he knows that sooner or later, she's going to put herself in danger again. And if she doesn't make it out alive either, he doesn't know what he'll have left.

But he can't do any of that, and he certainly can't say it. So he reads his asshole dad's emails out loud in the most snooty, snake-like voice he can conjure, and the two of them laugh until their stomachs hurt. And right now, in the moment, that's enough.

Bonus: Pix

Pix is enjoying the first peace and quiet she's had in the seven months since she first encountered Stevie Bell, Janelle Franklin, and Nate Fisher. The 21 days that the Ellingham students are on spring break is the longest Pix has gone without a headache since September.

Oh man that was so long. I sat down to write this at 9 AM and it's nearly noon now. But thank you anon for sending me this ask and helping me break out of a writers block that would make Nate Fisher's head spin. I really hope you enjoyed this!

*In the original book, Stevie works at a knockoff Starbucks in the Monroeville Mall which is really funny because I once was injured at a shitty coffee joint in the same mall but she's ultimately either fired or replaced because she works at a grocery store in BitW. My personal headcanon is that she listens to so many true crimepodcasts that she subconsciously starts making everyone's drinks look insane and horrifying. A woman orders a strawberry caramel macchiato and Stevie hands it back to her looking like a cup of brown sludge that's been drowned in blood. At one point somehow Stevie serves a latte with Charles Manson's face drawn into it. Customers begin leaving the shop in tears.

i'm gonna tag some people that might be interested now. this is my first taglist so comment to be added to taglist if you want endless td content and dm to be removed from taglist if you don't want to see my annoying endless td content <3

@viarine @minervahouse @inaudibly-bloodandfire @izzielizzie @dacorals

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