In Which Obsessions Are Explored.

[thebestbooksaround]

Spark of Safety by MidnightJen (@amidnightjen)

Buddie, Maddie Buckley & Evan 'Buck' Buckley | 7k | Teen

The man who opens the door is not her brother.

Or

The extended version of my tumblr ficlet in which Maddie turns up on Buck’s doorstep years later than in canon.

[amidnightjen]

Eddie’s sitting on the counter, heels smacking against a cabinet as he idly swing his legs to a beat she doesn’t recognise. His hands are dancing about and he’s talking fast and excited, words tumbling over themselves in their rush to come out, topic seemingly dancing from one to another as he follows his own thoughts.

Steve is just along for the ride. He’s moving about the kitchen easily enough, making dinner, baking dessert, moving around Eddie as though he’s used to him being in his space, used to the way Eddie talks and that the words don’t always seem to make sense because he’s jumping from one thought to the next as they occur to him and not necessarily as they flow.

He’s engaged, though, Nancy sees that. Makes soft comments here and there that garner delighted smiles and silly declarations from Eddie and Nancy doesn’t know if it’s new or old what she’s seeing here but she knows she’s seeing it.

She knows she’s seeing everything she could never give Steve and everything Steve has always wanted. She’s seeing that future with lots of kids and a RV for family vacations. She’s seeing a quiet moment right before her, one that she gets the feeling has happened dozens of times before.

She’s filled with such deep fondness then, for Steve and for Eddie and the future she knows they’re going to have, and so she leans against the doorframe and she watches it unfolding before her, taking this moment to exult in the love they have for one another before she ruins it with news that there’s a new gate opening and Vecna is back.

She’ll let them have this for a little bit longer.

[amidnightjen]

The backpack lands at his feet with a solid thunk and then Max is shoving past him, scrambling into the backseat of the beemer with a snapped, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Steve raises his eyebrows at Eddie but Eddie just shrugs at him and picks up Max’s backpack to toss it into the backseat, (seemingly) uncaring of whether or not it hits her.

Her snarl is a little more vicious than either were expecting and they exchange wary looks before they decide to just get in the car and deal with whatever this is at home.

Steve contemplates the wisdom of stopping for ice cream but he’s not sure Max is fit for public consumption and it seems safer to dig a pint out of the freezer than subject the unsuspecting employees of the Scoops knockoff to Max.

(Steve still has vivid memories of those days.)

When they get home, Max doesn’t say a word, just heads straight for her room. Slams the door hard.

“What the fuck?” Steve wonders. “Did something happen at school?”

Eddie can only shrug, which Steve interprets as Max continuing to avoid Eddie at school because he was in weird pseudo dad/brother territory and she was still struggling to deal with that development.

“Should we check on her?”

For a long moment they both stared at Max’s closed bedroom door.

“I know nothing about teenage girls.”

Steve glares at Eddie. “And I do?”

The look Eddie gives Steve then is amused. He points to Steve. “Very popular, many girls wanted you.” He points to himself. “Gay metalhead freak.”

Unamused, Steve points the Max’s bedroom door. “Teenage girl we both loved enough to kind of adopt.”

They both contemplate that for a moment.

“Should we call Mrs Byers?” Eddie suggests.

Steve is debating the wisdom of seeking help when Max’s door bangs open and she glares at them both.

“You’re both idiots.” It’s said with enough affection that Steve is sure she doesn’t mean it. Mostly.

“Want to talk about it?”

“Boys are dumb.”

“Sure,” Steve agrees because he is one and can confirm that yes they are dumb sometimes.

“Should I kill off Lucas?” Eddie asks.

The idea delights Max if the dark smile she offers them is any indication.

“Okay, retribution for dumbassery coming his way,” Eddie offers cheerfully.

Max smiles genuinely then and Steve sighs in relief. He’s still getting used to being the one caring for Max - legally at any rate - and he’s not sure they should be offering to kill off Lucas’ character as retribution but as long as Max was happy and they weren’t killing anyone in real life, he’d take the smile as a win and maybe have a word with Lucas later.

A threatening word maybe.

[amidnightjen]

Arthur Pendragon had never frozen in battle. He’d never hesitated when confronted with a fight, be it a challenging knight, a bandit or a sorcerer, he’d always prided himself on his ability to act under any circumstances, not to hesitate when the moment called for it.

He was frozen now.

His hand on his sword, mouth open as he’d been about to shout for his manservant, his entire body stilled as he completely failed to react to what was happening before him.

He’d seen the fog of the spell coming, had been desperately fighting with his knights to clear as many people from the citadel as they could before they succumbed. He’d known, even as he’d been running and calling orders over the panic and chaos, that he would soon lose his city, his people, to a spell he had no way of stopping, to a sorcerer he couldn’t identify.

He’d known he would continue to fight and that unless, by some miracle, they found the sorcerer, that he too would fall beneath the curse and that there was nothing he could do to fight against the sweeping fog.

There wasn’t anything he could do.

But Merlin -

He’d never seen his manservant look so -

There had been such sorrow in his eyes and then he’d -

But Merlin wasn’t -

He didn’t -

Arthur had never heard Merlin’s voice sound so deep and commanding. He’d never once seen his manservant throw a hand toward the sky and command lightning. He’d never seen the man he trusted betray him so deeply and he froze, unable to move or act as Merlin - stupid, bumbling Merlin - commanded the very sky and nature itself to do his bidding.

A sorcerer. The man he trusted beyond all other.

Merlin was a sorcerer.

And frozen, though he was, furious as he was, still unable to move, he could say nothing. Do nothing.

Arthur Pendragon had never frozen in battle. He’d never hesitated when confronted with a fight, be it a challenging knight, a bandit or a sorcerer, but he froze then, in the face of the greatest betrayal he’d ever known.

Froze even as Merlin wielded magic to save Camelot.

[catknives]

soulmate-esque au where steve is born with a psychic power where the first time he touches someone who will be important to him, he gets flashes of future moments between the two of them.

the first time he touches nancy he sees flashes of the two of them happy together, then an argument. the flashes clearly jump ahead a few years, as if they maybe stopped talking for a while, but they still look happy in that future. he thinks that maybe they get in a big fight, but clearly they’re still in each others lives for a long, long time.

when he ruffles dustin’s hair looking for dart, he gets flashes of laughter and jokes and a long life of brotherhood. he sees secret handshakes and little plastic dice and being invited to thanksgiving.

they’re not always positive. the first time he brushes past billy in the locker room, he’s filled with flashes of anger and dread and pain, and none of what he sees makes sense in the moment.

on his first day at scoops, he shakes robin’s hands and gets his biggest vision yet. there’s so much love and happiness and joy there, including a montage in which they seem to work a frankly absurd variety of jobs. but he gets stuck on an image of himself in a tux, robin in a wedding dress, and thinks this must be my future wife.

it isn’t until much later, on a dirty bathroom floor, that he realizes he was standing behind robin in that vision of her in a wedding dress, and, oh, he’s her best man.

almost a year later, when eddie pushes him against a wall with a broken bottle to his neck, steve is almost convinced he’s passed out because of the sheer number of visions running through his head. some of the flashes are innocent happy moments—sharing a joint, laughing at a movie, making dinner—but there’s also flashes of pleasure and adoration and devotion on a level that steve’s never felt before.

he sees flashes of waking up next to eddie in bed, walking a dog around a lake hand in hand, watching eddie perform on stage, a soft kiss to a bare shoulder.

and suddenly steve yearns, thinks he’s never fully known the meaning of that word until now. he tries to play it cool, doesn’t want to freak eddie out, but he’s seen so many visions of them holding hands that his fingers itch with the need to interlace with eddie’s.

when eddie is attacked by demobats, everyone tries to get steve and dustin to leave eddie’s body behind, because clearly eddie is dead. and steve can’t explain to them why he knows that can’t be true, he just stubbornly insists and drags eddie to a hospital as he promises again and again to dustin that eddie is going to make it.

everyone but steve is shocked when the doctors find the barest hint of a pulse.

it’s touch and go at first, but they put eddie in a medically induced coma and he starts to improve. steve is there the whole time. he tells the unconscious eddie about all of the things they still have to do together, about how he knows eddie will live a long, happy life because he’s seen eddie with gray in his hair, laugh lines etched into his face, as they welcome their first grandchild to the world.

and eddie makes it, and when he was up eddie tells steve he heard everything. steve steels himself for denial or disbelief, but eddie tells him that it’s the first thing he’s heard in the past month that actually makes sense.

they share their first kiss right there in the hospital room, and even though steve has seen this moment before, it still takes his breath away.

as he grows older, steve notices more and more of the moments he’s seen in visions as they happen. he happily discovers that there’s so much the visions don’t show, and there’s still so much to see.

because yes, just like he saw all those years ago, he stands behind robin at her wedding, and it’s as moving and special as it always looked. but he also gives max away at her and lucas’s wedding, and he helps dustin propose to suzie, and he helps erica pick out her wedding dress. and, of course, robin stands behind steve at his own wedding.

steve lives a long happy life, with so many memories—seen and unseen—to look forward to.

[amidnightjen]

“Ow! What the fuck?” Steve yelped when the bag of frozen peas was suddenly pressed against the side of his face. He tried to move away but Eddie poked him in the side and told him to sit still. “You couldn’t have warned me?”

“Was more fun this way,” Eddie told him with a grin that did nothing to hide how concerned he was. “I still think you should go to the hospital.”

Steve waved off Eddie’s concern with a careless hand that he then used to take the bag of peas from Eddie. “It’s not actually as bad as it looks,” he assured him. “I don’t even have a concussion this time.”

“That’s not as reassuring as you think it is,” Eddie pointed out. His eyes roamed over Steve, cataloguing all the bumps and bruises and the scrapes that would need cleaning.

But Steve wasn’t lying. The first time he’d gotten in that fight with Jonathon had been way worse and the bumps and scrapes from his first time dealing with the demogorgon, well he’d come off a lot worse than this. He had four more years of practice now, dealt with demodogs and the mind flayer and Vecna’s stupid fucking bats, Jonathon getting in a hit or two and then going toe-to-toe with the demogorgon with just a baseball bat? Nah, that had been nothing.

“You should have let me help you,” Eddie muttered.

Steve didn’t want that, didn’t want Eddie involved any more than he had been thanks to Vecna and Chrissy - and was it wrong to hold that against Chrissy? She’d died because of Vecna but it was her fault that Eddie got mixed up in the Upside Down.

But also, “We tried that,” Steve pointed out. And they had. Tried to insert Eddie in little ways and every time it was like something happened to prevent it.

Just like they hadn’t been able to save Barb or stop Will from being taken.

Just like he feared he wouldn’t be able to save Eddie when the time came.

[amidnightjen]

Merlin could see the horror in Arthur’s eyes as he shouted for his men to fall back, for the citizens of the lower town to run. Camelot was falling. Victim to a curse they had no way to stop. Uther had already fallen, most of the citadel lay sleeping where they’d stood, the curse flowing out from the heart of the citadel in the form of a fast moving fog that took down anyone in it’s path.

Merlin didn’t know how to break the curse, didn’t know who had even performed the magic but he thought perhaps he could slow it down, prevent it from reaching into the Lower Town.

But Arthur stood at his side, shouting orders to his men and his people and if Merlin did this, if Merlin acted now, he would save hundreds of lives, possibly thousands if the curse carried on sweeping across the whole of Camelot’s lands. But Arthur would know. There was no time to run or hide away. Arthur would know.

Arthur would know about his magic and the lies.

Arthur would know.

And Merlin did it anyway.

He turned to Arthur, reached out a hand to his arm to gain his attention and said, “I’m sorry, Arthur.”

“What?”

But Merlin could only smile at him as he took a step back toward the oncoming fog, raised his hands to the sky and shouted words that would out him as a sorcerer while he summoned all the power of earth and sky he had at his fingertips to save the place and the people that Arthur loved so much.

It would be worth it.

[amidnightjen]

“You have to help me!”

Will rolled over and buried himself under the blankets, burying his head under his pillow in a clear declaration that the ghost could fuck right off.

The ghost, of course, did not. He lunged at the bed and seemed surprised when his hands sank right through the pillow he’d tried to grab. They did not, unfortunately, sink through Will. Ghosts found him (un)fortunately solid and it had caused more than one accident when he wasn’t looking, and a ghost felt no need to go around him. For a while when he was younger he’d been thought clumsy. Now he had more of a handle on his abilities and usually sensed the hum fast enough to pin any troublesome ghosts with a glare or step around them.

There was no getting around a ghost who landed unexpectedly on the back of your head.

Will irritably sat up after the startled ghost pulled away. “Sod off.”

“No.”

Definitely a child then, the ghost had the same irritating quality Gin had when she was four and everything was a case of why. “Look, come back in the morning and I’ll try and sort you out.”

“It has to be now!” the ghost insisted. “If we hurry you might catch my killer.”

“Oh well if that’s the case, let me just get dressed.”

“Really?”

“No.” Will dropped back down with a huff. “You’re clearly already dead, I don’t see why I should have to risk joining you.”

[amidnightjen]

“Wait,” Robin said, holding her hand up to stop Steve because, “you know Eddie’s flirting with you, right?”

“What?” Steve could’t help but give her a confused look. “Of course, I know Eddie’s flirting with me.” His next look was slightly affronted. “How stupid do you think I am?”

“Based on this conversation,” Robin asked, “or in general?”

“Hey!”

“I’m just saying,” she went on, ignoring his indignant protest, “that based on the last thirty seven times I’ve witnessed you attempting to flirt with our customers - ”

“Thirty seven? It was not thirty seven.”

“ - I’m not sure you do know what flirting looks like.”

Steve gave Robin a very dry look. “I know what flirting looks like, Robin, I know how to flirt.”

“Do you?”

Steve grinned at her. “Have you considered the fact that I wasn’t trying to flirt with those five girls?”

“Thirty seven,” Robin corrects.

“It was not thirty seven!”

“And no,” she replied. “I know you, that was classic examples of ‘you suck’.”

“Robin,” Steve placed his hands on her shoulders and looked her dead in the eye. “I was not flirting with those girls and I am very aware when Eddie is flirting with me.”

“I just don’t see how that’s true,” Robin shook her head. “Steve, you really really suck.”

Steve let go of Robin, dropping his hands to his hips and his head back so that he could let out a very dramatic sigh.

“Like really suck,” Robin carried on.

And Steve, well, she’d really left herself open for this one, so he said, “That’s what Eddie said last night.”

“Ha!” Robin cried triumphantly, “Even Eddie thinks you suck at flirting.”

Steve stared at Robin. “That’s not what I meant.”

Robin stared at Steve.

Steve smirked.

Robin continued to stare at Steve.

And then it clicked. “Oh, gross!” She faked gagging. “I did not need that image in my head, Steve!”

Steve just grinned and went back to sorting the tapes that had come back in while he waited for her to realise what he’d just admitted to.

“WAIT WHAT?!”

[amidnightjen]

Steve has exactly zero idea what he’s done to deserve this.

“Ow!” He tries to pull away but Robin socks him in the arm again - harder this time. “What - hey!”

“How could you not tell me?!”

Dodging yet another blow, Steve tries to escape her but she just follows him until she’s got him pressed into the back corner of the office at Family Video and he’s out of ways to escape.

“Tell you what?” He holds up his hands to fend her off and she grabs one of his fingers and yanks. “Ow!!”

“You!” She punctuates this with a sharp jab to his stomach. “Eddie!”

“What about me and Eddie?” He asks, squirming away from her probing fingers and finally managing to get his finger free of her grip. “Jesus Christ, Robin, what the hell is wrong with you?” This, he demands, while cradling his abused finger close to his chest.

“What wrong with me?” She scoffs. “What’s wrong with you? How could you not tell me? Me!”

“Tell you what?” Steve snaps, she’s really a lot stronger than she looks.

“About you and Eddie!”

“What about me and Eddie?” And he knows his words are bleeding frustration because he has no idea what the hell she’s talking about and certainly not what he ever did to deserve this sort of punishment.

Robin, finally, pauses in her assault long enough to look at him.

She looks at him long and hard and then she says, “Oh, okay.” There’s an awkward pause and Steve knows - just knows - how hard she’s fighting babbling something at him but she just says. “Sorry.” And then she’s out of his space and the office as if it had never happened. Which it did and he’ll have the bruises to prove it.

But also, “What about me and Eddie?!”

Robin sticks her head back into the office and her expression is deadly serious when she says, “You know you just spent thirty minutes flirting with him, right?”

“No i didn’t,” he replies, because what? Him flirting with Eddie? That’s not…

That’s just…

He wasn’t…

“Oh my god, I’m in love with Eddie.”

“WHAT?!”

“Robin!” And now Steve knows there’s an edge of panic in his voice. “I’m in love with Eddie!”

Robin scoffs, and despite her earlier annoyance (because the flirting), she hadn’t seriously thought it was a thing so, she flails and says, “No, you’re not.”

But Steve’s really starting to think about it now and he’s noticing things and he’s remembering things and - “Holy shit, I’m in love with Eddie.”

“What?!”

[amidnightjen]

My first fic for Grimm in years is up! Contingency Plans is a time-travel fix-it that turned into a weird slice-of life thing totally out of my control.

[amidnightjen]

Eddie doesn’t move in.

He comes over one day and he just…doesn’t leave.

It’s not a thing, is the thing. Maybe it should have been, maybe he should have mentioned it, but it was just…it just happened. Slowly but surely Eddie’s things mixed with Steve’s until they shared a wardrobe and a bathroom, until his van nestled next to Steve’s in the drive and his guitar rested pride of place in the living room, sharing space with the disordered mix of music and overflowing shelves of Eddie’s D&D manuals.

When Max moves in, it’s a thing.

It deserves to be a thing.

It happens all at once, all of her friends are there, even if all of Max’s things fit in two boxes and a backpack. They make a thing of it.

He was sure they made a thing of it.

Only Robin is glaring at him from the other side of the counter at Family Video and while he’s super excited to see her because he didn’t think she was going to be home until Wednesday, she’s just mad at him.

“You moved!” she snaps at him. “How could you not tell me you moved?”

“What?” He looks at her funny. “You know i moved,” he points out. “You call me every week!”

“I call you here!” She jabs a finger at the phone on the desk for emphasis. “So you don’t die of boredom on your Thursday night close,” she reminds him.

That’s true, she does, and for that hour when she’s catching him up on everything she’s done and he’s telling her the (admittedly short) list of things she’s missed, it’s like she’s there with him, sharing in his misery. But still, how could she not know he moved? He talks about it all the time, he knows he does. Knows he’s complained about Eddie’s music and the way Max refuses to eat anything vaguely healthy for breakfast (but she’ll grudgingly let him make her lunch).

He knows he’s mentioned the flowers he’s thinking about planting and that both Eddie and Max have made fun of him for it even though they both tagged along to the nursery to pick out a few things.

…he mentioned those things, right? How could he not have?

Only, Robin tears him a new one about rocking up to his old house and finding a whole new family living there and how she had to walk all the way to Family Video and her angry tirade carries him through the rest of his shift and all the way through the drive home.

To the little house he shares with Eddie and Max.

Which somehow, comes as a complete surprise to her.

“Ow!” He dodges away from her slapping hands. “What the hell was that for?”

She makes an angry hissing screech and he runs away from her before she can start slapping him again. She tries to chase after him but she trips two steps into the house over a pair of Max’s sneakers and when she catches herself on the wall, finds herself with her face almost pressed up against his carefully arranged wall of photos, practically nose-to-nose with the one of him and Eddie that Max took and the sound that leaves Robin then suggests Steve is going to die.

It’s going to be painful and probably slow.

“You and Eddie?!”

[amidnightjen]

The first gathering she gets invited to she knows will be her last.

It’s not that she doesn’t feel welcomed, they’re all lovely and make her feel welcome, and it isn’t until later, when things are quieting down and she’s sitting around a table sipping at her wine listening to the conversation around her that she knows she won’t be back.

It’s the conversation that does it.

Eddie’s coworker Chim is talking about how his daughter is going through a phase where she has to sleep in bed with them. “And it’d be fine,” he’s saying, “but she clings!”

They all laugh at that, though Chim’s partner Maddie seems more amused than anyone else when she says, “She’s like Buck - he used to cling.”

“He still does,” Hen, another coworker laughs - although why and how she knows that Ana doesn’t know.

“He’s like an octopus,” Eddie agrees and that brings Ana up short. “All arms and legs and you’re trapped.”

Maddie laughs. “He’s still like that?”

Eddie nods, with a grin, not seeming to understand how strange a conversation this is for Ana to be overhearing - for him to even be having. And why is it that no one else finds it strange that Eddie knows his best friend likes to cuddle in bed? Why do they all just accept it?

What do they know that Ana doesn’t?

“Oh, yeah,” Eddie confirms. “It doesn’t matter how far apart we start out, come morning it’s a tangle of limbs and i don’t know where his pillow’s gone.”

Ana tries to laugh along with the rest of them but what Eddie is describing is more intimate than any sleeping they’ve ever done together.

“I don’t know how you don’t overheat,” Hen says. “The two time we shared a bed i thought i was going to melt.”

Hen and Buck shared a bed?

“When did you and Buck share a bed?” She finds herself actually asking, trying to share in the lighthearted amusement and no doubt failing.

“Covid,” Hen answers. “Four of us in Buck’s tiny apartment.”

“Eddie was the only one who could handle sharing a bed with Buck,” Chim explained further.

And it was such a relief to have something of an explanation that it wasn’t until after Eddie dropped her home and she was standing in her bathroom brushing her teeth that she realised he’d said start.

He’d been talking in present tense about sharing a bed with Buck.

Was he still sharing a bed with Buck?

It took her three more dates to work out that no, he really wasn’t cheating on her but his heart did belong to someone else.

[amidnightjen]

Here’s a sneak peak at Contingency Plans - the 20k Grimm time-travel fix-it that will land on AO3 next Friday:

The positive pregnancy test sitting on the lip of the bathtub was not something they’d planned for.

They’d made plenty of plans. Plans, contingency plans, back-up plans if aspects of plans had gone wrong. They’d planned carefully for Adalind to be without her powers for up to a year, they’d made plans for how to deal with Hank and Wu, how to make it so Monroe knew enough but not everything. They’d made plans to deal with Renard and the royals, with HW and Black Claw (especially Black Claw), they’d even made plans to deal with Juliette and his mother.

They had not made plans for this.

“Why are you so fertile?” was what Nick managed to say after they’d both been staring down at the results for a little too long.

Rather than be offended, Adalind laughed. It was a little choked and possibly wet, but Nick couldn’t pull his gaze away from the test just yet to check. He reached for her hand instead, pulled it to his mouth to press a kiss to the back of it.

“This is going to make things harder,” he murmured.

“We’ve done it before,” she pointed out.

That was true. They had done it before. In fact, the two of them had done it quite well, all things considered, raising a baby while defending themselves against a whole host of people and organisations trying to kill them.

“It’ll be different this time,” he reminded her.

[amidnightjen]

This piece is part of the Time Travel is an off-hand Comment au (affectionately known as The Mace Fic).

Morgan’s gasp cut through the chaos of Arthur’s chamber. He whipped around at the sound, losing focus for just a moment - a moment in which the practice sword he had been battling walloped him across the shoulder. He batted it away, annoyed, and it demonstrated an amount of sentience a piece of blunt steel should not have by wobbling apologetically at him before flopping harmless onto the rug.

Morgana gaped at him. Mouth open, eyes wide, hand clasped over her mouth.

For a moment, Arthur could only stare back at her in surprise, though obviously not as surprised as she was, before he realised she wasn’t going to be much help in this situation and so he said, “Have you considered knocking?”

She made a strangled sound and he realised with considerable alarm that her eyes were welling with tears.

He was not good with tears.

(Also not good with Morgana because he’d been reliving his past for months and still hated being alone with Morgana because every time he looked at her he saw what she would become. Merlin, too was having trouble deciding what to do with Morgana, though it seemed he’d made something of a decision because he’d apparently failed to include Morgana in the spell around his chambers that cancelled out any active magic when someone burst through the door.)

Merlin was a lot better with tears. Also not currently in the room, having disappeared off to the kitchens for lunch.

Morgana lowered her hand from her mouth but no sound came out even as her lips moved to form shapes.

“Arthur…” Morgana managed to gasp out his name eventually, just that single word filled with astonishment, perhaps a healthy dose of fear.

“Morgana,” he replied, tone biting, because she hadn’t knocked and he still did not know what to say to her.

She’d been responsible for the death of so many of his people and yet she stood before him in his chambers crying because she’d walked in on him having a mock battle with an enchanted practice sword.

“You have magic?”

Finally an actually sentence. An extremely inaccurate one, of course.

“No.”

“But I saw you!” There was fire in her words this time, which was a relief because Arthur could deal with an angry Morgana - even an angry Morgana wielding magic because Merlin had not forgotten to layer that into the spells around Arthur’s chambers. Any magic Morgana attempted to perform in his room would be quashed by Merlin’s own. Even if he wasn’t in the room.

Arthur looked down at the practice sword and nudged it with his boot. It nudged him back. Arthur rolled his eyes. Merlin managed to imbue most of the objects he enchanted with a piece of himself - though only if those objects were for Arthur’s use (this said a lot about Merlin’s feelings for Arthur which Arthur enjoyed teasing him about greatly).

“The sword is enchanted,” he explained.

Morgana seemed to flail at this news, managing a croaky, “Magic!”

It seemed walking in on Arthur carelessly making use of an enchanted sword had broken his half-sister. “Yes,” he confirmed dryly, “magic.”

[amidnightjen]

“What’s wrong with him?” Robin asked, the second she was in the car because the glare from the backseat burned.

Steve, who had become accustomed to the way Dustin was trying to set him on fire with eyes burning into the back of his head said, “He walked in on me and Eddie - ”

“He what?!”

“ - making breakfast,” Steve finished, ignoring Robin’s shrieked interruption.

“He what?” Her question was in a much more level (and confused) tone this time, as she twisted in her seat, first to look at Steve and then into the backseat where Dustin had his arms crossed and was glaring at Steve as though he’d done something world-ending and not just been in his kitchen making eggs.

“It’s not about the breakfast!” Dustin snapped from the backseat. “It’s what the breakfast implied!”

Robin looked to Steve, eyebrows raised but Steve looked just as confused as she felt. Steve made breakfast all the time, he made breakfast for her all the time. Well, when she could get away with staying at his place without her parents making a thing of it. Hell, she knew he’d made Dustin breakfast before, made Max and Lucas and Erica breakfast before. There was nothing weird about Steve making breakfast, they’d all crashed at his house before.

“How does breakfast imply anything?” She mused.

“It’s not about the breakfast!” Dustin screeched.

“Henderson,” Steve snapped, annoyed that he was yelling at Robin now too.

“You told me you were busy last night because you had a date,” Dustin snapped.

“I did have a date,” Steve confirmed.

“With Eddie!” Dustin shrieked.

“What?!” Now it was Robin’s turn to shriek - the betrayal! How could Steve go on a date with Eddie and not tell her? “You had a date with Eddie?”

“No!” Steve yelled. Then, more calmly, because he wasn’t sure why they were all yelling - or why Robin would believe he’d go on a date with Eddie in the first place, “I did not go on a date with Eddie, he came over after.”

“Oh.” Dustin deflated. “Sorry.” Then under his breath he muttered, “Thank god.”

And now Robin was glaring at Dustin, “What’s that supposed to mean?” She shot him a sharp look. “Dustin Henderson, are you being homophobic?”

“What?” Dustin sounded confused. “No.”

“So you just have a problem with Steve dating men?”

“What? Steve doesn’t even like men!” Dustin complained.

“You don’t know that,” Robbin snapped, just - apparently - to be contrary because Dustin did know that and so did Robin but she’d been thrown by Dustin’s horror at the very idea that Steve had gone on a date with Eddie.

(Steve was getting a headache.)

“Steve does not like men,” Steve informed them both.

“Ew, he just talked about himself in third person.”

“Steve does like a man,” he carried on as though he hadn’t been interrupted - again.

“What?!”

Steve shrugged. “Have you met Eddie?”

“What?!”

“I mean, Dustin wasn’t exactly wrong?”

“WHAT?!”

[amidnightjen]

And somehow it had completely slipped his mind that Eddie had a new neighbour until he was stumbling down the trailer steps and there was Max leaning against his car.

“Uh…”

“You’re going to drive me to school every time you and Eddie have a sleepover,” she informed him.

Steve sputtered. “Every time we what?”

“Payment for not saying anything to anyone else is that you buy me breakfast.”

“You’re blackmailing me?”

“You’re buying my silence.”

“That’s blackmail,” Steve pointed out. “What if i don’t care who you tell?” Steve questioned. “Because there’s nothing to tell.”

“You’ve got a hickey on your neck and you’re wearing Eddie’s t-shirt.”

Steve very carefully did not look down and he very pointedly did not raise a hand to cover what was absolutely a hickey on his neck. He did continue to attempt to stare Max down.

She grinned at him and for a moment she was Max, sarcastic and sharp, but without the sadness Billy’s death caused.

So of course he said, “Fine. I’ll drive you to school and buy you breakfast.”

“The breakfast is for every time you take me to school,” Max clarified.

“Fuck that,” Steve told her. “I’ll make you breakfast.”

“In my trailer?” Max sounded dubious.

Steve shook his head, eyeing her trailer and the potential of her mother inside. “Here. Just, you know, knock on the door.”

Max looked briefly disgusted before she looked smug. “I thought there was nothing to tell?”

“Get in the car, kid.”