Shit. I’m in my feels again.

🍓 Fictional men ruin my sleep schedule. Mom life by day, slow burns by night. Cozy, dramatic, occasionally feral, always heartfelt. Welcome in. 🍓

[inkmonster21]

Welcome, Friends!

I’m Ink, and you’ve found my safe space!

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This is a place for stories, brainrot, and all the characters I can’t stop thinking about. Interact, scream, cry, or just lurk… whatever feels right. You’re always welcome here. ✨

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[inkmonster21]

Sing For Me

Cooper Howard x Female OC

Series Masterlist

As the Ghoul pushes deeper into the desert with Lucy and Dogmeat, Clara lets Lucy tend the failing systems in her body and, around their campfire, slowly opens up about Cooper, Hank, and the long, painful road that made this strange little group feel like family.

26. What Life Was

The desert stretched in every direction, all glare and distance and heat that never really left your bones.

They walked through it anyway.

Dogmeat trotted ahead, nose low, tail flicking like a metronome. Cooper took the far side, a little ahead, silhouette long and narrow in the sun, rifle on his shoulder. Every few minutes he glanced back at the two figures behind him, then at the horizon, then at the ground, like he trusted no one and nothing, not even the dirt.

Clara and Lucy shared the middle.

Lucy had tied her hair up in a sweaty knot at the back of her neck. Her Vault jumpsuit was half unzipped, sleeves tied around her waist, a patched shirt underneath already stained with dust and a bit of dried blood on one cuff. She kept one hand on Dogmeat's trailing footprint line like she was afraid to lose the track.

Clara walked with her shotgun slung and her hands free, moving with an easy, economical grace that did not match the way her joints sometimes clicked.

"Watch your feet," Clara said.

Lucy blinked down at the sand. "What am I looking for?"

"Anything that looks like it doesn't belong," Clara said. "Straight lines, clean metal, color that looks too fresh. Or bones that look too recent." She squinted ahead. "Khans like tripwires. Some asshole in a fancy coat likes landmines. Super mutants like dropping things on your head. Wasteland's very creative."

Lucy's mouth twisted. "In the vault the worst thing hidden under the soil was a pipe that needed fixing."

"Yeah. Out here the pipes scream when you step on them."

Lucy grimaced and stepped over a half-buried tire.

They went on a while in silence, the crunch of grit under boots the only rhythm. A small prickling sensation ran up Clara's right arm. Then her fingers jerked closed, hard enough that her nails dug into her palm.

She bit back a hiss and flexed her hand. The joints in her wrist stuttered, then locked.

Lucy saw it.

"Hey," Lucy said quietly. "You need a minute?"

Clara rolled her shoulder. "It'll pass."

Her thumb twitched again, an involuntary staccato tapping against the stock of the shotgun.

Lucy stopped walking. "Sit."

Clara gave her a look. "I am not a brahmin, Vaultie."

"I know," Lucy said. "You're a medically interesting case with an overloaded neural bus and a hardware graft that wasn't designed for this climate. Sit down."

Clara held her stare for another beat, then dropped onto a flat rock with a theatrical sigh.

"Bossy," she muttered.

Lucy shrugged off her pack, dug through it, and pulled out a coil of thin cable and a flat metal tool. She stepped behind Clara and lifted the back of her shirt.

"Neck or lower spine?" she asked.

"Lower," Clara said. "Neck is for show. And for when things go very wrong."

Lucy found the access seam, just left of Clara's spine, disguised as a faint scar line that curved with the shape of her back. She slipped the tool under it and popped the panel open. Warm air pushed out against her fingers, along with a faint whine from the micro-fans trying to keep up.

"Still running a little hot," Lucy said.

"Desert will do that," Clara replied. "So will bullets and bad men."

Lucy smiled in spite of herself and plugged one end of the cable into the port at the base of the open hatch. The other end clicked into the side of her Pip-Boy. The screen flared to life with a mess of diagnostics.

"Your motor bundle on the right arm's throwing errors again," Lucy murmured.

Clara let her head hang forward. "Probably the fall. Big ugly bounty hunter yanked me through a window not long ago."

Lucy tried not to smile. "You sound really upset about it."

"I am upset about the window," Clara said. "Glass is hard to come by."

Lucy's fingers moved, gentle but sure, reseating connectors, checking for carbon scoring. Cooper slowed his pace ahead, watching them for a moment before turning his gaze back outward.

"You got it?" he called without looking back.

"I got it," Lucy answered.

Clara snorted. "She says that right before she fries my whole nervous system."

"Have I fried you yet?" Lucy asked.

"You have given me a headache," Clara said.

"That's not from me," Lucy said under her breath. "That's from the cowboy."

The tremor in Clara's hand eased. The error flags on the Pip-Boy blinked from red to amber, then settled on a tired yellow.

"That's about the best I can do while we're on the move," Lucy said. "You're stable. You just need to not sprint or get shot for a bit."

"What if I want to sprint and shoot someone?" Clara asked.

Lucy patted the metal casing before closing the hatch. "Then maybe let Cooper do the sprinting for one afternoon."

Clara made a thoughtful noise, then looked over at Lucy. "You know you're getting worryingly good at poking around in there."

Lucy wiped her hands on her shirt. "Basic understanding. That's all. Enough to keep you going."

"Enough to keep me going is more than Hank managed," Clara said. "So I'll take it."

They walked again.

After a while, the land sloped into a shallow wash where a dry riverbed had once been. A few twisted trees clung to life along the edges. Cooper whistled softly, and Dogmeat cut back to heel beside him as they angled down into the cooler ground.

Lucy fell into step a little closer to Clara now.

"So," Lucy said. "Can I ask you something?"

"You're going to ask anyway," Clara said. "Might as well pretend you're polite about it."

Lucy made a face. "What was it like? Before. I mean really before. Not just what's on your movie posters."

Clara's gaze went far for a moment, across the sand and across years.

"Loud," she said. "That's the first thing. Streets always humming. People, cars, music. Studios never quiet. Someone always yelling about lighting or costumes or a shot they did not get." She smiled faintly. "The air smelled different. Less metal. More gasoline, more perfume. Coffee. Cigarettes. Cheap cologne from whatever idiot was trying to impress whoever he thought could help his career."

Lucy listened with that open, earnest attention that made Clara feel both fond and vaguely uncomfortable.

"How did you and Cooper meet?" Lucy asked.

Clara huffed a soft laugh. "On a set. Of course. He came walking in wearing that ridiculous hat for the first time. Everyone on the crew rolled their eyes at the cowboy act. I thought he was putting it on."

"He wasn't?" Lucy asked.

Clara shook her head. "Oh, he was absolutely putting it on. He just did it so much it stuck. One of the grips made some comment about movie cowboys not being able to ride. Cooper got up on the horse they brought in for the scene and shut everyone up in ten seconds."

Lucy smiled. "You liked that."

"I liked that he didn't fall off," Clara said. "I liked that he talked to the horse first. Most men there never talked to anyone they thought was beneath them." She paused. "We kept ending up on the same projects. It's a small town when you're on every billboard." Her mouth tilted. "We worked together. We fought. We made each other better at the job."

Lucy hesitated, then asked, "And you... fell in love?"

Clara's eyes softened in a way that made the lines at the corners deeper.

"It wasn't fireworks at first," she said. "It was him bringing coffee at four in the morning with my name spelled wrong on every cup. It was him showing up at my shows even when he'd had a twelve hour day on set. It was how he looked at me when I walked off stage, like he knew that whole life was killing me and he was proud of me anyway." She shrugged one shoulder. "Things at home were not... good. For either of us. You spend that much time next to someone who makes you feel like you're not drowning. You figure out it's something more."

Lucy's eyes dropped to the ground.

"I get that," she said quietly.

Clara glanced sideways at her. "Yeah. You would."

They walked in silence for a stretch, the sound of their footsteps blending with Dogmeat's paws and Cooper's boots ahead.

Lucy eventually cleared her throat.

"And you just stayed together after that?" she asked. "Until the bombs?"

"We tried," Clara said. "World tried harder. There was work, there was his kid, there was my contracts, there was Vault-Tec sniffing around. You know the rest." Her voice went rougher. "Barb pulled the trigger in more ways than one. Hank signed the papers that let them turn me into a science project. Then it was just freezer dreams for a real long time."

Lucy's brow furrowed. "You remember being frozen?"

"Bits," Clara said. "It isn't like sleep. It's like dreaming in shards someone keeps shuffling. One minute it's Christmas. Next it's a studio lot. Next it's a hand on your throat and cold on your skin and you can't move." She flexed her fingers. "Then I woke up in a vault with some smiling shithead telling me my name was Melody and I was lucky to be alive."

"Hank," Lucy said, voice small.

Clara gave a short nod.

"He took what was left of my body," she said. "Heart, brain, what he thought was still useful. Had Vault-Tec slot it into one of the early synth shells I modeled for. Wrapped his pretty little fantasy around me and called it a marriage." Her mouth curled. "You know that part."

Lucy's stomach turned. "I know he used you. I know that's what he does."

Clara's shoulders rose and fell.

"He underestimated one thing," she said. "You can shock a brain, slice it up, surround it in metal, cover it in fake skin. Doesn't matter. You can't erase the burn of the people you really loved. Not if they were worth a damn." She looked ahead, where Cooper's hat cut a sharp line against the sky. "He could not scrub Cooper out if he tried for another two hundred years."

Lucy followed her gaze.

"You always knew Cooper was still out here?" Lucy asked.

"No," Clara said. "For a long time I thought I made him up. That he was just something my mind made to fill the gaps Hank left. Then I started seeing wanted posters. Hearing whispers about a ghoul bounty hunter who liked to shoot men in the ass." She chuckled. "The first time I heard someone say feo, fuerte y formal in that exact tone, I knew. Nobody says it like he does."

Lucy smiled. "You went looking for him."

"Eventually," Clara said. "After I broke Hank's wrist and walked out of that vault with a box of old clothes and a brain that hurt all the time." Her eyes clouded for a moment. "Took me thirty years to get from there to Goodneighbor. Took him just as long to dig himself out of a box. We met in the middle. Literally. You saw the rest."

Lucy nodded slowly, absorbing it all.

They climbed out of the wash and back onto higher ground. The sun had started its slow drop, the light turning harsher, throwing long shadows that sliced across the sand.

Cooper called a halt at a cluster of broken concrete slabs and a crooked billboard that still clung to half a smiling pre-war family. It was enough shelter for a night.

They picked a spot under the slant of the billboard. Cooper scouted the perimeter while Lucy and Clara laid out bedrolls and a small cookfire. Dogmeat flopped down with a happy huff like the smartest one of the group.

When the food was as ready as it would ever be and the sky had gone from white to deep orange, Lucy sat with her knees pulled up, chin resting on them. She watched Clara sort a small pouch of fuses and wires by the light of the flames.

"You always act like this," Lucy said.

Clara raised a brow. "Like what? Beautiful?"

Lucy smiled. "That too. I mean like you're not scared of anything."

Clara turned a fuse between her fingers. "You think I'm not scared?"

"You don't look like it," Lucy said.

Clara nodded at the open desert. "You grew up where the worst thing that could happen was a plumbing failure. I grew up where a bad phone call could end your career and a bad man with a good suit could end your life. I've been scared since I was twelve. You just learn how to tuck it somewhere it doesn't get in the way."

Lucy considered that.

"I still feel like a kid out here," she admitted. "Like any second I'm going to do something wrong and everybody'll die because of it."

Clara reached over and flicked a crumb of dried food off Lucy's shoulder.

"You're still alive," she said. "That means you're already doing better than most. You ask questions. You listen. You learn how to shoot straighter every day. That counts."

Lucy focused on her. "You think so."

"I know so," Clara said. "You're annoying as hell, but you're not stupid. And you care. That's expensive out here." Her voice went softer. "Hold onto it anyway."

Lucy's eyes went glossy for a moment. She blinked it away.

"You sound like..." she started, then stopped.

"Like what," Clara prompted.

"Like a mom," Lucy said.

Clara looked back down at the fuse in her hands. Her features shifted, just a little.

"I never got to be one," she said quietly. "Not really. I would've liked to try it without somebody trying to kill me over it." She reached out and nudged Lucy's Pip-Boy. "So if I tell you to drink water and clean your gun, you're gonna listen."

Lucy actually laughed.

"Yes ma'am," she said.

"Ew. Do not call me ma'am," Clara said. "You make me feel ancient."

"You are ancient," Lucy said. "You're like two hundred and... something."

"I'm preserved in my twenties," Clara said. "That's different."

Cooper came back into the circle of light then, boots scuffing, duster coated in the thin powder of the day. He took one look at the two of them and shook his head.

"What'd I miss," he asked. "You two talk each other to fucking death yet?"

"Not yet," Clara said. "We're saving that for New Vegas."

He grunted and dropped down beside them, back to the billboard, rifle across his knees. Dogmeat shoved his head into Cooper's lap and sighed.

Night crept in by inches. Stars emerged, harsh and many, cold above the lingering heat. The fire snapped and sank lower. Cooper's breathing settled into a slow, rough rhythm. Lucy's head nodded, jerked, then finally dropped onto her rolled pack.

Clara sat awake a little longer, watching the lines in Cooper's face smooth out in sleep, watching Lucy curl up unconsciously facing them both, hand resting in Dogmeat's fur.

Her spine hummed with the constant faint vibration of her systems. Her heart tapped a steady human beat under all the metal and wire.

Found family, she thought. What a stupid, precious thing to drag through a world like this.

She lay back on her own bedroll, angled so she could still see both of them. Her joints clicked once as she stretched out, then settled. The glitch she had felt earlier was just an echo now.

"Go to sleep, sweetheart," she murmured to herself, to Lucy, to the wasteland.

Dogmeat's tail thumped twice.

Clara closed her eyes.

The desert wind moved around their little camp, carrying the smell of dust and rust and the faintest remnant of perfume that clinged to the lining of her coat, like a memory that refused to burn away.

[inkmonster21]

✨📸 TAGLIST NOTIFICATION! 📸✨

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Chapter 45. Where the World Goes Quiet

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[inkmonster21]

✨📸 TAGLIST NOTIFICATION! 📸✨

babes… NEW CHAPTER OF No Cameras Here IS LIVE 😭🔥

Chapter 45. Where the World Goes Quiet

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[inkmonster21]

No Cameras Here

Simon “Ghost” Riley x TikTok Influencer!Reader

Series Masterlist

You surprise Simon with a secluded lochside honeymoon lodge in Scotland, where the quiet, privacy, and slow domestic intimacy let him fully settle into being your husband.

45. Where the World Goes Quiet

You do not tell Simon where you're taking him.

Not when you first book it in a fit of smug, over-caffeinated post-wedding bliss. Not when you print the reservation and hide it in the drawer beneath your side of the wardrobe. Not even when he catches you triple-checking train times and asks, one brow raised, "What are you up to."

You just smile and say, "Trust me."

He looks immediately suspicious.

"Don't like that phrase."

"You married it," you say sweetly, and kiss him before he can interrogate you further.

That is how you get away with it.

Mostly because he is still in that dazed little pocket of post-wedding tenderness where he seems permanently one half-step behind his own happiness. He is still looking at your ring, still saying wife like it sneaks up on him, still pulling you close in the kitchen for no reason other than he can.

So when you tell him a week after the wedding to pack for three nights and not ask too many questions, he does exactly what you hoped he would.

He grumbles.

But he packs.

The morning you leave, Manchester is silver and cool and half asleep.

Simon is in the kitchen before you, because of course he is, making coffee in joggers and a grey tee with sleep still rough in his voice. You walk in wearing leggings, one of his hoodies, and an expression so pleased with yourself that he immediately narrows his eyes.

"You're enjoying this."

"Immensely."

He slides your mug across the counter and studies you over the rim of his own. "Should I be worried."

"No."

"You say that with too much enthusiasm."

You grin and take a sip. "Pack the boots."

He freezes for half a second.

Then, very carefully, "Boots?"

"Mhm."

He sets his mug down slowly. "You're not takin me somewhere where I have to wear linen, are you."

You snort. "No."

"Or smile at strangers."

"No."

"Or eat decorative food."

You laugh. "No."

His whole body loosens a fraction.

"Alright," he says, like he's trying not to sound relieved. "Fine."

You set your mug down and wander over, sliding your arms around his waist. "I know you, baby."

He looks down at you, one hand resting automatically at the small of your back.

"That's what worries me."

"You're dramatic."

"You planned a mystery trip for a man who likes maps and exits. That's cruel."

You kiss him anyway. Slow enough that by the time you pull back, he's lost the edge of his complaint.

"Trust me," you whisper.

He sighs softly. "Still hate that phrase."

"You really don't."

He doesn't.

You get him to the train station with exactly zero clues.

He figures out quickly that you are not leaving the country, which already helps his mood. Then he realizes you are heading north and gets quieter in that thoughtful way that means he's trying to work it out.

You sit across from each other on the train, your legs tangled beneath the little table, your coat tossed beside you. Rain tracks the windows in thin silver lines while the city slowly gives way to open green.

Simon watches the landscape, then watches you watching him.

"Scotland?" he asks after an hour.

You smile and shrug. "Maybe."

He stares. "You're takin the piss."

"Maybe I am."

His mouth twitches despite himself.

It is the best part of the surprise so far. Not the destination. Not even the smug satisfaction thrumming in your chest.

It is seeing him begin to soften into it.

Seeing the way his eyes move over the hills when the scenery changes, the buildings thinning out, the sky opening wider. The way some old tension in him starts slipping off by degrees.

He reaches over at one point and hooks two fingers around your ankle where your foot rests against his leg.

"You really planned this."

You smile down at the contact, then back at him. "Yeah."

His thumb brushes absently over your sock through your leggings.

"Why."

You tilt your head. "Because I love you. Because I wanted to take my husband somewhere he'd actually enjoy instead of somewhere with too many white robes and couples massages."

He gives you a look. "Could've done without the robes, yeah."

"Exactly."

You lean forward a little. "And because you take care of everyone else all the time, and I wanted to give you a place where your shoulders actually come down from around your ears."

His gaze goes quiet at that. Warmer.

"You noticed that."

"Simon," you say, deadpan. "I have literally seen you evaluate the exits of a brunch place."

He huffs a laugh and squeezes your ankle once. "Fair."

You sit back and let the train rock the two of you north.

By the time you pull into the small station nearest your stop, the rain has eased to a mist. The air outside is colder. Cleaner. It smells like wet stone and green things and distance.

Simon steps onto the platform and actually stops.

You watch him take it in.

The hills beyond. The dark water visible through breaks in the trees. The little stone station house with flower boxes under the windows. The total lack of anyone trying to sell him a champagne package.

His chest rises in one slow breath.

"Where are we."

You grin and loop your arm through his. "Come on."

The place you booked is a lodge.

Not rustic in the "mould and spiders" sense. Rustic in the expensive, deeply intentional, ridiculously beautiful sense.

Private enough to feel hidden. Warm wood and stone. Big windows looking out over a loch bordered by trees already turning. A fireplace built into the main room. Deep sofa. Big kitchen. Huge bed. Bigger bathtub. The kind of place that feels like exhaling.

When you pull up in the little hired car, Simon goes quiet again.

You know by now that quiet can mean a hundred things from him. This one is almost always good.

You kill the engine and look at him.

"Well?"

His gaze moves from the cabin to you and back again.

"You got me a lodge."

"Yes."

"In the middle of nowhere."

"Yes."

He looks out over the water again. The hills. The soft grey sky. The privacy.

"You sneaky little shit."

You burst out laughing. "So that's a yes?"

He turns to you fully then, expression giving way just enough for you to catch the softness underneath it.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "That's a yes."

The inside is even better.

The owner left a little welcome basket with local bread, jam, whisky, and a handwritten note. There are heavy blankets folded at the foot of the bed and the fire is already laid, ready to be lit. The kitchen has black iron fixtures and a long wooden table that instantly makes you want to drink coffee and kiss there.

But Simon doesn't even make it that far before he sets your bags down just inside the door and catches your face in both hands.

"You did all this and didn't say a word."

You smile up at him. "Well, if I'd told you, it wouldn't have been a surprise."

His thumbs brush your cheeks.

"You're ridiculous."

"You married me."

His mouth curves in that small, private way that always feels like being chosen. Then he kisses you there in the entryway while the lodge smells like wood and cold air and whatever that shift in his chest is called when he realizes someone built something just for him.

When he pulls back, he rests his forehead against yours.

"I love you," he says quietly.

It still catches you every time, not because he says it rarely now, but because he says it like he means the full weight of it.

"I know," you whisper. "And I'm very smug about it."

He laughs softly and finally lets you go.

The first afternoon becomes all the things you hoped it would be.

You unpack slowly, because there's no rush. No plan except being here.

You film a little, naturally. Small clips. The view from the window. Your hand on the door latch. The kettle whistling in the kitchen. Simon's broad back carrying logs in from outside because of course he's already claimed stewardship over the fireplace.

You keep him out of frame mostly, though one shot catches his hand setting your mug down by the couch and you know the internet will lose its mind later.

"You're impossible," he says when he catches you filming him stacking wood.

"It's for the memories."

"It's for your followers."

"It can be both."

He gives you a look over his shoulder, then goes back to the fire. "No face."

"Never."

That relaxes him immediately.

You wander outside before sunset in borrowed wellies and one of Simon's heavier jackets zipped to your chin. The ground is damp. The air has that edge that makes your cheeks pink. Simon walks beside you with his hands in his pockets, boots sure over the gravel path, your fingers linked with his because there is no one around to make him self-conscious about it.

The loch lies dark and glassy beyond the reeds.

"This is nice," you say softly.

He glances down at you. "That all."

You smile a little. "No. But I'm trying to be understated."

He nudges your shoulder gently with his. "Don't suit you."

"I know."

You stop near the edge of the water and look out over it, then up at him.

"You really like it."

He doesn't answer right away. He just looks back at the lodge, the smoke beginning to curl from the chimney, the total lack of noise beyond wind and birds and water.

"Yeah," he says finally. "I really do."

It's such a simple thing, but the relief of it floods you anyway.

You step in close, wrap your arms around him under the big jacket and press your cheek to his chest.

"Good."

He folds around you automatically.

"You know," he says after a second, voice low in your hair, "I was prepared to fake enthusiasm if this was terrible."

You laugh. "Oh, I know. But I was also prepared to leave you here and go to a spa by myself if you got too mouthy."

He huffs a laugh into the top of your head and kisses your temple.

"You'd miss me."

"Probably."

"Liar."

He's right.

The first night is slow.

That's the only word for it.

You cook together because you genuinely want to, not because you have to. Something simple. Pasta and salad and too much bread from the basket. Simon pours whisky after. You curl up on the sofa under a blanket while the fire throws warm gold over the walls and rain starts again beyond the glass.

You don't turn on the television.

You don't need it.

You talk instead.

About nothing and everything.

About the wedding, now that it's done. About how strange it still feels to say husband and wife out loud. About children in that softer, less abstract way it's become safe to do lately. About how much Holly cried during the first dance. About how Johnny nearly got himself escorted out by one of the old venue staff because he tried to climb a chair during his speech.

You laugh until your sides hurt.

Then it quiets.

The sort of silence that belongs only to people who know each other's breathing well enough not to fill it by force.

Your head is in his lap. One of his hands is in your hair. His wedding band catches the firelight every time he moves.

You look at it for a while before speaking.

"I like seeing that on you."

His hand pauses, then continues slowly smoothing your hair back from your face.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." You smile. "Makes you look married."

He rolls his eyes. "That's because I am."

"Mm. To me."

That gets you a different look. Not annoyed. Not teasing.

Something softer. Heavier.

He slides down off the couch enough to kiss you slow and deep, his hand warm at the side of your neck, and when he draws back he murmurs, "Best part of it."

You close your eyes for a second because otherwise you might actually melt into the rug.

The second day is even better because all the edges are gone.

No travel. No checking in. No settling.

Just the two of you in rhythm.

You wake tucked against him while pale morning light washes the room. He's warm, sleepy, softer here than he is anywhere else. No phone buzzing. No schedule. No one expecting anything.

You make coffee barefoot in your pajamas while he lights the fire again because he likes the ritual of it. You film the smallest little clip of his hand striking the match, then lower the phone because some things still feel too private in the moment to capture.

You take the little hired car into the nearest village later, just to browse and eat and exist. There's a tiny bookshop and a bakery and a home store where you find a wool blanket that smells faintly like cedar and old paper. Simon buys it before you can tell him not to.

"For the flat," he says.

You raise a brow. "For our flat?"

He gives you a look over the counter where he's paying. "Yeah."

The woman ringing you up smiles like she knows exactly what she's looking at.

You buy jam and postcards and a ridiculous hand-carved spoon you do not need, then bring it all back to the lodge and spend the afternoon doing absolutely nothing of consequence.

You read on the sofa with your feet in his lap. He dozes with one hand on your ankle. At some point you move to the bed because the blankets there are warmer and it becomes one of those drowsy, half-laughing, softly heated afternoons where clothes disappear without urgency and kisses last longer than they have to.

The sex is slow and domestic and thick with affection. You in his shirt, him warm from sleep, the room dim and full of rainlight. Nothing performative. Nothing dramatic.

Just husband and wife in a bed far away from everything else.

After, he lies on his back with you draped over him, fingers lazily tracing the line of your spine, and says into your hair, "Could get used to this."

You smile against his skin. "The honeymoon lodge or being married to me."

"Yes."

You laugh softly, then lift your head and kiss his jaw.

"Good answer."

That night, when the fire has burned down low and the whole lodge is dark except for the little lamp over the kitchen sink, you make one final video.

Nothing flashy. Just little cuts.

The loch in the morning mist. The mugs on the windowsill. Your rings side by side on the blanket. A hand passing bread at dinner. Boots by the door. The blanket from the little shop folded at the foot of the bed. The back of Simon's neck for one frame as he leans over the stove and nothing more.

You sit curled beside him on the sofa editing it while he reads.

"What's the caption," he asks after a while.

You think about it.

Then smile.

"Gone somewhere quiet with my husband."

He lowers the book slowly.

"Husband."

"Mhm."

His mouth twitches. "Still sounds mad."

"You'll survive."

He closes the book, reaches over, and drags you halfway into his lap with one arm.

"I might."

You post it.

The internet, predictably, loses its entire mind.

Not because of the loch or the lodge, though people do scream about both.

Because the first line says my husband.

Your comments fill instantly.

MY HUSBAND??????

the hands got upgraded

quiet honeymoon content i'm SOBBING

she said husband and i blacked out

You laugh so hard you nearly drop your phone.

Simon peers over your shoulder. "Idiots."

"And yet," you say, turning to smile at him, "they are right."

He looks at you for a second too long.

Then, in that quiet way he has when he means something more than the words themselves, he says, "Yeah. They are."

And you kiss him while the fire glows and the rain taps and the whole world beyond the lodge disappears into dark.

Exactly where you wanted him.

Exactly where he thrives.

💀📱🖤💄💀📱🖤💄💀📱🖤💄💀📱🖤

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Drop a “TAG ME” below and I’ll make sure you never miss a chapter! Influencer chaos x Ghost brooding is not something you wanna sleep on 👀🖤

[inkmonster21]

Best Buds

Fezco x Fem!Reader

Series Masterlist

Trapped between your parents’ suffocating image control and the chaos of high school fallout, you cling to Fez as the one real, easy thing in your life and turn your empty, over polished house into a place that finally feels like yours for one night.

8. Material Girl

Life wasn't always like this.

That's the part people forget.

Your mom and dad weren't always obsessed with carving you and Dylan into matching, polished, perfectly inscribed replicas of themselves. There was a time when you were just a family.

A normal one.

Or, at least, normal enough.

Before your mom's book series took off.

Before your dad somehow leveraged her fame into a shiny professor gig at the state university.

Before local news anchors started using the word celebrity like it was your last name.

Before your entire life started feeling like a brand strategy.

You and Dylan have stood behind more red ribbons than you can count, smiling until your jaw hurt while your parents shook hands, posed for photos, and flashed the kind of practiced grins that look warm on camera and dead up close.

"Straighten up."

"Blue, not pink."

"Don't eat yet."

"Drink this."

"Smile."

"Walk."

"Breathe."

Enough.

Your life feels like it was built entirely out of stress and stage directions. Like every room has a mark taped to the floor, and every version of you has already been written before you even get there.

Maybe that's why Fezco feels like oxygen.

His whole existence advertises stress-free.

Dingy couch.

Ashtray always full.

Music low.

TV murmuring something half-watched.

Fez sitting there like the world can burn as long as you're comfortable beside him.

He can have you laughing just by looking at you.

"I didn't say anythin'," he says, trying to force his lips into a frown. "Why you laughin'?"

You climb into his lap, steal the blunt from his fingers, and take a slow drag. Then you grin as you blow the smoke away from his face.

"You're cute," you say simply.

Fez blinks at you like you just accused him of murder.

"I'm cute?"

"Very."

He shakes his head, but his hands are already settling at your waist.

"You wild, ma."

Maybe you are.

Or maybe, for once, you're just happy.

After the carnival, your parents don't even wait an hour before pouncing.

"You dressed like a whore!" your mother shouts.

She stands in the middle of your bedroom like she owns the air. Which, honestly, she kind of thinks she does.

"Do you know what we represent? I can't have my children out in the streets sleeping around and doing drugs. Do you know what that would do to us?"

Us.

Not you.

Never you.

You sit on the edge of your bed, jaw tight, saying nothing as she snatches the dress off your comforter like the fabric personally offended her.

"This is disgusting."

She storms off, heels hammering the hardwood.

Your dad lingers in the doorway.

Arms crossed.

Disappointment written in every line of his face.

And somehow that's worse than yelling.

"Do you have anything to say for yourself?"

You meet his stare.

Then you let out a small scoff.

"Not a word."

His face tightens.

Then he slams your door so hard your posters rattle.

You sit there in the silence afterward, staring at the wall.

Not crying.

Not yet.

Just breathing.

Because sometimes that is all you can do when your own house feels less like home and more like a courtroom.

The next day, Maddy is slumped in her seat wearing a massive black hoodie.

And right away, you know something is wrong.

Because Maddy Perez does not dress to disappear.

Not ever.

Sweat beads along her hairline. Her face looks pale under her makeup, and her eyes are a little too glassy, like she is physically present but mentally standing ten feet behind herself.

You lean over.

"Mads, you okay?"

"I'm just kinda hot," she says.

Her voice sounds thin.

She raises a hand, fingers trembling slightly.

"Is the air conditioner, like, not working?"

The teacher shakes her head.

"It's broken. You could always take off your hoodie."

Maddy sinks deeper into her chair and locks her arms around herself.

No chance.

On a normal day, she would strip that hoodie off without thinking. She'd make a show of it too, probably. Toss her hair, adjust her top, dare someone to say something.

But today there are bruises around her neck.

Today Nate Jacobs has his hands all over her skin in her memory.

Today she woke up three hours early to cake concealer over evidence like plaster.

And the carnival hit her body harder than she wants to admit. No food. No water. No sleep. Just a comedown, a secret, and a hoodie trapping heat against her skin.

You see it all click.

The heat.

The empty stomach.

The crash.

Right before she tips out of the chair.

"Maddy!" you gasp.

You catch the edge of her desk as she collapses, your chair scraping loudly against the floor.

A few people scream.

You drop beside her, patting her cheeks lightly.

"Maddy? Maddy, wake up."

Her lashes flutter, but she does not answer.

And for one awful second, the whole room goes quiet around you.

Paramedics end up crowding the classroom.

Everyone is pushed back.

Desks scrape.

The teacher keeps saying, "Give them space," like anyone in that room knows how to do that.

One of the paramedics peels Maddy's hoodie back.

The ugly bruising on her neck buys them a whole new level of urgency.

People whisper.

Of course they do.

Because in high school, even a medical emergency can become gossip before the ambulance doors close.

It does not take long before you are called into Mr. Hayes' office.

One by one.

Like suspects.

He sits across from you with his fingers steepled, trying to look kind and authoritative at the same time. Which is a hard combination to pull off when your office smells like old coffee and printer paper.

"But do you know why Nate and Maddy were fighting?" he asks.

You let out a long sigh.

"Is this my concern?"

He blinks.

You keep your face neutral.

"I don't think it's right for me to be talking. I wasn't there."

"But you're one of the girls closest to Maddy," he presses. "You had to have seen something."

You shift in the chair.

"I mean, they fight all the time. Nothing new."

"Was anything different this time?"

You hesitate.

Because there are things you know.

Things you suspect.

Things girls tell each other in bathrooms, in bedrooms, in cars, with lip gloss open and tears threatening to fall.

And there are things adults ask about like they really want the truth, when what they actually want is a neat little statement they can put into a report.

You look at Mr. Hayes.

"She called his mom a cunt."

Mr. Hayes blinks.

"She..." He clears his throat. "She called his mother the c-word. Okay."

You nod.

"That was different."

A few minutes later, you are released back into the wild of the cafeteria.

At lunch, neither Maddy nor Nate shows.

Which is not surprising.

But it is noticeable.

"Yo," BB says, dropping her tray onto the table like a judge's gavel. "I saw Nate get pulled outta second period by the cops."

"I know," you say, leaning forward. "Did you get interviewed by Hayes?"

"Yes. It was so weird." BB snorts and shovels Jell-O into her mouth. "I told him Nate was gay."

Cassie gasps.

Kat says, "BB."

BB shrugs.

"What? He asked what I knew."

Your phone buzzes.

Ash sent a Snapchat.

You open it.

Ash is standing in the store's walk-in freezer, holding up a tattoo gun like he has just discovered treasure and possibly several ways to ruin lives.

You type back.

You: are you fr?

Ash: wanna get one?

You: NO. I don't wanna be marked for life

Ash: pussy. rue and jules are gettin lip tats

You glance across the cafeteria.

Rue and Jules are sitting together, heads bent close over a tray.

Curiosity wins because curiosity almost always wins, even when it absolutely should not.

You abandon your milk and slide into the seat across from them.

"You two are letting Ash tattoo you?"

Rue shrugs, completely unbothered.

"Yeah. Why not?"

Jules twirls her straw, smiling.

"I'll do it if you do it," she says, pinching your arm across the table.

"Me?" you blink. "I wouldn't even know what to get."

Rue cackles around her sip.

"Fezco."

You freeze for half a second.

Then, slowly, a smirk pulls at your lips.

"No way," you say. "You're not gonna do it."

Rue lifts her brows.

Jules grins.

You lean back in your seat.

"We doing this after school?"

And that is how three girls end up making an incredibly permanent decision over cafeteria food.

"Just hold it there," Ash says.

He leans in with the buzzing tattoo gun as he lines up Rue's lip, his face way too serious for someone who should absolutely not be doing this.

"Oh my God," you and Jules squeal from the sides as Rue's eye twitches.

"Yeah," Rue deadpans through clenched teeth. "Totally doesn't hurt."

Ash pulls back, satisfied.

"Who's next?"

Jules immediately points at you.

"I need another minute. You go."

You roll your eyes, but your stomach flips.

Not because you're scared.

Okay, maybe because you're scared.

But also because the idea that popped into your head at lunch has not left since.

You stretch your legs out in front of Ash's little setup.

"What we doin'?" he asks.

You lick your inner lip.

Then you spell it out.

"F... E... Z... C... O."

Ash's eyes light up the second he catches on.

"Fuckin' aye."

Rue lets out a delighted laugh.

Jules covers her mouth.

The needle buzzes.

The vibration jumps straight through your jaw, followed by a sharp pinch where the ink goes in. Your toes curl, and your eyes water instantly, but you hold still because you refuse to be dramatic in front of Ash.

Mostly.

"What y'all doin' back here?"

Fez's voice rounds the corner.

Ash freezes.

You freeze.

Rue does not freeze because Rue enjoys chaos.

Fez steps into view and takes in the scene.

Ash.

The tattoo gun.

You tilted back with your lip pulled down.

His eyes go wide.

"Shit, man," he says, stepping closer. "I told you don't be tattooing people."

Ash pulls the gun away so Fez can see the letters.

Fez squints.

Then his brows jump.

"You for real?"

That slow smile creeps onto his face.

You stick your tongue out just enough to show him the fresh ink.

"Better than one of those tacky name necklaces."

Fez laughs.

Then he slides an arm over your shoulders and tugs you into his side.

"You crazy, ma."

He squeezes your cheeks together and kisses you, careful not to touch the fresh ink too much.

"I love that shit."

And he does.

You can tell.

Because Fez tries to play everything cool, but he looks at you like you just wrote his name on a piece of the world and handed it to him.

Later, you push open your own front door with Kat behind you.

Her head snaps back as she takes in the chandelier.

Then the staircase.

Then the foyer.

Then the kind of house that makes people forget how to act normal.

"Whoa," she says. "You didn't tell me you were rich."

"We're not rich," you reply automatically, kicking off your shoes.

"Who says we're not rich?" your mother's voice floats down from above.

Sharp.

Smooth.

Of course.

She glides down the stairs like she is descending onto a talk show stage.

You go still.

Not because you are scared.

Because your body has learned to prepare itself.

"Mom, this is Kat," you say flatly. "Kat, this is my mom."

"Oh, a friend!" your mom gasps, as if you have just handed her a plot twist.

Kat gives a small wave.

"Hi."

Your mom plucks one of her books from a nearby stack and presses it into Kat's hands with practiced grace.

"The Magic of Manifestation," Kat reads from the cover. "Uh... cool. Wow, thanks."

Your mother lifts a shoulder, already moving on.

"Oh, the house, dear," she says, turning to you. "(Y/N), your father and I are going to Tampa for the weekend. I've got a signing at a winery, and your father is tagging along. You know he likes to feel important."

Behind her, Arthur and Grimes haul suitcases toward the door.

Because of course your parents have staff with names like Arthur and Grimes.

"You're fully staffed for the weekend," she adds. "Paul is first on primary watch. He'll be giving me a report."

At the mention of Paul, a little spark of joy lights up inside you.

Your mom does not hug you goodbye.

No kiss.

No soft little be safe.

She just sweeps toward the car like she is leaving a hotel instead of her children.

Then she is gone.

Kat stares at the door.

"That's your mom?"

"Yeah."

Kat hesitates.

"She's kinda..."

"Yeah," you say. "I know."

"Be thankful you don't live with her."

"Shall I be writing this down in the report, Ms. (L/N)?" a familiar, dry voice calls.

You turn.

Paul stands at the top of the stairs, hands folded neatly behind his back, expression unreadable except for the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth.

"Yeah," you say. "Tell her she's a bitch too."

He nods.

"Very good, miss."

Kat stares at him.

You grin.

"Kat, meet Paul. The coolest butler ever."

Paul gives a small bow.

"Kat. Very nice to meet you."

Then he looks at you.

"Ladies, what type of trouble are we getting into tonight?"

He points subtly at your face.

"I see it in your eyes. What are you thinking?"

You bite your lip.

Your mind spins it out fast.

The empty house.

The pool.

The bar.

Your friends.

Fez.

Especially Fez.

"They're gone all weekend?" you ask.

"Yes," Paul confirms. "Left just now."

"And you're watching us?"

"Like a hawk."

"And she's expecting a good report on Monday?"

"As usual."

You drop your bag at the base of the stairs.

"Paul, call in sushi and pizza. We're gonna have a few friends over tonight."

Paul starts down the steps, deadpan.

"Good to see you following the rules, miss. Shall I heat the pool as well?"

Kat's eyes go huge.

"You have a pool?"

You flip your hair.

"Of course we have a pool. I'm rich, aren't I?"

Kat snorts.

You head for your room, already pulling out your phone.

Fez picks up before it even finishes the first ring.

"Sup, baby."

You smile immediately.

"Hey. What are you doing tonight?"

"I guess somethin' with you," he says, chuckling.

You hold a bikini up in the mirror, considering.

"You wanna come over? My parents are gone for the weekend. We're having our own little party. Kat's working on the girls."

"'Course I'ma be there," he says. "Rue and Jules comin' too?"

"Yeah. Tell them to bring swimsuits."

"We be there, babe. Love you."

You bite the inside of your cheek to fight your smile.

"I love you too, Fezzyco."

He groans.

"Man, don't call me that."

"You love it."

"I love you. Different thing."

You laugh and hang up before he can take it back.

An hour and a half, three delivery guys, and one very overwhelmed Kat later, the bar is fully stocked.

Pizza boxes.

Sushi trays.

Chips.

Soda.

Alcohol lined up like a movie set.

Kat stands in the middle of the room, staring at the spread like she is waiting for hidden cameras to pop out.

"This is fucking nuts," she says. "How much money do you have?"

You shrug.

"No idea. Ask my mom's accountant."

Paul waits by the door like a proper gentleman, opening it as the first guests arrive.

"Ms. Maddy and Ms. Cassie have arrived," he announces.

Cassie actually gasps.

"Oh my God. That's so cool."

Maddy throws her hands up as she struts in on her heels.

"That's right, bitches. I'm here."

The second wave arrives soon after.

Fez.

Jules.

Rue.

Paul opens the door again.

"Mr. Fezco, Ms. Rue, and Ms. Jules have arrived."

Fez gives him a respectful nod.

"'Ppreciate it, man."

You meet Fez halfway across the foyer, wearing a tiny black swimsuit with a matching robe hanging off your shoulders.

His eyes drop.

Then lift.

Then drop again.

"Hey, baby," he hums.

His hands immediately find your hips, pulling you in.

You smile up at him.

"Hi."

"Hello, time for that later," Rue announces, brushing past you both. "I wanna know if you have, like, a gold toilet I can use."

You laugh.

"Up the stairs, all the way down the hall."

Rue disappears.

A second later, you hear a scream.

You cup your hands around your mouth.

"Not that door! That's the hunting room! To your right!"

Jules turns to you slowly.

"The hunting room?"

You wince.

"My dad is deeply embarrassing."

The pool is warm and blue.

Drinks flow easily into plastic cups.

Music thumps softly through the speakers outside as everyone spreads out.

Maddy and Cassie take selfies near the water.

Jules and Kat sit by the edge, feet in the pool, talking close.

Rue is doing God knows what, which is usually how every sentence involving Rue ends.

Fez stands beside you, looking around at the yard, the lights, the house.

"Shit," he says, laughing under his breath. "You got me feelin' like the Fresh Prince in here."

You grin.

"Welcome to the club."

He looks back at you.

His gaze drops to the strap sitting high on your hip.

"You look good, ma," he murmurs, flicking it gently with his finger.

Your stomach flips.

Still.

Even after everything, it still does that.

You step closer and go up on your toes so your lips brush his ear.

"I wanna show you my room," you whisper.

Fez goes quiet for a second.

When he looks at you, his eyes are darker.

Softer too.

Like he understands this is not just about sneaking away from a party.

This is your house.

Your room.

Your world.

And you are choosing to bring him into it.

He nods.

"Lead the way, shawty."

You lace your fingers with his and sneak him back into the house, up the stairs, down the hallways, past family portraits and locked doors and polished little pieces of a life that never felt like yours.

Behind you, the laughter and music trail away.

Ahead of you, your bedroom waits.

And for once, you are not walking toward a version of yourself someone else created.

You are bringing the person you love into the only room in the house that ever really belonged to you.

[inkmonster21]

✨ Ozians, gather ‘round… ✨

A new chapter of Before the Tin is LIVE.

Chapter 38. Reinforced Beams and New Beginnings

🌪️ 🌈 💚 🌪️ 🌈 💚 🌪️ 🌈 💚 🌪️ 🌈 💚

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[inkmonster21]

Before the Tin

Boq / Tin man x Fem!Reader

Series Masterlist

Glinda offers Boq a real place in Oz’s future with a job, a home built to hold him, and the first true chance for the two of you to stop surviving in the margins and begin a life together.

38. Reinforced Beams and New Beginnings

Glinda’s summons came on thicker paper than usual.

Not the cheap pulpy stuff the Palace scribes used for memos, but the good stock they saved for proclamations and Very Important Decrees, the kind that tried to intimidate you with its weight before you even read the words.

You flipped it over twice, searching the back out of habit, as if Glinda might’ve scribbled help or tea? in the margin.

Nothing.

Boq watched you from the table, elbow joint disassembled neatly in front of him, a smear of oil like ink on his thumb.

“Well?” he asked. The light from the window picked out the new polish along his jaw, turning the tin sharp and clean. “Have we been promoted or executed?”

“Unclear,” you said, breaking the seal. “It’s either a trap or a performance. Place your bets.”

You scanned the elegant script, the precise loops of her ‘G’.

“‘Requesting your presence,’” you read aloud. “‘At your earliest convenience.’ In Glinda, that means ‘now.’”

Boq flexed his fingers, reassembling the elbow with careful little clicks.

“You don’t have to drag me along if you don’t want to,” he said. “She asked for you too. Might be personal.”

You snorted.

“Glinda doesn’t do personal,” you said. “She does ‘symbolic gestures with witnesses.’ Besides, she wrote your name first.”

That made him still.

“She did?” he asked.

You held the paper out so he could see.

There it was in elegant ink: To the attention of Clerk (Y/N) and Mister Boq, Tin Man.

He stared at it a moment longer than strictly necessary.

Something complicated flickered through his eyes, gone before you could pin it down.

“Alright,” he said at last. “Let’s go see what she’s painted.”

The Wizard’s grand meeting room had never felt like it was for you.

Or for anyone, really.

It had always been a theatre more than a hall, high ceiling, echoing stone, a stage where the giant green head could loom, smoke belching, lights flaring, while citizens craned their necks from below and pretended they didn’t see the seams in the drapes.

You’d expected the head to be gone, now that the Wizard was halfway to nowhere in his balloon.

You hadn’t expected… this.

“Oh,” you breathed, stopping just inside the newly opened doors.

Boq clanked to a halt beside you.

“Sweet Oz,” he said blankly.

Glinda had redecorated.

The hideous stone face that used to glare from the wall was gone, replaced by tall windows and long swaths of pink and gold fabric that caught the light instead of swallowing it. The great round platform in the center of the room remained, but the edges had been softened, curving benches instead of cold marble steps, little tables scattered like invites instead of barricades.

Light poured in, washing the room in rose glow instead of sickly green.

It looked less like a place you came to be judged and more like somewhere you might, begrudgingly, feel safe telling the truth.

On the far side of the room, Glinda sat in one of the curved benches, skirts spilling around her like a pink sunrise. She looked up when you entered.

Her smile tugged crooked around the edges.

“You came,” she said. “Good. Good good. That saves me sending a guard, and I’ve had quite enough of men with spears for one lifetime.”

“Calling us with Very Important Paper tends to work,” you said, stepping down from the doorway. “You’ve redecorated.”

She glanced around as if she’d forgotten.

“Oh,” she said. “Yes. It was this or let them put my face where his was, and I thought Oz had suffered enough.”

Boq’s funnel hat tipped back a fraction as he took in the pink, the gold, the utter absence of flame and smoke.

“It’s… different,” he said carefully.

Glinda’s eyes flicked to him.

“Masterful observation, Mister Tin Man,” she said dryly. Then, softer, “Thank you for coming.”

You hesitated by the nearest bench.

Boq stayed where he was, on the edge of the platform, too big and too careful for the dainty furniture, shoulders drawn tight.

Glinda noticed.

Of course she did.

“There,” she said, patting the curved bench across from her. “Sit. Tin Man can hover menacingly nearby if he likes. I assume he does that anyway.”

You shot Boq a look.

His hands flexed once at his sides, then settled.

“I’ll stand,” he said. “If it’s all the same.”

Glinda’s gaze softened the smallest bit.

“As you wish,” she said. “There’s no Wizard here anymore. No one’s going to shout if you don’t sit in the right place.”

You lowered yourself onto the bench.

The cushion was new.

It did not squeak.

Somehow that made you more nervous.

“What’s this about?” you asked, fingers lacing together in your lap. “We can only handle so much upheaval before breakfast, Glinda.”

She smoothed her skirts once, twice, as if trying to press her thoughts into place.

When she looked up again, the room’s pink glow didn’t soften the lines of exhaustion around her eyes.

“I need to give some things back,” she said.

You blinked.

“That’s… new,” you said. “Usually people in your position keep them.”

“I tried that,” she said. “Didn’t sleep for three nights. Turns out guilty conscience is very bad for the complexion.”

Her gaze moved past you to Boq.

“In the interest of beginning with something small and manageable,” she went on, “I thought I’d start with promises I can keep.”

Boq straightened a fraction.

Metal caught the light along his chestplate, flashing heart shaped where the watch lay underneath.

“I don’t follow,” he said.

Glinda took a breath.

“When I stood in that square and told Oz to fear the Witch,” she said quietly, “I used you as part of that fear. I let them see the axe and the tin and the anger and I said, look; he is what happens when we don’t listen to good authority. I let you be a warning instead of a person.”

Boq’s fingers twitched.

Your own hands curled into fists in your lap.

“Glinda,” you began.

She held up a hand.

“I’m not asking for absolution,” she said. “I’m not… that naive. I’m saying I won’t do it again. And I intend to prove that by offering you something that has nothing to do with broomsticks or heads or any of the mess we’ve just crawled out of.”

She gestured around the room.

“Oz needs boring people now,” she said. “Desperately. Clerks. Inspectors. People who read contracts before signing them and notice when words like ‘wicked’ and ‘traitor’ slip into law where they don’t belong.”

You could feel where she was angling.

Your shoulders tightened.

She looked at Boq as if there were no one else in the room.

“I’d like you to be one of those people,” she said. “Officially. Not as someone trapped in a provincial office under a Governor who never let you leave, but as a citizen of the Emerald City. With a job that uses your maddening sense of detail, and a home that doesn’t expect you to fit into furniture meant for someone else.”

Boq stared at her.

“I’m… not a clerk anymore,” he said slowly. “I’m tin. I wield an axe. I frighten children.”

“Children who ask to touch your arm and then squeal,” you muttered. “There’s a difference.”

He ignored you.

Glinda did not.

“You’re a man who survived what Oz did to him,” she said. “You’re also someone who knows exactly how dangerous the wrong line in a proclamation can be. I need that.”

She lifted her chin, a flicker of the old Galinda spark in her eyes.

“I’m offering you a position,” she said. “Chief…” She wrinkled her nose. “No, that sounds too grand. Senior legislative adviser. You’d help draft and review new laws. Especially anything having to do with Animals, Munchkins, and… people who’ve been caught between magic and administration.”

His jaw clicked softly.

“And the… home?” he managed.

Glinda’s smile crooked.

“Ah,” she said. “Yes. That.”

She leaned back, gesturing vaguely toward the Palace’s far side.

“The Wizard had a set of guest quarters built into the north wing that he never used,” she said. “Too close to the kitchens. He preferred the tower, where he could glower down on people. They’re solid. The beams are thick enough to hold three lions, two scarecrows, and a tin man doing jumping jacks. I checked.”

You choked on absolutely nothing.

Boq made a horrified strangled sound.

“Why,” he demanded, “would you measure that.”

“Because I wanted to see if they’d hold,” Glinda said, as if it were obvious. “You’re not… light. And I learned some things from watching him put Nessa in charge of Munchkinland. If I’m going to invite someone into my government, I’m not going to make them do it from a chair built to collapse under them.”

Something in your chest eased.

You hadn’t realized how much tension you’d brought into the room until it started to leave.

“So you want to put him in a job,” you said. “And you’re giving him somewhere to live. This feels suspiciously like… respect.”

“Yes, well,” Glinda said, picking at an imaginary thread on her sleeve. “Don’t tell anyone. It’ll ruin my reputation.”

Boq still hadn’t moved.

His fingers flexed once, twice.

“What’s the catch?” he asked.

Glinda’s eyes met his.

“No catch,” she said. “Just the understanding that if I ask you to help me write a law that hurts people like you, you’ll tell me the truth.”

Her voice wobbled just a little on the last word.

“And,” she added, softer, “that you’ll let her…” she tipped her chin at you “help you when your joints seize up and your stubbornness makes you pretend they aren’t.”

Heat crawled up your neck.

Boq’s gaze flicked to you, then back.

He stood there in the middle of the pink washed room, a man made of tin and spite and carefully mended hope, and you watched him weigh every part of himself against the offer.

At last, slowly, he nodded.

“Alright,” he said. “On three conditions.”

Glinda’s brows shot up.

“Three?” she echoed.

He lifted a finger.

“One: I won’t be used as a prop,” he said. “No more waving my axe from balconies to make a point. If you ask me to stand behind you, it will be because I’m part of what you’re saying, not the proof that someone else should be afraid.”

Glinda inclined her head.

“Agreed,” she said.

“Two,” he said, second finger rising. “I get to read whatever Animal legislation crosses your desk before it’s signed. All of it. Not just the parts written in letters big enough to show on posters.”

A muscle jumped in her cheek.

“Agreed,” she said again, after a heartbeat.

He hesitated on the third.

His eyes slid to you.

You stared right back, heart thudding.

“Three,” he said. “Any… domestic arrangements I make are my own business. Not fodder for rumor. If people assume things, you won’t… use them.”

Your breath caught.

Glinda’s gaze moved between the two of you.

For a moment, something like amusement sparked under her tiredness.

“I see,” she said. “So you’ll need reinforced furniture and strategically placed curtains.”

“Glinda,” you hissed.

She laughed, quick and short, the sound cracking down the middle.

“Fine,” she said. “Agreed. Your personal life is yours, unless it threatens to bring down the ceiling, in which case I reserve the right to complain about the plaster.”

Boq’s shoulders loosened.

“Then yes,” he said simply. “I accept.”

Something in the room shifted.

Not magic.

Just… direction.

Like the world had been tilted, and someone had finally shoved a wedge under it to stop the slide.

Glinda let out a breath you hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“Good,” she said. “Very good. Excellent, even. I’d hug you, but I’ve seen what tin does to silk.”

She rose, smoothing her skirts automatically.

“Come on,” she said. “Let me show you your new kingdom of boring paperwork and solid beams.”

The north wing smelled like fresh plaster and old stone.

Glinda walked ahead, talking as she went, about the staff who’d clean the rooms, about the cooks who would complain about having another person to feed and then quietly double their recipes, about the tailor who was already designing “formalwear that won’t shred when he moves his arms.”

Boq followed with a careful, measured clank.

You walked beside him, half a step behind.

“Here,” Glinda said at last, stopping before a heavy door with new hinges. “This is yours, if you want it.”

She pushed it open with a little flourish.

Inside was light.

And space.

The main room was larger than your entire suite, with a proper hearth, thick rugs, a table that looked like it had been built to hold three elephants and a very enthusiastic party. The chairs had wide, solid legs. The bed, visible through an open doorway, had a reinforced frame, sturdy posts, and a mattress that didn’t squeak when Glinda bounced her palm on it to demonstrate.

“I had them test it,” she said. “With sacks of grain. And a cow.”

You blinked.

“A cow,” you repeated.

“It was very patient,” she said. “Probably confused, but patient.”

Boq took two slow steps into the room.

His feet made soft thuds on the rug.

He looked at the hearth, at the table, at the bed, at the windows that overlooked a small internal garden instead of the main street.

“What if I… dent something?” he asked.

Glinda shrugged.

“Then we fix it,” she said. “Or we leave the dent and call it character. Either way, it’s better than you rusting on a mountainside.”

He swallowed, pointless, but still.

You watched the way his hand brushed the back of one of the chairs, fingers tracing the grain as if testing the weight.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Glinda added, stepping back toward the door. “Keep the key. Think about it. Or move in tonight and terrify the laundry staff. Up to you.”

She pressed the metal into his hand before he could protest.

Then she turned to you.

“And you,” she said. “I expect you back in my office after lunch unless you’ve eloped or been eaten by a lion. If you have eloped, I want the story. If you’ve been eaten… well, that’d be disappointing.”

You stared at her.

She smiled, small and wry.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she murmured. “I can do some things right.”

She left before you could say thank you.

The door clicked shut behind her, leaving you and Boq in the middle of a room that smelled like wood polish and possibility.

For a moment, neither of you spoke.

Boq turned the key over in his palm, the metal bright against tin.

“Well,” you said at last. “Reinforced furniture. She wasn’t joking.”

He huffed something almost like a laugh.

“No,” he said. “She wasn’t.”

He walked a slow circle, testing the give of the rug, the width of the doorway, the distance from hearth to table. His movements were smoother now, the craftman’s work and your nightly oiling paying off in glides instead of catches.

Finally, he stopped by the window, looking out at the little garden, the patch of green tucked inside the Palace walls, flowers already trying to reclaim the stones.

“So,” you said, coming to stand beside him. “What do you think?”

He was quiet long enough that you turned to study his face.

Grey eyes, familiar lines, the faint gleam where the shopkeeper had polished away the worst scars.

“It’s…” he began, then trailed off.

You waited.

“Strange,” he said finally. “To have somewhere… offered. Instead of assigned. To imagine putting things in drawers and expecting them to be there when I come back.”

Your throat got tight.

“You could,” you said. “Put things in drawers. Expect them. Expect… me.”

His hand twitched on the windowsill.

He didn’t look at you, but his voice went softer.

“It’s closer to your office,” he said. “To Glinda’s. To… everything.”

“Yes,” you said. “It is.”

“And it has…” He gestured vaguely around. “Space. For chairs. And tables. And… guests.”

You bit back a smile.

“Boq,” you said. “Are you asking me to move in, or just hinting until we both rust?”

The corner of his mouth kicked up helplessly.

“I’m not…” he started, then gave up and looked at you fully.

His eyes were very clear in the pink washed light.

“I’m saying,” he said slowly, “that if you wanted to… not have to walk across half the City every night to get home… I wouldn’t mind. At all. In the slightest. Ever.”

Warmth flooded your chest like sunlight.

“You wouldn’t,” you said, pretending to consider. “Even if I put annotated bills on your table and left ink on your bed linens?”

He stepped closer.

“I’d be offended if you didn’t,” he said.

Your heart did something very undignified.

You reached up and tapped the key still resting in his palm.

“Then we’ll need two copies,” you said. “Equal access. It’s in the contract.”

He laughed, a real, surprised sound that made something new and fragile settle between you.

“Senior legislative adviser,” he said. “Already negotiating terms.”

You rose on your toes and pressed a quick kiss to the edge of his jawplate.

“Someone has to keep up with you,” you murmured.

His hand came up, hovering at your waist like he was still getting used to the fact that you weren’t going to break under him.

“We don’t have to rush,” he said quietly.

“We’ve been rushing in circles for seven years,” you said. “I think it’s alright if we try walking in a straight line for once.”

He huffed, amused and wrecked.

“Walk, then,” he said. “With me.”

You turned to the window again, shoulder brushing his, looking out at the small garden that would now, somehow, be part of your orbit.

A job for him. A room built to hold his weight. A key between his fingers.

A life that, for the first time in a long while, didn’t feel like something snatched in the margins, but like something you might be allowed to write on the main page.

Behind you, the old Wizard’s head was gone.

Ahead of you, the city was still a mess.

Between the two, in a pink washed room with reinforced furniture, the Tin Man stood beside you and, without quite saying the words, asked you to stay.

You slid your fingers between his.

“I will,” you said, to the window, to him, to yourself.

His hand tightened around yours.

Outside, somewhere in the maze of streets and towers, the bells of Emerald City chimed the hour.

For once, they didn’t sound like an ending.

They sounded like a beginning.

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Want to follow this fic down the Yellow Brick Road? 🌪💛 🫧

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[inkmonster21]

Hello brave souls. This is your official tag alert that a new chapter of Spoonful of Fear is live.

Chapter 27. The Call

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[inkmonster21]

Hello brave souls. This is your official tag alert that a new chapter of Spoonful of Fear is live.

Chapter 27. The Call

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[inkmonster21]

A Spoonful of Fear

Pennywise x Reader (with Mary Poppins abilities)

Series Masterlist

Pennywise wakes, Adrian Mellon’s death restarts the cycle, and Mike makes some phone calls.

27. The Call

Derry took you back like a habit.

One moment, you were standing on a rooftop in some other little town, coat buttoned, umbrella open, watching a girl sleep without screaming for the first time in six months.

The next, a wind you hadn't called for shifted under your feet. It tilted, tugged, insisted.

You felt it the instant it changed direction.

Home.

You laughed once, low in your throat.

"Impatient old thing," you murmured.

The umbrella didn't bother to deny it.

You stepped.

The sky smeared into rain and cloud and the vague impression of distance, colors running together like watercolors left out in a storm. Lights pricked through here and there, little fears, little dreams, little towns.

Then the world firmed up again.

You were descending through grey.

Derry's grey.

The town rose to meet you in all its rotten, familiar glory: cracked sidewalks, leaning porches, the river cutting through its middle like an old scar. From above, it always looked so normal, like a model town in a child's bedroom.

From inside, it smelled like old sins.

Your boots touched down on the roof of the public library with the softest thump.

Rain misted the air, fine and cold.

"Subtle as ever," you told the town.

A gust of wind nudged your back.

You could have landed anywhere.

Of course you landed here.

The library had always been a kind of heart for them, for your Losers, and for Mike, especially. His light pulsed under the roof like a steady bright candle.

You closed your umbrella and stepped to the edge, peering down.

Streetlights glowed through the drizzle. A few cars rolled past. Across the way, the Theater still had a peeling marquee, even if the names on it had changed.

You could feel him under your feet.

Deep.

Far below the foundation, under the stacks and the old pipes, in the lair he'd crawled back to after falling into the dark.

He was still asleep.

Not all the way gone.

Never that.

But not hunting.

Yet.

Your deadlights hummed in your ribs in answer.

"Soon," you whispered down through the stone.

A whisper came back, faint as breath in the dark.

Early, it teased.

"You're hardly one to talk about timing," you murmured.

Something like a chuckle rippled through the rock.

You shook yourself.

There'd be time for that later.

Right now, there was a man downstairs who'd kept watch for almost three decades.

The library was the same and not.

The smell hit you as you came through the staff door and down the back stairs. Dust and paper and cleaning solution and the faint electric hum of computers that hadn't existed the last time you were here.

You smoothed your coat, hooked your umbrella over your arm, and stepped out into the stacks.

Afternoon light filtered through high windows, turning dust into lazy galaxies. Teenagers hunched over laptops in the reading area. A little boy sat cross-legged in the children's corner, nose buried in a book too big for his lap.

And at the central desk, stamping and scanning, stood Mike Hanlon.

He looked up as you approached.

Polite.

Ready with the standard, Can I help you find something?

The words never made it out of his mouth.

His eyes widened.

His hand stilled over the stamp.

For a heartbeat, he simply stared.

"Hello, Michael," you said softly.

He whispered your title. Your name they always give you.

"It is you... Nanny."

It slipped from his lips like a secret.

You hadn't heard it said like that in twenty-seven years.

You smiled.

"Yes. It's been a long time."

The teenager at the nearest computer glanced up at the sound in his voice, curious, then went back to his essay.

Mike's world had gone very small.

"You… I thought I was seeing..." He cleared his throat, tried again, older voice catching on the same kind of shock that had once ridden a thirteen-year-old's. "You're...really here."

"Looks like it," you said, glancing around at the shelves. "Nice place. You're in charge of all this?"

He laughed once, short and strained.

"Somebody's gotta be," he said.

His gaze darted over you.

The coat.

The umbrella.

The way you hadn't changed.

Not really.

You felt the question reach your eyes before he could ask it.

"I have better skincare than most," you said lightly.

It wasn't an answer. He heard that. His mouth twitched anyway.

He huffed a breath that might've been a laugh.

"Is it time?" he asked, voice low.

You didn't pretend not to understand.

"Soon," you said. "Not fully awake."

Mike nodded slowly.

"I've been...hearing things. Little things," he said, eyes going distant. "Patterns. Balloons. Headlines that feel...wrong. Like they're waiting to print the first poster." His hand curled around the stamp. "I thought maybe I was just going crazy. Seeing IT everywhere."

"You're not," you said. "And you are."

He snorted.

"Comforting," he muttered.

"You stayed," you said. "You were never going to be able to look at sewers the same way again."

He sobered.

"You being here..." He swallowed. "Last time I saw you"

"Yes," you said quickly. "A lot happened."

His gaze flicked to the children's corner, where the little boy had abandoned the book in favor of building a tower out of blocks.

"You here for...them?" he asked.

"Always," you said.

You didn't add: And for him. You didn't have to. The rocks under your feet hummed the rest.

He nodded.

"Parents still...don't see it?" he asked.

"Parents almost never do," you said. "Some try. Most forget just enough to sleep at night."

He rubbed a hand over his beard, thinking.

"I kept hoping maybe..." He trailed off.

"That he wouldn't wake up again?" you finished.

Mike's mouth twisted.

"That I'd be wrong," he said.

You tilted your head.

"How often has this town let you be wrong?" you asked gently.

His shoulders sagged.

"Right," he muttered. "Not its style."

The little boy in the corner knocked over his tower and squealed with laughter.

You glanced his way.

He glowed.

Not as brightly as your Losers had, not in the same hot, defiant way, but he shone. Fear and curiosity and the particular ache of a kid who'd already started feeling like the world didn't quite fit him.

"Who's that?" you asked.

"Jonah Pierce," Mike said automatically. "His mom works the afternoon shift at the diner. Dad's out of the picture. Smart. Reads above his grade level. Gets picked on for it."

You smiled.

"Ah," you said. "My type of people."

Mike watched you for a moment.

"What do we do?" he asked quietly.

You exhaled.

"Same thing we did last time," you said. "You watch. You listen. You call when it's time. And I keep as many little lights from going out as I can."

"Call who?" he asked, but his eyes said he already knew.

Your own gaze drifted to the middle distance, to the tug of a seven-pointed cord stretched all over the map.

"They'll remember you," you said. "They'll remember enough."

He swallowed.

"You're really here," he said again, like he had to keep checking the fact.

You tapped the umbrella against the floor, letting a few stray raindrops fall.

"Afraid so," you said. "You're stuck with me, Michael Hanlon."

Some of the panic bled out of his face.

He smiled, small and grim and grateful.

"Thank God," he said.

You weren't sure which one he meant.

You picked up work as easily as you picked up the wind.

Derry was always full of parents who needed someone to mind their children, people pulling double shifts, people passing their kids back and forth like parcels, people who'd swallowed the town's lie that nothing truly bad could happen here because nothing ever did that wasn't an accident.

Your name passed in murmurs.

"She's wonderful. Kids love her."

"Found her by chance. I think she's been here for years, somehow."

"She's...old-fashioned. In a nice way."

You found Jonah first, of course.

He was the easiest.

The diner buzzed with conversation and clinking glasses the night his mother introduced you. She wiped her hands on her apron, cheeks flushed from the heat of the kitchen, eyes tired but wary.

"You come highly recommended," she said. "From the library, from Mrs. Kelley up the street...even Pastor Craig, which is a first."

"I only bribe him with good tea," you said. "And the occasional well-behaved child."

She snorted.

"Good luck with Jonah, then," she said, jerking her head toward the end of the counter.

He sat there, legs dangling, a half-drunk milkshake sweating on the Formica. His nose was in a comic book, his brow furrowed.

He glanced up at you.

Stopped.

Frowned, like he was trying to place you through a fog he couldn't name.

"You're the umbrella lady," he said.

"Guilty," you said. "I also answer to 'nanny' and 'hey you, stop that.'"

He considered this.

"Can you make the drains stop gurgling at night?" he asked.

His mother stiffened.

"That's not" she began.

"I can help make them quieter," you said.

Jonah's eyes lit.

"Cool," he said. Then, as if it were an afterthought: "I guess you can babysit me if you want."

His mother rolled her eyes heavenward.

"I'm the parent," she muttered. "I hire you."

You smiled.

"Of course," you said. "We'll talk rates."

You collected other charges over the weeks, two sisters whose parents fought too loudly, a quiet boy with a stutter that made your chest ache, a girl who liked to stand at the edge of the Barrens and throw rocks into the water just to see the ripples.

They didn't shine exactly like your Losers had.

But for now, they were yours.

And he noticed.

You felt it anytime you walked past a storm drain.

A tiny flare of attention.

A low, amused hum.

New toys, he crooned once, from the shadows under Main Street.

"Mine," you said out loud.

A balloon appeared in the gutter half a block later.

Yellow this time.

You popped it with the tip of your umbrella without breaking stride.

"Jealous," you said.

He giggled.

⸻

The carnival arrived in town like it had every few years.

Strung lights.

Ferris wheel.

The smell of fry oil and cotton candy and cheap beer.

In Derry, a carnival was always overlaid with another smell, faint but insistent: old pennies and wet fur. Like something watching from the shadows, licking its teeth, while the humans distracted themselves with rides and games.

You took Jonah and the sisters on a Thursday evening, when the crowds were thick but not suffocating.

"Stay where I can see you," you said, as they vibrated with excitement. "And if anything starts talking to you from a place it shouldn't, you come get me."

They blinked.

"You mean like...a guy?" one of the girls asked, nose wrinkling.

"I mean like a clown in a storm drain," you said.

They laughed.

They thought you were joking.

You never were.

You bought tickets.

You watched them whirl on the carousel, cheeks pink, hair flying.

The carnival lights reflected in puddles, turning them into little portals to nowhere. Somewhere, a barker shouted about games of chance. The air was thick with sugar.

You felt him long before you saw him.

He was close now.

Awake.

Not fully stretched out, not entirely back in his full, ghastly glory, but prowling at the edges of the fairground like a dog testing a fence.

He brushed against your mind.

You came early, he sing-songed.

"You were taking too long," you murmured, leaning against a lamppost, eyeing the stands. "I got bored."

"Oooh," he cooed. "Impatient little nanny bird. Couldn't wait to see me with my makeup on."

A burst of laughter blew through the crowd.

You scanned faces.

He wasn't in any of them.

Not yet.

He was watching.

You felt the moment his attention shifted.

Off you.

Onto something else.

Someone else.

The change made your skin prickle.

"What are you doing?" you asked, under your breath.

He didn't answer you.

He purred.

You followed the direction of the hum.

Past the food stalls, past the game booths, past the ring toss and the dunk tank and the scruffy band trying to be heard over it all.

Near the river, the crowd thinned.

Teenagers gathered at the edges, smoking, laughing too loud, kissing in the shadows where parents' eyes didn't reach.

You saw them then.

Two men under the grandstand, hands linked, sharing the last of a funnel cake.

One was all restless motion and sharp laughter, Adrian Mellon, you knew from the town in a way that had nothing to do with gossip and everything to do with the way fear threaded around certain names.

The other, Don, quieter and solid at his side, eyes tracking the crowd with caution.

They'd both know what it was to be watched.

"I hate this town," Adrian said, shaking powdered sugar off his fingers. "But this? This is kind of great."

Don smiled, small and shy.

"Yeah," he said. "It is."

You saw, too, the boys watching them.

You'd seen that look before, too.

Hate in search of an excuse.

Webby Garton.

Chris Unwin.

Others.

Derry had never needed a cosmic horror to teach it cruelty. It had plenty all on its own.

Your hand tightened on the umbrella.

"You stay out of this," you told the town itself, under your breath. "You've done enough."

The hum under your feet deepened.

It wasn't the town that answered.

Oh, I don't know, Pennywise murmured. I think Derry's doing just fine.

The fight broke out fast.

An ugly shout.

A slur flung like a brick.

Adrian's laugh, too loud, too bright, a shield thrown up in panic.

"You got a problem?" he snapped, stepping forward. "You wanna say that again without your buddies behind you?"

They obliged.

Of course they did.

You felt the shape of it before you saw it, the way a mob's intention coalesced, thickening like storm clouds.

"Stay here," you told Jonah and the sisters. Your voice had an edge none of them had heard before. "Do not move. Do you understand me?"

They nodded, eyes wide.

You moved.

Cutting through the crowd.

The teens surged toward the river, dragging Adrian and Don with them.

Don tried to pull him back, murmuring, "Come on, come on, let it go, it's not worth it"

Adrian was drunk on carnival bravado and the simple fact of having someone's hand in his.

He didn't back down.

They hit the railing at the edge of the bridge.

Voices overlapped.

Shouts.

Laughter.

Derry's particular kind of venom.

You weren't close enough.

Not yet.

You could have used the storm.

You could have stopped them with a gust, a crack of thunder, a bolt of nonsense that knocked them all on their asses.

You didn't.

You thought, stupidly, Not here. Not in front of everyone. Not yet.

It happened in the space of a breath.

A shove.

A cry.

Adrian's body tipping over the edge.

Don lunging and missing.

The splash below, louder than it should've been.

The kids on the bridge stared.

Some cheered.

Some went abruptly, sickly quiet.

You broke into a run.

"Adrian!" Don screamed, voice raw. He leaned over the railing, hands scrabbling. "Ady!"

You reached the edge where the slope down to the river passed under the bridge, boots sliding on wet grass. Your coat snapped around your legs.

You could feel him.

Not Adrian.

Him.

He'd been waiting.

Down where the water eddied, where shadows pooled under the bridge, where all the junk Derry threw away eventually washed up.

Adrian's body bobbed in the current, arms flailing weakly, lungs burning, eyes wild.

You weren't the first thing he saw.

A hand reached out of the dark.

White glove.

Ruff.

Red smile.

"Need a hand?" Pennywise cooed from the shallows.

Adrian blinked water out of his eyes.

His terror spiked.

Not because of the clown.

Not at first.

He was drowning.

Any hand looked good.

He reached for it.

You stepped into the shallow water without feeling the cold, storm coiling at your feet.

"Don't," you snapped.

Pennywise's head turned.

Slowly.

Those yellow eyes found you across the dim, under the bridge.

His smile widened at the sight of you standing there, coat soaked at the hem, umbrella in hand.

"Nanny bird," he crooned. "You did come."

Adrian's fingers brushed his.

The world narrowed.

You could stop this.

Even now.

You knew that with every bright, useless, aching scrap of your being.

You could knock them both apart with a wave.

Haul Adrian up by his soaked jacket with a push of the storm.

Drag him gasping onto the shore.

You froze.

Just for a heartbeat.

Pennywise felt it.

He laughed, delighted, and jerked Adrian hard toward him.

Teeth flashed.

Adrian screamed once.

Then didn't.

You looked away.

It didn't matter.

You felt it, the fear bursting, rich and flavored with the particular spice of someone who'd spent a lifetime being punished for wanting to hold another man's hand. It rolled through the lair like a fine wine poured into an old throat.

Above, on the bridge, Don howled.

"Hurry up," Pennywise told you conversationally, voice muffled by meat and water. "You'll miss the fireworks."

You made yourself look.

Because that's what you did.

You watched.

You loved.

You failed.

Adrian's body jerked once more, then went slack.

Blood tinted the water pink.

Pennywise's makeup was smeared, his ruff soaked, his smile...ecstatic.

He lifted his head, droplets falling from his face.

"You always were a soft spot for the strays," he said, more to you than to his meal. "They taste so nice when they think they've escaped."

You stood there in the shallows, hands trembling around the umbrella handle, storm fluttering against your palms.

"You didn't need that one," you said.

"Need?" He scoffed. "You brought me a snack. It would've been rude not to."

"You pig," you said.

He chuckled.

"You like when I feed," he murmured. "Don't lie." His eyes ran over you, slow and greedy. "Makes your lights burn. Makes you remember what you are. What we are."

You stepped closer without meaning to.

The water lapped at your boots.

He inhaled, shuddering, Adrian's blood bright against white paint.

"You came early," he said again, softer now. "Couldn't stay away from me, could you?"

You hated him.

You hated yourself.

You hated the way your deadlights hummed in answer, low in your bones.

"You woke up," you said. "You started without me."

He pouted.

"I waited," he said. "Twenty-seven long years in the dark, dreaming of you and your little lanterns, and you show up just in time for dessert? I'm wounded."

"You killed a man whose only crime was loving someone," you snapped.

"That's Derry's crime," he corrected, amused. "I just...cleaned up."

He let Adrian's body drift.

It bumped against your leg.

You flinched.

Above, shouts.

Sirens, faint in the distance.

Don's sobbing voice on the wind.

You stepped back.

You couldn't be here when they came.

You couldn't explain this to any human mind without breaking it.

Pennywise giggled, hearing your calculation.

"Run along," he said. "You've got weeping widows and frightened children to attend to. Leave the heavy lifting to me."

"You're disgusting," you choked.

He licked a line of blood off his palm.

"You missed me," he sighed.

He wasn't wrong.

You turned and walked out of the water, not trusting yourself to speak again.

You didn't look back when the red balloon bumped gently against the underside of the bridge, as if nodding to an audience that didn't know it was watching.

Mike heard the news the way he always heard Derry's secrets, half by accident, half by design.

He'd installed the police scanner in his office years ago, under the pretense of keeping up with town emergencies for "community outreach." No one had questioned it. No one wanted to.

The dispatcher's voice crackled through the static, businesslike.

"Units respond to Main Street bridge by the canal. Possible homicide. Male victim. Carnival incident. Witness reports a clown..."

Mike froze mid-shelf.

His fingers tightened on the book he was reshelving.

He didn't move until the word clown repeated.

Then he moved fast.

The bridge was cordoned off by the time he got there, lights flashing blue and red in the damp night. Carnival music drifted faintly on the air from down the hill, the cheery tune turned sour.

He saw Don's hunched figure on the back of an ambulance, blanket around his shoulders, eyes staring at nothing.

He saw the body bag.

He saw the drag marks where something had pulled Adrian up from below or, if you knew what you were looking at, had let him drift just enough to be found.

He saw the balloon.

Red.

Tied to the railing by a piece of wet, dirty string.

No one else seemed to register it.

Cops stepped around it.

Paramedics brushed past.

Mike stared.

His breath came short.

It, he thought. It's started.

He didn't see you on the far side of the crowd, face pale under the streetlight, kids huddled close to you, eyes too wide.

He didn't need to.

He'd already seen enough.

Later, in his office, surrounded by stacks of notes and clippings and yellowed photos, he added Adrian Mellon's name to the list.

The pattern was complete.

The cycle had turned.

He thought of you walking into his library that afternoon like some terrible, comforting omen.

He thought of the oath.

He closed his eyes.

Then he went to the locked drawer where he kept the notebook with seven names and seven numbers.

One by one, he dialed them.

They all knew his voice.

Even through the distance, through the decades.

"Hey, man," Richie said, trying for breezy and landing somewhere shaky. "Long time no traumatizing childhood memory."

"B Bill," Mike said, when the first stutter came down the line from wherever in the world Bill Denbrough was writing the next haunted story he didn't realize was just a thinly disguised autobiography. "It's...It's back."

Ben listened in silence, hand on the model of a new building, feeling the walls tremble.

Eddie snapped about prank calls and germs until Mike said the word Derry, and then he went very, very quiet.

Beverly lit a cigarette with fingers that didn't quite stop shaking as Mike's calm voice threaded down the line into her too-perfect kitchen, bouncing off Tom's contempt and landing somewhere in the pit of her stomach.

They all remembered.

Not all at once.

Enough.

Envelopes went into bags.

Flights were booked.

Excuses were made to spouses and bosses and selves.

Only one didn't answer the call the way the others did.

Stanley Uris sat at his kitchen table in Atlanta with the phone pressed to his ear and the world suddenly very far away.

His wife watched him from the other side of the table, a crossword half-filled in front of her.

"Stan?" she asked, when his face went ashen.

He didn't answer.

Mike's voice flowed down the line, steady and gentle.

"Stan," Mike said. "I need you to come home. It's starting again. We...we need all of us. Like we promised."

Images hit Stan in staccato bursts.

Blood.

A paper boat.

A woman with an umbrella making impossible things happen in a library bathroom.

A pit.

A clown.

A head full of light.

His own voice, twelve and shaking: I swear.

His hand clenched around the phone.

Something in him, small and stubborn, whispered, He's lying. It can't be real. It was just a story.

Something else, older and deeper and wearing a kippah in a sewer, whispered, You know better.

His heart pounded.

He felt like he was back in the Standpipe, staring at things that shouldn't exist.

"Stan?" Mike said again. "You still there?"

"Yes," Stan said.

His voice sounded wrong to his own ears.

"You remember?" Mike asked quietly.

Stan looked at his wife.

At the neat little life he'd built.

At the walls that didn't bleed.

He saw himself back in Derry, standing on that trash-reeking mountain, hearing the wet thud of something monstrous hitting the bottom of the pit.

He saw the blood oath.

He saw your face over the circle of cut palms, smiling with something that looked like pride and sorrow mixed.

We'll come back, Bev had said.

Stan's hand shook.

He thought of getting on a plane and walking back into that town and feeling every thread of reality loosen under his feet.

He thought of facing you, the nanny who hadn't aged a day, who had looked at them all with something like knowing and let them go anyway.

He thought of Pennywise.

"I..." he said.

He swallowed.

The word no lodged in his throat.

The word yes wasn't any better.

He settled on neither.

"I'll...call you back," he said.

He hung up before Mike could answer.

His wife frowned.

"Everything okay?" she asked.

Stan smiled.

His best smile.

"Old friend," he said. His voice trembled only a little. "Old...stuff."

"You gonna go?" she asked.

He looked at her.

He thought of getting on a plane and being a boy again, no matter how many years his bones thought they'd earned.

"No," he said.

Later, he ran the bath.

He told his wife he just felt a little off, needed to relax.

He closed the door.

He stared at his own reflection for a long, long time.

The cut on his palm from the oath was a faint, pale crescent now, barely visible.

He traced it with his thumb.

"I'm sorry," he whispered.

He slid into the water.

You felt it.

Wherever you were in town that night, maybe humming Jonah to sleep, maybe sitting alone in your little rented room over the laundromat, listening to the pipes, you felt one of the seven threads snap.

Like a violin string breaking.

Sharp.

Final.

You put a hand to your chest.

"Stan," you breathed.

Your storm stirred.

Far below, in the lair, Pennywise opened his eyes wider.

He tasted something on the air, salt and sorrow and a particular, complicated flavor of fear turned inward.

He grinned.

"One down," he whispered into the dark.

You closed your eyes.

"Six to go," you whispered back.

And between you, like a buried live wire, the oath still hummed.

They were coming.

So were you.

So was he.

Derry's storm was just getting started.

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i adore your writing. it’s extremely rare to find an author who writes for characters/fandoms i like that actually writes well & follows through with their work. thank you for sharing your stories with us!

Oh wow, thank you so much 🥹💛 that honestly means a lot to me!!! I put a lot of heart and time into these stories, so hearing that they are landing with you like that really means everything. And thank you for noticing the follow through too, because I try really hard to keep showing up for the worlds and characters people get attached to. I’m just really grateful you are here reading and loving them with me 🫶

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Chapter 77. Finish the Job

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Chapter 77. Finish the Job

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I'm Just Next Door

Captain John Price x WifeReader

Series Masterlist

After Makarov finally falls, John is forced to face how deeply the hunt has hollowed him out and realizes that going home to you and the girls is no longer a comfort he can delay, but the only way back to himself.

77. Finish the Job

By the time Johnny could sit up without looking like death had only briefly lost the argument, John already knew he was too far in.

Not in the mission.

In himself.

That was the more dangerous thing.

The room they'd put Soap in was too white, too clean, too still for him. Tubes. Monitor. The antiseptic sting in the air. A side table with untouched tea and a bruised apple no one had had the heart to throw out yet. He looked wrong in it all. Too bright where he should have been loud. Too quiet where he should have been insufferable.

Still alive, though.

Still alive.

That mattered. It mattered more than anything. John kept telling himself that when the anger rose up hot enough to make his teeth hurt.

Soap looked up when John came in, one arm taped, one side of his face rough with several days of bad sleep and bad meds. He was pale under it all, but conscious. Alert. That crooked glint in his eye dulled, not gone.

"Cap," he said, voice rough. "You look shite."

John set the coffee down on the side table and stared at him. "You've got a hole in you."

"Aye. We all have flaws."

That should not have made him laugh. It did anyway, once, short and humorless.

Soap shifted and winced, then tried to pretend he hadn't. "Sit before you loom a trench into the floor."

John sat.

For a minute neither of them said anything. The machines did enough talking for the room.

Soap looked at him too long. That was the problem with men who knew you in more than one kind of weather. They noticed what everyone else politely ignored.

"You're burying yourself," he said finally.

John's jaw tightened. "No, I'm finishing it."

Johnny gave him a look that would have been obnoxious if he'd been healthy enough to put proper force behind it. "Aye. And I'm sure those are different things in your head."

John leaned back in the chair, arms folded. "You want me to let it go?"

"No." Soap's answer came sharp enough to hurt. "I want you to remember there's a difference between putting one in Makarov and staying in this so long you forget how to come home."

The room went still around that.

John looked away first.

Soap softened, a little. As much as Johnny MacTavish ever did. "You've still got somewhere to go back to, Cap. Don't act like you don't."

You.

The girls.

The house.

Kindergarten drawings and toddler socks and a wife who could hear a lie in his breathing over a bad line from another continent.

John rubbed a hand over his mouth. "I know."

"Do you?"

That one landed.

Because yes, of course he knew.

And also no, not in any useful way anymore. Not with Makarov moving in his head every waking minute. Not with Shepherd's bullshit spreading behind them like oil on water. Not with every quiet second making room for one more image of Johnny on the floor, blood on concrete, eyes slipping.

Soap breathed out carefully. "Finish the job. Fine. But don't go making a grave out of it while you're at it."

John looked back at him then.

Johnny tried for a grin. It pulled lopsided. Pain made it ugly around the edges. "Besides. If you die all tragic and broody, who's left to make fun of your hat?"

John snorted despite himself. "Gaz."

"Not enough spite in him."

"Ghost."

Soap thought about that. "Actually, fair."

They both fell quiet again.

Then Soap said, more softly than before, "Just come back with all your pieces, aye?"

John stood because if he didn't leave in the next ten seconds, something in his face might crack where Johnny could see it.

"I'll do what I can."

Johnny nodded once, accepting the non-answer for what it was. "That's about all any of us get."

Task Force 141 moved after that like a wounded animal pack.

More dangerous. Less patient. Not sloppier, never that. If anything the opposite. Every motion tightened. Every decision pared down to what mattered and what got in the way.

Gaz lost what little softness he usually let leak into the work. No jokes now. No under-the-breath commentary. Just hard focus and an expression that had gone younger somehow by becoming emptier.

Ghost became almost impossible to read. The cold in him, usually tucked under deadpan and habit, came right up to the surface. He said less. Moved faster. Watched everyone longer than they liked.

John got singular.

That was the word for it.

Not angry in the outward sense. Not reckless. Not even visibly different to anyone who didn't know the precise weight of him before. But singular, yes. Everything in him narrowed to purpose. Sleep happened when his body shut down by force. Food when someone put it near enough and refused to leave until he touched it. Calls home got shorter. More careful. More incomplete.

Laswell noticed.

Of course she did.

She found him standing over a live map in a dim operations room while half the world slept and the other half kept trying to kill them. Shepherd's name sat in one corner of the board now like a stain that wouldn't scrub out. Makarov's routes in red. Asset movement in blue. Ports, roads, shell companies, dead contacts, burned safehouses. Too many threads, all feeding each other.

"You're pushing too hard," she said.

John didn't look up. "No such thing."

Kate stopped beside the table and folded her arms. "There is when it starts costing you visibility."

That got his eyes on her.

She held them. "This has gone beyond the hunt and you know it. Shepherd made it filthier. Makarov made it personal. You don't get to pretend you're above either."

He rolled the cigar between his fingers, unlit. "Never said I was."

"No. You're just acting like exhaustion doesn't apply if you're angry enough."

Ghost moved in the far corner, checking a laptop feed. Gaz was somewhere down the corridor ripping apart a transport manifest with two analysts and no patience. The room smelled like old coffee and electronics cooking themselves to death.

John looked back at the board. "We're close."

Kate's mouth tightened. "That's the problem. Close is where men start making offerings to the mission that the mission didn't ask for."

He knew what she meant.

Sleep. Judgment. Pieces of themselves. Then larger things. Softness. Restraint. The ability to return to a life after the target hit the floor.

He also knew she was right and hated her for it on instinct.

Still, he said only, "We finish it."

Kate let the silence sit for a second. "Yes. You do. Then you go home."

That last part he did not answer.

Not because he disagreed.

Because he did not know yet what shape of him would make the trip.

At home, the shift had become impossible to miss.

You did not need details. You had pattern and absence and the tone of his voice when he was trying too hard to sound fine.

Peach asked less often now where Daddy was because she had learned the answer would not change. That hurt more than when she cried. The adjustment. The acceptance of something unfair because children got used to things they should never have to get used to.

Margot still did not understand any of it. On FaceTime she squealed at his face, shoved toys toward the camera, patted the screen, and shouted "Da!" until her whole little body bounced with it. Then she would hand the phone to you upside down and toddle off, having apparently resolved the problem by volume.

John smiled for the girls.

Always.

That never failed.

But once the girls were occupied, once Peach ran off to find a drawing and Margot got distracted by Slinky's tail, he would look at you through the screen and in that split second of adult silence, you could feel how far gone he was.

Not from you.

Into it.

One night you took the call in the dark kitchen because both girls were asleep and the monitor hissed softly from the counter. You held the phone with both hands and looked at him. Really looked. The hat off. Shirt collar open. Stubble heavier than he usually let it get. Eyes ringed in fatigue and something harsher.

"You need sleep," you said.

He almost smiled. "Need Makarov."

You closed your eyes for one beat. Opened them again. "John."

That was enough. He heard what you weren't saying.

When he spoke next, his voice dropped. Not for security. For honesty. "We're close, love."

And there it was.

Not triumph. Not hope.

Warning.

How close, you wanted to ask. At what cost. What else is moving besides him. What do they still not know. Is Ghost sleeping. Is Gaz eating. Is Laswell carrying the whole thing with one hand and a pistol in the other like she always does when men start fraying.

Instead you said, "Come back to me after."

His eyes held yours. "Aye."

You could hear it in him now. Not just distance. Hardness. The way some men became efficient enough to frighten themselves.

When the call ended, you stood alone in the kitchen with your own reflection faint in the black glass of the window and knew that the mission was no longer just work he was inside.

Now it was changing him while he was still in it.

Shepherd made everything dirtier.

John had never liked the man. Never trusted polish wrapped around rot. But seeing the full scale of the fallout, the self-protective games, the hidden hands and false loyalties, burned through whatever patience he had left for institutions pretending their corruption was strategy.

The mission widened, then narrowed violently.

Makarov still sat at the center of it, but Shepherd's shadow crossed everything. Routes compromised because someone in a suit had needed deniability. Men placed where sacrifice looked clean on paper. Information held too long. Lies deployed like barriers between consequence and the men expected to absorb it.

Soap, from his bed and still pale enough to make everyone angry all over again, summed it up best when Gaz brought him the latest update.

"So the old bastard made his mess our problem and now we're meant to mop and smile."

Gaz did not smile. "Something like that."

Johnny looked at John over the rim of a paper cup of hospital tea and muttered, "You put one in him too if there's time."

John said nothing.

He didn't need to. Not with the shape of the thing already moving in him.

The final push came in fragments and then all at once.

Intel broke. A route opened. One of Laswell's contacts finally chose survival over loyalty and handed over enough truth to matter. Makarov was moving through a corridor of his own making, using chaos and old debts and dead men's secrets as cover. For twenty-four hours everything accelerated so hard it felt like gravity had changed.

No one in 141 needed much briefing by then.

They were operating on instinct and years of trust and pain turned useful.

Ghost ran point through one sector with that same inhuman calm he always had when violence became mathematics. Gaz locked down comms and movement, every call exact, every correction immediate. Laswell moved whole pieces from half a world away and never once let her voice shake. Soap, sidelined physically but very much not absent, fed them what insight he could from recovery and complained viciously about anyone treating him like furniture.

"Tell Ghost if he gets Makarov before I do, I'm hauntin' him."

Ghost, on comms, replied flatly, "You're too loud to haunt anyone."

That was as close to comfort as any of them were getting.

John moved through the operation like he had already stepped beyond ordinary fatigue.

He was colder now. Not detached. Sharper. Stripped.

Every choice reduced to the line between target and team. Every instinct bent toward the finish. Makarov ahead. Makarov slipping. Makarov close enough now that his presence seemed to distort every room they entered.

The confrontation, when it came, had that ugly canon energy all final hunts did. Too much history in too little space. Makarov like a current running under everything. Shepherd's mess still bleeding through the edges. The stink of old betrayal and new fire. Nothing clean about it.

John did not experience it as narrative.

Only as motion.

One corridor. One staircase. One chance after another narrowing down to a single outcome.

Makarov in front of him at last. Real. Not in a file, not in a satellite image, not in another dead man's pocket.

Real.

He knew later people would call it victory. Completion. Justice. Words made for reports and memorial speeches and briefings to men who never got blood on their cuffs.

In the moment, it was only this: the man who had nearly taken Johnny, the man who had poisoned everything he touched, the man at the end of too many lines finally standing close enough to stop.

John did.

He finished it.

No flourish. No relief.

Just finality.

And when it was done, when the objective had been completed and the noise around it started to fall away in stages, there was no triumph in him. No sharp burst of righteousness. No satisfaction clean enough to stand upright.

Only cost.

Makarov gone did not unspill blood. Did not erase concrete under Johnny's back. Did not put warmth back into all the places this hunt had frozen inside him.

It just meant the thing was over enough for his body to realize what it had been carrying.

He felt it all at once then.

The exhaustion.

The anger, still alive but with nowhere left to go.

The guilt.

And beneath all of it, more dangerous than any of the rest, the sudden terrible awareness of home.

You.

The girls.

A kitchen with sunlight in it. A backpack by a dresser. Margot's little hand slapping at a phone screen to get to his face. Peach asking if teachers knew your name before they met you.

All of that still existed.

And he had nearly stayed away from it one minute too long.

The debrief afterward blurred.

Laswell's face. Ghost's silence. Gaz looking older than he should. Shepherd fallout folded into the mission in the ugly, necessary way of truth catching up with men who had outrun it for too long. Reports. Extraction. Movement orders. Names taken off boards. Others added.

John answered what was required.

Nothing more.

At some point he went back to Soap.

Johnny was propped up a little higher now, color still not right, but life more firmly attached. His eyes tracked John the second he came in.

"Well?" he asked.

John stood at the end of the bed with his hands in his pockets because if he did not anchor them somewhere he might start breaking furniture.

"It's done."

Soap watched him for one long second.

Then nodded once.

No grin this time. No joke.

Just understanding.

"Alright," he said quietly.

That was all.

And somehow, because it came from Johnny, because it held none of the false shine that other men would have tried to slap over a completed mission, that simple alright became the closest thing to permission John had felt since the shot.

Permission to stop standing in it.

To admit it had cost him.

To leave.

Later, much later, after the paperwork and the transport and the endless post-operation noise had finally thinned enough for him to be alone with himself, John found a quiet stretch of corridor and sat.

No hat now. No cigar. Just his hands hanging empty between his knees and his heartbeat finally slowing enough to let the rest of him catch up.

He should have felt completed. Useful. Vindicated.

Instead he felt worn raw.

Like the hunt had reached in and scraped him clean of everything not essential, then left the edges exposed.

He thought of you then, not abstractly, but with terrible specificity.

The way you looked when you were trying not to cry in front of the girls. The exact weight of your hand at the back of his neck when you pulled him down to kiss you hello. The sound of your laugh when Margot argued with a bowl of strawberries. The ordinary holiness of your house in the evening. The dishes in the sink. The bath routine. Peach's brave pancakes.

He couldn't stay in this one minute longer.

Not because war was done with him.

It never would be. Men like him did not get that kind of clean ending. There would be fallout. Reports. Reassignments. Another mess somewhere on the horizon already building itself.

But this part was done.

And if he stayed inside it, even out of habit, even out of discipline, there would be nothing left worth carrying back through your front door.

So he stood.

Found the hat.

Put it on not because he needed Captain Price anymore tonight, but because the man still had to get home somehow.

When he finally turned toward that thought fully, toward flights and roads and all the hours between him and your kitchen and your girls and your bed, it did not feel triumphant.

It felt necessary.

Like surfacing.

Like dragging himself out of cold water before his limbs forgot how warmth worked.

He took out his phone, stared at the dark screen for one second, then brought up your name.

He didn't call yet.

Just looked.

Let home become a real direction in his body before he moved.

Then he slipped the phone back into his pocket and started walking, not because the war was done with him, but because if he did not turn toward you now, he feared there might still be enough of it left in him to stay.

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Sweet on You has a brand new chapter fresh out of the oven, babes!! 🍓🖤✨

Come get your serving of Ghost, sugar, and a little emotional damage! It is warm and ready 😌🍰

Chapter 64. Hello Mrs. Riley

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@itsme-jessss

@mariam1000

@1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-1

@cmbghost

@grotesquebug7

@bowtruckleninja

@sorqenlos

@loloncookies

@whoislio4

@quest4cabbage

@xncasi

[inkmonster21]

Sweet on You has a brand new chapter fresh out of the oven, babes!! 🍓🖤✨

Come get your serving of Ghost, sugar, and a little emotional damage! It is warm and ready 😌🍰

Chapter 64. Hello Mrs. Riley

Tagged:

@mariam1000

@lavenderloss

@galactict3a

@englishstudentteacher

@foxstar08

@dustbuniesworld

@fictionalmen4eva

@sanctifiedcanines

@mxxnechos

@weallhaveadestiny

@pompomnoodle

@anonymouse1807

@jlordsangel

@funky0ne

@moon-on-the-crest

@galactict3a

@graybird320

@salyoungartist

@bubbyprincesse

@lotsoflove-lottie

@jaluley

@lilahlilac

@ghostlygirllovingreider

@junglewoos

@tessakate

@sousourulesthegalaxy

@marcysbear

@leighsartworks216

@betelgeuse420

@fertilise-me

@trashaccount19

@yukimaniac

@wowie-a-kitkat

@distinguishedvoidlady

@seattlekraken20

@silas-aeiou

@heyitsniki18

@winkymar

@eatingtheworldsoffanfiction

@rileyysexual

@bluzare

@lokigirlszendaya

@imsolotrash

@oscars-wifeyyy

@blueeyedbrat0716

@harrypotterlovers-things

@lostintro

@analoveslemonade

@glossy01

@hades-disappointment-child