My name is Amber, writing under the pseud inthegalaxxy on AO3. You can find my page here.
I'm 23, use she/her pronouns, am on the asexual spectrum, and have been writing recreationally on various platforms for about a decade.
I also have a personal blog: amber-in-the-attic
And a Bones-specific blog: ambersbones
I've been on Tumblr in one form or another for many years, but I've not made the jump to writing here until now! I'm working on several longfics but would like to try more shortform/shortfic exercises (drabbles, imagines, oneshots, twoshots, etc.).
Here is my current Masterlist.
And my current Drafting list.
And my current Want To Write list.
Fandoms I've been historically active in (in no particular order):
What We Do In The Shadows
Once Upon A Time
Twilight
Star Wars
Harry Potter (increasingly rarely due to fandom culture)
My new fandom activity (also in no particular order, but there might be a theme if you look reeeeally closely):
Bones (2005-2017)
Project Hail Mary (2026)
The Fall Guy (2024)
Barbie (2023)
The Gray Man (2022)
Bladerunner 2049 (2017)
The Nice Guys (2016)
La La Land (2016)
The Place Beyond The Pines (2012)
Drive (2011)
Crazy Stupid Love (2011)
Lars and The Real Girl (2007)
My favourite tropes and themes (to read and write):
Slow burn
Forced proximity
Enemies/dislike to lovers
Fake dating
Soulmates
Yearning and unrequited feelings (but not really)
I would love it if you felt like saying hi or if you felt inclined to submit a writing request (short or long form) for me to work on! Accepting all on my Want To Write list!
You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.
By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.
I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?
it's probably from assholes making asks a minefield of trolling/harassment for years with no real blocking ability, which turned people off from allowing asks on their blogs so as a whole the site moved away from it
but now that we do have better blocking, we should try to revive it.
The Geese as songs I already have added to their character playlists on Spotify (2)
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Author's Note: Exactly what it says on the box. Part 2 for @ponzuyu <3 (Guess who put this on the wrong blog the first time </3)
Part One
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Lars Lindstrom, Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Softcore - The Neighbourhood
“You're like the sun, you wake me up / But you drain me out if I get too much. / … / I don’t want to play this part / But I do, all for you.”
Noah Calhoun, The Notebook (2004)
Oh Caroline - The 1975
“The place I want to be / Is somewhere in your heart / Somewhere guaranteed.”
Ryland Grace, Project Hail Mary (2026)
Drowned in Emotion - Caskets
“Fighting through the fear / I've woken, nowhere left to hide. / ... / I can't carry the weight of the world. / Falling through the cracks / I'm frozen.”
Officer K, Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
begin again - Purity Ring
“Oh, guard the pounding sound. / You’ll be the moon, I’ll be the Earth / And when we burst / Start over, oh darling / Begin again.”
Sebastian Wilder, La La Land (2016)
Ashley - Halsey
“And I can’t remember why the decision wasn’t mine / But it seems I’m only clingin’ to an idea now / Took my heart and sold it out to a vision that I wrote myself.”
Jacob Palmer, Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011)
Worthy - The Home Team
“You better read it twice, I’m freakin’ out / Tell me, what’s the truth? I’ve never been in love before you. / You better make a move, don’t test me now.”
Henry Letham, Stay (2005)
Even If It Bleeds - DeathbyRomy
“On the way out, it’s a small world / You and I are bound to meet again. / We’re both poured from the same mold / And I’m only aiming for the kiss of death.”
The Geese as songs I already have added to their character playlists on Spotify
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Author's Note: Exactly what it says on the box. I have hit a wall with writing this week but I still wanted to post something so :)
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Colt Seavers, The Fall Guy (2024)
Holding Out For A Hero (Cover) - Frou Frou
"I'm holdin' out for a hero 'til the end of the night / He's gotta be strong, and he's gotta be fast / And he's gotta be fresh from the fight."
Courtland Gentry, The Gray Man (2024)
City Walls - Twenty One Pilots
“Square up with me, I can take your right, throw a left / Pair up with me, I’ma take you right to the chest / Warparth etched in the surface.”
Driver, Drive (2011)
Monster - PVRIS
"How could you let them do this to you? / How could you let them turn you into a monster?”
Holland March, The Nice Guys (2016)
It's Time - Imagine Dragons
“This road never looked so lonely / This house doesn’t burn down slowly / … / I’m just the same as I was / Now don’t you understand / That I’m never changing who I am?”
Ken, Barbie (2023)
Adventure of a Lifetime - Coldplay
“Gonna hold up half the sky and say / “Only I own me” / Now I feel my heart beatin’ / I feel my heart underneath my skin / Oh, I can feel my heart beatin’ / ‘Cause you make me feel / Like I’m alive again.”
Luke Glanton, The Place Beyond The Pines (2012)
Deadbeat (demo) - WesGhost
“You wanted everything or nothing at all / But I don’t blame you, it’s all my fault / Woah, I’m such a deadbeat, baby / … / It’s time for me to face the ugly truth / I’m no good for you.”
Summary: What does showering with The Geese look like?
Author's Note: Written kind've headcanon-y, kind've drabble-y. Part two courtesy of @nerd-do-well wanting Lars <3
Part One
Tags: I think this one is just very fluffy and anything suggestive is just kissing and being naked idk. I tried to make this as gender-ambiguous as possible so I'm tagging this GN!Reader.
Masterlist, Drafting, Want to Write
Please drop a prompt in my asks or my dms if you want to see a Goose put in a situation!
Jacob has a huge shower. Massive. It takes up half the room. It has a huge rainfall shower head and some kind of water jets built into the wall that you’re a little bit scared of, and it doesn’t even have a door. He has all of the fancy, high-end products that he has to have bought from that luxury hair salon he goes to and he clearly doesn’t even think about it when he puts twice as much of each liquid into his hands while he washes your hair. He knows how to emulsify, he’s working the shampoo into your scalp with firm, practiced hands, and he’s massaging both your head and the back of your neck in a way that makes you let out an unintentional, soft moan. You asked once about why it feels like he’s done this a thousand times before, and he tells you that his mother used to put him to work in her salon when he was home from college — which is not at all what you expected him to say but is a warmly unanticipated answer. You love sharing post-shower ritual time with Jacob because he has a routine too, and there’s plenty of room for the both of you at the sink while you do your own skincare routines on each side, smiling at and making eye contact with each other through the (huge) mirror until one of you demands a kiss from the other.
It takes a while to work up to showering with Lars. For the first few months you just take turns in the small bathroom of his garage-flat while the other warms a fluffy towel next to the fire to be exchanged when each of you get out of the shower. You’re incredibly conscious of how cramped the shower is and with his touch aversion (that has been getting a lot better with you, but you do not want to push it), you’re not confident in it really ever being a possibility, so you never ask. He’s the one who floats it as a surprisingly pointed suggestion one day — you’re both cold and wet from the rain outside and he thinks it would be safer for you to both just get in together and you don’t really have an argument for that because you don’t want either of you to get sick either. So he quickly finds some kind of rack to put both towels on near the fire and then he gingerly peels you out of your wet clothes (the second surprise of the evening) and sends you into the shower while he strips down too, throwing both of your clothes directly into the washing machine before stepping in with you. You press as far into the corner as you can to give the man more room (and are now barely under the warm stream of water from the shower head), and Lars is blinking hard like he does when he’s at the edge of being overwhelmed, but then he reaches out for your hand (like he often does now, which makes your heart soar) and gives you a soft pull closer so that you can (awkwardly) share the hot water.
In your first apartment with Sebastian, the shower is on the smaller side and you’re both too conscious of the water bill to spend much time in there together even when you’re both home at the same time. After you both ‘make it’ in your respective fields, things are a lot easier to shoulder. When Seb’s is doing really well and you’re moving up, you move into a much nicer apartment that neither of you really know what to do with for a while — especially when it comes to the shower with the square rainfall head that is twice as big as the previous one (on both counts). It does get utilised though, and then you’re regularly having sing-offs and doing karaoke in there (even though neither of you are vocalists) or listening to a jazz record off the bluetooth speaker that Sebastian insisted on buying just for the room and generally taking twice as long as you need to under the water. He’s tapping his fingers in time with the keyboard or piano notes in the music against any of your skin that he can reach when he isn’t taking the tension out of your shoulders with his long, elegant fingers that are almost as good at massaging as they are at playing his instrument. He’s bending forward for you to wash his hair for him while his hands settle softly on your hips, still tapping away, then he blinks down at you with an adoring gaze that he reserves only for you when he tips his head back to wash the product out. Sebastian has never been so thankful for someone having faith in him, and he intends to make you as happy and comfortable as possible.
Driver is the kind of man who uses 3/5/7/9/20-in-1 products — he wears a proper antiperspirant deodorant and he’s going to end up smelling like the garage anyway so what does it matter what he washes himself with as long as it gets the grease off? You, of course, are not using that and you don’t think he should either (it shares many of the same chemicals as the carpet cleaner you bought to get a grease spot out of his carpet too, which he smirks at when you tell him because “if it gets the grease out of the carpet, it’ll get the grease off me too” and you only lose that argument because what do you even say to rebut that?). So you turn up with proper bar soap (and a hardcore one specifically for automotive oil and grease), a shower gel, separate shampoo and conditioner, and two loofahs, and then you wash him. You lead him into the shower and then you give him an attitude-filled lecture on why each product is better than using the one product for everything while he watches you with an imperceptible expression. Once you’re done with his hair, he watches you as you scrub at him and is visibly surprised that your bar soap gets the grease off his forearm. Driver’s face lights up and he pulls you tight against him, kissing your temple or the top of your head, silently thanking the universe for giving him someone who cares about him so much that they care what he washes himself with.
Summary: What does doing jigsaw puzzles with The Geese look like?
Author's Note: Written kind've headcanon-y, kind've drabble-y again because I had ANOTHER brain spark that was eating me up and this seems like a good enough format? Let me know if you want a part 2!
Tags: Very fluffy. I tried to make this as gender-ambiguous as possible so I'm tagging this GN!Reader.
Masterlist, Drafting, Want to Write
Please drop me a prompt if you want to see some Geese put in a situation!
Parallel Play Kings:
Driver went out and bought you a lamp like his — maybe he even bought the two of you new lamps with a magnifying glass built in too. He would prefer to work on his car parts rather than work on your jigsaw puzzle with you, but he is so happy to sit in the dark silence with you while you both do your own thing and you’re just happy to be around him. He will occasionally get up and join you at the dining table to put in a few pieces of the puzzle or direct you to the pieces that he can see that fit together, but he’s much more focused on whatever he brought home from the garage. Driver is probably taking apart and rebuilding a 4L60E on a tray (transmission fluid is notoriously hard to clean and really he should have just done this at the garage but he wanted a challenge) or working on a Carter AFB carburetor (or the Rochester Quadrajet out of his own car) or maybe even just thoroughly cleaning an intake manifold if he had a big day.
Luke can’t sit still long enough to focus on a jigsaw puzzle but still wants to spend time with you, so he’s playing video games while you do the jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table. You’re absolutely sitting between his legs, on the floor with your back against the couch that he’s sitting on. He’s getting up for a smoke between games, leaning over you to give you spiderman kisses, bringing you snacks and water while you alternate between doing your puzzle and cheering him on in whatever he’s playing. Luke gives the top of your head a kiss every time he wins a round/a race/scores well.
Ryland has too many things to grade and lessons to plan to do your jigsaw puzzle with you, but he wants to spend time with you too, so you’re doing your jigsaw puzzle on one end of the dining table while he grades quizzes at the other. He will intermittently ask you if you would accept certain things as answers or whether you can read certain chunks of handwriting, getting up to hand the test/s in question to you which is when he puts a few pieces together while he waits for your feedback. He gives your forehead a kiss when you give him your answer, then goes back to his chair until he gets through his stack of papers or calls it quits for the night and joins you. Ryland's eyes get tired quickly, so you know you’ve only got about fifteen minutes of jigsaw-puzzling before he’s going to have a headache.
Sebastian taps away at his keyboard while you do your jigsaw puzzle with the coffee table pulled close to the couch so you don’t have to sit on the floor. Neither of you talk very much, but the silence is companionable because it’s punctuated with soft (if stuttery, slightly repetitive) jazz music and the occasional question of whether something sounded good (it almost always does). You’re the one getting up to get water and snacks for the both of you, only because Sebastian is so hyper-focused on getting a melody perfect that he usually forgets to eat/drink unprompted. Once he finishes off a piece, he’ll come sit with you for a little bit for a few kisses, some praise (going both ways), and he’ll put in one or two pieces before he goes back to the keyboard.
Henry spends most of his time painting even when you’re together, so it comes as no surprise that you’re doing your jigsaw puzzle on the floor while he sits near the window with a paintbrush in his hand late into the night. He’s too engrossed in his own work but did help you pick out the jigsaw puzzle you’re doing — it was one of the artwork themed ones the bookstore sells, jigsaw-ified famous paintings. There’s light conversation happening but you and Henry are both happy in the silence.
Active Participants:
Colt comes home from every long shoot with a new puzzle — somehow, he gets access to whatever the movie’s poster looks like at the time (much earlier than he should be able to) and gets it made into a jigsaw for the two of you to do together. He’s sitting on the other side of the coffee table with you and you’re both on the floor with a plate of snacks off to the side. He gives you all the on-set gossip for the movie, and you regularly have to tell him to stop spoiling the movie in question for you because you were actually interested in watching it (with him, so he can show you which stunts he did and you can oo and ahh). You’ve probably got a sitcom going on in the background that neither of you are paying attention to or one of you has your phone hooked up to play music. He’s getting up and moving around to stretch his back relatively often and you’re regularly conscripted to help massage, but Colt thinks it’s worth it and you can tell that he loves doing jigsaws with you so you don’t mind in the slightest.
Holland gets engrossed in a jigsaw and it throws you for a loop the first time you bring one over to the March residence. You brought it over for something to do while you hung out with Holly while her dad was out with Healy since you aren’t much interested in listening to her talk to Jessica on the phone or watching the reality TV she puts on and thought she might like to do it with you, and she does for a while while you ask her about her school day, but it’s her father who gets hooked. Doesn’t matter if he’s drunk, had a bad day, had a good day, anything, he’s sitting on the floor, criss-cross-applesauce across from your own seat on the couch with the jigsaw laid out on the coffee table and getting stuck right in as he tells you about what happened to him that day. Sometimes Healy comes in for a little while too if it isn’t too late at night, but he sits next to you on the couch and only interjects to correct Holland or add a key piece of information that he’s forgotten from his tale.
Lars will sit with you in silence almost regardless of what you’re doing, but he especially loves doing jigsaw puzzles with you. You each pick a corner to work out from once you’ve got the border done and you divide the pieces into their own tupperwares according to which quarter they look like they go in. You’re passing the tupperwares between you, handing each other any pieces you find that might work for the other’s corner — you’re a well oiled machine when the two of you work on a jigsaw together. You’re demolishing a thousand-piece jigsaw within two evenings, so you and Lars usually alternate jigsaws with Scrabble and bowling throughout the week to keep things interesting but on a schedule.
Jacob surprises you with a cupboard full of jigsaw puzzles one rainy afternoon. He tells you about how he used to do jigsaw puzzles alone on the nights he didn’t feel like going to Plus while he mixes drinks for the two of you (he claims an Old Fashioned helps him focus, which makes you roll your eyes but you give him your drink of choice anyway). Then he helps you move the furniture around until there’s pillows and blankets all over the floor between the coffee table and the couch and he’s showing you each jigsaw so you can choose which one to do. He’s sitting beside you for jigsaw-time, and he demands a kiss for every piece he puts in correctly, which is cute until you realise how good he is at jigsaw puzzles and have to put a stop to it after twenty minutes because he’s turning to you for a kiss multiple times per minute. To be fair to Jacob, he’s kissing your temple or your forehead every time he sees you put a piece in too.
Summary: What does showering with The Geese look like?
Author's Note: Written kind've headcanon-y, kind've drabble-y because I had a brain spark that I had to follow. May have a future part 2? Is this anything?
Tags: Very fluffy. NSFW in places but more suggestive rather than explicitly detailed. I tried to make this as gender-ambiguous as possible so I'm tagging this GN!Reader.
The shower in Luke’s trailer is very small and neither of you like to waste time in there, so it’s a toss-up of whether you’ll shower together or not every time (usually you do, both of you love being close to the other anyway and are rarely far apart). You both wash quickly and in motions reminiscent of vertical Twister when you do, and his hands only start to wander when you’re both clean — the proximity causes more things than just the water vapours to be steamy, and you’ve been pressing soft kisses to each other’s skin at every opportunity. He’s wrapping you up in a towel when you get out (whether you showered together or not) and you’re drying his hair with a hand towel until the bleach-blond tresses fall handsomely over his forehead as he leans down to kiss you. Do you even get dressed after the shower? Probably not, because Luke loves skin-to-skin contact and prefers to cuddle to sleep without boundaries.
If Colt comes home injured, you’re both getting in the shower pretty much immediately. He got any scratches or cuts patched up and medically cleared on set but you both know that your hands are a kind of magic that can’t be found in a medical trailer. You’re helping him strip off before shedding your own clothes, and then washing away the dirt and grime that still coats his skin with a soft washcloth under the stream of water as hot as the two of you can stand to try and loosen up his tight muscles. Your hands knead into his back with practiced ease (avoiding the visible bruises and abrasions and the still-tender area around his spinal injury) until he sighs heavily and melts into your touch, forehead pressed against the tiles as he tells you about what he was working on that day and you press kisses into his warm flesh.
When Colt isn’t injured, you’re washing each other while you quiz each other on movie quotes. He can’t reach most of his back so you have to wash it anyway (literally too jacked to reach between his own shoulder blades and it makes you giggle every time he tries). He is super supportive of your ‘everything showers’ and begs to be included, touching you softly as if he’s going to hurt you if he scrubs you with the loofah too hard. He takes all of your directions about what products to use and in what order, and he even wants to do skincare with you after! Matching face masks, moisturising, fluffy robes — you even bought him one of those novelty headbands to keep his hair out of his face. And you best bet that Colt's taking a silly selfie with you and then sending it to the stunt team group chat for whatever movie he’s working on with a corny message that makes you roll your eyes, something like ‘resting and rejuvenating 🙏’.
Holland is only allowed to shower with you sometimes.
When Holland does shower with you, he can’t keep his hands to himself. He loves to touch you, any way that you let him, and that usually means that the shower ends up being longer than an hour because you basically have to take a second shower in the same shower because of it. He’s praising you the whole time as he gropes at your chest and practically humps your thigh or against your ass because he thinks you’re just too divine to keep his hands (or his dick) away. Will ask you to wash his hair and then drop to his knees with that smirk you can’t help but blush at and then you’re up against the tiles while he uses his mouth on you.
When you don’t let Holland shower with you, he’s absolutely sitting on the lid of the toilet in his underwear, still intermittently praising you and telling you how good you look through the shower screen while he rambles to you about whatever case he’s working on. He’ll wrap you up in a towel when you’re done and you’ll probably stay in the bathroom while it’s his turn too so you can hear the rest of the story about the case because the second the two of you get into bed, it’ll go one of two ways — Holland will start groping you and you won’t stop him (you might even actively encourage it with the wandering of your own hands), or his head is hitting that pillow and he’s snoring within seconds.
When you shower with Ryland in the morning, you’re talking about what you each have going on for the day — what experiments is he running with his classes? What are they learning about? Who is he expecting to act up? Who has he been keeping an eye on because they always seem just a little bit too tired in class? He’s drawing stick figures and love hearts in the shower steam on the glass and saying “that’s us, we’re in love!” or some other adorably dorky thing that makes you smile wide and kiss him.
When you shower with Ryland at night, you’re debriefing — who did he snap and give detention to? Who had a really good question that reminded him of something he studied once? What gossip did he overhear in the teacher’s lounge? What published research paper did he read at lunch and why was the researcher right/wrong? You love it when he rambles, and it’s incredibly soothing when he talks to you in that soft voice he seems to only use with you (even when he’s calling some other scientist an idiot in creative ways for ten solid minutes) while you take turns washing each other. He’s putting his glasses on the second his face is dry so that he can look at you, even though they steam up pretty much immediately and his hair drips onto the lenses so he has to wipe them on his towel anyway, which gives you the opportunity to dry his hair until it’s only damp before he puts the glasses back on, pulls you close, and kisses you deeply with mutterings of how you always take care of him, how much he loves you, and how considerate you are. He pulls one of his clean t-shirts gently over your head for you to sleep in and holds your underwear out for you to step into before pulling on his own pajama pants (no shirt, because Ryland knows how much you love his chest and arms).
Ken is all-but playing with the shower products. Wants to help you wash your hair but you always end up with soap in your eye when he does so usually you wash his instead (and he melts). He uses too much of every product so you have to buy him his own (slightly more budget-friendly) products so he won’t use all of your good conditioner or exfoliating face soap within a week. Also touchy, but it’s soft, reverent hands that just want to feel your skin and be close to you. Also absolutely a skincare participant, complete with a novelty headband and face masks while you watch a comedy movie. Occasionally asks you to paint his nails to match yours while you wait for your face masks to marinate. It always gives you butterflies knowing that he wants to match with you as much as possible, so you paint Ken's nails while he tells you how pretty the colour looks on you and how he hopes it looks half as good on him.
Summary: Ken has learned a lot after bringing The Patriarchy to Barbieland, but now that his hair is darkening and he's dreaming of a lonely woman, he must return to the Real World to fix the new rift threatening Barbieland.
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four
Crossposted: Whole Work on AO3
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Seeing Stars
Franchise: Project Hail Mary (2026)
Pairing: Ryland Grace x Original Female Character
Form: Longfic, Ongoing
Total Word Count: 5.6k
AU? No Astrophage, All Human, All Teacher
Burn: Slow
Summary: Anna Hallow, English teacher, and Doctor Ryland Grace, science teacher, work for competing middle schools and happen to live next door to each other, which keeps their lighthearted rivalry fresh. That is, until Anna gets fired for wanting to pursue her doctorate.
Good thing Cleveland Grover Middle School needs a replacement for their retiring English teacher.
Tags: Teacher!Fic, Neighbours/Friends to Coworkers to (Eventual) Lovers, Humour, Forced Proximity (if you squint)
Chapter One, Chapter Two
Crossposted: Whole Work on AO3
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Workin' For It
Franchise: La La Land (2016)
Pairing: Sebastian Wilder x Original Female Character
Form: Oneshot, Completed
Total Word Count: 2.8k
AU? Post-Canon or AU
Summary: Abigail moves into a new apartment in Los Angeles to make her dreams of becoming a jazz musician just a little more likely.
Her neighbour happens to own the local jazz club (and is ridiculously handsome).
Tags: Fluff, First Dates, Neighbours to Dating, Soulmates (if you squint)
Single Chapter
Crossposted: Whole Work on AO3
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Prompts, Headcanons, Drabbles
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Showering with The Geese (1)
Franchise: The Place Beyond The Pines (2012), The Fall Guy (2024), The Nice Guys (2016), Project Hail Mary (2026), Barbie (2023).
Pairings: Gender-Neutral ! Reader with Luke Glanton, Colt Seavers, Holland March, Ryland Grace, and Ken.
Total Word Count: 1.3k
Summary: What does showering with The Geese look like?
Tags: Very fluffy. NSFW in places but more suggestive rather than explicitly detailed. I tried to make this as gender-ambiguous as possible so GN!Reader.
Showering with The Geese (2)
Franchise: Crazy Stupid Love (2011), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), La La Land (2016), Drive (2011).
Pairings: Gender-Neutral ! Reader with Jacob Palmer, Lars Lindstrom, Sebastian Wilder, and Driver.
Total Word Count: 1.1k
Summary: What does showering with The Geese look like?
Tags: I think this one is just very fluffy and anything suggestive is just kissing and being naked idk. I tried to make this as gender-ambiguous as possible so I'm tagging this GN!Reader.
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Jigsaw Puzzles with The Geese
Summary: What does doing jigsaw puzzles with The Geese look like?
Franchise: Drive (2011), The Place Beyond The Pines (2012), Project Hail Mary (2026), La La Land (2016), Stay (2005), The Fall Guy (2024), The Nice Guys (2016), Lars and the Real Girl (2007), Crazy Stupid Love (2011).
Pairings: Gender-Neutral ! Reader with Driver, Luke Glanton, Ryland Grace, Sebastian Wilder, Henry Letham, Colt Seavers, Holland March, Lars Lindstrom, and Jacob Palmer.
Total Word Count: 1.4k
Author's Note: Written kind've headcanon-y, kind've drabble-y again because I had ANOTHER brain spark that was eating me up and this seems like a good enough format? Let me know if you want a part 2!
Tags: Very fluffy. I tried to make this as gender-ambiguous as possible so I'm tagging this GN!Reader.
Summary: Anna Hallow, English teacher, and Doctor Ryland Grace, science teacher, work for competing middle schools and happen to live next door to each other, which keeps their lighthearted rivalry fresh. That is, until Anna gets fired for wanting to pursue her doctorate.
Good thing Cleveland Grover Middle School needs a replacement for their retiring English teacher.
Tags: Teacher!Fic, Neighbours/Friends to Coworkers to (Eventual) Lovers, Humour, Forced Proximity (if you squint)
Crossposted? Yes, AO3 > Here
Chapter One, Chapter Two
˚₊ ✧ ━━━━⊱ inthegalaxxy on AO3 ⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚
Friday starts as any normal day would.
Anna wakes up with her alarm at 6:30AM and spends the next twenty minutes staring at her ceiling — time that she’s built into her schedule to offset the rage that her alarm incites. The ceiling is an eggshell white colour that she finds ridiculously bland, but at least the crown moulding around the ceiling (that is the same colour) is almost elegant enough to offset the world’s safest choice in paint colour. The walls in the bedroom are one of the softest shades of dusty pink that she’s ever seen, but this fact may have been instrumental in her choice of renting this particular apartment. Additionally, the room is a good size for her queen bed, and the window over the bed bathes the room in light and warmth in the summer.
But it’s February, and it’s cold, and gloomy, and Anna can’t think of much she wants to do less than get out of this bed. This warm, comfortable, multi-blanketed bed.
If she had any other job, she would call out sick today, but Anna is a teacher, and she can’t leave her kids in the lurch for no reason other than her own comfort.
So, up she gets.
Having chosen a simple (but warm) outfit of black slacks, a plain black long-sleeved shirt, and a thickly knitted grey cardigan, she moves into the kitchen. Breakfast is a chore, but if she doesn’t eat now, she won’t even get to eat very much during Lunch since she’s on cafeteria duty. Bacon cooks quickly with minimal interaction, so a simple bacon sandwich for both breakfast and lunch will do her just fine.
She steps out of the apartment at 7:30AM, keys jingling in hand as she locks the apartment door and then fiddles with the doorknob to double check that it’s locked (an affectation she got from her mother). Her block heels clack against the floor with a satisfying knocking sound and her satchel rests heavily against her hip as she makes her way down three flights of stairs to the garage, pulling her car out of her designated space, and heading off to Coolidge Middle School.
Walking through the gate, she greets the teacher on duty — Mrs Cook — and any of the students who say hello on her way to her classroom. Traffic seemed to be on her side today, so she’s a little bit earlier than usual.
She sets out her laptop, worksheets, and anything else her first two classes need on her desk before the bell rings. Anna transitions seamlessly into teacher mode, making her way to the door to police the hallway as the younger kids run to their classes and the older ones take whatever they need out of their lockers then close them with a cacophony of clangs that might overstimulate another person, but just makes her smile warmly.
Her homeroom kids — a relatively well behaved cohort of eighth graders — filter into the room and she stands off to the side to let them through.
The second bell rings, and she lets the last few kids in as the hallway clears, then shuts the door.
“Alright,” she says, sitting at her desk in front of the open laptop. “You know the drill, sound off time,” she prompts.
“Aiden.”
“Angela.”
“Ben.”
“Bethany.”
The kids continue through Anna’s model of roll call and she marks their names on her laptop as they go, then sends it off to the office. She goes around the room to see what her kids got up to over the weekend and then they play a quick game of hangman as a group (today’s word is IMPENDING), and then morning announcements are called over the loudspeaker (Coolidge raised $5,632 in the bake sale, remember to sign up for the end of year play, and don’t forget that you’re not allowed to ride your skateboards in the hallway) before the bell rings for first period.
Most of the kids peel out the door to their first class of the day while others race to her room to beat the transition bell, and she repeats roll call sound off with the students before getting started.
“Okay team, today we’re going to be looking at the compositional structure and pacing of texts using the play we’ve been reading — did everyone bring A Midsummer Night’s Dream with them today? Anyone who left it in their locker gets three minutes to go get it, and anyone who didn’t bring it at all has the same amount of time to come and get a spare off the shelf.”
First and second period pass normally and she finds herself once again thankful that her morning classes are the older kids. She’s not sure she could cope with eleven- and twelve-year-olds first thing in the morning without becoming the kind of temperamental or slightly-too-strict teacher she hated in middle school. Anna couldn’t stand the power-trippers.
The two classes of seventh graders also pass without much of an incident — as expected since she spent most of both classes showing them scenes from The Hobbit and having them fill in worksheets based off of the key themes of each scene and then going over the appropriate answers as a group.
Anna spends her own ‘break’ period in the cafeteria, and then goes back to her classroom for the following two periods of sixth grade classes.
Nothing unusual happens until the final bell of the day rings.
She opens her door to let the study hall period of kids out, wishing them luck at practice or safe travels home, and then she looks up. Her eyes are met by the Principal, Mister Berwick, and she knows something is afoot based on the sympathetic gaze that she’s being studied with.
“Have a moment, Miss Hallow?”
---
Anna Hallow had never been fired before. Not from the jobs she used to put herself through college, or the Dairy Queen job she had in high school, not ever. So it was a shock to her system to be fired from the job she’d held for two years at Coolidge Middle School.
She drives home blanketed in an odd kind of resignation that dulls her emotions and senses alike. Everything was just as it had always been, but now it was wrong. She was wrong.
They had found out about her wanting to pursue a doctorate to complement her Masters, and had made a pre-emptive decision to fire her before she asked for a raise. In hindsight, she probably shouldn’t have been talking about it to the biggest gossip on staff, but unfortunately Mrs Gallagher was the only person at Coolidge that she’d considered something like a real friend. She couldn’t fault Mister Berwick for being worried about it, but she hadn’t even been planning to ask for a raise anyway simply because she knew the budget wasn’t there. He’d at least told her that he’d provide a glowing letter of recommendation for her wherever she went, affirmed that she hadn’t done anything wrong, and was giving her two weeks' notice so she’d have time to find another job, so that was something.
It was fine. Anna was a good teacher and she was sure she had a good reputation and at least one friend from her Masters program to call on for openings at their schools. She’d find something else, it just might take some time — likely more than the two weeks she had left at Coolidge.
She passes Doctor Grace on his bike in his sunny yellow raincoat.
She just hopes she won’t have to move.
Anna pulls into the garage, parks, and takes her satchel from the passenger seat before locking her doors and starting up the stairs, heels clacking away on the concrete.
Her apartment is cold when she enters. The outside temperature has permeated in and equalised. She wanted to be in warm, comfy clothes and curled up on the couch tonight, anyway, so the radiator on the wall of the living room gets turned on on the way to her pale pink bedroom, and when she emerges in her comfort armour the room has warmed a touch.
She stares listlessly into the refrigerator, then opens the freezer to fish out the bag of frozen chicken nuggets she knows is in there. They take eighteen minutes in the airfryer, and by the time they’re done and in a bowl in her cold hands, the room is notably warmer than it was when she entered it.
The TV goes on, and Anna eats curled into the corner of the sofa as Bones plays.
She’s never been so glad to not have anything to mark, because it means she gets to zone out to the comfortingly familiar sounds of Booth and Doctor Brennan bickering for a little while. She maintains her ritual of one episode while she eats, then switches to a movie she’s seen a thousand times that she won’t have to focus on — the recorded stageplay version of Much Ado About Nothing with Catherine Tate and David Tennant. Unserious is just what she needs.
What was she going to do? Where did she go from here?
Apply to jobs, that’s what she was going to do.
Her laptop is retrieved from the satchel at the other end of the couch, and she leans over it on the coffee table. She quickly finds a job board and searches for English teaching positions in a thirty-minute radius. Slim pickings. Incredibly slim pickings. There’s one job. One. And it’s for a teacher’s aide.
She widens the search to an hour — her uppermost radius before she knows she would have to move — and one other job joins the teacher’s aide role. A part-time maternity cover for six months, fifty-five minutes away.
Anna puts her head in her hands. Okay, she’d need to reach out to some people.
---
In a paradoxical way, the weekend and subsequent week pass both in a blink and slower than ever.
Anna has approximately no leads on a new job as she tucks herself into bed on Friday night at a respectable 10PM.
She’s been on every job board in the state multiple times every day and no other jobs have been added apart from the teacher’s aide and maternity cover roles that were there last week. She called everyone she could find a number for from her Masters program and found that almost all of them had moved out of state or knew their schools didn’t have any stable openings.
Fantastic.
She’s so tired. The week has drained the enthusiasm that her job usually incites with a voracity like no other. She’s bone-weary, barely eating, and a ball of anxious, irritable energy that has come out in her teaching (she issued five detentions this week, which was literally unheard of for her) and she’s just so tired.
Anna sleeps poorly, as she has been every night, and awakens around lunchtime on Saturday — which just serves to irritate her more. If she was going to sleep so late, she could at least feel rested, couldn’t she? Apparently not.
Having dragged herself out of bed, she flops onto the couch with all the grace of a sack of potatoes. She pulls the crochet blanket off the back of the sofa and throws it out over her legs as she picks up the television remote, flicking through her movie list until she settles on something she hasn’t seen before, and hits play.
The movie finishes and she finds she wasn’t paying attention at all and decides to find something else to do, something that might keep her engaged. There’s a stack of homework to grade in her satchel, so she sighs deeply and sets about it.
Anna gets through ten papers before there’s a knock on her door. She sighs again.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me?” Replies the familiar masculine voice with a lilt that portrays uncertainty. Anna sighs yet again, closing her eyes and counting to ten before standing up, wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, and unlocking the door.
“Woah, you look terrible,” is the first thing out of his mouth. She glares at him.
Her tone is short. “What do you want, Doctor Grace?”
“To return your tupperware, but I might keep it now you’re being so mean to me,” he says lightheartedly, and she looks at his hands to see the tupperware she left at his door filled with shortbread almost two weeks ago, now empty.
“Oh, sorry.”
He holds it out to her with an unsure smile and she takes it with a small upturn of her lips that barely counts as a return of his expression.
“Are you… are you okay?” He asks. She can tell he’s concerned now, because he’s playing with his fingers anxiously but looking at her with a slightly tilted head and the expression she expects he would approach a research problem with.
Anna nods airily, not really committing to an answer either way. “Thanks for returning the tupperware, Doctor Grace,” she says, reaching her free hand behind the open door and starting to push it closed.
“Hey, wait.” He puts his foot against the bottom of the door nearer to the hinges, stopping its swing. “Tell me what’s up. And there’s clearly something up — you look terrible and you haven’t been in the hallway when I’ve come home in over a week and now I’m worried about you.”
“Are you serious?” She snaps at him, grinding her molars as she clenches her jaw.
“Yes. Tell me what’s wrong.” They stand in silence. “I’m not letting you shut this door until you tell me what’s wrong. We can both freeze.”
His threat yields results only because his standing there is letting the cold air from the hallway into her toasty living room. He’s wearing jeans and a blue t-shirt with some kind of graph on it above the phrase ‘I had potential’, which she’s sure would be funny if she understood it.
“Excuse the… everything,” she says quietly as she relents, stepping aside and gesturing for him to enter her apartment for the first time in their two year acquaintance.
It hits her at that exact moment that they’ve known each other for two years. They met when she moved in. Two weeks before she started at Coolidge. Her eyes fill up with enemy tears and she has to wipe at them with the back of her hand as she closes the door.
“Your place is… nice?” Doctor Grace says as he stands in the middle of the room, next to her coffee table that has several stacks of papers and homework on it as well as an array of pens and markers, empty and half-filled mugs, her closed laptop, and a rubiks cube that has found a home sitting on one of the smaller stacks of paper — she’s been trying to solve that when she can’t focus on anything else. Her couch has two blankets hanging over it, one fleece and one of those hospital weave ones, and the side table is littered with used tissues she’s accumulated from crying on-and-off for basically two weeks that are starting to become a fire hazard at the base of the lamp. She can only hope he doesn’t look into the kitchen, which she knows he can see from his position and vantage point.
Anna decides not to sugar coat it. “I got fired,” she says simply, placing the tupperware on a free patch of the coffee table and sinking into the couch. She pats the space next to her for him to sit as well, and tucks into the corner, sitting criss-cross-applesauce with her back wedged in the corner junction.
“Oh,” is all he says as he sits on the other end of the sofa, watching her out of the corner of his eye. His glasses are actually on his face properly today, but she’s not sure how much detail she’s in since he’s not looking at her through the glass of them. “I’m sorry.”
“Hardly your fault — I talked too loudly about pursuing a doctorate.” She pauses. “My principal was really nice about it, though,” she adds quietly.
“Doesn’t take the sting out of it, I’m sure.”
“No, no it doesn’t.”
The air is heavy between them, and neither is really sure how to fill the silence.
“I’ve got a week left to find another job, but there’s just nothing. I’ve reached out to people I haven’t spoken to in two years and I’ve been on every job board there is trying to find something within commuting distance and there’s just nothing.”
“I see… Have you redone your CV yet?”
“Yeah, that’s what that stack is under the rubiks cube.”
He leans forward, taking the rubiks cube in one hand and the small stack of CVs in the other. He turns the rubiks cube over several times, studying it, then replaces it on the coffee table.
Anna is suddenly embarrassed that her headings and subheadings are in various shades of pink and finds the vulnerability of watching him read her working-life’s story too much to bear, so she throws her legs back over the side of the sofa, picks up the tupperware, and moves into the kitchen.
“Did you wash this?” She calls into the living room, removing the lid and sniffing the container.
“Yeah, by hand so you know it was done properly,” he answers lightheartedly. She can practically hear the smile in his voice and her anger kicks up.
She opens the cupboard where her tupperware lives and all but shoves the container inside, closing the door harder (and therefore louder) than she means to. She knows it’s irrational, that he’s just trying to lighten her mood, but all she can think about is how angry she is that he could be happy and joking with her right now.
Anna re-enters the room as Doctor Grace is picking the rubiks cube back up, placing the stack of CVs underneath it again as it was before he touched them. He stands, subtly patting his back pocket (presumably making sure his phone or wallet or something didn’t fall out of it and into her couch) and moves to the door.
“I was actually getting ready to head off to an appointment and thought I should drop the tupperware in so I wouldn’t forget about it, so I can’t stay. I’m sorry you got fired, but I’m certain something will materialise for you — call it a hunch.” The edges of his lips are upturned in an infuriating way and there’s a glint in his eye that makes it seem like his words are hollow.
“Yeah, no that’s fine,” Anna says, walking the rest of the way to the door and opening it for him. “Thank you for dropping it by — I kind’ve forgot you had it.”
He steps through the open door and turns. “No problem, Miss Hallow. I’ll bid the baker adieu.” He tips the brim of an invisible hat to her, then offers the usual parting wave which she returns before closing the door.
Anna’s brain is immediately firing on all cylinders.
What was up with that interaction? Was he happy that she was unemployed? Why? Had she misread this whole relationship dynamic they had going on? Did he actually hate her and she was just naive in thinking they were friends?
In the combination of lack of sleep, grading homework, general stress, and whatever the hell that was, she had obtained a splitting headache. Just her luck.
Summary: Anna Hallow, English teacher, and Doctor Ryland Grace, science teacher, work for competing middle schools and happen to live next door to each other, which keeps their lighthearted rivalry fresh. That is, until Anna gets fired for wanting to pursue her doctorate.
Good thing Cleveland Grover Middle School needs a replacement for their retiring English teacher.
Tags: Teacher!Fic, Neighbours/Friends to Coworkers to (Eventual) Lovers, Humour, Forced Proximity (if you squint)
Crossposted? Yes, AO3 > Here
Chapter One, Chapter Two
˚₊ ✧ ━━━━⊱ inthegalaxxy on AO3 ⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚
The walls of Anna’s apartment are almost paper thin, but the rent is cheap enough to afford on a teacher’s salary without eating only ramen noodles for every meal and it’s in a safe neighbourhood, so she finds she doesn’t mind it so much. It’s almost nice, really, to hear the hustle and bustle of everyone else’s lives almost continually — it’s meditative, a little bit like white noise. She doesn’t have to think so hard when something is always going on.
She hears him in the hallway almost every evening, too. The chain of his bike rolling through its geared mechanism as he walks it up the hall is a familiar sound that she finds comforting. She likes knowing that he gets home safe, and finds that sometimes she gets anxious when he doesn’t get home in the usual window — worries that he’s gotten hit by a car or fallen into a ditch somewhere. She knows he’s probably just gone out with a friend or stayed too late at the school grading papers or working on lesson plans, but that doesn’t stop her all but standing against the door with a glass to her ear.
Anna doesn’t really do that, of course. But she’d never admit aloud that she’s had to stop herself from it a few times.
He’s right on time tonight, and she’s glad that she hasn’t started on dinner yet else she might miss her opportunity. She unlocks her door when she hears him at the end of the hallway and stands in the frame, shoulder against the jamb, arms crossed over her chest.
“Ready to get your butt handed to you on Thursday?” She asks, tongue coated in confidence.
“Are you talking to mirrors again?” He shoots back with feigned disinterest. He still has his helmet on, but the chin strap is undone and swinging beneath his jaw like it usually is when he gets back to the apartment complex after school.
Anna bites her cheek so that she doesn’t laugh at his quip and uses her acting skills to keep her face neutral. He’s refusing to look at her, but she doesn’t miss the subtle twitch in his lip.
“No, just want you to be prepared to lose.”
“Not likely,” he says as he drifts past. “You should be more worried about Friday, anyway,” he calls over his shoulder.
“I have full confidence in my kids, I have trained them like tiny soldiers!”
He doesn’t respond as he leans the bike against the wall and pulls out his keys. His back is to her, and she can see a little shake in his raincoat- and backpack-clad shoulders that indicates he’s barely holding in a laugh.
Anna loves bickering with her down-the-hall neighbour. She’s certain that he enjoys it too. He keeps up with her very well, and she finds the baseless competitive back-and-forth refreshing. Neither of them mean it, and they both know it, but the teasing is welcome banter.
Doctor Grace wheels his bicycle into his apartment and waves at her with a cocky smirk. She rolls her eyes and waves back, and they both shut their doors with a soft thud.
Alright, now dinner and then grading, she thinks as she walks into the kitchen. Her refrigerator is more empty than she meant it to be, and all she can really throw together for dinner is pasta with a bare-minimum tomato-based sauce that comes almost entirely from the can of diced tomatoes that she found in the back of the cupboard yesterday.
With her dinner in a bowl in her hands, Anna sits on her plush couch in front of the television and queues the next episode of Bones. She allows herself that long to eat and nothing else, picking delicately at the dish (if you could even call it that) with a fork as she watches Booth and Doctor Brennan bicker at each other over their newest body for fourty-five minutes. Angela might be her favourite character, but Doctor Brennan speaks to her on a personal level.
Having eaten and placed her bowl on the side table with her thrifted lamp, Anna retrieves her satchel from the other end of the couch. She has plenty of papers to grade tonight, so she’d better get started.
It’s not long before her focus is interrupted by a tentative knock on her door.
“Who is it?” She calls, writing an A- on the test in front of her and circling it before tucking the pink pen behind her ear and standing up.
“It’s—”
“Doctor Grace,” she announces, cutting him off as the door opens to reveal the man. His silver-rimmed glasses are hanging off one ear and he’s swapped the dandelion-yellow raincoat for a light blue, knitted cardigan and has lost the red tie he was wearing earlier in favour of opening the top button of his collar. “What can I do for you?”
He’s a little startled but recovers well, and she can tell that he’s anxious by the way he’s playing with his hands.
“Do you have any salt you can spare? I meant to go grocery shopping on the way home but completely forgot and now I need to raise the boiling point of my water so my pasta cooks more evenly—”
“I don’t need the whole science lesson, Doctor Grace,” Anna cuts him off with a smile. Her tone is once again teasing, and he visibly relaxes. “Yes, I have salt I can spare. I have an unopened shaker in the cupboard — stay there and I’ll be back in a second.”
Anna snags her dinner bowl on the way back through her apartment and deposits it in the sink, then sets about the salt.
Himalayan rock salt in hand, she returns to the door and holds the shaker out to the man.
“It’s pink,” he says, taking the shaker by the bottom from her proffered hand.
“Yes, it is. Good observation, Mister Scientist,” she teases. “It’s Himalayan rock salt. It’s supposed to be better for you than regular table salt and it looks much prettier, don’t you think?”
“It’s less processed than table salt — has more natural minerals. That’s why it’s better for you.” He turns the shaker over in his hands, then looks up at her. “It is pretty, actually.”
They just look at each other for a minute and then he seems to remember where he is.
“I should probably go and eat — thank you, for this,” he says, tipping the salt shaker at her.
“No worries, Doctor Grace. Consider it a consolation prize for when Coolidge wipe the floor with Cleveland Grover at both the Science Fair AND Debate Day next week.” She smiles sweetly and swings the door shut in his face, landing in the frame with a soft thud.
Anna returns to her grading, unable to keep the smile off her face.
---
“How are we feeling, Miss Hallow? Scared yet?” He asks the woman saccharinely as he passes her unlocking her apartment door on Wednesday night.
“Not at all, Doctor Grace. The best school will win.”
“Big claims from last year’s losers, I see,” he teases, leaning his bike against the wall next to his own door and fishing his own keys from his backpack.
“Consider the redemption arc incoming,” Anna says as she presses her back into the door and barely drags her filled-to-the-brim grocery bags along the floor and into the apartment.
She returns to the doorway to retrieve the two bags she had to leave behind on the first trip, and he’s standing in his doorway just as she was on Monday — leant up against the jamb with his arms crossed over his chest.
“I won’t see you at the fair tomorrow, will I?”
“I have classes tomorrow that need their English teacher much more than the Science Fair needs an extra pair of eyes and final run throughs with the debate team after school, so no, I won’t be in attendance to see the Coolidge kids take out top prizes,” Anna quips. “You aren’t coming to the debate either, are you?”
“No, I have some experiments lined up for Friday,” he answers.
“What’re you running? Sheep’s eyeball? Frog dissection?” She provokes. It does exactly what she wants it to.
Doctor Grace huffs and rolls his eyes. “There are more experiments than that, you know?”
“Sure there are,” Anna prods with a glint in her gaze.
“I’ll have you know, I’m doing ice melting with sixth grade, and elephant’s toothpaste with seventh, and balloon cars with eighth, thank you very much.”
She holds back a wide smile at his indignant tone, schooling it down to a smirk. “You’re welcome, Doctor Grace,” she says sweetly. Then she remembers. “You better not be using my pretty salt for your ice-melting,” she threatens.
“I’ve had enough of you for one day, Miss Hallow,” he says lightheartedly, trying to keep a smile off his face and failing. He turns back into his apartment, pausing to give her the usual little wave before closing the door.
Having dragged all of the groceries through her living room and into the kitchen, Anna sets about unpacking and restocking her fridge and shelves — and ruining her dinner appetite by snacking on a bag of gummy worms as she does so.
Eventually, after settling on a grilled cheese for dinner, Anna sits down on the couch for her nightly ritual of Bones and grading.
And realises he didn’t answer her question about the salt.
---
It’s Sunday night, and Anna is in a pickle.
“So, remember when I gave you that salt shaker last week because you needed it?” She asks as soon as the door opens.
“Yeah?” He responds, an expression of amusement playing on his features. He’s wearing sweatpants and a loose-looking, faded graphic t-shirt of some kind that is mostly obscured by the faded blue robe draped over him.
“Please tell me you have about two cups of literally any kind of sugar?”
“I’ll see what I can dredge up — did you forget about a bake sale?” His tone is conspiratorial, like he’s stumbled upon some knowledge of greatly hushed importance.
Anna feels her cheeks pinken and rolls her eyes. “Yes, yes I did.”
He chuckles, and his eyes crinkle at the edges. “You’re kidding?” He asks in disbelief.
“I’m not. Do you have spare sugar or not?” She snips back, glaring at him.
“Alright alright, I’ll back off,” he says, holding his palms out to her as if she’s an aggressive animal. “I’ll go look.”
“Thank you.”
He comes back to the door several minutes later with a full, unopened bag of white sugar.
“Does this make us even? Or are you technically in my debt since your situation is much more dire?” He teases, holding the bag out to her.
Anna rolls her eyes as she takes the bag from his hands, grabbing the base of it since he’s holding the top.
“I could’ve easily gone down the hall to Mrs Goddard, but you were closer,” she says with a wink.
Doctor Grace checks his watch. “It’s almost 10PM! You need to get started on that baking soon or you won’t have the time to let everything cool and still get some sleep — what are you making? Do you have everything else you need?”
She softens a little at the questions. “Shortbread cookies, actually. Super easy, and relatively quick, and they don’t need to be frosted.” Her tone morphs into self-deprecation. “They also only have three ingredients, so it was a fatal error to have missed sugar when I went grocery shopping on Wednesday.”
“I actually haven’t had shortbread since my Grandma died, but I’m sure yours will be fantastic since they’ll feature my sugar,” he says with exaggerated pridefulness, puffing his chest out and squaring his shoulders comically.
She rolls her eyes again. “Congratulations on the Science Fair, by the way,” she says, changing the subject. “Must have been all those dissections and exploding volcanoes that set your kids up for their wins, hey?”
“You know I teach mo—”
She can’t hold back her giggles and covers her mouth with her free hand. He was so easy to rile up.
“You’re making fun of me? I was going to say a heartfelt congratulations to you to pass on to your debate team, and you’re making fun of me?” He says, a hand splayed over his chest in faux offense.
Anna laughs harder, and she can hear him chuckling too.
It takes her a minute to recover, but she knows she has to make a move on those cookies or he’ll be correct in it being too late for her to bake and also get a good night’s sleep. They smile, eyes shining, at each other, until Anna breaks the silence.
“Alright Doctor Grace — what was that thing you said to me the other day? “I’ve had enough of you for one day”? I’ll be taking my leave now.”
She turns and walks back to her apartment door, then calls back to the man still standing in his doorway: “Thank you for the sugar.”
They wave at each other, and then disappear behind closed doors.
---
She spent an additional ten minutes of preparation time trying to work out how much she’d have to alter the recipe to account for extra biscuits. Then, she spent even longer than she’d like to admit carving the details of an eye into the original circle shapes before putting them in the oven, but on Monday evening, before he can get home, Anna leaves a tupperware container filled with shortbread at Doctor Grace’s door with a handwritten note ripped out of one of the many notepads she has laying around.
Doctor Grace,
Thank you for the sugar.
These will probably not be as good as your Grandma’s, but I hope they’re good enough to honour her memory.
Summary: Ken has learned a lot after bringing The Patriarchy to Barbieland, but now that his hair is darkening and he's dreaming of a lonely woman, he must return to the Real World to fix the new rift threatening Barbieland.
Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four
Crossposted: Yes, AO3 > Here
˚₊ ✧ ━━━━⊱ inthegalaxxy on AO3 ⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚
“You’re such a fucking bitch, you know that? Why can you never just listen to me? Having to have all your own opinions and shit while we’re out with my friends? Why can’t you just sit quietly—”
“Are you fucking joking, Glenn? Your dickweed posse are misogynistic, patriarchal assholes! I wasn’t going to just sit there and take—”
While she’s speaking, he picks up the nearest glass from the kitchen bench and her eyes widen as it seems like time slows. It flies as though the air has viscosity, and Ashley watches in horror as it arcs over her shoulder and into the wall beside her head. The tumbler shatters with a bang and there’s an impact dent in the wall.
“Get out.”
“What the fuck did you just say to me?”
“I said, get out. Get the fuck out of my house, Glenn.” Ashley’s voice is steady in direct opposition to her shaking hands. “And take all your shit, because you aren’t coming back here. Ever.”
He grumbles and kicks the side of her couch and she can hear the wooden foot splinter. She doesn’t hover as Glenn briskly makes his way around her apartment, picking up clothes and shoes and other random crap (when did he bring a basketball over?) and nears the front door. He reaches for the handle, but pauses and studies her.
“You’re going to be a lonely, old, ugly woman, Ashley,” he says. “You’ll grow old and unwanted with all of your shitty books and those weird fucking dolls and no one will ever love you.”
“Fuck off, Glenn.”
“When you come to your senses, call me and we can patch all of this up, yeah? You’re just being emotional — when’s your period due again?”
“Get fucked, get out of my house, and lose my fucking number.”
He stares at her for a few more seconds before turning the knob and disappearing through the door.
The adrenaline drop is brutal, and she sinks to her knees on the linoleum floor in sobs that wrack her body. She doesn’t notice the shards of glass digging into her jeans as she tucks her feet underneath her with her head in her hands and her hair curtaining her cheeks.
Ashley just sits there, sobbing, for long enough that her joints ache and her throat feels raw, and she decides she should at least get up and lock the door. Then she can take a long, hot shower and go to bed and cry in comfort if there are any tears left to choke out. She can clean up the glass in the morning.
She manages to avoid the rest of the glass on the linoleum and pulls her socks off when she reaches the edge of the rug in the living room so that she doesn’t track shards through the rest of her apartment. The socks are tossed at the glass pile in the kitchen as the deadbolt slides into place smoothly. She leans her head against the door and takes a few deep breaths.
Ashley had known it was coming. Really, she had. She hadn’t dated much, but knew enough to see when a relationship was turning sour. Truthfully, it had been going downhill for months — Glenn had been really into that redpill bullshit on Reddit lately and she thought she saw a Tinder notification on his phone recently that she hadn’t really thought much of at the time — and she knew it was going to have to end, and that it would be messy, but tonight was just the final straw. She couldn’t take it anymore.
She snags her phone from the arm of the couch on her way to her bedroom, opening Glenn’s contact and blocking his number without a second thought.
Emerging from the hot shower into the cold air of the bathroom makes her skin raise in goosebumps and she wraps herself in the fluffy black towel before turning on the little space heater she had tucked under the vanity. She dries carefully, making sure every inch of skin is dry before redressing, and then leaves the room and makes her way to the queen bed that she’s pushed into the corner of her bedroom, beneath the window.
The venetian blinds are drawn, but she has an instinctual urge to raise them so that she can see the sky.
As she scoots down into her grey sheets, an odd wave of feeling crashes into her hard enough that her head spins for a moment, and she has the same instinctual urge to just… start talking. So she does.
“Hey universe, I don’t think you really listen to people, but you can’t send me another man like Glenn again. I can’t handle another man I have to teach basic decency to.”
Ashley looks over at her phone with something that feels like longing.
“I wish I had someone to talk to. A friend, really. I don’t have any anymore, but it’s my own fault for not reaching out to people. I’m twenty four and I can’t even keep a friend — how pathetic is that?” She asks no one as tears pool in the corners of her eyes. “I can’t keep… anyone. No one stays, and I don’t make an effort to keep them. I just— I wish someone would stay.”
A star burns up in the atmosphere.
---
“Heyyy… Weird Barbie?” Ken calls out as he stands awkwardly on the doorstep of Weird Barbie’s house in the early morning sunshine. His hands are clasped behind his back as he sways on his feet as he waits for a reply — he’s not rude and won’t just walk in.
A figure in pink camouflage print cartwheels into view from somewhere on his left, stopping in the middle of the room and sinking languidly into a middle split. “What can I do you for, Ken?” She asks, looking up at him with her arms crossed.
“I— Barbie said you’re the Barbie to go to for strange feelings and weird things happening?”
“I have helped a few Barbies with varying afflictions, yes. Why do you ask?”
“Can you… can you have a look at this?” He asks tentatively as he fiddles with the cap on his head, and if Weird Barbie isn’t mistaken, with an air of self-consciousness in his tone.
“Come sit,” she commands, slapping the ground in front of her.
Ken obliges, sitting criss-cross-applesauce in front of Weird Barbie. He bites his cheek as he looks away from her and raises his hand to the cap, lifting it slowly until he rests it in his lap.
“Oh— Oh I can’t help you with this.”
“What? You have to? What am I supposed to do?” Ken asks desperately.
Weird Barbie leans forward and Ken tips his head down for her to get a better look. “Is anything else happening?”
“I’ve been… I keep getting these weird dreams about a girl. She’s a different age every time but it’s definitely the same girl. It’s like I’m getting her memories? She has to be an adult now, based on some of them. She’s so… she’s so… sad.” Tears well in his eyes and he wipes at them with the back of his hand before they can fall. “I can feel it.”
“You know this is what happened to Barbie, don’t you?” He nods, replacing the cap on his head. “Things started changing for her and then she left Barbieland to find her girl to fix the rift.” Weird Barbie pauses. “You might have to do the same, Ken.”
Panic rises in his chest. “I can’t do that patriarchy thing again. I broke everything in Barbieland and I fell into it so easily the first time and Barbie hated me and I can’t…” he trails off, then mutters, shaking his head. “Those damn horses.”
Weird Barbie’s voice softens alongside her gaze. “You’ve done a lot of work on yourself since then, Ken. It’s been years, you know? The Real World is in 2026 now, so you’ve been learning and growing in Barbieland for at least two years. You’re a lot more secure now that you haven’t had Barbie around to obsess over and we deprogrammed you pretty easily. You know better now, don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” he answers dejectedly, playing with the hem of his shirt where it lays in his lap.
“Think about it, and come back to me if you decide you want to go back to the Real World to seek out your girl.”
He leaves Weird Barbie’s house just as forlornly as he walked in. Could he go back to the Real World? Would it just be a repeat of the Patriarchy Incident? He hopes he’s better now, but he was influenced so easily by some billboards and just a couple of books…
That’s what he’ll do. He’ll get some books!
Ken doesn’t have a car, so he crosses Barbieland on his rollerblades to find the library and speak to Barbie. She’s very nice about the whole thing and points him in the direction of the feminist literature. He recognises most of the titles from his initial ‘re-education’ (courtesy of Weird Barbie’s effort to deprogram him) but picks a few out anyway to take back to his House of Ken (something the Mattel executives had introduced when they left Barbieland — the Kens now had their own suburb with their own houses!) to reread while he thinks about what he should do. Barbie also points him in the psychology direction and helps him pick out a few books on susceptibility and something called ‘cults’.
A few hours later, as the sun has started its descent over the mountains, Ken feels a lot better. He’s reread all the books he brought home from cover to cover on his navy futon and even looked up some things he wasn’t sure about on the computer (another gift from the Mattel executives to make sure the patriarchy thing didn’t happen in Barbieland again… they’d introduced lots of things since his huge mess up…) and now he feels a lot more secure. He now also knows what a cult is and feels a new kind of guilt and shame at the fact he was briefly a cult leader.
He has to go find her. If that will fix his weird dreams and the weird dark patches in his hair… and maybe she won’t be so sad anymore. Maybe he can work out how to fix her too.
His chest hurts when he thinks about his dreams. She’s so… lonely. He thinks that’s the word. Lonely. She feels like he did with Barbie, and then with the Kens, and then when Barbie left again.
Barbie leaving Barbieland for the Real World put a lot of things in perspective for Ken, which is part of what Psychologist Barbie attributed to his easy deprogramming. He’s doing a lot better now. The emptiness and yearning in his chest has been mostly replaced with something else — he has gotten really close with Allan again which mostly fills the gap that he used to feel with Barbie. He had to be secure on his own. He had to be his own person, have his own friends, his own likes and dislikes, and his own interests.
He had interests now! He knew he liked to read, and he liked horses, and he knew more about Beach now than he ever had before (which had been more embarrassing than anything else when he realised he didn’t know anything about his job).
He was just Ken now, rather than ‘and Ken’. He was Kenough on his own.
He could go back to the Real World.
With that realisation, he stacks up all the books, grabs his cap from the coat rack, and heads across town on his rollerblades again, stopping into the library to return the stack, then heads to Weird Barbie’s house. She’s in the main room, doing a split against the wall, and when he gets to the doorway she ushers him in immediately.
“I can do it,” he says with a smile as he moves to stand in front of Weird Barbie. “I can go back to the real world. I’m strong enough.”
She claps him on the shoulder as her leg comes down from the wall, and she crosses the room in her military boots to the opposite wall, where she pulls a curtain until it pools on the ground beneath what Ken thinks is a map.
“This is a map,” Weird Barbie confirms before he can even ask, “to the Real World. When you get there, you will be inside Mattel Headquarters on their Barbieland Relations floor. What you’re going to do, is you’re going to tell them that Weird Barbie sent you on a 5061 and you need to find your girl. Got it?”
“Do you have a pen so I can write that down?” He asks, and Weird Barbie produces a black marker from one of the many pockets in her pink cargo pants. He uncaps the pen and asks: “What was the number again?”
“Five-Oh-Six-One,” she dictates back as he writes the number on the inside of his arm.
“Okay, got it.”
Ken heads back home and finds one of those ‘gym bag’ things with his name on it in one of the closets he’s piled all of the Ken Merch into, then empties his drawers and closet into it in surprisingly little time. His shoes go in next, tucked into the side of the bag until the zip is tight to close. He takes his favourite book (the Great Gatsby, he really resonates with Gatsby), a couple of the books he’s read lately (Project Hail Mary, The Gray Man, and The Notebook) as well as a couple he’s been wanting to read and tucks them into a side pocket that now also struggles to zip back up.
The bag is a bit heavy as he loads it into the car that has materialised on the road outside of his door, but he hefts it into the backseat anyway before he crosses the road to Allan’s house and rings the doorbell.
“Hey, man. What’s up?” Allan asks his blond best friend when he comes into view.
“I have…” He sniffles as his eyes start to wet. “I have to go to the Real World again.”
“Oh, buddy…” Allan says as he wraps his arms around his best friend.
Ken’s whole body shakes as he sobs into Allan’s shoulder.
