whatever i am, i am something

gabbi - she/her

[deadaccccccount]

[highlandvalley]

[joeylikespizza]

this is the sweetes, purest, most adorable thing i’ve ever seen

[hanschensolo]

I played this while my cats were sitting next to me and they both immediately snuggled in harder and it was so pure

[human-nonsense]

This has the same energy of that video of that woman yodeling an old traditional herding yodel to make the cows come to her

[voxeterna1]

Woman who grew up on a dairy farm here. Cows LOVE music. When I was first learning to play flute, my mom would tell me to go practice in the barn so the cows could listen ( and also probably because she didn’t want to hear Hot Cross Buns for the 900th time). I would stand in the hay loft overlooking the main corral and they would all gather around and stare at me and swish their tails.

[diedfromembarrassmentlikeasim]

@dairyisntscary

[katamarei]

[fluentisonus]

Lovers of Valdero // Lovers of Hasanlu // Bronze Age Scythian Couple // Sarcophagus of the Spouses // Etruscan Sarcophagi // Roman Sarcophagus // Ilka Scarneo Monument // A Memorial to Marriage, Patricia Cronin 

[nadjasnandor]

consuming media like

[acecroft]

SAM DRAKE + denim sherpa jacket

[all-class-darling]

[honeyluvsw]

knight pngs ! images not mine, i'd just prefer you don't repost as your own pngs please.

[carine-sleepingwhales]

-free spirit-

[durrtydawg]

The Sadir Inheritance

{Sam Drake x F!Reader} Chapter 20 | "Uncle Sam's an asshole."

Sam is doing his level best to inhabit the quiet domestic life for a night of babysitting - but the instincts that made him who he is refuse to stay dormant. 

masterlist ✨

Prev chapters : 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19

Word count: 7.7k

CW: Sickeningly sweet guardianship and a complete derailment of realistic timelines x

A/N: For all intents and purposes, Cassie is still an infant in the TSI timeline. Thank you. Please try to enjoy one very Sam-heavy chapter.

How does a sleeping baby manage to weigh roughly nothing and somehow also forty-five kilograms at once?

This is a question posed internally by Uncle Samuel Drake as his seven-month-old niece lies conked out on his chest.

She has been for the better part of ninety minutes; face mashed sideways into his sternum, one fist curled into the collar of his sweater, as though the grip is tethering her to whatever dreamscape babies sail through, a thin line of drool darkening the cotton. Every few minutes she does a little shuddering sigh, and each time she does it Sam stops breathing until she settles.

He's been lying half-reclined into the corner of Nathan's stupid comfortable couch, one arm a permanent brace across her back, the other switching between the TV remote and blonde wisps of hair, for long enough that the light through the window's gone from orange to navy.

He could move her. He's been told he can move her; his brother, halfway out the door with his wife and a face that hadn't looked that relaxed in weeks, had said:

"You can put her down in the crib, she'll be fine, you don't have to just -"

Sam had responded:

"Yeah, yeah, course."

And had subsequently not moved a muscle.

The TV mutters away adjacent to him, volume low, light flickering softly across the room. Not, for once, anything to do with deserts or dynasties or the cumbersome catalogue of his recent mistakes - just some BBC re-run from across the pond, a decade old at least: Hidden Killers of the Georgian Home.

Arsenic in the wallpaper, lead ground into face paint. Domestic poisons of people pottering cheerfully about houses and daily routines that were slowly wiping them out. Sam finds it oddly restful. There's something soothing about other people's catastrophes, especially the three-hundred-year-old kind that it's far too late to do anything about.

Across the room, on the little desk where Nathan does his admin and his spreadsheets and whatever other cryptic adult sorcery keeps this house upright, a small light glows: Sam's dead phone, plugged into the laptop by its umbilical cable, the recovery Nathan set running several hours back still grinding away. The photos'll still be on it even if the screen's cooked, his brother had said, ever the sentimental sibling, palm out for it. Lemme pull them off before you trash it. And Sam, who had wanted the photos with an intensity that made his palms sweat, had said: 

"Sure."

Indifferent as anything, and had then checked on the little crawling progress bar roughly nine hundred times in the past two hours.

He breathes out slow. The presenter moves on to the horrors of Regency skincare. Sam lets her take him with her, gratefully, into a world where the only thing quietly poisoning anyone is their own wig as opposed to their expertise in self-sabotage.

The documentary can only hold him so long, though. Sam was never built for sitting still - just shy of five decades and the knack has never once taken - and after a while the enforced stillness starts to itch - nothing to do with his hands but hold a sleeping baby and thumb a remote. He shifts as far as a man pinned under an infant can shift, which is barely at all, and lets his eyes wander the dim room instead - the scatter cushions, the framed photos, a lone sudoku puzzle book marooned on the coffee table, soft clutter of a life that keeps its shape even when set down for five minutes.

Restless. He's restless, and there's nowhere to put it.

He sighs, gaze drifting towards the fridge. He counts the magnets; four, five, six - Hm.

There are, he happens to know, four bottles of something Belgian and overpriced in the door of his brother's refrigerator, bought for a barbecue that got rained off shortly after he'd 'come to stay', and they have been calling to Sam in the small hours since.

God, he's thirsty.

He weighs it up, turning his head to and from the kitchen.

Cassie sighs her tiny sigh against him once more. He stops breathing, head snapping back to face her. She settles. He starts again.

He is, technically, on duty. Sole charge of a tiny person who can't stand on her own legs with total confidence, and the responsible thing would be to drink water and stay sharp and be the kind of uncle who can be trusted not to - well... not to do most of the things Sam has historically done.

He looks down at the swirl of golden hair under his chin.

"Do you think," he hums into it, very quietly, "daddy'd get mad if Uncle Sam borrowed one of his beers?"

Cassie does not weigh in. She is, to her great credit, and his relief, a heavy and committed sleeper.

"Yeah." Sam nods slowly, at her compelling case. "That's what I thought. Alright. We won't tell him."

Getting up off a couch with a sleeping child on your chest is, it turns out, a feat of engineering that would have impressed the men who built the pyramids. Sam does it in stages, concentration plugged in as if he were defusing a small bomb: Hand cupped to the back of her skull, other arm scooping under, weight transferred, abdomen engaged, knees doing the work, breath held the entire time, every motion smoothed out to nothing so the up-down of standing reaches her as a gentle swell. She frowns in her sleep. Pouty top lip suckling at the lower.

"There she is," he breathes. "C'mon. We're on a heist."

He pads through to the kitchen, baby cradled high against his shoulder, flip flops near silent on the tile, and stands in the cold blue glow of the open fridge feeling like a burglar in a house where he's been sleeping.

Which is, he supposes, accurate enough.

He gets a bottle out one-handed, nudges the door shut with his hip, and then faces the tedious problem of the bottle opener. Three and a half weeks of eating here and he still opens the wrong drawer for a spoon.

Sam starts a cautious game of cupboard roulette. Top drawer: tea towels, a pizza cutter, an alarming density of those little bag-clip things. Second drawer: food menus, batteries, a lone lemon squeezer. Third drawer -

"Where the hell's your old man keep his - " Sam mutters, leaning to peer in. " - aha."

Bottle opener. He hooks it out, levers the cap off against the lip of the counter one-handed -

The cap pings free and hits the tile with a noise that, in the hush of the house, sounds like a tray of cutlery dropped off a great height.

"Shhh-"

Her whole body startles - arms flinging wide in an infant-reflex way that never quite leaves them - and her face screws up around a held breath, the gathering, the dreadful little silence before the storm, and Sam's already going, "No - no nono, hey, hey, it's okay, that was just-"

Too late.

The wail comes. Full, outraged, and astonishingly loud for something that fits in the crook of one arm - the kind of sound that bypasses the ears and goes straight for the cerebral cortex. Sam's whole body responds before his mind does, the bounce, the sway, the desperate jiggle-walk, the murmur, "okay, okay, I know, I know, I'm - ah, shi- uh - shhh-ugar."

It is not landing. She is winding up, not down, fists balled, face gone furious red, working her way toward the big leagues - and Sam, who has talked his way out of literal life-or-death scenarios, feels something close to actual fear prick at him.

"Okay - okay - hang on-" He yanks the fridge open again one-handed, casting around with the wild eyes of a person who doesn't know which wire to cut to defuse the bomb. Milk? Does he warm milk? He doesn't know how to warm milk because he wasn't listening to his sister-in-law - he doesn't know the temperature or - oh, thank god - his eyes snag on a box of those squeezy yogurt pouch things on the second shelf, the cartoon animal on the front grinning at him, and he lunges for one.

He hip-checks the fridge shut and beelines for the nearest chair going - Nathan's desk, in the corner of the dining end - beer in one fist, pouch in the other, howling baby against his shoulder, the whole operation about as graceful as a cartoon banana peel incident.

He drops into the desk chair, plonks Cassie down on the edge of the desk, braced upright against his forearm, gets the foil lid of the pouch between his teeth, twists it off, spits it somewhere into the dark, and presents the open pouch to the furious creature in front of him as his ears ring.

And, in a marvellous turn of events, she latches on and the wail cuts out mid-note.

Blessed, ringing silence, broken only by the rhythmic, deeply committed suck of a baby with her priorities firmly back in order. After a moment her free fist uncurls from the air, resuming its hold on his sweater.

"Thank God,"; Sam breathes, sagging back into the chair.

He gets his own drink to his mouth at last - a long, grateful, hard-won pull - and on the way down he taps the neck of the bottle gently against the foil of her pouch.

"Salute, bambina."

Cassie suckles, and stares at him.

She does the unblinking intense thing that babies do, fixing him over the top of the pouch with flat, somewhat solemn attention akin to a tiny judge weighing a sentence.

"What?" Sam says. "What. What do you want? Hm?" He takes another sip under the stare and she reaches up and, with a 'bah!', pats his jaw with a small, profoundly yogurty hand.

"Ugh - yeah- thank you. Okay. Okay." He huffs, scrubbing at the smear with the back of his wrist.

"How 'bout a… A story. You want a story? That I can do. Allegedly." He queries, sucking the yogurt off of his wrist.

He shifts the beer to the hand braced behind her, frees the other up, and clears his throat - and hits, immediately, a wall. What story? What story does a person tell a baby? His entire repertoire is heists and bar fights and three or four things still under active investigation in two countries.

"Right. Let's see, uh… Once upon a time, there was a - a princess." He scrambles, "In a big old castle. Lots'a… dresses, and -"

Cassie's face crumples. The bottom lip comes out around the pouch as the opening bars of a formal complaint start up from somewhere in her chest.

"Alright, alright, scrap that, scrap the princess, jeez, tough crowd -" He bounces her gently, heading the meltdown off at the pass. "Okay. Okay. How about… pirates."

The crumple pauses.

Sam freezes mid-bounce, wincing, every muscle braced, riding out the long half-second in which it could still go either way -

"A pirate. C'mon. You gotta do me a solid here, kid, pirates is all I've got."

The crumple reverses. The lip retracts. She resumes suckling, and watches him, provisionally willing to hear the man out.

"Right." Sam rolls his shoulders like he's stepping up to a mic. "Once upon a time, there was a pirate… uh… captain."

He checks her face - she's watching him, placid, contented, no sign of the wobble - and he gives a small, pleased pout, thoroughly encouraged by his own material.

"Dead handsome. Roguish. Bit of a legend up and down the coast."

Cassie gurgles wetly around the pouch.

"Oh, you laughin'? At the captain? That's slander, that is. Actionable." He pokes her tummy; she squirms, delighted, nearly losing the pouch.

"Anyway." The word comes out - and then stalls, because, hang on. Is he actually doing this? Is he genuinely about to take the single thing that's chewed him up worst in forty-odd years of eminently chewable material and repackage it as light infantile entertainment? With voices? A bedtime bit, out of his own personal screw-up?

"The… captain's got himself a first mate. Younger fella."

He glances down. Cassie gazes back up at him, pouch going steadily, not a care in her entire tiny world - and Sam decides that her happiness outranks his heartache tonight.

"And the two of 'em have got - " he reaches over and plucks a crumpled Chinese takeaway menu off the corner of the desk, holds it up like Exhibit A, then taps it matter-of-factly against the top of Cassie's head " - a treasure map. Big red X. Buried gold nobody's clapped eyes on in a hundred years. So off they sail to go dig it up."

He sweeps the beer hand in a slow arc across an imaginary horizon. Cassie's eyes track the bottle like a metronome.

"Miles of open sea. Days of it. And then one mornin', middle of nowhere, they're hangin' over the rail, lookin' at the dolphins and the little fishies and -" he gasps, big and theatrical; her eyes blow wide to match him "- up pops… a mermaid."

She coos.

"Yeah. Exactly. Big moment." He leans in, conspiratorial. "And this mermaid knows everything, Cass. Every reef, every current, where all the old wrecks went down. Takes one look at their scrappy little map and goes - " and here Sam pitches his voice up into a wavering falsetto " - oh, that? Yeah, I know exactly where that is. You're holdin' it upside down, by the way -"

A burble.

"Mm. Cheeky. Just like that." And there she is - the ambush of her, the way she surfaces now without warning or permission, that exact upside-down, by the way sitting behind his teeth in a voice that isn't the mermaid's at all - and something bittersweet tugs at the corner of his mouth, a smile that gets halfway up and stalls. Swallow it, he tells himself, swallow it, swallow it, swallow it -

He bops Cassie on the nose to knock it loose, chasing her startled giggle like a man grabbing for a handrail just as he's about to tumble down a flight of stairs.

"So," he clears his throat, "She asks if she can tag along. Help 'em find it." The grin slips a notch. "And the captain wants to say yes - God, he wants to, you've no idea - but he's got reservations. 'Cause the sea's her whole world, right, she's safe down there, but a pirate ship? That's… Swordfights. Storms. Cannons. And the men on it - they are not nice men, peanut. The captain knows exactly what kind of men they are, on account of the fact that he's the worst one."

He stops. Takes another swig to force himself to concentrate on the task at hand.

"Reservations. That's the word. He's got 'em."

Cassie smacks the pouch against the desk. He rescues it absently and hands it back.

"But she doesn't take no for an answer, this one. So she just - swims along. Right alongside the ship's hull, day in, day out, keepin' pace, chatterin' away, pointin' 'em the right heading, and there's not a thing the captain can do about it, 'cause she is very, very smart and very, very fun to have around, and he is, frankly, nowhere near as tough as he makes out." A beat. "And the silly old pirate, he - he gets attached. Which he is absolutely not supposed to. 'Cause she's down there in the water and he's up on the deck and there's always - " he holds finger and thumb a careful inch apart in front of her, jiggling so she clocks it "always gonna be this much between 'em. He can never quite reach her. And he tells himself that's for the best."

He looks at the gap between his finger and thumb a second too long, then drops the hand.

And an echo he's spent nigh on a month failing to evict picks its moment to re-surface: his own voice, ugly and cruel, telling her to go home. Go home. Like she was a stray he could shoo off a porch. Like she hadn't out-thought, out-worked and out-classed the pair of them since day one. He'd watched her face crumple, eyes glazing over with saddened shock of something landing harder than it was aimed - except that's the lie he tells himself, isn't it. It landed exactly where he aimed it. He'd wanted it to hurt enough to stick, and it had, and she'd stopped arguing, and at the time, he'd called that success.

Something sour turns over in his chest. He takes it out on the beer.

"You want my honest opinion, Cass?" he murmurs, eyeing up a small pool of yogurty bubbles loitering around her mouth. "The captain's an asshole." He clears his throat. "Uncle Sam's an asshole. Sorry to curse, but I'm just - layin' that out early, y'know, so you grow up with the right information. Straight from the horse's mouth, 'n' all that."

Cassie blows her biggest bubble yet. He dodges the splash zone.

"Glad you agree." He rallies, voice climbing back up, because there's a baby watching him and she wants the fun part. He scrolls the empty air, as if the next page is up there.

"Anyway. The treasure. This is the good bit -" and he's off, gesturing now with the whole free hand, the beer abandoned to the desk: an island shaped like a skull, a map that only shows itself by moonlight, a riddle scratched in a cave, a magical shell necklace, a chest that turns out to be cursed, and a sea-monster with - he leans right in and drops his voice - "forty arms," and Cassie shrieks and yanks him forward by a fistful of his sweater with surprising strength.

Sam carries gamely on, laughing at the state of his niece. "an' the mermaid, of course, knows know to tame it, 'cause she's the clever one."

Cassie delivers a long, burbling editorial.

"You're right. Total carry. The boys'd have drowned off the harbour wall day one without her -"

And right there, riding high on her own delight, Cassie throws her entire small self into a shriek of purest joy - an ear-splitting, gleeful, full-lunged scream of a noise, that makes Sam jump - and both chubby fists fly up.

Including the one holding the pouch.

Which she squeezes.

The remaining payload of strawberry yogurt exits the pouch in a coordinated arc, catching Sam squarely across one cheek and the jaw, before flinging a long glistening pink splodge across the lower half of Nathan's laptop screen.

"…thanks, sweetheart," Sam grimaces. He wipes his cheek with the back of his wrist and inspects it. "More of an apricot man, myself."

Cassie beams at him, radiant, thrilled to her marrow with her own work as she claps her hands, further dispersing little splatters of pink all over the place.

"Yeah," he finds himself licking yogurt off of his skin for the second time in the last five minutes, "you're real pleased. I can tell."

The laptop, jostled by the flailing, has woken. And there behind the smeared pink streak, the progress bar - the one he's watched crawling across several hours - has crept to a sliver from the end. Ninety-something per cent. Almost done - he's almost got his photos back.

And something in his chest does a bittersweet sort of twinge, familiar deep aching wearing gladness like a dusty cloak, and Sam scowls down at himself for it, irritated, because he'd really rather not, thanks, he was doing fine.

"…Right." He hauls himself upright, hitching Cassie onto his hip. "C'mon, disaster junior. Let's clean this up before papa revokes my visiting rights."

Fortunately for Sam, there's a tub of baby wipes on every flat surface in this house, and he's come to understand they are simply the native flora of the place. He plucks a handful from the closest pack near the kitchen sink, swipes the worst of the pink off his own face in the window's reflection - catches his own eye there for half a second, fresh out of dignity, a smear of yogurt on his jaw, a baby on his hip - and has, despite his best efforts, some feelings about it.

Because the treacherous part is that even he's able to admit that this is… nice. All of it. The baby on his hip, the warm hush of the house, nobody watching him - no one to read or be read by, nothing wanted off him but stories and a sweater to grab on to - and he feels less like a man on the run from his own reflection and more like someone who might, given a fair wind, be quietly getting his shit together. Maybe this is the life. Maybe it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, being this. Uncle Sam. Beer thief. Teller of shitty pirate stories.

And then, right behind it, sharp as a stitch under the ribs: no. No, this isn't where he's meant to be. He misses it. He misses all of it - the heat, the hunt, the stupid ungodly hours, ruins by torchlight and documents by lamplight, coffee gone cold because he's too focused to drink it, and her. Her. Right there in the middle of every single frame of it, the way she's in the middle of everything now -

Oh, shut the fuck up, Samuel.

He hoists Cassie higher and heads back for the desk.

When they get back, the laptop's finished. The bar's gone. In its place, a folder sitting on the desktop, quietly holding the entire recovered photographic record of the last however-many years of Samuel Drake's slightly shit second-hand cell's life.

He sits and hazards a click on the folder… just to check.

Cassie gets re-perched on the edge of the desk, braced against his forearm, Sam working a fresh wipe one-handed over her sticky fists and her chin and the creases of her neck where dairy slop has somehow migrated.

"'Kay... Where were we." His attention is completely divided between his niece and the laptop screen as image thumbnails stutter in from the top. He clicks one half at random and there she is - and his thumb stalls on the trackpad for a second before he gets it going again.

"Right. The mermaid."

Cassie babbles a long, fond stream of nonsense at the screen.

"Yeah," Sam agrees, quieter. "Real pretty, huh?"

He carries on - half to the baby, half to himself - swiping slow through the roll with one hand while the other works the wipe over Cassie's fingers. Petra Palace breakfast. The scowl halfway up the 1,000 steps, green inky knuckles squeezing Scott's face into an expression of amused befuddlement. A blurry document behind glass. Her asleep on the train with a paperback collapsed on her chest. The narration thins out as he goes, the pirate captain quietly forgotten somewhere back near port… it's hard to do voices when your throat's gone tight in revolt.

"…an' then the mermaid," he tries, thumbing onto the next one - and it's the car rental place again, sunburnt cheeks, hands thrown up in a triumphant thumbs-up - "the mermaid rescues the whole - " and there he loses the thread entirely, because he's grinning down at the photo, and the sentence quietly dies where it stands.

A fat smear of drying yogurt sits square across the lower half of the screen, thankfully dragging him out of his stupor.

"…We'll make an artist outta you yet, peanut." He fishes the wipe back out, rolling up his sleeves. "Gimme a sec, we'll get her cleaned up."

It's her he means to wipe toward - but the yogurt's smeared lower across the frame, and clearing her means clearing all of it. So, in doing so, his eye snags on the other figure in the shot.

Scott. Off to the side, half-turned, caught not knowing the lens was on him. The backward glance. The smirk Sam clocked weeks ago and documented, without a second thought, as nothing but 'jealousy'.

He drags the wipe down through the drying strawberry smear, leaning in - not for Scott, not consciously, just to be sure he's got it all -

And the cloth comes away clean over the lower third of the frame, and Sam goes still.

Because it's not the smirk, nor the way his eyes are on her.

It's the pocket. The wipe's cleared the whole bottom of the shot, and there, in the side pocket of Scott's shorts where the low desert sun catches it - 

"What's…"

Sam leans in, eyes squinting.

A loop of fine gold chain, spilled half out. And just above it, pressed into the linen, a shape stamped against the fabric. Scalloped - no… petalled.

His fingers fumble for the tiny magnifying glass on the screen, zooming in and dragging the pocket to the centre of the screen.

A floral impression.

Sam knows that shape. Has watched it sit against her collarbone for weeks on end. Watched it click home into an ostentatious box in a Cornish crypt - cut for the slot. And - unbidden, unhelpful, and absolutely not the time for it - his mind's eye recalls how he's watched it closer than that.

The night she'd kept it on after he'd stripped her down to precious little else, the intricate metalwork settled in the hollow of her throat, rising and falling with her breath, catching the lamplight every time she moved. He'd pressed his mouth to the skin beside it and the metal had been cool against his lip, warm on one edge where it had lain against her, and she'd cursed right into his hair - and he'd thought, absurdly, tenderly, in the middle of everything, that it suited her. That some things simply know where they belong.

The locket.

He stops wiping. Cassie keeps up her happy commentary against his side; he doesn't pay much attention to it.

Because the funny thing - the thing that lifts the hair on his forearms - is that Scott claimed to have found that locket in a townhouse in Wiltshire. Weeks after this. Sam knows the exact moment, because Sam was on the phone for it: four hours deep into a microfilm reel with his eyes gone to sandpaper, when Scott had called in from the road.

"There's a weird little necklace thing in the mix too. Looks old. Could be junk."

Could be junk.

And yet here it is. In his pocket. In the desert. Days - weeks before a Wiltshire townhouse Scott hadn't so much as set foot in.

"…Huh." Sam says, very quietly.

Cassie babbles up at him, a long burbling question, and he answers it on autopilot;

"You see that, Cass?" - already dragging the laptop square in front of him, the wipe abandoned in a sticky pinkish ball, two clumsy fingers finding the keys.

It's probably nothing. People misremember where they picked things up. He knows that, tells himself that - except Scott had that necklace before he ever said he did, and lied about it. It feels like a strange thing to lie about.

And Sam finds he very badly wants to know what else he doesn't know.

Call it boredom. Call it three and a half weeks of nothing to point himself at but booze and sex with strangers and a total lack of self-discipline. Call it… professional curiosity, perhaps. Muscle memory, the itch derived from spending his whole life pulling threads - call it anything, in fact, except what it is, which is that he was supposed to let this go. All of it. Him. Her. The inheritance, the whole shoddy mess of it - dropped, for the greater good of all three of them, that was the deal he made with himself in a parking lot in the Great British Rain.

But.

He types up his name two-fingered, hunched, Cassie supervising with a fresh fistful of his sweater: Scott Parker.

And Scott's… there. Real enough. A digital scattering of his career: an old dig-team photo, a name buried in an acknowledgements list on a thesis, a lapsed account or two, a tagged shot from some college alumni event. Ordinary. Findable. A man with a genuine, traceable, relatively unremarkable life. Nothing that prickles.

Which, somehow, only makes the necklace revelation nestle deeper into uncomfortable territory. Because a man with a pretty traceable life and nothing to hide had still… curated a lie about a locket for no reason on God's earth that Sam can see.

So he goes at it the way he goes at everything. Sideways, dirty, from underneath, the only way he's ever found anything worth finding.

Now, Sam's grasp of the internet is loose at best, but there is one thing a hundred grim motel-room searches for things that don't want finding have taught him: the good stuff never lives on page one.

Page one is for people selling you things. The primetime slot. The deeper you scroll - past the polish, past the ads, down into the unloved sediment of online drivel - the stranger and older the results get, and strange and old is exactly where Sam works best.

"Parker, Parker, Parker."

Because his whole life, by his own endless telling, has been this - chasing, digging, hunting, scrounging for scraps and making something out of nothing - Sam ends up where these things always end up, down in the digitised guts of old regional papers nobody's opened in thirty years.

Cassie, bored of the screen's silent nonsense, rediscovers the far more compelling terrain of her uncle's face. A small hand closes around his nose. Another finds purchase on his cheek and squeezes with proprietary confidence.

"Yep - thank you - very helpful," Sam mutters, dipping and weaving without ever taking his eyes off the screen, letting her mash his features around like dough - because his attention has narrowed to a single point now, and somewhere deep in his gut, a low hum has started revving up, climbing, and he couldn't tell you why, and it will not stop.

A scan loads onscreen. Grey, blotched, the column bleeding at the edges, the date along the top: 1994. An obituaries page of a local New South Wales tabloid. Sam's eyes track down it on reflex, the dear-departeds, the in-loving-memories, strangers' grief, left, right and centre; nothing, nothing -

Christopher Parker.

Sam stops.

He leans in.

PARKER, Christopher. Lost his life overseas, August 1994, aged 34 years. A man who spent his life chasing history across the globe, and who died doing what he loved. Dearly loved husband of Carly. Adored father of Scott and Kieran. In our hearts always.

He reads it twice. Then a third time, slower.

"Doin' what he loved?"

Sam sits back in Nathan's desk chair, lets a slow breath out through his nose, and looks at the grey little box of words.

So. There it is. Scott's dad. A man who chased history round the world, exactly like his boy went on to do, dead thirty years gone, when Scott would've been - what. A kid, maybe.

That's not… sinister, necessarily. That's just sad. That's a boy who lost his old man young and grew up to do the same dangerous thing that killed him, the way people do, salting the wound for the rest of their lives.

And maybe - Sam turns it over, wanting it to fit - maybe that's all the necklace ever was, too. Some heirloom. Some last thing of his father's he didn't fancy explaining to two acquaintances, didn't want the patronising sympathy or the hounding questions, so he tucked it into a story about a townhouse in Wiltshire to keep the whole thing light.

People do that. People lie to keep their grief to themselves. Sam would know.

Can't be anything untoward in a dead dad and a secret locket.

Can there?

He chews the inside of his lip, eyes still on the obituary.

"…What d'you reckon, peanut?" he murmurs.

Cassie, gnawing thoughtfully on his sleeve, offers no opinion.

"Yeah. Nah. Me neither."

Because 'doing what he loved' is the kind of thing you write when what he was actually doing doesn't bear writing down. Sam's read enough of those. Said enough of those, if he's honest, standing over enough holes in enough ground - he knows the performance of a tidy sentence laid gently over an untidy death; a tarpaulin laid over something you didn't want the family to see.

And the locket, and the little lie, and the boy who grew up and forged a career in the same thing that put his father in the ground - and who never once, in the better part of months of deserts and digs and beers and fist fights, so much as mentioned it -

It snags. Catches, like an oversized sleeve on a door handle, and yanks him back to reassess.

It's nothing he can put a name to yet. Nothing he could say out loud without feeling like a paranoid idiot. Just a low rumble starting up somewhere under his ribs, the one he's learned, over a tumultuous and questionably-spent life, never to ignore - the one that says look closer, look closer, you're missing something.

He shifts Cassie more securely into the crook of his arm, settles his elbows on the edge of Nathan's desk as she starts her best Chopin impression on the wood, and lets his two slowest fingers go hunting across the keys, spelling out the name that's set the whole thing buzzing.

C-H-R-I-S-T-O-P-H-E-R.

The cursor blinks, patient, in the empty white box.

And he starts to type.

P-A-R-K-E-R. Then, after a beat, the year of the obituary: 1-9-9-4 - D-E-A-T-H. Enter.

The first page is chaff - the living Christopher Parkers of the world, estate agents and rugby coaches and a chiropractor in Illinois - and Sam scrolls straight through them, down, down into the sediment, thumbing the trackpad with a knuckle while Cassie now works, frowning, at the Chinese menu.

And near the bottom, half-swallowed by a genealogy site that looks like it was built in the eighties, there's a link. Another scan. Another regional paper, the same August, and this one isn't an obituary.

It's a news piece.

The headline loads first, in tall smudged capitals across three columns:

NEW SOUTH WALES RESEARCHERS FOUND DEAD AT KASTROM MEFA'A RUINS.

Sam's eyes are already moving, fast, snatching fragments off the degraded scan the way you'd snatch things from a burning room -

…Christopher Parker, 34, an amateur antiquities enthusiast of Yamba's northern suburbs… discovered alongside Martha Anyango ------, 29, a postgraduate archaeological researcher… the pair are understood to have entered the ancient site without permit or supervision…

A young woman. Twenty-nine. A researcher. Clever, young, brought out to the desert on somebody else's watch -

He clicks open a new tab, typing in Kastrom Mefa'a, flicking back to the prior while it loads.

Something thwaps him gently across the mouth.

He blinks.

Cassie, having apparently reached the conclusion that his attention has wandered, is enthusiastically attempting to feed him the crumpled menu with a "brrrpptlfltt" of concentration. Every time he fails to open his mouth, she gives him another determined little swat with it.

"Yeah, alright."

He gently lowers the menu before she can chew a corner off it, hitches her a little higher on his hip, and turns back to the screen.

…local authorities confirmed the young woman died of a catastrophic haemorrhage; the cause of Mr Parker's injuries has not been made public… no other parties are being sought…

"Jesus…" He murmurs, clicking back to the new tab.

And there, slap bang at the top of the search results:

Umm (ar) er-Rasas (Kastrom Mefa'a), Madaba, Jordan.

Sam feels his stomach give way.

A catastrophic haemorrhage.

He can see, with a clarity that grabs his lungs and squeezes hard, her face grey under torchlight, her whole body shaking, her nose bleeding, time and time and time again - bleeding, horrific headaches, and how back in Chatham he'd carried her to the car and told himself it was the… travel, the heat, the near-death experience and the trauma of waking up beside a dead body, all, of course only worsening the original catalyst: that it was his fault for knocking her into that pool… and he never once took it back out to inspect-

A girl, just shy of thirty, a researcher, who went down into Umm ar-Rasas on Scott's father's treasure hunt and… bled… to death.

And three decades later Christopher Parker's son found himself another clever young girl, and took her to the exact same hole in the exact same ground -

And she... started feeling strange…

And… the necklace - the necklace, the thing that started this whole miserable late-night seminar - sits in the middle, sucking his attention in like a black hole, bending everything toward it. Because - run it again: if it's an important artifact, you don't lie about where it came from and then hang it round a colleague's neck for weeks. You keep it. In a box, in a safe, against your own sternum. Nobody launders a sentimental object through a fake Wiltshire townhouse just to hand it straight to the hired researcher like a party favour.

Unless the lie and the loan are a part of the same move.

He needs to call her. Now, tonight, this second - and he can't. The number lives in the brick on the end of the cable and nowhere else, least of all his head, and his phone is dead because he drowned it himself, wallowing in self-pity and fetid thoughts instead of just… checking.

And even if he conjured the number out of thin air - she wouldn't pick up. Why would she? The last thing he gave her was a horrible speech about her own good, right before she left... with him.

Oh.

Oh, shit.

The harbour, the rain, Scott jabbing a finger into his chest, and Sam's own words coming back to him: why else d'you drop the 'doctor' thing in my ear? He'd known it even then, mid-swing. Scott had been listening. Scott knew about the checkup - verbatim, early, had it ready, locked and loaded, and slid it into Sam's ear at precisely the angle guaranteed to blow the two of them apart.

He wasn't just stirring for sport. Not being a nosey prick with a penchant for drama. Aim. Scott wanted them in fragments. Wanted Sam out of the picture - needled him, wound him, handed him the grenade and stood well back - but wanted her to… stay?

It's backwards. You're running a treasure hunt, you keep the treasure hunter. The forger, the climber, the guy who's been shot at on four continents - that's the asset. The bright-eyed Masters student is the one you thank and put on a plane. Scott burned the veteran off the job to keep the girl.

Why? Why does he need her?

And then - God, and then - the other thing Scott said that morning surfaces. The thing Sam took a swing over and never once took apart:

"She found the cufflink that day instead. Again - progress."

Progress. A girl bleeding from the face out of the blue on a semi-weekly basis skips the doctor, and Scott calls it progress. Sam had heard callousness. Sam had been callous. But upon reflection, you don't call a concerning symptom progress unless the symptom is somehow part of the job.

Scott hadn't overlooked her getting worse. Scott was the only one of them paying proper attention.

Sam realises he's stopped talking out loud. Realises, too, that his arm has curled all the way around his niece, snug, like something in the room needs guarding - like he's not going to allow another precious girl slip out of safety - and there's nothing here but a laptop and a dead phone and thirty-year-old newsprint.

"Am I losin' it?" he asks Cassie, quietly. "Blink once for yes."

She stares at him with the unblinking candour of the small and sturdy.

He frowns deeper. Because there's one more thing, while the dominoes are toppling one by one. Amman. Scott barrelling into her hotel room soaked in sweat, wild-eyed, I was followed - and Sam had never seen him like that, before or since. Rattled. Properly frightened. Practically begging Sam, of all people, for reassurance. And Sam's not saying the tail wasn't real. He's got no evidence it wasn't real. What he's got is the shape of what happened after: nothing. Nobody ever showed. No second sighting, no break-in, no follow-up, not so much as a nervous glance over the shoulder - the terror of being involved in a potential chase or - God forbid, murder investigation, just evaporated over time, unmentioned, unexplained, and by the time the finds started landing in their laps; the ledger, the box, the letters, the scroll; Scott was back to wall-to-wall smirking and flirting and fucking encouraging her to do more and more, like the fear had done its job and been put away for winter.

No. Nah. That - that doesn't prove anything. He knows that. Frightened men calm down; threats fizzle; life's like that.

It just itches. Everything about the man, tonight, itches.

Sam is aware, distantly, of what all this looks like. He's watched other men do it - build mountains out of molehills because the alternative was admitting they just wanted a reason to call her. And some pathetic synapse within him puts its hand up and owns it: yeah. Maybe. Maybe he's cooking up a fantasy because fantasies give him permission to go back.

He looks up to the ceiling, huffing a breath.

Sam can't explain it. The feeling in his gut. He's not going to try tonight; the how of it is a problem for daylight, for research, for a man with more than two brain cells not currently on fire, and not in sole charge of an infant. All he knows is that every separate thing he's found tonight bends the same direction: that her, alone, with Scott, is no good thing.

A ridiculous notion. Sure.

He'll take ridiculous over wrong.

Sam is on his feet. The chair's cracked back against the wall and Cassie's clutched to his chest, startled, a small fist bunched in his collar, and the low hum under his ribs has evolved into a siren. Every instinct he owns standing straight up at once and screaming the same three words -

She's not safe.

She could be fine. That's the sane voice, somewhere at the back, ruling its objection - she could be home this very minute, dead asleep, phone on charge, a thousand miles from every type of Samuel Drake and Scott Parker and every hole in the ground they've ever loved. Could be.

But could be is a coin flip, and Sam has never once in his life let a coin land flat without looking.

Until he confirms it, she's anything but.

"Okay - okay - " He's already moving, away from the desk through the dark kitchen, Cassie jostling against his shoulder and starting to grumble, one big hand cupped to the back of her head on pure autopilot - "s'okay, peanut, s'okay, Uncle Sammy's just - " Where does Nathan keep the house phone. There's a house phone, he's seen it, a landline in this day and age, where's the damn - hallway. Hallway table. He barrels down the hall in the dark, snatches the handset off its cradle, stabs it awake with his thumb.

Dial tone. Beautiful, prehistoric dial tone.

Back to the desk, handset jammed between ear and shoulder, Cassie redistributed to one arm, two fingers already stabbing at the laptop: fox and fiddle pub bromley south east london. The results cough up half the foxes in the city - a Fox & Firkin, a Fiddler's Arms, a gastro-looking thing with the right name and none of the character - and he scrolls on a knuckle, squinting at thumbnails, until: there. Greeny-blue tiled frontage, hanging baskets gone leggy, the A-board with the chalk ghost of a hundred rewritten deals and soccer matches and happy hours. He'd started a fight at that bar. Got patched up in that cupboard. That's the one.

He does the maths on his fingers, hours leaping forward across an ocean. Late there. Last orders gone, lights coming up, some poor soul mopping, just like she was when he first encountered her in person - focus, Samuel - but somebody'll still be in, cashing up, and if there's a God at all it'll be her - and he can hear her voice and feel like the world's biggest, most fortunate idiot, and hang up, and breathe.

He dials the number off the screen. International charges be damned. It rings.

And only now - naturally, helpfully, with the line already live - does administrative panic arrive: what exactly is he going to say? Three and a half weeks of silence, an ocean of it, and his grand opening move is a phone call to her place of work at midnight like some -

The dial tone stops.

"Sorry, mate. We're closed. You can call back tomorrow." A man. Flat, tired, the clatter of glasses clinking somewhere close to him.

Not her. Sam's grip tightens on the handset. He exhales.

"Yeah - no, I know, sorry. I'm, uh, tryin' to reach one of your staff." And then he says her name. Out loud, for the first time in three and a half weeks - it comes out rougher than he means it to, like it snagged on something on the way up. "She workin' tonight?"

A pause. Long enough to hear the hum of a fridge, a chair going up on a table.

"…You taking the piss?"

Sam's stomach tips. "What? No, I - "

"Mate, she's not been in for weeks. No call, no text, nothing - number just goes straight to voicemail. I've had to cancel my holiday to cover her shifts because the boss is too tight to hire a newbie." A huff, more tired than unkind. "You find her, tell her she's got to get her arse back here. You a friend?"

Sam doesn't answer.

He can't. The phone's speaker has gone very far away and very loud all at once, his own pulse a sudden tidal wave rushing betweeen his ears - weeks, no call, no text, voicemail, and somewhere on the other side of the world a stranger is saying hello? …hello? into a phone that Sam's no longer holding to his ear so much as gripping like a guard rail on a crumbling ledge.

He hangs up. Stands there in the dark with his niece, white noise crackling down the phone, and the roar of blood rising into his head.

Weeks.

What has he done?

He didn't walk away - he was walked. Scott held the door, and Sam marched through it with his stupid ideas of nobility in his damn mouth, and left her standing there, ripe for picking, and-

He takes half a second to try and convince himself that she's simply gone off with Scott to spite him. But that's bullshit. She was always so careful about cooking up the perfect excuse. Far too considerate to leave even the job she hated high and dry.

What the fuck has he done?

Numbers. He needs numbers. A voice of reason. Victor's, maybe - which one? The man changes numbers like clothes. Chloe's? She knows Scott. The address book - Elena keeps an address book, some ugly floral thing, hallway drawer - he wrenches the drawer so hard it comes off its runner, random keys, takeout menus and rubber bands cascading over his feet, Cassie now crying in earnest against his neck.

"I know, sweetheart, I know - " he breathes, bouncing her, cradling the phone in the crook of his neck, punching in the first number his fingers dredge up, eyes wild in the dark, heart going like a fist on a door. It rings once. Twice.

"C'mon," Sam whispers.

"C'mon, pick up. Pick up."

[carine-sleepingwhales]

long road

[disease-deactivated20210414]

Andreea Dumuta

[sweet4ngell]

[nathandrakeisabottom]

The Earnest Nathan Drake (or How I Learned to Kill the Rabbit): Chapter 7 - This is Chapter One

Summary: Oh, you thought that was the entire story? Baby, that was just the pilot episode.

Shay Valentine, professional liar, master of disguise, and newest reluctant mission partner to one Nathan Drake, sends her audition tape for the Sullivan Squad (patent pending), semi-successfully leaves the house for a single bag of groceries, and discovers whether it takes treasure hunters three Xanax tablets for the courage to leave the house.

Warning: Sexual Harassment, Mental Health Issues/Panic Attack.

⋆⋆⋆

Word Count: 7.8k

“Hey Sully!” A bubbly squeal crackles sharp over the screen. “Or… Mr. Sullivan, potential employer.” 

The voice lets out a knowing, nervous chuckle— but the colored bars of a VHS test pattern overlay its owner. 

“Yeah, let’s do that. ‘Mr. Sullivan’. I’m very professional.”

But whoever it is, they’re clearly not, because it takes all of one, two, three poignant smacks before the neon bars fade and are replaced by the grainy pixels of a small girl standing in a bright, poster-clustered room. The camera captures more nostril than face. 

“Oh, this fucking thing—”

One last smack for posterity. The screen shakes. The colors warble. And by the time the camera’s tripod has stilled, the voice’s owner has moved to a more flattering distance. The voice’s owner is a She.

And She smiles with a lot of teeth. A bright yellow shirt clings anxiously to her skin and only makes the flustered red of her cheeks pop harder.

“Okay— HEY, SULLY! So, I hope you got my tape. It’s kinda an old reel, so I’ll be attaching my full dialect vocabulary and an additional performance below. I can do Southern, Russian, Queens, New Jersey, British RP, Cockney, Transatlantic, and, um, I’m still working on my Irish, but I’m a decently quick learner.” She changes her mind with a self-conscious grin. “Regularly quick learner.”

“I’m willing to relocate for the position as long as it’s paid for. I’m not exactly—” But she cuts the rest off with a pursed lip, shrugging as if too obvious to explain. “But I’ve always wanted to travel, so I will make a passionate, energetic, and proactive treasure-hunting adversary. I am knowledgeable in Greek mythos, Roman, Egyptian, Christian, Jewish, Japanese, Chinese, Norse, Hindu, but I’m of course always learning more because I… just think it’s really cool. I’m also conversational in Spanish, Italian, and Japanese... ‘Vaffanculo’.”

She salutes winkingly. 

“I have experience in self-defense, but consider myself well-armed, to boot.” Her arm abruptly flies into frame, proudly raising a bright pink tube of pepper spray from her pocket, before toggling it with a fairy-like clinking sound against its carabiner. “And as a long-term survivor of high-functioning Agoraphobia, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, anxiety, depression, and being four foot eleven and a half, I know what it’s like to be resilient. I believe I sent you my college essay about it along with my headshot and resume. No babylonian possession curses getting inside this skull.”

Her knuckles rap hollow against her temple with a cheery, if somewhat overcompensating chuckle. They fall just as fast. 

She stops laughing. 

“A-anyway, I’m sure you’ve already made your pick by now, but I just wanted to reiterate my interest in the position. I’m willing to learn and do whatever it takes to be a productive member of your team. I’ve always been… fascinated— fuck-I-suck-I-wish-I-could-think-of-a-better-synonym-right-now— by what you do and would love nothing more than to be a part of something so important. Magical. Greater than… this. I hope there’s a place for me in there.” She changes her mind. “I know. I know there’s a place for me in there.”

An uneven breath prefaces an abrupt tuck of loose hair behind her ear and a loud clasp of her hands in front of her. She shrinks under the glaring ring light and the bright clothes and the too many posters, crumbled nail polish she picks at before forcing her palms into fists with a ravenous, apprehensive inhale. Trying. Failing. But then—

Shay smiles. 

And Shay succeeds.

“And now, I will be performing ‘Out, Damned Spot’ from the seminal classic Macbeth. In case you decide to follow through with that mission in Stratford-upon-Avon. And by ‘in case’, I mean ‘when’. Again, for today, my name is Shay Valentine. Thanks for your considera—-”

Victor snorts, smoke wafting from his beak like a settling dragon, La-Z-Boy beneath like a pile of gold… and firmly hits the eject button.

⋆⋆⋆

She only falls behind because she accidentally trips over another eviscerated limb. Easy mistake.

The metallic churn of whirling helicopter blades follows close like heel-barking dogs. Barking dogs like Dictator Hawn’s howling german shepherd snouts she can taste at her toes, the airy puff she imagines at her ankles, teeth tearing into flesh. A bullet passed and a ripping hole through a head. She runs faster. 

Platinum blonde hair befalls her high-angled face, profile sharp and cut like the throwing knives she so heavily accompliced back in Central Sudan. The grass was trimmer there, the smoke: less choking. A younger her would have excuses to tell, stories for every fellow spy, every fellow huntswoman of why her beautiful face was smeared red with blood. Maybe then there would’ve been sympathy for the glaring scar sliced across her eye at the ripe age of fifteen. Too young to know what it meant to slice another man back. Slice another man open. 

But then again, she was never young. 

There was never time to be. 

Her revolver has exactly three rounds left. Or four. Or is it two? She doesn’t dabble with specifics when specifics don’t matter. When she breathes, feet sprinting over leaves and vines and fluidly over less-than-subtle landmines, it parts her panting, rosemary-red, glossed lips into grins. After ten years in the biz, she already knows she can count on another ten— even if her last draw tonight was a blank. Her hair is coiffed and voluminous. Soft and silky, as well. 

Almond-shaped nails pluck a grenade from her belt and pull the pin like she would the cap off a tube of lipstick. Voluptuous Sin-Sister: her favorite shade. But the burgundy blood of the half-dozen gunners exploding behind her is a close second. The periphery of vermillion flames behind her: less so. Doesn’t go with her skin tone. She runs faster still. 

BANG! — But the enemy’s bullet whizzes past victim-less with only an offhand twist of her neck. Her hearing: better trained than even the Dictator’s hench-mutts. She listens to the jingle of her own silver hoops tapping in heartbeats at her jaw, tinkling rings with every jump her body propels. The enemy’s breath. Her own life pulsating in her chest. It was what her government-sanctioned, professional assassin, less-than-freshly-murdered father taught her, that night on the dock when he said he was just going on a “casual Tuesday night shark tank dive”: Just believe. 

Tell the world you’ll live and the world will listen. 

But that was before the fangs tore through him on the ocean floor. 

BOOM!

And the absolute second she can pull her ravaged, thin, exquisitely-proportioned body from the detonated landmine’s rubble, her enemy’s name leaves her lips.

“Hawn.” — She spits, a bloody glob amongst the soot.

“As I recall, we’ve discussed before that I prefer Doctor Hawn.” 

She grunts in pain when she attempts to wrangle herself onto her knees— blood, sweat, and ash where life once foliaged— but it’s with an effortlessly sensual femininity. The smudges of ash perfectly highlight her heaving, sweat-kissed bosom. She blows a loose strand of hair from her elegant face on the retort. 

“And as I recall, your doctorate in dictatorship proved little admiration.”

But Dictator Dickhead remains unfazed, only a razor-toothed sneer in its place— sharpened down by the finest of evil dentists. Amelia tries not to think about the sharks. 

“Big words for such a little girl.” 

“Small words for such a big, strong man.”

Hawn sneers to combat something else. Amelia doesn’t bother with the label. Might damage his fragile ego to say the feeling aloud. But unfortunately, for her, she won’t get a chance to. Because just as she dares her foot from static shock— 

“Men, cuff her. You know how she likes to fight it first.” And with the simplest snap of his fingers, his word is law. It’s as if the very trees themselves dematerialize for bulky camo print and bulletproof vests, towering above. Herself: a butterfly pinned to a frame. “They always do.” 

She knew she should’ve packed something to blend in, too. She could’ve lied and said the green was for luck.

‘Aww, and for our tenth hate-iversary I was gonna go easy, too.” The lying part: already down pat. As for luck: a late mistress, as always. 

But for the great Amelia Danger, forever a consistent one.

“Guess neither of us will be needing this, then.” 

And without another word, her squeezed fist is lifted to the jungle’s waning light, flickering overhead fluorescent, and with it, an adjoining tangle of brass beads and brilliant gold engraved into the head of a snarling tiger tacky costume jewelry limping sadly from a single rusted chain.

“You… thief!” 

The TV sings with the whines of a fooled Doctor Hawn, speakers clipping loudly due to the restraints of the era and more-than-shoddy boom mics, and Shay gives a sightless thunk! with the butt of her palm when the colors begin to fizzle alongside the rest of him. But then again, it was the flaws of the past that made it so nostalgic.

The room’s a 12’ x 12’ suburban box. But today, it’s the jungles of Africa.

“I don’t know her by any other name, Hawn.” “I don’t know her by any other name, Hawn…”

Shay murmurs right in time, snark bitten between large teeth and a smoking pre-roll as she inspects the box before her: PAWN AMERICA PRIORITY MAIL stamped defensively across the front, as if the hostility of upper case letters will be sufficient ammunition against their local neighborhood porch pirate.

But perhaps not.

Shay seamlessly slides the switch of her trusty pink pocket knife with a soft click!, and the other half of the package’s spine gives way to the remaining haul. Inside: more globs of cheap jewelry— if anything were to resemble the gold of Amelia Danger’s Head of Waghoba, it’d need to be sandblasted off from a layer of muck— a gaggle of pagers, an unpinned brooch that bites her when she dares a closer hand, a polaroid camera, and a couple of crystals, price tags from the tourist shop barely half-scraped off. She sighs. Certainly not worth the egregious hassle of stepping outside. 

Even if the CFO of Pawn America only happened to live two doors down. 

And half-drowned in lint at the bottom, a name and phone number on a piece of cardstock. Today, Shay tells herself it's merely practice. She always wanted a camera, anyway. 

“Dani-uh-el! This is Becca Monaghan wit’ Pawn America!” The Boston accent rolls off like butter, and she nearly wacks herself to the background sound of gunfire. Dammit. She told herself she was gonna start working on her Irish. Suppose old habits die hard. “I’m-uh callin’ boutcha package ya sent us.”

“Wha—?” The aforementioned Daniel responds around what is obviously a 2pm beer bottle. Her sneer: sweeping hills. “Uh… yeah, right, sure! Any winners?”

Now that Shay thinks about it, she’s pretty thirsty herself. 

“Winner winner, chicken dinner!” “Winn-uh winn-uh, chicken dinn-uh, Danny Boy…”

She twitters amongst the whining calls of Dr. Hawn as she leans up to retrieve a half-empty plastic water bottle from a nearby shelf, the joint: into the daycare of an ashtray. She takes a swig to allow Daniel’s sigh of satisfaction to properly sit.

“Oh, thank God, because—”

“Yeah, what are these, real amethyst?” The ‘50% off’ sticker peels off in one easy swing of her fingernail. A single scoff off-receiver. “Those can spot us a pretty seventy-five each, easy. And you sent us a mountain of ‘em.”

“Oh… really?” And Arrowhead spring tastes like heaven against her lips as doubt pulls loose from his own. “Well, I mean, depends what you’re offering for them. You know, they’re a—”

“Family heirloom?” Shay finishes, a simple crinkle of her fist and the sale sticker is at home on the carpet. “They always are.” 

“Y-yeah. So I’m not willing to part for at least a hundred each.”

Awww, Danny boy thinks he has a say on the matter. 

The silence as she sucks down the remaining water tastes sweet and clear, his little gulps of pathetic mouth-breathing music to her ears. She swings toward the TV: upon, a hundred gunmen readying their weapons, Amelia Danger: perfectly-painted lips dropped in a surprised “O” as she notices the horizon cap past the palm fronds. An idea upon her swiftly-raised brow.

This was always Shay’s favorite part.

“Well, listen Danny, it’s a tough economy out there right now. Ya know I got a family ta’ feed myself.”

“Of course.” Daniel replies, teeth chattering nervously upon the glass rim.

Shay’s eyes follow as Amelia swings the Head of Waghoba teasingly to and fro, Dr. Hawn’s mismatched eyes slivered suspicious. Easy. Too easy. Amelia’s mouth parts for an innocent, white-flag-waving grin. 

“But I like ya. So I’m willing to do…” Shay sightlessly dances her hand among the junk, feigning inspection. “Six hundred for the whole thing.”

“R-really? God, thank you so much, Miss—”

Easy.

“Monaghan.”

Like breathing.

“Rebecca Sunshine Monagha—”

“HAWN!” 

Don’t worry. Shay makes sure to twist her head towards it for extra believability.

“Oh god, who the hell are you?!” After what feels like eons of practice, the tonal match is borderline seamless.

And in one flawless motion, one spinning starburst of a second, upon the screen: Amelia Danger catapults the Head of Waghoba through the leaves— and directly off the half-hidden cliff beyond. Screams (and more than a few barks) fall by the dozens. And Shay just barely manages to bite back a smile as Daniel gasps on the other line’s end. 

“No… no, wait you can’t!” — A curt smash of her thumb against the volume button. 

THUNK!

The sound of Amelia’s grappling gun soaring through the air back towards the tiger’s head trades identical for a realistic punch. Shay wails phonily, clutching a make-shift wound upon her cheek, and Danny mirrors in wonderfully earnest fear.

“Please, no, not the kids!”

“GET HER!”

Dr. Hawn’s voice clears like raucous lightning through the receiver as Shay raises it high to the television speaker, static spraying thunderous with the mercenaries’ quickly obedient gunfire and ripping flaming holes through jungle foliage.

“Miss Monaghan?!” Danny boy: pathetically.

“No! No! NOOOOOO!” Shay cries, draping an arm over her forehead.

Amelia’s victorious laughter sings in seeming villainy as the grinning, glowing Head of Waghoba meets the sharp prick of her grappling hook— dozens of burly dumb-dumbs barreling towards its quickly-emptying space, and off the side of their own death— and reeling it right back into her awaiting claws. The VHS whines within when Shay orders a fast-forward.

“You sick BASTARD!” “YOU SICK BASTARD!”

Practice has proven just the right edge of soprano turns Hawn’s mirrored call invisible. So Shay makes sure to jack it an extra two octaves.

“You’ll never take me alive!” “YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!”

Eh, why not make it three? 

Just for funzies.

“That was always the plan… Danger.” — Hawn: Certain, icy, deadly.

And for the grand finale, Shay swings the now-empty water bottle up to the receiver and gives it one, good, solid twist.

CRACK!

There is silence on the other end. Exactly three seconds before a voice warbles from the beyond.

“Miss…?

Nothing.

“Miss Monaghan?”

Nothing but the sizzling static of an overrun VHS. 1986. Classic.

“Becca?!”

And before Danny the Dumbass can utter another made-up name, she’s already hung up the phone. 

From the TV bellows a cacophony of cheers, hollers, hoots. Shay’s favorite, Shay’s medicine, an actor’s only meal: applause. Amelia: hopped into the passenger’s seat of a speeding Jeep, driven runaway by the ever-handsome Professor, Daisy Mae and Eduardo exchanging celebratory high-fives in the back.

Luck: a fickle mistress. But, friends: far, far less so. 

“DANGEEEEEER!” 

And right in sync, Shay and Amelia stand, turn, and give a long, well-deserved bow. 

And… scene. 

They could both use a victory meal. The one with actual organs decidedly more so. Her thrift-picked rainbows: wall to wall; a dozen lamps; a blaring speaker. Her fabricated world: made jungle-rous. Made hers. Made into the thing she has control over. But with a simple swing of the door, her safe world immediately bleeds for—

Quiet.

And where there once was color, adventure, life, now stands little else but a deck of cards, a lifeless shell, of a one bedroom apartment. You’d never think the same specimen could possibly live in both. 

But then again, she doesn’t really. She survives.

Reluctant, overcast sunlight turns her Oliver orphan of a cramped kitchen even more sickly-looking. A single fluorescent bulb, audibly begging for death from the ceiling. A spider scurries unseen. Shay’s starved. But dread fills everything empty when she opens the fridge hinge for what she already knows to be true. A tube of butter. A can of mandarin oranges. A half-crunched baggie of dollar ramen, flavor packet lost somewhere between the stove and the over-stained counter. Shay’s starved. All at once, she feels sick. Her belly: a hole in a tiny, miserable, quivering body.

Reality. That’s what it is.

Shay’s scared. But she said that last time, over uncooked ramen noodles.

“Well… What’s next, Danger?” - The Professor’s voice peeps uncertainly from the next room over.

And Shay can do little else but sigh, fingers freezed in the artificial wind. She reminds herself Amelia Danger probably always carries a switchblade, garden stake, bat, taser, brass knuckles, shlock (combination lock and sock, a prison tradition) and pepper spray every time she goes to the grocery store, too. 

But still she does what she does best: she lies— and tells herself she must always take the three Xanax tablets before she goes, too. 

⋆⋆⋆

Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. An ancient ritual. A witch’s curse. A brutal combination. Every day, every night. When the morning rose, and when it was slain out of the sky by an army of merciless stars that night. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick.

Earbuds in the left, knife in the right. 

Earbuds in left, knife in the right. 

Because— obviously— you should put your defense closest to the dominant hand, because a person has more strength, more dexterity in their dominant hand. Earbuds in the left, knife in the right. A box cutter in the backpack. A fire poker under the pillow. 

Shay [REDACTED] is “spunky”.

Shay [REDACTED] is “quirky”.

Shay [REDACTED] is most of the lies on the expertly color-coordinated resume that she tells herself might actually get her a job. If one’s definition of ‘job’ is ‘a life’. Keyphrase being most of.

There was once a time where mentally disturbed constituted “quirky”. At least in a movie or two. Probably some midcentury musical. Probably one of the better ones.

Her fingers fidget and dig their way around the switchblade’s handle, and the air buckles in her throat when she realizes the tip isn’t facing outwards— which means that if she had to use it, it would take an extra 0.24 seconds to flip it towards the attacker. 0.24 more seconds: the difference between life and death. And so she flips it, removes her hand, wipes her sweating palm on the corduroy, puts it back in to make sure she could wrangle it in one sweeping motion if she needed to. Checks again just to make sure.

It’s a nearly sunny Sunday on the 4pm bus back from downtown, so she bares grinning teeth and too many bags and unsheaths a trembling “Thank you so much!” to the bus driver whose eyes are too bloodshot to even tease them off the road, before she slides into the leftmost upper level, row six, seat twelve. Because at 4pm, that’s where the most sun hits through the window. And Shay just luh-oves the sun. She just might love it more than anything. Maybe even more than disco. Concrete arcs and dashes and lines sweep by the towering palm trees of Pershing Square Park, dotted in burnt blood orange along the railings, somehow miraculously made more magical behind a glass pane. 

Or maybe just safer.

Shay finagles her grocery bags up the leftmost upper level, row six, seat twelve because she’s a liar. Because if she stays on the lower level, she won’t have sufficient visual vantage for an attack from the back, but if she’s too far back on the uppermost level, she won’t have sufficient distance to run through the back doors in event of an attack from the front. 

Obviously.

Golden yellow passes in warm, uneven slats where the skyscrapers’ blockade, and Shay crosses her legs thigh over thigh once she sits down— no, someone will able to see up her skirt, so she crosses ankle over ankle, no wait, because if the bus were to crash, she’d be propelled into the railing and her feet would break like twigs, snap, snap, she can practically hear it, has too vivid an imagination, so back thigh over thigh they go— but then again if a truck were to crash from the side and flip the bus over, then—

Snap.

She freezes and keeps herself thigh over thigh, even when an elderly gentleman beside her, face clouded over in menacing stubble and an even more menacing sneer: his eyes linger a hair too long. The slide over the bridge out the city pinpoints the dip between grandeur and suburb; soon, the steel highrises make way for 7/11s and sketchy-looking car dealerships parading fluttering air dancers in place of customers and the same endless, identical four-way intersections, sun sizzling yellow like a bad filter over a Hollywood movie set in Mexico. And as she watches them glide over the sewage-stained waters of the LA river, Shay uses her endless, overflowing, most whimsical of imaginations to imagine the worst.

Worst Case Scenario Handbook. Yellow cover. Page 5. 

Page 5: How to Escape a Sinking Car

She slides her earbuds into each ear, smacks her thumb into the ‘play’ button at her hip, and in a strike of honking cars and the sound of blaring trombones three thousand miles and an entire lifetime away, Diana Ross sings the soundtrack to a world better than hers. In her pesky, self-mutilated fingers— a swift chomp! of nail off the thumb of her right hand— a little, yellow book, and the tales it tells of how she’d survive if her bus plummeted off the edge and the world decided it didn’t want her anymore. Shifts back to ankle over ankle. Thigh over thigh.

Amelia Danger always gets to sit spread-eagle. Much more comfortable that way.

Disco croons paint the slits of dark shadows back in sunlight, caroling crackling from her walkman, and suddenly the little inked cartoons of drowning Buicks start to paint over in… something else entirely. The sun gives mercy between sporadic suburbs, the last few trees left in Los Angeles County, greens and yellows slashing sweet across the pages like stage lights. Before her very eyes, the words transform. Her world transforms. And there’s no better introduction to Step One, than the belaboring glides of a slide guitar.

Step 1: Open the windows, duh.

So, you’re taking your car for a swim. How… considerate. While a traditionally unideal pastime, if you are to consider such a feat, anyway, know that experts always recommend to keep your windows ajar while driving by open water—

So her eyes dart, a meerkat’s, wide and anxious, over the tops of heads and spot square where the panes of glass already trade for open air. The barest hint of release of strain from between her shoulder blades. 

“Check.” — She whispers under her breath. Careful, calculated, like speaking Shakespeare.

Step 2: Say goodbye to your swanky ride.

But if you prefer to live on the edge, and find that your windows won’t roll down in the event of an unfortunate swerve, use your foot, shoulder, steering wheel lock, or alternative weighty, phallic-shaped object to break one open.

And because she knows she can skip step two, there’s room now. 

“Check.” — Dark, distinctive, personal, like spouting poetry. Edgar Allen Poe.

Room for fantasy. An image idles beside her eyes: of her own furrowed brow and a Bruce Willis grit as she tells the passengers to stand back, a strong, certain palm thrown behind. Not for any particular purpose, but perhaps just for the sake of a flourish. Because hell no, she doesn’t understand the metrics of water pressure. She doesn’t know how many weights she’d need to sling to deadlift a car. Hell, she doesn’t even know how to shoot a gun.

But theatrics, fantasy, art, that burning, all-consuming, completely and utterly unnamable feeling in her chest that tells her she is alive: those are things she understands. 

Because those are the things that are real. 

Rising action star and sufficiently-breasted ingénue Shay Valentine (so she has enthusiastically settled on for this week) draws the garden stake she always carries from her bag and strikes the glass once, the sound of water rushing and gurgling below the tires, the wail of a police siren already calling past the middle distance. The passengers gasp in terror and joy as she plunges a second strike. Again. Again. And on the fifth and final, the center cracks open in a brilliant string of spider’s web. The water rushes, the crowds call, but the determined smirk so beautifully, so elegantly, so naturally etched across her lips never even thinks to falter. The bus-goers: wild, ravenous in their cheers. A distant trombone solo: tearing victorious through the plummeting water. All of life: a beautiful, beating, alive thing. A thing she is a part of.

Her thighs, splayed open across the seat. Because it’s more comfortable that way. 

God, she loves the fantasy of being comfortable.

But disco comes in at a damn close second.

On the intersection of Americana and Brand, a smashed Toyota wafts too thick with smoke to see its owner. To see if there’s blood. Pieces, all over the pavement. A policeman shakes his head to a curious pedestrian, who doesn’t even bother taking his headphones off first to ask.

“Excuse me?”

Her world, the real one: drowning buses— and not even making the news. 

“Sorry, excuse me?”

She moves back to ankle over ankle. 

“Sorry, but do you know which stop to get off for the Americana?”

And when her ignorance still bears no fruit, she submits, and plucks a single earbud free before turning uncertainly to the voice behind. Low and behold: the same scraggly man on the bench beside, eyes no longer leering, villainous, familiar. But rather, wide and welcoming. A soft cradle of a question.

And Shay’s heart sinks with guilt.

“Totally!” But she’s no green. The switch comes easier than breathing, everything lilting in proper, sufficient gentility, bearing a toothy smile as she twists to give full attention. She loves it when people smile at her. And so it only makes sense to smile back at him. “Brand and Harvard. Maybe… five more minutes? I can give you the heads up, if you want.”

He’s people. And Shay loves people.

“Great. Much appreciated.” He bears an earnest grin and any lingering weight lifts free as air before she can so much as graze her eyes back down to Step Three. 

Step 3: 

“Ya know, my wife and I used to go there all the time.”

And Shay loves people. She goddamn loves people. So, it’s stupid when she thinks she feels her teeth begin to grind.

“Aw, that’s so sweet!” 

Maybe she says it an octave higher than her normal register, which some people might interpret as phony. But that’s just a coincidence. She turns her head back to her book. And Shay reminds herself, between layers and layers of neon-colored sticky note, what a rancid, judgemental little insect she is. 

That’s what the pills are for.

Step 3: Get

“Ya know, it’s so nice to know there’s still good-hearted young people out there.”

…Oh.

And it is then that everything halts in its tracks. And Shay’s heart swells, alights like sunshine. What feels like the first time since she left her front door, she finally, truly breathes. And relief— that fickle, unruly mistress— trickles down between her shoulder blades in cooling rivulets. As if her very purpose, fulfilled. As if she was wrong.

She was wrong about everything.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find people who are willing to help others. Thank you.” 

Oh.

Oh.

And this time, when she replies, she looks at him. She really, really looks at him. And Shay smiles. Because she always liked it when people smiled at her. 

And the man with the wild hair and flower-picked meadows of stubble smiles right back.

“Of course, sir. I couldn’t agree more.” Purpose. People. Shay goddamn loves people, and the reasons are too many, too obvious to answer why. “I hope you and the missus have just the best day ever.”

Because when the mystery man smiles right back, it’s with wide, yellowing teeth, warm, button-pink cheeks, wrinkles that crinkle around the eyes, an embroidery laced that means joy. Joy that she made. Her lips ache at the sheer stretch, the sheer unrestrainedness of her smile, but she couldn’t possibly care less. Welcomes it, in fact. Because that’s what means she means it. That’s what means she did good today. She hopes he has the best day of all fucking time.  

In some distant reality, the water rushes forth, tumbles en masse into the socks and soles of their shoes, chaos erupting from the center of the earth… only to spring forth as quickly in its place: a brilliant myriad of light. Hope, sifting like sunbeams through the haphazard shards of broken glass, a whistle of wind like an old forgotten cowboy theme, signaling the way for exit. Signaling the way back to living. Because today is not the day it happens. Shay would smartly prop her foot upon the nearest seat, and extend her helping hand to the trembling citizen beside. Maybe she’d be a middle schooler in wilting pigtails. Maybe she’d be a girl her age, tears trading for mascara. A senior citizen carrying groceries back to his family of ten. Maybe it doesn’t really matter. And sure, maybe everybody dies eventually. 

But just not today.

“...You’re very pretty.” 

Shay’s body shoots forward when the wheels slide into a particularly hard stop at the corner of San Fernando and Brand— and she wonders what it would feel like if her shin snapped in half against the seat in front of her.

She doesn’t look at him when he says it. 

Thump thump, thump thump.

“You have a boyfriend?”

Thump thump, thump thump.

In fact, she tries really, really hard not to exist—

At all.

“Yeah, I do. He’s eight feet tall, but we’re working on it.” 

But she’s never quite able to do that.

“HA!” He bellows back an air-puncturing laugh. “Feisty!”

She’s pretty sure she took the Ativan. Two Ativan, actually. Pretty sure. 

“I like that.” (Not that she asked.)

The last therapist said to start with three and then, just go down to two, but the last therapist before her said to start with two and go down to one, but whenever she started with three instead of two, she felt—

“Love that.” He corrects, all teeth.

Oh God, she felt—

In some distant land, the water swells. It’s up to her calves now, dicey and dark, and the  girl with pigtails the woman her age the Trader-Joe’s-bag-laden crypt-keeper the face-less crowd of pedestrians horribly melt and mask and morph into each other. When she offers her hand, it’s not humanity that meets it on the other side. First their faces, then their shoulders, then their arms— becoming one in a sickly rat king— reaching out, just to pull her down with them. The water is rushing. So cold, it steals her very breath away. But she can’t leave without them. It’s not fair. The water: plunging daggers at her fear-locked knees. 

No, she lies. She can’t leave, because she can’t move. She can’t move. Because her body is no longer hers to own anymore.

“Look, I’m sorry if this is a bit forward—”

‘I’m sorry’ is what good people say. ‘I’m sorry’ is what kind people say.

“But my wife and I have been looking for a third—”

Thump thump, thump thump. The water is rushing. All he said was that she was pretty.

“HA! I’m kidding! Totally kidding!” 

Thump thump, thump thump.

And she should be grateful for that. She should be grateful for that.

“What are you, old enough to be my daughter?”

Her fingers, so small, too small to be anything useful, dip into her pocket, flip the switchblade’s tip forward from where it’s twisted back. 0.24 seconds lost. There was so much sun on her seat. There was so much wonderful, beautiful sun on her seat today—

“How lucky would I be, right?”

It was so beautiful.

She didn’t get to enjoy the sun enough. She thought she had more time to enjoy the sun.

“Though I’m sure your father would kill me.”

Did you know that in the state of California you can legally only carry a knife with a blade less than 2 inches in length?

“How old are you?”

Because if you stab someone with a knife with a blade more than 2 inches in length, you risk hitting vital organs and seriously injuring them.

“How old are you?”

And wouldn’t it just be the most fucked-up thing in the whole entire world— 

“Nineteen?”

The most lawless, decrepit, heart-breaking, earth-shattering tragedy the world has ever known—

“No… fifteen?”

Than for a young woman to kill an innocent man on the bus—

“Just kidding! Just kidding!”

All because he said she was pretty.

“Ha… I crack myself up sometimes.”

But that would never happen, because even in her wildest of fantasies, in the world she’s forced to build herself because there was no room anywhere else, the water’s fervor, its hunger, finally overtakes her meek, trembling, feminine 4’11’’ body entirely— and plunges it into the depths of the sea. 

“Yeesh, you seriously just gonna ignore me?”

Shay tries to catch the trumpets past the droning buzz of the air vents, the honking cars signaling death wishes to strangers for delaying their trip to Dick’s Sporting Goods for thirty seconds, but there is no longer any point. The song is over. And all that’s left in its place is reality, and a world that’s too big, too alive, for someone as small and insignificant as her.

The man sighs, an earnest, aching, forlorn thing.

“It’s so unfortunate that most folks can’t take a joke nowadays. The world was so much better when I was your age.”

And despite everything, crumpling her beating butterfly heart into a soggy, shallow, worthless paper ball… is guilt. 

There was never any point in reading the rest of the page, because she’s had it memorized since the day she got it, age eleven— realized there was a difference between being a child and a daughter—and decided she would never be a victim again.

Step 3: Get the fuck out of there.

But maybe it was never really up to her. Maybe that was the point.

“Check.” —  As she slams her itty bitty fist as hard as it will go into the stop request button. And if the world was kinder: a genuine bonafide witches’ curse.

Her chest heaves, writhes painful, black and barren, knuckles clenching til’ she can see the bones, shame slithering hot like wriggling maggots under a rotting corpse. On the sidewalks outside, the neighborhood bums sizzle on the sidewalk. Thump thump, thump thump. She sees their skin scramble for life against sunken ribs. Thump thump, thump thump. And she never did see the unfortunate driver of that smashed Toyota. If a tree falls in the forest—

“Th-thank you!” Her voice, a pitiful baby bird, for a bus driver who probably wouldn’t care if she lived or died tonight; it topples out of her throat, two octaves too high and heavier than groceries. Someone snickers. She feels embarrassed to be alive. Thump thump, thump thump. Maybe it would’ve been better if she had just eaten the butter. Thump thump, thump thump.

And for the thirty seconds it takes her to scurry off her seat, hop off from the door’s edge and smash her toes into the burning pavement below— bus wheels tearing past the summer heat before she can even check what street she’s on— she contemplates honor. Love. Life.

The things that make people kill.

Thump thump, thump thump.

Her world was going to be different. She swore she was going to be different.

Just not today.

“FUCK YOU!” 

A barrage of endless tears bruise her paper skin blue and black, grief a force too heavy against fragile, sniveling… prey like her. Eyeliner burning like brands into her eyes. Her bones struggle against a single bag of groceries— she’s an embarrassment, an embarrassment, it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t matter— and so in what universe were they ever built to carry such debilitating rage?

“FUCK-YOU-FUCK-YOU-FUCK-YOU-FUCK-YOU!”

She’ll kill him with her milk. That’s what she’ll do. He’ll be stopped. They all will. And she’ll win. And the sun in the seat will be all hers. Forever. And ever, ever, ever. And nobody will make her not want to leave the house again.

“FUCK YOOOOU— Ah!”

Shay practically slings her arm out of its goddamn socket on the jug’s journey to Glenoaks Boulevard. And it doesn’t even hit the tail light. She squeaks in pain, hand going hard to her opposite shoulder, and in the distance, a wet PFT-PFT-PFT!-ing noise as the hollow, plastic thing goes step-stoning off the indignant blacktop. 

“Fuck… you!”   

But who could possibly believe a little nothing like her?

And Shay [REDACTED] cries. She cries and cries and cries, because it’s what she’s best at. 

She’s no hero. There’s no sweeping orchestra, no waterproof mascara. She doesn’t save beautiful men from drowning buses with garden stakes. She’s the girl who cries on the corner and imagines braver, stronger, better people doing it, instead. And what she was built to do— was hope she doesn’t look too insecure when her fingers flutter down to yank her skirt from where it’s ridden up her thighs. A few feet away, the unmistakable rumble of a gaggle at teenage boys parked on the sidewalk beneath her, guffawing at something under their breath.

She sticks her hand into her right pocket, flips the handle when the tip is pointing the wrong way. Takes her hand back out. Puts it back in again. Flips it twice. Takes it back out again. 

And Shay decides she knows the truth. The world was never as big, as alive as she thought it was—

SNAP! 

The sound of a neighborhood squirrel scurrying up behind prompts her knife in a frantic flash from its pink recess, and her jaw drops open in quivering shock when the button snaps ajar: and out pops the blade, snapping into two perfect symmetrical halves on the pavement. 

CLACK-CLACK.

—She was just smaller and more dead than the rest of it.

She refuses to be a victim. 

She refuses to be a victim.

Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. Earbuds, switchblade, chapstick. A brutal combination, every day, every night, hidden under her pillow in case of a break-in. Earbuds in the left and knife in the right. Earbuds in left and knife in the right. Garden stake in the right pocket of her backpack, taser in the left pocket of her backpack, shlock in the inner right pocket of her backpack, baseball bat (a single sock rolled over top, just in case the assailant managed to grab it in time) in the inner left pocket of her backpack, zipped to the hilt, even if it kept falling out anyway, pepper spray on her house keys, brass knuckles on her work keys.

And her breath starts to choke in panic at her chest, because she realizes she forgot the second switchblade in her right boot. Second switchblade, right boot. Everytime, no exceptions, because it’s closest to the dominant hand, and a person has more strength, more dexterity in their dominant hand. 

If only she were a person, too. 

A person like she imagines other people got to be persons.

✶✶✶

Shay clicks shut the top lock, the bottom lock, the deadbolt, the door chain, the door guard, the flip guard— and for good measure— the portable lever lock that she had bought from the hardware store for $9.99, just in case. And maybe if she had bought the more expensive one like she knew she should’ve— she knew, she knew she fucking should’ve— she might even feel like it made her safer.

For a moment, all she can do is stand there, made obsolete in the silence of her stagnation-rotted apartment. Someone else’s air conditioning unit, muffled by her meticulously locked, shatter-proof windows, buzzes unsympathetically in the distance. She can barely see the meager furniture in her living room, the black hole pulsating in the center is too big. Gravity swells. Grows and grows and grows, and Shay can do nothing but shrink.

And shrink.

And shrink.

And shrink.

And everything— her half dozen eggs (because the employee stocking the full dozen was looking at her kinda funny), the last tenant’s deflated loveseat (because she couldn’t bear being locked alone with the movers), her single scotch-taped poster weakly curling off the bottom right corner (lest she catch tetanus if she steps on a loose thumbtack), her grey laminate flooring, the cheapest one any landlord in the entire county could possibly shell out for (because landlords fucking… suck)— everything, everything is humanity-lessly crushed beneath.

She’s home, and it’s not any better.

Thump-thump, thump-thump. 

She’s not even strong enough for her own living room.

Thump-thump, thump-thump. 

So why, oh why, would something like her be strong enough for life? 

And Shay crumples lopsided onto the floor.

Somewhere across her cheap, grey, laminate flooring, her tub of hummus dully rolls to safety. But there’s no point in attempting to ask it where exactly that might be. She clasps her half-empty, dirt-smeared milk bottle in a deathgrip as she holds herself, hugs herself against the pounding anxiety. Frantically finagles her backpack off the free shoulder, fingers scavenging for whatever pill happens to rattle today at the bottom. She’s learned the tactics. Trained, memorized, made it muscle memory, like a trained assassin. 

Or at the very least… like a heavily hairsprayed treasure hunter. 

The hollow plastic squeaks when she wrests the spout to her lips, half-choked on a swig and a swallow. She imagines the forever-grinning veneers of Amelia Danger. 

One: white — like milk. 

A crumple, a crunch!, as her bitty tennis shoes find purchase against an o’erturned grocery bag. She imagines the mud, the rock, the twenty-foot-tall, moss-dewed statues of a once-beloved god. 

Two: brown — like paper.

She fights to secure her breath with quivering lungs, like a bird floundering against a cage, molting feathers in its wake. She’s trying to help. The pills were there to help. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting it. Stop fighting— 

He was just being nice.

Three: green, like— her shoulders start, fingers tremble, and the facts always outweigh whatever frivolous flowers she plants in her mind, but she tries, oh god, does she try— green, like—

Bile.

Her body heaves, and she just barely manages to make it to the garbage bin before her body dives completely overboard. 

Shay’s never tasted the sting of pure acid before, but when her tears finally fall deep enough to crest her lip, she knows she doesn’t need her expert imagination to know they’re identical. Her heart pounds so violently in her skull, a throbbing egg, broken open on the counter for breakfast, that she gets her wires crossed, tactics a-muddle. The hench-mutts are barking. She doesn’t remember where she put her grappling hook. She doesn’t remember the lines. 

Shit. Was it five things you can see, three things you can taste? No, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste? No—

Four: sour— she imagines the waving reeds of Oxalis Stricta, sour grass, dotted down the intersection on the way home from school, back before she became a— 

No, no, no. 

Green, like— She was counting co— It was green like—

Green, like the jungles of Africa. Green, like the soundstages in Hollywood pretending to be a loose, sort-of-maybe, bastardized idea of the jungles of Africa.

Bee-buh-beeeeep!

Something buzzes barely among the ravenous rings of tinnitus, angry wasps at the back of her skull. Just another, and another, and another predator she can’t outrun. Shay drags a wrist across her bitter lip before fumbling for her pager, desperately thrashing off its riptide of denim. 

IT’S VICTOR.

And her meager living room crumbles away as she frantically smears the screen clear of a fallen tear— four: blue, no, salty, no, or was it— relief flooding whatever strangled, minute body her illness left remained. An unnamed number, sitting confident, still in the dead center of evergreen glass.

JOB IS YOURS. YOU IN?

She pointlessly clears her throat against the phlegm, a rock back to sitting, a manic rush at her wilting lines of mascara, as if he could really see her, fingers smashing hard to flip out the keypad and page back a lifeline. She stops, breath knocking askew up the hollows of her throat. Stares down at what she’s created.

IS HE NICE?

Her hands shake. Reconsiders. A sickly glob of sniffle. 

Stupid. Erases it. Rewrites.

IS HE LETHAL?

She’s barely pressed send before: Bee-buh-beeeeep! 

Magic, the way his reply still glows unmistakable past the vaseline lens of her tears:

LIKE A GODDAMN PITBULL. YOU IN?

And she thinks about how the sun was so beautiful today. It was so beautiful on the seat. She thought this morning she’d maybe try going to the park today. Just for a minute. Just to try. She only lasted fifteen minutes last time because the sun was coming down and the lightbulb over her bus stop was broken. She was going to do better this time. She was gonna touch the grass with her fingers. Even if there were bugs. 

She was gonna. Even if there were bugs.

The sun was so beautiful on her seat today. 

Shay gazes up from her spot on the floor— in her mousehole of an apartment, floor to ceiling, hell to heaven grey, doused in darkness, lest her haven: a lighthouse to an animal bigger, hungrier than her—- and twiddles her toes in her milk-covered soles. Perhaps just to remind herself she’s still alive, and not a corpse in a self-built tomb. 

The sun was so beautiful.

And she counts. And she breathes. 

Five: yellow… like the sun.

Dear god, does she miss the color yellow.

[aegis-7]

s h e e p !

[chlooob]

His friends call him Sully

[indyj1971]

Day Job...

The long promised part 2 ;) pt.1

(Closeups after the cut <3)

*tap for better quality*

[prettyswans]

mon cher.