This thing used to sit in our mess and eat our food and listen to our stories. Didn't you? You just sat there, listening to us, pretending to be our friend.
Admiral Cain & Gina Inviere | BATTLESTAR GALACTICA 2.11, 2.12 Resurrection Ship Parts I & II
Sleeping Sickness Chapter 33: But I Understand Your Sadness
While Dana coaches Harrison's baseball team, Cassie has a much needed conversation with her mother about her new girlfriend and why her mother has so much anxiety about Cassie starting to date.
Rating: Explicit
Content Warning: Addiction, Drug Use, Childhood Sexual Abuse (All implied, none explicit)
Prompt: “Take my scarf before you turn blue” for avorah please, please, please!
I don’t know how to work these things & how much information you’d like from me. Do whatever you’d like with it. Though I’m imagining it’s Christmassy, Ava’s been typical Ava and not dressing for the weather, cut to Deb and she’s annoyed at Ava for shivering (or something) and throws her the scarf (or something). Take liberties.
But do whatever you’d like, I trust you to create something extraordinary.
Xoxo,
Gay!
from this post; still accepting requests
it took me a moment to figure this out lmao, but ty Jade ♡
Rating: T
Words: 1,965
Prompt: "Take my scarf before you turn blue."
Notes: pre-relationship, set in season 2, barely repressed snow envy from the author, Deborah POV (not terrifying at all)
[ao3]
Deborah likes Christmas. This is known. She also likes the months leading up to it—decorations going up piecemeal until it tips past a certain threshold, after which every street looks curated, twinkling lights and tinsel and gorgeous, crimson reds. She enjoys the draft of spices now used to flavor hot drinks, the earthiness of pines and garlands permeating the air. Most of all, she likes time passing like a held breath, the anticipation cloaked in colder temperatures and slower days.
It's November and they're somewhere - she has long lost track of her relative position on the continent from the chain-link of tour stops - but they're somewhere where it snows, and by God, she's excited. The last time she saw the real thing, not chemically-made six-sided crystals blown into the air via machinery, she still believed in taking a holiday break from working.
Twelve years, maybe? Fifteen?
She's asleep when the first snowfall starts, tiny flakes that can't land before they're carried away on the strong winds. Weed informs her of it hours later, when it has already been replaced with a steady drum of rain on the metal roof.
It causes a flare of annoyance, but not one she knows how to express or even tolerate, so she just walks away.
The second snowfall greets them at their next stop—great, big, fluffy flakes that melt the moment they flutter down into her palm. She hurries back inside and when she re-exits bundled up warm against the cold, she stands in the parking lot with her face angled skyward and takes it all in.
The cold is crisp in her lungs, a plume of fog from her lips. Snow blows under the collar of her coat. The world is a flurry of white, and has grown so blessedly silent.
She feels lighter for it when she steps inside the next comedy club.
They have been announcing it on the radio for days, but nothing could have prepared her for the snowfall that follows them into Colorado. Again, she's largely unaware of space, only of time—specifically, of how much she has of it between shows to work on the jokes that are so nearly there she can taste the laughter she could get.
She's in her bed again when it starts, awake this time with Ava next to her. The image of that is not as incongruous as it should have been. Her anger isn't volatile anymore, but quietly subdued and often pushed aside entirely, because she…
Well.
She needs Ava.
It's a truth only admitted inside her own mind, and in the smallest of thoughts when she does, but it's been there, persistent, undeniable. She needs Ava for this to work. For them to carry it home.
Needs—
Ava is on her stomach on top of the sheets, transcribing their creative flow of the past hour into alternative lines in the document she keeps, and the e-mail feels miles and months away. Deborah watches her type—the dance of her long fingers across the keys, the downy hairs and constellation of freckles along her forearms, the play of warm light on burnished copper.
She is not pretty in any way Deborah understands. Her first impression was garish and unflattering, and those apply still, except she doesn't think them with as much sharpness anymore.
What a bright, bold thing.
This is why it takes her a few minutes to realize that the slate gray outside of her window has been replaced with—"Snow!"
Ava looks up and smiles, equally transfixed. "Damn, that's coming down something fierce."
Deborah is up and off the bed to press her hand to the glass and watch as it doesn't just come down, fiercely, but piles up before her eyes. Already the ground has been covered in a threadbare blanket of it, rooftops and branches and cars rendered in white.
"Why do you like it so much? Because you never get any in Vegas?" Ava asks, standing at her elbow. "Because I hate to break it to you, it kind of sucks. Shoveling driveways? I literally still have nightmares about that."
Her first instinct is to shoo her away, but the second is always to draw her in close, which she leaves unexamined. She shrugs. "I haven't always lived in Vegas."
"Are you a secret snow bunny, Deborah Vance?"
"Jesus." Deborah snorts, turning to face her—writer. "It's nice. Why can't something just be nicewithout a reason?"
Ava looks at her like she knows she's hiding something but is letting it go, which is as bad as if she had called her on it. A sense of being seen, wholly, despite her best efforts.
"Sure," she says after a drawn-out moment. "Should we go back to work?"
"No."
She makes Weed plot a course off the highway and to the town nearby, with its tiny, lit-up windows and the tall Christmas tree in the center. When Deborah closes her fingers in a circle, it's like she's holding a snowglobe, complete with figures in the streets and a charming twinkle.
"You're coming with me," she instructs Ava in passing as she goes to get her things, brooking, as always, no counter-argument. There nearly is one, but it dies on her chapped lips.
The two of them trundle out of the bus, into an ankle-high layer of snow that crunches beneath her shoe. A myriad of colors drips across the layer of white, some flashing and others steady, showing them the way.
It's a non-descript town the way America has many—a little forgotten. It must be near the Rocky Mountains, though, because most of the houses have that ski resort chic aesthetic, with all the textured rock façades and the copious amounts of wood paneling. There's a warmth here, especially the nearer they get to the main street like the town's beating heart, in every imperfection, in how unselfconscious the decorations have been hung up, as if they don'tcare about who might see.
It's all so bewilderingly genuine.
Unbidden her gaze goes to Ava, and all the joy and fucking whimsy in her heart dies at the sight of her pronounced shiver. She's in her Carhartt jacket that's all cotton, her hands, throat, and face exposed to the elements. Her cheeks and nose are a bright red, and her lips, when they're not pressed together, release the sound of teeth chattering into the otherwise pleasant evening atmosphere.
"Christ alive," she mutters, grabbing Ava by the arm to steer her towards a bar she spotted. "You couldn't have dressed for the cold?"
"I'm sorry I didn't bring my winter wardrobe. I have a single hook!"
Deborah rolls her eyes. "You should have known better. You're from Massachussetts!"
"Yeah, I know. My body is betraying me because I've been in Vegas so long, it doesn't know what to do with the cold anymore." Her huff's a bright cloud. "Rude."
The bar is so hot it replaces the cold nip at her skin with prickling, chasing it through and out her body. It's expectedly packed, dozens of people filling out the mismatched chairs around wooden tables that have the sort of nicks in them that include a story or a fond memory. There's a comfortable-looking arm chair by the fireplace that's calling her name.
The barkeep is a man in his thirties, if she had to wager a guess, with an easy smile and a casually attractive stubble. There's a bit of a lumberjack in his broad shoulders. His eyes skate right past her to land on Ava—heavily, considering.
Deborah doesn't like it.
"Do you have to-go cups?" she asks brusquely, putting the fire out of her mind. "Hot drinks?"
He gives her a nod, wiping his hands on the towel slung over his shoulder.
Ava bounds up to the counter. "How about whipped cream? Marshmallows?" Another nod, and her eyes kindle with glee. "Awesome!"
There's a station where Ava can turn her hot chocolate into a sugary monstrosity, piling whipped cream, cinnamon, nutmeg, and mini marshmallows as high as she can. Deborah leaves a more generous tip than she wants to and puts a hand on Ava's back as they leave.
"Good?" she asks, pointedly looking away from the mess Ava has already made of herself, the cream that's on her chin and the bridge of her nose.
"Yeah, amazing," she replies happily, lacing her hands around the cup.
The snow gives no sign of stopping any time soon, and Deborah is quiet on their walk through town to take it in. The marvel of it. The unfamiliarity after so long, when she remembers a childhood so full of snowy days. Sledding, and ice skating, and building an igloo, lying inside with her sister tucked close.
Shit. She did not want to think of Kathy.
Ava returns to her from throwing out her empty cup and must clock something of what she's thinking, because immediately her face, chocolate-stained, crumples into concern. "What is it?"
"Nothing," Deborah is quick to say, as if that might make it true. "Clean yourself up. Your whole face got to enjoy that drink."
She does as told, wiping down her face, but she misses a spot—of course she does. Can't trust her to not make an embarassment of herself. Deborah clicks her tongue to the roof of her mouth and wipes a thumb over the corner of Ava's mouth, catching the smudge. "There."
Ava shivers. "Thanks."
They follow the treeline hemming in the town, strolling down a bed of dense snow and pine needles. She's not unaware of how long she's taking, unwilling to make Weed send out a rescue party, but she's also not ready to go back into the tour bus.
It poses a dilemma. Ava is already struggling through the cold again, hugging her arms around herself for any scrap of warmth. It lances sharply through her, to see her like this. To bear it silently.
"Take my scarf before you turn blue."
"N-no, Deb," Ava protests—knee-jerkingly gallant, something Deborah pretends not to enjoy. "I can't."
"Oh, shut up." She unspools her scarf and beckons Ava closer to start winding it around her pale throat, tucking it in close, fluffing it up around her jaw and ears. "Isn't this so much better?"
Ava's eyes are so hazel and so wide, blinking slowly up at her. She wears snow on her lashes like tiny pearls, has it threaded in her hair. Deborah takes both of her hands between her own gloved ones, rubbing concentric circles over her knuckles.
She thinks of that man in the bar—of how he'd seen Ava and wanted her. This shaking purse dog of a creature who follows her into the snow without appropriate clothing, who is infuriating and callous and destructive.
Who could want someone like that?
Deborah winds her hand back into the scarf to pull Ava onto her toes and into her. The kiss is mostly cold, a little unpleasant, a shock of breath expelled, and icy cold fingers clasping her cheek.
She decides immediately she might love the cold and the snow, but she doesn't like when it's pressed into her like that, and she ends it before it has truly began, prying Ava's hand away from her.
The man vanishes from her mind, as does the tingling of her lips, but not the devastatingly happy smile on Ava's face as they parted—that one lingers all the way back to the bus.
And if maybe she lets Ava in when she knocks at her bedroom door, if perhaps she lets herself be pushed into the sheets and kissed with a warmer mouth and touched with coaxing fingers—well, then that would be just between them and the snow raging outside.
i need to know (and study) the overlap between mirandy shippers and avorah shippers and whether or not there are people who like tdwp but have not watched hacks—because if you guys do exist, and you’re on the fence about hacks? do it. i just know y’all will love it.
