Junie I kindly (desperately) beg for Porter. Or for Ash. Or Sam
preferably hurt/comfort level 3/5 when it comes to angst hehe
happy vacations! enjoy your free time to the fullest <33
(a/n: short but sweet! hope you enjoy!!)
"Do you want to talk about it?"
He gave them a glare that was intended to be withering but missed the mark by a country mile. He settled for making his tone as brittle and dry as possible.
"Not particularly, no."
They lapsed into silence, the gap filled by the rustlings of sheets and the intermittent hums and clicks of an air conditioning unit's power cycle.
"I just thought that he'd be happy to have me back, is all." He tucked an arm beneath his pillow, his words stilted and unready.
"Every conversation we have, every outing he briefs me on, you know who makes his way into William's every thought?"
He let out a laugh, a harsh, jagged utterance with absolutely no mirth to it at all.
"It's been years. Years since he left. And yet. 'How is he doing?' 'Does he seem happy?' 'His partner? How are they?' He has the resources to check on that himself. Obviously. But I'm the one who has to report."
The bitterness in his recount was tempered by the near perfect approximation of the accent, lulling and folding in the perfect places, crisp and curved and ancient.
He shifted onto his back, staring at the ceiling with fire in his eyes.
"I hurt for him."
"I know."
"I kill for him."
"I know."
"It's not enough for him."
"I know."
He turned onto his side, an expression so raw that it hurt to look him in the eye etched into his face. The need for paternal validation turned acrid jealousy was a yearning both primeval and tender. From the first murder to the last cruel word, the odds have ever been disproportionate in their stackings and devastating in their results.
"How am I enough for you?" he asked in a whisper that they could practically hold in their hands, pulsing and throbbing and weeping with prodigal lifeblood.
They gazed back steadily, unflinching at the maelstrom of agony that swirled within him, that pounded at his ribcage with a million miniscule hammers, playing his heartstrings like an instrument of woe.
"You just are."
His face crumpled, anger or something worse flashing in his eyes before he lunged forward, burying his face into their collarbones.
doc pins butterflies and does insect taxidermy and hush loves looking at their displays, learning about the insects and watches them while they pin bugs…careful not to startle them of course
Naturaly the Shaw Pack households own things made for dogs.
Anton and Love! Own a ballpit!! No questions asked!
David got himself a mat to wipe his paws on when he enters the house. It's soft and gentle on his paws. He doesn't really shifters much outside of work, but he's getting more comfortable with doing it around Angel.
Asher spends a lot of time shifted. As much as he can. He felt guilty for getting fur all over the couch from his naps, so Baabe bought a cute couch cover that they can easily wash. Now Asher can have guilt-free wolf time.
Milo does in fact own a tug-of-war rope, for both himself and Aggro. It's something they can play together, and Milo doesn't mind letting him win. And when Aggro gets overconfident, Milo can pull him along with the rope in his mouth.
Darlin doesn't want or need any kanine items. But Sam owns a pet hair roller. He likes to keep his flannels nice and neat. Darlin hates that he has it (their shedding lasts longer than any mark they could leave on his skin 👀).
Amanda managed to find dog booties large enough to fit her wolf form. She likes them because they protect her feet when she's on a pack run, and they make her look cooler than the other wolves (she thinks).
i don't think i can ever forget david's stupid ass 'how do you feel about dogs?' when he and angel meet. somehow more and less obvious than asher's 'pack-- of friends' shaw pack is a pack full of idiots how have you not blown covert wide open between the lot of you
(a/n: hey...this was supposed to be made last month. all it took was a fresh set of nails to remind me how much i love the way my fingers look when i type– i mean. how much i love to write. HUGE shoutout to @damnbtway for this idea. hope you enjoy my inability to write full fluff)
“I don't think I'm meant for love.”
David looked up from his laptop, eyebrows scrunched in the way that told Asher that he was deciding between polite concern and well-worn frustration, the downtick to his lips giving credence to the latter.
“Dramatic.” David observed, his tone neutral but not unkind. “I take it dinner didn't go well?”
“You take it one million percent correctly.” he huffed in reply, beelining for the fridge to grab a pop before collapsing on the sofa with a long-suffering sigh.
Silence.
He sighed again, casting his eyes down and to the side in forlorn despondency.
More silence.
He opened his mouth to sigh again, but changed course to a snicker when he heard the laptop click shut.
“What happened.”
“Well, if you must know,” he began, earning a withering glare that he pointedly ignored, “he got there on time.”
A different kind of silence.
“So…he's punctual. And that's…that's a problem?” David asked, his nose wrinkling in thought.
“Yeah, but you don't understand. I was early. Like, ten whole minutes early.”
This earned a surprised and somewhat approving expression that really shouldn't have made his heart stutter the way it did.
“I'm impressed,” David replied, his voice taking on the cadence of careful intention, “but he still showed up on time.”
“It's the principle of the matter.” he huffed. “He should be just as excited to see me as I was to see him.”
He realized how immature and disproportionate that sounded, but such things never truly mattered in moments of baggage disposal such as these.
“Right.” It was a testament to the utmost gravity of this situation that David didn't tack on a snide comment.
“Did anything else happen, or are you just realizing what it's like for everyone on the flip side when they meet up with you?”
Ah. There it was.
“Ass.” he groused, giving David a squinted look, though it wasn't without a deepening of his smile lines. “You know, no one would ever believe me if I told them how petty you are. You've got everyone under the impression that you're just a stoic sort of dickhead, when in reality, you're just as much a shithead as me.”
“Well,” David rumbled, returning his narrowed gaze with a cool look of his own, “there's something to be said about letting the pretenses drop around someone who knows you better than anyone else.”
“Ass.” he grunted again, praying that his best friend couldn't detect the hitch in his breathing.
“Come on,” David sighed, propping his elbow on the couch and leaning his head on his palm. “What else went so wrong that you're denouncing romance forever?”
Asher faltered, the tender skin at the sides of his nails suddenly becoming an increasingly distracting sight.
“Did he say something?” David's tone dropped into a warning grind. “Did he insult you? Make you uncomfortable? Try to do something you didn't want–”
“No, no.” he rushed to assuage him. “Nothing like that.”
“Oh.”
David settled back, though only slightly, his posture still tensed in anticipation of something yet unrealized.
“Then what was the problem?”
Asher didn't say anything for a long while, weighing the pros and cons of spilling his guts. He ultimately came to the conclusion that he owed nothing short of complete and utter transparency with the man who gave as much to him.
“He wasn't you.”
The apartment went deathly still, the hum of the air conditioning the only thing left to accompany the unsteady breaths echoing in his head.
“What does that mean, exactly?” David's voice was practiced, composed, and a dead giveaway for the lack of balance he was currently experiencing.
“He wasn't you.” Asher repeated, not letting himself indulge in the humiliating desire to meet his eyes. “He kept telling me things about himself, about his work, about his friends, about his life, and I just…I didn't care. I know how awful that sounds, and I felt how awful it was, but I checked out ten minutes in. All I could think about was coming home to you and forgetting that I had gone out in the first place.”
More quiet followed, and Asher had just mustered the courage to get up and go to his room when David spoke.
“It wouldn't work.”
And how pathetically telling it was that Asher elated at the idea that he wasn't dismissing his feelings outright, that a sensible explanation was at hand, even as something deep within his sternum began to wilt.
“I'm going to be the Alpha.” he continued. “After my dad. And you…you're going to be my Beta. I'm sure of it. And the politics of it…it just invites too many issues.”
He couldn't help the petulance that snaked its way into his tone. “That's why? Pack dynamics? That's bullshit, and you know it. It's not like a marriage, not the way most people think of it as, anyway. Plenty of Alphas and Betas are mates, David–”
At the word ‘mates,’ David flinched, sending a lance of something cold and bitterly sharp through his fingertips.
“It wouldn't work.” David repeated, before he added on, at a devastatingly diminished volume, “For me.”
A lifetime of carefully constructed scaffolding came crashing down in a barreling heap, a dam bound with nothing but the wisps of a faraway want crumbling to splinters and ruin.
It wasn't like Asher had expected a fairytale ending. Nothing of the sort. But it didn't have to be so abruptly finite, the candle snuffing itself out from both ends the instant the wick caught. His lungs were turning rotten, pulpy ephemera catching in his bronchial tubes and urging him to act.
“Can we act like it would?” he whispered. “Like it would work? Just for a moment?”
“Asher.” David rumbled, his eyes soft and tender. “That's not a good idea.”
“I don't care.” Asher bit back, fully aware of how his tone began to border on the pitiful holler of a struck dog. “It wasn't a good idea to tell you in the first place. I want to act like it would work. Please.”
David's face took on a brief but powerful conflict, his expression clouding over with a stormy internal reckoning before he sighed, long and ragged.
“Come here.” he rasped, and Asher scrambled to his feet and over to his best friend. David's hands, so large and capable, gently guided him to straddle his lap, the contact eliciting a shaky exhale from both of their chests.
The first brush of their lips was hesitant, lacking commitment, giving both parties ample time to retreat, to escape.
Neither took the grace period.
The next impact was a collision of flesh and heat, stubble rasping over skin and the flow of oxygen halting in service of something better. Asher's hands fluttered up to David's chest, curling into the fabric of his shirt and pulling him closer, closer, closer.
Something feral and righteous burned at the points of his canines and the hinges of his jaw, indignant and fierce. It was so unfair, so lacking in justice, to be kept apart by something so simple and yet ao destructive as power.
The absence of understanding threatened to rend him from the inside out, his innards curdling with a base, primal strain of anguished rage. Why couldn't it work? Why shouldn't it work? The sense of rightness that coursed through his veins nearly brought tears to his eyes.
He remembered, of all things in this moment, being a child, making friends with all manner of kith and kin. Spending nights on floors and every so often, spending a bleary-eyed Sunday morning in a rock-hard pew, listening to a man in an overstarched shirt drone about edicts and dire warnings he couldn't care less about.
But one thing that always stuck was the story of creation. How one was taken from the rib of another, destined to be at their side for all eternity, for the eternal machine to chug on the pumps of two pistons. As he got older, he had scoffed at the idea, casting it aside as demeaning and derogatory. Everyone was their own person, plain and simple.
But when David's palms swept a branding trail from his shoulders to his waist, his body hummed with a contentment as yet unheard of. Blunt fingers crosshatched with callouses slotted perfectly into a skeletal framework that practically whined with their own intrinsic craving, embedded to the marrow.
He panted into David's mouth, an electric thrill arcing up his spine at the resulting groan that poured onto his tongue. He could feel his phone digging into his thigh through his pocket, his shirt's tag scratching along the nape of his neck, and the fuzzed tang of coffee-tinged aftertaste on his cheeks. But he didn't care. Life could make a worthless martyr out of him, his trials consisted of the most inconsequential annoyances, and he would triumph with a ferocity unmatched.
Anything for this to go on endlessly. His pyre would be the discomfiture of pleasure, the inconvenience of hedony.
David's teeth nipped at his lower lip, soothing the sting with the flat of his tongue, sucking at the inflamed tissue until it throbbed in the best possible way. His fingers dug in ever tighter, and Asher sent up a desperate plea to anything with ears to hear that he would wake up to his best friend's handprints seared onto his skin.
Minutes, or hours, or perhaps days passed, neither one quite ready to end the bubble of bliss so fretfully erected, both sensing their impending arrival to the other side of heaven.
But they did it anyway. They broke apart, staring at each other, saying words that had no need of voice. They got off the couch. They went to their rooms. They laid on their beds and stared at their ceilings, wondering when the ache would dim.
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