-- @silvanebula asked: “ i’m on your side. ” - for Joey n Quentin
“Right?” Quentin grunted, rolling his shoulders through aches and spittled glass. “I don’t see you getting the knife in your gut.”
Outside of trials, they were all well and good. Easy to be amicable when you carefully section yourself off from certain shared experiences--murdering and getting murdered--and regarded it more like a distant, unpleasant job. Look into his eyes and sever them from the eyes of your eternal killer.
When inside trials, it’s harder to accept that when your guts are halfway to the floor.
He’s slumped partially down the wall, handing trailing blood with the force it takes to keep himself fully off the floor. Hawkins lab was stifled by dust and decay. One dead, one curled up on a floor trying to breath through sliced esophagus, and another halfway gone on a hook. Quentin wasn’t better off than any of them, cornered by the killer, wedged between groaning generator and broken wall. Him squirreled away into the corner, arms wrapped around stomach like a limp stuffed animal, face bloodless, hair stuck to blood-crusted eyelashes and sweat-slick forehead, it perhaps was pitying enough for Legion--Joey--to recollect his mercy.
Quentin’s breath rattled his ribcage.
“I think I’ve taken more than the recommended amount of stabbings...if you’re suddenly feeling to give me the hatch, I doubt I could make it anyway.” He was bitter. That’s how it was in trials that went especially bad, against a killer that he’d made the mistake of finding sentiment with out in the endless fog. Maybe he just didn’t want special treatment at the cost of his friends’ lives--he certainly didn’t deserve it over them.
Finally, his bones weakened and he let himself crumple to the floor. Legs slowly pull up to his chest, converse slipping over the slick of his own blood.
“Might as well get me over with. I know how it goes if you don’t do well in a trial...”
“ you’d be insane if you weren’t . ” i said after a long silence . my voice was low and my throat was coarse , and the only smile i could manage was thin-lipped and tired . but i embraced robin tightly , arms wrapping around her side , pulling her as close as i possibly can , pulling her together , until not a space was between us . we could both be a pain in each other’s asses , that’s an indisputable truth . but it’s a bigger pain when one of us is in a vulnerable state , like i’m breaking just as much as her .
“ well , i mean , more insane than you already are . which is a terrifying thought , really . ” my smile turned into a chuckle then , but my hug remained as tight , before i nuzzled my head against her playfully . “ drinks ? i know where father thomas is hiding his whiskey . ”
“He loves me, he loves me not… oh.” {[ LOL drunk riza probably, who knows ]}
VALENTINES INTENSIFY… (no longer accepting!)
It doesn’t surprise him to glance over, when she says that, and find that her eyes are focused elsewhere. Doesn’t surprise him to follow her line of sight to a particular dark-haired man meandering towards the washrooms now that the drinks have run their course. Doesn’t surprise him that her cheeks are pink, her glass is empty, her fingers are trembling around the leftover Valentines petals.
It only surprises him that she would let herself go this far.
A weary affection twists his lips. Maes sighs, not unkind, and scrapes his chair out from under him. “What am I going to do with you,” he wonders. He squeezes her shoulder in a one-armed hug, picks up her coat with the other. “Come on. Let’s get you home.”
yooo pls answer that what tropes do you find overused/boring question k thx
MUNDAY RP Q’S. ☼: Which tropes do you find overused/boring?
• i dont know if it’s a trope but the nothing fazes me ever especially re: witty dialogue and genius intellect. tossing quips back and forth forever without any actual progress seems boring to me, and also there’s that inner contest of “my character is smarter than yours/will win this dialogue fight” and it’s just... difficult for me to reply to to be being honest bc it feels forced... to me... tbh
• writing sentences with more than two commas (me @ me why?? do you do that???)
• that trope where one person kisses the other person and then suddenly the other person caves in an argument like i would break some kneecaps if someone kissed me while i was mad at them
“If you have time to fight, you’re not working hard enough.” / matt
"What?" says Foggy.
"What?" says Julie.
Whatever went down at the courthouse must not have been to their favour, and a thrill of unease cascades up her spine. Matt will probably be able to hear her pulse spike, or something, seeing her stride in like that, but still, she persists!
"I thought fighting was like, the second most important part of the job description?" A glance at Foggy, who is totally agreeing with her, giving her OK signs with his hands, etc. "Part of the benefits package, even?"
❛ what are you talking about ?? it’s SO easy to live with a lie . ❜
"--Okay, buddy." Said with a scoff that COULD and probably SHOULD be interpreted as a laugh! "Not all of us are literally the original like, fucking, liar of all fucking time, so maybe just, like, a crumb of introspection."
-- @smugliar asked: “ i need you to trust me. ” (give me a emotional moment between sleepy boy and gambler man)
Quentin stared through the grubby windshield towards the decaying decadence of the Silver Medallion Theater. Some far off antique from days of flapper dresses and champagne debauchery that teetered on the edge of a total economic and thus, inevitably, architectural apocalypse. Whatever use its remains had now seemed to at least be carrying on the tradition of the legally dubious.
Ace hovered over the open door. The car was parked in the sandblasted parking lot. Palm trees fizzling out of life in the climbing heat were as still as statues. Morosely, there was no wind, no rain, no chatter of bugs, just the heated sun. Quentin leaned back against the worn leather. The back of his neck was hot and his shirt stuck with sweat. The car was old and beaten and its air conditioning didn’t work and it was the best they could get in short change and notice. But didn’t get them too far before Ace’s past caught up. Quentin supposed he could find Ace’s past commendable for how quickly it picked up the trail after spending so long in another dimension.
Quentin’s gaze slid from the theater and over to Ace. Ace looked older than he usually did; that ebullient vigor that kept him softened with mirth was gone. He was long, drawn, and bleached by the sun. Shirt unbuttoned by the force of the heat, sunglasses pushed up to show make way for a rare graveyard of a countenance. The sky was blue and blank saving for a single cloud that haloed behind Ace’s slick head. Quentin, for as long as he had been on the road with Ace, had never seen him like this.
“I trust you’ll weasel your way out of this one,” Quentin’s attention drifted from Ace to the cloud to the sagging palm trees to the cracks in the pavement to the skittering of sand kicked up by Ace’s boot and finally to the glove compartment that he knew coffined Ace’s revolver. Quentin’s hand went and unlatched it. It fell open like a broken jaw; its silver tongue, locked and loaded with bullets for insults, gleamed in the sun.
“Shouldn’t you take it?” Quentin didn’t touch it. He slumped back. They were far from town and people and a hospital. “I don’t know if...you’re more experienced in all this than I am but...”
Quentin swallowed. Sand and saliva. His thighs were sore from sitting for so long. He wanted to come with, to make sure, to know what was happening, to know what will happen next, to see Ace enter the theater, to walk through the theater, and to leave the theater without a nick of blood on him.
He screwed his eyes shut. You die next to a man who robbed your dead body and then next trial you return the favor, and then the one after that you drag each other to survival. You escape it all together and then share motel rooms and bank accounts and lies and stolen beer and suddenly you don’t understand where you could go beyond that anymore. If Ace were to leave--willingly or forcefully--then Quentin would just be left with a very lonely car ride home.
“Are you sure I can’t...?” He’s already asked and asked to come in with him. He’s gotten no and no every time. It won’t change this time. Quentin shook his head, then ran a hand through his curls, tangling them in bandaged fingers before swiping at the sweat at his neck. “I get it. I get it. I may not trust you as an honest man, but I can trust you as one looking to survive. You’re not stupid.”
Whatever it was in that theater--mafia, debt collectors, rejected relative, a jilted lover or scammed business partner--Ace seemed to have gotten this far on his own well enough. Very much without a traumatized twenty-six-year-old dogging his steps and fearing the loss of another person so much that he sometimes feared himself.
I need you to trust me.
Quentin sighed. His fingers went to rub at his pendant.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll wait here for you. And after this, we’re getting pizza.”
