The low buzz at the edge of Asami's hearing pulls her focus away from Korra's animated retelling of how she foiled the latest Creeping Crystals theft of supplies to the refugee camp outside of Republic City. Her eyes wander the soft, green landscape of Avatar Korra Park, searching for the noise.
The blanket spread below them is laden with sliced fruits, cheese, and two empty plates. Nothing seems amiss. Her gaze travels further out, past the bushes to the edge of the bridge crossing the river to their left. Oranges, reds, and yellows pop against the green grass as Asami takes in the flowers swaying gently in the cooling breeze, before finding a small shape flitting among them. Time has tempered the sadness that seeing the creature inspires and Asami chooses to focus on the idyllic picture presented.
Korra trails off when she notices Asami's attention has wandered. She follows her line of sight and finds a hummingbird hovering between the long, thin petals of a lily and can't help the grin of delight as she laughs. "I've never seen a real one! It's cute, but not more cute than me."
Asami turns her attention back to her girlfriend, leaning her weight onto one hand as she shifts closer. "Oh, I don't know..."
The pout that steals the place of Korra's grin is almost convincing. Almost. Asami leans forward anyway, kissing the lower lip that juts out as she wraps her other hand around the strong bicep opposite to her. When they part, Asami presses their foreheads together and teases, "Can't do that with a hummingbird, so I think you're safely higher on my priority list. For now."
a-windsor replied to your post: All right, I want to write some Lauricity today....
I need some Nyssa discovering Lauricity is a thing. Sara can be there or not. But Nyssa figuring it out would be Awesome
Even though Nyssa al Ghul grew up without any contextual clues about healthy sisterly relationships due to her own troubles with her sister, she’d knew enough to be aware that the Lance sisters’ rivalry was very much Not Normal.
She had no idea how it normally worked between sisters when they weren’t overachievers—though the others certainly wouldn’t have called them that; she believed the term Thea had used had been “Extra” with an implied capital letter—but she figured even then the two would be considered strange. They were “ride or die” (another Thea term) for each other after Sara’s return from the League, but they could also fight as viciously as mortal enemies. They took pride in each other’s achievements, but also griped about the other reaching said achievements first.
The most puzzling for her was when Sara threw a knife at a practice dummy and turned to Nyssa. “I didn’t even get to be the gay cousin first,” she said.
Nyssa merely slanted a look at her. “My condolences.”
“I mean, I’m bi, but it’s a thing. An established thing. And she beat me to it.”
“You have a gay cousin? You’ve never told me of such a person.”
“No, of course not. My cousins are from Iowa and they’re straighter than their teeth—my aunt’s an orthodontist,” Sara said, waving that explanation away as unimportant. “Bad joke, I’m sorry. But Laurel! She hooked up with the class lesbian before I could. She couldn’t even let me have that.”
“The...class lesbian?”
“It was the early 2000s, every class had one out lesbian.” Sara waved that off and viciously attacked the training dummy as she told Nyssa the story, evidently working off her anger years later.
Years after that, Nyssa barely even remembered the conversation as she picked the lock to Laurel’s apartment. Passing through Star City meant that there were many ex-League buildings where she could crash, but in her days of retirement from the League, she’d become both a spendthrift and a woman who liked her creature comforts. Laurel’s guest bedroom had the best mattress in Star City. Her friend was no doubt out fighting crime either legally or through vigilantism, so she wouldn’t mind. “My door’s always open to you,” indeed.
When she pushed said door open, though, she realized how gravely she had miscalculated, and that perhaps she should have knocked.
At least she could take pride in her trainee’s reflexes: the second the door swung open, Laurel rolled off the other woman on the table, snatched up the first thing that came to hand, and hurtled it at Nyssa’s head. Were Nyssa anybody else and therefore slower, it would have knocked her quite silly.
“What the—Nyssa?” Laurel had snatched up her tonfa, but she lowered it now.
“Nyssa’s here?” Felicity scrambled to her feet, yanking her shirt closed. She jerked her glasses into place and gaped.
“What are you even doing here?” Laurel asked, tossing aside the tonfa so she could shrug back into the upper half of her uniform. She had a red mark on her neck.
“At the moment, I am deeply regretting that I didn’t knock,” Nyssa answered honestly, more amused than anything. Felicity had begun to flush bright red. “I didn’t see, ah, anything, if that’s what concerns you.”
To Laurel’s credit, she recovered quickly, stepping over to hug Nyssa—and retrieve the tablet she’d thrown at Nyssa’s head. “You scared the hell out of me. Come in.”
“My apologies for interrupting.”
“That’s—that’s okay.” But Felicity looked a little wild-eyed as she buttoned up her shirt. She cleared her throat. “I should maybe—I should go. Yeah, I should definitely just....go.”
“Are you sure? We didn’t even order the takeout yet.”
To Nyssa’s trained eye, it looked like it would have been some time before that would have happened, if at all. She said nothing.
“No, no, it’s okay. I’ll just grab something on the way home. And I really should get some work done tonight. I’ll see you later?” There was a lot unspoken in the look Felicity exchanged with Laurel, and Nyssa decided politely not to notice. She stepped to the side, nodding at Felicity as she left.
The second the door closed, she turned and raised an eyebrow at Laurel.
“It’s new,” Laurel said. “Like...today new. Don’t read into it.”
“Hm,” Nyssa said.
“And don’t tell the others.”
“You are concerned that I have somehow become close enough to anybody but you on this team to consider them a bosom companion?” Nyssa said.
Laurel let out a shaky laugh. “When you put it that way...Is something the matter? Do you need my help with something?”
“I was merely passing through and thought I might ask the use of your guest bedroom for the night.”
“Help yourself—to the room and anything in the fridge, though there’s not much there. We were planning on ordering something. Eventually. I’m going to go get changed.”
By the time Laurel emerged, dressed more comfortably in a pair of lounge pants and an ancient Starling City Flock T-shirt, Nyssa had located a bottle of ginger beer and some crisps and had shed some of her armor in the guest bedroom. “I don’t supposed you’d give me like a day so I could tell Sara myself?” Laurel asked without preamble.
“A day or two, I can grant you, but I don’t keep secrets from my beloved.”
“I know.” Laurel wrinkled her nose. “I can’t figure out if she’ll be happy about this...development or if she’ll just be like, ‘I told you so.’ It’s hard to tell.”
“She might be a little testy. She clings proudly to her identity and her place in the family.” Nyssa ate a crisp. “She once confessed that she was upset not to be the first ‘gay cousin.’ She told me all about your hooking up with Isabelle DeWitt.”
“Isa—” Laurel ran her hand down her face. “I didn’t hook up with Izzy! God. How many times do I have to tell her that? It was Seven Minutes in Heaven, for god’s sake. On a dare. I really did think I was straight.”
Nyssa debated asking what Seven Minutes in Heaven was, but decided she’d rather not carry that knowledge around. “Izzy?”
“My friend from the volleyball team—who admittedly, yes, came out of the closet later that year. But I thought I was straight. Sara can keep the First Gay Cousin title. Though she’s bi.”
And that, Nyssa thought, was the “ride or die” component of the Lance Sisters. They’d defend each other to the grave—literally—even while they exasperated the hell out of each other.
“She’ll be pleased to hear that,” Nyssa said. “I think she’ll be pleased to know she’s definitively not the only gay cousin, no matter how you identify.”
“Yeah, jury’s still out on that, I’ll get back to everyone later.” Laurel picked up her phone. “And speaking of relationships, can I make one request?”
“In the future,” Nyssa promised, “I will knock.”
Laurel didn’t even blink that Nyssa had anticipated her question. “Thank you.”
“Though I can’t say the same of Sara.”
“It’s her that will be scarred for life, not me. I don’t care.”
And that, Nyssa decided, was everything one needed to know about the Lance sisters.
I got tagged by my new friend @ohladybegood, who has an excellent fic in the works that I am positively squirming with excitement over. My one sentence comes from the next chapter of Given Unsought, which is in work but is unfortunately falling prey to the fact that I’m two months behind my deadline from #Herofail.
A room in a house like this, where she could wander out to the kitchen in a tank top and boy shorts because she didn’t have to worry about her boss walking in to get a midnight cup of coffee? It held more than a little appeal, actually.
Tagging @kaleidoscopes-and-carousels, @a-windsor, @obishenshenobi (i’m so evil), @alphaflyer, @insidiousmisandry, @victorianoir, and @geneeste, @crazy4orcas.
@a-windsor prompted: “This will not help you assassinate anyone.”
Sara kept her lip between her teeth as she wriggled out of the restrictive, strappy training top she’d been given as a neophyte in the League, pulling it over her head. It didn’t pass her notice that Nyssa suddenly and nobly found the rock wall to her left very suddenly interesting.
“No,” she said as she shoved her pants off and stepped over to the ledge, “but it’s going to feel great.”
She let out a whoop and cannonballed right into the spring, not missing the way her trainer and savior’s look turned briefly to longing as she surfaced. “So, gonna join me?”
16. Describe your WIP that currently has the highest word count.
Lemme check. Huh. The unposted and the posted are...eerily alike. They’re both f/f and involve small children. But longest WIP right now is a slow burn friends-to-lovers rewrite of AOS Season 3 if Jemma had come back from Maveth pregnant. It’s currently stalled because I know what I have to write to stick to the plot, but I just don’t wanna. Especially in light of Daisy getting her agency removed yet again in the latest episode.
(Unposted? It’s 9k of established relationship, or Felicity wishing her girlfriend would just let herself have nice things, dammit)
