ok but we should do a memori week during the hiatus to celebrate memori getting engaged!! show them a little love!! prayer circle a wedding into existence!! memori week!!
oh my gosh!!!!!!!!!!! yes!!!!!!!!!! like unfortunately i don’t have time to devote to it right now but if someone wants to plan a memori engagement celebration i am ALL FOR THAT!!!!!!
im throwing this out into the memori fandom if anyone wants to plan something!!!!!!!!!
Hi, guys! I’m stressed about the first week of class, so here’s a thing to distract me.
@bombshellsandbluebells lent her stellar editing talents to this piece so thank her for helping me <3
Also on Ao3
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn’t say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Then
“Otan!” Emori shouts, banging her way into the basement, nearly falling down the last two steps, her feet sliding in her too-big boots. “Otan, get your ass out of bed! I hit the jackpot!”
“‘S too early,” Otan grumbles, pulling the moth-eaten blanket over his head. “Why are you so loud?”
“I’m not loud,” Emori says. “You’re hungover.” She pulls out a package of day-old buns and a jar of generic peanut butter. “I got breakfast!”
“Breakfast?” Otan sat up. “Thought we didn’t have money for that.”
Emori shrugs. “Made a deal.”
Otan looks at her mistrustfully, but shuffles out of bed nonetheless, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders like a cape. She slaps some peanut butter on a roll and takes a big bite, hoping it will soothe the ache in her stomach.
“Don’t forget about me,” Otan grumbles.
Emori give him a cheeky smile. “Couldn’t if I tried,” she mumbles around a mouthful. “Make your own breakfast. And clean up. You smell like alcohol.”
Now
Otan seems to know that Emori is going to leave, even before she says anything.
“I kinda figured,” he says gently, ruffling her hair. “This life isn’t yours anymore, Em. I don’t know if jail did something to you, or if it was that kid, but…” He trails off, stares past her for a long moment. “You belong somewhere else now.”
Tears fill her eyes. She wraps her arms around her torso to keep herself from breaking. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Otan stuffs his hands in his pockets - a boyish, uncomfortable gesture. “I left you first.”
It hangs there. Brother and sister regard one another. Emori wants to hug him, but something in her balks at the idea. She can tell he wants to say something, but he won’t. Neither of them ever do.
She shoulders her backpack. She’s wearing John’s thermal sweatshirt. The fabric chafes against her neck. The sleeve bulges awkwardly over her bad hand. “I’ll call you,” she says softly.
Otan nods. She turns to the door. This feels final, like a door closing, a lock twisting shut and rusting there.
“Try not to forget about me,” Otan says suddenly, an echo of a past life, of a girl she supposes she isn’t anymore.
She smiles, carefully, but she doesn’t look back. “Couldn’t if I tried.”
John is standing outside the apartment building, pacing back and forth, running his hands through his hair. It’s shorter now, and he has more facial hair. It’s not a bad look, all things considered. She hopes it means that he’s taking care of himself, even though she knows there’s a high possibility that Raven just sat him down and chopped off his hair with safety scissors.
That’s not a bad idea, she thinks, absently fingering the dry ends of her long hair. Then, John turns to look at her, and she can’t think at all.
“Hey,” he says in a tone trying too hard to be casual. Despite herself, she feels a grin creep over her face. “What?”
“You came,” she says softly. “I didn’t-”
She’s about to say something else, but before she can take a breath, he’s running to her, sweeping one of her arms up over his shoulder and wrapping her in a hug.
“John,” she gasps, burying her face in his shoulder. His arms are tight around her, one around her shoulders and the other around her waist. She can feel him shaking.
“It’s okay,” she murmurs in his ear, squeezing his shoulder. “I’m okay.”
He nods into her shirt, then pulls away to look down at her. “Where’s your jacket?”
She curls her good hand into his sweatshirt that she’s wearing. “This is warm enough.”
He scoffs, shakes his head and starts shrugging off his coat. When he offers it to her, he doesn’t meet her eyes, but she puts it on anyway.
There’s a wall that’s gone up between them, swift and sudden. As quickly as he embraced her, he has shut her out. She fights the urge to do the same, instead choosing to lead him toward the train station, her backpack swishing against the cool nylon of John’s jacket.
They stand on the elevated platform nearly shoulder-to-shoulder. A neon sign hanging from the ceiling announces that their train is 30 minutes away and apt to be delayed because of an incoming storm. There’s a few people milling around, hiding in the shadows, sitting under the overhang, afraid of the promised rain.
A gust of wind blows through, whipping around the platform. Beside her, John stiffens, shivers. His closeness is terrifying; she has to stop herself from leaning into his warmth. His eyes are closed against the cold wind. When he opens them, they’re bright, as if with tears.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks, her voice creaking like broken floorboards. “What’s wrong?”
He looks away from her. “Nothing.” He shivers again.
“Do you want your jacket back?” she asks, already preparing to shrug it off.
“I don’t-” he starts to snap, then catches himself. “No.”
Impatience and anger rear their ugly heads in her. “What’s your problem, John?” she asks.
“Nothing!” His eyes are scared, his posture defensive. As thunder rumbles overhead, she realizes that he is afraid of her.
She backs up, standing under the overhang as rain starts to drizzle over them. John follows her, shoving his hands in his pockets so hard she’s surprised a seam doesn’t rip.
“John,” she says again, stepping forward and ducking to meet his eyes. “John, talk to me.”
“You can’t just stay when it works for you,” he says softly. His eyes are still bitter, but there’s sadness behind the blue fire. “You can’t come back and leave whenever you want. You freaked Raven out. Jasper missed you.”
“Oh, sure, this is about Raven and Jasper,” Emori scoffs. There’s a fist closing around her lungs. It’s wringing the life from them slowly but surely. “It couldn’t possibly be about you.”
“Shut up!” John shouts. She flinches back, and two bystanders turn to stare. The rain comes down harder. “You don’t get to blame this on me! You left me!”
“And now you’re punishing me for it?” Emori cries. “You said you understood! You said you wanted me to come home!”
“I didn’t say I’d make it easy,” he growls, taking a hasty step forward so they’re chest-to-chest. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t hate you for it.”
“Tell me to leave, John,” she breathes. Beg me to stay.
He kisses her instead. When they break apart, he makes a sound like a wounded animal. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re going to have to figure your shit out,” she whispers, her head spinning, her lips still feeling the ghost of his mouth. “I won’t let you talk to me like that again.”
He smirks down at her. “You going to punish me?”
The rain is pouring down now, soaking the pavement and sending wafts of mist under the overhang. Emori sees beads of it shimmering on her glove when she shoves his chest. “Shut up, John.”
He catches her bad hand, holds it close, lifts it to cup his cheek and kiss the wrapped palm. She feels her face fall and her eyes harden. “Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?” John asks, kissing the palm again.
“That.” She tugs her hand free.
“It deserves love too,” he murmurs, reaching for her good hand. Emori doesn’t know what to say to that, so she says nothing. Instead, she takes off John’s jacket and hands it to him. She steps back into the rain, tips her head up to the sky, and lets the cold water sting her face like tears.
“You’re crazy!” John shouts. She tilts her head down to look at him. Her hair plasters to her cheeks. “Emori, get back here!”
“Or what?” She spins in the rain, laughing. Later, she’ll be freezing, shivering and desperate for warmth, but right now, she craves the cold.
I’m going to be okay, she tells herself as the train roars past, its push and pull of wind soaking her even more. This will all be okay.
They both cry on the train on the way home. Emori, from joy, the salt dripping into her mouth, mixing with the rain falling from her hair; John for reasons she doesn’t understand.
“What’s wrong?” she asks him, breathless, her tears giving way to a kind of soft joy.
He wipes his eyes, though there are no tears. He cries like she used to: silent and without a trace. “If you say ‘nothing’,” Emori says, teasing, “I’ll kick you into tomorrow.”
“I don’t know,” he says softly. The train is dark and empty. Rain lashes at the windows. Emori scoots over to be nearer to him. Despite her wet clothes, he leans on her shoulder.
“Love, for you,” he murmurs, almost to himself, “isn’t the usual kind of love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.”
She frowns. As if of its own accord, her good hand flies up to stroke his hair. “I scare you.” She means it as a question. It sounds more like an accusation.
He doesn’t hesitate. “Yeah.”
She sighs. He stays there, on her shoulder. Her arm starts to go numb. She doesn’t ask him to move.
When they pull into the station outside their college campus - is it still hers, Emori wonders; is any of this still hers? - Raven is there, leaning against the hood of Bellamy’s car, arms crossed, good foot tapping on the ground. Her shadow is harsh in the street lamp above her. At the sight, Emori feels the knot in her stomach tense and tighten.
This is it, she tells herself as she shoulders her bag and shakes John awake. She won’t let me come home. Emails be damned.
Home. She nearly shakes herself, self-corrects. Come back.
“Hey, Reyes,” John says easily, not even flinching when Raven rockets straight past him to wrap Emori in a bruising hug.
“Don’t ever fucking scare me like that again,” Raven murmurs, rubbing Emori’s back with her hand.
Emori fights the urge to rest her forehead on Raven’s shoulder and cry. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, and waits for the rejection.
Raven pulls back just slightly and brushes a strand of hair from Emori’s face. “It’s okay. You’re home now. Lexa wanted to go through your stuff for clues, but I drew the line.”
John rolls his eyes. “You were this close to doing it, too.”
Raven shrugs. “Just wanted to make sure she was okay-“ She stops and twirls a lock of Emori’s hair in her fingers. “Wait, why are you wet?”
John snorts. Emori starts to explain, but is cut off when Raven hugs her again, then ushers her toward the car.
“Tell me later,” she says, fussing just like Otan would, like Bellamy would too, probably. “We need to get you dry.”
John mutters something Emori doesn’t hear. Raven does; she turns around in her seat and smacks him on the leg. John kicks her seat, and Emori retaliates by throwing the tissue box on the floor near her feet at John’s torso.
“I’ll have to tell Bellamy I did end up needing a car tissue box,” Raven says drily, and the three of them speed home.
“Why did you leave?”
Emori jumps at the sound of Octavia’s voice. She’s standing in the doorway, arms crossed loosely over her chest. “Everyone was worried. You had all of this, and you threw it away. Why?”
Emori sighs and kicks her now-empty backpack under the bed. “It’s a long story,” she sighs.
“Is it?” Octavia steps into the room. She and Emori are about the same height, but there’s something about the younger girl that makes her seem that much more imposing. “Because from where I stand, you put yourself ahead of the people that love you enough to want to keep you here.”
Emori takes a careful step forward. “You’re telling me you wouldn’t have done the same if it was your brother?” Octavia frowns. “If it was Bellamy?”
“Bellamy wouldn’t have asked me to,” Octavia nearly snarls.
“That’s the point!” Emori shouts. “You have no fucking idea how damn lucky you are! Your brother would do anything for you.” She remembers Bellamy’s tirade in the alley, his furious face inches from her brother’s impassive eyes. “He would never leave you; he would never ask you to forget about the things you want to help him fix his mistakes.”
She’s run out of tears, but her throat feels tight as if she’s about to cry. “You don’t understand,” she says softly, a broken thing. Octavia’s eyes soften incrementally the longer she stands there.
“I’m sure your brother loves you,” Octavia says quietly. She looks chastised, or at least a little guilty. “In his own way.”
“He does.” Emori nods, sniffles a little bit. “But…”
Octavia cocks her head. A frown creases the skin between her eyes. Behind her, Emori sees another person’s shadow, hovering in the hall.
“He didn’t choose me,” Emori says, finally, throat tight. “There was something he wanted more.”
There’s nothing left to say. Octavia leaves the room with a soft sound that Emori doesn’t have the energy to identify.
The shadow in the hall is Bellamy’s. He enters the room quietly, gently. “I told her not to talk to you like that,” he says, apologetically.
Emori shakes her head. The lump in her throat widens. “It’s okay.”
“That was nice,” Bellamy gestures to the room, “what you said about me.”
“It’s true.” Emori’s voice cracks, because what wouldn’t she give for her brother to care just a little bit more and in a little bit of a different way?
“Oh, come here,” Bellamy murmurs, reaching for Emori, hugging her by the shoulders and letting her sniffle, once, into the soft cotton of his shirt. “It’s okay.”
She doesn’t have words for the comfort she needs, but Bellamy doesn’t seem to mind. She closes her eyes and tentatively hugs him back, her arms around his torso.
“Aww, you didn’t invite me?” Raven leans against the doorframe, grinning slightly. Bellamy reaches his free arm out for Raven, who joins the hug, resting her chin on Emori’s shoulder and placing her hand carefully atop Emori’s bad one.
“You okay?” she murmurs in Emori’s ear. When Emori nods, Raven squeezes her hand. “We’ve got you.”
“Damn right.” Emori can’t see over Raven’s head, but she knows that’s Jasper, and, judging from the footsteps, Monty too. The boys join the group hug, hanging on even when Bellamy staggers forward under Jasper’s exuberant weight.
Emori has to laugh at Bellamy’s soft oof. “I’m fine,” she says softly.
“We know,” Monty says, patting her awkwardly on the head, the only part of her he can reach. “Doesn’t mean we can’t be here for you anyway.”
Emori doesn’t know what to say to that either. She stands there, encased in a knot of her roommates’ love and care, and lets them decide when to let go.
Something has shifted in the house’s atmosphere. It’s as if Emori’s absence, however short, has torn a hole in things that is now mending. Emori isn’t sure how true that is, but she is sure that there have never been this many people in the kitchen at one time.
“Get out!” John shoves Bellamy away from the fridge. “Sit down on the bar stool next to Emori or get the fuck out of my way. Your choice.”
Bellamy retrieves a beer and hastens to the living room, where Octavia, Monty, Jasper and Luna are duking it out over Mario Kart. Emori smiles at John when his back is to her. Lexa lets herself in from the backyard and gives Emori a knowing look.
“You two would be cute together,” Lexa whispers in Emori’s ear. Emori swats her on the arm without thinking about it; Lexa’s surprised laugh carries through the whole house as she goes to answer the door.
“Huh, what do you know?” a young man asks, kicking off his shoes and dropping a bag of potato chips on the counter. “She does have a personality.”
“Leave her alone,” John says, and then proceeds to glare at his back until he plops down on the rug in front of the TV.
“Who is he?” Emori asks, frowning.
“That’s Zeke Shaw.” The name sounds mean in John’s mouth. “I think he’s into Raven.”
“He’s cute.” Emori appraises him. His eyes are earnest and he has the set jaw and close-cut hair of a military man. He looks like he could handle Raven, or at least, make sure she can handle herself. “Objectively.”
“Well, yeah, but…” John sighs. The kitchen timer goes off. “I don’t want her to get hurt. Again.”
The set of his shoulders tell her the same sentiment applies to himself.
“I met Zeke when I came to find you in the city.”
Emori jumps at the sound of John’s voice from the bathroom doorway. She spits some toothpaste in the sink and rinses her toothbrush. “Oh.”
“I saw you watching him,” he clarifies. “Figured you should know he’s not a total stranger.”
“Only a slight stranger, then,” Emori says, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. John doesn’t return it, so she lets it drop and bends over to put away her toothpaste and hide the sadness of her eyes.
He won’t forgive you, she tells herself. Stop trying to earn it.
“Do you regret coming for me?” she asks, voice small, echoing slightly in the bathroom. She remembers holding herself up, arms stiff, mouth bitter, and remembers him tucking her into bed, holding her, lending her his shirt and some of his strength.
Her stomach rolls at the memory. That was where all the horrible things began.
“No,” John whispers, like it’s a bitter confession. “I don’t.” He laughs, sharp. “I probably should. But I don’t.”
She regards him in the mirror. It’s safer that way, a pane of glass separating the two of them, their words and all the things that split them before they even had a chance to come together.
“Can we start over?” John asks, in a rush. That question, and her answer, goes against both of their nature.
“Yes,” she says, and he smiles.
“You know,” Raven begins around a mouthful of food, “you’re pretty good at that.”
Emori looks up from Monty’s laptop. Or, at least, the shell of it. She’s installing a hard drive with more storage, although, from the looks of it, she should probably just build him his own gaming computer. “Oh. Thanks.”
“You should take a computer engineering class,” Raven continues, either undeterred by, or oblivious to, Emori’s standoffish reaction. “You wouldn’t be half bad.”
Emori gestures with her bad hand. “Can’t fix things properly with this.”
Raven raises an eyebrow. “You’re using it fine now.” She shrugs. “I walk funny. People might stare, but it doesn’t stop me. It shouldn’t stop you either.”
Emori blinks. She’d never considered that: that her appearance may not immediately disqualify her from something. After all, it had disqualified her from her mother’s love and from belonging. But maybe…
“Sure,” she says, genuinely. “I’ll look into it.”
Raven grins. “Hell, yeah.”
She does look into it. Fall turns into almost-winter, and she thinks and plans and crams for finals and works long nights to make sure she catches up from her unplanned hiatus. She even goes on a couple dates with John. They turn out better than the first one did; he takes her to the park for a chilly picnic, and they get tipsy and crunch fall leaves in their hands, their conversation evaporating with their breath in the air. He takes her dancing at some lame college event, and she surprises him, and herself, by wearing a dress.
Her favorite date is right before finals season: they stay in his room, and she helps him write out more poems to tape to his walls. There’s something strangely permanent about her writing in his space.
Love, for you, she writes, as careful as she can, is not the usual kind of love. It’s like a religion. It’s terrifying. No one will ever want to sleep with you.
He hangs that above his bed. Later, he kisses her as they lay below it.
The closer it gets to Thanksgiving, the more tense the house gets, thanks to finals and finals-induced stress. Jasper and Monty are at one another’s throats, John cuts back on the drinking to concentrate, but makes everyone miserable because of it, and Emori takes to sleeping in Raven’s room so Raven actually goes to bed at a halfway decent time.
“I like you,” Raven mumbles, half asleep. The clock reads 3:14 p.m. “You’re a good kid.”
Emori laughs drowsily. “I’m older than you.”
“Fuck if I know,” Raven says around a yawn. Emori’s heart warms.
The three-day break for the holiday is a welcome reprieve; even Jasper, an underachiever by his own admission, welcomes the break from studying. John wants to celebrate with a party, but they’re all so wiped out that they spend the day before Thanksgiving napping and watching the worst-rated movies on Netflix.
Emori didn’t even think they were going to celebrate the holiday until John hauls a massive turkey out of the freezer the night before.
“What...the fuck?” Octavia asks, eyes wide. “When did you buy a turkey?”
John shrugs. “You know. Whenever.”
“That’s Not an answer,” Octavia says. “And yes-”
“The capital letters are implied in your tone,” Raven and Lexa say in unison and in monotone. Emori hides a smile. Some things never change.
John bastes and roasts the turkey. Every time he says the turkey is roasting, Raven gets a shit-eating grin on her face that Octavia tries to wipe off by throwing pillows, papers and a magazine at her head. At some point between breakfast and a half-hearted lunch, Harper, Zeke, Luna and Bellamy come over, bearing mashed potatoes, corn casserole, green beans and pumpkin pie, respectively.
“What is that?” Lexa asks, poking Zeke’s glass pan with a finger.
“Corn casserole,” Zeke says, his head inside the fridge.
“Corn what?”
His head pops up almost comically fast. “You don’t know what corn casserole is?!” Lexa shakes her head. “Shame,” Zeke mutters, and spends the next five minutes unsuccessfully attempting to open his beer.
Monty tries to steal John’s steak knives three separate times. The fourth time, he succeeds, and Emori can’t suppress her laughter at John’s howl of rage when he sees his prize knife strapped to the roomba.
“GIVE ME THE KNIFE BACK!” he shouts. “Monty, I’m gonna drop-kick that piece of shit out the front door.”
“Hey!” Jasper picks up the object and cradles it to his chest dramatically. “Don’t insult Stabby.”
“If you call that thing ‘Stabby’ one more time, I’m gonna take you out,” Harper promises, stepping over Jasper and plopping onto the couch next to Monty. Emori wiggles her eyebrows at Raven over Monty’s head when the boy’s cheeks start to flush.
John doesn’t stop fussing over the turkey until Bellamy steals his apron and baster and shoos him out of the kitchen to set the table. He does, in proper form no less, and Emori sneaks behind him and messes up the silverware until John catches her.
“Saboteur,” he calls her, grabbing her around the middle and tickling her sides.
“John, stop!” she says, laughing, squirming away from him and nearly smacking her shoulder on the peninsula. She knocks over one of the bar stools and almost kicks a passing Zeke in the shins. “Seriously!”
John releases her just as the doorbell rings. “How many more people can we fit in this house?” he wonders aloud as Bellamy goes to answer the door.
“How many people can we fit at this table?” Lexa asks, gesturing to the makeshift banquet table that consists of the dining room table, two card tables, a large coffee table with cushions for sitting, and Raven’s desk.
“Hopefully three more,” Bellamy says, leading Echo, Clarke Griffin and Costia into the house. Echo immediately gravitates to Raven and Harper, while Clarke stays close to Bellamy and Costia hovers near John’s elbow as he carves the turkey.
“Can I have a drumstick?” she asks John, who nods. “I can help if you want.”
“That’s Emori’s man, Costia,” Octavia yells over her brother’s shoulder. “You’ve got your own woman!”
“And a fine one I am,” Lexa snarks. Luna swats at her. “What? I’m hot.”
Somehow, Bellamy and John navigate the chaos and get everyone settled at the table. They pause for grace - mostly for Zeke, Raven grumbles - then dig in. Emori stuffs herself on turkey and cranberries - and Zeke’s casserole, which isn’t half bad - and on the laughter and kindness of her friends that fills her to the brim.
“I want to try something,” John says softly, his head resting on her stomach. They’re in her bed, nestled under blankets, watching the first snow of the season from her window.
“Okay,” she murmurs, continuing to card her good fingers through John’s hair. When he lifts his head, her hand falls from the top of his head to the nape of his neck. “Whatever you want.”
He kisses her, soft, and she lets him; she tangles her good fingers in his hair again, but lets out a tiny huff of breath when his tongue swipes over her bottom lip.
“Sorry-” he says, breaking away. “I didn’t-”
“You’re fine!” she’s fast to reassure him. It’s like ripping off a BandAid, she realizes. “I wasn’t expecting it.”
“I said I wanted to try something,” he says, grumpy and cheeky.
She shoves at his shoulder as he moves closer. “Shut up,” she says, but she’s laughing right until the moment their lips connect. This time, he deepens the kiss almost instantly, and she lets him. She loses herself in it, in the soft way he bites at her lower lip, the careful press of his tongue, the gasp he makes when she sighs against his mouth.
“That was nice,” she murmurs when he breaks away, propping himself on his elbow and looking down at her. His hand strokes over her hair. “What was it for?”
He shrugs. Suddenly, he can’t meet her eyes. “What if you leave again?” he says, softly, the guilt in his eyes at that question palpable. “I want to do the things I regret not doing.” He winces. “That’s so fucking cheesy.”
Emori shakes her head. “No,” she whispers, shame and sadness piercing her heart. “It’s not.”
So Memori week was super excellent.
A shout-out to everyone else who created stuff and rebogged stuff, this online community is the absolute best. I honestly think the memori fandom is the purest part of the 100 fandom but I’m biased
And I just want to say that anyone who reblogged my fics and wrote comments in the tags made me incredibly happy, there’s honestly nothing better than that.
(I didn’t finish my freewrite from day seven but I’m planning on posting it further along, and I’m also hoping to edit the other days and post them to ao3 so stay tuned.)
@ my fellow participants… I love the different ways we interpreted the characters and prompts and situations. It’s like we all demonstrated different aspects of this ship and created this huge mosaic that encompassed everything about what makes memori beautiful and interesting.
So basically @dailymemori you did good.
In which Murphy goes on a road trip of self-discovery, following directions shoved in his cup holder in the hopes of undoing what he’s done.
Inspired by an excerpt of Siken’s “Road Music” sent to me by @emorireyes . Hopefully the length of this makes up for the length of time I spent on it.
And, as always, much love to @bombshellsandbluebells who sends me reaction GIFs and wonderful messages and also edits really darn well. <3
Also on Ao3.
1.
The eye stretches to the horizon and then must continue up.
Anything past the horizon
is invisible, it can only be imagined. You want to see the future but
you only see the sky. Fluffy clouds.
Look—white fluffy clouds.
Looking back is easy for a while and then looking back gets
murky. There is the road, and there is the story of where the road goes,
and then more road,
the roar of the freeway, the roar of the city sheening across the city.
There should be a place.
At the rest stop, in the restaurant, the overpass, the water’s edge…
Murphy won’t tell her where they’re going.
Granted, it was probably her own fault for not asking a couple more questions when he showed up at her apartment at 6 in the morning with a duffel bag and a list of oddly specific, seemingly nonsensical directions. She didn’t ask, though; she got dressed, packed a bag and put on her brace while he stood in her living room, staring at the ancient pictures on her wall.
Now that they’re three hours and nearly 250 miles down an abandoned stretch of highway, she asks, “What are we doing, J?”
“Driving,” he says.
“Obviously. But why?”
He doesn’t answer. He looks down at the napkin spread over his lap. When Raven squints, she sees directions printed in a careful hand. It’s not Murphy’s writing, and it’s not anyone else’s she recognizes.
“Where’s this taking us?”
He doesn’t answer. She can tell by the look in his eyes that he’s gone somewhere else in his head. She leans back in the passenger seat and waits.
She’s beautiful with a split lip and bloody nose. “Damn it, John, you couldn’t have waited another second?”
Murphy passes her a rag for her mouth. “You would’ve gotten killed!”
“I had it handled,” she says with a bloody grin. “You were just scared.”
He shrugs. “Maybe so.”
She smiles again, her soft eyes sharp against the rest of her vicious visage. “Come on.” She grabs his hand. “Let’s go.”
She pulls him along through a maze of alleyways, their pavement shiny from the spring rain, and to the overpass where cars race below at a dizzying speed.
He sits beside her and passes her the bottle of whiskey he’d swiped from the bar during Emori’s first fight. “I knew you loved me,” she crows.
“The alcohol’s what clued you in?” he asks, pressing a kiss to the side of her head. Back there, in the gaps between the skyscrapers, she has to hate him, and he has to avoid her. Here, away from the loud city, he can love her, and she can chose him. It’s nice, consequences be damned.
“That, among other things.” She kisses him. He tastes blood and sweat, salt and tears. When he opens his mouth to her, she lets out a low sound that sends shivers down his spine.
“Love you, John,” she murmurs against his lips. She pulls away and grins, taking a swig straight from the bottle, then passing it to him.
“Um, where the hell are we?” Raven asks, slamming the car door shut and jogging to Murphy’s side. He’s standing in front of an old brick wall with a brown metal security door and a single flickering light that doesn’t do much to ward off the shadows.
“Stay here,” he says, yanking on the handle until the door flails open with a scream of protest and slams against the wall, so hard Raven’s shocked the handle doesn’t dent the brick.
She counts to 20, then follows him. She’s not sure if she’s truly walking silently, or if he’s just too preoccupied to hear her, but he never once notices her presence as she weaves her way around dusty chairs and trash-ridden tables. He’s standing on a low, uneven stage, his feet leaving prints in the dust.
They lock eyes from across the room. He says nothing, only hops down after a long moment and pushes past her, back through the door and the cold back corridor.
They drive another 50 miles or so, weaving through cramped city streets that spit them out onto the highway. He pulls over at a rest stop, which is really nothing more than a collection of cramped, deteriorating brick buildings: two bathrooms, a storage shed and something that might have been a picnic shelter once, before the weeds took over.
He walks to the edge of the woods, and Raven follows, mostly because she knows it might annoy Murphy out of his silence, but also because she doesn’t quite trust that he knows what he’s doing. The memory of him sitting on the floor in front of his mother’s worn green couch with a gun against his chin and tears in his eyes is still too fresh for her taste.
He hadn’t spoken to her then, either.
“Murphy.” Her voice is loud against a backdrop of cicada screams and road noise filtering in through the trees. “J. What are we doing here?”
He doesn’t answer. Raven contemplates putting her foot down and refusing to budge an inch until he gives her some answers, but she knows he won’t hesitate to leave her behind. Plus, the scientist in her is curious about why they’re on this spontaneous adventure when Murphy hates both spontaneity and adventure; he once told Raven he needed at least 48 hours in advance to change his plans, even if his plans were to do nothing.
He tilts his head back and looks up at the sky. There are no stars, but Raven can see the moon.
“There should be more,” Murphy murmurs. “More than this.”
“What?”
He shakes his head. When he looks down, Raven can see tears in his eyes. “Nothing. Let’s go.”
It hasn’t occurred to Raven to be worried about her best friend, but as she watches his slim hands white-knuckle the wheel of his shitty car, she starts to be concerned. The tears never fall, but they’re there, resting on the edge of his lashes.
And then, she realizes. Or rather, she remembers. The memory feels like a faded photograph, blurry around the edges and fuzzy everywhere else, but she can see enough to know what Murphy’s thinking of.
“This is about her, isn’t it?” she asks quietly.
Murphy sniffs, nods. “About time you figured it out.”
She ignores the derisive tone of his voice. “J, it’s been three years.”
“I know,” he snaps. “But I can’t… I can’t let it go.”
“Murphy.”
He shakes his head. A tear spills over. “Don’t. Please. Just don’t.”
Raven shuts up and lets him drive.
2.
He was not dead yet, not exactly—
parts of him were dead already, certainly other parts were still only waiting
for something to happen, something grand, but it isn’t
always about me,
he keeps saying, though he’s talking about the only heart he knows—
He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There’s a niche in his chest
where a heart would fit perfectly
and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place—
well then, game over.
Raven falls asleep somewhere between midnight and dawn. Murphy envies her, but he can’t sleep. He keeps thinking about her, about her voice and the sound of her laugh and the soft way she sighed when he held her after a nightmare.
That’s why he’s doing this. He doesn’t know what to expect - a grave or a living girl - but he knows there’s a high chance she won’t be glad to see him.
He doesn’t blame her.
“Why are we doing this?” she asks, leaning against the doorway, watching him get dressed. “Why are we fighting?”
He doesn’t face her, doesn’t answer. He focuses on straightening his collar instead. Damn this new job that makes him care about his appearance. But it’s the price he pays for going straight, the price he pays for being able to be seen with the woman he loves.
“John.” Her voice is soft. When he turns to look at her, he sees her twisting the ring that hangs from a chain around her neck. His hand subconsciously moves to the matching one on his left hand. “John, what are we doing?”
He sighs. “Emori…”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I love you, but I won’t let you wall yourself off from me like this.” She holds up the ring. “How can we be a team when you won’t tell me what’s going on? How can we work together when you put a wedge between us.”
He doesn’t have an answer. What else is new.
She steps closer and folds down his collar with clumsy hands. He feels the heat radiating off her. He hates it, but it forces him to stand still.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asks when she moves back. He wants to kiss her on the forehead, wants to apologize for all the hateful things he said last night - things he should have known better than to ever let leave his mouth.
She nods. A glimmer of mischief brightens her eyes. Her cheeks, ruddy from days spent working in the hot summer sun, stretch as she smiles. “I’ll see you tonight.”
He kisses her quickly, a peck on the lips, and ignores her sound of protest when he doesn’t deepen it. She doesn’t follow him to the door.
He’s tried to forget her. It hasn’t worked, and he hates himself for it because he could pull his heart from his chest, but he can’t make himself remove the ring from his finger.
The sun breaks over the horizon, and with it comes the city, sprawling out in the distance, bright and lonely in the wide expanse of sky. Murphy pulls over on the side of the road at the top of a hill and watches the sun coming up. When Raven wakes up, muttering unintelligibly and squinting into the sun, he pretends her dark head on his shoulder belongs to someone else.
They stop at another rest stop so he can wash up and Raven can get some shitty vending machine coffee for the two of them. She gives him a ‘where-next?’ look that he doesn’t acknowledge, choosing instead to peel out onto the highway and roar toward the skyscrapers.
He wonders if she still has her warehouse job. He wonders if Anya makes her talk about her feelings or if she’s spent the past few years alone. He even dares to consider that she’s thrown her ring away.
Raven turns on the radio. He figured she would, figured she’d be bored of the silence, but that doesn’t mean he likes it. Twice, he shuts it off. Three times, she switches it back on.
This time, they don’t stop at the city. The directions scrawled on an old napkin don’t tell him to slow down, so he doesn’t.
“Murphy,” Raven starts as they swerve past the freeway exit and head down an old dirt road. “Do you know where you’re going?”
They pass a graveyard. He knows where they are now. His stomach knots in dread. There are tears gathering in his eyes and at the back of his throat. He doesn’t pay them any mind. He can’t afford to.
“Yep,” he says shortly. Raven raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t comment. She does, however, snatch his direction-filled napkin from his lap, peering at it in curiosity and confusion. “Where is this taking you?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m gonna be buried here someday,” she tells him nonchalantly, balancing on the fence post while he hikes himself up to sit on the top rail. “This is where people go when no one wants them.”
“Don’t think like that,” he says. She stands on one foot, then the other. Her hair whips around her face and sticks to her chapped lips.
Damn, she’s beautiful, he thinks.
“You’d bury me somewhere nice,” she continues, “but we both know you’ll die first.”
“Oh?” he asks, cocking an eyebrow at her.
“Between your fucked-up liver and your hatred of food, I’m hedging my bets on that.”
Murphy snorts. She grins that beautiful smile he’s come to know as well as his and plops down beside him.
“We’re not going to live much longer, are we?” she asks. She sounds mournful, and Murphy doesn’t blame her. Between her dead brother and his shitty mother, it’s a wonder they’ve made it this far. But it comes at a cost, like all things do; she lost her agency, and he lost his body. But at least they found each other.
He passes a knuckle over the scar under her eye. “I’ll live as long as you tell me to.”
“I want you to live forever,” she retorts, leaning into his touch.
“As long as it’s with you.”
She grimaces. “Sap.”
He smiles, leans forward to kiss her. She tastes like the dirt road and a lost bar fight. “Love you.”
She leans her forehead against his shoulder. “Love you too.”
He barely manages to pull over before he’s flinging the door open and dry heaving onto the dirt, the memory twisting his gut into painful knots.
“J!” Raven reaches for him, then pulls back. “Murphy, what is it?”
He doesn’t realize he’s sobbing until he tries to speak. “I need her,” he chokes out. “Raven, I fucked everything up. I fucked it up so long ago, what if-”
“Hey, shhh,” Raven tries to soothe him, but it’s clear she doesn’t know what to do in the face of his sudden outburst of emotion.
He gasps himself to some state of calm, and then Raven speaks again. “Is that what we’re doing? Finding her?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know.” He holds up the near-ruined napkin. “This was shoved in my cup holder last week. I don’t know whose writing it is, but these are all places she and I went.”
Raven frowns. He tries to focus on her clever eyes, but he fails. They’re the wrong shade of brown anyway. “You do realize how insane this is, right? That someone broke into your car to leave you this, and now you’re actually following the directions.”
He nods. “I don’t care.” He wipes his mouth and eyes with the back of his hand and closes the door. “I need to know what’s at the end.”
Raven sighs. Murphy entertains the irrational fear that she’s going to leave him, which is absurd since they’re hundreds of miles away from home. He’s been alive for nearly twenty-five years, and he’s been terrified of being alone for more than half of them. The closest he’s ever felt to safe is this.
“Okay,” Raven says. Murphy shuts the door. “Let’s go.”
3.
You wonder what he’s thinking when he shivers like that.
What can you tell me, what could you possibly
tell me? Sure, it’s good to feel things, and if it hurts, we’re doing it
to ourselves, or so the saying goes, but there should be
a different music here. There should be just one safe place
in the world, I mean
this world. People get hurt here. People fall down and stay down and I don’t like
the way the song goes.
You, the moon. You, the road. You, the little flowers
by the side of the road. You keep singing along to that song I hate. Stop singing.
There was a time when Emori thought John’s apartment was the only safe place in the world for her.
She plays with the chain around her neck and thinks about him, about his eyes and deft fingers and the way he smiled at her after a fight. She remembers the relief on his face when it was her coming into the bedroom and not someone else. She remembers the joy on his face in the courthouse, outside the church.
“You up?” Anya yells from outside the door, interrupting her thoughts.
“Yeah!” Emori shouts back. After a moment, she opens the door. Anya stands there, hands on her hips. “What? I’m not late.”
Anya raises an eyebrow at her tone but says nothing. She leaves, and Emori watches her go, standing in the doorway to her room, shivering against the rough wood. There’s a restless energy under her skin that won’t stop buzzing. She wants to rip it all to shreds, starting with her bad hand and working up, up, up until it all just-
Stops.
“What now, John?” she snaps. The nausea makes her angry. The fear makes her lightheaded. “What’s your fucking problem?”
He stands up, hands balled into fists. She doesn’t flinch - she knows he won’t hit her - but he’s ruined nonetheless. His face is twisted into the all-too-familiar look of self-hatred.
“You can’t even tell me why,” she whispers. “You can’t even tell me why,” she says.
He runs a hand through his hair. It sticks up at all angles. She tries not to find it cute. “Damn it, Emori-”
“No!” she shouts. “You can’t throw this away just because you’re scared! You picked me! You chose me! You signed a certificate and made a promise that you wouldn’t leave me! So don’t fucking lie to me and say that you want to be done!”
“I didn’t say that!”
She laughs, wrapping her arms around her torso. Her stomach shivers. “You’re sure acting like it.”
John stares at her. “Is that what you think?”
“This is what you always do,” she points out. “You cut and run when you’re afraid of what you’ll do, of losing this. I’m changing, John. We’re changing. And you need to catch up or be left behind.”
He makes his choice. She tries not to regret it when he moves out. She tries to hold firm when he moves back in, and she moves in with Raven. She nearly forgets when Raven moves out and Anya moves in, but it comes roaring back every so often and nearly chokes her every day.
There’s a knock at the door, a scuffle of feet on the porch that Emori can hear clearly thanks to the open windows throughout the house. Her heart leaps into her throat. She feels ink and a coarse napkin under her hands. She tastes blood and whiskey and kisses.
“Emori?” Anya shouts upstairs. Her voice is full of questions. “There’s someone here for you.”
She’s halfway down the stairs before Anya can finish saying her name.
His name dies on her lips the moment she sees him. He looks like hell, looks like thousands of miles of dirt road, hangovers and nights crying into a shitty mattress on a dirty apartment floor.
“Emori?”
She told herself if he ever came, she’d make him apologize - make him ask for her to come home.
“John.”
She told herself she wouldn’t let him touch her.
“I’m so sorry, Mori.”
She told herself she wouldn’t run to him.
“It’s okay.”
She can’t move. She can’t breathe. Anya’s looking at her as if to say want me to kick him off my porch?
“No, it’s not, I-”
Anya moves aside, out of the doorway, and Emori flies into his arms so quickly she startles herself. He wraps his arms tightly around her shoulders and holds on with trembling hands.
“I’m sorry, Emori, I’m so sorry,” he says into her neck. He’s crying a little, and so is she, but she tries to keep it together enough to remember how it feels to bury her head in his chest.
“It’s okay.” She rubs his back with her good hand. “Shh, John, it’s okay.”
She can’t help it. She sees his car, and she can’t help it.
“What are you doing?” Anya asks. They’re only in town for a few hours, and only because Lexa lives here, just blocks from John’s - their - place.
Emori kneels by the shitty red Oldsmobile and wiggles the handle. It pops open. Before she can second-guess herself, she stuffs the napkin in the cupholder.
She shouldn’t have spent the whole drive working on it. She shouldn’t have taken him to every place that would make him miss her. But she did. She does. She closes the door and prays.
“You could just call him,” Anya says.
Emori shakes her head. “I want him to find me.” She smiles. “We always did like driving.”
@bombshellsandbluebells deserves an award for editing this so quickly and lovingly. I’m counting this as my contribution to the last day of Memori Week.
Blame @thecarstairsheir for Bellamy’s Cartwheel app (she said I should write that in since I do that too) and blame the movie Good Will Hunting for the end scene.
Pls tell me what you think!
Also on Ao3.
I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,
I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow
glass, but that comes later.
And the part where I push you
flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,
shut up
I’m getting to it.
Emori knows what John likes.
(Actually, she knows what men like, but since John does fall solidly into that category, despite Raven’s jokes to the contrary, she figures her assumptions are correct.)
She knows he likes it when she smiles at him and loves it when she lets him help her type out assignments or write emails. She knows he thinks the way she texts is cute, and she knows he finds her lack of culinary taste endearing, if not disturbing.
She hates it.
She doesn’t want to know what he likes. She wants to discover him the same way he’s discovering her. He actually knows things now, knows that she’ll laugh when he nuzzles her neck with his nose, knows she’ll blush when he compliments her in front of the entire house, knows she’ll smile when he kisses her on his way out the door to class.
She hates that too. Not the romantic part, but the attachment part. How dare she fall for someone? How dare she feel safe?
All of these thoughts follow her through her Saturday morning. It’s early; the sunrise is warming the kitchen and she’s the only person awake to see it. For the first time in a record three-day anti-caffeine spree, she makes herself a cup of coffee. It tastes like the morning: nice, safe and a little bitter.
There’s that word again. Safe. It tastes sour in her mouth and makes her clench her jaw. It feels like a lie, even though she’s pretty sure it’s not.
She’s not completely convinced, though. She doesn’t think she ever will be.
She sits on the couch with her coffee, across from the TV cart that houses a tiny collection of action DVDs and Monty’s small, rechargeable roomba that he occasionally programs to chase Raven and Jasper around the kitchen. There are dust motes dancing in the sunlight. A clock ticks from somewhere in the house.
After a couple minutes, the door just off the kitchen creaks open, and Raven limps out, reaching for the coffee pot before she even gets to the counter.
“Hung over?” Emori asks before she can stop herself. It’s been too long; she should be comfortable talking to her roommates by now, but every word she says still sinks like a stone in her stomach.
Raven nods. “It’s been too long since I actually drank Monty’s moonshine,” she grumbles. “Usually I just hold a cup of it to be polite, then nurse a beer to keep Luna company.”
Raven, now bearing her own cup of coffee, plops down beside Emori and thumps her bad leg onto the coffee table. Emori looks at the space above Raven’s foot. There’s a tiredness tugging at her she’d rather not explore, but the alternative is a conversation she’s not sure she can handle.
Thankfully, Raven’s not in a talking mood. She stares off into space, eyes landing somewhere to the left of the TV. Emori watches her, the steady rise and fall of her chest, the twitch of her fingers against her leg.
“You okay?” Raven asks after a moment. “I know that fight with your brother was rough.”
Emori feels a lump rise in her throat. “I’m fine.”
She doesn’t sound like it, even to her own ears. She sounds angry and scared and as bitter as the coffee in her mug.
Raven looks at her and raises a skeptical eyebrow. “Are you?”
Emori bites her lip and looks down at her hands. “I don’t know.”
There’s a creak at the top of the stairs. Both girls’ heads snap up and over at the same time. John is standing there, looking mildly freaked out at their synchronicity.
“Morning,” he says after a moment, meandering down the stairs and flopping down between Raven and Emori. Emori leans her head against his shoulder, feeling the worn fabric of his grey sleep shirt against her cheek.
He reaches for Raven’s coffee cup, then, when she smacks his hand away with a disapproving glare, makes a grab for Emori’s. She hands it over willingly, smiling softly at John’s sound of delight when he swallows the warm liquid.
“Morning,” he says again, a special whisper just for her. He passes the mug back to her, brushes his fingers over her knuckles and kisses her forehead. Just like that, all her oxymoronic thoughts of safety and fear leave her. She hates how much she loves being able to snuggle into his side, but she does it all the same.
Raven looks over at the two of them and smiles. After a moment, she struggles to her feet. John looks up at her, then over at Emori.
“I’m not trying to make it weird,” Raven says casually, with one of her rare, genuine smiles not far behind. “I’m just hungry. You want pancakes?”
John grins. “You mean, do I want you to make Bellamy bring us pancakes when he inevitably comes over?”
For some reason, Raven’s chest flushes a deep red. “Um, yeah. Sure.”
Emori lifts her head. “Raven, have you found this house another unsuspecting deliveryman?”
“Or deliverywoman?” John asks, wiggling his eyebrows.
“J, I swear to God-”
The doorbell rings. Raven goes to answer it, relieved to escape this line of questioning. Upstairs, Emori can hear several howls of protest at the sound from Jasper, Monty and Octavia. She feels John’s laughter rumbling through his chest and up to his shoulders.
She’s about to say something when his lips on her skin make her stop short. He kisses her cheek, then her temple, then her hair. “You feeling better?” he asks.
“I’m trying not to think about it,” she answers truthfully. It’s a strange feeling, this honesty. It’s so easy to believe that she is capable of transparency. Sometimes, she can even fool herself.
Raven bustles back into the kitchen. After a moment, she pauses, leans over the peninsula counter and shouts, “Get in here!”
Luna pads into the kitchen, her hands clasped in front of her, like she’s not sure where to put them.
“You could have followed me, you know,” Raven says.
Luna shrugs. “I wasn’t sure.”
“It’s a standing invitation,” John notes.
“Ah,” Luna says, and then falls silent. She perches on the stool between Raven’s room and the back door and watches Raven place a call to Bellamy, presumably for pancakes.
Luna makes Emori nervous. She’s contained, but too much so. She’s like a powder keg; the slightest spark could set her off, but Emori doesn’t know what that spark is. The scars on her knuckles suggest a violent past, a past spent doling out pain. Maybe that’s what Emori senses.
“You alright?” Luna asks her, raising her voice to be heard over Raven, who is succinctly roasting Bellamy for something or another.
“Fine,” Emori says, sharpening her voice just enough for Luna to drop the subject.
John tangles his fingers in the ends of Emori’s hair. To escape the shivers running down her spine, she leans forward to set her coffee mug on the table. Behind them, Monty and Octavia clatter down the stairs. Monty picks up his phone from the dining room table and starts thumbing through it while trying to shield the screen from Octavia’s prying eyes.
“Who’s texting you so early on a Saturday morning?” Octavia asks, dodging Monty’s flying elbow.
“Some square who didn’t party as hard as us, probably,” Raven answers.
“‘Square’?” John asks over Emori’s head. “What, are we living in the ‘60s?”
Monty snorts, but his eyes don’t leave the phone. He starts to type, and Emori clocks the small smile on his face as it grows in size and volume.
“Who are you talking to?” she asks, nearly flinching when her voice makes the room go quiet. John told her once that it only happens because they aren’t used to her speaking up, but it still makes her anxious. She’s used to flying under the radar, to being invisible by her own design.
Thankfully, Monty spares her the awkwardness. “Just someone I met,” he hedges.
Emori thinks about letting it go, but she sees the blush on his cheeks and decides to have a little fun. “Would this be that pretty little blonde you met at the bookstore last Friday? You know, the one you tried to hide from Raven and me when you saw us walk in?”
“Damn it, Emori, you weren’t supposed to tell anyone!” Raven groans.
Emori smirks. John sits up a little straighter and pulls Emori a little closer. “Come on, Green,” he says. “Spill.”
“Her name is Harper,” he says. Raven wolf-whistles, ignoring the slap on the arm from Octavia. “We met at the lab library. She’s pre-med, but for research.”
“Raven looks like she’s about to become a human exclamation point,” John whispers in Emori’s ear. She can’t stop the laugh that bubbles up in her throat.
“What’re we talking about?” Lexa asks as she and Jasper come downstairs. A third set of footsteps follow, and everyone in the room turns to gape at Costia as she makes her way into the kitchen.
“Morning,” she says softly. “May I have some coffee?”
“Damn,” Emori mutters to John. “She’s been here what? Twice? She belongs here more than I do, and I live here.”
John inhales, like he’s about to say something, but then Raven starts questioning whether or not Costia had Slept Over last night (“The capital letters are implied in the tone,” Octavia says) and Lexa starts loudly insisting that Costia just came over really early, all the while Monty just looks relieved that Raven forgot about him. Then Bellamy shows up with breakfast and the whole house dissolves into a quiet kind of chaos-slash-feeding frenzy that abruptly ceases when Raven not-so-subtly herds everyone out into the backyard, leaving Emori and John alone on the couch, curled into each other’s warmth, breathing in the silence.
“That was obvious,” he says drily. Emori snorts and reaches for his hand. He takes her bad hand and runs his fingers over the callouses near what passes for her knuckles. “You want to go out there?”
She shakes her head because she doesn’t. She actually likes this, being alone with him. It’s a strange feeling, this trust in both him and herself.
He runs a finger over the scar under her eye, then shifts so his arm isn’t thrown around her shoulders, but instead resting on the side of her face. She has to look at him now. Damn him.
She remembers standing in his room, chocolate in her mouth, their answer-for-answer game, his fear of touching her, her fear of letting him in. She compares that image with them now, their shy touches and the way his eyes flicker to her mouth every so often, and something warm spreads through her.
“I wouldn’t have been okay with this two months ago,” she tells him. When he laughs, his breath tickles her cheek.
“Me either,” he says, and his eyes go to her mouth again.
She remembers her first morning in the house, how she wanted to bite his lips, and is almost relieved that the urge is still there. He’s so beautiful, blue eyes and sleep-wrinkled shirt, soft hands and careful words.
“Can I kiss you?” she asks.
They’re back in her old apartment and she’s waiting for him to ask, but he’s not, so here she is, tossing back her own fear in favor of something stronger. Love, maybe? That’s too much to hope for. She’d settle for his vague acceptance if she thought it would get her something more than a lifetime of being alone.
“Why are you asking?” John murmurs.
They’re on the stairs and he’s explaining why she terrifies him, why anyone that wants anything from him scares him to the point of hostility. It’s not an excuse, but it’s a reason, a reason she understands.
“Because no one else ever did,” she whispers.
He moves forward and presses his lips to hers. She feels herself gasp, then lets herself sink into the feeling of his hands in her hair and on her waist, his mouth moving against hers, the tentative press of his tongue on her lower lip.
“You belong here,” he murmurs against her mouth. “You belong right here, with us.”
She sighs, reaching up to tangle her good hand in his hair as he kisses her again, soft, then hard, then soft again, as if she’s something fragile, something holy. Her shirt rides up as she reaches for him with her bad hand, and he jerks back as his fingers brush the bare skin of her waist.
“It’s okay, John,” she says, pressing a light kiss to the underside of his jaw. His stubble tickles her nose. “It’s okay.”
They stay like that for a little while, hands roaming under shirts and over skin. Emori realizes that he likes it when she ghosts her hands over his spine, that he lets out a soft groan every time she nips at his mouth. When she finally gets up the nerve to sink her teeth into his lower lip, she’s rewarded with his hands tightening on her waist and his rough, desperate voice gasping her name.
They finally break apart when the back door creaks open and Costia’s apologetic voice announces that she’s just sneaking in to use the bathroom.
“It’s okay,” John says, propping himself up on his elbow (when did they end up lying down?). His voice is still flustered and raspy. Emori feels deeply gratified at the sound. “You can tell Captain Obvious and the others to come back in.”
“He means Raven,” Emori explains to the girl’s baffled expression. Costia nods awkwardly, then disappears into the bathroom.
John kisses her forehead, looking down at her. She smiles up at him.
She remembers his shaking voice: I want to kiss you, and it’s fucking terrifying. I want to fall in love with you, but I’m not sure that I can.
She wonders if it still terrifies him. She wonders if he could ever love her. She wonders if she has managed to trick him into doing so, just another well-done con, or if he chose this all on his own.
Then he kisses her again, grinning like a child, and she realizes that maybe, just maybe, someone actually managed to choose her without any coercion on her part.
The thought makes her want to cry.
Somewhere between cleaning up the kitchen and doing homework, she ends up roped into a grocery shopping trip with John, Octavia, Bellamy and Raven, which is a lot more fun than it sounds, especially since Bellamy seems more and more horrified at the prospect of dragging Raven and John through Target the more time he spends in a car with them.
Bellamy splits off from them the moment they get inside, making a beeline for the books. Raven and Octavia go in search of bread and coffee, and Murphy drags Emori to the frozen vegetables.
“You have to learn to like these,” he says, pointing to the array of frozen green things. “Pick two.”
Emori glares at him. “I’m not a child, John.”
“True,” he says, probably to placate her, “but you do need to eat something even mildly healthy for a change.”
She huffs at him, but agrees, taking out two bags of frozen green beans and tossing them at John, who glares and deposits them into the cart. “Here. Healthy. What next?”
“Want salad?” he asks. Emori wrinkles her nose. “Damn it, Emori, you can’t just eat garbage from convenience stores.”
“Watch me.”
“I’d rather not.” He leads her to the tiny produce section and passes her a bag of lettuce. “Here. Just trust me.”
She lets him lead her around a while more, first to get bread and milk, then to get some chips and salsa. She sneaks a package of cookies and a frozen pizza into the cart, but John pretends not to notice. He does, however, draw the line at a bottle of Coke.
They find Bellamy near the self-checkout stations, thumbing through his phone. The second John sees him, he groans.
“Bellamy, no,” he says as Bellamy looks into their cart, then begins typing.
“Listen, there’s-”
“Bellamy, no,” Octavia says, running up with her and Raven’s cart. “No. No Cartwheel. No.”
“What’s a Cartwheel?” Emori asks John.
“It’s a coupon app that this dumbass insists on using every time we go to Target,” John explains. Behind him, Raven begins another one of her roasts, this one all about Bellamy and his “grandfather-friend tendencies.” Emori can’t help but smile.
As she follows John out to Bellamy’s car with a cart full of food - real food! - and a chest full of laughter, she thinks about all the things she never thought she could have and how close they are to her grasp at this very moment.
It’s nice, but a little disconcerting. It’s nice, but not quite nice enough to make her forget about Otan - not completely.
She stares out the window the whole ride home. It’s just as loud and obnoxious as the ride there, but she can’t find it in her to join in. She looks at John out of the corner of her eye and thinks maybe I should break his heart. Then, maybe I should stop this before it all starts. Then, maybe all of this is more than I can handle, more than I can hold in my two hands, more than I ever deserved.
She wants out. She wants to run. She feels that same flight instinct she’s held onto since the day she was arrested. She feels the same itch that she felt the day Otan first called her, the day she took John to the place where she grew up, the day he kissed her and she actually felt like this life was something more than a hazy dream that would disappear the longer she actually lived inside it.
That’s what this feeling is, she realizes. It’s like she’s living inside a house of glass, and if she touches it, if she dares to think too much, if she dares to settle in and lean back against the wall, the whole damn illusion will shatter and she’ll find herself alone and scared on a street corner or another shitty apartment and this time there will be absolutely no safety net.
“Mori?” John nudges her gently. “You okay?”
He knows. Somehow, he must know what she’s thinking. She blinks, shakes her head, steadies her breathing. “I’m fine.”
She doesn’t look at him. She can’t. She can’t.
“We need to talk,” is the first thing she says when Otan picks up the phone.
“So now you want to?” he snaps. Emori flinches as if she’s been punched. “Where was that last night?”
She hangs up.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” John asks. She’s lying in bed. He’s kneeling on her floor, his cheek against the edge of her mattress. His voice is muffled, but still resigned. “I can tell when someone’s about to run. You have that look.”
She aches. Tears prickle at the back of her eyes. “He was all I had,” she says, because what else do you say to a true accusation?
“I know.”
“I literally owed him my life.” She sits up, props herself on an elbow and meets his eyes. “I don’t know how to feel. And I hate it.”
“I think he’s an idiot for not staying for you. For not coming back for you until it was too late. Family’s family.” He looks down and shrugs. “But what do I know?”
She reaches down and starts carding her fingers through his hair, smiling carefully when he leans into her touch with a sigh. The words I love you well up in her, swift and furious, and she has to gnaw on her lower lip to keep them inside.
“You’re beautiful,” she murmurs instead. He shakes his head. She tugs on the strands of his hair just enough to make him groan. “Yes, you are.”
He looks up at her. His eyes are dark. “Question for question?”
She sighs, sits up, and scoots back so he can climb up and sit next to her. They stack her pillows against the wall and lean back. “Sure.”
“Why are you leaving?”
She blows out a breath. “I can’t stay here. This doesn’t feel real.”
John snorts. “Bullshit.”
She shakes her head. This isn’t coming out right. “This isn’t my life, John. This passivity, this easiness, this pattern of school and classes and having enough to eat - it’s all wrong. It’s not mine.”
“You mean you don’t deserve it?” He sounds guarded, but like he’s trying to understand. Emori will take what she can get.
“I don’t.” She looks up at him, willing him to understand. The ache in her chest only grows stronger. “How long until they realize what I am and throw me out? How long before I’m alone again?”
He reaches for her bad hand and begins meticulously unwrapping it. When she tries to pull away, he holds on tighter. “John…”
“Otan left you,” he says evenly, not taking his eyes off her skin, which is slowly bared to him one scar and scab and flaw at a time. He tosses off the wrap and pushes her sleeve up, turning her palm over so he can brush the worst of the scar at her wrist with his fingers. “That was his choice. Your mom threw you out,” his voice catches on the words, “and that was her stupid, fucking choice.”
He crawls over the bed and kneels near her feet. She’s still wearing her boots: ugly things with the soles wearing out. He unzips one of them and pulls it off carefully. “You did some illegal shit, and, yeah, that was your choice.” He takes off her other boot. “But Otan was right there with you. And whatever happened with Baylis, I’m guessing that wasn’t up to either of you.”
He looks at her, dead in the eyes, and there’s no chance he’ll flinch away this time. Secretly, she’s glad, even as she shrinks under his gaze. Ontari has left him, it seems, and she rejoices in his freedom, however slight and fleeting.
“It’s not your fault,” he says softly, resting his hands on her shins. She tries to look away, but he grips her legs until she turns back to him. “It’s not your fault.”
“John…” She almost laughs, she’s so uncomfortable. His words grate against her ears. She wants to run, run now, run far away before his words shake the glass walls just enough to break them all down.
“It’s not your fault,” he says again, shuffling closer on his knees. He stops and kneels beside her, close enough to kiss her, close enough to reach her. “It’s not your fault.”
“Shut up, John.” She tries for anger, but her voice trembles. She pulls her knees up to her chest. Her eyes burn. Her face is warm. Her left hand weighs a thousand pounds.
“It’s not your fault.” He rests his hands on either side of her face. A single tear falls. John wipes it away. “Do you believe me?”
She lets out a dry, choked sob and shakes her head. “You belong here,” he whispers, kissing her forehead.
“This place is not my home.”
“Hey.” He kisses her nose. “Your home is with me. Okay?”
She lets out another sob. She reaches for him, and he comes to her. He wraps her in his arms and pulls the covers over them both. He lets her cry into his chest for the second time in as many nights and then he kisses her until she’s breathless and laughing as tears dry on her face.
The bag she packed hours before stands, forgotten, in the corner.
Hmm... probably an AU setting, Memori-centric, probably inspired by some kind of Siken poem, angst with cute moment sprinkled sparingly throughout.
that’s like every fic I’ve ever written lmaoooo
Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
Oh boy... well, I don’t know if it’s good, but probably:
He waits until she struggles into the passenger seat before handing her a cup of coffee left to cool in the cupholder. She sips at the lukewarm liquid and rolls down the window. The air is cold and crisp. It tastes like summer, like foggy mornings and late nights, and it lacks the bite of chemicals and pollution that city air carries.
She hangs her head out the window and watches the trees. Their leaves are turning thicker and darker, readying themselves for the summer to come. She sees tiny towns peeking through the foliage, their steeples, general stores and decrepit homes begging to be seen. Beyond it all rises the Blue Ridge Mountains, imposing and dark, full of secrets.
While they rattle along cracked and damaged highways, she uses her calloused fingers to rub layer after layer of cheap foundation into her skin, paying special attention to her left cheek and nose where the tattoo mars her otherwise-ordinary appearance.
“Want some?” She asks Otan, offering her makeup-stained finger to him before swiping some on his scarred cheek. The dark pigment stains his pale skin. He slaps her hand away, grins when she laughs at his attempts to wipe the smudge away.
He has to stop for gas so they pull off and rattle into a sleepy town that’s stirring under the warm blanket of a late spring morning. A diner at the end of the street has its lights on and the sign on the door winks feebly. Smelling the promise of pancakes, she slips from the cab and steals her brother’s wallet from his jacket pocket. (from Little Beast)
This is probably the best piece of scene-setting work I’ll ever write. That sounds super-cocky though so I apologize...
Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.
His name dies on her lips the moment she sees him. He looks like hell, looks like thousands of miles of dirt road, hangovers and nights crying into a shitty mattress on a dirty apartment floor.
“Emori?”
She told herself if he ever came, she’d make him apologize - make him ask for her to come home.
“John.”
She told herself she wouldn’t let him touch her.
“I’m so sorry, Mori.”
She told herself she wouldn’t run to him.
“It’s okay.”
She can’t move. She can’t breathe. Anya’s looking at her as if to say want me to kick him off my porch?
“No, it’s not, I-”
Anya moves aside, out of the doorway, and Emori flies into his arms so quickly she startles herself. He wraps his arms tightly around her shoulders and holds on with trembling hands. (from Road Music)
I wanted to capture confliction and pain and longing here, and I think I did a decent job. Plus, I wanted to give us all the reconciliation we deserve.
If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?
Probably Little Beast, because of the aesthetic. Or my unnamed next-gen fic, just because I would love to see some of the scenes I’ve written played out.
Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much
Only three?????
@bombshellsandbluebells is not ONLY THE BEST EDITOR EVER BUT ALSO THE BEST AT CAUSING ME PAIN and she has the most Interesting fic ideas EVER
@maskingtapepoetree was the first Memori fic writer I ever read and I LOVE how everything she writes is pure poetry. Plus, the smut.
@katswatermelon The List made me cryyyyyyyyy and that never happens. ‘Nough said.
Would you ever kill off a canon character?
Well, I killed Emori off in That’s All There Is lol but I don’t really anticipate killing anyone else off in the near future :))))
Talk about a review that made your day.
@maskingtapepoetree goes through my chapters and pulls out quotes or parts she likes and writes Long Comments on why she loves them. @emorireyes always ALWAYS reviews, no matter what and @sarcasticdebate wrote me a review on chapter 5 of Litany that made me smile so Hard.
This is one massive trope-slash-cliche and I wish I was sorry
Enjoy the Memori coffee shop AU we really didn’t need.
There is implied/reference self-harm in section V, but it’s minor. I’m not taking any chances though <3
i.
You really only choose the coffee shop because it's warm and quiet and those are two things your apartment is not at the moment, not since the heater broke and the December snow started piling on the windows and the music and noise from the second and first floors started drifting up to your third-floor walk-up.
It’s a small place, wood paneling on the walls in an artsy, slightly-disorganized contrast to the smooth floors and the mismatched couches, armchairs and tables. Their coffee is strong; you take it black and curl into the massive armchair near the window, sipping out of a chipped mug and reading over your assignments for winter term.
You’re there for two or three hours when someone flops into the chair across from you, letting out a sigh meant only for his ears. When you look up - and you didn’t mean to look up so sharply, but he doesn’t know that - he gives you a polite smile, then looks down at the cup of coffee in his hands.
He takes it black, too, you notice with interest. [Read on Ao3]
Once he opens his laptop, you study him. He’s maybe a little younger than you, with high cheekbones and blue eyes. He’s pretty, you think involuntarily, then ball your right hand into a tight fist until the pain from your nails on your skin jerks you back to the moment.
When he stretches and stands some time later, you look up and see the sky is pitch-black, the street lights right outside the shop’s window beginning to flicker on. He shoulders his backpack while staring out the window, then turns his body toward you slightly, just enough for you to know he’s talking to you.
“It’s snowing again.”
You look up at him. He has a nice, sharp jawline. “Yeah.”
He looks at you. His eyes aren’t exactly soft, but you don’t feel the need to run from him either. “You taking the bus?”
“No, I walked here.”
He pulls the hood of his jacket up. “Get home safe,” he says awkwardly, like an afterthought.
You don’t know what else to say but, “You too.” It sounds too polite leaving your mouth.
He walks away. You see him board the bus outside. When it pulls away, you swear his eyes meet yours from the window.
You look at the take-out coffee cup he left on the windowsill. When you pick it up, it’s empty. John is written on it in a barista's messy scrawl.
Something in you smiles.
ii.
You see John again the next day. It’s even colder, so you’re wearing your brother’s sweater over two thermal shirts, only one of which is long enough to hide your bad hand. You usually wrap a strip of cloth to hide it, but it froze overnight after getting wet from the leak in the roof.
Damn, your apartment is a mess.
Anyway, he’s there when you arrive and normally you would find somewhere else to sit, but that chair is right near a vent that blows warm air, which sounds pretty damn good right about now, so you sit.
He gives you another nod-smile and you grin back - not a real grin, but a flash of teeth that masquerades as one - and when you sit down, he takes a sip of his coffee and that’s that.
You're so deep into the eight-page paper you're working on - who the fuck told you it was a good idea to take classes during winter break and why did you listen? - that you don't notice him standing over you until he clears his throat and you flinch and blink upwards.
“You were shivering,” he says, a bit gruffly, and hands you a mug that may as well be a bowl with a handle.
“Was I?” you murmur so as not to disturb this moment, this strange moment when someone is standing over you offering you something warm and nice, looking at you with a furrow between his brow as if he’s confused or maybe worried.
It’s entirely unsettling.
He gives you a jerky nod and sits down across from you. The furrow between his eyes gets deeper when you start digging for your wallet.
“For the coffee,” you explain, holding out some crumpled bills.
He shakes his head. You outstretch your right hand, your good hand a little farther, and he shakes his head again.
I don’t want to owe anyone, you want to say, but it comes out as a “thank you” whispered into your backpack.
When you lift your head, a smile is fading from his lips.
iii.
“Shit,” he’s muttering when you sit down in your chair. “Fuck.”
You take in his angry expression and the way he’s slamming the keys of his laptop, and lean forward so he looks at you. “Computer trouble?”
He rakes a hand through his hair. “It just froze and I can’t fucking get it back and I have a project due in an hour and-“
“Gimme,” you say, reaching for the device. He hands it over and you look at it, tapping at the keys smoothly with your right hand and clumsily with your left. The screen fades to black, then whirs to life after a moment, and you pass it back with a proud smile.
“Thanks,” he says, clearing the remnants of anger from his voice. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Then, “are you taking winter classes too?”
Are you seriously talking to him? Your blood runs cold for a small moment, then thaws when he, looking just as startled as you feel, nods.
Your left hand is on display, you realize. It's resting awkwardly atop your knee, the faded bandana ugly in the dim light from the window. His eyes flick to it, then up to your face.
“Are you hurt or something?”
He says it with a tone of concern masquerading as indifferent curiousity. You look at his eyes and find the smallest hint of emotion and it’s enough to trust him.
“It’s not a bandage.” You unwrap the bandana, slowly but surely revealing the rough patches, fused fingers and that scar you never ever talk about.
“Woah,” he breathes, but it’s an admiring woah, the kind that meant “that’s so cool” in middle school. He reaches for it, traces a finger over the tiny stub near your pinky. “That’s really badass.”
You huff out a laugh that’s more relief than anything else. “Liar.” His acceptance of the worst part of you makes your throat constrict and you reach out as a thank-you and apology all at once. “I’m Emori, by the way.”
“Murphy,” he says, but you already know to call him John. “Nice to…formally meet you, I guess.”
You smile, a real one this time. Your stomach clenches. You feel like your skin is on fire, but the nice kind, the kind when you want something so badly and you know you’re so close to obtaining it. It’s the anticipation of the con, only you don’t have to con him into liking you because he already does.
“You too.”
It’s like the first day you met, only he doesn’t give you an awkward look, but grins, all flashing teeth and clever eyes, and eventually he moves his chair a little closer to yours, saying that the vent was warm and he was freezing, but he explains just a little too long, and do you dare hope he’s interested in your company?
(You shouldn’t dare, but you do.)
(When he leaves you his phone number, hidden under your coffee mug, you smile and text him right away.)
(You never stop texting after that.)
iv.
Thank God the coffee shop is open late on Fridays.
Otan is having a party and you need to work on your midterm, so you trudge the four blocks in the snow and single-digit temperature to get there, the thought of the chair by the vent and warm black coffee and John’s nice smile and pretty eyes buoying you.
You had texted him before leaving the house and he said he was in his usual spot, so that’s where your eyes go as soon as you arrive. He’s standing near the window when you burst in, shaking snow from your hair, but you nearly freeze when you see him with another girl. His back is to you, but you can see her, all dark-haired, pale, fierce-eyed and-
And he’s angry with her, hissing between gritted teeth, and she’s got a vice grip on his arm and before you can reconsider, you’re marching over there, tapping him on the shoulder until he turns around.
“Emori.” He sounds relieved? Scared? Both of the above? You take one look at the other girl and do what you do best: act.
“Hey, babe,” you say nonchalantly, wrapping your left arm around his shoulders and looking at the other girl with what you hope is a vaguely possessive expression. “Who’s this?”
“Ontari,” she says sharply, releasing John’s arm and jamming her hand in her pocket. “You’re his girlfriend?”
“Last time I checked.” You keep your tone light, but wary. John’s body relaxes with every moment Ontari’s hands are off him, but you’re sure that if you checked, the place where her grip was strongest would be bruising his pale skin. “Is there a problem here, John?”
“She was just leaving,” John says, wrapping his arm around your waist, bunching the fabric of your still-wet jacket in his hand.
Ontari looks murderous, but takes her leave with a snide “it was nice seeing you” that implies it really wasn’t.
You wait until she walks past the window to release him, but his arm still keeps you close. “You didn’t have to do that,” he says softly.
“Yeah,” you say, swiveling to face him. His hand is warm, burning you through all your layers, and you feel like your heart is about to come out of your throat when you look at his face, now so close to yours. “I did.”
He releases you after a moment, stammering out an apology that you wave off, and insists on buying you a coffee.
“As a thanks for being my knight in shining armor,” he says, a smirk on his face, and you let him bring you a steaming mug and wrap his huge scarf around your shoulders like a blanket when the warmth doesn’t seep in fast enough.
“Thanks,” you say, holding the mug as close to your face as you dare.
He sits down in his usual seat, then looks at her. “So, wait. ‘Babe’?”
You laugh. “Well, I had to assert dominance somehow! I’m sorry, do you prefer sweetheart?” When he starts laughing, you continue. “Honey? Kitten?”
“Oh, fuck off,” he says, but he’s still laughing, probably more in relief than anything else. You laugh with him, and the peace that settles into your bones drives away the cold more than even the coffee could.
v.
He sits beside you one day.
You’ve been texting for weeks and flirting for longer, the incident with Ontari sparking something that feels suspiciously like a crush. Sometimes you wonder if you’re imagining things, but then he’ll say things nearly complementary about your eyes or hair, and you’ll retaliate with teasing, and sometimes you drive one another away, but you always come back together in fits and starts.
You think you want him. And it fucking terrifies you, and you know it scares him because you met his best friend Raven one day when she showed up at the shop to give him his car keys and she whispered “give him time” in your ear when he went to the bathroom.
Now, he’s sitting beside you, his arm so close to yours and you feel like you’re on edge, but also like you’re more at peace than you’ve been in a long time.
So when he taps you on the shoulder and asks if a sentence he’s writing makes sense, you lean over to look. Your head is almost level with his chest and suddenly it’s very hard to keep your mind on the paper and not on how gentle his hand is as it rests on your shoulder.
“It’s good,” you nearly whisper, your heart in your throat. “It’s a good sentence, I mean.”
You know this feeling - not in practice, but in theory - and you like it, you like it way more than you should, you like it enough to want to burrow into it and live here until the weather outside is warm again.
You look up and your faces are inches away. He parts his lips and before you can say something, his eyes flick down to your mouth, then up to your eyes-
And then he leans back, blowing out a harsh breath and apologizing.
“Why do you apologize so damn much?” you ask before you can help it.
“I thought-”
“I would have said no,” you say.
He nods. “Okay.”
Nothing happens after that. You sit side by side and it’s awkward for a while, but soon he’s leaning over the arm of your chair to show you Vines his friends text him, and then you start talking. He tells you about these meme-loving friends, and you talk about the cities you’ve lived in and how college would be so much better if there were less tests and more essays and he asks, innocently, how you can type with your left fingers fused the way they are, so you get to show him your neat trick of reaching halfway across the keyboard with the longer fingers.
He reaches for your bad hand, touching the scar that rests like a rope right above the bone of your wrist. “What happened?”
You shake your head. “Nothing.” Your insides start to quiver. That feeling is back, that feeling that burns you up from the inside out whenever you think of him. It’s almost midnight and you’re tired, but you also feel so alive.
Something dawns in his eyes. He lets your wrist go and rolls up his sleeve to reveal the thin white scars marking his skin in even intervals like a white picket fence. “Like this?”
You want to cry just looking at them. Your only consolation is that they’re old scars and there’s no sign of fresh marks.
“Yes,” you say, and it’s barely a whisper, but he hears you nonetheless.
He pulls his sleeve down and touches your wrist again, lifting your hand so the scar is eye level. “Badass,” he says again and then he keeps his eyes on yours as he presses a kiss to the ruined skin, his lips trembling against your greatest flaw.
“John-” you start to say and he jerks back like he’s expecting you to hit him or run away but you surge forward to kiss him and as his hand cups the back of your head, you find yourself not caring about the cold or the shame or anything else except the warm skin under your hands and the gentleness in his lips.
“You have a tattoo,” he says, and your right hand flies to your cheek because yes, you do, but you wear such heavy foundation that you forget it’s there half the time, and he’s never commented on it before anyway. “That’s-”
“Badass?” you suggest with a quirk of your brow, and he laughs.
“Why do you cover up all the good stuff?” he asks with a pout. You watch in fascination as his pupils slowly shrink, revealing more and more blue. “Your hand, the tattoo. Why?”
You shrug. “The tattoo is so people don’t stare. I hate staring. And I hate this-” you hold up your hand - “more than anything.”
“I think it’s the best thing about you,” he says softly. After a breath, he speaks again. "You're the best thing that's happened to me in a long time."
