For Anon
Prompt: D'you think you could write something Halloween-y (no pressure you can post it in December if you want) for Lukivesse?
This fall's warmer than last year's; her fingers aren't even numb yet.
An apology, maybe, for how crazy it was last time, and while nature doesn't normally seem the type to care about human acts of nonsense, like Witherstorms or the horrors they bring, the ground here was once stripped to bedrock, the trees and hedges and meadows all plucked up just like the people.
For all the good their recovery efforts have done, as amazing as mass-scale building and rebuilding can be, maybe nature's still recovering, just a bit.
Regardless of the why or how, Olivia won't complain. The walk to the hairdresser would be way more unbearable if the weather was anything like last year's, and the wait outside would be worse.
(Time marches on, natures heals, and Lukas's hair grew longer than he ever intended to let it while they were in the portals.
Olivia's half surprised he didn't take care of it himself as soon as they all got back, but he deserves the chance to kick back and they've all been a bit too busy trying to get back to life the past few weeks.)
Their conversation lulls as they approach, lapsing comfortably, and Olivia stretches, stepping away from the door.
Thanks to how it’s made almost entirely of glazed glass, she's also stepping out of the distorted and hazy beam of light passing through it.
Her fingers curl, briefly, around the back of the bench set between the salon and the nearest shop, a cafe with cute sayings written in chalk on its sign and few lights currently on inside, enough to keep monsters from spawning and little else.
"I'll wait out here." It's a wooden bench, making it ten times more inviting than a metal one would be even on a lukewarm night, and the nearest lamp is just far enough away for the lighting to be safe but relaxing, working well with the decorations and much smaller lights strung up around nearby buildings and the salon itself. Olivia's gaze jumps from the swirling patterns on the lantern glass to Jesse, matching her raised eyebrow with one of her own. "I know I wouldn't want to get between you and Lukas's hair."
Lukas reacts more to that statement than Jesse does, his lower lip sticking out a bit too much to be genuine, the brief chewing at it too harsh and timed to be a nervous tic. His arms cross, the pout as overly dramatic as it is pronounced, and she half expects a demand to apologize not to him, but his hair.
"You like my hair." Lukas's tone is as wounded as his expression, and just as manufactured, the brief tremble to it more likely to be due to the way his lips twitch upwards than any emotional ache.
Still, Olivia's amazed he never went into theater.
"And I can play with it at home." She snorts, hand on her hip. "Do you want a third set of hands messing with your hair? Because the hairdresser's going to have enough competition with Jesse on that."
"If it bothers anybody, then I'll just stop." Jesse says it the way a chicken wanders in a meadow; with too much ease and far too much daring. It's a little haughty, but mostly soft, as joking as the way she ruffles Lukas's hair again.
(His bangs are practically covering his eyes, falling from where they'd been combed back before they left the temple, his fingers twitching for the comb he left at home. It's cuter than it has any right to be.)
"Jesse, you saved how many people? How many worlds? You could spit on them and they still wouldn't say anything to your face. They're definitely not going to tell you to stop messing with Lukas's hair when we're paying for it." Olivia considers that statement, because she fully believes it but she's also known Jesse almost all of her life, and that sounds like something that could be taken as a challenge. "Not unless you go wild in there, but I trust you two to behave yourselves."
Lukas and Jesse grin, nearly speaking at the same time.
"First mistake."
They're still giggling and chuckling to themselves as they walk in, bell chiming quietly as they do, and they're dorks, absolute total dorks who amuse themselves better than anyone, but they're hers and Olivia's grinning when she sits on the bench.
They'll never be able to top the queen of the dorks, even if the effort's adorable and they're dorky in their own, less redstone-related and socially-awkward ways.
They pull off cute well, especially with how shaggy Lukas's hair's gotten, soft as ever but getting damnably long in a way that seems to bother him far more than it bothers Olivia or Jesse, who are equally happy to have more to mess with.
Olivia's amazed he never hacked it off before now, using one of the swords they had or even a pair of shears she's sure they came across at some point. She knows Lukas loves his hair, and would hate mutilating it even more than not properly caring for it, but it's been driving him crazy as it is just doing basic, normal things at home or during training.
If he'd had another week of running for his life and trying to deal with his hair falling in his face, maybe he would have given in and cut it. The portals seemed good at inspiring that sort of desperation.
The portals.
On second thought, maybe he did trim it at some point before it grew back and he gave up.
They were gone long enough, and maybe it just seemed like a waste of time.
Olivia rests the side of her head against her hand, elbow propped up on the bench armrest as she watches the string of lights above her tremble in the breeze.
They don't talk about the portals.
Not that they aren't affected near constantly.
There's been a lot of crying, a lot of staying up sleepless, a lot of working themselves to exhaustion to try and bypass the nightmares and lurking memories, but there hasn't been a lot of talking about the portal misadventures.
Or any talking, really. None that doesn't fizzle and shrivel up, pushed aside in favor of ignoring it all together as best they can.
(There are a lot of names, mumbled, whispered, shrieked, or casually said that mean nothing to her yet. It's maybe worse when she does recognize the names, her stomach turning when Lukas screams Aiden's name in his sleep before gasping awake, throat hoarse even before he can curl up and start shuddering with his own sobs, her mind screeching at her that she knew the Blaze Rods were nothing but trouble, that Aiden's threats were more than just talk.
It's awful to hear, to think about, but it's hardly talking.
Mostly, she finds out about portal things through Lukas's writing, rough drafts he passes her way in lieu of describing vocally. Olivia looks over the details with the scrutiny of a trusted editor; she memorizes them the way any concerned person would, friend, partner, or otherwise, and some of the descriptions are ghastly and are burned into her brain whether she likes them or not.
It's fair; she wouldn't have kind things to say about dying.
Lukas still hasn't written about the Blaze Rods, beyond a general, too vague and too passive summary of terrible things that happened in some city in the sky.
Olivia wonders if he ever will. She trusts him, though, to heal in his own way, and she knows he'll write about it when he's ready, even if it's just for the sake of giving the right beginning to his book.)
Maybe this haircut's one of the first steps towards trying to really move past it all.
Maybe not.
It could just be driving Lukas crazy without being symbolic of anything, or it could be the opposite; Lukas trying to force things back to the way they were and acting like things are fine when they aren't.
Regardless, she'll be here.
If he's trying to stuff it all down, he won't get very far with both Olivia and Jesse keeping an eye on him, and Jesse won't get far with trying the same thanks to Lukas and Olivia watching her.
They worry about Olivia too when they shouldn't, when she was kidnapped for little more than a day while they spent weeks and months scared and in terrible situations. They care so much, and maybe she doesn't agree with it, but she can work with them all looking out for each other.
Notch knows they deserve it, deserve some kind of break, even if they have to carve out a space for it between the doubts and nightmares and endlessly crushing work schedules because some nights they're busy leaders.
Some nights, though, they're just doing their best to have a good time and able to try. Some nights, that's more than enough.
The wind shifts again, whistling through a nearby alley and then up into the tree limbs, soft and deep and almost sounding like a wolf's cry before ending in the rattling of crisp and still dying leaves. A chill goes up her spine, making her curl in on herself, one arm wrapping around her stomach as her shoulders hunch. It's not much colder, but the shift gets Olivia to consider going inside, laughing at whatever Lukas and Jesse are up to or making comments about new directions Lukas could take with his hair.
Then the wind slows, and there's not another whistle from the alley.
Instead, two figures emerge, slowly and gently gliding out of the corner of her eye. Olivia wants to congratulate them on their makeup, soft and pale, ask how whatever party they were at went, and then her tongue goes dead in her mouth and she has to make sure she doesn't swallow it.
Because their feet aren't even on the ground. They're truly gliding, swaying side by side, holding each other's hands and looking only at the other. They're not up for outside questions, from the look of it.
Their clothes shine as much as their skin, silver and outdated likely beyond even Soren's standards. Holes that are there at one moment aren't in the next, and with each motion, their outfits grow less tattered and worn, fraying ends seemingly mending themselves as the figures begin to look healthier, happier, skin still never losing its pale, translucent quality even as the tired smiles melt into something brighter and more innocent.
Olivia watches them waltz down the street, glowing as softly as the string of pumpkin shaped orange lights hanging above the salon and the cafe beside it.
There's a melody in her head that wasn't there before, a catchy but tinny tune she could see playing out of a very old jukebox, when they fade out of view, dissipating into little more than brief shimmers of gold. It's as if they turn to glowstone, and by the next blink, there's nothing there at all but an abandoned street and an alley threatening to whistle and howl lowly again.
A leaf scrapes against the ground, tumbling as it passes from one sidewalk to another, and Olivia's...
Well, she's not sure about a lot of things, including if she's the only one who saw them or if what she saw was even close to real. She's not the superstitious type, and all the same she's seen weirder.
But she hopes they're having a nice night. Found peace, maybe, even if ghosts don't quite work well with that concept.
Olivia settles back into the bench, rests her head against her hand again, and smiles as she hears Jesse start to laugh, Lukas spluttering about something. There's a joke, hard but good to hear through the wall, about maybe trying out some new colors, about dyes on sale and colors that could fit him, and in that moment Olivia's found peace too.
