Princess Mechanic, possibly in the poly fic verse, idk, 580 words
Written in under 20 minutes
*
The night is frigid cold and clear, and their breaths mist out in front of them with every exhale. Raven's wearing a pair of warm knitted gloves that Dr. Griffin--Abby, she's supposed to call her--pulled out of some closet, and her hands feel chunky and useless in them, but they're terribly warm and soft inside so she can't complain. She cups her hands up to her mouth and blows into them, lets her own hot breath waft back to the exposed skin of her face, then claps her palms together a couple times, listens to the dull, muffled sound they make, still too loud in the stillness.
Every other bit of her is bundled up, and she can feel a particular type of sharp cold, a certain incipient numbness, casting across her face: the frigid points of her nose, her cheeks, the bottoms of her ears.
Clarke is the type of person whose family owns a second home out in the country.
This is probably a sign that it will never work between them--one of how many now? at one point she was counting--but still. It is peaceful out here. Deliriously quiet, in the hours after sunset, rolling farmland in the distance rising and falling along gentle hills, frosted over so the green of the dying grass turns almost colorless, the long driveway a frozen, hard-packed dirt beneath their boots.
"Do you think your mother likes me?" Raven asks. She wasn't going to say it, wasn't going to say anything at all. The question just comes out on its own.
"She adores you," Clarke answers, too fast for a lie, and curls her arm through Raven's. "She thinks you're smart."
"That's obvious."
Clarke laughs, and the sound seems too big, too sharp, the clouded exhales of her breath too wide in the gentle quiet. "Right, I mean--"
"Smarter than Finn."
"Yeah."
And it's true that Abby didn't really know him, but Clarke still shrugs, like, well she's not wrong.
Their shoes squeak on the hard ground, tramping not quite in tune with each other. Above them, the sky stretches out so far above them it feels infinite, just about as infinite as it really is, and scattered over with tiny white stars. The most breathtaking, vast landscape that Raven has ever seen.
She stops up short without meaning to, tips her head all the way back, and tries to breathe them in. Next to her, Clarke stands incredibly still, cuddled up close to her with their arms still intertwined, watching her--Raven can't see her face but she knows the look, knows that Clarke is watching her like she's watching the stars.
"Hey," Clarke breathes. "Do you see that?"
She's still not looking up, but Raven blinks and then she sees the stars are moving, that not all of the pinpricks of white are stars at all, but that some of them are snowflakes, and they're falling light and airy down from the heavens to the ground.
She follows one down, or tries to, but her gaze is always moving, always distracted by the next--and then she sees that Clarke is grinning, the wide and joyous smile that makes Raven remember, yes, she understands what true beauty is, understands better than most and is moved so much more--Raven covers Clarke's hand with her hand and squeezes tight.
By the morning the whole town will be blanketed in white.
December 9: Murphy & Miller, Worst Secret Santa Gift
For the prompt "“I’m going to buy/make the worst secret Santa gift humanly possible," requested by @fontainebleau22. Thank you!
Murphy & Miller, ~660 words, modern AU
I reblogged some winter/holiday prompts here, and I'm accepting requests if anyone is interested.
*
"I am going to make the worst secret Santa gift humanly possible," Murphy announces, as he surveys the coffee table, and the mess of crafting supplies he has arrayed upon it.
Miller looks up. He's sitting sideways in the armchair, his legs over the arm. For over an hour now has been so engrossed in his book that he's barely paid any attention to the sounds of Murphy moving, gathering, arranging, dropping, and piling up his hoard of Christmas stuff. When he catches sight of the coffee table now, his eyebrows rise up.
"Is that a threat?"
"It's a declaration of intent," Murphy answers. He's got that glint in his eyes that says he's scheming and proud of it.
Miller just shrugs. "That table looks like an elf threw up on it," he says, and turns back to his book.
"That's the idea." He picks up some scraps of yarn in one hand, and a small canister of round red and green beads in the other. "I want to create something that looks like it came from Christmas Town by way of hell."
"What did your secret Santa giftee ever do to you?" He flips a page. Then glances up one more time. "It's not me, is it?"
"Nathan. Have you forgotten what the word secret means?" He's starting to fold a piece of white paper now, as if to make a snowflake, creasing it hard enough to give himself paper cuts. "This isn't about the giftee, this is about Clarke."
"And her insistence that everyone make their Christmas gift this year?"
"Yeah. She has artistic talent. She is probably going to give her giftee some amazing piece of art that looks like it could hang in a museum and what am I supposed to do? Hmmm? What am I supposed to make?"
"Elf vomit from hell?"
"Exactly." Underneath all the glitter, beads, yarn, paper, felt, tape, and glue is a rectangular cardboard box, not much bigger than a shoe box. Miller can see, out of the corner of his eye, Murphy extract it from beneath the wreckage of every elementary school craft project ever, and eye it warily. His half-finished snowflake has fallen to the floor.
"So your gift's for Clarke?"
"I didn't say that."
"Right."
He returns to his book. From the couch, he can smell the scent of Elmer's glue and hear the rattling of beads, the soft sound of Murphy cursing, and the sharp cutting sound of scissors slicing through paper.
"So what's going in the box?"
"Nothing. The box is the gift."
Miller looks up, tilts his chin down and stares at Murphy as if over the top of invisible glasses. Murphy stops, one garish felt snowman in his hand and the bottle of glue in the other.
"What? It's a beautiful keepsake."
"Don't be a troll."
Not to Clarke.
Murphy just snorts, and for a while afterword, works in a suspiciously uninterrupted silence.
But when Clarke opens the box on Christmas Eve, at the annual friend group holiday exchange—the box that looks like the monstrous reject from an kindergarten art class, so doused in glitter that it's shedding sparkles all over Clarke's hands and festive knitted sweater—she smiles a genuine, sweet smile, and says, "Thank you, Murphy," in a voice softer than Miller's ever heard her use before.
And the next time he sees her, she's wearing the cracked watch case from her father’s wristwatch on a chain around her neck.
"How'd you even get your hands on it, anyway?" he asks Murphy later. "I haven't even seen it since it broke and she stopped wearing it."
Murphy just stares at him, stone-faced, the smallest tic at the corner of his mouth the only indication of a smile. But Miller knows it would be a self-satisfied grin if he would let it. "You're not the only thief around here, Nate," he says.
Summary: Bellamy and the boys head down the coast on a whim, ready to have the best summer of their lives. They work tourist season jobs and hang out on the beach, listen to the rambling stories of their landlord, who owns the surf shop downstairs, and flirt with the locals.
Then one afternoon, at his job behind the counter of a record store, Bellamy meets a beautiful, rich, unattainable, ex-Daddy's girl, and for the rest of the summer, he can't get her out of his head.
Just a little indulgent thing idk. I like it, though.
*
Octavia's bedroom is set off from the rest of the loft by a beaded curtain. It's in the corner of the space, with a window taking up half the wall behind the bed, the rest of the walls exposed gray brick. She's got a bed, a chest of drawers that she hauled in on her brother's pick-up truck from a garage sale in the suburbs, and a milk crate that she uses as a bedside table. In the corner is an Army bag that she uses for her laundry, and a tall lamp with three opposable bulbs that shine light up to the ceiling, where, at night, it reverberates throughout the corner and flashes back against the glass, creating wide parallelograms of shadow and light.
The bed is a full-sized mattress set low to the floor, on a wooden bed frame made of slats. No headboard. Her sheets are white and her comforter a purple color in the mid-range of the scale, a color almost red, in the poor evening light. A few times, Clarke has found herself alone in the bed, and from that vantage point she has examined the remainder of the room in as much detail as she can without actually breaking confidence and snooping. She's looked through the books that Octavia keeps in the milk cart: trade paperbacks with underlining in them that must have come from Bellamy, and an A6-sized journal held closed with a green rubber band. She's stared at the chest of drawers, finding patterns in the scars on the wood, memorizing the faded stickers on the side. A flower with neon green and pink petals. A smiley face. A peace sign. She's catalogued the items on top of the chest too: toiletries, hair ties, a metal water bottle, a few pieces of jewelry that Octavia never wears. The space is always neat, Clarke supposes because it's so small.
This summer, she has spent a lot of time in the loft, sometimes hanging out with Octavia's brother and his girlfriend, whom she met first, but increasingly with Octavia herself. The first time she stayed over, she bunked on the couch. The second time, the couch was occupied, and Bellamy and Raven's bed didn't fit a third—"Also, gross," as Octavia put it—and so, she crashed in the only available space left. ("Since I don't want to be mean,” Octavia said, “and make you sleep on the floor.”)
In that bed, she has learned Octavia's silences, which mean more somehow than all her smart remarks and little sister commentary—Octavia as herself, no longer performing for her brother or his friends. She'd obviously been doing that for a long time. Clarke watches her now and gets away with it, lazes quietly next to her as the high noon sun floods in, and the little fan Octavia has borrowed from the main loft whirs gently from the top of the milk carton, and causes tendrils of their hair to fly around their faces, and the pages of Clarke's book to rustle and try to flip. She feels it like a whisper against her skin. Octavia is lying on her back and staring up at her journal, held directly above her: not writing, but only skimming idly over past thoughts. Clarke's not close enough to see any of the words. She rests on her side with her head propped up on her fist and just stares, and tries to feel every bit of her body, every bit of her skin: naked, against the worn sheets, warm, in patches of sun, briefly shivering, when grazed by the artificial breeze. She can smell someone cooking in the kitchen on the other side of the loft. She can see all the wrinkles in the bedsheets and the way Octavia's chest rises and falls with the working of her lungs.
The sunlight glints off the beaded curtain, bringing out sharper tones of green and blue from the sea-colored strands.
One night, she brings Octavia a present: a square box, with a ribbon tied around it and a bow on top. The day has been wickedly hot, and her pale blue sundress sticks to her back with a patch of sweat, and her thighs rub together with sweat. Heat rises, so even after dark, the loft still feels warm as if baked in residual sun. Most of the lights are off. Almost no one home.
A familiar glow from the corner.
She parts the beaded curtain gently with just her fingertips, finds Octavia lying diagonally across the center of her bed, frowning deeply down at the pages of one of her books. She's wearing men's boxer shorts and a purple tank-top, also marred with patches of sweat. She looks up at the hint of movement, or sound—whatever clue Clarke gave to her presence that she herself does not discern.
Her frown deepens. "Hey."
"You busy?"
"No." She sets the book down on the floor and gestures with her chin to the box. "What's that?"
"A gift." She sits down lightly at the corner of the bed, next to the pillows, and Octavia pulls herself up and sits cross-legged next to her. She's only a couple years younger than Clarke, but she's got a certain lankiness and long-limbed gangliness that makes her seem, at times, younger than she is, and a habit of being too careless with her body, as if she were not yet aware of its size, which leaves her skin marred with constant, random bruises. Clarke sees one on her upper thigh, turning yellow.
She hands over the box, and Octavia turns it around in her hands suspiciously, without undoing the bow. "I've seen these," she says. "It's a kind of light, isn’t it? Lets you project stars and stuff on the walls?" She hands it back, or tries to, her arms held straight out in front of her and the box between her hands. "You should give it to Raven. She's into space and stuff. I would much rather stay here on Earth, thanks."
Clarke pushes the gift back. "This one's not stars." And, when Octavia still hesitates, "Just turn it on."
She's not sure why she bought the thing, not even if she's just honest within herself. She'd just seen it, in one of the stores she wandered into while trying to think, and simply decided that Octavia should have it.
"You're more stubborn than my roommates," Octavia grumbles, though what she means, Clarke thinks, is more stubborn than me. But she turns on the light anyway, and sets it on top of the chest of drawers. Then, perhaps just to show that she's game, she turns off her lights.
The bedroom, the whole loft, is dark, except for the city light through the window, and the wavering blues and greens from the box. It turns slowly around, sending patterns of waves, starfish, sea creatures, along the brick walls and flickering over the curtain.
Octavia stands still for a moment, between the chest of drawers and the bed, and watches them. Clarke watches her face.
Then, slowly, still not looking down, she climbs back onto her bed, and lies down on her back and looks up, and flicks her eyes across the room. Except for this movement, she is utterly still. She is awash in shades of ocean light. Clarke has never seen her look more beautiful.
Wanted to write but wasn't sure what I should write so here is a little angsty Murven ficlet. I listened to Exile in Guyville today for the first time in a while; this is inspired by Divorce Song but also doesn't really have the mood of Divorce Song so there you go.
Murphy/Raven, Modern AU, ~870 words
Written in about 27 minutes
*
What did he think? That somewhere along the way, their road trip up the coast, they'd fall in love? It's an awfully romantic notion, coming from him.
They get a late start, then lose their way, a wrong exit on the wrong highway and the steel-blue sky framed by the windshield, the fluttering of palm fronds at the edges of the roadway, the gathering clouds in shifting shades of gray. Murphy came to pick her up mid-morning. He'd stood in the doorway of her bedroom, watching her finish up her last-minute packing—stuff she'd put off because she was working last night, and cared for the work more. The best thing he could do was not lift a finger to help. He'd just get in the way. Still, it infuriated her to feel his eyes on her, watching and waiting.
"Almost ready, Reyes?" he'd drawled at her, and she'd thrown her duffel bag at his chest, and for a moment afterward they'd been caught together almost in the hall, continuously blocking each other's way with each step to the side. An exhausting moment.
She'd asked if he was fucking with her.
Isn't he always?
The plan was to leave early and get to Bellamy and Clarke's by the end of the day, but even before the wrong turn, she's sure it won't shake out that way. She's too tired to get behind the wheel, and Murphy only pretends to be a daredevil, obeys posted speed limits and tells her to get her feet off his dash. Maybe they'll get to Portland and the aura of romance will take them over. A wedding and all. Maybe as she grumbles, rearranges herself in the passenger seat, traces the edges of stacks of heavy clouds from over the ocean, she imagines as much, like some sort of sick indulgence. If she were really smart, like she tells herself she is, she'd never touch him.
Her phone runs out of batteries. His has no service. She forgot the map in the glove compartment of her car. The sky opens up wide, threatens to swallow them.
They have to stop for the night at a shady little place blinking neon VACANC-C-C-C-CY in the early dark and pouring rain: a motel with a big rectangular sign, barely legible in fading fluorescent. They hold their coats over their heads and splash the light into shards in the puddles on their way to the office. The rain is coming down so hard it's all Raven can hear in her own head: the thud of it on car roofs, the splatter of it on the asphalt. Inside, the motel is muddied with cheap yellow light. She stomps her feet on the welcome mate and beats at her jacket while Murphy shakes himself off like a dog.
She asks for two rooms without thinking. If it weren't for the map behind the greasy haired kid behind the counter, she wouldn't know what town they were in. Even now, the name doesn't ring a bell.
Murphy's standing close to her, glowering, cold. For a moment, his hand brushes against her back—low—like he forgot for a moment what role he was playing. What line he was using.
"You know, it would be cheaper—" he starts, as the kid fiddles around with the keys.
She keeps her gaze straight. The faded lines of the map, the off-yellow wall. "They don't have any twin beds left," she murmurs back. Sounds cold like unseasonable prickling rain even to her own ears. She takes her key in her hand and holds it tight so that the edges bite into her palm.
Their rooms are right next door to each other and for a while they stand under the awning, a bare bulb just above them encircling them in a stark halo of white. Her bag is in the stupid car. All she wants is a shower, the melding of running water and running water. A moment to feel clean. She starts to say I didn't mean anything by it, but it comes out, "What did you expect?"
He flinches, but it comes out as a scoff. Pale and shining wet, his hair flat against his face, and the rain so loud on the tin awning that it might drown him out, he answers, "Nothing," like a curse, a lie, and "Don't make me out to be the asshole here. I haven't done a goddamn thing."
They've been rejecting each other now for years. He'd say she's frightened. He'd say maybe there's something inevitable about them, something more than just the heat of human warmth when they stand close beneath the awning, shivering, not yet touching, except that her hand is grasping hard around the edge of his coat. Zipper teeth in one palm, silver key in the other.
She could just go in his room with him, let the other sit empty, but it wouldn't be for lust or anything as grand as love, but only to prove to him what a terrible idea they would be. Something raw and mean. Something she wants too much.
"You haven't," she answers, and lets go of his jacket, and lets herself into her room.
Clarke & Wells, college AU, possibly the poly fic idk
For the prompt, 'hot chocolate date'
~480 words, written in about 20 minutes
*
The door to the coffee shop is thrown open, and with the entrance of another patron comes a strong gust of winter wind and a scattering of snow across the threshold. Clarke, sitting in the corner closest to the pot-bellied stove, toasty and warm by its fire, still feels the sharp, brisk shiver of it down her back, and then the wash of warmth that follows when the door slips shut again. Beyond the windows, a fine white snow has been falling for hours. When she left the dorms, the streets were still gray and clear and barely flecked with white, but she's sure by now a thin cover of soft white has obscured the roads and the grass, will be falling on her shoulders and getting caught in her hair when she finally heads back at dusk.
Around the window sill, strings of red and silver lights are blinking softly. Holiday music wafts quietly below the sound of coffee mugs set down on wood tables, and conversations in the farther corners of the room. Without the occasional gust of air through the door, the atmosphere can become almost stuffy. Clarke can feel her cheeks warm and red from the artificial heat.
She's on her second mug of coffee, sipped slowly, the sturdy, square wooden table strewn over with books and notebooks, as she sketches out thoughts for her final research paper, due in two weeks. When her thoughts grow too tangled, too thick, she sits back and stares for a while at the couple in their cozy winter sweaters, chatting at their table by the door; the other student bobbing her head to the music coming through her earbuds, as she types away on her laptop; the view outside the window, swirling soft and gray beneath the snow clouds.
Her mug is almost empty and her thoughts just starting to strangle again when she hears the sound of another mug set down, and smells the deep, heady scent of hot chocolate wafting up to her.
She looks up. Then she smiles.
"I'm surprised you found room on the table," she says.
Wells smiles back and answers, "So am I." He's wearing his winter jacket, a black pea coat dusted with white about the shoulders, and his green plaid scarf untied and hanging loose over his shoulders. His hands are cupped around an identical mug, thin wisps of steam swirling up toward his face. "I thought you could use a break."
Clarke's smile breaks open into a proper grin, and she starts awkwardly stacking books on top of each other, stray sheets of notepaper sticking out between them. "I bet you could use a break, too, huh? Hot chocolate date?"
"Hot chocolate date," Wells agrees, and pulls over a chair. He finds himself a little spot in the corner of the table, sets down his mug, and asks Clarke how the research is coming along.
