#wes andrada

[flopgoblins]

the mortifying ordeal of being known

appreciation post for sarah @hylianthvs​, beta extraordinaire and literally always here to snatch the wigs straight off our cast

[hong-ara]

@thelioninmybed @imindhowwelayinjune

[flopgoblins]

Wes had told Pidge repeatedly that they didn’t need the porch repaired, everyone knew not to step on the three boards that were rotted through, or to lean against any of the railings. He hadn’t been all that surprised when his boyfriend insisted, even though his iron sensitivity meant he had to do it in heavy gloves with a scarf wrapped around his face.

To show his support, Wes had come out with him to read journals on his phone, tease the neighbourhood cat, and enjoy the weak spring sunshine and Pidge’s biceps because, allergy or not, Pidge would die before he wore long sleeves.

But as had happened so frequently since acquiring a magical boyfriend, Wes’s attention had wandered from schoolwork and his fairy specifically to the fae in general. With the cat dozing in his lap and Pidge cussing whenever his elbow brushed a nail, he thumbed away from JSTOR and opened Wikipedia.

“Pidge,” he murmured, five minutes later.

“Westopher,” said Pidge, wiping his brow and putting down the hammer with the same care with which one handled a loaded gun with a broken safety.

“So I’m on Wikipedia - ”

“Uh oh.” Pidge hissed something at the cat, which made a mrowling noise back but obligingly climbed out of Wes’s lap. Pidge took its place, draping his arms around Wes’s shoulders, smelling of tar, sweat and weed, and making more of an impression on Wes’s joints than the cat had.

“Oof,” said Wes and then, putting the talking to animals thing aside for another day, “So, I was reading the thing about changelings, and it says sometimes- Sometimes- ” Wes cleared his throat. “‘In rare cases, the very elderly of the fairy people would be exchanged in the place of a human baby, so that the old fairy could live in comfort, being coddled by its human parents’.”

“Huh.” Behind Pidge, the patch of slimy, rotten wood he’d cleared of nails looked significantly less mouldy than it had half an hour ago. Wes knew, without checking, that the boards were sound again, even though they were starting to put out leaves.

Wes started into his boyfriend’s opaque, inhuman eyes. “Is that true? It sounds really weird, like, aren’t you immortal? Why would you need a retirement plan?”

“There are some questions better not asked, bud. Some truths too awful for the human mind to hold,” Pidge said mysteriously, and Wes thought of every horror he’d witnessed in Faerie; thralls with their minds gone more rotten than the deck and their fingers worn to bone, or minds left whole in bodies transfigured into monstrosity.

“Oh no, do the fairies that do it, like, maintain their immortality by draining people’s life force? Do they eat the real baby? Is it like parasitic wasps?”

“No, nothin’ like that.” Pidge wrinkled his nose, and Wes tried to prepare himself for a revelation his mind was unequal to. “They’re just some creeps into that adult baby fetish thing. Shit’s freaky.”

“Oh. Oh, ew.” 

[flopgoblins]

In honor of father’s day, an update! And, more importantly, a new story. With The Fairy Dealer off with our agency, we’ve turned out attention to revisions of our very first manuscript …

happy father's day! Is your father a tree? Wish he was a tree? Does he at least make bad branch puns? We got you

[flopgoblins]

Building Relationships with the Fair Folk: 5

Fairies are finicky creatures, and so we must not expect a lot from them and we must be patient in our search for them

It had been almost two weeks and Wes wasn’t worrying. He was much too busy with papers and rotation and shopping and food prep, which took up way more time than he considered reasonable. But Pidge would want him to eat properly, even if he wasn’t there to bully Wes into it.

Leaving the window open with a glass of oat milk on the sill hadn’t lured Pidge back, and nor had the pile of glitter or the Claire’s plastic bracelet he’d got out of the hospital’s lost and found. His WhatsApp messages were left unread too and no birds had tapped on the window to tell him, in Pidge’s voice, that the Alaskan Thunder Fuck was budding and he’d be right over when the harvesting was done. Wes knew, because Jessica kept repeating it, that this was to be expected, it came with the territory of dating a supernatural creature, or a guy who was almost thirty and sold weed out of a derelict warehouse. Wes worried anyway though because maybe another of Pidge’s siblings had hurt him, or maybe he’d gotten bored of playing house with a mortal, or maybe he’d just gotten bored of Wes.  

Also, nice Mrs Silvetti, who’d only been in for a hip replacement and shown him endless pictures of her poodle, had come down with pneumonia. Yesterday she’d been fighting with Doctor Calderwood over whether Wes replacing her IV bag was more or less important than looking at Winnie in her favorite jacket, and this morning she was fighting to breathe, and now she was in a drawer down in the morgue, not fighting anything.

Patients died, Wes knew that. It came with the job. Just, it would be nice knowing it while his boyfriend spooned him and told him that changing the saline solution five minutes faster wouldn’t have helped, and that probably he didn’t need to call her daughter to check that she knew that Winnie ate chicken and rice, and never kibble because she has a delicate stomach.

Instead, Wes spent four hours going over his notes, belatedly scraped the weird crusty bits off the bowl of leftover dahl that was his dinner, and dragged himself to bed. The sheets were soft, but they smelt of his own sweat now, not detergent or Pidge. He ought to wash them, Pidge would want him to but he wasn’t here. And nor was Mrs Silvetti. Here in the world, not here in Wes’s bed.

Even if it didn’t smell like Pidge anymore - and Wes pressed the sheets to his nose to check - his fingerprints were all over it, in the ash and cigarette burns wiped off the sheets, and the softness of the mattress, which was so much more comfortable than it had been but still not comfortable enough to let Wes sleep.

There was a joint hidden inside a disposable pen in Wes’s backpack, and he crawled out of bed and rummaged, shivering, through the detritus of crumpled note pages and candy bar wrappers until he found it. One of Maple Dale’s, but Wes didn’t care. Anything that’d slow his pulse and his breathing and the churn of his mind in what wasn’t quite a panic attack but had ambitions and aspirations, and would meet them if he let it.

The weed helped. It always did.

Wes fell asleep with the stub of the joint still between his fingers and woke up to a figure crouched on his windowsill, black against the night. “Hey Wes’r,” it whispered. “You asleep?”

“Pidge?” Wes asked, and was rewarded with a sudden weight on his stomach as Pidge straddled him, and the press of night-cold lips against the corner of his mouth. It was a shock; Pidge usually gave out heat like a volcano with good abs. “Where’ve you been?”

“Out and about,” Pidge drawled. He sounded beat, but Wes couldn’t always tell weariness from his usual posturing. His smell was the same as always; herb and cold winds and something that sparkled in the nose like good cocaine, which Wes thought of as the scent of magic. “Over hill, over dale.”

“Is that Shakespeare?” He searched Pidge’s face as much as the half-light allowed for, as Pidge slithered out of his boots and pants and crawled under the covers.

“I dunno. Maybe.” Pidge’s nose brushed the curls at the nape of Wes’s neck, followed by the press of his cold lips and warmer tongue, and then a rumble of disapproval deep in Pidge’s chest. “You been smoking?”

“Yeah,” Wes said, as one of Pidge’s cold hands slid up under his shirt and Pidge’s knees pressed against the backs of Wes’s. And then, “You were gone for ages. And you didn’t text. Or send a bird.”

“Got a bit tied up.”

Wes waited for him to elaborate but, true to form, Pidge didn’t. “I’d like it if you texted,” Wes pressed. “So I know you’re okay. I was worried.”

The blankets rustled and Pidge’s fingers tensed against Wes’s stomach. “Like I said, bit tied up.” Wes recognized the brusque, uncomfortable tone from all the times he’d tried to press Pidge about Sparrow and Chick, and what his life had been like before he’d bailed on Faerie. So probably it had been something bad, and probably he wasn’t tired of dropping in on Wes.

Probably.

Rather than press, Wes lay a moment in the dark, feeling Pidge’s hands grow warm against his belly and his breaths go slow like they did before they tipped into snores. “Mrs. Silvetti died,” Wes blurted before they could.  

Pidge snuffled and then went quiet. “The old biddy with the poodle?” he said, sounding wide awake again.

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry, bud. That’s a bitch.”

“Yeah.”

“That dog got a home to go to?”

The question made Wes’s eyes burn a little because he was ninety per cent sure Pidge didn’t actually give a damn about Winnie the poodle. “Yeah. Her daughter’s taking care of her. I keep thinking about how one day there’ll have been so many Mrs. Silvettis that it won’t even hurt, and I don’t want that, but also I kind of do. It doesn’t seem fair that helping people ends up hurting all the time. I just keep thinking, if I’d paid more attention - ”

“The hurt ain’t fair but you don’t gotta make it worse by poking at it,” Pidge said firmly, tightening his arms and pressing his chin into Wes’s shoulder. “You done everything a body could.”

“Thanks, Pidge,” Wes mumbled. Embarrassingly, even with the weight of anxiety and lingering annoyance at Pidge, hearing him say what Wes had known he’d say still reassured him.

“Anytime, baby. Always here to tell you not to be a dumbass and get some sleep.”

Wes yawned. “Except when you’re tied up.”

No answer was forthcoming, but Wes hadn’t really expected one. In the long quiet, he closed his eyes and felt the rise and fall of Pidge’s chest against his back, the brush of his breath against his neck, the slow, soothing movement of his hand along Wes’s side. If Wes couldn’t rely on Pidge to be there when his heart thudded like the bass had dropped,and the air in the room pressed against his face and clogged his lungs like wet flannel, it was really nice when he was.

That was fine. Wes didn’t expect more than that.

[flopgoblins]

June: Partner read our short story and he liked it but he also had the impression they were tiny the whole time and lived in a hole in the ground - which is fair, I'm not sure we had any indicators they were usually human size if you're coming in totally new

Lion:  lmao AU where Pidge is six inches tall for the entirety of the novel

June: Talk about size kink

Lion: I was JUST THINKING how uncomfortably closely we skirt a whole bunch of fetishes Magic opens doors that should be kept closed though I think the AU where Wes has a miniature weed dealer for 9 months and never questions it is actually a vast improvement

June: hahahahahah FUCK wes is in SO much darker a place in this au

Lion: Borrower Pidge, selling joints as big as he is

June: oh my god instead of jess being like 'how did you not realize he was sketchy' it's jess shaking pidge in a shoebox like 'wes what the fuck' Wes still has a crush on him

Lion: 

June: 

i'm gonna forget i did this on a sticky and accidentally use it for something work related

[flopgoblins]

“So this is really a thing with you, huh?”

[flopgoblins]

Building Relationships with the Fair Folk: 4

To welcome fairies to your home, leave out a small bowl of milk before you go to bed. Fairies love milk, and will take this as an offering to them. In some ways, Pidge was a lot like the stray cat that Wes left food out for on the porch. He came and went as he pleased, and you never knew for sure how long he’d stay.

The cat, actually, was a bit more predictable.

“Seen him?” Wes asked, scratching the orange tabby’s ears as it butted against his shin and pushed its nose into the bowl of kibble he’d set out. “Down an alley maybe? Up a tree? Is he hanging out in the colony with you?”

The cat made no answer beyond enthusiastic chewing noises, so Wes stroked its back once more and went back inside. He futzed around in the kitchen a while and then retreated to his room. It was getting late - even for Wes, for whom bedtime was usually when his face collided with his laptop - and so he shut of the lights, arranged something on the windowsill, just in case, and rolled into bed.

He was awoken just before dawn by a drop of something landing on him. “Whum!” said Wes, and sat up fast, shaking his head like someone had just dribbled milk in his ear.

Which they had.

“Ey,” said Pidge, who was perched on his headboard and wiping his mouth. “Din’t mean to wake you.” He set down the bowl he’d been drinking out of and which had previously been on Wes’s windowsill.

“I’m glad you did,” said Wes, reaching for him. Pidge let himself be dragged down into the blankets and only winced a little as Wes’s bony knees jostled him in the groin. “It’s why I left the milk out.” Other lovers might leave notes or flowers - Jessica had occasionally left Wes both, when she was feeling especially sweet - but Pidge wasn’t much of a reader, and Wes still hasn’t figured out what kind of flowers would be non-offensive to someone who frequently addressed plants by name.

In the opaque grey of pre-dawn light, he could see Pidge quirk a pierced eyebrow. “Oh yeah?”

It hadn’t been the most interesting trivia about fairies he’d found online, but it was certainly prevalent. “It’s supposed to be welcoming.”

“Is that why you keep getting me glasses of milk ‘n’ shit everytime I come over?”

Wes didn’t answer, just stuck his nose into Pidge’s neck. Probably Pidge didn’t come just for the milk, but it couldn’t hurt to encourage.

“I appreciate the thought,” said Pidge, and then winced and suppressed a burp. “Never one to turn down your hospitality, me. But hey, Westopher?”

“Yeah?”

“You couldn’t offer a brother some Lactaid, could you?”

Sometime later, remorseful, Wes hugged his knees as the toilet flushed and Pidge emerged from the bathroom, one hand on his stomach and an expression of regret on his face.

“You didn’t have to drink them just to be nice,” he said, as Pidge slithered under the blankets and nudged at him until Wes made a lap for him to rest his head on. “I didn’t know dairy disagreed with you!”

“Yeah, well, ‘snot whimsical to include ‘but the occasional fairy gets milk shits somethin’ dreadful’ in those pithy little elf blogs you keep finding.”

“Noted,” said Wes, strangely touched that Pidge drank all his offerings and damned the consequences. Maybe it meant that he would come by anyway, without the encouragement. Still, some things didn’t quite add up. “But Pidge?”

“Yeah?”

“Wouldn’t Lactaid not work on you anyway? Other human medicines don’t.”

Pidge groaned. “I dunno who’s more of an idiot here, you or me. It’s a good thing we can’t reproduce.”

“Can’t we? Well, obviously you and I can’t, but maybe you and a female human -” Wes started to say speculatively, but Pidge pushed him aside and made another dash for the bathroom.

“Sorry,” said Wes again, and hugged his knees. He looked surreptitiously at the open tab on his phone and wondered if he should just trust in Pidge’s dubious affection to keep him coming back. Or maybe he’d try leaving out sparkly objects like wyrd-wondrings.com recommended instead.

It would be easier on the plumbing.