HELLFIRE.

The walk, at least, gives him enough time to collect himself, one arm around Naomi, his good leg dragging him forward, his head hung low. Once he leans against the wall of the cab, what remains of the ache again surges through his body, making him flinch. One good thing about pain, at least, is that it makes the noise dissipate; the back of his head throbs but his mind’s usual babbling has fallen silent. In its absence, senses take over, letting him take the world in, the autumn chill and brute night sky, and for once Blackrock doesn’t seem so unpleasant. It’s nice to get away from himself. It‘s nice to feel the warmth of someone else’s touch without having to think about what it means. 

He closes his eyes. There are universes kinder than this. In one, he’s seven and it’s summer’s end in Kumamoto and Mom doesn’t buy tickets back to America. They stay at her parents farm, watching rows of ducks wade across the rice paddies, and later at night Jii-chan takes him down the fields to teach him how to catch fireflies. In another universe, Mom doesn’t leave him with Dad. If he weren’t allowed to demand so much kindness, there’s at least a universe where he doesn’t leave the bar earlier than he wanted, doesn’t pass through the woods on his way home or walk into the snap of a wolf’s jaws. In that universe, he asks Naomi to stay a little longer.

There are universes kinder than this one. Reality isn’t so gentle. Time drove a wedge between them and the memory of those moments, pushing them so far apart now that he’s not sure if he made it all up, held a pretty lie in his mouth at a time when his truth was getting harder to swallow. Six years between one tender moment and the next. She lived her life; he didn’t. Maybe their connection was much less significant than hope would have him believe, and even if it were, maybe they’ve changed too much, became too different from their younger selves to rekindle whatever it was that he thought was there.

And her softness is familiar as it is jarring. “I’m gonna be alright.” His mouth splits into a smile when he looks at her. “I miss when you were meaner,” he says with a quiet laugh, because he’s not sure which terrifies him more: that the knife of her tenderness will cut him open, or that it won’t. There’s a temptation, now, to confess everything — that he was slowly settling into this life, that he was so close to accepting this new definition of normalcy until she fucked it all up, that she had no right to barge into his world and offer the possibility of more when he’d spent too much energy learning to be content with just enough. But even he couldn’t stomach hearing that. “Where’d you go off to?” he says instead. “When you left, I mean.”

Being around Evan feels a lot like strapping on her skates and venturing out onto the lake after the first frost settles, feeling the ice shift under her weight with every movement. She thinks maybe if she says the wrong thing then the ice underneath her feet will crack open, and the water will swallow her whole once more. “Me being a raging bitch does it for you, huh?” she teases, her own lips lifting in response to his smile, but the expression doesn’t last, melting into a frown as she ponders his question.

Everywhere, she thinks. Everywhere and nowhere. One and a half years spent on the road running from herself, or that’s what she lets people believe anyway.

Here’s a truth: Evan is the first person who’s ever made her want to unwrap the barbed wire from her ribs. For six years, she’s been searching for his ghost, had looked for him in everyone she’s ever let touch her since. Now that he’s here, scant few inches between them, close enough to brush her fingertips against his skin if she just reached out, she wonders if she’ll be able to reconcile the young man in her memories with the one before her.

Part of her wonders if she even wants to. Maybe they’d both be better off leaving the past where it belongs. God knows she’s ruined every good thing she’s ever had.

“Here and there,” she says eventually, leaning back against the closed door and tucking her hands underneath her thighs. “I ended up in Florida, at one point,” she says. If she tries hard enough she can recall the sticky heat of Jacksonville, when being outside had felt like she was walking underwater, except instead of ice cold lake water it was the warm, salty ocean in her lungs. “First time I’d ever been to a beach,” she admits. It feels like a bigger confession than it is, trusting him with such a mundane fact about her. 

There’s a barrage of other pointless confessions of the like on the tip of her tongue—I really like sea salt ice cream, amusement parks are overrated, I wish I’d kissed you that night—but she swallows them, too much of a coward to lay out the pieces of herself like that, afraid that he might think she’s begging him to take those pieces and build her into something better than what she is, a version of her who is worthy of being loved.

“You went to college in California, didn’t you?” she asks instead, wondering briefly what the fuck she’s doing talking to him in the cab of her truck when she should probably be taking him to someone who he might actually accept help from. It doesn’t look like he’s hurt that badly, but she doubts he’d let her check. “I wonder if the beaches there are any different. You should take me to a Californian beach someday.”

It’s when he shuts off the vacuum cleaner to take a breather that he hears it: footsteps — unmistakably footsteps — climbing up the lattice. His mind conjures a few possibilities: Raine forgot the house keys. Grey, in all their acrobatic magnificence, disregards the use of doors. But when Evan peeks out the window, it’s evident figure is female, her hair too straight to be Nat’s. Dread gnawing at his bones, Evan takes a few steps back. When the woman crawls into the house, her hair falls over her face and shoulders, and it looks like a scene straight out of a horror movie.

In panic, Evan’s mind blanks. Ray Parker Jr. crawls into the empty space and sings the Ghostbusters theme.He’s almost frozen. He at least has enough sense, still, to send Diego a text message (sadako’s here, he’d typed. That both words were spelled correctly was miracle in itself ). He turns the vacuum cleaner on just to let the intruder know that she isn’t alone. Of its own accord, his arm moves, lifting the nozzle up like a sniper taking aim. The small Ray Parker Jr. in his brain croons: There’s something weird and it don’t look good. 

Except.

His eyes widen. A kind memory blossoms at the corner of his mind, drowned out by fear and vacuum noise and Ghostbusters music. It can’t quite bloom in full, but the feeling it revives calms his nerves enough to let his shoulders relax. A smile forms on instinct, but he can’t tell if it comes from this strange familiarity, or the need to disguise his fear. Probably the latter, because he still feels like pissing himself. Still, he lets out a laugh that carries the barest traces of nervousness, then says, “I think that’s supposed to be my line.”

What the fuck, indeed. He shuts the vacuum cleaner off and lowers the nozzle. “First of all,” he starts, doing his best to keep his tone calm and nonthreatening (which, honestly and unfortunately, isn’t that hard), “Please remove all footwear before proceeding inside. This is an Asian household, and more importantly, I’d just vacuumed.” It’s easy enough to stay calm until the image of Naomi Choi roundhouse kicking Mandy H. Peterson into the Blackrock High parking lot flashes though his mind. His heart surges, and he would rather not process what that means. The smile he wears, at least, doesn’t fall from his face. “Second of all, Diego isn’t home.”

He’s taller than she remembers, thinner, too, the shadows under his eyes more prominent. But memory can be a fickle thing, and the years between the last moment they shared and now don’t help. There is a part of her that wants to ask if he remembers her, but that would mean admitting that she remembers him, and that requires more honesty from her than she’s willing to give.

Naomi’s never been good at being honest—but being a bitch?

The smile he offers her is not returned, and Naomi props one foot up on the neatly-made bed, the silence in the room dragging on as she tugs her boot off, then the other, tying the laces together before tossing them both out the window she’d just crawled in from. They’ll be a real pain in the ass for look for later, but being difficult has always been a knee-jerk reaction of hers when told what to do, no exceptions. Not even for boys whom she’d once dreamt of kissing under the moonlight.

“There,” she declares, dusting her hands off and turning back to him with a straight face. “No footwear in the household.”

She doesn’t believe in regret, too stubborn to want to take back anything she’s ever done, but the declaration that Diego isn’t home almost makes a believer out of her. “You’re fucking kidding me,” she mutters, although she’s not entirely surprised by the turn of events. The universe has made no secret of hating her, after all, and what better way to make a fool out of her than to force her to talk to Evan Czarnecki while standing in her socks.

She hadn’t meant to send the text, cheap vodka guiding her fingers as she typed out the words. It’s a confession she would have preferred to take to the grave; loneliness is a luxury that she can’t afford, not when she’s had to fight her entire life to prove that she has the right to even exist. Whether that existence is spent alone or not shouldn’t matter, not when she’s alive, not when she’s cheated death twice over, and yet—

I feel alone without you.

Loneliness finds a way to seep into the cracks despite her best efforts, and some nights she’s so full of it that she thinks it’s all she’ll bleed if she’s cut open. But Naomi’s never been good with people, never known how to exist any other way than alone, made worse after one and a half years with nothing but her truck and the endless stretch of road ahead of her. 

The vodka burns a trail down her throat, lighting her up from the inside out, but it’s not enough to banish the cold that’s made a home out of her. Sometimes she wishes someone would take her apart, press their fingers into her flesh and pry the cold from her ribs. It’s a train of thought she doesn’t let herself dwell on, turning her anger into a blade sharp enough to carve the desire out of herself before it can fester and consume her whole.

She hears him coming before she sees him. His footfalls are quiet, muffled by the grass, and more familiar than she’s willing to admit. Each step is slow and deliberate, probably gauging her response to decide the best way to approach, as if she’s a wounded animal who might startle at the slightest sound—she’s not sure if she’s touched or offended.

“You know,” she calls out, her senses trained on the man behind her, but her gaze unmoving from the deceptively calm surface of the lake. “Usually if a girl doesn’t respond to your texts, it’s a sign that she doesn’t want to see you.”

Sometimes the House is too Small || Naomi & Raine

Location: Pack House Time: 17 nov evening after the Harvestfest ended @acrimcnies

Raine’s head was swimming with the day’s events. Not just the whole black-out that had ended it, and finding Evan messed up on the grounds, but their terrible conversation with Diego, horrible confrontation with Mar, and Clover who had been in the middle of that last one. They just wanted to lie down on their bed an watch some dumb youtube videos over the house’s terrible bandwith. 

The world had something else planned for them. 

They looked at the little shape walking through the house and squinted their eyes. “Since fucking when are you back?” they asked Naomi with an anything but friendly tone. 

Here’s a fact about girls with black holes for hearts: nothing hurts them. Or they pretend that’s the case, but what’s the difference, really? Play a role long enough and the lines start to blur. Naomi knows her role in the pack well, slips back into being the black sheep seamlessly, as if she’d never been gone at all. 

Raine’s hostility is almost welcome, truth be told. Being back in Blackrock has been too much too soon, and every nerve ending in her body is singing for a fight. If Raine’s planning to pick one with her, she’ll gladly indulge them.

location: whitegrass land

status: open / @shiverstarters

There’s a bruise on his cheekbone, a cut near his lip. A slight pain surges through the leg he broke last month, but he’s not really sure if he’d just imagined that. Whatever it is makes it hard to stand even when both hands grip the side of a carnival stall to drag himself upwards, and the attempt fails, because his good leg struggles to support him on its own and before he can process it, both legs collapse from underneath him.

It’s alarming, but there’s just static where panic should me. The rest of his body feels like a bad memory. Same pain, different place. It’s a ugly sense of déjà vu that he can’t quite shake off, but at the moment he’s too dazed to yet feel unsettled. All he can do is shut his eyes and stop the way his mind collects jagged shards of imagination before they can form something coherent, something that looks like the past.

“Hi, uh—“ His voice sounds small. Logically, he knows that’s embarrassing, but whatever burn of shame he thinks he’s supposed to feel fails to cut through the haze of disorientation. Evan blinks at the passing figure. “Can you help me up?”

You look like shit. It’s the first thought that pops into her mind, but she bites her tongue. Weird, she thinks to herself, half-distracted by the coppery tang that fills her mouth. When was the last time she’s held her tongue? Has she ever? The fact that she can’t recall any other instances should be concerning, but then he’s asking for her help and as ridiculous as that is—hands like hers are only good for hurting people, after all—she finds herself moving towards him anyway.

There’s a split second where she hesitates; the last time she’d touched him feels like a dream, and she can almost convince herself that she’d only imagined the way their fingers had brushed as they passed the cigarette between them, the way their breaths and the smoke curled around them in that little alley, the world beyond the two of them ceasing to exist. If she touches him now—she won’t be able to take it back, not this time.

Her fingertips brush against his elbow, first, trailing down until her fingers can circle his wrist, guiding his arm over her own shoulder. But the journey doesn’t end there. This time, she moves in reverse, up his arm, to his shoulder, down his back, until she finally grasps his waist, tugging him closer until he’s tucked securely against her side. “C’mon,” she says, voice gentler than she’d thought she was capable of. “Let’s get you out of here.”

No one’s paying any attention to them, too caught up in trying to catch their own bearings, but it’s only a matter of time before someone does. The walk back to her truck is slow, and she hopes Evan is out of it enough not to notice the way she’s started to tremble slightly with the effort of supporting him, but they make it eventually. 

She helps him into the back of the cab before crawling in after him, and it’s only in the relative privacy of her truck that she finally allows herself to really look at him, cataloguing every cut and every bruise that she can see. Unthinkingly, she reaches out again; the back of her fingers brush against his split lip, and then she pulls back suddenly, cradling her hand to her chest as if the feather-light touch had burned her. There’s a different kind of burn in her throat too, shame and something else—something dangerously close to longing. 

It’s real easy work, Terry had said, when he first offered Randy a swing at handling the illustrious Tin Can Drop booth. You just gotta handle the cash, and that’s it. Easy work, easy money. Maybe he can finally work up the nerve to ask Rosie out on a date, ‘cause her and Alex aren’t going out anymore.

His shift had started out so well. It was easy work, Terry’d been right, because all he needs to do is hand out tennis balls to the kids and couples who come up to the booth, eyes taken in by the fluffy prizes all adorned on the wall behind him. A couple of them walk away with some of the smaller prizes, as was instructed to him by Terry. And then Naomi fucking Choi appeared, and now his shift’s gone to Hell.

When she swings her way across the counter, landing on two feet like she’s made for barging her way into booths, into anywhere, he’s powerless to stop her. Fuck Terry, and fuck this booth, and fuck the way he can feel his own jaw seize up, because there’s a crowd forming and Naomi’s their ringmaster, and he knows his cheeks are getting red. Glued to the board, she says. This shit is fuckin’ rigged. “I– I’m just trying to do my job,” he says, caught between placating and pleading, “I just hand out the balls ‘n take the cash and that is it–” He can hear his own voice go up, not in volume but in timbre, panic rising like bile as he starts to sweat.

The crowd’s murmuring. Rigged? Glued to the board? Hey, isn’t that that Choi girl? When did she get back? No, I heard she did, she’s just as much trouble as she used to be–

Yes, Randy wants to say, she absolutely goddamn is–

“Naomi,” she says, voice dark but not sharp, low and deceptively calm. It’s one word, but it means what’s this? Mar Sandoval. Fuck his entire life, now there’s two of them; omens of dark-haired devilry sent to ruin Randy’s night. Is this about that time he stole a Snickers bar and a can of Coke and blamed it on Nathan Parsons? Because it feels like overkill.

Mar Sandoval steps up to the booth, but unlike Naomi fucking Choi, she doesn’t swing past the counter. No, she just stands there, studying Randy’s personal Hell with disaffected interest. He begins to look for a way out of the situation, and spots a stuffed pink rabbit with a candy-cane bowtie.

It’s been a long time since someone’s called her by her name. When she’d left Blackrock, when she’d had the chance to start over, to be anyone other than herself, she’d taken it. Names and personalities shrugged on and off like nothing more than an old coat at every county line she’d crossed, the real Naomi tucked away, safe, inside—safe for who, she wonders sometimes. For the people around her, or herself?

The way the syllables of her name wrap around Mar’s lips. The soft cadence of her voice. The steady, unwavering gaze. Mar makes Naomi nervous in a way few people do, like she sees right through the anger she wears like a second skin. Maybe she does. Naomi’s heard the rumours, after all. Either way, she hates that the older woman makes her feel like a goddamn open book, hates that part of her wants to ask Mar what she sees.

Hates that she can’t ever seem to stop owing Mar Sandoval. 

“I’m exposing the injustices of rigged carnival games,” she answers, her tone as disaffected as Mar’s gaze, inspecting her nails; a corner of the fingernail on her index finger is chipped from striking the can earlier. “The good people of Blackrock deserve to know that they’re not getting their money’s worth with these things.” 

Muscle memory is a curious thing; the route to the too-full house on the edge of town had been infuriatingly familiar, and it had been hard to stop herself from cataloguing the sights and sounds and smells along the way. If she’d been a more honest woman she might have allowed herself to admit that the familiarity had been comforting, that there’d been a vague sense of homecoming that had permeated her senses, settling under her skin like an itch she refuses to acknowledge. 

Too fucking bad she’s always been a liar, she supposes.

Naomi hadn’t planned on climbing in through the second floor window, just—she’s going to blame that one on muscle memory, too. Too many nights spent avoiding the front door after a night of havoc just in case Diego might be lurking in the darkened living room waiting for her to get back. It’s kind of ironic that she’s not entering through the front now that she’s actually looking for the guy, but she’d already been halfway up the lattice by the side of the house when she realised what she was doing, and she’d figured—fuck it.

Maybe if she had climbed back down and gone back to ring the doorbell like a normal fucking person then she wouldn’t be staring at the sucky-end of a vacuum cleaner being held by a guy she’d known in high school who she’d last seen on MISSING posters around town. “What the fuck,” Naomi says, ever so eloquent. She opens her mouth, starts to ask where the fuck have you been, but then clenches her jaw shut hard enough that her teeth ache, refusing to give voice to her question. Even in her head it sounds too much like a confession: I wondered where you’d gone, I thought about you, I missed you.

when: November 15th (Friday), 8:16 PM where: Pioneer Square, Harvestfest 2019 who: @acrimcnies

Harvestfest put her on edge.

It always had: it reminded her too much of her own small town past, and yet it livened up the winter dark. Eased the ever-gnawing thing inside her that hungered for spring, for escape, at least for the four days it went on; gave her something else to distract herself with. 

Now, though, she was busy avoiding the Blackrock PD stall, and the half-rabid animal inside was rendering flesh from ribs, and she couldn’t find Sam to stave it off. Wouldn’t, actually. Too stubborn for that, her thoughts still stuck on him, in her kitchen, and all the things both said and unsaid–

Naomi’s voice was unmistakeable. She was arguing with a bewildered booth attendant, fist clenched around a tennis ball, the cheerful sign that hung above them reading TIN CAN TOSS in a looping, red-painted font. PRIZES!! CAN YOU MAKE THE TIN CANS DROP?

“Miss,” she heard the man say to Naomi, Mar sticking to the sidelines as she approached. His hands were palms-out, halfway to pleading for mercy, clearly out of his depth. “I-if the cans don’t fall, you don’t get a–”

Oh, boy.

Naomi hates Harvestfest. Has always hated Harvestfest. While other kids her age had run free, enjoying the festivities, Naomi had always been forced to stand in front of the little booth that their church set up without fail every year, smiling at—and subsequently being ignored by— passing strangers as she asked them if they had a moment to talk about our Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ.

But right now, she thinks she hates Randy H. Peterson more.

“I don’t give a fuck about your stupid rules,” she hisses at the young man standing between her and the first place prize. “I clearly hit that last can. This is bullshit.” 

A small crowd starts to form around them, because one and a half years being away from town isn’t nearly long enough for people to forget that Naomi Choi is synonymous with trouble, and watching her start shit is evidently more exciting than whatever the fuck the clowns two booths down are doing.

BASICS

Name: Naomi Choi

Gender: Cis Female

Pronouns: She / Her

Species: Werewolf

Age: 26 ( 28 October 1993 )

Occupation: Server at Buckshot Bar & Grill