𝔞𝔪𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔠𝔞𝔫 𝔠𝔞𝔫𝔡𝔶

— #𝐅𝐋𝐄𝐓𝐂𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐔. original character penned by ems for roswell-rp .

                  * 𝐭𝐥;𝐝𝐫: fletcher liu thirty-one years old ( born december 2nd ) and currently resides in moonbeam gardens . he works as a sergeant in the U.S military and , on the side , indulges in cage fighting and mixed martial arts for an extra buck . fletcher is straight , is referred to by he/him pronouns &is decorated head-to-toe with needlework !!

“i bet you’re just itching to throw a punch at my smug face right now, huh?” her jaw tenses, teeth clenched hard enough that she can hear the blood pumping through her ears. the rage feels like coming home, numb for a little too long and suddenly remembering that she’s alive, worrying that the strength of her emotions could incinerate her from the inside out. for the moment, fury is better than nothing and a cruel, humorless smile stretches across her lips, head cocking to the side with dark eyes honing in on fletcher like a predator with her prey. but the fire turns to ash on her tongue, doused by his self-deprecation until she’s blinking up at him, suddenly confused, arguably angrier than she was before. you can’t insult someone already insulting himself, can’t kick a man when he’s down and all that. her hands ball into fists at her side, a low humming verging on a growl at the base of her throat as her eyes clench shut. then a sharp inhale. the surge of emotion is entirely too overwhelming. she wanted a fight, needed a fight, and he ripped the rug out from under her, left with adrenaline pumping through her body and nowhere to direct it. “fuck you,” she hisses without venom, swallowing down all the rest as a shaky hand comes to remove the cigarette from her lips and she shudders out a smoky breath. 

a brief snort escaped gunner’s lips. “man, you’re probably the one person in this town who actually knows me,” he hummed, though he knew it wasn’t entirely true. at least, it wasn’t when you counted jaden, but even jaden was someone he kept more at arm’s length than anything. he had never gotten used to the idea of letting people in, and his entire career had been plagued by people making assumptions about him and selling them to the closest tabloid, so now he almost took it for granted. that people would believe one thing about him and nothing else, so what was the point in trying to explain everything that went on in his head to other people? “well, you can’t go wrong with that,” he hummed, laying his head back as his artist grabbed a razor to clear the hair from his leg for the tattoo design. “it’s one way to describe it, at least.”

“well, my hatred of other sports probably helped,” gunner laughed lightly, watching his own artist getting the cartoon ghost onto a piece of transfer paper. “feel like most people see me as a sports guy and think i like all sports, but the only one i’ve ever liked was football.” soccer, baseball, softball - every other sport he was required to do a recap on when it came to his radio job? he hated every second of it, because that meant he had to watch the games, and that was the last thing he wanted to do. he lays his head back lazily as a faint hum falls from his lips. “no shit?” gunner couldn’t relate - had never liked someone enough to date them after he’d graduated high school and ended the one relationship he’d ever had - but he was happy for the other man. if he couldn’t be happy, he wanted fletcher to be happy. “well, knowing you, man, i don’t think it’s tempting fate to mention it. the fact that you even want to? s’worlds more than you’ve given me about anyone else you’ve ever been with.”

“’when you have high quality shirts, you need high quality accessories,’“ she wastes no time mimicking with an irreverent snort. “you’re such a city boy, fletch. why are you even here?” here as in roswell. here as in a dead-end town with a single upscale restaurant that was still more likely to be filled with flip-flops than dress shoes. sometimes he seemed photoshopped into the scene, too pristine against the backdrop of the pony from the perfectly pressed, tailored suits down to the car he’d arrived in. the minute she left LA, the designer clothes were the first things to go, mostly because she needed the money but also because they just didn’t make sense here. who here, in roswell, new mexico, would actually be impressed by all that material crap? who here was even worth impressing? fucking no one. though the sentiment feels way less harsh coming from her own head than confirmed through the words out of his mouth. “no? why wouldn’t i understand, huh? why wouldn’t i understand?” it’s the type of thing that used to roll right off her shoulders, but she can’t seem to reign in her emotions these days. the agitation comes spilling out before she can cap it. “act like you’re better all you fucking want but whatever decisions you’ve made in your life have lead you to the exact same fucking place i am—smoking a shitty cigarette outside a shitty bar in a shitty town. so how much better can you really be?” 

“Not surprising,” Chiba said with a shrug. “But hey, can she really blame me? When my bestie asks, I have to comply, right? If it were something less innocent… and also I was protecting my own reputation as well, I didn’t want her to know that about me yet,” he added, making a serious face. He could easily lie about it though, any bruises could’ve been from his job as well, it wasn’t so easy for Fletcher, so he would stand by the other’s side if he could. 

Chiba chuckled. He was far too drunk for this, though it mostly resulted in him finding the compliments and niceties funny, had he been sober, he would’ve waved them off. “I got your back, man,” he said. Which was about all the words Chiba knew to use, he wasn’t much for fancy words, instead he would give advice, that was his way of showing he cared for someone else, that he cared for Fletcher. Because truly, he did, there were very few people who knew everything about him, and who had seen him through it all.

he was an acquired taste . he was marmite , caviar , cilantro ; not many people thought of fletcher as anything more than a stuck-up rich kid , somebody who cosied up in his gated community and sipped spirits from his rooftop . part of that was true — the male was comfortable , and he certainly preferred his own company to that of other humans , but chiba was the only exception . even the act of agreeing to go for a drink , to spending time in a dive such as this ( where he was sure he’d return home with some sort of venereal disease ) it was made all the more bearable by present company . it seemed that was what his life had become , a string of pit-stops made possible by the filter of good people that had peppered the surface of his armour . 

“no shit? at least i know you’re not using me as a piece of eye candy like half the middle aged women in moonbeam do when i go for runs,” gunner joked, giving a small shake of his head as he did. his tattoos were things he got when the mood struck - usually to mean something, sometimes not, and he’d had most of them so long that for the most part, he didn’t even realize that he hadn’t been born with them. from the raven and dragonfly on his arm - you have to kill the person you were born to be in order to become the person you wanna be, or at least that’s what it meant to him - to the roman numerals on his ribs or the full back piece, they were all things that he probably wouldn’t know what he looked like without if it wasn’t for old paparazzi photos. sitting himself on the tattoo bed, gunner lifted his leg up and tugged the bottom of his jeans, fingers folding it up neatly and quickly until it was around his knee, leaving his calf on full display. “thanks- i figured it was about time for me to not hate my job.” it was - mostly - a joke, but his shoulders lifted in a small shrug anyway. “what about you? what’s new in your life?”

“you couldn’t class up the place if you tried,” she shoots back, though it’s not a dig at him but rather a praise for her home away from home. “she’s completely null and void of class. sucks it up like a vamp and spits it out somewhere down the road. set foot in here and you’re as grimy and hopeless as the rest of us. all part of her charm.” she may hate working but only in the way that she hates authority, hates being asked to do anything or worse, expected to do it. the pony’s filled with all sorts of memories—the good, the bad, and the ugly—stretching all the way back to her childhood when her mom would name drop the place before disappearing for a bit or the time the ‘do not enter’ wall prominently featured a polaroid of her flipping off the bartender that confiscated her fake ID. those are the easier ones to tackle, water under the bridge compared to the recent memories that sting too hard to do anything more than push ‘em away to be dealt with later. “real question: where the fuck are you buying shirts that still need cufflinks? isn’t that like, bridgerton shit?” 

She. Anton’s brows shoot right up towards the sandy hues of his bleached and dyed curls. Another quick scan over the other and he supposes that it is, in fact, bizarrely normal to hear the personification pop out of his mouth. It sounds like a supplication, as though enough humanising might bring the car to life enough for it— she —to repair itself. “Yeah, nah, I… don’t,” he admits. Another quick glance, this time over their surroundings, and he spots some familiar additions to the crows: Students of his, phones whipped out and filming the meltdown. Anton can’t really blame their amusement. “You got insurance, though, right?”

it was so normalised , in fact , that anton’s hesitation was water off a duck’s back to fletcher liu . he was so wrapped up among his own thoughts that the side-eye hadn’t been picked up upon , the slight raise in the other’s voice , the stifling of laughter at the ridiculousness of the situation . in that moment there was nothing ridiculous about it , as a grown man paced back and forth trying not to shed a tear over the damaged paintwork of his prized vehicle . oh , what a sad little life . 

Kinda his thing. Sadly it was Chiba’s as well. Though he hadn’t done much talking at all before. But everything he didn’t get to say, he threw out of him. All the anger and dispair that he felt when his ex had her second miscarriage, every bit of frightful certainty when they broke up, it was all so easy to throw a punch and not have to worry about talking about his feelings. Sure, he did that more than Fletcher, but it wasn’t as if he was much better at holding important conversations with anything. He was still at odds with his sister, and he knew it was all on him for being shit at communicating. 

“I know,” he said, in drunken stupor, able to see Fletcher’s distress, but not able to offer him anything else than advice sung at him since he was a baby. “Meh, but isn’t everything. I’m still waiting for Mia to come after me,” he said laughing. “She’s going to be so mad at me for playing along, but no worries, I’ll put in a good word in for you too,” he said. “It’s okay that she doesn’t understand why we do it, but hey, she’s a good person, she’ll want to understand if she loves you, and I’m pretty sure she does.”

in the darkness of their conversation , in the realisation that their friendship had been born by their own inability to communicate like ‘ regular ‘ folk , came the bark of laughter , a strange sound that was half a cough and half a roar from fletcher’s chest . laughter was such a rarity that , once it hit the air , it oxidised like a precious metal and formed an unfamiliar sound entirely . “ she’s gonna have your head once she realises you’ve been complicit this entire time , my insider . it’s been an entire military operation outside of the base . “ a long game of he said , she said . a prolonged playground activity . it was as though they were children , asking their friend to tell their crush that somebody like them ; for an adult , at the ripe age of thirty-one , fletcher sure was inept when it came to relationships . 

“hey! halloween is most certainly not the worst time of year, it’s the best time of the year! how dare you.” za huffed, giving fletcher a brief stern look, hands resting on her hips. in the time she’s known fletcher one of her favorite things to do with the guy has always been to help brainstorm a last minute halloween costume and nine times out of ten she always felt like he looked better than she did! “you know, you outta just be the grinch for halloween,” she teased, playfully sticking her tongue out, before erupting into a small fit of laughter. “i’m kidding, i’m kidding. you know what this means though, right?” a playful smirk spreads on her lips, “we need to hit up the ol’ callisto costume store and see what we can conjure up! are you sure you don’t any anything in mind?”

            “  jesus,   okay.  ”     like waving a white flag ,    his hands are held up in surrender for only a moment before slipping back into his jacket pockets.    he has seen that look before.   the one usually followed by   are you dumb   in which soggy would nod   only once   and never give any real consideration to.         A MILITARY MAN   ,   he could tell .    he’s aggressive,   kind of mean,    and extremely handsome     so much so that if soggy weren’t so intimidated he would have asked for his workout routine.       “  no,  yeah,  no,  you’re right.  fuck russia.  i was thinking that anyway ‘cause putin’s a bitch.  ”   the word bitch is emphasized,  the B popping between his lips.     “  you know,  you kind of remind me of my eighth grade english teacher,  like there’s no right answer.  ”      the two were incomparable in every fashion.   there’s a lack of steadiness in the conversation;  a sense of unpleasantry filling their surroundings.    “  you wouldn’t get an american flag,  would you ?”

“oh good point but i think you could rock that” she replies, eyes scanning back up to the board in front of them. nora was still undecided on what she wanted or if she was going to get anything at all, a lot of the designs weren’t speaking to her, “you sure? you could always try something new” she shrugs. “maybe” she muses, “i kinda like the flowers, up there” she points to one of them, “i think that might go well with some i already have”.