a large girl with a large amount of emotion

Zimbits, #3 from this prompt list.

Bitty is still passive aggressively washing dishes and grumbling about how hard it must be to just let Bitty know in advance if they have random dinner reservations somewhere, instead of waiting until Bitty has already cooked an entire four-course meal… when Jack gets down on one knee.

“Marry me.”

Bitty freezes and blinks dumbly down at the sudsy water. 

He says, faintly, desperately trying to catch up to the moment, “You know, that’s not what an apology sounds like.”

“Please marry me?”

“Still not an ‘I’m sorry,’” Bitty says, but it comes out breathless. He drops his rubber gloves onto the counter and turns around.

Jack has a ring box in his hands and a panicked but determined look in his eyes. His expression is a little like when he first asked Bitty to officially be his boyfriend, and a little like right before he scored the game winning goal that got the Falconers their first Stanley Cup a few months ago.

You found my weakness, my sweet bean kenny p. I went with pimmbits if that’s alright

-

He’s running.

He’s always running but its never fast enough. 

He’s Sisyphus in the underworld, always moving but getting nowhere. He’s never fast enough.

As he crashes through the door he knows he’s never going to be fast enough. He will never be fast enough to stop Jack from taking those pills. He’ll never be fast enough to get to him before he passes out. He’ll never be fast enough to feel his heartbeat when it was still strong, still hopeful.

He gets there when its barely a flutter beneath his fingers. When shouting into the phone does nothing to resuscitate his friend. The paramedics are fast, impossibly so. When he blinks they’re there crushing Jack’s chest, counting out numbers, trying to pull him back out of the black. 

No one looks at Kent during all this. They never do, no matter how loud he is. He thinks perhaps this is his punishment. For the manipulation. For the shouting and the coercion. For refusing to recognize all the signs he was seeing for the red flags that they really were. 

This is his punishment for letting his friend die.

He’s crying. He can feel that through the fog of his dream, knows its happening in real life too. That recognition is enough to blessedly pull him back, pull him out of this nightmarish hell in which he is trapped. He sucks in air on a scratch of a sob. He feels his body jolt, feels it knock into the one next to him, feels hands - his own then others - touching his face and coming away wet. 

“Kenny?” 

“No way you got all those hickeys from one girl.”

“Nah bro, some of them were from her boyfriend.”

*literal spittake*

——-

so that means kent kissed jack and for a second jack was like, JUST GOING FOR IT????? they’re kissing and jack is immediately going for kent’s shirt and i’m just. i’m upset. i’m really really emo about this. jack was both IMMEDIATELY and INSTINCTIVELY gung ho about hooking up with kent but also like two seconds later, the moment his brain kicks in, he’s thinking, “wait everything about this relationship was horrible and dysfunctional i gotta not do this.”

i love the fluffy, romcom feel that not many queer stories get to embrace, 

there’s no way that kent ‘i love two things: hockey and jack zimmermann and not necessarily in that order’ parson was, at 15-17 solely responsible for jack’s drug use and subsequent drug abuse.