rivusa trap

“Oh, it’s you,” Sam spits from behind her, and she frowns at his tone. Riven’s pretty much an asshole by definition, but he hasn’t actually said or done anything yet.

“Delighted to see you too, Junior,” Riven retorts, then nods his head at her. “Red Flag. Not normally one to cockblock, but I’ve got a bit of a situation here.”

There’s a gauze pad, a rolled bandage and medical tape lying in his lap, but he’s clearly a hand short to be able to apply it by himself.

“Sounds like a you problem. Let’s go, babe.” Sam grabs her hand and pulls her arm back, but she resists his tug.

Riven’s eyes flick from her face to his shoulder, then back to her. The now third-year Specialist is hard to miss around the school, but they haven’t spoken one on one since their spat during Training Day last year. Ever since Sky and Bloom have made it official, though, there are rare days when he isn’t hanging with Beatrix and Dane and instead tags along with his roommate, and she’s been spending more time with Bloom while Terra takes up shifts in the greenhouse, so they’ve been part of the same conversation a couple of times.

It’s how she knows it’s his pride that prevents him from asking, not the hostility she can feel rolling off of Sam. She aches to take it from him, settle him down, but she won’t risk it in front of Riven.

She sighs, “Sam, he’s injured.”

“I can see that. Bitter pill, isn’t it, a taste of your own medicine?”

“You know what, Wallflower—”

“Stop,” Musa commands, not sure how all of her time with Sam lately keeps spiraling into this — him wound up in all the wrong ways, her feeling everything but the absence of chaos.

“I’ll meet you back in your room,” she mutters, closing her eyes in preparation for the disappointed sigh she knows is coming. It does, and then she feels the warmth of him retreat, senses his thundercloud of emotions drifting away as he steps through the outside wall.

Riven has the common sense to only raise a suggestive eyebrow at the display. She crosses the distance and lowers herself onto the bed behind him.

“Things are… tense, with Professor Harvey and Rosalind,” she defends her boyfriend’s actions in spite of herself, then quickly deflects. “Can you get this shirt off?”

He grabs the collar of the lycra half-zip and pulls it over his head. She takes over at his shoulder, helping the fabric down his arm, careful to avoid the sizable open gash right where the Alfea logo is positioned on the sleeve. His eyes follow her movement, his head tilted sideways.

“Andreas?” she asks.

“Got it in one.”

She quickly rubs her hands together before resting her fingers on his skin, carefully prodding. She registers the way his body instantly loses just a little bit of its tension. He is still on guard, still rigid, but his shoulders lower half an inch, and his skin moves under her fingertips as his muscles uncoil.

“Well, I’m not a Harvey, but I don’t think it’s deep enough to require stitches.”

“It’s not. Just help me bandage it and you can get back to the guy you were planning to undress.”

She tears open the sterile packaging and positions the gauze over the wound, securing the edges with strips of tape. “Pretty sure that’s out of the window for tonight.”

He hums, amused. “Doesn’t have to be. Just say the word.” 

The brash frivolity is just what she needs. “What, three is a crowd, four is a party?”

Riven snorts in surprise, twisting his body further to look at her, and the side of her mouth pulls up into a smirk as she envelopes his arm to circle the bandage around it.

“You’re wasted on him,” he murmurs in a low voice.

Her face falls, and she gives a sharp pull on the loose end of the bandage, causing him to grimace, before tucking it underneath the layer below. “You don’t get to judge him.”

She stands up, looking down on him for once. “You sided with the people who are turning this school into some kind of totalitarian military camp. You’re not as dumb as you act sometimes; you can’t be surprised that people didn’t take kindly to that.”

“You don’t understand,” he bristles, and she turns before he can see her eyes go purple. She can’t hold off the wave of indignation, mixed with a desperation that should be out of place, but is awfully familiar to her instead. She’s known that his overconfidence is a mask for his ache to belong for months, senses it every time he’s even remotely near.