violet

The serenity of Chimney Rock had been one of the main factors that had drawn you to it when you had first made the move.

In the city, there was never a moment to breathe. Every step outside was met with another person walking around you or near you. Every quiet night in had to be accompanied by a fan or headphones lest you hear sirens or cars honking in the distance. There was never a moment where you could hear the overwhelming sound of silence in your ears, or cry on the way home from a hard day, without knowing that at least one person was watching it happen a few seats down from you.

The smell of the subway was ingrained in your mind, and the constant odor of urine, blood, and whatever else people were choosing to leave scattered around them had become a thing of normalcy to you. Everything was within reach, and yet you had nothing that you wanted.

It felt like the biggest contradiction, really. If you wanted to see a deep-cut movie from 1988 on film, you could just hop on a train and do that. If you wanted to spectate a film premiere from a balcony overhead, you were more than welcome to engage with the culture in that way. Every major brand had a presence, and almost every pop-up event that you could attend or dream of hosting was available to you. But what purpose did that serve you when you felt so utterly alone, despite being surrounded by so many people that you hardly ever remembered their faces after five minutes?

Mainly, you found that you missed Jud.

But he hadn’t been your driver for moving to the small town; you had no idea that he was going to be there. But his departure had left a void in your soul that you incorrectly believed that the never-ending hustle of New York City could fill. Perhaps, you figured, if you needed to have five roommates just to make rent on a tiny apartment in SoHo, then you could never really be alone.

If you had constant opportunities at your fingertips, then how could you not succeed?

Opportunity didn’t change the fact that you needed to work toward your goals, and it was difficult to do that when you were so exhausted and overwhelmed after a long day that you hardly had the desire or drive to write much of anything. There was no real inspiration in anything that you were seeing because it moved so fast that it didn’t stick in your mind for long enough for you to conjure up a thought. There was hardly anything that you could do to drive up your interest, and that was compounded by the fact that, despite being surrounded by millions of people on a daily basis, one million people didn’t fill the void in your heart that one person had left.

Quality will always supersede quantity, and the quality of the interpersonal relationships that you had made was so low that it was clear none of them would be capable of filling the hole that had been left by your ex-boyfriend.

So you moved to Chimney Rock for some peace, and despite the turbulence that had come from moving to a small town and finding the very man who had left a piece of your heart missing working in a church that seemed to congregate the strangest of people, you found the respite that you were looking for.

Late at night, when you were just trying to observe the stars and listen to the crickets sing, you could do that. You could hear their loud noises without wondering if you were actually listening to someone having an interpersonal argument at the worst possible place to do so (right outside of your window). With peace came creativity, and with creativity came a bit of personal fulfillment that you hadn’t felt in a long time. Things were different now. But it was a different that you figured you could reckon with.

That was, of course, until about ten minutes ago.

You were outside the church now, trying to urge Jud into allowing you to clean the blood off his fingers. But he was in some form of shock and claiming that it would be tampering with evidence, probably. Wicks, the man who had put Jud through hell since he had come here, was dead.

It had happened abruptly. He was giving his sermon when he stepped down from the podium to rejuvenate himself. It was a somewhat known secret that Wicks was an alcoholic and would step down when he felt like he needed to have a drink, but some of the members of the congregation didn’t need to know that about him. It was why, when he heard the collapse, the first thing that Jud thought to do was collect the fallen flask before Sampson could see it.

Wicks was dead. Stabbed, somehow, even though there was nobody in the room with him that could have been seen. Jud had gone to investigate, only to find that there was blood pooling everywhere. But there was something attached to it that was of some intrigue: a small, wolf-head statue. The top of a lamp at a local bar that Doctor Nat frequented. You were aware that the wolf-head had been in the church since the night before, and you’d offered to come look for it. But, you suppose, things had begun to shift last night as opposed to this morning.

But that was a story for another time.

Everything had happened quickly after that. Everyone there was taken to the station for questioning, and you were separated from Jud, which you knew wasn’t a good idea. It didn’t take much thought to recognize that he was going to be blamed for what happened, even though he wasn’t in the room when it had happened. He was the one with DNA on the handle, and he was the first one alone with Wicks.

They would spin a narrative that he had poisoned his flask, or that he took the opportunity of his sudden collapse to kill him as though it had been an opportunity provided by God himself. Cy had recorded Jud claiming that he wanted to get Wicks out of this church, that he would do everything that it would take to do so. Once the police and the public got their hands on that video, his black-sheep status would be promoted to main murder suspect, and you knew it from the moment that you processed the fact that Wicks was actually dead.

Your feet tapped against the floor anxiously as an overworked officer sat across from you. The fluorescent lights overhead with countless dead bugs trapped within them did nothing to help with the anxiety that you were feeling right now, either.

“What can you tell me about today?” Police Chief Scott was speaking from across you, and though her tone was firm, she didn’t seem to be attempting to intimidate you. Even so, you felt more nervous than you had any right to feel, knowing that you hadn’t committed a crime.

“Probably nothing different from what you already know.”

“I just want to know what happened in your words, anything relevant, even if it wasn’t today.”

Your eyes drifted down towards your tapping feet. Anything relevant. There was a wolf-head figure, wasn’t there? It had come from the bar after Jud threw it at the church, and it busted through the window. You had known that it was there and offered to go back and get it so Jud wouldn’t get in any trouble, but Jud wanted to spend as little time as possible at the church after what happened. Even when you did go back there after a few hours, he didn’t feel like looking for it.

How could you say no to him in that moment? And wasn’t it relevant that you had seen the wolf before? Relevant, but incriminating. Yet you had an alibi. He was with you right after he left the bar and came by the church to throw the head at the window. He had mentioned when you saw him that something had spooked him, that someone had been lurking there, and that he rode off. Wasn’t all of this relevant information? There was someone lurking in the shadows, watching the church late at night. And Jud himself hadn’t been there for hours after that, giving the person ample time to come in and do their nasty work. Maybe that was why you couldn’t find the wolf-head in the morning when you decided to finally look for it.

Jud was with you – wasn’t that relevant?

It was an alibi. It was the opposite of incriminating in the eyes of the law. But you knew how it sounded, and you knew that enough eyebrows would be raised if you even mentioned it. For his sake, it was better if nobody found out at all. At least, that they didn’t know a majority of the details.

Clearing your throat, you spoke after what felt like an eternity of listening to nothing other than your tapping feet and the lights overhead buzzing too loudly.

“I spent the night at the church. I do that sometimes before a big sermon. Even though there weren’t going to be many people there this time, it was important to Wicks, and he often has me help set up since he says I need to ‘make myself useful if I’m going to hang around so much.’ So, I spent the night in one of the guest rooms in the church and-”

“Wait, just to clarify, why do you spend so much time at the church?”

“Father Jud and I are old friends; we grew up together. I knew him before he became a priest, and I had no clue he lived here when I moved to be closer to my family. I’m usually there to help him. This is his first time in a bigger role but… don’t ask me much more about what a smaller role is, I’m not in the church if you couldn’t tell.”

“Noted. Continue.”

“So, anyway, I spent the night in the guest room and woke up in the morning there. I showered and helped Father Jud prepare his song for this morning. I found Wicks’ behaviour strange, though. He usually has me prepare communion, but this morning he didn’t. I knew that there was a smaller number of people planning on being in attendance, but even when it’s only the loyalists, he always had communion. Something was off, though. It was like his entire sermon today was a… it was like he knew that something was going to kill him, or like something had killed him in the past.”

“Could he have been speaking from the perspective of Jesus for the holiday?”

“I suppose, but it just felt… timely.” You tapped your fingers against your thigh once you stopped moving your foot. You had already gotten through the slightly fabricated part; the rest would be gravy. “After that, he stepped off to the side because he needed a moment to himself. This is typically when Jud performs his songs, allowing Wicks time to reinvigorate himself with what he needs to finish delivering his sermon.”

Jud hid the flask — he’d done it for a reason; you weren’t going to take that from him.

“But he never finished it. We heard this bang from the side of the room where he had gone, the little alcove that he often collected his bearings in. Father Jud was the first to check on him, but when he went in there he saw that he had something inside of him. He was bleeding through his robes, so we believed that it was a knife. He tried to look a little harder, maybe to see if it was somewhere vital or something. But Doctor Nat was there, so he took responsibility.”

You really did try to remember everything. Someone in that room was responsible, and if you knew that it wasn’t Jud, then you needed to make it clear what everyone else was doing.

“Martha screamed, I remember that. And then we all looked at her and tried to make sure that she was okay, but then there was more blood, and it was clear that Wicks was dead and not just passed out. Then you guys came, and now I’m here.”

Chief Scott was still taking her notes, the silence making you a bit too nervous again. But then she spoke, and you knew this was your chance to try and make it clear to her that Jud wouldn’t do something like this. “Is there anyone who you think has some sort of motive to have killed Wicks?”

“All of them, to be honest.”

“All of them?”

“Yeah.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, everyone gives their confessions to Wicks except for me. I give my confessions to Father Jud because he’s my friend. But everyone else airs out all of their dirty laundry to a man who’s dead now; maybe they were worried that they were too honest with him or something. Besides that, he’s been using Simone for her money for a long time, and maybe she found out. Any number of things could have happened, but all of them have some motive to kill him. It’s not like he’s the nicest person in the world, anyway.”

“So you’d say that you’re not upset that he’s dead?”

Ah. Maybe it was wise to take some scrutiny; it might help Jud. “I didn’t say that. But, I won’t be dishonest here-” any more than you had been already, that was. “-Wicks was a mean, cruel, antiquated man. He treated everyone around him like they should worship the ground that he walks on, and uses that big platform-podium thing he has to stand in front of the town and spew bigoted rhetoric. Maybe one of the many, many people he’s scrutinized in this town snuck in and killed him, somehow. Or maybe it was someone in that room. Point is, I don’t know who did it, but they probably had a good reason for it.”

“I see.” Chief Scott seemed to have gotten what she needed, finishing off her notes before shutting the book that she was writing in. “Unless you have any questions for me, that will be all.”

“Understood, thank you.”

You sent her a nod before leaving the room. But the moment you were in the hallway, it was like all of the air you had been holding in could be released. You found Jud rather quickly, opting to go back to the church with him before you were forced to spend another moment in this police station. Something besides Wicks' dying was shifting in an odd way; you could feel it in the thick, stagnant air that was surrounding you. But you didn’t know what, and you were almost certain that you had no interest in finding out.

Jud was quiet and somewhat distant as you walked out together, waiting until you were alone in the woods and walking back to the church to take your hand within his. He needed comfort, you reasoned. You knew that he was going to be blamed for this, and he knew it, too. You stuck by his side closely as you walked together, your thumb running along the back of his hand.

Your eyes trailed over his face once you were halfway here, trying to figure out how he was feeling. There was a slight tremble in his lips, but also a tell that he was trying hard not to say something. You observed the way that mostly everything else was the same, though. His collar was still up where it normally was, the tattoo on his neck that he had gotten in another life. There was something different, though, one little thing that most people wouldn’t notice. But you weren’t most people.

Yet, you ignored it when he finally spoke.

“What did you tell them?”

“The truth… mostly.” Your eyes were soft as you observed his face, empathetic. You didn’t feel the slightest bit bad for Wicks, yet you were petrified. Not for him, never for someone who had been as off-putting as him. But for Jud, for the way that this was going to seep into every crevice of his life going forward. He had come here, he had become a priest, for a fresh start. It seemed like tragedy had a sick way of following him. “You took the flask to protect Sampson, didn’t you”

“I did.”

“And I respected your choice, I didn’t tell the officer about Wicks’ drinking problem or that you took the flask.” Your words were quiet, not knowing if there was a chance of someone lingering nearby. But the only sound that you heard was the soft sway of the trees in the spring breeze, and you were quite certain that you were alone. “I didn’t tell her we were together last night, I figured it would… I figured there was only one conclusion that people could draw. Or… two, I guess?”

“What’s the second?”

“That we’re co-conspirators in his murder, or something. I did share that I was at the church last night, in a spare room-”

“A spare room?”

“Yes, a spare room. I didn’t clarify that your room is the spare room, just that I was in a spare room.” You’d been in his room last night, you recalled. Admitting that wasn’t going to go over very well if there were two things that people could think that you’d been doing. One would be incriminating in the eyes of the law, the other in the eyes of the Lord. It was easier to keep the truth to yourself when it was especially damning. “I had to, anyway. Martha probably told them the same thing, and if I omitted what someone else could confirm, then it would be a pretty obvious lie.”

And wasn’t that something, because it took two people to spend hours together and sleep in the same room. You had been betting against all of his boyish charm and innate need to always do the right thing, that Jud hadn’t told the truth, either.

“We omitted the same things, I suppose.” He finally said, a weight coming off your chest. Of course, you had, because you knew him. You didn’t need to discuss what you were going to say to the police to make the same story come out of your mouth. You probably had the exact same thought-process, and you knew that you needed to choose your words carefully to keep people from looking more suspiciously at Jud.

You were both quiet again until you reached the church. But the moment you were inside, you sat beside him in one of the pews. His prayers turned into sobs, and you had your arms around him in an attempt to console him.

For just a brief moment, it felt like things had been before all of this happened. You remembered the nights that Jud had an especially hard fight. He was too sweet to be in the ring; he fit this life far better. You remembered mending his cuts and bruises and then holding him while he cried, all within the span of twenty minutes. It was like an instinctual switch had been flipped in your head when he was crying beside you, an arm around his neck while you tried to tell him that everything was going to be alright.

Maybe it wouldn’t be, you never had the real confidence that it would be after his matches, either. But you needed to tell him that it would be, you needed to be there for him.

“I don’t know if it’s all going to be okay this time, it can’t- you admitted it, they all think that I did it. And if they don’t, they’re going to.”

“But you didn’t, Jud.”

“But they think I do, and it doesn’t matter if I did or if I didn’t because I know that they think. I’m going to go to prison, especially because they know- they know about-” He cried a bit harder at the memory that you knew was in his mind again. He’d held a prayer circle that had gone poorly, a prayer circle in which he admitted to killing a man in the ring. That was something that had changed him; it had been the main reason that your relationship ended. He couldn’t bear the guilt of what he had done, and the entire congregation knew about it now.

“Shh, shh. This isn’t- Jud, please. Just breathe, I’ve got you, please just breathe.” You were trying your best, brushing the tears from his face and holding onto him tightly.

The light from the doors interrupted you, both of you turning to see a man whom you had never seen before standing there. Jud collected himself as quickly as he could, standing up to inform the man that there was no sermon today, but you were almost positive that he wasn’t here to hear the good word from Monsignor Wicks.

Though you listened as they spoke for a few moments, you could feel yourself beginning to tune it out. It wasn’t that you didn’t care, or that you weren’t interested in what was being said. But there was a large part of your mind that was beginning to feel the pressure from this whole thing, too. Or, you were beginning to feel it even more than you had been in the police station.

This wasn’t good, and it wasn’t something that could just be solved easily.

From the moment that you arrived in Chimney Rock, the pecking order had been incredibly clear. Everyone who was on Wicks’ good side was someone who could get away with just about everything so long as they did nothing to defy him. People seemed to respect him just as much as they feared him, but they would never let on to the fact that they harbored any fear of the man who they praised like he was God himself.

Jud was at the bottom of the pecking order; he had been from the moment that he got here. Even before people knew that you and Jud knew each other, that you were close, you didn’t fit in with their flock. Wicks didn’t like you, and he especially didn’t like that you were close with Jud who he had hated from the first glance he took of him. As far as the town was concerned, they had two black sheep, and they would do anything to get them out of their town for good.

Yet you both remained.

Now, though, the pecking order would become clearer to you and perhaps less clear to the police if they played their cards right. You knew that the person who killed Wicks had to have been someone who was in that room, but you knew you didn’t do it, and you knew Jud didn’t do it. But you also knew three inextricable facts that could not be denied as pertinent.

For starters, Jud was the first person to find the body. He heard the collapse just as everyone else did, but he moved from the podium to where he was before anyone else could have seen him. He could see, though. From where he was, he had a better angle than anyone else would have, and where anyone else could have surmised that Wicks had dropped something, Jud had seen the fact that he had dropped himself. So, even though it was true that he was the one who would have seen it first, it was also impossible to ignore that his being the first person seen with the body was incriminating.

Then there was after. After the police were called, and after Doctor Nat had determined that Wicks was dead. Jud had made a point of opening the door in a way that hid the flask behind it because he wanted to protect Sampson, and you both excluded that fact from your stories. But after the police were called, you stayed in the church with Jud for a few moments to retrieve and hide the flask. That gave you time alone with the body, and had people found that out, it would make you both look even more suspicious.

But there was also a third fact that gave you more pause: the people in this community, the people who were in that room, saw Jud as an outsider. Every single one of them had a motive, and you were sure most of them would be willing to murder Wicks and pin it on the man who was on camera, saying that he wanted to cut Wicks out of the church like a cancer. It was easy, really. Or, it would be. Maybe they knew he would be the first to see the body, and maybe they knew that – if everything was done correctly – they could easily frame Jud for the murder. But it was difficult to prove that someone was being framed to begin with. It was especially difficult to prove it when you took into consideration that you didn’t know who was actually guilty.

You would have spent more time spiraling, but your thoughts were cut short by a hand on your arm.

“We’ve gotta go,” Jud spoke softly next to you, and even though he was spiraling, too, you could sense that there was a part of him that was trying to comfort you. “We’re gonna be okay.”

Even if he didn’t entirely believe it himself, his words did bring you enough comfort that you smiled up at him before following him out of the church with Chief Scott and Detective Blanc. Though when you ended up face-to-face with the corpse of a man whom you had seen alive only recently, you had partially wished that you had stayed at the church and not bothered coming.

Why were you being dragged along anyway? It felt almost counterintuitive to have two obvious suspects (Jud more so, though you were sure you’d be looked at as an accessory at best) along with the investigation. Scott seemed to agree, but Blanc was steadfast on keeping you both there, even though you all ended up having to chase Jud out into the hallway when it was clear that he wasn’t prepared for this.

The thought that he was a bit sensitive to seeing dead bodies after what happened to him in the ring all those years ago crossed your mind, but it wasn’t something that you were going to bring up in front of people, and certainly not people who were members of law enforcement. You just needed to find a time in which you could get him alone, and you weren’t sure when that time was going to be. Not during this whole investigation thing, not when you were obviously being looped into something that you weren’t sure if you wanted to be looped into. For Jud, though, you supposed you could stomach it.

It wasn’t until Blanc and Scott let you both know that they wanted to talk for a moment before going to the next place on the list that you got him alone.

The air behind the police station felt strangely stagnant. It wasn’t especially warm for a mid-spring afternoon, but everything felt off. The leaves that often brought you such comfort with the sheer amount of them were slow-moving due to the lack of breeze. Everything felt like it was real and not real all at once, and you weren’t sure what to do with that. Because it was real. It wasn’t some nightmare that you were going to wake up from; it was something that you were going to have to deal with and hope for a good solution.

“You should go back to the church.” Jud broke the silence, your eyes darting away from his for a moment when you felt his hand within yours. He had been touchier as of late, but you were aware of why that was. You didn’t mind it - quite the opposite, really. His touch gave you a sense of comfort that very little else really did. “I don’t want you to have to be involved in this just because I am.”

“I’m not involved in it just because you are, Jud.”

“You kind of are. I mean, you weren’t really paying attention, but they only brought you because I-because we- just because we were talking, I guess. Detective Blanc thought you’d help calm me down.” His fingers were playing with yours, and you found that motion was calming you down just like you were supposed to be doing for him. “And they all think I did it, I know that. You know it too. But they might not think that about you, so you could probably get far, far away from me before they-”

“Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.” You took a step forward, resting your free hand on his cheek. You could feel his fingers trembling against yours, now. He seemed a bit petrified. Scared of what was happening, maybe shaken up because he had just had to look at the corpse of a man that he knew personally. But regardless, he was scared, and you couldn’t blame him for feeling that way. “Last time, I didn’t stand by your side. I mean, I didn’t have much of a choice, but I didn’t. You were going through something awful, you were struggling, and you struggled alone, and I’m not letting that happen again. I care about you too much to just leave you. And I never wanna leave you again.”

“But it’s not safe, it’s just not safe for you.”

“Listen, okay, if you’re in prison in a year - which you won’t be, because you’re innocent - I’m still going to visit you. And if you’re in hiding, I’m going to come with you. I’m not going to leave you when you’re down, and if you wanna fight me on that, you’re gonna have to find someone to drag me kicking and screaming.”

He sighed, but nodded after a moment. “Okay, yeah, fine. But if they start accusing you of anything-”

“I’ll prove them wrong. About me, and certainly about you.” Jud’s fingers relaxed against your hand, settling instead to hold onto it. “Listen - I don’t know if this is God sending the demons from your past back to you, but if it is, then you’re going to prove that you’re not that man anymore. You’re not the guy in the ring anymore, and Wicks wanted to bring that guy out of you again, but he didn’t. We have the truth on our side, and we just need to prove it to everyone else and figure out who actually did this. In six months' time, you’re gonna be running that church on your own, and you’re gonna be just fine.”

There was a little bit of a smile on his lips, finally, albeit a pained one. “I don’t know about running it on my own.”

“I mean, maybe they’ll send someone to replace Wicks or something.”

“No, no. I won’t be on my own because I’ll have you.”

Now it was your turn to smile, letting your thumb brush across his cheek for a moment. It struck you, painfully, that you wanted to kiss him. You almost always wanted to kiss him, but if you were going to do something like that, it certainly wasn’t going to be in public. Still, your hand moved down to adjust his collar before letting your hand fall back to your side. For a moment, you could see your own want reflected in his eyes, his gaze lingering on your mouth for a moment too long. Really, any moment was too long in the situation that you were in. But that was shattered by the sound of the door opening.

Whatever moment of vague consideration that you were having felt like it had a bucket of ice-water poured over it when you saw the two people whom you were waiting for. Still, you went with them for the rest of the day.

There had been a moment, even if only for a brief second, in which it felt like there was going to be some sort of crack in the case. Sampson had been recording the game that day, and it was possible that it would have picked up on an interference that would answer the question of how something like this could have happened. How an impossible crime could have been committed without someone lingering in the wings behind Wicks for everyone to see.

But even that possibility was shattered, and it was clear that Jud was taking it hard. How could he not?

He knew that the police were going to be looking to him as a suspect, but he also knew that the people within the flock had already determined that he was responsible for this, even though he wasn’t. Doctor Nat and Martha had both expressed how they felt about him at different times, claiming that he was somehow responsible for this, even though he wasn’t. You knew that many people within the flock weren’t fond of Jud, you remembered how upset he had been after everything had acted like he was committing some sort of crime for wanting to hold a prayer circle without Wicks’ approval. But he had still invested time in this community. He had still come here with the best of intentions and gotten to know these people on a personal level.

What did it get him? People who hung on Wicks’ every word, mainly. And people who knew that a man as venomous as him would be telling them to blame Jud from beyond the grave. He had always hated that man, and them doing the same in his honor only felt fitting.

It felt like more than that, though.

You were silent as you sat beside Jud while he wrote his statement, your head resting against his shoulder. You’d be half-asleep if your mind wasn’t racing as much as it was.

When you were being questioned earlier, you had been honest in claiming that every single member of the flock most likely had the motive to kill Wicks in some capacity. Some of them were being extorted for all that they were worth, and others knew that he was harboring secrets that they never wanted revealed. But if that was the case, what could have happened that would have caused them to believe that he was going to reveal these secrets to the world?

The killer must have been someone who was in the church that day; they must have done something to cause this to happen before everyone’s eyes, without giving themselves away. But they didn’t simply want to get away with the crime, because it would always come back to them somehow when the options were so sparse. The best way to get away with it was to frame someone else for the murder, and they must have known that Jud was the perfect person to frame.

An outsider who they could easily turn everyone else against, someone who had already expressed his dislike for Wicks on camera and had recently gotten into a physical altercation. But someone who had confessed to killing someone in the past, too. Surely, Jud claiming that he killed someone a long time ago in the ring wasn’t something that could be used against him in this case. But sometimes the law wasn’t all that mattered. Not when they knew that they could turn the community against him.

You needed to help figure out who did this because otherwise.. otherwise you were sure that this was going to end poorly for Jud.

It wasn’t until he finished writing that you ended up sitting beside him on the couch while Detective Blanc read over what he wrote. He was quiet, and when you looked at him, you could tell that he was tired. Physically, because it had been a long, strenuous day. But emotionally, too. He looked drained, like he either wanted to pass out or cry. Even the firelight painting him in orange hues didn’t make him look less like he needed some good rest.

“I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.” Your voice was barely above a whisper as you spoke words that you didn’t want anyone else to hear. “I don’t care what I have to do, I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“I don’t know if you can control it, I don’t-” There was a hitch in his words when he choked over them, so you just wrapped an arm around him and tried to help him relax.

Jud’s head pressed in between your shoulder and your neck while you brushed against his arm softly, your chin pressed against his hair. “Shh, it’s okay. Try to get some rest while he reads.”

“Okay, okay. You get some rest, too.”

“I can try.”

You didn’t really need to try.

It had been an exceptionally long day, so it took less than a minute for you to both be pretty much passed out on the couch. It wasn’t until Blanc woke you up, asking why Jud had lied in what he wrote, that you were on high alert.

“You,” his finger pointed towards you when he spoke, accusation laced within his tone. “You lied, too, when you were speaking with the police earlier. You both told the exact same story, but there was something else, wasn’t there?”

“The flask.” Jud knew what he was talking about, and he knew that you’d both been caught in that lie. But Blanc had thus far been more welcoming of your presence than the police were, so you wanted to hope that, while he told that truth, you weren’t shooting yourselves in the foot. There had only been one other lie by omission that you had both made, and you were half-ready for him to ask about it. But he didn’t. He just instructed Jud to bring him to where the flask had been stored.

It should have been right there; you knew just where he had left it because you were with him when it happened, but it was gone. It was gone, and that raised questions in your mind. But just as soon as you were really thinking about it, Jud was lying back against his pillow and fast-asleep. You only moved to lie beside him, something that perhaps shouldn’t have been so casual if the look that you got from Blanc was any indication.

For a moment, you believed that he was just going to let you sleep, too, but his words made you open your eyes.

“You told another lie, didn’t you?”

“What-uh-I’m not familiar.”

“Last night, Jud didn’t go straight back to the church, and you weren’t here to practice for tomorrow. He went to your house, and you came back here.”

“I-” You could try to lie, but you figured if he’d caught you on two lies already, there was probably no point. “Yeah, that’s-that’s pretty much what happened.”

“And why wouldn’t you think it’s important to share that?”

“Because-” You groaned quietly and let your head thud back against the wall. There was so much that you could say, a truth that might help as an alibi. But you couldn’t, you didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do. “Because if I tell everyone that me and my ex-boyfriend, who’s a priest now spent the night before Wicks got murdered together, people are either going to think we chose a coincidental time to have sex or that we were plotting his murder. You’ve gotta understand that the cardinal sin being the better option probably isn’t the best alibi. And besides, people clearly already think lowly of him; adding a scandal like that into the mix is only going to make people presume his guilt even more than they already are.”

Blanc hummed, but there was something expectant behind his eyes. It was like he was waiting for you to say more, like he knew that there was more to your story and that you were choosing to keep it to yourself, but you kept your mouth shut.

“The person who took the flask,” or, rather, you changed the subject. “If they were able to get into this room without people batting an eyelash, they probably work closely with the church. Is that… anything? Does that help?”

It was pointing out the obvious, really. Anyone with eyes could see that someone with access to Jud’s private room who wouldn’t raise any eyebrows would probably be lurking around the church grounds quite commonly. It narrowed it down somewhat, but not really. As obvious as a deduction as it was, there was an earnestness in his tone that made it clear that your interest in the question was because of your love for the man beside you. Something about that made Blanc hold back from making a joke about it.

“Yeah, ‘course it’s helpful. You should both get some rest.”

Sleep came quickly. Your head had fallen back against the pillow at some point, before your body ultimately decided to curl into Jud’s while you were sleeping. It felt good not to have to think about the waking nightmare that you had been in since the morning for at least a little while. To feel warm, and held, and to know that there wasn’t a single thing that you were going to allow to happen to Jud so long as you could prevent it.

Even when you did wake up in the morning, there was a brief period in which everything felt normal. Your arms wrapped around his body, the blankets pulled over you even though you remember falling asleep without them. He was halfway on top of you, but you didn’t mind the additional weight of the taller man pressed into you. It felt normal, like you could forget the chaos that was waiting for you outside of this room the moment that you decided to open the door.

The sounds from outside the window were momentarily louder than the thoughts racing in your mind, but that moment was shattered only when Jud spoke from in front of you.

“They’ll be expecting us for the funeral soon.”

“I know, just give me a few minutes.”

You knew that the moment you stepped outside, it would be chaos again. People would be clamoring for a reason to have Jud imprisoned for one reason or another, and others would be looking at both of you with the same disdain that they’ve always had multiplied by two. Whatever weak trust that there was had been fractured by this whole thing, and you were certain that even the ones who weren’t entirely sold on Wicks would stay away from the murder suspect and his willing accomplice.

“Just a few more minutes.” From the way that he sounded, Jud needed more time just as much as you did. Granted, he probably needed more time than you did, but he wasn’t willing to admit that to anyone.

Not verbally, anyway. The way that he held on while you stayed wrapped around him made it rather clear that he wasn’t really ready to face the world. There was no way to prepare for people shouting accusations at you when you know that you’ve done nothing legally wrong. There was no way to prepare yourself to have to defend yourself to the police when you’re being framed for a murder that you didn’t commit. But he was going to have to go out there whether he was ready to or not, and you were more than willing to remain by his side throughout the entire ordeal.

The moment passed, though.

Soon enough, you were getting changed into whatever formal, all-black clothing that you had stashed in his room because you hadn’t come prepared. You were lucky that you had come back here to change after a funeral that you attended a few weeks ago, that we being held at the church; otherwise, you wouldn’t have had anything appropriate to wear.

“Doesn’t it feel contradictory?” Jud was behind you while you were putting the finishing touches on your mascara. “The sun, I mean. The skies are blue, the birds are chirping, and the sun is bright and shining. But everything is wrong. Someone’s dead, and we’re in the middle of a murder investigation. But the sun is just as happy as ever.”

Jud wasn’t wrong – it was a beautiful spring day outside. It wasn’t overly warm or humid, but it wasn’t going to be surprisingly cold when you stepped out into the UV rays. But, “the sun shines every day, and every day there’s a tragedy happening sometimes. It just so happens to be occurring in our lives, this time.” You reasoned, turning back to face him. “Besides, I think it’s forecasted to rain tonight.”

“True, I guess.” He reached behind you to grab your setting spray for you, waiting for you to close your eyes before spraying it across your face and neck. “It just feels off. Like some other shoe has to drop. I mean, we’re looking for the shoe, so hopefully it’s going to drop.”

“It will.” Your force was firm when you were finally able to open your eyes, your hand resting on his forearm. “I promise. We’re going to find what we need. Someone is framing you for this murder because they don’t want to get caught, but they’re going to.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Maybe I’m just naive.”

“Hopeful.” He corrected, a hint of a smile tugging at his face.

But it was a bitter smile, because he wasn’t as hopeful as you were that everything was going to work out. Benoit Blanc was incredibly famous for solving impossible cases, which was why he was here. But when you’re in the middle of it, when you’re being accused of the crime, it’s difficult to hold out any sort of hope that everything is going to be okay eventually.

“We should go,” you finally said, your eyes on his while you kept your hand on his forearm just to hold him for a moment longer.

“Just one more minute.”

You weren’t especially surprised when he kissed you. Jud had kissed you a million times, and the last time wasn’t long ago. But you hadn’t talked to him about what had happened that night, yet you hadn’t had the time or the desire to bring it up. Still, you figured that it was a moment of weakness and that it wouldn’t happen again. Maybe this was a moment of weakness, too. But it was, it was the same thing for both of you.

If he might go to prison soon, you might as well get the most out of the time that you have with him prior to potentially losing him again.

His kiss was soft and sweet, one of his large hands cradling the back of your neck when you kissed him back. He sighed into it, like it was lulling him into a calmer state. But his lips were warm, familiar to you like your favorite blanket was as a child. It brought you comfort to kiss him, to feel him so close.

It couldn’t last long. Because you were in a rush, sure, but because you both knew that it was frowned upon. You were committing a sin that you weren’t supposed to commit. But sin shouldn’t have felt like that, not really. It wasn’t just good, because temptation was always supposed to feel good to lure people in. It felt right, like you were supposed to be kissing each other in that very moment.

Maybe you were, or maybe you weren’t. It didn’t really matter.

You were outside with everyone else soon enough, and the looks that they gave you made it clear that every single worry that you had about being around them again was warranted. There was a certain loathing in the way that people looked at you and Jud, even when he was helping them and moving the casket. Though you would be foolish to claim that you didn’t notice that the majority of the dirty looks were coming from the same people who had been giving Jud a hard time yesterday: Martha and Doctor Nat.

While everyone besides Blanc seemed to be looking at him with natural apprehension, and you like you were his lackey who would fight them for his honor if the need arose, Martha and Doctor Nat almost seemed like they had a personal stake in making sure that people believed that Jud was responsible for Wicks’ death. Maybe they did have a personal stake in it, how were you to know, really?

There was no formal reception following the sealing of the tomb. Everything was too short-notice for something like that to have been planned. But the people within the in-crowd did naturally concrete together to discuss what had happened, and they seemed more than opposed to Jud entering the room and interrupting whatever private conversation it was that they had been having.

Everyone but Cy.

Cy led the three of you into a side room so he could show you everything that had happened two nights ago. You remembered how Jud had shown up at your door that night, drunk and looking like a puppy who had just been kicked. He had overheard everyone congregating; he had overheard mention of the prayer meeting that he had tried to hold, and when he went to join in, he was met with Wicks throwing a book at his head. Jud had told you this story over and over again while you were working on getting him sober, so it would have been difficult for you to have forgotten it so soon.

What you didn’t know, however, was the other perspective.

The meeting hadn’t been as sunshine and rainbows as you had initially believed it to have been. Your statement to the police hadn’t been off-base, if what you were gathering. You had made it clear that you believed that every single member of the flock had the motive to kill Wicks. They all had the opportunity to do so, as well, before the sermon in which he was apparently looking to air every bit of dirty laundry that they had out to the world so he could make his getaway with the money that he believed he was owed.

If he was planning on exposing their sins to the world, then they all probably had one reason or another to want him dead. Yey, you could rule some people out. As annoying as he was, there was no way that Cy would be willing to show this to anyone if he believed that it would be incriminating. He couldn’t have been the killer if he was willing to reveal something that would blow his cover if he was, so you were certain that he was innocent. Simone, too, had a reason to kill him, but you figured that she wouldn’t do it like that if that was her master plan.

No. Whoever killed him wanted it to be done like that for a reason. They wanted him to have said at least part of his speech; they wanted him to cut off before they were exposed to the world. But Simone had nothing to expose to the world, really. The others stood to lose something, which meant that they had been in that church and waiting for just the right moment to silence Wicks before he could say anything that was damning to their reputations.

In your heart, you hoped that alone would be enough to exonerate Jud. He hadn’t been there for that meeting, but he had shown up, hadn’t he? He had been abused with books being thrown at his head and made to feel like an outsider. He had gotten drunk and damaged the property because he was upset, and even if all of that wasn’t true, it still wouldn’t be enough to prove him innocent. You needed more. You needed the money that Wicks had been talking about. The fortune that he had promised. The case behind Jud and Blanc seemed to be the key to that need, but they would wait until Cy was gone to try to investigate further.

When he was gone, it was just another dead-end. But Jud was able to call the people who were responsible for opening and closing the tomb, and that call extended into something else.

You could see it on his face, the shift when he realized what was waiting for him on the other line. Jud had come here because he believed in something, because he wanted to help people and serve the Lord. But when he came to Chimney Rock, all he found was a man who abused his power and people who were so accustomed to it that they no longer knew how to behave around someone approaching them with a pure heart and purer intentions. It had almost been as though the town had drained him of the hope and optimism that he had come here with, and while he still tried to help, this entire investigation had clearly taken a toll on him.

As he excused himself into the other room, you couldn’t help the slight guilt that encroached its way into your mind as you figured that you must have made his crisis of faith worse.

“You omitted some details about what you two did the other night, didn’t you?” Blanc spoke from across the desk, his attention on the mess that had been made on the table.

“Was I that obvious?”

“You? No. The hickey on his neck was a giveaway, though. You kept adjusting his collar to cover it – if I had to guess, you were hoping that it would blend in with the tattoo.”

There was a bit of shame in your expression as you looked at your lap, clearing your throat. You remembered what the two of you had done that night. You remembered, too, exactly why you hadn’t told a soul about it.

Jud being in your bed was nothing new. He had come over before. Sometimes he came over just because he had a rough day with Wicks and needed to get away from him. Other times, he had come over just to catch up with you.

Tonight seemed to be different from any other night that you had experienced with him in recent memory.

An hour and a half ago, he had shown up at your door drunk and mumbling about how awful his day had been. He started talking about how he had taken a wolf head from the bar accidentally, and how he had thrown it at the church. He was pretty sure that he had broken a window, but he didn’t remember until he had sobered up a little bit. He then explained how he ended up feeling low enough to go to the bar in the first place, but everything was rather incoherent for a little bit. He was too drunk for you to really make out much of what he was saying and comprehend it into a functional sentence.

But he was talking, and he was letting you sober him up, so you would take that as a win. He was a lot better now, calmer while he was nursing the warm tea that you had made for him to help clear his mind. It was the same flavor that he always had when he came over – the same one that he used to steal sips of when you were drinking it before you had lost contact with him.

“I try to do everything right, but it never feels like it’s good enough. Sometimes, I feel like they like me. But the second I do, he comes round and ruins it again.” Jud complained, leaning his head back against the wall. You were sitting next to him, your fingers brushing softly through his hair. “Maybe I should just beg them to reassign me. I’ve done my time for what I did, maybe they’ll make an exception.”

Even when he spoke such an idea into existence, Just seemed to know that it was something that was never going to happen. He could wish for a move away from Wicks and Chimney Rock all that he wanted, but there was no shot that they were going to send him somewhere else without a good reason for it.

“Do you ever think that you’re here for a purpose?” You asked, curling a pointer finger against a strand of his hair before letting it go. “I think I was, I mean, it’s a pretty crazy coincidence that I found you here. But these people… they’re all so misguided. The people in the flock are conditioned to be okay with the blasphemy that he shouts to them, and the rest of the townspeople have been made to fear the church because he makes it seem like nothing more than a place for them to be humiliated.”

“But you,” you continued, brushing a hand down from his hair so you could cradle his jaw and bring his gaze to you. “You aren’t like him, and maybe you don’t see what’s going to happen now, but maybe you’re here to bring peace to a broken town.”

“And you.”

“Hm?”

“Maybe I’m here for you, too. Neither of us knew the other was here – maybe I was supposed to find you, and maybe that’s a part of my purpose.”

“Maybe so.”

He calmed a bit, but he focused on something else instead of his racing thoughts. You could see the moment that the thought clicked in his mind, and you had a long time to shut it down before it was too late. But you felt his lips against yours, fully, for the first time in a long time, and it was difficult for you to focus on anything other than the slow, experimental way that he was kissing you. It almost felt like it was happening for the first time, even though you knew that it wasn’t.

It wasn’t until he was on top of you, until you were pressed back against the pillows, that you found the desire or courage to place a hand on his chest and speak.

“You’re drunk, we can’t do this.”

“I feel just fine.”

“But-”

“I promise, I didn’t have that much. I just haven’t had it in a long time.”

He did seem to be speaking normally. There was natural worry in his eyes, like he was concerned about doing this but was allowing his own selfish desire to win over his inhibitions for once. Maybe you should have been the responsible one, reminded him of his vows, and ended the interaction there. But you had already stopped him too late, and you couldn’t scrub the taste of his lips from your memory even if you tried.

“Tell me to stop if you need me to.”

You broke, finally, letting him kiss you again. It was harder this time, like your bodies knew each other well despite the time apart. His kisses traced down along your jawline, his tongue pressing into your skin. One of Jud’s hands found the hem of your sweater, his fingertips dancing along your skin but not yet finding the confidence to raise the article of clothing up and over your head.

“I missed the way you taste.” He murmured against your neck, his eyes moving up to meet yours. There was a clear, unfiltered desire plain in his eyes, and that was a sight that you’d never want to forget. You’d remembered what it felt like to receive these looks of want and desire from Jud, but after so long, everything felt like it was amplified up to eleven.

“I missed everything about you.” You admitted, watching his fingertips press a bit firmer into your skin before he finally adjusted his wrists so he could gently pull your sweater off your body. You hadn’t been this exposed in front of him in a long time, and he hadn’t seen anyone this exposed in front of him in a long time. It almost felt odd, but at the same time, it didn’t. It was everything you had gotten used to for years, and everything that you had lost for a long time. But that loss didn’t change the fact that your body would always recognize his touch, the way that it felt to have his teeth sinking into your neck.

Jud took his time, and you let him. He kissed every bit of your neck, your chest, down your stomach before slowly easing your pants off of your lower torso. He didn’t want this to feel rushed; he wanted to make sure that he tasted and touched every bit of you now, just in case he would never have the chance to again. But it was difficult to speak, difficult to do anything other than watch each other out of fear that any word spoken was going to break whatever spell you were currently under.

His fingers were careful when he settled his face in between your thighs, pushing gently at your panties but never fully removing them until he was good and ready. But you figured it was because he could tell you were a bit nervous, shaky after so long apart from each other. Your heart was racing in your chest, your fingers trembling on and off each moment.

“Do you want to stop?” His voice was soft, his chin resting on your lower torso when you looked into his eyes. This felt natural, familiar, but you could tell that he was nervous, too. It had been a long time, and as natural as it felt, it was also a bit nerve-wracking coming back to something that you hadn’t experienced in so long.

Still, you responded rather quickly. “No, no. I don’t want to stop, I just… I just want to make sure we do this right.”

In case it’s the last time – in case he regrets breaking his vows in the morning.

“We will.”

His reassurance made you feel a lot better, easing back as he slowly removed your panties from your hips. You let him take them off, let him spread your legs a bit more while one of your legs was placed over his shoulder. His movements were graceful and slow, his lips pressing soft kisses against your thighs until he got a bit sloppier. His teeth bit down into the meat of one thigh, surely leaving bite marks in his wake. Your fingers tangled in his dark hair briefly, your own movement causing him to finally press his lips against your soaked core.

Jud sighed softly as his tongue ran slowly from your opening to your clit, the familiar taste of you making a soft moan leave his lips. He took his time, even though it was obvious that he was over-excited by the prospect of pleasuring you again. His mouth was careful as he licked and sucked at your core, his lips wrapping around your clit when you tugged on his hair.

He seemed to revel in your moans, like his hands on your hips and the noises falling from your mouth were the heaven that he had been looking for.

It couldn’t have taken more than three minutes for you to come against his lips, the time apart making you all the more sensitive to his touch, even with him taking his sweet time. But he made sure not to overwork you, kissing softly against your hip before moving up so you were level with each other again. But Jud was still fully clothed, and you knew that you needed to be careful.

“Can I take this off?” You asked him, your voice quiet as you pressed your hand against his chest. Taking off his clothing was personal in the best of times, but he still wore the collar now. The physical manifestation of the vows he had made. The vows that he was in the process of breaking.

“Always.”

But he didn’t hesitate, and his lack of hesitation made it easier for you to remove his clothing bit by bit. The collar was placed on your nightstand as gingerly as it could be, your hands nervous and shaky while you unbuttoned his shirt. But this was Jud, not someone you would normally be nervous around. He gave you no reason to be shaking like this, so once you had his shirt off, you could feel the tension beginning to ebb away from your body enough for you to feel okay about taking his pants off.

Once he was undressed, you couldn’t help the way that you observed him. But Jud seemed to be losing at least a little bit of his patience by now.

“Come here.” He mumbled, his voice a bit rougher when he leaned down to kiss you. It was messier than before, the taste of your own cunt seeping into your mouth when his tongue pressed into yours. You could feel one of his large hands on your thigh, pressing into your bare skin and bringing your leg up and over his hip. But, in the same breath, his hand slid lower, pressing in between your legs so he could dip two fingers into you. “Just as tight as I remember.”

You weren’t sure you’d even imagined anything remotely filthy coming from his mouth since you saw him again, so to have him mumbling like that against your lips while his fingers pumped inside of you was certainly something that you didn’t feel quite ready for.

“Please-” You were cut off by his fingers curling inside of you, a whine leaving your lips that only made him laugh against them.

“Please, what?”

“I need you inside of me, please.”

“Ohh, that – right.”

You laughed against his lips even when he took his fingers from you, his hand moving to grab your hip while his other hand lined his cock up with your cunt. Your eyes moved down as you watched him slowly push inside of you, fighting to keep your eyes open just so you could see him fully enter you for the first time in a long time. And though it had been a while, you remembered what it felt like to have him fully inside of you like this. To have him pressed against you, to have him close enough that you can feel every breath that he takes.

The noises that left his lips when he actually started moving felt like they were sent down from the heavens, even if nothing that you were doing was considered to be correct biblically. Jud’s eyes closed for a moment as he set a steady pace, his hips pressed against your before moving out again. You, however, decided to kiss his throat while he adjusted to the feeling of being inside of you again.

“I haven’t even gotten off,” he admitted, his head fallen back as your tongue pressed against his skin. “Felt like God was watching, like I couldn’t. But I got hard after we went out for lunch once. You wore this skirt that wasn’t indecent on its own, but you bent over to pick something up, and I almost touched myself, but I couldn’t allow myself to do it.” He was babbling a bit, like he was at confession instead of fucking you against your mattress. “I thought about it a lot, actually.”

“Me too,” you admitted, nipping softly against the tattoo on his neck. “But I definitely got off to the thought of you more than once.”

“Fuck-”

Jud’s hips moved a bit harder, not minding when you sucked a bit of skin right beside the tattoo into your mouth. You’d leave a mark, but you figured that it was one that would be easily covered. And neither of you was really thinking about that right now. The only thing you were thinking about was the way that he felt inside of you, the way that it felt to have him fuck you harder and harder with each passing moment before you felt your cunt fluttering around him.

You were dripping a bit onto the blankets, your head fallen back against the pillows while your hips jerked messily to meet his thrusts.

Neither of you was all too careful. He did pull out, his come on your thighs, and your body quivering when you came down from your second orgasm. But there were hickeys on both of your necks that would linger until the morning at least, and he had been inside of you until the end without any protection. And yet, when he was cleaning you off, and you were giggling into his chest, none of it really seemed to matter.

You’d given him his privacy when he needed to pray afterwards, cleaning yourself up so you could return to the church to spend the night with him in his room so as not to arouse suspicion. But you’d both gone so long without being around each other, so when he fucked you against the wall in his room for good measure, you would be the last person to deny him.

“We were together before he became a priest, that’s why we’re so close.” You finally admitted, your entire face feeling warmer than before, after admitting to the truth. “He’d been upset that night, and he came over when he was drunk to vent. But then he sobered up and… and then we were in bed together.”

“And you were at the church that night because…”

“That was because we didn’t want to be apart, I guess. I just wanted to be with him, and I’d spent the night there before. He didn’t want to be alone, either.”

“So you didn’t have sex there?”

“No, we did.”

“Oh, okay.”

“Does this impact the investigation?”

“I mean, it could. If people knew that you were together to play hide the zucchini and that you marked each other up in the process, people would be less likely to believe that you were plotting Wicks’ murder.”

“So what you’re saying is that I should tell the police we fucked?”

“Essentially.”

He wasn’t wrong, really. Telling the police that you had an actual alibi for why you were together the night before the murder wasn’t a terrible idea. Everyone knew that you were exes, just as everyone knew that you were attached at the hip and constantly sending ‘longing glances’ at each other from across the room. If they knew that you were hooking up the night before, it would take away some of the premeditation aspect… maybe.

“No, no. I can’t. It’ll ruin his reputation-”

“It’s already ruined-”

“And besides, how do they know pillow talk wasn’t us plotting to murder Wicks? Or that we got really, really turned on talking about murder and hooked up because of it? It doesn’t help.”

“It could help a little, though.”

Maybe. Maybe it could, and maybe the responsible thing was giving over any information that could absolve him of the murder that you knew he didn’t commit. You’d been together all night and all morning, and there was no possible time in which he could have premeditated a murder, but that didn’t change the fact that it would ruin his reputation. It was bad enough that he broke his vows; he didn’t need the whole town knowing about it. Especially not when they already viewed him as a black sheep.

Things had changed by the time Jud was back from his phone call, though.

He had been on the phone with someone from the company who had been called to open the tomb. Someone who needed a prayer, who had been going through something that required someone to communicate to God with them. It was clear that Jud had some sort of epiphany, that he needed to be alone. And for a few moments, you were inclined to let him be alone.

The police were coming, and someone would need to take the fall anyway. Why not have that person be you? It was the least you could do with him, especially with the lingering worry that some of his guilt came from the fact that he had broken his vows in the first place just to sleep with you.

Yet, there was a part of you that figured you should chase after him. You’d let him run away the first time, and you lost him for a long time while he was figuring out what he wanted to do and who he was. Even now, he wasn’t fully set on anything. He wanted to be a priest, he wanted to help people, and he loved what he did. But he didn’t know how to do it, and he needed some sort of guidance that he just wasn’t getting. Chasing after him would only get you so far, especially when you knew that the police were after him. If they had you, maybe that would be enough for now.

But Blanc wouldn’t stand for that.

He needed you not locked up, so he made sure that you ran before they could find where you were – and run you did.

You ran until you eventually found Jud. He was covered in mud and halfway ready to turn himself in at the police station when you ran into him. You’d suspected that maybe he’d been taken in, so you had gone there to see if you could find out. But he hadn’t, and Blanc was rushing you both out of the station before you could be arrested for something that was done by someone else.

That someone else being Doctor Nat, apparently. Doctor Nat, who was now dead, too.

The scene before you in that basement would surely be difficult to forget, but the smell was something else entirely. The smell of human decomposition was overtaken by the strong chemicals that had been used to melt the flesh of Doctor Nat in the tub and Wicks' arms that were holding him down. Wicks smelled like a corpse, decomposing and old, and nothing like the musky scent that he sprayed himself with in the morning every day that you had seen him when he was alive.

Alcohol no longer lingered on his breath, and his closed eyes were no longer filled with hatred. Everyone had believed that he rose from the dead, apparently. You weren’t made privy to that because you had been looking for Jud and had lost signal to your phone at some point while you were in the woods, but you knew it, now. And yet, it didn’t look like he had risen from the dead.

He was here, now, seemingly positioned to look like he had been the one to drown Doctor Nat in a tub full of acid in his own basement. But something was off about this. He smelled of decomp; he looked like he had been dead for days. If someone were to be resurrected by the almighty, surely they would be granted a clean slate in terms of their newly withering skin and the smell of death perfuming their skin. Surely, as well, Wicks wouldn’t be granted a second chance of life by God himself only to be struck down committing a murder that he had never once implied he would want to do before.

Wicks was a cruel, awful man. But he wasn’t a killer, nor was he an angel. He couldn’t have been resurrected, and he couldn’t have done this. Which means that something else had happened, but what had happened, you weren’t sure of.

Regardless of the sight in front of you, Jud had already made up his mind about his guilt and what he believed that he needed to do to clear his conscience. He wasn’t guilty, but he figured that he was. Someone had stabbed Sampson, and he believed that he had been the one holding the knife, even if it wasn’t true. So you didn’t stop him when he decided that he was going to walk to the church to confess, but you did go with him.

Your fingers were intertwined with his as you walked through the woods, the navy-dawn beginning to seep through the treeline while you watched out for anything that you could trip on.

“I’m sorry for getting you involved with all of this,” Jud spoke quietly, his eyes still on the ground below you. “You should’ve never had to do any of this.”

“You didn’t do anything; I chose to be here.” You hated hearing him sound so broken, so upset. He seemed to have some sort of clarity about what he wanted last night, but now everything was even messier than it had been before. “I’m sorry for-I’m sorry.”

For breaking his vows, for doing something that neither of you was supposed to do. You’d carried the guilt of acting on your desires with you for days, knowing what that meant to him. But that apology was the one thing that stopped him in his tracks.

His hand caught yours while you tried to keep walking, turning back so you could face him. Jud dropped your hand, though. Moving closer to you and letting his hands cradle your cheeks instead. “Don’t apologize, you did nothing wrong.”

“But-”

“Being with you that night has been the only good memory that’s kept me going the last couple of days, and I chose to do it. Don’t be sorry, okay? Please.” He was calm when he spoke, his thumbs lightly caressing your cheeks. What you didn’t expect was for him to kiss you. It was soft, slow. Nothing like the needy kisses that you’d shared in your room or his room the other night. “We’re gonna figure everything out.”

Even now, he was trying to reassure you. But even if you were certain that they were going to take him to prison for something that he didn’t do, his presence and his touch calmed you as you walked the rest of the way to the church.

You remained with him through all of it.

His initial guilty plea, his desire to just get everything over with, because he had decided somewhere along the line that he was guilty. But you knew that he didn’t kill Wicks, and even if you had no idea what had happened with Sampson, everything in your heart was telling you that he hadn’t done that, either. Something was wrong here, and when Blanc intervened to try to tell everyone what he believed had happened, there was a moment in which you were sure that everything was going to be alright.

Blanc was known for solving everything unsolvable, and if he could figure this out, then Jud was going to walk free. Someone else in this church was responsible; something else was afoot here. But you didn’t know what, and the best thing that you could do was try not to intervene with the proceedings to make sure that Jud had as fair a chance as he possibly could have.

Until… he didn’t solve the case. Or, he didn’t seem to.

For at least two minutes, it just sort of felt like everything was crumbling apart. The case was going to go unsolved, and the only person that the police were really looking at as a suspect was Jud. Jud, whom you knew, was innocent. Jud, who had been with you the entire time. For a moment, you were ready to confess to the police that you’d been together that night and that morning, that it would have been incredibly difficult for him to premeditate a crime while he was right in front of you without you knowing about it.

But, like your integrity was being protected by something divine, Martha entered the room.

When she spoke, when she explained herself, it was like every missing piece that you needed had come together. Martha and Doctor Nat had been the ones who were the most aggressive toward Jud. They were the ones who wanted to blame him for the murder more than anything, and Doctor Nat was the one who was always at the bar. He would have known about the wolf-head, and chances were, he would have known that Jud had been there that night.

She had been at this church for a long time, and everything that she had done and said since the beginning of this case had begun to make sense in your mind. She had done this because Wicks had become greedy, because he learned that he had an untapped fortune that he could make his own. He was going to take the money and run, and that wasn’t very priestly of him.

But he was going to expose everyone in the flock, too. The ones who had confessed to him, the ones who had shared their dirty little secrets. Just like you had believed, someone from the flock had believed that Wicks was going to use what they had confessed against them, and now you knew why. You knew why, and you knew what had caused them to frame Jud. Maybe there was nothing more that you could have done to help, but clearly, you didn’t need to. Everything was revealed in time, and Jud wasn’t going to be arrested for a crime that he didn’t commit.

In the following months, tensions were lowered in Chimney Rock.

You’d been helping Jud change up the church once he got confirmation that he was going to be permitted to run it. He had proven himself to be a good servant of Christ in the church's eyes. But he didn’t want a big podium that put him physically above everyone else, like Wicks had. He wanted to be level with the people – his people. He wanted to welcome everyone, and he wanted to put Eve’s Apple right where any believer could see it, without being too obvious.

The church had taken months to be prepared, but the opening was tomorrow, and you were sitting beside Jud in the (much larger) room that he had acquired after the death of Wicks. He was organizing the papers that he was going to be using the following morning, figuring out how best to advertise the changes that were being made within the church.

“Wanna get dinner later?”

His voice took you from your thoughts, the sun shining through the stained-glass window that was in the bedroom. “It better not be pasta again, I don’t think I can stomach a fourth night in a row.”

“I thought you loved pasta!”

“I do, I do. Not that much of it, though.”

“Well, that knocks down the options to… Chinese.”

Right. Chimney Rock was a small town.

You sighed, leaning your chin into your palm while you thought about it before you perked up, scooting closer to him and resting your chin on his shoulder. “We should cook something. Whatever you want, just… something. Together.”

Jud’s smile was felt even if you weren’t looking at his face. You could feel it when he kissed the top of your head, a gesture that could be mistaken for casual if you weren’t semi-capable of describing your relationship to other people.

It wasn’t like it had been years ago, but it wasn’t not like that, either. Sometimes you kissed, every so often you had sex, and he repented, and it was inherently non-traditional. Everything about it was non-traditional, and yet it felt right. It felt holy in a way that repressing it and lying about it to yourself and others didn’t. Wicks had been far too traditional to the point of exclusion, but you were figuring yourselves out. And if it ended up that it was wrong, you were certain that you’d receive some sort of sign of confirmation that it was. But as of yet, nothing had ever felt more right in your mind.

“We’ll cook, then.” He finally agreed, tipping your chin up with his finger, pressing a chaste kiss against your lips. “Just not pasta.”

“Certainly not.”

“We’ll do it together.”

“Oh, always.”

“Just like we do everything else.”

You paused for a moment, your eyes softening as you looked up at him. You loved him more than anything, and seeing that same love reflected back in his eyes made you feel like everything was right in the world. “Just like we do everything else,” you affirmed, pressing a kiss to his cheek.

Eventually, you might have concrete answers for what you were doing together and if it was the right, moral thing. But you felt like you already had them, like you didn’t need them. Maybe you never did, maybe all you really needed was each other. Now, after what felt like an eternity of being kept apart even when you were physically together, it felt like you had each other in all the ways that you were meant to.

Adjusting was a difficult thing for anyone.

It presented itself differently for different people, and for you, it had been somewhat challenging in the first few months after arriving at Hawkins. You’d been born and raised in California, and you were used to the sun and the temperate weather. You were used to being able to go to the beach when you wanted to and being around people who you had grown up with.

Things changed when your mother met someone. He wasn’t a pleasant man. You were between Max and Billy in terms of age, so you had some understanding of what was happening at home, but you didn’t know how to deal with it. All you knew was that you were someone who was used to helping people; you weren’t one to allow someone to suffer for no reason when you believed that there was something that you could do about it. You’d been the one to try and help Billy, even though he bore no real relation to you as anything other than a step-brother instead of someone related by blood.

The first time that you ever saw him being berated, the first time that you saw things get physical, you tried to interject; there was only so much a fifteen-year-old girl could do, though. Billy didn’t want you to protect him, anyway. Maybe because he was too prideful to admit that he was being abused, or maybe because he didn’t want you to have to deal with what he dealt with. Either way, there was little you could do to help.

So you adjusted to Hawkins, instead.

Max and Billy both had a hard time adjusting for different reasons. They made friends after a bit, but it was clear that neither of them really wanted to be in the new place that they were in. But you made peace with it. You were on the straight-and-narrow. Your grades were top-notch, you were respectful and polite, and you ended up trying out for the volleyball team and the cheer squad.

While you were studying and joining clubs, it became somewhat apparent that everything in Hawkins wasn’t as it seemed. You were involved with something called the Upside Down, something that resulted in everyone you knew nearly dying before your step-brother actually did die. Once Billy was gone, so was the man who was footing most of the bills. You ended up moving into a trailer park with your sister and mother, but neither of them was really taking it well.

Not you, though. You kept up appearances and spent most nights sleeping over at Chrissy Cunningham’s house when you were allowed to. But through it, you became one of the more respected, popular girls at school. People liked you because you were nice and normal, and people questioned how you were related to Max, who had become more reclusive since seeing Billy die.

It wasn’t that you weren’t affected by it. Seeing anyone die, let alone your own step-brother, and then having to move and keep the secret of what really happened at Starcourt Mall that night was hard. But you were in therapy, you didn’t pull away from the people who were close to you, either. You let them help you, let them comfort you when they figured that you were probably upset. You let people in while Max pushed people away, and that made it different for you when everything went down.

But there was some context needed, really.

The thing was, when Billy was still alive, you weren’t really allowed to be around boys. He was only two years older than you, but he was still older than you, and you were still in the same school. He didn’t trust boys around you, so you were mainly only around the girls at school. Chrissy was one of your closest friends. She was sweet, she helped you adjust to being new to the cheer team, and she helped you practice when you were having trouble with some harder moves that everyone had trouble with in the beginning.

She also happened to know that you had a massive crush on Jason Carver.

It had come out one night when you were at her house. She was close friends with Jason. The two had dated a few years back, but she said that they had decided that they were better off as friends. It wasn’t that they didn’t care about each other, because they did, it was just that they had gotten what kind of care they felt wrong when they started dating. So, when you were talking about him, and you got all mousy, it wasn’t hard for her to figure out that you liked him.

She knew that you had to keep it under the radar if you were going to be talking to him, so as to not upset Billy, so she helped you keep it a secret from him when she played matchmaker and tried to get you two together without anyone else present. Through her matchmaking scheme, you did end up being close friends with Jason. But the summer had been difficult with Billy dying, and fall had been mainly spent getting used to everything again. And then the year was just going by so fast.

You and Jason were both still deciding where you wanted to go to college, and that meant that neither of you knew if you were going to see each other ever again after the school year ended. It almost felt counter-productive to admit that you liked him when you knew that you had such limited time together before graduating, but you did find yourself hoping that he would ask you to prom.

The night of the championship game, you had ended up going back to Benny’s old diner with him and the team to celebrate their win. It was the first time that Hawkins had won in years, and it was all thanks to Lucas Sinclair, someone whom you had grown to know well because of the Upside Down. It was nice seeing him fit in, but it was mostly nice being able to spend the night with Jason.

Things weren’t so nice in the morning, though.

The news of Chrissy came a little bit after everyone woke up, but something seemed off. The most obvious answer was that it had something to do with Eddie. He was the last person there with her, and he had run away after she died. There was no one else there, and no one else who knew Chrissy. But why would he do something like that? If you weren’t somewhat (vaguely) familiar with him, maybe you wouldn’t give it any more thought because, to an outsider, it seemed like a pretty clean and dry case. The older boy, who happened to be a drug dealer on the side, had a dead girl in his trailer and was on the run. Sure. Easy. But it wasn’t that easy when you knew about the Upside Down and when you knew that a death like that just wasn’t physically possible.

But it was like Jason had gotten some kind of tunnel vision. It was the easiest answer, and one of his best friends was dead. He needed someone to blame, and he didn’t know anything about the Upside Down. On the one hand, maybe it would be better if he stayed like that. Knowing about the Upside Down put people in danger, people like Billy, like Chrissy. You didn’t want him to be in danger. But Chrissy didn’t know about the Upside Down, neither did Fred, and yet they had both just died in the same way, and there was no way that Eddie could have done anything to Fred - he didn’t even know Fred.

All of that could only really mean that he wasn’t the one to do it, and even if he did somehow develop serial killer tendencies overnight, the things that had happened weren’t physically possible for one human being to do to another human being. Something else was happening, and based upon everything that you knew, that something else had to do with the Upside Down. This meant that Jason was putting himself in harm’s way every single day just because he didn’t know what was happening.

While the others might be somewhat okay with that, they also didn’t really know him. But you did. You were close with him, you spent a lot of time with him, and the idea of him even being involved with this was something that put you off. But he was actively trying to hunt Eddie down, and that meant that he was somehow getting himself tangled up in the Upside Down. So, while the others were investigating a lead on someone named Victor Creel, you were looking for Jason to see if you could try to reason with him.

The words of your sister rang in your ears as you sat across from him. He was partially ready for Chrissy’s funeral, his hands adjusting his tie while you made sure that your hair was in place. But you knew that you needed to say something, you needed to do something. But Max had made a good point earlier - what if he just doesn’t believe you? What if you go out of your way to tell him the truth, and he thinks that you’re insane and ends up getting himself killed anyway?

But he’s willing to believe in the supernatural, isn’t he? He believes that Eddie’s ‘satanic cult’ is somehow behind all of this, so clearly he’s willing to suspend the element of disbelief at least a little bit; otherwise, he wouldn’t be getting involved with this at all.

“Can you help me with this?” Your eyes left your hair as you heard Jason speak from across the room. He seemed to have given up on his tie, a sadness in his eyes that lingered even when they connected with yours in the mirror. Had Jason ever lost someone he cared about before? You were almost tempted to believe that he hadn’t, and now he was experiencing all new emotions for the first time.

Moving to stand in front of him, your fingers wrapped around his tie as you started to do it for him. You’d seen Jason with them on before, but it was possible that he was just too upset to do it right now or that he usually had someone do it for him.

“Doesn’t feel real that we’re going to her funeral, you know? I mean, I know that she’s dead but- it just sucks.”

“I know, I-”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that to you. I know what you’ve been through.”

It hadn’t been even a year since you saw Billy die. As far as everyone in the town knew, he had gotten you and Max out of the mall and ended up dying in the flames. In reality, he had been the one to take the brunt of the attack from the Mind Flayer. But people couldn’t know that there was a Mind Flayer, so the fire excuse was just something that had to stick.

“It’s okay. Just because my step-brother died doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to be upset about our friend dying.” Your voice was soft, gentle. “She was my best friend, it doesn’t feel right that I’m not with her right now but… here we are.”

You adjusted his collar around the tie once it was on properly, smoothing down his suit before looking at him. His features were always so perfect, even the birthmark on the side of his nose made you feel all soft inside. Jason was almost too perfect, too pretty, but you could never get tired of watching him.

“I need to tell you something.”

“What is it?”

He let you take his hand, let you bring him to the bed so you could sit down next to each other while you tried to broach the subject that you were trying to bring up. You had to tell him about the Upside Down; there had to be some way. But everything felt insane. Was it really any more insane to trade one monster that you can’t really see right now to thinking that Eddie Munson was possessed by some sort of demon that gave him the ability to murder people without touching them?

It was all insane - you just needed him to see that your insanity was the real one.

“I… um- there’s-so… Billy didn’t die in a fire.”

“The mall burned, though. Did-”

“It was… there’s this… this thing. You know the curse, like everyone keeps saying that we’re cursed and that people are always dying in this town and stuff?”

“Yeah, but-”

“And the girl with the superpowers that people kept talking about but everyone decided had to be fake?”

“I… yeah.”

“It wasn’t Eddie that killed Chrissy, it was something else. The same thing that killed Barb and Billy and everyone else who’s died recently. It keeps happening, and the same thing that happened to Chrissy is happening to my sister. Something picked her. There was… she was seeing these things in the last couple of days she was alive. Like… clocks and stuff. There was this grotesque-looking creature that she told me about that was like- shaming her and stuff. Making her sad, miserable, and scared. And now she’s dead, and the same kind of thing is happening to Max, but she’d got her music, so she’s okay for now.”

“I don’t understand. Eddie was the last person with her.”

“Yeah, because of the thing. She was seeing this thing, and it was making her so anxious on top of everything she was going through with her parents, and she went to Eddie for drugs but-”

“Have you seen him?”

You were quiet for a minute, tapping your fingers on your leg before relenting. “Yeah.” You admitted, keeping your voice low. “I know where he is, but I know he didn’t do it. He ran because he thought it was a ghost or whatever, but it wasn’t a ghost. It was… I have-”

Letting go of his hand, you moved to pull up your cardigan’s sleeve so he could see the giant slash marks on your forearm. The scar was unnatural, like some sort of small dinosaur had done it rather than an animal or something of that nature. You’d covered them up from the moment that you got them fighting against one of those creatures because they looked so awful, but you’d show them to Jason if you had to.

“One of these things almost killed me, and you have to at least admit that this shit doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever seen before.”

Jason’s hands were gentle on your arm, inspecting the scar tissue as though it was the first time he was seeing your skin. He’d noticed that you always covered up your arms, but he figured that it was just some unfounded insecurity that you had, so he never mentioned it to you. When you refused to get in the pool during a party he was having, he almost tried to talk to you about it, but he didn’t want to make you uncomfortable, so he never brought it up to you.

“Listen, I know it sounds insane, but it’s not any more insane than thinking that Eddie Munson has superpowers that he uses for evil. There’s a thing, a terrible, terrible thing. And I never told you because I didn’t want you to end up-”

Now you did choke up a bit, your face turning away from him. Everyone who knew was in constant danger; your sister could die if something went wrong in what you were doing, and your step-brother was already dead. Your mom didn’t know what was going on, but just the fact that she had lost so much was making everything a little bit more difficult for her than it needed to be. She hated being in the trailer park, and she hated being in Hawkins now that she had lost the person who had her move here in the first place.

“End up what?” His hand had moved from your arm at some point, one remaining there and caressing your skin with his thumb in a comforting sort of way, while the other turned your head so you were looking at him. “Dead?”

“Yeah, dead. And now… now it’s choosing people so randomly. Chrissy and Fred didn’t know about this, and Eddie was never involved in this stuff before. And it’s like you’re in danger anyway, and I don’t want anything to happen to you. I can’t lose you, I can’t. I can lose a lot, but not you.”

Jason had always meant more to you than most people did, but that was something that you tended not to share. Sure, Chrissy knew you had a crush on him and teased you a little bit for it, but it was more than just a crush.

“You won’t, okay? I believe you. But I need to keep you safe, too. So if you want to go be with your sister after the funeral, you can be. But I want to come with you.”

“No, Jason-”

“What if you’re with her and it picks me just because you said something? What if it’s after the people you care about? I want to come with you, so let me.”

The thing was, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Chrissy was your best friend, and Max was your sister. The Upside Down had killed your step-brother, too. But Fred felt like an outlier, someone who was close with Nancy. Maybe it was punishing the entire Party for standing up against it - maybe he would be next, and maybe it wouldn’t be drawn out like Chrissy was.

“Fine, okay. You can come with me, but don’t get yourself hurt. Promise me that you’re not going to get yourself hurt.”

“I promise, but you need to promise me the same thing.”

Your eyes searched his for any sort of deception, but you found nothing. “Okay, yeah, I promise too.”

So you went with him to the funeral, and afterwards you had to surprise everyone when you showed up with Jason Carver in tow. You had known that they would be gathered at the trailer park to discover what they had learned so far, but they were all a bit surprised to see that he was with you. He wasn’t someone any of them were hoping to see, even though they all knew that you were close.

“Why-”

“I told him about everything; he knows it wasn’t Eddie.” Your voice was calm as you waved one hand to dismiss the concerns that you knew were about to come from Nancy. Your other hand was still holding onto Jason’s, something that neither of you had stopped doing since around the time that you had left the funeral. “I know we’re supposed to talk about it before we tell people, but I needed him to know.”

Max seemed the least surprised out of anyone. She knew that you adored Jason, that you always had, so she seemed almost a bit relieved that you’d at least talked about something of meaning, even if you hadn’t told him how you felt about him.

“Fine, but how much did you tell him?”

“Probably not enough.”

It was Steve who motioned for you both to sit down. He’d gone through something quite similar, from what you’d heard. He had been a bit of an asshole to everyone before, but he changed a bit over time. He had been exposed to the Upside Down, and now he was used to all of this. He seemed more keen on letting you bring your friend into the fold than anyone else did, but everyone still took the time to explain everything to him in great detail until it was decided that the group would part ways for the night.

Max decided that she was going to go off with Lucas, whom Jason had apparently been unable to find for the last day. But you decided to go back to Jason’s home, not feeling comfortable with the entire prospect of him knowing, because you were worried that it was going to put him in some sort of danger.

He was lying beside you in bed, his eyes trained on the ceiling. If any of you got any sort of meaningful sleep, it would be a miracle.

You expected him to just turn onto his side and try to sleep, but you were surprised to find his hand wrapped around yours. Your fingers squeezed against his before you turned your head to look at him, your eyes locking with his blue eyes.

“I had a sign.”

“What?” Your eyebrows furrowed after he spoke, confusion clear on your face while you tried to make sense of what he was trying to tell you.

“I was going to ask you to prom, I made this cheesy sign that I wanted to show you, and Chrissy was supposed to help with it. I just thought- I mean, I never told you, but I always really liked you. I just didn’t want to ruin things, even though Chrissy kept telling me that you liked me back. I figure she’d want me to tell you the truth now, just in case.”

Silence filled the room as you actually contemplated what he was saying, but it wasn’t something uncomfortable. It couldn’t be when you leaned over to press a kiss to his forehead. “I like you, too. I’ve liked you for a while, I just never knew how to tell you. I guess now’s as good a time as any.”

Jason’s eyes had fluttered shut when you kissed his forehead, but he did open them before he spoke again. “Can you kiss me on the mouth?”

There was a light fluttering in your stomach when he asked that, but you obliged. Leaning over, your lips pressed softly against his. It was careful, not like you’d never kissed before, but like you wanted to savour the way that it felt to kiss him.

He was careful with the way that he kissed you, one hand holding onto your cheek while the other remained intertwined with yours. Jason kissed in a way that made it clear that he had been thinking about doing this for a while, that this wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment thing that he was doing because he was grieving. This was something personal to him, and something that you probably should have been doing a long time ago.

When he pulled back, you didn’t let him go far. Your arms were around him, your head resting against his chest. Jason just held you tightly, pressing a kiss to the top of your head. It was easier to fall asleep that way, easier than it had been in a while. Nothing was going to happen to either of you tonight, not without you being there to stop it, at least.

Everything was different now, and the strict line that you had placed between the life that you had known about the Upside Down and the life that you had with Jason and Chrissy was now incredibly blurred. You’d always made a point of keeping the normalcy separate from the crazy part of your life, and it had worked thus far. But it was only a matter of time before all of the people close to you were involved with it in some way. You’d lost Chrissy, and maybe, had she known about what was happening, she could have been saved. Regardless of whether that was true or not, you weren’t going to make the same mistake with Jason if you could help it.

When you’d been assigned to work on a science project with Jason, you didn’t really think that it was going to be much of a big deal. You knew him, and you had known him for a few years. You got along, but you didn’t talk that much, so you didn’t have that big of an impression of him in your mind. He was really just someone who you mainly saw in the hallways.

That’s not to say that he hadn’t made any sort of meaningful impact on you, though. He made some impact, but you just weren’t sure how to properly explain it.

Jason was popular. You, too, were popular. Just not on your own merit, which made it a bit different. You were popular because your brother was Steve Harrington, and Steve was one of the most popular boys in the school. People knew him, and they knew you because they knew him. But that didn’t mean that people really knew that much about you separate from Steve.

Some did. Some people really did want to get to know you; they had no reason not to. You were good at school, you got straight-a’s, you were a cheerleader, and you were on the academic decathlon team, so a few different types of people knew you all the same. But Steve, more specifically, after everything had happened with the upside down and The Party, was a bit more protective of you than he had been when you were both a bit younger.

That’s not to say that Steve wasn’t protective before, because he was.

When you were younger, he let you come to the parties that he threw and some of the parties that he went to. But he made sure that you weren’t getting too close to any guys. He let you come along to hang out with his friends, but if he got a whiff of an idea that one of them was going to try something to either hurt you or flirt with you, he made sure to shut it down immediately. The idea of anyone trying to be with you irritated him because he knew teenage boys - he knew himself, didn’t he? - and he knew that they couldn’t be trusted.

Then everything happened. He got a little less weird about the idea of boys hitting on you, but you got weird about it in turn. What if a boy did hit on you? There were dangers in the world that they could never know about, and being with someone meant putting them at risk of being exposed to something terrible. It meant putting more people in danger, and that wasn’t something that you were willing to do. You were a junior, anyway. Once you got out of Hawkins, everything was going to change - maybe things would get better.

Even so, you still wanted to finish school normally. As far as you knew, you didn’t need to worry about the upside down anymore, and Steve was going to graduate this year, meaning that the final year of school would be up to you. He did his best, as of late, to keep you from people who he figured were genuinely bad. People who were like he was a few years ago, or people like Billy Hargrove. But he had laid off a bit; he wanted you to finish on a high note, and you were sure that you would.

Really, it was supposed to be clean and easy. You would finish school in a year, Steve would finish in a month, and you would try to put the whole upside down thing behind you without any romantic strings attached.

Two things happened around the same time that put a wrench in that plan.

The first issue, and really the main issue that caused the other, was Jason. You were assigned to work on your final project for Physics with him, and that wasn’t something that you were particularly stressed about. The first day, you went to the library with him. It was supposed to be easy and simple, just an hour or two planning before you met up the next day at his house to discuss it. But you ended up spending an hour or two talking about the project and about three hours talking to each other about anything that you could think about discussing.

Then, the next day, you got a lot of research for the project done at his house before you ended up sitting on the couch together and watching whatever was on the television. You weren’t really paying attention, though. Jason was right next to you, and you hadn’t really noticed until then that he was attractive. While you noticed. Everyone noticed. He was incredibly popular, and people liked looking at him; you knew that. But you hadn’t noticed that you, personally, found him attractive until he was recalling how he got his silly little shark watch while on vacation, and you were listening intently like he was telling you something massively important.

That was how you realized that you liked the way that his blond hair fell over his forehead and the blue in his eyes. It was how you came to understand that you wanted to listen to any word that would come out of his mouth if you got to look at him for a little bit longer. He was beautiful, and that was a problem. And even with it being a problem, you went out to dinner with him like it was something normal. Maybe it was. Going out with friends was something that you did all the time. But this was different. He was cute, and he talked to you in a way that made you want to keep talking to him. It didn’t really take a rocket scientist for you to realize that you had a little bit of a crush on him.

With that realization in mind, it made all of today a bit more complicated.

Jason was at your home - he was in your room with the door wide open while you both focused on studying for about an hour before you recalled that your brother was downstairs cleaning because he was having a party later in the night. That was the second issue: the party. Because all night you had been trying to figure out if you should just ask him if you could bring a plus-one.

Steve was graduating in a month. He was throwing a party to celebrate graduation with his friends before the official grad party the following month. It was more like the house parties that he had been having while you were growing up. Something to ring in the end of everything that he had known for most of his life, and something predominantly for the seniors. You were only invited because you lived in the house, and even with that itself being a problem, you had also never once asked to bring a plus-one to one of Steve’s parties. If you started now, especially for such a hyper-specific sort of party, Steve was going to know why. But the more time that you spent working with Jason, the more time you realized that it was probably your best shot at making a move. He was popular, and he wouldn’t be single for long; you knew that you needed to do something.

So, swallowing your pride, you were sitting on the couch in front of Steve while you tried to figure out the best possible way to broach the subject.

“So, uh- you know that party you’re having tonight?”

“I’m… I- yeah?” He seemed a bit incredulous, and probably rightfully so, given that he had been in the middle of setting it up when you decided that you needed to come downstairs and ask him something so important that you had to abruptly stop studying for your final project.

“I was just wondering if I could bring someone, maybe.”

“Someone like who? It better not be one of the kids; this is a grown-up party.”

“You’re hardly a grown-up, Steve.”

“Stop avoiding the question.”

“Fine, jeez, I wanted to ask Jason. You know, he’s in the house already, and it’s uh… it seems… mean to not invite him since he sees you setting up.”

“I don’t think it’s mean, he’s a junior.”

“Yeah, but so I am I.”

“Uh-huh, and you live here.”

Clearing your throat, you toyed with your fingers for a moment while you tried to figure out the best way to respond without giving yourself away. The last thing that you wanted to do was openly admit that you had a crush on anyone, much less Jason Carver. But the whole point of even asking was to try to make a move, wasn’t it? Steve was going to find out one way or another.

“Can he still come, though?”

“You’ve never, ever, ever asked if anyone can come.”

“Yeah, but-”

“Are you hiding something from me?” His tone made it clear that he knew just as much as the way that he sat down beside you with the most smug grin that you’d ever seen on his face in your entire life did. “Like, I don’t know, maybe you’re not just spending so much time with him for school.”

“Well, we’re like very much working on the project.”

“Mhm. And what else? Chemistry, is it?”

“Physics.”

Steve’s gaze was unwavering and far-too-knowing, but you didn’t want to actually say it. You had to, though. He wasn’t going to give in if you didn’t just admit what you didn’t want to admit and you knew that. Steve could be like an immovable object when he wanted to be.

“Fine, Steve, I like him, okay? Can I please invite him?”

“Aww-”

“I’m gonna hit you.”

“Save it.” He held one of your wrists to stop you from smacking him with one of the pillows on the couch. There was a glare on your face as you looked at him, but he seemed to have never been happier in his life. For someone who had never wanted you to be in a relationship before, he seemed to have had a change of tune. Or, maybe he just found it funny to hold above your head. “Invite him, but you better not chicken out.”

“I won’t, I promise.” You might, but you were going to pretend that you wouldn’t when you finally left to go back to your room.

“How’s Steve?” Jason was waiting rather patiently, fiddling with some part of what you had already set up. It wasn’t much, but you had started working on the ideas that you’d been coming up with. All you really needed to do was make something that worked, but you both got straight-a’s in all of your classes so you were going to come up with something a little better than that.

“Good, good, um- he’s having a party here tonight. I was wondering if you would want to go? I mean, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. It’s just for the seniors anyway, but I kinda… live here, and like-it would be-I-I want you to go.”

“Tonight? Uh-”

It was a weekend, but he had rather strict parents. Even so, he smiled in a way that told you that his mind was made up before he even really said anything.

“You want me to go?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I’ll be there. Or, here. I’ll be here.”

“I mean, downstairs, probably, the party isn’t in my room.”

The party wasn’t really in your room for everyone else, but it was for you.

It wasn’t that it was awkward downstairs with all of the seniors and the two of you being the only juniors, or even really with Steve staring you down like he was going to make his own life-sized Ken and Barbie dolls kiss. It was just that, after about an hour or two, you’d naturally migrated upstairs.

Jason had jumped in the pool at some point for a swim, and you told him that he could use your blow dryer and whatever he needed on his hair. But you went with him up to your room, and now you were sitting on your bed with a bottle of beer that you were sharing between both of you. He let you lay your legs against his lap, and neither of you seemed too bothered about how close you were sitting. You’d reasoned that it was so the beer didn’t spill on your bed, but that wasn’t really why you wanted to be close to him, and you knew that.

“We should do this next year.” Jason mused, leaning back against one of the pillows on your bed while you took a sip from the beer in between you and passed it to him.

“What, throw a grad party? I was probably planning on it, anyway.”

“No no, we should. Like, both of us.”

“Mm, that would be cool.” You agreed, though you weren’t sure what good throwing a party together would be; it could be fun. But wasn’t that the in that you wanted? Or, at least some sort of confirmation that you weren’t crazy in assuming that Jason wanted something to do with you after everything was said and done.

There was a part of you that was still worried. You’d gotten involved with something incredibly dangerous, and you didn’t want to involve someone else in it by being close to them. But you wanted to figure that it was over. It had been months since everything happened, and there hadn’t been a single peep about another attack that you knew of. A new mall had just been opened, and the town seemed to be moving on from the attacks at the school and around town.

Maybe you could be happy - maybe you deserved to be.

“Have you been to the mall yet?” You asked, leaning forward so you were resting against the pillows that had been propped up against the wall as well. You were shoulder to shoulder now, and that made your heart flutter with nerves, but there was a bit of excitement in that feeling, too.

“Not yet.”

Jason took a moment to think about his next words, though. A long enough moment that you both spoke at the same time with the exact same idea.

“We should go together.” Came out of both of your mouths, which made him laugh in a way that made your stomach get all mushy. He was way too attractive to be sitting next to anyone in bed, but he was next to you, and all you wanted to do was kiss him and get closer to him.

“I’m free tomorrow.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Okay, I’ll pick you up.”

He took a sip from the beer before offering the last bit to you. You took it happily, hoping that the bit of liquid courage would stop making you so jittery over what was going on. He was just asking you to go to the mall; it wasn’t a date. Or, maybe it was. You wanted it to be a date, you wanted him to come to this party because you wanted to go on a date with him, and you were sitting with your legs draped over his lap like you were halfway to sitting on top of him. None of those aspects was platonic, but it was difficult to get out of your head.

It stopped being so difficult when you felt his pointer finger brushing along yours. He was doing that on purpose, and you weren’t going to let it pass by. Your hand turned over so he could intertwine your fingers, your eyes locked on your hands together, while you tried not to overthink what was happening.

“Hey, look at me.” His voice was soft, but not commanding. He was a confident guy, but he was generally a nice one, too. The kind of clean-cut boy who people’s parents liked to meet, the kind that would go to the ends of the Earth to protect his girl if he had to. But he was being gentle right now, maybe because it was obvious that you were a bit nervous. He urged you to look at him, rather than making you, and when he did, his next question was equally as careful. “Can I kiss you?”

When you nodded, his free hand moved to cradle your cheek. You leaned into the touch, your eyes fluttering when you felt his mouth against yours. His kiss was sweet and soft, experimental in all the ways that you wouldn’t expect from someone who everyone wanted. You were sure he’d been kissed before, but he didn’t do it all sloppy, or like he just liked to get his rocks off. He did it like he cared. He took it low and steady, and he didn’t mind when your fingers tightened around his hand, nor when your other arm moved to wrap around his neck.

Jason helped to hoist you so you were at a more comfortable angle, your legs on either side of his hips, and his body pressed against yours. His tongue brushed against yours, a sigh exiting your mouth as you tried to stabilize yourself a bit. Your arms were around his neck, but his kiss stopped after a moment. He breathed heavy against your mouth when he pulled back, his forehead pressed into yours.

“I know we’re already in bed and all, but I want to take you on a proper date before… you know.”

“I’d really, really like that.”

The amount of hairspray that you had in your hair should be considered an obscenity of some kind, but you didn’t have much say in the matter if you wanted to present yourself well at work.

Everything was so new and experimental at Vought. You were brought on as an assistant, but had in your agreement that you would be given Compound when they had a replacement lined up for you, ‘just in case’. That alone should have deterred you from the project, but some part of you figured that you weren’t actually going to be given Compound V after working for the company for a month. They probably could have found someone rather easily within that period of time to replace you, but they didn’t.

It wasn’t that you didn’t want the experimental drug, because you did. The entire reason you were on the company’s radar was that you had signed up for it, but they decided that they had a better, more temporary use for you.

You weren’t upset about it, anyway. You couldn’t be. Not when you had made friends with some of the people you were working with.

Mainly, you had made friends with Bombsight, or Robbie, though he tended to be okay with either. He was your favorite out of the group of new Supes. He was easily one of the most attractive people you had met before, and he always seemed to have a way of keeping you entertained. He talked to you before anyone else did, even though you were just there to take the coffee order of everyone in the room. He took the time to make you laugh, even though he really didn’t have to.

From what you had gathered about him, he at the very least knew that he was good-looking. But he wasn’t in your face about it, even if that was true. He didn’t sit around, making it clear that he knew that half of the people in the room were going to turn and stare at him whenever he walked in. Though he did seem to be at least somewhat aware that you found it rather distracting when he sat with his legs wide open half of the time. But you didn’t let on that much, and you didn’t see much of a purpose in doing so, anyway. You wanted to, but you sort of worked for him, and he seemed to respect the fact that this entire thing was very new. Vought, the company having assistants and superheroes. The last thing that anyone needed was him misreading the signals that you’re putting down and getting the company sued before it could even really get off the ground.

Another Supe on the new team, Soldier Boy (or Ben, either worked, he claimed), didn’t have a single problem with flirting with you in front of everyone. You knew that he was flirting; anyone with a pair of eyes knew that he was flirting. They knew that he was staring right at your chest when you happened to bend over enough that skin could be exposed if you weren’t so keen on wearing undershirts. Everyone knew that he started at your legs, and your hips, and your ass when you were doing just about anything in the same room as him. He made it no secret that he was interested in you, but you weren’t quite sure how to feel about that.

It wasn’t that he was unattractive; it was quite the opposite. He was a good-looking guy, and he knew it better than anyone did. But he also seemed to have other people who had caught his eye. He was a clean-cut player. He got around, and he got around with other people whom you worked with, like Liberty. You knew that he didn’t mind sleeping with anyone or anything, and that made it difficult for you to deal with the teasing and the flirting. Because the thing was, you’d never call it harassment.

If you really wanted him to stop, he would. You doubted that he’d even tell anyone if you confronted him. He could be a bit intimidating, but he didn’t seem like the type to fuck you over for telling him no. You got jittery when he touched you, you felt something in your stomach and between your thighs when he got too close to you, and sometimes things got a little bit out of hand. Or, really, one time things got a little bit out of hand, and every other time things were pretty under control.

You just remembered that you had been standing in front of a window, looking out into the city by yourself. You’d never worked in a building like the one that you were working in, not really. You had office jobs before, sure, but nothing like this. The scale that was going into making sure that everything was perfect was something that you had never seen in person before, and something that you weren’t sure if you would ever see again.

It almost made you feel important to be able to look into the city like this, knowing that Supes were the talk of the town and that you were in line to get injected too. Truthfully, you might die if you did. There were only five people who had been injected and lived to tell the tale, and a part of you wasn’t sure why you were even counting down the days until they told you that it was coming. You weren’t sure that you wanted it to come.

The thought had been stressing you out enough that when Soldier Boy came into the room, when he flirted with you and stood so close behind you that his chest was pressed against your back, you couldn’t help the way that you leaned into it. The way that your ass pressed against his hips, or the way that you let his hands rest on your waist for just a moment before one of them inched between your thighs.

Everything else had been a blur. You remembered being pressed against a bookshelf in the study that you were in. You remembered the way that his lips felt on your neck and the way that he felt inside of you. But you also remembered that you realized, pretty succinctly, afterwards, that you didn’t have half as much interest in him as you had in Bombsight. Soldier Boy was good in bed; he knew how to please a woman, and he knew how to keep you interested. He even cleaned you up afterwards and made sure that you were okay. But there was just some emotion in you that was missing, something that you were quite sure that you would have felt if you had been with Bombsight instead.

How would you know, though? You hadn’t been with Bombsight, and you weren’t sure if he was going to give you the chance, even though he had lightly flirted with you when he had the opportunity to do so.

Things changed, though. Faster than you would have liked, too.

You’d anticipated that maybe, someday, someone would come to you and remind you that you had signed up to be tested on, too. That they were working on finding a replacement just in case. Or, really, no matter what. If it worked and you lived, you would probably take on a different role in the company. But if it didn’t work and you died, then you were just going to have to be replaced anyway. It didn’t make much of a difference. No matter what, that day didn’t seem like it would ever come, but after two months, it did.

The memory of being injected with Compound V was something that was gone the moment it happened. You somewhat remembered that Bombsight was there, that he was the one person they allowed to be with you when it happened because he was the first one to ask. You knew that, if you were to die, you didn’t much like the last image that he would have of you, but you figured that you would rather be with him than be alone or be with anyone else. But if he held you or stayed awkwardly in the corner, you would never remember.

The injection seemed to fry that part of your memory.

When you woke up, your entire face was covered in blood. There was blood clotted along your cheeks and your lips from where you had probably been coughing, and someone was in the process of cleaning it up. But you were alive, and that much seemed to be a shock to them.

“Y-oh my God.” Bombsight was beside you the moment that your face was cleaned up, his glove coming off so he could feel your neck, right below your jawline. “I don’t understand. She still has no pulse.”

“You thought I was dead?”

“You have no pulse.”

Right. That makes sense.

“It could be a side effect of whatever power she got, sir.”

It was, you’d come to find out rather quickly. You had a pulse, your heart was beating, but no one could feel it. It was like there was an impenetrable barrier around your vulnerabilities that was being protected. You were stronger than before, much stronger, and you were better with weapons that you had certainly never trained with. It seemed like it gave you talents more than it gave you straightforward powers, but you weren’t too offended by that. It made the next step in Vought’s position for you to make more sense, anyway.

If you had something harmless, being told that you were a secret weapon would make no sense. You wouldn’t wear a cool outfit like the other Supes, nor would you be in the public eye like them. To anyone else, you would just appear as an upper-level employee at the company. You were business-savvy, so they could genuinely use you in those areas. But you would handle grittier work, the type of work that would typically be assigned to a bald man in a suit with leather gloves and a suitcase. Someone who no one would suspect could easily overpower them, but could.

But that meant that you weren’t an assistant anymore, and that meant that you were essentially equals with the man who had chosen to be with you when you took the injection in the first place. The shift had been palpable within him, but that also meant that it was palpable with Soldier Boy. Soldier Boy, with whom you had sex with two weeks ago, and it felt like they were in some sort of silent competition that you wanted no part in. Bombsight had no qualms with being with you now, at the very least, he had fewer qualms with expressing it out of fear that he’d upset you, since you were more on an equal playing field.

But Soldier Boy never had any issue with expressing himself, and Soldier Boy had no issue with expressing that he wanted to fuck you again. You, however, were rather aware that you preferred Bombsight. You knew that from the moment you’d been intimate with Soldier Boy, and you weren’t sure how to tell him that. What if you were being presumptuous and Bombsight didn’t want that? What if he was just a nice guy and you thought he was hitting on you when he wasn’t? Plus, you weren’t afraid of Soldier Boy, but you had never been good at doing things that you knew might hurt someone’s feelings.

And yet? You were well aware of what you wanted. You didn’t need to listen to them bicker with each other or have Private Angel and Torpedo remind you that they’re both clearly vying for your attention to realize that. They were both flirting, but you really only wanted one of them. It was Private Angel who eventually got you to actually admit that, and Private Angel who sent Bombsight your way with all of that information to finally (hopefully) stop the bickering and pining that has been going on for as long as she’s known you.

“How’s… this? What is this, actually?”

Your attention was diverted from the papers that you were working on. It was a speech that was being planned for Soldier Boy to give in a few days' time with Liberty, something that you knew was incredibly important to the company and its image. But it also needed to be planned just right. You would be there, and the company knew that a party interested in dismantling Supes would be there as well. There needed to be a big enough diversion in the speech to feel natural and not incite conspiracy, but enough that people wouldn’t notice if you took the party at interest out during the speech.

“A speech, nothing. You’ll see in a few days.” You shrugged it off, leaning back to sit up straight when Bombsight approached you. “Business as usual.”

“Another defector?”

“Something like that, yeah. Disgruntled guy who got rejected for the trials, says that he was denied his ‘fair shake’ at being a Supe when his DNA didn’t align with Compound V. Guess he’d rather die than be told no.”

“Mm.”

Bombsight usually talked a bit more, and he almost always had something more to add to conversations. But right now, he was eerily quiet, and it wasn’t something that you were used to. You watched him with your eyes squinted a bit as he pulled up a chair, sitting beside you. His legs were spread enough that you were watching him quite clearly, but you could swear that there was more of a bulge in his pants than normal.

“You can keep writing.”

“But you’re here, maybe I wanna talk to you.”

“Maybe I want you to keep writing.”

“But-”

“Please?”

“Fine, Robbie.” You huffed as you leaned back down to keep writing, but after you got a paragraph or so done, you could feel one of his hands on your arm. You watched the way that his fingers grazed delicately against the cotton button-down’s sleeve. The way that he undid the button at the wrist was just so his fingers could brush against your arm. He was doing it on purpose, touching you just to get a rise out of you. But he was sitting closer, too. His leg brushes against your thigh, his chin moving to rest on your shoulder. “You’re far.”

“What?” He paused when you spoke, almost sure that he misunderstood you. But you understood what was happening here. Private Angel had done you a favor, and you were getting what you wanted. You weren’t going to let that pass you by, especially since it took two to tango.

“You’re sitting too far away.”

Your eyes met his when you let your pen fall.

“How close would you suggest I sit?”

“I don’t know, maybe we could share a chair?”

He pretended to think about it for a moment before you were both shuffling. He was in your chair, his hands on your hips, and pulling you down to sit on his lap. You were seated rather comfortably against him after a moment, before you picked up your pen and started writing again. But he was kissing your neck the moment that you were writing, and you were really trying to keep up the ruse that you were still invested in the speech and not rather wet and pressed up against him.

“Did he hold you like this?”

So he knew that, too.

“Not really, no.”

“Did you think about me?” His tongue dragged against your skin when he asked that, and you were certain that you almost felt your soul leave your body when he nipped at your neck.

“Yes, I thought about you.”

“Did you wish it was me?”

Bombsight was getting bolder, you noted. He had removed his gloves and placed them on the desk, one of his hands cupping yours so he could make sure that you were still working. His other hand was pressed on your inner thigh, his fingers trailing past your lace garters before pressing lightly against the dampness that was coating the center of your panties.

“I did-I-” You were certain that your brain short-circuited when he pushed his fingers underneath the fabric of your panties, his middle finger sliding through the slickness of your folds. He moaned against your neck, and some part of you knew that no one else could ever make you feel this way. “Tho-thought about you, I wished it was you. I wanted it to be you so bad, and I-after-all I co-ould think about was you.”

“I bet.”

Admittedly, he seemed a bit distracted. He did have two fingers inside of you, though, so you weren’t shocked that his mind wasn’t entirely thinking about whether or not you thought about him when you were with someone else. But he did take your pen out of your hand, urging you to relax against him. The moment he did, you leaned back against him. Your head pressed into his shoulder, your lips parted as a soft sigh left your lips.

“Robbie-”

“Mhm?”

“Please don’t stop.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, sweetheart.”

His fingers moved a bit quicker, pushing deeply inside of you and curling just where you needed them. You could feel his thumb brush upwards to press circles into your clit. The pressure was just enough to make you squirm but not enough to feel overstimulating. He seemed to know just how to make you feel good, and he must have known it, given the obscene sounds that were leaving your lips as your body pressed back against his.

Bombsight’s lips were pressed against your neck again, muffling his quiet moans as your hips slowly ground against his bulge on instinct. Everything he did made you squirm, and that made you brush up against him. He was just as much of a wreck as you were, and that was definitely saying something.

He held you through it, though. Keeping you close while his fingers worked inside of you until your pussy clenched around them. His grip was rather tight as you cried out softly, trying to keep yourself from making too much noise that it would draw anyone’s attention, but knowing, too, that there was a part of you that didn’t mind too much if anyone heard.

It wasn’t until you came down from it enough to pay attention to your surroundings that you noticed that he was kissing your neck again. Though he did seem a bit surprised when your hands moved underneath you so you could undo the belt on his pants.

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to, though.” You responded, turning back to face him. His cheeks were a little flushed, his lips parted and somewhat wet. But his blue eyes were blown out, all dark, his blond hair a bit of a mess. He looked good, but he looked good every single time that you looked at him, so you weren’t too surprised. “Do you want to? I only want to if you do.”

There was a small bit of your brain reminding you that you needed to be careful with this - there were certain things that were considered polite and impolite in society, and having sex with someone like this was certainly not considered to be polite. But he had just fingered you, so you figured that some of those manners that you were brought up on weren’t in the picture anymore. Really, they had probably flown out of the window the moment that you sat down on his lap.

“I do- God, I do.”

The smile that covered your lips was a bit infectious, but neither of you focused on it for too long. Bombsight worked on his pants rather quickly, while you took your damp panties off so you weren’t just trying to keep them out of the way while you were together. But that was taken care of soon enough, and when he was inside of you, you couldn’t bring yourself to understand why you hadn’t done this sooner.

Your hips moved slowly against his at first, taking him deeper than you had anticipated in the first move, but getting used to it in the long-run. His body felt like it melded against yours perfectly, his hands finding your hips and holding you to him while your soft moans filled the room. But you tried to keep quiet, mainly. Not just because there was a risk of people hearing you, but because you really, really wanted to hear the noises that were coming out of his lips. You’d heard him make little noises here and there before. Mainly, whenever he got hurt in some way, nothing that you were overtly getting off to. But this was different. He was moaning because he was inside of you, and he was doing it so close to your ear that it would have been impossible to miss.

One of his hands moved to the front of you, pressing you back tighter against him when you started to move faster. Your head was pressed back against him, resting right at his collarbone, while you leaned into him. Your eyes were rolled back just a bit, though you bit down into your inner cheek to avoid making a noise that was too loud when you felt him hit just the right spot inside of you.

Everything felt like it was slow and fast at the same time. You were with him, you were moving with him, and you could feel him inside of you over and over again, and that was all that mattered. You weren’t really sure how long it went on before you both finished; all you really knew was that, at some point, you’d both ended up slouched against the desk with one of his hands gripping your hips so tightly that it may have hurt if you felt pain in the same way that a human did still.

Bombsight was as careful about cleaning up as he was about anything else. He kept you close while he cleaned you up before setting you down in the chair that he had been sitting on. But you stopped him when he went to put his gloves back on, taking hold of one of his hands and tugging yourself up on moderately shaky legs so you could meet him in the middle.

“Don’t run off.”

“I’m not.”

“You totally are.”

He stopped, though. His hands found your shoulders to stabilize you when he realized that you had been a little shaky standing up. But Bombsight didn’t run off, even though some part of him seemed to want to.

“It should have been you from the beginning, anyway.” Your voice was so quiet that it was probably easy to miss. But he was so close to you, there was no way that he missed anything that was coming out of your mouth. “I just figured- it just felt like-”

“I get it, it’s… complicated.”

“Yeah.”

His eyes averted to your mouth, and you realized for perhaps the first time since he came in here that he’d kissed your skin but not your mouth. You wondered what his lips tasted like, what he would feel like pressed even closer against you. It didn’t really seem like you needed to wonder for long when one hand slowly moved to your face. One of you closed the distance, and it really didn’t matter which one. But someone did, and all you could really think about was how good he was at kissing you. He was good at everything, and it was almost insufferable, but you had your fingers tangled in his hand and tugging him closer before you could really spend too much time thinking about that.

“The fuck did they put in your hair to get it so stiff?” You teased, breaking a bit of the tension when he pulled back. His smile was adorable, the dimples in his cheeks making you feel weak at the knees in all the ways that you figured he was supposed to.

“The same stuff they put in your hair, don’t be a hypocrite.” He wasn’t wrong, especially given how stiff your hair was when he twirled it around his finger. “We should go wash it out together.”