#basdecsey

It’s early enough in the night that Pearl still feels cold. She’s drinking steadily, like maybe if she tosses more kerosene onto the fire in her belly she’ll be able to chase out the draft, but her eyes keep wandering back to the back of the trees dripping in paint. There were so many rumours already— vicious ones. Would Freddie really like this kind of memorial, as some of the students insisted on calling it? To your ghost, they howled as they tipped their flasks and let liquor drip from the sides of their mouths. She feels the worst when she follows suit.

She’s almost shivering now, and she chalks it up to guilt. Peter had disappeared for a quieter place, fumbling for his lighter and making an excuse to smoke. Pearl let him go without a thought, but the salute to a ghost has made her paranoid. How long had it been since he left? Minutes? A half hour? She takes another swallow from the bottle she holds, wincing as it slides down her throat.

She’s too afraid to wander far from the bonfire. Her eyes burn from the smoke but she keeps looking back at it as she trudges between the trees. She won’t go further than the light it throws, she won’t go too far that she can’t find her way back. “Pete?” Her voice is quiet, it doesn’t carry far. Pearl reaches for her phone to try and send him a text, her fingers clumsy as she looks for the right letters. It’s then, with her head curved down and her focus pulled away that she bumps into someone— taller than her and with a broad chest, solid enough that she drops everything.

Leave a “Amuse Me” for my character trying to cheer yours up.

                            [First year]

“Oh c’mon Bas,” Clement said from where he was sitting on Bastian’s bed beside his dear roommate, swinging his legs off the edge of it, “It’ll be fine. That exam was fuckin’ hard, it wasn’t just you that felt that.” The both of them had just walked back from their philosophy of religion class — a brutal midterm that’d taken them both the entire allotted time had shaken them both enough that they didn’t bother to wander over to the cafeteria to get food — and they had holed themselves up in their dorm.

Bastian let out a long sigh, clenching his jaw but not replying to Clement’s attempt to comfort.

“Listen,” Clement continued, as if he hadn’t been ignored, “it’s almost Friday — I’ll let you do my shot this week; sometimes you just gotta stab your roommate.” He let out a small, quiet laugh at his own joke. Wiping at his nose — the cold, dry air making the threat of an unexpected nosebleed more possible than in the more humid months — Clement stopped swinging his legs and hopped off Bastian’s bed. “I have something for you.”

“What?”

“Can’t tell you it wouldn’t be a surprise.” A pause. “You’ll love it though.” Clement cleared the small distance between their beds with a few steps and rifled through his rather worn out backpack — the one he kept all his dorm snacks in. He pulled out a pair of metal chopsticks and set them on the top of his immaculately made bed before pulling out two large bags of Cheetos.

He threw one bag at Bastian’s head, to which Bastian caught it with a plastic-y crunch and a smile. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Clement said as he grabbed his bag of Cheetos and his chopsticks before going back across the room and jumping back onto Bastian’s bed. “You sure you don’t need some of these?” He raised the hand he was holding the chopsticks in.

“I still think that’s so strange,” Bastian said, a hint of a laugh in his voice. He opened his bag of Cheetos.

“It’s better than having orange dust on your fingers.”

“The orange dust is a rite of passage.”

Leave a “Value Me” in my ask, and I’ll write a drabble about my character telling yours how they feel about them.

Sylvianne tucked her chin into the dip between Bastian’s broad shoulder and throat, pressing a kiss there. Through thick lashes she watched the crowd as it watched them; her arms wrapped around him, her eyes laughed. This was the part that she was good at, she was a thespian of life, an actress on a stage built by herself. They ate it up and the corner of Bas’ full mouth twitched up into a smile. Her actions were for them, but her words were his alone, prompted by one too many glasses of champagne, sending her teetering towards unknown territory.

She’d read too much Neruda before they’d left that evening, perhaps she was feeling inspired. “I think you are half my soul–” Sylv murmured, smiling against his skin. She didn’t have a heart to give, but she could give him the greater part of her. Her hand reached for his, twining their fingers; the bracelet he’d given her glinted on her thin wrist. Had she been poetic, she’d of likened them to something powerful. Hades and Persephone, ruling not the underworld but instead their dark secret. Her thumb brushed against his, it was hard to imagine him without blood on his hands. She forgave him for it, she wondered if he did the same for her.