#brallison

"Why not?”  Allison bites back a groan of sheer frustration.  She knows that Braeden is pushing, that she won’t back down.  She never does.

“You know why,” Allison says.  "You can’t just fall off the radar for ten months and expect things to be normal.“

"I had my reasons, Ally.  Lots of them.  I didn’t leave because I wanted to.”

“It wouldn’t have been the first time,” Allison says.  It’s cruel and childish, but she doesn’t bite the words back.

“Don’t act like you’re perfect,” Braeden snaps.  "You ran away first.“  Braeden’s words are true, Allison knows they’re true, but knowing that doesn’t make hearing them any easier.  

"We can’t do this again,” she says quietly.  She lets the words linger for a few moments and when Braeden doesn’t answer, she hangs up and drops her phone into her lap.  Her face feels like it’s on fire and there’s a lump in her stomach, sitting heavy as a stone.  Both of those things make her even angrier with herself.  There’s no reason for her to feel this way.  Allison hasn’t thought about Braeden for a very long time.  She’s moved on, tried to form relationships with people, people who stay put, who are predictable.

And she’s hated every last moment of it.  

She snatches her phone from her lap, not allowing her reservations to keep her from calling back.  Amazingly, Braeden answers on the first ring.

“I thought you were dead,” Allison says, voice cracking in the middle of the sentence.  "Ten months, Braeden.  Ten months.“

"I thought I was too, a few times,” Braeden says.  "But I didn’t die.  I did gain some scars and a new perspective on some things.  Like us.“  

"Us,” Allison repeats.  It’s been so long since she’s said it out loud, but she’s never stopped thinking of her and Braeden as an us, not once in the three years.  Saying it brings a smile to her face.

“When are you coming back?” she asks.

“I’m not sure,” Braeden replies.  "I still have some loose ends to clean up here.  Shouldn’t take more than a few days.“  

"Good.  Make it sooner rather than later,” Allison murmurs, feeling that smile spread even further across her face.

Thing is, she’s spent so long there, she doesn’t even know where she’d want to go. She has an associate’s degree from Beacon Hills Community, and while it would be easy to continue in her education, she doesn’t really want to. What would she study? Physical Education? French? Werewolf mythology?

No, college won’t work. It’s not for her, not now. Spending so much time alone, fighting monsters that shouldn’t be real, makes education seem pretty unimportant in the long term.

Inexplicably, she thinks of Braeden. Somehow, she can’t imagine her settling into a mundane, stationary life, either.

She calls Derek.

She works at the one Starbucks in Beacon Hills, and a lot of people come through. She used to catalog them, but now she doesn’t even bother. Most of them won’t be supernatural, anyway, and if they are, she can deal with them later.

So she doesn’t notice Braeden until she’s at the counter ordering a white mocha frappuccino with three pumps of hazelnut syrup, please.

“I heard you were looking for me,” Braeden says as she pays for the drink. She pays in cash that she pulls out of her cleavage, unrolls calmly, and slides across the counter.

“My break’s in five,” she answers, because it seems weird to ask how she can get into the mercenary business while she still has customers waiting for their caramel macchiatos.

“Sure.” She moves across the counter to wait on her drink. She doesn’t bother looking around the room to look for people of the supernatural variety, but then, maybe she did that when she came in. Braeden is efficient like that.

“Hold steady,” Allison says, quiet. She’s crouched behind a tree, watching a warlock try to bring his lover back from the dead. They have to time their shots exactly right—after the completion of the physical spell, while he was still concentrating on the mental aspects. Soon enough to stop the zombie from rising and causing other problems.

The warlock had been hired by a family of wendigos who wanted to hunt but didn’t want to attract people, and so asked for fresh corpses to be reanimated. The warlock hadn’t exactly delivered, and now they wanted him to pay.

Allison found the whole situation distasteful, but she didn’t really care if the warlock got roughed up. The ability to perform necromancy required a blood sacrifice from the person you love most—forcefully taken, and terminal.

She wasn’t really sure why he was trying to bring his lover back. Being drained of blood wouldn’t make him last long.

Braeden was several trees away. She had a gun trained on the warlock, but that was only going to be the secondary method of capture.

Only necessary if Allison missed.

She wouldn’t miss.

Finally, the warlock finished, and Allison stood, stance firm. She shot him in the thigh.

He screamed and collapsed. She could see him trying to take the arrow out, but his hands were slipping over the hilt, useless. They were moving slower, too, because the arrow was dipped in kanima venom.

By the time they reached him, he was completely paralyzed.

Braeden grinned at her. “Nice.”

“I did okay?” she asked, smiling and leaning up onto the balls of her feet.

“I’d say the trial run was a success,” Braeden agrees.

They hunt together, after that. Braeden still takes her own jobs—jobs where she’s hunting people who didn’t really do anything wrong, who Allison won’t hunt. Allison never tries to stop her, though she considers it.

And just when Allison thinks she’s falling back into the same pattern of boredom and mistakes, Braeden pulls her back to reality, grounds her with a kiss, rough and smooth all at once.

It’s not in her blood to stay still, to remain the same. Allison understands that now.