#clpdwings

She can’t sleep. 

     It’s unsurprising; Astoria can rarely sleep around other people, though she’s gotten better in the two months since Dean picked her up. They’ve spent enough time together — driving, investigating, fighting — and it’s impossible to do any of this if you don’t trust the person at your back not to shoot you there. Still, it’s a force of habit, and no matter how much she knows that Dean has started to carve out spaces for exceptions to his rule that a monster is a monster, and that she is the biggest exception of them all, that does little to soothe years of trauma responses, and so she’s stopped trying to force herself through it. 

     Instead she sits up and swings her legs over the side of the bed, bending forward to gather her laptop out of her bag. She’s been emailing back and forth with an expert in Italy and it’s late enough in the day there that he might have responded, and she can’t see the point in laying on the bed and staring at the ceiling and trying desperately to lull herself when she could be getting something done. The hotel room is technically a suite, if you can call it that just because it has a mini-fridge and a little table, but it’ll do for now, and she settles there as she boots her laptop up. Idly, she picks up the discarded flannel shirt from the chair beside hers as she shivers and she shrugs it on; she heard Dean get up to leave an hour ago, no doubt to get a drink and find a good time, and if he didn’t take it with him then, as far as she’s concerned, it’s fair game. Her company hasn’t yet encouraged her towards any greater modesty; she still sleeps in a tank top and a pair of underwear and nothing else, and Washington is cold this time of year. 

     She’s in the middle of reading the email when she feels a little tug on the web she built around their door — just a bit of magic, to alert her if anyone else tries to come in, so that she doesn’t jump out of her skin every time Dean passes through. She doesn’t look up, only raises a hand to wave when the door opens; her bare legs are crossed, feet set on the chair beside her, the shirt falling off one shoulder, and it would be a spectacularly good look for her constant game of how much flirting will it take before he tries to take his favorite monster to bed if she hadn’t been pulling the shirt up every few minutes and shivering as she did. She shudders again at the open door, yawning, and she lowers her legs, nudging the chair with her foot to gesture for him to sit. 

     ( There’s blood caked under her fingernails and drying in her hair; revenge is satisfying and it leaves her feeling safer than she has in thirteen years, but it’s disgusting all the same. Whoever said revenge wasn’t necessary for moving on clearly didn’t get it. Dean is watching her, his expression inscrutable as he tries to make sense of what he’s just allowed to happen. “If it helps,” Astoria says cheerfully, holding her cigarette out for him to light, and he takes his lighter out begrudgingly, “she did sell my soul when I was fourteen. All I did was trade hers and her brother’s in for mine, and to keep the power after the fact. Not really the sort of woman you want to keep around. The world’s better off without her, and trust me, she’s a worse monster than I’ve ever been. Sometimes, being a good man means letting someone else act as the retributive hand.” )

     “ is that how you truly feel? ”

+ @clpdwings​ asked:  “ guess what? I got Fruit Roll-Ups in the car. ” (from peter or gwen, your choice!)

@clpdwings​ asked:“why don’t you ever talk about them?” from grant!             questions meme ! a variety of question sentence starters.

　　　　«  I’d  ask  you  how  you  found  me  but  I’m  not  exactly hiding  these  days.  »  The  voice  came  out  from  the  former cage-fighter  before  she  even  turned around,  red  hair  sparkling  in  the  summer sun  like  copper fibers.  For  once,  the  baseball hat  on  her  head  was  actually  there  to  protect her  face  from  the  heat,  pale  Russian skin  not  really familiar  with  the  skies  of  California.  The  sand  under  her  feet  was  a  nice  replacement for  Madripoor  concrete, stinky  alleyways  and  sidewalks  replaced with  air  smelling like  salt  and  sunscreen.  

　　　　That  was  what  freedom smelled  like, she’d  always  wondered that  much.  Although her  life  on  the  island had  been  more  than  what  she’d  had  for  the  first  twenty-something  years  of  her  existence,  it  hadn’t  been  until  Yelena had  told  her  about  the  Red  Room  going  down  that  Alina  had  truly  understood  the  difference  between fighting  for  freedom and  being  free. Living  without  the  constant  fear  of  people finding  her  was  better  than  the  adrenaline of  a  good  fight,  yet  she  wondered just  how  long  that  feeling of  peace  was  going to last  before  boredom was  going  to  replace  the  new  found  interest  for  traveling  the  world.  

　　　　Luckily  enough, she  was  pretty sure  Maven  was  going  to  prevent  her  from  ever  finding  out.  

　　　　Amber-green  eyes  finally falling  on  the  other  widow, Alina  kept  her  distance  more  out  of  habit  than  because  she  perceived  the  other  as  an  actual threat.  Cause  she  wasn’t,  most  certainly  not  for  lack  of  skills but  because  Alina  had  heard  enough  about  who  exactly Maven  had  become since  breaking  out  of  the  Red  Room.  Two  survivors staring  at  each  other,  Alina  stayed  arms  crossed  as  a  cat-like smile  surged  to  her  lips.  «  You  look  well,  but  I  guess  SHIELD didn’t  send  you  here  on  vacation?  »  It  felt  weird,  being  the  only  one  wearing  a  bikini,  her  knife  and  gun  hiding in  her  bag  like  two  most  loyal  best  friends. «  Aren’t  you  sweating  in that  uniform?  »

"I thought this wasn’t happening again.” 

     She’s being petty. She knows being petty. But she thinks she’s earned it; he keeps showing up here with dates, like their friends’ backyard is the fucking Met Gala and he’s arriving to be looked at. ( She keeps showing up with dates, too, but it’s because she can’t let him think he’s winning this breakup. ) Astoria’s underwear is on the other side of the room, and she’s a little unsteady on her feet when she goes to collect it — she’s learned by now not to wear heels anywhere they could run into each other, for safety’s sake. 

     The worst of it is that she’s been thinking about this for the past week, since she was invited. They know what happens, every time; they find a room no one else is using. They don’t talk. He keeps his hand over her mouth so no one else will hear them. He looks beautiful like this, hair a mess and face flushed and her lipstick smeared across his throat. She never tells him it’s there. She spends the rest of the night looking at it like she thinks she can rewrite history if she tries hard enough. 

     She never brings anyone she’s seen before, or plans to see again. She tells herself every time that it isn’t happening this time, that they got it out of their systems. ( But it’s going to keep happening. It has to keep happening. ) 

     ( Her parents were relieved when she told them, dispassionate and monotone, that things were over with Damien; as far as they were concerned he was her rebellion, her chance to fuck around on the wrong side of the tracks. The first time it happened, she’d brought the insipid and exhausting self-described entrepreneur her mother had insisted she meet, and when he asked where she’d been on the drive home she’d looked him in the eye and said I was fucking my ex in the bathroom. I’ll drop you off at yours. It was the last time her parents tried to set her up. It was the last time they mentioned Damien, too. She’d taken it as a victory and had almost called him to tell him, before she remembered. ) 

     There’s something impossibly necessary to it. They’re in the same room and her vision starts to blur and her breathing gets uneven and he touches her again and she’s fine. He didn’t bother to cover her mouth this time, and when she said his name he kissed her like he wanted to swallow the sound, and she nearly wept. She never realizes how much she misses him until the night after, when she feels his absence like a wound and she can only occasionally stop herself from dialing the number she deleted from her contacts months ago. 

     ( At least she knows he’s going to think about her tonight, alone in his own bed; she’d seen how he looked at the new tattoos. At least she knows she won’t be alone in missing him so much she can barely breathe. ) 

Kaz had been sparing with the details. Hardly a shock — Kaz Brekker never gave information unnecessarily. She’s starting to understand why: if he had told her that his intention would be to leave her alone with a former drüskelle in chains, she would have laughed and told him to find someone else. 

     ( She is nineteen years old and running, running, snow crunching under her feet, breath coming in sharp, painful gasps, the cold of the air stinging her skin, and voices behind her. )

     Breaking a prisoner out of Hellgate tonight. Be available. Bring bandages. And Astoria had obeyed — because Per Haskell told her that she should, because the indenture she’d negotiated for herself means that when Per Haskell tells her to jump, she asks how high. Which means that she’s done what Kaz asks, and which means, apparently, that she’ll be breaking into the Ice Court. 

     ( The water hears and understands. The ice does not forgive. She’s not sure which she’s meant to be, now. ) 

     She doesn’t interfere when the man — Matthias, they’d said, his eyes afire with fury and every muscle in his body tense, like some great cat prepared to hunt — leaps at Kaz. Kaz doesn’t need her help, would be insulted if she tried, and so she simply waits, hands folded in her lap, clean bandages in a cloth bag beside her, eyebrows raised. When Matthias is shackled and pushed back into the room again, Astoria speaks for the first time since her arrival, defaulting to Fjerdan rather than Kerch.