#egg timer

When he kissed her, that first time, it felt like he’d been waiting all day to be needed.

She, exhausted, couldn’t remember how long she’d been waiting for someone to need.

“Go home now,” Jack told her when they broke apart, the back of her neck in his warm, rough hand. “Take care of yourself.”

Overheated, sick of everyone but him, and, honestly, hornier than it seemed possible to be after a thirteen-hour shift, Samira said, “Do it yourself.”

Jack looked away, grinning, shaking his head, scrunching the loose, damp curls stuck to her neck when he flexed his fingers. And then he looked right at her, pierced her like a bullet.

It wasn’t as though he hadn’t said, “Hypothetically,” and she hadn’t responded, “Hypothetically, what?” They’d panted those three words into the air minutes before, Jack venturing forward, Samira egging him on. There was precedent now, when she dared him to take care of her. And, she supposed, reason for that look in his eyes. Take care of me didn’t mean, Make sure I get enough sleep. No. After a kiss like they’d just had, it meant something more like, Make sure I don’t sleep. Keep me up.

“I will.” He said it like an oath, facing her square, telling her stern, but flushed with the heat and the hypotheticals. “Soon.”

That was how Samira got her answer, in very few words. How they decided to have sex—or, rather, realized they were going to. It wasn’t exactly rational, when she had her tongue in his mouth and his arms tight around her and his knee nudging her leg like he was thinking of slipping his thigh between hers. (He didn’t do it, maybe because he could tell she’d grind down.) Baby or no, the first order of business would be sex for the sake of sex. Though it wouldn’t be business, or anything like it. And it would be impossible to keep categorizing Jack as a work colleague.

Three days later, Samira spends the drive to Jack’s considering exactly what he is to her now. Work colleague is still true, but the categories aren’t neat anymore. She was reluctant, before, to even precisely call them friends. They get along like friends, joke like friends, look out for one another like friends, have people in common they would both certainly call friends. But Jack is so observant of hierarchy, of the chain of command. He’s never bossy, but he is her boss when she goes on the occasional night rotation. He’s her teacher. Her mentor. And has she ever put aside the practicality, just for a moment, and thought that it’s hot? Did she think it was hot, for example, when a bunch of them from PTMC skipped the traditional post-shift beer in the park in favour of going to an actual bar, where Jack demonstrated how many random objects he could use to open a beer bottle, Samira watching his hands work, leaning close because it was loud and Jack wasn’t raising his voice as he talked her through each one like they were procedures she’d be expected to replicate under his watchful eye? Did that turn her on?

Wow, yeah: she should’ve seen it coming. Samira gets Cassie’s assumption now. There may have been a few instances in which an onlooker could have interpreted things a certain way.

She turns into his driveway. Cute house—small, but only one resident. A stand of young-looking birch trees in the yard is the only visible sign of intentional cultivation, besides the grass, which appears recently mown. Samira kills the engine and wishes she could slow her own heartrate as easily; her pulse was rapid on the drive, her hands quick and tingling on the wheel. She unfastens her seatbelt, then just sits there.

She’s never exactly done this before.

Before the lingering chill of the AC has completely dissipated, Jack’s front door opens and he comes out onto the step. She watches him through the windshield, but he doesn’t hurry her, just leans against the brick and starts idly picking dead blooms off the flowers in a hanging pot, flicking them out into the yard. Samira takes a deep breath and gets out of the car.

—

He invited her for dinner, technically, then said, “You can come around three,” so she did. The air is as dense as a greenhouse’s—though not quite as hot as it was on the 4th—but they sit in the shade on Jack’s back patio. He’s a diligent host; she has a glass of iced tea in her hand, resting the base, ice-cold, on her thigh. Condensation builds on the glass like a slow froth, bursting into rivulets. Most can’t reach the bottom before her hand swipes them away. There’s a cool ring seeping into her brown linen pants from the ones that get past her.

Samira would like to conduct research on who this man is, at home. She tries not to look at him like she’s studying, but everything he does is a minor astonishment to her, a meteor shower of little actions like elbowing the sliding door wide, parting his knees when he’s seated. How often has she even seen him sit? Rarely enough for even that to feel extra domestic on him. Jack hooks his fingers into the neck of his green t-shirt, and for a heart-pounding second, Samira thinks he’s going to yank it off, but he just flaps the front to generate a breeze. Sweat darkens the fabric under his arms; he lifts a hand to shoo a bumbling fly, and she notices. She notices everything. She drains her glass and the ice cubes, deformed by the heat, rattle.

They’re talking about work, not about sex. It’s probably wise, since they struggle to talk about sex even when they’re trying to. Neither of them called this a hook-up. He invited her over. She said yes. Maybe the breathy conversation of a few days before set some expectations, but Samira has to allow that things can just be said in the moment. She’s definitely not here for some kind of Get Me Pregnant appointment, though an impatient, heat-provoked part of her wants to know how Jack would react if she said she was.

He’s easier to read now though, on the other side of their first kiss. There were a lot of things before—behaviours, looks, words spoken in a lowered voice—that she used to convince herself she was insane to think meant anything. Already, she’s newly aware of the way she effortlessly draws his attention, pulling him around her like a compass point. He never takes the shortest route from here to there; he moves so he has to touch her, or almost touch her.

He didn’t tell her what she could bring, and in the tight two-step of the intense way Jack asked her out and Samira lit up like fire on an oil-slicked sea, she didn’t think to ask. She showed up with a bag of farmer’s-market peaches, bought this morning, still warm from her passenger seat when she put them into Jack’s hands. He grabs one from the patio table and takes a bite. She wants to lick the juice off the side of his hand.

But they aren’t talking about sex. Jack’s asking her about her mother.

“It’s basically fine now,” she says with a shrug.

“Now? What about when she’s back from the cruise?”

Samira lets her head hang over the back of her chair for a second.

“Ugh,” she groans. “Don’t ask me that.”

“Ok.”

She lifts her head and eyes him, happily eating the peach.

“You’re sneaky, you know,” is her assessment.

“You think?”

“Yeah, I do think. You’re doing some weird trick you probably learned from your therapist.”

Jack raises his eyebrow. “…Listening?”

Samira dodges that, explaining, “You’re agreeing with me.”

“Should I not?”

“And you’re asking a lot of questions,” she points out.

He opens his mouth like he’s about to ask another, then realizes, detouring for a bite of the peach. After a minute of not trying as hard to pretend she’s not watching him eat (because, god), Samira sighs and says in a hurry, “I think I’m probably a lot like her. And I get that she’s lonely, and, actually, I should be supportive of the fact that she’s doing something about that.”

Tentatively, Jack says, “You’re probably like her?”

Samira catches his faint teasing smile.

“Shut up.” She passes the iced tea to her other hand so she can try to flick the water glazing her palm at him. When it doesn’t work, she leans forward and wipes her cold hand across his knee.

Jack jolts, but when their eyes meet, she doubts it’s from the cold. Samira clears her throat and sits back.

More seriously, he says, “I wasn’t trying to therapize, by the way. It sounds like you’ve got your shit figured out.”

“I’m starting to believe I’ll get there, anyway,” she says, then closes her eyes to bask in the heat.

—

She noticed the barbecue in the backyard, so she’s surprised when Jack’s plans for dinner don’t include the not-always-bad-but-definitely-tired masculine impulse for open-air grilling. He cooks at the stove while she sits on a stool at the kitchen’s peninsula—after dragging it around the corner so she’s more in his cooking space than out of it. Far from minding, he smirks to himself and keeps stealing glances at her as he cuts and scrapes. It would be impossible to deny that he’s moved a considerable distance down the counter to be closer to her while he works, not letting her do anything.

With chicken sizzling in a pan, he slices up one of her peaches to add to the salad, paring back the skin with a small, sharp knife before he offers her a piece. She takes it with her teeth. Jack reddens. He runs his hand down her thigh under the counter’s overhang.

She just smiles and chews when he returns to the cooktop, his back to her. (One swift, stolen backwards glance; he can’t believe she ate from his fingers.) Suddenly curious about how the bullet graze is healing, Samira thinks of asking, but can’t see any way the question won’t lead to her offering to take a look for him. Jack with his shirt off in the Pitt is a very different situation from this one. She’s not at all sure she could keep it professional.

It’s the heat. Though there’s air conditioning in here, it’s like they wore the heat in on their bodies; hers is still warm from the outside air. Samira releases her hair from its claw clip, then twists it back up, reclipping it higher. When she gets up from her stool to be helpful, intentionally passing too close behind Jack on her way to the fridge, she can smell the way the hot weather, sweating, has stirred up the scent of his cologne. She can’t remember him having a noticeable smell before—not that she was exactly using their proximity at the bedside of trauma victims to sniff him—but he does now, and he did it for this, for her. She inhales black cherry, sweet and tangy and sweat-through, but she doesn’t mind it. She swallows and keeps going, grabbing the chilled bottle of wine.

“Have you lived here long?” she asks, leaning against the counter beside the stove, tasting the aroma of rosemary and lemon that rises from the hot pan. Jack covers it so the spitting oil won’t burn her.

“I planted those birch trees,” he says in answer. The kitchen looks onto the backyard rather than the front, but he points in that direction.

“Huh.”

“What?”

“No, I just didn’t know you were a tree guy.”

Jack snorts.

“I don’t know if I’m a tree guy, but I like ’em.” He scratches his arm and turns towards her. “I used to drive around a lot, after my shift. Soothing. Even in winter, when the mornings were dark, birch trees were easy to spot. They lit up in the headlights. I like how they look growing like that, clustered together.”

He shrugs, and she offers a soft smile.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever really noticed that,” she admits, “but I do too.”

—

“Just so you’re not overawed,” he says as he pulls a box of creamsicles from the freezer when dinner’s done, plates in the sink.

Samira, standing too close again, shivers as the blast of frigid air hits her bare feet, her legs through light linen.

“You like ice cream?” He’s ripping the box open, fingers under the cardboard flap rough and efficient.

“That’s an insane question,” Samira tells him flatly. She sticks out her hand to receive.

He gives her one to hold for him too while he retrieves a crutch from a closet that has a bag of potatoes nestled on its dark floor, then removes his prosthesis. Makes a dry joke about slipping into something more comfortable that she wonders if he would’ve made without the wine.

“You could’ve done that earlier, you know,” she says as he leads her into the living room.

“I’m shy.”

She snorts.

“Easier to cook with both hands free,” he amends.

He takes a seat at one end of the couch, resting the crutch against the side. Samira feels the glass of wine in her system, the heat that can no longer be attributed to the outdoors after this long inside, but she chickens out, dropping into a chair instead of the space next to Jack.

There are pictures of his wife in here. Not like a shrine or anything, but a couple unobtrusively around—a frame on an end table, another on a shelf. Samira decides that she likes that they’re here; it must mean Jack’s comfortable with her looking. In the photo displayed on the shelf, he’s giving his wife a piggyback, both of them smiling, both his legs whole. They look young. Carefree.

Tearing open the creamsicle’s plastic sleeve makes Samira laugh. When she looks up, Jack’s smiling at her. He rips into his own, and then they’re just sitting together, eating popsicles, so sweet and cold that Samira’s teeth ache until she gets used to it. She pulls her legs up and sinks deeper into the chair. Warm brown, broken-in leather. She wonders if this is where he sits to read. She wonders what he reads, besides medical journals.

“They’re kind of my weakness,” he says, chucking his denuded popsicle stick into the sleeve on the end table.

“You’re full of surprises.” She speaks in a tone of amusement and kindness.

He cocks an eyebrow.

“Look who’s talking.”

Samira knows it’s not an idle remark. Is this when they come to it then? To the role she’s offering him in her five-year plan? To the closer yet hazier milestone of the first time they fuck? She’s licking the last of the vanilla ice cream off her popsicle stick and Jack, like a gentleman, isn’t watching her, which only sexualizes it more for her, makes her more sure of what he must be thinking.

After a minute, Jack says, “I have to break character and ask you something uncool.”

Samira laughs, but his face is solemn when he leans forward, elbows on his thighs.

“What do you want from me?” he asks. It’s not an exasperated demand, just a calmly-delivered question. “I don’t ask what you need from me, because I think at this point we both have an idea of what me sharing my genetic material with you is gonna look like.” Softer, gruffer, only half under his breath: “Or several ideas.”

“Um.” It takes her a second to get past the thought that Jack has some kind of fantasy film gallery featuring scenes of him impregnating her, but she fights her focus back to his first question. “Originally, just that. Just the, uh, sharing of genetic material. Obviously, how we feel about each other”—and her face is getting hot—“complicates that.”

“It doesn’t have to. It would suck a boatload of ass,” Jack admits, sitting back and tucking his hands into his armpits, “but we could try to wind this thing back. Donation only.”

It’s like she’s been given a shot of something, like a slow paralysis that some distant voice is trying to convince her is for her own good.

“So, you wouldn’t want to be involved?”

“I didn’t say that. I’m just simplifying things for you. It’s one option.”

“Is it?” Samira wonders aloud. She stares at him.

Gently, Jack says, “What if the other stuff doesn’t work out? You want to have a kid, right? That’s the goal? So, maybe you don’t have to worry about me.”

“Yeah, but it’s not just about me,” she counters. “As soon as I ask you to have any part in this, you’re… part of it. Are you planning on breaking up with me?”

“We aren’t even together yet,” he reminds her, then looks thoughtful. “Are we?”

“I guess that’s a whole other line of questions.” Starting to get stressed, Samira bows her head and digs her fingers into her hair, still held tight by the clip. “Are we together? When is it ok? Do we tell people?”

She feels his hand on her forearm and looks up. It must have happened gradually, but it seems as though the living room has gotten dark all of a sudden. It can’t be sunset for another hour or two, so likely clouds have rolled in. A potential break in the heat.

Gazing back at her, Jack instructs, “Forget that. What do you want to happen?”

“Choosing to do it without you if I have the option of doing it with you feels…” Samira searches her brain for an elegant conclusion. “…worse.”

“Ok,” he says, “good.”

It’s not clear to her whether Jack is just praising her for articulating her feelings, but she thinks he agrees. Otherwise, he surely wouldn’t have brought up the boatload of ass it would suck for him to not be involved.

Keeping his gaze locked on hers, he asks his next question: “And what do you want right now?”

Thunder rumbles, as sudden and spooky and surrounding as if it’s the growling of a big cat, and they’re in its mouth. It’s the reason there are already goosebumps on Samira’s arms when she unfolds her legs from the chair and stands.

—

A brown-out might be enough to get one of them called in to work tonight; people do stupid things in the dark.

Fortunately, they don’t lose power. The light’s still on in the kitchen when Samira climbs lightly onto Jack’s lap. He touches her knees, her hips, her waist, not sliding his hands up, just a broken line of contact, more like he’s testing for a pain response. He’s looking at her like he wants to topple her sideways, down the length of the couch. But he doesn’t. She needs to add Jack’s discipline to the list of things she’s realizing turn her on.

“Once I make a decision, it’s hard for me not to act on it,” she feels compelled to explain, perched on his lap.

“I would love for you to”—Jack clears his throat—“act on it.”

Samira hedges, “We haven’t figured out the parenting situation though.”

“You’re not pregnant yet.”

“I like to plan ahead.”

They stare at one another. It’s not much different from when they’re working on a patient: Jack prompts her for a course of action, she proposes one, he gives her a contemplative look like, Yeah, that just might work. There’s probably something a little fucked up in the fact that she has a sudden desire to hear Jack call her Dr. Mohan.

“What if you didn’t?” he challenges.

“Plan ahead?”

Jack nods.

“Well…” she begins.

“Don’t forget, I already know what you want. Step one, Samira,” Jack coaches. “Be on step one with me.”

She’s not sure he’s ever called her “Samira” before.

Gradually, she tips forward to kiss him. It’s the first time today, the second time ever, the last time if this doesn’t work out? No, screw that. Samira presses her mouth firmly to Jack’s, and he makes a sound like it winds him. She feels his tentative touch on her calves before his hands creep a little higher and grip her thighs. Her nipples go hard, the certainty of his want surging hotly through her body. It’s not just chemistry when his tongue meets hers and white light flashes behind her closed eyelids; Jack’s living room curtains are open, and another deep roll of thunder follows the lightning.

He sucks her lip, then murmurs, “Might be a big one.”

Samira shifts forward on his lap until his hardening cock prods between her legs. She smirks. He sees.

“Don’t you say a fuckin’ word,” Jack commands. “You’ll make me blush.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, meaning it like, Order received, but pairing it with tilting his jaw so she can start kissing his neck, lips moving over smooth skin and scruff.

“And don’t start that,” Jack pleads.

“How come?”

“Because you’ll say it at work, offhand, and I’ll fully fuckin’ blow any cover you want us to have.”

She smiles. She wonders if he feels her teeth.

“What’ll give us away?” she asks.

He doesn’t answer, head falling back against the couch as she nips intentionally at the thin skin of his throat. She can’t believe he’s like this: Jack Abbot, melting into his own living room couch, subdued not at gunpoint or in a chokehold but by the relaxed weight of her body on his. Samira gives him some pressure from her hips and he groans.

One thing she’s learned from Jack is, if something’s working, you keep going. You see how far you can push.

“Are you that scared I’ll make you blush, Jack?” Samira taunts, surprised at herself, but too caught-up to be self-conscious.

She licks his neck, and his grip tightens, keeping her in place when he rubs against her. Her linen pants are too thin for this—or they were just the right choice; Samira gasps. She doesn’t try to pull away, but to angle herself. Help me help you, he encourages her sometimes in the Pitt, when her mind becomes a logjam of solutions and she forgets to say them out loud. Tell me what you need from me.

“Or,” she wagers, “do you think I’ll get you hard saying two words to you?”

She lifts her eyes, eyelids half lowered over her all-in seductive gaze, and finds some stripe of fear in Jack’s. Abruptly, she’s self-conscious.

“Too much?”

But he says, tone so low she has to resist grinding, “No. I want it. You’re just… even further out of my league than I thought you were.”

“Jack,” she says discouragingly.

“No,” he says again, like even he doesn’t know what the word means. Lightning catches them like a flash in an unexpected photo. It goes, and leaves them blinking, blind. “You’re fucking sexy. It’s a privilege to get hard at the sound of your voice.”

And then his guiding hand is on her neck, like the first time, and his tongue is deep in her mouth, his head cocked at an angle like he’d swallow her if he could. Her arousal might soak through these pants. The sound of thunder is colossal. Samira wraps her arms around the back of Jack’s neck and his fold around her hips, muscles firm and sure. They gather one another close like desperate people. But then, they are desperate people: Mr. Widower and Miss Biological Clock.

—

“You’re staying here tonight,” he tells her, not asks her, when her hips are jerking mindlessly and rain is slashing the living room window. “It’s not safe to drive.”

“You can borrow pajamas,” he huffs, discarding her claw clip to stroke her hair.

If she remembers, she might tell him later that that’s what makes her come: the thought of borrowed pajamas. The throb in her cunt from how hard he’s trying to make his fanatical need for her to need him seem reasonable.

—

She doesn’t get him inside her that night—not the part of him that would force their hand on logistical matters of a pregnancy. There’s still her possible fellowship to think of; it’s as though, in the night, parts of her future she thought had flown have returned—watchful, hopeful—to the nest where she first reared them. It’s like Jack put his fingers into the workings of a clock to stop the hands from turning for a while. Samira can't hear the tick. She only hears the rain.

After the couch, he motioned her ahead of him, herding her towards his bedroom. He kept the light off—didn’t need it to hunt her up something to wear to bed, he said. When he turned around with a clean t-shirt and boxers in his fist, she was standing there in just her skin. Linen pants were quick, and, in this heat, she hadn’t worn a bra, so. He hadn’t expected to find her like that. Even so, his army-trained reflexes would beat hers every time. It was an extra step to nudge him back into the bureau he’d moved away from.

“I’d like to suck your dick,” she said heavily, because he hadn’t let himself come before. She didn’t know what that was about.

He gave her a contemplative look like, Yeah, that just might work.

She got on her knees, watched his hand tighten on the crutch.

After that, and after Jack took her to bed and fingered her (so deft, so heedful of her body’s responses) until she couldn’t see why there was any other way for people to fuck, they fell asleep. And then she woke up alone.

Retracing her steps to the living room, she finds him in front of the big window, staring out at the rain. It isn’t falling as hard as before, so maybe he can actually see through it now. He turns his head as Samira approaches him with a ragged-sounding, “Hey.” It’s the first thing she’s said since waking up after… she’s not sure how many hours asleep. Three or four, if she had to guess; beyond the window is still deep-dark.

Jack doesn’t try to hide, but she can tell he didn’t expect company: something in his expression almost convinces her she isn’t here, that he isn’t sure, that this house might know a habit of a man alone at a window. Samira stands beside him and gazes out at his white birches.

“Out for a drive?” she jokes softly.

His laugh is as soft. He pulls her into his side. She rests her face on his shoulder.

It isn’t right away, but he says, “Too many good things at once. I thought I might be scared.”

Samira looks up at him.

“Are you?”

“No.” But he adds, “It’s not gone”—she doesn’t entirely understand what “it” is, but from what she knows of Jack, she has guesses—“but it hasn’t drawn its weapon.”

He shifts to meet her eye, eyebrow hiked.

“Think I’m nuts?”

Earnestly, Samira says, “No.”

Jack draws her back in, mumbles into her hairline, “I’ll ask again when you know me better.”

“What I do think,” she says, “is that you should come back to bed.”

“Been a long time since I had somebody to tell me to do that.”

She wraps an arm around him protectively.

“How does it feel?”

He dodges that and tells her, “I might as well let you know now that you should get used to getting your way. I don’t want you noticing down the line and thinking you wore me down or something.”

“You’re already worn down?”

“For you? Flattened. I’m roadkill, baby.”

Samira laughs and lets him go so they can walk back to the bedroom.

Like he’s thinking aloud, Jack says, “I might have to run to the store in the morning for something for breakfast. I didn’t think—”

That peaches would lead to wine would lead to creamsicles would lead to Samira on his lap, on her knees, in his bed? Sweet.

Jack clears his throat.

“Unless you want eggs?”

Something about that makes her laugh. It makes her laugh hard. He’s gonna think she’s nuts.

Spade and Shovel's father and the primary family they had throughout their life (besides each other). Before election, he was a farmer, but he was very charismatic. He knew what the people of the vault wanted, and he represented that over the competition at the time. He was basically "the man of the people" after a long time of corruption.

The vault terms are until retirement/end of life. As the overseer, he had a generally successful term, though he started to lose touch with the part of himself that made him so relatable, especially with the loss of his spouse. He changed , and became more protective, sometimes sheltering his twin children too much and keeping them involved with his leadership closer than he should have.

His decisions around how to handle the famine caused a split amongst the vault, first his leadership was challenged and then 'war' broke out. By the time the vault regained the control he had almost wasted away, and he left the leadership to his twins. No one was left in the position to challenge the young overseers.

Trowel:

Spade and Shovel's mother. Manager of the farm system. The whole system. Incredibly intelligent, but often more quiet and reserved than their spouse. She preferred to let other people handle the social situations. Fell in love with Rake when he was a farmer and supported him throughout his campaign, though she would often express how she missed when life was simpler.

She passed away from a terminal illness, and around her death came the first domino in the failure of the farm. The person taking over her position struggled, but the agricultural system the vault used was on the verge of collapse even if she was still alive.

They would often joke how it wasn't fair their whole family was so tall.

Shovel takes after her personality a lot.

Egg Timer:

It is really wound up and high strung, and it works itself up a lot. It is very righteous, like Timer, and tends to tick like she does.

It tends to be pretty serious all the time, and it can take a second to get a joke. Prone to yelling at other kitchen staff, but it works as hard as the rest of them and yells at people who mess with the staff even more. It's a feisty little timer.

It's very intense, and is quick to start fights and pick sides.

Light Bulb: 

They aren't very verbose, like Timer, nor are they very physically expressive. They tend to be passive, even to the point they get walked over. Despite how intense Egg Timer is though, she always gives them the space to talk.

They like joking around, especially if they're able to catch Egg Timer off guard. Prone to pranks. Their bulb lights up when they have an idea and Egg Timer knows to look out for that. They're a terrible liar, even with a good poker face.

Their face is basically always :) and :| and they're really mellow

They would spend more time with their daughter Timer with their lower paced job. Timer was bored at the time but she really misses doing the rounds with them.

Corkboard:

This guy has a major RBF, and it's not because of all the pins in his face. He and his wife handle the education in the vault, with Cork being the one to handle the more 'serious' topics like math and history. He has a low tolerance for shenanigans and a very strict, often cold personality.

He loves his son, but Push Pin is such a goofball that he was often getting in trouble with his dad, and used to think he'd just never be able to make him proud. 

Despite being a strait laced, stern faced guy, he did have a secret soft spot for the silly things from time to time. He'd surprise his spouse and son with little silly gestures from time to time, like small pranks or dressing up for a history lesson.

Paint Bucket:

Very artsy, very silly, people don't look at Paint Bucket and it getting along with someone like Corkboard, but it did more than make it work, it was the one that courted him.

Paint Bucket did art, english and music. And for science, she and Corkboard would work together to make hands on small science projects.

The vault was very low on supplies and its library was small so she'd have to be creative to make it work. 

Push Pin takes a lot after them, and it was sometimes a bad influence. When Push Pin would get in trouble for pulling a prank, Paint Bucket might secretly unground him.