#flashfictionfriday

He really was so lucky.

Greg risked another discreet sideways glance at his partner and turned, yet again, to the first line of the page he had flipped to. He couldn’t perceive a single word; the letters were just blotches of ink on paper. He couldn’t help the twitch of his lips though.

It wasn’t long before he heard a voice over the tapping of the keyboard.

“Darling.”

Greg would never fail to get a thrill out of it when Mycroft called him an endearment. Hearing a word so soft and lovingly said like that from the voice that had called him ‘Detective Inspector’ or ‘Lestrade’ for more than a decade would always send a skitter through his pulse. He turned a page, unread, trying to appear nonchalant. “Hmm?”

“We have been married for three years.”

For a panicked second, Greg wondered if he had missed their anniversary. He had not.

“Yeah?” he prompted cautiously.

“You are allowed to look, you know. I would like to assume that the stage of shy glances and averted eyes are well behind us.”

Greg laughed and flipped himself over on the sofa to actually look at the man, dropping the book in the process.

“Got it,” he said, watching Mycroft try to stop himself from smiling and work at the same time. “I’ll just lay like this and gaze at you while you do your thing.”

“On the condition that you do not distract me and let me actually do my thing, as you put it.”

“Not fair, ‘cause you started it, but yeah, I guess.”

Mycroft huffed a laugh, shaking his head at his husband’s ridiculousness. But Greg could see Mycroft was now stumbling at the task quite a bit.

Greg bit his lip, knowing very well that Mycroft was having the same kind of problem.

“Hey,” he ventured.

“Absolutely not.” Mycroft ducked his head to seem like he was way too immersed in whatever he was doing on his laptop. He wasn’t. Greg could tell.

“You’re literally backspacing an entire paragraph as we speak.”

“I am not.”

“Come on now,” he sing-songed. “You know you want to.”

“It’s the middle of the day, Gregory!”

“So?”

“What do you mean ‘so’?”

He was relieved that decision to lower the rescue cradle to the ground and detach the winch cables had already been made.  It wasn’t the ideal way to load and secure people into the seats, but it would mean Gordon could get their five hapless hikers secured without the cradle rocking violently from every small twitch Two made above.  It shouldn’t be long now until Gordon gave the okay to re-lower the cables ready for extraction.

But the call Gordon gave over the comms was far from what Virgil was expecting.

“Virgil, I have eyes on your bogey aircraft, coming in fast and armed!  Get clear!  Repeat, get clear of the canyon!!”

His instrumentation confirmed what his younger brother had yelled.  Aircraft coming in from above and behind, slightly to starboard.  At the same time Two was buffeted by a gusty headwind.  Two wasn’t built for evasive manoeuvres even when space was not so limited, so all Virgil could do was blast the VTOL and climb as quickly as possible, and do what he could to avoid the rocky walls on either side.

“Weapons fire!”

Something exploded somewhere to starboard, buffeting Two sideways and forcing the port wing into the cliff face, grinding and tearing against the remaining five meters of rock until she reached clear air.

Warning lights lit up red on Virgil’s dash console.

Nothing structural on the starboard side, but the port wing had taken damage.  It was making evading the other aircraft difficult, and said bogey seemed to be tailing him, watching and waiting, but keeping Two within weapons range.

“Thunderbird Two, status report!” John demanded.

“Little busy right now Five!” Virgil growled through gritted teeth as he tried to compensate for the twisted cahelium while safely firing the main engines and gain some distance on the other plane.

John showed his relief at that simple answer by giving Virgil helpful stats instead.  “The GDF should be with you in two minutes.  Thunderbird One is on the way to the rescue location to pick up Gordon and the rescue cradle.”

In other words, get out of here and avoid taking further damage if you can!

After all, John would have access to most of the same warnings Two was flashing – port wing assembly damaged, hinge mechanism offline, potential damage to hydraulic line and electronics being the main concerns.

“FAB, Five.  Main engines seem to be unaffected, steering’s a little off and I won’t be able to fold the port wing, but I should be able to make it home as long as I don’t take another . . .”

The pilot of the hostile aircraft had apparently grown impatient and fired on Two again, this time exploiting the weakness of the broken wing.  Multiple explosions rippled along the port side, taking the port side engine offline and sending Two violently sideways and bathing the entire cockpit in the horrifying glow of red and amber warning lights.

Virgil was so busy trying to stop his ‘bird from rolling, while diverting what controls he could into working systems to compensate for those he’d lost, and attempting to keep her in the air with only one working main engine, that he almost didn’t register the fact he’d lost comms.

“Another what, Thunderbird Two?”  A fast series of critical warnings from Two lit up across John’s displays, and then a bunch of them blinked out again.  “Thunderbird Two, respond.”

No response.

“Virgil?”

Nothing.  He tried boosting the signal.

“Thunderbird Two, do you read?”

"Not allowed," Purah sing-songed back.

"It's the rules," Zelda piped up from the corner of the room, still sounding half asleep. She didn't look nearly so prim and princess-y with her hair tumbled around her in heavy snarls and her feet propped up against the wall. Hopefully she'd missed the part when Revali had needed to consider his chances against her stepmother. "You have to - hic - choose."

The party had already been dying down for a while by this point; they were among the last left, along with Zelda, who barely counted (she'd been asleep for the last hour), and a gaggle of Impa's friends, who'd retreated with her into her room to discuss musty matters of philosophy, or whatever it was that provoked such a buzz of debate behind closed doors. (Robbie, Purah's flatmate, academic rival, and "worst friend/best enemy", had likewise disappeared, though for a different kind of conference.)

They ought to be dragged out here and face the same indignity, Revali thought, still searching for a loophole that wasn't forthcoming. He would be forced to choose, one way or another.

"Tch." There was only one option. "Marry," he said, leaving just enough of a pause to take in their looks of shock, before continuing, "because spouses can't be compelled to testify against each other in a court of law, and we'll both be in need of the alibi."

Purah threw her head back and cackled. "True to form, you can't give up on the murder."

As if she was one to talk: "Robbie," he shot back.

"Killing." A curl of smoke drifted towards the ceiling. "Definitely killing."

"You've killed half of campus between you," Zelda pointed out. "Is anyone still alive?"

She said it like Revali was responsible, when the whole thing started because Purah just happened to be bored and this was less destructive than letting her build fully-functioning catapults out of the communal toaster. The catapults were works of art. The toasters were never the same again.

"Oh! I've got one for you, Zel..."

Outside, a roaring in the alley died down to a grumbling purr. Revali tilted his head towards the sound, trying to determine whether it was -- but it couldn't be. That guy had been given the night off from princessly bodyguarding duties.

"...Wouldn't have expected that from you!"

Whatever he'd missed, a glance at Zelda's burning-red face confirmed he ought to be glad not to have heard it.

"Maybe we should finish this now," Mipha suggested, the voice of reason -- or perhaps the voice of not wanting to be the one sober enough to hold anyone's hair (or feathers) back in the morning. But speaking up only brought attention her way.

"You've been quiet, Mi- Aren't you curious at all?"

Purah took up Zelda's line of attack: "Nobody's psyche you want to peer into?"

"Not really," said Mipha, too hesitantly for her own good; Purah continued to prod until she could only do her best to put her foot down.

"Last one," she said.

"Make sure to choose wisely~."

Revali and Mipha glanced at each other. Don't ask me, he thought, only for Mipha to say, "Revali-"

He glared. Mipha mouthed an apology.

Then ask Purah - Revali tried to signal it with his line of sight. 'Killing' Purah would be one way to end the game for good; they'd be within their rights to ignore the protestations of the so-recently deceased.

"Fuck, marry, or kill - um, let's see..."

Nobody had locked the door. A rush of cold air swept inside, trailing frosty fingers down the back of Revali's neck, and Mipha looked up in surprise. "Link?"

"Fuck!" Revali swore, lunging for the low table where Purah's stash of 'herb' was in full view; that guy was so straight-laced and boring that the only time Revali had ever seen an expression on his face was when Purah pulled it out in public. Then the realisation of what he'd said slammed into him.

Ignore that.

Zelda tried to sit upright, an inelegant manoeuvre given her previous contortions. "Link! What are you doing here?"

Silently, he pointed at the clock they'd deliberately forgotten to consult at any point, then held out a small object that should have been in Zelda's bag...

"Oh." It was Zelda's phone. "Oh, no - Urbosa's going to kill me - "

Link tossed it her way. His eyes scanned the room and settled on Revali; a frown was in them.

"Revali," Purah said loudly, "what did you just say?"

Mipha clapped her hands together, bracelets rattling. "That's it, game over!" To Revali she mouthed, Really?

"Nooooo," Purah said, "we need to know more about this. Confession of the century. Revali, you want to do what - "

"Pluck off," he snapped.

"That wasn't what you said before."

Making another valiant effort to maintain order, Mipha said, "We agreed this would stay in this room. Even you voted for that rule."

"Linky's in the room," Purah pointed out unhelpfully.

Revali made a grab for his scarf. "I'm leaving," he said, then left, though it was too late for a bus and too dark to fly and his legs never liked to cooperate after a drink.

Link caught up to him before the end of the street, jangling keys in a question.

"No," Revali said. "Absolutely not." He didn't know how much Link had heard, or pieced together. "There is no way -"

--

Revali didn't talk for the rest of the trip. The rush of air from a motorbike wasn't too dissimilar from the wind in his braids during flight. He told himself, firmly, that that was the only enjoyment to be found in this.

It wasn't long before they pulled up outside Revali's place.

Gratitude. Remember gratitude. "Thanks, I guess," he tried, though Link said nothing back, of course.

This was too awkward to bear. Revali turned his back on him and rummaged for a key.

"About before," Link said abruptly, steps clanking away down the metal steps - "Maybe when you're sober."

Revali froze. Before he could confront Link, Epona's engine growled back to life. He could only watch the red light sink into the darkness.

"As if," he muttered, and went inside.

His saxophone normally fell into tune easily enough, muscle memory and instinct enough to get it pitch-perfect without needing to try too hard.  Recently, since the war, it had faltered.

He could get it back, of course.  What son of Apollo would he be if he couldn’t tune an instrument, couldn’t tune his instrument, the one that called to him above all others?  Not even the silence of his dreams could stop that.

He knew it wasn’t just him with silence in his dreams.  Apollo wasn’t ignoring him, no amount of screaming talk to me! into the void of night was getting his father back again.  None of his siblings had heard from him, either, and Austin trusted them all enough to know they wouldn’t hide it.  Not now.  Not when the war was over and Olympus was supposed to be open again but Apollo was still silent.

The oracle was silent, too.  He’d heard Rachel talking with Will about it, quiet murmurs that Austin suspected he wasn’t supposed to hear, except the whispers carried in the silence.  Delphi was still strangled by Python, and Apollo was still silent.

There had been mutterings of a quest, of trying to find and liberate Delphi themselves.

They couldn’t go on a quest without a prophecy, and they couldn’t get a prophecy without their oracle.  Their oracle wouldn’t be freed without a quest.

Something, at some point, would have to give.  Things couldn’t stay as they were; Apollo couldn’t be silent forever, not the god of music.  As long as he was still around, somewhere, he’d burst into an encore and perform again.  Talk again, and not leave Austin and his siblings in the uncertainty of their father’s absence.

Austin hoped it would be sooner rather than later, hoped that Apollo would make a noise again soon, so that his fingers and tongue could stop hesitating when he assembled his saxophone and started to play it, the distraction of the background silence getting his preparations off by a hair.

He fiddled a little bit more, took a deep breath because he knew Apollo wouldn’t want silence to prevail, and played that arpeggio one more time.  C E G C E G C G E C G E C.

It rang out in tune, because even if his father was absent Austin was a son of Apollo and a little bit of silence wasn’t going to defeat his music so easily.

Austin didn’t know where Apollo was, or why he was so silent when the war was over, when they’d won, but music could reach into the darkest of places.  As a musician, it was Austin’s duty to fill the silence, at least until his father came back to fill it himself.

He played a scale or two, feeling the keys follow the pads of his fingers, and launched into a familiar, comforting piece he’d memorised long ago.

---

The cultist's screams cut off abruptly as Arthur's dagger pierced the white-masked man's throat.

Oscar watched Arthur with wide eyes, remembering when he was the one on the floor under Arthur's violent intent—

“Ah!” Oscar yelped as his left arm pulled him toward the full-length mirror—an impossibility since his arm ended at his elbow—and he saw without understanding the black energy coiled in the air at his stump to take the shape of his lost arm.

“Arthur!”

“Kid!”

John and Noel were distracted, pulling a frenzied and hateful Arthur off the cultist, dagger flailing and screams tearing from his raw throat.

Oscar's soles slid across the floor as he in vain pulled against the force in his spectral arm. The occult portal shimmered within the gold frame of the mirror, and a landscape took shape like a painting, stroke by stroke. Dark and grey, sunless sky, monotonous.

“John?” Oscar called, ignored.

“It's all right, it's all right!” John held Arthur about his waist, kneeling behind him to hold him back as they tumbled over, sprayed in red.

“Arthur?” Oscar yelled, but Arthur didn't hear anyone.

“Let go, John!” Arthur snarled viciously. “He deserves more!”

“Noel!” Oscar cried out, his flesh and blood hand going through the dark energy like smoke.

“He's dead, kid, you got him! Calm down!” Noel caught Arthur's flailing dagger-weilding hand by the wrist, prying it from his grip.

Oscar redoubled his efforts and managed to stop, for a moment. The portal crackled loudly and the pull increased, as though angry with him for resisting.

The parasite that inhabited his arm disappeared into Scratch's portal, lost to dimensions beyond understanding to mortal minds. Oscar knew it was to this unknown plane the portal led, drawing him in to his certain death. The damned parasite wanted the rest of him.

“Oscar is being drawn in!” John yelled suddenly. “The portal is still open!”

“But I killed the cultist!” Arthur exclaimed.

Noel ran to the mirror and smashed the handle of the dagger into it. The glass shattered, the portal remained.

“John?” Noel called in a panic. “Close it!”

John stared into the portal in palefaced terror.

“It’s the Dark—” John bit his lip, bleeding down his chin. Arthur startled out of his feral state with a gasp.

“Oscar…?” Arthur sounded afraid. “No, no, no!”

Oscar's terror struck him all at once, ten-fold at seeing Arthur and John's horror. Noel crashed into him, arms around his waist and straining to stop his approach.

“Noel, you have to let go,” Oscar pleaded, “or it'll pull you in, too!”

“Shut it!” Noel hissed into his ear, high and panicked.

“We have to help him!” Arthur snarled, and Oscar saw John wrestling Arthur onto the ground to stop him.

“We're not going back!” John roared. “We have the tome. We'll bring him back as quick as we can.”

“We don't know how!”

The dark energy latched onto Noel. Another violent spark from the portal, a flicker, and Oscar felt Noel tighten around him as though in pain. The landscape in the portal changed abruptly from colorless into too much color: a violet sky, a blue star, red sand, burning it's color into his vision.

“Noel, Noel, please love, let go,” Oscar begged. He was going to die, or suffer untold miseries and wish he was. He couldn't let Noel join him. They were so close, too close, drawn in faster despite—because?—of Noel's presence.

Noel gasped in his ear, kicking at the ground, put his leg against the wall to brace. It didn't help.

Arthur yelled and threw something small and metal in their direction. His lighter? Noel caught it just as Oscar's spectral fingertips touched the portal’s glassy surface.

John cried out:

“We'll get you out, just h—”

Every atom of Oscar's being shivered in terror, died, and delighted in reborn ecstacy, in the exact same configuration but a little to the left.

He heard himself scream in the distance.

Hot air rushed around him and he thudded heavily, alone, on the crest of a sand dune, flopped over bonelessly and rolled helplessly down the steep slope into the bottom of the bowl.

Breath knocked out of his chest when he stopped, the baking hot air burning his throat. He struggled to breathe, vision swimming with black spots.

“Oscar!”

Noel.

Oscar wanted to cry in relief, but he couldn't even make a noise, and his vision darkened as he couldn't take a breath without curling in pain.

All of a sudden hands cupped his cheeks.

“Open your eyes, come on, come on, you're all right, yeah? Fuck, fuck— Oscar! Please, please?”

Oscar committed the herculean act of opening his eyes. Noel's tear-streaked face blocked the burning star above. His smile wobbled and his face cracked, and Oscar felt his familiar weight ontop of him as he sobbed, truly wailed into his chest like only after certain nightmares.

That told Oscar everything he needed to know. He forced air into his lungs, trembling in desperately pushed down fear.

“This is the Dreamlands.”

Noel nodded and keened. Arthur's dagger and lighter lay dropped next to them, halfway covered by Noel's hat. He wrapped his arm, his only arm, around Noel's back and took a burning breath.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” Oscar pressed his lips to his hair, “for you are with me.”

“You are with me,” Noel repeated thickly.

Arthur's lighter glinted in the light, the inscription quietly hopeful: This Too Shall Pass.

Bilbo looked at his cousin and had to clench his fists to stop himself from doing something so unhobbitish that he would be exiled from The Shire, even if he never lived there again.

To Bilbo’s utter astonishment, Thorin had invited some of Bilbo’s braver cousins, aunts, and uncles to visit his regrowing kingdom to prove that Bilbo was thriving in his mountain.

It had been almost 2 years since the Battle of the Five Armies, and Bilbo had seamlessly slotted into all of his dwarves’ lives as he had always meant to be there.

He spent time with them all, but he especially adored it when Thorin would come to him in the evenings after his duties were done for the day, and they would share a freshly brewed cup of tea, speaking about everything.

Bilbo felt more and more in love with the dwarf each moment he spent with him, and how Bilbo wished Thorin would be more than just his friend, how he wished Thorin knew he was his everything.

Bilbo hadn’t said anything, of course. He was, after all, just a hobbit and Thorin was not only a dwarf but the king of dwarves. King of Erebor. And for all Bilbo’s silly titles that The Company liked to shout at him jovially, he was and would always be just another hobbit. He wasn’t extraordinary in any way. Wasn’t even considered handsome for hobbits, sort of how all hobbits were round and red-faced. He was nothing special, and so any ideas he had ever let stir in the back of his mind about there being something more between himself and Thorin would stay just that, ideas and hidden dreams. A longing he would hold tight to, just as he held tight to Thorin on that dreadful day, had kept the dwarf tethered to both Bilbo and the living world long enough for real aid to come to him.

And that would have been enough. Bilbo would never truly be as happy as he had once wanted to be, dreaming foolish dreams about having a love the way his mother and father had with one another, but he had been here, in Erebor. The only hobbit this side of the Misty Mountain,s but now that was no longer the case.

Brave, daring, younger hobbits who were related to Bilbo enough to have some of his mannerisms but who were much more open-minded about all the new experiences they were willing to try.

Whilst Bilbo was odd by hobbity standards, he was still a hobbit, and he preferred books and a well-stocked kitchen to the more dwarvish aspects of his friends' lives.s He joined in, learnt as much as he could, of course, after all, they were his friends, his family, but whilst he would sit through Gloin’s long explanations of the different cuts of gems, or he enjoyed learning about the history of the dwarves from Balin, the amount of battles they ended up in as a race hurt Bilbo’s very heart to hear. So no, he adored it here, and he adored his friends, and he adored everything about his new life, even if he somehow found it hard to relate to them and they him.

What he didn’t adore was Rorimac Brandybuck in this moment. Rori was one of Bilbo’s friends and favourite cousins, though he was almost 15 years Bilbo’s junior. And Bilbo loved him, he really did but if he cocked his head like that once more, if he twirled his curls that were both lighter and fuller than Bilbo’s as he spoke to Thorin one more time, Bilbo would not be held responsible for anything that happened to the younger hobbit, such as him accidentally falling down a mineshaft for the rest of eternity.

Bilbo shook his head to get such cruel thoughts out of his head. He didn’t want to and wouldn’t actually hurt Rori, really, but well …

Bilbo looked down at his own clothes, clothes that Dori had painstakingly made for him to Bilbo’s hobbity standards, beautiful clothes that were made in the best of fabrics but that were still very much as stuffy as the hobbit himself, Bilbo supposed.

He then looked at Rori who Bilbo thought looked quite absurd, b ut from the dwarves faces and the comments they were saying in Kuzdhul, he appeared to look quite fetching in dwarven clothing an with a sort of modified boot on his fee,t ones that would protect his feet in Erebor’s forges but wouldn’t squish his foot hair, footwear that Bilbo wouldn't be seen dead in and yet he had seen Thorin as he gazed upon the contraptions the first time and he had seen the interest int he dwarf’s eyes, apparently not just at the footwear, but at Bilbo’s cousin too.

It wasn’t fair, Bilbo bemoaned to the Valar. He had done all the hard work at getting his dwarves to actually give a fig about him and hobbit sin general, he had been the one to save them time and time again, he had been the one to keep Thorin alive and in his world until healers could get to him and yet it was Rori getting all the looks Bilbo wanted, getting attention Bilbo so desperately craved form the dwarf his heart called for.

Bilbo forced himself to take a deep breath before putting on a fake smile as he bid good day to his cousin, whom he so desperately wanted to be his dwarf. He couldn’t stand here as Rori fit in this life Bilbo had carved out for himself better than he could. He couldn’t watch Thorin smile at the other hobbit in that soft wya of his without wanting to scratch Rorimac’s eyes out like a feral cat.

Bilbo turned to walk away, unable to see what was before him and break his own heart all over again.

What he didn’t see as he turned was the look Thorin rested on him as he walked away. He didn’t see as those ice blue eyes stared into Bilbo, trying to stare into his very soul, trying to claim it with nothing but the intensity of Thorin’s want. What Bilbo didn’t see that everyone else could was how desperately Thorin wanted him to, how he was all but begging the other hobbits to help him court Bilbo properly.