HELLO MY BEAUTIFUL FRIEND KAT!!

in the dollhouse — the outsiders x the forbidden game. it's one of my favorite fics ever because i get to marry two canons i love dearly into a really fun genre blend-y fic. it has everything: pregnant pony! dallas having to deal with his parent issues! two-bit focus! a shepard swap!

in most splendid light — i'm in love with this fic. it's about dallas being scooped up by the snake cult while fleeing nyc and him falling in love with pony, leaving him, and then coming back. truly a fic i adore. (i honestly am gonna rec the entire series, mariolatry. it's a series i've poured a lot of love into and continue to.)

this is your heart (can you feel it?) — soc au my beloved 💖💖💖 i was shocked at how easily i wrote this one.

the lonely — some of the best writing i've ever done has been for this twilight zone au, taking the episode from the show and turning it into a heart wrenching situation for dallas and pony.

More than once, Chris has asked that of his mother, whenever this has happened. Sometimes she responds, sometimes she just walks out of the door, sometimes he's lucky if she acknowledges it at all. Point is that by the time he's about thirteen he's been left with at least a handful of strangers at one time or another whether it was other drug users like his Uncle Curly who usually was passed out in no time or if it was in better places, like his Aunt Patty who used to argue with his Mama. Sometimes that was Aunt Donna too, until she'd up and left with one of the Carlsons.

Usually he can expect it.

Not today when he hears someone call out his name in the parking lot. His head whips up fast enough when it's called, squinting up to see an omega man walking over with long auburn hair and a burned on one side jacket that looks a bit big for him. "You're Christopher, right? Sylvia's kid?"

Chris feels something curling up in his stomach not out of fear but resentment—this could really only mean one thing and he rubs at his forehead. At least one advantage of being pretty friendless is that he doesn't have anyone coming after him as he trudges over to the man. "Yeah. What are you, her new boyfriend?" The teenager gives him an appraising look—omegas weren't her type at all, much less ones that were kind of weird looking for one.

He's too tall to be a normal omega, and he's got a streak of grey in one side of his face that seems odd given he's certainly younger than his Mama. He gives Chris a once over, cocking his hip. "No. She told me where you were and I came to pick you up and keep you until she's ready to."

Chris doesn't need to read between the lines that this guy is a dealer who probably has a gun on him—he knows with the way he's chosen his sentence that he's trying to put it in a way that won't alarm him. For a second, he thinks about ditching his bag and running. About just going and hiding in the Shepard lot for awhile.

You get to runnin' and they'll shoot you in the back, kid,. His father's voice comes back to him then and Chris hopes that wherever this guy is gonna hold him, he's got a phone. Or that someone's thought to call Buck to get in touch with his father.

So he goes along with the lie, sticking out his hand, "I know my Mom's friends. Just call me Chris, mister."

"I ain't a mister. S'Ponyboy," he reaches out to shake his hand, clearly in on the joke. Chris' eyebrows jump a little at that—he'd never thought he'd run into the guy from the stories, the one who'd saved his Pops' life when they were kids. "You get in the passenger side, and we'll go get you some dinner first. You're lookin' skinny and Sylvia's a shit cook."

Darry's voice is filled with sharp, unhappy points that Ponyboy knows he should feel bad about, feel bad for. The Ponyboy that he used to have was a lot smaller, simpler than the one that's been returned to him. They both know that in spades.

He should comfort him, he supposes. Reach over, pat his hand. Tel him that things will be okay.

Except they can't be, aren't. Not when he doesn't want to be here, not when he's wearing clothes Dallas and Angela thought to get him, not when he's been stowing away letters to send to Menelaus' lawyer the moment he can get a job.

He's not twelve years old anymore, he's sixteen—which is the crux of the problem, really, that he doesn't need Darry like he did then. That someone else had become the person Darry should've been, and they can't walk it all back anymore and he can't pretend as if he wants to pretend to be a family with him.

"Well, you ain't exactly the same neither," is all he can muster up, at the dinner table he wishes were filled with different people.

I have an idea for who I personally would want to say this and what kind of scene but I want to see what you come up with first.

Sometimes, people don't see the resemblance in Atreus that Menelaus' features carry—it's mostly that he resembles Pelops over Hippodamia that makes the difference. Tonight though, it's clear that he's his father's son at how angry his expression gets hearing Darry's words at the other end of the hallway.

Every piece of anger that's etched on his face is a mirror to Atreus' own, from the intense focus on Darry that anchors to him immediately to the sheer rage in his gait as he makes his way to Darry, the anger coming off of him in such waves that Soda finds himself backing into the wall. "Ponyboy is my brother more than he is yours—it is my business why the fuck he was out on the street late at night and why he ran away instead of running home!"

He's as fearless as his father is too, given how hard he shoves Darry, right there in the station. All of the patience that he's had for months over the situation has evaporated.

for the ask prompts 💚

The Sundome is everything that Dallas has expected and at the same time it's more than that as he follows Ponyboy out to the main floor. The records had been good, and clear but there's just nothing compared to being inside of it, to not have to hear the steady pitter-patter of rain, to not have to have distant sounds of the shore at the very back of his brain anymore. He finds himself awed by it as he walks around the circular structure, looking at all of the things the explorers had previously built.

He'd never really liked libraries, back in New Tulsa. They never felt as if they were places were people lived, breathed, studied. All the repairs they'd done to move the old world out to make room of the new had taken that away from it. Here, he can feel the time on the walls, from the rust that still drips down in daggers to the out of date Venusian Mirrors that still glimmer like stones to the portraits that he's only found in textbooks that were at least two generations older than him. The seashells are guache—the kind of thing Two Bit's Mom still liked even though it was old fashioned.

It'd probably be a lot more old fashioned now.

He turns his head around, watching Ponyboy sling off the suit he'd worn, the rain getting through his auburn curls cleanly, his voice a chirp, "I found human food down here that's still good. They had really good refrigeration techniques on top of luck." He kicks off the boots last, wiping at his face. Water slides down there, and his head cocks over. "You alright, Dally?"

"Yeah, just—it's quiet down here," Dallas peers around him, wondering if he's just remembering the rain out now. The suit he decides to keep on a little bit longer, given he's a human and Ponyboy sure as shit isn't. No human would shuck off their suit to be naked down to the day they were born for fear of embarrassment, much less a trip to the hospital if they stepped on something rusted or jagged.

It's one of those moments that passes, that Dallas is forced to remember that no matter what his senses try to tell him, Ponyboy doesn't have real blood in those veins of his. He only does certain things to make Dallas comfortable, to make him feel as if there's really two of them up here, two real living breathing people. He doesn't need to wear it here, so he simply doesn't just as he wouldn't wear shoes anywhere that didn't require it, just as he ignored Dallas sometimes to watch him eat with an almost catlike fascination.

Sometimes he hates it, the reminder that he's stuck up here for decades to come, that if he ever would get off of this asteroid it would either be a lucky escape or a retrieval for his ashes.

Sometimes he likes it, the reminder that someone, something up here is with him, no matter how strange they are. That Ponyboy's odd habits are because he's someone who will survive up here, long after he will and that he loves that, loves him even though he shouldn't.

It strikes him then that he doesn't know how old Ponyboy truly is. If he really was a recent fluke or an old one and Dallas breathes behind the helmet, remembering the church and—

"I guess it is quiet for you," Ponyboy gives him one of those long, cat like looks again, his mouth upturning. "You walk two steps behind me—I found something you'll love."

Not wanting to test not obeying an order crosses Dallas' mind. He keeps two steps behind as instructed, going down the winding tunnels that feel less like a stick in space and more like home. Keeps going past crops he's never seen before, past a cafeteria that looks ten times smaller than the one on the space station, past door after door until Ponyboy finally pulls him into a room that's bigger than the others.

A room that shows something he hasn't seen in real time in years: Earth, right then and there. Faint on the dome that's showing it, but there it is, in all of it's familiarity.

"Sun's going down in Tulsa right now," Ponyboy grasps for his hand, tight around the suit, "We can watch it, Dally. Right now."

His throat dries up, his eyes prick.

He should say no.

He chokes out a, "Yeah. Yeah."