a  lying  kiss. (technically this is against the rules and I should write this for Plushia but you know I'm a slut for Darcy/Adrian so...)

"--Oh, him?" Adrian doesn't strike Darcy as the jealous type; that would require a level of confidence much below the one he has, the smug cocky knowledge of just how he affects her to be smudged out from his brain. So Darcy doesn't falter when he spots her IG selfie with Rhett, when he asks her who's that with no more suspicion than he would if she had taken a selfie with her mother or a school friend.

Tucking her head against his shoulder, her nose finds a home in the junction between his throat and the strong line of her jaw, her hand with it's chipped nail polish resting on the same place, mirrored side.

"He's a work friend."

Dangerous enough lie. She doesn't think about the easy flirtation, the hand holding, the dinners, doesn't even think to mention her little crush. The work they're doing together?

Well, that's worth keeping secret from Adrian, too, but as Darcy smears her lipstick like blood against his jaw, his cheek, leans in to taste the liquor on his lips, it seems less significant.

“You’re such a fucking freak sometimes, Kelsey, my gosh.”

My gosh — a force of habit from a time long gone.

“I don’t know about this, Kels.”

Well — it’s not that Kelsey is wrong. The two of them together are surely smarter than — well — just about anybody else there could be. (Mackenzie has only encountered so many people in her life — majorly spent in isolation — so she sometimes believes naive things like this.)

And what’s more, Mackenzie is not above ruthlessness, not above cruelty. But she could always comfort herself with there being a explanation — something something greater good, something something ends justify the means. As compellingly as Kelsey speaks about her beliefs, Mackenzie isn’t quite sure she understands, let alone agrees. 

Six years.

She wishes she could say she hadn't thought about him often, or at all. Six years full of fast-tracked medical school and residency, specializing in mutant emergency care and services -- there should not have been time to think of him, it would make sense.

She wishes she could say she hadn't thought about him, much less, atleast, then he had thought about her.

But it would probably be a lie.

Around them, birds chirp, but the rain falls down in sheets, and it makes the world feel like it's condensed to just that little overhang that keeps them dry if not warm, if not safe. Because she had thought of him, and often. Even when awkwardly with other men, even when patching up a wound on a kid too young to be fighting for his right to just live, fighting against the crime of being born. Asking herself with each new patient in critical condition if he was the source of her work. (And how would his voice sound if she called him and asked him? How would those long fingers cradle his phone to his ear? And would he answer at all?)

But Darcy doesn't think about that now.

Six years, and the first thing she wonders, really, is if the taste of coconut cake and milk tea on her tongue is too sweet for him, if the way she touches him, soft finger tips across the familiar sharp lines of his face, down the column of his pale throat to rest against his chest to use as an anchor as he kisses her, is too endearing?

Adrian Luca.

Six years and he touches her like he has the right to, like they were lovers who were separated by unfortunate third party circumstances and not because he was what he was, and Darcy folds right into him in spite of the fact she knows he has no right to her tenderness.

It flashes in her mind like lightning. The hand print, pressed into his flesh like a moldering brand.

The soft hold of her hands become a weapon, fingers curling to press manicured nails into the wall of his rib cage, to push him away before their lips have even parted.