#prompt27

Prompt: Getting caught staring @jilytoberfest

Lily could admit that James Potter was, at least, conventionally attractive– in that the features he happened to possess, by nature of genetics, fit to the idealized beauty standard. He was tall, and had finally grown into his body. His face was symmetrical, except for the lopsided grin he flashed at girls. He had hazel eyes with impossibly long eyelashes that were the color of molten gold– but changed to feature more of the green depending on his mood, or what he was wearing. 

And technically, he could be considered funny– charming even–he was by most of the student body. His taunting and teasing, that had teetered between good-natured fun and bullying in years past, now rested firmly on the side of good-natured ribbing between friends– save for a few unsavory individuals.  

Lily considered her partner across from her as he diligently poured over the prefects rounds schedule for the coming month. What had changed? She chewed on the end of her sugar quill, giving herself a moment to analyze him for changes while his attention was otherwise occupied. 

Potter was smart, she knew, if only he would truly apply himself. And it had seemed that this was the year he’d chosen to do so. He was Head Boy, and ranked just below her in most classes, and exceeded her scores in a few such as transfiguration and astronomy. 

And this year, he’d even apologized for his behavior in years past, and they’d gone on to be almost chummy during their patrols. More often than not, Lily found herself laughing along with his good-natured teasing, and looking forward to spending time together– a stark contrast to the way she’d dreaded his presence for the majority of sixth year. Some of his comments bordered on down right flirty, and she didn’t know why her stomach fluttered nervously when he gave her that lopsided grin. She couldn’t help but frown at the memory of her own reaction to that stupidly charming smile. 

Potter remained dutifully focussed on the task at hand, oblivious to her perusal and internal wonderings. 

She watched as he consulted the prefects’ timetables and schedules, before penning in their names for patrols. His large hands flexed around the eagle quill he used, and he took a moment to push his glasses up his nose– leaving a marking of ink across his cheek in the most adorably dorky way. Adorable? Potter? No. 

Fine. It was adorably dorky. 

He chewed on his bottom lip as he puzzled over a particularly tricky batch of prefects to schedule, and she found herself wondering what would happen if she leaned over and took that lip between her own. 

She shook her head to clear the silly thought from her head, but the motion caught his notice. 

“See something you like, Evans?” he asked with a teasing glint in his eye and that stupidly charming smile across his face. 

“Ugh, nope. Just something vaguely intolerable,” she rushed out, embarrassed to have been caught staring. “Actually, you have some ink. Right there,” she said, gesturing to his right cheek. 

“Oh, uh, thanks, Evans,” he said, swiping blindly at the offending mark. 

She giggled as he missed again. “Here,” she said, leaning forwards and swiping her thumb over the ink spot in question carelessly– only to realize belatedly how close the move had put their two faces. 

“Thanks,” Potter said, barely above a whisper. 

“Yeah, don’t mention it,” she returned, dropping her eyes to her own (blank) parchment, an embarrassed flush climbing up her neck and into her cheeks. 

She’d wanted him to kiss her. Him. Potter. She’d wanted him to kiss her! And she couldn’t help the confusing, yet profound disappointment when he didn’t. 

______________________________________________________

James could feel the weight of Evans’ stare from across the library table. She sucked on the end of that blasted sugar quill, seemingly unaware of the images it conjured in his mind. She’d been staring at him for the better part of the hour, her brows drawn together as if puzzling out a particularly complicated rune sequence. 

He did his best to fill out the patrol schedule– but with her staring at him like that, with her sugar quill dancing tantalizingly across her lips, it was growing increasingly hard to focus. He shifted in his seat, the front of his trousers uncomfortably tight. He bit down on his lip until the pain chased away his arousal, and reminded himself that they were friends. Just friends. They’d worked hard to get there, and people who were friends didn’t sit in libraries fantasizing about what the other’s mouth might feel like wrapped around–

He bit down on his lip hard to break the train of thought, and adjusted his glasses awkwardly, hoping his depraved thoughts about his friend hadn’t shown in his face. Friends definitely didn’t think about each other that way, and it was best he remembered that. 

He tried in vain to fill out the patrol schedule, but trying to focus on the task at hand was damn near impossible if she didn’t stop staring at him like that. He already knew he’d have to redo the whole thing– since he was writing in utter rubbish in his attempt to look busy and unbothered by her captivating stare. 

Another ten minutes passed like that. Evans stared at him like he was a particularly interesting puzzle, and he pretended to be unaffected by the stare of his longtime crush. But a bloke could only take so much. Gathering his courage, he looked up to meet her inquisitive stare. “See something you like, Evans?” he teased, only a tad hopeful. 

Evans startled at having been caught staring. ““Ugh, nope. Just something vaguely intolerable,” she said with a teasing lilt and slow smile that softened her statement. 

Was she? No. Was Evans flirting with him? He told himself not to get his hopes up, even as he inevitably ignored his own advice. 

“Actually, you have some ink. Right there,” she said, with a careless gesture to his cheek. Of course. Of course Evans wasn’t suddenly considering him as anything other than a former rival turned friend. She didn’t see him as anything more than a nuisance who was now slightly more tolerable. A nuisance who was incapable of writing without getting ink all over himself like a dunce. 

“Oh, uh, thanks, Evans,” he said, swiping blindly, searching for the offending mark. Evidently he was unsuccessful. He felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment,  as she giggled at his fumbling before leaning forwards. 

“Here,” she said, as she leaned across the table. The tip of her finger brushed his cheekbone as she wiped away the ink leaving a searing path in its wake. The move had brought her closer, until their faces were mere inches away. 

They stared at each other in silence. He could feel her breath ghosting across his lips. 

Say something. He should say something. Or do something. Kiss her? No. Maybe? Anything was better than sitting here, mute and unmoving. 

“Thanks,” was all he managed to croak out. 

He saw a flash of what looked like disappointment cross her face, but it was gone too quickly for him to be sure it was anything other than his hopeful aspirations projected onto her. 

“Yeah, don’t mention it,” she replied, casually settling back into her seat and focusing on her parchment once more. 

He’d almost kissed her. He’d wanted to kiss her. But as she settled back in and focussed on her school work, seemingly unaffected, he thanked Merlin ten times over that he hadn’t– but couldn’t shake the nagging disappointment that settled in his stomach.  

@doubi-ixi​ @linariouswrites​ @thethistlegirl​

Cute dragon under the cut

Who had Natural disasters on their bingo card!?

................................

A wave of energy hit the space pod Anisha was riding in. She was thrown against the wall as the power all went out. She even heard the backup power whine to silence. This normally wouldn’t be a problem. She could normally regulate her body temperature, breathe on the smallest hint of oxygen, and go for a long time without food or water. But her dragon genes were being repressed at the moment. She was just a human at the moment. Without her magic, her normally terrible eyesight came back, making her nearly blind at anything more than a foot. She hurt. 

She got to her hands and knees and crawled along the floor, searching for her glasses. She needed to get the ship functioning. A wave of energy like that would have shorted out the computers. She could restart the computers. She’d done this before…. But never on so short a time limit. 

Anisha shook that thought out of her head and got to work after replacing her glasses. She opened dashboards and cut wires in the small light of a candle she had taken a liking to recently. She twisted the last wires together just as it was starting to get really cold. She took precious moments to find a coat. She slid it on and started mucking with the computers. Her hands were so cold. Anisha didn’t have great circulation in her fingers. She was pretty sure that came from her grandpa. 

Anisha took another gasping breath in between normal ones. She often did that even in her normal life. She sometimes forgot to breath deep enough and had to make up for it, but this was different. She was struggling with an actual lack of oxygen. She took a small moment to steady herself and then continued. She was getting less and less air, but tried not to take gasping breaths. That wouldn’t help. And, oh, it was so so cold. She hated it. She shivered and tried not to think about warm showers and sitting indoors in a puddle of sun coming through a window. 

Anisha wiped her face and continued, focusing on the screen and the buttons, not even speaking curses out loud when the computer flashed a warning or wouldn’t put a command through. 

Her fingers seemed to be a funny color now, and she couldn’t stop shivering, but she refused to give in to despair. Either she would fix the computer and be fine, or she would die. She wasn’t afraid of death. She still didn’t think about dying, though. That would distract her and she was so easy to distract.

She was starting to have a really hard time thinking and her chest ached. She checked out at this point. Her body kept going on autopilot, shivering violently between button presses. One last click and everything turned on. But Anisha fell out of the chair and lay still on the ground. When she woke up, her chest kind of ached and it felt like it would take days for her fingers to stop being numb, but she decided she was alive. 

Anisha got up and stretched slowly, congratulating herself on another job well done. 

“That sucked,” she said loudly to herself. “Let’s never do that again. Now, to check those other panels and then take a shower. Yup. A shower sounds good.”

Anisha wandered off into the ship, talking loudly to herself as she began to put things back in order, fix her simple patch jobs, and take a shower. 

“Khod’a! Can you come in here for a moment please!”

The words were called up the stairs towards the children’s room while the giant eased a small wooden case out of her jacket. Truth was it had been in and out of that pocket repeatedly since she’d picked it up earlier, but thinking about the moment of giving it over had been at the forefront of her mind since even before the wedding. The whole matter had felt like unfinished business, and she wasn’t of a mind to let it linger any longer than it needed to.

The young miqo’te comes swiftly down the steps, smiling despite the both of them knowing her play time had at least been briefly interrupted. They were a good kid, respectful and clever. Suddenly having a child that age as part of the home had been a little odd at first admittedly, but she couldn’t be more proud to have her as part of the family. “C’mon, let’s go sit over on the couch. I have something for you.”

“Yes, Miss Brem!” The young girl started bounding off for a couch cushion, their colorful sun dress sweeping through the energetic motion. The roegadyn instead was in her usual layers of leather and cloth that marked time dealing with her airship and it’s crew, adding to the contrast the pair had in their relationships to their own gender identity. As much of an adjustment it had been to suddenly be parenting a half-grown child, getting a few moons in going from raising a young boy to raising a young transgirl was several additional steps beyond. The prospect had worried her, not out of any negative feelings for her choice. That she was ready to support unconditionally. But the giant’s own childhood had been femininity forced down upon her time and again, leading to years of viewing embracing anything but the commanding, butch persona as a portal to weakness. The truth was she wasn’t entirely sure how to be a little girl the way that Khod’a had chosen to be. 

“When I was a kid, probably a lil’ older than you are now, my Pop gave me a very nice gift. Probably nicer than he shoulda. We weren’t poor but.. it wasn’t nothin’ like how things are here and now.” A gloved thumb runs over the box she was holding against her thigh, giving it a couple of taps before offering it over to the young girl. It didn’t take her particularly long to get the lid open to reveal a necklace. Not particularly ornate, it did have a brilliant silver chain with three small pendants set with vibrant emeralds. “It.. wasn’t my sort of thing, but I always kept hold of it because Pop was very proud of bein’ able to get me somethin’ like that. I had to get it adjusted a little bit.. what with it bein’ sized for a roegadyn neck and all, but I think it’d look real pretty on you.”

The miqo’te’s eyes lit up as she started to pull the jewelry up from the case, looking it over in her hands a few times. “Can I put it on now? Can I? Please?” A warm chuckle seeps out of the giant as she reaches over to help sweep the girl’s hair up into a momentary pony tail to keep it up out of the way for getting the necklace on. The motions finished with a couple of fluffing bounces of her hair after to resettle it.

It was taking nearly every thing Brem had not to burst immediately into laughing and give away her hiding spot too early, but every image she conjured up in her head of the end of this day-long project kept the impish glee bubbling up to the surface. Regular check-ins with her employees working as co-conspirators let her know how progress had been moving along, but her primary regret was that she couldn’t see the fruits of her labors as they happened.

It all started with leaving a message for C’arha that every bottle of her favorite whiskey had been stashed away, and would remain locked up until she completed the hunt the sea wolf had put together for her. A string of short riddles and small puzzles always leading into another one just ahead of it, occasionally rewarding a trinket that would help with some other puzzle along the way. None of it was entirely too taxing, but would take just long enough to wear at the tiny catte so that she’d worked into a proper muttering of how she was going to ‘kill that stupid mountain bitch when I find her’ along the way. She’d been all over the Mason itself, the grounds surrounding it, even to a couple of local merchants, but it all ended with sending the miqo’te to Brem’s office while the Sea Wolf herself hid cramped into the loft she had put in for her business partner, with a couple of fingers on a link pearl.

Hearing the door to her office open nearly broke her will to hold things in, a few bodily shakes taking her as she forced the laughs back down her throat. The heavy foot-falls of an angry runt managed to even out do the muffling effect of the rug before halting a few paces in. C’arha was frozen in her tracks by the pale white horse currently hitched behind Brem’s desk. It’s mane had been dyed black with a few stripes of blue and a make-shift silver mask was covering one eye, in a mockery of the sea wolf’s own face plate, with a link pearl hidden within it set to project it’s sound out. Activating things from her end, Brem couldn’t even get two simple words out without already devolving into giggles. 

“What...?”

The young roe’s hands tighten around the box she was holding onto as her mind raced to catch up to the moment. It was a few days before the elezen’s sixteenth nameday, and Brem always made a point of sneaking the two of them away to get her a present early. She’d saved for moons to get the coin to send off with one of her many ‘uncles’ to fetch the prettiest shell necklace her money could buy, and the fruits of that entire labor sat within the wooden container she was nearly ready to crack apart with her grip. “Issy, I don’t..”

“Brem, don’t make this harder than it has to be.” The blonde Wildwood girl was wearing a light pink dress with a few frills. It was one of the sea wolf’s favorite’s to see her out in, something she’d not been in the least bit shy in sharing. She’d thought it was a sign of a special evening when they’d first met up for the night. “It’s not about you, alright? It’s just.. I.. don’t like girls. Not like you like them. What we we’ve been doing was.. fun, it was exciting. It was taboo and that was wild. But.. I want a husband, and babies, and to live a normal life. I’m sorry.”

“Two years! It’s taken you two years to decide ‘you don’t like girls’? The fuck is that! You’re lying! You’re a liar!” The words snap out of the pale girl, driving an accusing finger out at the other teen, that digit quaking as the emotional torrent set in. “Two years of secret dates, and kisses, and.. and..” The thought trails away, and despite the rage of emotions the both of them flushed at the implication of her unfinished list of evidence. “Now what, it was all nothing? You were just playing a game? Chocobo shite! You don’t mean that! We’re.. we’re in..”

“No, Brem. We aren’t. I was.. confused. That kiss in the woods in that day was a nice surprise but I.. this isn’t me.” Though she was trying her best to be mature and ‘do the right thing’, Isiene’s eyes were starting to catch some of the mist that was pouring down the roe’s face. “I.. think maybe it worked for a while because you’re big and strong kind of like..” The girl trails off, looking down at the hands folded ontop of her lap.

“Like WHAT?” There’s a snarl in the teen’s voice, leaping straight from pained and confused to furious in one swift motion. “Like a MAN? Is that what you meant to say? That I was a BIG STRONG MAN for you all this time?” The wooden box she’d nearly snapped in half instead gets hurled at the smaller girl’s chest, a bruise she’d have ‘fun’ explaining later. “You.. you said I was pretty! You asked me to wear that STUPID dress out after we’d been together a year! You.. you..” Her jaw snapped shut, letting the anger within come seeping out of her glaring eyes instead. 

“You’re a lying whore, Isiene. I hope you get a nice bald husband, and get so fat after having all those babies you can’t leave your house ever again, and all the little children point and giggle when they see you through a window. That you get SO FAT that you can’t even tell when a kid is coming anymore until the fall out of your weird floppy vagina! Fuck you, Isiene Shifant! I NEVER want to see you again!”

So short was the wait, New steps discarding fear. Cruel steps walk with them, The mice bring a Rat.

Cruel steps break away, Rushing boldly to the cage. A hollow fragment in hand, The key fashioned by failure.