#shortwrite

He knelt down and asked me to marry him, his hands trembling. Panic shot through me — I turned away, both afraid and anxious at the thought of the word marriage.

He saw my confusion, but he didn’t want to rush me. Instead, he slowed down, pulled me into his arms, and gently asked about my fears. I poured out everything, every worry, every doubt, without holding back.

My eyes stung, tears warming my cheeks. He wiped them away with care.

Silence lingered, until my soft voice broke through.

Calm as he had seemed before, now he looked anxious, desperate even — waiting for my reply, for some sign of assurance.

When the ring finally slid onto my finger, he kissed me. His embrace was so tight it felt as though everything that had just happened had been a fleeting dream.

The wind still blew softly, but now the only sound filling the air was the beating of our hearts, echoing endlessly.

Thomas was sensibly terrified out of his mind, clutching to the amulet hanging around his neck like a security blanket. It glowed beneath his clenched fist, power humming from the pentacle as it projected a shimmering blue sphere of energy around the pair. Mary’s was in her hand, removed from her neck and lightless.

              Thomas chanced a glance over his shoulder and around the concrete planter the two were hiding behind, seeing the glass statue twisting and contorting in its search for them. To his relief, it hadn’t spotted them yet, but if it had a weak point, he sure as hell couldn’t find it, not in that reflecting mess of glass and metal. He always thought that the statue was a stupid addition to the front of campus; it was always blinding new arrivals and half of the year it was covered in snow anyway, and because he couldn’t figure out how to say no, he would be stuck cleaning it every time.

              As he ducked back down next to Mary, he caught her staring at him, her dark grey eyes boring into his, and despite himself he felt his heart start to race even faster. Given how fast it was racing from fear anyway, he could hardly imagine that it was possible. Still, it wasn’t the fire or the light that made him start to sweat, but Mary’s undivided attention. He gulped and laughed awkwardly, his mind screaming that this could wait but his mouth moving nonetheless. “So, uh, this is gonna sound kinda stupid, but bear with me. That statue thing’s pretty bright, right, but nothing lights up my life like you-“

              “I just noticed that your shirt was on inside-out.” Mary said evenly, cutting Thomas short. Thomas blushed hard, the color of his cheeks matching the flames currently licking at the energy shell around them. “I thought something looked weird. Glad it wasn’t your hair.” She turned her attention back to the pentacle in her hand, which she squeezed tighter.

              “H-Hey, give me a break! You stormed into my room at the crack of dawn and threw a shirt at me, it’s not like I was in the state of mind to check the inside-out-ness of my attire before chasing after you! Besides, we’ve got a bigger problem on our hands, if you haven’t noticed.” He glanced back up and watched as the glass monster used its large reflective claws to tear apart some nearby shrubbery, probably searching for something to torch or shred. Thomas gulped, imagining what it would be like to be on the receiving end of that.

              “What, like the fact that you still can’t come up with a good pick-up line? You know, you could always just ask me, like normal people do.” Mary said, popping up to see where the glass monster was. The creature, she calculated, was about four times their height and had a stance width about the size of an average SUV. Despite that and everything she knew about the tensile strength of glass and cheap iron that made up that statue, the thing moved freely and didn’t constantly come under threat of collapsing under its own anthropomorphic weight. After it took a step forward, turning its back to them, Mary could see what kept this thing from falling to pieces. A single bundle of silver mana glistened in the small of the beast’s back, right where it would it couldn’t hurt itself on accident.

              Meanwhile, Thomas had heard her, and in response turned rapidly towards her, smacking his knee and scraping his head against the concrete as surprise overtook spatial awareness. “Agh, that stings…”

              She snarked, despite herself. “Really? I thought you’d enjoy hearing it. How’s long has it been, two years since we started hanging out? My roommates bet it’d only take a semester until you worked up the courage. Needless to say, I made a solid twenty dollars that day.” She shot a sideways glance at him, which he met with wide eyes. Mary sighed. She could tell that he was still trying to comprehend that curveball, which was a shame because she really needed his help before she could do anything safely, as was normally the standard issue with their set-up.

“Wait, hang on, did you just say that you guys bet on me?” Thomas said, somewhat insulted. Sure, it was kind of silly how long he had been waiting. They were juniors now, and it hit Thomas like a tank engine how obvious he must have been. Disregarding that, he’s more surprised Mary didn’t just shoot him down earlier if she’d known all this time. Maybe, Thomas dared to hope, it meant that he had a shot? It’s not like it was a big deal either way, if Mary said no, they would just stay friends, right?

              Mary knew from Thomas’s rapid blinking that he was processing something and needed time to do that, which was fine by her. She still had to channel the power in her pentacle anyway, and she couldn’t decide whether a lance or a hammer projection would be better. The lance provided more reach, but the hammer was more satisfying than a simple poke. Weight, of course, wasn’t an issue, as the constructs were always light as a feather to wield, but heavy as a shipping container when struck. They were magical, after all. The decision was simple, yet complex: did she want to be tactical, or fabulous?

              She contemplated fabulously destroying the monster, but then her idiot brain had to go and do the rationally fearful thing and simulate the worst case scenario. Her mind was filled with images of her hammer being tossed aside, followed by an impalement, or an evisceration, or a crushing, after which Thomas would likely follow, stuck somewhere between despair and outrage. He would, inevitably, die if he charged. He lacked the athleticism and the spatial awareness to win a brawl with the glass goliath alone.

              Her old habits reasserted themselves. She imagined forging the hammer again, looking for different angles of attack, anticipating different ways that she could be countered, running calculations as though she were back in her junior year of high school, back when she still played chess religiously and treated defeats like doomsdays that she simply had to learn how to avert for the future. Repeat after repeat, sum after sum, she had caught herself in a logical loop, and as she started to sink into it her vision unfocused and the image in her mind became the only one she could see.

              Faintly, dimly, she registered the fact that the ground was shaking at regular intervals, first very minutely but growing with each repetition. Instinctively, she knew that the sand-cooked soldier was stomping its way over to their location, but she was still thinking. If it would only wait a minute, she would have things figured o-

              “Mary!” Thomas shouted, desperation lacing his outcry. His friend had been staring off into space for a solid minute now, long enough for the charge in his amulet to drop to critically low levels and the creature to find out where they were hiding. It had been long enough for it to stomp right over to them, a massive, glassy limb raised high, poised to crash onto the two and bring a swift end to their college careers. He gave his partner one last glance, grit his teeth and, for a brief moment, felt as though he were seeing the world in slow motion. Without a second thought, he leapt up to his feet, ripping his amulet from his neck and raising it high into the air, intercepting the behemoth’s attack.

              Mary watched from below as her meek friend leapt to her defense, a fire burning in his eyes that dragged her out of her daze with a start. It was the same look he had when she came to him during freshman year, terrified of the guys who were following her back to her dorm nearly every night of the first week. It was the same look he had when he walked back with her and helped her scare them off before things got out of hand. She could see his fear, his worry, but burning over that was everything else he ever gave a damn about. And, like a torch to a pool of oil, it drew Mary’s own anger out from under her skin, a cold, calculating wrath that would give no mercy and take no surrender from the monster threatening them.

              But first, her friend needed saving. Mary started to her feet, watched the cracks form in Thomas’s shield, and moved behind him as they spread out to the edges. In her left hand, held far off to her side, materialized a spear of bright blue light, simple and deadly in form right down to the point. She and Thomas had done this before, gotten the timing down during sophomore year just in case something like this ever happened. She knew back then as she did now that their weaknesses weren’t always going to be overcome alone, but she had her partner at her side. And she knew as well as he did that failure was not an option.  

              Mary breathed in. Glass creaked, and the magical shield sizzled and hissed as its form fractured. Thomas chanced a glance back to Mary, his eyes set with determination, and nodded. With his off hand, he reached out towards Mary, grabbing for her outstretched arm.

              The shield shattered, and they were engulfed in a blinding white light.

--

Mary and Thomas were sitting outside their 8:00 am psych class, both in equally distressing states of undress for what they were about to do. Their shoes, socks, and coats had been removed, lain across the chairs to dry in the few minutes they had. Thomas was fretting over the state of things as he always did, muttering nervously about all the things that have already gone horribly wrong that morning and all of the things left that were probably, definitely going to happen and, oh God, what if his parents found out, he’d be dead by the end of the week. Mary, for her part, was sympathetic to her research partner’s plight. The entire project had been his idea, after all, and making a case for adaptive learning in relation to the early education of mathematics wasn’t easy, especially not on an hour of sleep (two if you counted the brief stint of spacing out while waiting for the coffee to kick in).

It wasn’t as though Mary herself wasn’t scared out of her mind. She did need this grade just as much as he did. If things went south, she ran the risk of dropping her GPA right into the dirt- and her scholarship with it. The burden of payment was already a strain on her family, and the only reason she was able to go for a bachelor’s in the first place was because of the scholarship. She’d be forced to drop out and come back home to work at a minimum wage job she would inevitably hate to support a family that would certainly be heartbroken, and Mary’s stomach felt abyssal at the thought of it.

The guilt would crush her like an anvil, and the frustration she was feeling nearly matched it. Forget research at grad school, you’ll be likely to be researching the best way to hold a spatula for all the burger-flipping you’ll be doing. Yet, when she looked at Thomas, hyperventilating and muttering his mind out, her thoughts weren’t on the simulations of horrible futures that might result from a failure now. They had spent the past night ironing things out, running the presentation over and over until it was second nature, but nature meant nothing if Thomas couldn’t even draw a full breath. No, her mind was tackling the problem of calming Thomas down so that they could give the presentation they had trained for.

It was a tall order, as the stakes for Thomas were just as high as they were for Mary, but Mary was never one to shirk from a challenge. The presentation part would be easy, as long as she could somehow sustain this state of mind until after class was finished. She could explain the neuroscience for hours, talk biological development of the human brain for twice that amount of time, and the inevitable curveball questions that would come after the presentation, whose answers would determine whether she and Thomas earned an A or a B? She glanced down at the notecards, miraculously dry despite the downpour outside, and let out a calming breath. She had her contingencies, spent just as many hours writing those as she had spent practicing.

Now, she just needed her partner, and everything would be alright.

She turned to look at him again, and he was still in the throes of doubt. “But we haven’t prepared information in case they ask…” As he rattled off hypothetical questions, ranging from self-explanatory to loosely related, Mary reached for one of her wet socks, gripped it tight around the neck, and swung it hard down onto Thomas’s arm.

The sound was like that of a freshly-caught fish slapping onto the dock. He jumped and yelped, looking on at Mary with more shock than anything else. They locked eyes and, for a moment, Thomas’s breath froze. “Now that I have your attention,” she said, “I think it’s time that I remind you what you told me yesterday: everything’s going to be fine. It’s just another presentation.”

Thomas’s face scrunched together, doubtful and frustrated. “I don’t mean to be short, but the last thing I need from you right now is for you to throw my words back at me!” Despite the harshness, Mary was unfazed. He had gotten like this before, back when Mary was helping him get ready for prom (which she made sure not to attend) and he started having second thoughts about slow-dancing with his date. She knew to just wait it out until he paused, so she let him go on. “Look, I get that this whole public speaking thing comes naturally to you, but I’m not like that! The only people I can ever talk to are kids years younger than me, teachers years older than me, and you. I can’t go out there in front of a room full of my peers and just rattle off all the shit I’ve been collecting in my head for years! I’d make a fool of myself.”

Mary shot back an incredulous look. “Oh, bullshit, when the hell has that stopped you in the past? You’ve ranted about this shit since high school. Hell, you spent an hour filibustering a test I hadn’t studied for by arguing with the teacher about how their handouts and packets aren’t effective learning methods and, if I remember correctly, you got that test postponed long enough to save my ass. I’m pretty sure that if someone asked you on the walk over about how you’d go about fixing the educational system, you could talk for hours at the drop of a hat.”

Thomas started to turn red. “Look, it was one time-“

Mary continued on without waiting for him to finish. “This isn’t any different. You’re still talking about education to someone who’ll inevitably judge you for what you do and don’t say. That hasn’t stopped you in the past. So, what’s stopping you now?”

Thomas bit his lip for a moment before answering. “What happens if things go wrong? You’re going to lose your scholarship, and I’ll lose y- you get the idea!” His face, Mary noted, was red enough to be alarming. Under any other circumstance, she would be reaching for his inhaler, but she found the sentiment heartwarming. “I don’t know if I can do this with the thought of that weighing on me.”

Despite herself, Mary was somewhat flattered. It wasn’t every day that you got such solid confirmation that someone you cared about also cared about you just as much. A part of her felt guilty that she was so busy thinking about herself while her partner was thinking about the weight on her shoulders the whole time, but the rest thought it was sweet. She put a reassuring hand on his arm and gave it a squeeze. “Then don’t think about what you might do that’ll make us fail. Think about what you can do to make sure we succeed.” The door to the classroom began to open, and the instructor stepped out. She glanced over them, Mary noticed, and immediately adopted a sympathetic expression.

As the somewhat short woman spoke, her hands moved almost reflexively and her hair bobbed with each gesture. “Oh dear, it must be absolutely pouring outside. I’ll excuse the attire, given the circumstance, but we’re running a bit behind, so if you could come in and start immediately, that would be fantastic.” Seven, Mary counted. Seven times her hair had bobbed. It was almost hypnotizing. She nodded, reflected a thankful smile, and rose to her feet. She grabbed the door as the instructor retreated back inside, turning back to look at Thomas, who was still sitting.

He looked up at her. He felt like he was certain what he needed to do, but his decision still hadn’t been made convincing yet. His feet refused to move. “Aren’t… aren’t you scared?”

Mary shrugged. “I’m always scared. I’m used to it. I’ll function, same as always.” She gave him a reassuring smile, extended her hand. “I’m sure you’ll be able to manage it, too.”

--

              Thomas grabbed for Mary’s hand and dragged himself back up to his feet. He noticed with a start that, even now, his legs were still shaking. He laughed grimly, “Well, damn, there goes your cover. Sorry about that. I’m a shit partner, aren’t I?” Mary was nicely surprised by the change in tone. Before her stood a different person than the guy she had to reassure before a presentation, and she couldn’t help feeling a sense of pride and satisfaction.

              A grin danced at the edge of Mary’s lips that pulled a full-toothed smile out of Thomas. The fires were still burning around them, and the amulet in his hand was out of juice, but everything was still alright. “Hey, I’m not the one who just saved my life. If you’re a shit partner, what does that make me?” The titan screeched, a sound like metal scraping glass, and reared up. As it did so, Mary noticed, it revealed its backside- and its mana core with it.

              She grinned, took aim and cocked her arm back as the thing screamed to its hearts content. “Reflect on this.” She whipped the spear construct and it sailed like a homing dart true, piercing the monster’s core. With a sound like a dying man’s scream, the construct wrapped around the core and, with a tightening of Mary’s fist, crushed the core like an empty soda can. As the core crumbled, the giant’s pieces immediately fell to the ground, now lifeless and powerless, and the two staggered back at the force of the wind. It wasn’t enough to knock out all of the flames, but not a moment passed until it began to rain, soft drops striking their skin.

              “That’s almost too perfect.” Thomas said, his head tilted up at the darkening sky. “You think that-“

              “That thing was suspending the local weather.” Mary said, pointing at the now-shattered remains of the glass statue. “I heard this morning it was supposed to rain.” She looked up, watching the storm clouds gathering. “Damn shame. I really liked that statue, too.”

              “Really? I always thought it was an eye-sore.” Thomas said, squinting at the thing.

              Mary pocketed her amulet, shaking her head. “Takes one to know one.”

              Thomas’s lips fell into an incredulous line and she gave Mary a dry look. “Couldn’t resist it, huh? Should’ve seen it coming.”

              Mary started to slip the hoodie she had stashed behind another planter on, and Thomas watched the sky, waiting. “I could say the same thing. Honestly, that was a great save back there. If it wasn’t for you, we’d have been squashed.”

              “Hey, don’t give me all the credit. If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be squashed if you gave me a few seconds, so let’s just say that we both did good today.” Thomas glanced over to her and smiled dumbly, suddenly feeling awkward. “You know, we should really get out of this weather. Let’s get lunch?”

              Mary turned and grinned. “Only if you buy me dinner later, too.”

              Thomas looked at her with raised eyebrows. Even though he was the one that was excited to say yes, he couldn’t bring himself to say it, let alone say it in a comical framing. The words felt wrong as they came out of his mouth, like he was acknowledging an ugly picture frame in an otherwise pristine room. “Are you… still sure you want a guy like me? I mean, I’m not that consistent with communicating my feelings and stuff-“

              Mary stuck her tongue out, catching a raindrop. “You’re doing it right now.”

              Thomas jammed his hands into his pockets and kept his gaze firmly down, “I’m not really handsome, or funny-“

              Mary checked her phone, making sure they were on the right street to catch the bus. “You’re kind of funny-looking, if that counts.”

              Thomas ran a nervous hand through the back of his hair. “And I’m a big mess of stress and anxiety most of the time. I hate to say it, but I’m afraid I’m going to be a lot of work. Relationships are scary enough, but dating me is probably going to be much worse than that.”

              Mary looked up at Thomas, straight in the eye. He was scared. Still. Mary didn’t know whether to be baffled or amused. Course, it wasn’t obvious to him that she felt the same way about him, and that her heart was racing out of her chest at a rate that she didn’t even reach in the heat of combat. There’s no possible way he could’ve known that she had been thinking about asking him, too, since the start of junior year, but couldn’t really find a good time to do it that wasn’t being occupied with his horrific attempts at flirting, or their classes, or their “extracurricular” monster-slaying. Yet, she thought she had been making it so obvious, and it was downright perplexing. “Eh. Can’t be that much worse than me.”

              Thomas raised an eyebrow. He wanted to dispute that on principle, but he couldn’t. Despite how much he already loved her, she wasn’t perfect. She snored when she slept, and unabashedly at that. From the few times she had stayed over, forcing him to sleep on the couch, he knew firsthand that letting Mary anywhere near the kitchen before she got her first coffee was a disaster waiting to strike. Hell, last time she tried to help him make breakfast after crawling out of bed, they had both nearly lost a finger. And, besides that, she would definitely tease and poke fun, even into old age. But, in Thomas’s eyes, she was still wonderful. And he was so certainly not. “That and, well, relationships are terrifying, you know?”

              Mary looked at him quizzically, bordering on annoyed. It was raining harder now, and if it kept up it’d soak straight through her hoodie. Why couldn’t he just ask already? And, for that matter, why the hell wasn’t he worried about the rain, he wasn’t even wearing a jacket! “I thought you were the one who wanted to date me?”

              Thomas’s eyes widened, as if that realization just struck him again for the first time. He hastily raised his hands, palms out. “I do! I still really do, it’s just…” He sighed. He couldn’t believe himself. They had walked through hell and back together. This should be easy. “Aren’t you scared?”

              Mary smiled at him. So she wasn’t the only one. “I’m always scared. I’m used to it. I’ll manage. But, I’d much prefer to manage with you.” She extended her hand out to him, and Thomas looked down at it, hiding a smile.

              “You’ll be stuck with my dad jokes forever.” He said, grabbing her hand.

              She pulled him close, surprising him into a stumble. They were nose to nose in a moment, both of them smiling wide and goofy grins. “And you’ll be stuck paying dinner forever. Now, come on. If we hurry, you can buy me a burrito at half price. Saves you some money for later.” She let go of his hand and sped racing down the street, aiming for the bus stop at the other end of the block.