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Bela Lugosi's Dead

At first she just gazed at him, incredulous, and then she was crushing construction paper in order to get at him. To kiss his nose and tug at his ears, and laughingly complain about how much that'd stung.

Goals

He paused, still sitting there, still hesitating, before he put his cigarette out on top of the spool and flicked the butt into the pile of garbage serving as a makeshift fence.

"I'm bad at it," he said, half-warning, half-whine, suddenly moving with self-conscious shyness as he slipped down to his feet, hesitated, and lobbed the ball her way.

It was not a skin that fit him well and it was clearly that he was ill at ease in it, but maybe with time--with her usual easy lack of judgment for him, her just-right balance between teasing and being pleased--he'd loosen. Maybe he'd laugh, or grin that grin he got when he suddenly felt competitive. But right now all he was doing was watching her, shy and nervous and reserved, searching her face and her body language for a hint of--anything, really.

Mysteries

Pausing, America took a few moments to catch up and realize the implications. "Do you like...do you think he might have taught here?" She tried to imagine a Caelius 14 years younger. "Wonder if there's more s**t on him lurking around here..."

She began quickly scanning through the rest of the letters, a speculative grin growing broad across her features.

Scary Stories

Her expression held love and resignation and sorrow, but mostly it was just plain trust in him. There were a lot of reasons why, some of which she couldn't even articulate to herself let alone him. But mainly it was this:

"I want him to be able to say what it was he wanted to tell me. I think he'd tell you and you're the only one I'd want to hear it."

Goals

Again the hesitation, the fear of looking stupid, and for a second it seems like maybe he's thought better of it. But he gives in, eventually, timid at first, but with escalating competitiveness.

The easy grace and speed of the sparring grounds are here, stripped of their violence. They're better for it: he fails to her superior experience as often as he wins on the basis of a clever feint or whip-quick snap of his foot, but he meets both with equal good grace, part shyly embarrassed, part laughing.

"We should get more people to play," he says, breathless on the heels of a failed attempt to get the ball away from her, and then he pauses, and he says: "Eventually," and then: "I'm going to call a penalty against you every time you grin like that for putting me at a disadvantage on account of my weak knees. No more grinning. Officially banned."

Goals

America brought up the sweaty collar of her shirt up and over her nose, obscuring the offending expression but for her bright, crinkled eyes. "What sort of penalty are we talkin' bout here?" Idly, she stepped up onto the ball, trying to balance on her toes.

Shelter

He'd been nurturing a fantasy of some perverse echo of a nuclear normality, a honey-I'm-home (from slaughtering horrors from beyond the boundaries of reality) act of crawling into an occupied bed, welcomed with an exhale half-comfort, half-irritation at being woken up.

Instead he glanced at her and quietly put away his mission bag, emptied his pockets neatly onto the nightstand, took off his boots and aligned them with precision against the edge of the rumpled bed next to her heels, and crossed the room to kneel in front of her and begin taking off the hideous things that were passing as shoes--not because they were abominations, although they were, but because they, and the unmade bed, jarred with the idea of serene and sleepy comfort he'd been nursing all evening.

When she stirred--he suspected she had already been awake--he kissed her knee without pausing. "Nightmares?"

Shelter

He fell quiet, his hands slowing.

And what would he say if she let him? Thank you? I'm so ******** sorry? It felt like a simper. It was an acknowledgement of his own compromised standards. The fact that he felt compelled to say either one disgusted him, rage just barely tightening his fingers around her bare heel, but disgust did not quell the urge. Disgust did not eliminate overwhelming gratitude and stomach-turning guilt. He hated that every second of her time was some sort of sacrifice and compromise, and hated that he asked it of her even when he didn't ask.

Take what you can get, for as long as you can get it. You deserve no better.

(And even now, in the thick of his constantly-suppressed panic for his daughter, his regrets, the second part of that thought no longer rang as it true as it once had. But certainly she deserved better.)

"It went fine," he said finally, lowly, as if afraid to disturb the quiet. "I--I like this work. I feel--" he said, hesitating for the right word

(and it was about the mission, it was about the work he'd chosen and been allowed to pursue, but it was about her in this room right now, a girl he loved, a woman he respected, his trembling hand distractedly measuring the shape of her ankle before reaching back, trying to gather her into his arms in a jacket still smelling like smoke and autumn and faintly of the sweat of exertion, as though he would, like he had as a younger man with other girls, carry her to bed with her arms around his shoulders; and it was about defying the part of him that said otherwise and insisted to the contrary because she'd had to make this sacrifice and hadn't made it until now and viewed it as temporary and he nonetheless wanted to weep with gratitude for it, debasing himself with relief)

"--valuable."