Title: Human Music and Mai Tais
Summary: "A bunch of guys went to the hospital last year!" …Oh, really? Braire one-shot.
Warning: Mention of pre-canon events as perceived by the author, blood, use of hospital drugs, and Brock swearing a little, but mostly this is nice enough.
Dedication: To YoukaiYume over at deviantArt and Tumblr for being the awesome life form that introduced people to this ship by art and the simple statement, "If you don't ship these two, you are a liar," and to the mizter, who is writing the longest Braire fic to date "The Way He Looks When He Sleeps" which should be read by anyone who appreciates this pairing in the least. Go look at their work after this, because they are much better than I am.

-:-
It's as if Bernie Williams stepped up to the plate as a Yankee, and instead of swinging a bat, picked up a Stratocaster and whipped off the Hendrix version of the
"Star Spangled Banner".
-Blue Bloods.

There is a certain way that Claire felt when she saw members of JOX being thrown from the library and landing in different sections of the grounds one at a time. First, she had the pleasure of amusement when she spotted Roy O'Growlahan and George Sanderson bounce off of the roof and into a large tree, getting stuck on the way down, hanging precariously from their branches over the pond water adjacent to the house of reading. Second, she felt a little guilty when Dirk, Percy and Omar had no pre-landing pad in the trees and went straight into the water with an unfortunate slap of body to water (she wasn't the only one that flinched at the sounds Omar's wings of leather made on double impact) before they rose with spitting and gurgling; all of them clutched at their backsides and she did not envy the bruising and stinging all day the next day.

The third, and by far, the worst feeling she felt was when she spotted Brock flying out of the librarian's tentacle like a piece of meat thrust by accident from a bird of prey's talons and landed, with a cracking sound that had her mouth widen in horror, against a ledge hanging from the side of the building that should (should have, should have—Claire was going to kill the Greek Council members that had not done their job in cleaning the area properly) have been cleared. After which, he fell from that ledge with his eyes closed in a way that she knew, as much as she knew she was a failed PNK Triclops, meant he was unconscious and smashed into the tree boughs holding Roy and George; all three of them crashing into the water.

Within the three seconds it took Roy and George to ascend back above the water, Claire was out of the spot in the grass under the low bridge she and her HSS sisters had taken up to watch the losing teams fly out of the library, and was at the foot of the water, blood rising in little smoke weaving patterns from Brock's still submerged position.

She wasn't aware she was saying the words until well after everyone had been panicking and she had trudged into the pond, pulling out Brock's considerable mass, her hands around his arm and around his neck to keep him from choking on water and relieve the head and torso injuries that were spurting blood.

"Somebody call an ambulance! This isn't part of the games!"

The tree directly outside of the hospital room Brock had been placed in (not as big as some of the rooms for monsters twice his size, with two beds rather than his single; tile under their feet an ugly bronze that made someone want to lick the inside of their teeth to remove the phantom smell and taste of nickels swimming to mind) had a plastic bag stuck to one of the branches. Claire noticed when the sun cast light and the bag and tree cast a shadow in the room, near the chair she had been in since Brock had been brought back from the ER, the tricks of the eye made her see a pigeon trying to hold to the branch in a heavy wind.

Another wind rose up as the sun nearly dimmed into nothing so close to night and Claire blinked away at the shadow of the plastic bag/bird flapping powerful, but paper thin wings and went back to fiddling with her music player that had a little mini-stereo plugged in so it might wake Brock up with the Human Genre music blaring from the little holes in the stereo sound maker.

(They had actually met the summer before college and it was in the music store that they'd ended up in as the only two monsters to frequent the Human Genre section at the back of most stores in town.

[It was little known by most, but a lot of humans threw away or lost perfectly good music and books and history of themselves and scare companies had a tendency to loan doors that were no longer useful to them—i.e. ones belonging to towns and single properties in the human world where the humans had abandoned their homes because of personal reasons or some sort of natural disaster—to outside parties for anthropological or material research and human music was a relatively profitable result of that.]

Brock had been grinning over being lucky enough to find a well taken care of copy of The Beatles 'White Album' and when he'd reached out to grab it, Claire had been aiming to grab a single copy, thirteen song collection, of some depressing French/Norway mix band that the bird monster couldn't hope to pronounce at the time—and going on dating her years later, still could only try to butcher when sounds tried to form and make words.)

She pressed hard on one button on the music player and relaxed when the song she was looking for ("Whatever Happened to Saturday Night?" as featured on his slightly scuffed up disc of Glee: Rocky Horror Picture Show that she, once in a while, listened to with him when he got homesick) buzzed to life.

When the words of the featured human singer came to a peak ("Opportunity, bless my soul! I really love that rock'n'roll…" just before a scratch in the album registered in the recording and made Claire clinch her crooked teeth as she set the objects on the roll-away table near the foot of the bed with a plate of jell-o in the center, green and with little bits of burnt marshmallows wiggling in the mold each time a larger monster down the hall—a doctor, a nurse, a candy striper—caused tremors in their steps,) Brock started to come around. No doubt the noise was most of the cause, but as she got up from her seat and flicked the end of his serrated beak twice with her pointer finger, Claire was pretty confident that the mixture body oil she ordered on-line and covered her wrists in to excess (the smells of nail polish remover and Mai Tais was something her mother had come up with to reject suitors who couldn't stand the scent, but Claire had added in spiced hot-dog water to cancel out some of the effect of the other smells so some of the guys she was moderately interested in stood a chance) helped out just a smidge. The big goof probably thought he was in for a big meal.

"Good morning, Mary Sunshine," she greeted him once his eyes seemed to focus on her and he stopped squinting at the hospital lights coloring his vision in yellow like spectral shadows trying to turn him blind and blinking them away would deter them from causing him misery.

"…Did we win?"

Her teeth grit and, rather than state the absolute 'NO' in words, she performed her specialty, the only thing she had going for her as a scarer, as way of explanation.

Brock, groggy and filled to the brim with as many drugs as he was given for two broken ribs, a head injury, and internal damage as he was, reacted to the sight of burning green eyes, a widened mouth full of an assortment of teeth adding to her growling at him and arms as well as legs elongating to give the impression of extreme danger as anybody in his state of being would.

"Aw, you were worried about me, dude."

Claire rapidly deflated from her irrational bout of anger (fear/agitation/anxiety) and settled for earning a pained (but half-hearted and actually amused in one way or another) noise from Brock when she grabbed both of his feet at the end of the bed and kneaded one like she was giving a particularly harsh round of tickling, while she lifted and slammed the other one the mattress.

She repeated the action when the Brock cackled at her frustrated growl and then proceeded to grab the pillow out from under his head and play-smother him until he yanked at her around her waist to hold her still, spat the pillow out of his mouth (she might have been joking about trying to kill him, but that still left a lot of room for her to stuff the white, starched clean pillow and case down into his beak before it even began to hinder his breathing efforts) and nipped at her ponytail that had started coming undone after she had dragged him out of the water. This followed by her calming down, going lax in his arm like he knew she would.

"I wasn't worried," she muttered when he pulled her up and onto the side of the bed so she was snuggled up to his side like a teddy bear, her voice as stubborn as it was when they were in the Greek Council rooms talking about funding and probability factors for recruitment of the next term to each fraternity and sorority (her own sorority hadn't been able to attend as they were one girl short and he had been able to attend only because he had taken the semester off of Greek Council to get into the Scare Games at Roy's begging and promise that there would be no cheating if Brock was involved—for once) and all the stuff they were used to talking about most days; pretending she didn't care, "I just… You were bleeding."

His smile diminished a little from the broad look it often had, but that was because when he was serious around her, he made the attempt to act like an adult—though the truth of that reality seemed like a lifetime away from where they were right at that moment (her fingers lightly tugging at his feathers in that way that was a little like running fingers through hair for a monster of his type; his beak continually pressing into the side of her face and nipping at her hair over and over again).

"Yeah, but… I seem to remember you pulling me out of the water."

"You were unconscious."

"At the time, but while George and Roy were in the next room bull-shitting about their busted legs, before the nurses moved them to better digs, they happened to mention a sexy HSS girl dragging my sorry ass out of the drink like a draft horse."

"…Oh."

"You're blushing."

And just like that, the pillow was back in his face and had added ammunition in her pressing her body oil slathered wrist right up against his nostrils to make him wiggle around like he was being poisoned.

("You like that? You like that?")

("Not cool, dude!")