A/N: This is for anyone who's been forced to do a particularly loathsome assignment, regardless of your age. By the way, I don't think Kim is a slacker. She just has a lot of other assignments and social obligations to juggle. The delightful imagery to follow under exaggerates how I felt about a recent paper. Growl. Anyway! Let's commence with making lemons into fluffy lemonade! Here's…
The Rough Draft
An EdwardxKim
Kim had long ago decided that she would rather eat a bowl of warm diarrhea than work on the paper. She would rather listen to a charming selection of Kevin's favorite rap CDs in a small enclosed room for a day and a half straight than work on the paper. She would kiss a rabid squirrel, lick a piece of roadkill off a busy street in the middle of a sweltering day, donate one or more of her limbs to Mrs. Lovett's bakery, and babysit a hospital full of colicky babies if it meant not having to write the paper. And she would do it cheerfully. It was that kind of assignment. The loathsome thing was due in ten hours, works cited page and all. Kim had yet to start on it. She sat in front of her laptop, reddened eyes squinting in the amazingly sadistic glare of the screen. She started one sentence, stared dumbly at it for a few seconds, then deleted it with a sigh that lasted about a quarter of a minute.
The strawberry blonde plunked her forehead into the palm of her hand. Her raccoon-ringed eyes squinched shut as she rigorously kneaded the bridge of her nose like she was hoping to milk some ideas from her increasingly pudding-like brain. Tap tap tap Kim looked up and turned to face her bedroom door. The one responsible for the barely audible taps waited uncertainly in the hallway. She couldn't help but smile just a little despite her overwhelmingly pitch-black mood. "Hi. Come on in." Edward smiled shyly and shuffled through the doorway. Leather creaked and buckles jingled under Mr. Boggs's oversized pajamas as he sat down next to her. "You're up late." She just caught his soft words. "Yeah."
His head tipped just the tiniest bit to one side. "Aren't you tired?" Her smile grew. She pushed a hand through her disheveled hair and heaved another sigh of epic proportions. "I'm very tired. But I have this stupid homework assignment that..." The minute restless snicking of his blades distracted her. She looked closer at him and realized that he was trembling. "Edward, what's wrong?" He looked at his lap. "I…I had a …bad dream. About my father." These last three words trailed off into a whisper that Kim had to lipread. "Oh," she breathed, pressing her cheek to his. "Edward, I'm so sorry." He laid his head on her shoulder, and she stroked his wild hair. Edward stayed there for several minutes. Kim's gentle stroking slowed his trembling and soon stopped it altogether.
He watched as she typed up an earthshattering seven sentences. "There! The introductory paragraph's out of the way, at least." He nodded encouragingly. Kim frowned in thought, trying to figure out how she could go on about a subject that she despised so much for three to six more pages and still get enough sleep to keep from nodding off in the middle of the dissection lab in second period. She was torn from these morbid thoughts by Edward's head sliding off her shoulder and onto her keyboard. The sweet suburbanite started a little. As she peeked down at him to see if he was okay, her heart melted. His dark eyelashes fluttered the tiniest bit. His scarred lips were parted in a silent snore. He was fast asleep. As Kim stroked his hair and tenderly skimmed the backs of her knuckles across his scratched-up cheek, realization dawned. A grin tugged at the corners of her mouth. Edward had saved her from the paper for a little while longer.
EPILOGUE- As it turned out, Kim did get struck by a sudden burst of inspiration around midnight. She wrote out the rest of her draft by hand and ended up getting six hours of sweet, sweet sleep. She typed up the whole paper at breakfast and on the bus and printed it out just ten minutes before class. Edward slept the rest of the night without any more bad dreams. He woke up with QWERTY impressed in the side of his face, Kim's favorite pillow under his head, and a plate of Mrs. Boggs's cookies sitting on top of a stack of looseleaf notebook pages that had 'BOO YEAH!' scrawled in gigantic, barely legible script at the very bottom of the final page.