*Coauthored with Illyria Lives, or dearsummerdiary as she is known on Tumblr.

*Various ships included are Stephen/Rory, Callum/Boo, and at the moment I'm typing this, a dash of Jerome/Rory.

*Some language.

*SPOILERS.

A: Applause

Rory was at a pub.

How she ended up at the pub was beyond her.

Well, wait, she remembered. It had been a week – or two – some days since Stephen's funeral and since they found him. Not him, exactly, but a deadyetnotdead him that followed them around and spoke in soft tones with a lot of ellipses as he tried to feed his solid thoughts to his vestigial mouth.

And Boo and Callum had wanted to get drunk, and she and Stephen wanted to hold hands but they couldn't, and they wanted to stay close - but like hell were they going to risk that in a pub, so Stephen was waiting outside-

And why was she being led up to the stage? She didn't want to go up there.

"Go on, Rory! You'll be fine!" Boo cheered her on as she dumbly walked up the stairs. Callum gave her a thumbs-up. They were being jostled by the crowd, but didn't appear to mind.

I am drunk, she blatantly thought as she was handed a microphone. The beat of some old Spice Girls song began to pump through the speakers.

I don't even like karaoke.

But, as if she was a puppet and her puppeteer was ol' Drunk, Wasted, and Etc., himself, she sang. And sang.

And through one of the pub's windows, Stephen towered above the Living, a ghost that was clapping for her till the last note.

B: Bones

Boo put on her bravest face as the hanging skeleton drooped one arm over her bare shoulder, plastic-y and hollow, drifting horribly smooth. She shuddered and realized that her bravest face was the face of a pissing scared ten year old by the way that Callum was looking at her, with laughter in his eyes.

"Don't say a word," she warned him, flinching again as another skeleton dropped from the ceiling as a mechanized voice moaned her nickname, scaring the group of costumed children just ahead of them. For all she had seen of ghosts, of car wrecks, and of nightmares of what it would be like to have died as a building caved in around her, there was something about the emptiness of a skeleton's eyes and smile that she was never able to climb over. But she was a big girl, and — oh shit that one got really close.

She leaned away from it, heart hammering away beneath her frankly amazing witch costume (not that anyone had cared to compliment her on it). Callum outright laughed, wrapping one arm around her shoulders and pulling her close to his side.

"I've gotcha," he said, and a few girls looked on at them in jealousy as they made their way through the rest of the haunted house. "No need to fear!"

She glared at him as best as she could, but she never left the warmth of his side for the rest of the night, bones shaking and clattering in their wake.

C: Close Call

"You forgot that it was Boo's birthday tomorrow, didn't you?"

"Shut the hell up, Stephen!" Rory snapped, turning around at the Shade who stood behind her. She had had a bad day. A bad week. A bad month. Might even go so far as to say a bad life.

And she definitely did not need Stephen Dene condescending her on today. She had made a low grade on that major test she had studied hours for, and also had a small, now meaningless, spat with Jazza.

Stephen's mouth turned down at the edges; the only sign of Rory's command making an impact. "It isn't the end of the world." He, almost self-consciously, it seemed, crossed his arms. "I'll come with you to-"

She shoved by him, because he was blocking the door she later told herself, and not simply because of her frustration at the world suddenly deciding to be against her.

Some hours, a cheap gift hurriedly bought, and a make-out session with Jerome later, Rory found herself back at the Shades' flat. Again.

"It was a call about an abusive boyfriend. The bastard's bullet didn't hit any vital organs, though," Boo reported over Callum's string of obscenities in the background.

Rory paced the floor, almost numbly.

"He should be, you know, fine, yeah?" Boo tried again.

"I was so angry with him earlier, though-"

"We all get mad at him, don't worry," Callum managed to pause in his cursing to make a lame attempt at comfort. "He's Stephen and he won't allow a gunshot to stop him from finishing paperwork." He took a deep breath. "Let's go to the hospital. Come on."

D: Discombobulated

Stephen stood at the door, a sharp, angrily straight line, staring at his hand, which was resting on the doorknob.

Which way do you turn the fucking knob he demanded an answer that his mind refused to give up. It escaped his understanding that perhaps he should try a direction, since he had a fifty percent chance of making the right choice that would open the door and allow him to escape—

"Stephen!"

For his credit, he does manage to jiggle the knob a bit, finding it hard to breathe and hiding it underneath a mask of indifference. Rory skidded to a stop beside him and took in the scene: uniformed Stephen, staring at the door out of the flat as if any second his eyes were about to spout laser beams and burn it down for him.

It's precisely then that she realized that she had no idea what to say. "Um," she tried. "We," she said slowly, and then finally blurted out, "Boo said we could use her room, okay?!"

Stephen glanced at her once and then locked onto the door again. She could almost hear the numbers ticking down in his head as he replaced the image of her in an oversized sweater, hair a private mess, with the image of her panting on the bed, topless, with a similarly topless teenage boy.

"Not again," he finally said. "Okay?"

"Okay," Rory agreed calmly. She tugged on the edge of the sweater she had tugged on as she left the room, which had been in the hallway and so might have been (definitely was) Stephen's, not Boo's.

"Um, if it makes it any better," she said, after Stephen still had not moved beyond worrying the doorknob with one hand, "We weren't actually going to do anything… the shop down the corner was closed, and Jerome isn't the kind of guy to go around carrying condoms…"

At that, Stephen shoved the door open and took off at a brisk pace (read: sprint) down the walkway. Rory stared after him, and Jerome cautiously poked his head, so wonderfully debauched looking, from Boo's room.

"Your friend's roommate seems… nice," he tried, running one hand through his messy hair. "A little out of it, though."

Rory giggled a bit and walked back down the hallway.

E: Effortless

He had forgotten himself.

He stared through the windshield, but didn't see anything beyond it. He didn't watch the street he was near, didn't take notice of the overcast sky; he only imagined his sister sitting next to him, chastising him for doing this, because Rory was Just A Girl and surely he wasn't going to-

Shut up.

-almost give up his life for the sake of her? Why not call the force? Why not contact Thorpe? Why not at least have Callum and Boo with him? Callum had offered to drive the car!

I have to do this alone. His knuckles tightened on the wheel.

You're smart, Stephen. Why don't you see that there is a better way than this? It's crude, it's martyrdom. You'll die.

Rory will be safe. His foot hovered above the pedal.

"Rory," he said with a hint of finality, silencing his older sister. She stared at him, her freckled face mixed with regret and concern before fading into nothing, and he could then see Jane Quaint's black car racing towards the entrance to his lane.

"It's for Rory," he elaborated to no-one but himself; and it was with an almost effortless ease that he pressed his foot on the gas.

The police car shot forward like a bullet after the pulling of a trigger; like a body jumping and then hanging from a noose.

A, C, E: MythScavenger

B, D: Illyria Lives