A/N: I played with a lot of prompts and fests this year during NaNoWriMo. This is the last one written, and is quite the deviation from my usual fare. As always, questions, comments, squee, and concrit are welcomed. Thank you for reading.

From My Heart and From My Hand

by LadySilver

"That one is perfect," Lydia stated, leaning over Danny's shoulder to point at an Abercrombie & Fitch model as his picture scrolled by.

Danny paused the scrolling, backed up, frowned in critique of the model's features. "Are you sure? We don't have to pick from the first page. There're thousands of images here. Millions." He gave the mouse a swipe that sent the photo gallery scrolling as if to demonstrate the wealth of pictures at their disposal.

"Are you accusing me of settling?" Lydia asked, planting a hand on one hip.

Danny blanched at the venom in her question. "Of course not," he replied. "It's just..." He pointed to one of the barely-clothed models that the scrolling had brought forth. "Look at that one. His abs. Those are the abs of a god." His eyes widened in appreciation and he clicked on the picture to save it to his hard drive.

Lydia scoffed, but let it go. She knew when it was worth picking a fight and when it wasn't. Besides, she knew as well as anyone how often great discoveries originated in happy accidents, and this was a fantastic accident. "Why do we have to pick one model?" she asked in a stroke of genius. "Let's take his abs and Mr. Cheekbones and put them together. You can do that right?"

"You don't have to pretend around me, Lyd," Danny said. "You know I can do that. And I know that you know that I can do that." To demonstrate, he pulled up PhotoShop and imported the two pictures. Merging them was a piece of cake, though the result didn't have the polish to it that the originals had. Turning back to the image gallery, he scrolled until he found a set of arms that made his throat go dry and selected it.

"Perfect," Lydia agreed, following his thought process as smoothly as if she were in his head. "Now the legs."

To neither of their surprise, their tastes in men aligned neatly and, though they bickered a little over hair color, soon enough the composite picture sat on the screen before them.

The friends leaned back to admire the finished product, perfection in pixels. Lydia swallowed hard, moistened her lips. "I need that in my life," she announced. "Why can't anything like that really exist?"

"It probably does," Danny answered. "Just, not in Beacon Hills." His voice was strained, his breathing slow and controlled. "The things I would to him if he were," he murmured. As if unaware of what he was doing, his hand drifted down and pressed on his crotch.

Lydia observed the lapse of control with fascination. For as long as they'd been friends, and for all the boundaries their conversations had vaulted past in that time, they had never crossed into acting on their sexual urges around one another. A flush rose in her cheeks and she once more darted a tongue over her lips. "Tell me what you'd do," Lydia suggested. She leaned closer to him, laying the words softly in his ear.

Danny's body warmed and his pulse fluttered in his neck. "Oh, god," he moaned, as if just now realizing that his answer wasn't as defined as he thought. His gaze roamed lasciviously over the picture, seeking a starting point. "Tongue," he finally answered.

"Whose tongue?" Lydia prompted.
"Mine," Danny answered, his voice shaky. "I'd run my tongue over him, taste every inch of his skin. I'd lick-" Biting hard into his bottom lip, he stopped his fantasizing. His hands darted back to rest on the keyboard and his shoulders slumped. "It's just a picture," he lamented.

"Well, yeah. You're not seriously telling me that you've never masturbated to a picture before, are you?" Lydia asked. With a nonchalant shrug, she volunteered, "I have." The confession didn't exactly mean anything; it wasn't like Danny was going to ask her to show him.

Danny shot her a "are you seriously asking me that?" look and turned right back to the computer monitor. "Personally, I'd rather have the real thing," he replied. "Wouldn't you?"

"Duh."

"How about the next best thing?"

Lydia frowned. "What, exactly, would that be?" They could print the picture out, but she failed to see how that would be an improvement over the image on the screen. Except that each of them could get their own copy. Maybe Danny only meant that he didn't want to cross the line they'd just scuffed with their metaphorical toes. If that was all, she wished he'd say so, because while he might have distracted himself out of his hormones, hers were still raging as much as ever.

Danny ignored her and started typing. A mysterious and infuriating smile played around his mouth, exacerbated with each keystroke. She watched him for a few moments before growing bored. While she liked the idea of watching Danny masturbate, this was not the kind she wanted.

Throwing herself on his bed, she grabbed the nearest magazine—which fortunately turned out to be about lacrosse rather than computers—and began leafing through it. The very fit and toned men displayed in its pages increased her own longing. Imagining how one of those calloused hands would feel, she traced her fingers over a nipple and shuddered. "He should play lacrosse," she suggested, airily.

"What?" Danny asked, without stopping whatever he was doing.

"Our dream man," she answered. "He should play lacrosse. Can you imagine those thigh muscles rippling when he charges after a ball? Or the way his triceps will flex when he catches a shot?" Her nipples pressed hard against her bra now, and she reached back to unclasp it for easier access.

Dryly, Danny answered, "I might be able to imagine that."

"Don't be smart," she chided. She glanced up from the page she was on. Danny was still typing away at the computer. The image on the screen had changed, though. It looked like a 3-D wireframe of a male body slowly spinning.

"You're gonna be happy that I am," he returned. "What else should be our dream guy be? Do we want intelligence?" An inset window of tiny text at the bottom of the screen paused in its scrolling while Danny waited for an answer.

"Well, I certainly don't want a raving idiot. Some smarts would be good. He needs to be at least smart enough to not find an intelligent woman threatening." Her mind flashed on Michael, a gorgeous specimen of a senior, and the starting center on the basketball team, who had sneered at her during their one and only date when she had criticized the physics in a movie. Cupping her breasts, she forced that memory—and all the other ones like it—away. She squeezed and pleasure coursed through her belly. Her skin was well-moisturized and smooth, as always, save for the tiny bumps surrounding her nipples. Reveling in the texture change, she rubbed her thumbs over them. A new question intruded on her thoughts and interrupted her groove. "What's the point of discussing personality anyway? It's just a picture."

As if he hadn't heard her, Danny continued, "He should have a sense of adventure. We can't have a guy who isn't willing to try new things. Especially sex." He paused and let out a long, shuddering sigh. "Especially sex. And food. He should be able to cook." Diving back into his typing, he hunched over the keyboard, entering information as fast as his fingers could move. His broad shoulders moved under the tight stretch of his white t-shirt.

"Daniel," Lydia asked, slowly. The new suspicion poking at the edges of her mind sent a thrill through her body that burst into heat between her legs. "Are you planning to make our dream guy?" The thought had fluttered around the back of her mind, too, but hadn't been one she'd felt any need to capture.

The night was all wrong for such an experiment. The sky out the window shone clear and star-studded, without even a wisp of cloud in the sky or hint of a coming lightning storm. It was warm out with the approach of summer and Danny had his windows open. The chirring of cicadas and the distant rush of traffic grounded the ethereal feeling that darkness often brought.

Besides, Lydia had read Frankenstein, and while she was willing to do a lot in the interest of advancing science, grave robbing was not on the list. It was so undignified.

Danny shrugged as if her question had been totally reasonable. "I was thinking more of an interactive online presence. We wouldn't be able to touch him, but we could look at him and talk to him..." He trailed off, a new burst of typing taking over.

"Just talk?" Lydia asked. "You mean you're spending all this time and effort to make a phone sex line?"

"Better," he promised, though Lydia couldn't see how.

In frustration, she slapped the magazine shut. "I am far too horny to waste my night watching you program a phone sex line. Or computer sex. Or whatever. If we're going to make a man, then let's do it right." The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. She hid the flinch of her impulse overtaking her better judgment; rare though it was, she'd never let even Danny know that it sometimes happened.

Danny spun in his desk chair and blinked at her. Slipping on her mask of confidence, Lydia picked up her bra to demonstrate its absence from her body, then let it fall back to the bed in a pile of white lace. With a tilt of her head, she smiled at him. Her eyes felt heavy with lust. Though she knew none of that would have any effect on him, she hoped he would at least get the hint as to her broader goal.

"What do you mean?"

She huffed out sigh. "What is the point of designing our dream guy if we can't have him. And I do mean have." After a second, she added coyly, "I also mean we," like the thought had just occurred to her. Danny might not find her sexually attractive, but that didn't mean that he hadn't featured in her fantasies. And now she saw the chance to bring those fantasies to life. If it took an intermediary that they designed and built themselves, then so much the better. Lydia's college applications needed a little zing.

"I have a 3-D printer in the study," Danny suggested.

With a roll of her eyes, Lydia flipped onto her stomach and kicked her feet into the air. "Really? That's the best you can think of?"

"What do you suggest?" he challenged.

She let one high-heeled shoe slip off, then the other one. Examined the pink lacquer on her nails. Pouted her lips and smacked them at the air. Just before Danny gave up and spun back to his computer, she gave the air a last kick and said, "Magic."

"Oookaaay," he drawled. "That's a word I never thought you'd use. Shouldn't you be laughing now?"

Lydia arched an eyebrow. "I think it could be a fun experiment. I've never tested the principals of magic before."

"That's because there aren't any," Danny protested. "Magic is fictional."

"So were germs once." The more she thought about it, the more right the idea felt. Besides, as much as she enjoyed the pleasures her hand could bring, she preferred her orgasms to not be solo efforts. Right now, magic sounded like as viable a means of achieving that as anything—and certainly safer than picking up a random guy at the coffee shop.

Danny read the resolution on her face and capitulated, as she knew he would. "Fine. But, I'm going to do my type of magic while you work on yours." With that, he spun back to his computer, reviewed what was on the screen, swore softly, and got back to work.

With a shrug, Lydia accepted the terms. Doing the work herself was easier, anyway.

Pulling out her phone, Lydia began the first step of casual research. Magic was easy to say, but in truth, she had no idea where to begin. A cursory glance of several sites revealed that no one else did either. She found a plethora of baseless commentaries on the power of star alignments and the mystical value of magnetic fields. She found blatantly wrong information about plants, and prayers to deities and demons even she had never heard of.

With a sigh, she closed the browser. The internet would not be helpful tonight. Instead, she turned her not-inconsiderable intelligence to the task. What was the goal, she asked herself? And what steps did she need to follow to reach it?

An answer began to form in her head. She didn't question it, didn't examine it closely on fear that it wouldn't hold up. With only her instincts to guide her, she started to gather items from around the house: A cast-iron pan from the kitchen, the washing machine hose, empty water bottles from the recycle bin.
Lydia brought all the mirrors she could move into Danny's room to capture and reflect the light of the nearly full moon, and found candles in a china cabinet just in case.

She picked up, examined, and replaced the tiny bottle of coriander; grabbed the paprika just before the cabinet closed on her fingers. She found fingernail polish, a jug of apple vinegar, and a different jug of anti-freeze. There were wires and string, a fully articulated action figure that Danny dredged from a box of old toys in his closet, and a pile of discarded circuit boards and alligator clips in a growing pile of seemingly random items on Danny's floor.

With a bottle of strawberry-flavored massage-oil, she traced a circle around the whole mess, then lowered herself into the center of it and began to hook things together.

When the last clip hooked onto the action-figure's hand and her kitchen-chemistry was flowing through the tubes, Lydia sat back. "Well, I'm sure I'd get full points for style," she stated.

His chin propped on his fist, Danny was watching her with a look of bemusement. "You know," he replied, "I'm going to have to be the one to explain this to my parents."

"Just tell them it's for a school project. Parents will believe anything if you tell them it's for school," Lydia answered. She swept an assessing eye over the conglomeration of bubbling and beeping things and decided that school would have been a lot more interesting if they'd done projects like this. It didn't even matter if the experiment worked—though, obviously, she wanted to. While the intellectual exercise had distracted her from her body's needs, she became acutely aware that her body now wanted payment and interest. Heat burning all through her lower belly made her squirm.

"Somehow I don't think my parents are going to buy it. They're a little more paranoid about what I get into. Speaking of which, while you were busy with your high-tech Tinkertoys, I hacked into DARPA. Between my program and their power, we should be able to do..." He splayed his hands in an open question. "...something?"

"DARPA? If we get arrested, you're explaining that to my parents, too," Lydia said. Not that she had anything to worry about; Danny had only been arrested once, and that was before he learned how to cover his tracks. Dismissing the subject, she patted the floor next to her. "Come sit down. We both have to be inside the circle for the magic to work."

Danny's mouth opened like he was going to question her, then closed. He pressed his lips together, crossed his arms. Finally, he abandoned the last of his reservations with a long sigh. He brought his keyboard with him and set it within easy reach on the floor. "OK," he said. "If we're going to do this, let's do it."

Lydia smiled and handed Danny the last accessory. "Put this on."

He took it gingerly, eyed the straps and the hooks. "I'm good." He tried to hand it back.

She glared stonily at him until he relented and put the item on, albeit in an unconventional way. But, this was one detail that she could give a little on. "When you're ready," she stated. A quick check confirmed that her panties were soaked. That tiny touch alone sent shivers through her body; she bit back a frustrated moan.

"As ready as you are," Danny confirmed, his voice sounding suddenly strained.

A push of a button started Danny's program. They grasped hands and chanted their intentions. The wire figure spun lazily on the screen while liquid bubbled in the plastic bottles. A faint crackle of energy in the air marked the electricity running through the wires. The street lights shining through the window flickered. The lights in the house dimmed, grew brighter, and abruptly went out. A glance outside showed that the whole street was dark.

Smoke began to rise from one bottle, then another, and another. Lydia chanted louder and tried not to think about how she hadn't added any catalysts to the chemicals. Danny's chanting tapered off. A nudge of his knee restarted him, though he came back slower as he watched the smoke coalesce in a cloud over their heads. It grew thicker and began to glow a pale green.

It fell.

Visibility disappeared as the cloud engulfed them. Its touch was cold where Lydia's skin was exposed, and it smelled of expensive aftershave.

Lydia went still, her breathing as close to negligible as she could make it. Her body tightened with a twist of desire that would have left her panting in any other circumstances. Danny gripped her thigh, his blunt nails biting into her skin.

Eventually the smoke cleared, the lights flickered back on, and the computer rebooted with a reluctant beep.

Danny stood up slowly, his knees stiff for entirely the wrong reason. "People haven't mistaken electricity for magic in over a century," he commented, as if he needed to say something. "Maybe our ancestors knew something we've forgotten." He pulled the bra off his head and looked around at his room which, aside from a little more dust that usual floating through the air, now appeared unchanged.

Lydia elbowed him. "Just wait," she said. In truth, she had her own doubts about the efficacy of the spell, seeing as how she'd never knowingly cast a spell before. Then again, she'd never failed at anything she'd set out to do, either.

She started cleaning up, moving the mirrors out of the way and snuffing out the candles. Something was different. She stared at the center of the massage-oil circle for a long moment before realizing that wires leading into it attached to nothing. The action figure was gone.

Before she could comment on its absence, the shower came on.

The pounding water sounded loud through the door to Danny's room.

Danny and Lydia looked at each other, then raced for the bathroom door. Danny flung it open, Lydia right behind him. Steam billowed out of the shower and slowly filled the room like the smoke had just moments before. The shower curtain hung open.

In the shower stood Mr. abs-thighs-and-cheekbones himself in true, living, three dimensional flesh. On spotting them watching him, he propped an arm on the wall, flicked the first drops of water off his short blond hair. "If you two are going to join me, you'd better get undressed," he stated. "I'm not suffering a cold shower because you couldn't move fast enough."

All Lydia and Danny could do was stare. Not too tall, not too short. Muscular without being ostentatious. While they watched, he twisted his hips around to reveal tight, smooth buttcheeks. With a small, appreciative nod, he slapped one cheek, then resumed his previous waiting pose.

He was perfect.

And he wanted to shower with them.

Both of them.

Danny broke free of the mesmerization first. Leaning down to Lydia, he whispered, "One: You win. Two: I had to trade empathy for looks. Please don't hurt me." He yanked his t-shirt off and tossed it to the floor. His jeans and socks followed with astonishing speed. He wasn't wearing underwear.

For a moment longer, Lydia admired the gorgeous hunk of studliness she had summoned. His toned body glistened under the running water; his blue eyes pierced right through her. And the cheekbones were everything she'd imagined. She let out a long sigh. "Just this once," she answered to Danny's naked back, "I'll forgive you."

The shower stall would be a tight fit for the three of them, though Lydia could see that working to her advantage. Adding her skirt and blouse to the growing pile on the floor, she stepped toward the waiting men.

Danny was already busy exploring the dream man's chest. His fingers left wet trails across the pale skin that he traced with his tongue. "You need a name," he said, pausing over a nipple. "Do you have a name?"

"Jackson," Lydia supplied, spouting out the first non-traditional name that came to mind. She had better things to do than debate names and naming conventions. Especially now. With the stray prickles of water hitting her skin and chilling her, she pushed in close to the guys, slid one hand down over the construct's butt and the other up around Danny's side. "His name is Jackson. The real question is: which one of us is he going to do first?"

"I knew we should have made twins," Danny groaned, and went right back to licking his way down Jackson's chest.

Jackson laced a hand through Danny's hair, his eyes drooping in pleasure. "Don't worry," he assured Lydia. "There's plenty of me to go around." Pulling her closer, he added, "Isn't that what you wished for? Plenty of me to share?" A sudden exhalation gave away what Danny's mouth had found. Jackson's mouth fell open, his shoulders dropped back. If possible, his cheekbones became even more stunning.

She stroked Danny's back, starting between the shoulder blades and down as far as she could reach. His body swayed as he worked, broadening the range of her touch. The three stood so close that a wrong move would topple them into each other, yet Lydia had no fear of that happening. With slight shifts in stance or hints from flexed muscles, Jackson guided their positions. All while Danny wrung moans of delight from him.

The noises that overlapped the streaming water, and the pleasure laid bare on Jackson's face, sent a fresh twist of heat through Lydia's body. Her areolae tingled, grew tight. The water teased her, streaming onto and over her breasts with barely enough force to set her nerves aquiver. She needed to be touched.

A hand slipped between her legs. She jumped. Inexpert fingers probed her folds and pushed through her pubic hair. Then another hand closed over the first and guided it toward her nerve center. "Oh," she sighed. The tight space didn't let her see what was happening, though she could easily imagine the contrasts of Danny's tanned skin and Jackson's pale skin as their fingers worked together to explore her.

Jackson's lips spread into a self-satisfied smirk. He knew he could give her what she wanted, and without breaking his own stride. If he weren't so correct in his high opinion, she'd be tempted to slap him.

Instead, she spread her legs, twisting her hips to give the boys easier access, and let out a long sigh.

Never again would she have to suffer sexual frustration. Never again would she have to teach an inept or selfish man how to touch her properly, or even that he should.

As the thoughts wended their way through her mind, the strokes on her clit sped up. Her body tensed, back arching, and she cried out.

Sometime later, Lydia rolled over, seeking a cool spot on the pillow, and snuggled deeper under the sheets. An instant later, she bolted upright. Pillow. Sheets. She was dressed in the clothes she'd been wearing the day before, now rumpled and creased after a night of being slept in.

Cool sunlight flooded the room and washed across the navy sheets that covered Danny's bed. Lydia swept her hand across them, testing their realness. The silky weave passed smoothly under her touch save for a single thread that caught on a chip in a fingernail. She frowned, making a mental note to go in for a manicure, then shook her attention back to the room.

The room was clean. She found no trace of errant mirrors or candles or massage oil. The hardwood floor had a slightly scuffed look like it hadn't had a proper cleaning in months.

Danny lay sprawled across his keyboard, his head resting on one arm. He, too, was dressed. His dark hair was mussed, yet dry. The monitor was dark, only the tiny green power light on its frame showing that it was in power-saving mode rather than shut off.

Danny jerked, groaned, and pushed himself up.

"Well, we've always joked about sleeping together," Lydia said into the still room.

Jumping at her voice, Danny turned to blink blearily at her. Red marks from the keyboard scored his cheek. "We slept together?" he asked, scrubbing a hand over his face, and sounding baffled at the suggestion.

"No," she answered, waving him off. "Not like that. I must have fallen asleep while waiting for you to do..." She waved her hand again, this time taking in the computer and recalling what they had been working on the previous night. "Did you finish the simulation?"

With a flurry of blinking and another scrub of his hand, Danny finished waking up. "I don't remember," he answered. "I think so." He cast his gaze around the room, scowling like he was looking for something, but couldn't remember what. "What happened last night?"

Lydia shrugged and extracted herself from the covers. Crossing her legs, she settled in for an extensive round of twenty questions. They'd done this before, but only after a night of heavy drinking as each tried to figure out how much damage control their reputations would need. "Did we get drunk last night? Try any strange drugs?"

Danny considered the questions, picking them apart to figure out what she really wanted to know. He'd always been good at that, which was probably why they'd become friends. "I think we did magic," he answered.

On reflex, Lydia opened her mouth to quip about all their time together being magical, then stopped herself. She pressed the blades of her hands against her mouth, prodded her memory. What she found there had to be the remnants of a dream or a hallucination. "So how come there's no evidence?" Shifting to get more comfortable, she became aware of soreness on her breasts and between her legs which suggested that maybe she and Danny had slept together, after all. Except her memory was showing her blond hair and blue eyes and a lithe form entirely unlike Danny's broad build.

Danny shook his head. "I'm seriously sitting here proposing magic as an explanation for anything, and you're sitting there not arguing with me. At all. That, alone, sounds like evidence."

"You know that's not what I meant. What I meant was..." She rolled her shoulders and came up with a faux-shy tilt of her head. "...evidence."

"Oh," Danny replied. "Evidence." He touched his mouth, and a wicked gleam came into his eyes. "I think I swallowed all the evidence."

Grabbing a pillow from the bed, Lydia tossed it at him. "Yuck." It landed short of the chair with a soft thud on the floor; Danny watched it fall with bemusement.

"You asked."

"So, where is he now? Did he vanish at midnight? Was it a one-night-only thing?" On a whim, she hopped off the bed and went to rummage in the closet. A short search later, and she found the action figure, right in the box they'd dug it out of the previous night. A fine coat of dust covered its plastic skin. She held it up for Danny to see.

He grimaced, and added his own question to the list: "Was our mystery guy just a shoddy cover story to explain why the gay guy would get it on with his best female friend?" Idly, he tapped a key to bring the computer back to life. The screen flashed on, off, and on once more before stabilizing.

Lydia paused in scrabbling for the pillow to throw it again, perhaps this time with better aim, to stare at the screen. Against a black background, the wireframe figure spun. She pointed.

Turning, Danny took in the image. "This is the program I was working on." He studied it, ruffled a hand through his hair, and shrugged. "I guess I didn't get as far with it as I thought I did. Hate it when that happens."

"Try running it again," Lydia suggested. The action figure looked nothing like the guy she remembered them building. Translated into real size, it would be as tall as Danny but with a chest easily twice his, bloated thighs, and no ass to speak of. But this was definitely the doll they'd used.

Danny splayed his hands in exasperation. "It's not done. The program will crash."

"Just try."

Capitulating, he sent the command.

Outside, a dog started barking furiously and a car horn blared to a squeal of tires.

The action figure burned. Lydia had tossed it away and scooted back before her brain even registered the heat. Now she blew on her hands and watched the doll smoke on the floor. Alerted by her strangled gasp of pain, Danny turned just in time to see the smoke billow up, disproportionally thick and extensive for such a small item.

"Oh shit," he muttered. "That's gonna ruin the floor and my mom's going to kill me."

The cloud of smoke expanded outward and upward until it ascribed an amorphous shape about human height and width. Then, abruptly, it cascaded in on itself, pouring back toward the ground like water down a drain. The doll was gone.

Left behind, stood Jackson. He was dressed today in the black shorts and burgundy jersey of the Beacon Hills Cyclones. A lacrosse stick swung from one hand. Lydia and Danny were both caught speechless at the sight. Jackson basked in their unabashed surprise for a moment, until at last his impatience won out. "Well?" he prompted. "You made me, there's nothing I can't do, so what do you say we make this worth our while?"

Lydia rocked back on her heels. A slow grin spread across her face, matched in the one curving Danny's lips. Presented with the means to have all her wishes fulfilled, she knew exactly where she wanted to start.