A bug crosses the floor along the grain of the wood, but at a large seam it stops, waits, and peeks inside to see what else is living beneath the house before continuing to cross into the opposite walls moldings.
When the insect seems to come too close to her body her hand twitches, fingers slowly crumbling into the palm of her hand to form a fist. Quinn is suddenly aware of the rise and fall of her chest, and the sweat that counters the cold wood floor she's still laying on, yet she's sure she hasn't blinked at all.
With an inhale she lets her heavy eyelids drop, but when they do she's met with the image of a gun at her forehead and the grin that pulled the trigger.
A real, genuine ringtone brings a fist to his night table only an inch away from the phone that sings, and when he finally grabs it his grip is enough to dent the metal.
"What is it?"
"DID YOU KILL HER?"
Chuuya feels his sheets fall around him as he sits up in bed, a hand smacking his forehead while tension builds in his jaw. Mai Sakurai was not a call he had to take.
"You need to be more specific."
"Of course I do, underworld scum,"
"You flatter me."
"Your girlfriend. I haven't seen her for almost two weeks, and considering she thrives off of pleasing you the only reason I can see her disappearing for is an unfortunate demise," Mai hisses on the other side of the phone and he wonders how Quinn can deal with her on a regular basis, especially working to keep her at bay from her true involvement with the mafia. Chuuya, of course, could only play dumb to her jokes for so long. When she turned out to actually have a brain what was he supposed to do? An executive is a hard role to ignore.
"I'm sure she can answer the question better than I can." it's a statement far too true as he turns a yawn into a sharp inhale before checking the date on his phone to realize he also hasn't seen Quinn for a while.
He tries to ignore how sick it makes him feel that a third party had to tell him his partner is off the rocks.
"Well she's not, and I find it oh-too-coincidental this is happening after that bump in with the detective agency guy."
His eyes stare straight ahead.
"Excuse me?"
Mai is quiet for once, but too soon he hears the squeak of her voice in an all too proud laugh.
"You know, you're both so guilty that it makes you compatible." her words are cryptic, and they shouldn't apply to anyone but him, but the sudden itch he feels biting at his skin gives the Sakurai far too much power on the other side of the phone line.
"Don't call this number again." he commands, and when he hangs up the edges of the phone reveal vicious indents where his hand once was.
Not unlike the wood at Quinn's door that threatens to splinter under his later gloved knuckles, mouth closed though jaw uncomfortably clenched as he waits for an answer.
There is none, and after the first minute he looks around at the mail piling at the corner of her door; generated university letters and strange catalogs, all forwarded from a dummy address, were stacked into a proper rectangle that only shows the wear of weather in the corners of its pages. By the second knock they're all under his arm as a means to clean up the already crowded porch and serve as a viable alibi for being there. He only considers the necessary details at the third knock when the motion is softer, and the familiar sensation of worry makes him take a deep breath.
He jiggles the door handle to be sure there's no forced lock for entry on the other side. At the slight right, it pushes open.
Chuuya looks between the concrete steps he stands on and the cheap wood at the divide of the door. Quietly, he steps in.
Like he's blocked by another doorway, Chuuya remains at the entrance of the hallway, eyes taking in the darkness save for a large window in the other room that makes every flying particle of dust visible. When he places the mail by his feet and takes off his shoes he notices how it also covers the floor, and the sheer two weeks Mai was concerned about suddenly spirals into more at the sheer state of emptiness—but when he continues through the rest of the apartment he finds that the home itself is unnervingly empty as though it was still waiting to be lived in, yet there's been over a year of life.
Soon he finds himself stopped at the plain white wood of the bedroom door; through the open crack he can see the sleeping figure inside rolled in the blanket facing the opposite side of the room.
She's far too still, and Chuuya wonders if she's buying time to make him go away.
"Have you been sleeping this entire time?" he pushes the door open wider, and the quiet croak makes her shift a bit in her sheets despite not turning around.
"Thinking, mostly," Quinn's voice comes after a few seconds of silence, and it's tinged with a hoarse tone that he could only place to screams.
"Thinking…" he ghosts the term while he leans into the doorway, eyes scanning the rest of the room. If it weren't for the bed he would have thought it just as empty as everywhere else. "Alright, what's been on your mind for two weeks?"
"Eleven days."
"And counting it seems."
He has a teasing grin that she can't see, yet Quinn reaches and pulls the covers over her face.
"Why are you here?" her words are muffled and barely pass through the barrier of the blanket, so he makes his way across the room to kneel at her bedside. When he does he finds her phone on the night table lighting up with an unknown number but not making a sound. Another of the many missed calls from Mai, he assumes, or even himself.
"Hows Juno's head treating you?" answering a question with a question, a clear deflective tactic that neither of them want to validate.
"Just peachy."
"Oh? Then why have you been playing hermit? You can think on the job, you know."
"Gosh, Chuuya!" with a dramatic groan she flings the blanket off of herself finally sitting eye level with the executive at the edge of her mattress. "Can't I just have eleven bad days!"
"Sequentially?" she groans again with his word and drops her head to his one raised knee, hair like experimental cotton-candy falling off the edges of his pants. In a bad reflex he beings his gloved hand tp rest at the base of her neck, a black thumb delicately stroking pastel strands of hair along her nerve; her own arms follow a bad reflex as they come to wrap around his waist, hands reaching through his jacket to fold themselves against the ends of his shirt.
Chuuya cares too much. He always has. When people would call him weak it never had anything to do with his strength, ability, tactfulness or grit, but his emotions. He was hardwired for anger with the burning flames of an ethereal being coursing through his body; he was raised too empathetic with other children whose survival was constantly in question; he devotes himself to other people, a man loyal to his city, his organization, its people, its boss.
His partners.
Chuuya stops his thumb when it comes back to the rest of his hand, the hand that is currently gently curled at the base of Quinn's neck nestled beneath short layers of hair the color of a different candy, one much sweeter than chocolate.
Quinn doesn't care much for the cotton-candy strands that fly in her face as she makes her way into tower three, heels clanking off the pavement as a means of saying "make way" to those that are around her. She doesn't care much for those people either, or the way her toes are pinched in the shoes; all this distaste for her current situation seeps into her expression like a terminal resting bitch face warding off even the nicest of agents as she makes her way to a steel door in the darkened corner of the buildings lobby floor.
Quickly she fishes out a black ID card with no markings other than a series of characters embossed on its front. Her thumb traces each computer generated stroke before swiping it against the necessary panel, visualizing what they read; executive, Nakahara.
The steel door drops into the floor and Quinn steps inside.
Thinking wasn't all she was doing for the past eleven days, thirteen hours and fifty three minutes. Planning would have been a better choice of words. From the poor comfort of her mattress she spent days going over the dream Juno gave her, the one that was obnoxiously clear, even if not concise, in comparison to the threads she would give her before. With Nichi there were crumbs, like she was holding something back, but with Dazai there was a searing anger—there was intent, and Quinn couldn't tell if she was more upset about the grainy contents of her nightmare or that Juno was a horrible communicator.
She needed facts, and in an organization that prided itself in its darkness, getting them cued up on her laptop in the comfort of her home was not possible. As far as the easily attainable records knew, Juno didn't exist outside of Quinn's new existence, and while that was oddly comforting it still left a black hole where a real person once was. Personnel files were only available on those active, and employees portals were just as updated and bland, which left the barracks of the paper trail the Port Mafia refuses to have: the records room.
Whose records are inaccessible to those below the outranking underboss status.
Chuuya, unfortunately, ended up as collateral damage in this ploy, a patsy for the smallest of crimes to which she had no idea how to answer to if she got caught. As there's no cctv-like security system set for the records level of the third tower, it would be easy for her to lie should anyone with true authority ask if she was there while also being easy to assume that Chuuya was just looking into... Things. He worked his way to executive in order to find information on his past, whose to say he was actually finished.
Her shoes clank against the sterile steel floors, and her eyes follow the sound as it bounces off of the walls of the hall like a ping pong ball. There's nothing in this tunnel other than herself, her dormant alter ego, and her thoughts—her own poor memories playing back as she finds the journey into the den to be painfully longer than she would have liked.
"Why was your door unlocked?" Chuuya asked her, appeased by her bland answer of needing fresh air. "Why didn't you call anyone?" he followed up and she said she needed to be alone.
"Why?" he was like a child in his need for answers and clarification on top of that. It was obnoxious enough to make her laugh, a genuinely sick sound that left her with her hands pulling the hair at her scalp as she stared at his torso wondering when he would notice it wasn't there, wondering if one wrong move would expose the black card amidst her white sheets, wondering what it was she actually felt that kept her in bed this long.
"Because I wasn't sure I was me."
In that way she knew Chuuya would understand, Chuuya would sympathize, and perhaps Chuuya would keep her secret for her if anything happened. Quinn needed to believe she could count on him at this point despite everything she's done, and though she knew she could in an almost unconditional way she just wasn't sure. After all, she found herself lied to by the liar.
The muscles at her jaw tighten as her teeth begin to grate against themselves; she nearly stops in her tracks steps away from the bright arch holding moldy boxes of paper files on the other side. She wants to call herself a fool but she cant, not until she knows the full story.
Hence the hours she spends searching through unalphabetized records, pinches from paper cuts on her thumbs subsiding before her blood could get anywhere incriminating, like the child photographs of the men that guard the bosses door or stand too long at the water cooler.
Or the picture of an infant Masamoto Juno held in the arms of her mother clipped to the corner of a manila folder.
Quinn swallows the lump in her throat that makes her want to puke and turns the page; Juno is ten and she glows with two pink braids framing her face as her parents frame her body behind her. In the opposite page theres a breakdown of her vitals with a small summary of her involvement in her family business, of the temper tantrums she throws at school and a fight she got in with a local boy. Theres a scribble at the bottom of this typed page in rushed japanese that she can't completely read, or rather can't completely pronounce. The words come out like a bad fraternity name except for the final word: yume, dreams.
Her thumb traces over the smile in the picture before flicking to the next page.
And theres nothing there.
Gunfire sings a horrific melody his lungs could give out to, and with a strong exhale smoke is added to the air. You wouldn't be able to place it, nor him with the sheer sounds of his breath, and Hirotsu finds a tranquil appreciation in the anonymity.
It's all over with a sigh.
"You're still not very good at sneaking up on people."
"I'll tell Kouyou to add it to my list of things to work on." he hears the way the young Machada is mocking the executive in her voice but he makes no move to negate in any reply, only a flick of his arm to drop the ashes at the end of his cigarette.
"Do you wish to speak with the dead?" the groans of the maimed now start their own symphony as feet shuffle around to deal the final blows. He takes another drag of his cigarette.
"I get enough of that keeping me up at night, I'm here to speak of the dead."
There's an unprecedented edge to her voice that Hirotsu has only heard rumors of, and a strength to her posture that he takes in with one eye before looking back to the cracks in the alley way. Fortune has favored many in the mafia, but in all his time he can't help but admit that it's favored her the most with all the opportunity she's stepped into without spilling a drop of blood. From being the bosses temporary plaything to an executives doll to dress, she's climbed the tower floors faster than most. But there was more to her than switching between the hands of higher ups and her involvement; there was more that he could see in the way her eyes casually darted around every exit while her body was lax yet in perfect stance to attack when necessary. There was a subtle kickstart to her reflexes that were like for like for the mafia regimen, a certain power she's obtained that did in fact make it just that much easier for her to sneak up on him.
If he were more involved with this growth, Hirotsu would dare to say he was proud, but her obsession with the Masamoto puzzle consistently ruins any pride anyone dares to have. As it clouds her concerns with her identity, it ultimately clouds the completion of any growth, and the strength of her upset masked by a cocky facade is a jumble of Juno's personality and Quinn's lived promotion.
"I am not the records, you know."
"I do know that." her curt reply is paired with an outstretched arm holding a folded triangle at her fingertips, a photograph stashed in her pockets he realizes when taking it from her hands, dust delicately staining his white gloves.
A child Masamoto surrounded by adults recognizable as her parents; draping over her shoulders are two braids framing a wide eyed smile frowned upon for census photos—but a child just cant help themselves.
"Executives and up are the only ones who have access to truly paper things." he muses, though Quinn doesn't oblige him with an answer, and answers is what she should already have if she's showing him such illicitly happy images.
"I don't know much of Juno" he says
"You've been here longer than anyone, of course you do, even if it's just whispers."
"What whispers are you looking for?" he asks.
She finally says "The whisper of her death, and how it was caused by the mafias own up and coming demon prodigy."
Hirotsu signs; Quinn always held the potential to be a beacon for trouble.
"Juno wasn't just some casualty to sporadic gunfire," she immediately argues when the silence isn't enough, "she was a casualty of intent. Clearly Mori wanted her to be killed, and her parents too," her words fall into the air with the rising smoke from Historu's dead cigarette and the clearing gunfire.
He can't tell if he should be sick by her insinuations of his boss or the new corpses that lay behind him, though neither have managed to bother him before.
"Hirotsu, please," she says in that innocent voice, the need that comes with her final word reminds him of her voice a year ago, the voice that was untouched from the chaos that effortlessly entered her veins.
He quickly folds the picture with his thumb and tosses it to the ground not wanting it in his presence longer than necessary, the edges already beginning to stain and fold in on themselves from the wet pavement.
"They were sympathizers," the word should hold poison but instead he finds only indifference "the Masamotos maintained a ring to relieve Mori of his seat as the boss. They wanted the mafia to return to the chaos it was before, because it was a chaos the previous boss dictated them to live in. Mori only acted as he should have."
He waits for the silence to be short lived, for her to say something, for her to accept the facts given, but no words come from her mouth.
It's not what she asked. It wasn't the answer Quinn wanted.
"But she survived," Quinn's voice wavers with a required anger, something new to the bite of words before.
"Yes."
"And Dazai was the one sent to pull the trigger?"
"Always."
Hums fill his throat as nimble fingers work on the task at hand. Gently each digit glides to fold perfect creases in a paper at his desk, body lax and mind clear despite the piercing silence that surrounds him. Dazai has had a good day, a day filled with absolutely nothing. Life at the agency was slow the past few days and he decided that he was into it and enjoyed the peace after so much chaos. Granted, Kunikida did smack him around a few times and he did experiment with the more deadly extremes of auto erotica asphyxiation, but it was good enough to get the blood flowing so he could sit for the next six hours rounding past the agencies official closing mark.
A rush of footsteps threaten to disturb the peace as the door to the office swings open, red hair flying past Dazai's desk and rummaging through a drawer with an apology for his hurried return. Dazai politely waves at Tanazaki slowly spinning in his chair and completely unbothered by the interruption until the boy stops short of leaving the door.
"Oh, by the way, I think I saw Quinn heading to your apartment,"
Dazai's foot stops its swaying motion, and the rest of his calm exterior drops for a second. She never just dropped by his home unannounced. She would always show up at the agency first, make it seem like she wasn't even after his company, and by the end of the night he would lead her to trip on her own feet in the grasslands.
With a small laugh, Dazai smiles. "She just can't stay away," he tells Tanazaki in an aloof fashion that has his physical expressions contrasting the on-edge feeling that seeped into every fiber of his body.
When he finally leaves, Dazai sits still in the darkness, his brain running through scenarios as his eyes stare blankly at the lowly lit floors. The crane he worked so hard to form with his fingertips suddenly crushed between his thumbs as he flicks the mound of paper away from him.
She's been caught, he considers, found out as a result of poor lies that Mai Sakurai could see through and share like a new global phenomenon. She's let her rouse take over her life, she had poor judgement, she came to a conclusion with her digging and—.
She found him out.
Yikes.
Only a crack of the door is open and Dazai finds himself hit by two sudden senses: the repeated sounds of what seemed like a slamming fist and the smell of fresh food the home significantly lacked. Despite the comfort of the smell he steadily stepped further into the room until he reached the kitchen where all the sounds were at their source.
With a steady flick of her wrist, Quinn repeatedly smacks a literal hammer against what seemed to be some kind of meat—chicken perhaps. The act was completely domestic but he was vividly picturing flesh being beaten in with blunt objects until the skin gave way like a levee for blood.
With every thwack the meat would grow tender and flatten against the surface, but there was no signs of success in her expression. Her stare was dead against the killed meat, strands of hair that fell from a poor knot behind her head sticking to her skin from the sheer effort of it all. What did that poor carcass do to her?
She pulls the hammer back, but before it could make another hit he swiftly moves to grab the top from behind her keeping her still in her kitchen attack stance.
"Looks to me like a job well done,"
She twitches ever so slightly before her eyes meet his in a piercing stare that turned the iris blacker than he's ever seen in her profile. Maybe it was just a blink, but his body is on edge again from the sight of sudden difference in her eyes before she looks away. It could have been pure surprise or it could have been pure malice; Dazai is uncomfortable with the fact that he can't be sure.
"If you like chewing rubber, I guess." she mumbles, she grunts, she puffs in her exhales and lets go of the hammer so he can drop it with a loud thunk into the sink behind her. There are so many signs of struggle in the way she moves now, so many telling details that tell him to get her the fuck out of his own house, but he just watches her as she seasons the meat that should be bruised, nimble fingers working everything into the flesh with an intense focus.
"You're making me dinner?" he questions, now looking to the stove where a pot of rice sits in his own steam like a body in a sauna. Behind him he hears the swish of a knife cooly cutting the air after being unearthed from the drawer; a quick glance and he sees Quinn hurriedly slicing through the chicken.
"I'm making you dinner." she says with a slice of the knife hard enough to dent his cheap cutting board. He opens the pot to pick out a few grains with his fingers and hums as a response.
"What's the occasion?" Dazai reaches for more, the lid dangling from the fingertips of his other hand. Quinn laughs, and it's a dangerous cackle with bass reminiscent of incredibly delayed thunder.
"Where do I start?"
"The beginning is always good."
"Well, it begins with you murdering a twelve year old girl."
The rice goes sour in his mouth. Quinn is now wiping off the poultry goo on the front of her already stained shirt.
"That doesn't seem very celebratory." Dazai narrows an eye as he watches her fabric covered fingers slowly trace the blade.
"It wasn't meant to be a celebration." her eyes are far too interested in the knife when she takes it out of her shirt and inspects the sharper ends in the light. He makes a point of clutching the lid in his hand tighter and holding it at the level of his chest like a makeshift shield. "It's your last supper."
He opens his mouth to say how ironic her biblical reference is in attempt to make time but it doesn't come out when the poignant swish of a blade through air fills the room instead. The knife she was so consumed with now thrown to the wall by Dazai's head, and if it weren't for his quick shift to the right it would have severely damaged his skull.
More tragically, his elbow tipped the rice pot onto the ground. The chances of dinner for him were slimmer than ever.
"That wasn't very nice, I wasn't ready yet," he pants between words as he slides to the opposite end of the small kitchen when Quinn seems to follow, hand dipping into the sink to grab the hammer he originally thought was her only choice of weapon.
"I'm so sorry, do you need a second to get yourself together?" she stands straight as she coos, head tilted to the side and arms lax like the whole threatening aura that caused her violent outburst was past her.
"Yeah that would actually be great—,"
"Fuck you!" her yell is like a battle cry as she charges towards him with a swing, and and the pot lid that was his means of defense is thwacked out of his hand with so much force he feels his hands burning as his skin prepares to display red welts.
"This all seems like very misplaced rage—,"
"Seven years ago Mori noticed an increase in sympathizers for the old boss. The child responsible for the army was tasked with taking them all out."
"That child was following very strict orders similar to yourself, all the time."
"Would you just let me finish!" with another scream she lunges towards him but Dazai still manages to slide out if harms way like the greasy bastard he is. Instead of coming into contact with his skull as she intended Quinn has herself stuck between the cheap linoleum of his kitchen cabinets, she huffs again, angry, and from afar Dazai realizes how little of a plan she actually had without attempting for an upper hand. There's an eerie calm that begins to settle in him knowing he'll likely make it out of tonight unscathed, and he considers it catastrophically uncharacteristic.
"You should really get to the point, the villains always loose when they take their time with their fancy speeches."
Her head seems to spin all the way around her neck to find him, pupils dilated, shoulders rising so fast her heart rate picks up by ten fold. "I'm the villain?" she snorts, and her hands let go of the hammer bringing his cabinets to now completely fall off the wall. "Since when were you so black and white about things, Dazai?"
She slowly heads towards him but he doesn't move. He decides against speaking, too, when the skin on her fists fall whiter than her already pale complexion, and with nothing left to physically use as a shield he gently raises his hands in front of him as if they alone will give her the will to stop.
The exact opposite unfolds in Quinn's head at the sight of his fingers nearly beckoning her, hands urging her close because they know they can stop her in closed quarters. The move alone is like he's raising the gun all over again, because God knows where she goes when his skin finally touches hers. That's what she's avoided all this time after all, the possibility of the void and the suffocation of being pulled from existence from the brush of hands.
Quinn swallows. She's shaking as she finally stops her steps, but in her lack of movement Dazai seems to believe he has clearance to then move towards her, and in a flash her hands grab the shitty kitchen towel tucked into her pants to thwack it at his face.
Naturally, he dodges the juvenile attack, though only to end up close enough for the towel to wrap around his wrist in a tight knot.
When Dazai's pupils dilate at the slight trap, Quinn refrains from letting the edges of her mouth curl into a maniacal grin as she uses all the force she can muster to flip his body to the floor. Something snaps at the collision with the ground, and before she could consider a final blow she is brought down with him by a tug of the towel.
As it collides with the ground, Quinn feel's her jaw press into her top row of teeth cracking the shallow bones. Her hand still wrapped around the cheap fabric able to snatch it when Dazai lets go—but she doesn't rush to her feet. She waits, and the loose teeth she spits out with blood are soon replaced like a drill in her gums, and her hanging jaw soon reassembles itself to bite on her tongue.
Blood still seeps into her mouth as she watches Dazai reach a kneel, but she swallows the taste. It's delicious, it's powerful, it leaves her insatiable even as she lays on the floor watching him stand, watching him step forward, watching him actualize an upper hand.
"You let Juno watch as you slaughtered her parents." the words spit like poison as the red stains at her lips begin to dry out. When Dazai's feet take up her eye sight he musters a laugh.
"To be fair I didn't know she was watching."
"Yes, you did," she spits again, blood staining the bottoms of his pants and dripping to his shoes. "You saw the eyes in the floorboards the moment you stepped inside. You smiled at her the moment you realized she was tucked away, like it was your Christmas."
If Quinn was paying attention to the twitch of his mouth she would have noticed the frown, she would have assumed his disappointment in her interpretation of him after all this time, but she can't give a fuck about him and his fictional expertise when its her reality he's shaken in that intentionally malicious way—so she trips him with a pull at the hem of his pants, legs crawling her way up his body to pull his arms over his head at a lose bandage. Her thumb barely centimeters away from his skin as she watches his stoic expression staring through her head.
She's too close, even as she inches her head towards his in some ridiculous display of power. Tendrils crawl across her skin, and she doesn't want to consider they could be from fear.
"Are you done now?" his breath smells giving the words a horrifying toxin, and all the flipping and tipping makes her want to throw up.
"I want you to tell me—,"
"Why? You know why, you know the whole story,"
"I want you to tell me why you waited for me to find out!" She yells and the movement pulls too hard at the dried skin of her lips that crack to let out drops of blood, and with gravity they fall onto the surface beneath her, under Dazai's eye and down his cheek in the pathway of a tear.
Dazai closes his eyes, and a painful relief comes across his face while his body is lax.
She could suffocate him now, she could hold him to the floor and wait for him to stay like a corpse forever. She could keep his cadaver, she could make it her prize, she could hold it up to the mirror and tell Juno to fuck off for good now.
But she lets him breathe, and lets him inhale slowly with her still against her chest only to let the wind from his nose brush past her cheek. The power that kept her there gone, and with the next breath she rolls herself to lay at his side, to breathe at his pace, and to lay with her body lax as a painful relief slowly washes itself through her body.
"Dazai..." she's not sure if she's actually breathing but she can feel her chest rise and fall, and can hear the air brush out of her nose in what must be a slow exhale.
"Quinn." his voice is all too comfortable amidst the pain she put him through, and for a split second she feels bad for making him suffer in his own home.
The second doesn't last.
"If I ever see you again, I will shoot you." her statement is definitive, less of a warning and more of a decision that sets this moment on the floor as a fluke, an emotional burst that is still tinged with doubt until she willed it away.
She can hear movement beside her, and quickly she turns her head to see Dazai's laying body turn on his side like the leaning is so casual with the blood stained tear threatening to stain the white lines in his dress shirt with the quietest "plop", yet stagnant on his pale skin.
"I would expect nothing less."
Quinn leaves when all the lights in the complex are off, with the sounds of the city at bay making the creaking close of Dazai's door echo across the street. Her hair is tossed over her shoulder with no attempt to mask the mess of her days old clothes, eyes in a daze as she makes it down the winding steps and to the street, waiting at the stoplight.
When she looks into the empty road, Chuuya is almost afraid she placed his bike in the sea of darkness ahead with him mounted and watching for her every move, but her eyes are empty and she blinks once, turns her head, and walks away as though she has done nothing wrong.
A/N AHEAD
remember when i said "yeah i'll totally finish this by the years end"? well like most things i say regarding timelines, it was an elaborate hoax that even i myself was fooled by. its chill though, we're still having a good time, right?
i wanna give a huge thanks to those who have followed me on the journey of writing this and the newcomers who see potential. i always believe in writing for yourself (as this is obviously evidence for in every possible way) but knowing that someone else loves my on fire garbage can too… damn, thats powerful stuff. as jane krakowski said, you're the real stars.
a big emphasis on staying safe right now. hygiene, of course, is key, and if you are locally prohibited from going out please please don't fight them on it. we're all stuck but we're stuck together so feel free to PM me, DM me, whatever communication you can get your hands on and wanna complain, gush, or theorize through. go right ahead and i'll do the same back! an example of things to discuss: i've started watching rwby and am realizing that quinn and chuuya are color coordinated with neo and roman and i feel both encouraged and threatened! thanks!
so as always, stay warm, stay safe (!theres no such thing as too many exclamation points!not kidding none can do justice please take care of yourselves!), and stay sassy old sport—jackie.
