Author's Note: Warning—one turkey was harmed in the making of this fic. Also, many em-dashes.
A Very Pogue Thanksgiving
The Chateau was normally chilly in the mornings because somebody'd left a window open, but this Thanksgiving, it was oven-warmed and faintly scented of butter. Golden light poured out of the kitchen, and a soft, rosy-hued dawn was peeking through the east-facing windows from over the sea.
"UGHHHHH!" Kie groaned into the midst of the post-card perfect setting. "Hate you all. So loud!"
"It wouldn't seem so loud if you were up and helping," Pope put in, over the testy clatter of a roasting pan.
She hauled another pillow over her head, but she was pretty sure he was passive-aggressively pan clattering now, and the noise only increased.
"Kieeeee!" A groan sounded from across the house.
"Kieeeeeeeeeeee!" A more masculine groan this time, dragging her name into something akin to a zombie-wail.
She grunted into her mountain of pillows, already drifting back to sleep.
"Kie?" the third try was more plaintive, and sleepy-Sarah was hard to resist. Kie hauled herself off the pull-out couch, trailing blankets behind her like mummy wraps, with her head still sagging forward onto the pillow she clutched to her chest. She waddled through the door to John B's bedroom and collapsed on the bed with an "Ufff."
"Your boyfriends," Sarah said seriously.
"Are so loud," John B whined.
Many hands caught her blanket-wrapped form and she was tugged and tumbled upward until she ended up nestled right between them. Sarah's arms soft around her shoulders and sweet-smelling. John B's stubbly chin velcroing itself into her hair and his morning breath—which always smelled like Colombian roast coffee even before he'd had coffee—drifting past her right ear. She ummfffed more contentedly now. Sarah was the best at cuddling, of all the Pogues. She got why John B was so bad at getting out of bed these days. Whereas Kie's own boyfriends, she was reminded, had abandoned her so early the rooster wasn't even up yet.
"At least JJ isn't being loud indoors," she said, a sleepy attempt at defending him because he had, after all, slipped his hand down her pajama shorts before he left so she'd woken from a steamy dream into a slow-cresting orgasm that he didn't even ask her to reciprocate before he'd kissed her forehead and left her drowsing on the best of the couch pillows. It was, JJ had always claimed, the best way to get around Kie's normal amounts of morning grouchiness.
You couldn't tell it by his grades, but that boy was smart.
Of course, Pope had then ruined it with the first of his seventeen programmed holiday-cooking reminders going off, then bustling out of bed with such alacrity that she'd been bounced nearly off the edge by the recoil of the springs. "The buns!" he'd hissed when she protested. "Do you not want the buns to rise?"
Kie had been pretty sure the only thing she wanted the buns to do was stay right there, under the covers and within easy groping distance. However, it was possible she'd misinterpreted the whole buns exchange, as she'd gone back to dreaming about a boat made of rainbows right after that. In the dream, she'd made a mental note to show JJ how the rainbow fuel mixture could be adjusted to lower the amount of emissions and burn more cleanly, if you just dialed in the prismatic control matrix. But on awaking, her remaining mental note had not been clear enough to revolutionize marine combustion engine design.
Alas.
Her first clue that she'd fallen back asleep was that the rainbow fuel mixtures started to make sense again. The second was that there was a lion-sized kitten laying on her back and he was very heavy and purred very loudly. But she didn't have time to contemplate this properly before a yelp of pain from Pope brought her around again.
The kitten's purrs broke off abruptly and John B's weight lifted from where it had been reconfiguring her elbow's bone structure. "Buddy? You okay in there?"
"Crap," Pope yelped back. "Crud crud crap." Pans clanged, and not in a passive-aggressive way.
"That sounds bad, John B," Sarah murmured, not opening her eyes. "You should go check. And maybe snag us some French toast on your way back?"
"Why do I have to go? I went to check on JJ last night when he sounded like he'd fallen off the roof."
"I warned you that was just his trying-to-muffle-an-orgasm noise," Sarah said. "How exactly would he hurt himself at three am?"
"The night before that, he did sort of fall off the dock at three am," Kie said.
"Thought he saw a mermaid under the dock."
"But it was just a really big carp."
"Which is why you shouldn't go out to smoke a joint when you can't sleep."
"Especially when it's JJ's cousin's Cripple."
"Frick! Darn this stupid…"
"Coming, dear!" John B hauled himself off the bed, making it bounce roughly as much as it would if they'd displaced a moose.
"Hmmrrrr." Sarah let out a happy sigh and curled more tightly around Kie, her fingernails playing softly through her hair. "Where was JJ going this morning when he was starting the engine so loudly?"
"Fishing." Kie smiled a little without opening her eyes. "He was worried since we can't afford a turkey that we wouldn't have anything for Thanksgiving."
"Did he not see the like, twelve bags of groceries Pope showed up with last night?"
"You mean the roofing supplies?" John B came back in, juggling a cup of coffee and a roll that was so hot he kept tossing it between his mouth and his hand.
"Why would Pope bring bags of roofing supplies?" Sarah sat up and stole the roll out of his hand, swiping a tissue out of the box next to the bed to insulate her hand so it didn't get burned.
Kie tried to struggle to sitting, but all the blankets and pillows were hopelessly tangled around her. Sarah fed her a bite of buttery roll, when she couldn't wrestle free to get one herself.
"Because the roof is leaking. When the roof is leaking, Pope always shows up with some tarpaper and shingles from the leftovers of jobs his dad does around the island. Big Heyward always makes the Kooks pay the per-case fee for materials after hurricanes, then sells the leftovers to locals at a discount, and the too-small-to-use scraps end up on the Chateau roof," John B explained.
"Up?" Kie waved a tired hand in the air. John B grabbed her hand and hauled her, one-armed, out of the blanket quicksand. "Thanks!" She smiled at him, and stole his coffee. "Pope's usually pretty quick about it because when he isn't, JJ and John B fix the roof with crap they stole out of Mr. Sanchez's burn pile at the edge of his property. Not," Kie noted after a sip of coffee, "always waterproof things."
"Roof gets fixed," John B said, wriggling onto the bed, stuffing his bare feet under the blanket and propping his head in Sarah's lap. "Who cares how it happens?"
"Flap," Kie said immediately, covering her eyes.
"Got it," Sarah said and when Kie re-opened her eyes, the flap of John B's boxers was securely closed again. "So wait, why didn't you tell JJ that Pope brought groceries for Thanksgiving, if you knew last night they weren't roofing supplies? Then maybe he wouldn't have woken us up at the ass-crack of dawn with the pull start of the outboard motor."
"Because then he wouldn't get to go fishing on Thanksgiving." Kie smiled. "JJ loves fishing. Now he'll come home all bright-eyed and grinning, and sneak Pope off to the surf shed for a quickie that will knock him right out of his oven-timer fueled panic spiral, which none of us will have been able to manage all morning. Plus, then we'll have fish, too."
She high-fived a horizontal John B, who smiled up at her. "Coffee me?"
"No," Sarah said when he made no move to sit up off her bare legs, just opened up his mouth like a baby bird. "No, no, noooooo. This idea is bad."
"It's fine, it's the blue cup," John B said. Kie tilted the cup, Sarah squealed and closed her eyes, and the coffee poured in a steady stream right into John B's waiting mouth. He swallowed, smacking his lips appreciatively.
"The blue cup's kinda square," Kie said. "So it pours better."
"Not our first rodeo," John B said.
"Pope?"
"Smashed his toe when the tower of baking pans slid off the counter. He's fine."
"Thanks for checking," Sarah said, feeding him a scrap of roll in gratitude.
"Just doing my duty as the man of the hou—what is it, Kie?" John B interrupted himself when he saw her staring out the window.
"Is that a—" she mumbled, blinking in disbelief.
"Turkey?" Sarah said, equally shocked.
John B bolted to sitting, jarring Kie's hand and getting hot coffee all over his bare chest in the process. "It's a sign!" he crowed, sluicing coffee off his chest. "Arm yourselves, troops!"
"This is also," Sarah began, "a very bad idea."
#
By the time JJ got back with a full stringer of fish, they were both armed and ready. Sarah was wearing a camouflage crop top and Kie had one of Pope's red bandannas tied around her head, Rambo-style. Pope had grabbed a pitchfork, Kie had a machete, John B was wielding a gaff hook and Sarah was trying to use Big John's old angle grinder to sharpen some rebar from Sanchez's burn heap into a spear, while Pope whined at her to put on safety glasses.
"This is," JJ claimed, eyeing Kie's bikini and machete, "possibly the hottest, weirdest thing a man has ever come home to."
"Nice fish," Pope said, stealing a kiss.
"Nice fish yourself," JJ said back, copping a quick feel.
"I saw that," John B said.
"Flap!" Kie said.
"Got it," Sarah said, and zipped his fly for him.
"We gotta go!" John B said, pointing his gaff hook into the forest. "The turkey's getting away!"
"Hold up, one sec!" JJ said, darting into the house and slinging his whole stringer of fish into the fridge, unwrapped.
Pope winced, watching him through a window. "It's a good thing he's cute."
Kie fist-bumped him in solidarity. "Also, shockingly skilled at oral sex."
"And in the interest of changing that subject, are you sure you girls want to go on this hunt?" John B said.
Kie lifted her machete, and also her eyebrow. "Are you sure you boys are gonna want to have said that out loud?"
"First, it was only John B. The rest of us boys did not say that," Pope said. "Though to be precise, you do loudly hate hunting. And Sarah is a vegetarian."
"Yeah, but I've always wanted to kill things with a spear," Sarah said, admiring her freshly sharpened pole of rebar.
John B shivered, his grin lopsided. "Sexy."
"The turkey is an invasive species," Kie said. "So I'm technically resetting the biological equilibrium of the island. It probably escaped from one of the Kook's gardens after they decided it'd be an exotic pet to show off to their Kooky friends. Also, I do really want to eat pie but I do not want to celebrate a holiday of an indigenous people having to use their winter stores to rescue some starving white men from the consequences of their own mediocrity. Therefore, I feel I could celebrate with more integrity if I eat a bird I hunted and killed my own damn self."
"Did you follow that?" John B asked the group at large, just as JJ nodded decisively and said, "Damn straight." And Pope said, "Actually, that would be a surprisingly ecologically friendly way to reclaim the cultural narrative. Also, good exercise before a big meal."
"Freedommmm!" Sarah raised her makeshift spear to howl, Braveheart-style, which frightened their turkey prey farther into the woods.
JJ dove under the stairs and grabbed a spear gun. "Wait for me!"
They stampeded into the woods, the turkey taking off with a squawk toward the highway. They pelted after him, and many near-fatalities then occurred in short order. The first was when they narrowly avoided being roadkill—Pope, after the driver turned to gawk at Kie's bikini. Almost had to call a halt to the hunt to get a tetanus shot—JJ, when he tried to pole-vault Mr. Sanchez's burn pile using Sarah's rebar spear. Fortunately, Kie remembered that he'd had a tetanus shot last Tuesday, when he got a nail through the hand trying to dismantle an abandoned trailer to build a ladder up to the old water tower in search of stashed pirate treasure. After that, they almost were crushed when a leaning tree was knocked the rest of the way down—Sarah, pulled to safety at the last minute by Pope, who was screetching BE CAREFUL YOU'RE UNINSURED. Nearly bitten by a squirrel, while making out inside a hollow of a tree previously claimed by that animal—Pope again, aided and abetted by JJ. Then nearly bitten by a snake, who fell on them from an overhead branch while they were making out in the open—Kie, aided and abetted again by a very helpful JJ.
Fortunately, Kie wasn't afraid of snakes, so she just caught it behind the head and tossed it away while JJ squealed and told at least three tall tales about people they peripherally knew dying of snakebites.
Sarah scratched her head and said, "I'm hungry and we haven't seen the turkey in a long time. Maybe we should head home. Plus, John B's the only one who hasn't almost died, which is never a good sign."
"What's that supposed to mean?" her husband protested.
"Don't move," JJ said, his eyes zeroing in on something behind John B, who shrieked and dove to hide behind Sarah.
"Really?" she said, rolling her eyes as she adjusted her camo crop top.
"I said not to move," JJ griped, as the turkey took off into the woods again, startled by John B's very high-pitched noises, and presumably, also by his lack of chivalry.
"You say a lot of things," John B said. "And in my defense, most of them don't make me safer."
"True that," JJ agreed, then thrust his spear gun toward the forest. "After it!"
Pope vaulted a log and took off like a sprinter, JJ hot on his heels shouting, "We will feast on your burnt bones!" to the turkey.
"You don't have to be cruel about it!" Kie shot back, outpacing both of them with a lithe duck around a tree and a burst of speed.
John B thudded along behind, always sluggish when he wasn't running from the cops. "Can't we just eat rolls? Pope already made rolls and they were super buttery and delicious."
"Pope!" Kie called. "Rebound me." She long-jumped from a tree, her machete glimmering in the sunlight as she landed just to the left of the turkey. It re-routed with a squawk, only to run beak-first into Pope's pitchfork. The turkey back-pedaled with both wings, headed toward Sarah, who threw up her hands with a startled scream, then took a wild swing with her rebar at the last second. Miraculously, it winged the turkey, sending it pin-wheeling unevenly back to the forest floor just in time for JJ to loose the spear gun at it.
With a horrible cry that sounded like John B forced to get out of bed with no coffee, the turkey flap-ran away, trailing the tether of the speargun behind it. JJ held tight and the spearpoint lurched and tore free. "Shit!" he yelled. "It's getting away!"
John B dove headlong and tackled the turkey, which made a much angrier sound—more like Kie forced to get out of bed with no coffee, now. There was a lot of flapping and whining—John B—and quite a bit of crowing and excited hopping—JJ—as well as some truly vicious attempts at sending John B to the urgent care—the turkey.
"Oh fuck!" Sarah said.
"We really need to get health insurance," Pope said.
"Jesus Christ," Kie said, and waded in to calmly wring the turkey's neck.
Sarah cheered, Kie asked the boys, not for the first time, why they couldn't do anything without her, and Pope wet-wiped her hands.
"Hot," JJ said, and high-fived her.
"Nice spear gun action," she told him.
"I've been told I know how to handle my…spear," he said, making a lewd gesture with the shaft.
"By whom?" his boyfriend asked.
"Literally who has ever said that?" his girlfriend said.
"Burnnnnn," John B chortled, bounding back to his feet and bleeding from at least three different peck marks on his face and neck. Pope wet-wiped him, too.
"Let's get you to the urgent care, baby," Sarah said, slinging John B's arm over her shoulder so she could lead him back to the road. "Again."
"If we ever get the gold back," Pope said wistfully, picking up Sarah and John B's weapons and trotting along behind, "I'm making all of you buy health insurance."
#
That night, the sweet potatoes were runny—because Pope had turned off the oven before they'd gone hunting. The rolls were cold—because he'd made them that morning. And the beer cans smelled vaguely like fish—because of JJ-related reasons.
But the turkey smelled good roasting in the firepit, and it looked good after Sarah Instagram-filtered it and posted it in her stories. It didn't necessarily taste good, but Kie considered that unimportant because it seemed suitably Pogue like to cook Thanksgiving over an open fire. Also, she was in a good mood because they'd killed a non-native species with their bare hands (hers) and a spear gun (her hot boyfriend's) which was pretty badass. Also, she'd snuck behind the Chateau to fool around with Pope earlier, and JJ had caught them and then fooled them both twice as good. Now she was feeling so loopy and relaxed that even her fish-scented beer was going down pretty well.
"In epic fantasy novels," Pope noted, poking at the stick-speared turkey carcass, "they roast all their kills on a spit over a fire and they're…good? And not burnt on the outside and bloody on the inside while also being stringy as heck."
"That's fiction for you. I bet the girls all orgasm every time in those stories, crying out the hero's name," Sarah said.
"Ooh, Sir Gallard!" Kie mocked. "And they come in unison, too. Like synchronized swimmers."
"You don't orgasm every time?" John B said to Sarah, looking crestfallen.
"You guys don't come in unison?" JJ said to Pope and Kie, looking thunderstruck.
"Twice," Pope said.
"Only twice," Kie confirmed. "And you didn't come at the same time as us either time."
"Also, it looked like a lot of work," Pope said.
JJ grinned. "I don't mind work, especially the hard kinds."
"You faked it?" John B said mournfully. "Really?"
"Only twice," Sarah said, patting his shoulder.
"I'm so disappointed in you," Kie said, though it wasn't clear which of the two she was disappointed in. "We're definitely going to talk about that later."
"We definitely are." John B pouted.
"It's all in the tongue," JJ advised, leaning over to pat John B's shoulder. "I'll show you, bro. Nothing to it."
"Ooh, I think this piece is done!" Sarah pointed at one part of the turkey, hopping a little in her seat.
JJ ripped it off and popped it in his mouth. "Ow!" he breathed out around the meat, trying to blow on it and eat it at the same time. "Hot! Hot! Also, definitely not done. I think I've got salmonella."
"Not just for salmons anymore, folks," Kie intoned, and John B burst out laughing. "Remember that one Thanksgiving when we had to take JJ to the urgent care, and he kept insisting he wasn't sick because—"
"Because you can only get salmonella from salmons and he hadn't had any salmons," Pope finished. "Again, another holiday that could have been rescued by health insurance. The co-pays on the office visits alone…"
"Rose ordered a five-layer cake with our family crest sculpted in gilded mascarpone on top," Sarah said, slumping back against a log with her oversized sweater slipping off her shoulder. "And she keeps texting me, expecting me to go home and eat it with my psychopath brother so she can post about her perfect step-family on Instagram. I think I'd rather be at the urgent care, projectile vomiting with JJ."
"I'm pretty good company at the urgent care," JJ said, patting her shoulder. "One time, I belched the whole ABCs to keep John B from getting bored in the waiting room. 'Cept I puked on E."
"And X," John B said.
"And that wasn't even the time we were there for salmonella," Kie said. "That was for when John B got an axe in his foot."
"Fish is done!" Pope announced, pulling another crispy fried fish from the frying pan.
"Lemme test it," JJ insisted, and proceeded to burn his tongue on another mouthful before pronouncing it safe for Pogue consumption. "We already did our round at the urgent care today and we don't have the gas money to go back."
"We don't?" Kie winced. "Shit, then how am I gonna get home for my Thanksgiving? We were supposed to have crawfish pie."
"Yeah, but also your mom would be riding your ass about college applications and what you were going to wear to the Kook Winter Ball, so…that'sh a win in my book," JJ slurred, trying to talk while pressing his burned tongue to a cold beer can.
"Spanx," Kie said indignantly to JJ and the beer can obscuring most of his face. "She wants me to wear Spanx under my dress because she says that's 'how everyone does it.' As if that's not reinforcing an impossible standard of feminine beauty and also bringing us right back into the corset and foot-binding phase of misogynistic society and seriously? Why do Spanx even come in a size zero? Spanx in any size are just a capitalist translation of the notion that female bodies in their natural shape are unacceptable. There are so many things wrong with Spanx I don't even know where to start."
JJ shifted against his log. "If you're gonna keep talking about spanking I'm gonna need a blanket over here."
Pope poked him in the shoulder. "Honey. We've talked about making sex jokes to lighten the mood when Kie's political ranting. It comes across as unsupportive."
"Right." JJ clasped Kie's shoulder. "Kie, I'm fully supportive of you wearing as little as you want under your Winter Ball gown, in the name of feminism. For the five minutes you're going to be there before I sneak you out the back on my dirt bike."
"Just long enough to see Pope working the grill in his hot leather apron?"
"Damn straight." They high fived.
"Where are the marshmallows?" Sarah asked. "If the turkey's never going to be done, I wanna at least roast a marshmallow before I hitchhike home to my mascarpone nightmare of a family Thanksgiving."
"John B ate the last marshmallow already," JJ reported. "And seriously, Sarah, I'll trade you your family's stuck-up cake for my dad, prolly calling me from the bar later to pick him up when he's too drunk to even stagger home. As if giving a drunk ass a ride home on a bike is so easy. I literally had to tie him to my back with bailing twine to keep him from tipping us over last time."
"Next time, just tie him to an oil barrel and push him into the ocean," muttered Kie. "Pass the chips."
"John B ate all the chips," Sarah reported, handing over the uneaten half of her fish instead.
"At least your dad's still here to call you," John B said, squinting out over the darkened ocean the way he always did when he missed his father.
Sarah snuggled closer back into his knees. "Maybe I only faked one and a half orgasms?" she offered.
He squinted down at her, suspicious. "Really?"
"No, but I could say that if it would make you feel better about your dad."
He kissed her hair. "You're the best girlfriend."
"You're the best boyfriend."
"Best boyfriend minus two points," Kie opined. "Which we will be discussing later."
"Another fish done!" Pope announced. Then, "Dammit, JJ!"
"Give that one another minute," he said, swallowing the stolen bite and then fanning his tongue with his hand to cool it. "It's pretty slimy still."
"Why, JJ?" Kie spread her hands. "Just…why?"
"Obvious," he said, digging in the cooler. "Hey, where are all the popsicles?"
"Obvious," answered Pope, sneaking a bite of fish from the hidden skillet he had on the far side of the fire that Kie had been keeping his secret about all night.
"We don't have the best track record of cooking stuff over fires," JJ said, abandoning the popsicle hunt and turning back to Kie. "And I have the most iron stomach. So it's better I test everything before you guys get turkey-manella, since we're out of gas money to get to the urgent care. Also, the first bite is usually the only bite you're gonna get, with John B eating the last of everything around here. You thought I wouldn't need to go fishing, just because Pope brought a ton of food. Except what are we eating for Thanksgiving dinner? Fish. Because John B ate everything else. And that's after we spear-gunned an extra turkey!"
"I'm a growing boy!" John B protested.
"Something's growing all right," Sarah said, patting his belly lovingly.
"Flap!" barked JJ, and Sarah looked down, then re-zipped John B's fly. "Sorry, my bad."
"What about you, Pope?" Sarah asked. "We pretty much know why all of us are ditching our shitty family Thanksgivings—"
"Dude, you didn't even get me started on my uncle Ralph and his crazy political rants," Kie muttered.
"But why aren't you home?" Sarah stole John B's beer and took a sip. "Aren't your parents going to be mad?"
"Nah. We always have Thanksgiving tomorrow so we can keep the store open and snatch up all the sales the day of for people who forgot to buy butter and stuff," Pope said. "Plus, they always give me Thanksgiving off so I can be here for you guys. I think my mom figures otherwise you'd all starve. She even sent over an extra pumpkin pie with the groceries this year."
"Uh," John B said, fidgeting guiltily. "Was that supposed to be for today?"
"Literally what would a pumpkin pie be for, if not Thanksgiving?" Kie asked, knocking his hat off his head and into his lap.
Pope didn't look mad, though. He just smiled, as he handed JJ an ice cube out of the cooler for his burnt tongue, then slipped Kie a perfectly-crisp fish out of the secret frying pan, whispering, "Don't worry, that was just the decoy pie.".
"My mom always says, the true meaning of Thanksgiving," Pope said to the group at large, "isn't just the thanks part. It's also the giving. And there's nobody I'd rather give to than you bunch of assholes."
"Aww, that's sweet, Pope. Love you, too, bud," John B said. Then, "Wait, has anyone seen the last beer?"
Author's Note: The rebar turkey hunt is a true story, courtesy of some dirtbag climbers I know celebrating Thanksgiving at Indian Creek. Their hunt was not, shall we say, successful. Kie's notions of turkeys not being native to Outer Banks is incorrect- they were native, and then were hunted to extinction. However, I don't see the Pogues stopping to google for biological accuracy when a hunt is afoot. Kie's machete is in honor of redremembrance's awesome fic, in which Luke Maybank was threatened with a machete. As he always should be.