Disclaimer: *sighs* How many times do I have to say it? Still not mine . .
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A/N: Much thanks to all of my reviewers! *hands out root and holly shaped cookies* If anybody has any ideas, please feel free to tell me.
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Holly and Root had been sorting and pricing items for the past couple of hours. Holly sighed in frustration.
"Y'know what?" she snapped angrily.
Root looked up from an old pair of shoes. "What?"
"I don't care how much his coat is worth!" Holly yelled. "I'm hungry!" she said and got up, various items falling off her lap and mingling with the other piles. She stormed off to the kitchen, leaving Root to the mess.
Root got up more carefully, putting the items into the correct piles and then following Holly into the kitchen where he found her staring moodily into the refrigerator. "What was that about?"
"I've been pricing your old crap for the past three hours and I'm hungry! There isn't anything wrong with that!" Holly snapped.
Root blinked, surprised. Sure it was boring, but it really wasn't this big a deal. "You could've stopped earlier."
Holly sighed and sat down at the kitchen table loudly, the refrigerator door still hanging open. "You don't know how lucky you are, do you?"
"Considering that I have no idea what you're talking about, I guess I don't," Root replied, closing the door and sitting down next to Holly.
"You have all of that stuff, as well as the stuff in your attic, which you never use, you never look at, you don't care about at all," Holly started. "Before my apartment had blown up, I had the bare minimum. I had a few things just for fun but most of my stuff was the basics: a bed, a refrigerator, a bathtub." She sighed. "Everything I didn't need, I sold. You have all of this stuff that you don't care about at all that other people could really use."
Root didn't say anything. What was there to say to a speech like that?
"You have so much extra money just sitting in the bank accumulating more extra money when you really should give some to some place that needs it, like the LEP, a charity or somebody like me, although I'd personally drop dead before taking any more of your money," Holly continued. "I can understand if at one point you were planning on raising a family with Nichkola, but she's been dead for over two hundred years and she isn't coming back. I'm sure that if you looked hard enough, you could fall in love again, maybe even with somebody who loves you and wants to have a family as well, but I know that isn't a high priority of yours."
A thought flashed through Root's head almost at random and he quickly pushed it away, not bothering to give it a second thought. "Maybe I'm hoping the right person will find me," Root said softly.
Holly looked at him oddly. "I thought you only cared about work."
"Maybe that's because there's nobody else to care about," Root snapped and left abruptly, going in the general direction of his room. Right before he left, he turned around and added, "And you're one to talk. If I remember correctly, you haven't been with anyone in over thirty years."
Holly stared after him in amazement. She almost went after him, but decided against it. He needed some time to think. So did she. She hadn't thought of it like that before.
*
Root was on his bed, practically fuming. He had knocked Nichkola's old clothes to the floor in anger, not wanting to deal with them now. He could put up with Short - no, Holly – lecturing him about money and the conditions at the LEP, but love? That wasn't even close to being her business. Root highly suspected now that she hadn't ever been in love; if she had, she wouldn't have said that.
*It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all . . .*
The disembodied line floated through his head, although from where, he didn't know. It was a lie; there was little worse than loosing your love. In fact, he realized, there wasn't anything worse.
"Well what if she's right?" a little voice in the back of his head asked. "What if you do only care about work?"
"No . . . that's not true," Root answered himself.
"Give three examples," the voice demanded, taking on the tone of a disbelieving school teacher.
Root thought for a bit. "Foaly . . . he's my friend"
"Two more," the voice snapped.
He thought some more.
"Can't think of any, can you? Maybe that's because there aren't any," the voice reasoned.
"No," Root replied. "Not true."
"Holly?" the voice asked and then disappeared.
"Alright, fine. I care about Holly," Root snapped at the departed voice.
It was instantly back again. "One more."
"There isn't one more," Root grudgingly admitted.
"See? This is your problem!" a new voice said excitedly. A voice that sounded remarkably like a certain female elf's. "This is what you need to fix."
"I don't need to fix anything," Root growled and pushed all the voices to the back of his head. Talking to the little voices in his head while falling asleep in the middle of the day was one thing, but now, when he was supposed to be helping Holly organizing a fundraiser in the middle of the night was completely different.
Root sighed loudly and left the safety of his bedroom, returning to the piles of junk in front of his closet. Holly was apparently still in the kitchen, a fact which he didn't like at all since that let him talk to the voices, but pushed them away and went back to work.
One voice, the one that sounded too much like Holly for his liking, seized on the opportunity and said, "Y'know, maybe if you didn't always push the voices away in favour of work that might help."
"Do I need to repeat myself?" he snapped in his head. "I don't need help."
"Really? Then why are you doing this? You took Holly's help . . . my help," Holly's voice said.
Root stared at the piles around him and, just to spite Holly, started shoving them back in the closet, thinking, "This is why I push away the voices. I get things done when I push them away. I don't when they bother me." When he finished, he went into the kitchen.
"I changed my mind," he snapped at Holly, who was cupping her hands around a steaming mug that smelled like his herbal tea. The herbal tea that he had been planning on having.
"See how similar you are?" the other voice, the one that didn't sound like Holly, said. Root pushed it away again, too angry at everything to deal with any sort of voice other than his own.
Holly looked up in surprise. "About what?"
"The fundraiser," Root spat.
"What?" Holly yelled, standing up so quickly she knocked her chair over backwards. "You can't do that!"
"Why not?" Root roared back. "They're my things and I want them!"
Holly glared at him. "You're just calling it off because I want to," she spat.
"Jesus, how did she know that?" Root asked himself. He recovered quickly enough that he thought – hoped – that Holly hadn't noticed. "No, I'm stopping it because I want my things!" Root yelled and left, slamming the cupboard door closed.
Holly stared after him seething. He had no right to do that. They had shaken on it. Holly ran after him, shouting, "We shook on it!"
"Who's in charge here, Holly? I am!" Root yelled, spinning around to face her.
"Short," she hissed and left, storming downstairs.
Root stared after her and then went back to his room again, deflated.
"Jerk," Holly's voice yelled at him inside his head. "You idiot!"
"Shut up," he told the voice.
"I can't believe you did that! You were getting somewhere with me!" Holly's voice screamed at him.
"Shut up!" he said louder, almost yelling in his head.
"You know I care about you!" Holly snapped at him. "Well, I did. You blew it. She's gone."
"Shut up!" he yelled, either not knowing or caring that he had said it out loud.
*
As soon as Holly was downstairs again, she slammed the power button on the TV and stared moodily at it. It was still on the station from last night that showed mudman movies. This one must've been really old; it was in black and white. Holly sat down on the couch, amused. She hadn't known that things this old still existed.
Holly stared at the screen, wondering if whoever had made this movie was in his right mind. It appeared to show a large roof and somebody falling stiffly over the edge while a voiceover told what was going on. The camera narrowed in on a man holding a wheel as the voiceover spoke. Then a different man ran down the hill with a large pair of wings flying over him.
The scene then changed to the man who had been giving the voiceover and Holly figured out that he had been telling about a dream he had had. Holly settled down to watch the movie, still slightly worried about the director's sanity.
*
Root sat down on his bed again, the picture of himself and Nichkola in his hands. At least one thing Holly had said was right: Nikki was dead, and she wasn't coming back. He had thought that he had realized that, but Holly had made it blindingly obvious that he was still waiting for her to come back. Maybe Holly was right. Maybe he should start thinking about things other than work.
"Isn't that what you were doing?" the voice that wasn't Holly's asked. "Has it really gotten so bad that everything you do *has* to have something to do with work?"
"No, of course not," Root snapped. "What about when Holly and I -"
"Short," Holly's voice interrupted.
Root sighed. "- when Short and I had gone shopping?"
"Two more," the schoolteacher voice demanded again.
"The yard sale-"
"Doesn't count. You stopped because everything in that closet reminded you of Nichkola," the first voice interrupted.
"It did not," Root snapped. "Some of those things weren't even invented then."
"Most were," the same voice said. "And those that weren't, you still associate with her because they're old."
"No," Root replied, but felt his argument wavering.
"Yes," Holly's voice insisted angrily. "And she's why. MOVE ON!" That was it: the voices were gone. And Holly was knocking on his door.
*
The movie was over. It had been ok, certainly very odd. Holly found out that the title had been Spellbound and the director Alfred Hitchcock. The voice vaguely rang a bell, but she couldn't place it. She turned off the TV and yawned; tonight hadn't been an easy night. Holly walked over to the dresser and opened the drawer where she had put the underwear and began looking for the large work shirt she had put in there as pyjamas. The other she was planning on wearing the next day.
"What?" she said out loud, finding something that definitely wasn't hers. Holly pulled it out and shook it out. Part of it fell to the floor and she picked it up, realizing that it was an underwear set. Holly laughed loudly when she realized that they were made of black lace and quite scanty. She walked upstairs and knocked on Root's door, forcing herself not to laugh and not to say something rude when she heard Root acknowledge her.
"I found these in Nichkola's underwear drawer," she said, throwing the lingerie at him. "Must've missed them before."
Root didn't say anything, just turned bright red.
Holly smirked at him and returned to the basement where she changed, turned off the lights and climbed into bed. She couldn't fall asleep. She could only think about Root.
She felt really bad about how she had yelled at him and about telling him to call her Short. She could fix that tomorrow. She wasn't really angry at him; she felt bad for him. He was still so obviously in love with Nichkola.
"What if that isn't a bad thing?" a voice in her head asked her. "It's not like you've ever been in love."
"Yeah, and I'm happy that way," Holly answered herself. It was true, even if it did get a little lonely at times. The time thirty years ago when she had shared a bed with somebody didn't count. He had been her best friend at the time and they had both been curious. It had lasted that night and neither of them had mentioned it again. They would still have been friends except for the fact that he had moved to Atlantis ten years later.
"Are you really?" the voice asked. "If you're happy, then why do you constantly dream about being a mother and a wife? And you just saw that movie: they said that dreams were your subconscious trying to tell you something."
"Then my subconscious is delusional," Holly answered herself.
"Which is it, Holly? You, or your subconscious?" the voice asked.
"Well considering that I can't possibly answer that question because it's my SUBconscious . . ." Holly trailed off, rolling her eyes and the impossible questions she was challenging herself with.
"And last night," the voice said eagerly. "Who was your husband last night?"
"Screw you," Holly hissed, feeling her cheeks heat up. She hadn't thought about that at all except for the five seconds after she had woken up and remembered her dream. She had instantly pushed the dream to the back of her head, never to be heard from again. That was the plan, at least.
"See?" the voice said smugly. "I'm right."
"Only that I dreamed about him," Holly snapped.
"Why shouldn't you dream about him? Or be in love with him?" the voice asked soothingly. "He's really quite a nice man, once you get through to him."
"I hate him!!!" Holly yelled into her pillow. "I never want to see him again!!!"
"Then why don't you move in with Foaly?" the voice asked her. "His pay is probably as big as Root's-"
"Don't say his name," Holly interrupted.
"-as *Root's*, so that isn't an issue. You'd only have to see him at work," the voice reasoned.
"Don't say his name!" Holly yelled inside her head.
"Why?" the voice challenged.
Holly sighed. She knew why. She just didn't care. Not yet.
"You do care," the voice replied. "If you didn't care, you wouldn't have gotten through to him."
"I just pestered him enough," Holly replied. "I *don't* care."
"Then why haven't you stopped thinking about buttons all day long?" the voice asked.
Holly blushed. It was true. They had been on her mind all day. "Because I'm curious why he would blush."
"Well he blushed when you tossed Nichkola's lingerie at him, so maybe it has something to do with that," the voice repeated. It had been over this with Holly many times that day and the lingerie incident had only strengthened its argument.
"No way," Holly replied. In truth, she actually agreed with the voice. She absentmindedly started fingering the buttons on her shirt, wondering what exactly had gone on between Root, Nichkola and buttons.
"Then stop fiddling with *your* buttons," the voice snapped at Holly. "And stop thinking about Nichkola's buttons and how Root must've-"
"Screw you," Holly repeated, but stopped playing with her buttons. "I don't know what he did with them, I don't care what he did with them and I don't want to know what he did with them."
"Really?" the voice asked. "I thought you *liked* the idea of Root playing with Nichkola's buttons. Rather, I thought you liked imagining *you* were Nichkola."
"Bullshit," Holly snapped. That part was true. She hadn't imagined herself as Nichkola. But now the thought was in her head and inescapable. "I hate you," Holly mumbled at the voice, but surrendered to her thoughts, hoping that if she did once, they would go away.
*
Root angrily threw the lingerie into the pile of Nichkola's other clothes. He had completely forgotten about those. He had been thinking about buttons too much.
*Button-man*
Root could clearly hear Nichkola saying that, almost as if she was in bed next to him again. She had called him that so many times, once even in public. Root remembered just how many threats it had taken before Owen had finally promised not to tell anyone. Root could feel himself smiling bitterly at the thought. It actually had been really funny, although then he certainly hadn't thought so.
Root looked at the pile of clothes and remembered the Holly voice telling him to move on. Maybe the first step in doing that was getting rid of the clothes.
"Why don't you give them to charity?" Holly's voice piped up.
"Fine. I'll give them to charity," Root snapped, pretending to be angry. In all honesty, he had been planning on doing that in the couple of seconds it took before Holly's voice had suggested it. That thought in mind, he changed, turned off the lights and fell asleep.
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Fifth chapter done! Please, if you have any ideas, let me know!
A/N: Much thanks to all of my reviewers! *hands out root and holly shaped cookies* If anybody has any ideas, please feel free to tell me.
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Holly and Root had been sorting and pricing items for the past couple of hours. Holly sighed in frustration.
"Y'know what?" she snapped angrily.
Root looked up from an old pair of shoes. "What?"
"I don't care how much his coat is worth!" Holly yelled. "I'm hungry!" she said and got up, various items falling off her lap and mingling with the other piles. She stormed off to the kitchen, leaving Root to the mess.
Root got up more carefully, putting the items into the correct piles and then following Holly into the kitchen where he found her staring moodily into the refrigerator. "What was that about?"
"I've been pricing your old crap for the past three hours and I'm hungry! There isn't anything wrong with that!" Holly snapped.
Root blinked, surprised. Sure it was boring, but it really wasn't this big a deal. "You could've stopped earlier."
Holly sighed and sat down at the kitchen table loudly, the refrigerator door still hanging open. "You don't know how lucky you are, do you?"
"Considering that I have no idea what you're talking about, I guess I don't," Root replied, closing the door and sitting down next to Holly.
"You have all of that stuff, as well as the stuff in your attic, which you never use, you never look at, you don't care about at all," Holly started. "Before my apartment had blown up, I had the bare minimum. I had a few things just for fun but most of my stuff was the basics: a bed, a refrigerator, a bathtub." She sighed. "Everything I didn't need, I sold. You have all of this stuff that you don't care about at all that other people could really use."
Root didn't say anything. What was there to say to a speech like that?
"You have so much extra money just sitting in the bank accumulating more extra money when you really should give some to some place that needs it, like the LEP, a charity or somebody like me, although I'd personally drop dead before taking any more of your money," Holly continued. "I can understand if at one point you were planning on raising a family with Nichkola, but she's been dead for over two hundred years and she isn't coming back. I'm sure that if you looked hard enough, you could fall in love again, maybe even with somebody who loves you and wants to have a family as well, but I know that isn't a high priority of yours."
A thought flashed through Root's head almost at random and he quickly pushed it away, not bothering to give it a second thought. "Maybe I'm hoping the right person will find me," Root said softly.
Holly looked at him oddly. "I thought you only cared about work."
"Maybe that's because there's nobody else to care about," Root snapped and left abruptly, going in the general direction of his room. Right before he left, he turned around and added, "And you're one to talk. If I remember correctly, you haven't been with anyone in over thirty years."
Holly stared after him in amazement. She almost went after him, but decided against it. He needed some time to think. So did she. She hadn't thought of it like that before.
*
Root was on his bed, practically fuming. He had knocked Nichkola's old clothes to the floor in anger, not wanting to deal with them now. He could put up with Short - no, Holly – lecturing him about money and the conditions at the LEP, but love? That wasn't even close to being her business. Root highly suspected now that she hadn't ever been in love; if she had, she wouldn't have said that.
*It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all . . .*
The disembodied line floated through his head, although from where, he didn't know. It was a lie; there was little worse than loosing your love. In fact, he realized, there wasn't anything worse.
"Well what if she's right?" a little voice in the back of his head asked. "What if you do only care about work?"
"No . . . that's not true," Root answered himself.
"Give three examples," the voice demanded, taking on the tone of a disbelieving school teacher.
Root thought for a bit. "Foaly . . . he's my friend"
"Two more," the voice snapped.
He thought some more.
"Can't think of any, can you? Maybe that's because there aren't any," the voice reasoned.
"No," Root replied. "Not true."
"Holly?" the voice asked and then disappeared.
"Alright, fine. I care about Holly," Root snapped at the departed voice.
It was instantly back again. "One more."
"There isn't one more," Root grudgingly admitted.
"See? This is your problem!" a new voice said excitedly. A voice that sounded remarkably like a certain female elf's. "This is what you need to fix."
"I don't need to fix anything," Root growled and pushed all the voices to the back of his head. Talking to the little voices in his head while falling asleep in the middle of the day was one thing, but now, when he was supposed to be helping Holly organizing a fundraiser in the middle of the night was completely different.
Root sighed loudly and left the safety of his bedroom, returning to the piles of junk in front of his closet. Holly was apparently still in the kitchen, a fact which he didn't like at all since that let him talk to the voices, but pushed them away and went back to work.
One voice, the one that sounded too much like Holly for his liking, seized on the opportunity and said, "Y'know, maybe if you didn't always push the voices away in favour of work that might help."
"Do I need to repeat myself?" he snapped in his head. "I don't need help."
"Really? Then why are you doing this? You took Holly's help . . . my help," Holly's voice said.
Root stared at the piles around him and, just to spite Holly, started shoving them back in the closet, thinking, "This is why I push away the voices. I get things done when I push them away. I don't when they bother me." When he finished, he went into the kitchen.
"I changed my mind," he snapped at Holly, who was cupping her hands around a steaming mug that smelled like his herbal tea. The herbal tea that he had been planning on having.
"See how similar you are?" the other voice, the one that didn't sound like Holly, said. Root pushed it away again, too angry at everything to deal with any sort of voice other than his own.
Holly looked up in surprise. "About what?"
"The fundraiser," Root spat.
"What?" Holly yelled, standing up so quickly she knocked her chair over backwards. "You can't do that!"
"Why not?" Root roared back. "They're my things and I want them!"
Holly glared at him. "You're just calling it off because I want to," she spat.
"Jesus, how did she know that?" Root asked himself. He recovered quickly enough that he thought – hoped – that Holly hadn't noticed. "No, I'm stopping it because I want my things!" Root yelled and left, slamming the cupboard door closed.
Holly stared after him seething. He had no right to do that. They had shaken on it. Holly ran after him, shouting, "We shook on it!"
"Who's in charge here, Holly? I am!" Root yelled, spinning around to face her.
"Short," she hissed and left, storming downstairs.
Root stared after her and then went back to his room again, deflated.
"Jerk," Holly's voice yelled at him inside his head. "You idiot!"
"Shut up," he told the voice.
"I can't believe you did that! You were getting somewhere with me!" Holly's voice screamed at him.
"Shut up!" he said louder, almost yelling in his head.
"You know I care about you!" Holly snapped at him. "Well, I did. You blew it. She's gone."
"Shut up!" he yelled, either not knowing or caring that he had said it out loud.
*
As soon as Holly was downstairs again, she slammed the power button on the TV and stared moodily at it. It was still on the station from last night that showed mudman movies. This one must've been really old; it was in black and white. Holly sat down on the couch, amused. She hadn't known that things this old still existed.
Holly stared at the screen, wondering if whoever had made this movie was in his right mind. It appeared to show a large roof and somebody falling stiffly over the edge while a voiceover told what was going on. The camera narrowed in on a man holding a wheel as the voiceover spoke. Then a different man ran down the hill with a large pair of wings flying over him.
The scene then changed to the man who had been giving the voiceover and Holly figured out that he had been telling about a dream he had had. Holly settled down to watch the movie, still slightly worried about the director's sanity.
*
Root sat down on his bed again, the picture of himself and Nichkola in his hands. At least one thing Holly had said was right: Nikki was dead, and she wasn't coming back. He had thought that he had realized that, but Holly had made it blindingly obvious that he was still waiting for her to come back. Maybe Holly was right. Maybe he should start thinking about things other than work.
"Isn't that what you were doing?" the voice that wasn't Holly's asked. "Has it really gotten so bad that everything you do *has* to have something to do with work?"
"No, of course not," Root snapped. "What about when Holly and I -"
"Short," Holly's voice interrupted.
Root sighed. "- when Short and I had gone shopping?"
"Two more," the schoolteacher voice demanded again.
"The yard sale-"
"Doesn't count. You stopped because everything in that closet reminded you of Nichkola," the first voice interrupted.
"It did not," Root snapped. "Some of those things weren't even invented then."
"Most were," the same voice said. "And those that weren't, you still associate with her because they're old."
"No," Root replied, but felt his argument wavering.
"Yes," Holly's voice insisted angrily. "And she's why. MOVE ON!" That was it: the voices were gone. And Holly was knocking on his door.
*
The movie was over. It had been ok, certainly very odd. Holly found out that the title had been Spellbound and the director Alfred Hitchcock. The voice vaguely rang a bell, but she couldn't place it. She turned off the TV and yawned; tonight hadn't been an easy night. Holly walked over to the dresser and opened the drawer where she had put the underwear and began looking for the large work shirt she had put in there as pyjamas. The other she was planning on wearing the next day.
"What?" she said out loud, finding something that definitely wasn't hers. Holly pulled it out and shook it out. Part of it fell to the floor and she picked it up, realizing that it was an underwear set. Holly laughed loudly when she realized that they were made of black lace and quite scanty. She walked upstairs and knocked on Root's door, forcing herself not to laugh and not to say something rude when she heard Root acknowledge her.
"I found these in Nichkola's underwear drawer," she said, throwing the lingerie at him. "Must've missed them before."
Root didn't say anything, just turned bright red.
Holly smirked at him and returned to the basement where she changed, turned off the lights and climbed into bed. She couldn't fall asleep. She could only think about Root.
She felt really bad about how she had yelled at him and about telling him to call her Short. She could fix that tomorrow. She wasn't really angry at him; she felt bad for him. He was still so obviously in love with Nichkola.
"What if that isn't a bad thing?" a voice in her head asked her. "It's not like you've ever been in love."
"Yeah, and I'm happy that way," Holly answered herself. It was true, even if it did get a little lonely at times. The time thirty years ago when she had shared a bed with somebody didn't count. He had been her best friend at the time and they had both been curious. It had lasted that night and neither of them had mentioned it again. They would still have been friends except for the fact that he had moved to Atlantis ten years later.
"Are you really?" the voice asked. "If you're happy, then why do you constantly dream about being a mother and a wife? And you just saw that movie: they said that dreams were your subconscious trying to tell you something."
"Then my subconscious is delusional," Holly answered herself.
"Which is it, Holly? You, or your subconscious?" the voice asked.
"Well considering that I can't possibly answer that question because it's my SUBconscious . . ." Holly trailed off, rolling her eyes and the impossible questions she was challenging herself with.
"And last night," the voice said eagerly. "Who was your husband last night?"
"Screw you," Holly hissed, feeling her cheeks heat up. She hadn't thought about that at all except for the five seconds after she had woken up and remembered her dream. She had instantly pushed the dream to the back of her head, never to be heard from again. That was the plan, at least.
"See?" the voice said smugly. "I'm right."
"Only that I dreamed about him," Holly snapped.
"Why shouldn't you dream about him? Or be in love with him?" the voice asked soothingly. "He's really quite a nice man, once you get through to him."
"I hate him!!!" Holly yelled into her pillow. "I never want to see him again!!!"
"Then why don't you move in with Foaly?" the voice asked her. "His pay is probably as big as Root's-"
"Don't say his name," Holly interrupted.
"-as *Root's*, so that isn't an issue. You'd only have to see him at work," the voice reasoned.
"Don't say his name!" Holly yelled inside her head.
"Why?" the voice challenged.
Holly sighed. She knew why. She just didn't care. Not yet.
"You do care," the voice replied. "If you didn't care, you wouldn't have gotten through to him."
"I just pestered him enough," Holly replied. "I *don't* care."
"Then why haven't you stopped thinking about buttons all day long?" the voice asked.
Holly blushed. It was true. They had been on her mind all day. "Because I'm curious why he would blush."
"Well he blushed when you tossed Nichkola's lingerie at him, so maybe it has something to do with that," the voice repeated. It had been over this with Holly many times that day and the lingerie incident had only strengthened its argument.
"No way," Holly replied. In truth, she actually agreed with the voice. She absentmindedly started fingering the buttons on her shirt, wondering what exactly had gone on between Root, Nichkola and buttons.
"Then stop fiddling with *your* buttons," the voice snapped at Holly. "And stop thinking about Nichkola's buttons and how Root must've-"
"Screw you," Holly repeated, but stopped playing with her buttons. "I don't know what he did with them, I don't care what he did with them and I don't want to know what he did with them."
"Really?" the voice asked. "I thought you *liked* the idea of Root playing with Nichkola's buttons. Rather, I thought you liked imagining *you* were Nichkola."
"Bullshit," Holly snapped. That part was true. She hadn't imagined herself as Nichkola. But now the thought was in her head and inescapable. "I hate you," Holly mumbled at the voice, but surrendered to her thoughts, hoping that if she did once, they would go away.
*
Root angrily threw the lingerie into the pile of Nichkola's other clothes. He had completely forgotten about those. He had been thinking about buttons too much.
*Button-man*
Root could clearly hear Nichkola saying that, almost as if she was in bed next to him again. She had called him that so many times, once even in public. Root remembered just how many threats it had taken before Owen had finally promised not to tell anyone. Root could feel himself smiling bitterly at the thought. It actually had been really funny, although then he certainly hadn't thought so.
Root looked at the pile of clothes and remembered the Holly voice telling him to move on. Maybe the first step in doing that was getting rid of the clothes.
"Why don't you give them to charity?" Holly's voice piped up.
"Fine. I'll give them to charity," Root snapped, pretending to be angry. In all honesty, he had been planning on doing that in the couple of seconds it took before Holly's voice had suggested it. That thought in mind, he changed, turned off the lights and fell asleep.
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Fifth chapter done! Please, if you have any ideas, let me know!