Sadie Hawkins
"He's okay, right?" Mac asks in what she, no doubt, hopes is an uncaring way, kicking at some grass that's pushes its way through the cement blocks of her back patio.
He wishes she was a better liar; he can hear the concern in her voice and even see it in the way her fingers twist in the fabric of her shirt.
"He's fine; he's just not used to not getting what he wants."
Her eyes flash up at him and he immediately wishes he had worded that differently. It's obvious that it's not alright anyway, they've been hanging out at her house a lot more ever since Dick came home to find them on the couch, empty pizza boxes all over the place, the fast paced talk of The Thin Man snapping against ears that weren't paying any attention.
They were too involved in each other, Mac's shirt half under the couch and his visible hand slid under the dark fabric of her bra.
All Dick had said was fuck before he turned around and left. He hadn't come back for three days. He had been hiding at Logan's and ever since Dick had come back, he had pretty much been hiding at Mac's.
Her parents were really active in the community and in her brother's life so there were huge chunks of time that they had it all to themselves.
As long as Cassidy left by ten, they had no problem with him. In fact, as amazing as it was, they actually seemed to like him now; feeding him on a regular basis and Mrs. Mackenzie making sure he had done his homework.
It was adorable and sweet and sad all at once.
A Smiths song washed over them from an old tape player set up on the grass beside him.
Dick hated the Smiths, whiny British wankers he would say. He sunk his teeth into his lip, his mind kept slipping back to Dick and he hated it, but he was pretty sure that the reason was that he missed him.
He made an unhappy noise and rolled onto his stomach, snatching Mac's ankle and pulling at her until she laid down next to him.
"He's an idiot." He grumbled even though he didn't really believe that.
"You don't believe that." She caught without even looking at him, her eyes on the lines of clouds and airplane trail overhead.
"Do you?"
She shrugs and he can feel it against him, "I don't really know him." She tells him simply.
"He's brash and selfish, and he's such a fucking baby. Just because he's bigger than me he thinks it gives him reign over me, but do you know how many times I've bailed him out? How many times I've rolled that idiot into the recovery position?" He's ripping at pieces of grass in front of him. He's not sure if he's trying to steer her away from any positive feelings for his brother or just venting like a regular person.
That was Mac's magic, twisting him back into a normal boy.
Mac's hand slides into his back pocket, the fingers skipping along his belt before sliding in.
"It's okay if you miss spending time with him. He's your brother."
"I don't." His reply is flat and hollow as he slumps further into the grass unhappily.
No one believes him. He and Dick had been a set for so long, ever since their father had started to fill his time with gold diggers and not with the torture of his smaller child.
As if to prove his point she makes a noise of disbelief, this funny little snort of a thing he kind of loves.
"You can't spend all your time with me Cass."
"You want me to-"
"Stop, you know I'm not saying anything like that. It's just, I don't know, don't you ever want to talk about surfing and," she shrugs, "I don't know penises and stuff?"
His laughter is a bark of noise; he rolls onto his side to look at her, her cheeks are pink.
"You don't really think that's what guys talk about, do you?"
She rolls to look at him, head propped up on her hand, "I don't know. I don't have the required equipment to be involved in those kinds of conversations." She rolls her eyes, but Cassidy can't help but make a face like he's really thinking about that.
"Are you sure?"
A nervous laugh sputters out of her, "Yes and," she looks over her shoulder back at the dark, empty house before turning back to him, "and so are you."
"Oh I don't know..." He hems and haws, putting a hand to her hip, fingers grabbing at the heavy material of her skirt, "what if you grew one since last time." He asks seriously.
"Since yesterday?" The good humor in her voice gave it a strange hissing quality.
"You could be a miracle of science." He told her, pushing her gently onto her back in the empty backyard, "I should definitely check." He nodded sagely, sliding her legs apart. There was no resistance, that naughty girl.
He was on his knees between her legs, pushing her skirt up, but if she expected his hands to investigate the area in question she was momentarily disappointed and confused. He leaned down; emboldened by the music and smell of her and the fact that she loved him.
When his breath hit her damp underwear he heard a soft moan and the rip of grass.
He looked at his watch quickly; her parents weren't due back for about an hour. There was time and she made the best fucking noises when he did this to her that even if they were due back in ten, he'd probably still chance it.
He hooked his fingers into her underwear and ran his tongue along her.
"Not here..." She said weakly, but made no effort at all to stop him. When he looked up at her, she had one hand up her shirt and the other tugging on the red in the hair like he liked to do.
Tongue and fingers and the sound of a car pulling up in the driveway sent her into a desperately muffled moaning place, his tongue and fingers soaked.
"They're early." She huffs out and sits up. Fuck, it is them and he is sporting the kind of hard on that even his jeans can't hide. He doesn't think there's enough blood left in his brain to assess the situation properly, to think of baseball and fix the boiling thumping of his blood.
She's red in the face and gorgeous, blades of grass in her hair.
"Shit." He huffs out, pulling at his jeans in a vain attempt to find a comfortable way for the denim to sit.
"You better, umm... Bathroom." She tells him quietly, biting her lip and eying his tented pants with what he thinks might be hunger.
"Right." He agrees and starts back into the house. She calls after him as he slides the patio door open.
"You satisfied?"
He shrugs, "We'll have to check again, you know, in the name of science."
"Yeah, science." She waves him away and he gets into the basement bathroom just as the front door opens and the rest of Mac's family pile into the house.
It's easy to take care oif things with the taste of her still in his mouth and his mind flooded with images, most notably the black silk and lace outfit from Valentines.
The taste of her stays in his mouth until Mrs. Mackenzie practically force feeds him lasagna. They make him leave right after dinner that night and he's fairly certain that they've figured out what had happened before they got home, to some extent at least, because they watch like hawks as he kisses Mac goodbye.
Just to ensure that he's still allowed back, he kisses her on the cheek.
He wakes up in the middle of the night a couple days later, his stomach twisting unhappily and his body feels like ice.
God, he knows what this is.
Woody.
He's been hearing nothing but shit about that stupid essay contest for 'Temporary Deputy Mayor' for what feels like years.
He's had two teachers try to push him into the contest, promising him extra credit he didn't need and talking about how good it would look on his college application next year.
How much Hearst would like it.
He's not sure why he's surprised that they know about his relationship with Mac or that they're trying to use it to force him into the contest.
It just reminds him that this mess isn't really over.
Woody is of no use to him anymore, he's already bought up the majority of the good real estate just outside of the incorporation line. He has to go soon and if he ended up winning that fucking contest he wouldn't die by suicide when the weight of killing that bus load of innocent kids became too much, but rather a garish letter opener to the neck.
His first proper murder, his hands covered in literal blood rather than the metaphorical blood he was stained with, the only actual blood he'd gotten on his hands had been Mac's, and he knew that didn't count.
He pulls on another blanket, but the chill doesn't lessen.
Something more was needed, some sort of human contact, something grounding and real. Pushing himself out of the bed, he pulled on some clothes.
Across the hall Dick's door is partially open, he walks across the hall and with a hand on the door gently pushes it open.
Dick is dead asleep, tangled up in the covers, across the bed at a sharp angle. His homework is scattered across the room. Physics, Dick always had trouble with physics and up until recently he had been 'helping'; doing most of his homework for a small fee.
He gathers up the paperwork and sits at the rarely used desk.
When he flicks on the desk lap all Dick does is grumble unhappily and roll away from the small light source.
He'll do the bulk of the homework, making sure to get just enough of the answers wrong so that it looks like Dick is trying hard rather than cheating, he's had years of practice. When he's done, he'll send the prepared threatening email and video to Woody.
Get this shit in motion.
The sooner he was dead and pinned with the bus crash the sooner he could start being a normal teenage boy.
He'd say again, but that would be a lie. He'd never been a normal teenage boy.
He wakes up hours later in Dick's bed, tucked in carefully like it had really meant something to Dick to do it properly.
Fuck. He did miss that idiot; missed the non-stop chatter that had filled his life up to now, his ridiculous schemes to get laid.
He just missed having him around. Mac was right, he couldn't just spend all of his time with her, he needed his brother, too.
Okay he'd send his next email and then work on getting them in the same room together while both were conscious.
He had passed three FBLA Sadie Hawkins posters already this morning with Mac.
She had said nothing about them, just continued their conversation about, of all things, how ridiculous she thought incorporation was.
They passed another poster and he looked at her as she continued to rant about the classist bullshit that was incorporation. Even Hart had been asked to Sadie Hawkins. Here he was with a proper girlfriend and she hadn't even asked if he wanted to go or not.
He wasn't sure he really wanted to go; he just knew he wanted her to ask him.
He stops at an overhead banner and waits.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm standing here wondering what I've done to make you ashamed of me," the words come out in a light tone, but it's not far off base, "its the age thing, isn't it. You know, me in my full blush of youth, you, in your advancing years."
The smile on her face is bitten back like she expects there to be more to this joke, "I'm standing in the middle of the hallway, holding your hand dorkwad."He looks back at the banner and with a slight air of amusement she continues, "You don't really want to go to that thing?"
He doesn't, not really, but...
"Well yeah, I'd like to be asked."
"Fine," she starts rocking her shoulders back and forth, swinging their connected hands, "You wanna go to the big dance Cassidy?"
"That so hard?" Her smile is bright and ridiculous, and he's sure his is, too, "Yes, and if the dance blows, half as much as I'm guessing it will, we can cut out early, go straight for the good stuff."
"Oh my." She fans herself with a hand, dramatically.
"I'm talking Neptune's best Pizza-Quest 06. You," he tells her pointedly, "get your mind out if the gutter."
They split down opposite halls for next period and when he looks back at her she's merged paths with Veronica.
Ugh. They are talking animatedly about something or other and he can't help but wonder if it's about him. Hopefully just about how sweet little Cassidy doesn't seem to be an adopted Casablancas after all.
It'll be nice once she's in college, away from Veronica and her parents and they could just spend entire nights together without having to weave elaborate lies.
His mind slips into a fantasy of spending hours at her dorm, dissecting whatever strange film she's been assigned in some film study class then falling asleep in her too small, twin bed with her.
A life with her was perfect no matter where he imagined the setting.
His eye is caught by the ridiculous colors of an announcement on a bulletin board outside of his calculus class.
Deputy Mayor Essay Contest.
His blood goes cold and he pulls his eyes away from the painful thing, that bastard was going down in a blaze of glory or so help him God. Or, the devil, maybe. He was pretty sure he had been forsaken years ago.
He knew the exact moment he had been forsaken; the moment was a rip in his soul that screamed for revenge, justice.
And that's what it would get.
He and Dick actually eat dinner together for the rest of the week. He doesn't tell him why Mac thinks it would be a good idea to not come back to her house for a while.
The air between them has finally smoothed out and he doesn't want to fuck it up again by accidentally rubbing his girlfriend in his face.
The chatter has started to fill the silences back up, Dick never could stand silence, and he had missed it so much. Not talking to Dick had thrown something in him out of whack, but it was sorting itself out.
"You're okay, right?"
"Yeah." Dick told him and there was something in the word that was firm and nonnegotiable that he didn't say anything else about it.
Dick had come to a decision about something, most likely about how Mac was with his little brother. Maybe he had resigned himself to the fact that they loved each other and not him, maybe he was okay with it because Cassidy would go to hell for Cindy Mackenzie.
He didn't know exactly what it was, but he found it didn't really matter as long as they were talking to each other in full sentences again.
"Sadie Hawkins dance is tonight, right?" Dick asked in a believably off hand manner.
"Yeah..."
He just nods and goes back to smashing the buttons of his controller.
Cassidy executed another special move with the speed learned by years of playing with his button-mashing brother.
He had thought that their preferred methods of video game fighting were just one more thing on the huge list of the differences between him and Dick, but after the far too long time they had been cut off from each other he had been thinking about it more and more. It was like they were two halves of a whole person.
He felt much more whole when he was with Mac than without, but having them both, he was pretty sure, was the way it was supposed to be; that they made a perfect unit.
He would consider inviting Dick to the island he had stashed away in Mac's name.
"How long do you think you'll last at that suck-tastic dance?" He asks, leaning into him in an effort to fracture his concentration or maybe in hopes of pulling off a miracle comeback.
He sounds genuinely interested, like maybe he wants to hang out with them after, like he plans on trying to make this whole thing between the three of them functional.
He shrugs, "Hour?"
"Cool."
Dick nods a little and the look on his face, like he's determined to make this work, pulls at something inside of Cassidy, so much so that Dick manages to win the match.
Dick jumps from the couch arms raised in triumph.
"You wanna beer?" He asks, directing his victory dance towards the kitchen.
"Sure."
Dick's smile is bright for a moment before their eyes meet and the joy on his brother shifts into something burning and determined, and not very Dick at all.
Something is weird, but Dick disappears into the kitchen before he has a chance to call him on it. He can only assume that it's about Mac, so many things were nowadays.
He can't even image what it would be like if the roles were reversed, if the girl he had loved for three years had chosen his brother. It must have burnt a little extra for it to be his younger, smarter brother, but they were doing so well right now, they would get over this. They would have to because he refused to be without them. He wouldn't pick.
He was a Casablancas, people as rich as he was didn't have to pick. People as smart as him didn't either, hell he was getting away with murder.
He has only one beer with Dick, he has to see Mac's parents when he picks her up and he can just feel, in his bones, that they would know he had been drinking.
His phone buzzes across the console.
"That your other date?" Mac asks, pulling her legs up to press them against the glove compartment, she's wearing jeans and a kind of purple and blue long sleeve number with her hair pulled away from her face.
He wonders if she had spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to wear, if her room was littered with possibilities.
"Well yeah, how could I say no? They were just so desperate to spend time with me." He tells her, tossing the phone into her lap.
He knows who it is. Hart has been messaging him like his life depended on it for at least a half an hour.
"Hart wants to know if he should kiss with tongue." When he chances a look at her, a soft bemused smile is spread across her face and she's quirked an eyebrow, "Why is he asking you? Is Hart your other date? Should I be jealous?"
Cassidy lets a small laugh slip from him as he turns into the parking lot.
They are late, Dick had practically demanded it, he wouldn't let his little brother be one of those nerds that are there before they start the fucking music.
"It's like they think I'm this great bastion of knowledge now that I landed myself a senior."
"Do they think I'm teaching you things?" She asked scandalized, "That's just outrageous."
"I know, pure as the driven snow we are." He smirks at her and leans across the car to press his mouth urgently against her own.
They are lost in themselves for a long moment, the frantic buzz of Hart's desperate pleas unheard.
What is heard, however, is a harsh wrap against the window.
Mr. Wu.
"Out you come, kids. You're missing all the excitement." He says it like even he knows that it's going to be dull, just an excuse to make some money on the desperation of youth.
They walk hand in hand into the school, he loves holding her hand, there's something so comforting about how public that particular show of affection is. It takes two unanswered questions before he realizes that she's answering Hart's questions.
He leans in close to her, "So did you tell him to use his teeth?" He watches her cheeks flush.
"I don't think he's ready for that if he also asked if he should ask her to slow dance, do you?"
They dance twice, but mostly spend their time making fun of people and Hart. She's beautifully sarcastic and he just wants to get her back to his house so they can make out a little bit and maybe play some video games with Dick.
He officially gives up on the idea of this dance almost exactly an hour in.
They are taking a side hall towards the parking lot when he realizes that he left his sweater on the bleachers.
"Fuck."
"What?"
"Sweater." He sighs and turns back to the auditorium.
"You want me to come with you?"
"Nah, if were both there they can drag us back in, I'm not willing to risk another hour here, are you?"
"Not when there is pizza and video games a waiting." She makes a shooing motion with her hands and leans against a row of bright yellow lockers.
Logan and Veronica are slow dancing when he sneaks back in to grab his sweater.
He makes it out with no problems, which is nice for once.
"Stop it." Mac's voice breaks across the near silence of the empty hall and he freezes for a moment. Her voice is sharp and just cuts into him.
"Will you just listen?"
Dick.
He'd know that voice from beyond the grave and it's deep and heavy, and desperate. It pushes him to the end of the hall, he can see them now. Dick with his hands on Mac's arms, hers pressed angrily against his chest, keeping him at a distance.
"I've been in love with you since you left me in that fucking closet at Rachelle's place, three years ago."
The words twist like a knife. Was that determination in Dick, this? Was he deciding to do this, whatever it was.
"I don't-" her words are cut off by Dick's mouth and he drops his jacket.
Push him away
Push him away!
Push him!
He watches with eyes wider than he thinks is even humanly possibly as Mac, his Cindy, just fucking melts into Dick. Watches her fists loosen and her hands slide up his brother's chest and into that stupid blond hair.
His brother.
His girlfriend.
He watches as she leans into it, moves against him like, God he doesn't even know, his throat is thick and his chest hurts, fucking everything hurts. How could they do this to him? They were supposed to love him.
God what an idiot he is.
His vision is blurred and he just can't take it anymore.
"You can stop any time." He tells them and they shoot apart, Mac slamming back into the metal lockers and God he hates himself for caring if it hurt her or not.
"Cassidy!" She sounds like she's about to cry, fuck maybe she is crying, he doesn't know. He can barely see past his own, "Cassidy it's not, I didn't,"
"Cass," Dick starts, but he just holds up a hand and he must do it with some sort of strange authority because they both stop talking.
"Do not talk to me." He tells them both and with a heavy breath he starts walking. Mac reaches out for him as he passes and he just looks at her, the tears actually falling now, "You said you wouldn't leave." he tells her in this harsh, thick voice he doesn't recognize, "Don't talk to me again."
"Cassidy please."
"Cass man, it's not her fault." Dick tries behind him, but his words just fucking burn and cut and twist because, God, he thought they could all be together, he had fucking missed that asshole.
"I saw you, I saw you both, you can fucking have each other. I want nothing to-" he can't finish the words, he wipes desperately at his eyes and just turns his back on them, he figures that that's got to be symbolic enough for even Dick to understand.
The air outside is cool and biting against his wet face.
Dick's truck is parked at an odd angle in the parking lot and he stops to let the air out of his tires before getting into his own car.
He has to pull over on the side of the road, about halfway home, because he can't see the road any more. He sits there in the driver's seat, his eyes closed tight, his body shaking, collapsed against the steering wheel.