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[meatbrained]

( five + one )

how it works:

i. post a comment with the characters you play.
ii. go around and prompt other players with a 5 + 1 prompt (e.g. "Five times Hope said sorry and one time he didn't")
iii. write a fic for the prompts people leave you!
iv. enjoy your fic? we hope?

Comments

[hollowly]

5 times kate didn't get any sleep and the one time she did.

5 times matt let emily win an argument and the one time he put his foot down.

1/2 pretends she doesn't have to work yolo

[meatbrained]

| five times matt let emily win an argument and the one time he put his foot down

"Matt, come on, we gotta go!"
He glances in the mirror one last time and tugs at the suit she's stuffed him in with the half-lidded eyes of someone who would really rather not go at all. The debate had echoed all through the car - it's not like either of them particularly like Emily's professor, why do they need to spend an evening celebrating her published research? He can think of much less uncomfortable ways to spend their evening (protip: none of them involve bow ties) - but, eventually, they went for appearance over comfort.

That... that sums up a lot of the time they spend together, really. Em shoves him into clothes that look good and feel like they're trying to cut off the circulation to all his limbs. Keep your mask on and play perfect.

(Two years into dating, she explains the concepts of 建て前 and 本音, the difference between your public face and real thoughts. It's a thing in Japan, she tells him.

And everything makes a lot more sense.)

"I am so not eating at Olive Garden."
That's an easy loss; although he does love those breadsticks.

"Ugh. As if we're going to camp."
Emily introduces him to the concept of glamping instead (she does that a lot, bring up little things he's never heard of and explain them as though everyone should know this already, Matt) and Matt nearly doubles over at the price of the place she selects - not just a little site a couple of days drive away, but an ice sculpture of a campsite in the remote regions of Finland.

He books the flights with a credit card and tries to ignore the sinking stone in his stomach called impending overtime.

"Green is so not your colour."
Another easy win for Emily, once he gets a glimpse of the lime-coloured t-shirt in a store mirror, all too bright against his skin.

"Come get me, asshole!"
She's drunk and bitter and somewhere in downtown LA and it's three o'clock in the goddamn morning before one of the most important games his team will play, but a taxi isn't good enough for Emily. She screams at him for ten minutes on the phone, telling him that he better pick her up or she's dumping him.

It's somewhere around the 8th minute, when she's drawling about how football is more important than her, that it clicks in his mind - fear, rather than anger, is the driving force here.

He grabs his keys.

"Just say something."
The proposal was a disaster. Going big backfired and trying to fix it made everything worse. Emily folds her arms and scowls out the window of the car, head turned to not-really-watch the bypassing city as they move from fancy stores and restaurants to office blocks and eventually housing and open spaces. She hasn't spoken in fifteen minutes and the air hangs thick with the heat of anger.

He pulls the car over outside of a park two blocks from her house and gets out, moves to the passenger side and pulls open the door, holding out a hand.

Just- come on.

They walk through the park in the same way they did after their second date (it went much, much better than the first- which was about as much of a disaster as that proposal, really), quiet and side-by-side. No handholding, because Emily's wound up in herself and Matt is fumbling for the ring box in the pocket of his trousers.

"Emily." He so rarely uses her full name. Em, almost always Em like she's a pause for thought, a break between words. "Just- marry me?"

Like it's as simple as that.

(Spoiler alert: it is.)

2/2 my heart no

[dedikated]

| five times kate didn't get any sleep and the one time she did

| 十二 〈 twelve 〉
the first night is the hardest.

it's late october, just a handful of days after marc's birthday, and kate sits in a strange bed in a stranger's house, her hair pooled around her like a blanket and her knees pulled up to her chest.

(she used to sit like this on the rooftop back home, her mother's legs either side of her as she threaded her fingers through kate's hair and created intricate patterns across her scalp, little and big braids alike.)

the first night, the first sunrise in this new world, ends with her hair still loose and the sun hidden behind blackout curtains.

| 十五 〈 fifteen 〉
come on, barbie, let's go party.

there's a guy in her year at school who insists on the nickname barbie for the entire year she's fifteen, the first time she dyes her hair bubblegum pink. kate's used to nicknames by now - hearing katherine says you're in trouble, you little shit more than anything (except maybe katherine jane, but the only people to call her that are three years in the hollow earth now) - so all she does is roll her eyes and say no.

but yes, let's party.

it becomes a habit during secondary school, a teenage tradition all across the kingdom that isn't really a kingdom in much more than technicalities (a royal family remembered solely for the extra holidays, for the speech on television at christmas): buying 2 litre bottles of booze that's on offer for a couple of quid at a corner shop run by some guy who either can't tell or doesn't care that his customers are obviously underage and going to the park.

the group holes themselves up in a cluster of bushes and trees not too far from the climbing frame and pass around the bottles and a pack of cigarettes, talking about nothing, swearing too much, collapsing on each other.

the boy calls her barbie all night, lets his hand get too comfortable with her thigh between rounds of yelled out dares (climb the fuckin' frame! it'll be hilarious!), and kate tugs her knees up against her chest when he leaves, glances over at marc as he chats up that-girl-from-his-chemistry-class, the one with black rimmed glasses she doesn't really need (she's cute, though. all thick, overstraightened hair flipped to one side and paper-white skin that makes the smeared red lipstick stand out even more), and finishes the bottle a kid from... shit, where's this kid even from, passes her.

the sunrise gives them all a splitting headache.

| 十九 〈 nineteen 〉
i don't know nothing!

she decided he was probably telling the truth ten minutes into the interrogation. the kid's three years younger than her (looks about five years younger, though) and all wide, trembling eyes and dreadlocks that frame his face when his head lolls forward.

the room stinks of cigarette smoke and burned flesh, rings with the ghosts of each round of tears he bursts into.

kate decides he knows nothing after ten minutes but stops after fifty.

she returns home at six in the morning, the sun already awake and marc sat at their everything-but-simply-a-breakfast-bar that divides the kitchenette from the living room, tea in hand and coffee next to it, and slams the door to her bedroom shut without a hello.

marc says nothing and that kid knew nothing.

her clothes stink of cigarette smoke and burned flesh.

| 二十一 〈 twenty-one 〉
we're short staffed.

kate picks up her level voice from rosenberg, the slow, clarifying way she speaks when she needs to think. she also picks up a severe dislike of those words:

short-staffed

because, as proven time and time again, short-staffed means they're told you're superhuman in a tone that only ever means "go without sleep again". she sees the bags under marc's eyes and the way he takes a second too long to react to her directions when they're in action; she hears his mind slow in her head and knows they can't last in this routine much longer.

"everyone's short on--"

(leave it, kate)

the tug of her hair gets her to shut up and she misses another sunrise by being stuck underground.

| 二十三 〈 twenty-three 〉
the remembrance ceremony will take place at 10.30 outside st. michael's.

the flat's too big without marc, but she's been too busy to really notice until now, when her footsteps echo through the bathroom and into the main room. she buried him - cremated, if you want to be technical about it, none of them ever wanted to be one of the skulls that line the underground - before this, the ceremony faith organises to remember everyone that died that night. the ones that fought with and against them, the people caught up in crossfires and hit by incoming flame.

the expanse of their - of her, now - living room stares at her, too wide and too silent for kate to deal with. so she runs, darts up the stairs of the building to the rooftop and sails through the air - hopping one roof to another, sometimes at full speed, where she arcs, soars through the air for longer than anyone should be able to (she can't fly, but sometimes it looks like she can), sometimes slow and almost human, where she picks her way through an obstacle course above the city. she skips through the city centre with all its towering buildings and follows the path of slowly decreasing height, the one that leads towards the quieter parts of town.

there's a bridge just before the residential areas bloom into semi-detached houses and well-manicured gardens, a tall thing built decades before her own existence, with scaffolding wound up to the highest point. she picks her way up it in the latest hours of the night, sits with her knees tucked against her chest and her hair whipping in the wind, and lets the colours of the dawn wash over her.

| 三十 〈 thirty 〉
you awake?

her answer comes with the shift of blankets and the gentle exhale of breath, a stretch and groan as - eventually - kate peeks her head out from under the duvet and blinks herself into the world of the living.

"you missed sunrise."

she looks out of the window and shrugs.

"was tired."