Monday: Hurt/Comfort
Hello, comment_fic friends! I’m drabblewriter, jazzed to be your benevolent overlord for the week, and our first theme is my personal favorite fic genre, hurt/comfort. Today's the day we put our faves through the emotional and/or physical wringer, then send someone in to make them feel a bit better.
Just a few rules:No more than five prompts in a row ( Read more... )
Just a few rules:No more than five prompts in a row ( Read more... )
Sometimes she doesn’t know how to cope with all this. So much has happened these past few months, so much responsibility she thought would be a piece of cake … but then reality crashed in and left her with bad numbers and the worst reputation ever.
With each day passing she realized how much her father had actually done, so much neither she nor her brothers knew of.
They take it easy, keep living their lives as if nothing changed at all, but it’s not possible for the new head of GeneCo.
And sometimes, just like now, she just likes to disappear for a day, wander the town with a face no one recognizes, just to escape the questions, the nagging and the duties.
Her hands are shaking as she pulls out a cigarette and lights it, sits down on dirty stairs in one of the countless back-alleys the city has to offer, and allows herself to let a tear run down her face. No one’s taking notice, no one bothers, no one cares for a crying stranger. They all have their own problems.
“Well, if that isn’t an unusual sight,” a deep voice startles her. Great, just what she needed.
With an annoyed sigh she turns away and wipes her face, hoping he hasn’t seen her cry, but of course hoping is pointless.
She can’t see him frown, narrowing his eyes at her, trying to see through this strange behaviour.
“What, no ‘hello’ to an old friend?”
“I can’t remember you ever being a friend,” she says with a soft voice, way softer than anything he ever experienced with her. Normally everything about the two of them is hard, rough and raw.
He should huff and turn away, or maybe mock her about it … he shouldn’t care. At all.
But he can’t, and he knows it, so he sighs and shuffles over to her.
“Bad day?” he asks in spite of everything and sits down next to her.
“Rather bad months. Bad life, if you want,” she answers bitterly.
“Mh,” he makes and looks to the floor.
She swallows a lump in her throat and tries to keep her lips from trembling, so she takes another strike of the almost finished cigarette to distract herself.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” she finally states.
“Mh?” he asks and turns his head a bit to look at her. Her hair is still black, but the face is new. Very unlike her, actually. There’s nothing one would call pretty. The nose is crooked at one place, even a little too large. The lips too thin, the chin too pointy. Her eyes brown … very unlike herself.
“You don’t have to sit here and pretend to care. I’m not dumb, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says softly.
“And I’m also not interested in Z for a change. So there’s nothing for you to gain today.” The bitterness returns to her voice.
“I know,” he repeats, and that’s when she finally turns to look at him with a hard face. No seduction, no play. No Amber.
“How did you know it’s me anyway?” she asks now, noticing how he looks at her face.
A shrug. “I just did.”
She huffs again and turns away. “Yeah.”
After a moment, she continues: “If you want to, you can go.”
“I know,” he says once more, and that’s when she rolls her eyes. “Well, if you know that much, why bother talking to me?”
Yeah, why bother?
He asks himself the same thing in this moment. “It would feel wrong to just leave you like this.”
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Though she intended for these words to sound hard, her voice trembles again and her eyes water up. “That’s all there always is,” she whispers and shuts her eyes, makes the tears spill over and presses her knees tightly to her body.
He sees her in a new light at this moment, sees the person behind the addicted woman she usually is. And he can’t deny that it moves something in him.
“Hey,” he says softly and lays an arm around her. She still feels like Amber, and that surprises him for a moment, but it also makes him pull her closer. “It’s going to be alright.”
Just a phrase, normally meaningless, but at this moment it means the world to her. She starts to sob as she turns to him and buries her face in his shoulder, smells dirt and death and HIM, so familiar, so comforting, and when he lays his second arm around her and holds her tight, she feels safe for the first time in months.
After a while her tears subside and her shaking body relaxes.
“You know,” she says and wipes her eyes for the last time, “you’re better at comforting than I thought.” She laughs softly and sits up, leaves his embrace and looks at him. A new Amber.
“Guess there’s still a lot we don’t know about each other,” he answers with a teasing voice and a smile.
And suddenly the world seems to be just a little brighter.
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Thank you!
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