round five (super shift): you had this expression on your face (arrow)
title: you had this expression on your face
fandom: arrow
characters: tommy, thea (mentions of the queen family and malcolm)
rating: pg
word count: 2807
recipient/prompt: Kelsey; who wanted Tommy's daemon (or familiar, some kind of soul-bonded animal) knows it needs to protect Thea before he figures out why (aka- magical sibling shenanigans!) (though you should know I had to research daemons for this so they will probably be out of character/different than you know them/more soul-bonded animals called daemons…I hope you still like it anyways,)
setting: daemon-setting/magical setting
It starts when he’s young (and stupid) and she’s younger (but smarter somehow, always smarter), and Tommy’s too wrapped up in other things to think it all through. To realize what it means. To think about what it could mean.
His daemon has yet to choose one single form. His father gets on him for that but he just smiles. Tommy thinks it’s just another part of him rebelling against his father.
And he’s very okay with that.
He’s playing video games at the Queen’s mansion, Oliver kicking his ass the game, when his daemon appears in his lap. It doesn’t startle him but the black cat staring up at him is a bit unnerving even when he knows it’s a part of himself. When he knows it’s there to tell him something.
Oliver pauses the game and looks over at it.
“Are cats supposed to have blue eyes?”
“It’s not even a real cat.” Tommy rolls his eyes, “Besides my eyes are blue. It makes sense.”
Oliver shrugs. He had a crow and its eyes were as dark as its feathers.
“What doesn’t make sense is why its staring at me…You know these things would be more helpful if they were more like Lassie. You know, leading you to the well and all that.”
The cat meowed at him, swiping at his face, making him turn to the left to avoid the claws.
It took a minute.
His eyes whipping around, not sure if it meant anything at all, but then there was something above him that caught his eye.
Not something, someone.
He was up and into the hall before he knew what he was doing.
“Thea Queen, what do the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tommy yells and it echoes and the cat meows at his side.
Thea giggles, putting another foot in front of the other.
“My gymnastics coach says I need more practice.” Thea says, placing another foot in front of her as she steps across the banister. The high, high banister that no one should ever stand on.
“I’m just doing what she said.” She smiles at him.
Her brown eyes are mischievous and playful, like she doesn’t understand that she could fall and die and the whole world might end in one minute when she makes the wrong step, wobbles the wrong way, when she falls and falls.
“Thea, I’m serious that isn’t safe-”
“To normal people it’s not safe.” Thea rolls her eyes, turning to look at him dead on. “For us, everything’s different.”
She took another step. This time it was not on the banister, not on the make-shift beam, but forwards-
“Thea!”
He could hear Oliver hurrying from the other room.
She giggled again, hovering above the ground, both of her feet on solid air.
When he realized she wasn’t falling to her painful death, he let out a rush of air he didn’t know he was holding, and the cat next to him began purring as it rubbed against his leg.
“Remember, Tommy, we’re different.” She smiles at him. “We’ll always be different. But, at least we have each other.”
She’s dropped to the floor, faster than he could see, landing in a crouching position. Thea looked up at him, the same smile on her face.
“What fun is having magic, if you can’t, have fun?” Thea giggles again.
She walks past him (and Oliver), and heads towards the kitchen.
“Your sister is going to be the death of me.” Tommy finally says out loud.
“I’ve always thought she’d be the death of someone.” Oliver says.
His stupid daemon meows.
--
It happens again (and again and again), Tommy’s daemon never deciding on a true form but he always knows something is happening when the cat appears. The cat with dark hair and blue eyes and a look that tells him to do something already. Even when he has no idea what that something is supposed to be.
It should really learn to talk.
He was over at Oliver’s again (because when he was not), there was a party that night. Somebody’s birthday maybe. Or maybe it was a charity thing. He didn’t know.
He was just there to enjoy the alcohol.
The cat with the too bright eyes appears in the window when he’s talking to a pretty brunette. He sighs, chugging back the glass of champagne, and giving her a quick goodbye as he followed his daemon.
He followed the direction it seemed to lead him in, heading towards the backyard and out of the house.
Tommy sighs at what he sees.
A fourteen year old Thea with a bottle of something surely alcoholic in her hand as she stood before the pool. And god, she really was going to be the death of him.
He steps closer, hears her muttering words under her breath and waving her empty hand in the air in a round motion. Sparks flew out and went everywhere.
“Thea, you know the rules,” He shakes his head at her and she turns to look at him, her face lighting up as she sees him there. “No magic when you’re drinking.”
He’s close enough to grab the bottle out of her hand. Bourbon. He was almost impressed. He hadn’t moved onto bourbon until he was at least sixteen.
“It makes me more open to my senses.” She smiles at him.
“It makes your words slur.” Tommy says, “And Latin, you know, not meant to be slurred. Also not to be understood half the time as far as I can tell, but still.”
“I thought you were supposed to be the fun brother.”
“I’m not actually your brother-”
“I don’t care.” Thea huffs, like things like biology don’t actually matter, “I’m adopting you.”
“I…”
How did you respond to that?
“Oliver might get jealous.”
“Good.” She smiles vindictively and her eyes narrow just enough that he’s reminded of the daemon that had led him there. It often wore that look. Like he should just know something without explanation. Like he should already know what was going on. Like a little bit of vindictiveness wasn’t a bad thing.
“You’re kind of a mean person, Thea Queen.”
She smiles. “If you’re going to be a witch, be the biggest one you can.”
He sighs again. Taking a swig of the bourbon himself. (He hears her huff a little at that, like if she wasn’t allowed he shouldn’t be either, but he ignores it, his eyes closed.)
“So…” He says turning to look at her again, “What exactly was the plan here?”
“Plan? No real plan…just experimenting.”
“Like when you blew up Oliver’s watch?”
“No, that was on purpose. That was ugly.”
“I bought him that watch.”
“I know.” Thea shakes her head, “You need better taste.”
“I have-”
His words stop when he notices her hand still moving, around and around her fingers goes and there are sparks flying out.
She had been distracting him. Damn it. “Thea, what are you doing?”
“Experimenting.” She smiles.
Suddenly there was an explosion of water from the pool, like a giant had dive bombed it, and suddenly Tommy (and his very expensive suit) was soaked.
Thea giggled again and through watery eyes he noticed she was somehow still dry.
“How…”
“Oh, Tommy, you still have so much to learn.” She says moving just close enough to kiss him on the cheek. “But I guess that’s the fun part.”
She left, still dry, and walked back to the house. Somehow able to stay steady on the stilettos she was wearing despite having drunk half the bottle he was holding.
Tommy looked down at the cat at his side.
“This is all your fault.” He says.
It just meows back and he swears he thinks it looks like it was giving him the same look Thea had given him.
--
Thea had always wanted everything.
(It was a fault to most but to Tommy it was just another example of her being smarter than him. Thea wanted everything. Tommy wanted…Tommy wanted. End of sentence.)
It was proven when she was six and wanted a puppy. Tommy and Oliver and their daemons had stumbled up her in her room giggling, hundreds of different kinds of puppies crowding her large room.
She had already named each and every one of them.
Was heartbroken when she had to give them away.
(They belonged to her, she had said, she had made them.)
When she was seven it had been chocolate cakes. It had started after her parents had gotten her strawberry cake for her birthday. Pink, like her favorite color. Only pink wasn’t her favorite color she had declared and she had been angry enough with them for not knowing that, that she didn’t even open her birthday gifts. Chocolate cakes appearing all around the house after that, all equally delicious and extravagant.
Tommy hadn’t actually been there for that one, but he had heard about it and got to enjoy eating the spoils later. (Every time Moria tried to be rid of them, by magic or having the staff remove them, another two appeared in its place.)
By the time she was twelve and things like it just kept happening, Oliver was beginning to question if Thea wasn’t the reason they had so much money.
Tommy had laughed it off, their two families had always been wealthy, connected in that way as well as magic, but it had given him pause.
Made him wonder just what Thea was capable when her mind was set to it. Because he had seen what happened when she didn’t even try and it was better than anything he or Oliver could do and that was after years of practice.
It made him curious.
Probably why his daemon had started turning into a cat after that.
(Curiosity killed the cat and one day Thea would certainly be the death of him.)
--
Tommy always knew magic wasn’t a cure-all, wasn’t a fix-it to the world’s problems, or even just your own. He had learned that at a very age when one night his mother hadn’t come home.
(His father had always seemed to remind him of it after that whenever he could.)
Tommy knew this, but still, when the cat appeared in the passenger seat beside him as he paused at a red light, it took him back. Its eyes weren’t blue anymore, instead deep brown, almost almond shaped, and too human to be on a real cat.
It meowed on him, a sad sound escaping its mouth, something new, as it stared back at him. His daemons eyes never leaving his, a message written in them that he had yet to entirely learn to read.
A car honked behind him and he looked up to see the light had changed.
He ended up taking a left, then another, and then a right, his car leading him to the Queen mansion instead of home where he was originally going. The daemon meowed each time he made a turn or a line closer to the home, moving so it was looking out the window.
When he pulled up and his car was taken and Marta opened the door for him, despite him having a key, informing him the Oliver and the Queens were out.
His daemon appeared again, this time on the stairs, looking at him and then looking up.
“Is…Is Thea here?” He asks hesitantly.
“I…Miss Queen is…”
“She’s here.” Tommy already knew the answer.
“She didn’t want to go out,” Marta says sadly, “She’s upset but no one knows why. Even Oliver could not get it out of her.”
“Maybe it’s time to bring in the B team.” He smiles and Marta let him slide by her and head towards the stairs, towards Thea.
Halfway up he hear her say, “Mr. Merlyn, to Thea you certainly aren’t the B Team.”
He smiled a little unable to stop himself. There were just somethings he had never heard before. And even if it wasn’t the truth, hearing it still made something in him shift.
Tommy found Thea curled up in her bed. His daemon was next to her, purring and licking her face.
He could taste salt.
“Thea?” He says hesitantly stepping into the room, stepping closer to her.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I…I don’t even know what there is to talk about.” He says, “I just know you’re here, alone, in bed and I-I don’t care what happened, really. I just want to make it better.”
She shifted in her bed, lifting his daemon onto her lap as she stroked its fur, and a touch of a smile appeared on her tear stained face.
“What if you can’t make it better?” Thea asks.
“Then, I go downstairs and get some rocky road and then we spend the night watching movies where things blow up. I know how you like explosions.”
She looked down again, petting his daemon gently, as a tear drop fell on its head.
“Its eyes are brown.” Thea says.
“Yeah,” Tommy says nodding, “That’s new. But the looks it gives me are still the same.”
“Why is it always a cat when I’m around?”
“I…”
How had he never realized that? How had he never put the two together? That his daemon’s form changed but when it was Thea, and somehow it was always Thea, even at her young age (she’d be sixteen next month but he’d still be older than her).
It had different forms other times, but when it was leading him to Thea it was always in cat form. And when it hissed at his father when he yelled, it was in cat form then too. Every person he had ever met and the only one he had ever seen take his father back, take him down a peg, had been Thea and her unforgiving honesty. And that one time when she was five and had stomped on his foot for being too harsh with Tommy.
(She how you like it, she had said. He had always remembered that.)
“I think when it knows I’m supposed to be with you, it turns itself into a cat.” Tommy finally says slowly, “I think it knows, knows you, and it…it turns itself into the closest thing like you.”
Thea was small and young but she had claws that left scratch marks in your skin. She screamed and hissed at anyone who would hurt someone she loved, her hackles raised as she observed the people she cared about and knew something was wrong. She curled into herself, curled into small spaces when she was upset. She tore things up just because it seemed like fun at the time.
His daemon couldn’t be more like her if it tried.
Only it was.
Now it had added her eyes. The exact color and shape.
He wondered if now that he knew, if it would ever change forms again.
“I don’t need saving.” Thea says quietly as she looks at him, “I don’t need you-it-trying to protect me. I don’t need anyone too.”
“Of course not, you’re a queen. Queens don’t need saving, they’re the ones that decide who lives and who dies remember?” He says, “But you know what they say, it’s lonely on the top, and even queens need lowly huntsmen to confide in.”
“You’re not a huntsman, Tommy.” She says with a smile as she looks at him, “You’re so much more than that.”
“Like I said, it’s the queen that decides.”
--
Tommy gets the ice cream like he promised and two spoons and they sit on her bed watching bad action movies and explosion after explosion.
Whenever something would explode on screen, Thea moved her hand and a small explosion would appear out of thin air. She smiled, telling Tommy it’ll make sure he stayed awake and didn’t leave her to watch the movies alone. She also once did it with a smile as she said he wasn’t allowed to leave until she said he could. Not for the night anyways.
She never tells him why she was crying, though she snuggles up to him and his daemon simultaneously, confusing his magical senses. But she doesn’t cry again that night. Instead laughing and laughing, even when the things he said weren’t funny or when they were at serious parts of the movies they were halfway watching.
Eventually she fell asleep on his shoulder, her dark hair spread against him as she snuggles closer.
His daemon blinks at him with wide almond shaped brown eyes.
Somehow he thinks this time he gets what it’s trying to tell him.
(It never does change forms again. Instead staying that way with the same dark eyes. He thinks he likes it better that way.)
fandom: arrow
characters: tommy, thea (mentions of the queen family and malcolm)
rating: pg
word count: 2807
recipient/prompt: Kelsey; who wanted Tommy's daemon (or familiar, some kind of soul-bonded animal) knows it needs to protect Thea before he figures out why (aka- magical sibling shenanigans!) (though you should know I had to research daemons for this so they will probably be out of character/different than you know them/more soul-bonded animals called daemons…I hope you still like it anyways,)
setting: daemon-setting/magical setting
It starts when he’s young (and stupid) and she’s younger (but smarter somehow, always smarter), and Tommy’s too wrapped up in other things to think it all through. To realize what it means. To think about what it could mean.
His daemon has yet to choose one single form. His father gets on him for that but he just smiles. Tommy thinks it’s just another part of him rebelling against his father.
And he’s very okay with that.
He’s playing video games at the Queen’s mansion, Oliver kicking his ass the game, when his daemon appears in his lap. It doesn’t startle him but the black cat staring up at him is a bit unnerving even when he knows it’s a part of himself. When he knows it’s there to tell him something.
Oliver pauses the game and looks over at it.
“Are cats supposed to have blue eyes?”
“It’s not even a real cat.” Tommy rolls his eyes, “Besides my eyes are blue. It makes sense.”
Oliver shrugs. He had a crow and its eyes were as dark as its feathers.
“What doesn’t make sense is why its staring at me…You know these things would be more helpful if they were more like Lassie. You know, leading you to the well and all that.”
The cat meowed at him, swiping at his face, making him turn to the left to avoid the claws.
It took a minute.
His eyes whipping around, not sure if it meant anything at all, but then there was something above him that caught his eye.
Not something, someone.
He was up and into the hall before he knew what he was doing.
“Thea Queen, what do the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tommy yells and it echoes and the cat meows at his side.
Thea giggles, putting another foot in front of the other.
“My gymnastics coach says I need more practice.” Thea says, placing another foot in front of her as she steps across the banister. The high, high banister that no one should ever stand on.
“I’m just doing what she said.” She smiles at him.
Her brown eyes are mischievous and playful, like she doesn’t understand that she could fall and die and the whole world might end in one minute when she makes the wrong step, wobbles the wrong way, when she falls and falls.
“Thea, I’m serious that isn’t safe-”
“To normal people it’s not safe.” Thea rolls her eyes, turning to look at him dead on. “For us, everything’s different.”
She took another step. This time it was not on the banister, not on the make-shift beam, but forwards-
“Thea!”
He could hear Oliver hurrying from the other room.
She giggled again, hovering above the ground, both of her feet on solid air.
When he realized she wasn’t falling to her painful death, he let out a rush of air he didn’t know he was holding, and the cat next to him began purring as it rubbed against his leg.
“Remember, Tommy, we’re different.” She smiles at him. “We’ll always be different. But, at least we have each other.”
She’s dropped to the floor, faster than he could see, landing in a crouching position. Thea looked up at him, the same smile on her face.
“What fun is having magic, if you can’t, have fun?” Thea giggles again.
She walks past him (and Oliver), and heads towards the kitchen.
“Your sister is going to be the death of me.” Tommy finally says out loud.
“I’ve always thought she’d be the death of someone.” Oliver says.
His stupid daemon meows.
--
It happens again (and again and again), Tommy’s daemon never deciding on a true form but he always knows something is happening when the cat appears. The cat with dark hair and blue eyes and a look that tells him to do something already. Even when he has no idea what that something is supposed to be.
It should really learn to talk.
He was over at Oliver’s again (because when he was not), there was a party that night. Somebody’s birthday maybe. Or maybe it was a charity thing. He didn’t know.
He was just there to enjoy the alcohol.
The cat with the too bright eyes appears in the window when he’s talking to a pretty brunette. He sighs, chugging back the glass of champagne, and giving her a quick goodbye as he followed his daemon.
He followed the direction it seemed to lead him in, heading towards the backyard and out of the house.
Tommy sighs at what he sees.
A fourteen year old Thea with a bottle of something surely alcoholic in her hand as she stood before the pool. And god, she really was going to be the death of him.
He steps closer, hears her muttering words under her breath and waving her empty hand in the air in a round motion. Sparks flew out and went everywhere.
“Thea, you know the rules,” He shakes his head at her and she turns to look at him, her face lighting up as she sees him there. “No magic when you’re drinking.”
He’s close enough to grab the bottle out of her hand. Bourbon. He was almost impressed. He hadn’t moved onto bourbon until he was at least sixteen.
“It makes me more open to my senses.” She smiles at him.
“It makes your words slur.” Tommy says, “And Latin, you know, not meant to be slurred. Also not to be understood half the time as far as I can tell, but still.”
“I thought you were supposed to be the fun brother.”
“I’m not actually your brother-”
“I don’t care.” Thea huffs, like things like biology don’t actually matter, “I’m adopting you.”
“I…”
How did you respond to that?
“Oliver might get jealous.”
“Good.” She smiles vindictively and her eyes narrow just enough that he’s reminded of the daemon that had led him there. It often wore that look. Like he should just know something without explanation. Like he should already know what was going on. Like a little bit of vindictiveness wasn’t a bad thing.
“You’re kind of a mean person, Thea Queen.”
She smiles. “If you’re going to be a witch, be the biggest one you can.”
He sighs again. Taking a swig of the bourbon himself. (He hears her huff a little at that, like if she wasn’t allowed he shouldn’t be either, but he ignores it, his eyes closed.)
“So…” He says turning to look at her again, “What exactly was the plan here?”
“Plan? No real plan…just experimenting.”
“Like when you blew up Oliver’s watch?”
“No, that was on purpose. That was ugly.”
“I bought him that watch.”
“I know.” Thea shakes her head, “You need better taste.”
“I have-”
His words stop when he notices her hand still moving, around and around her fingers goes and there are sparks flying out.
She had been distracting him. Damn it. “Thea, what are you doing?”
“Experimenting.” She smiles.
Suddenly there was an explosion of water from the pool, like a giant had dive bombed it, and suddenly Tommy (and his very expensive suit) was soaked.
Thea giggled again and through watery eyes he noticed she was somehow still dry.
“How…”
“Oh, Tommy, you still have so much to learn.” She says moving just close enough to kiss him on the cheek. “But I guess that’s the fun part.”
She left, still dry, and walked back to the house. Somehow able to stay steady on the stilettos she was wearing despite having drunk half the bottle he was holding.
Tommy looked down at the cat at his side.
“This is all your fault.” He says.
It just meows back and he swears he thinks it looks like it was giving him the same look Thea had given him.
--
Thea had always wanted everything.
(It was a fault to most but to Tommy it was just another example of her being smarter than him. Thea wanted everything. Tommy wanted…Tommy wanted. End of sentence.)
It was proven when she was six and wanted a puppy. Tommy and Oliver and their daemons had stumbled up her in her room giggling, hundreds of different kinds of puppies crowding her large room.
She had already named each and every one of them.
Was heartbroken when she had to give them away.
(They belonged to her, she had said, she had made them.)
When she was seven it had been chocolate cakes. It had started after her parents had gotten her strawberry cake for her birthday. Pink, like her favorite color. Only pink wasn’t her favorite color she had declared and she had been angry enough with them for not knowing that, that she didn’t even open her birthday gifts. Chocolate cakes appearing all around the house after that, all equally delicious and extravagant.
Tommy hadn’t actually been there for that one, but he had heard about it and got to enjoy eating the spoils later. (Every time Moria tried to be rid of them, by magic or having the staff remove them, another two appeared in its place.)
By the time she was twelve and things like it just kept happening, Oliver was beginning to question if Thea wasn’t the reason they had so much money.
Tommy had laughed it off, their two families had always been wealthy, connected in that way as well as magic, but it had given him pause.
Made him wonder just what Thea was capable when her mind was set to it. Because he had seen what happened when she didn’t even try and it was better than anything he or Oliver could do and that was after years of practice.
It made him curious.
Probably why his daemon had started turning into a cat after that.
(Curiosity killed the cat and one day Thea would certainly be the death of him.)
--
Tommy always knew magic wasn’t a cure-all, wasn’t a fix-it to the world’s problems, or even just your own. He had learned that at a very age when one night his mother hadn’t come home.
(His father had always seemed to remind him of it after that whenever he could.)
Tommy knew this, but still, when the cat appeared in the passenger seat beside him as he paused at a red light, it took him back. Its eyes weren’t blue anymore, instead deep brown, almost almond shaped, and too human to be on a real cat.
It meowed on him, a sad sound escaping its mouth, something new, as it stared back at him. His daemons eyes never leaving his, a message written in them that he had yet to entirely learn to read.
A car honked behind him and he looked up to see the light had changed.
He ended up taking a left, then another, and then a right, his car leading him to the Queen mansion instead of home where he was originally going. The daemon meowed each time he made a turn or a line closer to the home, moving so it was looking out the window.
When he pulled up and his car was taken and Marta opened the door for him, despite him having a key, informing him the Oliver and the Queens were out.
His daemon appeared again, this time on the stairs, looking at him and then looking up.
“Is…Is Thea here?” He asks hesitantly.
“I…Miss Queen is…”
“She’s here.” Tommy already knew the answer.
“She didn’t want to go out,” Marta says sadly, “She’s upset but no one knows why. Even Oliver could not get it out of her.”
“Maybe it’s time to bring in the B team.” He smiles and Marta let him slide by her and head towards the stairs, towards Thea.
Halfway up he hear her say, “Mr. Merlyn, to Thea you certainly aren’t the B Team.”
He smiled a little unable to stop himself. There were just somethings he had never heard before. And even if it wasn’t the truth, hearing it still made something in him shift.
Tommy found Thea curled up in her bed. His daemon was next to her, purring and licking her face.
He could taste salt.
“Thea?” He says hesitantly stepping into the room, stepping closer to her.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I…I don’t even know what there is to talk about.” He says, “I just know you’re here, alone, in bed and I-I don’t care what happened, really. I just want to make it better.”
She shifted in her bed, lifting his daemon onto her lap as she stroked its fur, and a touch of a smile appeared on her tear stained face.
“What if you can’t make it better?” Thea asks.
“Then, I go downstairs and get some rocky road and then we spend the night watching movies where things blow up. I know how you like explosions.”
She looked down again, petting his daemon gently, as a tear drop fell on its head.
“Its eyes are brown.” Thea says.
“Yeah,” Tommy says nodding, “That’s new. But the looks it gives me are still the same.”
“Why is it always a cat when I’m around?”
“I…”
How had he never realized that? How had he never put the two together? That his daemon’s form changed but when it was Thea, and somehow it was always Thea, even at her young age (she’d be sixteen next month but he’d still be older than her).
It had different forms other times, but when it was leading him to Thea it was always in cat form. And when it hissed at his father when he yelled, it was in cat form then too. Every person he had ever met and the only one he had ever seen take his father back, take him down a peg, had been Thea and her unforgiving honesty. And that one time when she was five and had stomped on his foot for being too harsh with Tommy.
(She how you like it, she had said. He had always remembered that.)
“I think when it knows I’m supposed to be with you, it turns itself into a cat.” Tommy finally says slowly, “I think it knows, knows you, and it…it turns itself into the closest thing like you.”
Thea was small and young but she had claws that left scratch marks in your skin. She screamed and hissed at anyone who would hurt someone she loved, her hackles raised as she observed the people she cared about and knew something was wrong. She curled into herself, curled into small spaces when she was upset. She tore things up just because it seemed like fun at the time.
His daemon couldn’t be more like her if it tried.
Only it was.
Now it had added her eyes. The exact color and shape.
He wondered if now that he knew, if it would ever change forms again.
“I don’t need saving.” Thea says quietly as she looks at him, “I don’t need you-it-trying to protect me. I don’t need anyone too.”
“Of course not, you’re a queen. Queens don’t need saving, they’re the ones that decide who lives and who dies remember?” He says, “But you know what they say, it’s lonely on the top, and even queens need lowly huntsmen to confide in.”
“You’re not a huntsman, Tommy.” She says with a smile as she looks at him, “You’re so much more than that.”
“Like I said, it’s the queen that decides.”
--
Tommy gets the ice cream like he promised and two spoons and they sit on her bed watching bad action movies and explosion after explosion.
Whenever something would explode on screen, Thea moved her hand and a small explosion would appear out of thin air. She smiled, telling Tommy it’ll make sure he stayed awake and didn’t leave her to watch the movies alone. She also once did it with a smile as she said he wasn’t allowed to leave until she said he could. Not for the night anyways.
She never tells him why she was crying, though she snuggles up to him and his daemon simultaneously, confusing his magical senses. But she doesn’t cry again that night. Instead laughing and laughing, even when the things he said weren’t funny or when they were at serious parts of the movies they were halfway watching.
Eventually she fell asleep on his shoulder, her dark hair spread against him as she snuggles closer.
His daemon blinks at him with wide almond shaped brown eyes.
Somehow he thinks this time he gets what it’s trying to tell him.
(It never does change forms again. Instead staying that way with the same dark eyes. He thinks he likes it better that way.)