Promptly prompted prompts? Or, y'know, something.
My brain is struggling with five ideas at the same time and while I kind of want to write all of them, I also don't feel like jumping into a real story right now. The solution, of course, would be drabbling all over the place, which is why your support would be most appreciated. Which is to say:
Prompt me! And others! And yourself! Like so:
Prompt me! And others! And yourself! Like so:
- I queued ( Read more... )
Steve's quiet when he gets out.
Everything's too loud, too bright, too fast, Danny most of all, Danny who hides everything badly, in plain sight underneath eighty-mile-an-hour bluster and gossip. Most of it is stuff Steve already knows, shared over a shitty six-foot phone line between three inches of glass, read and reread and tucked into his boots, the boots he wore before. He curls his toes, reassured by the folds of the letters under his soles, and watches a pair of sunglasses land in his lap.
Danny must have seen the squint. Steve puts the glasses on but doesn't look up; he's not quite ready for sky just yet.
The house, when they get there, is far too big, open and rattly and wrong, and Steve wants nothing more than to be in his boxers and thongs again but he stops himself from taking off his boots; he stops entirely when he's halfway to the kitchen, completely at a loss for what to do with himself.
Danny closes the door behind them, and he's finally, finally quiet, probably watching and Steve should go forward or turn around, should do something, anything, but he's stuck, he can't, he's standing on a lifeline he's not supposed to need anymore and Danny sighs out a soft "Welcome home," before he brushes Steve's elbow and heads for the kitchen. "You hungry?" Danny calls, like the last months never happened. Steve can hear him muttering to the kitchen at large, cataloging cupboard contents Steve didn't buy and deciding on "Ma's puttanesca, there's comfort food'll make you cry."
Steve gets upstairs, somehow, finds the bedroom almost like he'd left it--messier bed, Danny-detritus in random places, his own clothes untouched--and he strips out of everything, the cargoes too itchy, the polo-collar too heavy; he strips it off until he's down to his underwear and he feels right again. The space between the nightstand and the wall is the perfect size for squeezing into, a good space so he can pull the letters out of the boots.
He unfolds the stack, smoothing them over his thighs the same as always--oldest first, their creases soft and thin, revealing bright crayon, Kono's scrawl, Mary's loops, Danny's sharp, precise hand. The dates get farther apart for most of them, the drawings shift to marker and colored pencil and are less obviously for Steve but he doesn't care, the skies were always blue. The newest ones are still crisp at the top of the stack, the last one hastily-typed and printed on hotel paper, two lines from Jenna in place of Danny's usual three pages:
"Your release will be 11:00 am on Friday. Danny will pick you up."
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This is so, so beautiful. It is.
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I have a feeling this might grow a bit, because Danny keeps finding Steve tucked into small spaces and Steve really has to work to act normal, again, and all that eye contact is unnerving but eventually, eventually he'll get back to where he was, to who he was, he knows it, they all know it, and Danny takes to leaving the radio on, somewhere in the house, because if it's not too quiet Steve finds it easier to stay out in the open and Danny doesn't say anything about the letters forming a hard lump under Steve's pillow, he just tucks them back into the pillowcase when they fall out, and the day Steve finally goes for a swim Danny adds one more to the stack.
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you just captured how steve feels so right and your writing style is amazing. i think i love you and i don't even know you.
♥♥♥
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Aw, thank you! You totally made my afternoon, what a lovely comment!
(I'm going to be playing with this a bit, and posting officially on AO3 in the near future. I think there's going to be a bit more...)
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