grapefruit and cookies 'n' cream with double malt, cookie crumbs and a pocky chain
Story: Timeless { backstory | index }
Title: I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing
Rating: PG-13
Challenge: Grapefruit #24: a penny saved, Cookies ‘n’ Cream #27: push
Toppings/Extras: pocky chain, cookie crumbs, malt (x2)
Wordcount: 2,200
Summary: Isaac Prowse and Adele Merritt’s story.
Notes: I’m back, I think. The relationship of Isaac and Adele throughout Timeless. Titled after the Petshop Boys song that always reminds me of them-it’s been cheering me up big time. :) Grapefruit PFAH: Adele : My personal plaything. BtS PFAH: Isaac : the future is so awesome. Cookie crumbs of: Hobby, Goddess, Tarnish, Funny Business, First Night, Not Fair, Spelling It Out and Something Wonderful. I'll be going on a reading spree soon. <3
The first time their eyes meet, Adele has just finished shaking hands with Ashdown.
“Whoa, hold on,” she says, frown cutting her brow-an expression Isaac would become well used to over time. She gestures to him and turns to the others. “Who’s this?”
“Ashdown’s bodyguard,” Robyn says lightly. “He wouldn’t leave him behind.”
Adele’s eyes narrow at the deviation from the plan. She hates deviations from the plan. After glaring haughtily at Isaac as if it were all his fault, she opts simply to ignore him unless forced to take his existence into account. Hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary.
-----
It seems that Ashdown is going to die. Isaac’s not allowed near him for fear of catching the same thing, which leaves him standing miserably in front of a perspex screen. If Ashdown dies, who the hell is going to pay him?
“You’re like a faithful dog,” Adele smirks. Isaac glares at her and she looks offended. “It’s not my fault your boss has an immune system like wet tissue paper. Why aren’t you keeling over, anyway?”
“Plague survivor,” Isaac says.
“Oh,” Adele replies sweetly. “That explains the face, then.”
Isaac pins her with an unamused look.
“What’s your excuse?”
-----
By the time it gets to boarding the Kraken, Adele is getting desperate. Newson will rescue her now. He has to rescue her now. Otherwise she would actually have to go onto the actual ship and spend actual months on board with actual pirates.
That cannot happen.
“After you,” Isaac says to her politely. She could have hit him. Being polite at a time like this? She scowls at him fiercely but he’s not fazed in the least. A lifetime of dealing with Ashdown, she supposes in irritation as she looks up at the old-fashioned ship in front of her.
-----
After a few days Adele calms down a little and stops moping about being abandoned by her beloved boss. Isaac can’t help but wonder at her choice of clothing. Business suits, nothing but business suits.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” she snarls at him suddenly.
His brow crinkles, mostly in amusement.
“Are you always this charming, Miss Merritt?” he asks lightly.
“Only to the lucky few.”
“I’m honoured.”
Adele squints at him for a while like she’s not sure what to make of him. The sharp boning of her face gives her a fearsome appearance, and those lips…
-----
Everything about Isaac Prowse changes when he smiles. He’s not a born smiler, so Adele doesn’t notice until the night the pirates find the CD player and the air is filled with awful music and the atmosphere is cheery.
His hair, usually slicked out of his face painstakingly, has auburn strands falling forwards from his strange playfight with the pirate captain and the smile-the first real, genuine smile she’s seen on his face… it’s bright and lovely. Adele doesn’t usually like bright and lovely things but this is different.
So she decides: he’ll do. Just as a silly hobby.
-----
Isaac doesn’t know what to do.
He’s just realised that, oh shit, he’s falling.
There’s something ethereal just then, that exact moment, which makes him see it clearly for the first time. Something about those dark lips and her sleek hair, the tiny waist and massive hips, a goddess of evil and seduction and snakes and plagues and night.
Her most frightening qualities are what captivate him the most.
The silence is close to breaking point as she turns to him and then flashes him her pearly fangs in a heart-stopping smirk, saying into the still night air, “You’re adorable.”
-----
Their first time is a calculated attack. Adele knows what she wants from the outset and good God, does she get it. It’s clear that Isaac Prowse isn’t used to being jumped on and devoured, but that’s his problem, not hers. In the half-darkness she pushes him into walls and scratches him and mixes her kisses with bites, and then when he starts doing the same she nearly loses all of the breath in her body.
When it comes to the sex he’s hesitant again, which Adele thinks is just silly. Some bullshit about tarnishing her honour. Is he serious?
-----
Apparently the whole thing is some sort of business deal to Adele.
And she has rules.
No kissing, no hand-holding, no marriage proposals (…oh), no terms of endearment, no doe-eyes… the list goes on. Isaac feels stupid. He should have expected it really, but he’s bruised by it nonetheless. What if he wants to kiss her, and hold her hand, and hug her sometimes?
It’s pointless. He might as well forget it.
But it’s the nights: like the love-starved vampire that she is, every night she returns to him and he should resist her but he can’t, he just can’t.
-----
Tonight, she doesn’t know why, but once they’ve finished with their tearing and their throwing and their kissing and their gasping and their twisting… their everything… she stays. Nothing in the world can put her feelings into words, not to her, as she sinks under the covers, tucks her head against his arm and feels herself drifting. Getting up seems like too much effort: she feels warm and calm and the world is soft and blurry, and really, if she leaves early enough in the morning, nobody will know.
It’s nothing to do with him. Of that she is certain.
-----
The longer it goes on, the more it hurts. It’s awful, how much he cares for her. When she starts sleeping in his room, staying after the sex, he starts hoping. He needn’t have bothered. Adele makes her feelings perfectly clear in the daylight.
At the time, though, when they’re settling to a night of dreams and she’s anchored into his arms… he feels like he’s caught a storm cloud, like he’s finally managed to win her over. She holds him and he holds her; he kisses her hairline and she smiles at the contact, looking so normal and loving.
-----
“We need some dirt on Ashdown.”
“Oh?” Adele frowns as she holds the communicator to her ear, seated at the desk in her cabin. She runs a finger over the wooden surface and suppresses a grin when she remembers what she and Isaac were doing on it last night…
“You’ve got one of his close allies on board, right? His bodyguard, the Prowse guy?”
“Yes.” Oh, this is too good. Voskoy has no idea she’s fucking the man’s brains out every night-it’ll be easy! “I’ll see what I can do,” she says, and means it. It’s her biggest mistake.
-----
He thinks he’s going to die when she starts quizzing him about Ashdown.
Honestly. He thinks he can feel his blood slowing, stopping, cooling in his veins. She’s not subtle about it in the least and doesn’t seem to expect him to have any sort of objection to being used. He’s been had. No.
“Is this what it’s always been about?” he asks, aghast. Adele furrows her brow.
“What?”
“This. Ashdown.”
Adele laughs, which isn’t the reaction he’d hoped for.
“What do you think?” she says like it’s obvious.
And oh God, it is obvious, it’s so obvious it hurts.
-----
“I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Those are the words that break her world into a thousand splinters of unexpected pain. She can’t let it show, she refuses, but from that day on the Kraken is harrowing and empty. She can’t get her head around it. Isaac, the most lovesick of puppies, isn’t allowed to break things off with her, he just isn’t. He’s hers.
It’s dizzying, breath-taking how much it hurts. She feels as though she’s been shattered into a million pieces against the wall. Surely this isn’t allowed. There must be rules against this.
But there aren’t.
-----
Isaac realises that he’s being glared at, but he’s used to it by now. He ducks his head and gets on with his work tying down the halliard because he can’t be dealing with Adele’s vicious glares.
Everything he did was because he loves her. The way she’s reacting to their embarrassingly public split is nearly enough to convincing she feels the same, or at least feels something, but she refuses to say anything on the matter.
When she starts sniping and jibing and being a pathetic, spiteful, mean-spirited bitch about the whole thing, he gives up on being polite.
-----
For a while she can’t see a thing, everything turning white-hot in her eyes, and then the searing pain cuts in from the back of her head. Adele struggles onto one elbow, and suddenly there’s a presence by her arm.
“Ada… are you alright?”
Blearily, she blinks at Isaac, and then she realises he just called her ‘Ada’ like he used to.
She wants to reply with something more appropriate than, “Fuck! My head!” but she can’t.
“You got, er, a little bit… bludgeoned,” Isaac informs her weakly.
The sea battle rages on around them and Adele’s heart rages too.
-----
After that it’s all tip-toes.
“Hey,” Adele says when Isaac comes around the corner. His eyes fix to the iron poker in her hand.
“Hello,” he replies. “Um, seeing to the captives?”
“Yeah,” Adele says, a forced conversational tone in her voice. “Just… you know.” She waves the poker. It looks dangerous. “Getting information.”
“That’s nice… I, er, usually use knives.”
“Well, they can get a bit… messy,” Adele says, adding with sudden desperation, “Not… not that that’s always a bad thing!”
“Yes. Uh… well, I should go.”
“Right… maybe see you later?”
“Maybe,” Isaac replies inanely, feeling utterly bonkers.
-----
When she finally admits to him that she misses him all day every day along with each and every night, when she finally breaks and asks him to be hers again, asks him to be theirs, apologises for everything and begs him to take her back, she feels good. She can scarcely believe it.
He holds her tight and yes, she’s in his arms again, back where she belongs. The place she’s been yearning for.
“I think I might love you,” he says softly.
She can’t, she can’t. She twists her fists up in his clothes and loves him too.
-----
The days are hot, slow and lovely.
Both of them sit in the doorway to one of the top-deck cabins for the shade there: Adele stretches her legs out, no longer bothering with the black tights that had once been a standard uniform to her. Arm around her, tucking her head close, Isaac kisses her heartily every few minutes. He never once thought that he would be glad for a mutiny, but he is now. It’s dwindled their responsibilities to nothing; they spend their days together, all day, every day.
He’s dreading the day it will come to an end.
-----
She sees him through the foliage, crunching up the beach towards them, wet hair and streaming clothes and part of her is admiring his chest and part of her so glad, so goddamn glad she could cry.
Isaac came for her. He didn’t leave her to be shot.
Ashdown looks absolutely agog.
There’s such a strange few minutes of silence as they all stand there. They don’t have minutes to spare, there’s a sea battle coming, but they need to sort this out. Things have changed.
“For fuck’s sake,” Ashdown curses explosively.
Adele nearly falls over.
Yes. Things have changed.
-----
On the helicopter back to the mainland, Adele sits on his lap and the two of them kiss and kiss and kiss. The helicopter is rather full. Ashdown stares at them, appearing both bemused and disgusted.
“Would you mind not gluing your face to the hostage, Mr Prowse?” he asks frostily over the thrumming of the whisperblade above their heads. “It may give our threat a little less credibility.”
Quite calmly, Isaac replies, “If you shoot her, I’ll kill you.”
Ashdown looks genuinely terrified as well as a little stung. His new redheaded friend just about busts a gut laughing.
-----
She watches him saying goodbye.
All of the familiar faces from his previous life go by, wishing him well, expressing a variety of emotions. It’s all very strange. Things are going to be so different for them.
It’s going to be different for her, too.
She’s never shared a home before. Or a life.
And nobody has ever given up so much for her. Nobody has ever done something even close to this, just for that chance of sharing lives. Of being together.
Part of her doesn’t want him to make the sacrifice.
But of course, most of her does.
-----
“You know,” he says once everyone’s gone and everything is so strangely quiet, “I’m not a man with many prospects. I can’t offer what I’d want for you.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, sweetheart.”
“Someone has to…!”
“Walshe is going for another little trip in the machine.”
“What?”
“Ashdown owes you.” Adele smiles sweetly. Too sweetly. “How does a quarter of his fortune sound?”
“It sounds like theft!”
“Isaac!” Adele loops her fingers through his. “He’s never paid you a penny before.”
“That was our deal.”
She presses her soft, smirking lips against his.
“And this is the new deal.”
Title: I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind Of Thing
Rating: PG-13
Challenge: Grapefruit #24: a penny saved, Cookies ‘n’ Cream #27: push
Toppings/Extras: pocky chain, cookie crumbs, malt (x2)
Wordcount: 2,200
Summary: Isaac Prowse and Adele Merritt’s story.
Notes: I’m back, I think. The relationship of Isaac and Adele throughout Timeless. Titled after the Petshop Boys song that always reminds me of them-it’s been cheering me up big time. :) Grapefruit PFAH: Adele : My personal plaything. BtS PFAH: Isaac : the future is so awesome. Cookie crumbs of: Hobby, Goddess, Tarnish, Funny Business, First Night, Not Fair, Spelling It Out and Something Wonderful. I'll be going on a reading spree soon. <3
The first time their eyes meet, Adele has just finished shaking hands with Ashdown.
“Whoa, hold on,” she says, frown cutting her brow-an expression Isaac would become well used to over time. She gestures to him and turns to the others. “Who’s this?”
“Ashdown’s bodyguard,” Robyn says lightly. “He wouldn’t leave him behind.”
Adele’s eyes narrow at the deviation from the plan. She hates deviations from the plan. After glaring haughtily at Isaac as if it were all his fault, she opts simply to ignore him unless forced to take his existence into account. Hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary.
-----
It seems that Ashdown is going to die. Isaac’s not allowed near him for fear of catching the same thing, which leaves him standing miserably in front of a perspex screen. If Ashdown dies, who the hell is going to pay him?
“You’re like a faithful dog,” Adele smirks. Isaac glares at her and she looks offended. “It’s not my fault your boss has an immune system like wet tissue paper. Why aren’t you keeling over, anyway?”
“Plague survivor,” Isaac says.
“Oh,” Adele replies sweetly. “That explains the face, then.”
Isaac pins her with an unamused look.
“What’s your excuse?”
-----
By the time it gets to boarding the Kraken, Adele is getting desperate. Newson will rescue her now. He has to rescue her now. Otherwise she would actually have to go onto the actual ship and spend actual months on board with actual pirates.
That cannot happen.
“After you,” Isaac says to her politely. She could have hit him. Being polite at a time like this? She scowls at him fiercely but he’s not fazed in the least. A lifetime of dealing with Ashdown, she supposes in irritation as she looks up at the old-fashioned ship in front of her.
-----
After a few days Adele calms down a little and stops moping about being abandoned by her beloved boss. Isaac can’t help but wonder at her choice of clothing. Business suits, nothing but business suits.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” she snarls at him suddenly.
His brow crinkles, mostly in amusement.
“Are you always this charming, Miss Merritt?” he asks lightly.
“Only to the lucky few.”
“I’m honoured.”
Adele squints at him for a while like she’s not sure what to make of him. The sharp boning of her face gives her a fearsome appearance, and those lips…
-----
Everything about Isaac Prowse changes when he smiles. He’s not a born smiler, so Adele doesn’t notice until the night the pirates find the CD player and the air is filled with awful music and the atmosphere is cheery.
His hair, usually slicked out of his face painstakingly, has auburn strands falling forwards from his strange playfight with the pirate captain and the smile-the first real, genuine smile she’s seen on his face… it’s bright and lovely. Adele doesn’t usually like bright and lovely things but this is different.
So she decides: he’ll do. Just as a silly hobby.
-----
Isaac doesn’t know what to do.
He’s just realised that, oh shit, he’s falling.
There’s something ethereal just then, that exact moment, which makes him see it clearly for the first time. Something about those dark lips and her sleek hair, the tiny waist and massive hips, a goddess of evil and seduction and snakes and plagues and night.
Her most frightening qualities are what captivate him the most.
The silence is close to breaking point as she turns to him and then flashes him her pearly fangs in a heart-stopping smirk, saying into the still night air, “You’re adorable.”
-----
Their first time is a calculated attack. Adele knows what she wants from the outset and good God, does she get it. It’s clear that Isaac Prowse isn’t used to being jumped on and devoured, but that’s his problem, not hers. In the half-darkness she pushes him into walls and scratches him and mixes her kisses with bites, and then when he starts doing the same she nearly loses all of the breath in her body.
When it comes to the sex he’s hesitant again, which Adele thinks is just silly. Some bullshit about tarnishing her honour. Is he serious?
-----
Apparently the whole thing is some sort of business deal to Adele.
And she has rules.
No kissing, no hand-holding, no marriage proposals (…oh), no terms of endearment, no doe-eyes… the list goes on. Isaac feels stupid. He should have expected it really, but he’s bruised by it nonetheless. What if he wants to kiss her, and hold her hand, and hug her sometimes?
It’s pointless. He might as well forget it.
But it’s the nights: like the love-starved vampire that she is, every night she returns to him and he should resist her but he can’t, he just can’t.
-----
Tonight, she doesn’t know why, but once they’ve finished with their tearing and their throwing and their kissing and their gasping and their twisting… their everything… she stays. Nothing in the world can put her feelings into words, not to her, as she sinks under the covers, tucks her head against his arm and feels herself drifting. Getting up seems like too much effort: she feels warm and calm and the world is soft and blurry, and really, if she leaves early enough in the morning, nobody will know.
It’s nothing to do with him. Of that she is certain.
-----
The longer it goes on, the more it hurts. It’s awful, how much he cares for her. When she starts sleeping in his room, staying after the sex, he starts hoping. He needn’t have bothered. Adele makes her feelings perfectly clear in the daylight.
At the time, though, when they’re settling to a night of dreams and she’s anchored into his arms… he feels like he’s caught a storm cloud, like he’s finally managed to win her over. She holds him and he holds her; he kisses her hairline and she smiles at the contact, looking so normal and loving.
-----
“We need some dirt on Ashdown.”
“Oh?” Adele frowns as she holds the communicator to her ear, seated at the desk in her cabin. She runs a finger over the wooden surface and suppresses a grin when she remembers what she and Isaac were doing on it last night…
“You’ve got one of his close allies on board, right? His bodyguard, the Prowse guy?”
“Yes.” Oh, this is too good. Voskoy has no idea she’s fucking the man’s brains out every night-it’ll be easy! “I’ll see what I can do,” she says, and means it. It’s her biggest mistake.
-----
He thinks he’s going to die when she starts quizzing him about Ashdown.
Honestly. He thinks he can feel his blood slowing, stopping, cooling in his veins. She’s not subtle about it in the least and doesn’t seem to expect him to have any sort of objection to being used. He’s been had. No.
“Is this what it’s always been about?” he asks, aghast. Adele furrows her brow.
“What?”
“This. Ashdown.”
Adele laughs, which isn’t the reaction he’d hoped for.
“What do you think?” she says like it’s obvious.
And oh God, it is obvious, it’s so obvious it hurts.
-----
“I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Those are the words that break her world into a thousand splinters of unexpected pain. She can’t let it show, she refuses, but from that day on the Kraken is harrowing and empty. She can’t get her head around it. Isaac, the most lovesick of puppies, isn’t allowed to break things off with her, he just isn’t. He’s hers.
It’s dizzying, breath-taking how much it hurts. She feels as though she’s been shattered into a million pieces against the wall. Surely this isn’t allowed. There must be rules against this.
But there aren’t.
-----
Isaac realises that he’s being glared at, but he’s used to it by now. He ducks his head and gets on with his work tying down the halliard because he can’t be dealing with Adele’s vicious glares.
Everything he did was because he loves her. The way she’s reacting to their embarrassingly public split is nearly enough to convincing she feels the same, or at least feels something, but she refuses to say anything on the matter.
When she starts sniping and jibing and being a pathetic, spiteful, mean-spirited bitch about the whole thing, he gives up on being polite.
-----
For a while she can’t see a thing, everything turning white-hot in her eyes, and then the searing pain cuts in from the back of her head. Adele struggles onto one elbow, and suddenly there’s a presence by her arm.
“Ada… are you alright?”
Blearily, she blinks at Isaac, and then she realises he just called her ‘Ada’ like he used to.
She wants to reply with something more appropriate than, “Fuck! My head!” but she can’t.
“You got, er, a little bit… bludgeoned,” Isaac informs her weakly.
The sea battle rages on around them and Adele’s heart rages too.
-----
After that it’s all tip-toes.
“Hey,” Adele says when Isaac comes around the corner. His eyes fix to the iron poker in her hand.
“Hello,” he replies. “Um, seeing to the captives?”
“Yeah,” Adele says, a forced conversational tone in her voice. “Just… you know.” She waves the poker. It looks dangerous. “Getting information.”
“That’s nice… I, er, usually use knives.”
“Well, they can get a bit… messy,” Adele says, adding with sudden desperation, “Not… not that that’s always a bad thing!”
“Yes. Uh… well, I should go.”
“Right… maybe see you later?”
“Maybe,” Isaac replies inanely, feeling utterly bonkers.
-----
When she finally admits to him that she misses him all day every day along with each and every night, when she finally breaks and asks him to be hers again, asks him to be theirs, apologises for everything and begs him to take her back, she feels good. She can scarcely believe it.
He holds her tight and yes, she’s in his arms again, back where she belongs. The place she’s been yearning for.
“I think I might love you,” he says softly.
She can’t, she can’t. She twists her fists up in his clothes and loves him too.
-----
The days are hot, slow and lovely.
Both of them sit in the doorway to one of the top-deck cabins for the shade there: Adele stretches her legs out, no longer bothering with the black tights that had once been a standard uniform to her. Arm around her, tucking her head close, Isaac kisses her heartily every few minutes. He never once thought that he would be glad for a mutiny, but he is now. It’s dwindled their responsibilities to nothing; they spend their days together, all day, every day.
He’s dreading the day it will come to an end.
-----
She sees him through the foliage, crunching up the beach towards them, wet hair and streaming clothes and part of her is admiring his chest and part of her so glad, so goddamn glad she could cry.
Isaac came for her. He didn’t leave her to be shot.
Ashdown looks absolutely agog.
There’s such a strange few minutes of silence as they all stand there. They don’t have minutes to spare, there’s a sea battle coming, but they need to sort this out. Things have changed.
“For fuck’s sake,” Ashdown curses explosively.
Adele nearly falls over.
Yes. Things have changed.
-----
On the helicopter back to the mainland, Adele sits on his lap and the two of them kiss and kiss and kiss. The helicopter is rather full. Ashdown stares at them, appearing both bemused and disgusted.
“Would you mind not gluing your face to the hostage, Mr Prowse?” he asks frostily over the thrumming of the whisperblade above their heads. “It may give our threat a little less credibility.”
Quite calmly, Isaac replies, “If you shoot her, I’ll kill you.”
Ashdown looks genuinely terrified as well as a little stung. His new redheaded friend just about busts a gut laughing.
-----
She watches him saying goodbye.
All of the familiar faces from his previous life go by, wishing him well, expressing a variety of emotions. It’s all very strange. Things are going to be so different for them.
It’s going to be different for her, too.
She’s never shared a home before. Or a life.
And nobody has ever given up so much for her. Nobody has ever done something even close to this, just for that chance of sharing lives. Of being together.
Part of her doesn’t want him to make the sacrifice.
But of course, most of her does.
-----
“You know,” he says once everyone’s gone and everything is so strangely quiet, “I’m not a man with many prospects. I can’t offer what I’d want for you.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, sweetheart.”
“Someone has to…!”
“Walshe is going for another little trip in the machine.”
“What?”
“Ashdown owes you.” Adele smiles sweetly. Too sweetly. “How does a quarter of his fortune sound?”
“It sounds like theft!”
“Isaac!” Adele loops her fingers through his. “He’s never paid you a penny before.”
“That was our deal.”
She presses her soft, smirking lips against his.
“And this is the new deal.”