Minerva Mcgongall pulled out her notebook and turned to the page that listed the names and details of that years Gryffindor Quidditch team. Her heart swelling with pride she jotted down the name “Harry Potter” next to the position “Seeker” before closing the book and opening a second drawer. She took out a small, wooden box and rummaged in it for a few seconds before withdrawing a worn out envelope, inside of which was a short letter and a photograph.
“Dearest Minnie,
Hope you’re doing well! I’m the same of course, driving Lily up the wall as usual, she sends you her love by the way!
Now I know I told you that you’ll never find a chaser as good as me ever again, but it just goes to show that even the brilliant are sometimes mistaken. I’ve found you (made you!) a replacement who will one day outshine his old man by leagues! Enclosed is a photograph of your new Quidditch prodigy so that you may assess his skills for yourself. We have him chasing the cat for practice. He’ll be unbeatable by the time he starts at Hogwarts! The youngest Quidditch player in a century!
I guarantee it, Minnie. And you know I’m never wrong, though you’ll never admit it!
Missing you and Hogwarts terribly,
Lots of love,
James
P.S. Sirius says his marriage proposal still stands.”
Wiping away a single tear that ran down her cheek and chuckling to herself, she smiled down at the photograph of a small, gleeful, black haired boy zooming along on a toy broom, a pair of legs chasing after him and a young woman laughing hysterically in a corner.
“Right again, Mr. Potter.”
Tag: im not crying youre crying
An Ordinary Phoenix
Annnnnd here’s my full piece for @sterekzine! 2.8k of ridiculous wedding fluff.
I know I’ve said it a million times but Solstice was an absolute joy to run and everyone who contributed did a phenomenal job.
He can hear them up ahead, his family and friends, the laughter and murmured conversation rumbling from the clearing where they’re waiting. Where Derek’s waiting. His heart gives an odd, slippery thump at the thought.
The sounds die down as he breaks through the tree line, everyone falling quiet as they realize he’s there. Wooden folding chairs are arranged in two loose half moons, creating a larger circle around the space in the middle, and everyone is craning in their seats to get a look at him.
Scott’s grinning at him so hard it looks like it hurts, sitting with Melissa at his flank, who’s giving Stiles such a look of motherly pride that it hurts. Allison’s on his other side, eyes twinkling. Lydia and Cora are hand in hand, giving him looks that are affectionate and threatening, respectively.
The rest of the small crowd blurs as he catches sight of Derek behind them. His feet are also bare, planted firmly within the ritual circle Stiles himself cut into the earth earlier in the day. He’s bare-chested, but painted so thoroughly with runes that it almost looks like he’s covered in blood, paint shining in the firelight.
The altar behind him is woven so thickly with marigolds and California poppies that Stiles can’t even see the frame. And, oh, his eyes are positively glowing where they’re pinned on him, the look in them so soft it makes Stiles ache.
And Holy shit, Stiles thinks, Holy shit. We’re getting married.
And don’t forget to check out the entire Solstice collection.
If Sirius and Remus had lived, they would have been 55 when they legally got married. Face it, everyone would have cried. Remus would be a full on silver fox(or wolf) while Sirius, with his Black genes, would still have perfect hair.
James would probably be half grey and bawl more than anyone as Sirius’s best man. Lily would be Remus’s best man.
know what makes me cry?
in deathly hallows when harry and hermione go see james and lily’s gravestone and they see hundreds upon hundreds of messages scribbled on or around the grave that say “good luck harry!”, “here’s to the boy who lived” and others of the sort.
they all knew harry would come to see his parents, and everyone knew that in that moment he would grieve, just like they all did. All of those hundreds of people visited james and lily’s grave, and each one of them wanted to tell harry that although he was an orphan, he was loved by so many.
i also can’t help but think that the first message scribbled on there was “you are loved, harry” written by remus two nights after halloween. every visitor since has made their own addition over it, but if you look very closely near the bottom of the grave, you can see it. every full moon the message glows faintly.
bones throws jim a surprise party and at first jim can’t help but feel awkward. no one had ever celebrated his birthday before, not for real. his mother had kissed his forehead and tried to hide her eyes, red from crying; bones knew without asking that what jim needed most was a drink and some room to breathe.
until now. bones throws jim a surprise party and he’s surrounded by his beaming crew and something dislodges inside his chest. he finds himself laughing even though he kind of wants to cry.
i love you, he thinks, and he hopes every single one of them can somehow hear him. he hopes they know. his crew. I love you.
people begin to trickle away as the evening wanes until, eventually, it’s just him and bones left. they sit side by side on the couch and stare out at the skeleton of their ship. jim leans into bones’ warmth and bones slings an arm around his shoulders and jim is taken back to the first time they sat like this, way back at the academy, watching the stars from a rooftop and hoping, hoping, hoping.
jim can hardly believe there was a time when he existed without bones by his side. bones pulls him closer and kisses the top of his head and jim never wants to exist without him again.
“happy birthday, darlin,” bones says, and for the first time, jim thinks the words feel right.
please don’t wait. it was over before it began
I love Guillermo del Toro.
[Caption: a set of tweets by Guillermo del Toro.
@realgdt:”This piece of art by Quivery encapsulates EXACTLY the reason why I did the film.”
The image is a digital illustration of Mako Mori: young Mako stands on front, looking up, sad. Behind her, adult Mako stands with her training staff, a determined expression as she looks directly at the viewer. Behind her stands her jaeger, the nuclear core glowing orange right behind Mako’s head like a halo, the arm-sword extended.
@realgdt:”It’s important for little girls to know not every story has to be a fucking love story. / I didn’t want girls buying toys. I was hoping they would buy bravery. We all are Jaegers inside of which scared children live. / Mako and Raleigh have the least amount of lines but complete their story arch beautifully in my book. / You can overcome the pain and kill the monsters. We can vanquish the impossible if we learn to trust again.”]
Voicemails
@pale-silver-comb made this post and then I had post-season-5-feelings so this happened 🙂
It just became a thing they did. Stiles knew Derek needed to get out, needed to get away. Stiles knew better than a lot of his friends and could understand how much it would help Derek to get out of Beacon Hills and the hellhole that it is. But over the course of all their interactions Stiles had started to trust Derek, had started to rely on him. Stiles had gotten a hold of Derek’s number just for emergencies but he didn’t have to resort to theft to always have Derek’s latest number because Stiles became the first person Derek shared it with.
So even though he has a connection to Derek, Stiles doesn’t use it all that often. He doesn’t use it to beg Derek to come back even when he really, really could. He sends Derek stupid shit he finds on the internet. He asks Derek where he is and what he’s doing. If he’s still with Braeden, if he’s happy. Derek always, always responds. Sometimes it takes a couple hours but they both know the texts are their way of making sure the other is still alive. Even if things aren’t perfect on either side, they’re alive and that’s the most important part.
Derek doesn’t lie to him. He doesn’t sugar coat things. He rants in a voicemail and tells Stiles how sick he is of driving. How he knows he will probably come back but he just can’t stomach it yet. They need to find Kate and Peter; he needs to see them dead and gone for good before he trusts himself to settle in Beacon Hills for good.
He and Cora fight sometimes.
Whenever that happens Stiles gets a voicemail of Derek complaining about younger siblings and they don’t understand and she’s so spoiled Stiles. She got taken in after the fire right away as soon as she’d stopped running and she didn’t want for anything. Laura and I survived off soup kitchen and homeless shelters for a whole year, Stiles, before the insurance money was cleared and we could afford to stop and stay somewhere, afford to actually buy groceries.
But he always sends a second voicemail saying how much he really is glad to have his sister. That he’s glad she didn’t have to live like he and Laura did. That for as much as they irritate each other they’re happy to have each other.
Stiles was the one that started the voicemail thing, and he does it more often than Derek really ever does. But Derek’s life isn’t as driven by insanity as Stiles’ life in Beacon Hills is anymore. At the beginning he’d sent Derek a text that read: “I just need to vent to someone I know understands but I don’t want to just throw this shit at you so just don’t answer your phone and let it go to voicemail. It’s your choice if you want to listen or not. Don’t feel like you have to.”
It used to be stupid stuff over the summer that Derek would listen to as he worked in the yard around the house he bought up in New England. But things changed when Stiles left a message ranting about some guy named Theo and how Stiles doesn’t trust him, something is off and Stiles knows he’s up to something. It had been amusing initially because it was just such a Stiles reaction. But after all they’ve been through, Derek knows this isn’t some misguided knee jerk reaction to someone new coming into their group. If Stiles got this worked up it means he’s got a reason, and most likely, Scott didn’t want to listen until Stiles had more proof.
Derek had been settled in the little cottage in New Hampshire since the spring when he got that first voicemail about Theo. He’d wanted to really experience a New England fall and was determined to do so. Stiles didn’t have to know he listened to the message. Didn’t have to know that Derek was always waiting for the next one, waiting for a call for help.
Stiles kept sending him his normal comments on his day or his dad but Derek got an increasing amount of voicemails left on his phone.
Somebody is making supernatural creatures. Creatures that don’t have to follow the supernatural laws they should. There’s a halfhearted joke about the laws being ‘more like guidelines anyway.’
Scott’s trying to be a leader without actually using the people he’s leading to help him. He’s trying to just do everything, figure out everything by himself.
(He doesn’t get a voicemail from Stiles that people are dying but he does get a text from Scott that if he’s heard anything about it not to worry that they’ve got everything under control. He doesn’t need to come home. Derek had appreciated Scott’s words, he knew Scott didn’t mean that Derek wasn’t welcome but they both knew things would just be weird between them because of the power shift. That it would take an adjustment period before they would ever be able to be in the same pack.)
The voicemail that has Derek almost packing up and jumping on a plane is the one that starts with Stiles’ voice coming through so shaky and vulnerable Derek had had a bag pulled out of his closet before he even heard the words, “I killed somebody.”
He listens to the whole message though before he does anything rash. He listens as Stiles pulls himself together, rationalizes that even if he has to tell Scott eventually, it was self-defense. It was self-defense. Stiles was going to die if he hadn’t done what he’d done. Surely Scott would rather Stiles be alive and a killer than let the bad guy kill him. It takes a lot for Derek not to buy a red-eye flight back to California.
But then he gets a second message telling him that Stiles doesn’t want him to come back for him, he wants Derek to come back for himself.
And then Stiles doesn’t text or call for almost two weeks.
Derek wakes up from a deep, uninterrupted sleep to a beautiful fall day and two voicemails.
“Derek,” Stiles’ voice comes through quiet and shaky and Derek already dreads what this message is going to end like. “Theo is worse than I expected him to be. He- he went after my dad. He hurt my dad. And Scott,” Derek hates the way Stiles’ voice breaks. ”Scott he doesn’t trust me, didn’t believe me and-“
There’s silence for a moment but Derek knows, Scott is Stiles’ brother, he’s Stiles’ rock, someone he depends on always being there. He knows what it’s like to have the world pull out from under your feet like this. Peter wasn’t always clinically insane. Derek hates that Stiles has to experience that feeling, that feeling like everything you depend on suddenly shifts and changes and isn’t there anymore.
Stiles’ voice is croaking like he’s speaking through a throat tight with emotion when he says, “I need,” before he just groans and hangs up.
Derek fumbles with his phone for a minute trying to see when the second voicemail came through and listen to it. He knows Stiles’ had been crying before he called back and finally told Derek what he has been waiting to hear.
“I know I always say I don’t want you to come back for me, to-to help me. And I still don’t; I wish you could make the decision if you’re coming back or staying away. But I can’t not ask you to come back because I want your help. I need you here, not across the country listening to my voicemails. Please, Derek, I need you to come back. You don’t have to stay, you can leave again if you need to but I just-”
“I need you here.”
Derek left the cottage within the hour, with one ticket to California and two tickets back to New Hampshire.
shealwaysreads 