Distractions

[hedda62]

I have to make a heck of a lot of plant labels this week, and complete many other similar tasks, so I could use a little fannish distraction (of the more creative sort than randomly browsing tumblr (which I still do not belong to, oh god tell me I'm not going to have to do this) or rewatching POI s2).

So, feel free to prompt - DVD commentaries on my fic, trope ficlets, Important Fandom Questions, whatever - and I'll fit in answers as I have time. I think you all know my fandoms, and I'll just tell you if you prompt something I can't do.

(Yes, that is a pay phone with a green roof in the DW icon. Seen in a California state park.)

Comments

[hedda62]

And here we are, and which character POV to pick was fairly obvious. :)

*

It hadn't occurred to Shaw that she'd start liking Harold and John. She didn't think she'd call them Harold and John, either, but after some weeks of avoiding addressing her by name, John started using "Sam" with a little smirk, so she had to smirk right back. Harold held out with "Ms. Shaw" for a while longer, until she told him he might as well save a syllable, and he gave her one of those flashing grins that made him look ten years younger, and began calling her Samantha.

Exasperated affection was pretty much how she had to define the feeling, and the first inkling of it came the day she was stuck in the Library long enough that she had to pee. When she asked, John got this oh-shit look on his face, exchanged a glance with Harold, then got up and walked her down a hall to the door marked "Women." The facilities worked fine, and there was toilet paper in the stall, but every surface was dusty and the faucet had dripped some kind of mineral stain down the sink; no one had been in the room in years. When she'd relieved herself, she did a little exploring; the men's room was up another floor. It wasn't pristine, but it had been swabbed down sometime in living memory, and it was clear that Harold and John had been using it; Harold had been using it, even on his bad days when avoiding the stairs would have saved him some pain.

The next time she went to the girls' room, someone had mopped it and there was a bouquet of lilies on the counter. "Amazed you dared step over the threshold," she tossed at them when she got back. "Weren't you afraid you'd get cooties?"

They were ridiculous, but she had to admire the way they got things done. Harold surprised her all the time; John was predictable but efficient. Somehow she ended up agreeing to regular sparring sessions with him, which he seemed to regard as a necessary training exercise and she thought of as a way to work off energy and provoke that oh-shit expression. Until one day, triumphant at pinning him, she caught herself almost vocalizing "You are such a wuss, Frank," and it hit her that she'd grown up with brothers, and here she was again. Though sometimes Harold was more like Mom, worried that they'd break something.

And actually Harold's worry was kind of endearing. She got used to hearing him in her ear in the middle of an op, squawking out "Ms. Shaw!" (she couldn't cure him of formality in the field; there was a lot of "Mr. Reese!" too) and letting out a little sigh when she responded. It didn't stop him from sending them into some pretty hairy situations - civilians who didn't know what the hell they were doing could be more dangerous than terrorists who did, it turned out - or from putting himself out there too, more often than he should. Though she figured out, the first time she crossed paths with him while he was doing the give-no-fucks billionaire act with the requisite cane and you-are-a-lower-form-of-life glances, that he had a flair for the dressing-up parts, especially when he turned up later in the day just as plausibly playing a mild-mannered cable repairman.

So she didn't worry about him back, not that she would have anyway aside from the chance he'd get one of them or a number killed. That is, until the day he didn't come home from his routine undercover at a school - he did "substitute teacher" really well too - and John's pacing and teeth-gritting made it past annoying and into contagious.

"Damn it," she muttered to herself after she'd done two lengths of the stacks, and John turned a whole new kind of oh-shit look on her - he looked like Frank when she'd put his hamsters out on a fifth-floor windowsill - and she really wanted to punch him, but instead said something stupid about Harold being fine and then strolled away though not before she heard him actually whimper. Unless that was Bear.

Twenty minutes later Harold walked in the door, and John made a crack about detention because that was how he said "if you'd been dead Sam would have had to sit on me to stop me shooting myself," and Harold snarked back with equal restraint and Bear licked everybody's hands, and she realized suddenly what she was feeling. Relief. Everybody she cared about alive at the end of the day. Everything rosy.

"While you were out you could have got some new flowers for the bathroom," she told Harold. "I like pink."

[astolat]

I love this one heaps <3

[hedda62]

Thanks!

[pendrecarc]

Love this - Finch adding an extra syllable, flowers in the bathroom, and of course Shaw grew up with brothers. And I will never not enjoy accidental feelings and uncomfortable anxiety--this show gives us so many people who care but wouldn't admit it, and it is beautiful. Thank you!

[hedda62]

You're welcome! And "restraint" is definitely a keyword for the show. I'm very much looking forward to how they pull Shaw in. :)

[yunitsa]

THEM <3 <3

[hedda62]

Yup. Says it all. :)