Snippet Sunday

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Snippets from 3 WIPs under the cut (including The Boys, Stranger Things, and Firefly), unbetaed and not heavily picked through but enjoy nonetheless:

 

The Boys, Hughie/Butcher (A History of Small Things)--beginning of fic draft:
Hughie has feelings for Billy Butcher.

This has been mildly inconvenient at the best of times and a metaphorical (if not occasional) Aggravated Assault on his person at the worst. He doesn't necessarily want to be in love with Butcher, but telling his frankly outrageous abandonment issues to calm down hasn't done the trick yet so he's decided to just ride the wave.

 

Honestly, he'd been handling it fine (probably). Butcher didn't notice--or if he did, he didn't care--and Hughie's been enjoying his budding relationship with Annie. She's kind and friendly and fun (so fun).

You know what? He probably doesn't, like, love Butcher, he thinks for the [number redacted for decency] time. It's really not that deep. He met the guy how long ago? A few weeks. A very stressful few weeks. Right after…

Robin.

God, she was kind and friendly and fun. People don't just move on from their exes like he's doing, yeah? It's a coping mechanism for trauma or something. He feels a little bad, thinking about Annie like that, but with Butcher he has no qualms. The man's kind of a piece of shit. Hughie could probably say as much to him and get a 'thank you kindly' for Butcher's perceived art of shitbaggery.

Anyway, he'd been handling it fine…but it's all a bit complicated when Hughie has to choke his way around the awkward conversation about Becca and, holy shit, Butcher has (had) a wife? 8 whole years of…this? Becoming Butcher. 

(Apparently he never moved on from her, Robin's voice teases at the back of his mind.) 

"You alright, son?"

Hughie blinks. He's pretty sure, You're incredibly hot when you talk about the death of your wife, isn't the conversational continuation Butcher's looking for. The other part of his brain is dedicated to Robin, Robin, Robin in a fairly vicious and guilty circle.

So, yeah…something to work out another day maybe.


Stranger Things, Eddie/Chrissy/Steve (Untitled)--the first time Steve shows up in the fic in 1986 and he and Eddie cross paths:

Steve

Steve is nursing a bloody nose and black eye at the police station. Robin’s alternating between finishing paperwork and asking if he’s okay.

Okay isn’t the word he’s using in his head, but he tells her he is anyway, because it’s a whole risk-reward thing, see? And he doesn’t regret it, breaking up the fight between a guy twice his size and some skinny senior who works with Nancy on the paper who just wanted to rent a copy of Pretty in Pink. Sure, it hadn’t been any of his business, he should have stayed out of it, they were due to lock up within the hour, but the guy was so…shrimpy. 

So Steve’s fine. He doesn’t regret it…or he didn’t, until the police told him he would have to fill out ‘The Necessary Paperwork’. And now, Robin--best friend, pest friend, and current anointed saint in the Church of Harrington--is doing just that (because he can only see out of one eye and she’d seen the whole thing anyway, she reasons) when Eddie Munson is dragged in, loudly complaining.

“I’m telling you, man,” he jerks away from Callahan and the officer is either exasperated or complacent enough to let him go. “I’m not high. She was in the air, feet full off the ground!” He slams his hands on the counter Robin’s using as a table and she retreats to sit beside Steve instead. “You need to let me go. Or-or call my uncle at least, there’s something in that trailer!”

“Unless you want to graduate this year, you’re going to cool your heels in that cell until we get a full incident report from Miss. Cunningham, you hear me?”

Robin and Steve look between one another and Steve rests his head heavily in his hand. 

“Cunningham?” The guy who had (however accidentally) rearranged Steve’s face raises his voice from the opposite desk. “Chrissy Cunningham? What the hell did you do to her, freak?”

“Haven’t you had enough for one night, Jesus,” Steve feels a throb behind his eye.

“Lifting into the air?” Robin hisses, tugging at his elbow for his attention.

“He’s high.” Robin gives him a look. Finally he relents. ”Fine. You go check on…Christy…?”

”Chrissy, Steve, she only cheered for you for three years!”

“Chrissy, right,” Steve shakes his head. “Blonde, cute teeth, Jason’s girl. Go check on her at the hospital. Find out what she knows, if you can.”

“Oh, oh!” Robin practically throws the paperwork, nearly finished at him. “Yeah, I can do that! Wait, shit, what about like…parents?”

“I don’t know Robin, god!” Steve tries to keep his voice low. “Pretend to be a friend. People have those, right?”

“Yeah, sure, right!” She gives him a thumbs up. “Wait, you’re okay right?”

 
“I’m…,” he takes a breath, looking between the oversized basketball player on the phone and the back where they had dragged Munson, kicking and screaming. He can still hear him, faintly, making a fuss. “I’ll be fine, go on.”

Firefly, Jayne/Simon (Some Year There are Apples)--halfway into Simon chapter territory but still before they meet Ma Cobb:

The train ride to Dustdown was quiet, Simon staring out of the window and Jayne shifting in his seat from restless boredom. Simon felt the irritation slowly leech out of him by small degrees.

“I was upset,” Simon admitted. “When I woke up and you weren't there. I don’t know why I lied. To save face, I guess.”

“S’okay,” Jayne raised a shoulder, picking at the wood grain table in front of him with the tip of his knife “Don’t know why I went.”

"To a brothel?" Simon raised his brows.

"I didn't sleep with none of them."

"Well you wouldn't have had the coin."

"They take credit--"

"Jayne."

Simon reached into his bag, fetching the smallest of two sturdy sticks, eyeing the dirty floor before pulling out the knife he had boarded Serenity with, now glad he hadn't thrown it away. In surgery it would be a liability, but it could still carve out wood for a trap. 

"Didn't take you for whittlin'," Jayne said.

"It's a trap," Simon kept his concentration. A dull surgical tool could still maul the tip of his thumb. "Truthfully, I like making the knots more."

"I teach you to trap too?"

Simon flicked his eyes up and saw that, across from him, Jayne was staring at Simon's hands, a furrow between his brows. Simon set side the trap and pulled out his notebook, flipping a third of the way in to mark the date.

"Yes," he said as he wrote, On Calchas: Jayne does not remember teaching trapping. "Along with the sneaking and the tracking, like I said."

 

”What’s in that book?” Jayne motioned at his lap. “The one you’re always writing in after I say something wrong.”

"Wrong?" Simon shifted his focus completely to Jayne. The other man twirled his own knife noiselessly into the table between them. "There's nothing wrong, Jayne. Just…here."

Simon licked the pad of his thumb flipping back a few pages. "You're my patient. You're allowed access to whatever records you want, irregular and non-meticulous as these might be. I've not dealt with a case like this before and to be frank it's a bit…," Jayne flipped the page, finger moving underneath what Simon had written. Simon weighed his words. "Well it's a bit personal obviously."

Jayne turned the notebook back to Simon with a bit of force. “The other me...was he better?” 

Simon folded his notebook shut. He had, of course, considered the mental side effects of memory loss. But it hadn’t occurred to him that, well--

"I'm just trying to parse it is all, Doc." Jayne slammed his knife into the table and Simon did a fair impression of a Man Not Startled By staying perfectly still. Jayne reached across to slap at the notebook. "This ruttin' journal sure ain't helpin'. Doesn't say a gorram thing about…"

Whatever he was going to say trailed off in a stream of soft curses. 

"I ain't dumb," he said at Simon, though he seemed to be talking to no one in particular. 

"There aren't two of you, Jayne." Simon chuckled. “And if there were, you're both terrible patients.”

Jayne fidgeted, tapping the toe of his shoe against the wood floor. “You and me, on Gallus. I remember stuff, I do. I just feel like it’s…,”

"A dream?" Jayne nodded and Simon relaxed marginally in his own seat. “You were heavily medicated for a lot of our experience. Even without the Devil's Breath, who's to say this wouldn't have naturally occurred?”

Jayne rubbed a thumb across his jawline. Simon thought about how soft his beard was.

"Did we really not go to the ocean?"

He snorted. "No. We didn't.

"Guess we'll have to go back."

"Jayne, the place almost killed you. Twice."

"Ocean didn't," he pointed out. "No bad memories for a place you never been. 'Sides, we'd never go back to the ship, the way we near been killed on Serenity, both."

They settled back into their seats, Simon picking up his sticks again and Jayne examining the hilt of his knife. Jayne let his legs stretch out farther than they had before, knees knocking slightly against Simon's, comfortably, unobtrusive.

“You called me Simon more,” Simon said, absently, a small settlement outside the window catching his attention.

“I did?”

Simon turned back to the other man. “You did. Not much more. Just enough to surprise me.” Jayne looked off-kilter himself, but said nothing. Simon looked out the window again. “You surprised me.”