Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Danny was on her third cup of coffee and second red pen when the knock sounded. She rose from her desk, thankful for a break from marking the freshman seminar papers.

“Just a sec!” She threw her arms forward and linked her fingers, rolled her shoulders and gave her stiff neck a good pop. She yanked the glasses from her face, stashing them atop the dresser as she crossed to the door of her private room.

She opened the door to find one Zeta, a Mr. Brody Kirsch, beefy forearms in the default cross over his chest, perpetually dopey and clueless countenance waiting for an invite.

Which would not be extended.

“Sup with you and L²?” he asked.

“Kirsch? What are you doing here?”

“As social chair, I’ve gotta keep all the Zeta bros in the know about the sketchness going down on campus. I don’t need my guys accused of something they didn’t do. But if they did do it, we gotta bring the hammer down hard, Summer Psycho.” To emphasize, Kirsch pounded a sturdy fist into his opposite palm.

Danny replied with a dramatic eyeroll.

Undeterred, or oblivious (who can really tell with this guy?), Kirsch continued his socially engrained rant of machismo:

“Since you’re all up in the investigative workings with L², I figured I’d come to the source. Additionally, and this is no detraction from your own badassness, but you scare me a lot less than leather-scary-hottie. Figured I’d come find you, since I’m like, communications liaison for the bros. So, spill it. We got short-pale-and-broody all tied up, so what can we do to help you and L² protect the hotties of our bangin’ student body?

“L²?” Danny asked, fatigued and careless enough to open the door an inch wider. She placed her hands at the small of her back and leaned against the door frame, thankful not to be sitting down. Even if she was conversing with Kirsch, of all people.

“You and Laura? Like, lady Starsky and Hutch?”

“So… Cagney and Lacey.”

“Wait, there’s another L? Dammit, now it’s L-cubed, which does not have the same ring, blue eyes.”

It took significant effort on Danny’s part to control the urge to facepalm.

“How—what—Kirsch, L²? What do—why are you calling her that?”

“She told me she didn’t really like ‘little nerd hottie’. But, dude, she is. A little nerd hottie. But she doesn’t like it, so now we’ve got L to the two. Little Laura! Unless this Lacey chick comes in, in which case—”

“So…" Just shut it down, Danny. "L²?”

“I can do math, you know,” Kirsch stood taller, as if in lengthening his spine, differential calculus would rise from under his neo-classical jaw like stubbly algebraic Braille lines. “If you’re gonna do eight fluid ounces of a mixer to four ounces of forty-proof, taking into account your pregame regimen and average body mass index, you’re looking at black-out status in—”

“Yes, your computation of impending black-outs leaves Stephen Hawking quaking on his wheels.”

“Not cool, blue eyes. He might talk like dude Siri, but he basically invented time.”

“God, he didn’t invent time, dumbass… wait. You’ve read A Brief History of Time?”

“I’ve got two words for you: time travel. Like, how ballin’ would it be to go whenever you wanted? Parties in the future, I bet it’s all neon and hoverboards. British wheels basically said it was possible, and he totes stomped on Einstein in his epic rap battle.”

“That’s not… He didn’t rap— well, you took a far more optimistic view of that book than I did.”

“Whatever Summer Pyscho, back to ladies of the lost. See, you just gotta let me in on the action with L²! She’s all up in this case like Nancy Drew, and it took us a while to get the ropes around scary hottie, so what’s the deal? Will won’t tell me anything, and Natalie’s been freaked ever since SJ… well, you know.” His hands finally dropped from their semi-hostile chestcross and migrated to his jean pockets.

Danny preferred the asymmetry of his working jaw, like he couldn’t quite set his face into an appropriate expression of emotion. That’s how she figured he genuinely wanted to help: because he was confused enough and desperate enough to show his vulnerability to her, the campus ‘Summer Psycho’.

“I know you two were… close,” she offered.

“I mean, I wasn’t about to put a ring on it, but she was a super cool babe before she got pod-peopled. Played Assasin’s Creed with me, and liked it. Damn cool chick. I’ve never… there was this sophomore, back in my high school, he got killed in a car wreck. Didn’t really know him, but SJ? I’ve never been close to someone who’s died before, blue eyes.”

“I’m sorry, Kirsch. It’s… it is hard, when stuff like this happens. And the bad thing is, it’s not the first time this has happened at Silas. For all we know, Betty’s dead, too. Authorities usually give them—”

“—forty-eight hours, I know. Then they might as well be dead.”

“Shoulda known you were into reality TV.”

“I read that, Summer Psycho,” Kirsch bristled.

“You read?” she asked, incredulous.

“For your class, duh! Gotta crack the books to pass. I’m not into these stupid flying-saucer stories, but Beowulf was awesome! He’d totally make a badass bro. Viking bro. Broking. Dude, King of the Bros!”

“It’s Chaucer, not saucer. And BroKing, huh?” another eyeroll, incapable of suppression. “Exactly what I want coming across in my lectures.”

“Mission accomplished!”

“Sarcasm.”

“Oh well, irregardless—”

“God, not a word—”

“Beowulf kicked monster ass, Psycho.”

“Kirsch! Quit with the 'Summer Psycho' crap. It’s rude.”

“Sorry, I give all my bros their nicknames on reflex, dude— blue eyes.”

“I’m not your bro, so Danny is fine. Just Danny.”

“Nah, Danny’s so boring! You’re like my bro sis, and we got L², scary strong hottie—”

“You called SJ by her name.”

“She asked me to, blue. Plus, she was my babe.”

“Fine,” Danny said, exasperated. The conversation was spiraling into tedium. Marking freshman seminar papers didn’t seem so bad, comparatively. “I’m asking: Kirsch, could you just call me Danny?”

“I thought I was supposed to call you Miss Lawrence?” he said, tacking on a set of unnecessary wiggly eyebrows.

“When we’re talking pod-people, it’s Danny. When it’s Beowulf, Miss Lawrence is fine.”

“Awesome. So then, Danny, what about leads, with the girls? Who do I get to put the beat down on?”

Danny sighed, but continued reluctantly. Annoying as gnats and damn persistent should be the Zeta motto. “Uhm, Kirsch, it’s not as simple as you think. First off, you can’t just go around beating on people with impunity. This is Silas, behavior like that is tribunal-worthy. Besides, there’s… sort of an issue with an authority figure.”

“Authority figure?” Kirsch questioned, and Danny could see the connections zipping through his synapses at regular human-speed. Impressive for a mesomorph, as Laura would say (though Laura was much sweeter than Danny). “You mean like a prof? ‘Cause that’s way outta line, du—Danny. Girls start thinking they have to do stuff for grades, and then we’re neck deep in some Law & Order shit.”

“No, it’s not… quite like that. There’s still more stuff we have to figure out before we do anything. We don’t want to act prematurely.”

“Premature, bad. Right-o Danny girl.”

“Kirsch.”

“Danny.”

And that’s as much as she was willing to give him. For now. She’d never been particularly graceful at conversational exits, or of getting people out of her space without, well, pushing them bodily from her path, so she tried a topic change in hopes the boy would leave from boredom:

“Have you even started on you literature assignment? Or have you been too wrapped up in chivalric fantasies of saving damsels in distress?”

“Me? Damsels? Thought that was your thing, blue eyes.”

Woah, where did that come from?

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Danny blustered.

“You’re running for L² every time a co-ed so much as twitches. Give her a break, she’s a big girl. I mean, not really, but, figuratively speaking, like we were talking about in class? In a metaphorical way, she’s a big girl. Besides, I’m 95% sure she socked Will in the throat, but he’s been sulking over some big assignment so I can’t rag on him for it.”

“Laura and I are… it’s none of your business. Besides, she’s my student,” Danny didn’t know when, but at some point in the conversation her hands had moved to cross over her own chest, which, duh, blatant body aggression, bro. “You should probably just let Will sulk. And maybe avoid him. And possibly kick him out of the frat.”

Well, so much for keeping tight-lipped.

“Dude—Danny, Will’s my bro. Even if he got his ass kicked by—”

“What, by a girl?”

“I was gonna say someone a whole foot shorter than him.”

“Oh,” Danny said, abashed. “Huh.”

“Don’t criticize me before I even make a mistake for you to correct! That’s what the midterm assignment’s for,” Kirsch replied good-naturedly, maybe even a bit smug, which might imply some sort of higher awareness, which… huh, Danny thought.

“Besides, I’ve seen you at the kick-boxing class," Kirsch continued. "You could probably hand me my ass on a platter, girl or not.”

“That’s… surprisingly egalitarian of you.”

“Yeah, well… your face is egalitarian!”

Annnnnnd now we’ve come full-circle with obtuse adolescent retorts. Time to abort.

“Just… go write your paper. And look up ‘egalitarian’ while you’re at it. I’ll fill you in on the pod-people as soon as I have something to report. If it’s anything like we think, we’ll probably need a lot of help from the Zetas. Just maybe not Will.”

“Why not Will?” Kirsch asked seriously. “Is it something personal or… do you really think he has something to do with all of this?”

“We don’t know enough about it yet, Kirsch. Don’t act any differently around him, though. Don’t confront him,” Danny insisted, reaching out to grab his wrist. “We don’t need any more casualties.”

…

…

…

“Will’s my bro, and this is some serious shade you’re throwing his way,” Kirsch answered. “I need to know if you think he’s involved, for real. We have an internal bro code that deals with stuff like this.”

Danny dropped her hand, flustered and unsettled by Kirsch’s tone. “What is—”

“Can’t tell you that. Summer Soc’s got their secrets, and I know you would never rat on them. Don’t ask me about our stuff, and I won’t ask you about yours.”

“You wouldn’t do anything… illegal, would you?” Danny asked. Not that Will wouldn’t deserve it, but she was an employee of the school. There were any number of illegalities that could occur on campus because, well, Silas, but a Zeta Omega Mu version of a student tribunal Danny could see getting out of hand very quickly. Like a grease fire doused in lighter fluid, with inebriated brethren throwing back flaming shots. And well-meaning but deluded Kirsch, burning in the middle of it. Maybe she’d have to give him a little information to keep him from doing something exceedingly stupid.

“Nothing illegal, at least, not in the student handbook. But the bro code is law. And if we’re talking about him abducting people, he’s gotta take the punishment. And every brother has the right to exact it. So I’m asking you, Danny, because you’ll tell me straight… do you think Will’s behind this?”

“I think he’s… involved,” Danny conceded. “I don’t know everything, but he’s definitely linked to these disappearances.”

“You got any proof of that?”

“Just the word of someone I don’t trust,” Danny practically snarled.

“Then why do you believe it?”

“Because Laura trusts her.”

“And you trust Laura.”

“Yes. A shaky little ladder of confidence we’re climbing here.”

“Well, just add some more rungs. ‘Cause I trust you. And the bros trust me, so you can count on us, whenever you decide to act.”

“Why do you trust me? You barely know me.”

“Dude, you’re Danny Lawrence! You and the Summer Society are legend. We’ve got alums still raving over the Zeta/Summer Soc mixer of 2012, not to mention the fact that you straight-up put Kevin in his place.”

Danny chuckled. “Knives like those aren’t allowed on school property.”

“He may be a bro, but he’s a total douche.”

“Agreed.”

“So, we cool, blue eyes?”

“Danny,” she corrected.

“I’m sorry, Miss Lawrence, I have a paper to work on,” Kirsch said, and saluted his exit.

“And trouble to stay out of!” Danny called down the hall.

“Same to you. But if you ever feel like getting into a little trouble, just remember, I got your back.”

“Sure.”

“It’s what bros are for, blue eyes!”

Chapter Text

She gulps and runs another hand through her hair, steeling herself for the knock. Despite the incessant thoughts of: of all people, and, how the hell did it come to this?, and, how is this supposed to make me feel any better?, Danny finds herself on the stoop of the unofficial Zeta Omega Mu house, fifty yards off campus with a burnt out hole in the yard from all of their bonfires, Solo cups littering the over-grown lawn, and what’s she’s sure is a pledge passed out on a front porch swing with peeling yellow paint. It’s either a person, or the school really needs to review those reports of Chupacabra sightings.

Her knuckles rap on the splintered board before she can think herself out of it, because dammit if she doesn’t need… something right now.

There’s the muffled sound of tromping and then the door swings open to reveal a shirtless guy, bleary-eyed and groggy despite it being close to two in the afternoon. Day-sleeping: perfected pastimes of frat bros and vampires. And the connection between the two only increases her dislike for both, which makes her second-guess herself, again, because really, they’re not that close.

“Heeeeeeeyy,” the guy at the door drawls, and it’s tired and sleezy all at once, and Danny curbs the urge to break his pinky.

“Is Kirsch here?” she asks.

“Lemme see… KIRSCH!!!”

It grates on her ears, how yelling requires so little effort. And then: rewind a few hours, and Danny’s there, yelling, at Carmilla, at Laura, because yelling is easy but explaining is herculean, because her point gets quashed the second Laura calls her on her shit. When she quiets down, her carefully constructed arguments are gone and so is Laura, out of Danny’s protection and out of her life (aside from a measly Brit Lit I seminar where they don’t really speak. Not to mention the class concludes in seven weeks, which is really just a blip on the radar of Danny’s collegiate career).

“KIIIIIIIIIIRSSSSCCCHHH!!!! Ginger babe’s here for you!”

Danny shuffles over the threshold and immediately regrets it, because everything smells like sweat and two-week old pizza. At her immediate left is a beer-pong table ready for use (again, it’s two in the afternoon) and a big screen TV, numerous gaming consoles and wires snaking onto the floor and overcrowding an extension plug. On her right the aforementioned pizza boxes materialize, and between the overloaded outlets, lumpy, slip-covered sofas and cans of lighter fluid no doubt stocked in the pantry for those ridiculous bonfires, the place makes the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory look regulation.

Kirsch appears at the top of the stairs and bounds down with his signature blank grin, and Danny flashbacks to the puppy she got when she turned seven.

“Blue eyes! Daring to go where no Summer Soc has gone before!” he jokes, and only then does Danny realize he’s got his bookbag slung over his shoulder haphazardly, doing all sorts of damage to his spine. And she wants to tell him the straps are there for a reason, derfwad, but that’s not why she came by.

“Can we…” she gestures vaguely to the front porch, and turns to walk before he agrees. But not before she catches the raised brow and ‘thumbs up’ from shirtless guy, which Kirsch doesn’t discourage.

If anything, his puppy-face brightens and blooms, which, if he wasn’t picking up on something from her body language alone, only justifies her assumption that the boy (bless him) is dumber than dirt in some regards.

She shoves her hands in the pockets of her jeans so she doesn’t run them through her hair. It’s a stress-induced habit: she shed enough to stuff a throw pillow when Summer Soc initiation coincided with first semester finals of her freshman year. She’s closed-off and sighing and working up the nerve to make this absurd request when Kirsch finally catches on.

“Danny? Is… everything okay?”

“No… I’m, I mean—do you…” One hand sneaks out of her pocket and she scratches the crown of her head absentmindedly, then drags her fingers through the red like a talon-tipped rake.

Dammit.

“Do you want to get drunk and smash things?” she finally asks.

And to his credit, Kirsch doesn’t ask why, or what’s wrong, or even attempt to touch her. Instead she gets a—

“Smash what?”

“Just stuff. There’s an abandoned utility shed about two hundred yards into the woods, if you take a right at the big oak, like you’re walking toward the pond? There’s pots there, and vials, and paint cans, and this old deep freezer that smells suspiciously of human remains, but it’s empty. I checked, and I don’t think the vials contain diseases, or else some of the girls from the Summer Soc would’ve shown symptoms by now. I commandeered some bats from our intramural supplies, and I’ve got a case of beer that was almost too big to carry.”

“You didn’t want one of your SumSoc chicks with you?”

“I really don’t want to be around girls right now.”

“Okay, I’m in.”

“Cool. Beer’s in the back of the car. I’ll grab the bats.”

 It’s mid-October and chilly outside but she’s sweating like the cafeteria workers do when they emerge from stirring that suspicious boiler full of food-byproduct. Their skin is amazingly clear despite the sweat, and Danny wonders if there’s some chemical in the food that acts as exfoliate.

Then she busts another paint can and spurts of caution-cone-orange splatter across her green jeans and sleeveless top. The pants are ruined, because it’s industrial paint and they’re her favorites but she’s five beers in and swinging off-balance and she just really doesn’t fucking care right now.

Kirsch has been uncharacteristically… subdued. He’d shouldered the case of twenty-four while Danny retrieved the bats and they walked in silence to the shed in the woods, Danny leading the way and deftly avoiding the suspicious pits the Summer Society had marked with yellow caution tape at the start of term. Once they had reached the clearing Kirsch dropped the pack and tore into the cardboard, passed a can to Danny and opened one of his own. She’d popped the top and chugged, and kinda hated herself for it. Kirsch had sat atop the case, sipping at his own beer, running his hands up and down the grip of the bat. She’d seen him eye her with unconcealed misgiving, and that’s when she grabbed two more cans and the bat and stalked into the shed, because she’d somehow become the girl who made fratastic Zetas uncomfortable in her presence.

Two hours later and the shed is in even more shambles than it was to begin with: paint is everywhere, neon constellations spattered on her clothes and the interior walls. There’s a couple of streaks that look like someone took a knife to the jugular of each Teletubbie splashed across jaggedy broken windows. There’s glass everywhere, not from actual blows, but more so collateral damage.

And Danny walks out as soon as the term registers properly in her grey matter.

Danny finds a box full of plastic bottles, and soft-tosses them to Kirsch while he takes hard cuts, hammering them into the side of the shed. The rebound is fierce, and one catches Danny near the temple.

“Wanna stop?” Kirsch asks, kneeling beside her.

“Nah, there’s only a few more in here. What’s the point if we don’t destroy them all?”

“Okay.”

Kirsch swings gracefully, and it’s then that Danny wonders why her vision is starting to blur and he’s still hitting the bottles squarely each time.

“Want another beer?” she asks.

He hesitates, then sighs, and plops down on the leafy ground in front of her. “Gimme two,” he says. And then there’s a pocket-knife and something close to precision, because the can isn’t exploding and he’s reaching for the second after shot-gunning the first. And in her tipsy haze his actions seem impressive.

“You’ve got a good swing,” she comments.

“I was recruited for college in the states.”

“Seriously?”

“Nah, I’m bull-shitting you. But I did play back at school.”

“What was your average?”

“.381.”

“Impressive.”

Kirsch shrugs and wipes his mouth with the back of one hand, crushing the second can in the opposite fist. “Fair for high school.”

She's picking at the grip wrapped around the handle on the bat, slurping loudly at her sixth—seventh?— drink, and again curses her build, because it takes more to get her drunk than she ever likes to consume. But she doesn’t do this often.

Kidnappings and break-ups and mortal fear from the supernatural warrant drunken destruction, in her opinion.

“You wanna talk about it?” Kirsch asks.

“Not particularly.”

“Something to do with the missing girls?”

She blinks, twice, and puts the can down at her side. She’s sitting Indian style and the chill is setting in now that the sweat is drying, now that the sun is sinking and the shadows are lengthening this deep in the woods. And something prickles in her gut that isn’t related to the temperature, it’s shame, and it curdles with the self-righteous indignation until she feels like she’s about to vomit. And then she looks at the discarded cans around her feet and realizes she’s probably going to vomit, out here in the woods at twilight with paint of her face and a frat as fuck bro looking at her with all the curiosity of a squirrel.

Elbows on bent knees, and her forehead in her hands, she squeaks out a, “… not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“You remember how I told you I thought Will was involved with the kidnappings?”

Kirsch’s face hardens, like time-lapsed clay. “Yeah, so, does this mean I need to call a Zeta tribunal? ‘Cause there’s only so many places that sell that amount of pig’s blood—”

“What the—no, don’t… call a tribunal. And don’t, just, hear me out, okay?” Now she’s got her face propped in her hands, and for some reason coming off as crazy to this guy, she deems unacceptable. Then again, she did just drag him out into the woods with beer and bats and no explanation. And he followed, the idiot. What if she had been a serial killer? People are missing on this campus and he follows her… like, what is Silas even teaching these kids about personal safety?

She shakes her head and regrets it, because she’s a little drunk and that makes her mind wander and her head thump like a bass.

“Will is a vampire,” Danny says.

“Will’s a… vampire?”

“So is Carmilla.”

“Who?”

“Scary-dark-hottie? Rooms with Laura.”

“Dude, vampire?”

“Yep.”

“That explains the bite…”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Yeah, I mean, no, ‘cause that doesn’t… well, dude, fuck that, it makes complete sense,” Kirsch says, and his eyes are wide and eager.

“You think?”

“Of course! It all fits! Something seriously evil has got to be going down for the library to come back to life, plus the girls turning into party-hardy-hotties, then S.J… I don’t care how screwed up she was, she wasn’t jump out of a window freaked, you know? Scary-hottie’s her own deal, but Will… he’s been on and on about his mom lately, and it’s just getting a little too Tyrannosaurus Rex—”

“God, you mean Oedipus Rex—?”

“So it not like you’re telling me something I didn’t already suspect, you know?”

“Right…” Danny says, and it makes her—lighter, somehow—that she’s not putting some undue mental strain on the guy.

“So, the vampire thing…?”

“Yeah?”

“That what the bats are for?”

“Oh, no. Well, yeah, but…”

“… not exactly,” he finishes, repeating her own words.

“It’s about…” and is she doing this? Is she really about to spill her guts? Can’t she salvage some dignity, pick up the cans and take them to the recycling, wash her face and hair and Google some magic cleaning agent that will restore her brilliant Kelly green pants to their former glory and forget being the loser in the woods who’s just gone Barry Bonds on miscellaneous items in a garden shed?

Nope, she can’t.

“It’s about Laura,” Danny mumbles.

“L²!” Kirsch says with a little ring to it, and it shouldn’t be revolting now but it is. “Wait, she’s okay, right?”

“That’s what I’m saying!” Danny shouts, and it’s louder than she intended, and her hands are flung out over her knees in this gimme-gimme pose, like supplication and earnestness and need. She flexes her fingers and feels like a toddler who's had her toy taken.

“Ooooooookay, and this is where you’re reverting to the Summer Psycho persona…” Kirsch declares, but it’s leading, like he’s waiting for the explanation she’s reluctant to give.

“We… had a fight,” Danny supplies.

…

…

…

“She break it off?” Kirsch asks.

“There was… we didn’t… it’s not like there was anything to break. I don’t know.”

“But you’re in the dog house?”

“Essentially.”

“You do something?”

“I guess.”

And then he laughs, the prick.

“What the hell, Kirsch?!”

“Nothing, it’s just… you sound like me.”

And oh God… oh please God, no.

“God, I hope not,” Danny says. “You know, I’m a lit major for the love of—damn. I mean, I should’ve seen this coming right? The irony of becoming what you despise, the gyres turning, cyclical repetition of suppression, only in a different form, though the structure is the same—”

“Blue eyes, what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I can’t be a white knight,” Danny says. It’s not so much a realization as capitulation; she never set out to be that, but somehow this spooky-ass place was hers and the people on it were her people, so why shouldn’t she protect them? Laura was… something else, but hers by extension. But that kind of possessiveness tastes sour and incorrect on her tongue, and she finds she’s still physically holding her diaphragm down so she doesn’t start to dry heave. "I didn't want to be a knight, but... I just want to make sure she's safe."

“Well, all that armor is fucking heavy, you know. And I bet it rusts real easy, gotta polish it, chain mail pinches your armpits. Like, what even deo do you use for that, cause Axe ain't gonna cut it. Just sounds like a pain in the ass,” Kirsch says.

And then she laughs, and it’s not better, but it… is.

“She got tired of you looking at her like she was a baby bird, right?”

“Yeah,” Danny says.

“So she broke it off.”

“Yeah.”

“Because if I know L², she’s probably neck-deep in something insane, like trying to take on a hoard of vampires by herself,” Kirsch says.

Danny wants to roll her eyes, but her head hurts, and she’s afraid her pupils might just roll back and she’ll pass out right there.

“She doesn’t understand where I’m coming from, I guess,” Danny says. “There’s a really fine line between bravery and recklessness, you know?”

“Man, do I. Spent the whole of my sophomore year pushing it to the limit. As did you back in the day, if the rumors about the tree-climbing incident with the griffin’s nest—”

“Completely false,” she cuts him off, but flushes because that night… wow.

“Irregardless—”

“Try again—”

“You’re still friends, right?”

“I… don’t know. I hope we are. I, I want to be her friend.”

“You want to be more than her friend. And who could blame you? She’s got an awesome bod—”

“Kirsch!”

“—body and the best part is the… brain. Obviously, is what I was going to say.”

“Nice save, bro.”

It’s almost too dark to see and she knows they’ve been out here too long. The reflective markers will only do so much and with her addled state, it’s gonna be hell navigating back to campus. She pushes up on her knees and wobbles like a newborn calf, then falls flat on her ass beside the case of beer. She can already hear Kirsch complaining: it’s half full and a damn waste.

“We should probably go,” Danny groans, still prostrate.

“Right…” Kirsch says, and extends a hand. He snatches it away when she goes to take it with the addendum, “…lemme save the beer!” He’s gone into the shed and grabbed the bats, and the case of beer is gone when she opens her eyes and looks to her left.

“Okay, try again?” he says, and offers a hand.

He hoists her up and equilibrium’s a bitch, because things are spinning and apparently she’s miscounted her beer consumption. The cans at her feet number five if she divides by two to account for the slight double vision, and she knows she left at least four in the shed. And of course this happens, of course, but she’s still stubborn enough to try.

She takes one step and ends up at a seventy degree angle, if geometry is being generous.

“Woah there, lady killer,” Kirsch says.

“I don’t suppose there’s any point in telling you that I’m fine,” Danny says, and sways unsteadily while holding onto Kirsch’s shoulder.

“Nope. Not on this uneven terrain, anyway.”

“So you’re going to have to help me.”

“At least til we get back to a sidewalk,” Kirsch says.

“Could this day get any worse?”

“For you, probably.”

And he scoops her up into a bridal carry and makes toward the path, and OH HELL NO!!! is he going to fucking march her out of the woods like some conquest.

“You have two seconds to put me down—!”

“Or what, you’ll throw a punch a foot to the right of my face?”

“I will scream bloody murder and you and I both know what kinds of things come out here at night.”

“Fine,” Kirsch says, and drops her with little warning.

She ‘oomphs’ on the ground and glares daggers up at him, standing in his default mode with arms-over-chest and stupid grinny face.

“Obviously I can’t make it out of here without your help,” she seethes.

“All you had to do was ask.”

“I’ve had a shitty day, but I still have my pride.”

“You won’t even have that if we stay out here another hour,” Kirsch says, turning a tentative 180 to scan the clearing. “We really need to head back.”

“Okay, I think I’ve got a solution—help me up,” Danny says, and she’s still dizzy, wavering slightly in his outstretched arms.

“Okay, first things first, hands. And secondly, mention this to anyone, and I will turn it around on you in a flat second.” She stoops down to pick up the two (now severely dented) bats from the Summer Society and then clamps down onto his shoulder with her free hand. She shuffles behind him and pushes down until she’s got him in what she assumes is a crouch.

“Okay, on three. One—two—”

“Shit, you said on three,” Kirsch cries, hands flying to the undersides of Danny’s legs as she wriggles into better piggy-back position.

“Yeah, as in one-two-jump, not one-two-three and then jump. Come on, Kirsch.”

The bats clank against each other as she directs him toward the path, avoiding the large sink holes marked by the reflectors, checking overhead periodically for any of those suspicious hanging vines LaFontaine was droning on about two weeks prior.

They’re back on the main trail and can just make out the street lights of campus when Kirsch slows just a little.

“Blue eyes?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re okay now?”

“Okay is relative, but I guess I’m… I’m better.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

…

…

…

“Kirsch?”

“Huh?”

“Thanks for coming with me. And for… I don’t know. All of it. And… carrying me, as loath as I am to say it.”

“Does this mean you’ll bump my midterm grade up?” he asks hopefully.

“Oh hell no. You did awful on that test. Did you even study?”

“Mixer with the Drama society the night before. Girls in wigs, man—”

“Okay, I get it.”

…

…

…

“Your essay was really good, though.”

“Dude, really?”

“Yeah, dude, really. Talking about the language that translators used that warped Grendel’s mom into a monster as opposed to a female warrior. How those women were considered ‘monstrous’ because they defied gender roles. Not in so many words, but it was a very… progressive reading of the text, for you.”

“Well, you’re kinda the reason I wrote it that way.”

“What’d I do to inspire such genius? Not that I’m not a genius, but you?”

Danny yelps and feels her stomach drop as Kirsch lurches below her, practically clawing into his shoulder.

“Sorry, thought I saw a… rat,” Kirsch snickers.

“Sure.”

“Anyway, you were just saying how calling people certain names is like, rude or offensive or makes you feel bad or whatever. And when I saw that they were using the same names to describe Beowulf and Grendel and the warriors and the mom, I was like, ‘why does the mom get monster tacked onto her title?’ So I went with that.”

“I think I gave you a C+ on that,” Danny says.

“Ballin’,” Kirsch replies, and they’re only a few yards away from level ground.

“I might bump it up to a B-. The structure wasn’t great, and the form’s a little rough around the edges, but the content makes up for it.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“B for bros, amirite?” Kirsch asks.

She doesn’t want to say it. It’s been a hell of a long day and she really wants nothing more than to go to bed and sleep it all off, forget about Laura and disappearances and vampires for seven hours and try to start fresh tomorrow. But instead, she’s nodding at Brody Kirsch.

“B for bros,” she agrees.

…

…

…

“Kirsch?”

“Yeah, Danny?”

“Get your hands off my ass.”

“Right.”

Chapter Text

The dribbling bell above the door at the on-campus bookstore reminds Danny of adventure. As one child in a brood of six, it was difficult (read, damn near impossible) for Danny to get any time alone with one or both of her parents. And as the eldest girl, it was unlikely (read, never gonna happen) that she would find a moment to herself, in which one-to-three of her siblings weren’t hanging off of her gangly limbs, crying for their own version of attention from Mother 2.0.

But there was the special occasion, perhaps a single Saturday per month, that Ma would sneak her out early, just the two of them, to Carlsburg’s Bookshop. There had been a bell over that door, too. And it was at Carlsburg’s that Danny discovered how words and plots rang truer than life, for stories were never bound by anything so quotidian and stifling as the realistic. There were dragons and gypsies and gladiators and spaceships for a single Saturday a month, when she had her Ma and the tintinnabular reverb of adventure all to herself.

Danny knows she’s been preoccupied lately, between mushroom clobbering, pointed distance with her crush, Summer Society duties, reviewing her classes’ final essay proposals, and the… well, supernatural disappearances sure to result in painful and brimstoney death for at least a handful of coeds.

So today, Saturday, she’s decided to treat herself. It’s the day after Halloween and the leaves have changed fully, bristly, dry flora flooding the walk across campus with a bold gradient of the red scale. She bops into the coffee shop and passes on ciders and pumpkin-flavored concoctions, requesting instead a double espresso sans sugar (there’s really only so much sweet her palette can endure).

There’s not much activity this early on a weekend morning but Danny prefers it that way: these brief flickers of serenity interspersed with requisite action. Like cardio circuit training. Just long enough to catch her breath before hurtling back headlong into the bustle of collegiate life.

She sees two of her sisters, Caitlin and Everett, jogging along one of the sidewalks on the Quad. Caitlin’s a frosh, so Danny doesn’t know her that well; but Everett’s only a year her junior, and is known for her inclination toward speedy races. Danny smiles at the jogging pair, no doubt training for the Silas half-marathon. They’ll need to pick up the pace, though, if they intend to outrun whatever beasts the marathon moderators have acquired as this years ‘incentivizers’.

She toasts the two with her tiny carry-out espresso, double-takes at her silly action, then strides off in the direction of the bookstore. Not that she has tons of funds to be spending on delicately crafted classics and hardback versions of newer novels, but she is not setting foot in that library until things return to a semistable level of normal on this campus.

She shoulders open the door, and the bell is as comforting today as it was fifteen years ago.

“Hey, Chuck,” Danny says to the stooped figure behind the counter. His skin is dark like cherry wood and his face is nicked with pockmarks of aging wear, but his smile is refreshing and constant. She’d made friends with the aged man (who she’d wager her next T.A. stipend is some form of clairvoyant warlock conjurer because, how are her favorite titles always in stock?) on the third week of her freshman year, and has made it a point to stop and visit biweekly since she began her tenure at Silas.

“Danielle, always a pleasure,” he growls, voice smoky as a jazz club. “Looking for anything particular?”

“Just gonna see what strikes my fancy.”

“I think you’ll find just what you need.”

“You always seem to have it for me.”

“Can’t help a man from having favorite customers. Like to make sure we’ve got your preferences in stock. Though with how well-read you are—”

“Flatterer,” she cuts him off with a good-natured shrug.

She doesn’t know what she’s in the mood for this morning: high fantasy or pseudophilosophy or classic poetry, or just something easy and trashy that she’ll need to hide under her mattress should any of her sisters invade her room without her knowledge. She’s read it all and loved it all, because stories are… nonjudgmental. With stories you get out what you put in, and it’s a particular investment, a consumption of sorts, that Danny’s been fond of for a long while. Stories are probably her most passive interest, and with the current state of her affairs, she’s eager to sit back and just enjoy something for a change.

She’s wandering aimlessly in historical fiction when she hears a low groan emanating from the textbook selection two bookcases down. She walks that way, because what the heck?, and gapes at the back of a beleaguered bro. The cut off tank and hoodie combo paired with baggy workout sweats is a dead give away. He’s banging his head against the top shelf of the biography section, muttering with every punctuated thud.

“Hey…” she starts. “You need some help?”

“They still don’t have History of Lost Souls. I’m a dead man. My soul is as lost as theirs if I fail this class.”

Danny perks up because, fatalistic and grumpy as it sounds, she knows that voice.

“Kirsch?”

“Hey, Danny.”

“This is honestly the last place I thought I’d see you,” she comments, striding towards her frie—bro. “And before noon…” She pauses. “…on a Saturday.”

“You know that pick-two triangle? The college version?” Kirsch draws something of an equilateral shape in the air with his pointer, head still bonking away on the shelf. “Sleep, grades, social?”

“Yeah…”

“Would you believe I chose grades over sleep?”

“No. But I’d say I’m very impressed with you, since you did.”

Kirsch continues whacking his head against the shelf, a fruitless search apparent grounds for brain-cell depletion. Danny, unable to stand it, presses on his shoulder and the boy whirls around, eyes red as the fallen leaves on the Quad.

“Still no copy of your lost text book, then?” she asks.

“No. I failed the midterm because I didn’t have the material.”

“I hate to suggest it, but have you checked—”

“The library? Yeah, it’s out on loan. And the prof’s a total douche, hard-line all the way. Won’t give me any extra notes, no photocopies of the textbook pages. I ordered it two weeks ago and it’s still not in.”

“What edition is it?”

“Fourth.”

“Well, I never took that class, but I can see if some of the girls have a copy they can lend you.”

“God, that’d be excellent, bro. Just ask around ASAP, ‘cause I need to study bad.”

He rubs a gnarly-knuckled hand over his unshaven jaw, then knots his fist into his eye and twists it. It’s reminiscent of her little brother, Jake, sans morning cowlick and breath to knock an elephant unconscious. Danny just rolls her eyes and leans back against the nearest bookcase.

“Long night last night? I know the Zetas hosted their hoppin’ Halloween throwdown.”

“Yeah. Great til midnight, then I drew the late shift on basement watch. Something weird in the Zeta house. Did sort of a stake out.”

“And by ‘stake-out’ you mean card game with the boys who couldn’t score with the ladies?”

Kirsch scrunches up his face in confusion, and something pangs lightly in Danny’s chest.

Scrunched up face.

Laura.

“No, I mean stake out,” Kirsch clarifies. “Like, sitting up all night and watching for creepy stuff.”

“Who pulled the shift with you?”

“Everybody else was at the party, so just me.”

Now it’s Danny’s turn to scrunch up her face.

“Why ‘just you’?”

Kirsch laces his fingers and plants them atop his head, a move Danny recognizes from their infrequent sparring sessions at the gym. Ever since the baseball bat episode in the woods, Kirsch has been a real sport: offering himself as a partner for sparring sessions when the Summer Soc girls just couldn’t take her boundless fury anymore. That, and he’s surprisingly okay with Taylor Swift albums set to ‘repeat’. Kirsch cracks his neck to the left, then to the right side, and rolls his shoulders. It’s what she’s come to recognize as his ‘gearing up’ movement, like lubricating the cogs and wheels of something mechanical.

“The bros wouldn’t stop complaining about it. And… well, Will disappears down there every so often when no one’s looking. Like, in the middle of a party when everyone’s plastered, I’ve seen him sneaking off with a girl a time or two. And the other day I come home and our room is trashed, and Will is nowhere. I found him an hour later, just standing in the basement. Gave him hell for all the crap in the room, but he was just… standing there. Silent. Like, worse than the quiet when everybody’s taking their exams at the same time. It was… tense. Really weird.”

“But nothing else suspicious going on with Will?” Danny inquires. “He was being strangely kind to me after…” she waves a fluttery hand off to the side, substituting motion for articulation. “…whatever. I took out my frustrations on social media and he noticed. He doesn’t know you know he’s a vam— I mean,” Danny drops her voice, sidles up a step closer to Kirsch for discretion. “He doesn’t suspect that you know anything odd about him, does he?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, L²’s got her vids up for everybody to see, so I don’t get why he thinks I haven’t watched them. We watched the ones we were in a couple’a times.”

“Narcissists.”

“We’re internet famous, blue eyes. Don’t be jelly.”

“You try not being ridiculous and we’ll call it even. Additionally, the Summer Society needs the chainsaw back.”

“Dude, no! What if those mega-shrooms crop up again?!”

“Then we’ll need to fight them off just as much as you guys. Redirect your weekly kegger funds toward a chainsaw purchase so you can stop leeching off of us.”

“Will you clear my essay proposal if I give it back?”

“No, Kirsch, that’s not how this works! Academic bargaining is a Class J misdemeanor according to the student handbook.”

“But the prof said it wouldn’t be so bad if I wrote about—”

“I’m not letting you compare Hamlet and The Lion King on your final essay, Brody.”

“Oh, fine then, Miss Lawrence. See if you ever get your chainsaw back now.”

“You can’t withhold our jumbo-gardening equipment like that. It’s… horticultural hostage.”

“And you can’t just nix my super-cool Disney paper because you want to! Like I said in the proposal, The Lion King is Hamlet, the sequel is Romeo and Juliet, and The Lion King One-and-a-Half is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. That paper writes itself!”

“You ever think I rejected your proposal because I wanted you to—I don’t know—actually put forth some effort for your paper?”

“Ugh… effort.”

Danny runs a hand through her hair, tucks a falling strand behind her ear. It’s easy, this amicable chiding. Familiar. She’s aware of her role, plays to it, and succeeds. She might even have a chance at making someone come out better, for what it’s worth. Then again, there’s that razor thin line of prodding versus pushing, protecting versus smothering. She doesn’t want to be guilty of taking it too far, even with her T.A. authority.

“So… I’ve been thinking,” Danny swaps topics. It’s easier talking alone with Kirsch when they happen upon each other like this. Multiple, pre-arranged meet-ups earn her stink-eyes from the girls in the Summer Society, and the Zetas on campus regard the pair of them when seen fraternizing with enough smugness to make her stomach lurch. “… about, well, what we should do if there’s an—uh, uprising.”

“An uprising?” Kirsch asks.

“Like, a fight. I think it would be good, I mean, I think we should be… training.”

“Training for an uprising.”

“What I said, genius.”

“No, no,” Kirsch nods, and crosses his arms over his pectorals. “I’m just… trying to figure out what you’re getting at, here. Like, we’d need to get into the gym after hours, and we couldn’t let it get out to a bunch of people—”

“I’ve got a handful of Summer Soc girls in mind for the job. We don’t want to risk alarming everyone, turning the campus more manic than it already is. I just think, sparring, preparing for a, well… a fight of supernatural proportions, that’s going to take more than your basic jab-cross-hook-uppercut combo in Cardio Kickbox.”

“Yeah, yeah, I feel ya on that, blue eyes,” Kirsch readjusts his stance, as if this conversation requires the same kind of physical energy that their sparring sessions do. His face scrunches again, and Danny can see the mental effort, the turning of gears and illuminating of cerebral bulbs as Kirsch gets his thoughts in order. “There’s a few bros, two or three anyway, I could see them ready for a fight like that.”

“They need to be able to fight,” Danny agrees. “But they also need to be able to keep their mouths shut.”

“If it falls under the bro code, it’s sacred. Protecting the hotties through top-secret supernatural combat training? I don’t know what bro wouldn’t want to be in on that.”

“They’d be sparring with us. I’ve got some… uh, supplies we’ll need to learn how to use. Weapons to, uhm, wield.”

“Wielding weapons well, hmm?” Kirsch smirks. “If I say that’s alliteration, will you sign off on my topic?”

“No.”

“Damn, worth a shot. So, you got after hours access to the gym?”

“Not exactly. There’s CCTV in all of the work-out rooms. Laura might want to risk putting her recorded self out there for the administration to see, but I don’t. Since you’re basement’s being haunted, I think we could drag some mats and punching bags down to the basement of the Summer Soc House. The only problem is explaining the sudden presence of four Zeta guys who previously haven’t set foot on the premises.”

“Shit, that’s cake.”

“Pardon?”

“House boys!”

…

…

…

“What?” Danny deadpans.

“House boys! You know, guys that help out around sorority houses.”

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“Dude, one of my best friends from high school is a house boy for the Kappa Chis at his uni, and he loves it.”

“What’s there to love if the job is nothing more than glorified labor?”

“Well, they get compensated in different ways, you know? They help with the dinners and stuff, so they get free food. Help clean up the common areas, so the girls tutor them. Not to mention they get to hang around hotties all day—”

“In some twisted, subordinate roleplay—”

“It’s not weird. They’re doing work and saving money. They don’t have to sign up for a ridiculously expensive meal plan when the houses make better dinners anyway. Just think, it’s an easy fix that some of the Zeta guys become house boys. Think of it as the Summer Soc trying to like, ease tensions with the warring campus clubs.”

“Because campus unity and bickering factions is the last thing we need right now,” Danny replies, exasperated.

“Exactly.”

Danny toes something nonexistent on the floor, eyes downcast. It’s not a great plan, and they’ll be hell from the girls about letting the Zetas into the house and giving them free rein. There will have to be rules, of course: no Zetas allowed upstairs, not that they’d get past the second step if Marley and Gretchen had anything to say about it; no messing around in the storage closet; no raiding the pantry despite this ‘free food’ reciprocity; plus, the guys would probably have to do actual work, to make the story look convincing.

“I don’t like it,” Danny proceeds. “But it seems about as good an idea as anything else I could come up with. Lemme talk to Marley, she keeps up with everything at the Summer Soc house. I’ll text you later and let you know about it.”

“Can we have a codename?” Kirsch asks with unmanufactured glee.

“A code name?”

“Every top secret mission has to have a codename. I’m thinking Operation Honey Badger.”

“We don’t need a—”

“Honey Badger, like, H-B, as in House Boys, as in Zeta bros in combat training,” Kirsch proceeds to chop the air with closed fingers, which Danny guesses is his impersonation of an inept ninja.

“Call it whatever you want, Kirsch,” Danny says, and can’t help the grin his antics induce. She moves deeper into the textbook section and starts scanning shelves. “Let’s see if we can find your book, you might just be checking the wrong shelf—”

“Oh!”

"Oh."

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

...

...

...

“Uh, hey?”

Laura and Danny both stare at Kirsch, and Danny’s wondering what inspired the questioning inflection of his address, because she’s pretty sure she’s the one with the most pressing questions at the moment. The ones running through her head currently:

How are you?

Have you been being careful?

What can I do to help?

Is your roommate still moving, and if so, what can I do to immobilize her permanently?

I miss you… could you just… let me try again?

“So anyway, thanks for letting me redo that proposal,” Kirsch says, and claps a hand over Danny’s shoulder. “I knew you’d come around once you’d let me explain.”

“What proposal?” Laura asks, cue the scrunched up face.

“For the Brit Lit final essay?” Kirsch supplies, and Danny’s not quite sure where her attention should be set presently. “Isn’t that right, blue eyes?”

“Blue eyes?” Laura says, with no small hint of malice.

Danny takes her in, wrapped up snugly in a scarf and a green jacket, honey-colored hair hanging limply over her face. Laura’s juggling a handful of books and it takes significant effort, too much too soon, for Danny not to reach over and help Laura with the load. Danny would lighten every load Laura ever saw fit to shoulder, if only the petite firebrand would allow her the privilege. But Laura’s adamant, as evinced by their lack of communication. So Danny stands bereft and digs her hands into her pockets so she won’t reach out and do something stupid, like touch her.

“Yeah,” Danny says, as noncommittal as possible. Though she’s not sure if the affirmative is for Kirsch’s benefit or Laura’s.

“See,” Kirsch continues, “… at first she wouldn’t let me write about Hamlet, but then I explained my outline and uh, structure and content and stuff, and she said that it would be okay if I had some of the proper, uhm… sources. So long story short, she’s giving me another shot. I mean, everybody deserves a second chance, right L²?”

And oh… oh. Danny shoots Kirsch a look that’s both a warning and a thanks, then casts a glance sideways with a direction that silently wails: get the hell out of here.

“Yeah, I… yeah,” Laura agrees, and doesn’t meet Danny’s eyes.

“Kirsch, why don’t you go ask Chuck about your History of Lost Souls textbook? He might have it in the back somewhere,” Danny suggests.

“Right. Right, lost textbook. I’m just gonna…” he jerks a thumb off to the side, and starts walking that way. Laura’s back is to him, so she can’t see him throw Danny two huge thumbs up, can’t see him mouth the words ‘you owe me’, then proceed to pantomime Rafiki presenting Simba to the pride lands a la the opening scene of The Lion King.

Danny widens her eyes and tilts her head sideways, because good deed or no, Kirsch doesn’t get to hear this.

“Lost a textbook?” Laura asks, indicating the numbskull that had just departed.

“It’s been missing since the second week of class,” Danny fills in. “He’s only just now started freaking out about it.”

“Right.”

“Yeah.”

…

…

…

“So how have you—”

“Have you found any—”

“Sorry,” Laura says, readjusting the books in her grip. “Go ahead.”

“No—I… sorry, it’s… do you, uh, you got those?” Danny asks, because Laura is clearly struggling.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

And still clearly stubborn.

“Okay. I was… just wondering how you’ve been? Missed you in class the other day—not that I’m keeping tabs!” Danny course corrects, because that sounds like over-attentive behavior and she promised, she promised to back off. “Just… because I was taking roll. For class. I mean, you weren’t the only one. Half the class didn’t show, because of the spores.”

“Yeah, sorry about that, I’ll get my proposal to you soon.”

“It’s…” but it’s not okay, can’t be okay because Danny can’t show preference, even for Laura, who wouldn’t want to be treated special even though she is. “Just get it in when you can. You’ve still got a week before deadline.”

“Kirsch is making me feel like a slacker,” Laura jokes. “He’s tackling Hamlet?”

“He wants to do a comparative write-up between that and The Lion King,” Danny smiles.

“That sounds a bit more like the bro I know,” Laura jokes.

...

...

...

It’s getting easier.

“Laura, I…” Danny huffs, and runs a hand through her hair out of nervousness. She really wants to get this right. “I haven’t watched your videos, or anything. I’m just… you know, still caring over here,” she mumbles. Her voice is small and cramped, much to small for a woman of her stature, of her assertiveness. “I’m not hovering or judging. Just… have their been any developments? Anything I can help you with?”

Laura’s brows knit together and her eyes squint into slits. She takes a step closer and Danny loses the ability to breathe momentarily.

“You… you haven’t heard?” Laura asks quietly.

“No, I… like I said, I haven’t been watching anything.”

“They—uhm, we think they took LaFontaine.”

“What?!”

“Keep your voice down.”

“Yeah,” Danny inhales, and crosses her hands over her chest, entertains a peripheral thought that she’s been hanging out too much with Kirsch if this is her default stance. “How’s Perry taking it?”

“Not well,” Laura confesses.

Danny sympathizes immediately with Perry. She’s never much cared for LaFontaine, but Danny just knows that she’d feel the same inundating worry and petrification if Laura were ever taken.

“I’ll be sure and talk to her,” Danny says.

“She’s been staying with us, since she found the card. There was no goop attached—”

“Goop?” Danny inquires. “What goop?”

“Oh, right, you weren’t there for that. Uh… it’s cerebrospinal fluid.”

…

…

…

“You mean—”

“Yes.”

“They’ve been getting the… goop from girls’ brains?!” Danny seethes through clenched teeth.

“Yeah, LaFontaine ran some tests, before we went back to the library for more sources concerning supernatural parasites. That’s what these are,” Laura says, indicating the stack of dusty-jacketed hardbacks weighing down her small frame. “Thought it best not to go back into the bound journals basement without backup, so I came down here to see if they had a few titles in stock. Ironically enough, this shop’s got almost every title I need.”

“And it’s free of a haunted card catalog,” Danny offers. It could be a dig or an observance, but Danny immediately wants to apologize.

“Always an adventure, the library.”

“It’s not the library itself,” Danny says. “The stories are the real adventure.”

Maybe it’s because Danny’s held her tongue and decided against scolding and reprimanding and advising when Laura’s clearly begging for it, but the freshman’s face lights up and Danny’s lips twitch heavenwards. It’s a tentative peace, fresh as an open wound and susceptible; but it’s healing and Danny dares hope, just for a minute, despite Perry’s distress and the girls’ brain fluids and LaFontaine’s disappearance. Laura isn’t letting the setbacks staunch her relentless quest for answers, and Danny’s not lying down and taking it, either. Laura’s smile and Kirsch’s suggestions ignite the fuse and Danny is suddenly ready for action, for training and prepping and reconnaissance so that she can end this threat to her campus. Danny’s got Laura’s brain and Kirsch’s brawn in her corner, and decides she could be working with worse odds.

She’ll watch the videos. Prep with the Summer Soc girls and the Zetas. And when the time comes, she’ll be ready to fight. Not for Laura. But with her. Alongside her.

Because that’s what Laura deserves.

“I better be heading back,” Laura says, smile bright as a rainbow. “Lots of reading to do. Plus a proposal to write.”

“I look forward to reading it,” Danny says, watching Laura turn. “Laura? You know… I just want to help. You ever need backup, I’m ready. You know how to reach me.”

“I know. That you just... just want to help—” Laura stutters. “And, uh, how to reach you. Both of those things. I know. Them. It’s been…” Laura sighs, looks down at her books, then meets Danny full in the eyes. “It was really good to see you again.”

“Yeah. I—” missed you. “Good to see you, too. You, uhm, better get on.”

“Right. Take… care.”

Laura darts around the corner of a bookshelf, and Danny smirks inwardly. She’s almost sure Laura was attempting to reach around the stack of books and brush her arm, but doesn’t dare project her hopes onto the younger girl’s flailing actions.

It’s still… premature. This awkward, mutely acknowledged reconciliation. She moves back to the front and passes a smiling Chuck, wondering how he knew she’d find just what she needed on today’s excursion, despite exiting the establishment without a book in hand.

Danny is halfway back to the Summer Soc house when she starts, jumps off the sidewalk and lands crouched with her hands in a defensive position in front of her face.

Kirsch has emerged from the bushes, textbook in hand, with that dopey grin on his face.

“God, don’t do that.”

“You owe me!” Kirsch sing-songs.

“I don’t owe you anything,” Danny argues, and leaves him with a leaf stuck to the back of his ear.

“Come on, that was a classic wingman performance.”

“I’m not reconciling with Laura using some poorly executed charade,” Danny argues. "And don't think that means you've got clearance for your proposal."

“Give me some credit, I got her to talk to you.”

“Fine. You did that much.”

“Like a conversational co-pilot. Ohmygosh, dude—”

“Please no—”

“BROPILOT!”

“And there it is,” Danny shrugs, defeated.

Kirsch throws an arm around her shoulders and yells over the abandoned Quad: “Hear ye, hear ye, I am the official Bro-pilot for Danny Lawrence!!!”

“Kirsch, stop it!” Danny shrieks, and jerks out from under his half-hug. She pushes off from him, and he rams back into her shoulder so that she’s stumbling through leaves, laughing for the first time in a while. She stoops down and tosses a handful of leaves in his face and he comes up sputtering, ducking his head and wrapping his arms around her waist. She uses his momentum against him and rolls back easily, leaving him flat on his back in a sea of mustards and burnt oranges. She’s standing over him with an arched brow, hands on her hips and a you know better air about her person.

“You seem like you’re in a better mood,” Kirsch comments from the ground.

“So what if I am?”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“I’m not.”

“You’ll thank me one day.”

“We’ll see.”

“So what do you say, Blue Eyes?”

“Is that my code name?”

“It is if I can be Bro-pilot.” Kirsch sticks his hand upwards and Danny clasps it, pulls him to his feet and brushes off his shoulders.

“Fine. Operation Honey Badger is ago.”

“Hell yeah!” Kirsch says with an obligatory fist pump.

Chapter Text

Danny’s panting like a Labrador by the time she makes it to the rear entrance of the Summer Society house. She’s been running for… damn, nearly two hours, and it was on her fifth loop of the most well-lit campus sidewalks that she decided to stop pushing her luck and call it an evening. She’s definitely heard the whisperings about the mutated, tusked gophers the administration has been trying to dismiss since Halloween.

Luckily, there’s nothing sinister on the back steps, just a rough wooden handrail, a foot mat, and three pair of Wellies caked with drying mud haphazardly set in the walkway. She stumbles over the shoes (dammit, Claire) and through the door with a graceless grunt. Someone’s left the light on in the kitchen so Danny shrugs and heads that direction, unzips her hoodie and ties it around her waist. She’s sweating, and probably smells like the noxious fumes the Alchemy Club inadvertently released after the whole ‘Dodo Egg’ incubation went south. She rakes her fingers over flyaways from her braided ponytail but stops short when she turns the corner to the small dining hall.

The lights hum quietly over the tables but none of her sisters are milling about. Danny instead meets scattered dishes, and cutlery smeared with the remnants of this evening’s dinner. The three twelve-seater tables haven’t been wiped down. Condensation collects on the neglected pitchers, such that they soak the shellacked wooden tabletops with ugly water rings. It’s out of the ordinary, and say what you will about Marley, but the senior house director usually runs a tight ship at the Summer Soc house.

Danny doesn’t see a way around it, so she sets to work.

She’s almost grateful for the mess, because she really doesn’t want to go back in her room. Doesn’t want to see her cracked computer screen, to face the evidence of her overreaction.

Danny gathers plates and scrapes leftovers onto the topmost dish, smiling despite herself because it feels like clean-up back home with her brothers and sisters. The action reminds her of home because she’s doing all the work, but it makes her feel capable, and needed. But now she’s trying to negotiate a world where the people she cares about don’t need her, where those people, or, well, one person… where that person views her capabilities as maybe more hindrance than help.

The worst part is she gets to witness it.

Every. Single. Moment.

Danny gets to go back and watch when things weren’t as complex and convoluted. To see Laura’s smudged cheek and chunks of pickled herring; to be there for the awkward switching of seats; to witness her own introduction to a world connected by electronic byways and ISPs and techy jargon she couldn’t care less about; to relive that momentary flutter, brief and exhilarating in her thoracic cavity, when she exited the room and Laura clutched the air in celebration, as if just talking to Danny constituted some sort of accomplishment for the freshman.

Danny gets to relive the moment when possibility (leaps and bounds ahead of a mere crush) entered her life and crippled her ever so slightly.

It makes Danny’s ego and heart swell until she thinks about the most recent videos.

Anger and misunderstandings. When the kidnappings hit too close to home and Perry’s high on devastation (literally, though unintentionally), and Laura won’t seek Danny out because the freshman’s stubborn and yeah, ballsy. But the person—being Laura does turn to… she’s… it’s… out of Danny’s league, as in, how can I ever compete with that? With unaffected mannerisms from Eastern European courts and seamless dance steps and centuries of knowledge and a hypnotic air of callousness, betrayed only by small gestures indicative of care and concern?

The tines of a fork rake sharply across a plate and Danny winces at the screech.

Danny’s got care and concern: heaps and loads and mountains of it. But what she doesn’t have is time. Carmilla possesses the subtlety and patience that immortality affords. Carmilla can seduce and charm and entice all she wants, because the vampire doesn’t have anything as ridiculously finite as finals or graduation or, well, death looming over her like the rest of the campus does. Danny’s witnessed that disregard for time, and gagged at every glance Carmilla threw that Laura didn’t catch.

Danny knows she isn’t as blessed as her rival. Time is a luxury. That’s an axiom all mortals recognize, because life… life is fleeting. And that’s a cliché all mortals fear. She’s detested the ‘gather ye rosebuds’ argument from the get-go, whether in its original form or in that of the modern (#YOLO). But now, after sleepless nights of worthless thinking, she understands that her protective overtures are symptomatic of her mortal condition. Danny must be big, and brass, and set concrete plans for pie, and openly suggest collaboration and study dates because there’s not enough time… She knows better than most that it is imperative to tell someone how much you love them—or like, no… that’s not enough… how much you care for them before everything goes up in flames.

She knows she’s been thinking too much about Carmilla when a knife clatters to the floor and dishes begin to shift in her grip; her knuckles are white and she’s clasping the plate edges so hard she’s surprised she hasn’t cracked the stoneware.

Danny is so fed up with it, this incessant thinking. That’s what the run had been for. To clear her head, to ensure something close to a restful night. She’d purposefully gone jogging without her iPod. Her soundtrack had been wind and pulse and patterned exhalations, mainly because she had drained her battery that afternoon listening to the collected discography of angry, jilted female pop artists while grading papers. Again, it’s so feebly human, to vent frustrations with Kelly Clarkson and P!nk and T-Swfit that she begins to think she’s not… worthy, in some twisted way.

After all, who is she to quash something so unique, Laura’s once-in-a-lifetime experience with a supernatural creature, of all things, just because Danny felt—feels—felt… something substantial? She saw Laura in that video, heard that unedited confession: Worst. Crush. Ever.

That's when her laptop broke.

Unable to bear another turn on the sine wave of outrage and insecurities she’s been riding for the past week, Danny slumps through the dining hall and heads to the kitchen, which is as pristine as she’s ever seen it. The contrast to the dining hall is so stark, she nearly misses the guy turning from the sink, earbuds in and a concentrated expression on his face. When he catches her eye, he quirks a corner lip upward and it turns everything asymmetrical: a square jaw, juxtaposed against a slanted lip, combined with the tilted puppy head. The rag in one hand and squirt bottle in the other is definitely new, as is the pink, two-pocketed apron he’s got hanging over his torso. He shakes his hands and rips the earbuds out, then silences the blaring rock music.

“Hey thanks! I was just coming for those. The kitchen took longer than I thought it would.”

“What are you doing?” Danny asks, scraping the top plate of leftovers into the trash. She hands over the dishes at Kirsch’s nod, then shuffles toward the refrigerator in search of her water bottle.

“I drew clean-up duty."

“You sure you’re at the right house for that?” Danny teases, twisting the top and taking a refreshing gulp. The water trickles down her esophagus and things start to feel less—less spiky and less irritating and less prickly. Talking in the kitchen with Kirsch after an extensive run just makes everything that’s been too much lately suddenly feel… less.

“Gotta start this House Boys schtick at some point,” Kirsch posits, opening the door of the dishwasher and setting the plates in the rack. “Brandon, Jeff and Ollie cooked, but the place looked like a post-formal nuclear blow-out when I got back here. Thought I’d wash the bigger serving bowls and stuff, let the dishwasher handle the plates.”

“Fair reasoning,” Danny says, and follows him back into the dining hall. She helps gather up the remaining plates and trails behind him as he returns to the kitchen.

“And dude, a dishwasher! You guys must be rolling in it to be able to afford that.”

“Not exactly. Dues are budgeted pretty strictly, and we’ve got a whole separate account for house investments and repairs. It helps that we’ve got three business majors in the group,” Danny comments, and hops on the countertop beside the sink. She’s looking down at Kirsch as he semi-rinses the dishes, overcrowding the rack and stuffing an excess of washing liquid in the tiny window designated for ‘tough-on-stains’ cleaner. He stares intently at the control board then hits the ‘quick wash’ button. His struggle is immensely entertaining.

“Can’t remember the last time we had a meal with the guys that wasn’t on paper plates.”

“Don’t suppose you recycle, do you?” Danny asks.

Kirsch’s look says ‘gimme a break’, and he squirts her playfully with the kitchen sink sprayer.

“Hey!”

“C’mon, don’t ask questions you already know the answer to, Blue. We all know you’re a genius.”

“Hardly.”

“They pay you to teach and grade papers. Might as well be.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” she bobs her head in agreement, then slings her braid over her shoulder.

“Only way that matters, when you’re at Uni. You got your nerds—” he squirts her again, but only catches half of her face this time. She sputters and punches him in the arm, then grabs a dishrag and mops the moisture from the counter top.

Why is it that she’s always cleaning up other people’s messes?

“—well,” Kirsch continues, “then you got people like me.”

His inflection, normally so buoyant and careless, drops as he finishes his sentence. And Danny can’t help it, can’t help but help, so she kicks out with her right foot to get his attention.

“What’s up?”

“No thing, Blue.”

“C’mon. What’s the matter, and what Disney movie could make it better?”

“I like other movies besides Disney,” Kirsch grumbles, up to his elbows in soapy suds. “I can understand stuff that isn’t drawn into cartoons.”

“Never thought you couldn’t,” Danny says, ill-prepared for such defensiveness.

She’s not been here with Kirsch before. With Marley, and Claire, and Dianna, and any number of the Summer Soc sisters, she’s done this. Been the strong shoulder for emotional or physical leaning, the available ear, the soundboard. It’s strange for her to think, though, that Kirsch was there for her when she asked him to be. So the least she can do is stay, and wait, since the guy is usually forthcoming. Sort of like a toddler, who’s bursting at the seams to show you his newest drawing, intent on sharing his latest discovery. No matter if that drawing is of a red Solo cup pyramid, and the discovery something along the lines of two-for-one energy drinks at the haunted gas station on Fourth Street. Kirsch is, oddly enough, sincere in his excitement, and genuine in his disappointment.

Danny flashes back to that moment, awkward and unexpected, when Kirsch had wrapped his arms around her waist and propped his chin on her shoulder after S.J.’s accident. She had stiffened when he’d hugged her and now she regrets it, wishes she could’ve—well, reciprocated. He’d needed a friend then, but she wasn’t one at the time.

She could certainly be one now.

“Seriously, what’s up with you?” Danny prods again. “Let me help.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“See, that’s a challenge. How can I walk away now?” Danny ducks her head and smiles, finally catching Kirsch’s eye.

“You’re just part of the problem.”

“Me? What did I do?”

Kirsch pulls his hands from the water and flicks them once over the sink, grabs a towel from his back pocket and runs it over the wet skin.

“You think I’m an idiot.”

“Well, yeah. An endearing idiot,” Danny smiles.

“It’s not ‘endearing’ when everybody thinks that. It’s… it sucks, because it’s embarrassing. Just because I don’t know the definition of ‘troglodyte’ doesn’t mean I can’t Google it! I mean, just because I’m not smart—”

“Woah, wait a sec—”

“It doesn’t mean I can’t, like, contribute. Doesn’t mean I’m, uhm… damn, I mean, not like I can’t do anything to help.”

“You’re not incompetent,” Danny finishes for him.

“Everybody else thinks I am. I talked to Laura, the other night, and... they think I don’t see it, you know? I might not have the grades, or read the books, but I know when people are looking at me funny. When something feels off. I know not everybody is super open about the bro life on campus, but like, they don’t have to be so… I mean, we just want the hotties to have a good time. And, no matter what you think, Summer Psychbro—” Kirsch points at her, like he knows she’s about to interrupt, “—we want everybody to be safe.”

“You see, that’s where I disagree,” Danny argues. “It’s wrong of us to assume that every Zeta is the same, but Kirsch, come on, you’ve got to know that the fraternity culture has never been good for women on campus. Just because you’re a good guy doesn’t mean the establishment is good. It doesn't mean all of your bros are, either.”

“I know that. Some of the bros can be douches. God, Kevin.”

“Everybody hates Kevin.”

“Even Kevin hates Kevin, sometimes. It’s like he knows he’s a creep. Just like I know I’m an endearing idi—”

“Okay, just stop right there. I’m not letting you have a pity party for yourself with that frilly apron on and a Mr. Clean bottle in your hand. It’s too pathetic, and I’m the one who just got dumped.”

Danny hops off the counter and takes the cleaner from his hand, then yanks on the apron tie behind his neck. The garment flaps listlessly to the floor and he struggles to get out of it with his size twelve sneakers, looking almost as graceful as Danny does on the rare occasion that she tries to rid herself of pantyhose.

“Look, Blue, it’s cool you’re trying to help, but it’s just something I need to get over—”

“Shut up and listen. That’s the thing that pisses me off most about frats. You could be cool guys if you turned down the party music for a whole ten seconds and listened to what girls are trying to tell you,” Danny shifts in her sneakers, feels a pang in her quad, and curses herself for not stretching properly post-run. She winces and rubs at the muscle, which elicits a half-hearted harrumph from the bro standing opposite her. His head falls and he crosses his arms, and Danny thinks she catches something close to concern flash across his features. She’s too distracted by his poked-out lip to focus on it, though.

“And stop pouting. You’re a grown man, so act like it,” Danny admonishes, because maybe it’s tough love that Kirsch needs right now. She’s got a lot of ‘mom’ tactics she’s honed over the years. She’ll have to delve into her repertoire to see what works best for young Master Brody.

“Look, Kirsch, let’s get a few things straight. I disagree with several fundamentals of the fraternal system. I think it can be manipulating and oppressive for coeds on campus. I think it gives guys an excuse not to try, because they find a community that accepts this… party-all-night-and-sleep-all-day kind of lifestyle. But even I have to concede that it can be… good, in some respects. You’ve got your brothers for encouragement, just like I’ve got my sisters, and I guess, in some round-about way, it hones qualities like loyalty, and leadership. I mean, just because you’re the social chair doesn’t mean you just go to parties. You have to plan them, and organize them, and that’s… I mean, you’re developing skills for that. Zetas throw the best parties on campus, everybody knows that. And that’s on you.”

She props her hip against the counter and reaches for her water bottle. She toys with the cap, and waits for a response.

…

…

…

“Sometimes I feel like that’s all I’m good for,” Kirsch finally offers. “I’m just, you know, the party guy. People forget that I do… that I’ve always…”

“What, Kirsch?”

“I just… I try, but it doesn’t come easy for everybody, you know?”

Danny stops herself from saying try harder, because instinct tells her that’s all Brody Kirsch has heard for a long time.

“You know how I started dating S.J. after she came back? Like, after she got back from being taken the first time?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’d met her before,” Kirsch says, and stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “At the student resource center. She tutored me in science. Helped me with my bio class, and went over my problems for Intro to Calculus. I just… everybody’s expecting me to flunk out, but I wanted to show them up. She totally thought I could do it. Said I had a lot of potential. I was crushing so hard back then.”

He pulls his hand out of his pocket and Danny catches a flash of bubblegum pink. It’s one of those scrunchies like she used to wear in kindergarten, falling apart at the seams.

“She gave me this, the day before my first Biology exam. She said that when she took her tests, she liked to have something to hold onto, to keep her grounded. ‘It’s just a test’, she said, not the end of the world. And she was so smart, like on scholarship, first-class and admission to all the honors socs. ‘Just a test’ for her wasn’t the same as ‘just a test’ for me. She had serious pressure. But she gave it to me, like a good luck charm.”

Kirsch fingers the hairpiece with surprising delicacy, his big hands and clumsy digits an odd contrast to such a soft pink. He’s solemn, and it’s a color Danny can’t quite consolidate with his person, or, at least the half of the person she knows so well.

It disconcerts her, the feeling that maybe she doesn’t know the guy across from her very well at all. And it’s even more unnerving that she wants to know him. Wants to help him.

“She must have been really special to you.”

“I freaked when I found out she was one of the ones taken. And when she came back, I asked her out on the spot. I wasn’t about to let anything else happen to her. I knew she was smart, and that she… I don’t know, she was just good at everything. But I wanted to be able to help with stuff. So I took her to parties, got to see her loosen up. I never thought someone had… that something bad was…”

Kirsch exhales and Danny doesn’t push. She’s got her own issues with the chthonic goings-on at Silas but doesn’t feel that now is the time to press her only bro-pal for his opinions on supernatural girl-napping.

“I didn’t think someone had changed her. And that’s me being stupid again, can’t see what’s right in front of my face. I thought she… I mean, I thought she was trying to take an interest in my stuff. Went to the parties I planned... I thought she might have liked me, you know?”

“Kirsch, of course she liked you. I don’t doubt that.”

“We know they got their brains turned into scrambled eggs, Blue. You don’t have to try and make me feel better.”

“S.J. said you had potential before she got taken. She gave you that scrunchie before, Kirsch. I don’t think she would’ve done that for someone she didn’t like.”

…

…

…

“If you don’t mind my asking… who’s ‘everybody’?” Danny knits her ginger brows together at the inquiry.

“Huh?” Kirsch asks.

“You said, ‘everybody’s expecting me to flunk out’. Who thinks that?”

“Oh… that’s… I was just, uh... you know, college bro, likes to party. It’s how it goes, right?”

“I’ve got plenty of Summer Soc sisters who party with the best of them and have better grades than I do,” Danny argues. “Who made you think you were going to flunk out?”

…

…

…

“My Dad.”

…

…

…

“I only got in because he’s an alum,” Kirsch scratches the back of his neck and avoids eye contact. “Mom’s on my case a lot, too, so it’s… I just don’t want to screw up too bad.”

“They had to have thought you could do it if they sent you in the first place.”

“My brother helped, a lot more than my parents did. He wasn’t around, but he talked me into coming here. Said I couldn’t do anything but try.”

“He wasn’t around?”

“Third year of residency,” Kirsch supplies.

She doesn’t want to overanalyze that family dynamic, but Danny does feel like she’s two steps forward on figuring out more about her one and only Bro-pilot.

“He’s another one of those that likes to smile at me, and nod,” Kirsch says. “Like I can’t help it. Like I don’t know any better. Like I’m stu—”

“You’re not stupid. Stop saying you are,” Danny huffs. “You’re organizing recon missions on the Dean’s study! That takes logic, and intuition, and smarts, and yeah, a little bit of crazy, but you’re not stupid. A little lazy, maybe, but I see the potential S.J. saw, okay? And you’re not flunking my class. I’ll kick your ass if you do,” she smirks.

“You could try.”

“I don’t make empty threats.”

“Nah, you just make bets on the long shot.”

“Bigger payday in the end, though.”

“And you say I’m the crazy one.”

“Anyone who believes in bow ties and popped collars as adequate fashion staples must be certifiable.”

They settle back into comfortable silence. Danny’s drained physically, and Kirsch’s emotional engagement has succeeded in relegating her own personal problems to the mental backburner. She wants to go up and shower, and sleep, and get ready for tomorrow morning’s sparring practice with the Zetas. Which reminds her…

“You’ve got the sparring rotation worked up?” she asks.

“Yeah, I’ll print it out and bring it in the morning. I paired Ollie with Amelia because she absolutely crushed Jeff in grappling practice last week. Thought I’d give her a bigger challenge.”

“Nice to know you’re not holding back any more.”

“As if we could. Besides, you’re a ninja with that stake.”

“Menacing,” Danny agrees. “We’ll need to start partnering up, too. Figure out complimentary styles, because it’ll take at least two of us to take down one of them.”

“Yeah. I’ve got some thoughts on that.”

“See, there you go again, thinking.”

“Danny?”

“Hmm?”

“Thanks. You know, for…”

Brody lets the sentence fall, and extends his hand. She takes it, and her long fingers wrap around his palm as he pulls her in and claps her back with the opposite arm. His hands are cracked and dry and he smells like pomegranate dish soap. It’s her first real bro-hug, but the sentiment, the solidarity, is just as authentic as any other hug she’s had the privilege of experiencing. Their clasped hands are smushed in between their chests but there’s nothing carnal about it. It’s… affectionate, and filled with gratitude. He squeezes and tucks his chin on her shoulder, just like he did in Laura’s room. But this time she squeezes back, and takes amusement in hugging a frame that’s larger than her own. They don’t linger, but there’s understanding and partnership and the desire to affect significant change… to help people, even if it’s just each other.

He claps her between the shoulder blades one final time and they separate wordlessly. She nods towards the door and he waves her off, grabs a rag and finishes wiping everything up in the kitchen. After her shower, Danny hits the mattress with sore calves and a calm mind. For the first time in two weeks, she sleeps okay.

Chapter Text

“Okay, when you said you were making wings, I thought you meant, like, hot wings. I didn’t think you meant… what are these?” Danny asks, prodding the chilled avian meat.

She has to speak up a bit, because Kirsch has about six pots and pans roiling on the burners of the industrial stove, the fan in the oven hood above whirring away to dissipate the steam rising from his culinary concoction.

“They’re duck wing tips,” Kirsch explains.

The raised skin from the recently plucked (did he actually pluck a duck?) wings is cold and a little slimy, but Kirsch insisted it was just the residue from the marinade. Danny can just make out a tiny hole in the bulk of the wing meat.

She blanches at the thought of grinding her molars on buckshot.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Nah, just got to know how to prep ‘em to get the meat tender enough. It’s not like chickens. They chill on the ground all day laying eggs. Ducks gotta fly south and all, so the wing muscles are leaner, and tougher. Can you pass me the tarragon?”

“Which is the—”

“The green one.”

Danny knocks over two apples, an onion, a bundle of carrots and a carton of chicken stock in the process, but finally delivers the verdant sprig to Kirsch. He’s got his own apron on now, black, with an odd picture of women’s underwear slapped across the front. She wants to ask about the ‘save the panties’ campaign, but thinks better of it while the bro’s wielding a boning knife with all the deftness of a Top Chef.

“That’s thyme, Danny.”

“Time? Time for what?”

“No… thyme. Like, the herb?”

Danny glances down at the spray, and then across the counter at the other, just as green, just as leafy stem of aromatic cooking herbs. She tosses it back on the table and hands over the other plant, then watches in amazement as Kirsch chops the sprig into miniscule grassy slivers.

“Wipe that smirk off your face,” Danny instructs.

Kirsch just beams back silently, but definitely looks the part of the cat that caught the canary.

“Ugh, don’t act like everybody knows what that is,” Danny says with an eye roll.

“I expected more from you,” he jeers.

“I made casseroles, okay? A family as big as mine subsisted wholly on mac-and-cheese, Hamburger Helper and, on the rare occasion, salad before the frozen chicken nuggets. I didn’t really get into veggie dinners until college…”

Danny trails off, thinking of a particularly fine Summer Soc meal she’d cobbled together. Grilled squash and zucchini, and deer backstrap stuffed into bell peppers with cottage cheese. Mouth-watering didn’t begin to describe it, and the fact that she’d taken down the white tail buck with her own hunting bow: priceless. Compared to her dinners back home, it had been a feast of greens and fresh meat, sans processed polysyllabic additives and preservatives.

“It’s a wonder none of my brothers and sisters had scurvy or some other vitamin deficiency growing up. There was just too much pizza,” she vocalizes.

“Did you say… pizza?”

“Kirsch, don’t—”

“Pizza or Death! Cibus enim Vitae!” He wails at the top of his lungs like a barbarian, waves his knife about and punches the air to emphasize the Latin syllables.

“Down boy,” Danny deadpans.

“Relax, Psych-bro. There’s nobody here.”

Danny casts a dubious glance into the bowels of the campus cafeteria kitchen, wary of the scratching noises she heard upon entering the building. The hanging herbs and pickled items in dusty glass bottles are no doubt more appropriate for an eighteenth-century apothecary’s cupboard than a modern university kitchen. The shrunken heads are certainly unnerving.

“Still not a good enough reason for you to be flinging knives overhead,” she says.

“Look, I’m just as good with these knives as you are with your stake and bow, okay? Chillax and let me do my do.”

Danny gives him a wonderfully dead eye. “Whatever. Just don’t come running to me with a series of deep lacerations. I can do many things, but sewing finger joints back on is not one of my talents.”

“Noted, Blue.”

“But what’s with all this?” Danny asks, gesturing vaguely toward the ingredients scattered across the kitchen island and the boilers simmering on the stovetop. “You trying to ply me with food for a better grade?”

“Can’t a bro just throw some wings and veggies together for his best female bro?”

“Not if he doesn’t want something out of it.”

…

…

…

“Okay, so, I need a favor—”

“Of course you do,” Danny says. She hops up on the high stool and props her elbows on the kitchen island. She crosses her ankles, Converse laces flopping into place, and leans her head back with a grin. She waits for Kirsch to grovel or beg, because a dinner (no matter how splendid and 4-star equivalent it might be) is not enough to win the favor of the Outdoor Rec VP. Danny likes to help people, but… well, if she can get something out of it (especially the indebtedness of a Zeta brother), she’s not going to pass up the chance.

“Well? What is it?” Danny asks.

Kirsch grunts, then sets to dicing the onion on the cutting board he’s magicked onto the countertop. How he knows where all of the crockery and culinary supplies are located, Danny can only guess. The caf’s usually locked up tighter than Fort Knox, and with all the skull-and-crossbones labels, she’s wondering just how the premises passed inspection with poison control, let alone the health department. But Kirsch navigates it like he’s been working in the kitchen for years, undeterred by questionable labels and circumspect ingredients.

Both their eyes begin to water from the onion fumes but Kirsch soldiers on, and Danny reluctantly admits to herself that she’s more than a little impressed. She bites her tongue and tells herself she won’t compliment him until she at least tastes the food.

She doesn’t want to give him an even bigger head.

“Do you want to pull the basement shift with me?”

“Say what now?”

“Basement watch?” Kirsch explains. “At the Zeta house? I’m up on the rotation again, but Blake’s pulling an all-nighter on his medical ethics essay. Something about the pros and cons of reanimated life. Anyway, half the guys are gone for the intramural dodgeball tournament.”

“What about Will?”

…

…

…

“He’s out of town, again. Bought that train ticket, said he had family business and he’d be back by Monday.”

…

…

…

“I still kinda trust him, he’s a bro, but…last time I was down there, it shook me up pretty bad. I did the shift by myself, just thought I was hanging out in the dark for half an hour or whatever. My phone died, even though I had full battery, but I didn’t think it was anything sketch,” Kirsch pauses and burries his head into his shoulder. His blinks after he reemerges, eyes bright and teary. It could be the onion, Danny thinks. Or… it could not be.

“I came back up, and it was the middle of the night,” Kirsch mumbles. “Like, five hours just… gone. Will was supposed to come down and take the shift with me. He said he did, but he sure as hell wasn’t down where I was. I don’t know if that’s on me, or if I’m just starting to think a little harder, with all the sparring and prep we’ve been doing to fight the Dean and her peeps. Just… crap, maybe it’s something about vampires in the dark.”

…

…

…

“No one would blame you,” Danny offers.

“For going to a Summer babe for help instead of one of my bros? It’s a serious infraction of Zeta bylaws.”

“It’s not tantamount to treachery,” Danny argues, and scooches back as Kirsch throws the wings into the searing hot oil on the pan. It pops and sizzles, and Danny curses her growling stomach for betraying her. “Besides, I’m not a Summer babe, bro. I’m just a friend, who’d rather you didn’t disappear for hours at a time, honestly.”

“Thanks,” Kirsch says, but it’s all sarcasm.

“No, Kirsch, I’m serious,” Danny says, and it rattles her that her own sincerity has been called into question. “I mean, has this happened to anybody else? To any of your other brothers when they took their shifts? It might be connected, for all we know.”

“I don’t think so. They haven’t been having the nightm—” Kirsch cuts off abruptly, and nudges the wing tips into the center of the pan with a long-handled spatula. “You know, it might just be Silas being Silas.”

“Still—”

“I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the Dean, but it doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous,” Kirsch comments, with an air of situational awareness Danny wouldn’t have assumed he possessed.

She finds this whole, ‘underestimating Kirsch’ thing more and more difficult now that she’s started a friendship with the guy. He was still a hulking, dopey-eyed puppy during the acquaintanceship stage, but now… Danny can’t have him staking out that basement alone.

“Look, after I went down and the weird ran away with me, we decided on partnering up,” Kirsch says. “No one’s supposed to go down by themselves, which is why I’m asking you. You… got my back, right?”

“Yeah, I got your back,” Danny replies with startlingly little hesitation.

“Awesomesauce. And I’m not just talking about the topping for these beauties here, either. You wanna stir it? I’ve got to keep the heat low and a spoon going or else it will congeal like that necrotizing sap from the freaky dryad grove on south campus.”

Danny hops off the stool and crosses to the burner. The steady figure-eight rotation of the wooden spoon shoots a barb of domesticity up her wrist and forearm that, again, she would have never associated with Brody.

“Can’t believe you lured me into helping you with duck confit,” Danny scoffs.

“Woah, woah there, Blue. Maybe if you like, save my soul I’ll make you confit. You’ve got to cure the meat for that and, well, long story short, I don’t whip out the French for just anybody.”

Danny’s eyebrows shoot skyward, and she decides she’s done with the underestimating. “Parlez-vous français?”

“Holiday hoobie whatty?” Kirsch croaks.

Damn. So close.

“Never mind, Kirsch. Just cook the dinner. If I’m gonna be up all night, might as well have a full stomach.”

The giggles erupt in a most un-dudely fashion. He tries to cover the noise with a snort and some fancy, single-handed maneuver of tossing vegetables into a pan with salt and spice.

“What’s so funny?”

“I was just thinking how awesome it’s gonna be when I tweet that I got Danny Lawrence to stay the night with me… in the Zeta house.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she shrieks, and nearly burns herself on the sauce pot.

“Keep stirring,” he instructs, “…and what’s stopping me?”

“I would hope your sense of self-preservation.”

“I mean, you agreed to it. I keep everybody on campus up-to-date with my movements, and my company—”

“You make it into anything inappropriate and I will destroy all you hold dear,” she threatens.

“At least I made you dinner first?” Kirsch says, but the implied question in his tone means he knows he’s in trouble.

Danny’s jaw drops. She wants to wollop him over the head with his slow cooker, but instead settles for poking him in the chest with unmitigated fury. “You know what, this is good. This will give me plenty of time to school you on the so-called practices of reciprocity for male-female interactions. Like, just because you make a girl dinner, doesn’t mean she owes you anything. And by the same token—”

“God, I’m regretting this already and we haven’t even had the appetizer.”

“Cats or dogs?”

“Dogs.”

“Rocky Road or Raspberry Ripple?”

“Dude, no contest, Rocky Road,” Kirsch replies. “Though I could kill two pints of salted caramel anything in a single sitting if we’re being real.”

“Formal duds, or sweats and sneakers?”

“What for, like, class?”

“Nah, just which do you like better? Don’t over think it.”

“Formal duds. Skinny tie and slacks, I can definitely fill out a suit.”

“Think awfully high of yourself, don’t you?”

“What, like you could do better?”

“Fill out a suit? Hell, yeah,” Danny challenges.

“I’d look like James Bond, though. All I lack is the Aston Martin.”

“Oh, that’s a good one, standard or automatic?”

“Standard. You gotta know how to work a stick if you’re ever gonna get a sports car. And I’m damn sure going to have a sports car when I make my millions—”

“Doing what? Tabulating and calculating and playing at Sard’s theorem and nonlinear dynamics?”

“Mathletes will rule the world, just you watch. And when I do, don’t ask me to take you out in my Aston Martin,” Kirsch huffs.

“I guess that answers the question for Math or English.”

“Math, all day everyday, but you obviously knew that one.”

“Yeah, but I thought maybe I’d changed your mind since we’re almost at the end of the semester,” Danny says.

“Math makes sense. Some things are in flux, but there’s not as big a window for error. There’s a right answer, you know? But in stories, anything can happen. It’s weird learning that the bad guy’s not really the bad guy, he’s just the sort-of-bad-guy. And the good guy’s not the good guy, he’s just in the middle of a bunch of shit that makes him look that good. And then, come to find out, the characters aren’t bad or good, but it’s the author that was bad all along. Why can’t there be plain old bad guys and good guys anymore?”

“Because the world would be exceedingly dull with people so sadly one-dimensional,” Danny answers.

It’s only been about an hour for the pair of them sitting against the basement wall of the Zeta property, but Danny’s already getting fidgety. There’s a reason she’s outdoor rec VP. It isn’t that she’s claustrophobic, but tight spaces and close walls are so inhibiting. She can lie for hours, reading or napping or whatever, as long as she can unfurl her limbs like spooling thread and breathe unmanufactured air. In such cramped quarters, without something more than twenty questions with bro-pilot over here to keep her mind occupied, her body seeks stimulation. She points her toes and flexes her ankles several times over. In the darkness, she can’t see the navy of her Chuck Taylors, can’t make out the hand she waves three inches in front of her face. Even with her glasses on, the basement is blacker than pitch.

“Lemme have the flashlight, I’m going to walk around,” Danny says.

“Why? You hear something?”

“No, and that’s the point. If I don’t get up and move I’ll end up falling asleep.”

“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”

“Kirsch, this place isn’t that big. It’s not like I’m going to get lost down here.”

“You don’t know that… the time thing—”

“You ever consider that you might have just fallen asleep? You were down here, in the dark, by yourself—”

“No! I was doing like you’re about to, walking around, just checking for noises and stuff. Then Will’s freaking out and I’m freaking out because I’ve lost hours of my memory. I know something happened, just not what, because of the—”

“Maybe you just fell into a time whirlpool, or something,” Danny scoffs. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Silas had one.”

“Don’t screw around, Blue.”

“Kirsch, c'mon. Gimme that flashlight.”

Kirsch doesn’t hand it over so much as Danny seizes it. She flicks it on and the beam of light hits her pale face, throwing roaming shadows on the walls and stinging her eyes from the stark luminescence.

“I’ll talk to you the whole time, okay? I’m just going to make a loop around, get some blood circulation back in my legs. My right foot fell asleep just sitting there.”

“Danny—”

“Follow the bouncing light, Kirsch,” Danny says, and waves the flashlight around so the beam hits the wall in a series of arching jumps, like a ‘follow-the-Mickey-head’ in a sing-a-long film. She places her left hand on the tiles of the wall for better navigation and starts walking. Danny cracks her neck, her glasses dislodged by the sudden jolt. She pushes them back into place and shakes her arms out. It’s like she’s been hunched over her desk grading papers with a boulder resting atop her gimpy right ankle. The blood flow returns and her eyes adjust to the dimness, flying to the fuzzy edges of the light beam.

“Kirsch, how you doing?”

“Fine.”

“See, this isn’t so bad, huh?” she asks, though she can’t be more than twenty feet away from the guy. “Maybe you were just being paranoid.”

“Blue, paranoia is a survival skill at a place like this.”

The light beam catches the corner of a couch and coffee table in the middle of the room. There’s other discolored lumps ranging in hue from onyx to sable to darkest blue, but she can’t make out their shapes let alone their functions in the subterranean room.

“Fair point. But that’s why you always bring back up, and a flash light,” Danny says. “Why don’t you guys invest in some lamps, or something?”

“We’ve changed the light bulbs three times. Campus maintenance has been by and it’s not a short in the wiring. We even called a local electrician, which, believe me, Zack threw a fit over.”

“Why? Can’t afford high quality tequila shots for the ladies when you’re paying for electrical diagnostics?”

“Exactly.”

“Pathetic,” Danny mumbles under her breath.

The temperature of the wall has grown progressively cooler, but the change was so moderate Danny didn’t even notice. Like a frog that won’t jump out of water if it’s boiled gradually, Danny didn’t register the lack of sensation until the tips of her fingers were numbed from the cold, as if she were trailing her palm over an unmeltable sheet of ice.

Until she hit the moisture.

“Kirsch, you might want to come look at this,” she says.

There’s movement behind her, but she’s fixated on the wall. The liquid streaking the dry wall is greasy and multi-colored in the beam of her flashlight, like the tye-dye rainbow of an oil spot. It doesn’t smell like oil, or any other scent that Danny’s ever encountered. She sniffs experimentally; it’s not sweet but it isn’t foul, either, and Danny wonders if it’s been leaking long enough to cause any damage to the house’s foundation. She’ll be the first to tell you she’s not the biggest fan of the Zetas, but that doesn’t mean she wants their house to collapse in on itself.

“Kirsch?” Danny asks again. She heard him moving when she called, or, at least she thought she did.

“Seriously, Kirsch, you need to come look at this stuff. You might want to call a plumber and an electrician. It’s not sticky, but it could be gross.” Danny shines the light in the direction from whence she came, but can’t seem to locate Kirsch’s crouched form. “Kirsch?” she asks again, and hates that her voice hitches on the last cluster of consonants.

“Kirsch, stopping screwing around. Where’d you go?” Danny asks, and books it back to their original stake-out spot. It’s just across the room, so it takes her all of fifteen seconds to navigate the space; but there’s no Kirsch, and the liquidy substance she’s found has evaporated from her hand. Instead of icy numbness it’s burning, her fingers swelling and throbbing a little like after she’s gone on a run in the heat of the afternoon.

“Kirsch!” Danny shouts with authority, stability returning as vexation replaces uneasiness. Of course he’d pull some stunt like this, probably on a dare from his so-called brethren, as some sort of one-up on the Summer Society.

And she fell for it.

She brings her sweltering hand to her head and bonks it once for good measure, then storms up the stairs toward the Zeta common room with all the fury of a mama Grizzly bear.

“Brody Kirsch!” she hollers, “I swear to all that is good in this world that if you’ve been—”

“Danny?”

“Claire?”

“Danny!”

“Kirsch, what the hell?”

Upon flinging open the basement door, Danny is greeted by the sight of Brody Kirsch and a trio of her Summer Soc sisters, armed to the teeth with assorted weaponry, from stakes to paint-ball guns, kitchen knives to cable ties. Brody’s adorned a camouflage poncho and combat boots, and Cynthia’s hair is braided in that style that Danny’s only ever seen her wear for the annual Adonis hunt. Claire loses years off of her face as her expression morphs from anxious to relieved. Danny hears Monique let out a pitiful gasp when she steps over the threshold.

And then there are arms, and hands, gathering her up in vice-like embraces then releasing in a flurry of well-intentioned limbs because she might be injured and don’t crowd her!

“Guys, remember what happened the last time we tried that group hug? It devolved into the sloppiest dog pile I’ve ever seen,” Danny says. “No pudding involved, sorry Kirsch.”

“Danny, you’re— are you okay?” Cynthia asks.

“Yes, why is everybody freaking—oh. Oh, crap, Kirsch—”

“I stayed for an hour but I had to have backup,” Kirsch explains. “Took me long enough to find everybody, they thought I was playing some stupid joke—”

“Well, can you blame us? We don’t have the best history with the Zetas!” Claire pseudo-shouts. “Need I remind you about the pickled herring shower you guys started—”

“Okay, let’s just calm down for a second,” Danny says, extending her hands in a conciliatory position. Her left pointer and middle fingers are tingly and warmer than the ones on her right. She wiggles them, rubs them against her thumb, and even snaps, but can’t seem to deduce why there would be some unnatural temperature difference. Her hand hasn't bothered her for years.

“Danny, what’s wrong?” Kirsch asks.

“Nothing, my hand, it’s…” she stares down, then decides minor fluctuations in her body’s equilibrium are the least pressing concerns at the moment. “… never mind. How long was I gone?”

…

…

…

Kirsch looks at his wristwatch twice, and his shoulders slump as he runs a hand over the back of his head. He doesn’t meet her eyes, nor does he look at the other girls. “… three and a half hours.”

“What?!”

“What!?!?!”

The three Summer Soc girls all start talking at once, running the vocal gamut from contralto to coloratura in varying degrees of hysteria: “You should have found us earlier!”; “Can’t believe you even got her over here!”; “Stupid that it took you so long!”

“GUYS! Shut up, you’re not helping,” Danny snaps, because Kirsch has curled in on himself like a snail in its shell, and doesn’t need the streams of vitriol to look (and likely feel) appropriately abashed.

“I’m back now, it’s fine,” Danny amends with a lower tone, because more yelling isn’t the solution. There’s something nefarious and foreboding lurking in the Zeta basement, and she has the uncanny notion that she’s supposed to be remembering something about her walk around the room down there. She had walked around the room, right? That’s how she got separated from Kirsch in the first place, wasn’t it?

It seems like ages ago, but Danny swears it's only been five minutes. She doesn’t want to heighten tonight’s drama with any half-baked theories or over reactions, so she figures damage control is her best option for the present. She runs a hand through her hair in anxious frustration, and collects herself.

“I’m here. I’m fine, as far as I know. You should thank Kirsch for even coming to get you guys in the first place. He could’ve left me for dead, or worse… tried to let those fratty-frats help him.”

“Just because he’s in on sparring practice doesn’t give him leeway to use you for his Zeta jobs—”

“Can it, Claire. Kirsch is my friend, I offered to help him,” which, technically, is only a partial truth. No offer extended prior to the bribe of braised duck, but the friend part… yeah, she didn’t mind helping him. “You guys can head on back. Lemme talk to Kirsch for a sec.”

“Danny, I don’t know if—”

“I’m fine, Monique. You three head back to the house, I’ll be along shortly. Leave me that pellet rifle, though. Can’t take too many chances this late.”

After a weaponry exchange the girls exit the Zeta common room, leaving Danny, suspicious but still controlled, with Kirsch.

If Danny’s calm Kirsch is anything but. He looks ridiculous, the hem of that hunter green camo poncho kicking up at weird angles around his kneecaps, extra material bunching over his elbows. There’s a pair of serrated steak knives on the cushion beside him, and a belted holster hanging uselessly off the couch. He’s pale as eggshell, and perhaps just as fragile. He won’t look her in the eye, preferring instead to stare off into the middle distance with steepled fingers and a haunted countenance.

“Kirsch, it wasn’t that bad.”

“I told you not to go off on your own.”

“But I’m back! There’s nothing the matter with me, well, physically, as far as I know. But I can’t help but feel like—”

“You’re missing something? Like your brain space got… stolen?”

…

…

…

“I don’t know. Maybe, sure,” Danny mutters, the vague description bizarrely appropriate.

“Does your head ache? Like, pound in the back, just here?” Kirsch asks, and raises wary fingers to the soft patch of skin at the base of his skull.

“No,” Danny says, and that answer seems to add a shade of color to Kirsch’s cheeks.

“Good… uh, good,” Kirsch replies, nodding.

…

…

…

“Why would it?”

“Mine hurt, that night after it happened. Still twinges pretty bad, off and on.”

“Prior injury?” Danny asks.

“A long time ago. I thought I was over it.”

“You think your brief disappearance in the basement has something to do with a prior injury resurfacing?” Danny asks skeptically.

“Yes, I think it does. And we’ll know for sure after tonight,” Kirsch answers soberly.

“Oh, and how will we know that?”

“Cause you’re staying with me.”

“Sorry, I’m what now?” Danny asks, ire and fatigue mingling into outright disapproval. She puts her hands on her hips and assumes her best looming pose over the boy sitting on the couch.

“Cool your jets, Blue. Just… I think you should. I want… I mean, I just don’t think…” Kirsch falls back into the couch and groans, then wipes tired hands over his face. “I want you to have someone there if you need them.”

“You make it sound like I’m going to.”

“I hope you don’t.”

“Kirsch, what the hell are you talking about?!”

“The nightmares.”

“What nightmares?”

“The worst one was the night after my first watch,” he explains. “After Will gave me hell for supposedly disappearing on him. I was so tired I didn’t even argue with him, just went up stairs and passed out. I woke up yelling and sweating two hours later. It was fucking awful, Blue.”

“You… was it like in Laura’s videos? With the crying girl, and the blood—”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“It’s personal.”

“Then what makes you think you didn’t just have a regular old nightmare, huh?” Danny argues. “That you’d been gone and mad at Will and your subconscious was just taking it out on you?”

“Because I’ve had the same nightmare every night since I lost all that time,” Kirsch explains. “The first night was the most severe, but I’ve sort of gotten… not used to them, but it’s good to know they’re coming. That’s why I didn’t want you wandering off on your own. Not because you couldn’t very well take care of yourself down there, or because anything bad might happen when you did go, but because something bad was going to happen when you came back. Just… I told you earlier, Will’s gone, so I can take the top bunk. You can have mine. I’ll whip out the sleeping bag and everything so you won’t be creeped out, okay?”

“Kirsch, I hardly think this is necessary—”

“Please, Danny. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t keep asking if I didn’t think it was important, you know? I don’t want to push, but… if you won’t stay then you need one of your girls to bunk with you tonight. I know as VP you get the single room, but screw that. Go crash with Claire or Monique. Just have someone Danny.”

…

…

…

“You’re serious about this?” Danny asks, one eyebrow still propped up by long-suffering incredulity.

“As a heart attack, Blue.”

…

…

…

“It’s late enough that walking by myself, even with the pellet rifle, probably isn’t a wise decision,” Danny acquiesces. “Change the sheets and I’ll bunk with you. I better text Claire so she doesn't freak.”

“Good,” Kirsch says, and slaps his knees as he lumbers up. He walks towards the stairs and yanks his head, directing Danny to follow.

“And if I hear any more of this, ‘I got Danny Lawrence into bed’ crap—”

“This isn’t a joke, Danny!” Kirsch insists. “I would never turn this into something like that, I don’t want you to think I’m trying to…” he makes an awkward hand motion, between the pair of them. “You’re my best friend-girl. I’ll walk you back to the Summer Soc house if you want, but I’m trying to have your back here, okay? Bro-pilot, first class.”

He says it like a promise. With conviction, concern, and sincerity.

And Danny’s too tired to fear something that hasn’t happened yet, and too over Silas as a whole to worry over this one night at the Zeta house. She’s had nightmares before, and she’s survived every one.

How bad could it be?

 “JAKE!!!!!!”

Heat.

Heat that scorches, and sears, and makes her eyes water enough that she’s crying. It’s a heat so hot that the tears evaporate and she’s crying harder to replace lost moisture, and the cycle repeats until Danny’s sure she’s been reduced to a dehydrated sack of eyeball goop and bone dust and tendon strings. Her left hand is flaming and charred, and the skin sizzles into little smoky whisps as each raindrop pounds against what’s left of her flesh. She can’t move some of her fingers, can’t feel some of her fingers, and the body in the backseat beside her is so heavy and hot that she can’t move him. Danny can’t douse the flames either, not with her jacket or the emergency blanket or those damn knee high socks she’s got stuffed in her bag from practice. Strong arms wrap around her shoulders like a boa constrictor, squeeze, and drag her from the incinerated car.

“JAKE!” Danny hollers, but her throat is thorny and prickly like the stems of a blood red rosebush. Extremes of cold and heat rack her gangly, teenage frame and this shouldn’t be happening. She’s only fifteen and her brothers are invincible heroes—annoying as those unwanted advances from Joshua Reynolds in homeroom—but they’re still her brothers.

There’s a human-looking lump thirty yards ahead that could be Scott or Charlie, the cut above the brow spouting carmine liquid like a leaky faucet head. The smoke mingles with steam in the rain and she struggles against the arms holding her, kicks out, twists, throws elbows at a beer belly and gags at the scent of moist earth and fuel and chewing tobacco. The rain doesn’t let up so she thinks the fire’s gone, it’s almost out, which is why the explosion catches her off guard.

It’s brief and contained, confined to the gas tank in the rear of the paint-peeling sedan. But the blast is enough to shoot flames out in a mini-mushroom cloud around what’s left of the crumpled car, enough to completely shatter the already splintered windshield and jettison the burning metal carcass five feet from its original position. The Mac truck in the ravine on the road side is dented in the front and Scott’s car is burning. There’s a man with burly, hairy forearms holding her back, and a skinny, boyish frame with auburn hair matted to his face moving in her direction.

Charlie.

The lump on the roadside shifts, then cries out, and Danny knows Scott’s badly injured. And the car keeps burning and roasting, like smelted iron and cooked meat, and Jacob is nowhere, nowhere, nowhere in the flames or the rain or the road.

“Jake?” Danny cries, and brings her hands to her face. Her left is red as the paint job on the approaching fire trucks, blistering bubbles of blackened flesh dotting knuckles and palm and wrist.

“Jake—” Danny sobs again, and the arms pull her closer.

“JAKE!” she screeches, but the rain continues to fall.

 “Danny, Danny shhh, it’s okay. Everything’s okay, you’re alright. C’mon, Blue.”

The trucker’s arms around her shoulders have morphed into those of an athlete. The hair’s not as dense and the biceps much less flabby, but those arms still hold her tight, hold her back, back, back from the action—from the flames and the carnage and the blindside of the highway—back from her little brother.

“Danny... Danny, look at me, please?”

There’s a hand on her lower back, to stop the thrashing, a hand on the side of her cheek, to make her face reality.

Danny blinks away the blurry edges, inhales and tastes stinging salt on her tongue tip from crying in her sleep. It’s dim. There’s a lamp on in the corner, but the sweatshirt hanging off the shade dampens what little light it provides. Her left hand tingles, especially her middle two fingers, and she briefly wonders if this new-found disturbance will affect her bow grip, if the skin grafts she had all those years ago are somehow rebelling due to… something. Like, a poison, or, no…

Danny shakes her head and the foreign hand on her face migrates to her shoulder.

Nothing makes sense. She’s missing something, something big. She’s… somewhere, no, she’s… at the Zeta house. There’s a ripped bed sheet at her waist, and she’s clad in an oversized ZOM Ultimate t-shirt Kirsch let her borrow.

Zeta House.

Kirsch.

He offered her the bottom bunk because of—

…

…

…

Nightmares.

“Danny?” Kirsch asks gently, and lets his hand fall from her shoulder. She inhales, and it’s jagged as the glass from a windshield broken nearly a decade ago. Kirsch is sitting on the edge of the mattress in his Zeta tank and sweats, waiting for some verbal confirmation that Danny has not in fact lost her shit. He has to duck a bit because the top bunk’s set a little low, and Danny feels comforted and crowded simultaneously, terrified and consoled because it’s all clicking into place now.

“Kirsch, I—I’m…” She’s got a death grip on the sheets, a good quality khaki Jersey-knit that she helped Kirsch put on the extended twin mattress. She remembers giving him a perfunctory salute, and then clambering atop the bed and shutting her lids, giving herself over to the dreamscape.

There’s a bite mark and a saliva ring on the soft cotton. Threads are jammed up underneath her fingernails, and there’s gashes in the material that look like ribbons of flesh. She shuts her eyes and shakes her head again, cringing at the thought.

“Sorry about your sheets,” she mutters.

“Don’t worry about it.”

…

…

…

“Brody, is it… is it this bad every night?” she whimpers, wiping at the watery lines on her cheekbones.

“It gets better.”

“Don’t you fucking lie to me—”

“No, really,” Kirsch reassures her by offering an awkward pat against her thigh. “Seriously, Blue, it… lessens? I guess? I mean, it’s still scary as—hell, I don’t know. It just—”

In lieu of words, Kirsch extends his hands outward, like he’s holding a giant yoga ball, and then moves them slowly in, as if he’s mashing the bellows of an accordion into place.

Some form of dreamy decompression.

“It’s not as intense. I’m hoping they’ll stop, soon enough. It’s not like I’m there anymore, you know? That first one… it felt like I was dreaming in HD, in 5D. Smells and sounds, and I could feel the pain—”

“What do you dream of?” Danny asks.

…

…

…

“You don’t have to tell me, sorry,” Danny redacts, but she needs to focus on something else… like not thinking about the fact that she gets to relive the singular worst day of her existence every night from now until who knows when.

“Darkness,” Kirsch grumbles. “Just… weakness, and black. It hurts my head, right here,” he says, and indicates the back of his skull once more.

“Darkness?” Danny asks, and bends forward to touch the soft hollow where the vertebrae ends and the foramen magnum swallows the spinal cord, connects it to that fragile and precious brain. “Kirsch, did you have an accident?”

“Temporary blindness after head trauma. I was ten.”

“How long?”

“…long enough to think it was permanent,” Kirsch replies through clenched teeth. “Just short of a month. And when the light came back, I cried. Like, a lot. Doctors and mom said it was because I wasn’t used to the brightness, but that wasn’t it, it was because I felt—”

“Relief.”

“Yeah. It’s why my eyes go kinda unfocused every now and then. Like they’re taking a break. Being lazy. My brother used to call it my ‘spaced-out’ face. Ever since, I haven’t really been a fan of the dark.”

“Yeah, I… imagine,” Danny says, and pulls her long legs up into her body. She wraps her arms around herself, her own little cocoon of comfort. “This is… it’s weird, Kirsch. The basement, taking time away from us, these… I don’t know, benign, dully lived moments of wandering in the dark... and then exacerbating old, painful memories. Your head hurts and my hand burns and it’s—it could be… shit, why can’t school just be normal for one fucking day!”

Danny pounds her fists at either side of her body, no longer grieving and scared but seriously pissed off. There’s really only so much a girl can take, and at the end of the day she shouldn’t be worrying about supernatural threats invading her mind. She does enough worrying about that on her walks across campus.

“I guess that’s what we signed up for when we got our acceptance letters.”

“It’s not what I signed up for,” Danny insists. “No one deserves this, kidnappings and girls dying and poisonous fungi spores and nightmares you can’t escape where your hand gets burned crispier than a chicken strip dinner at KFC—”

“That’s your dream?” Kirsch questions lightly. “You burn? Your hand, I mean.”

…

…

…

“No. I mean, yes, it’s part of it, but that’s… that’s not the nightmarish part.”

Kirsch nods, and to his credit, doesn’t press.

“I’m sorry you hurt your hand.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Danny dismisses him. She hates being pitied. “Got it fixed with skin grafts and physical therapy. Good as new.”

“But it’s not the same. You know what it’s like to feel hurt. Handicapped, and weak. Is that why you’re so brave, Blue? Because you don’t want other people to feel the way you did?”

“Kirsch, I’m in no mood for psychoanalysis at the present moment.”

“Okay, yeah, you’re right,” Kirsch agrees, and rises from his side of the mattress. He puts both hands against the top bunk and scans her, all curled in on herself, a half-shell, like she’s somehow trying to make herself smaller. He gives her a half-smile, then turns to flick the lamp switch off. He heaves himself up onto the top bunk with a low grunt, his spindly toes wiggling over the edge.

Danny uncurls herself, and lies on her back with her hands crossed over her chest, staring up at the interlaced metal frame that holds the top bunk in place. There’s a jerky wrapper stuck in the metal, and two pictures shoved into place directly overhead. It’s dark, but Danny can see the line-up of boys behind a gold trophy that’s as big as they are, the words 2003-04 Little League Regional Champs typed in bold across the bottom. Then another, smaller picture, that Danny reaches for to get a better look at. It’s Kirsch, in his high school graduation gear. Danny recognizes the Mu Alpha Theta cord hung over his neck that denotes inclusion in the honors math club. And another guy who looks enough like him to definitely be his older brother, shaking his hand and grinning into the camera, clad in a ZOM sweatshirt.

Danny’s smile waters, and she thinks of her family: Scott and his guilt, Charlie and his goofiness, then the girls, Jules and Catherine, in the middle of their high school angst years. And Jacob, who never got the chance to figure out what he wanted to be—

“He’s my brother,” she says suddenly, as if she can’t hold it in anymore.

“Jake?”

“Yeah, my little brother. Was… he was my little brother.”

…

…

…

“Danny?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I… thanks, Kirsch.”

…

…

…

“It was a car crash. I was fifteen.”

…

…

…

“Were you driving?”

“No, my older brother, Scott, was pulling out onto the highway that leads off the road from our school. It was me and Scott, and my other little brother, Charlie, and Jake. Charlie got the front seat, ‘cause even though he was younger than me, he was taller, and so I got the back with Jake.”

“Danny, you don’t have to—”

“I know, I just… I think I need to talk about it. Talk about it like it happened eight years ago, instead of ten minutes ago.”

“Okay…”

“We were all into sports, and Scott and I were pissed, because it was raining, and cold, and Jake was late getting out of hockey practice," she strokes the edges of her fingers absentmindedly, recalling the details. "The girls were already at home. They were still in primary school at the time, and Scott was so excited to drive us, even with all our crap, sticks and skates and gyms bags. It was just a perfect storm of circumstance, the lights on the Mac truck were flickering in and out, the light turned green, but the truck hydroplaned… t-boned the left side, and the autop—the au—the autopsy said he died on impact. But the gas tank was on the left side, so the car was burning, all of our stuff, the bags, and the practice jerseys—”

“God, Danny.”

“I was trying to pull him out. I thought he was still—that he was going to be fine, if I could just get us away from the flames. But my jacket sleeve caught fire. I didn’t care, because Jake was just sitting there, he wasn’t even trying to get out.”

…

…

…

“I guess that should have tipped me off,” Danny whispers into the dark. “Big families… we’re supposed to protect each other.”

“Danny—”

“I know, Kirsch. I… I know.”

“It won’t be so bad tomorrow night. We’ll figure something out.”

“I don’t know. These intangible threats are the worst ones. There’s no way to know how to fight back.”

“You’ll figure something out. You’re pretty smart.”

“You’re not so bad yourself.”

She hears him flop over above her, then flinches when she sees a meaty hand fall into the airspace above her bunk. He waves it about and she grins, probably because she’s delusional from mysterious time lapses and sleep deprivation, but she reaches up to grab it anyway. He clasps it, holds the weight of her arm up, and she squeezes her thank you into his sure grip. She knows this isn’t a good position, that her arm will fall asleep, that he could very well roll off the bunk and break her wrist.

But she doesn’t want to let go, not just yet, because Brody’s holding her left hand and it doesn’t burn, or tingle very much at all. Danny laces their fingers together and it’s there, an acknowledged accord of care and companionable devotion. And she’s so glad, so truly grateful, that she gets to protect her family; and that she has family to protect her when the time comes.

“Brody?”

“Yeah, Danny?”

"You were right."

"I was?"

"Yeah, I... I needed someone."

...

...

...

"Happy to help."

“Thank you. Really, just... thank you so much.”

She squeezes a little harder.

…

…

…

“Don’t sweat it, Blue.”

Chapter Text

Every time she jabs the punching bag, clouds of chalk puff from her wrapped hands. Danny’s been going at high intensity for over thirty minutes, classic rock at full volume on her earbuds, and a single, dangling light bulb flickering in the basement of the Summer Society house. It smells worse than a high school boy’s locker room, with pallets and mats and two 100-pound black EVERLAST bags dangling from linked chains drilled into the basement ceiling studs. There’s a sack of weapons sitting unused in the corner. The nunchucks, katana, brass knuckles, and whittled wooden stakes were all attractive options, but Danny knew that a more… hands-on approach would be necessary to work out her resentment.

“—can I have an extension on my term paper?”

“How ‘bout no?” she murmurs through clenched teeth, and pivots on the ball of her left foot to bring the flat of her flexed right against the bag in a powerful roundhouse kick.

“—did you think I asked you over here so you and I could…?”

“Yeah, that’s the impression you get when Perry says you want to see me in your dorm room, Hollis, instead of like, during office hours.”

She unleashes a flurry of jabs and violent crosses, hitting with such bruising force that the wrapped strips of material about her hands do little in the way of protection: her knuckles are cracked and bleeding after the brutal punch combo, blood and powdered chalk staining the front of the twisting bag.

“Aaah!” she hisses, but feeds her own personal masochism by hitting harder, clenching tighter; essentially ruining the backs of her hands until they’re a bloody mess of pale and crimson flesh. The streaks look like candy cane peppermints, which reminds her that Christmas is just around the corner. Guess she better cancel that order for the autographed Christiane Amanpour book she’d bid on for Laura.

“Dammit…”

“… I’m not the one being unfair and vindictive…”

“No, but you are being reckless and foolhardy,” Danny wheezes as she punches. “Underestimating your opponent is the first step to defeat, Laura. Even the Zetas are aiming for discretion, and I know you’re smarter than them.”

Danny hates this, hates grunting at an inanimate bag that she’s trouncing into quiet submission; because no matter what she tries to say to Laura, it never comes out how she wants it to. She wonders how it came to this. To her, alone, balancing recurring nightmares, paper grading and lesson plans, Summer Soc winter sports (not to mention Operation Honey Badger with the Zetas), a full load of grad school classes, and investigations into lost memories.

Laura’s not the only one with extracurricular supernatural woes. Danny thinks, somewhat jaded and bitterly, that she had more sleep during Summer Soc initiation her freshman year, back when impromptu midnight runs were more the norm than exception, back when the standards were higher and pledges had to keep at least a B average to even be admitted in the first place.

But Hollis, fixated, inexperienced, blinders-on-to-the-fucking-world Laura Hollis, doesn’t realize TAs can’t grant extensions without sound reason. That Danny took a chance because she was in lo—infatuated—in deep shit, seeing Laura as much as she did outside of class. She was wrong, because she persisted with the relationship, but she certainly never thought Laura would use their connection to a situational advantage, asking Danny to let her slide on an academic issue that could get Danny fired, or worse, expelled, if anyone found out.

Supernatural interferences don’t warrant extensions, it says so right in the handbook! It might as well be the Silas motto.

If Laura was asking Danny to lie for her to the professor, then maybe Danny was wrong about her from the start. Ballsy, Danny had called her. Maybe Danny never realized how much.

The slam at the landing of the basement steps startles her out of her mental spiral. It’s four a.m. (she couldn’t sleep much after hours of reading, even longer hours of brain-churning fury over Laura. And when she finally drifted off she was greeted by polar opposite sensations of frigid cold and searing heat, a throbbing left hand, screams and crunching metal with one more sibling than she’s used to having), so she hardly expected company. Plus, the Summer Soc house board recently invested in some soundproofing for the basement that at least dulled the clamorous roar of aerobics and calisthenics, so Danny knows she hasn’t woken anyone up.

Danny ducks off into the corner where the weapons bag rests and gropes for the katana hilt. The form descending the staircase is big and bulky, but Danny’s only got so much light and space to work with in the basement. The person (or thing?) apparently hasn’t noticed her presence, which puts her at an attack advantage. She silently unsheathes the sword and raises it over her shoulder, careful not to stick the blade into the ring of light shining near the center of the room. The person (again, or thing?) drops a gym bag onto the floor with a disgruntled noise of frustration, then proceeds to strip off a hoodie and long-sleeve tee until he’s down to a grey muscle tank.

So… definitely a person.

Before she can get a good look at his face, he throws an enraged punch against the boxing bag on the far side of the basement. The bag shudders under the force of the blow as the figure kicks off his shoes and socks. He starts hopping, barefoot, back and forth, and throws a couple of quick strikes into the air to loosen up the muscles in his arms. He pulls his right arm across his left side and twists his chin, stretching out triceps and biceps enough for Danny to know he’s a fighter, or an athlete, semi-trained with a familiar style. He does a series of high knee hops and quad stretches before getting down to the business of the bag again.

He stops and exhales heavily, then twists his head around in search of something. He crosses directly to the Summer Soc supply closet under the stairs and Danny lowers her weapon onto her shoulder.

“You know, just because I extend an invite once doesn’t give you the right to come around at your leisure, Kirsch. I don’t think I approve of you just waltzing into a house full of sleeping girls.”

He stops and catches her eye, but doesn’t rise to the taunt. He yanks open the supply closet door and comes out with a pair of large boxing gloves tucked under his armpit, then crosses to his gym bag.

“Gym’s closed this late,” he says, by way of explanation. “And Claire gets awful chatty about the hide-a-key when she's drunk. I won’t come back if it bothers you, but I need to hit something.”

“Fine by me,” Danny replies, abandoning her own assault of the other boxing bag.

The katana in her hand has given her a new idea. She trades in the metal blade for one of the wooden swords in the closet, and proceeds to clobber the makeshift standing pell the Operation Honey Badger Team assembled during their second practice. Even if their efforts against the Dean come to naught, at least Danny has fostered some sense of camaraderie between a handful of Summer Socs and Zetas. She revels in the small accomplishment as she strikes the lower third of the target.

The pair of enraged collegians spends another fifteen minutes in their individual physical endeavors until Danny begins to tire. She wipes sweat from her forehead and heads to her gym bag to rummage about for her squirt bottle. Crossing to the fan, she drinks, and admires the progress Kirsch has made since his first few bouts against her members. He’s keeping his core defended better, and his punches are more concentrated, compacted, such that his fists burst with power and speed every time he strikes the bag. He’d gotten by on strength and size for so long, no one had ever thought to use his speed. Danny can still top him when they grapple, and he’s tapped out every single time she’s gotten him into a decent arm-bar hold. But they fight well together and, as the quasi-leaders of this little rebellious unit, they’d been partnered as an attack team as soon as the rest of the members had seen them spar against each other.

She waves a signaling hand at him and he pauses in his thrusts. Perspiration is pouring down his head and half moons of moist discoloration have collected under his sleeveless arms. An uneven line of sweat runs down the center of his chest, too, and Danny thanks Artemis above for not being born with that many sweat glands. The odor alone is enough to scare off a herd of hogs.

Danny tosses her water bottle to him and he catches it, yanks out his earbuds and squeezes the bottle until water gushes into his mouth. He throws the water back to her as she slides onto the bench where his gym bag rests. He sits, then pulls out a sweat towel from a Nike bag that smells even worse than he does. Seriously, some rodent probably died in there and he just hasn’t noticed yet.

He throws the towel over his head and slumps against the wall beside Danny, elbows on his knees and gaze fixed on the floor.

“Rough night?” she ventures.

…

…

…

“My roommate’s an ass-hat.”

…

…

…

“What about you?” he asks.

“My ex is an ass-hat,” she explains. "Well, no... but, she's... something. Definitely not a positive something."

He nods, running restless fingers over the padded black of the boxing gloves. Danny doesn’t engage, doing her best to focus on nothing at all while her breathing returns to a normal rate.

She appreciates the stillness, how she and Kirsch have settled upon this mutual, silent agreement: that just because they’re hanging out more, it doesn’t mean they’re continuously jabbering at each other. They bicker, of course they do. But between the frenzy of living in a houseful of tenacious Summer Soc sisters, and what Danny imagines is an atmosphere of raucousness and perpetual bellowing at the Zeta crib, she thinks their tentative friendship has had some of its better moments in the silent times. When they’re hammering plastic bottles into the walls of sheds with baseball bats, or washing dishes mutely side-by-side. When they’re eating companionably without the need for commentary on the sauce, or when they’re at their own individual workouts, but still somehow… working it out together.

Danny casts a sympathetic glance over her friend and nudges him gently at the shoulder.

“Here,” she says, passing the water bottle over again. She knows she really appreciates the wordless developments, but Kirsch has been surprisingly forthcoming whenever more emotional topics have been broached. Perhaps he doesn’t get to vent as much as he needs; and, well, if he could be quiet for her, she could start talking for him.

“You… want to talk about it?” Danny asks softly. “What’s going on with Will?”

“It’s stupid…” Kirsch starts, unscrewing and rescrewing the cap to Danny’s plastic bottle.

“It’s four a.m. and you’re pissed enough to break into the Summer Soc house. You’re risking the wrath of dozens of battle-hardened warriors, so it must be more than stupid.”

Kirsch grins crookedly at that, and turns to face Danny. “You wouldn’t let them pound on me too hard, would you?”

“Hard enough so you learned your lesson,” Danny says. “But I guess I’d calm ‘em down before they crippled you.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“Anytime.”

…

…

…

“I don’t think I can trust Will anymore,” Kirsch says.

“Really? You… you seemed quite intent on defending him.”

“Yeah, I am! Was, I… it’s just… you take a vow, you know?” Kirsch begins solemnly. “Like, you think these guys are always, always gonna have your back. At the core of it, it’s not about parties and hotties and booze—even though that stuff’s great. It’s about being there for your bros, and it sucks that some guys don’t take that seriously.”

“You can hardly expect a supernatural being to live by a university club code if he can’t even live by a moral one.”

“Yeah, I… I think I get that now,” Kirsch mutters. “It’s still… it’s hard, though. Like, what if one of your sisters, or, your best friend turned out to be doing something seriously wrong? Hurting people, and you’ve spent half the semester playing Call of Duty with them, drinking beer and watching Game of Thrones. He’s my roommate! Like, what the hell?”

“Did he take someone else?”

“No,” Kirsch mumbles. “But he’s been gone a lot, lately. Last couple’a weekends, says he’s got a lot going on with his family. His mom’s working on some big project, and thanks to you, I know exactly what that is. It’s like, he’s lying straight to my face, and Zetas don’t lie to each other,” Kirsch continues with conviction. “Not real Zetas. Not real bros. He’s been hanging around me all week, like, he’s trying to get back in my good graces. But every time I look at him I think about S.J. and I wonder—” he breaks off, and Danny can see the whites of his knuckles, clenched tightly around the water bottle. He’s squeezing so tight the cap’s like to burst off, spewing what little liquid remains over his bare feet. Danny reaches over and places one of her broken hands on his, encouraging him to loosen up.

“—I think he had something to do with it,” Kirsch finishes. “And I can’t let him off the hook for that. It’s not legal. It’s not right.”

“Kirsch, what… what do you think you’re going to do?”

“I’m calling a Zeta tribunal. They don’t usually take outside testimony, but would you care if I called you as a witness?”

“Seriously? I have to come speak against Will?”

“There’s a procedure.”

“With pig’s blood, from the little I’ve gathered so far,” Danny scoffs. “Is there also some sort of tabernacle? Ritualistic dance and garment rending? Manacles and a stake and the ceremonial expectorating-on-the-accused?”

“Dude, no. We’re not the occult, okay? But there’s fifty of us, and only one of him. And if he is responsible for what happened to S.J…”

Danny takes the water bottle from him before he can dismantle it.

“Kirsch, I… I’m with you on this, you know that right?”

Kirsch nods, brows furrowing, as if he senses the forthcoming objection.

“But I think… we’ve been training so long, and we’re so close. It’s… I don’t want us to give our hand away to the Dean by taking out Will too early, you know? We’ve kinda been over this.”

“I know, I get that, but I hate this waiting,” Kirsch slaps his hands on his knees, then gets up to pace. “It’s why I came over here in the first place. I go to bed, and I dream of dark, and pain, and weakness, and when I wake up, sometimes I don’t feel like it’s any different—”

“You said the dreams would go away,” Danny protests, fright tinting her voice.

“No, they’re like, not gone. They’re not as intense, but I still feel that weird not-right feeling, like when you’re watching some slasher flick alone at night and you hear a noise? And then the hair stands up on the back of your neck?” Kirsch is trying to explain, pacing back and forth in frustrated strides. “And you know it’s nothing, but it’s still scary. And you can’t shake it, and it just feels wrong, feels bad right here,” he stops, and pounds against his chest with a fist.

“When you know there’s something wrong, and you’re powerless to stop it,” Danny says.

“And maybe in the back of my mind, I always thought Will would come around. I think I believed more in the cause than in the brothers themselves, you know? God, I’m such an idiot.”

“Kirsch, no,” Danny stands, and turns him around to face her. She slips into her lecture stance, fists on her hips and reassurance on her tongue. It’s second-nature, years worth of coddling, coaching, and scolding various siblings, students, and sisters. The need to provide comfort overtakes whatever she’d been feeling previously.

“It’s not bad to believe in something bigger than yourself,” she reasons. “In… camaraderie, in bravery, okay? It’s just hard when… when you’re such a good person, you want to see the best in everybody. And now that you’re faced with someone significantly lacking in character, it’s… it hurts you. Like you feel like you failed him. Or that Zeta Omega Mu failed him, though that bastardized system of so-called ‘fraternity’ is a whole other can of worms.”

Danny scratches the underside of her ear, then waits a moment for her words to sink in.

“Will doesn’t live by our rules, okay? He’s got a whole history we’ll never know. I don’t see anything excusing his actions, especially in relation to the missing girls, but the point of this is, Kirsch, Brody—” Danny places a hand on his shoulder and holds him at arm’s length, forcing him to look at her. “What goes on with Will isn’t your fault. You were his friend. If anything, you were a good influence, okay? You didn’t fail him. He failed you. You and the Zetas could have been his chance for redemption or whatever, but he didn’t even try. He just went along and took those girls, and there’s no one to blame but him for that. So when the time comes down to it, don’t beat yourself up for doing what you have to do. You’re too good a guy for that.”

“You think so?”

“Well, some of the time, at least. I’ve got a list of things we need to work on.”

“Awe, PsychoSociety cares!”

“Pssshha, the ‘con’ column seriously outweighs the ‘pro’ bit in your case, so I wouldn’t puff up too big.”

“Alright Blue, alright. I—thanks, you know?” he says, and his lop-sided grin returns.

Dopier than most but overflowing with compassionate authenticity, Danny sees now how Brody Kirsch has accomplished the impossible: retained his teeth-grinding, blood-boiling hardline on the fraternal system, but made enough strides at human decency in the process that Danny couldn’t help but want to make him better. His heart was already purer than hers, so half the battle was already won. He wasn’t an idiot (though he himself would protest that assertion), so Danny knows she can help him; challenge him; be there for him.

Do the kinds of things friends do for each other.

“So, Blue?”

“Yeah?” Danny starts from her short mental vacation.

“You… you okay, too? I mean, you said you and Laura—”

“Oh, yeah.”

Her temper has waned, but the hot-headedness that still comprises Danny Lawrence never really fades. The animal hibernating in the pit of her stomach stretches itself out of its hibernation and itches for activity; she wonders if she can have another go at the boxing bag before fatigue finally overtakes her.

“You’re done for real?” Kirsch asks again.

“I—”

Yes. They’re done for real. She doesn't really have a chance, not when she’s second best. And Danny hates it. Hates getting the silver behind Carmilla of all people. Hates this feeling of unworthiness, of not-good-enough. If you’re not here to win, then why the hell did you enter in the first place?

“Yeah, I think we are,” Danny confesses.

“Are you sad about it?”

Sad? Oh, hell no. Irate, infuriated, frustrated, and hella hot under the collar? Definitely. But she’s not sad, not disappointed, doesn’t feel like she lost something really special this time—

“Yes, I’m… I’m kinda sad, Kirsch.”

“You wanna go get the baseball bats? Get drunk in the woods again?”

“Nah. I’ve got to get an early start. Brit Lit seminars turn in their final papers today. I’ll be grading all weekend, so meditating over my break-up is probably the worst thing for me right now.”

“Oh yeah! You’ll get to read all about my dope Lion King paper.”

“Please tell me you didn’t.”

“You’re gonna have to wait and see.”

“Yeah, wait and C-minus if you actually wrote about that.”

“Give it a chance, Blue. It might just blow your mind.”

“Doubtful.”

Kirsch goes back to the bench and proceeds to redress, zips his gym bag into place and slings it over his shoulder.

“Papers aside, I’ll hold off on talking to Will. I don’t know how much longer I can, though. We’re supposed to go by Laura’s today, talk about the whole ‘missing girls’ deal I supposedly know zilch about,” Kirsch says, then screws up his face. “He keeps saying he’ll take me to meet his mom, but I’ve been trying to get out of that at every possible turn.”

“You’re going to visit Laura later?”

“Yeah, this afternoon or something. You… want me to tell her anything?”

“No… I just… no.”

“It’ll be alright, Psychbro. She’ll come around.”

“Sure,” Danny says, returning to her study of the floor.

“Hey, come on, we can—hey! I know what’ll cheer you up!”

“Oh god, what now?”

“You should totally come to formal with me!” Kirsch brightens.

“Wait… what now?”

“You and I should go to formal together!” He’s clutching his cross-strap gym bag with barely constrained glee, like a balloon animal about to burst because a child's clutching it so tightly. “Like, we’ll get dressed all swanky, and basically be the two biggest lady-killers at the show.”

“Slow down, Don Juan. Throwing around terms like ‘lady-killer’ seems a little insensitive in light of recent events, don’t you think?”

“I’m just saying…” Kirsch continues, undeterred by the reprimand. “Between the two of us, there’s not a hottie that stands a chance. I am the best at a party and you’ve got… well, I mean I guess you’ve got something going on if Laura was into you,” he waves a hand in her general direction.

“Wow, thanks.”

“Just think about it,” Kirsch says. “When all this supernatural bull-shit is over, sometimes the only thing left to do is drink all night and dance until your feet hurt.”

Danny listens to Kirsch hike up the steps of the basement, wondering just what harm a dance could do. It’d be nice not to be bogged down by school and spooks and the girl that broke a little bit of her heart. Nice to be free of pressure, only if for a night. And Kirsch does throw a good party, but she’d never tell him that. She might even meet someone new, not that she’s looking for anything so soon, but… well, you never know.

She thinks there are worse things at this university than accompanying Brody Kirsch to formal.

“Hey, Zeta zombie!”

“Yeah, Psycho?”

“Meet up at eight-thirty?”

“There’s hardly anytime for pre-game—”

“Kirsch.”

“Eight-thirty. Yes ‘mam!”

“Catch you later. Good luck with Will.”

“See you, Blue. L² doesn’t know what she’s missing.”