Log: Nick Furcillo and Abi Blyg WHO: Abi Blyg and Nick Furcillo WHAT: Abi takes the advice of her friends and is direct! It goes badly, then better. WHEN:BACKDATED to the late afternoon of 16 August WHERE: A park in Vallo City WARNINGS: References to almost-assault, PTSD, verbal abuse while under the influence of monster, the need for therapy, and some pretty severe violence
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Be direct.
Abi knew it was good advice. It was more or less the advice she’d gotten from everyone, even if it had been delivered in highly questionable phrasing in some cases. (She was never asking Katou for relationship advice again, not unless it was along the lines of “does this make my ass look good?”)
It was just hard advice for someone like her to follow. Abi had always been the quiet type, going with the flow, hesitant to put herself forward anywhere but in her art. Making a deliberate forward advance was a real challenge. The thing was, Nick was so much the same way, and Abi was pretty sure that he felt even more guilty about their last night in their own world than she did. There was no way he was going to make a move unless she made it extremely, unequivocally clear that she’d be receptive to it.
So here she was, out on a walk with him, doing yet another activity that would never move out of the realm of maybe a date unless she gave it a little push. Push, therefore, she would.
“Can I be weird for a minute?” she asked, which she knew might not be the best opening salvo, but it was an attempt.
Nick Furcillo was by his own admittance bad at “feelings talks”. A chatty boy by nature, his higher functioning tended to shut down as soon as vulnerability was on the table, and he did a lot of “well…” and “you know…” and “...yeah”-ing rather than actually use his words. He was aware of it as a flaw, of course. He’d spent the entire summer pining over Abi, only to have the whole thing fumbled because of a werewolf attack. It seemed obvious to him that his chance at romance with Abi was dead on arrival. He’d been incredibly cruel to her after being bitten, and then got awfully close to killing her. Not the stuff of cinema or song. Nick knew he’d have to find peace in being her friend, and honestly, Abi was great enough he thought that with practice, he might may be almost capable of standing it.
And so it was with no real thought as to Abi’s motive that he glanced over his shoulder at her, face curious. “Yeah,” he said with a blink, then: “‘course. What’s up?”
“Before we, um…before we were interrupted. Back home–well, at camp, I mean. We were, um…”
God, she was even worse at this than she thought. Abi had practiced her opening several times, and this was definitely not the one she’d written down. She sighed and looked up at the few white fluffy clouds overhead, searching for some little bit of zen that would help her get this out.
“Ugh, let me try that again,” she sighed. One more deep breath, and then Abi made a go at the full, sensible sentences she’d put down in her notebook. “Hey Nick. I understand if things got way too messed up and you don’t feel the same way about me anymore, but on the chance that your liking me survived a shotgun blast, I wanted to say that I do still like you. So if you wanted to go on a date that doesn’t get wrecked by a monster sometime…that would be cool.”
A few moments after he realized what exactly was going on - what exactly she was asking him - Nick’s higher functioning had melted down like his brain was Chernobyl. Or possibly the dinosaurs - the whole of the dinosaurs - with the meteor bearing down upon them. Either way: mass destruction of pretty much anything inside his head except the phrase: I do still like you.
It rattled around for a bit while he processed. Nick still liked Abi - of course he still liked Abi - but he was also terrified. The last time they’d admitted to anything romantic toward one another, he’d been attacked by a monster, nearly bled to death, turned cruel and focused and predatory, and then almost killed her and his friends. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that despite the last few months of relative calm, and despite troubleshooting his monthly transformation, that he was afraid of somehow doing it again: of mocking her, of preying on her fears. Of killing her.
His brain had definitely not caught up with his mouth when he produced in a breathless sort of blather: “What? No.” She couldn’t be serious. Right? Abi wouldn’t screw with him; she wasn’t the type. He saw the expression start to break over her face and he quickly corrected himself: “Yes. I mean, yes, I still like you -- like, a lot, but--” Oh no, her face, Nick panicked: “are you crazy?”
Abi’s face still hadn’t quite recovered, even though he’d finally gotten around to saying that he still liked her. The phrase had come, after all, in the middle of ‘no’ and ‘are you crazy?’ despite her attempt to do nothing more complicated than ask him on a date. A date, that was all! Not ‘let’s live happily ever after,’ not even ‘be my boyfriend,’ just ‘would you like to go on a date.’ And he reacted like that.
“Wow.” She blinked a few times, and told herself she was not going to cry. She hadn’t cried when he was outright mean to her, and she hadn’t cried when she was covered in his blood. She was not going to cry just because his liking her, whatever that meant to him, did not include wanting to date her.
Abi quickly pulled up old advice from her mother: use a logical task to shift the brain off the emotions making your throat close up. List things that can go in a salad. Lettuce. Arugula. Cherry tomatoes. Feta. Olives. Cucumber slices. Croutons.
There. She had this. She still sounded hurt, but she could talk.
“Okay. Well. That was, um…very direct. Thanks. I, ah…I think maybe I’d like to finish this walk by myself now, if you don’t mind.”
“No, wait, I mean--” He reached out to take her elbow but stopped his fingers just short of her arm, instead raking a hand through his dark curls, mouth opening and closing. Immediately his instincts warred between ‘fix it’ and ‘back off’ - Nick remembered pressuring Abi, vaguely, in that awful pool house. He wasn’t sure of what he’d said, too bleary, too feverish, too unlike himself, but he knew he’d been entitled. Had tried to slice at her freedom, her dignity. He finally shoved his hands in his pockets now, trying to make himself smaller, not threatening, eyes sliding to his scuffed athletic shoes.
“I mean, I-- you can take a walk. Without me, I mean, I totally don’t mind, and you’re okay to do that, but-- if you-- could make… wait for one sec? I didn’t mean to-- sound like such a c-- that.” He winced. God, that was one word that he’d learned the hard way wasn’t common in American slang vernacular. He looked back up at her, mouth twisting to the side as he waited for her decision before continuing.
Abi had been all set to bolt. The plan was to take off, walk around one of Vallo City’s lovely greenspaces that had nice grass but didn’t remind her too much of the dark mountain forest where they all nearly died, eventually touch enough grass that she felt better, then sneak in the house to put on her bat kigurumi and draw silly Halloween-themed crap. Eventually she would get her feet back under her, and then she’d go right back to treating Nick like the dear friend he was and get to the work of getting over her crush. Vallo was full of pretty people, after all, and some of them were even her age, and some of them were really cool, and she did not need this particular boy to like her. She could totally move on, like a boss bitch in a Cardi B song, and she would be fine.
But if this particular boy did like her and was just somehow even worse at saying so than she was herself, well…maybe she’d give him one more shot to say it.
Abi stopped and turned around to face him, arms crossed protectively around herself. “Maybe take a couple breaths?” she suggested, only a little frost on the edge of her tone. “Think the thoughts, then say the thoughts? It might go better.”
“Yeah,” Nick agreed vaguely, and then in a more determined tone: “Yeah.” He could do this. He’d faced down a kitchen insurrection when a bunch of middle-year campers decided to ignore his authority and raid the junk drawer. He could fumble together a sentence or three about how he felt about Abi. He could. Nick lifted a finger to indicate patience as he tried to sort out what to say. So, okay, she definitely had had a script - Abi was no Emma; she couldn’t make a line sound really natural - and that meant that this meant a lot to her. He needed to match that kind of vulnerability, right? That’s how this went?
She wanted to go on a date. Date him. After all--- that.
Okay. He took a breath, hesitated, and then said: “So I really like you, and I’m terrified to fuck this up.” Which, he assumed, might be obvious, but the extent of which probably wasn’t, right? “I have nightmares about that night,” he said, eyes sliding toward hers and then back to his shoes. “Which like… I know you know, you’re in the same house. And I know you have them as well, but like…” he exhaled, tried to find the proper verbal phrasing to use that sounded eloquent and warm and not like he was trying to let her down gently or… whatever. “I… kind of remember… feeling all that. What I said to you. What I wanted to do. And I know that-- I know it wasn’t me, I know it’s not true, but---” He realized he was looking at her again, really looking at her, face scrunched up in something resembling hope and anxiety. “I just, I-- what if it happens again, Abi? I couldn’t. I couldn’t live with that. I-- You mean too much to me.” He snorted, exhaled, retreated a bit in snark: “I mean, I’d feel bad about it with anyone, but especially you.”
This, Abi thought, was simultaneously better and worse than she’d expected. On one hand, it wasn’t ‘everything got way too messed up and I want nothing to do with you romantically.’ On the other, though, these weren’t silly little concerns that she could just brush aside with a ‘don’t be silly.’
“Give me a sec to get my words together?” Abi requested. That was a deal she’d worked out with a high-anxiety friend in school, and she thought Nick might need it now: let them know you’re not mad, you just need a few breaths before you have a sentence that makes sense.
Nick had a fair point, she knew. They were both suffering from some pretty serious PTSD, and unlike some of their friends, their version of that PTSD was pretty wrapped up in each other. It wasn’t just the horrifying violence, for them. It was Abi’s ever-lingering fear that the worst things Nick could say to hurt her were true, and the guilt that sat so heavily on Nick’s shoulders for having said those things to begin with. Abi had been worried about having shot him, but that was really just the part of a vast worry iceberg she’d been ignoring a lot of.
Right, so there was a place to start.
“I don’t think it would happen again,” Abi said. “I think you know now that you get really sensitive before the shift, and I know that too, so we just talk by text day-of so you have time to think. And—“
She was about to be a lot more blunt than she usually was, but she’d come here to be direct and she couldn’t quit now just because it was harder than expected.
“And I know the werewolf brain isn’t sure if it wants to fuck me or eat me, but that’s seemed like it doesn’t hit as bad as it did the first time, when none of us knew what was happening. So…” She shrugged, but then her expression took a turn for the worried. “It’s not all about what I think, though. That all messed you up as much as it did me, and if the idea of kissing me is going to be really triggering and awful for you, then I’m not selfish enough to put you through that.”
Nick bit his lip and did his best not to interrupt her while she worked out what she wanted to say. It was some instinct - maybe from home, maybe just his personality - that made him want to cut in, reassure, equivocate - but no, he let her have her piece, and did his best to listen and consider things. It was when she had said her last - triggering and awful - that he took a sharp breath and shook his head, picking up from where she’d left off.
“I don’t know if it’ll be like that,” he said quickly, earnestly. “I don’t. I just--” How to say that the memory - the lack of memory - was a void that demanded his attention? He was terrified of tripping and falling right back into that void. Lack of care might ensure that what had happened at Hackett’s Quarry was the beginning, not the entirety of the trauma.
But when he thought of Abi, he thought of sunlight. Sunset, specifically, playing over her hair as she sketched. He didn’t think of shadows or emptiness at all.
“Maybe we could… take things slow.” He exhaled, offered her a half-smile. “Really slow. Just-- keep going as we are, but with like… an eye to things getting somewhere… closer? I--” He pulled out a card from his jacket; it was worn and creased, because it’d been in his pocket for a while. “I’ll actually - talk to the school’s mental health people. Do that work. And maybe… just take this day by day.”
“That sounds like a really good idea,” Abi softly replied. She gave him a smile just as soft, a little one full of gentle hope despite everything they’d been through. “And, um…honestly, I’d like ‘slow’ best anyway. I had a grand total of one high school boyfriend two years ago, and we never went any further than some making out on the sofa. So if you had wanted to go jumping into things full-speed and head-first I probably would’ve just panicked.”
“Ah yeah,” he snorted, scratching the back of his head with his hand. “Not--- yeah, let’s not go full-speed. I don’t… I don’t really think that’s us, anyhow, with how much we dithered about this summer.” Because for fuck’s sakes, he’d known he’d liked her two weeks in. And had kept waiting, hoping that it’d be obvious what he needed to do next. Nick wasn’t stupid - he knew he was good looking - and he knew how to sweet talk her, how to flirt, how to be available. Jacob had wondered why he hadn’t done any of those things.
Because it was all fake. All that.. pretending, covering up. Being someone else was easy. Being himself? Awfully hard.
After a beat, he took a breath, and held out his hand to her.
And without any hesitation, Abi took it in hers.
“This is the kind of Going For A Walk I was hoping for,” she said, giving his hand a gentle squeeze to go with the smile she aimed up at him. Way up—if she was planning to kiss this boy at some point in the future, she was going to need to put a stepstool on the porch. Maybe also some other rooms. Prompto and Noctis would support her in strategic placement of steps around the house, she was sure.
“We got there in the end,” Nick agreed with a huff of a laugh, and gestured toward the sun dipping below the skyline with one shoulder. “...which I’m going to say is all that matters.”
There weren’t (currently) monsters, they’d had a talk, some semblance of a plan, and her hand felt perfect in his. Nick was going to call this a win - and hope that the worst of it was behind them.