Notes: Someone mentioned (one of my anons) that AUs which deviate from the actual plotline of the show usually don’t keep Connor and Oliver’s age difference. While I enjoy a good HS!AU or anything that changes their ages, I decided to try this where they knew each other when they were younger, but I kept their age difference intact. Unbeta’d like always. Enjoy!
Connor peered over the second floor banister as Gemma and Oliver walked into the house. They were laughing about something, probably something too ‘grown-up’ or ‘cool’ for Connor. That was his sister’s favorite excuse to never fill him in, at least. But he wasn’t a baby or anything. He was starting eighth grade in three weeks. He was a teenager. He was cool.
“Oh my god, Connor. Go mind your own business. Stop being such a little creep.” Connor frowned at what his sister said, slinking away. He wasn’t sure how someone as nice as Oliver could be friends with his witch of a sister.
"Gems, be nice. Your brother is so sweet.“
Connor perked up a bit, overhearing that as he walked to his room.
Thanks so much to the two anons who sent me 61 and the two anons who sent me 98!
Oliver had listened to the voicemail more than two dozen times, his lip growing increasingly raw and red from biting it. Closing his eyes, he pressed the play button, “Of course, you’re sleeping. It’s the middle of the night but I can’t stop thinking. Or drinking. And maybe that’s why I have the courage to finally say all of this. Oliver, I can’t be your best man. I appreciate the offer. I do. But, you see, the thing is… I love you. I’m completely and utterly in love with you. Please don’t get married.”
Notes: This is the sequel to the cheating fic that I posted a few days back. I haven’t had any inspiration for the cancer fic today, so I wrote this instead. And this fic ends on a happy note. 🙂 It might be good if you’ve read the other fic first, but I think you can get the gist of this one without it. Unbeta’d like always. Enjoy!
Oliver held Connor close while he slept, tears glistening in his eyes. He suppressed the urge to sob in relief, afraid of waking his sleeping husband.
After months of counseling and months of feeling like they might never be who they were pre-cheating, they finally reconnected. The forgiveness presented itself and Oliver barely contained his emotions.
a/n: after rereading, i think this turned out to be much more of a drama club!au than i’d originally intended. oops….
This is the dumbest thing in the world (and it’s not even a real ficlet bc I’m too stressed to actually write anything using ‘sentences’ and ‘grammar’ and blah blah blah) but I really REALLY want a coliver hs!au where they are both nerds, like the nerdiest of the nerds.
Don’t get me wrong, I love hs!aus where Connor’s popular and Oliver’s not (or vise-versa – love them all) but I also really want a fic where Connor Walsh is little bit a lot of a nerd.
Like, where he’s captain of the debate team and actually campaigns for class president. Connor totally makes posters and wears a button and tries really hard on his campaign speech. (And he’s super pissed when he loses out to that asshole captain of the football team who promised everyone pizza for lunch. Like the class president has any authority whatsoever over the cafeteria menu. Come on, Adam!)
Pair that with Oliver who is the editor of the technology section of the school paper and runs the sound and lighting boards during school plays and assemblies. Oliver who says ‘good morning’ to all of the janitors and not only knows all of their names but also about their kids and families because he’s kind enough to ask. Oliver who uses his study hall to help Ms. Winterbottom put away books in the library and helps organize the coat and food drive in the winter.
Now, they’ve always been sort of friends. like they say ‘hi’ when they pass in the halls and share a few classes together. They instinctively have each other’s backs in the living hell that is gym class. Not that anyone actually messes with them. I mean, they’ve all see Walsh on the lacrosse field. The guy’s a freaking animal. Not to mention Oliver’s captain of the wrestling team and a few of them were witness to Oliver taking down Frank Delfino in last year’s conference final. Delfino didn’t know what hit him. (There was a rumor floating around that Oliver actually dislocated Delfino’s shoulder and made him blackout but no one ever actually asked Oliver if that were true.)
But that’s all it really is. Just those sort -of-friends friendships you have in high school. They don’t hang on the weekends or see each other outside of school. (Well, they did once. Oliver was grocery shopping with his mom and Connor was their cashier but that was really it and all they did was exchange small ‘hi’s while Mrs. Hampton dug eighteen cents out of her purse.)
Then it’s time for the play tryouts and Ms. Winterbottom is getting desperate.
14 – Hey, I’m with you, okay? Always (from this list) (a/n: I come back from a mini-break to give you angst. I am sorry.)
He said no.
Oliver couldn’t believe it. He stood dumbfounded in the middle of their – no – his living room. His apartment. His no longer theirs. In one fell swoop, 303 was suddenly and fully his once again.
Connor said no.
Oliver’s knee faintly ached from the hardwood floor and he shook it out a little as he replayed what the hell just happened.
Dinner had gone off without a hitch. The meal and conversation and everything had been just perfect, just like Oliver’d planned.
They’d been lingering over dessert and Connor’d thrown his head back with a laugh. It’d been one of those ones Oliver loved, full bodied and full bellied, and Oliver just knew that this was moment he’d been waiting for. This was the moment he was going to ask Connor to spend forever with him.
Oliver slid out of his chair at the table to kneel on the floor next to Connor. He’d taken Connor’s hand and said his little speech and waited for Connor to say yes.
Notes: One of my lovely nonnies requested this: (1) Connor and Oliver after a fight/argument and they spent the night separately? Please? (2) I realize that request sounded angsty but maybe about them making up after? Hope the fic lives up to your expectations, lovely. Unbeta’d as always. Enjoy 🙂
Connor snatched his pillow off of the bed, his chest still heaving from Oliver’s final blow. How the argument started, neither parties were sure, but it took very little for it to gain the necessary momentum.
“Where are you going?“
Connor stopped at the door, his back muscles tensing. "If you honestly think that after all of that, we’re sleeping beside each other tonight, you’ve lost your mind.”
When I started writing The Memory of Light I wanted to keep in mind three things. First, I wanted to write about a young girl whose life is fairly normal. There’s no obvious or recent trauma in Vicky Cruz’ life. There’s no abuse or bullying or destructive behavior. The stresses and pressures in her life are those that are typical to sixteen-year-olds. Her family is well off. She lives in a house in Austin Texas with a beautiful view and a heated swimming pool in the back yard. She attends an exclusive private school. And yet, despite all these privileges, she finds herself in a hospital the day after a suicide attempt without the will to live. With the help of Dr. Desai and the other patients in the hospital’s psychiatric ward she slowly comes to understand the effects of the illness we call depression. By giving Vicky an outwardly good life, I was able to focus not so much on the causes of depression or on the situations that may lead to depression but on the illness itself and the effects it has on lives that, in many ways, have many good things going for them.
The second thing I wanted to focus on in The Memory of Light was Vicky’s recovery. There are many young adult books that describe the downward spiral toward a rock-bottom depression where suicide looks like the only way to alleviate the pain, but not many that focus on the upward path toward a healing, which includes the ability to adjust and function with depression. This upward journey is a hopeful journey but it can also be rocky and suspenseful. Will Vicky be able to sustain the insights she gained at the hospital once she re-enters her old routine? Vicky’s journey toward recovery and toward a commitment to life is, in many ways, a journey that we all need to make. For saying yes to life no matter what it brings us, ultimately depends on our ability discover and embrace a purpose for our life. Purpose and the ability to see goodness in the world, despite overwhelming suffering and evil, is a prerequisite to mental health.
But the most important consideration that weighed upon me as I wrote The Memory of Light was the urgent, pressing sense that I needed to “get it right”. Getting it right meant that the characters, the thoughts of a person with depression, the various mental illnesses described in the book, all had to sound and feel real to the reader. Getting it right also involved finding the right tone and voice for the story. It involved creating a harmony for disparate and maybe even opposing realities. The book had to be both realistic and optimistic, for example. It had to be serious but upbeat and at times funny. I was aware, as I wrote, that the book would one day end up in the hands of a person on the verge of deciding for or against life and I needed to make sure that the book tipped the young person’s inner conflict in the direction of life. I had to get it right.
It took me a long time to get the book to a point where it felt right. I think that in the four years it took to write the book I really wrote three books. I started over after the first two versions because there was something about Vicky’s voice or about the story that did not “feel right.” Getting it right required the patient help and feedback of Cheryl Klein, my editor at Scholastic. It also required a lot of quiet listening to Vicky and the other characters in the book and a willingness to wait for them to reveal themselves to me. Getting it right required re-living my own experiences with depression and watching carefully for how it manifested itself and remembering the tools that helped me survive. Depression, ugly and painful as it is, can also teach us about life and how to live it, and these lessons also needed to be included in the book in a non-didactic way.
Throughout the writing of The Memory of Light, I kept reminding myself that the book needed to be interesting and entertaining. I wanted the reader to see himself or herself in Vicky’s life and to root for her recovery. If the book was interesting, if the reader could lose herself in the story, then it would be possible for the book to become a source of light and hope in the reader’s life.
Francisco X. Stork was born in Monterrey, Mexico. When he was six years old, Charles Stork, a retired American citizen of Dutch descent, married Ruth Arguelles, a single mother, adopted Francisco and moved the three-member family to El Paso, Texas. He is the author of six novels including Marcelo in the Real World, which received the 2010 Schneider Award and The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, whichwas the recipient of the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award and the International Latino Book Award. The Memory of Light has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly.
Notes: I got the idea for this post-breakup, angst fic after listening to a song off of Panic! at the Disco’s new album. (It doesn’t resemble that song anymore, but it did inspire me.) And once I started writing it, it kind of took off and here we are, a week and nearly 5k words later. There is a possibility for a sequel because I’m not a monster. Unbeta’d as always. Enjoy!
It was one of those chance meetings, that type of thing Connor never believed in. The type of chance that existed in movies and novels, not in real life. He counted the number of years in his mind and it seemed like it wasn’t possible. But it was. Five years passed since their breakup and he still remembered Oliver like the back of his hand. Or, his memories of Oliver. Of course, people changed over such a period of time, but his memories of Oliver remained the same. If everything remained constant, he could recite coffee preference, sleeping clothes preference, nervous ticks, so on and so forth.
“What brings you to the West Coast?” Connor mumbled, his lips pressed against the edge of his coffee mug.
“Business and pleasure.” Oliver replied coolly. Connor deserved that, honestly. But Oliver approached him. Oliver sat down in front of him. Hadn’t five years healed any of those wounds? From the looks of it, no. Oliver regarded him as a familiar stranger, how you would treat someone you had met once at a party. Not someone you had shared the most intimate moments with time and time again.
nonny prompt: coliver in a bath (a/n: a week of vacay and i come back to write this. i don’t even know…)
“I can’t believe I agreed to this,” Connor mutters as he tugs off his tie.
From his perch on the edge of the tub, Oliver swirls a hand through the water, testing the temperature and sending the bubbles spinning, before he stands. “You never know,” he offers. “You may like it.”
“Unlikely.” Connor turns to toss his shirt in the hamper and Oliver steps up behind him.
Tucking an arm around Connor’s midsection, Oliver pulls Connor’s back flush against his front. “It’s just a bath, Connor. Nothing too painful.”
“That’s what you think,” Connor grumbles, leaning back a little against Oliver.
And it’s not the bath Connor’s objecting too. It’s the bubbles and the candles and the soft music. Oliver set all of this up just for him and it’s too much. Too much attention. Too much effort. Too much love.
Oliver presses a fond smile into Connor’s shoulder and tightens his grip to pull Connor in just a hair closer. “I promise. It’ll be nice and relaxing.”
lanablack 