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The great thing about college was that Brick was on his own, living his life, nine months out of the year completely on his terms. No brothers nagging him for shit, no cleaning up after anyone but himself, and no disruptions during study time. His life, his rules, quiet and tranquil.
Except for the giant, sentient hairball currently terrorizing north campus that some poor asshole (Brick) would have to deal with.
Because the worst thing about college was that he was on his own, living his life, nine months out of the year without his brothers around to follow his lead without question.
“Evacuate to Prospect Avenue!” Blossom’s clear, commanding voice rang out over the shouts and screams of fleeing students.
Which, cool. Drunk, sleep-deprived twenty-year-olds in their pajamas at three in the morning were totally going to listen to the imperious Super flying above them in her pink camisole and Ivy University logo sweatpants.
Spoiler: they didn’t, and Brick was forced to abandon his warm, solitary room and his physics textbook in only a pair of old basketball shorts and his favorite red T-shirt in favor of saving a hysterical Freshman from split ends that would have literally split her end to end.
Crimson afterglow marked Brick’s path and singed the sentient tresses that crawled like tentacles after the panicking Freshman. Pudgy and cute and in the throes of a panic attack, she clung to Brick’s shirt even after he set her down a safe distance from the monstrous hairball.
“Please don’t leave me!” she sobbed.
Brick pushed her off him. “Get a grip, you’re not dead.”
She reached for him again, frightened and unable to defend herself against the supernatural monster and yes, okay, logically he knew it wasn’t her fault but fuuuuuuuuck what a pain in the ass this was.
He sidestepped her and she stumbled, almost falling, until he caught her by the elbow so she wouldn’t break her nose on the concrete. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Please,” she sobbed, genuinely frightened.
Brick winced. “Just get to Prospect Avenue. It’s that way.”
And with that, he left her to follow the screams of her fellow fleeing students because she was not his problem. If Blossom had already decided on a proper evacuation plan, then that meant less work for him. Lord knew he was too tired for this shit running on three hours of sleep in the last 60 hours courtesy of two finals in as many days back to back. He had four left. He did not have time for whatever the hell was going on tonight.
Crack!
Blossom crash-landed in the green not four feet from where Brick stood. Her sweatpants were streaked in grass stains and her mane of wild, red hair was swept up in a very messy bun.
“Brick,” she said, a bit breathless, a bit pissed off.
“Blossom,” he returned.
Their passive-aggressive greeting was cut short when a lash of prehensile hair came slamming down on top of them. They bolted in opposite directions, nothing but pink and red vapor, and reconvened high up in the air. Brick got an eyeful of the creature steamrolling through campus and wondered why, even so far from Townsville, he still had to deal with this weird crap.
Talk about a bad hair day, Boomer would have said if he was here. He wasn’t, and Brick just scowled.
“It’s growing,” Blossom said grimly.
Son of a bitch, she was right. The thing was sprouting more arms to help it crawl overland and tangling around the gothic architecture like the ivy this elite college was named for. It slithered through windows and drain pipes, as though searching for life hiding inside.
“Cool,” Brick said.
He was so tired.
“Can you try—”
“Not unless you want me to burn down all of Balin Hall in the process,” he interrupted her, already knowing what she’d ask. Ignoring her frown he said, “What about your—”
“Same problem, opposite outcome. These old buildings will crumble if I freeze them,” she said.
Brick matched her frown. “Fine. Then we split up.”
She looked at him far too gravely for three in the goddamn morning. “That’s not a plan.”
“It’s the best you’re getting from me right now, so stop complaining.”
That earned him a scathing glare. “Brick—”
But she didn’t get her chance to chastise him because a massive hair tentacle shot toward them with deadly accuracy and exploded into nine smaller tentacles when it was upon them. Brick darted away from the mutant tresses, but he wasn’t quick enough. Thick, black hair wrapped around his ankle and yanked him down hard enough to send his jaw rattling.
The stone shingles of a Sophomore dorm building came rushing close. He twisted, tried to get away before impact, but the thing was fast and strong and those shingles couldn’t break him but hell if they didn’t hurt on impact. Brick grunted as he gasped for breath. His back roared with pain, but the Chemical X bonded to his bones was quick to mitigate the damage, leaving him breathless with the brief, phantom memory of it. He gathered scarlet energy in his palms and blasted the hair tentacle shackling him, but the damn thing only quivered like water wherever his energy blasts hit it.
He felt it before he saw it, a cold so unnatural it grabbed him like a vice and squeezed until he nearly choked. Ice crystals bloomed upon the hair, slowing and freezing it until it lost all sentience and cracked like dry pasta under Brick’s immense strength. He blasted out of there and pulled up alongside his savior.
“You said you weren’t going to use your ice breath,” he snapped.
“Thanks for your help, Blossom, I really appreciate it,” she said, flying alongside him in a swoop back around toward north campus.
Brick rolled his eyes and immediately regretted it. Exhausted and severely sleep-deprived, he briefly saw double and faltered. A warm hand steadied his arm.
“Hey, are you okay?” Her voice lacked the smarmy edge this time and she looked at him with a measure of concern.
Brick was about to tell her to focus on the monster instead of him, but he didn’t get the chance when more hair lashes shot after them with the persistence and speed of homing missiles. Brick grabbed Blossom and flew, but he didn’t make it ten feet with her in his arms before a mass of writhing hair surrounded them and constricted.
Blossom gasped for air as she tried in vain to extricate herself, but between Brick’s ironclad hold around her and the hair shackling them together, neither of them could move. The hair squeezed tighter, and Brick gagged.
“B-Brick,” she said, her voice raspy against his neck. Her hands were flat against his chest and they were pressed so tightly together that he could hear his own heartbeat thundering under her fingertips. Even now, he could feel her trembling as they slowly, painfully suffocated.
And now he was good and furious.
Acrid, black smoke swirled in his lungs, hot and building. As little as he could move, he fisted the back of Blossom’s camisole in a silent plea. But three months and change here without either of their siblings around gave them ample time to learn each other free of distraction, and words were hardly necessary anymore. She ducked her head against his shoulder as close as she could get, and he turned his head as far from hers as he could manage before opening his mouth and releasing a concentrated inferno upon the hair binding them.
The effects were instantaneous. The fire gorged on the evil strands with abandon and drew a chilling scream from deep within them. Soon Brick and Blossom were suffocating from the smoke and heat rather than constriction. But it lasted only a moment; the second he felt the pressure around them slacken, he took off as fast as he could before the fire could consume them too.
So much for not burning down north campus, he thought, resigned.
Blossom coughed against him, and he realized he was still holding on to her. Rose met red as she looked up at him. “Thank you,” she said.
He was so tired that all he could do was stare at her for a minute. He was pretty sure she’d never looked at him like that before, without a trace of suspicion or superiority, genuinely happy to have him there.
The hair shrieked again, and both of them looked down on the burning mass below. Except, it wasn’t burning much anymore. The hairball somehow managed to sever the huge chunk lost to Brick’s fire and save itself from burning up entirely. The melted mass stank and smoked and made Brick’s bloodshot eyes water as he watched it turn to ash in mere seconds. Unfortunately, the rest of the hair that had escaped the conflagration was resilient and began to gather and engorge as it angled for Brick and Blossom, like it knew they were a threat it needed to eliminate.
“That hair is psychotic,” Blossom said with such gravitas that under different circumstances, he probably would have laughed at the lunacy of it all.
“Yeah,” he said. There wasn’t much else to say.
She’d pulled away as they hovered, sharp eyes narrowed in thought. Brick, head buzzing with adrenaline keeping him excruciatingly awake, also racked his brain for something that might help him. It came to him like lightning, and Blossom glanced at him in the same moment with the same conclusion.
“What if we led it—” she began.
“—to Tower Lake?” he finished.
She smirked. “Genius.”
“Efficient,” he agreed, managing a tired but determined grin of his own.
The great thing about college was that Brick was on his own, living his life, nine months out of the year with the only person on the planet who was sharp enough to understand him and his thought processes without the added annoyance of explanation.
She took off in a burst of pink, and he flew in the opposite direction, knowing he could trust her to move and adapt with him without the extra guidance their siblings often required.
Her laser eye beams drew the hair monster’s attention eastward, and it roiled like a thundercloud as it scrambled up the side of Balin Hall and launched into the air after her. But Brick was there and ready to blast it with his own laser eye beams, enabling Blossom to slip away from the grabby tentacles. Something within the tangled mass roared, animalistic, and soon it was tearing after him.
Just as it was about to grab him, there was Blossom with a burst of icy wind. They tag teamed the monster, leading it ever closer to the lake where the rowing team practiced, remote and clear of students at this hour. Enraged, the hairball clambered after them, determined to swat them out of the sky until they rebuffed it with fire or ice, only to draw it in again with their lasers.
The giant hairball was not smart, to the surprise of absolutely no one, and when it reached the shore it went tumbling into the dark water, unable to slow its momentum. Screeching, the mass writhed and tried to backtrack to save itself, but the water sapped it of its supernatural strength and the tentacles fell limp and lifeless the wetter they got, until it was nothing but a normal, extremely disgusting hairball.
Brick and Blossom stood an arm’s length apart on the shore watching the mass slowly sink to the bottom. It was an oddly hypnotic sight, and he couldn’t look away even as his eyes began to droop.
“Well. We’re going to need a lot of Draino to clear this out,” Blossom quipped.
Brick, half aware of his bare toes sinking into the damp soft sand, laughed at that one. And then he fell.
“Brick!” she shouted, far away.
He blacked out for all of three seconds, just long enough for her to grab him before he could lose what was left of his dignity by falling flat on his ass. Sluggish, he was slow to react to her looping his arm over her shoulders so she could bear his weight and fly them back toward campus.
“Have you slept?” she demanded in that snobbish way she had.
“Think I just did,” he said, barely able to stay awake despite the ignominy of being half carried like an invalid. That thought ignited something in him and he jerked, making them swerve.
“Watch it! Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
He rubbed his stinging eyes and didn’t really fight her as she led him back through the window to his single dorm room. Luckily, the hair monster hadn’t infiltrated his building, so his room was in the same state as he’d left it.
She let go of him and he landed on his twin bed against the wall. And then he realized what had just happened.
“What the fuck, Blossom?” he growled and staggered to his feet.
He didn’t take even a step from his bed before she pushed him back down with her strength.
“Have you slept?” she asked him again, but it came out sounding more like a threat this time.
“I’m vaguely familiar with the concept,” he snapped and tried to get up again.
She pushed him down again and pressed her hands down on his shoulder so he couldn’t get up again. Red eyes glared up at her, seething, but she matched his venom with her own, and the sight made him falter.
“They say sarcasm is the lowest form of humor. You need to sleep.”
“I need to study.”
Her hands squeezed his shoulders, and her expression softened. “Is that why you’re so tired?”
“No, I’m always tired after dealing with you.” Absurd, every minute of this. He couldn’t even stand up with her weighing him down and blocking him.
Her hands sparked with her power, pissed off at him as usual. Brick wasn’t one to believe in fate or some higher plan, but it was times like this that he seriously suspected the universe was fucking with him by giving him a literal perfect match with the most annoying personality he had ever encountered.
He sighed and rested his weight on his hands on the bed. The power she channeled to her fingers had a lovely, soporific effect as it danced over his neck and shoulders, though he would never, ever admit this to her. “What are you even doing here?”
Her fingers clenched and slackened, like she couldn’t decide, and he bit his lip to stifle a groan. God, that felt good.
“Rest,” she said, much closer than she’d been before.
Her tempting fingers moved from his shoulders along his neck and threaded through his short, red hair. Her nails were clipped but not so short that he couldn’t feel them scrape pleasantly along his scalp.
Sleep-deprived going on his third all-nighter and utterly drained after the adrenaline burst of having to fight a monster tonight in the midst of finals season, Brick finally gave up and leaned into her touch with a needy sigh.
“Blossom,” he mumbled. She smelled faintly of smoke and of him, and the heady scent made him smile to himself. His hand found the hem of her camisole and clenched it gently, a silent, delirious plea to bring her closer.
So smoothly he barely even realized it was happening, she laid him down on the bed, her hands heavy on his chest as if to push him down deep enough for the covers to swallow him whole. Her hair fell around his face, slipped free from its precarious bun, and he breathed her in.
“Rest now,” she whispered, those magical hands still dowsing him in her cool, calming power like waves over his skin.
Unable to resist her, he finally nodded off into a deep, dreamless slumber and didn’t wake again for another twelve hours.
The worst thing about college was that he was on his own, living his life, nine months out of the year with the one girl he could never seem to escape, and whom he’d never managed to keep.
Blossom gently played with his hair as he lulled to sleep at last, the last vestiges of his controlled resistance finally spent. His fingers remained curled around the hem of her shirt, warm against her waist. Sitting next to him on his bed, she watched his face slacken, at peace as his breathing evened out.
“Why are you so stubborn?” she murmured, running her fingers over his freckled cheek.
He had the determination and purpose of an avalanche, inevitable and absolutely crushing. It had given him the power to catch up to her in school as kids, to challenge her at every turn like no one else could, and to motivate her to try harder, to be better, to give him a challenge worth rising to. She couldn’t say when her feelings had changed. There was not a day, or a moment, or even a sudden epiphany that revealed her deep and tranquil affection for him.
It was as gradual as the changing tides, deep waters hiding truths that had always been there, quietly waiting. She’d been accepted Early Admission to Ivy University, the culmination of her high school efforts, and he wasn’t even sold on college when they went their separate ways for the holiday break. And then, in passing, he mentioned the pre-Frosh weekend in April for new admits; he’d be going, and could he borrow her notes for missed classes since she probably wasn’t?
She couldn’t pinpoint when or how, but she knew why. As much as he preferred to remain ineffable and unknowable, he had failed with her. Rather spectacularly, though she would never expose him like that. Not until he was ready.
Carefully so as not to disturb him, Blossom leaned close and kissed his forehead. Ice crystals melted upon his skin, and his fingers unconsciously closed tighter around her shirt.
Stupid, stubborn boy.
But there was time.
The best thing about college was that she was on her own, living her life, nine months out of the year with the boy she’d never been able to leave behind, and never would.