a study in shackles

later,

The three of you head into the wilderness, Martha leading, you and Toni trailing. Your hair, frizzy and clumpy to the touch (you really should have thought things through logically before grabbing those scissors) gets caught on a branch as you walk. Toni turns as you struggle to free yourself, adopting an expression of amusement, as you make a quiet noise of frustration, finger working at the branch until you free yourself.

"How bad is it?" you ask in response to her smirk, smiling yourself as she answers "Not bad. Looks like you got your hair cut at a salon staffed by toddlers, but not bad."

You smile at her, she tentatively smiles back - the moment lasts a little too long to be strictly casual, you feel your cheeks warm at the intensity of your eye contact, and then the moment shatters as the two of you hurry to catch up to Martha.

There's a conversation (confrontation) - for a moment you'd forgotten Martha's anti-animal harm policy, and you're hungry, dammit. Martha scoffs but Toni backs you up (or, rather, backs her stomach up - she's right, this isn't about sides, it's about survival, you try to remind yourself of that but now your own stomach is filled with butterflies).

Martha stalks away, and you and Toni follow - until Toni announces, abrupt, that she needs to pee.

You block out the rushing in your ears as she squats, turning away before she can see you blush.

"Performance anxiety," she says a moment later. You offer to move further away, but she grins and asks you if you wouldn't rather sing instead.

You're brought back to the day of the branch, the oh-so-holy hymns you'd been singing for really no other reason than to piss her off. You can practically hear Toni's smirk as you ridiculously burst into Macklemore.

There's a brief pause, and then Toni snickers. She teases you lightly about the song choice: "It's random, I like it," will stick in your mind and replay for the next few minutes - your head spins, happily dazed, at the thought of Toni liking anything about or related to you, much less your singing.

(Later, you'll compare that statement with a past experience: that night on the mission with Andrew, watching the sunset. He hadn't responded in Toni's laughter-tinged voice, though. He'd scoffed at your excitement, had meant the word 'random' as a patronizing derogative; she'd said random as if it were something to be proud of.

It is something to be proud of if she likes it, you think, then immediately flush at the realization of just how whipped you are for her.)

You continue to sing a couple more lines, and you can practically see her good-natured eyeroll at your substitution of "fucking" with "fricking", despite the fact that your back is turned.

She stands - the job is apparently done, so you stop singing and wait an appropriate amount of time until you're sure she's pulled her shorts back up (you immediately flush at the thought of them down, then scold yourself sharply).

As Toni falls into step beside you, you smile to yourself at the ease of your conversation - you both laugh at each other's misconceptions of the song's lyrics, the angry tension between the two of you gone.

You're not totally convinced at Toni's "When would I ever do that" in response to you asking if she'd just been pretending to relate to your Macklemore-related mishap. You feel like she should give herself some more credit, she's more intuitive than she thinks, but you don't want to ruin the relaxed moment so instead you settle for a quiet, "True".

You laugh as she tells you about getting sent to the principal's office for "singing a song about armed robbery", but your laughter is cut short and turns into a high-pitched gasp as you hear leaves crackling and rustling - the two of you stop abruptly.