The States

Sunshine

aka Eli friend zones himself for a hundred years

(Here is how it begins: one day, Eli looks at Marisol, and thinks she has a sunshine smile.

And then he never stops noticing her.)

1900

Eli likes to lay on the floor of the makeshift art room when Marisol makes pottery, because she hums when it's going well and it's relaxing.

He looks towards her as the pottery wheel slows to a stop.

Marisol leans her elbows on the wheel. "Look, I like you, I know you like me, why can't we try this?"

Eli looks away. "You're important to me and I can't risk it," he finally tells her, and Marisol sighs. He meets her eyes, pleads for her to understand.

She restarts the pottery wheel, but she doesn't hum anymore.

🌣🌣🌣🌣🌣🌣🌣🌣

They don't talk about it. Marisol lets it drop and they continue life as it was before.

1914

All the books paint love as this wonderful, beautiful thing, but Eli looks at Marisol at her statehood ceremony and thinks I love her and it feels like fear. 

1920

They do not talk about what happened in the trenches- about Marisol putting her gas mask on Eli and knocking him out- but he doesn't forget it.

Marisol scares him. She is always been willing to martyr herself for the people she loves- she'd gone to war so Nate wouldn't be alone, she'd taken off a gas mask in a trench full of poisonous air to give it to Eli and then knocked him out when he tried to give it back.

He hesitantly brings up her tendency of self-sacrifice one night while she spins pottery.

Marisol shrugs. "What's the point of immortality if you don't use it to save the people you love?" Her eyes are equally fierce and solemn, and Eli drops it. He owes her that, at least. 

He doesn't mention that he'd rather die than see her give him another gas mask.

1923

Eli is completely speechless. "You made these?" He's holding up one of the perfect little glass test tubes out of the box. She'd only picked out the best ones. She was very firmly not thinking of her box of failed attempts. 

(When she'd said she'd made something for him, Eli had brightened and jokingly said as long as it's not another vase.)

Marisol grins. "I got bored and all my pots felt wrong. So. Yeah."

"Doesn't glassblowing require special equipment?" There's her Eli, always curious. 

"Yeah, but these are actually lampworked." Eli makes the gesture Marisol translates to elaborate. "Glassblowing uses furnaces, lampworking uses hand torches. Yes, like mini blowtorches. They're made of borosilicate, so you can use them in a lab."

Eli hesitates before he hugs her, and Marisol resists the urge to sigh as she melts against him.

🌣🌣🌣🌣

Nate snorts at the box of failed attempts shoved into the back of her workshop a month later. "Jeez, have you got it bad or what?" He nudges it with his foot, and Marisol sticks her tongue out at him when she can't think of a response.