Calamine - RPFS (Demi/Selena), PG-13

Warning: Real-person femslash.

Selena wondered if things would be easier if she were a normal teenage girl. If she hadn't jumped headfirst into show business at the age of seven, if she wasn't faced with this insanely grown-up task of holding a career, if she didn't have to balance the responsibilities of actress and singer and dancer and Disney star and ROLE MODEL in big capital letters. If she could just... be.

Because sixteen-year-olds shouldn't have to complete five rounds of the talk show circuit in a span of a week. A sixteen-year-old girl should be able to sleep in during the summer and not wake up at the crack of dawn and make herself look presentable for an interview that's airing only on the radio, for god's sake. She shouldn't have to work fourteen-hour days shooting episodes, and she especially shouldn't have to field embarrassing questions asked by important strangers more than twice her age about who she is or isn't dating, because most sixteen-year-old girls wouldn't dare to talk about that even with their own parents.

She loved her job, of course, but sometimes she just missed... the little things, the normal-girl-things, the past nine years of her life that she didn't get to have because she was running from audition to audition to audition. She felt tired. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to be one of the sixteen-year-old girls watching the Disney stars on TV and wishing she could be one of them, rather than, well, being one of them. Because to be Selena Gomez was stressful, exhausting, even terrifying. And she wasn't stupid. She saw what the media was doing to Miley; she recognized that she could be next. All she could do was wait helplessly for the impending backlash, sure to start the second she broke the facade of her flawless good-girl image.

And Selena knew it was about to break. She had known for months—at some unconscious level, maybe for years. Maybe for what seemed like forever.

If she were to go back and change the decisions she had made as a little kid, it would have started with Barney, and it would have started with never asking her mom if she could go to that audition. But just thinking about that audition made Selena smile, because had it not been for standing for hours in line with thousands of other bright-eyed oblivious seven-year-olds—too young to know any better—she never would have met Demi. And without Demi, there just... would be no point. Selena couldn't imagine life without her.

So despite her own selfish wishes for that irretrievable normal teenage life, Selena smiled for the thousand flashing lights at award ceremonies and drank the never-quite-sweet-enough coffee served to her on the morning talk shows and waved to the paparazzi when they deemed her interesting enough to take her picture. Because, at least, she knew that in a month she'd have one day to herself, when she wouldn't have to work, when she and Demi could goof off in her bedroom and make five new ridiculous YouTube videos and sing along with Paramore on the radio and play Twister in their pajamas and collapse into heaps of sprawled arms and legs and breathless giggles before falling asleep under the covers, side by side. Maybe that one day of teenage normalcy could be enough.

But when it came to the Teen Choice Awards on that scorching night in August, Selena felt an itch, and it wasn't just her uncomfortable (though breathtaking) cerulean designer dress that no normal teenage girl would ever be fortunate enough to wear even to prom. She felt restless—which was crazy, considering she'd hardly slept in weeks—and anxious and as if she could burst, and the only thing keeping her sane was the fact that Demi was sitting beside her. And the reporters were at it again, asking her about Miley, about Nick, about the supposed feud between the three of them and Selena thought that maybe tonight would be the night that these walls (too poorly constructed, because she'd built them herself) would come crashing down and they'd stomp all over her broken pieces. The anxiety was killing her, her heart was racing, her skin was hot, and then—and then—Demi's hand would slip across her back to Selena's shoulder, and it was like calamine lotion: soothing, cool, relief. All the little nuances instantly melting away.

Selena didn't want it to be temporary, as this relief so often was, because she remembered getting poison ivy as a kid—maybe the one "normal kid" event that she could actually recall—and that feeling that the itch might never go away. Stay, she thought, but she didn't dare say it aloud. Don't leave me. (And what was there to be afraid of, after all?) But she felt herself regressing; she remembered a time when they were little, when their mothers took them shopping and somehow they ended up alone, maybe not even for a full minute, and they would have (should have) been terrified—had they not had each other to cling to, the two little girls alone in a store. Selena felt like that again, so she felt herself reaching, grasping, clinging, shamelessly putting her hands where most sixteen-year-old girls wouldn't dare with their friends, but Selena and Demi were different, after all. And Selena knew it. She always had.

It was easier to smile for the camera with Demi's soft finger tracing slow circles on her shoulderblade as Selena tightened her grip on Demi's knee, and Demi giggled, but neither of them said a word. And soon, like that, their hands were all over each other the entire evening, pulling, groping, longing, neither wanting to let go, not caring that these pictures would be plastered all over the internet by tonight, and the magazines by the end of the week. Would anyone notice, or care? They were just being sixteen-year-old girls, after all. So they didn't have to come up with excuses, or reasons why, and besides, it was obvious already: because they were best friends, or because they needed each other, or because of course they wouldn't leave each other's side, or something else. Or something else.

And so tonight they would climb into a limo, side-by-side, bodies turned towards each other, knees pressed together, smiling-speechless-laughing. They would go back to Selena's house and maybe, if they weren't totally exhausted, make another YouTube video for their fans to enjoy, because that webcam, despite its inability to pick up good lighting, somehow always managed to capture their true "Demi Selena Lovato Gomez" moments.

Or maybe, tonight, they wouldn't turn on the webcam at all. Maybe they wouldn't need to use the Twister mat as an excuse for falling so hard, so fast, hands and legs intertwined. Maybe, tonight, they'd create new moments altogether, tracing circles over skin as smooth as calamine, and finally finally feel that relief they had been searching for since the day they met. Maybe fancy cerulean not-prom dresses could lie in comfortable heaps on the floor with black leather pants and button-down jackets and high-heeled shoes, and fingers could reach to touch the spots where calamine lotion is never applied, to relieve itches in places no one sees.

Flying - Wizards of Waverly Place, PG

Written for Wizards of Waverly Place Weekly Prompts. Implied incest. 178 words.

We could put a blanket over this, they said. We could cover it, fold it up and lock it away. We could find a rug to sweep this under, they whispered, like it never happened. We can hide this behind closed doors, closed mouths, closed eyes and closed hearts in order to keep it from all the closed minds.

But the blanket would come out again when they needed something to keep themselves warm.

And the rug would grace the floor once more when it became too cold and uncomfortable to walk over.

Doors were opened for exploration; mouths were opened for exploration; eyes were opened more widely for better searching, even if they didn't always like what they found. And hearts—definitely hearts—were open, because if they weren't, they might combust.

"This isn't working," Alex sighed. "We need to find something else."

And since the blanket didn't work, and the rug didn't work, and closed doors and mouths and eyes and hearts never worked either, they decided to find a carpet. Not to hide under, but to set themselves—finally—free.

Songs Not Yet Written - Camp Rock, PG-13

Mitchie meant it when she thanked her parents for giving her the best summer of her life. She made friends she wouldn't forget; she performed in front of everyone; she proved to herself and to the world—as it existed in that moment—who she truly was and what she was really about. She had held Shane Gray's hands in both of her own and won him over completely. These were the picture-perfect moments that she would talk about and share for months to come.

But when she thought about that summer, none of those memories came to mind.

From the moment Mitchie arrived on the campgrounds, it had been about her. The summer had not been about proving herself, or forming a connection with Shane, or sharing her music with the world, or bonding with Caitlyn, or trying to be popular. It had always, only been about Tess.

Mitchie didn't want to think about what that might mean. Because at first—at first—it seemed simple. It seemed a matter of making new friends, of standing out for once, of being popular. And it had nothing (absolutely nothing) to do with the way she had noticed Tess' hair gleam in the sunlight the first time she laid eyes on her. It had nothing to do with the feelings she got watching the way Tess carried herself, the way she laughed, the way she smiled, the way she moved with the music when she sang. Because those were just feelings of admiration, of wanting to be accepted, of borderline idol-worship so common among teenage girls. And it definitely had nothing to do with being so excited to share a cabin with her, or the way she felt her mouth turn dry and her stomach do flips when Tess insisted that Mitchie take the bed next to hers.

Of course it had nothing to do with any of that, Mitchie told herself. Yet she was the only girl at the entire camp not obsessing over Shane Gray's presence, instead focusing all her energy on trying to impress Tess. On trying to win over this girl she barely seemed to know, on forming a relationship that she could not explain—not to Caitlyn, or her own mother, or to Shane months later when he'd ask her about it as they lay in each other's arms pretending—because explanations were too complicated.

What scared Mitchie the most was that she did know Tess. One look at her was enough to know that Tess needed to be saved as badly as she did, and Mitchie—out of her element as she was—convinced herself that she would be the one to do it. Regardless of the lies she'd have to tell along the way.

And naturally it fell apart, because that was how these things went. Because Tess had the upper hand; she always did. Mitchie hated her for it, for using that magnetism on her and pulling her in, because now there was no way out. She could sit in classroom corners, she could hide from the world and cry, but escaping Tess's forcefield was an impossibility. She could sing, she could dance, but she could not start or stop this.

Mitchie shouldn't have been surprised when their fight felt more like a breakup than the end of a friendship. And she shouldn't have been so pleased when Tess finally apologized. She shouldn't have acted like it was nothing, because it wasn't nothing, and she shouldn't have been lying in bed wide awake at two a.m. on her last night at camp still thinking about it, so she stopped. She needed to get out of her head and out of these thoughts, so she grabbed her sweater and walked around outside for a while but of course found herself standing before Tess' cabin, because it was the direction she had been walking in all along, the entire summer. The door was unlatched and she made her way across the room quietly, placing a hand on the other girl's small shoulder.

"Tess," she whispered. "Tess."

A few moments passed before Tess opened her eyes, and she smiled when she saw Mitchie. "Hey."

Mitchie realized her hand was still on her shoulder, and she pulled it away. "I just... um. I wanted to tell you how much your apology meant to me. I felt like I didn't make that clear before."

Tess pulled herself up in bed and rubbed her eyes. "You came over here to tell me that?"

"Well, sure. I guess."

Tess smiled. "My apology shouldn't have meant much. I treated you like shit."

"It's—it's okay," Mitchie said, embarrassed. "I mean. You didn't. I mean, I guess, it could have been worse..." She could feel herself blushing. Tess always had that effect. Mitchie wanted to hate her for it, but—couldn't.

Tess didn't say anything, and Mitchie found herself feeling increasingly stupid. Maybe this was a bad idea. But then—somewhat shyly, Tess said, "The ironic thing is how I tried to drag you down, when I'd give anything for a mom like yours." Mitchie was quiet. "I mean, did you see my mom tonight? Did you see me?" Tess laughed; it was harsh against the silence. Then, softly, "How do you like that? The girl who tries to be so big and scary is the most fragile of all."

Mitchie still couldn't think of anything to say, but she tried. "Tess, I—"

"No, forget it. I'm happy for you, Mitchie. Look at all you've done. You were so brave tonight. You really proved yourself"—she paused, smiling—"and Shane Gray seems quite fond of you."

Mitchie could see her eyes shining in the dark. She had trouble finding the words, but finally they came: "It was never really about that though, was it?"

Tess didn't respond, and for the first time Mitchie felt like maybe the playing field had evened out between them, the power had finally shifted and for once, she could be in control. Maybe she could take charge for once and Tess would let her. Maybe, this time, she could lean in and kiss Tess on the lips and not worry about how she would react to her every tiny move. So Mitchie leaned in. And she kissed her. And she stopped thinking about what it may or may not mean, because it was the first truly honest thing she had done all summer.

She still had a long way to go, of course. But she could smile later that night as she finally fell asleep, thinking about how the next summer would be even better. She could hum lyrics to songs not yet written.