Disclaimer: I do not own Darkest Powers. Nor do I own Rebecca Black's song Friday (not that I would want to...)

I Got This, You Got This

One-shot 1:

"7 AM, Waking Up in the Morning"

Summary: "Can we save the ordering around for later? It's too early in the morning, and I'm barely awake. I don't have enough energy to properly tell you off."

The point of hiding from the St. Cloud cabal was to do just that: hide. Whether that meant ducking behind dumpsters or squatting in abandoned buildings at any sign of danger, they had to do whatever they could to make it seem like they were invisible, like they had dropped off the face of the planet. That did not mean sitting outside in the bright morning sunlight, right out in the open, and exposing herself to the entire world driving by the cheap motel they had settled in the night before.

"Get inside." He shouldn't have to tell her that, but apparently, Chloe wasn't trying to play it safe that morning. Which was completely fine because it wasn't as if they had run away from peril only, you know, two weeks ago. Two weeks and acting like they were in the clear from anyone chasing after them. Derek knew better. They would always be running. It wasn't going to take two weeks for all of this to end, for all of them to be safe again.

"I will in a minute." Chloe said through a yawn.

"No. Right now. Inside." Didn't she see? That man standing across the street getting a newspaper from the stand could very well be an agent sent by the Edison Group. He might have been wearing innocently-colored blue crocs, but that didn't stop the werewolf from being skeptical. Blue crocs. Yeah right. Like those were above suspicion.

"Can we save the ordering around for later? It's too early in the morning, and I'm barely awake." She waved a hand up at him limply, another yawn forcing her jaw wide open. "I don't have enough energy to properly tell you off."

Yikes. Someone was grouchy this morning. On closer inspection, Derek noted the sheet wrapped around her shoulders and the flashlight on the ground next to her on the walkway. The spaces under her eyes were dark and slightly puffy with exhaustion. Sitting next to her, he asked, "Have you been out here all night long?"

Her silence was enough of a response for her, and he felt the frustrated growl at the back of his throat. Catching his girlfriend outside without anyone else was one thing, but her being alone outside for a long stretch of time was a whole other problem.

"How long?"

"Derek-"

"For how long, Chloe?"

"I came outside about two hours after you went to bed." He'd left her last night at ten, his father calling him back to the room they shared with Simon. Two hours after that...Midnight. Now it was seven in the morning. She'd been out there almost eight hours.

"Do you realize how incredibly irresponsible that was?" He had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep his voice at a near-hiss. As it was, he was ready to full-out shout at her. Suppose the people they were running from finally found them. She'd be out there, with no one, nothing to protect her from an ambush. Sitting duck, that's what she'd be. There were no words to describe what a mistake she'd made. If it'd been insomnia, she should have woken him up as well. He might not be much protection from a tranq dart stealing through the night to prick their necks, but he had his nose and his ears. He would've been able to tell something was wrong and rushed them into hiding.

Before he could tell her all of this, though, she grabbed his arm. "There was a ghost. In the room."

"Even still, you could have come to me..." He wanted to continue, but she was shaking her head, trying to explain more.

"It was a woman. I think she died in the room and was a residual, one of those reenactments of a ghost's death. Because she didn't follow me when I left. And..." She was staring off into the distance, watching some remembered spirit that filled her eyes with heartache. With a shake of her head, she brought herself back into the present conversation. "She kept hovering over the bed, tucking me in, so I think she must have been in their with her child. And she was telling me to go to sleep. Except I couldn't sleep, not with her there."

She didn't say out loud what she was thinking. That she couldn't sleep with the ghost there because she was waiting, waiting for the reenactment to turn deadly. When Margaret, an older, supposedly wiser necromancer, had been giving her lessons at their not-so-safe safe house, she'd clarified that the ghostly residuals were what happened in truly traumatic deaths. Chloe must have laid in bed wide awake, wondering when exactly she'd find out how the woman and whoever she had been tucking in had died.

The last time this had happened, with the grotesque murder in the woods, Derek had sworn he'd yell at her if she didn't have him there. It was on the tip of his tongue to do so, in fact, but Chloe's hand was crawling into his, and her head lazily moving towards his shoulder. How could he yell at her when she was clearly about to pass out? No, he'd save it for later when she was wide awake and able to yell back herself over how he was certainly being unreasonable and far too overprotective.

Still, it worried him. Had she gotten him, woken him up, what would he have done? Told the ghost off? Yeah, because talking to a ghost in the past had really worked in the past. And those ones had been true ghosts, not just the leftover energy from their deaths. It burned brightly in his mind, like a giant neon sign. There was nothing he could have done. Nothing at all.

"We'll switch rooms tonight. I'll tell Dad, he'll talk to your aunt," he whispered against her forehead, mouth coming into soft contact with her skin, breath blowing her bangs into movement. "You won't have to deal with it again."

She gave a grunt of approval, eyes closed, chest steadily moving up and down, and body heavy against his side as she floated off to a dreamland where ghosts were forbidden, forgotten.

"No more staying up all night outside. I won't have to yell at you again." Sleeping she may be, but he felt he should continue reassuring her. Protect her from assailants, he could do. Protect her from guns and crazy mad scientists, he could do. Protect her from the things only she could see, well, he was going to do that, too. As best he could.

"And tomorrow morning, I'm not going to come outside and find you sitting here. You'll be inside, you hear me?" He took her quiet snore as compliance and lightly squeezed their tangled fingers.

Authoress's Notes: I feel so accomplished, finishing two things for DP in one week! XD

Anyways, this here is a new Chlerek one-shot collection, with each chapter being based off one lyric from the song "Friday". My friend and I thought this up yesterday for our separate fandoms and surprisingly, we're going through with it (I'm writing for DP, she's writing for Yu-Gi-Oh). We haven't figured out the schedule just yet, but we want to update a new addition every Friday, in honor of it being, duh, Friday.

It is not recommended that you listen to "Friday" while reading this. Please, save your ears. Unless it is a version of "Friday" you like. I, myself, find that I can actually get a bit pumped while listening to the Glee rendition of it. Although, I only listened to my Darkest Powers playlist while writing this. Because I'm a fan like that.

Hope you enjoyed! Thanks to all who read/review!