#and it just sparked memory of this fic I liked a whole bunch but now can’t find anywhere | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

heliads · 2 years

Note

aside from congratulations, I have a request.

If you could do something very angsty for me? The whole fic is happening while y/n is smoking a cigarette, she *ran* from her fraction to dauntless because her parents were abusive and too strict, now she is stuck between two men who want her. The love-hate relationship with Eric and the too needy and draining with Four. In the end she puts the cigarette out and decides whatever you feel like.

I'm just feeling angsty fics lately, you know? Thanks in advance❤️

ok but the cigarette as a framing device for the plot is so superior, anon your mind >>

masterlist

There’s a spark on the table in front of you, one bright bit of red in the midst of all this darkened gray and gloomy charcoal. Your mind races ahead of your body, wondering if you should put it out before a fire starts. Anyone else would, you think, the possibility of further damage too great for any temporary satisfaction of inaction.

Instead, you cross your legs and watch it until it burns out on your desk. Over your time in Dauntless, you’ve learned how to gauge risks, how to tell what’s going to blossom into something deadly and what is just that, a spark, something that will flare for a second and then die out into nothing. There are far more sparks than people care to think, just embers in ashes that will choke out soon enough. Hardly any risks are worth the revolutions that people like to imagine.

In the end, maybe that’s the lesson you learned from Dauntless, that everyday acts of bravery are only valued because they have no real meaning. Anyone can tell themselves that they’re changing the world when they pick up a blade and choose not to send it spiraling into someone’s head, or when they stand up to a playground bully for using their fists one too many times.

Talk all you like of integrity, of courage, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. Nothing does matter around here, that’s precisely how Dauntless works. You send a bunch of diehard adrenaline junkies into a building, whip them up on lies and promises to never be afraid again, and see what happens. They’ll cloak their bodies in black shadow and save you the trouble of trying to convince them to hide themselves away.

Dauntless sticks to Dauntless out of misguided pride. Thus, the other factions don’t have to waste a single breath in convincing the brave to stay away from their pure homes when your fearless faction already keeps to themselves more than even the Abnegation.

But you guess that’s what you signed up for back when you chose Dauntless in the first place. The cigarette you’ve been smoking sends up a flurry of ash at the moment, as if even the smoke can’t bear to think of the memories even more than you could. Doesn’t mean you can hide from it any more, though, and you take a drag just to wash down the foul memories with a blast of acid down your throat.

It comes as quite a surprise to anyone who’s ever known you to hear that you weren’t a Dauntless-born. You’ve seen your share of shocked reactions, how their eyes widen to a comical size before they start proclaiming that this couldn’t be, that you’re the most Dauntless person they’ve ever met. Of course you are, you’ve butchered parts of yourself in your hurries to cut away all that wouldn’t fit in here. You are what they made you, and in the end, that is Dauntless through and through.

Once upon a time, though, you weren’t. The image appears in a wave of bluish gray mist, and when you close your eyes, it burns with all the fervor of the sparks still clinging to the lit end of your smoke.

You hadn’t just been a transfer, you know, you had been worse. An Amity, the worst kind of person to ever end up here. There’s no one the Dauntless hate more than the Amity. At least the Abnegation had the common sense to try and claw for power over the city, even if they’re misusing their position to waste resources on those who can’t better the place.

The Amity, though? They’re such a lost cause that it’s laughable. Who in their right minds would ever cast away the chance for success and ambition to run forever out in the never ending fields surrounding the city limits, pulling crops and wiping sweaty brows until you die? Their smiles are all fake, everybody knows that. It’s a front for something malevolent, like the fact that not everybody is so thirsty for blood that despite all odds the yellow clothed faction might actually be kind.

That scares the Dauntless more than anything, so you spit at this totally foreign enemy and cast them aside. There’s a reason Dauntless soldiers gunning for a new place on the wall have to be forcibly conscripted into serving time in Amity. They swear off ever stepping foot in that faction, even though it’s statistically impossible that the city wall could have guard towers all around without having somebody there to watch over Amity.

You don’t bring it up, your heritage. It’s not your birthright any more than it’s Max’s, or Eric’s, or any of the other Dauntless leaders. You are no longer the sort of person who could live and die without a fight. You’ve split too many lips and knocked out too many teeth to ever look at someone smiling and not feel a need to end it.

It just wasn’t for you, that’s all. For Amity parents, yours were certainly on the stricter side of things, and you grew to hate how they ordered you around in the midst of Amity’s supposed freedom. The hypocrisy rankled, dragging at your skin with nails and talons until you could bear it no longer.

Maybe, if you hadn’t been someone who grew up with such desperate hatred of all who promised sweet things and never kept their end of the deal, you wouldn’t go out looking for the complete opposite. Dauntless would never lie to you like Amity did because Dauntless will never claim to be a place where flowers could bloom or skies could stay sunny forever.

No, if Amity was a spring morning, Dauntless is damned hellfire through and through. It’s still warmth somehow, still bright and fierce as anything, but worse, in a way that makes you spit at the world that could have been yours. Dauntless teaches you to be strong so that you can make others weak, but at least you get some sort of pride out of it.

Your light is burning through the cigarette faster and faster, a small heap of ashes collects on the surface of the table in front of you after you tap it. They spread out immediately, staining the tips of your fingers with a silvery sheen.

It hadn’t been enough to just live in Dauntless, you wanted to own it. Same as everybody else, of course. If you’re at Dauntless, you want to be at the top. That’s the principle of the place, and also how it manages to keep its wheels of war turning year after year. The people who end up winning want to stay ahead of everybody, and those who are dealt a losing hand push others down to get to a better level. The constant falling and rising keeps the faction in perpetual motion.

So, if you were set on making it big here, it makes sense that you’d brush shoulders with the same sorts of people. There are two types of viewpoints when it comes to shaking Dauntless to the core: those who want to make it worse, and rarer still, those who want to make it better. There are two names that come to mind when you think of this particular dichotomy, two young men who would give their all to wake up and see a Dauntless utterly different than the one they met during their shared initiation.

Eric Coulter is the first kind of radical. He’s more monster than man, which is precisely why you get along with him so well. Eric saw the fight in you, that hunger to either change this faction or tear it down to your level. He’d sooner kill than save, but no one’s instincts are better in a fight.

You take another breath of smoke and fire when you think of him. Eric is your slow poison, the one you always love to pick. He’s a rush, pure thrill with a human mind to make you worse. You spend a week head over heels, and Eric makes you feel like you could take on the world. The next seven days, you hate him so much you can’t think straight because he took your broken pieces and shattered them even more.

There is no reasoning with him, your madman. Eric is on a course straight to hell, and when you’re together, you run with him as fast as you can. If this is how you die, at least you’ll do it with a smile. You have never been stronger than when you’re by Eric’s side, and he is the same with you. He is Dauntless in the way that a blade is Dauntless, for cutting without a second thought; how a bullet is Dauntless true, for striking clean through fear you have ever dared to call your own.

If Eric is the brutal side of Dauntless, though, then there must be someone on the other end to balance him out. You met this counterpart during the initiation that the three of you shared. Years later, the training instructors would say that they’ve never seen the top rankings switch around so often as they did when the three of you were going through the initiation process. Eric would be on top for what he claimed would be forever, then you’d snatch the lead from him in the blink of an eye, and then the title would be conquered by someone else, and that someone was Four.

Four. Four fears, four weaknesses when everyone else seems to have so many. Four has something even more uncommon than Eric’s furious strength: calm capability. Four could look down the barrel of a gun pointed at his head and talk a shooter out of killing him. Four could look at you and see someone not just capable of love, but worthy of it as well.

You may never understand him. Four came from twisted memories, just like you, but where it’s only sharpened your jagged edges, Four’s past has made him kind. Every day, Four wakes up and decides that he’s going to take the fight against madness and win. He takes the power that Dauntless instills in its wild youth and uses it to spare, not to damn.

The worst part about the saving is that Four refuses to stop trying to free you. If he could come out of the tailspin of Dauntless, he’s certain that he can pull you out as well. The only issue is that you don’t particularly want to be dragged out onto dry land when drowning makes you feel more than you ever have. Not everybody is cut out to be a martyr, and Four’s cardinal sin is that he can’t fathom that you wouldn’t share his unconquerable spirit to save and save and save again.

It’s exhausting, in all brutal honesty. The smoke burns your lungs as you think of it, how Four begs and pleads with you every other night to do better, to come out of this. He’ll chastise you for your monstrous tendencies, then praise your strength, anything to convince you to come out of the dark and into the light with him.

Doesn’t he get it, though? We are all in the darkness here. There is no light to be found, no great fire to run towards in the midst of inky blackness. The only sparks are the people here, the points of brightness that will burn themselves out before they manage to contribute to any real flame. Nothing is real here, nothing but the blood we spill and the bones we break. Anything else is a delusion.

That doesn’t stop Four from trying, though. Some days, it feels as if you’re caught in the middle of one great war. Eric convinces you to kill off the rest of the world in favor of being the one left after it all ends, then Four makes you believe that there might be a life for you in which you could lay down your weapons and just rest, just be whole again.

In truth, neither side is quite you. How could you pick a side if neither one is right? Eric’s face comes to you out of the darkness, the sharp edges, the cunning smile as he drags you down beside him. You’re in freefall with him, constantly waiting for the impact, knowing that both of you would gladly pull the other with you if it meant you would die with someone you loved by your side.

And Four, his eyes as warm as blood coursing around a knife. He is the closest you will ever come to forgiveness, the only shot you have at ever being more than this mass of bullets and endless rage. Four is your chance at an armistice, your one way out. If you do not have him, you will never have anything again.

And do you, in the end? Want anything that cannot be yours without someone guiding you to it? The answer comes slowly, brought over in ripples of bluish silver smoke that curls around your fingertips like the rush of scarlet around a fist. You want what you have always wanted, that rare delight that made you choose Dauntless over anything else back when you were sixteen and living was still something that you couldn’t understand. Do you now, though? Will you ever?

You close your eyes, letting the burn of nicotine on your lips do the talking instead of your own words. You’re making your choice now, just as you did in your Ceremony all those years ago. There aren’t just two paths before you, there are countless journeys that are yours for the taking. You’ll run down as many as you please, with or without who you please. Two young men were not where your story began, and they will not be where you end.

Neither of them, then. Eric is too cruel, Four is too draining. You are some mess of both of them, and that means you have enough of their spirit to ever need them by your side forever. You take one last drag, then stamp out your cigarette decisively on the smooth surface of your desk. Down the hall, you can hear a gun fire at the same time, the echo spinning around your head with the last strains of smoke. This is not your epilogue, you know. Only the start of something new that only you will see. It is your choice, then, to see what you make of it.

divergent tag list: @dindjarinneedsahug, @poisonmenegan, @ozzynka, @rogueanschel, @with-inked-solace, @gods-fools-heroes

247 notes · View notes

teenandbeyond · 2 years

Note

Hello! This is a different anon from the one who asked for Kid from One Piece, but I was wondering if you might make a part 2 of that request? I loved that fic ❤

Kid and Y/n meet coincidently on a mission with the strawhats and others. They are not happy seeing one another, at least Y/n is not. The plot can be whatever you want, but in the end, Y/n joins the Strawhats group, much to Kid's dismay.

Thank you! ❤

Eustass Kid x Fem. Reader [Pt.2]

Angst...ah I've missed you.

Want more from me? Masterlist 2

Part 1: Hello

☆*: .｡. .｡.:*☆☆*: .｡. .｡.:*☆

🧲The Other Side🧲 (One Piece)

Warning(s): Angst

You bump into the man you hate most right now...it isn't the best encounter.

✨✨✨✨

"This secret map, the myth, do you know where it's supposed to be?"

The elderly woman smiled, "Dear girl, it's simply a myth."

You shyly laughed, "I know. But I don't have the best memory, it feels nice to be able to remember things."

The old woman continued to clean clothes in thought, "Well, no outsiders are told the complete myth. Only people who are from here."

"Really?"

"But, since you've been such a sweetheart, helping me with this laundry--I can indulge you."

"Thank you, Ma'am," you grinned.

"So...the part that the myth ends for you, is simply that it's on the island in the box of challenges, which is on the mountain, right?"

"Yes, in the box, there are hidden traps. They prevent one from getting to the map."

"Yes," the woman's eyes followed you as you hung a dress, "But there's a specific area where it's located."

"Hm. Makes sense why they wouldn't tell outsiders, most already believe it a myth. But if the pirate era is anything to go by, people like testing myths."

"We only get a few people that try now, before there were lines, but when no one came out...the amount dropped."

You frowned, "Wouldn't that say something about it being proven true?"

"We localists believe it's a trick our ancestors left, to destroy threats. A death box, I wish that we could get rid of it..."

"Hmm..."

"They say, it's located at the top, the deadliest floor."

"That would make sense," your gaze turned to the gigantic cube in the distance. "Do you know who made it?"

"No, young Miss, I do not, it's been long forgotten among us."

You hung up the last shirt, "You sure you can finish that yourself?"

"We made a deal, I'd only let you help me if I could do my own portion. I may be old, but I can handle myself, dear."

You sighed, "All right, thank you, Ma'am."

She cast you a worried glance, "You have such a bright life ahead of you, please don't go into that box and extinguish it. Don't waste it on an empty promise."

You give a smile and depart.

The thing was...it was the locals who were tricked, it wasn't a myth.

How did you know this? Because you had managed to get ahold of the blueprints.

As well as the fact, you could feel it, from whatever little bits of your power came back with memory.

You flipped out a machete, chopping at the vines and leaves in your way.

All you remembered was that you were powerful, you were the first mate to a pirate captain (you didn't know who), and you had a skill of sneaky stealth and often effortlessly stole things for your crew.

Speaking of your memory, one sparked when word spread of this secret map, leading to info that could be advantageous, your crew had been looking for it before. The story reemerged.

Only people with the strongest pirate instincts--along with the insanity to risk their lives for something like info, believed it was true.

Well, a few civilians or low-rank pirates who just wanted to prove themselves tried, but never made it past the first floor.

Considering where you were, you can guess which one you were.

"This is a whole bunch of vines, are you sure we're going in the right direction, Nami?" a gruff voice asked not too far away.

"Unlike you, I know where I'm going, I have a map...wait...do you see that, Zoro?"

"Yeah, these vines are cut, someone's been this way."

"Oh, yeah. I can feel them," a cheery voice announced.

"Why didn't you say anything?!"

"There are lots of people here, I didn't think about it! But this person is strong..."

You cursed under your breath.

Deciding to run as quietly as you could, you didn't want to run into anyone else looking.

Once you got a distance away, you decided to sleep overnight at a small motel, " One bed."

The man spits into a bucket beside you, making you recoil in disgust, "Eight berries."

You toss the coins, "Seems a little much for a place that looks like it's going to fall down in the next windstorm."

"Then leave if you've got a problem."

"Nah, it's cheap, it'll work."

You catch the key he tosses and head to your room.

Not paying any attention to what was ahead of you, you bumped into someone, "Oh, sorry--Oh."

Your face immediately turned into a scowl at his face.

Eustass Kid.

"[Name]. It's been a while."

"Mm."

"How've you been?"

"You wouldn't care, so I'm not gonna waste my breath telling you," you bit back.

"Seems you've gotten stronger--"

You scoffed, "I'm not gonna do this with you! You drop me off like that, and now you're acting like everything is fine?! Do you not understand what hate means?"

He clenched his jaw, sighing out, "Fine. I'm gonna ask this as a pirate, what are you doing here?"

You crossed your arms, "Same thing as you I'm sure, no one sober would come to this island for any other reason."

"The secret map?"

"No, they've got special bread here that I've been dying to try," you rolled your eyes. "Yes, the secret map."

You scoffed, "Now, if you excuse me. The more I hear your voice, the more I get annoyed. So I'm going to bed."

He let you past, watching you rush to your room, slamming the door shut. The force was so hard, that the hallway shook for a moment.

He was surprised the door hadn't fallen off.

Kid took a deep breath, "It's for the betterment of the crew."

Before the break of dawn, you set off, moving as fast as you could to get as must distance as possible from the man you hated...

..Well, maybe you didn't truly hate him, you were just hurt.

But it was close enough, so you didn't bother with the specifics.

And by the afternoon, you were standing in front of the box.

"Now, to get inside," you unscrolled the blueprint.

"Who're you?"

Your head snapped over to a curious expression, "Who're you?"

"I'm Luffy, Captain of the Straw Hats!"

You remember this man, Kid had complained about this captain often.

"Oh."

"You lookin' for the map, too?"

"Mhm."

"Where's the rest of your crew?" he swayed back and forth in his seated position.

"Where's yours?"

"Out for food. I had to wait here, something about not letting anybody get in before us," he pouted.

You tilted your head, he seemed much more disappointed about the food part.

Rolling back up the blueprint, you tuck it into your waistband.

"I don't got a crew. Here on my own, so if you excuse me," you walked to the entrance of the box...only to be pulled back into hard muscle.

"You can't go in there silly! I told you I have to keep you out," he smiled.

You groaned, trying to escape from your rubber-armed prison to no avail, "I forgot about your power, damn it."

He only laughed, not even budging from your effort, "You're trying really hard, huh? It's cute."

After he left you go and you ran for the entrance again, he didn't let you go again until his crew returned.

"Who's this Luffy?" a familiar female voice from before asked.

"I dunno. She was trying to get inside the box."

"Good job, you listened."

"Who are you?" a green-haired man asked, getting to the point.

"Who're you?"

"I asked you first!"

"She likes doing that," Luffy informed.

"I'm Roronoa Zoro."

You tilted your head, "So it was you. The man who uses three swords."

"So you know me?" he smirked.

"Don't get cocky, I only know you because of my ex-captain."

"I thought you said you didn't have a crew?" Luffy's voice asked next to your ear.

"I don't, not anymore. I left."

"Who was your Captain?" the girl asked, Nami, you remembered.

"...Eustass Kid."

"Wha--Him?!" Luffy exclaimed.

You winced, "Ow, you're in my ear!"

"I can see why you left," Zoro chuckled.

"It isn't like that...he's...a good person, he just--he stabbed me in the back."

"What's that?" Nami turned her gaze to the blueprint in your waistband.

Why would you tell her--Kid hates them, right?

You could indulge a little, work with them.

"Blueprints, for the box."

"Blueprints?" her eyes lit up.

"Yeah."

"How did you get them? Even the best of pirates looking for the box couldn't find them!"

You couldn't help the cocky smirk that tore onto your face, "Guess I'm better than the best at finding things."

"Hm...What's your name?" Luffy asked.

"My name? [Name]. I don't have a last name...I think."

"You think?" Zoro raised a brow.

"My memory's a little wacky."

"That name sounds familiar," Nami tapped her chin, "A very famous first mate has that name, too. Legend has it, she's over fifty with how good her skills are."

You snorted, you're definitely not fifty. But you must have been pretty cool for that rumor to be spreading.

"[Name]. Join my crew!"

"Ow! My ear, please!" you whined.

"Stop inviting people to randomly join our crew!"

"But then we can work together. [Name] has blueprints, right? If she's in our crew, we can use them too, or have her help us get the map to share," Luffy reasoned.

"That's actually not a bad idea, Luffy--for once..." Nami muttered.

Zoro scoffed, "But there's no way she gonna just--"

"--Sure," a mischievous smile overtook your expression.

"Eh?"

"I'll join you, and I'll come back with the secret map."

"There's no way it's that easy..." Nami squinted in suspicion.

You shrugged, "The only catch is making sure Kid is annoyed. I can do that by joining you. Simple."

"You really have a grudge, huh? That's petty as hell," Zoro chuckled.

"You don't even know half of it."

"But how can you get to the top alone? It's deadly."

Luffy finally lets you go and you walk to the entrance, "Trust me."

And you leave their sight.

You edge forward, flipping out of the aim of a dart, swinging across bars on the ceiling.

Hanging on your legs, you pull your body up, avoiding a thin blade that could've easily cut you in half.

After taking the right steps, you flip up to the next floor.

You ease up the floors, only getting a few thin cuts.

Kid growls as he and a few crew members hurry up the mountain, he could feel the straw hats and he could feel you.

He swore if they hurt you...

Just as he was about to break through to the top, a cloaked figure ran past, he couldn't tell who they were, they felt scrambled.

He caught sight of the scroll in their hand, "After him! He got the secret map!"

They changed course, chasing after them as they effortlessly leaped into the trees.

He growled as they stopped in front of Luffy, a hand signal being given.

His arms wrap around them as he prepares to launch them to their ship not too far away.

"You're not getting away Strawhats!"

"Gum Gum..."

Just as they launch away, the cloaked person reveals their identity..

With a booming laugh, you grin, "Not a 'he', by the way! Later Kid Pirates!"

Kid's jaw clenches so hard, that it wouldn't be surprising if a tooth cracked.

"Boss, what's [Name] doing with the Strawhats?"

He didn't know, but he didn't like it.

The Strawhats wanted a fight? They had one.

One should never take something of a pirate's...and they made that mistake when they took you from him.

#one piece kid x reader #kid x reader #kid one piece #kid eustass #one piece #one piece x female reader #anime #one piece x you #angst

128 notes · View notes

goldeneyedgirl · 11 months

Note

Hi!

Do you remember how you got obsessed with Jalice? What was it that got you so intensely involved in them & twilight?

For example, when its comes to me, everything started with this one video edit on YT, and then I read STL and @flowerslut ‘s CotN, and ohmy its was the beginning of the end for me, lol) 12-old me watched Twilight and was like “meh”, 19 yo me read Jalice and was like “ooh”. And then, I uploaded tumblr because I wanted to follow you, and got sucked into Twilight Renaissance mayhem. So, yeah, “story of my life” as Rihanna’s song goes.

What about you?

❤️

OH, I actually know this one! Which is kind of weird for me, my fandom acquisition is usually very odd.

Rewind back to Twilight's release (I actually have the OG Twilight release with the Alice cover somewhere), I was 18-19 and was enriched for about 10 minutes and then realized that I actually found it a deeply flawed and unsatisfying story, but I already know that I was here for Alice and Jasper only (though I have a vivid memory of opening my brand new copy of New Moon outside the post-office and being delighted when I saw Emmett's name on the page. No other context for that memory except that I was horrified how much paperback copies of New Moon and Eclipse cost me).

I have the recollection of reading one specific Jalice fic back then that didn't really spark joy, but that was about the sum of my investment in the OG Twilight fandom.

My sister dragged me to the first movie, I cackled at how Carlisle looked like he'd been dowsed with powdered sugar, was highly disappointed in the costumes and Alice's story being cut out of the movie, and moved on with my life.

Fast forward to 2014. I was heavily into the MCU, and was pretty fucking invested in Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (the superior Marvel cartoon, fyi), and was pretty enriched by one Janet Van Dyne and her dynamic with Captain America. Sadly, the cartoon had been axed for a hot minute by then and the fic was pretty limited. I'd say there were 10? Which lasted me exactly half an hour.

I was also working an internship and a full-course load and would end up spiraling into a Majorly Depressed Girl Summer, so my nighttime thing was to collapse on my couch with my iPad, the remote, and an ice pack for my headache and just read fic. But I was out. I had no Janet/Steve fic left that I hadn't essentially memorized.

So what ship would give me the exact same vibes (smol and hyper, tall and stern)? That had a whole bunch of fic available?

Alice and Jasper were right fucking there.

Around this time (November 30, 2014) as well, ABC Kids decided to play Breaking Dawn which was the fucking *weirdest* combination. I have no idea what the American equivalent would be, tbh. But Breaking Dawn on ABC *Kids*? That was a goddamn joke in itself, so OF COURSE I watched it. And Part 2 when it played (Lee Pace was a welcome surprise, as was Rami Malek.)

And I was like, welp, let's just fucking *go*. I spent the summer reading every Jalice fic on FF.Net *eye-twitch* and then I started writing it because the initial vibes had fit my needs, but now I was invested in writing - specifically, human Alice/vampire Jasper. That genre is like crack to me, and I will do it a million times over and still be having a great time.

9 notes · View notes

iamfabiloz · 2 years

Text

@jayzzu hi sorry here if ur onefire fic thing sorry I went insane and wrote so much more than a paragraph I got too into it💔 i literally cannot just do a simple thing real!! I wrote context for the scene where onewhisker and firestar r cuddling after Tallstar kicks the bucket! It is currently 4:30am I started writing at like 2am I am so sick 😁 anyways enjoy!! There’s probably a bunch of mistakes but my vision is blurring so I’m gonna pass out now AAAJWJ oki gone

Onewhisker felt cold air seep into his bones, the wind felt strange and unfamiliar to his aching pelt. A black and white figure was slumped on the ground before him. The limp tom’s once fever-bright eyes were dull and void, no spark of recognition in them at all. The cat’s pelt was cold to the touch and rolled lifelessly when Onewhisker nudged it desperately.

Tallstar was dead.

Windclan cats milled around the body, dipping their heads solemnly and murmuring kind words. Onewhisker sat in silence only a few pawsteps away from the cat who had once been leader of WindClan. Morningflower, Onewhisker’s sister, was hunched over looking devastated. Onewhisker felt his heart twist as he heard her shaky sobs.

Tallstar was her mentor.

Ashfoot, Onewhisker’s other sister, was licking her head soothingly, though her own expression was deeply grim.

Bitter bile rose in his throat, and overwhelming grief swept over him once more in a terrible wave. He had know Tallstar for so long, he had been something of a father figure to him, he wasn’t sure what he’d do without him. Onewhisker remembered being a small kit when Tallstar had been in his prime, leading WindClan valiantly. He was beloved, even by those not in WindClan. Onewhisker treasured those memories fondly, though sometimes he found himself wishing he were a kit again. But now he was a full-grown warrior, no long wet behind the ears and starry-eyed. And Tallstar was dead. Dead, dead, dead and hunting with StarClan forever. Onewhisker wished he could mourn in peace and just think about the good times with the old tom, but it wasn’t that simple. Before Tallstar had passed, he had given Onewhisker the most terrifying message he had ever received in his whole life.

He was to be the next leader of WindClan.

Onewhisker closed his eyes painfully at the memory, still feeling surprised at the fact that it was real. Everyone had expected Mudclaw, the clan’s actual deputy, to be the next leader. But, Tallstar had other plans. With his dying breaths, Tallstar had named Onewhisker as his successor, shaking the brown tabby warrior to his core.

How am I going to do this? Onewhisker thought helplessly. I’m not ready to lead a whole clan. What about Mudclaw? He could feel the deputy’s glare burning into the back of his head. The disgraced dark brown tom was hunched over in the back of the crowd, looking mournful yet extremely cross. I would be mad too if someone stole my position. But Tallstar chose me. And I need to honor his word, no matter what Mudclaw thinks. Right?

Onewhisker exhaled deeply through his nose, feeling even more wretched. Thought he agreed with the thoughts in his mind, nagging doubt still ate at him. He turned to gaze at the crowd.

I wish Firestar was here.

As if on cue, a flame-colored form began weaving itself through the sea of pelts. Onewhisker stiffened as the familiar orange tom grew near. Firestar’s pelt was glossy and slick with rain, his muscles rippling strongly beneath his fur. The tom’s emerald green eyes gleamed like fireflies in the night, making Onewhisker feel fluttery. The handsome tom finally made it to Onewhisker’s side, sitting down next to him with a worried look.

“Are you alright? Losing a leader is hard, I know how it is.”

Firestar murmured, his word gentle, reaching out with a paw to place it on Onewhisker’s side. Onewhisker shivered at the touch, despite himself. All his miserable thoughts seemed to fade slightly into the background as he stared at the handsome ginger tom. But the elder’s dragging Tallstar away for burial preparation distracted him from his momentary bliss.

“I-It’s fine. I’m just thinking, you know..”

Onewhisker fumbled, failing to think think of the right words. He sighed again, feeling his chest grow heavy once more. Firestar blinked at him, concern shining in his eyes.

“It’s alright, you can talk to me. I’m here for you Onewhisker, I’m your friend.” Firestar pressed closer, his tail flicking at Onewhisker’s own. Onewhisker’s muzzle twitched once, before he opened his mouth and spilled his guts.

“What if I’m not a good leader for WindClan? I wasn’t expecting this at all, how can I be ready? It’s too soon… Tallstar is going to be disappointed in me and so will all my clanmates, I- can’t do this, Firestar.”

Onewhisker clamped his jaws shut, preventing anymore of his own whiny rambling.

What was that? Onewhisker growled internally at himself. You made a complete fool of yourself, you rabbit-brain.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know where that came from.” Onewhisker muttered, his eartips burning with shame.

He looked wearily at Firestar, expecting a scornful look. Instead, Firestar’s warm face was filled with sympathy. Onewhisker stiffened as Firestar leaned over and buried his muzzle in Onewhisker’s shoulder.

“It’s alright, I know how you feel.” The ThunderClan leader whispered, his voice brimming with unexpected emotion.

“When Bluestar died, I felt hopeless and out of my league. She had been the only leader of ThunderClan I’d ever known and I’d never seen the position taken by anyone else. It was so jarring to have to take her place and lead ThunderClan, especially with Tigerstar around. Despite that, I knew that she wanted me to continue on without her. She believed in me and I know Tallstar had the upmost faith in you. He may have been on his death bed, but he was one of the wisest cats I’ve ever known. He chose you, for a reason. He knew that you were going to do amazing as leader, better than Mudclaw ever could. Everything is going to turn out great, I know it Onewhisker.”

Onewhisker felt his pelt grow increasingly warm. He leaned into the tom’s pelt, his comforting, foresty scent filling his nose. Onewhisker made a small choking noise and felt his eyes water. He had never felt so grateful and overwhelmed by kindness in his life. Utter fondness for the other tom washed over his pelt like an ocean wave, along with something else… Onewhisker swallowed hard, deep emotional babbling threatening to spill directly from his mouth.

“I- thank you Firestar. That means a lot coming from you.” Onewhisker meowed huskily, daring to touch his nose to Firestar’s cheek.

Firestar’s rumbling purr sent shivers down Onewhisker’s spine.

“Your very welcome. I would do anything for you, you know. I promise whatever’s coming we’ll face it together. You and I.”

Firestar meowed, his honey-sweet voice encouraging. He pulled his head away from Onewhisker’s shoulder, much to the brown tabby’s silent disappointment. Firestar gave Mudclaw behind them an uneasy glance, but he turned back to gaze at Onewhisker warmly.

Onewhisker struggled to keep it together, the fur along his quivering subconsciously. He couldn’t help but smile, despite them being present at a funeral. Feeling better than he had in days, he purred softly.

“I don’t deserve a friend like you.” Onewhisker murmured, glancing over Tallstar’s curled up form. It was now covered in lavender, mint and other sweet smelling herbs the elders had placed upon his deceased pelt.

Firestar nuzzled the side of Onewhisker’s head affectionately. Onewhisker bit back a mew of a surprise.

“Of course you do. Who else would in WindClan would I pester?” Firestar joked lightly. Onewhisker hid his smile by lifting a paw to his face.

“Thunder-cat.” He hissed playfully. Firestar purred and sat up straight. The playful light in his pretty eyes died as he gazed solemnly at Tallstar’s body.

“He was a good friend to us both.” Firestar mewed softly, his voiced cracking with emotion.

Onewhisker nodded sadly.

“I’m going to miss him so much.”

Onewhisker felt his stomach twist with grief again, but this time it was less sharp. Firestar’s warm presence soothed his turbulent emotions a smidge. But he felt his eyes brim with tears again and he couldn’t help but but lean against Firestar’s glossy orange shoulder and weep silently. Firestar shifted so that his head was resting on the top of Onewhisker’s own. The warm weight made Onewhisker squirm delightedly in his pelt despite himself. Onewhisker closed his eyes, feeling his tears dampen the fur on his face.

Though he wept, he was no longer soul-crushingly hopeless. He still felt the sting of loss but it was greatly dulled by the presence of the ThunderClan leader and the reassurance he had brought.

He had a … “friend”, someone who he could rely and depend upon. Someone who, dare he say it… loved him, truly, Firestar could see and understand Onewhisker in a way no other cat had before.

He has a mate and kits! A rational inner voice chimed in the back of the smitten warrior’s head. But it quickly faded to the sidelines as Onewhisker squeezed his eyes tighter, relishing the touch of soft fur against his. He didn’t want to dwell on more happiness destroying knowledge today, thank you very much. Anways…

Onewhisker he loved him, right back, always. Though he couldn’t cohesively put it into words, even inside his mind, Onewhisker was painfully aware. But just for right now, he wouldn’t dwell upon what these thoughts said about him and his state of being.

For now, the pitter patter of raindrops splashing against stone and grass filled his head, drizzling out any further thoughts.

Firestar curled his tail over Onewhisker’s side, partially shielding his from the dripping water. Feeling like he could breath again, Onewhisker sucked in air deeply, but this time it wasn’t out of fear or stress.

It was out of simple contentment.

I won’t let either of you down, he vowed, feeling the water droplets prick his pelt. I’ll do my best to make you proud, Tallstar. And you too, he silently thought at the ginger tom curled around him.

I promise.

#onefire #firestar #onestar #writing prompt requests #warrior cats #wc #warriors #jayzzu #please help #fanfiction

51 notes · View notes

drabbleposter · 23 days

Text

## abandoned fic

The room, frequently warm from sparked candles and welcoming with his boss’ cordial expression, had run cold. No, the candles were still there, and his boss was still strangely smiling despite the news he had just delivered, but it was something different. Like the tightness in Person A’s throat suddenly clear to him, or the frustration drawing his fingers in and unveiling fists at his sides, or the emotion pulling his face this way and that way.

The cause of this sudden change was words, a statement capable of changing Person A’s life only for the worse. Something that his boss fit on his tongue too easily for the punch it delivered. You’ll have to work with him in order to work against him.

It’s somewhere close to the saying, keep your friends close but your enemies closer, maybe just an inch off when it comes to wording but spot on when it comes to meaning. They both mean the same thing, play along with the enemy in order to hit them correctly–either physically or mentally, or any other way. And both of them ring true in all of the things Person A had witnessed or done himself, which also raises his suspicion towards those he does know pretty well.

But who was the him in question, the one that made Person A’s ire boil over at the mention? He looks like this, tall, virile, charming, and whatever simple and not extravagant synonym there is to fit in that bunch. He’s sweet (or was sweet). He was a gentleman towards everyone he knew, a samaritan, saying only the kindest things, yet, he was the same one who said the cruelest words that Person A has ever heard. Well, he never said it, never to Person A at least. But those small explanations could only fit one person, Person B. His ex high school sweetheart, his ex, that Person B.

Though, his boss didn’t know that Person B was his ex. Person A didn’t tell him that–it wasn’t important (and Person A hated holding onto a scarring past). Which ultimately makes Person A’s frustration his own fault because maybe if he addressed the fact he would have redirected the task onto someone else.

But Person A has his own principles, never let his personal life and relations interfere with his work. Person B was one of them, he was a relation. And even though he’s now in the same field of work that Person A is–perfect, right?--his memories and history with Person B are personal, and long gone.

“Okay, if it will help then I will. Do you have a location?”

“Daejeon. It will be a long ride but at least you have a hotel to look forward to when you get there. Heard from Person D that they’re planning on getting there two days from now, so you’ll have a head start, and don’t worry, your work will be beyond helpful for us.”

“So what exactly do you want me to do?” Person A asks.

“Just try your best to get close to him. You’re the more faceless worker of our bunch, it’ll be easier for you since only your name is the thing out there at this moment.”

It’s funny, his boss’ reasoning, because if only he knew that it would be useless here. Person B knew his name, he knew his face, he more than likely paired them together when hearing the name because how could he not. Person A was the name he said everyday, the face he saw everyday, you can’t just erase the value of both of those like it’s nothing. No matter how cruel Person B was, he couldn’t do that, and no matter how much Person A had grown to hate him, he couldn’t either.

“Okay. I’ll do my best then, and I’ll pack my bags as quickly as possible.”

“Great.” His boss smiled. “Then I’ll call a driver to your place in about an hour from now. For now, though, you are dismissed, and I wish you luck, Person A.”

There’s a churn in his gut, causing the after effect of guilt that he didn’t raise his voice and say he couldn’t do it, that he didn’t tell his boss why everything wouldn’t work, but he lets the feeling swallow him whole as he only nods before leaving the room without saying anything.

The ride to his place is quiet, no music and barely the small sound of the tires of his car driving over the pavement. The sound of motion lingers around in his ears, ping and pong. No music, no cars honking, nobody in his passenger seat saying this or that, but it’s loud.

His thoughts repeat in an endless cycle. A repeat of the interaction with his boss, the echo of his boss’ request, and the story behind him and Person B. The interaction was more stilted than usual, so Person A was surprised that his boss didn’t catch onto it. His boss’ request was daunting and dreadful. His and Person B’s story was fucking sad. Not the, shedding tears and screaming into a pillow sad, but the throwing his phone and being seconds from stabbing holes into Person B’s car sad (well, not that sad, but if you asked him at that time when he was high on impulse he would have said that).

Person A sighs, resting his forehead against the wheel when he arrives home. The car’s still running because he had yet to turn it off. The frustration like an ongoing fuse. It just feels immature to still be mad at something that occurred in the past, something that happened years ago. It already happened, but he’s still mad over it. Why couldn’t he just let it go?

Then after a while, Person A’s just one more shirt away from being done with packing the clothing section of his suitcase when he hears a car honk just outside of his apartment. An hour had passed just like that, and he only packed in a few sets of pajamas and going-out clothes for him to go.

Well now it’s just pack whatever he can while he can. Packing was a hassle, he had to conjecture the weather as well as what he’d feel like wearing, and most of the time he was never in the mood to wear what he had ended up packing too. It wasn’t much of a problem before, like years ago. When he didn’t want to wear what he packed–which was more often than not–he’d borrow Person B’s clothes, use his black hoodie despite having the same one just in orange, borrow his sweatpants, necklaces, but not anymore, and never anymore.

The proceeding honk results in Person A slipping whatever is on his desk, accessory-wise, in his bag. The clamor of jewelry sounding out as it lands on top of his clothes. Hygiene related products were already packed, they were his top priority, so the accessories being last was the favorable option.

He ushers down the stairs with his suitcase in tow, spotting the matte black car parked temporarily near the curb. He climbs into the front seat after sliding his suitcase in the back, muttering a quick apology for his time delay but the driver shrugs it off.

“Is this task any easier?”

Person A looks out the window, perching his elbow on the armrest and dropping his cheek into his palm. Trees blur by in motion lines, bushes, greenery in general, but it’s a weird and almost funny contrast to the cars that don’t. “Easier than the typical tasks?” Which primarily consisted of risking his life with a seventy-percent chance that he wouldn’t make it out alive. He hums in contemplation. Was it easier? Meeting up with an ex, trying to get close despite the rift between them that not even the longest bridge could connect, and trying to make things work. “No, it isn’t. Maybe harder. Way harder, Person C.”

Person C glances at him, almost as if pitying him. “Then what is it? Your task.”

“I have to try to get close to one of them…Ja–Jongseong.” It’s been so long since he had mentioned the name, or even mentioned him in any way. He avoided it since that day, since the breakup, but now that he had to, the habit of calling him by his nickname came back to him as if they were still dating. It was pathetic how part of him lurched to still grab that false reality of them being together. Regardless, Person A hated him, he was an asshole, not the person that Person A had fallen for before. “Basically getting close to him so it’d be easier to target the team after.”

“Ah, like keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”

“Pretty much.”

“So how is it harder then? It doesn’t sound bad.”

“It just feels harder, that’s it.”

Person C hums, but Person A’s pretty sure he doesn’t understand it still, but Person C doesn’t ask further. When they finally get to the hotel with the faint tunes of Justin Beiber and Post Malone playing throughout the ride quiet enough for Person C’s small lip syncs to sound louder than the lyrics themselves, Person C pulls Person A’s hotel room card out of the sun visor. “Here. You don’t have to worry about going to the front desk but if they question you, show them the card. You’re on the D hall of the second floor, room number is on there.”

“Alright,” Person A murmurs. He unbuckles his seatbelt and steps out of the car when Person C unlocks the doors. “Thanks. Will you also drive me back?” He pulls his suitcase from the backseat.

“Yup,” Person C chimes. “Good luck.”

Person A grins. “Thanks. I’ll need it.”

He closes the car door, waves Person C goodbye as the boy drives off, and enters the hotel. It’s clean, floors beaming back at him and bouncing back the reflections of both him and his suitcase. A quick scan gets his approval, but it wasn’t like he was entirely skeptical about the place either given that it was his boss who assigned it for him. Mr. Lee was nice enough to not do him wrong, especially since he’s such an asset.

Nobody questions him, probably too busy with others to investigate someone who looks like he knows what he’s doing. So he gets situated in his room after a while, finding his way around easily. He was familiar with hotels, the many trips visiting Person B’s family in the U.S. made him that way. Bitter memories. Bitter memories.

He lays his suitcase on the bed, careful of keeping the wheels off of the white blankets in case any dirt had gotten on them. The morning dew remains for a while when it’s cold, so there’s a high chance that it did. It’s just to check and make sure that he packed everything he needed, that’s all. He moves the zipper along the line of the zip, peeling the top back to behold the mess of jewelry on top. He picks apart the necklaces in the pile. A silver one here, another that was rose gold, another that was gold,and another–another one he remembers too well. Its origin (borrowed from him and never given back because he was told to keep it), who gave it (him, Person B). Yet the thing he didn’t know was why he still had it, why was it on his desk? He should have thrown it away a long long time ago. He really should have. Fuck.

“They arrived in Daejeon. Person D planted a tracker and it seems like either the entire team, or just Jongseong is heading toward a speakeasy near Seongnam-dong, probably meeting up with someone there. If you want to get any information feel free to go but be careful. Use an alternative name. But if you don’t want to and want to wait, you can. That’s just what I have right now that I can provide you with.”

“Update me when they arrive.”

“You’re going to go?” Mr. Lee asks.

“Yes. Anything to get started on this, so I’ll go. I kind of prepared an outfit for something like this just in case so I might as well use it even if it will only be once.”

“Good. Then I will send you the address. They seem to be arriving at 7:00, either exactly or around that time.”

“Alright,” Person A says, lifting his back off of the mattress. As much as he should have spent his time exploring the area, since he’s never really came here from what he remembers, he stayed in the hotel bed, finding ways to busy himself with his phone instead, for heading out would have been too risky. “I’ll head there as soon as possible, then.”

“Great.”

Enough time later, after a shower, a new set of clothes, styling his hair wavy for what took longer than his shower, and an abhorred glance towards a particular necklace before he chose the silver, he was on his way to the address he was sent. A smooth ride, it was, the taxi driver didn’t speak, only when saying hello and goodbye which Person A preferred more than anything for he wasn’t fond of chit chat. Then only two words have him entering the speakeasy. Though they had a history of being hidden or disguised in plain sight, as time progressed, that stopped being the case, but they still had the occasional person inside checking for passwords in order to get in, that stayed.

It was only about 7:37, the hotel wasn’t far but the getting ready process took the most time. Hopefully they would still be there–well, not too heavy on Person B.

They’re a bit like clubs, but more formal due to the long tradition of big groups meeting up at them rather than the much more common clubs people frequent. So it makes sense that they come here out of all places.

All of that aside, this has to be a regular interaction, nothing too stiff and intentional, so why not indulge in himself beforehand? If it’s just a simple sip, it won’t hurt. Yet, when he approaches the bar and the bartender greets him with a smile before asking what he would like, Person A answers; “Absinthe. Cocktail.”

Liquid courage. That’s what he needs if he’s meeting up with him again.

“Of course. And then for you, sir?”

Person A looks at him confused. The bartender’s gaze hadn't moved from his direction but he was the only one there, in that seat. He darts his eyes to the side, but that guy already had his drink, so his last option was to look behind him.

“Just a whiskey on ice, nothing as strong as absinthe.” His voice is different, same enunciation but just a semitone or two deeper than the voice he possessed back in high school, much more smooth and bewitching. He mentions Person A’s choice of absinthe, which insinuates that he’s going for a conversation. He knows. The bartender left by the time Person B had asked him a question. “Here? In Daejeon?”

“What do you mean by that?” Person A keeps his back turned towards him. Eye contact is too much, speaking is just enough.

#gang #exes

0 notes

besthimbomachine · 1 year

Note

I want your commentary on a section of one of your fics, or a whole fic, that you've been DYING to get your thoughts out on. 😊

I hope you've been having a good day, and wanted to get this in before I go to bed glrbfj.

Owwwn thank you sweetheart <3

Btw I got this ask for the Directors Commentary thing AND another one for that too by an anon, nonnie I'm gonna save yours until chapter 4 is done cause I'll for SURE have things to talk about chapter 4 too. I fought through the pure angst of chapters 1 and 2 to get to the other ones which will have more funny, fluffy and horny things which I love writing. Chapter 3 already starts that off with the horny.

Anyways into the commentary proper, I did a bunch of parts of chapter 3 cause I really liked writing it.

I guess first I wanna comment in the fic as a whole. If anyone doesn't know, the title "my love when it counted" comes from the hozier song shrike. If you haven't listened to it, go and look it up, it's great and very much the vibe of this fic.

Anyways, this fic came not from a prompt or situation I found hot as most of mine do but from a feeling. Like, we know Kenny talked about thinking of retiring due to his injuries and we've been getting the vibe, esp after this week's show but also on his feud with Osprey, that he has been feeling the years. That he knows time has started to take it's toll on him. And I myself have been kinda going through my own crisis cause I'm reaching thirty, and as someone who only fell in tune with my own skin after I was 25, the dawning of my youth scares me.

So a heavy theme of this fic is time, how it changes you, in some ways it's bad, in some ways it's good, but it changes you. It has the power to change you so thoroughly that you become a stranger to your past self. So this is a story about the inexorable march of time and the changes it forces on you, and how sometimes you can be the right person at the wrong time. It's also about learning to live with your mistakes and putting in the work to fix things.

Also, every chapter has a working title so I can tell from one look at my Google docs what it's gonna be about, this one was "down memory lane hard".

Chapter parts will be under the read more

That was the box Kenny had dumped any photo with you in, to never be seen again. Shit, he didn’t even know he still had that. He was supposed to have thrown it away, but he never did quite get up the courage to do so. Looking at them now, he could feel the bitter sweet pang of nostalgia, the way it tasted like ashes in his mouth. Swallowing thickly, he stacked the photos together in the box again. That’s when he noticed something else, the black metal previously hidden by the scattered papers shining back at him. (Kenny made the big mistake of giving himself time to doubt instead of just throwing things out right away, big mistake buddy. Nostalgia is a drug, and also a liar, rarely the past is quite as good as it makes you think. Anyways, this is not the last we will hear from the nostalgia box, it still holds something else we haven’t heard about yet.)

For the most part, the camera seemed ok, and it sparked in Kenny a curiosity that he knew he shouldn’t feed. Whatever pictures it held, he knew they would do him no good right now. He knew he should just put it back in the box and leave it be. But he couldn’t resist as his finger pushed the power button, body moving on its own, ignoring all common sense. All he could do was hope the thing just would not turn on. (These three first chapters are just a long stretch of Kenny making bad decisions, some he really thinks would work out - like pretending you are strangers instead of trying to behave normally - and others he really know wouldn’t work out and still he does. At this point he is doing this almost as a type of self flagellation, he knows it will only hurt but it feels better to have the pain than nothing at all)

But of course it did. (hello ominous one liner in italic my old friend)

When Kenny finally made his way to the old photos, the first thing he was greeted with was his own face. Those same baby blues staring back at him, although a good few wrinkles less and many years younger. (references to how he feels about his age are actually important but hey kenny time did you good, you look better now) He had a smile on his face, features framed by the ropes as he sat on the floor of the ring. Behind him, he could see the silhouettes of Matt and Nick facing the vast empty arena, only a few more blurred forms dotted in the background.

Sighing deeply, Kenny moved on to the older photos. Passing through pictures of him, Matt and Nick preparing in the ring, as well as pictures of you getting ready or climbing on the ropes. There was one video from that day that had you and Kenny dancing around the ring, and for the second time now he felt his heart shatter as his memory failed him. He made through the pictures of the four of you, but nothing moved his mind, the memories truly lost to time. (Time and how it changes people is at the core of this fics theme yes and the first thing time goes for in a person is their memories, the human mind is actually very bad at remembering things and sometimes that’s great but other times it’s depressing.)

Biting his lower lip, Kenny laid back against the headboard, finger pressing the button again, but the picture meeting him this time being completely different. The photo had been taken in front of a large mirror outside a building, and standing in the frame were the two of you. He had an umbrella in hand, and you had the camera covering half of your face as you looked through the viewfinder. (Go ahead and imagine the most Wes Anderson looking ass picture, that’s what I was going for, and yes I do deserve to get sent to the content gulag for my hipster crimes)

Sighing again, Kenny flipped through the photos rapidly before stopping when he noticed a change in environment. The picture he’d stopped in was of you, looking away from the camera with your hair tied up, water covering your bare chest all the way above the breasts. He paused, studying the environment, the stone walls and hazy fog circling you were hard to mistake. You two were at an onsen, by the size of it a private one, probably from whichever place you were staying at. (Hello darkness my old friend, like I said, I would have a hard time getting into an onsen cause the japanese still connect tattoos to criminal behavior and I’m covered in tattos but I’ve never commited a crime [Maria has in fact commited multiple minor crimes ranging from drug possession, to showin her tits in public, to having sex in a public-ish place, to stealing from a supermarket to the worst of all,multiple accounts of piracy])

Kenny’s eyes trailed the exposed skin on the back of your neck, eyes following the curve of your spine as it delved underwater. He felt his chest tighten again, you were so gorgeous, if he closed his eyes he could almost feel your soft skin on his fingertips. The next picture had you laughing, waving one hand at the camera as if trying to shoo him away. Your movement - and the surrounding fog - made the photo blurry, but he could still see your exposed chest. Warm water spilled down the inside of your breasts, kissing your skin in ways he could only have in his dreams now.

Moving on to the next photo, Kenny felt the air hitching in his throat as his eyes met with your own, large and entrancing in a way that he never found again after he lost you. Your beautiful irises stared back at him through the screen, keeping him locked in place for a good moment as he felt himself dragged to the bottom of a lake. And for a second there, he really didn’t want to resurface. (Kenny is longing to the point of self destruction, poor guy, but like I said I like to write my man a little pathetic, take him down a notch, make him suffer for his crimes and have to work to get the girl)

When he finally remembered to breathe, Kenny fully took in the image. You stared straight ahead, deep sultry eyes locked with the lens as his hand touched your face. One of your hands held his own, your lips touching his knuckles and the back of his fingers in a soft kiss. Water droplets ran down the curve of your breasts, with the way you were sitting the water just about touched your chest, not fully reaching your nipples. God, you looked like something out of this world, like a siren ready to drag him underwater, a lure he’d never deny. (If he won’t let you do like a siren and drag him to the bottom of a lake to kill him, does he really love you?)

Blood rushed to Kenny’s face and in a moment his breathing became hard, air evading him for a long second. It was almost like he’d forgotten just how gorgeous you could be. His fragile memory - and his most shameful dreams - not doing justice to a sight he once had so freely that he didn’t fully value. He was young and stupid, and you were too beautiful for him to understand - and fuck, from what he saw in the ring you’d only gotten better. (Gotta make sure to remind yall that we are romanticizing aging in this house, you look better in your early thrities than you did in your early twenties!!!)

It did him no good. (Ominous one liner here again to remind Kenny that he should have just turned off the camera)

Watching the scene in the camera had Kenny groaning, extending his legs out in the bed, free hand coming to rest on top of the bulge now formed in his pants. He watched the image of you continue to tease him on the screen, licking his swollen head as you made eye contact with the lens. Muttering curses, his eyes followed the movements of your tongue, his fingers caressing his large bulge over the fabric of his pants. Just the sight of your lips surrounding the head of his cock being enough to have him fully hard. (One hard thing about this chapter was making it clear what was happening on the screen and what was happenning in current time you know, I wanted to make it clear enough so that things wouldn’t be too confusing. Anyways, love writing handjobs and blowjobs, this short smut gave me both, I should have expanded on it but I was tired already.)

Shit, he knew he shouldn’t be watching this. Let alone taking his pleasure from it. It felt wrong, but he didn’t really wanna think about that right now. Kenny only barely remembered filming this video, let alone that it still existed somewhere. He brushed against it again by pure chance, it was not like a premeditated thing.

Fuck, he missed you in more ways than he’d want to admit, and he didn’t want to deny his body’s desire. He didn’t want to deny the way seeing you in the ring had his mind reeling. The way hearing your voice in the backstage halls sent shivers down his spine. He knew it was wrong, but for a single moment he chose to give in to the desire burning deep inside his core. (We get a ‘I know it’s wrong but fuck it’ moment. Was it wrong of him? Yeah, kinda. But as someone who has been friends with people attracted to me and has artistic nudes floating somewhere in the internet, my personal belief is you can jerk off to a picture of me whatever so long as you treat me like a normal human being I don’t care)

Pulling the waistband of his pants down, Kenny released his throbbing cock. Veins popping around the thick shaft and sensitive head, his fingers sliding around it lazily. (thick and veiny is my favorite) He watched as you started slowly moving your head up and down on the screen, each time taking more of his shaft inside your mouth. Groaning, he cursed the lack of audio on the camera, wanting nothing more than to hear the delicious sounds he knew you’d be making. Kenny’s large hand wrapping tight around his length, fingers barely meeting as he pumped himself slowly. (One way I like to give the idea of dick size in smut instead of using the extremely vague and relative ‘it’s huge’ or the waaaay to specific and not sexy at all ‘X inches’ is to compare it to other things, writing blowjobs and handjobs is good for that. I mean, you know how large Kenny’s hands are, if his fingers can barely touch when he warps his hand around his cock, you know it’s BIG)

Kenny took in a sharp breath as he saw your lips getting close to the base of his cock, the camera shaking in his hands as a shiver coursed through his body, setting every nerve alight. He threw his head back, cursing under his breath before looking down again, watching you with darkened eyes. Taking his hand from his cock for a second, Kenny spat on his palm before he went back to fisting his length, fingers now picking up speed. (Spit is not good as lube I know, but it gives a raw sense of desperation that I find sexy for blowjob scenes)

Darkened eyes followed your movements as you bobbed your head a few more times, from tip all the way down, until your lips finally reached the base. The image shook a little before it steadied again. Kenny could almost feel the sensations, the tip of his cock touching the back of your throat, the wet warmth of your mouth stretching around his dick. He’d never forget that feeling, sinful and holy, pleasure bordering on pain. (Deep throat! Deep throat! A girl got a well trained gag reflex, kudos. Also, I know it’s cheap using a pleasure/pain comparison but I like it, I do.)

You continued your sucking on screen, and oh, what wouldn’t Kenny give to hear the noises. He groaned, trying to conjure them in his head as he fisted himself faster now, one hand almost not enough to satisfy his full length. Pre cum dripped from his swollen head, onto his fingers and down his veiny cock, making his movements easier and faster. His erection throbbing in his hand, feeling hot and heavy against his rough palm. (I love this whole paragraph, man. It’s cause Kenny has those hug beautiful hands with long thick fingers. Imining that pumping a big fat cock has me way too horny. I’m a sucker for nice hands.)

You locked eyes with the camera once again, and Kenny could see his hips bucking forward in the video. The hand in your hair stuttering in its pace as your tongue slipped out of your mouth and under his cock. Shit, just seeing that had him delirious, spilling praises out of his lips that he knew you’d never hear. (Gotta slip at least a little ‘alas, poor kenny’ moment in the middle of this horny mess) He imagined the feeling of your mouth, the warmth of your tongue all around him. Deft fists pumped up and down at a voracious speed, his cock heavy and slick in his hands, balls feeling full and tight.

In the screen, his hips bucked erratically now, not even caring if he was bringing your head all the way down or not. Your lips looked wet and abused as they stretched around his girth, moving up and down fast. Pulling your head all the way to his tip, Kenny’s hand moved to your lip, pulling your open mouth towards the camera before coming back to his own cock. He fisted himself a couple times, resting the head of his cock on your tongue as his thick length twitched. Rope after rope of his thick white cum spilled past your plump lips, filling your mouth with it. (I regret now not thinkin gof using the word flooding instead of filling, it would be sexier, but also I find the ‘cumming on someones open mouth so you can watch it’ thing very sexy)

Kenny pumped his hand faster and harder, feeling the coil in his gut snap as he watched you close your pretty mouth, swallowing all of his hot cum, tongue darting out to lick some that had slipped down your lip. He felt his orgasm hit like a truck, shutting his eyes as the intensity of the feeling had him seeing stars. With a grunt, his cock spasmed in his hand, shooting his cum like a torrent. Multiple white, thick ropes spilling from his cock, feeling hot as they poured on his exposed thighs and hips, staining his shirt where they fell on the fabric.

Kenny rode his orgasm for what felt like forever, ecstasy completely clouding his mind. When he finally came to, eyes opening to see his still hard cock twitching slowly. Pearly white of cum painted his fingers, a string of it coming from the head and connecting to his hips. He swiped his thumb over his still sensitive head, spreading his thick white jizz over the tip. He was breathing hard, and it still took him a moment to fully return from his high. (I have a cum kink, send me to the nasty jail cause I’m gonna write guys who cum a lot and also guys whose cum is thick, you know I’m really horny for a character if I give him both traits, I like the image of a throbbing cock too, just *chefs kiss*, once again, loved writing these two paragraphs. Press F for Kenny’s shirt tho, depending on the fabric this is gonna be hard to clean.)

Looking at the mess he’d made, Kenny felt that pang of guilt back in his chest. Shit, he shouldn’t have done that. Pushing his cock back into his pants, he cleaned his hand in his already stained shirt before sitting straight against the headboard, the full weight of his guilt crashing down. He ran his hand through his hair, lips feeling dry as he swallowed hard.

He really shouldn’t have done that. If Kenny had felt bad after your recent fight, he felt even worse now. Like a sleazy, cowardly excuse of a man. One who was too weak to let go and too harsh to fix things. Worse, he felt like he had slipped back into the self centered asshole you’d left all those years back. Shit, this wasn’t who he wanted to be, and it made him sick to the stomach. He looked back to the camera, the video had already ended, the final image being your smiling face. (like I described this chapter once: Kenny’s very bad no good at all post nut clarity)

With a quick push of the buttons, Kenny deleted the video, erasing it from existence like he had done with the others after your break up. This was the right thing, and if he had known about this camera, known about this video, he’d have done it a long time ago. Now it was done, still he felt like shit. And there wasn’t really any way to erase that taste of guilt from his mouth. (We finish with Kenny doing the correct thing and also showing that he was an asshole but not a completly awful person, he did have the mind to at least do the minimally decent thing of erasing the sex videos he knew he had - he may or may not have jerked off to them before that just as he may or may not have jerked off to videos of reader’s matches - and this one he is erasing now. Like I said he will get the chance to straighten up his act and make some better choices, I don’t wanna end this in angst no happy ending)

#wanderbreadsworld #ask #directors commentary #maria speaks #this commentary starts off very thought and full of feelings and then delves into slutty shit #would you ever guess that this fic was me romanticizing aging so I can accept the inexorable march of time?#as the mountain goats once said: I don't know if it's true but I've been told it's real sweet to grow old

1 note · View note

hotdamnhunnam · 3 years

Note

🎰🔪🧨 with Charlie himself. 🤞🏻

Thanks for your request for my Emoji Fic Fest! 💗

..................................................

Slut Machine

Pairing: Charlie Hunnam x F!Reader Warnings: smut, swearing, Vegas shenanigans Word Count: ~1.5k Emoji Prompt: 🎰🔪🧨 (key words are in bold)

“Morning, sleepyhead.”

… Whose voice is that? Your senses are too hazy yet to process who it was or what he said. You blink your bleary eyes and wake up in an… unfamiliar bed. The sheets are a ridiculous resplendent red—must be a love motel or some shit—there’s a story as to how you ended up here but you find you can’t remember any of it. Sleep was so deep that you feel as if you’re waking from the dead.

When your eyes finally flutter open everything comes flooding back. You’re here in bed with Charlie Motherfucking Hunnam and the sight of his blue gaze and bright white grin gives you a goddamn heart attack.

You cover your face with your hands and groan out loud at just how mortified you are. Recalling how you’d made a clown out of yourself last night when you bumped into this million-dollar movie star. Literally bumped into him—till yesterday you never even knew him—you had just been crushing hard on him for years but he was always a completely unattainable celebrity. A girls’ trip brought you to Sin City; you and your besties were hopping casually from bar to bar, when you had stumbled clumsily straight into Charlie as he stepped out of his car.

You’d simply scurried off in that instant ‘cause he was too damn beautiful in person and your ass was terrified. But then bumped into him again soon after you both got inside. This time you had a full martini glass in hand and spilled its contents all across his shirt and thought you ought to help the man get dried. Decided then you really shouldn’t try to run away and hide.

You’d grabbed a bunch of napkins, dabbing at his chest and abs through the damp fabric as you nervously apologized for what happened. Your spastic wiping motions all across his chiseled muscles weren’t exactly very helpful with the spilled drink situation, as your brain cells were all absent in the face of heaven’s most stunning creation. Charlie said some shit about how bumping into you a second time wasn’t an accident. You were too hypnotized with lust to understand just what he meant.

He joked that you could make it up to him by winning him a jackpot at the slot machines. You told him shyly that the whole gambling thing isn’t quite your scene. Although he didn’t want to pressure you he asked you to indulge him in a night of fun—all kinds of shit you’d never done—let him take you out around Vegas to the wildest places you had never been.

It didn’t make sense that you felt so safe with him but hell you did. You were still sober by the time Charlie was coming onto you and all your girlfriends chanted do it do it do it! And the craziest night of your life began before you even knew it. Took you to his favorite high-stakes casino—then to seats in the front row at a big AEW Dynamite show—and then to some intense axe-throwing place that also offered knives and ninja stars and other shit to throw.

The best part of the night though… was of course when Charlie claimed you as his dirty little ho. The memory of it is vivid as you look up at him now and find that both of you are still stuck in the most mind-blowing afterglow.

***************

“No way that was your first fucking time throwing knives?!” Charlie shakes his blonde head in defeat as he walks you back out to the sweet car he drives. “Bitch I swear you’ve been doing this shit your whole life.”

You slide into the passenger seat while erupting in laughter. He’s so fucking butthurt that your aim was better than his because he’s a competitive smug little bastard. “Well I am an assassin specifically hired to take out insanely attractive actors… but I can assure you that wasn’t a factor.”

He closes the driver’s side door, turns the keys and the engine ignites in a smooth thrumming roar. “And by ‘take out’ you mean…?”

“It’s cute of you to ask but dinner and a movie isn’t really the assassin scene.”

He chuckles playfully as he speeds down the street, the night alive with white hot heat, the lights of Vegas bright as ever as the night deepens. “You gonna kill me in my sleep, then?”

“That’d be making it too easy.”

“Babe, don’t tease me. We both know you make it hard.”

Okay so he just pulled that card.

Fight off the burning urge to stare down at his crotch—no doubt the car would crash then if you saw what you’re imagining and know you’d be unable to resist the urge to touch…

You’ve never wanted anyone or anything in all your life so fucking much.

The sudden tension in the air leads him to smooth back his slicked hair, facing the road with a restrained stare. He’s been picking up on signals all night long but doesn’t dare to just assume you want to go there. Tries to come off calm and cool although there’s nothing he wants more. “So, uh—should I just drive you back to your hotel or…?”

The voice that comes out of your mouth is one you barely even recognize. It takes both you and Charlie by surprise, the way your inner slut replies: “That’d be a fucking bore. You know I’d much rather you take me back to yours… so you can fuck me like a filthy little whore.”

***************

The swanky penthouse suite in the five-star hotel where Charlie came to stay… it’s a ten-minute drive away.

That’s way too far needless to say.

He needs you right this second, after what you’d gone and said—although the backseat of his car is a fine spot for a good wrecking, there are fifty shades of shit he’d rather do with you spread in the comfort of a big sumptuous bed.

Thankfully there is an extremely tacky-looking love motel just down the road. And it’s the perfect place for you two to check in and let your passions for each other just explode.

It turns out this particular motel has a requirement for guests to stay the night that just might pose a bit of trouble: lovebirds have to pass through the adjoining chapel first and be a lawfully wedded couple.

So you stand uncomfortably at the reception desk and bite your tongue. Happen to know that Charlie tied the knot in Vegas once when he was young; you’ve heard about it in some interviews. You’re sure that he’d have no desire to repeat that same mistake tonight with you.

But this has been a night of wild crazy shit and he’s on fire to continue.

Mostly it’s just that he really needs his dick in you… but there’s a spark that he can feel might someday blossom into something more and he just hopes that you can feel it too.

***************

Of course you do. The ceremony is a joke but you’re both giddy as if it’s real by the time you’ve seen it through. There’s just no hope of sanity and self-control between you two.

You’re in a fluffy white confection of a wedding gown that this establishment provided for the night. You look like a big puff of cotton fucking candy and he wants to take a bite. So much about this night seems wrong, but when the heat between the racing of your heartbeats is so strong, it can’t feel anything but right.

Once you’re at last inside your room he throws you down onto the bed and dives headfirst into your gown, and goes to town, taking you high until you die as he goes down.

The dress is so damn big, that you can’t see his flawless face, let alone his glorious dick, and that’s a royal fucking waste. You need to see and touch and taste.

He knows exactly what you need and ravenously rips the poufy fabric off of you. His pearly smile and the bristles of his beard are gleaming with your pussy juices as he climbs on top of you. You long to tell him just how bad you want to blow him—want to tell him that you love him even though you barely know him—it would be fucking insane to say I love you, but of course you can still show him.

Yet he wants to consummate this marriage first, before he lets you satisfy your thirst. You’ll have a lifetime’s worth of days and nights to suck on his big dick if you decide to stay with him and make him yours.

That’s everything you want of course.

This whirlwind of a night that started with a stupid joke about hitting the jackpot at the slot machines… turned into you being his motherfucking wife, after the wildest and best night of your motherfucking life. And now he’s here on top of you about to fuck you and it’s totally outrageously obscene.

You wouldn’t have it any other way ‘cause you know you were put on earth to serve as Charlie Hunnam’s dirty little slut machine.

..................................................

Emoji Fic Masterlist

Emoji Fic Tag List – below; if you’d like to be added or removed, just let me know!

@happyhunnams @band--psycho @est11 @edonaspanca @starbooty @innerpaperexpertcloud @i-love-scott-mccall @six-camelot @alexa-rae-dreamz @coffeebooksandfandom @thesuicidalflower @flaireandsynch @helloheyhihowdyheya @gemini0410 @waywardodysseys @zozebo @bettergetusetoit @emilykjh @little-diable @rocketqueen @mrspeacem1nusone @miss-smutty @rayslittlekitten @abby-splace @chubbychubbs28 @miraclesoflove @tegggeeee @hunnambabe @missusnora @kesskirata @vixenrebellion @thexhostess @pomegranatearildreams @kandii395 @severewobblerlightdragon @itspdameronthings @niki-xie @cind-in-real-life @saweetspoiled @poge-life @few-proud-emotonal @samanthaisnthome @melodranas @soaharleys @charlie-hunnams-old-lady @simpmasterjr @nataliewalker93 @lovebarefootblonde @marvelousmermaid @tsukuyomi011 @sciapod @midnight-dreams-23

#charlie hunnam #charlie hunnam smut #charlie hunnam imagine #charlie hunnam fanfiction #charlie hunnam fic #charlie hunnam x reader #charlie hunnam x you #jax teller #sons of anarchy #soa #gavin nichols #the ledge #rpf #rpf fanfic #rpf fanfiction #celebrity imagines #emoji fics

177 notes · View notes

spencersstrawberryjello · 3 years

Text

Treat People With Kindness (The BAU)

Summary: Garcia gets Reid into Harry Styles and everyone subsequently loses their minds over it.

Content: Honestly just funny I’m not sure what to call it

MC’s name/pronouns: No alternate main character, just Spencer.

Word Count: 1706

A/N: This whole fic was inspired by the fact that a fan gave Matthew Gray Gubler a Treat People With Kindness pin, which then sparked my friend Emily and I to theorize that Spencer Reid would absolutely be a Harry Styles stan. So yeah, this is literally just the product of one fan interaction lmao

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I got a good feelin’.”

“... What’s he doing?” Emily leaned over and whispered to JJ, who just shook her head.

“I’m just takin’ it all in.”

“Ok, what happened to Reid?” Morgan joined them, and they both shrugged, watching Spencer walk through the doors of the office.

“Floatin’ up and dreamin’.”

“You know, maybe I need to add him to my drug test list too.” Hotch had stepped out of his office, trying to hide his grin as they saw Spencer making his way to his desk, headphones in and practically dancing over to his seat, mouthing every word of the song he was listening to. He plopped down in it with a little spin, opening a file on his desk without ever taking his headphones out.

“Try ‘Dancing with the Stars,’” Emily laughed, and JJ broke away from their group, heading over to his desk.

“Hey Spence,” She rested her arms on the divide between his desk and Emily’s, tapping on it to get his attention.

“Maybe we can find a place to feel good.”

“Spence!” She tapped his arm this time, and he practically jumped out of his skin, turning to face her.

“And we can treat -”

He quickly tore the headphones out of his ears, setting them down on his desk and looking up at her, clearing his throat.

“Sorry. I was listening to something.” He gestured to the headphones still connected to his phone, as if that wasn’t already obvious.

“Yeah, I noticed,” JJ laughed.

“Do we have a case?”

“Nothing yet, you’re good.” She tried fruitlessly to hide her grin, and he gave her a strange look.

“Ok…”

“So,” She plopped down in Emily’s chair, rolling it over to sit near him, “What were you listening to?”

“Oh!” His face lit up, and he grabbed his phone, holding it out for her to see. She put the headphones in her ears, hearing the final moments of the song he’d been jamming to.

“And we can treat people with kindness, find a place to feel good.”

“Harry Styles?” JJ laughed incredulously, handing him back his phone.

“You’ve heard of him?” He asked, taking the phone and sitting it back on his desk and turning back to her.

“I’m pretty sure most people have heard of him, Spence.”

“Ok, well, I hadn’t. But on Saturday I was speaking at the University of Mary Washington with Rossi, and one of the girls gave me this, after the lecture,” He grabbed his bag off the back of the chair, pointing to a round pin clipped on the strap. It was enamel, with light pink on the inside and a red rose in the center, encircled by the phrase “Treat People With Kindness” in black lettering. “And you know, naturally I thought it was a good message so I put it on my bag and I thought that was all it was. But then I ran into Garcia.”

“Oh god.”

“I was walking in yesterday and she saw it and kind of freaked out a little bit, and pulled me into her office and played me the song - the one you just listened to - and it was amazing and so I told her I thought it was amazing, which made her freak out even more and then you called with a case so I left, only to receive a a YouTube playlist a few hours later that she told me I had to watch every video on or she’d stop printing the case files for me.”

“You know she loves you too much to actually do that, right?”

“I mean, the odds were low, but I wasn’t going to risk it. Either way, I sort of listened to every single song on Fine Line and Self-Titled in one night and also a whole bunch of interviews that she sent me and he’s really funny and his music is great and the moral of the story is I kind of love him.”

JJ sent back in her chair, dumbfounded. “Dude… you mean to tell me Garcia made you a Harry Styles fan?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“I - Penelope!” JJ left without another word, making her way into Garcia’s office. Spencer just shrugged, returning to the file he was looking at - and his music - as Garcia spun to face JJ.

“Jennifer, my love, to what do I owe the pleasure? New case?” She asked. JJ just shook her head.

“You broke Reid.”

“I did not break Reid!” She defended with a grin. “I merely helped him reach his true form.”

“He willingly used technology, and he came into the office today practically dancing to Treat People With Kindness. So yes, you did break Reid.”

“JJ, dear,” Garcia got up from her chair, taking JJ’s hands in the doorway, “Do you remember when Reid got that adorable little shaggy haircut?”

“Despite the fact that he changes his hair like every month, yes, I do.”

“And do you remember what Hotch said?”

She thought for a moment, then her eyes widened in shock. “You did all of this… because of the boyband joke?”

“Like I said: true form.” Garcia returned to her chair, spinning around with a laugh. “In my defense, I didn’t know he was going to get a Harry Styles pin. I just took advantage of the opportunity when it presented itself. I already failed at teaching him to worship Lady Gaga, I could not miss another chance to try and pull him out of the dark ages.”

“You are ridiculous, you know that?”

“That’s why you love me!”

JJ laughed, leaving Garcia’s office and heading up to hers, ruffling Spencer’s hair on her way by.

“You should grow your hair out again.”

“You think so?” He reached up and fussed with his hair, just as Garcia emerged into the main room.

“Spencer Reid, my beautiful boy genius, did you do what I asked?”

“Garcia, I figured out how to download music to my phone because of you. So yes, I did what you asked.”

“You are officially my new favorite person.”

“Hang on, what is this all about?” Emily asked. Garcia grinned, hardly able to contain her excitement.

“I’m finally bringing the lovely Dr. Reid here into the 21st Century.”

“Penelope,” Emily raised an eyebrow at her, “What did you do?”

“Garcia thinks she did something revolutionary by getting me into Harry Styles’ music,” Spencer clarified. Emily immediately clapped her hand over her mouth, about to respond before Derek piped up from his desk.

“Oh, she converted you too?”

“‘Too’ - you mean to tell me that you, Derek Morgan, are a Harry Styles fan?” Emily was looking between the three of them now, practically in shock. Derek just laughed, holding up his hands.

“What can I say, the guy’s got an incredible voice.”

“And the make up of his songs is so interesting as well; I mean, when you look at the music he’s produced in the last few years in comparison to what he performed while he was a part of One Direction -”

“Oh my god please tell me you’ve also listened to One Direction,” Emily said, laughing when Spencer nodded.

“I don’t understand why you guys are making such a big deal out of this. He’s a singer, it’s not like he doesn’t have fans,” He defended.

“Reid, two months ago you didn’t even know who Lady Gaga was. This is kind of a big deal.”

“Conference room in five,” JJ walked through the group, heading upstairs as everyone else got up to follow her.

“Do not think I am dropping this,” Emily pointed at Derek and Spencer before jogging to catch up with JJ. Derek laughed, falling in step with Reid.

“So, what all did Garcia make you watch?”

“Oh, just a bunch of interviews. I did some of my own reading though -”

“Of course you did.”

“- and what I found really interesting was One Direction’s actual rise to fame. Because the thing is, they didn’t even win X-Factor. They came in third, and yet they became the most famous group to come from that season of the show. In Forever Young - their book - they talked about their time on X-Factor, but it was so strange to me because their first album - Up All Night, that came out not even a full year after they finished the X-Factor live tour - sold 4.5 million copies within the first year. And they just kept growing… Morgan why are you laughing?”

“I’m sorry,” They’d walked into the conference room by now, sitting down next to each other at the table while Derek tried to stop himself from laughing, looking at Reid in disbelief, “You read their book?”

“And their Wikipedia page - I told you I did my own reading!”

“You said you did some of your own reading, you didn’t say you’d memorized everything about their career!”

“Eidetic memory, remember?” He tapped his forehead, and Derek rolled his eyes.

“You never let me forget. I’m assuming you know everything about their solo careers as well?”

“Well I got into Harry’s stuff first, but I ended up reading all of theirs since I didn’t have anything else to do last night. It’s just so interesting to think about what One Direction’s situation reveals about human nature and celebrity culture. I mean, a lot of their fans are dictionary definition erotomaniacs, and yet -”

“I shouldn’t even be surprised that you read this all in one night.”

“Like I said: didn’t have anything else to do.”

“As much as I’m glad you boys are bonding, we have more important things to worry about than Reid’s newfound love for a British boy band,” JJ interrupted.

“Niall Horan’s actually Irish -”

“Spence. The case.” She pulled up the photos on the screen, and Spencer nodded, opening the case file in front of him as JJ began to review everything they needed to know. She finally closed out, and Hotch grabbed his tablet and rose from the table.

“Alright, wheels up in thirty.”

Everyone nodded, gathering up their things and vacating the room. Spencer and Derek trailed out after everyone, Spencer picking up the conversation as soon as JJ finished.

“You know, I’m considering learning how to knit - there’s this cardigan that Harry wore...”

#criminal minds #criminal minds fanfiction #spencer reid #spencer reid fanfiction #bau #bau headcanon #spencer reid headcanon #criminal minds headcanon #bau fanfiction #fanfiction #reid #dr reid #dr spencer reid #writing #harry styles #treat people with kindness #hs #styles

142 notes · View notes

lebrookestore · 3 years

Text

ignite it; l.tn

Pairing: Ten Lee x reader

Themes: angst, suggestive, sad-ish, the reader is not in the best state of mind, making out

Warnings: suggestive, unrequited love, self hate? kind of, tens an asshole, a toxic relationship, everyone is fucked amen

Wc: 2k

Playlist: here

Taglist: @danishmiilk @channoticedmeuwu @chicksung @1-800-seo @blueprint-han @jenosslut @cupidluvstarrz @kkakkdugi @yunntext @vera-liscious @leetaeyonglover @kunrengui @unknown5tar @kisshim @the-rooftop-fight

Authors note: ahem, this is a very self indulgent fic, it turned out to be longer and spicier than I had anticipated, its a bunch of making out and angst, enjoy! I got carried away h a h a. I even made a spotify playlist oh em gee

The incessant ticking of the clock was the only thing keeping you sane at the moment. You had ten minutes before he would arrive, ten minutes to pull yourself together, out of a hole you had dug yourself into. Sighing, you took your cup to your kitchen, placing it in the sink and running a hand through your hair.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Time was something that always roped you in. You never had enough, you had too much, you had none. The minutes ticked by as you walked to your bedroom, taking your sweater off.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Was it a sin to feel this way? You had never felt it before, it felt so wrong, yet so right. Every touch was like throwing alcohol on a flame. All it did was help it burn brighter.

Five minutes.

You didn’t want Ten to arrive, you wanted him to stay far away from you. You wanted to never see him again, because every moment you spent with him ate at you, it made your skin crawl. He gave you that momentary high, before you crashed back down to the ground, keeping you roped in.

You kept going back, for that mercurial high, those few hours where you could pretend you had it all, when you could pretend that he was yours, when all you were was a distraction. Stress relief, a girl with no face he gave his attention to.

Why did you keep going back?

A desperation coursed through you as you glanced at your phone, awaiting the text that told you he had arrived. You wanted him to come, you wanted him there with you right now, kissing you, making you forget everything. How could you have ever doubted him? It was Ten after all, the boy you loved. You trusted him with everything you were, you wanted him to be there-

No you didn’t. You wanted him to leave, but god, you wanted him to stay as well, stay with you and never leave.

It was a dangerous game.

He left so fast as well, you would never see him for more than a few hours on end, before he would disappear, only to show up late in the night, apologizing profusely, telling you it was his terrible memory. He told you he loved you, he promised he did.

He remembered everything else, everyone else, but you.

You remembered when you first met Ten, the pretty boy with an even prettier smile, in the pouring rain. He gave you his umbrella and walked away in the rain, his hair matting against his forehead as he smiled at you, assuring you it wasn’t a big deal.

You met him again later by chance, and he smiled at you again. You swore you had never been more entranced by such a simple gesture before. He was in your college, and you had bumped into him on campus. You promised to give his umbrella back the next day,

You didn’t see him the next day, in fact, you didn’t see him for a whole week, yet you carried the umbrella around. It was about more than just the umbrella, you wanted him to give you that smile again, to thank you and smile again.

You finally saw him and finally returned the umbrella, and left, suddenly feeling empty. You had no reason to run into him again, so you decided to forget about him, until you ran into him at a party. From there on, the two of you got closer, until one day he finally kissed you.

You didn’t see him for a week after that.

He came back, and never made any indication he remembered the kiss, in fact he made no mention of it. He would cut you off every time you tried to bring it up, offering to hang out some other time, or talking about something absurd and unrelated.

Finally, he spoke about it, telling you he liked you but didn’t want anything serious. You agreed, assuring him you liked him back. You said it was alright, it was fine if he wasn’t ready for a relationship, you were fine.

From then on, you tolerated it all, the late night calls, his random mood swings, the times he would seemingly disappear for days on end, before returning and kissing you, avoiding your questions and promising to make it up to you.

He loved you after all, he said, he loved you.

He did, right?

Tick. Tock.

You still didn’t know what the two of you were, and it had been months. Months of running around each other, of missing him and having him before losing him again. Maybe he liked playing games with you, maybe he liked the way you broke slowly for him, forgiving him every time.

You loved you after all, you loved him.

Your phones screen lit up, and it was embarrassing, just how fast you clicked on the notification, eyes glossing over as you read the message.

[00:45 am] Ten: I’m here

You swallowed the lump in your throat as you walked to the living room, past the hall and to your main door, right hand gripping the knob. Everything inside you screamed to leave it shut, to stop this game right now. You didn’t want to be a pawn anymore, you wanted to roll the dice, pull a six and win.

And leave.

But he was so close. Even that thought made you shiver, just outside your door was Ten, the boy your loved, the boy you wanted. Just thinking about it set you off, igniting a fire that lay dormant when he wasn’t around. A euphoric flame that you didn’t want extinguished.

You opened the door, holding your breath.

Tick. Tock.

He stood there, looking gorgeous as usual, hair messy, lips red, eyes staring into yours. He had his hands in his pockets, as he held the gaze, taking a step forward and licking his lips.

“Y/n”

All he had done was said your name, but fuck, even that made you want to drag him by his collar inside and kiss him. It sent shivers down your spine, and even if it was well past midnight, you felt alert and awake, buzzing with energy only he gave you. That short lived adrenaline shot.

“Ten”

You sounded breathless, and he hadn’t even done anything. He stepped inside your house and shut the door for you, looking back at your expectant eyes, before leaning forward and capturing your lips in an intoxicating kiss.

Your hands quickly found their way to his hair, his hands found your waist pulling you closer. Tugging slightly at the hair at the base, you tilted your head, staggering back as he followed.

The game had begun.

Fuck he was right there, you were in his arms as he kissed you. You felt that flame light again, burning brightly with fury. You hated the way you liked it, the way you wanted it to never stop. The sparks jumped brighter, but you weren’t so sure it was a good thing.

You hated the fact you left yourself go through the same thing again and again, the same excruciating pain, just for a few moments of happiness. When he came around, you forgot all the hatred you held, you only remembered that he was there.

Stop, please stop, you thought, before your mind did a full one-eighty flip, pulling him closer. Ten pulled away, pushing you against the wall before he kissed you again. Your fingers fisted the ends of shirt as his lips trailed down to your jaw, leaving butterfly kisses all along it. They travelled down to your neck, and you were lost.

Lost in between kisses and touches, trapped within your own mind wasted. It was so wrong, but it felt so, so right. You didn’t know how to stop, you were utterly lost to him. You felt yourself going dizzy, you couldn’t think straight.

This wasn’t how love was supposed to be right?

At first it was wonderful, you would get those first crush butterflies, you would feel giddy every time he was around, every time he kissed you, Now even the thought of Ten filled you with dread, a dread that would pool in the pit of your stomach, until it was replaced with wanting him.

It was a rush, pulling him closer, only to lose him again, why the fuck did you still want this?

He cupped your face, kissing you once again, before pulling away. His half lidded eyes stared back at you. You wanted to follow him, and kiss him again, but you waited. He pulled you along with him to your bedroom, he pulled you along like a puppet like he always did.

You were attached as he strung you along, and the ironic thing was the fact he had asked for a no strings attached relationship. Correction: he asked for no relationship at all.

Every kiss burnt, setting your skin alight. It was painful against your lips. It was messy, it hurt, and it was wrong. You shouldn’t enjoy it, you shouldn’t want him, but you did, fuck you wanted him all the time. You wanted him to be yours.

“I’m sorry”, he whispered against your lips. He sounded genuine, like he meant it, but it was all a lie. You knew how things would go, he would come along, he would apologize, he would promise he loved you, and he would leave, leaving you empty.

He would light you on fire, and leave you to burn out.

Of course you forgave him, you always forgave him, because you didn’t want him to leave. Because you hoped that one day he would come back for you, and he would stay. You still held onto that foolish hope that the initial feeling of happiness would come back to you.

That flushed feeling of butterflies, the giddiness, the giggling and late night talks. You wanted the Ten you had met before back, but you wanted the Ten you knew right now as well. You wanted it all.

You would end up with nothing, you knew.

You were greedy, but you didn’t care. You still wanted everything you could have, even if it was only for a moment. You let yourself get lost in him, lost to him like a moth drawn to a flame.

Make me forget, you thought, make me forget you. You couldn’t forget him even if you tried. You loved him, didn’t you?

“It’s okay”, you said in between kisses, as his lips trailed down your skin, searing hot.

Maybe you weren’t in love with him, you were in love with the idea of having him. You were in love with his smile, his eyes, the way he spoke. You were in love with the memories you had, and you held onto them.

You sometimes wondered what you would be like if you had never met him. If you hadn’t been out there in the rain that day, if you were still oblivious to Ten’s existence and everything about him, his pretty smile, his dark eyes. Everything that you loved about him.

Your love was tainted, but you believed it was beautiful in it’s own dark, twisted way. Maybe it was a fairytale told by wronged side, the side of the story that no one liked. You hated it too, but you couldn’t stop it. You lived for that tainted beauty.

All fairytales came to an end at one point, but this one never had one. It was a cycle, the same thing over and over. You were afraid of the end, knowing it wouldn’t be a happy one. It had no chance to be.

His tongue swiped your lower lip dangerously, asking for permission. you nodded weakly, wrapping your arms around his neck, basking in the familiarity of the situation. The flame inside you burst out, angry and wanting. You let yourself fade away in his arms, mind going blank.

He ignited you once again, only to leave by the end of it, a dying fire left behind.

After all, fires were meant to be extinguished.

144 notes · View notes

bigskydreaming · 3 years

Note

I agree with everything you said in the last post but especially the Damian part.

Like I don’t know why people treat it like Dick had to choose between two toys and he chose the shinier model. He was in a situation where a 9/10 year old child was going to go back to a murder cult if he didn’t find a quick way to sure he stayed. And no option was good if Damian left. It was either Ra is going to steal his body or would become a powerful supervillain who would resent the whole family and between that is a whole lot of child abuse. It not like Dick had all the time in the world to figure out a different way for Damian to stay he had maybe like a day.

Also we never actually got to see Dick’s view on the situation only Tim’s because the only time we got to see that conversation was in Red Robin ( which might be wrong but I’m pretty sure I’m right). Tim was having a slight mental breakdown so maybe not the best narrator.

Like, the ONE thing I'd love for people to keep more centered in the varying discourses about Dick, Tim, Robin and Red Robin, is that like.....

The writer himself had Tim and Dick reconcile and work together in the aftermath of Tim leaving because he was upset.

It really doesn't get mentioned enough IMO that at no point in the actual canon stories was Dick ever oblivious to Tim being hurt, uncaring of this, nor did the canon ever try to claim on Dick's behalf that he DIDN'T hurt Tim, y'know?

I talked earlier tonight about the importance of remembering that these are fictional characters who can not CHOOSE any actions for themselves, but rather are ruled entirely by what the writers choose FOR them.

And the thing is.....for all that Dick is often characterized in fanfics as being oblivious or uncaring to having hurt Tim, or say that he kicked Tim out of the house and the city, or that he called Tim crazy or that he chose Damian OVER Tim or all these other things.....

None of those things say anything about Dick or what kind of character he is, despite the fact that fanon and fics have made a huge deal OUT of running with the idea that THOSE acts in fact say a LOT about Dick's actual character or whatever.....

But like, the point is not just that none of those things say anything about Dick simply because they're not how the canon went....

JUST as important, IMO, is the fact that none of those things are even in the BALLPARK of saying anything about Dick's actual character.....

Because the actual canon was written the way it was for the sake of TIM'S story. It was never about trying to make Dick look good, the events played out the way they did because the writer INTENDED there to be conflict between the brothers about it! Dick didn't find some magical way of ensuring that he delivered the news to Tim in the absolute right way possible because he just didn't care enough about Tim's feelings to do so....Damian delivered the news to Tim in the absolute worst way possible BECAUSE the writer WANTED the chasm between Dick and Tim.

THE CONFLICT WAS THE STORY!

And just as importantly.....the same writer who caused the conflict also RESOLVED the conflict. In his own same stories. Tim and Dick may have never hashed over every single detail of Tim's issues with Dick, but there was CLEARLY a reconciliation. Tim showed his forgiveness, his understanding of why Dick had done what he'd done and the fact that he'd made his peace with it, in a variety of ways from telling Dick he still had his trust, joking with Dick in SPECIFIC ways that called back to personal in-jokes that they'd had since the 90s -

(and that in fact were originally written by the same writer....like, the Brady Bunch jokes are a SPECIFICALLY Fabian Nicieza thing, as in he's the only writer who has EVER had Dick and Tim having that particular in joke between them, and he established it when he first wrote Tim, when he and Dick were great during Tim's time as Robin in the 90s. Tim calling back to those jokes during Red Robin and specifically reinviting memories of some of his favorite moments with his brother HIMSELF, like was as clear a peace gesture as you can get, IMO.)

But point is....the conflict happened the way it did, because it was MEANT to happen. There was supposed to be conflict, so by that very token, Dick wasn't MEANT to find the perfect way to handle the Robin situation that made sure Tim didn't suffer any negative feelings about it.

The reason its lasted so long as discourse in fandom was that regardless of the fact that the writers and characters both showed a resolution to the conflict that was deliberately sown to BE a conflict in the first place....

Fans of Tim decided this resolution wasn't adequate enough.

And so the events of it have been tweaked endlessly, as has the fact that the brothers reconciled itself, in order to keep this conflict extended far beyond the parameters or duration of the ACTUAL canon conflict its based on....with Dick further exaggerated into this uncaring instigator because the conflict FANS wanted was one in which Tim was Dick's victim in a way that he was never intended to be by the initial source conflict, which wanted BOTH characters to be somewhat sympathetic but now turned into a one-sided thing where only ONE character is 'deserving' of sympathy.....

But the problem is....that wasn't the story. And this wouldn't BE a problem, due to it being fanfic and fanfic being innately transformative, if not for the fact that people keep trying to point to canon actions as the proof of conclusions they're drawing about Dick's actions in the FANON conflict.....when the only thing the canon actions are meant to serve as the foundation for, is the conflict which ACTUALLY happened AND was resolved in canon!

And the thing is, a lot of fandom have done a lot to compare this situation to Dick losing Robin in the first place, but without actually leaning into that comparison in order to examine how Dick truly felt about that then, and ACTUALLY make it the comparison they're raising it as.....

(people can't claim that they've done this if they themselves are calling the situations parallel and yet clearly holding Tim and his feelings as innately more sympathetic and deserving of understanding than they're willing to even retroactively apply to Dick in the very situation they themselves have invited comparisons to....like if you're STILL calling for Dick's head for what he did with Robin here in a way that you're not having any characters anywhere, even just in reference or passing say that Bruce deserves being chewed out for to similar degrees.....your comparison is rigged from the start, it just is)....

But ultimately at the end of the day, there IS an answer for why Dick wasn't more careful and studious in his handling of the Robin situation....and that answer, for better or worse, is that he wasn't MEANT to be. The handling exists the way it played out, because it was meant to engender a specific conflict, one that was then resolved to the satisfaction of the story's writer.

If that wasn't to the satisfaction of fans, that's understandable! No story ever satisfies all fans!

But the problem is, the transformative nature of fanfic cuts two ways. And this is what people so often conveniently overlook when they cite that you can do anything with fanfic and that its subject to everyone's personal wants and agenda.

Like this is all perfectly true. But what people CAN'T do, is forbid others from drawing conclusions based on what decisions you do and don't make with fanfic.

And the problem with the Red Robin discourse, is we have a conflict that was engineered from the start, and negatively impacted a particular character aka Tim.

And the resolution the canon offered didn't satisfy the itch a lot of Tim's fans had for that particular conflict.

But the thing is.....there's two entirely different ways to tweak a conflict with fanfic.

You can make it BETTER.

Or you can make it WORSE.

And nine out of ten times - with this being especially obvious when you keep in mind that the canon itself DID CREATE RESOLUTION TO ITS OWN CONFLICT - its very apparent that a lot of fans just were not interested in making the resolution of this conflict even BETTER than what we got in the canon.

See, because the reason it happened in canon at all was NOT in fact because Dick was just as uncaring and neglectful as FANON of this conflict makes him out to be....since the reason it happened that way at all was ONLY because the writer needed it to happen in SOME way that sowed conflict between Tim and Dick and sparked Tim's solo journey of self-discovery.....

The only real way to BETTER resolve the conflict of the Robin mantle transition...

Would be for Dick to specifically approach Tim in such a way as to take his feelings about the matter into account and make his argument for why he felt Damian needed this now.

And that's something that's ABSOLUTELY easy to do, because the only reasons things DIDN'T happen that way in the first place, was circumstantial! Because the story was PLOTTED to have Damian spill the beans before Dick even had an opportunity to talk to Tim one on one. Changing a story's direction born of circumstance is one of the easiest things to do with fanfic since all you have to do is write different circumstances! Nobody's character even needs addressing there, because no character is inherently flawed for that story happening the way it did....that's why the story WORKED, in canon! Dick just circumstantially wasn't given even an OPPORTUNITY to be as conscientious about the matter as we would have liked him to be.

Easy, EASY fix with fanfic.

But that's not what fanfic tends to do with this particular story point, is it?

Instead, we get constant worsenings of Dick's motivations, Dick's choices, Dick's reaction to Tim's response, etc, etc.

The slant is entirely one-sided, aimed at making Tim not just more sympathetic, but Dick LESS sympathetic. Making it a nuance-free example of not even two brothers fighting in the face of their mutual grief, but one being VICTIMIZED by the other's willful ignorance of their feelings and loss, while simultaneously demonstrating none of the same himself.

And that's a choice that tons of fanfic writers have made, and they GET to make that choice, but what doesn't get to happen is making everyone else pretend that this was the only way the story COULD have gone, the TRUE resolution it deserved and the thing that ACTUALLY said something indicative of Dick's character.....

When not only were there these other opportunities to resolve the conflict in ways better for BOTH characters....the resolution of the actual conflict is considered irrelevant even though creating a conflict that could be resolved in story was the ONLY reason for the characters making the specific choices they made in the first place!

The discourse is literally all just born of people using the slight against Tim's character as an excuse to make Dick's character look worse. IMO to distract from the fact that this happened at all, because the real gripe was with Tim not being Robin anymore but there was no way to unilaterally decry that WITHOUT making the case that Damian should never have been Robin, and most fans I think recognize that would have been a nonstarter, discourse wise. There’s no rolling the clock back on a new Robin EXISTING, that’s been proven conclusively in the past. Once a character has been a Robin, you can’t argue away their right to ever be one period. If it couldn’t happen with Steph, despite the shortness of her Robin tenure and the smaller size of the girls’ fanbases relative the various Batboys (and let’s not pretend a disparity doesn’t exist there), then it wasn’t going to happen with Damian. So fans made their displeasure known in another way - venting it on the character that precipitated the changing of this particular guard.

And the thing is, ultimately, for all the comparisons made to the Bruce and Dick Robin debacle, they all fall short of being valid given two fundamental differences:

1) Canon has one hundred percent refused to ever fully address the conflict Bruce created in story when he fired Dick or just gave Robin away to Jason, with the only time its ever really been addressed in the comics being when Dick came to confront Bruce about it and Bruce made no form of actual apology or recourse, but instead ultimately just yelled at Dick about missing him and then told him to go. Which umm. Yeah. Oh, the resolution of it all.

2) The other key difference being that while there are certainly fans who have used these story points simply TO make Bruce look worse, the same as I'd argued happened with Dick in the Red Robin scenario.....it is still undeniable that there are a sizable number of fans such as myself who have always insisted we only raise this particular story element because we WANT to see better or actual resolution of the conflict raised in story - aka Bruce firing Dick or just giving away Robin - AS WELL AS being very clear on a perfectly easy way TO showcase better resolution: just having Bruce fucking OWN HIS ACTIONS AND APOLOGIZE FOR THEM.

So even with the awareness that while ultimately both Robin turnovers only happened because the writers chose that conflict happen, they remain incomparable in my mind purely because only one of them was ACTUALLY resolved or treated as resolved in canon, and like.....the other one is the only one that actually has fans continuously making the point of what story actions can actually be taken in meta, headcanons and fics, TO create the resolution we want.....whereas the other conflict will never be resolved any better than it is in canon, because the people who keep raising the conflict don't even want to acknowledge that it even WAS resolved in canon at all, because that would defeat the entire purpose of continuously worsening the conflict specifically TO create reasons for a continued grudge against Dick's character.

And you flat out just can't ever resolve a conflict that people ultimately WANT to exist.

28 notes · View notes

aubreyprc · 3 years

Text

hope ur ok

part three of my sour series

for @ssa-sparks, who requested a hotchniss witsec fic surrounding ‘hope ur ok’ if you have any requests feel free to message/ask💝💗💓💘

“Don't know if I'll see you again someday

But if you're out there,

I hope that you're okay”

“God, I hope that you're happier today

'Cause I love you,

and I hope that you're okay”

ao3

She tries everyday not to think about him, albeit unsuccessfully, but she tries, all day, to push him from her mind, to forget, to ignore, but he always manages to push himself into the forefront of her mind whenever she has a moments peace, replaying their memories in her head, the good, the bad, the pretty, the ugly…all of them. Forcing her to relive their glorious (but cut short) time together all those years ago, before Doyle, before Paris, before their entire future went up in flames right in front of them, turning to dust behind them as they walked away in different directions. Him into the arms of another woman and her into the unknown, a new country, a new job, a new her.

When she allows the thoughts to takeover she always wonders if she would have done anything differently, knowing what she knows now. That he’d be ripped from her, from all of them in one of the worst ways, leaving them with only memories and questions that will never be answered. Leaving them, her, with the knowledge that he’s out there, hunted and alone, with no form of contact, no way to know if he’s okay, if Jack’s okay, if their even alive. She wonders if she’d have stayed, tried harder to get him back, to become the fairytale romance they laughed about wrapped up in bedsheets across the country back when they could have had everything. If she thinks for long enough, she finds herself wiping away tears, realising that yes, she would have, because all she has now is memories and regrets, a long line of what if’s and maybe’s.

Standing at her window, staring out into the city night, she looks back at the picture of them in her hands, tracing a finger over his smile as her lips curl at the recollection of the moment it was taken, the two of them in their own bubble just a mere eight weeks before their whole thing snapped in half, never to be put back together. She remembers the way her heart fluttered at the sight of his smile, how her stomach filled with butterflies like she was some sort of teenager at the sound of his laugh and how the feel of his hand on her thigh set her body on fire, a strike of lightening shooting into her nerves and its a feeling she doesn’t think she’s had before, and one doesn’t expect to have again.

He was a once in a life time.

They, were a once in a life time.

She takes a deep breath, closing her eyes as a tear falls down her cheek and she exhales with a shaky breath. Looking back down at the picture, she slowly runs a finger over it again and wonders, not for the first time (and not the last) if she’d ever see him again, hear him laugh, feel his hands in hers. Smiling down at the picture, she sighs.

“I hope you’re okay.” She whispers, before placing the frame back down on the windowsill and staring out into the city, inhaling a breath as she thinks that maybe, he’s looking out at the moon as well.

Deciding against going back to the BAU once he was able to leave witsec was an easy choice, him and Jack finally setting a routine, creating a bond he’d been unable to maintain before, finally able to relax without any need to keep one eye open, be on constant alert, remaining where he was and staying away was an easy choice. Making Emily unit chief was another easy decision, one he never thought twice about and one he knew everyone would accept. What wasn’t easy was making the decision to remain without contact. With anyone. But especially her.

It was a choice he felt was right, cutting them off, scared that any contact he had could be traced, that he’d put his son in danger again, but just because he felt it was right did not mean it was easy.

The first time he almost breaks it (can you really break a rule you set yourself?) Is on Jack’s thirteen birthday, surrounded by family and new friends. He hovers over her number, her contact picture (one he could never find in himself to delete. A picture only he has. A candid one from their short but remarkable time together.) Her smile staring right back at him as he contemplates on just one call, but, instead of calling he locks his phone, drops it down onto the kitchen counter and walks away, heading back into the room where his new life is playing out, all while he pretends he isn’t aching for just a tiny part of his old one. The part where he has her.

Two years later, he’s lost count of how many times he’d thought about reaching out but never going through with it. And this time is no different as he finds himself watching a press release from a case he imagines their still on the way home from. It’s her on the podium and he feels his breath hitch, the sound of her voice something he’d worked (and failed) on trying to forget. He can’t take his eyes of her, watching in complete awe as she talks to the press with an amount of authority he could only dream of having over such a harsh group of people and he finds himself smiling as she finishes, can see Reid and JJ following close behind her as she walks away and it’s then that he notices it, when she holds up her left hand to push hair from her face.

A ring.

A large, silver diamond on her ring finger and it has his breath hitching for a second time for a different reason.

The clip ends and he closes the laptop, standing and heading over to a box he keeps on top of a high shelf. Placing the box on the desk he sighs and pulls out the picture, one of the few they have together, but his favourite from the small bunch. Her body tilited towards him as they laugh together, his hand rested gently on her thigh as hers curls around his shoulder, tilting her head to whisper something to him as they bask in their own company, he remembers feeling as though no one else mattered in that moment, that the two of them could have it all and they almost did.

Almost being a key word surrounding anything when it comes to them.

Almost together.

Almost in love.

Almost going back.

Almost calling.

It’s almost and never absolutely. Always a what if and never a definite and it’s haunting.

Looking at her smile he can’t help but hope that she’s happy. Happier than she was with him, happier in all aspects because she deserves it. He loves her, he knows he always will and as he runs a finger over her smile, his own lips curl upwards.

“I hope that you’re happier,” he whispers, placing the picture back in the box before he looks out of the window, grabbing his beer from the desk as he looks into the night sky and it’s then he notices the distinct flashing of a plane. Smiling, something in him knowing it’s them, it’s her, he tilts his bottle, a small cheers to them, to her, to himself.

“I hope that you’re okay.” He whispers, watching as the plane travels across the sky and out of a view, a sense of bittersweetness casting over him as he finds peace in knowing she’s happy, even if it isn’t with him.

fin

#hotchniss sour series #hope this is what you had in mind bestie <33 #hotchniss fic #hotchniss #emily prentiss #aaron hotchner #criminal minds fic #my fics

46 notes · View notes

lizardkingeliot · 3 years

Text

So, do those of you currently reading time cast a spell on you (but you won’t forget me) remember that scene in chapter 4 where Quentin shows up for his tutoring session and Eliot says he wants to go to the edge of the campus and manipulate the magic of the wards so they can fly? You know... this one:

Only they never end up making it there because they start bickering the second they leave the library? Well, in the rough draft of this chapter I initially had this scene... ending very differently. And they also weren’t going to fly, they were going to... well. I think I’ll just let y’all read it for yourselves lmao. I think I talked about this a bit on twitter when I was working on the chapter so if it sounds familiar that’s probably why. ANYWAY. I have a ton of deleted scenes from this fic, most of which will never see the light of day, but I woke up this morning with the urge to share at least part of this one so... I guess that’s what I’m going to do.

This is super rough and unedited and honestly not up to my usual standards, but... you know. Rough drafts tend to be that way. It’s also all over the place in terms of tone and where they were at this point in the fic lmao. This might be bordering on crack honestly. Which is why I just scrapped the whole thing and went a different route in the final draft. Anyway. Shutting up now. This is about 2k words so I’m putting most of it under a cut...

—

Trudging across campus two paces behind Eliot, Quentin was stricken by the overwhelming feeling that he was trapped inside a dream. The eerie, quiet campus, lit only by the waning moon and a few dots of light spilling from the various student houses. He looked back over his shoulder, spotting the Cottage in the distance, the dim orange glow of the front bay window swimming in his vision like a boat lost at sea.

As they approached the outer edge of the grounds, Quentin could feel the magic of the wards, buzzing on the air like insects. Bone-deep reverberations, strains of music swelling from within. He’d never been out this far before. The line where Brakebills ended and the real world began. Where there was nothing but the boat house and the wind. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He breathed in deep, the scent of the Hudson rushing nearby filling his senses as Eliot came to a sudden halt in the dark.

“Here,” Eliot said. Quentin could only just barely make out the shape of his elegant fingers pointing just ahead. “Can you feel the energy? I guess the Naturalists come out here sometimes and use it to light their bongs.” He laughed, a sound that warmed Quentin underneath his jacket at once. “And occasionally singe their own eyebrows off in the process.”

Quentin looked back. They’d come out to a place that the light from the Cottage couldn’t reach. Eliot formed an orb between his hands and pinned it overhead, a grapefruit sized pendant of magic swaying gently in the breeze. He stepped into Quentin’s personal space, giving him the once over. Head-to-toe and back again, settling at last on Quentin’s eyes.

“So,” he said with a smirk. “Cavaleri Animation. My memory of the First Year curriculum is a little hazy, but they’ve dazzled you all with that one already, yes? Turning your marbles into little glass animals, you know the one.”

Quentin nodded. “Yeah, um… but Alice was the only one who could actually get hers to work.”

Swift and warm as a pulse, Eliot’s hand curled around the nape of Quentin’s neck. Heat spreading down the column of his spine like a flame catching a wick. Thumb teasing over burning flesh. Eliot’s lips ghosted over his ear, not quite touching. Still, Quentin swore he could feel his smile. “Well,” he said, soft and dark, “I’m here now. And you’re going to do it. And it’s going to work.”

Quentin’s hand was bunching up the back of Eliot’s cardigan. He didn’t know when that had happened. The hum of the magic was making him dizzy. For a moment, it was impossible to breathe. His body a tight line of tension and desire. Eliot pulled away and Quentin released his hold, staggering a little as he tried to regain some semblance of control.

“Um, okay…” Quentin ran a hand through his hair in a half-hearted attempt at centering himself. “Why, uh—why do we have to do that here? We could have just done that spell in the library.”

“Because,” Eliot said with a tip of his head, “I have a theory.”

“A theory?” Quentin frowned. “You brought me out here for a theory?”

“More of a hypothesis really,” Eliot said with a wave of his hand. “But I think it’s going to work.”

“Great,” Quentin said with an exasperated sigh. “Dicking around with unstable magic in the middle of the night. What could possibly go wrong.”

“Look, it’s going to be fun,” Eliot said with that casual little air of his. “And we probably won’t explode even if I’m wrong. So we really don’t have very much to lose.”

“Okay, I’m—” Quentin threw his hands up. “For fuck’s sake, El, can you just tell me what we’re actually doing out here?”

“We,” Eliot said very slowly, reaching inside his cardigan, pulling a sliver of magenta colored glass out of the pocket of his vest, and looking through it, “are going to tap into all that crazy energy and make your little glass marble friend into a very big animal friend and take it for a spin.” He passed the sliver of glass over to Quentin. “Take a look.”

Quentin stared at Eliot for a very long time before relenting. “You’re actually a crazy person, you know that?”

“I think you mean certified sorcerer genius, but I’ll take it.” He gestured with a nod of his head. “Go on. It’s balls to the wall out here. So much energy we could power a fucking nuclear reactor and I doubt Henry would notice.”

Quentin looked through the glass, moving it from one eye over to the other. At first, it was impossible to make sense of what he was actually seeing. A latticework of stars. Billions of them it seemed, all bumping up against one another in a wild, cosmic dance. A galaxy of intersecting lines and patchwork patterns shimmering like the wings of a dragonfly. And every now and then, a spark. Popping off into the dark like fingers desperate for the night. Quentin handed the glass back to Eliot with a shake of his head.

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Don’t be boring, Quentin,” Eliot said. It made Quentin’s chest ache with its normalcy. Like their past couldn’t touch them out here. Like out here with their bad ideas and their wild magic, maybe they could have some hope to start again. “But maybe… maybe don’t make anything that wants to bite our heads off.”

“Okay, so…” Quentin sighed with his whole chest. “To recap: you want to steal unstable magic from the wards of the school where we’re both currently students to make a giant glass animal that hopefully doesn’t swallow us whole so we can… take it for a ride?”

“Yes,” Eliot said, like it was the most obviously brilliant thing in the world. “Don’t make that face with your face. Tell me you’ve never wanted to ride a rhinoceros.”

“We are not riding a rhinoceros, Eliot. Absolutely not.”

“Well, okay…” Eliot’s hand on his nape again. Heat, fire, a five alarm blaze encircling his neck like a collar. “If you could ride on any animal, real or imaginary—”

“The Cozy Horse,” Quentin said without thinking, heart pounding like hoofbeats trapped inside his chest. “Um… it’s from the Fillory books, uh…”

Eliot laughed softly. “Okay.” His hand slid down to Quentin’s shoulder, gripping it possessively. “Tell me about... the Cozy Horse.”

“Um…” Quentin squeezed his eyes shut, took a breath, shook his head. Eliot’s hand was stroking up and down the expanse of his upper arm and shoulder, making everything go all fuzzy in his brain. “It’s just, uh… it’s this horse that Jane rode on. It’s, uh… really tall. Like a hundred feet. Like a clydesdale on steroids.”

“You won’t ride a rhinoceros but you’re perfectly fine with a horse that’s a hundred feet tall?”

Quentin turned his face upward, trapping himself in Eliot’s gaze. Sinking, flying, falling. Close enough to kiss if he only went up on his toes a little. Tucked inside the safety of his warmth. Quentin wanted to burn, to melt into a puddle at Eliot’s feet and slosh around like muck. “I…” Quentin swallowed. “I don’t think the Cozy Horse would hurt us. It’s basically a giant stuffed animal.”

Eliot grinned, gazing down at Quentin for a long beat before pulling away. “Okay then,” he said, taking a few steps down the path under their feet. “Show me Cozy Horse.”

Quentin reached into his pocket, knelt down, set the marble on the path. “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to… harness the magic of the wards.”

Eliot made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, peering through it with one eye. “Just leave that part to me,” he said absently. “Go on. Make your horse. And don’t say you can’t do it. We both know that you can.”

Quentin gazed up the long line of Eliot’s body. Eliot was fully focused on the wards. The sound of night, the crackle of magic. Quentin shivered under his jacket. His hands hovered over the marble, focusing his energy on prepping the glass for transformation with Dempsey's Silent Thermogenesis. Once molten, the marble could be manipulated into almost any shape he could imagine. For the Cozy Horse, Quentin didn’t have much to go on but the memory of a single illustration, and a few lines from The Wandering Dune, but he figured it would probably be simple enough. How hard could it be to imagine a draft horse the size of something straight out of the Cretaceous period?

Quentin twisted the glass under his fingers, so fully focused on his task he almost didn’t notice when Eliot began to move. When, suddenly, through the loop of Eliot’s fingers, a beam of sharp, frenzied magic began to focus on the animal he had half-formed with laser precision.

“You might wanna hurry,” Eliot said. “I don’t know how long I can hold this here.”

Quentin scowled in his direction, looping a bit of the molten glass into the shape of a tail. “You’re shit at communicating, you know that,” he spit, letting the gentle rage rising in his belly fuel his magic. “I thought cooperative magic was supposed to be, I don’t know… cooperative?”

Legs, hooves, the gentle slope of a hulking animal’s back. The wispy tendrils of a mane. Eliot was saying something that might have been a warning. Quentin was too focused on his creation to parse a single one of his words. The magic of the wards cracked like lightning. He could feel it in his hands. Quickly, almost as an afterthought, Quentin gave the beast that had come to life beneath his fingers a shimmering loop around the back of the neck that might have passed for reins if he squinted.

A single hoofbeat on the soft ground. The beam of magic stuttering through Eliot’s fingers died away, and he let out a tremendous sigh.

“Okay so... “ Quentin frowned, eyes flitting from the tiny glass horse up to Eliot’s face. “I don’t think this is going to—”

A flash, a pop, a tremendous wave of heat knocking the air from his lungs. Quentin shoved his body backward off the path and into the grass just as Eliot was running over. Kneeling down, using himself as a makeshift shield as he pushed Quentin further back away from the molten monstrosity shifting and morphing and doubling, tripling, quadrupling in size. A deep rumble, the tinkling of glass. Quentin peered over Eliot’s shoulder, his eyes moving up, up, up, trying to take in what it was he was actually seeing.

The glass horse shook out its mane, rearing up on its hind legs and down again with an earth-trembling thud. The distance from the ground to its shoulder must have been twenty feet. It had no eyes and no mouth, but Quentin swore he could feel its glassy stare boring into him. The light of the orb dangling overhead passed right through the center of its body. For a long moment, everything went perfectly still.

And then Eliot started to laugh. “Holy shit,” he said, his eyes wide as dinner plates when he turned his face to Quentin. “That is a big fucking horse.”

A laugh sputtered out from between Quentin’s lips. “Yeah, um… yeah. Fuck. It really is.”

Eliot’s body pressed right up against Quentin’s body when he turned, and leaned in, so close they were almost kissing. A pulse of heat passed between them. Quentin felt it in his chest like a second heart. “So,” Eliot said, a hand curling around Quentin’s cheek for a fleeting moment before pulling away. “You wanna take her for a spin?”

Quentin felt absolutely out of his mind. Hazy, his body a liminal space. “Yeah,” he said with a short, stuttering burst of laughter. “Yeah, why the fuck not.”

Unreality set in hard as they stood and cautiously approached. Up close, they might as well have been gazing upward at the hulking glass back of a dinosaur. The haphazard reins Quentin had created looped around the beast’s neck like a string of fairy lights.

“Um…” Quentin laughed, tucking a tuft of hair behind his ear. “How the fuck are we even going to get on this thing?”

Eliot took his hand suddenly, threading their blood-warm fingers together. “Oh, Q,” he said with a full-faced grin, “we’re gonna fucking fly.”

#the magicians #queliot #otp: proof of concept #myfic #*margo hanson voice* that's not tonally consistent with the fic

39 notes · View notes

shakspeare · 3 years

Text

faith is the ache

→ dean/cas fic → circa season four. it’s the emo soldier of god for me. → this is 90% kink y’all, most definitely rated r. → ao3 link here if you��d rather read there → first time destiel writer the renaissance rly hit hard

Cas and Dean’s first kiss is a battlefield kiss.

It’s raw and desperate and bloody, torn from Cas’s lips like salvation, a prayer. Dean’s never been a praying man, but if this is faith, he’s a goddamn saint. He can taste blood on Cas’s tongue, feel Cas’s breath through his ribs, rushed and angry and brutal.

This is faith.

Faith is the way his fingers feel like they’re about to break. Faith is the way he’s holding Cas to him the same way he’d hold onto his gun. Faith is Cas’s eyelashes, dark and wet, ghosting against his cheek. Faith is every stolen breath and broken bone, every stabbing pain, every gasp, every tear, every loss.

Faith is the ache.

The world burns red through his eyelids; he opens his eyes. Releases his angel.

“Sam!” he roars, spinning on his heel, staring into the fray. The woodland’s half on fire, some demon coughing up its guts at his feet. He slams his heel down on its throat, scanning the tree line.

“Sam!”

“Let’s move!” Sam’s spat out of the forest like a rocket, tearing over the waste ground between them. Dean doesn’t need telling twice. He hauls Cas to his feet and they run.

The forest blurs past them in shadow and ash. The night’s dark; freakishly so. No stars. A volley of sparks explodes in the air above their heads; they flinch, keep running. Things had gone wrong, gone very badly wrong. Dean stumbles on the broken earth, curses under his breath. It was a trap, that should’ve been obvious. He was off his game.

“Dean?” The angel’s voice is curious, not yet practised in concern. Dean jerks his head; keep moving.

“I’m fine,” he barks, and Cas turns, keeps going.

“Here!” Sam’s voice comes low through the trees, and Dean gives a sigh of relief. He thought they’d overshot by a mile, but the Impala is just visible in the darkness. Least something’s gone to plan. His heart’s hammering against his ribs and something feels really wrong there. Broken, he’s guessing. He drops into the driver’s seat, fumbles for the keys. Half a second to breathe, and then he’s gunning baby’s engine to freaking Timbuktu. He reaches out to yank the door shut, but Cas is there, suddenly, holding it still. He stares down at Dean, eyes wide, hair going every which way.

“I’ll lead them off,” he says, and his voice is rough and low. “I doubt we will go undisturbed.”

Dean blinks, Cas takes a step back—

“Wait, Cas!”

He tilts his head, frowns at Dean. Dean gives himself a shake; man, he’s losing it.

“Get in the car.” The angel looks at him almost pityingly.

“No, thank you. I’m much faster out of it.”

“I’m not offering you a lift, you goddamn hippie,” There’s something moving in the trees. He slides the key into the ignition, keeps his voice low.

“You going off alone, that’s exactly what they’ll be expecting.” Castiel hesitates, still staring at him.

“Get in the damn car!”

Cas slides into the backseat just as he guns the engine and the angels break the clearing; the Impala snarls and jerks forward over the rough earth, spraying up dirt and stone in her wake, and if he said that didn’t satisfy him to hell, he’d be lying. He yanks the steering wheel hard left, spinning them out onto the freeway, and in 30 seconds he’s put miles between them and their heavenly little tete a tete. Cars flicker past either side of them, and Dean’s eyes flick up to the rearview. Cas’s baby blues are fixed firmly on the road ahead, that little frown quirking his brow.

“So it was a trap,” Sam grimaces, running a finger down the gash in his arm.

“Woah, dude!” Dean exclaims. “Upholstery, blood; blood, upholstery!” Sam ignores him, reaching out a bloody finger and daubing some hokey symbol on the passenger side window.

“Angel proofing, dumb-ass. They won’t be able to find us.”

Angel proofing. Right. Dean grumbles under his breath. It’s not the worst idea in the world. The pain in his ribs flares and he winces.

Yeah, they need some off-radar time.

“Check the map,” he nods at the roadmap on the floor at Sam’s feet. “Find us somewhere to crash. My four hours is calling my name.” His eyes flick back up to the rearview. No reason why.

***

The nearest motel’s about an hour’s drive. Sam falls asleep in his seat; Dean flicks on the radio. Adrenaline’s coursing through him like a freight train; it always does, after a hunt. He flexes his fingers against the wheel, shifts in his seat. Feels good. Feels strong.

His lips are burning.

“You ok?” The words come out a little gruffer than he’d intended. He clears his throat, keeps his eyes fixed on the road. It’s just the polite thing to do. Ask. For a minute he thinks Cas might’ve angel-ed out, but then—

“I am uninjured.” Right. “Great.” He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, itching to do… something. He needs a drink. A sleazy bar. Pounding music.

“But I… feel strange.”

He can’t help it; he glances up at Cas’s reflection. Cas is gazing out at the night, frowning.

“Strange how?”

“I should have known it was a trap,” Cas murmurs. “There were warning signs. I failed to notice them. I failed to keep you safe.”

“Guilt. That’s called guilt, Cas.”

Cas sighs.

“It’s not a big deal, no one got hurt.” He ignores the stabbing pain in his side; he’s had worse. “Everyone make mistakes. It’s uh, human.”

Cas’s searching gaze meets his and he swallows, looks quickly back to the road. Jesus. A scattergun of images flicker past in his mind’s eye; Cas, bright-eyed, burning, in the split second before he kissed him; Cas, in the barn, sparks exploding in the air around him, hair lit up like some dollar store invocation of Jesus Christ; and another, something he’s not sure he’s ready to think about yet; Cas, with bruised lips, shirt collar open and staring at him like he’s seeing for the first time.

Yeah, he’s itching to do something, alright.

“Dean.”

He jerks out of his reverie, slides the steering wheel left a little, keeps them straight. Eyes on the road. Get it together. Right. He shifts a little in his seat, pretends like Cas’s gaze isn’t burning a hole in the back of his neck. His cock twitches in his jeans.

“Alright!” He clears his throat, reaches over to the radio. “If you’re gonna slum it on earth with the rest of us, you gotta live the whole experience. Guilt, shame, the whole nine yards. Now this,” he raises his voice over House of the Rising Sun, “this is a whole experience of it’s own.”

Cas frowns a little. Dean sighs, leans back in his seat. Resists the urge to shift his hips, let the denim friction graze his dick. Jesus Christ, there’s something in the air. He risks a glance at Cas again; he’s gazing out his window now, thank god, watching headlights flicker past.

Alright. It’s not like he hasn’t been with men before. It’s no big deal, right? Except — and this is the kicker — sucking some trucker off for twenty dollars is pretty fucking different. Isn’t it? His heart skips a little in his chest, imagines Cas looking down at him, Cas running deft fingers through his hair. Yeah, it’s different. Different like, there’s a part of him that wants to pull the car over and get on his knees right now. He remembers the heat of Cas pressing against his chest, rough and aching; remembers the sting of his angel blade, caught between them and digging into his side.

Is Cas thinking about it? Do angels get turned on?

He’s not even sure why he did it, why he stepped over the angel Cas had just gutted and wrapped his fist in Cas’s shirt. He remembers the last time he had sex; in that strip joint with some hooker — he’d barely started railing her when all hell broke loose and he and Cas had to book it out the back. Does this feel like that? His dick twitches at the memory; the chick buck naked and spreading her legs, widening her come-fuck-me eyes. He frowns, shifts, remembers the puzzled expression on Cas’s face before he kissed him.

Nah, this is different. He doesn’t know why — the chick was hot, Cas is hot, his dick’s sure as hell into both. But it is. It is different.

Cas is still silent in the backseat. What’s he thinking about? I feel strange. Probably still grappling with his newfound guilt, whatever that feels like for an angel. I failed to keep you safe. Dean snorts. Right. Safe. When has anyone ever worried about his safety before? He barely worries about it himself. His mind fritzes for a hot second; faceless men in truck stop bathrooms; this week’s monster, teeth bared and barrelling out of the darkness; dad, waking him up at three in the morning and thrusting a sawn-off into his hands.

Safe doesn’t figure. It just doesn’t. And if he slammed on the brakes and insisted the angel in the backseat fuck him in the next lay-by, there’d be nothing safe about that either. He shifts, presses his dick against the rough fabric of his jeans. A single streetlamp bursts overhead as they fly beneath it, and in the shower of sparks, he sees Cas, bright blue eyes, one hand gripping the back of Dean’s neck like he owns him.

They make it to the motel somewhere round two in the morning. Seeing Cas properly for the first time since he kissed him is a freaking test. It starts to rain as they haul their bags out the trunk, and Cas has done nothing to fix his shirt, where Dean had wrapped his fingers in his collar and claimed him just hours before. He looks a goddamn mess. Dean swallows, slams the car door, wonders if there’s a bar anywhere nearby. Cas maintains his angelic silence as they cross the lot, stumble into the motel reception. Sam stays awake just long enough to check in, scrawl a bunch of sigils on the window, and then collapse on his twin bed, shoes on, dead to the world.

Dean slings his duffel onto the vacant bed. He’d gotten a twin room on autopilot, hadn’t even thought about it. Now it feels weird. He clears his throat, gives himself a shake. Tries to ignore the ache in his throat. God, he needs a drink. Or something.

Cas is stood at the window, gazing out at the blinking neon sign. White Rose Motel.

“Uh, Cas— ” Cas turns, looks at him expectantly. “What are you, uh—”

He was going to ask what Cas was gonna do all night, going to ask if he wanted his own room, hell, maybe angels like their privacy, he doesn’t know. But Cas is gazing at him, throat exposed, and Christ, he doesn’t remember the last time he wanted to fuck someone this badly. Dean glances at Sammy, passed out on the bed, and clears his throat.

“Outside?”

Cas narrows his eyes a fraction, and then nods, the tiniest movement. He closes the space between them, and when he presses his hand to Dean’s shoulder, Dean’s knees almost give way.

***

The air vanishes, twists; rain glitters on the sidewalk; the night fills Dean’s lungs, and he can’t wait, can’t wait another goddamn second. His fists find Cas’s shirt and he seizes him, pulls him close; his head collides with the wall behind him; the pain in his ribs flares like an open wound, and he doesn’t give a damn, doesn’t give a damn about anything. He’s done thinking. Sex is sex, and he’s a freaking cowboy. He needs this.

He can taste Cas’s blood on his tongue, feel Cas's lips against his, rough and punishing and claiming. Mine, mine, mine, and oh god, he wants to die here. Suddenly, Cas’s hand locks onto his wrist like a vice, and he steps back; Dean’s eyes snap up to meet his; strange, blue—

There are unspoken questions in Cas’s eyes, in the persistent frown that quirks his brow. His grip tightens on Dean’s wrist, and he presses Dean back against the wall; he can feel the damp coming through his shirt, feel the rain, soft, on his forehead. Dean can’t remember the last time he was this turned on; he doesn’t want to stop, to think, he just wants Cas—

“Cas, please—” It falls unbidden from his lips, and in the silent seconds that follow it feels like heresy. He’s hard as hell, and the angel at his throat is looking at him like he wants to tear him apart, and god, if that doesn’t turn him on more. Dean finds his voice, chokes out a word.

“Please.”

Cas’s fingers wrap around Dean’s throat, and he can’t tell if he’s about to kiss him, or kill him, or both—

Then Cas kisses him and he moans; a prayer that’s snuffed out by the press of Cas’s mouth against his own and suddenly he’s desperate, starving; his hands find the back of Castiel’s neck and he holds him to him, panting, pressing into Cas’s kiss like he wants to die on the altar of his lips. He gasps into Cas’s mouth, inhaling liquor and salt and copper. Cas shifts against him, open palm against his chest and—

The pain in his ribs flares suddenly, sharp and hot.

“You lied,” Cas whispers. “You’re hurt.”

Dean nods, doesn’t know how he manages it, but he does.

“Ah— yeah. It’s nothing. It’s nothing, Cas.”

He doesn’t want this to be over, he can’t have this be over, not yet. Cas passes a hand over his ribs, gazing at Dean like he’s lost in thought. Dean winces as his hand slides across the break; he can’t help it. Cas’s eyes flicker silver.

“You should let me heal it.”

“Right. Yes. Okay, Cas. Heal it, please— and then—”

“Pray to me,” Cas murmurs.

“Wh— what?”

His eyes are gleaming, hair lit up by the street-lamps, glittering with the fallen rain. He looks fucking otherworldly, divine. He loosens his grip on Dean’s throat, and suddenly he’s full of something Dean doesn’t recognise. All he knows is that he craves it, needs it, dark and bright and strong and holy.

When he falls to his knees, it doesn’t feel anything other than right. He doesn’t question it, doesn’t think. When Cas runs his fingers through his hair, tilts his chin up to the sky, the ache in his chest subsides. The rain continues to fall, and the cold is creeping into his bones, but he doesn’t care. This is different.

He prays. He wants to. He wants Cas to be his, and he wants to be Cas’s, forever. Cas whispers to him softly, voice almost lost in this hiss of the falling rain. He lets him drag his tongue over his cock, lets him taste it, kiss it, and then — once he’s asked and begged and prayed a hundred times — Cas answers his prayer, thrusts his cock between his lips. He tastes like ichor and iron and wine and his fingers wind a little tighter in Dean’s hair. Dean’s never wanted to please someone this badly in his goddamn life. He’s good at sucking cock, he knows he is, but for Cas, he wants to be better than good. He wants Cas to need him, to know him, to never leave him. He runs his tongue down the length of Cas’s cock, wraps his hand around the base. He drags his tongue over the head, slow and rough and teasing. He keeps his eyes on Cas’s. When his cock hits the back of his throat, Dean feels like he’s about to fucking ascend. When Cas pulls him to his feet it feels like rapture. His legs are shaking; he all but collapses against him, his angel, and then Cas’s lips find his and Cas holds him up, pressing softer kisses on him now, sweet and deft and silent.

“Good boy,” he murmurs, and Dean feels lightheaded.

“Yeah?” he manages to breathe, in between Cas’s soft, persistent kisses.

“Yes,” Cas murmurs simply. “That was good,” and Jesus Christ, why does hearing that drive him crazy? Cas’s hand finds the tear in Dean’s ribs, palm like an open flower, and there’s a moment, warmth, and the pain is gone. Dean moans into Cas’s kiss, keening, presses his hips against him. For a moment Cas pulls back; Dean’s left breathless, aching, Cas’s fingers tracing the line of his jaw. Then the air around them rents itself in two, and suddenly Cas’s lips are on him again, but the world is upside down; the wall is gone; the air is closer, drier—

He tries to right himself, get purchase, and realises he’s flat out, sheets beneath his head. Cas’s had is still at his jaw, gentle, kind, and he realises with a lurch that the angel is fucking straddling him. He gasps, pressing up into Cas’s kiss so hard he can feel the bruise it’s going to leave on his lips.

“Where—” he manages to breathe out, the last vestige of his dignity wondering where exactly they are, though right now he’s so turned on he’d gladly beg Cas to fuck him in front of a freaking bar full of people — his dick twitches in his pants at that thought and he thinks he notices Cas’s eyes darken — that’s a thought to explore at a later date —

“An unoccupied room. This motel is not popular,” Cas murmurs, his lips grazing the hollow of Dean’s throat. His hands find Dean’s, loosening his grip on him, and Dean whines in protest; he wants to pull him closer, find some goddamn friction, never let go.

“Quiet,” Cas murmurs. His hands slide along Dean’s wrists, guide them up over his head, press them into the mattress, and Dean’s breath comes out in a little stutter. Cas blinks at him with those fucking weird, cosmic eyes, and then he’s closer still, pressing little butterfly kisses to his neck. Dean tilts his head back to the stars and gasps. The ache in his chest feels like holy fire, and he forgets everything — god, girls, demons, devils. All he can be sure of are the hands on his wrists, the mouth at his throat, the blood on his tongue, the split in his lip.

“Dean,” Cas’s voice vibrates, soft, just by his ear. A shiver runs down his spine; his eyes flutter shut.

“Yeah?”

“Are you sure?” Cas’s weight shifts slightly; Dean opens his eyes.

Cas’s eyes are bright in the shadows; he’s tossed his coat aside. There’s still blood on his shirt, staining the white, patterning his throat. He can see it when Cas looks away, lifts his chin and gazes across the room He shifts beneath him, a little, til his cock is pressing into Cas’s thigh.

“What?”

“Are you sure?” Cas’s gaze meets his, and there’s no challenge, no threat. Dean’s stomach flips over when he recognises the glimmer in his eyes. There’s no challenge because it’s all possession. Quiet, unyielding, simple. As if it’s all there is.

He swallows. “Yes. I’m sure.”

There’s a split second where Cas doesn’t move, only blinks at him, and he grinds his hips up into Cas in frustration, voice coming out in a whine—

“Please.”

And then Cas’s kissing him like he’s about to die. The press of his body against Dean’s is like a blessing, something otherworldly and dangerous and close to god. Dean can’t think, can’t breathe, can only arch up into the angel at his throat and pray, a broken string of words and sounds and promises that tumble from his lips without thought. When Cas lets go his wrists, his hands tangle in Cas’s hair, trace the curve of his jaw, the hollow of his throat. Cas’s shirt is gone, and he jerks his own off over his head, rough and careless, and when Cas’s palm presses against the brand on his shoulder like it’s a prayer, a rite, some secret sacred invocation that only they know, only they will ever know, Dean loses his mind, desperate, aching—

Cas draws back for a split second. His hair is tousled, his skin like marble in the half light. Dean’s heart is hammering like it’s going to leap out of his chest; he gasps, breathes, collapses back onto the bed.

“Cas,” he whispers, hands restless, reaching. “Come back, come back, please.”

He feels Cas’s weight shift, move, and when he opens his eyes Cas is beside him, eyelashes ghosting against his cheek. His lips press softly against Dean’s jaw, just below his ear, and suddenly Dean’s eyes are wet, and he has no idea why. His hands find his belt; he slips free of his jeans, his pants. He knows what he wants, and he doesn’t want to stop, to think. The air is warm against his naked skin but he feels vulnerable, strange; he rolls towards Cas, shields himself against his body.

Cas catches his chin with the pad of his thumb; soft, tender. He traces the sides of his body with the tips of his fingers, and his eyes are dark, brilliant, and Dean’s trembling because this is different, this is different from any guy, any girl, anyone he’s ever been with before. No one has ever looked at him like this before. The way Cas touches him, it’s like he’s the one who’s divine.

Cas presses him gently onto his back with a kiss, reverent, and his hand drifts down, over his stomach, his hips, finds his cock. He drags his fingers along the length of it, slow, playful, and Dean whines into the kiss, pleading. Suddenly his dick is slick, wet, and he moans, twisting in Cas’s hand.

“How—” he gasps, and Cas’s voice is just a breath in his ear.

“I’m an angel, Dean.”

When Cas pushes his legs open, and slips between them — when he trails kisses down Dean’s stomach, runs his tongue down the crease where his thigh meets his hip — when he kisses Dean so hard he draws blood, and then slips his fingers into Dean’s mouth — Dean’s gone. He can feel his own cock leaking against his stomach, so exposed and vulnerable and untouched. He needs this, needs Cas to touch him, hold him, want him. He swears out loud when Cas’s spit slick fingers slide between his asscheeks, tease at his hole. He pushes into his touch, craving more, needing to feel—

And then Cas’s tongue grazes his cock, his thigh, his asshole, and he’s trembling, bucking on the bed beneath him; his hands find Cas’s shoulders and he grabs him, pleading, as Cas’s tongue, hot and wet and obscene, teases at his fluttering hole. Cas’s gaze flicks up to meet his, eyes glittering, lips bruised, the column of his throat stark in the half light, and Dean is suddenly hit by the fact that this is an angel, this is not a man, this is an angel, a soldier of god, a force of nature, divine and unknowable and sacred. Cas slips up over him and presses a kiss against his open mouth, presses his palm against his aching dick, and slowly, agonisingly, pushes his cock inside him.

Dean’s lost. His throat is tipped back to the stars, stars obscured by a plywood and mortar and brick. He rocks onto Cas’s cock, and Cas whispers in his ear; soft, calm, quiet, tender. He moves slowly, gently, like Dean is fragile, sacred. Like he matters. He presses kisses to his lips, his throat, his shoulders as he pushes deeper in, as Dean gasps and presses up to meet him, wanting, always wanting. His hand grips Dean’s cock, thumb flicking lazily over the head, smearing pre-come and Dean could swear he’s enjoying this, toying with him, making him wait. He whimpers beneath him, tries to arch his hips in time with Cas’s lazy, teasing thrusts.

Cas lowers his mouth to Dean’s ear, whispers, his voice rough.

“Wait.”

Dean can’t wait, can’t think about anything but the ache between his thighs, the gentle fingers teasing him, the fact Cas pushed in even further as he whispered wait, bottomed out, flush against Dean’s prostate and just holding him there, not moving. He shakes his head, protests, tries to grind into Cas’s palm, but Cas tuts, sighs, brushes his thumb across his lips.

“I told you to wait.”

“Please, Cas— I can’t wait, I— please—”

Cas’s eyes are bright, searching.

“What do you want?”

“You know, Cas— you—”

“I want you to say it.”

“Please— Cas, please—”

Cas’s gaze flicks down, over his throat, the expanse of his chest, his leaking cock. He shifts, and Dean moans beneath him. His hand comes to meet Dean’s jaw, dragging the pad of his thumb down over his lower lip, gazing as if he’s curious, thoughtful.

“I want you to say it.”

His voice is low and rough and it sends a shiver down Dean’s spine. He’s a mess; he needs this, like he doesn’t remember needing before; and the fact Cas wants him to say it is somehow even better, even more—

“I want you to fuck me. Please. Please.”

Cas doesn’t move, still watching him, as if lost in thought. He twitches his hand a little around Dean’s cock, rubs his thumb over his aching head, and something in Dean snaps, and the words tumble from his lips before he can stop them—

“I need you to fuck me, Cas, I need it, I’m begging you, I need it, I need you, I need you here, please, god, please, Cas, please, please, just fuck me, touch me, make me yours, I can’t—”

And then his words are cut off by Cas’s kiss, hard, rough, dominant; one hand on Dean’s throat, the other like a vice around his leaking cock, and he’s fucking him so hard Dean cries out, sound lost on Cas’s lips. Dean wraps his legs around him, pulls him closer, closer, closer, and Cas’s hand finds his shoulder, palm like fire against Dean’s brand. Dean’s hips stutter and he gasps, his cum hot and wet against his ribs. Cas’s mouth is at his throat, his lips, and then he pulls Dean toward him, Dean’s forehead pressed against him as he comes, head tipped back and moaning, eyes lidded, lips parted, dishevelled and messy and divine and his.

***

He falls asleep in his arms.

There is a split in his lip; Cas brushes it softly with his finger. His healing touch is light, deft.

He moves very little; he doesn’t want to wake Dean.

Sleep. It looks peaceful. The warring emotions that usually colour Dean’s brow have all but faded. For a brief moment, Cas considers closing his eyes; perhaps there is bliss in the wilful dulling of the senses.

But that would mean taking his eyes off Dean.

Anger — unfamiliar, strange — courses through him; he had failed last night. Failed to protect the man who sleeps, now, mercifully whole, in his arms.

He would not make the same mistake again.

Dean turns in his sleep, turns toward him, nestles into Cas’s chest. His eyelashes flutter against him, his breath warm on Cas’s skin.

Cas feels — peaceful. Anger, guilt, joy; the messy milieu of human emotion is startling and strange. But this is different.

He knows this. The ache in his chest, the fire that burns. Faith. It is, perhaps, the only thing he has ever truly known. And for millennia, he had never questioned where to place it.

Dean murmurs in his sleep, and Cas traces his fingers over his chest, sweet and gentle and slow. By morning, there are a hundred Enochian love letters patterned, invisible, onto Dean’s ribs.

The stars fade, and the sun rises, and Cas watches over Dean.

This is faith.

#destiel #deancas #destiel wedding #deancas wedding #dean winchester #cas #castiel #supernatural #bi dean #dean is bi #bi!dean #supernatural fic #spn fic #supernatural meta #destiel is canon #fic #mine

40 notes · View notes

fallen-gravity · 4 years

Text

Safety in Numbers

A surprise gift fic for @artsymeeshee, because the art she recently posted of the Stan Twins cuddling warmed my heart and apparently inspired me to write..uh...almost five thousands words.

Don’t you dare tag this as a ship.

Summary: Every great thing that ever happens to you is usually followed by something much, much worse.

You save the world from the apocalypse, you're convinced that you've lost everything and everyone you've ever loved.

You gain your memories back, you have nightmares so vivid that they fuck with your sense of fantasy versus reality.

It's a lose-lose, if you ask Stan.

AO3

Stan awakens to an alarm clock he doesn’t remember setting. Groaning, he sits up, eyes not quite open yet, and his back makes an ugly popping sound he knows he’s going to feel as soon as his body is fully awake. He blinks his eyes open slowly, and takes a few moments to re-familiarize himself with his twin brother’s old study room. He turns, to check the time and stop that infernal beeping sound, but his neck is so stiff that it makes him want to blow chunks. That’s what he gets for sleeping on a couch, he supposes, but he’s certainly slept on worse, and even if Ford did have a bed somewhere in the mess of a shack he chose to call home, Stan certainly didn’t deserve it, because people who are probably responsible for the death of their family don’t deserve nice things.

Grunting, he swings his legs off the couch, and stands so he doesn’t have to bend his neck in any more weird directions just to turn the alarm off. Its obnoxiously bright red letters blink 5:31am, and Stan scrubs a hand down his face as he punches the clock’s OFF button with the other.

That’s right. The only reason he set the damn alarm in the first place is because a stubborn customer who couldn’t speak a lick of English refused to leave the gift shop until she found the perfect gift for her little kiddo back home despite the Shack having closed nearly half an hour prior. It’s the only time in his life he’s ever been grateful for the year he was trapped in Colombia, because he’s sure if he wasn’t able to heckle with her in Spanish her into leaving with one of everything, he has a feeling she’d still be wandering back and forth across the shop. Stan laughs to himself at the thought, and makes a mental note to make that sort of thing an attraction someday if he ever gets a customer as stubborn as she is again.

But no, that’s not what matters right now. He bends over to pick up a hairbrush that’d been carelessly tossed to the floor the night prior and runs it through his soft brown hair that he promises he’s going to get cut as soon as he has the time and money, and as soon as his hair manageable enough to brush through it without snagging on any tough knots, he carelessly tosses the brush over his shoulder and heads out of the room, navigating himself around the place with a flashlight. He’s aware that it’d make things much easier to just turn the lights on, but keeping the gift shop lights on all weekend is already burning a hole in his wallet, and he’s not sure he could afford the electricity bill if he left the lights in the study room on by mistake for even ten extra minutes.

When he reaches the staircase leading to the basement, he flicks the flashlight off and sets it down on the counter by the cash register. It’s much easier to navigate down the winding steps with both of his hands free in case he falls and needs to catch himself, and the faint blue hum of the portal is enough of a light source to show him the way to the basement anyway. He sits down at the desk, adjusts the framed photo of himself and Ford at boxing practice in high school, and pulls Journal 1 out from the hidden shelf in front of the monitor. He’d spent all of last week desperately looking for 2 and 3, but the harsh winter snowfall had cut his search short and he didn’t want to waste any more time when he could just try to get the damned thing working without them.

“C’mon, Poindexter, y’gotta give me something to work with,” he mumbles, opening the desk drawer and pulling out a pad of paper and a pen. “I spent weeks memorizing all of your fancy shmancy ciphers. That’s more than I ever studied in high school. You can’t ramble on for two whole pages about how to crack them and then switch to this…” he squints at the squiggles scattered across the portal’s blueprints. “...Cooky alien language, or whatever. This is real life we’re talkin’ here. This is your life we’re talkin’ here. It’d be a lot easier if you didn’t write this thing in Klingon, or whatever”

Stan knows, at the back of his mind, that talking to the journal like it’s Ford himself isn’t going to get him anywhere, but in a weird kind of way, it makes him feel less alone. Helps a guy out from feeling too lonely, y’know?

He chuckles to himself at his own joke, taking comfort in the fact that if Ford were here he’d probably be rambling off about how Klingon is one of thousands of different intergalactic languages and how he obviously wrote it in Hqjolvk, thank you very much, and Stan can’t help but roll his eyes fondly as he flips through his notepad. He’s tried everything, he’s tried translating them to whichever letter in the English alphabet they just happen to look closest to, he’s tried throwing sentences in gibberish into three different ciphers at once to see if he could get anything even relatively close to whatever it is, and even when he “bought” a book at the store on ancient hieroglyphics and ancient symbolism the closest thing he got was just a bunch of dumb numbers. And even then, translating all of those dumb numbers back to English from a1z26 just hit him against another dumb wall.

Frustrated, he throws the pad of paper against the desk and kicks off from its edge, sending his swivel chair flying backwards across the room. When the chair finally stops rolling, his gaze fixes on the portal through the window in front of the desk he’d just been sitting at, and it’s really only now that he’s looking at it from this distance, from this angle, that he notices….the same weird squiggles from the journal carved all over the circular ring in the center of the portal.

But...if the weird squiggles in the journal came from the portal, and translating those numbers from the Egyptian book through a1z26 just gave him gibberish...could...could it be that easy? Could it be-?

“Coordinates!” Stan yells, jumping to his feet, and tears build in his eyes at the epiphany. “Sweet Moses, they’re coordinates! How could it’ve been so obvious?” he cries, and nearly trips over himself in excitement as he scrambles back over to the monitor, and his hands are shaking as he flips through his notepad. Once he finds the page he’s looking for, he forces his hands steady as he enters the number into the keypad.

The tiny, logical voice in the very back of his mind is screaming at him that it’s never going to work, he only has a third of what he needs, he really shouldn’t get his hopes up, but the slamming of his heart against his chest drowns that sound out as he frantically enters and re-enters the numbers when he’s sure he accidentally entered the wrong ones (damn his chubby fingers), and when he’s finally, finally certain he’s gotten them all entered correctly, he presses the dark red SEND button, takes a few steps backwards, and waits.

For what couldn’t be longer than two minutes but feels like six hours, there’s nothing. Stan’s about to sigh, call it a good stopping point for the day and kick himself for getting his hopes up too high, but then a flash of blue lightning sparks from the portal and strikes the ground.

“HA!” Stan exclaims, pumping his fists in the air. “I knew it! I knew it! Nothing can stop Stan Pines!”

He sprints into the portal room, pausing only briefly to grab the toolbox on his way in. Two more bolts of lightning strike against the ground with a loud pop as he enters, and the grin spread across Stan’s face rivals them in brightness. Kneeling down in front of the lever, Stan opens his toolbox and pulls out his lucky red screwdriver that’s gotten him out of his fair share of car trunks, and goes to work on fixing up loose bolts and that awful crunching sound the lever kept making the last time he tried turning it on.

Three bolts emerge from the portal, and Stan is too ecstatic to notice their uncomfortably close proximity to his head. He stands, once he’s absolutely certain he’s got the lever all fixed, and puts everything he has into shoving the lever from its off position to the on position.

He can hear the gears turning in the machine, and his heart is pounding so hard against his chest it makes his ears ring. He’s tearing up again, but he doesn’t care, just as long as he gets to punch Ford in the shoulder and tell him off to never scare him like that again when he emerges in the next couple of minutes. The circular ring in the center of the portal begins to spin, slowly, and those weird symbols carved along it start to glow blue.

Stan nearly drops to his knees, but no, he can’t let Ford see him at rock bottom, and maybe that’s a little selfish, considering all of the places Ford’s probably been the past two years, but the last thing he needs Ford to see is how much he’s been killing himself working to get him back. The ring spins faster, and faster, and where there was once a hole in the center of the portal that leads only to the back wall of the room, there’s now a blindingly bright flash of blue light, and Stan is knocked to the ground by the kickback.

He goes to stand again, but the sound of shattering glass turns his attention elsewhere. He looks behind him, and the lightbulbs in the other room are exploding like it’s nobody’s business. He’s lucky his hearing was heightened from the ten years on the street, because he’s just quick enough to hear the cracking of the bulb right above his head that he’s able to dodge out of the way of the shattered glass as it rains down towards him. He jumps to his feet, brushing his clothes off, but he’s horrified to see that the portal’s ring is beginning to slow to a stop with no twin brother in sight.

“No!” he cries, and sprints back into the other room to reenter the coordinates into the monitor. But it’s just his luck, because the monitor’s glass is shattered to pieces as well, and there’s a thin line of black smoke rising from it. “No, no no no! I was so close!” he shouts, and sprints back into the portal room. He switches the lever from on to off and back to on again, but nothing changes.

When the ring comes to a complete stop, the bright blue light fades away, an ugly kind of rage boils in the pit of Stan’s stomach. “This is all your fault, you dumb machine!” he yells, and launches at the portal like it was a thug trying to rob him of his wallet, and starts punching it like there’s no tomorrow, like if he gave it enough left hooks it’ll obey him and spit Stanford right out to his side.

He’s about to go in for another punch when he hears the sound of the machine’s gears turning again. He grins, rubbing his hands together, and steps backwards to watch the process in its completion. Four bolts spark from the portal this time, but rather than strike the ground, they lunge for him, and Stan screams in agony as they jolt through his whole body. He takes it as a sign that he’s probably better off watching the process from the desk in the other room, but when he tries to turn heel and run, five bolts of lightning reach out and snake around his leg before he can take another step further, and he collapses to the ground. Gritting his teeth to avoid letting out a choked cry of pain, Stan tries to inch himself towards the lever for support to stand up, but it’s as if the damned lightning has the power to read his thoughts, because it shocks the lever with such a thick bolt of lightning that it fries the thing black.

The charge from the lightning gives the lever just the right amount of static charge it needs to reactivate properly, and Stan doesn’t notice the hum of the portal’s gears getting louder and louder until he finds himself floating off the ground. “W-whoa, hey! Hey! Hold on a minute!” Stan scrambles around at nothing in particular, hoping his feet or arms will snag on something and prevent him from getting pulled in. “Let’s talk this over! We can work together!” He must be losing his damn mind if he thinks bargaining with the portal like it’s sentient is going to do anything, but it’s the only option he’s got left. “I just want my brother back! You want to stay on, yeah? You don’t like getting turned on and off at random, right? I’ll-I’ll keep you on! As long as it takes for my brother to find his way home, I’ll keep you turned on! I promise!”

The machine, of course, does not respond, and the higher Stan gets off the ground the blurrier his vision gets. Damn fear of heights. He flaps his arms around as if he could fly, but nothing seems to work. He starts kicking, as well, to see if swimming towards the ground could work any better, but he still doesn’t budge.

But that does give him the idea of kicking off of the portal itself, since it’s the only solid thing left, save for the ceiling, and Stan curls himself up into a ball to try and get himself to flip over. It works, thankfully, but when he turns his glance back towards the portal his heart drops to his stomach. Curling himself up had helped his body change directions, yes, but it also changed his course entirely. Rather than being sucked towards the edge of the portal’s entrance, like he’d been when he was hovering above the lever, he’s now heading right for the center of the portal with nowhere to kick off of.

“N-No! No!” He shouts frantically, kicking his leg away from the cold blue substance the portal emitted. When he spares another glance backwards, his feet are already sucked inside, and the rest of him is quickly following. “No! Somebody help! Somebody!” he shouts, his own words painfully echoing those of Ford’s when he’d been in the same situation.

Ford,

If the portal manages to stay active after he gets sucked in, Ford’s gonna be able to find his way home, but he’ll be all alone, left to wonder what could’ve happened to him. Vaguely, Stan remembers Ford had been saying something about shutting it down for good, and his panicked flailing at the thought that he may be the one never coming again only makes his descent into the portal quicken. “Stanford!” he shouts, in the odds that his brother can hear his cries from the other side of the portal. “Stanford, do something! Stanford!”

The blue substance within the portal is thick and flavorless as his head is sucked in. He closes his mouth, because he doesn’t want to risk suffocating on whatever the hell this stuff is made of, and closes his eyes for impact for the same horrors that swallowed up his brother just two years prior, and…

…

When he forces his eyes open again, he’s lying on a bed. An actual, decently sized bed with fluffy blankets and at least three pillows supporting his head and neck. He’s not sure he’s slept on one of those in….what, thirteen years, give or take, if he’s not including the bug-infested hotels?

All of his burns from the lightning strikes have seemingly vanished into thin air, along with that gnawing hunger that never seemed to leave his stomach even when he had the time to eat more than a single meal a day, and though the air feels cool, it doesn’t feel humid and stuffy like Ford’s old lab had felt moments ago.

The rest of his aches are gone, too, he realizes as he sits up, replaced now by a dull pain in his hips and knees that he supposes he could credit to getting sucked into a portal and falling thirty feet to the ground to...uh, wherever he is now.

Is this where Ford’s been stuck all this time? It’s no wonder he never tried to find his way back on his own, because all things considered, this place is actually pretty comfortable. Maybe he wound up on a friendly alien planet, and some locals rushed him to the hospital to get him fixed up. But there’s no calamity outside his door like there usually is in most hospitals back on Earth, and there’s no weird tubes attached to either of his arms and not a sight of ace bandages anywhere on his body. And...is he…swaying back and forth?

Stan glances down at his hands, and the rest of his body still wrapped in a thick comforter. No, it’s not him, he realizes quickly, it’s the room that’s swaying back and forth. If he squints hard enough, he can make out the foot of his bed gently rocking back and forth. Scratching at his head, he goes to stand up and investigate his surroundings, until he notices a round window next to where he’d just been laying his head, just outside of his current line of sight. He lies back down, and his breath nearly catches in his throat at the sight.

It’s the biggest cluster of stars he’s ever seen his entire life, and if he looks close enough, he can see streaks of what he can only assume must be the galaxy itself. It certainly looks like the Earth’s skies, and when he looks again he notices the stars are reflecting off of… some kind of body of water?

Ah, so he’s on a boat. That explains the swaying. There’s a twinge of warm nostalgia in chest at the realization, of the days two scrappy little boys from New Jersey would spend their afternoons working on a sailboat of their own, musing dreamily about the day they’d finally sail away from the dumb town.

But...no. That couldn’t possibly be right. He got kicked out at seventeen, and Ford is god-knows-where in the universe. This must be some sort of sick joke, or an optical illusion that plays on his greatest dreams, or something. He turns away from the window, covering that half of his face with the blanket, and fully intends to fall asleep so he can bug the boat’s captain in the morning about where the hell he is and how the hell he wound up here in the first place. Just as he’s about to close his eyes, though, he notices a bulky, bright pink book sitting at his bedside table next to the lamp.

Well, he’s got nothing to lose, right? Maybe this thing’ll have some answers. He flicks the lamp on and sits up. The book is called MABEL’S SCRAPBOOK, and the title written in glitter pen in a child’s handwriting.

He snorts in laughter. Maybe the book belongs to the captain’s daughter, and she left it in here by mistake. Still, it could help to learn more about the family keeping him captive, and it’s not like she’ll know he ever read it, right? He chuckles to himself at the thought, but as soon as he grabs for the book to place it on his lap, the feel and smell of the dried glue and paint on the cover makes him feel dizzy, and his head’s suddenly swirling with so many thoughts that he feels like he’s drowning.

Grunkle Stan, it’s me! It’s me Grunkle Stan!

There has to be something we can do! I know my grunkle’s in there!

This is our first day in Gravity Falls, and this is when you let me take the grappling hook from the gift shop! Dipper thought I’d never use it, but he couldn’t be more wrong. Zing!

Over and over, all at once, the voice of two….wonderful, incredible rascal little nuisance kids keep yelling at him in his head, and he slams the book back down against his nightstand.

Damn memory relapses. Ford warned him they could happen, since McGucket had experienced a few of them himself before Stan and Ford left Gravity Falls, but Ford never said anything about the nightmares. Yeah, yeah, he could see it as a good thing, extra proof that his mind’s intact and they don’t need to worry that it’ll ever be gone for good, but nothing sucks more than nightmares that are so based in reality that they fuck with your sense of what’s real and what isn’t.

Stan rubs his eyes, and stands up. He figures it’d be a good idea to step out on deck and get some fresh air. He has no idea what time it is, but maybe if he goes and stares at the stars long enough he’ll eventually feel tired enough to crawl back into bed. He flicks his lamp light back off, and he’s maybe three steps out of his bedroom door before he notices that the light in Ford’s bedroom next to his is still on.

Stan pinches the bridge of his nose. He wants to be mad at Ford for staying up this late, and any other night he would tell him off and guilt him into sleeping by lying about how his light and excessive scribbling is what woke him up, but tonight he’s actually relieved by his brother’s dangerous sleeping habits, because talking out loud about his relapses and distinguishing real memories from fake ones always seems to widen the gap between his next relapse, and it certainly doesn’t help that tonight’s nightmare was about Ford’s disappearance. He creaks the door open slowly, to avoid activating Ford’s flight-or-magnet-gun-in-your-face response, and his mouth closes just as quickly as he’d opened it to speak. Ford’s desk lamp is on, yes, but his nerdy brother is not, in fact, hunched over with a thousand stacks of paper covering his face like he usually is this time of night.

Oh no. The lamp, it seems, was left on by mistake, because Ford’s curled up in his bed, fast asleep with his face half-buried in the pillow and his glasses tucked away in the drawer of his nightstand that he must’ve forgotten to close. Rolling his eyes, Stan sneaks into the room as quietly as he can and flicks the light off so he doesn’t have to replace the lightbulb when it subsequently dies out in the morning.

He turns heel, and he’s set on going back to his original plan of staring up at the sky until he feels tired again, but as he turns to close Ford’s door he gets another close look at his brother’s sleeping form and his chest warms with nostalgia at the sight as another memory, one from his childhood, resurfaces itself tonight.

When they were kids, Pa was...never the comforting kind of parent. And yeah, while that was pretty obvious in that it was always Ma who helped patch up their skinned knees and splinters from the boardwalk and the occasional bee sting, there were times he’d be...more subtle about it, if that’s even the right word to describe him. If either of them came poking their heads in their parents’ bedroom after a nightmare, asking if they could crawl in bed and sleep with them for the night, Pa would always brush them off and send them back to their own room, giving them some excuse about the shop opening early tomorrow and how he can’t afford to lose any sleep in case someone tries to come in and rob them.

From a young age, Stan and his brother learned that it’d be easier just to stop asking Pa at all, and instead they’d resort to climbing into each other’s bed instead. They shared a bunk bed up until they were about fourteen, and they had this unspoken system going where if the other poked them awake or tried to crawl under their blanket in the middle of the night, they’d have to comply and let them in without asking why because it usually meant they were having bad dreams. Ford learned very early on never to hesitate for Stan, because he knew that if Stan was willing to climb to the top bunk despite his fear of heights that his nightmares must’ve been bad.

Stan pauses, and wonders if Ford still remembers those times as well as he does. He hesitates, his grip still tight around the doorknob, until he recalls that it had been Ford who had asked him to accompany him to the arctic, and Ford who kept their childhood photo tucked away in the pocket of his trench coat.

Well, here goes nothing.

Just as quietly as he’d been before, he tiptoes over to Ford’s bedside, and he’s thankful to find that there was still enough room for him to crawl under the covers without squishing Ford uncomfortably against the wall. Slowly, as not to jostle the blankets too much to wake his brother, he flips a corner of the blanket up, crawls underneath, and as soon as his head hits the extra pillow he’s out cold.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If Ford had to complain about anything from his thirty year trip around the multiverse, besides, well...all of it, he’d have to credit the worst of it to his heightened hearing.

Ages ago, when it’d just been two weeks since he was sucked into the portal, he taught himself to sleep with his eyes open, and he taught his ears to pick up on the tiniest of movements, even the wind blowing the leaves off a tree branch. He couldn’t afford capture, and if that meant he had to sacrifice sleep to assure it wouldn’t happen, then so be it.

He’d lost the habit of sleeping with his eyes open after all the time he spent with Jheselbraum, thank god, but he could never quite get over the habit of listening. Every time something creaked in the Shack, every time Stan or one of the kids awoke in the middle of the night in search of the bathroom, it’d wake him up in a jolt, and it’d always take him longer than necessary to fall back asleep.

The nights on the Stan O’ War II are usually the quietest and most peaceful nights Ford’s ever experienced since his childhood. Though he and Stan always spend their days tracking and hunting monsters, they’re always able to find quiet little seaport towns to dock their boat when they need a place to rest for the night where nobody makes a peep until sunrise.

That is...until tonight. He’d been awake just a few minutes prior, mapping out the coordinates for the next monster they needed to track down and how long it would take for them to find it, but he finally got to a point where he had been so tired that his handwriting was starting to give up on him and he decided it was probably for the best that he just go to sleep. Standing to stretch, he places his glasses in the drawer of his nightstand and didn’t bother with the lamp light because he could just replace the bulb in the morning if need be, and practically collapsed face first onto his bed and fell asleep.

He heard mumbling coming from the thin wall to his brother’s room, and since their departure from Gravity Falls he’s become so used to Stan’s constant presence that it no longer bolts him awake. In a way it’s almost comforting, knowing he’s never alone on the vast sea. He shifts, when he hears his brother’s slippers lightly slapping against the deck, but dismisses that just as quickly.

He can feel himself dozing back off to real sleep when he hears his own lamp click off and his bedroom door closing. Ah, Stan was probably coming in to check on him but left when he saw that he was already asleep. That’s fine; he did that a lot the week before they left for their trip. He’s used to it.

What he’s not used to is the blanket getting ripped from his shoulders, and the bed making a dull creaking sound of...something sitting on it. Baffled, he pops his eye open, ready to reach for his weapon in case some sea creature managed to slip on board and into his bed, but his heart rate eases when he makes out the familiar shape of his brother fast asleep in the other half of his bed.

The sight of it makes Ford want to laugh.

He can’t believe Stan remembers.

Closing his eyes, Ford shifts his position ever so slightly, like it’s a maneuver he’s been practicing for ages, and scooches himself closer to Stan without shaking the bed. He snakes an arm around Stanley’s shoulder, whose whole body seems to release itself of tension at the gesture. Unconsciously, Stan shifts himself closer to Ford as well, and snakes his own arm around Ford’s chest, like he, too, had been practicing the maneuver since they were separated all those years ago.

#my writing #gravity falls #stan twins #sea grunkles #artsymeeshee

138 notes · View notes

viking-raider · 4 years

Text

Of Truth and Justice - Part II

Summary: Clark tries his best to convince Calea into helping the Justice League in defeating Steppenwolf and saving Earth. The League works on gaining more information on the Mother Boxes.

Pairing: Clark Kent/Superman x OFC

Word Count: 8,866

Parts: I

Rating: PG-13 - Justice League!AU, Language, Fluff, Angst, PTSD, Anxiety

Inspiration: Something that’s been on my Muse’s brain after watching Justice League a couple of times.

Author’s Note: TY to the amazing @wondersofdreaming for being a stellar Beta! Tell me what you think!

Tag List: @jennylovelyheart, @peakygroupie, @jessevans, @rosie-loves-things, @ohjules, @mary-ann84, @omgkatinka, @the-freak-cassie-131, @wardl0w, @agniavateira, @cap-barnes, @romyr4, @michelehansel, @kaatelyyynn, @badassbaker, @mrsaugustwalker, @authentic-bish-face, @rizeandvibe, @severuined, @supernaturalvikingwhore, @bellastellaluna, @wondersofdreaming, @thisisntmyrightera, @michelle-1185, @winchwm, @royallylazy, @sofiebstar, @worldicreate, @agniavateira, @fantasygirlsuniverse, @witches-of-discovery-a, @xuxszx, @ayamenimthiriel, @keiva1000, @fantasygirlsuniverse, @itsreigns, @constip8merm8, @scorpionchild81, @mylifefallingupthestairs, @onlyhenrys, @luclittlepond, @ellixthea, @lebguardians, @geralt-yennefer-jeskier, @cherrybloomn, @p3nny4urth0ught5, @iloveyouyen, @hollydaisy23, @mcuimagination, @psychosupernatural, @sweetlybigdragonn, @whitewolfandthefox, @moviemonzy, @the-soot-sprite, @hell1129-blog, @trippedmetaldetector, @captaingothgirl1996, @dont8mind8me8eue, @peaky-marvel, @desperate-and-broken21, @monstersnmoney, @dancingwendigo, @redhot-mystacism, @thereisa8ella, @black-ninja-blade, @oddduckthatgirl, @rosewinx, @henrythickcavill, @tinabean37, @hnryycvll, @msblkfire84, @romangenesius, @emelinelovesjc, @strangerliaa, @lovieebby, @pinksdaydream, @fanfictionaddiction99, @seb-owns-these-tatas, @oh-for-fic-sake, @sauvage-et-libre, @mis-lil-red, @angreav, @crazyandanonymous4u, @the-mighty-jellybean @henrycavell, @jimmypagesandbrianmayshair, @iam-laiya, @worshipping-skarsgard, @thetruthandotherstories, @ruthoakenshield, @lostinaseaoffictionalbliss, @theonetheycallhannah, @nina-skyee, @thatgirly81, @inanna999, @suueeeeeee, @spideysimpossiblegirl, @x-wingwarriorbbpoe8, @beckster07890, @daddys-littlewhitegirl, @magic-and-the-macabre, @stxphmxlls, @radaofrivia, @lostinaseaoffictionalbliss, @starstruckkittyangel, @heartfelt-pen

“Ouch.” Clark hissed, pulling away from Calea. “That keeps happening.” He frowned, watching teeny blue bolts of electricity jump from the top of her hand to the pads of his fingers.

“It happened, when I touched you in the--”

“Sol-Gel.” Calea replied, watching two more sparks jump from him to her, even with their hands centimetres apart. “It's like, super advanced Human Stem Cells.”

“It's the same as the Genesis Chamber, in the Fortress of Solitude.” Clark nodded, understanding. “Why does it keep happening though?” He asked, frowning at her.

Calea frowned at him. “Not to be untoward.”

She opened his brown leather hoodie and pushed her hand up inside his shirt, feeling the downy trail over his abdomen, half smirking as his muscles spasmed under her warm touch and the teeny sparks their skin continued to generate between them. Her hand skimmed over the pectoral muscles of his chest and met his eyes, through the glass of his black frames. Taking a deep breath, Calea rested her hand over his heart, fingers spread and pads pressed into his skin. Both of them gasped as a painful jolt of electricity passed between them, a bright blue tinge coloring both of their eyes for the briefest of moments.

Calea gasped and ripped her hand away from his chest and stumbled to her feet.

“What is it?” Clark frowned, getting to his own feet.

“Nothing.” She replied, turning away from him. “It just hurt, is all.” She lied, running a hand through her hair, fingers shaky.

“Can I do anything?” He asked, fretting.

“No, I'll be fine.” Calea replied, taking deep breaths and calming down her heart. “How does it feel to be alive again?” She asked, changing the subject.

“Itchy.” He chuckled, rubbing his arm. “Loud and bright.”

“Do you prefer it?” She asked, turning to look at him again. “Being alive or dead.”

“Being alive is nice.” Clark smiled. “Especially, since I get to see my mother again.” He took a deep breath, the air cool and fragrant in his lungs. “Why is it, you prefer to be asleep in the Sol-Gel, than being out here?”

“Other than Ryder, I have no reason to be here. No connection or bond rooting me in place.” Calea explained to him, glancing up at the dimming sky. “All I have is a reminder of what I lost and will never get back. Now, all that is for not, with Steppenwolf in possession of the Mother Boxes.”

“The pouring of salt in a never healing wound.” She sighed.

“So, if Calea is the only Selian left in the universe,” Barry started around a mouthful of cereal. “What are you?” He asked Ryder.

“I am a Coteran.” Ryder replied, rubbing his face at Barry's four hundredth question. “An ally to the Selians. Many of us train to become elite servants to the Selians. I was one such.”

“Are your people still around?”

“It's most likely.” Ryder answered with a shrug of his shoulders. “I haven't encountered one since we arrived here on Earth. I also haven't looked for any, I'm kept busy watching over Calea.”

“How hard can she be to watch, when she's in a tub of goo?” Arthur laughed.

“It's not as simple as that.” Ryder huffed at the Atlantean. “I have to maintain the temperature of the Sol-Gel, to make sure it stays fresh and active. Maintain her vital signs and comfort, make sure no one finds us and tries to harm her. I also have to keep her up to date on what's going on in the world.”

“How the hell do you do that?” Arthur rasped, lifting a brow at him.

Ryder looked at Arthur and narrowed his eyes. “Painstakingly.”

Clark and Calea stepped into the house and Ryder moved to her side, looking her over and making sure she was all right.

“I'm fine.” She sighed, patting him on the cheek. “Why don't you make them dinner, I'm going to lay down, I still have a lot of re-acclimating to do.” She told him softly, and turned to the rest of them.

“If I don't see you in the morning, it was a pleasure meeting you all.”

“Wait!” Bruce snapped, jumping up from his chair. “You're not going to help us?”

“I don't know how.” Calea told him, shaking her head. “Or, if I even can. By the time I try and learn how to, it will be far too late.”

“But, we need you.” He tried to argue.

Calea smiled at them, chuckling. “No, you do not.” You told him, meeting their eyes. “You have each other.”

Then, with a bow of her head to them, she went upstairs to her room.

“You have to convince her to help us.” Bruce said, looking over at Ryder. “You're the one that brought us here.”

“I am also the one that said you would have to convince her of it. I can't, or anyone for that matter, force Calea to do anything she doesn't wish too. Many have tried, and died, in the attempt.” Ryder replied, pushing up the sleeves of his shirt.

“Great, so we wasted valuable time.” Arthur groaned, rolling his eyes.

Clark touched his chest and frowned up the stairs. “Perhaps not.” He whispered. “She's just woke up with the bad news that one thing her people were trying to hide and protect, has been found and taken, by the very thing that wiped her people out. I can understand her reluctance to face that, if it wiped out your whole race before, killing you shouldn't be so hard.”

“I had the same qualm with Zod.”

“Do you think you can convince her to help us?” Diana asked, frowning up at him.

“I don't know.” Clark sighed, he had felt a connection with Calea, an understanding about something only someone in the same boat would understand and know how to shoulder. “I can try in the morning.” He said, stifling a yawn.

Calea whimpered in her sleep, it had been decades since she had slept unaided by the monitored and controlled Sol-Gel. Instead of well placed memories of a happier life, she was tormented by the memories and nightmares of things she couldn't stop or change. Growling, she sat up, tugging the bunched up blankets off her legs and got out of bed. She went to push open the double doors leading out to the balcony off her room, when the quickening of a heart somewhere in the house, started pounding in her sensitive ears. Sighing, Calea pulled on a robe and stepped into the hall, closing her eyes and swiveling her head to catch what direction it was coming from.

Honing in on it, Calea followed it down the hall to one of the guest rooms. Quietly opening the door and stepping inside, her eyes rested on the sleeping form of Clark, laying on his stomach and breathing hard, his handsome face pinched. Frowning, Calea's bare feet silently crossed the floor and she sat on the edge of his bed, her head tilting at him and her fingertips drifted down the length of Clark's back, small bolts touching each of his vertebra as she passed over them.

“Clark.” She whispered, hearing his soft whimper and rested her hand between his shoulder-blades.

Gasping, Clark jerked up, his pupils glowing red as he reacted to her touch.

“Clark.” Calea snapped, cupping his face in her hands and leaning forward.

Clark blinked, his heat vision cooling as he pulled away from her. “I almost hurt you.”

“No.” She shook her head. “You're all right.”

“What are you doing in here?” He frowned, running a hand through his hair.

“I heard your heart rate pick up.” She replied, heaving a sigh. “I just wanted to check on you.”

“It was just a nightmare.” He replied, turning to sit next to her. “I'm sorry for waking you.”

Calea chuckled, smiling softly. “I was already awake.” She assured him. “Nightmares of my own. What were you dreaming about?”

“The same dream I've had since coming back to life.” He sighed, licking his lips. “Dying all over again. Being trapped in my coffin. A deafening darkness.”

Calea narrowed her eyes for a moment. “Walk with me?” She asked, lifting a brow at him as she stood.

Clark stared at her for a moment, then stood up, pulling on his shirt and followed her out. They tiptoed downstairs and out the door, Calea smiled at him, slipping off her robe and walked barefoot into the forest. Tilting his head, Clark curiously followed after her, they didn't speak for a long time, just walking through the quiet darkness of the trees, a light and cool breeze stirring around them, making the tree branches rustle and wave at them as they passed underneath.

“I'm sure you're a good jumper?” She asked, turning to him and smirking.

“You can say that.” He smirked back. “What are we jumping to?” He asked, looking around.

Calea winked at him, crouched and sprang up, vanishing above the trees. Not sparing a moment, he pushed up and followed after the sound of her heart and found her sitting on a plateau, her feet swaying back and forth over the edge.

“I used to come up here, when I needed absolute quiet and I couldn't sleep. It's nearly impossible for anyone, but me, to get up here. So, it's perfect for solitude.” She explained as he sat beside her.

“How did you die?” Calea asked, curiously.

“Bruce and I didn't like each other, when we first met.” He answered, scanning the horizon in front of them. “We didn't see eye to eye on things. I felt his 'brand of justice' wasn't right and attempted to expose him through my job as a Journalist, at the Daily Planet. Bruce already had an issue with me, being an Alien and Superman, he worried that I would turn and try to take over the world. Like some, dark god.”

Calea snorted and shook her head. “Such is the will of Humans. Always worrying about someone, from Earth or otherwise, wanting to be supreme overlord.” She said dramatically, making Clark laugh.

“It is.” He nodded. “Well, we met up as Batman and Superman and nearly leveled half of the city. While in the process, another Human, Lex Luther, managed to break into a scout ship General Zod crashed and raised a Kryptonian monster, he named, Doomsday.”

“Appropriate, if unoriginal.”

Clark snorted, looking down at his hands. “After Doomsday was unleashed, Bruce and I put aside our dislike for each other, with Diana's help, and worked on trying to stop him together. But, everything we and anyone else did, the creature only grew stronger. Since Luther created him in the Scout Ship's Genesis Chamber and his own blood, it was nearly impossible to kill him without..”

“Kryptonite.” Calea nodded, resting back on her elbows.

“You know about it?” Clark frowned, looking at her surprised.

“I'm well over five thousand years old, Clark Kent.” She teased him. “There aren't many Races and their history I don't know about.”

“I've only been around for thirty-four years. So, you've got all that on me.” He replied, laying back with her. “Have you met any other Kryptonians?”

“You're the third Kryptonian, I've ever met.” She answered, staring up at the stars. “I really liked one of them, Zall-Ba, he was part of the Kryptonian Science Guild. He would come to Selion periodically to confer with our scientists, and my parents would host him.” She smiled, recalling him fondly. “I loved listening to him talk about the different sciences with my father. Such spirited and good natured debates.”

She turned her head and looked at him. “You're the last one, the last Kryptonian?”

“I am.” Clark nodded, solemnly. “It blew up, almost forty years ago now.”

“That really sucks. Have you met any other Kryptonians?”

“Oh yeah.” He laughed, his body shaking. “Zod was a Kryptonian General. He had been exiled from Krypton for trying to do a hostile takeover with the rest of his exiled crew. They wanted to kill me and turn Earth into a new Krypton. So, I..” He sighed and rubbed his face. “I had to kill him. He was the first person, whose life I took, and whose body Luther used to help create Doomsday.”

Calea wiggled her body closer to him. “You see that purplish dot?” She asked, pointing up at the sky.

“Mmhm.” Clark nodded, tilting his head towards hers, as he looked up at it.

“That's Selion.” She smiled at him. “That's my home planet. Now, if you go out a few dots,” she moved her finger across the inky and sparkling sky. “That faint red dot, is the star Krypton used to orbit.”

Clark blinked, his body relaxing as he stared up at that teeny, but beautiful, dot. No one had pointed it out to him before. Then again, there hadn't been anyone around that could point out where his birth planet had once been. Now that Calea had, he felt more grounded to where he was in the world. Now, when he was feeling lost and out of place, he knew where to look to bring himself back.

“Thank you.” He whispered, turning his head to look at her.

“You're welcome.” She smiled at him. “It's nice to be able to see home, even if you can't go back.”

“What scares you about trying to help us stop Steppenwolf?” He asked her, suddenly.

Calea sighed and looked back up at the stars. “I don't know.” She whispered, biting her lip. “Losing myself.”

“Losing yourself, how?” Clark frowned.

“I've fought this dark part of myself that wanted to scour the universe for wherever Steppenwolf went, after his defeat, and kill him in the slowest way possible. I want to kill him in a way that would take him years to die from.” She told him, her face and eyes hardening, as the anger she had kept pent up inside for so long, surfaced.

“I want to punch my hand through his chest and slowly squeeze that black hole heart of his, until it's mush in my palm.” She added, making Clark blink at her. “Sorry.” She cleared her throat, catching the look on his face from the corner of her eye.

“I can't say I blame you.” He replied, giving her a soft expression. “I would want to avenge my parents, if I could, had they died like that.” He empathized with her, his hand touching hers as they rested between them.

“I guess you can say, I'm afraid of losing myself, in the attempt to stop him, and not being able to find myself again.”

Clark bit the inside of his lip and nodded at her, he could understand that. “But, you won't know, until you try.” He pointed out to her. “You have to be willing to make that leap of faith.”

“True.” She sighed, pressing her lips together. “I don't know, Clark. But, I'll think about it.”

The Justice League left that morning, without Calea and Ryder, much to their frustrated and dejected dismay.

“I can't believe we wasted all that time.” Arthur rasped as they all entered the Hall of Justice.

“I totally thought she was going to come with us!” Barry said, who was, as usual, stuffing his face with food. “Doing that 'edgy, hold them in suspense' thing. Telling us, she'd come at the last moment.” He mumbled.

“Well, she didn't.” Bruce grunted, running a hand through his hair. “We need to look to other sources for stopping Steppenwolf, since Calea isn't going to help. Victor, do you have anything?”

“Steppenwolf hasn't activated the Mother Boxes, yet.” Victor answered, pacing the room. “But, it's all a matter of time until he does.”

“Do we have any ideas on where he would take the Boxes to activate them?” Diana asked, looking at him.

“I've been actively searching every place and keeping an ear out for any changes, but so far...” He trailed off.

“Nothing.” Bruce sighed, dropping into a chair and rubbing at his face. “He has to show his hand at some point.”

The team broke off to their own areas to work on various things, Steppenwolf related and otherwise. Victor was searching a globe mainframe and scanning all the possible pathways he could for any sign of Steppenwolf and his Para-Demon. Diana went to the training area of the Hall, needing a distraction, Barry found his way to the kitchen, while Bruce talked to Alfred about Wayne Industries and anything he's found about Steppenwolf, and Clark sat down with his laptop to start working on the article he was supposed to have turned into Parry the next day.

“Guys!” Victor yelled out. “I found something!”

“What is it?” Clark asked, setting his laptop aside and joining the team around Victor.

“There's a huge blip of activity here.” He touched a spot on the map and it blew up between them, showing a flashing red dot. “From the readings I'm getting, it has to have something to do with Steppenwolf and his horde.”

“Where?” Diana asked, getting ready.

“Romania.” Victor replied, heading towards the jet. “I'll fly us there.”

“I'll meet you there.” Clark said, all suited up and heading out.

Clark landed a little distance away from the scene that was swarming with Para-Demons, they were all agitated and flapping around one area of the forest, but Clark couldn't pinpoint what it was they were so frantic to get their hands on. His ear twitched, hearing the sound of the League's jet landing several yards behind him and turned around to join them.

“They're looking for something.” He told them, as they stepped off the jet.

“What more could they possibly be looking for?” Diana frowned. “They have all three of the Mother Boxes.”

“I don't know, but they are whipped up into a frenzy for it.” Clark replied, shaking his head. “Shall we get the bug spray out?” He asked, smirking and making the team chuckle.

“Let's do this.”

The team ran and flew through the trees towards the thicket of Para-Demons. It took a moment for the heavily distracted Para-Demons to notice their guests, but after Clark used his heat vision to melt three in half and Diana sliced through another two, the full intensity of the swarm's focus was on the Justice League and a full blown battle commenced.

Bruce used his grappling gun to grapple a Para-Demon, swinging him in a wide arch and swatting several other Para-Demons out of the air, Arthur stabbing them through with his trident. Barry used his speed to push Para-Demons into Diana's sword or Clark's heat vision. Punching a Para-Demon square through the chest, Clark picked up on a muffled sound and scanned the area around him, identifying the opening of a mining shaft. Glancing at his team, Clark zipped into the mine, finding three miners trapped inside and cornered by a pair of Para-Demons, who were drawn by the thick scent of their fear.

“Hey, bug boy.” Clark called, catching their attention. “That's right.” He smirked.

The Para-Demons screeched at him, dragonfly-like wings beating furiously as they took off at Clark.

“Run!” Clark barked at the miners in Romanian, as he deflected one of the Para-Demons.

Not needing to be told twice, the miners tore out of the mine shaft, like bats out of hell. Clark ducked the clawed swipe of one of the demons and shoved the second away from him, pushing him into one of the mine's support beams. The already strained wood buckled and splintered, before collapsing as the Para-Demon recovered and jumped on Clark's back. He grunted as they gave him a front to back assault, but managed to snap the neck of the Para-Demon in front of him and tossed him away, inadvertently breaking another support beam as he reached behind him to grab the last Para-Demon. The rough dome ceiling groaned and crumbled on top of Clark and the Para-Demon, burying them under a massive amount of stone.

It didn't hurt Clark, a mountain swallowing him whole, but it did stun him. The sudden crash of falling rock ringing in his ears, the screech of the Para-Demon being crushed flat, the vile smell and feel of its radioactive green blood oozing all over the back of his black suit and down the side of his neck; the uncomfortable press of rock crushing him down to the ground. But, what got to Clark, was the pitch black darkness, not even his sensitive eyes and heat vision could penetrate it, he could just barely hear the faint and muffled sound of the rest of the Justice League still fighting at the surface, probably unaware of his current situation.

Had this been four months ago, Clark would have easily blasted his way out of the rubble, through the mountain top and into the clear blue skies above. But, his heart started to race and his chest tightened, panic setting in as his mind flashed back to the dark quiet of death and his coffin. He had only been six feet under the first time he was buried, now, he was easily miles below ground. The team would never find him, he'd be trapped there, forever. He would never see his Ma again, never turn in another piece for the Daily Planet. They would all wonder what had become of Superman and Clark Kent.

Had he left them, tired of being their hero and supposed god?

Had he died all over again?

Or was the supposed resurrection of Superman a complete lie, a hoax to garner who knows what?

There was nothing Clark could do, laying there, paralyzed to run darker and darker scenarios in his mind; breathing hard, chest tight and his heart clenched like a hard hand was wrapped around it. Then, a soft sound came to him, he wasn't sure if it was coming from around him or just in his head, but it was there. So soft he couldn't make it out, but it raced down his spine and crackled throughout his limbs, popping in the base of his brain, clearing away all the anxiety that had been washing over him.

His muscles tensing, Clark rocked through the almost endless feeling layers of rock, bursting out the top of the mountain and taking a deep lungful of fresh air as he did.

“Where have you been?” Arthur asked as Clark landed beside him.

“Rescuing some trapped miners.” He replied, not willing to talk about what truly happened. “Did we discover what they were looking for?”

“No.” Bruce replied, appearing out of the treeline, his suit covered in flakes of Para-Demon blood.

“There has to be something.” Diana added in, looking around for any clues.

“Victor, are you picking up on anything?” Bruce asked, turning towards him.

“Nothing.” Victor answered, shaking his head. “Whatever reason they're here, it must be why Steppenwolf hasn't activated the Unity with the Mother Boxes.”

“It's the only thing that makes sense.” Clark commented, frowning. “Let's go back to the Hall, and compile what we know.” He said, and shot off into the sky.

“What happened to him?” Barry asked, looking around the remaining group.

“No idea.” Bruce rasped, concerned, as he watched Clark disappear.

“Clark, are you all right?” Diana called, opening the door to Clark's room in the sleeping quarters of the Hall of Justice. “Clark.” She called softer, as he jerked and twisted in his bed, trapped in a night terror.

Frowning, Diana rested her hand on his tense back, only for Clark's thick arm to fly out and swat her across the room, and nearly through the wall. Clark rose up, body still tense as he turned to face her, his eyes glowing red hot. Diana tensed, ready to defend herself, but the door flew open and a blur moved past Diana. Grabbing Clark by the shoulders and twisting him around, they ducked, as Clark unleashed the beams of his heat vision, through the bedroom window.

“Clark, wake up!”

“Calea!” Bruce's voice yelled from the door, as he and the others ran in, hearing the commotion. “What are you doing here?”

“Clark, no!” She barked as he turned to him and growled.

Calea grasped Clark's arms tighter as he tried to move towards Bruce, snarling at him. Dropping down to a squat and throwing herself backwards, Calea tossed Clark over her body and through the wall, sending him skidding across the back lawn of the Hall of Justice grounds.

“What are you doing here?” Bruce asked, looking at her astonished.

“Well, I came to tell you, I changed my mind and want to help.” Calea answered, panting. “But, I heard a crash and came to investigate, finding Clark had thrown Diana into a wall and about to mel-” She tried to explain, just as Clark came jetting through the hole his body made and collided with her.

Both of them spiraled through several walls, before Calea was able to gain traction and push back against Clark, slowing him down considerably. Their muscles strained against each other, she groaned and took deep breaths, just barely holding him back, teeth gritted. Releasing enough of her push against him, Calea drove her knee into his stomach, driving him back again, both of them dropping to the floor, feet first.

“Clark, please.” She begged him. “You're having a waking nightmare, Clark. Whatever you're thinking, it isn't real.” She tried to reason with him, holding a hand out to him.

Growling, Clark drew in a deep breath, his bare chest swelling.

“Please, don't do this, Clark.” Calea pleaded with him. “Please, don't do this.”

Clark let out a blast of cold breath, that would have made Antarctica feel like Hawaii. Calea gasped, doubled over to shield herself, her warm breath coming out in a frosty mist. She squeezed her eyes shut and her hands into fists, the lights around the hall, and even out on the street, flickered and blinked rapidly, several bulbs popped and shattered. Calea stood up straight, her eyes glowing bright blue with crackling bolts of electricity around the corners of her eyelids. Bending her arms at the elbows, hands up and her open palms faced out towards Clark, she sent out a strong bubble of energy towards him, stopping the flow of his frosty breath and sent him staggering backwards several steps.

Snapping forward, Calea grabbed Clark by the face, her face and body returning to normal as she whispered his name. “Kal.”

“He won't let me rest.” Clark whimpered, brow creased.

Calea's eyes rose to Bruce as he and the rest of the group stood in one of the gaping holes they left behind. She brought her mouth close to Clark's ear. “I'll let you rest, Kal-El.” She cooed to him, stroking the nape of his neck and hairline.

His arms snaked around her waist and his head dropped heavily on her shoulder, his breathing light and even against the skin of her neck. Bruce and Arthur picked their way through the rubble to help Calea get Clark back to a room that was still all in one piece.

“How did you do that?” Bruce asked, standing next Calea as she sat beside Clark's bed. “You stopped him. You almost matched him.”

“I'm a Prime Selian.” Calea sighed, rubbing her tired face. “It's--” she shook her head, trying to find the words. “It's my people's version of Superman.” She gave in. “A tortoise is always a turtle, but a turtle isn't always a tortoise.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Bruce frowned, shaking his head.

“Prime Selians are always Selians, but Selians aren't always Prime.” She groaned, too tired to give the Human a history lesson. “We never understood what caused it, but some Selians, when they were born, were far more advanced and enhanced the rest of us; stronger, more stamina and endurance, so on. You know your child is a Prime Selian in only one way.” She said, standing up and removing her jacket.

“Their markings.”

A line of blue runes lit up and raced over Calea's arm to her shoulder. Bruce studied them, reaching out and carefully touching them, he could feel the hum of power in them, charging Calea's body up with power; he found it fascinating.

“I am a Royal Prime Selian, which is basically an Alpha, in terms you would understand.”

“What is it that makes you more different?”

“The Royal Blood of Selion is pure.” Calea replied, sitting back down. “Was pure. Not like other Selians that might fall in love and have kids with other Races around the galaxy. There were two Royal houses of Selion, my mother's and my Father's. They were never related, but they would marry one another and have kids.”

“How does that even work?”

Calea laughed. “I matured, when I turned a thousand years old, Mr. Wayne.” She smiled. “I've looked just as you see me now, for the last four thousand years. The 'peak' of our lives, unlike Humans and many other Races, never changes, only we change. Only we decide we no longer wish to produce children. So, my mother's parents, who looked no older than you,” She snorted at him, teasingly. “kept producing children. As did my father's parents, and when a pair of them reached maturity, they would marry and so on.”

Bruce looked blankly at her.

“I know, it's horribly complicated and there's always an easier way, but that's the way they chose to do it. For thousands of years. While still managing to keep track of the line of succession. I was the first Prime Selian, in almost two hundred years, I'm the only female Prime Selian ever known to our history.”

“Not to mention the only Royal one.” He laughed, trying to lighten the mood.

“Especially, then.” She smiled back at him, her eyes drifted back to Clark as he started to fuss in his sleep again.

“I should go.” Bruce said, shifting uncomfortably. “I'd rather him see your face first, than mine. He's less likely to punch it, and I have a mess to clean up.”

“I am sorry about that.” Calea frowned at his back.

“It's all right.” He smiled, turning back to her. “I'm rich, it just looks like a scratch to me.”

Calea snorted as Bruce went out, then slid herself and her chair closer to Clark's bedside. “Hey, you're all right, Clark.” She cooed at him, squeezing his hand and rubbing his forearm. “Whoa!” She gasped, when Clark shot up in bed.

“It was just a dream.”

“Calea?” He gasped and frowned at her, brows furrowed. “What—am I?”

“You're awake and alive.” She smiled at him.

“What happened?” He groaned, swinging his feet over the edge of the bed. “Why are you here?”

“To the latter, I changed my mind and want to help.” She told him, softly. “To the former, you had a night terror.”

“A what?” Clark sighed, shaking his head and glanced around.

“You were having a nightmare, a waking one. You nearly sent Diana through a wall.”

Clark's head snapped back to Calea. “Is she all right?”

“She's fine.” Calea assured him. “Typical Diana and all.”

“I hope I didn't make too much of a mess.”

“Well,” She snorted, looking down at her feet and smirked. “We made a mess.” She replied. “You tried melting her with your heat vision, then you saw Bruce and started after him, so I..uh..threw you out a window.”

“You threw me out a window?”

“You're not that heavy.” She chuckled, brushing her hair behind her ear. “But, you did pay me back for it. I'm not entirely sure how we didn't level the whole building.” She commented glancing around, expecting it to suddenly collapse on top of them.

“Your frost breath is extremely cold, by the way.”

“I'm so sorry.” Clark sighed, raking a hand through his disheveled curls.

“What happened, Clark?” She asked, concerned for him.

Clark rolled his shoulders and rubbed the back of his neck. “We found a swarm of Para-Demons in Romania. They were looking for something, we didn't find what it was they were after. But, a couple of miners got trapped inside a mine by a pair of Para-Demons, so I went into the shaft to save them. I knocked out the support beams and the shaft fell in on me.” He explained to her, his mind flashing back to it.

“It was--” He closed his eyes. “Dark and quiet, cool. Like, when I was dead. I was crushed more by the anxiety of being trapped in another coffin, than I was by the thousands of tons of mountain on top of me. I couldn't move and could barely use any of my powers to free myself, convinced I was going to die there, and no one would find me or care that I was gone.”

“But, you got out.” Calea cooed at him, soothingly.

“Because of something I heard.” He replied, he could still hear it in his mind. “A small sound and all the anxiety went away, allowing me to free myself.”

“You have PTSD.” She replied, lightly.

“I'm an Alien.”

“And?” Calea countered, brows drawn down and eyes wide. “PTSD is a mental and emotional state. Anything capable of thinking and feeling, is more than unfortunate in possibly suffering from it.”

“And you speak from experience.”

“I do.” She nodded. “For a very long time. You said the Para-Demons were looking for something in Romania.” She asked, sensing Clark's need for a change in subject.

“Yes, but we don't know what or why.”

“Hm.” Calea hummed, frowning.

“We think it's why Steppenwolf hasn't unleashed the Mother Boxes yet.” He explained.

A knock on the door interrupted their conversation.

“Not to intrude.” Barry said, a hand pressed over his eyes.

Calea and Clark looked at each other, smirking, and rolled their eyes at him.

“What is it, Barry?” Clark asked, lifting a brow at him.

“Victor has something he wants us all to see.” Barry replied, peeking through his fingers at them.

“We'll meet you down there.” Clark told him, standing up.

“Nice to see you again, Calea.” Barry said, smiling and blushing at her.

“You too, Barry.” She smirked, chuckling as he blushed even harder. “What do you think it is?”

“I'm not sure. But, I am sure, it's related to Steppenwolf.” Clark answered, showing her the way down to the labs.

They joined the rest of the team and saw what it was Victor had to show them. Trapped inside a protective cell and beating its hands against the thick glass, was a Para-Demon. Screeching so loud, that everyone winced. Victor had managed to capture the creature and content it in its current jail. Beams of multi-colored lights scanned all sides of the tube, reading as much information they could about the creature; various monitors flashing and beeping in unison with them.

“You captured a Para-Demon.” Diana said, in disbelief. “How?”

“It wasn't easy, believe me.” Victor replied, smirking at her. “I thought, if we could get our hands on one and run some tests on it, we could find out more about Steppenwolf and his plans.”

“Any luck?” Bruce asked, folding his arms over his chest as he squinted at the creature.

“Nothing so far, my scans just started.”

“I have something that I want to see how it reacts too.” Bruce said, moving over to a work table and picked up a chunky black device. “I found out a few weeks ago, after encountering a Para-Demon on the top of a building in Gotham, there's a high frequency sound that agitates them. It came off a building's security alarm.” He explained, stepping closer to the encapsulated creature with the device.

Bruce flipped the device on and a loud wailing and whirling screech filled the room, making everyone grimace and plug their ears. The Para-Demon screamed along with the siren-like noise, withering in agony as it desperately tried to escape its cell, obviously to no avail. Calea whimpered, her ears felt like they were bleeding. She shook her head, trying to lessen the pain throbbing through her skull, the Para-Demon's screeches pulsed through her brain, making her eyes hurt and blur.

“D-De-” A sketchy and raspy voice clawed at Calea's brain, like scrapping steel wool and red hot pokers. “De-Defas Se-vit.” The words echoed in her skull.

“Defas Sevit.”

“Help me.” Calea whimpered back.

“Defas Miresa.”

“Help us.” She echoed back.

“Calea?” Clark groaned, grasping her arm as she stumbled. “Turning off!” He snapped at Bruce. “Turn the damn thing off!” He hissed, maneuvering Calea into a chair.

Bruce quickly switched the device off, the silence more deafening than the sound it made. They crowded around Calea, Diana sent Barry zooming out for a glass of water, as they tried to make sure she was all right.

“Help me. Help us. Help me. Help us.” Calea kept repeating, pressing her fists to her temples.

“Who, Calea?” Clark frowned, kneeling beside her and shook his head. “Who needs help?”

Calea shook her head hard, trying to dislodge the voice in her head. “I don't know.” She panted, taking the glass from Barry and downing it in one go. “I don't know.” She gasped, pressing her fingertips into her throbbing and watering eyes.

“I don't know.”

“It's all right, just relax.” Clark replied, rubbing her arm.

Victor looked between Calea and the Para-Demon, calculating. “You heard it.” He said, suddenly. “You actually heard the Para-Demon.”

“That's impossible.” Diana shook her head at him.

“There's only one way to find out.” Arthur commented, lifting a brow.

“Absolutely not.” Ryder's voice boomed from the doorway. “You are not putting her through that again.” He hissed.

“I'm starting to wonder if I should just forego the security systems in my buildings.” Bruce sighed, shaking his head.

“How did you find her?”

“It's my job to keep track of her.” Ryder growled, moving over to Calea and checking her out. “Why didn't you tell me you were leaving?” He chided her.

“I don't need your permission to do things, Ryder.” She replied, rolling her eyes and shaking him off.

Standing up, Calea moved to stand in front of the trapped Para-Demon, unflinching as it gnashed its sharp teeth at her, going wild against the tempered glass. She pressed her hands and forehead to the glass.

“Lusnet uda ecto.” She whispered, holding the creature's eyes.

“What is she saying?” Barry asked, looking around the room.

“I can hear you.” Ryder translated. “It's Solean, Ancient Solean, at that.”

The Para-Demon's screeches faltered for a moment, before recovering and going wild again. Sighing, Calea turned around and looked at the group. “Turn it back on.” She said to Bruce. “It's the only way for it to answer me.”

“I don't think this is a good idea.” Diana protested, shaking her head. “We saw what happened the last time we messed with something we didn't understand.”

“Clark nearly wiped the entire planet out.” Arthur agreed.

“Yeah, but as bad as that was, he ended up just fine.” Barry argued.

“Barely.” Victor huffed.

Growling, Calea shot forward and snatched the device from Bruce's hand, turning it back on as she refocused on the Para-Demon. “Let's see what you got to say, bug boy.” She hissed, gritting her teeth against the sound.

“I can hear you. Tell me what you know.”

The Para-Demon shook its head, pressing its back to the other side of the cage. “Help me. Help us.” It hissed in agony.

“How?” Calea whined back, a bubble of pain in the base of her skull made her feel cold. “Tell me!” She yelled, eyes glowing blue.

The air in the lab changed, the hairs on everyone's bodies stood erect and on end, the Para-Demon snapped forward, colliding with the grass in a dull thud, but Calea still didn't move or change, their eyes only the thickness of the glass apart.

“Princess Calea Stormborn of Fallborn.” It spoke in a slurping hiss, that echoed in her mind.

“You know me?”

“Of course, I was once Kulas of Everhaven.”

“You were a Selian.” She let out in a startled gasp.

“We all once were.” He choked, head twisting and jerking to the side with stomach turning crunches. “Steppenwolf's most advanced Para-Demons were all once Selians. He turned us into his most perfect and effective soldiers, as a penalty for not giving over the Boxes.”

“And now, he has them.” Calea sighed, shaking her head. “What is he looking for in Romania?”

“The--” His head smashed against the glass, startling Calea back a step. “My bloo-” He rasped, pounding his forehead against the glass several more times, neon green blood dripping down his ashen face and splattered on the cracking glass. “Will tell you.”

With one more solid smash, the Para-Demon's neck snapped and he felt limp to the bottom of his cage. Ryder snatched the still screaming device out of her hand and smashed it against the wall, ears ringing. Looking around, Calea spotted a small, half empty bottle of Tropicana apple juice and grabbed it, unscrewing the lid and dumping it out on the floor.

“Hey, that was mine!” Barry protested, his mouth dropping open. “Rude.” He pouted.

Calea squatted down and held the empty bottle under the cage, catching the green ooze as it dripped from the grated floor. Almost full, she stood back up, looking at it at half an arm's length, curious how it would tell her anything about what Steppenwolf was searching for Romania. That was so important, it would delay his plans for the Unity of the Mother Boxes.

“Oh, that is so gross.” Barry grimaced, swallowing.

“He said, his blood would tell me what Steppenwolf was looking for.” Calea said, ignoring Barry and still staring at the container of blood.

“We can run it through a couple of my scanners.” Victor said, stepping up to one of the control consoles and hurriedly typed on its keyboard. “Put some of it in right there.” He told Calea, pointing to a centrifuge-like device.

Calea poured some of the Para-Demon's blood into the device's chamber and closed the lid. It started out slow, but eventually spun at a fast rate, the compounds of the blood separating into different chambers and making a variety of glowing lights flash around it and on the monitor in front of Victor.

“There are dozens of isotopes in this creature's blood, some that can't even be identified.” He said, shaking his head. “There's almost zero plasma as well. But, I don't see anything that can be a clue or hint to what Steppenwolf is up to.”

“Whoa!” Arthur snapped, grossed out as Calea touched the bottle to her lips.

“Calea, no!” Ryder barked, but it was too late, she had already started chugging it down. “What have you done!”

“Something stupid, I'm sure.” She replied, smacking her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the thick metallic and bitter taste of the blood on her taste buds.

“This girl's nuts.” Arthur laughed, grinning. “I dig it.”

“Oh.” She groaned and grunted, doubling over as sharp pains spiked through her chest and stomach.

“Stupid in-fucking-deed.” Ryder hissed, resting his hands on her.

“Stop babying me.” Calea hissed back, eyes glowing a blue-green color.

“Oh shit, the blood is affecting her.” Victor gasped, shocked.

“Calea.” Clark panted, watching the change come over her, her body shivering in pain and the blood's affect.

Her mouth fell open and she gasped, eyes going huge. Making a choking noise, Calea's eye rolled into the back of her head and she fell limply to the floor. Clark nearly shoved everyone away from her and picked her up into his arms.

“Her heart is slowing.” He frowned, scanning her.

“She's dying.” Diana whispered, astounded and horrified.

“No.” Clark whimpered, hugging her tight against his body and rocketing out of the Hall.

“Why couldn't he have just used the door?” Bruce groaned, as they glanced up through the massive hole he left behind.

“Where's he taking her?” Ryder demanded, snarling at the League.

“How are we to know?” Arthur huffed back at him. “Aren't you the one that's supposed to be keeping track of her?”

Clark landed in front of Calea's home in the forest, her heart even slower than it was at the Hall. “Hold on, Calea.” He murmured to her, carrying her inside and down the lift to the Sol-Gel chamber.

He carefully laid her down and grabbed the black mask that helped her breathe in the Sol-Gel and put it on her, before gently easing her into the Gel. Clark didn't understand any of the equipment that maintained the whole system of Sol-Gel, so he wasn't at all sure how to make it work, or tell if it was working already. He stood beside the chamber and glanced at the back of his hand, turning it over to look at his palm, an idea striking him. Biting his lip, Clark plunged his hands into the Gel, pushing up the sleeves of Calea's jacket and gripping her bare upper arms, the electric current that always sparked between their skin made the hair all over Clark's body stand and charged the Gel.

Calea's heart suddenly started to beat stronger.

Relieved, she'd be all right, hopefully. Clark pulled away from her, wiping the Gel off of his arms and paced the room. He felt agitated as he moved around the room, touching things, picking them up and putting them back down, trying to calm himself and reassure his nerves that she would be more than fine now that she was back in the protection of the Sol-Gel. But, Clark wasn't completely satisfied or comforted by that fact.

So, he did something that was more than likely, irrational.

It was an amazingly beautiful day in Selion, the native mint sparrows twittering and zooming about, trying to catch flying insects. The rays of the white sun shielded by a few puffy clouds, letting out a pleasant warmth. The air was a buzz with bees lighting on wildflowers, that gave the clear and fresh air an alluring and soothing fragrance.

Calea could feel the soft blades of wild grass under her bare feet and closed her eyes, nothing felt better than being back home, especially when you've been homesick for thousands of years. She paused and dipped her cupped hands into a small babbling stream beside her, lifting them to her lips and took a deep drink, the clean and cold water tasted sweet and refreshing to her taste buds and senses. Glancing around, Calea made her way through the streets towards home and smiled seeing it, shining in the high afternoon sun.

“Mama!” She called out, voice echoing in the grand halls. “Papa?”

She received no answer, but she could hear the echo of voices, and followed it. The sounds led her into the banquet hall and her blood ran cold before she even entered the vast room. A group of hissing and screeching Para-Demons stood menacingly behind, none other than, Steppenwolf. Her mother and father stood in the hall with several of the house's servants cowering on the floor.

“No!” Calea screamed and ran at them, but she skid through them, like a ghost.

“Where are the Boxes!” Steppenwolf growled, pointing his Electro Axe at them.

“We will never tell you!” Her mother, Solea, hissed back at him.

“Oh, I think you will.” Steppenwolf grinned, raising his Axe and striking one of the servants, taking their head clean off. “I will either kill every Selian on this planet or turn them into my Para-Demons, until you tell me where you've sent the Mother Boxes.” He threatened.

“Then, that is what you will do.” Calien replied, standing strong.

Steppenwolf roared in fury and hacked his way through the servants, several turning into Para-Demons, while others had a more fortunate fate in death. He brought in more and more people into the banquet hall, giving the King and Queen countless opportunities to tell him where the Mother Boxes had been sent, but Calien and Solea never budged or spoke up, watching Steppenwolf ravage their people. It wasn't long though, that one of the Selians brought into the Hall spoke up.

“Please, please!” They begged, slipping on the massive puddle of blood covering the floor. “I don't want to die! I have a family! I'll tell you where the Boxes are.”

“Finally, someone with a shed of intelligence.” Steppenwolf smirked. “Tell me where they are.”

“They're no longer on the planet.”

“Adas!” Calien barked, veins bulging in his neck.

“Then, where are they?” Steppenwolf asked, ignoring the enraged King.

“They've been taken off of the planet.” Adas trembled, looking between Calien and Steppenwolf.

“Is that so?” Steppenwolf rasped, eyeing Solea and Calien.

“They've been taken to--”

A scream rang out in the hall and a crackling bolt of electricity struck Adas, his body trembling as the massive surge coursed through him. Calien released the flow of electricity with an exhausted gasp, shoulders slumping as his energy drained. Solea wrapped her arms around her husband, supporting him as Adas's body dropped to the floor; dead. Steppenwolf shoved everyone aside, grabbing Calien by the throat and holding him off the ground.

“I will find everything for my Mother Boxes, with or without your help, Selian.” Steppenwolf rasped, tightening his hand around Calien's throat more and more. “And your planet will be the first of many to crumble.” He said, letting out a rumbling laugh.

“Papa, no!” Calea cried, watching as Steppenwolf killed her father, tears streaming down her face.

Laughing, Steppenwolf turned on his heels and left the hall. Solea cradled Calien's head in her lap, rocking back and forth as she wailed and sobbed. One of the servants crawled across the bloody floor towards her Queen, wrapping her arms around her shoulders and rocking with her, crying into her neck.

“He will never find what he seeks, never.” Solea wept, stoically. “I thank the gods my sweet girl is safe away from this place.”

“What is he looking for?” The Servant asked.

Solea seemingly met Calea's eyes as she answered the question.

Ryder barged into the house with Bruce and Diana, it was the only conceivable place for Clark to take Calea in the condition she was in when he took her from the Hall of Justice. The ride down in the lift felt longer than the flight from Gotham, and their mouths dropped open, when they finally got off the lift.

“He's taken the Sol-Gel Chamber.” Ryder growled, picking up a chair and sent it crashing into a wall. “He's not only taken Calea with her life in danger, he's stolen the Sol-Gel. Where could have gone with them?” He hissed, getting into Bruce's face.

“I don't know!” Bruce snapped, taking a step back.

“Ryder, calm down.” Diana sighed, pressing her hand against his chest. “If Clark has taken the Chamber, then it means he's put Calea in it, to try and save her.”

“How!” Ryder roared, face beet red. “All the equipment that controls the Gel is still here and even if it wasn't, he doesn't know how to use it.”

“Clark wouldn't do anything to harm or endanger her.” Bruce growled at him, offended by Ryder's disrespect of his friend.

“Oh yeah?” He replied, throwing his arms out and motioning around the room. “The one place she was the safest, he's taken her from.”

“We'll find them.” Diana told him, trying to cool off the situation before Bruce and Ryder came to blows.

-- Part III --

111 notes · View notes